“Meaning my attentions aren’t welcome to Your Majesty!” He paced the floor. “Young woman, it’s about time for a showdown! I’ve hinted at this before, but I’ve been as charitable and long-suffering as I could, but, by God, you’ve gotten away with too much, and then you try to pretend—— ‘Just kiss me good-night!’ Sure! I’m to be a monk! I’m to be one of these milk-and-water husbands that’s perfectly content to hang around the house and not give one little yip if his wife don’t care for his method of hugging! Well, believe me, young woman, you got another guess coming, and if you think that just because I’m a preacher I’m a Willie-boy—— You don’t even make the slightest smallest effort to learn some passion, but just act like you had hard work putting up with me! Believe me, there’s other women a lot better and prettier—yet, and more religious!—that haven’t thought I was such a damn’ pest to have around! I’m not going to stand—— Never even making the slightest effort—”
“Oh, Elmer, I have! Honestly I have! If you’d only been more tender and patient with me at the very first, I might have learned—”
“Rats! All damned nonsense! Trouble with you is, you always were afraid to face hard facts! Well, I’m sick of it, young woman. You can go to the devil! This is the last time, believe me!”
He banged the door; he had satisfaction in hearing her sob that night; and he kept his vow about staying away from her, for almost a month. Presently he was keeping it altogether; it was a settled thing that they had separate bedrooms.
And all the while he was almost as confused, as wistful, as she was; and whenever he found a woman parishioner who was willing to comfort him, or whenever he was called on important but never explained affairs to Sparta, he had no bold swagger of satisfaction, but a guilt, an uneasiness of sin, which displayed itself in increasingly furious condemnation of the same sin from his pulpit.
“O God, if I could only have gone on with Sharon, I might have been a decent fellow,” he mourned, in his sorrow sympathetic with all the world. But the day after, in the sanctuary, he would be salving that sorrow by raging, “And these dance-hall proprietors, these tempters of lovely innocent girls, whose doors open to the pit of death and horror, they shall have reward—they shall burn in uttermost hell—burn literally—BURN!—and for their suffering we shall have but joy that the Lord’s justice has been resolutely done!”
II
Something like statewide fame began to cling about the Reverend Elmer Gantry during his two years in Sparta—1918 to 1920. In the spring of ’18 he was one of the most courageous defenders of the Midwest against the imminent invasion of the Germans. He was a Four-Minute Man. He said violent things about atrocities, and sold Liberty Bonds hugely. He threatened to leave Sparta to its wickedness while he went out to “take care of our poor boys” as a chaplain, and he might have done so had the war lasted another year.
In Sparta, too, he crept from timidly sensational church advertisements to such blasts as must have shaken the Devil himself. Anyway, they brought six hundred delighted sinners to church every Sunday evening, and after one sermon on the horrors of booze, a saloon-keeper, slightly intoxicated, remarked “Whoop!” and put a fifty-dollar bill in the plate.
Not to this day, with all the advance in intellectual advertising, has there been seen a more arousing effort to sell salvation than Elmer’s prose poem in the Sparta World-Chronicle on a Saturday in December, 1919: