CHAPTER XXVII
I
elmer, in court, got convictions of sixteen out of the twenty-seven fiends whom he had arrested, with an extra six months for Oscar Hochlauf for resisting arrest and the use of abusive and profane language. The judge praised him; the mayor forgave him; the chief of police shook his hand and invited him to use a police squad at any time; and some of the younger reporters did not cover their mouths with their hands.
Vice was ended in Zenith. It was thirty days before any of the gay ladies were really back at work—though the gentlemanly jailers at the workhouse did let some of them out for an occasional night.
Every Sunday evening now people were turned from the door of Elmer’s church. If they did not always have a sermon about vice, at least they enjoyed the saxophone solos, and singing “There’ll be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” And once they were entertained by a professional juggler who wore (it was Elmer’s own idea) a placard proclaiming that he stood for “God’s Word” and who showed how easy it was to pick up weights symbolically labeled “Sin” and “Sorrow” and “Ignorance” and “Papistry.”
The trustees were discussing the erection of a new and much larger church, a project for which Elmer himself had begun to prepare a year before, by reminding the trustees how many new apartment-houses were replacing the run-down residences in Old Town.
The trustees raised his salary to five thousand, and they increased the budget for institutional work. Elmer did not institute so many clubs for students of chiropractic and the art of motion-picture acting as did Dr. Otto Hickenlooper of Central Methodist, but there was scarcely an hour from nine in the morning till ten at night when some circle was not trying to do good to somebody . . . and even after ten there were often Elmer and Lulu Bains Naylor, conferring on cooking classes.
Elmer had seen the danger of his crusading publicity and his Lively Sunday Evenings—the danger of being considered a clown instead of a great moral leader.
“I’ve got to figure out some way so’s I keep dignified and yet keep folks interested,” he meditated. “The thing is sort of to have other people do the monkey-business, but me, I got to be up-stage and not smile as much as I’ve been doing. And just when the poor chumps think my Sunday evening is nothing but a vaudeville show, I’ll suddenly soak ’em with a regular old-time hell-fire and damnation sermon, or be poetic and that stuff.”
It worked, reasonably. Though many of his rival preachers in Zenith went on calling him “clown” and “charlatan” and “sensationalist,” no one could fail to appreciate his lofty soul and his weighty scholarship, once they had seen him stand in agonized silent prayer, then level his long forefinger and intone: