pail of coffee for Jim's breakfast. They were laboring windily into new arguments, Jim a little more stubborn, Elmer ever more irritable, when no less a dignitary than President the Rev. Dr. Willoughby Quarles, chin whisker, glacial shirt, bulbous waistcoat and all, plunged under the fat soft wing of the landlady.
The president shook hands a number of times with everybody, he eyebrowed the landlady out of the room, and boomed in his throaty pulpit voice, with belly-rumblings and long-drawn R's and L's, a voice very deep and owlish, most holy and fitting to the temple which he created merely by his presence, rebuking to flippancy and chuckles and the puerile cynicisms of the Jim Leffertses — a noise somewhere between the evening bells and the morning jackass:
"Oh, Brother Elmer, that was a brave thing you did! I have never seen a braver! For a great strong man of your gladiatorial powers to not be afraid to humble himself! And your example will do a great deal of good, a grrrrrreat deal of good! And we must catch and hold it. You are to speak at the Y.M.C.A. tonight — special meeting to reenforce the results of our wonderful Prayer Week."
"Oh, gee, President, I can't!" Elmer groaned.
"Oh, yes, Brother, you must. You must! It's already announced. If you'll go out within the next hour, you'll be gratified to see posters announcing it all over town!"
"But I can't make a speech!"
"The Lord will give the words if you give the good will! I myself shall call for you at a quarter to seven. God bless you!"
He was gone.
Elmer was completely frightened, completely unwilling, and swollen with delight that after long dark hours when Jim, an undergraduate, had used him dirtily and thrown clods at his intellect, the President of Terwillinger College should have welcomed him to that starched bosom as a fellow-apostle.
While Elmer was making up his mind to do what he had made up his mind to do, Jim crawled into bed and addressed the Lord in a low poisonous tone.
Elmer went out to see the posters. His name was in lovely large letters.
For an hour, late that afternoon, after various classes in which every one looked at him respectfully, Elmer tried to prepare his address for the Y.M.C.A. and affiliated lady worshipers. Jim was sleeping, with a snore like the snarl of a leopard.
In his class in Public Speaking, a course designed to create congressmen, bishops, and sales-managers, Elmer had had to produce discourses on Taxation, the Purpose of God in History, Our Friend the Dog, and the Glory of the American Constitution. But his monthly orations had not been too arduous; no one had grieved if he stole all his ideas and most of his phrasing from the encyclopedia. The most important part of preparation had been the lubrication of his polished-mahogany voice with throat-lozenges after rather steady and totally forbidden smoking. He had learned nothing except the placing of his voice. It had never seemed momentous to impress the nineteen students of oratory and the instructor, an unordained licensed preacher who had formerly been a tax-assessor in Oklahoma. He had, in Public Speaking, never been a failure nor ever for one second interesting.
Now, sweating very much, he perceived that he was expected to think, to articulate the curious desires whereby Elmer Gantry was slightly different from any other human being, and to rivet together opinions which would not be floated on any tide of hallelujahs.
He tried to remember the sermons he had heard. But the preachers had been so easily convinced of their authority as prelates, so freighted with ponderous messages, while himself, he was not at the moment certain whether he was a missionary who had to pass his surprising new light on to the multitude, or just a sinner who —
Just a sinner! For keeps! Nothing else! Damned if he'd welsh on old Jim! No, sir! Or welsh on Juanita, who'd stood for him and merely kidded him, no matter how soused and rough and mouthy he might be!...Her hug. The way she'd get rid of that buttinsky aunt of Nell's; just wink at him and give Aunty some song and dance or other and send her out for chow —
God! If Juanita were only here! She'd give him the real dope. She'd advise him whether he ought to tell Prexy and the Y.M. to go to hell or grab this chance to show Eddie Fislinger and all those Y.M. highbrows that he wasn't such a bonehead —
No! Here Prexy had said he was the whole cheese: gotten up a big meeting for him. Prexy Quarles and Juanita! Aber nit! Never get them two together! And Prexy had called on him —
Suppose it got into the newspapers! How he'd saved a tough kid, just as good as Judson Roberts could do. Juanita — find skirts like her any place, but where could they find a guy that could start in and save souls right off the bat?
Chuck all these fool thoughts, now that Jim was asleep, and figure out this spiel. What was that about sweating in the vineyard? Something like that, anyway. In the Bible...However much they might rub it in — and no gink'd ever had a worse time, with that sneaking Eddie poking him on one side and Jim lambasting him on the other — whatever happened, he had to show those yahoos he could do just as good —
Hell! This wasn't buying the baby any shoes; this wasn't getting his spiel done. But —
What was the doggone thing to be about?
Let's see now. Gee, there was a bully thought! Tell 'em about how a strong husky guy, the huskier he was the more he could afford to admit that the power of the Holy Ghost had just laid him out cold —
No. Hell! That was what Old Jud had said. Must have something new — kinda new, anyway.
He shouldn't say "hell." Cut it out. Stay converted, no matter how hard it was. He wasn't afraid of — Him and Old Jud, they were husky enough to —
No, sir! It wasn't Old Jud; it was his mother. What'd she think if she ever saw him with Juanita? Juanita! That sloppy brat! No modesty!
Had to get down to brass tacks. Now!
Elmer grasped the edge of his work-table. The top cracked. His strength pleased him. He pulled up his dingy red sweater, smoothed his huge biceps, and again tackled his apostolic labors:
Let's see now: The fellow at the Y. would expect him to say —
He had it! Nobody ever amounted to a darn except as the — what was it? — as the inscrutable designs of Providence intended him to be.
Elmer was very busy making vast and unformed scrawls in a ten-cent-note-book hitherto devoted to German. He darted up, looking scholarly, and gathered his library about him: his Bible, given to him by his mother; his New Testament, given by a Sunday School teacher; his text-books in Weekly Bible and Church History; and one-fourteenth of a fourteen-volume set of Great Orations of the World which, in a rare and alcoholic moment of bibliomania, he had purchased in Cato for seventeen cents. He piled them and repiled them and tapped them with his fountain-pen.
His original stimulus had run out entirely.
Well, he'd get help from the Bible. It was all inspired, every word, no matter what scoffers like Jim said. He'd take the first text he turned to and talk on that.
He opened on: "Now therefore, Tatnai, governor beyond the river, Shethar-boznai, and your companions the Apharsachites, which are beyond the river, be ye far from thence," an injunction spirited but not at present helpful.
He returned to pulling his luxuriant hair and scratching.
Golly. Must be something.
The
