We better get outa here quick!" panted Jim.
"Gee, yes!" Elmer groaned and they edged back through the crowd, while Eddie Fislinger's piping pursued them like icy and penetrating rain:
"Don't be afraid to acknowledge the leading of Jesus! Are you boys going to show yourselves too cowardly to risk the sneers of the ungodly?"
They were safely out of the crowd, walking with severe countenances and great rapidity back to the Old Home Sample Room.
"That was a dirty trick of Eddie's!" said Jim. "God, it certainly was! Trying to convert me! Right before those muckers! If I ever hear another yip out of Eddie, I'll knock his block off! Nerve of him, trying to lead me up to any mourners' bench! Fat chance! I'll fix him! Come on, show a little speed!" asserted the brother to all them that were oppressed.
By the time for their late evening train, the sound conversation of the bartender and the sound qualities of his Bourbon had caused Elmer and Jim to forget Eddie Fislinger and the horrors of undressing religion in public. They were the more shocked, then, swaying in their seat in the smoker, to see Eddie standing by them, Bible in hand, backed by his two beaming partners in evangelism.
Eddie bared his teeth, smiled all over his watery eyes, and caroled:
"Oh, fellows, you don't know how wonderful you were tonight! But, oh, boys, now you've taken the first step, why do you put it off — why do you hesitate — why do you keep the Savior suffering as he waits for you, longs for you? He needs you boys, with your splendid powers and intellects that we admire so — "
"This air," observed Jim Lefferts, "is getting too thick for me. I seem to smell a peculiar and a fishlike smell." He slipped out of the seat and marched toward the forward car.
Elmer sought to follow him, but Eddie had flopped into Jim's place and was blithely squeaking on, while the other two hung over them with tender Y.M.C.A. smiles very discomforting to Elmer's queasy stomach as the train bumped on.
For all his brave words, Elmer had none of Jim's resolute contempt for the church. He was afraid of it. It connoted his boyhood...His mother, drained by early widowhood and drudgery, finding her only emotion in hymns and the Bible, and weeping when he failed to study his Sunday School lesson. The church, full thirty dizzy feet up to its curiously carven rafters, and the preachers, so overwhelming in their wallowing voices, so terrifying in their pictures of little boys who stole watermelons or indulged in biological experiments behind barns. The awe-oppressed moment of his second conversion, at the age of eleven, when, weeping with embarrassment and the prospect of losing so much fun, surrounded by solemn and whiskered adult faces, he had signed a pledge binding him to give up, forever, the joys of profanity, alcohol, cards, dancing, and the theater.
These clouds hung behind and over him, for all his boldness.
Eddie Fislinger, the human being, he despised. He considered him a grasshopper, and with satisfaction considered stepping on him. But Eddie Fislinger, the gospeler, fortified with just such a pebble-leather Bible (bookmarks of fringed silk and celluloid smirking from the pages) as his Sunday School teachers had wielded when they assured him that God was always creeping about to catch small boys in their secret thoughts — this armored Eddie was an official, and Elmer listened to him uneasily, never quite certain that he might not yet find himself a dreadful person leading a pure a boresome life in a clean frock coat.
" — and remember," Eddie was wailing, "how terribly dangerous it is to put off the hour of salvation! 'Watch therefore for you know not what hour your Lord doth come,' it says. Suppose this train were wrecked! Tonight!"
The train ungraciously took that second to lurch on a curve.
"You see? Where would you spend Eternity, Hell-cat? Do you think that any sportin' round is fun enough to burn in hell for?"
"Oh, cut it out. I know all that stuff. There's a lot of arguments — You wait'll I get Jim to tell you what Bob Ingersoll said about hell!"
"Yes! Sure! And you remember that on his deathbed Ingersoll called his son to him and repented and begged his son to hurry and be saved and burn all his wicked writings!"
"Well — Thunder — I don't feel like talking religion tonight. Cut it out."
But Eddie did feel like talking religion, very much so. He waved his Bible enthusiastically and found ever so many uncomfortable texts. Elmer listened as little as possible but he was too feeble to make threats.
It was a golden relief when the train bumped to a stop at Gritzmacher Springs. The station was a greasy wooden box, the platform was thick with slush, under the kerosene lights. But Jim was awaiting him, a refuge from confusing theological questions, and with a furious "G'night!" to Eddie he staggered off.
"Why didn't you make him shut his trap?" demanded Jim.
"I did! Whadja take a sneak for? I told him to shut up and he shut up and I snoozed all the way back and — Ow! My head! Don't walk so fast!"
CHAPTER II
1
For years the state of sin in which dwelt Elmer Gantry and Jim Lefferts had produced fascinated despair in the Christian hearts of Terwillinger College. No revival but had flung its sulphur-soaked arrows at them — usually in their absence. No prayer at the Y.M.C.A. meetings but had worried over their staggering folly.
Elmer had been known to wince when President the Rev. Dr. Willoughby Quarles was especially gifted with messages at morning chapel, but Jim had held him firm in the faith of unfaith.
Now, Eddie Fislinger, like a prairie seraph, sped from room to room of the elect with the astounding news that Elmer had publicly professed religion, and that he had endured thirty-nine minutes of private adjuration on the train. Instantly started a holy plotting against the miserable sacrificial lamb, and all over Gritzmacher Springs, in the studies of ministerial professors, in the rooms of students, in the small prayer-meeting room behind the chapel auditorium, joyous souls conspired with the Lord against Elmer's serene and zealous sinning. Everywhere, through the snowstorm, you could hear murmurs of "There is more rejoicing over one sinner who repenteth — "
Even collegians not particularly esteemed for their piety, suspected of playing cards and secret smoking, were stirred to ecstasy — or it may have been snickering. The football center, in unregenerate days a companion of Elmer and Jim but now engaged to marry a large and sanctified Swedish co-ed from Chanute, rose voluntarily in Y.M.C.A. and promised God to help him win Elmer's favor.
The spirit waxed most fervent in the abode of Eddie Fislinger, who was now recognized as a future prophet, likely, some day, to have under his inspiration one of the larger Baptist churches in Wichita or even Kansas City.
He organized an all-day and all-night prayer-meeting on Elmer's behalf, and it was attended by the more ardent, even at the risk of receiving cuts and uncivil remarks from instructors. On the bare floor of Eddie's room, over Knute Halvorsted's paint-shop, from three to sixteen young men knelt at a time, and no 1800 revival saw more successful wrestling with the harassed Satan. In fact one man, suspected of Holy Roller sympathies, managed to have the jerks, and while they felt that this was carrying things farther than the Lord and the Baptist association would care to see it, added excitement to praying at three o'clock in the morning, particularly as they
