Elmer Gantry (Unabridged). Sinclair Lewis

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СКАЧАТЬ window, with all those glossy new magazine covers! That distant piano — magic. What exquisite young women the co-eds! What lovable and sturdy men the students! He was at peace with everything. What a really good fellow he was! He'd lost all his meannesses. How kind he'd been to that poor lonely sinner, Jim Lefferts. Others might despair of Jim's soul — he never would.

      Poor old Jim. His room had looked terrible — that narrow little room with a cot, all in disorder, a pair of shoes and a corncob pipe lying on a pile of books. Poor Jim. He'd forgive him. Go around and clean up the room for him.

      (Not that Elmer had ever cleaned up their former room.)

      Gee, what a lovely spring night! How corking those old boys were, Prexy and everybody, to give up an evening and pray for him!

      Why was it he felt so fine? Of course! The Call had come! God had come to him, though just spiritually, not corporeally, so far as he remembered. It had come! He could go ahead and rule the world!

      He dashed into the president's house; he shouted from the door, erect, while they knelt and looked up at him mousily, "It's come! I feel it in everything! God just opened my eyes and made me feel what a wonderful ole world it is, and it was just like I could hear his voice saying, 'Don't you want to love everybody and help them to be happy? Do you want to just go along being selfish, or have you got a longing to — to help everybody?'"

      He stopped. They had listened silently, with interested grunts of "Amen, Brother."

      "Honest, it was awful' impressive. Somehow, something has made me feel so much better than when I went away from here. I'm sure it was a real Call. Don't you think so, President?"

      "Oh, I'm sure of it!" the president ejaculated, getting up hastily and rubbing his knees.

      "I feel that all is right with our brother; that he has now, this sacred moment, heard the voice of God, and is entering upon the highest calling in the sight of God," the president observed to the dean. "Don't you feel so?"

      "God be praised," said the dean, and looked at his watch.

       3

      On their way home, they two alone, the oldest faculty-member said to the dean, "Yes, it was a fine gratifying moment. And — herumph! — slightly surprising. I'd hardly thought that young Gantry would go on being content with the mild blisses of salvation. Herumph! Curious smell of peppermint he had about him."

      "I suppose he stopped at the drug-store during his walk and had a soft drink of some kind. Don't know, Brother," said the dean, "that I approve of these soft drinks. Innocent in themselves, but they might lead to carelessness in beverages. A man who drinks ginger ale — how are you going to impress on him the terrible danger of drinking ale?"

      "Yes, yes," said the oldest faculty-member (he was sixty-eight, to the dean's boyish sixty). "Say, Brother, how do you feel about young Gantry? About his entering the ministry? I know you did well in the pulpit before you came here, as I more or less did myself, but if you were a boy of twenty-one or -two, do you think you'd become a preacher now, way things are?"

      "Why, Brother!" grieved the dean. "Certainly I would! What a question! What would become of all our work at Terwillinger, all our ideals in opposition to the heathenish large universities, if the ministry weren't the highest ideal — "

      "I know. I know. I just wonder sometimes — All the new vocations that are coming up. Medicine. Advertising. World just going it! I tell you, Dean, in another forty years, by 1943, men will be up in the air in flying machines, going maybe a hundred miles an hour!"

      "My dear fellow, if the Lord had meant men to fly, he'd have given us wings."

      "But there are prophecies in the Book — "

      "Those refer purely to spiritual and symbolic flying. No, no! Never does to oppose the clear purpose of the Bible, and I could dig you out a hundred texts that show unquestionably that the Lord intends us to stay right here on earth till that day when we shall be upraised in the body with him."

      "Herumph! Maybe. Well, here's my corner. Good night, Brother."

      The dean came into his house. It was a small house.

      "How'd it go?" asked his wife.

      "Splendid. Young Gantry seemed to feel an unmistakable divine call. Something struck him that just uplifted him. He's got a lot of power. Only — "

      The dean irritably sat down in a cane-seated rocker, jerked off his shoes, grunted, drew on his slippers.

      "Only, hang it, I simply can't get myself to like him! Emma, tell me: If I were his age now, do you think I'd go into the ministry, as things are today?"

      "Why, Henry! What in the world ever makes you say a thing like that? Of course you would! Why, if that weren't the case — What would our whole lives mean, all we've given up and everything?"

      "Oh, I know. I just get to thinking. Sometimes I wonder if we've given up so much. Don't hurt even a preacher to face himself! After all, those two years when I was in the carpet business, before I went to the seminary, I didn't do very well. Maybe I wouldn't have made any more than I do now. But if I could — Suppose I could've been a great chemist? Wouldn't that (mind you, I'm just speculating, as a student of psychology) — wouldn't that conceivably be better than year after year of students with the same confounded problems over and over again — and always so pleased and surprised and important about them! — or year after year again of standing in the pulpit and knowing your congregation don't remember what you've said seven minutes after you've said it?"

      "Why, Henry, I don't know what's gotten into you! I think you better do a little praying yourself instead of picking on this poor young Gantry! Neither you nor I could ever have been happy except in a Baptist church or a real cover-to-cover Baptist college."

      The dean's wife finished darning the towels and went up to say good-night to her parents.

      They had lived with her since her father's retirement, at seventy-five, from his country pastorate. He had been a missionary in Missouri before the Civil War.

      Her lips had been moving, her eyebrows working, as she darned the towels; her eyebrows were still creased as she came into their room and shrieked at her father's deafness:

      "Time to go to bed, Papa. And you, Mama."

      They were nodding on either side of a radiator unheated for months.

      "All right, Emmy," piped the ancient.

      "Say Papa — Tell me: I've been thinking: If you were just a young man today, would you go into the ministry?"

      "Course I would! What an idea! Most glorious vocation young man could have. Idea! G'night, Emmy!"

      But as his ancient wife sighingly removed her corsets, she complained, "Don't know as you would or not — if I was married to you — which ain't any too certain, a second time — and if I had anything to say about it."

      "Which is certain! Don't be foolish. Course I would."

      "I don't know. Fifty years I had of it, and I never did get so I wa'n't just mad clear through when the ladies of the church came poking around, criticizing me for every little tidy I put on the chairs, and talking something terrible if I had a bonnet or a shawl that was the СКАЧАТЬ