Elmer Gantry (Unabridged). Sinclair Lewis

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ was slowly dividing into separate strands, and under the study table it had been scuffed through to the cheap pine flooring.

      The only pictures were Frank's steel engraving of Roger Williams, his framed and pansy-painted copy of "Pippa Passes," and Don Pickens' favorite, a country church by winter moonlight, with tinsel snow, which sparkled delightfully. The only untheological books were Frank's poets: Wordsworth, Longfellow, Tennyson, Browning, in standard volumes, fine-printed and dismal, and one really dangerous papist document, his "Imitation of Christ," about which there was argument at least once a week.

      In his room squatting on straight chairs, the trunks, and the bed, on a November evening in 1905, were five young men besides Elmer and Eddie Fislinger. Eddie did not really belong to the group, but he persisted in following Elmer, feeling that not even yet was everything quite right with the brother.

      "A preacher has got to be just as husky and pack just as good a wallop as a prize-fighter. He ought to be able to throw out any roughneck that tries to interrupt his meetings, and still more, strength makes such a hit with the women in his congregation — of course I don't mean it any wrong way," said Wallace Umstead.

      Wallace was a student-instructor, head of the minute seminary gymnasium and "director of physical culture"; a young man who had a military mustache and who did brisk things on horizontal bars. He was a state university B.A. and graduate of a physical-training school. He was going into Y.M.C.A. work when he should have a divinity degree, and he was fond of saying, "Oh, I'm still one of the boys, you know, even if I am a prof."

      "That's right," agreed Elmer Gantry. "Say, I had — I was holding a meeting at Grauten, Kansas, last summer, and there was a big boob that kept interrupting, so I just jumped down from the platform and went up to him, and he says, 'Say, Parson,' he says, 'Can you tell us what the Almighty wants us to do about prohibition, considering he told Paul to take some wine for his stomach's sake?' 'I don't know as I can,' I says, 'but you want to remember he also commanded us to cast out devils!' and I yanked that yahoo out of his seat and threw him out on his ear, and say, the whole crowd — well, there weren't so awfully many there, but they certainly did give him the ha-ha! You bet. And to be husky makes a hit with the whole congregation, men's well as women. But there's more'n one high-toned preacher that got his pulpit because the deacons felt he could lick 'em. Of course praying and all that is all O.K., but you got to be practical! We're here to do good, but first you have to cinch a job that you can do good in!"

      "You're commercial!" protested Eddie Fislinger, and Frank Shallard: "Good heavens, Gantry, is that all your religion means to you?"

      "Besides," said Horace Carp, "you have the wrong angle. It isn't mere brute force that appeals to women — to congregations. It's a beautiful voice. I don't envy you your bulk, Elmer — besides, you're going to get fat — "

      "I am like hell!"

      " — but what I could do with that voice of yours! I'd have 'em all weeping! I'd read 'em poetry from the pulpit!"

      Horace Carp was the one High Churchman in the Seminary. He was a young man who resembled a water spaniel, who concealed Saints' images, incense, and a long piece of scarlet brocade in his room, and who wore a purple velvet smoking-jacket. He was always raging because his father, a wholesale plumber and pious, had threatened to kick him out if he went to an Episcopal seminary instead of a Baptist fortress.

      "Yes, you prob'ly would read 'em poetry!" said Elmer. "That's the trouble with you high-falutin' guys. You think you can get people by a lot of poetry and junk. What gets 'em and holds 'em and brings 'em to their pews every Sunday is the straight gospel — and it don't hurt one bit to scare 'em into being righteous with the good old-fashioned Hell!"

      "You bet — providing you encourage 'em to keep their bodies in swell shape, too," condescended Wallace Umstead. "Well, I don't want to talk as a prof — after all I'm glad I can still remain just one of the Boys — but you aren't going to develop any very big horse-power in your praying tomorrow morning if you don't get your sleep. And me to my little downy! G'night!"

      At the closing of the door, Harry Zenz, the seminary iconoclast, yawned, "Wallace is probably the finest slice of tripe in my wide clerical experience. Thank God, he's gone! Now we can be natural and talk dirty!"

      "And yet," complained Frank Shallard, "you encourage him to stay and talk about his pet methods of exercise! Don't you ever tell the truth, Harry?"

      "Never carelessly. Why, you idiot, I want Wallace to run and let the dean know what an earnest worker in the vineyard I am. Frank, you're a poor innocent. I suspect you actually believe some of the dope they teach us here. And yet you're a man of some reading. You're the only person in Mizpah except myself who could appreciate a paragraph of Huxley. Lord, how I pity you when you get into the ministry! Of course, Fislinger here is a grocery clerk, Elmer is a ward politician, Horace is a dancing master — "

      He was drowned beneath a surf of protests, not too jocose and friendly.

      Harry Zenz was older than the others — thirty-two at least. He was plump, almost completely bald, and fond of sitting still; and he could look profoundly stupid. He was a man of ill-assorted but astonishing knowledge; and in the church ten miles from Mizpah which he had regularly supplied for two years he was considered a man of humorless learning and bloodless piety. He was a complete and cheerful atheist, but he admitted it only to Elmer Gantry and Horace Carp. Elmer regarded him as a sort of Jim Lefferts, but he was as different from Jim as pork fat from a crystal. He hid his giggling atheism — Jim flourished his; he despised women — Jim had a disillusioned pity for the Juanita Klauzels of the world; he had an intellect — Jim had only cynical guesses.

      Zenz interrupted their protests:

      "So you're a bunch of Erasmuses! You ought to know. And there's no hypocrisy in what we teach and preach! We're a specially selected group of Parsifals — beautiful to the eye and stirring to the ear and overflowing with knowledge of what God said to the Holy Ghost in camera at 9:16 last Wednesday morning. We're all just rarin' to go out and preach the precious Baptist doctrine of 'Get ducked or duck.' We're wonders. We admit it. And people actually sit and listen to us, and don't choke! I suppose they're overwhelmed by our nerve! And we have to have nerve, or we'd never dare to stand in a pulpit again. We'd quit, and pray God to forgive us for having stood up there and pretended that we represent God, and that we can explain what we ourselves say are the unexplainable mysteries! But I still claim that there are preachers who haven't our holiness. Why is it that the clergy are so given to sex crimes?"

      "That's not true!" from Eddie Fislinger.

      "Don't talk that way!" Don Pickens begged. Don was Frank's roommate: a slight youth, so gentle, so affectionate, that even that raging lion of righteousness, Dean Trosper, was moved to spare him.

      Harry Zenz patted his arm. "Oh, you, Don — you'll always be a monk. But if you don't believe it, Fislinger, look at the statistics of the five thousand odd crimes committed by clergymen — that is those who got caught — since the eighties, and note the percentage of sex offenses — rape, incest, bigamy, enticing young girls — oh, a lovely record!"

      Elmer was yawning, "Oh, God, I do get so sick of you fellows yammering and arguing and discussing. All perfectly simple — maybe we preachers aren't perfect: don't pretend to be; but we do a lot of good."

      "That's right," said Eddie. "But maybe it is true that — The snares of sex are so dreadful that even ministers of the gospel get trapped. And the perfectly simple solution is continence — just take it out in prayer and good hard exercise."

      "Oh, sure, Eddie, you bet; what a help you're going to be to the young men in your church," purred Harry Zenz.

      Frank СКАЧАТЬ