Page:Elmer Gantry (1927).djvu/365



There were two amiable young females who, tired of working in a rather nasty bread factory and of being unremuneratively seduced by the large, pale, puffy bakers on Sunday afternoons, had found it easier and much jollier to set up a small flat in a street near Elmer's church. They were fond of reading the magazines and dancing to the phonograph and of going to church—usually Elmer's church. If their relations to their gentlemen friends were more comforting than a preacher could expect, after his experience of the sacred and chilly state of matrimony, they entertained only a few of these friends, often they darned their socks, and almost always they praised Elmer's oratory.

One of the girls, this evening, was discoursing with a man who was later proved in court not to be her husband; the other was in the kitchen, making a birthday-cake for her niece and humming "Onward, Christian Soldiers." She was dazed by a rumbling, a clanging, a shouting in the street below, then mob-sounds on the stairs. She fluttered into the living-room, to see their pretty imitation mahogany door smashed in with a rifle butt.

Into the room crowded a dozen grinning policemen, followed, to her modest shame, by her adored family prophet, the Reverend Gantry. But it was not the cheerful, laughing Mr. Gantry that she knew. He held out his arm in a horrible gesture of holiness, and bawled, "Scarlet woman! Thy sins be upon thy head! No longer are you going to get away with leading poor unfortunate young men into the sink and cesspool of iniquity! Sergeant! Draw your revolver! These women are known to be up to every trick!"

"All right, sure, loot!" giggled the brick-faced police sergeant.

"Oh, rats! This girl looks as dangerous as a goldfish, Gantry," remarked Bill Kingdom, of the Advocate-Times. . . he who was two hours later to do an epic of the heroism of the Great Crusader.

"Let's see what the other girl's up to," snickered one of the policemen.

They all laughed very much as they looked into the bed-