Babbitt
of his tires and had at last shut the garage door. Instantly, for
Babbitt, a blessed state of oblivion.
IV
At that moment in the city of Zenith, Horace Updike was making love to
Lucile McKelvey in her mauve drawing-room on Royal Ridge, after their
return from a lecture by an eminent English novelist. Updike was
Zenith’s professional bachelor; a slim-waisted man of forty-six with an
effeminate voice and taste in flowers, cretonnes, and flappers. Mrs.
McKelvey was red-haired, creamy, discontented, exquisite, rude, and
honest. Updike tried his invariable first maneuver--touching her nervous
wrist.
“Don’t be an idiot!” she said.
“Do you mind awfully?”
“No! That’s what I mind!”
He changed to conversation. He was famous at conversation. He spoke
reasonably of psychoanalysis, Long Island polo, and the Ming platter he
had found in Vancouver. She promised to meet him in Deauville, the
coming summer, “though,” she sighed, “it’s becoming too dreadfully
banal; nothing but Americans and frowsy English baronesses.”
And at that moment in Zenith, a cocaine-runner and a prostitute were
drinking cocktails in Healey Hanson’s saloon on Front Street. Since
national prohibition was now in force, and since Zenith was notoriously
law-abiding, they were compelled to keep the cocktails innocent by
drinking them out of tea-cups. The lady threw her cup at the
cocaine-runner’s head. He worked his revolver out of the pocket in his
sleeve, and casually murdered her.
At that moment in Zenith, two men sat in a laboratory. For thirty-seven
hours now they had been working on a report of their investigations of
synthetic rubber.
At that moment in Zenith, there was a conference of four union officials
as to whether the twelve thousand coal-miners within a hundred miles of
the city should strike. Of these men one resembled a testy and
prosperous grocer, one a Yankee carpenter, one a soda-clerk, and one a
Russian Jewish actor. The Russian Jew quoted Kautsky, Gene Debs, and
Abraham Lincoln.
At that moment a G. A. R. veteran was dying. He had come from the Civil
War straight to a farm which, though it was officially within the
city-limits of Zenith, was primitive as the backwoods. He had never
ridden in a motor car, never seen a bath-tub, never read any book save
the Bible, McGuffey’s readers, and religious tracts; and he believed
that the earth is flat, that the English are the Lost Ten Tribes of
Israel, and that the United States is a democracy.
At that moment the steel and cement town which composed the factory of
the Pullmore Tractor Company of Zenith was running on night shift to
fill an order of tractors for the Polish army. It hummed like a million
bees, glared through its wide windows like a volcano. Along the high
wire fences, searchlights played on cinder-lined yards, switch-tracks,
and armed guards on patrol.
At that moment Mike Monday was finishing a meeting. Mr. Monday, the
distinguished evangelist, the best-known Protestant pontiff in America,
had once been a prize-fighter. Satan had not dealt justly with him. As a
prize-fighter he gained nothing but his crooked nose, his celebrated
vocabulary, and his stage-presence. The service of the Lord had been
more profitable. He was about to retire with a fortune. It had been well
earned, for, to quote his last report, “Rev. Mr. Monday, the Prophet
with a Punch, has shown that he is the world’s greatest salesman of
salvation, and that by efficient organization the overhead of spiritual
regeneration may be kept down to an unprecedented rock-bottom basis. He
has converted over two hundred thousand lost and priceless souls at an
average cost of less than ten dollars a head.”
Of the larger cities of the land, only Zenith had hesitated to submit
its vices to Mike Monday and his expert reclamation corps. The more
enterprising organizations of the city had voted to invite him-- Mr.
George F. Babbitt had once praised him in a speech at the Boosters’
Club. But there was opposition from certain Episcopalian and
Congregationalist ministers, those renegades whom Mr. Monday so finely
called “a bunch of gospel-pushers with dish-water instead of blood, a
gang of squealers that need more dust on the knees of their pants and
more hair on their skinny old chests.” This opposition had been crushed
when the secretary of the Chamber of Commerce had reported to a
committee of manufacturers that in every city where he had appeared, Mr.
Monday had turned the minds of workmen from wages and hours to higher
things, and thus averted strikes. He was immediately invited.
An expense fund of forty thousand dollars had been underwritten; out on
the County Fair Grounds a Mike Monday Tabernacle had been erected, to
seat fifteen thousand people. In it the prophet was at this moment
concluding his message:
“There’s a lot of smart college professors and tea-guzzling slobs in
this burg that say I’m a roughneck and a never-wuzzer and my knowledge
of history is not-yet. Oh, there’s a gang of woolly-whiskered book-lice
that think they know more than Almighty God, and prefer a lot of Hun
science and smutty German criticism to the straight and simple Word of
God. Oh, there’s a swell bunch of Lizzie boys and lemon-suckers and
pie-faces and infidels and beer-bloated scribblers that love to fire off
their filthy mouths and yip that Mike Monday is vulgar and full of mush.
Those pups are saying now that I hog the gospel-show, that I’m in it for
the coin. Well, now listen, folks! I’m going to give those birds a
chance! They can stand right up here and tell me to my face that I’m a
galoot and a liar and a hick! Only if they do--if they do!--don’t faint
with surprise if some of those rum-dumm liars get one good swift poke
from Mike, with all the kick of God’s Flaming Righteousness behind the
wallop! Well, come on, folks! Who says it? Who says Mike Monday is a
fourflush and a yahoo? Huh? Don’t I see anybody standing up? Well, there
you are! Now I guess the folks in this man’s town will quit listening to
all this kyoodling from behind the fence; I guess you’ll quit listening
to the guys that pan and roast and kick and beef, and vomit out filthy
atheism; and all of you’ll come in, with every grain of pep and
reverence you got, and boost all together for Jesus Christ and his
everlasting mercy and tenderness!”
V
At that moment Seneca Doane, the radical lawyer, and Dr. Kurt Yavitch,
the histologist (whose report on the destruction of epithelial cells
under radium had made the name of Zenith known in Munich, Prague, and
Rome), were talking in Doane’s library.
“Zenith’s a city with gigantic power--gigantic buildings, gigantic
machines, gigantic transportation,” meditated Doane.
“I hate your city. It has standardized all the beauty out of life. It is
one big railroad station--with all the people taking tickets for the
best cemeteries,” Dr. Yavitch said placidly.
Doane roused. “I’m hanged if it is! You make me sick, Kurt, with your
perpetual whine about ‘standardization.’ Don’t you suppose any other
nation is ‘standardized?’ Is anything more standardized than England,
with every house that can afford it having the same muffins at the same
tea-hour, and every retired general going to exactly the same evensong
at the same gray stone church with a square tower, and every golfing
prig in Harris tweeds saying ‘Right you are!’ to every other prosperous
ass? Yet I love England. And for standardization--just look at the
sidewalk cafés in France and the love-making in Italy!
“Standardization is excellent, _per se_. When I buy an Ingersoll watch
or a Ford, I get a better tool for less money, and I know precisely what
I’m getting, and that leaves me more time and energy to be individual
in. And-- I remember once in London I saw a picture of an American
suburb, in a toothpaste ad on the back of the _Saturday Evening
Post_--an elm-lined snowy street of these new houses, Georgian some of
’em, or with low raking roofs and-- The kind of street you’d find here in
Zenith, say in Floral Heights. Open. Trees. Grass. And I was homesick!
There’s no other country in the world that has such pleasant houses. And
I don’t care if they _are_ standardized. It’s a corking standard!
“No, what I fight in Zenith is standardization of thought, and, of
course, the traditions of competition. The real villains of the piece
are the clean, kind, industrious Family Men who use every known brand of
trickery and cruelty to insure the prosperity of their cubs. The worst
thing about these fellows is that they’re so good and, in their work at
least, so intelligent. You can’t hate them properly, and yet their
standardized minds are the enemy.
“Then this boosting-- Sneakingly I have a notion that Zenith is a better
place to live in than Manchester or Glasgow or Lyons or Berlin or
Turin--”
“It is not, and I have lift in most of them,” murmured Dr. Yavitch.
“Well, matter of taste. Personally, I prefer a city with a future so
unknown that it excites my imagination. But what I particularly want--”
“You,” said Dr. Yavitch, “are a middle-road liberal, and you haven’t the
slightest idea what you want. I, being a revolutionist, know exactly
what I want--and what I want now is a drink.”
VI
At that moment in Zenith, Jake Offutt, the politician, and Henry T.
Thompson were in conference. Offutt suggested, “The thing to do is to
get your fool son-in-law, Babbitt, to put it over. He’s one of these
patriotic guys. When he grabs a piece of property for the gang, he makes
it look like we were dyin’ of love for the dear peepul, and I do love to
buy respectability--reasonable. Wonder how long we can keep it up, Hank?
We’re safe as long as the good little boys like George Babbitt and all
the nice respectable labor-leaders think you and me are rugged patriots.
There’s swell pickings for an honest politician here, Hank: a whole city
working to provide cigars and fried chicken and dry martinis for us, and
rallying to our banner with indignation, oh, fierce indignation,
whenever some squealer like this fellow Seneca Doane comes along!
Honest, Hank, a smart codger like me ought to be ashamed of himself if
he didn’t milk cattle like them, when they come around mooing for it!
But the Traction gang can’t get away with grand larceny like it used to.
I wonder when-- Hank, I wish we could fix some way to run this fellow
Seneca Doane out of town. It’s him or us!”
At that moment in Zenith, three hundred and forty or fifty thousand
Ordinary People were asleep, a vast unpenetrated shadow. In the slum
beyond the railroad tracks, a young man who for six months had sought
work turned on the gas and killed himself and his wife.
At that moment Lloyd Mallam, the poet, owner of the Hafiz Book Shop, was
finishing a rondeau to show how diverting was life amid the feuds of
medieval Florence, but how dull it was in so obvious a place as Zenith.
* * * * *
And at that moment George F. Babbitt turned ponderously in bed--the last
turn, signifying that he’d had enough of this worried business of
falling asleep and was about it in earnest.
Instantly he was in the magic dream. He was somewhere among unknown
people who laughed at him. He slipped away, ran down the paths of a
midnight garden, and at the gate the fairy child was waiting. Her dear
and tranquil hand caressed his cheek. He was gallant and wise and
well-beloved; warm ivory were her arms; and beyond perilous moors the
brave sea glittered.
CHAPTER VIII
I
The great events of Babbitt’s spring were the secret buying of
real-estate options in Linton for certain street-traction officials,
before the public announcement that the Linton Avenue Car Line would be
extended, and a dinner which was, as he rejoiced to his wife, not only