Babbitt
starting, Ed. I’ve got a fellow coming to see me early to-morrow.” As
Overbrook helped him with his coat, Babbitt said, “Nice to rub up on the
old days! We must have lunch together, P.D.Q.”
Mrs. Babbitt sighed, on their drive home, “It was pretty terrible. But
how Mr. Overbrook does admire you!”
“Yep. Poor cuss! Seems to think I’m a little tin archangel, and the
best-looking man in Zenith.”
“Well, you’re certainly not that but-- Oh, Georgie, you don’t suppose we
have to invite them to dinner at our house now, do we?”
“Ouch! Gaw, I hope not!”
“See here, now, George! You didn’t say anything about it to Mr.
Overbrook, did you?”
“No! Gee! No! Honest, I didn’t! Just made a bluff about having him to
lunch some time.”
“Well.... Oh, dear.... I don’t want to hurt their feelings. But I don’t
see how I could stand another evening like this one. And suppose
somebody like Dr. and Mrs. Angus came in when we had the Overbrooks
there, and thought they were friends of ours!”
For a week they worried, “We really ought to invite Ed and his wife,
poor devils!” But as they never saw the Overbrooks, they forgot them,
and after a month or two they said, “That really was the best way, just
to let it slide. It wouldn’t be kind to _them_ to have them here. They’d
feel so out of place and hard-up in our home.”
They did not speak of the Overbrooks again.
CHAPTER XVI
I
The certainty that he was not going to be accepted by the McKelveys made
Babbitt feel guilty and a little absurd. But he went more regularly to
the Elks; at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon he was oratorical regarding
the wickedness of strikes; and again he saw himself as a Prominent
Citizen.
His clubs and associations were food comfortable to his spirit.
Of a decent man in Zenith it was required that he should belong to one,
preferably two or three, of the innumerous “lodges” and
prosperity-boosting lunch-clubs; to the Rotarians, the Kiwanis, or the
Boosters; to the Oddfellows, Moose, Masons, Red Men, Woodmen, Owls,
Eagles, Maccabees, Knights of Pythias, Knights of Columbus, and other
secret orders characterized by a high degree of heartiness, sound
morals, and reverence for the Constitution. There were four reasons for
joining these orders: It was the thing to do. It was good for business,
since lodge-brothers frequently became customers. It gave to Americans
unable to become Geheimräte or Commendatori such unctuous honorifics as
High Worthy Recording Scribe and Grand Hoogow to add to the commonplace
distinctions of Colonel, Judge, and Professor. And it permitted the
swaddled American husband to stay away from home for one evening a week.
The lodge was his piazza, his pavement café. He could shoot pool and
talk man-talk and be obscene and valiant.
Babbitt was what he called a “joiner” for all these reasons.
Behind the gold and scarlet banner of his public achievements was the
dun background of office-routine: leases, sales-contracts, lists of
properties to rent. The evenings of oratory and committees and lodges
stimulated him like brandy, but every morning he was sandy-tongued. Week
by week he accumulated nervousness. He was in open disagreement with his
outside salesman, Stanley Graff; and once, though her charms had always
kept him nickeringly polite to her, he snarled at Miss McGoun for
changing his letters.
But in the presence of Paul Riesling he relaxed. At least once a week
they fled from maturity. On Saturday they played golf, jeering, “As a
golfer, you’re a fine tennis-player,” or they motored all Sunday
afternoon, stopping at village lunchrooms to sit on high stools at a
counter and drink coffee from thick cups. Sometimes Paul came over in
the evening with his violin, and even Zilla was silent as the lonely man
who had lost his way and forever crept down unfamiliar roads spun out
his dark soul in music.
II
Nothing gave Babbitt more purification and publicity than his labors for
the Sunday School.
His church, the Chatham Road Presbyterian, was one of the largest and
richest, one of the most oaken and velvety, in Zenith. The pastor was
the Reverend John Jennison Drew, M.A., D.D., LL.D. (The M.A. and the
D.D. were from Elbert University, Nebraska, the LL.D. from Waterbury
College, Oklahoma.) He was eloquent, efficient, and versatile. He
presided at meetings for the denunciation of unions or the elevation of
domestic service, and confided to the audiences that as a poor boy he
had carried newspapers. For the Saturday edition of the _Evening
Advocate_ he wrote editorials on “The Manly Man’s Religion” and “The
Dollars and Sense Value of Christianity,” which were printed in bold
type surrounded by a wiggly border. He often said that he was “proud to
be known as primarily a business man” and that he certainly was not
going to “permit the old Satan to monopolize all the pep and punch.” He
was a thin, rustic-faced young man with gold spectacles and a bang of
dull brown hair, but when he hurled himself into oratory he glowed with
power. He admitted that he was too much the scholar and poet to imitate
the evangelist, Mike Monday, yet he had once awakened his fold to new
life, and to larger collections, by the challenge, “My brethren, the
real cheap skate is the man who won’t lend to the Lord!”
He had made his church a true community center. It contained everything
but a bar. It had a nursery, a Thursday evening supper with a short
bright missionary lecture afterward, a gymnasium, a fortnightly
motion-picture show, a library of technical books for young
workmen--though, unfortunately, no young workman ever entered the church
except to wash the windows or repair the furnace--and a sewing-circle
which made short little pants for the children of the poor while Mrs.
Drew read aloud from earnest novels.
Though Dr. Drew’s theology was Presbyterian, his church-building was
gracefully Episcopalian. As he said, it had the “most perdurable
features of those noble ecclesiastical monuments of grand Old England
which stand as symbols of the eternity of faith, religious and civil.”
It was built of cheery iron-spot brick in an improved Gothic style, and
the main auditorium had indirect lighting from electric globes in lavish
alabaster bowls.
On a December morning when the Babbitts went to church, Dr. John
Jennison Drew was unusually eloquent. The crowd was immense. Ten brisk
young ushers, in morning coats with white roses, were bringing folding
chairs up from the basement. There was an impressive musical program,
conducted by Sheldon Smeeth, educational director of the Y.M.C.A., who
also sang the offertory. Babbitt cared less for this, because some
misguided person had taught young Mr. Smeeth to smile, smile, smile
while he was singing, but with all the appreciation of a fellow-orator
he admired Dr. Drew’s sermon. It had the intellectual quality which
distinguished the Chatham Road congregation from the grubby chapels on
Smith Street.
“At this abundant harvest-time of all the year,” Dr. Drew chanted,
“when, though stormy the sky and laborious the path to the drudging
wayfarer, yet the hovering and bodiless spirit swoops back o’er all the
labors and desires of the past twelve months, oh, then it seems to me
there sounds behind all our apparent failures the golden chorus of
greeting from those passed happily on; and lo! on the dim horizon we see
behind dolorous clouds the mighty mass of mountains--mountains of
melody, mountains of mirth, mountains of might!”
“I certainly do like a sermon with culture and thought in it,” meditated
Babbitt.
At the end of the service he was delighted when the pastor, actively
shaking hands at the door, twittered, “Oh, Brother Babbitt, can you wait
a jiffy? Want your advice.”
“Sure, doctor! You bet!”
“Drop into my office. I think you’ll like the cigars there.” Babbitt did
like the cigars. He also liked the office, which was distinguished from
other offices only by the spirited change of the familiar wall-placard
to “This is the Lord’s Busy Day.” Chum Frink came in, then William W.
Eathorne.
Mr. Eathorne was the seventy-year-old president of the First State Bank
of Zenith. He still wore the delicate patches of side-whiskers which had
been the uniform of bankers in 1870. If Babbitt was envious of the Smart
Set of the McKelveys, before William Washington Eathorne he was
reverent. Mr. Eathorne had nothing to do with the Smart Set. He was
above it. He was the great-grandson of one of the five men who founded
Zenith, in 1792, and he was of the third generation of bankers. He could
examine credits, make loans, promote or injure a man’s business. In his
presence Babbitt breathed quickly and felt young.
The Reverend Dr. Drew bounced into the room and flowered into speech:
“I’ve asked you gentlemen to stay so I can put a proposition before you.
The Sunday School needs bucking up. It’s the fourth largest in Zenith,
but there’s no reason why we should take anybody’s dust. We ought to be
first. I want to request you, if you will, to form a committee of advice
and publicity for the Sunday School; look it over and make any
suggestions for its betterment, and then, perhaps, see that the press
gives us some attention--give the public some really helpful and
constructive news instead of all these murders and divorces.”
“Excellent,” said the banker.
Babbitt and Frink were enchanted to join him.
III
If you had asked Babbitt what his religion was, he would have answered
in sonorous Boosters’-Club rhetoric, “My religion is to serve my fellow
men, to honor my brother as myself, and to do my bit to make life
happier for one and all.” If you had pressed him for more detail, he
would have announced, “I’m a member of the Presbyterian Church, and
naturally, I accept its doctrines.” If you had been so brutal as to go
on, he would have protested, “There’s no use discussing and arguing
about religion; it just stirs up bad feeling.”
Actually, the content of his theology was that there was a supreme being
who had tried to make us perfect, but presumably had failed; that if one
was a Good Man he would go to a place called Heaven (Babbitt
unconsciously pictured it as rather like an excellent hotel with a
private garden), but if one was a Bad Man, that is, if he murdered or
committed burglary or used cocaine or had mistresses or sold
non-existent real estate, he would be punished. Babbitt was uncertain,
however, about what he called “this business of Hell.” He explained to
Ted, “Of course I’m pretty liberal; I don’t exactly believe in a
fire-and-brimstone Hell. Stands to reason, though, that a fellow can’t
get away with all sorts of Vice and not get nicked for it, see how I
mean?”
Upon this theology he rarely pondered. The kernel of his practical
religion was that it was respectable, and beneficial to one’s business,
to be seen going to services; that the church kept the Worst Elements
from being still worse; and that the pastor’s sermons, however dull they
might seem at the time of taking, yet had a voodooistic power which “did
a fellow good--kept him in touch with Higher Things.”
His first investigations for the Sunday School Advisory Committee did
not inspire him.
He liked the Busy Folks’ Bible Class, composed of mature men and women
and addressed by the old-school physician, Dr. T. Atkins Jordan, in a
sparkling style comparable to that of the more refined humorous
after-dinner speakers, but when he went down to the junior classes he
was disconcerted. He heard Sheldon Smeeth, educational director of the
Y.M.C.A. and leader of the church-choir, a pale but strenuous young man
with curly hair and a smile, teaching a class of sixteen-year-old boys.
Smeeth lovingly admonished them, “Now, fellows, I’m going to have a
Heart to Heart Talk Evening at my house next Thursday. We’ll get off by