Babbit (29 page)

  "I suppose you go to Chicago and New York right
along, Mr. Babbitt," she prodded.

  "Well, I get to Chicago fairly often."

  "It must be awfully interesting. I suppose you take
in all the theaters."

  "Well, to tell the truth, Mrs. Overbrook, thing that
hits me best is a great big beefsteak at a Dutch restaurant in the
Loop!"

  They had nothing more to say. Babbitt was sorry, but
there was no hope; the dinner was a failure. At ten, rousing out of
the stupor of meaningless talk, he said as cheerily as he could,
"'Fraid we got to be 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.

  
T
HE 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 Geheimrate
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 cafe. 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 ourselves
and be frank about our Secret Worries. You can just tell old Sheldy
anything, like all the fellows do at the Y. I'm going to explain
frankly about the horrible practises a kiddy falls into unless he's
guided by a Big Brother, and about the perils and glory of Sex."
Old Sheldy beamed damply; the boys looked ashamed; and Babbitt
didn't know which way to turn his embarrassed eyes.