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!