“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
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 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.