An enormous graystone church with a rigid spire; dim
light in the Parlors, and cheerful droning of choir-practise.
The quivering green mercury-vapor light of a photo-engraver’s
loft. Then the storming lights of down-town;
parked cars with ruby tail-lights; white arched entrances
to movie theaters, like frosty mouths of winter caves;
electric signs—serpents and little dancing
men of fire; pink-shaded globes and scarlet jazz music
in a cheap up-stairs dance-hall; lights of Chinese
restaurants, lanterns painted with cherry-blossoms
and with pagodas, hung against lattices of lustrous
gold and black. Small dirty lamps in small stinking
lunchrooms. The smart shopping-district, with
rich and quiet light on crystal pendants and furs
and suave surfaces of polished wood in velvet-hung
reticent windows. High above the street, an unexpected
square hanging in the darkness, the window of an office
where some one was working late, for a reason unknown
and stimulating. A man meshed in bankruptcy,
an ambitious boy, an oil-man suddenly become rich?
The air was shrewd, the snow was deep in uncleared
alleys, and beyond the city, Babbitt knew, were hillsides
of snow-drift among wintry oaks, and the curving ice-enchanted
river.
He loved his city with passionate wonder. He
lost the accumulated weariness of business—worry
and expansive oratory; he felt young and potential.
He was ambitious. It was not enough to be a Vergil
Gunch, an Orville Jones. No. “They’re
bully fellows, simply lovely, but they haven’t
got any finesse.” No. He was going
to be an Eathorne; delicately rigorous, coldly powerful.
“That’s the stuff. The wallop in
the velvet mitt. Not let anybody get fresh with
you. Been getting careless about my diction.
Slang. Colloquial. Cut it out. I was
first-rate at rhetoric in college. Themes on—Anyway,
not bad. Had too much of this hooptedoodle and
good-fellow stuff. I—Why couldn’t
I organize a bank of my own some day? And Ted
succeed me!”
He drove happily home, and to Mrs. Babbitt he was
a William Washington Eathorne, but she did not notice
it.
III
Young Kenneth Escott, reporter on the Advocate-Times
was appointed press-agent of the Chatham Road Presbyterian
Sunday School. He gave six hours a week to it.
At least he was paid for giving six hours a week.
He had friends on the Press and the Gazette and he
was not (officially) known as a press-agent.
He procured a trickle of insinuating items about neighborliness
and the Bible, about class-suppers, jolly but educational,
and the value of the Prayer-life in attaining financial
success.
The Sunday School adopted Babbitt’s system of
military ranks. Quickened by this spiritual refreshment,
it had a boom. It did not become the largest
school in Zenith—the Central Methodist Church
kept ahead of it by methods which Dr. Drew scored
as “unfair, undignified, un-American, ungentlemanly,
and unchristian”—but it climbed from
fourth place to second, and there was rejoicing in
heaven, or at least in that portion of heaven included
in the parsonage of Dr. Drew, while Babbitt had much
praise and good repute.
