He had received the rank of colonel on the general
staff of the school. He was plumply pleased by
salutes on the street from unknown small boys; his
ears were tickled to ruddy ecstasy by hearing himself
called “Colonel;” and if he did not attend
Sunday School merely to be thus exalted, certainly
he thought about it all the way there.
He was particularly pleasant to the press-agent, Kenneth
Escott; he took him to lunch at the Athletic Club
and had him at the house for dinner.
Like many of the cocksure young men who forage about
cities in apparent contentment and who express their
cynicism in supercilious slang, Escott was shy and
lonely. His shrewd starveling face broadened with
joy at dinner, and he blurted, “Gee whillikins,
Mrs. Babbitt, if you knew how good it is to have home
eats again!”
Escott and Verona liked each other. All evening
they “talked about ideas.” They discovered
that they were Radicals. True, they were sensible
about it. They agreed that all communists were
criminals; that this vers libre was tommy-rot; and
that while there ought to be universal disarmament,
of course Great Britain and the United States must,
on behalf of oppressed small nations, keep a navy equal
to the tonnage of all the rest of the world.
But they were so revolutionary that they predicted
(to Babbitt’s irritation) that there would some
day be a Third Party which would give trouble to the
Republicans and Democrats.
Escott shook hands with Babbitt three times, at parting.
Babbitt mentioned his extreme fondness for Eathorne.
Within a week three newspapers presented accounts
of Babbitt’s sterling labors for religion, and
all of them tactfully mentioned William Washington
Eathorne as his collaborator.
Nothing had brought Babbitt quite so much credit at
the Elks, the Athletic Club, and the Boosters’.
His friends had always congratulated him on his oratory,
but in their praise was doubt, for even in speeches
advertising the city there was something highbrow and
degenerate, like writing poetry. But now Orville
Jones shouted across the Athletic dining-room, “Here’s
the new director of the First State Bank!” Grover
Butterbaugh, the eminent wholesaler of plumbers’
supplies, chuckled, “Wonder you mix with common
folks, after holding Eathorne’s hand!”
And Emil Wengert, the jeweler, was at last willing
to discuss buying a house in Dorchester.
When the Sunday School campaign was finished, Babbitt
suggested to Kenneth Escott, “Say, how about
doing a little boosting for Doc Drew personally?”
Escott grinned. “You trust the doc to do
a little boosting for himself, Mr. Babbitt! There’s
hardly a week goes by without his ringing up the paper
to say if we’ll chase a reporter up to his Study,
he’ll let us in on the story about the swell
sermon he’s going to preach on the wickedness
of short skirts, or the authorship of the Pentateuch.
Don’t you worry about him. There’s
just one better publicity-grabber in town, and that’s
this Dora Gibson Tucker that runs the Child Welfare
and the Americanization League, and the only reason
she’s got Drew beaten is because she has got
some brains!”
