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.
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.