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, search-lights
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! Well, come on,
folks! Who says it? Who says Mike Monday is a fourflush
and a yahoo? Huh? Don't I see anybody standing
up? Well, there you are! Now I guess the folks in this
man's town will quit listening to all this kyoodling from behind
the fence; I guess you'll quit listening to the guys that
pan and roast and kick and beef, and vomit out filthy atheism;
and all of you 'll come in, with every grain of pep and reverence
you got, and boost all together for Jesus Christ and his
everlasting mercy and tenderness!''
At that moment Seneca Doane, the radical lawyer, and Dr.
Kurt Yavitch, the histologist (whose report on the destruction
of epithelial cells under radium had made the name of
Zenith known in Munich, Prague, and Rome), were talking in
Doane's library.
"Zenith's a city with gigantic power—gigantic buildings,
gigantic machines, gigantic transportation,'' meditated Doane.
"I hate your city. It has standardized all the beauty out
of life. It is one big railroad station—with all the people
taking tickets for the best cemeteries,'' Dr. Yavitch said
placidly.
Doane roused. "I'm hanged if it is! You make me sick,
Kurt, with your perpetual whine about `standardization.'
Don't you suppose any other nation is `standardized?' Is anything
more standardized than England, with every house that
can afford it having the same muffins at the same tea-hour,
and every retired general going to exactly the same evensong
at the same gray stone church with a square tower, and
every golfing prig in Harris tweeds saying `Right you are!'
to every other prosperous ass? Yet I love England. And for
standardization—just look at the sidewalk cafés in France
and the love-making in Italy!
"Standardization is excellent, per se. When I buy an Ingersoll
watch or a Ford, I get a better tool for less money, and
I know precisely what I'm getting, and that leaves me more
time and energy to be individual in. And— I remember
once in London I saw a picture of an American suburb, in
a toothpaste ad on the back of the Saturday Evening Post—
an elm-lined snowy street of these new houses, Georgian some
of 'em, or with low raking roofs and— The kind of street
you'd find here in Zenith, say in Floral Heights. Open.
Trees. Grass. And I was homesick! There's no other country
in the world that has such pleasant houses. And I don't
care if they
are standardized. It's a corking
standard!
"No, what I fight in Zenith is standardization of thought,
and, of course, the traditions of competition. The real villains
of the piece are the clean, kind, industrious Family Men
who use every known brand of trickery and cruelty to insure
the prosperity of their cubs. The worst thing about these
fellows is that they're so good and, in their work at least, so
intelligent. You can't hate them properly, and yet their
standardized minds are the enemy.
"Then this boosting— Sneakingly I have a notion that
Zenith is a better place to live in than Manchester or Glasgow
or Lyons or Berlin or Turin—''
"It is not, and I have lift in most of them,'' murmured
Dr. Yavitch.
"Well, matter of taste. Personally, I prefer a city with a
future so unknown that it excites my imagination. But what
I particularly want—''
"You,'' said Dr. Yavitch, "are a middle-road liberal, and
you haven't the slightest idea what you want. I, being a
revolutionist, know exactly what I want—and what I want now
is a drink.''
