Babbitt

BABBITT

BY

SINCLAIR LEWIS

AUTHOR OF “MAIN STREET”

_HBMC_

NEW YORK

HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY

HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

_To

EDITH WHARTON_

BABBITT

CHAPTER I

I

The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of

steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver

rods. They were neither citadels nor churches, but frankly and

beautifully office-buildings.

The mist took pity on the fretted structures of earlier generations: the

Post Office with its shingle-tortured mansard, the red brick minarets of

hulking old houses, factories with stingy and sooted windows, wooden

tenements colored like mud. The city was full of such grotesqueries, but

the clean towers were thrusting them from the business center, and on

the farther hills were shining new houses, homes--they seemed--for

laughter and tranquillity.

Over a concrete bridge fled a limousine of long sleek hood and noiseless

engine. These people in evening clothes were returning from an all-night

rehearsal of a Little Theater play, an artistic adventure considerably

illuminated by champagne. Below the bridge curved a railroad, a maze of

green and crimson lights. The New York Flyer boomed past, and twenty

lines of polished steel leaped into the glare.

In one of the skyscrapers the wires of the Associated Press were closing

down. The telegraph operators wearily raised their celluloid eye-shades

after a night of talking with Paris and Peking. Through the building

crawled the scrubwomen, yawning, their old shoes slapping. The dawn mist

spun away. Cues of men with lunch-boxes clumped toward the immensity of

new factories, sheets of glass and hollow tile, glittering shops where

five thousand men worked beneath one roof, pouring out the honest wares

that would be sold up the Euphrates and across the veldt. The whistles

rolled out in greeting a chorus cheerful as the April dawn; the song of

labor in a city built--it seemed--for giants.

II

There was nothing of the giant in the aspect of the man who was

beginning to awaken on the sleeping-porch of a Dutch Colonial house in

that residential district of Zenith known as Floral Heights.

His name was George F. Babbitt. He was forty-six years old now, in

April, 1920, and he made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes

nor poetry, but he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more

than people could afford to pay.

His large head was pink, his brown hair thin and dry. His face was

babyish in slumber, despite his wrinkles and the red spectacle-dents on

the slopes of his nose. He was not fat but he was exceedingly well fed;

his cheeks were pads, and the unroughened hand which lay helpless upon

the khaki-colored blanket was slightly puffy. He seemed prosperous,

extremely married and unromantic; and altogether unromantic appeared

this sleeping-porch, which looked on one sizable elm, two respectable

grass-plots, a cement driveway, and a corrugated iron garage. Yet

Babbitt was again dreaming of the fairy child, a dream more romantic

than scarlet pagodas by a silver sea.

For years the fairy child had come to him. Where others saw but Georgie

Babbitt, she discerned gallant youth. She waited for him, in the

darkness beyond mysterious groves. When at last he could slip away from

the crowded house he darted to her. His wife, his clamoring friends,

sought to follow, but he escaped, the girl fleet beside him, and they

crouched together on a shadowy hillside. She was so slim, so white, so

eager! She cried that he was gay and valiant, that she would wait for

him, that they would sail--

Rumble and bang of the milk-truck.

Babbitt moaned, turned over, struggled back toward his dream. He could

see only her face now, beyond misty waters. The furnace-man slammed the

basement door. A dog barked in the next yard. As Babbitt sank blissfully

into a dim warm tide, the paper-carrier went by whistling, and the

rolled-up _Advocate_ thumped the front door. Babbitt roused, his stomach

constricted with alarm. As he relaxed, he was pierced by the familiar

and irritating rattle of some one cranking a Ford: snap-ah-ah,

snap-ah-ah, snap-ah-ah. Himself a pious motorist, Babbitt cranked with

the unseen driver, with him waited through taut hours for the roar of

the starting engine, with him agonized as the roar ceased and again

began the infernal patient snap-ah-ah--a round, flat sound, a shivering

cold-morning sound, a sound infuriating and inescapable. Not till the

rising voice of the motor told him that the Ford was moving was he

released from the panting tension. He glanced once at his favorite tree,

elm twigs against the gold patina of sky, and fumbled for sleep as for a

drug. He who had been a boy very credulous of life was no longer greatly

interested in the possible and improbable adventures of each new day.

He escaped from reality till the alarm-clock rang, at seven-twenty.

III

It was the best of nationally advertised and quantitatively produced

alarm-clocks, with all modern attachments, including cathedral chime,

intermittent alarm, and a phosphorescent dial. Babbitt was proud of

being awakened by such a rich device. Socially it was almost as

creditable as buying expensive cord tires.

He sulkily admitted now that there was no more escape, but he lay and

detested the grind of the real-estate business, and disliked his family,

and disliked himself for disliking them. The evening before, he had

played poker at Vergil Gunch’s till midnight, and after such holidays he

was irritable before breakfast. It may have been the tremendous

home-brewed beer of the prohibition-era and the cigars to which that

beer enticed him; it may have been resentment of return from this fine,

bold man-world to a restricted region of wives and stenographers, and of

suggestions not to smoke so much.

From the bedroom beside the sleeping-porch, his wife’s detestably

cheerful “Time to get up, Georgie boy,” and the itchy sound, the brisk

and scratchy sound, of combing hairs out of a stiff brush.

He grunted; he dragged his thick legs, in faded baby-blue pajamas, from

under the khaki blanket; he sat on the edge of the cot, running his

fingers through his wild hair, while his plump feet mechanically felt

for his slippers. He looked regretfully at the blanket--forever a

suggestion to him of freedom and heroism. He had bought it for a camping

trip which had never come off. It symbolized gorgeous loafing, gorgeous

cursing, virile flannel shirts.

He creaked to his feet, groaning at the waves of pain which passed

behind his eyeballs. Though he waited for their scorching recurrence, he

looked blurrily out at the yard. It delighted him, as always; it was the

neat yard of a successful business man of Zenith, that is, it was

perfection, and made him also perfect. He regarded the corrugated iron

garage. For the three-hundred-and-sixty-fifth time in a year he

reflected, “No class to that tin shack. Have to build me a frame garage.

But by golly it’s the only thing on the place that isn’t up-to-date!”

While he stared he thought of a community garage for his acreage

development, Glen Oriole. He stopped puffing and jiggling. His arms

were akimbo. His petulant, sleep-swollen face was set in harder lines.

He suddenly seemed capable, an official, a man to contrive, to direct,

to get things done.

On the vigor of his idea he was carried down the hard, clean,

unused-looking hall into the bathroom.

Though the house was not large it had, like all houses on Floral

Heights, an altogether royal bathroom of porcelain and glazed tile and

metal sleek as silver. The towel-rack was a rod of clear glass set in

nickel. The tub was long enough for a Prussian Guard, and above the set

bowl was a sensational exhibit of tooth-brush holder, shaving-brush

holder, soap-dish, sponge-dish, and medicine-cabinet, so glittering and

so ingenious that they resembled an electrical instrument-board. But the

Babbitt whose god was Modern Appliances was not pleased. The air of the

bathroom was thick with the smell of a heathen toothpaste. “Verona been

at it again! ’Stead of sticking to Lilidol, like I’ve re-peat-ed-ly

asked her, she’s gone and gotten some confounded stinkum stuff that

makes you sick!”

The bath-mat was wrinkled and the floor was wet. (His daughter Verona

eccentrically took baths in the morning, now and then.) He slipped on

the mat, and slid against the tub. He said “Damn!” Furiously he snatched

up his tube of shaving-cream, furiously he lathered, with a belligerent

slapping of the unctuous brush, furiously he raked his plump cheeks with

a safety-razor. It pulled. The blade was dull. He said,

“Damn--oh--oh--damn it!”

He hunted through the medicine-cabinet for a packet of new razor-blades

(reflecting, as invariably, “Be cheaper to buy one of these dinguses and

strop your own blades,”) and when he discovered the packet, behind the

round box of bicarbonate of soda, he thought ill of his wife for putting

it there and very well of himself for not saying “Damn.” But he did say

it, immediately afterward, when with wet and soap-slippery fingers he

tried to remove the horrible little envelope and crisp clinging oiled

paper from the new blade.

Then there was the problem, oft-pondered, never solved, of what to do

with the old blade, which might imperil the fingers of his young. As

usual, he tossed it on top of the medicine-cabinet, with a mental note

that some day he must remove the fifty or sixty other blades that were

also temporarily piled up there. He finished his shaving in a growing

testiness increased by his spinning headache and by the emptiness in his

stomach. When he was done, his round face smooth and streamy and his

eyes stinging from soapy water, he reached for a towel. The family

towels were wet, wet and clammy and vile, all of them wet, he found, as

he blindly snatched them--his own face-towel, his wife’s, Verona’s,

Ted’s, Tinka’s, and the lone bath-towel with the huge welt of initial.

Then George F. Babbitt did a dismaying thing. He wiped his face on the

guest-towel! It was a pansy-embroidered trifle which always hung there

to indicate that the Babbitts were in the best Floral Heights society.

No one had ever used it. No guest had ever dared to. Guests secretively

took a corner of the nearest regular towel.

He was raging, “By golly, here they go and use up all the towels, every

doggone one of ’em, and they use ’em and get ’em all wet and sopping,

and never put out a dry one for me--of course, I’m the goat!--and then I

want one and-- I’m the only person in the doggone house that’s got the

slightest doggone bit of consideration for other people and

thoughtfulness and consider there may be others that may want to use the

doggone bathroom after me and consider--”

He was pitching the chill abominations into the bath-tub, pleased by the

vindictiveness of that desolate flapping sound; and in the midst his

wife serenely trotted in, observed serenely, “Why Georgie dear, what are

you doing? Are you going to wash out the towels? Why, you needn’t wash

out the towels. Oh, Georgie, you didn’t go and use the guest-towel, did

you?”

It is not recorded that he was able to answer.

For the first time in weeks he was sufficiently roused by his wife to

look at her.

IV

Myra Babbitt--Mrs. George F. Babbitt--was definitely mature. She had

creases from the corners of her mouth to the bottom of her chin, and her

plump neck bagged. But the thing that marked her as having passed the

line was that she no longer had reticences before her husband, and no

longer worried about not having reticences. She was in a petticoat now,

and corsets which bulged, and unaware of being seen in bulgy corsets.

She had become so dully habituated to married life that in her full

matronliness she was as sexless as an anemic nun. She was a good woman,

a kind woman, a diligent woman, but no one, save perhaps Tinka her

ten-year-old, was at all interested in her or entirely aware that she

was alive.

After a rather thorough discussion of all the domestic and social

aspects of towels she apologized to Babbitt for his having an alcoholic

headache; and he recovered enough to endure the search for a B.V.D.

undershirt which had, he pointed out, malevolently been concealed among

his clean pajamas.

He was fairly amiable in the conference on the brown suit.

“What do you think, Myra?” He pawed at the clothes hunched on a chair in

their bedroom, while she moved about mysteriously adjusting and patting

her petticoat and, to his jaundiced eye, never seeming to get on with

her dressing. “How about it? Shall I wear the brown suit another day?”

“Well, it looks awfully nice on you.”

“I know, but gosh, it needs pressing.”

“That’s so. Perhaps it does.”

“It certainly could stand being pressed, all right.”

“Yes, perhaps it wouldn’t hurt it to be pressed.”

“But gee, the coat doesn’t need pressing. No sense in having the whole

darn suit pressed, when the coat doesn’t need it.”

“That’s so.”

“But the pants certainly need it, all right. Look at them--look at those

wrinkles--the pants certainly do need pressing.”

“That’s so. Oh, Georgie, why couldn’t you wear the brown coat with the

blue trousers we were wondering what we’d do with them?”

“Good Lord! Did you ever in all my life know me to wear the coat of one

suit and the pants of another? What do you think I am? A busted

bookkeeper?”

“Well, why don’t you put on the dark gray suit to-day, and stop in at

the tailor and leave the brown trousers?”

“Well, they certainly need-- Now where the devil is that gray suit? Oh,

yes, here we are.”

He was able to get through the other crises of dressing with comparative

resoluteness and calm.

His first adornment was the sleeveless dimity B.V.D. undershirt, in

which he resembled a small boy humorlessly wearing a cheesecloth tabard

at a civic pageant. He never put on B.V.D.’s without thanking the God of

Progress that he didn’t wear tight, long, old-fashioned undergarments,

like his father-in-law and partner, Henry Thompson. His second

embellishment was combing and slicking back his hair. It gave him a

tremendous forehead, arching up two inches beyond the former hair-line.

But most wonder-working of all was the donning of his spectacles.

There is character in spectacles--the pretentious tortoise-shell, the

meek pince-nez of the school teacher, the twisted silver-framed glasses

of the old villager. Babbitt’s spectacles had huge, circular, frameless

lenses of the very best glass; the ear-pieces were thin bars of gold. In

them he was the modern business man; one who gave orders to clerks and

drove a car and played occasional golf and was scholarly in regard to

Salesmanship. His head suddenly appeared not babyish but weighty, and

you noted his heavy, blunt nose, his straight mouth and thick, long

upper lip, his chin overfleshy but strong; with respect you beheld him

put on the rest of his uniform as a Solid Citizen.

The gray suit was well cut, well made, and completely undistinguished.

It was a standard suit. White piping on the V of the vest added a flavor

of law and learning. His shoes were black laced boots, good boots,

honest boots, standard boots, extraordinarily uninteresting boots. The

only frivolity was in his purple knitted scarf. With considerable

comment on the matter to Mrs. Babbitt (who, acrobatically fastening the

back of her blouse to her skirt with a safety-pin, did not hear a word

he said), he chose between the purple scarf and a tapestry effect with

stringless brown harps among blown palms, and into it he thrust a

snake-head pin with opal eyes.

A sensational event was changing from the brown suit to the gray the

contents of his pockets. He was earnest about these objects. They were

of eternal importance, like baseball or the Republican Party. They

included a fountain pen and a silver pencil (always lacking a supply of

new leads) which belonged in the righthand upper vest pocket. Without

them he would have felt naked. On his watch-chain were a gold penknife,

silver cigar-cutter, seven keys (the use of two of which he had

forgotten), and incidentally a good watch. Depending from the chain was

a large, yellowish elk’s-tooth--proclamation of his membership in the

Brotherly and Protective Order of Elks. Most significant of all was his

loose-leaf pocket note-book, that modern and efficient note-book which

contained the addresses of people whom he had forgotten, prudent

memoranda of postal money-orders which had reached their destinations

months ago, stamps which had lost their mucilage, clippings of verses by

T. Cholmondeley Frink and of the newspaper editorials from which Babbitt

got his opinions and his polysyllables, notes to be sure and do things

which he did not intend to do, and one curious inscription--D.S.S.D.M.Y.P.D.F.

But he had no cigarette-case. No one had ever happened to give him one,

so he hadn’t the habit, and people who carried cigarette-cases he

regarded as effeminate.

Last, he stuck in his lapel the Boosters’ Club button. With the

conciseness of great art the button displayed two words:

“Boosters--Pep!” It made Babbitt feel loyal and important. It associated

him with Good Fellows, with men who were nice and human, and important

in business circles. It was his V.C., his Legion of Honor ribbon, his

Phi Beta Kappa key.

With the subtleties of dressing ran other complex worries. “I feel kind

of punk this morning,” he said. “I think I had too much dinner last

evening. You oughtn’t to serve those heavy banana fritters.”

“But you asked me to have some.”

“I know, but-- I tell you, when a fellow gets past forty he has to look

after his digestion. There’s a lot of fellows that don’t take proper

care of themselves. I tell you at forty a man’s a fool or his doctor-- I

mean, his own doctor. Folks don’t give enough attention to this matter

of dieting. Now I think-- Course a man ought to have a good meal after

the day’s work, but it would be a good thing for both of us if we took

lighter lunches.”

“But Georgie, here at home I always do have a light lunch.”

“Mean to imply I make a hog of myself, eating down-town? Yes, sure!

You’d have a swell time if you had to eat the truck that new steward

hands out to us at the Athletic Club! But I certainly do feel out of

sorts, this morning. Funny, got a pain down here on the left side--but

no, that wouldn’t be appendicitis, would it? Last night, when I was

driving over to Verg Gunch’s, I felt a pain in my stomach, too. Right

here it was--kind of a sharp shooting pain. I-- Where’d that dime go to?

Why don’t you serve more prunes at breakfast? Of course I eat an apple

every evening--an apple a day keeps the doctor away--but still, you

ought to have more prunes, and not all these fancy doodads.”

“The last time I had prunes you didn’t eat them.”

“Well, I didn’t feel like eating ’em, I suppose. Matter of fact, I think

I did eat some of ’em. Anyway-- I tell you it’s mighty important to-- I

was saying to Verg Gunch, just last evening, most people don’t take

sufficient care of their diges--”

“Shall we have the Gunches for our dinner, next week?”

“Why sure; you bet.”

“Now see here, George: I want you to put on your nice dinner-jacket that

evening.”

“Rats! The rest of ’em won’t want to dress.”

“Of course they will. You remember when you didn’t dress for the

Littlefields’ supper-party, and all the rest did, and how embarrassed

you were.”

“Embarrassed, hell! I wasn’t embarrassed. Everybody knows I can put on

as expensive a Tux. as anybody else, and I should worry if I don’t

happen to have it on sometimes. All a darn nuisance, anyway. All right

for a woman, that stays around the house all the time, but when a

fellow’s worked like the dickens all day, he doesn’t want to go and

hustle his head off getting into the soup-and-fish for a lot of folks

that he’s seen in just reg’lar ordinary clothes that same day.”

“You know you enjoy being seen in one. The other evening you admitted

you were glad I’d insisted on your dressing. You said you felt a lot

better for it. And oh, Georgie, I do wish you wouldn’t say ‘Tux.’ It’s

‘dinner-jacket.’”

“Rats, what’s the odds?”

“Well, it’s what all the nice folks say. Suppose Lucile McKelvey heard

you calling it a ‘Tux.’”

“Well, that’s all right now! Lucile McKelvey can’t pull anything on me!

Her folks are common as mud, even if her husband and her dad are

millionaires! I suppose you’re trying to rub in _your_ exalted social

position! Well, let me tell you that your revered paternal ancestor,

Henry T., doesn’t even call it a ‘Tux.’! He calls it a ‘bobtail jacket

for a ringtail monkey,’ and you couldn’t get him into one unless you

chloroformed him!”

“Now don’t be horrid, George.”

“Well, I don’t want to be horrid, but Lord! you’re getting as fussy as

Verona. Ever since she got out of college she’s been too rambunctious to

live with--doesn’t know what she wants--well, I know what she

wants!--all she wants is to marry a millionaire, and live in Europe, and

hold some preacher’s hand, and simultaneously at the same time stay

right here in Zenith and be some blooming kind of a socialist agitator

or boss charity-worker or some damn thing! Lord, and Ted is just as bad!

He wants to go to college, and he doesn’t want to go to college. Only

one of the three that knows her own mind is Tinka. Simply can’t

understand how I ever came to have a pair of shillyshallying children

like Rone and Ted. I may not be any Rockefeller or James J. Shakespeare,

but I certainly do know my own mind, and I do keep right on plugging

along in the office and-- Do you know the latest? Far as I can figure

out, Ted’s new bee is he’d like to be a movie actor and-- And here I’ve

told him a hundred times, if he’ll go to college and law-school and make

good, I’ll set him up in business and-- Verona just exactly as bad.

Doesn’t know what she wants. Well, well, come on! Aren’t you ready yet?

The girl rang the bell three minutes ago.”

V

Before he followed his wife, Babbitt stood at the westernmost window of

their room. This residential settlement, Floral Heights, was on a rise;

and though the center of the city was three miles away-- Zenith had

between three and four hundred thousand inhabitants now--he could see

the top of the Second National Tower, an Indiana limestone building of

thirty-five stories.

Its shining walls rose against April sky to a simple cornice like a

streak of white fire. Integrity was in the tower, and decision. It bore

its strength lightly as a tall soldier. As Babbitt stared, the

nervousness was soothed from his face, his slack chin lifted in

reverence. All he articulated was “That’s one lovely sight!” but he was

inspired by the rhythm of the city; his love of it renewed. He beheld

the tower as a temple-spire of the religion of business, a faith

passionate, exalted, surpassing common men; and as he clumped down to

breakfast he whistled the ballad “Oh, by gee, by gosh, by jingo” as

though it were a hymn melancholy and noble.

CHAPTER II

I

Relieved of Babbitt’s bumbling and the soft grunts with which his wife

expressed the sympathy she was too experienced to feel and much too

experienced not to show, their bedroom settled instantly into

impersonality.

It gave on the sleeping-porch. It served both of them as dressing-room,

and on the coldest nights Babbitt luxuriously gave up the duty of being

manly and retreated to the bed inside, to curl his toes in the warmth

and laugh at the January gale.

The room displayed a modest and pleasant color-scheme, after one of the

best standard designs of the decorator who “did the interiors” for most

of the speculative-builders’ houses in Zenith. The walls were gray, the

woodwork white, the rug a serene blue; and very much like mahogany was

the furniture--the bureau with its great clear mirror, Mrs. Babbitt’s

dressing-table with toilet-articles of almost solid silver, the plain

twin beds, between them a small table holding a standard electric

bedside lamp, a glass for water, and a standard bedside book with

colored illustrations--what particular book it was cannot be

ascertained, since no one had ever opened it. The mattresses were firm

but not hard, triumphant modern mattresses which had cost a great deal

of money; the hot-water radiator was of exactly the proper scientific

surface for the cubic contents of the room. The windows were large and

easily opened, with the best catches and cords, and Holland

roller-shades guaranteed not to crack. It was a masterpiece among

bedrooms, right out of Cheerful Modern Houses for Medium Incomes. Only

it had nothing to do with the Babbitts, nor with any one else. If

people had ever lived and loved here, read thrillers at midnight and

lain in beautiful indolence on a Sunday morning, there were no signs of

it. It had the air of being a very good room in a very good hotel. One

expected the chambermaid to come in and make it ready for people who

would stay but one night, go without looking back, and never think of it

again.

Every second house in Floral Heights had a bedroom precisely like this.

The Babbitts’ house was five years old. It was all as competent and

glossy as this bedroom. It had the best of taste, the best of

inexpensive rugs, a simple and laudable architecture, and the latest

conveniences. Throughout, electricity took the place of candles and

slatternly hearth-fires. Along the bedroom baseboard were three plugs

for electric lamps, concealed by little brass doors. In the halls were

plugs for the vacuum cleaner, and in the living-room plugs for the piano

lamp, for the electric fan. The trim dining-room (with its admirable oak

buffet, its leaded-glass cupboard, its creamy plaster walls, its modest

scene of a salmon expiring upon a pile of oysters) had plugs which

supplied the electric percolator and the electric toaster.

In fact there was but one thing wrong with the Babbitt house: It was not

a home.

II

Often of a morning Babbitt came bouncing and jesting in to breakfast.

But things were mysteriously awry to-day. As he pontifically tread the

upper hall he looked into Verona’s bedroom and protested, “What’s the

use of giving the family a high-class house when they don’t appreciate

it and tend to business and get down to brass tacks?”

He marched upon them: Verona, a dumpy brown-haired girl of twenty-two,

just out of Bryn Mawr, given to solicitudes about duty and sex and God

and the unconquerable bagginess of the gray sports-suit she was now

wearing. Ted--Theodore Roosevelt Babbitt--a decorative boy of seventeen.

Tinka--Katherine--still a baby at ten, with radiant red hair and a thin

skin which hinted of too much candy and too many ice cream sodas.

Babbitt did not show his vague irritation as he tramped in. He really

disliked being a family tyrant, and his nagging was as meaningless as it

was frequent. He shouted at Tinka, “Well, kittiedoolie!” It was the only

pet name in his vocabulary, except the “dear” and “hon.” with which he

recognized his wife, and he flung it at Tinka every morning.

He gulped a cup of coffee in the hope of pacifying his stomach and his

soul. His stomach ceased to feel as though it did not belong to him, but

Verona began to be conscientious and annoying, and abruptly there

returned to Babbitt the doubts regarding life and families and business

which had clawed at him when his dream-life and the slim fairy girl had

fled.

Verona had for six months been filing-clerk at the Gruensberg Leather

Company offices, with a prospect of becoming secretary to Mr. Gruensberg

and thus, as Babbitt defined it, “getting some good out of your

expensive college education till you’re ready to marry and settle down.”

But now said Verona: “Father! I was talking to a classmate of mine

that’s working for the Associated Charities--oh, Dad, there’s the

sweetest little babies that come to the milk-station there!--and I feel

as though I ought to be doing something worth while like that.”

“What do you mean ‘worth while’? If you get to be Gruensberg’s

secretary--and maybe you would, if you kept up your shorthand and didn’t

go sneaking off to concerts and talk-fests every evening--I guess you’ll

find thirty-five or forty bones a week worth while!”

“I know, but--oh, I want to--contribute-- I wish I were working in a

settlement-house. I wonder if I could get one of the department-stores

to let me put in a welfare-department with a nice rest-room and chintzes

and wicker chairs and so on and so forth. Or I could--”

“Now you look here! The first thing you got to understand is that all

this uplift and flipflop and settlement-work and recreation is nothing

in God’s world but the entering wedge for socialism. The sooner a man

learns he isn’t going to be coddled, and he needn’t expect a lot of free

grub and, uh, all these free classes and flipflop and doodads for his

kids unless he earns ’em, why, the sooner he’ll get on the job and

produce--produce--produce! That’s what the country needs, and not all

this fancy stuff that just enfeebles the will-power of the working man

and gives his kids a lot of notions above their class. And you--if you’d

tend to business instead of fooling and fussing-- All the time! When I

was a young man I made up my mind what I wanted to do, and stuck to it

through thick and thin, and that’s why I’m where I am to-day, and-- Myra!

What do you let the girl chop the toast up into these dinky little

chunks for? Can’t get your fist onto ’em. Half cold, anyway!”

Ted Babbitt, junior in the great East Side High School, had been making

hiccup-like sounds of interruption. He blurted now, “Say, Rone, you

going to--”

Verona whirled. “Ted! Will you kindly not interrupt us when we’re

talking about serious matters!”

“Aw punk,” said Ted judicially. “Ever since somebody slipped up and let

you out of college, Ammonia, you been pulling these nut conversations

about what-nots and so-on-and-so-forths. Are you going to-- I want to use

the car to-night.”

Babbitt snorted, “Oh, you do! May want it myself!” Verona protested,

“Oh, you do, Mr. Smarty! I’m going to take it myself!” Tinka wailed,

“Oh, papa, you said maybe you’d drive us down to Rosedale!” and Mrs.

Babbitt, “Careful, Tinka, your sleeve is in the butter.” They glared,

and Verona hurled, “Ted, you’re a perfect pig about the car!”

“Course you’re not! Not a-tall!” Ted could be maddeningly bland. “You

just want to grab it off, right after dinner, and leave it in front of

some skirt’s house all evening while you sit and gas about lite’ature

and the highbrows you’re going to marry--if they only propose!”

“Well, Dad oughtn’t to _ever_ let you have it! You and those beastly

Jones boys drive like maniacs. The idea of your taking the turn on

Chautauqua Place at forty miles an hour!”

“Aw, where do you get that stuff! You’re so darn scared of the car that

you drive up-hill with the emergency brake on!”

“I do not! And you-- Always talking about how much you know about motors,

and Eunice Littlefield told me you said the battery fed the generator!”

“You--why, my good woman, you don’t know a generator from a

differential.” Not unreasonably was Ted lofty with her. He was a natural

mechanic, a maker and tinkerer of machines; he lisped in blueprints for

the blueprints came.

“That’ll do now!” Babbitt flung in mechanically, as he lighted the

gloriously satisfying first cigar of the day and tasted the exhilarating

drug of the _Advocate-Times_ headlines.

Ted negotiated: “Gee, honest, Rone, I don’t want to take the old boat,

but I promised couple o’ girls in my class I’d drive ’em down to the

rehearsal of the school chorus, and, gee, I don’t want to, but a

gentleman’s got to keep his social engagements.”

“Well, upon my word! You and your social engagements! In high school!”

“Oh, ain’t we select since we went to that hen college! Let me tell you

there isn’t a private school in the state that’s got as swell a bunch as

we got in Gamma Digamma this year. There’s two fellows that their dads

are millionaires. Say, gee, I ought to have a car of my own, like lots

of the fellows.”

Babbitt almost rose. “A car of your own! Don’t you want a yacht, and a

house and lot? That pretty nearly takes the cake! A boy that can’t pass

his Latin examinations, like any other boy ought to, and he expects me

to give him a motor-car, and I suppose a chauffeur, and an aeroplane

maybe, as a reward for the hard work he puts in going to the movies with

Eunice Littlefield! Well, when you see me giving you--”

Somewhat later, after diplomacies, Ted persuaded Verona to admit that

she was merely going to the Armory, that evening, to see the dog and cat

show. She was then, Ted planned, to park the car in front of the

candy-store across from the Armory and he would pick it up. There were

masterly arrangements regarding leaving the key, and having the gasoline

tank filled; and passionately, devotees of the Great God Motor, they

hymned the patch on the spare inner-tube, and the lost jack-handle.

Their truce dissolving, Ted observed that her friends were “a scream of

a bunch--stuck-up gabby four-flushers.” His friends, she indicated, were

“disgusting imitation sports, and horrid little shrieking ignorant

girls.” Further: “It’s disgusting of you to smoke cigarettes, and so on

and so forth, and those clothes you’ve got on this morning, they’re too

utterly ridiculous--honestly, simply disgusting.”

Ted balanced over to the low beveled mirror in the buffet, regarded his

charms, and smirked. His suit, the latest thing in Old Eli Togs, was

skin-tight, with skimpy trousers to the tops of his glaring tan boots, a

chorus-man waistline, pattern of an agitated check, and across the back

a belt which belted nothing. His scarf was an enormous black silk wad.

His flaxen hair was ice-smooth, pasted back without parting. When he

went to school he would add a cap with a long vizor like a shovel-blade.

Proudest of all was his waistcoat, saved for, begged for, plotted for; a

real Fancy Vest of fawn with polka dots of a decayed red, the points

astoundingly long. On the lower edge of it he wore a high-school

button, a class button, and a fraternity pin.

And none of it mattered. He was supple and swift and flushed; his eyes

(which he believed to be cynical) were candidly eager. But he was not

over-gentle. He waved his hand at poor dumpy Verona and drawled: “Yes, I

guess we’re pretty ridiculous and disgusticulus, and I rather guess our

new necktie is some smear!”

Babbitt barked: “It is! And while you’re admiring yourself, let me tell

you it might add to your manly beauty if you wiped some of that egg off

your mouth!”

Verona giggled, momentary victor in the greatest of Great Wars, which is

the family war. Ted looked at her hopelessly, then shrieked at Tinka:

“For the love o’ Pete, quit pouring the whole sugar bowl on your corn

flakes!”

When Verona and Ted were gone and Tinka upstairs, Babbitt groaned to his

wife: “Nice family, I must say! I don’t pretend to be any baa-lamb, and

maybe I’m a little cross-grained at breakfast sometimes, but the way

they go on jab-jab-jabbering, I simply can’t stand it. I swear, I feel

like going off some place where I can get a little peace. I do think

after a man’s spent his lifetime trying to give his kids a chance and a

decent education, it’s pretty discouraging to hear them all the time

scrapping like a bunch of hyenas and never--and never-- Curious; here in

the paper it says-- Never silent for one mom-- Seen the morning paper

yet?”

“No, dear.” In twenty-three years of married life, Mrs. Babbitt had seen

the paper before her husband just sixty-seven times.

“Lots of news. Terrible big tornado in the South. Hard luck, all right.

But this, say, this is corking! Beginning of the end for those fellows!

New York Assembly has passed some bills that ought to completely outlaw

the socialists! And there’s an elevator-runners’ strike in New York and

a lot of college boys are taking their places. That’s the stuff! And a

mass-meeting in Birmingham’s demanded that this Mick agitator, this

fellow De Valera, be deported. Dead right, by golly! All these agitators

paid with German gold anyway. And we got no business interfering with

the Irish or any other foreign government. Keep our hands strictly off.

And there’s another well-authenticated rumor from Russia that Lenin is

dead. That’s fine. It’s beyond me why we don’t just step in there and

kick those Bolshevik cusses out.”

“That’s so,” said Mrs. Babbitt.

“And it says here a fellow was inaugurated mayor in overalls--a

preacher, too! What do you think of that!”

“Humph! Well!”

He searched for an attitude, but neither as a Republican, a

Presbyterian, an Elk, nor a real-estate broker did he have any doctrine

about preacher-mayors laid down for him, so he grunted and went on. She

looked sympathetic and did not hear a word. Later she would read the

headlines, the society columns, and the department-store advertisements.

“What do you know about this! Charley McKelvey still doing the sassiety

stunt as heavy as ever. Here’s what that gushy woman reporter says about

last night:”

Never is Society with the big, big S more flattered than when they

are bidden to partake of good cheer at the distinguished and

hospitable residence of Mr. and Mrs. Charles L. McKelvey as they

were last night. Set in its spacious lawns and landscaping, one of

the notable sights crowning Royal Ridge, but merry and homelike

despite its mighty stone walls and its vast rooms famed for their

decoration, their home was thrown open last night for a dance in

honor of Mrs. McKelvey’s notable guest, Miss J. Sneeth of

Washington. The wide hall is so generous in its proportions that it

made a perfect ballroom, its hardwood floor reflecting the charming

pageant above its polished surface. Even the delights of dancing

paled before the alluring opportunities for tête-à-têtes that

invited the soul to loaf in the long library before the baronial

fireplace, or in the drawing-room with its deep comfy armchairs,

its shaded lamps just made for a sly whisper of pretty nothings all

a deux; or even in the billiard room where one could take a cue

and show a prowess at still another game than that sponsored by

Cupid and Terpsichore.

There was more, a great deal more, in the best urban journalistic style

of Miss Elnora Pearl Bates, the popular society editor of the

_Advocate-Times_. But Babbitt could not abide it. He grunted. He

wrinkled the newspaper. He protested: “Can you beat it! I’m willing to

hand a lot of credit to Charley McKelvey. When we were in college

together, he was just as hard up as any of us, and he’s made a million

good bucks out of contracting and hasn’t been any dishonester or bought

any more city councils than was necessary. And that’s a good house of

his--though it ain’t any ‘mighty stone walls’ and it ain’t worth the

ninety thousand it cost him. But when it comes to talking as though

Charley McKelvey and all that booze-hoisting set of his are any blooming

bunch of of, of Vanderbilts, why, it makes me tired!”

Timidly from Mrs. Babbitt: “I would like to see the inside of their

house though. It must be lovely. I’ve never been inside.”

“Well, I have! Lots of--couple of times. To see Chaz about business

deals, in the evening. It’s not so much. I wouldn’t _want_ to go there

to dinner with that gang of, of high-binders. And I’ll bet I make a

whole lot more money than some of those tin-horns that spend all they

got on dress-suits and haven’t got a decent suit of underwear to their

name! Hey! What do you think of this!”

Mrs. Babbitt was strangely unmoved by the tidings from the Real Estate

and Building column of the _Advocate-Times_:

Ashtabula Street, 496--J. K. Dawson to

Thomas Mullally, April 17, 15.7 × 112.2,

mtg. $4000................ Nom.

And this morning Babbitt was too disquieted to entertain her with items

from Mechanics’ Liens, Mortgages Recorded, and Contracts Awarded. He

rose. As he looked at her his eyebrows seemed shaggier than usual.

Suddenly:

“Yes, maybe-- Kind of shame to not keep in touch with folks like the

McKelveys. We might try inviting them to dinner, some evening. Oh,

thunder, let’s not waste our good time thinking about ’em! Our little

bunch has a lot liver times than all those plutes. Just compare a real

human like you with these neurotic birds like Lucile McKelvey--all

highbrow talk and dressed up like a plush horse! You’re a great old

girl, hon.!”

He covered his betrayal of softness with a complaining: “Say, don’t let

Tinka go and eat any more of that poison nut-fudge. For Heaven’s sake,

try to keep her from ruining her digestion. I tell you, most folks don’t

appreciate how important it is to have a good digestion and regular

habits. Be back ’bout usual time, I guess.”

He kissed her--he didn’t quite kiss her--he laid unmoving lips against

her unflushing cheek. He hurried out to the garage, muttering: “Lord,

what a family! And now Myra is going to get pathetic on me because we

don’t train with this millionaire outfit. Oh, Lord, sometimes I’d like

to quit the whole game. And the office worry and detail just as bad. And

I act cranky and-- I don’t mean to, but I get-- So darn tired!”

CHAPTER III

I

To George F. Babbitt, as to most prosperous citizens of Zenith, his

motor car was poetry and tragedy, love and heroism. The office was his

pirate ship but the car his perilous excursion ashore.

Among the tremendous crises of each day none was more dramatic than

starting the engine. It was slow on cold mornings; there was the long,

anxious whirr of the starter; and sometimes he had to drip ether into

the cocks of the cylinders, which was so very interesting that at lunch

he would chronicle it drop by drop, and orally calculate how much each

drop had cost him.

This morning he was darkly prepared to find something wrong, and he felt

belittled when the mixture exploded sweet and strong, and the car didn’t

even brush the door-jamb, gouged and splintery with many bruisings by

fenders, as he backed out of the garage. He was confused. He shouted

“Morning!” to Sam Doppelbrau with more cordiality than he had intended.

Babbitt’s green and white Dutch Colonial house was one of three in that

block on Chatham Road. To the left of it was the residence of Mr. Samuel

Doppelbrau, secretary of an excellent firm of bathroom-fixture jobbers.

His was a comfortable house with no architectural manners whatever; a

large wooden box with a squat tower, a broad porch, and glossy paint

yellow as a yolk. Babbitt disapproved of Mr. and Mrs. Doppelbrau as

“Bohemian.” From their house came midnight music and obscene laughter;

there were neighborhood rumors of bootlegged whisky and fast motor

rides. They furnished Babbitt with many happy evenings of discussion,

during which he announced firmly, “I’m not straitlaced, and I don’t mind

seeing a fellow throw in a drink once in a while, but when it comes to

deliberately trying to get away with a lot of hell-raising all the while

like the Doppelbraus do, it’s too rich for my blood!”

On the other side of Babbitt lived Howard Littlefield, Ph.D., in a

strictly modern house whereof the lower part was dark red tapestry

brick, with a leaded oriel, the upper part of pale stucco like spattered

clay, and the roof red-tiled. Littlefield was the Great Scholar of the

neighborhood; the authority on everything in the world except babies,

cooking, and motors. He was a Bachelor of Arts of Blodgett College, and

a Doctor of Philosophy in economics of Yale. He was the

employment-manager and publicity-counsel of the Zenith Street Traction

Company. He could, on ten hours’ notice, appear before the board of

aldermen or the state legislature and prove, absolutely, with figures

all in rows and with precedents from Poland and New Zealand, that the

street-car company loved the Public and yearned over its employees; that

all its stock was owned by Widows and Orphans; and that whatever it

desired to do would benefit property-owners by increasing rental values,

and help the poor by lowering rents. All his acquaintances turned to

Littlefield when they desired to know the date of the battle of

Saragossa, the definition of the word “sabotage,” the future of the

German mark, the translation of “_hinc illæ lachrimæ_” or the number of

products of coal tar. He awed Babbitt by confessing that he often sat up

till midnight reading the figures and footnotes in Government reports,

or skimming (with amusement at the author’s mistakes) the latest volumes

of chemistry, archaeology, and ichthyology.

But Littlefield’s great value was as a spiritual example. Despite his

strange learnings he was as strict a Presbyterian and as firm a

Republican as George F. Babbitt. He confirmed the business men in the

faith. Where they knew only by passionate instinct that their system of

industry and manners was perfect, Dr. Howard Littlefield proved it to

them, out of history, economics, and the confessions of reformed

radicals.

Babbitt had a good deal of honest pride in being the neighbor of such a

savant, and in Ted’s intimacy with Eunice Littlefield. At sixteen Eunice

was interested in no statistics save those regarding the ages and

salaries of motion-picture stars, but--as Babbitt definitively put

it--“she was her father’s daughter.”

The difference between a light man like Sam Doppelbrau and a really fine

character like Littlefield was revealed in their appearances. Doppelbrau

was disturbingly young for a man of forty-eight. He wore his derby on

the back of his head, and his red face was wrinkled with meaningless

laughter. But Littlefield was old for a man of forty-two. He was tall,

broad, thick; his gold-rimmed spectacles were engulfed in the folds of

his long face; his hair was a tossed mass of greasy blackness; he puffed

and rumbled as he talked; his Phi Beta Kappa key shone against a spotty

black vest; he smelled of old pipes; he was altogether funereal and

archidiaconal; and to real-estate brokerage and the jobbing of

bathroom-fixtures he added an aroma of sanctity.

This morning he was in front of his house, inspecting the grass parking

between the curb and the broad cement sidewalk. Babbitt stopped his car

and leaned out to shout “Mornin’!” Littlefield lumbered over and stood

with one foot up on the running-board.

“Fine morning,” said Babbitt, lighting--illegally early--his second

cigar of the day.

“Yes, it’s a mighty fine morning,” said Littlefield.

“Spring coming along fast now.”

“Yes, it’s real spring now, all right,” said Littlefield.

“Still cold nights, though. Had to have a couple blankets, on the

sleeping-porch last night.”

“Yes, it wasn’t any too warm last night,” said Littlefield.

“But I don’t anticipate we’ll have any more real cold weather now.”

“No, but still, there was snow at Tiflis, Montana, yesterday,” said the

Scholar, “and you remember the blizzard they had out West three days

ago--thirty inches of snow at Greeley, Colorado--and two years ago we

had a snow-squall right here in Zenith on the twenty-fifth of April.”

“Is that a fact! Say, old man, what do you think about the Republican

candidate? Who’ll they nominate for president? Don’t you think it’s

about time we had a real business administration?”

“In my opinion, what the country needs, first and foremost, is a good,

sound, business-like conduct of its affairs. What we need is--a business

administration!” said Littlefield.

“I’m glad to hear you say that! I certainly am glad to hear you say

that! I didn’t know how you’d feel about it, with all your associations

with colleges and so on, and I’m glad you feel that way. What the

country needs--just at this present juncture--is neither a college

president nor a lot of monkeying with foreign affairs, but a

good--sound--economical--business--administration, that will give us a

chance to have something like a decent turnover.”

“Yes. It isn’t generally realized that even in China the schoolmen are

giving way to more practical men, and of course you can see what that

implies.”

“Is that a fact! Well, well!” breathed Babbitt, feeling much calmer, and

much happier about the way things were going in the world. “Well, it’s

been nice to stop and parleyvoo a second. Guess I’ll have to get down to

the office now and sting a few clients. Well, so long, old man. See you

to-night. So long.”

II

They had labored, these solid citizens. Twenty years before, the hill

on which Floral Heights was spread, with its bright roofs and immaculate

turf and amazing comfort, had been a wilderness of rank second-growth

elms and oaks and maples. Along the precise streets were still a few

wooded vacant lots, and the fragment of an old orchard. It was brilliant

to-day; the apple boughs were lit with fresh leaves like torches of

green fire. The first white of cherry blossoms flickered down a gully,

and robins clamored.

Babbitt sniffed the earth, chuckled at the hysteric robins as he would

have chuckled at kittens or at a comic movie. He was, to the eye, the

perfect office-going executive--a well-fed man in a correct brown soft

hat and frameless spectacles, smoking a large cigar, driving a good

motor along a semisuburban parkway. But in him was some genius of

authentic love for his neighborhood, his city, his clan. The winter was

over; the time was come for the building, the visible growth, which to

him was glory. He lost his dawn depression; he was ruddily cheerful when

he stopped on Smith Street to leave the brown trousers, and to have the

gasoline-tank filled.

The familiarity of the rite fortified him: the sight of the tall red

iron gasoline-pump, the hollow-tile and terra-cotta garage, the window

full of the most agreeable accessories--shiny casings, spark-plugs with

immaculate porcelain jackets, tire-chains of gold and silver. He was

flattered by the friendliness with which Sylvester Moon, dirtiest and

most skilled of motor mechanics, came out to serve him. “Mornin’, Mr.

Babbitt!” said Moon, and Babbitt felt himself a person of importance,

one whose name even busy garagemen remembered--not one of these

cheap-sports flying around in flivvers. He admired the ingenuity of the

automatic dial, clicking off gallon by gallon; admired the smartness of

the sign: “A fill in time saves getting stuck--gas to-day 31 cents”;

admired the rhythmic gurgle of the gasoline as it flowed into the tank,

and the mechanical regularity with which Moon turned the handle.

“How much we takin’ to-day?” asked Moon, in a manner which combined the

independence of the great specialist, the friendliness of a familiar

gossip, and respect for a man of weight in the community, like George F.

Babbitt.

“Fill ’er up.”

“Who you rootin’ for for Republican candidate, Mr. Babbitt?”

“It’s too early to make any predictions yet. After all, there’s still a

good month and two weeks--no, three weeks--must be almost three

weeks--well, there’s more than six weeks in all before the Republican

convention, and I feel a fellow ought to keep an open mind and give all

the candidates a show--look ’em all over and size ’em up, and then

decide carefully.”

“That’s a fact, Mr. Babbitt.”

“But I’ll tell you--and my stand on this is just the same as it was four

years ago, and eight years ago, and it’ll be my stand four years from

now--yes, and eight years from now! What I tell everybody, and it can’t

be too generally understood, is that what we need first, last, and all

the time is a good, sound business administration!”

“By golly, that’s right!”

“How do those front tires look to you?”

“Fine! Fine! Wouldn’t be much work for garages if everybody looked after

their car the way you do.”

“Well, I do try and have some sense about it.” Babbitt paid his bill,

said adequately, “Oh, keep the change,” and drove off in an ecstasy of

honest self-appreciation. It was with the manner of a Good Samaritan

that he shouted at a respectable-looking man who was waiting for a

trolley car, “Have a lift?” As the man climbed in Babbitt condescended,

“Going clear down-town? Whenever I see a fellow waiting for a trolley, I

always make it a practice to give him a lift--unless, of course, he

looks like a bum.”

“Wish there were more folks that were so generous with their machines,”

dutifully said the victim of benevolence.

“Oh, no, ’tain’t a question of generosity, hardly. Fact, I always

feel-- I was saying to my son just the other night--it’s a fellow’s duty

to share the good things of this world with his neighbors, and it gets

my goat when a fellow gets stuck on himself and goes around tooting his

horn merely because he’s charitable.”

The victim seemed unable to find the right answer. Babbitt boomed on:

“Pretty punk service the Company giving us on these carlines. Nonsense

to only run the Portland Road cars once every seven minutes. Fellow gets

mighty cold on a winter morning, waiting on a street corner with the

wind nipping at his ankles.”

“That’s right. The Street Car Company don’t care a damn what kind of a

deal they give us. Something ought to happen to ’em.”

Babbitt was alarmed. “But still, of course it won’t do to just keep

knocking the Traction Company and not realize the difficulties they’re

operating under, like these cranks that want municipal ownership. The

way these workmen hold up the Company for high wages is simply a crime,

and of course the burden falls on you and me that have to pay a

seven-cent fare! Fact, there’s remarkable service on all their

lines--considering.”

“Well--” uneasily.

“Darn fine morning,” Babbitt explained. “Spring coming along fast.”

“Yes, it’s real spring now.”

The victim had no originality, no wit, and Babbitt fell into a great

silence and devoted himself to the game of beating trolley cars to the

corner: a spurt, a tail-chase, nervous speeding between the huge yellow

side of the trolley and the jagged row of parked motors, shooting past

just as the trolley stopped--a rare game and valiant.

And all the while he was conscious of the loveliness of Zenith. For

weeks together he noticed nothing but clients and the vexing To Rent

signs of rival brokers. To-day, in mysterious malaise, he raged or

rejoiced with equal nervous swiftness, and to-day the light of spring

was so winsome that he lifted his head and saw.

He admired each district along his familiar route to the office: The

bungalows and shrubs and winding irregular driveways of Floral Heights.

The one-story shops on Smith Street, a glare of plate-glass and new

yellow brick; groceries and laundries and drug-stores to supply the more

immediate needs of East Side housewives. The market gardens in Dutch

Hollow, their shanties patched with corrugated iron and stolen doors.

Billboards with crimson goddesses nine feet tall advertising cinema

films, pipe tobacco, and talcum powder. The old “mansions” along Ninth

Street, S.E., like aged dandies in filthy linen; wooden castles turned

into boarding-houses, with muddy walks and rusty hedges, jostled by

fast-intruding garages, cheap apartment-houses, and fruit-stands

conducted by bland, sleek Athenians. Across the belt of railroad-tracks,

factories with high-perched water-tanks and tall stacks--factories

producing condensed milk, paper boxes, lighting-fixtures, motor cars.

Then the business center, the thickening darting traffic, the crammed

trolleys unloading, and high doorways of marble and polished granite.

It was big--and Babbitt respected bigness in anything; in mountains,

jewels, muscles, wealth, or words. He was, for a spring-enchanted

moment, the lyric and almost unselfish lover of Zenith. He thought of

the outlying factory suburbs; of the Chaloosa River with its strangely

eroded banks; of the orchard-dappled Tonawanda Hills to the North, and

all the fat dairy land and big barns and comfortable herds. As he

dropped his passenger he cried, “Gosh, I feel pretty good this

morning!”

III

Epochal as starting the car was the drama of parking it before he

entered his office. As he turned from Oberlin Avenue round the corner

into Third Street, N.E., he peered ahead for a space in the line of

parked cars. He angrily just missed a space as a rival driver slid into

it. Ahead, another car was leaving the curb, and Babbitt slowed up,

holding out his hand to the cars pressing on him from behind, agitatedly

motioning an old woman to go ahead, avoiding a truck which bore down on

him from one side. With front wheels nicking the wrought-steel bumper of

the car in front, he stopped, feverishly cramped his steering-wheel,

slid back into the vacant space and, with eighteen inches of room,

manœuvered to bring the car level with the curb. It was a virile

adventure masterfully executed. With satisfaction he locked a

thief-proof steel wedge on the front wheel, and crossed the street to

his real-estate office on the ground floor of the Reeves Building.

The Reeves Building was as fireproof as a rock and as efficient as a

typewriter; fourteen stories of yellow pressed brick, with clean,

upright, unornamented lines. It was filled with the offices of lawyers,

doctors, agents for machinery, for emery wheels, for wire fencing, for

mining-stock. Their gold signs shone on the windows. The entrance was

too modern to be flamboyant with pillars; it was quiet, shrewd, neat.

Along the Third Street side were a Western Union Telegraph Office, the

Blue Delft Candy Shop, Shotwell’s Stationery Shop, and the

Babbitt-Thompson Realty Company.

Babbitt could have entered his office from the street, as customers did,

but it made him feel an insider to go through the corridor of the

building and enter by the back door. Thus he was greeted by the

villagers.

The little unknown people who inhabited the Reeves Building

corridors--elevator-runners, starter, engineers, superintendent, and the

doubtful-looking lame man who conducted the news and cigar stand--were

in no way city-dwellers. They were rustics, living in a constricted

valley, interested only in one another and in The Building. Their Main

Street was the entrance hall, with its stone floor, severe marble

ceiling, and the inner windows of the shops. The liveliest place on the

street was the Reeves Building Barber Shop, but this was also Babbitt’s

one embarrassment. Himself, he patronized the glittering Pompeian Barber

Shop in the Hotel Thornleigh, and every time he passed the Reeves

shop--ten times a day, a hundred times--he felt untrue to his own

village.

Now, as one of the squirearchy, greeted with honorable salutations by

the villagers, he marched into his office, and peace and dignity were

upon him, and the morning’s dissonances all unheard.

They were heard again, immediately.

Stanley Graff, the outside salesman, was talking on the telephone with

tragic lack of that firm manner which disciplines clients: “Say, uh, I

think I got just the house that would suit you--the Percival House, in

Linton.... Oh, you’ve seen it. Well, how’d it strike you?... Huh?...

Oh,” irresolutely, “oh, I see.”

As Babbitt marched into his private room, a coop with semi-partition of

oak and frosted glass, at the back of the office, he reflected how hard

it was to find employees who had his own faith that he was going to make

sales.

There were nine members of the staff, besides Babbitt and his partner

and father-in-law, Henry Thompson, who rarely came to the office. The

nine were Stanley Graff, the outside salesman--a youngish man given to

cigarettes and the playing of pool; old Mat Penniman, general utility

man, collector of rents and salesman of insurance--broken, silent, gray;

a mystery, reputed to have been a “crack” real-estate man with a firm of

his own in haughty Brooklyn; Chester Kirby Laylock, resident salesman

out at the Glen Oriole acreage development--an enthusiastic person with

a silky mustache and much family; Miss Theresa McGoun, the swift and

rather pretty stenographer; Miss Wilberta Bannigan, the thick, slow,

laborious accountant and file-clerk; and four freelance part-time

commission salesmen.

As he looked from his own cage into the main room Babbitt mourned,

“McGoun’s a good stenog., smart’s a whip, but Stan Graff and all those

bums--” The zest of the spring morning was smothered in the stale office

air.

Normally he admired the office, with a pleased surprise that he should

have created this sure lovely thing; normally he was stimulated by the

clean newness of it and the air of bustle; but to-day it seemed

flat--the tiled floor, like a bathroom, the ocher-colored metal ceiling,

the faded maps on the hard plaster walls, the chairs of varnished pale

oak, the desks and filing-cabinets of steel painted in olive drab. It

was a vault, a steel chapel where loafing and laughter were raw sin.

He hadn’t even any satisfaction in the new water-cooler! And it was the

very best of water-coolers, up-to-date, scientific, and right-thinking.

It had cost a great deal of money (in itself a virtue). It possessed a

non-conducting fiber ice-container, a porcelain water-jar (guaranteed

hygienic), a dripless non-clogging sanitary faucet, and machine-painted

decorations in two tones of gold. He looked down the relentless stretch

of tiled floor at the water-cooler, and assured himself that no tenant

of the Reeves Building had a more expensive one, but he could not

recapture the feeling of social superiority it had given him. He

astoundingly grunted, “I’d like to beat it off to the woods right now.

And loaf all day. And go to Gunch’s again to-night, and play poker, and

cuss as much as I feel like, and drink a hundred and nine-thousand

bottles of beer.”

He sighed; he read through his mail; he shouted “Msgoun,” which meant

“Miss McGoun”; and began to dictate.

This was his own version of his first letter:

“Omar Gribble, send it to his office, Miss McGoun, yours of twentieth to

hand and in reply would say look here, Gribble, I’m awfully afraid if we

go on shilly-shallying like this we’ll just naturally lose the Allen

sale, I had Allen up on carpet day before yesterday and got right down

to cases and think I can assure you--uh, uh, no, change that: all my

experience indicates he is all right, means to do business, looked into

his financial record which is fine--that sentence seems to be a little

balled up, Miss McGoun; make a couple sentences out of it if you have

to, period, new paragraph.

“He is perfectly willing to pro rate the special assessment and strikes

me, am dead sure there will be no difficulty in getting him to pay for

title insurance, so now for heaven’s sake let’s get busy--no, make that:

so now let’s go to it and get down--no, that’s enough--you can tie those

sentences up a little better when you type ’em, Miss McGoun--your

sincerely, etcetera.”

This is the version of his letter which he received, typed, from Miss

McGoun that afternoon:

BABBITT-THOMPSON REALTY CO.

Homes for Folks

Reeves Bldg., Oberlin Avenue & 3d St., N.E.

Zenith

Omar Gribble, Esq.,

576 North American Building,

Zenith.

Dear Mr. Gribble:

Your letter of the twentieth to hand. I must say I’m awfully afraid

that if we go on shilly-shallying like this we’ll just naturally

lose the Allen sale. I had Allen up on the carpet day before

yesterday, and got right down to cases. All my experience indicates

that he means to do business. I have also looked into his financial

record, which is fine.

He is perfectly willing to pro rate the special assessment and

there will be no difficulty in getting him to pay for title

insurance.

_So let’s go!_

Yours sincerely,

As he read and signed it, in his correct flowing business-college hand,

Babbitt reflected, “Now that’s a good, strong letter, and clear’s a

bell. Now what the-- I never told McGoun to make a third paragraph there!

Wish she’d quit trying to improve on my dictation! But what I can’t

understand is: why can’t Stan Graff or Chet Laylock write a letter like

that? With punch! With a kick!”

The most important thing he dictated that morning was the fortnightly

form-letter, to be mimeographed and sent out to a thousand “prospects.”

It was diligently imitative of the best literary models of the day; of

heart-to-heart-talk advertisements, “sales-pulling” letters, discourses

on the “development of Will-power,” and hand-shaking house-organs, as

richly poured forth by the new school of Poets of Business. He had

painfully written out a first draft, and he intoned it now like a poet

delicate and distrait:

SAY, OLD MAN!

I just want to know can I do you a whaleuva favor? Honest! No

kidding! I know you’re interested in getting a house, not merely a

place where you hang up the old bonnet but a love-nest for the wife

and kiddies--and maybe for the flivver out beyant (be sure and

spell that b-e-y-a-n-t, Miss McGoun) the spud garden. Say, did you

ever stop to think that we’re here to save you trouble? That’s how

we make a living--folks don’t pay us for our lovely beauty! Now

take a look:

Sit right down at the handsome carved mahogany escritoire and shoot

us in a line telling us just what you want, and if we can find it

we’ll come hopping down your lane with the good tidings, and if we

can’t, we won’t bother you. To save your time, just fill out the

blank enclosed. On request will also send blank regarding store

properties in Floral Heights, Silver Grove, Linton, Bellevue, and

all East Side residential districts.

Yours for service,

P.S.--Just a hint of some plums we can pick for you--some genuine

bargains that came in to-day:

SILVER GROVE.--Cute four-room California bungalow, a.m.i., garage,

dandy shade tree, swell neighborhood, handy car line. $3700, $780

down and balance liberal, Babbitt-Thompson terms, cheaper than

rent.

DORCHESTER.--A corker! Artistic two-family house, all oak trim,

parquet floors, lovely gas log, big porches, colonial, HEATED

ALL-WEATHER GARAGE, a bargain at $11,250.

Dictation over, with its need of sitting and thinking instead of

bustling around and making a noise and really doing something, Babbitt

sat creakily back in his revolving desk-chair and beamed on Miss McGoun.

He was conscious of her as a girl, of black bobbed hair against demure

cheeks. A longing which was indistinguishable from loneliness enfeebled

him. While she waited, tapping a long, precise pencil-point on the

desk-tablet, he half identified her with the fairy girl of his dreams.

He imagined their eyes meeting with terrifying recognition; imagined

touching her lips with frightened reverence and-- She was chirping, “Any

more, Mist’ Babbitt?” He grunted, “That winds it up, I guess,” and

turned heavily away.

For all his wandering thoughts, they had never been more intimate than

this. He often reflected, “Nev’ forget how old Jake Offutt said a wise

bird never goes love-making in his own office or his own home. Start

trouble. Sure. But--”

In twenty-three years of married life he had peered uneasily at every

graceful ankle, every soft shoulder; in thought he had treasured them;

but not once had he hazarded respectability by adventuring. Now, as he

calculated the cost of repapering the Styles house, he was restless

again, discontented about nothing and everything, ashamed of his

discontentment, and lonely for the fairy girl.

CHAPTER IV

I

It was a morning of artistic creation. Fifteen minutes after the purple

prose of Babbitt’s form-letter, Chester Kirby Laylock, the resident

salesman at Glen Oriole, came in to report a sale and submit an

advertisement. Babbitt disapproved of Laylock, who sang in choirs and

was merry at home over games of Hearts and Old Maid. He had a tenor

voice, wavy chestnut hair, and a mustache like a camel’s-hair brush.

Babbitt considered it excusable in a family-man to growl, “Seen this new

picture of the kid--husky little devil, eh?” but Laylock’s domestic

confidences were as bubbling as a girl’s.

“Say, I think I got a peach of an ad for the Glen, Mr. Babbitt. Why

don’t we try something in poetry? Honest, it’d have wonderful

pulling-power. Listen:

’Mid pleasures and palaces,

Wherever you may roam,

You just provide the little bride

And we’ll provide the home.

Do you get it? See--like ‘Home Sweet Home.’ Don’t you--”

“Yes, yes, yes, hell yes, of course I get it. But-- Oh, I think we’d

better use something more dignified and forceful, like ‘We lead, others

follow,’ or ‘Eventually, why not now?’ Course I believe in using poetry

and humor and all that junk when it turns the trick, but with a

high-class restricted development like the Glen we better stick to the

more dignified approach, see how I mean? Well, I guess that’s all, this

morning, Chet.”

II

By a tragedy familiar to the world of art, the April enthusiasm of Chet

Laylock served only to stimulate the talent of the older craftsman,

George F. Babbitt. He grumbled to Stanley Graff, “That tan-colored voice

of Chet’s gets on my nerves,” yet he was aroused and in one swoop he

wrote:

DO YOU RESPECT YOUR LOVED ONES?

When the last sad rites of bereavement are over, do

you know for certain that you have done your best for

the Departed? You haven’t unless they lie in the

Cemetery Beautiful.

LINDEN LANE

the only strictly up-to-date burial place in or near

Zenith, where exquisitely gardened plots look from

daisy-dotted hill-slopes across the smiling fields of

Dorchester.

Sole agents

BABBITT-THOMPSON REALTY COMPANY

Reeves Building

He rejoiced, “I guess that’ll show Chan Mott and his weedy old Wildwood

Cemetery something about modern merchandizing!”

III

He sent Mat Penniman to the recorder’s office to dig out the names of

the owners of houses which were displaying For Rent signs of other

brokers; he talked to a man who desired to lease a store-building for a

pool-room; he ran over the list of home-leases which were about to

expire; he sent Thomas Bywaters, a street-car conductor who played at

real estate in spare time, to call on side-street “prospects” who were

unworthy the strategies of Stanley Graff. But he had spent his credulous

excitement of creation, and these routine details annoyed him. One

moment of heroism he had, in discovering a new way of stopping smoking.

He stopped smoking at least once a month. He went through with it like

the solid citizen he was: admitted the evils of tobacco, courageously

made resolves, laid out plans to check the vice, tapered off his

allowance of cigars, and expounded the pleasures of virtuousness to

every one he met. He did everything, in fact, except stop smoking.

Two months before, by ruling out a schedule, noting down the hour and

minute of each smoke, and ecstatically increasing the intervals between

smokes, he had brought himself down to three cigars a day. Then he had

lost the schedule.

A week ago he had invented a system of leaving his cigar-case

and cigarette-box in an unused drawer at the bottom of the

correspondence-file, in the outer office. “I’ll just naturally be

ashamed to go poking in there all day long, making a fool of myself

before my own employees!” he reasoned. By the end of three days he was

trained to leave his desk, walk to the file, take out and light a cigar,

without knowing that he was doing it.

This morning it was revealed to him that it had been too easy to open

the file. Lock it, that was the thing! Inspired, he rushed out and

locked up his cigars, his cigarettes, and even his box of safety

matches; and the key to the file drawer he hid in his desk. But the

crusading passion of it made him so tobacco-hungry that he immediately

recovered the key, walked with forbidding dignity to the file, took out

a cigar and a match--“but only one match; if ole cigar goes out, it’ll

by golly have to stay out!” Later, when the cigar did go out, he took

one more match from the file, and when a buyer and a seller came in for

a conference at eleven-thirty, naturally he had to offer them cigars.

His conscience protested, “Why, you’re smoking with them!” but he

bullied it, “Oh, shut up! I’m busy now. Of course by-and-by--” There was

no by-and-by, yet his belief that he had crushed the unclean habit made

him feel noble and very happy. When he called up Paul Riesling he was,

in his moral splendor, unusually eager.

He was fonder of Paul Riesling than of any one on earth except himself

and his daughter Tinka. They had been classmates, roommates, in the

State University, but always he thought of Paul Riesling, with his dark

slimness, his precisely parted hair, his nose-glasses, his hesitant

speech, his moodiness, his love of music, as a younger brother, to be

petted and protected. Paul had gone into his father’s business, after

graduation; he was now a wholesaler and small manufacturer of

prepared-paper roofing. But Babbitt strenuously believed and lengthily

announced to the world of Good Fellows that Paul could have been a great

violinist or painter or writer. “Why say, the letters that boy sent me

on his trip to the Canadian Rockies, they just absolutely make you see

the place as if you were standing there. Believe me, he could have given

any of these bloomin’ authors a whale of a run for their money!”

Yet on the telephone they said only:

“South 343. No, no, no! I said _South_--South 343. Say, operator, what

the dickens is the trouble? Can’t you get me South 343? Why certainly

they’ll answer. Oh, Hello, 343? Wanta speak Mist’ Riesling, Mist’

Babbitt talking.... ‘Lo, Paul?”

“Yuh.”

“’S George speaking.”

“Yuh.”

“How’s old socks?”

“Fair to middlin’. How’re you?”

“Fine, Paulibus. Well, what do you know?”

“Oh, nothing much.”

“Where you been keepin’ yourself?”

“Oh, just stickin’ round. What’s up, Georgie?”

“How ’bout lil lunch’s noon?”

“Be all right with me, I guess. Club?”

“Yuh. Meet you there twelve-thirty.”

“A’ right. Twelve-thirty. S’ long, Georgie.”

IV

His morning was not sharply marked into divisions. Interwoven with

correspondence and advertisement-writing were a thousand nervous

details: calls from clerks who were incessantly and hopefully seeking

five furnished rooms and bath at sixty dollars a month; advice to Mat

Penniman on getting money out of tenants who had no money.

Babbitt’s virtues as a real-estate broker--as the servant of society in

the department of finding homes for families and shops for distributors

of food--were steadiness and diligence. He was conventionally honest, he

kept his records of buyers and sellers complete, he had experience with

leases and titles and an excellent memory for prices. His shoulders were

broad enough, his voice deep enough, his relish of hearty humor strong

enough, to establish him as one of the ruling caste of Good Fellows. Yet

his eventual importance to mankind was perhaps lessened by his large and

complacent ignorance of all architecture save the types of houses turned

out by speculative builders; all landscape gardening save the use of

curving roads, grass, and six ordinary shrubs; and all the commonest

axioms of economics. He serenely believed that the one purpose of the

real-estate business was to make money for George F. Babbitt. True, it

was a good advertisement at Boosters’ Club lunches, and all the

varieties of Annual Banquets to which Good Fellows were invited, to

speak sonorously of Unselfish Public Service, the Broker’s Obligation to

Keep Inviolate the Trust of His Clients, and a thing called Ethics,

whose nature was confusing but if you had it you were a High-class

Realtor and if you hadn’t you were a shyster, a piker, and a

fly-by-night. These virtues awakened Confidence, and enabled you to

handle Bigger Propositions. But they didn’t imply that you were to be

impractical and refuse to take twice the value of a house if a buyer was

such an idiot that he didn’t jew you down on the asking-price.

Babbitt spoke well--and often--at these orgies of commercial

righteousness about the “realtor’s function as a seer of the future

development of the community, and as a prophetic engineer clearing the

pathway for inevitable changes”--which meant that a real-estate broker

could make money by guessing which way the town would grow. This

guessing he called Vision.

In an address at the Boosters’ Club he had admitted, “It is at once the

duty and the privilege of the realtor to know everything about his own

city and its environs. Where a surgeon is a specialist on every vein and

mysterious cell of the human body, and the engineer upon electricity in

all its phases, or every bolt of some great bridge majestically arching

o’er a mighty flood, the realtor must know his city, inch by inch, and

all its faults and virtues.”

Though he did know the market-price, inch by inch, of certain districts

of Zenith, he did not know whether the police force was too large or too

small, or whether it was in alliance with gambling and prostitution. He

knew the means of fireproofing buildings and the relation of

insurance-rates to fireproofing, but he did not know how many firemen

there were in the city, how they were trained and paid, or how complete

their apparatus. He sang eloquently the advantages of proximity of

school-buildings to rentable homes, but he did not know--he did not know

that it was worth while to know--whether the city schoolrooms were

properly heated, lighted, ventilated, furnished; he did not know how the

teachers were chosen; and though he chanted “One of the boasts of Zenith

is that we pay our teachers adequately,” that was because he had read

the statement in the _Advocate-Times_. Himself, he could not have given

the average salary of teachers in Zenith or anywhere else.

He had heard it said that “conditions” in the County Jail and the Zenith

City Prison were not very “scientific;” he had, with indignation at the

criticism of Zenith, skimmed through a report in which the notorious

pessimist Seneca Doane, the radical lawyer, asserted that to throw boys

and young girls into a bull-pen crammed with men suffering from

syphilis, delirium tremens, and insanity was not the perfect way of

educating them. He had controverted the report by growling, “Folks that

think a jail ought to be a bloomin’ Hotel Thornleigh make me sick. If

people don’t like a jail, let ’em behave ’emselves and keep out of it.

Besides, these reform cranks always exaggerate.” That was the beginning

and quite completely the end of his investigations into Zenith’s

charities and corrections; and as to the “vice districts” he brightly

expressed it, “Those are things that no decent man monkeys with.

Besides, smatter fact, I’ll tell you confidentially: it’s a protection

to our daughters and to decent women to have a district where tough nuts

can raise cain. Keeps ’em away from our own homes.”

As to industrial conditions, however, Babbitt had thought a great deal,

and his opinions may be coordinated as follows:

“A good labor union is of value because it keeps out radical unions,

which would destroy property. No one ought to be forced to belong to a

union, however. All labor agitators who try to force men to join a union

should be hanged. In fact, just between ourselves, there oughtn’t to be

any unions allowed at all; and as it’s the best way of fighting the

unions, every business man ought to belong to an employers’-association

and to the Chamber of Commerce. In union there is strength. So any

selfish hog who doesn’t join the Chamber of Commerce ought to be forced

to.”

In nothing--as the expert on whose advice families moved to new

neighborhoods to live there for a generation--was Babbitt more

splendidly innocent than in the science of sanitation. He did not know a

malaria-bearing mosquito from a bat; he knew nothing about tests of

drinking water; and in the matters of plumbing and sewage he was as

unlearned as he was voluble. He often referred to the excellence of the

bathrooms in the houses he sold. He was fond of explaining why it was

that no European ever bathed. Some one had told him, when he was

twenty-two, that all cesspools were unhealthy, and he still denounced

them. If a client impertinently wanted him to sell a house which had a

cesspool, Babbitt always spoke about it--before accepting the house and

selling it.

When he laid out the Glen Oriole acreage development, when he ironed

woodland and dipping meadow into a glenless, orioleless, sunburnt flat

prickly with small boards displaying the names of imaginary streets, he

righteously put in a complete sewage-system. It made him feel superior;

it enabled him to sneer privily at the Martin Lumsen development,

Avonlea, which had a cesspool; and it provided a chorus for the

full-page advertisements in which he announced the beauty, convenience,

cheapness, and supererogatory healthfulness of Glen Oriole. The only

flaw was that the Glen Oriole sewers had insufficient outlet, so that

waste remained in them, not very agreeably, while the Avonlea cesspool

was a Waring septic tank.

The whole of the Glen Oriole project was a suggestion that Babbitt,

though he really did hate men recognized as swindlers, was not too

unreasonably honest. Operators and buyers prefer that brokers should not

be in competition with them as operators and buyers themselves, but

attend to their clients’ interests only. It was supposed that the

Babbitt-Thompson Company were merely agents for Glen Oriole, serving the

real owner, Jake Offutt, but the fact was that Babbitt and Thompson

owned sixty-two per cent. of the Glen, the president and purchasing

agent of the Zenith Street Traction Company owned twenty-eight per

cent., and Jake Offutt (a gang-politician, a small manufacturer, a

tobacco-chewing old farceur who enjoyed dirty politics, business

diplomacy, and cheating at poker) had only ten per cent., which Babbitt

and the Traction officials had given to him for “fixing” health

inspectors and fire inspectors and a member of the State Transportation

Commission.

But Babbitt was virtuous. He advocated, though he did not practise, the

prohibition of alcohol; he praised, though he did not obey, the laws

against motor-speeding; he paid his debts; he contributed to the church,

the Red Cross, and the Y. M. C. A.; he followed the custom of his clan

and cheated only as it was sanctified by precedent; and he never

descended to trickery--though, as he explained to Paul Riesling:

“Course I don’t mean to say that every ad I write is literally true or

that I always believe everything I say when I give some buyer a good

strong selling-spiel. You see--you see it’s like this: In the first

place, maybe the owner of the property exaggerated when he put it into

my hands, and it certainly isn’t my place to go proving my principal a

liar! And then most folks are so darn crooked themselves that they

expect a fellow to do a little lying, so if I was fool enough to never

whoop the ante I’d get the credit for lying anyway! In self-defense I

got to toot my own horn, like a lawyer defending a client--his bounden

duty, ain’t it, to bring out the poor dub’s good points? Why, the Judge

himself would bawl out a lawyer that didn’t, even if they both knew the

guy was guilty! But even so, I don’t pad out the truth like Cecil

Rountree or Thayer or the rest of these realtors. Fact, I think a fellow

that’s willing to deliberately up and profit by lying ought to be shot!”

Babbitt’s value to his clients was rarely better shown than this

morning, in the conference at eleven-thirty between himself, Conrad

Lyte, and Archibald Purdy.

V

Conrad Lyte was a real-estate speculator. He was a nervous speculator.

Before he gambled he consulted bankers, lawyers, architects, contracting

builders, and all of their clerks and stenographers who were willing to

be cornered and give him advice. He was a bold entrepreneur, and he

desired nothing more than complete safety in his investments, freedom

from attention to details, and the thirty or forty per cent. profit

which, according to all authorities, a pioneer deserves for his risks

and foresight. He was a stubby man with a cap-like mass of short gray

curls and clothes which, no matter how well cut, seemed shaggy. Below

his eyes were semicircular hollows, as though silver dollars had been

pressed against them and had left an imprint.

Particularly and always Lyte consulted Babbitt, and trusted in his slow

cautiousness.

Six months ago Babbitt had learned that one Archibald Purdy, a grocer in

the indecisive residential district known as Linton, was talking of

opening a butcher shop beside his grocery. Looking up the ownership of

adjoining parcels of land, Babbitt found that Purdy owned his present

shop but did not own the one available lot adjoining. He advised Conrad

Lyte to purchase this lot, for eleven thousand dollars, though an

appraisal on a basis of rents did not indicate its value as above nine

thousand. The rents, declared Babbitt, were too low; and by waiting they

could make Purdy come to their price. (This was Vision.) He had to bully

Lyte into buying. His first act as agent for Lyte was to increase the

rent of the battered store-building on the lot. The tenant said a number

of rude things, but he paid.

Now, Purdy seemed ready to buy, and his delay was going to cost him ten

thousand extra dollars--the reward paid by the community to Mr. Conrad

Lyte for the virtue of employing a broker who had Vision and who

understood Talking Points, Strategic Values, Key Situations,

Underappraisals, and the Psychology of Salesmanship.

Lyte came to the conference exultantly. He was fond of Babbitt, this

morning, and called him “old hoss.” Purdy, the grocer, a long-nosed man

and solemn, seemed to care less for Babbitt and for Vision, but Babbitt

met him at the street door of the office and guided him toward the

private room with affectionate little cries of “This way, Brother

Purdy!” He took from the correspondence-file the entire box of cigars

and forced them on his guests. He pushed their chairs two inches forward

and three inches back, which gave an hospitable note, then leaned back

in his desk-chair and looked plump and jolly. But he spoke to the

weakling grocer with firmness.

“Well, Brother Purdy, we been having some pretty tempting offers from

butchers and a slew of other folks for that lot next to your store, but

I persuaded Brother Lyte that we ought to give you a shot at the

property first. I said to Lyte, ‘It’d be a rotten shame,’ I said, ‘if

somebody went and opened a combination grocery and meat market right

next door and ruined Purdy’s nice little business.’ Especially--”

Babbitt leaned forward, and his voice was harsh, “--it would be hard

luck if one of these cash-and-carry chain-stores got in there and

started cutting prices below cost till they got rid of competition and

forced you to the wall!”

Purdy snatched his thin hands from his pockets, pulled up his trousers,

thrust his hands back into his pockets, tilted in the heavy oak chair,

and tried to look amused, as he struggled:

“Yes, they’re bad competition. But I guess you don’t realize the Pulling

Power that Personality has in a neighborhood business.”

The great Babbitt smiled. “That’s so. Just as you feel, old man. We

thought we’d give you first chance. All right then--”

“Now look here!” Purdy wailed. “I know f’r a fact that a piece of

property ’bout same size, right near, sold for less ’n eighty-five

hundred, ’twa’n’t two years ago, and here you fellows are asking me

twenty-four thousand dollars! Why, I’d have to mortgage-- I wouldn’t mind

so much paying twelve thousand but-- Why good God, Mr. Babbitt, you’re

asking more ’n twice its value! And threatening to ruin me if I don’t

take it!”

“Purdy, I don’t like your way of talking! I don’t like it one little

bit! Supposing Lyte and I were stinking enough to want to ruin any

fellow human, don’t you suppose we know it’s to our own selfish interest

to have everybody in Zenith prosperous? But all this is beside the

point. Tell you what we’ll do: We’ll come down to twenty-three

thousand--five thousand down and the rest on mortgage--and if you want

to wreck the old shack and rebuild, I guess I can get Lyte here to

loosen up for a building-mortgage on good liberal terms. Heavens, man,

we’d be glad to oblige you! We don’t like these foreign grocery trusts

any better ’n you do! But it isn’t reasonable to expect us to sacrifice

eleven thousand or more just for neighborliness, _is_ it! How about it,

Lyte? You willing to come down?”

By warmly taking Purdy’s part, Babbitt persuaded the benevolent Mr. Lyte

to reduce his price to twenty-one thousand dollars. At the right moment

Babbitt snatched from a drawer the agreement he had had Miss McGoun type

out a week ago and thrust it into Purdy’s hands. He genially shook his

fountain pen to make certain that it was flowing, handed it to Purdy,

and approvingly watched him sign.

The work of the world was being done. Lyte had made something over nine

thousand dollars, Babbitt had made a four-hundred-and-fifty dollar

commission, Purdy had, by the sensitive mechanism of modern finance,

been provided with a business-building, and soon the happy inhabitants

of Linton would have meat lavished upon them at prices only a little

higher than those down-town.

It had been a manly battle, but after it Babbitt drooped. This was the

only really amusing contest he had been planning. There was nothing

ahead save details of leases, appraisals, mortgages.

He muttered, “Makes me sick to think of Lyte carrying off most of the

profit when I did all the work, the old skinflint! And-- What else have I

got to do to-day?... Like to take a good long vacation. Motor trip.

Something.”

He sprang up, rekindled by the thought of lunching with Paul Riesling.

CHAPTER V

I

Babbitt’s preparations for leaving the office to its feeble self during

the hour and a half of his lunch-period were somewhat less elaborate

than the plans for a general European war.

He fretted to Miss McGoun, “What time you going to lunch? Well, make

sure Miss Bannigan is in then. Explain to her that if Wiedenfeldt calls

up, she’s to tell him I’m already having the title traced. And oh, b’

the way, remind me to-morrow to have Penniman trace it. Now if anybody

comes in looking for a cheap house, remember we got to shove that Bangor

Road place off onto somebody. If you need me, I’ll be at the Athletic

Club. And--uh-- And--uh-- I’ll be back by two.”

He dusted the cigar-ashes off his vest. He placed a difficult unanswered

letter on the pile of unfinished work, that he might not fail to attend

to it that afternoon. (For three noons, now, he had placed the same

letter on the unfinished pile.) He scrawled on a sheet of yellow

backing-paper the memorandum: “See abt apt h drs,” which gave him an

agreeable feeling of having already seen about the apartment-house

doors.

He discovered that he was smoking another cigar. He threw it away,

protesting, “Darn it, I thought you’d quit this darn smoking!” He

courageously returned the cigar-box to the correspondence-file, locked

it up, hid the key in a more difficult place, and raged, “Ought to take

care of myself. And need more exercise--walk to the club, every single

noon--just what I’ll do--every noon--cut out this motoring all the

time.”

The resolution made him feel exemplary. Immediately after it he decided

that this noon it was too late to walk.

It took but little more time to start his car and edge it into the

traffic than it would have taken to walk the three and a half blocks to

the club.

II

As he drove he glanced with the fondness of familiarity at the

buildings.

A stranger suddenly dropped into the business-center of Zenith could not

have told whether he was in a city of Oregon or Georgia, Ohio or Maine,

Oklahoma or Manitoba. But to Babbitt every inch was individual and

stirring. As always he noted that the California Building across the way

was three stories lower, therefore three stories less beautiful, than

his own Reeves Building. As always when he passed the Parthenon Shoe

Shine Parlor, a one-story hut which beside the granite and red-brick

ponderousness of the old California Building resembled a bath-house

under a cliff, he commented, “Gosh, ought to get my shoes shined this

afternoon. Keep forgetting it.” At the Simplex Office Furniture Shop,

the National Cash Register Agency, he yearned for a dictaphone, for a

typewriter which would add and multiply, as a poet yearns for quartos or

a physician for radium.

At the Nobby Men’s Wear Shop he took his left hand off the

steering-wheel to touch his scarf, and thought well of himself as one

who bought expensive ties “and could pay cash for ’em, too, by golly;”

and at the United Cigar Store, with its crimson and gold alertness, he

reflected, “Wonder if I need some cigars--idiot--plumb forgot--going t’

cut down my fool smoking.” He looked at his bank, the Miners’ and

Drovers’ National, and considered how clever and solid he was to bank

with so marbled an establishment. His high moment came in the clash of

traffic when he was halted at the corner beneath the lofty Second

National Tower. His car was banked with four others in a line of steel

restless as cavalry, while the crosstown traffic, limousines and

enormous moving-vans and insistent motor-cycles, poured by; on the

farther corner, pneumatic riveters rang on the sun-plated skeleton of a

new building; and out of this tornado flashed the inspiration of a

familiar face, and a fellow Booster shouted, “H’ are you, George!”

Babbitt waved in neighborly affection, and slid on with the traffic as

the policeman lifted his hand. He noted how quickly his car picked up.

He felt superior and powerful, like a shuttle of polished steel darting

in a vast machine.

As always he ignored the next two blocks, decayed blocks not yet

reclaimed from the grime and shabbiness of the Zenith of 1885. While he

was passing the five-and-ten-cent store, the Dakota Lodging House,

Concordia Hall with its lodge-rooms and the offices of fortune-tellers

and chiropractors, he thought of how much money he made, and he boasted

a little and worried a little and did old familiar sums:

“Four hundred fifty plunks this morning from the Lyte deal. But taxes

due. Let’s see: I ought to pull out eight thousand net this year, and

save fifteen hundred of that--no, not if I put up garage and-- Let’s see:

six hundred and forty clear last month, and twelve times six-forty

makes--makes--let see: six times twelve is seventy-two hundred and-- Oh

rats, anyway, I’ll make eight thousand--gee now, that’s not so bad;

mighty few fellows pulling down eight thousand dollars a year--eight

thousand good hard iron dollars--bet there isn’t more than five per

cent. of the people in the whole United States that make more than Uncle

George does, by golly! Right up at the top of the heap! But-- Way

expenses are-- Family wasting gasoline, and always dressed like

millionaires, and sending that eighty a month to Mother-- And all these

stenographers and salesmen gouging me for every cent they can get--”

The effect of his scientific budget-planning was that he felt at once

triumphantly wealthy and perilously poor, and in the midst of

these dissertations he stopped his car, rushed into a small

news-and-miscellany shop, and bought the electric cigar-lighter which he

had coveted for a week. He dodged his conscience by being jerky and

noisy, and by shouting at the clerk, “Guess this will prett’ near pay

for itself in matches, eh?”

It was a pretty thing, a nickeled cylinder with an almost silvery

socket, to be attached to the dashboard of his car. It was not only, as

the placard on the counter observed, “a dandy little refinement, lending

the last touch of class to a gentleman’s auto,” but a priceless

time-saver. By freeing him from halting the car to light a match, it

would in a month or two easily save ten minutes.

As he drove on he glanced at it. “Pretty nice. Always wanted one,” he

said wistfully. “The one thing a smoker needs, too.”

Then he remembered that he had given up smoking.

“Darn it!” he mourned. “Oh well, I suppose I’ll hit a cigar once in a

while. And-- Be a great convenience for other folks. Might make just the

difference in getting chummy with some fellow that would put over a

sale. And-- Certainly looks nice there. Certainly is a mighty clever

little jigger. Gives the last touch of refinement and class. I-- By

golly, I guess I can afford it if I want to! Not going to be the only

member of this family that never has a single doggone luxury!”

Thus, laden with treasure, after three and a half blocks of romantic

adventure, he drove up to the club.

III

The Zenith Athletic Club is not athletic and it isn’t exactly a club,

but it is Zenith in perfection. It has an active and smoke-misted

billiard room, it is represented by baseball and football teams, and in

the pool and the gymnasium a tenth of the members sporadically try to

reduce. But most of its three thousand members use it as a café in which

to lunch, play cards, tell stories, meet customers, and entertain

out-of-town uncles at dinner. It is the largest club in the city, and

its chief hatred is the conservative Union Club, which all sound members

of the Athletic call “a rotten, snobbish, dull, expensive old hole--not

one Good Mixer in the place--you couldn’t hire me to join.” Statistics

show that no member of the Athletic has ever refused election to the

Union, and of those who are elected, sixty-seven per cent. resign from

the Athletic and are thereafter heard to say, in the drowsy sanctity of

the Union lounge, “The Athletic would be a pretty good hotel, if it were

more exclusive.”

The Athletic Club building is nine stories high, yellow brick with

glassy roof-garden above and portico of huge limestone columns below.

The lobby, with its thick pillars of porous Caen stone, its pointed

vaulting, and a brown glazed-tile floor like well-baked bread-crust, is

a combination of cathedral-crypt and rathskellar. The members rush into

the lobby as though they were shopping and hadn’t much time for it. Thus

did Babbitt enter, and to the group standing by the cigar-counter he

whooped, “How’s the boys? How’s the boys? Well, well, fine day!”

Jovially they whooped back--Vergil Gunch, the coal-dealer, Sidney

Finkelstein, the ladies’-ready-to-wear buyer for Parcher & Stein’s

department-store, and Professor Joseph K. Pumphrey, owner of the Riteway

Business College and instructor in Public Speaking, Business English,

Scenario Writing, and Commercial Law. Though Babbitt admired this

savant, and appreciated Sidney Finkelstein as “a mighty smart buyer and

a good liberal spender,” it was to Vergil Gunch that he turned with

enthusiasm. Mr. Gunch was president of the Boosters’ Club, a weekly

lunch-club, local chapter of a national organization which promoted

sound business and friendliness among Regular Fellows. He was also no

less an official than Esteemed Leading Knight in the Benevolent and

Protective Order of Elks, and it was rumored that at the next election

he would be a candidate for Exalted Ruler. He was a jolly man, given to

oratory and to chumminess with the arts. He called on the famous actors

and vaudeville artists when they came to town, gave them cigars,

addressed them by their first names, and--sometimes--succeeded in

bringing them to the Boosters’ lunches to give The Boys a Free

Entertainment. He was a large man with hair _en brosse_, and he knew the

latest jokes, but he played poker close to the chest. It was at his

party that Babbitt had sucked in the virus of to-day’s restlessness.

Gunch shouted, “How’s the old Bolsheviki? How do you feel, the morning

after the night before?”

“Oh, boy! Some head! That was a regular party you threw, Verg! Hope you

haven’t forgotten I took that last cute little jack-pot!” Babbitt

bellowed. (He was three feet from Gunch.)

“That’s all right now! What I’ll hand you next time, Georgie! Say, juh

notice in the paper the way the New York Assembly stood up to the Reds?”

“You bet I did. That was fine, eh? Nice day to-day.”

“Yes, it’s one mighty fine spring day, but nights still cold.”

“Yeh, you’re right they are! Had to have coupla blankets last night, out

on the sleeping-porch. Say, Sid,” Babbitt turned to Finkelstein, the

buyer, “got something wanta ask you about. I went out and bought me an

electric cigar-lighter for the car, this noon, and--”

“Good hunch!” said Finkelstein, while even the learned Professor

Pumphrey, a bulbous man with a pepper-and-salt cutaway and a pipe-organ

voice, commented, “That makes a dandy accessory. Cigar-lighter gives

tone to the dashboard.”

“Yep, finally decided I’d buy me one. Got the best on the market, the

clerk said it was. Paid five bucks for it. Just wondering if I got

stuck. What do they charge for ’em at the store, Sid?”

Finkelstein asserted that five dollars was not too great a sum, not for

a really high-class lighter which was suitably nickeled and provided

with connections of the very best quality. “I always say--and believe

me, I base it on a pretty fairly extensive mercantile experience--the

best is the cheapest in the long run. Of course if a fellow wants to be

a Jew about it, he can get cheap junk, but in the long _run_, the

cheapest thing is--the best you can get! Now you take here just th’

other day: I got a new top for my old boat and some upholstery, and I

paid out a hundred and twenty-six fifty, and of course a lot of fellows

would say that was too much-- Lord, if the Old Folks--they live in one of

these hick towns up-state and they simply can’t get onto the way a city

fellow’s mind works, and then, of course, they’re Jews, and they’d lie

right down and die if they knew Sid had anted up a hundred and

twenty-six bones. But I don’t figure I was stuck, George, not a bit.

Machine looks brand new now--not that it’s so darned old, of course; had

it less ’n three years, but I give it hard service; never drive less ’n

a hundred miles on Sunday and, uh-- Oh, I don’t really think you got

stuck, George. In the _long_ run, the best is, you might say, it’s

unquestionably the cheapest.”

“That’s right,” said Vergil Gunch. “That’s the way I look at it. If a

fellow is keyed up to what you might call intensive living, the way you

get it here in Zenith--all the hustle and mental activity that’s going

on with a bunch of live-wires like the Boosters and here in the Z.A.C.,

why, he’s got to save his nerves by having the best.”

Babbitt nodded his head at every fifth word in the roaring rhythm; and

by the conclusion, in Gunch’s renowned humorous vein, he was enchanted:

“Still, at that, George, don’t know’s you can afford it. I’ve heard your

business has been kind of under the eye of the gov’ment since you stole

the tail of Eathorne Park and sold it!”

“Oh, you’re a great little josher, Verg. But when it comes to kidding,

how about this report that you stole the black marble steps off the

post-office and sold ’em for high-grade coal!” In delight Babbitt

patted Gunch’s back, stroked his arm.

“That’s all right, but what I want to know is: who’s the real-estate

shark that bought that coal for his apartment-houses?”

“I guess that’ll hold you for a while, George!” said Finkelstein. “I’ll

tell you, though, boys, what I did hear: George’s missus went into the

gents’ wear department at Parcher’s to buy him some collars, and before

she could give his neck-size the clerk slips her some thirteens. ‘How

juh know the size?’ says Mrs. Babbitt, and the clerk says, ‘Men that let

their wives buy collars for ’em always wear thirteen, madam.’ How’s

that! That’s pretty good, eh? How’s that, eh? I guess that’ll about fix

you, George!”

“I--I--” Babbitt sought for amiable insults in answer. He stopped,

stared at the door. Paul Riesling was coming in. Babbitt cried, “See you

later, boys,” and hastened across the lobby. He was, just then, neither

the sulky child of the sleeping-porch, the domestic tyrant of the

breakfast table, the crafty money-changer of the Lyte-Purdy conference,

nor the blaring Good Fellow, the Josher and Regular Guy, of the Athletic

Club. He was an older brother to Paul Riesling, swift to defend him,

admiring him with a proud and credulous love passing the love of women.

Paul and he shook hands solemnly; they smiled as shyly as though they

had been parted three years, not three days--and they said:

“How’s the old horse-thief?”

“All right, I guess. How’re you, you poor shrimp?”

“I’m first-rate, you second-hand hunk o’ cheese.”

Reassured thus of their high fondness, Babbitt grunted, “You’re a fine

guy, you are! Ten minutes late!” Riesling snapped, “Well, you’re lucky

to have a chance to lunch with a gentleman!” They grinned and went into

the Neronian washroom, where a line of men bent over the bowls inset

along a prodigious slab of marble as in religious prostration before

their own images in the massy mirror. Voices thick, satisfied,

authoritative, hurtled along the marble walls, bounded from the ceiling

of lavender-bordered milky tiles, while the lords of the city, the

barons of insurance and law and fertilizers and motor tires, laid down

the law for Zenith; announced that the day was warm--indeed,

indisputably of spring; that wages were too high and the interest on

mortgages too low; that Babe Ruth, the eminent player of baseball, was a

noble man; and that “those two nuts at the Climax Vaudeville Theater

this week certainly are a slick pair of actors.” Babbitt, though

ordinarily his voice was the surest and most episcopal of all, was

silent. In the presence of the slight dark reticence of Paul Riesling,

he was awkward, he desired to be quiet and firm and deft.

The entrance lobby of the Athletic Club was Gothic, the washroom Roman

Imperial, the lounge Spanish Mission, and the reading-room in Chinese

Chippendale, but the gem of the club was the dining-room, the

masterpiece of Ferdinand Reitman, Zenith’s busiest architect. It was

lofty and half-timbered, with Tudor leaded casements, an oriel, a

somewhat musicianless musicians’-gallery, and tapestries believed to

illustrate the granting of Magna Charta. The open beams had been

hand-adzed at Jake Offutt’s car-body works, the hinges were of

hand-wrought iron, the wainscot studded with handmade wooden pegs, and

at one end of the room was a heraldic and hooded stone fireplace which

the club’s advertising-pamphlet asserted to be not only larger than any

of the fireplaces in European castles but of a draught incomparably more

scientific. It was also much cleaner, as no fire had ever been built in

it.

Half of the tables were mammoth slabs which seated twenty or thirty men.

Babbitt usually sat at the one near the door, with a group including

Gunch, Finkelstein, Professor Pumphrey, Howard Littlefield, his

neighbor, T. Cholmondeley Frink, the poet and advertising-agent, and

Orville Jones, whose laundry was in many ways the best in Zenith. They

composed a club within the club, and merrily called themselves “The

Roughnecks.” To-day as he passed their table the Roughnecks greeted him,

“Come on, sit in! You ’n’ Paul too proud to feed with poor folks? Afraid

somebody might stick you for a bottle of Bevo, George? Strikes me you

swells are getting awful darn exclusive!”

He thundered, “You bet! We can’t afford to have our reps ruined by being

seen with you tightwads!” and guided Paul to one of the small tables

beneath the musicians’-gallery. He felt guilty. At the Zenith Athletic

Club, privacy was very bad form. But he wanted Paul to himself.

That morning he had advocated lighter lunches and now he ordered nothing

but English mutton chop, radishes, peas, deep-dish apple pie, a bit of

cheese, and a pot of coffee with cream, adding, as he did invariably,

“And uh-- Oh, and you might give me an order of French fried potatoes.”

When the chop came he vigorously peppered it and salted it. He always

peppered and salted his meat, and vigorously, before tasting it.

Paul and he took up the spring-like quality of the spring, the virtues

of the electric cigar-lighter, and the action of the New York State

Assembly. It was not till Babbitt was thick and disconsolate with mutton

grease that he flung out:

“I wound up a nice little deal with Conrad Lyte this morning that put

five hundred good round plunks in my pocket. Pretty nice--pretty nice!

And yet-- I don’t know what’s the matter with me to-day. Maybe it’s an

attack of spring fever, or staying up too late at Verg Gunch’s, or maybe

it’s just the winter’s work piling up, but I’ve felt kind of down in the

mouth all day long. Course I wouldn’t beef about it to the fellows at

the Roughnecks’ Table there, but you-- Ever feel that way, Paul? Kind of

comes over me: here I’ve pretty much done all the things I ought to;

supported my family, and got a good house and a six-cylinder car, and

built up a nice little business, and I haven’t any vices ’specially,

except smoking--and I’m practically cutting that out, by the way. And I

belong to the church, and play enough golf to keep in trim, and I only

associate with good decent fellows. And yet, even so, I don’t know that

I’m entirely satisfied!”

It was drawled out, broken by shouts from the neighboring tables, by

mechanical love-making to the waitress, by stertorous grunts as the

coffee filled him with dizziness and indigestion. He was apologetic and

doubtful, and it was Paul, with his thin voice, who pierced the fog:

“Good Lord, George, you don’t suppose it’s any novelty to me to find

that we hustlers, that think we’re so all-fired successful, aren’t

getting much out of it? You look as if you expected me to report you as

seditious! You know what my own life’s been.”

“I know, old man.”

“I ought to have been a fiddler, and I’m a pedler of tar-roofing! And

Zilla-- Oh, I don’t want to squeal, but you know as well as I do about

how inspiring a wife she is.... Typical instance last evening: We went

to the movies. There was a big crowd waiting in the lobby, us at the

tail-end. She began to push right through it with her ‘Sir, how dare

you?’ manner-- Honestly, sometimes when I look at her and see how she’s

always so made up and stinking of perfume and looking for trouble and

kind of always yelping, ‘I tell yuh I’m a lady, damn yuh!’--why, I want

to kill her! Well, she keeps elbowing through the crowd, me after her,

feeling good and ashamed, till she’s almost up to the velvet rope and

ready to be the next let in. But there was a little squirt of a man

there--probably been waiting half an hour-- I kind of admired the little

cuss--and he turns on Zilla and says, perfectly polite, ‘Madam, why are

you trying to push past me?’ And she simply-- God, I was so ashamed!--she

rips out at him, ‘You’re no gentleman,’ and she drags me into it and

hollers, ‘Paul, this person insulted me!’ and the poor skate, he got

ready to fight.

“I made out I hadn’t heard them--sure! same as you wouldn’t hear a

boiler-factory!--and I tried to look away-- I can tell you exactly how

every tile looks in the ceiling of that lobby; there’s one with brown

spots on it like the face of the devil--and all the time the people

there--they were packed in like sardines--they kept making remarks about

us, and Zilla went right on talking about the little chap, and

screeching that ‘folks like him oughtn’t to be admitted in a place

that’s _supposed_ to be for ladies and gentlemen,’ and ‘Paul, will you

kindly call the manager, so I can report this dirty rat?’ and-- Oof!

Maybe I wasn’t glad when I could sneak inside and hide in the dark!

“After twenty-four years of that kind of thing, you don’t expect me to

fall down and foam at the mouth when you hint that this sweet, clean,

respectable, moral life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, do you? I can’t

even talk about it, except to you, because anybody else would think I

was yellow. Maybe I am. Don’t care any longer.... Gosh, you’ve had to

stand a lot of whining from me, first and last, Georgie!”

“Rats, now, Paul, you’ve never really what you could call whined.

Sometimes-- I’m always blowing to Myra and the kids about what a whale of

a realtor I am, and yet sometimes I get a sneaking idea I’m not such a

Pierpont Morgan as I let on to be. But if I ever do help by jollying you

along, old Paulski, I guess maybe Saint Pete may let me in after all!”

“Yuh, you’re an old blow-hard, Georgie, you cheerful cutthroat, but

you’ve certainly kept me going.”

“Why don’t you divorce Zilla?”

“Why don’t I! If I only could! If she’d just give me the chance! You

couldn’t hire her to divorce me, no, nor desert me. She’s too fond of

her three squares and a few pounds of nut-center chocolates in between.

If she’d only be what they call unfaithful to me! George, I don’t want

to be too much of a stinker; back in college I’d ’ve thought a man who

could say that ought to be shot at sunrise. But honestly, I’d be

tickled to death if she’d really go making love with somebody. Fat

chance! Of course she’ll flirt with anything--you know how she holds

hands and laughs--that laugh--that horrible brassy laugh--the way she

yaps, ‘You naughty man, you better be careful or my big husband will be

after you!’--and the guy looking me over and thinking, ‘Why, you cute

little thing, you run away now or I’ll spank you!’ And she’ll let him go

just far enough so she gets some excitement out of it and then she’ll

begin to do the injured innocent and have a beautiful time wailing, ‘I

didn’t think you were that kind of a person.’ They talk about these

_demi-vierges_ in stories--”

“These _whats_?”

“--but the wise, hard, corseted, old married women like Zilla are worse

than any bobbed-haired girl that ever went boldly out into this-here

storm of life--and kept her umbrella slid up her sleeve! But rats, you

know what Zilla is. How she nags--nags--nags. How she wants everything I

can buy her, and a lot that I can’t, and how absolutely unreasonable she

is, and when I get sore and try to have it out with her she plays the

Perfect Lady so well that even I get fooled and get all tangled up in a

lot of ‘Why did you say’s’ and ‘I didn’t mean’s.’ I’ll tell you,

Georgie: You know my tastes are pretty fairly simple--in the matter of

food, at least. Course, as you’re always complaining, I do like decent

cigars--not those Flor de Cabagos you’re smoking--”

“That’s all right now! That’s a good two-for. By the way, Paul, did I

tell you I decided to practically cut out smok--”

“Yes you-- At the same time, if I can’t get what I like, why, I can do

without it. I don’t mind sitting down to burnt steak, with canned

peaches and store cake for a thrilling little dessert afterwards, but I

do draw the line at having to sympathize with Zilla because she’s so

rotten bad-tempered that the cook has quit, and she’s been so busy

sitting in a dirty lace negligée all afternoon, reading about some brave

manly Western hero, that she hasn’t had time to do any cooking. You’re

always talking about ‘morals’--meaning monogamy, I suppose. You’ve been

the rock of ages to me, all right, but you’re essentially a simp. You--”

“Where d’ you get that ‘simp,’ little man? Let me tell you--”

“--love to look earnest and inform the world that it’s the ‘duty of

responsible business men to be strictly moral, as an example to the

community.’ In fact you’re so earnest about morality, old Georgie, that

I hate to think how essentially immoral you must be underneath. All

right, you can--”

“Wait, wait now! What’s--”

“--talk about morals all you want to, old thing, but believe me, if it

hadn’t been for you and an occasional evening playing the violin to

Terrill O’Farrell’s ’cello, and three or four darling girls that let me

forget this beastly joke they call ‘respectable life,’ I’d ’ve killed

myself years ago.

“And business! The roofing business! Roofs for cowsheds! Oh, I don’t

mean I haven’t had a lot of fun out of the Game; out of putting it over

on the labor unions, and seeing a big check coming in, and the business

increasing. But what’s the use of it? You know, my business isn’t

distributing roofing--it’s principally keeping my competitors from

distributing roofing. Same with you. All we do is cut each other’s

throats and make the public pay for it!”

“Look here now, Paul! You’re pretty darn near talking socialism!”

“Oh yes, of course I don’t really exactly mean that-- I s’pose.

Course--competition--brings out the best--survival of the

fittest--but-- But I mean: Take all these fellows we know, the kind right

here in the club now, that seem to be perfectly content with their

home-life and their businesses, and that boost Zenith and the Chamber of

Commerce and holler for a million population. I bet if you could cut

into their heads you’d find that one-third of ’em are sure-enough

satisfied with their wives and kids and friends and their offices; and

one-third feel kind of restless but won’t admit it; and one-third are

miserable and know it. They hate the whole peppy, boosting, go-ahead

game, and they’re bored by their wives and think their families are

fools--at least when they come to forty or forty-five they’re bored--and

they hate business, and they’d go-- Why do you suppose there’s so many

‘mysterious’ suicides? Why do you suppose so many Substantial Citizens

jumped right into the war? Think it was all patriotism?”

Babbitt snorted, “What do you expect? Think we were sent into the world

to have a soft time and--what is it?--‘float on flowery beds of ease’?

Think Man was just made to be happy?”

“Why not? Though I’ve never discovered anybody that knew what the deuce

Man really was made for!”

“Well we know--not just in the Bible alone, but it stands to reason--a

man who doesn’t buckle down and do his duty, even if it does bore him

sometimes, is nothing but a--well, he’s simply a weakling. Mollycoddle,

in fact! And what do you advocate? Come down to cases! If a man is bored

by his wife, do you seriously mean he has a right to chuck her and take

a sneak, or even kill himself?”

“Good Lord, I don’t know what ‘rights’ a man has! And I don’t know the

solution of boredom. If I did, I’d be the one philosopher that had the

cure for living. But I do know that about ten times as many people find

their lives dull, and unnecessarily dull, as ever admit it; and I do

believe that if we busted out and admitted it sometimes, instead of

being nice and patient and loyal for sixty years, and then nice and

patient and dead for the rest of eternity, why, maybe, possibly, we

might make life more fun.”

They drifted into a maze of speculation. Babbitt was elephantishly

uneasy. Paul was bold, but not quite sure about what he was being bold.

Now and then Babbitt suddenly agreed with Paul in an admission which

contradicted all his defense of duty and Christian patience, and at

each admission he had a curious reckless joy. He said at last:

“Look here, old Paul, you do a lot of talking about kicking things in

the face, but you never kick. Why don’t you?”

“Nobody does. Habit too strong. But-- Georgie, I’ve been thinking of one

mild bat--oh, don’t worry, old pillar of monogamy; it’s highly proper.

It seems to be settled now, isn’t it--though of course Zilla keeps

rooting for a nice expensive vacation in New York and Atlantic City,

with the bright lights and the bootlegged cocktails and a bunch of

lounge-lizards to dance with--but the Babbitts and the Rieslings are

sure-enough going to Lake Sunasquam, aren’t we? Why couldn’t you and I

make some excuse--say business in New York--and get up to Maine four or

five days before they do, and just loaf by ourselves and smoke and cuss

and be natural?”

“Great! Great idea!” Babbitt admired.

Not for fourteen years had he taken a holiday without his wife, and

neither of them quite believed they could commit this audacity. Many

members of the Athletic Club did go camping without their wives, but

they were officially dedicated to fishing and hunting, whereas the

sacred and unchangeable sports of Babbitt and Paul Riesling were

golfing, motoring, and bridge. For either the fishermen or the golfers

to have changed their habits would have been an infraction of their

self-imposed discipline which would have shocked all right-thinking and

regularized citizens.

Babbitt blustered, “Why don’t we just put our foot down and say, ‘We’re

going on ahead of you, and that’s all there is to it!’ Nothing criminal

in it. Simply say to Zilla--”

“You don’t say anything to Zilla simply. Why, Georgie, she’s almost as

much of a moralist as you are, and if I told her the truth she’d believe

we were going to meet some dames in New York. And even Myra--she never

nags you, the way Zilla does, but she’d worry. She’d say, ‘Don’t you

_want_ me to go to Maine with you? I shouldn’t dream of going unless

you wanted me;’ and you’d give in to save her feelings. Oh, the devil!

Let’s have a shot at duck-pins.”

During the game of duck-pins, a juvenile form of bowling, Paul was

silent. As they came down the steps of the club, not more than half an

hour after the time at which Babbitt had sternly told Miss McGoun he

would be back, Paul sighed, “Look here, old man, oughtn’t to talked

about Zilla way I did.”

“Rats, old man, it lets off steam.”

“Oh, I know! After spending all noon sneering at the conventional stuff,

I’m conventional enough to be ashamed of saving my life by busting out

with my fool troubles!”

“Old Paul, your nerves are kind of on the bum. I’m going to take you

away. I’m going to rig this thing. I’m going to have an important deal

in New York and--and sure, of course!-- I’ll need you to advise me on the

roof of the building! And the ole deal will fall through, and there’ll

be nothing for us but to go on ahead to Maine. I-- Paul, when it comes

right down to it, I don’t care whether you bust loose or not. I do like

having a rep for being one of the Bunch, but if you ever needed me I’d

chuck it and come out for you every time! Not of course but what

you’re--course I don’t mean you’d ever do anything that would put--that

would put a decent position on the fritz but-- See how I mean? I’m kind

of a clumsy old codger, and I need your fine Eyetalian hand. We-- Oh,

hell, I can’t stand here gassing all day! On the job! S’ long! Don’t

take any wooden money, Paulibus! See you soon! S’ long!”

CHAPTER VI

I

He forgot Paul Riesling in an afternoon of not unagreeable details.

After a return to his office, which seemed to have staggered on without

him, he drove a “prospect” out to view a four-flat tenement in the

Linton district. He was inspired by the customer’s admiration of the new

cigar-lighter. Thrice its novelty made him use it, and thrice he hurled

half-smoked cigarettes from the car, protesting, “I _got_ to quit

smoking so blame much!”

Their ample discussion of every detail of the cigar-lighter led them to

speak of electric flat-irons and bed-warmers. Babbitt apologized for

being so shabbily old-fashioned as still to use a hot-water bottle, and

he announced that he would have the sleeping-porch wired at once. He had

enormous and poetic admiration, though very little understanding, of all

mechanical devices. They were his symbols of truth and beauty. Regarding

each new intricate mechanism--metal lathe, two-jet carburetor, machine

gun, oxyacetylene welder--he learned one good realistic-sounding phrase,

and used it over and over, with a delightful feeling of being technical

and initiated.

The customer joined him in the worship of machinery, and they came

buoyantly up to the tenement and began that examination of plastic slate

roof, kalamein doors, and seven-eighths-inch blind-nailed flooring,

began those diplomacies of hurt surprise and readiness to be persuaded

to do something they had already decided to do, which would some day

result in a sale.

On the way back Babbitt picked up his partner and father-in-law, Henry

T. Thompson, at his kitchen-cabinet works, and they drove through South

Zenith, a high-colored, banging, exciting region: new factories of

hollow tile with gigantic wire-glass windows, surly old red-brick

factories stained with tar, high-perched water-tanks, big red trucks

like locomotives, and, on a score of hectic side-tracks, far-wandering

freight-cars from the New York Central and apple orchards, the Great

Northern and wheat-plateaus, the Southern Pacific and orange groves.

They talked to the secretary of the Zenith Foundry Company about an

interesting artistic project--a cast-iron fence for Linden Lane

Cemetery. They drove on to the Zeeco Motor Company and interviewed the

sales-manager, Noël Ryland, about a discount on a Zeeco car for

Thompson. Babbitt and Ryland were fellow-members of the Boosters’ Club,

and no Booster felt right if he bought anything from another Booster

without receiving a discount. But Henry Thompson growled, “Oh, t’ hell

with ’em! I’m not going to crawl around mooching discounts, not from

nobody.” It was one of the differences between Thompson, the

old-fashioned, lean Yankee, rugged, traditional, stage type of American

business man, and Babbitt, the plump, smooth, efficient,

up-to-the-minute and otherwise perfected modern. Whenever Thompson

twanged, “Put your John Hancock on that line,” Babbitt was as much

amused by the antiquated provincialism as any proper Englishman by any

American. He knew himself to be of a breeding altogether more esthetic

and sensitive than Thompson’s. He was a college graduate, he played

golf, he often smoked cigarettes instead of cigars, and when he went to

Chicago he took a room with a private bath. “The whole thing is,” he

explained to Paul Riesling, “these old codgers lack the subtlety that

you got to have to-day.”

This advance in civilization could be carried too far, Babbitt

perceived. Noël Ryland, sales-manager of the Zeeco, was a frivolous

graduate of Princeton, while Babbitt was a sound and standard ware from

that great department-store, the State University. Ryland wore spats, he

wrote long letters about City Planning and Community Singing, and,

though he was a Booster, he was known to carry in his pocket small

volumes of poetry in a foreign language. All this was going too far.

Henry Thompson was the extreme of insularity, and Noël Ryland the

extreme of frothiness, while between them, supporting the state,

defending the evangelical churches and domestic brightness and sound

business, were Babbitt and his friends.

With this just estimate of himself--and with the promise of a discount

on Thompson’s car--he returned to his office in triumph.

But as he went through the corridor of the Reeves Building he sighed,

“Poor old Paul! I got to-- Oh, damn Noël Ryland! Damn Charley McKelvey!

Just because they make more money than I do, they think they’re so

superior. I wouldn’t be found dead in their stuffy old Union Club!

I-- Somehow, to-day, I don’t feel like going back to work. Oh well--”

II

He answered telephone calls, he read the four o’clock mail, he signed

his morning’s letters, he talked to a tenant about repairs, he fought

with Stanley Graff.

Young Graff, the outside salesman, was always hinting that he deserved

an increase of commission, and to-day he complained, “I think I ought to

get a bonus if I put through the Heiler sale. I’m chasing around and

working on it every single evening, almost.”

Babbitt frequently remarked to his wife that it was better to “con your

office-help along and keep ’em happy ’stead of jumping on ’em and poking

’em up--get more work out of ’em that way,” but this unexampled lack of

appreciation hurt him, and he turned on Graff:

“Look here, Stan; let’s get this clear. You’ve got an idea somehow that

it’s you that do all the selling. Where d’ you get that stuff? Where d’

you think you’d be if it wasn’t for our capital behind you, and our

lists of properties, and all the prospects we find for you? All you got

to do is follow up our tips and close the deal. The hall-porter could

sell Babbitt-Thompson listings! You say you’re engaged to a girl, but

have to put in your evenings chasing after buyers. Well, why the devil

shouldn’t you? What do you want to do? Sit around holding her hand? Let

me tell you, Stan, if your girl is worth her salt, she’ll be glad to

know you’re out hustling, making some money to furnish the home-nest,

instead of doing the lovey-dovey. The kind of fellow that kicks about

working overtime, that wants to spend his evenings reading trashy novels

or spooning and exchanging a lot of nonsense and foolishness with some

girl, he ain’t the kind of upstanding, energetic young man, with a

future--and with Vision!--that we want here. How about it? What’s your

Ideal, anyway? Do you want to make money and be a responsible member of

the community, or do you want to be a loafer, with no Inspiration or

Pep?”

Graff was not so amenable to Vision and Ideals as usual. “You bet I want

to make money! That’s why I want that bonus! Honest, Mr. Babbitt, I

don’t want to get fresh, but this Heiler house is a terror. Nobody’ll

fall for it. The flooring is rotten and the walls are full of cracks.”

“That’s exactly what I mean! To a salesman with a love for his

profession, it’s hard problems like that that inspire him to do his

best. Besides, Stan-- Matter o’ fact, Thompson and I are against bonuses,

as a matter of principle. We like you, and we want to help you so you

can get married, but we can’t be unfair to the others on the staff. If

we start giving you bonuses, don’t you see we’re going to hurt the

feeling and be unjust to Penniman and Laylock? Right’s right, and

discrimination is unfair, and there ain’t going to be any of it in this

office! Don’t get the idea, Stan, that because during the war salesmen

were hard to hire, now, when there’s a lot of men out of work, there

aren’t a slew of bright young fellows that would be glad to step in and

enjoy your opportunities, and not act as if Thompson and I were his

enemies and not do any work except for bonuses. How about it, heh? How

about it?”

“Oh--well--gee--of course--” sighed Graff, as he went out, crabwise.

Babbitt did not often squabble with his employees. He liked to like the

people about him; he was dismayed when they did not like him. It was

only when they attacked the sacred purse that he was frightened into

fury, but then, being a man given to oratory and high principles, he

enjoyed the sound of his own vocabulary and the warmth of his own

virtue. To-day he had so passionately indulged in self-approval that he

wondered whether he had been entirely just:

“After all, Stan isn’t a boy any more. Oughtn’t to call him so hard. But

rats, got to haul folks over the coals now and then for their own good.

Unpleasant duty, but-- I wonder if Stan is sore? What’s he saying to

McGoun out there?”

So chill a wind of hatred blew from the outer office that the normal

comfort of his evening home-going was ruined. He was distressed by

losing that approval of his employees to which an executive is always

slave. Ordinarily he left the office with a thousand enjoyable fussy

directions to the effect that there would undoubtedly be important tasks

to-morrow, and Miss McGoun and Miss Bannigan would do well to be there

early, and for heaven’s sake remind him to call up Conrad Lyte soon ’s

he came in. To-night he departed with feigned and apologetic liveliness.

He was as afraid of his still-faced clerks--of the eyes focused on him,

Miss McGoun staring with head lifted from her typing, Miss Bannigan

looking over her ledger, Mat Penniman craning around at his desk in the

dark alcove, Stanley Graff sullenly expressionless--as a parvenu before

the bleak propriety of his butler. He hated to expose his back to their

laughter, and in his effort to be casually merry he stammered and was

raucously friendly and oozed wretchedly out of the door.

But he forgot his misery when he saw from Smith Street the charms of

Floral Heights; the roofs of red tile and green slate, the shining new

sun-parlors, and the stainless walls.

III

He stopped to inform Howard Littlefield, his scholarly neighbor, that

though the day had been springlike the evening might be cold. He went in

to shout “Where are you?” at his wife, with no very definite desire to

know where she was. He examined the lawn to see whether the furnace-man

had raked it properly. With some satisfaction and a good deal of

discussion of the matter with Mrs. Babbitt, Ted, and Howard Littlefield,

he concluded that the furnace-man had not raked it properly. He cut two

tufts of wild grass with his wife’s largest dressmaking-scissors; he

informed Ted that it was all nonsense having a furnace-man--“big husky

fellow like you ought to do all the work around the house;” and

privately he meditated that it was agreeable to have it known throughout

the neighborhood that he was so prosperous that his son never worked

around the house.

He stood on the sleeping-porch and did his day’s exercises: arms out

sidewise for two minutes, up for two minutes, while he muttered, “Ought

take more exercise; keep in shape;” then went in to see whether his

collar needed changing before dinner. As usual it apparently did not.

The Lettish-Croat maid, a powerful woman, beat the dinner-gong.

The roast of beef, roasted potatoes, and string beans were excellent

this evening and, after an adequate sketch of the day’s progressive

weather-states, his four-hundred-and-fifty-dollar fee, his lunch with

Paul Riesling, and the proven merits of the new cigar-lighter, he was

moved to a benign, “Sort o’ thinking about buying a new car. Don’t

believe we’ll get one till next year, but still, we might.”

Verona, the older daughter, cried, “Oh, Dad, if you do, why don’t you

get a sedan? That would be perfectly slick! A closed car is so much more

comfy than an open one.”

“Well now, I don’t know about that. I kind of like an open car. You get

more fresh air that way.”

“Oh, shoot, that’s just because you never tried a sedan. Let’s get one.

It’s got a lot more class,” said Ted.

“A closed car does keep the clothes nicer,” from Mrs. Babbitt; “You

don’t get your hair blown all to pieces,” from Verona; “It’s a lot

sportier,” from Ted; and from Tinka, the youngest, “Oh, let’s have a

sedan! Mary Ellen’s father has got one.” Ted wound up, “Oh, everybody’s

got a closed car now, except us!”

Babbitt faced them: “I guess you got nothing very terrible to complain

about! Anyway, I don’t keep a car just to enable you children to look

like millionaires! And I like an open car, so you can put the top down

on summer evenings and go out for a drive and get some good fresh air.

Besides-- A closed car costs more money.”

“Aw, gee whiz, if the Doppelbraus can afford a closed car, I guess we

can!” prodded Ted.

“Humph! I make eight thousand a year to his seven! But I don’t blow it

all in and waste it and throw it around, the way he does! Don’t believe

in this business of going and spending a whole lot of money to show off

and--”

They went, with ardor and some thoroughness, into the matters of

streamline bodies, hill-climbing power, wire wheels, chrome steel,

ignition systems, and body colors. It was much more than a study of

transportation. It was an aspiration for knightly rank. In the city of

Zenith, in the barbarous twentieth century, a family’s motor indicated

its social rank as precisely as the grades of the peerage determined the

rank of an English family--indeed, more precisely, considering the

opinion of old county families upon newly created brewery barons and

woolen-mill viscounts. The details of precedence were never officially

determined. There was no court to decide whether the second son of a

Pierce Arrow limousine should go in to dinner before the first son of a

Buick roadster, but of their respective social importance there was no

doubt; and where Babbitt as a boy had aspired to the presidency, his son

Ted aspired to a Packard twin-six and an established position in the

motored gentry.

The favor which Babbitt had won from his family by speaking of a new car

evaporated as they realized that he didn’t intend to buy one this year.

Ted lamented, “Oh, punk! The old boat looks as if it’d had fleas and

been scratching its varnish off.” Mrs. Babbitt said abstractedly,

“Snoway talkcher father.” Babbitt raged, “If you’re too much of a

high-class gentleman, and you belong to the _bon ton_ and so on, why,

you needn’t take the car out this evening.” Ted explained, “I didn’t

mean--” and dinner dragged on with normal domestic delight to the

inevitable point at which Babbitt protested, “Come, come now, we can’t

sit here all evening. Give the girl a chance to clear away the table.”

He was fretting, “What a family! I don’t know how we all get to

scrapping this way. Like to go off some place and be able to hear myself

think.... Paul... Maine.... Wear old pants, and loaf, and cuss.” He said

cautiously to his wife, “I’ve been in correspondence with a man in New

York--wants me to see him about a real-estate trade--may not come off

till summer. Hope it doesn’t break just when we and the Rieslings get

ready to go to Maine. Be a shame if we couldn’t make the trip there

together. Well, no use worrying now.”

Verona escaped, immediately after dinner, with no discussion save an

automatic “Why don’t you ever stay home?” from Babbitt.

In the living-room, in a corner of the davenport, Ted settled down to

his Home Study; plain geometry, Cicero, and the agonizing metaphors of

Comus.

“I don’t see why they give us this old-fashioned junk by Milton and

Shakespeare and Wordsworth and all these has-beens,” he protested. “Oh,

I guess I could stand it to see a show by Shakespeare, if they had swell

scenery and put on a lot of dog, but to sit down in cold blood and

_read_ ’em-- These teachers--how do they get that way?”

Mrs. Babbitt, darning socks, speculated, “Yes, I wonder why. Of course I

don’t want to fly in the face of the professors and everybody, but I do

think there’s things in Shakespeare--not that I read him much, but when

I was young the girls used to show me passages that weren’t, really,

they weren’t at all nice.”

Babbitt looked up irritably from the comic strips in the _Evening

Advocate_. They composed his favorite literature and art, these

illustrated chronicles in which Mr. Mutt hit Mr. Jeff with a rotten egg,

and Mother corrected Father’s vulgarisms by means of a rolling-pin. With

the solemn face of a devotee, breathing heavily through his open mouth,

he plodded nightly through every picture, and during the rite he

detested interruptions. Furthermore, he felt that on the subject of

Shakespeare he wasn’t really an authority. Neither the _Advocate-Times_,

the _Evening Advocate_, nor the _Bulletin of the Zenith Chamber of

Commerce_ had ever had an editorial on the matter, and until one of them

had spoken he found it hard to form an original opinion. But even at

risk of floundering in strange bogs, he could not keep out of an open

controversy.

“I’ll tell you why you have to study Shakespeare and those. It’s because

they’re required for college entrance, and that’s all there is to it!

Personally, I don’t see myself why they stuck ’em into an up-to-date

high-school system like we have in this state. Be a good deal better if

you took Business English, and learned how to write an ad, or letters

that would pull. But there it is, and there’s no talk, argument, or

discussion about it! Trouble with you, Ted, is you always want to do

something different! If you’re going to law-school--and you are!-- I

never had a chance to, but I’ll see that you do--why, you’ll want to

lay in all the English and Latin you can get.”

“Oh punk. I don’t see what’s the use of law-school--or even finishing

high school. I don’t want to go to college specially. Honest, there’s

lot of fellows that have graduated from colleges that don’t begin to

make as much money as fellows that went to work early. Old Shimmy

Peters, that teaches Latin in the High, he’s a what-is-it from Columbia

and he sits up all night reading a lot of greasy books and he’s always

spieling about the ‘value of languages,’ and the poor soak doesn’t make

but eighteen hundred a year, and no traveling salesman would think of

working for that. I know what I’d like to do. I’d like to be an aviator,

or own a corking big garage, or else--a fellow was telling me about it

yesterday-- I’d like to be one of these fellows that the Standard Oil

Company sends out to China, and you live in a compound and don’t have to

do any work, and you get to see the world and pagodas and the ocean and

everything! And then I could take up correspondence-courses. That’s the

real stuff! You don’t have to recite to some frosty-faced old dame

that’s trying to show off to the principal, and you can study any

subject you want to. Just listen to these! I clipped out the ads of some

swell courses.”

He snatched from the back of his geometry half a hundred advertisements

of those home-study courses which the energy and foresight of American

commerce have contributed to the science of education. The first

displayed the portrait of a young man with a pure brow, an iron jaw,

silk socks, and hair like patent leather. Standing with one hand in his

trousers-pocket and the other extended with chiding forefinger, he was

bewitching an audience of men with gray beards, paunches, bald heads,

and every other sign of wisdom and prosperity. Above the picture was an

inspiring educational symbol--no antiquated lamp or torch or owl of

Minerva, but a row of dollar signs. The text ran:

$ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $

POWER AND PROSPERITY IN PUBLIC SPEAKING

A Yarn Told at the Club

Who do you think I ran into the other evening at the De Luxe Restaurant?

Why, old Freddy Durkee, that used to be a dead-or-alive shipping clerk

in my old place-- Mr. Mouse-Man we used to laughingly call the dear

fellow. One time he was so timid he was plumb scared of the Super, and

never got credit for the dandy work he did. Him at the De Luxe! And if

he wasn’t ordering a tony feed with all the “fixings” from celery to

nuts! And instead of being embarrassed by the waiters, like he used to

be at the little dump where we lunched in Old Lang Syne, he was bossing

them around like he was a millionaire!

WHAT WE TEACH YOU!

How to address your lodge.

How to give toasts.

How to tell dialect stories.

How to propose to a lady.

How to entertain banquets.

How to make convincing selling-talks.

How to build big vocabulary.

How to create a strong personality.

How to become a rational, powerful and original thinker.

How to be a MASTER MAN!

I cautiously asked him what he was doing. Freddy laughed and said, “Say,

old chum, I guess you’re wondering what’s come over me. You’ll be glad

to know I’m now Assistant Super at the old shop, and right on the High

Road to Prosperity and Domination, and I look forward with confidence to

a twelve-cylinder car, and the wife is making things hum in the best

society and the kiddies getting a first-class education.

“Here’s how it happened. I ran across an ad of a course that claimed to

teach people how to talk easily and on their feet, how to answer

complaints, how to lay a proposition before the Boss, how to hit a bank

for a loan, how to hold a big audience spellbound with wit, humor,

anecdote, inspiration, etc. It was compiled by the Master Orator, Prof.

Waldo F. Peet. I was skeptical, too, but I wrote (just _on a postcard_,

with name and address) to the publisher for the lessons--sent On Trial,

money back if you are not absolutely satisfied. There were eight simple

lessons in plain language anybody could understand, and I studied them

just a few hours a night, then started practising on the wife. Soon

found I could talk right up to the Super and get due credit for all the

good work I did. They began to appreciate me and advance me fast, and

say, old doggo, what do you think they’re paying me now? $6,500 per

year! And say, I find I can keep a big audience fascinated, speaking on

any topic. As a friend, old boy, I advise you to send for circular (no

obligation) and valuable free Art Picture to:--

SHORTCUT EDUCATIONAL PUB. CO.

Desk WA Sandpit, Iowa.

ARE YOU A 100 PERCENTER OR A 10 PERCENTER?

PROF. W. F. PEET

author of the Shortcut Course in Public-Speaking, is easily the

foremost figure in practical literature, psychology & oratory. A

graduate of some of our leading universities, lecturer, extensive

traveler, author of books, poetry, etc., a man with the unique

PERSONALITY OF THE MASTER MINDS, he is ready to give _YOU_ all the

secrets of his culture and hammering Force, in a few easy lessons

that will not interfere with other occupations.

Babbitt was again without a canon which would enable him to speak with

authority. Nothing in motoring or real estate had indicated what a Solid

Citizen and Regular Fellow ought to think about culture by mail. He

began with hesitation:

“Well--sounds as if it covered the ground. It certainly is a fine thing

to be able to orate. I’ve sometimes thought I had a little talent that

way myself, and I know darn well that one reason why a fourflushing old

back-number like Chan Mott can get away with it in real estate is just

because he can make a good talk, even when he hasn’t got a doggone thing

to say! And it certainly is pretty cute the way they get out all these

courses on various topics and subjects nowadays. I’ll tell you, though:

No need to blow in a lot of good money on this stuff when you can get a

first-rate course in eloquence and English and all that right in your

own school--and one of the biggest school buildings in the entire

country!”

“That’s so,” said Mrs. Babbitt comfortably, while Ted complained:

“Yuh, but Dad, they just teach a lot of old junk that isn’t any

practical use--except the manual training and typewriting and basketball

and dancing--and in these correspondence-courses, gee, you can get all

kinds of stuff that would come in handy. Say, listen to this one:”

CAN YOU PLAY A MAN’S PART?

If you are walking with your mother, sister or best

girl and some one passes a slighting remark or uses

improper language, won’t you be ashamed if you can’t

take her part? Well, can you?

We teach boxing and self-defense by mail. Many

pupils have written saying that after a few lessons

they’ve outboxed bigger and heavier opponents. The

lessons start with simple movements practised before

your mirror--holding out your hand for a coin, the

breast-stroke in swimming, etc. Before you realize it

you are striking scientifically, ducking, guarding and

feinting, just as if you had a real opponent before you.

“Oh, baby, maybe I wouldn’t like that!” Ted chanted. “I’ll tell the

world! Gosh, I’d like to take one fellow I know in school that’s always

shooting off his mouth, and catch him alone--”

“Nonsense! The idea! Most useless thing I ever heard of!” Babbitt

fulminated.

“Well, just suppose I was walking with Mama or Rone, and somebody passed

a slighting remark or used improper language. What would I do?”

“Why, you’d probably bust the record for the hundred-yard dash!”

“I _would_ not! I’d stand right up to any mucker that passed a slighting

remark on _my_ sister and I’d show him--”

“Look here, young Dempsey! If I ever catch you fighting I’ll whale the

everlasting daylights out of you--and I’ll do it without practising

holding out my hand for a coin before the mirror, too!”

“Why, Ted dear,” Mrs. Babbitt said placidly, “it’s not at all nice, your

talking of fighting this way!”

“Well, gosh almighty, that’s a fine way to appreciate-- And then suppose

I was walking with _you_, Ma, and somebody passed a slighting remark--”

“Nobody’s going to pass no slighting remarks on nobody,” Babbitt

observed, “not if they stay home and study their geometry and mind their

own affairs instead of hanging around a lot of poolrooms and

soda-fountains and places where nobody’s got any business to be!”

“But gooooooosh, Dad, if they DID!”

Mrs. Babbitt chirped, “Well, if they did, I wouldn’t do them the honor

of paying any attention to them! Besides, they never do. You always hear

about these women that get followed and insulted and all, but I don’t

believe a word of it, or it’s their own fault, the way some women look

at a person. I certainly never’ve been insulted by--”

“Aw shoot, Mother, just suppose you _were_ sometime! Just _suppose_!

Can’t you suppose something? Can’t you imagine things?”

“Certainly I can imagine things! The idea!”

“Certainly your mother can imagine things--and suppose things! Think

you’re the only member of this household that’s got an imagination?”

Babbitt demanded. “But what’s the use of a lot of supposing? Supposing

never gets you anywhere. No sense supposing when there’s a lot of real

facts to take into considera--”

“Look here, Dad. Suppose-- I mean, just--just suppose you were in your

office and some rival real-estate man--”

“Realtor!”

“--some realtor that you hated came in--”

“I don’t hate any realtor.”

“But suppose you _did_!”

“I don’t intend to suppose anything of the kind! There’s plenty of

fellows in my profession that stoop and hate their competitors, but if

you were a little older and understood business, instead of always going

to the movies and running around with a lot of fool girls with their

dresses up to their knees and powdered and painted and rouged and God

knows what all as if they were chorus-girls, then you’d know--and you’d

suppose--that if there’s any one thing that I stand for in the

real-estate circles of Zenith, it is that we ought to always speak of

each other only in the friendliest terms and institute a spirit of

brotherhood and coöperation, and so I certainly can’t suppose and I

can’t imagine my hating any realtor, not even that dirty, fourflushing

society sneak, Cecil Rountree!”

“But--”

“And there’s no If, And or But about it! But if I _were_ going to

lambaste somebody, I wouldn’t require any fancy ducks or

swimming-strokes before a mirror, or any of these doodads and flipflops!

Suppose you were out some place and a fellow called you vile names.

Think you’d want to box and jump around like a dancing-master? You’d

just lay him out cold (at least I certainly hope any son of mine would!)

and then you’d dust off your hands and go on about your business, and

that’s all there is to it, and you aren’t going to have any

boxing-lessons by mail, either!”

“Well but-- Yes-- I just wanted to show how many different kinds of

correspondence-courses there are, instead of all the camembert they

teach us in the High.”

“But I thought they taught boxing in the school gymnasium.”

“That’s different. They stick you up there and some big stiff amuses

himself pounding the stuffin’s out of you before you have a chance to

learn. Hunka! Not any! But anyway-- Listen to some of these others.”

The advertisements were truly philanthropic. One of them bore the

rousing headline: “Money! Money!! Money!!!” The second announced that

“Mr. P. R., formerly making only eighteen a week in a barber shop,

writes to us that since taking our course he is now pulling down $5,000

as an Osteo-vitalic Physician;” and the third that “Miss J. L., recently

a wrapper in a store, is now getting Ten Real Dollars a day teaching our

Hindu System of Vibratory Breathing and Mental Control.”

Ted had collected fifty or sixty announcements, from annual

reference-books, from Sunday School periodicals, fiction-magazines, and

journals of discussion. One benefactor implored, “Don’t be a

Wallflower-- Be More Popular and Make More Money-- You Can Ukulele or Sing

Yourself into Society! By the secret principles of a Newly Discovered

System of Music Teaching, any one--man, lady or child--can, without

tiresome exercises, special training or long drawn out study, and

without waste of time, money or energy, learn to play by note, piano,

banjo, cornet, clarinet, saxophone, violin or drum, and learn

sight-singing.”

The next, under the wistful appeal “Finger Print Detectives Wanted-- Big

Incomes!” confided: “YOU red-blooded men and women--this is the

PROFESSION you have been looking for. There’s MONEY in it, BIG money,

and that rapid change of scene, that entrancing and compelling interest

and fascination, which your active mind and adventurous spirit crave.

Think of being the chief figure and directing factor in solving strange

mysteries and baffling crimes. This wonderful profession brings you into

contact with influential men on the basis of equality, and often calls

upon you to travel everywhere, maybe to distant lands--all expenses

paid. NO SPECIAL EDUCATION REQUIRED.”

“Oh, boy! I guess that wins the fire-brick necklace! Wouldn’t it be

swell to travel everywhere and nab some famous crook!” whooped Ted.

“Well, I don’t think much of that. Doggone likely to get hurt. Still,

that music-study stunt might be pretty fair, though. There’s no reason

why, if efficiency-experts put their minds to it the way they have to

routing products in a factory, they couldn’t figure out some scheme so a

person wouldn’t have to monkey with all this practising and exercises

that you get in music.” Babbitt was impressed, and he had a delightful

parental feeling that they two, the men of the family, understood each

other.

He listened to the notices of mail-box universities which taught

Short-story Writing and Improving the Memory, Motion-picture-acting and

Developing the Soul-power, Banking and Spanish, Chiropody and

Photography, Electrical Engineering and Window-trimming, Poultry-raising

and Chemistry.

“Well--well--” Babbitt sought for adequate expression of his admiration.

“I’m a son of a gun! I knew this correspondence-school business had

become a mighty profitable game--makes suburban real-estate look like

two cents!--but I didn’t realize it’d got to be such a reg’lar

key-industry! Must rank right up with groceries and movies. Always

figured somebody’d come along with the brains to not leave education to

a lot of bookworms and impractical theorists but make a big thing out

of it. Yes, I can see how a lot of these courses might interest you. I

must ask the fellows at the Athletic if they ever realized-- But same

time, Ted, you know how advertisers, I means some advertisers,

exaggerate. I don’t know as they’d be able to jam you through these

courses as fast as they claim they can.”

“Oh sure, Dad; of course.” Ted had the immense and joyful maturity of a

boy who is respectfully listened to by his elders. Babbitt concentrated

on him with grateful affection:

“I can see what an influence these courses might have on the whole

educational works. Course I’d never admit it publicly--fellow like

myself, a State U. graduate, it’s only decent and patriotic for him to

blow his horn and boost the Alma Mater--but smatter of fact, there’s a

whole lot of valuable time lost even at the U., studying poetry and

French and subjects that never brought in anybody a cent. I don’t know

but what maybe these correspondence-courses might prove to be one of the

most important American inventions.

“Trouble with a lot of folks is: they’re so blame material; they don’t

see the spiritual and mental side of American supremacy; they think that

inventions like the telephone and the areoplane and wireless--no, that

was a Wop invention, but anyway: they think these mechanical

improvements are all that we stand for; whereas to a real thinker, he

sees that spiritual and, uh, dominating movements like Efficiency, and

Rotarianism, and Prohibition, and Democracy are what compose our deepest

and truest wealth. And maybe this new principle in education-at-home may

be another--may be another factor. I tell you, Ted, we’ve got to have

Vision--”

“I think those correspondence-courses are terrible!”

The philosophers gasped. It was Mrs. Babbitt who had made this discord

in their spiritual harmony, and one of Mrs. Babbitt’s virtues was that,

except during dinner-parties, when she was transformed into a raging

hostess, she took care of the house and didn’t bother the males by

thinking. She went on firmly:

“It sounds awful to me, the way they coax those poor young folks to

think they’re learning something, and nobody ’round to help them

and-- You two learn so quick, but me, I always was slow. But just the

same--”

Babbitt attended to her: “Nonsense! Get just as much, studying at home.

You don’t think a fellow learns any more because he blows in his

father’s hard-earned money and sits around in Morris chairs in a swell

Harvard dormitory with pictures and shields and table-covers and those

doodads, do you? I tell you, I’m a college man-- I _know_! There is one

objection you might make though. I certainly do protest against any

effort to get a lot of fellows out of barber shops and factories into

the professions. They’re too crowded already, and what’ll we do for

workmen if all those fellows go and get educated?”

Ted was leaning back, smoking a cigarette without reproof. He was, for

the moment, sharing the high thin air of Babbitt’s speculation as though

he were Paul Riesling or even Dr. Howard Littlefield. He hinted:

“Well, what do you think then, Dad? Wouldn’t it be a good idea if I

could go off to China or some peppy place, and study engineering or

something by mail?”

“No, and I’ll tell you why, son. I’ve found out it’s a mighty nice thing

to be able to say you’re a B.A. Some client that doesn’t know what you

are and thinks you’re just a plug business man, he gets to shooting off

his mouth about economics or literature or foreign trade conditions, and

you just ease in something like, ‘When I was in college--course I got my

B.A. in sociology and all that junk--’ Oh, it puts an awful crimp in

their style! But there wouldn’t be any class to saying ‘I got the degree

of Stamp-licker from the Bezuzus Mail-order University!’ You see-- My

dad was a pretty good old coot, but he never had much style to him, and

I had to work darn hard to earn my way through college. Well, it’s been

worth it, to be able to associate with the finest gentlemen in Zenith,

at the clubs and so on, and I wouldn’t want you to drop out of the

gentlemen class--the class that are just as red-blooded as the Common

People but still have power and personality. It would kind of hurt me if

you did that, old man!”

“I know, Dad! Sure! All right. I’ll stick to it. Say! Gosh! Gee whiz! I

forgot all about those kids I was going to take to the chorus rehearsal.

I’ll have to duck!”

“But you haven’t done all your home-work.”

“Do it first thing in the morning.”

“Well--”

Six times in the past sixty days Babbitt had stormed, “You will not ‘do

it first thing in the morning’! You’ll do it right now!” but to-night he

said, “Well, better hustle,” and his smile was the rare shy radiance he

kept for Paul Riesling.

IV

“Ted’s a good boy,” he said to Mrs. Babbitt.

“Oh, he is!”

“Who’s these girls he’s going to pick up? Are they nice decent girls?”

“I don’t know. Oh dear, Ted never tells me anything any more. I don’t

understand what’s come over the children of this generation. I used to

have to tell Papa and Mama everything, but seems like the children

to-day have just slipped away from all control.”

“I hope they’re decent girls. Course Ted’s no longer a kid, and I

wouldn’t want him to, uh, get mixed up and everything.”

“George: I wonder if you oughtn’t to take him aside and tell him

about-- Things!” She blushed and lowered her eyes.

“Well, I don’t know. Way I figure it, Myra, no sense suggesting a lot of

Things to a boy’s mind. Think up enough devilment by himself. But I

wonder-- It’s kind of a hard question. Wonder what Littlefield thinks

about it?”

“Course Papa agrees with you. He says all this--Instruction--is-- He says

’tisn’t decent.”

“Oh, he does, does he! Well, let me tell you that whatever Henry T.

Thompson thinks--about morals, I mean, though course you can’t beat the

old duffer--”

“Why, what a way to talk of Papa!”

“--simply can’t beat him at getting in on the ground floor of a deal,

but let me tell you whenever he springs any ideas about higher things

and education, then I know I think just the opposite. You may not regard

me as any great brain-shark, but believe me, I’m a regular college

president, compared with Henry T.! Yes sir, by golly, I’m going to take

Ted aside and tell him why I lead a strictly moral life.”

“Oh, will you? When?”

“When? When? What’s the use of trying to pin me down to When and Why and

Where and How and When? That’s the trouble with women, that’s why they

don’t make high-class executives; they haven’t any sense of diplomacy.

When the proper opportunity and occasion arises so it just comes in

natural, why then I’ll have a friendly little talk with him

and--and-- Was that Tinka hollering up-stairs? She ought to been asleep,

long ago.”

He prowled through the living-room, and stood in the sun-parlor, that

glass-walled room of wicker chairs and swinging couch in which they

loafed on Sunday afternoons. Outside, only the lights of Doppelbrau’s

house and the dim presence of Babbitt’s favorite elm broke the softness

of April night.

“Good visit with the boy. Getting over feeling cranky, way I did this

morning. And restless. Though, by golly, I will have a few days alone

with Paul in Maine!... That devil Zilla!... But.... Ted’s all right.

Whole family all right. And good business. Not many fellows make four

hundred and fifty bucks, practically half of a thousand dollars, easy as

I did to-day! Maybe when we all get to rowing it’s just as much my

fault as it is theirs. Oughtn’t to get grouchy like I do. But-- Wish I’d

been a pioneer, same as my grand-dad. But then, wouldn’t have a house

like this. I-- Oh, gosh, _I don’t know_!”

He thought moodily of Paul Riesling, of their youth together, of the

girls they had known.

When Babbitt had graduated from the State University, twenty-four years

ago, he had intended to be a lawyer. He had been a ponderous debater in

college; he felt that he was an orator; he saw himself becoming governor

of the state. While he read law he worked as a real-estate salesman. He

saved money, lived in a boarding-house, supped on poached egg on hash.

The lively Paul Riesling (who was certainly going off to Europe to study

violin, next month or next year) was his refuge till Paul was bespelled

by Zilla Colbeck, who laughed and danced and drew men after her plump

and gaily wagging finger.

Babbitt’s evenings were barren then, and he found comfort only in Paul’s

second cousin, Myra Thompson, a sleek and gentle girl who showed her

capacity by agreeing with the ardent young Babbitt that of course he was

going to be governor some day. Where Zilla mocked him as a country boy,

Myra said indignantly that he was ever so much solider than the young

dandies who had been born in the great city of Zenith--an ancient

settlement in 1897, one hundred and five years old, with two hundred

thousand population, the queen and wonder of all the state and, to the

Catawba boy, George Babbitt, so vast and thunderous and luxurious that

he was flattered to know a girl ennobled by birth in Zenith.

Of love there was no talk between them. He knew that if he was to study

law he could not marry for years; and Myra was distinctly a Nice

Girl--one didn’t kiss her, one didn’t “think about her that way at all”

unless one was going to marry her. But she was a dependable companion.

She was always ready to go skating, walking; always content to hear his

discourses on the great things he was going to do, the distressed poor

whom he would defend against the Unjust Rich, the speeches he would make

at Banquets, the inexactitudes of popular thought which he would

correct.

One evening when he was weary and soft-minded, he saw that she had been

weeping. She had been left out of a party given by Zilla. Somehow her

head was on his shoulder and he was kissing away the tears--and she

raised her head to say trustingly, “Now that we’re engaged, shall we be

married soon or shall we wait?”

Engaged? It was his first hint of it. His affection for this brown

tender woman thing went cold and fearful, but he could not hurt her,

could not abuse her trust. He mumbled something about waiting, and

escaped. He walked for an hour, trying to find a way of telling her that

it was a mistake. Often, in the month after, he got near to telling her,

but it was pleasant to have a girl in his arms, and less and less could

he insult her by blurting that he didn’t love her. He himself had no

doubt. The evening before his marriage was an agony, and the morning

wild with the desire to flee.

She made him what is known as a Good Wife. She was loyal, industrious,

and at rare times merry. She passed from a feeble disgust at their

closer relations into what promised to be ardent affection, but it

drooped into bored routine. Yet she existed only for him and for the

children, and she was as sorry, as worried as himself, when he gave up

the law and trudged on in a rut of listing real estate.

“Poor kid, she hasn’t had much better time than I have,” Babbitt

reflected, standing in the dark sun-parlor. “But-- I wish I could’ve had

a whirl at law and politics. Seen what I could do. Well-- Maybe I’ve made

more money as it is.”

He returned to the living-room but before he settled down he smoothed

his wife’s hair, and she glanced up, happy and somewhat surprised.

CHAPTER VII

I

He solemnly finished the last copy of the _American Magazine_, while his

wife sighed, laid away her darning, and looked enviously at the lingerie

designs in a women’s magazine. The room was very still.

It was a room which observed the best Floral Heights standards. The gray

walls were divided into artificial paneling by strips of white-enameled

pine. From the Babbitts’ former house had come two much-carved

rocking-chairs, but the other chairs were new, very deep and restful,

upholstered in blue and gold-striped velvet. A blue velvet davenport

faced the fireplace, and behind it was a cherrywood table and a tall

piano-lamp with a shade of golden silk. (Two out of every three houses

in Floral Heights had before the fireplace a davenport, a mahogany table

real or imitation, and a piano-lamp or a reading-lamp with a shade of

yellow or rose silk.)

On the table was a runner of gold-threaded Chinese fabric, four

magazines, a silver box containing cigarette-crumbs, and three

“gift-books”--large, expensive editions of fairy-tales illustrated by

English artists and as yet unread by any Babbitt save Tinka.

In a corner by the front windows was a large cabinet Victrola. (Eight

out of every nine Floral Heights houses had a cabinet phonograph.)

Among the pictures, hung in the exact center of each gray panel, were a

red and black imitation English hunting-print, an anemic imitation

boudoir-print with a French caption of whose morality Babbitt had always

been rather suspicious, and a “hand-colored” photograph of a Colonial

room--rag rug, maiden spinning, cat demure before a white fireplace.

(Nineteen out of every twenty houses in Floral Heights had either a

hunting-print, a _Madame Fait la Toilette_ print, a colored photograph

of a New England house, a photograph of a Rocky Mountain, or all four.)

It was a room as superior in comfort to the “parlor” of Babbitt’s

boyhood as his motor was superior to his father’s buggy. Though there

was nothing in the room that was interesting, there was nothing that was

offensive. It was as neat, and as negative, as a block of artificial

ice. The fireplace was unsoftened by downy ashes or by sooty brick; the

brass fire-irons were of immaculate polish; and the grenadier andirons

were like samples in a shop, desolate, unwanted, lifeless things of

commerce.

Against the wall was a piano, with another piano-lamp, but no one used

it save Tinka. The hard briskness of the phonograph contented them;

their store of jazz records made them feel wealthy and cultured; and all

they knew of creating music was the nice adjustment of a bamboo needle.

The books on the table were unspotted and laid in rigid parallels; not

one corner of the carpet-rug was curled; and nowhere was there a

hockey-stick, a torn picture-book, an old cap, or a gregarious and

disorganizing dog.

II

At home, Babbitt never read with absorption. He was concentrated enough

at the office but here he crossed his legs and fidgeted. When his story

was interesting he read the best, that is the funniest, paragraphs to

his wife; when it did not hold him he coughed, scratched his ankles and

his right ear, thrust his left thumb into his vest pocket, jingled his

silver, whirled the cigar-cutter and the keys on one end of his

watch-chain, yawned, rubbed his nose, and found errands to do. He went

upstairs to put on his slippers--his elegant slippers of seal-brown,

shaped like medieval shoes. He brought up an apple from the barrel which

stood by the trunk-closet in the basement.

“An apple a day keeps the doctor away,” he enlightened Mrs. Babbitt, for

quite the first time in fourteen hours.

“That’s so.”

“An apple is Nature’s best regulator.”

“Yes, it--”

“Trouble with women is, they never have sense enough to form regular

habits.”

“Well, I--”

“Always nibbling and eating between meals.”

“George!” She looked up from her reading. “Did you have a light lunch

to-day, like you were going to? I did!”

This malicious and unprovoked attack astounded him. “Well, maybe it

wasn’t as light as-- Went to lunch with Paul and didn’t have much chance

to diet. Oh, you needn’t to grin like a chessy cat! If it wasn’t for me

watching out and keeping an eye on our diet-- I’m the only member of this

family that appreciates the value of oatmeal for breakfast. I--”

She stooped over her story while he piously sliced and gulped down the

apple, discoursing:

“One thing I’ve done: cut down my smoking.

“Had kind of a run-in with Graff in the office. He’s getting too darn

fresh. I’ll stand for a good deal, but once in a while I got to assert

my authority, and I jumped him. ‘Stan,’ I said-- Well, I told him just

exactly where he got off.

“Funny kind of a day. Makes you feel restless.

“Wellllllllll, uh--” That sleepiest sound in the world, the terminal

yawn. Mrs. Babbitt yawned with it, and looked grateful as he droned,

“How about going to bed, eh? Don’t suppose Rone and Ted will be in till

all hours. Yep, funny kind of a day; not terribly warm but yet-- Gosh,

I’d like-- Some day I’m going to take a long motor trip.”

“Yes, we’d enjoy that,” she yawned.

He looked away from her as he realized that he did not wish to have her

go with him. As he locked doors and tried windows and set the heat

regulator so that the furnace-drafts would open automatically in the

morning, he sighed a little, heavy with a lonely feeling which perplexed

and frightened him. So absent-minded was he that he could not remember

which window-catches he had inspected, and through the darkness,

fumbling at unseen perilous chairs, he crept back to try them all over

again. His feet were loud on the steps as he clumped upstairs at the end

of this great and treacherous day of veiled rebellions.

III

Before breakfast he always reverted to up-state village boyhood, and

shrank from the complex urban demands of shaving, bathing, deciding

whether the current shirt was clean enough for another day. Whenever he

stayed home in the evening he went to bed early, and thriftily got ahead

in those dismal duties. It was his luxurious custom to shave while

sitting snugly in a tubful of hot water. He may be viewed to-night as a

plump, smooth, pink, baldish, podgy goodman, robbed of the importance of

spectacles, squatting in breast-high water, scraping his lather-smeared

cheeks with a safety-razor like a tiny lawn-mower, and with melancholy

dignity clawing through the water to recover a slippery and active piece

of soap.

He was lulled to dreaming by the caressing warmth. The light fell on the

inner surface of the tub in a pattern of delicate wrinkled lines which

slipped with a green sparkle over the curving porcelain as the clear

water trembled. Babbitt lazily watched it; noted that along the

silhouette of his legs against the radiance on the bottom of the tub,

the shadows of the air-bubbles clinging to the hairs were reproduced as

strange jungle mosses. He patted the water, and the reflected light

capsized and leaped and volleyed. He was content and childish. He

played. He shaved a swath down the calf of one plump leg.

The drain-pipe was dripping, a dulcet and lively song: drippety drip

drip dribble, drippety drip drip drip. He was enchanted by it. He looked

at the solid tub, the beautiful nickel taps, the tiled walls of the

room, and felt virtuous in the possession of this splendor.

He roused himself and spoke gruffly to his bath-things. “Come here!

You’ve done enough fooling!” he reproved the treacherous soap, and

defied the scratchy nail-brush with “Oh, you would, would you!” He

soaped himself, and rinsed himself, and austerely rubbed himself; he

noted a hole in the Turkish towel, and meditatively thrust a finger

through it, and marched back to the bedroom, a grave and unbending

citizen.

There was a moment of gorgeous abandon, a flash of melodrama such as he

found in traffic-driving, when he laid out a clean collar, discovered

that it was frayed in front, and tore it up with a magnificent yeeeeeing

sound.

Most important of all was the preparation of his bed and the

sleeping-porch.

It is not known whether he enjoyed his sleeping-porch because of the

fresh air or because it was the standard thing to have a sleeping-porch.

Just as he was an Elk, a Booster, and a member of the Chamber of

Commerce, just as the priests of the Presbyterian Church determined his

every religious belief and the senators who controlled the Republican

Party decided in little smoky rooms in Washington what he should think

about disarmament, tariff, and Germany, so did the large national

advertisers fix the surface of his life, fix what he believed to be his

individuality. These standard advertised wares--toothpastes, socks,

tires, cameras, instantaneous hot-water heaters--were his symbols and

proofs of excellence; at first the signs, then the substitutes, for joy

and passion and wisdom.

But none of these advertised tokens of financial and social success was

more significant than a sleeping-porch with a sun-parlor below.

The rites of preparing for bed were elaborate and unchanging. The

blankets had to be tucked in at the foot of his cot. (Also, the reason

why the maid hadn’t tucked in the blankets had to be discussed with Mrs.

Babbitt.) The rag rug was adjusted so that his bare feet would strike it

when he arose in the morning. The alarm clock was wound. The hot-water

bottle was filled and placed precisely two feet from the bottom of the

cot.

These tremendous undertakings yielded to his determination; one by one

they were announced to Mrs. Babbitt and smashed through to

accomplishment. At last his brow cleared, and in his “Gnight!” rang

virile power. But there was yet need of courage. As he sank into sleep,

just at the first exquisite relaxation, the Doppelbrau car came home. He

bounced into wakefulness, lamenting, “Why the devil can’t some people

never get to bed at a reasonable hour?” So familiar was he with the

process of putting up his own car that he awaited each step like an able

executioner condemned to his own rack.

The car insultingly cheerful on the driveway. The car door opened and

banged shut, then the garage door slid open, grating on the sill, and

the car door again. The motor raced for the climb up into the garage and

raced once more, explosively, before it was shut off. A final opening

and slamming of the car door. Silence then, a horrible silence filled

with waiting, till the leisurely Mr. Doppelbrau had examined the state

of his tires and had at last shut the garage door. Instantly, for

Babbitt, a blessed state of oblivion.

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, searchlights 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!”

V

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.”

VI

At that moment in Zenith, Jake Offutt, the politician, and Henry T.

Thompson were in conference. Offutt suggested, “The thing to do is to

get your fool son-in-law, Babbitt, to put it over. He’s one of these

patriotic guys. When he grabs a piece of property for the gang, he makes

it look like we were dyin’ of love for the dear peepul, and I do love to

buy respectability--reasonable. Wonder how long we can keep it up, Hank?

We’re safe as long as the good little boys like George Babbitt and all

the nice respectable labor-leaders think you and me are rugged patriots.

There’s swell pickings for an honest politician here, Hank: a whole city

working to provide cigars and fried chicken and dry martinis for us, and

rallying to our banner with indignation, oh, fierce indignation,

whenever some squealer like this fellow Seneca Doane comes along!

Honest, Hank, a smart codger like me ought to be ashamed of himself if

he didn’t milk cattle like them, when they come around mooing for it!

But the Traction gang can’t get away with grand larceny like it used to.

I wonder when-- Hank, I wish we could fix some way to run this fellow

Seneca Doane out of town. It’s him or us!”

At that moment in Zenith, three hundred and forty or fifty thousand

Ordinary People were asleep, a vast unpenetrated shadow. In the slum

beyond the railroad tracks, a young man who for six months had sought

work turned on the gas and killed himself and his wife.

At that moment Lloyd Mallam, the poet, owner of the Hafiz Book Shop, was

finishing a rondeau to show how diverting was life amid the feuds of

medieval Florence, but how dull it was in so obvious a place as Zenith.

* * * * *

And at that moment George F. Babbitt turned ponderously in bed--the last

turn, signifying that he’d had enough of this worried business of

falling asleep and was about it in earnest.

Instantly he was in the magic dream. He was somewhere among unknown

people who laughed at him. He slipped away, ran down the paths of a

midnight garden, and at the gate the fairy child was waiting. Her dear

and tranquil hand caressed his cheek. He was gallant and wise and

well-beloved; warm ivory were her arms; and beyond perilous moors the

brave sea glittered.

CHAPTER VIII

I

The great events of Babbitt’s spring were the secret buying of

real-estate options in Linton for certain street-traction officials,

before the public announcement that the Linton Avenue Car Line would be

extended, and a dinner which was, as he rejoiced to his wife, not only

“a regular society spread but a real sure-enough highbrow affair, with

some of the keenest intellects and the brightest bunch of little women

in town.” It was so absorbing an occasion that he almost forgot his

desire to run off to Maine with Paul Riesling.

Though he had been born in the village of Catawba, Babbitt had risen to

that metropolitan social plane on which hosts have as many as four

people at dinner without planning it for more than an evening or two.

But a dinner of twelve, with flowers from the florist’s and all the

cut-glass out, staggered even the Babbitts.

For two weeks they studied, debated, and arbitrated the list of guests.

Babbitt marveled, “Of course we’re up-to-date ourselves, but still,

think of us entertaining a famous poet like Chum Frink, a fellow that on

nothing but a poem or so every day and just writing a few advertisements

pulls down fifteen thousand berries a year!”

“Yes, and Howard Littlefield. Do you know, the other evening Eunice told

me her papa speaks three languages!” said Mrs. Babbitt.

“Huh! That’s nothing! So do I--American, baseball, and poker!”

“I don’t think it’s nice to be funny about a matter like that. Think

how wonderful it must be to speak three languages, and so useful

and-- And with people like that, I don’t see why we invite the Orville

Joneses.”

“Well now, Orville is a mighty up-and-coming fellow!”

“Yes, I know, but-- A laundry!”

“I’ll admit a laundry hasn’t got the class of poetry or real estate, but

just the same, Orvy is mighty deep. Ever start him spieling about

gardening? Say, that fellow can tell you the name of every kind of tree,

and some of their Greek and Latin names too! Besides, we owe the Joneses

a dinner. Besides, gosh, we got to have some boob for audience, when a

bunch of hot-air artists like Frink and Littlefield get going.”

“Well, dear--I meant to speak of this--I do think that as host you ought

to sit back and listen, and let your guests have a chance to talk once

in a while!”

“Oh, you do, do you! Sure! I talk all the time! And I’m just a business

man--oh sure!--I’m no Ph.D. like Littlefield, and no poet, and I haven’t

anything to spring! Well, let me tell you, just the other day your darn

Chum Frink comes up to me at the club begging to know what I thought

about the Springfield school-bond issue. And who told him? I did! You

bet your life I told him! Little me! I certainly did! He came up and

asked me, and I told him all about it! You bet! And he was darn glad to

listen to me and-- Duty as a host! I guess I know my duty as a host and

let me tell you--”

In fact, the Orville Joneses were invited.

II

On the morning of the dinner, Mrs. Babbitt was restive.

“Now, George, I want you to be sure and be home early to-night.

Remember, you have to dress.”

“Uh-huh. I see by the _Advocate_ that the Presbyterian General Assembly

has voted to quit the Interchurch World Movement. That--”

“George! Did you hear what I said? You must be home in time to dress

to-night.”

“Dress? Hell! I’m dressed now! Think I’m going down to the office in my

B.V.D.’s?”

“I will not have you talking indecently before the children! And you do

have to put on your dinner-jacket!”

“I guess you mean my Tux. I tell you, of all the doggone nonsensical

nuisances that was ever invented--”

Three minutes later, after Babbitt had wailed, “Well, I don’t know

whether I’m going to dress or _not_” in a manner which showed that he

was going to dress, the discussion moved on.

“Now, George, you mustn’t forget to call in at Vecchia’s on the way home

and get the ice cream. Their delivery-wagon is broken down, and I don’t

want to trust them to send it by--”

“All right! You told me that before breakfast!”

“Well, I don’t want you to forget. I’ll be working my head off all day

long, training the girl that’s to help with the dinner--”

“All nonsense, anyway, hiring an extra girl for the feed. Matilda could

perfectly well--”

“--and I have to go out and buy the flowers, and fix them, and set the

table, and order the salted almonds, and look at the chickens, and

arrange for the children to have their supper up-stairs and-- And I

simply must depend on you to go to Vecchia’s for the ice cream.”

“All riiiiiight! Gosh, I’m going to get it!”

“All you have to do is to go in and say you want the ice cream that Mrs.

Babbitt ordered yesterday by ’phone, and it will be all ready for you.”

At ten-thirty she telephoned to him not to forget the ice cream from

Vecchia’s.

He was surprised and blasted then by a thought. He wondered whether

Floral Heights dinners were worth the hideous toil involved. But he

repented the sacrilege in the excitement of buying the materials for

cocktails.

Now this was the manner of obtaining alcohol under the reign of

righteousness and prohibition:

He drove from the severe rectangular streets of the modern business

center into the tangled byways of Old Town--jagged blocks filled with

sooty warehouses and lofts; on into The Arbor, once a pleasant orchard

but now a morass of lodging-houses, tenements, and brothels. Exquisite

shivers chilled his spine and stomach, and he looked at every policeman

with intense innocence, as one who loved the law, and admired the Force,

and longed to stop and play with them. He parked his car a block from

Healey Hanson’s saloon, worrying, “Well, rats, if anybody did see me,

they’d think I was here on business.”

He entered a place curiously like the saloons of ante-prohibition days,

with a long greasy bar with sawdust in front and streaky mirror behind,

a pine table at which a dirty old man dreamed over a glass of something

which resembled whisky, and with two men at the bar, drinking something

which resembled beer, and giving that impression of forming a large

crowd which two men always give in a saloon. The bartender, a tall pale

Swede with a diamond in his lilac scarf, stared at Babbitt as he stalked

plumply up to the bar and whispered, “I’d, uh-- Friend of Hanson’s sent

me here. Like to get some gin.”

The bartender gazed down on him in the manner of an outraged bishop. “I

guess you got the wrong place, my friend. We sell nothing but soft

drinks here.” He cleaned the bar with a rag which would itself have done

with a little cleaning, and glared across his mechanically moving elbow.

The old dreamer at the table petitioned the bartender, “Say, Oscar,

listen.”

Oscar did not listen.

“Aw, say, Oscar, listen, will yuh? Say, lis-sen!”

The decayed and drowsy voice of the loafer, the agreeable stink of

beer-dregs, threw a spell of inanition over Babbitt. The bartender moved

grimly toward the crowd of two men. Babbitt followed him as delicately

as a cat, and wheedled, “Say, Oscar, I want to speak to Mr. Hanson.”

“Whajuh wanta see him for?”

“I just want to talk to him. Here’s my card.”

It was a beautiful card, an engraved card, a card in the blackest black

and the sharpest red, announcing that Mr. George F. Babbitt was Estates,

Insurance, Rents. The bartender held it as though it weighed ten pounds,

and read it as though it were a hundred words long. He did not bend from

his episcopal dignity, but he growled, “I’ll see if he’s around.”

From the back room he brought an immensely old young man, a quiet

sharp-eyed man, in tan silk shirt, checked vest hanging open, and

burning brown trousers--Mr. Healey Hanson. Mr. Hanson said only “Yuh?”

but his implacable and contemptuous eyes queried Babbitt’s soul, and he

seemed not at all impressed by the new dark-gray suit for which (as he

had admitted to every acquaintance at the Athletic Club) Babbitt had

paid a hundred and twenty-five dollars.

“Glad meet you, Mr. Hanson. Say, uh-- I’m George Babbitt of the

Babbitt-Thompson Realty Company. I’m a great friend of Jake Offutt’s.”

“Well, what of it?”

“Say, uh, I’m going to have a party, and Jake told me you’d be able to

fix me up with a little gin.” In alarm, in obsequiousness, as Hanson’s

eyes grew more bored, “You telephone to Jake about me, if you want to.”

Hanson answered by jerking his head to indicate the entrance to the back

room, and strolled away. Babbitt melodramatically crept into an

apartment containing four round tables, eleven chairs, a brewery

calendar, and a smell. He waited. Thrice he saw Healey Hanson saunter

through, humming, hands in pockets, ignoring him.

By this time Babbitt had modified his valiant morning vow, “I won’t pay

one cent over seven dollars a quart” to “I might pay ten.” On Hanson’s

next weary entrance he besought, “Could you fix that up?” Hanson

scowled, and grated, “Just a minute--Pete’s sake--just a min-ute!” In

growing meekness Babbitt went on waiting till Hanson casually reappeared

with a quart of gin--what is euphemistically known as a quart--in his

disdainful long white hands.

“Twelve bucks,” he snapped.

“Say, uh, but say, cap’n, Jake thought you’d be able to fix me up for

eight or nine a bottle.”

“Nup. Twelve. This is the real stuff, smuggled from Canada. This is none

o’ your neutral spirits with a drop of juniper extract,” the honest

merchant said virtuously. “Twelve bones--if you want it. Course y’

understand I’m just doing this anyway as a friend of Jake’s.”

“Sure! Sure! I understand!” Babbitt gratefully held out twelve dollars.

He felt honored by contact with greatness as Hanson yawned, stuffed the

bills, uncounted, into his radiant vest, and swaggered away.

He had a number of titillations out of concealing the gin-bottle under

his coat and out of hiding it in his desk. All afternoon he snorted and

chuckled and gurgled over his ability to “give the Boys a real shot in

the arm to-night.” He was, in fact, so exhilarated that he was within a

block of his house before he remembered that there was a certain matter,

mentioned by his wife, of fetching ice cream from Vecchia’s. He

explained, “Well, darn it--” and drove back.

Vecchia was not a caterer, he was The Caterer of Zenith. Most coming-out

parties were held in the white and gold ballroom of the Maison Vecchia;

at all nice teas the guests recognized the five kinds of Vecchia

sandwiches and the seven kinds of Vecchia cakes; and all really smart

dinners ended, as on a resolving chord, in Vecchia Neapolitan ice cream

in one of the three reliable molds--the melon mold, the round mold like

a layer cake, and the long brick.

Vecchia’s shop had pale blue woodwork, tracery of plaster roses,

attendants in frilled aprons, and glass shelves of “kisses” with all the

refinement that inheres in whites of eggs. Babbitt felt heavy and thick

amid this professional daintiness, and as he waited for the ice cream he

decided, with hot prickles at the back of his neck, that a girl customer

was giggling at him. He went home in a touchy temper. The first thing he

heard was his wife’s agitated:

“George! _Did_ you remember to go to Vecchia’s and get the ice cream?”

“Say! Look here! Do I ever forget to do things?”

“Yes! Often!”

“Well now, it’s darn seldom I do, and it certainly makes me tired, after

going into a pink-tea joint like Vecchia’s and having to stand around

looking at a lot of half-naked young girls, all rouged up like they were

sixty and eating a lot of stuff that simply ruins their stomachs--”

“Oh, it’s too bad about you! I’ve noticed how you hate to look at pretty

girls!”

With a jar Babbitt realized that his wife was too busy to be impressed

by that moral indignation with which males rule the world, and he went

humbly up-stairs to dress. He had an impression of a glorified

dining-room, of cut-glass, candles, polished wood, lace, silver, roses.

With the awed swelling of the heart suitable to so grave a business as

giving a dinner, he slew the temptation to wear his plaited dress-shirt

for a fourth time, took out an entirely fresh one, tightened his black

bow, and rubbed his patent-leather pumps with a handkerchief. He glanced

with pleasure at his garnet and silver studs. He smoothed and patted his

ankles, transformed by silk socks from the sturdy shanks of George

Babbitt to the elegant limbs of what is called a Clubman. He stood

before the pier-glass, viewing his trim dinner-coat, his beautiful

triple-braided trousers; and murmured in lyric beatitude, “By golly, I

don’t look so bad. I certainly don’t look like Catawba. If the hicks

back home could see me in this rig, they’d have a fit!”

He moved majestically down to mix the cocktails. As he chipped ice, as

he squeezed oranges, as he collected vast stores of bottles, glasses,

and spoons at the sink in the pantry, he felt as authoritative as the

bartender at Healey Hanson’s saloon. True, Mrs. Babbitt said he was

under foot, and Matilda and the maid hired for the evening brushed by

him, elbowed him, shrieked “Pleasopn door,” as they tottered through

with trays, but in this high moment he ignored them.

Besides the new bottle of gin, his cellar consisted of one half-bottle

of Bourbon whisky, a quarter of a bottle of Italian vermouth, and

approximately one hundred drops of orange bitters. He did not possess a

cocktail-shaker. A shaker was proof of dissipation, the symbol of a

Drinker, and Babbitt disliked being known as a Drinker even more than he

liked a Drink. He mixed by pouring from an ancient gravy-boat into a

handleless pitcher; he poured with a noble dignity, holding his alembics

high beneath the powerful Mazda globe, his face hot, his shirt-front a

glaring white, the copper sink a scoured red-gold.

He tasted the sacred essence. “Now, by golly, if that isn’t pretty near

one fine old cocktail! Kind of a Bronx, and yet like a Manhattan.

Ummmmmm! Hey, Myra, want a little nip before the folks come?”

Bustling into the dining-room, moving each glass a quarter of an inch,

rushing back with resolution implacable on her face, her gray and

silver-lace party frock protected by a denim towel, Mrs. Babbitt glared

at him, and rebuked him, “Certainly not!”

“Well,” in a loose, jocose manner, “I think the old man will!”

The cocktail filled him with a whirling exhilaration behind which he was

aware of devastating desires--to rush places in fast motors, to kiss

girls, to sing, to be witty. He sought to regain his lost dignity by

announcing to Matilda:

“I’m going to stick this pitcher of cocktails in the refrigerator. Be

sure you don’t upset any of ’em.”

“Yeh.”

“Well, be sure now. Don’t go putting anything on this top shelf.”

“Yeh.”

“Well, be--” He was dizzy. His voice was thin and distant. “Whee!” With

enormous impressiveness he commanded, “Well, be sure now,” and minced

into the safety of the living-room. He wondered whether he could

persuade “as slow a bunch as Myra and the Littlefields to go some place

aft’ dinner and raise Cain and maybe dig up smore booze.” He perceived

that he had gifts of profligacy which had been neglected.

By the time the guests had come, including the inevitable late couple

for whom the others waited with painful amiability, a great gray

emptiness had replaced the purple swirling in Babbitt’s head, and he had

to force the tumultuous greetings suitable to a host on Floral Heights.

The guests were Howard Littlefield, the doctor of philosophy who

furnished publicity and comforting economics to the Street Traction

Company; Vergil Gunch, the coal-dealer, equally powerful in the Elks and

in the Boosters’ Club; Eddie Swanson, the agent for the Javelin Motor

Car, who lived across the street; and Orville Jones, owner of the Lily

White Laundry, which justly announced itself “the biggest, busiest,

bulliest cleanerie shoppe in Zenith.” But, naturally, the most

distinguished of all was T. Cholmondeley Frink, who was not only the

author of “Poemulations,” which, syndicated daily in sixty-seven leading

newspapers, gave him one of the largest audiences of any poet in the

world, but also an optimistic lecturer and the creator of “Ads that

Add.” Despite the searching philosophy and high morality of his verses,

they were humorous and easily understood by any child of twelve; and it

added a neat air of pleasantry to them that they were set not as verse

but as prose. Mr. Frink was known from Coast to Coast as “Chum.”

With them were six wives, more or less--it was hard to tell, so early in

the evening, as at first glance they all looked alike, and as they all

said, “Oh, _isn’t_ this nice!” in the same tone of determined

liveliness. To the eye, the men were less similar: Littlefield, a

hedge-scholar, tall and horse-faced; Chum Frink, a trifle of a man with

soft and mouse-like hair, advertising his profession as poet by a silk

cord on his eye-glasses; Vergil Gunch, broad, with coarse black hair _en

brosse_; Eddie Swanson, a bald and bouncing young man who showed his

taste for elegance by an evening waistcoat of figured black silk with

glass buttons; Orville Jones, a steady-looking, stubby, not very

memorable person, with a hemp-colored toothbrush mustache. Yet they were

all so well fed and clean, they all shouted “’Evenin’, Georgie!” with

such robustness, that they seemed to be cousins, and the strange thing

is that the longer one knew the women, the less alike they seemed; while

the longer one knew the men, the more alike their bold patterns

appeared.

The drinking of the cocktails was as canonical a rite as the mixing. The

company waited, uneasily, hopefully, agreeing in a strained manner that

the weather had been rather warm and slightly cold, but still Babbitt

said nothing about drinks. They became despondent. But when the late

couple (the Swansons) had arrived, Babbitt hinted, “Well, folks, do you

think you could stand breaking the law a little?”

They looked at Chum Frink, the recognized lord of language. Frink pulled

at his eye-glass cord as at a bell-rope, he cleared his throat and said

that which was the custom:

“I’ll tell you, George: I’m a law-abiding man, but they do say Verg

Gunch is a regular yegg, and of course he’s bigger ’n I am, and I just

can’t figure out what I’d do if he tried to force me into anything

criminal!”

Gunch was roaring, “Well, I’ll take a chance--” when Frink held up his

hand and went on, “So if Verg and you insist, Georgie, I’ll park my car

on the wrong side of the street, because I take it for granted that’s

the crime you’re hinting at!”

There was a great deal of laughter. Mrs. Jones asserted, “Mr. Frink is

simply too killing! You’d think he was so innocent!”

Babbitt clamored, “How did you guess it, Chum? Well, you-all just wait a

moment while I go out and get the--keys to your cars!” Through a froth

of merriment he brought the shining promise, the mighty tray of glasses

with the cloudy yellow cocktails in the glass pitcher in the center. The

men babbled, “Oh, gosh, have a look!” and “This gets me right where I

live!” and “Let me at it!” But Chum Frink, a traveled man and not unused

to woes, was stricken by the thought that the potion might be merely

fruit-juice with a little neutral spirits. He looked timorous as

Babbitt, a moist and ecstatic almoner, held out a glass, but as he

tasted it he piped, “Oh, man, let me dream on! It ain’t true, but don’t

waken me! Jus’ lemme slumber!”

Two hours before, Frink had completed a newspaper lyric beginning:

_I sat alone and groused and thunk, and scratched my head and sighed and

wunk, and groaned, “There still are boobs, alack, who’d like the

old-time gin-mill back; that den that makes a sage a loon, the vile and

smelly old saloon!” I’ll never miss their poison booze, whilst I the

bubbling spring can use, that leaves my head at merry morn as clear as

any babe new-born!_

Babbitt drank with the others; his moment’s depression was gone; he

perceived that these were the best fellows in the world; he wanted to

give them a thousand cocktails. “Think you could stand another?” he

cried. The wives refused, with giggles, but the men, speaking in a

wide, elaborate, enjoyable manner, gloated, “Well, sooner than have you

get sore at me, Georgie--”

“You got a little dividend coming,” said Babbitt to each of them, and

each intoned, “Squeeze it, Georgie, squeeze it!”

When, beyond hope, the pitcher was empty, they stood and talked about

prohibition. The men leaned back on their heels, put their hands in

their trousers-pockets, and proclaimed their views with the booming

profundity of a prosperous male repeating a thoroughly hackneyed

statement about a matter of which he knows nothing whatever.

“Now, I’ll tell you,” said Vergil Gunch; “way I figure it is this, and I

can speak by the book, because I’ve talked to a lot of doctors and

fellows that ought to know, and the way I see it is that it’s a good

thing to get rid of the saloon, but they ought to let a fellow have beer

and light wines.”

Howard Littlefield observed, “What isn’t generally realized is that it’s

a dangerous prop’sition to invade the rights of personal liberty. Now,

take this for instance: The King of-- Bavaria? I think it was

Bavaria--yes, Bavaria, it was--in 1862, March, 1862, he issued a

proclamation against public grazing of live-stock. The peasantry had

stood for overtaxation without the slightest complaint, but when this

proclamation came out, they rebelled. Or it may have been Saxony. But it

just goes to show the dangers of invading the rights of personal

liberty.”

“That’s it--no one got a right to invade personal liberty,” said Orville

Jones.

“Just the same, you don’t want to forget prohibition is a mighty good

thing for the working-classes. Keeps ’em from wasting their money and

lowering their productiveness,” said Vergil Gunch.

“Yes, that’s so. But the trouble is the manner of enforcement,” insisted

Howard Littlefield. “Congress didn’t understand the right system. Now,

if I’d been running the thing, I’d have arranged it so that the drinker

himself was licensed, and then we could have taken care of the shiftless

workman--kept him from drinking--and yet not’ve interfered with the

rights--with the personal liberty--of fellows like ourselves.”

They bobbed their heads, looked admiringly at one another, and stated,

“That’s so, that would be the stunt.”

“The thing that worries me is that a lot of these guys will take to

cocaine,” sighed Eddie Swanson.

They bobbed more violently, and groaned, “That’s so, there is a danger

of that.”

Chum Frink chanted, “Oh, say, I got hold of a swell new receipt for

home-made beer the other day. You take--”

Gunch interrupted, “Wait! Let me tell you mine!” Littlefield snorted,

“Beer! Rats! Thing to do is to ferment cider!” Jones insisted, “I’ve got

the receipt that does the business!” Swanson begged, “Oh, say, lemme

tell you the story--” But Frink went on resolutely, “You take and save

the shells from peas, and pour six gallons of water on a bushel of

shells and boil the mixture till--”

Mrs. Babbitt turned toward them with yearning sweetness; Frink hastened

to finish even his best beer-recipe; and she said gaily, “Dinner is

served.”

There was a good deal of friendly argument among the men as to which

should go in last, and while they were crossing the hall from the

living-room to the dining-room Vergil Gunch made them laugh by

thundering, “If I can’t sit next to Myra Babbitt and hold her hand under

the table, I won’t play-- I’m goin’ home.” In the dining-room they stood

embarrassed while Mrs. Babbitt fluttered, “Now, let me see-- Oh, I was

going to have some nice hand-painted place-cards for you but-- Oh, let me

see; Mr. Frink, you sit there.”

The dinner was in the best style of women’s-magazine art, whereby the

salad was served in hollowed apples, and everything but the invincible

fried chicken resembled something else.

Ordinarily the men found it hard to talk to the women; flirtation was an

art unknown on Floral Heights, and the realms of offices and of kitchens

had no alliances. But under the inspiration of the cocktails,

conversation was violent. Each of the men still had a number of

important things to say about prohibition, and now that each had a loyal

listener in his dinner-partner he burst out:

“I found a place where I can get all the hootch I want at eight a

quart--”

“Did you read about this fellow that went and paid a thousand dollars

for ten cases of red-eye that proved to be nothing but water? Seems this

fellow was standing on the corner and fellow comes up to him--”

“They say there’s a whole raft of stuff being smuggled across at

Detroit--”

“What I always say is--what a lot of folks don’t realize about

prohibition--”

“And then you get all this awful poison stuff--wood alcohol and

everything--”

“Course I believe in it on principle, but I don’t propose to have

anybody telling me what I got to think and do. No American’ll ever stand

for that!”

But they all felt that it was rather in bad taste for Orville Jones--and

he not recognized as one of the wits of the occasion anyway--to say, “In

fact, the whole thing about prohibition is this: it isn’t the initial

cost, it’s the humidity.”

Not till the one required topic had been dealt with did the conversation

become general.

It was often and admiringly said of Vergil Gunch, “Gee, that fellow can

get away with murder! Why, he can pull a Raw One in mixed company and

all the ladies’ll laugh their heads off, but me, gosh, if I crack

anything that’s just the least bit off color I get the razz for fair!”

Now Gunch delighted them by crying to Mrs. Eddie Swanson, youngest of

the women, “Louetta! I managed to pinch Eddie’s doorkey out of his

pocket, and what say you and me sneak across the street when the folks

aren’t looking? Got something,” with a gorgeous leer, “awful important

to tell you!”

The women wriggled, and Babbitt was stirred to like naughtiness. “Say,

folks, I wished I dared show you a book I borrowed from Doc Patten!”

“Now, George! The idea!” Mrs. Babbitt warned him.

“This book--racy isn’t the word! It’s some kind of an anthropological

report about--about Customs, in the South Seas, and what it doesn’t

_say_! It’s a book you can’t buy. Verg, I’ll lend it to you.”

“Me first!” insisted Eddie Swanson. “Sounds spicy!”

Orville Jones announced, “Say, I heard a Good One the other day about a

coupla Swedes and their wives,” and, in the best Jewish accent, he

resolutely carried the Good One to a slightly disinfected ending. Gunch

capped it. But the cocktails waned, the seekers dropped back into

cautious reality.

Chum Frink had recently been on a lecture-tour among the small towns,

and he chuckled, “Awful good to get back to civilization! I certainly

been seeing some hick towns! I mean-- Course the folks there are the best

on earth, but, gee whiz, those Main Street burgs are slow, and you

fellows can’t hardly appreciate what it means to be here with a bunch of

live ones!”

“You bet!” exulted Orville Jones. “They’re the best folks on earth,

those small-town folks, but, oh, mama! what conversation! Why, say, they

can’t talk about anything but the weather and the ne-oo Ford, by

heckalorum!”

“That’s right. They all talk about just the same things,” said Eddie

Swanson.

“Don’t they, though! They just say the same things over and over,” said

Vergil Gunch.

“Yes, it’s really remarkable. They seem to lack all power of looking at

things impersonally. They simply go over and over the same talk about

Fords and the weather and so on,” said Howard Littlefield.

“Still, at that, you can’t blame ’em. They haven’t got any intellectual

stimulus such as you get up here in the city,” said Chum Frink.

“Gosh, that’s right,” said Babbitt. “I don’t want you highbrows to get

stuck on yourselves but I must say it keeps a fellow right up on his

toes to sit in with a poet and with Howard, the guy that put the con in

economics! But these small-town boobs, with nobody but each other to

talk to, no wonder they get so sloppy and uncultured in their speech,

and so balled-up in their thinking!”

Orville Jones commented, “And, then take our other advantages--the

movies, frinstance. These Yapville sports think they’re all-get-out if

they have one change of bill a week, where here in the city you got your

choice of a dozen diff’rent movies any evening you want to name!”

“Sure, and the inspiration we get from rubbing up against high-class

hustlers every day and getting jam full of ginger,” said Eddie Swanson.

“Same time,” said Babbitt, “no sense excusing these rube burgs too easy.

Fellow’s own fault if he doesn’t show the initiative to up and beat it

to the city, like we done--did. And, just speaking in confidence among

friends, they’re jealous as the devil of a city man. Every time I go up

to Catawba I have to go around apologizing to the fellows I was brought

up with because I’ve more or less succeeded and they haven’t. And if you

talk natural to ’em, way we do here, and show finesse and what you might

call a broad point of view, why, they think you’re putting on side.

There’s my own half-brother Martin--runs the little ole general store my

Dad used to keep. Say, I’ll bet he don’t know there is such a thing as a

Tux--as a dinner-jacket. If he was to come in here now, he’d think we

were a bunch of--of-- Why, gosh, I swear, he wouldn’t know what to think!

Yes, sir, they’re jealous!”

Chum Frink agreed, “That’s so. But what I mind is their lack of culture

and appreciation of the Beautiful--if you’ll excuse me for being

highbrow. Now, I like to give a high-class lecture, and read some of my

best poetry--not the newspaper stuff but the magazine things. But say,

when I get out in the tall grass, there’s nothing will take but a lot of

cheesy old stories and slang and junk that if any of us were to indulge

in it here, he’d get the gate so fast it would make his head swim.”

Vergil Gunch summed it up: “Fact is, we’re mighty lucky to be living

among a bunch of city-folks, that recognize artistic things and

business-punch equally. We’d feel pretty glum if we got stuck in some

Main Street burg and tried to wise up the old codgers to the kind of

life we’re used to here. But, by golly, there’s this you got to say for

’em: Every small American town is trying to get population and modern

ideals. And darn if a lot of ’em don’t put it across! Somebody starts

panning a rube crossroads, telling how he was there in 1900 and it

consisted of one muddy street, count ’em, one, and nine hundred human

clams. Well, you go back there in 1920, and you find pavements and a

swell little hotel and a first-class ladies’ ready-to-wear shop--real

perfection, in fact! You don’t want to just look at what these small

towns are, you want to look at what they’re aiming to become, and they

all got an ambition that in the long run is going to make ’em the finest

spots on earth--they all want to be just like Zenith!”

III

However intimate they might be with T. Cholmondeley Frink as a neighbor,

as a borrower of lawn-mowers and monkey-wrenches, they knew that he was

also a Famous Poet and a distinguished advertising-agent; that behind

his easiness were sultry literary mysteries which they could not

penetrate. But to-night, in the gin-evolved confidence, he admitted them

to the arcanum:

“I’ve got a literary problem that’s worrying me to death. I’m doing a

series of ads for the Zeeco Car and I want to make each of ’em a real

little gem--reg’lar stylistic stuff. I’m all for this theory that

perfection is the stunt, or nothing at all, and these are as tough

things as I ever tackled. You might think it’d be harder to do my

poems--all these Heart Topics: home and fireside and happiness--but

they’re cinches. You can’t go wrong on ’em; you know what sentiments any

decent go-ahead fellow must have if he plays the game, and you stick

right to ’em. But the poetry of industrialism, now there’s a literary

line where you got to open up new territory. Do you know the fellow

who’s really _the_ American genius? The fellow who you don’t know his

name and I don’t either, but his work ought to be preserved so’s future

generations can judge our American thought and originality to-day? Why,

the fellow that writes the Prince Albert Tobacco ads! Just listen to

this:

It’s P.A. that jams such joy in jimmy pipes. Say--bet you’ve often

bent-an-ear to that spill-of-speech about hopping from five to

f-i-f-t-y p-e-r by “stepping on her a bit!” Guess that’s going

some, all right--BUT--just among ourselves, you better start a

rapidwhiz system to keep tabs as to how fast you’ll buzz from low

smoke spirits to _tip-top-high_--once you line up behind a jimmy

pipe that’s all aglow with that peach-of-a-pal, Prince Albert.

Prince Albert is john-on-the-job--always joy’usly more-_ish_ in

flavor; always delightfully cool and fragrant! For a fact, you

never hooked such double-decked, copper-riveted, two-fisted smoke

enjoyment!

Go to a pipe--speed-o-quick like you light on a good thing!

Why--packed with Prince Albert you can play a joy’us jimmy straight

across the boards! _And you know what that means!_”

“Now that,” caroled the motor agent, Eddie Swanson, “that’s what I call

he-literature! That Prince Albert fellow--though, gosh, there can’t be

just one fellow that writes ’em; must be a big board of classy

ink-slingers in conference, but anyway: now, him, he doesn’t write for

long-haired pikers, he writes for Regular Guys, he writes for _me_, and

I tip my benny to him! The only thing is: I wonder if it sells the

goods? Course, like all these poets, this Prince Albert fellow lets his

idea run away with him. It makes elegant reading, but it don’t say

nothing. I’d never go out and buy Prince Albert Tobacco after reading

it, because it doesn’t tell me anything about the stuff. It’s just a

bunch of fluff.”

Frink faced him: “Oh, you’re crazy! Have I got to sell you the idea of

Style? Anyway, that’s the kind of stuff I’d like to do for the Zeeco.

But I simply can’t. So I decided to stick to the straight poetic, and I

took a shot at a highbrow ad for the Zeeco. How do you like this:

The long white trail is calling--calling--and it’s over the hills

and far away for every man or woman that has red blood in his veins

and on his lips the ancient song of the buccaneers. It’s away with

dull drudging, and a fig for care. Speed--glorious Speed--it’s more

than just a moment’s exhilaration--it’s Life for you and me! This

great new truth the makers of the Zeeco Car have considered as much

as price and style. It’s fleet as the antelope, smooth as the glide

of a swallow, yet powerful as the charge of a bull-elephant. Class

breathes in every line. Listen, brother! You’ll never know what the

high art of hiking is till you TRY LIFE’S ZIPPINGEST ZEST--THE

ZEECO!”

“Yes,” Frink mused, “that’s got an elegant color to it, if I do say so,

but it ain’t got the originality of ‘spill-of-speech!’”

The whole company sighed with sympathy and admiration.

CHAPTER IX

I

Babbitt was fond of his friends, he loved the importance of being host

and shouting, “Certainly, you’re going to have smore chicken--the idea!”

and he appreciated the genius of T. Cholmondeley Frink, but the vigor of

the cocktails was gone, and the more he ate the less joyful he felt.

Then the amity of the dinner was destroyed by the nagging of the

Swansons.

In Floral Heights and the other prosperous sections of Zenith,

especially in the “young married set,” there were many women who had

nothing to do. Though they had few servants, yet with gas stoves,

electric ranges and dish-washers and vacuum cleaners, and tiled kitchen

walls, their houses were so convenient that they had little housework,

and much of their food came from bakeries and delicatessens. They had

but two, one, or no children; and despite the myth that the Great War

had made work respectable, their husbands objected to their “wasting

time and getting a lot of crank ideas” in unpaid social work, and still

more to their causing a rumor, by earning money, that they were not

adequately supported. They worked perhaps two hours a day, and the rest

of the time they ate chocolates, went to the motion-pictures, went

window-shopping, went in gossiping twos and threes to card-parties, read

magazines, thought timorously of the lovers who never appeared, and

accumulated a splendid restlessness which they got rid of by nagging

their husbands. The husbands nagged back.

Of these naggers the Swansons were perfect specimens.

Throughout the dinner Eddie Swanson had been complaining, publicly,

about his wife’s new frock. It was, he submitted, too short, too low,

too immodestly thin, and much too expensive. He appealed to Babbitt:

“Honest, George, what do you think of that rag Louetta went and bought?

Don’t you think it’s the limit?”

“What’s eating you, Eddie? I call it a swell little dress.”

“Oh, it is, Mr. Swanson. It’s a sweet frock,” Mrs. Babbitt protested.

“There now, do you see, smarty! You’re such an authority on clothes!”

Louetta raged, while the guests ruminated and peeped at her shoulders.

“That’s all right now,” said Swanson. “I’m authority enough so I know it

was a waste of money, and it makes me tired to see you not wearing out a

whole closetful of clothes you got already. I’ve expressed my idea about

this before, and you know good and well you didn’t pay the least bit of

attention. I have to camp on your trail to get you to do anything--”

There was much more of it, and they all assisted, all but Babbitt.

Everything about him was dim except his stomach, and that was a bright

scarlet disturbance. “Had too much grub; oughtn’t to eat this stuff,” he

groaned--while he went on eating, while he gulped down a chill and

glutinous slice of the ice-cream brick, and cocoanut cake as oozy as

shaving-cream. He felt as though he had been stuffed with clay; his body

was bursting, his throat was bursting, his brain was hot mud; and only

with agony did he continue to smile and shout as became a host on Floral

Heights.

He would, except for his guests, have fled outdoors and walked off the

intoxication of food, but in the haze which filled the room they sat

forever, talking, talking, while he agonized, “Darn fool to be eating

all this--not ’nother mouthful,” and discovered that he was again

tasting the sickly welter of melted ice cream on his plate. There was no

magic in his friends; he was not uplifted when Howard Littlefield

produced from his treasure-house of scholarship the information that

the chemical symbol for raw rubber is C₁₀H₁₆, which turns into

isoprene, or 2C₅H₈. Suddenly, without precedent, Babbitt was not merely

bored but admitting that he was bored. It was ecstasy to escape from the

table, from the torture of a straight chair, and loll on the davenport

in the living-room.

The others, from their fitful unconvincing talk, their expressions of

being slowly and painfully smothered, seemed to be suffering from the

toil of social life and the horror of good food as much as himself. All

of them accepted with relief the suggestion of bridge.

Babbitt recovered from the feeling of being boiled. He won at bridge. He

was again able to endure Vergil Gunch’s inexorable heartiness. But he

pictured loafing with Paul Riesling beside a lake in Maine. It was as

overpowering and imaginative as homesickness. He had never seen Maine,

yet he beheld the shrouded mountains, the tranquil lake of evening.

“That boy Paul’s worth all these ballyhooing highbrows put together,” he

muttered; and, “I’d like to get away from--everything.”

Even Louetta Swanson did not rouse him.

Mrs. Swanson was pretty and pliant. Babbitt was not an analyst of women,

except as to their tastes in Furnished Houses to Rent. He divided them

into Real Ladies, Working Women, Old Cranks, and Fly Chickens. He mooned

over their charms but he was of opinion that all of them (save the women

of his own family) were “different” and “mysterious.” Yet he had known

by instinct that Louetta Swanson could be approached. Her eyes and lips

were moist. Her face tapered from a broad forehead to a pointed chin,

her mouth was thin but strong and avid, and between her brows were two

outcurving and passionate wrinkles. She was thirty, perhaps, or younger.

Gossip had never touched her, but every man naturally and instantly rose

to flirtatiousness when he spoke to her, and every woman watched her

with stilled blankness.

Between games, sitting on the davenport, Babbitt spoke to her with the

requisite gallantry, that sonorous Floral Heights gallantry which is

not flirtation but a terrified flight from it:

“You’re looking like a new soda-fountain to-night, Louetta.”

“Am I?”

“Ole Eddie kind of on the rampage.”

“Yes. I get so sick of it.”

“Well, when you get tired of hubby, you can run off with Uncle George.”

“If I ran away-- Oh, well--”

“Anybody ever tell you your hands are awful pretty?”

She looked down at them, she pulled the lace of her sleeves over them,

but otherwise she did not heed him. She was lost in unexpressed

imaginings.

Babbitt was too languid this evening to pursue his duty of being a

captivating (though strictly moral) male. He ambled back to the

bridge-tables. He was not much thrilled when Mrs. Frink, a small

twittering woman, proposed that they “try and do some spiritualism and

table-tipping--you know Chum can make the spirits come--honest, he just

scares me!”

The ladies of the party had not emerged all evening, but now, as the sex

given to things of the spirit while the men warred against base things

material, they took command and cried, “Oh, let’s!” In the dimness the

men were rather solemn and foolish, but the goodwives quivered and

adored as they sat about the table. They laughed, “Now, you be good or

I’ll tell!” when the men took their hands in the circle.

Babbitt tingled with a slight return of interest in life as Louetta

Swanson’s hand closed on his with quiet firmness.

All of them hunched over, intent. They startled as some one drew a

strained breath. In the dusty light from the hall they looked unreal,

they felt disembodied. Mrs. Gunch squeaked, and they jumped with

unnatural jocularity, but at Frink’s hiss they sank into subdued awe.

Suddenly, incredibly, they heard a knocking. They stared at Frink’s

half-revealed hands and found them lying still. They wriggled, and

pretended not to be impressed.

Frink spoke with gravity: “Is some one there?” A thud. “Is one knock to

be the sign for ‘yes’?” A thud. “And two for ‘no’?” A thud.

“Now, ladies and gentlemen, shall we ask the guide to put us into

communication with the spirit of some great one passed over?” Frink

mumbled.

Mrs. Orville Jones begged, “Oh, let’s talk to Dante! We studied him at

the Reading Circle. You know who he was, Orvy.”

“Certainly I know who he was! The Wop poet. Where do you think I was

raised?” from her insulted husband.

“Sure--the fellow that took the Cook’s Tour to Hell. I’ve never waded

through his po’try, but we learned about him in the U.,” said Babbitt.

“Page Mr. Dannnnnty!” intoned Eddie Swanson.

“You ought to get him easy, Mr. Frink, you and he being fellow-poets,”

said Louetta Swanson.

“Fellow-poets, rats! Where d’ you get that stuff?” protested Vergil

Gunch. “I suppose Dante showed a lot of speed for an old-timer--not that

I’ve actually read him, of course--but to come right down to hard facts,

he wouldn’t stand one-two-three if he had to buckle down to practical

literature and turn out a poem for the newspaper-syndicate every day,

like Chum does!”

“That’s so,” from Eddie Swanson. “Those old birds could take their time.

Judas Priest, I could write poetry myself if I had a whole year for it,

and just wrote about that old-fashioned junk like Dante wrote about.”

Frink demanded, “Hush, now! I’ll call him.... O, Laughing Eyes, emerge

forth into the, uh, the ultimates and bring hither the spirit of Dante,

that we mortals may list to his words of wisdom.”

“You forgot to give um the address: 1658 Brimstone Avenue, Fiery

Heights, Hell,” Gunch chuckled, but the others felt that this was

irreligious. And besides--“probably it was just Chum making the knocks,

but still, if there did happen to be something to all this, be exciting

to talk to an old fellow belonging to--way back in early times--”

A thud. The spirit of Dante had come to the parlor of George F. Babbitt.

He was, it seemed, quite ready to answer their questions. He was “glad

to be with them, this evening.”

Frink spelled out the messages by running through the alphabet till the

spirit interpreter knocked at the right letter.

Littlefield asked, in a learned tone, “Do you like it in the Paradiso,

Messire?”

“We are very happy on the higher plane, Signor. We are glad that you are

studying this great truth of spiritualism,” Dante replied.

The circle moved with an awed creaking of stays and shirtfronts.

“Suppose--suppose there were something to this?”

Babbitt had a different worry. “Suppose Chum Frink was really one of

these spiritualists! Chum had, for a literary fellow, always seemed to

be a Regular Guy; he belonged to the Chatham Road Presbyterian Church

and went to the Boosters’ lunches and liked cigars and motors and racy

stories. But suppose that secretly-- After all, you never could tell

about these darn highbrows; and to be an out-and-out spiritualist would

be almost like being a socialist!”

No one could long be serious in the presence of Vergil Gunch. “Ask Dant’

how Jack Shakespeare and old Verg’--the guy they named after me--are

gettin’ along, and don’t they wish they could get into the movie game!”

he blared, and instantly all was mirth. Mrs. Jones shrieked, and Eddie

Swanson desired to know whether Dante didn’t catch cold with nothing on

but his wreath.

The pleased Dante made humble answer.

But Babbitt--the curst discontent was torturing him again, and heavily,

in the impersonal darkness, he pondered, “I don’t-- We’re all so flip

and think we’re so smart. There’d be-- A fellow like Dante-- I wish I’d

read some of his pieces. I don’t suppose I ever will, now.”

He had, without explanation, the impression of a slaggy cliff and on it,

in silhouette against menacing clouds, a lone and austere figure. He was

dismayed by a sudden contempt for his surest friends. He grasped Louetta

Swanson’s hand, and found the comfort of human warmth. Habit came, a

veteran warrior; and he shook himself. “What the deuce is the matter

with me, this evening?”

He patted Louetta’s hand, to indicate that he hadn’t meant anything

improper by squeezing it, and demanded of Frink, “Say, see if you can

get old Dant’ to spiel us some of his poetry. Talk up to him. Tell him,

‘_Buena giorna, señor, com sa va, wie geht’s? Keskersaykersa_ a little

pome, _señor_?’”

II

The lights were switched on; the women sat on the fronts of their chairs

in that determined suspense whereby a wife indicates that as soon as the

present speaker has finished, she is going to remark brightly to her

husband, “Well, dear, I think per-_haps_ it’s about time for us to be

saying good-night.” For once Babbitt did not break out in blustering

efforts to keep the party going. He had--there was something he wished

to think out-- But the psychical research had started them off again.

(“Why didn’t they go home! Why didn’t they go home!”) Though he was

impressed by the profundity of the statement, he was only

half-enthusiastic when Howard Littlefield lectured, “The United States

is the only nation in which the government is a Moral Ideal and not just

a social arrangement.” (“True--true--weren’t they _ever_ going home?”)

He was usually delighted to have an “inside view” of the momentous world

of motors but to-night he scarcely listened to Eddie Swanson’s

revelation: “If you want to go above the Javelin class, the Zeeco is a

mighty good buy. Couple weeks ago, and mind you, this was a fair,

square test, they took a Zeeco stock touring-car and they slid up the

Tonawanda hill on high, and fellow told me--” (“Zeeco--good boat

but-- Were they planning to stay all night?”)

They really were going, with a flutter of “We did have the best time!”

Most aggressively friendly of all was Babbitt, yet as he burbled he was

reflecting, “I got through it, but for a while there I didn’t hardly

think I’d last out.” He prepared to taste that most delicate pleasure of

the host: making fun of his guests in the relaxation of midnight. As the

door closed he yawned voluptuously, chest out, shoulders wriggling, and

turned cynically to his wife.

She was beaming. “Oh, it was nice, wasn’t it! I know they enjoyed every

minute of it. Don’t you think so?”

He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t mock. It would have been like sneering at

a happy child. He lied ponderously: “You bet! Best party this year, by a

long shot.”

“Wasn’t the dinner good! And honestly I thought the fried chicken was

delicious!”

“You bet! Fried to the Queen’s taste. Best fried chicken I’ve tasted for

a coon’s age.”

“Didn’t Matilda fry it beautifully! And don’t you think the soup was

simply delicious?”

“It certainly was! It was corking! Best soup I’ve tasted since Heck was

a pup!” But his voice was seeping away. They stood in the hall, under

the electric light in its square box-like shade of red glass bound with

nickel. She stared at him.

“Why, George, you don’t sound--you sound as if you hadn’t really enjoyed

it.”

“Sure I did! Course I did!”

“George! What is it?”

“Oh, I’m kind of tired, I guess. Been pounding pretty hard at the

office. Need to get away and rest up a little.”

“Well, we’re going to Maine in just a few weeks now, dear.”

“Yuh--” Then he was pouring it out nakedly, robbed of reticence. “Myra:

I think it’d be a good thing for me to get up there early.”

“But you have this man you have to meet in New York about business.”

“What man? Oh, sure. Him. Oh, that’s all off. But I want to hit Maine

early--get in a little fishing, catch me a big trout, by golly!” A

nervous, artificial laugh.

“Well, why don’t we do it? Verona and Matilda can run the house between

them, and you and I can go any time, if you think we can afford it.”

“But that’s-- I’ve been feeling so jumpy lately, I thought maybe it might

be a good thing if I kind of got off by myself and sweat it out of me.”

“George! Don’t you _want_ me to go along?” She was too wretchedly in

earnest to be tragic, or gloriously insulted, or anything save dumpy and

defenseless and flushed to the red steaminess of a boiled beet.

“Of course I do! I just meant--” Remembering that Paul Riesling had

predicted this, he was as desperate as she. “I mean, sometimes it’s a

good thing for an old grouch like me to go off and get it out of his

system.” He tried to sound paternal. “Then when you and the kids

arrive-- I figured maybe I might skip up to Maine just a few days ahead

of you-- I’d be ready for a real bat, see how I mean?” He coaxed her with

large booming sounds, with affable smiles, like a popular preacher

blessing an Easter congregation, like a humorous lecturer completing his

stint of eloquence, like all perpetrators of masculine wiles.

She stared at him, the joy of festival drained from her face. “Do I

bother you when we go on vacations? Don’t I add anything to your fun?”

He broke. Suddenly, dreadfully, he was hysterical, he was a yelping

baby. “Yes, yes, yes! Hell, yes! But can’t you understand I’m shot to

pieces? I’m all in! I got to take care of myself! I tell you, I got

to-- I’m sick of everything and everybody! I got to--”

It was she who was mature and protective now. “Why, of course! You shall

run off by yourself! Why don’t you get Paul to go along, and you boys

just fish and have a good time?” She patted his shoulder--reaching up to

it--while he shook with palsied helplessness, and in that moment was not

merely by habit fond of her but clung to her strength.

She cried cheerily, “Now up-stairs you go, and pop into bed. We’ll fix

it all up. I’ll see to the doors. Now skip!”

For many minutes, for many hours, for a bleak eternity, he lay awake,

shivering, reduced to primitive terror, comprehending that he had won

freedom, and wondering what he could do with anything so unknown and so

embarrassing as freedom.

CHAPTER X

I

No apartment-house in Zenith had more resolutely experimented in

condensation than the Revelstoke Arms, in which Paul and Zilla Riesling

had a flat. By sliding the beds into low closets the bedrooms were

converted into living-rooms. The kitchens were cupboards each containing

an electric range, a copper sink, a glass refrigerator, and, very

intermittently, a Balkan maid. Everything about the Arms was excessively

modern, and everything was compressed--except the garages.

The Babbitts were calling on the Rieslings at the Arms. It was a

speculative venture to call on the Rieslings; interesting and sometimes

disconcerting. Zilla was an active, strident, full-blown, high-bosomed

blonde. When she condescended to be good-humored she was nervously

amusing. Her comments on people were saltily satiric and penetrative of

accepted hypocrisies. “That’s so!” you said, and looked sheepish. She

danced wildly, and called on the world to be merry, but in the midst of

it she would turn indignant. She was always becoming indignant. Life was

a plot against her, and she exposed it furiously.

She was affable to-night. She merely hinted that Orville Jones wore a

toupé, that Mrs. T. Cholmondeley Frink’s singing resembled a Ford going

into high, and that the Hon. Otis Deeble, mayor of Zenith and candidate

for Congress, was a flatulent fool (which was quite true). The Babbitts

and Rieslings sat doubtfully on stone-hard brocade chairs in the small

living-room of the flat, with its mantel unprovided with a fireplace,

and its strip of heavy gilt fabric upon a glaring new player-piano, till

Mrs. Riesling shrieked, “Come on! Let’s put some pep in it! Get out

your fiddle, Paul, and I’ll try to make Georgie dance decently.”

The Babbitts were in earnest. They were plotting for the escape to

Maine. But when Mrs. Babbitt hinted with plump smilingness, “Does Paul

get as tired after the winter’s work as Georgie does?” then Zilla

remembered an injury; and when Zilla Riesling remembered an injury the

world stopped till something had been done about it.

“Does he get tired? No, he doesn’t get tired, he just goes crazy, that’s

all! You think Paul is so reasonable, oh, yes, and he loves to make out

he’s a little lamb, but he’s stubborn as a mule. Oh, if you had to live

with him--! You’d find out how sweet he is! He just pretends to be meek

so he can have his own way. And me, I get the credit for being a

terrible old crank, but if I didn’t blow up once in a while and get

something started, we’d die of dry-rot. He never wants to go any place

and-- Why, last evening, just because the car was out of order--and that

was his fault, too, because he ought to have taken it to the

service-station and had the battery looked at--and he didn’t want to go

down to the movies on the trolley. But we went, and then there was one

of those impudent conductors, and Paul wouldn’t do a thing.

“I was standing on the platform waiting for the people to let me into

the car, and this beast, this conductor, hollered at me, ‘Come on, you,

move up!’ Why, I’ve never had anybody speak to me that way in all my

life! I was so astonished I just turned to him and said-- I thought there

must be some mistake, and so I said to him, perfectly pleasant, ‘Were

you speaking to me?’ and he went on and bellowed at me, ‘Yes, I was!

You’re keeping the whole car from starting!’ he said, and then I saw he

was one of these dirty ill-bred hogs that kindness is wasted on, and so

I stopped and looked right at him, and I said, ‘I--beg--your--pardon, I

am not doing anything of the kind,’ I said, ‘it’s the people ahead of

me, who won’t move up,’ I said, ‘and furthermore, let me tell you,

young man, that you’re a low-down, foul-mouthed, impertinent skunk,’ I

said, ‘and you’re no gentleman! I certainly intend to report you, and

we’ll see,’ I said, ‘whether a lady is to be insulted by any drunken bum

that chooses to put on a ragged uniform, and I’d thank you,’ I said, ‘to

keep your filthy abuse to yourself.’ And then I waited for Paul to show

he was half a man and come to my defense, and he just stood there and

pretended he hadn’t heard a word, and so I said to him, ‘Well,’ I

said--”

“Oh, cut it, cut it, Zill!” Paul groaned. “We all know I’m a

mollycoddle, and you’re a tender bud, and let’s let it go at that.”

“Let it go?” Zilla’s face was wrinkled like the Medusa, her voice was a

dagger of corroded brass. She was full of the joy of righteousness and

bad temper. She was a crusader and, like every crusader, she exulted in

the opportunity to be vicious in the name of virtue. “Let it go? If

people knew how many things I’ve let go--”

“Oh, quit being such a bully.”

“Yes, a fine figure you’d cut if I didn’t bully you! You’d lie abed till

noon and play your idiotic fiddle till midnight! You’re born lazy, and

you’re born shiftless, and you’re born cowardly, Paul Riesling--”

“Oh, now, don’t say that, Zilla; you don’t mean a word of it!” protested

Mrs. Babbitt.

“I will say that, and I mean every single last word of it!”

“Oh, now, Zilla, the idea!” Mrs. Babbitt was maternal and fussy. She was

no older than Zilla, but she seemed so--at first. She was placid and

puffy and mature, where Zilla, at forty-five, was so bleached and

tight-corseted that you knew only that she was older than she looked.

“The idea of talking to poor Paul like that!”

“Poor Paul is right! We’d both be poor, we’d be in the poorhouse, if I

didn’t jazz him up!”

“Why, now, Zilla, Georgie and I were just saying how hard Paul’s been

working all year, and we were thinking it would be lovely if the Boys

could run off by themselves. I’ve been coaxing George to go up to Maine

ahead of the rest of us, and get the tired out of his system before we

come, and I think it would be lovely if Paul could manage to get away

and join him.”

At this exposure of his plot to escape, Paul was startled out of

impassivity. He rubbed his fingers. His hands twitched.

Zilla bayed, “Yes! You’re lucky! You can let George go, and not have to

watch him. Fat old Georgie! Never peeps at another woman! Hasn’t got the

spunk!”

“The hell I haven’t!” Babbitt was fervently defending his priceless

immorality when Paul interrupted him--and Paul looked dangerous. He rose

quickly; he said gently to Zilla:

“I suppose you imply I have a lot of sweethearts.”

“Yes, I do!”

“Well, then, my dear, since you ask for it-- There hasn’t been a time in

the last ten years when I haven’t found some nice little girl to comfort

me, and as long as you continue your amiability I shall probably

continue to deceive you. It isn’t hard. You’re so stupid.”

Zilla gibbered; she howled; words could not be distinguished in her

slaver of abuse.

Then the bland George F. Babbitt was transformed. If Paul was dangerous,

if Zilla was a snake-locked fury, if the neat emotions suitable to the

Revelstoke Arms had been slashed into raw hatreds, it was Babbitt who

was the most formidable. He leaped up. He seemed very large. He seized

Zilla’s shoulder. The cautions of the broker were wiped from his face,

and his voice was cruel:

“I’ve had enough of all this damn nonsense! I’ve known you for

twenty-five years, Zil, and I never knew you to miss a chance to take

your disappointments out on Paul. You’re not wicked. You’re worse.

You’re a fool. And let me tell you that Paul is the finest boy God ever

made. Every decent person is sick and tired of your taking advantage of

being a woman and springing every mean innuendo you can think of. Who

the hell are you that a person like Paul should have to ask your

_permission_ to go with me? You act like you were a combination of Queen

Victoria and Cleopatra. You fool, can’t you see how people snicker at

you, and sneer at you?”

Zilla was sobbing, “I’ve never-- I’ve never--nobody ever talked to me

like this in all my life!”

“No, but that’s the way they talk behind your back! Always! They say

you’re a scolding old woman. Old, by God!”

That cowardly attack broke her. Her eyes were blank. She wept. But

Babbitt glared stolidly. He felt that he was the all-powerful official

in charge; that Paul and Mrs. Babbitt looked on him with awe; that he

alone could handle this case.

Zilla writhed. She begged, “Oh, they don’t!”

“They certainly do!”

“I’ve been a bad woman! I’m terribly sorry! I’ll kill myself! I’ll do

anything. Oh, I’ll-- What do you want?”

She abased herself completely. Also, she enjoyed it. To the connoisseur

of scenes, nothing is more enjoyable than a thorough, melodramatic,

egoistic humility.

“I want you to let Paul beat it off to Maine with me,” Babbitt demanded.

“How can I help his going? You’ve just said I was an idiot and nobody

paid any attention to me.”

“Oh, you can help it, all right, all right! What you got to do is to cut

out hinting that the minute he gets out of your sight, he’ll go chasing

after some petticoat. Matter fact, that’s the way you start the boy off

wrong. You ought to have more sense--”

“Oh, I will, honestly, I will, George. I know I was bad. Oh, forgive me,

all of you, forgive me--”

She enjoyed it.

So did Babbitt. He condemned magnificently and forgave piously, and as

he went parading out with his wife he was grandly explanatory to her:

“Kind of a shame to bully Zilla, but course it was the only way to

handle her. Gosh, I certainly did have her crawling!”

She said calmly, “Yes. You were horrid. You were showing off. You were

having a lovely time thinking what a great fine person you were!”

“Well, by golly! Can you beat it! Of course I might of expected you to

not stand by me! I might of expected you’d stick up for your own sex!”

“Yes. Poor Zilla, she’s so unhappy. She takes it out on Paul. She hasn’t

a single thing to do, in that little flat. And she broods too much. And

she used to be so pretty and gay, and she resents losing it. And you

were just as nasty and mean as you could be. I’m not a bit proud of

you--or of Paul, boasting about his horrid love-affairs!”

He was sulkily silent; he maintained his bad temper at a high level of

outraged nobility all the four blocks home. At the door he left her, in

self-approving haughtiness, and tramped the lawn.

With a shock it was revealed to him: “Gosh, I wonder if she was

right--if she was partly right?” Overwork must have flayed him to

abnormal sensitiveness; it was one of the few times in his life when he

had queried his eternal excellence; and he perceived the summer night,

smelled the wet grass. Then: “I don’t care! I’ve pulled it off. We’re

going to have our spree. And for Paul, I’d do anything.”

II

They were buying their Maine tackle at Ijams Brothers’, the Sporting

Goods Mart, with the help of Willis Ijams, fellow member of the

Boosters’ Club. Babbitt was completely mad. He trumpeted and danced. He

muttered to Paul, “Say, this is pretty good, eh? To be buying the stuff,

eh? And good old Willis Ijams himself coming down on the floor to wait

on us! Say, if those fellows that are getting their kit for the North

Lakes knew we were going clear up to Maine, they’d have a fit, eh?...

Well, come on, Brother Ijams--Willis, I mean. Here’s your chance! We’re

a couple of easy marks! Whee! Let me at it! I’m going to buy out the

store!”

He gloated on fly-rods and gorgeous rubber hip-boots, on tents with

celluloid windows and folding chairs and ice-boxes. He simple-heartedly

wanted to buy all of them. It was the Paul whom he was always vaguely

protecting who kept him from his drunken desires.

But even Paul lightened when Willis Ijams, a salesman with poetry and

diplomacy, discussed flies. “Now, of course, you boys know,” he said,

“the great scrap is between dry flies and wet flies. Personally, I’m for

dry flies. More sporting.”

“That’s so. Lots more sporting,” fulminated Babbitt, who knew very

little about flies either wet or dry.

“Now if you’ll take my advice, Georgie, you’ll stock up well on these

pale evening dims, and silver sedges, and red ants. Oh, boy, there’s a

fly, that red ant!”

“You bet! That’s what it is--a fly!” rejoiced Babbitt.

“Yes, sir, that red ant,” said Ijams, “is a real honest-to-God _fly_!”

“Oh, I guess ole Mr. Trout won’t come a-hustling when I drop one of

those red ants on the water!” asserted Babbitt, and his thick wrists

made a rapturous motion of casting.

“Yes, and the landlocked salmon will take it, too,” said Ijams, who had

never seen a landlocked salmon.

“Salmon! Trout! Say, Paul, can you see Uncle George with his khaki pants

on haulin’ ’em in, some morning ’bout seven? Whee!”

III

They were on the New York express, incredibly bound for Maine,

incredibly without their families. They were free, in a man’s world, in

the smoking-compartment of the Pullman.

Outside the car window was a glaze of darkness stippled with the gold of

infrequent mysterious lights. Babbitt was immensely conscious, in the

sway and authoritative clatter of the train, of going, of going on.

Leaning toward Paul he grunted, “Gosh, pretty nice to be hiking, eh?”

The small room, with its walls of ocher-colored steel, was filled mostly

with the sort of men he classified as the Best Fellows You’ll Ever

Meet--Real Good Mixers. There were four of them on the long seat; a fat

man with a shrewd fat face, a knife-edged man in a green velour hat, a

very young young man with an imitation amber cigarette-holder, and

Babbitt. Facing them, on two movable leather chairs, were Paul and a

lanky, old-fashioned man, very cunning, with wrinkles bracketing his

mouth. They all read newspapers or trade journals, boot-and-shoe

journals, crockery journals, and waited for the joys of conversation. It

was the very young man, now making his first journey by Pullman, who

began it.

“Say, gee, I had a wild old time in Zenith!” he gloried. “Say, if a

fellow knows the ropes there he can have as wild a time as he can in New

York!”

“Yuh, I bet you simply raised the old Ned. I figured you were a bad man

when I saw you get on the train!” chuckled the fat one.

The others delightedly laid down their papers.

“Well, that’s all right now! I guess I seen some things in the Arbor you

never seen!” complained the boy.

“Oh, I’ll bet you did! I bet you lapped up the malted milk like a

reg’lar little devil!”

Then, the boy having served as introduction, they ignored him and

charged into real talk. Only Paul, sitting by himself, reading at a

serial story in a newspaper, failed to join them, and all but Babbitt

regarded him as a snob, an eccentric, a person of no spirit.

Which of them said which has never been determined, and does not matter,

since they all had the same ideas and expressed them always with the

same ponderous and brassy assurance. If it was not Babbitt who was

delivering any given verdict, at least he was beaming on the chancellor

who did deliver it.

“At that, though,” announced the first, “they’re selling quite some booze

in Zenith. Guess they are everywhere. I don’t know how you fellows feel

about prohibition, but the way it strikes me is that it’s a mighty

beneficial thing for the poor zob that hasn’t got any will-power but for

fellows like us, it’s an infringement of personal liberty.”

“That’s a fact. Congress has got no right to interfere with a fellow’s

personal liberty,” contended the second.

A man came in from the car, but as all the seats were full he stood up

while he smoked his cigarette. He was an Outsider; he was not one of the

Old Families of the smoking-compartment. They looked upon him bleakly

and, after trying to appear at ease by examining his chin in the mirror,

he gave it up and went out in silence.

“Just been making a trip through the South. Business conditions not very

good down there,” said one of the council.

“Is that a fact! Not very good, eh?”

“No, didn’t strike me they were up to normal.”

“Not up to normal, eh?”

“No, I wouldn’t hardly say they were.”

The whole council nodded sagely and decided, “Yump, not hardly up to

snuff.”

“Well, business conditions ain’t what they ought to be out West,

neither, not by a long shot.”

“That’s a fact. And I guess the hotel business feels it. That’s one good

thing, though: these hotels that’ve been charging five bucks a day--yes,

and maybe six-seven!--for a rotten room are going to be darn glad to get

four, and maybe give you a little service.”

“That’s a fact. Say, uh, speaknubout hotels, I hit the St. Francis at

San Francisco for the first time, the other day, and, say, it certainly

is a first-class place.”

“You’re right, brother! The St. Francis is a swell place--absolutely

A1.”

“That’s a fact. I’m right with you. It’s a first-class place.”

“Yuh, but say, any of you fellows ever stay at the Rippleton, in

Chicago? I don’t want to knock-- I believe in boosting wherever you

can--but say, of all the rotten dumps that pass ’emselves off as

first-class hotels, that’s the worst. I’m going to _get_ those guys, one

of these days, and I told ’em so. You know how I am--well, maybe you

don’t know, but I’m accustomed to first-class accommodations, and I’m

perfectly willing to pay a reasonable price. I got into Chicago late the

other night, and the Rippleton’s near the station-- I’d never been there

before, but I says to the taxi-driver-- I always believe in taking a taxi

when you get in late; may cost a little more money, but, gosh, it’s

worth it when you got to be up early next morning and out selling a lot

of crabs--and I said to him, ‘Oh, just drive me over to the Rippleton.’

“Well, we got there, and I breezed up to the desk and said to the clerk,

‘Well, brother, got a nice room with bath for Cousin Bill?’ Saaaay!

You’d ’a’ thought I’d sold him a second, or asked him to work on Yom

Kippur! He hands me the cold-boiled stare and yaps, ‘I dunno, friend,

I’ll see,’ and he ducks behind the rigamajig they keep track of the

rooms on. Well, I guess he called up the Credit Association and the

American Security League to see if I was all right--he certainly took

long enough--or maybe he just went to sleep; but finally he comes out

and looks at me like it hurts him, and croaks, ‘I think I can let you

have a room with bath.’ ‘Well, that’s awful nice of you--sorry to

trouble you--how much’ll it set me back?’ I says, real sweet. ‘It’ll

cost you seven bucks a day, friend,’ he says.

“Well, it was late, and anyway, it went down on my

expense-account--gosh, if I’d been paying it instead of the firm, I’d

’a’ tramped the streets all night before I’d ’a’ let any hick tavern

stick me seven great big round dollars, believe me! So I lets it go at

that. Well, the clerk wakes a nice young bellhop--fine lad--not a day

over seventy-nine years old--fought at the Battle of Gettysburg and

doesn’t know it’s over yet--thought I was one of the Confederates, I

guess, from the way he looked at me--and Rip van Winkle took me up to

something-- I found out afterwards they called it a room, but first I

thought there’d been some mistake-- I thought they were putting me in the

Salvation Army collection-box! At seven _per_ each and every _diem_!

Gosh!”

“Yuh, I’ve heard the Rippleton was pretty cheesy. Now, when I go to

Chicago I always stay at the Blackstone or the La Salle--first-class

places.”

“Say, any of you fellows ever stay at the Birchdale at Terre Haute? How

is it?”

“Oh, the Birchdale is a first-class hotel.”

(Twelve minutes of conference on the state of hotels in South Bend,

Flint, Dayton, Tulsa, Wichita, Fort Worth, Winona, Erie, Fargo, and

Moose Jaw.)

“Speaknubout prices,” the man in the velour hat observed, fingering the

elk-tooth on his heavy watch-chain, “I’d like to know where they get

this stuff about clothes coming down. Now, you take this suit I got on.”

He pinched his trousers-leg. “Four years ago I paid forty-two fifty for

it, and it was real sure-’nough value. Well, here the other day I went

into a store back home and asked to see a suit, and the fellow yanks out

some hand-me-downs that, honest, I wouldn’t put on a hired man. Just out

of curiosity I asks him, ‘What you charging for that junk?’ ‘Junk,’ he

says, ‘what d’ you mean junk? That’s a swell piece of goods, all wool--’

Like hell! It was nice vegetable wool, right off the Ole Plantation!

‘It’s all wool,’ he says, ‘and we get sixty-seven ninety for it.’ ‘Oh,

you do, do you!’ I says. ‘Not from me you don’t,’ I says, and I walks

right out on him. You bet! I says to the wife, ‘Well,’ I said, ‘as long

as your strength holds out and you can go on putting a few more patches

on papa’s pants, we’ll just pass up buying clothes.’”

“That’s right, brother. And just look at collars, frinstance--”

“Hey! Wait!” the fat man protested. “What’s the matter with collars? I’m

selling collars! D’you realize the cost of labor on collars is still two

hundred and seven per cent. above--”

They voted that if their old friend the fat man sold collars, then the

price of collars was exactly what it should be; but all other clothing

was tragically too expensive. They admired and loved one another now.

They went profoundly into the science of business, and indicated that

the purpose of manufacturing a plow or a brick was so that it might be

sold. To them, the Romantic Hero was no longer the knight, the wandering

poet, the cowpuncher, the aviator, nor the brave young district

attorney, but the great sales-manager, who had an Analysis of

Merchandizing Problems on his glass-topped desk, whose title of nobility

was “Go-getter,” and who devoted himself and all his young samurai to

the cosmic purpose of Selling--not of selling anything in particular,

for or to anybody in particular, but pure Selling.

The shop-talk roused Paul Riesling. Though he was a player of violins

and an interestingly unhappy husband, he was also a very able salesman

of tar-roofing. He listened to the fat man’s remarks on “the value of

house-organs and bulletins as a method of jazzing-up the Boys out on the

road;” and he himself offered one or two excellent thoughts on the use

of two-cent stamps on circulars. Then he committed an offense against

the holy law of the Clan of Good Fellows. He became highbrow.

They were entering a city. On the outskirts they passed a steel-mill

which flared in scarlet and orange flame that licked at the cadaverous

stacks, at the iron-sheathed walls and sullen converters.

“My Lord, look at that--beautiful!” said Paul.

“You bet it’s beautiful, friend. That’s the Shelling-Horton Steel Plant,

and they tell me old John Shelling made a good three million bones out

of munitions during the war!” the man with the velour hat said

reverently.

“I didn’t mean-- I mean it’s lovely the way the light pulls that

picturesque yard, all littered with junk, right out of the darkness,”

said Paul.

They stared at him, while Babbitt crowed, “Paul there has certainly got

one great little eye for picturesque places and quaint sights and all

that stuff. ’D of been an author or something if he hadn’t gone into the

roofing line.”

Paul looked annoyed. (Babbitt sometimes wondered if Paul appreciated his

loyal boosting.) The man in the velour hat grunted, “Well, personally, I

think Shelling-Horton keep their works awful dirty. Bum routing. But I

don’t suppose there’s any law against calling ’em ‘picturesque’ if it

gets you that way!”

Paul sulkily returned to his newspaper and the conversation logically

moved on to trains.

“What time do we get into Pittsburg?” asked Babbitt.

“Pittsburg? I think we get in at--no, that was last year’s

schedule--wait a minute--let’s see--got a time-table right here.”

“I wonder if we’re on time?”

“Yuh, sure, we must be just about on time.”

“No, we aren’t--we were seven minutes late, last station.”

“Were we? Straight? Why, gosh, I thought we were right on time.”

“No, we’re about seven minutes late.”

“Yuh, that’s right; seven minutes late.”

The porter entered--a negro in white jacket with brass buttons.

“How late are we, George?” growled the fat man.

“’Deed, I don’t know, sir. I think we’re about on time,” said the

porter, folding towels and deftly tossing them up on the rack above the

washbowls. The council stared at him gloomily and when he was gone they

wailed:

“I don’t know what’s come over these niggers, nowadays. They never give

you a civil answer.”

“That’s a fact. They’re getting so they don’t have a single bit of

respect for you. The old-fashioned coon was a fine old cuss--he knew his

place--but these young dinges don’t want to be porters or

cotton-pickers. Oh, no! They got to be lawyers and professors and Lord

knows what all! I tell you, it’s becoming a pretty serious problem. We

ought to get together and show the black man, yes, and the yellow man,

his place. Now, I haven’t got one particle of race-prejudice. I’m the

first to be glad when a nigger succeeds--so long as he stays where he

belongs and doesn’t try to usurp the rightful authority and business

ability of the white man.”

“That’s the i.! And another thing we got to do,” said the man with the

velour hat (whose name was Koplinsky), “is to keep these damn foreigners

out of the country. Thank the Lord, we’re putting a limit on

immigration. These Dagoes and Hunkies have got to learn that this is a

white man’s country, and they ain’t wanted here. When we’ve assimilated

the foreigners we got here now and learned ’em the principles of

Americanism and turned ’em into regular folks, why then maybe we’ll let

in a few more.”

“You bet. That’s a fact,” they observed, and passed on to lighter

topics. They rapidly reviewed motor-car prices, tire-mileage,

oil-stocks, fishing, and the prospects for the wheat-crop in Dakota.

But the fat man was impatient at this waste of time. He was a veteran

traveler and free of illusions. Already he had asserted that he was “an

old he-one.” He leaned forward, gathered in their attention by his

expression of sly humor, and grumbled, “Oh, hell, boys, let’s cut out

the formality and get down to the stories!”

They became very lively and intimate.

Paul and the boy vanished. The others slid forward on the long seat,

unbuttoned their vests, thrust their feet up on the chairs, pulled the

stately brass cuspidors nearer, and ran the green window-shade down on

its little trolley, to shut them in from the uncomfortable strangeness

of night. After each bark of laughter they cried, “Say, jever hear the

one about--” Babbitt was expansive and virile. When the train stopped at

an important station, the four men walked up and down the cement

platform, under the vast smoky train-shed roof, like a stormy sky, under

the elevated footways, beside crates of ducks and sides of beef, in the

mystery of an unknown city. They strolled abreast, old friends and well

content. At the long-drawn “Alllll aboarrrrrd”--like a mountain call at

dusk--they hastened back into the smoking-compartment, and till two of

the morning continued the droll tales, their eyes damp with cigar-smoke

and laughter. When they parted they shook hands, and chuckled, “Well,

sir, it’s been a great session. Sorry to bust it up. Mighty glad to met

you.”

Babbitt lay awake in the close hot tomb of his Pullman berth, shaking

with remembrance of the fat man’s limerick about the lady who wished to

be wild. He raised the shade; he lay with a puffy arm tucked between his

head and the skimpy pillow, looking out on the sliding silhouettes of

trees, and village lamps like exclamation-points. He was very happy.

CHAPTER XI

I

They had four hours in New York between trains. The one thing Babbitt

wished to see was the Pennsylvania Hotel, which had been built since his

last visit. He stared up at it, muttering, “Twenty-two hundred rooms and

twenty-two hundred baths! That’s got everything in the world beat. Lord,

their turnover must be--well, suppose price of rooms is four to eight

dollars a day, and I suppose maybe some ten and--four times twenty-two

hundred--say six times twenty-two hundred--well, anyway, with

restaurants and everything, say summers between eight and fifteen

thousand a day. Every day! I never thought I’d see a thing like that!

Some town! Of course the average fellow in Zenith has got more

Individual Initiative than the fourflushers here, but I got to hand it

to New York. Yes, sir, town, you’re all right--some ways. Well, old

Paulski, I guess we’ve seen everything that’s worth while. How’ll we

kill the rest of the time? Movie?”

But Paul desired to see a liner. “Always wanted to go to Europe--and, by

thunder, I will, too, some day before I pass out,” he sighed.

From a rough wharf on the North River they stared at the stern of the

_Aquitania_ and her stacks and wireless antennæ lifted above the

dock-house which shut her in.

“By golly,” Babbitt droned, “wouldn’t be so bad to go over to the Old

Country and take a squint at all these ruins, and the place where

Shakespeare was born. And think of being able to order a drink whenever

you wanted one! Just range up to a bar and holler out loud, ‘Gimme a

cocktail, and darn the police!’ Not bad at all. What juh like to see,

over there, Paulibus?”

Paul did not answer. Babbitt turned. Paul was standing with clenched

fists, head drooping, staring at the liner as in terror. His thin body,

seen against the summer-glaring planks of the wharf, was childishly

meager.

Again, “What would you hit for on the other side, Paul?”

Scowling at the steamer, his breast heaving, Paul whispered, “Oh, my

God!” While Babbitt watched him anxiously he snapped, “Come on, let’s

get out of this,” and hastened down the wharf, not looking back.

“That’s funny,” considered Babbitt. “The boy didn’t care for seeing the

ocean boats after all. I thought he’d be interested in ’em.”

II

Though he exulted, and made sage speculations about locomotive

horse-power, as their train climbed the Maine mountain-ridge and from

the summit he looked down the shining way among the pines; though he

remarked, “Well, by golly!” when he discovered that the station at

Katadumcook, the end of the line, was an aged freight-car; Babbitt’s

moment of impassioned release came when they sat on a tiny wharf on Lake

Sunasquam, awaiting the launch from the hotel. A raft had floated down

the lake; between the logs and the shore, the water was transparent,

thin-looking, flashing with minnows. A guide in black felt hat with

trout-flies in the band, and flannel shirt of a peculiarly daring blue,

sat on a log and whittled and was silent. A dog, a good country dog,

black and woolly gray, a dog rich in leisure and in meditation,

scratched and grunted and slept. The thick sunlight was lavish on the

bright water, on the rim of gold-green balsam boughs, the silver birches

and tropic ferns, and across the lake it burned on the sturdy shoulders

of the mountains. Over everything was a holy peace.

Silent, they loafed on the edge of the wharf, swinging their legs above

the water. The immense tenderness of the place sank into Babbitt, and

he murmured, “I’d just like to sit here--the rest of my life--and

whittle--and sit. And never hear a typewriter. Or Stan Graff fussing in

the ’phone. Or Rone and Ted scrapping. Just sit. Gosh!”

He patted Paul’s shoulder. “How does it strike you, old snoozer?”

“Oh, it’s darn good, Georgie. There’s something sort of eternal about

it.”

For once, Babbitt understood him.

III

Their launch rounded the bend; at the head of the lake, under a mountain

slope, they saw the little central dining-shack of their hotel and the

crescent of squat log cottages which served as bedrooms. They landed,

and endured the critical examination of the habitués who had been at the

hotel for a whole week. In their cottage, with its high stone fireplace,

they hastened, as Babbitt expressed it, to “get into some regular

he-togs.” They came out; Paul in an old gray suit and soft white shirt;

Babbitt in khaki shirt and vast and flapping khaki trousers. It was

excessively new khaki; his rimless spectacles belonged to a city office;

and his face was not tanned but a city pink. He made a discordant noise

in the place. But with infinite satisfaction he slapped his legs and

crowed, “Say, this is getting back home, eh?”

They stood on the wharf before the hotel. He winked at Paul and drew

from his back pocket a plug of chewing-tobacco, a vulgarism forbidden in

the Babbitt home. He took a chew, beaming and wagging his head as he

tugged at it. “Um! Um! Maybe I haven’t been hungry for a wad of

eating-tobacco! Have some?”

They looked at each other in a grin of understanding. Paul took the

plug, gnawed at it. They stood quiet, their jaws working. They solemnly

spat, one after the other, into the placid water. They stretched

voluptuously, with lifted arms and arched backs. From beyond the

mountains came the shuffling sound of a far-off train. A trout leaped,

and fell back in a silver circle. They sighed together.

IV

They had a week before their families came. Each evening they planned to

get up early and fish before breakfast. Each morning they lay abed till

the breakfast-bell, pleasantly conscious that there were no efficient

wives to rouse them. The mornings were cold; the fire was kindly as they

dressed.

Paul was distressingly clean, but Babbitt reveled in a good sound

dirtiness, in not having to shave till his spirit was moved to it. He

treasured every grease spot and fish-scale on his new khaki trousers.

All morning they fished unenergetically, or tramped the dim and

aqueous-lighted trails among rank ferns and moss sprinkled with crimson

bells. They slept all afternoon, and till midnight played stud-poker

with the guides. Poker was a serious business to the guides. They did

not gossip; they shuffled the thick greasy cards with a deft ferocity

menacing to the “sports;” and Joe Paradise, king of guides, was

sarcastic to loiterers who halted the game even to scratch.

At midnight, as Paul and he blundered to their cottage over the pungent

wet grass, and pine-roots confusing in the darkness, Babbitt rejoiced

that he did not have to explain to his wife where he had been all

evening.

They did not talk much. The nervous loquacity and opinionation of the

Zenith Athletic Club dropped from them. But when they did talk they

slipped into the naïve intimacy of college days. Once they drew their

canoe up to the bank of Sunasquam Water, a stream walled in by the dense

green of the hardhack. The sun roared on the green jungle but in the

shade was sleepy peace, and the water was golden and rippling. Babbitt

drew his hand through the cool flood, and mused:

“We never thought we’d come to Maine together!”

“No. We’ve never done anything the way we thought we would. I expected

to live in Germany with my granddad’s people, and study the fiddle.”

“That’s so. And remember how I wanted to be a lawyer and go into

politics? I still think I might have made a go of it. I’ve kind of got

the gift of the gab--anyway, I can think on my feet, and make some kind

of a spiel on most anything, and of course that’s the thing you need in

politics. By golly, Ted’s going to law-school, even if I didn’t! Well-- I

guess it’s worked out all right. Myra’s been a fine wife. And Zilla

means well, Paulibus.”

“Yes. Up here, I figure out all sorts of plans to keep her amused. I

kind of feel life is going to be different, now that we’re getting a

good rest and can go back and start over again.”

“I hope so, old boy.” Shyly: “Say, gosh, it’s been awful nice to sit

around and loaf and gamble and act regular, with you along, you old

horse-thief!”

“Well, you know what it means to me, Georgie. Saved my life.”

The shame of emotion overpowered them; they cursed a little, to prove

they were good rough fellows; and in a mellow silence, Babbitt whistling

while Paul hummed, they paddled back to the hotel.

V

Though it was Paul who had seemed overwrought, Babbitt who had been the

protecting big brother, Paul became clear-eyed and merry, while Babbitt

sank into irritability. He uncovered layer on layer of hidden weariness.

At first he had played nimble jester to Paul and for him sought

amusements; by the end of the week Paul was nurse, and Babbitt accepted

favors with the condescension one always shows a patient nurse.

The day before their families arrived, the women guests at the hotel

bubbled, “Oh, isn’t it nice! You must be so excited;” and the

proprieties compelled Babbitt and Paul to look excited. But they went to

bed early and grumpy.

When Myra appeared she said at once, “Now, we want you boys to go on

playing around just as if we weren’t here.”

The first evening, he stayed out for poker with the guides, and she said

in placid merriment, “My! You’re a regular bad one!” The second evening,

she groaned sleepily, “Good heavens, are you going to be out every

single night?” The third evening, he didn’t play poker.

He was tired now in every cell. “Funny! Vacation doesn’t seem to have

done me a bit of good,” he lamented. “Paul’s frisky as a colt, but I

swear, I’m crankier and nervouser than when I came up here.”

He had three weeks of Maine. At the end of the second week he began to

feel calm, and interested in life. He planned an expedition to climb

Sachem Mountain, and wanted to camp overnight at Box Car Pond. He was

curiously weak, yet cheerful, as though he had cleansed his veins of

poisonous energy and was filling them with wholesome blood.

He ceased to be irritated by Ted’s infatuation with a waitress (his

seventh tragic affair this year); he played catch with Ted, and with

pride taught him to cast a fly in the pine-shadowed silence of Skowtuit

Pond.

At the end he sighed, “Hang it, I’m just beginning to enjoy my vacation.

But, well, I feel a lot better. And it’s going to be one great year!

Maybe the Real Estate Board will elect me president, instead of some

fuzzy old-fashioned faker like Chan Mott.”

On the way home, whenever he went into the smoking-compartment he felt

guilty at deserting his wife and angry at being expected to feel guilty,

but each time he triumphed, “Oh, this is going to be a great year, a

great old year!”

CHAPTER XII

I

All the way home from Maine, Babbitt was certain that he was a changed

man. He was converted to serenity. He was going to cease worrying about

business. He was going to have more “interests”--theaters, public

affairs, reading. And suddenly, as he finished an especially heavy

cigar, he was going to stop smoking.

He invented a new and perfect method. He would buy no tobacco; he would

depend on borrowing it; and, of course, he would be ashamed to borrow

often. In a spasm of righteousness he flung his cigar-case out of the

smoking-compartment window. He went back and was kind to his wife about

nothing in particular; he admired his own purity, and decided,

“Absolutely simple. Just a matter of will-power.” He started a magazine

serial about a scientific detective. Ten miles on, he was conscious that

he desired to smoke. He ducked his head, like a turtle going into its

shell; he appeared uneasy; he skipped two pages in his story and didn’t

know it. Five miles later, he leaped up and sought the porter. “Say, uh,

George, have you got a--” The porter looked patient. “Have you got a

time-table?” Babbitt finished. At the next stop he went out and bought a

cigar. Since it was to be his last before he reached Zenith, he finished

it down to an inch stub.

Four days later he again remembered that he had stopped smoking, but he

was too busy catching up with his office-work to keep it remembered.

II

Baseball, he determined, would be an excellent hobby. “No sense a man’s

working his fool head off. I’m going out to the Game three times a

week. Besides, fellow ought to support the home team.”

He did go and support the team, and enhance the glory of Zenith, by

yelling “Attaboy!” and “Rotten!” He performed the rite scrupulously. He

wore a cotton handkerchief about his collar; he became sweaty; he opened

his mouth in a wide loose grin; and drank lemon soda out of a bottle. He

went to the Game three times a week, for one week. Then he compromised

on watching the _Advocate-Times_ bulletin-board. He stood in the

thickest and steamiest of the crowd, and as the boy up on the lofty

platform recorded the achievements of Big Bill Bostwick, the pitcher,

Babbitt remarked to complete strangers, “Pretty nice! Good work!” and

hastened back to the office.

He honestly believed that he loved baseball. It is true that he hadn’t,

in twenty-five years, himself played any baseball except back-lot catch

with Ted--very gentle, and strictly limited to ten minutes. But the game

was a custom of his clan, and it gave outlet for the homicidal and

sides-taking instincts which Babbitt called “patriotism” and “love of

sport.”

As he approached the office he walked faster and faster, muttering,

“Guess better hustle.” All about him the city was hustling, for

hustling’s sake. Men in motors were hustling to pass one another in the

hustling traffic. Men were hustling to catch trolleys, with another

trolley a minute behind, and to leap from the trolleys, to gallop across

the sidewalk, to hurl themselves into buildings, into hustling express

elevators. Men in dairy lunches were hustling to gulp down the food

which cooks had hustled to fry. Men in barber shops were snapping, “Jus’

shave me once over. Gotta hustle.” Men were feverishly getting rid of

visitors in offices adorned with the signs, “This Is My Busy Day” and

“The Lord Created the World in Six Days--You Can Spiel All You Got to

Say in Six Minutes.” Men who had made five thousand, year before last,

and ten thousand last year, were urging on nerve-yelping bodies and

parched brains so that they might make twenty thousand this year; and

the men who had broken down immediately after making their twenty

thousand dollars were hustling to catch trains, to hustle through the

vacations which the hustling doctors had ordered.

Among them Babbitt hustled back to his office, to sit down with nothing

much to do except see that the staff looked as though they were

hustling.

III

Every Saturday afternoon he hustled out to his country club and hustled

through nine holes of golf as a rest after the week’s hustle.

In Zenith it was as necessary for a Successful Man to belong to a

country club as it was to wear a linen collar. Babbitt’s was the Outing

Golf and Country Club, a pleasant gray-shingled building with a broad

porch, on a daisy-starred cliff above Lake Kennepoose. There was

another, the Tonawanda Country Club, to which belonged Charles McKelvey,

Horace Updike, and the other rich men who lunched not at the Athletic

but at the Union Club. Babbitt explained with frequency, “You couldn’t

hire me to join the Tonawanda, even if I did have a hundred and eighty

bucks to throw away on the initiation fee. At the Outing we’ve got a

bunch of real human fellows, and the finest lot of little women in

town--just as good at joshing as the men--but at the Tonawanda there’s

nothing but these would-be’s in New York get-ups, drinking tea! Too much

dog altogether. Why, I wouldn’t join the Tonawanda even if they-- I

wouldn’t join it on a bet!”

When he had played four or five holes, he relaxed a bit, his

tobacco-fluttering heart beat more normally, and his voice slowed to the

drawling of his hundred generations of peasant ancestors.

IV

At least once a week Mr. and Mrs. Babbitt and Tinka went to the movies.

Their favorite motion-picture theater was the Château, which held three

thousand spectators and had an orchestra of fifty pieces which played

Arrangements from the Operas and suites portraying a Day on the Farm, or

a Four-alarm Fire. In the stone rotunda, decorated with

crown-embroidered velvet chairs and almost medieval tapestries,

parrakeets sat on gilded lotos columns.

With exclamations of “Well, by golly!” and “You got to go some to beat

this dump!” Babbitt admired the Château. As he stared across the

thousands of heads, a gray plain in the dimness, as he smelled good

clothes and mild perfume and chewing-gum, he felt as when he had first

seen a mountain and realized how very, very much earth and rock there

was in it.

He liked three kinds of films: pretty bathing girls with bare legs;

policemen or cowboys and an industrious shooting of revolvers; and funny

fat men who ate spaghetti. He chuckled with immense, moist-eyed

sentimentality at interludes portraying puppies, kittens, and chubby

babies; and he wept at deathbeds and old mothers being patient in

mortgaged cottages. Mrs. Babbitt preferred the pictures in which

handsome young women in elaborate frocks moved through sets ticketed as

the drawing-rooms of New York millionaires. As for Tinka, she preferred,

or was believed to prefer, whatever her parents told her to.

All his relaxations--baseball, golf, movies, bridge, motoring, long

talks with Paul at the Athletic Club, or at the Good Red Beef and Old

English Chop House--were necessary to Babbitt, for he was entering a

year of such activity as he had never known.

CHAPTER XIII

I

It was by accident that Babbitt had his opportunity to address the S. A.

R. E. B.

The S. A. R. E. B., as its members called it, with the universal passion

for mysterious and important-sounding initials, was the State

Association of Real Estate Boards; the organization of brokers and

operators. It was to hold its annual convention at Monarch, Zenith’s

chief rival among the cities of the state. Babbitt was an official

delegate; another was Cecil Rountree, whom Babbitt admired for his

picaresque speculative building, and hated for his social position, for

being present at the smartest dances on Royal Ridge. Rountree was

chairman of the convention program-committee.

Babbitt had growled to him, “Makes me tired the way these doctors and

profs and preachers put on lugs about being ‘professional men.’ A good

realtor has to have more knowledge and finesse than any of ’em.”

“Right you are! I say: Why don’t you put that into a paper, and give it

at the S. A. R. E. B.?” suggested Rountree.

“Well, if it would help you in making up the program-- Tell you: the way

I look at it is this: First place, we ought to insist that folks call us

‘realtors’ and not ‘real-estate men.’ Sounds more like a reg’lar

profession. Second place-- What is it distinguishes a profession from a

mere trade, business, or occupation? What is it? Why, it’s the public

service and the skill, the trained skill, and the knowledge and, uh, all

that, whereas a fellow that merely goes out for the jack, he never

considers the--public service and trained skill and so on. Now as a

professional--”

“Rather! That’s perfectly bully! Perfectly corking! Now you write it in

a paper,” said Rountree, as he rapidly and firmly moved away.

II

However accustomed to the literary labors of advertisements and

correspondence, Babbitt was dismayed on the evening when he sat down to

prepare a paper which would take a whole ten minutes to read.

He laid out a new fifteen-cent school exercise-book on his wife’s

collapsible sewing-table, set up for the event in the living-room. The

household had been bullied into silence; Verona and Ted requested to

disappear, and Tinka threatened with “If I hear one sound out of you--if

you holler for a glass of water one single solitary time-- You better

not, that’s all!” Mrs. Babbitt sat over by the piano, making a nightgown

and gazing with respect while Babbitt wrote in the exercise-book, to the

rhythmical wiggling and squeaking of the sewing-table.

When he rose, damp and jumpy, and his throat dusty from cigarettes, she

marveled, “I don’t see how you can just sit down and make up things

right out of your own head!”

“Oh, it’s the training in constructive imagination that a fellow gets in

modern business life.”

He had written seven pages, whereof the first page set forth:

[Illustration]

The other six pages were rather like the first.

For a week he went about looking important. Every morning, as he

dressed, he thought aloud: “Jever stop to consider, Myra, that before a

town can have buildings or prosperity or any of those things, some

realtor has got to sell ’em the land? All civilization starts with him.

Jever realize that?” At the Athletic Club he led unwilling men aside to

inquire, “Say, if you had to read a paper before a big convention, would

you start in with the funny stories or just kind of scatter ’em all

through?” He asked Howard Littlefield for a “set of statistics about

real-estate sales; something good and impressive,” and Littlefield

provided something exceedingly good and impressive.

But it was to T. Cholmondeley Frink that Babbitt most often turned. He

caught Frink at the club every noon, and demanded, while Frink

looked hunted and evasive, “Say, Chum--you’re a shark on this

writing stuff--how would you put this sentence, see here in my

manuscript--manuscript--now where the deuce is that?--oh, yes, here.

Would you say ‘We ought not also to alone think?’ or ‘We ought also not

to think alone?’ or--”

One evening when his wife was away and he had no one to impress, Babbitt

forgot about Style, Order, and the other mysteries, and scrawled off

what he really thought about the real-estate business and about himself,

and he found the paper written. When he read it to his wife she yearned,

“Why, dear, it’s splendid; beautifully written, and so clear and

interesting, and such splendid ideas! Why, it’s just--it’s just

splendid!”

Next day he cornered Chum Frink and crowed, “Well, old son, I finished

it last evening! Just lammed it out! I used to think you writing-guys

must have a hard job making up pieces, but Lord, it’s a cinch. Pretty

soft for you fellows; you certainly earn your money easy! Some day when

I get ready to retire, guess I’ll take to writing and show you boys how

to do it. I always used to think I could write better stuff, and more

punch and originality, than all this stuff you see printed, and now I’m

doggone sure of it!”

He had four copies of the paper typed in black with a gorgeous red

title, had them bound in pale blue manilla, and affably presented one to

old Ira Runyon, the managing editor of the _Advocate-Times_, who said

yes, indeed yes, he was very glad to have it, and he certainly would

read it all through--as soon as he could find time.

Mrs. Babbitt could not go to Monarch. She had a women’s-club meeting.

Babbitt said that he was very sorry.

III

Besides the five official delegates to the convention--Babbitt,

Rountree, W. A. Rogers, Alvin Thayer, and Elbert Wing--there were fifty

unofficial delegates, most of them with their wives.

They met at the Union Station for the midnight train to Monarch. All of

them, save Cecil Rountree, who was such a snob that he never wore

badges, displayed celluloid buttons the size of dollars and lettered “We

zoom for Zenith.” The official delegates were magnificent with silver

and magenta ribbons. Martin Lumsen’s little boy Willy carried a tasseled

banner inscribed “Zenith the Zip City--Zeal, Zest and Zowie--1,000,000

in 1935.” As the delegates arrived, not in taxicabs but in the family

automobile driven by the oldest son or by Cousin Fred, they formed

impromptu processions through the station waiting-room.

It was a new and enormous waiting-room, with marble pilasters, and

frescoes depicting the exploration of the Chaloosa River Valley by Père

Emile Fauthoux in 1740. The benches were shelves of ponderous mahogany;

the news-stand a marble kiosk with a brass grill. Down the echoing

spaces of the hall the delegates paraded after Willy Lumsen’s banner,

the men waving their cigars, the women conscious of their new frocks

and strings of beads, all singing to the tune of Auld Lang Syne the

official City Song, written by Chum Frink:

Good old Zenith,

Our kin and kith,

Wherever we may be,

Hats in the ring,

We blithely sing

Of thy Prosperity.

Warren Whitby, the broker, who had a gift of verse for banquets and

birthdays, had added to Frink’s City Song a special verse for the

realtors’ convention:

Oh, here we come,

The fellows from

Zenith, the Zip Citee.

We wish to state

In real estate

There’s none so live as we.

Babbitt was stirred to hysteric patriotism. He leaped on a bench,

shouting to the crowd:

“What’s the matter with Zenith?”

“She’s all right!”

“What’s best ole town in the U. S. A.?”

“Zeeeeeen-ith!”

The patient poor people waiting for the midnight train stared in

unenvious wonder--Italian women with shawls, old weary men with broken

shoes, roving road-wise boys in suits which had been flashy when they

were new but which were faded now and wrinkled.

Babbitt perceived that as an official delegate he must be more

dignified. With Wing and Rogers he tramped up and down the cement

platform beside the waiting Pullmans. Motor-driven baggage-trucks and

red-capped porters carrying bags sped down the platform with an

agreeable effect of activity. Arc-lights glared and stammered overhead.

The glossy yellow sleeping-cars shone impressively. Babbitt made his

voice to be measured and lordly; he thrust out his abdomen and rumbled,

“We got to see to it that the convention lets the Legislature understand

just where they get off in this matter of taxing realty transfers.” Wing

uttered approving grunts and Babbitt swelled--gloated--

The blind of a Pullman compartment was raised, and Babbitt looked into

an unfamiliar world. The occupant of the compartment was Lucile

McKelvey, the pretty wife of the millionaire contractor. Possibly,

Babbitt thrilled, she was going to Europe! On the seat beside her was a

bunch of orchids and violets, and a yellow paper-bound book which seemed

foreign. While he stared, she picked up the book, then glanced out of

the window as though she was bored. She must have looked straight at

him, and he had met her, but she gave no sign. She languidly pulled down

the blind, and he stood still, a cold feeling of insignificance in his

heart.

But on the train his pride was restored by meeting delegates from

Sparta, Pioneer, and other smaller cities of the state, who listened

respectfully when, as a magnifico from the metropolis of Zenith, he

explained politics and the value of a Good Sound Business

Administration. They fell joyfully into shop-talk, the purest and most

rapturous form of conversation:

“How’d this fellow Rountree make out with this big apartment-hotel he

was going to put up? Whadde do? Get out bonds to finance it?” asked a

Sparta broker.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” said Babbitt. “Now if I’d been handling it--”

“So,” Elbert Wing was droning, “I hired this shop-window for a week, and

put up a big sign, ‘Toy Town for Tiny Tots,’ and stuck in a lot of doll

houses and some dinky little trees, and then down at the bottom, ‘Baby

Likes This Dollydale, but Papa and Mama Will Prefer Our Beautiful

Bungalows,’ and you know, that certainly got folks talking, and first

week we sold--”

The trucks sang “lickety-lick, lickety-lick” as the train ran through

the factory district. Furnaces spurted flame, and power-hammers were

clanging. Red lights, green lights, furious white lights rushed past,

and Babbitt was important again, and eager.

IV

He did a voluptuous thing: he had his clothes pressed on the train. In

the morning, half an hour before they reached Monarch, the porter came

to his berth and whispered, “There’s a drawing-room vacant, sir. I put

your suit in there.” In tan autumn overcoat over his pajamas, Babbitt

slipped down the green-curtain-lined aisle to the glory of his first

private compartment. The porter indicated that he knew Babbitt was used

to a man-servant; he held the ends of Babbitt’s trousers, that the

beautifully sponged garment might not be soiled, filled the bowl in the

private washroom, and waited with a towel.

To have a private washroom was luxurious. However enlivening a Pullman

smoking-compartment was by night, even to Babbitt it was depressing in

the morning, when it was jammed with fat men in woolen undershirts,

every hook filled with wrinkled cottony shirts, the leather seat piled

with dingy toilet-kits, and the air nauseating with the smell of soap

and toothpaste. Babbitt did not ordinarily think much of privacy, but

now he reveled in it, reveled in his valet, and purred with pleasure as

he gave the man a tip of a dollar and a half.

He rather hoped that he was being noticed as, in his newly pressed

clothes, with the adoring porter carrying his suit-case, he disembarked

at Monarch.

He was to share a room at the Hotel Sedgwick with W. A. Rogers, that

shrewd, rustic-looking Zenith dealer in farm-lands. Together they had a

noble breakfast, with waffles, and coffee not in exiguous cups but in

large pots. Babbitt grew expansive, and told Rogers about the art of

writing; he gave a bellboy a quarter to fetch a morning newspaper from

the lobby, and sent to Tinka a post-card: “Papa wishes you were here to

bat round with him.”

V

The meetings of the convention were held in the ballroom of the Allen

House. In an anteroom was the office of the chairman of the executive

committee. He was the busiest man in the convention; he was so busy that

he got nothing done whatever. He sat at a marquetry table, in a room

littered with crumpled paper and, all day long, town-boosters and

lobbyists and orators who wished to lead debates came and whispered to

him, whereupon he looked vague, and said rapidly, “Yes, yes, that’s a

fine idea; we’ll do that,” and instantly forgot all about it, lighted a

cigar and forgot that too, while the telephone rang mercilessly and

about him men kept beseeching, “Say, Mr. Chairman--say, Mr. Chairman!”

without penetrating his exhausted hearing.

In the exhibit-room were plans of the new suburbs of Sparta, pictures of

the new state capitol, at Galop de Vache, and large ears of corn with

the label, “Nature’s Gold, from Shelby County, the Garden Spot of God’s

Own Country.”

The real convention consisted of men muttering in hotel bedrooms or in

groups amid the badge-spotted crowd in the hotel-lobby, but there was a

show of public meetings.

The first of them opened with a welcome by the mayor of Monarch. The

pastor of the First Christian Church of Monarch, a large man with a long

damp frontal lock, informed God that the real-estate men were here now.

The venerable Minnemagantic realtor, Major Carlton Tuke, read a paper in

which he denounced coöperative stores. William A. Larkin of Eureka gave

a comforting prognosis of “The Prospects for Increased Construction,”

and reminded them that plate-glass prices were two points lower.

The convention was on.

The delegates were entertained, incessantly and firmly. The Monarch

Chamber of Commerce gave them a banquet, and the Manufacturers’

Association an afternoon reception, at which a chrysanthemum was

presented to each of the ladies, and to each of the men a leather

bill-fold inscribed “From Monarch the Mighty Motor Mart.”

Mrs. Crosby Knowlton, wife of the manufacturer of Fleetwing Automobiles,

opened her celebrated Italian garden and served tea. Six hundred

real-estate men and wives ambled down the autumnal paths. Perhaps three

hundred of them were quietly inconspicuous; perhaps three hundred

vigorously exclaimed, “This is pretty slick, eh?” surreptitiously picked

the late asters and concealed them in their pockets, and tried to get

near enough to Mrs. Knowlton to shake her lovely hand. Without request,

the Zenith delegates (except Rountree) gathered round a marble dancing

nymph and sang “Here we come, the fellows from Zenith, the Zip Citee.”

It chanced that all the delegates from Pioneer belonged to the Brotherly

and Protective Order of Elks, and they produced an enormous banner

lettered: “B. P. O. E.--Best People on Earth--Boost Pioneer, Oh Eddie.”

Nor was Galop de Vache, the state capital, to be slighted. The leader of

the Galop de Vache delegation was a large, reddish, roundish man, but

active. He took off his coat, hurled his broad black felt hat on the

ground, rolled up his sleeves, climbed upon the sundial, spat, and

bellowed:

“We’ll tell the world, and the good lady who’s giving the show this

afternoon, that the bonniest burg in this man’s state is Galop de Vache.

You boys can talk about your zip, but jus’ lemme murmur that old Galop

has the largest proportion of home-owning citizens in the state; and

when folks own their homes, they ain’t starting labor-troubles, and

they’re raising kids instead of raising hell! Galop de Vache! The town

for homey folks! The town that eats ’em alive oh, Bosco!

We’ll--tell--the--world!”

The guests drove off; the garden shivered into quiet. But Mrs. Crosby

Knowlton sighed as she looked at a marble seat warm from five hundred

summers of Amalfi. On the face of a winged sphinx which supported it

some one had drawn a mustache in lead-pencil. Crumpled paper napkins

were dumped among the Michaelmas daisies. On the walk, like shredded

lovely flesh, were the petals of the last gallant rose. Cigarette stubs

floated in the goldfish pool, trailing an evil stain as they swelled and

disintegrated, and beneath the marble seat, the fragments carefully put

together, was a smashed teacup.

VI

As he rode back to the hotel Babbitt reflected, “Myra would have enjoyed

all this social agony.” For himself he cared less for the garden party

than for the motor tours which the Monarch Chamber of Commerce had

arranged. Indefatigably he viewed water-reservoirs, suburban

trolley-stations, and tanneries. He devoured the statistics which were

given to him, and marveled to his roommate, W. A. Rogers, “Of course

this town isn’t a patch on Zenith; it hasn’t got our outlook and natural

resources; but did you know--I nev’ did till to-day--that they

manufactured seven hundred and sixty-three million feet of lumber last

year? What d’ you think of that!”

He was nervous as the time for reading his paper approached. When he

stood on the low platform before the convention, he trembled and saw

only a purple haze. But he was in earnest, and when he had finished the

formal paper he talked to them, his hands in his pockets, his spectacled

face a flashing disk, like a plate set up on edge in the lamplight. They

shouted “That’s the stuff!” and in the discussion afterward they

referred with impressiveness to “our friend and brother, Mr. George F.

Babbitt.” He had in fifteen minutes changed from a minor delegate to a

personage almost as well known as that diplomat of business, Cecil

Rountree. After the meeting, delegates from all over the state said,

“Hower you, Brother Babbitt?” Sixteen complete strangers called him

“George,” and three men took him into corners to confide, “Mighty glad

you had the courage to stand up and give the Profession a real boost.

Now I’ve always maintained--”

Next morning, with tremendous casualness, Babbitt asked the girl at the

hotel news-stand for the newspapers from Zenith. There was nothing in

the _Press_, but in the _Advocate-Times_, on the third page-- He gasped.

They had printed his picture and a half-column account. The heading was

“Sensation at Annual Land-men’s Convention. G. F. Babbitt, Prominent

Ziptown Realtor, Keynoter in Fine Address.”

He murmured reverently, “I guess some of the folks on Floral Heights

will sit up and take notice now, and pay a little attention to old

Georgie!”

VII

It was the last meeting. The delegations were presenting the claims of

their several cities to the next year’s convention. Orators were

announcing that “Galop de Vache, the Capital City, the site of Kremer

College and of the Upholtz Knitting Works, is the recognized center of

culture and high-class enterprise;” and that “Hamburg, the Big Little

City with the Logical Location, where every man is open-handed and every

woman a heaven-born hostess, throws wide to you her hospitable gates.”

In the midst of these more diffident invitations, the golden doors of

the ballroom opened with a blatting of trumpets, and a circus parade

rolled in. It was composed of the Zenith brokers, dressed as

cowpunchers, bareback riders, Japanese jugglers. At the head was big

Warren Whitby, in the bearskin and gold-and-crimson coat of a

drum-major. Behind him, as a clown, beating a bass drum, extraordinarily

happy and noisy, was Babbitt.

Warren Whitby leaped on the platform, made merry play with his baton,

and observed, “Boyses and girlses, the time has came to get down to

cases. A dyed-in-the-wool Zenithite sure loves his neighbors, but we’ve

made up our minds to grab this convention off our neighbor burgs like

we’ve grabbed the condensed-milk business and the paper-box business

and--”

J. Harry Barmhill, the convention chairman, hinted, “We’re grateful to

you, Mr. Uh, but you must give the other boys a chance to hand in their

bids now.”

A fog-horn voice blared, “In Eureka we’ll promise free motor rides

through the prettiest country--”

Running down the aisle, clapping his hands, a lean bald young man cried,

“I’m from Sparta! Our Chamber of Commerce has wired me they’ve set aside

eight thousand dollars, in real money, for the entertainment of the

convention!”

A clerical-looking man rose to clamor, “Money talks! Move we accept the

bid from Sparta!”

It was accepted.

VIII

The Committee on Resolutions was reporting. They said that Whereas

Almighty God in his beneficent mercy had seen fit to remove to a sphere

of higher usefulness some thirty-six realtors of the state the past

year, Therefore it was the sentiment of this convention assembled that

they were sorry God had done it, and the secretary should be, and hereby

was, instructed to spread these resolutions on the minutes, and to

console the bereaved families by sending them each a copy.

A second resolution authorized the president of the S.A.R.E.B. to spend

fifteen thousand dollars in lobbying for sane tax measures in the State

Legislature. This resolution had a good deal to say about Menaces to

Sound Business and clearing the Wheels of Progress from ill-advised and

short-sighted obstacles.

The Committee on Committees reported, and with startled awe Babbitt

learned that he had been appointed a member of the Committee on Torrens

Titles.

He rejoiced, “I said it was going to be a great year! Georgie, old son,

you got big things ahead of you! You’re a natural-born orator and a good

mixer and-- Zowie!”

IX

There was no formal entertainment provided for the last evening. Babbitt

had planned to go home, but that afternoon the Jered Sassburgers of

Pioneer suggested that Babbitt and W. A. Rogers have tea with them at

the Catalpa Inn.

Teas were not unknown to Babbitt--his wife and he earnestly attended

them at least twice a year--but they were sufficiently exotic to make

him feel important. He sat at a glass-covered table in the Art Room of

the Inn, with its painted rabbits, mottoes lettered on birch bark, and

waitresses being artistic in Dutch caps; he ate insufficient lettuce

sandwiches, and was lively and naughty with Mrs. Sassburger, who was as

smooth and large-eyed as a cloak-model. Sassburger and he had met two

days before, so they were calling each other “Georgie” and “Sassy.”

Sassburger said prayerfully, “Say, boys, before you go, seeing this is

the last chance, I’ve _got it_, up in my room, and Miriam here is the

best little mixologist in the Stati Unidos, like us Italians say.”

With wide flowing gestures, Babbitt and Rogers followed the Sassburgers

to their room. Mrs. Sassburger shrieked, “Oh, how terrible!” when she

saw that she had left a chemise of sheer lavender crêpe on the bed. She

tucked it into a bag, while Babbitt giggled, “Don’t mind us; we’re a

couple o’ little divvils!”

Sassburger telephoned for ice, and the bell-boy who brought it said,

prosaically and unprompted, “Highball glasses or cocktail?” Miriam

Sassburger mixed the cocktails in one of those dismal, nakedly white

water-pitchers which exist only in hotels. When they had finished the

first round she proved by intoning “Think you boys could stand

another--you got a dividend coming” that, though she was but a woman,

she knew the complete and perfect rite of cocktail-drinking.

Outside, Babbitt hinted to Rogers, “Say, W. A., old rooster, it comes

over me that I could stand it if we didn’t go back to the lovin’ wives,

this handsome _Abend_, but just kind of stayed in Monarch and threw a

party, heh?”

“George, you speak with the tongue of wisdom and sagashiteriferousness.

El Wing’s wife has gone on to Pittsburg. Let’s see if we can’t gather

him in.”

At half-past seven they sat in their room, with Elbert Wing and two

up-state delegates. Their coats were off, their vests open, their faces

red, their voices emphatic. They were finishing a bottle of corrosive

bootlegged whisky and imploring the bell-boy, “Say, son, can you get us

some more of this embalming fluid?” They were smoking large cigars and

dropping ashes and stubs on the carpet. With windy guffaws they were

telling stories. They were, in fact, males in a happy state of nature.

Babbitt sighed, “I don’t know how it strikes you hellions, but

personally I like this busting loose for a change, and kicking over a

couple of mountains and climbing up on the North Pole and waving the

aurora borealis around.”

The man from Sparta, a grave, intense youngster, babbled, “Say! I guess

I’m as good a husband as the run of the mill, but God, I do get so tired

of going home every evening, and nothing to see but the movies. That’s

why I go out and drill with the National Guard. I guess I got the

nicest little wife in my burg, but-- Say! Know what I wanted to do as a

kid? Know what I wanted to do? Wanted to be a big chemist. Tha’s what I

wanted to do. But Dad chased me out on the road selling kitchenware, and

here I’m settled down--settled for _life_--not a chance! Oh, who the

devil started this funeral talk? How ’bout ’nother lil drink? ‘And

a-noth-er drink wouldn’ do ’s ’ny harmmmmmmm.’”

“Yea. Cut the sob-stuff,” said W. A. Rogers genially. “You boys know I’m

the village songster? Come on now--sing up:

Said the old Obadiah to the young Obadiah,

‘I am dry, Obadiah, I am dry.’

Said the young Obadiah to the old Obadiah,

‘So am I, Obadiah, so am I.’”

X

They had dinner in the Moorish Grillroom of the Hotel Sedgwick.

Somewhere, somehow, they seemed to have gathered in two other comrades:

a manufacturer of fly-paper and a dentist. They all drank whisky from

tea-cups, and they were humorous, and never listened to one another,

except when W. A. Rogers “kidded” the Italian waiter.

“Say, Gooseppy,” he said innocently, “I want a couple o’ fried

elephants’ ears.”

“Sorry, sir, we haven’t any.”

“Huh? No elephants’ ears? What do you know about that!” Rogers turned to

Babbitt. “Pedro says the elephants’ ears are all out!”

“Well, I’ll be switched!” said the man from Sparta, with difficulty

hiding his laughter.

“Well, in that case, Carlo, just bring me a hunk o’ steak and a couple

o’ bushels o’ French fried potatoes and some peas,” Rogers went on. “I

suppose back in dear old sunny It’ the Eyetalians get their fresh

garden peas out of the can.”

“No, sir, we have very nice peas in Italy.”

“Is that a fact! Georgie, do you hear that? They get their fresh garden

peas out of the garden, in Italy! By golly, you live and learn, don’t

you, Antonio, you certainly do live and learn, if you live long enough

and keep your strength. All right, Garibaldi, just shoot me in that

steak, with about two printers’-reams of French fried spuds on the

promenade deck, _comprehenez-vous_, Michelovitch Angeloni?”

Afterward Elbert Wing admired, “Gee, you certainly did have that poor

Dago going, W. A. He couldn’t make you out at all!”

In the _Monarch Herald_, Babbitt found an advertisement which he read

aloud, to applause and laughter:

Old Colony Theatre

Shake the Old Dogs to the

WROLLICKING WRENS

The bonniest bevy of beauteous

bathing babes in burlesque.

Pete Menutti and his

Oh, Gee, Kids.

This is the straight steer, Benny, the painless chicklets of the

Wrollicking Wrens are the cuddlingest bunch that ever hit town.

Steer the feet, get the card board, and twist the pupils to the

PDQest show ever. You will get 111% on your kale in this fun-fest.

The Calroza Sisters are sure some lookers and will give you a run

for your gelt. Jock Silbersteen is one of the pepper lads and slips

you a dose of real laughter. Shoot the up and down to Jackson and

West for graceful tappers. They run 1-2 under the wire. Provin and

Adams will blow the blues in their laugh skit “Hootch Mon!”

Something doing, boys. Listen to what the Hep Bird twitters.

“Sounds like a juicy show to me. Let’s all take it in,” said Babbitt.

But they put off departure as long as they could. They were safe while

they sat here, legs firmly crossed under the table, but they felt

unsteady; they were afraid of navigating the long and slippery floor of

the grillroom under the eyes of the other guests and the too-attentive

waiters.

When they did venture, tables got in their way, and they sought to cover

embarrassment by heavy jocularity at the coatroom. As the girl handed

out their hats, they smiled at her, and hoped that she, a cool and

expert judge, would feel that they were gentlemen. They croaked at one

another, “Who owns the bum lid?” and “You take a good one, George; I’ll

take what’s left,” and to the check-girl they stammered, “Better come

along, sister! High, wide, and fancy evening ahead!” All of them tried

to tip her, urging one another, “No! Wait! Here! I got it right here!”

Among them, they gave her three dollars.

XI

Flamboyantly smoking cigars they sat in a box at the burlesque show,

their feet up on the rail, while a chorus of twenty daubed, worried, and

inextinguishably respectable grandams swung their legs in the more

elementary chorus-evolutions, and a Jewish comedian made vicious fun of

Jews. In the entr’actes they met other lone delegates. A dozen of them

went in taxicabs out to Bright Blossom Inn, where the blossoms were made

of dusty paper festooned along a room low and stinking, like a

cow-stable no longer wisely used.

Here, whisky was served openly, in glasses. Two or three clerks, who on

pay-day longed to be taken for millionaires, sheepishly danced with

telephone-girls and manicure-girls in the narrow space between the

tables. Fantastically whirled the professionals, a young man in sleek

evening-clothes and a slim mad girl in emerald silk, with amber hair

flung up as jaggedly as flames. Babbitt tried to dance with her. He

shuffled along the floor, too bulky to be guided, his steps unrelated to

the rhythm of the jungle music, and in his staggering he would have

fallen, had she not held him with supple kindly strength. He was blind

and deaf from prohibition-era alcohol; he could not see the tables, the

faces. But he was overwhelmed by the girl and her young pliant warmth.

When she had firmly returned him to his group, he remembered, by a

connection quite untraceable, that his mother’s mother had been Scotch,

and with head thrown back, eyes closed, wide mouth indicating ecstasy,

he sang, very slowly and richly, “Loch Lomond.”

But that was the last of his mellowness and jolly companionship. The man

from Sparta said he was a “bum singer,” and for ten minutes Babbitt

quarreled with him, in a loud, unsteady, heroic indignation. They called

for drinks till the manager insisted that the place was closed. All the

while Babbitt felt a hot raw desire for more brutal amusements. When W.

A. Rogers drawled, “What say we go down the line and look over the

girls?” he agreed savagely. Before they went, three of them secretly

made appointments with the professional dancing girl, who agreed “Yes,

yes, sure, darling” to everything they said, and amiably forgot them.

As they drove back through the outskirts of Monarch, down streets of

small brown wooden cottages of workmen, characterless as cells, as they

rattled across warehouse-districts which by drunken night seemed vast

and perilous, as they were borne toward the red lights and violent

automatic pianos and the stocky women who simpered, Babbitt was

frightened. He wanted to leap from the taxicab, but all his body was a

murky fire, and he groaned, “Too late to quit now,” and knew that he did

not want to quit.

There was, they felt, one very humorous incident on the way. A broker

from Minnemagantic said, “Monarch is a lot sportier than Zenith. You

Zenith tightwads haven’t got any joints like these here.” Babbitt raged,

“That’s a dirty lie! Snothin’ you can’t find in Zenith. Believe me, we

got more houses and hootch-parlors an’ all kinds o’ dives than any burg

in the state.”

He realized they were laughing at him; he desired to fight; and forgot

it in such musty unsatisfying experiments as he had not known since

college.

In the morning, when he returned to Zenith, his desire for rebellion was

partly satisfied. He had retrograded to a shame-faced contentment. He

was irritable. He did not smile when W. A. Rogers complained, “Ow, what

a head! I certainly do feel like the wrath of God this morning. Say! I

know what was the trouble! Somebody went and put alcohol in my booze

last night.”

Babbitt’s excursion was never known to his family, nor to any one in

Zenith save Rogers and Wing. It was not officially recognized even by

himself. If it had any consequences, they have not been discovered.

CHAPTER XIV

I

This autumn a Mr. W. G. Harding, of Marion, Ohio, was appointed

President of the United States, but Zenith was less interested in the

national campaign than in the local election. Seneca Doane, though he

was a lawyer and a graduate of the State University, was candidate for

mayor of Zenith on an alarming labor ticket. To oppose him the Democrats

and Republicans united on Lucas Prout, a mattress-manufacturer with a

perfect record for sanity. Mr. Prout was supported by the banks, the

Chamber of Commerce, all the decent newspapers, and George F. Babbitt.

Babbitt was precinct-leader on Floral Heights, but his district was safe

and he longed for stouter battling. His convention paper had given him

the beginning of a reputation for oratory, so the Republican-Democratic

Central Committee sent him to the Seventh Ward and South Zenith, to

address small audiences of workmen and clerks, and wives uneasy with

their new votes. He acquired a fame enduring for weeks. Now and then a

reporter was present at one of his meetings, and the headlines (though

they were not very large) indicated that George F. Babbitt had addressed

Cheering Throng, and Distinguished Man of Affairs had pointed out the

Fallacies of Doane. Once, in the rotogravure section of the Sunday

_Advocate-Times_, there was a photograph of Babbitt and a dozen other

business men, with the caption “Leaders of Zenith Finance and Commerce

Who Back Prout.”

He deserved his glory. He was an excellent campaigner. He had faith; he

was certain that if Lincoln were alive, he would be electioneering for

Mr. W. G. Harding--unless he came to Zenith and electioneered for Lucas

Prout. He did not confuse audiences by silly subtleties; Prout

represented honest industry, Seneca Doane represented whining laziness,

and you could take your choice. With his broad shoulders and vigorous

voice, he was obviously a Good Fellow; and, rarest of all, he really

liked people. He almost liked common workmen. He wanted them to be well

paid, and able to afford high rents--though, naturally, they must not

interfere with the reasonable profits of stockholders. Thus nobly

endowed, and keyed high by the discovery that he was a natural orator,

he was popular with audiences, and he raged through the campaign,

renowned not only in the Seventh and Eighth Wards but even in parts of

the Sixteenth.

II

Crowded in his car, they came driving up to Turnverein Hall, South

Zenith-- Babbitt, his wife, Verona, Ted, and Paul and Zilla Riesling. The

hall was over a delicatessen shop, in a street banging with trolleys and

smelling of onions and gasoline and fried fish. A new appreciation of

Babbitt filled all of them, including Babbitt.

“Don’t know how you keep it up, talking to three bunches in one evening.

Wish I had your strength,” said Paul; and Ted exclaimed to Verona, “The

old man certainly does know how to kid these roughnecks along!”

Men in black sateen shirts, their faces new-washed but with a hint of

grime under their eyes, were loitering on the broad stairs up to the

hall. Babbitt’s party politely edged through them and into the

whitewashed room, at the front of which was a dais with a red-plush

throne and a pine altar painted watery blue, as used nightly by the

Grand Masters and Supreme Potentates of innumerable lodges. The hall was

full. As Babbitt pushed through the fringe standing at the back, he

heard the precious tribute, “That’s him!” The chairman bustled down the

center aisle with an impressive, “The speaker? All ready, sir! Uh--let’s

see--what was the name, sir?”

Then Babbitt slid into a sea of eloquence:

“Ladies and gentlemen of the Sixteenth Ward, there is one who cannot be

with us here to-night, a man than whom there is no more stalwart Trojan

in all the political arena-- I refer to our leader, the Honorable Lucas

Prout, standard-bearer of the city and county of Zenith. Since he is not

here, I trust that you will bear with me if, as a friend and neighbor,

as one who is proud to share with you the common blessing of being a

resident of the great city of Zenith, I tell you in all candor, honesty,

and sincerity how the issues of this critical campaign appear to one

plain man of business--to one who, brought up to the blessings of

poverty and of manual labor, has, even when Fate condemned him to sit at

a desk, yet never forgotten how it feels, by heck, to be up at

five-thirty and at the factory with the ole dinner-pail in his hardened

mitt when the whistle blew at seven, unless the owner sneaked in ten

minutes on us and blew it early! (Laughter.) To come down to the basic

and fundamental issues of this campaign, the great error, insincerely

promulgated by Seneca Doane--”

There were workmen who jeered--young cynical workmen, for the most part

foreigners, Jews, Swedes, Irishmen, Italians--but the older men, the

patient, bleached, stooped carpenters and mechanics, cheered him; and

when he worked up to his anecdote of Lincoln their eyes were wet.

Modestly, busily, he hurried out of the hall on delicious applause, and

sped off to his third audience of the evening. “Ted, you better drive,”

he said. “Kind of all in after that spiel. Well, Paul, how’d it go? Did

I get ’em?”

“Bully! Corking! You had a lot of pep.”

Mrs. Babbitt worshiped, “Oh, it was fine! So clear and interesting, and

such nice ideas. When I hear you orating I realize I don’t appreciate

how profoundly you think and what a splendid brain and vocabulary you

have. Just--splendid.”

But Verona was irritating. “Dad,” she worried, “how do you know that

public ownership of utilities and so on and so forth will always be a

failure?”

Mrs. Babbitt reproved, “Rone, I should think you could see and realize

that when your father’s all worn out with orating, it’s no time to

expect him to explain these complicated subjects. I’m sure when he’s

rested he’ll be glad to explain it to you. Now let’s all be quiet and

give Papa a chance to get ready for his next speech. Just think! Right

now they’re gathering in Maccabee Temple, and _waiting_ for us!”

III

Mr. Lucas Prout and Sound Business defeated Mr. Seneca Doane and Class

Rule, and Zenith was again saved. Babbitt was offered several minor

appointments to distribute among poor relations, but he preferred

advance information about the extension of paved highways, and this a

grateful administration gave to him. Also, he was one of only nineteen

speakers at the dinner with which the Chamber of Commerce celebrated the

victory of righteousness.

His reputation for oratory established, at the dinner of the Zenith Real

Estate Board he made the Annual Address. The _Advocate-Times_ reported

this speech with unusual fullness:

“One of the livest banquets that has recently been pulled off occurred

last night in the annual Get-Together Fest of the Zenith Real Estate

Board, held in the Venetian Ball Room of the O’Hearn House. Mine host

Gil O’Hearn had as usual done himself proud and those assembled feasted

on such an assemblage of plates as could be rivaled nowhere west of New

York, if there, and washed down the plenteous feed with the cup which

inspired but did not inebriate in the shape of cider from the farm of

Chandler Mott, president of the board and who acted as witty and

efficient chairman.

“As Mr. Mott was suffering from slight infection and sore throat, G. F.

Babbitt made the principal talk. Besides outlining the progress of

Torrensing real estate titles, Mr. Babbitt spoke in part as follows:

“‘In rising to address you, with my impromptu speech carefully tucked

into my vest pocket, I am reminded of the story of the two Irishmen,

Mike and Pat, who were riding on the Pullman. Both of them, I forgot to

say, were sailors in the Navy. It seems Mike had the lower berth and by

and by he heard a terrible racket from the upper, and when he yelled up

to find out what the trouble was, Pat answered, “Shure an’ bedad an’ how

can I ever get a night’s sleep at all, at all? I been trying to get into

this darned little hammock ever since eight bells!”

“‘Now, gentlemen, standing up here before you, I feel a good deal like

Pat, and maybe after I’ve spieled along for a while, I may feel so darn

small that I’ll be able to crawl into a Pullman hammock with no trouble

at all, at all!

“‘Gentlemen, it strikes me that each year at this annual occasion when

friend and foe get together and lay down the battle-ax and let the waves

of good-fellowship waft them up the flowery slopes of amity, it behooves

us, standing together eye to eye and shoulder to shoulder as

fellow-citizens of the best city in the world, to consider where we are

both as regards ourselves and the common weal.

“‘It is true that even with our 361,000, or practically 362,000,

population, there are, by the last census, almost a score of larger

cities in the United States. But, gentlemen, if by the next census we do

not stand at least tenth, then I’ll be the first to request any knocker

to remove my shirt and to eat the same, with the compliments of G. F.

Babbitt, Esquire! It may be true that New York, Chicago, and

Philadelphia will continue to keep ahead of us in size. But aside from

these three cities, which are notoriously so overgrown that no decent

white man, nobody who loves his wife and kiddies and God’s good

out-o’-doors and likes to shake the hand of his neighbor in greeting,

would want to live in them--and let me tell you right here and now, I

wouldn’t trade a high-class Zenith acreage development for the whole

length and breadth of Broadway or State Street!--aside from these three,

it’s evident to any one with a head for facts that Zenith is the finest

example of American life and prosperity to be found anywhere.

“‘I don’t mean to say we’re perfect. We’ve got a lot to do in the way of

extending the paving of motor boulevards, for, believe me, it’s the

fellow with four to ten thousand a year, say, and an automobile and a

nice little family in a bungalow on the edge of town, that makes the

wheels of progress go round!

“‘That’s the type of fellow that’s ruling America to-day; in fact, it’s

the ideal type to which the entire world must tend, if there’s to be a

decent, well-balanced, Christian, go-ahead future for this little old

planet! Once in a while I just naturally sit back and size up this Solid

American Citizen, with a whale of a lot of satisfaction.

“‘Our Ideal Citizen-- I picture him first and foremost as being busier

than a bird-dog, not wasting a lot of good time in day-dreaming or going

to sassiety teas or kicking about things that are none of his business,

but putting the zip into some store or profession or art. At night he

lights up a good cigar, and climbs into the little old ’bus, and maybe

cusses the carburetor, and shoots out home. He mows the lawn, or sneaks

in some practice putting, and then he’s ready for dinner. After dinner

he tells the kiddies a story, or takes the family to the movies, or

plays a few fists of bridge, or reads the evening paper, and a chapter

or two of some good lively Western novel if he has a taste for

literature, and maybe the folks next-door drop in and they sit and visit

about their friends and the topics of the day. Then he goes happily to

bed, his conscience clear, having contributed his mite to the

prosperity of the city and to his own bank-account.

“‘In politics and religion this Sane Citizen is the canniest man on

earth; and in the arts he invariably has a natural taste which makes him

pick out the best, every time. In no country in the world will you find

so many reproductions of the Old Masters and of well-known paintings on

parlor walls as in these United States. No country has anything like our

number of phonographs, with not only dance records and comic but also

the best operas, such as Verdi, rendered by the world’s highest-paid

singers.

“‘In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby

bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America

the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any

other decent business man; and I, for one, am only too glad that the man

who has the rare skill to season his message with interesting reading

matter and who shows both purpose and pep in handling his literary wares

has a chance to drag down his fifty thousand bucks a year, to mingle

with the biggest executives on terms of perfect equality, and to show as

big a house and as swell a car as any Captain of Industry! But, mind

you, it’s the appreciation of the Regular Guy who I have been depicting

which has made this possible, and you got to hand as much credit to him

as to the authors themselves.

“‘Finally, but most important, our Standardized Citizen, even if he is a

bachelor, is a lover of the Little Ones, a supporter of the hearthstone

which is the basic foundation of our civilization, first, last, and all

the time, and the thing that most distinguishes us from the decayed

nations of Europe.

“‘I have never yet toured Europe--and as a matter of fact, I don’t know

that I care to such an awful lot, as long as there’s our own mighty

cities and mountains to be seen--but, the way I figure it out, there

must be a good many of our own sort of folks abroad. Indeed, one of the

most enthusiastic Rotarians I ever met boosted the tenets of

one-hundred-per-cent pep in a burr that smacked o’ bonny Scutlond and

all ye bonny braes o’ Bobby Burns. But same time, one thing that

distinguishes us from our good brothers, the hustlers over there, is

that they’re willing to take a lot off the snobs and journalists and

politicians, while the modern American business man knows how to talk

right up for himself, knows how to make it good and plenty clear that he

intends to run the works. He doesn’t have to call in some highbrow

hired-man when it’s necessary for him to answer the crooked critics of

the sane and efficient life. He’s not dumb, like the old-fashioned

merchant. He’s got a vocabulary and a punch.

“‘With all modesty, I want to stand up here as a representative business

man and gently whisper, “Here’s our kind of folks! Here’s the

specifications of the Standardized American Citizen! Here’s the new

generation of Americans: fellows with hair on their chests and smiles in

their eyes and adding-machines in their offices. We’re not doing any

boasting, but we like ourselves first-rate, and if you don’t like us,

look out--better get under cover before the cyclone hits town!”

“‘So! In my clumsy way I have tried to sketch the Real He-man, the

fellow with Zip and Bang. And it’s because Zenith has so large a

proportion of such men that it’s the most stable, the greatest of our

cities. New York also has its thousands of Real Folks, but New York is

cursed with unnumbered foreigners. So are Chicago and San Francisco. Oh,

we have a golden roster of cities--Detroit and Cleveland with their

renowned factories, Cincinnati with its great machine-tool and soap

products, Pittsburg and Birmingham with their steel, Kansas City and

Minneapolis and Omaha that open their bountiful gates on the bosom of

the ocean-like wheatlands, and countless other magnificent

sister-cities, for, by the last census, there were no less than

sixty-eight glorious American burgs with a population of over one

hundred thousand! And all these cities stand together for power and

purity, and against foreign ideas and communism--Atlanta with Hartford,

Rochester with Denver, Milwaukee with Indianapolis, Los Angeles with

Scranton, Portland, Maine, with Portland, Oregon. A good live wire from

Baltimore or Seattle or Duluth is the twin-brother of every like fellow

booster from Buffalo or Akron, Fort Worth or Oskaloosa!

“‘But it’s here in Zenith, the home for manly men and womanly women and

bright kids, that you find the largest proportion of these Regular Guys,

and that’s what sets it in a class by itself; that’s why Zenith will be

remembered in history as having set the pace for a civilization that

shall endure when the old time-killing ways are gone forever and the day

of earnest efficient endeavor shall have dawned all round the world!

“‘Some time I hope folks will quit handing all the credit to a lot of

moth-eaten, mildewed, out-of-date, old, European dumps, and give proper

credit to the famous Zenith spirit, that clean fighting determination to

win Success that has made the little old Zip City celebrated in every

land and clime, wherever condensed milk and pasteboard cartons are

known! Believe me, the world has fallen too long for these worn-out

countries that aren’t producing anything but bootblacks and scenery and

booze, that haven’t got one bathroom per hundred people, and that don’t

know a loose-leaf ledger from a slip-cover; and it’s just about time for

some Zenithite to get his back up and holler for a show-down!

“‘I tell you, Zenith and her sister-cities are producing a new type of

civilization. There are many resemblances between Zenith and these other

burgs, and I’m darn glad of it! The extraordinary, growing, and sane

standardization of stores, offices, streets, hotels, clothes, and

newspapers throughout the United States shows how strong and enduring a

type is ours.

“‘I always like to remember a piece that Chum Frink wrote for the

newspapers about his lecture-tours. It is doubtless familiar to many of

you, but if you will permit me, I’ll take a chance and read it. It’s

one of the classic poems, like “If” by Kipling, or Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s

“The Man Worth While”; and I always carry this clipping of it in my

note-book:

_When I am out upon the road, a poet with a pedler’s load, I mostly

sing a hearty song, and take a chew and hike along, a-handing out

my samples fine of Cheero Brand of sweet sun-shine, and peddling

optimistic pokes and stable lines of japes and jokes to Lyceums and

other folks, to Rotarys, Kiwanis’ Clubs, and feel I ain’t like

other dubs. And then old Major Silas Satan, a brainy cuss who’s

always waitin’, he gives his tail a lively quirk, and gets in quick

his dirty work. He fills me up with mullygrubs; my hair the

backward way he rubs; he makes me lonelier than a hound, on Sunday

when the folks ain’t round. And then b’gosh, I would prefer to

never be a lecturer, a-ridin’ round in classy cars and smoking

fifty-cent cigars, and never more I want to roam; I simply want to

be back home, a-eatin’ flap-jacks, hash, and ham, with folks who

savvy whom I am!_

_But when I get that lonely spell, I simply seek the best hotel, no

matter in what town I be--St. Paul, Toledo, or K.C., in Washington,

Schenectady, in Louisville or Albany. And at that inn it hits my

dome that I again am right at home. If I should stand a lengthy

spell in front of that first-class hotel, that to the drummers

loves to cater, across from some big film theayter; if I should

look around and buzz, and wonder in what town I was, I swear that I

could never tell! For all the crowd would be so swell, in just the

same fine sort of jeans they wear at home, and all the queens with

spiffy bonnets on their beans, and all the fellows standing round

a-talkin’ always, I’ll be bound, the same good jolly kind of guff,

’bout autos, politics and stuff and baseball players of renown that

Nice Guys talk in my home town!_

_Then when I entered that hotel, I’d look around and say, “Well,

well!” For there would be the same news-stand, same_ _magazines

and candies grand, same smokes of famous standard brand, I’d find

at home, I’ll tell! And when I saw the jolly bunch come waltzing in

for eats at lunch, and squaring up in natty duds to platters large

of French Fried spuds, why then I’d stand right up and bawl, “I’ve

never left my home at all!” And all replete I’d sit me down beside

some guy in derby brown upon a lobby chair of plush, and murmur to

him in a rush, “Hello, Bill, tell me, good old scout, how is your

stock a-holdin’ out?” Then we’d be off, two solid pals,

a-chatterin’ like giddy gals of flivvers, weather, home, and wives,

lodge-brothers then for all our lives! So when Sam Satan makes you

blue, good friend, that’s what I’d up and do, for in these States

where’er you roam, you never leave your home sweet home._

“‘Yes, sir, these other burgs are our true partners in the great game of

vital living. But let’s not have any mistake about this. I claim that

Zenith is the best partner and the fastest-growing partner of the whole

caboodle. I trust I may be pardoned if I give a few statistics to back

up my claims. If they are old stuff to any of you, yet the tidings of

prosperity, like the good news of the Bible, never become tedious to the

ears of a real hustler, no matter how oft the sweet story is told! Every

intelligent person knows that Zenith manufactures more condensed milk

and evaporated cream, more paper boxes, and more lighting-fixtures, than

any other city in the United States, if not in the world. But it is not

so universally known that we also stand second in the manufacture of

package-butter, sixth in the giant realm of motors and automobiles, and

somewhere about third in cheese, leather findings, tar roofing,

breakfast food, and overalls!

“‘Our greatness, however, lies not alone in punchful prosperity but

equally in that public spirit, that forward-looking idealism and

brotherhood, which has marked Zenith ever since its foundation by the

Fathers. We have a right, indeed we have a duty toward our fair city, to

announce broadcast the facts about our high schools, characterized by

their complete plants and the finest school-ventilating systems in the

country, bar none; our magnificent new hotels and banks and the

paintings and carved marble in their lobbies; and the Second National

Tower, the second highest business building in any inland city in the

entire country. When I add that we have an unparalleled number of miles

of paved streets, bathrooms, vacuum cleaners, and all the other signs of

civilization; that our library and art museum are well supported and

housed in convenient and roomy buildings; that our park-system is more

than up to par, with its handsome driveways adorned with grass, shrubs,

and statuary, then I give but a hint of the all-round unlimited

greatness of Zenith!

“‘I believe, however, in keeping the best to the last. When I remind you

that we have one motor car for every five and seven-eighths persons in

the city, then I give a rock-ribbed practical indication of the kind of

progress and braininess which is synonymous with the name Zenith!

“‘But the way of the righteous is not all roses. Before I close I must

call your attention to a problem we have to face, this coming year. The

worst menace to sound government is not the avowed socialists but a lot

of cowards who work under cover--the long-haired gentry who call

themselves “liberals” and “radicals” and “non-partisan” and

“intelligentsia” and God only knows how many other trick names!

Irresponsible teachers and professors constitute the worst of this whole

gang, and I am ashamed to say that several of them are on the faculty of

our great State University! The U. is my own Alma Mater, and I am proud

to be known as an alumni, but there are certain instructors there who

seem to think we ought to turn the conduct of the nation over to hoboes

and roustabouts.

“‘Those profs are the snakes to be scotched--they and all their

milk-and-water ilk! The American business man is generous to a fault,

but one thing he does demand of all teachers and lecturers and

journalists: if we’re going to pay them our good money, they’ve got to

help us by selling efficiency and whooping it up for rational

prosperity! And when it comes to these blab-mouth, fault-finding,

pessimistic, cynical University teachers, let me tell you that during

this golden coming year it’s just as much our duty to bring influence to

have those cusses fired as it is to sell all the real estate and gather

in all the good shekels we can.

“‘Not till that is done will our sons and daughters see that the ideal

of American manhood and culture isn’t a lot of cranks sitting around

chewing the rag about their Rights and their Wrongs, but a God-fearing,

hustling, successful, two-fisted Regular Guy, who belongs to some church

with pep and piety to it, who belongs to the Boosters or the Rotarians

or the Kiwanis, to the Elks or Moose or Red Men or Knights of Columbus

or any one of a score of organizations of good, jolly, kidding,

laughing, sweating, upstanding, lend-a-handing Royal Good Fellows, who

plays hard and works hard, and whose answer to his critics is a

square-toed boot that’ll teach the grouches and smart alecks to respect

the He-man and get out and root for Uncle Samuel, U.S.A.!’”

IV

Babbitt promised to become a recognized orator. He entertained a Smoker

of the Men’s Club of the Chatham Road Presbyterian Church with Irish,

Jewish, and Chinese dialect stories.

But in nothing was he more clearly revealed as the Prominent Citizen

than in his lecture on “Brass Tacks Facts on Real Estate,” as delivered

before the class in Sales Methods at the Zenith Y.M.C.A.

The _Advocate-Times_ reported the lecture so fully that Vergil Gunch

said to Babbitt, “You’re getting to be one of the classiest spellbinders

in town. Seems ’s if I couldn’t pick up a paper without reading about

your well-known eloquence. All this guff ought to bring a lot of

business into your office. Good work! Keep it up!”

“Go on, quit your kidding,” said Babbitt feebly, but at this tribute

from Gunch, himself a man of no mean oratorical fame, he expanded with

delight and wondered how, before his vacation, he could have questioned

the joys of being a solid citizen.

CHAPTER XV

I

His march to greatness was not without disastrous stumbling.

Fame did not bring the social advancement which the Babbitts deserved.

They were not asked to join the Tonawanda Country Club nor invited to

the dances at the Union. Himself, Babbitt fretted, he didn’t “care a fat

hoot for all these highrollers, but the wife would kind of like to be

Among Those Present.” He nervously awaited his university class-dinner

and an evening of furious intimacy with such social leaders as Charles

McKelvey the millionaire contractor, Max Kruger the banker, Irving Tate

the tool-manufacturer, and Adelbert Dobson the fashionable interior

decorator. Theoretically he was their friend, as he had been in college,

and when he encountered them they still called him “Georgie,” but he

didn’t seem to encounter them often, and they never invited him to

dinner (with champagne and a butler) at their houses on Royal Ridge.

All the week before the class-dinner he thought of them. “No reason why

we shouldn’t become real chummy now!”

II

Like all true American diversions and spiritual outpourings, the dinner

of the men of the Class of 1896 was thoroughly organized. The

dinner-committee hammered like a sales-corporation. Once a week they

sent out reminders:

TICKLER NO. 3

Old man, are you going to be with us at the livest Friendship Feed

the alumni of the good old U have ever known? The alumnæ of ’08

turned out 60% strong. Are we boys going to be beaten by a bunch of

skirts? Come on, fellows, let’s work up some real genuine

enthusiasm and all boost together for the snappiest dinner yet!

Elegant eats, short ginger-talks, and memories shared together of

the brightest, gladdest days of life.

The dinner was held in a private room at the Union Club. The club was a

dingy building, three pretentious old dwellings knocked together, and

the entrance-hall resembled a potato cellar, yet the Babbitt who was

free of the magnificence of the Athletic Club entered with

embarrassment. He nodded to the doorman, an ancient proud negro with

brass buttons and a blue tail-coat, and paraded through the hall, trying

to look like a member.

Sixty men had come to the dinner. They made islands and eddies in the

hall; they packed the elevator and the corners of the private

dining-room. They tried to be intimate and enthusiastic. They appeared

to one another exactly as they had in college--as raw youngsters whose

present mustaches, baldnesses, paunches, and wrinkles were but jovial

disguises put on for the evening. “You haven’t changed a particle!” they

marveled. The men whom they could not recall they addressed, “Well,

well, great to see you again, old man. What are you-- Still doing the

same thing?”

Some one was always starting a cheer or a college song, and it was

always thinning into silence. Despite their resolution to be democratic

they divided into two sets: the men with dress-clothes and the men

without. Babbitt (extremely in dress-clothes) went from one group to the

other. Though he was, almost frankly, out for social conquest, he sought

Paul Riesling first. He found him alone, neat and silent.

Paul sighed, “I’m no good at this handshaking and ‘well, look who’s

here’ bunk.”

“Rats now, Paulibus, loosen up and be a mixer! Finest bunch of boys on

earth! Say, you seem kind of glum. What’s matter?”

“Oh, the usual. Run-in with Zilla.”

“Come on! Let’s wade in and forget our troubles.”

He kept Paul beside him, but worked toward the spot where Charles

McKelvey stood warming his admirers like a furnace.

McKelvey had been the hero of the Class of ’96; not only football

captain and hammer-thrower but debater, and passable in what the State

University considered scholarship. He had gone on, had captured the

construction-company once owned by the Dodsworths, best-known pioneer

family of Zenith. He built state capitols, skyscrapers, railway

terminals. He was a heavy-shouldered, big-chested man, but not sluggish.

There was a quiet humor in his eyes, a syrup-smooth quickness in his

speech, which intimidated politicians and warned reporters; and in his

presence the most intelligent scientist or the most sensitive artist

felt thin-blooded, unworldly, and a little shabby. He was, particularly

when he was influencing legislatures or hiring labor-spies, very easy

and lovable and gorgeous. He was baronial; he was a peer in the rapidly

crystallizing American aristocracy, inferior only to the haughty Old

Families. (In Zenith, an Old Family is one which came to town before

1840.) His power was the greater because he was not hindered by

scruples, by either the vice or the virtue of the older Puritan

tradition.

McKelvey was being placidly merry now with the great, the manufacturers

and bankers, the land-owners and lawyers and surgeons who had chauffeurs

and went to Europe. Babbitt squeezed among them. He liked McKelvey’s

smile as much as the social advancement to be had from his favor. If in

Paul’s company he felt ponderous and protective, with McKelvey he felt

slight and adoring.

He heard McKelvey say to Max Kruger, the banker, “Yes, we’ll put up Sir

Gerald Doak.” Babbitt’s democratic love for titles became a rich relish.

“You know, he’s one of the biggest iron-men in England, Max. Horribly

well-off.... Why, hello, old Georgie! Say, Max, George Babbitt is

getting fatter than I am!”

The chairman shouted, “Take your seats, fellows!”

“Shall we make a move, Charley?” Babbitt said casually to McKelvey.

“Right. Hello, Paul! How’s the old fiddler? Planning to sit anywhere

special, George? Come on, let’s grab some seats. Come on, Max. Georgie,

I read about your speeches in the campaign. Bully work!”

After that, Babbitt would have followed him through fire. He was

enormously busy during the dinner, now bumblingly cheering Paul, now

approaching McKelvey with “Hear, you’re going to build some piers in

Brooklyn,” now noting how enviously the failures of the class, sitting

by themselves in a weedy group, looked up to him in his association with

the nobility, now warming himself in the Society Talk of McKelvey and

Max Kruger. They spoke of a “jungle dance” for which Mona Dodsworth had

decorated her house with thousands of orchids. They spoke, with an

excellent imitation of casualness, of a dinner in Washington at which

McKelvey had met a Senator, a Balkan princess, and an English

major-general. McKelvey called the princess “Jenny,” and let it be known

that he had danced with her.

Babbitt was thrilled, but not so weighted with awe as to be silent. If

he was not invited by them to dinner, he was yet accustomed to talking

with bank-presidents, congressmen, and clubwomen who entertained poets.

He was bright and referential with McKelvey:

“Say, Charley, juh remember in Junior year how we chartered a sea-going

hack and chased down to Riverdale, to the big show Madame Brown used to

put on? Remember how you beat up that hick constabule that tried to run

us in, and we pinched the pants-pressing sign and took and hung it on

Prof. Morrison’s door? Oh, gosh, those were the days!”

Those, McKelvey agreed, were the days.

Babbitt had reached “It isn’t the books you study in college but the

friendships you make that counts” when the men at head of the table

broke into song. He attacked McKelvey:

“It’s a shame, uh, shame to drift apart because our, uh, business

activities lie in different fields. I’ve enjoyed talking over the good

old days. You and Mrs. McKelvey must come to dinner some night.”

Vaguely, “Yes, indeed--”

“Like to talk to you about the growth of real estate out beyond your

Grantsville warehouse. I might be able to tip you off to a thing or two,

possibly.”

“Splendid! We must have dinner together, Georgie. Just let me know. And

it will be a great pleasure to have your wife and you at the house,”

said McKelvey, much less vaguely.

Then the chairman’s voice, that prodigious voice which once had roused

them to cheer defiance at rooters from Ohio or Michigan or Indiana,

whooped, “Come on, you wombats! All together in the long yell!” Babbitt

felt that life would never be sweeter than now, when he joined with Paul

Riesling and the newly recovered hero, McKelvey, in:

Baaaaaattle-ax

Get an ax,

Bal-ax,

Get-nax,

Who, who? The U.!

Hooroo!

III

The Babbitts invited the McKelveys to dinner, in early December, and the

McKelveys not only accepted but, after changing the date once or twice,

actually came.

The Babbitts somewhat thoroughly discussed the details of the dinner,

from the purchase of a bottle of champagne to the number of salted

almonds to be placed before each person. Especially did they mention the

matter of the other guests. To the last Babbitt held out for giving Paul

Riesling the benefit of being with the McKelveys. “Good old Charley

would like Paul and Verg Gunch better than some highfalutin’ Willy boy,”

he insisted, but Mrs. Babbitt interrupted his observations with,

“Yes--perhaps-- I think I’ll try to get some Lynnhaven oysters,” and when

she was quite ready she invited Dr. J. T. Angus, the oculist, and a

dismally respectable lawyer named Maxwell, with their glittering wives.

Neither Angus nor Maxwell belonged to the Elks or to the Athletic Club;

neither of them had ever called Babbitt “brother” or asked his opinions

on carburetors. The only “human people” whom she invited, Babbitt raged,

were the Littlefields; and Howard Littlefield at times became so

statistical that Babbitt longed for the refreshment of Gunch’s, “Well,

old lemon-pie-face, what’s the good word?”

Immediately after lunch Mrs. Babbitt began to set the table for the

seven-thirty dinner to the McKelveys, and Babbitt was, by order, home at

four. But they didn’t find anything for him to do, and three times Mrs.

Babbitt scolded, “Do please try to keep out of the way!” He stood in the

door of the garage, his lips drooping, and wished that Littlefield or

Sam Doppelbrau or somebody would come along and talk to him. He saw Ted

sneaking about the corner of the house.

“What’s the matter, old man?” said Babbitt.

“Is that you, thin, owld one? Gee, Ma certainly is on the warpath! I

told her Rone and I would jus’ soon not be let in on the fiesta

to-night, and she bit me. She says I got to take a bath, too. But, say,

the Babbitt men will be some lookers to-night! Little Theodore in a

dress-suit!”

“The Babbitt men!” Babbitt liked the sound of it. He put his arm about

the boy’s shoulder. He wished that Paul Riesling had a daughter, so that

Ted might marry her. “Yes, your mother is kind of rouncing round, all

right,” he said, and they laughed together, and sighed together, and

dutifully went in to dress.

The McKelveys were less than fifteen minutes late.

Babbitt hoped that the Doppelbraus would see the McKelveys’ limousine,

and their uniformed chauffeur, waiting in front.

The dinner was well cooked and incredibly plentiful, and Mrs. Babbitt

had brought out her grandmother’s silver candlesticks. Babbitt worked

hard. He was good. He told none of the jokes he wanted to tell. He

listened to the others. He started Maxwell off with a resounding, “Let’s

hear about your trip to the Yellowstone.” He was laudatory, extremely

laudatory. He found opportunities to remark that Dr. Angus was a

benefactor to humanity, Maxwell and Howard Littlefield profound

scholars, Charles McKelvey an inspiration to ambitious youth, and Mrs.

McKelvey an adornment to the social circles of Zenith, Washington, New

York, Paris, and numbers of other places.

But he could not stir them. It was a dinner without a soul. For no

reason that was clear to Babbitt, heaviness was over them and they spoke

laboriously and unwillingly.

He concentrated on Lucile McKelvey, carefully not looking at her

blanched lovely shoulder and the tawny silken band which supported her

frock.

“I suppose you’ll be going to Europe pretty soon again, won’t you?” he

invited.

“I’d like awfully to run over to Rome for a few weeks.”

“I suppose you see a lot of pictures and music and curios and everything

there.”

“No, what I really go for is: there’s a little _trattoria_ on the Via

della Scrofa where you get the best _fettuccine_ in the world.”

“Oh, I-- Yes. That must be nice to try that. Yes.”

At a quarter to ten McKelvey discovered with profound regret that his

wife had a headache. He said blithely, as Babbitt helped him with his

coat, “We must lunch together some time and talk over the old days.”

When the others had labored out, at half-past ten, Babbitt turned to his

wife, pleading, “Charley said he had a corking time and we must

lunch--said they wanted to have us up to the house for dinner before

long.”

She achieved, “Oh, it’s just been one of those quiet evenings that are

often so much more enjoyable than noisy parties where everybody talks at

once and doesn’t really settle down to--nice quiet enjoyment.”

But from his cot on the sleeping-porch he heard her weeping, slowly,

without hope.

IV

For a month they watched the social columns, and waited for a return

dinner-invitation.

As the hosts of Sir Gerald Doak, the McKelveys were headlined all the

week after the Babbitts’ dinner. Zenith ardently received Sir Gerald

(who had come to America to buy coal). The newspapers interviewed him on

prohibition, Ireland, unemployment, naval aviation, the rate of

exchange, tea-drinking _versus_ whisky-drinking, the psychology of

American women, and daily life as lived by English county families. Sir

Gerald seemed to have heard of all those topics. The McKelveys gave him

a Singhalese dinner, and Miss Elnora Pearl Bates, society editor of the

_Advocate-Times_, rose to her highest larknote. Babbitt read aloud at

breakfast-table:

’Twixt the original and Oriental decorations, the strange and

delicious food, and the personalities both of the distinguished

guests, the charming hostess and the noted host, never has Zenith

seen a more recherche affair than the Ceylon dinner-dance given

last evening by Mr. and Mrs. Charles McKelvey to Sir Gerald Doak.

Methought as we--fortunate one!--were privileged to view that fairy

and foreign scene, nothing at Monte Carlo or the choicest

ambassadorial sets of foreign capitals could be more lovely. It is

not for nothing that Zenith is in matters social rapidly becoming

known as the choosiest inland city in the country.

Though he is too modest to admit it, Lord Doak gives a cachet to

our smart quartier such as it has not received since the

ever-memorable visit of the Earl of Sittingbourne. Not only is he

of the British peerage, but he is also, on dit, a leader of the

British metal industries. As he comes from Nottingham, a favorite

haunt of Robin Hood, though now, we are informed by Lord Doak, a

live modern city of 275,573 inhabitants, and important lace as well

as other industries, we like to think that perhaps through his

veins runs some of the blood, both virile red and bonny blue, of

that earlier lord o’ the good greenwood, the roguish Robin.

The lovely Mrs. McKelvey never was more fascinating than last

evening in her black net gown relieved by dainty bands of silver

and at her exquisite waist a glowing cluster of Aaron Ward roses.

Babbitt said bravely, “I hope they don’t invite us to meet this Lord

Doak guy. Darn sight rather just have a nice quiet little dinner with

Charley and the Missus.”

At the Zenith Athletic Club they discussed it amply. “I s’pose we’ll

have to call McKelvey ‘Lord Chaz’ from now on,” said Sidney Finkelstein.

“It beats all get-out,” meditated that man of data, Howard Littlefield,

“how hard it is for some people to get things straight. Here they call

this fellow ‘Lord Doak’ when it ought to be ‘Sir Gerald.’”

Babbitt marvelled, “Is that a fact! Well, well! ‘Sir Gerald,’ eh? That’s

what you call um, eh? Well, sir, I’m glad to know that.”

Later he informed his salesmen, “It’s funnier ’n a goat the way some

folks that, just because they happen to lay up a big wad, go

entertaining famous foreigners, don’t have any more idea ’n a rabbit how

to address ’em so’s to make ’em feel at home!”

That evening, as he was driving home, he passed McKelvey’s limousine and

saw Sir Gerald, a large, ruddy, pop-eyed, Teutonic Englishman whose

dribble of yellow mustache gave him an aspect sad and doubtful. Babbitt

drove on slowly, oppressed by futility. He had a sudden, unexplained,

and horrible conviction that the McKelveys were laughing at him.

He betrayed his depression by the violence with which he informed his

wife, “Folks that really tend to business haven’t got the time to waste

on a bunch like the McKelveys. This society stuff is like any other

hobby; if you devote yourself to it, you get on. But I like to have a

chance to visit with you and the children instead of all this idiotic

chasing round.”

They did not speak of the McKelveys again.

V

It was a shame, at this worried time, to have to think about the

Overbrooks.

Ed Overbrook was a classmate of Babbitt who had been a failure. He had a

large family and a feeble insurance business out in the suburb of

Dorchester. He was gray and thin and unimportant. He had always been

gray and thin and unimportant. He was the person whom, in any group, you

forgot to introduce, then introduced with extra enthusiasm. He had

admired Babbitt’s good-fellowship in college, had admired ever since his

power in real estate, his beautiful house and wonderful clothes. It

pleased Babbitt, though it bothered him with a sense of responsibility.

At the class-dinner he had seen poor Overbrook, in a shiny blue serge

business-suit, being diffident in a corner with three other failures. He

had gone over and been cordial: “Why, hello, young Ed! I hear you’re

writing all the insurance in Dorchester now. Bully work!”

They recalled the good old days when Overbrook used to write poetry.

Overbrook embarrassed him by blurting, “Say, Georgie, I hate to think of

how we been drifting apart. I wish you and Mrs. Babbitt would come to

dinner some night.”

Babbitt boomed, “Fine! Sure! Just let me know. And the wife and I want

to have you at the house.” He forgot it, but unfortunately Ed Overbrook

did not. Repeatedly he telephoned to Babbitt, inviting him to dinner.

“Might as well go and get it over,” Babbitt groaned to his wife. “But

don’t it simply amaze you the way the poor fish doesn’t know the first

thing about social etiquette? Think of him ’phoning me, instead of his

wife sitting down and writing us a regular bid! Well, I guess we’re

stuck for it. That’s the trouble with all this class-brother

hooptedoodle.”

He accepted Overbrook’s next plaintive invitation, for an evening two

weeks off. A dinner two weeks off, even a family dinner, never seems so

appalling, till the two weeks have astoundingly disappeared and one

comes dismayed to the ambushed hour. They had to change the date,

because of their own dinner to the McKelveys, but at last they gloomily

drove out to the Overbrooks’ house in Dorchester.

It was miserable from the beginning. The Overbrooks had dinner at

six-thirty, while the Babbitts never dined before seven. Babbitt

permitted himself to be ten minutes late. “Let’s make it as short as

possible. I think we’ll duck out quick. I’ll say I have to be at the

office extra early to-morrow,” he planned.

The Overbrook house was depressing. It was the second story of a wooden

two-family dwelling; a place of baby-carriages, old hats hung in the

hall, cabbage-smell, and a Family Bible on the parlor table. Ed

Overbrook and his wife were as awkward and threadbare as usual, and the

other guests were two dreadful families whose names Babbitt never caught

and never desired to catch. But he was touched, and disconcerted, by the

tactless way in which Overbrook praised him: “We’re mighty proud to have

old George here to-night! Of course you’ve all read about his speeches

and oratory in the papers--and the boy’s good-looking, too, eh?--but

what I always think of is back in college, and what a great old mixer

he was, and one of the best swimmers in the class.”

Babbitt tried to be jovial; he worked at it; but he could find nothing

to interest him in Overbrook’s timorousness, the blankness of the other

guests, or the drained stupidity of Mrs. Overbrook, with her spectacles,

drab skin, and tight-drawn hair. He told his best Irish story, but it

sank like soggy cake. Most bleary moment of all was when Mrs. Overbrook,

peering out of her fog of nursing eight children and cooking and

scrubbing, tried to be conversational.

“I suppose you go to Chicago and New York right along, Mr. Babbitt,” she

prodded.

“Well, I get to Chicago fairly often.”

“It must be awfully interesting. I suppose you take in all the

theaters.”

“Well, to tell the truth, Mrs. Overbrook, thing that hits me best is a

great big beefsteak at a Dutch restaurant in the Loop!”

They had nothing more to say. Babbitt was sorry, but there was no hope;

the dinner was a failure. At ten, rousing out of the stupor of

meaningless talk, he said as cheerily as he could, “’Fraid we got to be

starting, Ed. I’ve got a fellow coming to see me early to-morrow.” As

Overbrook helped him with his coat, Babbitt said, “Nice to rub up on the

old days! We must have lunch together, P.D.Q.”

Mrs. Babbitt sighed, on their drive home, “It was pretty terrible. But

how Mr. Overbrook does admire you!”

“Yep. Poor cuss! Seems to think I’m a little tin archangel, and the

best-looking man in Zenith.”

“Well, you’re certainly not that but-- Oh, Georgie, you don’t suppose we

have to invite them to dinner at our house now, do we?”

“Ouch! Gaw, I hope not!”

“See here, now, George! You didn’t say anything about it to Mr.

Overbrook, did you?”

“No! Gee! No! Honest, I didn’t! Just made a bluff about having him to

lunch some time.”

“Well.... Oh, dear.... I don’t want to hurt their feelings. But I don’t

see how I could stand another evening like this one. And suppose

somebody like Dr. and Mrs. Angus came in when we had the Overbrooks

there, and thought they were friends of ours!”

For a week they worried, “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

I

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 Geheimräte 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 café. 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. Drew chanted,

“when, though stormy the sky and laborious the path to the drudging

wayfarer, yet the hovering and bodiless spirit swoops back o’er all the

labors and desires of the past twelve months, oh, then it seems to me

there sounds behind all our apparent failures the golden chorus of

greeting from those passed happily on; and lo! on the dim horizon we see

behind dolorous clouds the mighty mass of mountains--mountains of

melody, mountains of mirth, mountains of might!”

“I certainly do like a sermon with culture and thought in it,” meditated

Babbitt.

At the end of the service he was delighted when the pastor, actively

shaking hands at the door, twittered, “Oh, Brother Babbitt, can you wait

a jiffy? Want your advice.”

“Sure, doctor! You bet!”

“Drop into my office. I think you’ll like the cigars there.” Babbitt did

like the cigars. He also liked the office, which was distinguished from

other offices only by the spirited change of the familiar wall-placard

to “This is the Lord’s Busy Day.” Chum Frink came in, then William W.

Eathorne.

Mr. Eathorne was the seventy-year-old president of the First State Bank

of Zenith. He still wore the delicate patches of side-whiskers which had

been the uniform of bankers in 1870. If Babbitt was envious of the Smart

Set of the McKelveys, before William Washington Eathorne he was

reverent. Mr. Eathorne had nothing to do with the Smart Set. He was

above it. He was the great-grandson of one of the five men who founded

Zenith, in 1792, and he was of the third generation of bankers. He could

examine credits, make loans, promote or injure a man’s business. In his

presence Babbitt breathed quickly and felt young.

The Reverend Dr. Drew bounced into the room and flowered into speech:

“I’ve asked you gentlemen to stay so I can put a proposition before you.

The Sunday School needs bucking up. It’s the fourth largest in Zenith,

but there’s no reason why we should take anybody’s dust. We ought to be

first. I want to request you, if you will, to form a committee of advice

and publicity for the Sunday School; look it over and make any

suggestions for its betterment, and then, perhaps, see that the press

gives us some attention--give the public some really helpful and

constructive news instead of all these murders and divorces.”

“Excellent,” said the banker.

Babbitt and Frink were enchanted to join him.

III

If you had asked Babbitt what his religion was, he would have answered

in sonorous Boosters’-Club rhetoric, “My religion is to serve my fellow

men, to honor my brother as myself, and to do my bit to make life

happier for one and all.” If you had pressed him for more detail, he

would have announced, “I’m a member of the Presbyterian Church, and

naturally, I accept its doctrines.” If you had been so brutal as to go

on, he would have protested, “There’s no use discussing and arguing

about religion; it just stirs up bad feeling.”

Actually, the content of his theology was that there was a supreme being

who had tried to make us perfect, but presumably had failed; that if one

was a Good Man he would go to a place called Heaven (Babbitt

unconsciously pictured it as rather like an excellent hotel with a

private garden), but if one was a Bad Man, that is, if he murdered or

committed burglary or used cocaine or had mistresses or sold

non-existent real estate, he would be punished. Babbitt was uncertain,

however, about what he called “this business of Hell.” He explained to

Ted, “Of course I’m pretty liberal; I don’t exactly believe in a

fire-and-brimstone Hell. Stands to reason, though, that a fellow can’t

get away with all sorts of Vice and not get nicked for it, see how I

mean?”

Upon this theology he rarely pondered. The kernel of his practical

religion was that it was respectable, and beneficial to one’s business,

to be seen going to services; that the church kept the Worst Elements

from being still worse; and that the pastor’s sermons, however dull they

might seem at the time of taking, yet had a voodooistic power which “did

a fellow good--kept him in touch with Higher Things.”

His first investigations for the Sunday School Advisory Committee did

not inspire him.

He liked the Busy Folks’ Bible Class, composed of mature men and women

and addressed by the old-school physician, Dr. T. Atkins Jordan, in a

sparkling style comparable to that of the more refined humorous

after-dinner speakers, but when he went down to the junior classes he

was disconcerted. He heard Sheldon Smeeth, educational director of the

Y.M.C.A. and leader of the church-choir, a pale but strenuous young man

with curly hair and a smile, teaching a class of sixteen-year-old boys.

Smeeth lovingly admonished them, “Now, fellows, I’m going to have a

Heart to Heart Talk Evening at my house next Thursday. We’ll get off by

ourselves and be frank about our Secret Worries. You can just tell old

Sheldy anything, like all the fellows do at the Y. I’m going to explain

frankly about the horrible practises a kiddy falls into unless he’s

guided by a Big Brother, and about the perils and glory of Sex.” Old

Sheldy beamed damply; the boys looked ashamed; and Babbitt didn’t know

which way to turn his embarrassed eyes.

Less annoying but also much duller were the minor classes which were

being instructed in philosophy and Oriental ethnology by earnest

spinsters. Most of them met in the highly varnished Sunday School room,

but there was an overflow to the basement, which was decorated with

varicose water-pipes and lighted by small windows high up in the oozing

wall. What Babbitt saw, however, was the First Congregational Church of

Catawba. He was back in the Sunday School of his boyhood. He smelled

again that polite stuffiness to be found only in church parlors; he

recalled the case of drab Sunday School books: “Hetty, a Humble Heroine”

and “Josephus, a Lad of Palestine;” he thumbed once more the

high-colored text-cards which no boy wanted but no boy liked to throw

away, because they were somehow sacred; he was tortured by the stumbling

rote of thirty-five years ago, as in the vast Zenith church he listened

to:

“Now, Edgar, you read the next verse. What does it mean when it says

it’s easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye? What does this

teach us? Clarence! Please don’t wiggle so! If you had studied your

lesson you wouldn’t be so fidgety. Now, Earl, what is the lesson Jesus

was trying to teach his disciples? The one thing I want you to

especially remember, boys, is the words, ‘With God all things are

possible.’ Just think of that always--Clarence, _please_ pay

attention--just say ‘With God all things are possible’ whenever you feel

discouraged, and, Alec, will you read the next verse; if you’d pay

attention you wouldn’t lose your place!”

Drone--drone--drone--gigantic bees that boomed in a cavern of

drowsiness--

Babbitt started from his open-eyed nap, thanked the teacher for “the

privilege of listening to her splendid teaching,” and staggered on to

the next circle.

After two weeks of this he had no suggestions whatever for the Reverend

Dr. Drew.

Then he discovered a world of Sunday School journals, an enormous and

busy domain of weeklies and monthlies which were as technical, as

practical and forward-looking, as the real-estate columns or the

shoe-trade magazines. He bought half a dozen of them at a religious

book-shop and till after midnight he read them and admired.

He found many lucrative tips on “Focusing Appeals,” “Scouting for New

Members,” and “Getting Prospects to Sign up with the Sunday School.” He

particularly liked the word “prospects,” and he was moved by the rubric:

“The moral springs of the community’s life lie deep in its Sunday

Schools--its schools of religious instruction and inspiration. Neglect

now means loss of spiritual vigor and moral power in years to come....

Facts like the above, followed by a straight-arm appeal, will reach

folks who can never be laughed or jollied into doing their part.”

Babbitt admitted, “That’s so. I used to skin out of the ole Sunday

School at Catawba every chance I got, but same time, I wouldn’t be where

I am to-day, maybe, if it hadn’t been for its training in--in moral

power. And all about the Bible. Great literature. Have to read some of

it again, one of these days.”

How scientifically the Sunday School could be organized he learned from

an article in the _Westminster Adult Bible Class_:

“The second vice-president looks after the fellowship of the class. She

chooses a group to help her. These become ushers. Every one who comes

gets a glad hand. No one goes away a stranger. One member of the group

stands on the doorstep and invites passers-by to come in.”

Perhaps most of all Babbitt appreciated the remarks by William H.

Ridgway in the _Sunday School Times_:

“If you have a Sunday School class without any pep and get-up-and-go in

it, that is, without interest, that is uncertain in attendance, that

acts like a fellow with the spring fever, let old Dr. Ridgway write you

a prescription. Rx. Invite the Bunch for Supper.”

The Sunday School journals were as well rounded as they were practical.

They neglected none of the arts. As to music the _Sunday School Times_

advertised that C. Harold Lowden, “known to thousands through his sacred

compositions,” had written a new masterpiece, “entitled ‘Yearning for

You.’ The poem, by Harry D. Kerr, is one of the daintiest you could

imagine and the music is indescribably beautiful. Critics are agreed

that it will sweep the country. May be made into a charming sacred song

by substituting the hymn words, ‘I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say.’”

Even manual training was adequately considered. Babbitt noted an

ingenious way of illustrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ:

“Model for Pupils to Make. Tomb with Rolling Door.--Use a square covered

box turned upside down. Pull the cover forward a little to form a groove

at the bottom. Cut a square door, also cut a circle of cardboard to more

than cover the door. Cover the circular door and the tomb thickly with

stiff mixture of sand, flour and water and let it dry. It was the heavy

circular stone over the door the women found ‘rolled away’ on Easter

morning. This is the story we are to ‘Go--tell.’”

In their advertisements the Sunday School journals were thoroughly

efficient. Babbitt was interested in a preparation which “takes the

place of exercise for sedentary men by building up depleted nerve

tissue, nourishing the brain and the digestive system.” He was edified

to learn that the selling of Bibles was a hustling and strictly

competitive industry, and as an expert on hygiene he was pleased by the

Sanitary Communion Outfit Company’s announcement of “an improved and

satisfactory outfit throughout, including highly polished beautiful

mahogany tray. This tray eliminates all noise, is lighter and more

easily handled than others and is more in keeping with the furniture of

the church than a tray of any other material.”

IV

He dropped the pile of Sunday School journals.

He pondered, “Now, there’s a real he-world. Corking!

“Ashamed I haven’t sat in more. Fellow that’s an influence in the

community--shame if he doesn’t take part in a real virile hustling

religion. Sort of Christianity Incorporated, you might say.

“But with all reverence.

“Some folks might claim these Sunday School fans are undignified and

unspiritual and so on. Sure! Always some skunk to spring things like

that! Knocking and sneering and tearing-down--so much easier than

building up. But me, I certainly hand it to these magazines. They’ve

brought ole George F. Babbitt into camp, and that’s the answer to the

critics!

“The more manly and practical a fellow is, the more he ought to lead the

enterprising Christian life. Me for it! Cut out this carelessness and

boozing and-- Rone! Where the devil you been? This is a fine time o’

night to be coming in!”

CHAPTER XVII

I

There are but three or four old houses in Floral Heights, and in Floral

Heights an old house is one which was built before 1880. The largest of

these is the residence of William Washington Eathorne, president of the

First State Bank.

The Eathorne Mansion preserves the memory of the “nice parts” of Zenith

as they appeared from 1860 to 1900. It is a red brick immensity with

gray sandstone lintels and a roof of slate in courses of red, green, and

dyspeptic yellow. There are two anemic towers, one roofed with copper,

the other crowned with castiron ferns. The porch is like an open tomb;

it is supported by squat granite pillars above which hang frozen

cascades of brick. At one side of the house is a huge stained-glass

window in the shape of a keyhole.

But the house has an effect not at all humorous. It embodies the heavy

dignity of those Victorian financiers who ruled the generation between

the pioneers and the brisk “sales-engineers” and created a somber

oligarchy by gaining control of banks, mills, land, railroads, mines.

Out of the dozen contradictory Zeniths which together make up the true

and complete Zenith, none is so powerful and enduring yet none so

unfamiliar to the citizens as the small, still, dry, polite, cruel

Zenith of the William Eathornes; and for that tiny hierarchy the other

Zeniths unwittingly labor and insignificantly die.

Most of the castles of the testy Victorian tetrarchs are gone now or

decayed into boarding-houses, but the Eathorne Mansion remains virtuous

and aloof, reminiscent of London, Back Bay, Rittenhouse Square. Its

marble steps are scrubbed daily, the brass plate is reverently polished,

and the lace curtains are as prim and superior as William Washington

Eathorne himself.

With a certain awe Babbitt and Chum Frink called on Eathorne for a

meeting of the Sunday School Advisory Committee; with uneasy stillness

they followed a uniformed maid through catacombs of reception-rooms to

the library. It was as unmistakably the library of a solid old banker as

Eathorne’s side-whiskers were the side-whiskers of a solid old banker.

The books were most of them Standard Sets, with the correct and

traditional touch of dim blue, dim gold, and glossy calf-skin. The fire

was exactly correct and traditional; a small, quiet, steady fire,

reflected by polished fire-irons. The oak desk was dark and old and

altogether perfect; the chairs were gently supercilious.

Eathorne’s inquiries as to the healths of Mrs. Babbitt, Miss Babbitt,

and the Other Children were softly paternal, but Babbitt had nothing

with which to answer him. It was indecent to think of using the “How’s

tricks, ole socks?” which gratified Vergil Gunch and Frink and Howard

Littlefield--men who till now had seemed successful and urbane. Babbitt

and Frink sat politely, and politely did Eathorne observe, opening his

thin lips just wide enough to dismiss the words, “Gentlemen, before we

begin our conference--you may have felt the cold in coming here--so good

of you to save an old man the journey--shall we perhaps have a whisky

toddy?”

So well trained was Babbitt in all the conversation that befits a Good

Fellow that he almost disgraced himself with “Rather than make trouble,

and always providin’ there ain’t any enforcement officers hiding in the

waste-basket--” The words died choking in his throat. He bowed in

flustered obedience. So did Chum Frink.

Eathorne rang for the maid.

The modern and luxurious Babbitt had never seen any one ring for a

servant in a private house, except during meals. Himself, in hotels, had

rung for bell-boys, but in the house you didn’t hurt Matilda’s

feelings; you went out in the hall and shouted for her. Nor had he,

since prohibition, known any one to be casual about drinking. It was

extraordinary merely to sip his toddy and not cry, “Oh, maaaaan, this

hits me right where I live!” And always, with the ecstasy of youth

meeting greatness, he marveled, “That little fuzzy-face there, why, he

could make me or break me! If he told my banker to call my loans--!

Gosh! That quarter-sized squirt! And looking like he hadn’t got a single

bit of hustle to him! I wonder-- Do we Boosters throw too many fits about

pep?”

From this thought he shuddered away, and listened devoutly to Eathorne’s

ideas on the advancement of the Sunday School, which were very clear and

very bad.

Diffidently Babbitt outlined his own suggestions:

“I think if you analyze the needs of the school, in fact, going right at

it as if it was a merchandizing problem, of course the one basic and

fundamental need is growth. I presume we’re all agreed we won’t be

satisfied till we build up the biggest darn Sunday School in the whole

state, so the Chatham Road Presbyterian won’t have to take anything off

anybody. Now about jazzing up the campaign for prospects: they’ve

already used contesting teams, and given prizes to the kids that bring

in the most members. And they made a mistake there: the prizes were a

lot of folderols and doodads like poetry books and illustrated

Testaments, instead of something a real live kid would want to work for,

like real cash or a speedometer for his motor cycle. Course I suppose

it’s all fine and dandy to illustrate the lessons with these decorated

book-marks and blackboard drawings and so on, but when it comes down to

real he-hustling, getting out and drumming up customers--or members, I

mean, why, you got to make it worth a fellow’s while.

“Now, I want to propose two stunts: First, divide the Sunday School into

four armies, depending on age. Everybody gets a military rank in his own

army according to how many members he brings in, and the duffers that

lie down on us and don’t bring in any, they remain privates. The pastor

and superintendent rank as generals. And everybody has got to give

salutes and all the rest of that junk, just like a regular army, to make

’em feel it’s worth while to get rank.

“Then, second: Course the school has its advertising committee, but,

Lord, nobody ever really works good--nobody works well just for the love

of it. The thing to do is to be practical and up-to-date, and hire a

real paid press-agent for the Sunday School--some newspaper fellow who

can give part of his time.”

“Sure, you bet!” said Chum Frink.

“Think of the nice juicy bits he could get in!” Babbitt crowed. “Not

only the big, salient, vital facts, about how fast the Sunday

School--and the collection--is growing, but a lot of humorous gossip and

kidding: about how some blowhard fell down on his pledge to get new

members, or the good time the Sacred Trinity class of girls had at their

wieniewurst party. And on the side, if he had time, the press-agent

might even boost the lessons themselves--do a little advertising for all

the Sunday Schools in town, in fact. No use being hoggish toward the

rest of ’em, providing we can keep the bulge on ’em in membership.

Frinstance, he might get the papers to-- Course I haven’t got a literary

training like Frink here, and I’m just guessing how the pieces ought to

be written, but take frinstance, suppose the week’s lesson is about

Jacob; well, the press-agent might get in something that would have a

fine moral, and yet with a trick headline that’d get folks to read

it--say like: _Jake Fools the Old Man; Makes Getaway with Girl and

Bankroll_. See how I mean? That’d get their interest! Now, course, Mr.

Eathorne, you’re conservative, and maybe you feel these stunts would be

undignified, but honestly, I believe they’d bring home the bacon.”

Eathorne folded his hands on his comfortable little belly and purred

like an aged pussy:

“May I say, first, that I have been very much pleased by your analysis

of the situation, Mr. Babbitt. As you surmise, it’s necessary in My

Position to be conservative, and perhaps endeavor to maintain a certain

standard of dignity. Yet I think you’ll find me somewhat progressive. In

our bank, for example, I hope I may say that we have as modern a method

of publicity and advertising as any in the city. Yes, I fancy you’ll

find us oldsters quite cognizant of the shifting spiritual values of the

age. Yes, oh yes. And so, in fact, it pleases me to be able to say that

though personally I might prefer the sterner Presbyterianism of an

earlier era--”

Babbitt finally gathered that Eathorne was willing.

Chum Frink suggested as part-time press-agent one Kenneth Escott,

reporter on the _Advocate-Times_.

They parted on a high plane of amity and Christian helpfulness.

Babbitt did not drive home, but toward the center of the city. He wished

to be by himself and exult over the beauty of intimacy with William

Washington Eathorne.

II

A snow-blanched evening of ringing pavements and eager lights.

Great golden lights of trolley-cars sliding along the packed snow of the

roadway. Demure lights of little houses. The belching glare of a distant

foundry, wiping out the sharp-edged stars. Lights of neighborhood drug

stores where friends gossiped, well pleased, after the day’s work.

The green light of a police-station, and greener radiance on the snow;

the drama of a patrol-wagon--gong beating like a terrified heart,

headlights scorching the crystal-sparkling street, driver not a

chauffeur but a policeman proud in uniform, another policeman perilously

dangling on the step at the back, and a glimpse of the prisoner. A

murderer, a burglar, a coiner cleverly trapped?

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.

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 tommyrot; 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.

IV

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!”

“Well, now Kenneth, I don’t think you ought to talk that way about the

doctor. A preacher has to watch his interests, hasn’t he? You remember

that in the Bible about--about being diligent in the Lord’s business, or

something?”

“All right, I’ll get something in if you want me to, Mr. Babbitt, but

I’ll have to wait till the managing editor is out of town, and then

blackjack the city editor.”

Thus it came to pass that in the Sunday _Advocate-Times_, under a

picture of Dr. Drew at his earnestest, with eyes alert, jaw as granite,

and rustic lock flamboyant, appeared an inscription--a wood-pulp tablet

conferring twenty-four hours’ immortality:

The Rev. Dr. John Jennison Drew, M.A., pastor of the beautiful

Chatham Road Presbyterian Church in lovely Floral Heights, is a

wizard soul-winner. He holds the local record for conversions.

During his shepherdhood an average of almost a hundred sin-weary

persons per year have declared their resolve to lead a new life and

have found a harbor of refuge and peace.

Everything zips at the Chatham Road Church. The subsidiary

organizations are keyed to the top-notch of efficiency. Dr. Drew is

especially keen on good congregational singing. Bright cheerful

hymns are used at every meeting, and the special Sing Services

attract lovers of music and professionals from all parts of the

city.

On the popular lecture platform as well as in the pulpit Dr. Drew

is a renowned word-painter, and during the course of the year he

receives literally scores of invitations to speak at varied

functions both here and elsewhere.

V

Babbitt let Dr. Drew know that he was responsible for this tribute. Dr.

Drew called him “brother,” and shook his hand a great many times.

During the meetings of the Advisory Committee, Babbitt had hinted that

he would be charmed to invite Eathorne to dinner, but Eathorne had

murmured, “So nice of you--old man, now--almost never go out.” Surely

Eathorne would not refuse his own pastor. Babbitt said boyishly to Drew:

“Say, doctor, now we’ve put this thing over, strikes me it’s up to the

dominie to blow the three of us to a dinner!”

“Bully! You bet! Delighted!” cried Dr. Drew, in his manliest way. (Some

one had once told him that he talked like the late President Roosevelt.)

“And, uh, say, doctor, be sure and get Mr. Eathorne to come. Insist on

it. It’s, uh-- I think he sticks around home too much for his own

health.”

Eathorne came.

It was a friendly dinner. Babbitt spoke gracefully of the stabilizing

and educational value of bankers to the community. They were, he said,

the pastors of the fold of commerce. For the first time Eathorne

departed from the topic of Sunday Schools, and asked Babbitt about the

progress of his business. Babbitt answered modestly, almost filially.

A few months later, when he had a chance to take part in the Street

Traction Company’s terminal deal, Babbitt did not care to go to his own

bank for a loan. It was rather a quiet sort of deal and, if it had come

out, the Public might not have understood. He went to his friend Mr.

Eathorne; he was welcomed, and received the loan as a private venture;

and they both profited in their pleasant new association.

After that, Babbitt went to church regularly, except on spring Sunday

mornings which were obviously meant for motoring. He announced to Ted,

“I tell you, boy, there’s no stronger bulwark of sound conservatism than

the evangelical church, and no better place to make friends who’ll help

you to gain your rightful place in the community than in your own

church-home!”

CHAPTER XVIII

I

Though he saw them twice daily, though he knew and amply discussed every

detail of their expenditures, yet for weeks together Babbitt was no more

conscious of his children than of the buttons on his coat-sleeves.

The admiration of Kenneth Escott made him aware of Verona.

She had become secretary to Mr. Gruensberg of the Gruensberg Leather

Company; she did her work with the thoroughness of a mind which reveres

details and never quite understands them; but she was one of the people

who give an agitating impression of being on the point of doing

something desperate--of leaving a job or a husband--without ever doing

it. Babbitt was so hopeful about Escott’s hesitant ardors that he became

the playful parent. When he returned from the Elks he peered coyly into

the living-room and gurgled, “Has our Kenny been here to-night?” He

never credited Verona’s protest, “Why, Ken and I are just good friends,

and we only talk about Ideas. I won’t have all this sentimental

nonsense, that would spoil everything.”

It was Ted who most worried Babbitt.

With conditions in Latin and English but with a triumphant record in

manual training, basket-ball, and the organization of dances, Ted was

struggling through his Senior year in the East Side High School. At home

he was interested only when he was asked to trace some subtle ill in the

ignition system of the car. He repeated to his tut-tutting father that

he did not wish to go to college or law-school, and Babbitt was equally

disturbed by this “shiftlessness” and by Ted’s relations with Eunice

Littlefield, next door.

Though she was the daughter of Howard Littlefield, that wrought-iron

fact-mill, that horse-faced priest of private ownership, Eunice was a

midge in the sun. She danced into the house, she flung herself into

Babbitt’s lap when he was reading, she crumpled his paper, and laughed

at him when he adequately explained that he hated a crumpled newspaper

as he hated a broken sales-contract. She was seventeen now. Her ambition

was to be a cinema actress. She did not merely attend the showing of

every “feature film;” she also read the motion-picture magazines, those

extraordinary symptoms of the Age of Pep--monthlies and weeklies

gorgeously illustrated with portraits of young women who had recently

been manicure girls, not very skilful manicure girls, and who, unless

their every grimace had been arranged by a director, could not have