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Babbitt

by Sinclair Lewis · English · Gutenberg #1156 · 722,680 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Babbitt

Author: Sinclair Lewis


        
Release date: February 11, 2002 [eBook #1156]
                Most recently updated: March 14, 2025

Language: English

Original publication: Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc..

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1156

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 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 loo

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