Babbitt
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