Babbitt
country club as it was to wear a linen collar. Babbitt’s was the Outing
Golf and Country Club, a pleasant gray-shingled building with a broad
porch, on a daisy-starred cliff above Lake Kennepoose. There was
another, the Tonawanda Country Club, to which belonged Charles McKelvey,
Horace Updike, and the other rich men who lunched not at the Athletic
but at the Union Club. Babbitt explained with frequency, “You couldn’t
hire me to join the Tonawanda, even if I did have a hundred and eighty
bucks to throw away on the initiation fee. At the Outing we’ve got a
bunch of real human fellows, and the finest lot of little women in
town--just as good at joshing as the men--but at the Tonawanda there’s
nothing but these would-be’s in New York get-ups, drinking tea! Too much
dog altogether. Why, I wouldn’t join the Tonawanda even if they-- I
wouldn’t join it on a bet!”
When he had played four or five holes, he relaxed a bit, his
tobacco-fluttering heart beat more normally, and his voice slowed to the
drawling of his hundred generations of peasant ancestors.
IV
At least once a week Mr. and Mrs. Babbitt and Tinka went to the movies.
Their favorite motion-picture theater was the Château, which held three
thousand spectators and had an orchestra of fifty pieces which played
Arrangements from the Operas and suites portraying a Day on the Farm, or
a Four-alarm Fire. In the stone rotunda, decorated with
crown-embroidered velvet chairs and almost medieval tapestries,
parrakeets sat on gilded lotos columns.
With exclamations of “Well, by golly!” and “You got to go some to beat
this dump!” Babbitt admired the Château. As he stared across the
thousands of heads, a gray plain in the dimness, as he smelled good
clothes and mild perfume and chewing-gum, he felt as when he had first
seen a mountain and realized how very, very much earth and rock there
was in it.
He liked three kinds of films: pretty bathing girls with bare legs;
policemen or cowboys and an industrious shooting of revolvers; and funny
fat men who ate spaghetti. He chuckled with immense, moist-eyed
sentimentality at interludes portraying puppies, kittens, and chubby
babies; and he wept at deathbeds and old mothers being patient in
mortgaged cottages. Mrs. Babbitt preferred the pictures in which
handsome young women in elaborate frocks moved through sets ticketed as
the drawing-rooms of New York millionaires. As for Tinka, she preferred,
or was believed to prefer, whatever her parents told her to.
All his relaxations--baseball, golf, movies, bridge, motoring, long
talks with Paul at the Athletic Club, or at the Good Red Beef and Old
English Chop House--were necessary to Babbitt, for he was entering a
year of such activity as he had never known.
CHAPTER XIII
I
It was by accident that Babbitt had his opportunity to address the S. A.
R. E. B.
The S. A. R. E. B., as its members called it, with the universal passion
for mysterious and important-sounding initials, was the State
Association of Real Estate Boards; the organization of brokers and
operators. It was to hold its annual convention at Monarch, Zenith’s
chief rival among the cities of the state. Babbitt was an official
delegate; another was Cecil Rountree, whom Babbitt admired for his
picaresque speculative building, and hated for his social position, for
being present at the smartest dances on Royal Ridge. Rountree was
chairman of the convention program-committee.
Babbitt had growled to him, “Makes me tired the way these doctors and
profs and preachers put on lugs about being ‘professional men.’ A good
realtor has to have more knowledge and finesse than any of ’em.”
“Right you are! I say: Why don’t you put that into a paper, and give it
at the S. A. R. E. B.?” suggested Rountree.
“Well, if it would help you in making up the program-- Tell you: the way
I look at it is this: First place, we ought to insist that folks call us
‘realtors’ and not ‘real-estate men.’ Sounds more like a reg’lar
profession. Second place-- What is it distinguishes a profession from a
mere trade, business, or occupation? What is it? Why, it’s the public
service and the skill, the trained skill, and the knowledge and, uh, all
that, whereas a fellow that merely goes out for the jack, he never
considers the--public service and trained skill and so on. Now as a
professional--”
“Rather! That’s perfectly bully! Perfectly corking! Now you write it in
a paper,” said Rountree, as he rapidly and firmly moved away.
II
However accustomed to the literary labors of advertisements and
correspondence, Babbitt was dismayed on the evening when he sat down to
prepare a paper which would take a whole ten minutes to read.
He laid out a new fifteen-cent school exercise-book on his wife’s
collapsible sewing-table, set up for the event in the living-room. The
household had been bullied into silence; Verona and Ted requested to
disappear, and Tinka threatened with “If I hear one sound out of you--if
you holler for a glass of water one single solitary time-- You better
not, that’s all!” Mrs. Babbitt sat over by the piano, making a nightgown
and gazing with respect while Babbitt wrote in the exercise-book, to the
rhythmical wiggling and squeaking of the sewing-table.
When he rose, damp and jumpy, and his throat dusty from cigarettes, she
marveled, “I don’t see how you can just sit down and make up things
right out of your own head!”
“Oh, it’s the training in constructive imagination that a fellow gets in
modern business life.”
He had written seven pages, whereof the first page set forth:
The other six pages were rather like the first.
For a week he went about looking important. Every morning, as he
dressed, he thought aloud: “Jever stop to consider, Myra, that before a
town can have buildings or prosperity or any of those things, some
realtor has got to sell ’em the land? All civilization starts with him.
Jever realize that?” At the Athletic Club he led unwilling men aside to
inquire, “Say, if you had to read a paper before a big convention, would
you start in with the funny stories or just kind of scatter ’em all
through?” He asked Howard Littlefield for a “set of statistics about
real-estate sales; something good and impressive,” and Littlefield
provided something exceedingly good and impressive.
But it was to T. Cholmondeley Frink that Babbitt most often turned. He
caught Frink at the club every noon, and demanded, while Frink
looked hunted and evasive, “Say, Chum--you’re a shark on this
writing stuff--how would you put this sentence, see here in my
manuscript--manuscript--now where the deuce is that?--oh, yes, here.
Would you say ‘We ought not also to alone think?’ or ‘We ought also not
to think alone?’ or--”
One evening when his wife was away and he had no one to impress, Babbitt
forgot about Style, Order, and the other mysteries, and scrawled off
what he really thought about the real-estate business and about himself,
and he found the paper written. When he read it to his wife she yearned,
“Why, dear, it’s splendid; beautifully written, and so clear and
interesting, and such splendid ideas! Why, it’s just--it’s just
splendid!”
Next day he cornered Chum Frink and crowed, “Well, old son, I finished
it last evening! Just lammed it out! I used to think you writing-guys
must have a hard job making up pieces, but Lord, it’s a cinch. Pretty
soft for you fellows; you certainly earn your money easy! Some day when
I get ready to retire, guess I’ll take to writing and show you boys how
to do it. I always used to think I could write better stuff, and more
punch and originality, than all this stuff you see printed, and now I’m
doggone sure of it!”
He had four copies of the paper typed in black with a gorgeous red
title, had them bound in pale blue manilla, and affably presented one to
old Ira Runyon, the managing editor of the _Advocate-Times_, who said
yes, indeed yes, he was very glad to have it, and he certainly would
read it all through--as soon as he could find time.
Mrs. Babbitt could not go to Monarch. She had a women’s-club meeting.
Babbitt said that he was very sorry.
III
Besides the five official delegates to the convention--Babbitt,
Rountree, W. A. Rogers, Alvin Thayer, and Elbert Wing--there were fifty
unofficial delegates, most of them with their wives.
They met at the Union Station for the midnight train to Monarch. All of
them, save Cecil Rountree, who was such a snob that he never wore
badges, displayed celluloid buttons the size of dollars and lettered “We
zoom for Zenith.” The official delegates were magnificent with silver
and magenta ribbons. Martin Lumsen’s little boy Willy carried a tasseled
banner inscribed “Zenith the Zip City--Zeal, Zest and Zowie--1,000,000
in 1935.” As the delegates arrived, not in taxicabs but in the family
automobile driven by the oldest son or by Cousin Fred, they formed
impromptu processions through the station waiting-room.
It was a new and enormous waiting-room, with marble pilasters, and
frescoes depicting the exploration of the Chaloosa River Valley by Père
Emile Fauthoux in 1740. The benches were shelves of ponderous mahogany;
the news-stand a marble kiosk with a brass grill. Down the echoing
spaces of the hall the delegates paraded after Willy Lumsen’s banner,
the men waving their cigars, the women conscious of their new frocks
and strings of beads, all singing to the tune of Auld Lang Syne the
official City Song, written by Chum Frink:
Good old Zenith,
Our kin and kith,
Wherever we may be,
Hats in the ring,
We blithely sing
Of thy Prosperity.
Warren Whitby, the broker, who had a gift of verse for banquets and
birthdays, had added to Frink’s City Song a special verse for the
realtors’ convention:
Oh, here we come,
The fellows from
Zenith, the Zip Citee.
We wish to state
In real estate
There’s none so live as we.
Babbitt was stirred to hysteric patriotism. He leaped on a bench,
shouting to the crowd:
“What’s the matter with Zenith?”
“She’s all right!”
“What’s best ole town in the U. S. A.?”
“Zeeeeeen-ith!”
The patient poor people waiting for the midnight train stared in
unenvious wonder--Italian women with shawls, old weary men with broken
shoes, roving road-wise boys in suits which had been flashy when they
were new but which were faded now and wrinkled.
Babbitt perceived that as an official delegate he must be more
dignified. With Wing and Rogers he tramped up and down the cement
platform beside the waiting Pullmans. Motor-driven baggage-trucks and
red-capped porters carrying bags sped down the platform with an
agreeable effect of activity. Arc-lights glared and stammered overhead.
The glossy yellow sleeping-cars shone impressively. Babbitt made his
voice to be measured and lordly; he thrust out his abdomen and rumbled,
“We got to see to it that the convention lets the Legislature understand
just where they get off in this matter of taxing realty transfers.” Wing
uttered approving grunts and Babbitt swelled--gloated--
The blind of a Pullman compartment was raised, and Babbitt looked into
an unfamiliar world. The occupant of the compartment was Lucile
McKelvey, the pretty wife of the millionaire contractor. Possibly,
Babbitt thrilled, she was going to Europe! On the seat beside her was a
bunch of orchids and violets, and a yellow paper-bound book which seemed
foreign. While he stared, she picked up the book, then glanced out of
the window as though she was bored. She must have looked straight at
him, and he had met her, but she gave no sign. She languidly pulled down
the blind, and he stood still, a cold feeling of insignificance in his
heart.
But on the train his pride was restored by meeting delegates from