Babbitt
milk-and-water ilk! The American business man is generous to a fault,
but one thing he does demand of all teachers and lecturers and
journalists: if we’re going to pay them our good money, they’ve got to
help us by selling efficiency and whooping it up for rational
prosperity! And when it comes to these blab-mouth, fault-finding,
pessimistic, cynical University teachers, let me tell you that during
this golden coming year it’s just as much our duty to bring influence to
have those cusses fired as it is to sell all the real estate and gather
in all the good shekels we can.
“‘Not till that is done will our sons and daughters see that the ideal
of American manhood and culture isn’t a lot of cranks sitting around
chewing the rag about their Rights and their Wrongs, but a God-fearing,
hustling, successful, two-fisted Regular Guy, who belongs to some church
with pep and piety to it, who belongs to the Boosters or the Rotarians
or the Kiwanis, to the Elks or Moose or Red Men or Knights of Columbus
or any one of a score of organizations of good, jolly, kidding,
laughing, sweating, upstanding, lend-a-handing Royal Good Fellows, who
plays hard and works hard, and whose answer to his critics is a
square-toed boot that’ll teach the grouches and smart alecks to respect
the He-man and get out and root for Uncle Samuel, U.S.A.!’”
IV
Babbitt promised to become a recognized orator. He entertained a Smoker
of the Men’s Club of the Chatham Road Presbyterian Church with Irish,
Jewish, and Chinese dialect stories.
But in nothing was he more clearly revealed as the Prominent Citizen
than in his lecture on “Brass Tacks Facts on Real Estate,” as delivered
before the class in Sales Methods at the Zenith Y.M.C.A.
The _Advocate-Times_ reported the lecture so fully that Vergil Gunch
said to Babbitt, “You’re getting to be one of the classiest spellbinders
in town. Seems ’s if I couldn’t pick up a paper without reading about
your well-known eloquence. All this guff ought to bring a lot of
business into your office. Good work! Keep it up!”
“Go on, quit your kidding,” said Babbitt feebly, but at this tribute
from Gunch, himself a man of no mean oratorical fame, he expanded with
delight and wondered how, before his vacation, he could have questioned
the joys of being a solid citizen.
CHAPTER XV
I
His march to greatness was not without disastrous stumbling.
Fame did not bring the social advancement which the Babbitts deserved.
They were not asked to join the Tonawanda Country Club nor invited to
the dances at the Union. Himself, Babbitt fretted, he didn’t “care a fat
hoot for all these highrollers, but the wife would kind of like to be
Among Those Present.” He nervously awaited his university class-dinner
and an evening of furious intimacy with such social leaders as Charles
McKelvey the millionaire contractor, Max Kruger the banker, Irving Tate
the tool-manufacturer, and Adelbert Dobson the fashionable interior
decorator. Theoretically he was their friend, as he had been in college,
and when he encountered them they still called him “Georgie,” but he
didn’t seem to encounter them often, and they never invited him to
dinner (with champagne and a butler) at their houses on Royal Ridge.
All the week before the class-dinner he thought of them. “No reason why
we shouldn’t become real chummy now!”
II
Like all true American diversions and spiritual outpourings, the dinner
of the men of the Class of 1896 was thoroughly organized. The
dinner-committee hammered like a sales-corporation. Once a week they
sent out reminders:
TICKLER NO. 3
Old man, are you going to be with us at the livest Friendship Feed
the alumni of the good old U have ever known? The alumnæ of ’08
turned out 60% strong. Are we boys going to be beaten by a bunch of
skirts? Come on, fellows, let’s work up some real genuine
enthusiasm and all boost together for the snappiest dinner yet!
Elegant eats, short ginger-talks, and memories shared together of
the brightest, gladdest days of life.
The dinner was held in a private room at the Union Club. The club was a
dingy building, three pretentious old dwellings knocked together, and
the entrance-hall resembled a potato cellar, yet the Babbitt who was
free of the magnificence of the Athletic Club entered with
embarrassment. He nodded to the doorman, an ancient proud negro with
brass buttons and a blue tail-coat, and paraded through the hall, trying
to look like a member.
Sixty men had come to the dinner. They made islands and eddies in the
hall; they packed the elevator and the corners of the private
dining-room. They tried to be intimate and enthusiastic. They appeared
to one another exactly as they had in college--as raw youngsters whose
present mustaches, baldnesses, paunches, and wrinkles were but jovial
disguises put on for the evening. “You haven’t changed a particle!” they
marveled. The men whom they could not recall they addressed, “Well,
well, great to see you again, old man. What are you-- Still doing the
same thing?”
Some one was always starting a cheer or a college song, and it was
always thinning into silence. Despite their resolution to be democratic
they divided into two sets: the men with dress-clothes and the men
without. Babbitt (extremely in dress-clothes) went from one group to the
other. Though he was, almost frankly, out for social conquest, he sought
Paul Riesling first. He found him alone, neat and silent.
Paul sighed, “I’m no good at this handshaking and ‘well, look who’s
here’ bunk.”
“Rats now, Paulibus, loosen up and be a mixer! Finest bunch of boys on
earth! Say, you seem kind of glum. What’s matter?”
“Oh, the usual. Run-in with Zilla.”
“Come on! Let’s wade in and forget our troubles.”
He kept Paul beside him, but worked toward the spot where Charles
McKelvey stood warming his admirers like a furnace.
McKelvey had been the hero of the Class of ’96; not only football
captain and hammer-thrower but debater, and passable in what the State
University considered scholarship. He had gone on, had captured the
construction-company once owned by the Dodsworths, best-known pioneer
family of Zenith. He built state capitols, skyscrapers, railway
terminals. He was a heavy-shouldered, big-chested man, but not sluggish.
There was a quiet humor in his eyes, a syrup-smooth quickness in his
speech, which intimidated politicians and warned reporters; and in his
presence the most intelligent scientist or the most sensitive artist
felt thin-blooded, unworldly, and a little shabby. He was, particularly
when he was influencing legislatures or hiring labor-spies, very easy
and lovable and gorgeous. He was baronial; he was a peer in the rapidly
crystallizing American aristocracy, inferior only to the haughty Old
Families. (In Zenith, an Old Family is one which came to town before
1840.) His power was the greater because he was not hindered by
scruples, by either the vice or the virtue of the older Puritan
tradition.
McKelvey was being placidly merry now with the great, the manufacturers
and bankers, the land-owners and lawyers and surgeons who had chauffeurs
and went to Europe. Babbitt squeezed among them. He liked McKelvey’s
smile as much as the social advancement to be had from his favor. If in
Paul’s company he felt ponderous and protective, with McKelvey he felt
slight and adoring.
He heard McKelvey say to Max Kruger, the banker, “Yes, we’ll put up Sir
Gerald Doak.” Babbitt’s democratic love for titles became a rich relish.
“You know, he’s one of the biggest iron-men in England, Max. Horribly
well-off.... Why, hello, old Georgie! Say, Max, George Babbitt is
getting fatter than I am!”
The chairman shouted, “Take your seats, fellows!”
“Shall we make a move, Charley?” Babbitt said casually to McKelvey.
“Right. Hello, Paul! How’s the old fiddler? Planning to sit anywhere
special, George? Come on, let’s grab some seats. Come on, Max. Georgie,
I read about your speeches in the campaign. Bully work!”
After that, Babbitt would have followed him through fire. He was
enormously busy during the dinner, now bumblingly cheering Paul, now
approaching McKelvey with “Hear, you’re going to build some piers in
Brooklyn,” now noting how enviously the failures of the class, sitting
by themselves in a weedy group, looked up to him in his association with
the nobility, now warming himself in the Society Talk of McKelvey and
Max Kruger. They spoke of a “jungle dance” for which Mona Dodsworth had
decorated her house with thousands of orchids. They spoke, with an
excellent imitation of casualness, of a dinner in Washington at which
McKelvey had met a Senator, a Balkan princess, and an English
major-general. McKelvey called the princess “Jenny,” and let it be known
that he had danced with her.
Babbitt was thrilled, but not so weighted with awe as to be silent. If
he was not invited by them to dinner, he was yet accustomed to talking
with bank-presidents, congressmen, and clubwomen who entertained poets.
He was bright and referential with McKelvey:
“Say, Charley, juh remember in Junior year how we chartered a sea-going
hack and chased down to Riverdale, to the big show Madame Brown used to
put on? Remember how you beat up that hick constabule that tried to run
us in, and we pinched the pants-pressing sign and took and hung it on
Prof. Morrison’s door? Oh, gosh, those were the days!”
Those, McKelvey agreed, were the days.
Babbitt had reached “It isn’t the books you study in college but the
friendships you make that counts” when the men at head of the table
broke into song. He attacked McKelvey:
“It’s a shame, uh, shame to drift apart because our, uh, business
activities lie in different fields. I’ve enjoyed talking over the good
old days. You and Mrs. McKelvey must come to dinner some night.”
Vaguely, “Yes, indeed--”
“Like to talk to you about the growth of real estate out beyond your
Grantsville warehouse. I might be able to tip you off to a thing or two,
possibly.”
“Splendid! We must have dinner together, Georgie. Just let me know. And
it will be a great pleasure to have your wife and you at the house,”
said McKelvey, much less vaguely.
Then the chairman’s voice, that prodigious voice which once had roused
them to cheer defiance at rooters from Ohio or Michigan or Indiana,
whooped, “Come on, you wombats! All together in the long yell!” Babbitt
felt that life would never be sweeter than now, when he joined with Paul
Riesling and the newly recovered hero, McKelvey, in:
Baaaaaattle-ax
Get an ax,
Bal-ax,
Get-nax,
Who, who? The U.!
Hooroo!
III
The Babbitts invited the McKelveys to dinner, in early December, and the
McKelveys not only accepted but, after changing the date once or twice,
actually came.
The Babbitts somewhat thoroughly discussed the details of the dinner,
from the purchase of a bottle of champagne to the number of salted
almonds to be placed before each person. Especially did they mention the
matter of the other guests. To the last Babbitt held out for giving Paul
Riesling the benefit of being with the McKelveys. “Good old Charley
would like Paul and Verg Gunch better than some highfalutin’ Willy boy,”
he insisted, but Mrs. Babbitt interrupted his observations with,
“Yes--perhaps-- I think I’ll try to get some Lynnhaven oysters,” and when
she was quite ready she invited Dr. J. T. Angus, the oculist, and a
dismally respectable lawyer named Maxwell, with their glittering wives.
Neither Angus nor Maxwell belonged to the Elks or to the Athletic Club;
neither of them had ever called Babbitt “brother” or asked his opinions
on carburetors. The only “human people” whom she invited, Babbitt raged,