Babbitt
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