Babbit

d 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

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 hinge; 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,