Babbit (8 page)

  
B
ABBITT'S
preparations for leaving the office to its feeble self during the
hour and a half of his lunch-period were somewhat less elaborate
than the plans for a general European war.

  He fretted 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 traced. And oh, b' the way, remind me to-morrow to have
Penniman trace it. Now if anybody comes in looking for a cheap
house, remember we got to shove that Bangor Road place off onto
somebody. If you need me, I'll be at the Athletic Club. And - uh -
And - uh - I'll be back by two."

  He dusted the cigar-ashes off his vest. He placed a
difficult unanswered letter on the pile of unfinished work, that he
might not fail to attend to it that afternoon. (For three noons,
now, he had placed the same letter on the unfinished pile.) He
scrawled on a sheet of yellow backing-paper the memorandum: "See
abt apt h drs," which gave him an agreeable feeling of having
already seen about the apartment-house doors.

  He discovered that he was smoking another cigar. He
threw it away, protesting, "Darn it, I thought you'd quit this darn
smoking!" He courageously returned the cigar-box to the
correspondence-file, locked it up, hid the key in a more difficult
place, and raged, "Ought to take care of myself. And need more
exercise - walk to the club, every single noon - just what I'll do
- every noon-cut out this motoring all the time."

  The resolution made him feel exemplary. Immediately
after it he decided that this noon it was too late to walk.

  It took but little more time to start his car and
edge it into the traffic than it would have taken to walk the three
and a half blocks to the club.

  II

  As he drove he glanced with the fondness of
familiarity at the buildings.

  A stranger suddenly dropped into the business-center
of Zenith could not have told whether he was in a city of Oregon or
Georgia, Ohio or Maine, Oklahoma or Manitoba. But to Babbitt every
inch was individual and stirring. As always he noted that the
California Building across the way was three stories lower,
therefore three stories less beautiful, than his own Reeves
Building. As always when he passed the Parthenon Shoe Shine Parlor,
a one-story hut which beside the granite and red-brick
ponderousness of the old California Building resembled a bath-house
under a cliff, he commented, "Gosh, ought to get my shoes shined
this afternoon. Keep forgetting it." At the Simplex Office
Furniture Shop, the National Cash Register Agency, he yearned for a
dictaphone, for a typewriter which would add and multiply, as a
poet yearns for quartos or a physician for radium.

  At the Nobby Men's Wear Shop he took his left hand
off the steering-wheel to touch his scarf, and thought well of
himself as one who bought expensive ties "and could pay cash for
'em, too, by golly;" and at the United Cigar Store, with its
crimson and gold alertness, he reflected, "Wonder if I need some
cigars - idiot - plumb forgot - going t' cut down my fool smoking."
He looked at his bank, the Miners' and Drovers' National, and
considered how clever and solid he was to bank with so marbled an
establishment. His high moment came in the clash of traffic when he
was halted at the corner beneath the lofty Second National Tower.
His car was banked with four others in a line of steel restless as
cavalry, while the cross town traffic, limousines and enormous
moving-vans and insistent motor-cycles, poured by; on the farther
corner, pneumatic riveters rang on the sun-plated skeleton of a new
building; and out of this tornado flashed the inspiration of a
familiar face, and a fellow Booster shouted, "H' are you, George!"
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 cafe 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!"