Babbit (27 page)

  "'Yes, sir, these other burgs are our true partners
in the great game of vital living. But let's not have any mistake
about this. I claim that Zenith is the best partner and the
fastest-growing partner of the whole caboodle. I trust I may be
pardoned if I give a few statistics to back up my claims. If they
are old stuff to any of you, yet the tidings of prosperity, like
the good news of the Bible, never become tedious to the ears of a
real hustler, no matter how oft the sweet story is told! Every
intelligent person knows that Zenith manufactures more condensed
milk and evaporated cream, more paper boxes, and more
lighting-fixtures, than any other city in the United States, if not
in the world. But it is not so universally known that we also stand
second in the manufacture of package-butter, sixth in the giant
realm of motors and automobiles, and somewhere about third in
cheese, leather findings, tar roofing, breakfast food, and
overalls!

  "'Our greatness, however, lies not alone in punchful
prosperity but equally in that public spirit, that forward-looking
idealism and brotherhood, which has marked Zenith ever since its
foundation by the Fathers. We have a right, indeed we have a duty
toward our fair city, to announce broadcast the facts about our
high schools, characterized by their complete plants and the finest
school-ventilating systems in the country, bar none; our
magnificent new hotels and banks and the paintings and carved
marble in their lobbies; and the Second National Tower, the second
highest business building in any inland city in the entire country.
When I add that we have an unparalleled number of miles of paved
streets, bathrooms vacuum cleaners, and all the other signs of
civilization; that our library and art museum are well supported
and housed in convenient and roomy buildings; that our park-system
is more than up to par, with its handsome driveways adorned with
grass, shrubs, and statuary, then I give but a hint of the all
round unlimited greatness of Zenith!

  "'I believe, however, in keeping the best to the
last. When I remind you that we have one motor car for every five
and seven-eighths persons in the city, then I give a rock-ribbed
practical indication of the kind of progress and braininess which
is synonymous with the name Zenith!

  "'But the way of the righteous is not all roses.
Before I close I must call your attention to a problem we have to
face, this coming year. The worst menace to sound government is not
the avowed socialists but a lot of cowards who work under cover -
the long-haired gentry who call themselves "liberals" and
"radicals" and "non-partisan" and "intelligentsia" and God only
knows how many other trick names! Irresponsible teachers and
professors constitute the worst of this whole gang, and I am
ashamed to say that several of them are on the faculty of our great
State University! The U. is my own Alma Mater, and I am proud to be
known as an alumni, but there are certain instructors there who
seem to think we ought to turn the conduct of the nation over to
hoboes and roustabouts.

  "'Those profs are the snakes to be scotched - they
and all their 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.

  
H
IS 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
alumnae 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.