Babbit (9 page)

  "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, now, Paul, you've never really what you could
call whined. Sometimes - I'm always blowing to Myra and the kids
about what a whale of a realtor I am, and yet sometimes I get a
sneaking idea I'm not such a Pierpont Morgan as I let on to be. But
if I ever do help by jollying you along, old Paulski, I guess maybe
Saint Pete may let me in after all!"

  "Yuh, you're an old blow-hard, Georgie, you cheerful
cut-throat, but you've certainly kept me going."

  "Why don't you divorce Zilla?"

  "Why don't I! If I only could! If she'd just give me
the chance! You couldn't hire her to divorce me, no, nor desert me.
She's too fond of her three squares and a few pounds of nut-center
chocolates in between. If she'd only be what they call unfaithful
to me! George, I don't want to be too much of a stinker; back in
college I'd 've thought a man who could say that ought to be shot
at sunrise. But honestly, I'd be tickled to death if she'd really
go making love with somebody. Fat chance! Of course she'll flirt
with anything - you know how she holds hands and laughs - that
laugh - that horrible brassy laugh - the way she yaps, 'You naughty
man, you better be careful or my big husband will be after you!' -
and the guy looking me over and thinking, 'Why, you cute little
thing, you run away now or I'll spank you!' And she'll let him go
just far enough so she gets some excitement out of it and then
she'll begin to do the injured innocent and have a beautiful time
wailing, 'I didn't think you were that kind of a person.' They talk
about these demi-vierges in stories - "

  "These WHATS?"

  " - but the wise, hard, corseted, old married women
like Zilla are worse than any bobbed-haired girl that ever went
boldly out into this-here storm of life - and kept her umbrella
slid up her sleeve! But rats, you know what Zilla is. How she nags
- nags - nags. How she wants everything I can buy her, and a lot
that I can't, and how absolutely unreasonable she is, and when I
get sore and try to have it out with her she plays the Perfect Lady
so well that even I get fooled and get all tangled up in a lot of
'Why did you say's' and 'I didn't mean's.' I'll tell you, Georgie:
You know my tastes are pretty fairly simple - in the matter of
food, at least. Course, as you're always complaining, I do like
decent cigars - not those Flor de Cabagos you're smoking - "

  "That's all right now! That's a good two-for. By the
way, Paul, did I tell you I decided to practically cut out smok -
"

  "Yes you - At the same time, if I can't get what I
like, why, I can do without it. I don't mind sitting down to burnt
steak, with canned peaches and store cake for a thrilling little
dessert afterwards, but I do draw the line at having to sympathize
with Zilla because she's so rotten bad-tempered that the cook has
quit, and she's been so busy sitting in a dirty lace negligee all
afternoon, reading about some brave manly Western hero, that she
hasn't had time to do any cooking. You're always talking about
'morals' - meaning monogamy, I suppose. You've been the rock of
ages to me, all right, but you're essentially a simp. You - "

  "Where d' you get that 'simp,' little man? Let me
tell you - "

  " - love to look earnest and inform the world that
it's the 'duty of responsible business men to be strictly moral, as
an example to the community.' In fact you're so earnest about
morality, old Georgie, that I hate to think how essentially immoral
you must be underneath. All right, you can - "

  "Wait, wait now! What's - "

  " - talk about morals all you want to, old thing,
but believe me, if it hadn't been for you and an occasional evening
playing the violin to Terrill O'Farrell's 'cello, and three or four
darling girls that let me forget this beastly joke they call
'respectable life,' I'd 've killed myself years ago.

  "And business! The roofing business! Roofs for
cowsheds! Oh, I don't mean I haven't had a lot of fun out of the
Game; out of putting it over on the labor unions, and seeing a big
check coming in, and the business increasing. But what's the use of
it? You know, my business isn't distributing roofing - it's
principally keeping my competitors from distributing roofing. Same
with you. All we do is cut each other's throats and make the public
pay for it!"

  "Look here now, Paul! You're pretty darn near
talking socialism!"

  "Oh yes, of course I don't really exactly mean that
- I s'pose. Course - competition - brings out the best - survival
of the fittest - but - But I mean: Take all these fellows we know,
the kind right here in the club now, that seem to be perfectly
content with their home-life and their businesses, and that boost
Zenith and the Chamber of Commerce and holler for a million
population. I bet if you could cut into their heads you'd find that
one-third of 'em are sure-enough satisfied with their wives and
kids and friends and their offices; and one-third feel kind of
restless but won't admit it; and one-third are miserable and know
it. They hate the whole peppy, boosting, go-ahead game, and they're
bored by their wives and think their families are fools - at least
when they come to forty or forty-five they're bored - and they hate
business, and they'd go - Why do you suppose there's so many
'mysterious' suicides? Why do you suppose so many Substantial
Citizens jumped right into the war? Think it was all
patriotism?"

  Babbitt snorted, "What do you expect? Think we were
sent into the world to have a soft time and - what is it? - 'float
on flowery beds of ease'? Think Man was just made to be happy?"