Babbitt

Who do you think I ran into the other evening at the De Luxe Restaurant?Why, old Freddy Durkee, that used to be a dead-or-alive shipping clerk in my old place— Mr. Mouse-Man we used to laughingly call the dear fellow.One time he was so timid he was plumb scared of the Super, and never got credit for the dandy work he did.Him at the De Luxe!And if he wasn’t ordering a tony feed with all the “fixings” from celery to nuts!And instead of being embarrassed by the waiters, like he used to be at the little dump where we lunched in Old Lang Syne, he was bossing them around like he was a millionaire!

I cautiously asked him what he was doing.Freddy laughed and said, “Say, old chum, I guess you’re wondering what’s come over me.You’ll be glad to know I’m now Assistant Super at the old shop, and right on the High Road to Prosperity and Domination, and I look forward with confidence to a twelve-cylinder car, and the wife is making things hum in the best society and the kiddies getting a first-class education.

“Here’s how it happened. I ran across an ad of a course that claimed to teach people how to talk easily and on their feet, how to answer complaints, how to lay a proposition before the Boss, how to hit a bank for a loan, how to hold a big audience spellbound with wit, humor, anecdote, inspiration, etc. It was compiled by the Master Orator, Prof. Waldo F. Peet. I was skeptical, too, but I wrote (just on a postcard, with name and address) to the publisher for the lessons—sent On Trial, money back if you are not absolutely satisfied.There were eight simple lessons in plain language anybody could understand, and I studied them just a few hours a night, then started practising on the wife.Soon found I could talk right up to the Super and get due credit for all the good work I did.They began to appreciate me and advance me fast, and say, old doggo, what do you think they’re paying me now?$6,500 per year!And say, I find I can keep a big audience fascinated, speaking on any topic.As a friend, old boy, I advise you to send for circular (no obligation) and valuable free Art Picture to:—

Shortcut Educational Pub.Co.
Desk WA Sandpit, Iowa.

ARE YOU A 100 PERCENTER OR A 10 PERCENTER?

 

Babbitt was again without a canon which would enable him to speak with authority.Nothing in motoring or real estate had indicated what a Solid Citizen and Regular Fellow ought to think about culture by mail.He began with hesitation:

“Well—sounds as if it covered the ground.It certainly is a fine thing to be able to orate.I’ve sometimes thought I had a little talent that way myself, and I know darn well that one reason why a fourflushing old back-number like Chan Mott can get away with it in real estate is just because he can make a good talk, even when he hasn’t got a doggone thing to say!And it certainly is pretty cute the way they get out all these courses on various topics and subjects nowadays.I’ll tell you, though: No need to blow in a lot of good money on this stuff when you can get a first-rate course in eloquence and English and all that right in your own school—and one of the biggest school buildings in the entire country!”

“That’s so,” said Mrs. Babbitt comfortably, while Ted complained:

“Yuh, but Dad, they just teach a lot of old junk that isn’t any practical use—except the manual training and typewriting and basketball and dancing—and in these correspondence-courses, gee, you can get all kinds of stuff that would come in handy.Say, listen to this one:”

“Oh, baby, maybe I wouldn’t like that!”Ted chanted.“I’ll tell the world!Gosh, I’d like to take one fellow I know in school that’s always shooting off his mouth, and catch him alone—”

“Nonsense!The idea!Most useless thing I ever heard of!”Babbitt fulminated.

“Well, just suppose I was walking with Mama or Rone, and somebody passed a slighting remark or used improper language.What would I do?”

“Why, you’d probably bust the record for the hundred-yard dash!”

“I would not! I’d stand right up to any mucker that passed a slighting remark on my sister and I’d show him—”

“Look here, young Dempsey!If I ever catch you fighting I’ll whale the everlasting daylights out of you—and I’ll do it without practising holding out my hand for a coin before the mirror, too!”

“Why, Ted dear,” Mrs. Babbitt said placidly, “it’s not at all nice, your talking of fighting this way!”

“Well, gosh almighty, that’s a fine way to appreciate— And then suppose I was walking with you, Ma, and somebody passed a slighting remark—”

“Nobody’s going to pass no slighting remarks on nobody,” Babbitt observed, “not if they stay home and study their geometry and mind their own affairs instead of hanging around a lot of poolrooms and soda-fountains and places where nobody’s got any business to be!”

“But gooooooosh, Dad, if they DID!”

Mrs. Babbitt chirped, “Well, if they did, I wouldn’t do them the honor of paying any attention to them!Besides, they never do.You always hear about these women that get followed and insulted and all, but I don’t believe a word of it, or it’s their own fault, the way some women look at a person.I certainly never’ve been insulted by—”

“Aw shoot, Mother, just suppose you were sometime! Just suppose!Can’t you suppose something?Can’t you imagine things?”

“Certainly I can imagine things!The idea!”

“Certainly your mother can imagine things—and suppose things!Think you’re the only member of this household that’s got an imagination?”Babbitt demanded.“But what’s the use of a lot of supposing?Supposing never gets you anywhere.No sense supposing when there’s a lot of real facts to take into considera—”

“Look here, Dad.Suppose— I mean, just—just suppose you were in your office and some rival real-estate man—”

“Realtor!”

“—some realtor that you hated came in—”

“I don’t hate any realtor.”

“But suppose you did!”

“I don’t intend to suppose anything of the kind!There’s plenty of fellows in my profession that stoop and hate their competitors, but if you were a little older and understood business, instead of always going to the movies and running around with a lot of fool girls with their dresses up to their knees and powdered and painted and rouged and God knows what all as if they were chorus-girls, then you’d know—and you’d suppose—that if there’s any one thing that I stand for in the real-estate circles of Zenith, it is that we ought to always speak of each other only in the friendliest terms and institute a spirit of brotherhood and coöperation, and so I certainly can’t suppose and I can’t imagine my hating any realtor, not even that dirty, fourflushing society sneak, Cecil Rountree!”

“But—”

“And there’s no If, And or But about it! But if I were going to lambaste somebody, I wouldn’t require any fancy ducks or swimming-strokes before a mirror, or any of these doodads and flipflops! Suppose you were out some place and a fellow called you vile names. Think you’d want to box and jump around like a dancing-master? You’d just lay him out cold (at least I certainly hope any son of mine would!) and then you’d dust off your hands and go on about your business, and that’s all there is to it, and you aren’t going to have any boxing-lessons by mail, either!”

“Well but— Yes— I just wanted to show how many different kinds of correspondence-courses there are, instead of all the camembert they teach us in the High.”

“But I thought they taught boxing in the school gymnasium.”

“That’s different.They stick you up there and some big stiff amuses himself pounding the stuffin’s out of you before you have a chance to learn.Hunka!Not any!But anyway— Listen to some of these others.”

The advertisements were truly philanthropic.One of them bore the rousing headline: “Money!Money!!Money!!!”The second announced that “Mr. P.R., formerly making only eighteen a week in a barber shop, writes to us that since taking our course he is now pulling down $5,000 as an Osteo-vitalic Physician;” and the third that “Miss J.L., recently a wrapper in a store, is now getting Ten Real Dollars a day teaching our Hindu System of Vibratory Breathing and Mental Control.”

Ted had collected fifty or sixty announcements, from annual reference-books, from Sunday School periodicals, fiction-magazines, and journals of discussion.One benefactor implored, “Don’t be a Wallflower— Be More Popular and Make More Money— You Can Ukulele or Sing Yourself into Society!By the secret principles of a Newly Discovered System of Music Teaching, any one—man, lady or child—can, without tiresome exercises, special training or long drawn out study, and without waste of time, money or energy, learn to play by note, piano, banjo, cornet, clarinet, saxophone, violin or drum, and learn sight-singing.”

The next, under the wistful appeal “Finger Print Detectives Wanted— Big Incomes!”confided: “YOU red-blooded men and women—this is the PROFESSION you have been looking for. There’s MONEY in it, BIG money, and that rapid change of scene, that entrancing and compelling interest and fascination, which your active mind and adventurous spirit crave. Think of being the chief figure and directing factor in solving strange mysteries and baffling crimes. This wonderful profession brings you into contact with influential men on the basis of equality, and often calls upon you to travel everywhere, maybe to distant lands—all expenses paid. NO SPECIAL EDUCATION REQUIRED.”

“Oh, boy!I guess that wins the fire-brick necklace!Wouldn’t it be swell to travel everywhere and nab some famous crook!”whooped Ted.

“Well, I don’t think much of that.Doggone likely to get hurt.Still, that music-study stunt might be pretty fair, though.There’s no reason why, if efficiency-experts put their minds to it the way they have to routing products in a factory, they couldn’t figure out some scheme so a person wouldn’t have to monkey with all this practising and exercises that you get in music.”Babbitt was impressed, and he had a delightful parental feeling that they two, the men of the family, understood each other.

He listened to the notices of mail-box universities which taught Short-story Writing and Improving the Memory, Motion-picture-acting and Developing the Soul-power, Banking and Spanish, Chiropody and Photography, Electrical Engineering and Window-trimming, Poultry-raising and Chemistry.

“Well—well—” Babbitt sought for adequate expression of his admiration.“I’m a son of a gun!I knew this correspondence-school business had become a mighty profitable game—makes suburban real-estate look like two cents!—but I didn’t realize it’d got to be such a reg’lar key-industry!Must rank right up with groceries and movies.Always figured somebody’d come along with the brains to not leave education to a lot of bookworms and impractical theorists but make a big thing out of it. Yes, I can see how a lot of these courses might interest you. I must ask the fellows at the Athletic if they ever realized— But same time, Ted, you know how advertisers, I means some advertisers, exaggerate. I don’t know as they’d be able to jam you through these courses as fast as they claim they can.”

“Oh sure, Dad; of course.”Ted had the immense and joyful maturity of a boy who is respectfully listened to by his elders.Babbitt concentrated on him with grateful affection:

“I can see what an influence these courses might have on the whole educational works.Course I’d never admit it publicly—fellow like myself, a State U.graduate, it’s only decent and patriotic for him to blow his horn and boost the Alma Mater—but smatter of fact, there’s a whole lot of valuable time lost even at the U., studying poetry and French and subjects that never brought in anybody a cent.I don’t know but what maybe these correspondence-courses might prove to be one of the most important American inventions.

“Trouble with a lot of folks is: they’re so blame material; they don’t see the spiritual and mental side of American supremacy; they think that inventions like the telephone and the areoplane and wireless—no, that was a Wop invention, but anyway: they think these mechanical improvements are all that we stand for; whereas to a real thinker, he sees that spiritual and, uh, dominating movements like Efficiency, and Rotarianism, and Prohibition, and Democracy are what compose our deepest and truest wealth.And maybe this new principle in education-at-home may be another—may be another factor.I tell you, Ted, we’ve got to have Vision—”

“I think those correspondence-courses are terrible!”

The philosophers gasped.It was Mrs. Babbitt who had made this discord in their spiritual harmony, and one of Mrs. Babbitt’s virtues was that, except during dinner-parties, when she was transformed into a raging hostess, she took care of the house and didn’t bother the males by thinking. She went on firmly:

“It sounds awful to me, the way they coax those poor young folks to think they’re learning something, and nobody ’round to help them and— You two learn so quick, but me, I always was slow.But just the same—”

Babbitt attended to her: “Nonsense! Get just as much, studying at home. You don’t think a fellow learns any more because he blows in his father’s hard-earned money and sits around in Morris chairs in a swell Harvard dormitory with pictures and shields and table-covers and those doodads, do you? I tell you, I’m a college man— I know!There is one objection you might make though.I certainly do protest against any effort to get a lot of fellows out of barber shops and factories into the professions.They’re too crowded already, and what’ll we do for workmen if all those fellows go and get educated?”

Ted was leaning back, smoking a cigarette without reproof.He was, for the moment, sharing the high thin air of Babbitt’s speculation as though he were Paul Riesling or even Dr. Howard Littlefield.He hinted:

“Well, what do you think then, Dad?Wouldn’t it be a good idea if I could go off to China or some peppy place, and study engineering or something by mail?”

“No, and I’ll tell you why, son. I’ve found out it’s a mighty nice thing to be able to say you’re a B. A. Some client that doesn’t know what you are and thinks you’re just a plug business man, he gets to shooting off his mouth about economics or literature or foreign trade conditions, and you just ease in something like, ‘When I was in college—course I got my B. A. in sociology and all that junk—’ Oh, it puts an awful crimp in their style! But there wouldn’t be any class to saying ‘I got the degree of Stamp-licker from the Bezuzus Mail-order University!’You see— My dad was a pretty good old coot, but he never had much style to him, and I had to work darn hard to earn my way through college.Well, it’s been worth it, to be able to associate with the finest gentlemen in Zenith, at the clubs and so on, and I wouldn’t want you to drop out of the gentlemen class—the class that are just as red-blooded as the Common People but still have power and personality.It would kind of hurt me if you did that, old man!”

“I know, Dad!Sure!All right.I’ll stick to it.Say!Gosh!Gee whiz!I forgot all about those kids I was going to take to the chorus rehearsal.I’ll have to duck!”

“But you haven’t done all your home-work.”

“Do it first thing in the morning.”

“Well—”

Six times in the past sixty days Babbitt had stormed, “You will not ‘do it first thing in the morning’!You’ll do it right now!”but to-night he said, “Well, better hustle,” and his smile was the rare shy radiance he kept for Paul Riesling.

IV

“Ted’s a good boy,” he said to Mrs. Babbitt.

“Oh, he is!”

“Who’s these girls he’s going to pick up?Are they nice decent girls?”

“I don’t know.Oh dear, Ted never tells me anything any more.I don’t understand what’s come over the children of this generation.I used to have to tell Papa and Mama everything, but seems like the children to-day have just slipped away from all control.”

“I hope they’re decent girls.Course Ted’s no longer a kid, and I wouldn’t want him to, uh, get mixed up and everything.”

“George: I wonder if you oughtn’t to take him aside and tell him about— Things!”She blushed and lowered her eyes.

“Well, I don’t know.Way I figure it, Myra, no sense suggesting a lot of Things to a boy’s mind.Think up enough devilment by himself. But I wonder— It’s kind of a hard question. Wonder what Littlefield thinks about it?”

“Course Papa agrees with you.He says all this—Instruction—is— He says ’tisn’t decent.”

“Oh, he does, does he!Well, let me tell you that whatever Henry T.Thompson thinks—about morals, I mean, though course you can’t beat the old duffer—”

“Why, what a way to talk of Papa!”

“—simply can’t beat him at getting in on the ground floor of a deal, but let me tell you whenever he springs any ideas about higher things and education, then I know I think just the opposite.You may not regard me as any great brain-shark, but believe me, I’m a regular college president, compared with Henry T.!Yes sir, by golly, I’m going to take Ted aside and tell him why I lead a strictly moral life.”

“Oh, will you?When?”

“When?When?What’s the use of trying to pin me down to When and Why and Where and How and When?That’s the trouble with women, that’s why they don’t make high-class executives; they haven’t any sense of diplomacy.When the proper opportunity and occasion arises so it just comes in natural, why then I’ll have a friendly little talk with him and—and— Was that Tinka hollering up-stairs?She ought to been asleep, long ago.”

He prowled through the living-room, and stood in the sun-parlor, that glass-walled room of wicker chairs and swinging couch in which they loafed on Sunday afternoons.Outside, only the lights of Doppelbrau’s house and the dim presence of Babbitt’s favorite elm broke the softness of April night.

“Good visit with the boy.Getting over feeling cranky, way I did this morning.And restless.Though, by golly, I will have a few days alone with Paul in Maine!...That devil Zilla!...But....Ted’s all right.Whole family all right.And good business.Not many fellows make four hundred and fifty bucks, practically half of a thousand dollars, easy as I did to-day! Maybe when we all get to rowing it’s just as much my fault as it is theirs. Oughtn’t to get grouchy like I do. But— Wish I’d been a pioneer, same as my grand-dad. But then, wouldn’t have a house like this. I— Oh, gosh, I don’t know!”

He thought moodily of Paul Riesling, of their youth together, of the girls they had known.

When Babbitt had graduated from the State University, twenty-four years ago, he had intended to be a lawyer.He had been a ponderous debater in college; he felt that he was an orator; he saw himself becoming governor of the state.While he read law he worked as a real-estate salesman.He saved money, lived in a boarding-house, supped on poached egg on hash.The lively Paul Riesling (who was certainly going off to Europe to study violin, next month or next year) was his refuge till Paul was bespelled by Zilla Colbeck, who laughed and danced and drew men after her plump and gaily wagging finger.

Babbitt’s evenings were barren then, and he found comfort only in Paul’s second cousin, Myra Thompson, a sleek and gentle girl who showed her capacity by agreeing with the ardent young Babbitt that of course he was going to be governor some day.Where Zilla mocked him as a country boy, Myra said indignantly that he was ever so much solider than the young dandies who had been born in the great city of Zenith—an ancient settlement in 1897, one hundred and five years old, with two hundred thousand population, the queen and wonder of all the state and, to the Catawba boy, George Babbitt, so vast and thunderous and luxurious that he was flattered to know a girl ennobled by birth in Zenith.

Of love there was no talk between them.He knew that if he was to study law he could not marry for years; and Myra was distinctly a Nice Girl—one didn’t kiss her, one didn’t “think about her that way at all” unless one was going to marry her.But she was a dependable companion.She was always ready to go skating, walking; always content to hear his discourses on the great things he was going to do, the distressed poor whom he would defend against the Unjust Rich, the speeches he would make at Banquets, the inexactitudes of popular thought which he would correct.

One evening when he was weary and soft-minded, he saw that she had been weeping.She had been left out of a party given by Zilla.Somehow her head was on his shoulder and he was kissing away the tears—and she raised her head to say trustingly, “Now that we’re engaged, shall we be married soon or shall we wait?”

Engaged?It was his first hint of it.His affection for this brown tender woman thing went cold and fearful, but he could not hurt her, could not abuse her trust.He mumbled something about waiting, and escaped.He walked for an hour, trying to find a way of telling her that it was a mistake.Often, in the month after, he got near to telling her, but it was pleasant to have a girl in his arms, and less and less could he insult her by blurting that he didn’t love her.He himself had no doubt.The evening before his marriage was an agony, and the morning wild with the desire to flee.

She made him what is known as a Good Wife.She was loyal, industrious, and at rare times merry.She passed from a feeble disgust at their closer relations into what promised to be ardent affection, but it drooped into bored routine.Yet she existed only for him and for the children, and she was as sorry, as worried as himself, when he gave up the law and trudged on in a rut of listing real estate.

“Poor kid, she hasn’t had much better time than I have,” Babbitt reflected, standing in the dark sun-parlor.“But— I wish I could’ve had a whirl at law and politics.Seen what I could do.Well— Maybe I’ve made more money as it is.”

He returned to the living-room but before he settled down he smoothed his wife’s hair, and she glanced up, happy and somewhat surprised.

CHAPTER VII

I

He solemnly finished the last copy of the American Magazine, while his wife sighed, laid away her darning, and looked enviously at the lingerie designs in a women’s magazine.The room was very still.

It was a room which observed the best Floral Heights standards.The gray walls were divided into artificial paneling by strips of white-enameled pine.From the Babbitts’ former house had come two much-carved rocking-chairs, but the other chairs were new, very deep and restful, upholstered in blue and gold-striped velvet.A blue velvet davenport faced the fireplace, and behind it was a cherrywood table and a tall piano-lamp with a shade of golden silk.(Two out of every three houses in Floral Heights had before the fireplace a davenport, a mahogany table real or imitation, and a piano-lamp or a reading-lamp with a shade of yellow or rose silk.)

On the table was a runner of gold-threaded Chinese fabric, four magazines, a silver box containing cigarette-crumbs, and three “gift-books”—large, expensive editions of fairy-tales illustrated by English artists and as yet unread by any Babbitt save Tinka.

In a corner by the front windows was a large cabinet Victrola.(Eight out of every nine Floral Heights houses had a cabinet phonograph.)

Among the pictures, hung in the exact center of each gray panel, were a red and black imitation English hunting-print, an anemic imitation boudoir-print with a French caption of whose morality Babbitt had always been rather suspicious, and a “hand-colored” photograph of a Colonial room—rag rug, maiden spinning, cat demure before a white fireplace. (Nineteen out of every twenty houses in Floral Heights had either a hunting-print, a Madame Fait la Toilette print, a colored photograph of a New England house, a photograph of a Rocky Mountain, or all four.)

It was a room as superior in comfort to the “parlor” of Babbitt’s boyhood as his motor was superior to his father’s buggy.Though there was nothing in the room that was interesting, there was nothing that was offensive.It was as neat, and as negative, as a block of artificial ice.The fireplace was unsoftened by downy ashes or by sooty brick; the brass fire-irons were of immaculate polish; and the grenadier andirons were like samples in a shop, desolate, unwanted, lifeless things of commerce.

Against the wall was a piano, with another piano-lamp, but no one used it save Tinka.The hard briskness of the phonograph contented them; their store of jazz records made them feel wealthy and cultured; and all they knew of creating music was the nice adjustment of a bamboo needle.The books on the table were unspotted and laid in rigid parallels; not one corner of the carpet-rug was curled; and nowhere was there a hockey-stick, a torn picture-book, an old cap, or a gregarious and disorganizing dog.

II

At home, Babbitt never read with absorption.He was concentrated enough at the office but here he crossed his legs and fidgeted.When his story was interesting he read the best, that is the funniest, paragraphs to his wife; when it did not hold him he coughed, scratched his ankles and his right ear, thrust his left thumb into his vest pocket, jingled his silver, whirled the cigar-cutter and the keys on one end of his watch-chain, yawned, rubbed his nose, and found errands to do.He went upstairs to put on his slippers—his elegant slippers of seal-brown, shaped like medieval shoes. He brought up an apple from the barrel which stood by the trunk-closet in the basement.

“An apple a day keeps the doctor away,” he enlightened Mrs. Babbitt, for quite the first time in fourteen hours.

“That’s so.”

“An apple is Nature’s best regulator.”

“Yes, it—”

“Trouble with women is, they never have sense enough to form regular habits.”

“Well, I—”

“Always nibbling and eating between meals.”

“George!”She looked up from her reading.“Did you have a light lunch to-day, like you were going to?I did!”

This malicious and unprovoked attack astounded him.“Well, maybe it wasn’t as light as— Went to lunch with Paul and didn’t have much chance to diet.Oh, you needn’t to grin like a chessy cat!If it wasn’t for me watching out and keeping an eye on our diet— I’m the only member of this family that appreciates the value of oatmeal for breakfast.I—”

She stooped over her story while he piously sliced and gulped down the apple, discoursing:

“One thing I’ve done: cut down my smoking.

“Had kind of a run-in with Graff in the office.He’s getting too darn fresh.I’ll stand for a good deal, but once in a while I got to assert my authority, and I jumped him.‘Stan,’ I said— Well, I told him just exactly where he got off.

“Funny kind of a day.Makes you feel restless.

“Wellllllllll, uh—” That sleepiest sound in the world, the terminal yawn.Mrs. Babbitt yawned with it, and looked grateful as he droned, “How about going to bed, eh?Don’t suppose Rone and Ted will be in till all hours.Yep, funny kind of a day; not terribly warm but yet— Gosh, I’d like— Some day I’m going to take a long motor trip.”

“Yes, we’d enjoy that,” she yawned.

He looked away from her as he realized that he did not wish to have her go with him.As he locked doors and tried windows and set the heat regulator so that the furnace-drafts would open automatically in the morning, he sighed a little, heavy with a lonely feeling which perplexed and frightened him.So absent-minded was he that he could not remember which window-catches he had inspected, and through the darkness, fumbling at unseen perilous chairs, he crept back to try them all over again.His feet were loud on the steps as he clumped upstairs at the end of this great and treacherous day of veiled rebellions.

III

Before breakfast he always reverted to up-state village boyhood, and shrank from the complex urban demands of shaving, bathing, deciding whether the current shirt was clean enough for another day.Whenever he stayed home in the evening he went to bed early, and thriftily got ahead in those dismal duties.It was his luxurious custom to shave while sitting snugly in a tubful of hot water.He may be viewed to-night as a plump, smooth, pink, baldish, podgy goodman, robbed of the importance of spectacles, squatting in breast-high water, scraping his lather-smeared cheeks with a safety-razor like a tiny lawn-mower, and with melancholy dignity clawing through the water to recover a slippery and active piece of soap.

He was lulled to dreaming by the caressing warmth.The light fell on the inner surface of the tub in a pattern of delicate wrinkled lines which slipped with a green sparkle over the curving porcelain as the clear water trembled.Babbitt lazily watched it; noted that along the silhouette of his legs against the radiance on the bottom of the tub, the shadows of the air-bubbles clinging to the hairs were reproduced as strange jungle mosses.He patted the water, and the reflected light capsized and leaped and volleyed. He was content and childish. He played. He shaved a swath down the calf of one plump leg.

The drain-pipe was dripping, a dulcet and lively song: drippety drip drip dribble, drippety drip drip drip.He was enchanted by it.He looked at the solid tub, the beautiful nickel taps, the tiled walls of the room, and felt virtuous in the possession of this splendor.

He roused himself and spoke gruffly to his bath-things.“Come here!You’ve done enough fooling!”he reproved the treacherous soap, and defied the scratchy nail-brush with “Oh, you would, would you!”He soaped himself, and rinsed himself, and austerely rubbed himself; he noted a hole in the Turkish towel, and meditatively thrust a finger through it, and marched back to the bedroom, a grave and unbending citizen.

There was a moment of gorgeous abandon, a flash of melodrama such as he found in traffic-driving, when he laid out a clean collar, discovered that it was frayed in front, and tore it up with a magnificent yeeeeeing sound.

Most important of all was the preparation of his bed and the sleeping-porch.

It is not known whether he enjoyed his sleeping-porch because of the fresh air or because it was the standard thing to have a sleeping-porch.

Just as he was an Elk, a Booster, and a member of the Chamber of Commerce, just as the priests of the Presbyterian Church determined his every religious belief and the senators who controlled the Republican Party decided in little smoky rooms in Washington what he should think about disarmament, tariff, and Germany, so did the large national advertisers fix the surface of his life, fix what he believed to be his individuality.These standard advertised wares—toothpastes, socks, tires, cameras, instantaneous hot-water heaters—were his symbols and proofs of excellence; at first the signs, then the substitutes, for joy and passion and wisdom.

But none of these advertised tokens of financial and social success was more significant than a sleeping-porch with a sun-parlor below.

The rites of preparing for bed were elaborate and unchanging.The blankets had to be tucked in at the foot of his cot.(Also, the reason why the maid hadn’t tucked in the blankets had to be discussed with Mrs. Babbitt.)The rag rug was adjusted so that his bare feet would strike it when he arose in the morning.The alarm clock was wound.The hot-water bottle was filled and placed precisely two feet from the bottom of the cot.

These tremendous undertakings yielded to his determination; one by one they were announced to Mrs. Babbitt and smashed through to accomplishment.At last his brow cleared, and in his “Gnight!”rang virile power.But there was yet need of courage.As he sank into sleep, just at the first exquisite relaxation, the Doppelbrau car came home.He bounced into wakefulness, lamenting, “Why the devil can’t some people never get to bed at a reasonable hour?”So familiar was he with the process of putting up his own car that he awaited each step like an able executioner condemned to his own rack.

The car insultingly cheerful on the driveway.The car door opened and banged shut, then the garage door slid open, grating on the sill, and the car door again.The motor raced for the climb up into the garage and raced once more, explosively, before it was shut off.A final opening and slamming of the car door.Silence then, a horrible silence filled with waiting, till the leisurely Mr. Doppelbrau had examined the state of his tires and had at last shut the garage door.Instantly, for Babbitt, a blessed state of oblivion.

IV

At that moment in the city of Zenith, Horace Updike was making love to Lucile McKelvey in her mauve drawing-room on Royal Ridge, after their return from a lecture by an eminent English novelist. Updike was Zenith’s professional bachelor; a slim-waisted man of forty-six with an effeminate voice and taste in flowers, cretonnes, and flappers. Mrs. McKelvey was red-haired, creamy, discontented, exquisite, rude, and honest. Updike tried his invariable first maneuver—touching her nervous wrist.

“Don’t be an idiot!”she said.

“Do you mind awfully?”

“No!That’s what I mind!”

He changed to conversation.He was famous at conversation.He spoke reasonably of psychoanalysis, Long Island polo, and the Ming platter he had found in Vancouver.She promised to meet him in Deauville, the coming summer, “though,” she sighed, “it’s becoming too dreadfully banal; nothing but Americans and frowsy English baronesses.”

And at that moment in Zenith, a cocaine-runner and a prostitute were drinking cocktails in Healey Hanson’s saloon on Front Street.Since national prohibition was now in force, and since Zenith was notoriously law-abiding, they were compelled to keep the cocktails innocent by drinking them out of tea-cups.The lady threw her cup at the cocaine-runner’s head.He worked his revolver out of the pocket in his sleeve, and casually murdered her.

At that moment in Zenith, two men sat in a laboratory.For thirty-seven hours now they had been working on a report of their investigations of synthetic rubber.

At that moment in Zenith, there was a conference of four union officials as to whether the twelve thousand coal-miners within a hundred miles of the city should strike.Of these men one resembled a testy and prosperous grocer, one a Yankee carpenter, one a soda-clerk, and one a Russian Jewish actor.The Russian Jew quoted Kautsky, Gene Debs, and Abraham Lincoln.

At that moment a G.A.R.veteran was dying.He had come from the Civil War straight to a farm which, though it was officially within the city-limits of Zenith, was primitive as the backwoods. He had never ridden in a motor car, never seen a bath-tub, never read any book save the Bible, McGuffey’s readers, and religious tracts; and he believed that the earth is flat, that the English are the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel, and that the United States is a democracy.

At that moment the steel and cement town which composed the factory of the Pullmore Tractor Company of Zenith was running on night shift to fill an order of tractors for the Polish army.It hummed like a million bees, glared through its wide windows like a volcano.Along the high wire fences, searchlights played on cinder-lined yards, switch-tracks, and armed guards on patrol.

At that moment Mike Monday was finishing a meeting.Mr. Monday, the distinguished evangelist, the best-known Protestant pontiff in America, had once been a prize-fighter.Satan had not dealt justly with him.As a prize-fighter he gained nothing but his crooked nose, his celebrated vocabulary, and his stage-presence.The service of the Lord had been more profitable.He was about to retire with a fortune.It had been well earned, for, to quote his last report, “Rev.Mr. Monday, the Prophet with a Punch, has shown that he is the world’s greatest salesman of salvation, and that by efficient organization the overhead of spiritual regeneration may be kept down to an unprecedented rock-bottom basis.He has converted over two hundred thousand lost and priceless souls at an average cost of less than ten dollars a head.”

Of the larger cities of the land, only Zenith had hesitated to submit its vices to Mike Monday and his expert reclamation corps.The more enterprising organizations of the city had voted to invite him— Mr. George F.Babbitt had once praised him in a speech at the Boosters’ Club.But there was opposition from certain Episcopalian and Congregationalist ministers, those renegades whom Mr. Monday so finely called “a bunch of gospel-pushers with dish-water instead of blood, a gang of squealers that need more dust on the knees of their pants and more hair on their skinny old chests.” This opposition had been crushed when the secretary of the Chamber of Commerce had reported to a committee of manufacturers that in every city where he had appeared, Mr. Monday had turned the minds of workmen from wages and hours to higher things, and thus averted strikes. He was immediately invited.

An expense fund of forty thousand dollars had been underwritten; out on the County Fair Grounds a Mike Monday Tabernacle had been erected, to seat fifteen thousand people.In it the prophet was at this moment concluding his message:

“There’s a lot of smart college professors and tea-guzzling slobs in this burg that say I’m a roughneck and a never-wuzzer and my knowledge of history is not-yet.Oh, there’s a gang of woolly-whiskered book-lice that think they know more than Almighty God, and prefer a lot of Hun science and smutty German criticism to the straight and simple Word of God.Oh, there’s a swell bunch of Lizzie boys and lemon-suckers and pie-faces and infidels and beer-bloated scribblers that love to fire off their filthy mouths and yip that Mike Monday is vulgar and full of mush.Those pups are saying now that I hog the gospel-show, that I’m in it for the coin.Well, now listen, folks!I’m going to give those birds a chance!They can stand right up here and tell me to my face that I’m a galoot and a liar and a hick!Only if they do—if they do!—don’t faint with surprise if some of those rum-dumm liars get one good swift poke from Mike, with all the kick of God’s Flaming Righteousness behind the wallop!Well, come on, folks!Who says it?Who says Mike Monday is a fourflush and a yahoo?Huh?Don’t I see anybody standing up?Well, there you are!Now I guess the folks in this man’s town will quit listening to all this kyoodling from behind the fence; I guess you’ll quit listening to the guys that pan and roast and kick and beef, and vomit out filthy atheism; and all of you’ll come in, with every grain of pep and reverence you got, and boost all together for Jesus Christ and his everlasting mercy and tenderness!”

V

At that moment Seneca Doane, the radical lawyer, and Dr. Kurt Yavitch, the histologist (whose report on the destruction of epithelial cells under radium had made the name of Zenith known in Munich, Prague, and Rome), were talking in Doane’s library.

“Zenith’s a city with gigantic power—gigantic buildings, gigantic machines, gigantic transportation,” meditated Doane.

“I hate your city.It has standardized all the beauty out of life.It is one big railroad station—with all the people taking tickets for the best cemeteries,” Dr. Yavitch said placidly.

Doane roused.“I’m hanged if it is!You make me sick, Kurt, with your perpetual whine about ‘standardization.’Don’t you suppose any other nation is ‘standardized?’Is anything more standardized than England, with every house that can afford it having the same muffins at the same tea-hour, and every retired general going to exactly the same evensong at the same gray stone church with a square tower, and every golfing prig in Harris tweeds saying ‘Right you are!’to every other prosperous ass?Yet I love England.And for standardization—just look at the sidewalk cafés in France and the love-making in Italy!

“Standardization is excellent, per se. When I buy an Ingersoll watch or a Ford, I get a better tool for less money, and I know precisely what I’m getting, and that leaves me more time and energy to be individual in. And— I remember once in London I saw a picture of an American suburb, in a toothpaste ad on the back of the Saturday Evening Post—an elm-lined snowy street of these new houses, Georgian some of ’em, or with low raking roofs and— The kind of street you’d find here in Zenith, say in Floral Heights. Open. Trees. Grass. And I was homesick! There’s no other country in the world that has such pleasant houses. And I don’t care if they are standardized. It’s a corking standard!

“No, what I fight in Zenith is standardization of thought, and, of course, the traditions of competition.The real villains of the piece are the clean, kind, industrious Family Men who use every known brand of trickery and cruelty to insure the prosperity of their cubs.The worst thing about these fellows is that they’re so good and, in their work at least, so intelligent.You can’t hate them properly, and yet their standardized minds are the enemy.

“Then this boosting— Sneakingly I have a notion that Zenith is a better place to live in than Manchester or Glasgow or Lyons or Berlin or Turin—”

“It is not, and I have lift in most of them,” murmured Dr. Yavitch.

“Well, matter of taste.Personally, I prefer a city with a future so unknown that it excites my imagination.But what I particularly want—”

“You,” said Dr. Yavitch, “are a middle-road liberal, and you haven’t the slightest idea what you want.I, being a revolutionist, know exactly what I want—and what I want now is a drink.”

VI

At that moment in Zenith, Jake Offutt, the politician, and Henry T.Thompson were in conference.Offutt suggested, “The thing to do is to get your fool son-in-law, Babbitt, to put it over.He’s one of these patriotic guys.When he grabs a piece of property for the gang, he makes it look like we were dyin’ of love for the dear peepul, and I do love to buy respectability—reasonable.Wonder how long we can keep it up, Hank?We’re safe as long as the good little boys like George Babbitt and all the nice respectable labor-leaders think you and me are rugged patriots. There’s swell pickings for an honest politician here, Hank: a whole city working to provide cigars and fried chicken and dry martinis for us, and rallying to our banner with indignation, oh, fierce indignation, whenever some squealer like this fellow Seneca Doane comes along! Honest, Hank, a smart codger like me ought to be ashamed of himself if he didn’t milk cattle like them, when they come around mooing for it! But the Traction gang can’t get away with grand larceny like it used to. I wonder when— Hank, I wish we could fix some way to run this fellow Seneca Doane out of town. It’s him or us!”

At that moment in Zenith, three hundred and forty or fifty thousand Ordinary People were asleep, a vast unpenetrated shadow.In the slum beyond the railroad tracks, a young man who for six months had sought work turned on the gas and killed himself and his wife.

At that moment Lloyd Mallam, the poet, owner of the Hafiz Book Shop, was finishing a rondeau to show how diverting was life amid the feuds of medieval Florence, but how dull it was in so obvious a place as Zenith.

 

And at that moment George F.Babbitt turned ponderously in bed—the last turn, signifying that he’d had enough of this worried business of falling asleep and was about it in earnest.

Instantly he was in the magic dream.He was somewhere among unknown people who laughed at him.He slipped away, ran down the paths of a midnight garden, and at the gate the fairy child was waiting.Her dear and tranquil hand caressed his cheek.He was gallant and wise and well-beloved; warm ivory were her arms; and beyond perilous moors the brave sea glittered.

CHAPTER VIII

I

The great events of Babbitt’s spring were the secret buying of real-estate options in Linton for certain street-traction officials, before the public announcement that the Linton Avenue Car Line would be extended, and a dinner which was, as he rejoiced to his wife, not only “a regular society spread but a real sure-enough highbrow affair, with some of the keenest intellects and the brightest bunch of little women in town.” It was so absorbing an occasion that he almost forgot his desire to run off to Maine with Paul Riesling.

Though he had been born in the village of Catawba, Babbitt had risen to that metropolitan social plane on which hosts have as many as four people at dinner without planning it for more than an evening or two.But a dinner of twelve, with flowers from the florist’s and all the cut-glass out, staggered even the Babbitts.

For two weeks they studied, debated, and arbitrated the list of guests.

Babbitt marveled, “Of course we’re up-to-date ourselves, but still, think of us entertaining a famous poet like Chum Frink, a fellow that on nothing but a poem or so every day and just writing a few advertisements pulls down fifteen thousand berries a year!”

“Yes, and Howard Littlefield.Do you know, the other evening Eunice told me her papa speaks three languages!”said Mrs. Babbitt.

“Huh!That’s nothing!So do I—American, baseball, and poker!”

“I don’t think it’s nice to be funny about a matter like that. Think how wonderful it must be to speak three languages, and so useful and— And with people like that, I don’t see why we invite the Orville Joneses.”

“Well now, Orville is a mighty up-and-coming fellow!”

“Yes, I know, but— A laundry!”

“I’ll admit a laundry hasn’t got the class of poetry or real estate, but just the same, Orvy is mighty deep.Ever start him spieling about gardening?Say, that fellow can tell you the name of every kind of tree, and some of their Greek and Latin names too!Besides, we owe the Joneses a dinner.Besides, gosh, we got to have some boob for audience, when a bunch of hot-air artists like Frink and Littlefield get going.”

“Well, dear—I meant to speak of this—I do think that as host you ought to sit back and listen, and let your guests have a chance to talk once in a while!”

“Oh, you do, do you!Sure!I talk all the time!And I’m just a business man—oh sure!—I’m no Ph.D. like Littlefield, and no poet, and I haven’t anything to spring!Well, let me tell you, just the other day your darn Chum Frink comes up to me at the club begging to know what I thought about the Springfield school-bond issue.And who told him?I did!You bet your life I told him!Little me!I certainly did!He came up and asked me, and I told him all about it!You bet!And he was darn glad to listen to me and— Duty as a host!I guess I know my duty as a host and let me tell you—”

In fact, the Orville Joneses were invited.

II

On the morning of the dinner, Mrs. Babbitt was restive.

“Now, George, I want you to be sure and be home early to-night.Remember, you have to dress.”

“Uh-huh. I see by the Advocate that the Presbyterian General Assembly has voted to quit the Interchurch World Movement. That—”

“George!Did you hear what I said?You must be home in time to dress to-night.”

“Dress?Hell!I’m dressed now!Think I’m going down to the office in my B.V.D.’s?”

“I will not have you talking indecently before the children!And you do have to put on your dinner-jacket!”

“I guess you mean my Tux.I tell you, of all the doggone nonsensical nuisances that was ever invented—”

Three minutes later, after Babbitt had wailed, “Well, I don’t know whether I’m going to dress or not” in a manner which showed that he was going to dress, the discussion moved on.

“Now, George, you mustn’t forget to call in at Vecchia’s on the way home and get the ice cream.Their delivery-wagon is broken down, and I don’t want to trust them to send it by—”

“All right!You told me that before breakfast!”

“Well, I don’t want you to forget.I’ll be working my head off all day long, training the girl that’s to help with the dinner—”

“All nonsense, anyway, hiring an extra girl for the feed.Matilda could perfectly well—”

“—and I have to go out and buy the flowers, and fix them, and set the table, and order the salted almonds, and look at the chickens, and arrange for the children to have their supper up-stairs and— And I simply must depend on you to go to Vecchia’s for the ice cream.”

“All riiiiiight!Gosh, I’m going to get it!”

“All you have to do is to go in and say you want the ice cream that Mrs. Babbitt ordered yesterday by ’phone, and it will be all ready for you.”

At ten-thirty she telephoned to him not to forget the ice cream from Vecchia’s.

He was surprised and blasted then by a thought.He wondered whether Floral Heights dinners were worth the hideous toil involved. But he repented the sacrilege in the excitement of buying the materials for cocktails.

Now this was the manner of obtaining alcohol under the reign of righteousness and prohibition:

He drove from the severe rectangular streets of the modern business center into the tangled byways of Old Town—jagged blocks filled with sooty warehouses and lofts; on into The Arbor, once a pleasant orchard but now a morass of lodging-houses, tenements, and brothels.Exquisite shivers chilled his spine and stomach, and he looked at every policeman with intense innocence, as one who loved the law, and admired the Force, and longed to stop and play with them.He parked his car a block from Healey Hanson’s saloon, worrying, “Well, rats, if anybody did see me, they’d think I was here on business.”

He entered a place curiously like the saloons of ante-prohibition days, with a long greasy bar with sawdust in front and streaky mirror behind, a pine table at which a dirty old man dreamed over a glass of something which resembled whisky, and with two men at the bar, drinking something which resembled beer, and giving that impression of forming a large crowd which two men always give in a saloon.The bartender, a tall pale Swede with a diamond in his lilac scarf, stared at Babbitt as he stalked plumply up to the bar and whispered, “I’d, uh— Friend of Hanson’s sent me here.Like to get some gin.”

The bartender gazed down on him in the manner of an outraged bishop.“I guess you got the wrong place, my friend.We sell nothing but soft drinks here.”He cleaned the bar with a rag which would itself have done with a little cleaning, and glared across his mechanically moving elbow.

The old dreamer at the table petitioned the bartender, “Say, Oscar, listen.”

Oscar did not listen.

“Aw, say, Oscar, listen, will yuh?Say, lis-sen!”

The decayed and drowsy voice of the loafer, the agreeable stink of beer-dregs, threw a spell of inanition over Babbitt.The bartender moved grimly toward the crowd of two men.Babbitt followed him as delicately as a cat, and wheedled, “Say, Oscar, I want to speak to Mr. Hanson.”

“Whajuh wanta see him for?”

“I just want to talk to him.Here’s my card.”

It was a beautiful card, an engraved card, a card in the blackest black and the sharpest red, announcing that Mr. George F.Babbitt was Estates, Insurance, Rents.The bartender held it as though it weighed ten pounds, and read it as though it were a hundred words long.He did not bend from his episcopal dignity, but he growled, “I’ll see if he’s around.”

From the back room he brought an immensely old young man, a quiet sharp-eyed man, in tan silk shirt, checked vest hanging open, and burning brown trousers—Mr. Healey Hanson.Mr. Hanson said only “Yuh?”but his implacable and contemptuous eyes queried Babbitt’s soul, and he seemed not at all impressed by the new dark-gray suit for which (as he had admitted to every acquaintance at the Athletic Club) Babbitt had paid a hundred and twenty-five dollars.

“Glad meet you, Mr. Hanson.Say, uh— I’m George Babbitt of the Babbitt-Thompson Realty Company.I’m a great friend of Jake Offutt’s.”

“Well, what of it?”

“Say, uh, I’m going to have a party, and Jake told me you’d be able to fix me up with a little gin.”In alarm, in obsequiousness, as Hanson’s eyes grew more bored, “You telephone to Jake about me, if you want to.”

Hanson answered by jerking his head to indicate the entrance to the back room, and strolled away.Babbitt melodramatically crept into an apartment containing four round tables, eleven chairs, a brewery calendar, and a smell. He waited. Thrice he saw Healey Hanson saunter through, humming, hands in pockets, ignoring him.

By this time Babbitt had modified his valiant morning vow, “I won’t pay one cent over seven dollars a quart” to “I might pay ten.”On Hanson’s next weary entrance he besought, “Could you fix that up?”Hanson scowled, and grated, “Just a minute—Pete’s sake—just a min-ute!”In growing meekness Babbitt went on waiting till Hanson casually reappeared with a quart of gin—what is euphemistically known as a quart—in his disdainful long white hands.

“Twelve bucks,” he snapped.

“Say, uh, but say, cap’n, Jake thought you’d be able to fix me up for eight or nine a bottle.”

“Nup.Twelve.This is the real stuff, smuggled from Canada.This is none o’ your neutral spirits with a drop of juniper extract,” the honest merchant said virtuously.“Twelve bones—if you want it.Course y’ understand I’m just doing this anyway as a friend of Jake’s.”

“Sure!Sure!I understand!”Babbitt gratefully held out twelve dollars.He felt honored by contact with greatness as Hanson yawned, stuffed the bills, uncounted, into his radiant vest, and swaggered away.

He had a number of titillations out of concealing the gin-bottle under his coat and out of hiding it in his desk.All afternoon he snorted and chuckled and gurgled over his ability to “give the Boys a real shot in the arm to-night.”He was, in fact, so exhilarated that he was within a block of his house before he remembered that there was a certain matter, mentioned by his wife, of fetching ice cream from Vecchia’s.He explained, “Well, darn it—” and drove back.

Vecchia was not a caterer, he was The Caterer of Zenith.Most coming-out parties were held in the white and gold ballroom of the Maison Vecchia; at all nice teas the guests recognized the five kinds of Vecchia sandwiches and the seven kinds of Vecchia cakes; and all really smart dinners ended, as on a resolving chord, in Vecchia Neapolitan ice cream in one of the three reliable molds—the melon mold, the round mold like a layer cake, and the long brick.

Vecchia’s shop had pale blue woodwork, tracery of plaster roses, attendants in frilled aprons, and glass shelves of “kisses” with all the refinement that inheres in whites of eggs.Babbitt felt heavy and thick amid this professional daintiness, and as he waited for the ice cream he decided, with hot prickles at the back of his neck, that a girl customer was giggling at him.He went home in a touchy temper.The first thing he heard was his wife’s agitated:

“George! Did you remember to go to Vecchia’s and get the ice cream?”

“Say!Look here!Do I ever forget to do things?”

“Yes!Often!”

“Well now, it’s darn seldom I do, and it certainly makes me tired, after going into a pink-tea joint like Vecchia’s and having to stand around looking at a lot of half-naked young girls, all rouged up like they were sixty and eating a lot of stuff that simply ruins their stomachs—”

“Oh, it’s too bad about you!I’ve noticed how you hate to look at pretty girls!”

With a jar Babbitt realized that his wife was too busy to be impressed by that moral indignation with which males rule the world, and he went humbly up-stairs to dress.He had an impression of a glorified dining-room, of cut-glass, candles, polished wood, lace, silver, roses.With the awed swelling of the heart suitable to so grave a business as giving a dinner, he slew the temptation to wear his plaited dress-shirt for a fourth time, took out an entirely fresh one, tightened his black bow, and rubbed his patent-leather pumps with a handkerchief.He glanced with pleasure at his garnet and silver studs.He smoothed and patted his ankles, transformed by silk socks from the sturdy shanks of George Babbitt to the elegant limbs of what is called a Clubman. He stood before the pier-glass, viewing his trim dinner-coat, his beautiful triple-braided trousers; and murmured in lyric beatitude, “By golly, I don’t look so bad. I certainly don’t look like Catawba. If the hicks back home could see me in this rig, they’d have a fit!”

He moved majestically down to mix the cocktails.As he chipped ice, as he squeezed oranges, as he collected vast stores of bottles, glasses, and spoons at the sink in the pantry, he felt as authoritative as the bartender at Healey Hanson’s saloon.True, Mrs. Babbitt said he was under foot, and Matilda and the maid hired for the evening brushed by him, elbowed him, shrieked “Pleasopn door,” as they tottered through with trays, but in this high moment he ignored them.

Besides the new bottle of gin, his cellar consisted of one half-bottle of Bourbon whisky, a quarter of a bottle of Italian vermouth, and approximately one hundred drops of orange bitters.He did not possess a cocktail-shaker.A shaker was proof of dissipation, the symbol of a Drinker, and Babbitt disliked being known as a Drinker even more than he liked a Drink.He mixed by pouring from an ancient gravy-boat into a handleless pitcher; he poured with a noble dignity, holding his alembics high beneath the powerful Mazda globe, his face hot, his shirt-front a glaring white, the copper sink a scoured red-gold.

He tasted the sacred essence.“Now, by golly, if that isn’t pretty near one fine old cocktail!Kind of a Bronx, and yet like a Manhattan.Ummmmmm!Hey, Myra, want a little nip before the folks come?”

Bustling into the dining-room, moving each glass a quarter of an inch, rushing back with resolution implacable on her face, her gray and silver-lace party frock protected by a denim towel, Mrs. Babbitt glared at him, and rebuked him, “Certainly not!”

“Well,” in a loose, jocose manner, “I think the old man will!”

The cocktail filled him with a whirling exhilaration behind which he was aware of devastating desires—to rush places in fast motors, to kiss girls, to sing, to be witty.He sought to regain his lost dignity by announcing to Matilda:

“I’m going to stick this pitcher of cocktails in the refrigerator.Be sure you don’t upset any of ’em.”

“Yeh.”

“Well, be sure now.Don’t go putting anything on this top shelf.”

“Yeh.”

“Well, be—” He was dizzy.His voice was thin and distant.“Whee!”With enormous impressiveness he commanded, “Well, be sure now,” and minced into the safety of the living-room.He wondered whether he could persuade “as slow a bunch as Myra and the Littlefields to go some place aft’ dinner and raise Cain and maybe dig up smore booze.”He perceived that he had gifts of profligacy which had been neglected.

By the time the guests had come, including the inevitable late couple for whom the others waited with painful amiability, a great gray emptiness had replaced the purple swirling in Babbitt’s head, and he had to force the tumultuous greetings suitable to a host on Floral Heights.

The guests were Howard Littlefield, the doctor of philosophy who furnished publicity and comforting economics to the Street Traction Company; Vergil Gunch, the coal-dealer, equally powerful in the Elks and in the Boosters’ Club; Eddie Swanson, the agent for the Javelin Motor Car, who lived across the street; and Orville Jones, owner of the Lily White Laundry, which justly announced itself “the biggest, busiest, bulliest cleanerie shoppe in Zenith.”But, naturally, the most distinguished of all was T.Cholmondeley Frink, who was not only the author of “Poemulations,” which, syndicated daily in sixty-seven leading newspapers, gave him one of the largest audiences of any poet in the world, but also an optimistic lecturer and the creator of “Ads that Add.”Despite the searching philosophy and high morality of his verses, they were humorous and easily understood by any child of twelve; and it added a neat air of pleasantry to them that they were set not as verse but as prose.Mr. Frink was known from Coast to Coast as “Chum.”

With them were six wives, more or less—it was hard to tell, so early in the evening, as at first glance they all looked alike, and as they all said, “Oh, isn’t this nice!” in the same tone of determined liveliness. To the eye, the men were less similar: Littlefield, a hedge-scholar, tall and horse-faced; Chum Frink, a trifle of a man with soft and mouse-like hair, advertising his profession as poet by a silk cord on his eye-glasses; Vergil Gunch, broad, with coarse black hair en brosse; Eddie Swanson, a bald and bouncing young man who showed his taste for elegance by an evening waistcoat of figured black silk with glass buttons; Orville Jones, a steady-looking, stubby, not very memorable person, with a hemp-colored toothbrush mustache.Yet they were all so well fed and clean, they all shouted “’Evenin’, Georgie!”with such robustness, that they seemed to be cousins, and the strange thing is that the longer one knew the women, the less alike they seemed; while the longer one knew the men, the more alike their bold patterns appeared.

The drinking of the cocktails was as canonical a rite as the mixing.The company waited, uneasily, hopefully, agreeing in a strained manner that the weather had been rather warm and slightly cold, but still Babbitt said nothing about drinks.They became despondent.But when the late couple (the Swansons) had arrived, Babbitt hinted, “Well, folks, do you think you could stand breaking the law a little?”

They looked at Chum Frink, the recognized lord of language.Frink pulled at his eye-glass cord as at a bell-rope, he cleared his throat and said that which was the custom:

“I’ll tell you, George: I’m a law-abiding man, but they do say Verg Gunch is a regular yegg, and of course he’s bigger ’n I am, and I just can’t figure out what I’d do if he tried to force me into anything criminal!”

Gunch was roaring, “Well, I’ll take a chance—” when Frink held up his hand and went on, “So if Verg and you insist, Georgie, I’ll park my car on the wrong side of the street, because I take it for granted that’s the crime you’re hinting at!”

There was a great deal of laughter.Mrs. Jones asserted, “Mr. Frink is simply too killing!You’d think he was so innocent!”

Babbitt clamored, “How did you guess it, Chum?Well, you-all just wait a moment while I go out and get the—keys to your cars!”Through a froth of merriment he brought the shining promise, the mighty tray of glasses with the cloudy yellow cocktails in the glass pitcher in the center.The men babbled, “Oh, gosh, have a look!”and “This gets me right where I live!”and “Let me at it!”But Chum Frink, a traveled man and not unused to woes, was stricken by the thought that the potion might be merely fruit-juice with a little neutral spirits.He looked timorous as Babbitt, a moist and ecstatic almoner, held out a glass, but as he tasted it he piped, “Oh, man, let me dream on!It ain’t true, but don’t waken me!Jus’ lemme slumber!”

Two hours before, Frink had completed a newspaper lyric beginning:

I sat alone and groused and thunk, and scratched my head and sighed and wunk, and groaned, “There still are boobs, alack, who’d like the old-time gin-mill back; that den that makes a sage a loon, the vile and smelly old saloon!”I’ll never miss their poison booze, whilst I the bubbling spring can use, that leaves my head at merry morn as clear as any babe new-born!

Babbitt drank with the others; his moment’s depression was gone; he perceived that these were the best fellows in the world; he wanted to give them a thousand cocktails.“Think you could stand another?”he cried.The wives refused, with giggles, but the men, speaking in a wide, elaborate, enjoyable manner, gloated, “Well, sooner than have you get sore at me, Georgie—”

“You got a little dividend coming,” said Babbitt to each of them, and each intoned, “Squeeze it, Georgie, squeeze it!”

When, beyond hope, the pitcher was empty, they stood and talked about prohibition.The men leaned back on their heels, put their hands in their trousers-pockets, and proclaimed their views with the booming profundity of a prosperous male repeating a thoroughly hackneyed statement about a matter of which he knows nothing whatever.

“Now, I’ll tell you,” said Vergil Gunch; “way I figure it is this, and I can speak by the book, because I’ve talked to a lot of doctors and fellows that ought to know, and the way I see it is that it’s a good thing to get rid of the saloon, but they ought to let a fellow have beer and light wines.”

Howard Littlefield observed, “What isn’t generally realized is that it’s a dangerous prop’sition to invade the rights of personal liberty.Now, take this for instance: The King of— Bavaria?I think it was Bavaria—yes, Bavaria, it was—in 1862, March, 1862, he issued a proclamation against public grazing of live-stock.The peasantry had stood for overtaxation without the slightest complaint, but when this proclamation came out, they rebelled.Or it may have been Saxony.But it just goes to show the dangers of invading the rights of personal liberty.”

“That’s it—no one got a right to invade personal liberty,” said Orville Jones.

“Just the same, you don’t want to forget prohibition is a mighty good thing for the working-classes.Keeps ’em from wasting their money and lowering their productiveness,” said Vergil Gunch.

“Yes, that’s so.But the trouble is the manner of enforcement,” insisted Howard Littlefield.“Congress didn’t understand the right system.Now, if I’d been running the thing, I’d have arranged it so that the drinker himself was licensed, and then we could have taken care of the shiftless workman—kept him from drinking—and yet not’ve interfered with the rights—with the personal liberty—of fellows like ourselves.”

They bobbed their heads, looked admiringly at one another, and stated, “That’s so, that would be the stunt.”

“The thing that worries me is that a lot of these guys will take to cocaine,” sighed Eddie Swanson.

They bobbed more violently, and groaned, “That’s so, there is a danger of that.”

Chum Frink chanted, “Oh, say, I got hold of a swell new receipt for home-made beer the other day.You take—”

Gunch interrupted, “Wait!Let me tell you mine!”Littlefield snorted, “Beer!Rats!Thing to do is to ferment cider!”Jones insisted, “I’ve got the receipt that does the business!”Swanson begged, “Oh, say, lemme tell you the story—” But Frink went on resolutely, “You take and save the shells from peas, and pour six gallons of water on a bushel of shells and boil the mixture till—”

Mrs. Babbitt turned toward them with yearning sweetness; Frink hastened to finish even his best beer-recipe; and she said gaily, “Dinner is served.”

There was a good deal of friendly argument among the men as to which should go in last, and while they were crossing the hall from the living-room to the dining-room Vergil Gunch made them laugh by thundering, “If I can’t sit next to Myra Babbitt and hold her hand under the table, I won’t play— I’m goin’ home.”In the dining-room they stood embarrassed while Mrs. Babbitt fluttered, “Now, let me see— Oh, I was going to have some nice hand-painted place-cards for you but— Oh, let me see; Mr. Frink, you sit there.”

The dinner was in the best style of women’s-magazine art, whereby the salad was served in hollowed apples, and everything but the invincible fried chicken resembled something else.

Ordinarily the men found it hard to talk to the women; flirtation was an art unknown on Floral Heights, and the realms of offices and of kitchens had no alliances.But under the inspiration of the cocktails, conversation was violent.Each of the men still had a number of important things to say about prohibition, and now that each had a loyal listener in his dinner-partner he burst out:

“I found a place where I can get all the hootch I want at eight a quart—”

“Did you read about this fellow that went and paid a thousand dollars for ten cases of red-eye that proved to be nothing but water?Seems this fellow was standing on the corner and fellow comes up to him—”

“They say there’s a whole raft of stuff being smuggled across at Detroit—”

“What I always say is—what a lot of folks don’t realize about prohibition—”

“And then you get all this awful poison stuff—wood alcohol and everything—”

“Course I believe in it on principle, but I don’t propose to have anybody telling me what I got to think and do.No American’ll ever stand for that!”

But they all felt that it was rather in bad taste for Orville Jones—and he not recognized as one of the wits of the occasion anyway—to say, “In fact, the whole thing about prohibition is this: it isn’t the initial cost, it’s the humidity.”

Not till the one required topic had been dealt with did the conversation become general.

It was often and admiringly said of Vergil Gunch, “Gee, that fellow can get away with murder!Why, he can pull a Raw One in mixed company and all the ladies’ll laugh their heads off, but me, gosh, if I crack anything that’s just the least bit off color I get the razz for fair!”Now Gunch delighted them by crying to Mrs. Eddie Swanson, youngest of the women, “Louetta!I managed to pinch Eddie’s doorkey out of his pocket, and what say you and me sneak across the street when the folks aren’t looking? Got something,” with a gorgeous leer, “awful important to tell you!”

The women wriggled, and Babbitt was stirred to like naughtiness.“Say, folks, I wished I dared show you a book I borrowed from Doc Patten!”

“Now, George!The idea!”Mrs. Babbitt warned him.

“This book—racy isn’t the word! It’s some kind of an anthropological report about—about Customs, in the South Seas, and what it doesn’t say!It’s a book you can’t buy.Verg, I’ll lend it to you.”

“Me first!”insisted Eddie Swanson.“Sounds spicy!”

Orville Jones announced, “Say, I heard a Good One the other day about a coupla Swedes and their wives,” and, in the best Jewish accent, he resolutely carried the Good One to a slightly disinfected ending.Gunch capped it.But the cocktails waned, the seekers dropped back into cautious reality.

Chum Frink had recently been on a lecture-tour among the small towns, and he chuckled, “Awful good to get back to civilization!I certainly been seeing some hick towns!I mean— Course the folks there are the best on earth, but, gee whiz, those Main Street burgs are slow, and you fellows can’t hardly appreciate what it means to be here with a bunch of live ones!”

“You bet!”exulted Orville Jones.“They’re the best folks on earth, those small-town folks, but, oh, mama!what conversation!Why, say, they can’t talk about anything but the weather and the ne-oo Ford, by heckalorum!”

“That’s right.They all talk about just the same things,” said Eddie Swanson.

“Don’t they, though!They just say the same things over and over,” said Vergil Gunch.

“Yes, it’s really remarkable.They seem to lack all power of looking at things impersonally.They simply go over and over the same talk about Fords and the weather and so on,” said Howard Littlefield.

“Still, at that, you can’t blame ’em.They haven’t got any intellectual stimulus such as you get up here in the city,” said Chum Frink.

“Gosh, that’s right,” said Babbitt.“I don’t want you highbrows to get stuck on yourselves but I must say it keeps a fellow right up on his toes to sit in with a poet and with Howard, the guy that put the con in economics!But these small-town boobs, with nobody but each other to talk to, no wonder they get so sloppy and uncultured in their speech, and so balled-up in their thinking!”

Orville Jones commented, “And, then take our other advantages—the movies, frinstance.These Yapville sports think they’re all-get-out if they have one change of bill a week, where here in the city you got your choice of a dozen diff’rent movies any evening you want to name!”

“Sure, and the inspiration we get from rubbing up against high-class hustlers every day and getting jam full of ginger,” said Eddie Swanson.

“Same time,” said Babbitt, “no sense excusing these rube burgs too easy.Fellow’s own fault if he doesn’t show the initiative to up and beat it to the city, like we done—did.And, just speaking in confidence among friends, they’re jealous as the devil of a city man.Every time I go up to Catawba I have to go around apologizing to the fellows I was brought up with because I’ve more or less succeeded and they haven’t.And if you talk natural to ’em, way we do here, and show finesse and what you might call a broad point of view, why, they think you’re putting on side.There’s my own half-brother Martin—runs the little ole general store my Dad used to keep.Say, I’ll bet he don’t know there is such a thing as a Tux—as a dinner-jacket.If he was to come in here now, he’d think we were a bunch of—of— Why, gosh, I swear, he wouldn’t know what to think!Yes, sir, they’re jealous!”

Chum Frink agreed, “That’s so.But what I mind is their lack of culture and appreciation of the Beautiful—if you’ll excuse me for being highbrow. Now, I like to give a high-class lecture, and read some of my best poetry—not the newspaper stuff but the magazine things. But say, when I get out in the tall grass, there’s nothing will take but a lot of cheesy old stories and slang and junk that if any of us were to indulge in it here, he’d get the gate so fast it would make his head swim.”

Vergil Gunch summed it up: “Fact is, we’re mighty lucky to be living among a bunch of city-folks, that recognize artistic things and business-punch equally.We’d feel pretty glum if we got stuck in some Main Street burg and tried to wise up the old codgers to the kind of life we’re used to here.But, by golly, there’s this you got to say for ’em: Every small American town is trying to get population and modern ideals.And darn if a lot of ’em don’t put it across!Somebody starts panning a rube crossroads, telling how he was there in 1900 and it consisted of one muddy street, count ’em, one, and nine hundred human clams. Well, you go back there in 1920, and you find pavements and a swell little hotel and a first-class ladies’ ready-to-wear shop—real perfection, in fact!You don’t want to just look at what these small towns are, you want to look at what they’re aiming to become, and they all got an ambition that in the long run is going to make ’em the finest spots on earth—they all want to be just like Zenith!”

III

However intimate they might be with T.Cholmondeley Frink as a neighbor, as a borrower of lawn-mowers and monkey-wrenches, they knew that he was also a Famous Poet and a distinguished advertising-agent; that behind his easiness were sultry literary mysteries which they could not penetrate.But to-night, in the gin-evolved confidence, he admitted them to the arcanum:

“I’ve got a literary problem that’s worrying me to death. I’m doing a series of ads for the Zeeco Car and I want to make each of ’em a real little gem—reg’lar stylistic stuff. I’m all for this theory that perfection is the stunt, or nothing at all, and these are as tough things as I ever tackled. You might think it’d be harder to do my poems—all these Heart Topics: home and fireside and happiness—but they’re cinches. You can’t go wrong on ’em; you know what sentiments any decent go-ahead fellow must have if he plays the game, and you stick right to ’em. But the poetry of industrialism, now there’s a literary line where you got to open up new territory. Do you know the fellow who’s really the American genius? The fellow who you don’t know his name and I don’t either, but his work ought to be preserved so’s future generations can judge our American thought and originality to-day? Why, the fellow that writes the Prince Albert Tobacco ads! Just listen to this:

“Now that,” caroled the motor agent, Eddie Swanson, “that’s what I call he-literature!That Prince Albert fellow—though, gosh, there can’t be just one fellow that writes ’em; must be a big board of classy ink-slingers in conference, but anyway: now, him, he doesn’t write for long-haired pikers, he writes for Regular Guys, he writes for me, and I tip my benny to him!The only thing is: I wonder if it sells the goods?Course, like all these poets, this Prince Albert fellow lets his idea run away with him.It makes elegant reading, but it don’t say nothing.I’d never go out and buy Prince Albert Tobacco after reading it, because it doesn’t tell me anything about the stuff.It’s just a bunch of fluff.”

Frink faced him: “Oh, you’re crazy!Have I got to sell you the idea of Style?Anyway, that’s the kind of stuff I’d like to do for the Zeeco.But I simply can’t.So I decided to stick to the straight poetic, and I took a shot at a highbrow ad for the Zeeco.How do you like this:”

“Yes,” Frink mused, “that’s got an elegant color to it, if I do say so, but it ain’t got the originality of ‘spill-of-speech!’”

The whole company sighed with sympathy and admiration

CHAPTER IX

I

Babbitt was fond of his friends, he loved the importance of being host and shouting, “Certainly, you’re going to have smore chicken—the idea!” and he appreciated the genius of T. Cholmondeley Frink, but the vigor of the cocktails was gone, and the more he ate the less joyful he felt. Then the amity of the dinner was destroyed by the nagging of the Swansons.

In Floral Heights and the other prosperous sections of Zenith, especially in the “young married set,” there were many women who had nothing to do.Though they had few servants, yet with gas stoves, electric ranges and dish-washers and vacuum cleaners, and tiled kitchen walls, their houses were so convenient that they had little housework, and much of their food came from bakeries and delicatessens.They had but two, one, or no children; and despite the myth that the Great War had made work respectable, their husbands objected to their “wasting time and getting a lot of crank ideas” in unpaid social work, and still more to their causing a rumor, by earning money, that they were not adequately supported.They worked perhaps two hours a day, and the rest of the time they ate chocolates, went to the motion-pictures, went window-shopping, went in gossiping twos and threes to card-parties, read magazines, thought timorously of the lovers who never appeared, and accumulated a splendid restlessness which they got rid of by nagging their husbands.The husbands nagged back.

Of these naggers the Swansons were perfect specimens.

Throughout the dinner Eddie Swanson had been complaining, publicly, about his wife’s new frock. It was, he submitted, too short, too low, too immodestly thin, and much too expensive. He appealed to Babbitt:

“Honest, George, what do you think of that rag Louetta went and bought?Don’t you think it’s the limit?”

“What’s eating you, Eddie?I call it a swell little dress.”

“Oh, it is, Mr. Swanson.It’s a sweet frock,” Mrs. Babbitt protested.

“There now, do you see, smarty!You’re such an authority on clothes!”Louetta raged, while the guests ruminated and peeped at her shoulders.

“That’s all right now,” said Swanson.“I’m authority enough so I know it was a waste of money, and it makes me tired to see you not wearing out a whole closetful of clothes you got already.I’ve expressed my idea about this before, and you know good and well you didn’t pay the least bit of attention.I have to camp on your trail to get you to do anything—”

There was much more of it, and they all assisted, all but Babbitt.Everything about him was dim except his stomach, and that was a bright scarlet disturbance.“Had too much grub; oughtn’t to eat this stuff,” he groaned—while he went on eating, while he gulped down a chill and glutinous slice of the ice-cream brick, and cocoanut cake as oozy as shaving-cream.He felt as though he had been stuffed with clay; his body was bursting, his throat was bursting, his brain was hot mud; and only with agony did he continue to smile and shout as became a host on Floral Heights.

He would, except for his guests, have fled outdoors and walked off the intoxication of food, but in the haze which filled the room they sat forever, talking, talking, while he agonized, “Darn fool to be eating all this—not ’nother mouthful,” and discovered that he was again tasting the sickly welter of melted ice cream on his plate.There was no magic in his friends; he was not uplifted when Howard Littlefield produced from his treasure-house of scholarship the information that the chemical symbol for raw rubber is C10H16, which turns into isoprene, or 2C₅H₈Suddenly, without precedent, Babbitt was not merely bored but admitting that he was bored.It was ecstasy to escape from the table, from the torture of a straight chair, and loll on the davenport in the living-room.

The others, from their fitful unconvincing talk, their expressions of being slowly and painfully smothered, seemed to be suffering from the toil of social life and the horror of good food as much as himself.All of them accepted with relief the suggestion of bridge.

Babbitt recovered from the feeling of being boiled.He won at bridge.He was again able to endure Vergil Gunch’s inexorable heartiness.But he pictured loafing with Paul Riesling beside a lake in Maine.It was as overpowering and imaginative as homesickness.He had never seen Maine, yet he beheld the shrouded mountains, the tranquil lake of evening.“That boy Paul’s worth all these ballyhooing highbrows put together,” he muttered; and, “I’d like to get away from—everything.”

Even Louetta Swanson did not rouse him.

Mrs. Swanson was pretty and pliant.Babbitt was not an analyst of women, except as to their tastes in Furnished Houses to Rent.He divided them into Real Ladies, Working Women, Old Cranks, and Fly Chickens.He mooned over their charms but he was of opinion that all of them (save the women of his own family) were “different” and “mysterious.”Yet he had known by instinct that Louetta Swanson could be approached.Her eyes and lips were moist.Her face tapered from a broad forehead to a pointed chin, her mouth was thin but strong and avid, and between her brows were two outcurving and passionate wrinkles.She was thirty, perhaps, or younger.Gossip had never touched her, but every man naturally and instantly rose to flirtatiousness when he spoke to her, and every woman watched her with stilled blankness.

Between games, sitting on the davenport, Babbitt spoke to her with the requisite gallantry, that sonorous Floral Heights gallantry which is not flirtation but a terrified flight from it:

“You’re looking like a new soda-fountain to-night, Louetta.”

“Am I?”

“Ole Eddie kind of on the rampage.”

“Yes.I get so sick of it.”

“Well, when you get tired of hubby, you can run off with Uncle George.”

“If I ran away— Oh, well—”

“Anybody ever tell you your hands are awful pretty?”

She looked down at them, she pulled the lace of her sleeves over them, but otherwise she did not heed him.She was lost in unexpressed imaginings.

Babbitt was too languid this evening to pursue his duty of being a captivating (though strictly moral) male.He ambled back to the bridge-tables.He was not much thrilled when Mrs. Frink, a small twittering woman, proposed that they “try and do some spiritualism and table-tipping—you know Chum can make the spirits come—honest, he just scares me!”

The ladies of the party had not emerged all evening, but now, as the sex given to things of the spirit while the men warred against base things material, they took command and cried, “Oh, let’s!”In the dimness the men were rather solemn and foolish, but the goodwives quivered and adored as they sat about the table.They laughed, “Now, you be good or I’ll tell!”when the men took their hands in the circle.

Babbitt tingled with a slight return of interest in life as Louetta Swanson’s hand closed on his with quiet firmness.

All of them hunched over, intent.They startled as some one drew a strained breath.In the dusty light from the hall they looked unreal, they felt disembodied.Mrs. Gunch squeaked, and they jumped with unnatural jocularity, but at Frink’s hiss they sank into subdued awe.Suddenly, incredibly, they heard a knocking.They stared at Frink’s half-revealed hands and found them lying still.They wriggled, and pretended not to be impressed.

Frink spoke with gravity: “Is some one there?”A thud.“Is one knock to be the sign for ‘yes’?”A thud.“And two for ‘no’?”A thud.

“Now, ladies and gentlemen, shall we ask the guide to put us into communication with the spirit of some great one passed over?”Frink mumbled.

Mrs. Orville Jones begged, “Oh, let’s talk to Dante!We studied him at the Reading Circle.You know who he was, Orvy.”

“Certainly I know who he was!The Wop poet.Where do you think I was raised?”from her insulted husband.

“Sure—the fellow that took the Cook’s Tour to Hell.I’ve never waded through his po’try, but we learned about him in the U.,” said Babbitt.

“Page Mr. Dannnnnty!”intoned Eddie Swanson.

“You ought to get him easy, Mr. Frink, you and he being fellow-poets,” said Louetta Swanson.

“Fellow-poets, rats!Where d’ you get that stuff?”protested Vergil Gunch.“I suppose Dante showed a lot of speed for an old-timer—not that I’ve actually read him, of course—but to come right down to hard facts, he wouldn’t stand one-two-three if he had to buckle down to practical literature and turn out a poem for the newspaper-syndicate every day, like Chum does!”

“That’s so,” from Eddie Swanson.“Those old birds could take their time.Judas Priest, I could write poetry myself if I had a whole year for it, and just wrote about that old-fashioned junk like Dante wrote about.”

Frink demanded, “Hush, now!I’ll call him....O, Laughing Eyes, emerge forth into the, uh, the ultimates and bring hither the spirit of Dante, that we mortals may list to his words of wisdom.”

“You forgot to give um the address: 1658 Brimstone Avenue, Fiery Heights, Hell,” Gunch chuckled, but the others felt that this was irreligious.And besides—“probably it was just Chum making the knocks, but still, if there did happen to be something to all this, be exciting to talk to an old fellow belonging to—way back in early times—”

A thud.The spirit of Dante had come to the parlor of George F.Babbitt.

He was, it seemed, quite ready to answer their questions.He was “glad to be with them, this evening.”

Frink spelled out the messages by running through the alphabet till the spirit interpreter knocked at the right letter.

Littlefield asked, in a learned tone, “Do you like it in the Paradiso, Messire?”

“We are very happy on the higher plane, Signor.We are glad that you are studying this great truth of spiritualism,” Dante replied.

The circle moved with an awed creaking of stays and shirtfronts.“Suppose—suppose there were something to this?”

Babbitt had a different worry.“Suppose Chum Frink was really one of these spiritualists!Chum had, for a literary fellow, always seemed to be a Regular Guy; he belonged to the Chatham Road Presbyterian Church and went to the Boosters’ lunches and liked cigars and motors and racy stories.But suppose that secretly— After all, you never could tell about these darn highbrows; and to be an out-and-out spiritualist would be almost like being a socialist!”

No one could long be serious in the presence of Vergil Gunch.“Ask Dant’ how Jack Shakespeare and old Verg’—the guy they named after me—are gettin’ along, and don’t they wish they could get into the movie game!”he blared, and instantly all was mirth.Mrs. Jones shrieked, and Eddie Swanson desired to know whether Dante didn’t catch cold with nothing on but his wreath.

The pleased Dante made humble answer.

But Babbitt—the curst discontent was torturing him again, and heavily, in the impersonal darkness, he pondered, “I don’t— We’re all so flip and think we’re so smart.There’d be— A fellow like Dante— I wish I’d read some of his pieces.I don’t suppose I ever will, now.”

He had, without explanation, the impression of a slaggy cliff and on it, in silhouette against menacing clouds, a lone and austere figure.He was dismayed by a sudden contempt for his surest friends.He grasped Louetta Swanson’s hand, and found the comfort of human warmth.Habit came, a veteran warrior; and he shook himself.“What the deuce is the matter with me, this evening?”

He patted Louetta’s hand, to indicate that he hadn’t meant anything improper by squeezing it, and demanded of Frink, “Say, see if you can get old Dant’ to spiel us some of his poetry.Talk up to him.Tell him, ‘Buena giorna, señor, com sa va, wie geht’s?Keskersaykersa a little pome, señor?’”

II

The lights were switched on; the women sat on the fronts of their chairs in that determined suspense whereby a wife indicates that as soon as the present speaker has finished, she is going to remark brightly to her husband, “Well, dear, I think per-haps it’s about time for us to be saying good-night.” For once Babbitt did not break out in blustering efforts to keep the party going. He had—there was something he wished to think out— But the psychical research had started them off again. (“Why didn’t they go home! Why didn’t they go home!” ) Though he was impressed by the profundity of the statement, he was only half-enthusiastic when Howard Littlefield lectured, “The United States is the only nation in which the government is a Moral Ideal and not just a social arrangement.” (“True—true—weren’t they ever going home?” ) He was usually delighted to have an “inside view” of the momentous world of motors but to-night he scarcely listened to Eddie Swanson’s revelation: “If you want to go above the Javelin class, the Zeeco is a mighty good buy. Couple weeks ago, and mind you, this was a fair, square test, they took a Zeeco stock touring-car and they slid up the Tonawanda hill on high, and fellow told me—” (“Zeeco—good boat but— Were they planning to stay all night?” )

They really were going, with a flutter of “We did have the best time!”

Most aggressively friendly of all was Babbitt, yet as he burbled he was reflecting, “I got through it, but for a while there I didn’t hardly think I’d last out.”He prepared to taste that most delicate pleasure of the host: making fun of his guests in the relaxation of midnight.As the door closed he yawned voluptuously, chest out, shoulders wriggling, and turned cynically to his wife.

She was beaming.“Oh, it was nice, wasn’t it!I know they enjoyed every minute of it.Don’t you think so?”

He couldn’t do it.He couldn’t mock.It would have been like sneering at a happy child.He lied ponderously: “You bet!Best party this year, by a long shot.”

“Wasn’t the dinner good!And honestly I thought the fried chicken was delicious!”

“You bet!Fried to the Queen’s taste.Best fried chicken I’ve tasted for a coon’s age.”

“Didn’t Matilda fry it beautifully!And don’t you think the soup was simply delicious?”

“It certainly was!It was corking!Best soup I’ve tasted since Heck was a pup!”But his voice was seeping away.They stood in the hall, under the electric light in its square box-like shade of red glass bound with nickel.She stared at him.

“Why, George, you don’t sound—you sound as if you hadn’t really enjoyed it.”

“Sure I did!Course I did!”

“George!What is it?”

“Oh, I’m kind of tired, I guess.Been pounding pretty hard at the office.Need to get away and rest up a little.”

“Well, we’re going to Maine in just a few weeks now, dear.”

“Yuh—” Then he was pouring it out nakedly, robbed of reticence.“Myra: I think it’d be a good thing for me to get up there early.”

“But you have this man you have to meet in New York about business.”

“What man?Oh, sure.Him.Oh, that’s all off.But I want to hit Maine early—get in a little fishing, catch me a big trout, by golly!”A nervous, artificial laugh.

“Well, why don’t we do it?Verona and Matilda can run the house between them, and you and I can go any time, if you think we can afford it.”

“But that’s— I’ve been feeling so jumpy lately, I thought maybe it might be a good thing if I kind of got off by myself and sweat it out of me.”

“George! Don’t you want me to go along?” She was too wretchedly in earnest to be tragic, or gloriously insulted, or anything save dumpy and defenseless and flushed to the red steaminess of a boiled beet.

“Of course I do!I just meant—” Remembering that Paul Riesling had predicted this, he was as desperate as she.“I mean, sometimes it’s a good thing for an old grouch like me to go off and get it out of his system.”He tried to sound paternal.“Then when you and the kids arrive— I figured maybe I might skip up to Maine just a few days ahead of you— I’d be ready for a real bat, see how I mean?”He coaxed her with large booming sounds, with affable smiles, like a popular preacher blessing an Easter congregation, like a humorous lecturer completing his stint of eloquence, like all perpetrators of masculine wiles.

She stared at him, the joy of festival drained from her face.“Do I bother you when we go on vacations?Don’t I add anything to your fun?”

He broke.Suddenly, dreadfully, he was hysterical, he was a yelping baby.“Yes, yes, yes!Hell, yes!But can’t you understand I’m shot to pieces? I’m all in! I got to take care of myself! I tell you, I got to— I’m sick of everything and everybody! I got to—”

It was she who was mature and protective now.“Why, of course!You shall run off by yourself!Why don’t you get Paul to go along, and you boys just fish and have a good time?”She patted his shoulder—reaching up to it—while he shook with palsied helplessness, and in that moment was not merely by habit fond of her but clung to her strength.

She cried cheerily, “Now up-stairs you go, and pop into bed.We’ll fix it all up.I’ll see to the doors.Now skip!”

For many minutes, for many hours, for a bleak eternity, he lay awake, shivering, reduced to primitive terror, comprehending that he had won freedom, and wondering what he could do with anything so unknown and so embarrassing as freedom.

CHAPTER X

I

No apartment-house in Zenith had more resolutely experimented in condensation than the Revelstoke Arms, in which Paul and Zilla Riesling had a flat. By sliding the beds into low closets the bedrooms were converted into living-rooms. The kitchens were cupboards each containing an electric range, a copper sink, a glass refrigerator, and, very intermittently, a Balkan maid. Everything about the Arms was excessively modern, and everything was compressed—except the garages.

The Babbitts were calling on the Rieslings at the Arms. It was a speculative venture to call on the Rieslings; interesting and sometimes disconcerting.Zilla was an active, strident, full-blown, high-bosomed blonde.When she condescended to be good-humored she was nervously amusing.Her comments on people were saltily satiric and penetrative of accepted hypocrisies.“That’s so!”you said, and looked sheepish.She danced wildly, and called on the world to be merry, but in the midst of it she would turn indignant.She was always becoming indignant.Life was a plot against her, and she exposed it furiously.

She was affable to-night.She merely hinted that Orville Jones wore a toupé, that Mrs. T.Cholmondeley Frink’s singing resembled a Ford going into high, and that the Hon.Otis Deeble, mayor of Zenith and candidate for Congress, was a flatulent fool (which was quite true).The Babbitts and Rieslings sat doubtfully on stone-hard brocade chairs in the small living-room of the flat, with its mantel unprovided with a fireplace, and its strip of heavy gilt fabric upon a glaring new player-piano, till Mrs. Riesling shrieked, “Come on!Let’s put some pep in it!Get out your fiddle, Paul, and I’ll try to make Georgie dance decently.”

The Babbitts were in earnest.They were plotting for the escape to Maine.But when Mrs. Babbitt hinted with plump smilingness, “Does Paul get as tired after the winter’s work as Georgie does?”then Zilla remembered an injury; and when Zilla Riesling remembered an injury the world stopped till something had been done about it.

“Does he get tired?No, he doesn’t get tired, he just goes crazy, that’s all!You think Paul is so reasonable, oh, yes, and he loves to make out he’s a little lamb, but he’s stubborn as a mule.Oh, if you had to live with him—!You’d find out how sweet he is!He just pretends to be meek so he can have his own way.And me, I get the credit for being a terrible old crank, but if I didn’t blow up once in a while and get something started, we’d die of dry-rot.He never wants to go any place and— Why, last evening, just because the car was out of order—and that was his fault, too, because he ought to have taken it to the service-station and had the battery looked at—and he didn’t want to go down to the movies on the trolley.But we went, and then there was one of those impudent conductors, and Paul wouldn’t do a thing.

“I was standing on the platform waiting for the people to let me into the car, and this beast, this conductor, hollered at me, ‘Come on, you, move up!’Why, I’ve never had anybody speak to me that way in all my life!I was so astonished I just turned to him and said— I thought there must be some mistake, and so I said to him, perfectly pleasant, ‘Were you speaking to me?’and he went on and bellowed at me, ‘Yes, I was!You’re keeping the whole car from starting!’he said, and then I saw he was one of these dirty ill-bred hogs that kindness is wasted on, and so I stopped and looked right at him, and I said, ‘I—beg—your—pardon, I am not doing anything of the kind,’ I said, ‘it’s the people ahead of me, who won’t move up,’ I said, ‘and furthermore, let me tell you, young man, that you’re a low-down, foul-mouthed, impertinent skunk,’ I said, ‘and you’re no gentleman! I certainly intend to report you, and we’ll see,’ I said, ‘whether a lady is to be insulted by any drunken bum that chooses to put on a ragged uniform, and I’d thank you,’ I said, ‘to keep your filthy abuse to yourself.’ And then I waited for Paul to show he was half a man and come to my defense, and he just stood there and pretended he hadn’t heard a word, and so I said to him, ‘Well,’ I said—”

“Oh, cut it, cut it, Zill!”Paul groaned.“We all know I’m a mollycoddle, and you’re a tender bud, and let’s let it go at that.”

“Let it go?”Zilla’s face was wrinkled like the Medusa, her voice was a dagger of corroded brass.She was full of the joy of righteousness and bad temper.She was a crusader and, like every crusader, she exulted in the opportunity to be vicious in the name of virtue.“Let it go?If people knew how many things I’ve let go—”

“Oh, quit being such a bully.”

“Yes, a fine figure you’d cut if I didn’t bully you!You’d lie abed till noon and play your idiotic fiddle till midnight!You’re born lazy, and you’re born shiftless, and you’re born cowardly, Paul Riesling—”

“Oh, now, don’t say that, Zilla; you don’t mean a word of it!”protested Mrs. Babbitt.

“I will say that, and I mean every single last word of it!”

“Oh, now, Zilla, the idea!”Mrs. Babbitt was maternal and fussy.She was no older than Zilla, but she seemed so—at first.She was placid and puffy and mature, where Zilla, at forty-five, was so bleached and tight-corseted that you knew only that she was older than she looked.“The idea of talking to poor Paul like that!”

“Poor Paul is right!We’d both be poor, we’d be in the poorhouse, if I didn’t jazz him up!”

“Why, now, Zilla, Georgie and I were just saying how hard Paul’s been working all year, and we were thinking it would be lovely if the Boys could run off by themselves. I’ve been coaxing George to go up to Maine ahead of the rest of us, and get the tired out of his system before we come, and I think it would be lovely if Paul could manage to get away and join him.”

At this exposure of his plot to escape, Paul was startled out of impassivity.He rubbed his fingers.His hands twitched.

Zilla bayed, “Yes!You’re lucky!You can let George go, and not have to watch him.Fat old Georgie!Never peeps at another woman!Hasn’t got the spunk!”

“The hell I haven’t!”Babbitt was fervently defending his priceless immorality when Paul interrupted him—and Paul looked dangerous.He rose quickly; he said gently to Zilla:

“I suppose you imply I have a lot of sweethearts.”

“Yes, I do!”

“Well, then, my dear, since you ask for it— There hasn’t been a time in the last ten years when I haven’t found some nice little girl to comfort me, and as long as you continue your amiability I shall probably continue to deceive you.It isn’t hard.You’re so stupid.”

Zilla gibbered; she howled; words could not be distinguished in her slaver of abuse.

Then the bland George F.Babbitt was transformed.If Paul was dangerous, if Zilla was a snake-locked fury, if the neat emotions suitable to the Revelstoke Arms had been slashed into raw hatreds, it was Babbitt who was the most formidable.He leaped up.He seemed very large.He seized Zilla’s shoulder.The cautions of the broker were wiped from his face, and his voice was cruel:

“I’ve had enough of all this damn nonsense!I’ve known you for twenty-five years, Zil, and I never knew you to miss a chance to take your disappointments out on Paul.You’re not wicked.You’re worse.You’re a fool.And let me tell you that Paul is the finest boy God ever made.Every decent person is sick and tired of your taking advantage of being a woman and springing every mean innuendo you can think of. Who the hell are you that a person like Paul should have to ask your permission to go with me? You act like you were a combination of Queen Victoria and Cleopatra. You fool, can’t you see how people snicker at you, and sneer at you?”

Zilla was sobbing, “I’ve never— I’ve never—nobody ever talked to me like this in all my life!”

“No, but that’s the way they talk behind your back!Always!They say you’re a scolding old woman.Old, by God!”

That cowardly attack broke her.Her eyes were blank.She wept.But Babbitt glared stolidly.He felt that he was the all-powerful official in charge; that Paul and Mrs. Babbitt looked on him with awe; that he alone could handle this case.

Zilla writhed.She begged, “Oh, they don’t!”

“They certainly do!”

“I’ve been a bad woman!I’m terribly sorry!I’ll kill myself!I’ll do anything.Oh, I’ll— What do you want?”

She abased herself completely.Also, she enjoyed it.To the connoisseur of scenes, nothing is more enjoyable than a thorough, melodramatic, egoistic humility.

“I want you to let Paul beat it off to Maine with me,” Babbitt demanded.

“How can I help his going?You’ve just said I was an idiot and nobody paid any attention to me.”

“Oh, you can help it, all right, all right!What you got to do is to cut out hinting that the minute he gets out of your sight, he’ll go chasing after some petticoat.Matter fact, that’s the way you start the boy off wrong.You ought to have more sense—”

“Oh, I will, honestly, I will, George.I know I was bad.Oh, forgive me, all of you, forgive me—”

She enjoyed it.

So did Babbitt.He condemned magnificently and forgave piously, and as he went parading out with his wife he was grandly explanatory to her:

“Kind of a shame to bully Zilla, but course it was the only way to handle her.Gosh, I certainly did have her crawling!”

She said calmly, “Yes.You were horrid.You were showing off.You were having a lovely time thinking what a great fine person you were!”

“Well, by golly!Can you beat it!Of course I might of expected you to not stand by me!I might of expected you’d stick up for your own sex!”

“Yes.Poor Zilla, she’s so unhappy.She takes it out on Paul.She hasn’t a single thing to do, in that little flat.And she broods too much.And she used to be so pretty and gay, and she resents losing it.And you were just as nasty and mean as you could be.I’m not a bit proud of you—or of Paul, boasting about his horrid love-affairs!”

He was sulkily silent; he maintained his bad temper at a high level of outraged nobility all the four blocks home.At the door he left her, in self-approving haughtiness, and tramped the lawn.

With a shock it was revealed to him: “Gosh, I wonder if she was right—if she was partly right?”Overwork must have flayed him to abnormal sensitiveness; it was one of the few times in his life when he had queried his eternal excellence; and he perceived the summer night, smelled the wet grass.Then: “I don’t care!I’ve pulled it off.We’re going to have our spree.And for Paul, I’d do anything.”

II

They were buying their Maine tackle at Ijams Brothers’, the Sporting Goods Mart, with the help of Willis Ijams, fellow member of the Boosters’ Club.Babbitt was completely mad.He trumpeted and danced.He muttered to Paul, “Say, this is pretty good, eh?To be buying the stuff, eh?And good old Willis Ijams himself coming down on the floor to wait on us!Say, if those fellows that are getting their kit for the North Lakes knew we were going clear up to Maine, they’d have a fit, eh?... Well, come on, Brother Ijams—Willis, I mean. Here’s your chance! We’re a couple of easy marks! Whee! Let me at it! I’m going to buy out the store!”

He gloated on fly-rods and gorgeous rubber hip-boots, on tents with celluloid windows and folding chairs and ice-boxes.He simple-heartedly wanted to buy all of them.It was the Paul whom he was always vaguely protecting who kept him from his drunken desires.

But even Paul lightened when Willis Ijams, a salesman with poetry and diplomacy, discussed flies.“Now, of course, you boys know,” he said, “the great scrap is between dry flies and wet flies.Personally, I’m for dry flies.More sporting.”

“That’s so.Lots more sporting,” fulminated Babbitt, who knew very little about flies either wet or dry.

“Now if you’ll take my advice, Georgie, you’ll stock up well on these pale evening dims, and silver sedges, and red ants.Oh, boy, there’s a fly, that red ant!”

“You bet!That’s what it is—a fly!”rejoiced Babbitt.

“Yes, sir, that red ant,” said Ijams, “is a real honest-to-God fly!”

“Oh, I guess ole Mr. Trout won’t come a-hustling when I drop one of those red ants on the water!”asserted Babbitt, and his thick wrists made a rapturous motion of casting.

“Yes, and the landlocked salmon will take it, too,” said Ijams, who had never seen a landlocked salmon.

“Salmon!Trout!Say, Paul, can you see Uncle George with his khaki pants on haulin’ ’em in, some morning ’bout seven?Whee!”

III

They were on the New York express, incredibly bound for Maine, incredibly without their families.They were free, in a man’s world, in the smoking-compartment of the Pullman.

Outside the car window was a glaze of darkness stippled with the gold of infrequent mysterious lights.Babbitt was immensely conscious, in the sway and authoritative clatter of the train, of going, of going on.Leaning toward Paul he grunted, “Gosh, pretty nice to be hiking, eh?”

The small room, with its walls of ocher-colored steel, was filled mostly with the sort of men he classified as the Best Fellows You’ll Ever Meet—Real Good Mixers.There were four of them on the long seat; a fat man with a shrewd fat face, a knife-edged man in a green velour hat, a very young young man with an imitation amber cigarette-holder, and Babbitt.Facing them, on two movable leather chairs, were Paul and a lanky, old-fashioned man, very cunning, with wrinkles bracketing his mouth.They all read newspapers or trade journals, boot-and-shoe journals, crockery journals, and waited for the joys of conversation.It was the very young man, now making his first journey by Pullman, who began it.

“Say, gee, I had a wild old time in Zenith!”he gloried.“Say, if a fellow knows the ropes there he can have as wild a time as he can in New York!”

“Yuh, I bet you simply raised the old Ned.I figured you were a bad man when I saw you get on the train!”chuckled the fat one.

The others delightedly laid down their papers.

“Well, that’s all right now!I guess I seen some things in the Arbor you never seen!”complained the boy.

“Oh, I’ll bet you did!I bet you lapped up the malted milk like a reg’lar little devil!”

Then, the boy having served as introduction, they ignored him and charged into real talk.Only Paul, sitting by himself, reading at a serial story in a newspaper, failed to join them, and all but Babbitt regarded him as a snob, an eccentric, a person of no spirit.

Which of them said which has never been determined, and does not matter, since they all had the same ideas and expressed them always with the same ponderous and brassy assurance. If it was not Babbitt who was delivering any given verdict, at least he was beaming on the chancellor who did deliver it.

“At that, though,” announced the first, “they’re selling quite some booze in Zenith.Guess they are everywhere.I don’t know how you fellows feel about prohibition, but the way it strikes me is that it’s a mighty beneficial thing for the poor zob that hasn’t got any will-power but for fellows like us, it’s an infringement of personal liberty.”

“That’s a fact.Congress has got no right to interfere with a fellow’s personal liberty,” contended the second.

A man came in from the car, but as all the seats were full he stood up while he smoked his cigarette.He was an Outsider; he was not one of the Old Families of the smoking-compartment.They looked upon him bleakly and, after trying to appear at ease by examining his chin in the mirror, he gave it up and went out in silence.

“Just been making a trip through the South.Business conditions not very good down there,” said one of the council.

“Is that a fact!Not very good, eh?”

“No, didn’t strike me they were up to normal.”

“Not up to normal, eh?”

“No, I wouldn’t hardly say they were.”

The whole council nodded sagely and decided, “Yump, not hardly up to snuff.”

“Well, business conditions ain’t what they ought to be out West, neither, not by a long shot.”

“That’s a fact.And I guess the hotel business feels it.That’s one good thing, though: these hotels that’ve been charging five bucks a day—yes, and maybe six-seven!—for a rotten room are going to be darn glad to get four, and maybe give you a little service.”

“That’s a fact.Say, uh, speaknubout hotels, I hit the St.Francis at San Francisco for the first time, the other day, and, say, it certainly is a first-class place.”

“You’re right, brother!The St.Francis is a swell place—absolutely A1.”

“That’s a fact.I’m right with you.It’s a first-class place.”

“Yuh, but say, any of you fellows ever stay at the Rippleton, in Chicago? I don’t want to knock— I believe in boosting wherever you can—but say, of all the rotten dumps that pass ’emselves off as first-class hotels, that’s the worst. I’m going to get those guys, one of these days, and I told ’em so. You know how I am—well, maybe you don’t know, but I’m accustomed to first-class accommodations, and I’m perfectly willing to pay a reasonable price. I got into Chicago late the other night, and the Rippleton’s near the station— I’d never been there before, but I says to the taxi-driver— I always believe in taking a taxi when you get in late; may cost a little more money, but, gosh, it’s worth it when you got to be up early next morning and out selling a lot of crabs—and I said to him, ‘Oh, just drive me over to the Rippleton.’

“Well, we got there, and I breezed up to the desk and said to the clerk, ‘Well, brother, got a nice room with bath for Cousin Bill?’Saaaay!You’d ’a’ thought I’d sold him a second, or asked him to work on Yom Kippur!He hands me the cold-boiled stare and yaps, ‘I dunno, friend, I’ll see,’ and he ducks behind the rigamajig they keep track of the rooms on.Well, I guess he called up the Credit Association and the American Security League to see if I was all right—he certainly took long enough—or maybe he just went to sleep; but finally he comes out and looks at me like it hurts him, and croaks, ‘I think I can let you have a room with bath.’‘Well, that’s awful nice of you—sorry to trouble you—how much’ll it set me back?’I says, real sweet.‘It’ll cost you seven bucks a day, friend,’ he says.

“Well, it was late, and anyway, it went down on my expense-account—gosh, if I’d been paying it instead of the firm, I’d ’a’ tramped the streets all night before I’d ’a’ let any hick tavern stick me seven great big round dollars, believe me!So I lets it go at that. Well, the clerk wakes a nice young bellhop—fine lad—not a day over seventy-nine years old—fought at the Battle of Gettysburg and doesn’t know it’s over yet—thought I was one of the Confederates, I guess, from the way he looked at me—and Rip van Winkle took me up to something— I found out afterwards they called it a room, but first I thought there’d been some mistake— I thought they were putting me in the Salvation Army collection-box! At seven per each and every diem!Gosh!”

“Yuh, I’ve heard the Rippleton was pretty cheesy.Now, when I go to Chicago I always stay at the Blackstone or the La Salle—first-class places.”

“Say, any of you fellows ever stay at the Birchdale at Terre Haute?How is it?”

“Oh, the Birchdale is a first-class hotel.”

(Twelve minutes of conference on the state of hotels in South Bend, Flint, Dayton, Tulsa, Wichita, Fort Worth, Winona, Erie, Fargo, and Moose Jaw.)

“Speaknubout prices,” the man in the velour hat observed, fingering the elk-tooth on his heavy watch-chain, “I’d like to know where they get this stuff about clothes coming down.Now, you take this suit I got on.”He pinched his trousers-leg.“Four years ago I paid forty-two fifty for it, and it was real sure-’nough value.Well, here the other day I went into a store back home and asked to see a suit, and the fellow yanks out some hand-me-downs that, honest, I wouldn’t put on a hired man.Just out of curiosity I asks him, ‘What you charging for that junk?’‘Junk,’ he says, ‘what d’ you mean junk?That’s a swell piece of goods, all wool—’ Like hell!It was nice vegetable wool, right off the Ole Plantation!‘It’s all wool,’ he says, ‘and we get sixty-seven ninety for it.’‘Oh, you do, do you!’I says.‘Not from me you don’t,’ I says, and I walks right out on him.You bet!I says to the wife, ‘Well,’ I said, ‘as long as your strength holds out and you can go on putting a few more patches on papa’s pants, we’ll just pass up buying clothes.’”

“That’s right, brother.And just look at collars, frinstance—”

“Hey!Wait!”the fat man protested.“What’s the matter with collars?I’m selling collars!D’you realize the cost of labor on collars is still two hundred and seven per cent.above—”

They voted that if their old friend the fat man sold collars, then the price of collars was exactly what it should be; but all other clothing was tragically too expensive.They admired and loved one another now.They went profoundly into the science of business, and indicated that the purpose of manufacturing a plow or a brick was so that it might be sold.To them, the Romantic Hero was no longer the knight, the wandering poet, the cowpuncher, the aviator, nor the brave young district attorney, but the great sales-manager, who had an Analysis of Merchandizing Problems on his glass-topped desk, whose title of nobility was “Go-getter,” and who devoted himself and all his young samurai to the cosmic purpose of Selling—not of selling anything in particular, for or to anybody in particular, but pure Selling.

The shop-talk roused Paul Riesling.Though he was a player of violins and an interestingly unhappy husband, he was also a very able salesman of tar-roofing.He listened to the fat man’s remarks on “the value of house-organs and bulletins as a method of jazzing-up the Boys out on the road;” and he himself offered one or two excellent thoughts on the use of two-cent stamps on circulars.Then he committed an offense against the holy law of the Clan of Good Fellows.He became highbrow.

They were entering a city.On the outskirts they passed a steel-mill which flared in scarlet and orange flame that licked at the cadaverous stacks, at the iron-sheathed walls and sullen converters.

“My Lord, look at that—beautiful!”said Paul.

“You bet it’s beautiful, friend.That’s the Shelling-Horton Steel Plant, and they tell me old John Shelling made a good three million bones out of munitions during the war!”the man with the velour hat said reverently.

“I didn’t mean— I mean it’s lovely the way the light pulls that picturesque yard, all littered with junk, right out of the darkness,” said Paul.

They stared at him, while Babbitt crowed, “Paul there has certainly got one great little eye for picturesque places and quaint sights and all that stuff.’D of been an author or something if he hadn’t gone into the roofing line.”

Paul looked annoyed.(Babbitt sometimes wondered if Paul appreciated his loyal boosting.)The man in the velour hat grunted, “Well, personally, I think Shelling-Horton keep their works awful dirty.Bum routing.But I don’t suppose there’s any law against calling ’em ‘picturesque’ if it gets you that way!”

Paul sulkily returned to his newspaper and the conversation logically moved on to trains.

“What time do we get into Pittsburg?”asked Babbitt.

“Pittsburg?I think we get in at—no, that was last year’s schedule—wait a minute—let’s see—got a time-table right here.”

“I wonder if we’re on time?”

“Yuh, sure, we must be just about on time.”

“No, we aren’t—we were seven minutes late, last station.”

“Were we?Straight?Why, gosh, I thought we were right on time.”

“No, we’re about seven minutes late.”

“Yuh, that’s right; seven minutes late.”

The porter entered—a negro in white jacket with brass buttons.

“How late are we, George?”growled the fat man.

“’Deed, I don’t know, sir.I think we’re about on time,” said the porter, folding towels and deftly tossing them up on the rack above the washbowls.The council stared at him gloomily and when he was gone they wailed:

“I don’t know what’s come over these niggers, nowadays.They never give you a civil answer.”

“That’s a fact.They’re getting so they don’t have a single bit of respect for you.The old-fashioned coon was a fine old cuss—he knew his place—but these young dinges don’t want to be porters or cotton-pickers.Oh, no!They got to be lawyers and professors and Lord knows what all!I tell you, it’s becoming a pretty serious problem.We ought to get together and show the black man, yes, and the yellow man, his place.Now, I haven’t got one particle of race-prejudice.I’m the first to be glad when a nigger succeeds—so long as he stays where he belongs and doesn’t try to usurp the rightful authority and business ability of the white man.”

“That’s the i.!And another thing we got to do,” said the man with the velour hat (whose name was Koplinsky), “is to keep these damn foreigners out of the country.Thank the Lord, we’re putting a limit on immigration.These Dagoes and Hunkies have got to learn that this is a white man’s country, and they ain’t wanted here.When we’ve assimilated the foreigners we got here now and learned ’em the principles of Americanism and turned ’em into regular folks, why then maybe we’ll let in a few more.”

“You bet.That’s a fact,” they observed, and passed on to lighter topics.They rapidly reviewed motor-car prices, tire-mileage, oil-stocks, fishing, and the prospects for the wheat-crop in Dakota.

But the fat man was impatient at this waste of time.He was a veteran traveler and free of illusions.Already he had asserted that he was “an old he-one.”He leaned forward, gathered in their attention by his expression of sly humor, and grumbled, “Oh, hell, boys, let’s cut out the formality and get down to the stories!”

They became very lively and intimate.

Paul and the boy vanished.The others slid forward on the long seat, unbuttoned their vests, thrust their feet up on the chairs, pulled the stately brass cuspidors nearer, and ran the green window-shade down on its little trolley, to shut them in from the uncomfortable strangeness of night.After each bark of laughter they cried, “Say, jever hear the one about—” Babbitt was expansive and virile.When the train stopped at an important station, the four men walked up and down the cement platform, under the vast smoky train-shed roof, like a stormy sky, under the elevated footways, beside crates of ducks and sides of beef, in the mystery of an unknown city.They strolled abreast, old friends and well content.At the long-drawn “Alllll aboarrrrrd”—like a mountain call at dusk—they hastened back into the smoking-compartment, and till two of the morning continued the droll tales, their eyes damp with cigar-smoke and laughter.When they parted they shook hands, and chuckled, “Well, sir, it’s been a great session.Sorry to bust it up.Mighty glad to met you.”

Babbitt lay awake in the close hot tomb of his Pullman berth, shaking with remembrance of the fat man’s limerick about the lady who wished to be wild.He raised the shade; he lay with a puffy arm tucked between his head and the skimpy pillow, looking out on the sliding silhouettes of trees, and village lamps like exclamation-points.He was very happy.

CHAPTER XI

I

They had four hours in New York between trains. The one thing Babbitt wished to see was the Pennsylvania Hotel, which had been built since his last visit. He stared up at it, muttering, “Twenty-two hundred rooms and twenty-two hundred baths! That’s got everything in the world beat. Lord, their turnover must be—well, suppose price of rooms is four to eight dollars a day, and I suppose maybe some ten and—four times twenty-two hundred—say six times twenty-two hundred—well, anyway, with restaurants and everything, say summers between eight and fifteen thousand a day. Every day! I never thought I’d see a thing like that! Some town! Of course the average fellow in Zenith has got more Individual Initiative than the fourflushers here, but I got to hand it to New York. Yes, sir, town, you’re all right—some ways. Well, old Paulski, I guess we’ve seen everything that’s worth while. How’ll we kill the rest of the time? Movie?”

But Paul desired to see a liner.“Always wanted to go to Europe—and, by thunder, I will, too, some day before I pass out,” he sighed.

From a rough wharf on the North River they stared at the stern of the Aquitania and her stacks and wireless antennæ lifted above the dock-house which shut her in.

“By golly,” Babbitt droned, “wouldn’t be so bad to go over to the Old Country and take a squint at all these ruins, and the place where Shakespeare was born.And think of being able to order a drink whenever you wanted one!Just range up to a bar and holler out loud, ‘Gimme a cocktail, and darn the police!’Not bad at all.What juh like to see, over there, Paulibus?”

Paul did not answer.Babbitt turned.Paul was standing with clenched fists, head drooping, staring at the liner as in terror.His thin body, seen against the summer-glaring planks of the wharf, was childishly meager.

Again, “What would you hit for on the other side, Paul?”

Scowling at the steamer, his breast heaving, Paul whispered, “Oh, my God!”While Babbitt watched him anxiously he snapped, “Come on, let’s get out of this,” and hastened down the wharf, not looking back.

“That’s funny,” considered Babbitt.“The boy didn’t care for seeing the ocean boats after all.I thought he’d be interested in ’em.”

II

Though he exulted, and made sage speculations about locomotive horse-power, as their train climbed the Maine mountain-ridge and from the summit he looked down the shining way among the pines; though he remarked, “Well, by golly!”when he discovered that the station at Katadumcook, the end of the line, was an aged freight-car; Babbitt’s moment of impassioned release came when they sat on a tiny wharf on Lake Sunasquam, awaiting the launch from the hotel.A raft had floated down the lake; between the logs and the shore, the water was transparent, thin-looking, flashing with minnows.A guide in black felt hat with trout-flies in the band, and flannel shirt of a peculiarly daring blue, sat on a log and whittled and was silent.A dog, a good country dog, black and woolly gray, a dog rich in leisure and in meditation, scratched and grunted and slept.The thick sunlight was lavish on the bright water, on the rim of gold-green balsam boughs, the silver birches and tropic ferns, and across the lake it burned on the sturdy shoulders of the mountains.Over everything was a holy peace.

Silent, they loafed on the edge of the wharf, swinging their legs above the water.The immense tenderness of the place sank into Babbitt, and he murmured, “I’d just like to sit here—the rest of my life—and whittle—and sit. And never hear a typewriter. Or Stan Graff fussing in the ’phone. Or Rone and Ted scrapping. Just sit. Gosh!”

He patted Paul’s shoulder.“How does it strike you, old snoozer?”

“Oh, it’s darn good, Georgie.There’s something sort of eternal about it.”

For once, Babbitt understood him.

III

Their launch rounded the bend; at the head of the lake, under a mountain slope, they saw the little central dining-shack of their hotel and the crescent of squat log cottages which served as bedrooms. They landed, and endured the critical examination of the habitués who had been at the hotel for a whole week.In their cottage, with its high stone fireplace, they hastened, as Babbitt expressed it, to “get into some regular he-togs.”They came out; Paul in an old gray suit and soft white shirt; Babbitt in khaki shirt and vast and flapping khaki trousers.It was excessively new khaki; his rimless spectacles belonged to a city office; and his face was not tanned but a city pink.He made a discordant noise in the place.But with infinite satisfaction he slapped his legs and crowed, “Say, this is getting back home, eh?”

They stood on the wharf before the hotel.He winked at Paul and drew from his back pocket a plug of chewing-tobacco, a vulgarism forbidden in the Babbitt home.He took a chew, beaming and wagging his head as he tugged at it.“Um!Um!Maybe I haven’t been hungry for a wad of eating-tobacco!Have some?”

They looked at each other in a grin of understanding.Paul took the plug, gnawed at it.They stood quiet, their jaws working.They solemnly spat, one after the other, into the placid water.They stretched voluptuously, with lifted arms and arched backs. From beyond the mountains came the shuffling sound of a far-off train. A trout leaped, and fell back in a silver circle. They sighed together.

IV

They had a week before their families came.Each evening they planned to get up early and fish before breakfast.Each morning they lay abed till the breakfast-bell, pleasantly conscious that there were no efficient wives to rouse them.The mornings were cold; the fire was kindly as they dressed.

Paul was distressingly clean, but Babbitt reveled in a good sound dirtiness, in not having to shave till his spirit was moved to it.He treasured every grease spot and fish-scale on his new khaki trousers.

All morning they fished unenergetically, or tramped the dim and aqueous-lighted trails among rank ferns and moss sprinkled with crimson bells.They slept all afternoon, and till midnight played stud-poker with the guides.Poker was a serious business to the guides.They did not gossip; they shuffled the thick greasy cards with a deft ferocity menacing to the “sports;” and Joe Paradise, king of guides, was sarcastic to loiterers who halted the game even to scratch.

At midnight, as Paul and he blundered to their cottage over the pungent wet grass, and pine-roots confusing in the darkness, Babbitt rejoiced that he did not have to explain to his wife where he had been all evening.

They did not talk much.The nervous loquacity and opinionation of the Zenith Athletic Club dropped from them.But when they did talk they slipped into the naïve intimacy of college days.Once they drew their canoe up to the bank of Sunasquam Water, a stream walled in by the dense green of the hardhack.The sun roared on the green jungle but in the shade was sleepy peace, and the water was golden and rippling.Babbitt drew his hand through the cool flood, and mused:

“We never thought we’d come to Maine together!”

“No.We’ve never done anything the way we thought we would.I expected to live in Germany with my granddad’s people, and study the fiddle.”

“That’s so.And remember how I wanted to be a lawyer and go into politics?I still think I might have made a go of it.I’ve kind of got the gift of the gab—anyway, I can think on my feet, and make some kind of a spiel on most anything, and of course that’s the thing you need in politics.By golly, Ted’s going to law-school, even if I didn’t!Well— I guess it’s worked out all right.Myra’s been a fine wife.And Zilla means well, Paulibus.”

“Yes.Up here, I figure out all sorts of plans to keep her amused.I kind of feel life is going to be different, now that we’re getting a good rest and can go back and start over again.”

“I hope so, old boy.”Shyly: “Say, gosh, it’s been awful nice to sit around and loaf and gamble and act regular, with you along, you old horse-thief!”

“Well, you know what it means to me, Georgie.Saved my life.”

The shame of emotion overpowered them; they cursed a little, to prove they were good rough fellows; and in a mellow silence, Babbitt whistling while Paul hummed, they paddled back to the hotel.

V

Though it was Paul who had seemed overwrought, Babbitt who had been the protecting big brother, Paul became clear-eyed and merry, while Babbitt sank into irritability.He uncovered layer on layer of hidden weariness.At first he had played nimble jester to Paul and for him sought amusements; by the end of the week Paul was nurse, and Babbitt accepted favors with the condescension one always shows a patient nurse.

The day before their families arrived, the women guests at the hotel bubbled, “Oh, isn’t it nice!You must be so excited;” and the proprieties compelled Babbitt and Paul to look excited.But they went to bed early and grumpy.

When Myra appeared she said at once, “Now, we want you boys to go on playing around just as if we weren’t here.”

The first evening, he stayed out for poker with the guides, and she said in placid merriment, “My!You’re a regular bad one!”The second evening, she groaned sleepily, “Good heavens, are you going to be out every single night?”The third evening, he didn’t play poker.

He was tired now in every cell.“Funny!Vacation doesn’t seem to have done me a bit of good,” he lamented.“Paul’s frisky as a colt, but I swear, I’m crankier and nervouser than when I came up here.”

He had three weeks of Maine.At the end of the second week he began to feel calm, and interested in life.He planned an expedition to climb Sachem Mountain, and wanted to camp overnight at Box Car Pond.He was curiously weak, yet cheerful, as though he had cleansed his veins of poisonous energy and was filling them with wholesome blood.

He ceased to be irritated by Ted’s infatuation with a waitress (his seventh tragic affair this year); he played catch with Ted, and with pride taught him to cast a fly in the pine-shadowed silence of Skowtuit Pond.

At the end he sighed, “Hang it, I’m just beginning to enjoy my vacation.But, well, I feel a lot better.And it’s going to be one great year!Maybe the Real Estate Board will elect me president, instead of some fuzzy old-fashioned faker like Chan Mott.”

On the way home, whenever he went into the smoking-compartment he felt guilty at deserting his wife and angry at being expected to feel guilty, but each time he triumphed, “Oh, this is going to be a great year, a great old year!”

CHAPTER XII

I

All the way home from Maine, Babbitt was certain that he was a changed man. He was converted to serenity. He was going to cease worrying about business. He was going to have more “interests”—theaters, public affairs, reading. And suddenly, as he finished an especially heavy cigar, he was going to stop smoking.

He invented a new and perfect method.He would buy no tobacco; he would depend on borrowing it; and, of course, he would be ashamed to borrow often.In a spasm of righteousness he flung his cigar-case out of the smoking-compartment window.He went back and was kind to his wife about nothing in particular; he admired his own purity, and decided, “Absolutely simple.Just a matter of will-power.”He started a magazine serial about a scientific detective.Ten miles on, he was conscious that he desired to smoke.He ducked his head, like a turtle going into its shell; he appeared uneasy; he skipped two pages in his story and didn’t know it.Five miles later, he leaped up and sought the porter.“Say, uh, George, have you got a—” The porter looked patient.“Have you got a time-table?”Babbitt finished.At the next stop he went out and bought a cigar.Since it was to be his last before he reached Zenith, he finished it down to an inch stub.

Four days later he again remembered that he had stopped smoking, but he was too busy catching up with his office-work to keep it remembered.

II

Baseball, he determined, would be an excellent hobby.“No sense a man’s working his fool head off.I’m going out to the Game three times a week. Besides, fellow ought to support the home team.”

He did go and support the team, and enhance the glory of Zenith, by yelling “Attaboy!” and “Rotten!” He performed the rite scrupulously. He wore a cotton handkerchief about his collar; he became sweaty; he opened his mouth in a wide loose grin; and drank lemon soda out of a bottle. He went to the Game three times a week, for one week. Then he compromised on watching the Advocate-Times bulletin-board. He stood in the thickest and steamiest of the crowd, and as the boy up on the lofty platform recorded the achievements of Big Bill Bostwick, the pitcher, Babbitt remarked to complete strangers, “Pretty nice! Good work!” and hastened back to the office.

He honestly believed that he loved baseball.It is true that he hadn’t, in twenty-five years, himself played any baseball except back-lot catch with Ted—very gentle, and strictly limited to ten minutes.But the game was a custom of his clan, and it gave outlet for the homicidal and sides-taking instincts which Babbitt called “patriotism” and “love of sport.”

As he approached the office he walked faster and faster, muttering, “Guess better hustle.”All about him the city was hustling, for hustling’s sake.Men in motors were hustling to pass one another in the hustling traffic.Men were hustling to catch trolleys, with another trolley a minute behind, and to leap from the trolleys, to gallop across the sidewalk, to hurl themselves into buildings, into hustling express elevators.Men in dairy lunches were hustling to gulp down the food which cooks had hustled to fry.Men in barber shops were snapping, “Jus’ shave me once over.Gotta hustle.”Men were feverishly getting rid of visitors in offices adorned with the signs, “This Is My Busy Day” and “The Lord Created the World in Six Days—You Can Spiel All You Got to Say in Six Minutes.”Men who had made five thousand, year before last, and ten thousand last year, were urging on nerve-yelping bodies and parched brains so that they might make twenty thousand this year; and the men who had broken down immediately after making their twenty thousand dollars were hustling to catch trains, to hustle through the vacations which the hustling doctors had ordered.

Among them Babbitt hustled back to his office, to sit down with nothing much to do except see that the staff looked as though they were hustling.

III

Every Saturday afternoon he hustled out to his country club and hustled through nine holes of golf as a rest after the week’s hustle.

In Zenith it was as necessary for a Successful Man to belong to a country club as it was to wear a linen collar.Babbitt’s was the Outing Golf and Country Club, a pleasant gray-shingled building with a broad porch, on a daisy-starred cliff above Lake Kennepoose.There was another, the Tonawanda Country Club, to which belonged Charles McKelvey, Horace Updike, and the other rich men who lunched not at the Athletic but at the Union Club.Babbitt explained with frequency, “You couldn’t hire me to join the Tonawanda, even if I did have a hundred and eighty bucks to throw away on the initiation fee.At the Outing we’ve got a bunch of real human fellows, and the finest lot of little women in town—just as good at joshing as the men—but at the Tonawanda there’s nothing but these would-be’s in New York get-ups, drinking tea!Too much dog altogether.Why, I wouldn’t join the Tonawanda even if they— I wouldn’t join it on a bet!”

When he had played four or five holes, he relaxed a bit, his tobacco-fluttering heart beat more normally, and his voice slowed to the drawling of his hundred generations of peasant ancestors.

IV

At least once a week Mr. and Mrs. Babbitt and Tinka went to the movies.Their favorite motion-picture theater was the Château, which held three thousand spectators and had an orchestra of fifty pieces which played Arrangements from the Operas and suites portraying a Day on the Farm, or a Four-alarm Fire.In the stone rotunda, decorated with crown-embroidered velvet chairs and almost medieval tapestries, parrakeets sat on gilded lotos columns.

With exclamations of “Well, by golly!”and “You got to go some to beat this dump!”Babbitt admired the Château.As he stared across the thousands of heads, a gray plain in the dimness, as he smelled good clothes and mild perfume and chewing-gum, he felt as when he had first seen a mountain and realized how very, very much earth and rock there was in it.

He liked three kinds of films: pretty bathing girls with bare legs; policemen or cowboys and an industrious shooting of revolvers; and funny fat men who ate spaghetti.He chuckled with immense, moist-eyed sentimentality at interludes portraying puppies, kittens, and chubby babies; and he wept at deathbeds and old mothers being patient in mortgaged cottages.Mrs. Babbitt preferred the pictures in which handsome young women in elaborate frocks moved through sets ticketed as the drawing-rooms of New York millionaires.As for Tinka, she preferred, or was believed to prefer, whatever her parents told her to.

All his relaxations—baseball, golf, movies, bridge, motoring, long talks with Paul at the Athletic Club, or at the Good Red Beef and Old English Chop House—were necessary to Babbitt, for he was entering a year of such activity as he had never known.

CHAPTER XIII

I

It was by accident that Babbitt had his opportunity to address the S. A. R. E. B.

The S.A.R.E.B., as its members called it, with the universal passion for mysterious and important-sounding initials, was the State Association of Real Estate Boards; the organization of brokers and operators.It was to hold its annual convention at Monarch, Zenith’s chief rival among the cities of the state.Babbitt was an official delegate; another was Cecil Rountree, whom Babbitt admired for his picaresque speculative building, and hated for his social position, for being present at the smartest dances on Royal Ridge.Rountree was chairman of the convention program-committee.

Babbitt had growled to him, “Makes me tired the way these doctors and profs and preachers put on lugs about being ‘professional men.’A good realtor has to have more knowledge and finesse than any of ’em.”

“Right you are!I say: Why don’t you put that into a paper, and give it at the S.A.R.E.B.?”suggested Rountree.

“Well, if it would help you in making up the program— Tell you: the way I look at it is this: First place, we ought to insist that folks call us ‘realtors’ and not ‘real-estate men.’Sounds more like a reg’lar profession.Second place— What is it distinguishes a profession from a mere trade, business, or occupation?What is it?Why, it’s the public service and the skill, the trained skill, and the knowledge and, uh, all that, whereas a fellow that merely goes out for the jack, he never considers the—public service and trained skill and so on.Now as a professional—”

“Rather!That’s perfectly bully!Perfectly corking!Now you write it in a paper,” said Rountree, as he rapidly and firmly moved away.

II

However accustomed to the literary labors of advertisements and correspondence, Babbitt was dismayed on the evening when he sat down to prepare a paper which would take a whole ten minutes to read.

He laid out a new fifteen-cent school exercise-book on his wife’s collapsible sewing-table, set up for the event in the living-room.The household had been bullied into silence; Verona and Ted requested to disappear, and Tinka threatened with “If I hear one sound out of you—if you holler for a glass of water one single solitary time— You better not, that’s all!”Mrs. Babbitt sat over by the piano, making a nightgown and gazing with respect while Babbitt wrote in the exercise-book, to the rhythmical wiggling and squeaking of the sewing-table.

When he rose, damp and jumpy, and his throat dusty from cigarettes, she marveled, “I don’t see how you can just sit down and make up things right out of your own head!”

“Oh, it’s the training in constructive imagination that a fellow gets in modern business life.”

He had written seven pages, whereof the first page set forth: