Chương Chương 15 · Chapter XV
I
His march to greatness was not without disastrous stumbling.
Fame did not bring the social advancement which the Babbitts deserved.
They were not asked to join the Tonawanda Country Club nor invited to
the dances at the Union. Himself, Babbitt fretted, he didn’t “care a fat
hoot for all these highrollers, but the wife would kind of like to be
Among Those Present.” He nervously awaited his university class-dinner
and an evening of furious intimacy with such social leaders as Charles
McKelvey the millionaire contractor, Max Kruger the banker, Irving Tate
the tool-manufacturer, and Adelbert Dobson the fashionable interior
decorator. Theoretically he was their friend, as he had been in college,
and when he encountered them they still called him “Georgie,” but he
didn’t seem to encounter them often, and they never invited him to
dinner (with champagne and a butler) at their houses on Royal Ridge.
All the week before the class-dinner he thought of them. “No reason why
we shouldn’t become real chummy now!”
II
Like all true American diversions and spiritual outpourings, the dinner
of the men of the Class of 1896 was thoroughly organized. The
dinner-committee hammered like a sales-corporation. Once a week they
sent out reminders:
TICKLER NO. 3
Old man, are you going to be with us at the livest Friendship Feed
the alumni of the good old U have ever known? The alumnæ of ’08
turned out 60% strong. Are we boys going to be beaten by a bunch of
skirts? Come on, fellows, let’s work up some real genuine
enthusiasm and all boost together for the snappiest dinner yet!
Elegant eats, short ginger-talks, and memories shared together of
the brightest, gladdest days of life.
The dinner was held in a private room at the Union Club. The club was a
dingy building, three pretentious old dwellings knocked together, and
the entrance-hall resembled a potato cellar, yet the Babbitt who was
free of the magnificence of the Athletic Club entered with
embarrassment. He nodded to the doorman, an ancient proud negro with
brass buttons and a blue tail-coat, and paraded through the hall, trying
to look like a member.
Sixty men had come to the dinner. They made islands and eddies in the
hall; they packed the elevator and the corners of the private
dining-room. They tried to be intimate and enthusiastic. They appeared
to one another exactly as they had in college--as raw youngsters whose
present mustaches, baldnesses, paunches, and wrinkles were but jovial
disguises put on for the evening. “You haven’t changed a particle!” they
marveled. The men whom they could not recall they addressed, “Well,
well, great to see you again, old man. What are you-- Still doing the
same thing?”
Some one was always starting a cheer or a college song, and it was
always thinning into silence. Despite their resolution to be democratic
they divided into two sets: the men with dress-clothes and the men
without. Babbitt (extremely in dress-clothes) went from one group to the
other. Though he was, almost frankly, out for social conquest, he sought
Paul Riesling first. He found him alone, neat and silent.
Paul sighed, “I’m no good at this handshaking and ‘well, look who’s
here’ bunk.”
“Rats now, Paulibus, loosen up and be a mixer! Finest bunch of boys on
earth! Say, you seem kind of glum. What’s matter?”
“Oh, the usual. Run-in with Zilla.”
“Come on! Let’s wade in and forget our troubles.”
He kept Paul beside him, but worked toward the spot where Charles
McKelvey stood warming his admirers like a furnace.
McKelvey had been the hero of the Class of ’96; not only football
captain and hammer-thrower but debater, and passable in what the State
University considered scholarship. He had gone on, had captured the
construction-company once owned by the Dodsworths, best-known pioneer
family of Zenith. He built state capitols, skyscrapers, railway
terminals. He was a heavy-shouldered, big-chested man, but not sluggish.
There was a quiet humor in his eyes, a syrup-smooth quickness in his
speech, which intimidated politicians and warned reporters; and in his
presence the most intelligent scientist or the most sensitive artist
felt thin-blooded, unworldly, and a little shabby. He was, particularly
when he was influencing legislatures or hiring labor-spies, very easy
and lovable and gorgeous. He was baronial; he was a peer in the rapidly
crystallizing American aristocracy, inferior only to the haughty Old
Families. (In Zenith, an Old Family is one which came to town before
1840.) His power was the greater because he was not hindered by
scruples, by either the vice or the virtue of the older Puritan
tradition.
McKelvey was being placidly merry now with the great, the manufacturers
and bankers, the land-owners and lawyers and surgeons who had chauffeurs
and went to Europe. Babbitt squeezed among them. He liked McKelvey’s
smile as much as the social advancement to be had from his favor. If in
Paul’s company he felt ponderous and protective, with McKelvey he felt
slight and adoring.
He heard McKelvey say to Max Kruger, the banker, “Yes, we’ll put up Sir
Gerald Doak.” Babbitt’s democratic love for titles became a rich relish.
“You know, he’s one of the biggest iron-men in England, Max. Horribly
well-off.... Why, hello, old Georgie! Say, Max, George Babbitt is
getting fatter than I am!”
The chairman shouted, “Take your seats, fellows!”
“Shall we make a move, Charley?” Babbitt said casually to McKelvey.
“Right. Hello, Paul! How’s the old fiddler? Planning to sit anywhere
special, George? Come on, let’s grab some seats. Come on, Max. Georgie,
I read about your speeches in the campaign. Bully work!”
After that, Babbitt would have followed him through fire. He was
enormously busy during the dinner, now bumblingly cheering Paul, now
approaching McKelvey with “Hear, you’re going to build some piers in
Brooklyn,” now noting how enviously the failures of the class, sitting
by themselves in a weedy group, looked up to him in his association with
the nobility, now warming himself in the Society Talk of McKelvey and
Max Kruger. They spoke of a “jungle dance” for which Mona Dodsworth had
decorated her house with thousands of orchids. They spoke, with an
excellent imitation of casualness, of a dinner in Washington at which
McKelvey had met a Senator, a Balkan princess, and an English
major-general. McKelvey called the princess “Jenny,” and let it be known
that he had danced with her.
Babbitt was thrilled, but not so weighted with awe as to be silent. If
he was not invited by them to dinner, he was yet accustomed to talking
with bank-presidents, congressmen, and clubwomen who entertained poets.
He was bright and referential with McKelvey:
“Say, Charley, juh remember in Junior year how we chartered a sea-going
hack and chased down to Riverdale, to the big show Madame Brown used to
put on? Remember how you beat up that hick constabule that tried to run
us in, and we pinched the pants-pressing sign and took and hung it on
Prof. Morrison’s door? Oh, gosh, those were the days!”
Those, McKelvey agreed, were the days.
Babbitt had reached “It isn’t the books you study in college but the
friendships you make that counts” when the men at head of the table
broke into song. He attacked McKelvey:
“It’s a shame, uh, shame to drift apart because our, uh, business
activities lie in different fields. I’ve enjoyed talking over the good
old days. You and Mrs. McKelvey must come to dinner some night.”
Vaguely, “Yes, indeed--”
“Like to talk to you about the growth of real estate out beyond your
Grantsville warehouse. I might be able to tip you off to a thing or two,
possibly.”
“Splendid! We must have dinner together, Georgie. Just let me know. And
it will be a great pleasure to have your wife and you at the house,”
said McKelvey, much less vaguely.
Then the chairman’s voice, that prodigious voice which once had roused
them to cheer defiance at rooters from Ohio or Michigan or Indiana,
whooped, “Come on, you wombats! All together in the long yell!” Babbitt
felt that life would never be sweeter than now, when he joined with Paul
Riesling and the newly recovered hero, McKelvey, in:
Baaaaaattle-ax
Get an ax,
Bal-ax,
Get-nax,
Who, who? The U.!
Hooroo!
III
The Babbitts invited the McKelveys to dinner, in early December, and the
McKelveys not only accepted but, after changing the date once or twice,
actually came.
The Babbitts somewhat thoroughly discussed the details of the dinner,
from the purchase of a bottle of champagne to the number of salted
almonds to be placed before each person. Especially did they mention the
matter of the other guests. To the last Babbitt held out for giving Paul
Riesling the benefit of being with the McKelveys. “Good old Charley
would like Paul and Verg Gunch better than some highfalutin’ Willy boy,”
he insisted, but Mrs. Babbitt interrupted his observations with,
“Yes--perhaps-- I think I’ll try to get some Lynnhaven oysters,” and when
she was quite ready she invited Dr. J. T. Angus, the oculist, and a
dismally respectable lawyer named Maxwell, with their glittering wives.
Neither Angus nor Maxwell belonged to the Elks or to the Athletic Club;
neither of them had ever called Babbitt “brother” or asked his opinions
on carburetors. The only “human people” whom she invited, Babbitt raged,
were the Littlefields; and Howard Littlefield at times became so
statistical that Babbitt longed for the refreshment of Gunch’s, “Well,
old lemon-pie-face, what’s the good word?”
Immediately after lunch Mrs. Babbitt began to set the table for the
seven-thirty dinner to the McKelveys, and Babbitt was, by order, home at
four. But they didn’t find anything for him to do, and three times Mrs.
Babbitt scolded, “Do please try to keep out of the way!” He stood in the
door of the garage, his lips drooping, and wished that Littlefield or
Sam Doppelbrau or somebody would come along and talk to him. He saw Ted
sneaking about the corner of the house.
“What’s the matter, old man?” said Babbitt.
“Is that you, thin, owld one? Gee, Ma certainly is on the warpath! I
told her Rone and I would jus’ soon not be let in on the fiesta
to-night, and she bit me. She says I got to take a bath, too. But, say,
the Babbitt men will be some lookers to-night! Little Theodore in a
dress-suit!”
“The Babbitt men!” Babbitt liked the sound of it. He put his arm about
the boy’s shoulder. He wished that Paul Riesling had a daughter, so that
Ted might marry her. “Yes, your mother is kind of rouncing round, all
right,” he said, and they laughed together, and sighed together, and
dutifully went in to dress.
The McKelveys were less than fifteen minutes late.
Babbitt hoped that the Doppelbraus would see the McKelveys’ limousine,
and their uniformed chauffeur, waiting in front.
The dinner was well cooked and incredibly plentiful, and Mrs. Babbitt
had brought out her grandmother’s silver candlesticks. Babbitt worked
hard. He was good. He told none of the jokes he wanted to tell. He
listened to the others. He started Maxwell off with a resounding, “Let’s
hear about your trip to the Yellowstone.” He was laudatory, extremely
laudatory. He found opportunities to remark that Dr. Angus was a
benefactor to humanity, Maxwell and Howard Littlefield profound
scholars, Charles McKelvey an inspiration to ambitious youth, and Mrs.
McKelvey an adornment to the social circles of Zenith, Washington, New
York, Paris, and numbers of other places.
But he could not stir them. It was a dinner without a soul. For no
reason that was clear to Babbitt, heaviness was over them and they spoke
laboriously and unwillingly.
He concentrated on Lucile McKelvey, carefully not looking at her
blanched lovely shoulder and the tawny silken band which supported her
frock.
“I suppose you’ll be going to Europe pretty soon again, won’t you?” he
invited.
“I’d like awfully to run over to Rome for a few weeks.”
“I suppose you see a lot of pictures and music and curios and everything
there.”
“No, what I really go for is: there’s a little _trattoria_ on the Via
della Scrofa where you get the best _fettuccine_ in the world.”
“Oh, I-- Yes. That must be nice to try that. Yes.”
At a quarter to ten McKelvey discovered with profound regret that his
wife had a headache. He said blithely, as Babbitt helped him with his
coat, “We must lunch together some time and talk over the old days.”
When the others had labored out, at half-past ten, Babbitt turned to his
wife, pleading, “Charley said he had a corking time and we must
lunch--said they wanted to have us up to the house for dinner before
long.”
She achieved, “Oh, it’s just been one of those quiet evenings that are
often so much more enjoyable than noisy parties where everybody talks at
once and doesn’t really settle down to--nice quiet enjoyment.”
But from his cot on the sleeping-porch he heard her weeping, slowly,
without hope.
IV
For a month they watched the social columns, and waited for a return
dinner-invitation.
As the hosts of Sir Gerald Doak, the McKelveys were headlined all the
week after the Babbitts’ dinner. Zenith ardently received Sir Gerald
(who had come to America to buy coal). The newspapers interviewed him on
prohibition, Ireland, unemployment, naval aviation, the rate of
exchange, tea-drinking _versus_ whisky-drinking, the psychology of
American women, and daily life as lived by English county families. Sir
Gerald seemed to have heard of all those topics. The McKelveys gave him
a Singhalese dinner, and Miss Elnora Pearl Bates, society editor of the
_Advocate-Times_, rose to her highest larknote. Babbitt read aloud at
breakfast-table:
’Twixt the original and Oriental decorations, the strange and
delicious food, and the personalities both of the distinguished
guests, the charming hostess and the noted host, never has Zenith
seen a more recherche affair than the Ceylon dinner-dance given
last evening by Mr. and Mrs. Charles McKelvey to Sir Gerald Doak.
Methought as we--fortunate one!--were privileged to view that fairy
and foreign scene, nothing at Monte Carlo or the choicest
ambassadorial sets of foreign capitals could be more lovely. It is
not for nothing that Zenith is in matters social rapidly becoming
known as the choosiest inland city in the country.
Though he is too modest to admit it, Lord Doak gives a cachet to
our smart quartier such as it has not received since the
ever-memorable visit of the Earl of Sittingbourne. Not only is he
of the British peerage, but he is also, on dit, a leader of the
British metal industries. As he comes from Nottingham, a favorite
haunt of Robin Hood, though now, we are informed by Lord Doak, a
live modern city of 275,573 inhabitants, and important lace as well
as other industries, we like to think that perhaps through his
veins runs some of the blood, both virile red and bonny blue, of
that earlier lord o’ the good greenwood, the roguish Robin.
The lovely Mrs. McKelvey never was more fascinating than last
evening in her black net gown relieved by dainty bands of silver
and at her exquisite waist a glowing cluster of Aaron Ward roses.
Babbitt said bravely, “I hope they don’t invite us to meet this Lord
Doak guy. Darn sight rather just have a nice quiet little dinner with
Charley and the Missus.”
At the Zenith Athletic Club they discussed it amply. “I s’pose we’ll
have to call McKelvey ‘Lord Chaz’ from now on,” said Sidney Finkelstein.
“It beats all get-out,” meditated that man of data, Howard Littlefield,
“how hard it is for some people to get things straight. Here they call
this fellow ‘Lord Doak’ when it ought to be ‘Sir Gerald.’”
Babbitt marvelled, “Is that a fact! Well, well! ‘Sir Gerald,’ eh? That’s
what you call um, eh? Well, sir, I’m glad to know that.”
Later he informed his salesmen, “It’s funnier ’n a goat the way some
folks that, just because they happen to lay up a big wad, go
entertaining famous foreigners, don’t have any more idea ’n a rabbit how
to address ’em so’s to make ’em feel at home!”
That evening, as he was driving home, he passed McKelvey’s limousine and
saw Sir Gerald, a large, ruddy, pop-eyed, Teutonic Englishman whose
dribble of yellow mustache gave him an aspect sad and doubtful. Babbitt
drove on slowly, oppressed by futility. He had a sudden, unexplained,
and horrible conviction that the McKelveys were laughing at him.
He betrayed his depression by the violence with which he informed his
wife, “Folks that really tend to business haven’t got the time to waste
on a bunch like the McKelveys. This society stuff is like any other
hobby; if you devote yourself to it, you get on. But I like to have a
chance to visit with you and the children instead of all this idiotic
chasing round.”
They did not speak of the McKelveys again.
V
It was a shame, at this worried time, to have to think about the
Overbrooks.
Ed Overbrook was a classmate of Babbitt who had been a failure. He had a
large family and a feeble insurance business out in the suburb of
Dorchester. He was gray and thin and unimportant. He had always been
gray and thin and unimportant. He was the person whom, in any group, you
forgot to introduce, then introduced with extra enthusiasm. He had
admired Babbitt’s good-fellowship in college, had admired ever since his
power in real estate, his beautiful house and wonderful clothes. It
pleased Babbitt, though it bothered him with a sense of responsibility.
At the class-dinner he had seen poor Overbrook, in a shiny blue serge
business-suit, being diffident in a corner with three other failures. He
had gone over and been cordial: “Why, hello, young Ed! I hear you’re
writing all the insurance in Dorchester now. Bully work!”
They recalled the good old days when Overbrook used to write poetry.
Overbrook embarrassed him by blurting, “Say, Georgie, I hate to think of
how we been drifting apart. I wish you and Mrs. Babbitt would come to
dinner some night.”
Babbitt boomed, “Fine! Sure! Just let me know. And the wife and I want
to have you at the house.” He forgot it, but unfortunately Ed Overbrook
did not. Repeatedly he telephoned to Babbitt, inviting him to dinner.
“Might as well go and get it over,” Babbitt groaned to his wife. “But
don’t it simply amaze you the way the poor fish doesn’t know the first
thing about social etiquette? Think of him ’phoning me, instead of his
wife sitting down and writing us a regular bid! Well, I guess we’re
stuck for it. That’s the trouble with all this class-brother
hooptedoodle.”
He accepted Overbrook’s next plaintive invitation, for an evening two
weeks off. A dinner two weeks off, even a family dinner, never seems so
appalling, till the two weeks have astoundingly disappeared and one
comes dismayed to the ambushed hour. They had to change the date,
because of their own dinner to the McKelveys, but at last they gloomily
drove out to the Overbrooks’ house in Dorchester.
It was miserable from the beginning. The Overbrooks had dinner at
six-thirty, while the Babbitts never dined before seven. Babbitt
permitted himself to be ten minutes late. “Let’s make it as short as
possible. I think we’ll duck out quick. I’ll say I have to be at the
office extra early to-morrow,” he planned.
The Overbrook house was depressing. It was the second story of a wooden
two-family dwelling; a place of baby-carriages, old hats hung in the
hall, cabbage-smell, and a Family Bible on the parlor table. Ed
Overbrook and his wife were as awkward and threadbare as usual, and the
other guests were two dreadful families whose names Babbitt never caught
and never desired to catch. But he was touched, and disconcerted, by the
tactless way in which Overbrook praised him: “We’re mighty proud to have
old George here to-night! Of course you’ve all read about his speeches
and oratory in the papers--and the boy’s good-looking, too, eh?--but
what I always think of is back in college, and what a great old mixer
he was, and one of the best swimmers in the class.”
Babbitt tried to be jovial; he worked at it; but he could find nothing
to interest him in Overbrook’s timorousness, the blankness of the other
guests, or the drained stupidity of Mrs. Overbrook, with her spectacles,
drab skin, and tight-drawn hair. He told his best Irish story, but it
sank like soggy cake. Most bleary moment of all was when Mrs. Overbrook,
peering out of her fog of nursing eight children and cooking and
scrubbing, tried to be conversational.
“I suppose you go to Chicago and New York right along, Mr. Babbitt,” she
prodded.
“Well, I get to Chicago fairly often.”
“It must be awfully interesting. I suppose you take in all the
theaters.”
“Well, to tell the truth, Mrs. Overbrook, thing that hits me best is a
great big beefsteak at a Dutch restaurant in the Loop!”
They had nothing more to say. Babbitt was sorry, but there was no hope;
the dinner was a failure. At ten, rousing out of the stupor of
meaningless talk, he said as cheerily as he could, “’Fraid we got to be
starting, Ed. I’ve got a fellow coming to see me early to-morrow.” As
Overbrook helped him with his coat, Babbitt said, “Nice to rub up on the
old days! We must have lunch together, P.D.Q.”
Mrs. Babbitt sighed, on their drive home, “It was pretty terrible. But
how Mr. Overbrook does admire you!”
“Yep. Poor cuss! Seems to think I’m a little tin archangel, and the
best-looking man in Zenith.”
“Well, you’re certainly not that but-- Oh, Georgie, you don’t suppose we
have to invite them to dinner at our house now, do we?”
“Ouch! Gaw, I hope not!”
“See here, now, George! You didn’t say anything about it to Mr.
Overbrook, did you?”
“No! Gee! No! Honest, I didn’t! Just made a bluff about having him to
lunch some time.”
“Well.... Oh, dear.... I don’t want to hurt their feelings. But I don’t
see how I could stand another evening like this one. And suppose
somebody like Dr. and Mrs. Angus came in when we had the Overbrooks
there, and thought they were friends of ours!”
For a week they worried, “We really ought to invite Ed and his wife,
poor devils!” But as they never saw the Overbrooks, they forgot them,
and after a month or two they said, “That really was the best way, just
to let it slide. It wouldn’t be kind to _them_ to have them here. They’d
feel so out of place and hard-up in our home.”
They did not speak of the Overbrooks again.