第 十二 章 · 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.