第 五 章 · Chapter V

I

Babbitt’s preparations for leaving the office to its feeble self during

the hour and a half of his lunch-period were somewhat less elaborate

than the plans for a general European war.

He fretted to Miss McGoun, “What time you going to lunch? Well, make

sure Miss Bannigan is in then. Explain to her that if Wiedenfeldt calls

up, she’s to tell him I’m already having the title traced. And oh, b’

the way, remind me to-morrow to have Penniman trace it. Now if anybody

comes in looking for a cheap house, remember we got to shove that Bangor

Road place off onto somebody. If you need me, I’ll be at the Athletic

Club. And--uh-- And--uh-- I’ll be back by two.”

He dusted the cigar-ashes off his vest. He placed a difficult unanswered

letter on the pile of unfinished work, that he might not fail to attend

to it that afternoon. (For three noons, now, he had placed the same

letter on the unfinished pile.) He scrawled on a sheet of yellow

backing-paper the memorandum: “See abt apt h drs,” which gave him an

agreeable feeling of having already seen about the apartment-house

doors.

He discovered that he was smoking another cigar. He threw it away,

protesting, “Darn it, I thought you’d quit this darn smoking!” He

courageously returned the cigar-box to the correspondence-file, locked

it up, hid the key in a more difficult place, and raged, “Ought to take

care of myself. And need more exercise--walk to the club, every single

noon--just what I’ll do--every noon--cut out this motoring all the

time.”

The resolution made him feel exemplary. Immediately after it he decided

that this noon it was too late to walk.

It took but little more time to start his car and edge it into the

traffic than it would have taken to walk the three and a half blocks to

the club.

II

As he drove he glanced with the fondness of familiarity at the

buildings.

A stranger suddenly dropped into the business-center of Zenith could not

have told whether he was in a city of Oregon or Georgia, Ohio or Maine,

Oklahoma or Manitoba. But to Babbitt every inch was individual and

stirring. As always he noted that the California Building across the way

was three stories lower, therefore three stories less beautiful, than

his own Reeves Building. As always when he passed the Parthenon Shoe

Shine Parlor, a one-story hut which beside the granite and red-brick

ponderousness of the old California Building resembled a bath-house

under a cliff, he commented, “Gosh, ought to get my shoes shined this

afternoon. Keep forgetting it.” At the Simplex Office Furniture Shop,

the National Cash Register Agency, he yearned for a dictaphone, for a

typewriter which would add and multiply, as a poet yearns for quartos or

a physician for radium.

At the Nobby Men’s Wear Shop he took his left hand off the

steering-wheel to touch his scarf, and thought well of himself as one

who bought expensive ties “and could pay cash for ’em, too, by golly;”

and at the United Cigar Store, with its crimson and gold alertness, he

reflected, “Wonder if I need some cigars--idiot--plumb forgot--going t’

cut down my fool smoking.” He looked at his bank, the Miners’ and

Drovers’ National, and considered how clever and solid he was to bank

with so marbled an establishment. His high moment came in the clash of

traffic when he was halted at the corner beneath the lofty Second

National Tower. His car was banked with four others in a line of steel

restless as cavalry, while the crosstown traffic, limousines and

enormous moving-vans and insistent motor-cycles, poured by; on the

farther corner, pneumatic riveters rang on the sun-plated skeleton of a

new building; and out of this tornado flashed the inspiration of a

familiar face, and a fellow Booster shouted, “H’ are you, George!”

Babbitt waved in neighborly affection, and slid on with the traffic as

the policeman lifted his hand. He noted how quickly his car picked up.

He felt superior and powerful, like a shuttle of polished steel darting

in a vast machine.

As always he ignored the next two blocks, decayed blocks not yet

reclaimed from the grime and shabbiness of the Zenith of 1885. While he

was passing the five-and-ten-cent store, the Dakota Lodging House,

Concordia Hall with its lodge-rooms and the offices of fortune-tellers

and chiropractors, he thought of how much money he made, and he boasted

a little and worried a little and did old familiar sums:

“Four hundred fifty plunks this morning from the Lyte deal. But taxes

due. Let’s see: I ought to pull out eight thousand net this year, and

save fifteen hundred of that--no, not if I put up garage and-- Let’s see:

six hundred and forty clear last month, and twelve times six-forty

makes--makes--let see: six times twelve is seventy-two hundred and-- Oh

rats, anyway, I’ll make eight thousand--gee now, that’s not so bad;

mighty few fellows pulling down eight thousand dollars a year--eight

thousand good hard iron dollars--bet there isn’t more than five per

cent. of the people in the whole United States that make more than Uncle

George does, by golly! Right up at the top of the heap! But-- Way

expenses are-- Family wasting gasoline, and always dressed like

millionaires, and sending that eighty a month to Mother-- And all these

stenographers and salesmen gouging me for every cent they can get--”

The effect of his scientific budget-planning was that he felt at once

triumphantly wealthy and perilously poor, and in the midst of

these dissertations he stopped his car, rushed into a small

news-and-miscellany shop, and bought the electric cigar-lighter which he

had coveted for a week. He dodged his conscience by being jerky and

noisy, and by shouting at the clerk, “Guess this will prett’ near pay

for itself in matches, eh?”

It was a pretty thing, a nickeled cylinder with an almost silvery

socket, to be attached to the dashboard of his car. It was not only, as

the placard on the counter observed, “a dandy little refinement, lending

the last touch of class to a gentleman’s auto,” but a priceless

time-saver. By freeing him from halting the car to light a match, it

would in a month or two easily save ten minutes.

As he drove on he glanced at it. “Pretty nice. Always wanted one,” he

said wistfully. “The one thing a smoker needs, too.”

Then he remembered that he had given up smoking.

“Darn it!” he mourned. “Oh well, I suppose I’ll hit a cigar once in a

while. And-- Be a great convenience for other folks. Might make just the

difference in getting chummy with some fellow that would put over a

sale. And-- Certainly looks nice there. Certainly is a mighty clever

little jigger. Gives the last touch of refinement and class. I-- By

golly, I guess I can afford it if I want to! Not going to be the only

member of this family that never has a single doggone luxury!”

Thus, laden with treasure, after three and a half blocks of romantic

adventure, he drove up to the club.

III

The Zenith Athletic Club is not athletic and it isn’t exactly a club,

but it is Zenith in perfection. It has an active and smoke-misted

billiard room, it is represented by baseball and football teams, and in

the pool and the gymnasium a tenth of the members sporadically try to

reduce. But most of its three thousand members use it as a café in which

to lunch, play cards, tell stories, meet customers, and entertain

out-of-town uncles at dinner. It is the largest club in the city, and

its chief hatred is the conservative Union Club, which all sound members

of the Athletic call “a rotten, snobbish, dull, expensive old hole--not

one Good Mixer in the place--you couldn’t hire me to join.” Statistics

show that no member of the Athletic has ever refused election to the

Union, and of those who are elected, sixty-seven per cent. resign from

the Athletic and are thereafter heard to say, in the drowsy sanctity of

the Union lounge, “The Athletic would be a pretty good hotel, if it were

more exclusive.”

The Athletic Club building is nine stories high, yellow brick with

glassy roof-garden above and portico of huge limestone columns below.

The lobby, with its thick pillars of porous Caen stone, its pointed

vaulting, and a brown glazed-tile floor like well-baked bread-crust, is

a combination of cathedral-crypt and rathskellar. The members rush into

the lobby as though they were shopping and hadn’t much time for it. Thus

did Babbitt enter, and to the group standing by the cigar-counter he

whooped, “How’s the boys? How’s the boys? Well, well, fine day!”

Jovially they whooped back--Vergil Gunch, the coal-dealer, Sidney

Finkelstein, the ladies’-ready-to-wear buyer for Parcher & Stein’s

department-store, and Professor Joseph K. Pumphrey, owner of the Riteway

Business College and instructor in Public Speaking, Business English,

Scenario Writing, and Commercial Law. Though Babbitt admired this

savant, and appreciated Sidney Finkelstein as “a mighty smart buyer and

a good liberal spender,” it was to Vergil Gunch that he turned with

enthusiasm. Mr. Gunch was president of the Boosters’ Club, a weekly

lunch-club, local chapter of a national organization which promoted

sound business and friendliness among Regular Fellows. He was also no

less an official than Esteemed Leading Knight in the Benevolent and

Protective Order of Elks, and it was rumored that at the next election

he would be a candidate for Exalted Ruler. He was a jolly man, given to

oratory and to chumminess with the arts. He called on the famous actors

and vaudeville artists when they came to town, gave them cigars,

addressed them by their first names, and--sometimes--succeeded in

bringing them to the Boosters’ lunches to give The Boys a Free

Entertainment. He was a large man with hair _en brosse_, and he knew the

latest jokes, but he played poker close to the chest. It was at his

party that Babbitt had sucked in the virus of to-day’s restlessness.

Gunch shouted, “How’s the old Bolsheviki? How do you feel, the morning

after the night before?”

“Oh, boy! Some head! That was a regular party you threw, Verg! Hope you

haven’t forgotten I took that last cute little jack-pot!” Babbitt

bellowed. (He was three feet from Gunch.)

“That’s all right now! What I’ll hand you next time, Georgie! Say, juh

notice in the paper the way the New York Assembly stood up to the Reds?”

“You bet I did. That was fine, eh? Nice day to-day.”

“Yes, it’s one mighty fine spring day, but nights still cold.”

“Yeh, you’re right they are! Had to have coupla blankets last night, out

on the sleeping-porch. Say, Sid,” Babbitt turned to Finkelstein, the

buyer, “got something wanta ask you about. I went out and bought me an

electric cigar-lighter for the car, this noon, and--”

“Good hunch!” said Finkelstein, while even the learned Professor

Pumphrey, a bulbous man with a pepper-and-salt cutaway and a pipe-organ

voice, commented, “That makes a dandy accessory. Cigar-lighter gives

tone to the dashboard.”

“Yep, finally decided I’d buy me one. Got the best on the market, the

clerk said it was. Paid five bucks for it. Just wondering if I got

stuck. What do they charge for ’em at the store, Sid?”

Finkelstein asserted that five dollars was not too great a sum, not for

a really high-class lighter which was suitably nickeled and provided

with connections of the very best quality. “I always say--and believe

me, I base it on a pretty fairly extensive mercantile experience--the

best is the cheapest in the long run. Of course if a fellow wants to be

a Jew about it, he can get cheap junk, but in the long _run_, the

cheapest thing is--the best you can get! Now you take here just th’

other day: I got a new top for my old boat and some upholstery, and I

paid out a hundred and twenty-six fifty, and of course a lot of fellows

would say that was too much-- Lord, if the Old Folks--they live in one of

these hick towns up-state and they simply can’t get onto the way a city

fellow’s mind works, and then, of course, they’re Jews, and they’d lie

right down and die if they knew Sid had anted up a hundred and

twenty-six bones. But I don’t figure I was stuck, George, not a bit.

Machine looks brand new now--not that it’s so darned old, of course; had

it less ’n three years, but I give it hard service; never drive less ’n

a hundred miles on Sunday and, uh-- Oh, I don’t really think you got

stuck, George. In the _long_ run, the best is, you might say, it’s

unquestionably the cheapest.”

“That’s right,” said Vergil Gunch. “That’s the way I look at it. If a

fellow is keyed up to what you might call intensive living, the way you

get it here in Zenith--all the hustle and mental activity that’s going

on with a bunch of live-wires like the Boosters and here in the Z.A.C.,

why, he’s got to save his nerves by having the best.”

Babbitt nodded his head at every fifth word in the roaring rhythm; and

by the conclusion, in Gunch’s renowned humorous vein, he was enchanted:

“Still, at that, George, don’t know’s you can afford it. I’ve heard your

business has been kind of under the eye of the gov’ment since you stole

the tail of Eathorne Park and sold it!”

“Oh, you’re a great little josher, Verg. But when it comes to kidding,

how about this report that you stole the black marble steps off the

post-office and sold ’em for high-grade coal!” In delight Babbitt

patted Gunch’s back, stroked his arm.

“That’s all right, but what I want to know is: who’s the real-estate

shark that bought that coal for his apartment-houses?”

“I guess that’ll hold you for a while, George!” said Finkelstein. “I’ll

tell you, though, boys, what I did hear: George’s missus went into the

gents’ wear department at Parcher’s to buy him some collars, and before

she could give his neck-size the clerk slips her some thirteens. ‘How

juh know the size?’ says Mrs. Babbitt, and the clerk says, ‘Men that let

their wives buy collars for ’em always wear thirteen, madam.’ How’s

that! That’s pretty good, eh? How’s that, eh? I guess that’ll about fix

you, George!”

“I--I--” Babbitt sought for amiable insults in answer. He stopped,

stared at the door. Paul Riesling was coming in. Babbitt cried, “See you

later, boys,” and hastened across the lobby. He was, just then, neither

the sulky child of the sleeping-porch, the domestic tyrant of the

breakfast table, the crafty money-changer of the Lyte-Purdy conference,

nor the blaring Good Fellow, the Josher and Regular Guy, of the Athletic

Club. He was an older brother to Paul Riesling, swift to defend him,

admiring him with a proud and credulous love passing the love of women.

Paul and he shook hands solemnly; they smiled as shyly as though they

had been parted three years, not three days--and they said:

“How’s the old horse-thief?”

“All right, I guess. How’re you, you poor shrimp?”

“I’m first-rate, you second-hand hunk o’ cheese.”

Reassured thus of their high fondness, Babbitt grunted, “You’re a fine

guy, you are! Ten minutes late!” Riesling snapped, “Well, you’re lucky

to have a chance to lunch with a gentleman!” They grinned and went into

the Neronian washroom, where a line of men bent over the bowls inset

along a prodigious slab of marble as in religious prostration before

their own images in the massy mirror. Voices thick, satisfied,

authoritative, hurtled along the marble walls, bounded from the ceiling

of lavender-bordered milky tiles, while the lords of the city, the

barons of insurance and law and fertilizers and motor tires, laid down

the law for Zenith; announced that the day was warm--indeed,

indisputably of spring; that wages were too high and the interest on

mortgages too low; that Babe Ruth, the eminent player of baseball, was a

noble man; and that “those two nuts at the Climax Vaudeville Theater

this week certainly are a slick pair of actors.” Babbitt, though

ordinarily his voice was the surest and most episcopal of all, was

silent. In the presence of the slight dark reticence of Paul Riesling,

he was awkward, he desired to be quiet and firm and deft.

The entrance lobby of the Athletic Club was Gothic, the washroom Roman

Imperial, the lounge Spanish Mission, and the reading-room in Chinese

Chippendale, but the gem of the club was the dining-room, the

masterpiece of Ferdinand Reitman, Zenith’s busiest architect. It was

lofty and half-timbered, with Tudor leaded casements, an oriel, a

somewhat musicianless musicians’-gallery, and tapestries believed to

illustrate the granting of Magna Charta. The open beams had been

hand-adzed at Jake Offutt’s car-body works, the hinges were of

hand-wrought iron, the wainscot studded with handmade wooden pegs, and

at one end of the room was a heraldic and hooded stone fireplace which

the club’s advertising-pamphlet asserted to be not only larger than any

of the fireplaces in European castles but of a draught incomparably more

scientific. It was also much cleaner, as no fire had ever been built in

it.

Half of the tables were mammoth slabs which seated twenty or thirty men.

Babbitt usually sat at the one near the door, with a group including

Gunch, Finkelstein, Professor Pumphrey, Howard Littlefield, his

neighbor, T. Cholmondeley Frink, the poet and advertising-agent, and

Orville Jones, whose laundry was in many ways the best in Zenith. They

composed a club within the club, and merrily called themselves “The

Roughnecks.” To-day as he passed their table the Roughnecks greeted him,

“Come on, sit in! You ’n’ Paul too proud to feed with poor folks? Afraid

somebody might stick you for a bottle of Bevo, George? Strikes me you

swells are getting awful darn exclusive!”

He thundered, “You bet! We can’t afford to have our reps ruined by being

seen with you tightwads!” and guided Paul to one of the small tables

beneath the musicians’-gallery. He felt guilty. At the Zenith Athletic

Club, privacy was very bad form. But he wanted Paul to himself.

That morning he had advocated lighter lunches and now he ordered nothing

but English mutton chop, radishes, peas, deep-dish apple pie, a bit of

cheese, and a pot of coffee with cream, adding, as he did invariably,

“And uh-- Oh, and you might give me an order of French fried potatoes.”

When the chop came he vigorously peppered it and salted it. He always

peppered and salted his meat, and vigorously, before tasting it.

Paul and he took up the spring-like quality of the spring, the virtues

of the electric cigar-lighter, and the action of the New York State

Assembly. It was not till Babbitt was thick and disconsolate with mutton

grease that he flung out:

“I wound up a nice little deal with Conrad Lyte this morning that put

five hundred good round plunks in my pocket. Pretty nice--pretty nice!

And yet-- I don’t know what’s the matter with me to-day. Maybe it’s an

attack of spring fever, or staying up too late at Verg Gunch’s, or maybe

it’s just the winter’s work piling up, but I’ve felt kind of down in the

mouth all day long. Course I wouldn’t beef about it to the fellows at

the Roughnecks’ Table there, but you-- Ever feel that way, Paul? Kind of

comes over me: here I’ve pretty much done all the things I ought to;

supported my family, and got a good house and a six-cylinder car, and

built up a nice little business, and I haven’t any vices ’specially,

except smoking--and I’m practically cutting that out, by the way. And I

belong to the church, and play enough golf to keep in trim, and I only

associate with good decent fellows. And yet, even so, I don’t know that

I’m entirely satisfied!”

It was drawled out, broken by shouts from the neighboring tables, by

mechanical love-making to the waitress, by stertorous grunts as the

coffee filled him with dizziness and indigestion. He was apologetic and

doubtful, and it was Paul, with his thin voice, who pierced the fog:

“Good Lord, George, you don’t suppose it’s any novelty to me to find

that we hustlers, that think we’re so all-fired successful, aren’t

getting much out of it? You look as if you expected me to report you as

seditious! You know what my own life’s been.”

“I know, old man.”

“I ought to have been a fiddler, and I’m a pedler of tar-roofing! And

Zilla-- Oh, I don’t want to squeal, but you know as well as I do about

how inspiring a wife she is.... Typical instance last evening: We went

to the movies. There was a big crowd waiting in the lobby, us at the

tail-end. She began to push right through it with her ‘Sir, how dare

you?’ manner-- Honestly, sometimes when I look at her and see how she’s

always so made up and stinking of perfume and looking for trouble and

kind of always yelping, ‘I tell yuh I’m a lady, damn yuh!’--why, I want

to kill her! Well, she keeps elbowing through the crowd, me after her,

feeling good and ashamed, till she’s almost up to the velvet rope and

ready to be the next let in. But there was a little squirt of a man

there--probably been waiting half an hour-- I kind of admired the little

cuss--and he turns on Zilla and says, perfectly polite, ‘Madam, why are

you trying to push past me?’ And she simply-- God, I was so ashamed!--she

rips out at him, ‘You’re no gentleman,’ and she drags me into it and

hollers, ‘Paul, this person insulted me!’ and the poor skate, he got

ready to fight.

“I made out I hadn’t heard them--sure! same as you wouldn’t hear a

boiler-factory!--and I tried to look away-- I can tell you exactly how

every tile looks in the ceiling of that lobby; there’s one with brown

spots on it like the face of the devil--and all the time the people

there--they were packed in like sardines--they kept making remarks about

us, and Zilla went right on talking about the little chap, and

screeching that ‘folks like him oughtn’t to be admitted in a place

that’s _supposed_ to be for ladies and gentlemen,’ and ‘Paul, will you

kindly call the manager, so I can report this dirty rat?’ and-- Oof!

Maybe I wasn’t glad when I could sneak inside and hide in the dark!

“After twenty-four years of that kind of thing, you don’t expect me to

fall down and foam at the mouth when you hint that this sweet, clean,

respectable, moral life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, do you? I can’t

even talk about it, except to you, because anybody else would think I

was yellow. Maybe I am. Don’t care any longer.... Gosh, you’ve had to

stand a lot of whining from me, first and last, Georgie!”

“Rats, now, Paul, you’ve never really what you could call whined.

Sometimes-- I’m always blowing to Myra and the kids about what a whale of

a realtor I am, and yet sometimes I get a sneaking idea I’m not such a

Pierpont Morgan as I let on to be. But if I ever do help by jollying you

along, old Paulski, I guess maybe Saint Pete may let me in after all!”

“Yuh, you’re an old blow-hard, Georgie, you cheerful cutthroat, but

you’ve certainly kept me going.”

“Why don’t you divorce Zilla?”

“Why don’t I! If I only could! If she’d just give me the chance! You

couldn’t hire her to divorce me, no, nor desert me. She’s too fond of

her three squares and a few pounds of nut-center chocolates in between.

If she’d only be what they call unfaithful to me! George, I don’t want

to be too much of a stinker; back in college I’d ’ve thought a man who

could say that ought to be shot at sunrise. But honestly, I’d be

tickled to death if she’d really go making love with somebody. Fat

chance! Of course she’ll flirt with anything--you know how she holds

hands and laughs--that laugh--that horrible brassy laugh--the way she

yaps, ‘You naughty man, you better be careful or my big husband will be

after you!’--and the guy looking me over and thinking, ‘Why, you cute

little thing, you run away now or I’ll spank you!’ And she’ll let him go

just far enough so she gets some excitement out of it and then she’ll

begin to do the injured innocent and have a beautiful time wailing, ‘I

didn’t think you were that kind of a person.’ They talk about these

_demi-vierges_ in stories--”

“These _whats_?”

“--but the wise, hard, corseted, old married women like Zilla are worse

than any bobbed-haired girl that ever went boldly out into this-here

storm of life--and kept her umbrella slid up her sleeve! But rats, you

know what Zilla is. How she nags--nags--nags. How she wants everything I

can buy her, and a lot that I can’t, and how absolutely unreasonable she

is, and when I get sore and try to have it out with her she plays the

Perfect Lady so well that even I get fooled and get all tangled up in a

lot of ‘Why did you say’s’ and ‘I didn’t mean’s.’ I’ll tell you,

Georgie: You know my tastes are pretty fairly simple--in the matter of

food, at least. Course, as you’re always complaining, I do like decent

cigars--not those Flor de Cabagos you’re smoking--”

“That’s all right now! That’s a good two-for. By the way, Paul, did I

tell you I decided to practically cut out smok--”

“Yes you-- At the same time, if I can’t get what I like, why, I can do

without it. I don’t mind sitting down to burnt steak, with canned

peaches and store cake for a thrilling little dessert afterwards, but I

do draw the line at having to sympathize with Zilla because she’s so

rotten bad-tempered that the cook has quit, and she’s been so busy

sitting in a dirty lace negligée all afternoon, reading about some brave

manly Western hero, that she hasn’t had time to do any cooking. You’re

always talking about ‘morals’--meaning monogamy, I suppose. You’ve been

the rock of ages to me, all right, but you’re essentially a simp. You--”

“Where d’ you get that ‘simp,’ little man? Let me tell you--”

“--love to look earnest and inform the world that it’s the ‘duty of

responsible business men to be strictly moral, as an example to the

community.’ In fact you’re so earnest about morality, old Georgie, that

I hate to think how essentially immoral you must be underneath. All

right, you can--”

“Wait, wait now! What’s--”

“--talk about morals all you want to, old thing, but believe me, if it

hadn’t been for you and an occasional evening playing the violin to

Terrill O’Farrell’s ’cello, and three or four darling girls that let me

forget this beastly joke they call ‘respectable life,’ I’d ’ve killed

myself years ago.

“And business! The roofing business! Roofs for cowsheds! Oh, I don’t

mean I haven’t had a lot of fun out of the Game; out of putting it over

on the labor unions, and seeing a big check coming in, and the business

increasing. But what’s the use of it? You know, my business isn’t

distributing roofing--it’s principally keeping my competitors from

distributing roofing. Same with you. All we do is cut each other’s

throats and make the public pay for it!”

“Look here now, Paul! You’re pretty darn near talking socialism!”

“Oh yes, of course I don’t really exactly mean that-- I s’pose.

Course--competition--brings out the best--survival of the

fittest--but-- But I mean: Take all these fellows we know, the kind right

here in the club now, that seem to be perfectly content with their

home-life and their businesses, and that boost Zenith and the Chamber of

Commerce and holler for a million population. I bet if you could cut

into their heads you’d find that one-third of ’em are sure-enough

satisfied with their wives and kids and friends and their offices; and

one-third feel kind of restless but won’t admit it; and one-third are

miserable and know it. They hate the whole peppy, boosting, go-ahead

game, and they’re bored by their wives and think their families are

fools--at least when they come to forty or forty-five they’re bored--and

they hate business, and they’d go-- Why do you suppose there’s so many

‘mysterious’ suicides? Why do you suppose so many Substantial Citizens

jumped right into the war? Think it was all patriotism?”

Babbitt snorted, “What do you expect? Think we were sent into the world

to have a soft time and--what is it?--‘float on flowery beds of ease’?

Think Man was just made to be happy?”

“Why not? Though I’ve never discovered anybody that knew what the deuce

Man really was made for!”

“Well we know--not just in the Bible alone, but it stands to reason--a

man who doesn’t buckle down and do his duty, even if it does bore him

sometimes, is nothing but a--well, he’s simply a weakling. Mollycoddle,

in fact! And what do you advocate? Come down to cases! If a man is bored

by his wife, do you seriously mean he has a right to chuck her and take

a sneak, or even kill himself?”

“Good Lord, I don’t know what ‘rights’ a man has! And I don’t know the

solution of boredom. If I did, I’d be the one philosopher that had the

cure for living. But I do know that about ten times as many people find

their lives dull, and unnecessarily dull, as ever admit it; and I do

believe that if we busted out and admitted it sometimes, instead of

being nice and patient and loyal for sixty years, and then nice and

patient and dead for the rest of eternity, why, maybe, possibly, we

might make life more fun.”

They drifted into a maze of speculation. Babbitt was elephantishly

uneasy. Paul was bold, but not quite sure about what he was being bold.

Now and then Babbitt suddenly agreed with Paul in an admission which

contradicted all his defense of duty and Christian patience, and at

each admission he had a curious reckless joy. He said at last:

“Look here, old Paul, you do a lot of talking about kicking things in

the face, but you never kick. Why don’t you?”

“Nobody does. Habit too strong. But-- Georgie, I’ve been thinking of one

mild bat--oh, don’t worry, old pillar of monogamy; it’s highly proper.

It seems to be settled now, isn’t it--though of course Zilla keeps

rooting for a nice expensive vacation in New York and Atlantic City,

with the bright lights and the bootlegged cocktails and a bunch of

lounge-lizards to dance with--but the Babbitts and the Rieslings are

sure-enough going to Lake Sunasquam, aren’t we? Why couldn’t you and I

make some excuse--say business in New York--and get up to Maine four or

five days before they do, and just loaf by ourselves and smoke and cuss

and be natural?”

“Great! Great idea!” Babbitt admired.

Not for fourteen years had he taken a holiday without his wife, and

neither of them quite believed they could commit this audacity. Many

members of the Athletic Club did go camping without their wives, but

they were officially dedicated to fishing and hunting, whereas the

sacred and unchangeable sports of Babbitt and Paul Riesling were

golfing, motoring, and bridge. For either the fishermen or the golfers

to have changed their habits would have been an infraction of their

self-imposed discipline which would have shocked all right-thinking and

regularized citizens.

Babbitt blustered, “Why don’t we just put our foot down and say, ‘We’re

going on ahead of you, and that’s all there is to it!’ Nothing criminal

in it. Simply say to Zilla--”

“You don’t say anything to Zilla simply. Why, Georgie, she’s almost as

much of a moralist as you are, and if I told her the truth she’d believe

we were going to meet some dames in New York. And even Myra--she never

nags you, the way Zilla does, but she’d worry. She’d say, ‘Don’t you

_want_ me to go to Maine with you? I shouldn’t dream of going unless

you wanted me;’ and you’d give in to save her feelings. Oh, the devil!

Let’s have a shot at duck-pins.”

During the game of duck-pins, a juvenile form of bowling, Paul was

silent. As they came down the steps of the club, not more than half an

hour after the time at which Babbitt had sternly told Miss McGoun he

would be back, Paul sighed, “Look here, old man, oughtn’t to talked

about Zilla way I did.”

“Rats, old man, it lets off steam.”

“Oh, I know! After spending all noon sneering at the conventional stuff,

I’m conventional enough to be ashamed of saving my life by busting out

with my fool troubles!”

“Old Paul, your nerves are kind of on the bum. I’m going to take you

away. I’m going to rig this thing. I’m going to have an important deal

in New York and--and sure, of course!-- I’ll need you to advise me on the

roof of the building! And the ole deal will fall through, and there’ll

be nothing for us but to go on ahead to Maine. I-- Paul, when it comes

right down to it, I don’t care whether you bust loose or not. I do like

having a rep for being one of the Bunch, but if you ever needed me I’d

chuck it and come out for you every time! Not of course but what

you’re--course I don’t mean you’d ever do anything that would put--that

would put a decent position on the fritz but-- See how I mean? I’m kind

of a clumsy old codger, and I need your fine Eyetalian hand. We-- Oh,

hell, I can’t stand here gassing all day! On the job! S’ long! Don’t

take any wooden money, Paulibus! See you soon! S’ long!”