12. 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 death-beds
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.