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 cross town 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 cafe 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!”