“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 hinge; 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.