Babbitt | Page 3

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BABBITT
BY SINCLAIR LEWIS
To EDITH WHARTON

BABBITT

CHAPTER I
THE towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers
of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver
rods. They were neither citadels nor churches, but frankly and
beautifully office-buildings.
The mist took pity on the fretted structures of earlier generations: the
Post Office with its shingle-tortured mansard, the red brick minarets of
hulking old houses, factories with stingy and sooted windows, wooden
tenements colored like mud. The city was full of such grotesqueries,
but the clean towers were thrusting them from the business center, and
on the farther hills were shining new houses, homes--they seemed--for
laughter and tranquillity.
Over a concrete bridge fled a limousine of long sleek hood and
noiseless engine. These people in evening clothes were returning from
an all-night rehearsal of a Little Theater play, an artistic adventure
considerably illuminated by champagne. Below the bridge curved a
railroad, a maze of green and crimson lights. The New York Flyer
boomed past, and twenty lines of polished steel leaped into the glare.
In one of the skyscrapers the wires of the Associated Press were closing
down. The telegraph operators wearily raised their celluloid eye-shades
after a night of talking with Paris and Peking. Through the building
crawled the scrubwomen, yawning, their old shoes slapping. The dawn
mist spun away. Cues of men with lunch-boxes clumped toward the
immensity of new factories, sheets of glass and hollow tile, glittering
shops where five thousand men worked beneath one roof, pouring out
the honest wares that would be sold up the Euphrates and across the
veldt. The whistles rolled out in greeting a chorus cheerful as the April
dawn; the song of labor in a city built--it seemed--for giants.
II

There was nothing of the giant in the aspect of the man who was
beginning to awaken on the sleeping-porch of a Dutch Colonial house
in that residential district of Zenith known as Floral Heights.
His name was George F. Babbitt. He was forty-six years old now, in
April, 1920, and he made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes
nor poetry, but he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more
than people could afford to pay.
His large head was pink, his brown hair thin and dry. His face was
babyish in slumber, despite his wrinkles and the red spectacle-dents on
the slopes of his nose. He was not fat but he was exceedingly well fed;
his cheeks were pads, and the unroughened hand which lay helpless
upon the khaki-colored blanket was slightly puffy. He seemed
prosperous, extremely married and unromantic; and altogether
unromantic appeared this sleeping-porch, which looked on one sizable
elm, two respectable grass-plots, a cement driveway, and a corrugated
iron garage. Yet Babbitt was again dreaming of the fairy child, a dream
more romantic than scarlet pagodas by a silver sea.
For years the fairy child had come to him. Where others saw but
Georgie Babbitt, she discerned gallant youth. She waited for him, in the
darkness beyond mysterious groves. When at last he could slip away
from the crowded house he darted to her. His wife, his clamoring
friends, sought to follow, but he escaped, the girl fleet beside him, and
they crouched together on a shadowy hillside. She was so slim, so
white, so eager! She cried that he was gay and valiant, that she would
wait for him, that they would sail--
Rumble and bang of the milk-truck.
Babbitt moaned; turned over; struggled back toward his dream. He
could see only her face now, beyond misty waters. The furnace-man
slammed the basement door. A dog barked in the next yard. As Babbitt
sank blissfully into