“Still, at that, you can’t blame ’em. They haven’t got any intellectual stimulus such as you get up here in the city,” said Chum Frink.
“Gosh, that’s right,” said Babbitt. “I don’t want you highbrows to get stuck on yourselves but I must say it keeps a fellow right up on his toes to sit in with a poet and with Howard, the guy that put the con in economics! But these small-town boobs, with nobody but each other to talk to, no wonder they get so sloppy and uncultured in their speech, and so balled-up in their thinking!”
Orville Jones commented, “And, then take our other advantages—the movies, frinstance. These Yapville sports think they’re all-get-out if they have one change of bill a week, where here in the city you got your choice of a dozen diff’rent movies any evening you want to name!”
“Sure, and the inspiration we get from rubbing up against high-class hustlers every day and getting jam full of ginger,” said Eddie Swanson.
“Same time,” said Babbitt, “no sense excusing these rube burgs too easy. Fellow’s own fault if he doesn’t show the initiative to up and beat it to the city, like we done—did. And, just speaking in confidence among friends, they’re jealous as the devil of a city man. Every time I go up to Catawba I have to go around apologizing to the fellows I was brought up with because I’ve more or less succeeded and they haven’t. And if you talk natural to ’em, way we do here, and show finesse and what you might call a broad point of view, why, they think you’re putting on side. There’s my own half-brother Martin—runs the little ole general store my Dad used to keep. Say, I’ll bet he don’t know there is such a thing as a Tux—as a dinner-jacket. If he was to come in here now, he’d think we were a bunch of—of—Why, gosh, I swear, he wouldn’t know what to think! Yes, sir, they’re jealous!”
Chum Frink agreed, “That’s so. But what I mind is their lack of culture and appreciation of the Beautiful—if you’ll excuse me for being highbrow. Now, I like to give a high-class lecture, and read some of my best poetry—not the newspaper stuff but the magazine things. But say, when I get out in the tall grass, there’s nothing will take but a lot of cheesy old stories and slang and junk that if any of us were to indulge in it here, he’d get the gate so fast it would make his head swim.”
Virgil Gunch summed it up: “Fact is, we’re mighty lucky to be living among a bunch of city-folks, that recognize artistic things and business-punch equally. We’d feel pretty glum if we got stuck in some Main Street burg and tried to wise up the old codgers to the kind of life we’re used to here. But, by golly, there’s this you got to say for ’em: Every small American town is trying to get population and modern ideals. And darn if a lot of ’em don’t put it across! Somebody starts panning a rube crossroads, telling how he was there in 1900 and it consisted of one muddy street, count ’em, one, and nine hundred human clams. Well, you go back there in 1920, and you find pavements and a swell little hotel and a first-class ladies’ ready-to-wear shop—real perfection, in fact! You don’t want to just look at what these small towns are, you want to look at what they’re aiming to become, and they all got an ambition that in the long run is going to make ’em the finest spots on earth—they all want to be just like Zenith!”
III
However intimate they might be with T. Cholmondeley Frink as a neighbor, as a borrower of lawn-mowers and monkey-wrenches, they knew that he was also a Famous Poet and a distinguished advertising-agent; that behind his easiness were sultry literary mysteries which they could not penetrate. But tonight, in the gin-evolved confidence, he admitted them to the arcanum:
“I’ve got a literary problem that’s worrying me to death. I’m doing a series of ads for the Zeeco Car and I want to make each of ’em a real little gem—reg’lar stylistic stuff. I’m all for this theory that perfection is the stunt, or nothing at all, and these are as tough things as I ever tackled. You might think it’d be harder to do my poems—all these Heart Topics: home and fireside and happiness—but they’re cinches. You can’t go wrong on ’em; you know what sentiments any decent go-ahead fellow must have if he plays the game, and you stick right to ’em. But the poetry of industrialism, now there’s a literary line where you got to open up new territory. Do you know the fellow who’s really the American genius? The fellow who you don’t know his name and I don’t either, but his work ought to be preserved so’s future generations can judge our American thought and originality today? Why, the fellow that writes the Prince Albert Tobacco ads! Just listen to this:
It’s P. A. that jams such joy in jimmy pipes. Say—bet you’ve often bent-an-ear to that spill-of-speech about hopping from five to f-i-f-t-y p-e-r by ‘stepping on her a bit!’ Guess that’s going some, all right—But just among ourselves, you better start a rapidwhiz system to keep tabs as to how fast you’ll buzz from low smoke spirits to Tip-Top-High—once you line up behind a jimmy pipe that’s all aglow with that peach-of-a-pal, Prince Albert.
Prince Albert is john-on-the-job—always joy’usly more-ish in flavor; always delightfully cool and fragrant! For a fact, you never hooked such double-decked, copper-riveted, two-fisted smoke enjoyment!
Go to a pipe—speed-o-quick like you light on a good thing! Why—packed with Prince Albert you can play a joy’us jimmy straight across the boards! And you know what that means!”
“Now that,” caroled the motor agent, Eddie Swanson, “that’s what I
