Babbit (13 page)

  "I know, Dad! Sure! All right. I'll stick to it.
Say! Gosh! Gee whiz! I forgot all about those kids I was going to
take to the chorus rehearsal. I'll have to duck!"

  "But you haven't done all your home-work."

  "Do it first thing in the morning."

  "Well - "

  Six times in the past sixty days Babbitt had
stormed, "You will not 'do it first thing in the morning'! You'll
do it right now!" but to-night he said, "Well, better hustle," and
his smile was the rare shy radiance he kept for Paul Riesling.

  IV

  "Ted's a good boy," he said to Mrs. Babbitt.

  "Oh, he is!"

  "Who's these girls he's going to pick up? Are they
nice decent girls?"

  "I don't know. Oh dear, Ted never tells me anything
any more. I don't understand what's come over the children of this
generation. I used to have to tell Papa and Mama everything, but
seems like the children to-day have just slipped away from all
control."

  "I hope they're decent girls. Course Ted's no longer
a kid, and I wouldn't want him to, uh, get mixed up and
everything."

  "George: I wonder if you oughtn't to take him aside
and tell him about - Things!" She blushed and lowered her eyes.

  "Well, I don't know. Way I figure it, Myra, no sense
suggesting a lot of Things to a boy's mind. Think up enough
devilment by himself. But I wonder - It's kind of a hard question.
Wonder what Littlefield thinks about it?"

  "Course Papa agrees with you. He says all this -
Instruction is - He says 'tisn't decent."

  "Oh, he does, does he! Well, let me tell you that
whatever Henry T. Thompson thinks - about morals, I mean, though
course you can't beat the old duffer - "

  "Why, what a way to talk of Papa!"

  " - simply can't beat him at getting in on the
ground floor of a deal, but let me tell you whenever he springs any
ideas about higher things and education, then I know I think just
the opposite. You may not regard me as any great brain-shark, but
believe me, I'm a regular college president, compared with Henry
T.! Yes sir, by golly, I'm going to take Ted aside and tell him why
I lead a strictly moral life."

  "Oh, will you? When?"

  "When? When? What's the use of trying to pin me down
to When and Why and Where and How and When? That's the trouble with
women, that's why they don't make high-class executives; they
haven't any sense of diplomacy. When the proper opportunity and
occasion arises so it just comes in natural, why then I'll have a
friendly little talk with him and - and - Was that Tinka hollering
up-stairs? She ought to been asleep, long ago."

  He prowled through the living-room, and stood in the
sun-parlor, that glass-walled room of wicker chairs and swinging
couch in which they loafed on Sunday afternoons. Outside only the
lights of Doppelbrau's house and the dim presence of Babbitt's
favorite elm broke the softness of April night.

  "Good visit with the boy. Getting over feeling
cranky, way I did this morning. And restless. Though, by golly, I
will have a few days alone with Paul in Maine! . . . That devil
Zilla! . . . But . . . Ted's all right. Whole family all right. And
good business. Not many fellows make four hundred and fifty bucks,
practically half of a thousand dollars easy as I did to-day! Maybe
when we all get to rowing it's just as much my fault as it is
theirs. Oughtn't to get grouchy like I do. But - Wish I'd been a
pioneer, same as my grand-dad. But then, wouldn't have a house like
this. I - Oh, gosh, I DON'T KNOW!"

  He thought moodily of Paul Riesling, of their youth
together, of the girls they had known.

  When Babbitt had graduated from the State
University, twenty-four years ago, he had intended to be a lawyer.
He had been a ponderous debater in college; he felt that he was an
orator; he saw himself becoming governor of the state. While he
read law he worked as a real-estate salesman. He saved money, lived
in a boarding-house, supped on poached egg on hash. The lively Paul
Riesling (who was certainly going off to Europe to study violin,
next month or next year) was his refuge till Paul was bespelled by
Zilla Colbeck, who laughed and danced and drew men after her plump
and gaily wagging finger.

  Babbitt's evenings were barren then, and he found
comfort only in Paul's second cousin, Myra Thompson, a sleek and
gentle girl who showed her capacity by agreeing with the ardent
young Babbitt that of course he was going to be governor some day.
Where Zilla mocked him as a country boy, Myra said indignantly that
he was ever so much solider than the young dandies who had been
born in the great city of Zenith - an ancient settlement in 1897,
one hundred and five years old, with two hundred thousand
population, the queen and wonder of all the state and, to the
Catawba boy, George Babbitt, so vast and thunderous and luxurious
that he was flattered to know a girl ennobled by birth in
Zenith.

  Of love there was no talk between them. He knew that
if he was to study law he could not marry for years; and Myra was
distinctly a Nice Girl - one didn't kiss her, one didn't "think
about her that way at all" unless one was going to marry her. But
she was a dependable companion. She was always ready to go skating,
walking; always content to hear his discourses on the great things
he was going to do, the distressed poor whom he would defend
against the Unjust Rich, the speeches he would make at Banquets,
the inexactitudes of popular thought which he would correct.

  One evening when he was weary and soft-minded, he
saw that she had been weeping. She had been left out of a party
given by Zilla. Somehow her head was on his shoulder and he was
kissing away the tears - and she raised her head to say trustingly,
"Now that we're engaged, shall we be married soon or shall we
wait?"

  Engaged? It was his first hint of it. His affection
for this brown tender woman thing went cold and fearful, but he
could not hurt her, could not abuse her trust. He mumbled something
about waiting, and escaped. He walked for an hour, trying to find a
way of telling her that it was a mistake. Often, in the month
after, he got near to telling her, but it was pleasant to have a
girl in his arms, and less and less could he insult her by blurting
that he didn't love her. He himself had no doubt. The evening
before his marriage was an agony, and the morning wild with the
desire to flee.

  She made him what is known as a Good Wife. She was
loyal, industrious, and at rare times merry. She passed from a
feeble disgust at their closer relations into what promised to be
ardent affection, but it drooped into bored routine. Yet she
existed only for him and for the children, and she was as sorry, as
worried as himself, when he gave up the law and trudged on in a rut
of listing real estate.

  "Poor kid, she hasn't had much better time than I
have," Babbitt reflected, standing in the dark sun-parlor. "But - I
wish I could 've had a whirl at law and politics. Seen what I could
do. Well - Maybe I've made more money as it is."

  He returned to the living-room but before he settled
down he smoothed his wife's hair, and she glanced up, happy and
somewhat surprised.

  I

  
H
E solemnly
finished the last copy of the American Magazine, while his wife
sighed, laid away her darning, and looked enviously at the lingerie
designs in a women's magazine. The room was very still.

  It was a room which observed the best Floral Heights
standards. The gray walls were divided into artificial paneling by
strips of white-enameled pine. From the Babbitts' former house had
come two much-carved rocking-chairs, but the other chairs were new,
very deep and restful, upholstered in blue and gold-striped velvet.
A blue velvet davenport faced the fireplace, and behind it was a
cherrywood table and a tall piano-lamp with a shade of golden silk.
(Two out of every three houses in Floral Heights had before the
fireplace a davenport, a mahogany table real or imitation, and a
piano-lamp or a reading-lamp with a shade of yellow or rose
silk.)

  On the table was a runner of gold-threaded Chinese
fabric, four magazines, a silver box containing cigarette-crumbs,
and three "gift-books" - large, expensive editions of fairy-tales
illustrated by English artists and as yet unread by any Babbitt
save Tinka.

  In a corner by the front windows was a large cabinet
Victrola. (Eight out of every nine Floral Heights houses had a
cabinet phonograph.)

  Among the pictures, hung in the exact center of each
gray panel, were a red and black imitation English hunting-print,
an anemic imitation boudoir-print with a French caption of whose
morality Babbitt had always been rather suspicious, and a
"hand-colored" photograph of a Colonial room - rag rug, maiden
spinning, cat demure before a white fireplace. (Nineteen out of
every twenty houses in Floral Heights had either a hunting-print, a
Madame Feit la Toilette print, a colored photograph of a New
England house, a photograph of a Rocky Mountain, or all four.)

  It was a room as superior in comfort to the "parlor"
of Babbitt's boyhood as his motor was superior to his father's
buggy. Though there was nothing in the room that was interesting,
there was nothing that was offensive. It was as neat, and as
negative, as a block of artificial ice. The fireplace was
unsoftened by downy ashes or by sooty brick; the brass fire-irons
were of immaculate polish; and the grenadier andirons were like
samples in a shop, desolate, unwanted, lifeless things of
commerce.

  Against the wall was a piano, with another
piano-lamp, but no one used it save Tinka. The hard briskness of
the phonograph contented them; their store of jazz records made
them feel wealthy and cultured; and all they knew of creating music
was the nice adjustment of a bamboo needle. The books on the table
were unspotted and laid in rigid parallels; not one corner of the
carpet-rug was curled; and nowhere was there a hockey-stick, a torn
picture-book, an old cap, or a gregarious and disorganizing
dog.

  II

  At home, Babbitt never read with absorption. He was
concentrated enough at the office but here he crossed his legs and
fidgeted. When his story was interesting he read the best, that is
the funniest, paragraphs to his wife; when it did not hold him he
coughed, scratched his ankles and his right ear, thrust his left
thumb into his vest pocket, jingled his silver, whirled the
cigar-cutter and the keys on one end of his watch chain, yawned,
rubbed his nose, and found errands to do. He went upstairs to put
on his slippers - his elegant slippers of seal-brown, shaped like
medieval shoes. He brought up an apple from the barrel which stood
by the trunk-closet in the basement.

  "An apple a day keeps the doctor away," he
enlightened Mrs. Babbitt, for quite the first time in fourteen
hours.

  "That's so."

  "An apple is Nature's best regulator."

  "Yes, it - "

  "Trouble with women is, they never have sense enough
to form regular habits."

  "Well, I - "

  "Always nibbling and eating between meals."

  "George!" She looked up from her reading. "Did you
have a light lunch to-day, like you were going to? I did!"

  This malicious and unprovoked attack astounded him.
"Well, maybe it wasn't as light as - Went to lunch with Paul and
didn't have much chance to diet. Oh, you needn't to grin like a
chessy cat! If it wasn't for me watching out and keeping an eye on
our diet - I'm the only member of this family that appreciates the
value of oatmeal for breakfast. I - "

  She stooped over her story while he piously sliced
and gulped down the apple, discoursing:

  "One thing I've done: cut down my smoking.

  "Had kind of a run-in with Graff in the office. He's
getting too darn fresh. I'll stand for a good deal, but once in a
while I got to assert my authority, and I jumped him. 'Stan,' I
said - Well, I told him just exactly where he got off.