Babbit (22 page)

  At midnight, as Paul and he blundered to their
cottage over the pungent wet grass, and pine-roots confusing in the
darkness, Babbitt rejoiced that he did not have to explain to his
wife where he had been all evening.

  They did not talk much. The nervous loquacity and
opinionation of the Zenith Athletic Club dropped from them. But
when they did talk they slipped into the naive intimacy of college
days. Once they drew their canoe up to the bank of Sunasquam Water,
a stream walled in by the dense green of the hardhack. The sun
roared on the green jungle but in the shade was sleepy peace, and
the water was golden and rippling. Babbitt drew his hand through
the cool flood, and mused:

  "We never thought we'd come to Maine together!"

  "No. We've never done anything the way we thought we
would. I expected to live in Germany with my granddad's people, and
study the fiddle."

  "That's so. And remember how I wanted to be a lawyer
and go into politics? I still think I might have made a go of it.
I've kind of got the gift of the gab - anyway, I can think on my
feet, and make some kind of a spiel on most anything, and of course
that's the thing you need in politics. By golly, Ted's going to
law-school, even if I didn't! Well - I guess it's worked out all
right. Myra's been a fine wife. And Zilla means well,
Paulibus."

  "Yes. Up here, I figure out all sorts of plans to
keep her amused. I kind of feel life is going to be different, now
that we're getting a good rest and can go back and start over
again."

  "I hope so, old boy." Shyly: "Say, gosh, it's been
awful nice to sit around and loaf and gamble and act regular, with
you along, you old horse-thief!"

  "Well, you know what it means to me, Georgie. Saved
my life."

  The shame of emotion overpowered them; they cursed a
little, to prove they were good rough fellows; and in a mellow
silence, Babbitt whistling while Paul hummed, they paddled back to
the hotel.

  V

  Though it was Paul who had seemed overwrought,
Babbitt who had been the protecting big brother, Paul became
clear-eyed and merry, while Babbitt sank into irritability. He
uncovered layer on layer of hidden weariness. At first he had
played nimble jester to Paul and for him sought amusements; by the
end of the week Paul was nurse, and Babbitt accepted favors with
the condescension one always shows a patient nurse.

  The day before their families arrived, the women
guests at the hotel bubbled, "Oh, isn't it nice! You must be so
excited;" and the proprieties compelled Babbitt and Paul to look
excited. But they went to bed early and grumpy.

  When Myra appeared she said at once, "Now, we want
you boys to go on playing around just as if we weren't here."

  The first evening, he stayed out for poker with the
guides, and she said in placid merriment, "My! You're a regular bad
one!" The second evening, she groaned sleepily, "Good heavens, are
you going to be out every single night?" The third evening, he
didn't play poker.

  He was tired now in every cell. "Funny! Vacation
doesn't seem to have done me a bit of good," he lamented. "Paul's
frisky as a colt, but I swear, I'm crankier and nervouser than when
I came up here."

  He had three weeks of Maine. At the end of the
second week he began to feel calm, and interested in life. He
planned an expedition to climb Sachem Mountain, and wanted to camp
overnight at Box Car Pond. He was curiously weak, yet cheerful, as
though he had cleansed his veins of poisonous energy and was
filling them with wholesome blood.

  He ceased to be irritated by Ted's infatuation with
a waitress (his seventh tragic affair this year); he played catch
with Ted, and with pride taught him to cast a fly in the
pine-shadowed silence of Skowtuit Pond.

  At the end he sighed, "Hang it, I'm just beginning
to enjoy my vacation. But, well, I feel a lot better. And it's
going to be one great year! Maybe the Real Estate Board will elect
me president, instead of some fuzzy old-fashioned faker like Chan
Mott."

  On the way home, whenever he went into the
smoking-compartment he felt guilty at deserting his wife and angry
at being expected to feel guilty, but each time he triumphed, "Oh,
this is going to be a great year, a great old year!"

  I

  
A
LL the way home
from Maine, Babbitt was certain that he was a changed man. He was
converted to serenity. He was going to cease worrying about
business. He was going to have more "interests" - theaters, public
affairs, reading. And suddenly, as he finished an especially heavy
cigar, he was going to stop smoking.

  He invented a new and perfect method. He would buy
no tobacco; he would depend on borrowing it; and, of course, he
would be ashamed to borrow often. In a spasm of righteousness he
flung his cigar-case out of the smoking-compartment window. He went
back and was kind to his wife about nothing in particular; he
admired his own purity, and decided, "Absolutely simple. Just a
matter of will-power." He started a magazine serial about a
scientific detective. Ten miles on, he was conscious that he
desired to smoke. He ducked his head, like a turtle going into its
shell; he appeared uneasy; he skipped two pages in his story and
didn't know it. Five miles later, he leaped up and sought the
porter. "Say, uh, George, have you got a - " The porter looked
patient. "Have you got a time-table?" Babbitt finished. At the next
stop he went out and bought a cigar. Since it was to be his last
before he reached Zenith, he finished it down to an inch stub.

  Four days later he again remembered that he had
stopped smoking, but he was too busy catching up with his
office-work to keep it remembered.

  II

  Baseball, he determined, would be an excellent
hobby. "No sense a man's working his fool head off. I'm going out
to the Game three times a week. Besides, fellow ought to support
the home team."

  He did go and support the team, and enhance the
glory of Zenith, by yelling "Attaboy!" and "Rotten!" He performed
the rite scrupulously. He wore a cotton handkerchief about his
collar; he became sweaty; he opened his mouth in a wide loose grin;
and drank lemon soda out of a bottle. He went to the Game three
times a week, for one week. Then he compromised on watching the
Advocate-Times bulletin-board. He stood in the thickest and
steamiest of the crowd, and as the boy up on the lofty platform
recorded the achievements of Big Bill Bostwick, the pitcher,
Babbitt remarked to complete strangers, "Pretty nice! Good work!"
and hastened back to the office.

  He honestly believed that he loved baseball. It is
true that he hadn't, in twenty-five years, himself played any
baseball except back-lot catch with Ted - very gentle, and strictly
limited to ten minutes. But the game was a custom of his clan, and
it gave outlet for the homicidal and sides-taking instincts which
Babbitt called "patriotism" and "love of sport."

  As he approached the office he walked faster and
faster, muttering, "Guess better hustle." All about him the city
was hustling, for hustling's sake. Men in motors were hustling to
pass one another in the hustling traffic. Men were hustling to
catch trolleys, with another trolley a minute behind, and to leap
from the trolleys, to gallop across the sidewalk, to hurl
themselves into buildings, into hustling express elevators. Men in
dairy lunches were hustling to gulp down the food which cooks had
hustled to fry. Men in barber shops were snapping, "Jus' shave me
once over. Gotta hustle." Men were feverishly getting rid of
visitors in offices adorned with the signs, "This Is My Busy Day"
and "The Lord Created the World in Six Days - You Can Spiel All You
Got to Say in Six Minutes." Men who had made five thousand, year
before last, and ten thousand last year, were urging on
nerve-yelping bodies and parched brains so that they might make
twenty thousand this year; and the men who had broken down
immediately after making their twenty thousand dollars were
hustling to catch trains, to hustle through the vacations which the
hustling doctors had ordered.

  Among them Babbitt hustled back to his office, to
sit down with nothing much to do except see that the staff looked
as though they were hustling.

  III

  Every Saturday afternoon he hustled out to his
country club and hustled through nine holes of golf as a rest after
the week's hustle.

  In Zenith it was as necessary for a Successful Man
to belong to a country club as it was to wear a linen collar.
Babbitt's was the Outing Golf and Country Club, a pleasant
gray-shingled building with a broad porch, on a daisy-starred cliff
above Lake Kennepoose. There was another, the Tonawanda Country
Club, to which belonged Charles McKelvey, Horace Updike, and the
other rich men who lunched not at the Athletic but at the Union
Club. Babbitt explained with frequency, "You couldn't hire me to
join the Tonawanda, even if I did have a hundred and eighty bucks
to throw away on the initiation fee. At the Outing we've got a
bunch of real human fellows, and the finest lot of little women in
town - just as good at joshing as the men - but at the Tonawanda
there's nothing but these would-be's in New York get-ups, drinking
tea! Too much dog altogether. Why, I wouldn't join the Tonawanda
even if they - I wouldn't join it on a bet!"

  When he had played four or five holes, he relaxed a
bit, his tobacco-fluttering heart beat more normally, and his voice
slowed to the drawling of his hundred generations of peasant
ancestors. IV

  At least once a week Mr. and Mrs. Babbitt and Tinka
went to the movies. Their favorite motion-picture theater was the
Chateau, which held three thousand spectators and had an orchestra
of fifty pieces which played Arrangements from the Operas and
suites portraying a Day on the Farm, or a Four-alarm Fire. In the
stone rotunda, decorated with crown-embroidered velvet chairs and
almost medieval tapestries, parrakeets sat on gilded lotos
columns.

  With exclamations of "Well, by golly!" and "You got
to go some to beat this dump!" Babbitt admired the Chateau. As he
stared across the thousands of heads, a gray plain in the dimness,
as he smelled good clothes and mild perfume and chewing-gum, he
felt as when he had first seen a mountain and realized how very,
very much earth and rock there was in it.

  He liked three kinds of films: pretty bathing girls
with bare legs; policemen or cowboys and an industrious shooting of
revolvers; and funny fat men who ate spaghetti. He chuckled with
immense, moist-eyed sentimentality at interludes portraying
puppies, kittens, and chubby babies; and he wept at deathbeds and
old mothers being patient in mortgaged cottages. Mrs. Babbitt
preferred the pictures in which handsome young women in elaborate
frocks moved through sets ticketed as the drawing-rooms of New York
millionaires. As for Tinka, she preferred, or was believed to
prefer, whatever her parents told her to.

  All his relaxations - baseball, golf, movies,
bridge, motoring, long talks with Paul at the Athletic Club, or at
the Good Red Beef and Old English Chop House - were necessary to
Babbitt, for he was entering a year of such activity as he had
never known.