Babbit (33 page)

  IV

  If he was frightened by Ted's slackness, Babbitt was
not sufficiently frightened by Verona. She was too safe. She lived
too much in the neat little airless room of her mind. Kenneth
Escott and she were always under foot. When they were not at home,
conducting their cautiously radical courtship over sheets of
statistics, they were trudging off to lectures by authors and Hindu
philosophers and Swedish lieutenants.

  "Gosh," Babbitt wailed to his wife, as they walked
home from the Fogartys' bridge-party, "it gets me how Rone and that
fellow can be so poky. They sit there night after night, whenever
he isn't working, and they don't know there's any fun in the world.
All talk and discussion - Lord! Sitting there - sitting there -
night after night - not wanting to do anything - thinking I'm crazy
because I like to go out and play a fist of cards - sitting there -
gosh!"

  Then round the swimmer, bored by struggling through
the perpetual surf of family life, new combers swelled.

  V

  Babbitt's father- and mother-in-law, Mr. and Mrs.
Henry T. Thompson, rented their old house in the Bellevue district
and moved to the Hotel Hatton, that glorified boarding-house filled
with widows, red-plush furniture, and the sound of ice-water
pitchers. They were lonely there, and every other Sunday evening
the Babbitts had to dine with them, on fricasseed chicken,
discouraged celery, and cornstarch ice cream, and afterward sit,
polite and restrained, in the hotel lounge, while a young woman
violinist played songs from the German via Broadway.

  Then Babbitt's own mother came down from Catawba to
spend three weeks.

  She was a kind woman and magnificently
uncomprehending. She congratulated the convention-defying Verona on
being a "nice, loyal home-body without all these Ideas that so many
girls seem to have nowadays;" and when Ted filled the differential
with grease, out of pure love of mechanics and filthiness, she
rejoiced that he was "so handy around the house - and helping his
father and all, and not going out with the girls all the time and
trying to pretend he was a society fellow."

  Babbitt loved his mother, and sometimes he rather
liked her, but he was annoyed by her Christian Patience, and he was
reduced to pulpiness when she discoursed about a quite mythical
hero called "Your Father":

  "You won't remember it, Georgie, you were such a
little fellow at the time - my, I remember just how you looked that
day, with your goldy brown curls and your lace collar, you always
were such a dainty child, and kind of puny and sickly, and you
loved pretty things so much and the red tassels on your little
bootees and all - and Your Father was taking us to church and a man
stopped us and said 'Major' - so many of the neighbors used to call
Your Father 'Major;' of course he was only a private in The War but
everybody knew that was because of the jealousy of his captain and
he ought to have been a high-ranking officer, he had that natural
ability to command that so very, very few men have - and this man
came out into the road and held up his hand and stopped the buggy
and said, 'Major,' he said, 'there's a lot of the folks around here
that have decided to support Colonel Scanell for congress, and we
want you to join us. Meeting people the way you do in the store,
you could help us a lot.'

  "Well, Your Father just looked at him and said, 'I
certainly shall do nothing of the sort. I don't like his politics,'
he said. Well, the man - Captain Smith they used to call him, and
heaven only knows why, because he hadn't the shadow or vestige of a
right to be called 'Captain' or any other title - this Captain
Smith said, 'We'll make it hot for you if you don't stick by your
friends, Major.' Well, you know how Your Father was, and this Smith
knew it too; he knew what a Real Man he was, and he knew Your
Father knew the political situation from A to Z, and he ought to
have seen that here was one man he couldn't impose on, but he went
on trying to and hinting and trying till Your Father spoke up and
said to him, 'Captain Smith,' he said, 'I have a reputation around
these parts for being one who is amply qualified to mind his own
business and let other folks mind theirs!' and with that he drove
on and left the fellow standing there in the road like a bump on a
log!"

  Babbitt was most exasperated when she revealed his
boyhood to the children. He had, it seemed, been fond of
barley-sugar; had worn the "loveliest little pink bow in his curls"
and corrupted his own name to "Goo-goo." He heard (though he did
not officially hear) Ted admonishing Tinka, "Come on now, kid;
stick the lovely pink bow in your curls and beat it down to
breakfast, or Goo-goo will jaw your head off."

  Babbitt's half-brother, Martin, with his wife and
youngest baby, came down from Catawba for two days. Martin bred
cattle and ran the dusty general-store. He was proud of being a
freeborn independent American of the good old Yankee stock; he was
proud of being honest, blunt, ugly, and disagreeable. His favorite
remark was "How much did you pay for that?" He regarded Verona's
books, Babbitt's silver pencil, and flowers on the table as
citified extravagances, and said so. Babbitt would have quarreled
with him but for his gawky wife and the baby, whom Babbitt teased
and poked fingers at and addressed:

  "I think this baby's a bum, yes, sir, I think this
little baby's a bum, he's a bum, yes, sir, he's a bum, that's what
he is, he's a bum, this baby's a bum, he's nothing but an old bum,
that's what he is - a bum!"

  All the while Verona and Kenneth Escott held long
inquiries into epistemology; Ted was a disgraced rebel; and Tinka,
aged eleven, was demanding that she be allowed to go to the movies
thrice a week, "like all the girls."

  Babbitt raged, "I'm sick of it! Having to carry
three generations. Whole damn bunch lean on me. Pay half of
mother's income, listen to Henry T., listen to Myra's worrying, be
polite to Mart, and get called an old grouch for trying to help the
children. All of 'em depending on me and picking on me and not a
damn one of 'em grateful! No relief, and no credit, and no help
from anybody. And to keep it up for - good Lord, how long?"

  He enjoyed being sick in February; he was delighted
by their consternation that he, the rock, should give way.

  He had eaten a questionable clam. For two days he
was languorous and petted and esteemed. He was allowed to snarl
"Oh, let me alone!" without reprisals. He lay on the sleeping-porch
and watched the winter sun slide along the taut curtains, turning
their ruddy khaki to pale blood red. The shadow of the draw-rope
was dense black, in an enticing ripple on the canvas. He found
pleasure in the curve of it, sighed as the fading light blurred it.
He was conscious of life, and a little sad. With no Vergil Gunches
before whom to set his face in resolute optimism, he beheld, and
half admitted that he beheld, his way of life as incredibly
mechanical. Mechanical business - a brisk selling of badly built
houses. Mechanical religion - a dry, hard church, shut off from the
real life of the streets, inhumanly respectable as a top-hat.
Mechanical golf and dinner-parties and bridge and conversation.
Save with Paul Riesling, mechanical friendships - back-slapping and
jocular, never daring to essay the test of quietness.

  He turned uneasily in bed.

  He saw the years, the brilliant winter days and all
the long sweet afternoons which were meant for summery meadows,
lost in such brittle pretentiousness. He thought of telephoning
about leases, of cajoling men he hated, of making business calls
and waiting in dirty anterooms - hat on knee, yawning at
fly-specked calendars, being polite to office-boys.

  "I don't hardly want to go back to work," he prayed.
"I'd like to - I don't know."

  But he was back next day, busy and of doubtful
temper.

  I

  
T
HE Zenith Street
Traction Company planned to build car-repair shops in the suburb of
Dorchester, but when they came to buy the land they found it held,
on options, by the Babbitt-Thompson Realty Company. The
purchasing-agent, the first vice-president, and even the president
of the Traction Company protested against the Babbitt price. They
mentioned their duty toward stockholders, they threatened an appeal
to the courts, though somehow the appeal to the courts was never
carried out and the officials found it wiser to compromise with
Babbitt. Carbon copies of the correspondence are in the company's
files, where they may be viewed by any public commission.

  Just after this Babbitt deposited three thousand
dollars in the bank, the purchasing-agent of the Street Traction
Company bought a five thousand dollar car, he first vice-president
built a home in Devon Woods, and the president was appointed
minister to a foreign country.

  To obtain the options, to tie up one man's land
without letting his neighbor know, had been an unusual strain on
Babbitt. It was necessary to introduce rumors about planning
garages and stores, to pretend that he wasn't taking any more
options, to wait and look as bored as a poker-player at a time when
the failure to secure a key-lot threatened his whole plan. To all
this was added a nerve-jabbing quarrel with his secret associates
in the deal. They did not wish Babbitt and Thompson to have any
share in the deal except as brokers. Babbitt rather agreed. "Ethics
of the business-broker ought to strictly represent his principles
and not get in on the buying," he said to Thompson.

  "Ethics, rats! Think I'm going to see that bunch of
holy grafters get away with the swag and us not climb in?" snorted
old Henry.

  "Well, I don't like to do it. Kind of
double-crossing."

  "It ain't. It's triple-crossing. It's the public
that gets double-crossed. Well, now we've been ethical and got it
out of our systems, the question is where we can raise a loan to
handle some of the property for ourselves, on the Q. T. We can't go
to our bank for it. Might come out."

  "I could see old Eathorne. He's close as the
tomb."

  "That's the stuff."

  Eathorne was glad, he said, to "invest in
character," to make Babbitt the loan and see to it that the loan
did not appear on the books of the bank. Thus certain of the
options which Babbitt and Thompson obtained were on parcels of real
estate which they themselves owned, though the property did not
appear in their names.

  In the midst of closing this splendid deal, which
stimulated business and public confidence by giving an example of
increased real-estate activity, Babbitt was overwhelmed to find
that he had a dishonest person working for him.

  The dishonest one was Stanley Graff, the outside
salesman.

  For some time Babbitt had been worried about Graff.
He did not keep his word to tenants. In order to rent a house he
would promise repairs which the owner had not authorized. It was
suspected that he juggled inventories of furnished houses so that
when the tenant left he had to pay for articles which had never
been in the house and the price of which Graff put into his pocket.
Babbitt had not been able to prove these suspicions, and though he
had rather planned to discharge Graff he had never quite found time
for it.

  Now into Babbitt's private room charged a red-faced
man, panting, "Look here! I've come to raise particular merry hell,
and unless you have that fellow pinched, I will!" "What's - Calm
down, o' man. What's trouble?"

  "Trouble! Huh! Here's the trouble - "

  "Sit down and take it easy! They can hear you all
over the building!"

  "This fellow Graff you got working for you, he
leases me a house. I was in yesterday and signs the lease, all
O.K., and he was to get the owner's signature and mail me the lease
last night. Well, and he did. This morning I comes down to
breakfast and the girl says a fellow had come to the house right
after the early delivery and told her he wanted an envelope that
had been mailed by mistake, big long envelope with
'Babbitt-Thompson' in the corner of it. Sure enough, there it was,
so she lets him have it. And she describes the fellow to me, and it
was this Graff. So I 'phones to him and he, the poor fool, he
admits it! He says after my lease was all signed he got a better
offer from another fellow and he wanted my lease back. Now what you
going to do about it?"