Babbit (50 page)

  "I guess you manage to give them a glad enough eye
when they do come in."

  "What do you mean? Mean I'm chasing flappers?"

  "I should hope not - at your age!"

  "Now you look here! You may not believe it - Of
course all you see is fat little Georgie Babbitt. Sure! Handy man
around the house! Fixes the furnace when the furnace-man doesn't
show up, and pays the bills, but dull, awful dull! Well, you may
not believe it, but there's some women that think old George
Babbitt isn't such a bad scout! They think he's not so bad-looking,
not so bad that it hurts anyway, and he's got a pretty good line of
guff, and some even think he shakes a darn wicked Walkover at
dancing!"

  "Yes." She spoke slowly. "I haven't much doubt that
when I'm away you manage to find people who properly appreciate
you."

  "Well, I just mean - " he protested, with a sound of
denial. Then he was angered into semi-honesty. "You bet I do! I
find plenty of folks, and doggone nice ones, that don't think I'm a
weak-stomached baby!"

  "That's exactly what I was saying! You can run
around with anybody you please, but I'm supposed to sit here and
wait for you. You have the chance to get all sorts of culture and
everything, and I just stay home - "

  "Well, gosh almighty, there's nothing to prevent
your reading books and going to lectures and all that junk, is
there?"

  "George, I told you, I won't have you shouting at me
like that! I don't know what's come over you. You never used to
speak to me in this cranky way."

  "I didn't mean to sound cranky, but gosh, it
certainly makes me sore to get the blame because you don't keep up
with things."

  "I'm going to! Will you help me?"

  "Sure. Anything I can do to help you in the
culture-grabbing line - yours to oblige, G. F. Babbitt."

  "Very well then, I want you to go to Mrs. Mudge's
New Thought meeting with me, next Sunday afternoon."

  "Mrs. Who's which?"

  "Mrs. Opal Emerson Mudge. The field-lecturer for the
American New Thought League. She's going to speak on 'Cultivating
the Sun Spirit' before the League of the Higher Illumination, at
the Thornleigh."

  "Oh, punk! New Thought! Hashed thought with a
poached egg! 'Cultivating the - ' It sounds like 'Why is a mouse
when it spins?' That's a fine spiel for a good Presbyterian to be
going to, when you can hear Doc Drew!"

  "Reverend Drew is a scholar and a pulpit orator and
all that, but he hasn't got the Inner Ferment, as Mrs. Mudge calls
it; he hasn't any inspiration for the New Era. Women need
inspiration now. So I want you to come, as you promised."

  IV

  The Zenith branch of the League of the Higher
Illumination met in the smaller ballroom at the Hotel Thornleigh, a
refined apartment with pale green walls and plaster wreaths of
roses, refined parquet flooring, and ultra-refined frail gilt
chairs. Here were gathered sixty-five women and ten men. Most of
the men slouched in their chairs and wriggled, while their wives
sat rigidly at attention, but two of them - red-necked, meaty men -
were as respectably devout as their wives. They were newly rich
contractors who, having bought houses, motors, hand-painted
pictures, and gentlemanliness, were now buying a refined ready-made
philosophy. It had been a toss-up with them whether to buy New
Thought, Christian Science, or a good standard high-church model of
Episcopalianism.

  In the flesh, Mrs. Opal Emerson Mudge fell somewhat
short of a prophetic aspect. She was pony-built and plump, with the
face of a haughty Pekingese, a button of a nose, and arms so short
that, despite her most indignant endeavors, she could not clasp her
hands in front of her as she sat on the platform waiting. Her frock
of taffeta and green velvet, with three strings of glass beads, and
large folding eye-glasses dangling from a black ribbon, was a
triumph of refinement.

  Mrs. Mudge was introduced by the president of the
League of the Higher Illumination, an oldish young woman with a
yearning voice, white spats, and a mustache. She said that Mrs.
Mudge would now make it plain to the simplest intellect how the Sun
Spirit could be cultivated, and they who had been thinking about
cultivating one would do well to treasure Mrs. Mudge's words,
because even Zenith (and everybody knew that Zenith stood in the
van of spiritual and New Thought progress) didn't often have the
opportunity to sit at the feet of such an inspiring Optimist and
Metaphysical Seer as Mrs. Opal Emerson Mudge, who had lived the
Life of Wider Usefulness through Concentration, and in the Silence
found those Secrets of Mental Control and the Inner Key which were
immediately going to transform and bring Peace, Power, and
Prosperity to the unhappy nations; and so, friends, would they for
this precious gem-studded hour forget the Illusions of the Seeming
Real, and in the actualization of the deep-lying Veritas pass,
along with Mrs. Opal Emerson Mudge, to the Realm Beautiful.

  If Mrs. Mudge was rather pudgier than one would like
one's swamis, yogis, seers, and initiates, yet her voice had the
real professional note. It was refined and optimistic; it was
overpoweringly calm; it flowed on relentlessly, without one comma,
till Babbitt was hypnotized. Her favorite word was "always," which
she pronounced olllllle-ways. Her principal gesture was a
pontifical but thoroughly ladylike blessing with two stubby
fingers.

  She explained about this matter of Spiritual
Saturation:

  "There are those - "

  Of "those" she made a linked sweetness long drawn
out; a far-off delicate call in a twilight minor. It chastely
rebuked the restless husbands, yet brought them a message of
healing.

  "There are those who have seen the rim and outer
seeming of the logos there are those who have glimpsed and in
enthusiasm possessed themselves of some segment and portion of the
Logos there are those who thus flicked but not penetrated and
radioactivated by the Dynamis go always to and fro assertative that
they possess and are possessed of the Logos and the Metaphysikos
but this word I bring you this concept I enlarge that those that
are not utter are not even inceptive and that holiness is in its
definitive essence always always always whole-iness and - "

  It proved that the Essence of the Sun Spirit was
Truth, but its Aura and Effluxion were Cheerfulness:

  "Face always the day with the dawn-laugh with the
enthusiasm of the initiate who perceives that all works together in
the revolutions of the Wheel and who answers the strictures of the
Soured Souls of the Destructionists with a Glad Affirmation - "

  It went on for about an hour and seven minutes.

  At the end Mrs. Mudge spoke with more vigor and
punctuation:

  "Now let me suggest to all of you the advantages of
the Theosophical and Pantheistic Oriental Reading Circle, which I
represent. Our object is to unite all the manifestations of the New
Era into one cohesive whole - New Thought, Christian Science,
Theosophy, Vedanta, Bahaism, and the other sparks from the one New
Light. The subscription is but ten dollars a year, and for this
mere pittance the members receive not only the monthly magazine,
Pearls of Healing, but the privilege of sending right to the
president, our revered Mother Dobbs, any questions regarding
spiritual progress, matrimonial problems, health and well-being
questions, financial difficulties, and - "

  They listened to her with adoring attention. They
looked genteel. They looked ironed-out. They coughed politely, and
crossed their legs with quietness, and in expensive linen
handkerchiefs they blew their noses with a delicacy altogether
optimistic and refined.

  As for Babbitt, he sat and suffered.

  When they were blessedly out in the air again, when
they drove home through a wind smelling of snow and honest sun, he
dared not speak. They had been too near to quarreling, these days.
Mrs. Babbitt forced it:

  "Did you enjoy Mrs. Mudge's talk?"

  "Well I - What did you get out of it?"

  "Oh, it starts a person thinking. It gets you out of
a routine of ordinary thoughts."

  "Well, I'll hand it to Opal she isn't ordinary, but
gosh - Honest, did that stuff mean anything to you?"

  "Of course I'm not trained in metaphysics, and there
was lots I couldn't quite grasp, but I did feel it was inspiring.
And she speaks so readily. I do think you ought to have got
something out of it."

  "Well, I didn't! I swear, I was simply astonished,
the way those women lapped it up! Why the dickens they want to put
in their time listening to all that blaa when they - "

  "It's certainly better for them than going to
roadhouses and smoking and drinking!"

  "I don't know whether it is or not! Personally I
don't see a whole lot of difference. In both cases they're trying
to get away from themselves - most everybody is, these days, I
guess. And I'd certainly get a whole lot more out of hoofing it in
a good lively dance, even in some dive, than sitting looking as if
my collar was too tight, and feeling too scared to spit, and
listening to Opal chewing her words."

  "I'm sure you do! You're very fond of dives. No
doubt you saw a lot of them while I was away!"

  "Look here! You been doing a hell of a lot of
insinuating and hinting around lately, as if I were leading a
double life or something, and I'm damn sick of it, and I don't want
to hear anything more about it!"

  "Why, George Babbitt! Do you realize what you're
saying? Why, George, in all our years together you've never talked
to me like that!"

  "It's about time then!"

  "Lately you've been getting worse and worse, and
now, finally, you're cursing and swearing at me and shouting at me,
and your voice so ugly and hateful - I just shudder!"

  "Oh, rats, quit exaggerating! I wasn't shouting, or
swearing either."

  "I wish you could hear your own voice! Maybe you
don't realize how it sounds. But even so - You never used to talk
like that. You simply COULDN'T talk this way if something dreadful
hadn't happened to you."

  His mind was hard. With amazement he found that he
wasn't particularly sorry. It was only with an effort that he made
himself more agreeable: "Well, gosh, I didn't mean to get
sore."

  "George, do you realize that we can't go on like
this, getting farther and farther apart, and you ruder and ruder to
me? I just don't know what's going to happen."

  He had a moment's pity for her bewilderment; he
thought of how many deep and tender things would be hurt if they
really "couldn't go on like this." But his pity was impersonal, and
he was wondering, "Wouldn't it maybe be a good thing if - Not a
divorce and all that, o' course, but kind of a little more
independence?"

  While she looked at him pleadingly he drove on in a
dreadful silence.

  I

  
W
HEN he was away
from her, while he kicked about the garage and swept the snow off
the running-board and examined a cracked hose-connection, he
repented, he was alarmed and astonished that he could have flared
out at his wife, and thought fondly how much more lasting she was
than the flighty Bunch. He went in to mumble that he was "sorry,
didn't mean to be grouchy," and to inquire as to her interest in
movies. But in the darkness of the movie theater he brooded that
he'd "gone and tied himself up to Myra all over again." He had some
satisfaction in taking it out on Tanis Judique. "Hang Tanis anyway!
Why'd she gone and got him into these mix-ups and made him all
jumpy and nervous and cranky? Too many complications! Cut 'em
out!"

  He wanted peace. For ten days he did not see Tanis
nor telephone to her, and instantly she put upon him the compulsion
which he hated. When he had stayed away from her for five days,
hourly taking pride in his resoluteness and hourly picturing how
greatly Tanis must miss him, Miss McGoun reported, "Mrs. Judique on
the 'phone. Like t' speak t' you 'bout some repairs."