Babbit (54 page)

  "Don't see much change," said Patten. "I'll be back
about eleven, and if you don't mind, I think I'll bring in some
other world-famous pill-pedler for consultation, just to be on the
safe side. Now George, there's nothing you can do. I'll have Verona
keep the ice-bag filled - might as well leave that on, I guess -
and you, you better beat it to the office instead of standing
around her looking as if you were the patient. The nerve of
husbands! Lot more neurotic than the women! They always have to
horn in and get all the credit for feeling bad when their wives are
ailing. Now have another nice cup of coffee and git!"

  Under this derision Babbitt became more
matter-of-fact. He drove to the office, tried to dictate letters,
tried to telephone and, before the call was answered, forgot to
whom he was telephoning. At a quarter after ten he returned home.
As he left the down-town traffic and sped up the car, his face was
as grimly creased as the mask of tragedy.

  His wife greeted him with surprise. "Why did you
come back, dear? I think I feel a little better. I told Verona to
skip off to her office. Was it wicked of me to go and get
sick?"

  He knew that she wanted petting, and she got it,
joyously. They were curiously happy when he heard Dr. Patten's car
in front. He looked out of the window. He was frightened. With
Patten was an impatient man with turbulent black hair and a hussar
mustache - Dr. A. I. Dilling, the surgeon. Babbitt sputtered with
anxiety, tried to conceal it, and hurried down to the door.

  Dr. Patten was profusely casual: "Don't want to
worry you, old man, but I thought it might be a good stunt to have
Dr. Dilling examine her." He gestured toward Dilling as toward a
master.

  Dilling nodded in his curtest manner and strode
up-stairs Babbitt tramped the living-room in agony. Except for his
wife's confinements there had never been a major operation in the
family, and to him surgery was at once a miracle and an abomination
of fear. But when Dilling and Patten came down again he knew that
everything was all right, and he wanted to laugh, for the two
doctors were exactly like the bearded physicians in a musical
comedy, both of them rubbing their hands and looking foolishly
sagacious.

  Dr. Dilling spoke:

  "I'm sorry, old man, but it's acute appendicitis. We
ought to operate. Of course you must decide, but there's no
question as to what has to be done."

  Babbitt did not get all the force of it. He mumbled,
"Well I suppose we could get her ready in a couple o' days.
Probably Ted ought to come down from the university, just in case
anything happened."

  Dr. Dilling growled, "Nope. If you don't want
peritonitis to set in, we'll have to operate right away. I must
advise it strongly. If you say go ahead, I'll 'phone for the St.
Mary's ambulance at once, and we'll have her on the table in
three-quarters of an hour."

  "I - I Of course, I suppose you know what - But
great God, man, I can't get her clothes ready and everything in two
seconds, you know! And in her state, so wrought-up and weak - "

  "Just throw her hair-brush and comb and tooth-brush
in a bag; that's all she'll need for a day or two," said Dr.
Dilling, and went to the telephone.

  Babbitt galloped desperately up-stairs. He sent the
frightened Tinka out of the room. He said gaily to his wife, "Well,
old thing, the doc thinks maybe we better have a little operation
and get it over. Just take a few minutes - not half as serious as a
confinement - and you'll be all right in a jiffy."

  She gripped his hand till the fingers ached. She
said patiently, like a cowed child, "I'm afraid - to go into the
dark, all alone!" Maturity was wiped from her eyes; they were
pleading and terrified. "Will you stay with me? Darling, you don't
have to go to the office now, do you? Could you just go down to the
hospital with me? Could you come see me this evening - if
everything's all right? You won't have to go out this evening, will
you?"

  He was on his knees by the bed. While she feebly
ruffled his hair, he sobbed, he kissed the lawn of her sleeve, and
swore, "Old honey, I love you more than anything in the world! I've
kind of been worried by business and everything, but that's all
over now, and I'm back again."

  "Are you really? George, I was thinking, lying here,
maybe it would be a good thing if I just WENT. I was wondering if
anybody really needed me. Or wanted me. I was wondering what was
the use of my living. I've been getting so stupid and ugly - "

  "Why, you old humbug! Fishing for compliments when I
ought to be packing your bag! Me, sure, I'm young and handsome and
a regular village cut-up and - " He could not go on. He sobbed
again; and in muttered incoherencies they found each other.

  As he packed, his brain was curiously clear and
swift. He'd have no more wild evenings, he realized. He admitted
that he would regret them. A little grimly he perceived that this
had been his last despairing fling before the paralyzed contentment
of middle-age. Well, and he grinned impishly, "it was one doggone
good party while it lasted!" And - how much was the operation going
to cost? "I ought to have fought that out with Dilling. But no,
damn it, I don't care how much it costs!"

  The motor ambulance was at the door. Even in his
grief the Babbitt who admired all technical excellences was
interested in the kindly skill with which the attendants slid Mrs.
Babbitt upon a stretcher and carried her down-stairs. The ambulance
was a huge, suave, varnished, white thing. Mrs. Babbitt moaned, "It
frightens me. It's just like a hearse, just like being put in a
hearse. I want you to stay with me."

  "I'll be right up front with the driver," Babbitt
promised.

  "No, I want you to stay inside with me." To the
attendants: "Can't he be inside?"

  "Sure, ma'am, you bet. There's a fine little
camp-stool in there," the older attendant said, with professional
pride.

  He sat beside her in that traveling cabin with its
cot, its stool, its active little electric radiator, and its quite
unexplained calendar, displaying a girl eating cherries, and the
name of an enterprising grocer. But as he flung out his hand in
hopeless cheerfulness it touched the radiator, and he squealed:

  "Ouch! Jesus!"

  "Why, George Babbitt, I won't have you cursing and
swearing and blaspheming!"

  "I know, awful sorry but - Gosh all fish-hooks, look
how I burned my hand! Gee whiz, it hurts! It hurts like the
mischief! Why, that damn radiator is hot as - it's hot as - it's
hotter 'n the hinges of Hades! Look! You can see the mark!"

  So, as they drove up to St. Mary's Hospital, with
the nurses already laying out the instruments for an operation to
save her life, it was she who consoled him and kissed the place to
make it well, and though he tried to be gruff and mature, he
yielded to her and was glad to be babied.

  The ambulance whirled under the hooded
carriage-entrance of the hospital, and instantly he was reduced to
a zero in the nightmare succession of cork-floored halls, endless
doors open on old women sitting up in bed, an elevator, the
anesthetizing room, a young interne contemptuous of husbands. He
was permitted to kiss his wife; he saw a thin dark nurse fit the
cone over her mouth and nose; he stiffened at a sweet and
treacherous odor; then he was driven out, and on a high stool in a
laboratory he sat dazed, longing to see her once again, to insist
that he had always loved her, had never for a second loved anybody
else or looked at anybody else. In the laboratory he was conscious
only of a decayed object preserved in a bottle of yellowing
alcohol. It made him very sick, but he could not take his eyes from
it. He was more aware of it than of waiting. His mind floated in
abeyance, coming back always to that horrible bottle. To escape it
he opened the door to the right, hoping to find a sane and
business-like office. He realized that he was looking into the
operating-room; in one glance he took in Dr. Dilling, strange in
white gown and bandaged head, bending over the steel table with its
screws and wheels, then nurses holding basins and cotton sponges,
and a swathed thing, just a lifeless chin and a mound of white in
the midst of which was a square of sallow flesh with a gash a
little bloody at the edges, protruding from the gash a cluster of
forceps like clinging parasites.

  He shut the door with haste. It may be that his
frightened repentance of the night and morning had not eaten in,
but this dehumanizing interment of her who had been so pathetically
human shook him utterly, and as he crouched again on the high stool
in the laboratory he swore faith to his wife . . . to Zenith . . .
to business efficiency . . . to the Boosters' Club . . . to every
faith of the Clan of Good Fellows.

  Then a nurse was soothing, "All over! Perfect
success! She'll come out fine! She'll be out from under the
anesthetic soon, and you can see her."

  He found her on a curious tilted bed, her face an
unwholesome yellow but her purple lips moving slightly. Then only
did he really believe that she was alive. She was muttering. He
bent, and heard her sighing, "Hard get real maple syrup for
pancakes." He laughed inexhaustibly; he beamed on the nurse and
proudly confided, "Think of her talking about maple syrup! By
golly, I'm going to go and order a hundred gallons of it, right
from Vermont!"

  II

  She was out of the hospital in seventeen days. He
went to see her each afternoon, and in their long talks they
drifted back to intimacy. Once he hinted something of his relations
to Tanis and the Bunch, and she was inflated by the view that a
Wicked Woman had captivated her poor George.

  If once he had doubted his neighbors and the supreme
charm of the Good Fellows, he was convinced now. You didn't, he
noted, "see Seneca Doane coming around with any flowers or dropping
in to chat with the Missus," but Mrs. Howard Littlefield brought to
the hospital her priceless wine jelly (flavored with real wine);
Orville Jones spent hours in picking out the kind of novels Mrs.
Babbitt liked - nice love stories about New York millionaries and
Wyoming cowpunchers; Louetta Swanson knitted a pink bed-jacket;
Sidney Finkelstein and his merry brown-eyed flapper of a wife
selected the prettiest nightgown in all the stock of Parcher and
Stein.

  All his friends ceased whispering about him,
suspecting him. At the Athletic Club they asked after her daily.
Club members whose names he did not know stopped him to inquire,
"How's your good lady getting on?" Babbitt felt that he was
swinging from bleak uplands down into the rich warm air of a valley
pleasant with cottages.

  One noon Vergil Gunch suggested, "You planning to be
at the hospital about six? The wife and I thought we'd drop in."
They did drop in. Gunch was so humorous that Mrs. Babbitt said he
must "stop making her laugh because honestly it was hurting her
incision." As they passed down the hall Gunch demanded amiably,
"George, old scout, you were soreheaded about something, here a
while back. I don't know why, and it's none of my business. But you
seem to be feeling all hunky-dory again, and why don't you come
join us in the Good Citizens' League, old man? We have some corking
times together, and we need your advice."

  Then did Babbitt, almost tearful with joy at being
coaxed instead of bullied, at being permitted to stop fighting, at
being able to desert without injuring his opinion of himself, cease
utterly to be a domestic revolutionist. He patted Gunch's shoulder,
and next day he became a member of the Good Citizens' League.

  Within two weeks no one in the League was more
violent regarding the wickedness of Seneca Doane, the crimes of
labor unions, the perils of immigration, and the delights of golf,
morality, and bank-accounts than was George F. Babbitt.

  I