Chapter Chapter 25 · Chapter XXV
I
He awoke to stretch cheerfully as he listened to the sparrows, then to
remember that everything was wrong; that he was determined to go astray,
and not in the least enjoying the process. Why, he wondered, should he
be in rebellion? What was it all about? “Why not be sensible; stop all
this idiotic running around, and enjoy himself with his family, his
business, the fellows at the club?” What was he getting out of
rebellion? Misery and shame--the shame of being treated as an offensive
small boy by a ragamuffin like Ida Putiak! And yet-- Always he came back
to “And yet.” Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with
a world which, once doubted, became absurd.
Only, he assured himself, he was “through with this chasing after
girls.”
By noontime he was not so sure even of that. If in Miss McGoun, Louetta
Swanson, and Ida he had failed to find the lady kind and lovely, it did
not prove that she did not exist. He was hunted by the ancient thought
that somewhere must exist the not impossible she who would understand
him, value him, and make him happy.
II
Mrs. Babbitt returned in August.
On her previous absences he had missed her reassuring buzz and of her
arrival he had made a fête. Now, though he dared not hurt her by letting
a hint of it appear in his letters, he was sorry that she was coming
before he had found himself, and he was embarrassed by the need of
meeting her and looking joyful.
He loitered down to the station; he studied the summer-resort posters,
lest he have to speak to acquaintances and expose his uneasiness. But he
was well trained. When the train clanked in he was out on the cement
platform, peering into the chair-cars, and as he saw her in the line of
passengers moving toward the vestibule he waved his hat. At the door he
embraced her, and announced, “Well, well, well, well, by golly, you look
fine, you look fine.” Then he was aware of Tinka. Here was something,
this child with her absurd little nose and lively eyes, that loved him,
believed him great, and as he clasped her, lifted and held her till she
squealed, he was for the moment come back to his old steady self.
Tinka sat beside him in the car, with one hand on the steering-wheel,
pretending to help him drive, and he shouted back to his wife, “I’ll bet
the kid will be the best chuffer in the family! She holds the wheel like
an old professional!”
All the while he was dreading the moment when he would be alone with his
wife and she would patiently expect him to be ardent.
III
There was about the house an unofficial theory that he was to take his
vacation alone, to spend a week or ten days in Catawba, but he was
nagged by the memory that a year ago he had been with Paul in Maine. He
saw himself returning; finding peace there, and the presence of Paul, in
a life primitive and heroic. Like a shock came the thought that he
actually could go. Only, he couldn’t, really; he couldn’t leave his
business, and “Myra would think it sort of funny, his going way off
there alone. Course he’d decided to do whatever he darned pleased, from
now on, but still--to go way off to Maine!”
He went, after lengthy meditations.
With his wife, since it was inconceivable to explain that he was going
to seek Paul’s spirit in the wilderness, he frugally employed the lie
prepared over a year ago and scarcely used at all. He said that he had
to see a man in New York on business. He could not have explained even
to himself why he drew from the bank several hundred dollars more than
he needed, nor why he kissed Tinka so tenderly, and cried, “God bless
you, baby!” From the train he waved to her till she was but a scarlet
spot beside the brown bulkier presence of Mrs. Babbitt, at the end of a
steel and cement aisle ending in vast barred gates. With melancholy he
looked back at the last suburb of Zenith.
All the way north he pictured the Maine guides: simple and strong and
daring, jolly as they played stud-poker in their unceiled shack, wise in
woodcraft as they tramped the forest and shot the rapids. He
particularly remembered Joe Paradise, half Yankee, half Indian. If he
could but take up a backwoods claim with a man like Joe, work hard with
his hands, be free and noisy in a flannel shirt, and never come back to
this dull decency!
Or, like a trapper in a Northern Canada movie, plunge through the
forest, make camp in the Rockies, a grim and wordless caveman! Why not?
He _could_ do it! There’d be enough money at home for the family to live
on till Verona was married and Ted self-supporting. Old Henry T. would
look out for them. Honestly! Why _not_? Really _live_--
He longed for it, admitted that he longed for it, then almost believed
that he was going to do it. Whenever common sense snorted, “Nonsense!
Folks don’t run away from decent families and partners; just simply
don’t do it, that’s all!” then Babbitt answered pleadingly, “Well, it
wouldn’t take any more nerve than for Paul to go to jail and-- Lord, how
I’d like to do it! Moccasins--six-gun--frontier town--gamblers--sleep
under the stars--be a regular man, with he-men like Joe
Paradise--gosh!”
So he came to Maine, again stood on the wharf before the camp-hotel,
again spat heroically into the delicate and shivering water, while the
pines rustled, the mountains glowed, and a trout leaped and fell in a
sliding circle. He hurried to the guides’ shack as to his real home, his
real friends, long missed. They would be glad to see him. They would
stand up and shout, “Why, here’s Mr. Babbitt! He ain’t one of these
ordinary sports! He’s a real guy!”
In their boarded and rather littered cabin the guides sat about the
greasy table playing stud-poker with greasy cards: half a dozen wrinkled
men in old trousers and easy old felt hats. They glanced up and nodded.
Joe Paradise, the swart aging man with the big mustache, grunted, “How
do. Back again?”
Silence, except for the clatter of chips.
Babbitt stood beside them, very lonely. He hinted, after a period of
highly concentrated playing, “Guess I might take a hand, Joe.”
“Sure. Sit in. How many chips you want? Let’s see; you were here with
your wife, last year, wa’n’t you?” said Joe Paradise.
That was all of Babbitt’s welcome to the old home.
He played for half an hour before he spoke again. His head was reeking
with the smoke of pipes and cheap cigars, and he was weary of pairs and
four-flushes, resentful of the way in which they ignored him. He flung
at Joe:
“Working now?”
“Nope.”
“Like to guide me for a few days?”
“Well, jus’ soon. I ain’t engaged till next week.”
Only thus did Joe recognize the friendship Babbitt was offering him.
Babbitt paid up his losses and left the shack rather childishly. Joe
raised his head from the coils of smoke like a seal rising from surf,
grunted, “I’ll come ’round t’morrow,” and dived down to his three aces.
Neither in his voiceless cabin, fragrant with planks of new-cut pine,
nor along the lake, nor in the sunset clouds which presently eddied
behind the lavender-misted mountains, could Babbitt find the spirit of
Paul as a reassuring presence. He was so lonely that after supper he
stopped to talk with an ancient old lady, a gasping and steadily
discoursing old lady, by the stove in the hotel-office. He told her of
Ted’s presumable future triumphs in the State University and of Tinka’s
remarkable vocabulary till he was homesick for the home he had left
forever.
Through the darkness, through that Northern pine-walled silence, he
blundered down to the lake-front and found a canoe. There were no
paddles in it but with a board, sitting awkwardly amidships and poking
at the water rather than paddling, he made his way far out on the lake.
The lights of the hotel and the cottages became yellow dots, a cluster
of glow-worms at the base of Sachem Mountain. Larger and ever more
imperturbable was the mountain in the star-filtered darkness, and the
lake a limitless pavement of black marble. He was dwarfed and dumb and a
little awed, but that insignificance freed him from the pomposities of
being Mr. George F. Babbitt of Zenith; saddened and freed his heart. Now
he was conscious of the presence of Paul, fancied him (rescued from
prison, from Zilla and the brisk exactitudes of the tar-roofing
business) playing his violin at the end of the canoe. He vowed, “I will
go on! I’ll never go back! Now that Paul’s out of it, I don’t want to
see any of those damn people again! I was a fool to get sore because Joe
Paradise didn’t jump up and hug me. He’s one of these woodsmen; too wise
to go yelping and talking your arm off like a cityman. But get him back
in the mountains, out on the trail--! That’s real living!”
IV
Joe reported at Babbitt’s cabin at nine the next morning. Babbitt
greeted him as a fellow caveman:
“Well, Joe, how d’you feel about hitting the trail, and getting away
from these darn soft summerites and these women and all?”
“All right, Mr. Babbitt.”
“What do you say we go over to Box Car Pond--they tell me the shack
there isn’t being used--and camp out?”
“Well, all right, Mr. Babbitt, but it’s nearer to Skowtuit Pond, and you
can get just about as good fishing there.”
“No, I want to get into the real wilds.”
“Well, all right.”
“We’ll put the old packs on our backs and get into the woods and really
hike.”
“I think maybe it would be easier to go by water, through Lake Chogue.
We can go all the way by motor boat--flat-bottom boat with an Evinrude.”
“No, sir! Bust up the quiet with a chugging motor? Not on your life! You
just throw a pair of socks in the old pack, and tell ’em what you want
for eats. I’ll be ready soon’s you are.”
“Most of the sports go by boat, Mr. Babbitt. It’s a long walk.”
“Look here, Joe: are you objecting to walking?”
“Oh, no, I guess I can do it. But I haven’t tramped that far for sixteen
years. Most of the sports go by boat. But I can do it if you say so-- I
guess.” Joe walked away in sadness.
Babbitt had recovered from his touchy wrath before Joe returned. He
pictured him as warming up and telling the most entertaining stories.
But Joe had not yet warmed up when they took the trail. He persistently
kept behind Babbitt, and however much his shoulders ached from the
pack, however sorely he panted, Babbitt could hear his guide panting
equally. But the trail was satisfying: a path brown with pine-needles
and rough with roots, among the balsams, the ferns, the sudden groves of
white birch. He became credulous again, and rejoiced in sweating. When
he stopped to rest he chuckled, “Guess we’re hitting it up pretty good
for a couple o’ old birds, eh?”
“Uh-huh,” admitted Joe.
“This is a mighty pretty place. Look, you can see the lake down through
the trees. I tell you, Joe, you don’t appreciate how lucky you are to
live in woods like this, instead of a city with trolleys grinding and
typewriters clacking and people bothering the life out of you all the
time! I wish I knew the woods like you do. Say, what’s the name of that
little red flower?”
Rubbing his back, Joe regarded the flower resentfully. “Well, some folks
call it one thing and some calls it another I always just call it Pink
Flower.”
Babbitt blessedly ceased thinking as tramping turned into blind
plodding. He was submerged in weariness. His plump legs seemed to go on
by themselves, without guidance, and he mechanically wiped away the
sweat which stung his eyes. He was too tired to be consciously glad as,
after a sun-scourged mile of corduroy tote-road through a swamp where
flies hovered over a hot waste of brush, they reached the cool shore of
Box Car Pond. When he lifted the pack from his back he staggered from
the change in balance, and for a moment could not stand erect. He lay
beneath an ample-bosomed maple tree near the guest-shack, and joyously
felt sleep running through his veins.
He awoke toward dusk, to find Joe efficiently cooking bacon and eggs and
flapjacks for supper, and his admiration of the woodsman returned. He
sat on a stump and felt virile.
“Joe, what would you do if you had a lot of money? Would you stick to
guiding, or would you take a claim ’way back in the woods and be
independent of people?”
For the first time Joe brightened. He chewed his cud a second, and
bubbled, “I’ve often thought of that! If I had the money, I’d go down to
Tinker’s Falls and open a swell shoe store.”
After supper Joe proposed a game of stud-poker but Babbitt refused with
brevity, and Joe contentedly went to bed at eight. Babbitt sat on the
stump, facing the dark pond, slapping mosquitos. Save the snoring guide,
there was no other human being within ten miles. He was lonelier than he
had ever been in his life. Then he was in Zenith.
He was worrying as to whether Miss McGoun wasn’t paying too much for
carbon paper. He was at once resenting and missing the persistent
teasing at the Roughnecks’ Table. He was wondering what Zilla Riesling
was doing now. He was wondering whether, after the summer’s maturity of
being a garageman, Ted would “get busy” in the university. He was
thinking of his wife. “If she would only--if she wouldn’t be so darn
satisfied with just settling down-- No! I won’t! I won’t go back! I’ll be
fifty in three years. Sixty in thirteen years. I’m going to have some
fun before it’s too late. I don’t care! I will!”
He thought of Ida Putiak, of Louetta Swanson, of that nice widow--what
was her name?--Tanis Judique?--the one for whom he’d found the flat. He
was enmeshed in imaginary conversations. Then:
“Gee, I can’t seem to get away from thinking about folks!”
Thus it came to him merely to run away was folly, because he could never
run away from himself.
That moment he started for Zenith. In his journey there was no
appearance of flight, but he was fleeing, and four days afterward he was
on the Zenith train. He knew that he was slinking back not because it
was what he longed to do but because it was all he could do. He scanned
again his discovery that he could never run away from Zenith and family
and office, because in his own brain he bore the office and the family
and every street and disquiet and illusion of Zenith.
“But I’m going to--oh, I’m going to start something!” he vowed, and he
tried to make it valiant.