Kabanata Kabanata 26 · Chapter XXVI
I
As he walked through the train, looking for familiar faces, he saw only
one person whom he knew, and that was Seneca Doane, the lawyer who,
after the blessings of being in Babbitt’s own class at college and of
becoming a corporation-counsel, had turned crank, had headed
farmer-labor tickets and fraternized with admitted socialists. Though he
was in rebellion, naturally Babbitt did not care to be seen talking with
such a fanatic, but in all the Pullmans he could find no other
acquaintance, and reluctantly he halted. Seneca Doane was a slight,
thin-haired man, rather like Chum Frink except that he hadn’t Frink’s
grin. He was reading a book called “The Way of All Flesh.” It looked
religious to Babbitt, and he wondered if Doane could possibly have been
converted and turned decent and patriotic.
“Why, hello, Doane,” he said.
Doane looked up. His voice was curiously kind. “Oh! How do, Babbitt.”
“Been away, eh?”
“Yes, I’ve been in Washington.”
“Washington, eh? How’s the old Government making out?”
“It’s-- Won’t you sit down?”
“Thanks. Don’t care if I do. Well, well! Been quite a while since I’ve
had a good chance to talk to you, Doane. I was, uh-- Sorry you didn’t
turn up at the last class-dinner.”
“Oh--thanks.”
“How’s the unions coming? Going to run for mayor again?”
Doane seemed restless. He was fingering the pages of his book. He said
“I might” as though it didn’t mean anything in particular, and he
smiled.
Babbitt liked that smile, and hunted for conversation: “Saw a bang-up
cabaret in New York: the ‘Good-Morning Cutie’ bunch at the Hotel
Minton.”
“Yes, they’re pretty girls. I danced there one evening.”
“Oh. Like dancing?”
“Naturally. I like dancing and pretty women and good food better than
anything else in the world. Most men do.”
“But gosh, Doane, I thought you fellows wanted to take all the good eats
and everything away from us.”
“No. Not at all. What I’d like to see is the meetings of the Garment
Workers held at the Ritz, with a dance afterward. Isn’t that
reasonable?”
“Yuh, might be good idea, all right. Well-- Shame I haven’t seen more of
you, recent years. Oh, say, hope you haven’t held it against me, my
bucking you as mayor, going on the stump for Prout. You see, I’m an
organization Republican, and I kind of felt--”
“There’s no reason why you shouldn’t fight me. I have no doubt you’re
good for the Organization. I remember--in college you were an unusually
liberal, sensitive chap. I can still recall your saying to me that you
were going to be a lawyer, and take the cases of the poor for nothing,
and fight the rich. And I remember I said I was going to be one of the
rich myself, and buy paintings and live at Newport. I’m sure you
inspired us all.”
“Well.... Well.... I’ve always aimed to be liberal.” Babbitt was
enormously shy and proud and self-conscious; he tried to look like the
boy he had been a quarter-century ago, and he shone upon his old friend
Seneca Doane as he rumbled, “Trouble with a lot of these fellows, even
the live wires and some of ’em that think they’re forward-looking, is
they aren’t broad-minded and liberal. Now, I always believe in giving
the other fellow a chance, and listening to his ideas.”
“That’s fine.”
“Tell you how I figure it: A little opposition is good for all of us, so
a fellow, especially if he’s a business man and engaged in doing the
work of the world, ought to be liberal.”
“Yes--”
“I always say a fellow ought to have Vision and Ideals. I guess some of
the fellows in my business think I’m pretty visionary, but I just let
’em think what they want to and go right on--same as you do.... By
golly, this is nice to have a chance to sit and visit and kind of, you
might say, brush up on our ideals.”
“But of course we visionaries do rather get beaten. Doesn’t it bother
you?”
“Not a bit! Nobody can dictate to me what I think!”
“You’re the man I want to help me. I want you to talk to some of the
business men and try to make them a little more liberal in their
attitude toward poor Beecher Ingram.”
“Ingram? But, why, he’s this nut preacher that got kicked out of the
Congregationalist Church, isn’t he, and preaches free love and
sedition?”
This, Doane explained, was indeed the general conception of Beecher
Ingram, but he himself saw Beecher Ingram as a priest of the brotherhood
of man, of which Babbitt was notoriously an upholder. So would Babbitt
keep his acquaintances from hounding Ingram and his forlorn little
church?
“You bet! I’ll call down any of the boys I hear getting funny about
Ingram,” Babbitt said affectionately to his dear friend Doane.
Doane warmed up and became reminiscent. He spoke of student days in
Germany, of lobbying for single tax in Washington, of international
labor conferences. He mentioned his friends, Lord Wycombe, Colonel
Wedgwood, Professor Piccoli. Babbitt had always supposed that Doane
associated only with the I. W. W., but now he nodded gravely, as one who
knew Lord Wycombes by the score, and he got in two references to Sir
Gerald Doak. He felt daring and idealistic and cosmopolitan.
Suddenly, in his new spiritual grandeur, he was sorry for Zilla
Riesling, and understood her as these ordinary fellows at the Boosters’
Club never could.
II
Five hours after he had arrived in Zenith and told his wife how hot it
was in New York, he went to call on Zilla. He was buzzing with ideas and
forgiveness. He’d get Paul released; he’d do things, vague but highly
benevolent things, for Zilla; he’d be as generous as his friend Seneca
Doane.
He had not seen Zilla since Paul had shot her, and he still pictured her
as buxom, high-colored, lively, and a little blowsy. As he drove up to
her boarding-house, in a depressing back street below the wholesale
district, he stopped in discomfort. At an upper window, leaning on her
elbow, was a woman with the features of Zilla, but she was bloodless and
aged, like a yellowed wad of old paper crumpled into wrinkles. Where
Zilla had bounced and jiggled, this woman was dreadfully still.
He waited half an hour before she came into the boarding-house parlor.
Fifty times he opened the book of photographs of the Chicago World’s
Fair of 1893, fifty times he looked at the picture of the Court of
Honor.
He was startled to find Zilla in the room. She wore a black streaky gown
which she had tried to brighten with a girdle of crimson ribbon. The
ribbon had been torn and patiently mended. He noted this carefully,
because he did not wish to look at her shoulders. One shoulder was lower
than the other; one arm she carried in contorted fashion, as though it
were paralyzed; and behind a high collar of cheap lace there was a gouge
in the anemic neck which had once been shining and softly plump.
“Yes?” she said.
“Well, well, old Zilla! By golly, it’s good to see you again!”
“He can send his messages through a lawyer.”
“Why, rats, Zilla, I didn’t come just because of him. Came as an old
friend.”
“You waited long enough!”
“Well, you know how it is. Figured you wouldn’t want to see a friend of
his for quite some time and-- Sit down, honey! Let’s be sensible. We’ve
all of us done a bunch of things that we hadn’t ought to, but maybe we
can sort of start over again. Honest, Zilla, I’d like to do something to
make you both happy. Know what I thought to-day? Mind you, Paul doesn’t
know a thing about this--doesn’t know I was going to come see you. I got
to thinking: Zilla’s a fine, big-hearted woman, and she’ll understand
that, uh, Paul’s had his lesson now. Why wouldn’t it be a fine idea if
you asked the governor to pardon him? Believe he would, if it came from
you. No! Wait! Just think how good you’d feel if you were generous.”
“Yes, I wish to be generous.” She was sitting primly, speaking icily.
“For that reason I wish to keep him in prison, as an example to
evil-doers. I’ve gotten religion, George, since the terrible thing that
man did to me. Sometimes I used to be unkind, and I wished for worldly
pleasures, for dancing and the theater. But when I was in the hospital
the pastor of the Pentecostal Communion Faith used to come to see me,
and he showed me, right from the prophecies written in the Word of God,
that the Day of Judgment is coming and all the members of the older
churches are going straight to eternal damnation, because they only do
lip-service and swallow the world, the flesh, and the devil--”
For fifteen wild minutes she talked, pouring out admonitions to flee the
wrath to come, and her face flushed, her dead voice recaptured something
of the shrill energy of the old Zilla. She wound up with a furious:
“It’s the blessing of God himself that Paul should be in prison now, and
torn and humbled by punishment, so that he may yet save his soul, and so
other wicked men, these horrible chasers after women and lust, may have
an example.”
Babbitt had itched and twisted. As in church he dared not move during
the sermon so now he felt that he must seem attentive, though her
screeching denunciations flew past him like carrion birds.
He sought to be calm and brotherly:
“Yes, I know, Zilla. But gosh, it certainly is the essence of religion
to be charitable, isn’t it? Let me tell you how I figure it: What we
need in the world is liberalism, liberality, if we’re going to get
anywhere. I’ve always believed in being broad-minded and liberal--”
“You? Liberal?” It was very much the old Zilla. “Why, George Babbitt,
you’re about as broad-minded and liberal as a razor-blade!”
“Oh, I am, am I! Well, just let me tell you, just--let--me--tell--you,
I’m as by golly liberal as you are religious, anyway! _You religious!_”
“I am so! Our pastor says I sustain him in the faith!”
“I’ll bet you do! With Paul’s money! But just to show you how liberal I
am, I’m going to send a check for ten bucks to this Beecher Ingram,
because a lot of fellows are saying the poor cuss preaches sedition and
free love, and they’re trying to run him out of town.”
“And they’re right! They ought to run him out of town! Why, he
preaches--if you can call it preaching--in a theater, in the House of
Satan! You don’t know what it is to find God, to find peace, to behold
the snares that the devil spreads out for our feet. Oh, I’m so glad to
see the mysterious purposes of God in having Paul harm me and stop my
wickedness--and Paul’s getting his, good and plenty, for the cruel
things he did to me, and I hope he _dies_ in prison!”
Babbitt was up, hat in hand, growling, “Well, if that’s what you call
being at peace, for heaven’s sake just warn me before you go to war,
will you?”
III
Vast is the power of cities to reclaim the wanderer. More than mountains
or the shore-devouring sea, a city retains its character, imperturbable,
cynical, holding behind apparent changes its essential purpose. Though
Babbitt had deserted his family and dwelt with Joe Paradise in the
wilderness, though he had become a liberal, though he had been quite
sure, on the night before he reached Zenith, that neither he nor the
city would be the same again, ten days after his return he could not
believe that he had ever been away. Nor was it at all evident to his
acquaintances that there was a new George F. Babbitt, save that he was
more irritable under the incessant chaffing at the Athletic Club, and
once, when Vergil Gunch observed that Seneca Doane ought to be hanged,
Babbitt snorted, “Oh, rats, he’s not so bad.”
At home he grunted “Eh?” across the newspaper to his commentatory wife,
and was delighted by Tinka’s new red tam o’shanter, and announced, “No
class to that corrugated iron garage. Have to build me a nice frame
one.”
Verona and Kenneth Escott appeared really to be engaged. In his
newspaper Escott had conducted a pure-food crusade against
commission-houses. As a result he had been given an excellent job in a
commission-house, and he was making a salary on which he could marry,
and denouncing irresponsible reporters who wrote stories criticizing
commission-houses without knowing what they were talking about.
This September Ted had entered the State University as a freshman in the
College of Arts and Sciences. The university was at Mohalis, only
fifteen miles from Zenith, and Ted often came down for the week-end.
Babbitt was worried. Ted was “going in for” everything but books. He had
tried to “make” the football team as a light half-back, he was looking
forward to the basket-ball season, he was on the committee for the
Freshman Hop, and (as a Zenithite, an aristocrat among the yokels) he
was being “rushed” by two fraternities. But of his studies Babbitt could
learn nothing save a mumbled, “Oh, gosh, these old stiffs of teachers
just give you a lot of junk about literature and economics.”
One week-end Ted proposed, “Say, Dad, why can’t I transfer over from the
College to the School of Engineering and take mechanical engineering?
You always holler that I never study, but honest, I would study there.”
“No, the Engineering School hasn’t got the standing the College has,”
fretted Babbitt.
“I’d like to know how it hasn’t! The Engineers can play on any of the
teams!”
There was much explanation of the “dollars-and-cents value of being
known as a college man when you go into the law,” and a truly oratorical
account of the lawyer’s life. Before he was through with it, Babbitt had
Ted a United States Senator.
Among the great lawyers whom he mentioned was Seneca Doane.
“But, gee whiz,” Ted marveled, “I thought you always said this Doane was
a reg’lar nut!”
“That’s no way to speak of a great man! Doane’s always been a good
friend of mine--fact I helped him in college-- I started him out and you
might say inspired him. Just because he’s sympathetic with the aims of
Labor, a lot of chumps that lack liberality and broad-mindedness think
he’s a crank, but let me tell you there’s mighty few of ’em that rake in
the fees he does, and he’s a friend of some of the strongest, most
conservative men in the world--like Lord Wycombe, this, uh, this big
English nobleman that’s so well known. And you now, which would you
rather do: be in with a lot of greasy mechanics and laboring-men, or
chum up to a real fellow like Lord Wycombe, and get invited to his house
for parties?”
“Well--gosh,” sighed Ted.
The next week-end he came in joyously with, “Say, Dad, why couldn’t I
take mining engineering instead of the academic course? You talk about
standing--maybe there isn’t much in mechanical engineering, but the
Miners, gee, they got seven out of eleven in the new elections to Nu Tau
Tau!”