Kabanata Kabanata 8 · Chapter VIII
I
The great events of Babbitt’s spring were the secret buying of
real-estate options in Linton for certain street-traction officials,
before the public announcement that the Linton Avenue Car Line would be
extended, and a dinner which was, as he rejoiced to his wife, not only
“a regular society spread but a real sure-enough highbrow affair, with
some of the keenest intellects and the brightest bunch of little women
in town.” It was so absorbing an occasion that he almost forgot his
desire to run off to Maine with Paul Riesling.
Though he had been born in the village of Catawba, Babbitt had risen to
that metropolitan social plane on which hosts have as many as four
people at dinner without planning it for more than an evening or two.
But a dinner of twelve, with flowers from the florist’s and all the
cut-glass out, staggered even the Babbitts.
For two weeks they studied, debated, and arbitrated the list of guests.
Babbitt marveled, “Of course we’re up-to-date ourselves, but still,
think of us entertaining a famous poet like Chum Frink, a fellow that on
nothing but a poem or so every day and just writing a few advertisements
pulls down fifteen thousand berries a year!”
“Yes, and Howard Littlefield. Do you know, the other evening Eunice told
me her papa speaks three languages!” said Mrs. Babbitt.
“Huh! That’s nothing! So do I--American, baseball, and poker!”
“I don’t think it’s nice to be funny about a matter like that. Think
how wonderful it must be to speak three languages, and so useful
and-- And with people like that, I don’t see why we invite the Orville
Joneses.”
“Well now, Orville is a mighty up-and-coming fellow!”
“Yes, I know, but-- A laundry!”
“I’ll admit a laundry hasn’t got the class of poetry or real estate, but
just the same, Orvy is mighty deep. Ever start him spieling about
gardening? Say, that fellow can tell you the name of every kind of tree,
and some of their Greek and Latin names too! Besides, we owe the Joneses
a dinner. Besides, gosh, we got to have some boob for audience, when a
bunch of hot-air artists like Frink and Littlefield get going.”
“Well, dear--I meant to speak of this--I do think that as host you ought
to sit back and listen, and let your guests have a chance to talk once
in a while!”
“Oh, you do, do you! Sure! I talk all the time! And I’m just a business
man--oh sure!--I’m no Ph.D. like Littlefield, and no poet, and I haven’t
anything to spring! Well, let me tell you, just the other day your darn
Chum Frink comes up to me at the club begging to know what I thought
about the Springfield school-bond issue. And who told him? I did! You
bet your life I told him! Little me! I certainly did! He came up and
asked me, and I told him all about it! You bet! And he was darn glad to
listen to me and-- Duty as a host! I guess I know my duty as a host and
let me tell you--”
In fact, the Orville Joneses were invited.
II
On the morning of the dinner, Mrs. Babbitt was restive.
“Now, George, I want you to be sure and be home early to-night.
Remember, you have to dress.”
“Uh-huh. I see by the _Advocate_ that the Presbyterian General Assembly
has voted to quit the Interchurch World Movement. That--”
“George! Did you hear what I said? You must be home in time to dress
to-night.”
“Dress? Hell! I’m dressed now! Think I’m going down to the office in my
B.V.D.’s?”
“I will not have you talking indecently before the children! And you do
have to put on your dinner-jacket!”
“I guess you mean my Tux. I tell you, of all the doggone nonsensical
nuisances that was ever invented--”
Three minutes later, after Babbitt had wailed, “Well, I don’t know
whether I’m going to dress or _not_” in a manner which showed that he
was going to dress, the discussion moved on.
“Now, George, you mustn’t forget to call in at Vecchia’s on the way home
and get the ice cream. Their delivery-wagon is broken down, and I don’t
want to trust them to send it by--”
“All right! You told me that before breakfast!”
“Well, I don’t want you to forget. I’ll be working my head off all day
long, training the girl that’s to help with the dinner--”
“All nonsense, anyway, hiring an extra girl for the feed. Matilda could
perfectly well--”
“--and I have to go out and buy the flowers, and fix them, and set the
table, and order the salted almonds, and look at the chickens, and
arrange for the children to have their supper up-stairs and-- And I
simply must depend on you to go to Vecchia’s for the ice cream.”
“All riiiiiight! Gosh, I’m going to get it!”
“All you have to do is to go in and say you want the ice cream that Mrs.
Babbitt ordered yesterday by ’phone, and it will be all ready for you.”
At ten-thirty she telephoned to him not to forget the ice cream from
Vecchia’s.
He was surprised and blasted then by a thought. He wondered whether
Floral Heights dinners were worth the hideous toil involved. But he
repented the sacrilege in the excitement of buying the materials for
cocktails.
Now this was the manner of obtaining alcohol under the reign of
righteousness and prohibition:
He drove from the severe rectangular streets of the modern business
center into the tangled byways of Old Town--jagged blocks filled with
sooty warehouses and lofts; on into The Arbor, once a pleasant orchard
but now a morass of lodging-houses, tenements, and brothels. Exquisite
shivers chilled his spine and stomach, and he looked at every policeman
with intense innocence, as one who loved the law, and admired the Force,
and longed to stop and play with them. He parked his car a block from
Healey Hanson’s saloon, worrying, “Well, rats, if anybody did see me,
they’d think I was here on business.”
He entered a place curiously like the saloons of ante-prohibition days,
with a long greasy bar with sawdust in front and streaky mirror behind,
a pine table at which a dirty old man dreamed over a glass of something
which resembled whisky, and with two men at the bar, drinking something
which resembled beer, and giving that impression of forming a large
crowd which two men always give in a saloon. The bartender, a tall pale
Swede with a diamond in his lilac scarf, stared at Babbitt as he stalked
plumply up to the bar and whispered, “I’d, uh-- Friend of Hanson’s sent
me here. Like to get some gin.”
The bartender gazed down on him in the manner of an outraged bishop. “I
guess you got the wrong place, my friend. We sell nothing but soft
drinks here.” He cleaned the bar with a rag which would itself have done
with a little cleaning, and glared across his mechanically moving elbow.
The old dreamer at the table petitioned the bartender, “Say, Oscar,
listen.”
Oscar did not listen.
“Aw, say, Oscar, listen, will yuh? Say, lis-sen!”
The decayed and drowsy voice of the loafer, the agreeable stink of
beer-dregs, threw a spell of inanition over Babbitt. The bartender moved
grimly toward the crowd of two men. Babbitt followed him as delicately
as a cat, and wheedled, “Say, Oscar, I want to speak to Mr. Hanson.”
“Whajuh wanta see him for?”
“I just want to talk to him. Here’s my card.”
It was a beautiful card, an engraved card, a card in the blackest black
and the sharpest red, announcing that Mr. George F. Babbitt was Estates,
Insurance, Rents. The bartender held it as though it weighed ten pounds,
and read it as though it were a hundred words long. He did not bend from
his episcopal dignity, but he growled, “I’ll see if he’s around.”
From the back room he brought an immensely old young man, a quiet
sharp-eyed man, in tan silk shirt, checked vest hanging open, and
burning brown trousers--Mr. Healey Hanson. Mr. Hanson said only “Yuh?”
but his implacable and contemptuous eyes queried Babbitt’s soul, and he
seemed not at all impressed by the new dark-gray suit for which (as he
had admitted to every acquaintance at the Athletic Club) Babbitt had
paid a hundred and twenty-five dollars.
“Glad meet you, Mr. Hanson. Say, uh-- I’m George Babbitt of the
Babbitt-Thompson Realty Company. I’m a great friend of Jake Offutt’s.”
“Well, what of it?”
“Say, uh, I’m going to have a party, and Jake told me you’d be able to
fix me up with a little gin.” In alarm, in obsequiousness, as Hanson’s
eyes grew more bored, “You telephone to Jake about me, if you want to.”
Hanson answered by jerking his head to indicate the entrance to the back
room, and strolled away. Babbitt melodramatically crept into an
apartment containing four round tables, eleven chairs, a brewery
calendar, and a smell. He waited. Thrice he saw Healey Hanson saunter
through, humming, hands in pockets, ignoring him.
By this time Babbitt had modified his valiant morning vow, “I won’t pay
one cent over seven dollars a quart” to “I might pay ten.” On Hanson’s
next weary entrance he besought, “Could you fix that up?” Hanson
scowled, and grated, “Just a minute--Pete’s sake--just a min-ute!” In
growing meekness Babbitt went on waiting till Hanson casually reappeared
with a quart of gin--what is euphemistically known as a quart--in his
disdainful long white hands.
“Twelve bucks,” he snapped.
“Say, uh, but say, cap’n, Jake thought you’d be able to fix me up for
eight or nine a bottle.”
“Nup. Twelve. This is the real stuff, smuggled from Canada. This is none
o’ your neutral spirits with a drop of juniper extract,” the honest
merchant said virtuously. “Twelve bones--if you want it. Course y’
understand I’m just doing this anyway as a friend of Jake’s.”
“Sure! Sure! I understand!” Babbitt gratefully held out twelve dollars.
He felt honored by contact with greatness as Hanson yawned, stuffed the
bills, uncounted, into his radiant vest, and swaggered away.
He had a number of titillations out of concealing the gin-bottle under
his coat and out of hiding it in his desk. All afternoon he snorted and
chuckled and gurgled over his ability to “give the Boys a real shot in
the arm to-night.” He was, in fact, so exhilarated that he was within a
block of his house before he remembered that there was a certain matter,
mentioned by his wife, of fetching ice cream from Vecchia’s. He
explained, “Well, darn it--” and drove back.
Vecchia was not a caterer, he was The Caterer of Zenith. Most coming-out
parties were held in the white and gold ballroom of the Maison Vecchia;
at all nice teas the guests recognized the five kinds of Vecchia
sandwiches and the seven kinds of Vecchia cakes; and all really smart
dinners ended, as on a resolving chord, in Vecchia Neapolitan ice cream
in one of the three reliable molds--the melon mold, the round mold like
a layer cake, and the long brick.
Vecchia’s shop had pale blue woodwork, tracery of plaster roses,
attendants in frilled aprons, and glass shelves of “kisses” with all the
refinement that inheres in whites of eggs. Babbitt felt heavy and thick
amid this professional daintiness, and as he waited for the ice cream he
decided, with hot prickles at the back of his neck, that a girl customer
was giggling at him. He went home in a touchy temper. The first thing he
heard was his wife’s agitated:
“George! _Did_ you remember to go to Vecchia’s and get the ice cream?”
“Say! Look here! Do I ever forget to do things?”
“Yes! Often!”
“Well now, it’s darn seldom I do, and it certainly makes me tired, after
going into a pink-tea joint like Vecchia’s and having to stand around
looking at a lot of half-naked young girls, all rouged up like they were
sixty and eating a lot of stuff that simply ruins their stomachs--”
“Oh, it’s too bad about you! I’ve noticed how you hate to look at pretty
girls!”
With a jar Babbitt realized that his wife was too busy to be impressed
by that moral indignation with which males rule the world, and he went
humbly up-stairs to dress. He had an impression of a glorified
dining-room, of cut-glass, candles, polished wood, lace, silver, roses.
With the awed swelling of the heart suitable to so grave a business as
giving a dinner, he slew the temptation to wear his plaited dress-shirt
for a fourth time, took out an entirely fresh one, tightened his black
bow, and rubbed his patent-leather pumps with a handkerchief. He glanced
with pleasure at his garnet and silver studs. He smoothed and patted his
ankles, transformed by silk socks from the sturdy shanks of George
Babbitt to the elegant limbs of what is called a Clubman. He stood
before the pier-glass, viewing his trim dinner-coat, his beautiful
triple-braided trousers; and murmured in lyric beatitude, “By golly, I
don’t look so bad. I certainly don’t look like Catawba. If the hicks
back home could see me in this rig, they’d have a fit!”
He moved majestically down to mix the cocktails. As he chipped ice, as
he squeezed oranges, as he collected vast stores of bottles, glasses,
and spoons at the sink in the pantry, he felt as authoritative as the
bartender at Healey Hanson’s saloon. True, Mrs. Babbitt said he was
under foot, and Matilda and the maid hired for the evening brushed by
him, elbowed him, shrieked “Pleasopn door,” as they tottered through
with trays, but in this high moment he ignored them.
Besides the new bottle of gin, his cellar consisted of one half-bottle
of Bourbon whisky, a quarter of a bottle of Italian vermouth, and
approximately one hundred drops of orange bitters. He did not possess a
cocktail-shaker. A shaker was proof of dissipation, the symbol of a
Drinker, and Babbitt disliked being known as a Drinker even more than he
liked a Drink. He mixed by pouring from an ancient gravy-boat into a
handleless pitcher; he poured with a noble dignity, holding his alembics
high beneath the powerful Mazda globe, his face hot, his shirt-front a
glaring white, the copper sink a scoured red-gold.
He tasted the sacred essence. “Now, by golly, if that isn’t pretty near
one fine old cocktail! Kind of a Bronx, and yet like a Manhattan.
Ummmmmm! Hey, Myra, want a little nip before the folks come?”
Bustling into the dining-room, moving each glass a quarter of an inch,
rushing back with resolution implacable on her face, her gray and
silver-lace party frock protected by a denim towel, Mrs. Babbitt glared
at him, and rebuked him, “Certainly not!”
“Well,” in a loose, jocose manner, “I think the old man will!”
The cocktail filled him with a whirling exhilaration behind which he was
aware of devastating desires--to rush places in fast motors, to kiss
girls, to sing, to be witty. He sought to regain his lost dignity by
announcing to Matilda:
“I’m going to stick this pitcher of cocktails in the refrigerator. Be
sure you don’t upset any of ’em.”
“Yeh.”
“Well, be sure now. Don’t go putting anything on this top shelf.”
“Yeh.”
“Well, be--” He was dizzy. His voice was thin and distant. “Whee!” With
enormous impressiveness he commanded, “Well, be sure now,” and minced
into the safety of the living-room. He wondered whether he could
persuade “as slow a bunch as Myra and the Littlefields to go some place
aft’ dinner and raise Cain and maybe dig up smore booze.” He perceived
that he had gifts of profligacy which had been neglected.
By the time the guests had come, including the inevitable late couple
for whom the others waited with painful amiability, a great gray
emptiness had replaced the purple swirling in Babbitt’s head, and he had
to force the tumultuous greetings suitable to a host on Floral Heights.
The guests were Howard Littlefield, the doctor of philosophy who
furnished publicity and comforting economics to the Street Traction
Company; Vergil Gunch, the coal-dealer, equally powerful in the Elks and
in the Boosters’ Club; Eddie Swanson, the agent for the Javelin Motor
Car, who lived across the street; and Orville Jones, owner of the Lily
White Laundry, which justly announced itself “the biggest, busiest,
bulliest cleanerie shoppe in Zenith.” But, naturally, the most
distinguished of all was T. Cholmondeley Frink, who was not only the
author of “Poemulations,” which, syndicated daily in sixty-seven leading
newspapers, gave him one of the largest audiences of any poet in the
world, but also an optimistic lecturer and the creator of “Ads that
Add.” Despite the searching philosophy and high morality of his verses,
they were humorous and easily understood by any child of twelve; and it
added a neat air of pleasantry to them that they were set not as verse
but as prose. Mr. Frink was known from Coast to Coast as “Chum.”
With them were six wives, more or less--it was hard to tell, so early in
the evening, as at first glance they all looked alike, and as they all
said, “Oh, _isn’t_ this nice!” in the same tone of determined
liveliness. To the eye, the men were less similar: Littlefield, a
hedge-scholar, tall and horse-faced; Chum Frink, a trifle of a man with
soft and mouse-like hair, advertising his profession as poet by a silk
cord on his eye-glasses; Vergil Gunch, broad, with coarse black hair _en
brosse_; Eddie Swanson, a bald and bouncing young man who showed his
taste for elegance by an evening waistcoat of figured black silk with
glass buttons; Orville Jones, a steady-looking, stubby, not very
memorable person, with a hemp-colored toothbrush mustache. Yet they were
all so well fed and clean, they all shouted “’Evenin’, Georgie!” with
such robustness, that they seemed to be cousins, and the strange thing
is that the longer one knew the women, the less alike they seemed; while
the longer one knew the men, the more alike their bold patterns
appeared.
The drinking of the cocktails was as canonical a rite as the mixing. The
company waited, uneasily, hopefully, agreeing in a strained manner that
the weather had been rather warm and slightly cold, but still Babbitt
said nothing about drinks. They became despondent. But when the late
couple (the Swansons) had arrived, Babbitt hinted, “Well, folks, do you
think you could stand breaking the law a little?”
They looked at Chum Frink, the recognized lord of language. Frink pulled
at his eye-glass cord as at a bell-rope, he cleared his throat and said
that which was the custom:
“I’ll tell you, George: I’m a law-abiding man, but they do say Verg
Gunch is a regular yegg, and of course he’s bigger ’n I am, and I just
can’t figure out what I’d do if he tried to force me into anything
criminal!”
Gunch was roaring, “Well, I’ll take a chance--” when Frink held up his
hand and went on, “So if Verg and you insist, Georgie, I’ll park my car
on the wrong side of the street, because I take it for granted that’s
the crime you’re hinting at!”
There was a great deal of laughter. Mrs. Jones asserted, “Mr. Frink is
simply too killing! You’d think he was so innocent!”
Babbitt clamored, “How did you guess it, Chum? Well, you-all just wait a
moment while I go out and get the--keys to your cars!” Through a froth
of merriment he brought the shining promise, the mighty tray of glasses
with the cloudy yellow cocktails in the glass pitcher in the center. The
men babbled, “Oh, gosh, have a look!” and “This gets me right where I
live!” and “Let me at it!” But Chum Frink, a traveled man and not unused
to woes, was stricken by the thought that the potion might be merely
fruit-juice with a little neutral spirits. He looked timorous as
Babbitt, a moist and ecstatic almoner, held out a glass, but as he
tasted it he piped, “Oh, man, let me dream on! It ain’t true, but don’t
waken me! Jus’ lemme slumber!”
Two hours before, Frink had completed a newspaper lyric beginning:
_I sat alone and groused and thunk, and scratched my head and sighed and
wunk, and groaned, “There still are boobs, alack, who’d like the
old-time gin-mill back; that den that makes a sage a loon, the vile and
smelly old saloon!” I’ll never miss their poison booze, whilst I the
bubbling spring can use, that leaves my head at merry morn as clear as
any babe new-born!_
Babbitt drank with the others; his moment’s depression was gone; he
perceived that these were the best fellows in the world; he wanted to
give them a thousand cocktails. “Think you could stand another?” he
cried. The wives refused, with giggles, but the men, speaking in a
wide, elaborate, enjoyable manner, gloated, “Well, sooner than have you
get sore at me, Georgie--”
“You got a little dividend coming,” said Babbitt to each of them, and
each intoned, “Squeeze it, Georgie, squeeze it!”
When, beyond hope, the pitcher was empty, they stood and talked about
prohibition. The men leaned back on their heels, put their hands in
their trousers-pockets, and proclaimed their views with the booming
profundity of a prosperous male repeating a thoroughly hackneyed
statement about a matter of which he knows nothing whatever.
“Now, I’ll tell you,” said Vergil Gunch; “way I figure it is this, and I
can speak by the book, because I’ve talked to a lot of doctors and
fellows that ought to know, and the way I see it is that it’s a good
thing to get rid of the saloon, but they ought to let a fellow have beer
and light wines.”
Howard Littlefield observed, “What isn’t generally realized is that it’s
a dangerous prop’sition to invade the rights of personal liberty. Now,
take this for instance: The King of-- Bavaria? I think it was
Bavaria--yes, Bavaria, it was--in 1862, March, 1862, he issued a
proclamation against public grazing of live-stock. The peasantry had
stood for overtaxation without the slightest complaint, but when this
proclamation came out, they rebelled. Or it may have been Saxony. But it
just goes to show the dangers of invading the rights of personal
liberty.”
“That’s it--no one got a right to invade personal liberty,” said Orville
Jones.
“Just the same, you don’t want to forget prohibition is a mighty good
thing for the working-classes. Keeps ’em from wasting their money and
lowering their productiveness,” said Vergil Gunch.
“Yes, that’s so. But the trouble is the manner of enforcement,” insisted
Howard Littlefield. “Congress didn’t understand the right system. Now,
if I’d been running the thing, I’d have arranged it so that the drinker
himself was licensed, and then we could have taken care of the shiftless
workman--kept him from drinking--and yet not’ve interfered with the
rights--with the personal liberty--of fellows like ourselves.”
They bobbed their heads, looked admiringly at one another, and stated,
“That’s so, that would be the stunt.”
“The thing that worries me is that a lot of these guys will take to
cocaine,” sighed Eddie Swanson.
They bobbed more violently, and groaned, “That’s so, there is a danger
of that.”
Chum Frink chanted, “Oh, say, I got hold of a swell new receipt for
home-made beer the other day. You take--”
Gunch interrupted, “Wait! Let me tell you mine!” Littlefield snorted,
“Beer! Rats! Thing to do is to ferment cider!” Jones insisted, “I’ve got
the receipt that does the business!” Swanson begged, “Oh, say, lemme
tell you the story--” But Frink went on resolutely, “You take and save
the shells from peas, and pour six gallons of water on a bushel of
shells and boil the mixture till--”
Mrs. Babbitt turned toward them with yearning sweetness; Frink hastened
to finish even his best beer-recipe; and she said gaily, “Dinner is
served.”
There was a good deal of friendly argument among the men as to which
should go in last, and while they were crossing the hall from the
living-room to the dining-room Vergil Gunch made them laugh by
thundering, “If I can’t sit next to Myra Babbitt and hold her hand under
the table, I won’t play-- I’m goin’ home.” In the dining-room they stood
embarrassed while Mrs. Babbitt fluttered, “Now, let me see-- Oh, I was
going to have some nice hand-painted place-cards for you but-- Oh, let me
see; Mr. Frink, you sit there.”
The dinner was in the best style of women’s-magazine art, whereby the
salad was served in hollowed apples, and everything but the invincible
fried chicken resembled something else.
Ordinarily the men found it hard to talk to the women; flirtation was an
art unknown on Floral Heights, and the realms of offices and of kitchens
had no alliances. But under the inspiration of the cocktails,
conversation was violent. Each of the men still had a number of
important things to say about prohibition, and now that each had a loyal
listener in his dinner-partner he burst out:
“I found a place where I can get all the hootch I want at eight a
quart--”
“Did you read about this fellow that went and paid a thousand dollars
for ten cases of red-eye that proved to be nothing but water? Seems this
fellow was standing on the corner and fellow comes up to him--”
“They say there’s a whole raft of stuff being smuggled across at
Detroit--”
“What I always say is--what a lot of folks don’t realize about
prohibition--”
“And then you get all this awful poison stuff--wood alcohol and
everything--”
“Course I believe in it on principle, but I don’t propose to have
anybody telling me what I got to think and do. No American’ll ever stand
for that!”
But they all felt that it was rather in bad taste for Orville Jones--and
he not recognized as one of the wits of the occasion anyway--to say, “In
fact, the whole thing about prohibition is this: it isn’t the initial
cost, it’s the humidity.”
Not till the one required topic had been dealt with did the conversation
become general.
It was often and admiringly said of Vergil Gunch, “Gee, that fellow can
get away with murder! Why, he can pull a Raw One in mixed company and
all the ladies’ll laugh their heads off, but me, gosh, if I crack
anything that’s just the least bit off color I get the razz for fair!”
Now Gunch delighted them by crying to Mrs. Eddie Swanson, youngest of
the women, “Louetta! I managed to pinch Eddie’s doorkey out of his
pocket, and what say you and me sneak across the street when the folks
aren’t looking? Got something,” with a gorgeous leer, “awful important
to tell you!”
The women wriggled, and Babbitt was stirred to like naughtiness. “Say,
folks, I wished I dared show you a book I borrowed from Doc Patten!”
“Now, George! The idea!” Mrs. Babbitt warned him.
“This book--racy isn’t the word! It’s some kind of an anthropological
report about--about Customs, in the South Seas, and what it doesn’t
_say_! It’s a book you can’t buy. Verg, I’ll lend it to you.”
“Me first!” insisted Eddie Swanson. “Sounds spicy!”
Orville Jones announced, “Say, I heard a Good One the other day about a
coupla Swedes and their wives,” and, in the best Jewish accent, he
resolutely carried the Good One to a slightly disinfected ending. Gunch
capped it. But the cocktails waned, the seekers dropped back into
cautious reality.
Chum Frink had recently been on a lecture-tour among the small towns,
and he chuckled, “Awful good to get back to civilization! I certainly
been seeing some hick towns! I mean-- Course the folks there are the best
on earth, but, gee whiz, those Main Street burgs are slow, and you
fellows can’t hardly appreciate what it means to be here with a bunch of
live ones!”
“You bet!” exulted Orville Jones. “They’re the best folks on earth,
those small-town folks, but, oh, mama! what conversation! Why, say, they
can’t talk about anything but the weather and the ne-oo Ford, by
heckalorum!”
“That’s right. They all talk about just the same things,” said Eddie
Swanson.
“Don’t they, though! They just say the same things over and over,” said
Vergil Gunch.
“Yes, it’s really remarkable. They seem to lack all power of looking at
things impersonally. They simply go over and over the same talk about
Fords and the weather and so on,” said Howard Littlefield.
“Still, at that, you can’t blame ’em. They haven’t got any intellectual
stimulus such as you get up here in the city,” said Chum Frink.
“Gosh, that’s right,” said Babbitt. “I don’t want you highbrows to get
stuck on yourselves but I must say it keeps a fellow right up on his
toes to sit in with a poet and with Howard, the guy that put the con in
economics! But these small-town boobs, with nobody but each other to
talk to, no wonder they get so sloppy and uncultured in their speech,
and so balled-up in their thinking!”
Orville Jones commented, “And, then take our other advantages--the
movies, frinstance. These Yapville sports think they’re all-get-out if
they have one change of bill a week, where here in the city you got your
choice of a dozen diff’rent movies any evening you want to name!”
“Sure, and the inspiration we get from rubbing up against high-class
hustlers every day and getting jam full of ginger,” said Eddie Swanson.
“Same time,” said Babbitt, “no sense excusing these rube burgs too easy.
Fellow’s own fault if he doesn’t show the initiative to up and beat it
to the city, like we done--did. And, just speaking in confidence among
friends, they’re jealous as the devil of a city man. Every time I go up
to Catawba I have to go around apologizing to the fellows I was brought
up with because I’ve more or less succeeded and they haven’t. And if you
talk natural to ’em, way we do here, and show finesse and what you might
call a broad point of view, why, they think you’re putting on side.
There’s my own half-brother Martin--runs the little ole general store my
Dad used to keep. Say, I’ll bet he don’t know there is such a thing as a
Tux--as a dinner-jacket. If he was to come in here now, he’d think we
were a bunch of--of-- Why, gosh, I swear, he wouldn’t know what to think!
Yes, sir, they’re jealous!”
Chum Frink agreed, “That’s so. But what I mind is their lack of culture
and appreciation of the Beautiful--if you’ll excuse me for being
highbrow. Now, I like to give a high-class lecture, and read some of my
best poetry--not the newspaper stuff but the magazine things. But say,
when I get out in the tall grass, there’s nothing will take but a lot of
cheesy old stories and slang and junk that if any of us were to indulge
in it here, he’d get the gate so fast it would make his head swim.”
Vergil Gunch summed it up: “Fact is, we’re mighty lucky to be living
among a bunch of city-folks, that recognize artistic things and
business-punch equally. We’d feel pretty glum if we got stuck in some
Main Street burg and tried to wise up the old codgers to the kind of
life we’re used to here. But, by golly, there’s this you got to say for
’em: Every small American town is trying to get population and modern
ideals. And darn if a lot of ’em don’t put it across! Somebody starts
panning a rube crossroads, telling how he was there in 1900 and it
consisted of one muddy street, count ’em, one, and nine hundred human
clams. Well, you go back there in 1920, and you find pavements and a
swell little hotel and a first-class ladies’ ready-to-wear shop--real
perfection, in fact! You don’t want to just look at what these small
towns are, you want to look at what they’re aiming to become, and they
all got an ambition that in the long run is going to make ’em the finest
spots on earth--they all want to be just like Zenith!”
III
However intimate they might be with T. Cholmondeley Frink as a neighbor,
as a borrower of lawn-mowers and monkey-wrenches, they knew that he was
also a Famous Poet and a distinguished advertising-agent; that behind
his easiness were sultry literary mysteries which they could not
penetrate. But to-night, in the gin-evolved confidence, he admitted them
to the arcanum:
“I’ve got a literary problem that’s worrying me to death. I’m doing a
series of ads for the Zeeco Car and I want to make each of ’em a real
little gem--reg’lar stylistic stuff. I’m all for this theory that
perfection is the stunt, or nothing at all, and these are as tough
things as I ever tackled. You might think it’d be harder to do my
poems--all these Heart Topics: home and fireside and happiness--but
they’re cinches. You can’t go wrong on ’em; you know what sentiments any
decent go-ahead fellow must have if he plays the game, and you stick
right to ’em. But the poetry of industrialism, now there’s a literary
line where you got to open up new territory. Do you know the fellow
who’s really _the_ American genius? The fellow who you don’t know his
name and I don’t either, but his work ought to be preserved so’s future
generations can judge our American thought and originality to-day? Why,
the fellow that writes the Prince Albert Tobacco ads! Just listen to
this:
It’s P.A. that jams such joy in jimmy pipes. Say--bet you’ve often
bent-an-ear to that spill-of-speech about hopping from five to
f-i-f-t-y p-e-r by “stepping on her a bit!” Guess that’s going
some, all right--BUT--just among ourselves, you better start a
rapidwhiz system to keep tabs as to how fast you’ll buzz from low
smoke spirits to _tip-top-high_--once you line up behind a jimmy
pipe that’s all aglow with that peach-of-a-pal, Prince Albert.
Prince Albert is john-on-the-job--always joy’usly more-_ish_ in
flavor; always delightfully cool and fragrant! For a fact, you
never hooked such double-decked, copper-riveted, two-fisted smoke
enjoyment!
Go to a pipe--speed-o-quick like you light on a good thing!
Why--packed with Prince Albert you can play a joy’us jimmy straight
across the boards! _And you know what that means!_”
“Now that,” caroled the motor agent, Eddie Swanson, “that’s what I call
he-literature! That Prince Albert fellow--though, gosh, there can’t be
just one fellow that writes ’em; must be a big board of classy
ink-slingers in conference, but anyway: now, him, he doesn’t write for
long-haired pikers, he writes for Regular Guys, he writes for _me_, and
I tip my benny to him! The only thing is: I wonder if it sells the
goods? Course, like all these poets, this Prince Albert fellow lets his
idea run away with him. It makes elegant reading, but it don’t say
nothing. I’d never go out and buy Prince Albert Tobacco after reading
it, because it doesn’t tell me anything about the stuff. It’s just a
bunch of fluff.”
Frink faced him: “Oh, you’re crazy! Have I got to sell you the idea of
Style? Anyway, that’s the kind of stuff I’d like to do for the Zeeco.
But I simply can’t. So I decided to stick to the straight poetic, and I
took a shot at a highbrow ad for the Zeeco. How do you like this:
The long white trail is calling--calling--and it’s over the hills
and far away for every man or woman that has red blood in his veins
and on his lips the ancient song of the buccaneers. It’s away with
dull drudging, and a fig for care. Speed--glorious Speed--it’s more
than just a moment’s exhilaration--it’s Life for you and me! This
great new truth the makers of the Zeeco Car have considered as much
as price and style. It’s fleet as the antelope, smooth as the glide
of a swallow, yet powerful as the charge of a bull-elephant. Class
breathes in every line. Listen, brother! You’ll never know what the
high art of hiking is till you TRY LIFE’S ZIPPINGEST ZEST--THE
ZEECO!”
“Yes,” Frink mused, “that’s got an elegant color to it, if I do say so,
but it ain’t got the originality of ‘spill-of-speech!’”
The whole company sighed with sympathy and admiration.