บทที่ บทที่ 18 · Chapter XVIII

I

Though he saw them twice daily, though he knew and amply discussed every

detail of their expenditures, yet for weeks together Babbitt was no more

conscious of his children than of the buttons on his coat-sleeves.

The admiration of Kenneth Escott made him aware of Verona.

She had become secretary to Mr. Gruensberg of the Gruensberg Leather

Company; she did her work with the thoroughness of a mind which reveres

details and never quite understands them; but she was one of the people

who give an agitating impression of being on the point of doing

something desperate--of leaving a job or a husband--without ever doing

it. Babbitt was so hopeful about Escott’s hesitant ardors that he became

the playful parent. When he returned from the Elks he peered coyly into

the living-room and gurgled, “Has our Kenny been here to-night?” He

never credited Verona’s protest, “Why, Ken and I are just good friends,

and we only talk about Ideas. I won’t have all this sentimental

nonsense, that would spoil everything.”

It was Ted who most worried Babbitt.

With conditions in Latin and English but with a triumphant record in

manual training, basket-ball, and the organization of dances, Ted was

struggling through his Senior year in the East Side High School. At home

he was interested only when he was asked to trace some subtle ill in the

ignition system of the car. He repeated to his tut-tutting father that

he did not wish to go to college or law-school, and Babbitt was equally

disturbed by this “shiftlessness” and by Ted’s relations with Eunice

Littlefield, next door.

Though she was the daughter of Howard Littlefield, that wrought-iron

fact-mill, that horse-faced priest of private ownership, Eunice was a

midge in the sun. She danced into the house, she flung herself into

Babbitt’s lap when he was reading, she crumpled his paper, and laughed

at him when he adequately explained that he hated a crumpled newspaper

as he hated a broken sales-contract. She was seventeen now. Her ambition

was to be a cinema actress. She did not merely attend the showing of

every “feature film;” she also read the motion-picture magazines, those

extraordinary symptoms of the Age of Pep--monthlies and weeklies

gorgeously illustrated with portraits of young women who had recently

been manicure girls, not very skilful manicure girls, and who, unless

their every grimace had been arranged by a director, could not have

acted in the Easter cantata of the Central Methodist Church; magazines

reporting, quite seriously, in “interviews” plastered with pictures of

riding-breeches and California bungalows, the views on sculpture and

international politics of blankly beautiful, suspiciously beautiful

young men; outlining the plots of films about pure prostitutes and

kind-hearted train-robbers; and giving directions for making bootblacks

into Celebrated Scenario Authors overnight.

These authorities Eunice studied. She could, she frequently did, tell

whether it was in November or December, 1905, that Mack Harker, the

renowned screen cowpuncher and badman, began his public career, as

chorus man in “Oh, You Naughty Girlie.” On the wall of her room, her

father reported, she had pinned up twenty-one photographs of actors. But

the signed portrait of the most graceful of the movie heroes she carried

in her young bosom.

Babbitt was bewildered by this worship of new gods, and he suspected

that Eunice smoked cigarettes. He smelled the cloying reek from

up-stairs, and heard her giggling with Ted. He never inquired. The

agreeable child dismayed him. Her thin and charming face was sharpened

by bobbed hair; her skirts were short, her stockings were rolled, and,

as she flew after Ted, above the caressing silk were glimpses of soft

knees which made Babbitt uneasy, and wretched that she should consider

him old. Sometimes, in the veiled life of his dreams, when the fairy

child came running to him she took on the semblance of Eunice

Littlefield.

Ted was motor-mad as Eunice was movie-mad.

A thousand sarcastic refusals did not check his teasing for a car of his

own. However lax he might be about early rising and the prosody of

Vergil, he was tireless in tinkering. With three other boys he bought a

rheumatic Ford chassis, built an amazing racer-body out of tin and pine,

went skidding round corners in the perilous craft, and sold it at a

profit. Babbitt gave him a motor-cycle, and every Saturday afternoon,

with seven sandwiches and a bottle of Coca-Cola in his pockets, and

Eunice perched eerily on the rumble seat, he went roaring off to distant

towns.

Usually Eunice and he were merely neighborhood chums, and quarreled with

a wholesome and violent lack of delicacy; but now and then, after the

color and scent of a dance, they were silent together and a little

furtive, and Babbitt was worried.

Babbitt was an average father. He was affectionate, bullying,

opinionated, ignorant, and rather wistful. Like most parents, he enjoyed

the game of waiting till the victim was clearly wrong, then virtuously

pouncing. He justified himself by croaking, “Well, Ted’s mother spoils

him. Got to be somebody who tells him what’s what, and me, I’m elected

the goat. Because I try to bring him up to be a real, decent, human

being and not one of these sapheads and lounge-lizards, of course they

all call me a grouch!”

Throughout, with the eternal human genius for arriving by the worst

possible routes at surprisingly tolerable goals, Babbitt loved his son

and warmed to his companionship and would have sacrificed everything for

him--if he could have been sure of proper credit.

II

Ted was planning a party for his set in the Senior Class.

Babbitt meant to be helpful and jolly about it. From his memory of

high-school pleasures back in Catawba he suggested the nicest games:

Going to Boston, and charades with stewpans for helmets, and word-games

in which you were an Adjective or a Quality. When he was most

enthusiastic he discovered that they weren’t paying attention; they were

only tolerating him. As for the party, it was as fixed and standardized

as a Union Club Hop. There was to be dancing in the living-room, a noble

collation in the dining-room, and in the hall two tables of bridge for

what Ted called “the poor old dumb-bells that you can’t get to dance

hardly more ’n half the time.”

Every breakfast was monopolized by conferences on the affair. No one

listened to Babbitt’s bulletins about the February weather or to his

throat-clearing comments on the headlines. He said furiously, “If I may

be _permitted_ to interrupt your engrossing private _conversation_-- Juh

hear what I _said_?”

“Oh, don’t be a spoiled baby! Ted and I have just as much right to talk

as you have!” flared Mrs. Babbitt.

On the night of the party he was permitted to look on, when he was not

helping Matilda with the Vecchia ice cream and the _petits fours_. He

was deeply disquieted. Eight years ago, when Verona had given a

high-school party, the children had been featureless babies. Now they

were men and women of the world, very supercilious men and women; the

boys condescended to Babbitt, they wore evening-clothes, and with

hauteur they accepted cigarettes from silver cases. Babbitt had heard

stories of what the Athletic Club called “goings-on” at young parties;

of girls “parking” their corsets in the dressing-room, of “cuddling” and

“petting,” and a presumable increase in what was known as Immorality.

To-night he believed the stories. These children seemed bold to him, and

cold. The girls wore misty chiffon, coral velvet, or cloth of gold, and

around their dipping bobbed hair were shining wreaths. He had it, upon

urgent and secret inquiry, that no corsets were known to be parked

upstairs; but certainly these eager bodies were not stiff with steel.

Their stockings were of lustrous silk, their slippers costly and

unnatural, their lips carmined and their eyebrows penciled. They danced

cheek to cheek with the boys, and Babbitt sickened with apprehension and

unconscious envy.

Worst of them all was Eunice Littlefield, and maddest of all the boys

was Ted. Eunice was a flying demon. She slid the length of the room; her

tender shoulders swayed; her feet were deft as a weaver’s shuttle; she

laughed, and enticed Babbitt to dance with her.

Then he discovered the annex to the party.

The boys and girls disappeared occasionally, and he remembered rumors of

their drinking together from hip-pocket flasks. He tiptoed round the

house, and in each of the dozen cars waiting in the street he saw the

points of light from cigarettes, from each of them heard high giggles.

He wanted to denounce them but (standing in the snow, peering round the

dark corner) he did not dare. He tried to be tactful. When he had

returned to the front hall he coaxed the boys, “Say, if any of you

fellows are thirsty, there’s some dandy ginger ale.”

“Oh! Thanks!” they condescended.

He sought his wife, in the pantry, and exploded, “I’d like to go in

there and throw some of those young pups out of the house! They talk

down to me like I was the butler! I’d like to--”

“I know,” she sighed; “only everybody says, all the mothers tell me,

unless you stand for them, if you get angry because they go out to their

cars to have a drink, they won’t come to your house any more, and we

wouldn’t want Ted left out of things, would we?”

He announced that he would be enchanted to have Ted left out of things,

and hurried in to be polite, lest Ted be left out of things.

But, he resolved, if he found that the boys were drinking, he

would--well, he’d “hand ’em something that would surprise ’em.” While he

was trying to be agreeable to large-shouldered young bullies he was

earnestly sniffing at them. Twice he caught the reek of prohibition-time

whisky, but then, it was only twice--

Dr. Howard Littlefield lumbered in.

He had come, in a mood of solemn parental patronage, to look on. Ted and

Eunice were dancing, moving together like one body. Littlefield gasped.

He called Eunice. There was a whispered duologue, and Littlefield

explained to Babbitt that Eunice’s mother had a headache and needed her.

She went off in tears. Babbitt looked after them furiously. “That little

devil! Getting Ted into trouble! And Littlefield, the conceited old

gas-bag, acting like it was Ted that was the bad influence!”

Later he smelled whisky on Ted’s breath.

After the civil farewell to the guests, the row was terrific, a thorough

Family Scene, like an avalanche, devastating and without reticences.

Babbitt thundered, Mrs. Babbitt wept, Ted was unconvincingly defiant,

and Verona in confusion as to whose side she was taking.

For several months there was coolness between the Babbitts and the

Littlefields, each family sheltering their lamb from the wolf-cub next

door. Babbitt and Littlefield still spoke in pontifical periods about

motors and the senate, but they kept bleakly away from mention of their

families. Whenever Eunice came to the house she discussed with pleasant

intimacy the fact that she had been forbidden to come to the house; and

Babbitt tried, with no success whatever, to be fatherly and advisory

with her.

III

“Gosh all fishhooks!” Ted wailed to Eunice, as they wolfed hot

chocolate, lumps of nougat, and an assortment of glacé nuts, in the

mosaic splendor of the Royal Drug Store, “it gets me why Dad doesn’t

just pass out from being so poky. Every evening he sits there, about

half-asleep, and if Rone or I say, ‘Oh, come on, let’s do something,’ he

doesn’t even take the trouble to think about it. He just yawns and says,

‘Naw, this suits me right here.’ He doesn’t know there’s any fun going

on anywhere. I suppose he must do some thinking, same as you and I do,

but gosh, there’s no way of telling it. I don’t believe that outside of

the office and playing a little bum golf on Saturday he knows there’s

anything in the world to do except just keep sitting there--sitting

there every night--not wanting to go anywhere--not wanting to do

anything--thinking us kids are crazy--sitting there--Lord!”

IV

If he was frightened by Ted’s slackness, Babbitt was not sufficiently

frightened by Verona. She was too safe. She lived too much in the neat

little airless room of her mind. Kenneth Escott and she were always

under foot. When they were not at home, conducting their cautiously

radical courtship over sheets of statistics, they were trudging off to

lectures by authors and Hindu philosophers and Swedish lieutenants.

“Gosh,” Babbitt wailed to his wife, as they walked home from the

Fogartys’ bridge-party, “it gets me how Rone and that fellow can be so

poky. They sit there night after night, whenever he isn’t working, and

they don’t know there’s any fun in the world. All talk and

discussion--Lord! Sitting there--sitting there--night after night--not

wanting to do anything--thinking I’m crazy because I like to go out and

play a fist of cards--sitting there--gosh!”

Then round the swimmer, bored by struggling through the perpetual surf

of family life, new combers swelled.

V

Babbitt’s father-and mother-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Henry T. Thompson,

rented their old house in the Bellevue district and moved to the Hotel

Hatton, that glorified boarding-house filled with widows, red-plush

furniture, and the sound of ice-water pitchers. They were lonely there,

and every other Sunday evening the Babbitts had to dine with them, on

fricasseed chicken, discouraged celery, and cornstarch ice cream, and

afterward sit, polite and restrained, in the hotel lounge, while a young

woman violinist played songs from the German via Broadway.

Then Babbitt’s own mother came down from Catawba to spend three weeks.

She was a kind woman and magnificently uncomprehending. She

congratulated the convention-defying Verona on being a “nice, loyal

home-body without all these Ideas that so many girls seem to have

nowadays;” and when Ted filled the differential with grease, out of pure

love of mechanics and filthiness, she rejoiced that he was “so handy

around the house and helping his father and all, and not going out with

the girls all the time and trying to pretend he was a society fellow.”

Babbitt loved his mother, and sometimes he rather liked her, but he was

annoyed by her Christian Patience, and he was reduced to pulpiness when

she discoursed about a quite mythical hero called “Your Father”:

“You won’t remember it, Georgie, you were such a little fellow at the

time--my, I remember just how you looked that day, with your goldy

brown curls and your lace collar, you always were such a dainty child,

and kind of puny and sickly, and you loved pretty things so much and the

red tassels on your little bootees and all--and Your Father was taking

us to church and a man stopped us and said ‘Major’--so many of the

neighbors used to call Your Father ‘Major;’ of course he was only a

private in The War but everybody knew that was because of the jealousy

of his captain and he ought to have been a high-ranking officer, he had

that natural ability to command that so very, very few men have--and

this man came out into the road and held up his hand and stopped the

buggy and said, ‘Major,’ he said, ‘there’s a lot of the folks around

here that have decided to support Colonel Scanell for congress, and we

want you to join us. Meeting people the way you do in the store, you

could help us a lot.’

“Well, Your Father just looked at him and said, ‘I certainly shall do

nothing of the sort. I don’t like his politics,’ he said. Well, the

man--Captain Smith they used to call him, and heaven only knows why,

because he hadn’t the shadow or vestige of a right to be called

‘Captain’ or any other title--this Captain Smith said, ‘We’ll make it

hot for you if you don’t stick by your friends, Major.’ Well, you know

how Your Father was, and this Smith knew it too; he knew what a Real Man

he was, and he knew Your Father knew the political situation from A to

Z, and he ought to have seen that here was one man he couldn’t impose

on, but he went on trying to and hinting and trying till Your Father

spoke up and said to him, ‘Captain Smith,’ he said, ‘I have a reputation

around these parts for being one who is amply qualified to mind his own

business and let other folks mind theirs!’ and with that he drove on and

left the fellow standing there in the road like a bump on a log!”

Babbitt was most exasperated when she revealed his boyhood to the

children. He had, it seemed, been fond of barley-sugar; had worn the

“loveliest little pink bow in his curls” and corrupted his own name to

“Goo-goo.” He heard (though he did not officially hear) Ted admonishing

Tinka, “Come on now, kid; stick the lovely pink bow in your curls and

beat it down to breakfast, or Goo-goo will jaw your head off.”

Babbitt’s half-brother, Martin, with his wife and youngest baby, came

down from Catawba for two days. Martin bred cattle and ran the dusty

general-store. He was proud of being a freeborn independent American of

the good old Yankee stock; he was proud of being honest, blunt, ugly,

and disagreeable. His favorite remark was “How much did you pay for

that?” He regarded Verona’s books, Babbitt’s silver pencil, and flowers

on the table as citified extravagances, and said so. Babbitt would have

quarreled with him but for his gawky wife and the baby, whom Babbitt

teased and poked fingers at and addressed:

“I think this baby’s a bum, yes, sir, I think this little baby’s a bum,

he’s a bum, yes, sir, he’s a bum, that’s what he is, he’s a bum, this

baby’s a bum, he’s nothing but an old bum, that’s what he is--a bum!”

All the while Verona and Kenneth Escott held long inquiries into

epistemology; Ted was a disgraced rebel; and Tinka, aged eleven, was

demanding that she be allowed to go to the movies thrice a week, “like

all the girls.”

Babbitt raged, “I’m sick of it! Having to carry three generations. Whole

damn bunch lean on me. Pay half of mother’s income, listen to Henry T.,

listen to Myra’s worrying, be polite to Mart, and get called an old

grouch for trying to help the children. All of ’em depending on me and

picking on me and not a damn one of ’em grateful! No relief, and no

credit, and no help from anybody. And to keep it up for--good Lord, how

long?”

He enjoyed being sick in February; he was delighted by their

consternation that he, the rock, should give way.

He had eaten a questionable clam. For two days he was languorous and

petted and esteemed. He was allowed to snarl “Oh, let me alone!”

without reprisals. He lay on the sleeping-porch and watched the winter

sun slide along the taut curtains, turning their ruddy khaki to pale

blood red. The shadow of the draw-rope was dense black, in an enticing

ripple on the canvas. He found pleasure in the curve of it, sighed as

the fading light blurred it. He was conscious of life, and a little sad.

With no Vergil Gunches before whom to set his face in resolute optimism,

he beheld, and half admitted that he beheld, his way of life as

incredibly mechanical. Mechanical business--a brisk selling of badly

built houses. Mechanical religion--a dry, hard church, shut off from the

real life of the streets, inhumanly respectable as a top-hat. Mechanical

golf and dinner-parties and bridge and conversation. Save with Paul

Riesling, mechanical friendships--back-slapping and jocular, never

daring to essay the test of quietness.

He turned uneasily in bed.

He saw the years, the brilliant winter days and all the long sweet

afternoons which were meant for summery meadows, lost in such brittle

pretentiousness. He thought of telephoning about leases, of cajoling men

he hated, of making business calls and waiting in dirty anterooms--hat

on knee, yawning at fly-specked calendars, being polite to office-boys.

“I don’t hardly want to go back to work,” he prayed. “I’d like to-- I

don’t know.”

But he was back next day, busy and of doubtful temper.