第 二 章 · Chapter II

I

Relieved of Babbitt’s bumbling and the soft grunts with which his wife

expressed the sympathy she was too experienced to feel and much too

experienced not to show, their bedroom settled instantly into

impersonality.

It gave on the sleeping-porch. It served both of them as dressing-room,

and on the coldest nights Babbitt luxuriously gave up the duty of being

manly and retreated to the bed inside, to curl his toes in the warmth

and laugh at the January gale.

The room displayed a modest and pleasant color-scheme, after one of the

best standard designs of the decorator who “did the interiors” for most

of the speculative-builders’ houses in Zenith. The walls were gray, the

woodwork white, the rug a serene blue; and very much like mahogany was

the furniture--the bureau with its great clear mirror, Mrs. Babbitt’s

dressing-table with toilet-articles of almost solid silver, the plain

twin beds, between them a small table holding a standard electric

bedside lamp, a glass for water, and a standard bedside book with

colored illustrations--what particular book it was cannot be

ascertained, since no one had ever opened it. The mattresses were firm

but not hard, triumphant modern mattresses which had cost a great deal

of money; the hot-water radiator was of exactly the proper scientific

surface for the cubic contents of the room. The windows were large and

easily opened, with the best catches and cords, and Holland

roller-shades guaranteed not to crack. It was a masterpiece among

bedrooms, right out of Cheerful Modern Houses for Medium Incomes. Only

it had nothing to do with the Babbitts, nor with any one else. If

people had ever lived and loved here, read thrillers at midnight and

lain in beautiful indolence on a Sunday morning, there were no signs of

it. It had the air of being a very good room in a very good hotel. One

expected the chambermaid to come in and make it ready for people who

would stay but one night, go without looking back, and never think of it

again.

Every second house in Floral Heights had a bedroom precisely like this.

The Babbitts’ house was five years old. It was all as competent and

glossy as this bedroom. It had the best of taste, the best of

inexpensive rugs, a simple and laudable architecture, and the latest

conveniences. Throughout, electricity took the place of candles and

slatternly hearth-fires. Along the bedroom baseboard were three plugs

for electric lamps, concealed by little brass doors. In the halls were

plugs for the vacuum cleaner, and in the living-room plugs for the piano

lamp, for the electric fan. The trim dining-room (with its admirable oak

buffet, its leaded-glass cupboard, its creamy plaster walls, its modest

scene of a salmon expiring upon a pile of oysters) had plugs which

supplied the electric percolator and the electric toaster.

In fact there was but one thing wrong with the Babbitt house: It was not

a home.

II

Often of a morning Babbitt came bouncing and jesting in to breakfast.

But things were mysteriously awry to-day. As he pontifically tread the

upper hall he looked into Verona’s bedroom and protested, “What’s the

use of giving the family a high-class house when they don’t appreciate

it and tend to business and get down to brass tacks?”

He marched upon them: Verona, a dumpy brown-haired girl of twenty-two,

just out of Bryn Mawr, given to solicitudes about duty and sex and God

and the unconquerable bagginess of the gray sports-suit she was now

wearing. Ted--Theodore Roosevelt Babbitt--a decorative boy of seventeen.

Tinka--Katherine--still a baby at ten, with radiant red hair and a thin

skin which hinted of too much candy and too many ice cream sodas.

Babbitt did not show his vague irritation as he tramped in. He really

disliked being a family tyrant, and his nagging was as meaningless as it

was frequent. He shouted at Tinka, “Well, kittiedoolie!” It was the only

pet name in his vocabulary, except the “dear” and “hon.” with which he

recognized his wife, and he flung it at Tinka every morning.

He gulped a cup of coffee in the hope of pacifying his stomach and his

soul. His stomach ceased to feel as though it did not belong to him, but

Verona began to be conscientious and annoying, and abruptly there

returned to Babbitt the doubts regarding life and families and business

which had clawed at him when his dream-life and the slim fairy girl had

fled.

Verona had for six months been filing-clerk at the Gruensberg Leather

Company offices, with a prospect of becoming secretary to Mr. Gruensberg

and thus, as Babbitt defined it, “getting some good out of your

expensive college education till you’re ready to marry and settle down.”

But now said Verona: “Father! I was talking to a classmate of mine

that’s working for the Associated Charities--oh, Dad, there’s the

sweetest little babies that come to the milk-station there!--and I feel

as though I ought to be doing something worth while like that.”

“What do you mean ‘worth while’? If you get to be Gruensberg’s

secretary--and maybe you would, if you kept up your shorthand and didn’t

go sneaking off to concerts and talk-fests every evening--I guess you’ll

find thirty-five or forty bones a week worth while!”

“I know, but--oh, I want to--contribute-- I wish I were working in a

settlement-house. I wonder if I could get one of the department-stores

to let me put in a welfare-department with a nice rest-room and chintzes

and wicker chairs and so on and so forth. Or I could--”

“Now you look here! The first thing you got to understand is that all

this uplift and flipflop and settlement-work and recreation is nothing

in God’s world but the entering wedge for socialism. The sooner a man

learns he isn’t going to be coddled, and he needn’t expect a lot of free

grub and, uh, all these free classes and flipflop and doodads for his

kids unless he earns ’em, why, the sooner he’ll get on the job and

produce--produce--produce! That’s what the country needs, and not all

this fancy stuff that just enfeebles the will-power of the working man

and gives his kids a lot of notions above their class. And you--if you’d

tend to business instead of fooling and fussing-- All the time! When I

was a young man I made up my mind what I wanted to do, and stuck to it

through thick and thin, and that’s why I’m where I am to-day, and-- Myra!

What do you let the girl chop the toast up into these dinky little

chunks for? Can’t get your fist onto ’em. Half cold, anyway!”

Ted Babbitt, junior in the great East Side High School, had been making

hiccup-like sounds of interruption. He blurted now, “Say, Rone, you

going to--”

Verona whirled. “Ted! Will you kindly not interrupt us when we’re

talking about serious matters!”

“Aw punk,” said Ted judicially. “Ever since somebody slipped up and let

you out of college, Ammonia, you been pulling these nut conversations

about what-nots and so-on-and-so-forths. Are you going to-- I want to use

the car to-night.”

Babbitt snorted, “Oh, you do! May want it myself!” Verona protested,

“Oh, you do, Mr. Smarty! I’m going to take it myself!” Tinka wailed,

“Oh, papa, you said maybe you’d drive us down to Rosedale!” and Mrs.

Babbitt, “Careful, Tinka, your sleeve is in the butter.” They glared,

and Verona hurled, “Ted, you’re a perfect pig about the car!”

“Course you’re not! Not a-tall!” Ted could be maddeningly bland. “You

just want to grab it off, right after dinner, and leave it in front of

some skirt’s house all evening while you sit and gas about lite’ature

and the highbrows you’re going to marry--if they only propose!”

“Well, Dad oughtn’t to _ever_ let you have it! You and those beastly

Jones boys drive like maniacs. The idea of your taking the turn on

Chautauqua Place at forty miles an hour!”

“Aw, where do you get that stuff! You’re so darn scared of the car that

you drive up-hill with the emergency brake on!”

“I do not! And you-- Always talking about how much you know about motors,

and Eunice Littlefield told me you said the battery fed the generator!”

“You--why, my good woman, you don’t know a generator from a

differential.” Not unreasonably was Ted lofty with her. He was a natural

mechanic, a maker and tinkerer of machines; he lisped in blueprints for

the blueprints came.

“That’ll do now!” Babbitt flung in mechanically, as he lighted the

gloriously satisfying first cigar of the day and tasted the exhilarating

drug of the _Advocate-Times_ headlines.

Ted negotiated: “Gee, honest, Rone, I don’t want to take the old boat,

but I promised couple o’ girls in my class I’d drive ’em down to the

rehearsal of the school chorus, and, gee, I don’t want to, but a

gentleman’s got to keep his social engagements.”

“Well, upon my word! You and your social engagements! In high school!”

“Oh, ain’t we select since we went to that hen college! Let me tell you

there isn’t a private school in the state that’s got as swell a bunch as

we got in Gamma Digamma this year. There’s two fellows that their dads

are millionaires. Say, gee, I ought to have a car of my own, like lots

of the fellows.”

Babbitt almost rose. “A car of your own! Don’t you want a yacht, and a

house and lot? That pretty nearly takes the cake! A boy that can’t pass

his Latin examinations, like any other boy ought to, and he expects me

to give him a motor-car, and I suppose a chauffeur, and an aeroplane

maybe, as a reward for the hard work he puts in going to the movies with

Eunice Littlefield! Well, when you see me giving you--”

Somewhat later, after diplomacies, Ted persuaded Verona to admit that

she was merely going to the Armory, that evening, to see the dog and cat

show. She was then, Ted planned, to park the car in front of the

candy-store across from the Armory and he would pick it up. There were

masterly arrangements regarding leaving the key, and having the gasoline

tank filled; and passionately, devotees of the Great God Motor, they

hymned the patch on the spare inner-tube, and the lost jack-handle.

Their truce dissolving, Ted observed that her friends were “a scream of

a bunch--stuck-up gabby four-flushers.” His friends, she indicated, were

“disgusting imitation sports, and horrid little shrieking ignorant

girls.” Further: “It’s disgusting of you to smoke cigarettes, and so on

and so forth, and those clothes you’ve got on this morning, they’re too

utterly ridiculous--honestly, simply disgusting.”

Ted balanced over to the low beveled mirror in the buffet, regarded his

charms, and smirked. His suit, the latest thing in Old Eli Togs, was

skin-tight, with skimpy trousers to the tops of his glaring tan boots, a

chorus-man waistline, pattern of an agitated check, and across the back

a belt which belted nothing. His scarf was an enormous black silk wad.

His flaxen hair was ice-smooth, pasted back without parting. When he

went to school he would add a cap with a long vizor like a shovel-blade.

Proudest of all was his waistcoat, saved for, begged for, plotted for; a

real Fancy Vest of fawn with polka dots of a decayed red, the points

astoundingly long. On the lower edge of it he wore a high-school

button, a class button, and a fraternity pin.

And none of it mattered. He was supple and swift and flushed; his eyes

(which he believed to be cynical) were candidly eager. But he was not

over-gentle. He waved his hand at poor dumpy Verona and drawled: “Yes, I

guess we’re pretty ridiculous and disgusticulus, and I rather guess our

new necktie is some smear!”

Babbitt barked: “It is! And while you’re admiring yourself, let me tell

you it might add to your manly beauty if you wiped some of that egg off

your mouth!”

Verona giggled, momentary victor in the greatest of Great Wars, which is

the family war. Ted looked at her hopelessly, then shrieked at Tinka:

“For the love o’ Pete, quit pouring the whole sugar bowl on your corn

flakes!”

When Verona and Ted were gone and Tinka upstairs, Babbitt groaned to his

wife: “Nice family, I must say! I don’t pretend to be any baa-lamb, and

maybe I’m a little cross-grained at breakfast sometimes, but the way

they go on jab-jab-jabbering, I simply can’t stand it. I swear, I feel

like going off some place where I can get a little peace. I do think

after a man’s spent his lifetime trying to give his kids a chance and a

decent education, it’s pretty discouraging to hear them all the time

scrapping like a bunch of hyenas and never--and never-- Curious; here in

the paper it says-- Never silent for one mom-- Seen the morning paper

yet?”

“No, dear.” In twenty-three years of married life, Mrs. Babbitt had seen

the paper before her husband just sixty-seven times.

“Lots of news. Terrible big tornado in the South. Hard luck, all right.

But this, say, this is corking! Beginning of the end for those fellows!

New York Assembly has passed some bills that ought to completely outlaw

the socialists! And there’s an elevator-runners’ strike in New York and

a lot of college boys are taking their places. That’s the stuff! And a

mass-meeting in Birmingham’s demanded that this Mick agitator, this

fellow De Valera, be deported. Dead right, by golly! All these agitators

paid with German gold anyway. And we got no business interfering with

the Irish or any other foreign government. Keep our hands strictly off.

And there’s another well-authenticated rumor from Russia that Lenin is

dead. That’s fine. It’s beyond me why we don’t just step in there and

kick those Bolshevik cusses out.”

“That’s so,” said Mrs. Babbitt.

“And it says here a fellow was inaugurated mayor in overalls--a

preacher, too! What do you think of that!”

“Humph! Well!”

He searched for an attitude, but neither as a Republican, a

Presbyterian, an Elk, nor a real-estate broker did he have any doctrine

about preacher-mayors laid down for him, so he grunted and went on. She

looked sympathetic and did not hear a word. Later she would read the

headlines, the society columns, and the department-store advertisements.

“What do you know about this! Charley McKelvey still doing the sassiety

stunt as heavy as ever. Here’s what that gushy woman reporter says about

last night:”

Never is Society with the big, big S more flattered than when they

are bidden to partake of good cheer at the distinguished and

hospitable residence of Mr. and Mrs. Charles L. McKelvey as they

were last night. Set in its spacious lawns and landscaping, one of

the notable sights crowning Royal Ridge, but merry and homelike

despite its mighty stone walls and its vast rooms famed for their

decoration, their home was thrown open last night for a dance in

honor of Mrs. McKelvey’s notable guest, Miss J. Sneeth of

Washington. The wide hall is so generous in its proportions that it

made a perfect ballroom, its hardwood floor reflecting the charming

pageant above its polished surface. Even the delights of dancing

paled before the alluring opportunities for tête-à-têtes that

invited the soul to loaf in the long library before the baronial

fireplace, or in the drawing-room with its deep comfy armchairs,

its shaded lamps just made for a sly whisper of pretty nothings all

a deux; or even in the billiard room where one could take a cue

and show a prowess at still another game than that sponsored by

Cupid and Terpsichore.

There was more, a great deal more, in the best urban journalistic style

of Miss Elnora Pearl Bates, the popular society editor of the

_Advocate-Times_. But Babbitt could not abide it. He grunted. He

wrinkled the newspaper. He protested: “Can you beat it! I’m willing to

hand a lot of credit to Charley McKelvey. When we were in college

together, he was just as hard up as any of us, and he’s made a million

good bucks out of contracting and hasn’t been any dishonester or bought

any more city councils than was necessary. And that’s a good house of

his--though it ain’t any ‘mighty stone walls’ and it ain’t worth the

ninety thousand it cost him. But when it comes to talking as though

Charley McKelvey and all that booze-hoisting set of his are any blooming

bunch of of, of Vanderbilts, why, it makes me tired!”

Timidly from Mrs. Babbitt: “I would like to see the inside of their

house though. It must be lovely. I’ve never been inside.”

“Well, I have! Lots of--couple of times. To see Chaz about business

deals, in the evening. It’s not so much. I wouldn’t _want_ to go there

to dinner with that gang of, of high-binders. And I’ll bet I make a

whole lot more money than some of those tin-horns that spend all they

got on dress-suits and haven’t got a decent suit of underwear to their

name! Hey! What do you think of this!”

Mrs. Babbitt was strangely unmoved by the tidings from the Real Estate

and Building column of the _Advocate-Times_:

Ashtabula Street, 496--J. K. Dawson to

Thomas Mullally, April 17, 15.7 × 112.2,

mtg. $4000................ Nom.

And this morning Babbitt was too disquieted to entertain her with items

from Mechanics’ Liens, Mortgages Recorded, and Contracts Awarded. He

rose. As he looked at her his eyebrows seemed shaggier than usual.

Suddenly:

“Yes, maybe-- Kind of shame to not keep in touch with folks like the

McKelveys. We might try inviting them to dinner, some evening. Oh,

thunder, let’s not waste our good time thinking about ’em! Our little

bunch has a lot liver times than all those plutes. Just compare a real

human like you with these neurotic birds like Lucile McKelvey--all

highbrow talk and dressed up like a plush horse! You’re a great old

girl, hon.!”

He covered his betrayal of softness with a complaining: “Say, don’t let

Tinka go and eat any more of that poison nut-fudge. For Heaven’s sake,

try to keep her from ruining her digestion. I tell you, most folks don’t

appreciate how important it is to have a good digestion and regular

habits. Be back ’bout usual time, I guess.”

He kissed her--he didn’t quite kiss her--he laid unmoving lips against

her unflushing cheek. He hurried out to the garage, muttering: “Lord,

what a family! And now Myra is going to get pathetic on me because we

don’t train with this millionaire outfit. Oh, Lord, sometimes I’d like

to quit the whole game. And the office worry and detail just as bad. And

I act cranky and-- I don’t mean to, but I get-- So darn tired!”