Babbit (11 page)

  "Oh - well - gee - of course - " sighed Graff, as he
went out, crabwise.

  Babbitt did not often squabble with his employees.
He liked to like the people about him; he was dismayed when they
did not like him. It was only when they attacked the sacred purse
that he was frightened into fury, but then, being a man given to
oratory and high principles, he enjoyed the sound of his own
vocabulary and the warmth of his own virtue. Today he had so
passionately indulged in self-approval that he wondered whether he
had been entirely just:

  "After all, Stan isn't a boy any more. Oughtn't to
call him so hard. But rats, got to haul folks over the coals now
and then for their own good. Unpleasant duty, but - I wonder if
Stan is sore? What's he saying to McGoun out there?"

  So chill a wind of hatred blew from the outer office
that the normal comfort of his evening home-going was ruined. He
was distressed by losing that approval of his employees to which an
executive is always slave. Ordinarily he left the office with a
thousand enjoyable fussy directions to the effect that there would
undoubtedly be important tasks to-morrow, and Miss McGoun and Miss
Bannigan would do well to be there early, and for heaven's sake
remind him to call up Conrad Lyte soon 's he came in. To-night he
departed with feigned and apologetic liveliness. He was as afraid
of his still-faced clerks - of the eyes focused on him, Miss McGoun
staring with head lifted from her typing, Miss Bannigan looking
over her ledger, Mat Penniman craning around at his desk in the
dark alcove, Stanley Graff sullenly expressionless - as a parvenu
before the bleak propriety of his butler. He hated to expose his
back to their laughter, and in his effort to be casually merry he
stammered and was raucously friendly and oozed wretchedly out of
the door.

  But he forgot his misery when he saw from Smith
Street the charms of Floral Heights; the roofs of red tile and
green slate, the shining new sun-parlors, and the stainless
walls.

  III

  He stopped to inform Howard Littlefield, his
scholarly neighbor, that though the day had been springlike the
evening might be cold. He went in to shout "Where are you?" at his
wife, with no very definite desire to know where she was. He
examined the lawn to see whether the furnace-man had raked it
properly. With some satisfaction and a good deal of discussion of
the matter with Mrs. Babbitt, Ted, and Howard Littlefield, he
concluded that the furnace-man had not raked it properly. He cut
two tufts of wild grass with his wife's largest
dressmaking-scissors; he informed Ted that it was all nonsense
having a furnace-man - "big husky fellow like you ought to do all
the work around the house;" and privately he meditated that it was
agreeable to have it known throughout the neighborhood that he was
so prosperous that his son never worked around the house.

  He stood on the sleeping-porch and did his day's
exercises: arms out sidewise for two minutes, up for two minutes,
while he muttered, "Ought take more exercise; keep in shape;" then
went in to see whether his collar needed changing before dinner. As
usual it apparently did not.

  The Lettish-Croat maid, a powerful woman, beat the
dinner-gong.

  The roast of beef, roasted potatoes, and string
beans were excellent this evening and, after an adequate sketch of
the day's progressive weather-states, his
four-hundred-and-fifty-dollar fee, his lunch with Paul Riesling,
and the proven merits of the new cigar-lighter, he was moved to a
benign, "Sort o' thinking about buyin, a new car. Don't believe
we'll get one till next year, but still we might."

  Verona, the older daughter, cried, "Oh, Dad, if you
do, why don't you get a sedan? That would be perfectly slick! A
closed car is so much more comfy than an open one."

  "Well now, I don't know about that. I kind of like
an open car. You get more fresh air that way."

  "Oh, shoot, that's just because you never tried a
sedan. Let's get one. It's got a lot more class," said Ted.

  "A closed car does keep the clothes nicer," from
Mrs. Babbitt; "You don't get your hair blown all to pieces," from
Verona; "It's a lot sportier," from Ted; and from Tinka, the
youngest, "Oh, let's have a sedan! Mary Ellen's father has got
one." Ted wound up, "Oh, everybody's got a closed car now, except
us!"

  Babbitt faced them: "I guess you got nothing very
terrible to complain about! Anyway, I don't keep a car just to
enable you children to look like millionaires! And I like an open
car, so you can put the top down on summer evenings and go out for
a drive and get some good fresh air. Besides - A closed car costs
more money."

  "Aw, gee whiz, if the Doppelbraus can afford a
closed car, I guess we can!" prodded Ted.

  "Humph! I make eight thousand a year to his seven!
But I don't blow it all in and waste it and throw it around, the
way he does! Don't believe in this business of going and spending a
whole lot of money to show off and - "

  They went, with ardor and some thoroughness, into
the matters of streamline bodies, hill-climbing power, wire wheels,
chrome steel, ignition systems, and body colors. It was much more
than a study of transportation. It was an aspiration for knightly
rank. In the city of Zenith, in the barbarous twentieth century, a
family's motor indicated its social rank as precisely as the grades
of the peerage determined the rank of an English family - indeed,
more precisely, considering the opinion of old county families upon
newly created brewery barons and woolen-mill viscounts. The details
of precedence were never officially determined. There was no court
to decide whether the second son of a Pierce Arrow limousine should
go in to dinner before the first son of a Buick roadster, but of
their respective social importance there was no doubt; and where
Babbitt as a boy had aspired to the presidency, his son Ted aspired
to a Packard twin-six and an established position in the motored
gentry.

  The favor which Babbitt had won from his family by
speaking of a new car evaporated as they realized that he didn't
intend to buy one this year. Ted lamented, "Oh, punk! The old boat
looks as if it'd had fleas and been scratching its varnish off."
Mrs. Babbitt said abstractedly, "Snoway talkcher father." Babbitt
raged, "If you're too much of a high-class gentleman, and you
belong to the bon ton and so on, why, you needn't take the car out
this evening." Ted explained, "I didn't mean - " and dinner dragged
on with normal domestic delight to the inevitable point at which
Babbitt protested, "Come, come now, we can't sit here all evening.
Give the girl a chance to clear away the table."

  He was fretting, "What a family! I don't know how we
all get to scrapping this way. Like to go off some place and be
able to hear myself think.... Paul ... Maine ... Wear old pants,
and loaf, and cuss." He said cautiously to his wife, "I've been in
correspondence with a man in New York - wants me to see him about a
real-estate trade - may not come off till summer. Hope it doesn't
break just when we and the Rieslings get ready to go to Maine. Be a
shame if we couldn't make the trip there together. Well, no use
worrying now."

  Verona escaped, immediately after dinner, with no
discussion save an automatic "Why don't you ever stay home?" from
Babbitt.

  In the living-room, in a corner of the davenport,
Ted settled down to his Home Study; plain geometry, Cicero, and the
agonizing metaphors of Comus.

  "I don't see why they give us this old-fashioned
junk by Milton and Shakespeare and Wordsworth and all these
has-beens," he protested. "Oh, I guess I could stand it to see a
show by Shakespeare, if they had swell scenery and put on a lot of
dog, but to sit down in cold blood and READ 'em - These teachers -
how do they get that way?"

  Mrs. Babbitt, darning socks, speculated, "Yes, I
wonder why. Of course I don't want to fly in the face of the
professors and everybody, but I do think there's things in
Shakespeare - not that I read him much, but when I was young the
girls used to show me passages that weren't, really, they weren't
at all nice."

  Babbitt looked up irritably from the comic strips in
the Evening Advocate. They composed his favorite literature and
art, these illustrated chronicles in which Mr. Mutt hit Mr. Jeff
with a rotten egg, and Mother corrected Father's vulgarisms by
means of a rolling-pin. With the solemn face of a devotee,
breathing heavily through his open mouth, he plodded nightly
through every picture, and during the rite he detested
interruptions. Furthermore, he felt that on the subject of
Shakespeare he wasn't really an authority. Neither the
Advocate-Times, the Evening Advocate, nor the Bulletin of the
Zenith Chamber of Commerce had ever had an editorial on the matter,
and until one of them had spoken he found it hard to form an
original opinion. But even at risk of floundering in strange bogs,
he could not keep out of an open controversy.

  "I'll tell you why you have to study Shakespeare and
those. It's because they're required for college entrance, and
that's all there is to it! Personally, I don't see myself why they
stuck 'em into an up-to-date high-school system like we have in
this state. Be a good deal better if you took Business English, and
learned how to write an ad, or letters that would pull. But there
it is, and there's no tall, argument, or discussion about it!
Trouble with you, Ted, is you always want to do something
different! If you're going to law-school - and you are! - I never
had a chance to, but I'll see that you do - why, you'll want to lay
in all the English and Latin you can get."

  "Oh punk. I don't see what's the use of law-school -
or even finishing high school. I don't want to go to college
'specially. Honest, there's lot of fellows that have graduated from
colleges that don't begin to make as much money as fellows that
went to work early. Old Shimmy Peters, that teaches Latin in the
High, he's a what-is-it from Columbia and he sits up all night
reading a lot of greasy books and he's always spieling about the
'value of languages,' and the poor soak doesn't make but eighteen
hundred a year, and no traveling salesman would think of working
for that. I know what I'd like to do. I'd like to be an aviator, or
own a corking big garage, or else - a fellow was telling me about
it yesterday - I'd like to be one of these fellows that the
Standard Oil Company sends out to China, and you live in a compound
and don't have to do any work, and you get to see the world and
pagodas and the ocean and everything! And then I could take up
correspondence-courses. That's the real stuff! You don't have to
recite to some frosty-faced old dame that's trying to show off to
the principal, and you can study any subject you want to. Just
listen to these! I clipped out the ads of some swell courses."

  He snatched from the back of his geometry half a
hundred advertisements of those home-study courses which the energy
and foresight of American commerce have contributed to the science
of education. The first displayed the portrait of a young man with
a pure brow, an iron jaw, silk socks, and hair like patent leather.
Standing with one hand in his trousers-pocket and the other
extended with chiding forefinger, he was bewitching an audience of
men with gray beards, paunches, bald heads, and every other sign of
wisdom and prosperity. Above the picture was an inspiring
educational symbol - no antiquated lamp or torch or owl of Minerva,
but a row of dollar signs. The text ran:

  $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ POWER AND PROSPERITY IN PUBLIC
SPEAKING

  A Yarn Told at the Club

  Who do you think I ran into the other evening at the
De Luxe Restaurant? Why, old Freddy Durkee, that used to be a dead
or-alive shipping clerk in my old place - Mr. Mouse-Man we used to
laughingly call the dear fellow. One time he was so timid he was
plumb scared of the Super, and never got credit for the dandy work
he did. Him at the De Luxe! And if he wasn't ordering a tony feed
with all the "fixings" from celery to nuts! And instead of being
embarrassed by the waiters, like he used to be at the little dump
where we lunched in Old Lang Syne, he was bossing them around like
he was a millionaire!

  I cautiously asked him what he was doing. Freddy
laughed and said, "Say, old chum, I guess you're wondering what's
come over me. You'll be glad to know I'm now Assistant Super at the
old shop, and right on the High Road to Prosperity and Domination,
and I look forward with confidence to a twelve-cylinder car, and
the wife is making things hum in the best society and the kiddies
getting a first-class education.

   - - - - - - - WHAT WE TEACH YOU I

  How to address your lodge.

  How to give toasts.

  How to tell dialect stories.

  How to propose to a lady.

  How to entertain banquets.

  How to make convincing selling-talks.

  How to build big vocabulary.

  How to create a strong personality.

  How to become a rational, powerful and original
thinker.

  How to be a MASTER MAN! - - - PROF. W. F. PEET

  author of the Shortcut Course in Public-Speaking, is
easily the foremost figure in practical literature, psychology
& oratory. A graduate of some of our leading universities,
lecturer, extensive traveler, author of books, poetry, etc., a man
with the unique PERSONALITY OF THE MASTER MINDS, he is ready to
give YOU all the secrets of his culture and hammering Force, in a
few easy lessons that will not interfere with other occupations. -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

  "Here's how it happened. I ran across an ad of a
course that claimed to teach people how to talk easily and on their
feet, how to answer complaints, how to lay a proposition before the
Boss, how to hit a bank for a loan, how to hold a big audience
spellbound with wit, humor, anecdote, inspiration, etc. It was
compiled by the Master Orator, Prof. Waldo F. Peet. I was
skeptical, too, but I wrote (JUST ON A POSTCARD, with name and
address) to the publisher for the lessons - sent On Trial, money
back if you are not absolutely satisfied. There were eight simple
lessons in plain language anybody could understand, and I studied
them just a few hours a night, then started practising on the wife.
Soon found I could talk right up to the Super and get due credit
for all the good work I did. They began to appreciate me and
advance me fast, and say, old doggo, what do you think they're
paying me now? $6,500 per year! And say, I find I can keep a big
audience fascinated, speaking on any topic. As a friend, old boy, I
advise you to send for circular (no obligation) and valuable free
Art Picture to: -