Babbit (14 page)

  "Funny kind of a day. Makes you feel restless.

  "Wellllllllll, uh - " That sleepiest sound in the
world, the terminal yawn. Mrs. Babbitt yawned with it, and looked
grateful as he droned, "How about going to bed, eh? Don't suppose
Rone and Ted will be in till all hours. Yep, funny kind of a day;
not terribly warm but yet - Gosh, I'd like - Some day I'm going to
take a long motor trip."

  "Yes, we'd enjoy that," she yawned.

  He looked away from her as he realized that he did
not wish to have her go with him. As he locked doors and tried
windows and set the heat regulator so that the furnace-drafts would
open automatically in the morning, he sighed a little, heavy with a
lonely feeling which perplexed and frightened him. So absent-minded
was he that he could not remember which window-catches he had
inspected, and through the darkness, fumbling at unseen perilous
chairs, he crept back to try them all over again. His feet were
loud on the steps as he clumped upstairs at the end of this great
and treacherous day of veiled rebellions.

  III

  Before breakfast he always reverted to up-state
village boyhood, and shrank from the complex urban demands of
shaving, bathing, deciding whether the current shirt was clean
enough for another day. Whenever he stayed home in the evening he
went to bed early, and thriftily got ahead in those dismal duties.
It was his luxurious custom to shave while sitting snugly in a
tubful of hot water. He may be viewed to-night as a plump, smooth,
pink, baldish, podgy goodman, robbed of the importance of
spectacles, squatting in breast-high water, scraping his
lather-smeared cheeks with a safety-razor like a tiny lawn-mower,
and with melancholy dignity clawing through the water to recover a
slippery and active piece of soap.

  He was lulled to dreaming by the caressing warmth.
The light fell on the inner surface of the tub in a pattern of
delicate wrinkled lines which slipped with a green sparkle over the
curving porcelain as the clear water trembled. Babbitt lazily
watched it; noted that along the silhouette of his legs against the
radiance on the bottom of the tub, the shadows of the air-bubbles
clinging to the hairs were reproduced as strange jungle mosses. He
patted the water, and the reflected light capsized and leaped and
volleyed. He was content and childish. He played. He shaved a swath
down the calf of one plump leg.

  The drain-pipe was dripping, a dulcet and lively
song: drippety drip drip dribble, drippety drip drip drip. He was
enchanted by it. He looked at the solid tub, the beautiful nickel
taps, the tiled walls of the room, and felt virtuous in the
possession of this splendor.

  He roused himself and spoke gruffly to his
bath-things. "Come here! You've done enough fooling!" he reproved
the treacherous soap, and defied the scratchy nail-brush with "Oh,
you would, would you!" He soaped himself, and rinsed himself, and
austerely rubbed himself; he noted a hole in the Turkish towel, and
meditatively thrust a finger through it, and marched back to the
bedroom, a grave and unbending citizen.

  There was a moment of gorgeous abandon, a flash of
melodrama such as he found in traffic-driving, when he laid out a
clean collar, discovered that it was frayed in front, and tore it
up with a magnificent yeeeeeing sound.

  Most important of all was the preparation of his bed
and the sleeping-porch.

  It is not known whether he enjoyed his
sleeping-porch because of the fresh air or because it was the
standard thing to have a sleeping-porch.

  Just as he was an Elk, a Booster, and a member of
the Chamber of Commerce, just as the priests of the Presbyterian
Church determined his every religious belief and the senators who
controlled the Republican Party decided in little smoky rooms in
Washington what he should think about disarmament, tariff, and
Germany, so did the large national advertisers fix the surface of
his life, fix what he believed to be his individuality. These
standard advertised wares - toothpastes, socks, tires, cameras,
instantaneous hot-water heaters - were his symbols and proofs of
excellence; at first the signs, then the substitutes, for joy and
passion and wisdom.

  But none of these advertised tokens of financial and
social success was more significant than a sleeping-porch with a
sun-parlor below.

  The rites of preparing for bed were elaborate and
unchanging. The blankets had to be tucked in at the foot of his
cot. (Also, the reason why the maid hadn't tucked in the blankets
had to be discussed with Mrs. Babbitt.) The rag rug was adjusted so
that his bare feet would strike it when he arose in the morning.
The alarm clock was wound. The hot-water bottle was filled and
placed precisely two feet from the bottom of the cot.

  These tremendous undertakings yielded to his
determination; one by one they were announced to Mrs. Babbitt and
smashed through to accomplishment. At last his brow cleared, and in
his "Gnight!" rang virile power. But there was yet need of courage.
As he sank into sleep, just at the first exquisite relaxation, the
Doppelbrau car came home. He bounced into wakefulness, lamenting,
"Why the devil can't some people never get to bed at a reasonable
hour?" So familiar was he with the process of putting up his own
car that he awaited each step like an able executioner condemned to
his own rack.

  The car insultingly cheerful on the driveway. The
car door opened and banged shut, then the garage door slid open,
grating on the sill, and the car door again. The motor raced for
the climb up into the garage and raced once more, explosively,
before it was shut off. A final opening and slamming of the car
door. Silence then, a horrible silence filled with waiting, till
the leisurely Mr. Doppelbrau had examined the state of his tires
and had at last shut the garage door. Instantly, for Babbitt, a
blessed state of oblivion.

  IV

  At that moment In the city of Zenith, Horace Updike
was making love to Lucile McKelvey in her mauve drawing-room on
Royal Ridge, after their return from a lecture by an eminent
English novelist. Updike was Zenith's professional bachelor; a
slim-waisted man of forty-six with an effeminate voice and taste in
flowers, cretonnes, and flappers. Mrs. McKelvey was red-haired,
creamy, discontented, exquisite, rude, and honest. Updike tried his
invariable first maneuver - touching her nervous wrist.

  "Don't be an idiot!" she said.

  "Do you mind awfully?"

  "No! That's what I mind!"

  He changed to conversation. He was famous at
conversation. He spoke reasonably of psychoanalysis, Long Island
polo, and the Ming platter he had found in Vancouver. She promised
to meet him in Deauville, the coming summer, "though," she sighed,
"it's becoming too dreadfully banal; nothing but Americans and
frowsy English baronesses."

  And at that moment in Zenith, a cocaine-runner and a
prostitute were drinking cocktails in Healey Hanson's saloon on
Front Street. Since national prohibition was now in force, and
since Zenith was notoriously law-abiding, they were compelled to
keep the cocktails innocent by drinking them out of tea-cups. The
lady threw her cup at the cocaine-runner's head. He worked his
revolver out of the pocket in his sleeve, and casually murdered
her.

  At that moment in Zenith, two men sat in a
laboratory. For thirty-seven hours now they had been working on a
report of their investigations of synthetic rubber.

  At that moment in Zenith, there was a conference of
four union officials as to whether the twelve thousand coal-miners
within a hundred miles of the city should strike. Of these men one
resembled a testy and prosperous grocer, one a Yankee carpenter,
one a soda-clerk, and one a Russian Jewish actor The Russian Jew
quoted Kautsky, Gene Debs, and Abraham Lincoln.

  At that moment a G. A. R. veteran was dying. He had
come from the Civil War straight to a farm which, though it was
officially within the city-limits of Zenith, was primitive as the
backwoods. He had never ridden in a motor car, never seen a
bath-tub, never read any book save the Bible, McGuffey's readers,
and religious tracts; and he believed that the earth is flat, that
the English are the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel, and that the United
States is a democracy.

  At that moment the steel and cement town which
composed the factory of the Pullmore Tractor Company of Zenith was
running on night shift to fill an order of tractors for the Polish
army. It hummed like a million bees, glared through its wide
windows like a volcano. Along the high wire fences, searchlights
played on cinder-lined yards, switch-tracks, and armed guards on
patrol.

  At that moment Mike Monday was finishing a meeting.
Mr. Monday, the distinguished evangelist, the best-known Protestant
pontiff in America, had once been a prize-fighter. Satan had not
dealt justly with him. As a prize-fighter he gained nothing but his
crooked nose, his celebrated vocabulary, and his stage-presence.
The service of the Lord had been more profitable. He was about to
retire with a fortune. It had been well earned, for, to quote his
last report, "Rev. Mr. Monday, the Prophet with a Punch, has shown
that he is the world's greatest salesman of salvation, and that by
efficient organization the overhead of spiritual regeneration may
be kept down to an unprecedented rock-bottom basis. He has
converted over two hundred thousand lost and priceless souls at an
average cost of less than ten dollars a head."

  Of the larger cities of the land, only Zenith had
hesitated to submit its vices to Mike Monday and his expert
reclamation corps. The more enterprising organizations of the city
had voted to invite him - Mr. George F. Babbitt had once praised
him in a speech at the Boosters' Club. But there was opposition
from certain Episcopalian and Congregationalist ministers, those
renegades whom Mr. Monday so finely called "a bunch of
gospel-pushers with dish-water instead of blood, a gang of
squealers that need more dust on the knees of their pants and more
hair on their skinny old chests." This opposition had been crushed
when the secretary of the Chamber of Commerce had reported to a
committee of manufacturers that in every city where he had
appeared, Mr. Monday had turned the minds of workmen from wages and
hours to higher things, and thus averted strikes. He was
immediately invited.

  An expense fund of forty thousand dollars had been
underwritten; out on the County Fair Grounds a Mike Monday
Tabernacle had been erected, to seat fifteen thousand people. In it
the prophet was at this moment concluding his message:

  "There's a lot of smart college professors and
tea-guzzling slobs in this burg that say I'm a roughneck and a
never-wuzzer and my knowledge of history is not-yet. Oh, there's a
gang of woolly-whiskered book-lice that think they know more than
Almighty God, and prefer a lot of Hun science and smutty German
criticism to the straight and simple Word of God. Oh, there's a
swell bunch of Lizzie boys and lemon-suckers and pie-faces and
infidels and beer-bloated scribblers that love to fire off their
filthy mouths and yip that Mike Monday is vulgar and full of mush.
Those pups are saying now that I hog the gospel-show, that I'm in
it for the coin. Well, now listen, folks! I'm going to give those
birds a chance! They can stand right up here and tell me to my face
that I'm a galoot and a liar and a hick! Only if they do - if they
do! - don't faint with surprise if some of those rum-dumm liars get
one good swift poke from Mike, with all the kick of God's Flaming
Righteousness behind the wallop! Well, come on, folks! Who says it?
Who says Mike Monday is a fourflush and a yahoo? Huh? Don't I see
anybody standing up? Well, there you are! Now I guess the folks in
this man's town will quit listening to all this kyoodling from
behind the fence; I guess you'll quit listening to the guys that
pan and roast and kick and beef, and vomit out filthy atheism; and
all of you 'll come in, with every grain of pep and reverence you
got, and boost all together for Jesus Christ and his everlasting
mercy and tenderness!"

  At that moment Seneca Doane, the radical lawyer, and
Dr. Kurt Yavitch, the histologist (whose report on the destruction
of epithelial cells under radium had made the name of Zenith known
in Munich, Prague, and Rome), were talking in Doane's library.

  "Zenith's a city with gigantic power - gigantic
buildings, gigantic machines, gigantic transportation," meditated
Doane.

  "I hate your city. It has standardized all the
beauty out of life. It is one big railroad station - with all the
people taking tickets for the best cemeteries," Dr. Yavitch said
placidly.

  Doane roused. "I'm hanged if it is! You make me
sick, Kurt, with your perpetual whine about 'standardization.'
Don't you suppose any other nation is 'standardized?' Is anything
more standardized than England, with every house that can afford it
having the same muffins at the same tea-hour, and every retired
general going to exactly the same evensong at the same gray stone
church with a square tower, and every golfing prig in Harris tweeds
saying 'Right you are!' to every other prosperous ass? Yet I love
England. And for standardization - just look at the sidewalk cafes
in France and the love-making in Italy!

  "Standardization is excellent, per se. When I buy an
Ingersoll watch or a Ford, I get a better tool for less money, and
I know precisely what I'm getting, and that leaves me more time and
energy to be individual in. And - I remember once in London I saw a
picture of an American suburb, in a toothpaste ad on the back of
the Saturday Evening Post - an elm-lined snowy street of these new
houses, Georgian some of 'em, or with low raking roofs and - The
kind of street you'd find here in Zenith, say in Floral Heights.
Open. Trees. Grass. And I was homesick! There's no other country in
the world that has such pleasant houses. And I don't care if they
ARE standardized. It's a corking standard!