Babbit (2 page)

  He was fairly amiable in the conference on the brown
suit.

  "What do you think, Myra?" He pawed at the clothes
hunched on a chair in their bedroom, while she moved about
mysteriously adjusting and patting her petticoat and, to his
jaundiced eye, never seeming to get on with her dressing. "How
about it? Shall I wear the brown suit another day?"

  "Well, it looks awfully nice on you."

  "I know, but gosh, it needs pressing."

  "That's so. Perhaps it does."

  "It certainly could stand being pressed, all
right."

  "Yes, perhaps it wouldn't hurt it to be
pressed."

  "But gee, the coat doesn't need pressing. No sense
in having the whole darn suit pressed, when the coat doesn't need
it."

  "That's so."

  "But the pants certainly need it, all right. Look at
them - look at those wrinkles - the pants certainly do need
pressing."

  "That's so. Oh, Georgie, why couldn't you wear the
brown coat with the blue trousers we were wondering what we'd do
with them?"

  "Good Lord! Did you ever in all my life know me to
wear the coat of one suit and the pants of another? What do you
think I am? A busted bookkeeper?"

  "Well, why don't you put on the dark gray suit
to-day, and stop in at the tailor and leave the brown
trousers?"

  "Well, they certainly need - Now where the devil is
that gray suit? Oh, yes, here we are."

  He was able to get through the other crises of
dressing with comparative resoluteness and calm.

  His first adornment was the sleeveless dimity B.V.D.
undershirt, in which he resembled a small boy humorlessly wearing a
cheesecloth tabard at a civic pageant. He never put on B.V.D.'s
without thanking the God of Progress that he didn't wear tight,
long, old-fashioned undergarments, like his father-in-law and
partner, Henry Thompson. His second embellishment was combing and
slicking back his hair. It gave him a tremendous forehead, arching
up two inches beyond the former hair-line. But most wonder-working
of all was the donning of his spectacles.

  There is character in spectacles - the pretentious
tortoiseshell, the meek pince-nez of the school teacher, the
twisted silver-framed glasses of the old villager. Babbitt's
spectacles had huge, circular, frameless lenses of the very best
glass; the ear-pieces were thin bars of gold. In them he was the
modern business man; one who gave orders to clerks and drove a car
and played occasional golf and was scholarly in regard to
Salesmanship. His head suddenly appeared not babyish but weighty,
and you noted his heavy, blunt nose, his straight mouth and thick,
long upper lip, his chin overfleshy but strong; with respect you
beheld him put on the rest of his uniform as a Solid Citizen.

  The gray suit was well cut, well made, and
completely undistinguished. It was a standard suit. White piping on
the V of the vest added a flavor of law and learning. His shoes
were black laced boots, good boots, honest boots, standard boots,
extraordinarily uninteresting boots. The only frivolity was in his
purple knitted scarf. With considerable comment on the matter to
Mrs. Babbitt (who, acrobatically fastening the back of her blouse
to her skirt with a safety-pin, did not hear a word he said), he
chose between the purple scarf and a tapestry effect with
stringless brown harps among blown palms, and into it he thrust a
snake-head pin with opal eyes.

  A sensational event was changing from the brown suit
to the gray the contents of his pockets. He was earnest about these
objects. They were of eternal importance, like baseball or the
Republican Party. They included a fountain pen and a silver pencil
(always lacking a supply of new leads) which belonged in the
righthand upper vest pocket. Without them he would have felt naked.
On his watch-chain were a gold penknife, silver cigar-cutter, seven
keys (the use of two of which he had forgotten), and incidentally a
good watch. Depending from the chain was a large, yellowish
elk's-tooth-proclamation of his membership in the Brotherly and
Protective Order of Elks. Most significant of all was his
loose-leaf pocket note-book, that modern and efficient note-book
which contained the addresses of people whom he had forgotten,
prudent memoranda of postal money-orders which had reached their
destinations months ago, stamps which had lost their mucilage,
clippings of verses by T. Cholmondeley Frink and of the newspaper
editorials from which Babbitt got his opinions and his
polysyllables, notes to be sure and do things which he did not
intend to do, and one curious inscription - D.S.S. D.M.Y.P.D.F.

  But he had no cigarette-case. No one had ever
happened to give him one, so he hadn't the habit, and people who
carried cigarette-cases he regarded as effeminate.

  Last, he stuck in his lapel the Boosters' Club
button. With the conciseness of great art the button displayed two
words: "Boosters-Pep!" It made Babbitt feel loyal and important. It
associated him with Good Fellows, with men who were nice and human,
and important in business circles. It was his V.C., his Legion of
Honor ribbon, his Phi Beta Kappa key.

  With the subtleties of dressing ran other complex
worries. "I feel kind of punk this morning," he said. "I think I
had too much dinner last evening. You oughtn't to serve those heavy
banana fritters."

  "But you asked me to have some."

  "I know, but - I tell you, when a fellow gets past
forty he has to look after his digestion. There's a lot of fellows
that don't take proper care of themselves. I tell you at forty a
man's a fool or his doctor - I mean, his own doctor. Folks don't
give enough attention to this matter of dieting. Now I think -
Course a man ought to have a good meal after the day's work, but it
would be a good thing for both of us if we took lighter
lunches."

  "But Georgie, here at home I always do have a light
lunch."

  "Mean to imply I make a hog of myself, eating
down-town? Yes, sure! You'd have a swell time if you had to eat the
truck that new steward hands out to us at the Athletic Club! But I
certainly do feel out of sorts, this morning. Funny, got a pain
down here on the left side - but no, that wouldn't be appendicitis,
would it? Last night, when I was driving over to Verg Gunch's, I
felt a pain in my stomach, too. Right here it was - kind of a sharp
shooting pain. I - Where'd that dime go to? Why don't you serve
more prunes at breakfast? Of course I eat an apple every evening -
an apple a day keeps the doctor away - but still, you ought to have
more prunes, and not all these fancy doodads."

  "The last time I had prunes you didn't eat
them."

  "Well, I didn't feel like eating 'em, I suppose.
Matter of fact, I think I did eat some of 'em. Anyway - I tell you
it's mighty important to - I was saying to Verg Gunch, just last
evening, most people don't take sufficient care of their diges -
"

  "Shall we have the Gunches for our dinner, next
week?"

  "Why sure; you bet."

  "Now see here, George: I want you to put on your
nice dinner-jacket that evening."

  "Rats! The rest of 'em won't want to dress."

  "Of course they will. You remember when you didn't
dress for the Littlefields' supper-party, and all the rest did, and
how embarrassed you were."

  "Embarrassed, hell! I wasn't embarrassed. Everybody
knows I can put on as expensive a Tux. as anybody else, and I
should worry if I don't happen to have it on sometimes. All a darn
nuisance, anyway. All right for a woman, that stays around the
house all the time, but when a fellow's worked like the dickens all
day, he doesn't want to go and hustle his head off getting into the
soup-and-fish for a lot of folks that he's seen in just reg'lar
ordinary clothes that same day."

  "You know you enjoy being seen in one. The other
evening you admitted you were glad I'd insisted on your dressing.
You said you felt a lot better for it. And oh, Georgie, I do wish
you wouldn't say 'Tux.' It's 'dinner-jacket.'"

  "Rats, what's the odds?"

  "Well, it's what all the nice folks say. Suppose
Lucile McKelvey heard you calling it a 'Tux.'"

  "Well, that's all right now! Lucile McKelvey can't
pull anything on me! Her folks are common as mud, even if her
husband and her dad are millionaires! I suppose you're trying to
rub in your exalted social position! Well, let me tell you that
your revered paternal ancestor, Henry T., doesn't even call it a
'Tux.'! He calls it a 'bobtail jacket for a ringtail monkey,' and
you couldn't get him into one unless you chloroformed him!"

  "Now don't be horrid, George."

  "Well, I don't want to be horrid, but Lord! you're
getting as fussy as Verona. Ever since she got out of college she's
been too rambunctious to live with - doesn't know what she wants -
well, I know what she wants! - all she wants is to marry a
millionaire, and live in Europe, and hold some preacher's hand, and
simultaneously at the same time stay right here in Zenith and be
some blooming kind of a socialist agitator or boss charity-worker
or some damn thing! Lord, and Ted is just as bad! He wants to go to
college, and he doesn't want to go to college. Only one of the
three that knows her own mind is Tinka. Simply can't understand how
I ever came to have a pair of shillyshallying children like Rone
and Ted. I may not be any Rockefeller or James J. Shakespeare, but
I certainly do know my own mind, and I do keep right on plugging
along in the office and - Do you know the latest? Far as I can
figure out, Ted's new bee is he'd like to be a movie actor and -
And here I've told him a hundred times, if he'll go to college and
law-school and make good, I'll set him up in business and - Verona
just exactly as bad. Doesn't know what she wants. Well, well, come
on! Aren't you ready yet? The girl rang the bell three minutes
ago."

  V

  Before he followed his wife, Babbitt stood at the
westernmost window of their room. This residential settlement,
Floral Heights, was on a rise; and though the center of the city
was three miles away - Zenith had between three and four hundred
thousand inhabitants now - he could see the top of the Second
National Tower, an Indiana limestone building of thirty-five
stories.

  Its shining walls rose against April sky to a simple
cornice like a streak of white fire. Integrity was in the tower,
and decision. It bore its strength lightly as a tall soldier. As
Babbitt stared, the nervousness was soothed from his face, his
slack chin lifted in reverence. All he articulated was "That's one
lovely sight!" but he was inspired by the rhythm of the city; his
love of it renewed. He beheld the tower as a temple-spire of the
religion of business, a faith passionate, exalted, surpassing
common men; and as he clumped down to breakfast he whistled the
ballad "Oh, by gee, by gosh, by jingo" as though it were a hymn
melancholy and noble.

  
R
ELIEVED 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.