Babbit (3 page)

  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 solici-tudes
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 talkfests
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 tonight."

  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 areoplane 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
tete-a-tetes 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!"