Babbitt
to make money! That’s why I want that bonus! Honest, Mr. Babbitt, I
don’t want to get fresh, but this Heiler house is a terror. Nobody’ll
fall for it. The flooring is rotten and the walls are full of cracks.”
“That’s exactly what I mean! To a salesman with a love for his
profession, it’s hard problems like that that inspire him to do his
best. Besides, Stan-- Matter o’ fact, Thompson and I are against bonuses,
as a matter of principle. We like you, and we want to help you so you
can get married, but we can’t be unfair to the others on the staff. If
we start giving you bonuses, don’t you see we’re going to hurt the
feeling and be unjust to Penniman and Laylock? Right’s right, and
discrimination is unfair, and there ain’t going to be any of it in this
office! Don’t get the idea, Stan, that because during the war salesmen
were hard to hire, now, when there’s a lot of men out of work, there
aren’t a slew of bright young fellows that would be glad to step in and
enjoy your opportunities, and not act as if Thompson and I were his
enemies and not do any work except for bonuses. How about it, heh? How
about it?”
“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. To-day 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 buying 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 talk, 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