Babbitt
Think of being the chief figure and directing factor in solving strange
mysteries and baffling crimes. This wonderful profession brings you into
contact with influential men on the basis of equality, and often calls
upon you to travel everywhere, maybe to distant lands--all expenses
paid. NO SPECIAL EDUCATION REQUIRED.”
“Oh, boy! I guess that wins the fire-brick necklace! Wouldn’t it be
swell to travel everywhere and nab some famous crook!” whooped Ted.
“Well, I don’t think much of that. Doggone likely to get hurt. Still,
that music-study stunt might be pretty fair, though. There’s no reason
why, if efficiency-experts put their minds to it the way they have to
routing products in a factory, they couldn’t figure out some scheme so a
person wouldn’t have to monkey with all this practising and exercises
that you get in music.” Babbitt was impressed, and he had a delightful
parental feeling that they two, the men of the family, understood each
other.
He listened to the notices of mail-box universities which taught
Short-story Writing and Improving the Memory, Motion-picture-acting and
Developing the Soul-power, Banking and Spanish, Chiropody and
Photography, Electrical Engineering and Window-trimming, Poultry-raising
and Chemistry.
“Well--well--” Babbitt sought for adequate expression of his admiration.
“I’m a son of a gun! I knew this correspondence-school business had
become a mighty profitable game--makes suburban real-estate look like
two cents!--but I didn’t realize it’d got to be such a reg’lar
key-industry! Must rank right up with groceries and movies. Always
figured somebody’d come along with the brains to not leave education to
a lot of bookworms and impractical theorists but make a big thing out
of it. Yes, I can see how a lot of these courses might interest you. I
must ask the fellows at the Athletic if they ever realized-- But same
time, Ted, you know how advertisers, I means some advertisers,
exaggerate. I don’t know as they’d be able to jam you through these
courses as fast as they claim they can.”
“Oh sure, Dad; of course.” Ted had the immense and joyful maturity of a
boy who is respectfully listened to by his elders. Babbitt concentrated
on him with grateful affection:
“I can see what an influence these courses might have on the whole
educational works. Course I’d never admit it publicly--fellow like
myself, a State U. graduate, it’s only decent and patriotic for him to
blow his horn and boost the Alma Mater--but smatter of fact, there’s a
whole lot of valuable time lost even at the U., studying poetry and
French and subjects that never brought in anybody a cent. I don’t know
but what maybe these correspondence-courses might prove to be one of the
most important American inventions.
“Trouble with a lot of folks is: they’re so blame material; they don’t
see the spiritual and mental side of American supremacy; they think that
inventions like the telephone and the areoplane and wireless--no, that
was a Wop invention, but anyway: they think these mechanical
improvements are all that we stand for; whereas to a real thinker, he
sees that spiritual and, uh, dominating movements like Efficiency, and
Rotarianism, and Prohibition, and Democracy are what compose our deepest
and truest wealth. And maybe this new principle in education-at-home may
be another--may be another factor. I tell you, Ted, we’ve got to have
Vision--”
“I think those correspondence-courses are terrible!”
The philosophers gasped. It was Mrs. Babbitt who had made this discord
in their spiritual harmony, and one of Mrs. Babbitt’s virtues was that,
except during dinner-parties, when she was transformed into a raging
hostess, she took care of the house and didn’t bother the males by
thinking. She went on firmly:
“It sounds awful to me, the way they coax those poor young folks to
think they’re learning something, and nobody ’round to help them
and-- You two learn so quick, but me, I always was slow. But just the
same--”
Babbitt attended to her: “Nonsense! Get just as much, studying at home.
You don’t think a fellow learns any more because he blows in his
father’s hard-earned money and sits around in Morris chairs in a swell
Harvard dormitory with pictures and shields and table-covers and those
doodads, do you? I tell you, I’m a college man-- I _know_! There is one
objection you might make though. I certainly do protest against any
effort to get a lot of fellows out of barber shops and factories into
the professions. They’re too crowded already, and what’ll we do for
workmen if all those fellows go and get educated?”
Ted was leaning back, smoking a cigarette without reproof. He was, for
the moment, sharing the high thin air of Babbitt’s speculation as though
he were Paul Riesling or even Dr. Howard Littlefield. He hinted:
“Well, what do you think then, Dad? Wouldn’t it be a good idea if I
could go off to China or some peppy place, and study engineering or
something by mail?”
“No, and I’ll tell you why, son. I’ve found out it’s a mighty nice thing
to be able to say you’re a B.A. Some client that doesn’t know what you
are and thinks you’re just a plug business man, he gets to shooting off
his mouth about economics or literature or foreign trade conditions, and
you just ease in something like, ‘When I was in college--course I got my
B.A. in sociology and all that junk--’ Oh, it puts an awful crimp in
their style! But there wouldn’t be any class to saying ‘I got the degree
of Stamp-licker from the Bezuzus Mail-order University!’ You see-- My
dad was a pretty good old coot, but he never had much style to him, and
I had to work darn hard to earn my way through college. Well, it’s been
worth it, to be able to associate with the finest gentlemen in Zenith,
at the clubs and so on, and I wouldn’t want you to drop out of the
gentlemen class--the class that are just as red-blooded as the Common
People but still have power and personality. It would kind of hurt me if
you did that, old man!”
“I know, Dad! Sure! All right. I’ll stick to it. Say! Gosh! Gee whiz! I
forgot all about those kids I was going to take to the chorus rehearsal.
I’ll have to duck!”
“But you haven’t done all your home-work.”
“Do it first thing in the morning.”
“Well--”
Six times in the past sixty days Babbitt had stormed, “You will not ‘do
it first thing in the morning’! You’ll do it right now!” but to-night he
said, “Well, better hustle,” and his smile was the rare shy radiance he
kept for Paul Riesling.
IV
“Ted’s a good boy,” he said to Mrs. Babbitt.
“Oh, he is!”
“Who’s these girls he’s going to pick up? Are they nice decent girls?”
“I don’t know. Oh dear, Ted never tells me anything any more. I don’t
understand what’s come over the children of this generation. I used to
have to tell Papa and Mama everything, but seems like the children
to-day have just slipped away from all control.”
“I hope they’re decent girls. Course Ted’s no longer a kid, and I
wouldn’t want him to, uh, get mixed up and everything.”
“George: I wonder if you oughtn’t to take him aside and tell him
about-- Things!” She blushed and lowered her eyes.
“Well, I don’t know. Way I figure it, Myra, no sense suggesting a lot of
Things to a boy’s mind. Think up enough devilment by himself. But I
wonder-- It’s kind of a hard question. Wonder what Littlefield thinks
about it?”
“Course Papa agrees with you. He says all this--Instruction--is-- He says
’tisn’t decent.”
“Oh, he does, does he! Well, let me tell you that whatever Henry T.
Thompson thinks--about morals, I mean, though course you can’t beat the
old duffer--”
“Why, what a way to talk of Papa!”
“--simply can’t beat him at getting in on the ground floor of a deal,
but let me tell you whenever he springs any ideas about higher things
and education, then I know I think just the opposite. You may not regard
me as any great brain-shark, but believe me, I’m a regular college
president, compared with Henry T.! Yes sir, by golly, I’m going to take
Ted aside and tell him why I lead a strictly moral life.”
“Oh, will you? When?”
“When? When? What’s the use of trying to pin me down to When and Why and
Where and How and When? That’s the trouble with women, that’s why they
don’t make high-class executives; they haven’t any sense of diplomacy.
When the proper opportunity and occasion arises so it just comes in
natural, why then I’ll have a friendly little talk with him
and--and-- Was that Tinka hollering up-stairs? She ought to been asleep,
long ago.”
He prowled through the living-room, and stood in the sun-parlor, that
glass-walled room of wicker chairs and swinging couch in which they
loafed on Sunday afternoons. Outside, only the lights of Doppelbrau’s
house and the dim presence of Babbitt’s favorite elm broke the softness
of April night.
“Good visit with the boy. Getting over feeling cranky, way I did this
morning. And restless. Though, by golly, I will have a few days alone
with Paul in Maine!... That devil Zilla!... But.... Ted’s all right.
Whole family all right. And good business. Not many fellows make four
hundred and fifty bucks, practically half of a thousand dollars, easy as
I did to-day! Maybe when we all get to rowing it’s just as much my
fault as it is theirs. Oughtn’t to get grouchy like I do. But-- Wish I’d
been a pioneer, same as my grand-dad. But then, wouldn’t have a house
like this. I-- Oh, gosh, _I don’t know_!”
He thought moodily of Paul Riesling, of their youth together, of the
girls they had known.
When Babbitt had graduated from the State University, twenty-four years
ago, he had intended to be a lawyer. He had been a ponderous debater in
college; he felt that he was an orator; he saw himself becoming governor
of the state. While he read law he worked as a real-estate salesman. He
saved money, lived in a boarding-house, supped on poached egg on hash.
The lively Paul Riesling (who was certainly going off to Europe to study
violin, next month or next year) was his refuge till Paul was bespelled
by Zilla Colbeck, who laughed and danced and drew men after her plump
and gaily wagging finger.
Babbitt’s evenings were barren then, and he found comfort only in Paul’s
second cousin, Myra Thompson, a sleek and gentle girl who showed her
capacity by agreeing with the ardent young Babbitt that of course he was
going to be governor some day. Where Zilla mocked him as a country boy,
Myra said indignantly that he was ever so much solider than the young
dandies who had been born in the great city of Zenith--an ancient
settlement in 1897, one hundred and five years old, with two hundred
thousand population, the queen and wonder of all the state and, to the
Catawba boy, George Babbitt, so vast and thunderous and luxurious that
he was flattered to know a girl ennobled by birth in Zenith.
Of love there was no talk between them. He knew that if he was to study
law he could not marry for years; and Myra was distinctly a Nice
Girl--one didn’t kiss her, one didn’t “think about her that way at all”
unless one was going to marry her. But she was a dependable companion.
She was always ready to go skating, walking; always content to hear his
discourses on the great things he was going to do, the distressed poor
whom he would defend against the Unjust Rich, the speeches he would make
at Banquets, the inexactitudes of popular thought which he would
correct.
One evening when he was weary and soft-minded, he saw that she had been
weeping. She had been left out of a party given by Zilla. Somehow her
head was on his shoulder and he was kissing away the tears--and she
raised her head to say trustingly, “Now that we’re engaged, shall we be
married soon or shall we wait?”
Engaged? It was his first hint of it. His affection for this brown