Babbitt
tender woman thing went cold and fearful, but he could not hurt her,
could not abuse her trust. He mumbled something about waiting, and
escaped. He walked for an hour, trying to find a way of telling her that
it was a mistake. Often, in the month after, he got near to telling her,
but it was pleasant to have a girl in his arms, and less and less could
he insult her by blurting that he didn’t love her. He himself had no
doubt. The evening before his marriage was an agony, and the morning
wild with the desire to flee.
She made him what is known as a Good Wife. She was loyal, industrious,
and at rare times merry. She passed from a feeble disgust at their
closer relations into what promised to be ardent affection, but it
drooped into bored routine. Yet she existed only for him and for the
children, and she was as sorry, as worried as himself, when he gave up
the law and trudged on in a rut of listing real estate.
“Poor kid, she hasn’t had much better time than I have,” Babbitt
reflected, standing in the dark sun-parlor. “But-- I wish I could’ve had
a whirl at law and politics. Seen what I could do. Well-- Maybe I’ve made
more money as it is.”
He returned to the living-room but before he settled down he smoothed
his wife’s hair, and she glanced up, happy and somewhat surprised.
CHAPTER VII
I
He solemnly finished the last copy of the _American Magazine_, while his
wife sighed, laid away her darning, and looked enviously at the lingerie
designs in a women’s magazine. The room was very still.
It was a room which observed the best Floral Heights standards. The gray
walls were divided into artificial paneling by strips of white-enameled
pine. From the Babbitts’ former house had come two much-carved
rocking-chairs, but the other chairs were new, very deep and restful,
upholstered in blue and gold-striped velvet. A blue velvet davenport
faced the fireplace, and behind it was a cherrywood table and a tall
piano-lamp with a shade of golden silk. (Two out of every three houses
in Floral Heights had before the fireplace a davenport, a mahogany table
real or imitation, and a piano-lamp or a reading-lamp with a shade of
yellow or rose silk.)
On the table was a runner of gold-threaded Chinese fabric, four
magazines, a silver box containing cigarette-crumbs, and three
“gift-books”--large, expensive editions of fairy-tales illustrated by
English artists and as yet unread by any Babbitt save Tinka.
In a corner by the front windows was a large cabinet Victrola. (Eight
out of every nine Floral Heights houses had a cabinet phonograph.)
Among the pictures, hung in the exact center of each gray panel, were a
red and black imitation English hunting-print, an anemic imitation
boudoir-print with a French caption of whose morality Babbitt had always
been rather suspicious, and a “hand-colored” photograph of a Colonial
room--rag rug, maiden spinning, cat demure before a white fireplace.
(Nineteen out of every twenty houses in Floral Heights had either a
hunting-print, a _Madame Fait la Toilette_ print, a colored photograph
of a New England house, a photograph of a Rocky Mountain, or all four.)
It was a room as superior in comfort to the “parlor” of Babbitt’s
boyhood as his motor was superior to his father’s buggy. Though there
was nothing in the room that was interesting, there was nothing that was
offensive. It was as neat, and as negative, as a block of artificial
ice. The fireplace was unsoftened by downy ashes or by sooty brick; the
brass fire-irons were of immaculate polish; and the grenadier andirons
were like samples in a shop, desolate, unwanted, lifeless things of
commerce.
Against the wall was a piano, with another piano-lamp, but no one used
it save Tinka. The hard briskness of the phonograph contented them;
their store of jazz records made them feel wealthy and cultured; and all
they knew of creating music was the nice adjustment of a bamboo needle.
The books on the table were unspotted and laid in rigid parallels; not
one corner of the carpet-rug was curled; and nowhere was there a
hockey-stick, a torn picture-book, an old cap, or a gregarious and
disorganizing dog.
II
At home, Babbitt never read with absorption. He was concentrated enough
at the office but here he crossed his legs and fidgeted. When his story
was interesting he read the best, that is the funniest, paragraphs to
his wife; when it did not hold him he coughed, scratched his ankles and
his right ear, thrust his left thumb into his vest pocket, jingled his
silver, whirled the cigar-cutter and the keys on one end of his
watch-chain, yawned, rubbed his nose, and found errands to do. He went
upstairs to put on his slippers--his elegant slippers of seal-brown,
shaped like medieval shoes. He brought up an apple from the barrel which
stood by the trunk-closet in the basement.
“An apple a day keeps the doctor away,” he enlightened Mrs. Babbitt, for
quite the first time in fourteen hours.
“That’s so.”
“An apple is Nature’s best regulator.”
“Yes, it--”
“Trouble with women is, they never have sense enough to form regular
habits.”
“Well, I--”
“Always nibbling and eating between meals.”
“George!” She looked up from her reading. “Did you have a light lunch
to-day, like you were going to? I did!”
This malicious and unprovoked attack astounded him. “Well, maybe it
wasn’t as light as-- Went to lunch with Paul and didn’t have much chance
to diet. Oh, you needn’t to grin like a chessy cat! If it wasn’t for me
watching out and keeping an eye on our diet-- I’m the only member of this
family that appreciates the value of oatmeal for breakfast. I--”
She stooped over her story while he piously sliced and gulped down the
apple, discoursing:
“One thing I’ve done: cut down my smoking.
“Had kind of a run-in with Graff in the office. He’s getting too darn
fresh. I’ll stand for a good deal, but once in a while I got to assert
my authority, and I jumped him. ‘Stan,’ I said-- Well, I told him just
exactly where he got off.
“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