Babbitt
“a regular society spread but a real sure-enough highbrow affair, with
some of the keenest intellects and the brightest bunch of little women
in town.” It was so absorbing an occasion that he almost forgot his
desire to run off to Maine with Paul Riesling.
Though he had been born in the village of Catawba, Babbitt had risen to
that metropolitan social plane on which hosts have as many as four
people at dinner without planning it for more than an evening or two.
But a dinner of twelve, with flowers from the florist’s and all the
cut-glass out, staggered even the Babbitts.
For two weeks they studied, debated, and arbitrated the list of guests.
Babbitt marveled, “Of course we’re up-to-date ourselves, but still,
think of us entertaining a famous poet like Chum Frink, a fellow that on
nothing but a poem or so every day and just writing a few advertisements
pulls down fifteen thousand berries a year!”
“Yes, and Howard Littlefield. Do you know, the other evening Eunice told
me her papa speaks three languages!” said Mrs. Babbitt.
“Huh! That’s nothing! So do I--American, baseball, and poker!”
“I don’t think it’s nice to be funny about a matter like that. Think
how wonderful it must be to speak three languages, and so useful
and-- And with people like that, I don’t see why we invite the Orville
Joneses.”
“Well now, Orville is a mighty up-and-coming fellow!”
“Yes, I know, but-- A laundry!”
“I’ll admit a laundry hasn’t got the class of poetry or real estate, but
just the same, Orvy is mighty deep. Ever start him spieling about
gardening? Say, that fellow can tell you the name of every kind of tree,
and some of their Greek and Latin names too! Besides, we owe the Joneses
a dinner. Besides, gosh, we got to have some boob for audience, when a
bunch of hot-air artists like Frink and Littlefield get going.”
“Well, dear--I meant to speak of this--I do think that as host you ought
to sit back and listen, and let your guests have a chance to talk once
in a while!”
“Oh, you do, do you! Sure! I talk all the time! And I’m just a business
man--oh sure!--I’m no Ph.D. like Littlefield, and no poet, and I haven’t
anything to spring! Well, let me tell you, just the other day your darn
Chum Frink comes up to me at the club begging to know what I thought
about the Springfield school-bond issue. And who told him? I did! You
bet your life I told him! Little me! I certainly did! He came up and
asked me, and I told him all about it! You bet! And he was darn glad to
listen to me and-- Duty as a host! I guess I know my duty as a host and
let me tell you--”
In fact, the Orville Joneses were invited.
II
On the morning of the dinner, Mrs. Babbitt was restive.
“Now, George, I want you to be sure and be home early to-night.
Remember, you have to dress.”
“Uh-huh. I see by the _Advocate_ that the Presbyterian General Assembly
has voted to quit the Interchurch World Movement. That--”
“George! Did you hear what I said? You must be home in time to dress
to-night.”
“Dress? Hell! I’m dressed now! Think I’m going down to the office in my
B.V.D.’s?”
“I will not have you talking indecently before the children! And you do
have to put on your dinner-jacket!”
“I guess you mean my Tux. I tell you, of all the doggone nonsensical
nuisances that was ever invented--”
Three minutes later, after Babbitt had wailed, “Well, I don’t know
whether I’m going to dress or _not_” in a manner which showed that he
was going to dress, the discussion moved on.
“Now, George, you mustn’t forget to call in at Vecchia’s on the way home
and get the ice cream. Their delivery-wagon is broken down, and I don’t
want to trust them to send it by--”
“All right! You told me that before breakfast!”
“Well, I don’t want you to forget. I’ll be working my head off all day
long, training the girl that’s to help with the dinner--”
“All nonsense, anyway, hiring an extra girl for the feed. Matilda could
perfectly well--”
“--and I have to go out and buy the flowers, and fix them, and set the
table, and order the salted almonds, and look at the chickens, and
arrange for the children to have their supper up-stairs and-- And I
simply must depend on you to go to Vecchia’s for the ice cream.”
“All riiiiiight! Gosh, I’m going to get it!”
“All you have to do is to go in and say you want the ice cream that Mrs.
Babbitt ordered yesterday by ’phone, and it will be all ready for you.”
At ten-thirty she telephoned to him not to forget the ice cream from
Vecchia’s.
He was surprised and blasted then by a thought. He wondered whether
Floral Heights dinners were worth the hideous toil involved. But he
repented the sacrilege in the excitement of buying the materials for
cocktails.
Now this was the manner of obtaining alcohol under the reign of
righteousness and prohibition:
He drove from the severe rectangular streets of the modern business
center into the tangled byways of Old Town--jagged blocks filled with
sooty warehouses and lofts; on into The Arbor, once a pleasant orchard
but now a morass of lodging-houses, tenements, and brothels. Exquisite
shivers chilled his spine and stomach, and he looked at every policeman
with intense innocence, as one who loved the law, and admired the Force,
and longed to stop and play with them. He parked his car a block from
Healey Hanson’s saloon, worrying, “Well, rats, if anybody did see me,
they’d think I was here on business.”
He entered a place curiously like the saloons of ante-prohibition days,
with a long greasy bar with sawdust in front and streaky mirror behind,
a pine table at which a dirty old man dreamed over a glass of something
which resembled whisky, and with two men at the bar, drinking something
which resembled beer, and giving that impression of forming a large
crowd which two men always give in a saloon. The bartender, a tall pale
Swede with a diamond in his lilac scarf, stared at Babbitt as he stalked
plumply up to the bar and whispered, “I’d, uh-- Friend of Hanson’s sent
me here. Like to get some gin.”
The bartender gazed down on him in the manner of an outraged bishop. “I
guess you got the wrong place, my friend. We sell nothing but soft
drinks here.” He cleaned the bar with a rag which would itself have done
with a little cleaning, and glared across his mechanically moving elbow.
The old dreamer at the table petitioned the bartender, “Say, Oscar,
listen.”
Oscar did not listen.
“Aw, say, Oscar, listen, will yuh? Say, lis-sen!”
The decayed and drowsy voice of the loafer, the agreeable stink of
beer-dregs, threw a spell of inanition over Babbitt. The bartender moved
grimly toward the crowd of two men. Babbitt followed him as delicately
as a cat, and wheedled, “Say, Oscar, I want to speak to Mr. Hanson.”
“Whajuh wanta see him for?”
“I just want to talk to him. Here’s my card.”
It was a beautiful card, an engraved card, a card in the blackest black
and the sharpest red, announcing that Mr. George F. Babbitt was Estates,
Insurance, Rents. The bartender held it as though it weighed ten pounds,
and read it as though it were a hundred words long. He did not bend from
his episcopal dignity, but he growled, “I’ll see if he’s around.”
From the back room he brought an immensely old young man, a quiet
sharp-eyed man, in tan silk shirt, checked vest hanging open, and
burning brown trousers--Mr. Healey Hanson. Mr. Hanson said only “Yuh?”
but his implacable and contemptuous eyes queried Babbitt’s soul, and he
seemed not at all impressed by the new dark-gray suit for which (as he
had admitted to every acquaintance at the Athletic Club) Babbitt had
paid a hundred and twenty-five dollars.
“Glad meet you, Mr. Hanson. Say, uh-- I’m George Babbitt of the
Babbitt-Thompson Realty Company. I’m a great friend of Jake Offutt’s.”
“Well, what of it?”
“Say, uh, I’m going to have a party, and Jake told me you’d be able to
fix me up with a little gin.” In alarm, in obsequiousness, as Hanson’s
eyes grew more bored, “You telephone to Jake about me, if you want to.”
Hanson answered by jerking his head to indicate the entrance to the back
room, and strolled away. Babbitt melodramatically crept into an
apartment containing four round tables, eleven chairs, a brewery
calendar, and a smell. He waited. Thrice he saw Healey Hanson saunter
through, humming, hands in pockets, ignoring him.
By this time Babbitt had modified his valiant morning vow, “I won’t pay
one cent over seven dollars a quart” to “I might pay ten.” On Hanson’s
next weary entrance he besought, “Could you fix that up?” Hanson
scowled, and grated, “Just a minute--Pete’s sake--just a min-ute!” In
growing meekness Babbitt went on waiting till Hanson casually reappeared
with a quart of gin--what is euphemistically known as a quart--in his
disdainful long white hands.
“Twelve bucks,” he snapped.
“Say, uh, but say, cap’n, Jake thought you’d be able to fix me up for
eight or nine a bottle.”
“Nup. Twelve. This is the real stuff, smuggled from Canada. This is none
o’ your neutral spirits with a drop of juniper extract,” the honest
merchant said virtuously. “Twelve bones--if you want it. Course y’
understand I’m just doing this anyway as a friend of Jake’s.”
“Sure! Sure! I understand!” Babbitt gratefully held out twelve dollars.
He felt honored by contact with greatness as Hanson yawned, stuffed the
bills, uncounted, into his radiant vest, and swaggered away.
He had a number of titillations out of concealing the gin-bottle under
his coat and out of hiding it in his desk. All afternoon he snorted and
chuckled and gurgled over his ability to “give the Boys a real shot in
the arm to-night.” He was, in fact, so exhilarated that he was within a
block of his house before he remembered that there was a certain matter,
mentioned by his wife, of fetching ice cream from Vecchia’s. He
explained, “Well, darn it--” and drove back.
Vecchia was not a caterer, he was The Caterer of Zenith. Most coming-out
parties were held in the white and gold ballroom of the Maison Vecchia;
at all nice teas the guests recognized the five kinds of Vecchia
sandwiches and the seven kinds of Vecchia cakes; and all really smart
dinners ended, as on a resolving chord, in Vecchia Neapolitan ice cream
in one of the three reliable molds--the melon mold, the round mold like
a layer cake, and the long brick.
Vecchia’s shop had pale blue woodwork, tracery of plaster roses,
attendants in frilled aprons, and glass shelves of “kisses” with all the
refinement that inheres in whites of eggs. Babbitt felt heavy and thick
amid this professional daintiness, and as he waited for the ice cream he
decided, with hot prickles at the back of his neck, that a girl customer
was giggling at him. He went home in a touchy temper. The first thing he
heard was his wife’s agitated:
“George! _Did_ you remember to go to Vecchia’s and get the ice cream?”
“Say! Look here! Do I ever forget to do things?”
“Yes! Often!”
“Well now, it’s darn seldom I do, and it certainly makes me tired, after
going into a pink-tea joint like Vecchia’s and having to stand around
looking at a lot of half-naked young girls, all rouged up like they were
sixty and eating a lot of stuff that simply ruins their stomachs--”
“Oh, it’s too bad about you! I’ve noticed how you hate to look at pretty
girls!”
With a jar Babbitt realized that his wife was too busy to be impressed
by that moral indignation with which males rule the world, and he went
humbly up-stairs to dress. He had an impression of a glorified
dining-room, of cut-glass, candles, polished wood, lace, silver, roses.
With the awed swelling of the heart suitable to so grave a business as
giving a dinner, he slew the temptation to wear his plaited dress-shirt
for a fourth time, took out an entirely fresh one, tightened his black