Babbitt
bow, and rubbed his patent-leather pumps with a handkerchief. He glanced
with pleasure at his garnet and silver studs. He smoothed and patted his
ankles, transformed by silk socks from the sturdy shanks of George
Babbitt to the elegant limbs of what is called a Clubman. He stood
before the pier-glass, viewing his trim dinner-coat, his beautiful
triple-braided trousers; and murmured in lyric beatitude, “By golly, I
don’t look so bad. I certainly don’t look like Catawba. If the hicks
back home could see me in this rig, they’d have a fit!”
He moved majestically down to mix the cocktails. As he chipped ice, as
he squeezed oranges, as he collected vast stores of bottles, glasses,
and spoons at the sink in the pantry, he felt as authoritative as the
bartender at Healey Hanson’s saloon. True, Mrs. Babbitt said he was
under foot, and Matilda and the maid hired for the evening brushed by
him, elbowed him, shrieked “Pleasopn door,” as they tottered through
with trays, but in this high moment he ignored them.
Besides the new bottle of gin, his cellar consisted of one half-bottle
of Bourbon whisky, a quarter of a bottle of Italian vermouth, and
approximately one hundred drops of orange bitters. He did not possess a
cocktail-shaker. A shaker was proof of dissipation, the symbol of a
Drinker, and Babbitt disliked being known as a Drinker even more than he
liked a Drink. He mixed by pouring from an ancient gravy-boat into a
handleless pitcher; he poured with a noble dignity, holding his alembics
high beneath the powerful Mazda globe, his face hot, his shirt-front a
glaring white, the copper sink a scoured red-gold.
He tasted the sacred essence. “Now, by golly, if that isn’t pretty near
one fine old cocktail! Kind of a Bronx, and yet like a Manhattan.
Ummmmmm! Hey, Myra, want a little nip before the folks come?”
Bustling into the dining-room, moving each glass a quarter of an inch,
rushing back with resolution implacable on her face, her gray and
silver-lace party frock protected by a denim towel, Mrs. Babbitt glared
at him, and rebuked him, “Certainly not!”
“Well,” in a loose, jocose manner, “I think the old man will!”
The cocktail filled him with a whirling exhilaration behind which he was
aware of devastating desires--to rush places in fast motors, to kiss
girls, to sing, to be witty. He sought to regain his lost dignity by
announcing to Matilda:
“I’m going to stick this pitcher of cocktails in the refrigerator. Be
sure you don’t upset any of ’em.”
“Yeh.”
“Well, be sure now. Don’t go putting anything on this top shelf.”
“Yeh.”
“Well, be--” He was dizzy. His voice was thin and distant. “Whee!” With
enormous impressiveness he commanded, “Well, be sure now,” and minced
into the safety of the living-room. He wondered whether he could
persuade “as slow a bunch as Myra and the Littlefields to go some place
aft’ dinner and raise Cain and maybe dig up smore booze.” He perceived
that he had gifts of profligacy which had been neglected.
By the time the guests had come, including the inevitable late couple
for whom the others waited with painful amiability, a great gray
emptiness had replaced the purple swirling in Babbitt’s head, and he had
to force the tumultuous greetings suitable to a host on Floral Heights.
The guests were Howard Littlefield, the doctor of philosophy who
furnished publicity and comforting economics to the Street Traction
Company; Vergil Gunch, the coal-dealer, equally powerful in the Elks and
in the Boosters’ Club; Eddie Swanson, the agent for the Javelin Motor
Car, who lived across the street; and Orville Jones, owner of the Lily
White Laundry, which justly announced itself “the biggest, busiest,
bulliest cleanerie shoppe in Zenith.” But, naturally, the most
distinguished of all was T. Cholmondeley Frink, who was not only the
author of “Poemulations,” which, syndicated daily in sixty-seven leading
newspapers, gave him one of the largest audiences of any poet in the
world, but also an optimistic lecturer and the creator of “Ads that
Add.” Despite the searching philosophy and high morality of his verses,
they were humorous and easily understood by any child of twelve; and it
added a neat air of pleasantry to them that they were set not as verse
but as prose. Mr. Frink was known from Coast to Coast as “Chum.”
With them were six wives, more or less--it was hard to tell, so early in
the evening, as at first glance they all looked alike, and as they all
said, “Oh, _isn’t_ this nice!” in the same tone of determined
liveliness. To the eye, the men were less similar: Littlefield, a
hedge-scholar, tall and horse-faced; Chum Frink, a trifle of a man with
soft and mouse-like hair, advertising his profession as poet by a silk
cord on his eye-glasses; Vergil Gunch, broad, with coarse black hair _en
brosse_; Eddie Swanson, a bald and bouncing young man who showed his
taste for elegance by an evening waistcoat of figured black silk with
glass buttons; Orville Jones, a steady-looking, stubby, not very
memorable person, with a hemp-colored toothbrush mustache. Yet they were
all so well fed and clean, they all shouted “’Evenin’, Georgie!” with
such robustness, that they seemed to be cousins, and the strange thing
is that the longer one knew the women, the less alike they seemed; while
the longer one knew the men, the more alike their bold patterns
appeared.
The drinking of the cocktails was as canonical a rite as the mixing. The
company waited, uneasily, hopefully, agreeing in a strained manner that
the weather had been rather warm and slightly cold, but still Babbitt
said nothing about drinks. They became despondent. But when the late
couple (the Swansons) had arrived, Babbitt hinted, “Well, folks, do you
think you could stand breaking the law a little?”
They looked at Chum Frink, the recognized lord of language. Frink pulled
at his eye-glass cord as at a bell-rope, he cleared his throat and said
that which was the custom:
“I’ll tell you, George: I’m a law-abiding man, but they do say Verg
Gunch is a regular yegg, and of course he’s bigger ’n I am, and I just
can’t figure out what I’d do if he tried to force me into anything
criminal!”
Gunch was roaring, “Well, I’ll take a chance--” when Frink held up his
hand and went on, “So if Verg and you insist, Georgie, I’ll park my car
on the wrong side of the street, because I take it for granted that’s
the crime you’re hinting at!”
There was a great deal of laughter. Mrs. Jones asserted, “Mr. Frink is
simply too killing! You’d think he was so innocent!”
Babbitt clamored, “How did you guess it, Chum? Well, you-all just wait a
moment while I go out and get the--keys to your cars!” Through a froth
of merriment he brought the shining promise, the mighty tray of glasses
with the cloudy yellow cocktails in the glass pitcher in the center. The
men babbled, “Oh, gosh, have a look!” and “This gets me right where I
live!” and “Let me at it!” But Chum Frink, a traveled man and not unused
to woes, was stricken by the thought that the potion might be merely
fruit-juice with a little neutral spirits. He looked timorous as
Babbitt, a moist and ecstatic almoner, held out a glass, but as he
tasted it he piped, “Oh, man, let me dream on! It ain’t true, but don’t
waken me! Jus’ lemme slumber!”
Two hours before, Frink had completed a newspaper lyric beginning:
_I sat alone and groused and thunk, and scratched my head and sighed and
wunk, and groaned, “There still are boobs, alack, who’d like the
old-time gin-mill back; that den that makes a sage a loon, the vile and
smelly old saloon!” I’ll never miss their poison booze, whilst I the
bubbling spring can use, that leaves my head at merry morn as clear as
any babe new-born!_
Babbitt drank with the others; his moment’s depression was gone; he
perceived that these were the best fellows in the world; he wanted to
give them a thousand cocktails. “Think you could stand another?” he
cried. The wives refused, with giggles, but the men, speaking in a
wide, elaborate, enjoyable manner, gloated, “Well, sooner than have you
get sore at me, Georgie--”
“You got a little dividend coming,” said Babbitt to each of them, and
each intoned, “Squeeze it, Georgie, squeeze it!”
When, beyond hope, the pitcher was empty, they stood and talked about
prohibition. The men leaned back on their heels, put their hands in
their trousers-pockets, and proclaimed their views with the booming
profundity of a prosperous male repeating a thoroughly hackneyed
statement about a matter of which he knows nothing whatever.
“Now, I’ll tell you,” said Vergil Gunch; “way I figure it is this, and I
can speak by the book, because I’ve talked to a lot of doctors and
fellows that ought to know, and the way I see it is that it’s a good
thing to get rid of the saloon, but they ought to let a fellow have beer
and light wines.”
Howard Littlefield observed, “What isn’t generally realized is that it’s
a dangerous prop’sition to invade the rights of personal liberty. Now,
take this for instance: The King of-- Bavaria? I think it was
Bavaria--yes, Bavaria, it was--in 1862, March, 1862, he issued a
proclamation against public grazing of live-stock. The peasantry had
stood for overtaxation without the slightest complaint, but when this
proclamation came out, they rebelled. Or it may have been Saxony. But it
just goes to show the dangers of invading the rights of personal
liberty.”
“That’s it--no one got a right to invade personal liberty,” said Orville
Jones.
“Just the same, you don’t want to forget prohibition is a mighty good
thing for the working-classes. Keeps ’em from wasting their money and
lowering their productiveness,” said Vergil Gunch.
“Yes, that’s so. But the trouble is the manner of enforcement,” insisted
Howard Littlefield. “Congress didn’t understand the right system. Now,
if I’d been running the thing, I’d have arranged it so that the drinker
himself was licensed, and then we could have taken care of the shiftless
workman--kept him from drinking--and yet not’ve interfered with the
rights--with the personal liberty--of fellows like ourselves.”
They bobbed their heads, looked admiringly at one another, and stated,
“That’s so, that would be the stunt.”
“The thing that worries me is that a lot of these guys will take to
cocaine,” sighed Eddie Swanson.
They bobbed more violently, and groaned, “That’s so, there is a danger
of that.”
Chum Frink chanted, “Oh, say, I got hold of a swell new receipt for
home-made beer the other day. You take--”
Gunch interrupted, “Wait! Let me tell you mine!” Littlefield snorted,
“Beer! Rats! Thing to do is to ferment cider!” Jones insisted, “I’ve got
the receipt that does the business!” Swanson begged, “Oh, say, lemme
tell you the story--” But Frink went on resolutely, “You take and save
the shells from peas, and pour six gallons of water on a bushel of
shells and boil the mixture till--”
Mrs. Babbitt turned toward them with yearning sweetness; Frink hastened
to finish even his best beer-recipe; and she said gaily, “Dinner is
served.”
There was a good deal of friendly argument among the men as to which
should go in last, and while they were crossing the hall from the
living-room to the dining-room Vergil Gunch made them laugh by
thundering, “If I can’t sit next to Myra Babbitt and hold her hand under
the table, I won’t play-- I’m goin’ home.” In the dining-room they stood
embarrassed while Mrs. Babbitt fluttered, “Now, let me see-- Oh, I was
going to have some nice hand-painted place-cards for you but-- Oh, let me
see; Mr. Frink, you sit there.”
The dinner was in the best style of women’s-magazine art, whereby the
salad was served in hollowed apples, and everything but the invincible
fried chicken resembled something else.