Babbitt
Revelstoke Arms had been slashed into raw hatreds, it was Babbitt who
was the most formidable. He leaped up. He seemed very large. He seized
Zilla’s shoulder. The cautions of the broker were wiped from his face,
and his voice was cruel:
“I’ve had enough of all this damn nonsense! I’ve known you for
twenty-five years, Zil, and I never knew you to miss a chance to take
your disappointments out on Paul. You’re not wicked. You’re worse.
You’re a fool. And let me tell you that Paul is the finest boy God ever
made. Every decent person is sick and tired of your taking advantage of
being a woman and springing every mean innuendo you can think of. Who
the hell are you that a person like Paul should have to ask your
_permission_ to go with me? You act like you were a combination of Queen
Victoria and Cleopatra. You fool, can’t you see how people snicker at
you, and sneer at you?”
Zilla was sobbing, “I’ve never-- I’ve never--nobody ever talked to me
like this in all my life!”
“No, but that’s the way they talk behind your back! Always! They say
you’re a scolding old woman. Old, by God!”
That cowardly attack broke her. Her eyes were blank. She wept. But
Babbitt glared stolidly. He felt that he was the all-powerful official
in charge; that Paul and Mrs. Babbitt looked on him with awe; that he
alone could handle this case.
Zilla writhed. She begged, “Oh, they don’t!”
“They certainly do!”
“I’ve been a bad woman! I’m terribly sorry! I’ll kill myself! I’ll do
anything. Oh, I’ll-- What do you want?”
She abased herself completely. Also, she enjoyed it. To the connoisseur
of scenes, nothing is more enjoyable than a thorough, melodramatic,
egoistic humility.
“I want you to let Paul beat it off to Maine with me,” Babbitt demanded.
“How can I help his going? You’ve just said I was an idiot and nobody
paid any attention to me.”
“Oh, you can help it, all right, all right! What you got to do is to cut
out hinting that the minute he gets out of your sight, he’ll go chasing
after some petticoat. Matter fact, that’s the way you start the boy off
wrong. You ought to have more sense--”
“Oh, I will, honestly, I will, George. I know I was bad. Oh, forgive me,
all of you, forgive me--”
She enjoyed it.
So did Babbitt. He condemned magnificently and forgave piously, and as
he went parading out with his wife he was grandly explanatory to her:
“Kind of a shame to bully Zilla, but course it was the only way to
handle her. Gosh, I certainly did have her crawling!”
She said calmly, “Yes. You were horrid. You were showing off. You were
having a lovely time thinking what a great fine person you were!”
“Well, by golly! Can you beat it! Of course I might of expected you to
not stand by me! I might of expected you’d stick up for your own sex!”
“Yes. Poor Zilla, she’s so unhappy. She takes it out on Paul. She hasn’t
a single thing to do, in that little flat. And she broods too much. And
she used to be so pretty and gay, and she resents losing it. And you
were just as nasty and mean as you could be. I’m not a bit proud of
you--or of Paul, boasting about his horrid love-affairs!”
He was sulkily silent; he maintained his bad temper at a high level of
outraged nobility all the four blocks home. At the door he left her, in
self-approving haughtiness, and tramped the lawn.
With a shock it was revealed to him: “Gosh, I wonder if she was
right--if she was partly right?” Overwork must have flayed him to
abnormal sensitiveness; it was one of the few times in his life when he
had queried his eternal excellence; and he perceived the summer night,
smelled the wet grass. Then: “I don’t care! I’ve pulled it off. We’re
going to have our spree. And for Paul, I’d do anything.”
II
They were buying their Maine tackle at Ijams Brothers’, the Sporting
Goods Mart, with the help of Willis Ijams, fellow member of the
Boosters’ Club. Babbitt was completely mad. He trumpeted and danced. He
muttered to Paul, “Say, this is pretty good, eh? To be buying the stuff,
eh? And good old Willis Ijams himself coming down on the floor to wait
on us! Say, if those fellows that are getting their kit for the North
Lakes knew we were going clear up to Maine, they’d have a fit, eh?...
Well, come on, Brother Ijams--Willis, I mean. Here’s your chance! We’re
a couple of easy marks! Whee! Let me at it! I’m going to buy out the
store!”
He gloated on fly-rods and gorgeous rubber hip-boots, on tents with
celluloid windows and folding chairs and ice-boxes. He simple-heartedly
wanted to buy all of them. It was the Paul whom he was always vaguely
protecting who kept him from his drunken desires.
But even Paul lightened when Willis Ijams, a salesman with poetry and
diplomacy, discussed flies. “Now, of course, you boys know,” he said,
“the great scrap is between dry flies and wet flies. Personally, I’m for
dry flies. More sporting.”
“That’s so. Lots more sporting,” fulminated Babbitt, who knew very
little about flies either wet or dry.
“Now if you’ll take my advice, Georgie, you’ll stock up well on these
pale evening dims, and silver sedges, and red ants. Oh, boy, there’s a
fly, that red ant!”
“You bet! That’s what it is--a fly!” rejoiced Babbitt.
“Yes, sir, that red ant,” said Ijams, “is a real honest-to-God _fly_!”
“Oh, I guess ole Mr. Trout won’t come a-hustling when I drop one of
those red ants on the water!” asserted Babbitt, and his thick wrists
made a rapturous motion of casting.
“Yes, and the landlocked salmon will take it, too,” said Ijams, who had
never seen a landlocked salmon.
“Salmon! Trout! Say, Paul, can you see Uncle George with his khaki pants
on haulin’ ’em in, some morning ’bout seven? Whee!”
III
They were on the New York express, incredibly bound for Maine,
incredibly without their families. They were free, in a man’s world, in
the smoking-compartment of the Pullman.
Outside the car window was a glaze of darkness stippled with the gold of
infrequent mysterious lights. Babbitt was immensely conscious, in the
sway and authoritative clatter of the train, of going, of going on.
Leaning toward Paul he grunted, “Gosh, pretty nice to be hiking, eh?”
The small room, with its walls of ocher-colored steel, was filled mostly
with the sort of men he classified as the Best Fellows You’ll Ever
Meet--Real Good Mixers. There were four of them on the long seat; a fat
man with a shrewd fat face, a knife-edged man in a green velour hat, a
very young young man with an imitation amber cigarette-holder, and
Babbitt. Facing them, on two movable leather chairs, were Paul and a
lanky, old-fashioned man, very cunning, with wrinkles bracketing his
mouth. They all read newspapers or trade journals, boot-and-shoe
journals, crockery journals, and waited for the joys of conversation. It
was the very young man, now making his first journey by Pullman, who
began it.
“Say, gee, I had a wild old time in Zenith!” he gloried. “Say, if a
fellow knows the ropes there he can have as wild a time as he can in New
York!”
“Yuh, I bet you simply raised the old Ned. I figured you were a bad man
when I saw you get on the train!” chuckled the fat one.
The others delightedly laid down their papers.
“Well, that’s all right now! I guess I seen some things in the Arbor you
never seen!” complained the boy.
“Oh, I’ll bet you did! I bet you lapped up the malted milk like a
reg’lar little devil!”
Then, the boy having served as introduction, they ignored him and
charged into real talk. Only Paul, sitting by himself, reading at a
serial story in a newspaper, failed to join them, and all but Babbitt
regarded him as a snob, an eccentric, a person of no spirit.
Which of them said which has never been determined, and does not matter,
since they all had the same ideas and expressed them always with the
same ponderous and brassy assurance. If it was not Babbitt who was
delivering any given verdict, at least he was beaming on the chancellor
who did deliver it.
“At that, though,” announced the first, “they’re selling quite some booze
in Zenith. Guess they are everywhere. I don’t know how you fellows feel
about prohibition, but the way it strikes me is that it’s a mighty
beneficial thing for the poor zob that hasn’t got any will-power but for
fellows like us, it’s an infringement of personal liberty.”
“That’s a fact. Congress has got no right to interfere with a fellow’s
personal liberty,” contended the second.
A man came in from the car, but as all the seats were full he stood up
while he smoked his cigarette. He was an Outsider; he was not one of the
Old Families of the smoking-compartment. They looked upon him bleakly
and, after trying to appear at ease by examining his chin in the mirror,
he gave it up and went out in silence.
“Just been making a trip through the South. Business conditions not very
good down there,” said one of the council.
“Is that a fact! Not very good, eh?”
“No, didn’t strike me they were up to normal.”
“Not up to normal, eh?”
“No, I wouldn’t hardly say they were.”
The whole council nodded sagely and decided, “Yump, not hardly up to
snuff.”
“Well, business conditions ain’t what they ought to be out West,
neither, not by a long shot.”
“That’s a fact. And I guess the hotel business feels it. That’s one good
thing, though: these hotels that’ve been charging five bucks a day--yes,
and maybe six-seven!--for a rotten room are going to be darn glad to get
four, and maybe give you a little service.”
“That’s a fact. Say, uh, speaknubout hotels, I hit the St. Francis at
San Francisco for the first time, the other day, and, say, it certainly
is a first-class place.”
“You’re right, brother! The St. Francis is a swell place--absolutely
A1.”
“That’s a fact. I’m right with you. It’s a first-class place.”
“Yuh, but say, any of you fellows ever stay at the Rippleton, in
Chicago? I don’t want to knock-- I believe in boosting wherever you
can--but say, of all the rotten dumps that pass ’emselves off as
first-class hotels, that’s the worst. I’m going to _get_ those guys, one
of these days, and I told ’em so. You know how I am--well, maybe you
don’t know, but I’m accustomed to first-class accommodations, and I’m
perfectly willing to pay a reasonable price. I got into Chicago late the
other night, and the Rippleton’s near the station-- I’d never been there
before, but I says to the taxi-driver-- I always believe in taking a taxi
when you get in late; may cost a little more money, but, gosh, it’s
worth it when you got to be up early next morning and out selling a lot
of crabs--and I said to him, ‘Oh, just drive me over to the Rippleton.’
“Well, we got there, and I breezed up to the desk and said to the clerk,
‘Well, brother, got a nice room with bath for Cousin Bill?’ Saaaay!
You’d ’a’ thought I’d sold him a second, or asked him to work on Yom
Kippur! He hands me the cold-boiled stare and yaps, ‘I dunno, friend,
I’ll see,’ and he ducks behind the rigamajig they keep track of the
rooms on. Well, I guess he called up the Credit Association and the
American Security League to see if I was all right--he certainly took
long enough--or maybe he just went to sleep; but finally he comes out
and looks at me like it hurts him, and croaks, ‘I think I can let you
have a room with bath.’ ‘Well, that’s awful nice of you--sorry to
trouble you--how much’ll it set me back?’ I says, real sweet. ‘It’ll
cost you seven bucks a day, friend,’ he says.
“Well, it was late, and anyway, it went down on my
expense-account--gosh, if I’d been paying it instead of the firm, I’d
’a’ tramped the streets all night before I’d ’a’ let any hick tavern
stick me seven great big round dollars, believe me! So I lets it go at
that. Well, the clerk wakes a nice young bellhop--fine lad--not a day