Babbitt
expressed the sympathy she was too experienced to feel and much too
experienced not to show, their bedroom settled instantly into
impersonality.
It gave on the sleeping-porch. It served both of them as dressing-room,
and on the coldest nights Babbitt luxuriously gave up the duty of being
manly and retreated to the bed inside, to curl his toes in the warmth
and laugh at the January gale.
The room displayed a modest and pleasant color-scheme, after one of the
best standard designs of the decorator who “did the interiors” for most
of the speculative-builders’ houses in Zenith. The walls were gray, the
woodwork white, the rug a serene blue; and very much like mahogany was
the furniture--the bureau with its great clear mirror, Mrs. Babbitt’s
dressing-table with toilet-articles of almost solid silver, the plain
twin beds, between them a small table holding a standard electric
bedside lamp, a glass for water, and a standard bedside book with
colored illustrations--what particular book it was cannot be
ascertained, since no one had ever opened it. The mattresses were firm
but not hard, triumphant modern mattresses which had cost a great deal
of money; the hot-water radiator was of exactly the proper scientific
surface for the cubic contents of the room. The windows were large and
easily opened, with the best catches and cords, and Holland
roller-shades guaranteed not to crack. It was a masterpiece among
bedrooms, right out of Cheerful Modern Houses for Medium Incomes. Only
it had nothing to do with the Babbitts, nor with any one else. If
people had ever lived and loved here, read thrillers at midnight and
lain in beautiful indolence on a Sunday morning, there were no signs of
it. It had the air of being a very good room in a very good hotel. One
expected the chambermaid to come in and make it ready for people who
would stay but one night, go without looking back, and never think of it
again.
Every second house in Floral Heights had a bedroom precisely like this.
The Babbitts’ house was five years old. It was all as competent and
glossy as this bedroom. It had the best of taste, the best of
inexpensive rugs, a simple and laudable architecture, and the latest
conveniences. Throughout, electricity took the place of candles and
slatternly hearth-fires. Along the bedroom baseboard were three plugs
for electric lamps, concealed by little brass doors. In the halls were
plugs for the vacuum cleaner, and in the living-room plugs for the piano
lamp, for the electric fan. The trim dining-room (with its admirable oak
buffet, its leaded-glass cupboard, its creamy plaster walls, its modest
scene of a salmon expiring upon a pile of oysters) had plugs which
supplied the electric percolator and the electric toaster.
In fact there was but one thing wrong with the Babbitt house: It was not
a home.
II
Often of a morning Babbitt came bouncing and jesting in to breakfast.
But things were mysteriously awry to-day. As he pontifically tread the
upper hall he looked into Verona’s bedroom and protested, “What’s the
use of giving the family a high-class house when they don’t appreciate
it and tend to business and get down to brass tacks?”
He marched upon them: Verona, a dumpy brown-haired girl of twenty-two,
just out of Bryn Mawr, given to solicitudes about duty and sex and God
and the unconquerable bagginess of the gray sports-suit she was now
wearing. Ted--Theodore Roosevelt Babbitt--a decorative boy of seventeen.
Tinka--Katherine--still a baby at ten, with radiant red hair and a thin
skin which hinted of too much candy and too many ice cream sodas.
Babbitt did not show his vague irritation as he tramped in. He really
disliked being a family tyrant, and his nagging was as meaningless as it
was frequent. He shouted at Tinka, “Well, kittiedoolie!” It was the only
pet name in his vocabulary, except the “dear” and “hon.” with which he
recognized his wife, and he flung it at Tinka every morning.
He gulped a cup of coffee in the hope of pacifying his stomach and his
soul. His stomach ceased to feel as though it did not belong to him, but
Verona began to be conscientious and annoying, and abruptly there
returned to Babbitt the doubts regarding life and families and business
which had clawed at him when his dream-life and the slim fairy girl had
fled.
Verona had for six months been filing-clerk at the Gruensberg Leather
Company offices, with a prospect of becoming secretary to Mr. Gruensberg
and thus, as Babbitt defined it, “getting some good out of your
expensive college education till you’re ready to marry and settle down.”
But now said Verona: “Father! I was talking to a classmate of mine
that’s working for the Associated Charities--oh, Dad, there’s the
sweetest little babies that come to the milk-station there!--and I feel
as though I ought to be doing something worth while like that.”
“What do you mean ‘worth while’? If you get to be Gruensberg’s
secretary--and maybe you would, if you kept up your shorthand and didn’t
go sneaking off to concerts and talk-fests every evening--I guess you’ll
find thirty-five or forty bones a week worth while!”
“I know, but--oh, I want to--contribute-- I wish I were working in a
settlement-house. I wonder if I could get one of the department-stores
to let me put in a welfare-department with a nice rest-room and chintzes
and wicker chairs and so on and so forth. Or I could--”
“Now you look here! The first thing you got to understand is that all
this uplift and flipflop and settlement-work and recreation is nothing
in God’s world but the entering wedge for socialism. The sooner a man
learns he isn’t going to be coddled, and he needn’t expect a lot of free
grub and, uh, all these free classes and flipflop and doodads for his
kids unless he earns ’em, why, the sooner he’ll get on the job and
produce--produce--produce! That’s what the country needs, and not all
this fancy stuff that just enfeebles the will-power of the working man
and gives his kids a lot of notions above their class. And you--if you’d
tend to business instead of fooling and fussing-- All the time! When I
was a young man I made up my mind what I wanted to do, and stuck to it
through thick and thin, and that’s why I’m where I am to-day, and-- Myra!
What do you let the girl chop the toast up into these dinky little
chunks for? Can’t get your fist onto ’em. Half cold, anyway!”
Ted Babbitt, junior in the great East Side High School, had been making
hiccup-like sounds of interruption. He blurted now, “Say, Rone, you
going to--”
Verona whirled. “Ted! Will you kindly not interrupt us when we’re
talking about serious matters!”
“Aw punk,” said Ted judicially. “Ever since somebody slipped up and let
you out of college, Ammonia, you been pulling these nut conversations
about what-nots and so-on-and-so-forths. Are you going to-- I want to use
the car to-night.”
Babbitt snorted, “Oh, you do! May want it myself!” Verona protested,
“Oh, you do, Mr. Smarty! I’m going to take it myself!” Tinka wailed,
“Oh, papa, you said maybe you’d drive us down to Rosedale!” and Mrs.
Babbitt, “Careful, Tinka, your sleeve is in the butter.” They glared,
and Verona hurled, “Ted, you’re a perfect pig about the car!”
“Course you’re not! Not a-tall!” Ted could be maddeningly bland. “You
just want to grab it off, right after dinner, and leave it in front of
some skirt’s house all evening while you sit and gas about lite’ature
and the highbrows you’re going to marry--if they only propose!”
“Well, Dad oughtn’t to _ever_ let you have it! You and those beastly
Jones boys drive like maniacs. The idea of your taking the turn on
Chautauqua Place at forty miles an hour!”
“Aw, where do you get that stuff! You’re so darn scared of the car that
you drive up-hill with the emergency brake on!”
“I do not! And you-- Always talking about how much you know about motors,
and Eunice Littlefield told me you said the battery fed the generator!”
“You--why, my good woman, you don’t know a generator from a
differential.” Not unreasonably was Ted lofty with her. He was a natural
mechanic, a maker and tinkerer of machines; he lisped in blueprints for
the blueprints came.
“That’ll do now!” Babbitt flung in mechanically, as he lighted the
gloriously satisfying first cigar of the day and tasted the exhilarating
drug of the _Advocate-Times_ headlines.
Ted negotiated: “Gee, honest, Rone, I don’t want to take the old boat,
but I promised couple o’ girls in my class I’d drive ’em down to the
rehearsal of the school chorus, and, gee, I don’t want to, but a
gentleman’s got to keep his social engagements.”
“Well, upon my word! You and your social engagements! In high school!”
“Oh, ain’t we select since we went to that hen college! Let me tell you
there isn’t a private school in the state that’s got as swell a bunch as
we got in Gamma Digamma this year. There’s two fellows that their dads
are millionaires. Say, gee, I ought to have a car of my own, like lots
of the fellows.”
Babbitt almost rose. “A car of your own! Don’t you want a yacht, and a
house and lot? That pretty nearly takes the cake! A boy that can’t pass
his Latin examinations, like any other boy ought to, and he expects me
to give him a motor-car, and I suppose a chauffeur, and an aeroplane
maybe, as a reward for the hard work he puts in going to the movies with
Eunice Littlefield! Well, when you see me giving you--”
Somewhat later, after diplomacies, Ted persuaded Verona to admit that
she was merely going to the Armory, that evening, to see the dog and cat
show. She was then, Ted planned, to park the car in front of the
candy-store across from the Armory and he would pick it up. There were
masterly arrangements regarding leaving the key, and having the gasoline
tank filled; and passionately, devotees of the Great God Motor, they
hymned the patch on the spare inner-tube, and the lost jack-handle.
Their truce dissolving, Ted observed that her friends were “a scream of
a bunch--stuck-up gabby four-flushers.” His friends, she indicated, were
“disgusting imitation sports, and horrid little shrieking ignorant
girls.” Further: “It’s disgusting of you to smoke cigarettes, and so on
and so forth, and those clothes you’ve got on this morning, they’re too
utterly ridiculous--honestly, simply disgusting.”
Ted balanced over to the low beveled mirror in the buffet, regarded his
charms, and smirked. His suit, the latest thing in Old Eli Togs, was
skin-tight, with skimpy trousers to the tops of his glaring tan boots, a
chorus-man waistline, pattern of an agitated check, and across the back
a belt which belted nothing. His scarf was an enormous black silk wad.
His flaxen hair was ice-smooth, pasted back without parting. When he
went to school he would add a cap with a long vizor like a shovel-blade.
Proudest of all was his waistcoat, saved for, begged for, plotted for; a
real Fancy Vest of fawn with polka dots of a decayed red, the points
astoundingly long. On the lower edge of it he wore a high-school
button, a class button, and a fraternity pin.
And none of it mattered. He was supple and swift and flushed; his eyes
(which he believed to be cynical) were candidly eager. But he was not
over-gentle. He waved his hand at poor dumpy Verona and drawled: “Yes, I
guess we’re pretty ridiculous and disgusticulus, and I rather guess our
new necktie is some smear!”
Babbitt barked: “It is! And while you’re admiring yourself, let me tell
you it might add to your manly beauty if you wiped some of that egg off
your mouth!”
Verona giggled, momentary victor in the greatest of Great Wars, which is
the family war. Ted looked at her hopelessly, then shrieked at Tinka:
“For the love o’ Pete, quit pouring the whole sugar bowl on your corn
flakes!”