Babbitt
During his shepherdhood an average of almost a hundred sin-weary
persons per year have declared their resolve to lead a new life and
have found a harbor of refuge and peace.
Everything zips at the Chatham Road Church. The subsidiary
organizations are keyed to the top-notch of efficiency. Dr. Drew is
especially keen on good congregational singing. Bright cheerful
hymns are used at every meeting, and the special Sing Services
attract lovers of music and professionals from all parts of the
city.
On the popular lecture platform as well as in the pulpit Dr. Drew
is a renowned word-painter, and during the course of the year he
receives literally scores of invitations to speak at varied
functions both here and elsewhere.
V
Babbitt let Dr. Drew know that he was responsible for this tribute. Dr.
Drew called him “brother,” and shook his hand a great many times.
During the meetings of the Advisory Committee, Babbitt had hinted that
he would be charmed to invite Eathorne to dinner, but Eathorne had
murmured, “So nice of you--old man, now--almost never go out.” Surely
Eathorne would not refuse his own pastor. Babbitt said boyishly to Drew:
“Say, doctor, now we’ve put this thing over, strikes me it’s up to the
dominie to blow the three of us to a dinner!”
“Bully! You bet! Delighted!” cried Dr. Drew, in his manliest way. (Some
one had once told him that he talked like the late President Roosevelt.)
“And, uh, say, doctor, be sure and get Mr. Eathorne to come. Insist on
it. It’s, uh-- I think he sticks around home too much for his own
health.”
Eathorne came.
It was a friendly dinner. Babbitt spoke gracefully of the stabilizing
and educational value of bankers to the community. They were, he said,
the pastors of the fold of commerce. For the first time Eathorne
departed from the topic of Sunday Schools, and asked Babbitt about the
progress of his business. Babbitt answered modestly, almost filially.
A few months later, when he had a chance to take part in the Street
Traction Company’s terminal deal, Babbitt did not care to go to his own
bank for a loan. It was rather a quiet sort of deal and, if it had come
out, the Public might not have understood. He went to his friend Mr.
Eathorne; he was welcomed, and received the loan as a private venture;
and they both profited in their pleasant new association.
After that, Babbitt went to church regularly, except on spring Sunday
mornings which were obviously meant for motoring. He announced to Ted,
“I tell you, boy, there’s no stronger bulwark of sound conservatism than
the evangelical church, and no better place to make friends who’ll help
you to gain your rightful place in the community than in your own
church-home!”
CHAPTER XVIII
I
Though he saw them twice daily, though he knew and amply discussed every
detail of their expenditures, yet for weeks together Babbitt was no more
conscious of his children than of the buttons on his coat-sleeves.
The admiration of Kenneth Escott made him aware of Verona.
She had become secretary to Mr. Gruensberg of the Gruensberg Leather
Company; she did her work with the thoroughness of a mind which reveres
details and never quite understands them; but she was one of the people
who give an agitating impression of being on the point of doing
something desperate--of leaving a job or a husband--without ever doing
it. Babbitt was so hopeful about Escott’s hesitant ardors that he became
the playful parent. When he returned from the Elks he peered coyly into
the living-room and gurgled, “Has our Kenny been here to-night?” He
never credited Verona’s protest, “Why, Ken and I are just good friends,
and we only talk about Ideas. I won’t have all this sentimental
nonsense, that would spoil everything.”
It was Ted who most worried Babbitt.
With conditions in Latin and English but with a triumphant record in
manual training, basket-ball, and the organization of dances, Ted was
struggling through his Senior year in the East Side High School. At home
he was interested only when he was asked to trace some subtle ill in the
ignition system of the car. He repeated to his tut-tutting father that
he did not wish to go to college or law-school, and Babbitt was equally
disturbed by this “shiftlessness” and by Ted’s relations with Eunice
Littlefield, next door.
Though she was the daughter of Howard Littlefield, that wrought-iron
fact-mill, that horse-faced priest of private ownership, Eunice was a
midge in the sun. She danced into the house, she flung herself into
Babbitt’s lap when he was reading, she crumpled his paper, and laughed
at him when he adequately explained that he hated a crumpled newspaper
as he hated a broken sales-contract. She was seventeen now. Her ambition
was to be a cinema actress. She did not merely attend the showing of
every “feature film;” she also read the motion-picture magazines, those
extraordinary symptoms of the Age of Pep--monthlies and weeklies
gorgeously illustrated with portraits of young women who had recently
been manicure girls, not very skilful manicure girls, and who, unless
their every grimace had been arranged by a director, could not have
acted in the Easter cantata of the Central Methodist Church; magazines
reporting, quite seriously, in “interviews” plastered with pictures of
riding-breeches and California bungalows, the views on sculpture and
international politics of blankly beautiful, suspiciously beautiful
young men; outlining the plots of films about pure prostitutes and
kind-hearted train-robbers; and giving directions for making bootblacks
into Celebrated Scenario Authors overnight.
These authorities Eunice studied. She could, she frequently did, tell
whether it was in November or December, 1905, that Mack Harker, the
renowned screen cowpuncher and badman, began his public career, as
chorus man in “Oh, You Naughty Girlie.” On the wall of her room, her
father reported, she had pinned up twenty-one photographs of actors. But
the signed portrait of the most graceful of the movie heroes she carried
in her young bosom.
Babbitt was bewildered by this worship of new gods, and he suspected
that Eunice smoked cigarettes. He smelled the cloying reek from
up-stairs, and heard her giggling with Ted. He never inquired. The
agreeable child dismayed him. Her thin and charming face was sharpened
by bobbed hair; her skirts were short, her stockings were rolled, and,
as she flew after Ted, above the caressing silk were glimpses of soft
knees which made Babbitt uneasy, and wretched that she should consider
him old. Sometimes, in the veiled life of his dreams, when the fairy
child came running to him she took on the semblance of Eunice
Littlefield.
Ted was motor-mad as Eunice was movie-mad.
A thousand sarcastic refusals did not check his teasing for a car of his
own. However lax he might be about early rising and the prosody of
Vergil, he was tireless in tinkering. With three other boys he bought a
rheumatic Ford chassis, built an amazing racer-body out of tin and pine,
went skidding round corners in the perilous craft, and sold it at a
profit. Babbitt gave him a motor-cycle, and every Saturday afternoon,
with seven sandwiches and a bottle of Coca-Cola in his pockets, and
Eunice perched eerily on the rumble seat, he went roaring off to distant
towns.
Usually Eunice and he were merely neighborhood chums, and quarreled with
a wholesome and violent lack of delicacy; but now and then, after the
color and scent of a dance, they were silent together and a little
furtive, and Babbitt was worried.
Babbitt was an average father. He was affectionate, bullying,
opinionated, ignorant, and rather wistful. Like most parents, he enjoyed
the game of waiting till the victim was clearly wrong, then virtuously
pouncing. He justified himself by croaking, “Well, Ted’s mother spoils
him. Got to be somebody who tells him what’s what, and me, I’m elected
the goat. Because I try to bring him up to be a real, decent, human
being and not one of these sapheads and lounge-lizards, of course they
all call me a grouch!”
Throughout, with the eternal human genius for arriving by the worst
possible routes at surprisingly tolerable goals, Babbitt loved his son
and warmed to his companionship and would have sacrificed everything for
him--if he could have been sure of proper credit.
II
Ted was planning a party for his set in the Senior Class.
Babbitt meant to be helpful and jolly about it. From his memory of
high-school pleasures back in Catawba he suggested the nicest games:
Going to Boston, and charades with stewpans for helmets, and word-games
in which you were an Adjective or a Quality. When he was most
enthusiastic he discovered that they weren’t paying attention; they were
only tolerating him. As for the party, it was as fixed and standardized
as a Union Club Hop. There was to be dancing in the living-room, a noble
collation in the dining-room, and in the hall two tables of bridge for
what Ted called “the poor old dumb-bells that you can’t get to dance
hardly more ’n half the time.”
Every breakfast was monopolized by conferences on the affair. No one
listened to Babbitt’s bulletins about the February weather or to his
throat-clearing comments on the headlines. He said furiously, “If I may
be _permitted_ to interrupt your engrossing private _conversation_-- Juh
hear what I _said_?”
“Oh, don’t be a spoiled baby! Ted and I have just as much right to talk
as you have!” flared Mrs. Babbitt.
On the night of the party he was permitted to look on, when he was not
helping Matilda with the Vecchia ice cream and the _petits fours_. He
was deeply disquieted. Eight years ago, when Verona had given a
high-school party, the children had been featureless babies. Now they
were men and women of the world, very supercilious men and women; the
boys condescended to Babbitt, they wore evening-clothes, and with
hauteur they accepted cigarettes from silver cases. Babbitt had heard
stories of what the Athletic Club called “goings-on” at young parties;
of girls “parking” their corsets in the dressing-room, of “cuddling” and
“petting,” and a presumable increase in what was known as Immorality.
To-night he believed the stories. These children seemed bold to him, and
cold. The girls wore misty chiffon, coral velvet, or cloth of gold, and
around their dipping bobbed hair were shining wreaths. He had it, upon
urgent and secret inquiry, that no corsets were known to be parked
upstairs; but certainly these eager bodies were not stiff with steel.
Their stockings were of lustrous silk, their slippers costly and
unnatural, their lips carmined and their eyebrows penciled. They danced
cheek to cheek with the boys, and Babbitt sickened with apprehension and
unconscious envy.
Worst of them all was Eunice Littlefield, and maddest of all the boys
was Ted. Eunice was a flying demon. She slid the length of the room; her
tender shoulders swayed; her feet were deft as a weaver’s shuttle; she
laughed, and enticed Babbitt to dance with her.
Then he discovered the annex to the party.
The boys and girls disappeared occasionally, and he remembered rumors of
their drinking together from hip-pocket flasks. He tiptoed round the
house, and in each of the dozen cars waiting in the street he saw the
points of light from cigarettes, from each of them heard high giggles.
He wanted to denounce them but (standing in the snow, peering round the
dark corner) he did not dare. He tried to be tactful. When he had
returned to the front hall he coaxed the boys, “Say, if any of you
fellows are thirsty, there’s some dandy ginger ale.”
“Oh! Thanks!” they condescended.
He sought his wife, in the pantry, and exploded, “I’d like to go in