Babbitt
there and throw some of those young pups out of the house! They talk
down to me like I was the butler! I’d like to--”
“I know,” she sighed; “only everybody says, all the mothers tell me,
unless you stand for them, if you get angry because they go out to their
cars to have a drink, they won’t come to your house any more, and we
wouldn’t want Ted left out of things, would we?”
He announced that he would be enchanted to have Ted left out of things,
and hurried in to be polite, lest Ted be left out of things.
But, he resolved, if he found that the boys were drinking, he
would--well, he’d “hand ’em something that would surprise ’em.” While he
was trying to be agreeable to large-shouldered young bullies he was
earnestly sniffing at them. Twice he caught the reek of prohibition-time
whisky, but then, it was only twice--
Dr. Howard Littlefield lumbered in.
He had come, in a mood of solemn parental patronage, to look on. Ted and
Eunice were dancing, moving together like one body. Littlefield gasped.
He called Eunice. There was a whispered duologue, and Littlefield
explained to Babbitt that Eunice’s mother had a headache and needed her.
She went off in tears. Babbitt looked after them furiously. “That little
devil! Getting Ted into trouble! And Littlefield, the conceited old
gas-bag, acting like it was Ted that was the bad influence!”
Later he smelled whisky on Ted’s breath.
After the civil farewell to the guests, the row was terrific, a thorough
Family Scene, like an avalanche, devastating and without reticences.
Babbitt thundered, Mrs. Babbitt wept, Ted was unconvincingly defiant,
and Verona in confusion as to whose side she was taking.
For several months there was coolness between the Babbitts and the
Littlefields, each family sheltering their lamb from the wolf-cub next
door. Babbitt and Littlefield still spoke in pontifical periods about
motors and the senate, but they kept bleakly away from mention of their
families. Whenever Eunice came to the house she discussed with pleasant
intimacy the fact that she had been forbidden to come to the house; and
Babbitt tried, with no success whatever, to be fatherly and advisory
with her.
III
“Gosh all fishhooks!” Ted wailed to Eunice, as they wolfed hot
chocolate, lumps of nougat, and an assortment of glacé nuts, in the
mosaic splendor of the Royal Drug Store, “it gets me why Dad doesn’t
just pass out from being so poky. Every evening he sits there, about
half-asleep, and if Rone or I say, ‘Oh, come on, let’s do something,’ he
doesn’t even take the trouble to think about it. He just yawns and says,
‘Naw, this suits me right here.’ He doesn’t know there’s any fun going
on anywhere. I suppose he must do some thinking, same as you and I do,
but gosh, there’s no way of telling it. I don’t believe that outside of
the office and playing a little bum golf on Saturday he knows there’s
anything in the world to do except just keep sitting there--sitting
there every night--not wanting to go anywhere--not wanting to do
anything--thinking us kids are crazy--sitting there--Lord!”
IV
If he was frightened by Ted’s slackness, Babbitt was not sufficiently
frightened by Verona. She was too safe. She lived too much in the neat
little airless room of her mind. Kenneth Escott and she were always
under foot. When they were not at home, conducting their cautiously
radical courtship over sheets of statistics, they were trudging off to
lectures by authors and Hindu philosophers and Swedish lieutenants.
“Gosh,” Babbitt wailed to his wife, as they walked home from the
Fogartys’ bridge-party, “it gets me how Rone and that fellow can be so
poky. They sit there night after night, whenever he isn’t working, and
they don’t know there’s any fun in the world. All talk and
discussion--Lord! Sitting there--sitting there--night after night--not
wanting to do anything--thinking I’m crazy because I like to go out and
play a fist of cards--sitting there--gosh!”
Then round the swimmer, bored by struggling through the perpetual surf
of family life, new combers swelled.
V
Babbitt’s father-and mother-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Henry T. Thompson,
rented their old house in the Bellevue district and moved to the Hotel
Hatton, that glorified boarding-house filled with widows, red-plush
furniture, and the sound of ice-water pitchers. They were lonely there,
and every other Sunday evening the Babbitts had to dine with them, on
fricasseed chicken, discouraged celery, and cornstarch ice cream, and
afterward sit, polite and restrained, in the hotel lounge, while a young
woman violinist played songs from the German via Broadway.
Then Babbitt’s own mother came down from Catawba to spend three weeks.
She was a kind woman and magnificently uncomprehending. She
congratulated the convention-defying Verona on being a “nice, loyal
home-body without all these Ideas that so many girls seem to have
nowadays;” and when Ted filled the differential with grease, out of pure
love of mechanics and filthiness, she rejoiced that he was “so handy
around the house and helping his father and all, and not going out with
the girls all the time and trying to pretend he was a society fellow.”
Babbitt loved his mother, and sometimes he rather liked her, but he was
annoyed by her Christian Patience, and he was reduced to pulpiness when
she discoursed about a quite mythical hero called “Your Father”:
“You won’t remember it, Georgie, you were such a little fellow at the
time--my, I remember just how you looked that day, with your goldy
brown curls and your lace collar, you always were such a dainty child,
and kind of puny and sickly, and you loved pretty things so much and the
red tassels on your little bootees and all--and Your Father was taking
us to church and a man stopped us and said ‘Major’--so many of the
neighbors used to call Your Father ‘Major;’ of course he was only a
private in The War but everybody knew that was because of the jealousy
of his captain and he ought to have been a high-ranking officer, he had
that natural ability to command that so very, very few men have--and
this man came out into the road and held up his hand and stopped the
buggy and said, ‘Major,’ he said, ‘there’s a lot of the folks around
here that have decided to support Colonel Scanell for congress, and we
want you to join us. Meeting people the way you do in the store, you
could help us a lot.’
“Well, Your Father just looked at him and said, ‘I certainly shall do
nothing of the sort. I don’t like his politics,’ he said. Well, the
man--Captain Smith they used to call him, and heaven only knows why,
because he hadn’t the shadow or vestige of a right to be called
‘Captain’ or any other title--this Captain Smith said, ‘We’ll make it
hot for you if you don’t stick by your friends, Major.’ Well, you know
how Your Father was, and this Smith knew it too; he knew what a Real Man
he was, and he knew Your Father knew the political situation from A to
Z, and he ought to have seen that here was one man he couldn’t impose
on, but he went on trying to and hinting and trying till Your Father
spoke up and said to him, ‘Captain Smith,’ he said, ‘I have a reputation
around these parts for being one who is amply qualified to mind his own
business and let other folks mind theirs!’ and with that he drove on and
left the fellow standing there in the road like a bump on a log!”
Babbitt was most exasperated when she revealed his boyhood to the
children. He had, it seemed, been fond of barley-sugar; had worn the
“loveliest little pink bow in his curls” and corrupted his own name to
“Goo-goo.” He heard (though he did not officially hear) Ted admonishing
Tinka, “Come on now, kid; stick the lovely pink bow in your curls and
beat it down to breakfast, or Goo-goo will jaw your head off.”
Babbitt’s half-brother, Martin, with his wife and youngest baby, came
down from Catawba for two days. Martin bred cattle and ran the dusty
general-store. He was proud of being a freeborn independent American of
the good old Yankee stock; he was proud of being honest, blunt, ugly,
and disagreeable. His favorite remark was “How much did you pay for
that?” He regarded Verona’s books, Babbitt’s silver pencil, and flowers
on the table as citified extravagances, and said so. Babbitt would have
quarreled with him but for his gawky wife and the baby, whom Babbitt
teased and poked fingers at and addressed:
“I think this baby’s a bum, yes, sir, I think this little baby’s a bum,
he’s a bum, yes, sir, he’s a bum, that’s what he is, he’s a bum, this
baby’s a bum, he’s nothing but an old bum, that’s what he is--a bum!”
All the while Verona and Kenneth Escott held long inquiries into
epistemology; Ted was a disgraced rebel; and Tinka, aged eleven, was
demanding that she be allowed to go to the movies thrice a week, “like
all the girls.”
Babbitt raged, “I’m sick of it! Having to carry three generations. Whole
damn bunch lean on me. Pay half of mother’s income, listen to Henry T.,
listen to Myra’s worrying, be polite to Mart, and get called an old
grouch for trying to help the children. All of ’em depending on me and
picking on me and not a damn one of ’em grateful! No relief, and no
credit, and no help from anybody. And to keep it up for--good Lord, how
long?”
He enjoyed being sick in February; he was delighted by their
consternation that he, the rock, should give way.
He had eaten a questionable clam. For two days he was languorous and
petted and esteemed. He was allowed to snarl “Oh, let me alone!”
without reprisals. He lay on the sleeping-porch and watched the winter
sun slide along the taut curtains, turning their ruddy khaki to pale
blood red. The shadow of the draw-rope was dense black, in an enticing
ripple on the canvas. He found pleasure in the curve of it, sighed as
the fading light blurred it. He was conscious of life, and a little sad.
With no Vergil Gunches before whom to set his face in resolute optimism,
he beheld, and half admitted that he beheld, his way of life as
incredibly mechanical. Mechanical business--a brisk selling of badly
built houses. Mechanical religion--a dry, hard church, shut off from the
real life of the streets, inhumanly respectable as a top-hat. Mechanical
golf and dinner-parties and bridge and conversation. Save with Paul
Riesling, mechanical friendships--back-slapping and jocular, never
daring to essay the test of quietness.
He turned uneasily in bed.
He saw the years, the brilliant winter days and all the long sweet
afternoons which were meant for summery meadows, lost in such brittle
pretentiousness. He thought of telephoning about leases, of cajoling men
he hated, of making business calls and waiting in dirty anterooms--hat
on knee, yawning at fly-specked calendars, being polite to office-boys.
“I don’t hardly want to go back to work,” he prayed. “I’d like to-- I
don’t know.”
But he was back next day, busy and of doubtful temper.
CHAPTER XIX
I
The Zenith Street Traction Company planned to build car-repair shops in
the suburb of Dorchester, but when they came to buy the land they found
it held, on options, by the Babbitt-Thompson Realty Company. The
purchasing-agent, the first vice-president, and even the president of
the Traction Company protested against the Babbitt price. They mentioned
their duty toward stockholders, they threatened an appeal to the courts,
though somehow the appeal to the courts was never carried out and the
officials found it wiser to compromise with Babbitt. Carbon copies of
the correspondence are in the company’s files, where they may be viewed
by any public commission.
Just after this Babbitt deposited three thousand dollars in the bank,
the purchasing-agent of the Street Traction Company bought a five
thousand dollar car, the first vice-president built a home in Devon