Babbitt
He was startled to find Zilla in the room. She wore a black streaky gown
which she had tried to brighten with a girdle of crimson ribbon. The
ribbon had been torn and patiently mended. He noted this carefully,
because he did not wish to look at her shoulders. One shoulder was lower
than the other; one arm she carried in contorted fashion, as though it
were paralyzed; and behind a high collar of cheap lace there was a gouge
in the anemic neck which had once been shining and softly plump.
“Yes?” she said.
“Well, well, old Zilla! By golly, it’s good to see you again!”
“He can send his messages through a lawyer.”
“Why, rats, Zilla, I didn’t come just because of him. Came as an old
friend.”
“You waited long enough!”
“Well, you know how it is. Figured you wouldn’t want to see a friend of
his for quite some time and-- Sit down, honey! Let’s be sensible. We’ve
all of us done a bunch of things that we hadn’t ought to, but maybe we
can sort of start over again. Honest, Zilla, I’d like to do something to
make you both happy. Know what I thought to-day? Mind you, Paul doesn’t
know a thing about this--doesn’t know I was going to come see you. I got
to thinking: Zilla’s a fine, big-hearted woman, and she’ll understand
that, uh, Paul’s had his lesson now. Why wouldn’t it be a fine idea if
you asked the governor to pardon him? Believe he would, if it came from
you. No! Wait! Just think how good you’d feel if you were generous.”
“Yes, I wish to be generous.” She was sitting primly, speaking icily.
“For that reason I wish to keep him in prison, as an example to
evil-doers. I’ve gotten religion, George, since the terrible thing that
man did to me. Sometimes I used to be unkind, and I wished for worldly
pleasures, for dancing and the theater. But when I was in the hospital
the pastor of the Pentecostal Communion Faith used to come to see me,
and he showed me, right from the prophecies written in the Word of God,
that the Day of Judgment is coming and all the members of the older
churches are going straight to eternal damnation, because they only do
lip-service and swallow the world, the flesh, and the devil--”
For fifteen wild minutes she talked, pouring out admonitions to flee the
wrath to come, and her face flushed, her dead voice recaptured something
of the shrill energy of the old Zilla. She wound up with a furious:
“It’s the blessing of God himself that Paul should be in prison now, and
torn and humbled by punishment, so that he may yet save his soul, and so
other wicked men, these horrible chasers after women and lust, may have
an example.”
Babbitt had itched and twisted. As in church he dared not move during
the sermon so now he felt that he must seem attentive, though her
screeching denunciations flew past him like carrion birds.
He sought to be calm and brotherly:
“Yes, I know, Zilla. But gosh, it certainly is the essence of religion
to be charitable, isn’t it? Let me tell you how I figure it: What we
need in the world is liberalism, liberality, if we’re going to get
anywhere. I’ve always believed in being broad-minded and liberal--”
“You? Liberal?” It was very much the old Zilla. “Why, George Babbitt,
you’re about as broad-minded and liberal as a razor-blade!”
“Oh, I am, am I! Well, just let me tell you, just--let--me--tell--you,
I’m as by golly liberal as you are religious, anyway! _You religious!_”
“I am so! Our pastor says I sustain him in the faith!”
“I’ll bet you do! With Paul’s money! But just to show you how liberal I
am, I’m going to send a check for ten bucks to this Beecher Ingram,
because a lot of fellows are saying the poor cuss preaches sedition and
free love, and they’re trying to run him out of town.”
“And they’re right! They ought to run him out of town! Why, he
preaches--if you can call it preaching--in a theater, in the House of
Satan! You don’t know what it is to find God, to find peace, to behold
the snares that the devil spreads out for our feet. Oh, I’m so glad to
see the mysterious purposes of God in having Paul harm me and stop my
wickedness--and Paul’s getting his, good and plenty, for the cruel
things he did to me, and I hope he _dies_ in prison!”
Babbitt was up, hat in hand, growling, “Well, if that’s what you call
being at peace, for heaven’s sake just warn me before you go to war,
will you?”
III
Vast is the power of cities to reclaim the wanderer. More than mountains
or the shore-devouring sea, a city retains its character, imperturbable,
cynical, holding behind apparent changes its essential purpose. Though
Babbitt had deserted his family and dwelt with Joe Paradise in the
wilderness, though he had become a liberal, though he had been quite
sure, on the night before he reached Zenith, that neither he nor the
city would be the same again, ten days after his return he could not
believe that he had ever been away. Nor was it at all evident to his
acquaintances that there was a new George F. Babbitt, save that he was
more irritable under the incessant chaffing at the Athletic Club, and
once, when Vergil Gunch observed that Seneca Doane ought to be hanged,
Babbitt snorted, “Oh, rats, he’s not so bad.”
At home he grunted “Eh?” across the newspaper to his commentatory wife,
and was delighted by Tinka’s new red tam o’shanter, and announced, “No
class to that corrugated iron garage. Have to build me a nice frame
one.”
Verona and Kenneth Escott appeared really to be engaged. In his
newspaper Escott had conducted a pure-food crusade against
commission-houses. As a result he had been given an excellent job in a
commission-house, and he was making a salary on which he could marry,
and denouncing irresponsible reporters who wrote stories criticizing
commission-houses without knowing what they were talking about.
This September Ted had entered the State University as a freshman in the
College of Arts and Sciences. The university was at Mohalis, only
fifteen miles from Zenith, and Ted often came down for the week-end.
Babbitt was worried. Ted was “going in for” everything but books. He had
tried to “make” the football team as a light half-back, he was looking
forward to the basket-ball season, he was on the committee for the
Freshman Hop, and (as a Zenithite, an aristocrat among the yokels) he
was being “rushed” by two fraternities. But of his studies Babbitt could
learn nothing save a mumbled, “Oh, gosh, these old stiffs of teachers
just give you a lot of junk about literature and economics.”
One week-end Ted proposed, “Say, Dad, why can’t I transfer over from the
College to the School of Engineering and take mechanical engineering?
You always holler that I never study, but honest, I would study there.”
“No, the Engineering School hasn’t got the standing the College has,”
fretted Babbitt.
“I’d like to know how it hasn’t! The Engineers can play on any of the
teams!”
There was much explanation of the “dollars-and-cents value of being
known as a college man when you go into the law,” and a truly oratorical
account of the lawyer’s life. Before he was through with it, Babbitt had
Ted a United States Senator.
Among the great lawyers whom he mentioned was Seneca Doane.
“But, gee whiz,” Ted marveled, “I thought you always said this Doane was
a reg’lar nut!”
“That’s no way to speak of a great man! Doane’s always been a good
friend of mine--fact I helped him in college-- I started him out and you
might say inspired him. Just because he’s sympathetic with the aims of
Labor, a lot of chumps that lack liberality and broad-mindedness think
he’s a crank, but let me tell you there’s mighty few of ’em that rake in
the fees he does, and he’s a friend of some of the strongest, most
conservative men in the world--like Lord Wycombe, this, uh, this big
English nobleman that’s so well known. And you now, which would you
rather do: be in with a lot of greasy mechanics and laboring-men, or
chum up to a real fellow like Lord Wycombe, and get invited to his house
for parties?”
“Well--gosh,” sighed Ted.
The next week-end he came in joyously with, “Say, Dad, why couldn’t I
take mining engineering instead of the academic course? You talk about
standing--maybe there isn’t much in mechanical engineering, but the
Miners, gee, they got seven out of eleven in the new elections to Nu Tau
Tau!”
CHAPTER XXVII
I
The strike which turned Zenith into two belligerent camps, white and
red, began late in September with a walk-out of telephone girls and
linemen, in protest against a reduction of wages. The newly formed union
of dairy-products workers went out, partly in sympathy and partly in
demand for a forty-four hour week. They were followed by the
truck-drivers’ union. Industry was tied up, and the whole city was
nervous with talk of a trolley strike, a printers’ strike, a general
strike. Furious citizens, trying to get telephone calls through
strike-breaking girls, danced helplessly. Every truck that made its way
from the factories to the freight-stations was guarded by a policeman,
trying to look stoical beside the scab driver. A line of fifty trucks
from the Zenith Steel and Machinery Company was attacked by
strikers--rushing out from the sidewalk, pulling drivers from the seats,
smashing carburetors and commutators, while telephone girls cheered from
the walk, and small boys heaved bricks.
The National Guard was ordered out. Colonel Nixon, who in private life
was Mr. Caleb Nixon, secretary of the Pullmore Tractor Company, put on a
long khaki coat and stalked through crowds, a .44 automatic in hand.
Even Babbitt’s friend, Clarence Drum the shoe merchant--a round and
merry man who told stories at the Athletic Club, and who strangely
resembled a Victorian pug-dog--was to be seen as a waddling but
ferocious captain, with his belt tight about his comfortable little
belly, and his round little mouth petulant as he piped to chattering
groups on corners. “Move on there now! I can’t have any of this
loitering!”
Every newspaper in the city, save one, was against the strikers. When
mobs raided the news-stands, at each was stationed a militiaman, a
young, embarrassed citizen-soldier with eye-glasses, bookkeeper or
grocery-clerk in private life, trying to look dangerous while small boys
yelped, “Get onto de tin soldier!” and striking truck-drivers inquired
tenderly, “Say, Joe, when I was fighting in France, was you in camp in
the States or was you doing Swede exercises in the Y. M. C. A.? Be
careful of that bayonet, now, or you’ll cut yourself!”
There was no one in Zenith who talked of anything but the strike, and no
one who did not take sides. You were either a courageous friend of
Labor, or you were a fearless supporter of the Rights of Property; and
in either case you were belligerent, and ready to disown any friend who
did not hate the enemy.
A condensed-milk plant was set afire--each side charged it to the
other--and the city was hysterical.
And Babbitt chose this time to be publicly liberal.
He belonged to the sound, sane, right-thinking wing, and at first he
agreed that the Crooked Agitators ought to be shot. He was sorry when
his friend, Seneca Doane, defended arrested strikers, and he thought of
going to Doane and explaining about these agitators, but when he read a
broadside alleging that even on their former wages the telephone girls
had been hungry, he was troubled. “All lies and fake figures,” he said,
but in a doubtful croak.
For the Sunday after, the Chatham Road Presbyterian Church announced a
sermon by Dr. John Jennison Drew on “How the Saviour Would End Strikes.”
Babbitt had been negligent about church-going lately, but he went to the
service, hopeful that Dr. Drew really did have the information as to
what the divine powers thought about strikes. Beside Babbitt in the