Babbitt
clucking made him feel secure. But he could not drum up even a dutiful
“Oh, she doesn’t really need you, does she?” While he tried to look
regretful, while he felt that his wife was watching him, he was filled
with exultant visions of Tanis.
“Do you think I’d better go?” she said sharply.
“You’ve got to decide, honey; I can’t.”
She turned away, sighing, and his forehead was damp.
Till she went, four days later, she was curiously still, he cumbrously
affectionate. Her train left at noon. As he saw it grow small beyond the
train-shed he longed to hurry to Tanis.
“No, by golly, I won’t do that!” he vowed. “I won’t go near her for a
week!”
But he was at her flat at four.
III
He who had once controlled or seemed to control his life in a progress
unimpassioned but diligent and sane was for that fortnight borne on a
current of desire and very bad whisky and all the complications of new
acquaintances, those furious new intimates who demand so much more
attention than old friends. Each morning he gloomily recognized his
idiocies of the evening before. With his head throbbing, his tongue and
lips stinging from cigarettes, he incredulously counted the number of
drinks he had taken, and groaned, “I got to quit!” He had ceased saying,
“I _will_ quit!” for however resolute he might be at dawn, he could not,
for a single evening, check his drift.
He had met Tanis’s friends; he had, with the ardent haste of the
Midnight People, who drink and dance and rattle and are ever afraid to
be silent, been adopted as a member of her group, which they called “The
Bunch.” He first met them after a day when he had worked particularly
hard and when he hoped to be quiet with Tanis and slowly sip her
admiration.
From down the hall he could hear shrieks and the grind of a phonograph.
As Tanis opened the door he saw fantastic figures dancing in a haze of
cigarette smoke. The tables and chairs were against the wall.
“Oh, isn’t this dandy!” she gabbled at him. “Carrie Nork had the
loveliest idea. She decided it was time for a party, and she ’phoned the
Bunch and told ’em to gather round.... George, this is Carrie.”
“Carrie” was, in the less desirable aspects of both, at once matronly
and spinsterish. She was perhaps forty; her hair was an unconvincing
ash-blond; and if her chest was flat, her hips were ponderous. She
greeted Babbitt with a giggling “Welcome to our little midst! Tanis says
you’re a real sport.”
He was apparently expected to dance, to be boyish and gay with Carrie,
and he did his unforgiving best. He towed her about the room, bumping
into other couples, into the radiator, into chair-legs cunningly
ambushed. As he danced he surveyed the rest of the Bunch: A thin young
woman who looked capable, conceited, and sarcastic. Another woman whom
he could never quite remember. Three overdressed and slightly effeminate
young men--soda-fountain clerks, or at least born for that profession. A
man of his own age, immovable, self-satisfied, resentful of Babbitt’s
presence.
When he had finished his dutiful dance Tanis took him aside and begged,
“Dear, wouldn’t you like to do something for me? I’m all out of booze,
and the Bunch want to celebrate. Couldn’t you just skip down to Healey
Hanson’s and get some?”
“Sure,” he said, trying not to sound sullen.
“I’ll tell you: I’ll get Minnie Sonntag to drive down with you.” Tanis
was pointing to the thin, sarcastic young woman.
Miss Sonntag greeted him with an astringent “How d’you do, Mr. Babbitt.
Tanis tells me you’re a very prominent man, and I’m honored by being
allowed to drive with you. Of course I’m not accustomed to associating
with society people like you, so I don’t know how to act in such exalted
circles!”
Thus Miss Sonntag talked all the way down to Healey Hanson’s. To her
jibes he wanted to reply “Oh, go to the devil!” but he never quite
nerved himself to that reasonable comment. He was resenting the
existence of the whole Bunch. He had heard Tanis speak of “darling
Carrie” and “Min Sonntag--she’s so clever--you’ll adore her,” but they
had never been real to him. He had pictured Tanis as living in a
rose-tinted vacuum, waiting for him, free of all the complications of a
Floral Heights.
When they returned he had to endure the patronage of the young
soda-clerks. They were as damply friendly as Miss Sonntag was dryly
hostile. They called him “Old Georgie” and shouted, “Come on now, sport;
shake a leg” ... boys in belted coats, pimply boys, as young as Ted and
as flabby as chorus-men, but powerful to dance and to mind the
phonograph and smoke cigarettes and patronize Tanis. He tried to be one
of them; he cried “Good work, Pete!” but his voice creaked.
Tanis apparently enjoyed the companionship of the dancing darlings; she
bridled to their bland flirtation and casually kissed them at the end of
each dance. Babbitt hated her, for the moment. He saw her as
middle-aged. He studied the wrinkles in the softness of her throat, the
slack flesh beneath her chin. The taut muscles of her youth were loose
and drooping. Between dances she sat in the largest chair, waving her
cigarette, summoning her callow admirers to come and talk to her. (“She
thinks she’s a blooming queen!” growled Babbitt.) She chanted to Miss
Sonntag, “Isn’t my little studio sweet?” (“Studio, rats! It’s a plain
old-maid-and-chow-dog flat! Oh, God, I wish I was home! I wonder if I
can’t make a getaway now?”)
His vision grew blurred, however, as he applied himself to Healey
Hanson’s raw but vigorous whisky. He blended with the Bunch. He began to
rejoice that Carrie Nork and Pete, the most nearly intelligent of the
nimble youths, seemed to like him; and it was enormously important to
win over the surly older man, who proved to be a railway clerk named
Fulton Bemis.
The conversation of the Bunch was exclamatory, high-colored, full of
references to people whom Babbitt did not know. Apparently they thought
very comfortably of themselves. They were the Bunch, wise and beautiful
and amusing; they were Bohemians and urbanites, accustomed to all the
luxuries of Zenith: dance-halls, movie-theaters, and roadhouses; and in
a cynical superiority to people who were “slow” or “tightwad” they
cackled:
“Oh, Pete, did I tell you what that dub of a cashier said when I came in
late yesterday? Oh, it was per-fect-ly priceless!”
“Oh, but wasn’t T. D. stewed! Say, he was simply ossified! What did
Gladys say to him?”
“Think of the nerve of Bob Bickerstaff trying to get us to come to his
house! Say, the nerve of him! Can you beat it for nerve? Some nerve I
call it!”
“Did you notice how Dotty was dancing? Gee, wasn’t she the limit!”
Babbitt was to be heard sonorously agreeing with the once-hated Miss
Minnie Sonntag that persons who let a night go by without dancing to
jazz music were crabs, pikers, and poor fish; and he roared “You bet!”
when Mrs. Carrie Nork gurgled, “Don’t you love to sit on the floor? It’s
so Bohemian!” He began to think extremely well of the Bunch. When he
mentioned his friends Sir Gerald Doak, Lord Wycombe, William Washington
Eathorne, and Chum Frink, he was proud of their condescending interest.
He got so thoroughly into the jocund spirit that he didn’t much mind
seeing Tanis drooping against the shoulder of the youngest and milkiest
of the young men, and he himself desired to hold Carrie Nork’s pulpy
hand, and dropped it only because Tanis looked angry.
When he went home, at two, he was fully a member of the Bunch, and all
the week thereafter he was bound by the exceedingly straitened
conventions, the exceedingly wearing demands, of their life of pleasure
and freedom. He had to go to their parties; he was involved in the
agitation when everybody telephoned to everybody else that she hadn’t
meant what she’d said when she’d said that, and anyway, why was Pete
going around saying she’d said it?
Never was a Family more insistent on learning one another’s movements
than were the Bunch. All of them volubly knew, or indignantly desired to
know, where all the others had been every minute of the week. Babbitt
found himself explaining to Carrie or Fulton Bemis just what he had been
doing that he should not have joined them till ten o’clock, and
apologizing for having gone to dinner with a business acquaintance.
Every member of the Bunch was expected to telephone to every other
member at least once a week. “Why haven’t you called me up?” Babbitt was
asked accusingly, not only by Tanis and Carrie but presently by new
ancient friends, Jennie and Capitolina and Toots.
If for a moment he had seen Tanis as withering and sentimental, he lost
that impression at Carrie Nork’s dance. Mrs. Nork had a large house and
a small husband. To her party came all of the Bunch, perhaps thirty-five
of them when they were completely mobilized. Babbitt, under the name of
“Old Georgie,” was now a pioneer of the Bunch, since each month it
changed half its membership and he who could recall the prehistoric days
of a fortnight ago, before Mrs. Absolom, the food-demonstrator, had gone
to Indianapolis, and Mac had “got sore at” Minnie, was a venerable
leader and able to condescend to new Petes and Minnies and Gladyses.
At Carrie’s, Tanis did not have to work at being hostess. She was
dignified and sure, a clear fine figure in the black chiffon frock he
had always loved; and in the wider spaces of that ugly house Babbitt was
able to sit quietly with her. He repented of his first revulsion, mooned
at her feet, and happily drove her home. Next day he bought a violent
yellow tie, to make himself young for her. He knew, a little sadly, that
he could not make himself beautiful; he beheld himself as heavy, hinting
of fatness, but he danced, he dressed, he chattered, to be as young as
she was... as young as she seemed to be.
IV
As all converts, whether to a religion, love, or gardening, find as by
magic that though hitherto these hobbies have not seemed to exist, now
the whole world is filled with their fury, so, once he was converted to
dissipation, Babbitt discovered agreeable opportunities for it
everywhere.
He had a new view of his sporting neighbor, Sam Doppelbrau. The
Doppelbraus were respectable people, industrious people, prosperous
people, whose ideal of happiness was an eternal cabaret. Their life was
dominated by suburban bacchanalia of alcohol, nicotine, gasoline, and
kisses. They and their set worked capably all the week, and all week
looked forward to Saturday night, when they would, as they expressed it,
“throw a party;” and the thrown party grew noisier and noisier up to
Sunday dawn, and usually included an extremely rapid motor expedition to
nowhere in particular.
One evening when Tanis was at the theater, Babbitt found himself being
lively with the Doppelbraus, pledging friendship with men whom he had
for years privily denounced to Mrs. Babbitt as a “rotten bunch of
tin-horns that I wouldn’t go out with, not if they were the last people
on earth.” That evening he had sulkily come home and poked about in
front of the house, chipping off the walk the ice-clots, like fossil
footprints, made by the steps of passers-by during the recent snow.
Howard Littlefield came up snuffling.
“Still a widower, George?”
“Yump. Cold again to-night.”
“What do you hear from the wife?”
“She’s feeling fine, but her sister is still pretty sick.”
“Say, better come in and have dinner with us to-night, George.”
“Oh--oh, thanks. Have to go out.”
Suddenly he could not endure Littlefield’s recitals of the more
interesting statistics about totally uninteresting problems. He scraped
at the walk and grunted.
Sam Doppelbrau appeared.
“Evenin’, Babbitt. Working hard?”
“Yuh, lil exercise.”
“Cold enough for you to-night?”
“Well, just about.”
“Still a widower?”
“Uh-huh.”