Babbitt
“Say, Babbitt, while she’s away-- I know you don’t care much for
booze-fights, but the Missus and I’d be awfully glad if you could come
in some night. Think you could stand a good cocktail for once?”
“Stand it? Young fella, I bet old Uncle George can mix the best cocktail
in these United States!”
“Hurray! That’s the way to talk! Look here: There’s some folks coming to
the house to-night, Louetta Swanson and some other live ones, and I’m
going to open up a bottle of pre-war gin, and maybe we’ll dance a while.
Why don’t you drop in and jazz it up a little, just for a change?”
“Well-- What time they coming?”
He was at Sam Doppelbrau’s at nine. It was the third time he had entered
the house. By ten he was calling Mr. Doppelbrau “Sam, old hoss.”
At eleven they all drove out to the Old Farm Inn. Babbitt sat in the
back of Doppelbrau’s car with Louetta Swanson. Once he had timorously
tried to make love to her. Now he did not try; he merely made love; and
Louetta dropped her head on his shoulder, told him what a nagger Eddie
was, and accepted Babbitt as a decent and well-trained libertine.
With the assistance of Tanis’s Bunch, the Doppelbraus, and other
companions in forgetfulness, there was not an evening for two weeks when
he did not return home late and shaky. With his other faculties blurred
he yet had the motorist’s gift of being able to drive when he could
scarce walk; of slowing down at corners and allowing for approaching
cars. He came wambling into the house. If Verona and Kenneth Escott were
about, he got past them with a hasty greeting, horribly aware of their
level young glances, and hid himself up-stairs. He found when he came
into the warm house that he was hazier than he had believed. His head
whirled. He dared not lie down. He tried to soak out the alcohol in a
hot bath. For the moment his head was clearer but when he moved about
the bathroom his calculations of distance were wrong, so that he dragged
down the towels, and knocked over the soap-dish with a clatter which, he
feared, would betray him to the children. Chilly in his dressing-gown he
tried to read the evening paper. He could follow every word; he seemed
to take in the sense of things; but a minute afterward he could not have
told what he had been reading. When he went to bed his brain flew in
circles, and he hastily sat up, struggling for self-control. At last he
was able to lie still, feeling only a little sick and dizzy--and
enormously ashamed. To hide his “condition” from his own children! To
have danced and shouted with people whom he despised! To have said
foolish things, sung idiotic songs, tried to kiss silly girls!
Incredulously he remembered that he had by his roaring familiarity with
them laid himself open to the patronizing of youths whom he would have
kicked out of his office; that by dancing too ardently he had exposed
himself to rebukes from the rattiest of withering women. As it came
relentlessly back to him he snarled, “I hate myself! God how I hate
myself!” But, he raged, “I’m through! No more! Had enough, plenty!”
He was even surer about it the morning after, when he was trying to be
grave and paternal with his daughters at breakfast. At noontime he was
less sure. He did not deny that he had been a fool; he saw it almost as
clearly as at midnight; but anything, he struggled, was better than
going back to a life of barren heartiness. At four he wanted a drink. He
kept a whisky flask in his desk now, and after two minutes of battle he
had his drink. Three drinks later he began to see the Bunch as tender
and amusing friends, and by six he was with them... and the tale was to
be told all over.
Each morning his head ached a little less. A bad head for drinks had
been his safeguard, but the safeguard was crumbling. Presently he could
be drunk at dawn, yet not feel particularly wretched in his
conscience--or in his stomach--when he awoke at eight. No regret, no
desire to escape the toil of keeping up with the arduous merriment of
the Bunch, was so great as his feeling of social inferiority when he
failed to keep up. To be the “livest” of them was as much his ambition
now as it had been to excel at making money, at playing golf, at
motor-driving, at oratory, at climbing to the McKelvey set. But
occasionally he failed.
He found that Pete and the other young men considered the Bunch too
austerely polite and the Carrie who merely kissed behind doors too
embarrassingly monogamic. As Babbitt sneaked from Floral Heights down to
the Bunch, so the young gallants sneaked from the proprieties of the
Bunch off to “times” with bouncing young women whom they picked up in
department stores and at hotel coatrooms. Once Babbitt tried to
accompany them. There was a motor car, a bottle of whisky, and for him a
grubby shrieking cash-girl from Parcher and Stein’s. He sat beside her
and worried. He was apparently expected to “jolly her along,” but when
she sang out, “Hey, leggo, quit crushing me cootie-garage,” he did not
quite know how to go on. They sat in the back room of a saloon, and
Babbitt had a headache, was confused by their new slang, looked at them
benevolently, wanted to go home, and had a drink--a good many drinks.
Two evenings after, Fulton Bemis, the surly older man of the Bunch, took
Babbitt aside and grunted, “Look here, it’s none of my business, and God
knows I always lap up my share of the hootch, but don’t you think you
better watch yourself? You’re one of these enthusiastic chumps that
always overdo things. D’you realize you’re throwing in the booze as fast
as you can, and you eat one cigarette right after another? Better cut it
out for a while.”
Babbitt tearfully said that good old Fult was a prince, and yes, he
certainly would cut it out, and thereafter he lighted a cigarette and
took a drink and had a terrific quarrel with Tanis when she caught him
being affectionate with Carrie Nork.
Next morning he hated himself that he should have sunk into a position
where a fifteenth-rater like Fulton Bemis could rebuke him. He perceived
that, since he was making love to every woman possible, Tanis was no
longer his one pure star, and he wondered whether she had ever been
anything more to him than A Woman. And if Bemis had spoken to him, were
other people talking about him? He suspiciously watched the men at the
Athletic Club that noon. It seemed to him that they were uneasy. They
had been talking about him then? He was angry. He became belligerent. He
not only defended Seneca Doane but even made fun of the Y. M. C. A.
Vergil Gunch was rather brief in his answers.
Afterward Babbitt was not angry. He was afraid. He did not go to the
next lunch of the Boosters’ Club but hid in a cheap restaurant, and,
while he munched a ham-and-egg sandwich and sipped coffee from a cup on
the arm of his chair, he worried.
Four days later, when the Bunch were having one of their best parties,
Babbitt drove them to the skating-rink which had been laid out on the
Chaloosa River. After a thaw the streets had frozen in smooth ice. Down
those wide endless streets the wind rattled between the rows of wooden
houses, and the whole Bellevue district seemed a frontier town. Even
with skid chains on all four wheels, Babbitt was afraid of sliding, and
when he came to the long slide of a hill he crawled down, both brakes
on. Slewing round a corner came a less cautious car. It skidded, it
almost raked them with its rear fenders. In relief at their escape the
Bunch--Tanis, Minnie Sonntag, Pete, Fulton Bemis--shouted “Oh, baby,”
and waved their hands to the agitated other driver. Then Babbitt saw
Professor Pumphrey laboriously crawling up hill, afoot, staring owlishly
at the revelers. He was sure that Pumphrey recognized him and saw Tanis
kiss him as she crowed, “You’re such a good driver!”
At lunch next day he probed Pumphrey with “Out last night with my
brother and some friends of his. Gosh, what driving! Slippery’s glass.
Thought I saw you hiking up the Bellevue Avenue Hill.”
“No, I wasn’t-- I didn’t see you,” said Pumphrey, hastily, rather
guiltily.
Perhaps two days afterward Babbitt took Tanis to lunch at the Hotel
Thornleigh. She who had seemed well content to wait for him at her flat
had begun to hint with melancholy smiles that he must think but little
of her if he never introduced her to his friends, if he was unwilling to
be seen with her except at the movies. He thought of taking her to the
“ladies’ annex” of the Athletic Club, but that was too dangerous. He
would have to introduce her and, oh, people might misunderstand and-- He
compromised on the Thornleigh.
She was unusually smart, all in black: small black tricorne hat, short
black caracul coat, loose and swinging, and austere high-necked black
velvet frock at a time when most street costumes were like evening
gowns. Perhaps she was too smart. Every one in the gold and oak
restaurant of the Thornleigh was staring at her as Babbitt followed her
to a table. He uneasily hoped that the head-waiter would give them a
discreet place behind a pillar, but they were stationed on the center
aisle. Tanis seemed not to notice her admirers; she smiled at Babbitt
with a lavish “Oh, isn’t this nice! What a peppy-looking orchestra!”
Babbitt had difficulty in being lavish in return, for two tables away he
saw Vergil Gunch. All through the meal Gunch watched them, while Babbitt
watched himself being watched and lugubriously tried to keep from
spoiling Tanis’s gaiety. “I felt like a spree to-day,” she rippled. “I
love the Thornleigh, don’t you? It’s so live and yet so--so refined.”
He made talk about the Thornleigh, the service, the food, the people he
recognized in the restaurant, all but Vergil Gunch. There did not seem
to be anything else to talk of. He smiled conscientiously at her
fluttering jests; he agreed with her that Minnie Sonntag was “so hard to
get along with,” and young Pete “such a silly lazy kid, really just no
good at all.” But he himself had nothing to say. He considered telling
her his worries about Gunch, but--“oh, gosh, it was too much work to go
into the whole thing and explain about Verg and everything.”
He was relieved when he put Tanis on a trolley; he was cheerful in the
familiar simplicities of his office.
At four o’clock Vergil Gunch called on him.
Babbitt was agitated, but Gunch began in a friendly way:
“How’s the boy? Say, some of us are getting up a scheme we’d kind of
like to have you come in on.”
“Fine, Verg. Shoot.”
“You know during the war we had the Undesirable Element, the Reds and
walking delegates and just the plain common grouches, dead to rights,
and so did we for quite a while after the war, but folks forget about
the danger and that gives these cranks a chance to begin working
underground again, especially a lot of these parlor socialists. Well,
it’s up to the folks that do a little sound thinking to make a conscious
effort to keep bucking these fellows. Some guy back East has organized a
society called the Good Citizens’ League for just that purpose. Of
course the Chamber of Commerce and the American Legion and so on do a
fine work in keeping the decent people in the saddle, but they’re
devoted to so many other causes that they can’t attend to this one
problem properly. But the Good Citizens’ League, the G. C. L., they
stick right to it. Oh, the G. C. L. has to have some other ostensible
purposes--frinstance here in Zenith I think it ought to support the
park-extension project and the City Planning Committee--and then, too,
it should have a social aspect, being made up of the best people--have
dances and so on, especially as one of the best ways it can put the
kibosh on cranks is to apply this social boycott business to folks big
enough so you can’t reach ’em otherwise. Then if that don’t work, the G.