Babbitt
C. L. can finally send a little delegation around to inform folks that
get too flip that they got to conform to decent standards and quit
shooting off their mouths so free. Don’t it sound like the organization
could do a great work? We’ve already got some of the strongest men in
town, and of course we want you in. How about it?”
Babbitt was uncomfortable. He felt a compulsion back to all the
standards he had so vaguely yet so desperately been fleeing. He fumbled:
“I suppose you’d especially light on fellows like Seneca Doane and try
to make ’em--”
“You bet your sweet life we would! Look here, old Georgie: I’ve never
for one moment believed you meant it when you’ve defended Doane, and the
strikers and so on, at the Club. I knew you were simply kidding those
poor galoots like Sid Finkelstein.... At least I certainly hope you were
kidding!”
“Oh, well--sure-- Course you might say--” Babbitt was conscious of how
feeble he sounded, conscious of Gunch’s mature and relentless eye.
“Gosh, you know where I stand! I’m no labor agitator! I’m a business
man, first, last, and all the time! But--but honestly, I don’t think
Doane means so badly, and you got to remember he’s an old friend of
mine.”
“George, when it comes right down to a struggle between decency and the
security of our homes on the one hand, and red ruin and those lazy dogs
plotting for free beer on the other, you got to give up even old
friendships. ‘He that is not with me is against me.’”
“Ye-es, I suppose--”
“How about it? Going to join us in the Good Citizens’ League?”
“I’ll have to think it over, Verg.”
“All right, just as you say.” Babbitt was relieved to be let off so
easily, but Gunch went on: “George, I don’t know what’s come over you;
none of us do; and we’ve talked a lot about you. For a while we figured
out you’d been upset by what happened to poor Riesling, and we forgave
you for any fool things you said, but that’s old stuff now, George, and
we can’t make out what’s got into you. Personally, I’ve always defended
you, but I must say it’s getting too much for me. All the boys at the
Athletic Club and the Boosters’ are sore, the way you go on deliberately
touting Doane and his bunch of hell-hounds, and talking about being
liberal--which means being wishy-washy--and even saying this preacher
guy Ingram isn’t a professional free-love artist. And then the way you
been carrying on personally! Joe Pumphrey says he saw you out the other
night with a gang of totties, all stewed to the gills, and here to-day
coming right into the Thornleigh with a--well, she may be all right and
a perfect lady, but she certainly did look like a pretty gay skirt for a
fellow with his wife out of town to be taking to lunch. Didn’t look
well. What the devil has come over you, George?”
“Strikes me there’s a lot of fellows that know more about my personal
business than I do myself!”
“Now don’t go getting sore at me because I come out flatfooted like a
friend and say what I think instead of tattling behind your back, the
way a whole lot of ’em do. I tell you, George, you got a position in the
community, and the community expects you to live up to it. And-- Better
think over joining the Good Citizens’ League. See you about it later.”
He was gone.
That evening Babbitt dined alone. He saw all the Clan of Good Fellows
peering through the restaurant window, spying on him. Fear sat beside
him, and he told himself that to-night he would not go to Tanis’s flat;
and he did not go... till late.
CHAPTER XXX
I
The summer before, Mrs. Babbitt’s letters had crackled with desire to
return to Zenith. Now they said nothing of returning, but a wistful “I
suppose everything is going on all right without me” among her dry
chronicles of weather and sicknesses hinted to Babbitt that he hadn’t
been very urgent about her coming. He worried it:
“If she were here, and I went on raising cain like I been doing, she’d
have a fit. I got to get hold of myself. I got to learn to play around
and yet not make a fool of myself. I can do it, too, if folks like Verg
Gunch’ll let me alone, and Myra’ll stay away. But--poor kid, she sounds
lonely. Lord, I don’t want to hurt her!”
Impulsively he wrote that they missed her, and her next letter said
happily that she was coming home.
He persuaded himself that he was eager to see her. He bought roses for
the house, he ordered squab for dinner, he had the car cleaned and
polished. All the way home from the station with her he was adequate in
his accounts of Ted’s success in basket-ball at the university, but
before they reached Floral Heights there was nothing more to say, and
already he felt the force of her stolidity, wondered whether he could
remain a good husband and still sneak out of the house this evening for
half an hour with the Bunch. When he had housed the car he blundered
upstairs, into the familiar talcum-scented warmth of her presence,
blaring, “Help you unpack your bag?”
“No, I can do it.”
Slowly she turned, holding up a small box, and slowly she said, “I
brought you a present, just a new cigar-case. I don’t know if you’d care
to have it--”
She was the lonely girl, the brown appealing Myra Thompson, whom he had
married, and he almost wept for pity as he kissed her and besought, “Oh,
honey, honey, _care_ to have it? Of course I do! I’m awful proud you
brought it to me. And I needed a new case badly.”
He wondered how he would get rid of the case he had bought the week
before.
“And you really are glad to see me back?”
“Why, you poor kiddy, what you been worrying about?”
“Well, you didn’t seem to miss me very much.”
By the time he had finished his stint of lying they were firmly bound
again. By ten that evening it seemed improbable that she had ever been
away. There was but one difference: the problem of remaining a
respectable husband, a Floral Heights husband, yet seeing Tanis and the
Bunch with frequency. He had promised to telephone to Tanis that
evening, and now it was melodramatically impossible. He prowled about
the telephone, impulsively thrusting out a hand to lift the receiver,
but never quite daring to risk it. Nor could he find a reason for
slipping down to the drug store on Smith Street, with its
telephone-booth. He was laden with responsibility till he threw it off
with the speculation: “Why the deuce should I fret so about not being
able to ’phone Tanis? She can get along without me. I don’t owe her
anything. She’s a fine girl, but I’ve given her just as much as she has
me.... Oh, damn these women and the way they get you all tied up in
complications!”
II
For a week he was attentive to his wife, took her to the theater, to
dinner at the Littlefields’; then the old weary dodging and shifting
began, and at least two evenings a week he spent with the Bunch. He
still made pretense of going to the Elks and to committee-meetings but
less and less did he trouble to have his excuses interesting, less and
less did she affect to believe them. He was certain that she knew he was
associating with what Floral Heights called “a sporty crowd,” yet
neither of them acknowledged it. In matrimonial geography the distance
between the first mute recognition of a break and the admission thereof
is as great as the distance between the first naïve faith and the first
doubting.
As he began to drift away he also began to see her as a human being, to
like and dislike her instead of accepting her as a comparatively movable
part of the furniture, and he compassionated that husband-and-wife
relation which, in twenty-five years of married life, had become a
separate and real entity. He recalled their high lights: the summer
vacation in Virginia meadows under the blue wall of the mountains; their
motor tour through Ohio, and the exploration of Cleveland, Cincinnati,
and Columbus; the birth of Verona; their building of this new house,
planned to comfort them through a happy old age--chokingly they had said
that it might be the last home either of them would ever have. Yet his
most softening remembrance of these dear moments did not keep him from
barking at dinner, “Yep, going out f’ few hours. Don’t sit up for me.”
He did not dare now to come home drunk, and though he rejoiced in his
return to high morality and spoke with gravity to Pete and Fulton Bemis
about their drinking, he prickled at Myra’s unexpressed criticisms and
sulkily meditated that a “fellow couldn’t ever learn to handle himself
if he was always bossed by a lot of women.”
He no longer wondered if Tanis wasn’t a bit worn and sentimental. In
contrast to the complacent Myra he saw her as swift and air-borne and
radiant, a fire-spirit tenderly stooping to the hearth, and however
pitifully he brooded on his wife, he longed to be with Tanis.
Then Mrs. Babbitt tore the decent cloak from her unhappiness and the
astounded male discovered that she was having a small determined
rebellion of her own.
III
They were beside the fireless fire-place, in the evening.
“Georgie,” she said, “you haven’t given me the list of your household
expenses while I was away.”
“No, I-- Haven’t made it out yet.” Very affably: “Gosh, we must try to
keep down expenses this year.”
“That’s so. I don’t know where all the money goes to. I try to
economize, but it just seems to evaporate.”
“I suppose I oughtn’t to spend so much on cigars. Don’t know but what
I’ll cut down my smoking, maybe cut it out entirely. I was thinking of a
good way to do it, the other day: start on these cubeb cigarettes, and
they’d kind of disgust me with smoking.”
“Oh, I do wish you would! It isn’t that I care, but honestly, George, it
is so bad for you to smoke so much. Don’t you think you could reduce the
amount? And George-- I notice now, when you come home from these lodges
and all, that sometimes you smell of whisky. Dearie, you know I don’t
worry so much about the moral side of it, but you have a weak stomach
and you can’t stand all this drinking.”
“Weak stomach, hell! I guess I can carry my booze about as well as most
folks!”
“Well, I do think you ought to be careful. Don’t you see, dear, I don’t
want you to get sick.”
“Sick, rats! I’m not a baby! I guess I ain’t going to get sick just
because maybe once a week I shoot a highball! That’s the trouble with
women. They always exaggerate so.”
“George, I don’t think you ought to talk that way when I’m just speaking
for your own good.”
“I know, but gosh all fishhooks, that’s the trouble with women! They’re
always criticizing and commenting and bringing things up, and then they
say it’s ‘for your own good’!”
“Why, George, that’s not a nice way to talk, to answer me so short.”
“Well, I didn’t mean to answer short, but gosh, talking as if I was a
kindergarten brat, not able to tote one highball without calling for the
St. Mary’s ambulance! A fine idea you must have of me!”
“Oh, it isn’t that; it’s just-- I don’t want to see you get sick and-- My,
I didn’t know it was so late! Don’t forget to give me those household
accounts for the time while I was away.”
“Oh, thunder, what’s the use of taking the trouble to make ’em out now?
Let’s just skip ’em for that period.”
“Why, George Babbitt, in all the years we’ve been married we’ve never
failed to keep a complete account of every penny we’ve spent!”
“No. Maybe that’s the trouble with us.”
“What in the world do you mean?”
“Oh, I don’t mean anything, only-- Sometimes I get so darn sick and tired
of all this routine and the accounting at the office and expenses at
home and fussing and stewing and fretting and wearing myself out
worrying over a lot of junk that doesn’t really mean a doggone thing,
and being so careful and-- Good Lord, what do you think I’m made for? I
could have been a darn good orator, and here I fuss and fret and
worry--”