Hesolemnly finished the last copy of theAmerican Magazine, while his wife sighed, laid away her darning, and looked enviously at the lingerie designs in a women’s magazine. The room was very still.
It was a room which observed the best Floral Heights standards. The gray walls were divided into artificial paneling by strips of white-enameled pine. From the Babbitts’ former house had come two much-carved rocking-chairs, but the other chairs were new, very deep and restful, upholstered in blue and gold-striped velvet. A blue velvet davenport faced the fireplace, and behind it was a cherrywood table and a tall piano-lamp with a shade of golden silk. (Two out of every three houses in Floral Heights had before the fireplace a davenport, a mahogany table real or imitation, and a piano-lamp or a reading-lamp with a shade of yellow or rose silk.)
On the table was a runner of gold-threaded Chinese fabric, four magazines, a silver box containing cigarette-crumbs, and three “gift-books”—large, expensive editions of fairy-tales illustrated by English artists and as yet unread by any Babbitt save Tinka.
In a corner by the front windows was a large cabinet Victrola. (Eight out of every nine Floral Heights houses had a cabinet phonograph.)
Among the pictures, hung in the exact center of each gray panel, were a red and black imitation English hunting-print, an anemic imitation boudoir-print with a French caption of whose morality Babbitt had always been rather suspicious, and a “hand-colored” photograph of a Colonial room—rag rug,maiden spinning, cat demure before a white fireplace. (Nineteen out of every twenty houses in Floral Heights had either a hunting-print, aMadame Fait la Toiletteprint, a colored photograph of a New England house, a photograph of a Rocky Mountain, or all four.)
It was a room as superior in comfort to the “parlor” of Babbitt’s boyhood as his motor was superior to his father’s buggy. Though there was nothing in the room that was interesting, there was nothing that was offensive. It was as neat, and as negative, as a block of artificial ice. The fireplace was unsoftened by downy ashes or by sooty brick; the brass fire-irons were of immaculate polish; and the grenadier andirons were like samples in a shop, desolate, unwanted, lifeless things of commerce.
Against the wall was a piano, with another piano-lamp, but no one used it save Tinka. The hard briskness of the phonograph contented them; their store of jazz records made them feel wealthy and cultured; and all they knew of creating music was the nice adjustment of a bamboo needle. The books on the table were unspotted and laid in rigid parallels; not one corner of the carpet-rug was curled; and nowhere was there a hockey-stick, a torn picture-book, an old cap, or a gregarious and disorganizing dog.
At home, Babbitt never read with absorption. He was concentrated enough at the office but here he crossed his legs and fidgeted. When his story was interesting he read the best, that is the funniest, paragraphs to his wife; when it did not hold him he coughed, scratched his ankles and his right ear, thrust his left thumb into his vest pocket, jingled his silver, whirled the cigar-cutter and the keys on one end of his watch-chain, yawned, rubbed his nose, and found errands to do. He went upstairs to put on his slippers—his elegant slippersof seal-brown, shaped like medieval shoes. He brought up an apple from the barrel which stood by the trunk-closet in the basement.
“An apple a day keeps the doctor away,” he enlightened Mrs. Babbitt, for quite the first time in fourteen hours.
“That’s so.”
“An apple is Nature’s best regulator.”
“Yes, it—”
“Trouble with women is, they never have sense enough to form regular habits.”
“Well, I—”
“Always nibbling and eating between meals.”
“George!” She looked up from her reading. “Did you have a light lunch to-day, like you were going to? I did!”
This malicious and unprovoked attack astounded him. “Well, maybe it wasn’t as light as— Went to lunch with Paul and didn’t have much chance to diet. Oh, you needn’t to grin like a chessy cat! If it wasn’t for me watching out and keeping an eye on our diet— I’m the only member of this family that appreciates the value of oatmeal for breakfast. I—”
She stooped over her story while he piously sliced and gulped down the apple, discoursing:
“One thing I’ve done: cut down my smoking.
“Had kind of a run-in with Graff in the office. He’s getting too darn fresh. I’ll stand for a good deal, but once in a while I got to assert my authority, and I jumped him. ‘Stan,’ I said— Well, I told him just exactly where he got off.
“Funny kind of a day. Makes you feel restless.
“Wellllllllll, uh—” That sleepiest sound in the world, the terminal yawn. Mrs. Babbitt yawned with it, and looked grateful as he droned, “How about going to bed, eh? Don’t suppose Rone and Ted will be in till all hours. Yep, funny kind of a day; not terribly warm but yet— Gosh, I’d like— Some day I’m going to take a long motor trip.”
“Yes, we’d enjoy that,” she yawned.
He looked away from her as he realized that he did not wish to have her go with him. As he locked doors and tried windows and set the heat regulator so that the furnace-drafts would open automatically in the morning, he sighed a little, heavy with a lonely feeling which perplexed and frightened him. So absent-minded was he that he could not remember which window-catches he had inspected, and through the darkness, fumbling at unseen perilous chairs, he crept back to try them all over again. His feet were loud on the steps as he clumped upstairs at the end of this great and treacherous day of veiled rebellions.
Before breakfast he always reverted to up-state village boyhood, and shrank from the complex urban demands of shaving, bathing, deciding whether the current shirt was clean enough for another day. Whenever he stayed home in the evening he went to bed early, and thriftily got ahead in those dismal duties. It was his luxurious custom to shave while sitting snugly in a tubful of hot water. He may be viewed to-night as a plump, smooth, pink, baldish, podgy goodman, robbed of the importance of spectacles, squatting in breast-high water, scraping his lather-smeared cheeks with a safety-razor like a tiny lawn-mower, and with melancholy dignity clawing through the water to recover a slippery and active piece of soap.
He was lulled to dreaming by the caressing warmth. The light fell on the inner surface of the tub in a pattern of delicate wrinkled lines which slipped with a green sparkle over the curving porcelain as the clear water trembled. Babbitt lazily watched it; noted that along the silhouette of his legs against the radiance on the bottom of the tub, the shadows of the air-bubbles clinging to the hairs were reproduced as strange jungle mosses. He patted the water, and the reflected lightcapsized and leaped and volleyed. He was content and childish. He played. He shaved a swath down the calf of one plump leg.
The drain-pipe was dripping, a dulcet and lively song: drippety drip drip dribble, drippety drip drip drip. He was enchanted by it. He looked at the solid tub, the beautiful nickel taps, the tiled walls of the room, and felt virtuous in the possession of this splendor.
He roused himself and spoke gruffly to his bath-things. “Come here! You’ve done enough fooling!” he reproved the treacherous soap, and defied the scratchy nail-brush with “Oh, you would, would you!” He soaped himself, and rinsed himself, and austerely rubbed himself; he noted a hole in the Turkish towel, and meditatively thrust a finger through it, and marched back to the bedroom, a grave and unbending citizen.
There was a moment of gorgeous abandon, a flash of melodrama such as he found in traffic-driving, when he laid out a clean collar, discovered that it was frayed in front, and tore it up with a magnificent yeeeeeing sound.
Most important of all was the preparation of his bed and the sleeping-porch.
It is not known whether he enjoyed his sleeping-porch because of the fresh air or because it was the standard thing to have a sleeping-porch.
Just as he was an Elk, a Booster, and a member of the Chamber of Commerce, just as the priests of the Presbyterian Church determined his every religious belief and the senators who controlled the Republican Party decided in little smoky rooms in Washington what he should think about disarmament, tariff, and Germany, so did the large national advertisers fix the surface of his life, fix what he believed to be his individuality. These standard advertised wares—toothpastes, socks, tires, cameras, instantaneous hot-water heaters—were his symbols and proofs of excellence; at first the signs, then the substitutes, for joy and passion and wisdom.
But none of these advertised tokens of financial and social success was more significant than a sleeping-porch with a sun-parlor below.
The rites of preparing for bed were elaborate and unchanging. The blankets had to be tucked in at the foot of his cot. (Also, the reason why the maid hadn’t tucked in the blankets had to be discussed with Mrs. Babbitt.) The rag rug was adjusted so that his bare feet would strike it when he arose in the morning. The alarm clock was wound. The hot-water bottle was filled and placed precisely two feet from the bottom of the cot.
These tremendous undertakings yielded to his determination; one by one they were announced to Mrs. Babbitt and smashed through to accomplishment. At last his brow cleared, and in his “Gnight!” rang virile power. But there was yet need of courage. As he sank into sleep, just at the first exquisite relaxation, the Doppelbrau car came home. He bounced into wakefulness, lamenting, “Why the devil can’t some people never get to bed at a reasonable hour?” So familiar was he with the process of putting up his own car that he awaited each step like an able executioner condemned to his own rack.
The car insultingly cheerful on the driveway. The car door opened and banged shut, then the garage door slid open, grating on the sill, and the car door again. The motor raced for the climb up into the garage and raced once more, explosively, before it was shut off. A final opening and slamming of the car door. Silence then, a horrible silence filled with waiting, till the leisurely Mr. Doppelbrau had examined the state of his tires and had at last shut the garage door. Instantly, for Babbitt, a blessed state of oblivion.
At that moment in the city of Zenith, Horace Updike was making love to Lucile McKelvey in her mauve drawing-roomon Royal Ridge, after their return from a lecture by an eminent English novelist. Updike was Zenith’s professional bachelor; a slim-waisted man of forty-six with an effeminate voice and taste in flowers, cretonnes, and flappers. Mrs. McKelvey was red-haired, creamy, discontented, exquisite, rude, and honest. Updike tried his invariable first maneuver—touching her nervous wrist.
“Don’t be an idiot!” she said.
“Do you mind awfully?”
“No! That’s what I mind!”
He changed to conversation. He was famous at conversation. He spoke reasonably of psychoanalysis, Long Island polo, and the Ming platter he had found in Vancouver. She promised to meet him in Deauville, the coming summer, “though,” she sighed, “it’s becoming too dreadfully banal; nothing but Americans and frowsy English baronesses.”
And at that moment in Zenith, a cocaine-runner and a prostitute were drinking cocktails in Healey Hanson’s saloon on Front Street. Since national prohibition was now in force, and since Zenith was notoriously law-abiding, they were compelled to keep the cocktails innocent by drinking them out of tea-cups. The lady threw her cup at the cocaine-runner’s head. He worked his revolver out of the pocket in his sleeve, and casually murdered her.
At that moment in Zenith, two men sat in a laboratory. For thirty-seven hours now they had been working on a report of their investigations of synthetic rubber.
At that moment in Zenith, there was a conference of four union officials as to whether the twelve thousand coal-miners within a hundred miles of the city should strike. Of these men one resembled a testy and prosperous grocer, one a Yankee carpenter, one a soda-clerk, and one a Russian Jewish actor. The Russian Jew quoted Kautsky, Gene Debs, and Abraham Lincoln.
At that moment a G. A. R. veteran was dying. He hadcome from the Civil War straight to a farm which, though it was officially within the city-limits of Zenith, was primitive as the backwoods. He had never ridden in a motor car, never seen a bath-tub, never read any book save the Bible, McGuffey’s readers, and religious tracts; and he believed that the earth is flat, that the English are the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel, and that the United States is a democracy.
At that moment the steel and cement town which composed the factory of the Pullmore Tractor Company of Zenith was running on night shift to fill an order of tractors for the Polish army. It hummed like a million bees, glared through its wide windows like a volcano. Along the high wire fences, searchlights played on cinder-lined yards, switch-tracks, and armed guards on patrol.
At that moment Mike Monday was finishing a meeting. Mr. Monday, the distinguished evangelist, the best-known Protestant pontiff in America, had once been a prize-fighter. Satan had not dealt justly with him. As a prize-fighter he gained nothing but his crooked nose, his celebrated vocabulary, and his stage-presence. The service of the Lord had been more profitable. He was about to retire with a fortune. It had been well earned, for, to quote his last report, “Rev. Mr. Monday, the Prophet with a Punch, has shown that he is the world’s greatest salesman of salvation, and that by efficient organization the overhead of spiritual regeneration may be kept down to an unprecedented rock-bottom basis. He has converted over two hundred thousand lost and priceless souls at an average cost of less than ten dollars a head.”
Of the larger cities of the land, only Zenith had hesitated to submit its vices to Mike Monday and his expert reclamation corps. The more enterprising organizations of the city had voted to invite him— Mr. George F. Babbitt had once praised him in a speech at the Boosters’ Club. But there was opposition from certain Episcopalian and Congregationalist ministers, those renegades whom Mr. Monday so finely called“a bunch of gospel-pushers with dish-water instead of blood, a gang of squealers that need more dust on the knees of their pants and more hair on their skinny old chests.” This opposition had been crushed when the secretary of the Chamber of Commerce had reported to a committee of manufacturers that in every city where he had appeared, Mr. Monday had turned the minds of workmen from wages and hours to higher things, and thus averted strikes. He was immediately invited.
An expense fund of forty thousand dollars had been underwritten; out on the County Fair Grounds a Mike Monday Tabernacle had been erected, to seat fifteen thousand people. In it the prophet was at this moment concluding his message:
“There’s a lot of smart college professors and tea-guzzling slobs in this burg that say I’m a roughneck and a never-wuzzer and my knowledge of history is not-yet. Oh, there’s a gang of woolly-whiskered book-lice that think they know more than Almighty God, and prefer a lot of Hun science and smutty German criticism to the straight and simple Word of God. Oh, there’s a swell bunch of Lizzie boys and lemon-suckers and pie-faces and infidels and beer-bloated scribblers that love to fire off their filthy mouths and yip that Mike Monday is vulgar and full of mush. Those pups are saying now that I hog the gospel-show, that I’m in it for the coin. Well, now listen, folks! I’m going to give those birds a chance! They can stand right up here and tell me to my face that I’m a galoot and a liar and a hick! Only if they do—if they do!—don’t faint with surprise if some of those rum-dumm liars get one good swift poke from Mike, with all the kick of God’s Flaming Righteousness behind the wallop! Well, come on, folks! Who says it? Who says Mike Monday is a fourflush and a yahoo? Huh? Don’t I see anybody standing up? Well, there you are! Now I guess the folks in this man’s town will quit listening to all this kyoodling from behind the fence; I guess you’ll quit listening to the guys that pan and roast and kick and beef, and vomit out filthy atheism;and all of you’ll come in, with every grain of pep and reverence you got, and boost all together for Jesus Christ and his everlasting mercy and tenderness!”
At that moment Seneca Doane, the radical lawyer, and Dr. Kurt Yavitch, the histologist (whose report on the destruction of epithelial cells under radium had made the name of Zenith known in Munich, Prague, and Rome), were talking in Doane’s library.
“Zenith’s a city with gigantic power—gigantic buildings, gigantic machines, gigantic transportation,” meditated Doane.
“I hate your city. It has standardized all the beauty out of life. It is one big railroad station—with all the people taking tickets for the best cemeteries,” Dr. Yavitch said placidly.
Doane roused. “I’m hanged if it is! You make me sick, Kurt, with your perpetual whine about ‘standardization.’ Don’t you suppose any other nation is ‘standardized?’ Is anything more standardized than England, with every house that can afford it having the same muffins at the same tea-hour, and every retired general going to exactly the same evensong at the same gray stone church with a square tower, and every golfing prig in Harris tweeds saying ‘Right you are!’ to every other prosperous ass? Yet I love England. And for standardization—just look at the sidewalk cafés in France and the love-making in Italy!
“Standardization is excellent,per se. When I buy an Ingersoll watch or a Ford, I get a better tool for less money, and I know precisely what I’m getting, and that leaves me more time and energy to be individual in. And— I remember once in London I saw a picture of an American suburb, in a toothpaste ad on the back of theSaturday Evening Post—an elm-lined snowy street of these new houses, Georgian someof ’em, or with low raking roofs and— The kind of street you’d find here in Zenith, say in Floral Heights. Open. Trees. Grass. And I was homesick! There’s no other country in the world that has such pleasant houses. And I don’t care if theyarestandardized. It’s a corking standard!
“No, what I fight in Zenith is standardization of thought, and, of course, the traditions of competition. The real villains of the piece are the clean, kind, industrious Family Men who use every known brand of trickery and cruelty to insure the prosperity of their cubs. The worst thing about these fellows is that they’re so good and, in their work at least, so intelligent. You can’t hate them properly, and yet their standardized minds are the enemy.
“Then this boosting— Sneakingly I have a notion that Zenith is a better place to live in than Manchester or Glasgow or Lyons or Berlin or Turin—”
“It is not, and I have lift in most of them,” murmured Dr. Yavitch.
“Well, matter of taste. Personally, I prefer a city with a future so unknown that it excites my imagination. But what I particularly want—”
“You,” said Dr. Yavitch, “are a middle-road liberal, and you haven’t the slightest idea what you want. I, being a revolutionist, know exactly what I want—and what I want now is a drink.”
At that moment in Zenith, Jake Offutt, the politician, and Henry T. Thompson were in conference. Offutt suggested, “The thing to do is to get your fool son-in-law, Babbitt, to put it over. He’s one of these patriotic guys. When he grabs a piece of property for the gang, he makes it look like we were dyin’ of love for the dear peepul, and I do love to buy respectability—reasonable. Wonder how long we can keep it up, Hank? We’re safe as long as the good little boyslike George Babbitt and all the nice respectable labor-leaders think you and me are rugged patriots. There’s swell pickings for an honest politician here, Hank: a whole city working to provide cigars and fried chicken and dry martinis for us, and rallying to our banner with indignation, oh, fierce indignation, whenever some squealer like this fellow Seneca Doane comes along! Honest, Hank, a smart codger like me ought to be ashamed of himself if he didn’t milk cattle like them, when they come around mooing for it! But the Traction gang can’t get away with grand larceny like it used to. I wonder when— Hank, I wish we could fix some way to run this fellow Seneca Doane out of town. It’s him or us!”
At that moment in Zenith, three hundred and forty or fifty thousand Ordinary People were asleep, a vast unpenetrated shadow. In the slum beyond the railroad tracks, a young man who for six months had sought work turned on the gas and killed himself and his wife.
At that moment Lloyd Mallam, the poet, owner of the Hafiz Book Shop, was finishing a rondeau to show how diverting was life amid the feuds of medieval Florence, but how dull it was in so obvious a place as Zenith.
And at that moment George F. Babbitt turned ponderously in bed—the last turn, signifying that he’d had enough of this worried business of falling asleep and was about it in earnest.
Instantly he was in the magic dream. He was somewhere among unknown people who laughed at him. He slipped away, ran down the paths of a midnight garden, and at the gate the fairy child was waiting. Her dear and tranquil hand caressed his cheek. He was gallant and wise and well-beloved; warm ivory were her arms; and beyond perilous moors the brave sea glittered.
Thegreat events of Babbitt’s spring were the secret buying of real-estate options in Linton for certain street-traction officials, before the public announcement that the Linton Avenue Car Line would be extended, and a dinner which was, as he rejoiced to his wife, not only “a regular society spread but a real sure-enough highbrow affair, with some of the keenest intellects and the brightest bunch of little women in town.” It was so absorbing an occasion that he almost forgot his desire to run off to Maine with Paul Riesling.
Though he had been born in the village of Catawba, Babbitt had risen to that metropolitan social plane on which hosts have as many as four people at dinner without planning it for more than an evening or two. But a dinner of twelve, with flowers from the florist’s and all the cut-glass out, staggered even the Babbitts.
For two weeks they studied, debated, and arbitrated the list of guests.
Babbitt marveled, “Of course we’re up-to-date ourselves, but still, think of us entertaining a famous poet like Chum Frink, a fellow that on nothing but a poem or so every day and just writing a few advertisements pulls down fifteen thousand berries a year!”
“Yes, and Howard Littlefield. Do you know, the other evening Eunice told me her papa speaks three languages!” said Mrs. Babbitt.
“Huh! That’s nothing! So do I—American, baseball, and poker!”
“I don’t think it’s nice to be funny about a matter like that.Think how wonderful it must be to speak three languages, and so useful and— And with people like that, I don’t see why we invite the Orville Joneses.”
“Well now, Orville is a mighty up-and-coming fellow!”
“Yes, I know, but— A laundry!”
“I’ll admit a laundry hasn’t got the class of poetry or real estate, but just the same, Orvy is mighty deep. Ever start him spieling about gardening? Say, that fellow can tell you the name of every kind of tree, and some of their Greek and Latin names too! Besides, we owe the Joneses a dinner. Besides, gosh, we got to have some boob for audience, when a bunch of hot-air artists like Frink and Littlefield get going.”
“Well, dear—I meant to speak of this—I do think that as host you ought to sit back and listen, and let your guests have a chance to talk once in a while!”
“Oh, you do, do you! Sure! I talk all the time! And I’m just a business man—oh sure!—I’m no Ph.D. like Littlefield, and no poet, and I haven’t anything to spring! Well, let me tell you, just the other day your darn Chum Frink comes up to me at the club begging to know what I thought about the Springfield school-bond issue. And who told him? I did! You bet your life I told him! Little me! I certainly did! He came up and asked me, and I told him all about it! You bet! And he was darn glad to listen to me and— Duty as a host! I guess I know my duty as a host and let me tell you—”
In fact, the Orville Joneses were invited.
On the morning of the dinner, Mrs. Babbitt was restive.
“Now, George, I want you to be sure and be home early to-night. Remember, you have to dress.”
“Uh-huh. I see by theAdvocatethat the Presbyterian General Assembly has voted to quit the Interchurch World Movement. That—”
“George! Did you hear what I said? You must be home in time to dress to-night.”
“Dress? Hell! I’m dressed now! Think I’m going down to the office in my B.V.D.’s?”
“I will not have you talking indecently before the children! And you do have to put on your dinner-jacket!”
“I guess you mean my Tux. I tell you, of all the doggone nonsensical nuisances that was ever invented—”
Three minutes later, after Babbitt had wailed, “Well, I don’t know whether I’m going to dress ornot” in a manner which showed that he was going to dress, the discussion moved on.
“Now, George, you mustn’t forget to call in at Vecchia’s on the way home and get the ice cream. Their delivery-wagon is broken down, and I don’t want to trust them to send it by—”
“All right! You told me that before breakfast!”
“Well, I don’t want you to forget. I’ll be working my head off all day long, training the girl that’s to help with the dinner—”
“All nonsense, anyway, hiring an extra girl for the feed. Matilda could perfectly well—”
“—and I have to go out and buy the flowers, and fix them, and set the table, and order the salted almonds, and look at the chickens, and arrange for the children to have their supper up-stairs and— And I simply must depend on you to go to Vecchia’s for the ice cream.”
“All riiiiiight! Gosh, I’m going to get it!”
“All you have to do is to go in and say you want the ice cream that Mrs. Babbitt ordered yesterday by ’phone, and it will be all ready for you.”
At ten-thirty she telephoned to him not to forget the ice cream from Vecchia’s.
He was surprised and blasted then by a thought. He wondered whether Floral Heights dinners were worth the hideoustoil involved. But he repented the sacrilege in the excitement of buying the materials for cocktails.
Now this was the manner of obtaining alcohol under the reign of righteousness and prohibition:
He drove from the severe rectangular streets of the modern business center into the tangled byways of Old Town—jagged blocks filled with sooty warehouses and lofts; on into The Arbor, once a pleasant orchard but now a morass of lodging-houses, tenements, and brothels. Exquisite shivers chilled his spine and stomach, and he looked at every policeman with intense innocence, as one who loved the law, and admired the Force, and longed to stop and play with them. He parked his car a block from Healey Hanson’s saloon, worrying, “Well, rats, if anybody did see me, they’d think I was here on business.”
He entered a place curiously like the saloons of ante-prohibition days, with a long greasy bar with sawdust in front and streaky mirror behind, a pine table at which a dirty old man dreamed over a glass of something which resembled whisky, and with two men at the bar, drinking something which resembled beer, and giving that impression of forming a large crowd which two men always give in a saloon. The bartender, a tall pale Swede with a diamond in his lilac scarf, stared at Babbitt as he stalked plumply up to the bar and whispered, “I’d, uh— Friend of Hanson’s sent me here. Like to get some gin.”
The bartender gazed down on him in the manner of an outraged bishop. “I guess you got the wrong place, my friend. We sell nothing but soft drinks here.” He cleaned the bar with a rag which would itself have done with a little cleaning, and glared across his mechanically moving elbow.
The old dreamer at the table petitioned the bartender, “Say, Oscar, listen.”
Oscar did not listen.
“Aw, say, Oscar, listen, will yuh? Say, lis-sen!”
The decayed and drowsy voice of the loafer, the agreeable stink of beer-dregs, threw a spell of inanition over Babbitt. The bartender moved grimly toward the crowd of two men. Babbitt followed him as delicately as a cat, and wheedled, “Say, Oscar, I want to speak to Mr. Hanson.”
“Whajuh wanta see him for?”
“I just want to talk to him. Here’s my card.”
It was a beautiful card, an engraved card, a card in the blackest black and the sharpest red, announcing that Mr. George F. Babbitt was Estates, Insurance, Rents. The bartender held it as though it weighed ten pounds, and read it as though it were a hundred words long. He did not bend from his episcopal dignity, but he growled, “I’ll see if he’s around.”
From the back room he brought an immensely old young man, a quiet sharp-eyed man, in tan silk shirt, checked vest hanging open, and burning brown trousers—Mr. Healey Hanson. Mr. Hanson said only “Yuh?” but his implacable and contemptuous eyes queried Babbitt’s soul, and he seemed not at all impressed by the new dark-gray suit for which (as he had admitted to every acquaintance at the Athletic Club) Babbitt had paid a hundred and twenty-five dollars.
“Glad meet you, Mr. Hanson. Say, uh— I’m George Babbitt of the Babbitt-Thompson Realty Company. I’m a great friend of Jake Offutt’s.”
“Well, what of it?”
“Say, uh, I’m going to have a party, and Jake told me you’d be able to fix me up with a little gin.” In alarm, in obsequiousness, as Hanson’s eyes grew more bored, “You telephone to Jake about me, if you want to.”
Hanson answered by jerking his head to indicate the entrance to the back room, and strolled away. Babbitt melodramatically crept into an apartment containing four roundtables, eleven chairs, a brewery calendar, and a smell. He waited. Thrice he saw Healey Hanson saunter through, humming, hands in pockets, ignoring him.
By this time Babbitt had modified his valiant morning vow, “I won’t pay one cent over seven dollars a quart” to “I might pay ten.” On Hanson’s next weary entrance he besought, “Could you fix that up?” Hanson scowled, and grated, “Just a minute—Pete’s sake—just a min-ute!” In growing meekness Babbitt went on waiting till Hanson casually reappeared with a quart of gin—what is euphemistically known as a quart—in his disdainful long white hands.
“Twelve bucks,” he snapped.
“Say, uh, but say, cap’n, Jake thought you’d be able to fix me up for eight or nine a bottle.”
“Nup. Twelve. This is the real stuff, smuggled from Canada. This is none o’ your neutral spirits with a drop of juniper extract,” the honest merchant said virtuously. “Twelve bones—if you want it. Course y’ understand I’m just doing this anyway as a friend of Jake’s.”
“Sure! Sure! I understand!” Babbitt gratefully held out twelve dollars. He felt honored by contact with greatness as Hanson yawned, stuffed the bills, uncounted, into his radiant vest, and swaggered away.
He had a number of titillations out of concealing the gin-bottle under his coat and out of hiding it in his desk. All afternoon he snorted and chuckled and gurgled over his ability to “give the Boys a real shot in the arm to-night.” He was, in fact, so exhilarated that he was within a block of his house before he remembered that there was a certain matter, mentioned by his wife, of fetching ice cream from Vecchia’s. He explained, “Well, darn it—” and drove back.
Vecchia was not a caterer, he was The Caterer of Zenith. Most coming-out parties were held in the white and gold ballroom of the Maison Vecchia; at all nice teas the guests recognized the five kinds of Vecchia sandwiches and the seven kindsof Vecchia cakes; and all really smart dinners ended, as on a resolving chord, in Vecchia Neapolitan ice cream in one of the three reliable molds—the melon mold, the round mold like a layer cake, and the long brick.
Vecchia’s shop had pale blue woodwork, tracery of plaster roses, attendants in frilled aprons, and glass shelves of “kisses” with all the refinement that inheres in whites of eggs. Babbitt felt heavy and thick amid this professional daintiness, and as he waited for the ice cream he decided, with hot prickles at the back of his neck, that a girl customer was giggling at him. He went home in a touchy temper. The first thing he heard was his wife’s agitated:
“George!Didyou remember to go to Vecchia’s and get the ice cream?”
“Say! Look here! Do I ever forget to do things?”
“Yes! Often!”
“Well now, it’s darn seldom I do, and it certainly makes me tired, after going into a pink-tea joint like Vecchia’s and having to stand around looking at a lot of half-naked young girls, all rouged up like they were sixty and eating a lot of stuff that simply ruins their stomachs—”
“Oh, it’s too bad about you! I’ve noticed how you hate to look at pretty girls!”
With a jar Babbitt realized that his wife was too busy to be impressed by that moral indignation with which males rule the world, and he went humbly up-stairs to dress. He had an impression of a glorified dining-room, of cut-glass, candles, polished wood, lace, silver, roses. With the awed swelling of the heart suitable to so grave a business as giving a dinner, he slew the temptation to wear his plaited dress-shirt for a fourth time, took out an entirely fresh one, tightened his black bow, and rubbed his patent-leather pumps with a handkerchief. He glanced with pleasure at his garnet and silver studs. He smoothed and patted his ankles, transformed by silk socks from the sturdy shanks of George Babbitt to the elegant limbsof what is called a Clubman. He stood before the pier-glass, viewing his trim dinner-coat, his beautiful triple-braided trousers; and murmured in lyric beatitude, “By golly, I don’t look so bad. I certainly don’t look like Catawba. If the hicks back home could see me in this rig, they’d have a fit!”
He moved majestically down to mix the cocktails. As he chipped ice, as he squeezed oranges, as he collected vast stores of bottles, glasses, and spoons at the sink in the pantry, he felt as authoritative as the bartender at Healey Hanson’s saloon. True, Mrs. Babbitt said he was under foot, and Matilda and the maid hired for the evening brushed by him, elbowed him, shrieked “Pleasopn door,” as they tottered through with trays, but in this high moment he ignored them.
Besides the new bottle of gin, his cellar consisted of one half-bottle of Bourbon whisky, a quarter of a bottle of Italian vermouth, and approximately one hundred drops of orange bitters. He did not possess a cocktail-shaker. A shaker was proof of dissipation, the symbol of a Drinker, and Babbitt disliked being known as a Drinker even more than he liked a Drink. He mixed by pouring from an ancient gravy-boat into a handleless pitcher; he poured with a noble dignity, holding his alembics high beneath the powerful Mazda globe, his face hot, his shirt-front a glaring white, the copper sink a scoured red-gold.
He tasted the sacred essence. “Now, by golly, if that isn’t pretty near one fine old cocktail! Kind of a Bronx, and yet like a Manhattan. Ummmmmm! Hey, Myra, want a little nip before the folks come?”
Bustling into the dining-room, moving each glass a quarter of an inch, rushing back with resolution implacable on her face, her gray and silver-lace party frock protected by a denim towel, Mrs. Babbitt glared at him, and rebuked him, “Certainly not!”
“Well,” in a loose, jocose manner, “I think the old man will!”
The cocktail filled him with a whirling exhilaration behind which he was aware of devastating desires—to rush places in fast motors, to kiss girls, to sing, to be witty. He sought to regain his lost dignity by announcing to Matilda:
“I’m going to stick this pitcher of cocktails in the refrigerator. Be sure you don’t upset any of ’em.”
“Yeh.”
“Well, be sure now. Don’t go putting anything on this top shelf.”
“Yeh.”
“Well, be—” He was dizzy. His voice was thin and distant. “Whee!” With enormous impressiveness he commanded, “Well, be sure now,” and minced into the safety of the living-room. He wondered whether he could persuade “as slow a bunch as Myra and the Littlefields to go some place aft’ dinner and raise Cain and maybe dig up smore booze.” He perceived that he had gifts of profligacy which had been neglected.
By the time the guests had come, including the inevitable late couple for whom the others waited with painful amiability, a great gray emptiness had replaced the purple swirling in Babbitt’s head, and he had to force the tumultuous greetings suitable to a host on Floral Heights.
The guests were Howard Littlefield, the doctor of philosophy who furnished publicity and comforting economics to the Street Traction Company; Vergil Gunch, the coal-dealer, equally powerful in the Elks and in the Boosters’ Club; Eddie Swanson, the agent for the Javelin Motor Car, who lived across the street; and Orville Jones, owner of the Lily White Laundry, which justly announced itself “the biggest, busiest, bulliest cleanerie shoppe in Zenith.” But, naturally, the most distinguished of all was T. Cholmondeley Frink, who was not only the author of “Poemulations,” which, syndicated daily in sixty-seven leading newspapers, gave him one of the largest audiences of any poet in the world, but also an optimistic lecturer and the creator of “Ads that Add.” Despite the searching philosophy and high morality of his verses, they were humorous and easily understood by any child of twelve; and it added a neat air of pleasantry to them that they were set not as verse but as prose. Mr. Frink was known from Coast to Coast as “Chum.”
With them were six wives, more or less—it was hard to tell, so early in the evening, as at first glance they all looked alike, and as they all said, “Oh,isn’tthis nice!” in the same tone of determined liveliness. To the eye, the men were less similar: Littlefield, a hedge-scholar, tall and horse-faced; Chum Frink, a trifle of a man with soft and mouse-like hair, advertising his profession as poet by a silk cord on his eye-glasses; Vergil Gunch, broad, with coarse black hairen brosse; Eddie Swanson, a bald and bouncing young man who showed his taste for elegance by an evening waistcoat of figured black silk with glass buttons; Orville Jones, a steady-looking, stubby, not very memorable person, with a hemp-colored toothbrush mustache. Yet they were all so well fed and clean, they all shouted “’Evenin’, Georgie!” with such robustness, that they seemed to be cousins, and the strange thing is that the longer one knew the women, the less alike they seemed; while the longer one knew the men, the more alike their bold patterns appeared.
The drinking of the cocktails was as canonical a rite as the mixing. The company waited, uneasily, hopefully, agreeing in a strained manner that the weather had been rather warm and slightly cold, but still Babbitt said nothing about drinks. They became despondent. But when the late couple (the Swansons) had arrived, Babbitt hinted, “Well, folks, do you think you could stand breaking the law a little?”
They looked at Chum Frink, the recognized lord of language. Frink pulled at his eye-glass cord as at a bell-rope, he cleared his throat and said that which was the custom:
“I’ll tell you, George: I’m a law-abiding man, but they do say Verg Gunch is a regular yegg, and of course he’s bigger ’nI am, and I just can’t figure out what I’d do if he tried to force me into anything criminal!”
Gunch was roaring, “Well, I’ll take a chance—” when Frink held up his hand and went on, “So if Verg and you insist, Georgie, I’ll park my car on the wrong side of the street, because I take it for granted that’s the crime you’re hinting at!”
There was a great deal of laughter. Mrs. Jones asserted, “Mr. Frink is simply too killing! You’d think he was so innocent!”
Babbitt clamored, “How did you guess it, Chum? Well, you-all just wait a moment while I go out and get the—keys to your cars!” Through a froth of merriment he brought the shining promise, the mighty tray of glasses with the cloudy yellow cocktails in the glass pitcher in the center. The men babbled, “Oh, gosh, have a look!” and “This gets me right where I live!” and “Let me at it!” But Chum Frink, a traveled man and not unused to woes, was stricken by the thought that the potion might be merely fruit-juice with a little neutral spirits. He looked timorous as Babbitt, a moist and ecstatic almoner, held out a glass, but as he tasted it he piped, “Oh, man, let me dream on! It ain’t true, but don’t waken me! Jus’ lemme slumber!”
Two hours before, Frink had completed a newspaper lyric beginning:
I sat alone and groused and thunk, and scratched my head and sighed and wunk, and groaned, “There still are boobs, alack, who’d like the old-time gin-mill back; that den that makes a sage a loon, the vile and smelly old saloon!” I’ll never miss their poison booze, whilst I the bubbling spring can use, that leaves my head at merry morn as clear as any babe new-born!
Babbitt drank with the others; his moment’s depression was gone; he perceived that these were the best fellows in the world; he wanted to give them a thousand cocktails. “Think you could stand another?” he cried. The wives refused, withgiggles, but the men, speaking in a wide, elaborate, enjoyable manner, gloated, “Well, sooner than have you get sore at me, Georgie—”
“You got a little dividend coming,” said Babbitt to each of them, and each intoned, “Squeeze it, Georgie, squeeze it!”
When, beyond hope, the pitcher was empty, they stood and talked about prohibition. The men leaned back on their heels, put their hands in their trousers-pockets, and proclaimed their views with the booming profundity of a prosperous male repeating a thoroughly hackneyed statement about a matter of which he knows nothing whatever.
“Now, I’ll tell you,” said Vergil Gunch; “way I figure it is this, and I can speak by the book, because I’ve talked to a lot of doctors and fellows that ought to know, and the way I see it is that it’s a good thing to get rid of the saloon, but they ought to let a fellow have beer and light wines.”
Howard Littlefield observed, “What isn’t generally realized is that it’s a dangerous prop’sition to invade the rights of personal liberty. Now, take this for instance: The King of— Bavaria? I think it was Bavaria—yes, Bavaria, it was—in 1862, March, 1862, he issued a proclamation against public grazing of live-stock. The peasantry had stood for overtaxation without the slightest complaint, but when this proclamation came out, they rebelled. Or it may have been Saxony. But it just goes to show the dangers of invading the rights of personal liberty.”
“That’s it—no one got a right to invade personal liberty,” said Orville Jones.
“Just the same, you don’t want to forget prohibition is a mighty good thing for the working-classes. Keeps ’em from wasting their money and lowering their productiveness,” said Vergil Gunch.
“Yes, that’s so. But the trouble is the manner of enforcement,” insisted Howard Littlefield. “Congress didn’t understand the right system. Now, if I’d been running the thing,I’d have arranged it so that the drinker himself was licensed, and then we could have taken care of the shiftless workman—kept him from drinking—and yet not’ve interfered with the rights—with the personal liberty—of fellows like ourselves.”
They bobbed their heads, looked admiringly at one another, and stated, “That’s so, that would be the stunt.”
“The thing that worries me is that a lot of these guys will take to cocaine,” sighed Eddie Swanson.
They bobbed more violently, and groaned, “That’s so, there is a danger of that.”
Chum Frink chanted, “Oh, say, I got hold of a swell new receipt for home-made beer the other day. You take—”
Gunch interrupted, “Wait! Let me tell you mine!” Littlefield snorted, “Beer! Rats! Thing to do is to ferment cider!” Jones insisted, “I’ve got the receipt that does the business!” Swanson begged, “Oh, say, lemme tell you the story—” But Frink went on resolutely, “You take and save the shells from peas, and pour six gallons of water on a bushel of shells and boil the mixture till—”
Mrs. Babbitt turned toward them with yearning sweetness; Frink hastened to finish even his best beer-recipe; and she said gaily, “Dinner is served.”
There was a good deal of friendly argument among the men as to which should go in last, and while they were crossing the hall from the living-room to the dining-room Vergil Gunch made them laugh by thundering, “If I can’t sit next to Myra Babbitt and hold her hand under the table, I won’t play— I’m goin’ home.” In the dining-room they stood embarrassed while Mrs. Babbitt fluttered, “Now, let me see— Oh, I was going to have some nice hand-painted place-cards for you but— Oh, let me see; Mr. Frink, you sit there.”
The dinner was in the best style of women’s-magazine art, whereby the salad was served in hollowed apples, and everything but the invincible fried chicken resembled something else.
Ordinarily the men found it hard to talk to the women; flirtation was an art unknown on Floral Heights, and the realms of offices and of kitchens had no alliances. But under the inspiration of the cocktails, conversation was violent. Each of the men still had a number of important things to say about prohibition, and now that each had a loyal listener in his dinner-partner he burst out:
“I found a place where I can get all the hootch I want at eight a quart—”
“Did you read about this fellow that went and paid a thousand dollars for ten cases of red-eye that proved to be nothing but water? Seems this fellow was standing on the corner and fellow comes up to him—”
“They say there’s a whole raft of stuff being smuggled across at Detroit—”
“What I always say is—what a lot of folks don’t realize about prohibition—”
“And then you get all this awful poison stuff—wood alcohol and everything—”
“Course I believe in it on principle, but I don’t propose to have anybody telling me what I got to think and do. No American’ll ever stand for that!”
But they all felt that it was rather in bad taste for Orville Jones—and he not recognized as one of the wits of the occasion anyway—to say, “In fact, the whole thing about prohibition is this: it isn’t the initial cost, it’s the humidity.”
Not till the one required topic had been dealt with did the conversation become general.
It was often and admiringly said of Vergil Gunch, “Gee, that fellow can get away with murder! Why, he can pull a Raw One in mixed company and all the ladies’ll laugh their heads off, but me, gosh, if I crack anything that’s just the least bit off color I get the razz for fair!” Now Gunch delighted them by crying to Mrs. Eddie Swanson, youngest of the women, “Louetta! I managed to pinch Eddie’s doorkey out of hispocket, and what say you and me sneak across the street when the folks aren’t looking? Got something,” with a gorgeous leer, “awful important to tell you!”
The women wriggled, and Babbitt was stirred to like naughtiness. “Say, folks, I wished I dared show you a book I borrowed from Doc Patten!”
“Now, George! The idea!” Mrs. Babbitt warned him.
“This book—racy isn’t the word! It’s some kind of an anthropological report about—about Customs, in the South Seas, and what it doesn’tsay! It’s a book you can’t buy. Verg, I’ll lend it to you.”
“Me first!” insisted Eddie Swanson. “Sounds spicy!”
Orville Jones announced, “Say, I heard a Good One the other day about a coupla Swedes and their wives,” and, in the best Jewish accent, he resolutely carried the Good One to a slightly disinfected ending. Gunch capped it. But the cocktails waned, the seekers dropped back into cautious reality.
Chum Frink had recently been on a lecture-tour among the small towns, and he chuckled, “Awful good to get back to civilization! I certainly been seeing some hick towns! I mean— Course the folks there are the best on earth, but, gee whiz, those Main Street burgs are slow, and you fellows can’t hardly appreciate what it means to be here with a bunch of live ones!”
“You bet!” exulted Orville Jones. “They’re the best folks on earth, those small-town folks, but, oh, mama! what conversation! Why, say, they can’t talk about anything but the weather and the ne-oo Ford, by heckalorum!”
“That’s right. They all talk about just the same things,” said Eddie Swanson.
“Don’t they, though! They just say the same things over and over,” said Vergil Gunch.
“Yes, it’s really remarkable. They seem to lack all power of looking at things impersonally. They simply go over and over the same talk about Fords and the weather and so on,” said Howard Littlefield.
“Still, at that, you can’t blame ’em. They haven’t got any intellectual stimulus such as you get up here in the city,” said Chum Frink.
“Gosh, that’s right,” said Babbitt. “I don’t want you highbrows to get stuck on yourselves but I must say it keeps a fellow right up on his toes to sit in with a poet and with Howard, the guy that put the con in economics! But these small-town boobs, with nobody but each other to talk to, no wonder they get so sloppy and uncultured in their speech, and so balled-up in their thinking!”
Orville Jones commented, “And, then take our other advantages—the movies, frinstance. These Yapville sports think they’re all-get-out if they have one change of bill a week, where here in the city you got your choice of a dozen diff’rent movies any evening you want to name!”
“Sure, and the inspiration we get from rubbing up against high-class hustlers every day and getting jam full of ginger,” said Eddie Swanson.
“Same time,” said Babbitt, “no sense excusing these rube burgs too easy. Fellow’s own fault if he doesn’t show the initiative to up and beat it to the city, like we done—did. And, just speaking in confidence among friends, they’re jealous as the devil of a city man. Every time I go up to Catawba I have to go around apologizing to the fellows I was brought up with because I’ve more or less succeeded and they haven’t. And if you talk natural to ’em, way we do here, and show finesse and what you might call a broad point of view, why, they think you’re putting on side. There’s my own half-brother Martin—runs the little ole general store my Dad used to keep. Say, I’ll bet he don’t know there is such a thing as a Tux—as a dinner-jacket. If he was to come in here now, he’d think we were a bunch of—of— Why, gosh, I swear, he wouldn’t know what to think! Yes, sir, they’re jealous!”
Chum Frink agreed, “That’s so. But what I mind is their lack of culture and appreciation of the Beautiful—if you’llexcuse me for being highbrow. Now, I like to give a high-class lecture, and read some of my best poetry—not the newspaper stuff but the magazine things. But say, when I get out in the tall grass, there’s nothing will take but a lot of cheesy old stories and slang and junk that if any of us were to indulge in it here, he’d get the gate so fast it would make his head swim.”
Vergil Gunch summed it up: “Fact is, we’re mighty lucky to be living among a bunch of city-folks, that recognize artistic things and business-punch equally. We’d feel pretty glum if we got stuck in some Main Street burg and tried to wise up the old codgers to the kind of life we’re used to here. But, by golly, there’s this you got to say for ’em: Every small American town is trying to get population and modern ideals. And darn if a lot of ’em don’t put it across! Somebody starts panning a rube crossroads, telling how he was there in 1900 and it consisted of one muddy street, count ’em, one, and nine hundred human clams. Well, you go back there in 1920, and you find pavements and a swell little hotel and a first-class ladies’ ready-to-wear shop—real perfection, in fact! You don’t want to just look at what these small towns are, you want to look at what they’re aiming to become, and they all got an ambition that in the long run is going to make ’em the finest spots on earth—they all want to be just like Zenith!”
However intimate they might be with T. Cholmondeley Frink as a neighbor, as a borrower of lawn-mowers and monkey-wrenches, they knew that he was also a Famous Poet and a distinguished advertising-agent; that behind his easiness were sultry literary mysteries which they could not penetrate. But to-night, in the gin-evolved confidence, he admitted them to the arcanum:
“I’ve got a literary problem that’s worrying me to death.I’m doing a series of ads for the Zeeco Car and I want to make each of ’em a real little gem—reg’lar stylistic stuff. I’m all for this theory that perfection is the stunt, or nothing at all, and these are as tough things as I ever tackled. You might think it’d be harder to do my poems—all these Heart Topics: home and fireside and happiness—but they’re cinches. You can’t go wrong on ’em; you know what sentiments any decent go-ahead fellow must have if he plays the game, and you stick right to ’em. But the poetry of industrialism, now there’s a literary line where you got to open up new territory. Do you know the fellow who’s reallytheAmerican genius? The fellow who you don’t know his name and I don’t either, but his work ought to be preserved so’s future generations can judge our American thought and originality to-day? Why, the fellow that writes the Prince Albert Tobacco ads! Just listen to this: