Theassurance of Tanis Judique’s friendship fortified Babbitt’s self-approval. At the Athletic Club he became experimental. Though Vergil Gunch was silent, the others at the Roughnecks’ Table came to accept Babbitt as having, for no visible reason, “turned crank.” They argued windily with him, and he was cocky, and enjoyed the spectacle of his interesting martyrdom. He even praised Seneca Doane. Professor Pumphrey said that was carrying a joke too far; but Babbitt argued, “No! Fact! I tell you he’s got one of the keenest intellects in the country. Why, Lord Wycombe said that—”
“Oh, who the hell is Lord Wycombe? What you always lugging him in for? You been touting him for the last six weeks!” protested Orville Jones.
“George ordered him from Sears-Roebuck. You can get those English high-muckamucks by mail for two bucks apiece,” suggested Sidney Finkelstein.
“That’s all right now! Lord Wycombe, he’s one of the biggest intellects in English political life. As I was saying: Of course I’m conservative myself, but I appreciate a guy like Senny Doane because—”
Vergil Gunch interrupted harshly, “I wonder if you are so conservative? I find I can manage to run my own business without any skunks and reds like Doane in it!”
The grimness of Gunch’s voice, the hardness of his jaw, disconcerted Babbitt, but he recovered and went on till they looked bored, then irritated, then as doubtful as Gunch.
He thought of Tanis always. With a stir he remembered her every aspect. His arms yearned for her. “I’ve found her! I’ve dreamed of her all these years and now I’ve found her!” he exulted. He met her at the movies in the morning; he drove out to her flat in the late afternoon or on evenings when he was believed to be at the Elks. He knew her financial affairs and advised her about them, while she lamented her feminine ignorance, and praised his masterfulness, and proved to know much more about bonds than he did. They had remembrances, and laughter over old times. Once they quarreled, and he raged that she was as “bossy” as his wife and far more whining when he was inattentive. But that passed safely.
Their high hour was a tramp on a ringing December afternoon, through snow-drifted meadows down to the icy Chaloosa River. She was exotic in an astrachan cap and a short beaver coat; she slid on the ice and shouted, and he panted after her, rotund with laughter.... Myra Babbitt never slid on the ice.
He was afraid that they would be seen together. In Zenith it is impossible to lunch with a neighbor’s wife without the fact being known, before nightfall, in every house in your circle. But Tanis was beautifully discreet. However appealingly she might turn to him when they were alone, she was gravely detached when they were abroad, and he hoped that she would be taken for a client. Orville Jones once saw them emerging from a movie theater, and Babbitt bumbled, “Let me make you ’quainted with Mrs. Judique. Now here’s a lady who knows the right broker to come to, Orvy!” Mr. Jones, though he was a man censorious of morals and of laundry machinery, seemed satisfied.
His predominant fear—not from any especial fondness for her but from the habit of propriety—was that his wife wouldlearn of the affair. He was certain that she knew nothing specific about Tanis, but he was also certain that she suspected something indefinite. For years she had been bored by anything more affectionate than a farewell kiss, yet she was hurt by any slackening in his irritable periodic interest, and now he had no interest; rather, a revulsion. He was completely faithful—to Tanis. He was distressed by the sight of his wife’s slack plumpness, by her puffs and billows of flesh, by the tattered petticoat which she was always meaning and always forgetting to throw away. But he was aware that she, so long attuned to him, caught all his repulsions. He elaborately, heavily, jocularly tried to check them. He couldn’t.
They had a tolerable Christmas. Kenneth Escott was there, admittedly engaged to Verona. Mrs. Babbitt was tearful and called Kenneth her new son. Babbitt was worried about Ted, because he had ceased complaining of the State University and become suspiciously acquiescent. He wondered what the boy was planning, and was too shy to ask. Himself, Babbitt slipped away on Christmas afternoon to take his present, a silver cigarette-box, to Tanis. When he returned Mrs. Babbitt asked, much too innocently, “Did you go out for a little fresh air?”
“Yes, just lil drive,” he mumbled.
After New Year’s his wife proposed, “I heard from my sister to-day, George. She isn’t well. I think perhaps I ought to go stay with her for a few weeks.”
Now, Mrs. Babbitt was not accustomed to leave home during the winter except on violently demanding occasions, and only the summer before, she had been gone for weeks. Nor was Babbitt one of the detachable husbands who take separations casually. He liked to have her there; she looked after his clothes; she knew how his steak ought to be cooked; and her 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 wifewas 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.
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, “Iwillquit!” 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 fantasticfigures 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 tolike 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 theBunch, 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, andhappily 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.
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.”
“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 thecenter 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. 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 betweendecency 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 communityexpects 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.
Thesummer 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 shesaid, “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,careto 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!”
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 hespent 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.
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—”
“Don’t you suppose I ever get tired of fussing? I get so bored with ordering three meals a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, and ruining my eyes over that horrid sewing-machine, and looking after your clothes and Rone’s and Ted’s and Tinka’s and everybody’s, and the laundry, anddarning socks, and going down to the Piggly Wiggly to market, and bringing my basket home to save money on the cash-and-carry and—everything!”
“Well, gosh,” with a certain astonishment, “I suppose maybe you do! But talk about— Here I have to be in the office every single day, while you can go out all afternoon and see folks and visit with the neighbors and do any blinkin’ thing you want to!”
“Yes, and a fine lot of good that does me! Just talking over the same old things with the same old crowd, while you have all sorts of interesting people coming in to see you at the office.”
“Interesting! Cranky old dames that want to know why I haven’t rented their dear precious homes for about seven times their value, and bunch of old crabs panning the everlasting daylights out of me because they don’t receive every cent of their rentals by three G.M. on the second of the month! Sure! Interesting! Just as interesting as the small pox!”
“Now, George, I will not have you shouting at me that way!”
“Well, it gets my goat the way women figure out that a man doesn’t do a darn thing but sit on his chair and have lovey-dovey conferences with a lot of classy dames and give ’em the glad eye!”
“I guess you manage to give them a glad enough eye when they do come in.”
“What do you mean? Mean I’m chasing flappers?”
“I should hope not—at your age!”
“Now you look here! You may not believe it— Of course all you see is fat little Georgie Babbitt. Sure! Handy man around the house! Fixes the furnace when the furnace-man doesn’t show up, and pays the bills, but dull, awful dull! Well, you may not believe it, but there’s some women that think old George Babbitt isn’t such a bad scout! They think he’s not so bad-looking, not so bad that it hurts anyway, andhe’s got a pretty good line of guff, and some even think he shakes a darn wicked Walkover at dancing!”
“Yes.” She spoke slowly. “I haven’t much doubt that when I’m away you manage to find people who properly appreciate you.”
“Well, I just mean—” he protested, with a sound of denial. Then he was angered into semi-honesty. “You bet I do! I find plenty of folks, and doggone nice ones, that don’t think I’m a weak-stomached baby!”
“That’s exactly what I was saying! You can run around with anybody you please, but I’m supposed to sit here and wait for you. You have the chance to get all sorts of culture and everything, and I just stay home—”
“Well, gosh almighty, there’s nothing to prevent your reading books and going to lectures and all that junk, is there?”
“George, Itoldyou, I won’t have you shouting at me like that! I don’t know what’s come over you. You never used to speak to me in this cranky way.”
“I didn’t mean to sound cranky, but gosh, it certainly makes me sore to get the blame because you don’t keep up with things.”
“I’m going to! Will you help me?”
“Sure. Anything I can do to help you in the culture-grabbing line—yours to oblige, G. F. Babbitt.”
“Very well then, I want you to go to Mrs. Mudge’s New Thought meeting with me, next Sunday afternoon.”
“Mrs. Who’s which?”
“Mrs. Opal Emerson Mudge. The field-lecturer for the American New Thought League. She’s going to speak on ‘Cultivating the Sun Spirit’ before the League of the Higher Illumination, at the Thornleigh.”
“Oh, punk! New Thought! Hashed thought with a poached egg! ‘Cultivating the—’ It sounds like ‘Why is a mouse when it spins?’ That’s a fine spiel for a good Presbyterian to be going to, when you can hear Doc Drew!”
“Reverend Drew is a scholar and a pulpit orator and all that, but he hasn’t got the Inner Ferment, as Mrs. Mudge calls it; he hasn’t any inspiration for the New Era. Women need inspiration now. So I want you to come, as you promised.”
The Zenith branch of the League of the Higher Illumination met in the smaller ballroom at the Hotel Thornleigh, a refined apartment with pale green walls and plaster wreaths of roses, refined parquet flooring, and ultra-refined frail gilt chairs. Here were gathered sixty-five women and ten men. Most of the men slouched in their chairs and wriggled, while their wives sat rigidly at attention, but two of them—red-necked, meaty men—were as respectably devout as their wives. They were newly rich contractors who, having bought houses, motors, hand-painted pictures, and gentlemanliness, were now buying a refined ready-made philosophy. It had been a toss-up with them whether to buy New Thought, Christian Science, or a good standard high-church model of Episcopalianism.
In the flesh, Mrs. Opal Emerson Mudge fell somewhat short of a prophetic aspect. She was pony-built and plump, with the face of a haughty Pekingese, a button of a nose, and arms so short that, despite her most indignant endeavors, she could not clasp her hands in front of her as she sat on the platform waiting. Her frock of taffeta and green velvet, with three strings of glass beads, and large folding eye-glasses dangling from a black ribbon, was a triumph of refinement.
Mrs. Mudge was introduced by the president of the League of the Higher Illumination, an oldish young woman with a yearning voice, white spats, and a mustache. She said that Mrs. Mudge would now make it plain to the simplest intellect how the Sun Spirit could be cultivated, and they who hadbeen thinking about cultivating one would do well to treasure Mrs. Mudge’s words, because even Zenith (and everybody knew that Zenith stood in the van of spiritual and New Thought progress) didn’t often have the opportunity to sit at the feet of such an inspiring Optimist and Metaphysical Seer as Mrs. Opal Emerson Mudge, who had lived the Life of Wider Usefulness through Concentration, and in the Silence found those Secrets of Mental Control and the Inner Key which were immediately going to transform and bring Peace, Power, and Prosperity to the unhappy nations; and so, friends, would they for this precious gem-studded hour forget the Illusions of the Seeming Real, and in the actualization of the deep-lying Veritas pass, along with Mrs. Opal Emerson Mudge, to the Realm Beautiful.
If Mrs. Mudge was rather pudgier than one would like one’s swamis, yogis, seers, and initiates, yet her voice had the real professional note. It was refined and optimistic; it was overpoweringly calm; it flowed on relentlessly, without one comma, till Babbitt was hypnotized. Her favorite word was “always,” which she pronounced olllllle-ways. Her principal gesture was a pontifical but thoroughly ladylike blessing with two stubby fingers.
She explained about this matter of Spiritual Saturation:
“There are those—”
Of “those” she made a linked sweetness long drawn out; a far-off delicate call in a twilight minor. It chastely rebuked the restless husbands, yet brought them a message of healing.
“There are those who have seen the rim and outer seeming of the Logos there are those who have glimpsed and in enthusiasm possessed themselves of some segment and portion of the Logos there are those who thus flicked but not penetrated and radioactivated by the Dynamis go always to and fro assertative that they possess and are possessed of the Logos and the Metaphysikos but this word I bring you thisconcept I enlarge that those that are not utter are not even inceptive and that holiness is in its definitive essence always always always whole-iness and—”
It proved that the Essence of the Sun Spirit was Truth, but its Aura and Effluxion were Cheerfulness:
“Face always the day with the dawn-laugh with the enthusiasm of the initiate who perceives that all works together in the revolutions of the Wheel and who answers the strictures of the Soured Souls of the Destructionists with a Glad Affirmation—”
It went on for about an hour and seven minutes.
At the end Mrs. Mudge spoke with more vigor and punctuation:
“Now let me suggest to all of you the advantages of the Theosophical and Pantheistic Oriental Reading Circle, which I represent. Our object is to unite all the manifestations of the New Era into one cohesive whole—New Thought, Christian Science, Theosophy, Vedanta, Bahaism, and the other sparks from the one New Light. The subscription is but ten dollars a year, and for this mere pittance the members receive not only the monthly magazine,Pearls of Healing, but the privilege of sending right to the president, our revered Mother Dobbs, any questions regarding spiritual progress, matrimonial problems, health and well-being questions, financial difficulties, and—”
They listened to her with adoring attention. They looked genteel. They looked ironed-out. They coughed politely, and crossed their legs with quietness, and in expensive linen handkerchiefs they blew their noses with a delicacy altogether optimistic and refined.
As for Babbitt, he sat and suffered.
When they were blessedly out in the air again, when they drove home through a wind smelling of snow and honest sun, he dared not speak. They had been too near to quarreling, these days. Mrs. Babbitt forced it:
“Did you enjoy Mrs. Mudge’s talk?”
“Well I— What did you get out of it?”
“Oh, it starts a person thinking. It gets you out of a routine of ordinary thoughts.”
“Well, I’ll hand it to Opal she isn’t ordinary, but gosh— Honest, did that stuff mean anything to you?”
“Of course I’m not trained in metaphysics, and there was lots I couldn’t quite grasp, but I did feel it was inspiring. And she speaks so readily. I do think you ought to have got something out of it.”
“Well, I didn’t! I swear, I was simply astonished, the way those women lapped it up! Why the dickens they want to put in their time listening to all that blaa when they—”
“It’s certainly better for them than going to roadhouses and smoking and drinking!”
“I don’t know whether it is or not! Personally I don’t see a whole lot of difference. In both cases they’re trying to get away from themselves—most everybody is, these days, I guess. And I’d certainly get a whole lot more out of hoofing it in a good lively dance, even in some dive, than sitting looking as if my collar was too tight, and feeling too scared to spit, and listening to Opal chewing her words.”
“I’m sure you do! You’re very fond of dives. No doubt you saw a lot of them while I was away!”
“Look here! You been doing a hell of a lot of insinuating and hinting around lately, as if I were leading a double life or something, and I’m damn sick of it, and I don’t want to hear anything more about it!”
“Why, George Babbitt! Do you realize what you’re saying? Why, George, in all our years together you’ve never talked to me like that!”
“It’s about time then!”
“Lately you’ve been getting worse and worse, and now, finally, you’re cursing and swearing at me and shouting at me,and your voice so ugly and hateful— I just shudder!”
“Oh, rats, quit exaggerating! I wasn’t shouting, or swearing either.”
“I wish you could hear your own voice! Maybe you don’t realize how it sounds. But even so— You never used to talk like that. You simplycouldn’ttalk this way if something dreadful hadn’t happened to you.”
His mind was hard. With amazement he found that he wasn’t particularly sorry. It was only with an effort that he made himself more agreeable: “Well, gosh, I didn’t mean to get sore.”
“George, do you realize that we can’t go on like this, getting farther and farther apart, and you ruder and ruder to me? I just don’t know what’s going to happen.”
He had a moment’s pity for her bewilderment; he thought of how many deep and tender things would be hurt if they really “couldn’t go on like this.” But his pity was impersonal, and he was wondering, “Wouldn’t it maybe be a good thing if— Not a divorce and all that, o’ course, but kind of a little more independence?”
While she looked at him pleadingly he drove on in a dreadful silence.
Whenhe was away from her, while he kicked about the garage and swept the snow off the running-board and examined a cracked hose-connection, he repented, he was alarmed and astonished that he could have flared out at his wife, and thought fondly how much more lasting she was than the flighty Bunch. He went in to mumble that he was “sorry, didn’t mean to be grouchy,” and to inquire as to her interest in movies. But in the darkness of the movie theater he brooded that he’d “gone and tied himself up to Myra all over again.” He had some satisfaction in taking it out on Tanis Judique. “Hang Tanis anyway! Why’d she gone and got him into these mix-ups and made him all jumpy and nervous and cranky? Too many complications! Cut ’em out!”
He wanted peace. For ten days he did not see Tanis nor telephone to her, and instantly she put upon him the compulsion which he hated. When he had stayed away from her for five days, hourly taking pride in his resoluteness and hourly picturing how greatly Tanis must miss him, Miss McGoun reported, “Mrs. Judique on the ’phone. Like t’ speak t’ you ’bout some repairs.”
Tanis was quick and quiet:
“Mr. Babbitt? Oh, George, this is Tanis. I haven’t seen you for weeks—days, anyway. You aren’t sick, are you?”
“No, just been terribly rushed. I, uh, I think there’ll be a big revival of building this year. Got to, uh, got to work hard.”
“Of course, my man! I want you to. You know I’m terribly ambitious for you; much more than I am for myself. I just don’t want you to forget poor Tanis. Will you call me up soon?”
“Sure! Sure! You bet!”
“Please do. I sha’n’t call you again.”
He meditated, “Poor kid!... But gosh, she oughtn’t to ’phone me at the office.... She’s a wonder—sympathy—‘ambitious for me.’... But gosh, I won’t be made and compelled to call her up till I get ready. Darn these women, the way they make demands! It’ll be one long old time before I see her!... But gosh, I’d like to see her to-night—sweet little thing.... Oh, cut that, son! Now you’ve broken away, be wise!”
She did not telephone again, nor he, but after five more days she wrote to him: