7. CHAPTER VII
I
HE solemnly finished the last copy of the American 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, a
Madame Feit la Toilette print, 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.
II
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 slippers
of 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.
III
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 light
capsized 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.
IV
At that moment In the city of Zenith, Horace Updike was
making love to Lucile McKelvey in her mauve drawing-room
on 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 had
come 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, search-lights
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 the Saturday Evening Post—
an elm-lined snowy street of these new houses, Georgian some
of '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 they
are standardized. 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.''
VI
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 boys
like 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.