XI
Flamboyantly smoking cigars they sat in a box at the burlesque
show, their feet up on the rail, while a chorus of twenty
daubed, worried, and inextinguishably respectable grandams
swung their legs in the more elementary chorus-evolutions,
and a Jewish comedian made vicious fun of Jews. In the
entr'actes they met other lone delegates. A dozen of them
went in taxicabs out to Bright Blossom Inn, where the blossoms
were made of dusty paper festooned along a room low
and stinking, like a cow-stable no longer wisely used.
Here, whisky was served openly, in glasses. Two or three
clerks, who on pay-day longed to be taken for millionaires,
sheepishly danced with telephone-girls and manicure-girls in
the narrow space between the tables. Fantastically whirled
the professionals, a young man in sleek evening-clothes and a
slim mad girl in emerald silk, with amber hair flung up as
jaggedly as flames. Babbitt tried to dance with her. He
shuffled along the floor, too bulky to be guided, his steps
unrelated to the rhythm of the jungle music, and in his staggering
he would have fallen, had she not held him with supple
kindly strength. He was blind and deaf from prohibition-era
alcohol; he could not see the tables, the faces. But he was
overwhelmed by the girl and her young pliant warmth.
When she had firmly returned him to his group, he remembered,
by a connection quite untraceable, that his mother's
mother had been Scotch, and with head thrown back, eyes
closed, wide mouth indicating ecstasy, he sang, very slowly
and richly, "Loch Lomond.''
But that was the last of his mellowness and jolly companionship.
The man from Sparta said he was a "bum singer,'' and
for ten minutes Babbitt quarreled with him, in a loud, unsteady,
heroic indignation. They called for drinks till the
manager insisted that the place was closed. All the while
Babbitt felt a hot raw desire for more brutal amusements.
When W. A. Rogers drawled, "What say we go down the line
and look over the girls?'' he agreed savagely. Before they
went, three of them secretly made appointments with the professional
dancing girl, who agreed "Yes, yes, sure, darling'' to
everything they said, and amiably forgot them.
As they drove back through the outskirts of Monarch, down
streets of small brown wooden cottages of workmen, characterless
as cells, as they rattled across warehouse-districts which
by drunken night seemed vast and perilous, as they were borne
toward the red lights and violent automatic pianos and the
stocky women who simpered, Babbitt was frightened. He
wanted to leap from the taxicab, but all his body was a murky
fire, and he groaned, "Too late to quit now,'' and knew that
he did not want to quit.
There was, they felt, one very humorous incident on the
way. A broker from Minnemagantic said, "Monarch is a lot
sportier than Zenith. You Zenith tightwads haven't got any
joints like these here.'' Babbitt raged, "That's a dirty lie!
Snothin' you can't find in Zenith. Believe me, we got more
houses and hootch-parlors an' all kinds o' dives than any burg
in the state.''
He realized they were laughing at him; he desired to fight;
and forgot it in such musty unsatisfying experiments as he
had not known since college.
In the morning, when he returned to Zenith, his desire for
rebellion was partly satisfied. He had retrograded to a shame-faced
contentment. He was irritable. He did not smile when
W. A. Rogers complained, "Ow, what a head! I certainly do
feel like the wrath of God this morning. Say! I know what
was the trouble! Somebody went and put alcohol in my
booze last night.''
Babbitt's excursion was never known to his family, nor to
any one in Zenith save Rogers and Wing. It was not officially
recognized even by himself. If it had any consequences, they
have not been discovered.
