III
It was the best of nationally advertised and quantitatively
produced alarm-clocks, with all modern attachments, including
cathedral chime, intermittent alarm, and a phosphorescent
dial. Babbitt was proud of being awakened by such a rich
device. Socially it was almost as creditable as buying
expensive cord tires.
He sulkily admitted now that there was no more escape,
but he lay and detested the grind of the real-estate business,
and disliked his family, and disliked himself for disliking them.
The evening before, he had played poker at Vergil Gunch's
till midnight, and after such holidays he was irritable before
breakfast. It may have been the tremendous home-brewed
beer of the prohibition-era and the cigars to which that beer
enticed him; it may have been resentment of return from
this fine, bold man-world to a restricted region of wives and
stenographers, and of suggestions not to smoke so much.
From the bedroom beside the sleeping-porch, his wife's detestably
cheerful "Time to get up, Georgie boy,'' and the itchy
sound, the brisk and scratchy sound, of combing hairs out of
a stiff brush.
He grunted; he dragged his thick legs, in faded baby-blue
pajamas, from under the khaki blanket; he sat on the edge
of the cot, running his fingers through his wild hair, while his
plump feet mechanically felt for his slippers. He looked regretfully
at the blanket—forever a suggestion to him of freedom
and heroism. He had bought it for a camping trip which
had never come off. It symbolized gorgeous loafing, gorgeous
cursing, virile flannel shirts.
He creaked to his feet, groaning at the waves of pain which
passed behind his eyeballs. Though he waited for their scorching
recurrence, he looked blurrily out at the yard. It delighted
him, as always; it was the neat yard of a successful business
man of Zenith, that is, it was perfection, and made him also
perfect. He regarded the corrugated iron garage. For the
three-hundred-and-sixty-fifth time in a year he reflected, "No
class to that tin shack. Have to build me a frame garage.
But by golly it's the only thing on the place that isn't
up-to-date!'' While he stared he thought of a community garage for
his acreage development, Glen Oriole. He stopped puffing and
jiggling. His arms were akimbo. His petulant, sleep-swollen
face was set in harder lines. He suddenly seemed capable, an
official, a man to contrive, to direct, to get things done.
On the vigor of his idea he was carried down the hard,
dean, unused-looking hall into the bathroom.
Though the house was not large it had, like all houses on
Floral Heights, an altogether royal bathroom of porcelain and
glazed tile and metal sleek as silver. The towel-rack was a
rod of clear glass set in nickel. The tub was long enough
for a Prussian Guard, and above the set bowl was a sensational
exhibit of tooth-brush holder, shaving-brush holder, soap-dish,
sponge-dish, and medicine-cabinet, so glittering and so ingenious
that they resembled an electrical instrument-board.
But the Babbitt whose god was Modern Appliances was not
pleased. The air of the bathroom was thick with the smell of
a heathen toothpaste. "Verona been at it again! 'Stead of
sticking to Lilidol, like I've re-peat-ed-ly asked her, she's gone
and gotten some confounded stinkum stuff that makes you
sick!''
The bath-mat was wrinkled and the floor was wet. (His
daughter Verona eccentrically took baths in the morning, now
and then.) He slipped on the mat, and slid against the tub.
He said "Damn!'' Furiously he snatched up his tube of
shaving-cream, furiously he lathered, with a belligerent slapping
of the unctuous brush, furiously he raked his plump cheeks
with a safety-razor. It pulled. The blade was dull. He
said, "Damn—oh—oh—damn it!''
He hunted through the medicine-cabinet for a packet of
new razor-blades (reflecting, as invariably, "Be cheaper to
buy one of these dinguses and strop your own blades,'') and
when he discovered the packet, behind the round box of bicarbonate
of soda, he thought ill of his wife for putting it
there and very well of himself for not saying "Damn.'' But
he did say it, immediately afterward, when with wet and
soap-slippery fingers he tried to remove the horrible little
envelope and crisp clinging oiled paper from the new blade.
Then there was the problem, oft-pondered, never solved, of
what to do with the old blade, which might imperil the fingers
of his young. As usual, he tossed it on top of the
medicine-cabinet, with a mental note that some day he must remove
the fifty or sixty other blades that were also temporarily,
piled up there. He finished his shaving in a growing testiness
increased by his spinning headache and by the emptiness
in his stomach. When he was done, his round face smooth
and streamy and his eyes stinging from soapy water, he
reached for a towel. The family towels were wet, wet and
clammy and vile, all of them wet, he found, as he blindly
snatched them—his own face-towel, his wife's, Verona's, Ted's,
Tinka's, and the lone bath-towel with the huge welt of initial.
Then George F. Babbitt did a dismaying thing. He wiped
his face on the guest-towel! It was a pansy-embroidered
trifle which always hung there to indicate that the Babbitts
were in the best Floral Heights society. No one had ever
used it. No guest had ever dared to. Guests secretively took
a corner of the nearest regular towel.
He was raging, "By golly, here they go and use up all the
towels, every doggone one of 'em, and they use 'em and get 'em
all wet and sopping, and never put out a dry one for me—
of course, I'm the goat!—and then I want one and— I'm the
only person in the doggone house that's got the slightest doggone
bit of consideration for other people and thoughtfulness
and consider there may be others that may want to use the
doggone bathroom after me and consider—''
He was pitching the chill abominations into the bath-tub,
pleased by the vindictiveness of that desolate flapping sound;
and in the midst his wife serenely trotted in, observed serenely,
"Why Georgie dear, what are you doing? Are you
going to wash out the towels? Why, you needn't wash out
the towels. Oh, Georgie, you didn't go and use the
guest-towel, did you?''
It is not recorded that he was able to answer.
For the first time in weeks he was sufficiently roused by
his wife to look at her.
