18. CHAPTER XVIII
I
THOUGH he saw them twice daily, though he knew and
amply discussed every detail of their expenditures, yet for
weeks together Babbitt was no more conscious of his children
than of the buttons on his coat-sleeves.
The admiration of Kenneth Escott made him aware of
Verona.
She had become secretary to Mr. Gruensberg of the Gruensberg
Leather Company; she did her work with the thoroughness
of a mind which reveres details and never quite understands
them; but she was one of the people who give an agitating
impression of being on the point of doing something
desperate—of leaving a job or a husband—without ever doing
it. Babbitt was so hopeful about Escott's hesitant ardors that
he became the playful parent. When he returned from the
Elks he peered coyly into the living-room and gurgled, "Has
our Kenny been here to-night?'' He never credited Verona's
protest, "Why, Ken and I are just good friends, and we only
talk about Ideas. I won't have all this sentimental nonsense,
that would spoil everything.''
It was Ted who most worried Babbitt.
With conditions in Latin and English but with a triumphant
record in manual training, basket-ball, and the organization
of dances, Ted was struggling through his Senior year in the
East Side High School. At home he was interested only when
he was asked to trace some subtle ill in the ignition system of
the car. He repeated to his tut-tutting father that he did not
wish to go to college or law-school, and Babbitt was equally
disturbed by this "shiftlessness'' and by Ted's relations with
Eunice Littlefield, next door.
Though she was the daughter of Howard Littlefield, that
wrought-iron fact-mill, that horse-faced priest of private ownership,
Eunice was a midge in the sun. She danced into the
house, she flung herself into Babbitt's lap when he was reading,
she crumpled his paper, and laughed at him when he
adequately explained that he hated a crumpled newspaper as
he hated a broken sales-contract. She was seventeen now.
Her ambition was to be a cinema actress. She did not merely
attend the showing of every "feature film;'' she also read the
motion-picture magazines, those extraordinary symptoms of
the Age of Pep-monthlies and weeklies gorgeously illustrated
with portraits of young women who had recently been manicure
girls, not very skilful manicure girls, and who, unless
their every grimace had been arranged by a director, could
not have acted in the Easter cantata of the Central Methodist
Church; magazines reporting, quite seriously, in "interviews''
plastered with pictures of riding-breeches and California bungalows,
the views on sculpture and international politics of
blankly beautiful, suspiciously beautiful young men; outlining
the plots of films about pure prostitutes and kind-hearted
train-robbers; and giving directions for making bootblacks
into Celebrated Scenario Authors overnight.
These authorities Eunice studied. She could, she frequently
did, tell whether it was in November or December, 1905, that
Mack Harker? the renowned screen cowpuncher and badman,
began his public career. as chorus man in "Oh, You Naughty
Girlie.'' On the wall of her room, her father reported, she
had pinned up twenty-one photographs of actors. But the
signed portrait of the most graceful of the movie heroes she
carried in her young bosom.
Babbitt was bewildered by this worship of new gods, and
he suspected that Eunice smoked cigarettes. He smelled the
cloying reek from up-stairs, and heard her giggling with Ted.
He never inquired. The agreeable child dismayed him. Her
thin and charming face was sharpened by bobbed hair; her
skirts were short, her stockings were rolled, and, as she flew
after Ted, above the caressing silk were glimpses of soft
knees which made Babbitt uneasy, and wretched that she
should consider him old. Sometimes, in the veiled life of his
dreams, when the fairy child came running to him she took on
the semblance of Eunice Littlefield.
Ted was motor-mad as Eunice was movie-mad.
A thousand sarcastic refusals did not check his teasing for
a car of his own. However lax he might be about early rising
and the prosody of Vergil, he was tireless in tinkering. With
three other boys he bought a rheumatic Ford chassis, built an
amazing racer-body out of tin and pine, went skidding round
corners in the perilous craft, and sold it at a profit. Babbitt
gave him a motor-cycle, and every Saturday afternoon, with
seven sandwiches and a bottle of Coca-Cola in his pockets,
and Eunice perched eerily on the rumble seat, he went roaring
off to distant towns.
Usually Eunice and he were merely neighborhood chums,
and quarreled with a wholesome and violent lack of delicacy;
but now and then, after the color and scent of a dance, they
were silent together and a little furtive, and Babbitt was
worried.
Babbitt was an average father. He was affectionate, bullying,
opinionated, ignorant, and rather wistful. Like most
parents, he enjoyed the game of waiting till the victim was
clearly wrong, then virtuously pouncing. He justified himself
by croaking, "Well, Ted's mother spoils him. Got to be somebody
who tells him what's what, and me, I'm elected the goat.
Because I try to bring him up to be a real, decent, human being
and not one of these sapheads and lounge-lizards, of course
they all call me a grouch!''
Throughout, with the eternal human genius for arriving by
the worst possible routes at surprisingly tolerable goals, Babbitt
loved his son and warmed to his companionship and would
have sacrificed everything for him—if he could have been sure
of proper credit.
II
Ted was planning a party for his set in the Senior Class.
Babbitt meant to be helpful and jolly about it. From his
memory of high-school pleasures back in Catawba he suggested
the nicest games: Going to Boston, and charades with stew-pans
for helmets, and word-games in which you were an Adjective
or a Quality. When he was most enthusiastic he discovered
that they weren't paying attention; they were only
tolerating him. As for the party, it was as fixed and standardized
as a Union Club Hop. There was to be dancing in the
living-room, a noble collation in the dining-room, and in the
hall two tables of bridge for what Ted called "the poor old
dumb-bells that you can't get to dance hardly more 'n half the
time.''
Every breakfast was monopolized by conferences on the
affair. No one listened to Babbitt's bulletins about the February
weather or to his throat-clearing comments on the headlines.
He said furiously, "If I may be permitted to
interrupt
your engrossing private conversation— Juh hear
what I said?''
"Oh, don't be a spoiled baby! Ted and I have just as much
right to talk as you have!'' flared Mrs. Babbitt.
On the night of the party he was permitted to look on, when
he was not helping Matilda with the Vecchia ice cream and
the petits fours. He was deeply disquieted. Eight years ago,
when Verona had given a high-school party, the children had
been featureless gabies. Now they were men and women of
the world, very supercilious men and women; the boys condescended
to Babbitt, they wore evening-clothes, and with
hauteur they accepted cigarettes from silver cases. Babbitt
had heard stories of what the Athletic Club called "goings
on'' at young parties; of girls "parking'' their corsets in the
dressing-room, of "cuddling'' and "petting,'' and a presumable
increase in what was known as Immorality. To-night he believed
the stories. These children seemed bold to him, and
cold. The girls wore misty chiffon, coral velvet, or cloth of
gold, and around their dipping bobbed hair were shining
wreaths. He had it, upon urgent and secret inquiry, that no
corsets were known to be parked upstairs; but certainly these
eager bodies were not stiff with steel. Their stockings were
of lustrous silk, their slippers costly and unnatural, their lips
carmined and their eyebrows penciled. They danced cheek
to cheek with the boys, and Babbitt sickened with apprehension
and unconscious envy.
Worst of them all was Eunice Littlefield, and maddest of
all the boys was Ted. Eunice was a flying demon. She slid
the length of the room; her tender shoulders swayed; her feet
were deft as a weaver's shuttle; she laughed, and enticed Babbitt
to dance with her.
Then he discovered the annex to the party.
The boys and girls disappeared occasionally, and he remembered
rumors of their drinking together from hip-pocket
flasks. He tiptoed round the house, and in each of the dozen
cars waiting in the street he saw the points of light from
cigarettes, from each of them heard high giggles. He wanted
to denounce them but (standing in the snow, peering round
the dark corner) he did not dare. He tried to be tactful.
When he had returned to the front hall he coaxed the boys,
"Say, if any of you fellows are thirsty, there's some dandy
ginger ale.''
"Oh! Thanks!'' they condescended.
He sought his wife, in the pantry, and exploded, "I'd like
to go in there and throw some of those young pups out of the
house! They talk down to me like I was the butler! I'd
like to—''
"I know,'' she sighed; "only everybody says, all the mothers
tell me, unless you stand for them, if you get angry because
they go out to their cars to have a drink, they won't come to
your house any more, and we wouldn't want Ted left out of
things, would we?''
He announced that he would be enchanted to have Ted left
out of things, and hurried in to be polite, lest Ted be left out
of things.
But, he resolved, if he found that the boys were drinking,
he would—well, he'd "hand 'em something that would surprise
'em.'' While he was trying to be agreeable to large-shouldered
young bullies he was earnestly sniffing at them
Twice he caught the reek of prohibition-time whisky, but then,
it was only twice—
Dr. Howard Littlefield lumbered in.
He had come, in a mood of solemn parental patronage, to
look on. Ted and Eunice were dancing, moving together like
one body. Littlefield gasped. He called Eunice. There was
a whispered duologue, and Littlefield explained to Babbitt that
Eunice's mother had a headache and needed her. She went
off in tears. Babbitt looked after them furiously. "That
little devil! Getting Ted into trouble! And Littlefield, the
conceited old gas-bag, acting like it was Ted that was the
bad influence!''
Later he smelled whisky on Ted's breath.
After the civil farewell to the guests, the row was terrific,
a thorough Family Scene, like an avalanche, devastating and
without reticences. Babbitt thundered, Mrs. Babbitt wept,
Ted was unconvincingly defiant, and Verona in confusion as
to whose side she was taking.
For several months there was coolness between the Babbitts
and the Littlefields, each family sheltering their lamb from
the wolf-cub next door. Babbitt and Littlefield still spoke in
pontifical periods about motors and the senate, but they kept
bleakly away from mention of their families. Whenever
Eunice came to the house she discussed with pleasant intimacy
the fact that she had been forbidden to come to the house;
and Babbitt tried, with no success whatever, to be fatherly
and advisory with her.
III
"Gosh all fishhooks!'' Ted wailed to Eunice, as they wolfed
hot chocolate, lumps of nougat, and an assortment of glacé
nuts, in the mosaic splendor of the Royal Drug Store, "it gets
me why Dad doesn't just pass out from being so poky. Every
evening he sits there, about half-asleep, and if Rone or I say,
`Oh, come on, let's do something,' he doesn't even take the
trouble to think about it. He just yawns and says, `Naw,
this suits me right here.' He doesn't know there's any fun
going on anywhere. I suppose he must do some thinking,
same as you and I do, but gosh, there's no way of telling it.
I don't believe that outside of the office and playing a little
bum golf on Saturday he knows there's anything in the world
to do except just keep sitting there-sitting there every night
—not wanting to go anywhere—not wanting to do anything—
thinking us kids are crazy—sitting there—Lord!''
IV
If he was frightened by Ted's slackness, Babbitt was not
sufficiently frightened by Verona. She was too safe. She
lived too much in the neat little airless room of her mind.
Kenneth Escott and she were always under foot. When they
were not at home, conducting their cautiously radical courtship
over sheets of statistics, they were trudging off to lectures
by authors and Hindu philosophers and Swedish lieutenants.
"Gosh,'' Babbitt wailed to his wife, as they walked home
from the Fogartys' bridge-party, "it gets me how Rone and
that fellow can be so poky. They sit there night after night,
whenever he isn't working, and they don't know there's any
fun in the world. All talk and discussion—Lord! Sitting
there—sitting there—night after night—not wanting to do
anything—thinking I'm crazy because I like to go out and
play a fist of cards—sitting there—gosh!''
Then round the swimmer, bored by struggling through the
perpetual surf of family life, new combers swelled.
V
Babbitt's father-and mother-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Henry
T. Thompson, rented their old house in the Bellevue district
and moved to the Hotel Hatton, that glorified boarding-house
filled with widows, red-plush furniture, and the sound of ice-water
pitchers. They were lonely there, and every other Sunday
evening the Babbitts had to dine with them, on fricasseed
chicken, discouraged celery, and cornstarch ice cream, and
afterward sit, polite and restrained, in the hotel lounge, while
a young woman violinist played songs from the German via
Broadway.
Then Babbitt's own mother came down from Catawba to
spend three weeks.
She was a kind woman and magnificently uncomprehending.
She congratulated the convention-defying Verona on being a
"nice, loyal home-body without all these Ideas that so many
girls seem to have nowadays;'' and when Ted filled the
differential with grease, out of pure love of mechanics and
filthiness, she rejoiced that he was "so handy around the house—
and helping his father and all, and not going out with the girls
all the time and trying to pretend he was a society fellow.''
Babbitt loved his mother, and sometimes he rather liked
her, but he was annoyed by her Christian Patience, and he
was reduced to pulpiness when she discoursed about a quite
mythical hero called "Your Father'':
"You won't remember it, Georgie, you were such a little
fellow at the time—my, I remember just how you looked that
day, with your goldy brown curls and your lace collar, you
always were such a dainty child, and kind of puny and sickly,
and you loved pretty things so much and the red tassels on
your little bootees and all—and Your Father was taking us
to church and a man stopped us and said `Major'—so many
of the neighbors used to call Your Father `Major;' of course
he was only a private in The War but everybody knew that
was because of the jealousy of his captain and he ought to
have been a high-ranking officer, he had that natural ability
to command that so very, very few men have—and this man
came out into the road and held up his hand and stopped
the buggy and said, `Major,' he said, `there's a lot of the
folks around here that have decided to support Colonel Scanell
for congress, and we want you to join us. Meeting people
the way you do in the store, you could help us a lot.'
"Well, Your Father just looked at him and said, `I certainly
shall do nothing of the sort. I don't like his politics,'
he said. Well, the man—Captain Smith they used to call
him, and heaven only knows why, because he hadn't the
shadow or vestige of a right to be called `Captain' or any
other title—this Captain Smith said, `We'll make it hot for
you if you don't stick by your friends, Major.' Well, you
know how Your Father was, and this Smith knew it too; he
knew what a Real Man he was, and he knew Your Father
knew the political situation from A to Z, and he ought to
have seen that here was one man he couldn't impose on, but
he went on trying to and hinting and trying till Your Father
spoke up and said to him, `Captain Smith,' he said, `I have
a reputation around these parts for being one who is amply
qualified to mind his own business and let other folks mind
theirs!' and with that he drove on and left the fellow standing
there in the road like a bump on a log!''
Babbitt was most exasperated when she revealed his boyhood
to the children. He had, it seemed, been fond of barley-sugar;
had worn the "loveliest little pink bow in his curls''
and corrupted his own name to "Goo-goo.'' He heard (though
he did not officially hear) Ted admonishing Tinka, "Come
on now, kid; stick the lovely pink bow in your curls and
beat it down to breakfast, or Goo-goo will jaw your head off.''
Babbitt's half-brother, Martin, with his wife and youngest
baby, came down from Catawba for two days. Martin bred
cattle and ran the dusty general-store. He was proud of being
a freeborn independent American of the good old Yankee
stock; he was proud of being honest, blunt, ugly, and disagreeable.
His favorite remark was "How much did you pay
for that?'' He regarded Verona's books, Babbitt's silver pencil,
and flowers on the table as citified extravagances, and said
so. Babbitt would have quarreled with him but for his gawky
wife and the baby, whom Babbitt teased and poked fingers
at and addressed:
"I think this baby's a bum, yes, sir, I think this little baby's
a bum, he's a bum, yes, sir, he's a bum, that's what he is, he's
a bum, this baby's a bum, he's nothing but an old bum, that's
what he is—a bum!''
All the while Verona and Kenneth Escott held long inquiries
into epistemology; Ted was a disgraced rebel; and Tinka,
aged eleven, was demanding that she be allowed to go to the
movies thrice a week, "like all the girls.''
Babbitt raged, "I'm sick of it! Having to carry three
generations. Whole damn bunch lean on me. Pay half of
mother's income, listen to Henry T., listen to Myra's worrying,
be polite to Mart, and get called an old grouch for trying
to help the children. All of 'em depending on me and picking
on me and not a damn one of 'em grateful! No relief, and
no credit, and no help from anybody. And to keep it up for
—good Lord, how long?''
He enjoyed being sick in February; he was delighted by
their consternation that he, the rock, should give way.
He had eaten a questionable clam. For two days he was
languorous and petted and esteemed. He was allowed to
snarl "Oh, let me alone!'' without reprisals. He lay on the
sleeping-porch and watched the winter sun slide along the
taut curtains, turning their ruddy khaki to pale blood red.
The shadow of the draw-rope was dense black, in an enticing
ripple on the canvas. He found pleasure in the curve of it,
sighed as the fading light blurred it. He was conscious of
life, and a little sad. With no Vergil Gunches before whom
to set his face in resolute optimism, he beheld, and half admitted
that he beheld, his way of life as incredibly mechanical.
Mechanical business—a brisk selling of badly built houses.
Mechanical religion—a dry, hard church, shut off from the real
life of the streets, inhumanly respectable as a top-hat.
Mechanical golf and dinner-parties and bridge and conversation.
Save with Paul Riesling, mechanical friendships—back-slapping
and jocular, never daring to essay the test of quietness.
He turned uneasily in bed.
He saw the years, the brilliant winter days and all the long
sweet afternoons which were meant for summery meadows,
lost in such brittle pretentiousness. He thought of telephoning
about leases, of cajoling men he hated, of making business
calls and waiting in dirty anterooms—hat on knee, yawning
at fly-specked calendars, being polite to office-boys.
"I don't hardly want to go back to work,'' he prayed. "I'd
like to— I don't know.''
But he was back next day, busy and of doubtful temper.