Babbit (16 page)

  By this time Babbitt had modified his valiant
morning vow, "I won't pay one cent over seven dollars a quart" to
"I might pay ten." On Hanson's next weary entrance he besought
"Could you fix that up?" Hanson scowled, and grated, "Just a minute
- Pete's sake - just a min-ute!" In growing meekness Babbitt went
on waiting till Hanson casually reappeared with a quart of gin -
what is euphemistically known as a quart - in his disdainful long
white hands.

  "Twelve bucks," he snapped.

  "Say, uh, but say, cap'n, Jake thought you'd be able
to fix me up for eight or nine a bottle."

  "Nup. Twelve. This is the real stuff, smuggled from
Canada. This is none o' your neutral spirits with a drop of juniper
extract," the honest merchant said virtuously. "Twelve bones - if
you want it. Course y' understand I'm just doing this anyway as a
friend of Jake's."

  "Sure! Sure! I understand!" Babbitt gratefully held
out twelve dollars. He felt honored by contact with greatness as
Hanson yawned, stuffed the bills, uncounted, into his radiant vest,
and swaggered away.

  He had a number of titillations out of concealing
the gin-bottle under his coat and out of hiding it in his desk. All
afternoon he snorted and chuckled and gurgled over his ability to
"give the Boys a real shot in the arm to-night." He was, in fact,
so exhilarated that he was within a block of his house before he
remembered that there was a certain matter, mentioned by his wife,
of fetching ice cream from Vecchia's. He explained, "Well, darn it
- " and drove back.

  Vecchia was not a caterer, he was The Caterer of
Zenith. Most coming-out parties were held in the white and gold
ballroom of the Maison Vecchia; at all nice teas the guests
recognized the five kinds of Vecchia sandwiches and the seven kinds
of Vecchia cakes; and all really smart dinners ended, as on a
resolving chord, in Vecchia Neapolitan ice cream in one of the
three reliable molds - the melon mold, the round mold like a layer
cake, and the long brick.

  Vecchia's shop had pale blue woodwork, tracery of
plaster roses, attendants in frilled aprons, and glass shelves of
"kisses" with all the refinement that inheres in whites of eggs.
Babbitt felt heavy and thick amid this professional daintiness, and
as he waited for the ice cream he decided, with hot prickles at the
back of his neck, that a girl customer was giggling at him. He went
home in a touchy temper. The first thing he heard was his wife's
agitated:

  "George! DID you remember to go to Vecchia's and get
the ice cream?"

  "Say! Look here! Do I ever forget to do things?"

  "Yes! Often!"

  "Well now, it's darn seldom I do, and it certainly
makes me tired, after going into a pink-tea joint like Vecchia's
and having to stand around looking at a lot of half-naked young
girls, all rouged up like they were sixty and eating a lot of stuff
that simply ruins their stomachs - "

  "Oh, it's too bad about you! I've noticed how you
hate to look at pretty girls!"

  With a jar Babbitt realized that his wife was too
busy to be impressed by that moral indignation with which males
rule the world, and he went humbly up-stairs to dress. He had an
impression of a glorified dining-room, of cut-glass, candles,
polished wood, lace, silver, roses. With the awed swelling of the
heart suitable to so grave a business as giving a dinner, he slew
the temptation to wear his plaited dress-shirt for a fourth time,
took out an entirely fresh one, tightened his black bow, and rubbed
his patent-leather pumps with a handkerchief. He glanced with
pleasure at his garnet and silver studs. He smoothed and patted his
ankles, transformed by silk socks from the sturdy shanks of George
Babbitt to the elegant limbs of what is called a Clubman. He stood
before the pier-glass, viewing his trim dinner-coat, his beautiful
triple-braided trousers; and murmured in lyric beatitude, "By
golly, I don't look so bad. I certainly don't look like Catawba. If
the hicks back home could see me in this rig, they'd have a
fit!"

  He moved majestically down to mix the cocktails. As
he chipped ice, as he squeezed oranges, as he collected vast stores
of bottles, glasses, and spoons at the sink in the pantry, he felt
as authoritative as the bartender at Healey Hanson's saloon. True,
Mrs. Babbitt said he was under foot, and Matilda and the maid hired
for the evening brushed by him, elbowed him, shrieked "Pleasopn
door," as they tottered through with trays, but in this high moment
he ignored them.

  Besides the new bottle of gin, his cellar consisted
of one half-bottle of Bourbon whisky, a quarter of a bottle of
Italian vermouth, and approximately one hundred drops of orange
bitters. He did not possess a cocktail-shaker. A shaker was proof
of dissipation, the symbol of a Drinker, and Babbitt disliked being
known as a Drinker even more than he liked a Drink. He mixed by
pouring from an ancient gravy-boat into a handleless pitcher; he
poured with a noble dignity, holding his alembics high beneath the
powerful Mazda globe, his face hot, his shirt-front a glaring
white, the copper sink a scoured red-gold.

  He tasted the sacred essence. "Now, by golly, if
that isn't pretty near one fine old cocktail! Kind of a Bronx, and
yet like a Manhattan. Ummmmmm! Hey, Myra, want a little nip before
the folks come?"

  Bustling into the dining-room, moving each glass a
quarter of an inch, rushing back with resolution implacable on her
face her gray and silver-lace party frock protected by a denim
towel, Mrs. Babbitt glared at him, and rebuked him, "Certainly
not!"

  "Well," in a loose, jocose manner, "I think the old
man will!"

  The cocktail filled him with a whirling exhilaration
behind which he was aware of devastating desires - to rush places
in fast motors, to kiss girls, to sing, to be witty. He sought to
regain his lost dignity by announcing to Matilda:

  "I'm going to stick this pitcher of cocktails in the
refrigerator. Be sure you don't upset any of 'em."

  "Yeh."

  "Well, be sure now. Don't go putting anything on
this top shelf."

  "Yeh."

  "Well, be - " He was dizzy. His voice was thin and
distant. "Whee!" With enormous impressiveness he commanded, "Well,
be sure now," and minced into the safety of the living-room. He
wondered whether he could persuade "as slow a bunch as Myra and the
Littlefields to go some place aft' dinner and raise Cain and maybe
dig up smore booze." He perceived that he had gifts of profligacy
which had been neglected.

  By the time the guests had come, including the
inevitable late couple for whom the others waited with painful
amiability, a great gray emptiness had replaced the purple swirling
in Babbitt's head, and he had to force the tumultuous greetings
suitable to a host on Floral Heights.

  The guests were Howard Littlefield, the doctor of
philosophy who furnished publicity and comforting economics to the
Street Traction Company; Vergil Gunch, the coal-dealer, equally
powerful in the Elks and in the Boosters' Club; Eddie Swanson the
agent for the Javelin Motor Car, who lived across the street; and
Orville Jones, owner of the Lily White Laundry, which justly
announced itself "the biggest, busiest, bulliest cleanerie shoppe
in Zenith." But, naturally, the most distinguished of all was T.
Cholmondeley Frink, who was not only the author of "Poemulations,"
which, syndicated daily in sixty-seven leading newspapers, gave him
one of the largest audiences of any poet in the world, but also an
optimistic lecturer and the creator of "Ads that Add." Despite the
searching philosophy and high morality of his verses, they were
humorous and easily understood by any child of twelve; and it added
a neat air of pleasantry to them that they were set not as verse
but as prose. Mr. Frink was known from Coast to Coast as
"Chum."

  With them were six wives, more or less - it was hard
to tell, so early in the evening, as at first glance they all
looked alike, and as they all said, "Oh, ISN'T this nice!" in the
same tone of determined liveliness. To the eye, the men were less
similar: Littlefield, a hedge-scholar, tall and horse-faced; Chum
Frink, a trifle of a man with soft and mouse-like hair, advertising
his profession as poet by a silk cord on his eye-glasses; Vergil
Gunch, broad, with coarse black hair en brosse; Eddie Swanson, a
bald and bouncing young man who showed his taste for elegance by an
evening waistcoat of figured black silk with glass buttons; Orville
Jones, a steady-looking, stubby, not very memorable person, with a
hemp-colored toothbrush mustache. Yet they were all so well fed and
clean, they all shouted "'Evenin', Georgie!" with such robustness,
that they seemed to be cousins, and the strange thing is that the
longer one knew the women, the less alike they seemed; while the
longer one knew the men, the more alike their bold patterns
appeared.

  The drinking of the cocktails was as canonical a
rite as the mixing. The company waited, uneasily, hopefully,
agreeing in a strained manner that the weather had been rather warm
and slightly cold, but still Babbitt said nothing about drinks.
They became despondent. But when the late couple (the Swansons) had
arrived, Babbitt hinted, "Well, folks, do you think you could stand
breaking the law a little?"

  They looked at Chum Frink, the recognized lord of
language. Frink pulled at his eye-glass cord as at a bell-rope, he
cleared his throat and said that which was the custom:

  "I'll tell you, George: I'm a law-abiding man, but
they do say Verg Gunch is a regular yegg, and of course he's bigger
'n I am, and I just can't figure out what I'd do if he tried to
force me into anything criminal!"

  Gunch was roaring, "Well, I'll take a chance - "
when Frink held up his hand and went on, "So if Verg and you
insist, Georgie, I'll park my car on the wrong side of the street,
because I take it for granted that's the crime you're hinting
at!"

  There was a great deal of laughter. Mrs. Jones
asserted, "Mr. Frink is simply too killing! You'd think he was so
innocent!"

  Babbitt clamored, "How did you guess it, Chum? Well,
you-all just wait a moment while I go out and get the - keys to
your cars!" Through a froth of merriment he brought the shining
promise, the mighty tray of glasses with the cloudy yellow
cocktails in the glass pitcher in the center. The men babbled, "Oh,
gosh, have a look!" and "This gets me right where I live!" and "Let
me at it!" But Chum Frink, a traveled man and not unused to woes,
was stricken by the thought that the potion might be merely
fruit-juice with a little neutral spirits. He looked timorous as
Babbitt, a moist and ecstatic almoner, held out a glass, but as he
tasted it he piped, "Oh, man, let me dream on! It ain't true, but
don't waken me! Jus' lemme slumber!"

  Two hours before, Frink had completed a newspaper
lyric beginning:

  "I sat alone and groused and thunk, and scratched my
head and sighed and wunk, and groaned, "There still are boobs,
alack, who'd like the old-time gin-mill back; that den that makes a
sage a loon, the vile and smelly old saloon!" I'll never miss their
poison booze, whilst I the bubbling spring can use, that leaves my
head at merry morn as clear as any babe new-born!"

  Babbitt drank with the others; his moment's
depression was gone; he perceived that these were the best fellows
in the world; he wanted to give them a thousand cocktails. "Think
you could stand another?" he cried. The wives refused, with
giggles, but the men, speaking in a wide, elaborate, enjoyable
manner, gloated, "Well, sooner than have you get sore at me,
Georgie - "

  "You got a little dividend coming," said Babbitt to
each of them, and each intoned, "Squeeze it, Georgie, squeeze
it!"

  When, beyond hope, the pitcher was empty, they stood
and talked about prohibition. The men leaned back on their heels,
put their hands in their trousers-pockets, and proclaimed their
views with the booming profundity of a prosperous male repeating a
thoroughly hackneyed statement about a matter of which he knows
nothing whatever.

  "Now, I'll tell you," said Vergil Gunch; "way I
figure it is this, and I can speak by the book, because I've talked
to a lot of doctors and fellows that ought to know, and the way I
see it is that it's a good thing to get rid of the saloon, but they
ought to let a fellow have beer and light wines."

  Howard Littlefield observed, "What isn't generally
realized is that it's a dangerous prop'sition to invade the rights
of personal liberty. Now, take this for instance: The King of -
Bavaria? I think it was Bavaria - yes, Bavaria, it was - in 1862,
March, 1862, he issued a proclamation against public grazing of
live-stock. The peasantry had stood for overtaxation without the
slightest complaint, but when this proclamation came out, they
rebelled. Or it may have been Saxony. But it just goes to show the
dangers of invading the rights of personal liberty."

  "That's it - no one got a right to invade personal
liberty," said Orville Jones.

  "Just the same, you don't want to forget prohibition
is a mighty good thing for the working-classes. Keeps 'em from
wasting their money and lowering their productiveness," said Vergil
Gunch.

  "Yes, that's so. But the trouble is the manner of
enforcement," insisted Howard Littlefield. "Congress didn't
understand the right system. Now, if I'd been running the thing,
I'd have arranged it so that the drinker himself was licensed, and
then we could have taken care of the shiftless workman - kept him
from drinking - and yet not 've interfered with the rights - with
the personal liberty - of fellows like ourselves."

  They bobbed their heads, looked admiringly at one
another, and stated, "That's so, that would be the stunt."

  "The thing that worries me is that a lot of these
guys will take to cocaine," sighed Eddie Swanson.