Babbit (20 page)

  Zilla writhed. She begged, "Oh, they don't!"

  "They certainly do!"

  "I've been a bad woman! I'm terribly sorry! I'll
kill myself! I'll do anything. Oh, I'll - What do you want?"

  She abased herself completely. Also, she enjoyed it.
To the connoisseur of scenes, nothing is more enjoyable than a
thorough, melodramatic, egoistic humility.

  "I want you to let Paul beat it off to Maine with
me," Babbitt demanded.

  "How can I help his going? You've just said I was an
idiot and nobody paid any attention to me."

  "Oh, you can help it, all right, all right! What you
got to do is to cut out hinting that the minute he gets out of your
sight, he'll go chasing after some petticoat. Matter fact, that's
the way you start the boy off wrong. You ought to have more sense -
"

  "Oh, I will, honestly, I will, George. I know I was
bad. Oh, forgive me, all of you, forgive me - "

  She enjoyed it.

  So did Babbitt. He condemned magnificently and
forgave piously, and as he went parading out with his wife he was
grandly explanatory to her:

  "Kind of a shame to bully Zilla, but course it was
the only way to handle her. Gosh, I certainly did have her
crawling!"

  She said calmly, "Yes. You were horrid. You were
showing off. You were having a lovely time thinking what a great
fine person you were!"

  "Well, by golly! Can you beat it! Of course I might
of expected you to not stand by me! I might of expected you'd stick
up for your own sex!"

  "Yes. Poor Zilla, she's so unhappy. She takes it out
on Paul. She hasn't a single thing to do, in that little flat. And
she broods too much. And she used to be so pretty and gay, and she
resents losing it. And you were just as nasty and mean as you could
be. I'm not a bit proud of you - or of Paul, boasting about his
horrid love-affairs!"

  He was sulkily silent; he maintained his bad temper
at a high level of outraged nobility all the four blocks home. At
the door he left her, in self-approving haughtiness, and tramped
the lawn.

  With a shock it was revealed to him: "Gosh, I wonder
if she was right - if she was partly right?" Overwork must have
flayed him to abnormal sensitiveness; it was one of the few times
in his life when he had queried his eternal excellence; and he
perceived the summer night, smelled the wet grass. Then: "I don't
care! I've pulled it off. We're going to have our spree. And for
Paul, I'd do anything."

  II

  They were buying their Maine tackle at Ijams
Brothers', the Sporting Goods Mart, with the help of Willis Ijams,
fellow member of the Boosters' Club. Babbitt was completely mad. He
trumpeted and danced. He muttered to Paul, "Say, this is pretty
good, eh? To be buying the stuff, eh? And good old Willis Ijams
himself coming down on the floor to wait on us! Say, if those
fellows that are getting their kit for the North Lakes knew we were
going clear up to Maine, they'd have a fit, eh? . . . Well, come
on, Brother Ijams - Willis, I mean. Here's your chance! We're a
couple of easy marks! Whee! Let me at it! I'm going to buy out the
store!"

  He gloated on fly-rods and gorgeous rubber
hip-boots, on tents with celluloid windows and folding chairs and
ice-boxes. He simple-heartedly wanted to buy all of them. It was
the Paul whom he was always vaguely protecting who kept him from
his drunken desires.

  But even Paul lightened when Willis Ijams, a
salesman with poetry and diplomacy, discussed flies. "Now, of
course, you boys know." he said, "the great scrap is between dry
flies and wet flies. Personally, I'm for dry flies. More
sporting."

  "That's so. Lots more sporting," fulminated Babbitt,
who knew very little about flies either wet or dry.

  "Now if you'll take my advice, Georgie, you'll stock
up well on these pale evening dims, and silver sedges, and red
ants. Oh, boy, there's a fly, that red ant!"

  "You bet! That's what it is - a fly!" rejoiced
Babbitt.

  "Yes, sir, that red ant," said Ijams, "is a real
honest-to-God FLY!"

  "Oh, I guess ole Mr. Trout won't come a-hustling
when I drop one of those red ants on the water!" asserted Babbitt,
and his thick wrists made a rapturous motion of casting.

  "Yes, and the landlocked salmon will take it, too,"
said Ijams, who had never seen a landlocked salmon.

  "Salmon! Trout! Say, Paul, can you see Uncle George
with his khaki pants on haulin' 'em in, some morning 'bout seven?
Whee!"

  III

  They were on the New York express, incredibly bound
for Maine, incredibly without their families. They were free, in a
man's world, in the smoking-compartment of the Pullman.

  Outside the car window was a glaze of darkness
stippled with the gold of infrequent mysterious lights. Babbitt was
immensely conscious, in the sway and authoritative clatter of the
train, of going, of going on. Leaning toward Paul he grunted,
"Gosh, pretty nice to be hiking, eh?"

  The small room, with its walls of ocher-colored
steel, was filled mostly with the sort of men he classified as the
Best Fellows You'll Ever Meet - Real Good Mixers. There were four
of them on the long seat; a fat man with a shrewd fat face, a
knife-edged man in a green velour hat, a very young young man with
an imitation amber cigarette-holder, and Babbitt. Facing them, on
two movable leather chairs, were Paul and a lanky, old-fashioned
man, very cunning, with wrinkles bracketing his mouth. They all
read newspapers or trade journals, boot-and-shoe journals, crockery
journals, and waited for the joys of conversation. It was the very
young man, now making his first journey by Pullman, who began
it.

  "Say, gee, I had a wild old time in Zenith!" he
gloried. "Say, if a fellow knows the ropes there he can have as
wild a time as he can in New York!"

  "Yuh, I bet you simply raised the old Ned. I figured
you were a bad man when I saw you get on the train!" chuckled the
fat one.

  The others delightedly laid down their papers.

  "Well, that's all right now! I guess I seen some
things in the Arbor you never seen!" complained the boy.

  "Oh, I'll bet you did! I bet you lapped up the
malted milk like a reg'lar little devil!"

  Then, the boy having served as introduction, they
ignored him and charged into real talk. Only Paul, sitting by
himself, reading at a serial story in a newspaper, failed to join
them and all but Babbitt regarded him as a snob, an eccentric, a
person of no spirit.

  Which of them said which has never been determined,
and does not matter, since they all had the same ideas and
expressed them always with the same ponderous and brassy assurance.
If it was not Babbitt who was delivering any given verdict, at
least he was beaming on the chancellor who did deliver it.

  "At that, though," announced the first "they're
selling quite some booze in Zenith. Guess they are everywhere. I
don't know how you fellows feel about prohibition, but the way it
strikes me is that it's a mighty beneficial thing for the poor zob
that hasn't got any will-power but for fellows like us, it's an
infringement of personal liberty."

  "That's a fact. Congress has got no right to
interfere with a fellow's personal liberty," contended the
second.

  A man came in from the car, but as all the seats
were full he stood up while he smoked his cigarette. He was an
Outsider; he was not one of the Old Families of the
smoking-compartment. They looked upon him bleakly and, after trying
to appear at ease by examining his chin in the mirror, he gave it
up and went out in silence.

  "Just been making a trip through the South. Business
conditions not very good down there," said one of the council.

  "Is that a fact! Not very good, eh?"

  "No, didn't strike me they were up to normal."

  "Not up to normal, eh?"

  "No, I wouldn't hardly say they were."

  The whole council nodded sagely and decided, "Yump.
not hardly up to snuff."

  "Well, business conditions ain't what they ought to
be out West, neither, not by a long shot."

  "That's a fact. And I guess the hotel business feels
it. That's one good thing, though: these hotels that've been
charging five bucks a day - yes, and maybe six - seven! - for a
rotten room are going to be darn glad to get four, and maybe give
you a little service."

  "That's a fact. Say, uh, speaknubout hotels, I hit
the St. Francis at San Francisco for the first time, the other day,
and, say, it certainly is a first-class place."

  "You're right, brother! The St. Francis is a swell
place - absolutely A1."

  "That's a fact. I'm right with you. It's a
first-class place."

  "Yuh, but say, any of you fellows ever stay at the
Rippleton, in Chicago? I don't want to knock - I believe in
boosting wherever you can - but say, of all the rotten dumps that
pass 'emselves off as first-class hotels, that's the worst. I'm
going to get those guys, one of these days, and I told 'em so. You
know how I am - well, maybe you don't know, but I'm accustomed to
first-class accommodations, and I'm perfectly willing to pay a
reasonable price. I got into Chicago late the other night, and the
Rippleton's near the station - I'd never been there before, but I
says to the taxi-driver - I always believe in taking a taxi when
you get in late; may cost a little more money, but, gosh, it's
worth it when you got to be up early next morning and out selling a
lot of crabs - and I said to him, 'Oh, just drive me over to the
Rippleton.'

  "Well, we got there, and I breezed up to the desk
and said to the clerk, 'Well, brother, got a nice room with bath
for Cousin Bill?' Saaaay! You'd 'a' thought I'd sold him a second,
or asked him to work on Yom Kippur! He hands me the cold-boiled
stare and yaps, 'I dunno, friend, I'll see,' and he ducks behind
the rigamajig they keep track of the rooms on. Well, I guess he
called up the Credit Association and the American Security League
to see if I was all right - he certainly took long enough - or
maybe he just went to sleep; but finally he comes out and looks at
me like it hurts him, and croaks, 'I think I can let you have a
room with bath.' 'Well, that's awful nice of you - sorry to trouble
you - how much 'll it set me back?' I says, real sweet. 'It'll cost
you seven bucks a day, friend,' he says.

  "Well, it was late, and anyway, it went down on my
expense-account - gosh, if I'd been paying it instead of the firm,
I'd 'a' tramped the streets all night before I'd 'a' let any hick
tavern stick me seven great big round dollars, believe me! So I
lets it go at that. Well, the clerk wakes a nice young bell hop -
fine lad - not a day over seventy-nine years old - fought at the
Battle of Gettysburg and doesn't know it's over yet - thought I was
one of the Confederates, I guess, from the way he looked at me -
and Rip van Winkle took me up to something - I found out afterwards
they called it a room, but first I thought there'd been some
mistake - I thought they were putting me in the Salvation Army
collection-box! At seven per each and every diem! Gosh!"

  "Yuh, I've heard the Rippleton was pretty cheesy.
Now, when I go to Chicago I always stay at the Blackstone or the La
Salle - first-class places."

  "Say, any of you fellows ever stay at the Birchdale
at Terre Haute? How is it?"

  "Oh, the Birchdale is a first-class hotel."

  (Twelve minutes of conference on the state of hotels
in South Bend, Flint, Dayton, Tulsa, Wichita, Fort Worth, Winona,
Erie, Fargo, and Moose Jaw.)

  "Speaknubout prices," the man in the velour hat
observed, fingering the elk-tooth on his heavy watch-chain, "I'd
like to know where they get this stuff about clothes coming down.
Now, you take this suit I got on." He pinched his trousers-leg.
"Four years ago I paid forty-two fifty for it, and it was real
sure-'nough value. Well, here the other day I went into a store
back home and asked to see a suit, and the fellow yanks out some
hand-me-downs that, honest, I wouldn't put on a hired man. Just out
of curiosity I asks him, 'What you charging for that junk?' 'Junk,'
he says, 'what d' you mean junk? That's a swell piece of goods, all
wool - ' Like hell! It was nice vegetable wool, right off the Ole
Plantation! 'It's all wool,' he says, 'and we get sixty-seven
ninety for it.' 'Oh, you do, do you!' I says. 'Not from me you
don't,' I says, and I walks right out on him. You bet! I says to
the wife, 'Well,' I said, 'as long as your strength holds out and
you can go on putting a few more patches on papa's pants, we'll
just pass up buying clothes."'

  "That's right, brother. And just look at collars,
frinstance - "

  "Hey! Wait!" the fat man protested. "What's the
matter with collars? I'm selling collars! D' you realize the cost
of labor on collars is still two hundred and seven per cent. above
- "

  They voted that if their old friend the fat man sold
collars, then the price of collars was exactly what it should be;
but all other clothing was tragically too expensive. They admired
and loved one another now. They went profoundly into the science of
business, and indicated that the purpose of manufacturing a plow or
a brick was so that it might be sold. To them, the Romantic Hero
was no longer the knight, the wandering poet, the cowpuncher, the
aviator, nor the brave young district attorney, but the great
sales-manager, who had an Analysis of Merchandizing Problems on his
glass-topped desk, whose title of nobility was "Go-getter," and who
devoted himself and all his young samurai to the cosmic purpose of
Selling - not of selling anything in particular, for or to anybody
in particular, but pure Selling.

  The shop-talk roused Paul Riesling. Though he was a
player of violins and an interestingly unhappy husband, he was also
a very able salesman of tar-roofing. He listened to the fat man's
remarks on "the value of house-organs and bulletins as a method of
jazzing-up the Boys out on the road;" and he himself offered one or
two excellent thoughts on the use of two-cent stamps on circulars.
Then he committed an offense against the holy law of the Clan of
Good Fellows. He became highbrow.