Babbitt: Chapters 6–11

Graff was not so amenable to Vision and Ideals as usual.

He was as afraid of his still-faced clerks—of the eyes focused on him, Miss McGoun staring with head lifted from her typing, Miss Bannigan looking over her ledger, Mat Penniman craning around at his desk in the dark alcove, Stanley Graff sullenly expressionless—as a parvenu before the bleak propriety of his butler.

They went, with ardor and some thoroughness, into the matters of streamline bodies, hill-climbing power, wire wheels, chrome steel, ignition systems, and body colors.

There was no court to decide whether the second son of a Pierce Arrow limousine should go in to dinner before the first son of a Buick roadster, but of their respective social importance there was no doubt; and where Babbitt as a boy had aspired to the presidency, his son Ted aspired to a Packard twin-six and an established position in the motored gentry.

Babbitt was again without a canon which would enable him to speak with authority.

“Nonsense! The idea! Most useless thing I ever heard of!” Babbitt fulminated.

The drain-pipe was dripping, a dulcet and lively song: drippety drip drip dribble, drippety drip drip drip.

“Come here! You've done enough fooling!” he reproved the treacherous soap, and defied the scratchy nail-brush with “Oh, you would, would you!”

She promised to meet him in Deauville, the coming summer, “though,” she sighed, “it's becoming too dreadfully banal; nothing but Americans and frowsy English baronesses.”

He had never ridden in a motor car, never seen a bath-tub, never read any book save the Bible, McGuffey's readers, and religious tracts; and he believed that the earth is flat, that the English are the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel, and that the United States is a democracy.

An expense fund of forty thousand dollars had been underwritten; out on the County Fair Grounds a Mike Monday Tabernacle had been erected, to seat fifteen thousand people.

They can stand right up here and tell me to my face that I'm a galoot and a liar and a hick!

For two weeks they studied, debated, and arbitrated the list of guests.

On the morning of the dinner, Mrs. Babbitt was restive.

He drove from the severe rectangular streets of the modern business center into the tangled byways of Old Town—jagged blocks filled with sooty warehouses and lofts; on into The Arbor, once a pleasant orchard but now a morass of lodging-houses, tenements, and brothels.

Babbitt followed him as delicately as a cat, and wheedled, “Say, Oscar, I want to speak to Mr. Hanson.”

Mr. Hanson said only “Yuh?” but his implacable and contemptuous eyes queried Babbitt's soul, and he seemed not at all impressed by the new dark-gray suit for which (as he had admitted to every acquaintance at the Athletic Club) Babbitt had paid a hundred and twenty-five dollars.

In alarm, in obsequiousness, as Hanson's eyes grew more bored, “You telephone to Jake about me, if you want to.”

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!”

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!”

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.

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.

...no sense excusing these rube burgs too easy. Fellow's own fault if he doesn't show the initiative to up and beat it to the city, like we done—did. And, just speaking in confidence among friends, they're jealous as the devil of a city man.

“There now, do you see, smarty! You're such an authority on clothes!” Louetta raged, while the guests ruminated and peeped at her shoulders.

The others, from their fitful unconvincing talk, their expressions of being slowly and painfully smothered, seemed to be suffering from the toil of social life and the horror of good food as much as himself.

He was again able to endure Vergil Gunch's inexorable heartiness.

“Ask Dant' how Jack Shakespeare and old Verg'—the guy they named after me—are gettin' along, and don't they wish they could get into the movie game!” he blared, and instantly all was mirth.

Though he was impressed by the profundity of the statement, he was only half-enthusiastic when Howard Littlefield lectured, “The United States is the only nation in which the government is a Moral Ideal and not just a social arrangement.”

He coaxed her with large booming sounds, with affable smiles, like a popular preacher blessing an Easter congregation, like a humorous lecturer completing his stint of eloquence, like all perpetrators of masculine wiles.

He coaxed her with large booming sounds, with affable smiles, like a popular preacher blessing an Easter congregation, like a humorous lecturer completing his stint of eloquence, like all perpetrators of masculine wiles.

Zilla was an active, strident, full-blown, high-bosomed blonde.

The Babbitts and Rieslings sat doubtfully on stone-hard brocade chairs in the small living-room of the flat, with its mantel unprovided with a fireplace, and its strip of heavy gilt fabric upon a glaring new player-piano, till Mrs. Riesling shrieked, “Come on! Let's put some pep in it! Get out your fiddle, Paul, and I'll try to make Georgie dance decently.”

But we went, and then there was one of those impudent conductors, and Paul wouldn't do a thing.

She wept. But Babbitt glared stolidly.

They strolled abreast, old friends and well content.

Babbitt lay awake in the close hot tomb of his Pullman berth, shaking with remembrance of the fat man's limerick about the lady who wished to be wild.

They landed, and endured the critical examination of the habitues who had been at the hotel for a whole week.

Paul was distressingly clean, but Babbitt reveled in a good sound dirtiness, in not having to shave till his spirit was moved to it.

They did not talk much. The nervous loquacity and opinionation of the Zenith Athletic Club dropped from them.

The day before their families arrived, the women guests at the hotel bubbled, “Oh, isn't it nice! You must be so excited;” and the proprieties compelled Babbitt and Paul to look excited.