Babbit (47 page)

  He was afraid that they would be seen together. In
Zenith it is impossible to lunch with a neighbor's wife without the
fact being known, before nightfall, in every house in your circle.
But Tanis was beautifully discreet. However appealingly she might
turn to him when they were alone, she was gravely detached when
they were abroad, and he hoped that she would be taken for a
client. Orville Jones once saw them emerging from a movie theater,
and Babbitt bumbled, "Let me make you 'quainted with Mrs. Judique.
Now here's a lady who knows the right broker to come to, Orvy!" Mr.
Jones, though he was a man censorious of morals and of laundry
machinery, seemed satisfied.

  His predominant fear - not from any especial
fondness for her but from the habit of propriety - was that his
wife would learn of the affair. He was certain that she knew
nothing specific about Tanis, but he was also certain that she
suspected something indefinite. For years she had been bored by
anything more affectionate than a farewell kiss, yet she was hurt
by any slackening in his irritable periodic interest, and now he
had no interest; rather, a revulsion. He was completely faithful -
to Tanis. He was distressed by the sight of his wife's slack
plumpness, by her puffs and billows of flesh, by the tattered
petticoat which she was always meaning and always forgetting to
throw away. But he was aware that she, so long attuned to him,
caught all his repulsions. He elaborately, heavily, jocularly tried
to check them. He couldn't.

  They had a tolerable Christmas. Kenneth Escott was
there, admittedly engaged to Verona. Mrs. Babbitt was tearful and
called Kenneth her new son. Babbitt was worried about Ted, because
he had ceased complaining of the State University and become
suspiciously acquiescent. He wondered what the boy was planning,
and was too shy to ask. Himself, Babbitt slipped away on Christmas
afternoon to take his present, a silver cigarette-box, to Tanis.
When he returned Mrs. Babbitt asked, much too innocently, "Did you
go out for a little fresh air?"

  "Yes, just lil drive," he mumbled.

  After New Year's his wife proposed, "I heard from my
sister to-day, George. She isn't well. I think perhaps I ought to
go stay with her for a few weeks."

  Now, Mrs. Babbitt was not accustomed to leave home
during the winter except on violently demanding occasions, and only
the summer before, she had been gone for weeks. Nor was Babbitt one
of the detachable husbands who take separations casually He liked
to have her there; she looked after his clothes; she knew how his
steak ought to be cooked; and her clucking made him feel secure.
But he could not drum up even a dutiful "Oh, she doesn't really
need you, does she?" While he tried to look regretful, while he
felt that his wife was watching him, he was filled with exultant
visions of Tanis.

  "Do you think I'd better go?" she said sharply.

  "You've got to decide, honey; I can't."

  She turned away, sighing, and his forehead was
damp.

  Till she went, four days later, she was curiously
still, he cumbrously affectionate. Her train left at noon. As he
saw it grow small beyond the train-shed he longed to hurry to
Tanis.

  "No, by golly, I won't do that!" he vowed. "I won't
go near her for a week!"

  But he was at her flat at four.

  III

  He who had once controlled or seemed to control his
life in a progress unimpassioned but diligent and sane was for that
fortnight borne on a current of desire and very bad whisky and all
the complications of new acquaintances, those furious new intimates
who demand so much more attention than old friends. Each morning he
gloomily recognized his idiocies of the evening before. With his
head throbbing, his tongue and lips stinging from cigarettes, he
incredulously counted the number of drinks he had taken, and
groaned, "I got to quit!" He had ceased saying, "I WILL quit!" for
however resolute he might be at dawn, he could not, for a single
evening, check his drift.

  He had met Tanis's friends; he had, with the ardent
haste of the Midnight People, who drink and dance and rattle and
are ever afraid to be silent, been adopted as a member of her
group, which they called "The Bunch." He first met them after a day
when he had worked particularly hard and when he hoped to be quiet
with Tanis and slowly sip her admiration.

  From down the hall he could hear shrieks and the
grind of a phonograph. As Tanis opened the door he saw fantastic
figures dancing in a haze of cigarette smoke. The tables and chairs
were against the wall.

  "Oh, isn't this dandy!" she gabbled at him. "Carrie
Nork had the loveliest idea. She decided it was time for a party,
and she 'phoned the Bunch and told 'em to gather round. . . .
George, this is Carrie."

  "Carrie" was, in the less desirable aspects of both,
at once matronly and spinsterish. She was perhaps forty; her hair
was an unconvincing ash-blond; and if her chest was flat, her hips
were ponderous. She greeted Babbitt with a giggling "Welcome to our
little midst! Tanis says you're a real sport."

  He was apparently expected to dance, to be boyish
and gay with Carrie, and he did his unforgiving best. He towed her
about the room, bumping into other couples, into the radiator, into
chair-legs cunningly ambushed. As he danced he surveyed the rest of
the Bunch: A thin young woman who looked capable, conceited, and
sarcastic. Another woman whom he could never quite remember. Three
overdressed and slightly effeminate young men - soda-fountain
clerks, or at least born for that profession. A man of his own age,
immovable, self-satisfied, resentful of Babbitt's presence.

  When he had finished his dutiful dance Tanis took
him aside and begged, "Dear, wouldn't you like to do something for
me? I'm all out of booze, and the Bunch want to celebrate. Couldn't
you just skip down to Healey Hanson's and get some?"

  "Sure," he said, trying not to sound sullen.

  "I'll tell you: I'll get Minnie Sonntag to drive
down with you." Tanis was pointing to the thin, sarcastic young
woman.

  Miss Sonntag greeted him with an astringent "How
d'you do, Mr. Babbitt. Tanis tells me you're a very prominent man,
and I'm honored by being allowed to drive with you. Of course I'm
not accustomed to associating with society people like you, so I
don't know how to act in such exalted circles!"

  Thus Miss Sonntag talked all the way down to Healey
Hanson's. To her jibes he wanted to reply "Oh, go to the devil!"
but he never quite nerved himself to that reasonable comment. He
was resenting the existence of the whole Bunch. He had heard Tanis
speak of "darling Carrie" and "Min Sonntag - she's so clever -
you'll adore her," but they had never been real to him. He had
pictured Tanis as living in a rose-tinted vacuum, waiting for him,
free of all the complications of a Floral Heights.

  When they returned he had to endure the patronage of
the young soda-clerks. They were as damply friendly as Miss Sonntag
was dryly hostile. They called him "Old Georgie" and shouted, "Come
on now, sport; shake a leg" . . . boys in belted coats, pimply
boys, as young as Ted and as flabby as chorus-men, but powerful to
dance and to mind the phonograph and smoke cigarettes and patronize
Tanis. He tried to be one of them; he cried "Good work, Pete!" but
his voice creaked.

  Tanis apparently enjoyed the companionship of the
dancing darlings; she bridled to their bland flirtation and
casually kissed them at the end of each dance. Babbitt hated her,
for the moment. He saw her as middle-aged. He studied the wrinkles
in the softness of her throat, the slack flesh beneath her chin.
The taut muscles of her youth were loose and drooping. Between
dances she sat in the largest chair, waving her cigarette,
summoning her callow admirers to come and talk to her. ("She thinks
she's a blooming queen!" growled Babbitt.) She chanted to Miss
Sonntag, "Isn't my little studio sweet?" ("Studio, rats! It's a
plain old-maid-and-chow-dog flat! Oh, God, I wish I was home! I
wonder if I can't make a getaway now?")

  His vision grew blurred, however, as he applied
himself to Healey Hanson's raw but vigorous whisky. He blended with
the Bunch. He began to rejoice that Carrie Nork and Pete, the most
nearly intelligent of the nimble youths, seemed to like him; and it
was enormously important to win over the surly older man, who
proved to be a railway clerk named Fulton Bemis.

  The conversation of the Bunch was exclamatory,
high-colored, full of references to people whom Babbitt did not
know. Apparently they thought very comfortably of themselves. They
were the Bunch, wise and beautiful and amusing; they were Bohemians
and urbanites, accustomed to all the luxuries of Zenith:
dance-halls, movie-theaters, and roadhouses; and in a cynical
superiority to people who were "slow" or "tightwad" they
cackled:

  "Oh, Pete, did I tell you what that dub of a cashier
said when I came in late yesterday? Oh, it was per-fect-ly
priceless!"

  "Oh, but wasn't T. D. stewed! Say, he was simply
ossified! What did Gladys say to him?"

  "Think of the nerve of Bob Bickerstaff trying to get
us to come to his house! Say, the nerve of him! Can you beat it for
nerve? Some nerve I call it!"

  "Did you notice how Dotty was dancing? Gee, wasn't
she the limit!"

  Babbitt was to be heard sonorously agreeing with the
once-hated Miss Minnie Sonntag that persons who let a night go by
without dancing to jazz music were crabs, pikers, and poor fish;
and he roared "You bet!" when Mrs. Carrie Nork gurgled, "Don't you
love to sit on the floor? It's so Bohemian!" He began to think
extremely well of the Bunch. When he mentioned his friends Sir
Gerald Doak, Lord Wycombe, William Washington Eathorne, and Chum
Frink, he was proud of their condescending interest. He got so
thoroughly into the jocund spirit that he didn't much mind seeing
Tanis drooping against the shoulder of the youngest and milkiest of
the young men, and he himself desired to hold Carrie Nork's pulpy
hand, and dropped it only because Tanis looked angry.

  When he went home, at two, he was fully a member of
the Bunch, and all the week thereafter he was bound by the
exceedingly straitened conventions, the exceedingly wearing
demands, of their life of pleasure and freedom. He had to go to
their parties; he was involved in the agitation when everybody
telephoned to everybody else that she hadn't meant what she'd said
when she'd said that, and anyway, why was Pete going around saying
she'd said it?

  Never was a Family more insistent on learning one
another's movements than were the Bunch. All of them volubly knew,
or indignantly desired to know, where all the others had been every
minute of the week. Babbitt found himself explaining to Carrie or
Fulton Bemis just what he had been doing that he should not have
joined them till ten o'clock, and apologizing for having gone to
dinner with a business acquaintance.

  Every member of the Bunch was expected to telephone
to every other member at least once a week. "Why haven't you called
me up?" Babbitt was asked accusingly, not only by Tanis and Carrie
but presently by new ancient friends, Jennie and Capitolina and
Toots.

  If for a moment he had seen Tanis as withering and
sentimental, he lost that impression at Carrie Nork's dance. Mrs.
Nork had a large house and a small husband. To her party came all
of the Bunch, perhaps thirty-five of them when they were completely
mobilized. Babbitt, under the name of "Old Georgie," was now a
pioneer of the Bunch, since each month it changed half its
membership and he who could recall the prehistoric days of a
fortnight ago, before Mrs. Absolom, the food-demonstrator, had gone
to Indianapolis, and Mac had "got sore at" Minnie, was a venerable
leader and able to condescend to new Petes and Minnies and
Gladyses.

  At Carrie's, Tanis did not have to work at being
hostess. She was dignified and sure, a clear fine figure in the
black chiffon frock he had always loved; and in the wider spaces of
that ugly house Babbitt was able to sit quietly with her. He
repented of his first revulsion, mooned at her feet, and happily
drove her home. Next day he bought a violent yellow tie, to make
himself young for her. He knew, a little sadly, that he could not
make himself beautiful; he beheld himself as heavy, hinting of
fatness, but he danced, he dressed, he chattered, to be as young as
she was . . . as young as she seemed to be.

  IV

  As all converts, whether to a religion, love, or
gardening, find as by magic that though hitherto these hobbies have
not seemed to exist, now the whole world is filled with their fury,
so, once he was converted to dissipation, Babbitt discovered
agreeable opportunities for it everywhere.

  He had a new view of his sporting neighbor, Sam
Doppelbrau. The Doppelbraus were respectable people, industrious
people, prosperous people, whose ideal of happiness was an eternal
cabaret. Their life was dominated by suburban bacchanalia of
alcohol, nicotine, gasoline, and kisses. They and their set worked
capably all the week, and all week looked forward to Saturday
night, when they would, as they expressed it, "throw a party;" and
the thrown party grew noisier and noisier up to Sunday dawn, and
usually included an extremely rapid motor expedition to nowhere in
particular.

  One evening when Tanis was at the theater, Babbitt
found himself being lively with the Doppelbraus, pledging
friendship with men whom he had for years privily denounced to Mrs.
Babbitt as a "rotten bunch of tin-horns that I wouldn't go out
with, rot if they were the last people on earth." That evening he
had sulkily come home and poked about in front of the house,
chipping off the walk the ice-clots, like fossil footprints, made
by the steps of passers-by during the recent snow. Howard
Littlefield came up snuffling.