relieved of babbitt's bumbling and the soft grunts with which his wife expressed the sympathy she was too experienced to feel and much too experienced not to show, their bedroom settled instantly into impersonality.
it gave on the sleeping-porch. it served both of them as dressing-room, and on the coldest nights babbitt luxuriously gave up the duty of being manly and retreated to the bed inside, to curl his toes in the warmth and laugh at the january gale.
the room displayed a modest and pleasant color-scheme, after one of the best standard designs of the decorator who “did the interiors” for most of the speculative-builders' houses in zenith. the walls were gray, the woodwork white, the rug a serene blue; and very much like mahogany was the furniture—the bureau with its great clear mirror, mrs. babbitt's dressing-table with toilet-articles of almost solid silver, the plain twin beds, between them a small table holding a standard electric bedside lamp, a glass for water, and a standard bedside book with colored illustrations—what particular book it was cannot be ascertained, since no one had ever opened it. the mattresses were firm but not hard, triumphant modern mattresses which had cost a great deal of money; the hot-water radiator was of exactly the proper scientific surface for the cubic contents of the room. the windows were large and easily opened, with the best catches and cords, and holland roller-shades guaranteed not to crack. it was a masterpiece among bedrooms, right out of cheerful modern houses for medium incomes. only it had nothing to do with the babbitts, nor with any one else. if people had ever lived and loved here, read thrillers at midnight and lain in beautiful indolence on a sunday morning, there were no signs of it. it had the air of being a very good room in a very good hotel. one expected the chambermaid to come in and make it ready for people who would stay but one night, go without looking back, and never think of it again.
every second house in floral heights had a bedroom precisely like this.
the babbitts' house was five years old. it was all as competent and glossy as this bedroom. it had the best of taste, the best of inexpensive rugs, a simple and laudable architecture, and the latest conveniences. throughout, electricity took the place of candles and slatternly hearth-fires. along the bedroom baseboard were three plugs for electric lamps, concealed by little brass doors. in the halls were plugs for the vacuum cleaner, and in the living-room plugs for the piano lamp, for the electric fan. the trim dining-room (with its admirable oak buffet, its leaded-glass cupboard, its creamy plaster walls, its modest scene of a salmon expiring upon a pile of oysters) had plugs which supplied the electric percolator and the electric toaster.
in fact there was but one thing wrong with the babbitt house: it was not a home.
ii
often of a morning babbitt came bouncing and jesting in to breakfast. but things were mysteriously awry to-day. as he pontifically tread the upper hall he looked into verona's bedroom and protested, “what's the use of giving the family a high-class house when they don't appreciate it and tend to business and get down to brass tacks?”
he marched upon them: verona, a dumpy brown-haired girl of twenty-two, just out of bryn mawr, given to solicitudes about duty and sex and god and the unconquerable bagginess of the gray sports-suit she was now wearing. ted—theodore roosevelt babbitt—a decorative boy of seventeen. tinka—katherine—still a baby at ten, with radiant red hair and a thin skin which hinted of too much candy and too many ice cream sodas. babbitt did not show his vague irritation as he tramped in. he really disliked being a family tyrant, and his nagging was as meaningless as it was frequent. he shouted at tinka, “well, kittiedoolie!” it was the only pet name in his vocabulary, except the “dear” and “hon.” with which he recognized his wife, and he flung it at tinka every morning.
he gulped a cup of coffee in the hope of pacifying his stomach and his soul. his stomach ceased to feel as though it did not belong to him, but verona began to be conscientious and annoying, and abruptly there returned to babbitt the doubts regarding life and families and business which had clawed at him when his dream-life and the slim fairy girl had fled.
verona had for six months been filing-clerk at the gruensberg leather company offices, with a prospect of becoming secretary to mr. gruensberg and thus, as babbitt defined it, “getting some good out of your expensive college education till you're ready to marry and settle down.”
but now said verona: “father! i was talking to a classmate of mine that's working for the associated charities—oh, dad, there's the sweetest little babies that come to the milk-station there!—and i feel as though i ought to be doing something worth while like that.”
“what do you mean 'worth while'? if you get to be gruensberg's secretary—and maybe you would, if you kept up your shorthand and didn't go sneaking off to concerts and talkfests every evening—i guess you'll find thirty-five or forty bones a week worth while!”
“i know, but—oh, i want to—contribute—i wish i were working in a settlement-house. i wonder if i could get one of the department-stores to let me put in a welfare-department with a nice rest-room and chintzes and wicker chairs and so on and so forth. or i could—”
“now you look here! the first thing you got to understand is that all this uplift and flipflop and settlement-work and recreation is nothing in god's world but the entering wedge for socialism. the sooner a man learns he isn't going to be coddled, and he needn't expect a lot of free grub and, uh, all these free classes and flipflop and doodads for his kids unless he earns 'em, why, the sooner he'll get on the job and produce—produce—produce! that's what the country needs, and not all this fancy stuff that just enfeebles the will-power of the working man and gives his kids a lot of notions above their class. and you—if you'd tend to business instead of fooling and fussing—all the time! when i was a young man i made up my mind what i wanted to do, and stuck to it through thick and thin, and that's why i'm where i am to-day, and—myra! what do you let the girl chop the toast up into these dinky little chunks for? can't get your fist onto 'em. half cold, anyway!”
ted babbitt, junior in the great east side high school, had been making hiccup-like sounds of interruption. he blurted now, “say, rone, you going to—”
verona whirled. “ted! will you kindly not interrupt us when we're talking about serious matters!”
“aw punk,” said ted judicially. “ever since somebody slipped up and let you out of college, ammonia, you been pulling these nut conversations about what-nots and so-on-and-so-forths. are you going to—i want to use the car tonight.”
babbitt snorted, “oh, you do! may want it myself!” verona protested, “oh, you do, mr. smarty! i'm going to take it myself!” tinka wailed, “oh, papa, you said maybe you'd drive us down to rosedale!” and mrs. babbitt, “careful, tinka, your sleeve is in the butter.” they glared, and verona hurled, “ted, you're a perfect pig about the car!”
“course you're not! not a-tall!” ted could be maddeningly bland. “you just want to grab it off, right after dinner, and leave it in front of some skirt's house all evening while you sit and gas about lite'ature and the highbrows you're going to marry—if they only propose!”
“well, dad oughtn't to ever let you have it! you and those beastly jones boys drive like maniacs. the idea of your taking the turn on chautauqua place at forty miles an hour!”
“aw, where do you get that stuff! you're so darn scared of the car that you drive up-hill with the emergency brake on!”
“i do not! and you—always talking about how much you know about motors, and eunice littlefield told me you said the battery fed the generator!”
