Babbitt

call he-literature! That Prince Albert fellow⁠—though, gosh, there can’t be just one fellow that writes ’em; must be a big board of classy ink-slingers in conference, but anyway: now, him, he doesn’t write for long-haired pikers, he writes for Regular Guys, he writes for me, and I tip my benny to him! The only thing is: I wonder if it sells the goods? Course, like all these poets, this Prince Albert fellow lets his idea run away with him. It makes elegant reading, but it don’t say nothing. I’d never go out and buy Prince Albert Tobacco after reading it, because it doesn’t tell me anything about the stuff. It’s just a bunch of fluff.”

Frink faced him: “Oh, you’re crazy! Have I got to sell you the idea of Style? Anyway that’s the kind of stuff I’d like to do for the Zeeco. But I simply can’t. So I decided to stick to the straight poetic, and I took a shot at a highbrow ad for the Zeeco. How do you like this:

The long white trail is calling⁠—calling⁠—and it’s over the hills and far away for every man or woman that has red blood in his veins and on his lips the ancient song of the buccaneers. It’s away with dull drudging, and a fig for care. Speed⁠—glorious Speed⁠—it’s more than just a moment’s exhilaration⁠—it’s Life for you and me! This great new truth the makers of the Zeeco Car have considered as much as price and style. It’s fleet as the antelope, smooth as the glide of a swallow, yet powerful as the charge of a bull-elephant. Class breathes in every line. Listen, brother! You’ll never know what the high art of hiking is till you Try Life’s Zippingest Zest⁠—The Zecco!”

“Yes,” Frink mused, “that’s got an elegant color to it, if I do say so, but it ain’t got the originality of ‘spill-of-speech!’ ” The whole company sighed with sympathy and admiration.

Chapter IX

I

Babbitt was fond of his friends, he loved the importance of being host and shouting, “Certainly, you’re going to have smore chicken⁠—the idea!” and he appreciated the genius of T. Cholmondeley Frink, but the vigor of the cocktails was gone, and the more he ate the less joyful he felt. Then the amity of the dinner was destroyed by the nagging of the Swansons.

In Floral Heights and the other prosperous sections of Zenith, especially in the “young married set,” there were many women who had nothing to do. Though they had few servants, yet with gas stoves, electric ranges and dishwashers and vacuum cleaners, and tiled kitchen walls, their houses were so convenient that they had little housework, and much of their food came from bakeries and delicatessens. They had but two, one, or no children; and despite the myth that the Great War had made work respectable, their husbands objected to their “wasting time and getting a lot of crank ideas” in unpaid social work, and still more to their causing a rumor, by earning money, that they were not adequately supported. They worked perhaps two hours a day, and the rest of the time they ate chocolates, went to the motion-pictures, went window-shopping, went in gossiping twos and threes to card-parties, read magazines, thought timorously of the lovers who never appeared, and accumulated a splendid restlessness which they got rid of by nagging their husbands. The husbands nagged back.

Of these naggers the Swansons were perfect specimens.

Throughout the dinner Eddie Swanson had been complaining, publicly, about his wife’s new frock. It was, he submitted, too short, too low, too immodestly thin, and much too expensive. He appealed to Babbitt:

“Honest, George, what do you think of that rag Louetta went and bought? Don’t you think it’s the limit?”

“What’s eating you, Eddie? I call it a swell little dress.”

“Oh, it is, Mr. Swanson. It’s a sweet frock,” Mrs. Babbitt protested.

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

“That’s all right now,” said Swanson. “I’m authority enough so I know it was a waste of money, and it makes me tired to see you not wearing out a whole closetful of clothes you got already. I’ve expressed my idea about this before, and you know good and well you didn’t pay the least bit of attention. I have to camp on your trail to get you to do anything⁠—”

There was much more of it, and they all assisted, all but Babbitt. Everything about him was dim except his stomach, and that was a bright scarlet disturbance. “Had too much grub; oughtn’t to eat this stuff,” he groaned⁠—while he went on eating, while he gulped down a chill and glutinous slice of the ice-cream brick, and coconut cake as oozy as shaving-cream. He felt as though he had been stuffed with clay; his body was bursting, his throat was bursting, his brain was hot mud; and only with agony did he continue to smile and shout as became a host on Floral Heights.

He would, except for his guests, have fled outdoors and walked off the intoxication of food, but in the haze which filled the room they sat forever, talking, talking, while he agonized, “Darn fool to be eating all this⁠—not ’nother mouthful,” and discovered that he was again tasting the sickly welter of melted ice cream on his plate. There was no magic in his friends; he was not uplifted when Howard Littlefield produced from his treasure-house of scholarship the information that the chemical symbol for raw rubber is C₁₀H₁₆, which turns into isoprene, or 2C₅H₈. Suddenly, without precedent, Babbitt was not merely bored but admitting that he was bored. It was ecstasy to escape from the table, from the torture of a straight chair, and loll on the davenport in the living-room.

The others, from their fitful unconvincing talk, their expressions of being slowly and painfully smothered, seemed to be suffering from the