this case.
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
