It was the best of nationally advertised and quantitatively produced alarm-clocks, with all
modern attachments, including
cathedral chime, intermittent alarm, and a
phosphorescent dial. Babbitt was proud of being
awakened by such a rich device. Socially it was almost as creditable as buying expensive cord
tires.
He sulkily admitted now that there was no more escape, but he lay and detested the grind of the
real-estate business, and disliked his
family, and disliked
himself for disliking them. The evening before, he had played
poker at Vergil Gunch's till midnight, and after such
holidays he was irritable before
breakfast. It may have been the tremendous home-brewed
beer of the
prohibition-era and the
cigars to which that beer enticed him; it may have been resentment of return from this fine, bold man-world to a restricted
region of wives and
stenographers, and of suggestions not to smoke so much.
From the
bedroom beside the sleeping-porch, his wife's detestably cheerful "
Time to get up, Georgie boy," and the itchy sound, the brisk and scratchy sound, of combing hairs out of a stiff brush.
He grunted; he dragged his thick legs, in faded baby-blue
pajamas, from under the
khaki blanket; he sat on the edge of the cot, running his fingers through
his wild hair, while his plump feet mechanically felt for his
slippers. He looked regretfully at the blanket--forever a suggestion to him of
freedom and
heroism. He had bought it for a
camping trip which had never come off. It symbolized gorgeous loafing, gorgeous cursing, virile
flannel shirts.
He creaked to his feet, groaning at the waves of pain which passed behind his
eyeballs. Though he waited for their scorching recurrence, he looked blurrily out at the yard. It delighted him, as always; it was the neat yard of a
successful
business man of Zenith, that is, it was perfection, and made him also perfect. He regarded the
corrugated iron garage. For the three-hundred-and-sixty-fifth time in a year he reflected, "No class to that
tin
shack. Have to build me a frame garage. But by golly it's the only thing on the place that isn't up-to-date!" While he stared he thought of a
community garage for his acreage
development, Glen Oriole. He stopped puffing and
jiggling. His arms were
akimbo. His petulant, sleep-swollen face was set in harder lines. He suddenly seemed capable, an official, a man to contrive, to direct, to get things done.
On the vigor of his idea he was carried down the hard, dean, unused-looking hall into the
bathroom.
Though the house was not large it had, like all houses on Floral Heights, an altogether royal
bathroom of
porcelain and glazed tile and metal sleek as
silver. The towel-rack was a rod of clear glass set in
nickel. The tub was long enough for a
Prussian Guard, and above the set bowl was a sensational exhibit of
tooth-brush holder, shaving-brush holder,
soap-dish,
sponge-dish,
and
medicine-cabinet, so glittering and so ingenious that they resembled an electrical instrument-board. But the Babbitt whose god was Modern Appliances was not pleased. The air of the bathroom was thick with the smell of a heathen
toothpaste. "Verona been at it again! 'Stead of sticking to
Lilidol, like I've re-peat-ed-ly asked her, she's gone and gotten some confounded stinkum stuff that makes you sick!"
The bath-mat was wrinkled and the floor was wet. (His daughter Verona eccentrically took baths in the morning, now and then.) He slipped on the mat, and slid against the tub. He said "
Damn!" Furiously he snatched up his tube
of
shaving-cream, furiously he lathered, with a belligerent slapping of the unctuous brush, furiously he raked his plump cheeks with a safety-
razor. It pulled. The blade was dull. He said, "Damn--oh--oh--damn it!"
He hunted through the medicine-cabinet for a packet of new razor-blades (reflecting, as invariably, "Be cheaper to buy one of these dinguses and strop your own blades,") and when he discovered the packet, behind the round box of
bicarbonate of soda, he thought ill of his wife for putting it there and very well of himself for not saying "Damn." But he did say it, immediately afterward, when with wet and soap-slippery fingers he tried to remove the horrible little envelope and crisp clinging oiled paper from the new blade. Then there was the problem, oft-pondered, never solved, of what to do with the
old blade, which might imperil the fingers of his young. As usual, he tossed it on top of the medicine-cabinet, with a mental note that some day he must remove the fifty or sixty other blades that were also temporarily, piled up
there. He finished his shaving in a growing testiness increased by his spinning
headache and by the emptiness in his stomach. When he was done, his round face smooth and streamy and his eyes stinging from soapy water, he
reached for a
towel. The family towels were wet, wet and clammy and vile, all of them wet, he found, as he blindly snatched them--his own face-towel, his wife's, Verona's, Ted's, Tinka's, and the lone bath-towel with the huge welt
of initial. Then George F. Babbitt did a dismaying thing. He wiped his face on the guest-towel! It was a
pansy-embroidered trifle which always hung there to indicate that the Babbitts were in the best Floral Heights society. No one had ever used it. No guest had ever dared to. Guests secretively took a corner of the nearest regular towel.
He was raging, "
By golly, here they go and use up all the towels, every
doggone one of 'em, and they use 'em and get 'em all wet and sopping, and never put out a dry one for me--of course, I'm the
goat!--and then I want one
and--I'm the only person in the doggone house that's got the slightest doggone bit of consideration for other people and thoughtfulness and consider there may be others that may want to use the doggone bathroom after me and
consider--"
He was pitching the chill
abominations into the bath-tub, pleased by the
vindictiveness of that desolate flapping sound; and in the midst his wife serenely trotted in, observed serenely, "Why Georgie dear, what are you doing?
Are you going to wash out the towels? Why, you needn't wash out the towels. Oh, Georgie, you didn't go and use the guest-towel, did you?"
It is not recorded that he was able to answer.
For the first time in weeks he was sufficiently roused by his wife to look at her.
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