Before breakfast he always reverted to up-state village
boyhood, and shrank from the complex urban demands
of shaving, bathing, deciding whether the current
shirt was clean enough for another day. Whenever
he stayed home in the evening he went to bed early,
and thriftily got ahead in those dismal duties.
It was his luxurious custom to shave while sitting
snugly in a tubful of hot water. He may be viewed
to-night as a plump, smooth, pink, baldish, podgy
goodman, robbed of the importance of spectacles, squatting
in breast-high water, scraping his lather-smeared
cheeks with a safety-razor like a tiny lawn-mower,
and with melancholy dignity clawing through the water
to recover a slippery and active piece of soap.
He was lulled to dreaming by the caressing warmth.
The light fell on the inner surface of the tub in
a pattern of delicate wrinkled lines which slipped
with a green sparkle over the curving porcelain as
the clear water trembled. Babbitt lazily watched
it; noted that along the silhouette of his legs against
the radiance on the bottom of the tub, the shadows
of the air-bubbles clinging to the hairs were reproduced
as strange jungle mosses. He patted the water,
and the reflected light capsized and leaped and volleyed.
He was content and childish. He played.
He shaved a swath down the calf of one plump leg.
The drain-pipe was dripping, a dulcet and lively song:
drippety drip drip dribble, drippety drip drip drip.
He was enchanted by it. He looked at the solid
tub, the beautiful nickel taps, the tiled walls of
the room, and felt virtuous in the possession of this
splendor.
He roused himself and spoke gruffly to his bath-things.
“Come here! You’ve done enough fooling!”
he reproved the treacherous soap, and defied the scratchy
nail-brush with “Oh, you would, would you!”
He soaped himself, and rinsed himself, and austerely
rubbed himself; he noted a hole in the Turkish towel,
and meditatively thrust a finger through it, and marched
back to the bedroom, a grave and unbending citizen.
There was a moment of gorgeous abandon, a flash of
melodrama such as he found in traffic-driving, when
he laid out a clean collar, discovered that it was
frayed in front, and tore it up with a magnificent
yeeeeeing sound.
Most important of all was the preparation of his bed
and the sleeping-porch.
It is not known whether he enjoyed his sleeping-porch
because of the fresh air or because it was the standard
thing to have a sleeping-porch.
Just as he was an Elk, a Booster, and a member of
the Chamber of Commerce, just as the priests of the
Presbyterian Church determined his every religious
belief and the senators who controlled the Republican
Party decided in little smoky rooms in Washington what
he should think about disarmament, tariff, and Germany,
so did the large national advertisers fix the surface
of his life, fix what he believed to be his individuality.
These standard advertised wares—toothpastes,
socks, tires, cameras, instantaneous hot-water heaters—were
his symbols and proofs of excellence; at first the
signs, then the substitutes, for joy and passion and
wisdom.
