This document is intended to strike somewhere between a temperance
lecture and the “Bartender’s Guide.” Relative to the latter, drink
shall swell the theme and be set forth in abundance. Agreeably to the
former, not an elbow shall be crooked.
Bob Babbitt was “off the stuff.” Which means—as you will discover by
referring to the unabridged dictionary of Bohemia—that he had “cut out
the booze;” that he was “on the water wagon.” The reason for Bob’s
sudden attitude of hostility toward the “demon rum”—as the white
ribboners miscall whiskey (see the “Bartender’s Guide”), should be of
interest to reformers and saloon-keepers.
There is always hope for a man who, when sober, will not concede or
acknowledge that he was ever drunk. But when a man will say (in the apt
words of the phrase-distiller), “I had a beautiful skate on last
night,” you will have to put stuff in his coffee as well as pray for
him.
One evening on his way home Babbitt dropped in at the Broadway bar that
he liked best. Always there were three or four fellows there from the
downtown offices whom he knew. And then there would be high-balls and
stories, and he would hurry home to dinner a little late but feeling
good, and a little sorry for the poor Standard Oil Company. On this
evening as he entered he heard some one say: “Babbitt was in last night
as full as a boiled owl.”
Babbitt walked to the bar, and saw in the mirror that his face was as
white as chalk. For the first time he had looked Truth in the eyes.
Others had lied to him; he had dissembled with himself. He was a
drunkard, and had not known it. What he had fondly imagined was a
pleasant exhilaration had been maudlin intoxication. His fancied wit
had been drivel; his gay humors nothing but the noisy vagaries of a
sot. But, never again!
“A glass of seltzer,” he said to the bartender.
A little silence fell upon the group of his cronies, who had been
expecting him to join them.
“Going off the stuff, Bob?” one of them asked politely and with more
formality than the highballs ever called forth.
“Yes,” said Babbitt.
Some one of the group took up the unwashed thread of a story he had
been telling; the bartender shoved over a dime and a nickel change from
the quarter, ungarnished with his customary smile; and Babbitt walked
out.
Now, Babbitt had a home and a wife—but that is another story. And I
will tell you that story, which will show you a better habit and a
worse story than you could find in the man who invented the phrase.
It began away up in Sullivan County, where so many rivers and so much
trouble begins—or begin; how would you say that? It was July, and
Jessie was a summer boarder at the Mountain Squint Hotel, and Bob, who
was just out of college, saw her one day—and they were married in
September. That’s the tabloid novel—one swallow of water, and it’s
gone.
But those July days!
Let the exclamation point expound it, for I shall not. For particulars
you might read up on “Romeo and Juliet,” and Abraham Lincoln’s
thrilling sonnet about “You can fool some of the people,” &c., and
Darwin’s works.
But one thing I must tell you about. Both of them were mad over Omar’s
Rubaiyat. They knew every verse of the old bluffer by heart—not
consecutively, but picking ’em out here and there as you fork the
mushrooms in a fifty-cent steak à la Bordelaise. Sullivan County is
full of rocks and trees; and Jessie used to sit on them, and—please be
good—used to sit on the rocks; and Bob had a way of standing behind her
with his hands over her shoulders holding her hands, and his face close
to hers, and they would repeat over and over their favorite verses of
the old tent-maker. They saw only the poetry and philosophy of the
lines then—indeed, they agreed that the Wine was only an image, and
that what was meant to be celebrated was some divinity, or maybe Love
or Life. However, at that time neither of them had tasted the stuff
that goes with a sixty-cent _table d’hôte_.
Where was I? Oh, they married and came to New York. Bob showed his
college diploma, and accepted a position filling inkstands in a
lawyer’s office at $15 a week. At the end of two years he had worked up
to $50, and gotten his first taste of Bohemia—the kind that won’t stand
the borax and formaldehyde tests.
They had two furnished rooms and a little kitchen. To Jess, accustomed
to the mild but beautiful savor of a country town, the dreggy Bohemia
was sugar and spice. She hung fish seines on the walls of her rooms,
and bought a rakish-looking sideboard, and learned to play the banjo.
Twice or thrice a week they dined at French or Italian _tables d’hôte_
in a cloud of smoke, and brag and unshorn hair. Jess learned to drink a
cocktail in order to get the cherry. At home she smoked a cigarette
after dinner. She learned to pronounce Chianti, and leave her olive
stones for the waiter to pick up. Once she essayed to say la, la, la!
in a crowd but got only as far as the second one. They met one or two
couples while dining out and became friendly with them. The sideboard
was stocked with Scotch and rye and a liqueur. They had their new
friends in to dinner and all were laughing at nothing by 1 A. M. Some
plastering fell in the room below them, for which Bob had to pay $4.50.
Thus they footed it merrily on the ragged frontiers of the country that
has no boundary lines or government.
And soon Bob fell in with his cronies and learned to keep his foot on
the little rail six inches above the floor for an hour or so every
afternoon before he went home. Drink always rubbed him the right way,
and he would reach his rooms as jolly as a sandboy. Jessie would meet
him at the door, and generally they would dance some insane kind of a
rigadoon about the floor by way of greeting. Once when Bob’s feet
became confused and he tumbled headlong over a foot-stool Jessie
laughed so heartily and long that he had to throw all the couch pillows
at her to make her hush.
In such wise life was speeding for them on the day when Bob Babbitt
first felt the power that the giftie gi’ed him.
But let us get back to our lamb and mint sauce.
When Bob got home that evening he found Jessie in a long apron cutting
up a lobster for the Newburg. Usually when Bob came in mellow from his
hour at the bar his welcome was hilarious, though somewhat tinctured
with Scotch smoke.
By screams and snatches of song and certain audible testimonials of
domestic felicity was his advent proclaimed. When she heard his foot on
the stairs the old maid in the hall room always stuffed cotton into her
ears. At first Jessie had shrunk from the rudeness and favor of these
spiritual greetings, but as the fog of the false Bohemia gradually
encompassed her she came to accept them as love’s true and proper
greeting.
Bob came in without a word, smiled, kissed her neatly but noiselessly,
took up a paper and sat down. In the hall room the old maid held her
two plugs of cotton poised, filled with anxiety.
Jessie dropped lobster and knife and ran to him with frightened eyes.
“What’s the matter, Bob, are you ill?”
“Not at all, dear.”
“Then what’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing.”
Hearken, brethren. When She-who-has-a-right-to-ask interrogates you
concerning a change she finds in your mood answer her thus: Tell her
that you, in a sudden rage, have murdered your grandmother; tell her
that you have robbed orphans and that remorse has stricken you; tell
her your fortune is swept away; that you are beset by enemies, by
bunions, by any kind of malevolent fate; but do not, if peace and
happiness are worth as much as a grain of mustard seed to you—do not
answer her “Nothing.”
Jessie went back to the lobster in silence. She cast looks of darkest
suspicion at Bob. He had never acted that way before.
When dinner was on the table she set out the bottle of Scotch and the
glasses. Bob declined.
“Tell you the truth, Jess,” he said. “I’ve cut out the drink. Help
yourself, of course. If you don’t mind I’ll try some of the seltzer
straight.”
“You’ve stopped drinking?” she said, looking at him steadily and
unsmilingly. “What for?”
“It wasn’t doing me any good,” said Bob. “Don’t you approve of the
idea?”
Jessie raised her eyebrows and one shoulder slightly.
“Entirely,” she said with a sculptured smile. “I could not
conscientiously advise any one to drink or smoke, or whistle on
Sunday.”
The meal was finished almost in silence. Bob tried to make talk, but
his efforts lacked the stimulus of previous evenings. He felt
miserable, and once or twice his eye wandered toward the bottle, but
each time the scathing words of his bibulous friend sounded in his ear,
and his mouth set with determination.
Jessie felt the change deeply. The essence of their lives seemed to
have departed suddenly. The restless fever, the false gayety, the
unnatural excitement of the shoddy Bohemia in which they had lived had
dropped away in the space of the popping of a cork. She stole curious
and forlorn glances at the dejected Bob, who bore the guilty look of at
least a wife-beater or a family tyrant.
After dinner the colored maid who came in daily to perform such chores
cleared away the things. Jessie, with an unreadable countenance,
brought back the bottle of Scotch and the glasses and a bowl of cracked
ice and set them on the table.
“May I ask,” she said, with some of the ice in her tones, “whether I am
to be included in your sudden spasm of goodness? If not, I’ll make one
for myself. It’s rather chilly this evening, for some reason.”
“Oh, come now, Jess,” said Bob good-naturedly, “don’t be too rough on
me. Help yourself, by all means. There’s no danger of your overdoing
it. But I thought there was with me; and that’s why I quit. Have yours,
and then let’s get out the banjo and try over that new quickstep.”
“I’ve heard,” said Jessie in the tones of the oracle, “that drinking
alone is a pernicious habit. No, I don’t think I feel like playing this
evening. If we are going to reform we may as well abandon the evil
habit of banjo-playing, too.”
She took up a book and sat in her little willow rocker on the other
side of the table. Neither of them spoke for half an hour.
And then Bob laid down his paper and got up with a strange, absent look
on his face and went behind her chair and reached over her shoulders,
taking her hands in his, and laid his face close to hers.
In a moment to Jessie the walls of the seine-hung room vanished, and
she saw the Sullivan County hills and rills. Bob felt her hands quiver
in his as he began the verse from old Omar:
“Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly—and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing!”
And then he walked to the table and poured a stiff drink of Scotch into
a glass.
But in that moment a mountain breeze had somehow found its way in and
blown away the mist of the false Bohemia.
Jessie leaped and with one fierce sweep of her hand sent the bottle and
glasses crashing to the floor. The same motion of her arm carried it
around Bob’s neck, where it met its mate and fastened tight.
“Oh, my God, Bobbie—not that verse—I see now. I wasn’t always such a
fool, was I? The other one, boy—the one that says: ‘Remould it to the
Heart’s Desire.’ Say that one—‘to the Heart’s Desire.’”
“I know that one,” said Bob. “It goes:
“‘Ah! Love, could you and I with Him conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire
Would not we—’”
“Let me finish it,” said Jessie.
“‘Would not we shatter it to bits—and then
Remould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!’”
“It’s shattered all right,” said Bob, crunching some glass under his
heel.
In some dungeon below the accurate ear of Mrs. Pickens, the landlady,
located the smash.
“It’s that wild Mr. Babbitt coming home soused again,” she said. “And
he’s got such a nice little wife, too!”