“Might call up Paul.”
Then he remembered.
He saw Paul in a jailbird’s uniform, but while he agonized he didn’t believe the tale.
It was part of the unreality of this fog-enchanted evening.
If she were here Myra would be hinting,
“Isn’t it late, Georgie?”
He tramped in forlorn and unwanted freedom.
Fog hid the house now.
The world was uncreated, a chaos without turmoil or desire.
Through the mist came a man at so feverish a pace that he seemed to dance with fury as he entered the orb of glow from a street-lamp.
At each step he brandished his stick and brought it down with a crash.
His glasses on their broad pretentious ribbon banged against his stomach.
Babbitt incredulously saw that it was Chum Frink.
Frink stopped, focused his vision, and spoke with gravity:
“There’s another fool.
George Babbitt.
Lives for renting howshes—houses.
Know who I am?
I’m traitor to poetry.
I’m drunk.
I’m talking too much.
I don’t care.
Know what I could ‘ve been?
I could ‘ve been a Gene Field or a James Whitcomb Riley.
Maybe a Stevenson.
I could ‘ve.
Whimsies.
‘Magination.
Lissen.
Lissen to this.
Just made it up:
Glittering summery meadowy noise Of beetles and bums and respectable boys.
Hear that?
Whimzh—whimsy.
I made that up.
I don’t know what it means!
Beginning good verse.
Chile’s Garden Verses.
And whadi write?
Tripe!
Cheer-up poems.
All tripe!
Could have written—Too late!”
He darted on with an alarming plunge, seeming always to pitch forward yet never quite falling.
Babbitt would have been no more astonished and no less had a ghost skipped out of the fog carrying his head.
He accepted Frink with vast apathy; he grunted,
“Poor boob!” and straightway forgot him.
He plodded into the house, deliberately went to the refrigerator and rifled it.
When Mrs. Babbitt was at home, this was one of the major household crimes.
He stood before the covered laundry tubs, eating a chicken leg and half a saucer of raspberry jelly, and grumbling over a clammy cold boiled potato.