On her previous absences he had missed her reassuring buzz and of her arrival he had made a fete.
Now, though he dared not hurt her by letting a hint of it appear in his letters, he was sorry that she was coming before he had found himself, and he was embarrassed by the need of meeting her and looking joyful.
He loitered down to the station; he studied the summer-resort posters, lest he have to speak to acquaintances and expose his uneasiness.
But he was well trained.
When the train clanked in he was out on the cement platform, peering into the chair-cars, and as he saw her in the line of passengers moving toward the vestibule he waved his hat.
At the door he embraced her, and announced,
“Well, well, well, well, by golly, you look fine, you look fine.”
Then he was aware of Tinka.
Here was something, this child with her absurd little nose and lively eyes, that loved him, believed him great, and as he clasped her, lifted and held her till she squealed, he was for the moment come back to his old steady self.
Tinka sat beside him in the car, with one hand on the steering-wheel, pretending to help him drive, and he shouted back to his wife,
“I’ll bet the kid will be the best chuffer in the family!
She holds the wheel like an old professional!”
All the while he was dreading the moment when he would be alone with his wife and she would patiently expect him to be ardent. III
There was about the house an unofficial theory that he was to take his vacation alone, to spend a week or ten days in Catawba, but he was nagged by the memory that a year ago he had been with Paul in Maine.
He saw himself returning; finding peace there, and the presence of Paul, in a life primitive and heroic.
Like a shock came the thought that he actually could go.
Only, he couldn’t, really; he couldn’t leave his business, and “Myra would think it sort of funny, his going way off there alone.
Course he’d decided to do whatever he darned pleased, from now on, but still—to go way off to Maine!”
He went, after lengthy meditations.
With his wife, since it was inconceivable to explain that he was going to seek Paul’s spirit in the wilderness, he frugally employed the lie prepared over a year ago and scarcely used at all.
He said that he had to see a man in New York on business.
He could not have explained even to himself why he drew from the bank several hundred dollars more than he needed, nor why he kissed Tinka so tenderly, and cried,
“God bless you, baby!”
From the train he waved to her till she was but a scarlet spot beside the brown bulkier presence of Mrs. Babbitt, at the end of a steel and cement aisle ending in vast barred gates.
With melancholy he looked back at the last suburb of Zenith.
All the way north he pictured the Maine guides: simple and strong and daring, jolly as they played stud-poker in their unceiled shack, wise in woodcraft as they tramped the forest and shot the rapids.
He particularly remembered Joe Paradise, half Yankee, half Indian.
If he could but take up a backwoods claim with a man like Joe, work hard with his hands, be free and noisy in a flannel shirt, and never come back to this dull decency!
Or, like a trapper in a Northern Canada movie, plunge through the forest, make camp in the Rockies, a grim and wordless caveman!
Why not?
He COULD do it!
There’d be enough money at home for the family to live on till Verona was married and Ted self-supporting.
Old Henry T. would look out for them.
Honestly!
Why NOT?
Really LIVE—
He longed for it, admitted that he longed for it, then almost believed that he was going to do it.
Whenever common sense snorted,
“Nonsense!
Folks don’t run away from decent families and partners; just simply don’t do it, that’s all!” then Babbitt answered pleadingly,
“Well, it wouldn’t take any more nerve than for Paul to go to jail and—Lord, how I’d’ * like to do it!
Moccasins—six-gun—frontier town—gamblers—sleep under the stars—be a regular man, with he-men like Joe Paradise—gosh!”
So he came to Maine, again stood on the wharf before the camp-hotel, again spat heroically into the delicate and shivering water, while the pines rustled, the mountains glowed, and a trout leaped and fell in a sliding circle.
He hurried to the guides’ shack as to his real home, his real friends, long missed.
They would be glad to see him.
They would stand up and shout?
“Why, here’s Mr. Babbitt!
He ain’t one of these ordinary sports!
He’s a real guy!”
In their boarded and rather littered cabin the guides sat about the greasy table playing stud-poker with greasy cards: half a dozen wrinkled men in old trousers and easy old felt hats.