All through the meal Gunch watched them, while Babbitt watched himself being watched and lugubriously tried to keep from spoiling Tanis’s gaiety.
“I felt like a spree to-day,” she rippled.
“I love the Thornleigh, don’t you?
It’s so live and yet so—so refined.”
He made talk about the Thornleigh, the service, the food, the people he recognized in the restaurant, all but Vergil Gunch.
There did not seem to be anything else to talk of.
He smiled conscientiously at her fluttering jests; he agreed with her that Minnie Sonntag was “so hard to get along with,” and young Pete “such a silly lazy kid, really just no good at all.”
But he himself had nothing to say.
He considered telling her his worries about Gunch, but—“oh, gosh, it was too much work to go into the whole thing and explain about Verg and everything.”
He was relieved when he put Tanis on a trolley; he was cheerful in the familiar simplicities of his office.
At four o’clock Vergil Gunch called on him.
Babbitt was agitated, but Gunch began in a friendly way:
“How’s the boy?
Say, some of us are getting up a scheme we’d kind of like to have you come in on.”
“Fine, Verg.
Shoot.”
“You know during the war we had the Undesirable Element, the Reds and walking delegates and just the plain common grouches, dead to rights, and so did we for quite a while after the war, but folks forget about the danger and that gives these cranks a chance to begin working underground again, especially a lot of these parlor socialists.
Well, it’s up to the folks that do a little sound thinking to make a conscious effort to keep bucking these fellows.
Some guy back East has organized a society called the Good Citizens’ League for just that purpose.
Of course the Chamber of Commerce and the American Legion and so on do a fine work in keeping the decent people in the saddle, but they’re devoted to so many other causes that they can’t attend to this one problem properly.
But the Good Citizens’ League, the G. C. L., they stick right to it. Oh, the G. C. L. has to have some other ostensible purposes—frinstance here in Zenith I think it ought to support the park-extension project and the City Planning Committee—and then, too, it should have a social aspect, being made up of the best people—have dances and so on, especially as one of the best ways it can put the kibosh on cranks is to apply this social boycott business to folks big enough so you can’t reach ‘em otherwise.
Then if that don’t work, the G. C. L. can finally send a little delegation around to inform folks that get too flip that they got to conform to decent standards and quit shooting off their mouths so free.
Don’t it sound like the organization could do a great work?
We’ve already got some of the strongest men in town, and of course we want you in.
How about it?”
Babbitt was uncomfortable.
He felt a compulsion back to all the standards he had so vaguely yet so desperately been fleeing.
He fumbled:
“I suppose you’d especially light on fellows like Seneca Doane and try to make ‘em—”
“You bet your sweet life we would!
Look here, old Georgie: I’ve never for one moment believed you meant it when you’ve defended Doane, and the strikers and so on, at the Club.
I knew you were simply kidding those poor galoots like Sid Finkelstein.... At least I certainly hope you were kidding!”
“Oh, well—sure—Course you might say—” Babbitt was conscious of how feeble he sounded, conscious of Gunch’s mature and relentless eye.
“Gosh, you know where I stand!
I’m no labor agitator!
I’m a business man, first, last, and all the time!
But—but honestly, I don’t think Doane means so badly, and you got to remember he’s an old friend of mine.”
“George, when it comes right down to a struggle between decency and the security of our homes on the one hand, and red ruin and those lazy dogs plotting for free beer on the other, you got to give up even old friendships.
‘He that is not with me is against me.’”
“Ye-es, I suppose—”
“How about it?
Going to join us in the Good Citizens’ League?”
“I’ll have to think it over, Verg.”
“All right, just as you say.”
Babbitt was relieved to be let off so easily, but Gunch went on: “George, I don’t know what’s come over you; none of us do; and we’ve talked a lot about you.
For a while we figured out you’d been upset by what happened to poor Riesling, and we forgave you for any fool thing you said, but that’s old stuff now, George, and we can’t make out what’s got into you.
Personally, I’ve always defended you, but I must say it’s getting too much for me.
All the boys at the Athletic Club and the Boosters’ are sore, the way you go on deliberately touting Doane and his bunch of hell-hounds, and talking about being liberal—which means being wishy-washy—and even saying this preacher guy Ingram isn’t a professional free-love artist.
And then the way you been carrying on personally!
Joe Pumphrey says he saw you out the other night with a gang of totties, all stewed to the gills, and here to-day coming right into the Thornleigh with a—well, she may be all right and a perfect lady, but she certainly did look like a pretty gay skirt for a fellow with his wife out of town to be taking to lunch.