To the eye, the men were less similar: Littlefield, a hedge-scholar, tall and horse-faced; Chum Frink, a trifle of a man with soft and mouse-like hair, advertising his profession as poet by a silk cord on his eye-glasses; Vergil Gunch, broad, with coarse black hair en brosse; Eddie Swanson, a bald and bouncing young man who showed his taste for elegance by an evening waistcoat of figured black silk with glass buttons; Orville Jones, a steady-looking, stubby, not very memorable person, with a hemp-colored toothbrush mustache.
Yet they were all so well fed and clean, they all shouted “‘Evenin’, Georgie!” with such robustness, that they seemed to be cousins, and the strange thing is that the longer one knew the women, the less alike they seemed; while the longer one knew the men, the more alike their bold patterns appeared.
The drinking of the cocktails was as canonical a rite as the mixing.
The company waited, uneasily, hopefully, agreeing in a strained manner that the weather had been rather warm and slightly cold, but still Babbitt said nothing about drinks. They became despondent.
But when the late couple (the Swansons) had arrived, Babbitt hinted,
“Well, folks, do you think you could stand breaking the law a little?”
They looked at Chum Frink, the recognized lord of language.
Frink pulled at his eye-glass cord as at a bell-rope, he cleared his throat and said that which was the custom:
“I’ll tell you, George: I’m a law-abiding man, but they do say Verg Gunch is a regular yegg, and of course he’s bigger ‘n I am, and I just can’t figure out what I’d do if he tried to force me into anything criminal!”
Gunch was roaring,
“Well, I’ll take a chance—” when Frink held up his hand and went on,
“So if Verg and you insist, Georgie, I’ll park my car on the wrong side of the street, because I take it for granted that’s the crime you’re hinting at!”
There was a great deal of laughter.
Mrs. Jones asserted, “Mr. Frink is simply too killing!
You’d think he was so innocent!”
Babbitt clamored,
“How did you guess it, Chum?
Well, you-all just wait a moment while I go out and get the—keys to your cars!”
Through a froth of merriment he brought the shining promise, the mighty tray of glasses with the cloudy yellow cocktails in the glass pitcher in the center.
The men babbled,
“Oh, gosh, have a look!” and
“This gets me right where I live!” and
“Let me at it!”
But Chum Frink, a traveled man and not unused to woes, was stricken by the thought that the potion might be merely fruit-juice with a little neutral spirits.
He looked timorous as Babbitt, a moist and ecstatic almoner, held out a glass, but as he tasted it he piped,
“Oh, man, let me dream on!
It ain’t true, but don’t waken me!
Jus’ lemme slumber!”
Two hours before, Frink had completed a newspaper lyric beginning:
“I sat alone and groused and thunk, and scratched my head and sighed and wunk, and groaned, There still are boobs, alack, who’d like the old-time gin-mill back; that den that makes a sage a loon, the vile and smelly old saloon!
I’ll never miss their poison booze, whilst I the bubbling spring can use, that leaves my head at merry morn as clear as any babe new-born!”
Babbitt drank with the others; his moment’s depression was gone; he perceived that these were the best fellows in the world; he wanted to give them a thousand cocktails.
“Think you could stand another?” he cried.
The wives refused, with giggles, but the men, speaking in a wide, elaborate, enjoyable manner, gloated,
“Well, sooner than have you get sore at me, Georgie—”
“You got a little dividend coming,” said Babbitt to each of them, and each intoned,
“Squeeze it, Georgie, squeeze it!”
When, beyond hope, the pitcher was empty, they stood and talked about prohibition.
The men leaned back on their heels, put their hands in their trousers-pockets, and proclaimed their views with the booming profundity of a prosperous male repeating a thoroughly hackneyed statement about a matter of which he knows nothing whatever.
“Now, I’ll tell you,” said Vergil Gunch; “way I figure it is this, and I can speak by the book, because I’ve talked to a lot of doctors and fellows that ought to know, and the way I see it is that it’s a good thing to get rid of the saloon, but they ought to let a fellow have beer and light wines.”
Howard Littlefield observed,
“What isn’t generally realized is that it’s a dangerous prop’sition to invade the rights of personal liberty.
Now, take this for instance: The King of—Bavaria? I think it was Bavaria—yes, Bavaria, it was—in 1862, March, 1862, he issued a proclamation against public grazing of live-stock.
The peasantry had stood for overtaxation without the slightest complaint, but when this proclamation came out, they rebelled.
Or it may have been Saxony.
But it just goes to show the dangers of invading the rights of personal liberty.”
“That’s it—no one got a right to invade personal liberty,” said Orville Jones.
“Just the same, you don’t want to forget prohibition is a mighty good thing for the working-classes.
Keeps ‘em from wasting their money and lowering their productiveness,” said Vergil Gunch.
“Yes, that’s so.