“Now, George!
The idea!” Mrs. Babbitt warned him.
“This book—racy isn’t the word!
It’s some kind of an anthropological report about—about Customs, in the South Seas, and what it doesn’t SAY!
It’s a book you can’t buy.
Verg, I’ll lend it to you.”
“Me first!” insisted Eddie Swanson.
“Sounds spicy!”
Orville Jones announced, “Say, I heard a Good One the other day about a coupla Swedes and their wives,” and, in the best Jewish accent, he resolutely carried the Good One to a slightly disinfected ending.
Gunch capped it.
But the cocktails waned, the seekers dropped back into cautious reality.
Chum Frink had recently been on a lecture-tour among the small towns, and he chuckled,
“Awful good to get back to civilization!
I certainly been seeing some hick towns!
I mean—Course the folks there are the best on earth, but, gee whiz, those Main Street burgs are slow, and you fellows can’t hardly appreciate what it means to be here with a bunch of live ones!”
“You bet!” exulted Orville Jones.
“They’re the best folks on earth, those small-town folks, but, oh, mama! what conversation!
Why, say, they can’t talk about anything but the weather and the ne-oo Ford, by heckalorum!”
“That’s right. They all talk about just the same things,” said Eddie Swanson.
“Don’t they, though! They just say the same things over and over,” said Vergil Gunch.
“Yes, it’s really remarkable.
They seem to lack all power of looking at things impersonally.
They simply go over and over the same talk about Fords and the weather and so on.” said Howard Littlefield.
“Still, at that, you can’t blame ‘em.
They haven’t got any intellectual stimulus such as you get up here in the city,” said Chum Frink.
“Gosh, that’s right,” said Babbitt.
“I don’t want you highbrows to get stuck on yourselves but I must say it keeps a fellow right up on his toes to sit in with a poet and with Howard, the guy that put the con in economics!
But these small-town boobs, with nobody but each other to talk to, no wonder they get so sloppy and uncultured in their speech, and so balled-up in their thinking!”
Orville Jones commented,
“And, then take our other advantages—the movies, frinstance.
These Yapville sports think they’re all-get-out if they have one change of bill a week, where here in the city you got your choice of a dozen diff’rent movies any evening you want to name!”
“Sure, and the inspiration we get from rubbing up against high-class hustlers every day and getting jam full of ginger,” said Eddie Swanson.
“Same time,” said Babbitt, “no sense excusing these rube burgs too easy.
Fellow’s own fault if he doesn’t show the initiative to up and beat it to the city, like we done—did.
And, just speaking in confidence among friends, they’re jealous as the devil of a city man.
Every time I go up to Catawba I have to go around apologizing to the fellows I was brought up with because I’ve more or less succeeded and they haven’t.
And if you talk natural to ‘em, way we do here, and show finesse and what you might call a broad point of view, why, they think you’re putting on side.
There’s my own half-brother Martin—runs the little ole general store my Dad used to keep.
Say, I’ll bet he don’t know there is such a thing as a Tux—as a dinner-jacket.
If he was to come in here now, he’d think we were a bunch of—of—Why, gosh, I swear, he wouldn’t know what to think!
Yes, sir, they’re jealous!”
Chum Frink agreed, “That’s so.
But what I mind is their lack of culture and appreciation of the Beautiful—if you’ll excuse me for being highbrow.
Now, I like to give a high-class lecture, and read some of my best poetry—not the newspaper stuff but the magazine things.
But say, when I get out in the tall grass, there’s nothing will take but a lot of cheesy old stories and slang and junk that if any of us were to indulge in it here, he’d get the gate so fast it would make his head swim.”
Vergil Gunch summed it up: “Fact is, we’re mighty lucky to be living among a bunch of city-folks, that recognize artistic things and business-punch equally.
We’d feel pretty glum if we got stuck in some Main Street burg and tried to wise up the old codgers to the kind of life we’re used to here.
But, by golly, there’s this you got to say for ‘em: Every small American town is trying to get population and modern ideals.
And darn if a lot of ‘em don’t put it across!
Somebody starts panning a rube crossroads, telling how he was there in 1900 and it consisted of one muddy street, count ‘em, one, and nine hundred human clams.