Hell, yes!
But can’t you understand I’m shot to pieces?
I’m all in!
I got to take care of myself!
I tell you, I got to—I’m sick of everything and everybody!
I got to—”
It was she who was mature and protective now.
“Why, of course!
You shall run off by yourself!
Why don’t you get Paul to go along, and you boys just fish and have a good time?”
She patted his shoulder—reaching up to it—while he shook with palsied helplessness, and in that moment was not merely by habit fond of her but clung to her strength.
She cried cheerily, “Now up-stairs you go, and pop into bed.
We’ll fix it all up.
I’ll see to the doors.
Now skip!”
For many minutes, for many hours, for a bleak eternity, he lay awake, shivering, reduced to primitive terror, comprehending that he had won freedom, and wondering what he could do with anything so unknown and so embarrassing as freedom.
CHAPTER X
No apartment-house in Zenith had more resolutely experimented in condensation than the Revelstoke Arms, in which Paul and Zilla Riesling had a flat.
By sliding the beds into low closets the bedrooms were converted into living-rooms.
The kitchens were cupboards each containing an electric range, a copper sink, a glass refrigerator, and, very intermittently, a Balkan maid.
Everything about the Arms was excessively modern, and everything was compressed—except the garages.
The Babbitts were calling on the Rieslings at the Arms.
It was a speculative venture to call on the Rieslings; interesting and sometimes disconcerting.
Zilla was an active, strident, full-blown, high-bosomed blonde.
When she condescended to be good-humored she was nervously amusing.
Her comments on people were saltily satiric and penetrative of accepted hypocrisies.
“That’s so!” you said, and looked sheepish.
She danced wildly, and called on the world to be merry, but in the midst of it she would turn indignant.
She was always becoming indignant.
Life was a plot against her and she exposed it furiously.
She was affable to-night.
She merely hinted that Orville Jones wore a toupe, that Mrs. T. Cholmondeley Frink’s singing resembled a Ford going into high, and that the Hon. Otis Deeble, mayor of Zenith and candidate for Congress, was a flatulent fool (which was quite true).
The Babbitts and Rieslings sat doubtfully on stone-hard brocade chairs in the small living-room of the flat, with its mantel unprovided with a fireplace, and its strip of heavy gilt fabric upon a glaring new player-piano, till Mrs. Riesling shrieked,
“Come on! Let’s put some pep in it!
Get out your fiddle, Paul, and I’ll try to make Georgie dance decently.”
The Babbitts were in earnest.
They were plotting for the escape to Maine.
But when Mrs. Babbitt hinted with plump smilingness,
“Does Paul get as tired after the winter’s work as Georgie does?” then Zilla remembered an injury; and when Zilla Riesling remembered an injury the world stopped till something had been done about it.
“Does he get tired?
No, he doesn’t get tired, he just goes crazy, that’s all!
You think Paul is so reasonable, oh, yes, and he loves to make out he’s a little lamb, but he’s stubborn as a mule.
Oh, if you had to live with him—!
You’d find out how sweet he is!
He just pretends to be meek so he can have his own way.
And me, I get the credit for being a terrible old crank, but if I didn’t blow up once in a while and get something started, we’d die of dry-rot.
He never wants to go any place and—Why, last evening, just because the car was out of order—and that was his fault, too, because he ought to have taken it to the service-station and had the battery looked at—and he didn’t want to go down to the movies on the trolley.
But we went, and then there was one of those impudent conductors, and Paul wouldn’t do a thing.
“I was standing on the platform waiting for the people to let me into the car, and this beast, this conductor, hollered at me,
‘Come on, you, move up!’