CHAPTER XXXIII

Our Mr. Wrenn

by Sinclair Lewis

CHAPTER XXXIII, OUR MR. WRENN by Sinclair Lewis

I

HE tried to explain to his wife, as they prepared for bed, how objectionable
was Sheldon Smeeth, but all her answer was, "He has such a beautiful voice--so
spiritual. I don't think you ought to speak of him like that just because you
can't appreciate music!" He saw her then as a stranger; he stared bleakly at
this plump and fussy woman with the broad bare arms, and wondered how she had
ever come here.

In his chilly cot, turning from aching side to side, he pondered of Tanis.
"He'd been a fool to lose her. He had to have somebody he could really talk
to. He'd--oh, he'd BUST if he went on stewing about things by himself. And
Myra, useless to expect her to understand. Well, rats, no use dodging the
issue. Darn shame for two married people to drift apart after all these years;
darn rotten shame; but nothing could bring them together now, as long as he
refused to let Zenith bully him into taking orders--and he was by golly not
going to let anybody bully him into anything, or wheedle him or coax him
either!"

He woke at three, roused by a passing motor, and struggled out of bed for a
drink of water. As he passed through the bedroom he heard his wife groan. His
resentment was night-blurred; he was solicitous in inquiring, "What's the
trouble, hon?"

"I've got--such a pain down here in my side--oh, it's just--it tears at me."

"Bad indigestion? Shall I get you some bicarb?"

"Don't think--that would help. I felt funny last evening and yesterday, and
then--oh!--it passed away and I got to sleep and--That auto woke me up."

Her voice was laboring like a ship in a storm. He was alarmed.

"I better call the doctor."

"No, no! It'll go away. But maybe you might get me an ice-bag."

He stalked to the bathroom for the ice-bag, down to the kitchen for ice. He
felt dramatic in this late-night expedition, but as he gouged the chunk of ice
with the dagger-like pick he was cool, steady, mature; and the old
friendliness was in his voice as he patted the ice-bag into place on her
groin, rumbling, "There, there, that'll be better now." He retired to bed, but
he did not sleep. He heard her groan again. Instantly he was up, soothing
her, "Still pretty bad, honey?"

"Yes, it just gripes me, and I can't get to sleep."

Her voice was faint. He knew her dread of doctors' verdicts and he did not
inform her, but he creaked down-stairs, telephoned to Dr. Earl Patten, and
waited, shivering, trying with fuzzy eyes to read a magazine, till he heard
the doctor's car.

The doctor was youngish and professionally breezy. He came in as though it
were sunny noontime. "Well, George, little trouble, eh? How is she now?" he
said busily as, with tremendous and rather irritating cheerfulness, he tossed
his coat on a chair and warmed his hands at a radiator. He took charge of the
house. Babbitt felt ousted and unimportant as he followed the doctor up to
the bedroom, and it was the doctor who chuckled, "Oh, just little
stomach-ache" when Verona peeped through her door, begging, "What is it, Dad,
what is it?"

To Mrs. Babbitt the doctor said with amiable belligerence, after his
examination, "Kind of a bad old pain, eh? I'll give you something to make you
sleep, and I think you'll feel better in the morning. I'll come in right after
breakfast." But to Babbitt, lying in wait in the lower hall, the doctor
sighed, "I don't like the feeling there in her belly. There's some rigidity
and some inflammation. She's never had her appendix out has she? Um. Well,
no use worrying. I'll be here first thing in the morning, and meantime she'll
get some rest. I've given her a hypo. Good night."

Then was Babbitt caught up in the black tempest.

Instantly all the indignations which had been dominating him and the spiritual
dramas through which he had struggled became pallid and absurd before the
ancient and overwhelming realities, the standard and traditional realities, of
sickness and menacing death, the long night, and the thousand steadfast
implications of married life. He crept back to her. As she drowsed away in
the tropic languor of morphia, he sat on the edge of her bed, holding her
hand, and for the first time in many weeks her hand abode trustfully in his.

He draped himself grotesquely in his toweling bathrobe and a pink and white
couch-cover, and sat lumpishly in a wing-chair. The bedroom was uncanny in its
half-light, which turned the curtains to lurking robbers, the dressing-table
to a turreted castle. It smelled of cosmetics, of linen, of sleep. He napped
and woke, napped and woke, a hundred times. He heard her move and sigh in
slumber; he wondered if there wasn't some officious brisk thing he could do
for her, and before he could quite form the thought he was asleep, racked and
aching. The night was infinite. When dawn came and the waiting seemed at an
end, he fell asleep, and was vexed to have been caught off his guard, to have
been aroused by Verona's entrance and her agitated "Oh, what is it, Dad?"

His wife was awake, her face sallow and lifeless in the morning light, but now
he did not compare her with Tanis; she was not merely A Woman, to be
contrasted with other women, but his own self, and though he might criticize
her and nag her, it was only as he might criticize and nag himself,
interestedly, unpatronizingly, without the expectation of changing--or any
real desire to change--the eternal essence.

With Verona he sounded fatherly again, and firm. He consoled Tinka, who
satisfactorily pointed the excitement of the hour by wailing. He ordered early
breakfast, and wanted to look at the newspaper, and felt somehow heroic and
useful in not looking at it. But there were still crawling and totally
unheroic hours of waiting before Dr. Patten returned.

"Don't see much change," said Patten. "I'll be back about eleven, and if you
don't mind, I think I'll bring in some other world-famous pill-pedler for
consultation, just to be on the safe side. Now George, there's nothing you can
do. I'll have Verona keep the ice-bag filled--might as well leave that on, I
guess--and you, you better beat it to the office instead of standing around
her looking as if you were the patient. The nerve of husbands! Lot more
neurotic than the women! They always have to horn in and get all the credit
for feeling bad when their wives are ailing. Now have another nice cup of
coffee and git!"

Under this derision Babbitt became more matter-of-fact. He drove to the
office, tried to dictate letters, tried to telephone and, before the call was
answered, forgot to whom he was telephoning. At a quarter after ten he
returned home. As he left the down-town traffic and sped up the car, his face
was as grimly creased as the mask of tragedy.

His wife greeted him with surprise. "Why did you come back, dear? I think I
feel a little better. I told Verona to skip off to her office. Was it wicked
of me to go and get sick?"

He knew that she wanted petting, and she got it, joyously. They were curiously
happy when he heard Dr. Patten's car in front. He looked out of the window.
He was frightened. With Patten was an impatient man with turbulent black hair
and a hussar mustache--Dr. A. I. Dilling, the surgeon. Babbitt sputtered with
anxiety, tried to conceal it, and hurried down to the door.

Dr. Patten was profusely casual: "Don't want to worry you, old man, but I
thought it might be a good stunt to have Dr. Dilling examine her." He gestured
toward Dilling as toward a master.

Dilling nodded in his curtest manner and strode up-stairs Babbitt tramped the
living-room in agony. Except for his wife's confinements there had never been
a major operation in the family, and to him surgery was at once a miracle and
an abomination of fear. But when Dilling and Patten came down again he knew
that everything was all right, and he wanted to laugh, for the two doctors
were exactly like the bearded physicians in a musical comedy, both of them
rubbing their hands and looking foolishly sagacious.

Dr. Dilling spoke:

"I'm sorry, old man, but it's acute appendicitis. We ought to operate. Of
course you must decide, but there's no question as to what has to be done."

Babbitt did not get all the force of it. He mumbled, "Well I suppose we could
get her ready in a couple o' days. Probably Ted ought to come down from the
university, just in case anything happened."

Dr. Dilling growled, "Nope. If you don't want peritonitis to set in, we'll
have to operate right away. I must advise it strongly. If you say go ahead,
I'll 'phone for the St. Mary's ambulance at once, and we'll have her on the
table in three-quarters of an hour."

"I--I Of course, I suppose you know what--But great God, man, I can't get her
clothes ready and everything in two seconds, you know! And in her state, so
wrought-up and weak--"

"Just throw her hair-brush and comb and tooth-brush in a bag; that's all
she'll need for a day or two," said Dr. Dilling, and went to the telephone.

Babbitt galloped desperately up-stairs. He sent the frightened Tinka out of
the room. He said gaily to his wife, "Well, old thing, the doc thinks maybe
we better have a little operation and get it over. Just take a few
minutes--not half as serious as a confinement--and you'll be all right in a
jiffy."

She gripped his hand till the fingers ached. She said patiently, like a cowed
child, "I'm afraid--to go into the dark, all alone!" Maturity was wiped from
her eyes; they were pleading and terrified. "Will you stay with me? Darling,
you don't have to go to the office now, do you? Could you just go down to the
hospital with me? Could you come see me this evening--if everything's all
right? You won't have to go out this evening, will you?"

He was on his knees by the bed. While she feebly ruffled his hair, he sobbed,
he kissed the lawn of her sleeve, and swore, "Old honey, I love you more than
anything in the world! I've kind of been worried by business and everything,
but that's all over now, and I'm back again."

"Are you really? George, I was thinking, lying here, maybe it would be a good
thing if I just WENT. I was wondering if anybody really needed me. Or wanted
me. I was wondering what was the use of my living. I've been getting so
stupid and ugly--"

"Why, you old humbug! Fishing for compliments when I ought to be packing your
bag! Me, sure, I'm young and handsome and a regular village cut-up and--" He
could not go on. He sobbed again; and in muttered incoherencies they found
each other.

As he packed, his brain was curiously clear and swift. He'd have no more wild
evenings, he realized. He admitted that he would regret them. A little grimly
he perceived that this had been his last despairing fling before the paralyzed
contentment of middle-age. Well, and he grinned impishly, "it was one doggone
good party while it lasted!" And--how much was the operation going to cost?
"I ought to have fought that out with Dilling. But no, damn it, I don't care
how much it costs!"

The motor ambulance was at the door. Even in his grief the Babbitt who
admired all technical excellences was interested in the kindly skill with
which the attendants slid Mrs. Babbitt upon a stretcher and carried her
down-stairs. The ambulance was a huge, suave, varnished, white thing. Mrs.
Babbitt moaned, "It frightens me. It's just like a hearse, just like being
put in a hearse. I want you to stay with me."

"I'll be right up front with the driver," Babbitt promised.

"No, I want you to stay inside with me." To the attendants: "Can't he be
inside?"

"Sure, ma'am, you bet. There's a fine little camp-stool in there," the older
attendant said, with professional pride.

He sat beside her in that traveling cabin with its cot, its stool, its active
little electric radiator, and its quite unexplained calendar, displaying a
girl eating cherries, and the name of an enterprising grocer. But as he flung
out his hand in hopeless cheerfulness it touched the radiator, and he
squealed:

"Ouch! Jesus!"

"Why, George Babbitt, I won't have you cursing and swearing and blaspheming!"

"I know, awful sorry but--Gosh all fish-hooks, look how I burned my hand! Gee
whiz, it hurts! It hurts like the mischief! Why, that damn radiator is hot
as--it's hot as--it's hotter 'n the hinges of Hades! Look! You can see the
mark!"

So, as they drove up to St. Mary's Hospital, with the nurses already laying
out the instruments for an operation to save her life, it was she who consoled
him and kissed the place to make it well, and though he tried to be gruff and
mature, he yielded to her and was glad to be babied.

The ambulance whirled under the hooded carriage-entrance of the hospital, and
instantly he was reduced to a zero in the nightmare succession of cork-floored
halls, endless doors open on old women sitting up in bed, an elevator, the
anesthetizing room, a young interne contemptuous of husbands. He was
permitted to kiss his wife; he saw a thin dark nurse fit the cone over her
mouth and nose; he stiffened at a sweet and treacherous odor; then he was
driven out, and on a high stool in a laboratory he sat dazed, longing to see
her once again, to insist that he had always loved her, had never for a second
loved anybody else or looked at anybody else. In the laboratory he was
conscious only of a decayed object preserved in a bottle of yellowing alcohol.
It made him very sick, but he could not take his eyes from it. He was more
aware of it than of waiting. His mind floated in abeyance, coming back always
to that horrible bottle. To escape it he opened the door to the right, hoping
to find a sane and business-like office. He realized that he was looking into
the operating-room; in one glance he took in Dr. Dilling, strange in white
gown and bandaged head, bending over the steel table with its screws and
wheels, then nurses holding basins and cotton sponges, and a swathed thing,
just a lifeless chin and a mound of white in the midst of which was a square
of sallow flesh with a gash a little bloody at the edges, protruding from the
gash a cluster of forceps like clinging parasites.

He shut the door with haste. It may be that his frightened repentance of the
night and morning had not eaten in, but this dehumanizing interment of her who
had been so pathetically human shook him utterly, and as he crouched again on
the high stool in the laboratory he swore faith to his wife . . . to Zenith .
. . to business efficiency . . . to the Boosters' Club . . . to every faith of
the Clan of Good Fellows.

Then a nurse was soothing, "All over! Perfect success! She'll come out fine!
She'll be out from under the anesthetic soon, and you can see her."

He found her on a curious tilted bed, her face an unwholesome yellow but her
purple lips moving slightly. Then only did he really believe that she was
alive. She was muttering. He bent, and heard her sighing, "Hard get real
maple syrup for pancakes." He laughed inexhaustibly; he beamed on the nurse
and proudly confided, "Think of her talking about maple syrup! By golly, I'm
going to go and order a hundred gallons of it, right from Vermont!"


II

She was out of the hospital in seventeen days. He went to see her each
afternoon, and in their long talks they drifted back to intimacy. Once he
hinted something of his relations to Tanis and the Bunch, and she was inflated
by the view that a Wicked Woman had captivated her poor George.

If once he had doubted his neighbors and the supreme charm of the Good
Fellows, he was convinced now. You didn't, he noted, "see Seneca Doane coming
around with any flowers or dropping in to chat with the Missus," but Mrs.
Howard Littlefield brought to the hospital her priceless wine jelly (flavored
with real wine); Orville Jones spent hours in picking out the kind of novels
Mrs. Babbitt liked--nice love stories about New York millionaries and Wyoming
cowpunchers; Louetta Swanson knitted a pink bed-jacket; Sidney Finkelstein and
his merry brown-eyed flapper of a wife selected the prettiest nightgown in all
the stock of Parcher and Stein.

All his friends ceased whispering about him, suspecting him. At the Athletic
Club they asked after her daily. Club members whose names he did not know
stopped him to inquire, "How's your good lady getting on?" Babbitt felt that
he was swinging from bleak uplands down into the rich warm air of a valley
pleasant with cottages.

One noon Vergil Gunch suggested, "You planning to be at the hospital about
six? The wife and I thought we'd drop in." They did drop in. Gunch was so
humorous that Mrs. Babbitt said he must "stop making her laugh because
honestly it was hurting her incision." As they passed down the hall Gunch
demanded amiably, "George, old scout, you were soreheaded about something,
here a while back. I don't know why, and it's none of my business. But you
seem to be feeling all hunky-dory again, and why don't you come join us in the
Good Citizens' League, old man? We have some corking times together, and we
need your advice."

Then did Babbitt, almost tearful with joy at being coaxed instead of bullied,
at being permitted to stop fighting, at being able to desert without injuring
his opinion of himself, cease utterly to be a domestic revolutionist. He
patted Gunch's shoulder, and next day he became a member of the Good Citizens'
League.

Within two weeks no one in the League was more violent regarding the
wickedness of Seneca Doane, the crimes of labor unions, the perils of
immigration, and the delights of golf, morality, and bank-accounts than was
George F. Babbitt.