Chapter: To George F. Babbitt, as to most prosperous citizens of Zenith, his
motor car was poetry and tragedy, love and heroism. The office was his
pirate ship but the car his perilous excursion ashore.

Among the tremendous crises of each day none was more dramatic than
starting the engine. It was slow on cold mornings; there was the long,
anxious whirr of the starter; and sometimes he had to drip ether into
the cocks of the cylinders, which was so very interesting that at lunch
he would chronicle it drop by drop, and orally calculate how much each
drop had cost him.

This morning he was darkly prepared to find something wrong, and he felt
belittled when the mixture exploded sweet and strong, and the car didn't
even brush the door-jamb, gouged and splintery with many bruisings by
fenders, as he backed out of the garage. He was confused. He shouted
"Morning!" to Sam Doppelbrau with more cordiality than he had intended.

Babbitt's green and white Dutch Colonial house was one of three in that
block on Chatham Road. To the left of it was the residence of Mr. Samuel
Doppelbrau, secretary of an excellent firm of bathroom-fixture jobbers.
His was a comfortable house with no architectural manners whatever; a
large wooden box with a squat tower, a broad porch, and glossy paint
yellow as a yolk. Babbitt disapproved of Mr. and Mrs. Doppelbrau as
"Bohemian." From their house came midnight music and obscene laughter;
there were neighborhood rumors of bootlegged whisky and fast motor
rides. They furnished Babbitt with many happy evenings of discussion,
during which he announced firmly, "I'm not strait-laced, and I don't
mind seeing a fellow throw in a drink once in a while, but when it comes
to deliberately trying to get away with a lot of hell-raising all the
while like the Doppelbraus do, it's too rich for my blood!"

On the other side of Babbitt lived Howard Littlefield, Ph.D., in a
strictly modern house whereof the lower part was dark red tapestry
brick, with a leaded oriel, the upper part of pale stucco like spattered
clay, and the roof red-tiled. Littlefield was the Great Scholar of the
neighborhood; the authority on everything in the world except babies,
cooking, and motors. He was a Bachelor of Arts of Blodgett College,
and a Doctor of Philosophy in economics of Yale. He was the
employment-manager and publicity-counsel of the Zenith Street Traction
Company. He could, on ten hours' notice, appear before the board of
aldermen or the state legislature and prove, absolutely, with figures
all in rows and with precedents from Poland and New Zealand, that the
street-car company loved the Public and yearned over its employees;
that all its stock was owned by Widows and Orphans; and that whatever it
desired to do would benefit property-owners by increasing rental values,
and help the poor by lowering rents. All his acquaintances turned
to Littlefield when they desired to know the date of the battle of
Saragossa, the definition of the word "sabotage," the future of the
German mark, the translation of "hinc illae lachrimae," or the number of
products of coal tar. He awed Babbitt by confessing that he often sat up
till midnight reading the figures and footnotes in Government reports,
or skimming (with amusement at the author's mistakes) the latest volumes
of chemistry, archeology, and ichthyology.

But Littlefield's great value was as a spiritual example. Despite
his strange learnings he was as strict a Presbyterian and as firm a
Republican as George F. Babbitt. He confirmed the business men in the
faith. Where they knew only by passionate instinct that their system of
industry and manners was perfect, Dr. Howard Littlefield proved it
to them, out of history, economics, and the confessions of reformed
radicals.

Babbitt had a good deal of honest pride in being the neighbor of such a
savant, and in Ted's intimacy with Eunice Littlefield. At sixteen
Eunice was interested in no statistics save those regarding the ages
and salaries of motion-picture stars, but--as Babbitt definitively put
it--"she was her father's daughter."

The difference between a light man like Sam Doppelbrau and a really fine
character like Littlefield was revealed in their appearances. Doppelbrau
was disturbingly young for a man of forty-eight. He wore his derby on
the back of his head, and his red face was wrinkled with meaningless
laughter. But Littlefield was old for a man of forty-two. He was tall,
broad, thick; his gold-rimmed spectacles were engulfed in the folds of
his long face; his hair was a tossed mass of greasy blackness; he puffed
and rumbled as he talked; his Phi Beta Kappa key shone against a spotty
black vest; he smelled of old pipes; he was altogether funereal
and archidiaconal; and to real-estate brokerage and the jobbing of
bathroom-fixtures he added an aroma of sanctity.

This morning he was in front of his house, inspecting the grass parking
between the curb and the broad cement sidewalk. Babbitt stopped his car
and leaned out to shout "Mornin'!" Littlefield lumbered over and stood
with one foot up on the running-board.

"Fine morning," said Babbitt, lighting--illegally early--his second
cigar of the day.

"Yes, it's a mighty fine morning," said Littlefield.

"Spring coming along fast now."

"Yes, it's real spring now, all right," said Littlefield.

"Still cold nights, though. Had to have a couple blankets, on the
sleeping-porch last night."

"Yes, it wasn't any too warm last night," said Littlefield.

"But I don't anticipate we'll have any more real cold weather now."

"No, but still, there was snow at Tiflis, Montana, yesterday," said the
Scholar, "and you remember the blizzard they had out West three days
ago--thirty inches of snow at Greeley, Colorado--and two years ago we
had a snow-squall right here in Zenith on the twenty-fifth of April."

"Is that a fact! Say, old man, what do you think about the Republican
candidate? Who'll they nominate for president? Don't you think it's
about time we had a real business administration?"

"In my opinion, what the country needs, first and foremost, is a good,
sound, business-like conduct of its affairs. What we need is--a business
administration!" said Littlefield.

"I'm glad to hear you say that! I certainly am glad to hear you say
that! I didn't know how you'd feel about it, with all your associations
with colleges and so on, and I'm glad you feel that way. What the
country needs--just at this present juncture--is neither a college
president nor a lot of monkeying with foreign affairs, but a good--sound
economical--business--administration, that will give us a chance to have
something like a decent turnover."

"Yes. It isn't generally realized that even in China the schoolmen are
giving way to more practical men, and of course you can see what that
implies."

"Is that a fact! Well, well!" breathed Babbitt, feeling much calmer, and
much happier about the way things were going in the world. "Well, it's
been nice to stop and parleyvoo a second. Guess I'll have to get down to
the office now and sting a few clients. Well, so long, old man. See you
tonight. So long."


II

They had labored, these solid citizens. Twenty years before, the hill
on which Floral Heights was spread, with its bright roofs and immaculate
turf and amazing comfort, had been a wilderness of rank second-growth
elms and oaks and maples. Along the precise streets were still a few
wooded vacant lots, and the fragment of an old orchard. It was brilliant
to-day; the apple boughs were lit with fresh leaves like torches of
green fire. The first white of cherry blossoms flickered down a gully,
and robins clamored.

Babbitt sniffed the earth, chuckled at the hysteric robins as he would
have chuckled at kittens or at a comic movie. He was, to the eye, the
perfect office-going executive--a well-fed man in a correct brown soft
hat and frameless spectacles, smoking a large cigar, driving a good
motor along a semi-suburban parkway. But in him was some genius of
authentic love for his neighborhood, his city, his clan. The winter was
over; the time was come for the building, the visible growth, which to
him was glory. He lost his dawn depression; he was ruddily cheerful when
he stopped on Smith Street to leave the brown trousers, and to have the
gasoline-tank filled.

The familiarity of the rite fortified him: the sight of the tall red
iron gasoline-pump, the hollow-tile and terra-cotta garage, the window
full of the most agreeable accessories--shiny casings, spark-plugs with
immaculate porcelain jackets tire-chains of gold and silver. He was
flattered by the friendliness with which Sylvester Moon, dirtiest and
most skilled of motor mechanics, came out to serve him. "Mornin', Mr.
Babbitt!" said Moon, and Babbitt felt himself a person of importance,
one whose name even busy garagemen remembered--not one of these
cheap-sports flying around in flivvers. He admired the ingenuity of the
automatic dial, clicking off gallon by gallon; admired the smartness
of the sign: "A fill in time saves getting stuck--gas to-day 31 cents";
admired the rhythmic gurgle of the gasoline as it flowed into the tank,
and the mechanical regularity with which Moon turned the handle.

"How much we takin' to-day?" asked Moon, in a manner which combined the
independence of the great specialist, the friendliness of a familiar
gossip, and respect for a man of weight in the community, like George F.
Babbitt.

"Fill 'er up."

"Who you rootin' for for Republican candidate, Mr. Babbitt?"

"It's too early to make any predictions yet. After all, there's still
a good month and two weeks--no, three weeks--must be almost three
weeks--well, there's more than six weeks in all before the Republican
convention, and I feel a fellow ought to keep an open mind and give
all the candidates a show--look 'em all over and size 'em up, and then
decide carefully."

"That's a fact, Mr. Babbitt."

"But I'll tell you--and my stand on this is just the same as it was four
years ago, and eight years ago, and it'll be my stand four years from
now--yes, and eight years from now! What I tell everybody, and it can't
be too generally understood, is that what we need first, last, and all
the time is a good, sound business administration!"

"By golly, that's right!"

"How do those front tires look to you?"

"Fine! Fine! Wouldn't be much work for garages if everybody looked after
their car the way you do."

"Well, I do try and have some sense about it." Babbitt paid his bill,
said adequately, "Oh, keep the change," and drove off in an ecstasy of
honest self-appreciation. It was with the manner of a Good Samaritan
that he shouted at a respectable-looking man who was waiting for a
trolley car, "Have a lift?" As the man climbed in Babbitt condescended,
"Going clear down-town? Whenever I see a fellow waiting for a trolley,
I always make it a practice to give him a lift--unless, of course, he
looks like a bum."

"Wish there were more folks that were so generous with their machines,"
dutifully said the victim of benevolence. "Oh, no, 'tain't a question of
generosity, hardly. Fact, I always feel--I was saying to my son just the
other night--it's a fellow's duty to share the good things of this world
with his neighbors, and it gets my goat when a fellow gets stuck
on himself and goes around tooting his horn merely because he's
charitable."

The victim seemed unable to find the right answer. Babbitt boomed on:

"Pretty punk service the Company giving us on these car-lines. Nonsense
to only run the Portland Road cars once every seven minutes. Fellow gets
mighty cold on a winter morning, waiting on a street corner with the
wind nipping at his ankles."

"That's right. The Street Car Company don't care a damn what kind of a
deal they give us. Something ought to happen to 'em."

Babbitt was alarmed. "But still, of course it won't do to just keep
knocking the Traction Company and not realize the difficulties they're
operating under, like these cranks that want municipal ownership. The
way these workmen hold up the Company for high wages is simply a
crime, and of course the burden falls on you and me that have to pay
a seven-cent fare! Fact, there's remarkable service on all their
lines--considering."

"Well--" uneasily.

"Darn fine morning," Babbitt explained. "Spring coming along fast."

"Yes, it's real spring now."

The victim had no originality, no wit, and Babbitt fell into a great
silence and devoted himself to the game of beating trolley cars to the
corner: a spurt, a tail-chase, nervous speeding between the huge yellow
side of the trolley and the jagged row of parked motors, shooting past
just as the trolley stopped--a rare game and valiant.

And all the while he was conscious of the loveliness of Zenith. For
weeks together he noticed nothing but clients and the vexing To Rent
signs of rival brokers. To-day, in mysterious malaise, he raged or
rejoiced with equal nervous swiftness, and to-day the light of spring
was so winsome that he lifted his head and saw.

He admired each district along his familiar route to the office: The
bungalows and shrubs and winding irregular drive ways of Floral Heights.
The one-story shops on Smith Street, a glare of plate-glass and new
yellow brick; groceries and laundries and drug-stores to supply the more
immediate needs of East Side housewives. The market gardens in Dutch
Hollow, their shanties patched with corrugated iron and stolen doors.
Billboards with crimson goddesses nine feet tall advertising cinema
films, pipe tobacco, and talcum powder. The old "mansions" along Ninth
Street, S. E., like aged dandies in filthy linen; wooden castles turned
into boarding-houses, with muddy walks and rusty hedges, jostled
by fast-intruding garages, cheap apartment-houses, and fruit-stands
conducted by bland, sleek Athenians. Across the belt of railroad-tracks,
factories with high-perched water-tanks and tall stacks-factories
producing condensed milk, paper boxes, lighting-fixtures, motor cars.
Then the business center, the thickening darting traffic, the crammed
trolleys unloading, and high doorways of marble and polished granite.

It was big--and Babbitt respected bigness in anything; in mountains,
jewels, muscles, wealth, or words. He was, for a spring-enchanted
moment, the lyric and almost unselfish lover of Zenith. He thought of
the outlying factory suburbs; of the Chaloosa River with its strangely
eroded banks; of the orchard-dappled Tonawanda Hills to the North,
and all the fat dairy land and big barns and comfortable herds. As he
dropped his passenger he cried, "Gosh, I feel pretty good this morning!"
III

Epochal as starting the car was the drama of parking it before he
entered his office. As he turned from Oberlin Avenue round the corner
into Third Street, N.E., he peered ahead for a space in the line of
parked cars. He angrily just missed a space as a rival driver slid into
it. Ahead, another car was leaving the curb, and Babbitt slowed up,
holding out his hand to the cars pressing on him from behind, agitatedly
motioning an old woman to go ahead, avoiding a truck which bore down on
him from one side. With front wheels nicking the wrought-steel bumper
of the car in front, he stopped, feverishly cramped his steering-wheel,
slid back into the vacant space and, with eighteen inches of room,
manoeuvered to bring the car level with the curb. It was a virile
adventure masterfully executed. With satisfaction he locked a
thief-proof steel wedge on the front wheel, and crossed the street to
his real-estate office on the ground floor of the Reeves Building.

The Reeves Building was as fireproof as a rock and as efficient as
a typewriter; fourteen stories of yellow pressed brick, with clean,
upright, unornamented lines. It was filled with the offices of lawyers,
doctors, agents for machinery, for emery wheels, for wire fencing, for
mining-stock. Their gold signs shone on the windows. The entrance was
too modern to be flamboyant with pillars; it was quiet, shrewd, neat.
Along the Third Street side were a Western Union Telegraph Office,
the Blue Delft Candy Shop, Shotwell's Stationery Shop, and the
Babbitt-Thompson Realty Company.

Babbitt could have entered his office from the street, as customers
did, but it made him feel an insider to go through the corridor of
the building and enter by the back door. Thus he was greeted by the
villagers.

The little unknown people who inhabited the Reeves Building
corridors--elevator-runners, starter, engineers, superintendent, and the
doubtful-looking lame man who conducted the news and cigar stand--were
in no way city-dwellers. They were rustics, living in a constricted
valley, interested only in one another and in The Building. Their
Main Street was the entrance hall, with its stone floor, severe marble
ceiling, and the inner windows of the shops. The liveliest place on the
street was the Reeves Building Barber Shop, but this was also Babbitt's
one embarrassment. Himself, he patronized the glittering Pompeian
Barber Shop in the Hotel Thornleigh, and every time he passed the
Reeves shop--ten times a day, a hundred times--he felt untrue to his own
village.

Now, as one of the squirearchy, greeted with honorable salutations by
the villagers, he marched into his office, and peace and dignity were
upon him, and the morning's dissonances all unheard.

They were heard again, immediately.

Stanley Graff, the outside salesman, was talking on the telephone with
tragic lack of that firm manner which disciplines clients: "Say, uh, I
think I got just the house that would suit you--the Percival House, in
Linton.... Oh, you've seen it. Well, how'd it strike you?... Huh?
...Oh," irresolutely, "oh, I see."

As Babbitt marched into his private room, a coop with semi-partition of
oak and frosted glass, at the back of the office, he reflected how hard
it was to find employees who had his own faith that he was going to make
sales.

There were nine members of the staff, besides Babbitt and his partner
and father-in-law, Henry Thompson, who rarely came to the office. The
nine were Stanley Graff, the outside salesman--a youngish man given to
cigarettes and the playing of pool; old Mat Penniman, general utility
man, collector of rents and salesman of insurance--broken, silent, gray;
a mystery, reputed to have been a "crack" real-estate man with a firm
of his own in haughty Brooklyn; Chester Kirby Laylock, resident salesman
out at the Glen Oriole acreage development--an enthusiastic person with
a silky mustache and much family; Miss Theresa McGoun, the swift and
rather pretty stenographer; Miss Wilberta Bannigan, the thick, slow,
laborious accountant and file-clerk; and four freelance part-time
commission salesmen.

As he looked from his own cage into the main room Babbitt mourned,
"McGoun's a good stenog., smart's a whip, but Stan Graff and all those
bums--" The zest of the spring morning was smothered in the stale office
air.

Normally he admired the office, with a pleased surprise that he should
have created this sure lovely thing; normally he was stimulated by
the clean newness of it and the air of bustle; but to-day it seemed
flat--the tiled floor, like a bathroom, the ocher-colored metal ceiling,
the faded maps on the hard plaster walls, the chairs of varnished pale
oak, the desks and filing-cabinets of steel painted in olive drab. It
was a vault, a steel chapel where loafing and laughter were raw sin.

He hadn't even any satisfaction in the new water-cooler! And it was the
very best of water-coolers, up-to-date, scientific, and right-thinking.
It had cost a great deal of money (in itself a virtue). It possessed a
non-conducting fiber ice-container, a porcelain water-jar (guaranteed
hygienic), a drip-less non-clogging sanitary faucet, and machine-painted
decorations in two tones of gold. He looked down the relentless stretch
of tiled floor at the water-cooler, and assured himself that no tenant
of the Reeves Building had a more expensive one, but he could not
recapture the feeling of social superiority it had given him. He
astoundingly grunted, "I'd like to beat it off to the woods right now.
And loaf all day. And go to Gunch's again to-night, and play poker,
and cuss as much as I feel like, and drink a hundred and nine-thousand
bottles of beer."

He sighed; he read through his mail; he shouted "Msgoun," which meant
"Miss McGoun"; and began to dictate.

This was his own version of his first letter:

"Omar Gribble, send it to his office, Miss McGoun, yours of twentieth to
hand and in reply would say look here, Gribble, I'm awfully afraid if
we go on shilly-shallying like this we'll just naturally lose the Allen
sale, I had Allen up on carpet day before yesterday and got right down
to cases and think I can assure you--uh, uh, no, change that: all my
experience indicates he is all right, means to do business, looked into
his financial record which is fine--that sentence seems to be a little
balled up, Miss McGoun; make a couple sentences out of it if you have
to, period, new paragraph.

"He is perfectly willing to pro rate the special assessment and strikes
me, am dead sure there will be no difficulty in getting him to pay for
title insurance, so now for heaven's sake let's get busy--no, make that:
so now let's go to it and get down--no, that's enough--you can tie
those sentences up a little better when you type 'em, Miss McGoun--your
sincerely, etcetera."

This is the version of his letter which he received, typed, from Miss
McGoun that afternoon:

     BABBITT-THOMPSON REALTY CO.
     Homes for Folks
     Reeves Bldg., Oberlin Avenue & 3d St., N.E
     Zenith

Omar Gribble, Esq., 376 North American Building, Zenith.

Dear Mr. Gribble:

Your letter of the twentieth to hand. I must say I'm awfully afraid that
if we go on shilly-shallying like this we'll just naturally lose the
Allen sale. I had Allen up on the carpet day before yesterday, and got
right down to cases. All my experience indicates that he means to do
business. I have also looked into his financial record, which is fine.

He is perfectly willing to pro rate the special assessment and there
will be no difficulty in getting him to pay for title insurance.

SO LET'S GO! Yours sincerely,

As he read and signed it, in his correct flowing business-college hand,
Babbitt reflected, "Now that's a good, strong letter, and clear's a
bell. Now what the--I never told McGoun to make a third paragraph there!
Wish she'd quit trying to improve on my dictation! But what I can't
understand is: why can't Stan Graff or Chet Laylock write a letter like
that? With punch! With a kick!"

The most important thing he dictated that morning was the fortnightly
form-letter, to be mimeographed and sent out to a thousand "prospects."
It was diligently imitative of the best literary models of the day; of
heart-to-heart-talk advertisements, "sales-pulling" letters, discourses
on the "development of Will-power," and hand-shaking house-organs,
as richly poured forth by the new school of Poets of Business. He had
painfully written out a first draft, and he intoned it now like a poet
delicate and distrait:

SAY, OLD MAN! I just want to know can I do you a whaleuva favor? Honest!
No kidding! I know you're interested in getting a house, not merely a
place where you hang up the old bonnet but a love-nest for the wife and
kiddies--and maybe for the flivver out beyant (be sure and spell that
b-e-y-a-n-t, Miss McGoun) the spud garden. Say, did you ever stop
to think that we're here to save you trouble? That's how we make a
living--folks don't pay us for our lovely beauty! Now take a look:

Sit right down at the handsome carved mahogany escritoire and shoot us
in a line telling us just what you want, and if we can find it we'll
come hopping down your lane with the good tidings, and if we can't, we
won't bother you. To save your time, just fill out the blank enclosed.
On request will also send blank regarding store properties in Floral
Heights, Silver Grove, Linton, Bellevue, and all East Side residential
districts.

Yours for service,

P.S.--Just a hint of some plums we can pick for you--some genuine
bargains that came in to-day:

SILVER GROVE.--Cute four-room California bungalow, a.m.i., garage, dandy
shade tree, swell neighborhood, handy car line. $3700, $780 down and
balance liberal, Babbitt-Thompson terms, cheaper than rent.

DORCHESTER.--A corker! Artistic two-family house, all oak trim, parquet
floors, lovely gas log, big porches, colonial, HEATED ALL-WEATHER
GARAGE, a bargain at $11,250.


Dictation over, with its need of sitting and thinking instead of
bustling around and making a noise and really doing something, Babbitt
sat creakily back in his revolving desk-chair and beamed on Miss McGoun.
He was conscious of her as a girl, of black bobbed hair against demure
cheeks. A longing which was indistinguishable from loneliness enfeebled
him. While she waited, tapping a long, precise pencil-point on the
desk-tablet, he half identified her with the fairy girl of his dreams.
He imagined their eyes meeting with terrifying recognition; imagined
touching her lips with frightened reverence and--She was chirping,
"Any more, Mist' Babbitt?" He grunted, "That winds it up, I guess," and
turned heavily away.

For all his wandering thoughts, they had never been more intimate than
this. He often reflected, "Nev' forget how old Jake Offutt said a wise
bird never goes love-making in his own office or his own home. Start
trouble. Sure. But--"

In twenty-three years of married life he had peered uneasily at every
graceful ankle, every soft shoulder; in thought he had treasured them;
but not once had he hazarded respectability by adventuring. Now, as
he calculated the cost of repapering the Styles house, he was restless
again, discontented about nothing and everything, ashamed of his
discontentment, and lonely for the fairy girl.





IT was a morning of artistic creation. Fifteen minutes after the purple
prose of Babbitt's form-letter, Chester Kirby Laylock, the resident
salesman at Glen Oriole, came in to report a sale and submit an
advertisement. Babbitt disapproved of Laylock, who sang in choirs and
was merry at home over games of Hearts and Old Maid. He had a tenor
voice, wavy chestnut hair, and a mustache like a camel's-hair brush.
Babbitt considered it excusable in a family-man to growl, "Seen this
new picture of the kid--husky little devil, eh?" but Laylock's domestic
confidences were as bubbling as a girl's.

"Say, I think I got a peach of an ad for the Glen, Mr. Babbitt.
Why don't we try something in poetry? Honest, it'd have wonderful
pulling-power. Listen:

     'Mid pleasures and palaces,
     Wherever you may roam,
     You just provide the little bride
     And we'll provide the home.

Do you get it? See--like 'Home Sweet Home.' Don't you--"

"Yes, yes, yes, hell yes, of course I get it. But--Oh, I think we'd
better use something more dignified and forceful, like 'We lead, others
follow,' or 'Eventually, why not now?' Course I believe in using
poetry and humor and all that junk when it turns the trick, but with a
high-class restricted development like the Glen we better stick to the
more dignified approach, see how I mean? Well, I guess that's all, this
morning, Chet."


II

By a tragedy familiar to the world of art, the April enthusiasm of Chet
Laylock served only to stimulate the talent of the older craftsman,
George F. Babbitt. He grumbled to Stanley Graff, "That tan-colored voice
of Chet's gets on my nerves," yet he was aroused and in one swoop he
wrote:

DO YOU RESPECT YOUR LOVED ONES?

When the last sad rites of bereavement are over, do you know for certain
that you have done your best for the Departed? You haven't unless they
lie in the Cemetery Beautiful,

LINDEN LANE

the only strictly up-to-date burial place in or near Zenith, where
exquisitely gardened plots look from daisy-dotted hill-slopes across the
smiling fields of Dorchester.

     Sole agents
     BABBITT-THOMPSON REALTY COMPANY
     Reeves Building

He rejoiced, "I guess that'll show Chan Mott and his weedy old Wildwood
Cemetery something about modern merchandizing!"


III

He sent Mat Penniman to the recorder's office to dig out the names
of the owners of houses which were displaying For Rent signs of other
brokers; he talked to a man who desired to lease a store-building for
a pool-room; he ran over the list of home-leases which were about to
expire; he sent Thomas Bywaters, a street-car conductor who played at
real estate in spare time, to call on side-street "prospects" who were
unworthy the strategies of Stanley Graff. But he had spent his credulous
excitement of creation, and these routine details annoyed him. One
moment of heroism he had, in discovering a new way of stopping smoking.

He stopped smoking at least once a month. He went through with it like
the solid citizen he was: admitted the evils of tobacco, courageously
made resolves, laid out plans to check the vice, tapered off his
allowance of cigars, and expounded the pleasures of virtuousness to
every one he met. He did everything, in fact, except stop smoking.

Two months before, by ruling out a schedule, noting down the hour and
minute of each smoke, and ecstatically increasing the intervals between
smokes, he had brought himself down to three cigars a day. Then he had
lost the schedule.

A week ago he had invented a system of leaving his cigar-case
and cigarette-box in an unused drawer at the bottom of the
correspondence-file, in the outer office. "I'll just naturally be
ashamed to go poking in there all day long, making a fool of myself
before my own employees!" he reasoned. By the end of three days he was
trained to leave his desk, walk to the file, take out and light a cigar,
without knowing that he was doing it.

This morning it was revealed to him that it had been too easy to open
the file. Lock it, that was the thing! Inspired, he rushed out and
locked up his cigars, his cigarettes, and even his box of safety
matches; and the key to the file drawer he hid in his desk. But the
crusading passion of it made him so tobacco-hungry that he immediately
recovered the key, walked with forbidding dignity to the file, took out
a cigar and a match--"but only one match; if ole cigar goes out, it'll
by golly have to stay out!" Later, when the cigar did go out, he took
one more match from the file, and when a buyer and a seller came in for
a conference at eleven-thirty, naturally he had to offer them cigars.
His conscience protested, "Why, you're smoking with them!" but he
bullied it, "Oh, shut up! I'm busy now. Of course by-and-by--" There was
no by-and-by, yet his belief that he had crushed the unclean habit made
him feel noble and very happy. When he called up Paul Riesling he was,
in his moral splendor, unusually eager.

He was fonder of Paul Riesling than of any one on earth except himself
and his daughter Tinka. They had been classmates, roommates, in the
State University, but always he thought of Paul Riesling, with his dark
slimness, his precisely parted hair, his nose-glasses, his hesitant
speech, his moodiness, his love of music, as a younger brother, to be
petted and protected. Paul had gone into his father's business,
after graduation; he was now a wholesaler and small manufacturer of
prepared-paper roofing. But Babbitt strenuously believed and lengthily
announced to the world of Good Fellows that Paul could have been a great
violinist or painter or writer. "Why say, the letters that boy sent me
on his trip to the Canadian Rockies, they just absolutely make you see
the place as if you were standing there. Believe me, he could have given
any of these bloomin' authors a whale of a run for their money!"

Yet on the telephone they said only:

"South 343. No, no, no! I said SOUTH--South 343. Say, operator, what
the dickens is the trouble? Can't you get me South 343? Why certainly
they'll answer. Oh, Hello, 343? Wanta speak Mist' Riesling, Mist'
Babbitt talking. . . 'Lo, Paul?"

"Yuh."

"'S George speaking."

"Yuh."

"How's old socks?"

"Fair to middlin'. How 're you?"

"Fine, Paulibus. Well, what do you know?"

"Oh, nothing much."

"Where you been keepin' yourself?"

"Oh, just stickin' round. What's up, Georgie?"

"How 'bout lil lunch 's noon?"

"Be all right with me, I guess. Club?'

"Yuh. Meet you there twelve-thirty."

"A' right. Twelve-thirty. S' long, Georgie."


IV

His morning was not sharply marked into divisions. Interwoven with
correspondence and advertisement-writing were a thousand nervous
details: calls from clerks who were incessantly and hopefully seeking
five furnished rooms and bath at sixty dollars a month; advice to Mat
Penniman on getting money out of tenants who had no money.

Babbitt's virtues as a real-estate broker--as the servant of society in
the department of finding homes for families and shops for distributors
of food--were steadiness and diligence. He was conventionally honest, he
kept his records of buyers and sellers complete, he had experience with
leases and titles and an excellent memory for prices. His shoulders were
broad enough, his voice deep enough, his relish of hearty humor strong
enough, to establish him as one of the ruling caste of Good Fellows. Yet
his eventual importance to mankind was perhaps lessened by his large and
complacent ignorance of all architecture save the types of houses turned
out by speculative builders; all landscape gardening save the use of
curving roads, grass, and six ordinary shrubs; and all the commonest
axioms of economics. He serenely believed that the one purpose of the
real-estate business was to make money for George F. Babbitt. True,
it was a good advertisement at Boosters' Club lunches, and all the
varieties of Annual Banquets to which Good Fellows were invited, to
speak sonorously of Unselfish Public Service, the Broker's Obligation
to Keep Inviolate the Trust of His Clients, and a thing called Ethics,
whose nature was confusing but if you had it you were a High-class
Realtor and if you hadn't you were a shyster, a piker, and a
fly-by-night. These virtues awakened Confidence, and enabled you to
handle Bigger Propositions. But they didn't imply that you were to be
impractical and refuse to take twice the value of a house if a buyer was
such an idiot that he didn't jew you down on the asking-price.

Babbitt spoke well--and often--at these orgies of commercial
righteousness about the "realtor's function as a seer of the future
development of the community, and as a prophetic engineer clearing the
pathway for inevitable changes"--which meant that a real-estate broker
could make money by guessing which way the town would grow. This
guessing he called Vision.

In an address at the Boosters' Club he had admitted, "It is at once the
duty and the privilege of the realtor to know everything about his own
city and its environs. Where a surgeon is a specialist on every vein and
mysterious cell of the human body, and the engineer upon electricity in
all its phases, or every bolt of some great bridge majestically arching
o'er a mighty flood, the realtor must know his city, inch by inch, and
all its faults and virtues."

Though he did know the market-price, inch by inch, of certain districts
of Zenith, he did not know whether the police force was too large or too
small, or whether it was in alliance with gambling and prostitution.
He knew the means of fire-proofing buildings and the relation of
insurance-rates to fire-proofing, but he did not know how many firemen
there were in the city, how they were trained and paid, or how complete
their apparatus. He sang eloquently the advantages of proximity of
school-buildings to rentable homes, but he did not know--he did not
know that it was worth while to know--whether the city schoolrooms were
properly heated, lighted, ventilated, furnished; he did not know how the
teachers were chosen; and though he chanted "One of the boasts of Zenith
is that we pay our teachers adequately," that was because he had read
the statement in the Advocate-Times. Himself, he could not have given
the average salary of teachers in Zenith or anywhere else.

He had heard it said that "conditions" in the County Jail and the Zenith
City Prison were not very "scientific;" he had, with indignation at the
criticism of Zenith, skimmed through a report in which the notorious
pessimist Seneca Doane, the radical lawyer, asserted that to throw
boys and young girls into a bull-pen crammed with men suffering from
syphilis, delirium tremens, and insanity was not the perfect way of
educating them. He had controverted the report by growling, "Folks that
think a jail ought to be a bloomin' Hotel Thornleigh make me sick. If
people don't like a jail, let 'em behave 'emselves and keep out of it.
Besides, these reform cranks always exaggerate." That was the beginning
and quite completely the end of his investigations into Zenith's
charities and corrections; and as to the "vice districts" he brightly
expressed it, "Those are things that no decent man monkeys with.
Besides, smatter fact, I'll tell you confidentially: it's a protection
to our daughters and to decent women to have a district where tough nuts
can raise cain. Keeps 'em away from our own homes."

As to industrial conditions, however, Babbitt had thought a great deal,
and his opinions may be coordinated as follows:

"A good labor union is of value because it keeps out radical unions,
which would destroy property. No one ought to be forced to belong to a
union, however. All labor agitators who try to force men to join a union
should be hanged. In fact, just between ourselves, there oughtn't to
be any unions allowed at all; and as it's the best way of fighting the
unions, every business man ought to belong to an employers'-association
and to the Chamber of Commerce. In union there is strength. So any
selfish hog who doesn't join the Chamber of Commerce ought to be forced
to."

In nothing--as the expert on whose advice families moved to new
neighborhoods to live there for a generation--was Babbitt more
splendidly innocent than in the science of sanitation. He did not know
a malaria-bearing mosquito from a bat; he knew nothing about tests of
drinking water; and in the matters of plumbing and sewage he was as
unlearned as he was voluble. He often referred to the excellence of the
bathrooms in the houses he sold. He was fond of explaining why it
was that no European ever bathed. Some one had told him, when he was
twenty-two, that all cesspools were unhealthy, and he still denounced
them. If a client impertinently wanted him to sell a house which had a
cesspool, Babbitt always spoke about it--before accepting the house and
selling it.

When he laid out the Glen Oriole acreage development, when he ironed
woodland and dipping meadow into a glenless, orioleless, sunburnt flat
prickly with small boards displaying the names of imaginary streets, he
righteously put in a complete sewage-system. It made him feel superior;
it enabled him to sneer privily at the Martin Lumsen development,
Avonlea, which had a cesspool; and it provided a chorus for the
full-page advertisements in which he announced the beauty, convenience,
cheapness, and supererogatory healthfulness of Glen Oriole. The only
flaw was that the Glen Oriole sewers had insufficient outlet, so that
waste remained in them, not very agreeably, while the Avonlea cesspool
was a Waring septic tank.

The whole of the Glen Oriole project was a suggestion that Babbitt,
though he really did hate men recognized as swindlers, was not too
unreasonably honest. Operators and buyers prefer that brokers should
not be in competition with them as operators and buyers themselves,
but attend to their clients' interests only. It was supposed that the
Babbitt-Thompson Company were merely agents for Glen Oriole, serving
the real owner, Jake Offutt, but the fact was that Babbitt and Thompson
owned sixty-two per cent. of the Glen, the president and purchasing
agent of the Zenith Street Traction Company owned twenty-eight per
cent., and Jake Offutt (a gang-politician, a small manufacturer,
a tobacco-chewing old farceur who enjoyed dirty politics, business
diplomacy, and cheating at poker) had only ten per cent., which
Babbitt and the Traction officials had given to him for "fixing" health
inspectors and fire inspectors and a member of the State Transportation
Commission.

But Babbitt was virtuous. He advocated, though he did not practise, the
prohibition of alcohol; he praised, though he did not obey, the laws
against motor-speeding; he paid his debts; he contributed to the church,
the Red Cross, and the Y. M. C. A.; he followed the custom of his
clan and cheated only as it was sanctified by precedent; and he never
descended to trickery--though, as he explained to Paul Riesling:

"Course I don't mean to say that every ad I write is literally true or
that I always believe everything I say when I give some buyer a good
strong selling-spiel. You see--you see it's like this: In the first
place, maybe the owner of the property exaggerated when he put it into
my hands, and it certainly isn't my place to go proving my principal
a liar! And then most folks are so darn crooked themselves that they
expect a fellow to do a little lying, so if I was fool enough to never
whoop the ante I'd get the credit for lying anyway! In self-defense I
got to toot my own horn, like a lawyer defending a client--his bounden
duty, ain't it, to bring out the poor dub's good points? Why, the Judge
himself would bawl out a lawyer that didn't, even if they both knew
the guy was guilty! But even so, I don't pad out the truth like Cecil
Rountree or Thayer or the rest of these realtors. Fact, I think a fellow
that's willing to deliberately up and profit by lying ought to be shot!"

Babbitt's value to his clients was rarely better shown than this
morning, in the conference at eleven-thirty between himself, Conrad
Lyte, and Archibald Purdy.


V

Conrad Lyte was a real-estate speculator. He was a nervous speculator.
Before he gambled he consulted bankers, lawyers, architects, contracting
builders, and all of their clerks and stenographers who were willing
to be cornered and give him advice. He was a bold entrepreneur, and he
desired nothing more than complete safety in his investments, freedom
from attention to details, and the thirty or forty per cent. profit
which, according to all authorities, a pioneer deserves for his risks
and foresight. He was a stubby man with a cap-like mass of short gray
curls and clothes which, no matter how well cut, seemed shaggy. Below
his eyes were semicircular hollows, as though silver dollars had been
pressed against them and had left an imprint.

Particularly and always Lyte consulted Babbitt, and trusted in his slow
cautiousness.

Six months ago Babbitt had learned that one Archibald Purdy, a grocer
in the indecisive residential district known as Linton, was talking of
opening a butcher shop beside his grocery. Looking up the ownership of
adjoining parcels of land, Babbitt found that Purdy owned his present
shop but did not own the one available lot adjoining. He advised Conrad
Lyte to purchase this lot, for eleven thousand dollars, though an
appraisal on a basis of rents did not indicate its value as above nine
thousand. The rents, declared Babbitt, were too low; and by waiting they
could make Purdy come to their price. (This was Vision.) He had to bully
Lyte into buying. His first act as agent for Lyte was to increase the
rent of the battered store-building on the lot. The tenant said a number
of rude things, but he paid.

Now, Purdy seemed ready to buy, and his delay was going to cost him ten
thousand extra dollars--the reward paid by the community to Mr. Conrad
Lyte for the virtue of employing a broker who had Vision and
who understood Talking Points, Strategic Values, Key Situations,
Underappraisals, and the Psychology of Salesmanship.

Lyte came to the conference exultantly. He was fond of Babbitt, this
morning, and called him "old hoss." Purdy, the grocer, a long-nosed man
and solemn, seemed to care less for Babbitt and for Vision, but Babbitt
met him at the street door of the office and guided him toward the
private room with affectionate little cries of "This way, Brother
Purdy!" He took from the correspondence-file the entire box of cigars
and forced them on his guests. He pushed their chairs two inches forward
and three inches back, which gave an hospitable note, then leaned
back in his desk-chair and looked plump and jolly. But he spoke to the
weakling grocer with firmness.

"Well, Brother Purdy, we been having some pretty tempting offers from
butchers and a slew of other folks for that lot next to your store,
but I persuaded Brother Lyte that we ought to give you a shot at the
property first. I said to Lyte, 'It'd be a rotten shame,' I said, 'if
somebody went and opened a combination grocery and meat market right
next door and ruined Purdy's nice little business.' Especially--"
Babbitt leaned forward, and his voice was harsh, "--it would be hard
luck if one of these cash-and-carry chain-stores got in there and
started cutting prices below cost till they got rid of competition and
forced you to the wall!"

Purdy snatched his thin hands from his pockets, pulled up his trousers,
thrust his hands back into his pockets, tilted in the heavy oak chair,
and tried to look amused, as he struggled:

"Yes, they're bad competition. But I guess you don't realize the Pulling
Power that Personality has in a neighborhood business."

The great Babbitt smiled. "That's so. Just as you feel, old man. We
thought we'd give you first chance. All right then--"

"Now look here!" Purdy wailed. "I know f'r a fact that a piece of
property 'bout same size, right near, sold for less 'n eighty-five
hundred, 'twa'n't two years ago, and here you fellows are asking me
twenty-four thousand dollars! Why, I'd have to mortgage--I wouldn't mind
so much paying twelve thousand but--Why good God, Mr. Babbitt, you're
asking more 'n twice its value! And threatening to ruin me if I don't
take it!"

"Purdy, I don't like your way of talking! I don't like it one little
bit! Supposing Lyte and I were stinking enough to want to ruin any
fellow human, don't you suppose we know it's to our own selfish interest
to have everybody in Zenith prosperous? But all this is beside
the point. Tell you what we'll do: We'll come down to twenty-three
thousand-five thousand down and the rest on mortgage--and if you want to
wreck the old shack and rebuild, I guess I can get Lyte here to loosen
up for a building-mortgage on good liberal terms. Heavens, man, we'd
be glad to oblige you! We don't like these foreign grocery trusts any
better 'n you do! But it isn't reasonable to expect us to sacrifice
eleven thousand or more just for neighborliness, IS it! How about it,
Lyte? You willing to come down?"

By warmly taking Purdy's part, Babbitt persuaded the benevolent Mr. Lyte
to reduce his price to twenty-one thousand dollars. At the right moment
Babbitt snatched from a drawer the agreement he had had Miss McGoun type
out a week ago and thrust it into Purdy's hands. He genially shook his
fountain pen to make certain that it was flowing, handed it to Purdy,
and approvingly watched him sign.

The work of the world was being done. Lyte had made something over
nine thousand dollars, Babbitt had made a four-hundred-and-fifty dollar
commission, Purdy had, by the sensitive mechanism of modern finance,
been provided with a business-building, and soon the happy inhabitants
of Linton would have meat lavished upon them at prices only a little
higher than those down-town.

It had been a manly battle, but after it Babbitt drooped. This was the
only really amusing contest he had been planning. There was nothing
ahead save details of leases, appraisals, mortgages.

He muttered, "Makes me sick to think of Lyte carrying off most of the
profit when I did all the work, the old skinflint! And--What else have
I got to do to-day?... Like to take a good long vacation. Motor trip.
Something." He sprang up, rekindled by the thought of lunching with Paul
Riesling.

 Chapter Three begins with Babbitt starting his car for his drive to work. He observes his neighbors and his disapproval for the Doppelbraus originates from his view that they are 'Bohemian'. Conversely, Howard Littlefield is revered as the 'Great Scholar' of the neighborhood. He and Babbitt also share the same Republican politics. Howard's daughter, Eunice, is 'intimate' with Ted. Babbitt agrees when Howard says they need a 'business administration' when they discuss the next Republican candidate. Babbitt repeats this view as his own when he later has a conversation with a mechanic. After the 'drama' of parking his car, Babbitt enters the Reevers Building where his offices are based. The people who work in the building are described as 'the villagers' and the entrance hall is their Main Street. Babbitt regards himself as one of the 'squirearchy'. His employees are introduced and these include Stanley Graff and Theresa McGoun. This chapter ends with Babbitt comparing Miss McGoun to the fairy child. The readers are told that he has often admired women from afar, but has never had an affair in 23 years of married life. However, he feels restless and discontented. In Chapter Four, the readers are made privy to Babbitt working in the office writing an advertisement. There is a description of him trying and failing to stop smoking cigars. He then calls Paul Riesling, of whom he is fonder, 'than any one on earth except himself and his daughter Tinka'. Paul and Babbitt had been classmates and roommates at State University. Babbitt thinks of him as a younger brother and believes he could have been a great violinist, painter or writer. Instead, Paul went into his father's business of selling and manufacturing 'prepared-paper roofing'. They arrange to meet for lunch. It is revealed that Babbitt knows little about architecture, but he does have, what he calls, Vision. His other limits in knowledge are listed; for example, he does not know how much teachers are paid, how large the police forces are or what conditions are like in prison. Despite his lack of knowledge, he thinks prisons should not be run like hotels. Babbitt's dishonest business dealings are made reference to as it is supposed that the Babbitt-Thompson company are only agents for the Glen Oriole project whereas they own 62% of it. Babbitt still believes himself to be virtuous, though. A further example of Babbitt's shady business practice is detailed in a conference with Conrad Lyte and Archibald Purdy. Six months previously, Babbitt advised Lyte to buy the vacant property next to Purdy's business as he knew they would profit from Purdy's desire to own it too. Purdy is given the chance to buy this property at more than twice the value of it.

