Babbit (34 page)

  "Your name is - ?"

  "William Varney - W. K. Varney."

  "Oh, yes. That was the Garrison house." Babbitt
sounded the buzzer. When Miss McGoun came in, he demanded, "Graff
gone out?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Will you look through his desk and see if there is
a lease made out to Mr. Varney on the Garrison house?" To Varney:
"Can't tell you how sorry I am this happened. Needless to say, I'll
fire Graff the minute he comes in. And of course your lease stands.
But there's one other thing I'd like to do. I'll tell the owner not
to pay us the commission but apply it to your rent. No! Straight! I
want to. To be frank, this thing shakes me up bad. I suppose I've
always been a Practical Business Man. Probably I've told one or two
fairy stories in my time, when the occasion called for it - you
know: sometimes you have to lay things on thick, to impress
boneheads. But this is the first time I've ever had to accuse one
of my own employees of anything more dishonest than pinching a few
stamps. Honest, it would hurt me if we profited by it. So you'll
let me hand you the commission? Good!"

  II

  He walked through the February city, where trucks
flung up a spattering of slush and the sky was dark above dark
brick cornices. He came back miserable. He, who respected the law,
had broken it by concealing the Federal crime of interception of
the mails. But he could not see Graff go to jail and his wife
suffer. Worse, he had to discharge Graff and this was a part of
office routine which he feared. He liked people so much, he so much
wanted them to like him that he could not bear insulting them.

  Miss McGoun dashed in to whisper, with the
excitement of an approaching scene, "He's here!"

  "Mr. Graff? Ask him to come in."

  He tried to make himself heavy and calm in his
chair, and to keep his eyes expressionless. Graff stalked in - a
man of thirty-five, dapper, eye-glassed, with a foppish
mustache.

  "Want me?" said Graff.

  "Yes. Sit down."

  Graff continued to stand, grunting, "I suppose that
old nut Varney has been in to see you. Let me explain about him.
He's a regular tightwad, and he sticks out for every cent, and he
practically lied to me about his ability to pay the rent - I found
that out just after we signed up. And then another fellow comes
along with a better offer for the house, and I felt it was my duty
to the firm to get rid of Varney, and I was so worried about it I
skun up there and got back the lease. Honest, Mr. Babbitt, I didn't
intend to pull anything crooked. I just wanted the firm to have all
the commis - "

  "Wait now, Stan. This may all be true, but I've been
having a lot of complaints about you. Now I don't s'pose you ever
mean to do wrong, and I think if you just get a good lesson that'll
jog you up a little, you'll turn out a first-class realtor yet. But
I don't see how I can keep you on."

  Graff leaned against the filing-cabinet, his hands
in his pockets, and laughed. "So I'm fired! Well, old Vision and
Ethics, I'm tickled to death! But I don't want you to think you can
get away with any holier-than-thou stuff. Sure I've pulled some raw
stuff - a little of it - but how could I help it, in this
office?"

  "Now, by God, young man - "

  "Tut, tut! Keep the naughty temper down, and don't
holler, because everybody in the outside office will hear you.
They're probably listening right now. Babbitt, old dear, you're
crooked in the first place and a damn skinflint in the second. If
you paid me a decent salary I wouldn't have to steal pennies off a
blind man to keep my wife from starving. Us married just five
months, and her the nicest girl living, and you keeping us flat
broke all the time, you damned old thief, so you can put money away
for your saphead of a son and your wishywashy fool of a daughter!
Wait, now! You'll by God take it, or I'll bellow so the whole
office will hear it! And crooked - Say, if I told the prosecuting
attorney what I know about this last Street Traction option steal,
both you and me would go to jail, along with some nice, clean,
pious, high-up traction guns!"

  "Well, Stan, looks like we were coming down to
cases. That deal - There was nothing crooked about it. The only way
you can get progress is for the broad-gauged men to get things
done; and they got to be rewarded - "

  "Oh, for Pete's sake, don't get virtuous on me! As I
gather it, I'm fired. All right. It's a good thing for me. And if I
catch you knocking me to any other firm, I'll squeal all I know
about you and Henry T. and the dirty little lickspittle deals that
you corporals of industry pull off for the bigger and brainier
crooks, and you'll get chased out of town. And me - you're right,
Babbitt, I've been going crooked, but now I'm going straight, and
the first step will be to get a job in some office where the boss
doesn't talk about Ideals. Bad luck, old dear, and you can stick
your job up the sewer!"

  Babbitt sat for a long time, alternately raging,
"I'll have him arrested," and yearning "I wonder - No, I've never
done anything that wasn't necessary to keep the Wheels of Progress
moving."

  Next day he hired in Graff's place Fritz Weilinger,
the salesman of his most injurious rival, the East Side Homes and
Development Company, and thus at once annoyed his competitor and
acquired an excellent man. Young Fritz was a curly-headed, merry,
tennis-playing youngster. He made customers welcome to the office.
Babbitt thought of him as a son, and in him had much comfort.

  III

  An abandoned race-track on the outskirts of Chicago,
a plot excellent for factory sites, was to be sold, and Jake Offut
asked Babbitt to bid on it for him. The strain of the Street
Traction deal and his disappointment in Stanley Graff had so shaken
Babbitt that he found it hard to sit at his desk and concentrate.
He proposed to his family, "Look here, folks! Do you know who's
going to trot up to Chicago for a couple of days - just week-end;
won't lose but one day of school - know who's going with that
celebrated business-ambassador, George F. Babbitt? Why, Mr.
Theodore Roosevelt Babbitt!"

  "Hurray!" Ted shouted, and "Oh, maybe the Babbitt
men won't paint that lil ole town red!"

  And, once away from the familiar implications of
home, they were two men together. Ted was young only in his
assumption of oldness, and the only realms, apparently, in which
Babbitt had a larger and more grown-up knowledge than Ted's were
the details of real estate and the phrases of politics. When the
other sages of the Pullman smoking-compartment had left them to
themselves, Babbitt's voice did not drop into the playful and
otherwise offensive tone in which one addresses children but
continued its overwhelming and monotonous rumble, and Ted tried to
imitate it in his strident tenor:

  "Gee, dad, you certainly did show up that poor boot
when he got flip about the League of Nations!"

  "Well, the trouble with a lot of these fellows is,
they simply don't know what they're talking about. They don't get
down to facts.... What do you think of Ken Escott?"

  "I'll tell you, dad: it strikes me Ken is a nice
lad; no special faults except he smokes too much; but slow, Lord!
Why, if we don't give him a shove the poor dumb-bell never will
propose! And Rone just as bad. Slow."

  "Yes, I guess you're right. They're slow. They
haven't either one of 'em got our pep."

  "That's right. They're slow. I swear, dad, I don't
know how Rone got into our family! I'll bet, if the truth were
known, you were a bad old egg when you were a kid!"

  "Well, I wasn't so slow!"

  "I'll bet you weren't! I'll bet you didn't miss many
tricks!"

  "Well, when I was out with the girls I didn't spend
all the time telling 'em about the strike in the knitting
industry!"

  They roared together, and together lighted
cigars.

  "What are we going to do with 'em?" Babbitt
consulted.

  "Gosh, I don't know. I swear, sometimes I feel like
taking Ken aside and putting him over the jumps and saying to him,
'Young fella me lad, are you going to marry young Rone, or are you
going to talk her to death? Here you are getting on toward thirty,
and you're only making twenty or twenty-five a week. When you going
to develop a sense of responsibility and get a raise? If there's
anything that George F. or I can do to help you, call on us, but
show a little speed, anyway!'"

  "Well, at that, it might not be so bad if you or I
talked to him, except he might not understand. He's one of these
high brows. He can't come down to cases and lay his cards on the
table and talk straight out from the shoulder, like you or I
can."

  "That's right, he's like all these highbrows."

  "That's so, like all of 'em."

  "That's a fact."

  They sighed, and were silent and thoughtful and
happy.

  The conductor came in. He had once called at
Babbitt's office, to ask about houses. "H' are you, Mr. Babbitt! We
going to have you with us to Chicago? This your boy?"

  "Yes, this is my son Ted."

  "Well now, what do you know about that! Here I been
thinking you were a youngster yourself, not a day over forty,
hardly, and you with this great big fellow!"

  "Forty? Why, brother, I'll never see forty-five
again!"

  "Is that a fact! Wouldn't hardly 'a' thought
it!"

  "Yes, sir, it's a bad give-away for the old man when
he has to travel with a young whale like Ted here!"

  "You're right, it is." To Ted: "I suppose you're in
college now.

  Proudly, "No, not till next fall. I'm just kind of
giving the diff'rent colleges the once-over now."

  As the conductor went on his affable way, huge
watch-chain jingling against his blue chest, Babbitt and Ted
gravely considered colleges. They arrived at Chicago late at night;
they lay abed in the morning, rejoicing, "Pretty nice not to have
to get up and get down to breakfast, heh?" They were staying at the
modest Eden Hotel, because Zenith business men always stayed at the
Eden, but they had dinner in the brocade and crystal Versailles
Room of the Regency Hotel. Babbitt ordered Blue Point oysters with
cocktail sauce, a tremendous steak with a tremendous platter of
French fried potatoes, two pots of coffee, apple pie with ice cream
for both of them and, for Ted, an extra piece of mince pie.

  "Hot stuff! Some feed, young fella!" Ted
admired.

  "Huh! You stick around with me, old man, and I'll
show you a good time!"

  They went to a musical comedy and nudged each other
at the matrimonial jokes and the prohibition jokes; they paraded
the lobby, arm in arm, between acts, and in the glee of his first
release from the shame which dissevers fathers and sons Ted
chuckled, "Dad, did you ever hear the one about the three milliners
and the judge?"

  When Ted had returned to Zenith, Babbitt was lonely.
As he was trying to make alliance between Offutt and certain
Milwaukee interests which wanted the race-track plot, most of his
time was taken up in waiting for telephone calls.... Sitting on the
edge of his bed, holding the portable telephone, asking wearily,
"Mr. Sagen not in yet? Didn' he leave any message for me? All
right, I'll hold the wire." Staring at a stain on the wall,
reflecting that it resembled a shoe, and being bored by this
twentieth discovery that it resembled a shoe. Lighting a cigarette;
then, bound to the telephone with no ashtray in reach, wondering
what to do with this burning menace and anxiously trying to toss it
into the tiled bathroom. At last, on the telephone, "No message,
eh? All right, I'll call up again."

  One afternoon he wandered through snow-rutted
streets of which he had never heard, streets of small tenements and
two-family houses and marooned cottages. It came to him that he had
nothing to do, that there was nothing he wanted to do. He was
bleakly lonely in the evening, when he dined by himself at the
Regency Hotel. He sat in the lobby afterward, in a plush chair
bedecked with the Saxe-Coburg arms, lighting a cigar and looking
for some one who would come and play with him and save him from
thinking. In the chair next to him (showing the arms of Lithuania)
was a half-familiar man, a large red-faced man with pop eyes and a
deficient yellow mustache. He seemed kind and insignificant, and as
lonely as Babbitt himself. He wore a tweed suit and a reluctant
orange tie.

  It came to Babbitt with a pyrotechnic crash. The
melancholy stranger was Sir Gerald Doak.

  Instinctively Babbitt rose, bumbling, "How 're you,
Sir Gerald? 'Member we met in Zenith, at Charley McKelvey's?
Babbitt's my name - real estate."

  "Oh! How d' you do." Sir Gerald shook hands
flabbily.

  Embarrassed, standing, wondering how he could
retreat, Babbitt maundered, "Well, I suppose you been having a
great trip since we saw you in Zenith."

  "Quite. British Columbia and California and all over
the place," he said doubtfully, looking at Babbitt lifelessly.

  "How did you find business conditions in British
Columbia? Or I suppose maybe you didn't look into 'em. Scenery and
sport and so on?"

  "Scenery? Oh, capital. But business conditions - You
know, Mr. Babbitt, they're having almost as much unemployment as we
are." Sir Gerald was speaking warmly now.

  "So? Business conditions not so doggone good,
eh?"

  "No, business conditions weren't at all what I'd
hoped to find them."

  "Not good, eh?"

  "No, not - not really good."

  "That's a darn shame. Well - I suppose you're
waiting for somebody to take you out to some big shindig, Sir
Gerald."

  "Shindig? Oh. Shindig. No, to tell you the truth, I
was wondering what the deuce I could do this evening. Don't know a
soul in Tchicahgo. I wonder if you happen to know whether there's a
good theater in this city?"