Babbit (6 page)

  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.

  
I
T 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.