Babbit (5 page)

  "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: