Babbitt
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 fireproofing buildings and the relation of
insurance-rates to fireproofing, 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