CHAPTER IIII
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. |