IT 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.
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 diplomacy, and cheating at poker) had only ten per cent., which
Babbitt and the Traction officials had given to him for "fixing" health
inspectors and fire inspectors and a member of the State Transportation
Commission.
But Babbitt was virtuous. He advocated, though he did not practise, the
prohibition of alcohol; he praised, though he did not obey, the laws against
motor-speeding; he paid his debts; he contributed to the church, the Red
Cross, and the Y. M. C. A.; he followed the custom of his clan and cheated
only as it was sanctified by precedent; and he never descended to
trickery--though, as he explained to Paul Riesling:
"Course I don't mean to say that every ad I write is literally true or that I
always believe everything I say when I give some buyer a good strong
selling-spiel. You see--you see it's like this: In the first place, maybe the
owner of the property exaggerated when he put it into my hands, and it
certainly isn't my place to go proving my principal a liar! And then most
folks are so darn crooked themselves that they expect a fellow to do a little
lying, so if I was fool enough to never whoop the ante I'd get the credit for
lying anyway! In self-defense I got to toot my own horn, like a lawyer
defending a client--his bounden duty, ain't it, to bring out the poor dub's
good points? Why, the Judge himself would bawl out a lawyer that didn't, even
if they both knew the guy was guilty! But even so, I don't pad out the truth
like Cecil Rountree or Thayer or the rest of these realtors. Fact, I think a
fellow that's willing to deliberately up and profit by lying ought to be
shot!"
Babbitt's value to his clients was rarely better shown than this morning, in
the conference at eleven-thirty between himself, Conrad Lyte, and Archibald
Purdy.
V
Conrad Lyte was a real-estate speculator. He was a nervous speculator. Before
he gambled he consulted bankers, lawyers, architects, contracting builders,
and all of their clerks and stenographers who were willing to be cornered and
give him advice. He was a bold entrepreneur, and he desired nothing more than
complete safety in his investments, freedom from attention to details, and the
thirty or forty per cent. profit which, according to all authorities, a
pioneer deserves for his risks and foresight. He was a stubby man with a
cap-like mass of short gray curls and clothes which, no matter how well cut,
seemed shaggy. Below his eyes were semicircular hollows, as though silver
dollars had been pressed against them and had left an imprint.
Particularly and always Lyte consulted Babbitt, and trusted in his slow
cautiousness.
Six months ago Babbitt had learned that one Archibald Purdy, a grocer in the
indecisive residential district known as Linton, was talking of opening a
butcher shop beside his grocery. Looking up the ownership of adjoining parcels
of land, Babbitt found that Purdy owned his present shop but did not own the
one available lot adjoining. He advised Conrad Lyte to purchase this lot, for
eleven thousand dollars, though an appraisal on a basis of rents did not
indicate its value as above nine thousand. The rents, declared Babbitt, were
too low; and by waiting they could make Purdy come to their price. (This was
Vision.) He had to bully Lyte into buying. His first act as agent for Lyte was
to increase the rent of the battered store-building on the lot. The tenant
said a number of rude things, but he paid.
Now, Purdy seemed ready to buy, and his delay was going to cost him ten
thousand extra dollars--the reward paid by the community to Mr. Conrad Lyte
for the virtue of employing a broker who had Vision and who understood Talking
Points, Strategic Values, Key Situations, Underappraisals, and the Psychology
of Salesmanship.
Lyte came to the conference exultantly. He was fond of Babbitt, this morning,
and called him "old hoss." Purdy, the grocer. a long-nosed man and solemn,
seemed to care less for Babbitt and for Vision, but Babbitt met him at the
street door of the office and guided him toward the private room with
affectionate little cries of "This way, Brother Purdy!" He took from the
correspondence-file the entire box of cigars and forced them on his guests.
He pushed their chairs two inches forward and three inches back, which gave an
hospitable note, then leaned back in his desk-chair and looked plump and
jolly. But he spoke to the weakling grocer with firmness.
"Well, Brother Purdy, we been having some pretty tempting offers from butchers
and a slew of other folks for that lot next to your store, but I persuaded
Brother Lyte that we ought to give you a shot at the property first. I said
to Lyte, 'It'd be a rotten shame,' I said, 'if somebody went and opened a
combination grocery and meat market right next door and ruined Purdy's nice
little business.' Especially--" Babbitt leaned forward, and his voice was
harsh, "--it would be hard luck if one of these cash-and-carry chain-stores
got in there and started cutting prices below cost till they got rid of
competition and forced you to the wall!"
Purdy snatched his thin hands from his pockets, pulled up his trousers, thrust
his hands back into his pockets, tilted in the heavy oak chair, and tried to
look amused, as he struggled:
"Yes, they're bad competition. But I guess you don't realize the Pulling
Power that Personality has in a neighborhood business."
The great Babbitt smiled. "That's so. Just as you feel, old man. We thought
we'd give you first chance. All right then--"
"Now look here!" Purdy wailed. "I know f'r a fact that a piece of property
'bout same size, right near, sold for less 'n eighty-five hundred, 'twa'n't
two years ago, and here you fellows are asking me twenty-four thousand
dollars! Why, I'd have to mortgage--I wouldn't mind so much paying twelve
thousand but--Why good God, Mr. Babbitt, you're asking more 'n twice its
value! And threatening to ruin me if I don't take it!"
"Purdy, I don't like your way of talking! I don't like it one little bit!
Supposing Lyte and I were stinking enough to want to ruin any fellow human,
don't you suppose we know it's to our own selfish interest to have everybody
in Zenith prosperous? But all this is beside the point. Tell you what we'll
do: We'll come down to twenty-three thousand-five thousand down and the rest
on mortgage--and if you want to wreck the old shack and rebuild, I guess I can
get Lyte here to loosen up for a building-mortgage on good liberal terms.
Heavens, man, we'd be glad to oblige you! We don't like these foreign grocery
trusts any better 'n you do! But it isn't reasonable to expect us to sacrifice
eleven thousand or more just for neighborliness, IS it! How about it, Lyte?
You willing to come down?"
By warmly taking Purdy's part, Babbitt persuaded the benevolent Mr. Lyte to
reduce his price to twenty-one thousand dollars. At the right moment Babbitt
snatched from a drawer the agreement he had had Miss McGoun type out a week
ago and thrust it into Purdy's hands. He genially shook his fountain pen to
make certain that it was flowing, handed it to Purdy, and approvingly watched
him sign.
The work of the world was being done. Lyte had made something over nine
thousand dollars, Babbitt had made a four-hundred-and-fifty dollar commission,
Purdy had, by the sensitive mechanism of modern finance, been provided with a
business-building, and soon the happy inhabitants of Linton would have meat
lavished upon them at prices only a little higher than those down-town.
It had been a manly battle, but after it Babbitt drooped. This was the only
really amusing contest he had been planning. There was nothing ahead save
details of leases, appraisals, mortgages.
He muttered, "Makes me sick to think of Lyte carrying off most of the profit
when I did all the work, the old skinflint! And--What else have I got to do
to-day? . . Like to take a good long vacation. Motor trip. Something." He
sprang up, rekindled by the thought of lunching with Paul Riesling
Read next: CHAPTER V
Read previous: CHAPTER III
Table of content of Babbitt
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your reviewYour review will be placed after the table of content of this book
