 CHAPTER 1 THE TOWERS OF ZEENETH ASPIRED ABOVE THE MORNING MIST. Auster towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. They were neither citadels nor churches, but frankly and beautifully office buildings. The mist took pity on the fretted structures of the earlier generations. The post office, with its shingle tortured, mansard, the red brick miniserts of hulking old houses, factories with stingy and sooted windows, wooden tenements colored like mud. The city was full of such grotesqueries, but the clean towers were thrusting them from the business center and, on the further hills, were shining new houses, homes they seen for laughter and tranquility. Over a concrete bridge fled a limousine of long sleek hood and noiseless engine. These people and evening clothes were returning from an all-night rehearsal of a little theater play, an artistic adventure considerably illuminated by champagne. Below the bridge curved a railroad, a maze of green and crimson lights. The New York Flyer boomed past and twenty lines of polished steel leaped into the glare. In one of the skyscrapers the wires of the Associated Press were closing down. The telegraph operators were really raised her celluloid eyeshades after a night of talking with Paris and Peking. Through the building crawled the scrub women, yawning, their old shoes slapping. The dawn mist spun away. Cues of men with lunchboxes clumped toward the immensity of new factories. Sheets of glass and hollow tile glittering shops where five thousand men worked beneath one roof. Pouring out the honest wares that would be sold up the Euphrates and across the Velt. The whistles rolled out in greeting, a chorus, cheerful as the April dawn. The song of labor in a city built, it seemed, for giants. Two. There was nothing of the giant in the aspect of the man who was beginning to awaken on the sleeping porch of a Dutch colonial house in the residential district of Zenith, known as Floral Heights. His name was George F. Babbitt. He was forty-six years old now, in April 1920, and he made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry. But he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay. His large head was pink, his brown hair thin and dry. His face was babyish and slumbered despite his wrinkles and the red spectacle dense on the slopes of his nose. He was not fat, but he was exceedingly well fed. His cheeks were pads in the unruffened hand which, lay hopeless on the khaki-colored blanket, was slightly puffy. He seemed prosperous, extremely married and unromantic. And altogether unromantic appeared this sleeping porch, which looked on one sizable elm to respectable grass-plots a cement driveway in a corrugated iron garage. Yet Babbitt was again dreaming of the fairy-child, a dream more romantic than scarlet pagodas by a silver sea. For years the fairy-child had come to him. Were others saw but Georgie Babbitt? She discerned gallant youth. She waited for him in the darkness beyond mysterious groves. When at last he could slip away from the crowded house he darted to her. His wife, his clamoring friends, sought to follow but he escaped. The girl fleek beside him and they crouched together on a shadowy hillside. She was so slim, so white, so eager. She cried that he was gay and valiant, that she would wait for him, that they would sail, rumble and bang in a milk-truck. Babbitt moaned, turned over, struggled back toward his dream. He could see only her face now beyond misty waters. Furnace man slammed the basement door. Dog barked in the next yard. As Babbitt sank blissfully into a dim warm tide, the paper-carrier went by whistling and the rolled-up edificate thumped the front door. Babbitt roused, his stomach constricted with alarm. As he relaxed he was pierced by the familiar and irritating rattle of someone cranking a Ford. Himself a pious motorist. Babbitt cranked with the unseen driver. With him waited through taut hours for the roar of the starting engine. With him agonized as the roar ceased, then again began. The infernal patient, that a round flat sound, a shivering cold morning sound, a sound infuriating and inscapable. Not till the rising voice of the motor told him that the Ford was moving, was he released from the panting tension. He glanced once at his favorite tree, elm-twigs against the gold patina of sky, and fumbled for sleep as a drug. He, who had been a boy very credulous of life, was no longer greatly interested in the possible and improbable adventures of each new day. He escaped from reality till the alarm-clock rang at seven twenty. 3. It was the best of nationally advertised and quantitatively produced alarm clocks, with all modern attachments, including cathedral chime, intermittent alarm, and phosphorescent dial. Babbitt was proud of being awakened by such a rich device. Socially it was almost as credible as buying expensive cord tires. He subtly admitted now that there was no more escape. But he lay into test of the grind of the real estate business, and disliked his family and disliked himself for disliking them. Evening before, he had played poker at Virgil Gunch's till midnight, and after such holidays he was irritable before breakfast. It may have been the tremendous home-brewed beer of the prohibition era, and the cigars to which that beer enticed him. May have been resentment of return from this fine, bold man-world to a restricted region of wives and stenographers, and of suggestions not to smoke so much. From the bedroom beside the sleeping porch, his wife's detestably cheerful, time to get up, Georgie Boy, and the itchy sound, the brisk and scratchy sound of combing hairs out of a stiff brush. He grunted. He dragged his thick legs, and faded baby blue pajamas from under the khaki blanket. He sat on the edge of the cot, running his fingers through his wild hair, while his plump feet mechanically felt for his slippers. He looked regretfully at the blanket, forever a suggestion to him of freedom and heroism. He'd bought it for a camping trip which had never come off. Symbolized, gorgeous loafing, gorgeous cursing, barrel flannel shirts, he creaked to his feet groaning at the waves of pain which passed behind his eyeballs. Though he waited for their scorching recurrence, he looked blurrily out at the yard. It delighted him, as always. It was the neat yard of a successful businessman of Zenith. That is, it was perfection. It made him also perfect. He regarded the corrugated iron garage. For the three hundred and sixty-fifth time in a year, he reflected, no class to that tin shack. Have to build me a frame-garage. But by golly, it's the only thing on the place that isn't up to date. While he stared, he thought of a community garage for his acreage development, Glen Oriole. He stopped, puffing and jiggling. His arms were a kimbo. His petulant, sleep-swollen face was set in harder lines. He suddenly seemed capable and official. A man to contrive, to direct, to get things done. On the vigor of his idea, he was carried down the hard, clean, unused-looking hall into the bathroom. Though the house was not large, it had, like all houses on floral heights, an altogether royal bathroom of porcelain and glazed tile and metal sleek as silver. The towel rack was a rod of clear glass set in nickel. The tub was longing up for a prussian guard, and above the bowl was a sensational exhibit of toothbrush holder. Shaving brush holder, soap dish, sponge dish, and medicine cabinet. So glittering and so ingenious that they resembled an electrical instrument board. But the babbit whose god was modern appliances was not pleased. The air of the bathroom was thick with the smell of a heathen toothpaste. Verona had been at it again, instead of sticking to libidol, like I've repeatedly asked her. She's gone and gotten some confound stinking stuff that makes you sick. The bath mat was wrinkled and the floor mat was wet. His daughter, Verona, eccentrically took bath in the morning, now on then. He slipped on the mat and slid against the tub, said, damn. Furiously he snapped up his tube of shaving cream. Furiously he lathered, with a belligerent slapping of the uncuttyous brush. Furiously he raked his plump cheeks with a safety razor. It pulled. The blade was dull. He said, damn, oh, damn it! He hunted through the medicine cabinet for a packet of new razor blades, reflecting as invariably, be cheaper to buy one of those dinguses and drop your own blades. And when he discovered the packet behind the round box of bicarbonate of soda, he thought ill of his wife for putting it there in very well of himself, for not saying damn. But he did say it, immediately afterward, when with wet and soap-slippery fingers he tried to remove the horrible little envelope and crisp-clinging oiled paper from the new blade. Then there was the problem oft pondered, never solved, of what to do with the old blade. Which might imperil the fingers of his young. As usual he tossed it on top of the medicine cabinet, with a mental note that some day he must remove the fifty or sixty other blades that were also temporarily piled up there. He finished his shaving in a growling testiness, increased by a spinning headache and by the emptiness in his stomach. When he was done his round face smooth and steamy in his eye stinging from soapy water, he reached for a towel. The family towels were wet, wet and clammy and vile, all of them wet. He found as he blindly snatched them his own face towel, his wife, Verona's, Ted's, Tinka's, and the lone bath towel with a huge welt of initial. Then George F. Babbitt did a dismaying thing. He wiped his face on the guest-towel. It was a pansy and broidered trifle, which always hung there to indicate that the Babbitts were in the best of Floral Heights Society. No one had ever used it. No guest had even dared to. Guest secretly took a corner of the nearest regular towel. He was raging. By golly, here they go and use up all the towels to every dunk on one of them, and they use them and get them while wet and sopping and never put out a dry one for me, of course. I'm the goat. And then I want one, and I'm the only person in a dog-gone house that's got the slightest dog-gone bit of consideration for other people and thoughtfulness and consider there may be others that may want to use the dog-gone bathroom after me and consider— He was pitching the chill of bottom nations into the bathtub, pleased by the vindictiveness of the desolate, flapping sound, and in the midst his wife serially trotted in, observed serially. Why, Georgie, dear, what are you doing? Are you going to wash out the towels? Why, you'd need to wash out the towels. Oh, Georgie! Didn't go and use the guest-towel, did you? It is not recorded that he was able to answer. For the first time in weeks he was sufficiently roused by his wife to look at her. Four. Myra Babbitt. Mrs. George F. Babbitt. Was definitely mature. She had creases from the corner of her mouth to the bottom of her chin and her plump neck bagged. But the thing that marked her as having passed a line was that she no longer had reticences before her husband, and no longer worried about not having reticences. She was in a petticoat now, and corsets which bulged and unaware of being seen in bulgy corsets, she had become so dully habituated to married life that in her full matroness she was as sexless as an anemic nun. She was a good woman, kind woman, diligent woman. But no one, say perhaps Tinka, her ten-year-old, was at all interested in her, or entirely aware that she was alive. After a rather thorough discussion of all the domestic and social aspects of towels, she apologized to Babbitt for his having an alcoholic headache, and he recovered enough to endure the search for a BVD undershirt, which had he pointed out malevolently, been concealed among his clean pajamas. He was fairly amiable in the conference on his brown suit. What do you think, Maya? He pawed at the clothes hunched on a chair in the bedroom, while she moved about mysteriously adjusting and patting her petticoat, and to his jaundice eye, never seeming to get on with her dressing. How about it? Shall wear the brown suit another day? Well, it looks awfully nice on you. I know, but gosh, it needs pressing. That's all, perhaps it does. It certainly could stand being pressed, all right. Yes, perhaps it wouldn't hurt it to be pressed. But gee, the coat doesn't need pressing, no sense of having the whole darn suit pressed, when the coat doesn't need it. That's all. But the pants certainly need it all right. Look at him. Look at those wrinkles. Pants certainly do need pressing. That's all. Oh, Georgie, why couldn't you wear the brown coat with the blue trousers? We were wondering what we'd do with them. Good Lord, did you ever, in all my life, know me to wear the coat of one of suit and the pants of another? What do you think I am, a busted bookkeeper? Well, why don't you put on the dark gray suit today and stop in at the tailor and leave the brown trousers? Well, you certainly need nowhere the devil's that gray suit. Oh, yes, here we are. He was able to get through the other crisis of dressing with comparative resoluteness and calm. His first adornment was the sleeveless dimity BVD undershirt, in which he resembled a small boy humorously wearing a cheesecloth tabard at a civic pageant. He never put on BVDs without thanking the God of Progress, that he didn't wear tight, long, old-fashioned undergarments like his father-long partner Henry Thompson. His second embellishment was combing and slicking back his hair. It gave him a tremendous forehead, arching up two inches beyond the former hairline, but most wonder-working of all was the dawning of his spectacles. There is character in spectacles, the pretentious tortoise shell, the meek pincenese of the schoolteacher, the twisted silver-framed glasses of the old villager. Babbit spectacles had huge circular, frameless lenses of the very best glass. The earpieces were thin bars of gold. In them he was the modern businessman, one who gave orders to clerks and drove a car and played occasional golf, and was scholarly in regard to salesmanship. His head suddenly appeared not babyish, but weighty, and you noted his heavy blunt nose, his straight mouth and thick long upper lip, his chin over fleshy but strong, with respect you beheld him, put on the rest of his own uniform as a solid citizen. The gray suit was well cut, well made, and completely undistinguished. It was a standard suit, white piping on the V of the vest added a flavor of law and learning. His shoes were black laced boots, good boots, honest boots, standard boots, extraordinarily uninteresting boots. The only frivolity was his purple knitted scarf, with considerable comment on the matter to Mrs. Babbit, who acrobatically fastening the back of her blouse to her skirt with a safety pin, did not hear a word he said. He chose between the purple scarf and a tapestry effect with stringless brown harps among brown palms, and into it he thrust a snake head pin with oval eyes. A sensational event was changing from the brown suit to the gray the contents of his pockets. He was earnest about these objects. They were of internal importance, like baseball or the Republican Party. They included a fountain pen and a silver pencil, always lacking a supply of new leads, which belonged in the right hand upper vest pocket. Without them he would have felt naked. On his watch chain were a gold pen knife, silver cigar cutter, seven keys, the use of two of which he had forgotten, and incidentally a good watch. Depending from the chain was a large yellowish elk's tooth. Proclamation of his membership in the benevolent and protective order of elk's. Most significant of all was his loose leaf pocket notebook, that modern and efficient notebook, which contained the addresses of people whom he had forgotten. Prudent memorabilia of postal money orders, which had reached their destinations months ago, stamps which had lost their musilage, clippings of verses by T. Chamberly-Frank, and of newspaper editorials from which Babbit got his opinions and his polysyllables, notes to be sure and do things which he did not intend to do, and one curious inscription, D-S-S-D-M-Y-P-D-F. But he had no cigarette case. No one had ever happened to give him one, so he hadn't a habit. And people who carried cigarette cases, he considered effeminate. Last, he stuck in his lapel the boosters club button, with the consciousness of great heart the button displayed two words. Boosters, pep. It made Babbit feel loyal and important. It associated him with good fellows, with men who were nice and human, and important in business circles. It was his VC, his Legion of Honor ribbon, his Phi Beta Kappa Key. With the subtleties of dressing ran other complex worries. We were kind of punk this morning, he said. I think I had too much dinner last evening. You oughtn't deserve those heavy banana fritters. But you ask me to have some. I don't know, but I tell you, when a fellow gets past 40, he has to look after his digestion. There's a lot of fellows that don't take proper care of themselves. I tell you, at 40, a man's a fool or his doctor, I mean his own doctor. Folks don't give enough attention to this matter of dieting. I think, of course, man ought to have a good meal after the day's work. But it would be a good thing for both of us if we took lighter lunches. But Georgie, you're at home, I always do have a light lunch. Mean to imply I make a hog of myself eating downtown? Yeah, sure. You'd have a swell time if you had to eat the truck that new steward hands to us at the Atlantic Club. But I certainly do feel out of sorts this morning. Funny, I got a pain down here on the left side. No, that wouldn't be appendicitis, would it? Last night, driving over to Verge Gunches, I felt a pain in my stomach, too. Right here, there's kind of a sharp shooting pain. Eh, where'd that dime go to? Why don't you serve more prunes at breakfast? Of course, I eat an apple every evening. The apple a day keeps doctor away. Still, you ought to have more prunes and not all those fancy doodads. Last time I had prunes you didn't eat them. Well, I didn't feel like eating on a spoiled matter of fact. I think I did eat some of them, anyway. I'll tell you, it's mighty important to out. I was saying to Verge Gunch, just last evening, most people don't take sufficient care of their digest. Do we have the Gunches sold for dinner next week? Why, sure you bet. Now, see here, George, I want you to put on your nice dinner-jacket that evening. Rats, rest of them won't want to dress. Of course they will. You remember when you did dress for the Littlefield supper party, and all the rest did? And how embarrassed you were! Embarrassed? Hell, I wasn't embarrassed. Everybody knows I can put on as expensive a tux as anybody else. And I should worry if I don't happen to have it on sometimes. All a darn nuisance, anyway. All right for a woman, that stays around the house all the time. But when a fellow's worked like the Dickens all day, he doesn't want to go out and hustle his head off, getting into the soup and fish for a lot of folks that he's seen in just regular ordinary clothes that same day. You know you enjoy being in seen in one. The other evening you admitted you were glad I'd insisted on your dressing. You said you felt a lot better for it. And oh, Georgie, I do wish you wouldn't say tux. It's dinner-jacket. Rats, what's the odds? Well, it's what all the nice folks say. Suppose Lucille McKevley heard you calling it a tux. Well, that's all right now. Lucille McKevley can't pull anything on me. Her folks are common as mud, even if her husband and her dad are millionaires. I suppose you're trying to rub in your exalted social position. Well, let me tell you that your reverend paternal ancestor, Henry T., doesn't even call it a tux. He calls it a bobtail jacket for a ring-tail monkey. And you couldn't get him into one unless you chlor-formed him. Not to be horrid, George. Well, I don't want to be horrid, but Lord, you're getting as fussy as Verona. Ever since she got out of college, she's been too rambunctious to live with. Doesn't know what she wants. Well, I know what she wants. All she wants is to marry a millionaire and live in Europe, and hold some preacher's hand and simultaneously at the same time stay right here in Zenith. And be some blooming kind of socialist agitator, or boss charity work, or some damn thing. Lord, and Ted is just as bad. He wants to go to college, and he doesn't want to go to college. Only one of the three that knows her own mind is Tinka. Simply can't understand, however, came to have a pair of shelly-shelling children like Ronan Ted. I may not be any Rockefeller or James J. Shakespeare, but I certainly do know my own mind, and I do keep right on plugging along in the office. And do you know the latest? Far as I can figure out, Ted's new B is he'd like to be a movie actor. And here I've told him a hundred times if he'll go to college and law school and make good. I'll set him up in business, and Verona just exactly as bad. Don't know what she wants. Well, well, come on. Aren't you ready yet? The girl rang the bell three minutes ago. Five. Before he followed his wife, Babbit stood at the westernmost window of the room. This residential settlement, Floral Heights, was on a rise. And though the center of the city was three miles away, Zenith had between three and four hundred thousand inhabitants now. He could see the top of the second national tower, an Indiana limestone building of thirty-five stories. Its shining walls rose against April's sky to a simple cornice, like a streak of white fire. Integrity was in the tower in decision. It bore strength lightly as a tall soldier. As Babbit stared, the nervousness was soothed from his face, his slack chin lifted in reverence. All he articulated was, that's one lovely sight. But he was inspired by the rhythm of the city. His love of it renewed. He beheld the tower as a temple-spire of the religion of business. A faith-passionate, exalted, surpassing common men. And as he clumped down to breakfast, he whistled the ballad, Oh, by G. Oh, by Garsh, by Gingo. As though it were a hymn, melancholy and noble. End of Chapter 1. Relieved of Babbit's bumbling and the soft grunts with which his wife expressed the sympathy she was too experienced to feel and much too experienced not to show, their bedroom settled instantly into impersonality. It gave on the sleeping porch. It served both of them as dressing-room, and on the coldest nights, Babbit luxuriously gave up the duty of being manly, and retreated to the bed inside to curl his toes in the warmth and laugh at the January gale. The room displayed a modest and pleasant color scheme, after one of the best standard designs of the decorator who did the interiors, for most of the speculative builder's houses in Zenith. The walls were gray, the woodwork white, the rug a serene blue, and very much like mahogany was the furniture. The bureau, with its great clear mirror, misses Babbit's dressing table with toilet articles of almost solid silver, the plain-twin beds, between them a table holding a standard electric bedside lamp, a glass for water and a standard bedside book with colored illustrations. What particular book it was cannot be ascertained, since no one had ever opened it. The mattresses were firm but not hard, triumphant modern mattresses, which had cost a great deal of money. The hot water radiator was of exactly the proper scientific surface for the cubic contents of the room. The windows were large and easily opened, with the best catches and cords, and Holland Roller shades guaranteed not to crack. It was a masterpiece among bedrooms, right out of cheerful modern houses for medium incomes. Only it had nothing to do with Babbit's, nor with anyone else. If people had ever lived and loved air, red thrillers at midnight and lain in beautiful indolence on a Sunday morning, there were no signs of it. It had the air of being a very good room in a very good hotel. One expected the chambermaid to come in and make it ready for people. It would stay but one night. Go without looking back, and never think of it again. Every second house in Floral Heights had a bedroom precisely like this. The Babbit's house was five years old. It was all as competent and glossy as this bedroom. It had the best of taste, the best of inexpensive rugs, a simple and laudable architecture, and the latest conveniences. Throughout electricity took the place of candles and slightly hearth fires. Along the bedroom baseboard were three plugs for electric lamps concealed by little brass doors. In the halls were plugs for the vacuum cleaner, and a living room plugs for the piano lamp for the electric fan. The trimmed dining room was its admirable oak buffet, its leaded glass covered, its cream plaster walls, its modest scene of a salmon, expiring upon a pile of oysters, had plugs which supplied the electric percolator and the electric toaster. In fact, there was but one thing wrong with the Babbit house. It was not a home. Two. Often of a morning Babbit came bouncing and jesting into breakfast, but things were mysteriously awry to-day. As he pontifically treaded the upper hall, he looked into Verona's bedroom and protested. What's the use of giving a family a high-class house when they don't appreciate it, tend to do business and get down to brass tacks? He marched upon them. Verona, a dumpy brown-haired girl of twenty-two, just out of Brian Meyer, given those solicitudes about duty and sex and God, and the unconquerable bagginess of the gray sports suit she was now wearing. Ted. Theodore Roosevelt, Babbit. A decorative boy of seventeen. Tinker. Catherine. Still a baby at ten. With radiant red hair and a thin skin which hinted of too much candy and too many ice cream sodas, Babbit did not show his vague irritation as he tramped in. He really disliked being a family tyrant, and his nagging was as meaningless as it was frequent. He shouted at Tinker. Well, can he doodle? It was the only pet name in his vocabulary except for the deer and hun, with which he recognized his wife, and he flung at it Tinker every morning. He gulped a cup of coffee in the hope of pacifying his stomach and his soul. His stomach ceased to feel as though it did not belong to him. But Verona began to be conscientious and annoying, and abruptly there returned to Babbit the doubts regarding life and families and business, which had clawed at him when his dream life, and the slim fairy girl, had fled. Verona had for six months been filing clerk at the Grunzburg Leather Company offices, with a prospect of becoming secretary to Mr. Grunzburg, and thus, as Babbit defined it, getting some good out of your expensive college education till you're ready to marry and settle down. But now, said Verona, Father, I was talking to a classmate of mine that's working for the Associated Charities. Oh, Dad, there's the sweet little babies that come to the milk station there, and feel as though I ought to be doing something worthwhile like that. I mean, worthwhile. If you get to be Grunzburg's secretary, and maybe you would if you kept up your shorthand and then go sneaking off to concert and talk fest every evening, I guess you'll find thirty-five or forty bones a week worthwhile. I know, but I want to contribute. I wish I were working in a settlement house. I wonder if I could get one of the department stores to let me put in a welfare department, and a nice restroom, and chinsias, and wicker chairs, and so on, and so forth, where I could. Now, you look here. The first thing you've got to understand is that all this uplift and flip-flop and settlement work and recreation is nothing in God's world but the entering wedge for socialism. Sooner a man learns he isn't going to be coddled, and he needn't expect a lot of free grub and all these free classes and flip-flop and do-dads for the kids unless he earns them, while the sooner he'll get up on the job and produce, produce, produce. That's what the country needs. And not all this fancy stuff that just enfeebles the willpower of the working man, and gives his kids a lot of notions above their class. And you? If you'd tend to business instead of fooling and fussing at all the time, when I was a young man I made up my mind what I wanted to do, and stuck to it through thick and thin, and that's why I'm where I am today. Myra, what do you let this girl chop the toast up into these dinky little chunks for? Can't get your fist onto him. Half cold anyway. Ted Babbitt, Jr. in the Great Eastlake High School, had been making hiccup-like sounds of interruption. People are now, hey, Ron, you going to? Ron, world. Ted, will you kindly not interrupt us when we're talking about serious matters? Ah, punk, said Tech judiciously. Ever since somebody slipped up and led you out of college, ammonia, you've been pulling these nut conversations about what-nots and so on and so forth. Are you going to? I want to use the car tonight. Babbitt, Snort, I knew. May want it myself. Ron, to protest it. What you do, Mr. Smarty? I'm going to take it myself. Tinka, wailed. Oh, papa, you said maybe you'd drive us down to Rosdale. Mrs. Babbitt, careful, Tinka. Your sleeve is in the butter. They glared in Verona Earl. Ted, you're a perfect pig about the car. Course you're not. Not at all. Ted could be maddingly bland. You just want to grab it off right after dinner and leave it in front of some skirt's house all evening while you sit in gas-about literature and the high-brows. You're going to marry, if they only propose. Well, dad oughtn't ever let you have it. You and those beastly Joan boys drive like maniacs. The idea of you taking that turn on the Chippewa place at forty miles an hour. Ah, what do you get all that stuff? You're so darn scared of the car that you drive uphill with emergency brake on. I do not. And you, always talking about how much you know about the motors, and you know Slitofill told me you said the battery fed the generator. You, oh, why am I a good woman? You don't know a generator from a differential. Not unreasonably was Ted Lofty with her. He was a natural mechanic, a maker and tinkerer of machines. He'd lift thin blueprints for the blueprints came. Little do now, babbit flung in mechanically, as he lighted the gloriously satisfying first cigar of the day and tasted the exhilarating drug of the Advocate Times headlines. Ted negotiated. Gee, honest Joan, I don't want to take that old boat, but I promise a couple of girls here in my class I'd drive them down to the rehearsal of the school chorus, and gee, I don't want to, but a gentleman's got to keep his social engagements. Well, up on my word, you and your social engagements in high school. Oh, ain't we select since we went to the Hen College? Let me tell you, there isn't a private school in the state that's got to swell up a bunch of guys we got in Gamma Di Gamma this year. There's two fellas that your dads are millionaires. Say, gee, I ought to have a car of my own, like lots of the fellas. Babbit almost rose. A car of your own. Don't you want a yacht, and a house, and a lot? That pretty nearly takes the cake. Boy that can't pass on his Latin examinations like any other boy ought to, and he expects me to give him a motor car. And I suppose a chauffeur, an aeroplane maybe, has a reward for the hard work he puts in going to the movies with Eunice Littlefield. Well, when you see me giving you, somewhat later after diplomacy's, Ted persuaded Verona to admit that she was merely going to the armory the evening to see the dog and cat show. She was then, Ted planned, to park the car in front of the candy store across from the armory, and he would pick it up. There were masterly arrangements regarding leaving the key and making the gasoline tank filled. And passionately, devotees of the great God-motor, they hymen to patch on the spare inner tube and the lost jack handle. Their truce dissolving, Ted observed that her friends were a scream of a bunch of stuck-up, gabby fore-flushers. His friends, she indicated, were disgusting imitation sports and horrid little shrieking ignorant girls further. It's disgusting of you to smoke cigarettes and so on and so forth. And those clothes you've got on this morning? They're too utterly ridiculous, honestly, simply disgusting. Ted balanced over to the low beveled mirror on the buffet regarding his charms and smirk. His suit, the latest thing in old Eli-togs, was skin tight with skimpy trousers to the tops of his gleaming tan boots, a chorus man waistline, pattern of agitated check, and across the back a belt which belted nothing. His scarf was an enormous black silk wad. His flaxen hair was ice smooth, pasted it down without partying. When he went to school he would add a cap with a long visor, like a shovel-blade. Proudest of all was he of his waistcoat, save for beg for, plotted for, a real fancy vest of fawn with polka dots, of a decayed red. The points astoundingly long, on the lower edge, but he wore a high school button, a class button, and a fraternity pin. And none of it mattered. He was supple and swift and fleshed his eyes, which he believed to be cynical. Were candidly eager, but he was not over-gentle. He waved his hand at poor dumpy Verona and drawled. Yes, I guess you're pretty ridiculous and disgusting us. And I rather guess our new necktie is some smear. Babet Bart, it is. And while you're admiring yourself, let me tell you, it might add to your manly beauty if you wiped some of that egg off your mouth. Verona giggled momentarily Victor in the greatest of great wars. Which is the family war. Ted looked at her hopelessly, and shrieked at Tinka, for love of Pete, quit pouring the whole sugar bowl on your cornflakes. When Verona and Ted were gone, and Tinka upstairs, Babet grown to his wife. Nice family, I must say. I don't pretend to be a ball-am, and maybe I'm a little cross-grained at breakfast sometimes. But the way they go on jab, jab, jabbering, I simply can't stand it. I swear, I feel like going off someplace where I can get a little peace. I do think after a man spend his lifetime trying to give his kids a chance at a decent education, it's pretty discouraging to hear them all the time scrapping like a bunch of hyenas of never, and never. Curious, here in the paper it says, never silent for one more. See the morning paper yet? No, dear. In twenty-three years of married life, Mrs. Babet had seen the paper before her husband just sixty-seven times. Lots of news. Terrible, but tower-nado in the south. Hard luck, all right. But this, say, this is quirking. Beginning of the end for those fellows. New York Assembly has passed some bills that ought to completely outlaw the socialists. And there's an elevator-runner strike in New York, and a lot of college boys are taking their places. That's a stop. And mass meeting in Birmingham's demanded that this Mick Agitator, this fellow de Valera, be deported dead right by Gully. All those agitators. Paid with German gold anyway. And we got no business interfering with the Irish or any other foreign government. Keep our hands strictly off. And there's another well authenticated rumor from Russia that Lenin is dead. That's fine. Beyond me, why we don't just step in there and kick those Bolshevik cusses out? That so, added Mrs. Babbitt. And it says here, a fellow is inaugurated mayor and overalls, a preacher too. What do you think of that? Oh, well. He searched for an attitude but neither as a Republican, a Presbyterian, and an elk, nor a real estate broker did he have any doctrine about preacher mayor laid down for him. So he grunted and went on. She looked sympathetic and did not hear a word. Later she would read the headlines, the society columns, and the department store advertisements. What do you know about this? Charlie McKinverley. Still doing as society's dead as heavy as ever. Here's what that gushy woman reporter says about last night. Never is society with the big, big-ass, more flattered than when they are bitten to partake of good cheer at the distinguished and hospitable residents of Mr. and Mrs. Charles L. McKinverley, as they were last night. Sent in its spacious lawns and landscaping, one of the notable sights crowning Royal Ridge, but merry and home-like, despite its mighty stone walls and its fast rooms, famed for their decoration, their home was thrown open last night for a dance in honor of Mr. McKinverley's notable guest, Miss J. Sneeth of Washington. The wide hall is so generous in its proportions that it made a perfect ballroom, its hardwood floor reflecting the charming pageant above its poly surface. Even the delights of dancing paled before the alluring opportunities of tater-tase and invited the soul to loaf in the long library before the baronial fireplace or in the drawing room with its deep comfy armchairs. Its shaded lamps just made for a sly whisper of pretty nothing's ado or even in the billiard room where one could take a cue and show a prowess at still another game that sponsored by Cupid and Tropic Score. There was more, a great deal more, in the best urban journalistic style of Miss Ilona Pearl Bates, the popular society editor of The Advocate Times, but Babbit could not abide it. He grunted. He wrinkled a newspaper. He protested. Can you beat it? I'm willing to hand a lot of credit to Charlie McKinverley. When we were in college together, he was just as hard up as any of us, and he made a million good bucks out of the contracting and hasn't been any dishonest or bought any more city council than was necessary. And that's a good house of his. Though it ain't any mighty stone walls, and it ain't worth the ninety thousand to cost him. But when it comes to talking as though Charlie McKinverley and all that booze hoisting set of his or any bloomin' bunch of a Vanderbilt, why, it makes me tired. Temmily from Mrs. Babbit. I would like to see the inside of their house, though. It must be lovely. I've never been inside. I have, lots of couple of times, to see chas about business deals in the evening. It's not so much. I wouldn't want to go there for dinner with that gang of high binders. I'll bet I'll make a whole lot more money than some of those tin horns that spend all they got on dress suits and haven't got a decent suit of underwear to their name. Hey, what do you think of this? Mrs. Babbit was strangely unmoved by the tidings from the real estate and building column of the Advocate Times. Agsta Bula Street. 496 J. K. Dawson to Thomas Mullany, April 17, 157 by 112.2. Mortgage 4000. Nom. And this morning Babbit was too disquieted to entertain her with items from Mechanics Lean's mortgages recorded and contracts awarded. He rose. As he looked at her, his eyebrows seemed shaggier than usual suddenly. Yep, maybe. Some kind of shame to not keep in touch with folks like the McKevillys. We might try inviting them to dinner some evening on thunder. Let's not waste our time thinking about them. Our little bunch has a lot livelier times than those plutes. Just compare a real hoon human like you with those neurotic birds like Lucille McKevilly. All highbrow talk and dressed up like a plush horse. You're a great old girl, hon. He covered his betrayal of softness with the complaining, hey, don't let Tinker go and eat any more of those poison nut-fudge. For heaven's sake, try to keep her from ruining her digestion. I tell you, most folks don't appreciate how important it is to have good digestion and regular habits. Be back about usual time, I guess. He kissed her. He didn't quite kiss her. He laid unmoving lips against her unflushing cheek. He hurried out to the garage muttering, Lord, what a family. Now Myra's going to get pathetic on me because we don't train with a millionaire outfit. Oh, Lord, sometimes I'd like to quit the whole game. And the office worry and detail just as bad. And I act cranky and I don't mean to, but I get so darn tired. CHAPTER III To George F. Babbitt, as to most prosperous citizens of the Zenith, his motor-car was poetry and tragedy, love and heroism. The office was his pirate ship. But the car, his perilous excursion to shore. Among the tremendous crises of each day, none was more dramatic than starting the engine. It was slow on cold mornings. There was the long, anxious whir of the starter, and sometimes he had to drip ether into the cocks of the cylinders, which was so very interesting that at lunch he would chronicle it drop by drop and orally calculate how much each drop had cost him. This morning he was darkly prepared to find something wrong, and he felt belittled when the mixture exploded sweet and strong. And the car didn't even brush the door jam, gouged and splintery with many bruisings by fenders, as he backed out of the garage. He was confused. He shouted, Mornin' to Sam Doppelbrow, with more cordiality than he had intended. Babbitt's green and white Dutch colonial house was one of three on that block of Chatham Road. To the left of it was the residence of Mr. Samuel Doppeloo, secretary of an excellent firm of bathroom fixture jobbers. His was a comfortable house with no architectural manners whatever. A large wooden box with a squat tower, a broad porch and glossy paint yellow as a yoke. Babbitt disapproved of Mr. and Mrs. Doppeloo as Bohemian. From their house came midnight music and obscene laughter. There were neighborhood rumors of bootleg whiskey and fast motor rides. They furnished Babbitt with many happy evenings of discussion during which he announced firmly, I'm not straight-laced and I don't mind seeing a fellow throw a drink once in a while. But when it comes to deliberately trying to get away with a lot of hell-raising all the while like the Doppel rules do, it's too rich for my blood. On the other side of Babbitt lived Howard Littlefield, P.H.D. In a strictly modern house, whereof the lower part was dark and red tapestry brick, with a leaded aureal, the upper part of pale stucco, like spattered clay, and the roof red-tiled. Littlefield was the great scholar of the neighborhood, the authority on everything in the world except babies cooking and motors. He was a bachelor of arts of blodgic cottage and a doctor of philosophy and economics of Yale. He was the employment manager and publicity counsel of the Zenith Street Traction Company. He could on ten hours' notice appear before the Board of Aldermen or the State Legislator, and prove absolutely with figures all in rows and with precedents from Poland and New Zealand, that the streetcar company loved the public and yearned over its employees, that all its stock was owned by widows and orphans, and that whatever it desired to do would benefit property owners by increasing rental values and help the poor by lowering rents. All his acquaintances turned to Littlefield, when they desired to know the date of the battle of Saragossa, the definition of the word sabotage, the future of the German mark, the translation of Hink Elie Lachormione, or the number of products of coal tar. The odd babbit by confessing that he often sat up till midnight, reading the figures and footnotes in government reports or skimming with amusement at the author's mistakes, the latest volumes of chemistry, archaeology, and archaeology. But Littlefield's great value was as a spiritual example. Despite his strange learnings, he was as strict a Presbyterian and as firm a Republican as George F. Babbitt. He confirmed the businessman in the faith, where they knew only by passionate instinct that their system of industry and manners was perfect. Dr. Howard Littlefield proved it to them, out of history, economics, and the confessions of reformed radicals. Babbitt had a good deal of honest pride in being the neighbor of such a savant. And in Ted's intimacy with Eunice Littlefield, at sixteen, Eunice was interested in no statics save those regarding the ages and salaries of motion picture stars. But as Babbitt definitively put it, she was her father's daughter. The difference between a light man like Sam Daboulou and a fairly fine character like Littlefield was revealed in their appearances. Daboulou was disturbingly young for a man of forty-eight. He wore his derby on the back of his head and his red face was wrinkled with meaningless laughter. But Littlefield was an old man of forty-two. He was tall, broad, thick. His gold-rimmed spectacles were engulfed in the folds of his long face. His hair was a tossed mass of greasy blackness. He puffed and rumbled as he talked. His fine bit of cappickey shone against his spotty black vest. He smelled of old pipes. He was altogether funeral and arcadone clull, and to real estate brokerage and the jobbing of bathroom fixtures he added an aroma of sanctity. This morning he was in front of his house inspecting the grass parking between the curb and the broad cement sidewalk. Babbitt stopped his car and leaned out to shout, Mornin! Littlefield lumbered over and stood with one foot up on the running board. Fine morning, said Babbitt, lighting illegally early his second cigar of the day. Yes, it's a mighty fine morning, said Littlefield. Spring come along fast now. Yes, it's real spring now, all right, said Littlefield. Still cold night, so. Had to have a couple blankets on the sleeping porch last night. Yes, it wasn't any too warm last night, said Littlefield. But I'll anticipate we'll have any more real cold weather now. No, but still, there was snow at Taffas, Montana yesterday, said the scholar, and you remember the blizzard they had out west three days ago, thirty inches of snow in Greeley, Colorado. And two years ago we had a snow swall right here in Zenith on the twenty-fifth of April. Is that a fact? Say, oh man, what do you think about the Republican candidate? Who would nominate for president? Don't you think it's about time we had a real business administration? In my opinion, what the country needs first and foremost is a good sound business-like conduct of its affairs. What we need is a business administration, said Littlefield. I'm glad to hear you say that. I certainly am glad to hear you say that. I don't know how you'd feel about it, with all your associations, with colleges, and so on. And I'm glad you feel that way. What the country needs just at this present juncture is neither a college president nor a lot of monkeying with foreign affairs, but a good sound economical business administration. That will give us a chance to have something like a decent turnover. Yes, it doesn't generally realize that even in China the school men are giving way to more practical men. And, of course, you can see what that implies. It is a fact. Well, well, breathe, babbit. Feeling much calmer and much happier about the way things were going in the world. Well, it's been nice to stop and par-le-vous a second. Guess I'll have to get down to the office now and sting a few clients. Well, so long, oh man. See you tonight. So long. Two. 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 in the fragment of an old orchard. It was brilliant to-day. The apple-bowls were lit with fresh leaves like torches of green fire, the first white of cherry blossoms flickered down a gully, and robins clamored. Babbit 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 frame with spectacles, smoking a large cigar, driving a good motor along a semi-suburban parkway. But in him was some genus of authentic love for his neighborhood, his city, his clan. The winter was over, the time has come for the building. The visible growth, which to him was glory. He lost his dawn depression, he was rudely cheerful, and he stopped on Smith Street to leave the brown trousers and to have the gasoline tank filled. The familiarity of the right fortified him, the side of the tall red iron gasoline pump, the hollow tile and terracotta garage, the window full of the most agreeable accessories, shiny casings, spark plugs, and 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. "'Morning, Mr. Babbitt,' said Moon, and Babbitt himself felt person of importance, one whose name even busy garagemen remembered. Not one of those cheap sports flying around in flivers. 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, thirty-one 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're taking today?' asked Moon in a manner which combined the independence of a great specialist, the friendliness of a familiar gossip, and respect for a man of weight in the community, like George F. Babbitt.' "'Riller up!' "'Who you rooting for, for a Republican candidate, Mr. Babbitt?' "'Has 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 and all before the Republican Convention, and I feel a fellow ought to keep an open mind and give all the candidates a show. Look them all over and size them 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 cars the way you do. "'Well, I do try to 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 to a respectable-looking man who was waiting for a trolley car. "'Have a lift!' As the man climbed in, Babbitt condescended. "'Go on, clear downtown. 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, taint a question of generosity hardly. In 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 his world with his neighbors, and he 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 to come to giving us on these car lines. Nonsense, don't 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 doesn't care a damn what kind of a deal they give us. Something ought to happen to them.' 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.' "'In fact, there is remarkable service on all their lines, considering.' "'Well, uneasily.' "'Darn fine morning,' Babbitt explained. Spring coming along fast.' "'Yes, it's a real spring now.' The victim had no rage reality, 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 cars 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. Today, in mysterious mylies, he raged or rejoiced with equal nervousness, swiftness, and today 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 drives of floral heights. The one storey shops on Smith Street, a glare of plate glass, and new yellow brick, groceries and laundries and drugstores, to supply the more immediate needs of Eastside housewives. The market gardens in Dutch Hollow, their shanties patched with corrugated tin and stolen doors, billboards with crimson godliness, nine feet tall, advertising cinema films, pipe tobacco and talcum powder. The old mansions along 9th Street Southeast, 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 stacked factories producing condensed milk, paper boxes, lighting fixtures, motor cars, the new business center, the thickening, daring traffic, the crammed trolleys unloading, the 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 outlaying factory suburbs of the Chastelusa River, with its strongly eroded banks, of the Orchard-Daple-Tawadonna hills to the North, and all the fat dairy land and big barns and comfortable herds. As he dropped his passenger, he cried, I feel pretty good this morning. Three. Epical, starting the car, was the drama of parking it before he entered his office. As he turned from Oberlin Avenue round the corner onto 3rd Street Northeast, 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 rod-iron bumper of the car in front. He stopped feverishly, cramped his steering wheel, slid back into the vacant space, and with 18 inches of room maneuvered to bring the car level with the curb. It was a vile 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 and 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 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 Reeve Building corridors, elevator runners, starter, engine, superintendent, and the doubtful-looking lame man who conducted the news and cigar stand. They 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 the stone floor, severe marble ceiling, and the inner window of the shops. The liveliest place on the street was the Reeve's Building Barber Shop. But this was also Babbitt's one embarrassment. Himself he patronized the glittering Pomegan Barber Shop in the Hotel Thornlow, and every time he passed the Reeve Shop ten times a day, a hundred times, he felt untrue to his own village. Now, as one of the squier-archy greeted with honorable salutation by the villagers, he marched into his office, and peace and dignity were upon him, and the morning's dissonance is all unheard. They were heard again immediately. Stand to graph, the outside salesman was talking on the telephone with tragic lack of that firm manner. Which discipline's clients? Say, I think I got the house that would suit you. The Percival House in Linton. Oh, you've seen it? Well, how did strike it? Huh? Oh. Irresolutely. 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 into the office. The nine were Stand to Graph, the outside salesman, a youngish man given to cigarettes in the playing of pool, old Matt Peneman, 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 the 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, Mitch Teresa McKellman, a swift and rather pretty stenographer, Miss Wilberter Bennington, the thick, slow, laborious accountant and file-clerk, and for freelance part-time commission salesman. As he looked from his own cage into the main room, Babbitt mourned, McGowan's a good stenog, smart as a whip, but Stand to Graph, and all those bumps the zest of the spring morning was smothered in the stale office air. Normally he admired the office with a pleased surprise that he could have created this sure lovely thing. Normally he was stimulated by the clean newness of it and the air of bustle, but today it seemed flat, the tile floor like a bathroom, the ochre-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 fault. 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 water-cooler, 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 canadaire, a porcelain water jar guaranteed hygienic, a dripless non-crogging sanitary faucet, and machine-painted decorations in two tones of gold. He looked down the relentless stretch of tile floor at the water-cooler and assured himself that no tenet 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. Low fall day. Go to grunches again tonight, 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 with his mail. He shouted Ms. Gown, which meant Ms. McGowan, and began to dictate. This was his own version of his first letter. Omar Gribble sent it to his office, Ms. McGowan. Yours of twentieth to hand in and 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 the carpet day before yesterday. Got right down to cases and think I can assure you, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, change that. All my experience indicates he is all right, means to do business. Looked into financial record, which is fine. That sentence seems to be a little balled up. Ms. Gown, make a couple of sentences out of it, if you have to. Period, new paragraph. He is perfectly willing to pro-rate the special assessment, and strikes me, I'm 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 it 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 them. Ms. McGowan, your sincerely, et cetera. This is the version of his letter which he received typed from Ms. McGowan that afternoon. Babbit Thompson Realty Company, Holmes for Folks, Reeves Building, Oberlin Avenue and Third Street, North East, Zenith. Omar Gribble S. Squire, 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 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. You're sincerely. As he read and signed it in his correct flowing business college hand, Babbit reflected. Now, that's a good strong letter, and clear as a bell. Now, what I never told McGowan to make a third paragraph here, wish he'd quit trying to improve on my dictation. But what I can't understand is why can't Stan Graf or Chet Labig write a letter like that with punch, with kick? The most important thing he dictated that morning was the fortnightly form letter to be mimographed 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, disclosures on the development of willpower, and handshaking house organs, as richly poured forth by the new school of poets of business. He had painfully written out the first draft, and he intoned it now like a poet, delicate, and distinct. Say, old man, I just wanted to know, can I do you a wail of a favour? 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 kitties, and maybe for the fliverer out beyond. Be sure to spell B-E-Y-A-N-T, Ms. McGowan. The spud garden? Say, did you ever stop to think that we're here to save you trouble? That's how I make a living. Folks don't pay us for our lovely beauty. Now take a look. Sit down at that handsome-car mahogany eschataire and shoot us a line telling us just what you want, and if we can find it, we'll come hopping down to your lane with good tidings, and if we can't, we won't bother you. To save your time, just fill out the blank enclosed. On request, we'll also send blank recording store properties in floral heights, Silver Grove, Linton, Bellevue, and all East Side Residential District, yours for service. PS, just a hint of some plums we can pick for you. Some genuine bargains that came in today. Silver Grove, cute, four-room California bungalow, AMI garage, dandy shade tree, swell neighborhood, handy car line, $3,700, $780 down and balance, liberal. Babbit Thompson terms cheaper than rent. Dorchester, a corker, artistic two-family house, all oak trim, parquet floors, lovely gaslog, big porches, colonial, heated all-weather garage, a bargain, $11,250. Dictation over with its need of sitting and thinking instead of bustling around and making a noise, and really doing something. Babbit sat crickily back in his revolving desk chair and beamed on Miss McGowan. 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 he waited, tapping a long precise pencil-point on the desk tablet, he half-identified her with the fairy girl of his dreams. He imagined her eyes meeting with terrifying recognition. Imagine touching her lips with frightened reverence and she was chirping, any more, Mr. Babbit? He grunted, That winds it up, I guess, turned heavily away. For all his wandering thoughts, they had never been more intimate than this. He often reflected, Never forgot how, oh, Jay Coffit, 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 children, and thought he had treasured them. But not once had he hazarded respectability by adventuring. Now, as he calculated the cost of repapering the Stike's house, he was restless again, discontented about nothing and everything, ashamed of his discontentment and lonely for the fairy girl. He had a tenor voice, wavy chestnut hair, and a mustache like a camel's hair brush. Babbit considered it excusable in a family man to growl. Seen this new picture of the kid? Husky little devil, huh? But Laylock's domestic confidence were as bubbly as it was in the past. He had a tenor voice, wavy chestnut hair, and a mustache like a camel's hair brush. Babbit considered it Laylock's domestic confidence were as bubbling as a girl's. Say, I think I got a peach of an ad for the Glen, Mr. Babbit. Why don't we try something in poetry, honest? It'd have wonderful pulling power, listen. Mid-pleasures and palaces wherever you may roam. 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, hell yes, of course I get it. But I think we better use something more dignified and forceful like. We lead others follow, or eventually, why not now? Of 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. 2. By a tragedy familiar to the world of art, the April enthusiasm of Chet Laylock served only to stimulate the talent of the older craftsmen, George F. Babbit. He grumbled to Stanley Graf. At ten-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 you've done your best for their departed? You haven't, unless they lie in the cemetery beautiful, Linden Lane, the only strictly up-to-date burial place in or near Zeth, where exquisitely garden plots look from daisy dotted hill slopes across the smiling fields of Dorchester. Soul agents, Babbit Thompson Realty Company, Reeves Building. He rejoiced. I guess that'll show his tan and his weedy old Wildwood Cemetery. Something about modern merchandising. 3. He sent Matt Peniman 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 Baywaters, a streetcar conductor, who played at real estate in spare time to call on side street prospects who were unworthy the strategies of Stan the Graph, but he had spanned 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 it like the solid citizen he was, admitted the evils of tobacco, courageously made resolves, laid out plans to check the vise, tapered off his allowance of cigars, and expounded the pleasures of virtuoseness 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 the minute of each smoke, and aesthetically 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, begging 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 a light of 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 a 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 ol' 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 him. But he bullied it. Ah, shut up. I'm busy now. Of course, buy and buy. There was no buy and buy, 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 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 manufactured 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 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 those blooming authors a way of a run for their money. Yet on the telephone he 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? Want to speak Mr. Riesling? Mr. Babbitt talking. Hello, Paul. Yeah. Yes, George speaking. Yeah. How's old Sox? Fair Midland, how are you? Fine, fabulous. Well, what do you know? Oh, nothing much. Where you been keeping yourself? Oh, just sticking around. What's up, Georgie? Come on, little lunch. Say, noon? Be all right with me, I guess. Club? Yeah. Meet you there at 1230. All right, 1230. It's long, Georgie. Four. 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 a bath at $60 a month. Advice to Matt Benjamin 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 houses 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 cast of good fellows. Yet his eventual importance to mankind was perhaps lessened. By his large and complacent ignorance of all architecture saved the types of houses turned out by speculative builders. All landscape gardening saved 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 Booster's 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 involuntate 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 didn't, you were a scheister, 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 refused to take twice the value of a house if a buyer was such an idiot that he didn't drew 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 to the Booster's Club he had admitted, it is at once the duty and 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 in the human body, and the engineer upon electricity in all its phases, or every bolt of some great bridge majestically arching over a mighty flood. The realtor must know his city inch by inch, and all its faults and virtues. Though he did not 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 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 worthwhile to know, whether the city school rooms 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 Doan, the radical lawyer, asserted that to throw boys and young girls into a bullpen crammed with men suffering from syphilis, delirium, torments, 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, there no make me sick. If people don't like a jail, let them behave themselves and keep out of it. Besides, these reform cranks always exaggerate it. That was the beginning and quite completely the end of his investigation into Zenith Charities and Corrections. And as to the Vice Districts, he brightly expressed it, those are things that no decent man monkeys with. Besides, matter of 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 cane, keeps them away from our own homes. As to industrial conditions, however, Babbit had thought a great deal and his opinions may be coordinated as follows. A good labor union is of value because it keeps out radically 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 ought to be any unions allowed at all. And as it's the best way of fighting the unions, every businessman ought to belong to an employer's 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 move to new neighborhoods to live there for a generation, was Babbit, 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 vulnerable. 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. Someone had told him, when he was twenty-two, that all cess pools are unhealthy, and he still denounced them. If a client impertently wanted him to sell a house, which had a cess pool, Babbit 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, oriolis, sunburned, flat prickly, with small boards displaying the names of imaginary streets, he righteously put in a complete suede system. It made him feel superior. It enabled him to sneer privately at the Martin Lamseman development, Abinola, which had a cess pool and it provided a chorus for the full-page advertisements in which he announced the beauty, convenience, cheapness, and super-ongatory healthfulness of Glen Oriole. The only flaw was that Glen Oriole sewers had insufficient outlet, so the waste remained in them, not very agreeably while the Abinola cess pool was a warring septic tank. The whole of the Glen Oriole project was a suggestion at Babbit, though he really did not 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 client's interests only. It was supposed that the Babbit Thompson Company were merely agents for Glen Oriole, serving the real owner, Jake Offit, but the fact was that Babbit and Thompson owned 62% of the Glen. The president and purchasing agent of the Zenith Street Traction Company owned 28% and Jake Offit, a gang politician, a small manufacturer, a tobacco chewing ol' fact store, who enjoyed dirty politics, business diplomacy, and cheating at poker, had only 10%. Which Babbit and the traction officials had given him for fixing health inspectors and fire inspectors, and a member of the State Transportation Commission. But Babbit was virtuous. He advocated, though he did not practice, 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 YMCA. He followed the custom of his clan, and cheated only as it was sanctified by president, and he never descended into trickery. Though as he explained to Paul Reisling, Of course, I don't mean to say that I ever had write it literally true or that I always believe everything I say when I give some buyer a good strong selling spiel. You see, you can see it like this. In the first place, maybe the owner of the property exaggerated when he put it into my hands, and it certainly is my place to go proving my principle 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 full enough to never whoop and dandy, I'd get the credit for lying anyway in self-defense. I got to tube moan horn like a lawyer defending his client. It's burden duty, ain't it, to bring out the poor dub's good points while the judge himself would ball out a lawyer if he didn't, even if they both knew the guy was guilty. But even so, I don't pad down to tooth like Cecil Rauntree, or Thayer, or the rest of those, in fact, I think a fellow that's willing to deliberately up and profit by lying ought to be shot. Babbit's value to his clients was rarely better shown than this morning. In the conference at 11.30 between himself, Conrad Leidy and Archibald Purdy. Five. Conrad Leidy 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 sternographers 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 a 30 or 40 percent 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 semi-circular hollows, as those silver dollars had been pressed against them and left an imprint. Particularly and always, Leidy consulted Babbit, and trusted in his slow cautiousness. Six months ago, Babbit had learned that one Archibald Purdy, a grocer, in the indecisive residential district known as Linden, was talking of opening a butcher shop besides his grocery. Looking up the ownership of adjoining parcels of land, Babbit found that Purdy owned his present shop, but did not own the one available on adjoining. He advised Conrad Leidy to purchase this lot for eleven thousand dollars. The owner-praisal on basis of rents did not indicate its value as above nine thousand. The rents declared Babbit were too low, and by waiting they could make Purdy come to their price. This was vision. He had to bully Leidy into buying. His first act as agent for Leidy 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 Leidy for the virtue of employing a broker who had vision, and who understood talking points, strategic values, key situation, under-appraisals, and the psychology of salesmanship. Leidy came to the conference exultantly. He was fond of Babbit this morning and called him ol' haus. Purdy the grocer, a long-nosed man in solemn, seemed to care less for Babbit and for vision, but Babbit met him at the street door of the office and guided him toward the private room with the 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 a hospitable note, then leaned back on his desk chair and looked plump and jolly. But he spoke to the weakling grocer with firmness. Well, brother Purdy, we've 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 Leidy that we ought to give you a shot at the property first. I said to Leidy, eh, it'd be 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, Babbit leaned forward and his voice was harsh. It would be hard luck if one of those cash and carry chain stores got in there and started cutting prices below cost till they got rid of competition for shoot of 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, or bad competition, but I guess you don't realize the pulling power that personality has in a neighborhood business. The great Babbit smiled. And so, just as you feel, old man, we thought we'd give you first chance, all right then. Now look here, Purdy wailed. And know for a fact that a piece of property about same size right in there sold for less than eighty-five hundred. Twenty-two years ago, and here you fellows are asking me twenty-four thousand dollars while I'd have a mortgage. I wouldn't mind so much paying twelve thousand, but why good God, Mr. Babbit, you're asking more than twice its value and threaten 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 Lighty 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 hundred down and the rest on mortgage. And if you want to wreck the old shack and rebuild, I guess I can get Lighty 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 those foreign grocery trusts any better than you do. But it isn't reasonable to expect us to sacrifice eleven thousand or more just for neighbors, is it? How about it, Lighty? You willing to come down? By warmly taking Purdy's part, Babbit persuaded the benevolent Mr. Lighty to reduce his price to twenty-one thousand dollars. At the right moment, Babbit snatched from a drawer the agreement. He had missed McGowan type out a week ago and thrust it into Purdy's hands. He generally shook his fountain pen to make certain that it was flowing, handed it to Purry, and approvingly watched him sign. The work of the world was being done. Lighty had made something over nine thousand dollars. Babbit 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 Linden would have meat lavished upon them at prices only a little higher than those downtown. It had been a manly battle, but after it Babbit drooped. This was the only really amusing contest he had been planning. There was nothing ahead save details of leases, appraisals, and mortgages. He muttered, makes me sick to think of Lighty carrying off most of the profit when I did all the work, old skin-flint. And what else have I got to do to-day? Like to take a good long vacation, motor-trip or something. He sprang up, rekindled by the thought of lunching with Paul Reisling. End of Chapter 4