Kabanata Kabanata 4 · Chapter IV

I

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 fireproofing buildings and the relation of

insurance-rates to fireproofing, but he did not know how many firemen

there were in the city, how they were trained and paid, or how complete

their apparatus. He sang eloquently the advantages of proximity of

school-buildings to rentable homes, but he did not know--he did not know

that it was worth while to know--whether the city schoolrooms were

properly heated, lighted, ventilated, furnished; he did not know how the

teachers were chosen; and though he chanted “One of the boasts of Zenith

is that we pay our teachers adequately,” that was because he had read

the statement in the _Advocate-Times_. Himself, he could not have given

the average salary of teachers in Zenith or anywhere else.

He had heard it said that “conditions” in the County Jail and the Zenith

City Prison were not very “scientific;” he had, with indignation at the

criticism of Zenith, skimmed through a report in which the notorious

pessimist Seneca Doane, the radical lawyer, asserted that to throw boys

and young girls into a bull-pen crammed with men suffering from

syphilis, delirium tremens, and insanity was not the perfect way of

educating them. He had controverted the report by growling, “Folks that

think a jail ought to be a bloomin’ Hotel Thornleigh make me sick. If

people don’t like a jail, let ’em behave ’emselves and keep out of it.

Besides, these reform cranks always exaggerate.” That was the beginning

and quite completely the end of his investigations into Zenith’s

charities and corrections; and as to the “vice districts” he brightly

expressed it, “Those are things that no decent man monkeys with.

Besides, smatter fact, I’ll tell you confidentially: it’s a protection

to our daughters and to decent women to have a district where tough nuts

can raise cain. Keeps ’em away from our own homes.”

As to industrial conditions, however, Babbitt had thought a great deal,

and his opinions may be coordinated as follows:

“A good labor union is of value because it keeps out radical unions,

which would destroy property. No one ought to be forced to belong to a

union, however. All labor agitators who try to force men to join a union

should be hanged. In fact, just between ourselves, there oughtn’t to be

any unions allowed at all; and as it’s the best way of fighting the

unions, every business man ought to belong to an employers’-association

and to the Chamber of Commerce. In union there is strength. So any

selfish hog who doesn’t join the Chamber of Commerce ought to be forced

to.”

In nothing--as the expert on whose advice families moved to new

neighborhoods to live there for a generation--was Babbitt more

splendidly innocent than in the science of sanitation. He did not know a

malaria-bearing mosquito from a bat; he knew nothing about tests of

drinking water; and in the matters of plumbing and sewage he was as

unlearned as he was voluble. He often referred to the excellence of the

bathrooms in the houses he sold. He was fond of explaining why it was

that no European ever bathed. Some one had told him, when he was

twenty-two, that all cesspools were unhealthy, and he still denounced

them. If a client impertinently wanted him to sell a house which had a

cesspool, Babbitt always spoke about it--before accepting the house and

selling it.

When he laid out the Glen Oriole acreage development, when he ironed

woodland and dipping meadow into a glenless, orioleless, sunburnt flat

prickly with small boards displaying the names of imaginary streets, he

righteously put in a complete sewage-system. It made him feel superior;

it enabled him to sneer privily at the Martin Lumsen development,

Avonlea, which had a cesspool; and it provided a chorus for the

full-page advertisements in which he announced the beauty, convenience,

cheapness, and supererogatory healthfulness of Glen Oriole. The only

flaw was that the Glen Oriole sewers had insufficient outlet, so that

waste remained in them, not very agreeably, while the Avonlea cesspool

was a Waring septic tank.

The whole of the Glen Oriole project was a suggestion that Babbitt,

though he really did hate men recognized as swindlers, was not too

unreasonably honest. Operators and buyers prefer that brokers should not

be in competition with them as operators and buyers themselves, but

attend to their clients’ interests only. It was supposed that the

Babbitt-Thompson Company were merely agents for Glen Oriole, serving the

real owner, Jake Offutt, but the fact was that Babbitt and Thompson

owned sixty-two per cent. of the Glen, the president and purchasing

agent of the Zenith Street Traction Company owned twenty-eight per

cent., and Jake Offutt (a gang-politician, a small manufacturer, a

tobacco-chewing old farceur who enjoyed dirty politics, business

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.