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CHAPTER IV
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
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 *** of commercial righteousness about
the "realtor's function as a seer of the future development of the community, and as
a prophetic engineer clearing the pathway
for inevitable changes"--which meant that a real-estate broker could make money by
guessing which way the town would grow. This guessing he called Vision.
In an address at the Boosters' Club he had admitted, "It is at once the duty and the
privilege of the realtor to know everything about his own city and its environs.
Where a surgeon is a specialist on every vein and mysterious cell of the human body,
and the engineer upon electricity in all its phases, or every bolt of some great
bridge majestically arching o'er a mighty
flood, the realtor must know his city, inch by inch, and all its faults and virtues."
Though he did know the market-price, inch by inch, of certain districts of Zenith, he
did not know whether the police force was too large or too small, or whether it was
in alliance with gambling and prostitution.
He knew the means of fire-proofing buildings and the relation of insurance-
rates to fire-proofing, but he did not know how many firemen there were in the city,
how they were trained and paid, or how complete their apparatus.
He sang eloquently the advantages of proximity of school-buildings to rentable
homes, but he did not know--he did not know that it was worth while to know--whether
the city schoolrooms were properly heated,
lighted, ventilated, furnished; he did not know how the teachers were chosen; and
though he chanted "One of the boasts of Zenith is that we pay our teachers
adequately," that was because he had read the statement in the Advocate-Times.
Himself, he could not have given the average salary of teachers in Zenith or
anywhere else.
He had heard it said that "conditions" in the County Jail and the Zenith City Prison
were not very "scientific;" he had, with indignation at the criticism of Zenith,
skimmed through a report in which the
notorious pessimist Seneca Doane, the radical lawyer, asserted that to throw boys
and young girls into a bull-pen crammed with men suffering from syphilis, delirium
tremens, and insanity was not the perfect way of educating them.
He had controverted the report by growling, "Folks that think a jail ought to be a
bloomin' Hotel Thornleigh make me sick.
If people don't like a jail, let 'em behave 'emselves and keep out of it.
Besides, these reform cranks always exaggerate."
That was the beginning and quite completely the end of his investigations into Zenith's
charities and corrections; and as to the "vice districts" he brightly expressed it,
"Those are things that no decent man monkeys with.
Besides, smatter fact, I'll tell you confidentially: it's a protection to our
daughters and to decent women to have a district where tough nuts can raise cain.
Keeps 'em away from our own homes."
As to industrial conditions, however, Babbitt had thought a great deal, and his
opinions may be coordinated as follows:
"A good labor union is of value because it keeps out radical unions, which would
destroy property. No one ought to be forced to belong to a
union, however.
All labor agitators who try to force men to join a union should be hanged.
In fact, just between ourselves, there oughtn't to be any unions allowed at all;
and as it's the best way of fighting the unions, every business man ought to belong
to an employers'-association and to the Chamber of Commerce.
In union there is strength. So any selfish hog who doesn't join the
Chamber of Commerce ought to be forced to."
In nothing--as the expert on whose advice families moved to new neighborhoods to live
there for a generation--was Babbitt more splendidly innocent than in the science of
sanitation.
He did not know a malaria-bearing mosquito from a bat; he knew nothing about tests of
drinking water; and in the matters of plumbing and sewage he was as unlearned as
he was voluble.
He often referred to the excellence of the bathrooms in the houses he sold.
He was fond of explaining why it was that no European ever bathed.
Some one had told him, when he was twenty- two, that all cesspools were unhealthy, and
he still denounced them.
If a client impertinently wanted him to sell a house which had a cesspool, Babbitt
always spoke about it--before accepting the house and selling it.
When he laid out the Glen Oriole acreage development, when he ironed woodland and
dipping meadow into a glenless, orioleless, sunburnt flat prickly with small boards
displaying the names of imaginary streets,
he righteously put in a complete sewage- system.
It made him feel superior; it enabled him to sneer privily at the Martin Lumsen
development, Avonlea, which had a cesspool; and it provided a chorus for the full-page
advertisements in which he announced the
beauty, convenience, cheapness, and supererogatory healthfulness of Glen
Oriole.
The only flaw was that the Glen Oriole sewers had insufficient outlet, so that
waste remained in them, not very agreeably, while the Avonlea cesspool was a Waring
septic tank.
The whole of the Glen Oriole project was a suggestion that Babbitt, though he really
did hate men recognized as swindlers, was not too unreasonably honest.
Operators and buyers prefer that brokers should not be in competition with them as
operators and buyers themselves, but attend to their clients' interests only.
It was supposed that the Babbitt-Thompson Company were merely agents for Glen Oriole,
serving the real owner, Jake Offutt, but the fact was that Babbitt and Thompson
owned sixty-two per cent. of the Glen, the
president and purchasing agent of the Zenith Street Traction Company owned
twenty-eight per cent., and Jake Offutt (a gang-politician, a small manufacturer, a
tobacco-chewing old farceur who enjoyed
dirty politics, business diplomacy, and cheating at poker) had only ten per cent.,
which Babbitt and the Traction officials had given to him for "fixing" health
inspectors and fire inspectors and a member of the State Transportation Commission.
But Babbitt was virtuous.
He advocated, though he did not practise, the prohibition of alcohol; he praised,
though he did not obey, the laws against motor-speeding; he paid his debts; he
contributed to the church, the Red Cross,
and the Y. M. C. A.; he followed the custom of his clan and cheated only as it was
sanctified by precedent; and he never descended to trickery--though, as he
explained to Paul Riesling:
"Course I don't mean to say that every ad I write is literally true or that I always
believe everything I say when I give some buyer a good strong selling-spiel.
You see--you see it's like this: In the first place, maybe the owner of the
property exaggerated when he put it into my hands, and it certainly isn't my place to
go proving my principal a liar!
And then most folks are so darn crooked themselves that they expect a fellow to do
a little lying, so if I was fool enough to never whoop the ante I'd get the credit for
lying anyway!
In self-defense I got to toot my own horn, like a lawyer defending a client--his
bounden duty, ain't it, to bring out the poor dub's good points?
Why, the Judge himself would bawl out a lawyer that didn't, even if they both knew
the guy was guilty!
But even so, I don't pad out the truth like Cecil Rountree or Thayer or the rest of
these realtors.
Fact, I think a fellow that's willing to deliberately up and profit by lying ought
to be shot!"
Babbitt's value to his clients was rarely better shown than this morning, in the
conference at eleven-thirty between himself, Conrad Lyte, and Archibald Purdy.
V Conrad Lyte was a real-estate speculator.
He was a nervous speculator.
Before he gambled he consulted bankers, lawyers, architects, contracting builders,
and all of their clerks and stenographers who were willing to be cornered and give
him advice.
He was a bold entrepreneur, and he desired nothing more than complete safety in his
investments, freedom from attention to details, and the thirty or forty per cent.
profit which, according to all authorities,
a pioneer deserves for his risks and foresight.
He was a stubby man with a cap-like mass of short gray curls and clothes which, no
matter how well cut, seemed shaggy.
Below his eyes were semicircular hollows, as though silver dollars had been pressed
against them and had left an imprint.
Particularly and always Lyte consulted Babbitt, and trusted in his slow
cautiousness.
Six months ago Babbitt had learned that one Archibald Purdy, a grocer in the indecisive
residential district known as Linton, was talking of opening a butcher shop beside
his grocery.
Looking up the ownership of adjoining parcels of land, Babbitt found that Purdy
owned his present shop but did not own the one available lot adjoining.
He advised Conrad Lyte to purchase this lot, for eleven thousand dollars, though an
appraisal on a basis of rents did not indicate its value as above nine thousand.
The rents, declared Babbitt, were too low; and by waiting they could make Purdy come
to their price. (This was Vision.)
He had to bully Lyte into buying.
His first act as agent for Lyte was to increase the rent of the battered store-
building on the lot. The tenant said a number of rude things,
but he paid.
Now, Purdy seemed ready to buy, and his delay was going to cost him ten thousand
extra dollars--the reward paid by the community to Mr. Conrad Lyte for the virtue
of employing a broker who had Vision and
who understood Talking Points, Strategic Values, Key Situations, Underappraisals,
and the Psychology of Salesmanship. Lyte came to the conference exultantly.
He was fond of Babbitt, this morning, and called him "old hoss."
Purdy, the grocer, a long-nosed man and solemn, seemed to care less for Babbitt and
for Vision, but Babbitt met him at the street door of the office and guided him
toward the private room with affectionate little cries of "This way, Brother Purdy!"
He took from the correspondence-file the entire box of cigars and forced them on his
guests.
He pushed their chairs two inches forward and three inches back, which gave an
hospitable note, then leaned back in his desk-chair and looked plump and jolly.
But he spoke to the weakling grocer with firmness.
"Well, Brother Purdy, we been having some pretty tempting offers from butchers and a
slew of other folks for that lot next to your store, but I persuaded Brother Lyte
that we ought to give you a shot at the property first.
I said to Lyte, 'It'd be a rotten shame,' I said, 'if somebody went and opened a
combination grocery and meat market right next door and ruined Purdy's nice little
business.'
Especially--" Babbitt leaned forward, and his voice was harsh, "--it would be hard
luck if one of these cash-and-carry chain- stores got in there and started cutting
prices below cost till they got rid of competition and forced you to the wall!"
Purdy snatched his thin hands from his pockets, pulled up his trousers, thrust his
hands back into his pockets, tilted in the heavy oak chair, and tried to look amused,
as he struggled:
"Yes, they're bad competition. But I guess you don't realize the Pulling
Power that Personality has in a neighborhood business."
The great Babbitt smiled.
"That's so. Just as you feel, old man.
We thought we'd give you first chance. All right then--"
"Now look here!"
Purdy wailed.
"I know f'r a fact that a piece of property 'bout same size, right near, sold for less
'n eighty-five hundred, 'twa'n't two years ago, and here you fellows are asking me
twenty-four thousand dollars!
Why, I'd have to mortgage--I wouldn't mind so much paying twelve thousand but--Why
good God, Mr. Babbitt, you're asking more 'n twice its value!
And threatening to ruin me if I don't take it!"
"Purdy, I don't like your way of talking! I don't like it one little bit!
Supposing Lyte and I were stinking enough to want to ruin any fellow human, don't you
suppose we know it's to our own selfish interest to have everybody in Zenith
prosperous?
But all this is beside the point.
Tell you what we'll do: We'll come down to twenty-three thousand-five thousand down
and the rest on mortgage--and if you want to wreck the old shack and rebuild, I guess
I can get Lyte here to loosen up for a building-mortgage on good liberal terms.
Heavens, man, we'd be glad to oblige you! We don't like these foreign grocery trusts
any better 'n you do!
But it isn't reasonable to expect us to sacrifice eleven thousand or more just for
neighborliness, IS it! How about it, Lyte?
You willing to come down?"
By warmly taking Purdy's part, Babbitt persuaded the benevolent Mr. Lyte to reduce
his price to twenty-one thousand dollars.
At the right moment Babbitt snatched from a drawer the agreement he had had Miss McGoun
type out a week ago and thrust it into Purdy's hands.
He genially shook his fountain pen to make certain that it was flowing, handed it to
Purdy, and approvingly watched him sign. The work of the world was being done.
Lyte had made something over nine thousand dollars, Babbitt had made a four-hundred-
and-fifty dollar commission, Purdy had, by the sensitive mechanism of modern finance,
been provided with a business-building, and
soon the happy inhabitants of Linton would have meat lavished upon them at prices only
a little higher than those down-town. It had been a manly battle, but after it
Babbitt drooped.
This was the only really amusing contest he had been planning.
There was nothing ahead save details of leases, appraisals, mortgages.
He muttered, "Makes me sick to think of Lyte carrying off most of the profit when I
did all the work, the old skinflint! And--What else have I got to do to-day?...
Like to take a good long vacation.
Motor trip. Something."
He sprang up, rekindled by the thought of lunching with Paul Riesling.