CHAPTER IV

by Sinclair Lewis

　　CHAPTER IVIT was a morning of artistic creation. Fifteen minutes after the purpleprose of Babbitt's form-letter, Chester Kirby Laylock, the residentsalesman at Glen Oriole, came in to report a sale and submit anadvertisement. Babbitt disapproved of Laylock, who sang in choirs andwas merry at home over games of Hearts and Old Maid. He had a tenorvoice, wavy chestnut hair, and a mustache like a camel's-hair brush.Babbitt considered it excusable in a family-man to growl, "Seen thisnew picture of the kid--husky little devil, eh?" but Laylock's domesticconfidences 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 wonderfulpulling-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'dbetter use something more dignified and forceful, like 'We lead, othersfollow,' or 'Eventually, why not now?' Course I believe in usingpoetry and humor and all that junk when it turns the trick, but with ahigh-class restricted development like the Glen we better stick to themore dignified approach, see how I mean? Well, I guess that's all, thismorning, Chet."IIBy a tragedy familiar to the world of art, the April enthusiasm of ChetLaylock served only to stimulate the talent of the older craftsman,George F. Babbitt. He grumbled to Stanley Graff, "That tan-colored voiceof Chet's gets on my nerves," yet he was aroused and in one swoop hewrote:DO YOU RESPECT YOUR LOVED ONES?When the last sad rites of bereavement are over, do you know for certainthat you have done your best for the Departed? You haven't unless theylie in the Cemetery Beautiful,LINDEN LANEthe only strictly up-to-date burial place in or near Zenith, whereexquisitely gardened plots look from daisy-dotted hill-slopes across thesmiling fields of Dorchester. Sole agents BABBITT-THOMPSON REALTY COMPANY Reeves Building He rejoiced, "I guess that'll show Chan Mott and his weedy old WildwoodCemetery something about modern merchandizing!"IIIHe sent Mat Penniman to the recorder's office to dig out the namesof the owners of houses which were displaying For Rent signs of otherbrokers; he talked to a man who desired to lease a store-building fora pool-room; he ran over the list of home-leases which were about toexpire; he sent Thomas Bywaters, a street-car conductor who played atreal estate in spare time, to call on side-street "prospects" who wereunworthy the strategies of Stanley Graff. But he had spent his credulousexcitement of creation, and these routine details annoyed him. Onemoment 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 likethe solid citizen he was: admitted the evils of tobacco, courageouslymade resolves, laid out plans to check the vice, tapered off hisallowance of cigars, and expounded the pleasures of virtuousness toevery one he met. He did everything, in fact, except stop smoking.Two months before, by ruling out a schedule, noting down the hour andminute of each smoke, and ecstatically increasing the intervals betweensmokes, he had brought himself down to three cigars a day. Then he hadlost the schedule.A week ago he had invented a system of leaving his cigar-caseand cigarette-box in an unused drawer at the bottom of thecorrespondence-file, in the outer office. "I'll just naturally beashamed to go poking in there all day long, making a fool of myselfbefore my own employees!" he reasoned. By the end of three days he wastrained 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 openthe file. Lock it, that was the thing! Inspired, he rushed out andlocked up his cigars, his cigarettes, and even his box of safetymatches; and the key to the file drawer he hid in his desk. But thecrusading passion of it made him so tobacco-hungry that he immediatelyrecovered the key, walked with forbidding dignity to the file, took outa cigar and a match--"but only one match; if ole cigar goes out, it'llby golly have to stay out!" Later, when the cigar did go out, he tookone more match from the file, and when a buyer and a seller came in fora conference at eleven-thirty, naturally he had to offer them cigars.His conscience protested, "Why, you're smoking with them!" but hebullied it, "Oh, shut up! I'm busy now. Of course by-and-by--" There wasno by-and-by, yet his belief that he had crushed the unclean habit madehim 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 himselfand his daughter Tinka. They had been classmates, roommates, in theState University, but always he thought of Paul Riesling, with his darkslimness, his precisely parted hair, his nose-glasses, his hesitantspeech, his moodiness, his love of music, as a younger brother, to bepetted and protected. Paul had gone into his father's business,after graduation; he was now a wholesaler and small manufacturer ofprepared-paper roofing. But Babbitt strenuously believed and lengthilyannounced to the world of Good Fellows that Paul could have been a greatviolinist or painter or writer. "Why say, the letters that boy sent meon his trip to the Canadian Rockies, they just absolutely make you seethe place as if you were standing there. Believe me, he could have givenany 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, whatthe dickens is the trouble? Can't you get me South 343? Why certainlythey'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."IVHis morning was not sharply marked into divisions. Interwoven withcorrespondence and advertisement-writing were a thousand nervousdetails: calls from clerks who were incessantly and hopefully seekingfive furnished rooms and bath at sixty dollars a month; advice to MatPenniman on getting money out of tenants who had no money.Babbitt's virtues as a real-estate broker--as the servant of society inthe department of finding homes for families and shops for distributorsof food--were steadiness and diligence. He was conventionally honest, hekept his records of buyers and sellers complete, he had experience withleases and titles and an excellent memory for prices. His shoulders werebroad enough, his voice deep enough, his relish of hearty humor strongenough, to establish him as one of the ruling caste of Good Fellows. Yethis eventual importance to mankind was perhaps lessened by his large andcomplacent ignorance of all architecture save the types of houses turnedout by speculative builders; all landscape gardening save the use ofcurving roads, grass, and six ordinary shrubs; and all the commonestaxioms of economics. He serenely believed that the one purpose of thereal-estate business was to make money for George F. Babbitt. True,it was a good advertisement at Boosters' Club lunches, and all thevarieties of Annual Banquets to which Good Fellows were invited, tospeak sonorously of Unselfish Public Service, the Broker's Obligationto 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-classRealtor and if you hadn't you were a shyster, a piker, and afly-by-night. These virtues awakened Confidence, and enabled you tohandle Bigger Propositions. But they didn't imply that you were to beimpractical and refuse to take twice the value of a house if a buyer wassuch an idiot that he didn't jew you down on the asking-price.Babbitt spoke well--and often--at these orgies of commercialrighteousness about the "realtor's function as a seer of the futuredevelopment of the community, and as a prophetic engineer clearing thepathway for inevitable changes"--which meant that a real-estate brokercould make money by guessing which way the town would grow. Thisguessing he called Vision.In an address at the Boosters' Club he had admitted, "It is at once theduty and the privilege of the realtor to know everything about his owncity and its environs. Where a surgeon is a specialist on every vein andmysterious cell of the human body, and the engineer upon electricity inall its phases, or every bolt of some great bridge majestically archingo'er a mighty flood, the realtor must know his city, inch by inch, andall its faults and virtues."Though he did know the market-price, inch by inch, of certain districtsof Zenith, he did not know whether the police force was too large or toosmall, or whether it was in alliance with gambling and prostitution.He knew the means of fire-proofing buildings and the relation ofinsurance-rates to fire-proofing, but he did not know how many firementhere were in the city, how they were trained and paid, or how completetheir apparatus. He sang eloquently the advantages of proximity ofschool-buildings to rentable homes, but he did not know--he did notknow that it was worth while to know--whether the city schoolrooms wereproperly heated, lighted, ventilated, furnished; he did not know how theteachers were chosen; and though he chanted "One of the boasts of Zenithis that we pay our teachers adequately," that was because he had readthe statement in the Advocate-Times. Himself, he could not have giventhe average salary of teachers in Zenith or anywhere else.He had heard it said that "conditions" in the County Jail and the ZenithCity Prison were not very "scientific;" he had, with indignation at thecriticism of Zenith, skimmed through a report in which the notoriouspessimist Seneca Doane, the radical lawyer, asserted that to throwboys and young girls into a bull-pen crammed with men suffering fromsyphilis, delirium tremens, and insanity was not the perfect way ofeducating them. He had controverted the report by growling, "Folks thatthink a jail ought to be a bloomin' Hotel Thornleigh make me sick. Ifpeople don't like a jail, let 'em behave 'emselves and keep out of it.Besides, these reform cranks always exaggerate." That was the beginningand quite completely the end of his investigations into Zenith'scharities and corrections; and as to the "vice districts" he brightlyexpressed it, "Those are things that no decent man monkeys with.Besides, smatter fact, I'll tell you confidentially: it's a protectionto our daughters and to decent women to have a district where tough nutscan 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 aunion, however. All labor agitators who try to force men to join a unionshould be hanged. In fact, just between ourselves, there oughtn't tobe any unions allowed at all; and as it's the best way of fighting theunions, every business man ought to belong to an employers'-associationand to the Chamber of Commerce. In union there is strength. So anyselfish hog who doesn't join the Chamber of Commerce ought to be forcedto."In nothing--as the expert on whose advice families moved to newneighborhoods to live there for a generation--was Babbitt moresplendidly innocent than in the science of sanitation. He did not knowa malaria-bearing mosquito from a bat; he knew nothing about tests ofdrinking water; and in the matters of plumbing and sewage he was asunlearned as he was voluble. He often referred to the excellence of thebathrooms in the houses he sold. He was fond of explaining why itwas that no European ever bathed. Some one had told him, when he wastwenty-two, that all cesspools were unhealthy, and he still denouncedthem. If a client impertinently wanted him to sell a house which had acesspool, Babbitt always spoke about it--before accepting the house andselling it.When he laid out the Glen Oriole acreage development, when he ironedwoodland and dipping meadow into a glenless, orioleless, sunburnt flatprickly with small boards displaying the names of imaginary streets, herighteously 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 thefull-page advertisements in which he announced the beauty, convenience,cheapness, and supererogatory healthfulness of Glen Oriole. The onlyflaw was that the Glen Oriole sewers had insufficient outlet, so thatwaste remained in them, not very agreeably, while the Avonlea cesspoolwas 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 toounreasonably honest. Operators and buyers prefer that brokers shouldnot be in competition with them as operators and buyers themselves,but attend to their clients' interests only. It was supposed that theBabbitt-Thompson Company were merely agents for Glen Oriole, servingthe real owner, Jake Offutt, but the fact was that Babbitt and Thompsonowned sixty-two per cent. of the Glen, the president and purchasingagent of the Zenith Street Traction Company owned twenty-eight percent., and Jake Offutt (a gang-politician, a small manufacturer,a tobacco-chewing old farceur who enjoyed dirty politics, businessdiplomacy, and cheating at poker) had only ten per cent., whichBabbitt and the Traction officials had given to him for "fixing" healthinspectors and fire inspectors and a member of the State TransportationCommission.But Babbitt was virtuous. He advocated, though he did not practise, theprohibition of alcohol; he praised, though he did not obey, the lawsagainst 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 hisclan and cheated only as it was sanctified by precedent; and he neverdescended to trickery--though, as he explained to Paul Riesling:"Course I don't mean to say that every ad I write is literally true orthat I always believe everything I say when I give some buyer a goodstrong selling-spiel. You see--you see it's like this: In the firstplace, maybe the owner of the property exaggerated when he put it intomy hands, and it certainly isn't my place to go proving my principala liar! And then most folks are so darn crooked themselves that theyexpect a fellow to do a little lying, so if I was fool enough to neverwhoop the ante I'd get the credit for lying anyway! In self-defense Igot to toot my own horn, like a lawyer defending a client--his boundenduty, ain't it, to bring out the poor dub's good points? Why, the Judgehimself would bawl out a lawyer that didn't, even if they both knewthe guy was guilty! But even so, I don't pad out the truth like CecilRountree or Thayer or the rest of these realtors. Fact, I think a fellowthat's willing to deliberately up and profit by lying ought to be shot!"Babbitt's value to his clients was rarely better shown than thismorning, in the conference at eleven-thirty between himself, ConradLyte, and Archibald Purdy.VConrad Lyte was a real-estate speculator. He was a nervous speculator.Before he gambled he consulted bankers, lawyers, architects, contractingbuilders, and all of their clerks and stenographers who were willingto be cornered and give him advice. He was a bold entrepreneur, and hedesired nothing more than complete safety in his investments, freedomfrom attention to details, and the thirty or forty per cent. profitwhich, according to all authorities, a pioneer deserves for his risksand foresight. He was a stubby man with a cap-like mass of short graycurls and clothes which, no matter how well cut, seemed shaggy. Belowhis eyes were semicircular hollows, as though silver dollars had beenpressed against them and had left an imprint.Particularly and always Lyte consulted Babbitt, and trusted in his slowcautiousness.Six months ago Babbitt had learned that one Archibald Purdy, a grocerin the indecisive residential district known as Linton, was talking ofopening a butcher shop beside his grocery. Looking up the ownership ofadjoining parcels of land, Babbitt found that Purdy owned his presentshop but did not own the one available lot adjoining. He advised ConradLyte to purchase this lot, for eleven thousand dollars, though anappraisal on a basis of rents did not indicate its value as above ninethousand. The rents, declared Babbitt, were too low; and by waiting theycould make Purdy come to their price. (This was Vision.) He had to bullyLyte into buying. His first act as agent for Lyte was to increase therent of the battered store-building on the lot. The tenant said a numberof rude things, but he paid.Now, Purdy seemed ready to buy, and his delay was going to cost him tenthousand extra dollars--the reward paid by the community to Mr. ConradLyte for the virtue of employing a broker who had Vision andwho understood Talking Points, Strategic Values, Key Situations,Underappraisals, and the Psychology of Salesmanship.Lyte came to the conference exultantly. He was fond of Babbitt, thismorning, and called him "old hoss." Purdy, the grocer, a long-nosed manand solemn, seemed to care less for Babbitt and for Vision, but Babbittmet him at the street door of the office and guided him toward theprivate room with affectionate little cries of "This way, BrotherPurdy!" He took from the correspondence-file the entire box of cigarsand forced them on his guests. He pushed their chairs two inches forwardand three inches back, which gave an hospitable note, then leanedback in his desk-chair and looked plump and jolly. But he spoke to theweakling grocer with firmness."Well, Brother Purdy, we been having some pretty tempting offers frombutchers 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 theproperty first. I said to Lyte, 'It'd be a rotten shame,' I said, 'ifsomebody went and opened a combination grocery and meat market rightnext door and ruined Purdy's nice little business.' Especially--"Babbitt leaned forward, and his voice was harsh, "--it would be hardluck if one of these cash-and-carry chain-stores got in there andstarted cutting prices below cost till they got rid of competition andforced 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 PullingPower that Personality has in a neighborhood business."The great Babbitt smiled. "That's so. Just as you feel, old man. Wethought we'd give you first chance. All right then--""Now look here!" Purdy wailed. "I know f'r a fact that a piece ofproperty 'bout same size, right near, sold for less 'n eighty-fivehundred, 'twa'n't two years ago, and here you fellows are asking metwenty-four thousand dollars! Why, I'd have to mortgage--I wouldn't mindso much paying twelve thousand but--Why good God, Mr. Babbitt, you'reasking more 'n twice its value! And threatening to ruin me if I don'ttake it!""Purdy, I don't like your way of talking! I don't like it one littlebit! Supposing Lyte and I were stinking enough to want to ruin anyfellow human, don't you suppose we know it's to our own selfish interestto have everybody in Zenith prosperous? But all this is besidethe point. Tell you what we'll do: We'll come down to twenty-threethousand-five thousand down and the rest on mortgage--and if you want towreck the old shack and rebuild, I guess I can get Lyte here to loosenup for a building-mortgage on good liberal terms. Heavens, man, we'dbe glad to oblige you! We don't like these foreign grocery trusts anybetter 'n you do! But it isn't reasonable to expect us to sacrificeeleven 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. Lyteto reduce his price to twenty-one thousand dollars. At the right momentBabbitt snatched from a drawer the agreement he had had Miss McGoun typeout a week ago and thrust it into Purdy's hands. He genially shook hisfountain 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 overnine thousand dollars, Babbitt had made a four-hundred-and-fifty dollarcommission, Purdy had, by the sensitive mechanism of modern finance,been provided with a business-building, and soon the happy inhabitantsof Linton would have meat lavished upon them at prices only a littlehigher than those down-town.It had been a manly battle, but after it Babbitt drooped. This was theonly really amusing contest he had been planning. There was nothingahead save details of leases, appraisals, mortgages.He muttered, "Makes me sick to think of Lyte carrying off most of theprofit when I did all the work, the old skinflint! And--What else haveI 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 PaulRiesling.