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.''