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 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.