I
HE forgot Paul Riesling in an afternoon of not unagreeable
details. After a return to his office, which seemed to have
staggered on without him, he drove a "prospect'' out to view
a four-flat tenement in the Linton district. He was inspired
by the customer's admiration of the new cigar-lighter. Thrice
its novelty made him use it, and thrice he hurled half-smoked
cigarettes from the car, protesting, "I got to
quit smoking so
blame much!''
Their ample discussion of every detail of the cigar-lighter
led them to speak of electric flat-irons and bed-warmers. Babbitt
apologized for being so shabbily old-fashioned as still to
use a hot-water bottle, and he announced that he would have
the sleeping-porch wired at once. He had enormous and poetic
admiration, though very little understanding, of all mechanical
devices. They were his symbols of truth and beauty. Regarding
each new intricate mechanism—metal lathe, two-jet carburetor,
machine gun, oxyacetylene welder—he learned one
good realistic-sounding phrase, and used it over and over, with
a delightful feeling of being technical and initiated.
The customer joined him in the worship of machinery, and
they came buoyantly up to the tenement and began that examination
of plastic slate roof, kalamein doors, and seven-eighths-inch
blind-nailed flooring, began those diplomacies of hurt
surprise and readiness to be persuaded to do something they
had already decided to do, which would some day result in
a sale.
On the way back Babbitt picked up his partner and father-in-law,
Henry T. Thompson, at his kitchen-cabinet works, and
they drove through South Zenith, a high-colored, banging,
exciting region: new factories of hollow tile with gigantic wire-glass
windows, surly old red-brick factories stained with tar,
high-perched water-tanks, big red trucks like locomotives, and,
on a score of hectic side-tracks, far-wandering freight-cars from
the New York Central and apple orchards, the Great Northern
and wheat-plateaus, the Southern Pacific and orange groves.
They talked to the secretary of the Zenith Foundry Company
about an interesting artistic project—a cast-iron fence for
Linden Lane Cemetery. They drove on to the Zeeco Motor
Company and interviewed the sales-manager, Noël Ryland,
about a discount on a Zeeco car for Thompson. Babbitt and
Ryland were fellow-members of the Boosters' Club, and no
Booster felt right if he bought anything from another Booster
without receiving a discount. But Henry Thompson growled,
"Oh, t' hell with 'em! I'm not going to crawl around mooching
discounts, not from nobody.'' It was one of the differences
between Thompson, the old-fashioned, lean Yankee, rugged,
traditional, stage type of American business man, and Babbitt,
the plump, smooth, efficient, up-to-the-minute and otherwise
perfected modern. Whenever Thompson twanged, "Put your
John Hancock on that line,'' Babbitt was as much amused by
the antiquated provincialism as any proper Englishman by any
American. He knew himself to be of a breeding altogether
more esthetic and sensitive than Thompson's. He was a college
graduate, he played golf, he often smoked cigarettes instead
of cigars, and when he went to Chicago he took a room
with a private bath. "The whole thing is,'' he explained to
Paul Riesling, "these old codgers lack the subtlety that you
got to have to-day.''
This advance in civilization could be carried too far, Babbitt
perceived. Noel Ryland, sales-manager of the Zeeco, was
a frivolous graduate of Princeton, while Babbitt was a sound
and standard ware from that great department-store, the State
University. Ryland wore spats, he wrote long letters about
City Planning and Community Singing, and, though he was a
Booster, he was known to carry in his pocket small volumes
of poetry in a foreign language. All this was going too far.
Henry Thompson was the extreme of insularity, and Noël Ryland
the extreme of frothiness, while between them, supporting
the state, defending the evangelical churches and domestic
brightness and sound business, were Babbitt and his friends.
With this just estimate of himself—and with the promise of
a discount on Thompson's car—he returned to his office in
triumph.
But as he went through the corridor of the Reeves Building
he sighed, "Poor old Paul! I got to— Oh, damn Noël Ryland!
Damn Charley McKelvey! Just because they make
more money than I do, they think they're so superior. I
wouldn't be found dead in their stuffy old Union Club! I—
Somehow, to-day, I don't feel like going back to work. Oh
well—''