The Street Car Company don’t care a damn what kind of a deal they give us.
Something ought to happen to ‘em.”
Babbitt was alarmed.
“But still, of course it won’t do to just keep knocking the Traction Company and not realize the difficulties they’re operating under, like these cranks that want municipal ownership.
The way these workmen hold up the Company for high wages is simply a crime, and of course the burden falls on you and me that have to pay a seven-cent fare!
Fact, there’s remarkable service on all their lines—considering.”
“Well—” uneasily.
“Darn fine morning,” Babbitt explained.
“Spring coming along fast.”
“Yes, it’s real spring now.”
The victim had no originality, no wit, and Babbitt fell into a great silence and devoted himself to the game of beating trolley cars to the corner: a spurt, a tail-chase, nervous speeding between the huge yellow side of the trolley and the jagged row of parked motors, shooting past just as the trolley stopped—a rare game and valiant.
And all the while he was conscious of the loveliness of Zenith.
For weeks together he noticed nothing but clients and the vexing To Rent signs of rival brokers.
To-day, in mysterious malaise, he raged or rejoiced with equal nervous swiftness, and to-day the light of spring was so winsome that he lifted his head and saw.
He admired each district along his familiar route to the office: The bungalows and shrubs and winding irregular drive ways of Floral Heights. The one-story shops on Smith Street, a glare of plate-glass and new yellow brick; groceries and laundries and drug-stores to supply the more immediate needs of East Side housewives. The market gardens in Dutch Hollow, their shanties patched with corrugated iron and stolen doors. Billboards with crimson goddesses nine feet tall advertising cinema films, pipe tobacco, and talcum powder. The old “mansions” along Ninth Street, S. E., like aged dandies in filthy linen; wooden castles turned into boarding-houses, with muddy walks and rusty hedges, jostled by fast-intruding garages, cheap apartment-houses, and fruit-stands conducted by bland, sleek Athenians.
Across the belt of railroad-tracks, factories with high-perched water-tanks and tall stacks-factories producing condensed milk, paper boxes, lighting-fixtures, motor cars.
Then the business center, the thickening darting traffic, the crammed trolleys unloading, and high doorways of marble and polished granite.
It was big—and Babbitt respected bigness in anything; in mountains, jewels, muscles, wealth, or words.
He was, for a spring-enchanted moment, the lyric and almost unselfish lover of Zenith.
He thought of the outlying factory suburbs; of the Chaloosa River with its strangely eroded banks; of the orchard-dappled Tonawanda Hills to the North, and all the fat dairy land and big barns and comfortable herds.
As he dropped his passenger he cried,
“Gosh, I feel pretty good this morning!” III
Epochal as starting the car was the drama of parking it before he entered his office.
As he turned from Oberlin Avenue round the corner into Third Street, N.E., he peered ahead for a space in the line of parked cars.
He angrily just missed a space as a rival driver slid into it.
Ahead, another car was leaving the curb, and Babbitt slowed up, holding out his hand to the cars pressing on him from behind, agitatedly motioning an old woman to go ahead, avoiding a truck which bore down on him from one side.
With front wheels nicking the wrought-steel bumper of the car in front, he stopped, feverishly cramped his steering-wheel, slid back into the vacant space and, with eighteen inches of room, manoeuvered to bring the car level with the curb.
It was a virile adventure masterfully executed.
With satisfaction he locked a thief-proof steel wedge on the front wheel, and crossed the street to his real-estate office on the ground floor of the Reeves Building.
The Reeves Building was as fireproof as a rock and as efficient as a typewriter; fourteen stories of yellow pressed brick, with clean, upright, unornamented lines.
It was filled with the offices of lawyers, doctors, agents for machinery, for emery wheels, for wire fencing, for mining-stock.
Their gold signs shone on the windows.
The entrance was too modern to be flamboyant with pillars; it was quiet, shrewd, neat.
Along the Third Street side were a Western Union Telegraph Office, the Blue Delft Candy Shop, Shotwell’s Stationery Shop, and the Babbitt-Thompson Realty Company.
Babbitt could have entered his office from the street, as customers did, but it made him feel an insider to go through the corridor of the building and enter by the back door.
Thus he was greeted by the villagers.
The little unknown people who inhabited the Reeves Building corridors—elevator-runners, starter, engineers, superintendent, and the doubtful-looking lame man who conducted the news and cigar stand—were in no way city-dwellers.
They were rustics, living in a constricted valley, interested only in one another and in The Building.
Their Main Street was the entrance hall, with its stone floor, severe marble ceiling, and the inner windows of the shops.
The liveliest place on the street was the Reeves Building Barber Shop, but this was also Babbitt’s one embarrassment.
Himself, he patronized the glittering Pompeian Barber Shop in the Hotel Thornleigh, and every time he passed the Reeves shop—ten times a day, a hundred times—he felt untrue to his own village.
Now, as one of the squirearchy, greeted with honorable salutations by the villagers, he marched into his office, and peace and dignity were upon him, and the morning’s dissonances all unheard.
They were heard again, immediately.
Stanley Graff, the outside salesman, was talking on the telephone with tragic lack of that firm manner which disciplines clients:
“Say, uh, I think I got just the house that would suit you—the Percival House, in Linton....
Oh, you’ve seen it.
Well, how’d it strike you?...
Huh? ...Oh,” irresolutely, “oh, I see.”
As Babbitt marched into his private room, a coop with semi-partition of oak and frosted glass, at the back of the office, he reflected how hard it was to find employees who had his own faith that he was going to make sales.
There were nine members of the staff, besides Babbitt and his partner and father-in-law, Henry Thompson, who rarely came to the office. The nine were Stanley Graff, the outside salesman—a youngish man given to cigarettes and the playing of pool; old Mat Penniman, general utility man, collector of rents and salesman of insurance—broken, silent, gray; a mystery, reputed to have been a “crack” real-estate man with a firm of his own in haughty Brooklyn; Chester Kirby Laylock, resident salesman out at the Glen Oriole acreage development—an enthusiastic person with a silky mustache and much family; Miss Theresa McGoun, the swift and rather pretty stenographer; Miss Wilberta Bannigan, the thick, slow, laborious accountant and file-clerk; and four freelance part-time commission salesmen.