Babbit

tragedy, love and heroism. The office was his pirate ship but the car his perilous excursion

ered — not one of these cheap-sports flying around in flivvers. He admired the ingenuity of the automatic dial, clicking off gallon by gallon; admired the smartness of the sign: “A fill in time saves getting stuck — gas to-day 31 cents”; admired the rhythmic gurgle of the gasoline as it flowed into the tank, and the mechanical regularity with which Moon turned the handle.“How much we takin’ to-day?” asked Moon, in a manner which combined the independence of the great specialist, the friendliness of a familiar gossip, and respect for a man of weight in the community, like George F. Babbitt.“Fill ‘er up.”“Who you rootin’ for for Republican candidate, Mr. Babbitt?”“It’s too early to make any predictions yet. After all, there’s still a good month and two weeks — no, three weeks — must be almost three weeks — well, there’s more than six weeks in all before the Republican convention, and I feel a fellow ought to keep an open mind and give all the candidates a show — look ’em all over and size ’em up, and then decide carefully.”“That’s a fact, Mr. Babbitt.”“But I’ll tell you — and my stand on this is just the same as it was four years ago, and eight years ago, and it’ll be my stand four years from now — yes, and eight years from now! What I tell everybody, and it can’t be too generally understood, is that what we need first, last, and all the time is a good, sound business administration!”“By golly, that’s right!”“How do those front tires look to you?”“Fine! Fine! Wouldn’t be much work for garages if everybody looked after their car the way you do.”“Well, I do try and have some sense about it.” Babbitt paid his bill, said adequately, “Oh, keep the change,” and drove off in an ecstasy of honest self-appreciation. It was with the manner of a Good Samaritan that he shouted at a respectable-looking man who was waiting for a trolley car, “Have a lift?” As the man climbed in Babbitt condescended, “Going clear down-town? Whenever I see a fellow waiting for a trolley, I always make it a practice to give him a lift — unless, of course, he looks like a bum.”“Wish there were more folks that were so generous with their machines,” dutifully said the victim of benevolence. “Oh, no, ‘tain’t a question of generosity, hardly. Fact, I always feel — I was saying to my son just the other night — it’s a fellow’s duty to share the good things of this world with his neighbors, and it gets my goat when a fellow gets stuck on himself and goes around tooting his horn merely because he’s charitable.”The victim seemed unable to find the right answer. Babbitt boomed on:“Pretty punk service the Company giving us on these car-lines. Nonsense to only run the Portland Road cars once every seven minutes. Fellow gets mighty cold on a winter morning, waiting on a street corner with the wind nipping at his ankles.”“That’s right. 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!” IIIEpochal 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 t