Babbit by Sinclair Lewis Read Free Book Online Page B

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."
      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