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.”
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.
