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, Noel 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 Noel 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 Noel 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—”
II
He answered telephone calls, he read the four o’clock
mail, he signed his morning’s letters, he talked
to a tenant about repairs, he fought with Stanley
Graff.
Young Graff, the outside salesman, was always hinting
that he deserved an increase of commission, and to-day
he complained, “I think I ought to get a bonus
if I put through the Heiler sale. I’m chasing
around and working on it every single evening, almost.”
