CHAPTER III

Our Mr. Wrenn

by Sinclair Lewis

CHAPTER III, OUR MR. WRENN by Sinclair Lewis

To George F. Babbitt, as to most prosperous citizens of Zenith, his motor car
was poetry and tragedy, love and heroism. The office was his pirate ship but
the car his perilous excursion ashore.

Among the tremendous crises of each day none was more dramatic than starting
the engine. It was slow on cold mornings; there was the long, anxious whirr
of the starter; and sometimes he had to drip ether into the cocks of the
cylinders, which was so very interesting that at lunch he would chronicle it
drop by drop, and orally calculate how much each drop had cost him.

This morning he was darkly prepared to find something wrong, and he felt
belittled when the mixture exploded sweet and strong, and the car didn't even
brush the door-jamb, gouged and splintery with many bruisings by fenders, as
he backed out of the garage. He was confused. He shouted "Morning!" to Sam
Doppelbrau with more cordiality than he had intended.

Babbitt's green and white Dutch Colonial house was one of three in that block
on Chatham Road. To the left of it was the residence of Mr. Samuel
Doppelbrau, secretary of an excellent firm of bathroom-fixture jobbers. His
was a comfortable house with no architectural manners whatever; a large wooden
box with a squat tower, a broad porch, and glossy paint yellow as a yolk.
Babbitt disapproved of Mr. and Mrs. Doppelbrau as "Bohemian." From their
house came midnight music and obscene laughter; there were neighborhood rumors
of bootlegged whisky and fast motor rides. They furnished Babbitt with many
happy evenings of discussion, during which he announced firmly, "I'm not
strait-laced, and I don't mind seeing a fellow throw in a drink once in a
while, but when it comes to deliberately trying to get away with a lot of
hell-raising all the while like the Doppelbraus do, it's too rich for my
blood!"

On the other side of Babbitt lived Howard Littlefield, Ph.D., in a strictly
modern house whereof the lower part was dark red tapestry brick, with a leaded
oriel, the upper part of pale stucco like spattered clay, and the roof
red-tiled. Littlefield was the Great Scholar of the neighborhood; the
authority on everything in the world except babies, cooking, and motors. He
was a Bachelor of Arts of Blodgett College, and a Doctor of Philosophy in
economics of Yale. He was the employment-manager and publicity-counsel of the
Zenith Street Traction Company. He could, on ten hours' notice, appear before
the board of aldermen or the state legislature and prove, absolutely, with
figures all in rows and with precedents from Poland and New Zealand, that the
street-car company loved the Public and yearned over its employees; that all
its stock was owned by Widows and Orphans; and that whatever it desired to do
would benefit property-owners by increasing rental values, and help the poor
by lowering rents. All his acquaintances turned to Littlefield when they
desired to know the date of the battle of Saragossa, the definition of the
word "sabotage," the future of the German mark, the translation of "hinc illae
lachrimae," or the number of products of coal tar. He awed Babbitt by
confessing that he often sat up till midnight reading the figures and
footnotes in Government reports, or skimming (with amusement at the author's
mistakes) the latest volumes of chemistry, archeology, and ichthyology.

But Littlefield's great value was as a spiritual example. Despite his strange
learnings he was as strict a Presbyterian and as firm a Republican as George
F. Babbitt. He confirmed the business men in the faith. Where they knew only
by passionate instinct that their system of industry and manners was perfect,
Dr. Howard Littlefield proved it to them, out of history, economics, and the
confessions of reformed radicals.

Babbitt had a good deal of honest pride in being the neighbor of such a
savant, and in Ted's intimacy with Eunice Littlefield. At sixteen Eunice was
interested in no statistics save those regarding the ages and salaries of
motion-picture stars, but--as Babbitt definitively put it--"she was her
father's daughter."

The difference between a light man like Sam Doppelbrau and a really fine
character like Littlefield was revealed in their appearances. Doppelbrau was
disturbingly young for a man of forty-eight. He wore his derby on the back of
his head, and his red face was wrinkled with meaningless laughter. But
Littlefield was old for a man of forty-two. He was tall, broad, thick; his
gold-rimmed spectacles were engulfed in the folds of his long face; his hair
was a tossed mass of greasy blackness; he puffed and rumbled as he talked; his
Phi Beta Kappa key shone against a spotty black vest; he smelled of old pipes;
he was altogether funereal and archidiaconal; and to real-estate brokerage and
the jobbing of bathroom-fixtures he added an aroma of sanctity.

This morning he was in front of his house, inspecting the grass parking
between the curb and the broad cement sidewalk. Babbitt stopped his car and
leaned out to shout "Mornin'!" Littlefield lumbered over and stood with one
foot up on the running-board.

"Fine morning," said Babbitt, lighting--illegally early--his second cigar of
the day.

"Yes, it's a mighty fine morning," said Littlefield.

"Spring coming along fast now."

"Yes, it's real spring now, all right," said Littlefield.

"Still cold nights, though. Had to have a couple blankets, on the
sleeping-porch last night."

"Yes, it wasn't any too warm last night," said Littlefield.

"But I don't anticipate we'll have any more real cold weather now."

"No, but still, there was snow at Tiflis, Montana, yesterday," said the
Scholar, "and you remember the blizzard they had out West three days
ago--thirty inches of snow at Greeley, Colorado--and two years ago we had a
snow-squall right here in Zenith on the twenty-fifth of April."

"Is that a fact! Say, old man, what do you think about the Republican
candidate? Who'll they nominate for president? Don't you think it's about
time we had a real business administration?"

"In my opinion, what the country needs, first and foremost, is a good, sound,
business-like conduct of its affairs. What we need is--a business
administration!" said Littlefield.

"I'm glad to hear you say that! I certainly am glad to hear you say that! I
didn't know how you'd feel about it, with all your associations with colleges
and so on, and I'm glad you feel that way. What the country needs--just at
this present juncture--is neither a college president nor a lot of monkeying
with foreign affairs, but a good--sound economical--business--administration,
that will give us a chance to have something like a decent turnover."

"Yes. It isn't generally realized that even in China the schoolmen are giving
way to more practical men, and of course you can see what that implies."

"Is that a fact! Well, well!" breathed Babbitt, feeling much calmer, and much
happier about the way things were going in the world. "Well, it's been nice to
stop and parleyvoo a second. Guess I'll have to get down to the office now
and sting a few clients. Well, so long, old man. See you tonight. So long."


II

They had labored, these solid citizens. Twenty years before, the hill on
which Floral Heights was spread, with its bright roofs and immaculate turf and
amazing comfort, had been a wilderness of rank second-growth elms and oaks and
maples. Along the precise streets were still a few wooded vacant lots, and the
fragment of an old orchard. It was brilliant to-day; the apple boughs were
lit with fresh leaves like torches of green fire. The first white of cherry
blossoms flickered down a gully, and robins clamored.

Babbitt sniffed the earth, chuckled at the hysteric robins as he would have
chuckled at kittens or at a comic movie. He was, to the eye, the perfect
office-going executive--a well-fed man in a correct brown soft hat and
frameless spectacles, smoking a large cigar, driving a good motor along a
semi-suburban parkway. But in him was some genius of authentic love for his
neighborhood, his city, his clan. The winter was over; the time was come for
the building, the visible growth, which to him was glory. He lost his dawn
depression; he was ruddily cheerful when he stopped on Smith Street to leave
the brown trousers, and to have the gasoline-tank filled.

The familiarity of the rite fortified him: the sight of the tall red iron
gasoline-pump, the hollow-tile and terra-cotta garage, the window full of the
most agreeable accessories--shiny casings, spark-plugs with immaculate
porcelain jackets tire-chains of gold and silver. He was flattered by the
friendliness with which Sylvester Moon, dirtiest and most skilled of motor
mechanics, came out to serve him. "Mornin', Mr. Babbitt!" said Moon, and
Babbitt felt himself a person of importance, one whose name even busy
garagemen remembered--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!" 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.

As he looked from his own cage into the main room Babbitt mourned, "McGoun's a
good stenog., smart's a whip, but Stan Graff and all those bums--" The zest of
the spring morning was smothered in the stale office air.

Normally he admired the office, with a pleased surprise that he should have
created this sure lovely thing; normally he was stimulated by the clean
newness of it and the air of bustle; but to-day it seemed flat--the tiled
floor, like a bathroom, the ocher-colored metal ceiling, the faded maps on the
hard plaster walls, the chairs of varnished pale oak, the desks and
filing-cabinets of steel painted in olive drab. It was a vault, a steel chapel
where loafing and laughter were raw sin.

He hadn't even any satisfaction in the new water-cooler! And it was the very
best of water-coolers, up-to-date, scientific, and right-thinking. It had cost
a great deal of money (in itself a virtue). It possessed a non-conducting
fiber ice-container, a porcelain water-jar (guaranteed hygienic), a drip-less
non-clogging sanitary faucet, and machine-painted decorations in two tones of
gold. He looked down the relentless stretch of tiled floor at the
water-cooler, and assured himself that no tenant of the Reeves Building had a
more expensive one, but he could not recapture the feeling of social
superiority it had given him. He astoundingly grunted, "I'd like to beat it
off to the woods right now. And loaf all day. And go to Gunch's again
to-night, and play poker, and cuss as much as I feel like, and drink a hundred
and nine-thousand bottles of beer."

He sighed; he read through his mail; he shouted "Msgoun," which meant "Miss
McGoun"; and began to dictate.

This was his own version of his first letter:

"Omar Gribble, send it to his office, Miss McGoun, yours of twentieth to hand
and in reply would say look here, Gribble, I'm awfully afraid if we go on
shilly-shallying like this we'll just naturally lose the Allen sale, I had
Allen up on carpet day before yesterday and got right down to cases and think
I can assure you--uh, uh, no, change that: all my experience indicates he is
all right, means to do business, looked into his financial record which is
fine--that sentence seems to be a little balled up, Miss McGoun; make a couple
sentences out of it if you have to, period, new paragraph.

"He is perfectly willing to pro rate the special assessment and strikes me, am
dead sure there will be no difficulty in getting him to pay for title
insurance, so now for heaven's sake let's get busy--no, make that: so now
let's go to it and get down--no, that's enough--you can tie those sentences up
a little better when you type 'em, Miss McGoun--your sincerely, etcetera."

This is the version of his letter which he received, typed, from Miss McGoun
that afternoon:

BABBITT-THOMPSON REALTY CO.
Homes for Folks
Reeves Bldg., Oberlin Avenue & 3d St., N.E
Zenith

Omar Gribble, Esq.,
376 North American Building,
Zenith.

Dear Mr. Gribble:

Your letter of the twentieth to hand. I must say I'm awfully afraid that if
we go on shilly-shallying like this we'll just naturally lose the Allen sale.
I had Allen up on the carpet day before yesterday, and got right down to
cases. All my experience indicates that he means to do business. I have also
looked into his financial record, which is fine.

He is perfectly willing to pro rate the special assessment and there will be
no difficulty in getting him to pay for title insurance.

SO LET'S GO!
Yours sincerely,

As he read and signed it, in his correct flowing business-college hand,
Babbitt reflected, "Now that's a good, strong letter, and clear's a bell. Now
what the--I never told McGoun to make a third paragraph there! Wish she'd
quit trying to improve on my dictation! But what I can't understand is: why
can't Stan Graff or Chet Laylock write a letter like that? With punch! With a
kick!"

The most important thing he dictated that morning was the fortnightly
form-letter, to be mimeographed and sent out to a thousand "prospects." It was
diligently imitative of the best literary models of the day; of
heart-to-heart-talk advertisements, "sales-pulling" letters, discourses on the
"development of Will-power," and hand-shaking house-organs, as richly poured
forth by the new school of Poets of Business. He had painfully written out a
first draft, and he intoned it now like a poet delicate and distrait:

SAY, OLD MAN! I just want to know can I do you a whaleuva favor? Honest! No
kidding! I know you're interested in getting a house, not merely a place
where you hang up the old bonnet but a love-nest for the wife and kiddies--and
maybe for the flivver out beyant (be sure and spell that b-e-y-a-n-t, Miss
McGoun) the spud garden. Say, did you ever stop to think that we're here to
save you trouble? That's how we make a living--folks don't pay us for our
lovely beauty! Now take a look:

Sit right down at the handsome carved mahogany escritoire and shoot us in a
line telling us just what you want, and if we can find it we'll come hopping
down your lane with the good tidings, and if we can't, we won't bother you. To
save your time, just fill out the blank enclosed. On request will also send
blank regarding store properties in Floral Heights, Silver Grove, Linton,
Bellevue, and all East Side residential districts.
Yours for service,

P.S.--Just a hint of some plums we can pick for you--some genuine bargains
that came in to-day:

SILVER GROVE.--Cute four-room California bungalow, a.m.i., garage, dandy shade
tree, swell neighborhood, handy car line. $3700, $780 down and balance
liberal, Babbitt-Thompson terms, cheaper than rent.

DORCHESTER.--A corker! Artistic two-family house, all oak trim, parquet
floors, lovely gas log, big porches, colonial, HEATED ALL-WEATHER GARAGE, a
bargain at $11,250.


Dictation over, with its need of sitting and thinking instead of bustling
around and making a noise and really doing something, Babbitt sat creakily
back in his revolving desk-chair and beamed on Miss McGoun. He was conscious
of her as a girl, of black bobbed hair against demure cheeks. A longing which
was indistinguishable from loneliness enfeebled him. While she waited, tapping
a long, precise pencil-point on the desk-tablet, he half identified her with
the fairy girl of his dreams. He imagined their eyes meeting with terrifying
recognition; imagined touching her lips with frightened reverence and--She was
chirping, "Any more, Mist' Babbitt?" He grunted, "That winds it up, I guess,"
and turned heavily away.

For all his wandering thoughts, they had never been more intimate than this.
He often reflected, "Nev' forget how old Jake Offutt said a wise bird never
goes love-making in his own office or his own home. Start trouble. Sure.
But--"

In twenty-three years of married life he had peered uneasily at every graceful
ankle, every soft shoulder; in thought he had treasured them; but not once had
he hazarded respectability by adventuring. Now, as he calculated the cost of
repapering the Styles house, he was restless again, discontented about nothing
and everything, ashamed of his discontentment, and lonely for the fairy girl.