He was to share a room at the Hotel Sedgwick with W. A. Rogers, that shrewd, rustic-looking Zenith dealer in farmlands. Together they had a noble breakfast, with waffles, and coffee not in exiguous cups but in large pots. Babbitt grew expansive, and told Rogers about the art of writing; he gave a bellboy a quarter to fetch a morning newspaper from the lobby, and sent to Tinka a postcard: “Papa wishes you were here to bat round with him.”
V
The meetings of the convention were held in the ballroom of the Allen House. In an anteroom was the office of the chairman of the executive committee. He was the busiest man in the convention; he was so busy that he got nothing done whatever. He sat at a marquetry table, in a room littered with crumpled paper and, all day long, town-boosters and lobbyists and orators who wished to lead debates came and whispered to him, whereupon he looked vague, and said rapidly, “Yes, yes, that’s a fine idea; we’ll do that,” and instantly forgot all about it, lighted a cigar and forgot that too, while the telephone rang mercilessly and about him men kept beseeching, “Say, Mr. Chairman—say, Mr. Chairman!” without penetrating his exhausted hearing.
In the exhibit-room were plans of the new suburbs of Sparta, pictures of the new state capitol, at Galop de Vache, and large ears of corn with the label, “Nature’s Gold, from Shelby County, the Garden Spot of God’s Own Country.”
The real convention consisted of men muttering in hotel bedrooms or in groups amid the badge-spotted crowd in the hotel-lobby, but there was a show of public meetings.
The first of them opened with a welcome by the mayor of Monarch. The pastor of the First Christian Church of Monarch, a large man with a long damp frontal lock, informed God that the real-estate men were here now.
The venerable Minnemagantic realtor, Major Carlton Tuke, read a paper in which he denounced cooperative stores. William A. Larkin of Eureka gave a comforting prognosis of “The Prospects for Increased Construction,” and reminded them that plate-glass prices were two points lower.
The convention was on.
The delegates were entertained, incessantly and firmly. The Monarch Chamber of Commerce gave them a banquet, and the Manufacturers’ Association an afternoon reception, at which a chrysanthemum was presented to each of the ladies, and to each of the men a leather billfold inscribed “From Monarch the Mighty Motor Mart.”
Mrs. Crosby Knowlton, wife of the manufacturer of Fleetwing Automobiles, opened her celebrated Italian garden and served tea. Six hundred real-estate men and wives ambled down the autumnal paths. Perhaps three hundred of them were quietly inconspicuous; perhaps three hundred vigorously exclaimed, “This is pretty slick, eh?” surreptitiously picked the late asters and concealed them in their pockets, and tried to get near enough to Mrs. Knowlton to shake her lovely hand. Without request, the Zenith delegates (except Rountree) gathered round a marble dancing nymph and sang “Here we come, the fellows from Zenith, the Zip Citee.”
It chanced that all the delegates from Pioneer belonged to the Brotherly and Protective Order of Elks, and they produced an enormous banner lettered: “B.P.O.E.—Best People on Earth—Boost Pioneer, Oh Eddie.” Nor was Galop de Vache, the state capital, to be slighted. The leader of the Galop de Vache delegation was a large, reddish, roundish man, but active. He took off his coat, hurled his broad black felt hat on the ground, rolled up his sleeves, climbed upon the sundial, spat, and bellowed:
“We’ll tell the world, and the good lady who’s giving the show this afternoon, that the bonniest burg in this man’s state is Galop de Vache. You boys can talk about your zip, but jus’ lemme murmur that old Galop has the largest proportion of home-owning citizens in the state; and when folks own their homes, they ain’t starting labor-troubles, and they’re raising kids instead of raising hell! Galop de Vache! The town for homey folks! The town that eats ’em alive oh, Bosco! We’ll—tell—the—world!”
The guests drove off; the garden shivered into quiet. But Mrs. Crosby Knowlton sighed as she looked at a marble seat warm from five hundred summers of Amalfi. On the face of a winged sphinx which supported it someone had drawn a mustache in lead-pencil. Crumpled paper napkins were dumped among the Michaelmas daisies. On the walk, like shredded lovely flesh, were the petals of the last gallant rose. Cigarette stubs floated in the goldfish pool, trailing an evil stain as they swelled and disintegrated, and beneath the marble seat, the fragments carefully put together, was a smashed teacup.
VI
As he rode back to the hotel Babbitt reflected, “Myra would have enjoyed all this social agony.” For himself he cared less for the garden party than for the motor tours which the Monarch Chamber of Commerce had arranged. Indefatigably he viewed water-reservoirs, suburban trolley-stations, and tanneries. He devoured the statistics which were given to him, and marveled to his roommate, W. A. Rogers, “Of course this town isn’t a patch on Zenith; it hasn’t got our outlook and natural resources; but did you know—I nev’ did till today—that they manufactured seven hundred and sixty-three million feet of lumber last year? What d’ you think of that!”
He was nervous as the time for reading his paper approached. When he stood on the low platform before the convention, he trembled and saw only a purple haze. But he was in earnest, and when he had finished the formal paper he talked to them, his hands in his pockets, his spectacled face a flashing disk, like a plate set up on edge in the lamplight. They shouted “That’s the stuff!” and in the discussion afterward they referred with impressiveness to “our friend and brother, Mr. George F. Babbitt.” He had in fifteen minutes changed from a minor delegate to a personage almost as well known as
