Babbitt

Babbitt

CHAPTER I

The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of

steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver

rods. They were neither citadels nor churches, but frankly and

beautifully office-buildings.

The mist took pity on the fretted structures of earlier generations: the

Post Office with its shingle-tortured mansard, the red brick minarets of

hulking old houses, factories with stingy and sooted windows, wooden

tenements colored like mud. The city was full of such grotesqueries, but

the clean towers were thrusting them from the business center, and on

the farther hills were shining new houses, homes--they seemed--for

laughter and tranquillity.

Over a concrete bridge fled a limousine of long sleek hood and noiseless

engine. These people in evening clothes were returning from an all-night

rehearsal of a Little Theater play, an artistic adventure considerably

illuminated by champagne. Below the bridge curved a railroad, a maze of

green and crimson lights. The New York Flyer boomed past, and twenty

lines of polished steel leaped into the glare.

In one of the skyscrapers the wires of the Associated Press were closing

down. The telegraph operators wearily raised their celluloid eye-shades

after a night of talking with Paris and Peking. Through the building

crawled the scrubwomen, yawning, their old shoes slapping. The dawn mist

spun away. Cues of men with lunch-boxes clumped toward the immensity of

new factories, sheets of glass and hollow tile, glittering shops where

five thousand men worked beneath one roof, pouring out the honest wares

that would be sold up the Euphrates and across the veldt. The whistles

rolled out in greeting a chorus cheerful as the April dawn; the song of

labor in a city built--it seemed--for giants.