Chapter XIII. How One Dollar
and a Half Secured “The
Devil in Society.” The Medicine
Chest which Became a Tract Depository
under the Teachings of a
New Creed. How I Stuck to
Orthodoxy
THE spring was full upon us, with the return of the birds, the tang of the new plowed soil in the sugar-field where the “University Mare” tugged listlessly at the plow whose blade sliced through the clayey earth leaving back of it shiny, damp slices on which the birds stood and pecked up the exposed grubs and worms. The dynamite wagon with its frail springs and its dangerous load jogged by along the turnpike on its way to newly-bored oil-wells. Flocks of sheep with an accompanying host of maximum-legged lamblets passed over the turnpike on their way to the railroad-cars, to be followed by grunting packs of hogs directed by sapling-armed drovers who in one minute of speech profaned the whole English language. Chugging traction-engines, hauling plows and harrows and on their way to hundred-acred wheat and corn fields, passed in the night-time with their shrill whistle-screams for water and their explosive puffing and puffing as if no breath in their steel bodies could successfully spurt them through the soft mire.
Thropper said to me, one afternoon,
“Priddy, how would you like to sell books?”
“Sell books, Thropper?”
Thropper nodded.
“What for?” I asked, interestedly.
“For money, of course, Priddy! What do you think?”
“It takes talk to sell books, Thropper!”
“Then you ought to make a success at the business, Priddy!”
“What’s the book?”
“‘The Devil in Society, or High Life in Washington by an Ex-Congressman,’” quoted Thropper.
“Sensational, then?”
“A moral book—with a lesson,” laughed Thropper, “pepper to make you know that it stings, you see, Priddy. Fifty per cent on each one. Buy them for seventy-five cents, sell for dollar and a half. Easy money, everybody wants the book on sight. I’ll loan you three dollars for four if you want. Sure to sell them!”
“Anything to get some cash,” I cried. “Besides this would take me on Saturday trips into the surrounding towns. That would be quite an adventure after staying here throughout the winter. Will you show me the book?”
“‘Pa’ Borden will bring one around tonight. He’s the general agent,” declared my roommate.
In the evening, before the half-past seven bell had signalled silence and study, “Pa” Borden had displayed the book to us. It was a lurid green cloth-bound affair in which the glue showed in the web of the cloth, printed with blotched, worn type on the cheapest of cheap paper and interspersed with amateurish wood-cuts of which I recall a drunken revel in a ball-room and some ballet-dancer-garbed women on a seashore with wooden waves indicated by wavy lines. I was no connoisseur of literature at the time and took as solemn truth “Pa” Borden’s words that “anything that was of the Devil ought to be showed up, even if it cost a dollar and a half!” I allowed Thropper to get me four of the books and placed myself under his instructions for a week during which time I learned how to point out the chief items of interest in the illustrations when they were upside down, to give a kinetoscopic view of the table of contents, and to end by flashing the record of previous sales before the astonished housewife’s eyes before she could make up her mind whether she wanted the book or not.
The following week, then, after engaging a substitute waiter for the day I accompanied Thropper to Pubbets Junction to place “The Devil in Society.” The first door on which I knocked chanced to be that of a Christian Science Reader, a very highly cultivated and sweet-spirited woman who, the minute I announced that I was agent for a book entitled “The Devil in Society” immediately knocked my “patter” hors de combat by announcing, firmly, that there was no such thing as a Devil and that it was all a delusion of mortal mind, adding various other remonstrances of a philosophical, semi-philosophical, and dogmatic nature which I was in no mood or mind to combat. Besides bewildering me in the intellectual meshes of that new doctrine, the woman made me sit in her office and listen to a fascinating recital of her household’s progress from a drug-store of drugs to an empty medicine chest: to a radical change in the family temper from semi-pessimism into a real sunburst of glorious, mellowing optimism: to an intricate and involved interpretation of the Old Testament and then in a very cloudy but, to me, excitingly suggestive denial of all facts that men and books had told me were positive and real. All this, of course, was the precursor to an attempt to proselyte me to the faith of Christian Science. After she had shown me the empty medicine chest, which she was then using as a store-house for all sorts of Christian Science literature, I told her that I had learned a great deal that was both new and novel, that I would think it over seriously, but that I should never believe in anything but orthodoxy. Then I called at the next house and many other houses, so that by noon, when I met Thropper at a candy store, where we lunched on a glass of milk and some Washington pie, I had sold two books and earned one dollar and a half. In the flush of that success, I returned to the University, ready to repeat the excursion the following and several other Saturday mornings. According to Thropper’s epigram, “The Devil in Society” meant dollars in our pockets!