He can then go around the corner, if he wants to, and put his thumb to his nose or call the Buyer anything he can think up that doesn’t carry too far along the etheric waves. But to indulge any such feeling before one is off and premises is to invite probable loss of Sale and possible kick in neck.
But Zeekie, the poor smelt, got it all twisted and thought it was war-time and that Buyers were going to come up and kiss him when he arrived and ask him how all the folks were, and carry his suit-case for him, just because he had something to sell.
When they didn’t do it, but on the contrary, went right on reading and signing letters and transacting routine office business all the time he was talking to them, as Buyers in normal seasons enjoy doing, Zeekie felt that his dignity was being shot at from ambush, and so he began telling his Prospects different things that they could do if they didn’t want to buy his celebrated goods.
While no physical harm befell Ezekiel during these clashes, no orders befell him either, and after working the whole surrounding county and netting nothing but a large ostrich egg, he sat down at the wabbly hotel writing-desk on Saturday night and sent the Sales Manager a Report about those fourteen carloads that made that astute little Baked Bean shoot to the scantlings when he read it on Monday morning.
It took the Bostonian about one full minute after he struck terra cotta again to realize that Ezekiel was down with a violent case of Sales-manic Inflation that could be cured only by the knife. So he promptly cut off Zeke’s job and wired him to take the Fifteen Dollars he still had of Dear Firm’s expense money and paddle back to the Old Home Hamlet with it.
Now we come on with the anti-climax, the fall of the action, and the close, thus preserving the dramatic unities and giving our readers that sense of relief which a concluding announcement of ours always brings.
When the Hotel Proprietor received the fateful telegram Monday noon and delivered it personally to Ezekiel Whiffle at the breakfast table, the large bucolic appetite which Ezekiel had been vigorously feeding, suddenly and unceremoniously departed, leaving a whole shredded wheat biscuit midway between his incisors and the outside of his face. In fact he entirely forgot it was there until he came to, several minutes or aeons afterward, and tried to pass a glass of water along the parched pathway of his oesophagus.
On the thirty-seventh reading of the Farewell Proclamation, Ezekiel pulled himself together sufficiently to get up from the table and go out and announce to the Proprietor he was leaving for Chicago on the 3:37. The painstaking little Prop observed for the first time a human note in Zeke’s way of putting things.
He suggested that there was a fast train an hour later that carried all Pullmans and got in four hours sooner, if Zeke cared to drive over to the B. Q. & X. junction a mile away. Zeke thanked him (1st thank recorded) and said he had just as soon take the Day Coach Train as he was only going to be on it a day and a night.
Zeke went upstairs to pack his things and had a feeling that his room somehow was much larger and more comfortable than he had thought it was, and he sort of hated to give it up.
When the yellow bus came alongside for the 3:37 and the driver attempted to toss Zeke’s suit-case up on the roof, Zeke took it away from him and said he guessed he’d walk to the station and get the fresh air. The driver asked if he might take the suit-case anyway; but Zeke feared a nickle tip might be expected and he pulled it back and started off for the Station.
The Bus rumbled past Zeke on the way and Zeke thought they had painted it or something. Fifteen minutes later when he was still a half mile from the Station with but 10 minutes to spare, and had just shifted his baggage from hand to hand for the eleventh time, and was sweating like a Madras coolie, he got to thinking what a nice accomodation a Bus was anyway for a little jerkwater like Luke’s Rock, and wished he had hopped it at the Hotel.
The 3:37 was one hour and fifty-nine minutes late but Zeke didn’t have anything to attend to at destination that he couldn’t do just as well sitting here; so he continued his reflections about Life in general and didn’t grouse even to himself.
After riding a hundred and fifty years on the Day Coach, Zeke finally reached Chicago with a stiff neck and swollen underpinning but meek as a mujik. As he was hobbling out of the busy Railway Station a Red Cap passed him toting two big suit-cases. They had a million labels pasted all over them and as Zeke humped along behind, he began to inspect the curiosity.
He was reading “Bombay,” “Constantinople,” “Cairo” and a lot of other names that he had never heard before, and was wondering what State they were in, when he heard a voice just behind him call to the Red Cap: “Here, Boy, put them on this taxi.”
Ezekiel looked up and beheld the Big Silent Man—the man who had imparted the much needed but disregarded advice on the occasion of Zeke’s first meal at somebody else’s expense.
“Blackstone Hotel,” said the Big Man as he handed the Red Cap a quarter and stepped into the Taxi.
That night in a wee inside room on the fourth floor of the Lake Smell Dollar Up sat Ezekiel Whiffle trying to read the Help Wanted columns by the dim light that spluttered from a broken gas fixture over the narrow spring-tooth bed.
He was a sadder but a wiser Ambassador of Commerce.
A TIRED Business Man sat at his busy desk cleaning his nails with his paper-knife and lamenting in his tired-businessman’s heart the lack of organization among manufacturers.
The name of this particular t. b. Man was Willyums and he was well-to-do and had a separate pair of suspenders for each pair of trousers.
“Just look at the situation,” sighed our fervent plugger for united action. “Here we manufacturers are, all knifing one another like a squirming bunch of inch-browed dagoes, when we ought to be solidly organized and working as a single unit against the iniquitous principle of labor organization.”
At this point in Willyums’ little round soliloquy the Office Beetle crawled in and handed him his morning’s mail.
Willyums picked up the letter and read it carefully. It was from a friendly Compett who complained bitterly about the Government’s unfair discrimination, and he asked Willyums to offer a suggestion how to head off all such pernicious activity.
This gave Willyums a great wide opportunity to ventilate his views on the crying necessity for cooperative action among manufacturers.
He dictated a letter that was all muscle and fibre. In it he urged the importance of all manufacturers organizing for their mutual protection. He stated that only through unselfishness on the part of Each, could the good of All be served; and original things like that.
Willyums then drafted another snorter to send out to such other manufacturers as he was on speaking terms with, and he pleaded with them to put their shoulders to the wheel and make every sacrifice for the furtherance of the Cause.
He said that any man who would not give up his time whole-heartedly to the work was a stumbling-block in the march of Progress, and he coined other metaphors and epigrammatic phrases that made his letter sizzle and spit like a war-whooper at the Big Grove.
When the “copy” was typewritten and delivered back to Willyums to read and enjoy, he scanned it hurriedly a few dozen times and then handed it to his Advertising-Manager and told that groove-dweller to cut out all the personal pronouns so the Trade wouldn’t think it came from J. Ham Lewis and then gallop the letter off to all the names on the list.
The responses that fluttered back were very encouraging. Everybody seemed strong for organizing at once, and several letters indicated subdued excitement.
A number of leading manufacturers soon got together and perfected a temporary organization and selected a name for the new Association that read like a serial story.
Business matters of a pressing nature prevented Willyums from attending the first meeting, but he wrote a strong letter of endorsement and it was read at the morning session and was much enjoyed by All Those Present as well as himself.
At this Conference it was decided to hold a big meeting of the whole Trade and get things going like a busy shipyard, and the place and date were fixed well in advance so that nobody could stall out.
Willyums wrote the Secretary back another shoulder-to-the-wheel letter and said he would be there positivoli. But when the time slid up for him to set sail, he and his wife had a Breathitt County difference of opinion which threatened to end in Woodlawn Cemetery. It started about her always leaving the icebox door open, and finished up with a pungent polemic on his sensitiveness and all-round worthlessness as a marital leaning post.
Willyums naturally wanted to stick in the ring till the finish, so he was obliged to wire The Boys that he couldn’t be at the meeting and to go ahead without him.
The Meeting proved to be a Great Success and a date was fixed for the First Annual Convention which was to be held at Wagon Springs, Va., and all members were notified to be on hand and to bring their wives and colorless daughters along to enjoy the Entertainment Features and drink of the health-giving waters generously provided by the Hotel Management, with the slight assistance of Nature, at five cents per glass or one cent per paper cup.
Willyums invited Comrade Wife to accompany him and helped her to get her hat-box through the door and shut the cover of her yawning trunk and pack into his own little tin-trimmed steamer all the things she had forgotten to put in her travelling bungalow.
When Willyums arrived at Wagon Springs the Hotel people gave him the customary welcome of The Hotel Successful which consists in telling the train-tuckered visitor that they have no record of any reservation for him and that he will have to sleep on the Town Pump or up in the pigeons’ quarters.
Willyums smoothed out the bulge in his shirt-bosom and told the Emperor back of the desk that he was there to attend The Convention, and as soon as he said this, he lost the two good sleeping-chances referred to up-page.
This made him as sore as a blistered heel and he went straight to the Twelfth Assistant Manager and told him (the 12th Ass’t Manager) that if it had not been for him (Willyums), there would be no Convention at all, and that he (12th Ass’t Manager) would not be running full-up in his (Mgr’s) old Hotel, and that if he (M) did not at once provide him (W) with suitable accomodations, there was going to be a small but efficient funeral around there.
Willyums got the accomodations all right, including a washstand and neat little ash tray to put his ashes in; but it was so late when he and Mrs. Willyums hit the hessian that they did not open up until 10 o’clock next morning, and then he had to go and dig up the lost luggage so that Madame could drape her matronly Fig. in a new child’s dress.
As a consequence Willyums did not get to the opening session of the Convention but he pumped palms with a number of delegates and said he would see them surely at the afternoon session.
The afternoon session was scheduled for 2 o’clock, and so the delegates got there promptly at 3. Willyums was somewhere about the 3rd hole when the meeting was called to order because Mrs. Willyums was just a cub at golf and insisted on doing the 18 no matter what happened. They sweated back to the hotel along about sundown, barely on speaking terms because he had told her that the woman did not live who would not cheat at golf.
The next morning Willyums announced solemnly to his unselfish helpmeet that he was going to attend the remaining sessions of the Convention or bust. Whereupon Mrs. Willyums let loose a torrent of real tears and told him what a shrimp he was to bring her along and then keep her cooped up in a little ingrowing room when they might both be riding in the mountains and getting some fresh air.
Willyums was a highly sensitized man and could not endure lachrymal leaks, and it did not take him long to give in. In fact he caved in, and accompanied his considerate little wife on horseback, and they had a very nice time and both agreed that the afternoon would positively be his to spend at the closing session of the Convention.
When they returned to the Hotel Willyums learned that the Convention had disposed of all pending matters at the preceding session and had decided to adjourn sine die and give the last afternoon over to Unalloyed Pleasure.
Willyums met several delegates coming out of the Convention Hall and they told him they did not know what they should have done without his generous cooperation, and thanked him for the Great Assistance he had been to them all since the very beginning.
FLOPPINGHAM WATERDELL sat in his office, feet erect, smoking his morning sisal.
And nursing along his habitual grouch against Dear Firm.
Six months before, Floppingham Waterdell had been stricken with the honor of Branch Manager.
It was the biggest job he had ever managed to throw in all his long speckled career, but for some foolish reason Dear Firm thought they had hold of a Whale when they fished him out of the deep blue sea of Job Searchers.
“The utter planlessness of their work,” sighed Floppingham, re-crossing his unexercised legs and taking another long, legumenous puff at the root of all evil.
“They send me here to take charge of an office that has heretofore been conducted absolutely without system, and then they expect me to go out and do business without telling me where they want me to go, or how they expect me to go about it. They scuttle my plans and they don’t offer any themselves. All they say is, ‘Go get the business.’”
“All work should be planned beforehand,” continued Floppingham, reflectively. “No business man should attempt to do business until he knows his territory thoroughly and the character of his Prospects—even down to their peculiarities and hobbies, thus eliminating lost motion in the Approach, and simplifying the road of ingress.”
From the foregoing irridescent little exerpt from Floppingham Waterdell’s daily conferences with himself over the deficiencies of his Firm, the reader has come to the conclusion, or not, as the case may be, that Floppingham was himself a rhinoceros of no small heft when it came to Business Efficiency.
And indeed Flop was.
Every file in the office, every colored thumbtack on the map, every drawer of his desk, every card-index, chart, letter and cuspidor sang of The Office Efficient.
And all accomplished within six short, shrimpy months!
For examp: When Floppingham took charge of the dump, you couldn’t find a letter in the files without looking for it. Three months later you didn’t have to go to the files at all when you wanted to look at a letter. You would go to a Card Index where you found all the meaty paragraphs of the letter arranged on a card alphabetically, chronologically and hypodermically, including the writer’s telephone number and all such other thrilling news as appears at the apex of the average letterhead.
As a check against error, you then would get out the original letter from the regular files and compare the card with the letter, or the letter with the card, or vice versa, and the trick was done! Positively no plush curtains or false bottoms to deceive you!
It took one girl only four months to get this system in shape so she could take off the skid-chains.
Before Floppingham assumed charge, nobody around the office even knew how many steps a thirsty bookkeeper had to take to make the water-tank at the opposite side of the room and get back to the revolving perch. Nor did anybody know the amount of time that was consumed per step in such a wild orgy.
But Floppingham, through his original system of Step Reduction, figured out that if the bookkeeper would lengthen his stride to the Thirst Muffler, he would thereby reduce the number of steps; or, in other well selected words, reduce the time consumed in wasting Dear Firm’s time drinking water.
Thus if ten steps were saved through Step Standardization, and each step consumed one second, that would mean a net saving of ten seconds per trip to the Trough. Granted that six trips per day were made during the winter months, and six hundred during the Dog Season, the result would be a grand total of umpty-ump hours per year per clerk, or a net saving of ifty-ift dollars per year to the Business.
And just to show you to what a fine point the reasoning of the Efficiency Engineer can be spun out without snapping, we will add that Floppingham always took into consideration the length of an applicant’s legs when hiring a clerk.
These were but a couple of Floppingham’s efficiency installations. He had a million of them. They ranged all the way from Sales Planning to counting the number of puffs to a hemp panatella. He wore out the seat of his trouserial furniture figuring them out.
One day Dear Firm sent him a letter swathed in purple satire, suggesting that Efficiency was a means, not an end, and that if he felt that his Branch could do a little Business once in a while without greatly impairing its uselessness, they would send him a bright young man with a plaid vest to help him make sales.
Whereupon Floppingham Waterdell adjusted his glasses, took up his efficient pen that had pulled him through many a stall, and wrote out plans and specifications covering the kind and quality of man he desired.
It is possible that the talent and virtues and experience of the Human Race, taken as a whole, might have perhaps been able to squeeze up to Floppingham’s requirements as set forth by Flop under numerous heads and sub-heads designated as (a) (b) (c) and so forth—the kind, you know, that many Government employes and other bluffologists revel in.
When Dear Firm received from Floppingham this last brilliant contribution to the records of Commercial Pish, they winked one eye clear to the roots and then dictated the following Appreciation:
“We don’t know just when it happened, nor just how it happened, but the Business World today is infested with a new stripe of grafter—the Efficiency Eel, to which School you seem to have a Rhodes Scholarship.
“Efficiency Eels are Word Wizards and Figure Fixers of a very clever order, and we poor uneducated kanoops of the workaday-and-night world have been caught by the swing of their phrases and the flare of their ‘facts.’
“Not a yap of them ever did a day’s work since he left college, and couldn’t get out and sell a bill of postage stamps at 50 and 5. Instead of planning for business, they make a business of planning. They are always getting ready, but they never start. They are piffling pollywogs on the plane of the Practical, but past grand masters in the philosophy of Bunk.
“The reason they keep planning and organizing and systemizing all the time is because they know they are nix glox on Performance. And plans without performance are like teeth without jaws.
“Show us the gunk that is always laying the blame for his own failure to lack of efficiency and system in his employer’s business, and we’ll show you a gunk who is stalling for fair.
“For six months, come Yom Kippur, you have been ‘planning’ to bag a little business, and if we kept you there for six years, or six hundred years, you would still be planning. You are a planner and not a worker. You can MAKE plans all right, but you could not EXECUTE one of them if it laid its head on the block and handed you the axe.
“It isn’t your fault, Mr. Stall, that we have been slow to get your curves. We are just like hundreds of other firms—just plain, ordinary yappoos who would rather hire an outside man at $20,000 a year to do nothing but plan, than give half the salary to an inside man and have him perform. But now that we are ON, would you mind considering yourself submarined and greatly oblige etc.”
A POVERTY-PANNED mill owner who had only been able to finger in a bare ten million after twenty gruelling years of grimy grind at Board Meetings and Stock-holders’ Seances, sat wearily at his flat-topped Mahogany and heaved a long abdominal sigh at the hellward tendency of the children of today.
“It’s all due to the Pernicious Activity of these agitators,” he said, wiping away a great big humanitarian tear. “All that I am today I owe to the hardships I suffered when a child.”
Here he turned on a few more big salty boys and then continued; “Poverty is a blessing and an educator, and yet these here agitators come along and want to take out of my mill the lucky children that are having a chance through my bounty to become worthy citizens of this great, glorious Republic of ours.”
He was just on the verge of adding a few trembling mushmellows about the stars and stripes waving in the free, pure air of America when his emotion got a hackenschmidt stranglehold on his large oily thorax, and he couldn’t splutter it across.
When he had recovered his composure and wiped the sweat-beads from his nice thick neck, he got to thinking some more of all he had done for the town by giving employment to its skinny-legged children, and putting more money in circulation, and all that sort of fly-smacked mediaeval economics, and he choked up again at the thought of how little his beneficence had been appreciated.
In his great paternal heart he knew that his motive in doing all this unselfish thing for the thin-wristed tots of the town was as pure as the lotos flower, and that there was no low-lying thought of the good old coin he was pulling down on the investment.
In fact he was so sure of it that when he chanced one day to notice a wee ripple on the sweet still sea of Graft in the shape of a parboiled attempt to increase the children’s wages from One Penny to Two Pennies, he was about as indifferent as a gunless man in a tiger’s lair.
Many other little things went to show the philanthropic purpose of King Paunch’s acts. He had, for instance, a noonday feed served to the child workers which enabled them to romp joyfully back to the looms twenty minutes sooner each day, and a little later he again got busy with his short pencil and long head and figured out how he could cut off a certain yard space for a playground without cutting off the profits.
He stood wide-legged and willing at all times to prove to anybody that the children were better off in his mill working ten hours a day than they would be in their homes, and that when it came to Loving Care and Attention the laughing loom had any Day Nursery in the land walloped to a wobble.
There was no opportunity, he contended, for the youngsters to acquire vicious habits, except a lint-cough, and by keeping them standing all day catching threads to the rhythm of the loom-buzz, they would not run up against wicked temptation to Walk the Streets.
Every time he would get through telling about his charitable works, he would feel for his halo to see that it was on straight.
In certain moments of mental liberality he would concede that his mill did not include quite all the conveniences and comforts of Heaven, but generally speaking, it was about the most constructive hangout, from a physical, mental and moral standpoint, that you could find south of the Pearline Gates.
There was a touch of pathos in the sight of this willing martyr to the cause of Progress and Purity getting all sweatted up arguing his side of the case against those fanatics who were obsessed with the crazy notion that the place for little children was in school.
Searching through history he found that all the other great and good benefactors of the Race had always run up against the cross or the hemlock in time, and so whenever he was not perorating with fist-pounding positives, he was lying back sad-eyed and resigned, trying to acquire a forgive-them-for-they-know-not-what-they-do look, and breathing forgiveness heavily through every pore.
In time—and now we are coming to the weep part of our throbbing tale—Colonel Razorback’s friends began to notice that he was throttling down physically to the point where the only thing that could save him from losing his appetite between meals was to send him to Carlsbad.
Constant worriment over the passage of some Law in the selfish interest of Public Good by which he might have to give up his 500 precious child charges to the ruthless and demoralizing influence of home and school, reacted upon his liver and it began to reach out and kick him in the spine when he wasn’t looking.
There was not the least sign anywhere around the organic or functional premises to indicate that his condition was aggravated by the thought that he might have to employ grown-ups at slightly stretched wages, and we have therefore no right to diagnose any man’s case afar off.
We shall only say in passing, and without any intimate relevancy to our story whatever, that Colonel Hogshead was pained to the very quick-sand to have to leave his young daughter and his little cowlick-headed son to the tender mercies of a private tutor, a governess, three freckled servants, and their mother, but he managed to bear up under it, and sail away to Carlsbad.
Thus, after issuing Strict Instructions that his own precious tendrils should breathe no second-hand air, nor go out in the heat of the day, nor study too hard, nor exercise when they were the least bit tired, nor get less than 10 hours sleep, nor eat anything not raised under glass, he tore himself away, and, in due time, was lying peaceful and fat in his deck-chair, rugged in snugly and comfy, sleeping the sleep of the Righteous, and dreaming contentedly of all that he was today—all that the blessed privilege of early poverty had made him.
SLOBBINGS knew that motor cars had four wheels and were owned by people who could not afford them.
Slobbings’ wife was equally well up on the subject. She was once acquainted with some folks who had one of those graceful maroon tonneaus with the little back door like a Hicksville hotel bus, and she used to watch them take up the floor and dive down into the basement to fix the machinery every few miles when something went wrong.
Slobbings knew only too well that the day was coming when his wife would be asking him why it was that they were always hoofing it while their neighbors were jerking past in neat little Fords.
He himself was razor-keen to sit back of a steering wheel of his own and toot a big hebrew horn at jumping pedestrians, but he decided to lay low and let her spring the inevitable question first so that when they bought a car he could forever after blame her for everything that happened this side of Mars.
The issue came up as expected when the Spring flowers began to hatch, and the smell of new mown gasolene was in the air.
Thus it came to pass that Slobbings and his wife sallied forth one sunny afternoon to feed the motor microbe.
They passed right by the Ford agency but couldn’t see it because they hadn’t a telescope. Nothing less than a Twin Eight for them! They spent about three hours of lumpy stalling around the Automobile Shopping District pretending they knew what The Man was talking about, and concentrating on the relative merits of wind shields and ignoring little unimportant details like magnetos, carburetors, engines, etc. But after getting familiar with prices, they began to filter down into the Flivver class along about evening-fall and were ready to stop feeling upholstery and get down to cases.
Their decision finally perched upon a snappy, unimpeachable, luxurious top-quality performer which was priced at three figures, the tallest one of the three being under nine, although not more than two or three flights under.
They owned the car all of one day when the matrimonial bliss in which they had been soaring was brought down, and both occupants barely escaped with their lives.
It happened this way: Slobbings had been under the droll hallucination that he could drive the thing, and so he waved off the young man from the Agency who had volunteered to show him how to stay on a fairly wide road, and started to cut loose with the levers himself, with his Helpmeet at his right.
When the excitement subsided he took his wife into the house and stood her in a corner and made her solemnly swear that in future whenever one was driving, the other was never to cut in with criticism, contumely or contemptuous comment at critical junctures, but was to either sit tight or get out and pedal.
The next morning while Slobbings was at his office trying to get his mind on work, his wife sneaked over and got the demonstrator to throw away his chew and put on his coat and give her a lesson in driving the little pelican.
That night when she and Slobbings started out, it was she who insisted upon taking the wheel, and this gave Slobbings the pleasure of sitting on the thin edge of Uncertainty and grabbing the Emergency Brake every time another car could be discerned with the naked eye coming toward them.
Whenever she tooted the horn to signal their nervous approach, he would hand her the not-so-loud-dearie caution, hissing said caution between such teeth as he had not already ground off during previous hair-breadth escapes.
If he happened to be the one driving, and stuck out his wing to let the Traffic know he was going to turn a corner in due season provided he did not stall his engine, his wife would tell him that it was not customary nor necessary to injure one’s spine hanging so far over the side of the car. In devious other ways she vented her unstrung condition and frequently referred warmly to his all-round hopelessness as a level-headed driver.
There was a demoniacal something that came and sat between them every time they got into that car. The Dove of Peace never flew within five thousand miles of the tail light at any stage of the tragedy.
Each got the idea that the other felt there was nothing left around the car to be learned, and this naturally led to fierce engagements in which hand grenades were used freely on both sides.
Every time he told her that she shifted her gears like a steam riveter, she would spring back and tell him between her teeth that he couldn’t drive a nail, and then she’d follow through with a mighty beanbammer about his family not being very bright anyway, and no wonder he couldn’t get anything past the porphery.
She accused him of throwing out his chest when he ought to be throwing out his clutch, and he retaliated by charging her with imagining she was Barney Oldfield because she could cut around a moving van without losing more than one mud guard.
In their refreshing evening drives together, the one who would first discover that the Emergency Brake was still on, would get right out on the hood and crow and flap like a Hoosier cock in a congested corn-crib, making the other naturally as pleased as a pup with its tail in the door.
History does not recall that Slobbings and his merry mate ever came to a corner that he didn’t want to turn one way and she another, nor that both ever desired the Top up or down at the same time.
One day about six months after the Home Breaker had been purchased, Slobbings met with a serious business throw-back. No one was to blame but himself. Motoring had interfered with his Business and he had cut his Office from his visiting list.
Among other things there was an over-ripe note at the bank and he was obliged to produce the necessary piastres within twelve hours. So without slipping a syllable to his wife he up and sold the car, receiving therefor an amount so far below original cost that it made him dizzy to look down at it.
A few days later he broke the news to the Gentle One, and, after the lachrymal flood-gates had been opened and closed again in the usual way, she braced up and said it was all right and they would have to Be Brave.
A hell-hot evening in the following August found Slobbings and his wife taking a nice trolley ride out into the country for a sniff of fresh ozone.
They were sitting side by side, looking over the fields of waving wollypus, and he had his arm around her.
Both were silent. They were thinking of the same thing.
“Well anyway,” she said at last, “we did have good times with the little car while it lasted, didn’t we dear?”
“Yes, love,” he replied softly, “those were the happy days.”
ONE day a successful Manufacturer who had become strongly addicted to Efficiency Literature after making his pile, sat down and reasoned with himself thus:
“Something is wrong with my business. The Sales Increase for last year was only 120 percent. It should have been 850 percent. The fault lies with my Sales Manager.”
“True, he is a good slob, but he is not good enough. My Salesmen all like him and plug hard on his account, to say nothing of their own; but they don’t plug hard enough.”
“What I need is a Sales Chief who is not stocked up with the dry-bones of Salesmanship—someone who comes from the outside and brings a fresh, crisp point of view—someone who knows nothing at all about the Selling Game. That’s the stunt these days! My present man is in a rut. Raus!”
The morning following this sparkling synthesis, Comrade President called in the pre-damned S. M. and tied a campbell soup can to his Promising Career and sent him clattering up Main Street.
Then he grabbed a note-pad, scribbled off a terse Classified Ad, pressed a button on the waistline of his desk, and told the Office Poodle to get it into the morning papers and quit spitting on the radiator.
On a high stool in the Bookkeeping Department of a certain Plumbers Supply House sat an upright and painstaking young gentleman who wrote an excellent hand, never erred in his posting, and fainted when anybody turned the ledger pages from the bottom instead of the top.
But of late years he had contracted a serious case of correspondence-schoolitis and within him was stirring strong the ambition to Become An Executive And Earn Fifty Thousand A Year.
He was firmly convinced that the only difference between the man shoveling coal and the man shoveling coin was a difference in Earning Power, as told graphically in the pictures; and so whenever the Boss wasn’t looking, he would pull out his book and study up on how to increase his Earning Power.
On this particular morning this particular young gentleman had been casually perusing the newspaper for a few hours prior to the Boss’s arrival, and he had almost finished the twenty-eighth page when his eye leeched upon the advertisement of our friend the Efficiency President about whom we were chatting pleasantly before we went off on this spur.
“I feel the fingers of Fate upon my spine,” said the young gentleman osteopathically, as he clipped the Ad from the paper and slipped it into the upper berth of his double-breasted white waistcoat.
When the noon hour struck, it took him just two and one-quarter minutes to slide down the scaffolding of the high stool, grab his little cardboard derby, and jump a passing trolley in quest of the job.
But when he arrived at the factory, his Nerve suddenly up and left for parts unknown. With trembling ears, and muscles of the map twitching like a mare’s flank shivering off flies, he opened the office door. He didn’t burst it open wildly like a cartman with a delivery receipt for you to sign, or any important personage like that. He opened it just wide enough to squeeze through and scrape the buttons all off his coat.
The man in charge knew of course what this flickering taper had oozed in for. It was a cinch he wasn’t some Kentucky customer calling to raise hell about the last shipment. Only a man looking for a job could behave like a seidlitz powder and not arouse suspicion. So he ushered him in to see the President.
Mister President, pushing back his whiskers for oratorical clearance, delivered himself thus:
“Young Man,” he said, “have you any reason, either apparent or hidden about the premises, for thinking that you know any more about Salesmanship than a squirrel knows about Santa Claus?”
“No sir,” blurted the Dose of Salts, meaning to say “yes” and bluff it out.
“Good!” broke in Uncle President. “You’ve got the very qualification I’m looking for.
“And what name do you wag to?” queried Monsieur Le President, well pleased with his exceptional perceptive faculty.
“Elliott Buc——” But Pres. cut him short. “Never mind the details,” he said.
“And now Elliott,” he continued, throwing back an emphatic lapel and hooking his presidential thumb into his vest pocket, “I am going to make you my Sales Manager. You look and act as unlike a Sales Manager as anything I’ve ever seen this side of Lapland and that’s why I think you’ll do. I’m working on a new system. So get up off the floor there, and say ‘thank you’—and GO TO IT!”
Elliott’s full and complete name may be itemized as follows: Elliott Buckingham Tudor-Smith. But around the office they promptly re-capped it under the appropriate and musical monicker of “Ellie.”
They also noted that from the instant Ellie landed the coveted job, his knees and his neck began to stiffen like a steel bar, and there was something in his manner that seemed to say: “The President should be congratulated upon his good judgment.”
The whole overburdened Office Staff were stop-work observers of everything that went on in the office from a giggly conversation among the girls down to delivering a bottle of crystal spring water for the ice-cooler, and of course they all saw and remembered how Ellie went into the President’s office on all fours to apply for the job.
Hence when they now saw him swank past them full of superior swish and driving his heels to the floor like a Grenadier Guard, they naturally began to develop that warmth of fellowship toward him that one feels for the cramps.
Had Elliott not been by profession a Bookkeeper, he would have made a good Haberdasher. When it came to practical Salesmanship he had about as much experience as a sponge diver. Hence he possessed many essential qualifications of the modern blank-cartridge Sales Director, as psychically discerned by the President at the outset.
While Elliott might be described as a traveled person, he was not what you would exactly call a globe-trotter in the strict sense of said term. He had on several occasions joined the Sunday Excursion to Churubusco, Indiana, with the white duck panties and the blue serge Double Breasted. Also he had been twice to Chicago; once during his honeymoon, and once when he went there to get his teeth filled, and in so doing made the local horseshoer sore on him for life.
We mention this irrelevancy merely to show that when it came to skipping here and there over the cornbelt, and getting back to the Home Town safe and sound and unrobbed, Elliott could hold his own with the best of them.
Elliott possessed still another essential to successful latter-day sales management. He was one rhinoceros on System. In less than three months after he had set sail upon the hazardous sea of Sales Promotion, he had everything on the premises mapped and charted and indexed and cross-indexed and sub-indexed and super-indexed forty-seven different ways.
Any ordinary question put to him about the Business or the Weather would be followed by the pulling out of numerous little drawers and card-indexes and files and charts and things until the Questioner had forgotten what it was he asked about, or had gone on to other matters or to sleep.
Elliott’s highest qualification for his job, however, lay in his early-discovered ability to write a very superior quality of nagging letter to the Salesmen under him. When it came to the Quibble & Nag stuff, Elliott had every corn-fed Sales Manager in the land rolled up like a carpet.
Having himself never sold a Bill of Goods in his tiny conventional life, and being barely able to tell the Goods from a large knobby sack of apples without first walking all around them and squinting at them from different angles, he was insured at all times against writing the Sales Force upon anything that might be of any importance whatever to the Business.
For instance, when the Firm’s crack salesmanic shot of the Western Territory was aching like an ingrowing toenail for some constructive suggestion from Headquarters concerning a Big Deal he was trying to put across, he would receive a three-page Satire from Ellie criticizing him for scoring up 168 miles in his Expense Book when the R. R. Guide showed plainly and Unmistakably that the actual distance from point to point was only 167 miles.
And when some other Sales Wizard would send in a C/L Order from some dotty dorp off in the scrub of Oblivion where The House had never before sold a Lincoln Penny’s worth of their fully-guaranteed Stuff, Ellie would promptly press Button No. 2 (gawd, how Eddie loved to press those buttons!) and then dictate to the anaemic stenographer a couple of pages of acid contumely, telling how surprised The Writer was that an Order from a territory of such potential greatness should not have called for ten carloads instead of one carload.
Ellie of course never hiked out on The Road himself and therefore never knew whether a given Territory was potentially great or potentially punk, nor whether one carload was a slashing big Order or a paltry pee-wee, but he always had to write cheery stuff like yon foregoing because this is the particular phobia of the desk-reared Sales Manager.
Ellie never believed in complimenting a Road Rat and running the risk of impairing the gunk’s proper perspective of his work and maybe cause him to slap in an extra bus-fare on the strength of it.
In short, Ellie’s skilful management naturally succeeded in putting The Boys in such excellent spirits that every time they got a letter from him they felt like shooting up a Home for Incurables.
But in due and good time it came to pass that all those Salesmen on Elliott’s staff that were not buying clapboard homes on installment, slapped in their resignations and politely told Ellie and His System to go to hellenstaythere.
This, however, did not cause so much as a tropical ripple on the sea of Serenity upon which Elliott Buckingham Tudor-Smith was gliding so smoothly. As fast as one Salesman would up and kick off his breechin’, Ellie would hire another, and each time he got a better man than the man who quit. After a while he had as fine a bunch of Ribbon Clerks as ever lined up against a soda fountain on a reckless Saturday afternoon.
But all things come to him who stoops over when the boot of Wrath draws nigh. At the end of the Fiscal Year, which is the time of reckoning and erasing and general all ’round fixing of fake entries, Comrade President called Elliott into his private office, leaned back in his executive Swivel, and relieved himself of the following ballad:
“Young man,” he said, feeling for his tonsils to see that they were on straight, “I have just looked over the Sales Record for the year during which you have been benching in the Sales Department, and I find that Sales have fallen so shockingly low that they ought to be in a Rescue Home.
“When I gave you that job I was following out a plan that has proven successful in many cases as shown by magazine articles. I thought you would make a good Sales Manager because you knew nothing about Selling, just as the best organizers of Business Men’s Associations are Kendallville Professors who know nothing about Business, and the best writers of Efficiency Stuff are men who file their correspondence on a hook, and the most dazzling Shop Management Talksters those who heave a wheelbarrow over a fence and never see the gate.
“I now see that I was not only Dead Wrong but absolutely bughouse. I might as well expect to get a good hair-cut by a piano-tuner or boxing-lessons from a Tea Tenor, as to get a good Sales Manager out of any man who gets off a train head-first and doesn’t know a Sample Case from a schmeerkase.
“In twelve long, lanky months you haven’t yet got the lie of the 2nd hole on the Selling Course, and I have a sneaky suspicion that you wouldn’t get around the first Nine in ninety years.
“You couldn’t get a Salesman’s point of view if he stuck you in the leg with it, and for the same reason you couldn’t see the Dealer’s slant on things, nor the House’s policy if you trained a super-telescope on them.