Chapter III: Part 3

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.”

_Lesson for Today:_ We don’t know what we’ve got until we
haven’t got it any longer.

HOT SKETCH NO. 14

THE WOULD-BE SALES PROMOTER

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.

“Besides all that, you have been so busy trying to think out some new high-sounding title for your job, and writing brainless Briefs on Salesmanship for the tired Trade Press, and attending so many noonday foolishers called Business Luncheons, that you haven’t yet had time to learn whether our Line of Goods is made to wear or to eat.

“Here and there in this worryful World of Business you will occasionally find some old moss-chest who still holds that Salesmanship means SELLING GOODS, and not Charts, Maps, Conferences and After Dinner Oratory. I now see, after a brief but total eclipse of Horse Sense due to too much reading and too little thinking, that I am one of those Old Timers myself.

“I don’t blame _you_,” he went on, unmindful of a pair of quaking pants before him, “for getting the Bilged Bean right at the crank-up, for you have never shinned the rough spots of Salesmanship yourself, and you haven’t got the imagination of a moving van.

“The fault is all mine,” he concluded, “but that’s a matter that doesn’t cut any cantaloupe now. So get back to the High Stool and ply your penmanship! I’ve decided to hire a Regular. Voetsak!”

HOT SKETCH NO. 15

THE YOUNG SATELLITES OF STALLVILLE

CLARENCE and Bud lived in the same dotty dorp and went to the same little red-necked school.

Clarence was a studious piece of Rocquefort and scored 100 in everything.

Bud’s monthly report looked like the stock quotations in a demoralized market.

Whenever anything was pulled in the shape of Rough House, Bud was usually the Chairman of the Board of Directors.

Clarence, on yon other hand, always conducted himself in an Exemplary Manner and wore leggins.

There was a big manufacturing plant in the town and when the boys finished school they naturally went to work there. Everybody did. The whole force was born and raised within sound of the whistle.

The Export Manager had never been clear across the County Line. That’s why he was the Export Manager.

Clarence was given an important clerkship in the office.

Bud likewise received Four Dollars a week.

Bud pinched enough postage stamps to make it Four Twenty Five.

Time went on.

And on.

Clarence built up a record for piety, punctuality, faithful fidoism and fussy attention to details that made every aspiring clerk in the place eat the carrot of envy every time they thought of him and his little kuppenheimer.

Bud was the only one who couldn’t see even a dim outline of Clarence’s sterling virtues.

His psychology was as different from Clarence’s “as day is from night,” to put it originally yet cleverly.

Bud was a wrecker of rules and a punisher of precedent.

He couldn’t see where certain non-essential things cut any large and influential ice in the great game of Business.

And he voiced his views with such hobnailed frankness that Clarence daily expected to see Bud popped from the Payroll.

He cautioned Bud repeatedly in a patronizing high tenor to censor his stuff or be prepared for the Hiking Certificate.

Time went on some more.

Bud still stuck.

The predictions of Clarence and all the other starchy little stallers proved to be punk and peanutty.

Comrade Boss seemed to take considerable shine to Bud, but none of the tall-collared gentry could get it at all.

Bud didn’t smoke his cigarettes around in the alley. And he played billiards on the Sabbath. And his business letters lacked dignity they said, although the stuff got over.

The reason the Boss liked Bud can be explained very simply, without the aid of music, motion pictures or other contraptions calculated to emphasize and impress.

The reason was this: Bud had IDEAS.

Now an idea is something that only Individuals are susceptible to. Persons never contract them.

Bud was an Individual. The rest of the Office Staff was an office staff.

If an idea had ever wandered in among them, it would have been unable to establish its identity. Nobody would have known the stranger at all.

Bud didn’t see why things should be done a certain way just because old man Noah did them that way.

Nor why a business letter should throb with about as much human interest as a Report on Weights and Measures, just because it was called a business letter.

Bud was also dead set against office stalling.

He never threw the bluff that he was all fevered up with work when he wasn’t doing anything but tinker with a hangnail.

And when he worked on a job, he worked to produce, not to prolong.

Further, Bud declined to have it in for the Boss simply because he was the Boss. And at every session of the Rappers’ League he was as open about it as a woman with a secret.

All these things Burra Boss quietly eyed-in from time to time, as Bosses have the lowdown habit of doing.

And so one bright Spring Morning about eleven minutes past ten he called Bud into the Throne Room.

“Young man,” quoth he, “you have been for several years sitting in with a bunch of office beadles without becoming one of them.

“It is no simple cinch for a young man to hold himself aloof from the piffle and puff of Office Politics and to evolve ideas in an intellectual graveyard. I take this occasion to congratulate you, my boy.”

“Thank you sir,” quoth Bud, wondering if he was in for something more negotiable than a congratulation.

“And furthermore,” quoth on the Boss, “I have decided to promote you to the sales-managership of this hustling hive at twice the salary we have been smothering you with heretofore.”

Bud attempted to quoth back, but there wasn’t a quoth left in his quothary.

Too full for coherent utterance, he merely made various motions indicating large appreciation, such as bowing, tapping his shirt bosom, winding his watch, and so on.

And then he backed modestly out of the room.

Into the Salesmanager’s sanctum Bud carried the same dashing disregard for precedent and prehistoric policies that had landed him the hundred-and-fifty dollar job.

Inside two more years he had established such a ripping record that the Boss made him General Manager of the Works and raised him to Two Hundred.

The Boss also let Bud in on a percentage of the profits equaling one-sixteenth of one percent beginning with the tenth year after it went into effect.

As for Clarence, he is still sitting neat and erect somewhere in one of the outer offices checking things at a small desk.

In between glances at comrade clock, he wonders how the Boss could have possibly made such a busy blunder as to pop Bud to the top and overlook real genius.

“Mercy!” he ejaculates, and turns once more to his checking.

_Lesson for Today:_ A stiff neck never supported a thinking
head.

HOT SKETCH NO. 16

THE BENEDICT WHO WISDOMED-UP

MARK McMARK was one of those good-lord-look-at-this-desk Business Bees that fish their noonday grub out of a Pie Incubator and rush up and pay what they think is approximately correct, and then snap back to their offices like a rubber band.

When it came to Fortune Farming, Mark McMark was cutting a good clean furrow and he was as happy as the day is wide. In spite of this, he decided to get married.

He did not first make up his mind to rivet-up, and then roll up his sleeves and go out on a hunt for the girl.

On the contrary Mark had a keen contempt of large circumference for that type of male kanoop that sits around his bachelor dugout until the microbe of Melancholy begins to take up its winter quarters in his corrugated heart, and then decides he wants a Home and goes out and sizes up every girl he meets like a bumpkin in to buy a bullock.

Mark believed that Love chases not her own. He said that for every masculine mammal there was a feminine complement browsing somewhere along Life’s ranch, and that all you had to do was to stick around and the Right One would loom up over the hills before sunset.

There was no doubt in Mark’s mind that the Right One had credentialed in his case. He said he could tell it in any one of a dozen ways, no matter who held the cards. He was so german-sure about it that he began to get sort of section-boss with all his bachelor friends and told them that they were only Half Men and he spread considerable First Lesson Philosophy wherever he went.

All the married men in the office used to sit tightly non-commital when Mark raved. Their silence was about as quiet as a Miners Protest Meeting but it got right by Mark every time. He just kept on baiting everybody and maintained that no Business Man ever worked at maximum efficiency until he was buckled and had a man’s responsibility and some incentive to spur him on to Greater Achievement.

In time Mark and the Right One were lawfully wished on each other and duly preachered and Lohengrined, and they began to Keep House in an Apartment, which translated means that they began to stall less and learn more.

Mark didn’t have time to tell Her any longer about the Big Things he was going to do. It took all his time to explain the Little Things that he didn’t do. He got better acquainted with Her every time he forgot to leave an order at the Grocer’s, or carved the lamb from left to right instead of from right to left.

Mark also learned that he had oddly shaped ears, mispronounced many words, walked like a Yiddish cloak and suit maker, and slept with his face ajar. The breakfast table became a sort of observatory for physiological and temperamental defects, and the pastime developed to such an engrossing point, that Mark began to forget about the office and sort of hung around the house like a haze, fearing to lift, lest he miss a good opening for a caustic comeback.

Whenever the satire ran low on acid, an ominous lull would follow, during which nothing could be heard but the sullen click of knives and forks, and the ebb and flow of coffee along Mark’s aesophagus. Then suddenly the silence would crack wide open when she would ask him what was the matter with the potatoes that he didn’t eat them, and he would retort, “Good Lord, give me time—I can’t eat everything at once, can I?”

At the office everybody began to notice Mark’s speedometer wasn’t recording very reliably. They also thought he was shifting into Neutral a good deal for such a positive pussonality. He would sometimes sit for 20 or 21 minutes scratching his roof and looking at nothing concrete. Then just when he would be verging on the Mattewan Stare he would recover himself sufficiently to bawl everybody out.

Things went on in this peaceful, happy fashion at home and abroad until one day when Mark suddenly decided to have a Thorough Understanding with his Helpmeet. He pulled down his vest and the cover of his desk, slapped his granite derby on one Ear Hook, and pounded heavily homeward for the Finals.

Ten minutes later he opened the door of the little round-shouldered Apartment and called hoarsely to his Mate. There was no answer. Then he called again not quite so Arizona, but Silence again responded. Mark heard the water dripping in the kitchen sink. The little alarm clock on a chair in Her bedroom ticked like a steam riveter. One of Mark’s twenty-five cent pure silk hose lay on the rocker where She always sat. There was a needle and thread still in the sock. Everything in the place seemed kind of stiff and churchy—like a Scotch parlor on the Sabbath.

Mark hung around the middle of the floor for a few moments and then flopped on the sofa to think things over. It was boisterously quiet. The chairs all stood around looking at him like a lot of pall bearers waiting for the sign to catch hold. A curtain moved slightly in the breeze, and the rod of it tapped on the window sill. It was a quiet little tap—kind of uncanny, like a spirit rap.

“I’m beat,” said Mark, after a long pause, packed with ache. “If she would only breeze through that door right now, I’d chase pebbles up the beach all day long for her, or swim out and fetch sticks.”

A thought struck him. He got up, put on his o’rourke, and, closing the door ever so lightly behind him, slipped over to the florist’s. A moment later he returned with a great armful of lilacs. He looked as if he had pinched them—there were so many. Every vase in the house he filled with them, and then stuck the balance in empty milk bottles, pitchers, tin cans, and back of the pictures.

“There!” he said, surveying the job, “that will fix things up between us, and please her when she returns.”

Then Mark went back to his office and worked like a stoker.

That night when he returned home, the Right One met him at the door.

“I wish you had not put those old lilacs all over the place,” she opened up testily, “Just look at that floor!”

_Lesson for Today:_ What’s the use!

HOT SKETCH NO. 17

TWO BUSINESS BAGGERS OF PUNKTON

IN THE small burdock town of Punkton two rival manufacturing plants wiggled for supremacy.

The destinies of one were ably steered by a veneered razorback named Grabit.

At the helm of the other stood one, Fairman by name.

Grabit was a Pillar and had a pew right down front, a little to windward.

He used to sit ample and contented every Sunday morning listening to the little chinless preacher extol his Sterling Virtues to the blank-faced congregation.

Fairman wasn’t cutting any bold slashing figure as a Pillar and he was the only man in town who wasn’t wasting away worrying about it.

The rest of the burg spent many anxious hours speculating upon the probable location of Fairman’s residential quarters in the Hereafter.

Grabit thought of his employes in terms of machinery and was a devoted husband and father, according to custom.

Fairman called his men his “helpers” and had the absurd notion that they were human.

In Grabit’s mind there was not so much as a peewee doubt that he (i. e., Mr. Grabit) was a very superior order of genius and that every man under him was somewhere along about the mollusk stage of unfoldment.

He felt that through Divine favor he was enabled to grant to his men the blessed concession of working 10 hours per diem for 8 hours payem. And he tucked his napkin under his chin and was very grateful.

Fairman was so melon-brained that he imagined his manufactured products to be the result of the pooling of all the brains and activities of all the men in his plant from the General Manager down to the beetle that pinched the perfectos from the top desk-drawer.

Grabit stroked his enameled brain-case and reasoned that by paying his men more wages they would only have that much more to squander down at the Big Horn.

He figured that men of such muggy mentality didn’t care to spend any time in their dull homes, and so he couldn’t see any approximately sane reason for shortening working hours.

Fairman had the comical delusion that by expanding wages and contracting the workday he could cut off a lot of worry from the minds of his laborers and their weary wives, and that this in turn would mean increased bodily vigor, clarity of thought, efficiency of action and other things that would sound well if we could think of them at this moment.

With the recklessness of Irresponsibility, Fairman went so far as to put his spooly ideas into effect. He paid a minimum wage so high that when Grabit heard about it he let out a roar that shook the apples all off the trees in an orchard scene that his daughter, Eleanor, had painted when she was at the Academy.

He swore that Fairman was demoralizing the Labor Market and nervously pulled scotch hairs out of his dilating nostrils.

Time tangoed on.

Visitors to the plant of Fairman began to comment on the clear merry eyes of the workers. The men went about their tasks with speed and accuracy.

And whistled betimes.

And sang, maybe.

The factory’s output increased fifty percent without straining a ligament. The puddler seemed as interested as the President in everything that was doing around the Works.

If you had stood on the corner when the morning whistles blew, and watched the dinner-pailers heading up Main Street, you could have picked the workers of Fairman from the toilers of Grabit with your eyes 22° off centre.

The Grabiters all had that “I wasn’t-hired-to-do-that” air, and groused about the Boss in low dismal tones all the way from liver-and-coffee to forge and furnace, and back again. Every shoulder balanced its chip; and grouch, gruff and grump settled over the Works so thick you couldn’t rip it with a rapier.

Every morning when Grabit opened his mail he was regaled with much pleasing news from Kicking Kusstomers about defective Goods, shortage and all those things that wallow in the wake of a system of inspection that has sagged to a dull routine through indifference and the lack of pussonel interest.

Grabit didn’t sneak behind any door and whisper to himself what he really thought of the unreasonable dubs that made these complaints. On the contrary, he called his melancholy stenographer and dictated a masterful piece of satire and roofraising rhetoric that was calculated to double them up like a jack-knife.

Now all this kind of thing was planked sirloin for the Salesmen of Fairman. They shared in the profits of their Concern and didn’t have to knock down Bus Fares any more in their expense books, and so they were full of joy and jump.

They got after the disgruntled Customers of Grabit like bees after blossoms and did not exactly have to shoot up the place to scare any of them away from their old connections.

Grabit’s Salesmen were drawing down their good old $100 a month salary, and turning in vouchers for street-car fares, and so when they ran up against the Order Baggers of Fairman they were able to put up about as strong a rebuttal as a girls’ debating society.

Each succeeding season saw a new addition to the Fairman works, until forty acres had been brought under roof and the town had been made a regular stop for the Fast Express. Grabit noted every progressive step with increasing pains in the pit of the stomach, but not to be outdone, he revolutionized things himself by installing a new factory whistle.

Statements of the local banks showed steady increases in the deposits of Fairman’s workers. Neat little brick homes with phonographs in the parlors sprouted all over the town and made business good for the butcher, the baker, and the electric light and power company.

Men with long hair and short hair and no hair to speak of, came from far and near and from Vedersburg, Indiana, to find out how Fairman did it, and to get nose-close to the system in actual operation.

Certain yard-stick philanthropists questioned the Ultimate Good of it all, and there were many sincere and hard-working Business Men clearing all the way from $1,000 to $5,000 a year in their own business, who called Fairman “an industrial accident” and believed down back of their little cramped undershirts that such a thing as an accidentally successful man could actually be.

Recapitulation: Fairman became one slashing, sensational success no matter how you looked at the question—whether altruistically, practically, or through a knot-hole.

As for Grabit, he sits today at his dusty little desk, fingering his penny Ledger and absentmindedly feeling around in his whiskers betimes for a wild hair or two. Listlessly he turns the ledger pages and counts the tombstones, and in gloomy speculation asks himself why all those old Customers went over to the Competish,

Why his Salesmen were slipshod
And his goods built on luck
Why his best men deserted
And the worst stuck—and struck.

An echo answers “Why.”

The Office Cat, scrawny and sarcastic, jumps on the window ledge. She gives Grabit one withering look, puts her thumb-equivalent to her nose, and disappears into the night.

Grabit is alone.

Isn’t it harrowing though?

HOT SKETCH NO. 18

THE PICAYUNE PLANET

ONCE there was a ball-shaped mass of matter whirling through space called “The Earth.”

Compared to other masses of matter chasing through the charted Universe, it was about as big and important as a louse on the leg of an elephant.

The Earth was covered with millions of wiggling, jiggling, jumping little gnat-like creatures called “Men.” These “Men” told one another that they were the highest form of created life.

And believed it.

And thought they had a sense of humor.

They made themselves a god in their own image and likeness and kept altering and remodeling him from epoch to epoch, to suit their own selfish purposes. Their aim was to standardize him so that everybody, whether white or black or yellow or drab, could utilize him profitably in his business.

For thousands of years these little shrimpy Two Spots spent their time building up and tearing down. As soon as one set of them would start anything that promised to pull them out of the inch-browed class and enable them to stand on their hind legs and look upward, another set would come along and push them back on all fours again.

All of them were for Progress but none of them knew what Progress meant. They all stood for Morality, but as they had one Code of Morals for one set and another Code for another set and kept changing and shuffling these Codes all the time none of them knew at any stage of the game whether he was moral or immoral. He had to read the Season’s Revised Rules before he could tell.

In time certain foxy gazunks arose among them called “rulers.” These rulers wore a lot of bric-a-brac on their chests and catcher’s masks on top of their heads called “crowns,” and collected millions of Low Brows around them and told the L. B.’s that God had selected them to rule because they were wiser than anybody else. The poor kanoops opened their heavy jaws and bulged out their eyes in glassy awe, and believed it.

Each Ruler had his bright, beaming eye on the other’s loafing-stool called the “throne,” and manoeuvred merrily to pinch it. But he was not always sure that his knee-bending subjects would follow him and so he devised a dandy little scheme.

He tore a piece off his royal shirt, painted some hieroglyphics on it, and went out on the balcony and told the assembled yappoos that it was their “flag” and that they should always fight for it and defend it, no matter whether it was used to grab territory with, or to liberate people who preferred not to be liberated.

At this, they all threw up their sweaty caps and hoorayed until they were thick-throated and bughouse.

But here and there in the bunch was a party who had managed to wiggle out of the trough-stage in spite of Civilization, and these came forward and examined the “flag” and told the crowd it was nothing but the tail of a shirt waved for pilfering purposes. Whereupon these inquisitive agnostics were promptly busted on the butcher’s hook with proper religious ceremonies.

Other Rulers hung out their long lawyer-like necks to pipe the proceedings and found that the flag was the best all-around little device that had yet been framed for keeping the blobs ignorant of the cold-unemotional fact that their rulers were Con Men of keen calibre and their claim to Divine Right of Rule just common, ordinary, everyday Class C Shorthorn.

One day one of these rulers happened to turn his head to the right to sneeze, and while he wasn’t looking another ruler slipped over the back of his throne, beckoned to his vassals to follow, and sneaked up on his hands and knees to pull the throne-stool from under the party with the hay fever. Another Ruler, observing the empty seat of his neighbor Divine Ruler, started cross-lots to grab it.

But the first Ruler was a crafty little cuss and when he saw this rearguard action, he and his followers turned around and a mighty, murderous mix-up ensued.

With a Green Eye on Gain, the other Rulers then buckled on their war boots and galloped into the muck to help the respective pugs and at the same time help themselves to anything lying around uncrated.

When they all got thoroughly started, Hell closed its doors and went out of business on account of the competition.

Each Ruler realizing that he himself couldn’t fight for fried fish, began to shake his little mad-made god before the eyes of the Deluded, and through poetry, prose and prayer got them to believe that it was deity’s own special wish that he should slaughter his neighbor. This worked like a kaffir charm and all hands went to the slaughter with a smile that reached from ear to ear and clear around to the back of the neck.

Every time a certain Divine Righter landed a good old jaw-breaker on the enemy he would say that it was god’s coaching that did it, and every time he got one in the abdominal area that doubled him up like a folding-bed, he would shake his finger at the victor and splutter out, “You wait! God will punish you yet!” They all had the very same god working for them and beseeched him to come down and wallow with them.

When the rough-house had progressed long enough to lay them all out squirming and moaning and praying like a lot of winded dervishes, the great God of Eternity—the God that forged the Universe of Universes and set countless worlds a’whirring in one grand harmony of Love and Service—leaned over the balcony of Heaven, and with the back of His mighty hand swept them all off the dinky, ball-shaped mass of matter like ants from a table top.

HOT SKETCH NO. 19

THE PASSING OF THE BUCK PASSERS

THERE was a man of Pep and Potential who owned a large and constantly stretching Business.

Originally it was the size of a pants button and consisted of one ratty Rolltop, two rubber-stamps and a nominal assortment of liabilities.

National Advertising had dredged the Business out of the dump of Dinkyism and tossed it upon the apex of Affluence.

The sudden and unexpected growth had sunk the Boss ear-deep in detail drudgery, and so he decided to surround himself with men who could balance some of the burden that rested upon his convex shoulders and caused forehead-furrows like a first-line trench.

Thereupon he hired for his Sales Manager a calm and collected caterpillar who had been doing high-class dental work at a leading Way Station and acting as professional pallbearer on off-days. Caterpill came Highly Recommended by a frowsy friend connected with an Advertising Agency that was hoeing in 15 per cent on all business placed.

The Boss next decided to graft onto the main trunk an expert Advertising Manager, and so he selected from the 70,000 agitated applicants a complacent party that knew as much about Advertising as a first-class dragoman.

Then said Doc Boss to himself, said he: Now that I have the Sales and Advertising ends of the works hemmed up, I must get me somebody with brains and ballast to do my buying; also a hot hound to superintend the plant and a sprightly spaniel to see that the stuff gets shipped during the same historical epoch in which orders are received.

So he sniffed about the town and soon had these pearly positions filled with a couple of polliwogs related to his wife’s uncle and his cousin’s chums, and they brought their letters of Hearty endorsement from the Pastor and the red-horned Congressman of the District.

Having surrounded himself with the afore enumerated eminent executives, Comrade Boss leaned back in his revolving Reposer and said: “At last I am going to cop a wee round of rest and recreation. No more work, worry, and wiscissitude for me.”

The last syllable had slid gracefully away on the serene, sweet morning air when the new Superintendent greased in to find out if there would be any objection to his putting a new hinge on the factory door.

On his way out, the Supe bumped into the Sales Manager on his way in to ask Governor Boss if he should go ahead and O. K. an Expense Account upon whose fair bosom rested a Bus Fare charge at Holbrook Hollow where the hotel leans leisurely up against the railroad station.

Mayor-general Boss smiled sweetly, said “No” (dam you) and turned away to wrestle with a few speckled doubts that began to creep up into his Thinkery and nibble at his Composure.

Before he had bottled his irritabiliousness, in flowed the serene Advertising Manager wanting to know whether he should change the copy in the Ads every decade or so, or let it stand until it fell down from sheer exhaustion.

When this genius of initiative had ebbed away, the Boss’s telephone she rang and he grabbed at the instrument like a straw grabs at a drowning man, thinking that some diversion in way of a date might be in prospect.

But he found it was the new Buyer wanting to know which of two quotations he should accept—the higher or the lower. Professor Boss replied that it was a knotty case to decide off-palm, but from a superficial cast-over there might be no grievous mistake in accepting the lower quotation; and the Buyer naturally said he thought the same way but didn’t feel justified in taking the responsibility of deciding all alone by hisself.

When Uncle Boss had hung up the receiver he found the bright-eyed Shipping Clerk standing at his tired side waiting to be wisdomed-up on whether he should ship 34,999 lbs. at the L. C. L. rate or pay for the extra lb. and get the C. L. rate.

Major Boss thought a long time but not about what the Shipping Clerkerino had whispered. He was just trying to make a choice between murder and suicide. He decided to do neither, but to just hold onto his Patience as a matter of self-discipline and try to get in his rest between Foolish Quesions.

For the first six months he seemed to be making considerable prog., often getting several moments to himself, during which aforesaid moments he fumbled with his cufflinkers and pulled his eyebrows to see if he could get one out at every pull.

But when the calendar year had begun to run down at the heel, the demands from the Department Heads became so insistent and insupperable that one day Cap Boss jumped up on his desk, gave one blood icing yell, swung his arms wildly in the crisp autumn ozone, and dove head-on into the cuspidor.

When he had been fished out and revived, he seemed strangely calm and collected. In a voice that had a weird, far-away-over-the-hills sound, but carrying in its depths an unmistakable quality of determination, he called in all his hefty, high-class helpers, told them to be seated, and spake as hereinafter recorded, to wit and to-wot:

“When I engaged you muskrats I had a feeling that this Business was slightly pied. I thought you could do the Necessary, and use such commonsense as you perhaps happened to have, in order to push the Enterprise to the pinnacle of Power.

“I now find that not a rum of you has the initiative of a set of false whiskers nor the judgment of a jelly-bean. As Buck Passers you’ve got everything this side of Congress pummeled to a pulp, and when it comes to stalling, you are all Class A-Super and no mistake.

“You will therefore please take a long jump into the jungles of Oblivion, and, as a little souvenir of my regard, I propose to present each man on his way out with a swift kick in the Kupps.”

When the last kanoop had cleared, Commodore Boss got a new outfit consisting of non-relatived men of EXPERIENCE and while the thought of the high salaries he had to pay them made him swallow like a cock eating corn-meal, he got over it when he found he could get off every afternoon for 18 holes and fish for a fortnight without fretting a fret.

HOT SKETCH NO. 20

THE EXECUTIVE WITH THE CLERK’S MIND

A ONE-LEGGED manufactory had a little round office boy.

He used to go down to the Post Office every morning on his roller skates and fetch up the mail in a leather sack.

We forget the exact dimensions of the sack, but the story can go on without them until such time as we may be able to call them up.

This office boy was a good office boy and did not carve his initials in his father’s wooden leg, nor hang around the streets watching a safe moving in.

The manufactory in which he hopped about and drew his Dollar and a Quarter a week, was not so big as Standard Oil, but it had a side-track and a time-clock and involved the activities of seventy-five men, two of which were old women—the Sales & Advertising Manager and the Proprietor.

Time scuffled on, and the War came, and with it came some new business.

At first the Proprietor and the Sales Manager were a little sore around the heart at this intrusion upon their days of peace and quiet, spent largely in cutting up old envelopes for scratch paper.

But gradually they got used to the upset and flurry, and when the monthly Balance Sheet began to smile and then to grin, it poked their Ambition in the ribs and the first thing they knew they were actually craning their shaved necks for business in the Domestic as well as in the Export arena.