What a delightful little room to meditate in. From the broad windows he
could see the whole shining tideway of Fifth Avenue, passing lazily in
the warm sunlight. He turned to Mr. Beagle, greatly moved.
The next day an advertisement appeared in the leading papers, to this
effect:--
________________________
BEAGLE AND COMPANY
take pleasure in announcing to
their patrons and friends that
MR. GISSING
has been admitted to the firm in
the status of General Manager
Je Maintiendrai
__________________________
Mrs. Purp's excitement at this is easier imagined than described. Her
only fear was that now she would lose her best lodger. She made Purp
go out and buy a new shirt and a collar; she told Gissing, rather
pathetically, that she intended to have the whole house repapered in the
fall. The big double suite downstairs, which could be used as bedroom
and sitting-room, she suggested as a comfortable change. But Gissing
preferred to remain where he was. He had grown fond of the top floor.
Certainly there was an exhilaration in his new importance and
prosperity. The store buzzed with the news. At his request, Miss Whippet
was promoted to the seventh floor to be his secretary. It was delightful
to make his morning tour of inspection through the vast building. Mr.
Hound, the store detective, loved to tell his cronies how suspiciously
he had followed “The Duke” that first day. As Gissing moved through the
busy departments he saw eyes following him, tails wagging. Customers
were more flattered than ever by his courteous attentions. One day
he even held a little luncheon party in the restaurant, at which Mrs.
Dachshund, Mrs. Mastiff, and Mrs. Sealyham were his guests. He invited
their husbands, but the latter were too busy to come. It would have been
more prudent of them to attend. That afternoon Mrs. Dachshund, carried
away by enthusiasm, bought a platinum wrist-watch. Mrs. Mastiff bought
a diamond dog-collar. Mrs. Sealyham, whose husband was temporarily
embarrassed in Wall Street, contented herself with a Sheraton
chifforobe.
But it began to be evident that his delightful little office was not
going to be a shrine for quiet meditation. His vanity had been pleased
by the large advertisement about him, but he suddenly realized the
poison that lies in printer's ink. Almost overnight, it seemed, he had
been added to ten thousand mailing lists. Little Miss Whippet, although
she was fast at typewriting, was hard put to it to keep up with his
correspondence. She quivered eagerly over her machine, her small
paws flying. New pink ribbons gleamed through her translucent summery
georgette blouse. They were her flag of exultation at her surprising
rise in life. She felt it was immensely important to get all these
letters answered promptly.
And so did Gissing. In his new zeal, and in his innocent satisfaction
at having entered the inner circle of Big Business, he insisted on
answering everything. He did not realize that dictating letters is the
quaint diversion of business men, and that most of them mean nothing. It
is simply the easiest way of assuring yourself that you are busy.
This job was no sinecure. Old Mr. Beagle had so much affectionate
confidence in Gissing that he referred almost everything to him
for decision. Mr. Beagle junior, perhaps a little annoyed at the
floorwalker's meteoric translation, spent the summer afternoons at
golf. The infinite details of a great business crowded upon him.
Inexperienced, he had not learned the ways in which seasoned
“executives” protect themselves against useless intrusion. His telephone
buzzed like a hornet. Not five minutes went by without callers or
interruptions of some sort.
Most amazing of all, he found, was the miscellaneous passion for
palaver displayed by Big Business. Immediately he was invited to join
innumerable clubs, societies, merchants' associations. Every day would
arrive letters, on heavily embossed paper--“The Sales Managers Club will
hold a round-table discussion on Friday at one o'clock. We would greatly
appreciate it if you would be with us and say a few words.”--“Will you
be our guest at the monthly dinner of the Fifth Avenue Guild, and give
us any preachment that is on your mind?”--“The Merchandising Uplift
Group of Murray Hill will meet at the Commodore for an informal
lunch. It has been suggested that you contribute to the discussion on
Underwriting Overhead.”--“The Executives Association plans a clambake
and barbecue at the Barking Rock Country Club. Around the bonfire a few
impromptu remarks on Business Cycles will be called for. May we count on
you?”--“Will you address the Convention of Knitted Bodygarment Buyers,
on whatever topic is nearest your heart?”--“Will you write for Bunion
and Callous, the trade organ of the Floorwalkers' Union, a thousand-word
review of your career?”--“Will you broadcast a twenty-minute talk on
Department Store Ethics, at the radio station in Newark? 250,000 radio
fans will be listening in.” New to the strange and high-spirited world
of “executives,” it was natural that Gissing did not realize that the
net importance of this kind of thing was absolute zero. It did strike
him as odd, perhaps, that merchants did not dare to go on a junket or
plan a congenial dinner without pretending to themselves that it had
some business significance. But, having been so amazingly lifted into
this atmosphere of great affairs, he felt it was his duty to the store
to play the game according to the established rules. He was borne
along on a roaring spate of conferences, telephone calls, appointments,
Rotarian lunches, Chamber of Commerce dinners, picnics to talk tariff,
house-parties to discuss demurrage, tennis tournaments to settle the
sales-tax, golf foursomes to regulate price-maintenance. Of all these
matters he knew nothing whatever; and he also saw that as far as the
business of Beagle and Company was concerned it would be better not
to waste his time on such side-issues. The way he could really be of
service was in the store itself, tactfully lubricating that complicated
engine of goods and personalities. But he learned to utter, when called
upon, a few suave generalities, barbed with a rollicking story. This
made him always welcome. He was of a studious disposition, and liked
to examine this queer territory of life with an unprejudiced eye. After
all, his inward secret purpose had nothing to do with the success or
failure of retail trade. He was still seeking a horizon that would stay
blue when he reached it.
More and more he was interested to perceive how transparent the mummery
of business was. He was interested to note how persistently men fled
from success, how carefully most of them avoided the obvious principles
of utility, honesty, prudence, and courtesy, which are inevitably
rewarded. These sagacious, humorous fellows who were amusing themselves
with twaddling trade apothegms and ridiculous banqueteering solemnities,
surely they were aware that this had no bearing upon their own jobs?
He suspected that it was all a feverish anodyne to still some inward
unease. Since they must (not being fools) be aware that these antics
were mere subtraction of time from their business, the obvious
conclusion was, they were not happy with business. There was some
strange wistfulness in the conduct of Big Business Dogs, he thought.
Under the pretence of transacting affairs, they were really trying to
discover something that had eluded them.
The same thing, strangely enough, seemed to be going on in a sphere of
which he knew nothing, the world of art. He gathered from the papers
that writers, painters, musicians, were holding shindies almost every
night, at which delightful rebels, too busy to occupy themselves with
actual creation, talked charmingly about their plans. Poets were reading
poems incessantly, forgetting to write any. Much of the newspaper
comment on literature made him shudder, for though this was a province
quite strange to him, he had sound instincts. He discerned fatal
ignorance and absurdity between the pompous lines. Yet, in its own way,
it seemed a bold and honest ignorance. Were these, too, like the wistful
executives, seeking where the blue begins?
But what was this strange agitation that forbade his fellow-creatures
from enjoying the one thing that makes achievement possible--Solitude?
He himself, so happy to be left alone--was no one else like that? And
yet this very solitude that he craved and revelled in was, by a sublime
paradox, haunted by mysterious loneliness. He felt sometimes as though
his heart had been broken off from some great whole, to which it yearned
to be reunited. It felt like a bone that had been buried, which God
would some day dig up. Sometimes, in his caninomorphic conception
of deity, he felt near him the thunder of those mighty paws. In rare
moments of silence he gazed from his office window upon the sun-gilded,
tempting city. Her madness was upon him--her splendid craze of haste,
ambition, pride. Yet he wondered. This God he needed, this liberating
horizon, was it after all in the cleverest of hiding-places--in himself?
Was it in his own undeluded heart?
Miss Whippet came scurrying in to say that the Display Manager begged
him to attend a conference. The question of apportioning window space
to the various departments was to be reconsidered. Also, the book
department had protested having rental charged against them for books
exhibited merely to add a finishing touch to a furniture display. Other
agenda: the Personnel Director wished an appointment to discuss
the ruling against salesbitches bobbing their hair. The Commissary
Department wished to present revised figures as to the economy that
would be effected by putting the employees' cafeteria on the same floor
as the store's restaurant. He must decide whether early closing on
Saturdays would continue until Labor Day.
As he went about these and a hundred other fascinating trivialities, he
had a painful sense of treachery to Mr. Beagle senior. The old gentleman
was so touchingly certain that he had found in him the ideal shoulders
on which to unload his honourable and crushing burden. With more than
paternal pride old Beagle saw Gissing, evidently urbane and competent,
cheerfully circulating here and there. The shy angel of doubt that lay
deep in Gissing's cider-coloured eye, the proprietor did not come near
enough to observe.
If there is tragedy in our story, alas here it is. Gissing, incorrigible
seceder from responsibilities that did not touch his soul, did not dare
tell his benefactor the horrid truth. But the worm was in his heart.
Late one night, in his room at Mrs. Purp's, he wrote a letter to Mr.
Poodle. After mailing it at a street-box, he had a sudden pang. To the
dreamer, decisions are fearful. Then he shook himself and ran lightly to
a little lunchroom on Amsterdam Avenue, where he enjoyed doughnuts and
iced tea. His mind was resolved. The doughnuts, by a simple symbolism,
made him think of Rotary Clubs, also of millstones. No, he must be
fugitive from honour, from wealth, from Chambers of Commerce. Fugitive
from all save his own instinct. Those who have bound themselves are only
too eager to see the chains on others. There was no use attempting to
explain to Mr. Beagle--the dear old creature would not understand.
The next day, after happily and busily discharging his duties, and
staying late to clean up his desk, Gissing left Beagle and Company
for good. The only thing that worried him, as he looked round his
comfortable office for the last time, was the thought of little Miss
Whippet's chagrin when she found her new promotion at an end. She had
taken such delight in their mutual dignity. On the filing cabinet beside
her typewriter desk was a pink geranium in a pot, which she watered
every morning. He could not resist pulling out a drawer of her desk, and
smiled gently to see the careful neatness of its compartments, with
all her odds and ends usefully arranged. The ink-eraser, with an absurd
little whisk attached to it for brushing away fragments of rubbed paper;
the fascicle of sharpened pencils held together by an elastic band; the
tiny phial of typewriter oil; a small box of peppermints; a crumpled
handkerchief; the stenographic notebook with a pencil inserted at the
blank page, so as to be ready for instant service the next day; the long
paper-cutter for slitting envelopes; her memorandum pad, on which was
written Remind Mr. G. of Window Display Luncheon--it seemed cruel to
deprive her of all these innocent amusements in which she delighted so
much. And yet he could not go on as a General Manager simply for the
happiness of Miss Whippet.
In the foliage of the geranium, where he knew she would find it the
first thing in the morning, he left a note:--
MISS WHIPPET: I am leaving the store to-night and will not be back.
Please notify Mr. Beagle. Explain to him that I shall never take a
position with one of his competitors; I am leaving not because I didn't
enjoy the job, but because if I stayed longer I might enjoy it too much.
Tell Mr. Beagle that I specially urge him to retain you as assistant
to the new Manager, whoever that may be. You are entirely competent to
attend to the routine, and the new Manager can spend all his time at
business lunches.
Please inform the Display Managers' Club that I can't speak at their
meeting to-morrow.