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.