"This," said Mr. William Lum solemnly, "is the very las' bottle of this
stuff in these United States!"
It was a dramatic moment. He held it aloft with the pride and tender
care of a recent parent exhibiting a first-born child. Mr. Hugh Braddy
emitted a long, low whistle, expressive of the awe due the occasion.
"You don't tell me!" he said.
"Yes, siree! There ain't another bottle of this wonderful old hooch left
anywhere. Not anywhere. A man couldn't get one like it for love nor
money. Not for love nor money." He paused to regard the bottle fondly.
"Nor anything else," he added suddenly.
Mr. Braddy beamed fatly. His moon face--like a
two-hundred-and-twenty-pound Kewpie's--wore a look of pride and
responsibility. It was his bottle.
"You don't tell me!" he said.
"Yes, siree. Must be all of thirty years old, if it's a day. Mebbe
forty. Mebbe fifty. Why, that stuff is worth a dollar a sniff, if it's
worth a jit. And you not a drinking man! Wadda pity! Wadda pity!"
There was a shade of envy in Mr. Lum's tone, for Mr. Lum was, or had
been, a drinking man; yet Fate, ever perverse, had decreed that Mr.
Braddy, teetotaler, should find the ancient bottle while poking about in
the cellar of his very modest new house--rented--in that part of Long
Island City where small, wooden cottages break out in clusters, here and
there, in a species of municipal measles.
Mr. Braddy, on finding the treasure, had immediately summoned Mr. Lum
from his larger and more pretentious house near by, as one who would be
able to appraise the find, and he and Mr. Lum now stood on the very spot
in the cellar where, beneath a pile of old window blinds, the venerable
liquor had been found. Mr. Braddy, it was plain, thought very highly of
Mr. Lum's opinions, and that great man was good-naturedly tolerant of
the more placid and adipose Mr. Braddy, who was known--behind his
back--in the rug department of the Great Store as "Ole Hippopotamus."
Not that he would have resented it, had the veriest cash boy called him
by this uncomplimentary but descriptive nickname to his face, for Mr.
Braddy was the sort of person who never resents anything.
"Y'know, Mr. Lum," he remarked, crinkling his pink brow in philosophic
thought, "sometimes I wish I had been a drinking man. I never minded if
a man took a drink. Not that I had any patience with these here booze
fighters. No. Enough is enough, I always say. But if a fella wanted to
take a drink, outside of business hours, of course, or go off on a spree
once in a while--well, I never saw no harm in it. I often wished I could
do it myself."
"Well, why the dooce didn't you?" inquired Mr. Lum.
"As a matter of solid fact, I was scared to. That's the truth. I was
always scared I'd get pinched or fall down a manhole or something. You
see, I never did have much nerve." This was an unusual burst of
confidence on the part of Mr. Braddy, who, since he had moved into Mr.
Lum's neighborhood a month before, had played a listening role in his
conferences with Mr. Lum, who was a thin, waspy man of forty-four, in
ambush behind a fierce pair of mustachios. Mr. Braddy, essence of
diffidence that he was, had confined his remarks to "You don't tell me!"
or, occasionally, "Ain't it the truth?" in the manner of a Greek chorus.
* * * * *
Now inspired, perhaps, by the discovery that he was the owner of a
priceless bottle of spirits, he unbosomed himself to Mr. Lum. Mr. Lum
made answer.
"Scared to drink? Scared of anything? Bosh! Tommyrot! Everybody's got
nerve. Only some don't use it," said Mr. Lum, who owned a book called
"The Power House in Man's Mind," and who subscribed for, and quoted
from, a pamphlet for successful men, called "I Can and I Will."
"Mebbe," said Mr. Braddy. "But the first and only time I took a drink I
got a bad scare. When I was a young feller, just starting in the rugs in
the Great Store, I went out with the gang one night, and, just to be
smart, I orders beer. Them was the days when beer was a nickel for a
stein a foot tall. The minute I taste the stuff I feel uncomfortable. I
don't dare not drink it, for fear the gang would give me the laugh. So I
ups and drinks it, every drop, although it tastes worse and worse. Well,
sir, that beer made me sicker than a dog. I haven't tried any drink
stronger than malted milk since. And that was all of twenty years ago.
It wasn't that I thought a little drinking a sin. I was just scared;
that's all. Some of the other fellows in the rugs drank--till they
passed a law against it. Why, I once seen Charley Freedman sell a party
a genuine, expensive Bergamo rug for two dollars and a half when he was
pickled. But when he was sober there wasn't a better salesman in the
rugs."
Mr. Lum offered no comment; he was weighing the cob-webbed bottle in his
hand, and holding it to the light in a vain attempt to peer through the
golden-brown fluid. Mr. Braddy went on:
"I guess I was born timid. I dunno. I wanted to join a lodge, but I was
scared of the 'nitiation. I wanted to move out to Jersey, but I didn't.
Why, all by life I've wanted to take a Turkish bath; but somehow, every
time I got to the door of the place I got cold feet and backed out. I
wanted a raise, too, and by golly, between us, I believe they'd give it
to me; but I keep putting off asking for it and putting off and putting
off----"
"I was like that--once," put in Mr. Lum. "But it don't pay. I'd still be
selling shoes in the Great Store--and looking at thousands of feet every
day and saying thousands of times, 'Yes, madam, this is a three-A, and
very smart, too,' when it is really a six-D and looks like hell on her.
No wonder I took a drink or two in those days."
He set down the bottle and flared up with a sudden, fierce bristling of
his mustaches.
"And now they have to come along and take a man's liquor away from
him--drat 'em! What did our boys fight for? Liberty, I say. And then,
after being mowed down in France, they come home to find the country
dry! It ain't fair, I say. Of course, don't think for a minute that I
mind losing the licker. Not me. I always could take it or leave it
alone. But what I hate is having them say a man can't drink this and he
can't drink that. They'll be getting after our smokes, next. I read in
the paper last night a piece that asked something that's been on my mind
a long time: 'Whither are we drifting?'"
"I dunno," said Mr. Braddy.
"You'd think," went on Mr. Lum, not heeding, as a sense of oppression
and injustice surged through him, "that liquor harmed men. As if it
harmed anybody but the drunkards! Liquor never hurt a successful man;
no, siree. Look at me!"
Mr. Braddy looked. He had heard Mr. Lum make the speech that customarily
followed this remark a number of times, but it never failed to interest
him.
"Look at me!" said Mr. Lum, slapping his chest. "Buyer in the shoes in
the Great Store, and that ain't so worse, if I do say it myself. That's
what nerve did. What if I did used to get a snootful now and then? I had
the self-confidence, and that did the trick. When old man Briggs
croaked, I heard that the big boss was looking around outside the store
for a man to take his place as buyer in the shoes. So I goes right to
the boss, and I says, 'Look here, Mr. Berger, I been in the shoes
eighteen years, and I know shoes from A to Z, and back again. I can fill
Briggs' shoes,' I says. And that gets him laughing, although I didn't
mean it that way, for I don't think humor has any place in business.
"'Well,' he says, 'you certainly got confidence in yourself. I'll see
what you can do in Briggs' job. It will pay forty a week.' I knew old
Briggs was getting more than forty, and I could see that Berger needed
me, so I spins on him and I laughs in his face. 'Forty popcorn balls!' I
says to him. 'Sixty is the least that job's worth, and you know it.'
Well, to make a long story short, he comes through with sixty!"
This story never failed to fascinate Mr. Braddy, for two reasons. First,
he liked to be taken into the confidence of a man who made so princely a
salary; and, second, it reminded him of the tormenting idea that he was
worth more than the thirty dollars he found every Friday in his
envelope, and it bolstered up his spirit. He felt that with the
glittering example of Mr. Lum and the constant harassings by his wife,
who had and expressed strong views on the subject, he would some day
conquer his qualms and demand the raise he felt to be due him.
"I wish I had your crust," he said to Mr. Lum in tones of frank
admiration.
"You have," rejoined Mr. Lum. "I didn't know that I had, for a long,
long time, and then it struck me one day, as I was trying an
Oxford-brogue style K6 on a dame, 'How did Schwab get where he is? How
did Rockefeller? How did this here Vanderlip? Was it by being humble?
Was it by setting still?' You bet your sweet boots it wasn't. I just
been reading an article in 'I Can and I Will,' called 'Big Bugs--And How
They Got That Way,' and it tells all about those fellows and how most of
them wasn't nothing but newspaper reporters and puddlers--whatever that
is--until one day they said, 'I'm going to do something decisive!' And
they did it. That's the idea. Do something decisive. That's what I did,
and look at me! Braddy, why the devil don't you do something decisive?"
"What?" asked Mr. Braddy meekly.
"Anything. Take a plunge. Why, I bet you never took a chance in your
life. You got good stuff in you, Braddy, too. There ain't a better
salesman in the rugs. Why, only the other day I overheard Berger say,
'That fellow Braddy knows more about rugs than the Mayor of Bagdad
himself. Too bad he hasn't more push in him.'"
"I guess mebbe he's right," said Mr. Braddy.
"Right? Of course, he's right about you being a crack salesman. Why, you
could sell corkscrews in Kansas," said Mr. Lum. "You got the stuff, all
right. But the trouble is you can sell everything but yourself. Get
busy! Act! Do something! Make a decision! Take a step!"
Mr. Braddy said nothing. Little lines furrowed his vast brow; he half
closed his small eyes; his round face took on an intent, scowling look.
He was thinking. Silence filled the cellar. Then, with the air of a man
whose mind is made up, Hugh Braddy said a decisive and remarkable thing.
"Mr. Bill Lum," he said, "I'm going to get drunk!"
"What? You? Hugh Braddy? Drunk? My God!" The idea was too much even for
the mind of Mr. Lum.
"Yes," said Mr. Braddy, in a hollow voice, like Caesar's at the Rubicon,
"I'm going to drink what's in that bottle this very night."
"Not all of it?" Mr. Lum, as an expert in such things, registered
dismay.
"As much as is necessary," was the firm response. Mr. Lum brightened
considerably at this.
"Better let me help you. There's enough for both of us. Plenty," he
suggested.
"Are you sure?" asked Mr. Braddy anxiously.
"Sure," said Mr. Lum.