The blue prints and specifications in the case of Tidbury Epps follow:
Age: the early thirties.
Status: bachelor.
Habitat: Mrs. Kelty's Refined Boarding House, Brooklyn.
Occupation: a lesser clerk in the wholesale selling department of
Spingle & Blatter, Nifty Straw Hattings. See Advts.
Appearance: that of a lesser clerk. Weight: feather. Nose: stub. Eyes:
apologetic. Teeth: obvious. Figure: brief. Manner: diffident. Nature:
kind. Disposition: amiable but subdued.
Conspicuous vices: none.
Conspicuous virtues: none.
Distinguishing marks: none.
Tidbury was no Napoleon. He was aware of this, and so was everybody in
the hat company, including, unfortunately, Titus Spingle, the president,
who felt that he knew a thing or two about Bonapartes because he had
once been referred to in a straw-hat trade paper as the Napoleon of
Hatdom.
Mildly, as he did everything else in life, Tidbury admired, indeed
almost envied Mr. Spingle's silk shirts, which customarily suggested an
explosion in a paint factory. But such sartorial grandeur, Tidbury
felt, was not for him. He stuck to plain white shirts, dark blue ties
and pepper-and-salt suits. The pepper-and-salt suit was invented for
Tidbury Epps.
Tidbury worked diligently and even cheerfully on a high stool and a low
salary, copying neat little black figures into big black books. The
salary and the stool were the same Tidbury had been given when he first
came to New York from Calais, Maine, ten years before.
It probably never entered his head, as he bent over his columns of
digits that crisp fall morning, that in their sanctum of real mahogany
and Spanish leather his employers were discussing him.
"Whitaker has quit," announced Mr. Blatter, who acted as sales manager.
Mr. Spingle's acre of face, pink and dimpled from much good living,
showed concern.
"How come you can't keep an assistant, Otto?" he inquired.
"After they've been with me for six months," explained Mr. Blatter
modestly, "they get so good that they simply have to get better jobs."
"Well, got any candidates for the place?" queried the president.
"Burdette?" suggested Mr. Blatter.
Mr. Spingle eliminated Burdette with a flick of his finger.
"Too young," he said.
"Wetsel?"
"Too old."
"Fitch?"
"Too careless."
"Hydeman?"
"Too inexperienced."
"Well," ventured Mr. Blatter, "what about Tidbury Epps?"
Mr. Spingle's shrug included his shoulders, face and entire body.
"He's neither too old, too young, too careless nor too inexperienced,"
advanced Mr. Blatter.
"You're not serious, Otto?"
"Sure I am. Epps has been with us ten years and he's worked hard. I
believe in giving our old employees a chance."
"So do I," rejoined the Napoleon of Hatdom; "but you know perfectly
well, Otto, that Tidbury Epps is a dud."
"He's as conscientious as a Pilgrim father," remarked Mr. Blatter.
"That's the trouble with him," snorted Mr. Spingle.
"He spends so much time being conscientious that he hasn't time to be
anything else. Not that I object to a man having a conscience,
y'understand. But Epps hasn't anything else. You know how it is in the
hat trade, Otto; you've got to be a good fellow."
Mr. Spingle paused to pat his silken bosom, in hue reminiscent of sunset
in the Grand Canon. That he was a good fellow, a _bon vivant_, even, was
generally admitted in the hat trade.
"You see," went on the Napoleon of Hatdom, "your assistant has to be
nice to the trade. That's almost his chief job. Remember the motto of
our house is, 'Our business friends are our personal friends.' That's
meant a lot to us, Otto. Now and then you've simply got to take a big
buyer out and show him a good time--buy him a meal and take him to the
Winter Garden. You and I are mostly too busy to do it, but your
assistant isn't. Whitaker made us a lot of good friends, and good
customers, too, because he was a regular fella and knew the ropes. But
can you imagine old Epps giving a party?"
Mr. Blatter was forced to admit that he couldn't.
"But he's so willing," he argued.
"Oh, sure," agreed Mr. Spingle; "and sober and industrious and stands
without hitching and all that. But he's too much of a hermit. No more
personality than a parsnip. No spirit. No nerve. No fire. No zip. Sorry
I can't jump him up; he may be a good man, but he's not a good fellow."
"I suppose it will have to be Hydeman, then," remarked Mr. Blatter,
rising. "He's a little too slick and flip to suit me, and we don't know
much about him, but I suppose he'd know how to show a buyer Broadway."
"I'll bet he would," said Mr. Spingle. "Try him out. But watch his
expense account, Otto."
So Tidbury Epps continued to enjoy his high stool and his low salary and
to copy endless little figures into big black books. His shoulders
drooped a little when he heard of Hydeman's quick promotion, but he said
nothing.
Messrs. Spingle and Blatter, being interested solely in what went on
outside men's heads, did not attempt to find out what was wrong with
Tidbury Epps. But had a psychoanalyst peered darkly into the interior of
Tidbury's small round cranium he would have instantly noted that Mr.
Epps was suffering from a bad case of inferiority complex, complicated
by an acute attack of Puritanical complex.
If anybody was to blame for this it was not Tidbury himself but his Aunt
Elvira, who, with the aid of a patented cat-o'-nine-tails she had sent
all the way to Chicago for, willow switches from her own back yard, and
an edged tongue that cut worse than either, had confined his juvenile
steps to a very straight and exceedingly narrow path by the simple
process of lambasting him roundly whenever he so much as glanced to the
right or to the left.
Aunt Elvira was a lean woman with no digestion to speak of, and the
chief tenet of her philosophy was that whatever is enjoyable is sinful.
She impressed this creed on young Tidbury with her thin but sinewy arm,
until one day while castigating him violently for laughing at a comic
supplement that the groceries had come in she succumbed to an excess of
virtue and a broken blood vessel.
Tidbury promptly came to New York with two suits of flannel underwear
and many suppressed desires, and went soberly to work in the hat
company. His subsequent life was as empty of adventure, variety, sin or
success as the life of a Hubbard squash. His job wholly absorbed him.
The little figures in the big books became his only world. He had never
learned to play.
Yet people liked Tidbury, even while they thought him kin to the snail.
He had a quiet twinkle in his eye and he took over mean jobs and night
work without a peep of protest. It was his willingness to take on
overtime work, and his quiet competence that first attracted the
approving eye of Mr. Blatter. But Mr. Blatter had to admit that Mr.
Spingle had diagnosed the case of Tidbury Epps all too accurately;
Tidbury was indubitably, incurably a dud; and that is worse than being a
dub. If any latent fire lurked beneath that pepper-and-salt bosom no one
had ever glimpsed so much as a spark of it. Tidbury never lived up to
that twinkle in his eye.
One would have said that Tidbury was as inconspicuous as an oyster in a
fifteen-cent stew, and yet love, mysterious, ubiquitous love, found him
out and laid him violently by the heels.
It was the round black eyes of Martha Ritter, the new girl at the
information desk, and the way she cocked her head on one side when she
smiled, that first brought to Tidbury the alarming realization that his
heart was something more than a pump.
She was an alert little thing who would have been teaching school in her
native Ohio village of Granville had not the glittering metropolitan
magnet drawn her to it as every year it draws ten thousand Martha
Ritters from ten thousand Granvilles.
She smiled at Tidbury one day as he registered his punctual arrival on
the time clock, and a sudden strange warmth was kindled under his
pepper-and-salt coat. Tidbury knew that it was wicked to feel so good,
but he couldn't help it. Love laughs at complexes.
He saw her home; he called on her; he brought her salted peanuts; he
took her to a concert in Central Park; he kept her picture on his
washstand. But, characteristically, Tidbury as a lover was no volcano of
imperious emotion. He was no aggressive bark, battling fiercely against
wind and wave; he was a chip, floating with the tide. Matrimony, with
Martha, was a desirable but distant shore; he would drift there in time.
But Martha Ritter, who had more than a dash of romance in her, did not
think much of this sort of courting.
The last time he had been with her--they had gone to the Aquarium to
view the fishes--pent-up protest had burst from her, and she had
exclaimed, "Oh, Tidbury, you are so--so quiet!"
The words had jolted him; he had said them over to himself uncounted
times, and had pondered over them; indeed he was trying to keep from
thinking of them as he bent over his task the day they made Hydeman
assistant to the sales manager. Tidbury had noticed lately that Martha
talked about Mr. Hydeman a great deal; she had mentioned his polished
finger-nails; she had suggested that Tidbury would do well to get one of
those high-lapeled, snug-waisted suits that Mr. Hydeman affected; she
had quoted some of Mr. Hydeman's witticisms, and had retailed some
incidents from his highly colored life. In short, she appeared to have
taken a sudden acute interest in Mr. Hydeman.
Tidbury Epps could not drive from his mind the disquieting thought that
Mr. Hydeman as a rival would be dangerous. In the washroom Mr. Hydeman
made no secret of his finesse as a Don Juan. He was everything that
Tidbury was not--dashing, worldly, confident. There was something about
his smooth black hair, held in place by a shiny gummy substance,
something about the angle at which he tilted his short-brimmed hat,
something about the way his tight little knot of brilliant tie fitted
into his modishly low collar, something about the way he filliped the
ash from his cigarette so that one could see the diamond twinkle on his
finger--that carried a subtle suggestion of sophistication and an
adventurous nature.
That morning they had entered together--Tidbury and Mr. Hydeman--and
Tidbury, with icy fingers gripping his heart, had noted that Martha
bestowed on Mr. Hydeman a smile with a lingering personal note in it,
while her greeting to Tidbury was a curt formal nod. His bitter cup was
full, and for the first time in his life he gave way to the pangs of
jealousy when, at noontime, he saw Mr. Hydeman take her to lunch.
Tidbury came upon them, talking and laughing together, and Martha made
not the slightest attempt to conceal her interest in the suave new
assistant to the sales manager; she was open, even brazen about it.
Tidbury was moodily copying figures and trying not to heed the fact that
the green-eyed monster was clutching him with torturing talons when Mr.
Hydeman came up to his desk and prodded him playfully in the ribs.
"Well, old Tid," remarked Mr. Hydeman, "I'll bet you wish you were going
to be in my shoes to-night."
Tidbury looked up from his work.
"Why?" he asked.
For answer Mr. Hydeman thrust two tickets beneath Tidbury's stub of
nose. With only a vague comprehension Tidbury glanced at what was
printed on them.