addressed what she had to say straight to Bartholomew Berg.
"I--simply didn't want to interfere in this business. I know
nothing about it, really. Of course, I do know Featherloom
petticoats. I know all about them. It seemed to me that just
because the newspapers and magazines were full of pictures showing
spectacular creatures in impossible attitudes wearing tango tea
skirts, we are apt to forget that those types form only a thin
upper crust, and that down beneath there are millions and millions
of regular, everyday women doing regular everyday things in
regular everyday clothes. Women who wash on Monday, and iron on
Tuesday, and bake one-egg cakes, and who have to hurry home to get
supper when they go down-town in the afternoon. They're the kind
who go to market every morning, and take the baby along in the
go-cart, and they're not wearing crêpe de chine tango petticoats
to do it in, either. They're wearing skirts with a drawstring in
the back, and a label in the band, guaranteed to last one year.
Those are the people I'd like to reach, and hold."
"Hm!" said Hopper, from his corner, cryptically.
Bartholomew Berg looked at Emma McChesney admiringly. "Sounds
reasonable and logical," he said.
Sam Hupp sat up with a jerk.
"It does sound reasonable," he said briskly. "But it isn't. Pardon
me, won't you, Mrs. McChesney? But you must realize that this is
an extravagant age. The very workingmen's wives have caught the
spending fever. The time is past when you can attract people to
your goods with the promise of durability and wear. They don't
expect goods to wear. They'd resent it if they did. They get tired
of an article before it's worn out. They're looking for novelties.
They'd rather get two months' wear out of a skirt that's slashed a
new way, than a year's wear out of one that looks like the sort
that mother used to make."
Mrs. McChesney, her cheeks very pink, her eyes very bright,
subsided into silence. In silence she sat throughout the rest of
the conference. In silence she descended in the elevator with T.A.
Buck, and in silence she stepped into his waiting car.
T.A. Buck eyed her worriedly. "Well?" he said. Then, as Mrs.
McChesney shrugged noncommittal shoulders, "Tell me, how do you
feel about it?"
Emma McChesney turned to face him, breathing rather quickly.
"The last time I felt as I do just now was when Jock was a baby.
He took sick, and the doctors were puzzled. They thought it might
be something wrong with his spine. They had a consultation--five
of them--with the poor little chap on the bed, naked. They
wouldn't let me in, so I listened in the hallway, pressed against
the door with my face to the crack. They prodded him, and poked
him, and worked his little legs and arms, and every time he cried
I prayed, and wept, and clawed the door with my fingers, and
called them beasts and torturers and begged them to let me in,
though I wasn't conscious that I was doing those things--at the
time. I didn't know what they were doing to him, though they said
it was all for his good, and they were only trying to help him.
But I only knew that I wanted to rush in, and grab him up in my
arms, and run away with him--run, and run, and run."
She stopped, lips trembling, eyes suspiciously bright.
"And that's the way I felt in there--this afternoon."
T.A. Buck reached up and patted her shoulder. "Don't, old girl!
It's going to work out splendidly, I'm sure. After all, those
chaps do know best."
"They may know best, but they don't know Featherlooms," retorted
Emma McChesney.
"True. But perhaps what Jock said when he walked with us to the
elevator was pretty nearly right. You know he said we were
criticising their copy the way a plumber would criticise the
Parthenon--so busy finding fault with the lack of drains that we
failed to see the beauty of the architecture."
"T.A.," said Emma McChesney solemnly, "T.A., we're getting old."
"Old! You! I! Ha!"
"You may 'Ha!' all you like. But do you know what they thought of
us in there? They thought we were a couple of fogies, and they
humored us, that's what they did. I'll tell you, T.A., when the
time comes for me to give Jock up to some little pink-faced girl
I'll do it, and smile if it kills me. But to hand my Featherlooms
over to a lot of cold-blooded experts who--well--" she paused,
biting her lip.
"We'll see, Emma; we'll see."
They did see. The Featherloom petticoat campaign was launched with
a great splash. It sailed serenely into the sea of national
business. Then suddenly something seemed to go wrong with its
engines. It began to wobble and showed a decided list to port.
Jock, who at the beginning was so puffed with pride that his gold
fountain pen threatened to burst the confines of his very modishly
tight vest, lost two degrees of pompousness a day, and his
attitude toward his unreproachful mother was almost humble.
A dozen times a week T.A. Buck would stroll casually into Mrs.
McChesney's office. "Think it's going to take hold?" he would ask.
"Our men say the dealers have laid in, but the public doesn't seem
to be tearing itself limb from limb to get to our stuff."
Emma McChesney would smile, and shrug noncommittal shoulders.
When it became very painfully apparent that it wasn't "taking
hold," T.A. Buck, after asking the same question, now worn and
frayed with asking, broke out, crossly:
"Well, really, I don't mind the shrug, but I do wish you wouldn't
smile. After all, you know, this campaign is costing us
money--real money, and large chunks of it. It's very evident that
we shouldn't have tried to make a national campaign of this
thing."
Whereupon Mrs. McChesney's smile grew into a laugh. "Forgive me,
T.A. I'm not laughing at you. I'm laughing because--well, I can't
tell you why. It's a woman's reason, and you wouldn't think it a
reason at all. For that matter, I suppose it isn't, but--Anyway,
I've got something to tell you. The fault of this campaign has
been the copy. It was perfectly good advertising, but it left the
public cold. When they read those ads they might have been
impressed with the charm of the garment, but it didn't fill their
breasts with any wild longing to possess one. It didn't make the
women feel unhappy until they had one of those skirts hanging on
the third hook in their closet. The only kind of advertising that
is advertising is the kind that makes the reader say, 'I'll have
one of those.'"
T.A. Buck threw out helpless hands. "What are we going to do about
it?"
"Do? I've already done it."
"Done what?"
"Written the kind of copy that I think Featherlooms ought to have.
I just took my knowledge of Featherlooms, plus what I knew about
human nature, sprinkled in a handful of good humor and sincerity,
and they're going to feed it to the public. It's the same recipe
that I used to use in selling Featherlooms on the road. It used to
go by word of mouth. I don't see why it shouldn't go on paper. It
isn't classic advertising. It isn't scientific. It isn't even what
they call psychological, I suppose. But it's human. And it's going
to reach that great, big, solid, safe, spot-cash mass known as the
middle class. Of course my copy may be wrong. It may not go, after
all, but--"
But it did go. It didn't go with a rush, or a bang. It went
slowly, surely, hand over hand, but it went, and it kept on going.
And watching it climb and take hold there came back to Emma
McChesney's eye the old sparkle, to her step the old buoyancy, to
her voice the old delightful ring. And now, when T.A. Buck
strolled into her office of a morning, with his, "It's taking
hold, Mrs. Mack," she would dimple like a girl as she laughed back
at him--
"With a grip that won't let go."
"It looks very much as though we were going to be millionaires in
our old age, you and I?" went on Buck.
Emma McChesney opened her eyes wide.
"Old!" she mocked, "Old! You! I! Ha!"
IV
THE MAN WITHIN HIM
They used to do it much more picturesquely. They rode in coats of
scarlet, in the crisp, clear morning, to the winding of horns and
the baying of hounds, to the thud-thud of hoofs, and the crackle
of underbrush. Across fresh-plowed fields they went, crashing
through forest paths, leaping ditches, taking fences, scrambling
up the inclines, pelting down the hillside, helter-skelter, until,
panting, wide-eyed, eager, blood-hungry, the hunt closed in at the
death.
The scarlet coat has sobered down to the somber gray and the
snuffy brown of that unromantic garment known as the business
suit. The winding horn is become a goblet, and its notes are the
tinkle of ice against glass. The baying of hounds has harshened to
the squawk of the motor siren. The fresh-plowed field is a blue
print, the forest maze a roll of plans and specifications. Each
fence is a business barrier. Every ditch is of a competitor's
making, dug craftily so that the clumsy-footed may come a cropper.
All the romance is out of it, all the color, all the joy. But two
things remain the same: The look in the face of the hunter as he
closed in on the fox is the look in the face of him who sees the
coveted contract lying ready for the finishing stroke of his pen.
And his words are those of the hunter of long ago as, eyes
a-gleam, teeth bared, muscles still taut with the tenseness of the
chase, he waves the paper high in air and cries, "I've made a
killing!"
For two years Jock McChesney had watched the field as it swept by
in its patient, devious, cruel game of Hunt the Contract. But he
had never been in at the death. Those two years had taught him how
to ride; to take a fence; to leap a ditch. He had had his awkward
bumps, and his clumsy falls. He had lost his way more than once.
But he had always groped his way back again, stumblingly, through
the dusk. Jock McChesney was the youngest man on the Berg, Shriner
Advertising Company's big staff of surprisingly young men. So
young that the casual glance did not reveal to you the marks that
the strain of those two years had left on his boyish face. But the
marks were there.
Nature etches with the most delicate of points. She knows the
cunning secret of light and shadow. You scarcely realize that she
has been at work. A faint line about the mouth, a fairy tracing at
the corners of the eyes, a mere vague touch just at the
nostrils--and the thing is done.
Even Emma McChesney's eyes--those mother-eyes which make the lynx
seem a mole--had failed to note the subtle change. Then, suddenly,
one night, the lines leaped out at her.
They were seated at opposite sides of the book-littered library
table in the living-room of the cheerful up-town apartment which
was the realization of the nightly dream which Mrs. Emma McChesney
had had in her ten years on the road for the T.A. Buck Featherloom
Petticoat Company. Jock McChesney's side of the big table was
completely covered with the mass of copy-paper, rough sketches,
photographs and drawings which make up an advertising lay-out. He
was bent over the work, absorbed, intent, his forearms resting on
the table. Emma McChesney glanced up from her magazine just as
Jock bent forward to reach a scrap of paper that had fluttered
away. The lamplight fell full on his face. And Emma McChesney saw.
The hand that held the magazine fell to her lap. Her lips were
parted slightly. She sat very quietly, her eyes never leaving the
face that frowned so intently over the littered table. The room
had been very quiet before--Jock busy with his work, his mother
interested in her magazine. But this silence was different. There
was something electric in it. It was a silence that beats on the
brain like a noise. Jock McChesney, bent over his work, heard it,
felt it, and, oppressed by it, looked up suddenly. He met those
two eyes opposite.
"Spooks? Or is it my godlike beauty which holds you thus? Or is my
face dirty?"
Emma McChesney did not smile. She laid her magazine on the table,
face down, and leaned forward, her staring eyes still fixed on her
son's face.
"Look here, young 'un. Are you working too hard?"
"Me? Now? This stuff you mean--?"
"No; I mean in the last year. Are they piling it up on you?"
Jock laughed a laugh that was nothing less than a failure, so
little of real mirth did it contain.
"Piling it up! Lord, no! I wish they would. That's the trouble.
They don't give me a chance."
"A chance! Why, that's not true, son. You've said yourself that
there are men who have been in the office three times as long as
you have, who never have had the opportunities that they've given
you."
It was as though she had touched a current that thrilled him to
action. He pushed back his chair and stood up, one hand thrust
into his pocket, the other passing quickly over his head from brow
to nape with a quick, nervous gesture that was new to him.
"And why!" he flung out. "Why! Not because they like the way I
part my hair. They don't do business that way up there. It's
because I've made good, and those other dubs haven't. That's why.
They've let me sit in at the game. But they won't let me take any
tricks. I've been an apprentice hand for two years now. I'm tired
of it. I want to be in on a killing. I want to taste blood. I want
a chance at some of the money--real money."
Emma McChesney sat back in her chair and surveyed the angry figure
before her with quiet, steady eyes.
"I might have known that only one thing could bring those lines
into your face, son." She paused a moment. "So you want money as
badly as all that, do you?"
Jock's hand came down with a thwack on the papers before him.
"Want it! You just bet I want it."
"Do I know her?" asked Emma McChesney quietly.
Jock stopped short in his excited pacing up and down the room.
"Do you know--Why, I didn't say there--What makes you think
that--?"
"When a youngster like you, whose greatest worry has been whether
Harvard'll hold 'em again this year, with Baxter out, begins to
howl about not being appreciated in business, and to wear a late
fall line of wrinkles where he has been smooth before, I feel
justified in saying, 'Do I know her?'"
"Well, it isn't any one--at least, it isn't what you mean you
think it is when you say you--"
"Careful there! You'll trip. Never you mind what I mean I think it
is when I say. Count ten, and then just tell me what you think you
mean."
Jock passed his hand over his head again with that nervous little
gesture. Then he sat down, a little wearily. He stared moodily
down at the pile of papers before him: His mother faced him
quietly across the table.
"Grace Galt's getting twice as much as I am," Jock broke out, with
savage suddenness. "The first year I didn't mind. A fellow gets
accustomed, these days, to see women breaking into all the
professions and getting away with men-size salaries. But her pay
check doubles mine--more than doubles it."
"It's been my experience," observed Emma McChesney, "that when a
firm condescends to pay a woman twice as much as a man, that means
she's worth six times as much."
A painful red crept into Jock's face. "Maybe. Two years ago that
would have sounded reasonable to me. Two years ago, when I walked
down Broadway at night, a fifty-foot electric sign at Forty-second
was just an electric sign to me. Just part of the town's
decoration like the chorus girls, and the midnight theater crowds.
Now--well, now every blink of every red and yellow globe is
crammed full of meaning. I know the power that advertising has;
how it influences our manners, and our morals, and our minds, and
our health. It regulates the food we eat, and the clothes we wear,
and the books we read, and the entertainment we seek. It's
colossal, that's what it is! It's--"
"Keep on like that for another two years, sonny, and no business
banquet will be complete without you. The next thing you know
you'll be addressing the Y.M.C.A. advertising classes on The Young
Man in Business."
Jock laughed a rueful little laugh. "I didn't mean to make
a speech. I was just trying to say that I've served my
apprenticeship. It hurts a fellow's pride. You can't hold your
head up before a girl when you know her salary's twice yours, and
you know that she knows it. Why look at Mrs. Hoffman, who's with
the Dowd Agency. Of course she's a wonder, even if her face does
look like the fifty-eighth variety. She can write copy that lifts
a campaign right out of the humdrum class, and makes it luminous.
Her husband works in a bank somewhere. He earns about as much as
Mrs. Hoffman pays the least of her department subordinates. And
he's so subdued that he side-steps when he walks, and they call
him the human jelly-fish."
Emma McChesney was regarding her son with a little puzzled frown.
Suddenly she reached out and tapped the topmost of the scribbled
sheets strewn the length of Jock's side of the table.
"What's all this?"
Jock tipped back his chair and surveyed the clutter before him.
"That," said he, "is what is known on the stage as 'the papers.'
And it's the real plot of this piece."
"M-m-m--I thought so. Just favor me with a scenario, will you?"
Half-grinning, half-serious, Jock stuck his thumbs in the armholes
of his waistcoat, and began.
"Scene: Offices of the Berg, Shriner Advertising Company. Time,
the present. Characters: Jock McChesney, handsome, daring,
brilliant--"
"Suppose you--er--skip the characters, however fascinating, and
get to the action."
Jock McChesney brought the tipped chair down on all-fours with a
thud, and stood up. The grin was gone. He was as serious as he had
been in the midst of his tirade of five minutes before.
"All right. Here it is. And don't blame me if it sounds like cheap
melodrama. This stuff," and he waved a hand toward the paper-laden
table, "is an advertising campaign plan for the Griebler Gum
Company, of St. Louis. Oh, don't look impressed. The office hasn't
handed me any such commission. I just got the idea like a flash,
and I've been working it out for the last two weeks. It worked
itself out, almost--the way a really scorching idea does,
sometimes. This Griebler has been advertising for years. You
know the Griebler gum. But it hasn't been the right sort of
advertising. Old Griebler, the original gum man, had fogy notions
about advertising, and as long as he lived they had to keep it
down. He died a few months ago--you must have read of it. Left a
regular mint. Ben Griebler, the oldest son, started right in to
clean out the cobwebs. Of course the advertising end of it has
come in for its share of the soap and water. He wants to make a
clean sweep of it. Every advertising firm in the country has been
angling for the contract. It's going to be a real one. Two-thirds
of the crowd have submitted plans. And that's just where my kick
comes in. The Berg, Shriner Company makes it a rule never to
submit advance plans."
"Excuse me if I seem a trifle rude," interrupted Mrs. McChesney,
"but I'd like to know where you think you've been wronged in
this."
"Right here!" replied Jock, and he slapped his pocket, "and here,"
he pointed to his head. "Two spots so vital that they make old
Achilles's heel seem armor-plated. Ben Griebler is one of the
show-me kind. He wants value received for money expended, and
while everybody knows that he has a loving eye on the Berg,
Shriner crowd, he won't sign a thing until he knows what he's
getting. A firm's record, standing, staff, equipment, mean nothing
to him."
"But, Jock, I still don't see--"
Jock gathered up a sheaf of loose papers and brandished them in
the air. "This is where I come in. I've got a plan here that will
fetch this Griebler person. Oh, I'm not dreaming. I outlined it
for Sam Hupp, and he was crazy about it. Sam Hupp had some sort of
plan outlined himself. But he said this made his sound as dry as
cigars in Denver. And you know yourself that Sam Hupp's copy is so
brilliant that he could sell brewery advertising to a temperance
magazine."
Emma McChesney stood up. She looked a little impatient, and a
trifle puzzled. "But why all this talk! I don't get you. Take your
plan to Mr. Berg. If it's what you think it is he'll see it
quicker than any other human being, and he'll probably fall on
your neck and invest you in royal robes and give you a mahogany
desk all your own."
"Oh, what's the good!" retorted Jock disgustedly. "This Griebler
has an appointment at the office to-morrow. He'll be closeted with
the Old Man. They'll call in Hupp. But never a plan will they
reveal. It's against their code of ethics. Ethics! I'm sick of the
word. I suppose you'd say I'm lucky to be associated with a firm
like that, and I suppose I am. But I wish in the name of all the
gods of Business that they weren't so bloomin' conservative.
Ethics! They're all balled up in 'em, like Henry James in his
style."
Emma McChesney came over from her side of the table and stood very
close to her son. She laid one hand very lightly on his arm and
looked up into the sullen, angry young face.
[Illustration: "She laid one hand very lightly on his arm and
looked up into the sullen, angry young face"]
"I've seen older men than you are, Jock, and better men, and
bigger men, wearing that same look, and for the same reason. Every
ambitious man or woman in business wears it at one time or
another. Sooner or later, Jock, you'll have your chance at the
money end of this game. If you don't care about the thing you call
ethics, it'll be sooner. If you do care, it will be later. It
rests with you, but it's bound to come, because you've got the
stuff in you."
"Maybe," replied Jock the cynical. But his face lost some of its
sullenness as he looked down at that earnest, vivid countenance
up-turned to his. "Maybe. It sounds all right, Mother--in the
story books. But I'm not quite solid on it. These days it isn't
so much what you've got in you that counts as what you can bring
out. I know the young man's slogan used to be 'Work and Wait,' or
something pretty like that. But these days they've boiled it down
to one word--'Produce'!"
"The marvel of it is that there aren't more of 'em," observed Emma
McChesney sadly.
"More what?"
"More lines. Here,"--she touched his forehead,--"and here,"--she
touched his eyes.
"Lines!" Jock swung to face a mirror. "Good! I'm so infernally
young-looking that no one takes me seriously. It's darned hard
trying to convince people you're a captain of finance when you
look like an errand boy."
From the center of the room Mrs. McChesney watched the boy as he
surveyed himself in the glass. And as she gazed there came a
frightened look into her eyes. It was gone in a minute, and in its
place came a curious little gleam, half amused, half pugnacious.
"Jock McChesney, if I thought that you meant half of what you've
said to-night about honor, and ethics, and all that, I'd--"
"Spank me, I suppose," said the young six-footer.
"No," and all the humor had fled, "I--Jock, I've never said much
to you about your father. But I think you know that he was what he
was to the day of his death. You were just about eight when I made
up my mind that life with him was impossible. I said then--and you
were all I had, son--that I'd rather see you dead than to have you
turn out to be a son of your father. Don't make me remember that
wish, Jock."
Two quick steps and his arms were about her. His face was all
contrition. "Why--Mother! I didn't mean--You see this is business,
and I'm crazy to make good, and it's such a fight--"
"Don't I know it?" demanded Emma McChesney. "I guess your mother
hasn't been sitting home embroidering lunchcloths these last
fifteen years." She lifted her head from the boy's shoulder. "And
now, son, considering me, not as your doting mother, but in my
business capacity as secretary of the T.A. Buck Featherloom
Petticoat Company, suppose you reveal to me the inner workings of
this plan of yours. I'd like to know if you really are the
advertising wizard that you think you are."
So it was that long after Annie's dinner dishes had ceased to
clatter in the kitchen; long after she had put her head in at the
door to ask, "Aigs 'r cakes for breakfast?" long after those two
busy brains should have rested in sleep, the two sat at either
side of the light-flooded table, the face of one glowing as he
talked, the face of the other sparkling as she listened. And at
midnight:
"Why, you infant wonder!" exclaimed Emma McChesney.