Chapter 4

A week later an intent little group formed a ragged circle about the big table in the private office of Bartholomew Berg, head of the Berg, Shriner Advertising Company. Bartholomew Berg himself, massive, watchful, taciturn, managing to give an impression of power by his very silence, sat at one side of the long table. Just across from him a sleek-haired stenographer bent over her note book, jotting down every word, that the conference might make business history. Hopper, at one end of the room, studied his shoe heel intently. He was unbelievably boyish looking to command the fabulous salary reported to be his. Advertising men, mentioning his name, pulled a figurative forelock as they did so. Near Mrs. McChesney sat Sam Hupp, he of the lightning brain and the sure-fire copy. Emma McChesney, strangely silent, kept her eyes intent on the faces of the others. T.A. Buck, interested, enthusiastic, but somewhat uncertain, glanced now and then at his silent business partner, found no satisfaction in her set face, and glanced away again. Grace Galt, unbelievably young and pretty to have won a place for herself in that conference of business people, smiled in secret at Jock McChesney's evident struggle to conceal his elation at being present at this, his first staff meeting.

The conference had lasted one hour now. In that time Featherloom petticoats had been picked to pieces, bit by bit, from hem to waist-band. Nothing had been left untouched. Every angle had come under the keen vision of the advertising experts--the comfort of the garment, its durability, style, cheapness, service. Which to emphasize?

"H--m, novelty campaign, in my opinion," said Hopper, breaking one of his long silences. "There's nothing new in petticoats themselves, you know. You've got to give 'em a new angle."

"Yep," agreed Hupp. "Start out with a feature skirt. Might illustrate with one of those freak drawings they're crazy about now--slinky figure, you know, hollow-chested, one foot trailing, and all that. They're crazy, but they do attract attention, no doubt of that."

Bartholomew Berg turned his head slowly. "What's your opinion, Mrs. McChesney?" he asked.

"I--I'm afraid I haven't any," said Emma McChesney listlessly. T.A. Buck stared at her in dismay and amazement.

"How about you, Mr. Buck?"

"Why--I--er--of course this advertising game's new to me. I'm really leaving it in your hands. I really thought that Mrs. McChesney's idea was to make a point of the fact that these petticoats were not freak petticoats, but skirts for the everyday women. She gave me what I thought was a splendid argument a week ago." He turned to her helplessly.

Mrs. McChesney sat silent.

Bartholomew Berg leaned forward a little and smiled one of his rare smiles.

"Won't you tell us, Mrs. McChesney? We'd all like to hear what you have to say."

Mrs. McChesney looked down at her hands. Then she looked up, and 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.