Part 10

“Call him up when we get to Penn. Station,” said Sanford. “Tell him I can't give him any decision yet awhile. Tell him that loyalty to my own city will keep me there for some time. You might tell him that I believe the _Lens_ has great possibilities if properly handled. I should not care to build up the property of a Chicago paper while there is a chance of the _Lens_ becoming the great evening paper of the East.”

“Yes, sir,” said Edwards, jotting down what, might pass for stenography.

The train was running smoothly through level green country, and Mr. Birdlip laid down his paper on his lap. Sanford was ready to catch his eye.

“Good morning, Mr. Birdlip,” he said, genially.

“Good morning,” said the owner of the _Lens_, whose bright gaze exhibited a lively tincture of interest.

“Here are the typed notes of your remarks on 'Newspaper Circulation as a Byproduct of the Multiplication Table',” said Edwards, in a loud voice.

“You can let those wait,” said Sanford, carelessly. “I don't want to be bothered with anything else this morning. Give me a memorandum of anything that needs to be attended to when we get to New York.” He turned to Mr. Birdlip. “I find that in these busy days one has to attend to some of one's work even on the train. It is about the only place where one is never interrupted.”

“Did I hear you say something about Circulation?” said Mr. Birdlip. “Are you specially interested in that problem?”

“I have given it a good deal of thought,” said Sanford. “But I would hardly dignify it by calling it a problem. It is perfectly simple. It is purely a matter of taking the right attitude toward it. So many newspaper proprietors regard it merely as a problem in addition. Now it should be considered rather as a matter of multiplication. Instead of trying to add ten to your figures, why not multiply by ten? The result is so much more satisfactory.”

This sounded so plausible that Mr. Birdlip felt ashamed to ask how it was to be done.

“Will you have a cigar, sir?” asked Sanford, handing out the only one with a band on it. Mr. Birdlip accepted it, and looked as though he were about to ask a question. Sanford went on rapidly.

“Speaking of circulation,” he said, “when I am consulted I am always surprised to note that newspaper proprietors are so prone to view the matter merely as a question of distribution; of--well, of merchandising,” he added, as his eye fell upon that word in his copy of _System_. “Indeed it rests upon quite another basis. The essence of merchandising” (he repeated the word with relish, noting its soothing effect on his employer) “is what?”

He made a dramatic pause, and Mr. Birdlip, carried away, wondered what indeed was the essence.

“The essence of merchandising,” said Sanford (he smote the arm of his chair, and leaned forward in emphasis), “and by merchandising I mean of course in the modern sense, merchandising on a big scale, is nothing but Confidence. Confidence, an impalpable thing, a state of mind. Now, sir, what is it that upbuilds circulation? It is Public Confidence. The assurance on the part of the public that the newspaper is reliable. It is a secret and inviolable conviction on the part of the reader that the integrity and enterprise of the paper are beyond cavil, in other words, unimpeachable. In order to create the Will-to-Purchase on the part of the prospect, in order to beget that desirable state of mind, there must be a state of mind in the paper itself. Note that word _Mind_. Now what is the Mind of the paper? I always ask every newspaper owner who consults me, what is the Mind of his paper?”

Without waiting for Mr. Birdlip to be embarrassed by his inability to answer this question, the ecstatic Sanford continued:

“The Mind of the paper is, of course, the Editorial Department. How subtle, how delicate, how momentous, is that function of commenting on the great affairs of the world! As I said in an address to a Rotary club recently, of what use to have all the mechanical perfections ever invented unless your editors are the right men? Walter Whitman, the efficiency engineer, said: 'Produce great persons: the rest follows.' That is the kind of production that counts most. Get great personalities for your editors, and watch the circulation rise. Of course the right kind of editors must be very highly paid.”

This was a strange doctrine to Mr. Birdlip, who never read the editorial page of his own paper, and secretly wondered how the editors found so much to write about.

“The great error that so many newspaper owners make,” said Sanford, sonorously, “is to think of their product as they would of any other article of commerce which is turned out day by day, in standardized units, from a factory. A newspaper is not standardized. It is born anew every issue. It is not a manufacturing routine that puts it together: it is a human organism, built up out of human brains. Every unit is different. It depends not primarily on machinery but on human personalities. I cannot understand why it is that newspaper owners yearn for the finest and most modern presses, and yet are often content to staff their journals with second-rate men.”

“I agree with you,” said Mr. Birdlip. “It is all a question of getting the right man. That is one reason why I am so fond of travelling; I always meet up with new ideas. Now, sir (I am sorry I do not know your name, for your face is rather familiar; I think I must have met you at some Rotary club), you seem to me a man of forceful and aggressive character. You are the kind of man I should like to have on the _Lens_, I heard you mention the paper to your secretary awhile back; you must be interested in it.”

Sanford was perfectly cool. “I might consider it,” he said.

“I think you would find the _Lens_ a pleasant paper to work on,” said Mr. Birdlip. “I flatter myself that the staff is a capable one, for the most part.”

“I should insist on being given a free hand,” said Sanford. “Perhaps the position of circulation manager----?”

“Let me think a moment,” said Mr. Birdlip. “I suppose I ought to visit with my editor-in-chief before firing any one to make room for you. But I must say I like the way you talk, straight from the shoulder, like that Dr. Cranium, you know. That's the sort of stuff we need.”

“Right!” cried Sanford. “If you always talk straight from the shoulder, you'll never talk through your hat.”

Mr. Birdlip relished this impromptu aphorism. “Well, now, let me see,” he said, pondering. “The editor-in-chief, the managing editor, the editorial writers--they're all pretty good men.”

“Of course I shouldn't care for a merely routine position,” said Sanford. “The only position I would consider would be one in which I could really build up circulation for you.” He was wondering inwardly whether to stand out for a ten thousand salary.

“Quite so,” said Mr. Birdlip. “I think I have it. How would you care to run a column? 'Straight From the Shoulder'--wouldn't that be a fine title?”

“Fine!” said Sanford, but not without a secret shudder. Still, he thought, gold can assuage anything; and he reflected on the rich, sedentary, and care-free life of a syndicated philosopher.

“Very well,” said the owner. “I've been looking around for a man with both feet on the ground----”

(“Both feet on the pay envelope is my idea,” said Sanford to himself.)

“And I think you're just the man I want. There's only one place in the paper I can think of that really needs a change. There's a fellow on the staff called Sanford, runs a kind of column, terrible stuff. I don't think he amounts to much. Now why couldn't you take his job?”

Sanford has never forgiven his brother-in-law for that curious strangled sound he emitted.

THE CLIMACTERIC

MR. EUSTACE VEAL was a manufacturer of cuspidors. His beautiful factory was one of the finest of its kind, equipped with complete automatic sprinklers, wire-glass windows, cafeteria on the top floor, pensions for superannuated employees, rosewood directors' dining room, mottoes from Orison Swett Marden on the weekly pay envelopes, and a clever young man in tortoise-shell spectacles hired at eighty dollars a week to write the house-organ (which was called _El Cuspidorado_).

Mr. Veal lived in the exclusive and clean-shaven suburb of Mandrake Park, where he had built a stucco mansion with Venetian blinds, a croquet lawn with a revolving spray on it on hot days, and a mansard butler. Here Mrs. Veal and the two Veal girls, Dora and Petunia, led the blameless life of the _embonpoint_ classes. The electric lights in the bedrooms were turned on promptly at ten o'clock every night, except on the sixteen winter evenings when the Veals occupied their box at the opera. During “Rigoletto” or “Pagliacci” the uncomplaining Mr. Veal would sit in silence with his head against the thick red velvet curtain at the back of the box, thinking up new ways to get an order for ten thousand nickel-plated seamless number 13's from the Pullman Company.

Mr. Veal, hampered as he was by the restrictions of success, was still full of the enjoyment of life. He had written a little brochure on “The Cuspidor: Its Use and Abuse Since the Times of the Pharaohs,” which was very well spoken of in the trade. A morocco-bound copy lay on the console table in Mrs. Veal's salon. It was he who invented the papier-maché spittoon, and the collapsible paper “companion” for travelling salesmen. It was he who had presented a solid silver spittoon de luxe to the King of Siam when that worthy visited the United States. And it was his idea, too, to name the beautiful shining brass model, especially recommended for hotel lobbies, El Cuspidorado. This was a stroke of imaginative genius, and several rival manufacturers wept because they had not thought of it first.

The spittoon magnate's habits were regular and sane. He rose by alarm clock at seven. He bathed, shaved, brushed his teeth with the vertical motion recommended by the toothbrush advertisers, breakfasted on cereal and cream and poached eggs, with one cup of strong coffee; walked leisurely to the station, bought a paper, and caught the 8.13 train. He avoided the other men who wanted him to sit with them, took the fifth chair on the left-hand side of the smoking car, and just as the train started he lit his first cigar. His commutation ticket was always ready for the conductor to punch. He never kept others waiting, just as he hated to be kept waiting himself. After his ticket had been punched and put back into an alligator-hide pocketbook, he opened the paper and studied it faithfully until the train got to the terminal.

At the factory Mr. Veal's routine was equally well-ordered and uniform. At nine o'clock he reached his private office, greeted his secretary, and ran over the morning mail, which had been opened and lay on his desk. Then he went through his dictation, which was carefully (even if not grammatically) accomplished. The sales reports for the preceding day were brought to him. Then he discussed any matters requiring attention with his department heads, calling them in one by one. At a quarter after twelve he walked up to the Manufacturers' Club for lunch, after which he played one game of pool.

He was back at the office by half-past two, and gave his passionate and devoted attention to the salivary needs of the nation until five o'clock. He caught the 5.23 train back to Mandrake Park, sitting on the right-hand side of the smoker where the setting sun would not dazzle on his newspaper.

But one day, about the time of the March equinox, when young ladies put furry pussywillows on their typewriter desks, and bank tellers crack the shells of spring jokes through the brass railings, Mr. Veal's behaviour was so peculiar as to cause anxiety among his associates.

He had ridden on the train as usual, without showing any abnormal symptoms. But when he was next observed, walking down Vincent Street, there was a red spot on his cheekbones and his expression was savage. He entered a haberdasher's shop and asked to see some neckties. When the clerk put out a tray of silk scarves in rich, sober colours, such as are commonly worn by successful and middle-aged merchants, Mr. Veal swore and dashed them aside.

“Good Lord!” he cried, “I'm not going to a funeral! Things like that are worn by Civil War veterans. What do you think I am, seventy years old? Give me something with some snap to it!”

And he chose a lemon-tinted cravat with vorticist patterns of brown and purple. He tore off the dark gray tie he had on and substituted the gaudy new one.

At the next corner he passed a shoe-shop. He hesitated a moment at the plate-glass window, then he entered and glared at the brisk young puppet who came forward with a smirk. He displayed his elastic-sided boots of the floorwalker type (which he had worn for years on account of his corns) and asked to have them removed. When they were off his feet he threw them to the other end of the long, narrow room. “I want some russet shoes with cloth tops,” he said. “And some silk socks to match, the kind the men wear in the magazine ads.”

When he left the shop, his feet might have been taken for those of Charley Chaplin, or of an assistant advertising manager of a department store.

*****

Mr. Veal reached his office nearly two hours late, and one of his office boys was instantly discharged for asking him whom he wanted to see. Indeed, in a new suit of violent black-and-white checks, and with a crush hat of velvety substance, he was almost unrecognizable. As he passed through the filing department a hush fell over the young ladies there. His secretary, looking nervously from her corner outside the private office, felt a tingling _scherzo_ run up and down the keyboard of her spine. Never before had she seen Mr. Veal wear flowers in his buttonhole, and as he swung the door of his office behind him, she sniffed the vibrating air. In the rich wake of cigar-fragrance always exhaled by her employer her sharp nostrils detected a new tang--the sweet scent of mignonette. Heavens! Was Mr. Veal using perfume?

Miss Stafford was an acute young woman. She had long been waiting the adroit moment to push her employer for a raise, which was indeed due her. She determined that this was the psychological day. When the sign of the Ram is ascendant in the zodiac, let employers tremble. This is when even the most faithful and long-enduring wage-earner dreams seditiously of a fatter manila envelope. Miss Stafford's typewriter had sung like a zither for a number of years, she had orchestrated many curious harmonies on it, and now she had reached the point where she was almost as indispensable to the business as Mr. Veal himself. She was carrying what the efficiency dopesters call the peak load.

The buzzer buzzed, and Miss Stafford hastened to the private office, nerving herself to throw cantilevers across the Rubicon.

To her surprise, Mr. Veal, instead of sitting glowering over the morning mail, was standing by the window, throwing a paper-weight in the air and failing to catch it. The sunlight blazing through the large windows seemed to surround his emphatic clothes with a prismatic fringe. To her amazement, instead of the customary brief and reserved greeting, he said:

“Hullo, Miss Stafford. Great weather, eh? Sorry I'm late, but I just couldn't keep my schedule this morning. Went out to buy myself some golf clubs. I think I'd better take up the game, don't you?”

He made a swing at an imaginary golf ball, and slipped on the polished floor, nearly falling down. He recovered himself.

“Here's some flowers for you,” he said, taking a bunch of daffodils from the desk. “Daffy-down-dillies, as the poets call 'em. Lovely flowers, hey? Now comes in the sweet of the year. What ho!”

He advanced toward her, and for one extraordinary moment she thought he was about to chuck her under the chin.

“Ask Mr. Foster to come in,” he said.

“Mr. Veal,” she said, nervously, “there's just one thing--I wanted to ask you about, my salary, don't you think, er, I think, it seems to me about time I had a raise. I've been here----”

“Bless my soul,” he said. “I never thought of it. Why, of course, you're right. Miss Stafford, how old would you say I am?”

Miss Stafford knew perfectly well that he was fifty-five, but she had learned the cunning of all women who have to manage men, whether those men be husbands, employers, or ticket scalpers.

“Why, Mr. Veal, in a good light and in your new suit, I should say about thirty-nine.”

“What are you getting now, Miss Stafford?”

“Thirty dollars.”

“Tell Mr. Mason to double it.”

The feminine mind moves in rapid zigzags, and Miss Stafford's first conscious and coherent thought was of a certain woollen sports suit she had seen in a window on Vincent Street marked $50.00.

“And by the way,” said Mr. Veal, “when you see Mr. Mason, tell him I've got a new motto for next week's pay envelopes. Here it is; I found it in the paper this morning. I don't know who wrote it--better have him credit it to Orison Swett Marden.”

He handed her a slip of paper, on which he had copied out:

Though I look old, yet I am strong and lusty;

For in my youth I never did apply

Hot and rebellious liquors in my blood:

Nor did not with unbashful forehead woo

The means of weakness and debility.

--Orison Swett Marden (?)

“Before you call Mr. Foster,” said the secretary, “Mr. Schmaltz of the Pullman Company is here to see you; he arrived just before you came in. He says he wants to place a large order for the cuspidorados.”

“Send him in,” said Mr. Veal, chuckling. “Hello, Schmaltz,” he cried, as the customer entered. “How's this for weather?”

“Great stuff!” said Schmaltz. “Makes us old fellows feel almost young again, doesn't it?”

Mr. Veal's face grew dark. He aged ten years in the instant. He pointed morosely to a chair.

“Mr. Veal,” said the other, “we want to place an order for ten thousand of the cuspidorados. Can you give us the old price?”

“I can _not_,” said Mr. Veal, shortly. “Materials have gone to the sky. I can't give you the--the old price. I'll give you a young price, a very young one indeed, based on the present state of the market. Eighteen and a quarter cents is the best I can do.”

Mr. Schmaltz raised racial hands. “Heavens!” he said, “you used to let us have them for fourteen and a half. Why, in the old days----”

Mr. Veal pounded the desk with his fist.

“If you use that world _old_ again, I'll assassinate you with a dish of ham!” he roared. “Great pigs' knuckles, what do you think this is, a home for the aged?”

*****

After Mr. Schmaltz had gone Mr. Veal sent for Foster, the foreman of the manufacturing department.

“Well,” he said, “how about those machines?”

“Mr. Veal,” said Foster, “we'll have to replace at least six of those Victor stampers. They're so old they simply can't do the work. You know when one of those machines is over five years old----”

Mr. Veal was pointing to the door.

“Get out!” he said.

At lunch-time Mr. Veal went up to the club as usual. Swinging up the street, in the bright sun and pellucid air, he felt quite cheerful, and stopped to buy himself a rhinoceros cane. In the dining room of the club he met Edwards, and they sat down together.

“Hello, old man,” said Edwards. “You're looking chipper for a veteran. Played any golf yet this year?”

“I don't play,” said Mr. Veal.

“Don't you? That's a mistake. It's the only game for us older fellows. Of course we can't score like the youngsters; but still we can get round and have a deal of fun----”

Mr. Veal clenched his fists. Spilling his soup, he leaped up and rushed from the room. He seized his coat and hat, forgetting the new cane, and fled to the nearest Turkish bath.

*****

And all because, when going downstairs in the railway terminal that morning, he had heard a man behind him say to another:

“There goes Veal! He's beginning to look old, isn't he?”

It was the first time in his life Mr. Veal had heard the damnable adjective applied to himself in earnest.

Wait until _your_ turn comes!

PUNCH AND JUDY

WHEN Judy Cronin first saw the topless towers of Manhattan rising into the lilac vagueness of a foggy winter morning she passed into a numb and frightened daze. Standing on the steerage deck of the _Celtic_, she peered tremulously at those fantastic impossible profiles of stone. Perhaps you don't know what it is to be thrown, ignorant and timid, into a place where everything is utterly strange--particularly a place as huge, violent, and hasty as New York. Judy, aged twenty-one, from a little village near Queenstown, was incapable of distinguishing, in the roaring voice of the city, that undertone of helpful kindness that is really there. On the same steamer came the widow of a famous Irish recusant and hungerstriker, and there were ten thousand people massed in West Street to cheer her. Judy heard the shouts of the crowd, and saw the lines of policemen on the pier. There was some of that quiet but menacing scuffling with which the various branches of the English-speaking world show their esteem for each other. Judy was not familiar with that definition of a patriot as one who makes trouble for his harmless fellow-citizens; but it looked as though she was blundering into some more of the tribulations they had had at home.

At last her sister Connie found her, sitting white and miserable on her very small trunk, clutching her imitation-silver coin-purse. Connie had been in New York for a couple of years, and it gave her a homesick throb to see that coin-purse--one of those little metal pocketbooks with slots to hold gold sovereigns and half-sovereigns. Father Daly had given it to Judy, years ago, but it had never had gold in the little sockets until Connie sent over the passage money to bring Judy to New York.

The city flashed by like a current-events film. Judy found herself in a friendly lodging-house in Brooklyn, kept by an Irishwoman who had been kind to Connie. Her sister then explained matters. Her own employers, with whom she had a position too good to abandon, had arranged to go South for the latter part of the winter. They had already delayed leaving so that Connie could meet her sister and get her settled. They had given Connie a few days' holiday for that purpose.

Therefore Judy must get a place as soon as possible. And that very afternoon the sisters (Judy still in a kind of dreadful dream) went to the office of a Brooklyn newspaper to insert an advertisement.

A great many people were watching the _Situations Wanted_ columns, and the next evening, at supper-time, Mrs. Leland called up the lodging-house number, which had been given in the ad. Connie went to the telephone. Mrs. Leland had a pleasant voice and “talked like gentry”, Connie said. She lived in Heathwood, Long Island, which is some twenty miles from town, and wanted a nurse to take care of two children. Connie agreed to take Judy out to Heathwood the next morning, to see if they could come to terms. Judy was inexperienced, but Mrs. Leland liked her looks. In short: by the time Judy had been in America three days, she was installed at Mrs. Leland's home in the country; and a few days later Connie had gone off to Florida.