Part 7

The pageant pursued its more or less majestic way, but as the history of Granville was unfolded, scene upon scene, it became all too apparent to Mrs. Pottle that her poetic opus could not recapture the first serious mood of the audience. It positively jeered when Miss Eltruda Gulick announced that she was the Spirit of the Bogardus Canal. But it grew more interested as the curtain slid up on the battle scene. This, Mrs. Pottle felt, was her dramatic masterpiece. There lay the peaceful pioneer settlement--artfully fashioned from paste-board--while the simple but virile settlers strolled up and down the embryo Main Street and exchanged couplets. The chief settler, an adipose young man with a lisp, was Mr. Gurnee Gulick, until then noted as the most adept practitioner of the modern dance-steps in that part of Ohio. Through a beard, he announced, falsetto,

"_I give thee greeting, neighbor Gulick, Upon this blossom-burgeoning morning, I trust 'tis not the wily red-skin I just heard whooping in the forest._"

His trust was misplaced. It was, indeed, the wily red-skin in the persons of Mr. Edward Brannigan--known to intimates as "Beansy," and nine of his fellow horseshoe makers who had been hired to impersonate red-men, in rather loose-fitting brown cotton skins. Mr. Brannigan and fellow red-skins had done their part dutifully at rehearsals, and had permitted themselves to be knocked down, cuffed about a bit, and finally put to inglorious rout by the settlers. But on the fateful night of the pageant, while waiting for their turn to appear, they had passed the moments with a jug of cider that was standing with reluctant feet at that high point in its career where it has ceased to be sweet and has not yet become vinegar. That was no reason why they should not do their part, for it was not an intricate one. They were to rush on, with whoops, be annihilated, and retire in confusion.

They did rush on with whoops that left nothing to be desired from the standpoint of realism. Mrs. Pottle, tense in the wings, was congratulating herself that one scene at least had dramatic strength. It was at this moment that Mr. Brannigan, as Chief Winipasuki, sachem of the Algonquins, encountered Mr. Gulick, the principal settler. In his enthusiasm, Mr. Gulick over-acted his part. He smote the red-skin warrior so earnestly on the ear that Mr. Brannigan described a parabola and dented a papier-mache rock with his hundred and seventy pounds of muscular body. His part called for him to lie there, prone and impotent, while the settlers drove off his band.

It may have been a sudden rebellion of a proud spirit. It may have been the wraith of history in protest; it may have been an inherently perverse nature; or it may have been the cider. In any event, Chief Winipasuki got to his feet, war-whooped, and knocked the principal settler through the paste-board wall of the block-house. Those in the audience who were fond of realism enjoyed what ensued immensely. The settlers of the town, who were the nice young men, and the Indians, who were not so nice but were strong and willing, had at one another, and although they had only nature's weapons, the battle, as it waged up and down and back and through the shattered scenery, was stirring enough. When the curtain was at last brought down, Chief Winipasuki had a half-nelson on Settler Gulick, who was calling in a loud penetrating voice for the police.

In all the hub-bub and confusion, in all the delirium of the audience, Mr. Pottle remained calm enough to note that a miracle had taken place; Mr. Felix Winterbottom was chuckling. It was a dry, unpracticed chuckle at best, but it was a chuckle, nevertheless. Mr. Pottle was observing the phenomenon with wide eyes when he felt his elbow angrily plucked.

"You're to blame for this, Pottle," rasped a voice. It was Gurnee Gulick's irate father.

"Me?" sputtered Mr. Pottle.

"Yes. You. You knew those ruffians had been drinking."

"I did not."

"Don't contradict me, you miserable little hair-cutting fool."

"What? How dare you----" began Mr. Pottle.

"Bah. You wart!" said Mr. Gulick, and turned his square yard of fat back on the incensed little man.

Mr. Pottle was taking a step after him as if he intended to leap up and sink his teeth into the back of Mr. Gulick's overflowing neck, when another hand clutched him. It was his wife.

Her face was white and tear-stained, her lip quivering.

"They've ruined it, they've ruined it," she exclaimed. "I warned that simpleton Gurnee Gulick not to be rough with those horseshoe boys. Oh, dear, oh, dear." She pillowed her brimming eyes in his toga-draped shoulder.

"You've got to go out, now," she sobbed, "and give the historical epilogue."

"Never," said Mr. Pottle. "A thousand nevers."

"Please, Ambrose. We've got to end it, somehow."

"Very well," announced Mr. Pottle. "I'll go. But mind you, Blossom Pottle, I won't be responsible for what I say."

"Neither will I," sobbed his spouse.

Mr. Pottle hitched his toga about him, and strode out on the stage. There was some applause, but more titters. He held up his hand for silence, as orators do, and glared so fiercely at his audience that the theater grew comparatively quiet. At the top of his voice, he began,

"_Who am I, oh list'ning peoples?_"

"Pottle the barber," answered a voice in the gallery.

Mr. Pottle paused, fastened an awful eye on the owner of the voice, and, stepping out of character, remarked, succinctly:

"If you interrupt me again, Charlie Meacham, I'll come up there and knock your block off." He swept the house with a ferocious glance. "And that goes for the rest of you," he added. The intimidated audience went "ssssssh" at each other; Pottle was popular in Granville. He launched himself again.

"_Who am I, oh list'ning peoples? Hist'ry's spirit, stern and truthful! Come I here to give you an earful, Of our city's inside history, How the Gulicks grabbed the real estate, By foreclosing poor folk's mortgages._"

He did not have to ask for silence now. The hush of death was on the house, and the audience bent its ears toward him; even old Felix Winterbottom, on the edge of his chair, cupped a gnarled, attentive ear. Mr. Pottle went on,

"_You have heard the Gulick's blowing, Of their wonderful relations._

_Lend an ear, and I will slip you, What the real, true, red-hot dope is._"

He gave his toga a hitch, advanced to the foot-lights, and continued,

"_Old Saul Gulick was a drinker, Always full of home-made liquor, And he got the town of Granville, From the Indians, by cheating, Got 'em drunk, the records tell us, Got 'em boiled and stewed and glassy; Ere they sobered up, they sold him, All the land in this fair county, For a dollar and a quarter, Which, my friends, he never paid them._"

The audience held its breath; Felix Winterbottom cupped both ears. Pottle hurried on,

"_Now we come to 'Lijah Gulick, Him that lent the noble stallion To Revere, the midnight rider. Honest, folks, you'll bust out laughing, When I tell you 'Lijah stole him. For Elijah was a horsethief, And, as such, was hanged near Boston. "Patriot, scholar, king of horsemen"-- Honest, folks, that makes me snicker. Yes, he let Paul ride his stallion-- And charged him seven bucks an hour! If you think that I am lying, You will find all this in writing, In the library in the state house._"

Sensation! Gasps in the audience. Commotion in the wings. Felix Winterbottom made no attempt to conceal the fact that he was chuckling. Pottle drew in a deep breath, and spoke again.

"_Then you've heard of Noah Gulick, Him that won the Revolution. If he ever was a major, George J. Washington never knew it. When they charged at Saratoga, He was hiding in a cellar. Was he on the staff of Washington? Sure he was--but in the kitchen. I'll admit he made good coffee-- But a soldier? Quit your kidding. Now I'll take up Nathan Gulick, His descendants never mention That he spent a month in prison More than once, for stealing chickens----_"

Here Mr. Pottle abruptly stopped. The curtain had been dropped with a crashing bang by unseen hands in the wings.

As it fell, there was a curious, cackling noise in one of the boxes, the like of which had never before been heard in Granville. It was Felix Winterbottom laughing as if he were being paid a dollar a guffaw.

§4

Mr. Pottle sat beside the bedside of Mrs. Pottle, sadly going over a column of figures, as she lay there, wan, weak, tear-marred, sipping pale tea.

He cleared his throat.

"As retiring treasurer of the Granville Pageant," he announced, "I regret to report as follows:

Receipts from tickets $1,250.00 Expenses, including rent, music, scenery, costumes, and damages, $1,249.17

"This leaves a total net profit of eighty-three cents."

Mrs. Pottle wept softly into her pillow. A whistle outside caused her to lift a woeful head.

"There's the postman," she said, feebly. "Another bill, I suppose. We won't even make eighty-three cents."

Mr. Pottle returned with the letter; he opened it; he read it; he whistled; he read it again; then he read it aloud.

"Dear Mrs. Pottle:

"I never laughed at anything in my life till I saw your pageant. I pay for what I get.

"Yours,

"FELIX WINTERBOTTOM.

"P. S. Inclosed is my check for one thousand dollars for the Day Nursery."

Mrs. Pottle sat up in bed. She smiled.

VI: _The Cage Man_

All day long they kept Horace Nimms in a steel-barred cage. For twenty-one years he had perched on a tall stool in that cage, while various persons at various times poked things at him through a hole about big enough to admit an adult guinea pig.

Every evening round five-thirty they let Horace out and permitted him to go over to his half of a double-barreled house in Flatbush to sleep. At eight-thirty the next morning he returned to his cage, hung his two-dollar-and-eighty-nine-cent approximately Panama hat on a peg and changed his blue-serge-suit coat for a still more shiny alpaca. Then he sharpened two pencils to needle-point sharpness, tested his pen by writing "H. Nimms, Esq.," in a small precise hand, gave his adding machine a few preparatory pokes and was ready for the day's work.

Horace was proud, in his mild way, of being shut up in the cage with all that money. It carried the suggestion that he was a dangerous man of a possibly predatory nature. He wasn't. A more patient and docile five feet and two inches of cashier was not to be found between Spuyten Duyvil and Tottenville, Staten Island. Cashiers are mostly crabbed. It sours them somehow to hand out all that money and retain so little for their own personal use. But Horace was not of this ilk.

The timidest stenographer did not hesitate to take the pettiest petty-cash slip to his little window and twitter, according to custom: "Forty cents for carbon paper, and let me have it in large bills, please, Uncle Horace."

He would peer at the slip, pretend it was for forty dollars, smile a friendly smile that made little ripples round his eyes and--according to custom--reply: "Here you be. Now don't be buying yourself a flivver with it."

When the office force in a large corporation calls the office cashier "uncle" it is a pretty good indication of the sort of man he is.

For the rest, Horace Nimms was slightly bald, wore convict eye-glasses--the sort you shackle to your head with a chain--kept his cuffs up with lavender sleeve garters, carried a change purse, kept a small red pocket expense book, thought his company the greatest in the world and its president, Oren Hammer, the greatest man, was devoted to a wife and two growing daughters, dreamed of a cottage on Long Island with a few square yards of beets and beans and, finally, earned forty dollars a week.

Horace Nimms had a figuring mind. Those ten little Arabic symbols and their combinations and permutations held a fascination for him. To his ears six times six is thirty-six was as perfect a poem as ever a master bard penned. When on muggy Flatbush nights he tossed in his brass bed he lulled himself to sleep by dividing 695,481,239 by 433. At other and more wakeful moments he amused himself by planning an elaborate cost-accounting system for his firm, the Amalgamated Soap Corporation, known to the ends of the earth as the Suds Trust. Sometimes he went so far as to play the entertaining game of imaginary conversations. He pictured himself sitting in one of the fat chairs in the office of President Hammer and saying between puffs on one of the presidential perfectos: "Now, looky here, Mr. Hammer. My plan for a cost-accounting system is----"

And he limned on his mental canvas that great man, spellbound, enthralled, as he, Horace Nimms, dazzled him with an array of figures, beginning: "Now, let's see, Mr. Hammer. Last year the Western works at Purity City, Iowa, made 9,576,491 cakes of Pink Petal Toilet and 6,571,233 cakes of Lily White Laundry at a manufacturing cost of 3.25571 cents a cake, unboxed; now the selling cost a cake was"--and so on. The interview always ended with vigorous hand-shakings on the part of Mr. Hammer and more salary for Mr. Nimms. But actually the interview never took place.

It wasn't that Horace didn't have confidence in his system. He did. But he didn't have an equal amount in Horace Nimms. So he worked on in his little cage and enjoyed a fair measure of contentment there, because to him it was a temple of figures, a shrine of subtraction, an altar of addition. Figures swarmed in his head as naturally as bees swarm about a locust tree. He could tell you off-hand how many cakes of Grade-B soap the Southern Works at Spotless, Louisiana, made in the month of May, 1914. He simply devoured statistics. When the door of the cage clanged shut in the morning he felt soothed, at home; he immersed his own small worries in a bath of digits and decimal points. He ate of the lotus leaves of mathematics. He could forget, while juggling with millions of cakes of soap and thousands of dollars, that his rent was due next week; that Polly, his wife, needed a new dress; and that on forty a week one must live largely on beef liver and hope.

He sometimes thought, while Subwaying to his office, that if he could only get the ear of Oren Hammer some day and tell him about that cost-accounting system he might get his salary raised to forty-five. But President Hammer, whose office was on the floor above the cage, was as remote from Horace as the Pleiades. To get to see him one had to run a gantlet of superior, inquisitive secretaries. Besides Mr. Hammer was reputed to be the busiest man in New York City.

"I wash the faces of forty million people every morning," was the way he put it himself.

But the chief reason why Horace Nimms did not approach Mr. Hammer was that Horace held him in genuine awe. The president was so big, so masterful, so decisive. His invariable cutaway intimidated Horace; the magnificence of his top hat dazzled the little cashier and benumbed his faculties of speech. Once in a while Horace rode down in the same elevator with him and--unobserved--admired his firm profile, the concentration of his brow and the jutting jaw that some one had once said was worth fifty thousand a year in itself, merely as a symbol of determination. Horace would sooner have slapped General Pershing on the back or asked President Wilson to dinner in Flatbush than have addressed Oren Hammer. An uncommendable attitude? Yes. But after all those years behind bars, perhaps subconsciously his spirit had become a little caged.

One cool September morning Horace entered the cage humming "Annie Rooney." Coming over in the Subway he had straightened out a little quirk in his cost-accounting system that would save the company one-ninety-fifth of a cent a cake. He took off his worn serge coat, was momentarily concerned at the prospect of having to make it last another season and then with a hitch on his lavender sleeve garters he slipped into his alpaca office coat and added up a few numbers on the adding machine for the sheer joy of it.

He had not been sitting on his high stool long when he became aware that a man, a stranger, was regarding him fixedly through the steel screen. The man had calmly placed a chair just outside the cage and was examining the little cashier with the scrutinizing eye of an ornithologist studying a newly discovered species of emu.

Horace was a bit disconcerted. He knew his accounts were in order and accurate to the last penny. He had nothing to fear on that score. Nevertheless, he didn't like the way the man stared at him.

"If he has something to say to me," thought Horace, "why does he say it with glowers?"

He would have asked the starer what the devil he was looking at, but Horace was incapable of incivility. He began nervously to total up a column of figures and was not a little upset to find that under the cold gaze he had made his first mistake in addition since the spring of '98. He cast a furtive glance or two through the steel netting at the stranger outside, who continued to focus a pair of prominent blue eyes on the self-conscious cashier. Horace couldn't have explained why those particular eyes rattled him; some mysterious power--black art perhaps.

The staring man was quite bald, and his head, shaped like a pineapple cheese, had been polished until it seemed almost to glitter in the September sun. The eyes, light blue and bulgy, reminded Horace of poached eggs left out in the cold for a week. They had also a certain fishy quality; impassive, yet hungry, like a shark's. Without being actually fat, the mysterious starer had the appearance of being plump and soft; perhaps it was the way he clasped two small, perfectly manicured hands over a perceptible rotundity at his middle, an unexpected protuberance, as if he were attempting to conceal a honeydew melon under his vest.

Horace Nimms did his best to concentrate on the little columns of figures he was so fond of drilling and parading, but his glance strayed, almost against his will, to the bald-headed man with the fishy blue eyes, who continued to fasten on Horace the glance a python aims at a rabbit before he bolts him.

At length, after half an hour, Horace could stand it no longer. He addressed the stranger politely.

"Is there anything I can do for you?" asked Horace with his avuncular smile.

The starer, without once taking his eyes off Horace, rose, advanced to the little window and thrust through it an oversized card.

"You may go on with your work," he said, "just as if you were not under observation. I am here under Mr. Hammer's orders."

His voice was peculiar--a nasal purr.

The caged cashier glanced at the card. It read:

S. WALMSLEY COWAN EFFICIENCY EXPERT EXTRAORDINARY AUTHOR OF "PEP, PERSONALITY, PERSONNEL," "HOW TO ENTHUSE EMPLOYEES"

Horace Nimms had a disquieting sensation. He had heard rumors of a man prowling about in the company, subjecting random employees to strange tests, firing some, moving others to different jobs, but he had always felt that twenty-one years of service and the steel bars of his cage protected him. And now here was the man, and he, Horace Nimms, was under observation. He had always associated the phrase with reports of lunacy cases in the newspapers. Mr. Cowan returned to his seat near the cage and resumed his silent watch on its inmate. Horace tried to do his work, but he couldn't remember when he had had such a poor day. The figures would come wrong and his hand would tremble a little no matter how hard he tried to forget the vigilant Mr. Cowan who sat watching him.

At the end of a trying day Horace dismounted from his high stool, hitched up his lavender sleeve garters and inserted himself into his worn blue serge coat. He would be glad to get back to Flatbush. Polly would have some fried beef liver and a bread pudding for supper, and they would discuss for the hundredth time just what the ground-floor plan of that cottage would be--if it ever was.

But Mr. Cowan was waiting for him.

"Step this way, will you--ple-e-ese," said the expert.

Horace never remembered when he had heard a word that retained so little of its original meaning as Mr. Cowan's "ple-e-ese." Clearly it was tossed in as a sop to the hypersensitive. His "ple-e-ese" could have been translated as "you worm."

Horace, with a worried brow, followed Mr. Cowan into one of those goldfish-bowl offices affected by large companies with many executives and a limited amount of office space. It contained only a plain table and two stiff chairs.

"Sit down," said Mr. Cowan, "ple-e-ese."

It is a difficult linguistic feat to purr and snap at the same time, but Mr. Cowan achieved it.

Horace sat down and Mr. Cowan sat opposite him, with his unwinking blue eyes but two feet from Horace's mild brown ones and with no charitable steel screen between them.

"I am going to put you to the test," said Mr. Cowan.

Horace wildly thought of thumbscrews. He sat bolt upright while Mr. Cowan whipped from his pocket a tape measure and, bending over, measured the breadth of Horace Nimms' brow. With an ominous clucking noise the expert set down the measurement on a chart in front of him. Then he carefully measured each of Horace's ears. The measurements appeared to shock him. He wrote them down. He applied his tape to Horace's nose and measured that organ. He surveyed Horace's forehead from several different angles. He measured the circumference of Horace's head. The result caused Mr. Cowan acute distress, for he set it down on his elaborate chart and glowered at it a full minute.

Then he transferred his attention and tape to Horace's stubby hands. He measured them, counted the fingers, contemplated the thumb gravely and wrote several hundred words on the chart. Horace thought he recognized one of the words as "mechanical."

"Now," said Mr. Cowan solemnly, "we will test your mental reactions."

He said this more to himself than to Horace Nimms, on whose brow tiny pearls of perspiration were appearing. Mr. Cowan drew forth a stop watch and spread another chart on the table before him.

"Fill this out--ple-e-ese," he said, pushing the chart toward Horace. "You have just five minutes to do it."

Horace Nimms, dismayed, almost dazed, seized the paper and started to work at it with feverish confusion. He boggled through a maze full of pitfalls for a tired, rattled man:

If George Washington discovered America, write the capital of Nebraska in this space.........But if he was called the Father of His Country, how much is 49 × 7?........Now name three presidents of the United States in alphabetical order, including Jefferson, but do not do so if ice is warm.........If Adam was the first man, dot all the "i's" in "eleemosynary" and write your last name backward.........Omit the next three questions with the exception of the last two: How much is 6 × 9 = 54?........What is the capital of Omaha?........How many "e's" are there in the sentence, "Tell me, pretty maiden, are there any more at home like you?"........Put a cross over all the consonants in the foregoing sentence. Now fill in the missing words in the following sentences: "While picking........I was stung in the........by a........." "Don't bite the........that feeds you."

How old are you? Multiply your age by the year you were born in. Erase your answer. If a pound of steel is heavier than a pound of oyster crackers, don't write anything in this space.........Otherwise write three words that rhyme with "icicle." Now write your name, and then cross out all the consonants.

Name three common garden vegetables.........

It seemed to Horace Nimms that he had floundered along for less than a minute when Mr. Cowan said briskly, "Time," and took the paper from Horace.