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 gla.s.s. 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 compet.i.tor"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 b.u.mps, 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 ma.s.s 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 sc.r.a.p 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 G.o.dlike 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sed 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 cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.s, 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.