"Hammer?"
"President!"
"Soap?"
"Cakes!"
"Money?"
"Forty-five!"
"Up?"
"Down!"
"Man?"
"Cage!"
"Most peculiar," muttered Mr. Cowan as he noted down the answers. "We"ll have to look into this."
Horace could not suppress a shudder.
"That"s all," said Mr. Cowan.
When Horace arrived at his Flatbush flat, late for supper, he did not enjoy the bread pudding, though it was a particularly good one--with raisins. Nor did he go to sleep quickly, no matter how many numbers he multiplied. He was thinking what it would mean to him at his age if Mr.
Cowan should have him put out of his cage. His dreams were haunted by a pair of eyes like those of a frozen owl.
The next afternoon Horace Nimms, busy in his cage, received a notice that there would be an organization meeting at the end of the day. He went. The meeting had been called by S. Walmsley Cowan, who in his talks to large groups adopted the benevolent big-brother manner and turned on and off a beaming smile.
"My friends," he began, "it is no secret to some of you that Mr. Hammer has not been pleased with the way things are going in the company. He has felt that there has been a great deal of waste of time and money; that neither the volume of business nor the profits on it are what they should be. He has commissioned me to find out what is wrong in the company and to put pep, efficiency, enthusiasm into our organization."
He smiled a modest smile.
"I rather fancy," he continued, "that I"ll succeed. I have been conducting the tests with which you are all doubtless familiar through reading my books, "Pep, Personality, Personnel," and "How to Enthuse Employees." I have made a most interesting and startling discovery. Most of you are in the wrong jobs!"
He paused. The men and women looked at each other uneasily. Then he went on.
"I"ll cite just one instance. Yesterday I tested the mentality of one of you. I found that he was of the cage, or solitary, type of worker. See Page 239 of my book on Getting Into Men"s Brains. But he was already working in a cage! Here was a problem. Could it be that that was where he would do best? No! Then a happy solution struck me. He was in the wrong cage. So I am going to transfer him from a mathematical cage to a mechanical cage. I am going to transfer him to be an elevator operator.
This may surprise you, my friends, but science is always surprising.
Just fancy! This man has been working with figures for more than twenty years, and I discover by measuring that his thumbs are of the purely mechanical type, and all that time he would have been much happier running an elevator. Now by an odd coincidence I found that one of the elevator operators has a pure type of mathematical ear, so I am transferring him to the cashier"s cage. He may seem a bit awkward there at first, but we shall see, we shall see."
He turned on his smile. But the eyes of the employees had turned sympathetically to the pale face of Horace Nimms. How old and tired Uncle Horace looked, they thought. In a nightmare Horace heard his doom p.r.o.nounced. After twenty-one years! His temple of figures!
S. Walmsley Cowan unconcernedly began one of his celebrated pep-and-punch talks calculated to send morale up as a candle sends up the mercury in a thermometer.
"Friends," he said, thumping the table before him, "when Opportunity comes to knock be on the front porch! Don"t hold back! He who hesitates is lost. It may be that the humble will inherit the earth, but that will be when all the bold have died. Don"t hide your light under a basket; don"t keep your ideas locked up in your skulls. Bring "em out! Let"s have a look at them. You wouldn"t wear a diamond ring inside your shirt, would you? Be sure you"re right, then holler your head off. Get what is coming to you! n.o.body will bring it on a platter; you"ve got to step up and grab it. When you have an impulse, think it over. If it looks like the real goods, obey it. Get me? Obey it! n.o.body will bite you. Think all you like, but for heaven"s sake, act!"
It was for such talks that Mr. Cowan was famous. Even Horace Nimms forgot his impending fall as the efficiency expert extraordinary declaimed the gospel of action and boldness.
But when the meeting was over, silent misery came into the heart of the little cashier and like an automaton he stumbled into the Subway. He ate his bread pudding without tasting it and tried to talk to Polly about the proposed living room in the Long Island cottage. He hadn"t the courage to tell her what had happened; indeed he hardly realized what had happened himself.
In the morning he tried to pretend to himself that it was all a joke; surely Mr. Cowan couldn"t have meant it. But when he reached his cage he saw another figure already in that temple of addition and subtraction.
He rattled the wire door timidly. The figure turned.
"Wadda yah want?" it asked bellicosely.
Horace Nimms recognized the bluish jaw of Gus, one of the elevator men.
Sick at heart, Horace turned away. In the blur of his thoughts was the one that he must keep his job, some job, any job. One can"t save much on forty a week in Flatbush. And that he should work for any one but the Amalgamated Soap Corporation was unthinkable. So without knowing exactly how it happened, he found himself in a blue-and-gray uniform clumsily trying to vindicate his mechanical hands and attempting to stop his car within six inches of the floors. All morning he patiently escorted his car up and down the elevator shaft--twenty stories up, twenty stories down, twenty stories up, twenty stories down. He thought of the Song of the Shirt.
At noon he stopped his car at the eighteenth floor and two pa.s.sengers got on. Horace recognized them. One was Jim Wright, a.s.sistant to President Hammer; the other was Mr. Perrine, Western sales manager. They were in animated conversation.
"That fellow has the crust of a mud turtle and the tact of a rattlesnake," Mr. Perrine was saying.
"Remember," Jim Wright reminded him, "he is an efficiency expert extraordinary. The big boss seems to have confidence in him."
"He won"t have quite so much," said Mr. Perrine, "when he hears that he put an elevator man in as cashier. I hear he walked off with six hundred dollars before he"d been on the job an hour."
Horace p.r.i.c.ked up his ears. He made the car go as slowly as possible.
"He did?" Jim Wright was excited. "And this is one of the boss" bad days too! Just before I left him he was saying, "The Amalgamated has about as much system as a piece of cheese. Why, these high-salaried executives can"t tell me how much it costs them to make and sell a cake of soap!""
Then Horace reluctantly let them out of the elevator at the street floor.
All that afternoon he struggled with an impulse. The words of Mr.
Cowan"s oration of the night before began to come back to him. If only he had obeyed his impulses----
As he was a new man, they gave him the late shift. At one minute to six the indicator in his car gave two short, sharp, peremptory buzzes.
Horace, who was mastering the elements of elevator operating, shot up to the eighteenth floor. A single pa.s.senger got on. With a little gasp Horace recognized the cutaway coat and top hat of the president of the Amalgamated.
Horace set his teeth. His small frame grew tense. He turned the lever and the car started to glide downward. Seventeen, sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, twelve! Then with a quick twist of his wrist Horace stalled the car between the twelfth and eleventh floors and slipped the controlling key into his pocket. Then he turned and faced the big president.
"You don"t know a h.e.l.l of a lot about running an elevator," remarked Oren Hammer.
"No, I don"t," said Horace Nimms in a strange, loud voice that he didn"t recognize. "But I do know how much it costs a cake to make Pink Petal Toilet."
"What"s that? Who the devil are you?" The great man was more surprised than angry.
"Nimms," said Horace briefly. "Office cashier on seventeenth floor twenty-one years. Elevator operator one day. Mr. Cowan"s orders."
Mr. Hammer"s brow contracted.
"So you think you can tell me how much Pink Petal costs a cake to make, eh?" he said.
He had the reputation of never overlooking an opportunity.
The imaginary conversations that Horace had been having crowded back into his mind.