I thought of Mr. Wilding’s cubicle when I saw Mr. Bullard’s office. You could have put ten of Mr. Wilding’s offices in that room. The wall was decorated with tapestry. The floor was covered with a noiseless carpet, and it was quite a walk to where Mr. Bullard sat behind an antique Italian table. When he saw us he pushed his chair back and stood up. The light from the window on his left struck his horn-rimmed glasses, so that it was difficult to see his eyes. He looked like a professor about to deliver a lecture, except that he looked more prosperous. His double-breasted gray suit was beautifully cut. His gray hair was carefully trimmed and brushed back from his forehead. His voice was vibrant and sonorous.
“Draw up a chair for Mr. Pulham, William,” Mr. Bullard said. “Will you have a cigarette, Mr. Pulham?”
“No, thank you, sir,” I said.
“He doesn’t mean that,” Bill said. “He’d like a cigarette.”
Mr. Bullard opened a silver box on the table.
“Now, William tells me,” Mr. Bullard said, “that you would like to work with us. I hope you noticed the preposition—with us, not for us. We all work together here, a great big team—a family, aren’t we, William?”
“That’s exactly what I was telling him last night,” Bill said. “A great big team.”
Mr. Bullard stabbed into the air with his forefinger.
“In any form of work,” he said, “that team spirit comes into play. I am just playing with words, you understand. You can comprehend my next simile, having been in the Service. We all go over the top for an idea.”
“That’s right,” said Bill. “Exactly the way to put it.”
“First we sell ourselves on the idea,” Mr. Bullard said, “and then we go over the top for it. No one hangs back. Each contributes what little he can. Sometimes I consider myself merely a sieve that sifts and sorts ideas. I’m just playing with words when I say this, but at the same time I’m trying to paint a picture of the challenge which this type of work presents. Now would this sort of thing appeal to you, Mr. Pulham?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know anything about it, sir.”
Mr. Bullard looked out of the window and no one spoke for a while.
“It’s something in your favor,” he said. “It is better to write on a fresh page. It is better to know nothing than to be possessed of a lot of undigested facts.”
“He’s willing to give up a good job just to try this,” Bill said.
“Yes,” said Mr. Bullard, “I know, I know. Has he seen Walter Kaufman yet? What is Walter’s reaction?”
“I’ll go out and get him,” Bill said.
“I do want Walter’s reaction,” Mr. Bullard said. “Now, Mr. Pulham, let me ask you a question. What do you hope you’ll be doing ten years from now?”
The door opened. A red-faced, solid-looking man entered with Bill following just behind him.
“Oh, Walter,” Mr. Bullard said, “this is Mr. Pulham.”
Mr. Kaufman pivoted on his heel and faced me. His head was bald, but his eyebrows were yellow and bushy. His eyes were a pale blue, and his mouth was grim.
“How are you, Pulham?” he said.
“Walter,” Mr. Bullard asked, “just playing with words, what is your first immediate reaction toward Mr. Pulham?”
“You mean without any thought?” Mr. Kaufman asked.
“Just a snap judgment,” Mr. Bullard said.
“Mr. Bullard,” said Mr. Kaufman, “there is something basic there.”
“There is nothing,” said Mr. Bullard, “like an immediate reaction. Let me see—today is Wednesday. You might talk to Mr. Pulham, Walter, and have him come on Monday.”
“You’d better come out with me, Pulham,” Mr. Kaufman said.
Mr. Kaufman led us into another smaller office where he sat down at a flat-topped desk.
“All right,” he said. “Monday morning at nine. That’s all.”
“Don’t you want to ask me anything more?” I asked.
“No,” said Mr. Kaufman. “Take him away, King. Show him the Copy Department.”
Bill took me by the arm and steered me down an aisle through the main office.
“He just wanted to look at you,” he said.
“But they can’t hire people that way,” I said.
“Oh,” Bill answered, “can’t they?”
I was confused, but in my confusion my admiration for Bill was growing. He had a confident, almost benign manner that seemed to hint that he knew a great many important facts, that he was beyond all ordinary office routine. I had forgotten that adaptability of his. I was like a new boy at St. Swithin’s being shown the school by a Six-Former. It was the way it was when the Colonel’s adjutant first showed me my quarters.
“Over in those offices,” Bill said, waving his hand, “are the representatives who handle the clients.”
I learned later that they led the dangerous life of palace favorites, as the possibility that one of them might leave at any moment, taking the account with him, made each of them a potential menace.
“That’s where J. T. keeps his eye peeled,” Bill said, “here today and gone tomorrow. The iron ball starts rolling any time.”
I did not know what he meant, but I did not ask him.
“Over there is the Media Department,” Bill said; “college boys, trying to make good.”
I did not know what he meant by media either.
“The Art Department is over there,” Bill said, “and the layout men are over there. J. T. pays those boys.”
“What are layout men?” I asked.
“Idea artists,” Bill said. “Never mind about it now. And over here is the Copy Department. That’s where we work, and don’t you stick your nose out of the Copy Department without me. No one better see much of you for a while.”
“But what am I going to do?” I asked.
Bill smiled pontifically.
“Didn’t I tell you?” he asked. “That’s so. I didn’t. You’re my assistant. You’re going to follow me around and carry my tools. You don’t object to that, do you?”
“No,” I said, “of course not.”
“It’s just a way to start, my boy,” Bill said. “Now, the Copy Department is divided into small rooms to promote thought. That’s one of J. T.’s ideas. We used to be in a big room and then he divided it into cells. We’re responsible to Bullard and Kaufman. Don’t take any backwash from anybody else. Be genial and co-operative, but no backwash. Here’s our cell.”
Bill opened a door with ground glass on it, which let us into a smallish room, lighted by a single window. There were two desks, the flat tops of which could fold back and expose a typewriter, like the stenographers’ desk at Smith and Wilding. The one near the window must have been Bill’s because it was vacant. The second desk was in a corner near the door. A girl was bending over it, writing on a yellow sheet of paper with a soft lead pencil. She turned around and looked at us for a second, and then began to write again, arching her back over the desk, displaying a row of pearl buttons that ran down the nape of her neck between her shoulder blades. I had an impression, I do not know why, of arms and legs. Her ankles were locked tightly together under her swivel chair, and one of her high-heeled slippers was half off, displaying the heel of a golden-brown stocking. I do not know why I remember such a little thing as the heel half out of the slipper.
“Well,” Bill said, “here we are. They’ll move in something for you to sit at. Thank God, there won’t be room for anybody else.”
The girl straightened up her back and pushed a stray wisp of hair under the half-invisible net that girls wore then.
“Is that marine going to come in here too?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Bill. “The whole U. S. Army is camping here. This is Harry Pulham, Marvin Myles.”
“Is he a friend of yours?” she asked. “He doesn’t look it.”
“Is that a compliment,” Bill said, “or a cold rebuff?”
“Work it out on the slide rule,” she ans
wered.
“Aren’t you going to shake hands with him?” Bill said.
She held out her hand. Her mouth was large and the corners of her eyes wrinkled when she smiled.
“Well, hello,” she said.
There was a silence and I felt it was up to me to say something.
There was a pencil drawing on her desk, pasted on a piece of cardboard, a quick sketch of a girl in negligee, looking at her legs. Underneath the girl was printed: “You too can have stockings of sheer beauty.”
“Is that picture an advertisement?” I asked.
She swung her chair farther around. “It’s a layout,” she said.
Bill sat down on the edge of his desk and put his hands in his pockets.
“This is all new to Harry,” he told her.
“My God,” said Miss Myles, “is he another of J. T.’s ideas? Have you seen what’s just been sent in?”
She pointed to a printed sign on the wall, and we both turned to read it.
“Let each word,” I read, “however humble, be an arrow pointed by the barb of thought and feathered with the wings of beauty.”
“That Yale boy with the squint is going around tacking them up,” she said.
Bill nodded.
“It doesn’t look bad, does it?” Bill said. “I turned in that thought.”
Marvin Myles pushed back her chair, stood up, walked to a green tin cupboard, put on a coat with fur on the collar and pulled a bell-shaped hat half over her eyes.
“Well, I can’t stand any more on an empty stomach,” she said.
She opened her handbag, pulled out a box with a mirror in it, stared at herself and dabbed some powder on her nose. Then she took out a lipstick and passed it over her lips.
“Well, I’ll see you later, I suppose,” she said.
She walked out with a long, swinging stride and the door, equipped with an automatic device, closed silently behind her. Bill sat on the edge of his desk with his hands in his pockets and he seemed to have forgotten me entirely.
“What does she do?” I asked.
“Who?” Bill asked.
“Miss Myles,” I said.
“Women’s copy,” Bill said. “She went to the University of Chicago.”
I had always considered that college was a handicap for girls, and the girls I had known who went to college went there as a last resort. It made me nervous, like everything else in the office.
“I never saw a girl do that before,” I said, “that is, a nice girl.”
“Do what?” Bill asked.
“Powder herself like that,” I answered.
“Wait a minute,” Bill said. “I’ve got to dictate a memorandum.” He hurried out of the room, leaving me standing there, trying to put things together. I looked at the drawing of the girl and her stockings on Marvin Myles’s desk. Then I found myself reading what she had written in a round, legible hand upon the yellow paper.
A swish and then a rinse. That’s the Coza way. Try this two-minute test yourself tonight. Wash one pair of stockings with ordinary soap flakes; then into clean, warm water drop a pinch of Coza. Watch the snowy whiteness dissolve to lathery foam.
It all sounded cheap and unimportant. I was unable to read any further because Bill came back with a slip of paper in his hand.
“Mercury Clock Account,” he read. “The clock is a factory which handles the most precious of all commodities—Time. Suggest this thought can be enlarged with layout of factory and Mercury line in the foreground. Headline—One Tiny Jeweled Pivoted Wheel Turns Eight Million Dollars’ Worth of Machinery.”
Bill opened the green steel cupboard and took out his hat.
“Would you stop to read that or wouldn’t you?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t,” I said.
“All right,” Bill said. “Let’s go out now. I’ll see you to your train.”
Out on Fifth Avenue Bill linked his arm through mine.
“Bill,” I said, “I don’t think I’m going to be any good at it.”
“Don’t worry,” Bill said. “You stick to me. It’ll take you out of yourself.”
Then all at once I felt very grateful to him.
“I don’t know how to thank you, Bill,” I said. “You’re sure it won’t be too much for you, having me in there?”
“Hell, no,” Bill said. “Now, listen, Harry. You’re coming back, remember. Don’t let them change your mind.”
“Bill,” I asked, “what’s Coza?”
“It’s soap,” Bill said.
XIV
Let Me Draw a Diagram
The first conviction I really had that I was coming home was when I was in my chair on the one o’clock. The faces of the passengers had a familiar look as though they and I were part of a family. Most of them were my parents’ age and wore their same set, serene expression, and their voices were like my parents’.
The faces in the club car were younger. The talk up there was about the textile business and a railroad strike and the fight that was starting over the League of Nations. The voices sounded like echoes of my own voice as I sat down and lighted a cigarette. They pulled me home like the engine. There was something especially familiar in the way a man was sitting reading a newspaper across the aisle. His feet were under him as though he were about to spring and I knew the hands that held the paper before I saw his face.
“Bo-jo,” I called to him, “Bo-jo Brown!”
Bo-jo crumpled his paper noisily and sprang up.
“Where did you come from?” he called, and he sat down beside me.
His voice was so loud that everyone turned to look at us, but I did not mind.
“I just got back,” I said, “just coming home.”
“Porter,” Bo-jo called, “fetch out two Scotch-and-sodas. Do you know what’s happening? The whole damned country is going dry. So you got to France, did you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, it was a great war, wasn’t it?” Bo-jo said. “If you amounted to anything they never let you get to the front. Did you notice how that was? Did you get to the front?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“Well, I guess they didn’t think much of you,” Bo-jo said. “Now, take me. I was in the best damned outfit and just when we were getting on the train, what happened? I got orders to be physical director in a new division. My God, what I said to them! But it didn’t do any good. The whole lot of us went to a physical directors’ school. There was Siegel from Brown—you remember Siegel from Brown. And there was Dunbar from Yale—the one who fumbled first down on the six-yard line. What happened to you?”
“Well,” I began, “I was in the Half Moon Division—infantry,” but Bo-jo did not listen.
“Did I tell you that Dunbar was down in that physical directors’ school? It was a great experience—the war.”
“Yes,” I said. “It sort of changed me somehow. There’s something about seeing people getting killed—” but Bo-jo did not listen.
“You remember Dunbar, don’t you? Each one of us had turns drilling, you understand? And we were exhaling and inhaling, and there was Dunbar telling me to exhale, and do you know what I said?”
“No,” I answered.
“Well, I said, ‘Hold it, Dunbar,’ and then Dunbar saw me. You remember that play, don’t you?”
“What play?” I asked.
Bo-jo looked at me and scowled.
“The play when Dunbar dropped the ball and when I recovered. Have you got a pencil? Wait. I’ve got a pencil.”
Bo-jo pulled a pencil and envelope out of his pocket.
“Now, listen. Here we were on our six-yard line. Yale’s ball. First down. Just when Perkins snapped back the ball I came in through a hole like this. I was there and Dunbar was there. He saw me coming through that hole and he started moving before he got the pass. He didn’t get his fingers around it and it slipped and there I was. You remember now, don’t you?”
“Not exactly, Bo-jo,” I said.
“My God,” said
Bo-jo, “are you shell-shocked? I fell on that ball and rolled over and there I was running. I was there and Simmons was over there. You know that Eli in the backfield, Simmons? Just between you and me, Simmons was a yellow bastard. He could show off, but he didn’t have the guts. When I start going I get going. You remember now, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, “right down the field.”
Bo-jo picked up his glass of whisky.
“To hell with Yale,” he said.
“That’s right,” I said. “To hell with Yale.”
“And it’s certainly time you got back and got in touch with things.”
All sorts of matters which I had put aside grew important as Bo-jo talked. I began asking him how the Skipper was and what had happened at school and about our form and about our crowd at college and about the girls who had come out. Quite a lot of them were married, Bo-jo said—the war had that effect. Ten from the School, Bo-jo said, some of them before our time, had been killed or had died in the service from the flu, and the Skipper was getting the School architect to design a permanent plaque in the chapel to hold their names. Most of the crowd were working in bond houses. The whole business, Bo-jo said, was like football; the play was over and everyone was picking himself up, rubbing the mud off his face and getting back in position.
“The Class is going to get together in June,” Bo-jo said. “All the old crowd is just getting into formation and going ahead again.”
Bo-jo slapped me on the knee so hard that I jumped.
“We had the best damned class that ever came out of Harvard. I don’t know what’s the matter with the new kids. They haven’t got the guts we had.”
“What new kids?” I asked.
“The younger generation,” Bo-jo said, “the ones who didn’t get to war. They can’t hold their liquor. They’re spoiled and all they seem to think about is sex and they talk about it. You wouldn’t believe it. They talk about it in mixed company.”
The best thing to do with Bo-jo was not to say much, but to let him talk. He was pointing out that things were upset, that all the working classes, even the mill hands and the day laborers, were making too much money, and instead of being contented it gave them bad ideas. It made them lazy. Now he was as democratic as anyone, Bo-jo said, but it wasn’t right to see day laborers and working people, who should save their money, spending it on silk shirts and automobiles and giving their women silk stockings and fur coats. If they only knew it, they were biting off their noses to spite their faces. If women had to have silk underwear and silk stockings what was going to happen to the cotton business? As I listened to Bo-jo’s monologue my mind began to wander.
H. M. Pulham, Esquire Page 14