by Richard Connell
“Rather thirsty this morning, eh, Mr. Addicks?” inquired Cowdin, the chief purchasing agent. The “Mister” was said with a long, hissing “s” and was distinctly not meant as a title of respect.
Cowdin, as he spoke, rested his two square hairy hands on Croly Addicks’ desk, and this enabled him to lean forward and thrust his well-razored knob of blue-black jaw within a few inches of Croly Addicks’ face.
“Too bad, Mr. Addicks, too bad,” said Cowdin in a high, sharp voice. “Do you realize, Mr. Addicks, that every time you go up to the water cooler you waste fifteen seconds of the firm’s time? I might use a stronger word than ‘waste,’ but I’ll spare your delicate feelings. Do you think you can control your thirst until you take your lunch at the Waldorf-Astoria, or shall I have your desk piped with ice water, Mr. Addicks?”
Croly Addicks drew his convex face as far away as he could from the concave features of the chief purchasing agent and muttered, “Had kippered herring for breakfast.”
A couple of the stenographers tittered. Croly’s ears reddened and his hands played nervously with his blue-and-white polka-dot necktie. Cowdin eyed him for a contemptuous half second, then rotated on his rubber heel and prowled back to his big desk in the corner of the room.
Croly Addicks, inwardly full of red revolution, outwardly merely flustered and intimidated, rustled among the piles of invoices and forms on his desk, and tried desperately to concentrate on his task as assistant to the assistant purchasing agent of the Pierian Piano Company, a vast far-flung enterprise that boasted, with only slight exaggeration, “We bring melody to a million homes.” He hated Cowdin at all times, and particularly when he called him “Mr. Addicks.” That “Mister” hurt worse than a slap on a sunburned shoulder. What made the hate almost beyond bearing was the realization on Croly’s part that it was impotent.
“Gawsh,” murmured the blond stenographer from the corner of her mouth, after the manner of convicts, “Old Grizzly’s pickin’ on the chinless wonder again. I don’t see how Croly stands it. I wouldn’t if I was him.”
“Aw, wadda yuh expeck of Chinless?” returned the brunette stenographer disdainfully as she crackled paper to conceal her breach of the office rules against conversation. “Feller with ingrown jaws was made to pick on.”
At noon Croly went out to his lunch, not to the big hotel, as Cowdin had suggested, but to a crowded basement full of the jangle and clatter of cutlery and crockery, and the smell and sputter of frying liver. The name of this cave was the Help Yourself Buffet. Its habitués, mostly clerks like Croly, pronounced “buffet” to rhyme with “rough it,” which was incorrect but apt.
The place was, as its patrons never tired of reminding one another as they tried with practiced eye and hand to capture the largest sandwiches, a conscience beanery. As a matter of fact, one’s conscience had a string tied to it by a cynical management.
The system is simple. There are piles of food everywhere, with prominent price tags. The hungry patron seizes and devours what he wishes. He then passes down a runway and reports, to the best of his mathematical and ethical ability, the amount his meal has cost–usually, for reasons unknown, forty-five cents. The report is made to a small automaton of a boy, with a blasé eye and a brassy voice. He hands the patron a ticket marked 45 and at the same instant screams in a sirenic and incredulous voice, “Fawty-fi’.” Then the patron passes on down the alley and pays the cashier at the exit. The purpose of the boy’s violent outcry is to signal the spotter, who roves among the foods, a derby hat cocked over one eye and an untasted sandwich in his hand, so that persons deficient in conscience may not basely report their total as forty-five when actually they have eaten ninety cents’ worth.
On this day, when Croly Addicks had finished his modest lunch, the spotter was lurking near the exit. Several husky-looking young men passed him, and brazenly reported totals of twenty cents, when it was obvious that persons of their brawn would not be content with a lunch costing less than seventy-five; but the spotter noting their bull necks and bellicose air let them pass. But when Croly approached the desk and reported forty-five the spotter pounced on him. Experience had taught the spotter the type of man one may pounce on without fear of sharp words or resentful blows.
“Pahdun me a minute, frien’,” said the spotter. “Ain’t you made a little mistake?”
“Me?” quavered Croly. He was startled and he looked guilty, as only the innocent can look.
“Yes, you,” said the spotter, scowling at the weak outlines of Croly’s countenance.
“No,” jerked out Croly. “Forty-five’s correct.” He tried to move along toward the cashier, but the spotter’s bulk blocked the exit alley.
“Ain’t you the guy I seen layin’ away a double portion of strawb’ry shortcake wit’ cream?” asked the spotter sternly.
Croly hoped that it was not apparent that his upper lip was trembling; his hands went up to his polka-dot tie and fidgeted with it. He had paused yearningly over the strawberry shortcake; but he had decided he couldn’t afford it.
“Didn’t have shortcake,” he said huskily.
“Oh, no!” rejoined the spotter sarcastically, appealing to the ring of interested faces that had now crowded about. “I s’pose that white stuff on your upper lip ain’t whipped cream?”
“It’s milk,” mumbled Croly. “All I had was milk and oatmeal crackers and apple pie. Honest.”
The spotter snorted dubiously.
“Some guy,” he declared loudly, “tucked away a double order of strawb’ry shortcake and a hamboiger steak, and it wasn’t me. So come awn, young feller, you owe the house ninety cents, so cut out the arggament.”
“I–I—-” began Croly, incoherently rebellious; but it was clear that the crowd believed him guilty of the conscienceless swindle; so he quailed before the spotter’s accusing eye, and said, “Oh, well, have it your own way. You got me wrong, but I guess you have to pick on little fellows to keep your job.” He handed over ninety cents to the cashier.
“You’ll never see my face in this dump again,” muttered Croly savagely over his shoulder.
“That won’t make me bust out cryin’, Chinless,” called the spotter derisively.
Croly stumbled up the steps, his eyes moist, his heart pumping fast. Chinless! The old epithet. The old curse. It blistered his soul.
Moodily he sought out a bench in Madison Square, hunched himself down and considered his case. To-day, he felt, was the critical day of his life; it was his thirtieth birthday.
His mind flashed back, as you’ve seen it done in the movies, to a scene the night before, in which he had had a leading rôle.
“Emily,” he had said to the loveliest girl in the world, “will you marry me?”
Plainly Emily Mackie had expected something of the sort, and after the fashion of the modern business girl had given the question calm and clear-visioned consideration.
“Croly,” she said softly, “I like you. You are a true friend. You are kind and honest and you work hard. But oh, Croly dear, we couldn’t live on twenty-two dollars and fifty cents a week; now could we?”
That was Croly’s present salary after eleven years with the Pierian Piano Company, and he had to admit that Emily was right; they could not live on it.
“But, dearest Emily,” he argued, “to-morrow they appoint a new assistant purchasing agent, and I’m in line for the job. It pays fifty a week.”
“But are you sure you’ll get it?”
His face fell.
“N-no,” he admitted, “but I deserve it. I know the job about ten times better than any of the others, and I’ve been there longest.”
“You thought they’d promote you last year, you know,” she reminded him.
“And so they should have,” he replied, flushing. “If it hadn’t been for old Grizzly Cowdin! He thinks I couldn’t make good because I haven’t one of those underslung jaws like his.”
“He’s a brute!” cried Emily. “You know more about the piano business than he does.”
“I think I do,” said Croly, “but he doesn’t. And he’s the boss.”
“Oh, Croly, if you’d only assert yourself—-”
“I guess I never learned how,” said Croly sadly.
As he sat there on the park bench, plagued by the demon of introspection, he had to admit that he was not the pugnacious type, the go-getter sort that Cowdin spoke of often and admiringly. He knew his job; he could say that of himself in all fairness, for he had spent many a night studying it; some day, he told himself, they’d be surprised, the big chiefs and all of them, to find out how much he did know about the piano business. But would they ever find out?
Nobody, reflected Croly, ever listened when he talked. There was nothing about him that carried conviction. It had always been like that since his very first day in school when the boys had jeeringly noted his rather marked resemblance to a haddock, and had called out, “Chinless, Chinless, stop tryin’ to swallow your face.”
Around his chinlessness his character had developed; no one had ever taken him seriously, so quite naturally he found it hard to take himself seriously. It was inevitable that his character should become as chinless as his face.
His apprenticeship under the thumb and chin of the domineering Cowdin had not tended to decrease his youthful timidity. Cowdin, with a jut of jaw like a paving block, had bullied Croly for years. More than once Croly had yearned burningly to plant his fist squarely on that blue-black prong of chin, and he had even practiced up on a secondhand punching bag with this end in view. But always he weakened at the crucial instant. He let his resentment escape through the safety valve of intense application to the business of his firm. It comforted him somewhat to think that even the big-jawed president, Mr. Flagstead, probably didn’t have a better grasp of the business as a whole than he, chinless Croly Addicks, assistant to the assistant purchasing agent. But–and he groaned aloud at the thought–his light was hidden under a bushel of chinlessness.
Someone had left a crumpled morning edition of an evening paper on the bench, and Croly glanced idly at it. From out the pages stared the determined incisive features of a young man very liberally endowed with jaw. Enviously Croly read the caption beneath the picture, “The fighting face of Kid McNulty, the Chelsea Bearcat, who boxes Leonard.” With a sigh Croly tossed the paper away.
He glanced up at the Metropolitan Tower clock and decided that he had just time enough for a cooling beaker of soda. He reached the soda fountain just ahead of three other thirsty men. By every right he should have been served first. But the clerk, a lofty youth with the air of a grand duke, after one swift appraising glance at the place where Croly’s chin should have been, disregarded the murmured “Pineapple phosphate, please,” and turned to serve the others. Of them he inquired solicitously enough, “What’s yourn?” But when he came to Croly he shot him an impatient look and asked sharply, “Well, speak up, can’t yuh?” The cool drink turned to galling acid as Croly drank it.
He sprinted for his office, trying to cling to a glimmering hope that Cowdin, despite his waspishness of the morning, had given him the promotion. He reached his desk a minute late.
Cowdin prowled past and remarked with a cutting geniality, harder to bear than a curse, “Well, Mr. Addicks, you dallied too long over your lobster and quail, didn’t you?”
Under his desk Croly’s fists knotted tightly. He made no reply. To-morrow, probably, he’d have an office of his own, and be almost free from Cowdin’s ill-natured raillery. At this thought he bent almost cheerfully over his stack of work.
A girl rustled by and thumb-tacked a small notice on the bulletin board. Croly’s heart ascended to a point immediately below his Adam’s apple and stuck there, for the girl was Cowdin’s secretary, and Croly knew what announcement that notice contained. He knew it was against the Spartan code of office etiquette to consult the board during working hours, but he thought of Emily, and what the announcement meant to him, and he rose and with quick steps crossed the room and read the notice.
Ellis G. Baldwin has this day been promoted to assistant purchasing agent.
(Signed) SAMUEL COWDIN C. P. A.
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منبع: americanliterature
