Part 21

“Young man,” quoth he, “you have been for several years sitting in with a bunch of office beadles without becoming one of them.

“It is no simple cinch for a young man to hold himself aloof from the piffle and puff of Office Politics and to evolve ideas in an intellectual graveyard. I take this occasion to congratulate you, my boy.”

“Thank you sir,” quoth Bud, wondering if he was in for something more negotiable than a congratulation.

“And furthermore,” quoth on the Boss, “I have decided to promote you to the sales-managership of this hustling hive at twice the salary we have been smothering you with heretofore.”

Bud attempted to quoth back, but there wasn’t a quoth left in his quothary.

Too full for coherent utterance, he merely made various motions indicating large appreciation, such as bowing, tapping his shirt bosom, winding his watch, and so on.

And then he backed modestly out of the room.

Into the Salesmanager’s sanctum Bud carried the same dashing disregard for precedent and prehistoric policies that had landed him the hundred-and-fifty dollar job.

Inside two more years he had established such a ripping record that the Boss made him General Manager of the Works and raised him to Two Hundred.

The Boss also let Bud in on a percentage of the profits equaling one-sixteenth of one percent beginning with the tenth year after it went into effect.

As for Clarence, he is still sitting neat and erect somewhere in one of the outer offices checking things at a small desk.

In between glances at comrade clock, he wonders how the Boss could have possibly made such a busy blunder as to pop Bud to the top and overlook real genius.

“Mercy!” he ejaculates, and turns once more to his checking.

Lesson for Today: A stiff neck never supported a thinking head.

HOT SKETCH NO. 16

THE BENEDICT WHO WISDOMED-UP

MARK McMARK was one of those good-lord-look-at-this-desk Business Bees that fish their noonday grub out of a Pie Incubator and rush up and pay what they think is approximately correct, and then snap back to their offices like a rubber band.

When it came to Fortune Farming, Mark McMark was cutting a good clean furrow and he was as happy as the day is wide. In spite of this, he decided to get married.

He did not first make up his mind to rivet-up, and then roll up his sleeves and go out on a hunt for the girl.

On the contrary Mark had a keen contempt of large circumference for that type of male kanoop that sits around his bachelor dugout until the microbe of Melancholy begins to take up its winter quarters in his corrugated heart, and then decides he wants a Home and goes out and sizes up every girl he meets like a bumpkin in to buy a bullock.

Mark believed that Love chases not her own. He said that for every masculine mammal there was a feminine complement browsing somewhere along Life’s ranch, and that all you had to do was to stick around and the Right One would loom up over the hills before sunset.

There was no doubt in Mark’s mind that the Right One had credentialed in his case. He said he could tell it in any one of a dozen ways, no matter who held the cards. He was so german-sure about it that he began to get sort of section-boss with all his bachelor friends and told them that they were only Half Men and he spread considerable First Lesson Philosophy wherever he went.

All the married men in the office used to sit tightly non-commital when Mark raved. Their silence was about as quiet as a Miners Protest Meeting but it got right by Mark every time. He just kept on baiting everybody and maintained that no Business Man ever worked at maximum efficiency until he was buckled and had a man’s responsibility and some incentive to spur him on to Greater Achievement.

In time Mark and the Right One were lawfully wished on each other and duly preachered and Lohengrined, and they began to Keep House in an Apartment, which translated means that they began to stall less and learn more.

Mark didn’t have time to tell Her any longer about the Big Things he was going to do. It took all his time to explain the Little Things that he didn’t do. He got better acquainted with Her every time he forgot to leave an order at the Grocer’s, or carved the lamb from left to right instead of from right to left.

Mark also learned that he had oddly shaped ears, mispronounced many words, walked like a Yiddish cloak and suit maker, and slept with his face ajar. The breakfast table became a sort of observatory for physiological and temperamental defects, and the pastime developed to such an engrossing point, that Mark began to forget about the office and sort of hung around the house like a haze, fearing to lift, lest he miss a good opening for a caustic comeback.

Whenever the satire ran low on acid, an ominous lull would follow, during which nothing could be heard but the sullen click of knives and forks, and the ebb and flow of coffee along Mark’s aesophagus. Then suddenly the silence would crack wide open when she would ask him what was the matter with the potatoes that he didn’t eat them, and he would retort, “Good Lord, give me time—I can’t eat everything at once, can I?”

At the office everybody began to notice Mark’s speedometer wasn’t recording very reliably. They also thought he was shifting into Neutral a good deal for such a positive pussonality. He would sometimes sit for 20 or 21 minutes scratching his roof and looking at nothing concrete. Then just when he would be verging on the Mattewan Stare he would recover himself sufficiently to bawl everybody out.