Part 22

Things went on in this peaceful, happy fashion at home and abroad until one day when Mark suddenly decided to have a Thorough Understanding with his Helpmeet. He pulled down his vest and the cover of his desk, slapped his granite derby on one Ear Hook, and pounded heavily homeward for the Finals.

Ten minutes later he opened the door of the little round-shouldered Apartment and called hoarsely to his Mate. There was no answer. Then he called again not quite so Arizona, but Silence again responded. Mark heard the water dripping in the kitchen sink. The little alarm clock on a chair in Her bedroom ticked like a steam riveter. One of Mark’s twenty-five cent pure silk hose lay on the rocker where She always sat. There was a needle and thread still in the sock. Everything in the place seemed kind of stiff and churchy—like a Scotch parlor on the Sabbath.

Mark hung around the middle of the floor for a few moments and then flopped on the sofa to think things over. It was boisterously quiet. The chairs all stood around looking at him like a lot of pall bearers waiting for the sign to catch hold. A curtain moved slightly in the breeze, and the rod of it tapped on the window sill. It was a quiet little tap—kind of uncanny, like a spirit rap.

“I’m beat,” said Mark, after a long pause, packed with ache. “If she would only breeze through that door right now, I’d chase pebbles up the beach all day long for her, or swim out and fetch sticks.”

A thought struck him. He got up, put on his o’rourke, and, closing the door ever so lightly behind him, slipped over to the florist’s. A moment later he returned with a great armful of lilacs. He looked as if he had pinched them—there were so many. Every vase in the house he filled with them, and then stuck the balance in empty milk bottles, pitchers, tin cans, and back of the pictures.

“There!” he said, surveying the job, “that will fix things up between us, and please her when she returns.”

Then Mark went back to his office and worked like a stoker.

That night when he returned home, the Right One met him at the door.

“I wish you had not put those old lilacs all over the place,” she opened up testily, “Just look at that floor!”

Lesson for Today: What’s the use!

HOT SKETCH NO. 17

TWO BUSINESS BAGGERS OF PUNKTON

IN THE small burdock town of Punkton two rival manufacturing plants wiggled for supremacy.

The destinies of one were ably steered by a veneered razorback named Grabit.

At the helm of the other stood one, Fairman by name.

Grabit was a Pillar and had a pew right down front, a little to windward.

He used to sit ample and contented every Sunday morning listening to the little chinless preacher extol his Sterling Virtues to the blank-faced congregation.

Fairman wasn’t cutting any bold slashing figure as a Pillar and he was the only man in town who wasn’t wasting away worrying about it.

The rest of the burg spent many anxious hours speculating upon the probable location of Fairman’s residential quarters in the Hereafter.

Grabit thought of his employes in terms of machinery and was a devoted husband and father, according to custom.

Fairman called his men his “helpers” and had the absurd notion that they were human.

In Grabit’s mind there was not so much as a peewee doubt that he (i. e., Mr. Grabit) was a very superior order of genius and that every man under him was somewhere along about the mollusk stage of unfoldment.

He felt that through Divine favor he was enabled to grant to his men the blessed concession of working 10 hours per diem for 8 hours payem. And he tucked his napkin under his chin and was very grateful.

Fairman was so melon-brained that he imagined his manufactured products to be the result of the pooling of all the brains and activities of all the men in his plant from the General Manager down to the beetle that pinched the perfectos from the top desk-drawer.

Grabit stroked his enameled brain-case and reasoned that by paying his men more wages they would only have that much more to squander down at the Big Horn.

He figured that men of such muggy mentality didn’t care to spend any time in their dull homes, and so he couldn’t see any approximately sane reason for shortening working hours.

Fairman had the comical delusion that by expanding wages and contracting the workday he could cut off a lot of worry from the minds of his laborers and their weary wives, and that this in turn would mean increased bodily vigor, clarity of thought, efficiency of action and other things that would sound well if we could think of them at this moment.

With the recklessness of Irresponsibility, Fairman went so far as to put his spooly ideas into effect. He paid a minimum wage so high that when Grabit heard about it he let out a roar that shook the apples all off the trees in an orchard scene that his daughter, Eleanor, had painted when she was at the Academy.