Mixed Faces

The staring eye of an illuminated clock reminded him that MacDougall Alley was some distance away and he suffered a peculiar mixture of sadness and gladness as he began his journey. It seemed to him that he was a different person from the James Gollop who had happily invaded MacDougall's artistic precincts that morning from the James Gollop who was now disconsolately making his way thither. That Gollop of the morning had been happy and bright because he had a job; but this Gollop of the evening, jobless, and with a black mark against him that was too notorious to escape the amused attention of all possible employers in his line, was but a sad dog. It required conscious mental effort on his part to assume a cheerful demeanor when he climbed the studio stairs. He wished that he dared tell the "Candy Girl" all about it, but decided that it would be ungenerous to bother anyone else with his woes, and any indecision in this regard was ended before the evening was over because she was so frankly and unaffectedly happy that he hadn't the heart to say anything that might possibly mar it. Yet, even whilst they sat in a theater listening to a most cheerful musical comedy the sober and responsible side of his mind was weighing necessities. The first of these, he knew, must be economies; for he anticipated that it might be a considerable time before he could again be earning an income, and there was always the little home down in Baltimore and its occupant to be considered first, and his own pleasures must be relegated to a secondary place. He was therefore rather heart-broken, but firm in his final explanation that night as he parted from her in front of the Martha Putnam Hotel.

"That business session I had this afternoon," he said, trying to keep his voice from betraying his trouble, "has unfortunately upset all my plans. I can't have that little four days vacation I had been planning."

"What? How horrid!" exclaimed the girl. "I – I thought we were to – "

Her disappointment and distress were so manifest that Mr. James Gollop had a first-class fight with himself to keep from blurting out the truth there in the hotel rotunda and telling her that on the next morning he was starting on what promised to be a long hunt for employment. But he escaped such confession by saying that he had great hopes of returning to New York within a few days. In fact he actually predicted that it would be so. And after all, the only lie he told was embodied in that word "Return."

CHAPTER XI

Mr. James Gollop discovered in the course of the following three days that although most business men enjoy a joke, their sense of humor is so deficient that they don't care to combine jest and business. His ill-fame had preceded him, and in addition thereto, it was the off-season, and vacancies few.

"We'd like to have you, Jim," said one sales manager, "but the trouble is that we should want you to take up the territory where you are well known, and that, of course, is impossible."

Others told him to call later in the season. Others who would have given him samples were firms of such small caliber that he could not see any future, and several were willing to take him on commission sales only. The only thing that helped him was that prodigious store of optimism which impelled him after each rebuff to hope for a change just around the corner.

It was when he felt at rather low ebb that he passed, rather disconsolately, the Flat Iron Building and remembered Martin. Having no other place to go, he decided to call upon that shrewd gentleman and gather from such a source of hard common sense fresh courage. He turned in through the big swinging door that let a gust of winter into each compartment as it whirled, trundled it around and belched it into the great hallway, and somewhat absent-mindedly collided with a man who was coming out.

"Hello! She bumps!" said Jimmy good-naturedly and then – "Why – why it's you, is it, Mr. Martin? I was just coming up to your offices to see if by chance you happened to be in."

There was no mistaking the heartiness of the hand grasp that caught his.

"Well, we can go up now," said Martin, cheerfully. "In fact, I've been thinking about you quite a lot. Been rather eager to see you again. But – hold on! – the office is anything but a confidential resort. Suppose you come with me to the Engineers' Club where we can have a nice quiet talk."

Jimmy, feeling as if he had at least one friend left in the world, readily accepted, and thought it rather lucky that they were the only men in the club lounge room; felt that the chairs were very comfortable, and the atmosphere summery.

"How are things with you?" asked Martin shrewdly eyeing him through the first blue smoke screen of a cigar.

"Oh, so-so," replied Jimmy, evasively.

"Everything all right?"

"In a way. In a way."

"Chocolate business flourishing?"

"It was – up to a week ago."

"But now? How about now, Gollop?"

For a moment Jim scarcely knew what to answer, and looking up from an overly prolonged inspection of his cigar caught the humorous, quizzical twinkle in the friendly, keen eyes of his host.

"By jingoes!" he exclaimed, "you know something! You've heard the news. You know I've been fired."

"Yes, I do know it," answered Martin, with a grin. "I was – rather curious to learn how you took it. Suppose you tell me all about it. I'm your friend, you know. We've shared salt. I've been entertained in your mother's home. Now cut loose."

Jimmy laughed, sobered, shook his head and said, "You see, that's where the worst of the trouble is unknown. I can't – well, I can't worry Maw. She doesn't know it yet. I've been trying to get another job before I broke the news to her and – well, I haven't succeeded! Those worth while are afraid of me, or else have no opening. For the moment I'm the under dog; but – I'm not whipped!"

And then he told the whole story to Martin, who listened, asked an occasional question, smiled as if at some secret thought, and finally remarked, "Your story agrees with what I've heard. But that man Granger must have been a vindictive brute to carry it so far. By the way, did you say your firm gave you the letter he wrote? Let's see it."

Jimmy took it from his pocketbook and gave it to the wise old man, who stuck glasses on his nose awry, and at an angle well down toward the point, and scanned the missive.

"Humph! Sounds like that sort of man," he commented, as he handed it back. "What do you think of it?"

Jim considered the question for a time.

"At first I was sore because he couldn't take a joke. Then I remembered what kind of a man he appeared to be when I met him, and decided that it was just his way. Not a fault, you know, but something he couldn't help. Men are not all alike. Personally I can't keep a grudge. Life's too short for that. I never try to play, even, in a malicious way. If a man really hurts me, I 'most always think of his side of it, and if I decide I'm in the wrong, go to him and say so. If I think I'm in the right, – just forget him. If he gets the best of me in business, I congratulate him. That's part of the game. This chap Granger really never did me much harm and I think maybe that I, without really intending it, did him quite a lot. So I did the best I could to square it."

"How?" asked Martin with another one of those quizzical glances of his.

"I wrote to all the newspapers I could get knowledge of out there, and said that I was the guilty man; that I had played a fool joke under the impulse of the moment and that the Judge was in no wise responsible for anything at all that I said any more than he was for my actions."

"Is that all?"

"Yes, I suppose that was the most of it."

Mr. Martin laughed and shook his head, and then said, in a kindly voice, "No, that wasn't all you wrote. I read some of your communications as they were printed. You not only apologized for your practical joke, but you ended by the declaration that you regarded Judge Granger as a man worthy of confidence, and asserted that if you were a resident of his constituency you would vote for him. I call that pretty forgiving."

"But – you see I had done him an unmerited injury," said Jimmy, soberly. "And so I did all I could to undo it. It was merely playing a white man's game."

"In spite of the fact that he had cost you your livelihood and done all he could to hurt you?"

"Oh, that had nothing to do with it! I did him an injury, and – I did the best I could to undo it."

Martin sat and looked at him admiringly, for a time, and then asked, "But what are you going to do now that all your trade is aware of your predicament, and are afraid to employ you?"

"I'll be hanged if I know!" Jimmy admitted, with an air of gravity. "But – I'll keep on trying. You can bet on that! I'll find some way out of it, even if I have to begin again in some other line. They all of them have to admit that I'm honest – that's an asset that nobody can dispute. We can't all be brilliant and honest at the same time. Some men are brilliant but fail to gain confidence. Other men are honest but can't be brilliant. I'm honest but haven't proved brilliant, or unbrilliant, so I've got the best of the situation – up to date. Someone, therefore, will give me a chance. So I'm not discouraged. Maybe it's because I've got imagination. When things go dead wrong with me, I just imagine that they're not so bad, after all. Cowards and pessimists are the only ones to whom imagination is a curse. Why – even a crippled dog has dreams of hunting in his sleep, and he wakes up with hope!"

Jimmy's host seemed to ponder over this crude philosophy for a time as if bemused by its possibilities, and then suddenly straightened himself in his chair and leaned forward.

"Do you remember what you said to me in the train one day as to a man's having faith in whatever he sold? And you talked about an automobile called the Sayers car? You do, eh? Well, here's something that may interest you. The Sayers Automobile Company is going to reorganize its sales organization. It wants a man with imagination who will take hold of that department. It seeks a man with ideas – none of the old, worn out, hackneyed stuff, but – a man with original ideas that will prove good. The Martin Company handles its advertising. Do you think – really and honestly think – that you could reorganize its sales department and bring to it additional success if I recommend you to the Sayers people?"

"You bet your life I could!" asserted Jimmy. "I've thought about that car a lot. And in the last few days when nobody seems to want me, I have wondered if it wouldn't be a good move for me to get into the line of motor cars."

Martin seemed to ponder over the situation for a moment and then said, with a sly grin, "Of course the first step for you to take would be to go out to the Sayers works, meet Sayers and his superintendent, make a study of the sales methods they have been employing, and then put before them a full outline of what you propose. If they like it, they will probably give you a chance to demonstrate what you can do. And if you do get the place, and make good, I believe old Sayers is just the sort of man who would appreciate your work and make it mighty well worth your while to stay with him permanently. But I tell you this much, that he believes in efficiency and will have no one around him who can't deliver the goods. Now do you want to tackle it?"

"I do! I do!" replied Jimmy with fervency, stopped, and then emitted a groan and said, "But good Lord! The Sayers plant is out near Princetown, and Princetown is the home of Judge Granger, and – they'd lynch me if I showed up there – that is, unless I could get the infuriated populace to make another mistake of identity and hang the Judge in the belief that he was me!"

"Um-mh! Granger lives in Princetown, eh? That's rather awkward, isn't it? What do you propose?"

Jimmy thought a moment and slapped his leg with an air of cheerfulness.

"I've got it. I'll do as I did before – hide all of my face I can. I'll wear big blue glasses, and grow a mustache and get my hair dyed black. And if I can arrange it I'll go through Princetown like greased lightning, and stop at the works while there."

Martin chuckled with amusement and then said, "I think Sayers would send a car to meet you at the train if we wrote him when you were coming, and I have no doubt that you could find some place to stop out near the works. Did you notice if there were any houses near the plant?"

"Yes, lots of them. Neat little places, most of them. Sort of a model city, I should say."

"You are at least observant," commented Martin, and then promptly arose, went to a writing desk and wrote for a time, whilst Jimmy's spirits soared up and up until he was glad that he had been foisted out of the chocolate trade.