I
ERNIE BUDDER was a leading member of a profession not always given its just due—that is to say, he was an expert washer of automobiles. You have seen his like in your own service-station, garbed in rubber boots and rubber apron, a long-handled soapy brush in one hand, and the ragged end of a line of hose without a nozzle in the other. But unless you have attempted on your own account the task he so expeditiously performs, you have never properly appreciated this man. By the time you have run water over your car, only to find that it dries in muddy spots upon the varnished surface; by the time you have wet it again and wiped it hurriedly, and found the result suggestive of the protective coloration of a zebra; by the time you have for a third time applied the hose, and scrubbed with the sponge, and wiped with the chamois, and picked off with your fingernails the lint and dust that still persist in sticking, you will have begun to value at their true worth such men as Ernie Budder.
Ernie could and did wash and polish a car an hour, with monotonous regularity, all day long. For this work he was paid a dollar an hour, which seems munificent until you have tried it, and until you stop to consider that, for the work he has done, you paid his employer three dollars, and until you remember the cost of living and such matters not easy to forget.
He was a fixture at my particular service-station, where his abilities were recognized by the powers that were. If you ran your car in and said confidentially to Forgan, the foreman: “Give her an extra good going-over, will you? I’ve been out on some muddy roads, and she needs it,” then Forgan would nod, and promise reassuringly, “I’ll see to it that Ernie does her himself, boss.” Upon which, if you knew Ernie and trusted Forgan, you went away completely at your ease.
Ernie was not a young man, in spite of his youthful appellation. I suppose his name had once been Ernest. He was past middle life—how far past it was hard to guess. His hair was snow-white, and his square shoulders were a little stooped, but his hands were vigorous and his eye was mild and clear. There was a diffident affability about him, an amiability like that of a puppy which is afraid of being misunderstood; and, as a result of this quality, it is probable that he was somewhat put upon by the more aggressive characters among whom his lines were laid. My acquaintance with him was a matter of slow growth over a period of years. What might be called our friendship dated from the day when Ernie whispered to me that there had been a small leak in my radiator. I nodded abstractedly.
“Thanks,” I told him. “I’ll run her in to-morrow and let them patch it up.”
He shook his head.
“Don’t need to,” he told me. “I stuck a drop of solder on her to-day. Gave it a lick of enamel. You’ll never notice the place at all.”
I stifled my natural suspicion—for I did not know the man—and pulled out a bill; but Ernie smiled and backed away.
“No, no,” he said pleasantly. “No; I like to tinker. Don’t let Forgan know. That’s all.”
I was a little dazed, would have insisted. But in the face of his persistent, good-natured refusal, I perceived that I had been mistaken. The man was not a type; he was an individual. And thereafter we became, as I have suggested, friends. If there was a grease-cup missing when he washed the car, I was sure to find it replaced. If my brakes needed adjusting, he found time to attend to them. A surface-cut on a tire that passed under his hands was apt to be filled with cement and composition and firmly closed. I eventually discovered that this habit was no secret to Forgan.
“He thinks we ain’t wise,” the foreman said to me. “But I’ve spotted him at it. Long as he does them things on his own time, why should we kick? We don’t want to soak our customers. We’re human, ain’t we? Besides, it makes ’em good-natured. And Ernie likes to think he’s putting something over. So I don’t let on.”
But it was not that Ernie liked to think he was putting something over; it was simply, as the man had told me, that he liked to tinker. I was not alone in his favor. Others also benefited. He was a friend of all the world.