IV
Extract from a letter mailed from the New York office of the Thorne Knitting Mills under date of October 3, 1916, to Theodore E. Thorne, vice president and sales manager at the main offices and plant, Paris, Vermont:
...I hardly know what to say, Ted. You’re putting me in a rotten dilemma. God knows I’m no knocker. Also the last thing in the world I’d want on my conscience would be the dirty work of knifing a poor devil in the back because he hasn’t had advantages which some of us have been lucky to receive. But what alternative are you leaving me when you put it up as a question of policy affecting the welfare of the Company?
Forge came down here and spent the better part of a week going over things. As I’m leaving anyway, I was absolutely unprejudiced—you believe that, don’t you? I showed him all there was to show. He impressed me as being a fair business man, considering his age, a little higher than the average, perhaps. He’s got imagination and executive ability, especially the last, and there’s not a doubt he’d work his head off to make good. I think he’s especially endowed with the faculty for managing help. But this isn’t a factory down here, Ted. The office help requiring management, or even the local sales staff, are almost negligible. This job calls for a “mixer,” a diplomat, and a personality capable of holding the trade and adding to it by adroit business politics. I can conceive of Forge being a fair success out in the boardwalk towns, selling union suits to merchants who wait on the feminine trade with their vests unbuttoned and a toothpick between their lips. But running up against such smooth articles as old Anstruther, or the Caldwell boys or the Perkinsnaith people, they’d walk through him like a crooked lawyer driving a coach through a will written on the back of wall-paper.
You know that this business, as the New York territory has always done, contains a big portion of the personal element. Many’s the time we might have lost business with some of the heavy-weights if I hadn’t been “in right” personally with their families and womenfolk. Take Haymarker and the Tonowanda affair last June: you may not have known it, but I got old Haymarker and his wife to come out to the Long Island place for the week-end—or mother did, which amounts to the same thing—and played around with him until the psychological moment. Before he returned to town he clapped me on the shoulder and said: “Let’s forget the business fuss, Fred. We’re too good friends in a social way to let a matter of a few dollars break up our relations outside the office.”
...and that’s how young Forge must carry on, and I’m frank to tell you, Ted, I don’t believe he’s there. Oh, he may catch on in a year or so, but the cost to the company in the meantime may be ruinous. Why should the Thorne Knitting Mills pay for the education of a man who should have received that education at home from his parents? It’s a cruel handicap he’s under, but business is business. What his folks can have been thinking of is beyond me. And his wife—oh, my God!
...perhaps the average outsider would say that a man’s wife down here would have little bearing on his job. But believe me, Ted, it isn’t so. Maybe I’m over-emphasizing the social part, but business is sometimes a bit more than price asked and price paid. There are times when personality, family connections, tact, diplomacy, politics played by a fellow’s wife in a social way can mean thousands of dollars in the course of a year. And poor Forge has a millstone around his neck and an anvil tied to each wrist.
...I’ve nothing against her because she comes from a small town. But just because a person comes from a small town is no license to show themselves as mud-hut peasants who wear their boots to bed. A certain nicety of taste is expected of the least of us. And honestly, Ted, that girl Forge calls his wife is absolutely impossible. He must have found her and married her from the lowest class of factory help, just because she was female.
...she came to the dinner in a cheap afternoon frock whose shrieking color would stop a train—she clutched him like a poor relation—mother was almost a nervous wreck when the ordeal was over, and I should have been kicked for pulling any such stunt. She’s been all the week figuring out ways to apologize to her guests. The height of Mrs. Forge’s mentality and idea of dinner wit was an anecdote about somebody up in your town changing his trousers.
...of course you’re running your own business and it’s none of my affair. But I do hate to see all the good work I’ve tried to do and the organization I’ve built leak away or go to smash through being turned over to a poor country boob with a wife who remarks that “the servants mustn’t be onto their job in this place” because they’ve neglected to set out the toothpicks along with the demitasses—and actually thinks they aren’t.
...Forge wants to learn all right and he probably will. But the New York office of the Thorne Knitting Mills isn’t the place to teach him, and because his wife is so pitifully deficient in the common fundamentals of etiquette, I’m afraid the opportunity is not for him. I’m no snob, as you know, Ted. But there are some things that simply are not done.
Nathan entered the Paris offices of the knitting mills the day following and instinctively felt that something was wrong. A certain cordiality and solicitation were missing in the sales manager’s manner. His behavior, in fact, was a bit apologetic, furtive.
“Nat,” began the other, “it seems to us that the Pennsylvania and middle-New York territory is in such a precarious state just now, on account of the prospect of war, that the directors have decided it for the best interests of the company not to transfer you to New York for a while. We want you to keep on as you have been going—drumming the department-store trade.”
Nat’s disappointment was heart-rending,—for a moment.
“Back to the road again?” he whispered wearily. “It’s sort of monotonous, Ted; the same thing over and over, week after week——”
“I know, Nathan. But unfortunately there are those kinds of jobs in the world and somebody’s got to fill ’em. With war in prospect, we really don’t feel warranted in making the shift. That’s about all I can say. After all, you know, I’m under my directors.”
“That’s tough,” commented Nat finally. “I’d sort of set my heart on getting a big office job like that and really showing what I feel capable of doing. And—and—well, I’ve sort of grown beyond small-town living, and New York made me feel as though it was the sort of thing I’d hungered for, without exactly knowing what made that hunger.”
“I’m sorry, Nat. But business is business.”
That night Mrs. Anna Forge met her son on Main Street.
“...and he came down from upstairs, Nat! I’ll swear he came down from upstairs! And what could he have been doing up there that was all level and on the square?”
“What were you doing up at the house, to catch him?”
“Well, I—I—went up to see you and hear all about your New York trip. Milly’s bragging all over town about a swell dinner they gave you down there, and how you’re going down there to live and have swell dinners all the year ’round.”
“Don’t worry, Ma, I’m not going. The Thornes have changed their minds.”
Nathan went on toward home at the end of another ten minutes. Grimly he considered two things to which his mother had given voice, her worst fears about the man who had come down from the upstairs of Nathan’s home in company with Milly and—his mother’s comment after she had forced him to tell her all about the “swell” dinner.
“Oh, Natie,” she had cried anxiously, “I do hope you remembered your manners and said ‘please’ and folded your napkin afterwards, like I always tried to teach you at home!”