A "travelling man" is a commercial traveller, called by the vulgar, a "drummer"—a little unkindly I think. Until this meeting, and its consequences, I had never understood American travelling men. Now I do. I believe that these men form a kind of incubator for some of the keenness and determined-doggedness that is so marked in the American character.
And so upon the long journey I met several friends. One was travelling for corsets, I believe. The corsets did not interest me,—I'm not sure that they interested my friend very much, but they gave him scope for his profession, as well as an opportunity to bring up a family. I learnt a great deal from these two men, and the many conversations that had bored me a trifle while travelling, came back to my mind.
These fellows have to apply every device, every trick, to carry off their job. Their numbers are great and their customers are always on the defensive, so they've got to know more about human nature than about their wares. They have to overcome the defenses of the men they deal with. Their preliminary bombardment has to be intense. They've got to make an impression; either a very good one or an evil one,—both are effective, for an impression of their existence and what they stand for must be left upon the minds of their opponents. I heard two discussing their tactics on this long journey to Erie. One chap spoke of a merchant whose reputation as a notorious bully was well known to travelling men. He was a nasty red-headed fellow, and was overcome in the following way.
The drummer approached the desk and delivered his card. The merchant looked at it and said "What the hell do you mean by wasting my time? I don't want yer goods, what have yer come for?"
The drummer merely said, "I haven't come to sell you anything."
"Well, what the hell do yer want?" replied the merchant.
"I've merely come to have a good look at as mean a looking red-headed son-of-a-gun as exists on the face of this earth. I collect photographs of atrocities."
The merchant looked furious and then angrily said, "Come in!" So the drummer entered with certain fears. The red-head seated himself at his desk, and commenced his work, keeping the drummer standing. The drummer, fearing defeat and ignoring the notice "No Smoking," lit a foul cigar, walked over to the desk and commenced blowing clouds of smoke all over the merchant. The "red-headed son-of-a-gun" looked up and grinned. It was not difficult after that.
Finally, at about three-thirty, we reached Erie. We addressed a rather small audience in the court house, and afterwards spent a diverting hour in a local club.
At three-thirty A.M. we left for Pittsburgh and spent the rest of the early morning in a Pullman sleeper, getting duly asphyxiated. At Pittsburgh we addressed a large crowd of business men called "The Pittsburgh Association of Credit Men." They formed a delightful audience and listened with apparent interest to our story. The trouble is, that men these days, want to hear about atrocities. They like one to tell them about Belgium women getting cut up into impossible pieces and all that sort of thing. I don't see the use of it at all. Besides my job is not to amuse, nor to appeal to the side of a man's character which appreciates newspaper stories of tragedies, but rather to place before him actual conditions as I saw them. It always seems to me that the greatest atrocity of the war was the initial use of poisonous gas by the Germans, and the tragedy lay in the fact that human nature became so unsporting as to resort to such methods.