Bobbie, General Manager: A Novel

by Olive Higgins Prouty

During the last half-year Oliver had been superintending a gang of granite workers in a little town in Vermont. City life hadn't seemed to agree with Oliver's purse very well, and the diversions of the several middle-western cities, in each of which Oliver had made a great hit with all the nicest girls and their mothers, had interfered with his business hours. It was after he had tried six or seven positions, starting with banking in Pittsburg, and ending up with shipping automobile tires in Akron, Ohio, that Tom and Alec deposited Oliver, with scarcely a cent to his name, in Glennings Falls, Vermont, where the possibilities for spending money were rather limited.

Poor Oliver! I felt awfully sorry for him. He's such a brilliant-appearing fellow! It seemed to me as if he had struck an awfully hard run of luck since he graduated from college. He really is a civil engineer, but fate has swerved him into other lines, which I think is the cause of his checkered career. He always loved to build bridges and dams and toy railroads even as a small boy. After he finally succeeded in squeezing through college he conceived a foolish notion—foolish according to Tom—to take a course in Civil Engineering at Cornell. Of course he didn't have anything else to study—no bugbears like English Composition, Latin or Greek, so perhaps that is why he did so well in the Engineering. Anyhow he passed the examinations with some kind of an honour—the only one, poor boy, that he had ever been able to boast of in his life. Tom, who had pooh-poohed the idea of Oliver's wasting a year at Cornell, finally gave up his plan of putting the boy to work in his lumber camps, and Oliver started forth, hopes high and spirits aglow, to accept an engineering job in Arizona. On the way out, at Pittsburg, he stopped off to visit an old college friend for a fortnight, and at the end of the first week he wrote that he had struck a "gold mine." His friend's father was prominently connected with half a dozen banks in Pittsburg and had offered him a position. I could have told the friend's father that Oliver would never make a banker, but he found it out himself in a little while.

After Oliver left Pittsburg everything went wrong with him. No civil engineering jobs presented themselves, no more friends' fathers, no more "gold mines" seemed to be available. After that Oliver became a regular rolling-stone. He couldn't seem to keep any of his positions, or he wouldn't, I don't know which. He tried everything. It was manufacturing automobile parts in Toledo; selling motorcycles in Buffalo; making out orders for plumbers' supplies in Cleveland. He fizzled miserably each time. He never had any money. He was forever sending to Tom or Alec for a check for fifty until his salary was due. He was forever running down to New York or over to Chicago for a class reunion or a dance. He was forever writing to me vivid descriptions of new "queens" he had met.

It was when Tom and Alec had to pay fourteen hundred and fifty dollars for a "swell" little last season's roadster that Oliver had secured at a wonderful bargain from a friend of his in Akron (this was when he was a shipping clerk in a tire factory) and in which he had been sporting about through the streets of the place at a speed of thirty an hour, that he was summoned to the court of his older brothers, and after due consultation was sent up to Glennings Falls, like a convict, to work in the mines. His roadster was sold at a terrible sacrifice, he said, and that fact seemed at the time to be his greatest regret.

I could have cried for Oliver. There would be no "queens" in Glennings Falls; there would be no Sunday-night Lobster-Newbergs over a chafing-dish; there would be no stunning "visiting girls" whom he met at Class-Day or in Pittsburg when he was there, or in Toledo, Cleveland or Buffalo, for him to call on until eleven P.M.

When I arrived in Hilton, Alec was at the station in the automobile to meet me (I had had just time to 'phone him that I was coming) and Tom who had come flying on from the West the minute Alec's shocking telegram had reached him was there too. Malcolm had caught the midnight from New York and was waiting on the veranda when we ran up under the porte-cochère. It was really a family reunion, but all the joy of seeing each other again was buried beneath the horror and consternation in our hearts. Oliver's act was astounding. We're not an erratic family. We never figure in accidents or tragedies of any kind. We hate notoriety.

"And besides all the horrid publicity of a secret marriage," said Ruth, "Edith says the creature is too common for anything." Ruth dangled a dainty velvet pump on the tip of her toe as she made this remark. We were gathered in the room that used to be the sitting-room, all of us—Tom, Malcolm, Edith, Alec, Ruth and I. We had been talking for an hour.

"Common!" took up Edith. "She's absolutely impossible, I tell you! We stopped off to see Oliver for an hour on our way to the Green Mountains," she explained to me, "last fall, in the automobile. He didn't know we were coming. It was Sunday and he had some dreadful little frowzy-headed creature in tow, I'm sure her name was Tompkins—silly, simpering little thing—perfectly enormous pompadour and a cheap Hamburg open-work lingerie waist, over bright pink—oh, horribly cheap! I can't begin to tell you!"

"Well—well—we must try to make the best of it," said Tom lightly.