CLURKS AND CLARKS
Clurks and Clarks
The chief difference between a "clurk" and a "clark" is about six dollars a week—the difference, that is, in mere vulgar coin of the post-war period. There are tremendous differences, however, in clothes, dignity, savoir faire, and such intangible things. There is also a very pronounced difference between the kinds of service they give you. A mere "clurk" may keep you waiting, but he or she never manages to make you feel apologetic. "Clarks" always do—it is their social privilege.
It is at the blessed season of Christmas that we are especially reminded of these things. It is a time when we are much exposed to clerks—"clerks" being the generic term. We consort—not to say cohabit—with both species. If hanging over a counter for hours at a time, yelling futile directions at a monomaniac who insists on dragging down everything on the shelves except the thing one wants—if this doesn't amount to cohabitation, we would like to know what does. But, of course, there is something to be said in extenuation for the clerks.
Some day when we are a lot older and have made our pile, and have the whole four hundred and sixty dollars salted away carefully in some nice safe mining-stock—some day, in short, when we are independently rich and careless of what we say, we will write down our frank and unexpurgated opinion of Christmas shoppers, and then spend the rest of our life trying to induce some paper to print it. But that is a long way off yet. For the present we will compromise with the simple generalization that the average Christmas shopper is a lineal and typical descendant of such Gadarenes as managed to swim to safety after they had taken that historic jump off the cliff.
We feel that it is only fair to make this statement before we go on writing about the Christmas "clurk" and the Christmas "clark." For the Christmas shopper explains many things. To have to stand for ten, twelve, perhaps fifteen hours a day, while a lot of people, who have gone insane from starting in to do their Christmas shopping early and keeping at it without intermission ever since, howl impossible orders at one, would make the patient man of Uz himself pick up a bolt of dress-goods or a reading-lamp or some such handy trifle and clear a breathing space with it. Samson used the jaw-bone of an ass. But the asses who wedge themselves up against counters and scream at the clerk for things that are sold either two floors up or three circles over, keep their jaw-bones to jaw with.
The movement in favor of doing your Christmas shopping early is no solution of the problem. It has been worked to death. If you want to get ahead of the Christmas shoppers now, you have to start in the latter part of August. In that case your Christmas presents are likely to consist of lawn-mowers, mosquito netting, and parasols.
As a matter of fact, the wise man will do his shopping—unless he is so darn wise that he doesn't shop at all—the very last thing on Christmas Eve. By then all the red-eyed shock-troops will have got through their deadly work in the stores, and will be strapped to their beds surrounded by anxious nurses. A week earlier an ordinary man who plunged into a department-store at any hour of the day would take his life in his hand—along with his eighty-seven cents. If he managed to get through alive, he wouldn't have enough clothes left on him to make it safe to meet a modest policeman.
Another advantage of putting off your Christmas shopping is that you are bound to forget a lot of people to whom you would otherwise have sent a collection of assorted junk. Of course, it is too late by the time you do think of them. You are just that much in pocket, and they are relieved because they won't have to send you anything next year.