When the office force in a large corporation calls the office cashier "uncle" it is a pretty good indication of the sort of man he is.
For the rest, Horace Nimms was slightly bald, wore convict eye-glasses—the sort you shackle to your head with a chain—kept his cuffs up with lavender sleeve garters, carried a change purse, kept a small red pocket expense book, thought his company the greatest in the world and its president, Oren Hammer, the greatest man, was devoted to a wife and two growing daughters, dreamed of a cottage on Long Island with a few square yards of beets and beans and, finally, earned forty dollars a week.
Horace Nimms had a figuring mind. Those ten little Arabic symbols and their combinations and permutations held a fascination for him. To his ears six times six is thirty-six was as perfect a poem as ever a master bard penned. When on muggy Flatbush nights he tossed in his brass bed he lulled himself to sleep by dividing 695,481,239 by 433. At other and more wakeful moments he amused himself by planning an elaborate cost-accounting system for his firm, the Amalgamated Soap Corporation, known to the ends of the earth as the Suds Trust. Sometimes he went so far as to play the entertaining game of imaginary conversations. He pictured himself sitting in one of the fat chairs in the office of President Hammer and saying between puffs on one of the presidential perfectos: "Now, looky here, Mr. Hammer. My plan for a cost-accounting system is——"
And he limned on his mental canvas that great man, spellbound, enthralled, as he, Horace Nimms, dazzled him with an array of figures, beginning: "Now, let's see, Mr. Hammer. Last year the Western works at Purity City, Iowa, made 9,576,491 cakes of Pink Petal Toilet and 6,571,233 cakes of Lily White Laundry at a manufacturing cost of 3.25571 cents a cake, unboxed; now the selling cost a cake was"—and so on. The interview always ended with vigorous hand-shakings on the part of Mr. Hammer and more salary for Mr. Nimms. But actually the interview never took place.
It wasn't that Horace didn't have confidence in his system. He did. But he didn't have an equal amount in Horace Nimms. So he worked on in his little cage and enjoyed a fair measure of contentment there, because to him it was a temple of figures, a shrine of subtraction, an altar of addition. Figures swarmed in his head as naturally as bees swarm about a locust tree. He could tell you off-hand how many cakes of Grade-B soap the Southern Works at Spotless, Louisiana, made in the month of May, 1914. He simply devoured statistics. When the door of the cage clanged shut in the morning he felt soothed, at home; he immersed his own small worries in a bath of digits and decimal points. He ate of the lotus leaves of mathematics. He could forget, while juggling with millions of cakes of soap and thousands of dollars, that his rent was due next week; that Polly, his wife, needed a new dress; and that on forty a week one must live largely on beef liver and hope.
He sometimes thought, while Subwaying to his office, that if he could only get the ear of Oren Hammer some day and tell him about that cost-accounting system he might get his salary raised to forty-five. But President Hammer, whose office was on the floor above the cage, was as remote from Horace as the Pleiades. To get to see him one had to run a gantlet of superior, inquisitive secretaries. Besides Mr. Hammer was reputed to be the busiest man in New York City.
"I wash the faces of forty million people every morning," was the way he put it himself.
But the chief reason why Horace Nimms did not approach Mr. Hammer was that Horace held him in genuine awe. The president was so big, so masterful, so decisive. His invariable cutaway intimidated Horace; the magnificence of his top hat dazzled the little cashier and benumbed his faculties of speech. Once in a while Horace rode down in the same elevator with him and—unobserved—admired his firm profile, the concentration of his brow and the jutting jaw that some one had once said was worth fifty thousand a year in itself, merely as a symbol of determination. Horace would sooner have slapped General Pershing on the back or asked President Wilson to dinner in Flatbush than have addressed Oren Hammer. An uncommendable attitude? Yes. But after all those years behind bars, perhaps subconsciously his spirit had become a little caged.
One cool September morning Horace entered the cage humming "Annie Rooney." Coming over in the Subway he had straightened out a little quirk in his cost-accounting system that would save the company one-ninety-fifth of a cent a cake. He took off his worn serge coat, was momentarily concerned at the prospect of having to make it last another season and then with a hitch on his lavender sleeve garters he slipped into his alpaca office coat and added up a few numbers on the adding machine for the sheer joy of it.
He had not been sitting on his high stool long when he became aware that a man, a stranger, was regarding him fixedly through the steel screen. The man had calmly placed a chair just outside the cage and was examining the little cashier with the scrutinizing eye of an ornithologist studying a newly discovered species of emu.