S. Walmsley Cowan unconcernedly began one of his celebrated pep-and-punch talks calculated to send morale up as a candle sends up the mercury in a thermometer.
"Friends," he said, thumping the table before him, "when Opportunity comes to knock be on the front porch! Don't hold back! He who hesitates is lost. It may be that the humble will inherit the earth, but that will be when all the bold have died. Don't hide your light under a basket; don't keep your ideas locked up in your skulls. Bring 'em out! Let's have a look at them. You wouldn't wear a diamond ring inside your shirt, would you? Be sure you're right, then holler your head off. Get what is coming to you! Nobody will bring it on a platter; you've got to step up and grab it. When you have an impulse, think it over. If it looks like the real goods, obey it. Get me? Obey it! Nobody will bite you. Think all you like, but for heaven's sake, act!"
It was for such talks that Mr. Cowan was famous. Even Horace Nimms forgot his impending fall as the efficiency expert extraordinary declaimed the gospel of action and boldness.
But when the meeting was over, silent misery came into the heart of the little cashier and like an automaton he stumbled into the Subway. He ate his bread pudding without tasting it and tried to talk to Polly about the proposed living room in the Long Island cottage. He hadn't the courage to tell her what had happened; indeed he hardly realized what had happened himself.
In the morning he tried to pretend to himself that it was all a joke; surely Mr. Cowan couldn't have meant it. But when he reached his cage he saw another figure already in that temple of addition and subtraction. He rattled the wire door timidly. The figure turned.
"Wadda yah want?" it asked bellicosely.
Horace Nimms recognized the bluish jaw of Gus, one of the elevator men.
Sick at heart, Horace turned away. In the blur of his thoughts was the one that he must keep his job, some job, any job. One can't save much on forty a week in Flatbush. And that he should work for any one but the Amalgamated Soap Corporation was unthinkable. So without knowing exactly how it happened, he found himself in a blue-and-gray uniform clumsily trying to vindicate his mechanical hands and attempting to stop his car within six inches of the floors. All morning he patiently escorted his car up and down the elevator shaft—twenty stories up, twenty stories down, twenty stories up, twenty stories down. He thought of the Song of the Shirt.
At noon he stopped his car at the eighteenth floor and two passengers got on. Horace recognized them. One was Jim Wright, assistant to President Hammer; the other was Mr. Perrine, Western sales manager. They were in animated conversation.
"That fellow has the crust of a mud turtle and the tact of a rattlesnake," Mr. Perrine was saying.