“Very well, gentlemen,” said the stranger, “you’re just the people I’m looking for, and you’ll be glad you’ve met me.” Even as he spoke he had been reaching under the seat and produced a small can of something which he now held dramatically aloft. “It’s the finest thing in the way of a hand or machine soap that has ever been invented, no akali (he did not seem to know there were two ls in the word), good for man or woman. Won’t soil the most delicate fabric or injure the daintiest hands. I know, now, for I’ve been working on this for the last three years. It’s my personal, private invention. The basis of it is cornmeal and healing, soothing oils. You rub it on your hands before you put them in water and it takes off all these spots and stains that come from machine oil and that ordinary turpentine won’t take out. It softens them right up. Have you got any oil stains?” he continued, seizing one of Speed’s genial hands. “Very good. This will take it right out. You haven’t any water in there, have you, or a pan? Never mind. I’m sure this lady up here in this house will let me have some,” and off he hustled with the air of a proselytizing religionist.
I was interested. So much enthusiasm for so humble a thing as a soap aroused me. Besides he was curious to look at—a long, lean, shambling zealot. He was so zealous, so earnest, so amusing, if you please, or hopeless. “Here really,” I said, “is the basis of all zealotry, of all hopeless invention, of struggle and dreams never to be fulfilled.” He looked exactly like the average inventor who is destined to invent and invent and invent and never succeed in anything.
“Well, there is character there, anyhow,” said Franklin. “That long nose, that thin dusty coat, that watery blue, inventive eye—all mountebanks and charlatans and street corner fakers have something of this man in them—and yet——”
He came hustling back.
“Here you are now!” he exclaimed, as he put down a small washpan full of water. “Now you just take this and rub it in good. Don’t be afraid; it won’t hurt the finest fabric or skin. I know what all the ingredients are. I worked on it three years before I discovered it. Everybody in Binghamton knows me. If it don’t work, just write me at any time and you can get your money back.”
In his eager routine presentation of his material he seemed to forget that we were present, here and now, and could demand our money back before he left. In a fitting spirit of camaraderie Speed rubbed the soap on his hands and spots which had for several days defied ordinary soap-cleansing processes immediately disappeared. Similarly, Franklin, who had acquired a few stains, salved his hands. He washed them in the pan of water standing on the engine box, and declared the soap a success. From my lofty perch in the car I now said to Mr. Vallaurs (the name on the label of the bottle), “Well, now you’ve made fifteen cents.”
“Not quite,” he corrected, with the eye of a holy disputant. “There are eight ingredients in that besides the cornmeal and the bottle alone costs me four and one-half cents.”
“Is that so?” I continued—unable to take him seriously and yet sympathizing with him, he seemed so futile and so prodigal of his energy. “Then I really suppose you don’t make much of anything?”
“Oh, yes, I do,” he replied, seemingly unconscious of my jesting mood, and trying to be exact in the interpretation of his profit. “I make a little, of course. I’m only introducing it now, and it takes about all I make to get it around. I’ve got it in all the stores of Binghamton. I’ve been in the chemical business for years now. I got up some perfumes here a few years ago, but some fellows in the wholesale business did me out of them.”
“I see,” I said, trying to tease him and so bring forth any latent animosity which he might be concealing against fate or life. He looked to me to be a man who had been kicked about from pillar to post. “Well, when you get this well started and it looks as though it would be a real success, some big soap or chemical manufacturer will come along and take it away from you. You won’t make anything out of it.”