Personality Plus.

by Edna Ferber.

I

MAKING GOOD WITH MOTHER

When men began to build cities vertically instead of horizontally there pa.s.sed from our highways a picturesque figure, and from our language an expressive figure of speech. That oily-tongued, persuasive, soft-stepping stranger in the rusty Prince Albert and the black string tie who had been wont to haunt our back steps and front offices with his carefully wrapped bundle, retreated in bewildered defeat before the clanging blows of steel on steel that meant the erection of the first twenty-story skysc.r.a.per. "As slick," we used to say, "as a lightning-rod agent." Of what use his wares on a building whose tower was robed in clouds and which used the chain lightning for a necklace? The Fourth Avenue antique dealer had another curio to add to his collection of andirons, knockers, snuff boxes and warming pans.

But even as this quaint figure vanished there sprang up a new and glittering one to take his place. He stood framed in the great plate-gla.s.s window of the very building which had brought about the defeat of his predecessor. A miracle of close shaving his face was, and a marvel of immaculateness his linen. Dapper he was, and dressy, albeit inclined to glittering effects and a certain plethory at the back of the neck. Back of him stood shining shapes that reflected his glory in enamel, and bra.s.s, and gla.s.s. His language was floral, but choice; his talk was of gearings and bearings and cylinders and magnetos; his method differed from that of him who went before as the method of a skilled aeronaut differs from that of the man who goes over Niagara in a barrel. And as he multiplied and spread over the land we coined a new figure of speech. "Smooth!" we chuckled. "As smooth as an automobile salesman."

But even as we listened, fascinated by his fluent verbiage there grew within us a certain resentment. Familiarity with his glittering wares bred a contempt of them, so that he fell to speaking of them as necessities instead of luxuries. He juggled figures, and thought nothing of four of them in a row. We looked at our five-thousand-dollar salary, so strangely shrunken and thin now, and even as we looked we saw that the method of the unctuous, anxious stranger had become antiquated in its turn.

Then from his ashes emerged a new being. Neither urger nor spellbinder he. The twentieth century was stamped across his brow, and on his lips was ever the word "Service." Silent, courteous, watchful, alert, he listened, while you talked. His method, in turn, made that of the silk-lined salesman sound like the hoa.r.s.e hoots of the ballyhoo man at a county fair. Blithely he accepted five hundred thousand dollars and gave in return--a promise. And when we would search our soul for a synonym to express all that was low-voiced, and suave, and judicious, and patient, and sure, we began to say, "As alert as an advertising expert."

Jock McChesney, looking as fresh and clear-eyed as only twenty-one and a cold shower can make one look, stood in the doorway of his mother's bedroom. His toilette had halted abruptly at the bathrobe stage. One of those bulky garments swathed his slim figure, while over his left arm hung a gray tweed Norfolk coat.

From his right hand dangled a pair of trousers, in pattern a modish black-and-white.

Jock regarded the gray garment on his arm with moody eyes.

"Well, I'd like to know what's the matter with it!" he demanded, a trifle irritably.

Emma McChesney, in the act of surveying her back hair in the mirror, paused, hand gla.s.s poised half way, to regard her son.

"All right," she answered cheerfully. "I'll tell you. It's too young."

"Young!" He held it at arm's length and stared at it. "What d'you mean--young?"

Emma McChesney came forward, wrapping the folds of her kimono about her. She took the disputed garment in one hand and held it aloft. "I know that you look like a man on a magazine cover in it.

But Norfolk suits spell tennis, and seash.o.r.e, and elegant leisure.

And you're going out this morning, Son, to interview business men.

You're going to try to impress the advertising world with the fact that it needs your expert services. You walk into a business office in a Norfolk suit, and everybody from the office boy to the president of the company will ask you what your score is."

She tossed it back over his arm.

"I'll wear the black and white," said Jock resignedly, and turned toward his own room. At his doorway he paused and raised his voice slightly: "For that matter, they're looking for young men.

Everybody's young. Why, the biggest men in the advertising game are just kids." He disappeared within his room, still talking.

"Look at McQuirk, advertising manager of the Combs Car Company.

He's so young he has to disguise himself in bone-trimmed eye-gla.s.ses with a black ribbon to get away with it. Look at Hopper, of the Berg, Shriner Company. Pulls down ninety thousand a year, and if he's thirty-five I'll--"

"Well, you asked my advice," interrupted his mother's voice with that m.u.f.fled effect which is caused by a skirt being slipped over the head, "and I gave it. Wear a white duck sailor suit with blue anchors and carry a red tin pail and a shovel, if you want to look young. Only get into it in a jiffy, Son, because breakfast will be ready in ten minutes. I can tell by the way Annie's crashing the cups. So step lively if you want to pay your lovely mother's subway fare."

Ten minutes later the slim young figure, in its English-fitting black and white, sat opposite Emma McChesney at the breakfast table and between excited gulps of coffee outlined a meteoric career in his chosen field. And the more he talked and the rosier his figures of speech became, the more silent and thoughtful fell his mother. She wondered if five o'clock would find a droop to the set of those young shoulders; if the springy young legs in their absurdly scant modish trousers would have lost some of their elasticity; if the buoyant step in the flat-heeled shoes would not drag a little. Thirteen years of business experience had taught her to swallow smilingly the bitter pill of rebuff. But this boy was to experience his first dose to-day. She felt again that sensation of almost physical nausea--that sickness of heart and spirit which had come over her when she had met her first sneer and intolerant shrug. It had been her maiden trip on the road for the T.A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company. She was secretary of that company now, and moving spirit in its policy. But the wound of that first insult still ached. A word from her would have placed the boy and saved him from curt refusals. She withheld that word. He must fight his fight alone.

"I want to write the kind of ad," Jock was saying excitedly, "that you see 'em staring at in the subways, and street cars and L-trains. I want to sit across the aisle and watch their up-turned faces staring at that oblong, and reading it aloud to each other."

"Isn't that an awfully obvious necktie you're wearing, Jock?"

inquired his mother irrelevantly.

"This? You ought to see some of them. This is a Quaker stock in comparison." He glanced down complacently at the vivid-hued silken scarf that the season's mode demanded. Immediately he was off again. "And the first thing you know, Mrs. McChesney, ma'am, we'll have a motor truck backing up at the door once a month and six strong men carrying my salary to the freight elevator in sacks."

Emma McChesney b.u.t.tered her bit of toast, then looked up to remark quietly:

"Hadn't you better qualify for the trial heats, Jock, before you jump into the finals?"

"Trial heats!" sneered Jock. "They're poky. I want real money.

Now! It isn't enough to be just well-to-do in these days. It needs money. I want to be rich! Not just prosperous, but rich! So rich that I can let the bath soap float around in the water without any p.r.i.c.ks of conscience. So successful that they'll say, 'And he's a mere boy, too. Imagine!'"

And, "Jock dear," Emma McChesney said, "you've still to learn that plans and ambitions are like soap bubbles. The harder you blow and the more you inflate them, the quicker they burst. Plans and ambitions are things to be kept locked away in your heart, Son, with no one but yourself to take an occasional peep at them."

Jock leaned over the table, with his charming smile. "You're a jealous blonde," he laughed. "Because I'm going to be a captain of finance--an advertising wizard; you're afraid I'll grab the glory all away from you."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'You're a jealous blond,' he said"]

Mrs. McChesney folded her napkin and rose. She looked unbelievably young, and trim, and radiant, to be the mother of this boasting boy.

"I'm not afraid," she drawled, a wicked little glint in her blue eyes. "You see, they'll only regard your feats and say, 'H'm, no wonder. He ought to be able to sell ice to an Eskimo. His mother was Emma McChesney.'"

And then, being a modern mother, she donned smart autumn hat and tailored suit coat and stood ready to reach her office by nine-thirty. But because she was as motherly as she was modern she swung open the door between kitchen and dining-room to advise with Annie, the adept.

"Lamb chops to-night, eh, Annie? And sweet potatoes. Jock loves 'em. And corn au gratin and some head lettuce." She glanced toward Jock in the hallway, then lowered her voice. "Annie," she teased, "just give us one of your peach cobblers, will you? You see he--he's going to be awfully--tired when he gets home."

So they went stepping off to work together, mother and son. A mother of twenty-five years before would have watched her son with tear-dimmed eyes from the vine-wreathed porch of a cottage.

There was no watching a son from the tenth floor of an up-town apartment house. Besides, she had her work to do. The subway swallowed both of them. Together they jostled and swung their way down-town in the close packed train. At the Twenty-third Street station Jock left her.

"You'll have dinner to-night with a full-fledged professional gent," he bragged, in his youth and exuberance and was off down the aisle and out on the platform. Emma McChesney managed to turn in her nine-inch s.p.a.ce of train seat so that she watched the slim, buoyant young figure from the window until the train drew away and he was lost in the stairway jam. Just so Rachel had watched the boy Joseph go to meet the Persian caravans in the desert.

"Don't let them buffalo you, Jock," Emma had said, just before he left her. "They'll try it. If they give you a broom and tell you to sweep down the back stairs, take it, and sweep, and don't forget the corners. And if, while you're sweeping, you notice that that kind of broom isn't suited to the stairs go in and suggest a new kind. They'll like it."

Brooms and back stairways had no place in Jock McChesney's mind as the mahogany and gold elevator shot him up to the fourteenth floor of the great office building that housed the Berg, Shriner Company. Down the marble hallway he went and into the reception room. A cruel test it was, that reception room, with the cruelty peculiar to the modern in business. With its soft-shaded lamp, its two-toned rug, its Jacobean chairs, its magazine-laden cathedral oak table, its pot of bright flowers making a smart touch of color in the somber richness of the room, it was no place for the shabby, the down-and-out, the cringing, the rusty, or the mendicant.

Jock McChesney, from the tips of his twelve-dollar shoes to his radiant face, took the test and stood it triumphantly. He had entered with an air in which was mingled the briskness of a.s.surance with the languor of ease. There were times when Jock McChesney was every inch the son of his mother.

There advanced toward Jock a large, plump, dignified personage, a personage courteous, yet reserved, inquiring, yet not offensively curious--a very Machiavelli of reception-room ushers. Even while his lips questioned, his eyes appraised clothes, character, conduct.

"Mr. Hupp, please," said Jock, serene in the perfection of his shirt, tie, collar and scarf pin, upon which the appraising eye now rested. "Mr. McChesney." He produced a card.

"Appointment?"

"No--but he'll see me."

But Machiavelli had seen too many overconfident callers. Their very confidence had taught him caution.

"If you will please state your--ah--business--"

Jock smiled a little patient smile and brushed an imaginary fleck of dust from the sleeve of his very correct coat.