Bildungsromans; Fathers and sons -- Fiction; Young men -- Fiction
Sam, who was the son of Windy McPherson and who had more than once
ruthlessly condemned all men who put liquor into their mouths, got
drunk, and for eighteen hours went shouting poetry, singing songs, and
yelling at the stars like a wood god on the bend.
Late on an afternoon in the early spring he sat with Jack Prince in
DeJonge’s restaurant in Monroe Street. Prince, his watch lying before
him on the table and the thin stem of a wine glass between his fingers,
talked to Sam of the man for whom they had been waiting a half hour.
“He will be late, of course,” he exclaimed, refilling Sam’s glass. “The
man was never on time in his life. To keep an appointment promptly would
take something from him. It would be like the bloom of youth gone from
the cheeks of a maiden.”
Sam had already seen the man for whom they waited. He was thirty-five,
small and narrow-shouldered, with a little wrinkled face, a huge nose,
and a pair of eyeglasses that hooked over his ears. Sam had seen him in
a Michigan Avenue club with Prince solemnly pitching silver dollars at a
chalk mark on the floor with a group of serious, solid-looking old men.
“They are the crowd that have just put through the big deal in Kansas
oil stock and the little one is Morris, who handled the publicity for
them,” Prince had explained.
Later, when they were walking down Michigan Avenue, Prince talked at
length of Morris, whom he admired immensely. “He is the best advertising
and publicity man in America,” he declared. “He isn’t a four-flusher,
as I am, and does not make as much money, but he can take another man’s
ideas and express them so simply and forcibly that they tell the
man’s story better than he knew it himself. And that’s all there is to
advertising.”
He began laughing.
“It is funny to think of it. Tom Morris will do a job of work and the
man for whom he does it will swear that he did it himself, that every
pat phrase on the printed page Tom has turned out, is one of his own. He
will howl like a beast at paying Tom’s bill, and then the next time he
will try to do the job himself and make a hopeless muddle of it so
that he has to send for Tom only to see the trick done over again like
shelling corn off the cob. The best men in Chicago send for him.”
Into the restaurant came Tom Morris bearing under his arm a huge
pasteboard portfolio. He seemed hurried and nervous. “I am on my way
to the office of the International Biscuit Turning Machine Company,” he
explained to Prince. “I can’t stop at all. I have here the layout of
a circular designed to push on to the market some more of that common
stock of theirs that hasn’t paid a dividend for ten years.”
Thrusting out his hand, Prince dragged Morris into a chair. “Never mind
the Biscuit Machine people and their stock,” he commanded; “they will
always have common stock to sell. It is inexhaustible. I want you to
meet McPherson here who will some day have something big for you to help
him with.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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