Personality Plus Part 2

"Slightly. She's my one and only mother."

"She--you mean--her son! Well I'll be darned!" He held out his hand to Jock. "If you're a real son of your mother I wish you'd just call the office boy as you step down the hall with Von Herman and tell him to bring me a hammer and a couple of spikes. I'd better nail down my desk."

"I'll promise not to crowd you for a year or two," grinned Jock from the doorway, and was off with the pleased Von Herman.

Past the double row of beehives again, into the elevator, out again, up a narrow iron stairway, into a busy, cluttered, skylighted room. Pictures, posters, photographs hung all about.

Some of the pictures Jock recognized as old friends that had gazed familiarly at him from subway trains and street cars and theater programmes. Golf clubs, tennis rackets, walking sticks, billiard cues were stacked up in corners. And yet there was a bare and orderly look about the place. Two silent, s.h.i.+rt-sleeved men were busy at drawing boards. Through a doorway beyond Jock could see others similarly engaged in the next room. On a platform in one corner of the room posed a young man in one of those costumes the coat of which is a mongrel mixture of cutaway and sack. You see them worn by clergymen with unsecular ideas in dress, and by the leader of the counterfeiters' gang in the moving pictures. The pose was that met with in the backs of magazines--the head lifted, eyes fixed on an interesting object unseen, one arm crooked to hold a cane, one foot advanced, the other trailing slightly to give a Fifth Avenue four o'clock air. His face was expressionless.

On his head was a sadly unironed silk hat.

Von Herman glanced at the drawing tacked to the board of one of the men. "That'll do, Flynn," he said to the model. He glanced again at the drawing. "Bring out the hat a little more, Mack. They won't burnish it if you don't,"--to the artist. Then, turning about, "Where's that girl?"

From a far corner, sheltered by long green curtains, stepped a graceful almost childishly slim figure in a bronze-green Norfolk suit and close-fitting hat from beneath which curled a fluff of bright golden hair. Von Herman stared at her.

"You're not the girl," he said. "You won't do."

"You sent for me," retorted the girl. "I'm Miss Michelin--Gelda Michelin. I posed for you six months ago, but I've been out of town with the show since then."

Von Herman, frowning, opened a table drawer, pulled out a card index, ran his long fingers through it and extracted a card. He glanced at it, and then, the frown deepening, read it aloud.

"'Michelin, Gelda. Telephone Bryant 4759. Brunette. Medium build.

Good neck and eyes. Good figure. Good clothes.'"

He glanced up. "Well?"

"That's me," said Miss Michelin calmly. "I've got the same telephone number and eyes and neck and clothes. Of course my hair is different and I am thinner, but that's business. I'd like to know what chance a fat girl would have in the chorus these days."

Von Herman groaned. "I'll pay you for the time you've waited and for your trouble. Can't use you for these pictures." Then as she left he turned a comically despairing face to the two men at the drawing boards. "What are we going to do? We've got to make a start on these pictures and everything has gone wrong. They want something special. Two figures, young man and woman. Said expressly they didn't want a chicken. No romping curls and none of that eyes and lips fool-girl stuff. This chap's ideal for the man." He pointed to Jock.

Jock had been staring, fascinated, at the shaded, zigzag marks which the artist--dark-skinned, velvet-eyed, foreign-looking youth--was making on the sheet of paper before him. He had scarcely glanced up during the entire scene. Now he looked briefly and coolly at Jock.

"Where did you get him?" he asked, with the precise enunciation of the foreign-born. "Good figure. And he wears his clothes not like a cab driver, as the others do."

"Thanks," drawled Jock, flus.h.i.+ng a little. Then, boyish curiosity getting the better of him, "Say, tell me, what in the world are you doing to that drawing?"

He of the velvety eyes smiled a twisted little smile. His slim brown fingers never stopped in their work of guiding the pen in its zigzag path.

"It is work," he sneered, "to delight the soul of an artist. I am now engaged in the pleasing task of putting the bones in a herringbone suit."

But Jock did not smile. Here was another man, he thought, who had been given a broom and told to sweep down the stairway.

Von Herman was regarding him almost wistfully. "I hate to let you slip," he said. Then, his face brightening, "By Jove! I wonder if Miss Galt would pose for us if we told her what a fix we were in."

He picked up the telephone receiver. "Miss Galt, please," he said.

Then, aside, "Of course it's nerve to ask a girl who's earning three thousand a year to leave her desk and come up and pose for--h.e.l.lo! Miss Galt?"

Jock, seated on the edge of the models' platform, was beginning to enjoy himself. Even this end of the advertising business had its interesting side, he thought. Ten minutes later he knew it had.

Ten minutes later there appeared Miss Galt. Jock left off swinging his legs from the platform and stood up. Miss Galt was that kind of girl. Smooth black hair parted and coiled low as only an exquisitely shaped head can dare to wear its glory-crown. A face whose expression was sweetly serious in spite of its youth. A girl whose clothes were the sort of clothes that girls ought to wear in offices, and don't.

"This is mighty good of you, Miss Galt," began Von Herman. "It's the Kool Komfort Klothes Company's summer campaign stuff. We'll only need you for an hour or so--to get the expression and general outline. Poster stuff, really. Then this young man will pose for the summer union suit pictures."

"Don't apologize," said Miss Galt. "We had a hard enough time to get that Kool Komfort account. We don't want to start wrong with the pictures. Besides, I think posing's real fun."

Jock thought so too, quite suddenly. Just as suddenly Von Herman remembered the conventions and introduced them.

"McChesney?" repeated Miss Galt, crisply. "I know a Mrs.

McChesney, of the T.A. Buck--"

"My mother," proudly.

"Your mother! Then why--" She stopped.

"Because," said Jock, "I'm the rawest rooky in the Berg, Shriner Company. And when I begin to realize what I don't know about advertising I'll probably want to plunge off the Palisades."

Miss Galt smiled up at him, her clear, frank eyes meeting his.

"You'll win," she said.

"Even if I lose--I win now," said Jock, suddenly audacious.

"Hi! Hold that pose!" called Von Herman, happily.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'Hi! Hold that pose!' called Von Herman"]

II

PERSONALITY PLUS

There are seven stages in the evolution of that individual whose appearance is the signal for a listless "Who-do-you-want-to-see?"

from the white-bloused, drab-haired, anaemic little girl who sits in the outer office forever reading last month's magazines. The badge of fear brands the novice. Standing hat in hand, nervous, apprehensive, gulpy, with the elevator door clanging behind him, and the sacred inner door closed before him, he offers up a silent and paradoxical "Thank heaven!" at the office girl's languid "Not in," and dives into the friendly shelter of the next elevator going down. When, at that same message, he can smile, as with a certain grim agreeableness he says, "I'll wait," then has he reached the seventh stage, and taken the orders of the regularly ordained.

Jock McChesney had learned to judge an unknown prospective by glancing at his hall rug and stenographer, which marks the fifth stage. He had learned to regard office boys with something less than white-hot hate. He had learned to let the other fellow do the talking. He had learned to condense a written report into twenty-five words. And he had learned that there was as much difference between the profession of advertising as he had thought of it and advertising as it really was, as there is between a steam calliope and a cathedral pipe organ.

In the big office of the Berg, Shriner Advertising Company they had begun to chuckle a bit over the McChesney solicitor's reports.

Those same reports indicated that young McChesney was beginning to find the key to that maddening jumble of complexities known as human nature. Big Sam Hupp, who was the pet caged copy-writing genius of the place, used even to bring an occasional example of Jock's business badinage into the Old Man's office, and the two would grin in secret. As when they ran thus:

_Pepsinale Manufacturing Company_:

Mr. Bowser is the kind of gentleman who curses his subordinates in front of the whole office force. Very touchy.

Crumpled his advertising manager. Our chance to get at him is when he is in one of his rare good humors.

Or:

_E.V. Kreiss Company_:

Kreiss very difficult to reach. Permanent address seems to be Italy, Egypt, and other foreign ports. Occasionally his instructions come from Palm Beach.