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The Cost, a novel by David Graham Phillips |
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Chapter 11. Young America |
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_ CHAPTER XI. YOUNG AMERICA When Pierson, laggard as usual, returned to Battle Field a week after the end of the long vacation, he found Scarborough just establishing himself. He had taken two small and severely plain rooms in a quaint old frame cottage, one story high, but perched importantly upon a bank at the intersection of two much-traveled streets. "What luck?" asked Pierson, lounging in on him. "A hundred days' campaign; a thousand dollars net," replied the book agent. "And I'm hard as oak from tramping those roads, and I've learned--you ought to have been along, Pierson. I know people as I never could have come to know them by any other means--what they think, what they want, how they can be reached." There was still much of the boy in Pierson's face. But Scarborough looked the man, developed, ready. Pierson wandered into the bedroom to complete his survey. "I see you're going to live by the clock," he called out presently. He had found, pasted to the wall, Scarborough's schedule of the daily division of his time; just above it, upon a shelf, was a new alarm clock, the bell so big that it overhung like a canopy. "You don't mean you're going to get up at four?" "Every morning--all winter," replied Scarborough, without stopping his unpacking. "You see, I'm going to finish this year--take the two years in one. Then I've registered in a law office--Judge Holcombe's. And there's my speaking--I must practise that every day." Pierson came back to the sitting-room and collapsed into a chair. "I see you allow yourself five hours for sleep," he said. "It's too much, old man. You're self-indulgent." "That's a mistake," replied Scarborough. "Since making out the schedule I've decided to cut sleep down to four hours and a half." "That's more like it!" "We all sleep too much," he continued. "And as I shan't smoke, or drink, or worry, I'll need even less than the average man. I'm going to do nothing but work. A man doesn't need much rest from mere work." "What! No play?" "Play all the time. I've simply changed my playthings." Pierson seated himself at the table and stared gloomily at his friend. "Look here, old man. For heaven's sake, don't let Olivia find out about this program." But Olivia did hear of it, and Pierson was compelled to leave his luxury in the main street and to take the two remaining available rooms at Scarborough's place. His bed was against the wall of Scarborough's bedroom--the wall where the alarm clock was. At four o'clock on his first morning he started from a profound sleep. "My bed must be moved into my sitting-room to-day," he said to himself as soon as the clamor of Scarborough's gong died away and he could collect his thoughts. But at four o'clock the next morning the gong penetrated the two walls as if they had not been there. "I see my finish," he groaned, sitting up and tearing at his hair. He tried to sleep again, but the joint pressure of Olivia's memory-mirrored gray eyes and of disordered nerves from the racking gong forced him to make an effort to bestir himself. Groaning and muttering, he rose and in the starlight looked from his window. Scarborough was going up the deserted street on his way to the woods for his morning exercise. His head was thrown back and his chest extended, and his long legs were covering four feet at a stride. "You old devil!" said Pierson, his tone suggesting admiration and affection rather than anger. "But I'll outwit you." By a subterfuge in which a sympathetic doctor was the main factor, he had himself permanently excused from chapel. Then he said to Scarborough: "You get up too late, old man. My grandfather used to say that only a drone lies abed after two in the morning, wasting the best part of the day. You ought to turn in, say, at half-past nine and rise in time to get your hardest work out of the way before the college day begins." "That sounds reasonable," replied Scarborough, after a moment's consideration. "I'll try it." And so it came to pass that Pierson went to bed at the sound of Scarborough's two-o'clock rising gong and pieced out his sleep with an occasional nap in recitations and lectures and for an hour or two late in the afternoon. He was able once more to play poker as late as he liked, and often had time for reading before the gong sounded. And Scarborough was equally delighted with the new plan. "I gain at least one hour a day, perhaps two," he said. "Your grandfather was a wise man." Toward spring, Mills, western manager of the publishing house for which Scarborough had sold Peaks of Progress through Michigan, came to Battle Field to see him. "You were far and away the best man we had out last year," said he. "You're a born book agent." "Thank you," said Scarborough, sincerely. He appreciated that a man can pay no higher compliment than to say that another is master of his own trade. "We got about fifty orders from people who thought it over after you'd tried to land them and failed--that shows the impression you made. And you sold as many books as our best agent in our best field." "I'll never go as agent again," said Scarborough. "The experience was invaluable--but sufficient." "We don't want you to go as agent. Our proposition is for much easier and more dignified work." At the word dignified, Scarborough could not restrain a smile. "I've practically made my plans for the summer," he said. "I think we've got something worth your while, Mr. Scarborough. Our idea is for you to select about a hundred of the young fellows who're working their way through here, and train them in your methods of approaching people. Then you'll take them to Wisconsin and Minnesota and send them out, each man to a district you select for him. In that way you'll help a hundred young men to earn a year at college and you'll make a good sum for yourself--two or three times what you made last summer." Scarborough had intended to get admitted to the bar in June, to spend the summer at an apprenticeship in a law office and to set up for himself in the fall. But this plan was most attractive--it would give him a new kind of experience and would put him in funds for the wait for clients. The next day he signed an advantageous contract--his expenses for the summer and a guaranty of not less than three thousand dollars clear. He selected a hundred young men and twelve young women, the most intelligent of the five hundred self-supporting students at Battle Field. Pierson, having promised to behave himself, was permitted to attend the first lesson. The scholars at the Scarborough, School for Book Agents filled his quarters and overflowed in swarms without the windows and the door. The weather was still cool; but all must hear, and the rooms would hold barely half the brigade. "I assume that you've read the book," began Scarborough. He was standing at the table with the paraphernalia of a book agent spread upon it. "But you must read it again and again, until you know what's on every page, until you have by heart the passages I'll point out to you." He looked at Drexel--a freshman of twenty-two, with earnest, sleepless eyes and a lofty forehead; in the past winter he had become acquainted with hunger and with that cold which creeps into the room, crawls through the thin covers and closes in, icy as death, about the heart. "What do you think of the book, Drexel?" The young man--he is high in the national administration to-day--flushed and looked uneasy. "Speak frankly. I want your candid opinion." "Well, I must say, Mr. Scarborough, I think it's pretty bad." "Thank you," said Scarborough; and he glanced round. "Does anybody disagree with Mr. Drexel?" There was not a murmur. Pierson covered his face to hide his smile at this "jolt" for his friend. In the group round one of the windows a laugh started and spread everywhere except to seven of the twelve young women and to those near Scarborough--THEY looked frightened. "I expected Mr. Drexel's answer," began Scarborough. "Before you can sell Peaks of Progress each of you must be convinced that it's a book he himself would buy. And I see you've not even read it. You've at most glanced at it with unfriendly eyes. This book is not literature, gentlemen. It is a storehouse of facts. It is an educational work so simply written and so brilliantly illustrated that the very children will hang over its pages with delight. If you attend to your training in our coming three months of preliminary work you'll find during the summer that the book's power to attract the children is its strongest point. I made nearly half my sales last summer by turning from the parents to the children and stirring their interest." Pierson was now no more inclined to smile than were the pupils. "When I started out," continued Scarborough, "I, too, had just glanced at the book and had learned a few facts from the prospectus. And I failed to sell, except to an occasional fool whom I was able to overpower. Every one instinctively felt the estimate I myself placed upon my goods. But as I went on the book gradually forced itself upon me. And, long before the summer was over, I felt that I was an ambassador of education to those eager people. And I'm proud that I sold as many books as I did. Each book, I know, is a radiating center of pleasure, of thought, of aspiration to higher things. No, ladies and gentlemen, you must first learn that these eight hundred pages crowded with facts of history, these six hundred illustrations taken from the best sources and flooding the text with light, together constitute a work that should be in all humble households." Scarborough had his audience with him now. "Never sneer," he said in conclusion. "Sneering will accomplish nothing. Learn your business. Put yourself, your BEST self, into it. And then you may hope to succeed at it." He divided his pupils into six classes of about twenty each and dismissed them, asking the first class to come at three the next afternoon. The young men and young women went thoughtfully away; they were revolving their initial lesson in the cardinal principle of success--enthusiasm. When the two friends were alone Pierson said: "Do you know, I'm beginning to get a glimpse of you. And I see there isn't anything beyond your reach. You'll get whatever you want." Scarborough's reply was a sudden look of dejection, an impatient shrug. Then he straightened himself, lifted his head with a lion-like toss that shook back the obstinate lock of hair from his forehead. He laid his hand on his friend's shoulder. "Yes," he said, "because I'm determined to want whatever I get. Good fortune and bad--everything shall be grist for THIS mill." Pierson attended next day's class and afterward went to Olivia with an account of it. "You ought to have seen him put those fellows through, one at a time. I tell you, he'll teach them more in the next three months than they'll learn of the whole faculty. And this summer he'll get every man and woman of them enough to pay their way through college next year." "What did he do to-day?" asked Olivia. Of the many qualities she loved in Pierson, the one she loved most was his unbounded, unselfish admiration for his friend. "He took each man separately, the others watching and listening. First he'd play the part of book agent with his pupil as a reluctant customer. Then he'd reverse, and the pupil as agent would try to sell him the book, he pretending to be an ignorant, obstinate, ill-natured, close-fisted farmer or farmer's wife. It was a liberal education in the art of persuasion. If his pupils had his brains and his personality, Peaks of Progress would be on the center-table in half the farm parlors of Wisconsin and Minnesota by September." "IF they had his personality, and IF they had his brains," said Olivia. "Well, as it is, he'll make the dumbest ass in the lot bray to some purpose." In September, when Scarborough closed his headquarters at Milwaukee and set out for Indianapolis, he found that the average earnings of his agents were two hundred and seventy-five dollars, and that he himself had made forty-three hundred. Mills came and offered him a place in the publishing house at ten thousand a year and a commission. He instantly rejected it. He had already arranged to spend a year with one of the best law firms in Indianapolis before opening an office in Saint X, the largest town in the congressional district in which his farm lay. "But there's no hurry about deciding," said Mills. "Remember we'll make you rich in a few years." "My road happens not to lie in that direction," replied Scarborough, carelessly. "I've no desire to be rich. It's too easy, if one will consent to give money-making his exclusive attention." Mills looked amused--had he not known Scarborough's ability, he would have felt derisive. "Money's power," said he. "And there are only two ambitions for a wide-awake man--money and power." "Money can't buy the kind of power I'd care for," answered Scarborough. "If I were to seek power, it'd be the power that comes through ability to persuade." "Money talks," said Mills, laughing. "Money bellows," retorted Scarborough, "and bribes and browbeats, bully and coward that it is. But it never persuades." "I'll admit it's a coward." "And I hope I can always frighten enough of it into my service to satisfy my needs. But I'm not spending my life in its service--no, thank you!" _ |
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