Old Gorgon Graham Part 7

Never ask a man what he knows, but what he can do. A fellow may know everything that's happened since the Lord started the ball to rolling, and not be able to do anything to help keep it from stopping. But when a man can do anything, he's bound to know something worth while. Books are all right, but dead men's brains are no good unless you mix a live one's with them.

It isn't what a man's got in the bank, but what he's got in his head, that makes him a great merchant. Rob a miser's safe and he's broke; but you can't break a big merchant with a jimmy and a stick of dynamite. The first would have to start again just where he began--h.o.a.rding up pennies; the second would have his princ.i.p.al a.s.sets intact. But acc.u.mulating knowledge or piling up money, just to have a little more of either than the next fellow, is a fool game that no broad-gauged man has time enough to sit in. Too much learning, like too much money, makes most men narrow.

I simply mention these things in a general way. You know blame well that I don't understand any French, and so when you spring it on me you are simply showing a customer the wrong line of goods. It's like trying to sell our Pickled Luncheon Tidbits to a fellow in the black belt who doesn't buy anything but plain dry-salt hog in hunks and slabs. It makes me a little nervous for fear you'll be sending out a lot of letters to the trade some day, asking them if their stock of Porkuss America.n.u.ss isn't running low.

The world is full of bright men who know all the right things to say and who say them in the wrong place. A young fellow always thinks that if he doesn't talk he seems stupid, but it's better to shut up and seem dull than to open up and prove yourself a fool. It's a pretty good rule to show your best goods last.

Whenever I meet one of those fellows who tells you all he knows, and a good deal that he doesn't know, as soon as he's introduced to you, I always think of Bill Harkness, who kept a temporary home for broken-down horses--though he didn't call it that--back in Missouri.

Bill would pick up an old critter whose par value was the price of one horse-hide, and after it had been pulled and shoved into his stable, the boys would stand around waiting for c.r.a.pe to be hung on the door.

But inside a week Bill would be driving down Main Street behind that horse, yelling Whoa! at the top of his voice while it tried to kick holes in the dashboard.

Bill had a theory that the Ten Commandments were suspended while a horse-trade was going on, so he did most of his business with strangers. Caught a Northerner nosing round his barn one day, and inside of ten minutes the fellow was driving off behind what Bill described as "the peartest piece of ginger and cayenne in Pike County." Bill just made a free gift of it to the Yankee, he said, but to keep the transaction from being a piece of pure charity he accepted fifty dollars from him.

The stranger drove all over town bragging of his bargain, until some one casually called his attention to the fact that the mare was stone-blind. Then he hiked back to Bill's and went for him in broken Bostonese, winding up with:

"What the skip-two-and-carry-one do you mean, you old hold-your-breath-and-take-ten-swallows, by stealing my good money.

Didn't you know the horse was blind? Why didn't you tell me?"

"Yep," Bill bit off from his piece of store plug; "I reckon I knew the hoss was blind, but you see the feller I bought her of"--and he paused to settle his chaw--"asked me not to mention it. You wouldn't have me violate a confidence as affected the repertashun of a pore dumb critter, and her of the opposite sect, would you?" And the gallant Bill turned scornfully away from the stranger.

There were a good many holes in Bill's methods, but he never leaked information through them; and when I come across a fellow who doesn't mention it when he's asked not to, I come pretty near letting him fix his own salary. It's only a mighty big man that doesn't care whether the people whom he meets believe that he's big; but the smaller a fellow is, the bigger he wants to appear. He hasn't anything of his own in his head that's of any special importance, so just to prove that he's a trusted employee, and in the confidence of the boss, he gives away everything he knows about the business, and, as that isn't much, he lies a little to swell it up. It's a mighty curious thing how some men will lie a little to impress people who are laughing at them; will drink a little in order to sit around with people who want to get away from them; and will even steal a little to "go into society" with people who sneer at them.

The most important animal in the world is a turkey-c.o.c.k. You let him get among the chickens on the manure pile behind the barn, with his wings held down stiff, his tail feathers stuck up starchy, his wish-bone poked out perky, and gobbling for room to show his fancy steps, and he's a mighty impressive fowl. But a small boy with a rock and a good aim can make him run a mile. When you see a fellow swelling up and telling his firm's secrets, holler Cas.h.!.+ and you'll stampede him back to his hall bedroom.

I dwell a little on this matter of loose talking, because it breaks up more firms and more homes than any other one thing I know. The father of lies lives in h.e.l.l, but he spends a good deal of his time in Chicago. You'll find him on the Board of Trade when the market's wobbling, saying that the Russians are just about to eat up Turkey, and that it'll take twenty million bushels of our wheat to make the bread for the sandwich; and down in the street, asking if you knew that the cas.h.i.+er of the Teenth National was leading a double life as a single man in the suburbs and a singular life for a married man in the city; and out on Prairie Avenue, whispering that it's too bad Mabel smokes Turkish cigarettes, for she's got such pretty curly hair; and how sad it is that Daisy and Dan are going to separate, "but they do say that he--s.h.!.+ s.h.!.+ hush; here she comes." Yet, when you come to wash your pan of dirt, and the lies have all been carried off down the flume, and you've got the color of the few particles of solid, eighteen-carat truth left, you'll find it's the Sultan who's smoking Turkish cigarettes; and that Mabel is trying cubebs for her catarrh; and that the cas.h.i.+er of the Teenth National belongs to a whist club in the suburbs and is the superintendent of a Sunday-school in the city; and that Dan has put Daisy up to visiting her mother to ward off a threatened swoop down from the old lady; and that the Czar hasn't done a blame thing except to become the father of another girl baby.

It's pretty hard to know how to treat a lie when it's about yourself.

You can't go out of your way to deny it, because that puts you on the defensive; and sending the truth after a lie that's got a running start is like trying to round up a stampeded herd of steers while the scare is on them. Lies are great travellers, and welcome visitors in a good many homes, and no questions asked. Truth travels slowly, has to prove its ident.i.ty, and then a lot of people hesitate to turn out an agreeable stranger to make room for it.

About the only way I know to kill a lie is to live the truth. When your credit is doubted, don't bother to deny the rumors, but discount your bills. When you are attacked unjustly, avoid the appearance of evil, but avoid also the appearance of being too good--that is, better than usual. A man can't be too good, but he can appear too good.

Surmise and suspicion feed on the unusual, and when a man goes about his business along the usual rut, they soon fade away for lack of nourishment. First and last every fellow gets a lot of unjust treatment in this world, but when he's as old as I am and comes to balance his books with life and to credit himself with the mean things which weren't true that have been said about him, and to debit himself with the mean things which were true that people didn't get on to or overlooked, he'll find that he's had a tolerably square deal. This world has some pretty rotten spots on its skin, but it's sound at the core.

There are two ways of treating gossip about other people, and they're both good ways. One is not to listen to it, and the other is not to repeat it. Then there's young Buck Pudden's wife's way, and that's better than either, when you're dealing with some of these old heifers who browse over the range all day, stuffing themselves with gossip about your friends, and then round up at your house to chew the cud and s...o...b..r fake sympathy over you.

Buck wasn't a bad fellow at heart, for he had the virtue of trying to be good, but occasionally he would walk in slippery places. Wasn't very sure-footed, so he fell down pretty often, and when he fell from grace it usually cracked the ice. Still, as he used to say, when he shot at the bar mirrors during one of his periods of temporary elevation, he paid for what he broke--cash for the mirrors and sweat and blood for his cussedness.

Then one day Buck met the only woman in the world--a mighty nice girl from St. Jo--and she was hesitating over falling in love with him, till the gossips called to tell her that he was a dear, lovely fellow, and wasn't it too bad that he had such horrid habits? That settled it, of course, and she married him inside of thirty days, so that she could get right down to the business of reforming him.

I don't, as a usual thing, take much stock in this marrying men to reform them, because a man's always sure of a woman when he's married to her, while a woman's never really afraid of losing a man till she's got him. When you want to teach a dog new tricks, it's all right to show him the biscuit first, but you'll usually get better results by giving it to him after the performance. But Buck's wife fooled the whole town and almost put the gossips out of business by keeping Buck straight for a year. She allowed that what he'd been craving all the time was a home and family, and that his rare-ups came from not having 'em. Then, like most reformers, she overdid it--went and had twins.

Buck thought he owned the town, of course, and that would have been all right if he hadn't included the saloons among his real estate. Had to take his drinks in pairs, too, and naturally, when he went home that night and had another look at the new arrivals, he thought they were quadruplets.

Buck straightened right out the next day, went to his wife and told her all about it, and that was the last time he ever had to hang his head when he talked to her, for he never took another drink. You see, she didn't reproach him, or nag him--simply said that she was mighty proud of the way he'd held on for a year, and that she knew she could trust him now for another ten. Man was made a little lower than the angels, the Good Book says, and I reckon that's right; but he was made a good while ago, and he hasn't kept very well. Yet there are a heap of women in this world who are still right in the seraphim cla.s.s. When your conscience doesn't tell you what to do in a matter of right and wrong, ask your wife.

Naturally, the story of Buck's final celebration came to the gossips like a thousand-barrel gusher to a drilling outfit that's been finding dusters, and they went one at a time to tell Mrs. Buck all the dreadful details and how sorry they were for her. She would just sit and listen till they'd run off the story, and hemst.i.tched it, and embroidered it, and stuck fancy rosettes all over it. Then she'd smile one of those sweet baby smiles that women give just before the hair-pulling begins, and say:

"Law, Mrs. Wiggleford"--the deacon's wife was the one who was condoling with her at the moment--"people will talk about the best of us. Seems as if no one is safe nowadays. Why, they lie about the deacon, even. I know it ain't true, and you know it ain't true, but only yesterday somebody was trying to tell me that it was right strange how a professor and a deacon got that color in his beak, and while it might be inflammatory veins or whatever he claimed it was, she reckoned that, if he'd let some one else tend the alcohol barrel, he wouldn't have to charge up so much of his stock to leakage and evaporation."

Of course, Mrs. Buck had made up the story about the deacon, because every one knew that he was too mean to drink anything that he could sell, but by the time Buck's wife had finished, Mrs. Wiggleford was so busy explaining and defending him that she hadn't any further interest in Buck's case. And each one that called was sent away with a special piece of home scandal which Mrs. Buck had invented to keep her mind from dwelling on her neighbor's troubles.

She followed up her system, too, and in the end it got so that women would waste good gossip before they'd go to her with it. For if the pastor's wife would tell her "as a true friend" that the report that she had gone to the theatre in St. Louis was causing a scandal, she'd thank her for being so sweetly thoughtful, and ask if nothing was sacred enough to be spared by the tongue of slander, though she, for one, didn't believe that there was anything in the malicious talk that the Doc was cribbing those powerful Sunday evening discourses from a volume of Beecher's sermons. And when they'd press her for the name of her informant, she'd say: "No, it was a lie; she knew it was a lie, and no one who sat under the dear pastor would believe it; and they mustn't dignify it by noticing it." As a matter of fact, no one who sat under Doc Pottle would have believed it, for his sermons weren't good enough to have been cribbed; and if Beecher could have heard one of them he would have excommunicated him.

Buck's wife knew how to show goods. When Buck himself had used up all the cuss-words in Missouri on his conduct, she had sense enough to know that his stock of trouble was full, and that if she wanted to get a hold on him she mustn't show him stripes, but something in cheerful checks. Yet when the trouble-hunters looked her up, she had a full line of samples of their favorite commodity to show them.

I simply mention these things in a general way. Seeing would naturally be believing, if cross-eyed people were the only ones who saw crooked, and hearing will be believing when deaf people are the only ones who don't hear straight. It's a pretty safe rule, when you hear a heavy yarn about any one, to allow a fair amount for tare, and then to verify your weights.

Your affectionate father,

JOHN GRAHAM.

P.S.--I think you'd better look in at a few of the branch houses on your way home and see if you can't make expenses.

No. 9

From John Graham, at the Union Stock Yards, Chicago, to his son, Pierrepont, care of Graham & Company's brokers, Atlanta. Following the old man's suggestion, the young man has rounded out the honeymoon into a harvest moon, and is sending in some very satisfactory orders to the house.

IX

CHICAGO, February 1, 189-.

_Dear Pierrepont_: Judging from the way the orders are coming in, I reckon that you must be lavis.h.i.+ng a little of your surplus ardor on the trade. So long as you are in such good practise, and can look a customer in the eye and make him believe that he's the only buyer you ever really loved, you'd better not hurry home too fast. I reckon Helen won't miss you for a few hours every day, but even if she should it's a mighty nice thing to be missed, and she's right there where you can tell her every night that you love her just the same; while the only way in which you can express your unchanged affection for the house is by sending us lots of orders. If you do that you needn't bother to write and send us lots of love.

The average buyer is a good deal like the heiress to a million dollars who's been on the market for eight or ten years, not because there's no demand for her, but because there's too much. Most girls whose capital of good looks is only moderate, marry, and marry young, because they're like a fellow on 'Change who's scalping the market--not inclined to take chances, and always ready to make a quick turn. Old maids are usually the girls who were so homely that they never had an offer, or so good-looking that they carried their matrimonial corner from one option to another till the new crop came along and bust them. But a girl with a million dollars isn't a speculative venture. She can advertise for sealed proposals on her fiftieth birthday and be oversubscribed like an issue of 10 per cent.

Government bonds. There's no closed season on heiresses, and, naturally, a bird that can't stick its head up without getting shot at becomes a pretty wary old fowl.

A buyer is like your heiress--he always has a lot of nice young drummers flirting and fooling around him, but mighty few of them are so much in earnest that they can convince him that their only chance for happiness lies in securing his particular order. But you let one of these dead-in-earnest boys happen along, and the first thing you know he's persuaded the heiress that he loves her for herself alone or has eloped from town with an order for a car-load of lard.

A lot of young men start off in business with an idea that they must arm themselves with the same sort of weapons that their compet.i.tors carry. There's nothing in it. Fighting the devil with fire is all foolishness, because that's the one weapon with which he's more expert than any one else. I usually find that it's pretty good policy to oppose suspicion with candor, foxiness with openness, indifference with earnestness. When you deal squarely with a crooked man you scare him to death, because he thinks you're springing some new and extra-deep game on him.

A fellow who's subject to cramps and chills has no business in the water, but if you start to go in swimming, go in all over. Don't be one of those chappies who prance along the beach, s.h.i.+vering and showing their skinny shapes, and then dabble their feet in the surf, pour a little sand in their hair, and think they've had a bath.

You mustn't forget, though, that it's just as important to know when to come out as when to dive in. I mention this because yesterday some one who'd run across you at Yema.s.see told me that you and Helen were exchanging the grip of the third degree under the breakfast-table, and trying to eat your eggs with your left hands. Of course, this is all very right and proper if you can keep it up, but I've known a good many men who would kiss their wives on the honeymoon between swallows of coffee and look like an a.s.s a year later when she chirruped out at the breakfast-table, "Do you love me, darling?" I'm just a little afraid that you're one of those fellows who wants to hold his wife in his lap during the first six months of his married life, and who, when she asks him at the end of a year if he loves her, answers "Sure." I may be wrong about this, but I've noticed a tendency on your part to slop over a little, and a pail that slops over soon empties itself.

It's been my experience that most women try to prove their love by talking about it, and most men by spending money. But when a pocketbook or a mouth is opened too often nothing but trouble is left in it.

Don't forget the little attentions due your wife, but don't hurt the grocer's feelings or treat the milkman with silent contempt in order to give them to her. You can hock your overcoat before marriage to buy violets for a girl, but when she has the run of your wardrobe you can't slap your chest and explain that you stopped wearing it because you're so warm-blooded. A sensible woman soon begins to understand that affection can be expressed in porterhouse steaks as well as in American beauties. But when Charlie, on twenty-five a week, marries a fool, she pouts and says that he doesn't love her just the same because he takes her to the theatre now in the street-cars, instead of in a carriage, as he used to in those happy days before they were married. As a matter of fact, this doesn't show that she's losing Charlie's love, but that he's getting his senses back. It's been my experience that no man can really attend to business properly when he's chased to the office every morning by a crowd of infuriated florists and livery-men.

Of course, after a girl has spent a year of evenings listening to a fellow tell her that his great ambition is to make her life one grand, sweet song, it jars her to find the orchestra grunting and snoring over the sporting extra some night along six months after the ceremony. She stays awake and cries a little over this, so when he sees her across the liver and bacon at breakfast, he forgets that he's never told her before that she could look like anything but an angel, and asks, "Gee, Mame, what makes your nose so red?" And that's the place where a young couple begins to adjust itself to life as it's lived on Michigan Avenue instead of in the story-books.

There's no rule for getting through the next six months without going back to mamma, except for the Brute to be as kind as he knows how to be and the Angel as forgiving as she can be. But at the end of that time a boy and girl with the right kind of stuff in them have been graduated into a man and a woman. It's only calf love that's always bellering about it. When love is full grown it has few words, and sometimes it growls them out.

I remember, when I was a youngster, hearing old Mrs. Hoover tell of the trip she took with the Doc just after they were married. Even as a young fellow the Doc was a great exhorter. Knew more Scripture when he was sixteen than the presiding elder. Couldn't open his mouth without losing a verse. Would lose a chapter when he yawned.

Well, when Doc was about twenty-five, he fell in love with a mighty sweet young girl, Leila Hardin, who every one said was too frivolous for him. But the Doc only answered that it was his duty to marry her to bring her under Christian influences, and they set off down the river to New Orleans on their honeymoon.