“I have something I’d like to tell you, Mr. Witla,” he observed.
“Well, what is it?” smiled Eugene.
“Are you going out to lunch?”
“Certainly, come along.”
They went out together and Morgenbau communicated to Eugene what he had heard—that the Summerfield Company had just dismissed, or parted company with, or lost, a very capable director by the name of Freeman, and that they were looking for a new man.
“Why don’t you apply for that?” asked Morgenbau. “You could hold it. You’re doing just the sort of work that would make great ads. You know how to handle men, too. They like you. All the young fellows around here do. Why don’t you go and see Mr. Summerfield? He’s up in Thirty-fourth Street. You might be just the man he’s looking for, and then you’d have a department of your own.”
Eugene looked at this boy, wondering what had put this idea in his head. He decided to call up Dula and did so at once, asking him what he thought would be the best move to make. The latter did not know Summerville [sic], but he knew someone who did.
“I’ll tell you what you do, Eugene,” he said. “You go and see Baker Bates of the Satina Company. That’s at the corner of Broadway and Fourth Street. We do a big business with the Satina Company, and they do a big business with Summerfield. I’ll send a letter over to you by a boy and you take that. Then I’ll call Bates up on the phone, and if he’s favorable he can speak to Summerfield. He’ll want to see you, though.”
Eugene was very grateful and eagerly awaited the arrival of the letter. He asked Benedict for a little time off and went to Mr. Baker Bates. The latter had heard enough from Dula to be friendly. He had been told by the latter that Eugene was potentially a great artist, slightly down on his luck, but that he was doing exceedingly well where he was and would do better in the new place. He was impressed by Eugene’s appearance, for the latter had changed his style from the semi-artistic to the practical. He thought Eugene looked capable. He was certainly pleasant.
“I’ll talk to Mr. Summerfield for you,” he said, “though I wouldn’t put much hope in what will come of it if I were you. He’s a difficult man and it’s best not to appear too eager in this matter. If he can be induced to send for you it will be much better. You let this rest until tomorrow. I’ll call him up on another matter and take him out to lunch, and then I’ll see how he stands and who he has in mind, if he has anyone. He may have, you know. If there is a real opening I’ll speak of you. We’ll see.”
Eugene went away once more, very grateful. He was thinking that Dula had always meant good luck to him. He had taken his first important drawing. The pictures he had published for him had brought him the favor of M. Charles. Dula had secured him the position that he now had. Would he be the cause of his getting this one?
On the way down town on the car he encountered a cross-eyed boy. He had understood from someone recently that cross-eyed boys were good luck—cross-eyed women bad luck. A thrill of hopeful prognostication passed over him. In all likelihood he was going to get this place. If this sign came true this time, he would believe in signs. They had come true before, but this would be a real test. He stared cheerfully at the boy and the latter looked him full in the eyes and grinned.
“That settles it!” said Eugene. “I’m going to get it.”
Still he was far from being absolutely sure.
Chapter 32
The Summerfield Advertising Agency, of which Mr. Daniel C. Summerfield was president, was one of those curious exfoliations or efflorescences of the personality of a single individual which is so often met with in the business world, and which always means a remarkable individual behind them. The ideas, the enthusiasm, the strength of Mr. Daniel C. Summerfield was all there was to the Summerfield Advertising Agency. It was true there was a large force of men working for him, advertising canvassers, advertising writers, financial accountants, artists, stenographers, book-keepers and the like, but they were all as it were an emanation or irradiation of the personality of Mr. Daniel C. Summerfield. He was small, wiry, black-haired, black-eyed, black-mustached, with an olive complexion and even, pleasing, albeit at times wolfish, white teeth which indicated a disposition as avid and hungry as a disposition well might be.
Mr. Summerfield had come up into his present state of affluence or comparative affluence from the direst poverty and by the directest route—his personal efforts. In the State in which he had originated, Alabama, his family had been known, in the small circle to which they were known at all, as poor white trash. His father had been a rather lackadaisical, half-starved cotton planter who had been satisfied with a single bale or less of cotton to the acre on the ground which he leased, and who drove a lean mule very much the worse for age and wear, up and down the furrows of his leaner fields the while he complained of “the misery” in his breast. He was afflicted with slow consumption or thought he was, which was just as effective, and in addition had hook-worm, though that parasitic producer of hopeless tiredness was not yet discovered and named.
Daniel Christopher, his eldest son, had been raised with scarcely any education, having been put in a cotton mill at the age of seven, but nevertheless he soon manifested himself as the brain of the family. For four years he worked in the cotton mill, and then, because of his unusual brightness, he had been given a place in the printing shop of the Wickham Union, where he was so attractive to the slow-going proprietor that he soon became foreman of the printing department and then manager. He knew nothing of printing or newspapers at the time, but the little contact he obtained here soon cleared his vision. He saw instantly what the newspaper business was, and decided to enter it. Later, as he grew older, he suspected that no one knew very much about advertising as yet, or very little, and that he was called by God to revise it. With this vision of a still wider field of usefulness in his mind, he began at once to prepare himself for it, reading all manner of advertising literature and practicing the art of display and effective statement. He had been through such bitter things as personal fights with those who worked under him, knocking one man down with a heavy iron form key; personal altercation with his own father and mother in which he frankly told them that they were failures, and that they had better let him show them something about regulating their hopeless lives. He had quarreled with his younger brothers, trying to dominate them, and had succeeded in controlling the youngest, principally for the very good reason that he had become foolishly fond of him; this younger brother he later introduced into his advertising business. He had religiously saved the little he had earned thus far, invested a part of it in the further development of the Wickham Union, bought his father an eight acre farm, which he showed him how to work, and finally decided to come to New York to see if he could not connect himself with some important advertising concern where he could learn something more about the one thing that interested him. He was already married, and he brought his young wife with him from the South.
He soon connected himself as a canvasser with one of the great agencies and advanced rapidly. He was so smiling, so bland, so insistent, so magnetic, that business came to him rapidly. He became the star man in this New York concern and Alfred Cookman, who was its owner and manager, was soon pondering what he could do to retain him. No individual or concern could long retain Daniel C. Summerfield, however, once he understood his personal capabilities. In two years he had learned all that Alfred Cookman had to teach him and more than he could teach him. He knew his customers and what their needs were, and where the lack was in the service which Mr. Cookman rendered them. He foresaw the drift toward artistic representation of saleable products, and decided to go into that side of it. He would start an agency which would render a service so complete and dramatic that anyone who could afford to use his service would make money.
When Eugene first heard of this agency, the Summerfield concern was six years old and rapidly growing. It was already very large and profitable and as hard and forceful as its owner. Daniel C. Summerfield, sitting in his private office, was absolutely ruthless in his calculations as to men. He had studied the life of Napoleon and had come to the conclusion that no individual life was important. Mercy was a joke to be eliminated from business. Sentiment was silly twaddle. The thing to do was to hire men as cheaply as possible, to drive them as vigorously as possible, and to dispose of them quickly when they showed signs of weakening under the strain. He had already had five art directors in as many years, had “hired and fired,” as he termed it, innumerable canvassers, ad writers, book-keepers, stenographers, artists—getting rid of anyone and everyone who showed the least sign of incapacity or inefficiency. The great office floor which he maintained was a model of cleanliness, order—one might almost say beauty of a commercial sort, but it was the cleanliness, order and beauty of a hard, polished and well-oiled machine. Daniel C. Summerfield was not much more than that, but he had long ago decided that was what he must be in order not to be a failure, a fool, and as he called it, “a mark,” and he admired himself for being so.