The Sin of Monsieur Pettipon, and other humorous tales

by Richard Edward Connell

  VI: _The Cage Man_

  All day long they kept Horace Nimms in a steel-barred cage. Fortwenty-one years he had perched on a tall stool in that cage, whilevarious persons at various times poked things at him through a holeabout big enough to admit an adult guinea pig.

  Every evening round five-thirty they let Horace out and permitted him togo over to his half of a double-barreled house in Flatbush to sleep. Ateight-thirty the next morning he returned to his cage, hung histwo-dollar-and-eighty-nine-cent approximately Panama hat on a peg andchanged his blue-serge-suit coat for a still more shiny alpaca. Then hesharpened two pencils to needle-point sharpness, tested his pen bywriting "H. Nimms, Esq.," in a small precise hand, gave his addingmachine a few preparatory pokes and was ready for the day's work.

  Horace was proud, in his mild way, of being shut up in the cage with allthat money. It carried the suggestion that he was a dangerous man of apossibly predatory nature. He wasn't. A more patient and docile fivefeet and two inches of cashier was not to be found between SpuytenDuyvil and Tottenville, Staten Island. Cashiers are mostly crabbed. Itsours them somehow to hand out all that money and retain so little fortheir own personal use. But Horace was not of this ilk.

  The timidest stenographer did not hesitate to take the pettiestpetty-cash slip to his little window and twitter, according to custom:"Forty cents for carbon paper, and let me have it in large bills,please, Uncle Horace."

  He would peer at the slip, pretend it was for forty dollars, smile afriendly smile that made little ripples round his eyes and--according tocustom--reply: "Here you be. Now don't be buying yourself a flivver withit."

  When the office force in a large corporation calls the office cashier"uncle" it is a pretty good indication of the sort of man he is.

  For the rest, Horace Nimms was slightly bald, wore convicteye-glasses--the sort you shackle to your head with a chain--kept hiscuffs up with lavender sleeve garters, carried a change purse, kept asmall red pocket expense book, thought his company the greatest in theworld and its president, Oren Hammer, the greatest man, was devoted to awife and two growing daughters, dreamed of a cottage on Long Island witha few square yards of beets and beans and, finally, earned forty dollarsa week.

  Horace Nimms had a figuring mind. Those ten little Arabic symbols andtheir combinations and permutations held a fascination for him. To hisears six times six is thirty-six was as perfect a poem as ever a masterbard penned. When on muggy Flatbush nights he tossed in his brass bed helulled himself to sleep by dividing 695,481,239 by 433. At other andmore wakeful moments he amused himself by planning an elaboratecost-accounting system for his firm, the Amalgamated Soap Corporation,known to the ends of the earth as the Suds Trust. Sometimes he went sofar as to play the entertaining game of imaginary conversations. Hepictured himself sitting in one of the fat chairs in the office ofPresident Hammer and saying between puffs on one of the presidentialperfectos: "Now, looky here, Mr. Hammer. My plan for a cost-accountingsystem is----"

  And he limned on his mental canvas that great man, spellbound,enthralled, as he, Horace Nimms, dazzled him with an array of figures,beginning: "Now, let's see, Mr. Hammer. Last year the Western works atPurity City, Iowa, made 9,576,491 cakes of Pink Petal Toilet and6,571,233 cakes of Lily White Laundry at a manufacturing cost of 3.25571cents a cake, unboxed; now the selling cost a cake was"--and so on. Theinterview always ended with vigorous hand-shakings on the part of Mr.Hammer and more salary for Mr. Nimms. But actually the interview nevertook place.

  It wasn't that Horace didn't have confidence in his system. He did. Buthe didn't have an equal amount in Horace Nimms. So he worked on in hislittle cage and enjoyed a fair measure of contentment there, because tohim it was a temple of figures, a shrine of subtraction, an altar ofaddition. Figures swarmed in his head as naturally as bees swarm about alocust tree. He could tell you off-hand how many cakes of Grade-B soapthe Southern Works at Spotless, Louisiana, made in the month of May,1914. He simply devoured statistics. When the door of the cage clangedshut in the morning he felt soothed, at home; he immersed his own smallworries in a bath of digits and decimal points. He ate of the lotusleaves of mathematics. He could forget, while juggling with millions ofcakes of soap and thousands of dollars, that his rent was due next week;that Polly, his wife, needed a new dress; and that on forty a week onemust live largely on beef liver and hope.

  He sometimes thought, while Subwaying to his office, that if he couldonly get the ear of Oren Hammer some day and tell him about thatcost-accounting system he might get his salary raised to forty-five. ButPresident Hammer, whose office was on the floor above the cage, was asremote from Horace as the Pleiades. To get to see him one had to run agantlet of superior, inquisitive secretaries. Besides Mr. Hammer wasreputed to be the busiest man in New York City.

  "I wash the faces of forty million people every morning," was the way heput it himself.

  But the chief reason why Horace Nimms did not approach Mr. Hammer wasthat Horace held him in genuine awe. The president was so big, somasterful, so decisive. His invariable cutaway intimidated Horace; themagnificence of his top hat dazzled the little cashier and benumbed hisfaculties of speech. Once in a while Horace rode down in the sameelevator with him and--unobserved--admired his firm profile, theconcentration of his brow and the jutting jaw that some one had oncesaid was worth fifty thousand a year in itself, merely as a symbol ofdetermination. Horace would sooner have slapped General Pershing on theback or asked President Wilson to dinner in Flatbush than have addressedOren Hammer. An uncommendable attitude? Yes. But after all those yearsbehind bars, perhaps subconsciously his spirit had become a littlecaged.

  One cool September morning Horace entered the cage humming "AnnieRooney." Coming over in the Subway he had straightened out a littlequirk in his cost-accounting system that would save the companyone-ninety-fifth of a cent a cake. He took off his worn serge coat, wasmomentarily concerned at the prospect of having to make it last anotherseason and then with a hitch on his lavender sleeve garters he slippedinto his alpaca office coat and added up a few numbers on the addingmachine for the sheer joy of it.

  He had not been sitting on his high stool long when he became aware thata man, a stranger, was regarding him fixedly through the steel screen.The man had calmly placed a chair just outside the cage and wasexamining the little cashier with the scrutinizing eye of anornithologist studying a newly discovered species of emu.

  Horace was a bit disconcerted. He knew his accounts were in order andaccurate to the last penny. He had nothing to fear on that score.Nevertheless, he didn't like the way the man stared at him.

  "If he has something to say to me," thought Horace, "why does he say itwith glowers?"

  He would have asked the starer what the devil he was looking at, butHorace was incapable of incivility. He began nervously to total up acolumn of figures and was not a little upset to find that under the coldgaze he had made his first mistake in addition since the spring of '98.He cast a furtive glance or two through the steel netting at thestranger outside, who continued to focus a pair of prominent blue eyeson the self-conscious cashier. Horace couldn't have explained why thoseparticular eyes rattled him; some mysterious power--black art perhaps.

  The staring man was quite bald, and his head, shaped like a pineapplecheese, had been polished until it seemed almost to glitter in theSeptember sun. The eyes, light blue and bulgy, reminded Horace ofpoached eggs left out in the cold for a week. They had also a certainfishy quality; impassive, yet hungry, like a shark's. Without beingactually fat, the mysterious starer had the appearance of being plumpand soft; perhaps it was the way he clasped two small, perfectlymanicured hands over a perceptible rotundity at his middle, anunexpected protuberance, as if he were attempting to conceal a honeydewmelon under his vest.

  Horace Nimms did his best to concentrate on the little columns offigures he was so fond of drilling and parading, but his glance strayed,almost against his will, to the bald-headed man with the fishy blueeyes, who continued to fasten on Hora
ce the glance a python aims at arabbit before he bolts him.

  At length, after half an hour, Horace could stand it no longer. Headdressed the stranger politely.

  "Is there anything I can do for you?" asked Horace with his avuncularsmile.

  The starer, without once taking his eyes off Horace, rose, advanced tothe little window and thrust through it an oversized card.

  "You may go on with your work," he said, "just as if you were not underobservation. I am here under Mr. Hammer's orders."

  His voice was peculiar--a nasal purr.

  The caged cashier glanced at the card. It read:

  S. WALMSLEY COWAN EFFICIENCY EXPERT EXTRAORDINARY AUTHOR OF "PEP, PERSONALITY, PERSONNEL," "HOW TO ENTHUSE EMPLOYEES"

  Horace Nimms had a disquieting sensation. He had heard rumors of a manprowling about in the company, subjecting random employees to strangetests, firing some, moving others to different jobs, but he had alwaysfelt that twenty-one years of service and the steel bars of his cageprotected him. And now here was the man, and he, Horace Nimms, was underobservation. He had always associated the phrase with reports of lunacycases in the newspapers. Mr. Cowan returned to his seat near the cageand resumed his silent watch on its inmate. Horace tried to do his work,but he couldn't remember when he had had such a poor day. The figureswould come wrong and his hand would tremble a little no matter how hardhe tried to forget the vigilant Mr. Cowan who sat watching him.

  At the end of a trying day Horace dismounted from his high stool,hitched up his lavender sleeve garters and inserted himself into hisworn blue serge coat. He would be glad to get back to Flatbush. Pollywould have some fried beef liver and a bread pudding for supper, andthey would discuss for the hundredth time just what the ground-floorplan of that cottage would be--if it ever was.

  But Mr. Cowan was waiting for him.

  "Step this way, will you--ple-e-ese," said the expert.

  Horace never remembered when he had heard a word that retained so littleof its original meaning as Mr. Cowan's "ple-e-ese." Clearly it wastossed in as a sop to the hypersensitive. His "ple-e-ese" could havebeen translated as "you worm."

  Horace, with a worried brow, followed Mr. Cowan into one of thosegoldfish-bowl offices affected by large companies with many executivesand a limited amount of office space. It contained only a plain tableand two stiff chairs.

  "Sit down," said Mr. Cowan, "ple-e-ese."

  It is a difficult linguistic feat to purr and snap at the same time, butMr. Cowan achieved it.

  Horace sat down and Mr. Cowan sat opposite him, with his unwinking blueeyes but two feet from Horace's mild brown ones and with no charitablesteel screen between them.

  "I am going to put you to the test," said Mr. Cowan.

  Horace wildly thought of thumbscrews. He sat bolt upright while Mr.Cowan whipped from his pocket a tape measure and, bending over, measuredthe breadth of Horace Nimms' brow. With an ominous clucking noise theexpert set down the measurement on a chart in front of him. Then hecarefully measured each of Horace's ears. The measurements appeared toshock him. He wrote them down. He applied his tape to Horace's nose andmeasured that organ. He surveyed Horace's forehead from severaldifferent angles. He measured the circumference of Horace's head. Theresult caused Mr. Cowan acute distress, for he set it down on hiselaborate chart and glowered at it a full minute.

  Then he transferred his attention and tape to Horace's stubby hands. Hemeasured them, counted the fingers, contemplated the thumb gravely andwrote several hundred words on the chart. Horace thought he recognizedone of the words as "mechanical."

  "Now," said Mr. Cowan solemnly, "we will test your mental reactions."

  He said this more to himself than to Horace Nimms, on whose brow tinypearls of perspiration were appearing. Mr. Cowan drew forth a stop watchand spread another chart on the table before him.

  "Fill this out--ple-e-ese," he said, pushing the chart toward Horace."You have just five minutes to do it."

  Horace Nimms, dismayed, almost dazed, seized the paper and started towork at it with feverish confusion. He boggled through a maze full ofpitfalls for a tired, rattled man:

  If George Washington discovered America, write the capital of Nebraskain this space.........But if he was called the Father of His Country,how much is 49 x 7?........Now name three presidents of the UnitedStates in alphabetical order, including Jefferson, but do not do so ifice is warm.........If Adam was the first man, dot all the "i's" in"eleemosynary" and write your last name backward.........Omit the nextthree questions with the exception of the last two: How much is 6 x 9 =54?........What is the capital of Omaha?........How many "e's" are therein the sentence, "Tell me, pretty maiden, are there any more at homelike you?"........Put a cross over all the consonants in the foregoingsentence. Now fill in the missing words in the following sentences:"While picking........I was stung in the........by a........." "Don'tbite the........that feeds you."

  How old are you? Multiply your age by the year you were born in. Eraseyour answer. If a pound of steel is heavier than a pound of oystercrackers, don't write anything in this space.........Otherwise writethree words that rhyme with "icicle." Now write your name, and thencross out all the consonants.

  Name three common garden vegetables.........

  It seemed to Horace Nimms that he had floundered along for less than aminute when Mr. Cowan said briskly, "Time," and took the paper fromHorace.

  "Now the association test," said Mr. Cowan, drawing forth still anotherchart, very much as a magician draws forth a rabbit from a hat.

  "I'll say a word," he went on, seeming to grow progressively moreaffable as Horace grew more discomfited, "and you will say the word itsuggests immediately after--ple-e-ese," he added as an afterthought.

  Horace Nimms moistened his dry lips. Mr. Cowan pulled out his stopwatch.

  "Oyster?" said Mr. Cowan.

  "S-stew!" quavered Horace.

  "Flat?"

  "Bush!"

  "Hammer?"

  "President!"

  "Soap?"

  "Cakes!"

  "Money?"

  "Forty-five!"

  "Up?"

  "Down!"

  "Man?"

  "Cage!"

  "Most peculiar," muttered Mr. Cowan as he noted down the answers. "We'llhave to look into this."

  Horace could not suppress a shudder.

  "That's all," said Mr. Cowan.

  When Horace arrived at his Flatbush flat, late for supper, he did notenjoy the bread pudding, though it was a particularly good one--withraisins. Nor did he go to sleep quickly, no matter how many numbers hemultiplied. He was thinking what it would mean to him at his age if Mr.Cowan should have him put out of his cage. His dreams were haunted by apair of eyes like those of a frozen owl.

  The next afternoon Horace Nimms, busy in his cage, received a noticethat there would be an organization meeting at the end of the day. Hewent. The meeting had been called by S. Walmsley Cowan, who in his talksto large groups adopted the benevolent big-brother manner and turned onand off a beaming smile.

  "My friends," he began, "it is no secret to some of you that Mr. Hammerhas not been pleased with the way things are going in the company. Hehas felt that there has been a great deal of waste of time and money;that neither the volume of business nor the profits on it are what theyshould be. He has commissioned me to find out what is wrong in thecompany and to put pep, efficiency, enthusiasm into our organization."

  He smiled a modest smile.

  "I rather fancy," he continued, "that I'll succeed. I have beenconducting the tests with which you are all doubtless familiar throughreading my books, 'Pep, Personality, Personnel,' and 'How to EnthuseEmployees.' I have made a most interesting and startling discovery. Mostof you are in the wrong jobs!"

  He paused. The men and women looked at each other uneasily. Then he wenton.

  "I'll cite just one instance. Yesterday I tested the mentality of one ofyou. I foun
d that he was of the cage, or solitary, type of worker. SeePage 239 of my book on Getting Into Men's Brains. But he was alreadyworking in a cage! Here was a problem. Could it be that that was wherehe would do best? No! Then a happy solution struck me. He was in thewrong cage. So I am going to transfer him from a mathematical cage to amechanical cage. I am going to transfer him to be an elevator operator.This may surprise you, my friends, but science is always surprising.Just fancy! This man has been working with figures for more than twentyyears, and I discover by measuring that his thumbs are of the purelymechanical type, and all that time he would have been much happierrunning an elevator. Now by an odd coincidence I found that one of theelevator operators has a pure type of mathematical ear, so I amtransferring him to the cashier's cage. He may seem a bit awkward thereat first, but we shall see, we shall see."

  He turned on his smile. But the eyes of the employees had turnedsympathetically to the pale face of Horace Nimms. How old and tiredUncle Horace looked, they thought. In a nightmare Horace heard his doompronounced. After twenty-one years! His temple of figures!

  S. Walmsley Cowan unconcernedly began one of his celebratedpep-and-punch talks calculated to send morale up as a candle sends upthe mercury in a thermometer.

  "Friends," he said, thumping the table before him, "when Opportunitycomes to knock be on the front porch! Don't hold back! He who hesitatesis lost. It may be that the humble will inherit the earth, but that willbe when all the bold have died. Don't hide your light under a basket;don't keep your ideas locked up in your skulls. Bring 'em out! Let'shave a look at them. You wouldn't wear a diamond ring inside your shirt,would you? Be sure you're right, then holler your head off. Get what iscoming to you! Nobody will bring it on a platter; you've got to step upand grab it. When you have an impulse, think it over. If it looks likethe real goods, obey it. Get me? Obey it! Nobody will bite you. Thinkall you like, but for heaven's sake, act!"

  It was for such talks that Mr. Cowan was famous. Even Horace Nimmsforgot his impending fall as the efficiency expert extraordinarydeclaimed the gospel of action and boldness.

  But when the meeting was over, silent misery came into the heart of thelittle cashier and like an automaton he stumbled into the Subway. He atehis bread pudding without tasting it and tried to talk to Polly aboutthe proposed living room in the Long Island cottage. He hadn't thecourage to tell her what had happened; indeed he hardly realized whathad happened himself.

  In the morning he tried to pretend to himself that it was all a joke;surely Mr. Cowan couldn't have meant it. But when he reached his cage hesaw another figure already in that temple of addition and subtraction.He rattled the wire door timidly. The figure turned.

  "Wadda yah want?" it asked bellicosely.

  Horace Nimms recognized the bluish jaw of Gus, one of the elevator men.

  Sick at heart, Horace turned away. In the blur of his thoughts was theone that he must keep his job, some job, any job. One can't save much onforty a week in Flatbush. And that he should work for any one but theAmalgamated Soap Corporation was unthinkable. So without knowing exactlyhow it happened, he found himself in a blue-and-gray uniform clumsilytrying to vindicate his mechanical hands and attempting to stop his carwithin six inches of the floors. All morning he patiently escorted hiscar up and down the elevator shaft--twenty stories up, twenty storiesdown, twenty stories up, twenty stories down. He thought of the Song ofthe Shirt.

  At noon he stopped his car at the eighteenth floor and two passengersgot on. Horace recognized them. One was Jim Wright, assistant toPresident Hammer; the other was Mr. Perrine, Western sales manager. Theywere in animated conversation.

  "That fellow has the crust of a mud turtle and the tact of arattlesnake," Mr. Perrine was saying.

  "Remember," Jim Wright reminded him, "he is an efficiency expertextraordinary. The big boss seems to have confidence in him."

  "He won't have quite so much," said Mr. Perrine, "when he hears that heput an elevator man in as cashier. I hear he walked off with six hundreddollars before he'd been on the job an hour."

  Horace pricked up his ears. He made the car go as slowly as possible.

  "He did?" Jim Wright was excited. "And this is one of the boss' bad daystoo! Just before I left him he was saying, 'The Amalgamated has about asmuch system as a piece of cheese. Why, these high-salaried executivescan't tell me how much it costs them to make and sell a cake of soap!'"

  Then Horace reluctantly let them out of the elevator at the streetfloor.

  All that afternoon he struggled with an impulse. The words of Mr.Cowan's oration of the night before began to come back to him. If onlyhe had obeyed his impulses----

  As he was a new man, they gave him the late shift. At one minute to sixthe indicator in his car gave two short, sharp, peremptory buzzes.Horace, who was mastering the elements of elevator operating, shot up tothe eighteenth floor. A single passenger got on. With a little gaspHorace recognized the cutaway coat and top hat of the president of theAmalgamated.

  Horace set his teeth. His small frame grew tense. He turned the leverand the car started to glide downward. Seventeen, sixteen, fifteen,fourteen, thirteen, twelve! Then with a quick twist of his wrist Horacestalled the car between the twelfth and eleventh floors and slipped thecontrolling key into his pocket. Then he turned and faced the bigpresident.

  "You don't know a hell of a lot about running an elevator," remarkedOren Hammer.

  "No, I don't," said Horace Nimms in a strange, loud voice that he didn'trecognize. "But I do know how much it costs a cake to make Pink PetalToilet."

  "What's that? Who the devil are you?" The great man was more surprisedthan angry.

  "Nimms," said Horace briefly. "Office cashier on seventeenth floortwenty-one years. Elevator operator one day. Mr. Cowan's orders."

  Mr. Hammer's brow contracted.

  "So you think you can tell me how much Pink Petal costs a cake to make,eh?" he said.

  He had the reputation of never overlooking an opportunity.

  The imaginary conversations that Horace had been having crowded backinto his mind.

  "Now, looky here, Mr. Hammer," he began. "The Western works made9,576,491 cakes of Pink Petal Toilet last year. Now the cost a cakewas--" and so on. Horace was on familiar ground now. Figures andstatistics tripped from his tongue; the details he had bottled up insidehim so long came pouring forth. He knew the business of the Amalgamateddown to the last stamp and rubber band. Oren Hammer, listening withkeen interest, now and then put in a short, direct question. HoraceNimms snapped back short, direct answers. Once launched, he forgot allabout the cutaway coat and the dazzling top hat and even about thebig-jawed man who washed the faces of forty million people everymorning. Horace was talking to get back into his cage and words camewith a new-found eloquence.

  "By George," exclaimed President Hammer, "you know more about thebusiness than I do myself! And Cowan told you you didn't have a figuringmind, did he? I want you to report at my office the first thingto-morrow morning."

  Horace Nimms, in the black suit he saved for funerals and weddings, anda new tie, was ushered into the big office of President Hammer the nextmorning. Outwardly, it was his hope, he was calm; inwardly, he knew, hewas quaking.

  "Have a cigar, Nimms," said Oren Hammer, passing Horace one of thepresidential perfectos of his dreams. Then he summoned a secretary.

  "Ask Mr. Cowan to come in, will you?" he said.

  The efficiency expert extraordinary entered, beaming affably.

  "Good morning to you, Mr. Hammer," he called out in a cheery voice. Thenhe stopped short as he recognized Horace.

  "Oh, come here, Cowan," said President Hammer genially. "Before you go Iwant you to meet Mr. Nimms. He is going to install a new cost-accountingsystem for us. Just step down to the cashier's cage with him, will you,and get your salary to date."