What of It?

I was telling this to a friend of mine that’s in the furniture game; travels out of Grand Rapids for the Phillips people. And he says I ought to tell it to other friends of mine that’s on the road a good deal so as they’ll know how to protect themself when they bump into one of these here broadcasters like Lacey.

Well, it seems they was a fella named Dexter Cosset and in his spare time he wrote a play and mailed it to a friend of his in New York that was personally acquainted with Joe Morris, the producer. So he give it to Morris and somebody in Morris’ office that could read told Morris the play was good, so Morris got somebody that could write to wire a telegram to Cosset. It says in the telegram:

Accept your play Ghosts but must change title as it seems man named Ibsen has a farce that title come New York at once as we want to go right into rehearsal have renamed play Carlotta’s Corns which will be permanent title unless you can think of better one.

Well, it seems Cosset lived in South Bend and clerked in Ellsworth’s, and his gal clerked there, too, and when he wrote this play he named the heroine Carlotta because that was his gal’s name if you get what I mean. He thought it would kind of tickle her to have the heroine of a play named after her, do you understand me?

But as I say, Carlotta clerked in Ellsworth’s, too, and she was on her feet all day and had a good deal of trouble with them, and if she ever got word that Cosset had wrote a play and used her name in connections with the chiropody game, she would of give him the air and submitted to the caresses of Orville Pleat that was in the automobile game on Vistula Avenue.

And besides they wasn’t no place in the play where any reference was made to anybody’s corns let alone the heroine’s, so if it was produced under the title suggested by Mr. Morris, why unless the author wrote in a new scene devoted to pedal disorders which he had no personal experience, why the critics would say what the hell.

So anyway Cosset got on this train this night determined to think up a decent title for his play before he clumb into Mrs. Pullman’s spare bed, but Cosset, like a good many other South Bend boys, could not even start to think unless they was a live cigarette in his mush. So the first thing he done when he got on this train this night was look up a porter he knew personally named George something, a colored man. He asked George was they a buffet on the train.

“Why, no, massa,” replied George in his laughable darky dialect. “We dinna run no buffet car on this train since ze railroads quit selling what you call ze liquor. But if you got something on ze hip,” he added, rolling those big eyes and doing the double shuffle, “I get you ze ice and ze water.”

Cosset then exclaimed that what he wanted was a place where he could sit and smoke and think without interruptions and the best the clever darky could suggest was the washroom in his own car. It seems the washrooms in the other cars was jammed with members of the Grand Forks Well-Kept Lawns Association, bound for the annual Get-Together Dinner at Saratoga, with a one-day stopover at Troy to get their collar cleaned.

As Cosset entered the washroom of his own Pullman⁠—“Gastritis”⁠—he noted that the only occupant was a man in the late twenties or forties who he remembered having seen once or twice walking up and down Michigan Street with such a big sample case that a great many people thought he must be selling warships. He was a travelling man named Ben Lacey; lived in Chicago and was married to a Kenosha woman who had luckily lost her hearing. The misery left Lacey’s face when he seen Cosset come in. Here was an audience.

“Well,” he said, as the young clerk-playwright seated himself, “according to my watch we are twelve minutes late leaving the Bend. And I’m pretty sure the watch is right. I’ve had this old watch eight years and only paid twenty smackers for it, and it runs just as true now like when I got it. How is that for a twenty dollar watch?”

“Pretty good,” replied Cosset.

“I’ll say it’s pretty good,” said Lacey. “They don’t make watches no more like this here. I got a friend of mine that’s in the watch game and he knows watches. That’s his game. And he says they don’t make no more watches like this here. His name’s Fox, from Lafayette. Maybe you know him.”

“No,” replied Cosset, “I don’t know him.”

“He’s in the watch game,” said Lacey. “I just happened to meet him, and I thought you might maybe know him. He gives me a ring every time he hits Chi. He’s a card. Keep you up all night telling gags and stories. And original, too. I remember one morning I met him on the train going from Chi to Benton Harbor. No, it was Niles. Well, he had a morning paper and they was a big story on the front page about the Cragin murder out in Los Angeles. You remember⁠—Cragin, the picture director. They found him dead in his apartment, and it come out that they’d been a big party the night before where pretty near everybody there was a hophead. So this Fox, this friend of mine, he says had I saw the news in the paper and I says what news, and he says O, they’s been another snowstorm in Hollywood. He’s a card. Keeps everybody laughing. I thought maybe you might of ran across him.”

“No,” replied Cosset, “I don’t know him.”

“What game are you in?” asked Lacey.

“Dry goods,” replied Cosset.

“I got a brother-in-law in that game,” said Lacey. “He was in the insurance game, but now he’s in the dry goods game. He’s on the road for Smythe-Carter. He married my sister⁠—that’s my youngest sister, Bertha. She wouldn’t of met him only for me. I got acquainted with him on a train coming fom Racine to Chi. No, it was Janesville. He was living in a boardinghouse and I felt kind of sorry for him, so I says when he didn’t have nothing to do, to give me a ring. So he come out to the house one night to supper. The kid sister couldn’t see him at first. They was a couple of his front teeth was discolored. But after you got used to him, you didn’t notice it so much.

“So him and the kid got married. Now they got a home of their own out in Morgan Park. Built it cheap on account of one of his brothers being in the building game. They got two of the cutest kiddies you ever seen. The boy’s named after me: Ben. That’s my name. Little Ben’s just two years old and he calls me plain Ben. He can’t say uncle. So he just calls me Ben. Smart as a whip.”

Cosset didn’t deny this or make no comment of any kind as he hoped that absolute silence on his part might prove contagious. But he was too polite not to answer when Uncle Ben asked him a direct question, was he going to the Big Town. He said yes.

“Me, too,” said Lacey. “I generally always take the Century, but I had to take this train this time on account of being tied up in Chi with a customer of mine. He’s in the cement game. I’m in the elevator game myself; with the Trunkey people. Biggest elevator concern in the U.S. Well, this customer of mine got in town and give me a ring and I had to see him and after we was all through with our business I couldn’t get away from him. Great talker. We got in a argument about Coolidge. He was panning Coolidge so I stepped in and told him where he was wrong. If a man says something I don’t like, I tell him where he’s wrong, customer or no customer. He admitted he was wrong after I’d talked to him. He says, ‘I’m wrong, Lacey, and you’re right.’ So then we wound up telling stories. I thought he’d laugh himself sick when I told him the one about the Greek and the Spaniard. Have you heard that one?”

“No,” replied Cosset.

“It’s a good one if you ain’t heard it,” said Lacey. “It seems they was a Greek and a Spaniard and they was out with a couple of fly chorus dames⁠—”

“Would you mind telling it to me after a while?” says Cosset. “Right now, before I forget it, I want to see if my grip’s flied open. It don’t catch right.”

“Well, listen,” said Lacey, “I got a friend of mine in the Big Town in the suitcase and trunk game and I’ll give you a note to him and he’ll sell you the best suitcase you ever seen, at cost.”

“Well, I’m much obliged,” said Cosset, and hurried out of the washroom and to his seat.

He sat there over an hour, trying and trying to think. But as I said a while ago, he couldn’t even start to think unless they was a live cigarette in his mouth. And the car was half full of old women, bound for the annual banquet of the Little Rock Sorrel Growers’ Association at Rutland, Vermont.

Well, finally the man that had the lower come in and sat down in the section. He was a man either forty-two or forty-six years old, named Harrison Quolt. He observed that Cosset was acting very nervous.

“You are acting very nervous,” he said to Cosset. “What can be the matter?”

Cosset then told him all the circumstances and Quolt laughed softly.

“I’ve quit smoking myself,” he says. “I quit on account of a bad stomach. So I don’t have to travel in washrooms no more. But before I quit, I mastered the art of putting the quietus on these Pullman elocutionists. The last three or four trips I made with the cigarette habit, why I could share a washroom from morning till night with one of these here cross-country loud speakers and you’d never hear a word out of him; that is, after I’d give him the treatment.”

“What was the treatment?” asked Cosset. “Did you just keep still and not answer nothing he said?”

“Oh, no,” says Quolt. “Silence don’t do no good. And it don’t help none to pretend like you are reading. That just gives them something more to talk about⁠—books and magazines and so forth. But if you are in earnest about the importance of this thinking you’ve got to do, why I’ll go in there with you and fix this guy so’s he’ll have lockjaw all the rest of the way to New York.”

Cosset gratefully accepted this proposition and the two gents went to the washroom where they found Lacey lighting a fresh cigar. He was on the long seat, next to the window. Quolt moved one of the chairs to a position facing Lacey, and seated himself. He begun staring at Lacey’s right knee, like they was some item there that baffled or fascinated him. Lacey’s eyes hastily followed the direction of Quolt’s, but he couldn’t detect nothing the matter and looked up again.

“Well,” he said, “I was just reading in the paper about two more brokerage firms has failed in the Big Town. That must be a ticklish game. I was thinking once about going into that game myself. I was all set to go into it with another fella in Chi when a friend of mine that’s with the Trunkey Elevator people give me a ring and asked me how would I like to go into the elevator game. I says I would try anything once, so I took the position and been with them ever since.”

“What?” says Mr. Quolt, continuing to stare at Lacey’s knee.

Lacey looked down again, but couldn’t see nothing wrong.

“I was just saying,” he repeated, “that I seen in this paper where they was two more brokerage houses in New York had took the big flop. I was saying it must be a mighty risky game. I’m tickled to death I stayed out of it. I pretty near got into it once with a fella in Chi. But just as we was making our plans, a friend of mine with the Trunkey Elevator people give me a ring and asked me would I like to go into the elevator game. Well, his proposition sounded reasonable so I took him up and been with them ever since.”

“What of it?” said Mr. Quolt.

“Why,” says Lacey, “it just shows how lucky a man can be sometimes and maybe don’t appreciate just how lucky he was.”

“What of it?” said Mr. Quolt, and kept staring at Lacey’s knee.

Lacey’s eyes followed Quolt’s for the third time, but without results. The train was whistling for a station.

“That must be either Kendallville or Ligonier,” said Lacey.

“What of it?” said Mr. Quolt.

For maybe a half an hour the three gents sat in silence. Quolt’s eyes never left Lacey’s knee and the owner of same looked at it nervously every little while. Once or twice he opened his mouth like he was going to say something, but thought better of it. Finally Cosset spoke up.

“That’s plenty,” he says to Quolt. “The treatment’s worked grand and you don’t have to stay in this stuffy hole no longer. I’ve got a swell name for my play already. It’s going to be named ‘What of It?’ ”

Mr. Quolt removed his glance from Lacey’s knee and looked at Cosset.

“What did you say?” he asked him.