The Rise of David Levinsky (43 page)

Max shook his head pensively.

“ I am sure it is as I say,” I continued. “Dora is a peculiar woman. The trouble is, you judge her as if she were like the other women you meet. Hers is a different character.”

This point apparently interested him.

“She is always taken up with her thoughts,” I pursued. “She is not so easy to understand, anyway. I lived over a year in your house, and yet I’ll be hanged if I know what kind of woman she is. Of course you’re her husband, but still—can you say you know what she is thinking of most of the time?”

“There is something in what you say,” he assented, half-heartedly.

As we rose to go he said, timidly: “There is only one more question I want to ask of you, Levinsky. You won’t be angry, will you?”

“What is it?” I demanded, with a good-natured laugh. “What is bothering your head?”

“I mean if you meet her now, sometimes?”

“Now, look here, Max. You are simply crazy,” I said, earnestly. “I swear to you by my mother that I have not seen Dora since I moved out of your house, and that all your suspicions are nonsense” (to keep the memory of my mother from desecration I declared mutely that my oath referred to the truthful part of my declaration only—that is, exclusively to the fact that I no longer met Dora).

“I believe you, I believe you, Levinsky,” he rejoined.

We parted more than cordially, Max promising to call on me again and to spend an evening with me.

I was left in a singular state of mind. I was eaten up with compunction, and yet the pain of my love reasserted itself with the tantalizing force of two months before.

Max never called on me again.

A
S a salesman Bender proved a dismal failure, but I retained him in my employ as a bookkeeper and a sort of general supervisor. I could offer him only ten dollars a week, with a promise to raise his salary as soon as I could afford it, and he accepted the job “temporarily.” As general supervisor under my orders he developed considerable efficiency, although he lacked initiative and his naïveté was a frequent cause of annoyance to me. I found him spotlessly honest and devoted.

I quickly raised his salary to fifteen dollars a week.

He was the embodiment of method and precision and he often nagged me for my deficiency in these qualities. Sometimes these naggings of his or some display of poor judgment on his part would give rise to a tiff between us. Otherwise we got along splendidly. We were supposed to be great chums. In reality, however, I would freely order him about, while he would address me with a familiarity which had an echo of respectful distance to it.

With him to take care of my place when I was away, it became possible for me gradually to extend my territory as traveling salesman till it reached Nebraska and Louisiana. Thus, having failed as a drummer himself, he made up for it by enabling me to act as one.

He had been less than a year with me when his salary was twenty dollars.

 

Charles Eaton, the Pennsylvanian of the hemispherical forehead and bushy eyebrows who had given me my first lesson in restaurant manners, was now my sponsor at the beginning of my career as a full-fledged traveling salesman. He took a warm interest in me. Having spent many years on the road himself, more particularly in the Middle West and Canada, he had formed many a close friendship among retailers, so he now gave me some valuable letters of introduction to merchants in several cities.

When I asked him for suggestions to guide me on the road he looked perplexed.

“Oh, well, I guess you’ll do well,” he said.

“Still, you have had so much experience, Mr. Eaton.”

“Well, I really don’t know. It’s all a matter of common sense, I guess. And, after all, the merchandise is the thing, the merchandise and the price.”

He added a word or two about the futility of laying down rules, and that was all I could get out of him. That a man of few words like him should have succeeded as a salesman was a riddle to me. I subsequently realized that his reticence accentuated an effect of solidity and helped to inspire confidence in the few words which he did utter. But at the time in question I was sure that the “gift of the gab” was an indispensable element of success in a salesman.

Indeed, one of my faults as a drummer, during that period at least, was that I was apt to talk too much. I would do so partly for the sheer lust of hearing myself use the jargon of the market, but chiefly, of course, from eagerness to make a sale, from over-insistence. I was too exuberant in praising my own goods and too harsh in criticising those of my competitors. Altogether there was more emphasis than dignity in my appeal.

One day, as I was haranguing the proprietor of a small department store in a Michigan town, he suddenly interrupted me by placing a friendly hand on my shoulder. His name was Henry Gans. He was a stout man of fifty, with the stamp of American birth on a strong Jewish face.

“Let me give you a bit of advice, young man,” he said, with paternal geniality. “You won’t mind, will you?”

I uttered a perplexed, “Why, no”; and he proceeded:

“If you want to make good as a salesman, observe these two rules: Don’t knock the other fellow and don’t talk too much.”

For a minute I stood silent, utterly nonplussed. Then, pulling myself together, I said, with a bow:

“Thank you, sir. Thank you very much. I am only a beginner, and only a few years in the country. I know I have still a great deal to learn. It’s very kind of you to point out my mistakes to me.”

The gay light of Gans’s eye gave way to a look of heart-to-heart earnestness.

“It ain’t nice to run down your competitor,” he said. “Besides, it don’t pay. It makes a bad impression on the man you are trying to get an order from.”

We had a long conversation, gradually passing from business to affairs of a personal nature. He was interested in my early struggles in America, in my mode of living, in the state of my business, and I told him the whole story. He seemed to be well disposed toward me, but it was evident that he did not take my “one-horse” establishment seriously, and I left his store without an order. I was berating myself for having revealed the true size of my business. Somehow my failure in this instance galled me with special poignancy. I roamed around the streets, casting about for some scheme to make good my mistake.

Less than an hour after I left Gans’s store I re-entered it, full of fresh spirit and pluck.

“I beg your pardon for troubling you again, Mr. Gans,” I began, stopping him in the middle of an aisle. “You’ve been so kind to me. I should like to ask you one more question. Only one. I trust I am not intruding?”

“Go ahead,” he said, patiently.

“ I shall do as you advise me. I shall never knock the other fellow,” I began, with a smile. “But suppose his merchandise is really good, and I can outbid him. Why should it not be proper for me to say so? If you’ll permit me”—pointing at one of the suits displayed in the store, a brown cheviot trimmed with velvet. “Take that suit, for instance. It’s certainly a fine garment. It has style and dash. It’s really a beautiful garment. I haven’t the least idea how much you pay for it, of course, but I do know that I could make you the identical coat for a much smaller price. So why shouldn’t it be right for me to say so?”

He contemplated me for a moment, broke into a hearty laugh, and said:

“You’re a pretty shrewd fellow. Why, of course, there’s nothing wrong in selling cheaper than your competitor. That’s what we’re all trying to do. That’s the game, provided you really can sell cheaper than the other man, and there are no other drawbacks in doing business with you.”

What I said about the brown suit piqued him. He had his bookkeeper show me the bill, and defied me to sell him a garment of exactly the same material, cut and workmanship for less. I accepted the challenge, offering to reduce the price by four dollars and a half before I had any idea whether I could afford to do so. I was ready to lose money on the transaction, so long as I got a start with this man.

Gans expressed doubt of my ability to make good my offer. I proceeded to explain the special conditions under which I ran my business. I waxed eloquent.

“Doing business on a gigantic scale is not always an advantage, Mr. Gans,” I sang out, with an affected Yankee twang. “There are exceptions. And the cloak-and-suit industry is one of these exceptions, especially now that the Cloak-makers’ Union has come to stay. By dealing with a very big firm you’ve got to pay for union labor, while a modest fellow like myself has no trouble in getting cheap labor. And when I say cheap I don’t mean poor labor, but just the opposite. I mean the very best tailors, the most skilled mechanics in the country. It sounds queer, doesn’t it? But it’s a fact, nevertheless, Mr. Gans. It is a fact that the best ladies’ tailors are old-fashioned, pious people, green in the country, who hate to work in big places, and who keep away from Socialists, anarchists, unionists, and their whole crew. They need very little, and they love their work. They willingly stay in the shop from early in the morning till late at night.”

“They are dead stuck on it, hey?” Gans said, quizzically.

“They are used to it,” I explained. “In Russia a tailor works about fourteen hours a day. Of course, I don’t let them overwork themselves. I treat them as if they were my brothers or uncles. We get along like a family, and they earn twice as much as the strict union people, too.”

“I see. They get low wages and don’t work too much and are ahead of the game, after all. Is that it? Well, well. But you’re a smart fellow, just the same.”

I explained to him why my men earned more than they would in the big shops, and the upshot was an order for a hundred suits. Twenty of these were to be copies of the brown-cheviot garment which was the subject of his challenge, I buying that suit of him, so as to use it as a sample.

On my way home I exhibited that suit to merchants in other cities, giving it out for my own product. It was really an attractive garment and it brought me half a dozen additional sales.

 

I developed into an excellent salesman. If I were asked to name some single element of my success on the road I should mention the enthusiasm with which I usually spoke of my merchandise. It was genuine, and it was contagious. Retailers could not help believing that I believed in my goods.

T
HE road was a great school of business and life to me.

I visited scores of cities. I met hundreds of human types. I saw much of the United States. Every time I returned home I felt as though, in comparison with the places which I had just visited, New York was not an American city at all, and as though my last trip had greatly added to the “real American” quality in me.

Thousands of things reminded me of my promotion in the world. I could not go to bed in a Pullman car, walk over the springy “runner” of a hotel corridor, unfold the immense napkin of a hotel dining-room, or shake down my trousers upon alighting from a boot-black’s chair, without being conscious of the difference between my present life and my life in Antomir.

I was full of energy, full of the joy of being alive, but there was usually an undercurrent of sadness to all this. While on the road I would feel homesick for New York, and at the same time I would feel that I had no home anywhere, that my mother was dead and I was all alone in the world.

I missed Dora many months after she made me move from her house. As for Max, the thought of him, his jealousy and the way he groveled before me the last time I had seen him, would give me a bad taste in the mouth. I both pitied and despised him, and I hated my guilty conscience; so I would try to keep him out of my mind. What I missed almost as much as I did Dora was her home. There was no other to take its place. There was not a single family in New York or in any other American town who would invite me to its nest and make me feel at home there. I saw a good deal of Meyer Nodelman, but he never asked me to the house. And so I was forever homesick, not for Antomir—for my native town had become a mere poem—but for a home.

I did some reading on the road. There was always some book in my hand-bag—some volume of Spencer, Emerson, or Schopenhauer (in an English translation), perhaps. I would also read articles in the magazines, not to mention the newspapers. But I would chiefly spend my time in the smoker, talking to the other drummers or listening to their talk. There was a good deal of card-playing in the cars, but that never had any attraction for me. I tried to learn poker, but found it tedious.

The cigarette stumps by which I had sought to counteract my hunger pangs at the period of my dire need had developed the cigarette habit in me. This had subsequently become a cigar habit. I had discovered the psychological significance of smoking “the cigar of peace and good will.” I had realized the importance of offering a cigar to some of the people I met. I would watch American smokers and study their ways, as though there were a special American manner of smoking and such a thing as smoking with a foreign accent. I came to the conclusion that the dignity of smoking a cigar lasted only while the cigar was still long and fresh. There seemed to be special elegance in a smoker taking a newly lighted cigar out of his mouth and throwing a glance at its glowing end to see if it was smoking well. Accordingly, I never did so without being conscious of my gestures and trying to make them as “American” as possible.

The other cloak salesmen I met on the road in those days were mostly representatives of much bigger houses than mine. They treated me with ill-concealed contempt, and I would retaliate by overstating my sales. One of the drummers who were fond of taunting me was an American by birth, a fellow named Loeb.

“Well, Levinsky,” he would begin. “Had a big day, didn’t you?”

“I certainly did,” I would retort.

“How much? Twenty-five thousand?”