Man's Country/Chapter 6
IT will be remembered that Mr. Morris had asked, not too cordially, "What can I do for you?"
"I want a job as a demonstrator," replied George.
"Gad!" ejaculated Mr. Morris impatiently. "Is there a young fellow in Detroit that doesn't? They come in here twenty a day."
Now some salesmen talk too much. George Judson had learned better. To this impatient remark he offered no comment. He merely stood gazing expectantly at Mr. Morris, reinforcing his appeal for a job with the plea of his earnest eyes and the quiet persistence of his manner, selling himself without a word. Mr. Morris felt this. It compelled him to parley.
"Know anything about gasoline engines? Anything about automobiles?" he plumped.
"No," confessed the young man honestly, "but I've ridden in every automobile built in Detroit, and the best ride I got was in a Milton Morris. Anyhow my business is selling. I know how to get people to buy things."
"Gad! That's the point!" conceded Mr. Morris, who was secretly aggrieved that Olds should sell so many cars while his few stood in the warehouse. "You've got the right idea at least. I've a couple of young demonstrators now, and they just smell up the whole town with gasoline, while the warehouse stays full of cars." The door was open, and Mr. Morris pointed with his pencil to where six spick and span new cars stood awaiting a buyer. That was his idea of "full."
"What are you asking for those cars out there?" inquired George, feeling that he was making headway.
"One thousand dollars apiece—too much money for this man's town," frowned the manufacturer.
"Mr. Morris!" The tone of George's voice had been lowered almost to solemnity, and he advanced and leaned a hand impressively upon the big, littered desk. "I am about to make you a proposition that may sound fresh, but I don't mean it that way. I want you to give me two weeks to sell those six cars. If I sell them all in that time, give me fifty dollars apiece commission. If I don't sell them all, I've worked two weeks for you for nothing." George straightened and stepped back from the desk.
Milton Morris sat a moment rather breathless, taking in George again with his eye and his proposition with his mind—a proposition which in his experience, was unique.
"When can I start?" urged George.
"Now!—by jingo!" said Mr. Morris. "You can't bluff me. I like your nerve, too, young fellow. It will take you far. Anderson! Anderson!"
A lank, round-shouldered Swede with grease and grime spotting and streaking his overalls from head to foot appeared in the door leading to the shop.
"Take an hour off. Anderson, and give Mr. Judson a driving lesson," his boss directed.
The Swede looked at his employer and gave meek-eyed assent. Then he looked at George and jerked his head shop-ward.
"How's that young fellow getting along, Anderson?" it occurred to Mr. Morris to ask after a couple of hours, as his assembly foreman sauntered in for some instructions.
"He's drivin' the car all right, but you can't learn him nothing. Couldn't tell him nothing at all after the first five minutes. Wants to figure it out for himself. He's got her all apart out there now."
"All apart?" exclaimed Mr. Morris in some alarm. "Is he a mechanic?"
"Says not. Says you can't never sell a thing, though, till you understand it, know what makes it perform and all that."
"That's kind of sensible," admitted Mr. Morris, and getting up, he strolled out on the warehouse floor, where he found young Judson in a pair of borrowed overalls, with sleeves rolled up, grease and dirt to his elbows and his ears, engaged in prying into the mysteries of the Milton Morris automobile.
Secretly this pleased Mr. Morris. "Couldn't get one of these other dudes even to take an oil can in his hand," he remarked to himself.
For three days thereafter George appeared in overalls and flannel shirt. On the fourth day he was a clothing store model in appearance. He sold the sixth car on the tenth day of active salesmanship.
"Holy Zachariah!" exclaimed Mr. Morris. "You're selling 'em faster than we can make 'em. About eight or ten a month is as fast as we can turn 'em out."
"Couldn't you double the force and enlarge the shop?" suggested the young man modestly and yet hopefully.
This was rather cool, but Mr. Morris did not resent it. Instead he gazed thoughtfully, although with an expression half-humorous on his finely graven face.
"How do you do it? Sell 'em so easy, I mean?" he speculated.
"It's simple. All salesmanship is simple," expatiated George. "Just make the other fellow want the thing you're selling. Make him want it, and he'll do the rest. It is simple, sir . . . Mr. Morris!" and there was that respectful dropping of the voice which, with him, always preceded the making of any important proposal. "Mr. Morris, I believe if I took a little lope around the country, I believe I could get a bunch of orders for spring delivery, and we would be able to go ahead on a definite plan of expansion for the factory."
Who had said anything about expansion? And yet Milton Morris, sitting here, trying to dig in with his toes and hold back, felt himself being pushed—absolutely pushed—into contemplation of the idea.
Just how good a talker the young man was, Mr. Morris was beginning to realize. "Let's wait a year. You're pushing me on too fast. Besides, I haven't got the money to spare for the trip."
"I've got a little money," confided George, his eyes shining. "I ask you, Mr. Morris, to let me advance myself five hundred dollars on the firm's account. I believe in the future of the automobile, and I believe especially in your car and in you."
This was irresistible. "Go ahead, George, and convince yourself," said Milton Morris indulgently, and threw up his hands, then admitted: "If you could scare up twenty-five or thirty orders, it would sort of give us something to plan on."
George nodded, well pleased with himself, and was blithely happy as he took the train. He had never been outside the city of Detroit except for a few little daylight excursions. He had never ridden in a sleeping car. He was unfamiliar with just how one goes to a hotel and registers and deports oneself, but the morning of life was bright upon him. Not a doubt or a misgiving entered his mind. He was a bearer of good tidings to the world.
At the end of the fifth week he was back.
"Mr. Morris!" exclaimed George, all brakes off and unable to keep the exultant leap out of his voice. "I sold one hundred and two automobiles." He transferred a huge wallet of signed contracts from his pocket to the scarred and cluttered desk.
Mr. Morris's face, instead of joy, expressed consternation. His cheeks became ashen. "And contracted to deliver them?"
"Before June first."
"My Lord, boy! You have ruined us! Why, where on earth would I get the money to buy the material and pay the wages?"
"I've got part of it here," assured George most amazingly, and holding up a single contract he called attention to a pink slip with perforated edges attached. It was a draft for $333.33, one-third of the price of a Milton Morris automobile. There was one attached to every contract.
"But one hundred before June first?" the older man reflected as he filled his pipe. "I'm not so sure it can be done."
"Done? You've got to do it, Mr. Morris. I've sold 'em!"
This was almost autocratic. George said it like an autocrat, too, with a thump of his doubled fist upon the table. But Mr. Morris did not seem to notice.
"We can make 'em, I guess," he decided, "but we'll have to have more money even than this thirty-three thousand you've brought home. Thirty-three thousand! Can I believe it? I reckon, though, I can take those orders down to my bank and borrow twenty-five thousand on the strength of them."
But again George Judson thumped the table. "No, Mr. Morris," he objected squarely. "No! We won't make any little piker loan like that."
This time Mr. Morris observed the thump and the autocratic note. "Don't let a little success spoil you, George," he warned.
"I'll try not to," said the young salesman, flushing. "But don't you realize that if I sold one hundred automobiles in five weeks, I could sell a thousand automobiles in twelve months?"
"A—a thousand!" Mr. Morris murmured the word hoarsely, then leaned back and gaped, his startled, recessed eyes seeming to advance and gleam furtively in their sockets.
"Don't you know that Olds has sold four thousand cars this very season?"
"But Olds—Olds." Milton Morris sat forward again, floundering with his arms, as if he also floundered in his mind. "Olds has got the jump on us. Besides, that was just a freak demand. Nobody will ever sell four thousand cars again in any one year."
"Pardon me if I seem to contradict your judgment, Mr. Morris," said George suavely, "but there is a man in Detroit now offering to contract for one thousand cars for spring delivery for the New York City agency alone. I tell you the world is hungry for automobiles. Look at these!" The young man lifted the contracts and fiuttered them with their drafts attached. "Mr. Morris, do you know what you are going to do, you and I?"
Milton Morris had not a notion. Leaning back, rather helpless now, he had a craven feeling that however absurd the proposal, he would accept it.
George was going on: "We're going to build not one hundred and two, but one thousand one hundred and two cars, and have them ready for delivery next season. You build 'em. I sell 'em."
"By Gad, I believe you could sell 'em all right," conceded Mr. Morris with something like a gasp.
He had been secretly piqued that Olds and Ford could sell their cars while he had not sold his. The thing which George had just done tickled his natural and perfectly justifiable vanity. The thing George proposed to do tickled it still more—while it staggered him.
"I could build 'em, too," he decided, "if we had the money."
"Mr. Morris," said George speaking slowly, trying to strain out of his tones anything of overweening self-conceit, "I say it modestly but firmly—solemnly—I believe I can get the money. Manufacturing is your end; selling is mine. I'll go down here and sell ourselves to the banks for a couple of hundred thousand dollars—that's what I'll do. You go to work on the basis of turning out eleven hundred cars by June 30th. I'll find the money."
Under the spell of the younger man's enthusiastic dream the eyes of the older lighted, and his blood began to tingle. For a moment at least he saw the vision himself, the vision of the automobile—making smooth the road and short the way from every man's door to every mart of trade or pleasure—a new pastime and a new service to mankind, a bringing of the country to the city and the city to the country, a retaking of the world in the name of humanity. He saw the vision, but the light was toned down in his face and the tingle went out of his blood as, true to habit, his mind came back to concern itself with a concrete, individualized task.
"You're young, George," he said, gazing at the ardent salesman with a look of such sublime faith that it failed utterly to realize how young he was. "You've got an awful lot of pep, but it's an awful big job you've cut out for yourself, going down to get money out of these hardheaded old Detroit bankers on nothing but a shoestring tied to a sizzling gasoline engine."