§ 4
Una discovered that Mr. Ross, who had been negligible as advertising-manager of the Gas and Motor Gazette, had, in two or three years, become a light domestic great man, because he so completely believed in his own genius, and because advertising is the romance, the faith, the mystery of business. Mr. Pemberton, though he knew well enough that soap-making was a perfectly natural phenomenon, could never get over marveling at the supernatural manner in which advertising seemed to create something out of nothing. It took a cherry fountain syrup which was merely a chemical imitation that under an old name was familiar to everybody; it gave the syrup a new name, and made twenty million children clamor for it. Mr. Pemberton could never quite understand that advertising was merely a matter of salesmanship by paper and ink, nor that Mr. Ross's assistants, who wrote the copy and drew the pictures and selected the mediums and got the "mats" over to the agency on time, were real advertising men. No, the trusting old pirate believed it was also necessary to have an ordained advertising-manager like Mr. Ross, a real initiate, who could pull a long face and talk about "the psychology of the utilitarian appeal" and "pulling power" and all the rest of the theology. So he, who paid packing-girls as little as four dollars a week, paid Mr. Ross fifteen thousand dollars a year, and let him have competent assistants, and invited him out to the big, lonely, unhappy Pemberton house in the country, and listened to his sacerdotal discourses, and let him keep four or five jobs at once. For, besides being advertising-manager for Pemberton's, Mr. Ross went off to deliver Lyceum lectures and Chautauqua addresses and club chit-chats on the blessings of selling more soap or underwear; and for the magazines he wrote prose poems about stars, and sympathy, and punch, and early rising, and roadside flowers, and argosies, and farming, and saving money.
All this doge-like splendor Una discovered, but could scarcely believe, for in his own office Mr. Ross seemed but as the rest of us-a small round man, with a clown-like little face and hair cut Dutch-wise across his forehead. When he smoked a big cigar he appeared naughty. One expected to see his mother come and judiciously smack him. But more and more Una felt the force of his attitude that he was a genius incomparable. She could not believe that he knew what a gorgeous fraud he was. On the same day, he received an advance in salary, discharged an assistant for requesting an advance in salary, and dictated a magazine filler to the effect that the chief duty of executives was to advance salaries. She could not chart him.... Thus for thousands of years have servants been amazed at the difference between pontiffs in the pulpit and pontiffs in the pantry.
Doubtless it helped Mr. Ross in maintaining his sublimity to dress like a cleric-black, modest suits of straight lines, white shirts, small, black ties. But he also wore silk socks, which he reflectively scratched while he was dictating. He was of an elegance in linen handkerchiefs, in a chased-gold cigarette-case, in cigarettes with a monogram. Indeed, he often stopped during dictation to lean across the enormous mahogany desk and explain to Una how much of a connoisseur he was in tennis, fly-casting, the ordering of small, smart dinners at the Plaza.
He was fond of the word "smart."
"Rather smart poster, eh?" he would say, holding up the latest creation of his genius-that is to say, of his genius in hiring the men who had planned and prepared the creation.
Mr. Ross was as full of ideas as of elegance. He gave birth to ideas at lunch, at "conferences," while motoring, while being refreshed with a manicure and a violet-ray treatment at a barber-shop in the middle of one of his arduous afternoons. He would gallop back to the office with notes on these ideas, pant at Una in a controlled voice, "Quick-your book-got a' idea," and dictate the outline of such schemes as the Tranquillity Lunch Room-a place of silence and expensive food; the Grand Arcade-a ten-block-long rival to Broadway, all under glass; the Barber-Shop Syndicate, with engagement cards sent out every third week to notify customers that the time for a hair-cut had come again. None of these ideas ever had anything to do with assisting Mr. Pemberton in the sale of soap, and none of them ever went any farther than being outlined. Whenever he had dictated one of them, Mr. Ross would assume that he had already made a million out of it, and in his quiet, hypnotizing voice he would permit Una to learn what a great man he was. Hitching his chair an inch nearer to her at each sentence, looking straight into her eyes, in a manner as unboastful as though he were giving the market price of eggs, he would tell her how J. Pierpont Morgan, Burbank, or William Randolph Hearst had praised him; or how much more he knew about electricity or toxicology or frogs or Java than anybody else in the world.
Not only a priest, but a virtuoso of business was he, and Una's chief task was to keep assuring him that he was a great man, a very great man-in fact, as great as he thought he was. This task was, to the uneasily sincere Una, the hardest she had ever attempted. It was worth five dollars more a week than she had received from Troy Wilkins-it was worth a million more!
She got confidence in herself from the ease with which she satisfied Mr. Ross by her cold, canned compliments. And though she was often dizzied by the whirling dynamo of Pemberton's, she was not bored by the routine of valeting Mr. Ross in his actual work.... For Mr. Ross actually did work now and then, though his chief duty was to make an impression on old Mr. Pemberton, his sons, and the other big chiefs. Still, he did condescend to "put his O. K." on pictures, on copy and proof for magazine advertisements, car cards, window-display "cut-outs," and he dictated highly ethical reading matter for the house organ, which was distributed to ten thousand drug-stores, and which spoke well of honesty, feminine beauty, gardening, and Pemberton's. Occasionally he had a really useful idea, like the celebrated slogan, "Pemberton's Means PURE," which you see in every street-car, on every fourth or fifth bill-board. It is frequent as the "In God We Trust" on our coins, and at least as accurate. This slogan, he told Una, surpassed "A train every hour on the hour," or "The watch that made the dollar famous," or, "The ham what am," or any of the other masterpieces of lyric advertising. He had created it after going into a sibyllic trance of five days, during which he had drunk champagne and black coffee, and ridden about in hansoms, delicately brushing his nose with a genuine California poppy from the Monterey garden of R. L. S.
If Mr. Ross was somewhat agitating, he was calm as the desert compared with the rest of Pemberton's.
His office, which was like a million-dollar hotel lobby, and Una's own den, which was like the baggage-porter's den adjoining the same, were the only spots at Pemberton's where Una felt secure. Outside of them, fourteen stories up in the titanic factory, was an enormous office-floor, which was a wilderness of desks, toilet-rooms, elevators, waiting-rooms, filing-cabinets. Her own personality was absorbed in the cosmic (though soapy) personality of Pemberton's. Instead of longing for a change, she clung to her own corner, its desk and spring-back chair, and the insurance calendar with a high-colored picture of Washington's farewell. She preferred to rest here rather than in the "club-room and rest-room for women employees," on which Mr. Pemberton so prided himself.