Chapter XXXII

The Summerfield Advertising Agency, of which Mr. Daniel C. Summerfield was president, was one of those curious exfoliations or efflorescences of the personality of a single individual which is so often met with in the business world, and which always means a remarkable individual behind them. The ideas, the enthusiasm, the strength of Mr. Daniel C. Summerfield was all there was to the Summerfield Advertising Agency. It was true there was a large force of men working for him, advertising canvassers, advertising writers, financial accountants, artists, stenographers, book-keepers and the like, but they were all as it were an emanation or irradiation of the personality of Mr. Daniel C. Summerfield. He was small, wiry, black-haired, black-eyed, black-mustached, with an olive complexion and even, pleasing, albeit at times wolfish, white teeth which indicated a disposition as avid and hungry as a disposition well might be.

Mr. Summerfield had come up into his present state of affluence or comparative affluence from the direst poverty and by the directest route—his personal efforts. In the State in which he had originated, Alabama, his family had been known, in the small circle to which they were known at all, as poor white trash. His father had been a rather lackadaisical, half-starved cotton planter who had been satisfied with a single bale or less of cotton to the acre on the ground which he leased, and who drove a lean mule very much the worse for age and wear, up and down the furrows of his leaner fields the while he complained of "the misery" in his breast. He was afflicted with slow consumption or thought he was, which was just as effective, and in addition had hook-worm, though that parasitic producer of hopeless tiredness was not yet discovered and named.

Daniel Christopher, his eldest son, had been raised with scarcely any education, having been put in a cotton mill at the age of seven, but nevertheless he soon manifested himself as the brain of the family. For four years he worked in the cotton mill, and then, because of his unusual brightness, he had been given a place in the printing shop of the Wickham Union, where he was so attractive to the slow-going proprietor that he soon became foreman of the printing department and then manager. He knew nothing of printing or newspapers at the time, but the little contact he obtained here soon cleared his vision. He saw instantly what the newspaper business was, and decided to enter it. Later, as he grew older, he suspected that no one knew very much about advertising as yet, or very little, and that he was called by God to revise it. With this vision of a still wider field of usefulness in his mind, he began at once to prepare himself for it, reading all manner of advertising literature and practicing the art of display and effective statement. He had been through such bitter things as personal fights with those who worked under him, knocking one man down with a heavy iron form key; personal altercation with his own father and mother in which he frankly told them that they were failures, and that they had better let him show them something about regulating their hopeless lives. He had quarreled with his younger brothers, trying to dominate them, and had succeeded in controlling the youngest, principally for the very good reason that he had become foolishly fond of him; this younger brother he later introduced into his advertising business. He had religiously saved the little he had earned thus far, invested a part of it in the further development of the Wickham Union, bought his father an eight acre farm, which he showed him how to work, and finally decided to come to New York to see if he could not connect himself with some important advertising concern where he could learn something more about the one thing that interested him. He was already married, and he brought his young wife with him from the South.

He soon connected himself as a canvasser with one of the great agencies and advanced rapidly. He was so smiling, so bland, so insistent, so magnetic, that business came to him rapidly. He became the star man in this New York concern and Alfred Cookman, who was its owner and manager, was soon pondering what he could do to retain him. No individual or concern could long retain Daniel C. Summerfield, however, once he understood his personal capabilities. In two years he had learned all that Alfred Cookman had to teach him and more than he could teach him. He knew his customers and what their needs were, and where the lack was in the service which Mr. Cookman rendered them. He foresaw the drift toward artistic representation of saleable products, and decided to go into that side of it. He would start an agency which would render a service so complete and dramatic that anyone who could afford to use his service would make money.

When Eugene first heard of this agency, the Summerfield concern was six years old and rapidly growing. It was already very large and profitable and as hard and forceful as its owner. Daniel C. Summerfield, sitting in his private office, was absolutely ruthless in his calculations as to men. He had studied the life of Napoleon and had come to the conclusion that no individual life was important. Mercy was a joke to be eliminated from business. Sentiment was silly twaddle. The thing to do was to hire men as cheaply as possible, to drive them as vigorously as possible, and to dispose of them quickly when they showed signs of weakening under the strain. He had already had five art directors in as many years, had "hired and fired," as he termed it, innumerable canvassers, ad writers, book-keepers, stenographers, artists—getting rid of anyone and everyone who showed the least sign of incapacity or inefficiency. The great office floor which he maintained was a model of cleanliness, order—one might almost say beauty of a commercial sort, but it was the cleanliness, order and beauty of a hard, polished and well-oiled machine. Daniel C. Summerfield was not much more than that, but he had long ago decided that was what he must be in order not to be a failure, a fool, and as he called it, "a mark," and he admired himself for being so.

When Mr. Baker Bates at Hudson Dula's request went to Mr. Summerfield in regard to the rumored vacancy which really existed, the latter was in a most receptive frame of mind. He had just come into two very important advertising contracts which required a lot of imagination and artistic skill to execute, and he had lost his art director because of a row over a former contract. It was true that in very many cases—in most cases, in fact—his customers had very definite ideas as to what they wanted to say and how they wanted to say it, but not always. They were almost always open to suggestions as to modifications and improvements, and in a number of very important cases they were willing to leave the entire theory of procedure to the Summerfield Advertising Company. This called for rare good judgment not only in the preparation, but in the placing of these ads, and it was in the matter of their preparation—the many striking ideas which they should embody—that the judgment and assistance of a capable art director of real imagination was most valuable.

As has already been said, Mr. Summerfield had had five art directors in almost as many years. In each case he had used the Napoleonic method of throwing a fresh, unwearied mind into the breach of difficulty, and when it wearied or broke under the strain, tossing it briskly out. There was no compunction or pity connected with any detail of this method. "I hire good men and I pay them good wages," was his favorite comment. "Why shouldn't I expect good results?" If he was wearied or angered by failure he was prone to exclaim—"These Goddamned cattle of artists! What can you expect of them? They don't know anything outside their little theory of how things ought to look. They don't know anything about life. Why, God damn it, they're like a lot of children. Why should anybody pay any attention to what they think? Who cares what they think? They give me a pain in the neck." Mr. Daniel C. Summerfield was very much given to swearing, more as a matter of habit than of foul intention, and no picture of him would be complete without the interpolation of his favorite expressions.

When Eugene appeared on the horizon as a possible applicant for this delightful position, Mr. Daniel C. Summerfield was debating with himself just what he should do in connection with the two new contracts in question. The advertisers were awaiting his suggestions eagerly. One was for the nation-wide advertising of a new brand of sugar, the second for the international display of ideas in connection with a series of French perfumes, the sale of which depended largely upon the beauty with which they could be interpreted to the lay mind. The latter were not only to be advertised in the United States and Canada, but in Mexico also, and the fulfilment of the contracts in either case was dependent upon the approval given by the advertisers to the designs for newspaper, car and billboard advertising which he should submit. It was a ticklish business, worth two hundred thousand dollars in ultimate profits, and naturally he was anxious that the man who should sit in the seat of authority in his art department should be one of real force and talent—a genius if possible, who should, through his ideas, help him win his golden harvest.

The right man naturally was hard to find. The last man had been only fairly capable. He was dignified, meditative, thoughtful, with considerable taste and apprehension as to what the material situation required in driving home simple ideas, but he had no great imaginative grasp of life. In fact no man who had ever sat in the director's chair had ever really suited Mr. Summerfield. According to him they had all been weaklings. "Dubs; fakes; hot air artists," were some of his descriptions of them. Their problem, however, was a hard one, for they had to think very vigorously in connection with any product which he might be trying to market, and to offer him endless suggestions as to what would be the next best thing for a manufacturer to say or do to attract attention to what he had to sell. It might be a catch phrase such as "Have You Seen This New Soap?" or "Do You Know Soresda?—It's Red." It might be that a novelty in the way of hand or finger, eye or mouth was all that was required, carrying some appropriate explanation in type. Sometimes, as in the case of very practical products, their very practical display in some clear, interesting, attractive way was all that was needed. In most cases, though, something radically new was required, for it was the theory of Mr. Summerfield that his ads must not only arrest the eye, but fix themselves in the memory, and convey a fact which was or at least could be made to seem important to the reader. It was a struggling with one of the deepest and most interesting phases of human psychology.

The last man, Older Freeman, had been of considerable use to him in his way. He had collected about him a number of fairly capable artists—men temporarily down on their luck—who like Eugene were willing to take a working position of this character, and from them he had extracted by dint of pleading, cajoling, demonstrating and the like a number of interesting ideas. Their working hours were from nine to five-thirty, their pay meagre—eighteen to thirty-five, with experts drawing in several instances fifty and sixty dollars, and their tasks innumerable and really never-ending. Their output was regulated by a tabulated record system which kept account of just how much they succeeded in accomplishing in a week, and how much it was worth to the concern. The ideas on which they worked were more or less products of the brains of the art director and his superior, though they occasionally themselves made important suggestions, but for their proper execution, the amount of time spent on them, the failures sustained, the art director was more or less responsible. He could not carry to his employer a poor drawing of a good idea, or a poor idea for something which required a superior thought, and long hope to retain his position. Mr. Daniel C. Summerfield was too shrewd and too exacting. He was really tireless in his energy. It was his art director's business, he thought, to get him good ideas for good drawings and then to see that they were properly and speedily executed.

Anything less than this was sickening failure in the eyes of Mr. Summerfield, and he was not at all bashful in expressing himself. As a matter of fact, he was at times terribly brutal. "Why the hell do you show me a thing like that?" he once exclaimed to Freeman. "Jesus Christ; I could hire an ashman and get better results. Why, God damn it, look at the drawing of the arm of that woman. Look at her ear. Whose going to take a thing like that? It's tame! It's punk! It's a joke! What sort of cattle have you got out there working for you, anyhow? Why, if the Summerfield Advertising Company can't do better than that I might as well shut up the place and go fishing. We'll be a joke in six weeks. Don't try to hand me any such God damned tripe as that, Freeman. You know better. You ought to know our advertisers wouldn't stand for anything like that. Wake up! I'm paying you five thousand a year. How do you expect I'm going to get my money back out of any such arrangement as that? You're simply wasting my money and your time letting a man draw a thing like that. Hell!!"

The art director, whoever he was, having been by degrees initiated into the brutalities of the situation, and having—by reason of the time he had been employed and the privileges he had permitted himself on account of his comfortable and probably never before experienced salary—sold himself into bondage to his now fancied necessities, was usually humble and tractable under the most galling fire. Where could he go and get five thousand dollars a year for his services? How could he live at the rate he was living if he lost this place? Art directorships were not numerous. Men who could fill them fairly acceptably were not impossible to find. If he thought at all and was not a heaven-born genius serene in the knowledge of his God-given powers, he was very apt to hesitate, to worry, to be humble and to endure a good deal. Most men under similar circumstances do the same thing. They think before they fling back into the teeth of their oppressors some of the slurs and brutal characterizations which so frequently issue therefrom. Most men do. Besides there is almost always a high percentage of truth in the charges made. Usually the storm is for the betterment of mankind. Mr. Summerfield knew this. He knew also the yoke of poverty and the bondage of fear which most if not all his men were under. He had no compunctions about using these weapons, much as a strong man might use a club. He had had a hard life himself. No one had sympathized with him very much. Besides you couldn't sympathize and succeed. Better look the facts in the face, deal only with infinite capacity, roughly weed out the incompetents and proceed along the line of least resistance, in so far as your powerful enemies were concerned. Men might theorize and theorize until the crack of doom, but this was the way the thing had to be done and this was the way he preferred to do it.

Eugene had never heard of any of these facts in connection with the Summerfield Company. The idea had been flung at him so quickly he had no time to think, and besides if he had had time it would have made no difference. A little experience of life had taught him as it teaches everyone else to mistrust rumor. He had applied for the place on hearing and he was hoping to get it. At noon the day following his visit to Mr. Baker Bates, the latter was speaking for him to Mr. Summerfield, but only very casually.

"Say," he asked, quite apropos of nothing apparently, for they were discussing the chances of his introducing his product into South America, "do you ever have need of an art director over in your place?"

"Occasionally," replied Summerfield guardedly, for his impression was that Mr. Baker Bates knew very little of art directors or anything else in connection with the art side of advertising life. He might have heard of his present need and be trying to palm off some friend of his, an incompetent, of course, on him. "What makes you ask?"

"Why, Hudson Dula, the manager of the Triple Lithographic Company, was telling me of a man who is connected with the World who might make a good one for you. I know something of him. He painted some rather remarkable views of New York and Paris here a few years ago. Dula tells me they were very good."

"Is he young?" interrupted Summerfield, calculating.

"Yes, comparatively. Thirty-one or two, I should say."

"And he wants to be an art director, does he. Where is he?"

"He's down on the World, and I understand he wants to get out of there. I heard you say last year that you were looking for a man, and I thought this might interest you."

"What's he doing down on the World?"

"He's been sick, I understand, and is just getting on his feet again."

The explanation sounded sincere enough to Summerfield.

"What's his name?" he asked.

"Witla, Eugene Witla. He had an exhibition at one of the galleries here a few years ago."

"I'm afraid of these regular high-brow artists," observed Summerfield suspiciously. "They're usually so set up about their art that there's no living with them. I have to have someone with hard, practical sense in my work. Someone that isn't a plain damn fool. He has to be a good manager—a good administrator, mere talent for drawing won't do—though he has to have that, or know it when he sees it. You might send this fellow around sometime if you know him. I wouldn't mind looking at him. I may need a man pretty soon. I'm thinking of making certain changes."

"If I see him I will," said Baker indifferently and dropped the matter. Summerfield, however, for some psychological reason was impressed with the name. Where had he heard it? Somewhere apparently. Perhaps he had better find out something about him.

"If you send him you'd better give him a letter of introduction," he added thoughtfully, before Bates should have forgotten the matter. "So many people try to get in to see me, and I may forget."

Baker knew at once that Summerfield wished to look at Witla. He dictated a letter of introduction that afternoon to his stenographer and mailed it to Eugene.

"I find Mr. Summerfield apparently disposed to see you," he wrote. "You had better go and see him if you are interested. Present this letter. Very truly yours."

Eugene looked at it with astonishment and a sense of foregoneness so far as what was to follow. Fate was fixing this for him. He was going to get it. How strange life was! Here he was down on the World working for fifty dollars a week, and suddenly an art directorship, a thing he had thought of for years, was coming to him out of nowhere! Then he decided to telephone Mr. Daniel Summerfield, saying that he had a letter from Mr. Baker Bates and asking when he could see him. Later he decided to waste no time, but to present the letter direct without phoning. At three in the afternoon he received permission from Benedict to be away from the office between three and five, and at three-thirty he was in the anteroom of the general offices of the Summerfield Advertising Company, waiting for a much desired permission to enter.