# Tales from a Rolltop Desk/The Climacteric

THE CLIMACTERIC
Mr. Eustace Veal was a manufacturer of cuspidors. His beautiful factory was one of the finest of its kind, equipped with complete automatic sprinklers, wire-glass windows, cafeteria on the top floor, pensions for superannuated employees, rosewood directors' dining room, mottoes from Orison Swett Marden on the weekly pay envelopes, and a clever young man in tortoise-shell spectacles hired at eighty dollars a week to write the house-organ (which was called El Cuspidorado).
Mr. Veal lived in the exclusive and clean-shaven suburb of Mandrake Park, where he had built a stucco mansion with Venetian blinds, a croquet lawn with a revolving spray on it on hot days, and a mansard butler. Here Mrs. Veal and the two Veal girls, Dora and Petunia, led the blameless life of the embonpoint classes. The electric lights in the bedrooms were turned on promptly at ten o'clock every night, except on the sixteen winter evenings when the Veals occupied their box at ​the opera. During "Rigoletto" or "Pagliacci" the uncomplaining Mr. Veal would sit in silence with his head against the thick red velvet curtain at the back of the box, thinking up new ways to get an order for ten thousand nickel-plated seamless number 13's from the Pullman Company.
Mr. Veal, hampered as he was by the restrictions of success, was still full of the enjoyment of life. He had written a little brochure on "The Cuspidor: Its Use and Abuse Since the Times of the Pharaohs," which was very well spoken of in the trade. A morocco-bound copy lay on the console table in Mrs. Veal's salon. It was he who invented the papier-maché spittoon, and the collapsible paper "companion" for travelling salesmen. It was he who had presented a solid silver spittoon de luxe to the King of Siam when that worthy. visited the United States. And it was his idea, too, to name the beautiful shining brass model, especially recommended for hotel lobbies, El Cuspidorado. This was a stroke of imaginative genius, and several rival manufacturers wept because they had not thought of it first.
The spittoon magnate's habits were regular and sane. He rose by alarm clock at seven. He bathed, shaved, brushed his teeth with the vertical motion recommended by the toothbrush ad​vertisers, breakfasted on cereal and cream and poached eggs, with one cup of strong coffee; walked leisurely to the station, bought a paper, and caught the 8.13 train. He avoided the other men who wanted him to sit with them, took the fifth chair on the left-hand side of the smoking car, and just as the train started he lit his first cigar. His commutation ticket was always ready for the conductor to punch. He never kept others waiting, just as he hated to be kept waiting himself. After his ticket had been punched and put back into an alligator-hide pocketbook, he opened the paper and studied it faithfully until the train got to the terminal.
At the factory Mr. Veal's routine was equally well-ordered and uniform. At nine o'clock he reached his private office, greeted his secretary, and ran over the morning mail, which had been opened and lay on his desk. Then he went through his dictation, which was carefully (even if not grammatically) accomplished. The sales reports for the preceding day were brought to him. Then he discussed any matters requiring attention with his department heads, calling them in one by one. At a quarter after twelve he walked up to the Manufacturers' Club for lunch, after which he played one game of pool. ​He was back at the office by half-past two, and gave his passionate and devoted attention to the salivary needs of the nation until five o'clock. He caught the 5.23 train back to Mandrake Park, sitting on the right-hand side of the smoker where the setting sun would not dazzle on his newspaper.
But one day, about the time of the March equinox, when young ladies put furry pussywillows on their typewriter desks, and bank tellers crack the shells of spring jokes through the brass railings, Mr. Veal's behaviour was so peculiar as to cause anxiety among his associates.
He had ridden on the train as usual, without showing any abnormal symptoms. But when he was next observed, walking down Vincent Street, there was a red spot on his cheekbones and his expression was savage. He entered a haberdasher's shop and asked to see some neckties. When the clerk put out a tray of silk scarves in rich, sober colours, such as are commonly worn by successful and middle-aged merchants, Mr. Veal swore and dashed them aside.
"Good Lord!" he cried, "I'm not going to a funeral! Things like that are worn by Civil War veterans. What do you think I am, seventy years old? Give me something with some snap to it!"
And he chose a lemon-tinted cravat with ​vorticist patterns of brown and purple. He tore off the dark gray tie he had on and substituted the gaudy new one.
At the next corner he passed a shoe-shop. He hesitated a moment at the plate-glass window, then he entered and glared at the brisk young puppet who came forward with a smirk. He displayed his elastic-sided boots of the floorwalker type (which he had worn for years on account of his corns) and asked to have them removed. When they were off his feet he threw them to the other end of the long, narrow room. "I want some russet shoes with cloth tops," he said. "And some silk socks to match, the kind the men wear in the magazine ads."
When he left the shop, his feet might have been taken for those of Charley Chaplin, or of an assistant advertising manager of a department store.
Mr. Veal reached his office nearly two hours late, and one of his office boys was instantly discharged for asking him whom he wanted to see. Indeed, in a new suit of violent black-and-white checks, and with a crush hat of velvety substance, he was almost unrecognizable. As he passed through the filing department a hush fell over the young ladies there. His secretary, looking nervously ​from her corner outside the private office, felt a tingling scherzo run up and down the keyboard of her spine. Never before had she seen Mr. Veal wear flowers in his buttonhole, and as he swung the door of his office behind him, she sniffed the vibrating air. In the rich wake of cigar-fragrance always exhaled by her employer her sharp nostrils detected a new tang—the sweet scent of mignonette. Heavens! Was Mr. Veal using perfume?
Miss Stafford was an acute young woman. She had long been waiting the adroit moment to push her employer for a raise, which was indeed due her. She determined that this was the psychological day. When the sign of the Ram is ascendant in the zodiac, let employers tremble. This is when even the most faithful and long-enduring wage-earner dreams seditiously of a fatter manila envelope. Miss Stafford's typewriter had sung like a zither for a number of years, she had orchestrated many curious harmonies on it, and now she had reached the point where she was almost as indispensable to the business as Mr. Veal himself. She was carrying what the efficiency dopesters call the peak load.
The buzzer buzzed, and Miss Stafford hastened to the private office, nerving herself to throw cantilevers across the Rubicon.
​To her surprise, Mr. Veal, instead of sitting glowering over the morning mail, was standing by the window, throwing a paper-weight in the air and failing to catch it. The sunlight blazing through the large windows seemed to surround his emphatic clothes with a prismatic fringe. To her amazement, instead of the customary brief and reserved greeting, he said:
"Hullo, Miss Stafford. Great weather, eh? Sorry I'm late, but I just couldn't keep my schedule this morning. Went out to buy myself some golf clubs. I think I'd better take up the game, don't you?"
He made a swing at an imaginary golf ball, and slipped on the polished floor, nearly falling down. He recovered himself.
"Here's some flowers for you," he said, taking a bunch of daffodils from the desk. "Daffy-down-dillies, as the poets call 'em. Lovely flowers, hey? Now comes in the sweet of the year. What ho!"
He advanced toward her, and for one extraordinary moment she thought he was about to chuck her under the chin.
"Ask Mr. Foster to come in," he said.
"Mr. Veal," she said, nervously, "there's just one thing—I wanted to ask you about, my salary, ​don't you think, er, I think, it seems to me about time I had a raise. I've been here———"
"Bless my soul," he said. "I never thought of it. Why, of course, you're right. Miss Stafford, how old would you say I am?"
Miss Stafford knew perfectly well that he was fifty-five, but she had learned the cunning of all women who have to manage men, whether those men be husbands, employers, or ticket scalpers.
"Why, Mr. Veal, in a good light and in your new suit, I should say about thirty-nine."
"What are you getting now, Miss Stafford?"
"Thirty dollars."
"Tell Mr. Mason to double it."
The feminine mind moves in rapid zigzags, and Miss Stafford's first conscious and coherent thought was of a certain woollen sports suit she had seen in a window on Vincent Street marked $50.00.
"And by the way," said Mr. Veal, "when you see Mr. Mason, tell him I've got a new motto for next week's pay envelopes. Here it is; I found it in the paper this morning. I don't know who wrote it—better have him credit it to Orison Swett Marden."
He handed her a slip of paper, on which he had copied out:
"Before you call Mr. Foster," said the secretary, "Mr. Schmaltz of the Pullman Company is here to see you; he arrived just before you came in. He says he wants to place a large order for the cuspidorados."
"Send him in," said Mr. Veal, chuckling.
"Hello, Schmaltz," he cried, as the customer entered. "How's this for weather?"
"Great stuff!" said Schmaltz. "Makes us old fellows feel almost young again, doesn't it?"
Mr. Veal's face grew dark. He aged ten years in the instant. He pointed morosely to a chair.
"Mr. Veal," said the other, "we want to place an order for ten thousand of the cuspidorados. Can you give us the old price?"
"I can not," said Mr. Veal, shortly. "Materials have gone to the sky. I can't give you the—the old price. I'll give you a young price, a very young one indeed, based on the present state of the market. Eighteen and a quarter cents is the best I can do."
​Mr. Schmaltz raised racial hands. "Heavens!" he said, "you used to let us have them for fourteen and a half. Why, in the old days———"
Mr. Veal pounded the desk with his fist.
"If you use that world old again, I'll assassinate you with a dish of ham!" he roared. "Great pigs' knuckles, what do you think this is, a home for the aged?"
After Mr. Schmaltz had gone Mr. Veal sent for Foster, the foreman of the manufacturing department.
"Well," he said, "how about those machines?"
"Mr. Veal," said Foster, "we'll have to replace at least six of those Victor stampers. They're so old they simply can't do the work. You know when one of those machines is over five years old———"
Mr. Veal was pointing to the door.
"Get out!" he said.
At lunch-time Mr. Veal went up to the club as usual. Swinging up the street, in the bright sun and pellucid air, he felt quite cheerful, and stopped to buy himself a rhinoceros cane. In the dining room of the club he met Edwards, and they sat down together.
"Hello, old man," said Edwards. "You're ​looking chipper for a veteran. Played any golf yet this year?"
"I don't play," said Mr. Veal.
"Don't you? That's a mistake. It's the only game for us older fellows. Of course we can't score like the youngsters; but still we can get round and have a deal of fun———"
Mr. Veal clenched his fists. Spilling his soup, he leaped up and rushed from the room. He seized his coat and hat, forgetting the new cane, and fled to the nearest Turkish bath. ······· And all because, when going downstairs in the railway terminal that morning, he had heard a man behind him say to another:
"There goes Veal! He's beginning to look old, isn't he?"
It was the first time in his life Mr. Veal had heard the damnable adjective applied to himself in earnest.
Wait until your turn comes!