mean Boylan?”
“Yeah, that’s the bloke. He was going to buy up those religious paintings your friend Dun brought over from Europe.”
As Prigozi’s ebullience rose his ideas became more dissociated, and what slight command he held over the English language threatened to relax and disintegrate entirely. However, he lost none of his picturesque qualities. In fact, Moloch and the others derived the utmost enjoyment from these explosions. As a daily ritual, however, it was apt to become monotonous. In an hour or so Prigozi would quiet down, become earnest in a rather dignified way (if one could ever believe this possible of him—dignity!), and converse reasonably and charmingly about the vegetation in the Arctic regions, or the scientific means of determining the weight of the earth. But first, it seemed, he had to work off his grosser indulgences, those mad, lyric extravagances which he brought with him from somewhere—from the ghetto, possibly. About his past Prigozi was awkwardly reticent, and out of a feeling of sympathy and delicacy Moloch, despite the intimacy that existed between them, never alluded to the subject. Several times Prigozi had been on the verge of unbosoming, but Moloch’s attitude of complete indifference nettled him and forced him to shrink back.
Prigozi soon forgot about Boylan and his pigeons in the pursuit of his own chimeras. “If you fellows are serious,” he went on, “I’m going to tell you about this plan of mine … and I mean it when I say that I’m going to present it to Twilliger someday.” He cleared his throat and looked about for a cuspidor. “That jackass on the thirteenth floor—” referring to Vice-President Twilliger— “he wants to raise the standard of the messenger force, don’t he?’
Moloch nodded.
“Well, then, he’s got to recognize this fact,” and Prigozi embarked on a flood of ideas which, when the excitement abated, would land him in a telegraphic Utopia.
Moloch never refused an opportunity to listen to these panaceas. No matter how crack-brained the idea, there were always crumbs of information which he found valuable and practicable. It was an admitted fact that the one problem which all the telegraph companies had never adequately met was the business of providing a reliable, intelligent, and steady corps of messengers. Much energy and invention, not to speak of enormous sums, had been spent for the perfection of mechanical and electrical devices, but the messenger problem remained unsolved, almost untouched. It was more acute now than it had ever been in the past.
In the three years that he had been at his desk, Moloch had been given the opportunity to become acquainted with most of the disturbing factors involved; and, if he had not solved the problem for the company, he had at least effected a radical improvement. The chief obstacle in his path, for he had plans up his sleeve to improve the situation further, was that jackass, as Prigozi called him, on the thirteenth floor. Twilliger, who had been a messenger in his youth, believed that the only solutions of any value were those of his own making, or those which his so-called efficiency experts presented to him for approval. He saw no violation of logic in spending a fortune to reduce the transmission time to San Francisco only to have the message lie at the receiving office for a few hours because of a shortage of messengers. If, for instance, you received a message from California, a sticker informed you pompously that it took less than forty-five minutes to speed this greeting across the continent. Yet that same message might be brought you by a half-wit who had stopped on his way for three-quarters of an hour to watch a ball game—we will say nothing of those messages thrown down the sewer daily by aggrieved youngsters who had discovered that it was impossible to earn the twenty or twenty-five dollars a week on a piecework basis which the newspaper advertisements promised.
When Moloch
“Yeah, that’s the bloke. He was going to buy up those religious paintings your friend Dun brought over from Europe.”
As Prigozi’s ebullience rose his ideas became more dissociated, and what slight command he held over the English language threatened to relax and disintegrate entirely. However, he lost none of his picturesque qualities. In fact, Moloch and the others derived the utmost enjoyment from these explosions. As a daily ritual, however, it was apt to become monotonous. In an hour or so Prigozi would quiet down, become earnest in a rather dignified way (if one could ever believe this possible of him—dignity!), and converse reasonably and charmingly about the vegetation in the Arctic regions, or the scientific means of determining the weight of the earth. But first, it seemed, he had to work off his grosser indulgences, those mad, lyric extravagances which he brought with him from somewhere—from the ghetto, possibly. About his past Prigozi was awkwardly reticent, and out of a feeling of sympathy and delicacy Moloch, despite the intimacy that existed between them, never alluded to the subject. Several times Prigozi had been on the verge of unbosoming, but Moloch’s attitude of complete indifference nettled him and forced him to shrink back.
Prigozi soon forgot about Boylan and his pigeons in the pursuit of his own chimeras. “If you fellows are serious,” he went on, “I’m going to tell you about this plan of mine … and I mean it when I say that I’m going to present it to Twilliger someday.” He cleared his throat and looked about for a cuspidor. “That jackass on the thirteenth floor—” referring to Vice-President Twilliger— “he wants to raise the standard of the messenger force, don’t he?’
Moloch nodded.
“Well, then, he’s got to recognize this fact,” and Prigozi embarked on a flood of ideas which, when the excitement abated, would land him in a telegraphic Utopia.
Moloch never refused an opportunity to listen to these panaceas. No matter how crack-brained the idea, there were always crumbs of information which he found valuable and practicable. It was an admitted fact that the one problem which all the telegraph companies had never adequately met was the business of providing a reliable, intelligent, and steady corps of messengers. Much energy and invention, not to speak of enormous sums, had been spent for the perfection of mechanical and electrical devices, but the messenger problem remained unsolved, almost untouched. It was more acute now than it had ever been in the past.
In the three years that he had been at his desk, Moloch had been given the opportunity to become acquainted with most of the disturbing factors involved; and, if he had not solved the problem for the company, he had at least effected a radical improvement. The chief obstacle in his path, for he had plans up his sleeve to improve the situation further, was that jackass, as Prigozi called him, on the thirteenth floor. Twilliger, who had been a messenger in his youth, believed that the only solutions of any value were those of his own making, or those which his so-called efficiency experts presented to him for approval. He saw no violation of logic in spending a fortune to reduce the transmission time to San Francisco only to have the message lie at the receiving office for a few hours because of a shortage of messengers. If, for instance, you received a message from California, a sticker informed you pompously that it took less than forty-five minutes to speed this greeting across the continent. Yet that same message might be brought you by a half-wit who had stopped on his way for three-quarters of an hour to watch a ball game—we will say nothing of those messages thrown down the sewer daily by aggrieved youngsters who had discovered that it was impossible to earn the twenty or twenty-five dollars a week on a piecework basis which the newspaper advertisements promised.
When Moloch
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