Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 273, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 November 1914 — THE FLOOR WALKER [ARTICLE]

THE FLOOR WALKER

By CLARENCE L. CULLEN.

i* .Z ' (Copyright.) It was the crowded-bar hour of five in the afternoon in the Old King Cole fluid-refection room of the Hotel AstorKnicker. At the far end of the onyx bar a young man with irresolute eyes and the chin of a non-combatant began to weep silently but copiously into his highball. The bareheaded attache of the refectory, who touched the weeper upon the shoulder within less than ten seconds after the beginning of the lachrymose manifestation, looked as good as one of those House of SplookenJ heimer clothing ads. He was tall, rangy and square-jawed. He was the floor walker of the refectory; an evolutionized bouncer. It took him less than two minutes to condole with the despairing one and to guide him gently to the exit. The weeper was not bounced; he was conveyed to the outer air by a diplomatist, and went away with his misery assuaged. ' . “Good eye,” I observed to the calmeyed floor walker when he returned. “How did you spot that one so promptly?” “By keeping track of his in-dredges," said the floor walker. “I happened to remember that one. He’s a three-shot Terry. That is to say, when he seeps ' three molsties into his bilge the overflow always begins to trickle from his Wicks. Three for him, and the Joys do a bunny-trot away from him and the Glooms start in to turkey-mazurk all over him.

“Then the saline solution begins to dribble from his orbs, which, of course, is his getaway signal; for it wouldn’t do to have a sad* sog scattering salt epray over, the place when the bar is cluttered up with merry-merries, who hate grief and who are trying the best they can to forget even their own woes, without reaching out for the sobskymusic of zigs who insist upon diluting their booze with their tears.”

“But you are not giving me the arithmetical end of it,” I said to the floor walker. “How can you keep track of the number of liquid Inserts that each of them, buying rapidly, permits to percolate through his frame?” “Practice, bo—practice, continued with that Argus stuff, ’* replied the case floor walker. “After I get through with this job I’ll be able to do a vaudeville turn as a lightning calculator. How many fervent Ferdles are there lined up there at the onyx now, would tyou calculate? A hundred, say you? Wrong again. There are a hundred ;and fourteen. Included in the bunch are 19 whom I’ve got classified on memory’s yellow pages, Myrtle, as dangerous; “Unsafe, that is to say, in different Some of them are liable, if iufey go too far with the gimme-an-other request, to prong out the think that they’re white hopes and- stretch out their tentacles in search of mussiness. Others of the 19, if they stretch 'that please-reflll-the-flagon thing too far, are likely to raise their pipes in unseemly protest on the subjects of religion, baseball and politics, thus throwing in a flat wheel, so to speak, on the cathedral calm that should prevail in a fluid philansterie of this pattern.

‘Two of them, if they overstep their gurgle limit, will fall to atomizing their weeps until the plant will feel like it's being sprayed by a Scotch mist. 'N so on, ’n so on, as Mr.’Belasco says, nervously, when he does not wish to have you read the remainder of your play to him on the street. "Well, I’m the Tabulating Tommy with those 19 unsafe boys. I know just how far down the damp road each of them can go without getting his standing lights blurred, and I’m there with the mentally registered statistics as to just how many intakes each of them has up to this moment eased into Us facial orifice. Something at the top of my dome does an inaudible click each time any one of them creaks his elbow in the act of sifting a perfectly new and untried ball into his motor. "Thus, as each one of them treks along to the end of his little path, all I've got to do is the subtraction stuff, waft the wigwag to the barkeep, and the one who has played his string as far as I know, from experience, it ought to be gets the sad and sweet shake of the barkeep’s bean the next time he calls for one more, and that is all there is to it. If the one upon whom the box is turned resents the shut-down he is passed along to me, and I dish up to him whichever article of bunkological balm he seems most in need of. "I am not saying, get me, that any one of the 19 dangerous ones 4s liable to try to leap the barricade or scale the citadel today. They may go days and days before they vat up to the point where they will feel impelled to puli their rummlferous specialty. But I am peg-posted here for the purpose of watching that none of the breezy ones departs from the normal, and, if so, to chaperon them,-without any suggestion of the crude or coarse work, into the open—’’ ‘‘But hold!” I interrupted. "Howcan you tell how many they’ve had before they swing in here?" “That,” replied the floor walker of the high-grade fire-water foundry, “is where the Argus section of my sketch comes in. I can tell that by peeking them over when they zephyr in. I take an unobtrusive but Hawkshawlsh slant at each and every patient as he Wdges through the door, for the pur

pose of making a guess as to how many imbibings he has bestowed upon his concealed mechanism before getting this far up the line. “If their maps don’t reveal the story, then their chirps will. When, for instance, I accidentally overhear a just? arrived smudge telling the buddy with him that none of the folks at home, including his spousq, understand him, dog-gone the luck anyhow, then, even if I'hever have binocularlzed him before, I know that he has been hurling wetties into his diaphragm not alone, yea, at one, but at several other points further down the line, and I get the mental chalk on him and attend to it that he doesn’t reach the glug-glug stage of it through any fault of mine or the house. The sog who unlimbera it to his trudge-mate, at an early stage of toe proceedings in a damp drum, that the wife of his bosom cannot and does not and will not understand him. —that sog, if the act is permitted to proceed undisturbed, will fall to lamenting lachrymosely all over the upper and lower bar rails Just as sure as aigs ain’t eggs. As you yourself have Just seen, there is nothing sadder or more dispiritiiig to be observed in a groggery-de-luxe than the spectacle of a male person who shaves engaged in distilling his own tears into’ perfectly good booze, guaranteed under the Pure Food and Booze act of 1906.

“And when the weeper is doing it because, as he says in a tone loud enough for other persons to hear, he is deeply and darkly and sadly misunderstood at home, the said weeper frames into such an enticing figure to be booted all over the works and then out into the open, and the shoe-leather of so many men so twitches to do that same to him that it is highly desirable to get him out of the place just aa soon as possible, if not by the conologleal method, then by the ‘raus-mit-em* route. ~ “It is the business of the floor walker tn a Valenciennes-lace maison .de redeye of this Character to analyze the chatter of each of the patients who looks unsafe, all the time pretending, of course, that he couldn’t hear a president’s salute from a battleship if he was shining bright-work on the main deck, and to see to it that the chirper who manifests a tendency to become boisterous along the line of his particular specialty shall not reach the point where he imagines that he is in the spotlight down-stage, with all of the rest of the purchasers merely standing around acting the parts of the supernumeraries. “You would be surprised to know how many zigs there are, who outside of that are all right, that fall to imagining, after they’ve tossed just one or two' over their average number of hooters past their tonsils, that they are alone in a pleasant and animated little circle of one or two hundred fellow rums, many of whom entertain the same quaint idetu “Since the iherely taciturn or morose persons who do not care to shout about themselves while they are funneling stimulants into their frames, object to being reminded in a place like this of a cage filled with whitecrested parakeets just arrived from Paraguay, it keeps me busy shaming the spotlighters into submission or picturing to them the hygienic advantages of a trapes on the flag-stones that run past the door. “There are so many sulky, self-con-tained, mean-spirited men coming into a flagop factory of this sort wfio flon’t care to hear that Ty Cobb has it ninety ways on Alexander the Great, or that the wife of the Chinful Charlie next to him hasn’t the same old affection for him like what she used to have, no matter what he does for her and coughs up all his dough and gives her the life of a queen with nothing ever to do until tomorrow or even then — “There are, I say, so many surly visitors at a nose-paint pension of this sort who desire to throw off dull care and at the sanfe time be quiet about it, that the floor walker has tp be considerably jerry of his job in order to quiescently quell and exigently extinguish the gooks -who, after they’ve trod over their Plimsoll capacity, develop the insectivorous idea that they are all alone in the madding crowd and that, therefore, they can and must go as far or farther than they like with personally conducted tete-a-tete members bearing on and appertaining to little matters concerning themselves that nobody else could get interested in except on the payment of a large salary with house rent, forage and medical attendance free.”