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The Cat of the Stars
by
They were to meet McGee in the president’s suite at the hospital at four-thirty; and the train got in at three-fifteen.
McGee went to a hotel, and sat still, scared, looking at himself in a dressing-table mirror. He became momently more rustic, more tough, more skinned and awkward in his own eyes.
He called up the hospital, got the president. “Th-this is McGee. I—I’m coming right over,” he quavered.
“Huh! That fellow sounds kind of lightwaisted. Not much self-confidence,” complained the president to his old friend, the chairman of the board of directors. “Here, prop me up, Billy. We must give him a thorough look-over. Can’t take any chances. ”
The note of doubt was a germ which instantly infected the chairman. “That’s too bad. The Rating and Credit people reported he was a find. But still—of course—”
When Palmer McGee faced the president, the first vice president and a committee of four directors, three of the six had already turned from welcoming eagerness to stilly doubt. He felt that doubt. But he interpreted it thus:
“They think I’m a complete boob to have a haircut like this. Think I don’t know any better. And I can’t explain. Mustn’t admit that I know there’s anything wrong—mustn’t admit I was an easy mark and let a drunken barber carve me up. ”
He was so busy with these corroding reflections that he did not quite catch the sharp question which the president fired at him:
“McGee, what’s your opinion of the future of the competition between Australian wheat and the Argentine crop?”
“I—I—I didn’t quite u
nderstand you, sir,” lamented poor McGee, victim of the cat of the trembling stars.
The president thought to himself: “If he can’t get as dead simple a question as that—Wonder if the first vice president wouldn’t do, after all? No. Too old-fogyish. ”
While he meditated he was repeating the query without much interest; and without interest he heard McGee’s thorough but shaky answer.
And McGee forgot to put in his usual information about the future of New Zealand grain.
Two hours later the president and directors decided that McGee “wouldn’t quite do”; which meant that he wouldn’t do at all; and they wearily began to talk of other candidates for the position. None of the others were satisfactory.
Four months later they decided that they would have to go slow; wait for the president to recover. They could find no one adaptable enough to coordinate the president and the working management. So they gave up their option on the steamers of the Green Feather Line.
The best of the jest was that Palmer McGee had looked rather well in his flippant haircut. Because the Chapel Street barber had started cutting his hair a certain length when he had been a Freshman in Yale he had kept up that mode, which was respectable but dull. But the semi-shave had brought out his energetic neck muscles. Never had he looked so taut and trim. Though dozens of people between the Vernon barber shop and the New York hospital had noticed his uneasiness none of them had considered his coiffure queer—they had merely wondered whether he was an embezzler or a forger.
McGee returned to Vernon broken, and General Coreos y Dulce, ex-president of the Central American republic of San Coloquin, entered the train of victims of Willis Stodeport, of Scrimmins Street.
The general had colonized Ynez Island, lying off the coast of San Coloquin. Fields of cane and coffee he had created, and he was happily expropriating ten thousand melodious natives. The general was a merry and easy ruler. When he had accepted the presidency of San Coloquin, after certain military misunderstandings, he hadn’t even executed anybody—except a cousin or two, merely for politeness’ sake.