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Collier's

THE NATIONAL WEEKLY

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5¢ a copy

10 in Canada

In this issue: THE RUNNER-UP" by HOLWORTHY HALL also Whiting Williams - Raymond S. Spears - Lowell Mellett - Sax Rohmer

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THIS OAKLAND SENSIBLE SIX SEDAN IS POWERED WITH THE FAMOUS 44-HORSEPOWER, OVERHEAD-VALVE OAKLAND ENGINE

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Are not these the things that con-
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OPEN CAR, $1395; ROADSTER, $1395; FOUR DOOR SEDAN, $2065; COUPE, $2065
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OAKLAND MOTOR CAR COMPANY

Pontiac, Michigan

OAKLAND

SENSIBLE SIX

New York: 416 West 13th Street. London:

6 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, W. C. 2

THE NATIONAL WEEKLY

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Alice Maitland interrupted him: "But, Howard, what are you? Honestly just between ourselves-what ARE you?"

The Runner-Up

By Holworthy Hall

Illustrated by Wallace Morgan

What is the best business asset a man can have? In this
story Howard Lambert took orders for bonds because he
was a great golfer. Men to whom he could have sold noth-
ing gave him smashing orders just for the honor of being
seen on a golf course with him. Trading on anything but
real ability and knowledge of the job tends to just one
finish. Holworthy Hall knows both golf and business,
and this is one of those exceptional stories of his which
appeal to people who are interested in either-or in both

TOW every normal girl who is past seventeen looks upon all unattached men as just so many possibilities of romance, and her inward eye is always gazing-perhaps artlessly, perhaps even unconsciously-at the latest comer, to see if by chance he happens to be the fairy prince, as advertised. Furthermore, when Howard Lambert-H. Howard Lambert, if you insist on formality-was twenty-one, he was a very exceptional young man; he danced superbly (if a thousand testimonials are of any value) and he also rode like a Don Cossack; he was big and generous and impulsive, and he could also talk to women in soft words which, even if there was nothing in them, made a song; he could handle a gun, or a pair of eight-ounce gloves, with better than average skill, and he was also the intercollegiate golf champion and a national semifinalist. How he had managed to keep himself unspoiled, regardless of the combined efforts of a host of débutantes, was something of a miracle, but until he came to Pinehurst he had been equal to it, and there wasn't a person living who could accuse him, justly, of either selfishness or conceit.

It was during Easter vacation, in his senior year, that he first came to Pinehurst, where golf is an organized religion, and the office of high priest is a matter of challenge and conquest; and in Pinehurst he found an unusual number of girls who, after preliminary hypnosis from his conversation, and the thrill of dancing with him, were dazed into believing that because he had played the No. 2 course in 68, he had made himself a hero, and would make a correspondingly good husband. As usual, he was partly exhilarated but chiefly amused, and he was amused especially by a dark little girl, seventeen at the utmost, who never dared to look at him directly, but adored him from under her lashes as often as he crossed her path. She was very pretty and very

sweet, so that kindness came easily to him, and it cost him no particular trouble to ask her for a dance. His clearest memory of her, later, concerned her eyes, which had been deep and shining, and reverential, and he remembered them with pleasure even after he had forgotten her surname.

Sa matter of fact, he forgot her in about forty

feet by a type of social success which was so novel and so bewildering that he had no defense for it. At the hotels there were far more married women than there were débutantes; and every married woman, no matter how much she is in love with her husband, meets at one time or another some man who, although she would rather die than admit it, sets himself up in her mind as a substitute ideal. Abruptly, Lambert was taken up by an older group, which saw in him the reality of certain visions long since faded, and the proof that illusion is still the heart of the universe. It was all very flattering and quite spon

taneous, but it proved to be a fatal experience for Lambert.

It was a fatal experience for him because he didn't understand it. He didn't realize that he was attractive to these older women by reason of his youth and guilelessness; he imagined that he was popular with them because they took him to be a man of the world. Then he tried, naturally enough, to act the part, and the women were again fascinated, because he behaved exactly like a naughty little boy. For the last few days of his vacation he ignored the débutantes entirely, and when he went back to college he regarded his clubmates as rather underdeveloped.

He hadn't yet settled on a career, and he was wondering what style of employment would give him the greatest latitude for golf, when he was approached by a firm of bond brokers who frankly wanted to exploit him. The firm believed in ready-made publicity; it made overtures to college football captains and ranking tennis experts and men like Lambert, and used them as lay figures, to dress the shopwindow and attract attention. Lambert, for instance, would be given ample time to play competitive golf and to practice; he would solicit a hand-picked list of clients who would appreciate his importance; the path of glory was freshly raked and rolled for him, and he needed only to increase his speed and travel on to high prosperity.

At first he was lukewarm; he had been taught that sports have nothing in common with commercialism, and he said that if he accepted such an offer he should never cease to feel like a professional. But he hadn't a penny of his own, and he loved to play golf, and the firm amended the proposition so as to include his club dues and tournament expenses. "Why," said the head of the firm genially, "we're giving you a chance to make a living and learn a good business, and at the same time go ahead and be

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Win? There was never a man alive who could catch him, to-day or any day, on any course that was ever built!

one of the topnotchers in the game. Suppose you had an ordinary desk job somewhere-do you think you'd ever have time enough off to keep your form? I'll tell you what else we'll do-we'll pay all your incidental expenses too. Clubs, balls, caddy fees, everything! Now what do you say?"

And Lambert, dazzled by the prospect, wavered, weakened, and fell.

He won the Metropolitan title that season, so that most of his customers were slightly awed by his prestige; and he sold a great many bonds by the subtle artifice of inviting the rich duffer to spend a day on the links with the Metropolitan champion. Indeed, he worked out a system which was almost infallible; he got into touch with the client socially, invited him to play, gave him tips about his stance and swing, and, somewhat later, asked him to buy a thousand dollars' worth of ultraconservative bonds, merely to help Lambert keep his place on the sales sheet.

A thousand-dollar bond? Nonsense. The client invariably gestured with mild contempt; the item was too small to bother about. But if Lambert would come in next week, prepared to discuss an investment of twenty or twenty-five thousand. . .

His employers patted his back delightedly, and Lambert was deluded into thinking that he was a salesman.

H

E went down to Pinehurst for the United North and South championship and achieved a victory so one-sided that it hardly deserved a gallery. A hundred women, married and unmarried, old and young, practical and sentimental, innocent and disillusioned, were eager to meet him, or, if they had previously met him, were eager to be recognized as friends, and treated accordingly. To be sure, some of his former admirers lost their enthusiasm after the first few days, but for every deserter there were two fresh recruits, so that Lambert hardly noticed the difference.

The little girl with the dark eyes was there tooher name was Alice Maitland-and again he asked her, indulgently, to dance with him.

She looked straight up at him and laughed. "Thanks, my lord. I thought you'd forgotten me."

Her tone perplexed him, but he didn't stop to analyze it. "And I was afraid you'd forgotten me."

"How could I?" she inquired demurely, and Lambert, leading her out to the floor, was again puzzled, and wondered if she were attempting to be grown-up and cynical. She was the only person in town who hadn't fed him with compliments, and he was a trifle resentful about it. Still, she was almost too young

to visualize the summit of his grandeur; he smiled, tolerantly, and forgave her.

He enjoyed the dance, but although he remained in Pinehurst for a fortnight he didn't repeat the invitation, and toward the end of his stay he offered a plausible excuse. "I'm mighty sorry I haven't seen more of you this trip," he said, "but of course I've had so many appointments, and when I did dance, I was always having to tow some of these dowager dreadnoughts around, and then I've been mixed up with the bridge crowd almost every night -I do hope I'll have better luck next time."

"Did you lose much?" she asked solicitously. "I heard you were playing for awfully high stakes."

He stared at her and shook his head. "That wasn't what I meant, and you know it. What are you up to now-trying to have some fun with me?"

She gave him, from under her lashes, the swift glance which a season ago had contained shy reverence; now it was keenly perceptive. "How could I help it, Mr. Lambert?"

He had previously thought her adorable, but when he caught her laughing at him he was piqued. If he had known how many other girls-and matronswere also looking at him in a new light this season, he would have been the most astonished boy in Christendom. "Well, the next time you see me," he observed, with dignity,

"I trust you'll find somewhat less reason for the sense of humor."

The next time she saw him was three years later, and during the interval he had become internationally famous. Golf seems a small thing to deserve the eulogy of the nations, but Lambert could hit a ball harder and control it better and putt it truer than any

amateur on earth save possibly two; so that, when he paid the third of his winter visits to Pinehurst, he had acquired merit far beyond his most fantastic visionings.

He had been infected by glory, and he was suffering from a chronic disease of the ego; he was struggling to keep pace with men who had forty times his income and twice his capacity for cocktails; he had stepped out of his cloak of modesty and fancied that because he was a great golfer he was also a great man. On the very morning of his arrival she overheard a pair of retired magnates

who were talking about him, and one of them said to the other:

"It's a funny thing; it reminds me of the oil business. People never speak about the operators that go broke; they only speak about the ones that get rich overnight. And sometimes I'd like to see a list of the bright young fellows that have been ruined for life because they were too damn good at sports. This Lambert, now-he made his big reputation too young, and he never got over it. He's going downhill like a toboggan-drinking and gambling and society-and he's got a head so swelled you couldn't put it in a bushel basket. And he's only one out of hundreds. Five years ago he was the nicest boy you'd ever want to see, but he's had too many bouquets and too much success-at a game-and I'll give him about two more seasons before he'll be hunting for a job and bragging about the champion he used to be."

As soon as she saw him she realized that gossip for once was both accurate and just, but she was sorry for him, nevertheless. His health had suffered by his carelessness, and he looked tired and run down.

She watched him in all his conscious arrogance, she observed his infinite defects, of which he seemed so proud, and she listened to the chorus of those who had loved him five years ago and avoided him

now.

He swaggered through the lobby and around the course as though his triumphs had created him a czar; he had put on a coating of rudeness which he thought was self-assurance; and he was sarcastic to multimillionaires who wouldn't play bridge for a quarter a point-which, he said, was the least amount that made it worth while for him to give up an evening. Pinehurst, which had lately called him charming, now rose up and called him insufferable; but little Alice Maitland, watching from a distance, was thoughtful and kept her opinions to herself.

Of a sudden he was aware of her, and from that moment he never, of his own volition, let her get away. At the end of a week he was plainly growing serious; at the end of two weeks he was even able to dismiss in her presence all thought of the lame shoulder which was troubling him; in the week (Continued on page 16)

after that he offered her

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When a Man's Laid Off

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There are few greater chasms in all the world than that which separates those who wait jobless at the factory entrance and those who come proudly out of it, swinging the dinner pail of job possessors

W

HEN we all lose our inborn hankering to show the kind of man we are by means of the thing we do our everlasting itch to "get on" and "be somebody" by means of the job we have then our modern industrial civilization has lost its greatest asset. When the worker gets no greater satisfaction than the nonworker except a fuller stomach, then we must expect to see most of the world's fire boxes, steam chests, wheels, and motors stand motionless and cold.

My months of trying to get at the feelings of the workers in this country and in Britain have convinced me that the worker is immensely less concerned with what his job has to say to his stomach than with what it has to say to his soul. If that is true, then we ought to think more than twice before we dispose of the matter of the three and a half millions of men recently reported as out of jobs with: "Well, a great many of them have held on to their Liberty Bonds and so can weather a little loafing without any discomfort."

Or, still worse, as a woman of wealth and position put it lately with the sweet smile of an innocent babe: "Millions out of work? But, of course, that's their own fault, isn't it?"

"Livin'? Huh! I don't call it nuthin' but bloody lingerin'!" said a husky stevedore who was still far from starving one day last summer on the docks of a South Wales port when I asked if he made his living from the boats.

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"Ah'd say Ah had one foot in the grave-an' likely to step fahthah if Ah doan' find a job pretty soon," was the way a colored boy put it in the employment

office of a steel town in the winter of 1919. Some of his more strenuous companions who had waited day after day at the gates of the great plants joined their efforts in calling down curses upon the country that could offer nowhere any counter upon which they could put their capital-mostly their muscle from shoulder blade to finger tip-in return for the job and all that goes with it.

"T'ree night and no place for sleep!" was the lowvoiced testimony of a Polish laborer in an employment office a few weeks ago. The sign "No Shipment To-day" had been draped in black by some wag of a clerk. In a near-by store there was a real sign of the times, freshly scrawled: "Second-Hand Underwear for Sale or Rent.'

The Price of Empty Hands

UT with none of these was it a question of actu

Bally starving or seeing his children starve. Starv

ing is practically against the law in America and England. It was rather that terrible feeling of utter worthlessness and failure which so unbelievably oppresses the soul of the man who must go to the factory gates day after day to ask the same old question, asking it with the averted eyes, the discouraged voice, and the slouching shoulders that somehow always mark the mind and body of the workless worker. It is a feeling that comes to the jobless man even though he may have money in the bank. Savings or no savings, there are few greater chasms in all the world than that which

separates those who wait jobless at the factory entrance and those who come proudly out of it, pipe in mouth, swinging the dinner pails of job possessors.

Nothing is more certain than that industry in particular and the country in general pays a colossal price in terms of that final motive power of men's belief in themselves and in each other when it allows them to take their hands off the tools by which they do things worth doing and so obtain for themselves the feeling that they are themselves worth while.

To that price must be added the cost and the loss of the days spent by those who are lucky enough to have their hands still on their lathes or their ledgers, but who must wonder and worry when the dreaded word will strike their ears. Job or no job? Work or lay-off? They are few indeed whose lives are not shot through with the thought of that question during such periods of industrial depression as we have lately passed through.

At home the wife must have the news at the first possible moment. Of almost every one of the household's problems that hoped-for "Yes" or that dreaded "No" is the master key. If the days are crowded, the discussion of whatever strategy the news may require must go on in the night; perhaps to be recalled throughout the next day as a hazy nightmare built somehow around four-year-old Jack's labored breathing which had worried the doctor.

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