Part V Chapter 7 Doctor Dolittle's Circus by Hugh Lofting
MATTHEW MUGG, ASSISTANT MANAGER
Another member of the staff, besides Too-Too, the accountant, to be more than usually occupied in the first days of the Dolittle Circus was Dab-Dab, the housekeeper.
"You know," said she to Too-Too and Jip one night, "all this looks very nice--and I certainly don't want to be a kill-joy--but I wish we had some one else besides the Doctor to take care of the business end of things. He is fine where working out of new animal shows is concerned. As a stage manager no one could be better. But I know what's going to happen: all the other partners, Hercules and Hop and the Pintos and the rest, are going to get rich; and the Doctor is going to stay poor. Why, only last night he was talking about sending the opossum back to Virginia. He wants to climb trees, it seems--in the moonlight--and we haven't got the right kind of trees or moonlight here. I told him the moon in England is just as good as it is in Virginia. But he says it isn't--not green enough. Heaven only knows how much his ticket to America would cost. Yet I'm certain that as soon as the Doctor has the price of it he'll send him. He spoke of the lion and the leopard, too--says the big hunting animals should never be kept in confinement. I do wish we had some other man as well--somebody with good business sense--who could keep an eye on the Doctor's schemes."
"I quite agree with you," said Jip. "But I have great hopes of Matthew Mugg, myself. He isn't nearly such a fool as he looks."
"He's a very kind fellow," Swizzle put in. "Almost every time he meets me or Toby he pulls a bone or something out of his pocket and gives it to us."
"Oh, yes," said Jip. "That used to be his profession-- cat's-meat-man, you know. He has a good heart. And I think, Dab-Dab, you'll find he has a pretty good business head, too. It was he who arranged about the next three towns we're going to. The Doctor didn't know how to book the circus ahead or where to go next or anything about touring a circus around the country. He consulted Matthew. And Mugg went off at once to the next town and found out when the fair week was usually held and arranged for fodder supply and renting a show ground and everything. And he's just crazy about the circus business. I've often heard him boasting to gipsies and the like along the road that he's the partner of John Dolittle, M. D.--the famous showman. He knows how to advertise, too--and that's important in this game. It was Matthew who got the Doctor to have those big posters printed. I hear they're already stuck up in every street in Tilmouth, our next town. Yes, I'm quite helpful about Matthew. He's a good man."
The Dolittle Circus was an entirely new kind of circus. Now that he had the control of things in his own hands the Doctor proceeded to bring about the reforms and changes that he had so often wished for in the days of Blossom's management.
It was, as Jip had said, a good thing that Matthew was there to keep an eye on the Doctor. Otherwise he would most likely have begun by letting his new ideas run away with him. Certainly the average circus-going public had never seen anything like his show before. For one thing, John Dolittle insisted on the strictest politeness from all attendants. For another, he would allow no form of misrepresentation, as he called it. Ordinarily, circus folk had often been accustomed to say that their shows were "the greatest on earth," that their animals were "the only ones in captivity"--or something similarly extravagant and exaggerated.
This the Doctor would not permit. He said he wanted everything advertised just as it was, in order that the public should not be misled or cheated into paying to see something which they didn't see. To this, at the beginning, Matthew Mugg objected. He said you could never get a good crowd unless you "played it up big." But he soon found that the Doctor was right. When the people got to realize that whatever was promised in the Dolittle advertisements would be actually provided, the new circus earned a reputation for honesty that brought people in a way that nothing else would.
Another thing that worried Matthew in the first days of the Doctor's management was his insistence on providing tea, free, for the public.
"Why, Doctor," he said, "you'll be ruined! You can't serve tea for thousands of people without charging them for it. This ain't a hotel--or a Widow's and Orphans' Home!
"Matthew," said the Doctor, "the people who come to visit my show are, in a way, my guests. Some of them come long distances-- with babies to carry. Afternoon tea is a nice custom. I hate to go without it myself. It won't cost so much when we buy the tea and sugar by the hundredweight. Theodosia can make it."
So afternoon tea for all visitors became an institution. And shortly after another one was added: that of free packets of peppermints for the children. And what the Doctor prophesied came true. In one town where the Dolittle Circus crossed paths with another, a much bigger show, the Doctor's concern did twice the business that the other one did, because the people knew that they'd be given tea and treated honestly and politely.