Chapter 9
MRS. WILLING was as much interested as her husband in the arrival of Mrs. Knapp in the store. When he had finished telling her about the interview and they had laughed and wondered over the acuteness of the novice’s criticism of McCarthy’s window-dressing, Nell said reflectively: “Do you know, from all I’ve heard about her from the St. Peter’s women—I wouldn’t be a bit surprised....”
Jerome recognized the idea to which his wife’s imagination, like his own, had leaped, but he did not think it at all necessary to let Nell know that the same possibility had occurred to him.
He shook his head disapprovingly. “No, nothing doing,” he said. “Anybody that’s got so much pep to begin with, they’re always hard to handle. Want to boss everything.”
He was pleased to have his wife point out what had already occurred to him, the strangle-hold which their relative economic situations gave them over Mrs. Knapp. “I don’t believe she’d ever be hard to handle or want more than you wanted to give her—with all those reasons at home for holding onto a job,” said Nell. She had as good a businesshead as Jerome, however, felt as well as he how visionary it was to build even the slightest hopes on so slight a foundation, and now contributed her own share of cold water to the prudent lowering of their expectations. “But a woman with no experience of business! Women who have spent fifteen or twenty years housekeeping are no good for anything else.”
“I forgot to tell you,” said Jerome, “that she had worked some before she was married. Her father keeps the store in Brandville. I looked him up. Very good rating. She may get some of her ability from him. Those country-store men sometimes acquire a real business hunch. But see here, how can her family manage if she’s away all day? I didn’t feel like asking her. But I wondered if she could be depended on. There’s nothing more of a bother in a store than somebody who is always having to miss a day.”
“Mrs. Prouty was telling me how she’s got everything organized there. They are all saying it’s just like her. Mr. Knapp is fairly comfortable now and can read, and sit up in bed, and doesn’t need constant care. There’s nothing anybody candofor him, now, poor thing! The two older children are big enough to take care of themselves and dress their little brother and help around the house. It seems that several of the people at the store are being veryhelpful—not salespeople or anybody in Mr. Knapp’s office but a couple of the delivery boys and one of the cleaning women. The cleaning woman, old Mrs. Hennessy, works at the store you see, before and after hours, so she can go to the Knapp house in the daytime an hour or so to do up the work. And the delivery boys take turns dropping in nights and mornings to look out for the furnace and empty ashes and do the heavy things. They stop in daytimes too as they go by to see if he wants anything. Oh, they manage, somehow.”
“How good poor people are to anybody in trouble,” remarked Jerome comfortably, pulling on his pipe and wondering for the first time if perhaps there really might be some truth in that threadbare remark which he had heard and repeated so many times and never believed a word of.
“They say Mr. Knapp was always very kind to them at the store,” said his wife, “the work people, I mean—was lovely to old Mrs. Hennessy when her grandson had to be sent to the sanatorium. And he helped one of the delivery boys out of a scrape.”
The proprietor of the store frowned and took his pipe hastily out of his mouth. “Hedid! Which boy I wonder? What do you suppose he’d been doing? I’d like to know more about that!” He was very much vexed at the idea that something about which he had no information had been happeningat the store. It was just like that impractical, weak-kneed Knapp to shield an erring employee and interfere with discipline! He felt again a wave of the inexplicable annoyance which every contact with Knapp had caused him from the first time he ever laid eyes on the man. Helping the delivery boys to cover up their tracks, was he? Lord! what a dead loss that man was every way you looked at him. He didn’t blame Harvey Bronson for being rubbed the wrong way by him and snapping his head off. Who wouldn’t?
He remembered suddenly that the man was now a bed-ridden cripple, cooled down, put his pipe back in his mouth and said aloud: “Well, I wish you’d drop in to the Cloak-and-Suits after a week or so and just get an impression of her yourself.”
Miss Flynn, the veteran head saleswoman in the Cloak-and-Suits told Mrs. Willing that the new employee was a wonder, and that the way she had taken hold made them all sit up. “She’s just eating it up, Mrs. Willing, just eating it up. She’s learned her stock quicker than anybody you ever saw, as if she loved it. Now I never expect a stock-girl to know where things are inside the first week; they dowellif they do. But Mrs. Knapp—every minute there wasn’t a customer on hand, would she fluff up her hair and get out her vanity box or puther head together with the other girls, turning their backs on the stairs—not much! Mr. Willing had told her the way he’s told every stock-girl we’ve tried, that the first thing to do was to learn her stock and she went to it as if ’twas to a wedding! With never a word from me, she just tore off into the stock-cabinet every chance she got. First off, she made a list of the things, the way they hung and then as she worked I could see her look at her piece of paper, her lips moving, just like a kid learning a spelling lesson. And yet for all she was so deep in that, she’d keep her eye out for customers—yes, she did! You wouldn’t believe astock-girlwould feel responsible about customers, would you, Mrs. Willing, when there’s nothing in it for her? But for a fact she’d keep poking her head out of the stock-cabinet to make sure nobody had come in; and once I saw her, when she didn’t know I was looking, spot a customer coming up the stairs, and go to stir up that lazy Margaret Donahue to get busy, and she reading a novel under the counter the sly way she does behind my back!” Miss Flynn perceived that she had wandered from the sequence of her narrative and added now, “Well, by studying her work like that, it wasn’t three days—really, I mean it, Mrs. Willing, notthree daysbefore she knew where every cloak and suit in this entire department was hung, or if it had been sold. Iheard Ellen O’Hern that can’t remember athingask her to bring out that blue knit cape with the astrachan collar, and Mrs. Knapp say to her, in a nice quiet tone, so the customer couldn’t hear, ‘That was sold day before yesterday, don’t you remember, to Mrs. Emery,’ and go and get a blue broadcloth cape with a white wool collar that was the closest thing to the other cape. And Ellen O’Hern made the sale too. It was a good choice. I asked Mrs. Knapp how she ever happened to think of picking out just that and she said the customer just looked to her as though that blue broadcloth would be her style. I believe she slept nights on that list of stock she made and said it over as she did her hair in the morning. Lovely hair she’s got, hasn’t she, if sheisso very plain in the face. And yet look at the style of her! Sometimes I think that the plain ones have more style than the pretty ones, always.”
Before she had finished this aphorism, her Celtic wit perceived that her Celtic fluency had led her into what was rather a difficult position when she considered that she was talking with that important personage, the young and very pretty wife of the proprietor; and her Celtic tongue added smoothly, without so much as a comma, “though of course therearecertain lucky people that have all of everything.” She smiled meaningly as she spoke,and told herself with an inward grin that she had got out of that pretty well, if she did say so....
“Selling goods does polish people up to be the smooth article,” thought the wife of the proprietor, “but Miss Flynn thinks she’s just a little too smart. Flattery that’s too open is not thebestsalesmanship. It wears thin if you use it too often. I wouldn’t be surprised if Miss Flynn had lost more sales than she thinks with that oily manner. It’s more than probable that some of the silent country women who come in here go away without buying because they think that Miss Flynn is trying to make fools of them. No, she’s not really Grade A. But she’s so old she’ll have to get out before so very long anyhow.”
After this silent, inward colloquy, the voices of the two women became audible once more.
“Don’t you believe, Miss Flynn, that Mrs. Knapp could be tried out in saleswork soon?”
“I’d try her to-morrow if it was me,” said Miss Flynn promptly. “I bet a nickel she could knock the spots off that Margaret Donahue this minute.”
“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Willing remembered, “Jerome had told her that Miss Flynn had that objectionable habit of ‘playing favorites’ among her girls—the Irish were sopersonalanyhow! No abstract ideas of efficiency and justice.”
Aloud she said, “I’m going to suggest to Mr. Willingthat you let her have a try at noon hours, for the next week, when some of the girls are out to lunch.” She added tactfully to avoid seeming to commit the unpardonable offense of coming in from another department to dictate to a head salesperson about her girls, “We’re both of us so sorry for Mrs. Knapp in her great trouble we would like to help her along.”
“Yes, indeed, poor thing! Poor thing!” said Miss Flynn at once, in a sympathetic tone. But all the same, something of the substance of the younger woman’s silent observation had reached her dimly. What was Mrs. Willing up to? She didn’t like people nosing around her department that hadn’t any business there. What was Mrs. Willing, anyhow, when you got right down to it? Just the advertising woman, wasn’t she? And what was all this interest in Mrs. Knapp about? Were they thinking perhaps of getting rid of another faithful gray-haired employee, as they had already in other departments. Her Irish blood warmed. There’d be something said before....
A few days later, “We were mistaken about that Mrs. Knapp, Mr. Willing,” said Miss Flynn somewhat belligerently. “Mrs. Willing said you wanted to have me try her out in saleswork, so I gave her a salesbook yesterday, and explained how torecord sales and all, and turned her loose at the noon hour. But she hasn’t got the stuff in her. I’m sure of it.”
“What makes you think so, Miss Flynn?” asked the proprietor of the store mildly. As always when it was a question of the welfare of the store, he called in peremptorily every one of his five senses and all his attention, experience and acumen. On the aspect, attitude, voice and intonation of Miss Flynn he focused all of those trained faculties in a burning beam of which she was happily unaware. What she saw was his negligent attitude as he tipped back in his swivel chair, sometimes looking up at her, sometimes down at the blotting paper on his desk, on which he drew, as if absent-mindedly, an intricate network of lines, like a problem in geometry. She thought that perhaps after all the Willings were not so dangerously interested in Mrs. Knapp’s advancement as she had feared, and she relaxed a little from what had been her intention on entering the room. It certainly was a fact that Mrs. Knapp did need a job something terrible, with those three children and a bed-ridden husband and all. “Well, I don’t mean that she’s not all right, well enough, and a good worker and all, but no salesgirl. Why, let me tell you how she let a customer get away to-day.Lether get away! Pushed her right out of the store, I might say; wouldn’t let her buywhat she wanted. I was watching from across the aisle, without letting on, to see how she’d do. She was helping out in sweaters because they were short of help this noon. I saw her showing the goods to a customer. I heard the customer say, ‘My, isn’t that lovely!’ and I heard Mrs. Knapp say,—you’d hardly believe it, I heard her say just as bossy, ‘No, I don’t believe that is really what you want, Mrs. Something-or-other, it wouldn’t be suitable for the purpose you....’ And the customer looking at the goods as though she wanted to eat it ... it was a dandy sports sweater too, one of the chickest we have. Somebody called me off just then, and I didn’t see what happened afterwards, but after Mrs. Knapp had gone back to the stock-closet at two, I went to look and the sweater was still there,and no sale of a sweater on Mrs. Knapp’s salesbook either!”
Her horror at such an utter absence of any natural feeling for the standards of her profession was sincere and deep. She felt that the recital of the bare fact needed no embellishment to make its significance apparent to any man in retail selling.
As she expected, Mr. Willing lowered the corners of his mouth and raised his eyebrows high as he listened. He looked down at the geometrical design he was drawing on the blotting paper. He thought silently for a moment, gnawing meditatively on onecorner of his lower lip. Then, “I believe I’d better have a talk with Mrs. Knapp myself,” he said weightily; “send her in at closing time, won’t you?”
Miss Flynn went off, walking softly, and well satisfied.
He had made a point of not speaking to Mrs. Knapp except for a casual salutation since he had taken her up to the Cloak-and-Suits three weeks before, and now as she came into the office he looked at her hard to see what the experience had done for her, and make out if he could gather from her aspect, attitude, voice and intonation anything like the rich illustrative commentary which Miss Flynn had involuntarily given him.
“How do you like the work, Mrs. Knapp,” he asked her, in a dry, business-like way, “now that you have had a little experience of it?”
He was touched, he was actually moved by the flush of feeling which came into her dark, ardent face as she answered, “Oh, Mr. Willing, Iloveit! I do hope I’ll give satisfaction, for I love every bit of it.”
Jerome Willing loved it so himself that he felt warm towards the kindred spirit. “I’m glad of that,” he said heartily, swept away for an instant from his usual prudent reserve, “and I think there’s no doubt whatever that you’ll give satisfaction.”
He added with an instant return to his dry manner, “I mean, of course, when you’ve learned the work. There is a great deal to learn.”
“Yes, I know,” she said humbly. “I feel how ignorant I am. But I try to pick up whatever I can. I’ve been watching with all my might how the salespeople work. The job of stock-girl gives you such a splendid chance to watch customers and salespeople. And yesterday Miss Flynn gave me a salesbook and let me come out on the floor at noon. It is very exciting to me,” she said, smiling a little, deprecating her inexperience and ignorance.
“How did you get along?” asked Jerome, with an increase of the nonchalant in his tone.
“I was so interested I could hardly breathe,” she told him. “You’re so used to it all, Mr. Willing, you can’t think how fascinating it is to me. I’ve always loved shopping, anyhow, though I’ve had very little chance to do much. And I’ve thought about it a great deal, of course, from the customer’s point of view. Now to be on the other side and to be able to try to do what I’ve always thought salespeople ought to do ... it’s wonderful! Of course, nothing very extraordinary. Just what any experienced salesperson knows, without thinking about it, I suppose.”
“Yes, I dare say. What kind of thing?” asked the proprietor of the store, finding it hard to keepup his decent appearance of indifference when he really felt like a hound who, after weary beating about the bush, strikes a trail as fresh as paint and longs to give tongue to his joy in a full-throated bay.
“Oh, all kinds of things, too little to mention. Just what I’ve noticed in all the years I’ve shopped ... why, here’s one. The way a salesperson gets up and comes toward you when you come in. I’ve always loved to have a girl get up quickly, as if she were glad to see me, and come towards me, looking right at me with a pleasant welcoming look. It’s always made me feel cross when they drag themselves up and come sagging over to me, looking down at their blouse-fronts or over my head ... or especially at their finger-nails. Isn’t it queer how it rubs you the wrong way to have a salesperson look at her finger-nails?”
“Yes, that’s a good point,” said Mr. Willing guardedly, baying inwardly for joy.
“And then another thing I just love to be able to do is to know just where to lay my hand on anything. I’m afraid I’m very quick-tempered and irritable by nature, and I know I’ve started up and gone right out of a store, many’s the time, because the girl who was waiting on me would look and look for something I wanted, fumbling around absent-mindedly as if she weren’t really thinkingabout it, and then call across to another girl, ‘Say, Jen, where’d you put that inch-and-a-half binding?’”
The proprietor of the store repressed with difficulty a whoop of delight over the exactitude of this snapshot. He looked down neutrally at his desk.
The new saleswoman went on, “I’d always supposed that it must be ever so hard to know where things are back of a counter from the way the girls often act about it. But it’s not! Not for me anyhow! No harder than knowing where your baking-powder and salt stand on the kitchen shelf!”
“Oh, no, it’s not hard at all for any salesperson who puts her mind on it.” Mr. Willing tossed this off airily and negligently. So successful was his manner that his employee thought she was being indiscreet and had forgotten to keep her place. “I’m taking too much of your time,” she said apologetically, turning to go.
He kept her with an indulgent gesture, “Oh, no, you’ll find I’m always interested in anything that concerns the Store,” he said grandly. “And you haven’t told me yet about the sales you made in your first try.”
She looked at him earnestly now and spoke seriously, “Mr. Willing, there is something that troubled me, and I’d like to tell you about it. I’d made two or three sales all right, and then a customer,Mrs. Warner it was, perhaps you know her, came in to look at sweaters. We’re just out of the plain, one-color, conservative kind, though Miss Flynn said you had some ordered and they’d be here any day. That was the kind Mrs. Warner asked for. But she saw another one in the showcase, a bright emerald-green one with pearl-gray stripes, the conspicuous kind that young girls wear with pleated gray crepe-de-chine skirts and pearl-gray stockings and sandals, and it sort of took her eye. I knew it would look simply terrible on her—she’s between forty and fifty and quite stout—the kind who always runs her shoes over. And I persuaded her to wait till the plain ones came in. I thought she’d be better satisfied in the end and feel more like coming back to the store. But Miss Flynn thought it was very wrong in me to have let her get away without making a sale.”
“Why didn’t you try to sell her both sweaters?” asked the merchant testingly.
“Oh, her husband is only a clerk in Camp’s Drug Store! They haven’t much money. She’d never have felt she could afford two. If she’d taken the bright sporty one she’d have had to wear it for a year. And I know her husband and children wouldn’t have liked it.”
“Oh, you know her personally?” asked Jerome.
“No, not what you’d call personally—just fromwhat I’ve seen of her here in the store. She’s quite a person to come around ‘just looking’ you know. I guess she loves to look at pretty things as much as I do. And several times when I hadn’t any customer on hand, I’ve had a little talk with her to make friends, and I showed her some of our nicest things, letting her see that I knew they were nothing she wanted to buy. Iloveto show off some of the pretty young things to women like that, who have to work hard at home. It’s as good as going to a party for them. And it gives them the habit of coming to the store too when theydowant something. Then she happened to mention her name. I put it down on my list to memorize. I remember how I always used to like it when a salesgirl remembered my name.”
“Well, for God’ssake!” ejaculated the young merchant inaudibly, moved to an almost solemn thankfulness. Aloud he said, clearing his throat and playing with a paper-cutter, “Don’t you find it hard to remember the names of the customers?”
“No,” she said. “I’ve got a good memory for names naturally. And it interests me. I try to find out something about the customer, too, to put together with the name. It seems to keep me from getting them mixed. This Mrs. Warner, for instance, I looked up her address in the ’phone book and found out that she lives near one of my friendsin St. Peter’s parish, and I asked my friend about her and she told me that Mr. Warner works for Camp’s. It helps to know something personal, I think. In odd moments, when I’m walking down to the store in the morning, for instance, I have my list in my hand, and try to hitch the people to the names,—this way—‘J. P. Warner, drug-store husband, about fifteen hundred a year. Laura J. Pelman, teacher in Washington Street School, about twelve hundred. Mother lives with her.’ Inexperienced in selling as I am, I feel as though I could tell so much more what people want in merchandise if I know a little about them.”
“Yes, that’s so,” he admitted this point without comment.
He could hardly wait to get home and report this talk to Nell. She wouldn’t believe it, that was all. Well, he wouldn’t have believed it either if he hadn’t heard it with his own ears. And such perfect unconsciousness on the woman’s part! Apparently she thought that this was the way thatallsalespeople took hold of their work—save the mark!
“That’ll do for to-day, Mrs. Knapp,” he said with dignity. “I’m glad to hear you like the work. You seem to be giving very good satisfaction. We ... we ...” he hesitated, wondering just how to phrase it. “We have been meaning to add one more salespersonto the Cloak-and-Suits, to see if the department would carry one more. If you like, we will try you out there, beginning with next week. The pay is no higher. But of course you get a bonus on all sales after your weekly quota is reached.”
“Thank you very much, Mr. Willing,” she said, with some dignity of her own, the dignity of a mature woman who knows that she is useful.
He liked her for her reserve. She turned away.
He called after her, as though it were a casual notion, just come into his head, “Are you anything of a reader? Would you be interested in looking at a manual on retail selling? I have a pretty good one here that gives most of the general principles. Though of course nothing takes the place of experience.”
Her reserve vanished in a flash. Her strongly marked, mature face glowed like a girl’s. She came swiftly back towards him, her hand outstretched, “Oh, are therebookswritten about the business?” she cried eagerly. “Things you can study and learn?”