PART TWOChapter 7
IT was after an almost continuous thirty-six-hour session of work that Jerome Willing finally stepped out of his office, walked down the dark aisles between brown-linen-covered counters, nodded to the night-watchman, and shut the front door behind him. He crossed the street and turned to take a last affectionate survey of the building which sheltered his future. He was very tired, but as he looked at it he smiled to himself, a candid young smile of pride and satisfaction. It did not look to him like a four-storied brick front, but like a great door opened to the opportunity he had always longed for.
He stood gazing at it till a passer-by jostled him in the dusk. “Well, well ...” he shook his head with a long, satisfied sigh, “mustn’t stand mooning here; must get home to Nell and the little girls.”
As he walked up the pleasant street, between the double rows of well-kept front yards and comfortable homes, he was thinking for the thousandth time how lucky he was, lucky every way you looked at it. For one thing lucky just this minute in having an ex-business-woman for a wife. Nell would understandhis falling head over ears into work that first day and a half of his return after an absence. She never pulled any of that injured-wife stuff, no matter how deep in business he got. Fact was, she was as deep as he, and liked to see him get his teeth into it. She surely was the real thing as a wife.
When he let himself into the front door of the big old house, he heard the kids racketing around upstairs cheerfully, with their dog, and was grateful, as he and Nell so often were, for the ease and freedom and wide margin of small-town life. It wasn’t in a New York flat that the children could raise merry hell like that, with nobody to object.
Through the open door he saw his wife’s straight, slim, erect back. She was in the room they had set apart for her “office,” and she was correcting a galley of proof, the ads. for to-morrow’s papers.
“Hello there, Nell,” he cried cheerfully. “Got my head above water at last. I’m home for a real visit to-night.”
His wife laid down her fountain pen, turned around in her chair and smiled at him.
“That’s good,” she said. “What’s the news?” Although she saw that he looked haggard with fatigue, she made no comment on it.
“The news is, Mrs. Willing,” he said, bending over her for a kiss, “that I’ve got it just about all worked out.”
“Everything?” she said skeptically. “Even the bonus for the—”
“Pretty much! The store is surely tuning up! Give her a month to work the bearings in, and then watch our dust!”
They looked at each other happily, as he sat down in an armchair and leaned back with a long breath almost of exhaustion.
“Just like a dream, isn’t it, all of it?” said Nell.
“You’ve said it! When I remember how I used to hope that perhaps if we scrimped and saved we might be able to buy a part interest somewhere, after I’d put in the best years of my life working for other men! Doesn’t it make you afraid the alarm-clock will ring and wake you up any minute?”
“But did you really settle the bonus question for the non-selling force?” asked Mrs. Willing, returning relentlessly to the most difficult point.
“I worked it out by giving it up for the present,” he answered promptly.
She laughed. “Well, that’soneway.”
“I tell you, I’ve given up trying to make it all fit together like clockwork. Jobs in a store aren’t alike. Salespersons are one thing, and you can find out exactly what they’re worth in dollars and cents and pay them what theyearn. But when they don’t sell, it’s different. What I’m going to do is to decide on basic wages for all the employees who don’t sell—justabout enough to get along on. And then pull the really good work out of them with a bonus—I’ll call it a bonus. It’s really a sort of disguised fine for poor work....”
“I wish you’d start at the beginning and get somewhere,” said his wife rigorously. “If I put woolly statements like that into my advertising copy....”
“Well, here’s the idea. Take the delivery crews for example.—There’s only one of them now, of course, but there are going to be more soon. I offer them—oh, anything you like, twelve or fifteen dollars a week. That much they’re sure of until they’re fired, no matter how they do their work! ‘But if you do your work perfectly,’ I tell ’em, ‘there’s ten dollars a week more,’ or something like that—I haven’t made up my mind about the details.... ‘There’s ten dollars apiece for each of you if you get through the week with a perfect record.’—No, that doesn’t put emphasis enough on team spirit; I’ll make it ten or fifteen for the crew to divide—that’ll give them an incentive for jacking each other up. We put the money in dimes and quarters in a box with a glass cover where they can look at it. Then every time they run without oil, or with a dirty car, or lose a package, or let a friend ride with them, out comes a dollar or a quarter or fifty cents, depending on how serious the case may be. Don’t you just bet when they see their bonus shrinking beforetheir eyes they’ll buck up andtry? Of course I couldn’t use such a raw line with the better class—the accounting department, for instance, but something with the same idea.—By the way, that reminds me. I had to let Lester Knapp go—remember him? That dyspeptic gloom, second desk on the left as you go in.”
Mrs. Willing nodded. “I don’t know that I ever noticed him, but I’ve heard about him through the St. Peter’s women. I thought you said you could manage.”
“I never really thought that. I knew I couldn’t right along. But I tell you, Nell, the truth is I’m soft when it comes to telling folks they can go. I hate to do it! I kidded myself into thinking Knapp might buck up. But it wouldn’t do. For one thing Bronson can’t stand him and I’ve got to back up my heads of departments. They’ve got to like their help or they can’t get any work out of them.” He sat forward in his chair and began playing with his watch chain.
“How did Mr. Knapp take it?”
“Oh, very decently—too decently! It made it all the harder. He admitted, when I asked him, that his work didn’t interest him—that he hated it. When I half-way offered to give him a try at the selling end, he said he was sure he wouldn’t like it any better,—was sure he wouldn’t do even so wellthere. He said he knew he’d hate selling. Then when I put it up to him whether he thought a man can ever do good work if he doesn’t like his job, he didn’t say a thing, just kept getting whiter and whiter, and listened and listened. I did my best to let him down easy. Thanks of the firm for long and faithful service, take plenty of time to look for something else, no hurry. But it was no go. He’s got plenty of brains of a queer sort, enough to see through that sort of talk. It was damned unpleasant. He has a very uncomfortable personality anyhow. Something about him that rubs you the wrong way.” His voice was sharp with personal discomfort. He looked exasperated and aggrieved.
Out of her experience of his world and her knowledge of him, his wife’s sympathy was instant. “Itishard onyouhaving all those uncomfortable personal relations!” she said. “It always seems unfair that I can stay here at home with the children and draw a salary for writing advertisements that I love to do without sharing any of the dirty work.”
“It’s no joke,” he agreed rather somberly. He looked at his watch. “Will I have time for a cigar before dinner?” he asked.
“Just about. I didn’t know when you might be in, so the children and I have had ours. I told Kate to start broiling the steak when she heard you come in, but she’s always slow.”
He clipped and lighted his cigar with an air of immense comfort. Wasn’t it somethingliketo come back to such a home after working your head off, and find everything so easy and smooth!
“I’ve often thought,” said his wife, “that letting people go would be the hardest part of administrative work for me.”
He drew his first puff from his cigar and relaxed in his chair again. “Did I ever happen to tell you about the first time I had to fire any one?” He had told her several times but she gave no intimation of this, listening with a bright eager attention as he went on. “Way back when I’d only just pulled up to being head of the hosiery department at Burnham Brothers. She was a weak-kneed, incompetent, complaining old maid who was giving the whole department a black eye with the customers—ought to have been cleared out long before. Well, at last I got my nerve up to telling her to go, and she took it hard—made a scene, cried, threatened to kill herself, said her sick sister would starve. She was ninety per cent hysteric when she finally flung out of my office; and I was all in. So I beat it right up to the chief’s office and sobbed out the whole talk on old J. P. Burnham’s bosom.”
Nell smiled reminiscently. “Yes, how we all used to lean on old J. P. when things went wrong. He always made me think of a dog-tired old Atlas, holdingeverything up on those stooped old shoulders of his. What did he say?”
“Oh, he didn’t look surprised. I suppose I wasn’t the first youngster to lose my nerve that way. He limped over and shut the door as if he was going to give me a long talk, but after all he didn’t say much. Just a few pieces of advice with long pauses to let them sink in. But I’ve never forgotten them.”
“No, you never did forget what he said,” agreed Nell. She was very anxious to get on to another matter of importance but she saw by her husband’s manner that he was talking himself out of his discomfort, so she gave him another chance to go on, by remarking, “But I don’t see whatanybody can say about dismissing employees that would help a bit. It’s just horrid and that’s all there is to it.”
“Well, he sort of stiffened me up, anyhow. Reminded me that running a store isn’t philanthropy, that everybody from the boss down is there not to make a living for himself but to get goods sold. Made me see that for a department manager to keep an incompetent salesperson is just as dishonest as if he’d put his hand in the cash register. Worse, because the firm can stand losing a little cash enough sight better than having its customers snapped at and slighted. But what made the biggest impression on me was when he made me think of the other girls in the department whodiddotheir work, how unfair it was to them to keep a lame duck that shoos everybody away from the department so they can’t make any sales. They don’t come into the office and throw a fit, but they don’t get a fair deal just the same. Besides incompetence is as catching as measles.”
“That’s so.” Nell saw the point, thoughtfully. “But it doesn’t make it any pleasanter when the one you’re dismissingisthrowing the fit.”
“You bet your life it does not,” agreed her husband, drawing with satisfaction on his excellent cigar, “and old J. P. didn’t put up any bluff about it. He never said he enjoyed it. He said it was just a part of the job, and you’ve got to stand up to it if you’re going to grow up to carry a man’s load. You’re there to do your best for the business. He got another point over to me, a good one—even for the lame ducks, it’s kinder to throw ’em right out as soon as you’re sure they can’t make good. Don’t let ’em stay on and gather mold till they can’t make a good try at anything else. That’s what made it so hard to tell Knapp he was through. Uncle Charley ought to have told him that, after he’d been a month in the store, twelve years ago. It’s a crime to let a man stay on and vegetate and get mildewed like that. It must have been clear for anybody but a blind man to see, after he’d been a month at his desk, that he’d neverbe anything but a dead loss in the business-world, what with his ill health, and his wool-gathering, and his tags of poetry! Uncle Charley ought to have pushed him off to be a dish-washer, or a college professor, or one of those jobs that a man without any jump in him can hold. It’s just a sample of the way poor Uncle Charley let the business run downhill ever since he knew he had that cancer. You can’t blame him, in a manner of speaking. But the fact is that the whole works from the stock-room to the heating plant was just eaten up with dry rot.”
“I’m sorry about that Mr. Knapp though, personally,” said his wife. “He has a wife and three young children, you know.”
“The devil he has!” said Jerome annoyed. “Isn’t that just like him? Well, I’ll try to look him up to-morrow and see if I can’t suggestsomething else. Or give him a check with the thanks of the firm. That’d be the cheapest way out. I know right now there’s no getting any decent work out of him. Wherever I put him, he’d be like a bit of cotton waste clogging up an oil-pipe.”
“How about the accounting department, anyhow?” asked Nell. “Have you got it straightened out?”
“Yes, now that Knapp has gone I guess it will run all right. Thank heavens, there’s one department in the department-store business that’s prettywell standardized. That young expert accountant McKenzie and Blair sent on has straightened out the awful mess it was in. You can tell where you stand now without closing down and taking a month’s work to unravel the snarls. And I guess Bronson is young enough to keep it running. I’ll give him the chance anyway; he’s the livest wire on that side of the business if he is an awful roughneck! If he’ll come through, it’ll save time having to break somebody else in.”
“I rather think Mr. McCarthy may be good enough, too,” said Mrs. Willing. “Since you spoke about him, I’ve been watching his window displays. Of course they’re crude and he’s a bit old. But he has temperament and if you took him with you a time or two on buying trips to New York to let him look at the real thing and bought him a good modern manual on window-dressing—poor thing! I don’t suppose he dreams there are books on his subject....”
Her husband grunted. “Yes, there’s stuff in him. He’s pretty red-headed and touchy, but there never was a good window-dresser yet that wasn’t as prickly and unreasonable as a teething baby. We’d have to put up with that from any one who had the temperament to do the work the way it ought to be done. But that’s aboutallthe temperament I can stand. Thank the Lord, I won’t have to put upwith a professional buyer. The more I think of it the more I’m sure I want to keep the buying in my own hands, every bit of it—unlessyouwant to come along sometimes, of course. But no highly paid expert buyers in mine! You know them as well as I do. Did you ever see one that wasn’t domineering and stuck on himself and dead sure he never made a mistake in his life?”
“Never!” Nell burned with a resentment of as long a date and as hot as her husband’s. “Never!What always made me the tiredest about them was the way they blamed everything on the selling force or the advertising office. If the goods didn’t move, was it evertheirfault? Not once in a million times. It was because the salespeople couldn’t sell or the ad.-writers couldn’t write.”
“And yet look at the times they get suckered into buying a carload of what everybody knew was lemons, only we mustn’t let on, for fear of hurting their sacred temperamental feelings! No, by George, none of that in mine! I feel like sending up a Hallelujah when I think I’ll never have to baby one of them again and smooth him down and calm his nerves. I’ve had the experience and training to handle that whole thing for myself. And I’m going to do it!”
A gong boomed pleasantly behind him. “Dinner,” said Nell, getting up from her desk.
He threw away what was left of his cigar and went into the comfortable dining-room, his appetite whetted by the odor of steak, onions and fried potatoes.
“I bought a case of that near-beer Wertheimer’s has,” said his wife, uncorking and pouring out a foaming brown glassful. “I can’t see that it’s not just as good as it ever was.”
“Yes, tastes pretty good to me to-night, that’s sure,” said Jerome, taking a long drink and smiling as he cut into the thick steak. His wife let him alone while he took the sharpest edge off his appetite. She herself had often come in after working overtime in an office! But as he started in on a second round of everything, she said, “It’ll be a surprise for the old store, won’t it, to have somebody reallybuyingfor it after the junk that’s been loaded onto its shelves?”
“Uncle Charley,” pronounced Jerome, “never got beyond the A. T. Stewart 1872 notion of stocking up four times a year with ‘standard goods.’” They both laughed at the old phrase.
“Standard goods!” said Nell. “How funny it sounds! When you can’t sell a button the year after it’s made nowadays!”
“I justhope,” said Jerome, “I just hope to the Lord that some of that gang of crooks who used to sell Uncle Charley try to work the same game onme just once! Where in the world did theygetthe out-of-the-ark junk they used to work off on him? Must have had it stored in a barn somewhere!”
His wife thought silently that now, after he had eaten and was beginning on his pie, with a second cigar in prospect, perhaps she might get to the question she had really wanted to ask all along. “Did you see that young Crawford at Jordan Marsh’s?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Jerome.
And Nell knew that for some reason it was all off. “Won’t he do?” she said in disappointment. “Youdoneed a store superintendent so awfully if you’re going to be away on buying trips.”
“Well, it’s better to wait and get the right person than rush in and take somebody who’d gum the whole works. Oh, nothing wrong with Crawford. He’s a comer. But the more I talked with him the surer I was that he wouldn’t fit. Nobody like him would fit into the organization the way we want it. That corking slogan of yours says it all—‘The Homelike Store.’ Well, no smooth, big-city proposition like Crawford could be homelike, not in a thousand years. He wouldn’t want to be. He wouldn’t see the point. He’d be too smart for the town. He wouldn’t go to church. He’d play golf on Sundays. He wouldn’t belong to any of the societies or clubs. He’d drive a snappy runaboutand beat it off to the city. The long and the short of it is that he’d be bored by the town and show it.”
Nell saw all that. She nodded her head. She tried to imagine him at a church supper in the basement of the First Congo Church—and gave it up.
“Worse than that, it came to me,” said Jerome, “that any man with pep enough for the job would have too much pep. He’d want to look forward to being taken into the business. And I don’t want any partner but you. This isourstore! But leave that alone. He wouldn’t know how to handle the girls. He’d be used to flip, knowing, East-side tenement-house kids. How would he get along with our small-town American high-school graduates who’re as good as anybody and know it? He might try to get gay with them—you haven’t forgotten Ritchie at Burnham’s? None of that forourstore. We’ve got little girls of our own—and besides in a little place like this scandal gets round so quick and people take it so personally.”
“But you’ve got to have somebody. There are some pretty keen business women,” suggested his wife. “Why not try one of them—they give more value for the same salary. They stick to their work and don’t make trouble. Mostly they have tact enough not to antagonize the customers. Don’t you think the business could afford one of the really good ones?”
“It can afford pretty much any salary for the right party. Nothing’s too good for our store, Nell! Yes, I’d rather have a woman any day. I’ve thought about one or two of the best I know. They’re good, good as the best—wear the right sort of quiet clothes, don’t make a noise, always on the job, and they’d never make a row about not being taken into the firm. Yes, I like the idea of a woman for store manager—but—well—none of the ones I can think of are exactly right. They don’t quite stand for the idea I’ve got for the business, don’t make the personal friendly appeal. You know how they are—quiet enough and efficient enough, but they’ve got the big-town label plastered all over them, with their smart clothes and their permanent waves and their voices going up and down the scale. Half our customers would be afraid of them. And you hate people you are afraid of. I suppose a woman like that woulddo, but I’d rather wait a while to see if better material doesn’t come along. I want somebody the customers would think of as one ofthemselves.”
“Yes, of course that would be better,” acquiesced Nell. “But you have to take what you can get. Are you sure there’s nobody in the store?”
“I’ve been over the selling force with a fine-toothed comb. There’s nobody there who can go higher than floor manager. Miss Flynn, the head ofthe Cloak-and-Suits, is the nearest. She’s a wise old bird, with lots of experience. But she plays favorites with her girls, picks on certain ones for no special reason and protects others, no matter what they do. That’s the Irish of it. More temperament!”
“I suppose, anyhow, it’s always better policy to get an outsider. It means less friction. But it does seem as though we ought to be able to find some one in this town, some one who’s respected and liked by the people here.”
“If we could, she’d draw all the women into the store after her, as though they were her sisters and her cousins, especially if it was somebody known as a good buyer already. There are always some such in any community. We’d want a woman old enough to take care of herself but young enough to have all her physical stamina left, a nice woman, a first-rater, who could learn and grow into the job. Isn’t it exasperating how, when you have a grand opening like that for just the right person, you can’t lay your hand on her!”
“I could do it myself,” said Nell, “even although all my training has been in the ad. department. I know I could.”
“You could walk away with it, Nell. But we need you for the advertising, and besides that job would take you away from home all the time. Andof course somebody has to be here for the children.”
“No, I’d never consent to leave the children,” said Nell. “I didn’t really mean it. I was just thinking what fun it would be if there were two of me.”
“I wish there were!” said her husband, fervently.
“On second thought, I’m not at all sureIdo!” she said, laughing.
They went back now into the living-room and sank down in armchairs, Nell with a cigarette. She had looked first to be sure that the curtains were down so that she was not visible from the street. “No,” said Jerome, “we’d better not consider either of us taking it. It would be a waste not to stick to the lines we’ve been trained for. I suppose it’s just a pipe dream to think I can find exactly the right person. But you can bet your last cent I won’t tie up for any long contract to anybody who isn’t exactly the right person. I’ve got a hunch that some day the right one will walk into the store and let me lasso her. And I’ve faith enough in my hunch to believe I’ll know her when I see her, and....”
“Isn’t that the ’phone?” asked his wife, suspending her cigarette in mid-air.
“Oh, Lord! I hope not, just when we’re settled for the evening!” cried her husband.
“I’ll answer it,” she said, going out into the hall.
When she came back she looked grave. “Oh, Jerome, what do you think? That Mr. Knapp hasjust had a terrible accident, they say. Fell off a roof and killed himself.”
Jerome’s impulse was to cry out blamingly, “Isn’t that just like him! Why couldn’t he choose some other time!” But he repressed this decently. “Well, what do you think we ought to do?” he asked Nell.
He was frightfully tired. The idea of stirring out of his chair appalled him. But he wanted to establish a tradition in the town that the store looked after its employees like a father.
She hesitated. “Let me run upstairs and start the children to bed. I believe we’d better go around to their house and offer to do anything we can to help out.”