As they stepped quickly along in the dark, they tried to piece together
the chronology of the late afternoon for Knapp and decided that this
tragic ending to his feeble life must have come even before he could
have seen his wife to tell her of his dismissal from the store. “I’m so
glad of _that_!” said Nell Willing, softly. “Now she need never know.”
Her husband gave a hearty inward assent. It was the devil anyhow to be
so intimately concerned in other people’s lives as an employer was.
They found the little house alight from top to bottom, and full of
people, whispering, moving about restlessly and foolishly, starting
and turning their heads at any noise from upstairs. An old woman, who
said she was the Knapps’ next-door neighbor and most intimate friend,
stopped crying long enough to tell them in a loud whisper that the
doctor said Mr. Knapp was still alive, but unconscious, and dying from
an injury to the spine. The children, she said, had been taken away
by a sort of relative, Mrs. Mattie Farnham, who would keep them till
the funeral. Asked about Mrs. Knapp, she replied that Mrs. Knapp was
with the doctor and her dying husband and was, as always, a marvel of
self-possession and calm. “As long as there’s anything to do, Mrs.
Knapp will be right there to do it,” she said. “She’s a wonderful
woman, Mrs. Knapp is.”
The Willings sat for a time, awkwardly waiting, with the other people
awkwardly waiting, and then went away, leaving behind them a card on
which Jerome had penciled the request to be allowed to be useful in
any way possible “to the family of a highly respected member of the
Emporium staff.”
As they walked home through the darkness, they exchanged impressions.
“That old neighbor’s head is just like a snake’s, didn’t you think?”
said Jerome.
“She seemed very sympathetic, I thought,” said Nell extenuatingly.
“She did seem to think a lot of Mrs. Knapp,” admitted Jerome.
“All the women in St. Peter’s do,” said Nell. “Mrs. Prouty says she
doesn’t know what they would do in parish work if it weren’t for Mrs.
Knapp. She’s one of the _workers_, you know. And a good headpiece too.”
“I imagine she’s had to develop those qualities or starve to death,”
conjectured Jerome, forgetting for an instant that the man he was
criticizing lay at the point of death.
The memory of this kept them silent for a moment and then Nell asked,
“Did you notice that living-room?”
“You bet your life I did,” said her husband with a lively professional
interest. “The only living-room I’ve seen in this town that had any
style to it. Did you see that sofa? And those curtains?”
“They say she’s a wonderful housekeeper. The kind who stays right at
home and sticks to her job. You never see her out except at church.”
“No, I don’t believe I’ve ever laid eyes on her,” said Jerome.
“And people are always talking about how beautifully her children are
brought up. With real manners, you know. And such perfect ways at
table. How _do_ you suppose she does it?”
“What _did_ she ever see in Knapp?” Jerome cast out the age-old
question with the invariable, ever-fresh accent of amazement which
belongs with it.
“Oh, they married very young,” said thirty-year-old Mrs. Willing
wisely. “I believe he hadn’t finished his course at the State
University. He was specializing in English literature.”
“He _would_!” ejaculated Jerome, pregnantly.
His wife laughed. And then they both remembered again that the man was
dying.
When they heard through Dr. Merritt that poor Lester Knapp would not
die but would be a bed-ridden invalid, a dead-weight on his wife, the
Willings along with everybody else in town were aghast at the fatal way
in which bad luck seems to heap up on certain unfortunate beings.
“That poor wife of his! What has she ever done to deserve such a tragic
life!” cried young Mrs. Willing pityingly.
“For the Lord’s sake, what’s going to keep them from being dependent on
public charity?” thought Jerome, apprehensively.
He sent up to the house with a tactfully worded letter a check for
a hundred dollars, saying he thought the store was under a real
obligation to its faithful employee of long standing. “But,” he
thought, “you can’t keep that sort of help up forever.”
“I needn’t have worried!” he told himself the next morning, when
he found his check returned with a short, well-written expression
of thanks, but of unwillingness to accept help which could only be
temporary. “We shall have to manage, somehow, sooner or later,”
the letter ran. It was signed Evangeline Knapp. “What a fool name,
Evangeline!” thought the young merchant, somewhat nettled by the
episode.
After this he was away on a buying expedition that lasted longer than
he intended, and when he came home they had a set-to with leaking
steam-pipes in the store. He thought nothing more of the Knapps till,
meeting Dr. Merritt on the street, he remembered to ask for news. Knapp
was better now, he heard, suffering less atrociously, with periods of
several hours of relative quiet. There had been no actual fracture of
the spinal bones, but the spinal cord seemed affected, probably serious
effusion of blood within the spinal canal, with terrible nervous shock.
How doctors do run on about their cases if you get them started! Mr.
Willing cut short any more of this sort of medical lingo by asking to
be told in plain terms if the man would ever walk again.
“Probably not,” said Dr. Merritt, “though he will reach the wheel-chair
stage and perhaps even crutches. Still, you never can be sure....
But he is not a robust man, you know. I told you about his obstinate
dyspepsia. I never saw a worse case.”
Mr. Willing’s healthy satisfied face expressed the silent disgust of
a strong, successful man for a weak and unsuccessful one. “What in
hell are they going to _do_?” he inquired. He added, blamingly, “Three
children! Lord!”
Dr. Merritt found nothing to answer and went on, looking grave. He had
helped all three children into the world, had worn himself out over the
two older ones in their constantly recurring maladies, and felt for
them the tenderness and affection we have for those who have given us
much anxiety.
* * * * *
Jerome Willing was sitting at his office-desk, but he was not working.
He was dreaming. Into the quiet of his office filtered a hum of
activity exquisite to his ears, the clicking of billing-machines,
the whirr of parcel-carriers, the sound of customers’ voices, buying
merchandise. Out there the store was smoothly functioning, supplying
modern civilization to ten thousand men and women. And it was _his_
store! Not only did he reap the profit--that was a small part of his
pleasure. It was his personality which gave all those people the
opportunity to satisfy their needs, that was educating them to desire
better things. He called that a pretty fine way of doing your share in
raising the American standard of living. It was a whale of a job to get
it into shape, too. What a mess the business had got into during the
stagnant passivity of the last ten years of poor Uncle Charley’s life.
It was a wonder that so much as four walls and a roof were left.
Well, that just showed what an unheard-of favorable position it had,
the old store. It hung on and kept alive like a rugged old lilac bush
that you’d tried to cut down. What wouldn’t it do, now that it had
somebody to water it and enrich it--somebody who cared more about it
than about anything else in the world? And somebody who had the right
training, the right experience and information to do the job. That was
what had struck him most forcibly during the last six months, when he
had been walking round and round his new work, getting ready to take
hold of it. He saw that there was wonderful opportunity not only for
him, but just as wonderful for the store. And to take advantage of it
every scrap of his knowledge of business would come in, all that he
had picked up at trade conventions, what he’d learned out of books on
administration, above all, every hour of experience. Yes, every one,
from his first bewildered week as a salesman to the later years of the
intoxicating battle of personalities in the Market, when on his weekly
buying trips to New York, he had gone the round of the wholesalers,
comparing values, noting styles, making shrewdly hidden calculations,
keeping an inscrutable face before exquisite things that made him cry
out inwardly with admiration, misleading buyers from other stores,
keeping his own counsel, feeling his wits moving swiftly about inside
his skull with the smooth, powerful purr of a high-class motor. If he
could do all that just to be in the game, just to measure up to other
buyers, what couldn’t he do now!
What a half-year he had had! What a wonderful time he and Nell had
put in together in this period of waiting and preparation. No matter
how fine the realization might be, he was old enough to know that
nothing could ever be for them like this period of creative planning
when, moving around his problem, he had studied it, concentrated on it
and felt that he had the solution in his own brain and personality.
It fitted him! It was his work! It was like something in a book,
like a missionary going out into the field, like a prophet looking
beyond the veil of the present. Yes, that was what it was--he looked
through to the future, right past what was there, the little halting
one-horse affair, with its meager force of employees, so many of them
superannuated, others of good stuff, but in the wrong places, all of
them untrained and uninformed, dull, listless, bored, without a notion
of what a fascinating job they had. He had looked through them and had
seen the store he meant to have by the time he was forty-five; for he
knew enough to look far ahead, to take his time, to build slowly and
surely. There it stood, almost as plain to his eye as the poor thing
that now took its place. He saw a big, shining-windowed building, the
best in all that part of the state, with eighty or a hundred employees,
trained, alert, on their toes, sure of their jobs, earning big money,
developing themselves, full of personality and zip, as people can be
only when they are in work they’re meant for and have been trained for.
It would never be what a man from the city would call a _big_ business.
He never wanted it so big that he couldn’t keep his hand on it all. It
would be _his_ business, rather than a big one. But at that, he saw
now, especially with Nell getting a salary for doing the advertising,
it would bring them in more income than anybody else in town dreamed of
having. They could live as they pleased as far as spending went. Not
that that was the important part,--but still a very agreeable one.
He was sure of all this, sure! By God, he couldn’t fail! The cards were
stacked for him. A prosperous town, just the right size; good-will and
a monopoly of trade that ran back for forty years; no big city within
fifty miles--why, even the trains providentially ran at hours that were
inconvenient for people who wished to go to the city to shop. And no
rivals worth mentioning; nobody he couldn’t put out of business inside
ten years. He thought again, as he had so many times, how miraculous
it was that in the ten years since Uncle Charley had lost his grip, no
Jew merchant had cut in to snatch the rich heart out of the situation.
Nobody could do that now. He had the jump on the world.
With half-shut eyes he let himself bask for a few minutes in this
glorious vision; then, picking up his hat and overcoat he left the
office and, alert to every impression behind his pleasant mask of
affability, moved down between household linens and silk goods to the
front door and stepped out into the street. He had seen out of the tail
of his eye how that Boardman girl was making a mess of showing lining
silks to a customer, and made a mental note to call in Miss Atkinson,
the floor superintendent, and tell her to give the girl a lesson or two
on draping silks as you showed them and making sure that the price-tag
was where the customer could get the price without having to ask for it.
He was really on his way to the bank, but as he stood in the front
door, he saw that McCarthy was dressing a window for the sporting-goods
department and decided to go across the street to look at it. Jerome
was convinced that window-dressers never back far enough off from
their work, never get the total effect. Like everybody else they lose
themselves in details. He stepped across to the opposite side of the
street and stood there, mingling with the other passers-by.
As he looked back towards the store, he noticed a tall woman coming
rapidly down the street. His eye was taken at once by the quality of
her gait. He sometimes thought that he judged people more by the way
they walked than by any other standard. He always managed to get a
would-be employee to walk across the room before taking her on. This
tall, dark-haired woman in the well-made dark coat had just the sort
of step he liked to see, vigorous and swift, and yet unhurried. He
wondered who she was.
He saw her slow her pace as she approached the store and stand for
a moment looking in at McCarthy fussing with his baseball bats and
bicycle-lamps. She really looked at him, too, as few people ever look
at anything, as if she were thinking about what she was looking at,
and not about something in her own head. He had a good view of her
face now, a big-featured, plain face that looked as though she might
be bad-tempered but had plenty of motive-power. She was perhaps forty
years old. He wondered what she was thinking about McCarthy.
She turned into the store now. Oh, she was a customer. Well, she was
one they wanted to give satisfaction to. He stepped back across the
street and into the store to make sure that the salesperson to whom
she addressed herself was attentive. But she was nowhere to be seen.
Perhaps she had gone directly upstairs.
He went along the aisle, casting as he went that instinctively
attentive look of his on the notions and ribbons, and up the stairs to
the mezzanine floor where his office was. He meant to leave his hat and
coat there and go on in search of the new customer. He heard a woman’s
voice inside the accounting-room saying, “Will you tell me, please,
where Mr. Willing’s office is.”
He knew in a moment, without seeing her, that the voice belonged to the
woman he had seen. That was the kind of voice she _would_ have.
“This is Mr. Willing,” he said, coming into the accounting-room behind
her. “Won’t you come with me?”
Arrived in his office, she took the chair to which he motioned her and
said at once, in a voice which he divined to be more tense than usual,
“This is Mrs. Lester Knapp, Mr. Willing. You said, you remember....
You wrote on a card that you would do something to help us. I thought
perhaps you could let me try to fill my husband’s place. We need the
money very much. I would do my best to learn.”
Mr. Willing had the sure prescience of a man whose antennæ are always
sensitive to what concerns his own affairs. He had an intuition that
something important was happening and drew himself hastily together to
get the best out of it for the business. First of all, to make talk and
have a chance to observe her, he expressed his generous sympathy and
asked in detail about poor Knapp. He assured her that he was more than
willing to help her in any way to reconstruct their home-life and said
he was in no doubt whatever that they could find a place for her in the
business, though not in Mr. Knapp’s old place. “That office is entirely
reorganized and there are no vacancies. But in the sales department,
Mrs. Knapp. There are always opportunities there. And for any one with
a knack for the work, much better pay. Of course, like all beginners,
you would have to begin at the bottom and learn the business.”
She answered in a trembling voice, with an eagerness he found pitiful,
that she was quite willing to start anyhow, do anything, for a chance
to earn.
He guessed that she had been horribly afraid of him, had heard perhaps
from her husband that he was hard and cold, had dreaded the interview,
and was now shaken by the extremity of her relief. He liked the gallant
way she had swung straight into what she had feared.
To give her time to recover her self-control, he turned away from her
and fumbled for a moment in his drawer to get out an employment blank,
and then, as he held it in his hand and looked at its complicated
questions, he realized that it was another of the big-city devices that
did not hit his present situation. It would be foolish to give it to
this woman, with its big-city rigmarole of inquiry,--“Give the last
three places you worked; the address in full of last three employers;
what was your position; reason for leaving,” etc., etc. He put it back
in the drawer and instead asked the question to which he already knew
the answer, “You have, I suppose, had no experience at all in business?”
But after all, he did not know the answer, it seemed, for she said,
“Oh, yes, before I was married. My father keeps the biggest store in
Brandville, up in the northern part of the state. It’s only a general
store of course. Brandville is a small place. But I used to help him
always. I liked it. And Father always made a good thing out of the
business.”
Jerome was delighted, “Why, that’s the best sort of training,” he told
her. “I always maintain that country-store methods are the ideal: where
you know every customer personally, and all about their tastes and
needs and pocketbooks. Did you really work there? Sell goods?”
“Yes, indeed. From the time I was a little girl--after school in
the afternoons and in vacation time. Father had a special little
step-ladder made for me so that I could carry it around and climb up
to the shelves. I am the only child, you know. Father was proud that I
liked to work with him.”
The vivid expression of her face as she told him of this childhood
memory made Jerome Willing wonder that he could have thought she looked
bad tempered. She looked like a live wire, that was all. And they
never, in the nature of things, looked like feather beds.
“Well ...” he said, to give himself time to think. “Well....” He pulled
an official-looking loose-leafed book over to him and began looking
through it as though its contents had some connection with placing
the applicant before him. But as a matter of fact the book contained
nothing but some of his old reports from the Burnham days. He was
turning over in his mind the best way to handle the situation. Should
he put her in a slow-moving department like furniture or jewelry till
she got used to things? That was the safe, conservative way. But he
didn’t believe in the safe and conservative if a chance to move faster
looked good. And at that it wouldn’t be much of a chance. If she didn’t
pan out, he could move her back into the table linen, and no harm done.
He looked at her keenly to see the effect of his announcement. “I
believe the thing for you,” he said, “is the Ladies’ Cloak-and-Suit
department. I can put you right in as stock-girl till you get the
hang of things. I always think stock-girl work is the finest sort of
training for salesmanship.”
He saw by her expression that she did not know what a stock-girl was,
that she did not realize what a privilege it was to be put at once in
the coveted Cloak-and-Suits. But she rose at once. He liked the way
she stood up, with one thrust of her powerful body. That was the way he
liked to have salespeople get up, alertly, when a customer came in. It
expressed willingness to serve and strength to give good service. The
sale was half made, right there, he told his salespeople.
“I could go to work to-day,” she said. “I didn’t know ... I hoped ...
perhaps. I put on a black dress to be ready in case you might have....”
By George! She was ready to step right into it this minute. She slipped
off her well-cut cloak and showed a severe black serge dress.
“Why, yes, if you like,” he said negligently. She took off her hat
showing magnificent dark hair, streaked with gray.
He said casually, as if making talk, “I happened to see you watching
our window-dresser at work as you came in. What was your impression of
what he was doing?”
She said seriously, reflectively, “Well, Mr. McCarthy always seems to
me to put too many things in his windows. I’ve thought a good many
times that if he chose his things with more care and had fewer it might
catch the eye better.”
“Well, Great Scott!” said Mr. Willing to himself in extreme surprise.
Aloud he said impassively, “We haven’t talked wages yet. Stock-girls
only get ten dollars a week to begin with, you know.”
“That is a great deal better than nothing,” she said firmly. “We have a
few savings that will keep us going till I can get a start. And perhaps
I may learn the business fairly quickly.”
“You bet your life you will,” said the proprietor of the store
inaudibly. Aloud he said, “The cloakroom for salespeople is at the
other end of the second floor. If you’ll put your things there and come
back here, I’ll take you to your department and introduce you to Miss
Flynn.”
* * * * *
When Jerome Willing came back to his office he stood for a while
motionless, frowning down at his desk. “Yes, of course it was
preposterous,” he told himself. He’d known her less than half an
hour--all the same he’d backed those crazy hunches of his before--it
had paid him to play his hunches! And if something like that _did_
pan out ... he fell once more into a reverie. She was just the kind
of woman he was looking for, mature, with a local following, somebody
the women of the town trusted. He could hear their voices plain, “Ask
Mrs. Knapp to step here a minute, won’t you please? She has such good
taste, I’d trust her judgment....” And she’d be tied up so tight with
a sick husband and family of children there’d be no chance of some
one snatching her away and marrying her just after he’d taught her
the job. It would be _fun_ to teach somebody who wanted to learn.
Creative work--it always came back to that if you were going to do
anything first-rate. You took raw material and shaped it with your own
intelligence. If only she might be the raw material! If she turned
out to have only a little capacity to study and get information out
of books as well as the character and personality he was pretty sure
she had. Wilder dreams had come true. His thoughts ran on again to the
future of the store ... with a competent manager keeping the wheels and
cogs running smoothly ... with him to do the buying ... small lots at a
time ... every fortnight ... quick sales ... rapid turnovers that made
low profits possible. With Nell handling the advertising campaign as
only an intelligent college woman could, with just the right adaptation
of those smart modern methods of hers to this particular small town
they were serving. She was a first-rater, Nell was! It always had been
fun to work with her even before they were married! And what a lark to
work with her now! Good thing for Nell too! It had been asking a great
deal of a real, sure-enough business-woman like Nell to give it all up
for _Kinder_, _Küche_, and _Kirche_. Nell had been willing, had been
happy, had loved having the babies, had made them all happy. But now
the children were both going to school it stood to reason she’d find
time hang heavy on her hands, whip-stitch that she was! And life in a
small town was Hades if you didn’t have lots of work to do in spite of
the big lawns and comfortable roomy homes. As far as that went, life
anywhere was Hades if you didn’t have a job your size. You could see
Nell had thought of all that (though she had been too good a sport to
speak of it) by the way she had grabbed at this chance to get back into
the old work, the work she’d loved so, and done so well at Burnham’s.
Now if this Mrs. Knapp would only come through!
He brought himself up short again.... What a kid he was to let his
imagination reel it off like this--but a minute later he was thinking
how he and Nell would enjoy giving an apt pupil steers, showing her
how to use a microscope in fabric tests, how to know the right points
of a well-made garment, how to handle her girls as she got along to
executive work.... Oh, well, probably it was only a pipe dream--and he
knew enough to keep it to himself.
The clock in the National Bank opposite began striking. Jerome glanced
at it and saw with astonishment that the hands pointed to twelve
o’clock. Time to go home to lunch. As he got his hat and coat, he was
wondering whether he had wasted a forenoon or whether perhaps on the
contrary....