“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 something like to 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, holding everything 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 what anybody 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 who did do their 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 dismissing is throwing 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 never be 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.”