The home-maker

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

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.