The home-maker

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

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?”