THE MAN THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN
I
In the tame little town of Hillsdale he seemed the tamest thing of all, Will Rudd—especially appropriate to a kneeling trade, a shoe clerk by election. He bent the pregnant hinges to anybody soever that entered the shop, with its ingenious rebus on the sign-board:
He not only untied the stilted Oxfords or buttoned in the arching insteps of those who sat in the "Ladies' and Misses' Dept.," which was the other side of the double-backed bench whose obverse was the "Gents' Dept.," but also he took upon the glistening surface of his trousers the muddy soles of merchants, the clay-bronzed brogans of hired men, the cowhide toboggans of teamsters, and the brass-toed, red-kneed boots of little boys ecstatic in their first feel of big leather.
Rudd was a shoe clerk to be trusted. He never revealed to a soul that Miss Clara Lommel wore shoes two sizes too small, and when she bit her lip and blenched with agony as he pried her heel into the protesting dongola, he seemed not to notice that she was no Cinderella.
And one day, when it was too late, and Miss Lucy Posnett, whose people lived in the big brick mansard, realized that she had a hole in her stocking, what did Rudd do? Why, he never let on.
Stanch Methodist that he was, William Rudd stifled in petto the fact that the United Presbyterian parson's wife was vain and bought little, soft black kids with the Cuban heel and a patent-leather tip to the opera toe! The United Presbyterian parson himself had salved his own vanity by saying that shoes show so plainly on the pulpit, and it was better to buy them a trifle too small than a trifle too large, but—umm!—er, hadn't you better put in a little more of that powder, Mr. Rudd? I have on—whew!—unusually thick socks to-day.
Clay Kittredge, Rudd's employer, valued him, secretly, as a man who brought in customers and sold them goods. But he never mentioned this to his clerk lest Rudd be tempted to the sin of vanity, and incidentally to demanding an increase in that salary which had remained the same since he had been promoted from delivery-boy.
Kittredge found that Rudd kept his secrets as he kept everybody's else. Professing church member as he was, Rudd earnestly palmed off shopworn stock for fresh invoices, declared that the obsolete Piccadillies which Kittredge had snapped up from a bankrupt sale were worn on all the best feet on Fifth Avenoo, and blandly substituted "just as good" for advertised wares that Kittredge did not carry.