The Homemaker · Part II · Chapter 8 (1/2)

VIII

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 bedridden invalid, a deadweight 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 wheelchair 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; goodwill 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 passersby.

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 antennae 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 anyone 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.