He stood gazing at it till a passerby jostled him in the dusk. “Well, well …” he shook his head with a long, satisfied sigh, “mustn’t stand mooning here; must get home to Nell and the little girls.”
As he walked up the pleasant street, between the double rows of well-kept front yards and comfortable homes, he was thinking for the thousandth time how lucky he was, lucky every way you looked at it. For one thing lucky just this minute in having an ex-business-woman for a wife. Nell would understand his falling head over ears into work that first day and a half of his return after an absence. She never pulled any of that injured-wife stuff, no matter how deep in business he got. Fact was, she was as deep as he, and liked to see him get his teeth into it. She surely was the real thing as a wife.
When he let himself into the front door of the big old house, he heard the kids racketing around upstairs cheerfully, with their dog, and was grateful, as he and Nell so often were, for the ease and freedom and wide margin of small-town life. It wasn’t in a New York flat that the children could raise merry hell like that, with nobody to object.
Through the open door he saw his wife’s straight, slim, erect back. She was in the room they had set apart for her “office,” and she was correcting a galley of proof, the ads for tomorrow’s papers.
“Hello there, Nell,” he cried cheerfully. “Got my head above water at last. I’m home for a real visit tonight.”
His wife laid down her fountain pen, turned around in her chair and smiled at him.
“That’s good,” she said. “What’s the news?” Although she saw that he looked haggard with fatigue, she made no comment on it.
“The news is, Mrs. Willing,” he said, bending over her for a kiss, “that I’ve got it just about all worked out.”
“Everything?” she said skeptically. “Even the bonus for the—”
“Pretty much! The store is surely tuning up! Give her a month to work the bearings in, and then watch our dust!”
They looked at each other happily, as he sat down in an armchair and leaned back with a long breath almost of exhaustion.
“Just like a dream, isn’t it, all of it?” said Nell.
“You’ve said it! When I remember how I used to hope that perhaps if we scrimped and saved we might be able to buy a part interest somewhere, after I’d put in the best years of my life working for other men! Doesn’t it make you afraid the alarm-clock will ring and wake you up any minute?”
“But did you really settle the bonus question for the non-selling force?” asked Mrs. Willing, returning relentlessly to the most difficult point.
“I worked it out by giving it up for the present,” he answered promptly.
She laughed. “Well, that’s one way.”
“I tell you, I’ve given up trying to make it all fit together like clockwork. Jobs in a store aren’t alike. Salespersons are one thing, and you can find out exactly what they’re worth in dollars and cents and pay them what they earn. But when they don’t sell, it’s different. What I’m going to do is to decide on basic wages for all the employees who don’t sell—just about enough to get along on. And then pull the really good work out of them with a bonus—I’ll call it a bonus. It’s really a sort of disguised fine for poor work. …”
“I wish you’d start at the beginning and get somewhere,” said his wife rigorously. “If I put woolly statements like that into my advertising copy. …”
“Well, here’s the idea. Take the delivery crews for example.—There’s only one of them now, of course, but there are going to be more soon. I offer them—oh, anything you like, twelve or fifteen dollars a week. That much they’re sure of until they’re fired, no matter how they do their work! ‘But if you do your work perfectly,’ I tell ’em, ‘there’s ten dollars a week more,’ or something like that—I haven’t made up my mind about the details. … ‘There’s ten dollars apiece for each of you if you get through the week with a perfect record.’—No, that doesn’t put emphasis enough on team spirit; I’ll make it ten or fifteen for the crew to divide—that’ll give them an incentive for jacking each other up. We put the money in dimes and quarters in a box with a glass cover where they can look at it. Then every time they run without oil, or with a dirty car, or lose a package, or let a friend ride with them, out comes a dollar or a quarter or fifty cents, depending on how serious the case may be. Don’t you just bet when they see their bonus shrinking before their eyes they’ll buck up and try? Of course I couldn’t use such a raw line with the better class—the accounting department, for instance, but something with the same idea.—By the way, that reminds me. I had to let Lester Knapp go—remember him? That dyspeptic gloom, second desk on the left as you go in.”
Mrs. Willing nodded. “I don’t know that I ever noticed him, but I’ve heard about him through the St. Peter’s women. I thought you said you could manage.”
“I never really thought that. I knew I couldn’t right along. But I tell you, Nell, the truth is I’m soft when it comes to telling folks they can go. I hate to do it! I kidded myself into thinking Knapp might buck up. But it wouldn’t do. For one thing Bronson can’t stand him and I’ve got to back up my heads of departments. They’ve got to like their help or they can’t get any work out of them.” He sat forward in his chair and began playing with his
