A Stranger on the Monday

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town a householder who had engaged a man to work indoors did not lie awake over the money, settled in four minutes at her own door. She lay awake over the Monday morning, which nobody had mentioned at all.

Two paperhangers in the old town, the same paste and the same patterns.
Both measured a widow's parlour in the same wet week and both wrote eleven shillings.
Both meant to send a journeyman and keep their own hands for the Grange.
One left the question of whose hands they would be where he found it, nowhere.
One wrote four lines at the foot of his estimate on that subject alone.
Same paste, same pattern, same eleven shillings. Why did one get the parlour and the stairs besides?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

The trade is paperhanging, and in the town I have never named it was a trade of one man and a journeyman. Paste mixed the night before of flour and alum, a trestle carried in on the shoulder, and the silence of a man matching a pattern across a chimney breast.

Two of them measured the same sort of room that week and there was nothing to choose between them. The first made a widow's parlour four drops and an awkward return by the window, and wrote eleven shillings, the paper found by her. He was good company and knew his trade. She engaged him on the spot.

On the Monday a man she had never seen in her life knocked with a trestle under his arm.

He was civil, and the better hanger of the two, eleven years at it. But she had not been told he was coming, and so did not know whether to offer him tea, or whether to mention that the chimney breast had been damp in the spring. She sat in the kitchen with the door shut and listened to a stranger move about her parlour for seven hours. The work was good.

She never had him again. Asked who had done it, she said a man had come and it had been all right, which was all she could say.

The second man measured a parlour two streets over and reached the same figure. Underneath it he wrote four lines. The hanging would be done by his man of nine years, who had hung the staircase at the Assembly Rooms, which she could walk past. His man would bring his own dust sheets, knock at eight, take his boots off on the step, and want one bucket of water and nothing else all day. And he himself would come on the first morning to see the first drop hung.

She engaged him, and on the Monday opened her door to a man she had already met on paper. She told him about the damp before he had his coat off. By the Wednesday she had asked what he wanted for the stairs, which she had not meant to have done that year, and that was nineteen shillings more. She gave the master's name to two neighbours, and was able, which is the point, to tell them something when she gave it.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A customer does not buy your trade, she buys the pair of hands she believes is coming, and if that is not the pair that knocks you have broken a promise you never knew you made. The rest of this letter is that sentence with its workings shown.

Be fair to the first man, who told no lies. He never said he would hang the paper himself. He said nothing on the subject at all. But a man who comes alone, measures alone and writes the estimate in his own hand has put one picture into the householder's mind and left no other there, and an assumption you have not corrected is one you are trading on.

Count what it cost him, which was not the job, since he got the job. It cost him the damp, unmentioned because she would not interrupt a stranger. It cost him the stairs, further work being asked for by a customer grown comfortable, and nobody is comfortable with a stranger. And it cost him the recommendation, for a customer lends you her own good name and cannot lend it on an interval of noise behind a kitchen door.

Mark what the second man wrote, and more particularly what he did not. He did not praise his man, praise from a master being what a master would say of anybody. He wrote what could be checked by Monday night: nine years, a staircase she could look at, boots off at the step. Conduct promised in that much detail is conduct that turns up.

He also sold the part of the week she was anxious about, since the week your customer must live through is what she is really weighing. Nobody in your trade counts that day as part of the sale. The customer thinks of nothing else between the yes and the knock.

There is a further gain, and the greater. A trade in which only the master can be trusted has one pair of hands for sale however many it employs. Name your man and invite inspection, and you move a portion of your standing onto him; after a year he has standing of his own and work sells while you are three miles off. The master who keeps his journeyman out of sight is arranging that every sale will need him in the room. It will be objected that this invites the customer to ask for you instead. Some will, which is worth knowing, since it prices your hands against his. Most will not. What a customer wants is not your hands in particular but evidence that somebody has thought about whose hands they will be.

Two cautions. Do not name a man you may swap, a named man who fails to appear being worse than no name at all, since you have then broken something stated. And do not sell your own hands and send anybody's. A customer who finds one thing arranged for your convenience will go back over the rest looking for the others.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. Who did the last five jobs I sold? Put a name against each. If your own is against fewer than half, your estimates describe work you do not do.
2. What can be said of my man that a customer could check by Monday night? Years at the trade, a job she could walk past, the things he does unasked. Praise is not admissible, particulars are.
3. What happens in the first ten minutes in a stranger's house? Boots, sheets, the rug, what he needs and what he will never ask for. Settle it once, write it in six lines, send it on ahead.

The Answer to the Riddle

Same paste, same pattern, same eleven shillings. Why did one get the parlour and the stairs besides?

Because one sold the paper and the other sold the man. The price was identical, so the price decided nothing. What remained was whether a woman living alone would have a known man in her parlour on the Monday or a stranger, and only one of them made his man known beforehand.

The verse:

Your figure was matched to the penny, and so
were the paste and the pattern and all,
But she never lay wondering over the price,
She lay wondering who would call.

Until next time. Go and write at the foot of your next estimate the name of the man who will do the work, his years at it, and two things he will do before he begins.

P.S. Name your man and you may name yourself in the same breath: eleven shillings for my man on the Monday, fourteen for my own hands in three weeks. Most take the Monday, which is the answer you wanted, without argument, and the few who wait have told you what the difference between master and journeyman is worth.

Also in the archive: The Boy Minding the Shop, One Man to Ask and The Drawing He Promised.