The Hide Already Cut

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, two saddlers hung the same conditions on the same sort of card, and only one of them spent his week defending them.

Two saddlers in the town I have never named, the same hides and the same waxed thread.
Both asked half the money at the ordering, and both asked for the horse on a Tuesday morning.
Both wrote their conditions on a card and hung it where any customer could read it.
One of them argued at the counter two or three times a week, and often lost.
The other was hardly ever argued with, and his card was the longer of the two.
Same hides, same conditions, same hand. What was on the longer card?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Both men could make a saddle that lasted thirty years. Either could pick a hide from a pile by the feel of the butt and stuff a panel so evenly that a horse came back from twenty miles with the hair on his back lying flat. Their shops stood a quarter mile apart on the same road, both smelling of wax and oak bark, and their prices were within a shilling of each other.

Their conditions were the same too, and both had come by them honestly, which is to say by being caught. Half the money at the ordering. The horse in on a Tuesday morning for the tree to be fitted. The finished saddle collected within the week. Nothing taken back once stitched to a particular animal.

The first saddler wrote these four lines on a card in a good round hand and hung it by the door, and there he left the matter. He held, and I have heard sensible men hold it since, that a condition explained is a condition half withdrawn. Give your reasons and you invite a man to weigh them, and a man weighing them has already begun to bargain.

So he stated the thing plainly and stood behind it, and it cost him the best part of a day a week. The farmer from the top of the hill who saw no cause to pay before he had a saddle under him. The man who came on the Thursday, having read Tuesday and thought it a preference. The young fellow who used a new saddle a month, brought it back with the panel shaped to his mare, and could not see why that should signify. He won most of these arguments at the counter, being right and being firm, in front of whoever else was in the shop. He was known up and down that road as a particular man to deal with, which brought him fewer easy customers and more of the sort who enjoy a contest.

The second saddler hung the same four conditions and wrote the reason after each, in the same hand. Half at the ordering, because the hide is cut to one horse's measure and cannot be sold to another man. The horse on a Tuesday morning, because a tree is fitted by eye and the light at the back of the shop is good only until noon. Collection within the week, because a saddle on the rack is a hide and a fortnight of work doing nothing for anybody. Nothing taken back once stitched, because the panel is stuffed to one back and will sit crooked on any other.

The farmer from the top of the hill read that card while he waited, and paid his half without remark. He had not been overruled by a saddler. He had been told about a hide, and nobody can argue with a hide.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A condition that carries its reason is obeyed, and the same condition bare is tested. What changes is not the condition but what the customer takes it to be. A bare instruction reads as your preference, and a preference is a thing a man may reasonably ask you to set aside for him. He is not being difficult when he asks. He is doing what the card invites him to do, which is to find out how firm you are.

A reason moves the condition out of your will and into the circumstances of the work. When you refuse a man bare, the two of you are opposed and he can win by pressing. When the hide refuses him, you are on his side of the counter looking at the hide together, and there is no contest in the room because there is nobody to beat. Listen to a good tradesman at his best and you will hear it: not I cannot, but the work cannot, and here is why.

It is also why terms given with a reason collect less resentment than the same terms bare, on which see why a deposit is a decision. And it is the weaker half of a stronger principle, that a reason the customer has spoken himself persuades where yours can only be weighed. Your reason is second best. It is also the only one that works from a card by the door on a day you are out at a farm.

Two cautions. The first is that the reason must be true and survive being looked into. You will hear it said that the reason hardly matters, that a man will agree to a small thing if you merely put the word because in front of anything at all. There is something in that for trifles nobody examines, and nothing in it for a condition that costs money. That one he reads properly, and an invented reason does not merely fail, it takes your other three with it, since a man who has caught you once reads everything again. The second caution is that a reason is not an apology and must not be worded as one. Write it flat, as a fact of the work. The moment it opens with regret it stops explaining the condition and begins asking the customer to approve of it, which he will oblige you by considering.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. Which of my standing asks goes out bare? Write out everything you routinely ask a customer to do. Pay in advance. Be in on a certain morning. Clear the room before you arrive. Half will carry no reason, because you know the reason so well you have forgotten it was ever news.
2. Is my reason about the work or about me? The test is whether the customer would nod at it standing in your shop. That the hide is cut and cannot be sold again, he will nod at. Your want of money this month he will not, nor should he, that being yours to arrange.
3. Which of my conditions cannot be given a true reason at all? There is usually one, taken on after a bad job years ago or copied from a bigger firm, and when you sit down to write the because after it nothing honest comes. Mend it or drop it this week.

The Answer to the Riddle

Same hides, same conditions, same hand. What was on the longer card?

The reasons. Four of them, one after each condition, twenty words apiece. The longer card was the quicker to read, because it answered the question the shorter one provoked, and answered it at the door, before the customer ever reached the counter.

The verse:

Two cards hung in two saddle shops, the conditions much the same,
One gave the rule and nothing more and argued out its claim,
One set the hide, the light, the back behind each line it framed,
And no man reading that one found a soul in it to blame.

Until next time. Go and take the one condition you defend most often, and write its reason on the same line.

P.S. The order matters more than you would think. Put the condition first and the reason after it, never the other way about. A reason that arrives first reads as a plea, and by the time the condition appears the customer has taken it for the thing you were driving at all along. The fact, then the ground it stands on.

Also in the archive: Made for a Colder Winter, The Old Price Until Lady Day and The Single Errand.