The Shilling She Would Not Take

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, in the winter when the assembly rooms were let three evenings a week, two dancing masters kept classes a street apart.

Two dancing masters, the same chalked boards, the same fiddler by the evening.
Both taught the quadrille at fifteen shillings a quarter, neither fashionable.
Both knew that nine pupils in ten came of one lady telling another.
One offered a shilling to any lady who sent him a new pupil.
One offered nothing, and sent word each quarter of how the child got on.
By spring, why had the shilling emptied the room it meant to fill?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two dancing masters in the town I've never named, their classes a street apart and both upstairs. The same chalked boards, the same fiddler at one and sixpence, fifteen shillings a quarter for a child in the quadrille. Neither was fashionable and both were patient with a clumsy girl. Nor did either get pupils by advertising. They got them at the butcher's counter, one mother asking another where her daughter had learned to hold herself like that.

The first master had his card printed in November. A shilling, it said, to any lady who sends a new pupil. The arithmetic was sound: a pupil stayed three quarters, which came to five and forty shillings, so a shilling to get one was the cheapest money he could spend.

There was a flurry in December, and then the winter went oddly. A lady who had sent him four pupils in three years was offered her shilling at the foot of the stairs with two other mothers standing by. She took it, refusing being the louder act, and never mentioned his class again. A second, asked by a neighbour whether the man was any good, could not get the sentence out plainly, the shilling standing in the way of it. A third sent everybody she met, two of them children whose mothers could not find the second quarter. By March his book held more names than the year before and his room fewer children, and the half dozen women who had furnished him with pupils for years had all, without conferring, stopped.

The second master offered nobody a penny. What he did was duller. At each quarter's end he wrote three or four lines to whoever had sent him the child, saying what she could now do that she could not at Michaelmas, and said he was obliged to her. A penny post, and an hour of a Sunday.

And he did one other thing, the part most trades get backwards. Any present pupil's mother could offer a friend her first quarter at twelve shillings instead of fifteen. The three shillings came off his takings and went to the newcomer, not to the woman who sent her. So a lady speaking for him was not paid for her trouble. She arrived at a friend's door with a small gift in her hand, which is pleasanter than being a tout.

He took fewer new names that year and had more children on the floor at Easter. The ending was not close.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A recommendation is believed only while the person making it has nothing to gain by it, so the moment you pay for one you have bought the words and spent the belief that made them worth having. What the listener weighs is not your work, of which she knows nothing, but the motive of the woman in front of her, of which she knows much. The same twelve words, in an advertisement and in a doorway, are not the same twelve words. In the doorway they are evidence, her own judgement staked for no return but the credit of being right. In print they are an argument, and arguments get inspected. A shilling moves her quietly from the one case to the other.

The second injury is to the person you paid. A thing done for nothing has no price and so no limit. Put a shilling on it and she learns what it is worth to you, which is a shilling, and that is less than her word in a doorway is worth to her. Some decline the trade and go quiet, as the six did. Others do it as badly paid work is always done, by volume and without discrimination, sending you people you cannot serve. That cost arrives as names in the book, looking like success.

The test for whether a reward has crossed the line is whether the person recommended to would be comfortable knowing of it. An architect's commission passes, the relationship being known and priced. A shilling slipped to a neighbour must be kept from the one person whose belief you rely on, and what works only while hidden is not working, it is borrowed.

You will be told the schemes plainly work, large firms running them and counting results. Some do. Where the recommending was public and cheap anyway, a code passed among strangers, nobody takes it for private counsel and no standing is lent, so there is nothing to spoil. Where your trade lives on one woman telling another in a doorway, that counsel is the whole asset, and the shilling comes out of it.

What to do instead is not complicated. Put the benefit on the far side of the table, as the second master did, so the recommender gains only the pleasure of a good turn done. Repay her in standing rather than coin, and do not leave the person who vouched for you waiting to hear. Then ask for one person rather than anybody, which is a request a friend can perform.

Two cautions. This is no argument for meanness, the commonest fault in small trades being not that they buy recommendations but that they take them for nothing and say nothing. A present at Christmas, unasked and not reckoned per head, is a different creature from a tariff set in advance. And do not assume the doorways are full of people speaking for you. A true count of what your customers do will tell you whether you have word of mouth at all, and if none, no scheme will manufacture it.

Three questions, about the way your own work arrives:

1. Which of your arrangements would have to be concealed? Take each way you reward an introduction and ask whether the person introduced would be easy knowing of it. Whatever fails spends belief to buy names.
2. Who sent you work last year, and what did they get? Write the names out of the book. If the answer against each is nothing, you take the most valuable thing in your trade for free.
3. What does the friend gain by being sent to you? If nothing, each recommendation is a favour asked of a friend rather than done for her, and people are sparing with those.

The Answer to the Riddle

By spring, why had the shilling emptied the room it was meant to fill?

Because it turned witnesses into agents. Those ladies were believed because they had nothing to gain, and one line of print took that from them. He bought names at a shilling and lost, with no invoice ever shown him, six women whose word was worth more than his takings.

The verse:

The boards were chalked, the fiddle tuned, the terms were just the same,
One bought the word of mouth outright and wondered why it came.
One sent four lines at quarter day and let the credit stand,
For word that costs the speaker nought is word that leaves her hand.

Until next time. Go and move the money off the introduction and on to the person introduced, in one sentence you can send today.

P.S. Count how many customers came to you last year by somebody never asked and never paid. The figure is in none of your books, and that is the difficulty. What cannot be counted is mistaken for what is not working, which is how a trade buys at a shilling a head what it already had for nothing.

Also in the archive: Your Sister on the Lane, The Box of Offcuts and Eleven Years of Weather.