Two Streets Over

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, on the street where the harness makers kept their windows, two saddlers took in work, and now and again a man came in with something that was no part of their trade.

Two saddlers, the same oak-tanned hides, the same bench, the same prices to the penny.
Both were brought, now and again, a broken thing that no saddler could mend.
One said so truthfully, and the man went out again with it under his arm.
One said whose trade it was, and where he worked, and what to ask him for.
Both lost the identical work, since neither could have done an hour of it.
Why did only one of them get paid for losing it?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two saddlers in the town I've never named, their shops forty yards apart on the same street. The same oak-tanned hides from the same tannery, the same waxed thread, the same prices for a collar, a girth, a set of reins. Both did as they said they would.

One afternoon in the autumn a householder came into the first shop carrying a portmanteau. The corner irons had torn out, the frame was sprung, and the leather was far too good to throw away. The saddler pressed the corner with his thumb and told him the truth, which was that this was a trunk maker's job. The man thanked him and went out and stood on the pavement with the thing under his arm, having used up an afternoon and still not knowing where to go.

Be fair to him. It was not his trade, and he had a scruple that does him credit: a bad repair is remembered chiefly against whoever gave out the name. There was no work in it for him, so to his mind there was nothing in it.

A fortnight later the same householder, still carrying the same bag, came into the second shop. The second saddler said what the first had said, in about the same words, then did three more things, the whole of it inside four minutes.

He named the man: not a trade in general but a person, the trunk maker two streets over, above the cooper's yard. He wrote the trade and the street on a slip of his own paper. He said what to ask for, which was that the corner irons be let in afresh rather than riveted over the split, and what it ought to cost. Then the thing that cost nothing and mattered most. Tell him I sent you.

The bag was mended properly. In the spring the householder was back about a set of trap harness, and the year after about a pony's tack, and in between he had sent two others up the same stair with sprung trunks, both of whom walked past the first shop to get there. The trunk maker had straps wanting stitching and a man two streets off who could stitch them.

None of it was luck. The second saddler kept a book, a thin one, holding the trades nearest his own, and under each a name, a street, and a note of what that man was good at. Nobody was in it on hearsay. He had looked at the work himself, the way he looked at a hide.

That year he turned away eleven pieces of work he could not do. Nine of the eleven came back inside two years with work he could.

The first saddler was never once wrong in anything he said to anybody. He simply stopped speaking a sentence too early.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Work you cannot do is still worth something, and what it is worth is the standing of a man whose answer can be relied upon even when the answer is somebody else. Every trade refuses a quantity of enquiries and treats that quantity as waste. It is the cheapest material you will ever be handed.

Consider what the enquiry cost him before it reached you: noticing the trouble, deciding to act, finding you, coming in. By then he has spent the scarcest thing he has, the willingness to begin, and a flat no hands it all back and teaches him that asking you takes effort and returns nothing.

A name moves him on, and what is handed over is not the job. It is your judgement. He cannot tell a good trunk maker from a bad one, as is the case with every customer outside his own trade, you included. You can. It is the same currency as handing a customer the questions he ought to be asking, spent on a job you were never going to do.

You will be told the return comes by reciprocity, and some of it does, but I would not rest the case there: reciprocity is a tidy word for a thing that is never tidy. The trunk maker may send nothing for two years and the householder may never come back. The argument stands without either of them, on arithmetic: the job was already lost and could not have been done at any price. Set against that nothing, four minutes and a slip of paper buy a man helped at the moment he expected to be turned away, and a name in the district for knowing who is any good.

It also makes refusing easy, and the trader who refuses easily stops taking the jobs that do not suit him, most of which are taken only to avoid an empty-handed conversation with a customer who costs more than he pays.

Two cautions. You are lending your name and cannot take it back, so put nobody in the book whose finished work you have not seen yourself, and give one name rather than three, since a list of three tells the customer you do not really know. The second runs the other way. This is not a polite exit from work that is properly yours, nor a soft way of declining on price, and a customer tells that difference faster than you would like.

Three questions, before the next enquiry you cannot serve:

1. What are the three trades nearest your own, and can you name a person in each? Not a firm, a person, with a street or a number beside the name. If you cannot do it from memory now, you will not manage it with a customer waiting.
2. Have you seen their work, or only heard of it? Hearsay is how you come to answer for a stranger, and an afternoon looking at three men's finished jobs is the whole of the diligence this asks.
3. What became of the last five people you turned away? If you have no idea, that is the measure of what leaves your door unrecorded, and why it appears in nothing you count.

The Answer to the Riddle

Why did only one of them get paid for losing it?

Because one gave the truth and the other gave an answer, and they are not the same article. The truth was that neither could mend a portmanteau. The answer was where one gets mended. A man who leaves with the truth has been informed; a man who leaves with an answer has been helped, and help comes back up the street it went out on.

The verse:

The hides were one, the bench was one, the prices one the same,
And both were brought a broken thing that neither man could claim.
One shut his door upon a man still carrying his load,
One named a street, and work came back for years along that road.

Until next time. Go and write down the three trades nearest your own, with one name and one street under each, and keep the slip where you answer the telephone.

P.S. The book works in both directions and most traders load only one end. Tell the people in it that they are in it. A man who knows work arrives from you says your name when the reverse question is put to him, and handles your customer with care. An introduction nobody has been told of is a parcel left on a doorstep in the rain.

Also in the archive: Who Sent You, Your Sister on the Lane and Two Shillings of Leather.