What It Would Not Cover

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town a price was a spoken thing, said over a gate or written on a half sheet and left on a counter. The difficulty was never arriving at the figure. The difficulty was saying what the figure was for.

Two painters in one town, the same white lead and the same boiled oil.
Both looked over the same shop front, and both arrived at eleven pounds.
One sent the figure, which was honest, and nothing besides.
The other sent the figure and seven lines of what it would not cover.
Same price, same brush, same draper, and only one of them was believed.
Which of the two had given a price?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two house painters in the town I have never named. Both good: lead ground fine and mixed with oil the morning it was wanted, a sash cut freehand in one pass, dust sheets down before a pot was opened. Eighteen years apiece and the same day rate to the penny.

The work was a draper's shop front in the main street. Five sash windows, a door, a fascia gilded in somebody's grandfather's time and gone the colour of weak tea, iron railings to the area steps, a sill soft enough to take a thumbnail, and the sunny side blistered where old paint had been laid on in a hot August. Both looked it over on the same wet Tuesday, and both arrived, within a shilling, at eleven pounds.

The first man wrote the figure on a half sheet and left it with the shop boy. Eleven pounds, to paint the front. He was not careless and he hid nothing. He held a view about lists, which was that a long one looks like a man arranging his excuses before he has begun.

The second man sat at his kitchen table that evening and took longer. His figure was the same eleven pounds. Under it he put what the money did: two coats to the five sashes and the door, the frames and the boxing, the stall riser. Then seven lines of what it did not do. Not the railings. Not the burning off of the blistered side, a day's work on its own, priced beneath at seven and six. Not the gilding, which wanted a gilder, and he named one. Not the sill, which wanted a joiner first. Not the downpipe. Not the back gate. And not the clearing of the bombazine out of the window, which the shop must do overnight.

The draper gave him the work and said why, which is the part worth having. It was the only one of the two he could make any sense of, and he had been meaning to ask about the railings for a week and had not liked to. The bill came to twelve pounds fifteen, both extras having been asked for once he knew they were his to ask for, and he paid it without a murmur.

The first man painted a front in the next street that month, for eleven pounds, and did it beautifully. He finished on the Friday with the owner in the doorway, pleased with the windows, asking in a perfectly reasonable voice when he meant to start on the railings. He did them on the Saturday for nothing, and would have told you the town did not care to pay.

That is the whole of the difference, and notice what it is not. Not that one was the more honest, for both were honest, nor that one was dearer, for the figures were the same. One had drawn a line round his price. The other left the line to be drawn by a man who had never held a brush.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A customer does not read your price, he reads its edges, and where you have drawn none he will draw them himself. He has no choice in the matter. A figure with no boundary round it is not yet information, and the man holding one must supply the missing part out of his own head before he can decide anything.

He supplies it in one of two places, and both cost you. Supply it wide, and eleven pounds buys the front entire, railings, gilding, soft sill and all: you win the work and lose it again on the Friday, in the doorway, where every answer available makes you smaller. Supply it narrow, and eleven pounds buys five windows and no more, so your figure sits beside a rival's identical figure looking dearer than it is. That one you never hear about. It leaves as a man who thought it over, and you file it under a hard market.

Consider also what a bare figure does to him. Ten pounds and eleven pounds with nothing underneath are not two prices for one job, they are two prices for two jobs he cannot see. So he does what any of us do with a comparison we lack the means to make: he takes the lower, or the man whose face he preferred, or he puts it off for a season. A schedule beneath a figure is how a careful tradesman is told from a cheap one, and a quotation is written to be decided upon rather than to be filed.

As to why such lines are believed, that is the machinery under the rest. They cost the man something, visibly. Every one makes his eleven pounds look smaller than it did a moment before, and hands the draper a fresh reason to hesitate. Anybody may write that he is honest and thorough, the words being free, which is why they carry nothing. Hardly anybody will set down a thing that works against his own figure while the figure is still being weighed. Your customer cannot measure your character and knows it. What he can measure is whether you told him something you need not have, and he reasons from that to all the work he will never inspect.

A cost named before the work, besides, is arithmetic, and the same cost named during it is a story about your character. Thirty-five shillings for railings, written on a Tuesday, went onto a bill and was paid cheerfully. The identical sum arriving on the Thursday of a job, with the dust sheets down, is heard as a man who has seen his chance, and a cost that rises in the middle of a job is a conversation worth almost anything to avoid.

Two cautions. A schedule is not a defence and must not read as one. Seven plain lines in the customer's own words, on the sheet with the figure, is a man being clear; two columns of small print is a man lately in a quarrel, and reads as distrust before a penny has changed hands. And do not use the list to prop up a thin price. If the sill plainly wants a joiner before any paint goes near it, the honest form is a second priced line and a recommendation, not a silence dressed as a boundary.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. What would a stranger think he was buying? Give your last quotation to somebody outside your trade and ask what they believe they would get for the money. Every item they name that you did not mean is a line you owe the next customer.
2. Where did my last three disagreements begin? Nearly every one began as a silence on a half sheet of paper, which is a cause you can remove before Friday at no cost at all.
3. What must somebody else do before I can start? A room emptied, a colour settled, a scaffold, a landlord's consent, another trade in first. Each will hold the job up and be remembered as your delay unless it is written where the figure is.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which of the two had given a price?

The second. The first had given a number, which is a different article and a cheaper one to produce. Eleven pounds is not a price until the work it buys has an edge round it. Until then it is the opening of a misunderstanding, entered into warmly by both parties and discovered by only one of them, in a doorway, on a Friday, with the brushes already washed.

The verse:

A bare eleven pounds will buy
a quarrel and a doubt.
Write plainly what the money does,
and plainly what it leaves out.

Until next time. Go and add three lines to today's quotation naming what the price does not include.

P.S. Sit down to write what your price does not include and somewhere about the fourth line you will meet a thing you have been doing for nothing these three years, because doing it was quicker than saying you would not. That is the list's second use, and it costs you one evening.

Also in the archive: The Ledger That Would Not Lie Flat, The Two Nights in the Parlour and The Questions He Gave Away.