MARSTON AND MARSTON
During the weeks that immediately followed his return, Roland found that
he was, on the whole, happiest when he was at the office. He had less
there to worry him. His work was new and interesting. Mr. Marston had
decided that before Roland went on his tour alone he should acquire a
general knowledge of the organization of the business. And so Roland
spent a couple of weeks in each department, acquainting himself with the
routine.
“And a pretty good slack it will be,” Gerald had said. “It’s the
governor’s pet plan. He made me do it. But you won’t learn anything
that’s going to be of the least use to you. All you’ve got to do in this
show is to be polite and impress opulent foreigners. You don’t need to
know the ingredients of varnish nor how we arrange our advertising
accounts. And you can bet that the fellows themselves won’t be in any
hurry to teach you. The less we know about things the better they’re
pleased. They like to run their own show. If I were you I should have as
lazy a time as possible.”
Under ordinary circumstances Roland would have followed this advice. He
had learned at Fernhurst to do as much work as was strictly necessary,
but no more. He had prepared his lessons carefully for his house tutor
and the games’ master, the two persons, that is to say, who had it in
their power to make his existence there either comfortable or the
reverse. He had also worked hard for the few masters, such as Carus
Evans, who disliked him. That was part of his armor. When Carus Evans
had said to him for the third day running, “Now, I think we’ll have you,
Whately,” and he had translated the passage without a slip, he felt that
he was one up on Carus Evans. But for the others, the majority with whom
he was only brought into casual contact, and who were pleasantly
indifferent to those who caused them no trouble, he did only as much
work as was needful to keep him from the detention room. Roland had
rarely been inconvenienced by uncomfortable scruples about duty.
At any other time he would have spent the days of apprenticeship in
placid idleness--discussion of cricket matches; visits to the window and
subsequent speculation on the prospects of fine weather over the
week-end; glances at his watch to see how soon he could slip from the
cool of the counting house into the hot sunshine that was beating upon
the streets; pleasant absorption in a novel. But Roland was worried by
the family situation; he was finding life dull; he was prepared to
abandon himself eagerly to any fresh enthusiasm. For want of anything
better to do, without premeditation, with no thought of the power that
this knowledge might one day bring him, he decided to understand the
business of Marston & Marston.
On the first morning he was handed over to the care of Mr. Stevens, the
head of the trade department. Mr. Stevens was a faithful servant of the
firm, and, as is the way with faithful servants, considered himself to
be more important than his employers.
“They may sit up in that board room of theirs,” he would say, “and they
may pass their resolutions, and they may decide on this and they may
decide on that, but where’d they be without their figures, I’d like to
know. And who gives them their figures?”
He would chuckle and scratch his bald head, and issue a fierce series of
orders to the packers. He bore no malice against his directors; he was
not jealous; he knew that there were two classes, the governing and the
governed, and that it had been his fate to be born among the governed.
“There always have been two classes and there always will be two
classes. We can’t all be bosses.” It was a law of nature. And he
considered his performances more creditable than those of his masters.
“These directors,” he would say, “they were born into the business.
They’ve stayed where they was put; they haven’t gone up and they haven’t
gone down. But I--I started as a packer and I’m now head of the trade
department; and look you here, Jones,” he would suddenly bellow out, “if
you hammer nails into a box at that rate you’ll not only not be head of
a trade department, you’ll blooming soon cease to be a packer!”
It was natural that Mr. Stevens should, from his previous experience of
Gerald and certain other young gentlemen, regard Roland as an agreeable
trifler on the fringe of important matters.
“Well, well, sir, so you’ve come along to see how we do things down
here. I expect we shall be able to show you a thing or two. Now, if you
was to go and sit over in that corner you’d be out of the way and you’d
be able to see the business going on.”
“I daresay, Mr. Stevens, but that won’t help me very far, will it?”
“I wouldn’t say that, sir; nothing like seeing how the machinery works.”
“But I might as well go and ask an engine driver how a train worked and
then be told to sit in a corner of the platform at a railway station and
watch the trains go by. I should see how they worked but I shouldn’t
know much about them.”
Mr. Stevens chuckled and scratched the bald patch on his head
appreciatively.
“You see, Mr. Stevens,” Roland continued, “I don’t know anything about
this show at all and I know that you’re the only person in the place who
can help me.”
It was a lucky shot. Roland was not then the psychologist that he was to
become in the days of his power. He worked by intuition. What he had
intended for a graceful compliment was a direct appeal to Mr. Stevens’
vanity, at the point where it was most susceptible to such an assault.
It was a grief at times to Mr. Stevens that the authorities should
regard him as little more than a useful servant, who carried out
efficiently the orders that they gave him. Mr. Stevens was not
ambitious; the firm had treated him fairly, had recognized his talents
early and had promoted him. He had no quarrel with the firm, but he
knew--what no one else in the building, with the possible exception of
Perkins, the general manager, did know--that for a long time he had
ceased to carry out to the letter the instructions that had been given
him, and that Mr. Marston had only a general knowledge of a department
that he himself knew intimately. He had arranged numerous small
improvements of which Mr. Marston was ignorant, and had exploited highly
profitable exchanges of material with other dealers. Mr. Marston may
have perhaps noticed in the general accounts a gradual fall in packing
expenses, but if he had he had attributed it, without much thought, to
the increased facilities for obtaining wood and cardboard. He did not
know that as the result of most delicate maneuvering and an intricate
system of exchange conducted by Mr. Stevens his firm was being supplied
with cardboard at the actual cost price.
Mr. Stevens did not tell him. He enjoyed his little secret. Every year
he would consult the figures, scratch his bald head and chuckle. What a
lot he had saved the firm! He looked forward to the day when he should
tell Mr. Marston. How surprised they would all be! They had never
suspected that funny old Stevens was such a good business man. In the
evening hours of reverie and after lunch on Sunday he would endow the
scene with that dramatic intensity that he had looked for but had not
yet found in life. There were other moments, however, when he longed for
appreciation. He wished that someone would realize his importance
without having to have it explained to him. So that when Roland said to
him, “You’re the only person in the place who can help me,” he was
startled into the indulgence of his one weakness.
“Well, well, sir,” he said, and his face flushed with pleasure, “I
daresay if you put it like that”; and taking Roland by the arm he led
him away into his study and began to explain his accounts, his invoices,
his receipts and his method of checking them. And because he had found
an appreciative audience he proceeded to reveal one by one his little
secrets. “Mr. Marston doesn’t know I do this, and don’t tell him; I’m
keeping it as a surprise; but you can see that by letting the wood
merchants have that extra percentage there, I can get tin-foil cheap
enough to be able to pack our stuff at two per cent. less than it would
cost ordinarily. Think what I must have saved the firm!”
There could be no question of his value; but what Roland did not then
appreciate--what, for that matter, Mr. Stevens himself did not
appreciate--was the value of this work in relation to the general
business of the firm. Mr. Stevens was a specialist. He understood his
own department but he understood nothing else. He did not realize that
on the delicate balance of that two per cent. it had been possible to
undersell a dangerous rival.
The same conditions, Roland discovered, existed in several other
departments. Each head worked independently of the other heads. Mr.
Marston, sitting at his desk, coördinated their work. A one-man
business: that was Mr. Marston’s program. One brain must control,
otherwise there would be chaos. One department would find itself working
against another department. He believed in departments because they
stood for the delegation of routine work, but they must be subordinate
departments. There were moments, however, when Roland wondered whether
Mr. Marston’s hold on the business had not relaxed with the years. A
great deal was going on of which he was ignorant. He had started the
machinery and the machinery still ran smoothly, but was the guiding hand
ready to deal with stoppages? Roland wondered. How much did Mr. Marston
really know? Had he kept up with modern ideas, or was he still living
with the ideas that were current in his youth? But more than this even,
Roland wondered how much Perkins knew.
He did not like Perkins. “A good man,” Mr. Marston had called him, “as
good a general manager as you’re likely to find anywhere. Not a social
beauty; silent, and all that, but a good strong man. You can trust him.”
Roland did not agree with this estimate. First impressions are very
often right; he was inclined to trust his intuition before his reason,
and his first impression of Perkins was of an embittered, jealous man.
“He hates me,” Roland thought, “because I’m stepping straight into this
business through influence, with every prospect of becoming a director
before I’ve finished; while he’s sweated all his life, and worked from
nothing to a position that for all his ability will never carry him to
the board room.” He was a man to watch. The people who have been
mishandled by fortune show no mercy when they get the chance of revenge.
Perkins was scrupulously polite, but Roland felt how much he resented
his intrusion, and Gerald was inclined to endorse this opinion.
“Oh, yes, a sour-faced ass,” he said; “father thinks a lot of him,
though. It’s as well to keep on the right side of him. He can make
things rather awkward if you don’t. He keeps an eye on most of the
accounts, and he watches the travelers’ expenses pretty closely. If he
gets annoyed with you he might start questioning your extras.”
They laughed, remembering how they had entered under the heading
“special expenses” the charges for a lurid evening at a certain discreet
establishment in the Rue des Colombes.
On the whole, Roland was happy at the office, but the evenings were
distressing: the bus ride back; the walk up the hot stuffy street
towards his home; the subsequent walk with his father; the same walk
every day along the hard, flag-stoned roads, during which they met the
same dispirited men hurrying home from work. London was horrible in
June, with its metallic heat, its dust, and the dull leaves of the
plane-trees scattering their mournful shadows. How somber, too, were the
long evenings after the wretched two-course dinner, in the small
suburban drawing-room--ill lit, ill ventilated, meanly furnished. It was
not surprising that he should accept eagerly the Marstons’ frequent
invitations to spend the week-end with them in the country; it was
another world, a cleaner, fresher world, where you were met at the
station, where you drove through a long, winding drive to an old
Georgian house, where you dressed for dinner, where you drank crusted
port as you cracked your walnuts. Yet it was not this material
well-being that he so highly valued as the setting it provided for a
gracious interchange of courtesy, for the leisured preliminaries of
friendship, for ornament and decoration.
Was anything in his life better than that moment on a Friday evening
when from the corner seat of a railway carriage he watched the smoke and
chimneys of London fall behind him, when through the window he saw,
instead of streets and shops and houses, green fields and hedges and
small scattered villages, and knew that for forty-eight hours he could
forget the fretted uneasiness of his home.
He was invited during August to spend a whole week at Hogstead. Several
others would be there, and there would be cricket every day.
“We can’t do without you,” Mr. Marston had said, “and what’s more, we
don’t intend to.”
“Of course, we don’t,” said Muriel; “you’ve got to come!”
Naturally Roland did not need much pressing.