Chapter XII: Marston & 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 organisation 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 learnt 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 armour. 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'ld 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 recognised 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 manœuvring 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 realise 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 realise 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, co-ordinated their work. A one-man business: that was Mr Marston's programme. 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 travellers' 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 sombre, 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.