And the smile that accompanied the question made Roland feel very grown up and important.
These weeks of preparation for the foreign tour Roland considered however, in spite of their charm, as an interlude, a pause in the serious affairs of life. It was thus that he had always regarded his holidays. He had divided with a hard line his life at school and his life at home. The two were unrelated. April and Ralph, his parents and the Curtises belonged to a world that must remain for him always episodic. It was a pleasant world in which from time to time he might care to sojourn. But what happened to him there was of no great importance.
As he leaned over the taffrail of the steamer and felt the deck throb under him he knew that his real life had begun again. What significance had these encumbrances of his home life if he could cast them off so easily? Already they were slipping from him. The waves beat against the side of the ship, splashing the spray across the deck, and the sting of the water on his face filled him with a buoyant confidence. The thud of the engines beat through his body to a tune of triumph.
The gray line that was England faded and was lost.
CHAPTER XI
THE ROMANCE OF VARNISH
A SEPARATION of six months makes in the middle years of a man’s life little break in a relationship. Human life was compared over two thousand years ago by a Greek philosopher to the stream that is never the same from one moment to another. And though, indeed, nothing is permanent, though everything is in flux, the stream during the later stages of its passage flows quietly through soft meadows to the sea. A man of forty-five who has been married for several years may leave his family to go abroad and returning at the end of the year find his wife, his home, his friends, to all appearances, exactly as he left them.
Roland returned from Belgium a different person. He was no longer a schoolboy; he was a business man. He had been introduced to big financiers; he had listened to the discussion of important deals; he had witnessed the signatures of contracts. In the evenings he had sat with Marston and gone carefully over the accounts of the day’s transactions.
“There’s not much profit here,” Marston would say, “hardly any, in fact, when we’ve taken over-head charges, office expenses and all that into consideration. But we’re not out for profits just now. We’re building up connections. If we can make these foreign deals pay their way we’re all right. We shall crowd the other fellows out of the market, we shall make ourselves indispensable, and then we can shove our prices as high as we blooming well like.”
To Roland it was a game, with the thrills, the dangers, the recompenses of a game. He did not look on business as part of the social fabric. He did not regard wealth as a thing important in itself. A credit balance was like a score at cricket. You were setting your brains against an opponent’s. You made as many pounds as you could against his bowling. He did not allow first principles to attach disquieting corollaries. He did not ask himself whether it was just for a big firm to undersell their smaller rivals and drive them out of the market by the simple expedient of taking money out of one pocket and putting it into another. Business was a game; if one was big enough to take risks one took them.
Within a month Gerald was writing home to his father with genuine enthusiasm.