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.