“You are very thoughtful for your hands,” said Frithiof. “It is few, I should fancy, who would allow so much.”
“I don’t know that,” said Mr. Boniface. “A good many, I fancy, try something of the sort, and I am quite sure that it invariably answers. It is not in human nature to go on forever at one thing—every one needs variety. Business becomes a tread-mill if you never get a thorough change, and I like my people to put their heart into the work. If you try to do that you will be of real value, and are bound to rise.”
“Look,” said Roy, showing him a neatly drawn-out plan of names and dates. “This is the holiday chart which we worked out this summer. It takes my father quite a long time to arrange it all and make each dovetail properly with the others.”
They lingered for a few minutes talking over the details of the business, then Roy took Frithiof down into the shop again, and in the uninterrupted quiet of the Saturday afternoon showed him exactly what his future work would be. He was to preside at the song-counter, and Roy initiated him into the arrangement of the brown-holland portfolios with their black lettering, showed him his desk with account-books, order-book, and cash-box, even made him practice rolling up music in the neat white wrappers that lay ready to hand—a feat which at first he did not manage very quickly.
“I am afraid all this must be very uncongenial to you,” said Roy.
“Perhaps,” said Frithiof. “But it will do as well as anything else. And indeed,” he added warmly, “one would put up with a great deal for the sake of being under such a man as Mr. Boniface.”
“The real secret of the success of the business is that he personally looks after every detail,” said Roy. “All the men he employs are fond of him; he expects them to do their best for him, and he does his best for them. I think you may really be happy enough here, though of course it is not at all the sort of life you were brought up to expect.”
Each thought involuntarily of the first time they had met, and of Blanche Morgan’s ill-timed speech: “Only a shopkeeper!” Roy understood perfectly well what it was that brought the bitter look into his companion’s face, and, thinking that they had stayed long enough for Frithiof to get a pretty clear idea of the work which lay before him on Monday morning, he proposed that they should go home together. He had long ago got over the selfish desire to be quit of the responsibility of being with the Norwegian; his first awkward shyness had been, after all, natural enough, for those whose lives have been very uneventful seldom understand how to deal with people in trouble, and are apt to shrink away in unsympathetic silence because they have not learned from their own sore need what it is that human nature craves for in sorrow. But each time he met Frithiof now he felt that the terrible evening at the Arundel had broken down the barriers which hitherto had kept him from friendship with any one out of his own family. Mere humanity had forced him to stay as the solitary witness of an overwhelming grief, and he had gained in this way a knowledge of life and a sympathy with Frithiof, of which he had been quite incapable before.
He began to know intuitively how things would strike Frithiof, and as they went down to Brixton he prepared him for what he shrewdly surmised would be the chief disagreeable in his business life.
“I don’t think you heard,” he began “that there is another partner in our firm—a cousin of my father’s—James Horner. I dare say you will not come across him very much, but he is fond of interfering now and then, and sometimes if my father is away he gets fussy and annoying. He is not at all popular in the shop, and I thought I would just warn you beforehand, though of course you are not exactly expecting a bed of roses.”