To this Mr. Murgatroyd replied almost tearfully that if Mr. Meldrum proposed to run the establishment upon Sunday-school lines, the sooner they put up the shutters the better.
"Does that mean that you want to resign your post, Mr. Murgatroyd?" asked Philip hopefully.
Mr. Murgatroyd was not to be caught.
"Not at all, sir," he said. "I dare say we shall take a little time to get used to one another's ways, that's all; but in the end I'm sure we shall rub along grandly."
What Mr. Murgatroyd meant was:—
"You are a new broom. In a short time your youthful zeal for reform will have abated, and we can then slip back unto the old comfortable groove. For the present I must make a show of complying with your idiotic commands."
Philip understood this, and calculated that six months of commercial austerity would set his manager looking for a softer berth. Both sides having thus decided to wait and see, the interview terminated.
Philip next introduced his broom into the somewhat Augean garage. Car-washers were straitly informed that their duty was to wash cars and not to rifle the tool-boxes and door-pockets thereof. The current price of that fluctuating commodity, petrol, as fixed from day to day by the brigands who hold the world's supply in the hollow of their unclean hands, was chalked up in a conspicuous position every morning, in order that consumers might purchase at the market price and not at one fixed by the foreman. Sundry members of that well-organized and far-reaching Society for the Acquisition of Other People's Property—the brotherhood of chauffeurs who used the garage—were put through a brief but drastic course of instruction in the elementary laws of meum and tuum; and one particularly enterprising member of the craft, to whose possession a new and expensive jack, recently the property of a gentleman from the country who drove his own car, was traced after a systematic and quite unexpected official enquiry, was directed to remove himself and his vehicle to other quarters as an alternative to prosecution.
Having in the space of three weeks achieved a degree of unpopularity almost incredible to a man who has hitherto encountered only the genial side of his fellow creatures, Philip turned from the garage to the office. Here his troubles were of a different kind. Commercial arithmetic had no terrors for him; the systematic filing of correspondence and the compilation of cross-references appealed readily to his orderly soul. His difficulties arose not so much from these mechanical aids to commerce as from the human agents in charge of them. Mr. Atherton, the young gentleman who presided over the show-room, was, as already indicated, a square peg. The careers open to a younger son of a well-connected but impecunious house are strictly limited in number. Presuming, as is probably the case, that the family resources are already fully taxed in maintaining his elder brother in the army, and that he himself is debarred through insufficiency of grey matter from entering one of the three learned professions, our young English friend is forced to the inevitable conclusion that he must earn his living in some less distinguished field of effort.
"Not in trade, of course, dear," says his lady mother, with the air of a female Euclid throwing off an elementary and self-evident axiom. "But anything else you like."