THE differences between “young” Royce and “old” Bunnett had a dramatic quality that stirred even the wearied indifference of Stamp and Co.’s counting-house to simple efforts in psychological analysis.
Young Royce was dark, square, and determined; a reasoned boaster, who verified his boasts by action. When he made what sounded like a very rash assertion, it was bad policy to contradict, and quite fatal to bet against him.
Old Bunnett was tall and thin, fair, drooping, and despondent. He seldom committed himself to a confident statement of opinion, but gravely, almost voluptuously, hoped for the worst on every possible occasion. He was, by the office’s classification, of the same breed as “old Robinson,” who had come into the firm as a boy of fourteen and had now served his employers faithfully for fifty-one years.
Royce found a delight in marking that likeness. “Bunny, my boy,” he used to say, “you’ve come here to stop. When I come back here in twenty years’ time I shall find you still at the same old grind. You’ll never get out of it.”
“Not so sure as I want to,” was Bunny’s single form of defence against this impeachment of his powers of initiative—that and a sniff. The sniff was his characteristic comment on life; a long and thoughtful substitute for speech. He was not more than ordinarily susceptible to colds in the head; and his sniff was less a physical function than a vehicle of mental expression.
Young Royce, however, wanted and meant to leave the firm “directly he could see his way,” as he put it. He had a vein of prudence, or it may have been merely shrewdness, that was sometimes overlooked by those who had come a little to dread the threat of his boasting. The one consolation afforded to those who suffered under his implication of their feebleness was the reflection that he would almost certainly “go to the bad one of these days.” Bunny, alone, was pessimist enough to admit that Royce would “get on.” He had been known to add, “Sure to; he’s the sort that gets on.”
The office as a whole jealously disagreed with him; and in their vehement denouncement of Bunny’s pessimism failed to recognise that underlying all the violent and obvious contrasts between Royce and Bunnett there was at least one point of likeness, inasmuch as they both believed in Royce. (The only likeness conceded by the office was the coincidence that both men were born in the same month of the same year, and had come into the firm of Stamp and Company on the same day.)
Royce had actually left the firm on the Saturday afternoon that first introduced him to Bunnett’s mother on Hampstead Heath. He had “seen his way” as far as a job at Capetown—a very risky and uncertain affair, in the office’s opinion.
He had a streak of romantic sentiment hidden away somewhere, and he had come up to the Spaniards’ Road to “take a last look at London.” He was leaning over the railings looking down across the Vale of Health, when he became aware of an arrested Bunnett sniffing profoundly at the back of a bath-chair.
“My mother,” Bunnett said, by way of introduction, and then in a half-aside, “she’s a bit of an invalid, but she’s been a little better lately, ain’t you, mother? This is the Mr. Royce I was telling you about. Just going out to South Africa.”