This note was read out for the amusement of the company and afterwards stored away in the writer’s pocket till such a time as an opportunity should occur of giving it to Harlow.
As the writer of the note was on his way back to his room to resume work he was accosted by a man who had gone into Harlow’s room to criticize it, and had succeeded in finding several faults which he pointed out to the other, and of course they were both very much disgusted with Harlow.
“I can’t think why the coddy keeps him on the job,” said the first man. “Between you and me, if I had charge of a job, and Misery sent Harlow there—I’d send ’im back to the shop.”
“Same as you,” agreed the other as he went back to tear into his own room. “Same as you, old man: I shouldn’t ’ave ’im neither.”
It must not be supposed from this that either of these two men were on exceptionally bad terms with Harlow; they were just as good friends with him—to his face—as they were with each other—to each other’s faces—and it was just their way: that was all.
If it had been one or both of these two who had gone away instead of Harlow, just the same things would have been said about them by the others who remained—it was merely their usual way of speaking about each other behind each other’s backs.
It was always the same: if any one of them made a mistake or had an accident or got into any trouble he seldom or never got any sympathy from his fellow workmen. On the contrary, most of them at such times seemed rather pleased than otherwise.
There was a poor devil—a stranger in the town; he came from London—who got the sack for breaking some glass. He had been sent to “burn off” some old paint of the woodwork of a window. He was not very skilful in the use of the burning-off lamp, because on the firm when he had been working in London it was a job that the ordinary hands were seldom or never called upon to do. There were one or two men who did it all. For that matter, not many of Rushton’s men were very skilful at it either. It was a job everybody tried to get out of, because nearly always the lamp went wrong and there was a row about the time the work took. So they worked this job on to the stranger.
This man had been out of work for a long time before he got a start at Rushton’s, and he was very anxious not to lose the job, because he had a wife and family in London. When the “coddy” told him to go and burn off this window he did not like to say that he was not used to the work: he hoped to be able to do it. But he was very nervous, and the end was that although he managed to do the burning off all right, just as he was finishing he accidentally allowed the flame of the lamp to come into contact with a large pane of glass and broke it.
They sent to the shop for a new pane of glass, and the man stayed late that night and put it in in his own time, thus bearing half the cost of repairing it.