CHAPTER XIV

Francis’s opinion of Mr Graby never had a chance to blossom normally, because after his first interview with Mr Graby he never again saw the latter as a human being.

The instant that Francis became an Employee, Mr Graby became the Employer; otherwise the Old Man, Laughing Gravy, Gravy Soup, or, when mentioned in conjunction with Mr Bryant, Gravy and Potato. He became a kind of inscrutable, capricious and all-powerful ogre whose arrival made everyone work a little faster and whose departure made everyone sit back, relax their muscles and begin to rag their neighbour in sheer relief. This is the usual defect of an employer’s arrival and departure, despite the protestations to the contrary which are occasionally loyally lilted from a column in The Times.

The personnel and routine of the offices of Graby, Bryant & Co. Ltd. resembled, like the personnel and routine of most offices, a comic opera in full blast.

When a building and some hundred persons is devoted to furthering the solemn and religious ends of Commerce, cheerfulness will keep breaking through; just as in a theatre where a company of actors is devoting itself to producing gaiety and illusion, a grim devotion to duty and disregard of personal discomforts will develop.

But it was not until Francis had been employed there for nearly a fortnight that he perceived the comic opera analogy, and began to tell funny stories about what happened at work. During his first fortnight there he was too much in earnest about his work to see any person or situation in the impersonal way which perceives humour. He was afraid of being late, of being lazy, of being inefficient, of being sacked. All he wanted was to be the best and most efficient office boy that Graby & Bryant had ever had; and also the most interesting one (but this ambition was subconscious and did not begin to express itself until his first nervousness had died down.)

He certainly succeeded, in his first day at Graby & Bryant’s, in establishing himself as the most unusual and interesting office boy the firm had ever had.

By lunch time on that first Monday morning the question ‘Seen what the cat’s brought in, down in Ulick’s?’ was all over the building; and everyone was making excuses to go through the typists’ room (otherwise called Ulick’s, because it was under the control of Miss Ulick, Mr Graby’s personal secretary) in order to look at Francis.

This would have been very bad for Francis if he had known it, but fortunately he was so painfully absorbed by his small, fiddling but necessary tasks that he never thought about whether people were noticing him. He usually thought about this a great deal, but today all his energies were turned on to doing up parcels, stamping letters and going out to post them, running messages and memorizing names, faces, and official positions.

He never once thought that it was degrading that he, the son of a doctor and educated at a good second-class Public School should be an office boy. Snobbery was not one of the vices which the Garden children had acquired. Francis was arrogant, with a great sense of personal dignity and of his own entity, but he had no pride of class. He had his own private, vivid life, shut away from everyone; and licking labels and calling ill-bred men ‘Sir’ naturally did not affect this private dignity.