The Balliols (66 page)

“That's a pity, you know. One can't sell a thing unless one's really interested in it. One can't talk about it in the right way. You've got to make the customer feel enthusiastic. You can always do that best if you're talking about something that you'd give anything to be able to afford yourself. I should have myself been an admirable salesman of Rolls-Royce cars. Now, what is there that you'd give your soul for?”

Francis laughed.

“I want to have a good time, of course, but I've never felt that depended on having anything in particular. I want a certain amount of money, a position of a sort, so that I stand for something; I want
independence, I want leisure. But as for specific things, no, I can't really think of anything that would make all the difference.”

“If you don't make some suggestion the great men in the Staff Office will think you ambitionless. If you can't think of anything you particularly want to sell, it might be a help if you were to think of a few things you wouldn't handle with a barge-pole. Then they'll say: “Well, anyhow, he's got dislikes.”

“As a matter of fact I'd soonest work in the Sanction Office.”

The Sanction Office was the one department in the Despatch Office that was no more than cursorily included in the students' course. It was designed as a check on account customers who might considerably overdraw the extent to which they were allowed credit by making a number of purchases in various departments. The separate tickets would not reach the accounting office and be entered till the goods had been despatched. The Sanction Office acted as a check. Every single parcel passed through it; those which were account purchases were examined. One side of the room was filled with a large card index containing the record of every account upon the books. Every doubtful purchase was referred to this index. The superintendent had a memory which enabled him to spot any name that had caused the accounts staff anxiety. A name that was new to him he would hold back to verify the entry in the index; he would make a note in case later in the day other parcels should come from another department. If the aggregate of parcels exceeded the approved credit a reference would be made to the head office before the parcels were despatched.

Students were not allowed in the Sanction Office. They would have interfered with its running. If they were to make a mistake there the results might be extremely serious. The working of the office was no more than pointed out by the superintendent. But its routine had appealed to Francis's imagination. He had been fascinated by the stream of parcels perpetually passing through on the moving belt, on its way to the mail and general packing room. It was like Judgment Day. The sheep being divided from the goats. The hand stretched out to an account purchase, the examination of the address; sometimes the parcel would be put back on the revolving belt; sometimes it would be set aside till a message had been sent over to the accounting office; sometimes the parcel would be put back, but a note made to check any further parcels that might have been ordered by that customer.

Francis was fascinated, too, by the vast card index whose existence
in Irongate was unsuspected by the many thousands who said so lordlily across the counters in Oxford Street “Put it down to my account.” There were half a million entries in that index. The average householder, anyone in fact who was liable to income tax, would find in that index the half of his acquaintance. It contained innumerable secrets, small, amusing secrets; the unsuspected secondary addresses, the authorities given to draw against it, the cheques on credit, the surprisingly low credit allowed to some, the high credit allowed to others. There were the more dramatic secrets; the entries in red of bankrupts, of bad debts, of those who had fled the country, with the minute biographies compiled by protection societies to which commerce entrusts its interests; the numbers which to the layman would mean nothing, but to the holders of the code would be the clues to those houses that could give information or had issued warnings to their colleagues against defaulting customers; the intricate system of espionage with agencies in every town, by which the tradesman was protected. The person who knew where to look would discover, if left alone for half an hour with that index, much to surprise him about even his closest friends. Francis felt that working in the Sanction Office he would not only be at the very centre of the store's life, but he would be holding a telescope to his eye from which he could look out on London's vaster life.

“That's where I'd really like to work,” he said to Malcolm.

“It could be arranged.”

It was not, Malcolm said, what he would himself have recommended. The big money was made by the buyers at Oxford Street, not at Irongate. Even if Francis were to be in control of the entire accountancy, he would be in no danger of supertax. At the same time it was wise to work where one was interested. There was plenty of time. A couple of years would experience him in store routine. “Regard it as a stepping stone,” said Malcolm, “and you'll be all right.”

The value of Francis's services to the Sanction Office was assessed by the authorities at fifty-five shillings a week. He received it every Thursday, in a small blue envelope on whose flap was printed some message of admonishment, encouragement, congratulation. Francis kept the first envelope as a souvenir of the first money that he had ever earned. On its flap was printed:

A customer has just acquainted us with an incident that pleased her enormously.

Living in the North, and only a rare visitor to the Store, she
was considerably surprised, when in a department quite recently, to be recognized and her precise address remembered.

Cultivate your memory with regard to faces and names. You will always find your customer pleased to be remembered.

SELFRIDGE & Co., LTD.

He felt very proud at earning money of his own.

He also felt very rich. Living at Ilex he had no expenses, and he had driven a bargain with his father.

“How much would I have cost you during my four years at Oxford?” he had asked.

“About three hundred a year to three hundred and fifty.”

“I should have got into debt. You'd have had to settle them when I came down. It would have probably been four hundred a year. You've saved sixteen hundred on me. Now, look here, father. We'll compute. You invest fifteen hundred for me in War Loan. I'll say no more about it.”

He gained his point. He had over four pounds a week. He had not believed so much money existed. He went to Hugh's tailor and ordered himself two suits.

Malcolm had told him to look on his work in the Sanction Office as a stepping stone. It was easy advice for him to take. Everything seemed a stepping stone. The things he did were fun. That which they led to would be greater fun. Life was gay and varied, opening new vistas for him every day. Everything was discovery. Nothing was being done for the second time.

He enjoyed his work at Irongate. There was an atmosphere of reality, of achievement there. It was compact and practical. He liked the rough blind alley of a road that led to the Wharf and warehouse. He liked the dead end of the canal that curved below its windows, its surface thick with a slime of sediment, with cabbage stalks, banana skins, pieces of floating bark, with barges moored against the wall, and pigeons circling over it, in search of food. He liked the quiet hours of the morning, when correspondence and such odd jobs as might have been left over from the night before were settled with. Till midday the work was casual and intermittent. From midday till six it was strenuous, unceasing; a steady stream of parcels on the moving belt. As the day passed Francis would watch with a sense of exhilaration the large shelves of the P.A.C. department filling up. As he went out to his lunch he would watch the vans being stacked up, while the sorters distributed the parcels now packed firmly and addressed into their separate sections. Francis, during his last term at Fernhurst,
had felt despondent, reading the newspaper accounts of strikes, collapsing currencies, evidences of class hatred and party strife. Here, in this atmosphere of successful effort, it was easy to feel that whatever the newspapers might record, the wheels of the world were revolving smoothly.

Irongate was a quarter of an hour away by bus from the main building. The occasions were few on which Francis was despatched to Oxford Street for an official reason; barely once a fortnight. He rarely, however, missed an opportunity of walking through the store; on his way to lunch or on his way back from lunch. Very often, indeed, actually lunching in the store. He enjoyed the comparison between the predatory spirit in which he had walked down its long avenues as a customer, wondering what he could afford, with the personal, watchful scrutiny with which now he absorbed an atmosphere to which he was a contributing part. His eye took in the arrangement of the counters, the brisk amiable efficiency of the salesmen, the sauntering, unobtrusive supervision of the departmental heads, the unending stream of customers. The buyers, the salesmen, the superintendents, the lift girls in their pantomime attire existed for him as symbols of modern commerce, not as individuals, with lives and problems of their own, with houses, flats, cottages; with husbands, wives, lovers, parents, children; to make their lives gay or sombre, sad or happy. It was slowly, imperceptibly, that one person became detached and separate for him; to be thought about, brooded over, looked for.

It was a slow awakening; first of all the sight of a dark shingled head bent over a tray of handkerchiefs; then the curve of a neck, with the dark blouse falling a little back, the white skin running into the short bristles where the shingle started; the profile, seen in silhouette against the white background of a display of scarves, the lips full, parted, the nose tip-tilted; the fringe cut low upon the forehead. The sound of a voice, slow, drawled, like a tired purr. A figure, little and lithe and rounded; an instep arched and high-lifted upon tall heels; hands that were plump and dimpled, with short fingers and rounded finger nails. A series of snapshots composing little by little a person to be thought about, looked for; so that his passage through the store always took him through that one department; so that his step that was brisk and alert as he came in from Orchard Street, slowed down to a dawdle as he reached the series of counters over which was hung the placard “Scarves and Bags;” so that he became nervously excited, just as he did at cricket before going in to
bat; so that he made some excuse to dawdle after he had passed into the next department, examining some article, so that he should have an excuse for turning round, for looking at her from another angle.

Who was she? Where did she live? What was she doing here? Was she married, was she engaged to anyone? If only there were some way of meeting her. If only there were some way of finding out. It was difficult in a store where one worked oneself. He felt shy of asking questions about her. He would not know whom to ask. He couldn't just wander round asking everyone in the store he knew, “Can you tell me anything about the pretty girl who works in the Bags and Scarves?” If he hadn't been employed in the store, he might have tried to get into conversation with her. But that would be against store discipline. He couldn't stand there chatting to her, wasting her time and his. That would get not only him into trouble, but, what was more important, her as well. If only there were some way of meeting her; some way in which he could get introduced to her. He wondered if she went out to the store sports ground. He wondered whether she was a member of the theatrical society. Till the weather got too cold, he went out every week-end to the sports club for tennis, a game that he was bad at, and consequently despised. But there was no sign of the small, lithe, dark-haired figure, with the tip-tilted nose and slow drawled voice which occupied so many of his thoughts. When tennis was at an end, and the Rugby season started, though he possessed small histrionic skill, he joined the theatrical society. But she was not one of the lesser girls in the cast of
Ambrose Applejohn's Adventure
.

“But I must see her, I must!” he thought. He was not yet twenty-one. His knowledge of the world of women had come to him through books and plays and films. He had thought about them consistently, he had talked about them a great deal. But he had talked to them very little. He had no idea how to embark upon a courtship. He built day-dreams round some romantic and unexpected meeting; at a point of danger his turning to her in the calm centre of the typhoon with one peril survived, another to be lived through. “You've never seen me before,” he'd say. “But if you knew how many times I've watched you; how many hours I've spent dreaming about you.” Her eyes would grow wide and tender. The winds of the tempest would begin to louden. “I must attend to the top sail,” he'd say. “But if we both survive this, will you lunch with me to-morrow week?” Something like that.

But nothing remotely like that happened. During the autumn he did not refuse a single invitation of no matter how boring a nature,
to no matter how distant a surburban residence of a school friend's uncle in the hope that at some gathering he might encounter her. No such encounter came.

As Christmas approached his dream-fed anxiety grew desperate. His visits to Oxford Street grew more frequent. He had arranged to lunch during the unlikely hour of 11.30 to 12.30 so that he should be certain of passing through the Bag and Scarf department when she was there. His lunch grew scantier; so that he should have a longer period to dawdle there. He was able to manage two distinct passages sufficiently separate in time to pass unnoticed.

He had watched her from every angle. He knew her every gesture: the slow, graceful way in which she would bend her head; the easy way in which she would simultaneously talk to a customer and wrap a parcel; the tired gesture with which she would close her eyes, lean back her head as a customer walked away, the parcel beneath her arm. There was not one pose he had not studied, one movement with which he was not familiar. In absence he would recreate her, feature by feature, gesture by gesture; as with no one else that he had ever known had he been able to. Yet to her he was a complete stranger.