On his arrival at Hanson & Crane Ltd., Albert chatted to his two typists and three clerks until a snarl over the office telephone announced that Mr Seafair had opened the day’s foreign correspondence and was ready to give his instructions for dealing with it. Albert was not perturbed by Seafair’s early morning voice. He understood his managing director, accepted him without liking or disliking, and met his incalculable moods with passive or obstinate calm.
Seafair on his part enjoyed an employee who was neither frightened of him nor resentful. The managing director was close on seventy and considered that at that age a man should be able to say what he pleased. He did. Indeed he always had. But his feudal and kindly spirit had preserved him from the consequences; he never sacked an employee of Hanson & Crane Ltd. if he could possibly avoid it, and he was invariably generous in time of illness, marriage or birth. Seafair was neither gruff nor hearty. He was not a bear. Rather did he resemble an old snake guarding a treasure. He could use a silky charm and insinuating manner. He could hiss evilly and strike viciously; yet the hiss was without malice and the strike without venom. The managing director was a crotchety and energetic old man, cursed, respected, and, on the whole, liked by his board and his employees. He was unaccountable but he was not petty.
Seafair’s white head swayed back and forth behind his desk.
“Good morning, sir!” said Albert.
The managing director grunted, and remained silent for three awkward minutes. He always hated to say the word that would finally commit him to any policy upon which he had decided.
“Well, what are you doing in here?” he asked sharply.
“I thought you sent for me, sir,” replied Albert, promptly making for the door.
“So I did! Come back here!”
Albert returned up the floor of the long office, without any sign of amusement or resentment. Seafair declared to himself that the clerk should remain in charge of the export, whether he had the necessary qualifications or not; it was pleasant to deal with a man who paid no more attention to one’s mood than a mirror.
“Sit down, Mr Whitehead. A cigarette?”
“Thank you.”
Albert sat down. It was the first time he had ever touched a chair in Seafair’s office unless it were to place one for those whom his ruler chose to honour. That he should now be so honoured himself filled him with no elation. It might be the prelude to getting the sack or the first symptom of his director’s senile decay. He picked a cigarette from the cedar-wood box that was offered to him, and waited.
“Export’s going up, Mr Whitehead. Do you know why?”
“Quality tells, sir.”
“I know. I know. It always must in the end,” said Seafair, who prided himself on the transparent honesty of his workmanship and his marketing. “But there’s more to it than that. What do you think about Jews, Mr Whitehead?”
“I’ve met very few, sir. They seem to me much like anyone else. So far as I can tell, they’re a lot more honest than they are supposed to be.”
“Very right. I’ve never had to regret doing business with a Jew,” said Mr Seafair pontifically—it was not strictly true, but it suited him to believe it. “I’ll tell you what’s so remarkable about them, Mr Whitehead. They hang together!”
Albert made no reply, but waited for his employer to go on. Like most Englishmen of his type he had little knowledge of Jewish names. Cohen and Isaacs were familiar to him. But he would have been surprised to learn how many of those agents whose thoughts he so gently extracted from their ill-written letters were Jewish; the poetic name endings of -stein, -blum, -baum and -berg meant nothing to him.
“The Jewish boycott,” Mr Seafair continued, “should open up some markets to us that we’ve never been able to touch. If they won’t buy toys from Germany, they have to buy from us. Now, I can’t do a foreign tour. I’m too old. And you can’t, because you don’t know a damned thing about it. So we must have a traveller to do a quick run round and report. What do you think?”
“It’ll be expensive.”
“It’ll be very expensive. And I don’t suppose we’ll gain anything. And I know he’ll swindle us on the travelling expenses. And he’ll probably be useless. But, Mr Whitehead, it’s got to be done!”
“If you’ve decided, sir—”
“I have decided,” interrupted Mr Seafair sharply. “And I’ve engaged a man. If the Board don’t like it, they can go to hell.”
“What’s he like?”
“Damn it! Do I know what he’s like?” exploded the managing director, regretting that he had ever allowed his impulse to bear fruit. “Bendrihem recommended him to me. He’s the sort of chap Bendrihem would recommend. All the wrong type for a salesman! No stories and a general attitude of don’t-give-a-damn about him!”
“I dare say we can arrange for him to be taught some stories, sir,” said Whitehead inscrutably.
“Oh, you do, do you! Then let me tell you he’s probably forgotten more stories than the whole of Hanson & Crane ever heard. That’s the sort of chap he is. He’s got the languages and he’s got the experience and I like him—he held out for his price! If he does it for himself, he’ll do it for us. But he’s not the right type, Mr Whitehead. What I want you to do is to have a look at him and teach him anything you can about the toy business and tell me what you think. He’ll call on you at eleven. Now get out and let me do some work!”
“The foreign correspondence, Mr Seafair?” asked Whitehead getting up.
Seafair slammed the file across the desk to him.
“Deal with it yourself. I don’t see why I should be bothered to tell you how to answer everything. Are you an export manager or are you not?”
“I don’t know, sir,” replied Albert with such a lack of inflection that Seafair was quite unable to take the remark either as an impertinence or an invitation to make his intentions known.
It was intended to be a simple statement of fact, and after a moment’s consideration Seafair took it so, snarled fiercely and chuckled to himself. Whitehead picked up the file and left the managing director’s office.
Albert’s first impression of Toby Manning was neutral. The man was what he had been brought up to call a gentleman—that is to say: he bore himself well, was dressed in good cloth, spoke a cultured English and had certainly been educated at a public school and possibly at a university. Whitehead had little first-hand knowledge of the type. He reserved judgment. There were none such in Hanson & Crane Ltd., but there were not, for example, any Scotchmen either. The chap was out of the usual run of toy salesmen. That was all one could say.
Manning shook hands with a slight but definitely un-English bow, smiled pleasantly with his eyes and sat down. Whitehead vaguely envied the man’s ease, quite unaware that he also had it himself.
“You’ll find it’s not a bad firm to work for,” he said.
“Yes. That’s my impression. I don’t know how I’m going to get the hang of your business in a fortnight. But Mr Seafair thinks it will be enough.”
“It would take you a year to learn about costs and production,” said Whitehead, thinking that Seafair’s impatience must be a bit bewildering to a newcomer. “But don’t worry. I can give you a few tips on the way we run our export in a fortnight. I expect you chaps learn quickly.”
He had a feeling that these overseas representatives with their bronzed faces and gift of tongues must be masters of any number of trades. Like merchant adventurers, they could sell anything from soap to machine guns.
Whitehead’s father had been a commercial traveller. He remembered the romance of the bag of samples and the sudden, mysterious journeys with horse and trap. Little Albert was occasionally allowed to accompany his father, and had been fascinated by the inns and shops of the market towns they visited. He had wished to be a traveller himself, but it was too isolated a job for the man who had emerged from hospital.
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“Would you like to look through the files this morning?” asked Whitehead.
“Not much good yet. I’d like to sit quiet in your office and ask questions whenever something turns up. It’ll be a damned nuisance for you, I’m afraid. But, you see, I know what I don’t know, and you can’t possibly know it.”
Albert considered this profound truth and laughed. Mr Manning would, of course, be a nuisance. On the other hand it would be pleasant to have someone to talk to without feeling that he was wasting Hanson & Crane’s time.
“Do what you like. I’ll help you all I can.”
“Splendid! Will you lunch with me?”
“No. Look here, you lunch with me!”
“I’ll toss you for it.”
Manning lost.
“I’ll slip out for an hour,” he said, “and let you clear up the morning’s work.”
“Thanks. Then we can start square,” answered Whitehead gratefully, for he wanted to begin dictation on the pile of foreign correspondence.
When the door had closed on Mr Manning, Albert decided that he liked him. They did not toss for lunches in Hanson & Crane Ltd. They grabbed an economical meal at midday and went home promptly at five to the outer suburbs and high tea. Albert had naturally tossed for every kind of refreshment in his time, but he had never done so in the office. The simple act seemed to bring in a breath of air from the unknown places where Manning had spent his life, to which in a fortnight he would return.
Toby Manning’s true reason for going out was that he wanted to pawn his watch. His rent and food were paid for a week ahead—or rather his credit at the Earl’s Court boarding house was good for another week—but his cash in hand was twopence and one of the coins Spanish at that. He considered it, however, a true asset, since it would undoubtedly produce a piece of chocolate from a slot machine. In spite of his poverty he had refused to compromise when Seafair offered him £600 a year, had stood firm for £750 and had got it. With only twopence in his pocket a man could afford to back his luck. Complete destitution carried with it independence for just so long as no one could guess the destitution. It was a point of honour with Toby that nobody could. The world was far more likely to suspect him of carelessness in dress than of poverty.
During the last anxious months he had withdrawn himself from the few friends he had in England, not wishing to incur obligations that he would be unable to return. It was the purest good fortune that he had made a new one: Simon Bendrihem. He ran into him at a tiny Spanish restaurant where he occasionally ate when so nauseated by boarding-house food that he was compelled to be extravagant.
Having yielded, after much argument with himself, to the temptation to eat at Pepe’s, Toby was unreasonably annoyed to find the restaurant full. Any other evening he would have waited patiently for a table, but, being a little morbid after weeks of introspection, the trifling disappointment seemed to him a gratuitous and deliberate insult on the part of fate. Standing at the door he surveyed the restaurant angrily and hungrily. His aloofness was translated by all the patrons but one as the arrogance of an Englishman who disliked their faces, despised their clothes and thought their table manners deplorable.
Simon Bendrihem happened to look up from his soup and meet the smouldering eyes of the tall figure at the door. It had an air of outward independence that suggested the landowner or the young sea captain. Yet he was certainly a townsman; there was no more bluffness in him than in a fallen angel. A man under some kind of spiritual compulsion? Annoyance at finding no empty table—obviously his immediate trouble—was not enough to account for this air of having materialised out of the darkness with a flaming sword. On a sudden impulse of curiosity Bendrihem smiled and indicated the empty seat opposite his own.
Toby thanked him in Spanish, placing him as a Latin American businessman. Bendrihem, himself uncertain of the chance acquaintance’s nationality, for Toby’s manner was continental and his complexion dark, answered haltingly in the same language, trying instinctively to modernise the ancient form of it handed down to him by ancestors expelled from Spain four hundred years earlier.
“I thought you might be an Argentine,” said Toby, failing to understand the curious accent.
“No. I was born in Constantinople.”
“Of course! I should have guessed.”
“Yes, I’m a Jew. English on the passport. Simon Bendrihem is my name.”
Bendrihem stated his race with neither pride nor hesitation. Toby instantly liked him. It would have seemed a treachery to his own people had Bendrihem answered shortly that he was English and thus implied that Jewry was only a religion. The man created an atmosphere of calmness about him. He carried his fifty years with easy discipline, like a blunt-headed, hard-working Caesar. His short hawk nose, ageless eyes and energetic mouth were in themselves such absolute and satisfying proof that Jewry was a race, or a variety, or whatever one was supposed to call a group of Europeans of whom the majority were recognisable as belonging to the group.
“My name is Manning,” said Toby. “It’s kind of you to ask me to sit down. I hate dining alone.”
“So do I,” Bendrihem answered cordially.
It was only a partial truth. Simon Bendrihem loved any kind of society, preferably intelligent, but was sufficiently English rarely to seek for it from strangers. He was surprised by the obvious pleasure with which his offer of an empty chair had been accepted. Apparently the fallen angel entered into worldly life with considerable gusto once it had been warmed by some sign of human interest.
Toby Manning ordered himself a casserole and a pitcher of wine, and sat down to enjoy his food and his company with the delight of a man let out of prison. The conversation at the Earl’s Court boarding house resembled its hash: a dull résumé of unimportant events, striving after conventionality and avoiding any definite taste. With conscious vulgarity he cleaned the garlic sauce from his plate with a bit of bread, ate it and swallowed a great draught of wine.
“There’s a lot to be said for the Ottoman Empire,” he remarked. “It was the nearest approach to a world state that modern Europe has known. Nobody cared what language you spoke or what the colour of your eyes was. You were accepted as Moslem, Jew or Christian and given the privileges and disabilities of your beliefs. A man was only persecuted if he started talking nonsense about nationality.”
“You knew the Empire?”
“No. But I know some of the countries that have been carved out of it.”
Toby talked eagerly and, since his companion was a stranger whom he was unlikely to see again, talked about himself. Simon Bendrihem, who was fascinated by the curiosities of human nature, encouraged him with oriental craft and feminine understanding, seeking for the quality of fire by which he had been so impressed. He could not find it. What he did find were a shimmer of charm, and a light-hearted, almost brutal acceptance of life. There was also a shade of bitterness which seemed foreign both to his vision of the man and to the sturdy reality of his speech. Guessing at its cause, Bendrihem accepted as a hypothesis that he had been frustrated by the working of some economic law. Manning did not seem a person to resent too hardly the injustices of sex or society.
“What’s your business?” he asked when they had reached the coffee.
“None at the moment,” Toby replied, retiring into his shell with an abruptness that confirmed Bendrihem’s suspicions.
“So! Well, it’s hard once one has been marked by the wilderness.”
“Surely not so marked? I’m quite a common type.”
“Oh, I’ve no doubt that you can look like any other upper-class Englishman if you want to,” said Bendrihem swiftly. “You have the caste marks all over you. But I get the impression that you’ve jumped off the ladder of easy jobs. That’s all I meant.”
“How the hell do you know that?” Toby exclaimed.
“Don’t think I intend to pry into your private affai
rs.”
“I don’t resent it. I’ve met chaps like you before. You have such insight into human nature that one can only be grateful for it.”
“Perhaps because we chaps don’t want to change human nature. Speaking for myself, I only want to understand it.”
“A collector rather than a priest.”
“If you like,” said Bendrihem shortly.
He disliked the illustration, knowing himself to be exaggeratedly warm-hearted in all his dealings with men.
“I didn’t mean to suggest that you go about with a killing bottle and a pin,” Toby explained. “You’re content to observe.”
“Not entirely,” replied Bendrihem, seeking to bring the conversation back to personalities. “To observe doesn’t satisfy me. To help does.”
Toby smiled.
“I’m absurdly proud,” he said.
“You should be. Tell me—what languages do you speak?”
“Oh, a bit of everything in common use, and German, Spanish and French well.”
Simon Bendrihem had an agency for German printing machinery, and it was he who had imported the offset presses which decorated Hanson & Crane’s tin plate. He was in love with his delicate and powerful machines, and frequently visited his customers, more to see how his steel children were behaving than to beget further orders. Since he knew a little of every industry, from dairies to toilet paper, important enough to do its own printing, his clients used him as a walking information bureau able to advise them on the purchase of men and materials. He was comfortably off, for he had equipped whole newspaper plants and followed the advice of the proprietors in the investment of his profits.
“I know a firm which is looking for an overseas representative,” he said. “I don’t think it’s likely to become a permanent job—there isn’t enough trade to support one. Frankly, it would be a blind alley. But if you like to run round the continent for a year or so while looking out for something better, it might interest you.”
The Third Hour Page 9