Читать книгу Ploughman of the Moon - Robert William Service - Страница 15

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I have always regretted that my parents thwarted my desire to go to sea. Most of my schoolmates went into offices, but a few entered the merchant marine. They vanished for a while to reappear with brass buttons and brazen tales of far adventure. They were objects of admiration, but when the time arrived for them to return to their ships they became strangely subdued and slunk into civilian clothes. No more buffeting the billows. It was too tough. I think I would have stuck it out long enough to get a good sea-ground for a writer. However, my father having frustrated my ambition to be a future Clark Russell, I did the next best thing. If I could not work on a ship I would work in a shipping office. So I got a job at ten pounds a year, to drudge from nine till seven, with a firm beginning in business. From the first I found something fishy about the boss. He believed that credit was capital and that a man could measure his wealth by the amount he could borrow. I have heard him say: "You can pay off old debts by making new. Governments do it; so what?"

He was sole partner in the firm which professed to be ship-owners, but I soon discovered that the ships existed in his imagination. The office was a bare room where there were a table and a copying press, little more. In his private room the boss had a roll-top desk where he would write letters by hand, giving them to me to copy and post. One day he wrote a batch of letters in prospectus form to friends of his very respectable family, mostly widows and clergymen. He invited them to invest their capital in his flourishing business of owning ships, when he would increase it one hundred per cent. His letters glowed with confidence, but to my dismay I found I had dropped them in the letter-box without affixing the necessary70 postage. There were no replies. I can imagine gentle old ladies in their country homes and choleric Colonels in their clubs sniffing because they had to pay twopence postage; then snorting, as they read the dazzling offer to allow them to share in an El Dorado. "How can he make our fortunes if he cannot afford to stamp his letters?" I could hear them say.

For want of a stamp, maybe a fortune was lost. Lost to my boss anyway. But on the other hand I may have saved dear old creatures drawing their funds from Consols and losing them in a wild-cat concern. On the other hand I may have prevented them from really making a fortune. One never knows. My boss was a smart man and knew the shipping business. His idea was to charter and take options on vessels. Once he controlled them, I think he could have run them to advantage. All he needed was financial support, and perhaps it was his small and irresponsible office boy who thwarted him from becoming the founder of a great shipping line. Thinking about this I worried a great deal. As no replies came to his prospectus, my conscience pricked me. He seemed worried too, as morning after morning he examined his mail. Then one day he called me into his room. He had a letter in his hand and I recognized it as from his fiancée. I knew the handwriting, for I had read a previous one that was insufficiently sealed.

"I have here a letter from a young lady," he said severely. "She tells me that one I sent to her was unstamped. You posted it?"

"I'm sure I stamped it," I said earnestly. "Maybe the stamp came off in the mail."

"Well, in future put more moisture on your tongue."

I promised that, as his official stamp-licker, I would be more generous with my saliva, and there the affair ended.

I had to walk three miles to the office and trudge back the same distance, for carfare was beyond my means. Only rich people were able to afford the tramway. I carried with me a lunch made up at home, and washed it down with water from the office tap, which I drank from a tumbler faintly pink because the boss brushed his teeth in it. When I got home in the evening I was often too weary71 to eat supper, but I consoled myself: "Soon it will be pay-day, and I will be able to jingle money in my pocket. I will have ten times more than ever I had in my life." This thought bucked me up in my most desperate moments of fatigue. When pay-day came round I expected to see an envelope on my desk with sixteen shillings and eightpence in it. How I would gloat over the money I had earned so hardly! It would mean so much, two hundred pennies, over eightpence a day. I had it all figured out. I would buy a hot lunch and chocolates, of which I was passionately fond, and still have some pennies left over for pocket-money.

Well, the day arrived, but to my dismay no envelope was forthcoming. It will be for to-morrow, I thought. But no. However, on the third day I ventured to suggest that my pay was due. My boss seemed surprised and a little annoyed that I should dun him in this way. But he treated it as something that did not interest him very much. "All right; I'll pay you the end of the week," he promised casually. But the end of the week came and no wages. Again I meekly suggested my need of money. I felt scared, as if I were asking for something I had no right to. And he acted as if it were effrontery on my part. Huffily he promised to pay me at the end of the following week, but he made me feel so importunate I dared not ask again.

About this time he began to grudge me money to buy stamps for his letters. He would grumble and say: "Dear me, you seem to spend such a lot on postage." Then he would check up my stamp book and admit grudgingly: "Seems all right. Well, here's a shilling."

I reflected: "He doesn't trust me. I believe he expects me to pay for his stamps out of my own pocket. He shouldn't write so many letters. They don't do him any good, anyway." Then, as I was often hungry and tired, I was driven to a form of petty peculation that haunted my conscience for years after. Even to-day it worries me. Perhaps there is some excuse for me in that I was so young. Honesty is not natural; it is grafted on us. I was too youthful to understand its expedience. Twopence a day would have made all the difference to me. For that I could have a mug of coffee and a bath bun. What courage that would give me to carry on! But I had no72 twopence. Then I had an idea. I would post two letters without stamps. I would select letters to big firms that would not be likely to complain, and I would change the firms every time. This was easy. It worked, and I do not suppose it did much harm.

But I could sec that things were going from bad to worse with my employer. Creditors were haunting the office and the janitor was calling daily for his rent. I got orders to tell all callers that my boss was out, and I developed a special technique in handling them. I would enter the private room and stare solemnly around it. The boss, by this time, had the jitters, and would be cowering behind his roll-top desk. I would stare at him blankly as if he were invisible, then return to the outer office saying blandly: "No, he has gone out, but he has left a note on his desk to say he will be back at three." The creditor would go away grumbling, and my boss would emerge cautiously. "You needn't be so damn realistic about it," he would snap, but no doubt thought he had a very smart office boy.

However the crisis was approaching, and soon he could no longer hide behind the roll-top desk. One day he told me to spy on the janitor, and when the man was out of the way he had two draymen come and remove that piece of furniture. Next day I saw it in a near-by auction room, and I guessed the end was near. I no longer worried about my salary, for I knew I was only a ranking creditor on the estate, if any. Next morning the boss did not turn up, and I never saw him again. He had taken the letter books, and all that remained was the big copying press on which I had expended a month of muscular effort. I often wondered what became of him. He deserved fortune, for he had a bold, active mind. Perhaps he succeeded, and died with honour and dignity; but if so he must have been more discriminating in his choice of an office boy.