Sorrell and Son (Alfred A. Knopf, printing 9)/Chapter 8
THERE followed a winter of strenuous preparation.
The tourist traffic upon the road had dwindled to a very casual stream, and the Pelican,—during the process of putting on a new plumage, was glad of the respite. As Sorrell had foreseen, Mr. Roland was laying jealous hands upon the Georgian stables and joining them to the main building, and the transformation gave him ten more bedrooms and accommodation for the staff. A new garage was being built, and two tennis courts and a croquet lawn were te be laid out in the little paddock.
Roland had his own particular ideas. One of his first measures was to eliminate the public bar, and to add the space thus gained to the lounge. He decreed that commercial travellers—as such—were not to be accommodated, and the old commercial room became the card and smoking room. The whole place was to be redecorated, and much of it refurnished and recarpeted, and the various colour schemes were of Roland's own planning. He believed in any number of comfortable chairs, and in atmosphere of rich and pleasant simplicity. The china was to be of a plain white biscuit with a dark blue and gold border. The bedrooms were black, white and orange, or white and cerise. He used soft blues and greens with touches of purple and old rose in the living-rooms. All ugly and wasteful furniture was got rid of. Two new bathrooms were installed, and a small library arranged on one side of the hotel office.
One of Roland's most practical innovations was his attitude towards the "staff." He treated the principal members as fellow workers; he challenged their co-operation, and stimulated their keenness. There were queer, patriarchal little meetings in his sitting-room—"My Soviet" he called it laughingly. The committee consisted of Mrs. Marks the housekeeper, Fanny Garland the head waitress, Mrs. Lovibond the cook, Sorrell, and Bowden the gardener. To them Mr. Roland was a figure of encouraging and deliberate frankness. "This is our show. I take it that we are all keen on making a success of our show. We are all going to benefit by it. Suggestions. That's what I want from you. Anything to improve the efficiency or the comfort, or to wash out unnecessary work. My idea is to make the Pelican the most famous roadside inn on the south of the Thames. 'Where to stay?' 'Why,—the Pelican at Winstonbury. No other place to touch it.'"
Within a month he had the whole staff in his pocket. He had extraordinary powers of persuasion; it was the pull of his personality,—his air of calm and deliberate kindness, his assuming the other person to be as interested and as efficient as he was. He never fussed. He had one of those peculiarly pleasant and consoling voices.
The women ran about for him like happy slaves. He treated them all as though they were gentlewomen, and if they did not say it to each other they thought him a very great gentleman.
Mrs. Marks, that little dark woman, silently gliding everywhere, would look at him with the eyes of an intelligent little dog.
Fanny Garland, cheery and big and blonde, spread an atmosphere of smiling efficiency, using a brisk and philosophical tongue.
"A dirty fork's no use to anybody. Doesn't it make you feel all nice inside to see twenty white and glittering tables all laid and to know that there isn't a spot to be ashamed of anywhere? If the job's worth doing! Yes, and think of the tips, my dears!"
Bowden the gardener, rather a surly person, thawed gradually like the soil on a sunny morning after a frost. He found that Roland was providing him with a strong lad upon whom he could exercise a tongue and a passion for dour thoroughness.
"The idea is, Bowden, that we should be self-supporting as to vegetables."
"We ain't got the ground, sir."
"Well,—you shall have it. I am going to have the market value of all the vegetables sent in—checked. And you will get a percentage on results."
And Bowden's broad and rather Simian back was bent urgently over his spade.
To Sorrell those winter months were full of a steady encouragement. He had good food and a clean bed; he was not overworked; and Kit was happy with Mrs. Garland, and not too unhappy at the town school. Moreover, his job interested him; he was working for a man who was keen on detail and who appreciated thoroughness. Also, the human relationship seemed to matter more and more, and Thomas Roland and his second porter reached a pleasant and solid understanding. Roland talked to Sorrell more than he talked to any of the others, and always it seemed to Sorrell that their words went below the surface into the human realities beneath.
"After all," as Roland said, "a man must have a job, and it is the job that matters. Not so much what it is,—but how a man does it. That's how it strikes me."
He made Sorrell feel that he respected him and the work he did.
"An objective, sir."
"Of course. The nice people who want to flatten out all the social hills and bring us all down to a sort of boardschool playground! No good."
The work went on, the internal economy of the Pelican being so arranged that the casual few upon the road could be accommodated while the alterations were being carried out.
Roland was spending a great deal of money, and Sorrell appreciated the effect that was being produced. Those sumptuously pleasant rooms, the great chairs and richly coloured rugs, the clean paint and paper, those rows of pleasant bedrooms all so fresh and cosy, the sleekness of the garden, the beautiful cleanness of the freshly appointed kitchen, the bathrooms and pantries—white tiled and white enamelled, the linen, the table silver, the hundred and one nice details!
But was the Pelican going to pay? Had not Roland the musician and artist overwhelmed Roland the hotel keeper?
The problem worried Sorrell not a little. He had begun to identify himself so thoroughly with the Pelican and all that the Pelican stood for.
He was surprised when Thomas Roland showed him that he had divined his anxiety.
"You think I am overdoing it?"
"I don't know, sir."
For Roland had found Sorrell economizing coal and electric current. He would go about switching off unnecessary lights.
"I am all in on this adventure. Either we touch port—or we founder. I am going to give pours the best—the best I have in me. I wouldn't give them shoddy music. The pride of the craftsman."
Sorrell stood looking at the fire upon which he had been carefully banking a scoopful of "ovoids." His small but intelligent head was bent, and its darkness caught the firelight. His seriousness was a friend's tribute.
"One always likes to believe, sir, that if we give the best that is in us."
"I do believe it. After all—it should matter to us most. If the best doesn't pay, it is not our fault."
"All people are not as generous, sir."
"I'm not generous, man. The fact is I can't bring myself to do a thing meanly. Even the fitting up and the running of an hotel. Still, I appreciate it"
Their eyes met.
"Scientific fire building, Stephen!"
He smiled.
"Do you do it because you have a conscience?"
"Partly. There's another reason."
"I think I know it. You and I are mixed up together—somehow, heart and pocket. Well,—I would not have it otherwise."
The other problem that worried Sorrell was the inevitable advent of George Buck.
The ex-sergeant-major seemed to project a menacing adumbration, and to Sorrell he suggested the blond beast dominant, something hectoring and elephantine.
Buck!
He did not like the name; it was both too male and too American. He agreed that it was absurd of him to worry about the fellow, and yet he would catch himself at all sorts of moments creating a shadowy image of the prospective head-porter. What was the man like? Would Buck be a big, muscular creature, all belly, voice, and blond moustache? Would he order him about?
Sorrell began to dislike the man weeks before he had ever seen him, and his dislike was instinctive and natural. George Buck was a possible menace to his security; he might prove a destroyer of the pleasant and calm activity that Sorrell had begun to associate with the Pelican Inn. He might interfere with the nice little efficiences that the second porter was evolving. Moreover, he might pocket a sergeant-majorly share of the tips.
Sorrell was doing quite well in tips, in spite of enforced quietness of these months of transfiguration. He was saving money fast; he had a Post Office savings book.
But his prophetic hostility to George Buck was not only the hostility of a dog with a bone towards the bigger dog who was to share it. It was as though Sorrell had a premonition, a sensitive fore-feeling of what the man's presence would mean in the lounge and the luggage-room, and on the stairs and in the staff's quarters. Buck cast a shadow, a shadow as of something huge and menacing and hairy. Even the flicker of a fire at twilight throwing shadows about the lounge brought on this mood of depression and restlessness. Or a blustering wind at night. Sorrell fought against it. The thing was becoming an obsession, a clawing monkey at the back of his mind.
About a week before the head-porter's arrival Sorrell compelled himself to speak to Roland.
"I suppose, sir, that when Buck comes—I shall have to take orders?"
Roland was at the piano, and Sorrell had come in with a fresh supply of coal.
"Yes,—just a word. I told you. Buck will be responsible. That's only fair, Stephen."
"Quite fair, sir."
"He's not a bad sort of chap. Though, of course, I only knew him as a sergeant-major. I want him to have his chance."
Sorrell had a feeling that Tom Roland was maintaining certain mental reservations with regard to Buck. He did not quite know his man. There was an obligation, or what Roland conceived to be an obligation, and Sorrell found wisdom in reticence.
"I will do all I can to help him, sir."
"I'm sure you will. So far as I am concerned, Stephen, a man makes good or cuts his own throat. I observe things."
He began to play a piece of Debussy's, and Sorrell, after putting coal on the fire with careful noiselessness, went softly out of the room.
"Do your job and hang on," he thought. "Whatever that other man is he is not going to make me cut my own throat."
Ex-Sergeant-Major Buck arrived at the Pelican in the station bus. He wore a bowler hat and a blue overcoat with a velvet collar, and he travelled with a solid leather suitcase and a steamer trunk.
Sorrell had gone out to meet the bus, and he stood momentarily staring, et immense blue back emerging from the bus doorway. The figure separated itself, and turning showed a face that was like an uncooked round of beef, with two blue pebbles for eyes.
"Catch hold, my lad."
The man was holding out his suit case, and Sorrell, coming suddenly out of his trance, took the suit case.
"Are you Mr. Buck?"
"I am. Suppose you're the chap—under me."
Sorrell nodded. He was conscious of a sort of nausea. "Under me!" Yes, it seemed to him that those two words exactly expressed the situation. The man was all that his fears had pictured him to be, the big, raw-faced creature, all belly, voice, and blond moustache.
"You might fetch that trunk down."
"All right."
Buck's eyes rested on him consideringly for a moment, for he had divined in Sorrell something of that sulkiness that the private soldier's hatred had struggled to express without daring actual utterance. For Buck was less heavy in the uptake than he looked. "Dumb saucy! You are that sort, are you? We'll see about it!" And then Thomas Roland appeared, and Buck clicked the heels of his brown boots and gave a guardsman's salute, his big hand quivering.
"Come to report, sir."
Roland was smiling. He held out a hand.
"I'm glad to see you. Quite like old times, Buck. We have another ex-service man here in Sorrell."
Sorrell was struggling with the ex-sergeant-major's trunk, and loathing it as he had never loathed any other piece of luggage. He was aware of Buck watching him.
"Can you manage it?"
"Yes, thanks."
"You don't look as though you could," said the blue eyes. "Weedy sort of chap."
He went in with Mr. Roland.
During the winter months Sorrell had had time to make the acquaintance of a number of books, for Roland's sitting-room was full of them and he had allowed Sorrell to borrow. Sorrell's reading was various. It included Shaw, Edward Carpenter, Maurice Hewlett, the local history of Winstonbury and its surroundings, and the Michelin Guide. He kept a note-book. In it he had jotted down the distances between Winstonbury and all the places of note within a hundred miles of the town. He knew all the inns. He would go to the garage daily and extract from the chauffeurs any information as to the state of the different roads.
For, if a touring owner-driver appealed to him for information Sorrell felt a pleasing sense of efficiency when he was able to reel off the necessary facts.
"Quendon, sir? Forty-three miles. Forty-seven if you go by Langton. The Langton road is in better condition. On the other road they are laying a new water-main at Foxley."
Or
"Holmdale House, sir? Open every Thursday from ten till twelve. You present a card at the lodge. The Italian gardens and the Vandyks are worth seeing. But—of course you know that, sir."
Somewhere in one of Mr. Roland's books he had read that with the subtilizing of consciousness the field of man's eternal struggle had changed. The contest had ceased to be physical and had become mental, psychical, Man no longer contended with external forces and with other men; the struggle was with himself.
He agreed, and he disagreed.
It seemed to him that in his own case the struggle was a double one. He had to fight himself, that more primitive part of himself that wanted to break out into rages, to despair, to grow moody or cynical, or to run for comfort to some woman. On the other hand his battle with the physical and natural forces was only too real. There was luggage, and there was ex-Sergeant-Major Buck.
There was tacit war between them from the beginning.
It was most natural.
Each saw in the other a complete representation of all that was disliked, a collection of characteristics that caused the opposing prejudices to bristle. Sorrell was a brain, Buck a voice. One man's objective lay twenty years ahead; the other's was immediate and physical, the satisfying of the grosser appetites. Their contrasts did not attract; they repelled.
The struggle began at once, though there was no apparent struggle, for Buck, like many men of his type, had a good deal of cunning. He could truckle. He went about with an air of bluff cheeriness.
"Now then—my lad."
He took control on the very first day. There was to be no doubt as to who was head-porter and who was second. His bulk rolled briskly about the place. In the army he had learned how to convey an impression of immense activity, while in reality he did nothing. He used his voice on the others.
He began by being genial to Sorrell, but his geniality was contemptuous, and intended to be contemptuous. There was shrewd malice in the blue eyes.
For to Buck, Sorrell was a type, the type of the overeducated, sly, argumentative, sullen, weedy, mutinous recruit. A clever, circuitous, insolent devil. Uncomfortably quick too, a fellow who needed watching.
If Sorrell found Buck's self-confident bluster offensive, his own quietness and his reticences were equally offensive to the other man.
Buck had his own justifications.
"Nasty,—weedy,—supercilious chap. Ex-officer. I'll teach him a thing or two. Jealous of me. Ofcourse. He'll need watching. He's not the sort of man I want under me, no, not by a long chalk. Some big, good-natured chap, quick with the luggage, and not too quick with anything else. Well,—I think I know a thing or two."
At the back of his mind was the wish to get rid of Sorrell. He realized that in spite of the other man's weediness he was a competitor who was to be respected.
In the little room where Sorrell used to clean the boots and brush the clothes there was a window overlooking the garden, and here Sorrell had been in the habit of reading when there was nothing else that needed doing. He had an old Windsor armchair by the window, and Mrs. Marks had given him an old red cushion. She liked Sorrell better than he knew. And through the window he could glance from his book to the old trees, or at the yew hedges beyond the lane, or at the bulbs spearing up in the borders, or at clumps of purple and yellow crocuses.
He was looking out of this window one afternoon, with his book, one of Galsworthy's plays, lying folded over his knee, when he was surprised by a voice.
"You—seem—pretty active—Sorr'l."
That was one of the many petty details that annoyed Sorrell. Buck pronounced his name—abbreviating it—so that it sounded like "saul." He had not heard Buck come to the door. The big man could be very soft on his feet.
"Quite" was all that Sorrell said.
Buck came into the little room, his bulk seeming to fill it. He had the air of a righteous overseer. Seeing the book he reached for it deliberately, and picked it off Sorrell's knee.
"Doing a bit of reading. Well,—this sort of stuff is no—use to a man. Don't you think, my lad, that you might find something better to do?"
Sorrell sat still,—but he was quivering.
"Perhaps you'll suggest a job."
Buck threw the book on the window-sill.
"Look here, don't let there be any doubt about it. I'm responsible here. And I'm going to do my job, see. I've got the 'Skipper's' interests in my mind. He's a sport"
The implication was obvious, but Sorrell kept his temper. He was not going to uncover himself to this big creature.
"I agree. But this is one of Mr. Roland's books."
"Did he lend it you?"
"Yes."
Buck nodded a sage head.
"He's one of the easy sort. That makes it a bit more obvious, don't it? You look about and get busy. I don't blab,—but I use my eyes. You get busy."