Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/183

 "Butcher. Pushing on that inevitable half-penny. See him about it."

Sorrell had fallen to the fascination of figures and of "curves." He had plotted a series of curves, a grocery curve, a linen curve, a coal curve, a gas curve. The amount of meat consumed each week could be discovered at a glance. Sorrell's room was like a "staff" orderly room, the walls covered with typed notes and diagrams.

His day was not unlike an "orderly officer's" day in the army. He inspected everything, the kitchen, the meat, the vegetables sent in by Bowden, the store-room, the public rooms, the bathrooms and lavatories, the garage, the oil and petrol store. His knowledge of the Pelican's anatomy and physiology was becoming so complete and intimate that he was on the way to being an expert.

Ever and again he paused and watched his son. A well-mown lawn was as Satisfying as a well-kept ledger, and Sorrell had come to know that it was the inward thoroughness that mattered, doing the job thoroughly, even though no one saw the objective results of it. A queer thing that inward pride, that scorn of all slackness and of all shuffling, that daily struggle with man's fatal inertia. Your job was like a ship; you had to sail it in all weathers, when you felt sick, and when your moods were like baffling and uncertain winds.

It seemed to Sorrell that Christopher had this passion for thoroughness. He had never been childish. Sorrell hated childishness, especially that most exasperating form of it, the childishness of grown-up children. The dreamy, drowsy, inconsequential imbeciles!

Neither was Christopher a prig.

"Anything's better than priggishness."

Kit had finished his mowing, and Sorrell saw him wiping the blades and knife of the machine with an oily rag.

Sorrell had asked for a week's holiday.

"I should like to go up with the boy"—and Thomas Roland said "Of course."