Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/195

 a bonus of ten per cent. on the Pelican's profits. He had sold out all his War Stock, and had taken a share in the capitalization of the Roland Hotels. How much the enterprise would bring him he did not know. The Pelican was a little gold mine; the Royal Oak was finding fair weather, and Roland was talking buoyantly of twenty per cent.

Roland was a solid man now, very solid, and so ballasted with capital that nothing could blow him over. He was a proof of the old saying that—"Money breeds money," but Roland had used his imagination. He could meet any tooth-brush merchant and smile in his face.

"O, Roland, the chap who writes that musical stuff."

But Roland was proof against the commercialists' envious patronage, for there were the Roland Hotels. The tooth-brush merchant had to swallow them; they were not musical stuff; they stuck in the unimaginative man's gizzard.

Exactly!

Sorrell had picked up one or two of Roland's characteristic words. It was obvious that his son was up at Trinity, and could refer to his father as "Captain Sorrell. Interested in hotels, a director. In with Roland,—you know,—the Roland. Quite a big show."

Kit could speak with the voice of a sea-captain. There was no need for him to hand out basins.

At times a man's outlook on life is so narrowed by the press of circumstance that his consciousness peers through a slit at the immediate happenings that concern him. Like a gunner in a steel turret, a part of the machine, he lays his gun upon the obvious target. So it had been with Sorrell for many years, but now he had become aware of an enlarging of his consciousness. He had leisure. The sky had grown more spacious above his head. He could sit on his quarter-deck and look about him, and see his ship moving, swinging her prow against blue horizons. He issued orders, and the urge of every proud man is to issue orders.

A deep contentment took the place of the facile cheerfulness of the good-natured slave.

He was a person. Other people knew that he had to be considered. Moreover, he was popular, whatever that may mean. He had never bothered himself about popularity; he had bothered about his job.

Good food was brought him with great punctuality.