ATH-BOI, and other Insoluble Mysteries ' CAN'T bear the idea
of working in an office.'
I must, in my time, have uttered these words. I like to think that I did not utter them often, partly because they are plaintive and partly because my life has been haunted in only a mild and intermittent way by the bugbears they evoke. But I have frequently heard them spoken by other people, male and female, young and middle-aged, and I can- not recall a single instance in which I have withheld from the speaker my spontaneous sympathy and support. 'Office life,' I have always agreed, 'must be hell.'
Yet as a matter of fact I spend much of my own life in an office. It differs chiefly from pukka offices—I mean the sort of offices that one associates with 'office life'—in being much more uncomfortable and inconvenient than any of them; and it is at this time of the year, when the evenings begin to draw in and the wind to agitate in a discreet tattoo the metal flap marked 'Letters' which is its main, though not its only, means of ingress into my sanctum, that a vague dis- content steals over me. I think almost with envy of the white- collar class ascending daily in powerful lifts to warm, bright, functional rooms equipped with tape-recorders and calculat- ing machines.
The muted sociable rattle of the tea-trolley outside their doors does not interrupt their telephone conversations; mine are frequently blotted out altogether by the roar of a tractor. Their privacy is not at the mercy of scrap-iron merchants and fertiliser salesmen who, failing to observe the legend 'Inquiries' over a satellite office, bring in with them a great rush of gelid air. And no proper office harbours in its ceiling a colony of woodworms whose patient, unremitting efforts coat all beneath with a fine integument of dust.
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In all country estate offices there tends to accumulate a detritus of uninteresting curiosities : arrowheads, fossils, the skull of a stoat, bomb-splinters, great carbuncles cut from a diseased free, a miscellany of useless trouvailles which it never occurs to anyone to throw away. My office is no exception to this rule. But interspersed among this normal class of relics are others less congruous to their surroundings. When, and for what purpose, did I bring to my place of business a single volume (Aim-sot) of the 1875 edition of the Encyclopcedia Britannica? It is indeed crammed with fascinating informa- tion (`The strangeness of the baths of animal substances, that have been at various times in use, is such that their employ- ment seems scarcely credible. That baths of milk or whey might not be unpopular is not surprising, but baths of blood, in some cases of human blood, have been used; and baths of horse dung were for many ages in high favour!); but how did ATH-BOI ever get into my office, and how will it ever get out?
The same questions might be asked, with equal pertinency, about a complete set of Linguaphone records in Chinese.
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The Goon-like inconsequence of this jetsam would not bring on a feeling of malaise if only the essential appointments of my office made more sense. For it nit not be thought that I have surrendered to the forces of obsolescence and decay. On the contrary ! Every year some modernisation is effected. 1 can now for instance, with the aid of an instrument which looks as if it had at one time been on tour In Journey's End, telephone, to the estate mechanic in his workshop, pro- vided that he has not got 'Workers' Playtime' switched on too loud; and the real telephone is equipped with a wonder- ful bit of patent flex which never gets in a tangle and was sent me by its manufacturer after I had written a humorous article about the intransigence of ordinary telephone flex. The old grate, which used to fall apart and set fire to the threadbare carpet, has been replaced by a new one, and a large hook has been fixed to the porch outside, hitched to which my horse, if I ride to the office. gazes reproachfully at me through the window. All the time thoughtful improve- ments of this nature are being put in hand.
But still there is something not quite right, something slightly surrealist about the place. Nothing could look solider or more respectable than the glass-fronted bookcase or the nine volumes of Coates's Herd Book arrayed, with Knocker's Digest of Workmen's Compensation Cases and kindred tomes, upon the middle shelf. But why should the shelf below it house Darling's Pyrometry, six copies of a German translation of one of my books, Who's Who for 1920, a small empty bottle labelled 'Concentrated Orange Juice,' a large full bottle labelled 'Tincture of Iodine. Poison,' a bundle of Christmas cards, and one Egyptian piastre? I am not a finicky person, nor one who sets much store by the Art of Gracious Living; but why do I have to have Darling's Pyrometry among my lares et penates? What is pyrometry, anyhow?
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Then there is the problem of one of my maternal great- grandfathers, an Irish baronet and a surgeon of renown. A copy of his portrait by Millais stands on the floor behind a leather sofa. Since it is a practically life-size portrait there is no room for it on the walls, and Sir Richard's dignified, sardonic profile looms up over the back of the sofa like some- one who has been persuaded, against his better judgement, to play the Gravedigger in an amateur production of Hamlet. When anyone sits down on the sofa a cloud of tiny white feathers flies out through the holes which the dogs have scratched in the leather; and as these settle slowly on the antiquated or irrelevant appointments of my office I often have the illusion that a look of weary disgust passes across the face of my maternal great-grandfather.
This always reminds me that one of these days I must have his head cut off and framed in a picture of manageable size. Besides being inherently disrespectful, this act has been so long postponed that the thought of it fills me with a double dose of guilt. Office life may, as I have so often opined, be hell; but it really ought not to confront one with problems of this kind.
* * * And yet, despite all its drawbacks and follies (one huge drawer has never contained anything except nine composition billiard balls and a mousetrap), 1 would not change my office for a proper one, with graphs on the walls, fluorescent light- ing, silver photograph frames on the desk and a picture of an extensive factory over the mantelpiece. It is not commodious or up to date or within easy reach of anywhere that matters; but once, stepping out of it into the dusk. I saw a woodcock go roding through the grey air a few feet above its roof, and 'one can put up with a lot from an office where that sort of
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