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Interlude
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79
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third time, and I did not receive a vote of thanks. "If you don't leave my papers alone," he said, "you can get out."
I
turned to a more promising method of attack. The firm subscribed to
several French and English trade papers, but the men at the top read
nothing but the quotations in them, since, as I suspected, they could
read nothing well but German. I would make myself useful as a
translator. So I set to work and translated out the current week's
reports into German, copied them out in a fair hand, pinned them to the
originals and placed them prominently on the senior's desk.
This
time my shot succeeded. I was told to go on with translating and my
salary was doubled on the spot. I was now the foreign correspondent. I
blew in the whole of my salary on a gift for my mother—a dinner
service. She said little about it at the time save to chide me for my
extravagance, but it was a present that she did not forget, for
thirty-three years later there came to me in Hong Kong my mother's
will. "And to my son Louis the dinner service which he bought me with
his first earnings and which I have treasured beyond any of my
belongings."
Thereafter
promotion followed rapidly enough in the sense that I received more and
more responsibility, though the increase in pay was so small as to be
barely noticeable. But I did not mind, for the chief, on learning my
ambition to be a lawyer, allowed me time off every day to go to
lectures. I had, however, to make up the several hours a day thus lost
by staying at the office until io p.m. most
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