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interlude
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81
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and
residues offered to the firm from all over Europe, but also was
concerned with buying and grading and re-smeltÂing scrap metals,
ranging from old lead pipes to the most composite alloys. It was
first-rate experience.
I
had a good teacher in my chief, Leopold Hirsch, who was probably the
foremost scrap-metal expert in Vienna, but he had a vile temper and
hated anything that savoured of neatness or tidiness. He took an almost
fiendÂish delight in upsetting the files of papers I had taken hours to
sort out, and when I reproached him for it, he would simply say that he
could never find a document that was filed away in the proper manner.
Of course, I argued and got hot under the collar and spoke my mind
freely. But it was no use, and I must admit that he could smell out a
wanted paper in a twinkling, even if it were buried inches deep under a
pile of papers.
I
was vividly reminded of him when some twenty-five years later I came
across a hardware merchant in a big way of business in Mindanao, the
Southern Philippines, who had risen from being a pedlar to great
prosperity, and whose book-keeping system was of the simplest. He
merely had two apple barrels placed one on each side of his ramshackle
desk. In one he cast the paid accounts and into the other those that
awaited payment.
Now,
after three years' service with the firm I became entitled to my first
midsummer vacation. Those who nowadays clamour for frequent holidays
with pay might note what we of the older generation put up with in the
name of discipline, training, self-effacement, duty, and economy!
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