Back by Henry Green Page B

said.
    “And there’s the index. And here’s the cross index. The whole thing’s visible. Tell at a glance, I don’t think. It may seem loopy to you but this is the one way our particular job can be done.”
    “I see,” she said, while he sat back, having talked too much for him. “I wonder if I could meet one of the other girls,” she said.
    “I say, you must excuse me,” he begged. “You want to know where to put your things?” And he took her out to the friendliest typist, in the Board Room office.
    It was a great relief to have her. The main advantage was, it let him get back to his digs at a reasonable hour each night, and that at a time when he had got over Rose, that is to say when he could keep quite a bit relaxed. But he found he never seemed to do much in the evenings, all the same. He had explained it by making out that his staying sorry for himself about Rose, and his being overworked, prevented him going off free at nights. Yet now that he was so much freer, he seemed rather at a loose end.
    So he began to look about him. Even in the office; in spite of the saying, “Never on your own doorstep.”
    It began one afternoon, over the tea and bun at three thirty, as they sat side by side.
    “I wonder if you’d mind,” she said. “I get so muddled. What is what we’re doing for?”
    He took a sip. “Steel,” he replied.
    “Oh, they make steel in them, then?”
    “No. Parabolam,” he told her once again. “Used in special steels.”
    “Sounds strange,” she commented, and sniffed. She was drearily untidy, but there was something there, he thought.
    “What’s parabolam, then?” she asked, to keep the ball rolling.
    “Comes from birds’ droppings.”
    She looked at him, surprised. “Here,” she said, “you wouldn’t be having me on, by any chance?”
    “Word of honour,” he said. She waited.
    Like any silent man he talked technicalities freely, once he got started. “It was an accident,” he began, “like it was with stainless steel, when the heads were on an inspection round the foundry yard and one of ’em spotted something he’d noticed before, a bit of bright scrap through the rain. So they had it analysed, and there you are. Now it’s what you cut your meat up with.”
    “Well, I never knew that,” she said.
    “It was exactly similar with parabolam,” he went on, “only this time it was birds’ droppings. The swallows used to nest under the staging, where they charged the furnace. One day the foundry manager had all the nests cleared out, together with the filth below. And the labourer he gave the job, was too tired to take the mess down, he shovelled it in with the charge into the cupola. And what came out with their molten metal was so hard they couldn’t machine the casting.”
    “I can’t hardly believe you.”
    “Well I may have been exaggerating a trifle. Anyway, they allgot to work and it was isolated. In the end, they discovered there was a higher percentage of what it takes where sea birds roost. So we ship it in the raw state from South America, and the stuff is burned in those retorts we buy from Dicksons. In burning, a gas is released, which is treated in the catalysts. From there the vapour passes to those cooling chambers, that come from the A.B.P. people, and then the cold gas deposits its crystals onto what you won’t believe, you’ll think I’m play acting, onto ordinary common or garden laurel leaves they place on those long racks which Purdews make us.”
    “I know a girl named Laurel. Hardy we call her.”
    “I knew one called Rose.” Each time he said her name he noted he felt nothing any more, so much so that he hardly bothered to watch himself these days. He went on. “After which the leaves are washed, and it’s got to be laurel because of the chemical properties in the leaf. Then we take the water out on a Bennetts evaporator. And bob’s your uncle. Sells for £250 a ton into the bargain. That’s roughly the lot. If you wanted it