Making Money - Terry Pratchett [99]
But that’s plain daft, his sensible self pointed out. He could have said something like, “You see? Even I can make a mistake through a moment’s inattention! We must be forever vigilant!” Or he could have said, “I did this on purpose to test you!” Even schoolteachers know that one. I can think of half a dozen ways to wriggle out of something like that. But then I’m a wriggler. I don’t think he’s ever wriggled in his life.
“I hope he hasn’t done something…silly,” said Miss Drapes, fishing a crumpled handkerchief out of a sleeve.
Something…silly, thought Moist. That’s the phrase people used when they were thinking about someone jumping into the river or taking the entire contents of the medicine box in one go. Silly things like that.
“I’ve never met a less silly man,” he said.
“Well, er…we’ve always wondered about him, to be honest,” said a clerk. “I mean, he’s in at dawn and one of the cleaners told me he’s often in here late at night—What? What? That hurt!”
Miss Drapes, who had nudged him hard, now whispered urgently in his ear. The man deflated and looked awkwardly at Moist.
“Sorry, sir, I spoke out of turn,” he mumbled.
“Mr. Bent is a good man, Mr. Lipwig,” said Miss Drapes. “He drives himself hard.”
“Drives all of you hard, it seems to me,” said Moist.
This attempt at solidarity with the laboring masses didn’t seem to hit the mark.
“If you can’t stand the heat, get off the pot, that’s what I say,” said a senior clerk, and there was a general murmur of agreement.
“Er, I think you get out of the kitchen,” said Moist. “‘Get off the pot’ is the alternative when—”
“Half the chief cashiers in the Plains have worked in this room,” said Miss Drapes. “And quite a few managers, now. And Miss Lee, who’s deputy manager of Apsly’s Commercial Bank in Sto Lat, she got the job because of the letter Mr. Bent wrote. Bent-trained, you see. That counts for a lot. If you’ve got a reference from Mr. Bent, you can walk into any bank and get a job with a snap of your fingers.”
“And if you stay, the pay here is better than anywhere,” a clerk put in. “He told the Board, if they want the best, they’d have to pay for it!”
“Oh, he’s demanding,” said another clerk, “but I hear they’re all working for a human resources manager at Pipeworth’s Bank now, and if it comes to that I’ll take Mr. Bent any day of the week. At least he thinks I’m a person. I was hearing where she was timing how long people spent in the privy!”
“They call it time-and-motion study,” said Moist. “Look, I expect Mr. Bent just wants to be alone for a while. Who was he yelling at, the lad who’d made a mistake?…Or didn’t make it, I mean.”
“That was young Hammersmith,” said Miss Drapes. “We sent him home because he was in a bit of a state. And no, he wasn’t really shouting at him. He wasn’t really shouting at anybody. He was—” she paused, searching for a word.
“Gibbering,” said the clerk who had spoken out of turn, giving the turn another twist, “and you don’t all have to look at me like that. You all heard him. And he looked as though he’d seen a ghost.”
Clerks were wandering back into the counting house in ones and twos. They’d searched everywhere, was the general agreement, and there was strong support for the theory that he’d gone out through the Mint, it being rather busy in there with all the work still going on. Moist doubted it. The bank was old, and old buildings have all sorts of crannies, and Mr. Bent had been here for—
“How long has he been here?” he wondered aloud.
The general consensus was “since the mind of man can remember” but Miss Drapes, who seemed for some reason to have made herself well informed on the subject of Mavolio Bent, volunteered that it was thirty-nine years and he got a job when he was thirteen by sitting on the steps all night until the chairman came to work and impressing him with his command of numbers. He went from messenger boy to chief cashier in twenty years.
“Speedy!