Morrison was normally a clerk in the firm’s head office in Lower Regent Street. Usually he spent his time arranging for other people the enthralling journeys he so much longed to take himself. He was well acquainted with the world, and particularly with Europe, in what might be called a theoretic or paper fashion. Asked the route from Copenhagen to Constanta or from Archangel to Archachon, he would say before ever opening a book: “Oh, yes. The best way is via such and such towns and it will take you so many hours.” He was as much at home with a Continental Bradshaw as the normal Englishman is with Test Match scores, and always carried in his head the sterling equivalent of the principal currencies of the world. Harry Morrison had been intended for the diplomatic service and had gone to Cambridge from a good school. But before he had taken his degree his father had died, leaving, instead of the expected fortune, debts which practically wiped his legacy out, the result of secret speculation.
