What a relief,
moreover, to be able to talk to a gentleman for a change! I wished I
could have had him to myself for five minutes; there were one or two
things one would have liked to learn from him. Unfortunately he was
surrounded, as such people are, by half a dozen of the characteristic
masks. For the rest, His ex-Excellency seemed to be ineffably bored with
his new functions.
"What on earth brings you here?" he began in a fascinatingly
absent-minded style, as if he had known me all my life, and with an
inimitable nasal drawl. "This is a rotten job, my dear sir. Rotten! I
cannot recommend it. Not your style at all, I should say."
"But, my dear Sir F - - , I am not applying for your job. Something
subordinate, I mean. Anything, anything."
"What? Down there, cutting up newspapers at twenty-two shillings a week?
No, no. Let's have your address, and we will communicate with you when
we find something worth your while. By the way, have you tried the War
Office?"
I had.
And it stands to reason that I tried the Munitions more than once.
It was my rare good fortune - luck pursued me on these patriotic
expeditions - to come face to face, at the Munitions, with the fons et
origo; the deputy fountain-head, that is to say; a very peculiar
private-secretary-in-chief for that department. He was a perpendicular,
iron-grey personality, if I remember rightly, who smelt of some
indifferent hair-wash and lost no time in giving you to understand that
he was preternaturally busy.
Did I know anything about machinery?
Nothing to speak of, I replied. As co-manager and proprietor of some
cotton mills employing several hundred hands for spinning and weaving, I
naturally learnt how to handle a fair number of machines - sufficiently
well, at all events, to start and stop them and tell the girls how to
avoid being scalped or having their arms torn out whenever I happened to
be passing that way. This life also gave me some experience, useful
perhaps at the Munitions, in dealing with factory-hands - -
That was not the kind of machinery he meant. Did I know anything about
banking?
Nothing at all.
"You are like everybody else," he replied with a weary sigh, as much as
to say: How am I going to run the British Empire with a collection of
imbeciles like this? "We have several thousands of applicants like
yourself," he went on. "But I will put your name down. Come again."
"You are very kind."
"Do call again," he added, in his best private-secretary manner.
