And be able possibly to discover a vacancy for a public-school man
with a fairish knowledge of the world and some other things - one who,
moreover, had himself served in a cranky and fussy Government Department
and, though working in another sphere, had been thanked officially for
certain labours - once by the Admiralty, twice by the Board of Trade; and
anyway, hang it! one was not so infernally venerable as all that, was
one?
"I called about a fortnight ago. You have my name down."
"Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. We have such thousands of applicants. I
remember you! A mechanic, aren't you?"
"No. And you asked me if I understood banking, and I said I didn't."
"What a pity. Now if you knew about banking - - "
Nothing, evidently, had been done about my application, nor, for that
matter, about those thousands of others. We were being played with. I
began to feel grumpy. It was a lovely afternoon, and I remembered, with
regret, that I had thrown over an engagement to go for a walk with a
friend at Wimbledon. About this hour, I calculated, we should be
strolling along Beverley Brook or through the glades of Coombe Woods
with sunshine filtering through the birches overhead; it would have been
more pleasant, and far more instructive, than wasting my time with a
hatchet-faced automaton like this. That comes, I thought, of being
patriotic. I observed:
"Your department seems to require only bankers and mechanics. Would it
not be well to advertise the fact and save trouble and time to those
thousands of applicants who, you say, are in the same predicament as
myself? I came here to do national work of some general kind."
"So I gather. And if you understood banking - - "
"If I did, I should be a banker at my time of life - don't you see? - and
lending money to you people, and giving you good advice, instead of
asking you for employment. Isn't that fairly obvious? As a matter of
fact, my acquaintance with banking is limited to a knowledge of how to
draw cheques, and even that useful accomplishment is fast fading from my
memory, under the stress of the times."
Being a Welshman - so I presume, from his name - he condescended to smile
faintly, but not for long; his salary was too high. As for myself, I
refrained from saying a few harsher things I was minded to say; indeed,
I made myself so vastly agreeable, after my own private recipe, that he
was quite touched. He remarked:
"I think I had better put your name down, although we have thousands of
applicants, you know. Call again, won't you?"
For which I humbly thanked him, instead of saying, as I ought to have
done:
"You go to blazes. The public is a pack of idiots to run after people
who merely keep them loitering about while they feather their own nests.
We are out to lick the Germans, and yours is not the way to do it."
Did I understand banking?
