Alone | Page 3

in their degrees of beefiness, stolidity, and
self-sufficiency, but plainly of the same parentage--British to the
backbone; British of the wrong kind, with a sprinkling of Welshmen,
Irishmen, and Jews. Not a Scotsman discoverable in that whole mob of
complacent office-jacks. My countrymen were conspicuous by their
absence; they were otherwise engaged, in the field, the colonies, the
engine-room. I can only remember one single exception to this rule,
this type; it was the head of the Censorship Department.
For of course I offered my services there, climbing up that decent
red-carpeted stairway, and glad to find myself among respectable
surroundings after all the unseemly holes I had lately wallowed in. I
sent up a card which, to my surprise, caused me to be ushered forthwith
into the presence of the Chief, who may have heard of my existence
from some mutual friend. Here, at all events, was a man with a face
worth looking at, a man who had done notable things in his day. 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.

I called again a couple of weeks later. It struck me, namely, that they
might have acquired a sufficient stock of bankers and mechanics by this
time, 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