Alone | Page 4

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? The full ineptitude of this conundrum only
dawned upon me by degrees. Manifestly, if I understood banking, I
might do some specialised kind of work for the Government. But in
that case I would not apply to the Munitions. Granted they wanted
bankers. Well, there was my friend M----, renowned in the City as a
genius for banking; he could have saved them untold thousands of
pounds. They would have none of him. They sent him into the trenches,
where he was duly shot.
How easy it is for a disappointed place-seeker to jibe and rail against
the powers that be, especially when he is not in full possession of the
data! For all I know, they may have discovered my friend M---- to be a
dangerous character, and have been only too glad to remove him out of
society without unnecessary fuss, in an outwardly honourable fashion,
with a view to saving his poor but respectable parents the humiliating
experience of a criminal trial and possible execution in the family.
If I understood banking ... why did they want bankers at this institution?
Ah, it was not my business to probe into such mysteries of
administration. To my limited intelligence it would seem that the mere
fact of a man applying at the Munitions was primâ facie evidence that
banking was not one of his accomplishments. It seemed to me,
furthermore, that there was no end to such "ifs"--patriotic or otherwise.
If I were a woman, for instance, I would promptly aid the cause by
jumping into a nurse's outfit, telling improper stories to the Tommies,
and getting myself photographed for the Press every morning. But I am
only a man. If I were a high-class trumpeter, I could qualify for a job in
one of the Allied Armies or, failing that, on Judgment Day. But I can

only strum the piano. And if the moon were made of green cheese, we
might all try to get hold of a slice of it, mightn't we?...
Such was my pigheadedness, my boyish zeal, my belief in human
nature or perverse sense of duty, that I actually broke my vow and
returned to that ridiculous establishment. Yes, I "called again,"
flattering myself with the conjecture that, even if they had not yet
obtained a requisite amount of bankers and mechanics, and even if
persons of my particular aptitudes were still a drug in the market, there
might nevertheless be room, amid the ramifications and interstices of
so great a department, for a man or two who could help to count up or
pack munitions, or, if that proposal were hopelessly wide of the mark,
for the services of something even more recondite and exotic--an
intelligent corpse-washer, for instance, or half a dozen astrologers. I felt
I could distinguish myself, at a national crisis like this, in either
capacity. Anyhow, it