"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.