"Thanks very much. I should like to see your mother, but I'm afraid I can't stop this evening."
The clerk brought out the cheque. Darwen took it and, glancing over it, handed it on to Carstairs. "There you are, old chap. I'm sorry it's the last."
Carstairs took it. "Thanks," he said. "Good-bye," and turning on his heel he went out for the last time.
Darwen watched him through the window as he walked down the street with his long swinging stride. "The reason, personified, of why England owns half the earth," he said, to himself. "And equally the reason that she doesn't own the whole of it," he added, thoughtfully.
He lay back in his chair and gazed far into the future, mental pictures in many colours shaped themselves in kaleidoscopic procession across the white expanse of ceiling. For half an hour he sat thus, then sitting suddenly upright, and drawing in his outstretched legs, he plunged back into the present among the papers on his table.
Some six months later, in the dining-room at Chilcombe Vicarage, there was held a family council of war. The old vicar was there, Commander Carstairs was there, Phillip and Stanley Carstairs were there, and they all looked serious. For six months Jack Carstairs had been applying for each and every one of the multitudinous appointments advertized in the technical papers, with no results; he had learned through the same medium that Darwen had been appointed to one of the London stations at £750 per annum, to start; and that evening he had returned from making personal application for a very junior appointment at £1 per week in a neighbouring town. The chief (of German antecedent), the personification of ignorance and bombast, had catechized and bullied him, cross-examined and contradicted him, and finally abruptly refused him the billet.
Jack was speaking, and they all listened attentively. "When a German ex-gasfitter, with a little elementary arithmetic and less electrical catalogue information, talks to me as though he were a miniature Kaiser and I the last-joined recruit of his most unsatisfactory regiment, and then refuses me a switchboard attendant's job on technical grounds, then, I admit, my thoughts lightly turn to robbery with violence as a recreation and means of livelihood. He'd have liked me to say 'yes, sir,' and 'no, sir,' and 'please, sir,' and touch my cap and grovel in the dirt. I'd see him in hell first."
"I always said, Hugh, you ought to have put that boy in the Service," the sailor interjected, quite seriously.
The others smiled, a wry, sickly sort of smile.
"Can't we—er—don't we know somebody with some influence on these councils who would use it on Jack's behalf." It was the artist who spoke.