“It ought to have an effect if we can get every name signed to it.”
“Question is, has a legally married wife got any right to go throwing a man’s rel’tives in his face jest because they don’t come to see her? I ain’t responsible for my Uncle Richard, am I? If he’s gone and got himself into trouble in his time it ain’t me that’s got to be punished, is it? Very well, then, what’s the use of talkin’?”
William Henry, in Erb’s van, made a note. Never have an Uncle Richard.
“It must be unanimous,” remarked Erb, speaking in fragments, and endeavouring to entice Payne’s mind to imperial subjects as the policeman’s hand allowed them to go on, “or else it might as well not be done at all. It’s a case of all of us sticking together like glue. If it don’t have no effect, what I’ve been thinking of is a deputation to the General Manager.”
“She’s not a going to manage me,” returned Payne, catching something of the last sentence. “If I’m treated with proper respect I’m a lamb, but if anyone attempts to lord it over me, I’m simply a—”
William Henry, ordered back to the tail of his van, made note number two. Trouble brewing, and, in the case of wholesale discharges, a fair chance of honest lads gaining promotion.
The van foreman waited at the entrance to the railway arch where the up parcels office, after many experiments in other places, had decided to settle; he looked on narrowly as the vans drove up the side street. The van foreman had been a carman in his day (to say nothing of a more lowly start in boyhood), and he openly flattered himself that he knew the whole bag of tricks: he also sometimes remarked acutely that anyone who had the best of him had only one other person to get over, and that other person did not live on this earth. The van foreman was not really so clever as he judged himself to be (but his case was neither unprecedented nor without imitators), and his maxim—which was that in dealing with men you had to keep hammering away at them—was one that in practice had at times defective results.
“Yes,” said the van foreman gloomily, as though replying to a question, “of course, you two are not the first to arrive. Barnes and Payne—Payne and Barnes. There ain’t a pin to choose between you. What’s your excuse?”
“Wh-oh!” said Erb to his horse, assuming that it had shied. “Wo—ho! my beauty. Don’t be frightened at him. He ain’t pretty, but he’s quite harmless.”
“I want no sauce,” snapped the van foreman. “Good manners cost nothing.”