The clock on the tower over the senior block chimed quarter after quarter, but Mike sat on, thinking. It was quite late when he got up, and began to walk back to Acacia Road. He felt cold and stiff and very miserable.
4. First Steps in a Business Career
The City received Mike with the same aloofness with which the more western portion of London had welcomed him on the previous day. Nobody seemed to look at him. He was permitted to alight at St Paul’s and make his way up Queen Victoria Street without any demonstration. He followed the human stream till he reached the Mansion House, and eventually found himself at the massive building of the New Asiatic Bank, Limited.
The difficulty now was to know how to make an effective entrance. There was the bank, and here was he. How had he better set about breaking it to the authorities that he had positively arrived and was ready to start earning his four pound ten per mensem? Inside, the bank seemed to be in a state of some confusion. Men were moving about in an apparently irresolute manner. Nobody seemed actually to be working. As a matter of fact, the business of a bank does not start very early in the morning. Mike had arrived before things had really begun to move. As he stood near the doorway, one or two panting figures rushed up the steps, and flung themselves at a large book which stood on the counter near the door. Mike was to come to know this book well. In it, if you were an employe of the New Asiatic Bank, you had to inscribe your name every morning. It was removed at ten sharp to the accountant’s room, and if you reached the bank a certain number of times in the year too late to sign, bang went your bonus.
After a while things began to settle down. The stir and confusion gradually ceased. All down the length of the bank, figures could be seen, seated on stools and writing hieroglyphics in large letters. A benevolent-looking man, with spectacles and a straggling grey beard, crossed the gangway close to where Mike was standing. Mike put the thing to him, as man to man.
‘Could you tell me,’ he said, ‘what I’m supposed to do? I’ve just joined the bank.’ The benevolent man stopped, and looked at him with a pair of mild blue eyes. ‘I think, perhaps, that your best plan would be to see the manager,’ he said. ‘Yes, I should certainly do that. He will tell you what work you have to do. If you will permit me, I will show you the way.’
‘It’s awfully good of you,’ said Mike. He felt very grateful. After his experience of London, it was a pleasant change to find someone who really seemed to care what happened to him. His heart warmed to the benevolent man.
‘It feels strange to you, perhaps, at first, Mr—’
‘Jackson.’
‘Mr Jackson. My name is Waller. I have been in the City some time, but I can still recall my first day. But one shakes down. One shakes down quite quickly. Here is the manager’s room. If you go in, he will tell you what to do.’
‘Thanks awfully,’ said Mike.
‘Not at all.’ He ambled off on the quest which Mike had interrupted, turning, as he went, to bestow a mild smile of encouragement on the new arrival. There was something about Mr Waller which reminded Mike pleasantly of the White Knight in ‘Alice through the Looking-glass.’
Mike knocked at the managerial door, and went in.
Two men were sitting at the table. The one facing the door was writing when Mike went in. He continued to write all the time he was in the room. Conversation between other people in his presence had apparently no interest for him, nor was it able to disturb him in any way.
The other man was talking into a telephone. Mike waited till he had finished. Then he coughed. The man turned round. Mike had thought, as he looked at his back and heard his voice, that something about his appearance or his way of speaking was familiar. He was right. The man in the chair was Mr Bickersdyke, the cross-screen pedestrian.
These reunions are very awkward. Mike was frankly unequal to the situation. Psmith, in his place, would have opened the conversation, and relaxed the tension with some remark on the weather or the state of the crops. Mike merely stood wrapped in silence, as in a garment.
That the recognition was mutual was evident from Mr Bickersdyke’s look. But apart from this, he gave no sign of having already had the pleasure of making Mike’s acquaintance. He merely stared at him as if he were a blot on the arrangement of the furniture, and said, ‘Well?’
The most difficult parts to play in real life as well as on the stage are those in which no ‘business’ is arranged for the performer. It was all very well for Mr Bickersdyke. He had been ‘discovered sitting’. But Mike had had to enter, and he wished now that there was something he could do instead of merely standing and speaking.
‘I’ve come,’ was the best speech he could think of. It was not a good speech. It was too sinister. He felt that even as he said it. It was the sort of thing Mephistopheles would have said to Faust by way of opening conversation. And he was not sure, either, whether he ought not to have added, ‘Sir.’
Apparently such subtleties of address were not necessary, for Mr Bickersdyke did not start up and shout, ‘This language to me!’ or anything of that kind. He merely said, ‘Oh! And who are you?’
‘Jackson,’ said Mike. It was irritating, this assumption on Mr Bickersdyke’s part that they had never met before.
‘Jackson? Ah, yes. You have joined the staff?’
Mike rather liked this way of putting it. It lent a certain dignity to the proceedings, making him feel like some important person for whose services there had been strenuous competition. He seemed to see the bank’s directors being reassured by the chairman. (‘I am happy to say, gentlemen, that our profits for the past year are 3,000,006-2-2 1/2 pounds—(cheers)—and’—impressively—’that we have finally succeeded in inducing Mr Mike Jackson—(sensation)—to—er—in fact, to join the staff! (Frantic cheers, in which the chairman joined.’)
‘Yes,’ he said.
Mr Bickersdyke pressed a bell on the table beside him, and picking up a pen, began to write. Of Mike he took no further notice, leaving that toy of Fate standing stranded in the middle of the room.
After a few moments one of the men in fancy dress, whom Mike had seen hanging about the gangway, and whom he afterwards found to be messengers, appeared. Mr Bickersdyke looked up.
‘Ask Mr Bannister to step this way,’ he said.
The messenger disappeared, and presently the door opened again to admit a shock-headed youth with paper cuff-protectors round his wrists.
‘This is Mr Jackson, a new member of the staff. He will take your place in the postage department. You will go into the cash department, under Mr Waller. Kindly show him what he has to do.’
Mike followed Mr Bannister out. On the other side of the door the shock-headed one became communicative.
‘Whew!’ he said, mopping his brow. ‘That’s the sort of thing which gives me the pip. When William came and said old Bick wanted to see me, I said to him, “William, my boy, my number is up. This is the sack.” I made certain that Rossiter had run me in for something. He’s been waiting for a chance to do it for weeks, only I’ve been as good as gold and haven’t given it him. I pity you going into the postage. There’s one thing, though. If you can stick it for about a month, you’ll get through all right. Men are always leaving for the East, and then you get shunted on into another department, and the next new man goes into the postage. That’s the best of this place. It’s not like one of those banks where you stay in London all your life. You only have three years here, and then you get your orders, and go to one of the branches in the East, where you’re the dickens of a big pot straight away, with a big screw and a dozen native Johnnies under you. Bit of all right, that. I shan’t get my orders for another two and a half years and more, worse luck. Still, it’s something to look forward to.’