14 Psmith in the City Read online

  ‘Rough luck,’ said Mike. ‘I wonder why it is. Jolly good about Joe, wasn’t it? Let’s have fifty up, shall we?’

  Bob’s remarks had given Mike no hint of impending disaster. It seemed strange, of course, that his father, who had always been so easy-going, should have developed a hustling Get On or Get Out spirit, and be urging Bob to Do It Now; but it never occurred to him that there could be any serious reason for it. After all, fellows had to start working some time or other. Probably his father had merely pointed this out to Bob, and Bob had made too much of it.

  Half-way through the game Mr Jackson entered the room, and stood watching in silence.

  ‘Want a game, father?’ asked Mike.

  ‘No, thanks, Mike. What is it? A hundred up?’

  ‘Fifty.’

  ‘Oh, then you’ll be finished in a moment. When you are, I wish you’d just look into the study for a moment, Mike. I want to have a talk with you.’

  ‘Rum,’ said Mike, as the door closed. ‘I wonder what’s up?’

  For a wonder his conscience was free. It was not as if a bad school-report might have arrived in his absence. His Sedleigh report had come at the beginning of the holidays, and had been, on the whole, fairly decent—nothing startling either way. Mr Downing, perhaps through remorse at having harried Mike to such an extent during the Sammy episode, had exercised a studied moderation in his remarks. He had let Mike down far more easily than he really deserved. So it could not be a report that was worrying Mr Jackson. And there was nothing else on his conscience.

  Bob made a break of sixteen, and ran out. Mike replaced his cue, and walked to the study.

  His father was sitting at the table. Except for the very important fact that this time he felt that he could plead Not Guilty on every possible charge, Mike was struck by the resemblance in the general arrangement of the scene to that painful ten minutes at the end of the previous holidays, when his father had announced his intention of taking him away from Wrykyn and sending him to Sedleigh. The resemblance was increased by the fact that, as Mike entered, Mr Jackson was kicking at the waste-paper basket—a thing which with him was an infallible sign of mental unrest.

  ‘Sit down, Mike,’ said Mr Jackson. ‘How did you get on during the week?’

  ‘Topping. Only once out under double figures. And then I was run out. Got a century against the Green Jackets, seventy-one against the Incogs, and today I made ninety-eight on a beast of a wicket, and only got out because some silly goat of a chap—’

  He broke off. Mr Jackson did not seem to be attending. There was a silence. Then Mr Jackson spoke with an obvious effort.

  ‘Look here, Mike, we’ve always understood one another, haven’t we?’

  ‘Of course we have.’

  ‘You know I wouldn’t do anything to prevent you having a good time, if I could help it. I took you away from Wrykyn, I know, but that was a special case. It was necessary. But I understand perfectly how keen you are to go to Cambridge, and I wouldn’t stand in the way for a minute, if I could help it.’

  Mike looked at him blankly. This could only mean one thing. He was not to go to the ‘Varsity. But why? What had happened? When he had left for the Smith’s cricket week, his name had been down for King’s, and the whole thing settled. What could have happened since then?’

  ‘But I can’t help it,’ continued Mr Jackson.

  ‘Aren’t I going up to Cambridge, father?’ stammered Mike.

  ‘I’m afraid not, Mike. I’d manage it if I possibly could. I’m just as anxious to see you get your Blue as you are to get it. But it’s kinder to be quite frank. I can’t afford to send you to Cambridge. I won’t go into details which you would not understand; but I’ve lost a very large sum of money since I saw you last. So large that we shall have to economize in every way. I shall let this house and take a much smaller one. And you and Bob, I’m afraid, will have to start earning your living. I know it’s a terrible disappointment to you, old chap.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right,’ said Mike thickly. There seemed to be something sticking in his throat, preventing him from speaking.

  ‘If there was any possible way—’

  ‘No, it’s all right, father, really. I don’t mind a bit. It’s awfully rough luck on you losing all that.’

  There was another silence. The clock ticked away energetically on the mantelpiece, as if glad to make itself heard at last. Outside, a plaintive snuffle made itself heard. John, the bull-dog, Mike’s inseparable companion, who had followed him to the study, was getting tired of waiting on the mat. Mike got up and opened the door. John lumbered in.

  The movement broke the tension.

  ‘Thanks, Mike,’ said Mr Jackson, as Mike started to leave the room, ‘you’re a sportsman.’

  3. The New Era Begins

  Details of what were in store for him were given to Mike next morning. During his absence at Ilsworth a vacancy had been got for him in that flourishing institution, the New Asiatic Bank; and he was to enter upon his duties, whatever they might be, on the Tuesday of the following week. It was short notice, but banks have a habit of swallowing their victims rather abruptly. Mike remembered the case of Wyatt, who had had just about the same amount of time in which to get used to the prospect of Commerce.

  On the Monday morning a letter arrived from Psmith. Psmith was still perturbed. ‘Commerce,’ he wrote, ‘continues to boom. My pater referred to Comrade Bickersdyke last night as a Merchant Prince. Comrade B. and I do not get on well together. Purely for his own good, I drew him aside yesterday and explained to him at great length the frightfulness of walking across the bowling-screen. He seemed restive, but I was firm. We parted rather with the Distant Stare than the Friendly Smile. But I shall persevere. In many ways the casual observer would say that he was hopeless. He is a poor performer at Bridge, as I was compelled to hint to him on Saturday night. His eyes have no animated sparkle of intelligence. And the cut of his clothes jars my sensitive soul to its foundations. I don’t wish to speak ill of a man behind his back, but I must confide in you, as my Boyhood’s Friend, that he wore a made-up tie at dinner. But no more of a painful subject. I am working away at him with a brave smile. Sometimes I think that I am succeeding. Then he seems to slip back again. However,’ concluded the letter, ending on an optimistic note, ‘I think that I shall make a man of him yet—some day.’

  Mike re-read this letter in the train that took him to London. By this time Psmith would know that his was not the only case in which Commerce was booming. Mike had written to him by return, telling him of the disaster which had befallen the house of Jackson. Mike wished he could have told him in person, for Psmith had a way of treating unpleasant situations as if he were merely playing at them for his own amusement. Psmith’s attitude towards the slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune was to regard them with a bland smile, as if they were part of an entertainment got up for his express benefit.

  Arriving at Paddington, Mike stood on the platform, waiting for his box to emerge from the luggage-van, with mixed feelings of gloom and excitement. The gloom was in the larger quantities, perhaps, but the excitement was there, too. It was the first time in his life that he had been entirely dependent on himself. He had crossed the Rubicon. The occasion was too serious for him to feel the same helplessly furious feeling with which he had embarked on life at Sedleigh. It was possible to look on Sedleigh with quite a personal enmity. London was too big to be angry with. It took no notice of him. It did not care whether he was glad to be there or sorry, and there was no means of making it care. That is the peculiarity of London. There is a sort of cold unfriendliness about it. A city like New York makes the new arrival feel at home in half an hour; but London is a specialist in what Psmith in his letter had called the Distant Stare. You have to buy London’s goodwill.

  Mike drove across the Park to Victoria, feeling very empty and small. He had settled on Dulwich as the spot to get lodgings, partly because, knowing nothing about London, he was under the impression that ro
oms anywhere inside the four-mile radius were very expensive, but principally because there was a school at Dulwich, and it would be a comfort being near a school. He might get a game of fives there sometimes, he thought, on a Saturday afternoon, and, in the summer, occasional cricket.

  Wandering at a venture up the asphalt passage which leads from Dulwich station in the direction of the College, he came out into Acacia Road. There is something about Acacia Road which inevitably suggests furnished apartments. A child could tell at a glance that it was bristling with bed-sitting rooms.

  Mike knocked at the first door over which a card hung.

  There is probably no more depressing experience in the world than the process of engaging furnished apartments. Those who let furnished apartments seem to take no joy in the act. Like Pooh-Bah, they do it, but it revolts them.

  In answer to Mike’s knock, a female person opened the door. In appearance she resembled a pantomime ‘dame’, inclining towards the restrained melancholy of Mr Wilkie Bard rather than the joyous abandon of Mr George Robey. Her voice she had modelled on the gramophone. Her most recent occupation seemed to have been something with a good deal of yellow soap in it. As a matter of fact—there are no secrets between our readers and ourselves—she had been washing a shirt. A useful occupation, and an honourable, but one that tends to produce a certain homeliness in the appearance.

  She wiped a pair of steaming hands on her apron, and regarded Mike with an eye which would have been markedly expressionless in a boiled fish.

  ‘Was there anything?’ she asked.

  Mike felt that he was in for it now. He had not sufficient ease of manner to back gracefully away and disappear, so he said that there was something. In point of fact, he wanted a bed-sitting room.

  ‘Orkup stays,’ said the pantomime dame. Which Mike interpreted to mean, would he walk upstairs?

  The procession moved up a dark flight of stairs until it came to a door. The pantomime dame opened this, and shuffled through. Mike stood in the doorway, and looked in.

  It was a repulsive room. One of those characterless rooms which are only found in furnished apartments. To Mike, used to the comforts of his bedroom at home and the cheerful simplicity of a school dormitory, it seemed about the most dismal spot he had ever struck. A sort of Sargasso Sea among bedrooms.

  He looked round in silence. Then he said: ‘Yes.’ There did not seem much else to say.

  ‘It’s a nice room,’ said the pantomime dame. Which was a black lie. It was not a nice room. It never had been a nice room. And it did not seem at all probable that it ever would be a nice room. But it looked cheap. That was the great thing. Nobody could have the assurance to charge much for a room like that. A landlady with a conscience might even have gone to the length of paying people some small sum by way of compensation to them for sleeping in it.

  ‘About what?’ queried Mike. Cheapness was the great consideration. He understood that his salary at the bank would be about four pounds ten a month, to begin with, and his father was allowing him five pounds a month. One does not do things en prince on a hundred and fourteen pounds a year.

  The pantomime dame became slightly more animated. Prefacing her remarks by a repetition of her statement that it was a nice room, she went on to say that she could ‘do’ it at seven and sixpence per week ‘for him’—giving him to understand, presumably, that, if the Shah of Persia or Mr Carnegie ever applied for a night’s rest, they would sigh in vain for such easy terms. And that included lights. Coals were to be looked on as an extra. ‘Sixpence a scuttle.’ Attendance was thrown in.

  Having stated these terms, she dribbled a piece of fluff under the bed, after the manner of a professional Association footballer, and relapsed into her former moody silence.

  Mike said he thought that would be all right. The pantomime dame exhibited no pleasure.

  ”Bout meals?’ she said. ‘You’ll be wanting breakfast. Bacon, aigs, an’ that, I suppose?’

  Mike said he supposed so.

  ‘That’ll be extra,’ she said. ‘And dinner? A chop, or a nice steak?’

  Mike bowed before this original flight of fancy. A chop or a nice steak seemed to be about what he might want.

  ‘That’ll be extra,’ said the pantomime dame in her best Wilkie Bard manner.

  Mike said yes, he supposed so. After which, having put down seven and sixpence, one week’s rent in advance, he was presented with a grubby receipt and an enormous latchkey, and the seance was at an end. Mike wandered out of the house. A few steps took him to the railings that bounded the College grounds. It was late August, and the evenings had begun to close in. The cricket-field looked very cool and spacious in the dim light, with the school buildings looming vague and shadowy through the slight mist. The little gate by the railway bridge was not locked. He went in, and walked slowly across the turf towards the big clump of trees which marked the division between the cricket and football fields. It was all very pleasant and soothing after the pantomime dame and her stuffy bed-sitting room. He sat down on a bench beside the second eleven telegraph-board, and looked across the ground at the pavilion. For the first time that day he began to feel really homesick. Up till now the excitement of a strange venture had borne him up; but the cricket-field and the pavilion reminded him so sharply of Wrykyn. They brought home to him with a cutting distinctness, the absolute finality of his break with the old order of things. Summers would come and go, matches would be played on this ground with all the glory of big scores and keen finishes; but he was done. ‘He was a jolly good bat at school. Top of the Wrykyn averages two years. But didn’t do anything after he left. Went into the city or something.’ That was what they would say of him, if they didn’t quite forget him.

  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.’
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  ‘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.