The Middle of the Road. Philip Gibbs
“I take it that a Labour Exchange is to exchange labour? A pretty useful thing.”
The man with a dyed moustache stared at him blankly.
“I hope you don’t think I’m a damned labourer?” he asked, aggressively.
“I wish I were!” said Bertram. “Anything rather than lounging.”
He was saved further argument by the boy scout, who called his name and opened the inner door.
The Labour Exchange secretary rose as he entered the office, and said, “Take a seat, won’t you, Major?”
Bertram saw that he was in the presence of a man about his own age, twenty-five, and a pleasant-looking fellow, typical of the “temporary officers” who had poured out in their thousands to France.
“Anything I can do for you, sir?” said the secretary, offering a box of cheap Virginia cigarettes.
Bertram explained that he was looking out for a good job of any kind, and was disconcerted when the Labour Exchange man laughed, dropped the “sir” hurriedly, and said, “No good coming here, old man! Surely you’re not so hard put to it as all that?”
“That’s just what I am,” said Bertram, “devilish hard put to it.”
“What can you do?”
Bertram mentioned the blessed word “organising,” but again the secretary smiled and shook his head. Then he asked a series of questions, like a machine-gun opening rapid fire.
“Do you write a decent hand? No? Can you type? No? Any good at figures? No? Shorthand? No? Knowledge of engineering? book-keeping, surveying—any business, trade, or profession? No?”
“I was at St. Paul’s School,” said Bertram, “and one year at Oxford. I’m a jolly good gunner, and I was brought up as a gentleman. Hasn’t England any place for my sort?”
He was resentful of the smiling ironical look of the man interrogating him.
“Not any kind of place at all, old man”—Bertram wished he wouldn’t “old man” him so much—“unless you have a social pull. That’s still some good for jobs in Government offices and that kind of thing, but it’s getting less valuable as time goes on. Without it, fellows like you—and me—haven’t a dog’s chance. How do you think I got this job when I became demobbed?”
“Haven’t an idea,” said Bertram.
“Why, my pater is Chief Clerk of Marylebone. Social pull, my boy! Nothing else. There are thousands of young officers, ex-airmen, ex-everything, who’ll have to emigrate, or starve to death. There’s no alternative. … Well, there’s one!”
“What’s that?”
“Join the Auxiliary Force in Ireland. ‘Black and Tans,’ as they call them. Does the idea appeal to you?”
“Not in the least,” said Bertram.
The Labour Exchange secretary laughed, and touched his bell for the boy scout.
“I don’t blame you neither. A rotten game! Good day and good luck.”
Bertram had winced over that “neither.” He had been taught to speak pretty well, but though he would not say “I don’t blame you neither,” he hadn’t learnt enough, it seemed, either at St. Paul’s or Balliol, to get any kind of job in England.
“Not without a social pull,” said the Labour Exchange fellow. As a matter of fact, he had a social pull. His father was Michael Pollard, K.C., M.P.—with a considerable pull on the Tory crowd. His father-in-law was the Earl of Ottery, related by cousinship to most of the old blood in England. His brother-in-law, Alban, was in the Foreign Office with Kenneth Murless and other friends of Joyce, his wife. But none of them had offered him anything, or suggested anything, or gone a yard out of the way to help him.
Joyce’s people had no use for him. He didn’t belong to their caste, though they tolerated him coldly, for Joyce’s sake. He didn’t speak their language, as it were. He didn’t look at things from their point of view. He was an “outsider.” How could he bring himself to ask them for a job? The supercilious Alban, for instance? He could not even go to his own father, with whom he was hardly on speaking terms, because of a hopeless divergence of views on the subject of Ireland. “Join the Black-and-Tans, like Digby,” would be his father’s most genial suggestion, just like this secretary of the Labour Exchange.
Yet for Joyce’s sake he would have to humble himself and ask some of his exalted relatives to put him in charge of some department for wasting the tax-payer’s money. A financial crisis was bearing down on him with the enormous and imminent pressure of the Germans in March of 1918 against the British line. He had come to the end of the money he had put by out of his pay during the war—the very last pound of it. Henceforth it was Joyce who would do the paying until he grabbed at a job, or begged for one.
“I’m getting dishonest,” thought Bertram, as he walked through High Street, Marylebone, observing the mournful look of the people he passed, and turning his eyes away from a blinded man playing a piano organ.
“Old Christy’s intensive education in idealism is wearing off. Lord, if only I could do something worth doing—lift the world a little out of its mess—make it safer for the kids coming along—prevent more blinded men playing piano organs as payment for heroism! … Was it worth while, their sacrifice?”
The question that came into his brain seemed to him like a kind of blasphemy—a treachery to his own code, and to all the crowd who had fought for England. If that sacrifice had not been worth while, and so many men had died for false beliefs and hopes, then nothing in the world was right, and all that men were taught in faith was just a lie. Christy had said it was a lie, the whole make-up of civilisation, the code of his sort of people, patriotism itself. They had argued over that, almost savagely, and he had told Christy to shut up or clear out.
Yet how explain those newspaper placards which stared him in the face from newspaper shops in the Marylebone Road?
More Unemployed Riots.
Crime Wave Spreads.
No Houses for Heroes.
Is Europe Doomed?
Reprisals in Ireland.
France Insults England.
Not easy to keep cheerful, to retain a fair and sturdy optimism, to see the blessing of the victory, even after the slaughter of the world’s best youth, when those facts were on the placards, between High Street, Marylebone and the lower end of Baker Street!
Yet Bertram Pollard, ex-officer and unemployed, did not despair. He felt something “inside him,” as he used to say in his childhood, which promised some kind of revelation of all this mystery. He seemed to be waiting for a light that would make things clear to him in his own life, and in life. He was certain, beneath his deep uncertainty, that he would find some job to do, some job worth doing. God, or the great powers, or his own instincts, would give him a chance, a new impulse, some decent object in life. After all, he was only twenty-five, with health and strength and desire to find the right place.
Impossible that he should be useless and unused!
VII
A man came up in the dusk that was creeping into the streets of London, and walked alongside Bertram. He said something about no work, a sick wife, children, the war.
Bertram had heard it all a hundred times from other men, and tried to remember whether he had any money in his pocket. Then something in the man’s voice stirred an old memory. He halted and stared into the man’s face, and saw that it was one of his old company, Bill Huggett, the Cockney fellow from Camberwell.
He