“Great Scott, Smith,” he said, “did you tell him you’d send those speeches to the papers if he sacked me?”
Psmith looked at him through his eyeglass, and helped himself to another piece of toast.
“I am unable,” he said, “to recall at this moment the exact terms of the very pleasant conversation I had with Comrade Bickersdyke on the occasion of our chance meeting in the Turkish Bath that afternoon; but, thinking things over quietly now that I have more leisure, I cannot help feeling that he may possibly have read some such intention into my words. You know how it is in these little chats, Comrade Jackson. One leaps to conclusions. Some casual word I happened to drop may have given him the idea you mention. At this distance of time it is impossible to say with any certainty. Suffice it that all has ended well. He did reconsider his resolve. I shall be only too happy if it turns out that the seed of the alteration in his views was sown by some careless word of mine. Perhaps we shall never know.”
Mike was beginning to mumble some awkward words of thanks, when Psmith resumed his discourse.
“Be that as it may, however,” he said, “we cannot but perceive that Comrade Bickersdyke’s election has altered our position to some extent. As you have pointed out, he may have been influenced in this recent affair by some chance remark of mine about those speeches. Now, however, they will cease to be of any value. Now that he is elected he has nothing to lose by their publication. I mention this by way of indicating that it is possible that, if another painful episode occurs, he may be more ruthless.”
“I see what you mean,” said Mike. “If he catches me on the hop again, he’ll simply go ahead and sack me.”
“That,” said Psmith, “is more or less the position of affairs.”
The other event which altered Mike’s life in the bank was his removal from Mr. Waller’s department to the Fixed Deposits. The work in the Fixed Deposits was less pleasant, and Mr. Gregory, the head of the department was not of Mr. Waller’s type. Mr. Gregory, before joining the home staff of the New Asiatic Bank, had spent a number of years with a firm in the Far East, where he had acquired a liver and a habit of addressing those under him in a way that suggested the mate of a tramp steamer. Even on the days when his liver was not troubling him, he was truculent. And when, as usually happened, it did trouble him, he was a perfect fountain of abuse. Mike and he hated each other from the first. The work in the Fixed Deposits was not really difficult, when you got the hang of it, but there was a certain amount of confusion in it to a beginner; and Mike, in commercial matters, was as raw a beginner as ever began. In the two other departments through which he had passed, he had done tolerably well. As regarded his work in the Postage Department, stamping letters and taking them down to the post office was just about his form. It was the sort of work on which he could really get a grip. And in the Cash Department, Mr. Waller’s mild patience had helped him through. But with Mr. Gregory it was different. Mike hated being shouted at. It confused him. And Mr. Gregory invariably shouted. He always spoke as if he were competing against a high wind. With Mike he shouted more than usual. On his side, it must be admitted that Mike was something out of the common run of bank clerks. The whole system of banking was a horrid mystery to him. He did not understand why things were done, or how the various departments depended on and dovetailed into one another. Each department seemed to him something separate and distinct. Why they were all in the same building at all he never really gathered. He knew that it could not be purely from motives of sociability, in order that the clerks might have each other’s company during slack spells. That much he suspected, but beyond that he was vague.
It naturally followed that, after having grown, little by little, under Mr. Waller’s easygoing rule, to enjoy life in the bank, he now suffered a reaction. Within a day of his arrival in the Fixed Deposits he was loathing the place as earnestly as he had loathed it on the first morning.
Psmith, who had taken his place in the Cash Department, reported that Mr. Waller was inconsolable at his loss.
“I do my best to cheer him up,” he said, “and he smiles bravely every now and then. But when he thinks I am not looking, his head droops and that wistful expression comes into his face. The sunshine has gone out of his life.”
It had just come into Mike’s, and, more than anything else, was making him restless and discontented. That is to say, it was now late spring: the sun shone cheerfully on the City; and cricket was in the air. And that was the trouble.
In the dark days, when everything was fog and slush, Mike had been contented enough to spend his mornings and afternoons in the bank, and go about with Psmith at night. Under such conditions, London is the best place in which to be, and the warmth and light of the bank were pleasant.
But now things had changed. The place had become a prison. With all the energy of one who had been born and bred in the country, Mike hated having to stay indoors on days
