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whistle to his lips and summon an overwhelming force of heavily armed police? Meredith would have liked to think that it was so, but modesty assured him that members of the Athenaeum do not readily suggest such a figure. Moreover, the quality of the apprehensiveness in the persons before him subtly but decisively negatived this reading of the situation. Rather, they were like –
    And Meredith paused to remember. Yes, they were like undergraduates just about to come before a board of examiners for some viva voce test. Aided by this comparison – or rather, thought Meredith, by this intuitive perception of illuminating analogy – it was possible to make a bold guess. He, Meredith, was being taken for one of the bosses of the concern. And here, plainly, thought for the moment stopped and action must supervene. Only action, decisive and even inspired, would ever get that manuscript back to poor Mr Collins at Nesfield Court. Even as he entertained these reflections, Meredith found himself striding confidently towards the telephones, and the box for snarling into, and the man who carried – or was it ‘packed’? – the guns.
    Packed was indubitably correct – and even as Meredith reached this conclusion he heard a voice raised in harsh but not uncultivated reproof. ‘Get these people out of here,’ said the voice. ‘If they’re offering the same sort of rubbish as that fellow Spackman you’re all wasting your time. Clear them out, if you please. Trade’s over for the day.’ And Meredith – for the voice was Meredith’s very own – glanced round him in a menacing and authoritative manner. Anyone aware that this was the first occasion on which he had attempted to look menacing since leaving his private school would have been bound to admit that the learned pursuits to which he had given himself represented a sad deprivation in the annals of the legitimate stage.
    And the effect was altogether satisfactory. The bank attendant jumped like a bullock stung by the gadfly in June and fell to circling the room with gestures of the largest menace. ‘Gettahelloutahere,’ said the bank attendant. ‘Scram.’ And the clients, who all seemed of a kind accustomed to being held of small account, picked up their inferior offerings and began an abject and obedient shuffling from the room.
    The young lady at the desk looked helplessly from Meredith to her telephones and back again. ‘Of course, we know they’re a low lot,’ she said apologetically. ‘No class at all. It’s just that we try to clean up that kind at the end of the day.’
    ‘No doubt,’ said Meredith. And he looked at the young lady as nastily as he could. ‘As it happens, I’m feeling rather like a bit of clean up myself.’ He began to contort the muscles of his face into the semblance of a horrible scowl. Then, glimpsing an altogether more refined conception of his role, he transformed this into a sweet and – as he hoped – wholly spine-chilling smile. ‘A bit of clean up,’ he repeated softly; ‘just a little bit of straightening things out.’
    The obscure displeasingness which Meredith contrived to insinuate into this simple metaphor spoke much for the vigorous tone of the most unpresentable regions of his unconscious mind. ‘Of straightening things out,’ he reiterated lingeringly. And the repetition, though indulged in after the manner of the political orator who requires time to think, was so effective that the man with the revolvers sank down upon a shiny chair and made gulping noises in his throat.
    For the moment, Meredith judged, he dominated the room. Were he to order the gulping man to shoot the young lady dead the command would be unhesitatingly obeyed. Were he to order the young lady to stand up and sing the Jewel Song from Faust she would do so with the automatism of one in a heavy hypnotic trance. There was, in fact, only one thing that Meredith at this juncture had no chance of carrying off – and that was turning round and