"Yes. Waiting."
"Are you going to your office now?"
"Yes."
Edwin hesitated. "It won't take a minute, I suppose. I'll slip along
in two jiffs. I'll be there almost as soon as you are."
"Bring a receipt stamp," said the man, and resumed his way.
He was the secretary of the Bursley and Turnhill Permanent 50 pounds
Benefit Building Society, one of the most solid institutions of the
district. And he had been its secretary for decades. No stories of the
defalcation of other secretaries of societies, no rumours as to the
perils of the system of the more famous Starr-Bowkett Building
Societies, ever bred a doubt in Bursley or Turnhill of the eternal
soundness of the Bursley and Turnhill Permanent 50 pounds Benefit
Building Society. You could acquire a share in it by an entrance fee of
one shilling, and then you paid eighteen-pence per week for ten years,
making something less than 40 pounds, and then, after an inactive period
of three months, the Society gave you 50 pounds, and you began therewith
to build a house, if you wanted a house, and, if you were prudent, you
instantly took out another share. You could have as many shares as you
chose. Though the Society was chiefly nourished by respectable artisans
with stiff chins, nobody in the district would have considered
membership to be beneath him. The Society was an admirable device for
strengthening an impulse towards thrift, because, once you had put
yourself into its machinery, it would stand no nonsense. Prosperous
tradesmen would push their children into it, and even themselves. This
was what had happened to Edwin in the dark past, before he had left
school. Edwin had regarded the trick with indifference at first,
because, except the opening half crown, his father had paid the
subscriptions for him until he left school and became a wage-earner.
Thereafter he had regarded it as simple parental madness.
His whole life seemed to be nothing but a vista of Friday evenings on
which he went to the Society's office, between seven and nine, to `pay
the Club.' The social origin of any family in Bursley might have been
decided by the detail whether it referred to the Society as the
`Building Society' or as `the Club.' Artisans called it the Club,
because it did resemble an old-fashioned benefit club. Edwin had
invariably heard it called `Club' at home, and he called it `Club,' and
he did not know why.
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