Редьярд Джозеф Киплинг
A Diversity of Creatures
'Mad! Quite mad!' said Stalky, and for the third time wriggled back to Winton's throat. The door opened and King came in, Hartopp's little figure just behind him. The mound on the floor panted and heaved but did not rise, for Winton still squirmed vengefully. 'Only a little play, sir,' said Perowne. ''Only hit my head against a form.' This was quite true.
'Oh,' said King. 'Dimovit obstantes propinquos. You, I presume, are the populus delaying Winton's return to-Mullins, eh?'
'No, sir,' said Stalky behind his claret-coloured handkerchief. 'We're the maerentes amicos.'
'Not bad! You see, some of it sticks after all,' King chuckled to Hartopp, and the two masters left without further inquiries.
The boys sat still on the now-passive Winton.
'Well,' said Stalky at last, 'of all the putrid he-asses, Pater, you are the-'
'I'm sorry. I'm awfully sorry,' Winton began, and they let him rise. He held out his hand to the bruised and bewildered Vernon. 'Sorry, Paddy. I-I must have lost my temper. I-I don't know what's the matter with me.'
''Fat lot of good that'll do my face at tea,' Vernon grunted. 'Why couldn't you say there was something wrong with you instead of lamming out like a lunatic? Is my lip puffy?'
'Just a trifle. Look at my beak! Well, we got all these pretty marks at footer-owin' to the zeal with which we played the game,' said Stalky, dusting himself. 'But d'you think you're fit to be let loose again, Pater? 'Sure you don't want to kill another sub-prefect? I wish I was Pot. I'd cut your sprightly young soul out.'
'I s'pose I ought to go to Pot now,' said Winton.
'And let all the other asses see you lookin' like this! Not much. We'll all come up to Number Five Study and wash off in hot water. Beetle, you aren't damaged. Go along and light the gas-stove.'
'There's a tin of cocoa in my study somewhere,' Perowne shouted after him. 'Rootle round till you find it, and take it up.'
Separately, by different roads, Vernon's jersey pulled half over his head, the boys repaired to Number Five Study. Little Hartopp and King, I am sorry to say, leaned over the banisters of King's landing and watched.
'Ve-ry human,' said little Hartopp. 'Your virtuous Winton, having got himself into trouble, takes it out of my poor old Paddy. I wonder what precise lie Paddy will tell about his face.'
'But surely you aren't going to embarrass him by asking?' said King.
'Your boy won,' said Hartopp.
'To go back to what we were discussing,' said King quickly, 'do you pretend that your modern system of inculcating unrelated facts about chlorine, for instance, all of which may be proved fallacies by the time the boys grow up, can have any real bearing on education-even the low type of it that examiners expect?'
'I maintain nothing. But is it any worse than your Chinese reiteration of uncomprehended syllables in a dead tongue?'
'Dead, forsooth!' King fairly danced. 'The only living tongue on earth! Chinese! On my word, Hartopp!'
'And at the end of seven years-how often have I said it?' Hartopp went on, – 'seven years of two hundred and twenty days of six hours each, your victims go away with nothing, absolutely nothing, except, perhaps, if they've been very attentive, a dozen-no, I'll grant you twenty-one score of totally unrelated Latin tags which any child of twelve could have absorbed in two terms.'
'But-but can't you realise that if our system brings later-at any rate-at a pinch-a simple understanding-grammar and Latinity apart-a mere glimpse of the significance (foul word!) of, we'll say, one Ode of Horace, one twenty lines of Virgil, we've got what we poor devils of ushers are striving after?'
'And what might that be?' said Hartopp.
'Balance, proportion, perspective-life. Your scientific man is the unrelated animal-the beast without background. Haven't you ever realised that in your atmosphere of stinks?'
'Meantime you make them lose life for the sake of living, eh?'
'Blind again, Hartopp! I told you about Paddy's quotation this morning. (But he made probrosis a verb, he did!) You yourself heard young Corkran's reference to maerentes amicos. It sticks-a little of it sticks among the barbarians.'
'Absolutely and essentially Chinese,' said little Hartopp, who, alone of the common-room, refused to be outfaced by King. 'But I don't yet understand how Paddy came to be licked by Winton. Paddy's supposed to be something of a boxer.'
'Beware of vinegar made from honey,' King replied. 'Pater, like some other people, is patient and long-suffering, but he has his limits. The Head is oppressing him damnably, too. As I pointed out, the boy has practically been in the First Fifteen since term began.'
'But, my dear fellow, I've known you give a boy an impot and refuse him leave off games, again and again.'
'Ah, but that was when there was real need to get at some oaf who couldn't be sensitised in any other way. Now, in our esteemed Head's action I see nothing but-'
The conversation from this point does not concern us.
Meantime Winton, very penitent and especially polite towards Vernon, was being cheered with cocoa in Number Five Study. They had some difficulty in stemming the flood of his apologies. He himself pointed out to Vernon that he had attacked a sub-prefect for no reason whatever, and, therefore, deserved official punishment.
'I can't think what was the matter with me to-day,' he mourned. 'Ever since that blasted mouse-business-'
'Well, then, don't think,' said Stalky. 'Or do you want Paddy to make a row about it before all the school?'
Here Vernon was understood to say that he would see Winton and all the school somewhere else.
'And if you imagine Perowne and Malpass and me are goin' to give evidence at a prefects' meeting just to soothe your beastly conscience, you jolly well err,' said Beetle. 'I know what you did.'
'What?' croaked Pater, out of the valley of his humiliation.
'You went Berserk. I've read all about it in Hypatia.'
'What's "going Berserk"?' Winton asked.
'Never you mind,' was the reply. 'Now, don't you feel awfully weak and seedy?'
'I am rather tired,' said Winton, sighing.
'That's what you ought to be. You've gone Berserk and pretty soon you'll go to sleep. But you'll probably be liable to fits of it all your life,' Beetle concluded. ''Shouldn't wonder if you murdered some one some day.'
'Shut up-you and your Berserks!' said Stalky. 'Go to Mullins now and get it over, Pater.'
'I call it filthy unjust of the Head,' said Vernon. 'Anyhow, you've given me my lickin', old man. I hope Pot'll give you yours.'
'I'm awfully sorry-awfully sorry,' was Winton's last word.
It was the custom in that consulship to deal with games' defaulters between five o'clock call-over and tea. Mullins, who was old enough to pity, did not believe in letting boys wait through the night till the chill of the next morning for their punishments. He was finishing off the last of the small fry and their excuses when Winton arrived.
'But, please, Mullins'-this was Babcock tertius, a dear little twelve-year-old mother's darling-'I had an awful hack on the knee. I've been to the Matron about it and she gave me some iodine. I've been rubbing it in all day. I thought that would be an excuse off.'
'Let's have a look at it,' said the impassive Mullins. 'That's a shin-bruise-about a week old. Touch your toes. I'll give you the iodine.'
Babcock yelled loudly as he had many times before. The face of Jevons, aged eleven, a new boy that dark wet term, low in the House, low in the Lower School, and lowest of all in his home-sick little mind turned white at the horror of the sight. They could hear his working lips part stickily as Babcock wailed his way out of hearing.
'Hullo, Jevons! What brings you here?' said Mullins.
'Pl-ease, sir, I went for a walk with Babcock tertius.'
'Did you? Then I bet you went to the tuck-shop-and you paid, didn't you?'
A nod. Jevons was too terrified to speak.
'Of course, and I bet Babcock told you that old Pot 'ud let you off because it was the first time.'
Another nod with a ghost of a smile in it.
'All right.' Mullins picked Jevons up before he could guess what was coming, laid him on the table with one hand, with the other gave him three emphatic spanks, then held him high in air.
'Now you tell Babcock tertius that he's got you a licking from me, and see you jolly well pay it back to him. And when you're prefect of games don't you let any one shirk his footer without a written excuse. Where d'you play in your game?'
'Forward, sir.'
'You can do better than that. I've seen you run like a young buck-rabbit. Ask Dickson from me to try you as three-quarter next game, will you? Cut along.'
Jevons left, warm for the first time that day, enormously set up in his own esteem, and very hot against the deceitful Babcock.
Mullins turned to Winton. 'Your name's on the list, Pater.' Winton nodded.
'I know it. The Head landed me with an impot for that mouse-business at mechanical drawing. No excuse.'
'He meant it then?' Mullins jerked his head delicately towards the ground-ash on the table. 'I heard something about it.'
Winton nodded. 'A rotten thing to do,' he said. 'Can't think what I was doing ever to do it. It counts against a fellow so; and there's some more too-'
'All right, Pater. Just stand clear of our photo-bracket, will you?'
The little formality over, there was a pause. Winton swung round, yawned in Pot's astonished face and staggered towards the window-seat.
'What's the matter with you, Dick? Ill?'
'No. Perfectly all right, thanks. Only-only a little sleepy.' Winton stretched himself out, and then and there fell deeply and placidly asleep.
'It isn't a faint,' said the experienced Mullins, 'or his pulse wouldn't act. 'Tisn't a fit or he'd snort and twitch. It can't be sunstroke, this term, and he hasn't been over-training for anything.' He opened Winton's collar, packed a cushion under his head, threw a rug over him and sat down to listen to the regular breathing. Before long Stalky arrived, on pretence of borrowing a book. He looked at the window-seat.
''Noticed anything wrong with Winton lately?' said Mullins.
''Notice anything wrong with my beak?' Stalky replied. 'Pater went Berserk after call-over, and fell on a lot of us for jesting with him about his impot. You ought to see Malpass's eye.'
'You mean that Pater fought?' said Mullins.
'Like a devil. Then he nearly went to sleep in our study just now. I expect he'll be all right when he wakes up. Rummy business! Conscientious old bargee. You ought to have heard his apologies.'
'But Pater can't fight one little bit,' Mullins repeated.
''Twasn't fighting. He just tried to murder every one.' Stalky described the affair, and when he left Mullins went off to take counsel with the Head, who, out of a cloud of blue smoke, told him that all would yet be well.
'Winton,' said he, 'is a little stiff in his moral joints. He'll get over that. If he asks you whether to-day's doings will count against him in his-'
'But you know it's important to him, sir. His people aren't-very well off,' said Mullins.
'That's why I'm taking all this trouble. You must reassure him, Pot. I have overcrowded him with new experiences. Oh, by the way, has his Cap come?'
'It came at dinner, sir.' Mullins laughed.
Sure enough, when he waked at tea-time, Winton proposed to take Mullins all through every one of his day's lapses from grace, and 'Do you think it will count against me?' said he.
'Don't you fuss so much about yourself and your silly career,' said Mullins. 'You're all right. And oh-here's your First Cap at last. Shove it up on the bracket and come on to tea.'
They met King on their way, stepping statelily and rubbing his hands. 'I have applied,' said he, 'for the services of an additional sub-prefect in Carton's unlamented absence. Your name, Winton, seems to have found favour with the powers that be, and-and all things considered-I am disposed to give my support to the nomination. You are therefore a quasi-lictor.'
'Then it didn't count against me,' Winton gasped as soon as they were out of hearing.
A Captain of Games can jest with a sub-prefect publicly.
'You utter ass!' said Mullins, and caught him by the back of his stiff neck and ran him down to the hall where the sub-prefects, who sit below the salt, made him welcome with the economical bloater-paste of mid-term.
King and little Hartopp were sparring in the Reverend John Gillett's study at 10 P.M. – classical versus modern as usual.
'Character-proportion-background,' snarled King. 'That is the essence of the Humanities.'
'Analects of Confucius,' little Hartopp answered.
'Time,' said the Reverend John behind the soda-water. 'You men oppress me. Hartopp, what did you say to Paddy in your dormitories to-night? Even you couldn't have overlooked his face.'
'But I did,' said Hartopp calmly. 'I wasn't even humorous about it as some clerics might have been. I went straight through and said naught.'
'Poor Paddy! Now, for my part,' said King, 'and you know I am not lavish in my praises, I consider Winton a first-class type; absolutely first-class.'
'Ha-ardly,' said the Reverend John. 'First-class of the second class, I admit. The very best type of second class but'-he shook his head-'it should have been a rat. Pater'll never be anything more than a Colonel of Engineers.'
'What do you base that verdict on?' said King stiffly.
'He came to me after prayers-with all his conscience.'
'Poor old Pater. Was it the mouse?' said little Hartopp.
'That, and what he called his uncontrollable temper, and his responsibilities as sub-prefect.'
'And you?'
'If we had had what is vulgarly called a pi-jaw he'd have had hysterics. So I recommended a dose of Epsom salts. He'll take it, too-conscientiously. Don't eat me, King. Perhaps, he'll be a K.C.B.'
Ten o'clock struck and the Army class boys in the further studies coming to their houses after an hour's extra work passed along the gravel path below. Some one was chanting, to the tune of 'White sand and grey sand,' Dis te minorem quod geris imperas. He stopped outside Mullins' study. They heard Mullins' window slide up and then Stalky's voice:
'Ah! Good-evening, Mullins, my barbarus tortor. We're the waits. We have come to inquire after the local Berserk. Is he doin' as well as can be expected in his new caree-ah?'
'Better than you will, in a sec, Stalky,' Mullins grunted.
'Glad of that. We thought he'd like to know that Paddy has been carried to the sick-house in ravin' delirium. They think it's concussion of the brain.'
'Why, he was all right at prayers,' Winton began earnestly, and they heard a laugh in the background as Mullins slammed down the window.
''Night, Regulus,' Stalky sang out, and the light footsteps went on.
'You see. It sticks. A little of it sticks among the barbarians,' said King.
'Amen,' said the Reverend John. 'Go to bed.'
A TRANSLATION
HORACE, Bk. V. Ode 3
There are whose study is of smells,
And to attentive schools rehearse
How something mixed with something else
Makes something worse.
Some cultivate in broths impure
The clients of our body-these,
Increasing without Venus, cure,
Or cause, disease.
Others the heated wheel extol,
And all its offspring, whose concern
Is how to make it farthest roll
And fastest turn.
Me, much incurious if the hour
Present, or to be paid for, brings
Me to Brundusium by the power
Of wheels or wings;
Me, in whose breast no flame hath burned
Life-long, save that by Pindar lit,
Such lore leaves cold: I am not turned
Aside to it
More than when, sunk in thought profound
Of what the unaltering Gods require,
My steward (friend but slave) brings round
Logs for my fire.
The Edge of the Evening
(1913)
Ah! What avails the classic bent,
And what the chosen word,
Against the undoctored incident
That actually occurred?
And what is Art whereto we press
Through paint and prose and rhyme-
When Nature in her nakedness
Defeats us every time?
'Hi! Hi! Hold your horses! Stop!.. Well! Well!' A lean man in a sable-lined overcoat leaped from a private car and barred my way up Pall Mall. 'You don't know me? You're excusable. I wasn't wearing much of anything last time we met-in South Africa.'
The scales fell from my eyes, and I saw him once more in a sky-blue army shirt, behind barbed wire, among Dutch prisoners bathing at Simonstown, more than a dozen years ago3. 'Why, it's Zigler-Laughton O. Zigler!' I cried. 'Well, I am glad to see you.'
'Oh no! You don't work any of your English on me. "So glad to see you, doncher know-an' ta-ta!" Do you reside in this village?'
'No. I'm up here buying stores.'
'Then you take my automobile. Where to?.. Oh, I know them! My Lord Marshalton is one of the Directors. Pigott, drive to the Army and Navy Cooperative Supply Association Limited, Victoria Street, Westminister.'
He settled himself on the deep dove-colour pneumatic cushions, and his smile was like the turning on of all the electrics. His teeth were whiter than the ivory fittings. He smelt of rare soap and cigarettes-such cigarettes as he handed me from a golden box with an automatic lighter. On my side of the car was a gold-mounted mirror, card and toilette case. I looked at him inquiringly.
'Yes,' he nodded, 'two years after I quit the Cape. She's not an Ohio girl, though. She's in the country now. Is that right? She's at our little place in the country. We'll go there as soon as you're through with your grocery-list. Engagements? The only engagement you've got is to grab your grip-get your bag from your hotel, I mean-and come right along and meet her. You are the captive of my bow and spear now.'
'I surrender,' I said meekly. 'Did the Zigler automatic gun do all this?' I pointed to the car fittings.
'Psha! Think of your rememberin' that! Well, no. The Zigler is a great gun-the greatest ever-but life's too short, an' too interestin', to squander on pushing her in military society. I've leased my rights in her to a Pennsylvanian-Transylvanian citizen full of mentality and moral uplift. If those things weigh with the Chancelleries of Europe, he will make good and-I shall be surprised. Excuse me!'
He bared his head as we passed the statue of the Great Queen outside Buckingham Palace.
'A very great lady!' said he. 'I have enjoyed her hospitality. She represents one of the most wonderful institutions in the world. The next is the one we are going to. Mrs. Zigler uses 'em, and they break her up every week on returned empties.'
'Oh, you mean the Stores?' I said.
'Mrs. Zigler means it more. They are quite ambassadorial in their outlook. I guess I'll wait outside and pray while you wrestle with 'em.'
My business at the Stores finished, and my bag retrieved from the hotel, his moving palace slid us into the country.
'I owe it to you,' Zigler began as smoothly as the car, 'to tell you what I am now. I represent the business end of the American Invasion. Not the blame cars themselves-I wouldn't be found dead in one-but the tools that make 'em. I am the Zigler Higher-Speed Tool and Lathe Trust. The Trust, sir, is entirely my own-in my own inventions. I am the Renzalaer ten-cylinder aërial-the lightest aeroplane-engine on the market-one price, one power, one guarantee. I am the Orlebar Paper-welt, Pulp-panel Company for aeroplane bodies; and I am the Rush Silencer for military aeroplanes-absolutely silent-which the Continent leases under royalty. With three exceptions, the British aren't wise to it yet. That's all I represent at present. You saw me take off my hat to your late Queen? I owe every cent I have to that great an' good Lady. Yes, sir, I came out of Africa, after my eighteen months' rest-cure and open-air treatment and sea-bathing, as her prisoner of war, like a giant refreshed. There wasn't anything could hold me, when I'd got my hooks into it, after that experience. And to you as a representative British citizen, I say here and now that I regard you as the founder of the family fortune-Tommy's and mine.'
'But I only gave you some papers and tobacco.'
'What more does any citizen need? The Cullinan diamond wouldn't have helped me as much then; an'-talking about South Africa, tell me-'
We talked about South Africa till the car stopped at the Georgian lodge of a great park.
'We'll get out here. I want to show you a rather sightly view,' said Zigler.
We walked, perhaps, half a mile, across timber-dotted turf, past a lake, entered a dark rhododendron-planted wood, ticking with the noise of pheasants' feet, and came out suddenly, where five rides met, at a small classic temple between lichened stucco statues which faced a circle of turf, several acres in extent. Irish yews, of a size that I had never seen before, walled the sunless circle like cliffs of riven obsidian, except at the lower end, where it gave on to a stretch of undulating bare ground ending in a timbered slope half-a-mile away.
'That's where the old Marshalton race-course used to be,' said Zigler. 'That ice-house is called Flora's Temple. Nell Gwynne and Mrs. Siddons an' Taglioni an' all that crowd used to act plays here for King George the Third. Wasn't it? Well, George is the only king I play. Let it go at that. This circle was the stage, I guess. The kings an' the nobility sat in Flora's Temple. I forget who sculped these statues at the door. They're the Comic and Tragic Muse. But it's a sightly view, ain't it?'
The sunlight was leaving the park. I caught a glint of silver to the southward beyond the wooded ridge.
'That's the ocean-the Channel, I mean,' said Zigler. 'It's twenty-three miles as a man flies. A sightly view, ain't it?'
I looked at the severe yews, the dumb yelling mouths of the two statues, at the blue-green shadows on the unsunned grass, and at the still bright plain in front where some deer were feeding.
'It's a most dramatic contrast, but I think it would be better on a summer's day,' I said, and we went on, up one of the noiseless rides, a quarter of a mile at least, till we came to the porticoed front of an enormous Georgian pile. Four footmen revealed themselves in a hall hung with pictures.
'I hired this off of my Lord Marshalton,' Zigler explained, while they helped us out of our coats under the severe eyes of ruffed and periwigged ancestors. 'Ya-as. They always look at me too, as if I'd blown in from the gutter. Which, of course, I have. That's Mary, Lady Marshalton. Old man Joshua painted her. Do you see any likeness to my Lord Marshalton? Why, haven't you ever met up with him? He was Captain Mankeltow-my Royal British Artillery captain that blew up my gun in the war, an' then tried to bury me against my religious principles4. Ya-as. His father died and he got the lordship. That was about all he got by the time that your British death-duties were through with him. So he said I'd oblige him by hiring his ranch. It's a hell an' a half of a proposition to handle, but Tommy-Mrs. Laughton-understands it. Come right in to the parlour and be very welcome.'
He guided me, hand on shoulder, into a babble of high-pitched talk and laughter that filled a vast drawing-room. He introduced me as the founder of the family fortunes to a little, lithe, dark-eyed woman whose speech and greeting were of the soft-lipped South. She in turn presented me to her mother, a black-browed snowy-haired old lady with a cap of priceless Venetian point, hands that must have held many hearts in their time, and a dignity as unquestioned and unquestioning as an empress. She was, indeed, a Burton of Savannah, who, on their own ground, out-rank the Lees of Virginia. The rest of the company came from Buffalo, Cincinnati, Cleveland and Chicago, with here and there a softening southern strain. A party of young folk popped corn beneath a mantelpiece surmounted by a Gainsborough. Two portly men, half hidden by a cased harp, discussed, over sheaves of typewritten documents, the terms of some contract. A knot of matrons talked servants-Irish versus German-across the grand piano. A youth ravaged an old bookcase, while beside him a tall girl stared at the portrait of a woman of many loves, dead three hundred years, but now leaping to life and warning under the shaded frame-light. In a corner half-a-dozen girls examined the glazed tables that held the decorations-English and foreign-of the late Lord Marshalton.
'See heah! Would this be the Ordeh of the Gyartah?' one said, pointing.
'I presoom likely. No! The Garter has "Honey swore" – I know that much. This is "Tria juncta" something.'
'Oh, what's that cunning little copper cross with "For Valurr"?' a third cried.
'Say! Look at here!' said the young man at the bookcase. 'Here's a first edition of Handley Cross and a Beewick's Birds right next to it-just like so many best sellers. Look, Maidie!'
The girl beneath the picture half turned her body but not her eyes.
'You don't tell me!' she said slowly. 'Their women amounted to something after all.'
'But Woman's scope, and outlook was vurry limmutted in those days,' one of the matrons put in, from the piano.
'Limmutted? For her? If they whurr, I guess she was the limmut. Who was she? Peters, whurr's the cat'log?'
A thin butler, in charge of two footmen removing the tea-batteries, slid to a table and handed her a blue-and-qilt book. He was button-holed by one of the men behind the harp, who wished to get a telephone call through to Edinburgh.
'The local office shuts at six,' said Peters. 'But I can get through to'-he named some town-'in ten minutes, sir.'
'That suits me. You'll find me here when you've hitched up. Oh, say, Peters! We-Mister Olpherts an' me-ain't goin' by that early morning train to-morrow-but the other one-on the other line-whatever they call it.'
'The nine twenty-seven, sir. Yes, sir. Early breakfast will be at half-past eight and the car will be at the door at nine.'
'Peters!' an imperious young voice called. 'What's the matteh with Lord Marshalton's Ordeh of the Gyartah? We cyan't find it anyweah.'
'Well, miss, I have heard that that Order is usually returned to His Majesty on the death of the holder. Yes, miss.' Then in a whisper to a footman, 'More butter for the pop-corn in King Charles's Corner.' He stopped behind my chair. 'Your room is Number Eleven, sir. May I trouble you for your keys?'
He left the room with a six-year-old maiden called Alice who had announced she would not go to bed ''less Peter, Peter, Punkin-eater takes me-so there!'
He very kindly looked in on me for a moment as I was dressing for dinner. 'Not at all, sir,' he replied to some compliment I paid him. 'I valeted the late Lord Marshalton for fifteen years. He was very abrupt in his movements, sir. As a rule I never received more than an hour's notice of a journey. We used to go to Syria frequently. I have been twice to Babylon. Mr. and Mrs. Zigler's requirements are, comparatively speaking, few.'
'But the guests?'
'Very little out of the ordinary as soon as one knows their ordinaries. Extremely simple, if I may say so, sir.'
I had the privilege of taking Mrs. Burton in to dinner, and was rewarded with an entirely new, and to me rather shocking view, of Abraham Lincoln, who, she said, had wasted the heritage of his land by blood and fire, and had surrendered the remnant to aliens. 'My brother, suh,' she said, 'fell at Gettysburg in order that Armenians should colonise New England to-day. If I took any interest in any dam-Yankee outside of my son-in-law Laughton yondah, I should say that my brother's death had been amply avenged.'
The man at her right took up the challenge, and the war spread. Her eyes twinkled over the flames she had lit.
'Don't these folk,' she said a little later, 'remind you of Arabs picnicking under the Pyramids?'
'I've never seen the Pyramids,' I replied.
'Hm! I didn't know you were as English as all that.' And when I laughed, 'Are you?'
'Always. It saves trouble.'
'Now that's just what I find so significant among the English'-this was Alice's mother, I think, with one elbow well forward among the salted almonds. 'Oh, I know how you feel, Madam Burton, but a Northerner like myself-I'm Buffalo-even though we come over every year-notices the desire for comfort in England. There's so little conflict or uplift in British society.'
'But we like being comfortable,' I said.
'I know it. It's very characteristic. But ain't it a little, just a little, lacking in adaptability an' imagination?'
'They haven't any need for adaptability,' Madam Burton struck in. 'They haven't any Ellis Island standards to live up to.'
'But we can assimilate,' the Buffalo woman charged on.
'Now you have done it!' I whispered to the old lady as the blessed word 'assimilation' woke up all the old arguments for and against.
There was not a dull moment in that dinner for me-nor afterwards when the boys and girls at the piano played the rag-time tunes of their own land, while their elders, inexhaustibly interested, replunged into the discussion of that land's future, till there was talk of coon-can. When all the company had been set to tables Zigler led me into his book-lined study, where I noticed he kept his golf-clubs, and spoke simply as a child, gravely as a bishop, of the years that were past since our last meeting.
'That's about all, I guess-up to date,' he said when he had unrolled the bright map of his fortunes across three continents. 'Bein' rich suits me. So does your country, sir. My own country? You heard what that Detroit man said at dinner. "A Government of the alien, by the alien, for the alien." Mother's right, too. Lincoln killed us. From the highest motives-but he killed us. Oh, say, that reminds me. 'J'ever kill a man from the highest motives?'
'Not from any motive-as far as I remember.'
'Well, I have. It don't weigh on my mind any, but it was interesting. Life is interesting for a rich-for any-man in England. Ya-as! Life in England is like settin' in the front row at the theatre and never knowin' when the whole blame drama won't spill itself into your lap. I didn't always know that. I lie abed now, and I blush to think of some of the breaks I made in South Africa. About the British. Not your official method of doin' business. But the Spirit. I was 'way, 'way off on the Spirit. Are you acquainted with any other country where you'd have to kill a man or two to get at the National Spirit?'
