Mr Thump, very absurdly, ignored her upon strictly parallel lines. Ridiculous it was.
“Not now,” he said. “No. Never do.”
Other people dropped in, Mrs Doober and a rather severe-looking blonde young lady. With each arrival Mr Thump featured a deepening hopelessness, and Edward Albert’s delight in his frustration increased. Plainly the story was becoming more and more impossible. Mr Thump would start at every fresh arrival and throw up his eyes in comic despair. Always when no one but Edward Albert was looking. The others were beginning to notice Edward Albert’s uncontrollable hilarity. They suspected him. What was he laughing at? Then they suspected Mr Thump. Thereupon Mr Thump became more suspicious than anyone. He was a fair treat.
He addressed Edward Albert protestingly. He spoke in a low plaintive voice. “I only said a porcupine, you know, a very leetle porcupine. What is there to laugh at in a porcupine?”
His features had an instantaneous fit and then became very sad.
Edward Albert devoured bread hastily and a crumb went the wrong way.
“Just a porcupine!” said Thump in a broken falsetto.
“Oh! Oh! Oh!”
“You’ve set that boy laughing!” said Mrs Doober, “and I doubt if he’ll get any dinner. Gawpy, take him away and help him. It’s a shame of you, Mr Thump.”
“I never set him laughing. He started laughing at me. All I said, Mrs Doober, was this; I asked him if he knew the story of the monkey and the porcupine.”
“Well,” said the elderly man who had been sleeping before the drawing-room fire in the afternoon. “What is this precious story of the monkey and the porcupine? If it’s fit to tell here.”
“How should I know?” said Mr Thump, now in his glory. “If I knew, would I ask a little chap like that?”
“You mean to say there isn’t a story?”
“Not that I know of. No. Why should there be? I’ve been asking about it for years. From the way he laughed I really thought he had got something....”
The old gentleman grunted in a hostile manner.
“One of your Artful Catches, Mr Thump,” said Mrs Doober. “I shall fine you, if you do any more of them....”
Then changing the subject; “Our Belgian friends are late to-night....”
Mr Thump aired his voice for a few tuneful bars and then caught his wife’s eye and desisted. “Hm!” said Mr Thump, and sank back into insignificance.
When Albert Edward returned to the dining-room watery-eyed and still slightly hysterical, the Belgians had come in and the table talk had drifted away to other subjects, so that he never learnt that the great story of the monkey and the porcupine was merely selling a bargain. Immediately his eye sought Mr Harold Thump’s and was rewarded by a sympathetic grimace.
In this way a curious mental dependence was established between Mr Thump and himself. They reassured one another. They convinced each other that they existed.
When Mr Thump came into one of the reception rooms and everybody else behaved as though they had nothing against him very much except that they had had quite enough of him some time ago, he would look for Edward Albert and be sure of finding a bright expectant face. And Edward Albert, coming discreetly into a company to which, except for Mrs Doober’s official encouragements, he seemed invisible and unaudible, would find Harold Thump ready with a grimace for him and just that sly obliquity of vision in it that made them both fellow-conspirators against their fellow-boarders.
“They don’t exist,” they told each other mutely.
XIII. Intimations of Empire
Behind the florid personality of Mr Harold Thump, other individuals advanced and retreated. There was that other student, young Frankincense from University College, who had won so many honours. He was slender and tall, surmounted by a pear-shaped head with the broad part upward, and he came to Edward Albert and said, “I gather you too are a scholarship holder?”
“Not exactly a scholarship holder,” said Edward Albert.
“I’m studying at the Imperial College of Commercial Science in Kentish Town. Civil Service and all that.”
“Oh God!” cried Mr Frankincense in undisguised contempt, and turned away, and never afterwards approached him.
Whereupon a profound hatred for Mr Frankincense was born in Edward Albert’s soul, and it troubled him profoundly that he could devise no way of getting square with him. In reveries he called him Turnip Head, and cut him out with a particularly beautiful but non-existent young lady, with whom he was desperately enamoured. In this Edward Albert’s new tailor-made suit played its part. But Frankincense paid little attention to these profound humiliations, since he knew nothing whatever about them.
Edward Albert would see him playing chess in the snuggery and particularly with the Indian young gentleman, who looked like one of the Bolter’s College Old Boys, only more so, and who spoke in a high-pitched clear staccato manner that filled Edward Albert with a strange sense of superiority, more particularly when he learnt from old Mr Blake that this way of talking was “chi-chi” and characteristic of the lesser breeds within the law who inhabit Hindustan. He was part of Edward Albert’s Indian Empire, and as for his being a somebody because he was a Rajah’s son, said old Mr Blake, “these rajahs have dozens of ’em. Hareems they have, and they tax the skins off their people to keep them up and then blame us for it. Four wives and a lot of concubines and then some. Rajah’s son he may be in India, but over here he’s nothing more than a blasted bastard. But to hear him argue at times you would think we’d robbed India of her cotton trade and every sort of wealth they ever had.... Hareems is their factories, and whatsoever wealth they get, they’ll produce more mouths to eat it up, trust them. Why, when I see him talking to a nice blonde English girl like Miss Pooley, and giving himself airs with her, it fair makes my blood boil. Out there she’d be a Mem Sahib and he’d be salaaming to her....”
Edward Albert, as a prospective citizen of the British Motherland would listen to his subject from afar, watch the sinister movements of his long hands, and resent his shrill laugh of delight when he gained any advantage over Turnip Head, who after all was an Englishman, and who ought to know better than to lose games of chess to his political inferior. You cannot be too careful. At any time there might be another Mutiny, if once we lost our grip on them.
And in his reveries he would deal with his subject races very firmly. Sadly and sternly he would blow them from guns, because that was what they dreaded most. It affected their resurrection in some way. He revived his fantasy of an electric gun that never required re-loading, and with it he fought his way through hordes and hordes of turbaned rebels, mowing them down by the Fousand, literally by the Fousand, to rescue the foolish Turnip Head—just in time.
There the man was, hemmed in, his ammunition running short, awaiting the fate of all those who pander to the treacherous natives, yet, let this be said for him, holding out to the last, and then he heard the bagpipes. Softly in his own peculiar manner, Edward Albert whistled that inspiring tune, “The Campbells are Coming.”
He advanced along a nullah, because, whatever it may be, a nullah is what you always advance along in India, shooting right and left.
Then he discovered he was sitting quite close to the Indian rebel,....
Edward Albert didn’t care if he had heard....
XIV. Do Belgians Speak French?
Another stimulus to the patriotic consciousness of Edward Albert was those newly arrived Belgian refugees from Antwerp, always sitting together in a bunch, watchful to behave well, and talking of their affairs and hopes with the utmost freedom, to anyone whom on the slightest provocation they imagined might understand their French. In a little while the Germans would be driven out of Belgium again and they would return. Miss Pooley and the widow lady who had first spoken to Edward Albert really did have a working knowledge of French, and so it fell to them to hear and hand on their account of what in those milder days were regarded as the horrors of war.