The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [160]
But still the shade of Bellorius stood at his elbow demanding placation. There was unfinished business between these two. You cannot keep close company with a man, even though he be dead three centuries, without incurring obligations. Therefore at the time of the peace celebrations Scott-King distilled his learning and wrote a little essay, 4000 words long, entitled The Last Latinist, to commemorate the coming tercentenary of Bellorius’s death. It appeared in a learned journal. Scott-King was paid twelve guineas for this fruit of fifteen years’ devoted labour; six of them he paid in income tax; with six he purchased a large gun-metal watch which worked irregularly for a month or two and then finally failed. There the matter might well have ended.
These, then, in a general, distant view, are the circumstances—Scott-King’s history; Bellorius; the history of Neutralia; the year of Grace 1946—all quite credible, quite humdrum, which together produced the odd events of Scott-King’s summer holiday. Let us now “truck” the camera forward and see him “close-up.” You have heard all about Scott-King but you have not yet met him.
Meet him, then, at breakfast on a bleak morning at the beginning of the summer term. Unmarried assistant masters at Granchester enjoyed the use of a pair of collegiate rooms in the school buildings and took their meals in the common room. Scott-King came from his classroom where he had been taking early school, with his gown flowing behind him and a sheaf of fluttering exercise papers in his numb fingers. There had been no remission of wartime privations at Granchester. The cold grate was used as ashtray and wastepaper basket and was rarely emptied. The breakfast table was a litter of small pots, each labelled with a master’s name, containing rations of sugar, margarine and a spurious marmalade. The breakfast dish was a slop of “dried” eggs. Scott-King turned sadly from the sideboard. “Anyone,” he said, “is welcome to my share in this triumph of modern science.”
“Letter for you, Scottie,” said one of his colleagues. “‘The Honourable Professor Scott-King Esquire.’ Congratulations.”
It was a large, stiff envelope, thus oddly addressed, emblazoned on the flap with a coat of arms. Inside were a card and a letter. The card read: His Magnificence the Very Reverend the Rector of the University of Simona and the Committee of the Bellorius Tercentenary Celebration Association request the honour of Professor Scott-King’s assistance at the public acts to be held at Simona on July 28th–August 5th, 1946. R.S.V.P. His Excellency Dr. Bogdan Antonic, International Secretary of the Association, Simona University, Neutralia.
The letter was signed by the Neutralian Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. It announced that a number of distinguished scholars were assembling from all over the world to do honour to the illustrious Neutralian political thinker Bellorius and delicately intimated that the trip would be without expense on the part of the guests.
Scott-King’s first thought on reading the communication was that he was the victim of a hoax. He looked round the table expecting to surprise a glance of complicity between his colleagues, but they appeared to be busy with their own concerns. Second thoughts convinced him that this sumptuous embossing and engraving was beyond their resources. The thing was authentic, then; but Scott-King was not pleased. He felt, rather, that a long-standing private intimacy between himself and Bellorius was being rudely disturbed. He put the envelope into his pocket, ate his bread and margarine, and presently made ready for morning chapel. He stopped at the secretary’s office to purchase a packet of crested school writing paper on which to inscribe “Mr. Scott-King regrets . . .”
For the strange thing is that Scott-King was definitely blasé. Something of the kind has been hinted before, yet, seeing him cross the quadrangle to the chapel steps, middle-aged, shabby, unhonoured and unknown, his round and learned face puckered against