The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [162]
And Scott-King sat tight.
II
Some weeks later Scott-King sat in the aerodrome waiting room. His overcoat lay across his knees, his hand luggage at his feet. A loudspeaker, set high out of harm’s way in the dun concrete wall, discoursed dance music and official announcements. This room, like all the others to which he had been driven in the course of the morning, was sparsely furnished and indifferently clean; on its walls, sole concession to literary curiosity, hung commendations of government savings bonds and precautions against gas attack. Scott-King was hungry, weary and dispirited for he was new to the amenities of modern travel.
He had left his hotel in London at seven o’clock that morning; it was now past noon and he was still on English soil. He had not been ignored. He had been shepherded in and out of charabancs and offices like an idiot child; he had been weighed and measured like a load of merchandise; he had been searched like a criminal; he had been cross-questioned about his past and his future, the state of his health and of his finances, as though he were applying for permanent employment of a confidential nature. Scott-King had not been nurtured in luxury and privilege, but this was not how he used to travel. And he had eaten nothing except a piece of flaccid toast and margarine in his bedroom. The ultimate asylum where he now sat proclaimed itself on the door as “For the use of V.I.P.’s only.”
“V.I.P.?” he asked their conductress.
She was a neat, impersonal young woman, part midwife, part governess, part shop-walker, in manner. “Very Important Persons,” she replied without evident embarrassment.
“But is it all right for me to be here?”
“It is essential. You are a V.I.P.”
I wonder, thought Scott-King, how they treat quite ordinary, unimportant people?
There were two fellow-travellers, male and female, similarly distinguished, both bound for Bellacita, capital city of Neutralia; both, it presently transpired, guests of the Bellorius Celebration Committee.
The man was a familiar type to Scott-King; his name Whitemaid, his calling academic, a dim man like himself, much of an age with him.
“Tell me,” said Whitemaid, “tell me frankly”—and he looked furtive as men do when they employ that ambiguous expression—“have you ever heard of the worthy Bellorius?”
“I know his work. I have seldom heard it discussed.”
“Ah, well, of course, he’s not in my subject. I’m Roman Law,” said Whitemaid, with an accession of furtiveness that took all grandiosity from the claim. “They asked the Professor of Poetry, you know, but he couldn’t get away. Then they tried the Professor of Latin. He’s red. Then they asked for anyone to represent the University. No one else was enthusiastic so I put myself forward. I find expeditions of this kind highly diverting. You are familiar with them?”
“No.”
“I went to Upsala last vacation and ate very passable caviare twice a day for a week. Neutralia is not known for delicate living, alas, but one may count on rude plenty—and, of course, wine.”
“It’s all a racket, anyhow,” said the third Very Important Person.
This was a woman no longer very young. Her name, Scott-King and Whitemaid had learned through hearing it frequently called through the loudspeaker and seeing it chalked on blackboards, calling her to receive urgent messages at every stage of their journey, was Miss Bombaum. It was a name notorious to almost all the world except, as it happened, to Scott-King and Whitemaid. She was far from dim; once a roving, indeed a dashing, reporter who in the days before the war had popped up wherever there was unpleasantness—Danzig, the Alcazar, Shanghai, Wal-Wal; now a columnist whose weekly articles were syndicated in the popular press of four continents. Scott-King did not read such articles and he had wondered idly at frequent intervals during the morning what she could be. She did not look a lady; she did not even look quite respectable, but he could not reconcile her typewriter with the calling of actress or courtesan; nor for that matter the sharp little