The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [169]
“Comment dit-on en français ‘hiccup’?” he asked his neighbour.
“Plaît-il, mon professeur?”
Scott-King hiccuped. “Ça,” he said.
“Ça c’est le hoquet.”
“J’en ai affreusement.”
“Évidemment, mon professeur. Il faut du cognac.”
The waiters had drunk and were drinking profusely of brandy and there was a bottle at hand. Scott-King tossed off a glassful and his affliction was doubled. He hiccuped without intermission throughout the long dinner.
This neighbour, who had so ill-advised him, was, Scott-King saw from the card, Dr. Bogdan Antonic, the International Secretary of the Association, a middle-aged, gentle man whose face was lined with settled distress and weariness. They conversed, as far as the hiccups permitted, in French.
“You are not Neutralian?”
“Not yet. I hope to be. Every week I make my application to the Foreign Office and always I am told it will be next week. It is not so much for myself I am anxious—though death is a fearful thing—as for my family. I have seven children, all born in Neutralia, all without nationality. If we are sent back to my unhappy country they would hang us all without doubt.”
“Yugoslavia?”
“I am a Croat, born under the Hapsburg Empire. That was a true League of Nations. As a young man I studied in Zagreb, Budapest, Prague, Vienna—one was free, one moved where one would; one was a citizen of Europe. Then we were liberated and put under the Serbs. Now we are liberated again and put under the Russians. And always more police, more prisons, more hanging. My poor wife is Czech. Her nervous constitution is quite deranged by our troubles. She thinks all the time she is being watched.”
Scott-King essayed one of those little, inarticulate, noncommittal grunts of sympathy which come easily to the embarrassed Englishman; to an Englishman, that is, who is not troubled by the hiccups. The sound which in the event issued from him might have been taken as derisive by a less sensitive man than Dr. Antonic.
“I think so, too,” he said severely. “There are spies everywhere. You saw that man, as we came in, sitting with the woman with the cigar. He is one of them. I have been here ten years and know them all. I was second secretary to our Legation. It was a great thing, you must believe, for a Croat to enter our diplomatic service. All the appointments went to Serbs. Now there is no Legation. My salary has not been paid since 1940. I have a few friends at the Foreign Office. They are sometimes kind and give me employment, as at the present occasion. But at any moment they may make a trade agreement with the Russians and hand us over.”
Scott-King attempted to reply.
“You must take some more brandy, Professor. It is the only thing. Often, I remember, in Ragusa I have had the hiccups from laughing. . . . Never again, I suppose.”
Though the company was smaller at the banquet than at the vin d’honneur, the noise was more oppressive. The private dining room of the Ritz, spacious as it was, had been built in a more trumpery style than the Hôtel de Ville. There the lofty roof had seemed to draw the discordant voices upwards into the cerulean perspective with which it was painted, and disperse them there amid the floating deities; the Flemish hunting scenes on the walls seemed to envelop and muffle them in their million stitches. But here the din banged back from gilding and mirrors; above the clatter and chatter of the dinner table and the altercations of the waiters, a mixed choir of young people sang folk songs, calculated to depress the most jovial village festival. It was not thus, in his classroom at Granchester, that Scott-King had imagined himself dining.
“At my little house on the point at Lapad, we used to sit on the terrace laughing so loudly, sometimes, that