The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [172]
He did not wish to know more. He was an adult, an intellectual; he was all that has already been predicated of him. He was no chauvinist. Throughout six embattled years he had remained resolutely impartial. But now his hackles rose; quite literally he felt the roots of his sparse hairs prick and tingle. Like the immortal private of the Buffs he stood in Elgin’s place; not untaught certainly, nor rude, nor abysmally low-born, but poor and, at the moment, reckless, bewildered and alone, a heart with English instinct fraught he yet could call his own.
“I may have to keep the party waiting a few minutes,” he said. “I must go and call on my colleague Mr. Whitemaid.”
He found him in bed looking strange rather than ill; almost exalted. He was still rather drunk. The windows stood wide open on to the balcony and on the balcony, modestly robed in bath towels, sat Miss Sveningen eating beefsteak.
“They tell me downstairs that you are not coming with us to Simona?”
“No. I’m not quite up to it this morning. I have things to attend to here. It is not easy for me to explain.” He nodded towards the giant carnivore on the balcony.
“You spent an agreeable evening?”
“A total blank, Scott-King. I remember being with you at some kind of civic reception. I remember a fracas with the police, but that was much later. Hours must have intervened.”
“The police?”
“Yes. At some kind of dancing place. Irma here was splendid—like something in a film. They went down like nine-pins. But for her I suppose I should be in a cell at this moment instead of happily consuming Bromo-Seltzer in your company.”
“You made a speech.”
“So I gather. You missed it? Then we shall never know what I said. Irma in her blunt way described it as long and impassioned but incomprehensible.”
“Was it about Bellorius?”
“I rather suppose not. Love was uppermost in my mind, I think. To tell you the truth I have lost my interest in Bellorius. It was never strong. It wilted and died this morning when I learned that Irma was not of us. She has come for the Physical Training Congress.”
“I shall miss you.”
“Stay with us for the gymnastics.”
For a second Scott-King hesitated. The future at Simona was obscure and rather threatening.
“There are to be five hundred female athletes. Contortionists perhaps from the Indies.”
“No,” said Scott-King at length firmly. “I must keep faith with Bellorius.”
And he returned to the delegates who now sat impatiently in a charabanc at the doors of the Ritz.
III
The town of Simona stands within sight of the Mediterranean Sea on the foothills of the great massif which fills half the map of Neutralia. Groves of walnut and cork-oak, little orchards of almond and lemon, cover the surrounding country and grow to the foot of the walls which jut out among them in a series of sharp bastions, ingeniously contrived in the seventeenth century and never, in a long history of strife, put to the test of assault; for they enclose little of military significance. The medieval university, the baroque cathedral, twenty churches in whose delicate limestone belfries the storks build and multiply, a rococo square, two or three tiny shabby palaces, a market and a street of shops are all that can be found there and all that the heart of man can properly desire. The railway runs well clear of the town and betrays its presence only by rare puffs of white smoke among the treetops.
At the hour of the angelus Scott-King sat with Dr. Bogdan Antonic at a café table on the ramparts.
“I suppose Bellorius must have looked out on almost precisely the same prospect as we see today.”
“Yes, the buildings at least do not change. There is still the illusion of peace while, as in Bellorius’s time, the hills behind us are a nest of brigands.”
“He alludes to them, I remember, in the eighth canto, but surely today? . . .”
“It is still the same. Now they call them by different names—partisans, resistance