The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [242]
“Nonsense, I’m always seeing you about together. I am not doing anything ’fore lunch on Tuesday. How about then? Or Friday I could manage, but I should prefer Tuesday.”
So it was arranged.
There was a pause; I looked at my watch; Jeremy took no notice; I looked again.
“What is the time,” he said, “Twenty-three to. Oh, good!—hours yet.”
“Before a fool’s opinion of himself the gods are silent—aye and envious too,” I thought. on Thursday.”
“I’m speaking ‘on the paper’
“Good.”
“About the Near East. Macedonia. Oil, you know.”
“Ah.”
“I think it ought to be rather a good speech.”
“Yes.”
“Evelyn, you aren’t listening; now seriously, what do you really think is wrong with my speaking. What I feel about the Union myself is. . . .”
A blind fury, a mist of fire. We struggled together on the carpet. He was surprisingly weak for his size. The first blow with the poker he dodged and took on his shoulder; the second and third caved his forehead in. I stood up, quivering, filled with a beastly curiosity to find what was inside his broken skull. Instead I restrained myself and put his handkerchief over his face.
Outside the door I met my scout. I forgot the sherry.
“Hunt”—I almost clung to him. “There is a gentleman in the room lying on the carpet.”
“Yes sir. Drunk, sir?”
I remembered the sherry. “No, as a matter of fact he’s dead.”
“Dead, sir?”
“Yes, I killed him.”
“You don’t say so, sir!”
“But Hunt, what are we to do about it?”
“Well, sir, if he’s dead, there doesn’t seem to be much we can do, does there? Now I remember a gentleman on this staircase once, who killed himself. Poison. It must have been ’93 I should think, or ’94. A nice quiet gentleman, too, when he was sober. I remember he said to me. . . .”
The voice droned on, “. . . I liked your speech, but I thought it was ‘a little heavy.’ What do you think Bagnall meant by that?”
It was the voice of Jeremy. My head cleared. We were still there on opposite sides of the fire. He was still talking.
“. . . Scaife said. . . .”
At seven o’clock Jeremy rose. “Well, I mustn’t keep you from your bath. Don’t forget about asking Richard to lunch on Tuesday, will you? Oh, and Evelyn, if you know the man who reports the Union for the Isis, you might ask him to give me a decent notice this time.”
I try to think that one day I shall be proud of having known Jeremy. Till then. . . .
ANTONY, WHO SOUGHT THINGS THAT WERE LOST
Revolution came late to St. Romeiro and suddenly. Cazarin, the journalist who had been educated in Paris, was said to have proclaimed it. Messengers came to him with the news that students at Vienna had driven out Prince Metternich and perhaps had murdered him; that all Lombardy was in revolt, that the Pope had fled and all his cardinals. And from the coast the fishermen brought other tales, of how the foreigners were torturing men and women at Venice and of things that were done in Naples; how when the Pope left Rome the pillars of St. Peter’s were shaken and many of the peasants affirmed that it was the Emperor Napoleon who had done these things, not knowing that he was dead.
Thus and thus revolution came to St. Romeiro and Cazarin and the people came out in the heat of the day and cried before the Duke’s palace; Cazarin crying for liberty and the people for the removal of the duty on olives. Then the news came that the Duke had fled and with him all his family. So the people broke down the iron gates which the Duke’s grandfather had brought from Milan and burst into the Palace. And they found only a very few, very young soldiers, and since these seemed ill inclined to resist, they killed them; and then feeling much enraged at their own valour, they sought what further they might do. And they cried, “To the Castle!” for there were the prisoners kept and each had some near relative who for some crime or foolishness was imprisoned.
And Cazarin remembered the Count Antony who had been shut up with his lady in the Castle ten years ago. But when the prison was broken open, they found many debtors and thieves and a poor mad woman