The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [92]
For some time the Major had been impermeable to the rumours that circulated in the Majestic, having had his fill of them in the damp of the trenches where they grew like mushrooms. But now he found himself listening again, since the old ladies gobbled them up greedily and loved to share them with him (it was a mystery where they originated unless they were somehow generated by the revolutionary sentiments said to be bubbling in Murphy’s brain). The I.R.A. had planned to assassinate His Majesty, Miss Archer (no relation) assured him one day, with a dart tipped with curare fired from a blow-pipe by some form of savage imported specially from the jungles of Brazil.
“Oh, what nonsense!” the Major chaffed her (she was one of his favourites). “I’m surprised at you, Sybil, for believing such a cock-and-bull story.”
“But it’s perfectly true. I have it on the best authority.”
“Oh really!”
Miss Archer lowered her voice. “D.C.”
“D.C.?”
She clicked her tongue, despairing of the Major’s power to comprehend. “Dublin Castle.”
“Absolute rot,” laughed the Major.
But no, Miss Archer insisted that it was nothing less than the truth. And that wasn’t the half of it...Not only had the I.R.A. planned this dastardly act, they had come within a whisker of carrying it out. The Brazilian savage, wearing his own feathers and disguised as a tipster, had been placed beside the course at Ascot. As the Royal Carriage swept towards him he had raised his blow-pipe. The King had come nearer and nearer, had drawn level, the savage’s cheeks were actually bulging when...he had been taken by a fit of coughing (unused to the climate, he had died of pneumonia two days later), the dart had slithered out of the pipe and stuck harmlessly in the turf! Miss Archer had abandoned the pretence of seriousness and finished her story in a gale of maidenly giggles, her dim, rheumy, once beautiful eyes streaming with tears of laughter, so that the Major no longer knew whether she had ever intended him to take it seriously. Perhaps she no longer knew herself.
“I shall never believe another word you say,” the Major told her sternly.
There was another rumour believed by old Mrs Rice and the Misses Johnston, Laverty and Bagley (and at least half believed by the other ladies) to the effect that all the I.R.A. leaders spoke fluent German and that those mad women (Maud Gonne and the Gore-Booth girl who had married the man with the unpronounceable name) had both been mistresses of the Kaiser. As a supplement, Mr Norton indicated sotto voce to the Major that poor old Kaiser Bill had found them insatiable and had permanently impaired his health in an effort to uphold his honour.
Miss Staveley, as befitted her status at the Majestic, had a rumour vended and believed exclusively by herself but which nevertheless chilled for a moment any old lady who heard it: a scheme was afoot whereby every butcher in the country, whether pork or beef, would rise as one man and take their cleavers to the local gentry.
Yet the rumour which the Major liked most of all came from no less a person than Edward himself. He had heard, though it was probably “utter bilge,” that Dublin Castle’s water supply had been deliberately poisoned and the entire Executive laid low with the exception of a handful of the heaviest whiskey drinkers. These latter were desperately trying to conceal the situation while they coped with it. But what could they do? They were in a situation reminiscent of classical tragedy. The very elixir which had saved their lives now had them groping through an impenetrable alcoholic fog. As one cheerful intoxicated manoeuvre followed