Part 40 (2/2)
”Lancelot what?”
”Only Lancelot! Mr. Lancelot.”
”Why, that's like your Mary Ann!”
”So it is!” he laughed, more bitterly than cordially; ”it never struck me before. Yes, we are a pair.”
”How did you stumble on this place?”
”I didn't stumble. Deliberate, intelligent selection. You see, it's the next best thing to Piccadilly. You just cross Waterloo Bridge, and there you are at the centre, five minutes from all the clubs. The natives have not yet risen to the idea.”
”You mean the rent,” laughed Peter. ”You're as canny and careful as a Scotch professor. I think it's simply grand the way you've beaten out those s.h.i.+llings, in defiance of your natural instincts. I should have melted them years ago. I believe you _have_ got some musical genius after all.”
”You over-rate my abilities,” said Lancelot, with the whimsical expression that sometimes flashed across his face even in his most unamiable moments. ”You must deduct the thalers I made in exhibitions.
As for living in cheap lodgings, I am not at all certain it's an economy, for every now and again it occurs to you that you are saving an awful lot, and you take a hansom on the strength of it.”
”Well, I haven't torn up that cheque yet--”
”Peter!” said Lancelot, his flash of gaiety dying away, ”I tell you these things as a friend, not as a beggar. If you look upon me as the second, I cease to be the first.”
”But, man, I owe you the money; and if it will enable you to hold out a little longer--why, in Heaven's name, shouldn't you--?”
”You don't owe me the money at all; I made no bargain with you; I am not a moneylender.”
”_Pack d.i.c.k sum Henker!_” growled Peter, with a comical grimace. ”_Was fur_ a casuist! What a swindler you'd make! I wonder you have the face to deny the debt. Well, and how did you leave Frau Sauer-Kraut?” he said, deeming it prudent to sheer off the subject.
”Fat as a Christmas turkey.”
”Or a German sausage. The extraordinary things that woman stuffed herself with!--chunks of fat, stewed apples, Kartoffel salad--all mixed up in one plate, as in a dustbin.”
”Don't! You make my gorge rise. _Ach Himmel!_ to think that this nation should be musical! O Music, heavenly maid, how much garlic I have endured for thy sake!”
”Ha! ha! ha!” laughed Peter, putting down his whisky that he might throw himself freely back in the easy chair and roar.
”O that garlic!” he said, panting. ”No wonder they smoked so much in Leipsic. Even so they couldn't keep the reek out of the staircases.
Still, it's a great country is Germany. Our house does a tremendous business in German patents.”
”A great country? A land of barbarians rather. How can a people be civilised that eats jam with its meat?”
”Bravo, Lancelot! You're in lovely form to-night. You seem to go a hundred miles out of your way to come the truly British. First it was oil--now it's jam. There was that aristocratic flash in your eye, too, that look of supreme disdain which brings on riots in Trafalgar Square.
Behind the patriotic, the national note, 'How can a people be civilised that eats jam with its meat?' I heard the deeper, the oligarchic accent, 'How can a people be enfranchised that eats meat with its fingers?' Ah, you are right! How you do hate the poor! What bores they are! You aristocrats--the products of centuries of culture, comfort, and c.o.c.ksureness--will never rid yourselves of your conviction that you are the backbone of England--no, not though that backbone were picked clean of every sc.r.a.p of flesh by the rats of Radicalism.”
”What in the devil are you talking about now?” demanded Lancelot. ”You seem to me to go a hundred miles out of _your_ way to twit me with my poverty and my breeding. One would almost think you were anxious to convince me of the poverty of _your_ breeding.”
”Oh, a thousand pardons!” e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Peter, blus.h.i.+ng violently. ”But good heavens, old chap! There's your hot temper again. You surely wouldn't suspect _me_, of all people in the world, of meaning anything personal?
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