Guiltily, Gumbril denied himself. “Only to demonstrate the idea, Mr. Bojanus. I am exploiting the invention commercially, you see.”
“Commercially? I see, Mr. Gumbril.”
“Perhaps you would like a share,” suggested Gumbril.
Mr. Bojanus shook his head. “It wouldn’t do for my cleeantail, I fear, Mr. Gumbril. You could ’ardly expect the Best People to wear such things.”
“Couldn’t you?”
Mr. Bojanus went on shaking his head. “I know them,” he said, “I know the Best People. Well.” And he added with an irrelevance that was, perhaps, only apparent, “Between ourselves, Mr. Gumbril, I am a great admirer of Lenin....”
“So am I,” said Gumbril, “theoretically. But then I have so little to lose to Lenin. I can afford to admire him. But you, Mr. Bojanus, you, the prosperous bourgeois—oh, purely in the economic sense of the word, Mr. Bojanus....”
Mr. Bojanus accepted the explanation with one of his old-world bows.
“... you would be among the first to suffer if an English Lenin were to start his activities here.”
“There, Mr. Gumbril, if I may be allowed to say so, you are wrong.” Mr. Bojanus removed his hand from his bosom and employed it to emphasize the points of his discourse. “When the revolution comes, Mr. Gumbril—the great and necessary revolution, as Alderman Beckford called it—it won’t be the owning of a little money that’ll get a man into trouble. It’ll be his class-habits, Mr. Gumbril, his class-speech, his class-education. It’ll be Shibboleth all over again, Mr. Gumbril; mark my words. The Red Guards will stop people in the street and ask them to say some such word as ‘towel.’ If they call it ‘towel,’ like you and your friends, Mr. Gumbril, why then....” Mr. Bojanus went through the gestures of pointing a rifle and pulling the trigger; he clicked his tongue against his teeth to symbolize the report.... “That’ll be the end of them. But if they say ‘tèaul,’ like the rest of us, Mr. Gumbril, it’ll be: ‘Pass Friend and Long Live the Proletariat.’ Long live Tèaul.”