“Botany. Ah, there’s that fellow coming out. My turn, cheerioh.”
And thirty seconds later the bell had gone for roll-call.
“It’s the limit,” said Stone, “the absolute limit, and do you know what that absurd botany ass does, two hours a week, that’s all. Damn it all, and then he can just saunter into a queue whenever he likes. I’ve a jolly good mind to get a Priority Pass myself, it’s quite easy, all you’ve got to do is to invent a language that no one else is likely to know. Finnish, say, and old Westcott would be only too bucked to have another branch to his ‘Up dogs and at ’em’ League.”
To invent a language.
The idea ran through my mind, a glimmering thread of thought. What was it George Moore had said? A new tongue was needed. The day of the English language was over. It had passed through so many hands, been filtered in so many places, that it was now colourless and without significance. But this new tongue, this child that was waiting to be cradled; it was a lyre from which any rhythm might be struck; it was virgin soil that would bear epic upon epic, masterpiece on masterpiece; and it would be so simple, so childishly simple. All that was needed was the purchase of an Otto-Sauer conversation grammar which we could translate into Finnish. No one would be any the wiser. Colonel Westcott could be taken in quite easily.
I began to picture the scene.
Stone and I would go to him one evening, when there had been potatoes for supper. We should find him well filled and satisfied, puffing contentedly at a cigar, and musing sentimentally over an ideal world peopled with the Anglo-Saxon race, bred on collectivism and eugenics.
He would greet us with a kindly patronising smile.
“Well, Stone. Yes, and let me see, who is it, Waugh. Well?”