“Oh?” said the surprised Laura, who had heard from Cynthia only a few hours ago exactly how the Crown Prince had come into it at all, together with all the rest of the events following her own departure from the scene. “What was he, then?” she asked.
“A real Crown Prince,” replied Mr. Priestley solemnly.
Laura struggled with a wild desire to laugh. “Was he really?” she managed to say with equal solemnity, trying to remember the precise points of the story she had invented the previous morning.
“Indeed he was,” nodded Mr. Priestley. “So now you can see the pickle we’re in. I have a friend in the Foreign Office whom I went to see this afternoon, and I must admit that I did go with an ulterior motive. I went, in fact, to pump him.” Mr. Priestley spoke in a deprecating way and looked a little ashamed of himself.
“Yes?” said Laura, from whom all desire to laugh had very suddenly fled.
Mr. Priestley ate three mouthfuls of cake with maddening deliberation. “The result,” he continued, “surpassed my wildest expectations.”
It is a curious fact that when any normally well-educated, well-read person embarks upon the ship of fiction he immediately dons a complete outfit of clichés, such as he would shudder to use in ordinary converse; it is not until he has got his sea-legs that he discards, or does his best to discard, these atrocities. Mr. Priestley was no exception.
“Wildest expectations,” he repeated. “I found my friend much distressed. The Crown Prince of Bosnogovina, who has been in this country for many years, has disappeared during the week-end. Simply disappeared!” He paused impressively.
“Bosno—— where did you say?” asked the astonished Laura.
“Bosnogovina,” responded Mr. Priestley glibly. “I’m not surprised you don’t seem to know the country; I’d never heard of it myself till this afternoon. It’s a little state tucked in between the borders of Rumania and Jugo-Slavia. A buffer state, I think my friend called it. It is only a few hundred square miles in extent, but I gather that its importance in the European scheme of things is quite considerable. I am not much of a politician,” added Mr. Priestley apologetically, “but I understand that its importance lies in the fact that should Rumania and Jugo-Slavia ever contemplate going to war, one of them would have to invade Bosnogovina, and Bosnogovina’s neutrality has been guaranteed by all the big powers of Europe. A situation would therefore arise not unlike that of Belgium at the beginning of the recent war, with similar incalculable consequences. At least, I think that is what my friend said.”