“Hallo, Musgrave! Is Mona beginning to give you beans already?” says Suffield, who re-enters, having returned from his farm duties. “Grace, where are you?” he proceeds to shout. “Hurry up! It’s feeding time.” And then they all adjourn to another room, where the table is laid, and the party is augmented by a brace of tow-headed youngsters, of eleven and twelve respectively, who devote their energies to making themselves a nuisance all round, as is the manner of their kind if allowed to run wild, finishing up with a bear-fight among themselves on the floor, after which they are packed off to bed—a process effected, like the traditional Scotch editor’s grasp of the joke, with difficulty.
“And now, Mr Musgrave,” says the latter’s hostess, when quiet is restored, “you haven’t told me yet. How do you like—”
“Stop there, Grace,” cries Mona. “Mr Musgrave has just been bewailing his fate, in that he is condemned to answer that question the same number of times there are inhabitants of Doppersdorp, that is to say, about four hundred. And now you are the four hundred and first. In fact, he now answers before the question is asked, from sheer force of habit.”
“Ha, ha!” laughs Suffield. “Now you mention it, the thing must become a first-class bore, especially as you’re expected to answer every time that you think it a paradise, on pain of making a lifelong enemy. Now, for my part, I’d rather hang myself than have to live in Doppersdorp. As a deadly lively, utterly insignificant hole, there can be few to beat it among our most one-horse townships. And the best of the joke is that its inhabitants think it about as important as London.”
“Your verdict is refreshing, Suffield; nor does it inspire me with wild surprise, unless by reason of its complete novelty,” rejoins Roden. “But, however true, I don’t find its adoption for public use warranted upon any ground of expediency.”
“Where are you staying, Mr Musgrave?” asks Mona.
“At the Barkly, for the present. I went to it because it was the first I came to, and I felt convinced there was no choice.”
“Do they make you comfortable there?”
“H’m! Comfort, like most things in this world, is relative. Some people might discover a high degree of comfort in being stabled in a three-bedded room with a travelling showman, the proud proprietor of a snore which is a cross between a prolonged railway whistle and the discharge of a Gatling; and farther, who is given to anointing a profuse endowment of ruddy locks with cosmetics, nauseous in odour and of sticky consistency, and is not careful to distinguish between his own hair brash and that of his neighbours. Some people, I repeat, might find this state of things fairly comfortable. I can only say that my philosophy does not attain to such heights.”
“Rather not,” says Suffield. “Jones is a decent fellow in his way, but he’s no more fit to run an hotel than I am to repair a church organ. How do you find his table, Musgrave?”