“It’s a filthy, poisonous hole!” he protested fiercely. “It beats me why you can’t see it. If anything went wrong here, you wouldn’t have a white man in a hundred miles to turn to. You needn’t laugh. There’s nothing so howlingly funny about it. What about that Scotch engineer who was so everlastingly intimate with your precious Bhakdi’s next-door neighbour?”
“Well, what about him? The poor chap fell down a shaft and broke his neck.”
“Oh, he did, did he? Well, believe me, that’s not what they say in Singapore! Calvert, for God’s sake, get out of this infernal place. Every inch of it smells of death and damnation. How any one who calls himself an English gentleman can stick it for a minute——”
“But I don’t call myself an English gentleman,” the Honourable Tony assured him earnestly. “God forbid! I call myself an out-and-out waster exiled for ever from the Mother Country by a cruel and powerful elder brother. The only trick in it is that I’m simply cuckoo with ecstasy over the entire situation. Not according to Kipling, what? No, the glittering prospect of spending the remaining years of a misspent life in the largest rubber factory in Ohio leaves me considerably colder than ice.”
“I suggested Ohio because I happen to be in charge of that plant myself,” returned Ledyard stiffly. “If you’d rather have a go at one of the others——”
“But, my good child, it seems impossible to make you understand that the factory has not been built for which I would exchange one single baked banana soaked in rum and moonlight. Think of the simply hideous sacrifices that I’d make, can’t you?—taking advice instead of being paid good round guineas for giving it—working for one beastly hour after another instead of slipping from one golden minute to the next—drinking nasty chemical messes in constant terror of sudden death or prison bars, instead of tossing off bumpers and flagons and buckets of delectable fluids that smell like flowers and shine like jewels—dragging around to the most appalling festivals where pampered little females tip up their ridiculous powdered noses and distribute two minutes of their precious dances as though they were conferring the Order of the Garter, instead of——”
Ledyard looked suddenly three shades hotter beneath his freckles.
“Thanks—glad to know how much you enjoyed your visit.”
“I enjoyed every minute of it to the point of explosion, as you are thoroughly well aware. If I live to ninety-two, I shall remember the excellent yarns that your father spun over those incredibly good cigars and that simply immortal corn pudding, and the shoulders on the little red-headed creature in the black dress at the Country Club—good Lord, William, the shoulders on that creature! After four years of not especially pretty smells and not especially pretty noises, what do you think that those July evenings under the awnings on your veranda meant to a God-forsaken flying chap back from the wars, William?”
William looked frankly unappeased.