He stopped at the hat-rack, took down a hat and put it into Mr. Cato’s hand, nodding and smiling.
‘Put him on. You come wid me.’
‘I wasn’t going out.’
‘Come alonk. I make you beesness broposition.’ He hurried him down the steps. ‘Leedle flower’s all dead,’ he said, half glancing at the wintry garden. ‘Half-past seex,’ he added, looking at his watch.
As they bowled along in the smooth brougham, night fell. The Baron talked; Mr. Cato began to see dimly the gigantic outline of the thing that he had done. His mind was still numbed with the vastness of big figures; he hardly perceived the order in which things happened. The Baron had drawn a paper from some recess of the carriage and put it in his hand; he was fascinated by the purple unconscious forefinger striding about it, and the continuous voice in his ear. It was a map, a copy of the map of the Sooching forest made by the lawyers: ‘As shown in the map appended hereto, and marked C,’ he repeated to himself. Yellow squares, and circles and figures in black had grown on the bare centre since he last saw it. The purple blood-gorged finger was running rapidly from pit to pit; they were all full of gold, and the finger was peeping and gloating and chuckling, planning schemes of union and division, conquest and annihilation. The coachman’s steady back looked in with its two silver eyes from the box, like the face of a giant Fate, rumbling and gliding them to inevitable ends.
The burst of a barrel organ brought him to everyday consciousness. The Baron was still talking.
‘“Are de Government mad?” said my friends to me. “Dey might haf taken de whole ting wid deir retchiment of men; and dey let it all go to one shendlemann. An’ now dere can neffer be a war for it; it is brivate broperty. Dey leaf it to de Soochinks? Goot! Someday de Soochinks rebel; dey oppose de Ettucation law, de Tynamite law, de Church law: de Government take it away from dem. Goot! Dat is Bolitics. But dey have made it Broperty: dere is no Bolitics wid Broperty. We shall see big row. De Government will fall.”’
‘They have many things to answer for.’
‘It is solid gold!’
‘Ten thousand butchered Bulgarians lie at their door.’