“If they wanted to. There was less motoring—more meditation. We live—age of transition. H’rrmp.”
“And then it all went phut?” said the young man from the next studio. “Submerged and all that. What a lesson!”
“That need not have happened,” said Mr. Preemby darkly.
Mr. Preemby became dimly aware of scepticism. “There’s not an atom of evidence that there ever was a continent in the Atlantic,” Mr. Teddy Winterton was saying to Christina Alberta; “within thirty million years of anything human. The ocean troughs go right back to the Mesozoic age.”
Mr. Preemby would have noticed this remark but the untidy girl asked him suddenly if he did not think that the swastika was a symbol derived from Atlantis. He said he was quite certain it was. She asked what it meant exactly; she had always been curious about its significance: and he became guarded and mysterious. She wanted moreover to know things about the costume of that lost world, about its social customs, about its religion. Were women citizens? She was certainly the most intelligent about it of all the company. The silver-haired man seemed to be faintly amused.
The rest of the company wandered off into a discussion of the possibility of going to the Chelsea Arts Ball in the character of a party from the Lost Atlantis. Many of their ideas Mr. Preemby thought trivial and undignified. “Leaves us unlimited scope,” said Harold Crumb. “We could invent weapons—have wings if we liked. Magic carbuncles on our shields—illuminated. Mysterious books and tablets. And a sort of peculiar wailing, drumming music; Mya, mya, mya.”
He pursed up his face and made a curious mooing noise with it to convey his intention, twiddling his fingers to assist the effect.
It was no good protesting against such imaginative ignorance. But to the dark, untidy girl and to the acquiescent man with silvery hair Mr. Preemby continued to be quietly oracular and communicative from behind his moustache.
“But how are these things known?” the dark girl persisted. “There is nothing in the British Museum.”
“You forget,” said Mr. Preemby. “H’rrmp, the Freemasons. There are Inner Groups—traditions. Thank you. Just half a glass more. Oh! you’ve filled it! Thank you.”