He obeyed.
So that was Mongo!
The famous don, as usual, was curled like a beautiful cat[4] on the hob. With soft plump hands he clasped his dilapidated slippers, his golden head was bowed over his chest, his frayed shirt-sleeves delightfully visible, his chubby knees showed through the worn flannel trousers which had looked so smart in the mid-Edwardian groups.
[4] Other novelists have respectively described this invaluable character as crouching like an opossum, a satyr, a panther, or perched like a canary, a vulture, an angel. A few, less successful, have denied or pretended to ignore his existence. Mr. Budd has found a singularly happy mean. (Lit. Exec.)
“Dear Mongo!” called Gaveston, picking his way over the outstretched legs of four fifth-year Mongoons on the shabby sofa.
Mongo uncurled.
“Gaveston,” he answered, with a quick amber light in his eyes. “Welcome, thrice welcome. You all know each other, of course.” And he waved a vague hand round the circle of the Mongoons.
There was a silence as Gav sat down beside the others on the sofa. But he felt no shyness—he even poured out for himself a glass of his host’s famous barley-water, a drink which the Mongoons for years had loyally affected to enjoy. And the brilliant conversation resumed its nightly flow as he held up his glass to the light, sipped it, and lay back to survey this room which he was at last seeing in all its reality.
Yes, it was all even as had been foretold him. There they were, the myriad profile photographs of Mongoons past and present, crowding the wall space from floor to ceiling, but still (Gav was pleased to notice) with a few vacant places; and there the serried rows of lendable books; there, too, the great expanse of writing table stacked shoulder-high with letters from still-living Mongoons in every embassy, legation and consulate of the civilized world.