"That's the trouble," said I, while I stanched my nose. "You don't understand. You mount on the off-side, drop matches to set the country all ablaze, foul the stream where my horse drinks, believe all that you're told, and don't know venison from human flesh. So you have tantrums like a teething baby."
"Then you're not—a—"
"Cannibal? No. But you're a silly ass."
"Perhaps you're right," said Rams, as I hoisted him into the saddle.
Dense forest filled Paradise Cañon and from its head a switch-back trail climbed up the flank of a gigantic ridge. Along its spine we climbed for many a weary mile until even the midsummer length Of the day began to fail us and twilight was closing in.
Rams talked with a slight twitching of his large, seductively ugly ears—the kind one longs to stroke—and a faint snuffle of the nose, pinched red by wearing glasses, which looked quite convivial. He talked down to me, using nice simple words for me to understand about the London where he had been warped. This London of his was not my glittering City of Joy, and it was quite unlike Red Saunders' bleak manufacturing seaport. It was the London of the white Babu which had given him his uneducated body, his trained unquiet mind, and his opinions to which he attached no end of importance, giving them plenty of air and exercise. He was but one of millions of clerks and students who lived in suburbs, worked in offices. They improved their minds—poor things—of an evening at enormous universities called the Polytechnics where they make prigs. They spent their Saturday afternoons like sportsmen watching the games they could not afford to play. On their direful Sundays, they had their souls exorcised at Bigotarian chapels contemplating hell, and they cycled or walked in the parks to give the girls a treat.
Rams senior was a shiny Baptist millionaire who had bought a knighthood, and sat in the Commons on the Liberal side, a vegetarian, anti- most things, and pro- everything else, with no nonsense about him or any Christian mercy. His daughters were frumps on all sorts of committees, his sons were slaves, and this one was a mining engineer. To-day he rode over his first real rock, so different from the cabinet specimens, to see his first real mine, not like the show-case model. The swampy slopes of Alpine flowers told him nothing about the jagged schists underneath. The granite spires ahead sent him no message about God's ice-mills out of their purple bloom against the orange sky.
When I told him I had lots of relations in town, the weary man flickered up to this last expiring effort as he asked for their names, and where they lived.
"All over the place," I told him. "You know them by their coat-of-arms, the Medici Arms—three golden globes and a side door. They are my uncles."
Poor Rams!