On the pavement my friend who wrote Down in the Doldrums was waiting to walk home with me. "What in the world does it all mean?" I said. "Nothing," said he. "You've been asked there as a small deputy lion to roar in place of a much bigger man. You growled, though."
"I should have done much worse if I'd known," I grunted. "Ah," said he, "you haven't arrived at the real fun of the show. Wait till they've made you jump through hoops and your turn's over, and you can sit on a sofa and watch the new men being brought up and put through their paces. You've nothing like that in India. How do you manage your parties?"
And I thought of smooth-cut lawns in the gloaming, and tables spread under mighty trees, and men and women, all intimately acquainted with each other, strolling about in the lightest of raiment, and the old dowagers criticising the badminton, and the young men in riding-boots making rude remarks about the claret cup, and the host circulating through the mob and saying: "Hah, Piggy," or Bobby or Flatnose, as the nickname might be, "have another peg," and the hostess soothing the bashful youngsters and talking khitmatgars with the Judge's wife, and the last new bride hanging on her husband's arm and saying: "Isn't it almost time to go home, Dicky, dear?" and the little fat owls chuckling in the bougainvilleas, and the horses stamping and squealing in the carriage-drive, and everybody saying the most awful things about everybody else, but prepared to do anything for anybody else just the same; and I gulped a great gulp of sorrow and homesickness.
"You wouldn't understand," said I to my friend. "Let's go to a pot-house, where cabbies call, and drink something."
FOOTNOTES:
[25] "Turnovers," No. IX.
LONDON IN THE FOG