THE LAST STRAW.
Wee-Wee is frightfully worried about Bo-Bo being so overworked. He used to be at the head of the Department for Telling People What to Do, and he and his five hundred assistants were worked half dead; and now he's at the head of a still newer department, the one for Telling People What They're Not to Do, and, though he's eight hundred clerks to help him, Wee-Wee says the strain is too great for words. He goes to Whitehall at ten every day and comes back at three! And then he has the Long-Ago treatment that's being used so much now for war-frayed nerves. The idea is to get people as far away from the present as poss. So when Bo-Bo comes in from Whitehall he lies down on a fearful old worm-eaten oak settle in a dim room hung with moth-eaten tapestry, and Wee-Wee reads Chaucer to him, and sings ghastly little folk-songs, accompanying herself on a thing called a crwth—(it's a tremendously primitive sort of harp, but I can't believe that even a crwth meant to make such a horrible noise as Wee-Wee makes on it!). Myself, I don't consider Bo-Bo a bit the better for the Long-Ago treatment, and there's certainly a wild look in his eyes that wasn't there before!
M'amie, would you like to hear the simply odious storyette of Somebody's Cousin? Well, so you shall. Somebody is by way of being an intimate foe of mine, and Somebody's Cousin has long been a thorn in the flesh and a shaking of the head to his people. Before the War he belonged to the League for Taking Everything Lying Down, the Fellowship for Preventing People from Standing up against Foreign Aggression, and the Brotherhood for Giving up All Our Advantages to Aliens. He was of military age, and when war came, after giving vent to some completely detestable sentiments, he crossed to the U.S. and naturalised himself there, constantly attacking the country that was unlucky enough to produce him.
When the U.S. came in, he shed his citizenship in a hurry, fled to South America, and naturalised himself in a republic that had sworn by all its gods to keep out of the War à tout prix. This republic, however, changed its mind later and followed its big northern brother into the War, et voilà! Somebody's Cousin was at a loose end again. He afterwards naturalised himself in half-a-dozen small far-away nations that all finally came in, and then, chérie, he drifted down to the islands of the South Pacific (the favourite ocean of his sort!) and had himself made an Ollyoola. (The Ollyoolas are a tribe that has never in all its past history been known to go to war). He was made an Ollyoola with all the native rites, dancing and shrieking and so on, and he wore the correct Ollyoola dress (a few shells and his hair trained on sticks to stand straight up).
And now comes the point of this storyette: Only a few weeks after Somebody's Cousin had become a full-blooded Ollyoola (I think that's the proper phrase), the Ollyoolas suddenly fell out with the Patti-Tattis (on the next island) and went to war, for absolutely the first time, with a ferocity, my Daphne, that seems to have been saving up through all their centuries of peacefulness!
Nothing's been heard since of Somebody's Cousin!
Ever thine,
Blanche.
