I asked advice from Brown, a man of commonsense.
"During the Great War," said Brown, "I went down with pneumonia. They painted my chest yellow, and, when I asked the Sister why, she said it was a counter-irritant. That's what you want to use now, my lad. Stand up to your little friend and beat him at his own game."
"But how?" I said. "I can't. What he doesn't know about the gentle Czech isn't worth a cussovitch."
"Cultivate a counter-burden," said Brown, "and make him eat it as he has made you eat his."
When I left Brown it was decided that I was henceforth to be an authority on Mittel-Afrika. The next evening I was purposely unoccupied in a corner of the smoking-room when T.-T. came in, frowning and bowed down by his burden, to which apparently I had brought no relief.
"Well, to-day's news from Mittel-Europa is hardly—" he began.
"Scarcely glanced at it," I said. "I was so busy with the news from Mittel-Afrika—Abyssinia, in fact."
T.-T. looked surprised, partly, no doubt, because he knew as well as I did that Abyssinia is nowhere near the middle of Africa. Then he gained balance and reopened with the remark that "The ineradicable weakness of the Czecho-Slovak is—"
"Just what I feel about the Ethiopians," I said.
"Of course there is in the Czecho a fundamental—" began T.-T. once more.