“I say,” said the Colonel.
“Sponsored by the Rifle Nature Club, prize, the solid gold Empire cup designed for the club, but not yet engraved (or ordered or paid for) and the whole of England and Ameriker (“America,” I said weakly) hanging on every graphic report of the progress of their heroes! Well, ffiot?”
There was a pause. “ffiot, remember you were my fag at Harrow. That's fine, old man, knew you'd come through.” He hung up and looked at the Colonel and myself. “You two chaps better get home and to bed.' Nothing like sleep … yes, nothing like it.”
“I don't like it!” said the Colonel.
“Sleep?”
“This walking race!”
“Old man, it's for the club …”
“Blast your club,” said the Colonel, “and you remember you were my fag at school!” (May I add here that the schoolboy fag is the chap who waits hand and foot, fetches water, runs errands, and cleans shoes for an older student.)
Lord Bean snapped his fingers. “We could get old Mugger Martin who beat you at polo in Injah. He would like to repeat his victory over you. He'll do it if I say you dropped out … too ol and all that. Now, what is his number? Old Mugger must be in tip-top form, runs a bike shop in Kent. Sorry to hear your leg is getting worse.”
The Colonel reached for a fresh Scotch. “Blast you to hell,” said the Colonel. “The day I can't outwalk ol Mugger you can bury me in Westminster Abbey.”
Lord Bean winked at me. “The trouble with England has always been not enough of her military men, generals preferred, were buried early enough in the Abbey.”
So, trapped, we shook hands on it an went home for tiffin.
I borrowed the sweaters of a tennis player across the hall, and he advise me to take it easy and breathe through my nose. I said he had a better nose for it than I had. Terribly serious, he admitted it …
There was nothing I could do but try to sleep, but someone across the court was playing flute music on a flute with a tired air column, and next door to me a little clerk (called “clark” of course) was trying to grow muscles on his arms and was lifting some weights around. Anyway, I thought of that long, long walk to Scotland and I packed a small bag and took off my shoes an tiptoed down the stairs and out into the street.
There was no one but a cat paying a call in a can of garbage (called a “dust bin” in this odd nation) and a large bobby on the corner sleeping under his helmet while he leaned against a very old building. London after dark is like a movie set, only real. I walked a long time towards the India docks, then found a mission-type flop house where no one would look for me. Every one had a small coffin of a room to sleep in and the morning breakfast consisted of prayer, cold water, more prayer, and a motto to write to our mother, and hard bread and a wallpaper paste called oatmeal.
I decided to get out of London. As I crossed town hunting the high roa that passed through Sherwood Forest, I ran into a crowd of people and a short truck with a newsreel camera on its roof.
I stopped a large woman in bedroom slippers who was carrying a quart of ale home. “What's going on?”
“Goin' on … some damn fools flinging their fices in the public eye agin!”
“Oh.”
“Goin' to walk to Scotland thiy are … now ain't that somethin'?”
“Oh.”
“Can't ya siy anythin' but oh?”
I lifted my hat politely and went away quickly as someone cheered Ameriker … and I found the road and kept on going and all that day I lifted my thumb often enough to get about fifty miles out of London in some motor cars that were braving the winds of spring on old Briton highways that had seen the Romans pass in spear and plume hat … and the eagles of Rome ha marched here prouder than the American eagle on my passport carried inside my pocket.
I stopped that night at a small inn in a village that sounded like Mungleon-The-Joan-Harrison, which I was tol was near Plundee-On-The-Swinngle or a place that sounded like it. This may sound funny to us … but I remember once in London not being amused at an English traveler who got some cheap, cut-rate laughter by saying he remembered places in America called Broken Wagon, Texas, Double Groan, California, and Arrow Feather, Ohio (he sai it O-he-oh). So I suppose the English will think there is nothing amusing about places that sound like Mungleon and Plundee.
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