Fantasy fiction; Poetry; Science fiction; Short stories
Hamburg, and called himself Le Foy--descended from a Crusader of the
name of Levi--who was a jackal of one of the chief copper firms. He
overflowed with Imperialist sentiment, and when he wasn't waving the
flag he used to gush about the beauties of English country life the
grandeur of the English tradition. He hated me from the start, for
when he talked of going 'home' I thought he meant Hamburg, and said so;
and then a thing happened which made him hate me worse. He was
infernally rude to Tommy, who, like the dear sheep he was, never saw
it, and, if he had, wouldn't have minded. But one day I chanced to
overhear some of his impertinences, so I hunted out my biggest sjambok
and lay in wait for Mr. Le Foy. I told him that he was a
representative of the sovereign people, that I was a member of an
effete bureaucracy, and that it would be most painful if unpleasantness
arose between us. But, I added, I was prepared, if necessary, to
sacrifice my official career to my private feelings, and if he dared to
use such language again to his Majesty's representative I would give
him a hiding he would remember till he found himself in Abraham's
bosom. Not liking my sjambok, he became soap and butter at once, and
held his tongue for a month or two.
"But though Tommy was no good at his job, he was a tremendous swell at
other things. He was an uncommonly good linguist, and had always about
a dozen hobbies which he slaved at; and when he found himself at Deira
with a good deal of leisure, he became a bigger crank than ever. He
had a lot of books which used to follow him about the world in
zinc-lined boxes--your big paper-backed German books which mean
research,--and he was a Fellow of the Royal Society, and corresponded
with half a dozen foreign shows. India was his great subject, but he
had been in the Sudan and knew a good deal about African races. When I
went out to him, his pet hobby was the Bantu, and he had acquired an
amazing amount of miscellaneous learning. He knew all about their
immigration from the North, and the Arab and Phoenician trade-routes,
and the Portuguese occupation, and the rest of the history of that
unpromising seaboard. The way he behaved in his researches showed the
man. He worked hard at the Labonga language--which, I believe, is a
linguistic curiosity of the first water-from missionary books and the
conversation of tame Kaffirs. But he never thought of paying them a
visit in their native haunts. I was constantly begging him to do it,
but it was not Tommy's way. He did not care a straw about political
experience, and he liked to look at things through the medium of paper
and ink. Then there were the Phoenician remains in the foot-hills
where the copper was mined-old workings, and things which might have
been forts or temples. He knew all that was to be known about them,
but he had never seen them and never wanted to. Once only he went to
the hills, to open some new reservoirs and make the ordinary Governor's
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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