“If you wish to talk, Ambrose, you can start construing.”

“Please, sir, that’s as far as I got, sir.”

“Has anyone done any more?” (Scott-King still attempted to import into the lower school the adult politeness of the Classical Sixth.) “Very well, then, you can all spend the rest of the hour preparing the next twenty lines.”

Silence, of a sort, reigned. There was a low muttering from the back of the room, a perpetual shuffling and snuffling, but no one spoke directly to Scott-King. He gazed through the leaded panes to the leaden sky. He could hear through the wall behind him the strident tones of Griggs, the civics master, extolling the Tolpuddle martyrs. Scott-King put his hand in his coat-pocket and felt the crisp edges of the Neutralian invitation.

He had not been abroad since 1939. He had not tasted wine for a year, and he was filled, suddenly, with deep homesickness for the South. He had not often nor for long visited those enchanted lands; a dozen times perhaps, for a few weeks—for one year in total of his forty-three years of life—but his treasure and his heart lay buried there. Hot oil and garlic and spilled wine; luminous pinnacles above a dusky wall; fireworks at night, fountains at noonday; the impudent, inoffensive hawkers of lottery tickets moving from table to table on to the crowded pavement; the shepherd’s pipe on the scented hillside—all that travel agent ever sought to put in a folder, fumed in Scott-King’s mind that drab morning. He had left his coin in the waters of Trevi; he had wedded the Adriatic; he was a Mediterranean man.

In the midmorning break, on the crested school paper, he wrote his acceptance of the Neutralian invitation. That evening, and on many subsequent evenings, the talk in the common room was about plans for the holidays. All despaired of getting abroad; all save Griggs who was cock-a-hoop about an International Rally of Progressive Youth Leadership in Prague to which he had got himself appointed. Scott-King said nothing even when Neutralia was mentioned.

“I’d like to go somewhere I could get a decent meal,” said one of his colleagues. “Ireland or Neutralia, or somewhere like that.”

“They’d never let you into Neutralia,” said Griggs. “Far too much to hide. They’ve got teams of German physicists making atomic bombs.”

“Civil war raging.”

“Half the population in concentration camps.”

“No decent-minded man would go to Neutralia.”

“Or to Ireland for that matter,” said Griggs.

And Scott-King sat tight.

Some weeks later Scott-King sat in the aerodrome waiting room. His overcoat lay across his knees, his hand luggage at his feet. A loudspeaker, set high out of harm’s way in the dun concrete wall, discoursed dance music and official announcements. This room, like all the others to which he had been driven in the course of the morning, was sparsely furnished and indifferently clean; on its walls, sole concession to literary curiosity, hung commendations of government savings bonds and precautions against gas attack. Scott-King was hungry, weary and dispirited for he was new to the amenities of modern travel.

He had left his hotel in London at seven o’clock that morning; it was now past noon and he was still on English soil. He had not been ignored. He had been shepherded in and out of charabancs and offices like an idiot child; he had been weighed and measured like a load of merchandise; he had been searched like a criminal; he had been cross-questioned about his past and his future, the state of his health and of his finances, as though he were applying for permanent employment of a confidential nature. Scott-King had not been nurtured in luxury and privilege, but this was not how he used to travel. And he had eaten nothing except a piece of flaccid toast and margarine in his bedroom. The ultimate asylum where he now sat proclaimed itself on the door as “For the use of V.I.P.’s only.”

“V.I.P.?” he asked their conductress.

She was a neat, impersonal young woman, part midwife, part governess, part shop-walker, in manner. “Very Important Persons,” she replied without evident embarrassment.

“But is it all right for me to be here?”

“It is essential. You are a V.I.P.”

I wonder, thought Scott-King, how they treat quite ordinary, unimportant people?

There were two fellow-travellers, male and female, similarly distinguished, both bound for Bellacita, capital city of Neutralia; both, it presently transpired, guests of the Bellorius Celebration Committee.

The man was a familiar type to Scott-King; his name Whitemaid, his calling academic, a dim man like himself, much of an age with him.

“Tell me,” said Whitemaid, “tell me frankly”—and he looked furtive as men do when they employ that ambiguous expression—“have you ever heard of the worthy Bellorius?”

“I know his work. I have seldom heard it discussed.”

“Ah, well, of course, he’s not in my subject. I’m Roman Law,” said Whitemaid, with an accession of furtiveness that took all grandiosity from the claim. “They asked the Professor of Poetry, you know, but he couldn’t get away. Then they tried the Professor of Latin. He’s red. Then they asked for anyone to represent the University. No one else was enthusiastic so I put myself forward. I find expeditions of this kind highly diverting. You are familiar with them?”

“No.”

“I went to Upsala last vacation and ate very passable caviare twice a day for a week. Neutralia is not known for delicate living, alas, but one may count on rude plenty—and, of course, wine.”

“It’s all a racket, anyhow,” said the third Very Important Person.

This was a woman no longer very young. Her name, Scott-King and Whitemaid had learned through hearing it frequently called through the loudspeaker and seeing it chalked on blackboards, calling her to receive urgent messages at every stage of their journey, was Miss Bombaum. It was a name notorious to almost all the world except, as it happened, to Scott-King and Whitemaid. She was far from dim; once a roving, indeed a dashing, reporter who in the days before the war had popped up wherever there was unpleasantness—Danzig, the Alcazar, Shanghai, Wal-Wal; now a columnist whose weekly articles were syndicated in the popular press of four continents. Scott-King did not read such articles and he had wondered idly at frequent intervals during the morning what she could be. She did not look a lady; she did not even look quite respectable, but he could not reconcile her typewriter with the calling of actress or courtesan; nor for that matter the sharp little sexless face under the too feminine hat and the lavish style of hair-dressing. He came near the truth in suspecting her of being, what he had often heard of but never seen in the life, a female novelist.

“It’s all a racket,” said Miss Bombaum, “of the Neutralian Propaganda Bureau. I reckon they feel kind of left out of things now the war’s over and want to make some nice new friends among the United Nations. We’re only part of it. They’ve got a religious pilgrimage and a Congress of Physical Culture and an International Philatelists’ Convention and heaven knows what else. I reckon there’s a story in it—in Neutralia, I mean; not in Bellorius, of course, he’s been done.”

“Done?”

“Yes, I’ve a copy somewhere,” she said, rummaging in her bag. “Thought it might come in useful for the speeches.”

“You don’t think,” said Scott-King, “that we are in danger of being required to make speeches?”

“I can’t think what else we’ve been asked for,” said Miss Bombaum. “Can you?”

“I made three long speeches at Upsala,” said Whitemaid. “They were ecstatically received.”

“Oh, dear, and I have left all my papers at home.”

“Borrow this any time you like,” said Miss Bombaum, producing Mr. Robert Graves’s Count Belisarius. “It’s sad though. He ends up blind.”