Here the waiter arrived with the bowls of roast pigs’ pizzle; Uncle Johnus looked from this to Eszterhazy and from Eszterhazy back to the goodies. Eszterhazy helped himself and gestured that his guest should do so, too; conversation, it being assumed, could wait.
And wait it did. By and by Uncle Johnus licked his fingers and-wiped his immense moustaches on some fresh roll pieces and ate them and sipped some more rasberry wudky and swallowed and began to speak again. Them goats, now. Lately, however, through the agency of those whom or that which Johnus was rather he not be asked to name, the he-goats had begun to waver in their allegiance to the new and true religion. “They now runs away from the herds, Slash-Turk. They has crowns and garlands а-put upon their heads as in olden days. And they dances — ah, YoungLord Slash-Turk, yes, to the sound of that evil music they dances! They prances! They like to run wild in that there frenzy! Sometimes they carries on till they be dead, or sometimes they dashes off cliffs. And it’s a terror and a worry and a fright to us, Slash-Turk YoungLord, what if they be not а-coming down to serve the she-goats in the breeding-season? We shall have no goat-kids ... no kid-skins ... by and by, so, no more goats ... no cheese ... no milk... no meat... nor no leather. . . .
“And after that, sir: what then?”
The immense wax-lights in the Grand Chamber of the Privy Council were not needed at the moment, but custom required that they be lit, and so lit they were, and their immense wax tears seemed a silent accompaniment to the words being spoken. With an immense sigh, the Prince- President of the Privy Council said that their Intelligence Service was clearly not as keen as it ought to be. The Turks, partly because of British pressure, partly because of Russian pressure, partly because of Prussian
pressure, and partly because of no Turkish pressure at all — the Turks had recognized that it was just about moving-day in their two predominantly non-Turkish provinces of Western Wallachia and Neo-Macedonia. The Turks had recognized that they were to leave, and to leave soon. The expectation was that these two provinces would probably become autonomous nations.
“If this is what our non-keen Intelligence Service should have informed us but perhaps failed to,” said a Privy Councillor, “we may as well cut it out of the Budget and subscribe to the Swedish or the Portuguese newspapers instead. You tell us in effect that applesauce is good with pork. True. We already know it. Applesauce.”
The Prince-President raised from his stoop. Again the scarlet ribbon of the Great Order was a taut slash across his bosom. “So. Do you already know this? That our neighbors, those two rapacious, tough, absurdly small principalities of Ruritania and Graustark, have between them hatched a scheme to become extremely large at the expense of just about everyone else? Even now . . . now, I mean now . . . they are conducting secret manoeuvres in the Disputed Areas, where not so much as a sheep-warden or a Rural Constable patrols to prevent them, and if no immediate and tangible gesture intervenes within two days, it has been agreed between them thus: one will annex Western Wallachia and one will annex Neo-Macedonia: thus at one stroke we are to be presented with two newer, bigger, more swollen, more swaggering neighbors upon our eastern borders . . . likely at once to dispute even more than is already disputed... and this is a prospect which” — his voice arose over the cries of outrage and the groans of dismay — “a prospect which we never envisaged and for which we are absolutely not prepared . . .”
Someone demanded to know what the Turks were likely to do. “ ‘Do’? They will protest and demand compensation and they will loot and slay some other Christian folk, one which has the misfortune to live on the Asian and not the European side of the Bosporus —”
“The British?”
“They will make speeches in Parliament and cry, ‘Hear, hear!’ ”
The Austrians . . . Russians . . . Prussians . . . French? “A fait accompli.”
A silence.
An elderly Councillor asked, “Might not His Majesty, even as a temporary gesture, invoke the powers presumably latent in his Family’s ancient title of ‘Emperor de jure of New Rome and all Byzantium via Marriage by Proxy?’ ”
A murmur.
The Prime Minister cast a look of agony upon His Majesty, but His Majesty did not even look up at him, spoke without raising his bowed head. “His Majesty has just immediately recently, at the request of the
Turks in connection with the question of Little Byzantia, renounced that title. It has not yet been gazetted, but the assumpsit has been signed.” And, having signed, Ignats Louis bore the burden, and deftly led the pack on another scent. Another moment they sat and wondered what the Turk would do about Little Byzantia now —
A younger Privy Councillor demanded to know, Why were they all just nrting there? Had they not a Navy? At this the Minister for Navy awoke with a start which alone reminded them that he had been there all along; the same Privy Councillor at once demanded to know, Had they not an Army? Arose the Minister for War. Grimly. Yes [he said], they had an Army. He refrained from telling them why they had not a larger Army [he said], nor would he refer to last year’s decision to diminish the Army’s share of the Budget [he said]. “The facts are, however, that we have not a very large Army, that our Army is deployed here and there and mostly not near the eastern border, and that the Annual General Militia Call-up had been postponed because the harvest was late and the Militia-men were needed to help bring it in at home. Which they are now doing. ”
“For if not,” interjected the Minister of Agriculture, “perhaps it will spoil, prices will soar, and maybe not enough to eat.”
“Hog-lard at a hundred ducats a hundredw’ight,” said His Majesty, not bothering to bother with Court Gothic. One great groan rang through the Great Chamber, and the senior socialist Privy Councillor, a notorious Freethinker, was observed to spit three times in the palm of his hand and then surreptitiously to knock on the wooden framework of his upholstered chair. Field Marshals and Ministers, Aristocrats or Political Leaders though they were, still, the facts of farm life lurked never far away from any of them. Asked a labor leader, “Oh sire! That high?”
Sire said merely, “It ain’t mud that puts fat on the hogs, master. It’s maize.”
The leader of the Opposition asked, “ *.. . within two days,’ eh? And what is the very soonest that an effective body of troops could be moved to the eastern borders?”
Said the Minister of War: “Three days.”
Meanwhile, Eszterhazy had not only found no answer to the Mystery of the Goats, he had not even found a way perhaps to finding an answer. By the time he returned from his walk he was still perplexed. He made a note of the question; then he turned to his work of the moment, a laboratory experiment he carried on at home as adjunct to the one which formed his current project at the Royal-Imperial Institute of Science. Some time passed: he was thus still engaged when a loud knock at the door, a loud voice, and a loud trampling of feet advised him that he had a guest. And which guest he had.