Eszterhazy, his mild curiosity desiring to have the matter wrapped up, asked why they couldn’t get it anymore? And the button- maker, with a shrug and a smile, said They hadn’t brought it in. They? The dealers. That is, the dealers in such odds and ends— he implied that the odds were very odd, coming as they did from the ends of the Empire. Until the previous week. When one of the They had brought a lot of it in.
“So we should have this repaired and ready for the Dear Sir in very short order. Say two weeks?”
Eszterhazy said two weeks. Weitmondl smiled, bowed, withdrew. Eszterhazy was also withdrawing when a voice from above said, “You see, Sir, the lurlies stopped bringing the shells.”
Down from one of the movable ladders, where, presumably, he had heard the whole conversation, climbed one of the stock clerks—a man somewhat on in years, with a sallow little face framed in a curl of sallow little whiskers.
“The lurlies stopped—?”
The elder clerk now reached the floor, gave a short, stiff bow. “As in that song, Sir, about She combs her golden hair with a golden comb, sitting on the rocks by the river and he feels so sad.” “The lorelie, ah yes, go on.” Eszterhazy marveled how the man managed to get every element of the beginning of Heine’s beautiful poem into one sentence and in impeccably incorrect order. “But the poem, song, says nothing, surely, of shell—?”
"It says nothing. I says something. What the song calls, as the Sir says, a lorelie, we-folks back home calls a lurley, which is its correct name. And the old people always say, in the old days, how a lurley will bring ye gold or gems of such things, if you make right with her. But, by and by, don’t know what happen, the old people they say ‘the lurley stop bringing it,’ Sir, you see.”
“And now have started, again?” The old clerk’s only response was to call, as he moved the ladder further along the wall of drawers, “Number Twenty-two twenty, Coachman Gloves, two dozen short!”
More than once Eszterhazy had noticed that, once an idea or a notion had entered his mind, not long afterwards something hearing upon it would enter his Ken in some material way. Whether, by only thinking about it, he had released it—so to speak—into the Universal Aether, where it would grow and send forth intangible but none-the-less effective ‘tentacles,’ or whether, contrariwise, someone else had implanted it in the Aether by thinking about it, and so forth .... but he had never completed the concept. Nor could he tell why, now, he felt his eyes more than once straying to the telephone instrument in one corner of his room; or why he seemed to feel a sort of straining in his ears. Again and again he bent to his work, again and again he looked up from it: looked through the Swedish crystal-glass at the huge dry-cell batteries within the mahogany telephone- case. And it was with a sense of great relief that he did hear, at last, the clear, brisk tinking of the instrument’s bell.
“Eszterhazy is here,” he announced into the mouthpiece.
A voice asked him if he would graciously attend another moment “to faciliate a far-distant call.” In another moment, more-or-less, a second voice, somewhat weaker in volume, identified itself as the Avar-Ister exchange, and made the same request. After a somewhat longer wait, a somewhat even more distant voice proclaimed itself as “Second Princely Fortress of the Pious and Loyal Velotchshtchi”—in other words, Vlox-Minor—it had not quite finished when an other voice, entirely different in tone and quality, broke in to say, “Engli, this is Roldri Mud,” and all—or, at any rate, much—became clear.
Official maps of the Triune Monarchy bore none of those curious sad cross-hatchings, likelier to be found on maps of South America, and which mean—the key at the bottom informs us—Disputed Territory. Nevertheless. While some matters were certainly undisputed—the Romanou had never penetrated to the Gothic Highlands, for instance; the Slovatchko made no claims to Central Pannonia— nevertheless, there was not a single component nation-state of the Empire around whose borders things did not tend to become somewhere and in some measure subject to confusion, ethnicism, linguistic-nationalistic conflicts, and appeals to the tribunal of history: woe-betide whoever must bring his case to that much- crowded court!
Long ago the Goths and the Avars had fought along the Sable River—but the famous Kompromis of the Year ’60 had declared the area to form a part of Vlox-Minor, and so it still stood. To this district the Avars had in their customary fashion affixed one of their ponderous and polysyllabic names, meaning (in this case) ‘Estuary of the dark river where grow many reeds of the quality used for weirs and baskets’; the Goths, in their own fashion, had termed it ‘Mud.’ To be sure, the Vloxfolk doubtless had another name for it: but enough.
And all this area was the property of the Princes von Vlox, who, with their sixty-four proven quar- terings of nobility, their boresome plethora of available names and titles (Fitz-Guelf zu Borbon-Stuart, as exemplum), disdained not to describe themselves, in the person descendant of Charlemagne and the Lusignan kings of Cyprus, of Prince Roldrando, as Lord of Mud. The fens had in large part been reticulated and drained a century back, and constituted some of the richest farmland in the Monarchy. Probably sixty-four banks bulged with the quit-rents of the Lords of Mud, but one seldom saw them in Bella, even, let alone Paris or Monte Carlo: and legend pictured them as having returned altogether to the primitive, lolling about on rush-strewn floors, guzzling bread-beer, clad in wolf-skins.
“Ah, Roldri,” Eszterhazy said, aloud, “the lurlies have begun to bring up pearl-shell again after all this time—eh?”
And Prince Roldrando, his voice like an organ-note, said, “Ah . . . then you already know ”
Prince Roldrando was not wearing wolfskins, that had been a misunderstanding, he was wearing shaggy Scottish tweeds of such antique design that they must have been cut for a father or an uncle, and they had not been recently cleaned or pressed. “Damndest story you ever heard, Engli,” he said, as easily as he—a moment later—pointed out the Stationmas- ter’s office “—if you want to wash-up—” —the door of the public place of convenience, brightly painted with the internationally-recognized doublezero and W.C., he ignored as though it was not four feet away, and perhaps, inscribed in Hit- tite. “—or, we can stop by the roadside,” he offered an alternate suggestion.
“I won’t ask if you had a good journey,” he went on, "one never has a good journey by the cars, if the window is shut one swelters, if the window is open one gets cinders in one’s eyes.” Baggage had been picked up by two attendants, one of whom wore a footman’s coat and the other a footman’s hat: the trousers of both, as well as those of Prince Roldrando, gave evidence that a deer or boar had recently been killed, drawn, and flayed.
Very recently.
“Lunch in the hamper, whenever you like,” said the host, with a gesture. And, with another gesture, “Care to take the coachman’s seat?”
"Where is the coachman?” asked the guest.