Chapter 5 - Page 2

them in
his little brick villa in the neighbourhood of Shepherd's Bush.
There he lived with three sisters, ladies of solid goodness, but
sinister demeanour. His life was happy, as are almost all the lives
of methodical students, but one would not have called it
exhilarating. His only hours of exhilaration occurred when his
friend, Basil Grant, came into the house, late at night, a tornado
of conversation.

Basil, though close on sixty, had moods of boisterous babyishness,
and these seemed for some reason or other to descend upon him
particularly in the house of his studious and almost dingy friend.
I can remember vividly (for I was acquainted with both parties and
often dined with them) the gaiety of Grant on that particular
evening when the strange calamity fell upon the professor.
Professor Chadd was, like most of his particular class and type
(the class that is at once academic and middle-class), a Radical
of a solemn and old-fashioned type. Grant was a Radical himself,
but he was that more discriminating and not uncommon type of
Radical who passes most of his time in abusing the Radical party.
Chadd had just contributed to a magazine an article called "Zulu
Interests and the New Makango Frontier', in which a precise
scientific report of his study of the customs of the people of
T'Chaka was reinforced by a severe protest against certain
interferences with these customs both by the British and the
Germans. He-was sitting with the magazine in front of him, the
lamplight shining on his spectacles, a wrinkle in his forehead,
not of anger, but of perplexity, as Basil Grant strode up and down
the room, shaking it with his voice, with his high spirits and his
heavy tread.

"It's not your opinions that I object to, my esteemed Chadd," he
was saying, "it's you. You are quite right to champion the Zulus,
but for all that you do not sympathize with them. No doubt you
know the Zulu way of cooking tomatoes and the Zulu prayer before
blowing one's nose; but for all that you don't understand them as
well as I do, who don't know an assegai from an alligator. You are
more learned, Chadd, but I am more Zulu. Why is it that the jolly
old barbarians of this earth are always championed by people who
are their antithesis? Why is it? You are sagacious, you are
benevolent, you are well informed, but, Chadd, you are not savage.
Live no longer under that rosy illusion. Look in the glass. Ask
your sisters. Consult the librarian of the British Museum. Look at
this umbrella." And he held up that sad but still respectable
article. "Look at it. For ten mortal years to my certain knowledge
you have carried that object under your arm, and I have no sort of
doubt that you carried