And one would not like to encourage similar behaviour, now, would one? Respecting this request was rather difficult, since my fellow guests, when they met me walking in the garden, would contrive to find ways of referring to my friend’s disappearance, and when I replied, as I had been urged, that he had returned unexpectedly to Bongo-Bongo-Land, I am afraid they expressed their scepticism very crudely, by a variety of devices, such as raising their eyes to Heaven or drawing their fingers across their throats. When our hosts, who accompanied us up the garden paths, forbade further questions, the other guests took childish revenge by conferring on innocent flowers in the garden new and terrible aliases, calling the scarlet rose climbing the high walls ‘prisoner’s blood’, or asking our attendants whether the creamy clematis was cultivated for wreaths to adorn our unmarked graves. I brooded often on my late friends tragic end. How unfortunate an impression he had made. Yet I missed him.
