Northwest Passage by Kenneth Roberts

Author:Kenneth Roberts [Roberts, Kenneth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
Published: 2016-12-09T06:00:00+00:00

“That’s the place!” he said contemptuously. “Michilimackinac! What monstrous and degenerate mentality conjured up such a cacophany—such a travesty on music and onomatopoeia. Ono—ono—that’s right: onomatopoeia. It is right, is it not? Or is it not? Don’t sound quite right. Anyway, that’s what this brilliant young artist ought to do.”

Rogers was pleased. “That’s not a bad idea! Not a bad idea at all! Keep drunk, Natty; keep drunk! Langdon, you could do a picture of me with some little short Indians looking up at me, kind of scared and fawning. Of course you could! A few thousand of those around London wouldn’t do any harm.”

“Harm!” Potter said. “Be a benefit! Great benefit if it didn’t look too much like you, but just enough to familiarize the haut ton with something rather like your features! Everybody’d be clamoring to meet the celebrated Major Rogers! Yes, and wouldn’t that help to make tradesmen trustful?” This phrase so caught his fancy that he mumbled it over and over—“Trustful tradesmen: trustful tradesmen.”

He spoke oratorically. “What, I pause to enquire, would be celestial Heaven’s brightest gift to celebrated Rogers and Potter? Trustful tradesmen! Why? Because if they don’t trust us, we decline to buy of them—absolutely decline! Why do we so? Because we have our own reasons! What reasons? We decline to name them because they pain us. Why pain ourselves? Forward, then! I have another idea beside that for the universal prints of celebrated Rogers.”

“Another idea?” Rogers cried. “Name it, Natty!”

“Name it? I do so with pleasure and pride, Major—pleasure and pride in my own genius. Major, the tale of the untimely end of your gallant father must ring across the land! Must confront every reader in fair England as he opens his favorite journal! What is the taking of St. Francis to any true Briton of this Isle? Little, Major; little! But the passing of your parent, Major—ah, there’s where Fame waits on you with tongued strumpets—many-tongued strumpets—I mean trumpets—many tongued trumpets all a-clamoring ‘Hola! Hail! Rogers the Great! Hola!’”

The Major triumphantly put on a weskit of yellow watered silk, and thumped his bedizened chest resoundingly.

“By God!” he said, “if I don’t get the King’s ear, it’ll be because he hasn’t any to get!”

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