Page:The Plutocrat (1927).pdf/428

 what the barber had mingled with his new-cut hair. He was shaved intensively, pomaded, brushed, massaged, powdered, and almost holy-stoned. Never had such sleekness appeared upon every inch of him; and if at the same time there was something subdued about him, something a little baffled and spiritually sat upon, some hint of the fugitive temporarily at large, he was still able to offer municipal advice from heaven's most favoured spot, the one cherished and perfect city at the heart of the world.

"What you need here is a good, live, snappy Board o' Health," he was saying to the concierge. "You take all these smells, for instance—why, over at that town where I was yesterday there wasn't anything but smell, practically! In Algiers I ran across a smell I thought had anything I ever smelled stung to death, poisoned, coiled up in a knot and laid away to rest. Why, if a smell like that broke out in my town, we'd build a gas-works over it and sell it by the cubic foot to the War Department. But I see now I was just fresh from God's Country when I was in Algiers. I didn't really know what could be done in the line of smells and rags and sores on people. This Siddy Whatcha-call-it place could give the Arab quarter in Algiers cards and spades and just sit back and laugh!