THESE TWAIN. Bennett ArnoldЧитать онлайн книгу.
order from an impassioned student of periodical literature for more copies of one issue of the journal than the whole town had been used to buy before the marvellous invention of the missing-word. The post office was incommoded; even the Postmaster General was incommoded, and only by heroical efforts and miraculous feats of resourcefulness did he save himself from the ignominy of running out of shilling postal orders. Post office girls sold shilling postal orders with a sarcastic smile, with acerbity, with reluctance,—it was naught to them that the revenue was benefited and the pressure on taxpayers eased. Employers throughout the islands suffered vast losses owing to the fact that for months their offices and factories were inhabited not by clerks and other employees, but by wage-paid monomaniacs who did naught but read dictionaries and cut out and fill up coupons. And over all the land there hung the dark incredible menace of an unjust prosecution under the Gambling Laws, urged by interfering busybodies who would not let a nation alone.
“And how much did you make last week, Mr. Swetnam?” judicially asked Albert Benbow, who was rather pleased and flattered, as an active Wesleyan, to rub shoulders with frank men of the world like Tom. As an active Wesleyan he had hitherto utterly refused to listen to the missing-word; but now it seemed to be acquiring respectability enough for his ears.
Swetnam replied with a casual air:
“We didn’t make much last week. We won something, of course. We win every week; that’s a mathematical certainty—but sometimes the expenses mount up a bit higher than the receipts. It depends on the word. If it’s an ordinary word that everybody chooses, naturally the share is a small one because there are so many winners.” He gave no more exact details.
Clara breathed a disillusioned “Oh!” implying that she had known there must be some flaw in the scheme—and her husband had at once put his finger on it.
But her husband, with incipient enthusiasm for the word, said: “Well, it stands to reason they must take one week with another, and average it out.”
“Now, Albert! Now, Albert!” Edwin warned him. “No gambling.”
Albert replied with some warmth: “I don’t see that there’s any gambling in it. Appears to me that it’s chiefly skill and thoroughness that does the trick.”
“Gambling!” murmured Tom Swetnam shortly. “Of course it’s not gambling.”
“No!”
“Well,” said Vera Cheswardine, “I say ‘novelty.’ ‘A double event of unique novelty.’ That’s it.”
“I shouldn’t go nap on ‘novelty,’ if I were you,” said Tom Swetnam, the expert.
Tom read the thing again.
“Novelty,” Vera repeated. “I know it’s novelty. I’m always right, aren’t I, Stephen?” She looked round. “Ask Stephen.”
“You were right last week but one, my child,” said Stephen.
“And did you make anything?” Clara demanded eagerly.
“Only fifteen shillings,” said Vera discontentedly. “But if Stephen had listened to me we should have made lots.”
Albert Benbow’s interest in the word was strengthened.
Fearns, leaning carefully back in his chair, asked with fine indifference: “By the way, what is this week’s word, Tom? I haven’t your secret sources of information. I have to wait for the paper.”
“‘Unaccountably,’” said Tom. “Had you anything on it?”
“No,” Fearns admitted. “I’ve caught a cold this week, it seems.”
Albert Benbow stared at him. Here was another competitor—and as acute a man of business as you would find in the Five Towns!
“Me, too!” said Edwin, smiling like a culprit.
Hilda sprang up gleefully, and pointed at him a finger of delicious censure.
“Oh! You wicked sinner! You never told me you’d gone in! You deceitful old thing!”
“Well, it was a man at the shop who would have me try,” Edwin boyishly excused himself.
iii
Hilda’s vivacity enchanted Edwin. The charm of her reproof was simply exquisite in its good-nature and in the elegance of its gesture. The lingering taste of the feverish kiss she had given him a few minutes earlier bemused him and he flushed. To conceal his inconvenient happiness in the thought of his wife he turned to open the new enlarged window that gave on the garden. (He had done away with the old garden-entrance of the house, and thrown the side corridor into the drawing-room.) Then he moved towards Janet Orgreave, who was still seated at the closed piano.
“Your father isn’t coming, I suppose?” he asked her.
The angelic spinster, stylishly dressed in white, and wearing as usual her kind heart on her sleeve, smiled with soft benignity, and shook her head.
“He told me to tell you he was too old. He is, you know.”
“And how’s your mother?”
“Oh, pretty well, considering.... I really ought not to leave them.”
“Oh, yes!” Edwin protested. The momentary vision of Mr. and Mrs. Orgreave in the large house close by, now practically deserted by all their children except Janet, saddened him.
Then a loud voice dominated the general conversation behind him:
“I say, this is a bit stiff. I did think I should be free of it here. But no! Same old missing-word everywhere! What is it this week, Swetnam?”
It was Johnnie Orgreave, appreciably younger than his sister, but a full-grown man of the world, and somewhat dandiacal. After shaking hands with Hilda he came straight to Edwin.
“Awfully sorry I’m so late, old chap. How do, Jan?”
“Of course you are,” Edwin quizzed him like an uncle.
“Where’s Ingpen?”
“Not come.”
“Not come! He said he should be here at eight. Just like him!” said Johnnie. “I expect he’s had a puncture.”
“I’ve been looking out for him every minute,” Edwin muttered.
In the middle of the room Albert Benbow, stocky and vulgar, but feeling himself more and more a man of the world among men and women of the world, was proclaiming, not without excitement:
“Well, I agree with Mrs. Cheswardine. ‘Novelty’ ‘s much more likely than ‘interest.’ ‘Interest’ ‘s the wrong kind of word altogether. It doesn’t agree with the beginning of the paragraph.”
“That’s right, Mr. Benbow,” Vera encouraged him with flirtatious dimples. “You put your money on me, even if my own husband won’t.” Albert as a dowdy dissenter was quite out of her expensive sphere, but to Vera any man was a man.
“Now, Albert,” Clara warned him, “if you win anything, you must give it to me for the new perambulator.”
(“Dash that girl’s infernal domesticity!” thought Edwin savagely.)
“Who says I’m going in for it, missis?” Albert challenged.
“I only say if you do, dear,” Clara said smoothly.
“Then I will!” Albert announced the great decision. “Just for the fun of the thing, I will. Thank ye, Mrs. Cheswardine.”
He glanced at Mrs. Cheswardine as a knight at his unattainable mistress. Indeed the decision had in it something of the chivalrous; the attention of slim provocative Vera, costliest and most fashionably dressed woman in Bursley, had stirred his fancy to wander far beyond its usual