THE WORD
I
Ada was just crossing the hall to the drawing-room, a telegram on a
salver in her red hand.
"Here you are, Ada," said Edwin, stopping her, with a gesture towards
the telegram.
"It's for Mr. Tom Swetnam, sir."
Edwin and Hilda followed the starched and fussy girl into the
drawing-room, in which were about a dozen people, including Fearns, the
lawyer, and his wife, the recently married Stephen and Vera Cheswardine,
several Swetnams, and Janet Orgreave, who sat at the closed piano,
smiling vaguely.
Tom Swetnam, standing up, took the telegram.
"I never knew they delivered telegrams at this time o' night," said
Fearns sharply, looking at his watch. He was wont to keep a careful eye
on the organisation of railways, ships, posts, and other contrivances
for the shifting of matter from one spot to another. An exacting critic
of detail, he was proud of them in the mass, and called them
civilisation.
"They don't," said Tom Swetnam naughtily, glad to plague a man older
than himself, and the father of a family. Tom was a mere son, but he
had travelled, and was, indeed, just returned from an excursion through
Scandinavia. "Observe there's no deception. The envelope's been opened.
Moreover, it's addressed to Ben Clewlow, not to me. Ben's sent it up.
I asked him to. Now, we'll see."
Having displayed the envelope like a conjurer, he drew forth the
telegram, and prepared to read it aloud. One half of the company was
puzzled; the other half showed an instructed excitement. Tom read the
message:
"'Twenty-seven pounds ten nine. Philosophers tell us that there is
nothing new under the sun. Nevertheless it may well be doubted whether
the discovery of gold at Barmouth, together with two earthquake shocks
following each other in quick succession in the same district, does not
constitute, in the history of the gallant little Principality, a double
event of unique--'" He stopped.
Vera Cheswardine, pretty, fluffy, elegant, cried out with all the
impulsiveness of her nature:
"Novelty!"
"Whatever is it all about?" mildly asked Mrs. Fearns, a quiet and
dignified, youngish woman whom motherhood had made somewhat
absent-minded when she was away from her children.
"Missing-word competition," Fearns explained to her with curt, genial
superiority. He laughed outright. "You do go it, some of you chaps,"
he said. "Why, that telegram cost over a couple of bob, I bet!"
"Well, you see," said Tom Swetnam, "three of us share it. We get it
thirty-six hours before the paper's out--fellow in London--and there's
so much more time to read the dictionary. No use half doing a thing!
Twenty-seven pounds odd! Not a bad share this week, eh?"
"Won anything?"
"Rather. We had the wire about the winning word this morning. We'd
sent it in four times. That makes about L110, doesn't it? Between
three of us. We sent in nearly two hundred postal orders. Which leaves
L100 clear. Thirty-three quid apiece, net."
He tried to speak calmly and nonchalantly, but his excitement was
extreme. The two younger Swetnams regarded him with awe. Everybody was
deeply impressed by the prodigious figures, and in many hearts envy,
covetousness, and the wild desire for a large, free life of luxury were
aroused.
"Seems to me you've reduced this game to a science," said Edwin.
"Well, we have," Tom Swetnam admitted. "We send in every possible
word."
"It's a mere thousand per cent profit per week," murmured Fearns. "At
the rate of fifty thousand per cent per annum."
Albert Benbow, entering, caught the last phrase, which very properly
whetted his curiosity as a man of business. Clara followed him closely.
On nearly all ceremonial occasions these two had an instinctive need of
each other's presence and support; and if Albert did not run after
Clara, Clara ran after Albert.
II
Then came the proof of the genius, the cynicism and the insight of the
leviathan newspaper-proprietor who had invented the dodge of inviting
his readers to risk a shilling and also to buy a coupon for the
privilege of supplying a missing word, upon the understanding that the
shillings of those who supplied the wrong word should be taken for ever
away from them and given to those who supplied the right word. The
entire company in the Clayhanger drawing-room was absorbed in the
tremendous missing-word topic, and listened to Swetnam as to a new
prophet bearing the secret of eternal felicity. The rumour of Swetnam's
triumph drew people out of the delectable dining-room to listen to his
remarks; and among these was Auntie Hamps. So it was in a thousand, in
ten thousand, in hundreds of thousands of homes of all kinds throughout
the kingdom. The leviathan journalist's readers (though as a rule they
read nothing in his paper save the truncated paragraph and the rules of
the competition) had grown to be equivalent to the whole British public.
And he not only held them but he had overshadowed all other interests in
their minds. Upon honeymoons people thought of the missing-word amid
caresses, and it is a fact that people had died with the missing word on
their lips. Sane adults of both sexes read the dictionary through from
end to end every week with an astounding conscientiousness. The
leviathan newspaper-proprietor could not buy enough paper, nor hire
sufficient presses, to meet the national demands. And no wonder, seeing
that any small news-agent in a side street was liable at any moment to
receive an 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 limits.
"Albert! Well, I never!" exclaimed Mrs. Hamps.
"You don't mind, do you Auntie?" said Albert jovially, standing over
her.
"Not if it's not gambling," said Mrs. Hamps stoutly. "And I hope it
isn't. And it would be very nice for Clara, I'm sure, if you won."
"Hurrah for Mrs. Hamps!" Johnnie Orgreave almost yelled.
At the same moment, Janet Orgreave, swinging round on the music-stool,
lifted the lid of the piano, and, still with her soft, angelic smile,
played loudly and dashingly the barbaric, Bacchic, orgiastic melody
which had just recently inflamed England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and
the Five Towns--the air which was unlike anything ever heard before by
British ears, and which meant nothing whatever that could be avowed, the
air which heralded social revolutions and inaugurated a new epoch. And
as the ringed fingers of the quiet, fading spinster struck out the
shocking melody, Vera Cheswardine and one or two others who had been to
London and there seen the great legendary figure, Lottie Collins, hummed
more or less brazenly the syllables heavy with mysterious significance:
"_Tarara-boom-deay!_
_Tarara-boom-deay!_
_Tarara-boom-deay!_
_Tarara-boom-deay!_"
Upon this entered Mr. Peartree, like a figure of retribution, and
silence fell.
"I'm afraid..." he began. "Mr. Benbow."
They spoke together.
A scared servant-girl had come up from the Benbow home with the
affrighting news that Bert Benbow, who had gone to bed with the other
children as usual, was not in his bed and could not be discovered in the
house. Mr. Peartree, being in the hall, had chosen himself to bear the
grievous tidings to the drawing-room. In an instant Albert and Clara
were parents again. Both had an idea that the unprecedented,
incomprehensible calamity was a heavenly dispensation to punish them for
having trifled with the missing-word. Their sudden seriousness was
terrific. They departed immediately, without ceremony of any sort.
Mrs. Hamps said that she really ought to go too, and Maggie said that as
Auntie Hamps was going she also would go. The parson said that he had
already stayed longer than he ought, in view of another engagement, and
he followed. Edwin and Hilda dutifully saw them off and were as serious
as the circumstances demanded. But those who remained in the
drawing-room sniggered, and when Hilda rejoined them she laughed. The
house felt lighter. Edwin, remaining longest at the door, saw a
bicyclist on one of the still quaint pneumatic-tyred "safety" bicycles,
coming along behind a "King of the Road" lamp. The rider dismounted at
the corner.
"That you, Mr. Ingpen?"
Said a blithe voice:
"How d'ye do, host? When you've known me a bit longer you'll learn that
I always manage to arrive just when other people are leaving."