These Twain Part 35

"You needn't use all the house," Edwin proceeded. "You won't want all the servants."

"I wish you'd say a word to Johnnie," breathed Janet.

"I'll say a word to Johnnie, all right," Edwin answered loudly. "But it seems to me it's Tom that wants talking to. I can't imagine what he was doing to let your father in for that Palace Porcelain business. It beats me."

Janet quietly protested:

"I feel sure he thought it was all right."

"Oh, of course!" said Hilda, bitterly. "Of course! They always do think it's all right. And here's my husband just going into one of those big dangerous affairs, and _he_ thinks it's all right, and nothing I can say will stop him from going into it. And he'll keep on thinking it's all right until it's all wrong and we're ruined, and perhaps me left a widow with George." Her lowered eyes blazed at the carpet.

Janet, troubled, glanced from one to the other, and then, with all the tremendous unconscious persuasive force of her victimhood and her mourning, murmured gently to Edwin:

"Oh! Don't run any risks! Don't run any risks!"

Edwin was staggered by the swift turn of the conversation. Two thousand women hemmed him in more closely than ever. He could do nothing against them except exercise an obstinacy which might be esteemed as merely brutal. They were not accessible to argument--Hilda especially.

Argument would be received as an outrage. It would be impossible to convince Hilda that she had taken a mean and disgraceful advantage of him, and that he had every right to resent her behaviour. She was righteousness and injuredness personified. She partook, in that moment, of the victimhood of Janet. And she baffled him.

He bit his lower lip.

"All that's not the business before the meeting," he said as lightly as he could. "D'you think if I stepped down now I should catch Johnnie at the office?"

And all the time, while his heart hardened against Hilda, he kept thinking:

"Suppose I _did_ come to smas.h.!.+"

Janet had put a fear in his mind, Janet who in her wistfulness and her desolating ruin seemed to be like only a little pile of dust--all that remained of the magnificent social structure of a united and numerous Orgreave family.

V

Edwin met Tertius Ingpen in the centre of the town outside the offices of Orgreave and Sons, amid the commotion caused by the return of uplifted spectators from a football match in which the team curiously known to the sporting world as "Bursley Moorthorne" had scored a broken leg and two goals to nil.

"h.e.l.lo!" Ingpen greeted him. "I was thinking of looking in at your place to-night."

"Do!" said Edwin. "Come up with me now."

"Can't! ... Why do these ghastly louts try to walk over you as if they didn't see you?" Then in another tone, very quietly, and nodding in the direction of the Orgreave offices: "Been in there? ... What a week, eh!

... How are things?"

"Bad," Edwin answered. "In a word, bad!"

Ingpen lifted his eyebrows.

They turned away out of the crowd, up towards the tranquillity of the Turnhill Road. They were manifestly glad to see each other. Edwin had had a satisfactory interview with Johnnie Orgreave,--satisfactory in the sense that Johnnie had admitted the wisdom of all that Edwin said and promised to act on it.

"I've just been talking to young Johnnie for his own good," said Edwin.

And in a moment, with eagerness, with that strange deep satisfaction felt by the carrier of disastrous tidings, he told Ingpen all that he knew of the plight of Janet Orgreave.

"If you ask me," said he, "I think it's infamous."

"Infamous," Ingpen repeated the word savagely. "There's no word for it.

What'll she do?"

"Well, I suppose she'll have to live with Johnnie."

"And where will Mrs. Chris come in, then?" Ingpen asked in a murmur.

"Mrs. Chris Hamson?" exclaimed Edwin startled. "Oh! Is that affair still on the carpet? ... Cheerful outlook!"

Ingpen pulled his beard.

"Anyhow," said he, "Johnnie's the most reliable of the crew. Charlie's the most agreeable, but Johnnie's the most reliable. I wouldn't like to count much on Tom, and as for Jimmie, well of course----!"

"I always look on Johnnie as a kid. Can't help it."

"There's no law against that, so long as you don't go and blub it out to Mrs. Chris," Ingpen laughed.

"I don't know her."

"You ought to know her. She's an education, my boy."

"I've been having a fair amount of education lately," said Edwin. "Only this afternoon I was practically told that I ought to give up the idea of my new works because it has risks and the Palace Porcelain Co. was risky and Janet hasn't a cent. See the point?"

He was obliged to talk about the affair, because it was heavily on his mind. A week earlier he had persuaded himself that the success of a marriage depended chiefly on the tone employed to each other by the contracting parties. But in the disturbing scene of the afternoon, his tone had come near perfection, and yet marriage presented itself as even more stupendously difficult than ever. Ingpen's answering words salved and strengthened him. The sensation of being comprehended was delicious. Intimacy progressed.

"I say," said Edwin, as they parted. "You'd better not know anything about all this when you come to-night."

"Right you are, my boy."

Their friends.h.i.+p seemed once more to be suddenly and surprisingly intensified.

When Edwin returned, Janet had vanished again. Like an animal which fears the hunt and whose shyness nothing can cure, she had fled to cover at the first chance. According to Hilda she had run home because it had occurred to her that she must go through her mother's wardrobe and chest of drawers without a moment's delay.

Edwin's account to his wife of the interview with Johnnie Orgreave was given on a note justifiably triumphant. In brief he had "talked sense"

to Johnnie, and Johnnie had been convicted and convinced. Hilda listened with respectful propriety. Edwin said nothing as to his encounter with Tertius Ingpen, partly from prudence and partly from timidity. When Ingpen arrived at the house, much earlier than he might have been expected to arrive, Edwin was upstairs, and on descending he found his wife and his friend chatting in low and intimate voices close together in the drawing-room. The gas had been lighted.

"Here's Mr. Ingpen," said Hilda, announcing a surprise.

"How do, Ingpen?"

"How do, Ed?"

Ingpen did not rise. Nor did they shake hands, but in the Five Towns friends who have reached a certain degree of intimacy proudly omit the ceremony of handshaking when they meet. It was therefore impossible for Hilda to divine that Edwin and Tertius had previously met that day, and apparently Ingpen had not divulged the fact. Edwin felt like a plotter.