Part 35 (1/2)

”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.