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 £110, doesn’t it? Between three of us. We sent in nearly two hundred postal orders. Which leaves £100 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.”
