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Mary, the irrepressible, had hardly said one word since we left the beauty parlors! Mary, always the life of dinner parties, was sitting like a woman who had seen the ghost of a dead child; her eyes following Carpenter's, her mind evidently absorbed in probing his thoughts. "Abey!" said she, with sudden passion, of a sort I'd never seen her display before.
Then Abey leans over the counter an' ketches me by the neck 'andkerchief an' says, 'Think of the worst life you know, an' 'ave a bit on that. Naturally, talkin' o' bad lives, you're the first chap whose name comes into my 'ead." "Me!" ejaculated the engineer, starting. "But it wasn't wickedness old Abey meaned," continued the stoker, "only un'ealthiness in general.
Carpenter," protested T-S. "Is it dem strikers?" "I'm sorry; you see " "Now, honest, man, vy should you spoil your dinner fer a bunch o' damn lousy loafers " "Abey, vot a vay to talk at a dinner-party!" broke in Maw. And then suddenly Mary Magna spoke. It was a strange thing, though I did not realize it until afterwards.
Bingle was convinced, as time went on, that the tags on certain infants had been accidentally misplaced by careless attendants, and that Reginald's nick-name, bestowed by Frederick and Wilberforce in their frivolous wisdom, was not so far out of the way as it might have seemed if he had not been possessed of his own vague misgivings. They called him Abey.
Madame Planchet beamed, and the flesh-mountain was feebly cheered. "You like it, Abey?" "Sure, I like it! Maw, it's grand! It's like I got a new girl! Come on now, git up, we go git our dinner, and den we gotta see dem night scenes took. Don't forgit, we're payin' two tousand men five dollars apiece tonight, and we gotta git our money out of 'em."
"If only 'e 'ad lived " repeated the engineer in a strange far-away tone, "Oo's 'e?" he asked eagerly. "You know old Abey Turner as keeps the little sweet-an'-tobaccer shop over to Dorton Ware?" pursued the stoker. "Old Abey is a agint for the Popular Thrifty Life Insurance Company " "I know 'e is," confirmed the engineer.
"Abey 'as bin at me over an' over again to insure my life," explained the stoker, "but I told 'im as I didn't 'old with laying out good money wot wouldn't never come 'ome to roost-like, until I was dead.
"Shucks, Abey," broke in Maw, "vot you gotta do vit dat? Vy don't you mind your own business?" "Mind my own business? My own business, you say? Vell, I like to know vot you call my business! Ven I got a contract to pay a girl tirty-five hunded dollars a veek fer her face, and she goes and gits it all wrinkles, I ask any jury, is it my business or ain't it?
She had thrown a cloak around her. The deadly pallor of her cheeks was grotesquely heightened by the remnants of rouge which her shaking fingers had failed to completely remove. Her eyes were wide and staring, gazing into the future or the past ... into eternity it might have been. Mr. Abey Lewis laid a hand on her arm. "Miss Burton," he suggested, "you ain't quite got the paint off yet.
"An' wot did that old snake in the grass say to that bloomin' lie?" demanded the stoker savagely. "'E said life was a uncertain thing for all," sniggered the engineer, gently. "An' I'd better 'ave a bit on the event an' turn sorrow into joy, as the saying is. So I give Abey a shillin', bein' two weeks in advance, an' the Company sent me the policy, an' 'ere I am in for the money."
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