The man on the sofa was completely absorbed in a newspaper, behind which his face was hidden. He lay for fully twenty minutes without moving a muscle, with his long legs stretched out to the very end of the couch. Suddenly he crushed the paper between his hands, and swung himself up to a sitting posture.
“The damned thieves!” he exclaimed in an English accent. “Cutting wages at a time like this. The working man in England to-day is usually either over military age or else crippled from war service. To think of the curs cutting down their wages now! Well, it’s only one more evidence of the fat-headed manner in which everything is done in England—England, the land of blunders!”
Mauney noticed with surprise that none of the people at the table were paying any attention to the irate Englishman’s declamation—the more remarkable that he should continue:
“If they go on messing things up much worse, the working man is going to kick over and raise a bit of hell, and it will serve the skunks jolly well right. I hope that they put so big a land tax on the capitalists that they will lose every square foot of property they possess. It’s not theirs, anyhow. It belongs to the working man.”
Mrs. Manton presently glanced in his direction to behold him still bathed in the glow of his enthusiastic pronouncement.
“What’s wrong, Jolvin?” she purred softly. “Have they not yet recognized the rights of the working man? How discouraging!”
There was a note of sarcasm in her deep, melodious voice that irritated Jolvin. He had a long, thin face, scooped out at the temples and the cheeks, a narrow, black moustache directly under his long, thin nose, and a permanent dimple in the middle of his long chin. His long, narrow neck rose out of his collar like a jack-in-the-box, and he had an uncanny way of suddenly rotating his face, in conversation, full toward a speaker.
“Oh! damn it! Talk will you!” he fumed, looking at his landlady out of furious eyes, as if he had been much more content to have continued in monologue. “Some people are going to wake up one morning to discover the working man in possession of the helm of affairs!”
He jumped to his feet and stamped ill-temperedly toward the hall door.
“And,” he resumed, as he opened the door quickly, but paused to give Mrs. Manton the full benefit of his rage, “this is no dream of a fantastic mind. It’s just truth, damned-well truth!”