“You won’t,” I says.
“Bet you a five-pound note,” says Dave.
“All right,” I says.
So I sits down again, and Dave whistles to the girl, and he passes along his cup and mine. She filled ’em at once, without a word, and we got outside our fifth cup of tea each. Then Dave jingled his spoon, and passed both cups along again. She put some hot water in the pot this time, and, after we’d drunk another couple of cups, Dave muttered somethin’ about drownin’ the miller.
“We want tea, not warm water,” he growled, lookin’ sulky and passin’ along both cups again.
But she never opened her mouth; she wouldn’t speak. She didn’t even, look cross. She made a fresh pot of tea, and filled our cups again. She didn’t even slam the cups down, or swamp the tea over into the saucers—which would have been quite natural, considerin’.
“I’m about done,” I said to Dave in a low whisper. “We’ll have to give it up, I’m afraid, Dave,” I says.
“I’ll make her speak, or bust myself,” says Dave.
And I’m blest if he didn’t go on till I was so blanky full of tea that it brimmed over and run out the corners of my mouth; and Dave was near as bad. At last I couldn’t drink another teaspoonful without holding back my head, and then I couldn’t keep it down, but had to let it run back into the blanky cup again. The girl began to clear away at the other end of the table, and now and then she’d lay her hand on the teapot and squint round to see if we wanted any more tea. But she never spoke. She might have thought a lot—but she never opened her lips.
I tell you, without a word of a lie, that we must have drunk about a dozen cups each. We made her fill the teapot twice, and kept her waitin’ nearly an hour, but we couldn’t make her say a word. She never said a single word to us from the time we came in till the time we went out, nor before nor after. She’d made up her mind from the first not to speak to us.