“Not much use having anyone else’s,” remarked Louisa, with an effort at the old pertness.
“If she gets up to any of her nonsense send me a telegram.”
“I’ll write to you very often,” said Rosalind quietly. “Let me know—let me know if you see Lady Frances.”
The guard cried, “Stand away!” and gave the signal to start. Erb put his head in and kissed his sister’s face.
“Might as well serve both alike,” suggested Louisa sportively. She rubbed her eyes with her glove.
“Don’t dare,” said Erb.
One of the infatuated youths walked along with the train, and when Erb, with a wistful look in his eyes, fell back, the youth aimed a packet of chocolate, but either from nervousness or want of practice, missed the compartment and sent it into the next, where four children pounced upon it with a high scream of delight.
The violence of the paragraph concerning the Neckinger Road firm helped to appease those on the Committee who showed uneasiness in regard to what they called the “climb down.” True, some of them remarked that the attacks on the Neckinger Road firm had nothing to do with the objects of the society, and Erb, reckoning up, found that he had lost the confidence of three, but a carman who had been discharged by the firm for slight inebriety—“I’m a man that varies,” said the ex-carman. “Sometimes I may ’ave twenty pints, sometimes I may ’ave thirty pints, and then other days I may ’ave quite a lot,”—came and begged permission to thank them for the public service that the journal was doing, and assured the Committee, with the air of one having exclusive information, that they would get their reward, in this world or in the next, or in both. As the reports from Rosalind at Worthing became less satisfactory, so the fierceness of the attacks in “The Carman” increased; but it was not until a paragraph appeared headed “Wilful Murder!” that Neckinger Road, after taking the previous outbursts with a calm that suggested it was either deaf or asleep, suddenly started up and took action in the most decided and emphatic manner.
Information has been laid this day by for that you, within the district aforesaid, did unlawfully and maliciously publish a certain defamatory libel of and concerning the said well knowing the same defamatory libel to be false, contrary to the statute in such case made and provided. You are therefore hereby summoned to appear before the Court of Summary Jurisdiction sitting at the Southwark Police Court on the twentieth day of October, at the hour of ten in the forenoon, to answer to the said information. Signed with an indistinct signature, one of the magistrates of the police-court of the metropolis.
This, on a blue-coloured form, which a friendly policeman left one evening, when Erb was wrestling with his brief leading article, and unable to decide whether to give a touch of brightness to the column by the two lines of poetry from William Morris, and risk offending a few subscribers who looked on rhymes as frivolous, or to remain on the safer ground of prose. Erb, in his attacks on the Neckinger Road firm, had begun to feel as a fencer does who makes ingenious passes at the air, and he was so much gratified now to find that he had at last struck something, that he gave the warrant-officer something with which to purchase a drink, and had a very friendly chat with him concerning points of law. Erb had to confess he had not hitherto understood—being a man whose mind was occupied with other matters—that one had to appear at a police-court in regard to a charge of libel: the warrant-officer increased Erb’s knowledge by informing him that not only was this the case where no damages were claimed, but that the publication had only to be proved and you were at once committed to the Central Criminal Court to take your trial.