My Neighbors: Stories of the Welsh PeopleEvans, Caradoc
General
My Neighbors: Stories of the Welsh People
Evans, Caradoc
Wales -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
Until day dimmed and night grayed did they two search, neither of them
eating and neither of them discovering the treasure.
Therefore Hugh had not peace nor quietness. Grief he uttered with his
tongue, arms, and feet, and it was in the crease of his garments. He
sought sympathy and instruction from those with whom he traded. "All the
steam is gone out of me," he wailed. One shopkeeper advised him: "Has it
slipped under the lino?" Another said: "Any mice in the house? Money has
been found in their holes." The third said: "Sure the wife hasn't spent
it on dress. You know what ladies are." These hints and more Hugh wrote
down on paper, and he mused in this wise: "An old liar is the wench. For
why I wedded the English? Right was mam fach; senseless they are. Crying
she has lost the yellow gold, the bitch. What blockhead lost one penny?
What is in the stomach of my purse this one minute? Three
shillings--soferen--five pennies--half a penny--ticket railway. Hie
backwards will I on Thursday on the surprise. No comfort is mine before
I peep once again."
He pried in every drawer and cupboard, and in the night he arose and
inquired into the clothes his wife had left off; and he pushed his
fingers into the holes of mice and under the floor coverings, and groped
in the fireplaces; and he put subtle questions to Millie.
"If you'd done like this in a shop you'd be sacked without a ref," he
said when his search was over. "We must have him back. It's a sin to let
him go. Reduce expenses at once."
Millie disrobed herself by the light of a street lamp, and she ate
little of such foods as are cheapest, whereat her white cheeks sunk and
there was no more luster in her brown hair; and her larder was as though
there was a famine in the country. If she said to Hugh: "Your boots are
leaking," she was told: "Had I the soferens I would get a pair"; or if
she said: "We haven't a towel in the place," the reply was: "Find the
soferens and buy one or two."
The more Hugh sorrowed and scrimped, the more he gained; and word of his
fellows' hardships struck his broad, loose ears with a pleasant tinkle.
While on his journeys he stayed at common lodging-houses, and he did not
give back to his employers any of the money which was allowed him to
stay at hotels. Some folk despised him, some mocked him, and many
nicknamed him "the ten-pound traveler." To the shopkeeper who hesitated
to deal with him he whined his loss, making it greater than it was, and
expressing: "The interest alone is very big."
By such methods he came to possess one hundred and twenty pounds in two
years. His employers had knowledge of his deeds, and they summoned him
to them and said to him that because of the drab shabbiness of his
clothes and his dishonest acts they had appointed another in his stead.
"You started this," he admonished Millie. "Bring light upon mattar."
"What can I do?" Millie replied. "Shall I go back to the dressmaking as
I was?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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