Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 5.pdf/374

Rh the rising journalist woke them up. He perceived he had done so and that he had no time to lose. So while they engaged in inventing representatives to inquire, he went off and telephoned to the Daily Gunfire and the New Paper. When they answered he was positive and earnest. He staked his reputation—the reputation of a rising journalist!

"I swear there's something up," he said. "Get in first—that's all."

He had some reputation, I say—and he had staked it. The Daily Gunfire was sceptical but precise, and the New Paper sprang a headline "A Mermaid at last!"

You might well have thought the thing was out after that, but it wasn't. There are things one doesn't believe even if they are printed in a halfpenny paper. To find the reporters hammering at their doors, so to speak, and fended off only for a time by a proposal that they should call again; to see their incredible secret glaringly in print, did indeed for a moment seem a hopeless exposure both to the Buntings and the Sea Lady. Already they could see the story spreading, could imagine the imminent rush of intimate inquiries, the tripod strides of a multitude of cameras, the crowds watching the windows, the horrors of a great publicity. All the Buntings, and Mabel, were aghast, simply aghast. Adeline was not so much aghast as excessively annoyed at this imminent and, so far as she was concerned, absolutely irrelevant publicity. "They will never dare—" she said, and "Consider how it affects Harry!" and at the earliest opportunity she retired to her own room.