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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d7b82bc --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +*.txt text eol=lf +*.htm text eol=lf +*.html text eol=lf +*.md text eol=lf diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6312041 --- /dev/null +++ b/LICENSE.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements, +metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be +in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES. + +Procedures for determining public domain status are described in +the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org. + +No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in +jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize +this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright +status under the laws that apply to them. diff --git a/README.md b/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..91e0c65 --- /dev/null +++ b/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for +eBook #50131 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/50131) diff --git a/old/50131-0.txt b/old/50131-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 9c36781..0000000 --- a/old/50131-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9601 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Marbeck Inn, by Harold Brighouse - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most -other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions -whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of -the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at -www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have -to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. - - - -Title: The Marbeck Inn - A Novel - -Author: Harold Brighouse - -Release Date: October 4, 2015 [EBook #50131] -Last Updated: November 1, 2016 - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MARBECK INN *** - - - - -Produced by David Widger from page images generously -provided by the Internet Archive - - - - - - - - - -THE MARBECK INN - -A Novel - -By Harold Brighouse - -Little, Brown, And Company - -1920 - -Copyright, 1920 - - - -[Illustration: 0001] - - -[Illustration: 0009] - - - - - -THE MARBECK INN - - - - -CHAPTER I--THE STARTING-POINT - -|IT falls to some to be born, as they say, with a silver spoon in their -mouths, and the witty have made play with the thought that the wise -child chooses rich parents. - -Sam Branstone lacked the completeness of that wisdom. He was born in -one of those disconsolate streets of Manchester down which the stranger, -passing by tram along a main road, hardly more delectable than its -offshoots, looks and shudders; but was born with this difference from -the many--that he was son to Anne Branstone, a notable woman, and wisdom -may be conceded him for the discrimination of his choice. - -If, however, it was Anne who gave him birth and started him in life, it -was Mr. Councillor Travers who set him on his way from the mean street -of his birth and started his career, and the circumstance which led -to the intervention of Mr. Travers was due, not to Anne, but to the -occupation of Tom Branstone. - -Sam’s father, Tom, was a porter at Victoria Station, Manchester, and -there was just time between morning and afternoon school for young Sam -to snatch a meal himself and to carry his father’s dinner to him in a -basin tied up in a bandanna handkerchief. In those days Victoria was -an open station and a favourite dinner-hour lounge with boys from the -neighbouring Grammar School. The attractions were partly the trains, -partly the large automatic machines which delivered a packet of sweet -biscuits in return for a penny. First one lunched frugally on the -biscuits and pocketed the balance of one’s lunch allowance to buy knives -and other essentials, then one savoured the romance of a large station -from which trains went to Blackpool and to the Yorkshire moors. Often -one saw sailors on the through trains from Liverpool to Newcastle. One -found secluded ends of platforms and ran races with luggage trucks. -One was rather a nuisance, especially when one wrestled hardily at the -platform’s giddy edge and a train came in. - -Sam, as a porter’s son, was on the other side of the fence. He did not -lark at Victoria Station, and took his opinions of those who did from -his father, adding, perhaps, a touch of jealousy against these chartered -libertines who wore the silver owl upon their caps of dual blue. - -That day he had delivered Tom’s dinner to him in the porters’ room and -was retracing his steps down the platform when he saw two of the Grammar -School boys emerge in a confused whirl of battle and sag, interlocked, -towards the line, hopelessly unconscious in their struggle of an -incoming train. They reached the edge, deaf to all warning cries, and -long before help could reach them, fell over it in one entangled mass. -One boy, aroused to a sense of their common danger, was on his feet -nimbly enough and across the line to safety: the other, Lance Travers, -stayed where he fell, with a leg broken against the rail. Wits left the -first lad; he could only howl as the engine swept inexorably on, and -adult help, though active, could not avail in time. Sam had no precise -recollection of what followed, and certainly acted on impulse. He dived -to the line and dragged the injured boy across, escaping death for both -by the skin of his teeth. - -After that, all was confusion: an ambulance; inquiries; names taken and -so on; and Sam only came to himself when he discovered that he was being -punished for arriving late at school. It struck him as unfair, but he -did not realize that he was a hero till the evening paper told him -so. He, Samuel Branstone, had his name in the paper! Glory could go -no further, because those were the dark ages of journalism, before the -photograph illustrated all, and to read one’s name in print was then the -apogee. We have moved since those dull days, when “heart interest” was -still to be in vented. - -What profound satisfaction Anne Branstone found in that sober paragraph -her son was not to know. She did not think it good for him to know, but -she went about her house with softened eyes, and Sam heard her singing -more than once; so per haps he may have guessed that she was pleased -with him. - -It was more than she allowed Mr. Oscar Travers to guess, he was Lance’s -father, an estate agent with a good suburban practice, and Anne met him -at the door in a way which would have marred Sam’s future had Travers -not known that Lancashire women are apt to be undemonstrative. She found -a portly gentleman on the doorstep and thought he wore a patronizing -air. They resent patronage in Lancashire. - -As a matter of fact, Travers had come to see what he could do for the -lad who had saved his boy’s life. That may be patronage, but he was -thinking of it as the barest decency. - -“Good evening,” he said; “my name is Travers.” - -“This is a nice upset,” she said, without inviting him to come in. -“How’s your son?” - -“He’s doing very well, thank you.” - -“Oh? Well, it’s more than he deserves.” - -He did not argue that. “I wonder,” he said, “if you would allow me to -come in, or would you prefer me to return when your husband is at home?” - -“He’s at home now. It’s his early night. He’s having his tea.” - -“Shall I return when he has finished?” asked Travers with a nice -tactfulness. He knew the curious delicacy against being seen eating -by one of a superior class, as if that natural function were a deed -of shame. But Anne was for short cuts and she never considered Tom’s -feelings overmuch. - -“If you’ve owt to say,” she said, “you’d better come in and get it -over.” - -“I have something to say,” said Travers, entering. “Ah,” he added, as he -caught sight of Sam, “this is----?” - -“It’s him,” Anne interrupted. She might have been identifying a -criminal. - -“May I shake your hand?” he asked, and shook it heartily, ignoring -Anne’s muttered protest that the hand had not been washed for hours. “I -think you’re a very plucky lad.” He could have, said more than that, -and felt that as an expression of his gratitude it was hopelessly -inadequate, but Anne’s eyes forbade effusiveness, and he wanted to -propitiate Anne. He had something to propose which he had thought they -would agree to rapturously, but was not so sure about the rapture now. -For some reason, he had imagined that Sam would be one of a large family -and was disappointed to find no evidence of other children about -the room A large family would have made his proposal more certain of -acceptance. - -“Any brothers and sisters, Sam?” he asked; but Sam was tongue-tied, -while Anne was silently but unmistakably asking Travers what business -of his that was. However, Tom knew his place. Travers belonged with the -tipping public, whose questions one answered. - -“He has an elder sister, sir. Our Madge. She works out.” She was, in -fact, a general servant. - -Travers felt his confidence ebb fast, both at this information and at -Anne’s austere disapprobation of Tom’s communicativeness. He felt it was -suggested to him that his visit was irrelevant, that Anne, this small -woman, not uncomely, with her hands on her hips, and her black hair -tightly combed into a ridiculous knob at the back, was, in fact, a rock, -and that the impulses and desires of the two hulking men, Travers and -Tom Branstone, would break in ineffectual foam against her adamantine -resolution. - -She glared formidably, hating a “fuss,” judging Travers, who had invaded -her home for the purpose of making a fuss. - -“Indeed,” said Travers, marking time and hardly attempting to conceal -his dismay. The longer he spent in Anne’s presence, the more uneasy he -became. She seemed to divine his purpose, and to be telling him silently -what she thought of him for having such a purpose. He had, indeed, -banked on a large family; porters, he had felt certain, were prolific, -and you may subtract one child from a family of ten without much -heart-burning, whereas an only son is a serious matter. But time brought -no graciousness to Anne’s attitude. She even ignored the sacred rites of -hospitality; though tea was on the table, she had not asked him to have -a cup. So he gave up temporizing and decided to broach his purpose at -once, before Anne reduced him to complete incoherence. - -“Of course,” he said, “you know me already as Lance’s father. I don’t -know whether you happen to have heard of me beyond that?” Anne admitted -nothing, and as it was to her he spoke, it did not matter that Tom, who -had naturally spent a gossipy afternoon, was trying to signify that -he realized the importance of Travers. “I’m an estate agent, if you -understand what that means.” - -Anne nodded grimly. “Rent-collector said big,” she defined. - -“Well,” said Travers, intending to suggest an amended definition and -then thinking better of it. “Well, yes. I’m in the Council, too, you -know. Well, now, Mrs. Branstone, I happen to be a widower and Lance is -my only son. He means a great deal to me, and when I think how near I -came to losing him this afternoon, how certainly I had lost him hut for -the splendid presence of mind of this young hero here, I feel I owe a -debt which I can never hope to pay.” - -“Mr. Travers,” said Anne, “least said is soonest mended, and debts that -you can never hope to pay are best forgotten. It’s a kindly thought of -yours to come and look us up to-night, but I’m not in the Council, and -I’m no great hand at listening to long speeches. By your leave, we’ll -take the rest as said.” - -“By all means, Mrs. Branstone, so far as expressing my thanks goes. But -I have a suggestion to make. Lance, as I said, is my only son. He’s a -lonely boy, and he’d be the better for a companion of his own age about -the house. I was wondering if you would allow Sam to come and live with -us? I should send him with Lance to the Grammar School, and I think I -can promise that his future will be secured.” - -Sam’s heart gave a great leap. He, Sam Bran-stone, a Grammar School boy, -one of the elect, the Olympians whose play he had envied from afar! He -looked at Anne with glittering eyes, faint with hope. - -“Sam,” she said, “Mr. Travers wants you to leave us. He’s offering to -adopt you as his son. Tell him the answer.” - -Anne never doubted that she was mistress of her house, and perhaps -she did not doubt it now, but, for Sam, a child with the dreadful -sensibility of a child, this moment when she demanded calmly, -implacably, in the interests of discipline, that he should himself -pronounce sentence on his soaring hopes was of a pitiable bitterness -which brought him near the breaking-point. At one moment, to be raised -to the heavens of ecstasy, and at the next to be cast down to the -blackest hell of despondency; to be promised all, and to be expected -to refuse! He was not more callous than any other child, and Anne knew -perfectly well that a Land of Heart’s Desire had been opened to him. It -was not fair, and she knew that it was not fair, to ask him to speak the -word of refusal; but she thought that it was good for him, and once she -had, by her tone, if not by her actual words, indicated the reply which -she required, she knew that he would suppress his leaping hopes and -answer, in effect, that home, be it ever so humble, was home, and -parents, whatever their status, were parents. He had a wild impulse -to defy her, to tell her that he would come to see her on Saturday -afternoons, that to wear the cap with the silver owl was the dearest -ambition of his life, but he knew that it was hopeless. Even at such -a moment as this, and with such an ally as Mr. Travers, he dared not -challenge Anne. Her ascendancy was what it had always been, absolute. -He shuffled unhappily and tried to meet Mr. Travers’ eye bravely, -but succeeded only in looking up as far as the second button of his -waistcoat. - -“No,” said Sam Branstone, hero, and fled, a heartbroken, tear-washed -child, to hide his face and choke his sobs upon his pillow. And he was -named for valour in the evening paper! - -“No,” repeated Anne, when he had gone, and added, anticipating argument, -“I’m a woman of few words.” - -Travers knew he was fighting a losing engagement, but he had a shot in -the locker yet, and a hardy determination not to be worsted by the likes -of Anne Branstone. His pride was up, a pride which, over and above his -benevolence and his sense of the fitness of things, would not allow him -to regard the saving of his son’s life lightly. Travers counted, the -saviour of the son of Travers counted. He had offered to lift Sam -Branstone in one way, and if they would not let him do it in that way, -he would do it in another. Sam Branstone, willy nilly, was going to be -lifted. - -“I suppose,” he said, covering the retreat from his first position, -“that it is of no use pointing out to you the advantages which -my proposal offers to your son?” She shook her head. “Come, Mrs. -Branstone,” he went on, conscious that it was no use and platitudinous -at that, “we all have to make sacrifices for our children.” - -“I make them,” said Anne curtly. It was true. - -“Yet you will not make this?” - -She was thoughtful for a moment, and Travers began to hope that he was -making an impression. “I’m sure that it’s Genesis twenty-two,” she said, -“but I disremember the verse.” - -“Genesis,” he repeated, mystified. - -“Abraham and Isaac,” she explained her allusion. “Some sacrifices aren’t -looked for from us, and the Lord sent an angel to say so in those days, -but I’ve to be my own angel in these.” - -“But Abraham,” he said, “was going to sacrifice his son to the Lord.” - -“And I won’t,” she said, conveying her opinion of Travers, who had tried -to “come God Almighty over her,” as she expressed it later to Tom. But -Travers was not to be rebuffed. He had come to play Providence to Sam -(and so far granted that her allusion was apposite), but his providence -could compromise. He wasn’t an absolute Jehovah. - -“If Sam may not be Lance’s home companion,” he said, “at least let -them be school companions. Let me pay his fees at the Grammar School, -and----” He was going to add “for appropriate clothes,” but something -in Anne’s attitude told him that he had gone far enough, and he stopped -short with the completion of his sentence in mid air. - -Anne believed in education. She wasn’t convinced that a Grammar School -education was superior, as education, to a Parish School, but its -associations were. It gave a chance of “getting on” which transcended -anything the Parish School could offer. It was a start in life which set -one automatically above the lower rungs of the ladder. - -“Yes,” she said, but said it with a difficulty which Travers noted and, -indeed, applauded. He was Lancastrian himself, and honoured her for her -independence. He knew the mother-pride, the fierce individualism which -she had subdued before she had consented to take a favour even for her -son who earned it, and wasted no more words. “I’m glad,” he said. “Good -night,” and, shaking hands, was gone. - -“Finish your tea, Tom,” she said to her husband who had suspended -operations during the interview. “I want to clear away.” She stood a -moment pensively. “I’m a weak woman,” she decided. - -Tom Branstone ate his tea, reserving judgment. - - - - -CHAPTER II--WHERE THE SHOE PINCHED - -|WHEN Anne Branstone set her hand to the plough she ploughed deep, and -it was not her fault if the harvest was not immense. But she did not -misdirect her energy; she made certain that the seed was good seed -before she harnessed her plough. To drop metaphor, she let young Sam -prove that he was worth troubling over before she took trouble--trouble, -that is, as Anne understood the word. Of course, she sent him “decent” - to the Grammar School, and if that meant that she and Madge went without -new spring hats that year, well, last year’s hats must do. It was no -great matter, and the greater pride swallowed up the less. Mr. Travers -paid the fees, so that her son could associate with his, and Anne saw to -it thoroughly that, in externals, Sam should be worthy to associate with -Lance. - -That was the beginning, and Sam, so far, was untried metal. Then, at -the end of his first term, he came out top of his form at the July -examinations, and, after that, Anne began to take things seriously. - -It was not pure ability which brought Sam to that proud eminence so much -as the fact that he had been put in a form whose standard was really too -low for him, and he had not worked over hard at lessons, being naturally -preoccupied, in a first term, with finding his feet. Nor had that -been too difficult. The Manchester Grammar School was a democratic -institution. Schoolboys, anyhow, are not all snobs, and, in this -instance, the presence amongst the paying boys of a leaven of Foundation -Scholars, often from homes as poor as Sam’s, made acclimatization easy -for him. - -But his feat impressed Anne, though all she said, when the lists came -out with the name of “Branstone, S.” at the head of II. Alpha, was, “Of -course!” as if any other place were impossible for a son of hers; and -it decided her that Sam would “pay for” taking trouble. She proceeded to -take trouble. - -Tom Branstone’s first real inkling of what was passing in Anne’s mind -came to that good, easy man when he mentioned that his holidays were due -in a fortnight. - -“You’ll take a holiday at home this year, my lad,” she informed him. - -“But why’s that, Anne?” he asked. “Blackpool’s in the same place as it -was, and I get privilege passes on the line.” - -“Sam’s not in the same place, though,” she said. “He’s at the Grammar -School. It’s a place where other boys wear decent clothes, and I’ll see -that Sam shan’t fall behind them.” - -Tom took a holiday at home, varied with trips on the foot-plates of -friendly engine-drivers, and fortified his soul with the consolations of -tobacco. They were consolations which were not to be vouchsafed to him -much longer. Tobacco cost money, and Anne had need of it. - -In spite of Travers’ generosity--or of as much of it as she could bring -herself to accept--it was not an easy thing for Anne to keep her son at -the Grammar School. It was desperately difficult, but Anne was Anne. The -boy had his foot on the educational ladder, and she meant him to go to -the top, rung by rung and scholarship by scholarship. When Sam took -his honours degree at Oxford, Anne would relax; till then, she was -a crusader. She sacrificed all to that ambition. Sam should have his -chance, at no matter what cost to her, to Tom and to Madge. The boy must -be as well dressed as his fellows, and he must play their games. Games -are an essential part of English education, and Anne, with her constant -eye to the main chance, recognized the importance of the playing-fields -in cementing friendships with boys who might be useful to Sam in after -life. But games are expensive, and Tom gave, up smoking when Sam was -put into his class eleven. Anne gave up nothing. She had nothing more to -give. - -Honestly, Sam was grateful. Anne did not boast to him of the sacrifices -which they all made, but with the candour which distinguishes -working-class homes where anything but bare necessity is exceptional, he -was aware of every move, of all their deprivation, and did his best to -square accounts. But it was not a brilliant best, and after that first -term, Anne never repeated the satisfaction of seeing her son carry away -a form prize on Speech Day at the Free Trade Hall. He was a worker, a -safe plodding “swot,” taking by sheer application a respectable place in -the lists, but never heading them again, and especially he was weak at -mathematics. - -That troubled Anne distressingly. Mathematics appeared to her the -corner-stone of education, though in truth they mattered little to -Sam, who had followed Lance to the Classical side of the school, where -mathematics were an unconsidered trifle. But Anne recked nothing of -that. She had found the heel of her Achilles, and set herself to make -that vulnerable place secure. You are to picture Anne, with her forty -years of a working woman’s life behind her, wrestling with algebra and -trigonometry, blazing a trail for Sam to follow. It was heroic and, by -some mental freak, successful. She taught herself, then tutored him, -and it was not Sam who scraped through to an average place in the -mathematics examinations, but Anne in Sam. Day after day, in the -intervals of cook ing, cleaning, washing, she studied the text-books -which so puzzled him, and at night explained their knotty points to him -with a wonderful clarity. She had no education in particular, nothing -but a general capacity and a monstrous will--a will that surmounted the -obstacle of acquiring knowledge at an age when few can learn, and the -greater obstacle of patient teaching to a boy who had a blind spot for -mathematics. She illumined his darkness, but perhaps she hampered his -classics and made her hopes of Oxford visionary. - -Slowly and painfully, as the terms went by, with Branstone, S. rising -steadily in the school, but keeping regularly to his mediocre place in -class, Anne acknowledged to herself that her goose was not a swan. It -made her the more eager to cultivate what she called the social side; -and through that she met with a defeat. - -From the beginning, Sam’s rise in the world had borne heavily on Madge, -his sister, who was of an age for gaiety and of a mind untouched by -ambition, personal or vicarious. When Sam went to the Grammar School, -Madge was in service and very content. Anne had her out of that at once; -she wasn’t going to run the risk of Madge being the servant in the house -of one of Sands school companions. It was unusual, but Madge preferred -service, where she was lucky in her employers, to the weaving-shed, -where she had free evenings, but strenuous days with no gossiping -callers at the back door to break their monotony. And it became a -considerable question in Madge’s mind whether she would now be able -to outface Anne in the matter of George Chappie. Anne required a -presentable brother-in-law for Sam. - -Like Madge, George was unambitious, except that he wanted her, which -was ambition of a kind. Madge was small, like her mother, but derived -in most else from her father. She had freckles and carroty hair, and -the makings of a querulous shrew, but George saw otherwise, and desired -Madge to have and to hold, for better for worse, and didn’t perceive -that the odds were heavily against its being better. He was a wisp of -a man himself, and thought he was enterprising because he was a -window-cleaner; window-cleaning was a new trade then. But Anne did not -concur with that opinion, and Madge was in no very sanguine frame of -mind when George came in one night with an “It’s now or never” look -unmistakably in his eye. The trouble was that Anne was not the sort of -mother one defied with impunity. - -He came in shyly enough--a determined George was a contradiction in -terms--but plucked up courage at once when he found that she was -alone but for Sam. Sam’s presence was inevitable, but need not be -acknowledged. In a house, not, indeed, of one room, but of one fire and -one gas-jet, Sam had grown apt at insulating himself when he sat with -his books at the table. The business of the house went on, so did Sam’s -studies, and neither interfered with the other. Sam, absorbed in his -construe of Cicero’s _De Senectute_ for the morrow, was absolutely -unconscious of Madge and George. - -It was not Sam who troubled George, but Madge had truth with her when -she told her suitor that he looked worried. George jerked his thumb -vaguely streetwards. “It’s her again,” he explained. “I can’t think -why God made landladies. I ask you, Madge, is another blanket in this -weather a thing to fly into a temper about?” - -“It’s cold,” said Madge. “Won’t she give you another?” - -“I don’t know yet whether she’ll give me one or not. But she’s had my -last word. Another blanket or I’ll flit.” - -“You’ve threatened that so often.” - -He admitted it. “I know. It takes an earthquake to shift some folks, and -I reckon I’m one of them. I stay where I’m set.” And his tone implied -that conservatism was an admirable virtue. - -Madge did not think so. “That’s what my mother says of you,” she -observed, a trifle tartly. - -“It’s no lie, either,” he placidly agreed. “Seems to me,” he went on, -with a look, ardent but appealing, at Madge, “that there’s only one -thing will flit me from Mrs. Whitehead’s. You couldn’t give a guess at -it, could you?” - -“Yes, I could,” said Madge brazenly. After all, she was Anne’s daughter, -and direct. Then, despite herself, she fenced coyly: “You’re leaving the -town, I reckon, Mr. Chappie.” - -He stood aghast at the revolutionary thought. “Nay,” he said earnestly. -“I’m set here and I’ll not leave willing. There’s something to keep me -where I am.” - -“Your job’s not worth so much,” she said, misunderstanding wilfully. - -“It’s steady, though,” he defended it, “and a growing trade. My master’s -getting a lot of window-cleaning contracts all over the town. But -it’s not my job that keeps me here. It’s------” He dropped his cap and -fumbled for it nervously, somehow finding a sort of courage in the act, -so that when he rose he faced her with a spirit which was, for him, -quite debonair. “Now, you’ll not stop me, will you? I’ve come on purpose -to get this off my chest and I’ve worked myself up to a point. I’m a bit -slow at most things and I’m easily put off, so I’ll ask you to give my -humble request a patient hearing.” - -Madge looked at him acutely, and decided that his resolution was strong -enough to survive something that she very much wanted to say. “I’d -rather this didn’t come straight on top of a row with your landlady,” - she said. - -“Aye,” he agreed, “I can see your meaning, but it’s that that roused me -to point. Love’s like a pan of soup with me. It’s got to seethe a while -before it boils. But I’m boiling now, and I’m here to tell you so. I’ve -loved you since I saw you, Madge. After Sunday School one day it was, -with a wind on that blew the bonny curls across your eyes. I always -fancied gold and you’re gold twice over.” Madge was deeply moved at this -idealization of her hair. She had been made more peevishly conscious of -its redness than ever by the unsparing comments of the weaving-shed, but -she did not see wherein she was gold twice over until he explained it. -“I didn’t notice that the first day. I only saw your hair. I hadn’t the -nerve to come close enough to see the colour of your eyes. But when I -did, and found them all gold-brown as well, that finished me. I was deep -in love to the top of my head. Drowned in it, you might say.” - -“You’re talking a lot of nonsense, George,” said Madge, with a fond -appreciation that belied her words. - -“I’m telling you I love you,” he said, “and I’m asking if there’s -anything that you could see your way to tell me in return. I know I’m -not smart, Madge, but I’d work my fingers off to make you happy. Can’t -you say you love me, lass? Not,” he added, “if it isn’t true, of course. -I wouldn’t ask you to tell a lie even to oblige me.” - -“It might not be a lie,” said Madge softly, “but----” She paused so that -he was left to guess the rest. - -“But,” he suggested, “you don’t care to go so far as to say it?” - -He watched her timidly, with courage oozing out of him. She had all but -given him to hope, but now it appeared she had no more to say. “Well, I -can understand,” he said, half turning towards the door. “I’m not much -of a chap, and you might easily have put me down much harder than you -did. It’s soft letting now, by reason of your tactful ways. I’ll... I’ll -go and see if Mrs. Whitehead has given me yon other blanket.” - -He was at the door before she stopped him. “George!” she said, “come -back. You’re getting this all wrong. You know about my brother.” George -nearly smiled. “It’ud not be your mother’s fault if I didn’t,” he said. - -“No,” she said; “I suppose everybody knows about his going to the -Grammar School. They don’t all know what it means.” Madge was trying to -be loyal to the family ideal, she was trying not to be bitter, but it -wasn’t easy. It was one thing to go without new hats and the accustomed -ways of service, but another to go without George. - -“I’d like you to understand that this family puts itself about a bit for -Sam’s sake. We think he’ll go a long way up in the world, and the rest -of us aren’t doing anything to keep him down. None of us, no matter how -it hurts. Are you seeing what I mean?” - -He saw. “I’m not class enough for you,” he said. - -It was a part, but not the whole, of her meaning, and Madge wanted -no misapprehensions. “You’re class enough for me,” she said, “but I’m -telling you where the doubt comes in. It’s a habit we’ve got in this -family. We think of Sam.” That made the matter plain; she loved him, and -while he granted there was a certain impediment through Anne’s habit of -subordinating everything to Sam’s interests, he saw no just cause why he -should not marry Madge. “I wouldn’t knowingly do anything to upset your -mother,” he said, “but I’ve told you I’m boiling with my love for you. -I’m easily put off my purpose as a rule. I mean to say, supposing I ask -Mrs. Whitehead for a kipper for my tea, and she tells me eggs are cheap -and she’s got an egg instead, I don’t make a song about it--so long as -the egg’s not extra stale. But I’ll own I didn’t think of Sam in this. I -thought it was for you and me to settle by ourselves.” - -“Sam’s in it,” said Madge dully. “He’s in everything in this house.” - -Then Anne came in and the disturbance of her entrance, together with the -fact that he had finished his passage of “_De Senectute_” made Sam aware -that something was toward. He kept his eyes discreetly on his book, -but fluttered the pages of his dictionary no more. He found youth more -arresting than old age. - -Anne’s quick comprehension took the situation in at once. She had been -shopping, and as she put her parcels on the dresser she gave Madge the -benefit of a wordless reproof. She could say a good deal without opening -her mouth, and said it. But Madge was not going to be parted from her -George without a fight. Sam apart, George was eligible, and Madge saw -this as an unique occasion--the occasion for leaving Sam out. At least, -she meant to try. - -George was turned craven at sight of Anne and sidled to the door. “I’ll -be getting on home, I think,” he said. - -“You wait your hurry,” said Madge hardily. “Mother, George has been -asking me to wed him.” - -It was the gage of battle, for Anne knew the fact already. The statement -of it was a challenge. She met it coolly. “Has he?” she said. “Well, I -hope you told him gently.” - -And at that George found his second wind of courage, and intervened like -a man. “She’s told me nothing with her tongue. Nothing for certain. But -a blind man on a galloping horse could read the thoughts of her. Mrs. -Branstone, I love that girl as if she’d put a spell on me. It’s the -biggest feeling that’s come into my life, and I’m full and bursting with -it, or I’d not have the face to expose my inside thoughts to you like -this. And if you’ll only tell me I can take her, the Mayor in his -carriage won’t be happier than me.” - -“You know how steady George is, mother,” Madge seconded him. - -“He needs to be,” said Anne dryly. “He’s a window-cleaner.” - -“I’m steady by nature, Mrs. Branstone, as well as trade. I don’t drink. -Somehow one glass of ale is enough to make me whimsical, so I take none -at all. I know I’m being bowdacious in my love, but I’m moved to plead -with you. We’d not be standing in Sam’s way. We’d live that quiet and -snug you’d never know we’re in the town at all.” Anne looked at him with -a faint trace of appreciation drenched in her profound contempt. A -poor creature, but he had his thimbleful of spunk! “It would need to be -quiet,” she said, “with two to keep on your wage. Are you contented with -it?” - -Disastrously, he was. “It’s a regular job,” he said, voicing his pride -at being above the ranks of casual workers. In Anne’s view, a hopeless -case. - -“It’s a regular rotten job,” she retorted, but spoke more softly than -her wont. “I’ve Sam to consider, Madge. You might live quiet, but Sam’s -brother-in-law has got to make a better show of it than to be seen all -over the place at the top of a ladder like a monkey on a stick. I’m not -being hard on you, George Chappie, and I’ve nothing against you bar that -you’re not good enough. You better yourself and you’ll do. Stay as you -are, and Madge’ull do the same.” - -George opened his mouth to speak, but found that nothing came. It _was_ -a regular job, it satisfied his ambitions, and her objections were -inexplicable. He had shot his bolt and, having no more to say, he went, -relapsing to such invertebracy that when he found that Mrs. Whitehead -had not added the other blanket to his bed he had nothing to say to her -either, but spread a threadbare overcoat on the coverlet and shivered -unhappily to sleep. - - - - -CHAPTER III--THE HELL-PIKE CLUB - - -|TO a schoolboy of sixteen, love is an imbecile emotion, its victims -harmless lunatics, and it is not to be supposed that Sam’s interest in -the affair of Madge and George was based on intimate understanding. His -conspiratorial action came rather as a lark: behind, perhaps, was the -recognition that adults did habitually make fools of themselves in -this way, that his loyalty in such a case was to Madge who was of his -generation, and that Anne in obstructing their marriage was outrunning -the constable in her demands for self-sacrifice on his behalf. - -Larking, defined as enjoyable interference with other people for -motives either benevolent or purely egotistic, was a weakness of Samuel -Branstone, and the boy was father to the man. He did not agree with Anne -that the marriage was inimical to his interests. True, George cleaned -windows and balanced hardily at the top of swaying ladders, a precarious -trade, but his own. Apparently it suited the Georgian temperament, and -that funambulist would not wear a placard on his back proclaiming that -he was brother-in law to Branstone of the Classical Fifth. - -Branstone, who was going to rise in the world, would necessarily have -poor relations, and it hardly mattered how poor. Indeed, the poorer they -were the more cheaply he could afterwards play providence to them, since -their standards would be low and their expectations small. - -So it wasn’t a nice, impulsive lark, but coldblooded and calculated, -which is almost as objectionable in a lark as organization in Charity. -It is prudent good intentions that pave the way to Hell. - -He saw that there was a difference between this and the elopements -of that romantic literature with which he busied his relaxed hours: -sometimes the lady, but always the lover, was enterprising, while he -knew that George could never instigate anything. But that made things -more amusing for Sam, who could pull strings with absolute assurance -that his puppets would never take to dancing on their own account, or -to any tune but the one he piped; and it is not given to all of us to be -Omnipotence at the price of a ten-pound note. - -As always, Sam had luck. In the romantic elopements whose technique he -began to study with new interest, money was never a difficulty, but the -god in the machine of George Chappie’s elopement must put money in his -purse, or there could be no elopement. - -Sam liked money, but he must have liked power more, for, coming -miraculously into money at this time, he devoted it to this end. He -came into money because journalism was swiftly on the up grade since the -days, four years ago, when it couldn’t show its readers a photograph of -Sam Branstone, hero, in the evening paper, and had reached the civilized -stage of picture competitions. - -You bought a weekly paper which printed six crude wood-cuts supposed to -disguise the names of (say) famous battles, and it did not strain your -intellect to discover that the picture of a station with “Waterloo” - beneath its clock was intended to represent the battle of that name. -But pause: it was not all so easy as that. Inflamed by avarice and the -childish ease of identifying the battles in the first series, you bought -the next week’s number, and the next, until the competition closed, and -you found that the designs were increasingly baffling. It was not quite -money for nothing. It called for some knowledge of history and a sort -of knack in cheap wit to interpret the pictures. A garden syringe, and -a stage Irishman brandishing something that might easily be a cudgel -but wasn’t, represented, in fact, the not very renowned battle -of Seringapatam, and there were pictures which could bear two -interpretations. - -It was this last which led Sam to go into partnership with Lance -Travers. Both partners admitted that Sam’s wits were the sharper, so -it was only fair that Lance should finance the partnership and buy the -papers. And Sam, sanguine of winning, but desiring secrecy, preferred -that the firm should be registered in Lance’s name, so that if and when -Sam became a capitalist, he and not Anne should control his wealth. His -ideas of the uses of capital already went beyond the Post Office Savings -Bank. - -The weekly paper’s object was to increase its circulation, so it allowed -and encouraged competitors to send in numerous attempts, and printed -ambiguous drawings to tempt to prodigality. It is to be feared that -Classics suffered an eclipse at this period of journalistic enterprise. -The partners had other and more serious objects in life. And they won! -They won the second prize. It wasn’t a house or a motor-car or any of -the fantastic prizes with which still later journalism rewarded its -intelligent readers, but they divided twenty pounds and, for them, ten -pounds each was paradise enow. Lance bought a bicycle. Sam didn’t. He -bought a wedding-ring, and he had a talk with Sarah Pullen, who was so -passionately Madge’s bosom friend that she had gone into the mill with -her. - -Sarah received him coldly; she looked upon him as the cause of her -friend’s martyrdom and thought the cause unworthy. - -Sam cleared the air at once. “I’m on Madge’s side. I’m not going to see -her made unhappy for my sake,” he said, and Sarah relented so far as to -absolve him of personal malignity. - -“Much you can do to help it, though,” she said. “I _can_ do much,” he -replied, “but,” he flattered her, “perhaps you can do more. You see, -Sarah,” he went on confidentially, “Madge trusts you and she doesn’t -trust me. Now, between ourselves, she needs a friend’s advice. Put -yourself in her place. Would you knuckle under to your mother?” - -“I’d see her further first,” said Sarah. - -“I wonder,” said Sam, “if you could see your way to communicating your -views to Madge without mentioning that I suggested it?” - -“You!” said Sarah. “You! It’ud take a dozen your size to suggest -anything to me. Get off home and play marbles, or I’ll give you a slap -on th’ earhole that you’ll remember.” - -They didn’t play marbles in the Classical Fifth, but Sam was content to -put her allusion down to ignorance rather than deliberate insult. He -had gained his point: the atmosphere he desired created was about to he -created. - -He left that pot to simmer and turned his mind to George, whom he judged -less susceptible than Madge to the promptings of a friend. Besides, he -knew no friend of George, and confessed himself at fault. - -One day, shortly before the Whitsuntide holidays, he was staring -gloomily out of the window at the top of the stairs outside the Fifth -Form room, watching the boys of the Chetham’s Hospital at play in that -yard of theirs which the Grammar School pretends to scorn but secretly -envies, when he heard behind him a conversation between Lance Travers -and Dubby Stewart which set his brain awhirl. Yet it was not a -distinguished conversation. - -“Who ever heard of anyone in Manchester staying at home in Whit week?” - asked Lance. - -Sam had heard, often. - -“It isn’t done,” said Dubby, who had earned that abiding name when he -was in the Lower Third, and once read “dubious” aloud with a short “u.” - -“But I’ve to do it,” said Lance. “My governor’s too busy to get away. -Bit damnable, isn’t it?” - -“Matter of fact,” said Dubby, “we’re not going, either.” - -And it presently appeared that out of the form of twenty-four boys there -were as many as six who lived in Manchester and were not going away. “It -will be hell,” prophesied one of the unfortunates. - -“It needn’t,” said Sam Branstone, turning from the window to the -mournful group. - -“You’re used to it. We’re not,” said someone cruelly, and Lance smacked -his head. Allusions to anybody’s poverty were bad form. - -“What’s the prescription?” asked Dubby, and Sam was silent for a minute. -“Watch him. Something’s dawning,” chaffed Dubby. It wasn’t dawning, it -had dawned; but at first it looked like a risk, and then much less like -one, and Sam smiled beautifully as he realized that he, at least, had -all to gain and nothing to lose. He drew the luckless five mysteriously -aloof. - -“The prescription,” he said, “is to have a holiday in Manchester, in -a holiday house.” He let that soak for a minute, and then, “Our own -house,” he added. “There are six of us. We join together and we take -a house. A small house, and I daresay some of you won’t like the -neighbours, but as the neighbours won’t like us, that’s as broad as it’s -long. Swagger neighbours wouldn’t stand us anyhow, and the smaller the -house the smaller the rent. Something like four-and-six a week is my -idea. That’s nine-pence a week for each of us, and we’ve a house of our -own for that to do what we like in.” - -“By Jove!” said someone admiringly. - -“What shall we call it?” said another, a trifle doubtfully. - -“Call it?” said Lance. “That’s obvious. The Hell-fire Club.” - -And, of course, if any doubt remained, that settled it. Who would regret -the seaside if he could be a member of the Hell-fire Club? Lance was -commissioned to negotiate with his father, the estate agent, but it was -Sam who really chose their house. It was a house which in Sam’s opinion -excellently suited the requirements of a young married couple of the -window-cleaning class. Mr. Travers told Lance that he would stop the -value of any damage out of his pocket-money, and on those conditions let -them the house. But he need not have made that cautionary threat; Sam -saw that there was no damage. - -The Hell fire Club assembled for its initiatory debauch on the first day -of the holidays, and by eleven a.m. three inexpert cigarette-smokers had -had occasion to use the slopstone as a vomitorium. It left them feeling -chilly, and Dubby suggested that a house-warming without a fire was a -solecism, even on a hot day, so a lavish plutocrat brought in two sacks -of coal and a supply of chips. Firelighting is a sport out of which a -certain excitement can be derived, but only for a short time, and the -same evanescent quality attaches to the pleasure of sitting on bare -boards. - -“I’m too stiff to be happy,” said Lance. “I vote we furnish this club.” - -Carried, _nem. com_. “I’m afraid, though,” said Sam, “that I shall not -be able to contribute much.” - -“Wait till you’re asked, my son,” said Dubby. “By the time we five have -finished looting our homes, this place will be a little palace.” - -Loot is a brave word, suggestive of the treasures of the purple -East, but it was, in most instances, a case of permitted loot, the -offscourings of lumber rooms. Sandy Reed, however, was the sort of boy -who is happiest with a hammer in his hand, and Dubby had an eye for -chintz. To repair the veteran furniture which they brought struck Sandy -as work for a man. Behind him was his infantile past of fret-work -and model yachts; before him the foremanship of the Hell-fire Club -repair-shop. He worked and was the cause of work in others. And it was -willing work, partly because it was for an idea, partly because that -first day had threatened boredom and here was something definite to do, -mostly because it was making a noise. - -The ill-assorted chairs, tables and sofas which they collected under -their roof had this in common at the end, that they were strong; and -having by their own efforts made them strong, the boys did not by -their rioting make them weak again. They respected their handiwork, and -Dubby’s chintz procured a sort of uniformity. - -A club, of course, must eat and drink, and kitchen utensils, mostly odd -but all practicable, were gathered together that they might precede the -pleasures of eating with the pleasures of cooking. It was camp-life in -town, except that they went home to sleep, and so long as the activities -of “settling in” endured, they relished it abundantly. - -About a fortnight was what Sam had mentally set as the life of the -Hell-fire Club, and he had no intentions of paying the rent by himself -for more than a week or so. They had decided that Sunday was not a -club-day--there were difficulties at home--and Sam took George Chappie -for a walk. “I like this street,” he said as they turned the corner. -“Madge always fancied this district.” - -“Did she?” said George gloomily. - -“We’ll go in here,” and Sam produced the key and introduced George to -the Club premises. “What do you think of it?” - -The chintz took George’s eye at once. “By gum!” he said. - -“Sit down,” said Sam. “This is where you’re going to live when you’re -married to Madge. It isn’t your furniture yet, but it’s going to be. I’m -going to give it you for a wedding present. There isn’t a bed in, as you -see, but there will be, and I ask you, George, is it or is it not better -than Mrs. Whitehead’s?” - -“Aye,” said George, “but you’re going ahead a bit too fast for me.” - -“Not at all,” said Sam. “Yours is the pace that kills. The slow pace, -not the quick. Now, this place isn’t at your disposal yet, but if you’ll -put up the banns next Sunday and get married as soon as you can after -the three Sundays, you can walk in here and hang your hat up on that -hook. It’s a brass hook, George. We don’t approve of nails in this -house. I might mention that it will be all right about the banns. Mother -has dinner to cook on Sundays and doesn’t go to morning service, and -to-day is father’s Sunday off from the station and lie’s on duty for the -next three Sundays. So,” he concluded, “there you are.” - -“You’re promising a lot. Is this house yours?” - -“The rent is four-and-six,” said Sam, “which isn’t more than you can -afford to pay. And you bind yourself to nothing by putting up the banns. -If I fail to deliver you this house and all that’s in it, you needn’t -get married. But I’ve a word of advice for you, George. Let Madge hear -of it first from the parson’s lips in church. She won’t scream and she -won’t faint. We don’t, in our family, and it saves you the trouble of -asking her. Is it a bet?” - -George hesitated. “Come upstairs and see the other room,” said Sam. -George saw, and marvelled. “I’ll come round with you now to church,” - said Sam. “We’ve just nice time to catch the clerk after service.” - -“By gum!” said George Chappie. “I’ll do it. They can’t hang me. But,” he -added as he cast a last look at the household gods which Sam Bran-stone -promised should be his, “they may hang you.” - -Sam grinned blandly. - - - - -CHAPTER IV--THE COMPLEAT ANGLER - -|HE had succeeded with George beyond expectations, but that easy victory -did not deceive him into thinking that his battle was won. Madge, he had -said, would neither scream nor faint on hearing her banns announced and -he wished he was as confident about it as he had sounded. Much, in his -view too much, depended on the vigour of Sarah Pullen’s advice. - -He was taking risks all round, but found he rather liked it. There was -the risk that the Hell-fire Club would not tire of its toy in time. An -encouraging increase in absenteeism amongst the members elated him, -but the steadfast faith of an enthusiastic pair depressed him sadly. He -hoped, however, to find a way out of that wood. - -And there was the risk that some acquaintance of Anne’s would mention -the banns to her. He saw no way to counter that. It was a risk he had -to take. Fortunately, his father’s best friend, Terry O’Rourke, was a -Catholic. - -As things stood, he saw Madge as the weakest link in his chain. She -collapsed before the will of Anne like an opera hat, and he was candidly -afraid of her making a scene in church, either from pleasure or from -anger, when the banns were read. Not that he shrank on principle from -scenes, only that word of it would undoubtedly be carried to Anne and -the fat be in the fire. - -Rummaging one day that week at a second-hand bookstall in Withy Grove, -without the slightest intention of buying, he was attracted by a -title and recklessly planked his tuppence down. Intrigue, he felt, was -punishing his finances, but this title gave him too good an opening -with Madge to be the subject of economy. The title was “The Clandestine -Marriage,” and he knew that Sarah Pullen would be in that night to see -Madge. - -He was reading the play very earnestly when she called, though it rather -bored him and he thought its plot elementary compared with his own. -Sarah was no reader, but she noticed the cover because the word -“marriage” was an unfailing lure. - -“Whatever has the boy got hold of now?” She inquired, taking his bait -sweetly. - -He showed her. “Do you know what it means?” he asked. - -“I know what marriage means,” she said. - -“By hearsay,” he told the virgin pungently. “But I meant the middle -word.” - -She eyed it closely. “You’re always bragging your knowledge. I’m not at -the Grammar myself and Greek is Greek to me. Fat lot of good it’ud be in -a weaving-shed, and all.” She had a practical mind. - -“This isn’t Greek,” he said, “it’s English.” - -“It’s not the sort of English we talk in Manchester, choose how.” - -“I’ll tell you what it means.” - -“Wait till you’re asked, cheeky.” - -He didn’t wait. “It means surreptitious.” - -“I’m a grand sight the wiser for that. It’ll mean a thick ear for you -if you don’t stop coming the schoolmaster over me. I’m here to talk to -Madge, not to you.” - -He winked at Sarah with the eye which was hidden from Madge. “The Secret -Marriage, Sarah. That’s what it means.” - -Sarah was interested now. “Does it tell you how to work it?” - -“I might do that myself,” he said. - -“Don’t talk so foolish, Sam,” said his sister. “Are you coming for a -walk, Sarah?” - -“When I’m ready,” said Sarah. “Now then, young Sam, spit it out.” - -“Oh,” said Sam. “It isn’t much. Only I happened to be out for a walk -with George Chappie the other day and we went into a house that’s pretty -full of furniture.” - -“George Chappie with a house of furniture!” cried Madge. - -“I suppose he’s getting married,” said Sam. “He courted you at one time, -didn’t he, Madge? I rather liked his taste in furniture.” - -“Taste!” cried Madge with spirit. “I’ll taste him. I’ll eat him raw for -this. After all he said to me no more than a month ago, to take up with -another wench! What’s the hussy’s name?” - -“Her name?” said Sam. “Let’s see. Sunday to-morrow, isn’t it? The banns -might be up. If I were you I’d go and find out.” - -“As true as I’m alive I’ll tear every hair from her head,” said Madge. - -“I wouldn’t,” said Sam. “You have red hair, but better red than bald.” - -“Her!” said Sarah. “Do you mean----?” - -“Look here, Sarah,” Sam interrupted, and used a formula which he had -thought out rather carefully. “Do you imagine I’d be giving you a -message like this if he hadn’t sent it?” - -“Message! What message?” - -Then Anne came in. - -“Yes, Sarah,” she heard Sam saying with a pedagogic air. “The word -clandestine means secret.” He resumed with zest the reading of his play -and, though theirs was a small house, managed to avoid being alone with -Madge up to church time on the morrow. He had business out that Saturday -night--to make sure of George, whom he found full of panting resolution -to catch the clerk and cancel the banns. The glamour of that furniture -had lasted this long with George, but the awful hazard of the Sunday -morning eclipsed the glow as it came nearer. George wilted at the -thought of Madge rising in her place with a firm, irrevocable “I forbid -the banns” upon her lips. - -There had begun, too, to be a quality too much like that of an Arabian -night about his visit to the Club. Sam was a wonderful boy and George -granted his high superiority; but even George, the humble, did not quite -see Sam as a miracle-worker. He even began to doubt the existence of the -enchanted Palace which Sam had shown him, and that it was within Sam’s -competence to hand over that house to him appeared now ridiculous. Sam -came just in time. - -“Would you care,” he said, “to have another look at your house?” - -George would, but he hadn’t time then: he was going; to see the clerk, -and till he saw the clerk he was a man obsessed with an idea. “I -suppose,” he said sceptically, “that it’s still there?” - -“Of course,” said Sam, “and has a few more things in since you saw it.” - -“Well,” said George, “it’s a nice house, but I’m going to see yon clerk -to tell him not to put up banns.” - -Sam smiled, relieved to know that he was not too late. “Don’t do that,” - he said. “Madge is pleased.” - -“What!” said George. “Say that again.” - -“Madge is pleased,” repeated Sam brazenly. He was sure she was. He -trusted Sarah Pullen now. - -“Did she tell you so?” asked George. - -“Do you imagine I’d be giving you a message like this if she hadn’t sent -it?” - -George took his cap off. “If that’s so----” he said. - -“It’s so,” said Sam, not defining what was so. - -The banns went up, and Sam was able to devote his undivided attention to -Club affairs, as to which he had an idea arising out of the boredom he -suffered while reading “The Clandestine Marriage.” That tuppence was a -fruitful investment. - -A wet day came and with it, what was now rare, a full attendance at the -Club. But, since their repairs and decorations were complete, there was -nothing to do except to sit on their reliable chairs and admire their -reliability. - -“For a Hell-fire Club,” said Sandy, “we lack hellishness.” - -“Lance named us,” said Dubby. “He ought to make suggestions.” - -“Of a new name?” asked Sandy. “Call it the Eviscerated Emasculates.” - -“Call it a damned failure,” said another, and was sat upon. They -welcomed the diversion, but the thought had reached home. - -“What’s the matter,” said Sam, when order was restored, “is that we -aren’t serious enough.” - -“Oh, hell!” said Lance. - -“I mean it, Lance. We’re not a set of kids from the Lower School. If we -were, we might sit round and read Chums and the Boy’s Own Paper.” Two -men of the Classical Fifth and the Hell-fire Club looked guiltily at -him, but decided that he was not making personal allusions. “As it -is, we have higher interests. Now, there are six of us here and that’s -enough, with doubling, to take parts in a Shakesperian play. I vote we -read a play. In fact, I brought some down.” - -This suited Lance, who had aspirations towards the stage. “Bags I -Romeo,” he said. - -Sandy was less fired to enthusiasm, but, “All right,” he said, “if you -choose a play with lots of thick bits in it.” - -“We certainly,” said Sam, “shall not read an edition prepared for the -use of girls’ schoofs.” - -“_Merry Wives of Windsor_, then,” said Dubby. “Lance can spout Romeo out -of his bedroom window to stop a cat-fight.” - -Sam would have preferred a tragedy; he feared they would enjoy reading -The Merry Wives and so, on the whole, they did, but there were only five -promises to turn up next day and two of those were conditional upon its -being wet. Sam wasn’t dissatisfied, and as a comedy was postulated chose -_Much Ado about Nothing_, because he thought that it was dull in patches -and also for a reason of his own. He wanted to make certain that he had -nothing to learn as an intriguer from a famous case of match-making. He -found he had. - -Although it rained, _Much Ado_ had only four readers at the opening and -only two at the close. Lance sent postcards that night to the members -announcing _Hamlet_ for the morrow. He wanted to read Hamlet’s part, but -if you can’t have _Hamlet_ without the Prince, neither can you read it -satisfactorily with one other participant. - -Lance and Sam struggled through an act, then Lance gave in. “I’m getting -tired of this Club,” he said. “The members have no brain.” - -“It isn’t raining,” said Sam. - -“No. Lancashire’s batting, too. Let’s go and see Albert Ward and Frank -Sugg at Old Tafford.” - -Next day, the Club was uninhabited, except by the ghost of Sam’s -broadest smile, its only tenant for a week. The freeze-out was -accomplished, and its engineer had confidence enough to spend three -pounds of his capital on a bed and bedding, “to await instructions -before delivering.” Then he saw Lance Travers and pointed out to him -that there were better uses to be made of ninepence a week than to -waste it on a club which nobody used. - -“Nuisance, though, about the chairs and stuff,” said Lance, implying his -agreement that the Club had failed. - -“I can’t have them back here, because I’m turning our attic into an -aviary. That’s why I’ve had no time to go to the Club,” he explained -with a faint apology, and took Sam up to see his birds. - -“What shall we do about all that furniture at the Club? Pity the fifth -of November is so far off.” - -“I’ll try to think of something,” said Sam, rather terrified at Lance’s -incendiary suggestion. “In any case it must be discussed at a full -meeting. Let’s call the members together.” - -An urgent whip resulted in a full and slightly shame-faced attendance. -Nobody tried to dispute that the Club was a corpse: the only question -was what to do with its bones. “Well,” said Sam, “if none of you has -a suggestion to make, I’ll make one. Nobody’s aching to take the stuff -back where it came from. Now,” he went on candidly, “we _could_ sell it -to a dealer, but I’m against that because dealers are thieves and they’d -give us about thirty bob for the lot. But my sister’s getting married -and I don’t mind offering the Club five pounds for its property. That,” - he indicated, “is a pound each for the five of you.” - -“Cash on the nail?” asked Dubby, whose forebears came from Scotland. He -distrusted Sam in the character of capitalist. - -“Oh, yes,” explained the candid Sam. “You see, when I met Lance -yesterday I said I’d think of a way out of the difficulty and I came -prepared.” - -“I vote we take it,” said Sandy. “I can buy a lot of tools with a -pound.” - -“I don’t see why we should pander to your vices,” said Lance. “We’re -still a Club and this is club money.” - -“The Club is dead.” - -“Not yet. Not till we’ve killed it gloriously on Sam’s sister’s fiver. -There’s a hell of a bust in five pounds and we have to drink the bride’s -health. Champagne’s my drink.” - -It wasn’t, but it was rather too often his father’s, and Lance was -emulous, and, frightened a little of his own suggestion, carried things -now with a rush. “We’re the Hell-Fire Club,” he said, “and champagne is -the dew of Hell. Any member shirking will be held under the tap for half -an hour.” They braved it out, most of them conscience-stricken, and the -Hell-fire Club almost deserved its name in the hour of its extinction. -Things might have been serious had not Sam, by a well-timed push, caused -Lance to shatter a full magnum on the floor. - -As it was, five hangdog members reached home late, but presentable. But -they were most unhappy boys. The sixth boy was happy. He had consumed -a sober and interesting meal at other people’s expense, encountering -several delectable sorts of food for the first time and experiencing -that human but reprehensible thrill which results from feeling that one -is a clever fellow. - -Distance of course lent enchantment to the Hell-fire Club. When school -reassembled and boys fresh from the seaside tried to excite the jealousy -of the stay-at-homes with tales of land and sea, they were loftily put -in their places and struck to dumb admiration by legends of the dashing -vice of the Hell-fire Club. It lived in story as it had never lived in -fact. - -Sam visited the premises, on the day after the Club died, to wipe up -the mess, thriftily to salve some untouched edibles for a coming -wedding-feast, and by receiving and installing the bed to dedicate the -house to better uses. Then he put the key in his pocket and took it to -George. He had kept his bargain and now it was for George to keep his. - -There remained the question of Anne, and as a preliminary to its -solution Sam had recommended Madge to look peaked. Madge, naturally -inclined to that condition, had no difficulty in accentuating its -appearance by recourse to the vinegar bottle until even Anne, intolerant -as she was of small weaknesses, had to own that Madge looked unhappy and -unwell. - -On the night before her wedding, Madge shut herself up in her bedroom -whence the sounds as of a very ecstasy of woe penetrated to the kitchen. -Yet her woe was not ecstatic and hardly woe at all. She wept because -she was going to be married next day, because when one is going to -be married next day one weeps. One brims with undefinable emotion and -overflows into tears. - -But Anne, listening from the kitchen, where she sat with Sam, was moved -to unaccustomed softness. “That girl is fretting sadly,” she said. “It’s -a mort of trouble to be taking over a wastrel like George Chappie.” - -“Mother,” said Sam speculatively, “I wonder whether you have ever -considered the influence of matter over mind?” - -“I’m considering the influence of something that does not matter,” she -replied. “The influence of George Chappie.” - -“Suppose,” said Sam, “suppose that George Chappie lived in a decent -house of his own, with furniture that he took a pride in, instead of in -those awful lodgings of his. Don’t you think that he would live up to -his surroundings? Don’t you think that it would make a man of him?” - -“George Chappie is as far from having a decent house as he is from -wedding our Madge.” - -“That’s true,” said Sam, “as far--and as near.” - -“As near?” asked Anne suspiciously. “Sithee, Sam, have you been up to -something?” - -“Will you hear me out if I tell you a story?” he asked. - -“Am I going to like it?” she fenced cautiously. “I am hoping,” he said -piously, “to have your forgiveness. It’s a matter of happiness.” - -He told her what he had done and how and why he had done it. “The -wedding’s to-morrow,” he ended, “and I hope you’ll go.” He told his -exploit without arrogance and without extenuation, and it is not to be -supposed that Anne was unaware that a nice moralist would have found -much in it to criticize, but Sam had come out on top and that, for Anne, -almost excused his methods. It almost excused his coming out on top of -her. - -“I’ll go to the wedding,” she said, “and I’ll forgive them. They are -no more than a pair of naturals in the hands of a schemer.” Sam grinned -appreciatively. “But I’ll not let you down so easy,” she went on, and -the grin faded. “You’re clever, my lad, but you’re a schoolboy, and the -place for showing your cleverness is at school. It’s too long since you -brought me home a prize, and if you want my forgiveness for letting you -rap my knuckles like this, you’ll bring me a prize this Midsummer. Is -that a bargain, Sam?” - -“I always try,” he said, which was true. - -“Try harder,” said Anne Branstone dryly. - - - - -CHAPTER V--LAST SCHOOL-DAYS - - -|SAM had not a dog’s chance of winning the form prize of the Classical -Fifth, and knew it. He learnt with difficulty, retaining what he learnt; -but the process was slow and his form was overshadowed by the brilliance -of two boys who learnt easily and rapidly. - -It annoyed Sam to know that he had no chance against these two. Poetic -justice cried out that he, the railway porter’s son, should defeat Bull, -whose father was a professor at the University, and Adams, son of a -merchant prince whose “Hong” was as familiar in the godowns of Shanghai -as his name in Princess Street and on ‘Change; but it was hopeless. The -prize lay inevitably between these two who took to classics like -ducks to water and read Homer for (they said) pleasure, whilst their -form-mates struggled with Euripides in acknowledged agony. They were -both unpopular, both prigs, but unassailably pre-eminent; and they were -two. Had it been a case of Bull alone, or Adams alone, Sam might have -worked heroically on the off-chance, that his rival would be ill at -examination time, but it was too far-fetched to hope that both would -simultaneously ail. - -He had long passed beyond Anne’s powers of tuition. It was not a -“sound commercial education” that one got on the Classical side, and -mathematics had ceased to figure in his course. He went to the Classical -side because Lance was there and stayed because of Anne’s golden dream -of Oxford. The gold, she knew, was tarnished now, but if she no longer -saw in Sam the winner of an open scholarship at Balliol, she had not -abandoned hope that he might carry off one of the close scholarships -which the School commanded. Sam himself was sceptical about even that -qualified ambition. - -But he had to win a prize to satisfy Anne, and if he could not win the -prize of which she was thinking, he would try to win one of which she -did not think. It was certainly a prize, and a handsome prize, open not -only to a form but to the whole school--a prize for reading. - -He had a secondary spur, too, in the fact that Lance, that ardent -elocutionist, looked on this prize as his own, and the thought of -beating Lance on his chosen ground tickled Sam’s fancy. Not that he -was cocksure. He knew his handicap too well for that, but he had always -known it, and from the first day of his school life studied to correct -his accent. He did not, even now, even at the price of being thought -pedantic, indulge in slang. Lance, perhaps because he came from a -motherless home, perhaps from a stupid bravado, larded his speech with -silly blasphemies and the current vulgarisms, and, in fact, he did it -with an air; but Sam had to guard his tongue. There is a difference, too -easily detected, between correct slang and incorrect English: one must -first speak correctly before one can dare successfully to be incorrect, -and Sam’s handicap was that he came from a home where they used, in -Sarah Pullen’s words, “the sort of English we speak in Manchester;” - the other sort was an alien tongue and held to be an affectation of the -insincere. - -There was a set piece--the opening speech in _Comus_--the inefficients -were weeded out, and the elect tested on “unseens.” It was the “unseens” - that frightened Sam: he rehearsed _Comus_ till a misplaced aitch was -a physical impossibility, and he was sure of his rhythm and the -intelligence of his rendering; but he knew that aitches were elusive -when he was nervous. “Then don’t be nervous,” was counsel of perfection: -the ordeal of the “unseen” test intimidated him. - -But he practised, and did not spare himself. If sweat and blood -would win that prize, Sam would spend both. He read aloud by the -hour--classics of course suffering--with a pin in his hand with which he -resolutely drew blood at every aitch he dropped; and in his reading he -was fortunate. He read _The Spectator_ which he had borrowed by pure -chance from the school library, and the judges handed him a passage -from _The Spectator_ to read at the unseen test, and one of the great -speeches of Marlowe’s _Tamburlaine_, whose thundering music had so much -attracted Sam that he knew the purple patch by heart. - -He won the prize; staggered across the platform of the Free Trade Hall -with a Gibbon in six sumptuous volumes, calf-bound, stamped with the -school arms; he rode “in triumph through Persepolis,” and thought that -it was “sweet and full of pomp;” then, when it was over and the last -“Gaudeamus” of that Speech Day had been sung and the last cheers for the -holidays (always the heartiest) been given, he sought his mother in the -crowd. - -“Well?” said Sam, who had kept this glory as a surprise for her. - -“Aye,” said Anne, “but it might be better. You’ve won a prize and you’re -forgiven, but you know well enough that you’ve diddled me. I wanted a -prize to show that you’d the gift of learning, and you’ve won one to -show that you’ve the gift of the gab. I knew it already,” she ended -dryly, “and you’re nobbut tenth out of the twenty-four in your class. -Will they move you up?” - -She dissembled the genuine pride with which she had seen him cross that -platform and take his bulky prize, because she felt inly that the chief -talent Sam had proved was a talent for deception. This was a prize, but -she thought it too barely within the meaning of the act: it observed the -letter of his bargain and eluded the spirit. - -She did him less than justice. The average hoy came to school knowing -English; Sam had had to learn it, and here was proof, in a prize won -against the whole school and not merely against a form, that he had -learned his lesson well. - -Her disparagement depressed him. He had not reached, and with a -mother like Anne he could not at his age reach, the healthy younger -generation’s contempt for the opinions of its elders. He felt weakened -in his belief in the social and economical value of a decent accent and -grew careless in preserving it. His Gibbon lay upon his shelf unread, an -empty glory, and, in the event, his prize was to lead to a calamity. It -was to lead, indirectly, to Tom Branstone’s death. - -Sam found himself, after the holidays, moved up to the Transitus, the -last boy to be moved there from the Fifth. He was not sure that it -pleased him. Left in the Fifth he might have been a Triton among the -minnows: in the Transitus he was incurably a minnow. But he discovered -there an atmosphere to which he might have responded better than he did. -Discipline was slacker; one had reached the ante-room to the Sixth and -was assumed to be serious; one had the privilege of a form-room which -was open in the lunch-hour so that one had not to wait with smaller fry -in the corridors; and, above all, the form-master was a gentleman as -well as a scholar. - -He was not blind to these advantages, but he did not, somehow, “come -on” with his classics. The terrible facility of Bull and Adams was -a constant discouragement: mere perseverance was outvied by natural -ability and dragged its leaden weight behind. He knew himself incapable -of shining in this company, and gave up a losing fight the more -readily because the half-term brought a new diversion, and a chance to -coruscate. - -He was cast, as winner of the reading prize, for the Christmas play. -He, Sam Branstone, was to act Shylock at the Conversazione, whilst Lance -Travers was given Bassanio--salt on the still bleeding wound of his -defeat. Greek Tragedy interested Sam no more. He saw Irving’s Shylock -from the gallery of the Theatre Royal, and, for comparative purposes, -Benson’s. He haunted Cheetham Hill, observing Jewish “types.” He came -to the first rehearsal, like any other novice, knowing every line of his -part--and had painfully to unlearn and relearn under the direction of -the brisk little mathematics master who took the play-in hand. - -Anne screened her pride in this distinction. Play-acting was, in any -case, questionable, too newly come to respectable estate to be accepted -unreservedly. But, in secret, she determined that she would be one of -Sam’s audience and Tom another. - -Parents were invited to the Conversazione--that was what conversaziones -were for--but Anne and Tom had never accepted the invitation before. It -implied evening dress. - -She decided that she could “manage” with her Sunday dress and two yards -of lace; but Tom, too, must be there, and Tom must not shame Sam. She -thought she saw a way. - -“Nay, nay,” said Tom, “I couldn’t do it, lass. I’d never dare.” - -“You should have thought of that before you became Sam’s father,” she -replied. “I’m going to see him and I’ll none go alone. You’re coming -with me. I reckon Mr. O’Rourke will be in to-night as usual.” - -“Aye,” said Tom, suspecting nothing. - -One basis of his friendship with O’Rourke was that their evenings off -happened to coincide, Tom’s from Victoria Station and Terry’s from -the old-fashioned commercial hotel in Mosley Street, where he was an -institution. Terry was a waiter, but Tom had not yet seen the connection -between his friend’s profession and the Grammar School Conversazione. He -was never very bright. - -Terry had a hard head and a professional style, rather like a successful -doctor’s bed-side manner, which wheedled more tips from commercial -travellers than they gave at any other hotel in their rounds, but he had -a sunken vein of poetic superstition and, when Anne interrupted them, he -was explaining to Tom that he tolerated the Royal Hotel because he -could see from its window the green of the grass outside the Infirmary. -Manchester was Manchester because it lacked grass. The “good folk” - couldn’t dance on granite sets: only on grass did one find fairy-rings -and only where grass abounded were people blessed. - -“You’ll not be wanting your dress-clothes next Wednesday night, I -reckon,” said Anne, breaking in without apology. - -“Why, no, Mrs. Branstone,” he said. “Wednesday’s the night when I dress -like the public. I’ve gone into a strange hotel and been mistaken for an -ordinary customer on a Wednesday night.” - -“Then you’ll maybe not object to lending Tom your clothes next week. I -want him to be mistaken for a swell.” - -“There’s a shine on them,” objected Terry, “that you can see your face -in.” - -“Dress-clothes,” pronounced Anne, “are dressy when they shine. If you’ll -put studs and a clean shirt in with them, I’ll be obliged, and I’ll send -the shirt back washed.” - -“But, Anne----” protested Tom. - -“You hold your hush,” she said. “It’s settled. Go on about the fairies, -Terry.” - -Fairies seemed to Anne entirely suitable as a subject of conversation -for those children, men. - -Terry brought the clothes himself and personally assisted at Tom’s -transformation from a railway porter into a “swell.” His tie, at any -rate, was nicely tied, but “I feel the awkwardest fool alive,” said Tom, -as well he might, with clothes which fitted where they touched; Anne, -had she confessed her inward sinking, must have admitted that she was in -no better case herself, but confession was far from her: she had to be -brazen for two. Yet even Anne’s high courage failed her in the ladies’ -dressing-room: she emerged so humbled by the splendours which she had -seen unveiled that, at a word from Tom, she would have turned tail and -fled. - -But Tom had found countenance. Mr. Travers, meeting him on the stair, -had taken charge of him, and now added Anne to his convoy. It was kindly -tact increased to the power of heroism: he talked hard and sheltered -his waifs from feeling the curious glances which, even in that mixed -company, were directed embarrassingly at them. He ignored a quiet, -well-known alderman, who obviously wanted to speak to him. He shepherded -them to their places in the Lecture Theatre, sat with them and -accomplished the incredible feat of putting Tom Branstone at his ease in -the midst of the tipping public. - -Travers acquired more merit that night than by all his payments of Sam’s -school-fees: and Sam himself did nobly, not only on the stage whence -he acted at Anne and bowed to Anne, but afterwards when, still in -his costume, he paraded with her, drank coffee with her, and met -with Shylockian hatred any eye which seemed to hint that he had not -tremendous reason to be proud of his little mother. And what he did for -her, Lance and Mr. Travers did for Tom. - -Undoubtedly, a huge success: a night of nights, carved on the tablets of -memory in letters of gold: never, not by so much as a dubious hint, to -be associated with the illness of Tom Branstone. That was, of course, -caused by overwork at Christmas at the station. It had and could have -nothing to do with the fact that Tom, coming in ecstasy from the heated -school into the cold December night, presently threw off his overcoat -and danced exulting on the pavement: conduct so utterly unprecedented, -so wholly un-Tom-like, that he had footed it merrily for ten minutes -before Anne recovered enough command of him to put an end to the -discreditable performance. Besides, for five of the ten minutes, she -had danced hand in hand with him. She, too, exulted, but neither of them -ever referred to their pagan capering again. - -Poor Tom! He had not had so many nights of triumph in his life that this -should be his last, but he was soon to start upon a journey from which -even Anne’s imperious will was powerless to call him back. She helping -him, he struggled hard against pneumonia and made a better fight with -death than he had ever made with life, but his course was run and the -school had not reopened after the holidays when Tom Branstone ceased to -fight. It seemed that, on the night of the Conversazione, he had had his -hour, and - - “men must endure - - Their going hence even as their coming hither: - - Ripeness is all.” - -It did not come to Sam as the shattering of his world--only the death of -Anne could have done that--but certainly as a stunning blow. It was -the first time that he had come intimately close to death and he missed -death’s beauty and its peace. He saw too well its ugliness and the -detail of a burial. It hurt, not because Tom Branstone had had but -little joy in life, but because he died too soon to see the glory of his -son. In after years, Sam Branstone would have liked to recall how Tom’s -death softened him, how he melted to tears before that waxen face and -lovingly bought flowers to put inside the coffin. - -It wouldn’t do. It didn’t fit the facts. He knew that, honestly, he -had been angry with his father for dying, especially for dying in the -holidays. It spoiled the holidays and it robbed Sam of the day’s holiday -he would have had for the funeral had Tom had the gumption to die in -termtime. He resented his father’s death as he would have resented an -unjust thrashing from him--if Tom Branstone ever thrashed anybody. Tom -had died prematurely, while he was still useful to Sam. He had bilked -Sam, and Sam was angry. - -Not only had Tom died too soon to see the glory of his son, but his -son’s glory was seriously jeopardized by the breadwinner’s death. Sam -had, in his innermost soul, given up the idea of Oxford; he was not apt -enough at classics, but he was far from admitting it now. It was Tom’s -death, and that alone, which deprived him of that crown. - -Anne felt it deeply. She had loved Tom with something like mother-love -as well as wife’s. If she had been hard with him, it was for his good, -and he as well as she had known that her hardness was like the hardness -of a crab’s shell, hiding a tender place inside. Now that he was dead -she could hide her grief as she had hidden her love, and went about her -business soberly. Soberly she drew her money from the Sick and Burial -Society and soberly she spent it on “black” for Sam, for George, Madge -and herself, doing those things which Tom would have expected to be done -to dignify his death, but adding nothing that would make his funeral a -neighbours’ raree-show. - -She came back from the cemetery with dry eyes and soberly presided at -the inevitable meal (where she had to comfort a lachrymose O’Rourke) -and, on the morrow, soberly set out to visit Mr. Travers, and to tell -him that, of course, she could not now keep Sam at school. It was little -that Travers was allowed to guess from this stoic that this was the end -of her dream for Sam, that with Tom’s death the underpinnings of her -world had flopped. And her pride stood where it stood five years ago: no -more now than then would she accept from Travers money to pay expenses. - -She shook her head defiantly. “The lad’ull have to work,” she said. - -Travers knew adamant when he saw it. “Then, at least, let him come here -and work in my office.” Anne almost glared. “I want a fair field and -no favour. He’ll have to start as office-boy, with the wages of an -office-boy.” - -“Oh, hardly that, Mrs. Branstone. Remember, he comes to me from the -Classical Transitus.” - -“Yes,” she said, “and much use that is to an estate agent. He can’t add -up a row of figures.” - -She had no delusions about the practical value of a public school -education. - -“I think, though, that we must let it count for something,” he replied, -and Anne, compromising against the grain, consented to let it count -for fifteen shillings a week “until we see,” added Mr. Travers, “how he -shapes.” He intended to see very soon. - -Anne nodded grimly. “I’ll see he shapes,” she said, and Sam, silent -witness of this pregnant interview, was hardly surprised by Anne’s first -words on reaching home. “Get out those old arithmetic text-books of -yours,” she said, “and look up mensuration. I’ve not forgotten it, if -you have.” - - - - -CHAPTER VI--THE NEST-EGG - - -|TOM Branstone had drawn a wage of a pound a week, and tips may have -averaged ten shillings but more probably did not; your sixpenny tipper -is a rare bird in Manchester. - -Yet Anne had saved steadily, and she had not allowed a life-long habit -to be interrupted by a little thing like the necessity of providing -Sam with Grammar School books and clothes. I do not say that it was -admirable in her, but merely that it was heroic. It was an incredible -feat, but it can be done: it is done every day by people for whom the -word “thrift” has meaning. Perhaps they are often unlovely in their -lives or perhaps they have the robust satisfaction of those who live for -an idea: opinion has always differed as to whether what they do is worth -doing, and modern opinion inclines strongly to the belief that it is -not. Life to these iconoclasts seems more important than the means of -life. - -To Anne it seemed abundantly worth while, and the proof was here now -when she found that the interest on her savings amounted to three and -four-pence weekly. They could live on Sam’s earnings and Anne’s “means” - without pinching. Her forethought made all the difference now between -too little and enough. - -It was, of course, only to Anne that this seemed enough: Sam took a -larger view, but found his vision cramped for some time to come by the -conditions he met with in Mr. Travers’ office. Certainly that generous -soul did not mean to humiliate Sam; he did not mean Sam to begin as -office-boy; but, whatever his intentions, the clerks in his office -defeated them. Sam was a newcomer, the latest arrival, in a minority of -one against the old inhabitants; was there, moreover, obviously to do -as he was told. He was told to sweep the floor in the morning, to copy -letters and to lick stamps. He did these things rebelliously, bitter at -heart that such menial service should be required of an ex-member of the -Classical Transitus, certain that there was some mistake, that he had -only to catch Mr. Travers’ eye when he was so shamefully occupied for -that gentleman to take instant and drastic measures with the clerks who -misemployed him. - -Mr. Travers’ eye, even though caught at what Sam thought an opportune -moment, While Sam copied letters, unexpectedly failed to disapprove. He -seemed less preoccupied with Sam’s affairs than Sam was. As a matter of -fact, he took a long distance view of Sam, and took it, unfortunately, -rather muggily. Travers had the defect of his quality. A generous man, -he was generous in the worst way to himself, and Sam soon learnt the -meaning of a euphemism, current in the office, “Mr. Travers is attending -a property auction.” Property auctions are, it is true, usually held on -licensed premises, and whether Mr. Travers was or was not attending an -auction he was certainly on licensed premises more often than was good -for either his business or himself. - -And it was bad for Sam, not because it left him to find his own feet in -the office and to fight unbacked with his superiors (wherein, indeed, -it was good), but because he had figured Travers from afar as a princely -gentleman, without reproach, and the discovery of his failing took Sam -a long way on the road to cynicism. In youth one’s faith dies hard, and, -being dead, turns rapidly corrupt. - -The business was an excellent one, rotting slowly from the top, and Sam -found the office a notable place in which to pick up knowledge of the -world; especially, since he lacked good direction, of the shadier -ways of the world. He felt that he had declined in status: his -school-friends, there his equals, had gone either to the Universities -or, with influence behind them, to the professions. If they went to -business, it was as their fathers’ sons. They were not scratch men, and -Sam felt that he was starting at the scratch-line. - -Travers had really no intentions that Sam should feel himself misprized. -The boy had to learn the business, and the way to understanding lay -from the bottom upwards. But Sam contrasted himself bitterly with Lance, -first at school and then at Cambridge. In that, indeed, he found a -minimum of consolation. It wasn’t rational, but to Anne and consequently -to Sam, university had meant Oxford, and he won a hardy solace from the -thought that Lance was, after all, “only” at Cambridge. - -Meantime, he grew in knowledge of his world, and education came to Sam, -not in the cloistered freedom of the Isis, but where, in Manchester, -he went collecting rents: in country courts where hard laws operated -hardly: and in the office, where men did not greet each other with a -friendly smile, but gave instead the “competition glare.” It was not a -kindly school in which he spent the developing years, but one where it -was taught that self’s the man, and magnanimity is a mistake. “Get on -or get out,” and Sam got on with a sort of choleric zeal which gave no -quarter and expected none. - -But he did not get on fast enough to please himself. He had, he thought, -stepped down from the days of the Grammar School where he belonged with -the caste that rules or, at any rate, administers, the caste that sits -on velvet and overlooks the mob. Now he was in the cockpit, with the mob -that struggles to ascend, and, to Sam, a wage of thirty shillings a -week at the age of twenty was a derisory ascension. Anne thought it -satisfying, and it was her contentment with his rate of progress which -first made him begin to think of her as, after all, a limited person. -You didn’t bribe Sam Branstone to be meekly satisfied with thirty -shillings a week. - -“The trouble is,” he said to the only man in the office with whom he was -in the least confidential, “that you don’t begin to get on till you’ve -got a bit of capital together. Money breeds money.” - -His friend suggested betting as a means to affluence, and offered to -tell him of a dead certainty. - -Sam assumed his cunningest air of a superman of the world. “The best row -of houses where I go for the rents,” he said, “belongs to Jack Elsworth, -the bookie. I don’t see why I should help him to buy another house.” - -“Bookies don’t always win,” said the optimist. - -“No,” said Sam. “It’s possible to make money out of betting and it’s -possible to get a baby by a harlot, but that isn’t what the harlot’s -for, and it isn’t what the bookie’s for.” - -At this time, harlots were the pegs on which Sam hung his wit. He had no -other use for them, but had discovered that a coarse turn of phrase was -an asset in his world and therefore wielded it. But the effect of this -little conversation was to crystallize his aim. He wanted that “bit of -capital” badly, and did not intend that, if opportunity presented, a -nice regard for scruple should hold him back from taking anything the -gods might send. He had no ultimate design, but fortune came to -the fortunate and money to the moneyed, so that the first move was, -obviously, to get money. He wanted a jumping-off place; then he would -soar. - -Opportunity walked into the office in the person of Joseph of Arimathea -Minnifie. That was his full baptismal name: analogous with the styles of -certain limited companies, such as John Smith ( of Newcastle) Limited, -to distinguish that Smith from other Smiths. Minnifie’s mother had -explained to the parson that she was a New Testament woman. To her -intimates she had put it that she chose the name Joseph because she -liked it, but she also liked a man to be a man. It was deduced that she -supposed the third Joseph in the Bible would have acted differently from -the first in the affair of Potiphar’s wife. - -Sam’s accent had degenerated since the days of Shylock and the reading -prize. It had kept bad company, and might be known by the company it -kept to-day rather than by that which it used to keep at school; but he -could still, without too great an effort, assume a well-bred speech and -was often sent with a prospective buyer to show off any likely houses on -Mr. Travers’ list. Because it was usual for him to go on such errands, -and not because anyone supposed that niceties of speech could or would -have any effect on Mr. Minnifie, he was sent with him in a cab to tour -the suburbs where Travers had property in charge. - -A coarse accent was not likely to offend Joseph Minnifie, who a -fortnight earlier had been a market porter at Shude Hill, but had now -come into money, well invested in the best Brewery securities, from his -uncle, a publican. Minnifie had sold out some of the shares because -he could now satisfy a long ambition and live in his own house. He -proposed, he told Mr. Travers, to retire to the country. - -“The country?” asked Travers, whose practice was suburban. - -“Well,” said Minnifie, “summat quiet and homely. I’d like a change from -Rochdale Road. I thought,” he went on rather shyly, “of Whalley Range. -It’s a good neighbourhood.” - -Travers refrained from pointing out that Whalley Range was not usually -regarded as the country, but was, in fact, of the inner ring of -suburbs, a penny tram fare from the centre of Manchester. “Oh, yes, Mr. -Minnifie,” he said. “I think I can satisfy you in W’halley Range. I have -several available houses on my books in that district.” - -“I’ll pay three hundred pound for what I like,” said Minnifie, quite -fiercely. “I’ve got it in my pocket now.” He was fierce because he was -not yet quite sure that his legacy was not phantom gold, and he pulled -out a bundle of notes as much to assure himself that they were still -where he had put them as with the idea of proving his good faith to -Travers. - -Travers concealed a smile. After all, commission on three hundred pounds -is not to be sneezed at, but neither was this the sort of client for -whom Traver’s disturbed his habits. “I have myself,” he said, “a large -property auction to attend in the city, but Mr. Branstone will go with -you to inspect the houses.” He smiled kindly on Sam, and added, lest -Minnifie should think his affair, so important to him, underrated by the -agent: “Mr. Branstone is my confidential man. When Mr. Branstone tells -you anything about the houses you are going to see, it is as if I spoke -myself.” - -“I see,” said Minnifie. “He’s your foreman, and you needn’t tell me -you’ll back him up. I know foremen.” - -“Well, his word is certainly as good as mine. I leave you in safe hands, -Mr. Minnifie.” And Travers went out to attend his first auction of the -day, which usually happened at eleven o’clock in the morning. - -Sam and the client took a cab to Whalley Range, where Minnifie inspected -several houses which were to be had at about his price. But he was hard -to satisfy, and, what was worse, apparently unable to define his -reasons for dissatisfaction. As Sam praised this and that about a house, -Minnifie admitted that such things were praiseworthy, but he would, -please, see another house. Sam was a little piqued and tried his best -to be genial, suspecting that Minnifie resented being fobbed off with a -“foreman”; and Sam’s best was very good, so that presently the ice was -thawed. - -Minnifle stood at the bow-window of a dining-room and looked up and down -the street. It was empty save for a tradesman’s boy. From somewhere -round the corner came the diminished rattle of a milk-cart. Minnifle -shook his head sadly. - -“It’s quiet,” he said. “See that road. Nothing stirring. What is there -for the missus to look at when she sits in the window?” - -“It’s morning,” said Sam. “Things will be brisker in the afternoon.” But -his tone lacked conviction, and he could not resist the temptation to -add: “There’s a cat crossing the road now.” - -“Come out,” said Minnifle. “This’ull none do,” and when they stood upon -the door-step he sniffed the air of Whalley Range with disapproval. -“I don’t like it and it’s no use pretending that I do. It’s got a cold -smell to me. It isn’t homely.” - -“I know what you mean,” said Sam, diagnosing the trouble. “Wait a bit.” - He gave the cabman an address and was careful to leave the window open. -They came to other streets where the scent of yesterday’s fried fish -still lingered in the air and the nose of Mr. Minnifle inhaled it -greedily. “This is better,” he pronounced. - -They had come to Greenheys, which, when De Quincey’s father built a -country house there in 1791, was “separated from the last outskirts of -Manchester by an entire mile.” It is by no means separated now, and good -houses of the mid-Victorian period are to be had cheaply because good -tenants dislike bad neighbours. Travers had one of these survivals from -an urbane past on his books and Sam hugged himself for thinking of it -now: that house had proved itself the whitest of white elephants. - -Mr. Minnifie, exhilarated by the spicy smells of Greenheys, was no -longer a timid excursionist looking only where his guide bade him, but -a house hunter hot upon the trail, with eyes that spied on each side of -their route. - -“Ah!” he called suddenly. “Stop!” - -The cabman stopped. “But we’re not there,” said Sam, rather blankly. - -“I think we are,” said Minnifie, and got out of the cab. - -Sam followed, in that leaden state of mind which often precedes -inspiration. What had attracted Minnifie was a semi-detached house at -a corner, which the trams passed. Opposite were shops, and there was a -lively stir in the street. Certainly, Mrs. Minnifie would have something -to see here when she looked out of the window. - -Sam knew that pair of houses, and what he knew made him fear that he -would not, this time, rid Mr. Travers of the white elephant on his -books. They were good houses enough, but the people who had furniture to -fill them were not the sort of people who welcomed shops opposite their -windows and trams past their gate, so that both had been long empty. -Now, however, they were for sale, under a will, and a quick sale was -wanted that the estate might be wound up. They would certainly go -cheaply on that account, and the more so since two attempted auctions -had proved abortive. There had been no offers. - -And here was Mr. Minnilie plainly delighted, and those houses not in -Travers’ charge, but in that of a rival agency! Sam felt depressed, then -as dawn follows darkness, lie thought of what Travers had said, -that Sam’s word was as good as his own. It was going to be, and Mr. -Minnifie’s money as good in Sam’s hands as in those of Calverts’, the -legitimate agents for this pair of houses. He stepped out briskly now, -the ardent salesman. - -“One moment, Mr. Minnifie. I haven’t the key of this house with me, but -it is at the shop opposite. I will get it.” His quick eye had read so -much on Calverts’ notice board, but by the time he returned, Minnifie -had also seen that rival name on the board and mentioned the fact. - -“I know,” said Sam. “The board has not been altered, but this property -is in my hands now.” - -Which was true. - -The house enchanted Minnifie, who had made up his mind in advance to be -enchanted. And, of course, rooms may be in need of decoration, but good -proportions tell, even on a Mr. Minnifie. This house was very different -from the jerry-built villas of Whalley Range. - -“What’s price?” he asked. - -“Three hundred and fifteen pounds,” said Sam. - -“I said three hundred and I’ll none budge.” - -“If you will come to the office at six, I shall be able to tell -you,” said Sam, naming a queer hour, seeing that the office closed at -half-past five. - -“All right,” said Minnifie. “It’s a firm offer at three hundred, and I’m -a man of my word.” - -Sam devoutly hoped so. He was taking a considerable gamble on it. They -parted, and Sam, as usual, went home for lunch, but, not as usual, -returned with his cheque-book in his pocket. His accumulated savings -were five pounds, but he possessed a cheque-book. He waited rather -carefully until the banks had closed, then he walked into Calverts’ -offices and offered them two hundred and fifty pounds for the pair -of semi-detached houses in Greenheys. They accepted two hundred and -seventy-five; and Sam drew a cheque for that amount, and received the -title-deeds in exchange. Then he palpitated, but it was, in any case, -safely after banking hours. Calverts could not present his cheque that -day. - -He was busy at five-thirty, when the clerks left, and proposed to -work late for a while, “to clear things up,” he said. At six Minnifie -arrived, true to his word, and Sam could have kissed him. He had spent -the longest half hour of his life. He took Minnifie by the private -door into Travers’ office, so that he should not see the empty general -office, and put him in the client’s chair, himself usurping Travers’ -seat. - -“Well, Mr. Minnifie,” he said, “suppose I told you that the price is -still three fifteen, what would you say?” - -“I’d say ‘Good-day,’” and Minnifie showed that he meant it by rising to -his feet. Sam went on hurriedly. - -“Ah! Then it’s as well that I’ve succeeded. It has been an infinitude of -trouble---” - -“I reckon,” said Minnifie, “that you’re here to take trouble. Leastways, -if it’s easy money in your line, it’s the only line that’s made that -way.” - -“Oh, we have our troubles, like everybody else. This document,” he went -on, “conveys the house to you. The price is three hundred pounds.” - -“It’s a bargain,” said Mr. Minnifie, producing his notes, “count’em.” - Sam counted feverishly, then made out a receipt. Nothing short of murder -would have induced him to part with that money now. - -“If you will meet me to-morrow at twelve at that address--a lawyer’s--we -will have the conveyance put in proper form.” - -“I’ve seen a bit of lawyers lately over this brass of mine,” said -Minnifie, “and I don’t like’em. They eat money.” - -“But in this case,” said Sam magnanimously, “I pay the lawyer’s fees.” - -“Then I’ll be there,” said Minnifie. - -Sam was waiting next day for the doors of his bank to open, and breathed -colossal relief when his three hundred pounds were safely in to meet his -cheque. He had a net profit of some twenty pounds, after settling for -the conveyancing, and he had a house to sell. Not long afterwards, he -sold it for one hundred and seventy-five pounds. - -The fact that one of the pair had been thought desirable by somebody -caused somebody else to desire the other: and Sam could only hope that -the new neighbours would not compare notes. If they did, it did not -matter; he had only obeyed the axiom of commerce, “Buy cheap, sell -dear,” and it was not his fault that in the one case he had had to sell -less dearly than in the other. - -His bank credit was two hundred pounds. - - - - -CHAPTER VII--THE FLEDGLING CAPITALIST - - -|IN Sam’s opinion, nobody had suffered. Mr. Travers lost nothing, -because the corner house had conquered Minnifie at sight, and he would -not in any case have bought the white elephant which Travers had for -sale. Calverts had got as much as they expected to get for the houses, -or they would not have sold, while the beneficiary under the late -owner’s will was a charity, and Sam hoped that charity was charitable -enough not to look a gift-horse in the mouth: if it wasn’t, it ought to -be. As to the purchasers, who had certainly paid more for the property -than they need have done, that was what purchasers were for. Why did -smart business men exist if not to exploit purchasers? - -All this was highly comforting, but to confess the need for comfort was -to admit to disquiet, and he found that it was one thing to argue in -this strain with his conscience, and another to boast to Anne of his -achievement. Women don’t understand business, and he had an uneasy -feeling that the ethics of the transaction would not satisfy Anne. He -decided that he had better not tell her, that he must resist his impulse -of surprising her with the gift of a seal-skin coat, and remained a -capitalist under the rose. There was no hurry, and perhaps his next -stroke, when it came, would be under conditions that would bear the -limelight of her scrutiny. - -But repression was not all. Justify himself as he would, chuckle over -his gains as he did, the matter searched him deeply and reacted sharply -in two ways, of which the first began as that old expedient of -sinners, conscience-money. There are defaulters who find absolution for -themselves by sending notes, under initials, to the Chancellor of the -Exchequer, and by having them acknowledged with impressiveness in the -personal columns of the _Times_. That was not Sam’s way: he did not do -good deeds by stealth, and his conscience-money did not go out of the -family. He used it philanthropically, but it was philanthropy and ten -per cent, to begin with, and in the end it was very much more than ten -per cent. It was the Chappie Bill Posting and Window-Cleaning Company. - -He thought that he could, without exciting Anne’s suspicions, tell her -that his savings had reached ten pounds, and proposed to spend that sum -for the benefit of George Chappie. - -Inspired, perhaps, by his household gods, George was facing life -bravely, and won a minor place in Anne’s good graces when he and Madge -produced a firstborn son, who had the remarkable quality of looking -exactly like the infant Samuel, whose name he bore. But George had not, -in her opinion, deserved Sam’s generosity to this extent. - -“You’re over-good to them,” she said. “You’ve made a man and woman of a -pair of wastrels, and I’d let them alone to make their own way now.” - -“Do you think it will be much of a way?” asked Sam. “They’re the sort -that need help.” - -“Aye,” she said, “they’ll lean on you all right. They’re good at -leaning.” - -“Well,” said Sam, drawing himself up. “Let them lean.” - -“Sam,” said Anne, “I’m not fond, but if I told you what I think of you -for this, you’d have the right to call me fond and foolish. I like you -very well, my son. You’re the strong man helping and supporting the -weak.” - -She finished suddenly and a thought shamefacedly. She had praised -him openly and considered it a weakness in her. Sam put a hand on -her shoulder. It was not demonstrative, but his gesture was full of -understanding, and Anne turned rapidly away, shaking him off almost with -rudeness, taking very earnestly to her business of clearing away their -tea-things. - -Sam watched appreciatively through the corner of his eye. He relished -praise from Anne, even when, as now, it was not strictly merited. The -strong in Sam’s philosophy did not support the weak, but the weak the -strong. He was confirmed in his belief that women could not understand -business. This, however, he reminded himself, was not pure business, it -was conscience-money, which ought not to be unconscionably reproductive: -so he bought George a hand-cart, ladder, bucket and leathers, and -exacted from him not more than ten per cent, on his capital expenditure. -In Travers’ business Sam found opportunities of pushing George. A client -took a house, and Sam would suggest with a nicely casual air that the -windows needed cleaning. He would, to save the client trouble, then -offer to send a man round, so that George’s connection waxed, and he -prospered to the tune of two amazing pounds a week, till the restless -Sam began to widen his view of George’s potentialities. - -His eye for the main chance had always a useful squint which could see -money round the corner as well as in the straight high road, and he -thought that George, with his outfit of ladders, could see his talent -for height in other ways than window cleaning. There was, for example, -bill-posting, a trade whose mysteries Sam deemed it not beyond George’s -capabilities to learn. - -The thing grew by degrees, from the first builder’s hoarding which -Sam rented venturously for advertising space, to a comfortable little -business that ran itself by its own momentum long after he tired of its -comparative insignificance. With George, the start was all: he could -always plod where Sam had led, and as Sam had time to set the ball -rolling, and money enough to spoon-feed the infant business with -capital, George kept the thing in being by careful, steady management. -He hadn’t boasted when he told Anne he was steady. - -Of course, Sam was impatient and deplored his active partner’s -inactivity. He grew tired of the gradual increase, but, all the same, -the business was unquestionably successful, and he relished hugely his -sense of being the power behind the throne, if only behind a small, -conservative, so lamentably unambitious throne. Sam also was among the -king makers. - -The other, greater sequel to his reaction led to more pyrotechnical -results, and eventually to Sam’s launch on his career. Nothing happened -at first, and indeed for so long that he was feeling himself between -the devil of the estate office and the deep sea of George’s persistent -carefulness. The Chappie Bill-Posting Company was good enough for -George, but not for Sam: there were too many com petitors with too great -resources, while the estate office routine bored him, and opportunities -for piratical enterprise did not recur. - -He felt, at twenty-four years of age, and at two pounds ten a week, that -he was growing old in service, he who was not meant to serve but to be -served. - -But then--desolating thought--was he meant to be served? Had he lost, or -was he, at any rate, not losing the accent of speech and mind of those -who are served? He knew that his accent had touched pitch and been -defiled: those bawdy stories of his were told in the tongue of his -hearers, and there had been clients lately who had spoken to him, -when inspecting property, as if he were a clerk, and not a pleasant, -gentlemanly youth of obvious superiority to his present, no doubt -temporary, job. He had a sudden fear that the job might not be temporary -after all, and there followed a time when he was wholly bent on -self-improvement, when he abjured the narrow way of professional -text-books and read that he might become well-read, that he might -bandy allusions with those old school-fellows of his who had gone to -Universities, that he might, if he could not hope to shine, at least be -not outshone. - -It wasn’t _pour le bon motif_, and he did not even pretend to like -the greater part of what he read. He crammed against the grain, and a -growing row of the “World’s Classics” figured on his shelf as trophies -of his perseverance. Industriously he rubbed away the rust which had -accumulated on his mind since it took its not very brilliant polish of -the Grammar School. He took down the dust-stained Gibbon he had won for -reading, and ploughed heroically through it. - -That reminded him of another chink in his armour. A man of the world -must have the knack of speaking to the world, and Sam became a member of -the Concentrics. As Anne once told him, he had the gift of the gab, but, -except for his present fluent recommendations of houses to prospective -tenants, it was a talent he had buried. Now, however, he proposed to -dig it up and did it in (he thought) the ambitious surroundings of the -Concentrics, who were indeed as mixed a company as he could have found -anywhere, and on that account the better for his purpose. - -The common centre which was supposed to hold the Concentrics together -was a love of literature, but they tended to drop literature for -politics on the slightest pretext. There were literary enthusiasts -amongst them, but it rarely happened that one man’s enthusiasm coincided -with another’s. It did less than coincide. A member would read a -laborious paper on some man of letters, and the subsequent discussion -would be conducted by men who began their intelligent speeches by -admitting that they had not read a word of, say, Henry James or Lafcadio -Hearn, but that their opinion was nevertheless so and so. Whereas, of -course, nobody ever confessed to ignorance of politics. Politics is like -law, only more so. One is presumed by the law to know the law, which is -highly presumptuous of the law, because not even the lawyers know the -law, and they must often go to judges, at their client’s expense, to -find out what the law is: and the “more so,” as applied to politics, is -that while laymen hesitate to argue a point of law, and go to an expert, -they never hesitate to argue a point of politics, and _are_ the expert. - -Political discussions amongst the Concentrics were real and passionate, -literary discussions unreal and frigid; and as “social reform” became -a favourite shibboleth about this time, literature took a back seat -in favour of subjects about which men could grow emotional and their -oratory rhetorical. It was all one to Sam, who was here to speak, and -did his reading at home. - -He spoke often, so that he soon improved, and he practised the literary -allusiveness which was the purpose of his reading to such effect that -he attracted the attention of the chairman, who was the Rev. Peter -Struggles. - -It is not, strictly, fair to say that a man is handicapped through life -by a name like Struggles, because the legal process by which one can -change an undesirable name is inexpensive, but Peter had never thought -of such a move, and wore his handicap without being aware of it. In any -case, he failed in life. He had a round face, red hair, side-whiskers: -took snuff and messed his coat: was perfectly futile in practical -affairs and absolutely “a dear.” His scholarship was not profound, but -he loved letters genuinely, He had failed steadily for thirty years -to run a private school for boys in a suburb which was degenerating to -industrialism, and late in life had taken orders, quite sincerely, -not in the least with the idea of helping his school with a new -respectability. It was, anyhow, beyond help, and a man who offered -tradesmen’s sons a sound commercial education was presently to buy him -out. - -Peter Struggles, well in his fifties, became curate to a vicar of forty, -in the large, rough-and-tumble parish of St. Mary’s. One says that he -had failed in life, and, by Sam’s standards, he had, and even by the -working standards of his church. A man at fifty-six should not be a -curate with an income of some hundred and twenty pounds a year. But if -a man is happy at fifty-six to be a curate with that income? If he find -satisfaction in it? Snuff was his indulgence, and the chairmanship of -the Concentrics, who were not sectarian, his dissipation. For the rest, -Peter had made harbour. To the pushing educationist who had bought -him out, for a song, and now profaned his old school buildings with -shorthand and the rudiments of bookkeeping, Peter was a failure and -a pathetic failure. He was not conscious of failure himself, nor of -anything but a serene contentment that he had found, if late, the -work that he was fit to do. Through sheer single-minded, inoffensive, -unobtrusive goodness he came to be a figure in that parish, and a power. -Undignified in bearing, and careless in dress, he had a dignity of mind -and soul. - -Sam Branstone despised a worldly failure, here was a man of more than -twice Sam’s years, with less money than Sam had, and, by all his canons, -Sam should have despised Peter. But he didn’t. It was partly, no doubt, -other people’s opinions that influenced Sam--the universal esteem which -Peter Struggles won--but it was by much more the innate nobility of the -old curate. Sam began his speaking at the Concentrics to impress his -fellow members, he ended by caring only for the appreciation of the -quaint, slovenly figure who occupied the chair. - -He got the appreciation he craved. Peter was shrewd enough to discount -Sam’s rhetorics, and the flashy tricks of apt quotation: he saw Sam as a -misguided, self-seeking thruster who read only for veneer and spoke -only to impress. But, at least, Sam tried, and Peter could admire -perseverance. The thing was to direct Sam’s perseverance well, and Peter -asked him to supper. - -Our man of the world was prodigiously thrilled. The honour was -exceptional, for Peter could not afford to be a host often, and Sam -was aware not only of its rarity, but of Peter’s unique standing in -the parish: and, more than that, of Peter’s worth. To be singled out by -Peter Struggles, and asked to sup, was, socially, a triumph. It sounds -absurd, and perhaps it is absurd that one good man should shine so -brightly by contrast with the fifteen thousand others of an over-crowded -parish, but that was why Peter was a colossus amongst the pigmies, and -why Sam Branstone was egregiously excited by an invitation to sup at -Peter’s little house. - -Peter did not invite Sam to preach at him. It was the boy’s mind rather -than his soul that was the target of his aim, and Peter’s select library -to which he trusted for influence. Certainly the little meal of -cold beef and cocoa was not calculated to impress, nor the old, worn -furniture, with the gaping rents in its horse-hair coverings, through -which the stuffing poured. He handled books with reverence, and spoke -of them, but Sam was hardly listening. He was under fire from another -battery. - -Ada Struggles met young men at church functions, and spoke with them at -Sunday School, but she had few opportunities of greater intimacy, and -was not the lady to waste so rare a chance as this. Peter droned on -amongst his books and presently was lost in reading one. Ada lost -herself in nothing except a burning desire, to monopolize Sam. Books did -not interest Ada: getting married did. - -The trouble was that in the days of his school’s comparative prosperity, -Peter had done Ada rather well. Perhaps as a schoolmaster himself, he -got special consideration over terms, but at any rate he had sent her to -a good boarding school. She had received the education of a lady, and it -wasn’t fair, it didn’t chime with the fitness of things that she should -now be the daughter of an impractical curate. Her case, to some extent, -was parallel with Sam’s: the past of both had augured well, and the -future depended on their wits. - -There, however, the parallel ceased, for Ada had few wits, but she had -moods, and the reverse side of the moping discontent, which was endemic -with her, was the meretricious brilliance she now paraded for Sam’s -entanglement. Ada was “all out” after her prey, in her best clothes and -her best, that is, her most captivatingly genial manners. - -Sam thought that she illuminated that dingy book-surrounded room. They -were not gay books with gilded bindings, but solid, well-worn volumes -of ponderous aspect. The books repelled and Ada invited. Youth called to -youth: youth answered to the call. - -He was obsessed with his idea of accent, and the worldly value of -superiority in speech. Ada’s first appeal to him, though she did not -know it, was that she spoke well; her second was that she was -her father’s daughter; her third, as she knew perfectly, was the -helplessness which she used cunningly to flatter his masculine -importance. She told him without a word that he was a strong, powerful -man, and she a flower which he might pluck and wear. And she did the -anemone business quite effectively. - -There was not much of Ada, and what there was was not remarkable, but -she was fluffy and frilly and feminine in the feebler way. She had on -something that was not silk but suggested the rustle of silk. After -all, it was not Ada’s fault that it was not silk, or that her intimate -underclothing was of flannelette; she could only use the opportunities -she had, and they were few. - -But she had the prettiness, the rather silly and never lasting -prettiness, which accompanies anæmia. - -It would not wear, and she knew that it would not wear. She was becoming -desperate. Sam was sent by heaven. - -He thought so, too. Old Struggles read “Marcus Aurelius,” standing by -his book-shelf, utterly forgetful of his guest, and the guest thought -that Peter’s preoccupation was also instructed by heaven. It left him -free for Ada. - -What he said to Ada and what Ada said to him were things of no -importance: their serious conversation was not conducted by their -tongues, but by their eyes. - -This is the sort of thing: - -Ada (her voice): Of course, I remember seeing you quite often in church, -Mr. Branstone. - -(Her eyes): And you found favour in my sight. - -Sam (his voice): Naturally, I always saw you whenever I went. - -(His eyes): It was for you I went to church. - -Ada (her voice): I’m glad that you were able to come in to-night. I am -often lonely in the evenings. Father is so wrapped up in his books. - -(Her eyes): Meeting you is the great moment of my life. I’m an unhappy -princess in an ogre’s tower. Rescue me. Rescue me. - -Sam ( his voice): It was most kind of Mr. Struggles to ask me in for a -talk about books. - -(His eyes): Books be damned. I’m fascinated by the sensuous rustle of -your skirts, and I’m a hero sent to kiss the wistful look away from your -pleading eyes. - -And so on. By the end of the evening, had the unsaid speeches or half of -them been written down, Ada had evidence enough to have brought a -breach of promise action against a recalcitrant Sam. Only Sam was not -recalcitrant, but, on the contrary, ardent. It was, Ada congratulated -herself, uncommonly good going for a first meeting. - -Peter emerged from “Marcus Aurelius” with a gentle smile which lighted -up his undistinguished face. “Yes. Pagan but grand,” he said, quite -unaware that half an hour had passed since he last spoke. “I’ll lend you -this book, Branstone, and now”.--he glanced at the clock--“I’m afraid -that I must turn you out. I’d no idea it was so late. How rapidly the -time passes when one is talking about one’s books!” - - - - -CHAPTER VIII--ADA STRUGGLES - - -|THERE were moments during that night when Sam imagined that he was in -the stranglehold of a grand passion: times when he quite successfully -deceived himself that he burned for Ada. - -And certainly the experience, unique for him, of a sleepless night lent -colour to the belief that he was passionately in love, whereas he was, -in fact, merely attracted by a girl who had spared no pains to attract; -and what kept Sam awake was not passion but calculation. The affair, -indeed, was as broad as it was long: it had a slender basis of -mutual attraction, and a monstrous superstructure on each side of -self-interest. - -He did not “see through” Ada to the point of being prophetic about her, -but he did even from the beginning perceive that Anne was not likely -to be enthusiastic. But would Anne greet any daughter-in-law with open -arms? Was there born the daughter of Eve whom Anne would think the peer -of her Sam? He did not want to cross his mother, but a man must be a -man, and a mother’s fondness and her jealousy of the intending wife were -things about which one had to be callous. The world, as Benedick said, -must be peopled. - -Anne would see eye to eye with him as to the practical advantages of -Ada. Ada was Peter’s daughter. - -That parentage had, by way of discount, the defect of its quality. -Socially it was a great thing to be Peter’s son-in-law, and not only -socially but ideally. Sam’s admiration for the curate was genuine -enough, and he knew that Anne shared it. But there was the question of -money, and Peter had none. Sam kept his mother, and would have to keep -his wife. He saw in Ada an asset which he could ultimately exploit, but, -in the meantime, until there came into his mind the scheme which should -turn his association with Peter into money, he must reckon on a tight -period. Anne would see the tight period, but not the unborn, fruitful -plan on which he counted for their future. And he could not hurry that -plan to birth. His schemes came to him when he least expected them, -spontaneously. They were not to be forced by worry. - -Again, he reminded himself, there was no hurry. He had only just met -Ada, and was planning as if his engagement ring were on her finger. Not -that he had any serious doubts about that ring and Ada’s willingness to -wear it, but she did not wear it yet, and there was time in hand, and to -spare, for consideration of these practical affairs. - -Meantime, he loved her, and love, according to the authors, was the most -wonderful thing in the world. He told himself very firmly that he loved -Ada, and that love was wonderful. Reiteration is so potent that before -morning he believed what he wished to believe. He recalled the soft -pressure of her hand when she said “Good night,” the froufrou of her -skirt, her melting eye; and persuaded himself that Ada Struggles was a -pearl beyond price. - -He was perfectly sure that he loved her, and for proof there was his -sleeplessness. It occurred to him that as he could not sleep, and was -only thinking in circles, he might as well do something to hasten the -time when he could see Ada again. He could not return “Marcus Aurelius” - to Peter until he had read it, and if he returned it with unexpected -promptitude, he must be ready to face a stiff examination in it; -therefore he lit the gas and read “Marcus Aurelius” by way of serving -Ada, whom he loved. - -Hard service, too, for there was not much in Sam’s philosophy which -agreed with the Emperor’s, but two nights later he was ringing Peter’s -bell with the book under his arm, an ordered précis of it in his mind, -and some selected passages from it on his tongue. They were not selected -because Sam liked them, but because he thought Peter liked them. - -Peter was out, but Ada was in, and, curiously enough for one who was not -an optimist either by nature or experience, dressed again in her Sunday -clothes. - -She opened the door to him. “Father is out, Mr. Branstone,” she said. - -“I only called to return him this book.” - -“I do not think he will be long,” said Ada promptly, who knew very well -that Peter would certainly be late. “Will you not come in and wait for -him?” - -He came, crossing his Rubicon. The unchaperoned intimacy of that night -struck both of them as a daring short cut to a position to which they -were not entitled--a thing properly done only by the engaged and the -maturely and securely engaged. Luck fought for Ada. - -“I’m afraid I can’t stay very long,” he hedged desperately. - -Ada sat down and crossed her knees. A neat ankle was effectively on -exhibition. “That chair of father’s,” she said, “is fairly comfortable.” - Also, it faced Ada’s, and he drew up another, less inviting, chair, and -placed it flush with the fire. Except by a side-glance, he could not see -her ankle now, and evaded that aphrodisiac, while Peter’s chair, -though empty, completed the semi-circle, and seemed to give a sort of -countenance to their interview. Sam drew much comfort from that chair, -and tried to guide their conversation into literary paths of which the -chair would have approved. He discoursed of “Marcus Aurelius,” and he -was very dull, but felt virtuous. - -Ada did not believe that it was virtuous to be dull, and mentally cursed -that _tertium quid_, the ghost of Peter Struggles, whom Sam had so -firmly established in his chair; but she saw that the pace was not to be -quickened here, under Peter’s roof. - -“I think your knowledge of books is wonderful, Mr. Branstone,” she said, -when Sam had exhausted his ideas about “Marcus Aurelius.” - -“I never find time to read, myself. Whenever I have the opportunity of -recreation, I go out for exercise.” The statement lacked the merit of -truth She never took exercise, but was adept at sitting in front of a -fire doing exactly nothing. The point was that in this house of the good -Peter, Sam’s enterprise was burked, and she wanted him where he could -race without a handicap. “Do you ever go to Heaton Park?” she asked -conversationally. “I shall probably be going there on Saturday.” - -“With--with your father?” asked Sam. - -“Oh, no,” she answered brightly. “Saturday is sermon day. That is why I -am in the way here, although,” she added pathetically, “I fear he often -finds me in the way. I am not bookish like you and him.” She gave that -explanation suddenly, and it satisfied him. - -“I am not really bookish, either,” he said. “Of course you won’t be -going alone to Heaton Park.” - -She hoped not. “I expect so,” she said. - -Sam took the plunge. “Could I have the honour of accompanying you, Miss -Struggles?” - -“Oh, but you are so busy. I must not waste your time.” - -“It couldn’t be wasted with you,” said Sam, and glanced guiltily at -Peter’s chair, as if he had exceeded the limits of propriety, but he had -never seen Peter with anything but a benevolent smile, on his face, and -was unable to see him imaginatively now in any other mood. He took fresh -courage. “May I call for you?” - -“That,” said Ada, “would never do. It would disturb father at his -sermon. I shall go by tram at about three o’clock.” She rose. There was -nothing to be done with Sam in that house, but she pinned her faith to -Heaton Park: and not in vain. - -Allow for the difference in size, distance and the general scale of -things, and Heaton Park may be regarded as the Manchester equivalent to -Richmond Park. - -Once upon a time the Manchester Town Council had a magnificent -opportunity, and lost it. There are legends that they did not mean to -lose it, and that they did not lose it through any fault of theirs. But -they lost it. They lost the chance of buying Trafford Park, which lies -along the banks of the Manchester Ship Canal, and was bought by Mr. -Ernest Terah Hooley. It is said that Trafford Park, now a flourishing -and rather American-look-ing industrial town (even the streets in its -residential area are numbered, and not named, after the American plan, -and railways stray about the roads, _more Americano_), is the one -successful enterprise associated with the name of Hooley. That may or -may not be true: at any rate the Manchester Town Council missed its -chance at Trafford Park, and when Heaton Park, another old estate, came -into the market, the Council did not repeat their mistake. - -One goes, ascending all the way, through Cheetham Hill, the Ghetto, to -the heights of Crumpsall and the Park by a municipal tram, which -is admirably cheap or criminally cheap (according to one’s views on -municipal trams), and, in any case, magnificently efficient: and at the -end of the ride, one finds beauty. One may find tea at Heaton Hall, and -pictures that overflow from the meagre Art Gallery in Mosley Street, and -municipal golf-links, but one finds also beauty. - -It is a rolling country, raised above the smoke, dotted with wood and -lake. Old gardens cling about the Hall, with rhododendron glades where -there are sculpture and pools, and the Park rolls free in open air that -is as clean as any air can be within five miles of Manchester Town Hall. -It, lacks of Paradise, and if one can see green hills from Heaton Park, -one cannot kelp but see the factory stacks that crown them or rise up -from the valleys, but beauty lingers here on the outskirts of an ugly -city secure against the jerry-builder and the ultimate defilement. - -Ada was going to Heaton Park. Lovers have gone to Heaton Park before Ada -and they will go when Ada has crumbled to dust. Ada went, and Sam went -with her. - -He went with her, not she with him: but if she led, he was very, very -far from admitting it, though it may have been his obscure, subconscious -knowledge of her leadership which made him outwardly assume the mien and -the gestures of a leader. He asserted, every inch of him, that he was -man, the conqueror, and she permitted the assertion and flattered it. -Leading, indeed, was not a habit of Ada’s, who was born to be led, but -it is given to all of us to outstrip our nature on occasion, and this -was Ada’s chance. A subtle skill was granted her that she might be -cunning with her opportunity. She was all calculation now, while Sam -forgot to calculate, and walked with Ada on his arm along the main drive -of Heaton Park. - -Romance kept step with him and put a radiant veil between his sober -senses and this witching hour: through glamour he beheld his Ada, and -saw that she was good. He soared to high ambition, either to die or -to possess the nymph, and now, that heady hour, to put all to the test -amongst the rhododendron bushes behind the Hall. - -There, by a patch of ancient turf, he halted her, and found a seat near -the pool where water-lilies thrive: a lovers’ nook, love haunted. Who -knows what ardours of the old régime, when lords and ladies trod that -turf, had passed upon the now decaying stone of that comely seat? What -ghostly lovers in satin and brocade stood round to bless them or to -mock? Wood pigeons cooed above them, calling the tune, and Sam danced to -it in an ecstasy of hot desire. - -She had the sleek self-satisfaction of a cat, the same unhurried -certainty that the mouse was hers to gobble when she chose. Ada was very -happy. - -But apprehension gripped him now. He had not known her for a week, and -she was Ada. Peter’s daughter. He stood aghast at his precipitance, -then, with the feeling that it was after all a “stroke” (though a larger -one than ever before), and that he believed in acting promptly, cleared -his throat and plunged into speech. - -“Miss Struggles,” he said, “I know that I have only made your -acquaintance during the current week, but I seem to have known you all -my life. It’s because I used to see you in church, I daresay. I mean we -were not strangers when we met, and, anyhow,” he continued recklessly, -“I don’t care if we were. I’m not the hesitating sort. I mean, show me a -thing, and I can tell you right off whether it’s good or bad. My mind’s -made up in a jiffy: that’s the kind of fellow I am. And when my mind’s -made up, I act.” - -Ada had given a little gasp at the phrasing of his opening--that “during -the current week,” an idiom from his business correspondence slipping -in here to mark his nervousness--but he was fairly launched now, and she -purred gently like a cat well lubricated with butter. - -“Yes, Mr. Branstone,” she said, “I think men ought to be resolute.” - -“So do I,” he replied. “And so I am. Quite resolute and quite determined -about you.” - -“About me?” She turned innocent eyes wonderingly at him. “I didn’t know -you were being personal.” - -“Well,” he said, “I am. I am,” he repeated, and took her hand. - -“Mr. Branstone,” she murmured, as one who sees a vision splendid in a -dream, and let her hand lie limp in his. - -He bent to her. “Can’t you,” he asked hoarsely, “can’t you call me Sam?” - -She called him Sam, and he kissed her. - -“Ada!” He spoke her name like a caress. “Ada!” Her name was wonderful; -she was a miracle; Sam was triumphant love. At that moment he was -passionately in love, and he had conquered. He had pressed the lips of -his divinity, shyly, with a revealing inexpertness which should have -charmed her, who, being a woman, knew all about love while Sam was in -short trousers. It didn’t charm Ada, it touched no deeper chord than -satisfaction at a good job well done. This was his first, his freshest -love, but she cared only that the fish was on her line, securely hooked. -He saw her face, idealized her face and gloried in her face: she saw a -wedding-ring, she was to be Mrs., she was to escape the book-ridden home -of Peter Struggles. Both had their moment then, but Sam, in his, loved -Ada, and Ada only loved herself. - -“Darling,” he said, and sought her lips again She saw the thirst of -him--and used it. - -She drew back. “I do not think you ought to kiss me again until we have -mentioned this to father,” said Ada Struggles, digging the hook more -deeply in her fish. “Not,” she went on, as she saw him flinch, “that I -do not want you to. Only----” - -“Yes,” he said, as she left it at the “only,” and allowed him to -appreciate her infinite delicacy. “Yes. Of course. Shall we have tea at -the Hall?” - -“Oh,” said Ada, “ought we to?” She was seen to tremble on the brink of -a delicious temptation, and with difficulty to resist. “I’m afraid,” she -decided, “not yet. But father will have finished his sermon by now, and -if you came and saw him at once, then... then, Sam...” She eyed -him, languishing, and opened up for him the golden vista of a jocund -courtship--once Peter had been “seen.” He came, obediently, to see -Peter, and she relaxed her standard so far as to take his arm down the -drive of Heaton Park. Indeed, just at the corner by the copse, where -they were hidden, he had an arm round her waist: his feet trod air, and -his head was with the stars. - -Ada was thinking, “If he gets the engagement ring to-night, I can show -it after church to-morrow.” - - - - -CHAPTER IX--ADA AND A MAD TRAM-CAR - - -|ON general grounds--on the grounds, for instance, of anything so -out-of-date and out of reason as filial piety--Ada was quite indifferent -to Peter’s “consent,” and wanted it only to shackle Sam more firmly. She -had not much doubt that Peter would consent, as in fact he did, though -not so readily as she had anticipated. She did not exhibit an engagement -ring at church next day for the reason that she had none to exhibit. -Peter kept Sam too late for that. - -Of course Ada was wrong about Peter: she thought him a good man and -consequently a perfect fool, whereas his foolishness was imperfect, and -he was subject, like most unworldly people, to streaks of acumen about -worldly affairs. They come sometimes, these disconcerting fits -of perception, as if a dam had burst, and usually the times are -inconvenient to those who have reckoned on the unworldliness. - -Peter answered her expectation so far as to say, “Bless my soul,” and -so far only. After that, he began an elaborate and skilful catechism of -Sam, which pretended to be a friendly talk about books, but was really -an examination of Sam Branstone, his character and disposition. At the -beginning Peter knew little of Sam beyond what his observations at the -Concentrics had told him, and Sam’s volunteered remarks about his salary -and his prospects interested Peter to a very slight extent. At the end -Peter decided that Sam was to be trusted to make things easy for Ada on -the material side, and that spiritually he was not beyond hope. - -But he had not, spiritually, been touched as yet. Would Ada touch him? -That was the question for Peter, who knew his Ada. Ada could be led. He -admitted that he himself had failed with her, but he was not a strong -man. A strong man, with love as his ally, could lead Ada, could form -her, and Sam had strength, and, Peter thought, love. It depended, then, -on whether Sam’s love for Ada, reacting on him, would quicken his latent -spirituality so that the lead he gave to Ada would be good. And on the -whole Peter thought there was a reasonable chance. He believed in -the power of love, he believed that love is God and God is love, and -confronted with his pair of self-confessed lovers he read their future -optimistically in the light of his belief. What else could Peter do? -They said they were in love, they appeared to be in love, they had -the symptoms of the state of love. He could only judge the case on the -evidence before the court. - -He could not know that with Sam the symptoms, though real, were -temporary, and with Ada an intelligent mimicry. He gave his assent to -their engagement formally and very solemnly. - -Sam left the house late, thrilling with Ada’s “Good-night” kiss, but the -glow was quick to fade, and he found himself thinking rather of Peter -than of Ada, whom of course, he loved. If ever probe was gentle, it was -Peter’s: nevertheless, Sam had felt the probe antagonistically. He had -shivered naked before Peter’s inquisition, he had understood that he -was under examination, and resented it. It was, however disguisedly, -opposition, and the thought of that kindly opponent led him to think of -one from whom, also, opposition was to be expected, and, probably, less -tactfully. It led to Anne. - -Well, that was the fate of lovers: it was the way to deepen love and, -perhaps already a little doubtful of his love, he welcomed the idea of -Anne in opposition. It was curious that, while he thought of Ada as the -one woman in the world, he should expect Anne to be hostile not merely -to the idea of his marriage in general, but to marriage with Ada -in particular. It was hardly loyal to Ada, who should have reigned -unchallengably queen; and he could offer Anne the argument of the -advantages of being Peter Struggles’ son-in-law. But, with it all, he -looked for friction, and Anne was not to disappoint him there, although -at first she took it with a calmness which disarmed him. - -He came in, of course, late, and ate his supper, silently hoping that -she would give him an opening, but Anne asked no questions, though she -had not seen him since early morning, and Sam was not often out for -meals. She asked no questions because she wanted to watch him first. It -was clear to her at a glance that he was in one of two conditions: he -was drunk or he was in love, and she wanted to make no mistake. If it -was drink she would move very promptly and directly: if love, cannily -and by devious ways. She found quickly that it was not drink. It was -more serious. - -Her silence awed him. “Mother,” he asked by way of breaking it, “aren’t -you well?” - -“Aye,” she said grimly, “I’m well. Are you?” - -“I’ve eaten a good supper.” - -“I noticed that. I’ll clear away now.” - -“Wait a bit. I’ve something to tell you.” - -“I reckon it’ll keep till morning. You mayn’t have known it, but you -came in late. It’s bed-time and beyond.” - -“Still,” he said, “I’d like you to hear this tonight.” - -“You sound serious,” said Anne, and sat. “What is it, Sam?” - -“It’s something rather wonderful, mother.” - -“It would be,” said Anne. “What’s her name?” - -Sam rose, astonished at her perspicacity. “You guessed!” - -“I’m none in my dotage yet.” Anne was grim. - -“Mother, I hope you’re pleased. You must be pleased. It’s all so -wonderful to me.” - -“I asked you her name,” said Anne. - -“It’s Ada Struggles. You know,” he went on hurriedly, “how much we all -admire her father.” - -“I know, but I don’t know Ada.” - -“You will soon,” said Sam enthusiastically. - -“I will that,” said Anne, and there was menace in her voice. She took -her candle. “Good-night, my son,” she said, kissing him, which was not -habitual. - -“Is that all?” he asked. “All that you have to say?” - -“I don’t know Ada yet,” she said, and so was gone to bed. - -Peter and Anne went opposite ways in their search to know whether this -marriage was the right thing for their children’s happiness. Peter -ignored the bread and butter problem, or took it for granted: and his -was the higher wisdom. He knew that Sam was not made of the stuff that -starves for bread; not in his body but in his soul was Sam likely to be -pinched. - -Anne took the earthlier view that happiness resulted from home comforts. -Ada, as she knew, was no shining beauty, and the better for that. Beauty -is skin-deep. But she looked frail, only so, for the matter of that, -did some of the toughest girls, and she took it that Sam had had the -horse-sense to make some preliminary inquiries before he committed -himself. Sam, it appeared, had not. - -Was Ada strong and healthy? Was she economical? Could she cook? Was she -her own dressmaker? And when she found that Sam could answer none of -these questions, she said ironically: “Well, at least, you’ve eyes in -your head. Is their house clean?” - -Sam could only say that he supposed so, and Anne looked witheringly at -him. “Yes, you’re in love all right,” she said. “They say love’s blind. -You’re leaving a lot to me.” - -“Mother,” he said, alarmed, “what are you going to do?” - -“I’m going to get acquainted with Ada,” she said. “One of us must know -her, and you don’t.” - -“If you’ll be fair to her,” said Sam. “I’m not afraid.” - -“I’ll be fair,” said Anne, and meant to be; but is a mother ever fair to -the prospective wife of her only son? Perhaps, and in that case Anne -went to Ada with an open mind. “After all,” she reflected, “I daresay -Tom Branstone’s mother didn’t think much of me, though Tom was one of -ten and it makes a difference. It oughtn’t to, though”----she pulled -herself up. “Anne, you’ll be fair to the girl.” She looked indulgently -at Ada’s curtains and rang Ada’s bell. - -But Ada was wearing silver bangles on her wrists and her shoes were made -for show. Anne had the sort of pleasure which comes from having one’s -worst fears realized. She may have generalized too sweepingly, but she -held that only shallow people wear silver bangles and shoes whose aim is -daintiness and not durability. - -First impressions, at any rate, went heavily against Ada, but Anne -remembered her promise to be fair. It was possible that when Tom -Branstone took Anne to see his mother, that lady did not like Anne’s -way of doing her hair. To each generation the symbols of its youth and -perhaps bangles on Ada were not more skittish than a cairngorn brooch -had been on Anne. - -“I have tea ready, Mrs. Branstone,” said Ada. “Sam told me you were -coming.” - -“Did he?” Anne was surprised into saying. She had not told Sam of her -intention and his guess at it and his warning of Ada had spoilt her plan -of coming upon Ada unawares. She wanted Ada unprepared and unadorned: -Ada at home, not Ada “at home.” And Ada was very much “at home.” The -room had been “turned out”--and so had Peter that it might be--company -manners and the company tea-pot were on exhibition, and everything was -formal and obviously thought out. And, as Anne had to admit, not badly -thought out either. Ada had not been to that expensive boarding school -for nothing; she had an air to awe a porter’s widow. Anne didn’t like -her trick of putting the milk in the cup before she poured the tea, -nor her dogmatic way of asserting that it improved the flavour and that -“everybody did it now.” Everybody, did not do it, Anne did not do it; -but, again, perhaps this was the modern touch, and Anne had come to be -fair. - -She made her first score when Ada left the room for hot water. “This -room’s been dusted to-day,” thought Anne. “I’ll see what her dusting is -worth.” She put it to the test by running her finger along the top of -the books on one of the shelves, and her finger was very black. - -The only way to keep books clean in Manchester is the way taken by nine -out of ten people: they have no books. Some of the others put books -behind glass, like orchids, the rest have the habit of blowing hard at a -book when they take it from its shelf, and of washing their hands before -opening it. - -Anne did not know that. She kept Sam’s few books clean by daily -elbow-grease, and now furtively wiped her dirty finger on her stocking -with the feeling that she had found out Ada. The dust on the books (and -certainly it was thick) confirmed the impression left by the bangles, -and Anne was not in the least ashamed of her spying. Sam had stolen a -march on her by warning Ada and she paid him in his own coin. - -And from then onwards the score rose steadily against Ada. There were -cakes for tea. Now the only excuse for cakes was that one baked them -oneself and Ada confessed that they came from Mrs. Stubbins and made the -further mistake of showing an expert’s knowledge in the productions of -Mrs. Stubbins’ confectionery shop. “Frivolous in food as well as dress,” - was Anne’s comment. Her dress, Anne learnt, had been made by Madame -Robinson. - -“She’s dear,” said Ada, “but quite French. And, of course, she comes to -church.” - -No Nonconformists need apply; but Anne was thinking not of Madame’s -religion but her bills. The employer of a quite French dressmaker called -Robinson, born Duff, was no wife for Sam Branstone. - -And by way of making Anne’s assurance doubly sure, Ada let slip -something about being under the doctor. - -But Anne was not sanguine. She saw clearly enough that it was precisely -Ada’s weakness which was her strength with Sam. Sam had been leant upon -by Madge and George, and liked it, as Anne herself, in that case, had -liked it. But that was a different case from this. Madge had the claim -of sisterhood; Anne could see nothing in Ada and Ada’s weakness to give -her the claim to lean on Sam: and the leaning in marriage should not be -one-sided. Ada could give Sam nothing except herself, and Anne did not -think that gift worth having. - -Sam, unfortunately, did and Anne doubted her power of changing his mind. -Her first attempt, at all events, must be with Ada, and she felt cramped -in Ada’s house, for the reason, perhaps, that it was Peter’s house, the -shrine of his simplicity. She wanted Ada cut off from the defences of -the tea-table and her own familiar surroundings, and saying something -about the warmth of the evening, suggested a ride on the top of a -tram-car. - -“I often do it myself,” said Anne. “It blows the cobwebs away.” - -She did it as a matter of fact not often, for so it would have lost its -quality of a dissipation, but with a wise irregularity she escaped the -thraldom of her house on a tram-car. Tram rides were her romance, her -safety-valve, her glimpse at life. Six-pennyworth of tram is cheaper in -the long run than fourpennyworth of gin: both carry one away, but the -tram-car brings one safely back. - -Anne’s lip tightened when she saw that Ada did not change the flimsy -shoes and that her hat eclipsed their flimsiness. A “baby” hat, of -imitation lace, from which her face peeped out like a drooping, sapless -flower. “Yes,” thought Anne. “Men being men, that hat is clever. It’s a -trap for fools and it caught my fool. Ada Struggles, you’re dangerous.” - -They took the front seat on the tram and aloud she said, using purposely -her roughest accent: “It’s queer to think of our Sam marrying a lady. -I’m not saying he doesn’t deserve it, but his father were a railway -porter and mine were a policeman. His sister was in service.” - -“Sam wall get on,” said Ada, with conviction. - -“I’m none doubting it,” said Anne. “But he’s had luck and it’s a -question if the luck’ll hold. Mr. Travers took him up and sent him to -Grammar School, and Sam didn’t do too well there. He disappointed me and -he’s not gone on as he might have done. The fight’s ahead of him yet and -he’ll need a fighter by his side. I’ve done my share for him this long -while and I’m getting old. I shall be glad of a rest, Ada. Sam’s an -early riser and it’s weary work getting up on a winter’s morning to -light the fire and get his breakfast ready. Only that won’t trouble you. -You’re young.” - -“Of course,” said Ada, “we shall have a servant.” - -“What!” exclaimed Anne, “on two pounds ten a week, with me to keep and -all? I wouldn’t reckon on that, if I were you. Later on, perhaps. But I -know it can’t be done at present, or Sam would have done it for me.” - The idea of Anne Branstone with a wench about her house struck her as -humorous. Anne might have help some day--when she was bed-ridden: till -then, her house was her house. “No,” she went on, “you can take it from -me that it’ll not run to a servant. I don’t know what his idea is about -me, whether he will want me to live with you or not. Likely not. A man -doesn’t want his mother about when he’s wed.” - -“No,” agreed Ada hopefully. Anne oppressed her. - -“No. And I can get on with a pound a week from him. That’ll leave you -thirty shillings. Well, I’ve done it, so I know it can be done, though -mind you, it’s a struggle all the time and double tides when the babies -begin to come. But of course I’ll help you--with advice. I’m not for -forcing myself on you, but naturally I know Sam’s ways and his likings -about food. He’s a bit difficult at times, too, but that’s nothing. All -men are and you’ll know that, having had your father to do for. I don’t -say Sam’s finicky, but he likes what he likes and I hope you’re fond of -the same things. It always turned me up to clean a rabbit, and I never -liked the smell of onions, but that’s a favourite dish of Sam’s and so -I’d just to grin and bear it. And I know you’ll do the same for Sam.” - -Ada squirmed helplessly. She could have screamed. Anne sat at the -outside of the seat and pinned her to it. The tram seemed a Juggernaut -car which drove implacably over her dreams: a prison where she was -tortured by a coarse old woman with work-roughened hands and an endless -flow of vitriol. She wanted to tell Anne that she lied, that the more -she deprecated Sam the more desirable Ada knew him to be, that her -grapes were neither sour nor to be soured by Anne’s insane jealousy; -and she could not do it. The ride seemed more of a nightmare with every -moment that passed. The tram was a mad wheeled cage with a mad driver -and a mad guard. It left the lines and careered wildly into desolation, -and she was fettered in it to an avenging fury who would not stop -talking, but with ruthless common sense pricked all the bubbles of her -hopes. She shut her eyes and abandoned herself to misery. Each minute -seemed an hour. She thought that somebody was throttling her, that the -flying cage was her tomb, that vampires sucked her blood, and her naked, -drained body was shackled to her seat until the car, driving inevitably -through black space, bumped finally against a star in one consuming -smash. She opened her eyes to find that the tram had stopped at its -suburban terminus and that Anne was asking: “Shall we get down for a -walk or shall we go back by the same car?” - -So she was still in the living world, and with the consciousness of -it courage returned to her. For a minute she was silent, fighting her -demons off, catching at facts and weighing them. Anne was not a -vampire, but an old worn woman who had, curiously, the right to call Sam -Branstone son--Ada’s future mother-in-law, and a quaint one too; one to -be put firmly and haughtily in her place and kept there. - -“We’ll stay on this car,” she replied. Its madness had departed. It was -a tram, quite eminently sane and usual. “I think,” she went on, “that -you exaggerate the difficulties. I’ve no doubt that Sam will have more -money by the time we’re married. You see, he has me to work for now.” - -Not a simper with it either. Pure matter-of-fact statement, and the -truth of it hit Anne, the cool assumption that Ada as a spur to effort -was more competent than Anne. And this to Anne who had learnt algebra -for Sam, to Anne who had underfed herself that he might wear the clothes -a Grammar School boy ought to wear, to Anne who--oh, it was ineffable, -but it defeated her because she knew, bitterly, gallingly, but -undeniably, that it was true. This baby-faced chit, this fool in -petticoats was more to Sam than the mother who bore him. Queen Anne was -dead and Ada Struggles reigned in place of her. - - - - -CHAPTER X--GERALD ADAMS, SOCIOLOGIST - - -|ANNE called at Madge’s on her way home. Madge’s, in spite of George’s -progress, was still the house which had been the premises of the -Hell-fire Club. Anne did not often go there and never without reason, -but Madge was at a loss to know the reason of this visit, nor did she -guess it when Anne unobtrusively dovetailed into The conversation about -young Sam Chappie a question which might have seemed irrelevant. “Have -you done anything yet with that spare room of yours upstairs?” she -asked. - -“No,” said Madge. “Nor likely to, I fancy.” That was the reason of -the visit. Anne was safeguarding her retreat, though she by no means -admitted that it would come to a retreat. Engagements do not invariably -lead to marriage. Meantime, hers was the waiting game and a rupture with -Sam at this stage was to be avoided. - -When he asked her, not too confidently, if she did not agree with him -about the wonder of Ada, she exercised a noble self-restraint, and all -she said was: “She’s not the wife for a poor man, Sam.” - -“No,” said Sam thoughtfully. “I’d tumbled to that. And I don’t mean to -be poor either,” and so went out to open the dark chapter of his bright -success. He went to the Concentrics, not knowing that he was going to -his fate. He went because it was the night of their weekly meeting -and he had to go somewhere to avoid Anne’s eye, but his mood was not -concentric. “I must get rich for Ada, rich for Ada,” was the burden of -his thought--so early did he justify Ada’s words to Anne--and it was not -a timely thought for a Concentrics evening. - -He had even forgotten that he had a special interest in this meeting, -where the lecturer was to be Adams, once Sam’s pet aversion and -unbeatable rival at the Grammar School. He was reminded of it when -he found himself accosted by a young man whom he could not at first -identify. - -“Jove! If it isn’t Sammy Branstone! Are you a member of these fossils?” - -“Dubby Stewart!” said Sam, as recognition dawned on him. - -“Reed’s here as well, somewhere,” said Stewart. “It’s a gathering of the -clan.” - -Reed and Stewart, it seemed, were both members, which is to say that -they had come once or twice some time ago and continued to keep up the -small subscription from force of habit or through sheer weakness to -stop paying it. Few societies indeed could exist were it not for -the enthusiasm of the attending nucleus and the subscriptions of the -nonattending mass. - -“We came to hear Gerald Adams make an ass of himself,” Stewart -explained. “What a subject!” - -Sam had even forgotten what the subject was. “Rich for Ada, rich for -Ada,” was still ringing in his ears. - -The subject was “Social Purity.” - -“Which accounts,” said Stewart, “for the size of the audience. They’ve -all come hoping for the worst. I know I have.” - -The worst did not happen, or, rather, if it did, it was so skilfully -disguised that nobody recognized it as the worst. It was easy to mistake -it for the best. - -Adams was one part in earnest and two parts impish in the manner of the -superior person who is out for an intellectual lark. He had a constant -preoccupation with that which is known above all other questions as -_the_ social question. It was not a nice preoccupation for a young -man: it was, for instance, remote from the healthy exuberance of Sam’s -Rabelaisianism. And, of course, Adams was wily: he wasn’t the stuff of -martyrdom. He enjoyed, as an intellectual gymnastic, the treatment of -his subject so that it should at once shock his audience and win him -their approval as an honest man doing an unpleasant job from conviction. - -Sam agreed with Stewart. His old prejudice against Adams was strong -within him and he hoped Adams would come a cropper. That was at the -beginning, when Adams, with an egregious affectation of superiority, -began to read his lecture; but soon, quite soon, Sam changed his -mind and hoped for nothing but that the skilful skater would keep his -balance, on the thin ice. - -“Rich for Ada,” and here, as Sam saw it, was a “stroke” indeed if Adams -were successful to the end and if at the end he would listen sensibly to -Sam. - -Adams was in little danger. He was of Oxford, London, the world, and his -audience of Manchester. And he stooped to conquer with a lecture that -was a mosaic of advances and retreats, of blazing indiscretions and smug -apologies, of audacities and diffidence. - -Sam watched the audience keenly, and it would not be unjust to say that -the audience gloated. Not all of them gloated, but as a whole, as an -audience, they lapped up Adams’ lecture like mother’s milk. He called -it frankness and gave unnecessary detail, he had an appearance of -honest indignation and a reality of bathing in mud with relish. It was -abominable but diabolically clever; indecent to the core, it artfully -evaded anything to warrant a police court charge of indecency; it was -foulness cloaked in piety, marching under the banner of Reform. He was -a crusader in masquerade, flashing beneath their guard of British -reticence a rapier whose hilt was a cross. - -Adams found a curious satisfaction in standing there, like a penitent at -a Salvation Army meeting, pretending to an immense personal knowledge of -evil which was, happily, impossible, and he delighted in the presence -of a cleric in the chair. The thing developed, for him, into an exciting -game, a contest of his wits with Peter’s. He had carried his audience, -but the chairman sat aloof and dubious. If Peter saw through him, he had -lost; if not, he won. For Peter he read the condemnatory passages -with vibrant earnestness, and for Peter he read as if reluctantly, -conscience-impelled, the details of his evidence. - -Sam caught the infection, too, but hardly as a game. He hung on Peter’s -judgment with a deep anxiety, watched Peter flush and shuffle in his -chair, saw him take snuff nervously, trembled at the moment when Peter -seemed about to interrupt, sighed with relief when Peter sat back -silently again and waited feverishly for the chairman’s speech. - -There would probably have been little doubt about Peter’s verdict had -Adams been an ordinary Concentric, lecturer and a member of the Society. -But he was neither, and was there by invitation. And he was not only of -Oxford, Peter’s University, but brilliantly of Oxford, of Balliol, with -academic honours thick upon him. If Peter thought, as Adams spoke, that -he ought to call him to order, he remembered that Adams was a Double -First, and desisted. He couldn’t be a hypocrite--because he had won the -Ireland. He was terribly in earnest now--because he had won the -Greek Verse Prize. He was single-minded, chivalrous, braving the -misapprehension of the scurrilous, open and honest--because he was a -Fellow of Balliol. - -It did not matter to Peter that Adams’ father was the richest -parishioner in St. Mary’s; it mattered even less that Adams was -exquisitely dressed in exactly the shade of grey appropriate to an -ardent crusader. (“Look at his damned clothes,” Reed had whispered to -Stewart. “Hasn’t he thought it out?” He had: his clothes were chaste if -his lecture wasn’t.) But scholarship did matter to Peter, whose other -name was Charity, and once he had decided that Gerald was sincere, that -all he said was subordinate to and justified by high purpose, he was -generous, and the more generous because he had doubted. - -“The subject of Mr. Adams’ lecture,” he said, “is like nettles: if it -is not handled boldly, it stings. I have nothing but praise for the -courage, the down rightness, the earnestness of his treatment of this -distressing evil. I think that we have all been deeply stirred by his -instances of man’s inhumanity to women. As a churchman I feel a special -responsibility and, may I say, a special gratitude to Mr. Adams for his -study of this subject. Medicine, as we all know, has its martyrs, -its research workers who sacrifice themselves for the health of their -fellowmen. Mr. Adams, who has examined this social sore so thoroughly, -at what cost in pain to himself only the most sensitive amongst us can -guess, deserves to be ranked with the martyrs of science....” And so on, -doubly handsome because he felt ashamed of himself for doubting Gerald’s -honesty, and made amends. - -Adams had won his game, hands down. He thought the old boy gloriously -funny and he thought Sam Branstone, who rose when Peter sat down, -funnier still. Sam believed in striking while the iron was hot: he -didn’t want Peter to have the opportunity of changing his mind when he -came to think things over coolly. - -Sam began by congratulating himself on the good fortune that had been -his in having been the school-fellow of the distinguished Mr. Adams. -Adams gazed hard at Sam through his austere pince-nez and was observed -perceptibly to start. “Gad,” he was thinking, “it’s that lout, the -porter’s son.” But he liked Sam’s flattery very well. Sam, it appeared, -had been so deeply impressed by Mr. Adams’ admirable, indeed eloquent -and moving address, and by the chairman’s very just eulogy of it, -that he thought it would be a tremendous pity if so arresting, so -well-written a paper failed to reach a wider audience than that before -which it had been read. They had been waiting for this paper; its appeal -was wide; the urgency of its need, instinct in every word of it, was -emphasized by the chairman’s remarks. He had, therefore, a practical -proposal to make. The paper ought to be printed, and if Mr. Adams could -spare him a few moments after the meeting, Sam hoped that he would let -him arrange the matter. - -He sat down amongst great applause. Under its cover Stewart whispered: -“You inimitable ass!” Sam looked at him in pained surprise. “I want to -see that paper in print,” he declared indignantly. - -The debate meandered in the usual futile way. Few had anything to -say, but many liked the sound of their own voices and indulged their -preference at length, till both speakers and talkers had taken their -innings and Sam was able to go up to the platform. Peter had not changed -his mind and was complimenting Adams in his simple, charming way. - -It ought, no doubt, to have made Adams thoroughly ashamed of himself, -but it did not. It hardened his cynicism so that, when Sam came up, all -he was thinking was: “I’ve gulled the parson. Now to bounce the porter’s -son.” - -“How are you, Branstone?” he asked. “Glad to meet you again.” - -“And I you,” said Sam. They shook hands. “Have you had time to think of -what I proposed?” - -“As a matter of fact,” said Adams, which is the usual way of beginning a -lie, “I’d thought of sending my little paper to one of the Reviews--the -_Fortnightly_ or the _Contemporary_.” - -“Excellent,” said Peter. - -Sam could have kicked him. “I venture to differ,” he said. “The chief -object should be to reach as wide a public as possible. My own idea was -to do it by itself in the form of a----” he was going to say “pamphlet,” - but altered it to “brochure.” He thought it sounded more attractive. “In -the heavy reviews it would be read by comparatively few, and it would -not stand alone as in a brochure. It would take its place along with -other articles. And I have heard that contributors to the reviews are -not paid highly.” - -Adams had not thought of payment at all, but he thought of it now, with -zest. He was rich, but the idea of despoiling the porter’s son, who had -had the assurance to go to school with him, struck him as the crowning -move in a jolly game. This was, transcendently, his night for winning. - -“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, which was true. “I suppose I should get -about twenty pounds for it.” - -“I will give you twenty-five,” said Sam. - -“Sam!” protested Peter. He approached the motive (as he understood it), -but considered the offer reckless from a young man who contemplated -matrimony. - -“Twenty-five pounds,” repeated Sam firmly. - -“Well,” laughed Gerald, quite unable not to laugh at the idiot’s -persistence, “if you’re as keen on doing good as all that, I’ll take the -offer.” - -“Right,” said Sam. “I’ll settle it at once.” - -He went to the chairman’s table and made out a form of assignment of -copyright. He had a little knowledge of the law, and it was a dangerous -thin--for the other fellow. But both Sam and Adams went home that night -in a state of cherubic self-satisfaction. - -“What a game?” thought Adams. “And what an ass!” - -Curiously, the thoughts of Sammy Branstone were not dissimilar. He had -this advantage over Adams: that Adams had read his paper and had not -watched his audience all the time. Sam had watched the audience and -thought twenty-five pounds a cheap price for that paper. - -He slept on it, and awoke next day with confidence in his investment -undisturbed, but the news which awaited him at the office shook him at -first. It was one thing to see a profitable side-line in the publication -of Adams’ address and another to be suddenly obliged to regard the -copyright of that paper as his one sound asset. He feared, in cold -daylight, that it was not quite sound enough for that. - -Yet what had happened did not come as a complete surprise. Sam knew -Travers’ habits and knew that men of his habits are liable to die -suddenly. Travers had died in the night, and Sam was very angry. - -He told himself that he had no luck with people’s deaths. His father had -died too soon for Sam, and now Travers was dead just when Sam had become -engaged, and when he had undertaken a speculation which, however high -his hopes of it, was after all speculative. - -An estate agent’s business is largely personal and, if there is -no obvious successor, no heir apparent already in training for the -succession, is apt to fall to pieces when its head dies. The process of -disintegration in this case had set in long ago; drink had begun what -death now ended; and there was no heir. Lance Travers had decided for -medicine and was, on the material side, little affected by his father’s -death, since Travers had bought him a practice a year earlier -somewhere in the South, and the neighbourhood was proving healthily -valetudinarian. - -The office was not a cheerful place that day. Men estimated their -savings and balanced them against the probable weeks of unemployment -before they found new places. A few of them, no doubt, might hope to “go -with” the business to whomever bought it; and they wondered who would -buy and which of them would be engaged by the purchaser. - -They fancied Branstone’s chances, and so, in fact, did Sam, but it was -all in the air and exceedingly disturbing just when he had given himself -so much else to think about. Even if he did move with the business, it -could only be as a clerk. He lost the advantage of Travers’ friendliness -and, besides, he was not sure that anybody would think the business -worth buying. Travers had no right to die. - -Then the thought struck him that he was taking it lying down. He, a lad -of mettle, was whining like these gutless clerks in the office. He was -betraying his lucky star. Death, even Tom Branstone’s, had not been -forbiddingly unkind to him. Tom’s death had led him indirectly to -the office, to Minnifie, the Concentrics, Ada, and he began to see in -Travers’ death the possibilities of good. It might be the finger of -fate, pointing him away from the office which had served its turn to -a new dispensation to be arranged by the collaborators, Sam and -Providence, upon the rock of Adams’ paper. - -They carried on the routine work of the office as men under sentence of -death do little, ordinary things and find a solace in them. Then, -late that afternoon, Lance Travers came. He had travelled since early -morning, had been home, seen his father’s doctor and his father’s -solicitor and was now come to see Sam. They sat in Travers’ private -office, where the blinds were drawn, and in the presence of Travers’ -son, who owed his life to him, Sam was conscious of a deeper feeling -than he had ever known before, he was no longer angry because Travers -had died, but mourned him honestly. - -“By the way,” said Lance presently, “did my father ever tell you about -his will?” - -“His will!” said Sam. “No. Why should he?” - -“I thought he might have done,” said Lance. “He made it last year after -he bought me my practice. He thought then that he ought to do something -for you, but he didn’t expect to live long and he put it in his will. -There’s a thousand pounds for you.” - -Sam took it nicely. “I’d rather,” he said, “that he were still alive;” - and, at the moment, he meant it. - -But he had been right. It was the finger of fate. - - - - -CHAPTER XI--UNDER WAY - - -|AS a simple matter of course, Lance offered Sam the first refusal of -his father’s business, but was not surprised when Sam declined to think -of it. - -Sam was far more surprised at himself than Lance at Sam. Lance had never -looked upon estate agency as a desirable profession, whereas Sam had -been bored with its routine without losing his respect for its utility, -and only yesterday he would have jumped at the chance of owning the -business. He heard with astonishment the sound of his own voice politely -refusing the offer, but having refused he did not tamper with his swift -decision. - -The fact is, one supposes, that what might be called the quick-firing -part of his intelligence had absorbed and reacted to the fact of his -thousand pounds before the whole of him was properly aware of it. At any -rate, he refused, and, on reflection, approved his refusal. - -His speculation in Gerald Adams wore a different aspect now that he was -a capitalist. “Money,” as he had remembered once before, “breeds -money,” and he doubted if Travers’ business, robbed of Travers’ genial -personality, were fecund enough for the pace of money-breeding he -anticipated. Perhaps, too, there was something in the thought that the -Travers’ agency was dead man’s shoes, while, win or lose, the idea of -publishing Adams’ lecture was his own invention. - -Another thing that happened to him with his legacy was the feeling that -he had regained caste; he belonged again with his old school-fellows. -“How many of them,” he thought, “can lay hands at a moment’s notice on -a thousand pounds?” and walked erectly through the street where, -naturally, since he had not met him in eight years until last night, he -encountered Stewart. - -“Hullo,” said Stewart, “how’s the patron of letters? And would a drink -be any use to you?” - -Sam hesitated. Did the way to the society of the Olympians lie through -the doors of the public-house? Stewart was undeniably Olympian: he -had the air, the manner, the clothes of well-assured success. He had a -lightness and a poise that excited Sam’s envy. He had style, this youth -who might be anything, but who, Sam cynically thought, had probably -not paid for his distinguished clothes, while Sam was the owner of a -thousand pounds. He was, thereby, Olympian in quiet fact, which need not -be shrieked from the house-tops, as Stewart had, apparently, to shriek. -Sam _was_, and there was the possibility that Stewart only appeared -to be. It gave him strength to refuse. Not from principle, but from -economical prejudice Sam was a teetotaller. - -“I don’t take alcohol,” he said. - -“It’s never too late to mend,” said Stewart. “Still, there’s a café -here, and we’ll drink coffee. It’s bad for our hearts, but Balzac wrote -the ‘Comédie Humaine’ on black coffee, so there may be something in the -vice, though it isn’t a habit of mine. Two black coffees, Sophie,” he -ordered from the waitress. - -“If it isn’t a habit of yours,” asked Sam, “how do you come to know the -waitress by name?” - -“‘My dear ass!” said Stewart pityingly. - -“Do you call them all Sophie?” - -“Only when it’s their name. Your name is Sophie, isn’t it?” he said as -the girl returned with their coffee. - -“Yes, sir.” - -Stewart appreciated Sam’s astonishment. “I know I’m showing off, but I -like it. If you see a girl with an idiotic silver brooch made up of the -letters _SOPHIE_ you can assume that it’s her name, and not the name of -her best boy. Simple, when you know how it’s done, like all first-rate -conjuring.” - -“I hadn’t noticed her brooch,” said Sam. - -“I had. That’s the difference. Still, it isn’t fair to blame you. I’m -a professional observer.” Sam took Stewart to mean that he was a -detective, but hadn’t time to ask for confirmation, because Stewart -asked instead: “And what, by the way, are you?” And threw him into some -embarrassment by the question. What, indeed, at the moment was he? - -“Doesn’t your observation tell you?” he fenced. - -“It told me last night that you’re a considerable lunatic. Did you buy -that stuff of Adams’?” - -“Yes, I did.” - -“Thought I saw you in the act as I went out. Obviously, then, you’re a -tripe merchant.” - -“I wonder,” said Sam, “whether you could help me, Stewart. Seriously, I -mean.” - -“In the tripe trade?” - -“I want very much to meet a journalist.” He thought a detective ought to -know journalists. - -“But, my dear fellow, this is a café. It isn’t a bar. What do you want a -journalist for?” - -“I will tell that to the journalist.” - -“If you want to start a paper and you’re looking for an editor, you -needn’t look further than me. There have been candid moments in my -life when I have called myself a journalist. At present, I edit the -_Manchester Warden_, but I’m open to conviction.” He didn’t quite edit -that paper--yet, but reported for it at six pounds a week. He did not -know shorthand, but he quoted Joseph Conrad and Henry James, correctly -and incongruously, when he wrote a notice of a music-hall performance. - -“I’m afraid,” said Sam astutely, “that when I said a journalist, I meant -something very different from you, but I will tell you how I stand and -perhaps you will advise me. Last night, as you know, I bought Adams’ -paper. I gave him twenty-five pounds for it.” - -“Lunacy,” said Stewart, “is a mild word for your complaint. Twenty-five -shillings would be a top price for it in a friendly market.” - -“To-day I reached the office to learn that my employer had died -suddenly. You remember Lance Travers? It was his father, and with his -death, for all practical purposes the business comes to an end. Well, -you see my position.” - -Stewart quoted Sheridan: “‘The Spanish Fleet thou canst not see, because -it is not yet in sight.’ And much the same applies to your position, my -lad. Its postal address is the Womb of Time.” - -“That is true,” said Sam. “And I may add that I am engaged to be -married.” - -“I can admire thoroughness,” said Stewart. “You omit none of the -essentials.” - -“Now, with it all,” said Sam, “I’m still too proud to go to Adams and -ask him to let me off my bargain.” - -“And it wouldn’t be any use if you did,” said Stewart. “He’d laugh at -you.” - -“I can believe it of him. But I’m landed with his paper. It has cost me -twenty-live pounds. I meant to print it, and I mean to print it, but -I mean now to sell it when it is printed.” Sam left Stewart to suppose -that, had Travers not died, he would have distributed that pamphlet -free. “Money,” he added, “is a necessity.” - -He had taken the right line. Stewart’s instinctive generosity was -touched, and he meant to give this lame dog a lift over the stile. “I -see where your journalist comes in. All right, Branstone, you can count -on me.” - -“On you?” said Sam. “Oh, I couldn’t ask it of you.” - -“You didn’t ask,” replied Stewart naively. “I offer. I may edit the -_Manchester Warden_, but Zeus nods sometimes, ’busmen have been known to -take a holiday, and there is a paper called the _Sunday Judge_ in whose -chaste columns I have written under the name of Percy Persiflage. Send -me a proof of that pamphlet and Percy shall stamp upon it. He will say -that no decent person could read it without being revolted, and the -pamphlet will boom. It’s the Sunday-paper public that you want, and... -No, Percy shall not stamp. Percy shall bless. He will be moved to -admiration of Mr. Adams’ earnestness, he will applaud the high moral -purpose, and will do the rest by correspondence. Get your sisters and -your cousins and your aunts to pitch in letters on either side, and I’ll -see they get printed. I make this alteration because of the bookstalls.” - -“The bookstalls?” asked Sam vaguely. - -“This problem of distribution,” said Stewart impressively, “is the -most difficult question of modern life. The producer is here, you; -the consumer (we hope) is everywhere, and the problem is to bring your -pamphlet to the thirsting consumer. The answer is the bookstall, but -the bookstalls are cautious. When I say bookstalls I mean the right -bookstalls. You will never see your money back if the only bookstalls -which will exhibit your pamphlet are those which sell atrociously -printed paperbacked editions of ‘Nana’ and ‘Fanny Hill.’ You must -flourish on _the_ bookstalls, and they banned ‘Esther Waters.’ The -bookstalls, Branstone, are going to call for tact, and tact shall begin -with Percy’s appreciation.” - -“Or earlier,” said Sam. - -“Earlier?” - -“I hadn’t thought of the bookstalls, but this may help there, as well as -in other ways. I mean, as far as Manchester is concerned, and if we get -it on the stalls here, they can’t very well refuse it in other places.” - -“Manchester being Manchester, it isn’t likely,” said Stewart. “What’s -your idea?” - -“Only this,” said Sam, and showed him his proposed cover for the -pamphlet. - - - -THE SOCIAL EVIL - -Being an Address - -By Gerald Adams, M.A., - -Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. - -As Read before the Concentric Society with The Rev. Peter Struggles in -the Chair. - - -Stewart looked at it, then he looked at Sam, and Sam seemed to him very -little like a lame dog now. He whistled loudly. “You’ll get your money -back, my lad,” he said. “But this is rough on Peter.” - -“Mr. Struggles approved of the lecture.” - -“I wonder if he will approve of this?” said Stewart. - -“He can’t go back on his word,” said Sam. “Besides, I’m engaged to his -daughter.” - -“The thing that troubles me,” said Stewart admiringly, “is that I took -you for a harmless lunatic. I’m only a journalist myself, with one foot -in the _Manchester Warden_ and the other in the _Sunday Judge_. I’m a -Tory on Sundays and a Liberal on weekdays. I gave up honesty when I gave -up being young, and I thought I knew the ropes by this time. But when -I think that I took you for a guileless innocent, I want to go into a -corner and kick myself hard.” - -Sam found this rather alarming he knew that his use, or misuse, of -Peter’s name was cunning, but began to regret that he had shown Stewart -his pro posed cover. “But I get my review in the _Judge?_” he asked -hardily. - -“My son,” said Stewart, “you do. I’ve spent sixpence on coffee and half -an hour on you. There’s good copy in this and I can’t afford to waste -it. I’ve my living to earn, and Gerald Adams deserves the worst he’s -going to get. At the same time, I’ll allow myself the luxury of telling -you that yours is a lowdown game.” - -“We didn’t make the world what it is, did we?” said Sam. - -“And neither you nor I will leave it any better than we found it,” - said Stewart, prophesying rashly with the boundless cynicism of his -twenty-five years. “The worst of coffee,” he went on, finishing his cup, -“is that it makes you thirsty. I’m going across the road for a drink. Do -you have one with me?” - -“No, thanks,” said Sam. “I have to see a printer.” - -“Oh, yes. Well, why not the Judge Press? I daresay I could get you in -there on the ground floor.” - -“But they are not quite the right people for this. They print sporting -papers, and----” - -“You’ll die from overheated bearings in your brain-box,” said Stewart. -“You think of everything.” - -Sam had, at least, thought that a printer (however obscure by comparison -was the Judge Press, whose works were a small town in themselves) who -issued a religious paper was better for his purpose than the printers of -the _Sunday Judge, Sporting Notions and the Football Times_. He went to -Carter, Meadowbank & Co., who were on the verge of bankruptcy, but had -the advantage of printing _Christian Comfort_ and the _Church Child’s -Weekly_, and arranged with them to print five thousand copies of Adams’ -paper. Carter, who was the whole firm, looked askance at the title, but -when Sam pointed out that the Rev. Mr. Struggles had approved of the -contents, Carter succumbed at once, and did not even attempt a protest -when Sam instructed him to print on the whole five thousand: - -“This first edition of one thousand copies is issued at sixpence. -The price for future editions will be one shilling. Samuel Branstone, -Publisher.” - -Carter’s dingy office was decorated with the chief products of his firm, -texts, the stock-in-trade of commercialized religiosity. Well handled, -there was money in texts, but Carter was an old man with declining -powers and a conservative mind. Meadowbank, who had looked after the -distributive side of the business, was lately dead, and Carter’s -nightly prayer was that the concern might last his time. As things were -promising, it seemed unlikely, but here was Sam with an order for him -and no disposition to beat him down in price. Carter did not like the -instruction to describe five thousand copies as one thousand, and he -didn’t like the subject of the pamphlet, but he wanted business, and he -couldn’t conceive of a pirate sailing under the flag of Mr. Struggles. - -Sam rammed that home, feeling the man’s hesitation. “I think it -probable,” he said, “that Mr. Struggles will preach a sermon on -this pamphlet. Perhaps I might tell you that I am going to be his -son-in-law.” - -That settled Carter, and he took the order. He knew, and was sensitive -to, the influence of Peter Struggles, curate. He knew that in the -parish of. St. Mary’s, Peter’s smile counted for more than the vicar’s -weightiest word, and that while the vicar was unknown outside his -parish, Peter had authority throughout Manchester--an authority which -had lately growm through Peter’s refusal of preferment to an easy living -in the country. It hadn’t, of course, been Peter who had told of that -refusal, he had not told Ada. But it had leaked out, and Manchester, -which despises selflessness in men, honoured it in the curate; -Mancunians were flattered by his loyalty to St. Mary’s and by the -thought that they were fellow citizens to saintliness. - -Emphatically, the name of Peter Struggles on the pamphlet was a _clou_, -but Sam had not told Peter of it yet, and he must do it. He could not -afford an accident, and Peter, he considered, was manageable. - -Ada met him at the door with a bright smile, and raised expectant lips, -but he shook his head, touch ing her shoulder tenderly, and passed -in front of her into the room so that, when she followed, her face -expressed the anxiety he desired. He entered himself as a man crushed by -grief. - -“What is it, Sam?” she asked. “What’s the matter?” - -Peter closed “Plotinus” reluctantly: he never found time enough for -reading, and here was one of his few evenings interrupted. He had the -thought, feeling it ungenerous, that interruptions of this kind would -end when Ada was married. - -“I’ve had sad news to-day. Mr. Travers died in the night. It’s... it’s -rather a blow.” - -Peter disdained priestly conventionalities. “He was a good friend to -you, Sam.” - -“A second father,” said Sam carefully, not taking the opportunity of -telling that Travers’ friendship had lasted beyond death. Perhaps -he thought this moment too sacred for the intrusion of a legacy. “Of -course,” he went on, “I’ve had all day to think of it, and of the -difference this will make to me--to us, that is, Ada, for you and me.” - -“What difference, Sam?” she asked sharply. - -“It comes to this,” he said dejectedly, “that I am out of work and -competition is so desperate. While he lived, I had his friendship behind -me. Now--I don’t say that I’m afraid to stand alone. No doubt it will -be good for me eventually, but, Ada, you see how it may postpone our -hopes.” - -Ada saw it. “Plotinus” took that opportunity of slipping from Peter’s -knee, and Peter saw it, too, and sighed. “Oh, Sam!” said Ada. - -“And,” said Sam, looking at Peter with a fine affectation of guilt, -“there is my recklessness of last night. In my then circumstances, it -was extravagant. To-day it looks worse than that.” - -“You couldn’t know,” said Peter kindly. - -“No,” Sam agreed. “I couldn’t know, and I have the feeling now that I -must abide by what I did.” - -“Very proper, Sam, but Mr. Adams is not poor and I should think that if -you were to go to him------” - -“Oh, please,” said Sam, “please don’t press me to do that. A bargain, I -feel so strongly, is a bargain and should be kept at all costs.” - -Peter felt silently ashamed of himself. “You are perfectly right,” he -said. - -“Well,” said Sam, “that’s how I feel, but in a sense I’m landed with the -thing and I propose to go on with it. As I see it--and I know there’s -a certain amount of inappropriateness in thinking at all of these -practical affairs with my benefactor so recently dead, but I must, I -must----” he looked at Ada and it was understood that his thought for -her excused all--“As I see it, it’s a case for going on and trying to -pull the chestnuts out of the fire, so to speak. I shall print that -paper, and the good that I hoped to do will not be lost because my -circumstances have altered, but I shall make a small charge for it to -cover expenses as far as possible. And as I naturally want it to sell -well, I had the idea of stating on the cover that it was first read at -the Concentrics under your chairmanship. The point of that is that all -the members were not there last night; it will call their attention -to it; and they will, I hope, buy. It makes certain of a few reliable -purchasers.” - -“Quite, quite,” said Peter. “It’s an excellent idea. Though I can hardly -suppose that mention of my name has any value, the name of the society -should certainly help.” - -His modesty was quite incurable. He had not the faintest notion of the -wide-spread influence of Peter Struggles. “I have thought of little else -all day but Mr. Adams’ paper. I wondered if it was my duty to speak of -this terrible subject from the pulpit. The Church ought not to be silent -or it may be thought to acquiesce.” - -Sam felt his heart leap within him. “Adams thought frankness best,” he -said. - -“Yes, yes, at the Concentrics. But there are difficulties for me, -and perhaps I shall speak only to the Young Men’s Class at the-Sunday -School. Though that,” he reflected, “is perilously near to compromise.” - -“But what is it?” asked Ada. “What are you talking about?” - -Sam was silent. So was Peter, and the silence grew till he felt it a -reproach. He looked at Sam. “You see?” he said. “That is the dilemma -of the Church. I shall speak to the young men, and, after that perhaps, -perhaps----” He glanced at Ada. - -“No,” he finished decidedly, “I must leave it at that.” He was -fifty-six, and most of his life had been lived under Victoria the Good. - - - - -CHAPTER XII--DROPPING THE PILOT - - -|ANNE lived for Sam: and if she rarely showed it, if, for instance, it -appeared sometimes that she lived to make her house the cleanest in the -row, that was no more than a symptom of her stoicism. She lived for Sam, -and he knew it. She belonged to a race which hates ostentation like the -devil and keeps its feelings veiled behind a grim reserve. It conceals -emotion as a hidden treasure and wears a mask which strangers take to -indicate a want of sensibility. She had not the habit of caressing -Sam; she chastened whom she loved; and Sam was very well aware of the -strength of Anne’s love. - -She was ready, at the proper time, to give him to the proper woman, but -she held that Ada was not the woman nor this the time. She was ready to -go her ways from Sam, and from life itself, when he made a marriage -of which she could approve, but she was not ready to leave him to Ada -Struggles of whom she disapproved. She was not ready to die for the -likes of Ada Struggles. Let Sam marry Ada, and Anne, meant to live, -because some day he would have need of her and, when the day came, she -would be there. - -Now, Sam would have been pleased if he could have told Anne about the -pamphlet and the legacy. He had hoped after the Minnilie affair that his -next “stroke” would be one of which he could tell Anne, but he did -not see this as tellable. She would naturally ask what the pamphlet was -about, and if Peter could not speak of it to his daughter, Sam could -speak of it even less to his mother. And as to the legacy, what was the -use of mentioning that to a woman who would point out that security was -only to be had with two and a half per cent? Which wasn’t at all Sam’s -notion of the uses of a thousand pounds. - -After all, he was grown up and a man does not tell his mother -everything. But unless he is a fool, he tells her the things which she -is bound in any case to find out, and if he had foreseen the certainty -of her finding out he would, not being a fool, have told her these. -He did not foresee, because Anne did not read newspapers, but she had -neighbours who did and who told her, with comments, of the storm which -presently broke out in the columns of the _Sunday Judge_, and of Mr. -Travers’ will, which received a small paragraph in the paper when it was -proved. - -“There was a time when you and me didn’t go in for secrets,” she said to -him. “You’ve not had much to say to me of late and I’ve not seen much of -you, either, with the hours you’re keeping, but I’d put it down to love. -I know a man’s not rational when he’s courting, but it seems there’s a -lot about my son that I’ve to learn. Why didn’t you tell me about Mr. -Travers? Did you think I’d steal the money off you?” - -“Of course not, mother, but I meant to come to you with a finished tale, -not one that’s only just begun. I’m engaged in a business affair of -which I was going to tell you when it was complete.” - -“_Yes_,” she said, “I see. You’re risking your money. If you came out on -the right side, you’d tell me about it, and if you lost you’d forget to -tell me. Are you losing?” - -“It’s early days to say.” - -“Then maybe I’m still in time to nip this in the bud. What’s this about -the _Sunday Judge?_” - -“I Have you seen it?” he asked. - -“Aye. You’re the talk of the street.” - -“That’s splendid,” he let slip before he was aware of it. - -“Splendid! There’s a gentleman writing to the paper to say that you’re -trading in immorality.” - -“I wrote that letter myself,” grinned Sam. - -“You did what?” - -“I’m afraid I shall never make you understand.” - -“I doubt you won’t. Lying to me like that. Expecting me to believe you -write to the paper about yourself and call yourself hard names. And the -letter’s signed ‘Truth-teller,’ too. It’s printed in the paper that my -son has lifted the lid from the cesspool and let loose a smell to make -decent people vomit.” - -“Yes. I know. Advertising is a coarse art.” - -“Your name’s blackened for ever. And it’s my name, Sam, and the name -your father gave me. It’s the name of honest folk and----” - -“Mother, mother, don’t I tell you that it’s all advertisement?” - -“What you tell me and what I can believe are coming to be two different -things. I know what an advertisement in the paper is and I know what a -letter is. This is a letter.” - -Sam felt the hopelessness of further argument. - -She had a simple-minded faith in the integrity of newspapers and the -printed word, but he could at least show that the word could contradict -itself. “Very well,” he said, “it’s a letter, and so is this.” He took -a copy of the paper from his pocket. Stewart had kept his word, no great -feat since he had a good idea of what his editor supposed the Sunday -public to want, and a column of fervent correspondence flared under the -heading of “The Social Evil.--Is the Pamphlet Justified?” Sam chose a -letter which described Adams as a crusader and Branstone, his publisher, -as a high-souled social reformer courageously risking misapprehension -for principle and the right, calling the endorsement of the Rev. Peter -Struggles to witness in proof of his irreproachable motives. “Well,” - said Sam, “am I to be misapprehended after all, and by you?” - -“You told me you wrote the other letter,” she said. “Don’t you mean that -you wrote this one?” - -“I don’t,” he said truthfully. He wrote his, attacking himself, on one -side of Stewart’s desk, while Stewart at the other defended him. It had -been great fun. - -“And what,” she asked, “is the business affair you say you’re engaged -on?” - -“Why,” he said unguardedly, “it’s this.” - -“Then I don’t misapprehend at all, my son. I apprehend very well. And -you’ve worked Peter Struggles into it. Was that why you got engaged to -Ada?” - -“Mother!” he protested. “Doubt me if you like, but you must not doubt -Mr. Struggles. He surely is above suspicion.” - -“He’s keeping bad company just now,” said Anne, “and I doubt you’ve been -too clever for him.” - -Sam chose to be offended. “Is that what you think of me?” he asked. - -“That you’re clever. Aye. I think that all right. I’ve known it since -the time when you tricked a parcel of schoolboys out of a house of -furniture and put George Chappie into it. You’re clever in the wrong -places, Sam. When you were at school, you were clever out of school. -You’re at business now and you ought; to be clever in honesty, and I’ve -the notion that you’re being clever in dishonesty.” - -“Of course,” he said, “this only shows how right I was not to tell you. -It’s the old story. Women don’t understand business.” - -“I know. Business is a pair of spectacles that makes black into white, -but I don’t wear spectacles myself. Are you going to tell me what you’re -doing with that thousand pounds?” - -“I told you it isn’t decided yet. But if the sales of that pamphlet go -up this week as they did last, I’m going into the publishing business -with it.” - -“So that you can publish more of the same sort?” - -“If I can get them. There’s a lot of money in it.” - -“Sam,” she said earnestly, “is that all you’re caring about?” - -“You told me yourself that Ada was not the wife for a poor man.” He -considered that a very neat score, to seem to make Anne responsible, but -Anne was not to be deceived by any such seeming. As she saw it, Ada had -corrupted Sam, Ada was the motive of this misuse of his cleverness; and -the bitterness for Anne was doubly poignant. She believed in Sam, with -a faith which had never swerved in spite of her disappointment in his -school career; but she realized now that he had been marking time in -Travers’ office, that it was Ada and not she who had quickened his -energies to rapid action. Ada had quickened them, where under Anne they -had lain dormant but the quickening had been corrupt. It came from Ada, -poisoned at the source, and took to poisonous ways. - -They had touched bottom now and reached essentials. “Sam,” she said, “I -was joking like when I said a man’s not rational when he’s in love. But -it was a true word spoken in jest. You’re not rational or you wouldn’t -be doing these things and making a byword of the name of Branstone, and -the reason you’re not rational is Ada. If you were in love with a good -woman, you could no more do dishonourable things than fly. But you’re in -love with a bad woman and it leads to bad results. Sam, do you think I -like to tell you that you’ve made a mistake? And do you think I don’t -know? Lad, lad, I love you, and I’ve never reckoned myself a fool. -Choose now, I’m not the sort of fool to be jealous just because you -get wed. I’d none be jealous of the right lass, Sam. I’d take her and -welcome her and know she had a better right to you than me. But Ada -Struggles has no right: she’s mean and grasping and she’s small in every -way there is. She’s----” - -“Stop, mother. Don’t forget that I am marrying Ada.” - -“And nothing that I say will alter you? Sam, she’ll go on as she’s begun -by sending you to this.” She put her hand on the lurid polemics of the -_Sunday Judge_. “She’ll drive you down and down. You may make money and -you may be rich, but there’ll be a curse on your riches and on all you -do, and Ada Struggles is the name of the curse.” - -Sam attempted a small levity. “That will be all right,” he said. “She’s -going to change her name.” Anne shook her head. “A change of name’ull -none change Ada’s nature. It’s the best part of your life that’s before -you, and life with Ada spells ruin. I’m not telling you what I think. -It’s what I know, and I ask you, Sam, to heed my words.” - -“I’m heeding them,” he said, “but I know you’re wrong.” - -“That’s the last you’ve got to say?” - -“I’m sorry we don’t agree, mother.” - -“Agreeing’s nowt,” she said, “and I’m nowt against your happiness. See, -Sam, I’ll prove it. There’s a thought at the back of your mind that I’ve -nothing against Ada but a grudge because she’s come between you and me. -I say that girl’s no good for you, and I say I’ll do anything to force -you to see it. There’s nowt of myself in this and maybe this will make -you believe it.” - -There was a good fire in the room and she put her hand into it. Sam was -alert enough to drag her away before much damage was done, and he had -oil on the hand in a moment. - -“Don’t fuss,” said Anne, “but tell me what you think.” - -“I think,” he said, “that you’re plumb crazy--with jealousy.” - -It was not craziness, but fanatic devotion to an idea: and the idea -was Sam, Sam’s happiness, Sam’s future. She put her hand into the -fire hoping to convince, and she would have sat on the fire if she had -thought the larger act would carry a fuller conviction. But he did not -need to be convinced that she objected to Ada; the point was that -her objections were unfounded, and, in the face of Ada’s sublime and -stunning merits, idiotic. - -One cannot put a hand into the fire without suffering for it, and Anne -was suffering acutely. Her face was drawn with pain and her lips were -trembling uncontrollably, but her voice was firm. - -“I’ve done my best to save you, Sam. If you’ve nothing better to say -than that, you and me have come to a parting.” - -“Then,” said Sam, “we’ve come,” and turned his back on her. He thought -she would come round, that she would get over her attack of frenzied -jealousy. It was idle threat to talk of a parting. Why, she was -dependent on him, and in more ways than one. He housed and kept her, -but, more than that, she needed him. His presence was the breath of life -to her. He knew that, and he let her go! - -Of course, he thought she would come back, with a sharp lesson well -learnt. She had to learn that he was grown-up, of an age to act for -himself and choose and think without her tutelage. Only, she did not -come back. She went to Madge and stayed with Madge; and the terms on -which she stayed were her terms. “I furnish the room,” she said, “and I -pay you a rent for it. Also, I pay for what I eat.” - -She paid. At the age of fifty-two the mother of Sara Branstone, of -Branstone and Carter, and the mother-in-law of George Chappie, of the -Chappie Window-Cleaning and Bill Posting Company (a smaller affair -than its name, but the source of a regular five pounds a week), was a -charwoman on three days out of the seven, and it was not lack of offers -which limited her to three days, but the fact that she paid her way on -three days’ result. She kept other people’s houses as clean as she had -kept her own. - -It was suggested to George Chappie that it was hardly decent in him to -allow his mother-in-law to go out charring at her age--a prosperous man -like him. “I know,” he was reported to have replied, “and we’ve tried -all ways we can. But you can’t argue with Mrs. Branstone.” - -“She’s one of the old sort, isn’t she?” said his gossip, who, perhaps, -endured a mother-in-law of another kind. - -“All that,” said George succinctly. - - - - -CHAPTER XIII--THE INTERMITTENT COURTSHIP - - -|ONLY by long service does one become an artist, but one becomes married -by a simple ceremony. It is the tragedy of marriage, which is the -most difficult of all the arts, that most people come to it without -apprenticeship. Perhaps the popularity of widows as brides is due to the -fact that the widow is a widow: that she has been broken in to marriage: -that she has not everything to learn: that one, at any rate, of the -contracting parties, is expert. There is much to be said for the policy -of the “trial trip.” - -Courtship, if intimate enough, may be a fairish substitute, bowdlerized, -as it were, for a “trial trip,” but when Sam married Ada he knew -pitiably little about her. - -He thought that she was wonderful. Not only had he to think it, but he -actually did think it. He had to think it because only for a prodigy -among women could he have treated his mother as he did. He had thought -her crazy when she put her hand into the lire, but he knew it was -heroic. If she were crazy, it was for love for him, and at the core, he -loved her too and felt ashamed of himself, but Ada stood between them, -and he was not going to give up Ada. Then he was busy, time wore on, -custom blunted the prick of conscience, and it finally became a habit -either not to think of Anne at all, or to think comfortably of her as -happy enough with Madge. - -And he actually thought Ada wonderful because the conditions of -his courtship fought for her. He was visibly prospering; he liked -prosperity; it was Ada who had initiated his prosperity; and she was -glamorous for that. Again, he was very busy in those days with the first -steps of his new business, too occupied to play the diligent lover, and -saw her very fitfully. So seen, she did not lose the wonder of surprise, -but came upon him freshly with each of their meetings, able to parade -for each some new attraction from her slender stock of charm. She kept -their intercourse egregiously correct, and he thought her mystery was -infinite. She hid her shallowness behind affected modesty, knowing that -an intimate courtship would discover to him that there was nothing to -discover, and attracted by aloofness. It was immensely clever in its -short-winded way: a cleverness that lasted the course of courtship, -but evaporated when the tape--the altar--was reached. It did not seem -necessary to Ada to go on being clever once that ring was on her finger. -She was married, she had achieved: she was clever for the spurt, and -had no cleverness left, for the Marathon Race. And Sam had many -preoccupations in those days which prevented him from thinking too much -about Ada. - -If he was dull about his courtship, his wits were sharp enough for other -matters. He had the satisfaction, almost from the day of its issue, of -seeing the pamphlet sell steadily. Very quickly it ceased to be a case -of getting his money back, and became merely a question of how many -cents per cent he was going to make. His first edition of five thousand -(the _soi-disant_ thousand) was rapidly exhausted, and the presses of -Carter Meadowbank worked overtime to cope with the demand. He cast bread -upon the waters by sending copies to every name in the Clergy List and -every Member of Parliament; and did not cast in vain. Free advertisement -was lavished upon him. Somehow, he had found one of those times when -the social conscience is stirred: he published, without knowing it, -opportunely, and the diabolic cleverness of Gerald Adams’ writing -steered him safely past the rocks of the Public Prosecutor. It seemed -only to stimulate demand when he raised the price to a shilling. - -He had no further trouble with the pamphlet. It sold itself, but sitting -still watching the wheels go round did not appeal to Sam, who had a -thousand pounds to multiply. He hadn’t quite the hardihood to -believe that he could multiply his thou sand as rapidly as he had the -twenty-five which he paid Adams, but he felt that he was launched as a -publisher and had nothing to publish. - -His thoughts were diverted from that solecism one day when he went into -Carter’s printing-office to speed up the foreman. The foreman admitted -that the pace could be improved. “But I dunno, sir, that the boss wants -it improved. There’s nothing in to follow this job of yours. You might -say you’ve been the saving of Mr. Carter.” - -Sam was thoughtful for a minute. He had not looked upon himself as the -saviour of Mr. Carter and did not appreciate that character when it was -thrust upon him. He went into Carter’s office. - -“This little tract of mine,” he said (“tract” seemed the light -description in that text-hung room), “is selling remarkably well, and -the demand increases. Now, I’ve nothing to say about the past.-I came in -here a total stranger and you quoted me accordingly. But it’s only fair -to warn you that I have gone into prices with other printers and I may -find it necessary to make a change.” - -Carter made no effort to hide his dismay. “I hope you won’t do that, Mr. -Branstone. At least, give me a chance of revising my price.” - -“Once bitten,” said Sam, “is twice shy, and you don’t deny that you -bit.” - -“But surely business,” argued Carter, “is business.” - -“It is,” said Sam grimly, “and if you’ll answer me a few questions on -the understanding that this is a business interview and I’m not being -impertinently inquisitive, I shall be obliged.” - -“I’ll do my best,” said Carter. - -“Thank you. How old are your printing-presses?” - -“Twenty years.” - -“Consequently they are almost hopelessly out of date?” - -Carter had a tenderness for those presses. They had been young when he -was young, were bought when the world smiled on him and his business -had its hedyay. They had kept him and he could not be disloyal now. “I -believe that they have printed your tract efficiently, Mr. Branstone,” - he defended them. - -“Oh, there’s life in the old dogs yet,” said Sam. “I’m not proposing to -make scrap-iron of them.” - -“As they belong to me,” said Carter tartly, “it would not make such -difference if you did propose it.” - -“Therefore,” said Sam, “I don’t propose it--yet. Please remember that -I’m talking business. Do you care to tell me what that text cost to -produce and what you get for it?” - -Carter did not care, but, though he wondered at himself, he told. “And -that?” Sam asked, pointing to another; and again Carter told. - -“Then,” said Sam, “there are two religious papers which you print for -the proprietors. What----?” - -“Young man,” interrupted Carter, “are you proposing to buy my business?” - -“No,” said Sam coolly, “only to become your partner in it. What profit -were you going to tell me you made on the papers?” - -Carter told: he was too stupefied to do anything else. “Um,” said Sam. -“It isn’t much.” - -“They are a good work,” said Carter, and Sam looked at him sharply, but -the old man was perfectly sincere. It was good work to print religious -magazines and he did it for next to nothing. - -“Well,” said Sam, “thank you. Now I won’t mince matters: When I came -along with my--tract, I enabled you to postpone filing your petition, -but it was only a postponement, and if you’ll look facts in the face the -one big fact for you is bankruptcy.” - -“The Lord will provide.” Carter had lived from hand to mouth for many -months in that belief. - -“If you like to look at it that way. He has provided: He has provided -me. I will make you a good offer, Mr. Carter. I will introduce five -him dred pounds capital into the business for a halfshare in the plant, -goodwill and future profits of this concern. That is, the printing -business. What I, as publisher, do has nothing to do with you.” - -“... I must think it over,” said Carter; but they both knew that he had -already decided to accept. - -“The Lord,” Carter was thinking, “_has_ provided.” Sam, on the -contrary, was thinking, “I may or may not be a fool to go into this -without getting an accountant’s report on the books, but I believe in -rapid action, and if I’d offered too high a price I’m certain that he’s -imbecile enough to have told me.” - -It remained to find something to print, and he wanted Stewart’s advice, -but, with the idea of being first on the side of the angels, went to see -Peter Struggles. The battle which had raged round the pamphlet had left -Peter untouched, even though more than one of the clergy who received -it from Sam had thought it their duty to write to Peter’s bishop. The -bishop failed to see a case for disciplinary measures: Peter might have -been sinned against but he had not sinned. And the _Sunday Judge_ was -read by neither Peter nor his bishop. (The Church is notoriously out -of touch with modern life, but, after all, it is hardly reasonable -to expect the Church to compliment its rival, the _Sunday Press_, by -reading it.) - -Nevertheless, Peter had, on reflection, felt some wavering doubts about -the pamphlet. His intermittent shrewdness threw a flickering light -through the haze of his charity and gave him moments of discomfort. - -Sam’s attitude during this call was admirably calculated to resolve -his doubt. He wanted, with an eye to the future, to make sure of Peter, -whose name he might require another day, and was ready, even if it were -not immediately profitable, to placate Peter now. He explained that he -had joined forces with Mr. Carter, and at once acquired merit in Peter’s -eyes. Carter was irreproachable. He did not explain by what means he had -been able to join Carter and it did not occur to Peter to ask. Sam was -not going to tell Peter, who would tell Ada, of his legacy. If she found -out, as Anne had found out, he could not help it, but, meantime, it -was his secret. Ada, like Anne, belonged to the sex which had no -understanding of business. - -“And the point,” said Sam, “with a business like Mr. Carter’s, is to use -it for good. I take it that the texts do good, but perhaps they are -only for the simple-minded. I hope I don’t despise people for their -simplicity, but my own taste runs rather to books and I think you will -agree with me.” - -Peter agreed, with a quotation which rather dashed Sam; he had an idea -that poetry did not sell. - -“‘Poets are the trumpets which sing to battle. Poets are the -unacknowledged legislators of the world.’” - -“Yes,” said Sam. “Quite so. But isn’t poetry going to the opposite -extreme? I had the thought of something more direct. Good prose with a -good moral.” - -“Excellent,” said Peter, off again. - - “‘Were not God’s laws, - - His gospel laws, In olden time held forth - - By types, shadows and metaphors?’” - -“Of course they were,” said Sam, wondering when Peter would close his -mental dictionary of quotations and come down to business, “and that -quotation is very apt because I was thinking of classics. English -classics, you know,” he explained hurriedly, “and classics because they -are not copyright.” - -“And have stood the test of time,” said Peter. - -“Yes. Do you think you could propose a list? I should like to know that -the first books I publish had been selected by you. I don’t think they -ought to be exactly theological, but they must be good in every sense of -the word.” - -“Why not begin with the book from whose in traduction I just quoted?” - -“Why not indeed?” said Sam, who hadn’t the faintest idea of the source -of the quotation. - -“Very well,” said Peter. “Suppose you put that down for one.” - -Same made vague scratches on paper. He had a bookish reputation to -sustain and he was not going to betray ignorance prematurely. “Then,” - said Feter, “there is Law’s ‘Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life.’” - -“I’m letting myself in for something,” thought Sam, but he wrote it -down. - -“‘The Imitation of Christ,’ and ‘The Little Flowers of St. Francis,’” - Peter went on. - -“I think those should be enough to begin with,” said Sam hurriedly. - -“Four, isn’t it?” said Peter, recapitulating. - -“The ‘Pilgrim’s Progress ‘“----(“Thank God,” thought Sam, “I needn’t -give myself away.”) - -“Yes, four,” he interrupted, reading the now completed list. “And I am -very much obliged to you.” - -He wasn’t, though, quite sure about it. He had “nobbled” Peter, but he -feared those books would be a millstone round his neck. There might be a -steady sale for the “Pilgrim’s Progress” as a prize, but the -others----! Still, he need not print many copies of them, and--consoling -thought--they would be good window-dressing tor his list. He hoped it -would include other, very different, books. - -“I’m sorry Ada is out,” Peter was saying, and Sam was rather startled to -realize that he had not missed her. But he was sure of his position -with her: it was his position for her which he had to consolidate. He -proceeded to consolidate it by going in search of Stewart, and found him -where he expected to find him, in a bar. - -“I want your advice,” said Sam. - -“Whisky for the gentleman, Flora,” said Stewart. “That’s my advice and -you’ll get no other till you’ve taken this.” - -Sam took it. Business is business and, beyond that, his thrifty -prejudices were less necessary now. - -“You’re not unteachable,” said Stewart. “It’s a point in your favour. -The proper thing when you’ve drunk that is to ask me if I will have -another. My reply will be in the affirmative and we shall then retire, -with sustaining refreshment, into that corner, where I will advise you -for as long as you can continue to buy whisky for me and drink level. I -hate a shirker.” - -Sam told him of his partnership with Carter. “I’m always troubled about -you,” said Stewart. “I can never make up my mind whether you’re too -clever to live or whether you were born with luck instead of brain. -Obviously, you will publish novels.” - -“There are so many kinds,” said Sam. - -“No. Only two. Mine and the rest. But I suffer from honesty. Therefore I -tell you that my novel has been refused by every publisher in London. It -is waiting,” he said hopefully, “for a man with courage. The difference -between it and the Yellow Book is that my book _is_ yellow.” - -“I see,” said Sam. “But I have gone into the publishing trade to make my -living.” - -“On the whole,” decided Stewart, “you are more knave than fool. And you -would call it the publishing trade. It’s a benighted world, but there -are still some publishers who aren’t in trade--beyond the midriff. Do -you seriously come to me to ask what sort of novels to publish?” - -“Yes.” - -“The sort,” he said, “that is written for nursemaids by people who ought -to be nursemaids.” - -“That’s jealousy,” said Sam. “They get published and you don’t.” - -“Perhaps you’re right,” said Stewart. “But I’ve always heard that seeing -is believing. Do you ever go to the theatre?” - -“Not often.” - -“It’s a pity, because if you did, I’ve a tragedy in blank verse that -you might care to publish. It is great art and will never be produced. -Still, I’m a philanthropist to-night and you will come to the theatre -with me. I happen to be going for the _Warden._” - -“Are you a dramatic critic for the _Warden?_” asked Sam, rather awed. - -“I’m a reporter, old son. This isn’t the kind of play they waste a -critic on. Drink up, and we’ll go.” - -Sam found, to his relief, that he was able to go and decided he had a -strong head. The theatre was crowded when they reached it and Stewart -was young enough to sit self-consciously in one of the two seats kept -for the _Manchester Warden_. Dramatic criticism was taken seriously on -that journal; at least two of the paper’s regular critics were men of -genius, and Stewart hoped that he might be mistaken for one of them. But -the audience that night was not the kind which interests itself in the -lions of the higher journalism; rather it justified the contemptuous -reference to drama as the “art of the mob.” It would have made a sincere -democrat weep for his convictions. “Behold them,” said Stewart. “The -Public.” - -Sam beheld them more than he beheld the play. He reminded himself that -he was there on business, to be shown something which Stewart wanted him -to see, and if he had not the gift of detachment, he assumed it. - -When Adams had read his paper to the Concentrics, Sam had listened but -kept his eyes on the audience. In a darkened theatre, the audience was -more difficult to watch, but he could feel its quick response to -the play, could hear its ready laughter and its quite eager ears. -Emphatically, here was a play which seized its audience, gripped them, -tickled them, beslavered them, throttled them, did with them what it -liked and when it liked; all to their immense and vociferous delight. He -tried to keep his aloofness, to see how it was done, to tear the heart -out of this mystery. Here was something which the public wanted; he had -only to diagnose it, and the Open Sesame to fortune was his. - -He couldn’t do it. Detachment slipped from him, never to return till the -curtain fell. He wasn’t a superman, immune from other men’s emotions. -The play took hold of him and swayed him with the rest. He tried -resistance, vainly; told himself that he was here, not, as these others -were, for pleasure, but to learn, to learn; and the play gripped him the -harder for his attempt to take it coldly. - -At the end, Sam was applauding wildly while Stewart watched him with -cynical amusement. “Caught you all right,” he said, “and by way of a -confession I’ll own that the damned thing nearly got me once. Rum place, -the theatre, isn’t it? But,” he grew more serious, “I’ve to write about -that, write without being libellous about that maudlin, sentimental, -erotic, religious trash. It’s enough to make a man give up journalism -and take to something honest, like coal-heaving. But I’m forgetting. I -brought you here to teach you something. Have you learnt it? That’s a -play, but the same thing applies to a novel. You find novels with ‘The -Sign of the Cross’ in them, my boy. Queasy sentimentality to sicken a -bee, and, for the rest, don’t forget that Jesus died for you to make -money out of novels. This play makes me blasphemous, but I’m doing the -devil’s advocate to you to-night, so it’s all in the picture. When -I’ve finished my notice I think I’ll try a ‘short’ on ‘The Tradesman -Publisher’ or ‘The Dignity of Letters.’ It will be good for my -conscience.” - -“I wish you would,” said Sam. “I’ll reply to it, with a list of the -classics I am going to publish.” - -“Sometimes,” said Stewart, “you rather sicken me. I am speaking of the -_Manchester Warden_, not the _Sunday Judge_. Good-night.” - -But the vacillations of a journalist with a foot in two camps and an -idealistic standard which he hardly pretended to take seriously himself -left Sam unimpressed. The play and Stewart’s description of its essence -had given him furiously to think. He imagined that he knew the sort of -novel he wanted and he was not troubled by Stewart’s disease of dual -standards. Sam had one standard, the success standard; and anything else -was muddle-headedness. At the same time he felt most grateful to Stewart -who had advertised the pamphlet and now presented him with a policy. - -It was a policy, but not one for immediate application. _Festina lente_ -was his watchword for the moment, and he devoted himself to putting -new life into the sales of texts and to the issue of the “Branstone -+ Classics.” They were, one might note in passing, the Branstone + -Classics: his name loomed large and the names of their authors, the -insignificants like à Kempis and Bunyan, were properly small; and he -put the sign of the cross between the Branstone and the Classics. He -intended it to be his trade-mark, and if it were his trade-mark, why not -use it? It infringed nobody’s copyright. - -Amongst it all, he had little enough time for Ada, and she knew how much -she gained by being a luxury instead of a habit. But Sam was not engaged -for the sake of being engaged, and as soon as he knew he had made no -mistake in his business venture was eager to be married. There were no -objections from Ada. This intermittent courtship, in which his duties -as a lover took second place to his activities as a business man, suited -Ada well, but marriage, finality, the bond suited her better. - -Even to the end of that engagement it was things for Ada which -preoccupied him, rather than Ada herself, and he took the matter of -furnishing seriously--from a business point of view, interested less in -the furniture he bought than in the discounts he might, by this means or -that, secure. He suffered the usual surprise at the cost of mattresses -and kitchen equipment, but, to Ada, he appeared royally lavish. Ada did -not know of his legacy: she knew that Anne had told her on the top of -a fantastic tram-car that Sam had earned two pounds ten a week with -Travers, and the scale of this furnishing did not square with what a man -could save out of two pounds ten a week. It followed in Ada’s mind that -Anne had lied to her, malignantly misrepresenting Sam’s position to -frighten her; and the breach between Anne and Ada, which never had much -chance of closing, was permanently open. - -One does not have old connections with an estate agency without being -able to rent a good house cheaply. She was going to be mistress of a -house which fell little short of the dreams of her boarding-school days. -It was certainly “stylish”; she was not sure that it was not positively -“smart.” - -Madge wept on the night before her wedding. Ada did not weep. She -was too busy hugging herself because she had surmounted the perils of -courtship. She had accomplished her aim in life. She was going to be -married. - - - - -CHAPTER XIV--HONEYMOONERS - - -|ADA was married in white satin, though Peter sold books to do it and -her trousseau lacked essentials. It depends, though, on one’s point of -view. Ada thought white satin essential, while another might have put -underclothing first. But it is fitting to wear a crown at a coronation -and, when the object of one’s life has been to get married, to celebrate -in satin the attaining of one’s aim. - -It also reminded the congregation that the bride is the central figure -at a wedding. People might otherwise have remembered that they did not -come because Ada was Ada, but because she was Peter’s daughter. - -She entered with _réclame_ into the state of being Mrs. Samuel -Branstone, resenting a little the tweeds of Stewart, Sam’s best man, -but liking his manners and liking, too, the way in which Sam took it -for granted that the day was hers, not his. He did not even obtrude a -family. - -George was, in fact, obscurely there, hidden among the congregation. He -was there in the spirit of schoolboy, playing truant from Anne, who -was at home with Madge. Ada thought that the conspicuous absence of -Branstones added lustre to her satin. None but the necessary Sam was -there. - -They went to London, where neither of them had been before, and since it -is a bitter thing to have to look back to a boring honeymoon, the choice -of place had great discretion. There was so much besides themselves to -see in London that they postponed looking at each other till they -came home. They saw sights and went to theatres, but though they slept -together and rose together and saw the sights (all but one) together -there was no realization of “togetherness,” no birth of a new life -in which they were not Sam and Ada, but these two in one. They were -furiously modest about things which no honeymooner has any right to be -modest about. If they are modest about them, they have no right to be -honeymooners. It may have been in their case something both worse -and better than modesty. It may have been downright shame. Perhaps -subconsciously they knew that this was not a marriage, not the coming -together of two fit mates. It had no passion in it. There was self when -they should have been ecstatically selfless. They were two when they -should have been most one. - -But Sam, if he fell immensely short of ecstasy, was still too much under -her spell to be critical. He wondered a little at the frank delight in -being married which she displayed in public, at her flaunting of her -new wedding ring, at her advertisement that this was a honeymoon, and -contrasted this outward relish with her intimate frigidity; but even -this seemed a disloyalty, and he told himself that Ada in a hotel was -one person and at home would be another. Ada would “settle down,” and -meantime they were in London, and London was waiting to be explored with -her. - -They explored chiefly the London which Londoners do not know, the London -of the guide-books, and felt tremendously metropolitan because they went -to the Tower, the British Museum and the National Gallery. The shops -seared Ada. Their windows fascinated but their doors repelled. Probably -Sam would have held her back by main force had she attempted to go in, -but, as it was, she had the same satisfaction in identifying them that -social snobs find in recognizing, at a distance, famous people. These -were the authentic shops which advertised in the papers and they had a -game called “hunting the Harrod” or “looking for Barkers,” which led -to a lot of fun with ‘buses after they had quartered Oxford Street and -Regent Street. It was all very gay, and gayer, almost naughtily gay, to -go one night to a place called the Coliseum--a music-hall; a thing to -do audaciously, not to be spoken of at home; and yet the place was -very full of really most respectable people. They marvelled at the -emancipation of the Londoner. - -On his honeymoon, Sam became possessed of an ambition. It was not an -extraordinarily fine ambition, but he came to care about, it greatly and -it repaid his care a thousandfold. The way to sanity is to desire -very keenly something which it is just possible one may get, and Sam’s -ambition kept him sane in the days when he knew that Ada had failed him. - -Struggles had suggested to our debater of the Concentrics that he ought -to see the House of Commons at debate, and had written to their local -Member for a pass to the Gallery. The result was the most thrilling -experience of Sam’s honeymoon! It was, for one thing, unique that Ada -could not be with him: these were the first hours since he married her -that they spent apart and perhaps that, all unconsciously, had gilded -them for Sam. They had almost a tiff before she let him go: not quite, -but she resented his desertion of her and considered it his fault that -she was not allowed to sit with him to hear the legislators who made -laws for her as for him. Not that Ada cared who made her laws, nor cared -to watch the makers at their work, but she managed to put enough snap -into her resentment at his going to lend the added quality of a stolen -pleasure to his experience. - -That gallery, with its foreshortened view of the dingy cock-pit, is not -the first choice of the connoisseur in thrills, but on Sam its effect -was amazing. He must have had some gift, quite undisclosed till now, of -veneration, for it is almost beyond belief that the reality of the House -of Commons can impress. But the idea can and perhaps (to be just) the -reality is more impressive than that of any other Chamber on earth. -Imagination helping him, it caught and held his mind. - -A small stout man of undistinguished appearance was speaking in a -conversational tone not easy to hear from the Gallery, but presently the -orator warmed to his subject and poured out living words in a spate of -real emotion. He was one of those rare men, and this one of those rare -speeches, that really convert an opponent: and Sam’s ambition to speak -as this politician spoke, and from those benches, came instantly to -birth. - -Not only did he want to be a Member of Parliament, but a Liberal Member, -because this man of words was Liberal. Up to this time, Sam had not been -a political animal although he had voted, and voted Tory because that -was in general the line of Mr. Travers and the property-owning class he -represented. Now with a swift enthusiasm he was Liberal, knowing nothing -of either side, but caught by sudden hero-worship for a little, pudgy, -snubnosed politician who spoke in sentences of prodigious length and -never lost his way in them. - -In a twinkling he acquired the bias of the politician: his hero’s -opponent was palpably a fool; he had no gifts, no argument. Yes, Sam was -doubly right to be a Liberal. They had so obviously all the brains, they -were so undeniably the winning side. He did not understand the technique -of a division and was surprised when he looked at the paper next day -to find that the Liberals were outvoted. It gave him pause, but did -not shake him. When the Liberals came back to power, as with their -superiority in brain they were certain to do, he, Sam Branstone, would -come with them. Let it be only a year or two and he would be ready. He -too would loll upon those padded benches, and catch the Speaker’s eye, -and be an orator. - -He walked along the Embankment towards his hotel, and it came into his -mind that he had spent four hours in the Gallery and had not thought of -Ada. Nor could he, though he tried, think of her now. - -Sky-signs still flashed across the river, and as he paused and leaned -against the parapet a young policeman kept a wary eye on him. But Sam -was meditating life, not death. The lights of London gleamed upon the -Thames and made it magical for him. He conquered London in his reverie, -and stepped, a member, from the House to his automobile. His home, he -supposed, was somewhere in Park Lane. - -He thought back now to the theatre where he had seen _The Sign of the -Cross_. It was different from the London Theatres he had seen where -audiences seemed afraid of emotion. Or was it that the plays had not -been right? That was it: they had not the note: they weren’t--what was -Stewart’s phrase?--erotic religious plays. He wanted to move audiences -as that play had moved its audience. Power! The power of the spoken -word. That was the thing, and since he could not write a play he must -rely upon himself, his oratory, his single voice. He saw himself on -platforms facing crowded halls, gripping his hearers, leading them where -he would, taming the mob till it made an idol of its master. As to where -he would lead, why, he would lead and that was what mattered. Branstone -was Prime Minister that night. - -It was one o’clock before the young policeman felt at liberty to resume -his beat, and Sam left the enchanted river for his little hotel in -Norfolk Street. Ada had her back to him and apparently she slept. -Actually she was wide awake; she was wondering whether it had happened -to any other woman to be treated so abominably on her honeymoon. - -She brushed her hair nest morning with a notable viciousness. Hair has -uses beyond those of mere adornment. It is an admirable veil through -which one can watch without being seen to watch. Ada was watching Sam -and she was also listening to him. - -She listened not because his enthusiasm for the House of Commons -interested her, but because she was waiting for some word of apology. -It did not come. He was full of regret, but only because this was their -last day in town and he could not go to the House again. - -“What time is our train?” she asked. - -He told her. - -“Then I have time to do some shopping first.” - -“Shopping?” he asked, but unsuspiciously. - -She nodded. Sam was going to pay for his pleasures. Those blouses she -had seen at Peter Robinson’s no longer seemed impossibly expensive. If -Sam chose to enjoy himself in his own way, without her, she would enjoy -herself in hers--with Sam to pay the piper. - -Shopping is a loose term; one shops when one buys a kipper or a diamond -tiara. Ada was putting her hair up and he imagined her to mean that she -wanted a packet of hair-pins. “Oh, yes,” he said pensively. “And while -you go, I think I will just slip down to the House of Parliament again.” - The House would not be sitting and he could not get in. He knew that, -but he wanted to gaze, to look at the frame which was some day to -contain him. He wanted to be certain that it was still there. - -“I think,” she said, “that you will come with me to the shop. I shall -want you there to pay.” - -Sam paused in the act of fastening his collar. “To pay?” he asked, not -unsuspiciously now. - -“Are your selfish pleasures all you think about?” Ada wanted to know. -“Isn’t it a privilege to be allowed to buy me nice clothes?” - -He had not looked upon it in that light. In budgeting for their future -he had indeed assumed that a trousseau lasted a bride for her first -year. “I see,” he said gloomily; then remembering that he was in love -with her, “of course,” he added with a smile which might count to him -for heroism. “But we must not forget the fares, and after I have paid -the bill here I shall not have more than two pounds left to spend.” - -“Then I spend two pounds on blouses,” she said. - -He made a monosyllabic noise which might have been “Yes.” It might also -have been “Damn.” - -The truth was that he had deliberately kept those two pounds back, -intending to spend some, but not, he hoped, all of it, on a present for -Ada. He had thought of a hand-bag, had imagined her gasp of delight -when he audaciously entered with her one of those forbiddingly inviting -shops, her appreciation of his generosity. - -Last night had driven the thought entirely from his mind, and he was -annoyed now not only at his forgetfulness, but at Ada. She did not ask, -she demanded. A night in the Gallery may be regarded as dissipation, but -at least it is not a crime. It is even patriotic, and he was asked to -foot a bill for two pounds as the price of his patriotism. Ambition, he -thought, would be an expensive luxury if he had to pay in clothes for -Ada every time he went to a political meeting. For that, plainly, was -her attitude: she demanded a _quid pro quo_: she announced a policy of -retaliation. - -There is a queer perverted pleasure in scratching an open wound, in -cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. He had meant to be generous -and he wanted still to be generous, but the money he had laid aside for -generosity was now hypothecated to meet her claim. He would give her her -pound of flesh, but wanted very badly to roast it for her with coals of -fire. - -Gloom lifted from him suddenly. He took off the old tie which he had put -on as being good enough to travel in, and fastened very carefully one -which he had bought “for London.” - -“I’ll do it,” he was thinking. “It is--almost--a stroke.” - -At breakfast he was positively gay, so that Ada wondered furtively what -he was up to, and whether the way to raise his spirits would always be -to demand new clothes of him. It did not seem likely, but she proposed -at any rate to experiment freely in that direction. - -He divided his attention between her, breakfast, and the Parliamentary -report of the _Times_. He felt that he had virtually participated in -that debate, and even the shock of reading that the division had gone -against his hero did not spoil the pleasure he found in reading of it. -He read with a prophetic eye. He, too, would be reported in the _Times_ -some day. - -He called the waiter. “Marmalade, sir?” asked the man. - -“No, thanks. Bring me the directory.” - -“The directory,” protested the waiter, “is in the reading-room.” - -“And I,” said Sam superbly, “am in the coffee-room.” - -The waiter brought him the directory. - -Sam smiled broadly. He was testing his form, and decided that if it -were equal to coercing a waiter into carrying a directory to his -breakfast-table, it would probably not fail him in what he proposed -to do. He consulted the book and noted an address which was not, he -observed, in Park Lane. His respect for Sir William Gatenby suffered a -slight decline. - -Half an hour later he rang the hell of that gentleman’s house. Gatenby -was the local member, to whom Peter Struggles had written for Sam’s pass -to the Gallery. - -“Sir William in?” he asked. - -“Yes, but----” A trained eye observed his clothes. They were not cut in -Savile Row. - -“He will see me,” said Sam serenely. Some people are at their best in -the early morning. - -His card was accepted from him, and he was shown into a library of -severe Blue Books, possibly qualified by a reproduction of Millais’ -portrait of Gladstone. Ordinarily, Sam would have been met in the -library by a secretary who earned his salary by his talent for -administering polite snubs to unwanted callers. The secretary was not -earning his salary to-day, but, probably, spending it. It was Derby Day. - -After all, a vote is a vote, and Sir William came in with a show of -geniality. “Good morning, Mr. Branstone,” he said, reading Sam’s card. -“From the old town. I see.” - -“Is that all you remember about me?” asked Sam. - -“At the moment,” confessed Sir William warily. His majority was not -large. - -“Well,” said Sam, “the Reverend Mr. Struggles is my father-in-law.” - -“Sit down,” said Sir William. “I am very glad you called. How is Mr. -Struggles?” - -“T left him well, thank you. Perhaps you remember that he wrote to you -to ask you for a pass to the Gallery for me.” - -“I was happy to be lucky in the ballot,” said the Member. - -“Yes,” said Sam, “I went last night. But I mentioned that to establish -my identity. My object in calling upon you is to ask you to lend me five -pounds.” - -Sir William thought of his secretary, who should have saved him this. -Thinking of his secretary, he thought of Derby Day and the probable -intentions of a man who chooses that day to ask for a loan. “My dear -sir!” he said. - -“Quite,” agreed Sam. “Life would be unbearable to you if every -constituent who came to London tried to borrow money off you. But I -am Branstone. I run the Branstone Press and the Branstone Classics. I -published the ‘Social Evil’ pamphlet and sent you a copy which, I regret -to say, you did not acknowledge.” Sir William thought again of his -secretary, and unkindly. “This,” said Sam, “is merely to indicate that I -am a man of substance.” - -Sir William Gatenby wore side-whiskers. He was an old man and there was -little left of him besides pomposity and a determination to hold his -seat. He looked, what at this moment he felt, some one in a farce. He -was quite sure that Sam was some one in a farce. They were both in -a farce, and of course five-pound notes fly in farces like gnats in -August. It did not seem to him that there was anything to do but to -produce a five-pound note. - -“Thank you,” said Sam, and sat at a desk. “I will give you my cheque for -this.” - -It staggered Sir William. He nearly warned Sam of the danger of issuing -a cheque which was not likely to be honoured, but refrained in time. -“Then,” he said, “there was really no need for you to come to me at -all?” - -“Only,” said Sam, “that I wanted you to remember me.” - -“I think I shall do that,” said Sir William. - -“Thank you,” said Sam calmly. “I wanted to know you because I intend to -go into politics.” - -“The Cause,” said Sir William solemnly, “demands his best from every -earnest worker.” - -“I will work for the Cause,” said Sam. Neither of them attempted to -define the Cause, and Sam left without further remark, but his call had -this result: that on finding the cheque honoured Sir William wrote -to his agent to tell him of “a queer fish called Samuel Branstone who -called on me the other day, and offered to work for the Cause. A young -man whom I think you should encourage. He is the son-in-law of -Mr. Struggles, and the Church, alas, is so tepid towards our great -Principles that we must not neglect a promising recruit from that fold.” - - - - -CHAPTER XV--OTHER THINGS BESIDE MARRIAGE - -|DEBT appeals to some people. They feel that when they are in debt they -have had more out of life than life owes to them. Sam had given Gatenby -his cheque and was therefore not in debt to him, but he proceeded to -spend the five pounds as recklessly as if it had been borrowed money. - -He meant to astonish Ada, and succeeded, but the surprise he sprang did -not work quite as he anticipated. For a moment, indeed, as he bought -her hats and blouses she glowed with unaffected gratitude, and he tasted -with her the joy of headstrong acquisition. But Ada’s glow was quick to -pass. - -She had time in the train to forget the splendour of his presents and -the dash that she would cut next Sunday, and to remember that he had -spent a lot of money; he who denied that he had more than two pounds to -spend had spent seven. Obviously, he had lied to her. - -It was true, she thought, that he had repented of his lie and of his -meanness, and bought handsomely: the more handsome the purchase, the -more demonstrable the lie. - -She recalled her dreadful interview with Anne, Anne’s statements of his -means, and how little they conformed to the scale of Sam’s furnishing. -She pondered Sam’s open-handedness in the blouse-shop, and concluded that -the Branstones were congenital liars about money. - -In the future she would know how to act. Sam had plenty. - -“So you had money up your sleeve all the time,” she said. - -Sam winked facetiously. “There are a lot of funny things up my sleeve,” - he said. - -“I’m learning that,” said Ada. Which he took for a compliment; and -grinned. - -He had long since made up his mind that the way with women was to -mystify them, to treat them like children at a conjuring entertainment, -to surprise them with results, but never to explain. He nearly choked -with pride over his exploit with Sir William Gatenby. But for the -hat-box and the blouses up there on the rack, what he had done was too -good to be true, and certainly it was too good to be told to a woman. -They did not understand business; no woman could appreciate the daring -spirit of his feat. - -If he told Ada that he had borrowed from Gatenby, she would simply say -“Oh, yes,” and treat his unexampled audacity as a matter of course. It -was inspiration, brilliantly conceived and brilliantly executed, and its -bright memory was not to be tarnished by a woman’s dull acceptance of it -as something not in the least extraordinary. - -He grinned and did not tell, and what did not occur to him was that if -he offered no explanation she would supply one of her own. It is -idiotic to tell a wife everything, but wise to tell nearly everything; -especially when it is open to her to draw a false conclusion. - -Sam did not think a false conclusion open to her, because he still -believed the best of Ada, because he was still in love. But falling out -of love is desperately easy. - -“As a walled town,” says Touchstone, “is worthier than a village, so is -the forehead of a married man more honourable than the bare brow of a -bachelor,” and Sam was married. He could lay that flattering unction -to his soul, could hold his head higher, because he was a ratepayer and -bore responsibilities, and went home at night to a house with a garden. -He did all that, and it was empty honour because success in marriage, as -in all else, is not to be had ready-made, but depends upon the will to -make adjustments. - -The will can come best from passion, and there was no passion here to -tide them over the awkward age of marriage, the first difficult year -when the adjustments must, if ever, be made. Granted passion, a man can -love a woman whom he knows to be a murderess; let passion lack, and -he can fall out of love because the woman snores or is untidy. Sam’s -marriage was not made in heaven, but by Ada in Heaton Park, and with -a marriage so made it is as easy to fall out of love as off a house. -Little things count more than big when there is no passion to create its -life-long mirage. - -If you cannot have the mirage of passion there is a useful substitute -called common sense, another name for compromise, and Ada refused to -compromise. She was for self, unmitigated and supreme. Ada left the -adjustments to Sam, and relaxed in nothing from her perfect selfishness. - -The little thing which counted heavily against her, almost at once, was -simply that Ada was untidy. She did not invent places for things, or, if -she did, they were never used. She left her clothes downstairs after she -had been out, and the piano is not the place for a hat or the sofa -for an umbrella. It annoyed Sam to distraction to find her clothes -distributed about their bedroom, slung carelessly over chair backs, -pitched on the floor. - -Men are not the untidy sex: the virtue of tidiness, like most others, is -evenly distributed. Sam was tidy by nature, and habit is stronger still. -Ada’s misfortune was that he was used to Anne, that Anne was neat and -Ada a slut. Sam did not know until he missed it how much he appreciated -Anne’s tidiness, how much he needed it and how much he hated untidiness -until he lived with it in Ada. In London, in the hotel, he had excused -what he saw of it, because it was in an hotel; which was also why there -had been little to see, by reason of a good chambermaid. - -At home, it hurt him and he could do nothing. Ada did nothing, either. -She had not married for love, and one does not change a habit without -strong motive. His hints appeared to Ada peevish and unreasonable. -She thought he made mountains out of molehills and despised him for -small-mindedness; he thought a woman who could not put a petticoat into -a drawer when he asked her was wilfully provoking him. - -She was not wilful of set purpose. She simply refused to disturb her -habits, to accommodate herself to him, to make a sacrifice to love. She -had no love to which to sacrifice. - -And presently he found out that he, too, did not love. But that was -all. Then and afterwards that was, damnably, all. He did not love, but -neither did he hate. He had never loved her deeply enough to hate her. -That was the tragedy of Sam’s marriage: indifference, the deadliest sin. - -He was indifferent to her, to her untidiness and even to her -extravagance. She could not treat clothes reasonably, she did not know -how to wear them when she had them, but she lusted madly to possess -them. She was grossly, inexcusably extravagant, and he was indifferent. -He was indifferent because he was growing rich, and wanted his energies -for the purpose of growing richer, not of quarrelling with her. - -That was another tragedy. They never quarrelled. They never cleared the -air, they never flushed the drain. They did not make adjustments, but -left things where they were, in a bad place. On honeymoon, they turned -from looking at each other to look at London, and at home, after one -experience of revelation, they did not seek another, but rebounded and -looked anywhere but at themselves. - -But Peter was looking, and Anne, through the eyes of George, was -looking, and it seemed to her that things were happening as she had -expected they would happen. She had said the girl was no good and what -George told her in his fumbling way gave her to see that the girl turned -wife was equally no good. Anne tightened her lips grimly and went on -with her efficient charring. She thought her time would come. - -Peter looked for the coming of love to bless this marriage to which he -had consented in the belief that his God of love would sanctify. He -had trusted to the strength of Sam, and to the hope that Sam’s strength -would turn to sweetness; and it only turned to business. It did not -lead Ada from materialism, but drew Peter himself, unwittingly at -first, towards it. Peter found himself selecting texts for Sam’s “Church -Child’s Calendar,” a labour of love, which nevertheless had nothing to -do with Ada, except in the most indirect way, and nothing to do with the -Sam and Ada situation. - -It was the fact that, to them, there seemed to be no situation which -distressed Peter. They simply let things be, and things let be obey -the law of gravity. He hoped, ardently, for children. Children blessed -marriage in the physical sense, and from that blessing the other, the -spiritual blessing, might arise. - -There was at one time hope that Ada might have a child... and then the -hope was blighted, and the doctor told them not to hope again. Ada would -never be a mother. - -“I could have told them that,” said Anne. “You’d only to look at the -girl to see it.” Which may only have been wisdom after the event, but -certainly did not imply that Anne was disappointed; though Peter was, -and bitterly. - -Sam, too, had wanted a son, but not, as Peter thought, by Ada and -for Ada. He wanted an heir for dynastic reasons. He was the Branstone -Publishing Company, its parent and original, and wanted flesh of his -flesh to publish after him. He dreamed of a young Sam in the cap of the -Grammar School, who should go to the University to which he had not gone -and have the chances he had missed. He built many castles in Spain for -the son who was never born. - -Ada got up from bed and flashed greedily into new clothes. If the -measure of her buying was the measure of her grief, she had been deeply -touched. Perhaps she was touched, for she had aimed at marriage, which -is incomplete without a child. But in the shops, the fashion papers, -her clothes and the clothes of other women she found distraction and -an occupation. She passed a milestone and went on her way. Ada was no -stoic, no hider of her grief, and since she did not complain she must -have thought her childlessness was nothing to complain about. When she -set her heart on marriage, she hadn’t, perhaps, looked further than the -ring, the ceremony and the honourable state of being Mrs. Branstone. - -She plunged to shops and spending money, Sam to business and making it; -and some, at any rate, of the now thwarted love he had been storing for -his son passed to the business. Somewhere at the back of his mind he -knew his business was not lovable; that it was pitch; that one cannot -touch pitch without being defiled. But neither can one deal successfully -in pitch without arriving at faith in the virtues of pitch. At intimate -moments he was aware that the “Social Evil” pamphlet was pernicious, -but Sam Branstone, inducing a bookseller to stock it, was more than an -advocate who believes temporarily in his brief: he was a missionary with -faith in his mission. So, too, with the texts. He sold them with the -conviction that it was good for people to have texts on their walls. He -counterfeited sincerity until he came to be sincere, or, at all events, -to forget that he was insincere. - -Further and further into the unsearched recesses of his mind he pressed -the thought that he sold texts because their sales were good for -him, and with his working, everyday, non-introspective mind he had a -sincerity about his wares, convenient but none the less authentic,-which -was invaluable both to his self-respect and as a first aid to success -in salesmanship. He never, in the old days, praised a house with the -ringing voice of absolute conviction which he used about Law’s “Serious -Call.” He had not read Law, but the sales hung fire till he became -persuaded of Law’s tremendous worth. - -He had a serious call of his own, a call to sell good books at -good profits, and the call expressed itself in his clothes and his -appearance. He seemed older, graver, took his frock-coat into daily -wear, used only black in ties and socks, and had the air of one, who, -if not a clergyman, was often in their company, though as a fact he was -more frequently with commercial travellers, and in the hotels at night -his repertoire of smoke-room stories came no less gaily from his tongue -than of old. - -And about this time his moustache began to droop like a curtain over his -resolute mouth. - -Stewart came into the office one day with a parcel under his arm. He had -seen neither Sam nor his office lately, and stared wide-eyed at both. -Carter, partner in the printing business, still occupied the dilapidated -office where Sam had found him, but the Branstone Publishing Company had -ampler premises next door, in a building which Sam rented as warehouse -for his stock. Gilt lettering on its windows called the attention of the -passer-by to the Branstone + Classics. - -Sam still looked after detail, and when Stewart came in was correcting -proofs of a tear-off calendar with a Bible at his elbow. - -“I suppose,” said Stewart, “that you _are_ Branstone, but why disguise -yourself as a Scottish Elder?” - -“I am in my usual clothes,” said Sam, rather huffed. - -“If the clothes are the man, this is no place for me. Do you often use -the Bible in your business hours?” - -He often did, not only to check with a quite beautiful precision the -texts on his calendars by the Authorised Version, but in another way, -and one which seemed to show, if it showed anything, that he looked -upon the Bible with intimate familiarity. Perhaps one mascot was the -vellum-bound copy of the “Social Evil” pamphlet and the other the Bible. -At any rate, his price code used in the office was made up this way: - -M Y F A T H E R G O D - -1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 20 - -New clerks initiated into that code used to wonder at it for a day. Then -they got used to it. - -“I’m correcting the proofs of this calendar,” Sam explained. “You see, -it’s a shaving calendar. You hang this up by your shaving-mirror and -study the text for the day while you shave.” - -“I don’t,” said Stewart. “I go to the barber’s. My hand’s unsteady in -the morning. But I see the idea. First read the text, then wipe your -razor on it.” - -“That is not the idea. See.” He pointed to the card of the calendar, and -read solemnly: - - “A text a day - - Drives care away.” - -“It wouldn’t drive my sort of care away,” said Stewart. “Mine’s -serious.” - -“There can be no trouble too serious for you to find consolation in this -calendar.” - -“But suppose I have toothache on quarter-day, and the consolation you -offer for that date is consolation to a man who can’t pay his rent? -Seriously, Branstone, am I behind the scenes in this office, or do you -never drop the showman? I admit you’re in the pi-market, and you’ve -dressed the pi-man’s part and you’ve got his patter, too, but I don’t -know that you need exercise it on me. This stock of yours looks dire,” - he commented, strolling round the office. “I suppose it’s the stuff that -sells?” - -“My business,” said Sam, “is founded on a rock.” - -“I came in here to sell you a fortune,” said Stewart. “If you’re going -to talk cant at me, I’ll take the fortune to a London publisher. Your -business may be founded on a rock, but the name of the rock is the -‘Social Evil.’” - -“The word rock,” said Sam, with a twinkle in his eye, “is also used for -a kind of toffee.” - -“Well, now that I know you’re sane, I’ll talk to you. And I’ll talk -toffee, too I didn’t think in the days of my earnest youth that I -should come to this, but you never know what debt will do to a man. I’ve -written a novel. At least, it isn’t a novel, it’s an outrage on decency. -It’s a violent assault on the emotions. It’s the sort of thing I deserve -shooting for writing. Treacle is bitter compared with it, and it does -not contain one word of literature. It is a cast-iron certainty.” - -“I must read it,” said Sam. - -“You’re growing distrustful,” said Stewart sadly. - -“I don’t buy pigs in pokes, even when they’re yours,” said Sam. “Come -along in a couple of days.” - -He read the novel, and was ready for Stewart when he came. - -“I have taken the liberty,” he said, “of marking some passages in this -manuscript which you may care to alter.” - -“Oh? I know it’s mawkish, but I don’t believe there is a limit to what -they’ll stand--and like.” - -“I refer particularly to the character you have called Hetaera.” - -“But only once. After that she’s called Hetty.” - -“Hetty,” said Sam severely, “will have to be cut out. She is an impure -woman.” - -“Even the most popular of novels should bear some relationship to life.” - -“If you wish me to publish this one, Hetty must go. Branstones have a -reputation to sustain.” - -“Good God!” said Stewart. “Hetty is the one oasis of truth in a desert -of sloppy sentimentality. She’s true because I happen to know her.” - -“That is nothing to your credit, Stewart.” - -Stewart stared. “Are you pulling my leg, Sam, or is this really -serious?” - -“Why should you doubt my seriousness when I ask that fiction should be -devoid of offence?” - -“Don’t you mean devoid of truth?” He recovered his temper and his -perspective. After all, he was very short of money. “All right, Sam,” he -said. “Edit me. Censor me. I thought I knew things, but there are deeps -below the lowest depths, and you have reached them. I surrender. What -are the terms?” - -Sam offered terms which were quite generous. He might want Stewart -again. - -The novel was purged of Hetty and published. The three-page prayer of -the distressed heroine was used, in paraphrase, from quite a number of -nonconformist pulpits, and the book was a huge success. It was the -first of that series--Branstone’s Happy Novels for Healthy Homes--which -carried the strength of the literary emetic to a point of concentrated -sweetness undreamt of before, and discovered somewhere a public stomach -which did not reject its nauseating jam, but revelled in it. - - - - -CHAPTER XVI--THE POLITICAL ANIMAL - - -|IF only Ada had had the courage of what ought to have been her -convictions, things would have been very different. But she hadn’t the -pluck or the zest in life to be anything at all except an almost perfect -negative, and a man will fight for a wife for many reasons, but not for -the reason that she is a full-stop. - -Ada, as Peter knew when he consented to the marriage, could be led: with -even surer hope of good result she could be driven, and if Sam had cared -to drive, to play Petruchio with Ada, he could have turned her negative -into a comparative, if not into a positive. - -Unhappily, his driving powers were otherwise engaged, and his objectives -were on the battlefield, his office, rather than in the dormitory which -he might have turned into a home. And since Ada had all that she was -conscious of wanting, she had a dull contentment. Two servants and -credit at the shops were good enough for Ada, and good enough, too, for -Sam, because they advertised success. If Ada had been actively vicious, -if she had drunk, if men or a man had obsessed her, if indeed she had -been anything that was bad perceptibly, Sam would have abandoned his -indifference and taken a strong and effective line with her. It might, -at first, have been only because a positively vicious Ada would have -been bad for the Branstone + Classics, but it would have ended by being -good for Ada and for Sam: it would have been the beginning of Ada _and_ -Sam, of their dual life which had not yet come to birth. But, as it was, -he saw nothing to fight. There was a superficial rightness; therefore -all was right, he could forget Ada and turn to the things which were -vital to him, business for its own sake, and business considered as a -stepping-stone to politics. - -He was content for some time to leave his political ambitions alone, -because it seemed to him that money, quite a lot of money, was needed -for politics. In truth, he was rather awed by his ambition: the House of -Commons seemed a tremendous distance from his office in Manchester, -and he thought a great deal of money would be needed for the fare. -Fundamentally, he was modest and rarely overrated his abilities, but he -believed that he had luck, and thought money a good first aid to more -luck. Well as he was doing in business, he could not afford to divert -his energies from moneymaking to politics, wherein he did not mean to -begin at the bottom. - -He was not ready yet to make political opportunities for himself, but if -political opportunities came to him, that was another matter. And they -did come. When he interviewed Sir William Gatenby, he threw a pebble -into a pool whose wave was to wash him to high places. - -It washed him into the knowledge of Mr. Charles Wattercouch, who was -agent for the Division. Wattercouch read Gatenby’s letter about Sam with -some surprise, as one of his recruiting grounds for voluntary workers -was the Concentrics, and he thought he recalled hearing Sam speak for -the other faction, but he catalogued the name for future reference on -his list of earnest young men. - -Wattercouch, like Sam, was in no hurry. He preferred men to come to him, -not to go in search of them, but Sam did not come, and a letter from -Gatenby was not to be neglected. Though Gatenby had probably dismissed -the subject from his mind, he paid half of Wattercouch’s salary, and -he might inquire about Sam some day. So the agent called on Sam at the -office. - -He was a square-built, square-faced man of forty, with a pink, eupeptic -complexion, and light hair which bristled hardily. Your organizer of -victory, like your editor, is apt to be cynical about the politics he is -paid to profess, but Wattercouch kept his perfect faith in Liberalism, -in spite of the fact that he served the Liberal Party, a feat in the -accommodation of blameless principle with unscrupulous opportunism, -which he accomplished with entire sincerity. One can be sincere and -Jesuitical, in fact one can hardly be Jesuitical without being sincere, -and to Mr. Wattercouch the most egregiously illiberal acts of the -Liberal Party were justified because they were the acts of that party, -and must, however improbable it seemed, be means to the end which was -Liberalism. - -This is not to suggest that Mr. Wattercouch was complex, for he was -indeed quite simple, as witness the man’s relish in his grotesque name. -He knew the value of being ridiculed when one can turn ridicule into -respect, and much of his popularity resulted from the genial way in -which he took jokes about his name. He made an asset of what might, to a -less good-natured man, have been a handicap. “Indeed,” says Ben Jonson, -“there is a woundy luck in names, sir,” and Wattercouch turned doubtful -luck to good account. - -Sam had the gift of the gab, which means that he knew both how and -when to speak, and how and when to be silent. He was silent while Mr. -Wattercouch spoke of the valuable work to be done by an earnest labourer -in connection with the annual revision of the register. The point of the -work was to see that all possible known Liberals were on the register, -and all possible objection taken to any known Conservatives, and, -complicated as the work was by the removal habit amongst electors, -it was no light undertaking. Certainly no agent could have carried it -through without the aid of industrious volunteers. - -But Sam did not see himself in the character of an industrious -volunteer, and he was silent for two reasons. The first was that his -silence was causing Mr. Wattercouch visible embarrassment, and Sam liked -the other man to be embarrassed; the second was that he was considering -how to make Mr. Wattercouch see that his suggestion was an absurdity, if -not an insult. - -He smiled with quite polite superiority. “But I think, Mr. Wattercouch, -that you are making a mistake,” he said, as one who apologizes for -having to be blunt. - -“Well,” admitted Wattercouch, “I had my doubts, because I fancied I’d -heard you support Stephen Verity at the Concentrics.” - -“That,” said Sam, “is not the mistake to which I allude. I am aware that -I have supported Verity at the Concentrics. And I am aware that the -way to learn how to cut a man’s hair is to practise on a sheep’s head. -Verity was my sheep’s head.” - -“I’m afraid I hardly follow,” said Wattercouch, who was indeed rather -scandalized by such an allusion to Mr. Verity, who, if a Conservative, -was an alderman and a noted figure in local politics. - -“I will make it easier for you by admitting that even I had to learn,” - said Sam. - -“Ah! I see. You have now seen the error of your ways. You realize the -grandeur of Liberalism, the----” - -“I always did,” Sam asserted. “When I supported Verity, I was teaching -myself to speak. I was practising on Toryism that I might become perfect -in Liberalism. Those days when I made a convenience of Toryism were the -days of my apprenticeship to the art of speaking. Would you have had me -speak badly for such a cause as Liberalism? No. But if I spoke badly for -Toryism, I damaged nothing. Toryism _is_ nothing unless, as I said, it -is a sheep’s head for Liberals to practise on when they are novices, and -the mistake you made is to suppose that I am still a novice, when, as a -matter of fact----” He paused elaborately and hoped that Mr. Wattercouch -would fill in the blank intelligently. “But it is premature to speak -of that,” he said. “As to the registration, I can send you one of my -clerks.” He made a gesture dismissing as an affair of pygmies that chief -event of an agent’s year. - -“I see... I see,” said Wattercouch, trying hard to believe that he had -so far been looking at Sam through the wrong end of a telescope. “And -you yourself, Mr. Branstone?” - -It tempted Sam, that tone of quite startled respect which Wattercouch -adopted now. The misfortune of Sam’s imaginative flights was that he -never knew when to stop. All that he cared about, at the moment, was to -give Wattercouch the impression that Sam Branstone was too important -to be asked to drudge at registration work. He was in no hurry about -politics, but when he began it would not be as a volunteer clerk. - -“I?” he replied. “Two things. One a fact and the other a prophecy. -The fact is that I am an orator, and the prophecy is that Sir William -Gatenby will not live long and that I shall take his place as member -for the Division. Have you a cold?” he added, as Wattercouch choked with -irresistible stupefaction. - -He had not a cold, neither had he powers of speech just then, and the -silence grew emphatic without in the least disconcerting Sam. Once -launched on the sea of bluff, Sam was a hardy navigator, and he had the -moral support of knowing that his whole purpose just now was to avoid -being a clerk. To avoid being a clerk it is justifiable to do more -than to romance: it is justifiable to commit most of the crimes in the -Newgate Calendar. Sam was hardly asked to do that, but Wattercouch’s -cough was a challenge, and a bluff half bluffed is worse than no bluff -at all. It became a matter of pride to convince this unbeliever. - -“I intend,” said Sam with aplomb, “to do a good deal of platform for the -Party. If an election comes soon, so much the better. I shall take -the opportunity to make myself more popular with the electors than Sir -William Gatenby is. That is easy. He quotes Latin in election speeches, -and I’m a man of the people. After that, I expect to contest a -by-election for a seat which the Party regards as a forlorn hope. If -it is possible to win that seat for our Great Cause, I shall win it. -If not, I shall trust to two things, the senile decay of Sir William -Gatenby and the discretion of the Whip’s office.” - -Wattercouch was adapting himself painfully to the new perspective. He -granted that Sam had plausibility, and an assurance which nearly lent -conviction to his astonishing statement. - -“You are in touch with the Whips!” he gasped. - -Sam remembered and varied an old formula. “Do you suppose,” he asked -indignantly, “that I should be speaking to you like this if I were not?” - -Wattercouch did not suppose it. For one thing he was acquainted with the -devious ways of Whips, and nothing that those secretive autocrats did -could surprise him: for another, he wished to believe what Sam wished -him to believe. He saw in Sam the way out of a dilemma. - -His dilemma was a common one. A death had caused a vacancy in the -Town Council, and the local Liberal caucus was almost pathetically -embarrassed as to its choice of a candidate. There were at least -three veteran workers for the Cause who expected, with justice, to be -approached and none of the three could be selected without offence being -given to interests which it was impolitic to offend. - -It was all very well for the caucus: they left it to Wattercouch, the -general handy man, to make suggestions, and as he listened to Sam he -thought he had found a candidate who, simply because he was politically -unknown, could offend nobody. If the obvious men were wrong, he must -rely on the rightness of the unexpected, and, after all, Sam might be -speaking the truth. One never knew where one was with Whips, and here -was his chance to propitiate Sam and at the same time to solve the -problem which troubled the caucus. Sam was a dark horse and he wished he -knew more about him; it was startling to come in search of a voluntary -clerk and to find a candidate; but, finally, he saw it as a legitimate -case for taking a risk. - -“I don’t know, sir,” he said, with a very pretty respect in his voice, -“whether municipal politics will appeal to a man of your calibre, but -there is a vacancy in St. Mary’s Ward, and I hardly think there will be -any difficulty about your adoption as candidate if you cared to stand.” - -Sam pretended to reflect. The truth was that the prospect of an -immediate seat in the Council made his heart beat fiercely. He had meant -for a while longer to put business before politics, but this sort of -politics was business. The Council took up one’s time, but conferred a -prestige on Branstone and the Branstone Publications which would more -than compensate for the waste of time. - -And it was deliciously unexpected. He had not studied to impress -Wattercouch, but had talked exaltedly simply to excuse himself from -the unseen, thankless drudgery of organization: yet it seemed he had -impressed. Virtually, he was offered a seat, He was, this soon, to sit -where Travers had sat, to be a City Father before he was thirty-five. He -had romanced glibly about a bird in the bush, and found himself grasping -a bird in hand, and no contemptible fowl either. - -“We must despise nothing,” he said, “which makes for Liberalism.” - Wattercouch nodded with enthusiasm. “Of course,” Sam went on, “strictly -between ourselves, the Council is small beer. But it is for the Cause, -and if I were asked to stand, you may take it that I should not allow -the larger view I have of my ultimate activities to interfere with my -acceptance. I take pleasure in duty and I see it as my duty, even if it -involves the postponement of my Parliamentary ambitions, to throw myself -wholeheartedly into this conflict.” He was wonderfully pious. - -Wattercouch was less emotional. He had heard too many speeches from -prospective candidates to be carried away by Sam’s. “Quite probably -there will be no contest,” he said dryly. “It’s a safe Liberal seat.” - -“I should have preferred a fight,” Sam lied wistfully. “But I put duty -first.” - -As a fact, there was no contest, and if each of the three veteran -workers thought himself aggrieved, he had the consolation of knowing -that the other two shared his grievance. Wattercouch was discreetly -mysterious about Sam in the inner councils of the local Party, used -Gatenby’s name freely and managed to convey that Branstone was something -much bigger than he appeared to be. He had, at least, got them out of -their quandary. - -Nor did Sam discredit his sponsor either at the private meeting he -addressed or at the public one which followed. He had said he was an -orator, Wattercouch had repeated it indefatigably, and Sam’s audience -believed it implicitly. He was not quite an orator, but was coming along -nicely under the tuition of an old actor who had failed on the stage and -now called himself a professor of elocution. - -He became Mr. Councillor Branstone, and happy little references to the -event began to appear in the papers. The _Sunday Judge_, for instance, -had “no doubt that Mr. Branstone will live to look back upon his -unopposed return to the Council as a minor episode of his political -career, and we speak by the book. Branstone will go far, but, meantime, -it is something even for him to know that he is the most popular man in -St. Mary’s Ward. We had almost written in the whole city, but that would -be to anticipate. How is it done? How is such popularity achieved? How, -in other words, did merit become recognized? Mr. Branstone himself only -smiled when we asked him, but his smile is half of his secret and his -rousing, earnest oratory the other half. They are indeed an open smile -and an open secret. But there are other secrets less open. All we shall -say now is, ‘Watch Branstone. He will not disappoint you.’” - -There was a low evening paper, run in the Conservative interest, which -fastened on the phrase “other secrets less open” and published the -scurrilous statement that one of the less open secrets was the fact that -Mr. Councillor Branstone’s mother was a charwoman, but the paragraph -appeared only in the early edition and unaccountably disappeared from -later issues. It did no harm, as first editions are not published for -politicians, but for sportsmen, and, in any case, there was a brief, but -dignified, eulogy of Mr. Branstone in the _Manchester Warden_ next day. -That paper happened, fortunately, to be Liberal in politics, and indeed -to be, on just occasion, a valiant log-roller. It rolled a log for Sam; -the popularity of Branstone was established, hall-marked by the Press; -and it was about this time that Stewart’s second potboiler was accepted -for inclusion in Branstone’s Novels. The terms were even more favourable -to the author than before. - - - - -CHAPTER XVII--THE VERITY AFFAIR - - -|THE curse of the Wandering Jew is upon the advertiser: he must move -perpetually. Not that Sam would have been in any case content to sit -idly on a seat in the Council Chamber. He hadn’t the sedentary gifts, -nor was he of the breed of Ada, who, the state of matrimony once -achieved, existed in contemplation of a glory which was even more -vegetable than animal. - -He had to do something to justify a paper reputation for popularity and -he had even to convince himself that he would not soon wake up to find -it all a dream. It had happened too easily to be true, or, at least, -safe. Wattercouch had hinted that things were expected of him. - -They were, of course, expected of him as a Liberal, and Sam was not, -in fact, a Liberal but a Conservative. A Conservative is a man who -conserves, who says “Aye” to the words of Giovanni Malatesta. - - “What I have snared, in that I set my teeth - - And lose with agony.” - -Sam had snared, he proposed to go on snaring and never to lose what he -had snared. Whereas a Liberal is a Conservative weakened by sentimental -compassion for the dispossessed. He is not the opposite of a -Conservative, but a Conservative who is weak-minded, or timid or -scrupulous enough to think himself a robber and to propose to give the -poor some five per cent of his plunder. The opposite of a Conservative -is an anarchist. - -Politically he was a Liberal because he thought the Liberals certain to -come in for a long innings at the next election, and if there was any -feeling about it at all (beyond a desire to be on the winning side), -it was for the pudgy orator whose tremendous sentences had caught his -imagination when he visited the House of Commons. - -What he did became known as the Verity affair. It might with equal and -perhaps superior justice have been called the Branstone affair but for -that malicious impulse which causes people to refer to a scandal by the -name of the exposed rather than the exposer. It is like the odium which -we attach to a man who has been in prison, where he had already had his -punishment. Mankind is resolute against letting sleeping dogs lie. - -Mr. Alderman Verity was an elder statesman of the Council and a -Conservative of the honest, unyielding type who thought that to approve -of Tory Democracy was to be either a rogue or a fool, and Sam objected -to him not because he was a Conservative, but for deeper reasons. -Verity was the landlord of Sam’s offices. Every tenant objects to every -landlord. - -One calls Verity an honest Conservative because he made no concessions, -not because he was himself a fount of honour. He had no sympathy with -the modern mawkishness about pampering the people. He admitted that one -had to make promises, that the way to win elections was to tickle the -elector as if he were a trout, but as an Alderman he sat above the -cockpit of electioneering and frowned upon the Liberal attitudes to -which younger Conservatives descended to catch a vote. And their view -that the Council existed for the people honestly revolted him: it was so -patently the other way about. - -The particular instance was Baths in Hulme. He saw no sense in Baths in -Hulme. He was quite sincere in his belief that to build Baths in Hulme -was to cast pearls before swine. Hulme had not asked for Baths and did -not want Baths. Baths were opportunities for cleanliness and Hulme did -not want to be clean. Hulme would not be Hulme if it were clean. - -The uncleanliness of Hulme was an institution. Conservatives conserve -institutions, and the only thing which could remove his Conservative and -Aldermanic objection to Baths in Hulme was self-interest. - -Self-interest is the greatest institution of them all. - -He continued to oppose the young bloods of his Party because for a long -time he did not see where his self-interest came in. He even opposed -them publicly. He said in public that Baths in Hulme were a nasty, -pandering, Liberal idea and that no decent-minded Conservative could -think of it without nausea. And then, suddenly and silently, he was -found to be with those who proposed that Hulme should bathe if it wanted -to. His change of mind coincided with the discovery that there was no -open space in Hulme where Baths could be erected. Something would have -to come down that the Baths might go up, and what would come down, and -why, was the secret of Mr. Alderman Verity and one or two others of -the Old Gang who had the habit of standing loyally by each other when a -little simple jobbery was in question. Really, it was too simple to -be reprehensible. If a Town Council can by one and the same resolution -clear away a slum, and confer Baths, who benefits, and doubly, but the -Town? Naturally, the slum owner has to be compensated, though adequate -compensation can hardly be put high enough. Slums are so profitable. - -Wattercouch had many preoccupations just now, but his vigilance was -a habit, and he was struck by the change in Mr. Alderman Verity’s -attitude. The silence which succeeded his eloquence seemed pregnant -with something, and Wattercouch wondered with what. It was an error of -judgment in the Alderman not to be ill at this time, but he had covered -his tracks and the affair was prejudged, settled before it ever came -before the Council. Verity had neither conscience nor fears about it, -and the Conservative Party, with a prescient eye on the imminent General -Election, was going to use its majority in the Council that it might -figure as the Party which bestowed cleanliness on Hulme. - -Wattercouch wondered why it was Simpson’s Buildings which those -benefactors of mankind proposed to buy and demolish so as to clear a -site for their Baths. - -“This might be your opportunity, Branstone,” he said. - -“Isn’t it asking a good deal of the junior member of the Council to -suggest that he tackle an old hand like Alderman Verity?” asked Sam, -leaning back in his chair with his thumbs in his waistcoat armholes. - -“We all expect great things of you,” flattered Wattercouch, who had -still to justify his selection of Sam to the Liberal caucus. - -“I don’t intend to fail you, either. But I can’t oppose these Baths. As -a Liberal I am in favour of them.” - -“So are we all. But we are not in favour of Alderman Verity’s being in -favour of them.” - -“It’s David and Goliath to pit me against Verity, Wattercouch.” - -“David won.” - -“And Samuel will win. But he will make a condition. The condition is -a free hand. I want no help and no advice and I undertake on that -condition to pulverize Verity.” - -“But you’ll tell me what you propose to do?” - -“I said a free hand, Wattercouch. Leave this to me and I’ll settle it.” - -It seemed to Wattercouch that every time he had dealings with Sam he was -asked to take a gambling chance, but he had no plan of action, and the -man without a plan is always at a disadvantage against the man who, with -or without a plan, looks confident. He left it to Sam and there was, as -it happened, nobody to whom he could have left it better. - -Wattercouch had no inside information and only vague suspicions that -Verity’s change of mind was rooted in the same earth as Verity’s -self-interest. But Sam knew something and was not boasting idly when he -undertook to “pulverize” Verity. - -What he knew, rightly used at the right moment, was dynamic enough, but -he lacked evidence and he did not see how to get evidence. The Council -meeting was at hand and he was finding it each day more difficult to -grin with cheerful assurance at the mutely questioning Wattercouch. He -felt distinctly unassured. - -The facts were clear enough to him. Verity now approved of the Baths -because they were to be erected on the site of Simpson’s Buildings, and -Verity owned that dilapidated pile. He did not own it publicly because -respectable aldermen do not own slum property; he owned it in the name -of Mr. Sylvester Lamputt, Verity’s second cousin, a man of straw; and -Sam knew that he owned it because he had a good memory, he remembered -a conversation between Lamputt and Mr. Travers, which he had overheard, -and all the present circumstances pointed to the relations of Lamputt -with Verity being as they had been when Sam was in the estate agent’s -office. - -Verity was aware that retail profits are higher than wholesale, and -small retail than large retail; that when, for instance, a poor woman -buys an ounce of tea she pays a higher rate for it than when a rich -woman buys a pound or ten pounds, and similarly that when a family rents -a room in a slum property it pays immensely more for it proportionately -than when a cotton king rents a warehouse in the centre of the city. But -it is dignified to let a warehouse to a cotton king, and disreputable -to let single rooms in Hulme, so second cousin Lamputt was the putative -owner of Simpson’s Buildings. Sam smiled at the ludicrous thought of -the burly alderman sheltering behind the shrivelled form of his second -cousin Lamputt. It was like trying to hide a bull behind a weasel. - -But he did not smile often in those days. He paid a visit, at dusk, to -Simpson’s Buildings, and breathed softly lest Simpson’s Buildings should -collapse upon him. Obviously, the alderman was finding his market in the -nick of time. It eliminated doubt, but did not provide proof. - -He knew that in the matter of Simpson’s Buildings, Lamputt was identical -with Verity, but he wanted evidence, and to get evidence he must rely -upon the dullness of Mr. Lamputt, and did not think that he was dull. -The totem of Lamputt was certainly a ferret, and Sam credited the ferret -tribe with nimble wit. He had to be more nimble, then. - -He rejected the idea of making Mr. Lamputt gloriously drunk because it -seemed impossible to associate glory, even the glory of intoxication, -with Mr. Lamputt’s feeble body. It was a case, as usual with Sam, of -taking chances. - -He did nothing at all until the morning of the meeting which was to -decide if Hulme might bathe, and, even then, left his office only a -little before his usual time for going to the Town Hall. He turned into -a back street, ran up many stairs to the attic office whose door bore -the name of Sylvester Lamputt, Agent (more sins are committed in the -name of agency than of charity), and flung panting into the single room. - -He won the first throw in his game. Sylvester was in. - -He sat on a high office stool writing on the malodorous page of an -enormous ledger, looking for all the world like a diminutive office -boy on whom some one has fitted, in cruel jest, a hoary head. If the -calendars on his walls were trustworthy witnesses, he was agent for half -the insurance companies in the British Isles. Autolycus was Sylvester’s -other name. - -He reverenced his ledger as other men reverence the Bible. He kept no -other diary, for the ledger was his book of life, and when Sam burst -upon him he was absorbed in his records. He closed the book mechanically -through pure secretive habit, and closed into it just enough of his wits -to put him at a disadvantage with Sam. - -Sam gave no quarter. “Mr. Verity,” he gasped before he was fairly in the -room. “Simpson’s Buildings... the title-deeds... here, or has Mr. Verity -got them?” - -It succeeded. Lamputt took him for an urgent special messenger from -Verity. “If Mr. Verity’s memory is going,” he said with dignity, “mine -is not. The title-deeds are in the third drawer of his safe in his -office.” - -“In his name?” asked Sam quickly. - -“Of course,” said Lamputt, and then, too late, became suspicious. “I -say,” he began, “what-------?” - -But Sam had gone, and though Mr. Lamputt reached his hat and the door in -one bound and careered down his familiar stairs like the office boy -his figure aped, Sam had turned a corner and was lost to sight. Lamputt -raced to Verity’s office, only to find that the alderman was then -attending a Council meeting. Lamputt could do no more, indeed for a -man with a weak heart he had already done too much: but he had a strong -foreknowledge of the wrath of Alderman Verity, and goes, an unhappy, -shrinking figure, out of this story to an unknown fate. - -Sam went to the Town Hall with his bomb-shell, and they disapprove of -bombs at Council meetings, so he was sedulous to spare their feelings. -He supported that part of the resolution which referred to the erection -of Baths, but proposed that it should stand alone and that the naming of -a site should be deferred. Curiously, his proposal made the Conservative -majority very angry: the resolution was one and indivisible. Sam -regretted that in order to vote against the misuse of a particular site, -he was forced to vote against the Baths, but standing as he did for -purity in civic life, detesting the very shadow of jobbery, he had no -alternative but to move that the resolution be rejected. Here was a -proposal which, however innocent its wording, did in fact imply that -ratepayers’ money was to be handed over to a prominent member of the -party opposite, to a gentleman in whose safe, at whose office, in the -third drawer of the safe, were deposited at that moment the title-deeds -of the property whose acquisition by the city was suggested. He -abhorred personalities, he shrank from mentioning a name, and if the -second part of the resolution were withdrawn, he---- - -It was too much for a young, impetuous innocent opposite. “You dare not -mention a name. You lie.” - -Sam hoped the Council would absolve him of causing a scene. - -“Prove your words,” cried the rash gentleman. - -“I suggest,” said Sam blandly, “that we avoid unpleasantness. I have -made a statement and I am asked to prove it. If a deputation of three -will go with me and Mr. Alderman Verity to his office, the title-deeds -of Simpson’s Buildings will be found in the place I have indicated.” - -It was the sort of drama which appealed more to the readers of the -evening papers than to the Council. Mr. Mayor, in the chair, was -speechless in embarrassed distress. Sam had the calm of imperishable -rock in wind-tossed surf. In the midst of a breathless excitement, Mr. -Alderman Verity was seen to totter to his feet. “I own the property,” he -said, collapsed into his seat and graced that seat no more. - -Impossible even for a Conservative paper to uphold Verity, impossible -to do more than to suggest that Sam’s manners were deplorable: while -his own papers made a hero of him, found his manners a model of -consideration and his triumph as graceful as it was complete. - -All Sam cared to know was that he was on the crest of a wave of -popularity and a general election was at hand. Night after night he -spoke, and the tritest platitudes, with Sam’s smile behind them, shone -like new-found truth. He was _persona gratissima_ before he opened his -mouth: it gave him confidence, and confidence is half the speaker’s -battle. He coined some of those ugly, smart, journal-easy catch-words -which help to win elections, and are quoted in the papers and blossom -on the placards. And, with it all, he became what he had prematurely -called himself, an orator. - -He had the satisfaction of watching audiences sit through the boredom of -Gatenby that they might hear Branstone, and of being himself the “star” - speaker at outlying meetings. Gatenby was returned by a record majority -and it was Bran-stone for whom the mob yelled outside the Town Hall. - -The election was an early one, and Sam was called to speak in other -constituencies. He had wires, not only from agents in quite distant -divisions, but actually from Headquarters. He was in touch with the -Whips! Less than a year after he had lied to Wattercouch, the lie -turned true. He was in touch with the Whips, a wanted speaker, a man of -reputation, a name to be applauded when it was announced on a platform, -for all the world like people applaud when the number of a star -performer goes up on the announcement board of a music-hall. He was not -of the Great Unwanted, but of the few who were wanted. - -Someone discovered at this time the old canard which had once appeared -in the first edition of an evening paper, that his mother was a -charwoman. He did not deny it, but used it as Wattercouch his name, -making an asset of a handicap. He was of the people, blood of their -blood, a democrat by birth, knowing their aspirations and their needs -because he, too, had needed and aspired. In the heat of that election -he became egregiously a Radical. It told, it “went” with the audiences: -that was the thing that mattered to Sam. He hadn’t so much as the shadow -of a principle, he was winning, on the winning side, and pleased himself -enormously. - -And by the end of the campaign he stood, actually, where he had aimed -to stand: amongst prospective candidates who fight, as it were, -probationary elections where, they have scarcely a sporting chance, to -pay their footing towards the sort of candidature which gives a man -his seat. If the Conservatives had offered him a tolerably safe seat, -without preliminary fight, he would have ratted eagerly, and the -charwoman his mother would have been pressed into service on the other -side. It was all one to Sam Branstone. - - - - -CHAPTER XVIII--WHEN EFFIE CAME - - -|THEN Effie came with beauty, shattering the life he lived as sunshine -breaks the April clouds. At first he did not know what had happened to -him: there was a radiance, but he thought it nothing greater than -her physical appeal. He was disturbed, moved as nothing had moved him -before--not even applause--but did not see that more had come to him -than loveliness where all had been unlovely. He did not realize that -there were greater things in Effie than her comeliness. - -She was the daughter of a doctor who had lived up to every penny of his -income and died leaving his widow nothing but a cottage in the country, -which had been their week-end haunt. The widow sold the practice and got -for it enough to keep herself, with care, in the cottage. - -There Mrs. Mannering lived unhappily, resentfully, nourishing a grudge -against her poverty, developing a vein of hardy thrift unseen till now. -With management, she had enough, but lacked the gift of management. She -did not see things in proportion, imagined herself deep sunk in poverty -and made unreasoning demands on Effie. On Effie, not on her son who -managed a rubber plantation at Penang and followed the spendthrift -habits of his father. Father and son, the Mannerings were cursed with a -passion for popularity and entertained with open house to all comers. In -the East, it cost Rex Mannering more than it had cost his father at home -and, granted his habits, he was right in saying that he could do nothing -for his mother. He could deny himself nothing. - -It left the more for Effie. She who was not trained to work must go -into the world and fight not only for her bread but for her mother’s -luxuries. Augusta Mannering was merciless in her demands. She believed, -quite sincerely, that Eflie was gaining riches in the offices of -Manchester and withholding a share from her in simple self-indulgence. -Was it not by going to offices that Dr. Mannering’s rich patients had -been able to pay their bills? And hadn’t they an army of friends who -used to eat their salt? - -But the friends, misunderstanding Effie’s pride, offered no help of the -kind she could accept. She wanted work, not invitations to houses where, -with dress and servants’ tips, it would cost her more to live than in -the rooms she found in Rusholme. She had not the means to be decorative -now, and it occurred to nobody that Effie was a clerk, wanting a clerk’s -place. They could not think of her, that brilliant girl, shackled to a -typewriter. They did not offer what she wanted and she was too proud to -ask. - -Then memories are short, especially of the popular men who buy their -popularity across the dining-table and charge high fees to the unwell to -procure high feeding for the well; and when the Mannerings disappeared, -Augusta to her cottage and Effie to Rusholme, there were few inquiries -made. - -Some other entertainer stepped into the breach of local hospitality; -Effie’s net-play became a legend on their tennis lawns; and she herself -was deemed to be with her mother in the country, shining on other courts -than theirs. - -It was not pure callousness, but things are as they are, and one cannot -live by money and then lose money without losing more than money. - -Effie went into the city unfriended and alone, and her mother lived, a -miser, in her cottage. She wrote to Effie that she needed this and that; -that Effie must spare of her abundance or her mother must starve, and -Effie out of her thirty shillings a week did send, but her mother did -not buy. She warmed her hands at a bank-book, wore ancient clothes -and watched her credit grow. It was more than a perversion of her old -extravagance, it was insanity and Effie knew it. To keep an insane woman -moderately happy, she sacrificed necessities. That is why she was shabby -when she came into Mr. Branstone’s office for the post of typist one -bright, revealing afternoon soon after his party had triumphed at the -polls and he had made himself a figure on the hustings. - -Effie had found companionship in Rusholme, and knew by now the -difference between the friendship which is given and the friendship -which is bought. She had become expert in friendship, and Sam, from -their first encounter, seemed to her more like a friend than an -employer. By then, she had experience of employers. That was why she was -out of work. - -It wasn’t, of course, the normal Sam she met, but a Sam exalted, -genuinely raised and not merely puffed up, by his electioneering -notoriety. He had a new self-confidence; it seemed to him that little -was beyond his reach, that he might even hope to come to terms with -Effie. Not, that is to say, to such terms as her last employer had -proposed. Sam was not, in these matters, the average sensual man. The -point was, and it was to his credit, that he discerned something fine -in Effie even at this stage, and the mood of confidence gave him to hope -that he might not seem commonplace to her. Already, that afternoon, he -cared so much. Her opinion mattered. - -It mattered so greatly that he went slowly about the business of -surprising her: for that, of course, was what he thought he had to do. -She might not know things about Branstone which it was good for her to -know. He might be any employer who advertised for a typist, and he was -not any employer. He was Branstone, of the Classics and the Novels; town -councillor; politician; and she must be told about him. She must learn -what manner of man he was. He wanted to tell her how much greater he was -going to be, but decided that could wait. First she must know what he -had done, before it came to telling her what he was going to do, and his -record would come better from others than from himself. In the office -they knew it all and, even if she asked no questions, there was much -which the routine work would tell her of him. - -He curbed impatience and left her for some weeks in the general office, -where it was supposed that she was picking up some knowledge of the -business before beginning to act as his secretary, but what he hoped she -was picking up was some knowledge of him. He had the idea that he was -popular with his staff, and did not think that they would libel him to -her. - -All the time he burned to have her sitting with him in the private -office. It was for that purpose that he had advertised for a -typist-secretary, and to bring her from the general office could excite -no comment. On the contrary, to leave her there so long might look -strange or at least suggest that Effie was a failure. A failure! Much -he cared whether she was efficient at her work. Yet she was splendidly -efficient, and still he coquetted with his purpose of having her with -him. It seemed to him that to call her in would be a step definite and -irrevocable, one which he wanted and even yearned to make, but about -which he hesitated sensuously as a bridegroom might hesitate on the -threshold of the bridal chamber. He neglected to make two certainly -profitable journeys to London at this time because he could not deny -himself the pleasure of seeing her neck as she bent over her typewriter -when he passed through the office. - -And he had hardly spoken to her! But his dreams were vibrant with the -music of her voice, swelling like an organ till it filled his life with -new harmony. It filled his life not because he refused to think of Ada, -but because he could not think of her. Ada wasn’t there; she didn’t -exist. She never had been there, for Sam, in the true sense, so that the -step from the custom which is nothingness to complete nothingness -was almost imperceptible. She was a ghost from the past fading in the -radiance of the present. The sun puts out the candlelight. - -He was seeing Effie, of course, with quite grotesquely unperceiving -eyes. She might have been, for all he saw of her, the beautiful doll she -emphatically was not. Her outside pleased and satisfied his eye, and he -took it for granted that the woman within would satisfy him in the same -way as the woman without. And so, in the long run, she did, but not till -Sam had made a hurdle race of it and come some awkward croppers on the -course. The harmony of his organ dream might have been true prophecy; -it certainly was not present fact. He wasn’t seeing himself as Effie -saw him, or the sidelong glances he cast at her pretty neck might have -expressed more desire to break than to kiss it. - -He seemed to her a jolly monster, quite lovable if trained, but at -present as untrained as a badly brought-up dog, and perhaps too old to -learn. But it might be amusing to see if he could learn, and from her -who was not used to breaking in a mastiff. That made the thing worth -while, his bigness and the lovableness she recognized behind the -rankness of him. Chance might not come her way, and she thought it -unlikely that it would, but if it did, she meant to take it with -both hands. Effie, aged twenty-six, proposed to herself to form Sam -Bran-stone, who was thirty-five and her employer! She smiled at her -preposterous audacity, but the more she saw and the more she heard of -him, the more determination bit into her. Droll, officious, absurd--all -these her idea was, and she liked it because it was fantastic and -because Sam was Sam. In Effie’s wise, impertinent eyes fantasy and Sam -seemed bound together. And yet he paid her wages; he was a solid man, -a member of the Council, and a serious politician! She was impertinent -indeed. - -But he could not, either for his sake or hers, keep her for ever on -the threshold. For all his late-won confidence he was quite pitiably -nervous, and held back for days in pure hesitation before the simple -action of calling her into his office. He thought of it as initiation, a -ritual to which a high solemnity attached. He intended to act up to -its solemnity, to usher her into that office with all that was most -impressive, to signify to her the importance of being secretary to -Branstone; and, instead, he who was wordy fumbled for words, he who was -painfully correct dropped two aitches in a sentence, and stood there -most comically aghast at his slip. - -Of course, the ritual was finished; one cannot be ritualistic and -conscious of aitchlessness. Ritual implies the superhuman, the -something, at least, which sets the executant above the common clay, and -to drop an aitch is human. In the moment of solemnity, in the mouth of -the ritualist, it is drolly human. We find incongruity amusing, and the -more solemn the occasion the more readily does an impish mirth intrude -on light pretext. - -Effie giggled. She did not mean to be unkind, but the spectacle of his -confusion was too much for her. She hadn’t the strength to resist, and -though she turned her giggle, quite neatly, into a cough, it was not -before he had seen. - -This was his great moment, to which he had looked forward, and she -giggled at him! He felt himself writ down an ass, and wondered for -the fraction of a second whether he would get more satisfaction from -smacking her or from kicking himself. Then he saw her looking at him, -and nothing seemed to matter. He dropped aitches and she giggled. Very -well, then he wasn’t a superman, and she wasn’t divine. They were human -beings, at this moment in the relationship of employer and employed. - -“In future, you will sit at the little desk in here, Miss Mannering.” He -met her eye defiantly as he spoke the “here.” - -“If you have your notebook you can take this letter down.” - -He was running away from his ruined situation. To dictate a letter to -her had not been in the scheme at all, as he had planned it. It was -a refuge, and a safe one, but as he dictated he saw in the letter -his opportunity to indicate to her that he forgave the giggle. He was -writing to an author about a manuscript, which he intended to publish, -but broke off before he reached that decisive point of his letter. - -“Wait a bit,” he said. “Here is the novel I am writing about. I want -your opinion of it to fortify my own before I do anything definite. Will -you have a look at it in here? I’m due at a Council meeting and must -go.” - -“Certainly, Mr. Branstone,” she said; “but my judgment isn’t very -reliable.” - -“We don’t know that until you try,” he said, escaping from his office -to the Town Hall, where he kicked his heels for an hour till the meeting -began Nor did he return to business that day. He had a shyness and a -feeling of deflation. He needed time before he could expand again. - -Effie took her reading of the novel conscientiously rather than -seriously, not supposing that her verdict either way would go for -anything, but appreciating his hint of confidence, and the fact that, -considered as work, novel-reading was pleasant. And not finishing the -manuscript at the office, she took it home with her to Rusholme. - -In Rusholme the landladies are a little humanized from their primitive -Grundyism, partly by the girl clerk, but mainly because few of them have -avoided, at one time or another, the theatrical lodger, a valiant tilter -at conventionalities; and it is possible for a woman in lodgings to be -called upon by a man in the evening without being evicted as a sinner. -One must, of course, choose one’s landlady with discretion. - -Effie, who had not had the opportunity of selecting her parents and had -suffered accordingly, chose her landlady with discretion. By now she had -her friends, those she had made in Manchester, not those she inherited -from her father; there were men amongst them, and they came to see her. -Often, in fact, and especially on Sundays, her room was over-crowded; -but a bed, in the semi disguise of a travelling rug, holds many -callers, and they solved the problem of hospitality by bringing each a -contribution to the feast. - -To-night she had one caller, Stewart, who, having been brought one -Sunday by a man who knew a woman who was a fellow-clerk with Effie at -her last-but-one place, had formed the habit of coming as often as he -could. He was not at the _Warden_ office that night, for the same reason -which accounted for his not knowing that she had gone to Branstone’s. He -was convalescent after influenza, too limp to write the super-journalism -of the _Warden_, well enough to come out to take the tonic called Effie. - -“I ought not to let you in to-night,” she said. “Thank Heaven for -that,” he said, coming in. “Doing what one ought is the dullest thing I -know--unless you’re really serious, Effie? In which case I’ll go.” His -hand was on the door-knob. - -“I’m really serious,” she said with mock impressiveness. “I’m working -overtime. Behold!” She threw herself on the bed with the manuscript in -hand. “This,” she announced, “is Work.” - -“I can believe it,” he said, “because that looks like the typescript of -a novel. If it were mine it would be a pleasure to read; but as it is -not mine, it is probably work.” - -“Oh, it’s work all right,” she said. “Hard labour, too. I’m reading it -by order of my new chief. He publishes things like this.” - -Stewart sat up. “Not Branstone?” he, said. “Don’t say you’ve gone to -Sammy!” - -“Yes. Do you know him?” - -“Know him? I invented him. Bit of a Frankenstein for all that. Better -say I know most of him. He can still spring surprises on me, and you in -his office are one of’em.” - -“Why? Don’t you like his office?” - -“It’s an office. So long as you’ve to be in an office, you could pick -worse--easily. Sammy’s a stream with a lot of shallows in him, but there -are also depths, and I’ve never fathomed them. There’s mud in him, but -it’s not the nasty sort of mud.” - -“I’ve seen that much,” she said. “Polluted but curable.” - -“You’re not by any chance thinking of yourself as a Branstone River -Conservancy, are you?” - -“I rather like him, Dubby,” she said. - -“Good Lord! You and Sam: I say, old thing, no offence, but you know he’s -married?” - -“I know,” said Ellie. “What’s she like?” - -“Haven’t seen her since I was his best man. Wasn’t tempted to see more -of her.” - -“It’s as bad as that?” - -“Oh, rather worse, I believe. Pitch that novel over. I’ll tell you in -five minutes if it’s any use.” - -“Five minutes isn’t very fair to the author,” she protested. - -“Oh, quite. I’m a reviewer, and reviewing’s badly paid. It teaches you -to rip the guts out of a novel quickly. Smoke that cigarette and I’ll -tell you all about it by the time you’re through.” - -He fluttered the pages while she smoked. “Utter,” he decided. “Utter.” - -“I haven’t finished it,” she said; “but so far I agree with you.” - -“You’ll agree with me to the end. Pluperfect trash. Sam will love it.” - -“What!” - -“You’ll see. It’s just his line.” - -“Aren’t you trying to prejudice me against him?” - -He stared. “I’m trying to save you the trouble of reading the beastly -thing. I’ve given you expert opinion. It’s trash and the brand of trash -that he likes. Didn’t I tell you there, was mud in Sam?” - -“You told me you invented him. I don’t believe your influence has been -for good.” - -“Don’t be hard on a fellow, Effie; I only introduced him to the mud. I -didn’t know he’d wallow. Anyhow, let’s talk of something else.” - -“You know,” she said, “you do influence people, Dubby.” - -“Of course. That’s what I’m paid for. I’m a journalist. Have you never -heard of the power of the Press? It means a lot of little journalists -like me writing as their editors tell ‘em to. But I don’t appear to -have much influence on you. I asked you to change the subject and you’re -still thinking about Sam.” - -“Yes,” she agreed, “I’m still thinking of Sam.” - -“You and Sam!” he repeated, looking incredulously at her. - -Effie nodded. “But,” she said, “I don’t know yet.” - -He rose to his feet. “You’re sure, Effie? You’re sure you don’t know -about him yet?” - -“Quite sure.” - -“Then you do know about me? Effie, I’ve got to ask. Are you sure about -me?” - -She met his eyes bravely, knowing that she must hurt. She was sure she -did not love Stewart, who was free, and not sure about Branstone, who -was married. “I am quite, quite sure, Dubby,” she said softly. - -“I see,” he said. “Well, I’m not the sort that pesters, but if you want -me, Effie, if you find you want me, I’ll be there. I... I suppose I’d -better go now. It will take some doing to change the subject after -this.” - -“Dubby, I’m sorry. You’re not well, and----” - -She could see him trembling. - -“Not that, old thing,” he interrupted. “Not pity. That would make me -really ill. Love’s just a thing that happens along, but one starter -doesn’t make a race.” He held out his hand. “Well, doctor’s orders to go -to bed early. Good-night.” - -“Good-night, Dubby,” she said, and added hesitatingly: “You’ll come on -Sunday?” - -“Lord, yes,” he said. “I don’t love and run away. Good-night.” - -She sat for a long while staring into vacancy, then found that something -wet was dropping on her hands. She bathed her eyes and took the novel up -again. A proposal occupied, she found, twelve pages of turgid, emotional -dialogue; but, of course, her experience might be limited. Certainly it -did not confirm the book’s verbosity. - -She was quite sure that she did not want Dubby Stewart. He did not -strike her as humorous at all. - - - - -CHAPTER XIX--EFFIE IN LOVE - - -|SEVERAL causes combined to make her think of Sam, too, as not at all -humorous when she saw him in the morning. Unlike him, she was not at -her best in the early hours of the day, and the strain of arriving at -an office by nine a.m. was one from which she did not recover for some -time. She hated business, but without that cross of early rising she -might have found it almost tolerable. - -She woke that day to her landlady’s rap more resentfully than usual. The -world was disgustingly mismanaged. Why couldn’t she love Dubby, who was -free? She couldn’t, but she hated Sam for being married, he had no right -to be married. “Damn Mrs. Sam! Damn her!” she said heartily, by way of -a morning prayer, as she ran hairpins viciously into her glorious -hair. “But I’ll cure him of mud,” she added, as she raced downstairs to -swallow the tea and toast which she took almost in the same rush that -carried her from her bedroom to the tram. - -She reached the office and walked into Sam’s room to find him already -in possession. His obvious briskness at that hour struck her as almost -indecent; it was, at any rate, another cause for resentment, and one of -which he was himself quite blandly unaware. - -He was not stealing a march upon her any more than he habitually stole -marches on the rest of the world. He knew that early morning suited him, -and used it to advantage. They were certain in town that Branstone had -luck rather than brains because he was lazy; but if a man arrives at -his office at eight a.m., and puts in two hours of solid work by ten -o’clock, he is well ahead of his fellows of the employing class who go -down to offices on the 9.21 from home. He can afford to appear lazy. - -He liked that uninterrupted hour with the books, opened the letters -himself, and had them annotated before the men came, whose business it -was to deal with their contents. He planned out the day’s work, and -saw it in hand before his earliest caller came. After ten, which is the -first hour when it is etiquette for a salesman to call, Sam was never -too busy to talk of matters which were not strictly business--with -the right, the gainful caller. It was known that one could kill time -pleasantly with Branstone. Branstone was a lazy fellow, and his office -a good place to sit in on a wet afternoon, when there was no point in -going to Old Trafford. - -He came this morning even earlier than usual, to be ready for Effie when -she came at nine. He had slept off his embarrassment, and was ready in -his early morning ebullience to pooh-pooh it. It was stupid to be so -extraordinarily sensitive about an aitch. Accent had always troubled -him, but he need not overrate its importance, and especially now that -he wore the political badge of a democrat, and had acknowledged publicly -that his mother was a charwoman. - -So he was here, installed in his chair with the back of his morning’s -work broken, waiting for her when she came. - -No, she decided, not at all humorous to-day: formidable, in fact. He -had all the advantages; he was seated; he was first upon the ground, and -that ground his own, and he was abominably awake. He might have run away -yesterday, but this was the morning of retrieval. - -“Good morning,” he said, assuming an attitude of leisure. - -“Good morning,” she said, then saw that he was looking quizzically at -the parcel she carried, as if, she thought, he mistook it for her lunch. -“I took the novel home to finish,” she explained nervously, and called -herself a fool for giving him this readymade chance to open the subject -which of all things she wanted to delay until her suaver hour had come. -She might be able to cure him of mud, but a doctor should have a bedside -manner, and she distrusted her manners until the landlady’s knock had -ceased ringing in her ears. - -If she had not given him the chance, he would have made it. He gave no -quarter to bad starters. Had he known of her weakness, he might have -spared her. He might, because she was Effie; but it wasn’t his habit to -indulge the weaknesses of others, especially a weakness which he did not -share, did not understand, and denied to be anything but sloth. - -“Yes,” he said encouragingly. “And the verdict?” - -“Does my verdict matter, Mr. Branstone?” she asked. He hadn’t given her -time to get her jacket off! - -“What? Certainly it matters. I wasn’t asking you to waste your time when -I gave you the manuscript to read. The question is whether we ought to -publish it, and the answer depends on your opinion.” - -“Is that quite fair--to the author, I mean? My opinions of novels are -inexpert.” - -“That author can take care of himself very well,” he assured her. “He -won’t starve if we refuse his novel.” - -“I’m afraid my opinions are also intolerant,” she said. - -“Still,” he smiled, “I should like to hear them.” - -“They might infuriate you, and--well, I’d rather not be sacked if I can -help it.” - -“We will forget that it is in my power to sack you. Does that satisfy -you?” - -Oh, how she loathed people who could be magnanimous at nine a.m.! “You -are being very kind,” she said. - -“And you are not giving me your opinion. Come, Miss Mannering, you’ve -read it. What do you think of it?” - -Later in the day she might have put it more gently. Just now she could -manage nothing more kindly than: “I think it’s appalling. It’s false -from start to finish,” and she rejoiced to see how much her vehement -candour disconcerted him. “I’ve drawn first blood,” she thought; but -bleeding as a curative process is discredited. - -“But,” he said, “it is very like others of my series. I made sure it -would be popular.” - -“I’m not a judge of that. It’s possible enough. And now”--she smiled a -little wryly--“I’m afraid you know my opinion of the series. I warned -you,” she added hastily, “that my opinions were intolerant. I imagine -you will not ask for them again.” She turned resolutely to the -typewriter and took its cover off. She thought she had closed the -discussion, and was suiting action to her word, and sitting at her desk -when he motioned her back to the chair opposite his. It was not the sort -of motion one ignored. - -“I may ask for them again or I may not,” he said; “but in the meantime I -have certainly not given you anything to do at that machine, and we were -trying to forget that you are my typist.” - -“I thought after what I’ve said that it might be time to remember it,” - she suggested. - -“Not at all,” he assured her. “I get to the bottom of things, and, if -you please, we’ll have this out.” - -“Of course, if this is part of your secretary’s work----” she began. - -He cut her short. “It is. Now, you find my novel series appalling?” - -Effie was growing angry. _In vino veritas_--and in anger. “I could go -even further,” she said. “I find it degrading.” - -He thumped the desk. “But it sells, Miss Mannering, it sells. Did you -know that?” He leant back in his chair in one of the attitudes he took -when he was scoring heavily, thumbs in his waistcoat arm-holes. - -“It’s the most popular series of cheap novels on the market. See any -bookstall, if you doubt me.” He paused for her apology. - -Effle did not apologize. “That does not alter my opinion of it,” she -said coolly. “A public danger isn’t less dangerous because it’s large. -I’m afraid I can believe that there are no depths to which it is -impossible to degrade the public taste, but that does not make me like -any the better a series which degrades it.” - -Now a child is a child. It may be deformed, and its begetter may in -clairvoyant moments have acknowledged the deformity to himself, but he -resents its being pointed out to him. Sam was the father of his series. - -“I say!” he protested. “That’s nasty.” - -“It’s a nasty series,” she said hardily. “You are proud of it because it -sells when you ought to be ashamed of it because it’s bad.” Somehow -she had to say it. She couldn’t hedge from what she saw as truth, even -though she expected truth to hurt him and to be hurt in return. But Sam -wonderfully controlled himself. Emphatically, he was forgetting that she -was a typist. He remembered that she was Effie. - -He addressed the ceiling. “The fact is,” he mourned, “that women do not -understand business. Even business women don’t. Even you don’t.” - -Mentally she thanked him for his “even you.” It seemed to her a good -place to end the matter for that morning. She still distrusted her -manners, and not, she thought, without reason. - -“Consequently,” she told him quietly, “my opinion cannot matter,” and -moved as if to go to her typewriter. - -He held her to her seat. “That is to beg the question,” he replied, “and -we were to have it out.” - -“But,” she tried, “you have told me that I do not understand business.” - -“And you did not believe me.” - -He challenged her, in fact. Well, she must pick up his gage. “I do not -understand this about business, Mr. Branstone. What is it about business -which makes a man like you content to be a confectioner selling people -wares that give them mental indigestion? Business! It’s the name for -half the meanness and nine-tenths of the ugliness in the world. You see, -women do know something about business to-day. It isn’t their fault that -they are not still sitting cosily at home, hugging the old belief that -business is a dignified, majestic thing to which only the masculine -intellect can rise. It’s your fault, the men’s. You wanted cheap clerks, -and you raised the veil so that women have seen business at close -quarters, and the only thing they do not understand is how men continued -for so long to magnify its low chicane and its infinite humbug into a -cult which deceived them.” - -Sam came to the conclusion that Effie was not perfect. She suffered -from hysteria, but she must be answered. “Well,” he said, “you don’t -think much of business. But you came into it.” - -“I needed money,” she defended that. - -“So did I,” he said dryly. “We’re birds of a feather.” - -“You hate it, too?” she asked hopefully. - -“Honestly,” he said, “I like it. But,” he went on with mischief in his -eye, “I can tell you something that will please you. You dislike the -novel series. You think they degrade. You don’t think the Classics -degrade?” - -“No.” - -“I would much rather that the Classics sold largely than the novels.” - -“Why?” She was eager now. “Because they are great literature?” - -“No. That would be being sentimental about business, and it can’t be -done. Because they are not copyright, and it saves book-keeping.” He -grinned at her discomfiture. “Business,” he defined, “is money-getting.” - He was feeling tremendously pleased with himself, her master in -argument. He gave her rope indulgently, for she was Effie; then crushed -her utterly, for he was Sam. - -“Isn’t it better,” she asked, “to win a little money decently than to -gain a great deal by trading in poison? Whether you know it or not, -these books are poisonous.” - -“I don’t know it,” he said brusquely. “They give pleasure.” - -“So, I suppose, does opium. There are lots of pleasant poisons. Would -you keep an opium den if it paid? If you were a milkman, would you -adulterate milk and poison babies? You adulterate books and poison -minds. For money! Oh, yes; I, too, needed money, and I, too, came to -business. But we are not birds of a feather. I do not like business. I -don’t like having to get money. I don’t like money, but I need it. I’ve -things to do with it.” - -“My case again,” he capped her. “I’ve things to do with it.” He saw that -she was looking at him curiously, and that she took him to mean that he -wanted money for Ada. Incidentally he did, but essentially he did not. -“Politics,” he added. “Power! Power!” He repeated the word ecstatically, -not only because he was admitting her to the intimacy of his private -thought, not only because he felt it an ecstatic idea, but because -he had so thoroughly defeated her in argument. She sat there staring -speechlessly, and he exulted to perceive that she was mute before his -slashing common sense. - -Only, that was not the reason of her silence. She thought that, for a -first attempt, she had gone far enough, and had the hope that something -of what she had said would remain in his mind, perhaps stingingly. -She could only hope. Heaven knew it had been a queer enough interview -between an employer and his typist, and her prayer, as she sat there -permitting his exultation, was for an interruption. - -Her prayer was answered. Just as she thought him on the brink of seeing -that her silence was not entirely acquiescent, the office-boy brought in -the name of a caller he must see, and Effie rose with huge relief. She -hadn’t it in her to keep silent much longer, and felt that if she then -let go all that was firing her, she would say more than he could stand. -True, he had stood a good deal, but then she had said little of what -she had to say! She wanted to say it gradually, to lead him, not to spur -him, to her point of view. Already she was taking a more modern view of -the virtues of bleeding her patient. - -She thought, too, that his was the easier part. - -She had ideals for her Sam, but when she attempted to define them, they -seemed nebulous, indeed, against his simple practice of expediency. He -had his theory that what was expedient was just, and she--what was -her theory except that his was not good enough for him? And his was -in possession everywhere, established, honoured, received of all but a -trivial minority. He thought with the mass and she thought mass-thinking -was not good enough for him. It was difficult to explain. He wasn’t a -criminal, he wasn’t even individual in thought or method; he played the -common game, playing perhaps a little more astutely than the average, -but keeping honestly within the rules. He followed the crowd, and she -wanted him to follow the gleam. A gleam is indefinable, but she thought -she had a chance because she was so much more grown-up than Sam. -Business was a game of marbles, and girls do not play with marbles, but -with dolls. - -He was not to remain for long with the delusion that he had silenced her -in their first talk. There followed many other talks, although she was -coming to the conclusion that talking would not do the business for her. -It helped, it made a preparation of the ground, but it was stubborn clay -in which he had his roots. Talking did not dig deep enough; she must -uproot, she must transplant. - -“Politics,” he had said to pulverize her argument. - -“Another thing,” she told him, “which is not quite the mystery for women -that it was. Politics, but--why?” - -And he replied with the word which had raised him to ecstasy. “Power,”; -he said. - -“Yes?” she questioned. “Business leads you to money, money to politics, -and politics to power. And after that? You want power--for what?” - -“Why,” he cried, “power is power.” - -“An end in itself?” - -“At least, it’s an ambition,” he replied. - -It was, and so had Ada had her ambition to be married, an end, _the_ -end. He did not think of Ada, but he found it difficult to justify -himself. He could not even tell her that he was a Liberal, because he -had a decent hatred of a Tory; he wasn’t in politics for a faith which -enabled him to endure their artifice; he relished the artifice, he was -in with an axe to grind, but with no clear idea of the use he wished -to make of his axe when it was sharp. Ambition, purpose narrowed to two -letters--M.P. He wanted to be M.P. for Branstone, that Bran-stone might -hear the voice of Branstone speaking in the House of Commons. - -She watched him slyly, and thought her leaven worked. “Of course,” she -said casually, “it would be useful for your business if you were an -M.P.” - -“Enormously,” he agreed, marching blindly into her little trap. “It -gives prestige to any business.” - -“And completes the vicious circle,” she said. “Business takes you to -politics and politics brings you back to business.” - -He remembered an appointment hastily, and went to keep it. Sam Branstone -stumped for a reply was an unusual phenomenon, and she con gratulated -herself again that it worked. It worked, but slowly. She was not -impatient, but he was still doing unchanged the things she hated to see -him do, and she wanted the change to come. She doubted that it would -ever come by talk alone. One did not convert by conversation. - -She had intended to say so much, to keep a steady pressure on him, and -she couldn’t do it, partly because her point of view was difficult of -definition, partly because she thought no talk, no matter how inspired, -could change him of itself. She did not know of Anne, who had talked -and kept the pres sure up, and put sacrifice behind the talk even to the -point of thrusting her hand into the fire; but Effie, too, had sacrifice -in mind. Anne’s sacrifice had failed. It wasn’t, perhaps, the right -sacrifice: it was, at any rate, the immortal commonplace, the sacrifice -of the older generation to the younger, of the mother to the son, of -age to youth. Spectacular, heroic as it was, it was yet in the scheme of -things, and it is the sacrifice of youth to youth which can surprise by -unexpectedness. - -For some it is a sacrifice to cease talking even when they are convinced -that talk is futile. If Effie was one of these, she made that little -sacrifice at once. She never told him that his life was mean and ugly -and despicable, his triumphs worthless, his success a failure, his -highest ambition to know that people grovelled to him, his money and his -power. She did not say these things, but neither did she yield an inch -of her attitude which implied them. - -“I’ll win,” she told herself, “I’ll win.” - -By now she was crusading for the soul of Sammy Branstone, and all the -while her passion grew, fed as much by that in him which irritated her -as by what attracted. She accepted the fact that he was married and -discounted it. It was one with the other irritants, mattering less to -her, for it was irremovable. She could neglect the wife: what mattered -was the man. She must bring beauty to his life. - -They have tamed many wild things in a world growm standardized; they -have tried for centuries to bridle love and make it run in harness; but -love refuses to be tamed and standardized by the marriage service. -You don’t scare love away by the bogey-sign, “Trespassers will be -prosecuted.” Love’s wild, it’s free, blind to the handcuffs which Church -and State pathetically try to rivet on a given pair, lawless because -it knows no law, timeless because it know’s no time. Sometimes it lasts -while a butterfly could suck a flower’s honey, sometimes the space of a -man’s life, and they have tried to regulate this love, this volatility, -to pretend that because it sometimes does not evaporate, it never -evaporates till death. They sought to link love with property, and to -control the uncontrollable. They make laws round love, which is like -enclosing an eagle in a cobweb; and we suffer for their laws. We keep -the law and suffer; break it and we suffer. - -She knew that she would suffer, but she would bring beauty to Sam. He -hadn’t capitulated to her talk, and she thought that he had no chance -in Manchester. Perhaps her Sam was with her in his dreams, but each dawn -brought him to accustomed ugliness, and habit clogged his days with mud. -He couldn’t escape, he wanted wings, and she was there to bring them -him. He did not know there was another side to life, but she would show -it him. He should see her beauty, and, through that, the beauty of the -other side. - -She was presumptuous, but presumption is a quality of faith. She -interfered, but there are three inevitable interferences in life--birth, -love and death--and hers was one of these. It was them all: it was love -and the birth of the new Sam, and the death of the old. She interfered, -where she had right to interfere. She loved. - -Time passed between the day when she came to her decision and the day -when they acted upon it, and she never knew how long it was nor how she -spent it. She belonged to a living fact, and there were shadows in the -world, such as her work, her mother, the silly detail of arranging to go -away, and Stewart, a haunting shadow of one Sunday afternoon, but these -were unrealities and only her idea was real. She never remembered how -she put it to Sam, nor what he said, though she had a hazy memory -that he was desperately shocked and more profoundly humorous than ever -before. But she thought that he was only shocked as the right thing -shocks by rightness, not as the wrong by wrongness: and she knew that -difficulties melted: and they came. - -They came to the Marbeck Inn and entered into their kingdom of a week. - - - - -CHAPTER XX--THE MARBECK INN - - -|SAM was vilely dull about it all at first: his comprehension, stuck in -the mud, failed utterly to rise to the occasion, but before long; he was -looking back with horror on his turgid mental processes when she told -him that they would come away together. - -He had a shadow, not more than a shadow of excuse for his preposterous -misunderstanding of her ease. Sam followed the crowd, accepted readymade -their principles and their lack of principles, their morality and their -immorality, and to the crowd he followed the theory was faithfulness and -the practice as much licence as they could take without being found out. -They made a boast rather than a secret of their affairs with a shopgirl -or a typist, he had never had an affair and was flattered to think that -he was to have one now. - -He thought that an affair was rather a manly thing to have. - -When Effie spoke, he had a great surprise, then cheapened her -insultingly. He decided that he had been wrong about her. After all, she -was nothing more than a pretty typist with whom he was going to have his -first affair, who was going to give him the opportunity to join in that -sly boasting in hotel smoke-rooms which was the habit of his crowd. He, -too, would rank amongst the sportsmen. - -But, even at his worst, he had the grace to doubt that this was of the -same kind as those other affairs. It had a lowest common measure with -them, but--Effie! Cheapen her as he would, he could not think of her as -cheap enough for that. When others did this thing it was, surely, that -they were giving rein to grossness: it was at least charitable to assume -that the women of their amours were of coarser grain than their wives, -and Effie’s was not the coarser grain. He drifted, acquiescing and -puzzled, through the fog of his perplexity. - -Illumination came to him, not in the crowded railway carriage, but -in the trap which drove them from the station to the Inn. It came, he -thought, miraculously, but perhaps the miracle was nothing more than -that a man sees clearly in Westmoreland, and sees through dirt in -Manchester. He worshipped Effie who was sacrificing all to him, and -with abasement at the thought that he had meant, with his pitiful -achievements, to surprise her. - -He, shepherded to joy at the Marbeck Inn had set out to surprise Effie! -That was what made it, from the first dawn of understanding, a perfect -wonder-tale. He had not calculated this; it happened, like a dream, in -the air, unrooted in prevision. But that was all it had, except its rapt -intensity, of the quality of dream. It was dreamlike because it was more -vivid than his experience of life, but it was life. Only, he had not -known these things about life before. He had underestimated life. - -The Inn lay in a saucer of the hills at the end of a road which led to -nowhere. As a road, it finished at the Inn and went on only as a rough -cart-track which dwindled and divided into two trails across the passes. -The fells came down in grandeur to the Inn--it wasn’t a place from which -one looked at distant hills, but one where the hills were intimately -there--and half a mile away there was the Lake. - -They were twelve miles from a station, at the end of the world, alone -with happiness. Of course, there were other people at the Inn, but Sam -and Effie were alone: they two with the heather and the bracken and the -pines: they two with love. - -The crowd has not discovered Marbeck. The Inn, the Church, the Vicarage, -down by the Lake the Hall, a farmhouse or two along the road, and that -is all. Six miles away there is a post-office. - -He had followed the crowd on his rare holidays. He knew Blackpool -Promenade and Morecambe and the things to do at Douglas. Here, one did -not do those things. One walked and climbed and lay extended on the -heather or in the perfect isolation of high bracken, and bathed in the -Lake or the streams or the tarns, haphazard, naked, where one liked and -when one liked; and all the time one breathed the air. - -It needed no thunderous knocking on the door to get her out of bed into -the Marbeck air. Sam would go for an early dip in the pool below the Inn -where two streams cascaded into a swimmable basin, and when he returned -she would be up or ready to get up that he might brush her hair, or not -up that she might play at being peevish and be lifted out of bed by him. - -And the food, the good rough plenty of the Marbeck Inn! They ate of it -prodigiously and carried to the hills parcels of sandwiches and cakes -and cheese, shamelessly large, which they emptied to the last crumb, and -eked out in the woods with raspberries and nuts. - -She took him on the Lake, with a rod borrowed from the Inn, and showed -him how to fish. He relished it amazingly, catching little but the -spirit of the thing, happy because of the green reflection of the woods -in the water and because of her. His restlessness found pause in a boat -with Effie and she noted with a keen delight that he did not envy the -expert basket of the postman who cycled to Marbeck in the mornings -and fished till he cycled away with the letters in the afternoon. She -registered as a happy gain that he did not want to shine, or try to beat -that seasoned fisher at his game. Nor did the posts distract them. They -had no letters there. - -They bathed continually, for it was hot, and here again he made no -effort to excel, but let it be admitted that she was the better swimmer. -How much the better she did not let him know. She knew that he found the -water here a purer element than in the old Blackfriars Baths where he -had learnt when he was at school, and she tired less rapidly than he -did. But he was wondrously content to own inferiority. - -She had a deep symbolic faith in bathing. They were here to wash his mud -away, and water was cleaner than talk. Talk, indeed, was but a surface -pattern of their time. They hardly needed it, except as levity to -mitigate a deep communion which sometimes grew almost intolerably sweet. - -It was Blea Tarn, one of the many of that name, which they made -peculiarly theirs, their favourite bathing-place, their best lunch-room. -Effie stretched herself luxuriously on the close-cropped turf, at peace -in mind and body. - -“Sam,” she asked, “have you noticed that Frump at the Inn? She sits -behind me at dinner.” - -“No,” said Sam truthfully. “When I’m with you I notice nobody else. And -I don’t know how you saw her if she sits behind you.” - -“Eyes in the back of my head,” she explained. “You have them when you’re -a woman. Do you mind if I give her a shock?” - -“You would if she could see you now,” he said. “Yes, but she doesn’t -deserve it,” said Effie complacently. She surveyed herself and Sam did -the same. She pleased them both, taking her sun-bath there on the mossy -turf. “But I may shock her?” - -“You may do anything,” he said. - -“Thank God for that,” said Effie joyously, and something glittered in -the sun and fell with a splash far into the tarn. “Too deep to dive -for it,” she decided. “Bang goes a shilling and I’m glad. I never liked -pretence.” - -“I say!” Sam protested, and then fell silent comprehendingly. - -She looked at him and greeted his silence with a nod. “I shan’t catch -cold,” she said, holding up her finger where the wedding ring had been. -“I feel better now I’m rid of that.” - -The remarkable fact was that Sam understood. His education had -progressed and he knew that it was not for the Frump at the Inn that she -shed the imitation wedding ring which for form’s sake he had suggested -she should wear: it was for him. The ring was counterfeit, it was a -false symbol of something which was not true: it had no place in the -Marbeck scheme. - -She curled up happily like a stroked cat, partly in sheer physical -well-being, partly in gladness at her scheme’s success. “And to think,” - she crooned, “that I am a wicked woman!” - -“Effie,” he pleaded, taking her hand. “Don’t.” - -“As if I care,” she said, rolling over on to her back and taking his -hand with her to shade her eyes. “I might have been doing this all -my life.” Indeed, in her perfect absence of embarrassment, she might. -“Wicked!” She shied a stone after the wedding ring into the tarn and -laughed at a world well lost. “The Frump won’t understand, my dear, but -I think you do.” - -“I think I do,” said Sam, but the fullness of understanding had not come -to him yet. - -Something, indeed, of her fineness he did perceive, but not its whole, -its utter selflessness. He saw, roughly, what she was after: that it -was here, in Westmoreland when she made her sacrifice, here when she -lay beside him in the sun that she expressed in deed what she had been -baffled to express in Manchester. She had brought him away from the murk -and the fog and the place where they rather like dirt than otherwise -because dirt means money, to where nature was beautiful. She had shown -him beauty there, her beauty and the beauty of sacrifice and the beauty -of things. She had taught him that there was beauty in the world. “We’ll -never go back,” he cried. - -“No. Not back,” she said. “But we will go to Manchester.” - -“No. No. We’ll build a tabernacle here.” - -“Here? No. We’ve been lawless here. We’ll go to Manchester.” - -It rang in his ears like the trump of doom. So far they had marched in -thought together, and he imagined that in her scheme they were to be -together to the end. He thought her purpose was that they two were -to work together to give shape to beauty--and no bad exercise in -perception, either, for Sam Branstone. - -That was her purpose, but, as she saw it, they were not to work together -in the sense he meant. Her spirit was to go on with him, but she herself -would stand aside, denying herself the right and the joy of sharing his -work with him in physical partnership. She would have done her share at -Marbeck: she was a sign-post whose direction he was to follow but which -he left behind, not a guide to go with him on his way: and she thought -she was content with that. - -She renounced and she imagined that of the two of them it was she who -was the realist and he who was romantic, he was romantic because he -wanted her with him and she the realist because she remembered Ada. She -was not jealous of Ada no’; if she could not bless Ada, neither did she -damn her. Ada had never held him as Effie held him now. She thought it -satisfied her to know that she held him, and to let the days slip -past uncounted. Nothing is infinite except our human capacity for -self-deception. - -For the present, for the Marbeck heyday, it did satisfy her, and she -went about the business of her tutelage with the unruffled serenity of -fulfilled purpose, almost involuntarily now, thinking little, feeling -everything in the passionate intensity of her sacramental love. It would -end and she would suffer: meantime there were only so many days and -it was no use impairing finite days with regrets that they were not -infinite. - -Thought was for before and afterwards, not for now when she crusaded for -the soul of Sammy Branstone with the mystic rapture of a trance, joyful -like the other sorts of true religion. She would wake up, but she would -have taught Sam his lesson; she would have given him his gleam; and she -was selfless after that.... - -Of course she may have deceived herself. There is spiritual love, but -Effie was flesh and blood. - -Sam, at any rate, was not etherealizing things. He did not appreciate -the happiness of renouncing happiness. He wanted it to last, to go on -with the gay days on the hills when she put health into his body and -health into his mind, when it was all a high-spirited riot without -an undertow. For hours on end, they lived their lives unclouded by a -thought... rude, rough, exhilarating exercise on the glamorous fells -like that illustrious day when they climbed the Pike and lost themselves -in mist and found themselves again just where they wished to be, on the -downward trail by Corner Tarn to Yorkdale: then on the steamer down the -Lake, and the lonely moonlight walk across the Moor to Branley, where -the trap from the Inn met them and took them, comfortably tired, to -Marbeck and a giant’s feast. And there were other days, more leisured, -on their Lake or in the woods when more seemed to happen in his soul and -less in his body; and their day of Bathes, in five well separated tarns, -with a makeweight bathe in the Marsland Beck for luck. He wanted it to -last. He had intoxication of the hills, of her, of everything. - -He had not seen, he would not and he could not, see the possibility of -her leaving him. He did not know that leaving him was as fundamental a -part of her plan as coming to him. - -“We’ll go hack to Manchester,” she said, and it seemed to him that he -was ordered hack to hell. “That’s where your business is,” she added, a -little wickedly. - -Business! Hadn’t she shown him the ugliness of his business, and the -beauty of Marbeck? Why should they ever leave the hills? He had all the -extremity of a convert. - -Effie would say no more, and now, as the end of their time grew near, -the magic seemed to him less magical, because he had to leave it, -because she would not stay for ever in that lonely place, but wanted him -to go where other men lived, in an ugly town, where he had a business -she had taught him to despise, and responsibilities, and Ada. - -He plunged to gloom. What was the use of knowing that there was light if -he must go back to darkness? Was it not treachery in her to come so far -with him, then leave him to himself? - -“Effie!” he pleaded, and she consented to make things clear. - -“Don’t you see, Sam? We’ve done what we came here to do. You’ve seen, -you know, and you will not slide back. I won’t allow you to.” - -“You won’t allow! Then you’ll be there?” - -“I hope my spirit will be always there,” she said. “Do you doubt that?” - -“Spirit?” he said. “You’re overrating me. You’re asking more than I can -give. I cannot give what isn’t there.” - -“I’ve put it there,” she said. “You cannot fail. You can’t forget.” - -* “I’d not forget, but I should fail. It’s we, my dear. Not I alone, but -you and I. Without you I am lost.” - -She made a great concession. “Then, if you’re sure----” - -“Quite sure,” he said, and she decided to indulge his weakness. - -“Then don’t dismiss your secretary. Then I’ll be there.” - -“As secretary?” - -“Of, of course.” She spoke impatiently. All else was at the end. - -That only made it more impossible than ever. She was to be there--and -not to be there. There, in his office where he would see her every day, -where he had only to stretch out his hand to touch her, and where he was -not to touch, where he was to forget that he had ever touched. He -wanted her, all of her, the touch, the glow, the life of her, and she -offered--what? A sexless wraith, a spiritual guide, her presence in -asceticism. - -“No,” he said. “No. I’d rather die than that.” - -“Oh, death is a good arrangement, Sam, but well be brave.” - -“There are limits even to bravery.” - -“No,” said the realist. “There are none.” - -So she sent him, though he did not know that the suggestion came from -her, to gather strength in the peace of the everlasting hills. She -sent him to Hartle Pike to think, to see that she was right. He would -remember Ada there. - -He did remember Ada, but it seemed to him, when he tried to sum up his -recollections, that Ada was not the woman who counted in his life. The -women who counted were before Ada and after Ada. They were Anne and -Effie. - -In the gathering dusk on Hartle Pike he tried to be cool about it and to -see things in proportion. Effie had the supreme advantage of immediacy. -It wasn’t easy, whilst he lived encircled by her glamour, to see Ada at -all. - -But he had been Ada’s husband for ten years, a long time, more than a -quarter of his life. In all those years there must be something which -he could positively remember of her, some definite characteristic; -something, at any rate, which was individual to her. He searched -and found nothing. She had less individuality in his mind than his -sideboard. He supposed that she kept house, or did she? Didn’t he -recall that the cook’s wages went up one year, and that the cook became -cook-housekeeper? In that case, and he felt certain of it now, Ada did -nothing. He was equally certain that she was nothing. Since he had grown -accustomed to her demands for money, she was not even an irritant. She -was a standing charge, like the warehouse rent. - -Quite suddenly, as he lingered over that definition of his wife, “a -standing charge,” he saw that it was double-edged. It cut at him, and -shrewdly. - -Ada, like Effie, was a woman, and he knew from Effie what a woman could -be. There must, at least, have been possibilities in Ada. Dear God, what -had he done with them if she was nothing now? That was the charge--that -he had married her and that she was nothing: that he had permitted -her to become nothing. He could summon no witness for his defence, he -remembered no occasion when he had fought for Ada, as Effie had fought -for him. And as to sacrifice----! Yet he was supposed to have loved Ada. - -He could have howled for very shame, he could not, in fairness, think -that Ada had given him anything, but writhed that he had thought just -now of Anne and Effie as the two women who counted in his life. They -were the women who gave. Was he to take all from women and render -nothing to a woman in return? If he could say of Ada, his wife these -last ten years, that she did not count, then he was very much to blame -and the path was clear before him. He saw to where the gleam that Effie -gave him pointed. To Ada. It annoyed him desperately that it should -point to Ada. - -He began to descend the hill in a cold fury. The world was hideous, -Marbeck an illusion, Effie a fool. No: Effie was right. One could not -run away from facts and hide one’s head amongst the hills, and say there -were no facts. She had not brought him there to obscure facts, but to -reveal them. - -It remained to face them, to return to Manchester with new knowledge and -new courage. It needed courage to turn his back on Marbeck, to go away -from happiness to Ada. - -He stamped upon that thought, as on a snake. It was disloyalty to Effie -who had sacrificed to him and shown him all the beauty of her sacrifice. -He, too, would sacrifice and find a beauty in it. - -He found it extraordinarily difficult to meet Effie, and spent an -unnecessarily long time with the landlord of the Inn. Then he went in to -her. - -“I’m leaving,” he stammered. “I couldn’t stay another night. By driving -fifteen miles I can catch the South Mail at midnight. I’ve arranged for -you to come to-morrow.” - -He jerked each sentence out painfully. - -Effie met his eyes with her serene gaze. “That’s infinitely best,” she -said. “I’m proud of you.” - -He had seen! It was her victory, complete and unequivocal, and she -was proud of him and of herself. He had got rid of mud and he had seen -beauty. Now he was facing the facts as she would have him face them, -clear-eyed, without romance. Like her, he was a realist, and she was -glad... glad. - -But when he went up to their room to pack his bag, Effie left the Inn -quickly and walked hard. She must put space between them: space, that -she might cry unheard. It seemed to her that if he heard her crying he -would not go, and she wanted him to go. She was a realist. She was... -stifling her sobs amongst the heather; triumphing in victory on Marbeck -Ridge. - -She won, as she had said that she would win. But there were limits to -her bravery. - - - - -CHAPTER XXI--SATAN’S SMILE - - -|THE theory that Satan is a subtle devil is one which will not bear -examination. He is a crude fellow, theatrical, Mephistophelean. It may, -of course, be only because his experience of human nature has made a -cynic of him, and certainly his interferences do not as a rule lack -success because they want delicacy. He attacked Sam with a blatant -effrontery which suggested that he thought Sam’s a contemptuously easy -case. - -Sam reached Manchester very early in the morning, and spent the rest -of his broken night in a lugubrious hotel near the station. Manchester -hotels rarely make for gaiety, but it is wonderful what even a short -night will do in the way of altering a point of view. - -He expected to be depressed at the very air of Manchester, and, instead, -he sniffed at it as Mr. Minnifie had once relished the odours of -Greenheys, with an exile’s greed. He knew that he ought to feel a -loathing of the office, but found that he opened the letters with more -than his usual zest. He knew that it was wrong, all wrong, and checked -his itching fingers. - -There have been prisoners who, when offered freedom, have pleaded to -remain in the familiar cell. - -Was it like that with him, he wondered, as had as that, the jail-fever -so ineradically in him that he must breathe the tainted air to live? -But, was he offered freedom? He had to go to Ada, who was a mill-stone -and implied the other mill-stones. Unless she was not a mill-stone, -unless he could alter her. In the meantime, at all events, she was not -altered, she wanted the things which she had always wanted; and the -office was their source. It seemed to him that he was still in prison, -with the difference that he now knew that it was prison. He found little -comfort in the knowledge. - -His gaze returned to the pile of correspondence. There seemed nothing -else for it to do, and he saw an envelope, addressed not to the firm, -but to himself, which sent the blood whirling to his head in simple -premonition of its contents. From the postmark (S.W.--Satan’s Work?) -he saw that it had only come that morning and had not been waiting -his arrival. He thought of that as of a portent. Suppose he had stayed -another day at Marbeck! He might have been too late. - -It was a careful letter, but the facts were that, owing to the sudden -death of Sir Almeric Pannifer, the seat tor the Sandyford Division -of Marlshire was vacated. Mr. Morphew, who had reduced Sir Almeric’s -majority in that agricultural constituency to three hundred was, for -private reasons, unable to stand again (“I know these private reasons,” - thought Sam. “Morphew considers he has earned a walkover next time”), -but Headquarters were of opinion that a resolute candidate of strong -personality, etc.... - -In short, he was offered the opportunity to be the figurehead in a -demonstration for the Liberal Party. It was no more than that. Morphew -had doubtless nursed the constituency like a mother, and if at the -landslide of the last election he had done no better than to come within -three hundred of his opponents’ votes, the chances of a stranger’s -capturing the seat were negative. But it was the stepping-stone, the -_liaison_ between obscurity and the House of Commons. It was what he had -aimed at. - -He tried to believe that the letter did not exhilarate him as it would -have done a fortnight earlier, and Satan, the connoisseur of good -resolutions, smiled his age-long smile. - -He looked across at Effie’s chair. “My spirit will be always with you,” - she had said; he wondered if it were there now, and tried to see her. -Surely now, if ever, was her time; now when he had so lately left her, -when her scent was in his nostrils and her voice in his ears. Her voice -_was_ in his ears. He heard it clearly. She spoke one word, “Renounce.” - -“Yes, but, my dear,” he argued, “I have renounced. I’ve renounced you. -I’ve come back here and I’m going to Ada, to plumb the depths of her, -to find the good in her, and drag it to the top. I’m going to dive for -pearls,” he grew almost picturesque as he cited his intentions towards -Ada in his defence, “and I shall grow short of breath. I’m not doubting -that the pearls are there, because Ada’s a woman, and so are you, but I -know that they lie deep and I want breath for such a dive as that. I’ve -renounced you, and I’m going to make a woman of her; don’t I deserve -some recompense to make amends? It’s here beneath my hand, and I have -only to say ‘Yes.’ Effie,” he pleaded, “if you knew what this meant to -me, you wouldn’t frown. It’s not backsliding.” He denied that it was -backsliding, well knowing that it was. “It’s politics, I know, and you -don’t like politics. You told me women knew about politics now. Oh, -but you don’t know, you don’t. Smile at me, Effie, smile as I have seen -women smile when men talked of golf. I know we men are babies, and so do -you. Give me my game. It’s nothing but a hobby, like golf, but this is -mine, and I want it so much. Ada is my work and this is my play, and -just as necessary. It will not be a hindrance to what I have to do for -Ada, it will be a help. Effie, tell me that I may have my help.” - -He tried to blarney a consenting smile out of the figure of Eflie he -imagined sitting in her chair. He had no difficulty in imagining her -there; he saw her, too easily, too really to imagine a false Effie. He -could not imagine, try as he would, that he had won consent from her. He -was too near the real Effie for that. And Effie said “Renounce.” - -Then his cashier came into the office and routine swallowed him for -the day. A score of little points had arisen in his absence and must -be discussed and settled. The thought occurred to him that if he -telegraphed to London in the morning, Headquarters would hear from him -as soon as if he wrote to-day. They might expect a wire to-day; well, -they would not get it. He crammed the letter into his pocket and decided -that he would sleep upon it before he sent them his reply. - -And if Satan still smiled it was wistfully, as if he regretted his lost -subtlety; but there was still Ada, the married woman. - -If Ada was nothing else, she was a married woman; in a world where many -fail, she had succeeded; she had got married, and, like other people who -have reached their earthly paradise, she did not know what to do when -she got there, and did nothing. She stopped growing when she married. - -The emptiness of her life was a thing to marvel at. She slept and ate -and shopped. She was spared the ordinary duties of running a house, and -the trials of servants, because the cook, an elderly, reliable woman, -took (it seemed) a fancy to Sam and became a fixture first and a -housekeeper second, taking from Ada’s shoulders the burden of engaging -her underling. She had two “At homes” a week, and went to other people’s -“At homes.” On Sunday, she went to church, where one can display new -clothes to a larger audience than at the largest private “at home.” - She killed the evenings somehow, in company with a friend, or with the -fashion papers. - -Evenings interested her little; they were the time when Sam was often, -but not too often, at home. He was not, strictly, a nuisance, because -he never asked her, after a first experiment, to entertain a business -acquaintance, and did that at hotels. Nor did he ask her to entertain -him. Usually, he read a manuscript, or worked out costs or did something -which made no demand on Ada, except that she be reasonably quiet. She -was very quiet with Sam, for the reason that she had nothing to say. - -She did not go out much in the evenings and told her friends that this -was because she liked to be at home with her husband. They were supposed -to deduce an idyll of conjugal bliss where proximity was perfect -happiness. The real reasons were, first, pure laziness and, second, her -shoulders. Other married women might expose their shoulders in low-cut -dresses, but not Ada. It wasn’t modest. Her shoulders were ugly. - -She never went to see Peter, who had given her offence by suggesting the -blessedness of work. He had dared to lecture her, a married woman, -and she let fly at him in such fashion that he never tried again, he -deplored his weakness, but he gave her up. The cobbler’s child is the -worst shod, and something analogous often happens with the daughters of -the clergy: Ada was, perhaps, the worst of Peter’s flock. He knew and, -knowing the hopes he had had of this marriage, suffered at its failure, -but silently, confessing impotence. There were always books in which he -could forget, and the peace which had come to his house since Ada left -it. It is not easy to be saintly all the time, and her outrageous attack -had been, humanly speaking, unpardonable. - -“There must be something in her,” he told himself, as he left the -office, “and I’ve to find it.” - -The day had, naturally, after an absence, been unusually busy, and had -given him no time to think. He was bursting with intention, but it was -vague, unformed, though urgent and doubly urgent because of the letter -in his pocket. If he could make a woman of Ada, if that evening he could -make a fair start, perhaps he could conjure up the figure of Effie, his -ghostly counsellor, with a smile on her face consenting to his standing -for the seat. - -“Oh,” Ada greeted him, “I thought you were not coming back till -Saturday.” - -“I wasn’t,” he said. “Something changed my plan a little. I wanted to -get home.” - -She looked at him resentfully. There was no reason why he should not -change his plan and come home two days before she expected him, but -she resented the unexpected. And there was something about him which -appeared strange. - -“Tell me you are glad to see me,” he said. - -“Well, it wasn’t to be till Saturday,” she repeated stupidly. - -“Are you thinking of dinner?” he asked. “Kate will manage something.” - -She was not thinking of dinner, and no doubt Kate would manage -something. It was Kate’s business. - -“You’re wearing funny clothes,” she said. - -“Country clothes,” he explained. “You see, I’ve been in the country.” - -“Oh.” She was not curious. - -“Yes. In the country. It was rather beautiful, Ada.” - -“I nearly went with Mrs. Grandage to the ‘Métropole,’ at Blackpool, but -I don’t like dressing for dinner.” - -“Blackpool’s not beautiful,” he said. “Ada, I want to talk to you, and I -hardly know how to begin, except that I want you to understand that I’m -in earnest. It’s a serious matter.” - -“Money?” said Ada, sitting up sharply in her chair. - -“Not money. We’ve both been wrong about money, I think. We’ve both taken -it too seriously.” - -“If you’re going to tell me that something has gone wrong with your -money, it’s very serious indeed.” - -“It hasn’t. No. This is a larger thing than money. I want, if I can, -to alter things between us, Ada. How can I put it? There’s your -father----” - -“I never want to hear his name again,” she interrupted. “He insulted -me.” - -“You go to church, you know; you listen to him there.” - -“People would talk if I didn’t go. I needn’t listen to him when I am in -church.” - -“He’s a good old man. I’m sorry we have drifted from him. But I’ll not -press that now. If the rest comes right, that will come right with it. -It might even come so right as to include my mother.” - -“My word!” she said, “you _are_ digging up the past. I don’t see how you -could call things right when they include me with a charwoman.” - -“Ada!” he protested. - -“It’s what she is.” - -“By her own choice. But please forget that, Ada. Yes, it’s true that I -am digging in the past. I want to go back to see where we went wrong.” - -“Went wrong? When who went wrong?” - -“Why, you and I.” - -“I didn’t know we had gone wrong.” She looked at him. “You look well,” - she decided, “but you can’t be.” - -“I am better than I’ve ever been,” he said, “and stronger, and if need -be I shall use my strength, but I hope the need won’t come for that. -Ada, can you tell me this? Can you tell me what it is you want?” - -“You’re sure it’s all right about your money?” she asked anxiously. - -“Yes, of course it’s right,” he said impatiently. - -“Then I don’t know that I want anything. I could do with more, -naturally. Who couldn’t?” - -“More money. Not more beauty? Not a new purpose? Not something to live -for?” - -“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Sam. You’re very strange -to-night.” - -“I hardly know myself,” he confessed. “I know it’s all confused, and I -ought to have got things out of the tangle before I spoke to you. But -I thought you might have seen and so be able to help me out. No: that’s -all right, Ada,” he went on as she glared at him indignantly. “I’m -blaming no one but myself. It’s my responsibility. You don’t see it yet, -and I must make you see.” - -“If a thing’s there, I can see it.” - -“Oh, it’s there,” he said. “We can both see that. It’s only the cure for -it that isn’t plain.” - -“What’s there?” - -“The failure of our marriage, if I must put it into words.” - -“Failure! But we _are_ married. What do you mean?” What Ada meant was -that the ring was on her finger and the marriage certificate in her -desk. Failure in marriage, if it meant anything to her, meant failure -to get married, a broken engagement, and since their engagement had not -been broken, since they had been formally and legally married in church, -there could be no failure. - -“We didn’t exult in marriage,” he tried. - -“Exult? I’m sure I was the proudest woman in the parish the day I -married you.” It was true. “But afterwards, afterwards!” - -“Oh,” she cried, “are you throwing it in my teeth that I didn’t have a -baby? Was that my fault?” - -“No, no. But it might have saved us, all the same, and when the baby did -not come we made no effort to save ourselves. There’s a light somewhere -in every one of us and you and I have quenched our lights. They may be -small, they may not be a great light like your father’s, or... or the -light which I have seen in the country, they may be nothing but a feeble -glow, and we can only give our best. You and I have not given ours. We -have not tried to find our light, but now--now that we have discovered -what has been wrong with us all this while--we can try, and together. We -can all of us give something to the world, not children in our case, but -the something else which we were made to give. We don’t know what it -is that you can give and I can give, and we’ve left it late to begin to -find out, but it is not too late, is it, Ada? Ada,” he pleaded, “it is -not too late?” - -She looked at the clock. “If you want to wash your hands before dinner -you’d better do it now,” she said, “or you will be late.” She rose, but -before she left him, she had a moment of illumination. She thought she -saw what he was driving at, that he must have seen some happy family -while he was away and came back with the cry of the child less man on -his lips. “I suppose this means,” she said, “that you want me to adopt a -child. That’s what you mean by giving. Well, I won’t do it, Sam. I’ve -something else to do with my time than to look after another woman’s -brat.” - -“What have you to do?” he asked. “What is it that you want to do?” - -“To eat my dinner,” she said. She had a healthy appetite. Perhaps that -was why she wanted nothing else. - -He stood by the door when she had gone, and his hand strayed to his -pocket as though it sought a talisman. He felt the letter crinkle, then -tore his hand away. Ada was work for a man. There wasn’t room for Ada -and for politics. “Deeply regret private reasons compel total withdrawal -from politics.” Yes, that was the wording of the telegram which he would -send: it was best to be thorough, and, plainly, the man who had Ada in -hand had no time to spare on a hobby or an ambition or whatever it was -that politics represented for him. He had other work to do in the world. - -He stamped upon the ruins of a hope which came to birth ten years ago, -and which he had carried with him in his heart of hearts and, as the -letter in his pocket proved, not a fool’s hope either. Yes, he had loved -that hope which was born on his honeymoon. - -It occurred to him that in all he had said, or tried to say, to Ada he -had not mentioned love. It had not seemed the right word for use in a -conversation with Ada, but, he reflected savagely, he had loved his hope -of politics from the time of the honeymoon onwards: and from that time -he had not loved Ada. - -Was that true? Had he neglected the substance for the shadow, used love -upon his hope and not upon his wife? If he had his talk with her again, -could he honestly begin it in another way? Could he begin with love? He -knew that he could not, and squared his shoulders to the fact. It was a -case, then, for the more courage. What was it Effie had said? “There are -no limits to bravery.” He wondered, but he meant to see. - -And Satan’s smile had faded. There is more joy amongst the devils over -one sinner who back-slideth.... But not this time, Mephistopheles! Effie -was winning still. - - - - -CHAPTER XXII--THE OLD CAMPAIGNER - - -|EFFIE and Sam knew that they ought to be happy in the weeks which -followed, because to be good is, theoretically, to be happy: but they -were not happy. Sam, indeed, was less unhappy than Effie because he had -sunk into one of those leaden, numbed moods of his which he knew of old -as the stage preliminary to his brightest inspirations, and he could -wait resignedly if not happily for the inspiration to emerge. - -Decidedly, he thought, he needed inspiration, He had to discover Ada, to -search for her reality, and, having found it, to drag it out and set it -in the forefront of her being. A big task: one whose success he must not -jeopardize again by rushing at her prematurely without distinct plan. He -had only made her suspicious of him by his first impulsive attempt, and -time must undo the mischief before a return to the attack was either -discreet or opportune. - -He waited, but he did not savour life. When he had quickened Ada, life -would, no doubt, be worth the living, but, meantime, it dragged. He told -himself that he was too young yet at this new business of giving to feel -the joy of it. Certainly, he was not joyful, but he was resolute. There -was a grim tightening of the lips and a dogged look in the eyes which -proclaimed that this was Samuel, the son of Anne. In this mood he could -eat Dead Sea apples and feel they were a proper diet. Politics had gone, -and with them any interest in the Council. And he did not know what to -do about his business. He wanted to ask Effie, and Effie was not there -to be asked. - -It was not that she did not want to be there or that she did not suffer -for her absence. Effie was not numb, and she suffered keenly, but she -thought her absence strengthened Sam. When he came down from Hartle -Pike with his resolution formed she took it that her scheme, as she had -planned it, was complete and that she could forget her weak concession -to return to the office. She was to be there in spirit, and spirit is -strong though flesh is weak. Effie at the office in the flesh would have -wanted to hug Sam and to kiss him, things which it is unbefitting to do -in well-conducted offices. And, of course, she suffered. She had always -known that she would suffer, but not that it would be as bad as this. - -The office was a temptation every day: to go there was to be with him, -it was to find alleviation for her fever, it was to be at peace: but -it was also to fling away hard-won success, and she resisted. That -resistance engrossed her. It was all that she was capable of doing; it -demanded all her strength. - -The obvious, the practical thing, if she was not to go to Sam’s office, -was to go to someone else’s, to work, both as an antidote and as a means -of livelihood, and she could not rouse herself to do it. She pawned some -of the jewellery which remained to her, memorials of her father’s lavish -past, sent the weekly dole to her mother and lived upon the rest. She -had sunk to this, Effie the crusader, Effie the advocate of courage! -With Mélisande, she told herself she was not happy. She was not happy, -she was not well, and she wanted, wanted Sam. She stayed at home lest -she should go to him and ruin all that she had done. It could not last -and she knew it could not last, but neither did she see the end of it. - -Then began the game of consequences: the moves of two pieces, one a -pawn, the other the knight called Dubby Stewart. - -It is a frumpish world, a world where the Frumps, of one or other sex -or of neither sex, in one or other of their manifestations, have a great -deal to do with the ordering of things. That is why it is politic, for -one’s ease, never to ignore the Frumps and never, never to challenge -them by an act of gallant defiance such as shying an imitation wedding -ring into the waters of Blea Tarn. - -Effie held, of course, that since she was in any case defying the Frumps -it was honest to defy them in form as well as in substance, but it is -only certain kinds of honesty which are the best policy. - -The Frump who sat behind Effie at meals at the Inn (her name was -Miss Entwistle) had doubted the genuineness of that ring, and when it -disappeared her doubts went with it. The hussy, she saw, had realized -that her ring deceived nobody, and was brazening it out in the shameless -way of hussies. - -Women are wicked, but men are only weak; so that, though Miss Entwistle -faced Sam at dinner from the next table, it was some days before -she could spare her attention from the back of the greater sinner and -transfer it to the face of the lesser. She could stare to her heart’s -content; it did not matter to Sam, who had only eyes for Effie: and the -stare of Miss Entwistle was very persistent indeed. It was rude, but -it was also pensive. It seemed to be looking for something it could not -find. - -She could not place him and was annoyed because she felt certain she had -seen him before. She got up early more than once to read the names on -the morning’s letters, but did not find one which she could associate -with Sam, and came home to Manchester a disappointed woman. Her failure -to identify him spoiled her holiday. - -But all things come to her who waits, especially, as the world is made, -to Frumps, and Miss Entwistle came by the knowledge she craved one -afternoon when her friend Mrs. Grandage took her to Ada Branstone’s “At -Home.” - -The two photographs of Sam in Ada’s drawing-room were intended to sustain -her reputation for perfect domesticity. She couldn’t live without -him; she drew her very breath from him when he was there, and from his -photographs when he was not. And since one was full-face and the other -profile, they supplied Miss Entwistle with reliable identification of -the sinner of Marbeck. - -It was heavenly. Hers was the power and the glory of initiating a -scandal, of exploding a bomb--which would certainly disturb the peace -of quite a number of people, of figuring in a maelstrom of backbiting -tea-parties as the one authentic eyewitness. It was irresistible, -besides plain duty to her injured hostess. - -The drop of gall in her brimming honey-pot was that she did not know -Ada well enough to tell her the secret by herself, but must share the -excitement of that first surprise with Mrs. Grandage. She whispered with -her friend for some close-packed, hectic moments, and the two ladies -stubbornly outstayed the rest of the callers. - -They told Ada with a wonderful tenderness, watching her the while as -cats watch mice, and Ada did not disappoint them. She cast no doubt on -Miss Entwistle’s story; she did not tell her that she knew Sam was in -London at the time because she had had letters from him. Though she had -nothing in the world but her marriage, she made no effort to protect its -reputation. She exhibited herself to them in all the fury of her jealous -rage, so that naturally, seeing her instant belief in what they told -her, the ladies formed their own conclusion. - -“It is not the first time,” is what the eyes of Mrs. Grandage said, and -the eyes of the spinster looked back at her sepulchrally and said, “It -never is.” - -Ada was married. She had the title of wife, and unfaithfulness on her -part was as far removed from her imagination as from her opportunity. -She was married to Sam; she was the woman in possession, with the -title-deeds in her desk and the seal upon her finger, and this was -flagrant outrage. It struck at the roots of her complacency, and -complacency was life. Yet she hadn’t the wits to confound these -iconoclasts with one little uninventive lie. It needed only that to -abash Miss Entwistle--men’s faces are often alike, she knew perfectly -well that he was in London: anything would have done, anything would -have been better than this abject, immediate betrayal of her citadel. -She struck her flag without firing a shot, and lapsed into a slough of -inarticulate anger. - -“What shall I do? What shall I do?” she wailed as soon as she was able -to speak coherently. - -“That,” said Miss Entwistle, “that, you poor dear, is your business.” - -She had announced the glad tidings, she had found a titillating pleasure -in watching Ada’s reception of them and now she was eager to be off, -to spread the news, to be the first that ever burst into her friends’ -drawing-rooms with word of a glorious scandal. She pleaded another call -and escaped to her orgy. - -“I’ll make him pay for this,” said Ada viciously. - -“My dear,” advised Mrs. Grandage, who had a husband of her own, “I hope -you will be tactful.” - -“Tactful:” blazed Ada. “Tactful, when--oh! oh!” She screamed her sense -of Sam’s enormity. - -“Yes, but you know, men will be men.” - -“It isn’t men. It’s Sam. After all I’ve done for him! Oh!” and this was -a different “oh” from the others. It made Mrs. Grandage look up sharply. -“The beast! The beast! This explains it all. Ethel, that man came home -to me and asked me to adopt his child. He had the face. Of course I -didn’t know it was his own he was speaking of, but I see it now. Ethel, -what shall I do?” - -They seemed to Mrs. Grandage to be drifting into deeper waters than she -had skill to swim in. “I should take advice,” she said, meaning nothing -except that neither by advising nor anything else was she going to be -entangled in this affair. - -“A solicitor’s?” asked Ada, catching at the phrase. “Yes. Naturally. -Sam shall be made to pay to the uttermost farthing.” Her idea of legal -obligations were, perhaps, not vaguer than other people’s. - -“Not a solicitor’s,” said Mrs. Grandage in despair. “At least, my dear, -not yet. Your father’s.” - -“Yes. My father made me marry Sam. He brought Sam home and threw him -at me. I will go to my father. Of course, in any case, I can’t stay -here.” - -Mrs. Grandage made a last rally for wordly-wisdom. “Couldn’t you bring -yourself to see your husband first?” she asked. - -“See him!” said Ada heroically. “I will never see him again as long as I -live.” - -The visitor buttoned her glove. After all, if Ada chose to make a fool -of herself it was no business of hers, and she had tried her best, if a -resolutely non-committal attempt can be a best. She kissed Ada with real -sympathy. - -“My dear,” she said, “I’d give a great deal to undo this.” And by “this” - she did not mean the peccadillo of Sam Branstone, but the pruriency of -Miss Entwistle. She was an experienced woman, and angry with herself for -having listened to the temptress and for aiding and abetting her. - -When Mrs. Grandage referred in after years to “that woman,” it was -understood that she was thinking of Miss Entwistle. - -Ada saw her to the door, and went straight to the kitchen. - -“Kate,” she said to her cook, “Mr. Branstone has disgraced himself, he’s -been unfaithful. I am going to my father’s. Please tell him that I know -everything and that I shall not return.” She had no reticence. - -“Very well, mum,” said the Capable cook. - -The result was that when Sam went into the drawing-room that night, he -found Anne Branstone sitting there, darning his socks, and perhaps it -was because she was happy that she did not look a day older than when he -saw her last; perhaps charring suited her; or perhaps living for an idea -had kept her young. The idea was that, some day, Sam would need her. - -It wasn’t a miracle: there was nothing more wonderful about it than the -fact that Anne was a very good friend of the cook, Kate Earwalker: but -Sam stood gaping helplessly. In his own house, at his age, and after all -these years he stood before his mother, the intruder, like a schoolboy -who knows himself at fault. She lacked nothing of the old ascendancy. - -“Well,” she said, “you’re nobbut happy when you’ve got folks talking of -you. But you don’t look thriving on it, neither.” - -“Mother,” he gasped, “what’s this?” - -“It’s you that will tell me that,” said Anne. - -“Where’s Ada?” - -“Gone to her father’s, and none coming back, she says. Says you’re -unfaithful and told Kate she knows everything. What is it, Sam? What’s -everything?” - -“Who brought you here?” - -“Kate did,” said Anne calmly. “Why, Sam, did you think I’ve lived with -nothing better than what George Chappie and the papers told me of you? -I’d a fancy for the truth, and it’s not a thing to get from men. Kate’s -been a spy, like.” - -“Has she!” he cried. - -“She has, and you’ll bear no grudge for that. You’d have lived in a -pig-sty and fed like a pig if I’d none sent Kate to do for you, but I’ve -come myself this time. It looks summat beyond Kate.” - -“But what’s happened? What is it?” - -“You know better than me what it is. You’ve got folks talking of you and -they’ve talked to Ada. Unfaithful, she told Kate, and she’s gone home to -Peter’s.” - -“She must come back,” said Sam. - -“And why?” asked Anne. “Because folk talk? To stop their mouths?” - -“No. Because I want her here. They’re talking, are they? Well, they -can.” - -Anne looked at him. “You don’t care if they do?” - -“Why should I?” - -“And you a politician?” - -“Oh, politics!” he said. “That’s gone.” It had, and, as he saw -thankfully, at the right time. He tried to imagine how differently this -would have affected him if it had come in the midst of the Sandyford -election. Electors postulate respectability in a candidate. But that -had gone, and gossip did not matter now. The real things mattered. Ada -mattered. - -“You’ve had a move on, then,” she said, and neither her look nor tone -suggested that she found the move displeasing. - -“I daresay,” he said carelessly. “But Ada must come back. I’ve got to -get her back.” - -“Happen she’ll come and happen she won’t, and I’d have a better chance -of knowing which if you’d told me what’s upset her.” - -“What did she say?” he asked. “Unfaithful? Yes, it’s true. I’ve been -unfaithful for ten years. I’ve never been faithful and I’ve never been -fair. I’ve thought of the business and politics when I ought to have -been thinking of her. I worked at them and I didn’t work at Ada. Don’t -blame Ada, mother. I’ll not have that. You never liked her, and you -prophesied a failure. It’s been a failure, but I made it one; I let -it drift when I ought to have taken hold. But it isn’t going to be a -failure now. I’ve given up the other things and I’ve come back to -my job, the job I neglected, the job I did not see was there at all -until----” He paused. - -“Till what?” she asked. - -“Till Effie showed it me.” - -“Effie?” she asked. “Oh! Then there’s something in their talk.” - -“Something? There’s everything, and everything that’s wrong-headed and -abominable. That’s where this hurts me, mother. They’ll be saying wrong -things of her, of Effie.” He began to see that gossip mattered. - -“What would be the right things to say?” asked Anne dryly. “Who’s Effie? -And do you mean her when you say you’ve been unfaithful for ten years?” - -“I meant what I said. That I’ve put other things in front of Ada.” - -“Including Effie?” - -“Effie’s a ray from heaven,” he said. - -“Oh, aye,” said Anne sceptically. - -“Look here, mother, you’re not going to misunderstand?” - -“Not if you can make me understand.” - -“I can try,” he said, “and the chances are that I shall fail. The only -thing that will make you understand Effie is to see her.” - -“Try the-other ways first,” said Anne grimly. - -“She made me see. She gave me everything. She gave me herself. I found -myself because of her and I’m only living in the light she gave me.” - It was difficult to find words for what Effie was and meant to him. “I -don’t know if I can ever explain,” he faltered. - -“Go on. You’re doing very well.” He was--Anne’s insight helping her. - -“It’s like rebirth. It’s as if I’d lived till I met her six months ago -with crooked eyesight. I didn’t see straight, and then, mother----” He -hesitated as a man will hesitate before voicing a profound conviction, -afraid lest he be thought absurd. “Then I found salvation, I’ve been a -taker and we’re here to give. I took from you------” - -“Leave that,” said Anne curtly. “I know it.” - -“And I didn’t,” he replied. “It seems to me that I knew nothing till -Effie come.” - -“Why do you want Ada back?” - -“It’s time I gave to her.” - -“Did Effie show you that?” - -“Yes.” - -Anne was silent for a minute. Then: “I’ll have a look at Effie,” she -said. “You can take me to her.” - -“I can’t do that,” said Sam. “We’re not to meet.” - -She pondered it, and him. “Kate told me you were looking ill,” she said -with apparent inconsequence. “Well, if you can’t take me to Effie, I -must go alone. I’m going, either road. Give me her address and I’ll go -to-morrow.” - -He wrote it down. “Effie Mannering,” she read. “Aye,” she said grimly, -“I’ll give that young woman a piece of my mind.” - -“Mother,” he said, alarmed, “you’ll not be rude to her! You’ve not -misunderstood?” - -“Maybe,” said Anne, “but I don’t think so. I think I understand that -you’ve got your silly heads up in the clouds and it’ll do the pair of -you a lot of good to have them brought to earth. I’ll know for sure when -I’ve set eyes on her.” - -“You’ll see the glory of her, then,” he said defiantly. - -“Shall I?” she asked. “If you ask me, Sam, there’s been a sight too -much glorification about this business. It shapes to me,” she went on, -thwarting the protest which was leaping to his lips. “It shapes to me -like a plain case of love. Aye, and love’s too rare a thing in this -world to be thrown away. I was never one to waste.” - -So Anne Branstone took control, and Sam sat staring at her helplessly -like a man who dreams. - - - - -CHAPTER XXIII--THE KNIGHT’S MOVE - - -|IT might very well have occurred to Sam to retort that he and Effle had -not “their silly heads in the clouds” any more fantastically than had -Anne her self when she retreated to Madge’s and watched her loved son -only through the eyes of Kate Earwalker. But it did not occur to him -and, if it had, Effie at least would have disproved the retort. Effle -outstripped them all. - -The truth was that as soon as Effle knew what was the matter with -her she was not appalled, dismayed, ashamed, or any of the things -appropriate to a young lady in her situation, but simply and purely -exultant. Unhappiness fell from her like a cloak, and left her radiant -with joy. And she had called herself a realist! - -She was a realist; she was engrossed with fact, not with the -circumstantial detail of her fact. She hardly wanted Sam now, she had -him, she was miles and leagues from care, alone in a shining world with -her transcendant fact. Courage returned in full flood to her and she -brimmed with bravery and pride. - -She was out of work and must find work quickly which would pay her -well. She was going to suffer, she was going (to put it mildly) to -be misunderstood. What did it matter, what did anything matter in -comparison with her exultant fact? She was going to be the mother of his -child. Marbeck was not a dream; Marbeck was coming true, and the truth -and the glory of it swept her to a heaven which only women know. - -Perhaps she was a trespasser within the gates, but they had opened to -her and they would not close. She might be prosecuted for her trespass. -Let them try! You cannot hurt invulnerability. She was a world within a -world, self-satisfying, self-complete, not so much derisive of the other -world as utterly forgetful of it. Her cloud of glory hid it from her -eyes, and if she peeped at all through breaches in the cloud she -saw people as one sees them on the road beneath a mountain-top, like -crawling ants. - -A knock came at her door, and she looked bemused through a gap in the -clouds into the eyes of Dubby Stewart, but it was not to look at the -world which did not understand. It was to look at Dubby, who loved her. - -And Dubby knew. It had not been difficult to know. She had refused him, -she had let him see why, and Sam and Effie had been away from Manchester -at the same time. It was not precise evidence, but he had written -leaderettes on evidence not more exact and did not doubt the facts. They -had kept him from her till now, but he could keep away no longer. And -before he went into her room he knew all there was to know. - -“Effie,” he said, “I’m not sure if I’m welcome.” - -“Oh, but you are,” she said. “I ought to have written to you long ago. -I’ve been home weeks from my holiday.” It was no use trying to see -Dubby as a crawling ant, and she gave her hand in friendship. - -“That breaks the ice,” he said. - -“If there was ice to break.” - -“Well,” he reminded her, “I said I didn’t love and run away, and I did -more or less run away. I came one Sunday because I said I would, but -I couldn’t do it again. The trouble with me is that I ought to be a -journalist, and after about twelve years of it I’m still human.” - -“Dubby! I’m sorry!” - -“All right, Effie; I didn’t come to bleat. That’s only an apology for -not coming before. And now I’m here----” - -“You’ll have tea,” she said quickly, going to the bell, but he caught -her hand before she pulled. - -“Do you want to put a table between us? Do, if you must”--he released -her hand--“but I’d hoped it would not come to that. Shall I ring the -bell, Miss Mannering?” - -“You needn’t punish me by calling names. Don’t ring.” She armed herself -with courage, and turned to face him. - -“Thanks. Really thanks, Effie. I know I’m a bore, but if the old song -has a good tune to it I don’t see why I shouldn’t sing twice. It _is_ -a good tune,” he went on with a passion which belied his surface -flippancy. “It’s the best I have in me, which mayn’t be saying much, -because I’ve a rotten ear for music, but this tune’s got me badly, like -the diseases they play on the barrel-organs, and I can’t lose it. I -get up to it in the morning, and I go to bed to it at night, and it’s -ringing in my ears all day. Effie, I’m not much of a cove and I’ve -flattered myself that sincerity departed from me when I cut my wisdom -teeth. I tried to live up to that belief and it’s only half come off. -I’ve tried to make a raree-show of life, to sit outside and watch the -puppets play, and life’s won. Life’s got me down, and I’m inside now. -I’m where you’ve put me, and a good place too: I’m near the radiator and -it warms the cockles of my heart. But I never liked radiators. Mind you, -I can do with them and I can be grateful for them. If a season ticket -for life for a seat near the radiator is all that you can give me, I can -keep a stiff upper lip and thank you for what I’ve got. But I never had -a passion for radiators, and I do like fires. There’s life in a fire -Must it be just the radiator, or can you make it hearth and home for -us?” - -“Dubby,” she said, “I told you before.” - -“I know. Nothing doing in second thoughts?” She shook her head. - -“All right. I only got drunk last time. This time it will need the binge -of my life. I’d cherished hopes of this.” - -“Drunk,” she said reproachfully. “With a stiff upper lip?” - -“Oh, I dunno,” he said. “It takes a stiff upper lip to get me to the -dentist’s, but I make him use an anæsthetic all the same. Still, if -you’d rather I didn’t----” - -“I think it would be braver.” - -“Right. But I’d like to hit something. There’s nobody you’d like me to -hit, is there?” - -“Of course not.” - -“Sure?” he said. He had it well in mind that somebody ought to hit Sam. -“Let’s get back to where we were before I made a stump oration--to when -I came in and you looked at me like a friend.” - -“I hope I always shall.” - -“All right. It’s the privilege of a friend to be impertinent, and I’m -rather good at impertinence. You see, Effie old thing, you’re supposed -to be one of the world’s workers, and you’re not at the office to-day. -You haven’t been at the office for weeks. I know, because I gave Florrie -half a crown.” Florrie was the maid. “And it isn’t that you’ve come into -money, because Florrie tells me you’ve been starving yourself.” - -“I’ve not.” Effie was indignant. She had not starved herself. While -all was dreary, food had certainly not attracted her, but neither had -anything else; and she expected to take a lively interest in it now. -“Really I’ve not.” - -“What you say goes,” he said. “And Florrie imagined it, but she didn’t -imagine the part about your not going to the office, and if anything’s -wrong there, don’t forget that I know Branstone pretty well. I can talk -to him like a father.” - -“There’s nothing wrong, anywhere,” she said, and, indeed, things were -not only not wrong but exuberantly right, only she could not tell him -why. - -“You’re sure of that?” he persisted. “There’s nothing you can tell a -pal? Nothing you can tell me, when you know I’d walk through fire for -you? Damn it, I can’t pretend. I’m not a friend. I’m a man in love, and -I ask you to be fair.” - -“Dubby,” she pleaded, “don’t make things too hard for me.” - -“Is it I who make them hard?” he asked, “oris it Sam?” - -She looked at him amazed, and certainly Effie was stupid then, or, at -least, too wrapped up in her great preoccupation to be alert. “Oh, don’t -be petty,” she said. “I didn’t debit you with jealousy.” - -“No? No? And yet I have a certain right to be jealous of him. I think -you won’t deny it.” - -It wasn’t what he said or even the deep bitterness of his tone, it -was something in his eyes, like a hurt animal’s, which made her quite -suddenly, and as a thing apart from his words, see what had happened. -But she did not see even now the whole of Dubby’s love and the beauty of -his knightly move. - -“You know!” she said. “Dubby, you knew when you spoke just now. You knew -that Sam and I----” - -“I told you I had a word with Florrie.” - -“Florrie?” she asked. “What could Florrie tell you?” - -“Nothing,” he said, “that she knew she told. Guessing is another of the -things I’m good at.” - -She saw it then, to what perceptiveness his love had brought him, to -what high action. It had sped her cloud and she saw, clear-eyed as he, -his fine, impeccable fidelity. - -“Oh! And I called you petty! I told you you were jealous. Dubby, I -didn’t know. You’d have done that for me!” - -“Well, you see,” he apologized, “I’m in love with you.” - -“Why can’t we order love? Why does it come all wrong?” she cried. - -“It hasn’t come so wrong but I can put it right for you,” he said, -making his offer again. - -“I? I didn’t mean myself,” she said, wondering. “Love’s not come wrong -to me. It’s you I’m thinking of.” - -“But is it right for you?” he asked. - -“Oh, yes,” she smiled. “Terrifically.” - -“Is it? When Sam has not been near you in weeks?” It was wedged in his -mind that Sam was playing the villain. “When you are here alone, do you -see him, Effie?” - -“No. That’s why it’s all so right.” - -He shook his head, perplexed. “It may be good metaphysics, but it sounds -bad sense. I’ll be quite honest with you. I’m suffering pretty badly -from suppressed desire to horsewhip Sam Branstone. I think he deserves -it, I know I’d enjoy it and I think you’re trying to head me off it. I -daresay it’s primitive of me, but it will do me good and I don’t mind -telling you I need good doing to me. Effie, mayn’t I go and horsewhip -Sam?” - -“If anybody’s going to horsewhip Sam,” said a voice, “it’s me. I’m in -charge of this job, not you, my lad.” - -They had not seen Anne come in. They saw her now, a little old woman -of the working class in her best clothes, with a bugled cape and cotton -gloves, elastic-sided boots and a quaint bonnet tied with ribbon beneath -her chin, and, unaccountably, she filled the room. They would have -passed her in the street without a second glance as one of the throng, -at face value insignificant; but this was not Anne in the street. It -was Anne in arms for Sam, and when Effie and Stewart compared notes -afterwards they each confessed to having had the same thought: that -their eyes were traitors and that what they saw was fantasy and what -they felt was real. - -“I’m Sam’s mother,” she introduced herself, “and it’s like enough I were -overfond of him when he was a lad and didn’t thrash enough, but I’m not -too old to start again. You’ll be Effie? Aye, I’ve come round here to -put things in their places. They’ve got a bit askew amongst the lot of -you, and what I heard when I came in won’t help.” She looked accusingly -at Dubby. “You’ll be her brother, I reckon?” - -It seemed to him the best way out. Anne had come to “put things in their -places,” and she reckoned he was Effie’s brother, which, now he thought -of it, was exactly his place. Brotherhood was thrust upon him, but he -thought he had achieved it. Plainly, for all Effie’s enigmas, there was -nothing else for him, and he let Anne put him in his place. - -“Yes,” he said, without a glance at Effie, “her brother.” - -“You’re a clean-limbed family,” she complimented them, and Dubby stole -a look at Effie, half humorous and half defying her to contradict his -brotherhood. “Well, I came to see Effie, but I’ll none gainsay that her -brother has a right to stay and listen, if he’ll listen quiet.” - -“Yes,” said Dubby, still challenging Effie, “her brother has a right.” - And Effie did not deny him. She had her courage, but the unexpectedness -of Anne and the force of her, as if for all these years she had been -winding up her will, which now came into play like a spring immensely -braced in super-tightened coils, caused her to want an ally and she -agreed that Dubby had a right if not the one conferred on him by Anne. - -“Won’t you sit, Mrs. Branstone?” she said. - -“I was wondering when I should hear your voice,” said Anne. “You’re not -a talker, lass.” - -“No,” said Effie. - -“More of a doer.” Effie was wondering whether that was praise or -condemnation, when Anne added: “I like you the better for that, though -it’s a good voice. I haven’t heard it much, but I’ve heard it. I haven’t -seen you much, but I’ve seen enough. I’m on your side, Effie.” She -astonished them both by rising as if to go. - -“But,” said Dubby, “is that all?” - -Anne looked with humorous sympathy at Effie. “That’s men all over, isn’t -it?” she said. “They’re fond of calling women talkers, but a man’s not -happy till a thing’s been put in words. Me and your sister understand -each other now.” - -“I’m not quite certain that I do,” said Effie. - -“Well, maybe you’re right,” conceded Anne. “It’s a fact that I told Sam -last night I was coming round here to give you a piece of my mind, and I -don’t notice that I’m doing it. The need seemed to go when I set eyes -on you, and I’m pretty full of a thing I want to do, only I’ve not quite -got the face to ask.” - -“What is it, Mrs. Branstone?” - -“I want to kiss you, lass,” said Anne. - -Dubby Stewart had for the second time that day the impression that women -talked, so to speak, in hieroglyphics.... There seemed to be a kind -of feminine shorthand to which only women held the key, and he did not -understand the sudden softening of Ellie’s face nor her quick response. -And he did not know why, when Anne kissed her, Effie said, “No, no,” nor -why Anne said, “It isn’t no. It’s yes.” A kiss, it seemed, had various -meanings. - -Anne in effect had conveyed to Effie that she thanked her and, more, she -honoured her. Effie denied that she merited honour and Anne maintained -that she did. - -“Aye,” said Anne, “he’s had two dips in the lucky-bag and he’s drawn a -prize this time. It’s more than any man deserves, but we’ll not grudge -it Sam, will we, Effie?” And to Dubby the thing took on a fresh -aspect of bewilderment. If that meant anything, it meant that Anne was -welcoming a daughter. Didn’t the woman know that Sam was married? - -“I’ve grudged him nothing,” Effie said. - -Anne meditated that, then looked at Effie with a touch of what was, for -her, shyness. “You’ve grudged him nothing,” she disagreed, “except your -pride in giving up. And you can do it, you can give up, but Sam’s nobbut -a man, and they’re a weak flesh, men. He looks the shadow of himself,” - she exaggerated resolutely. - -“Does he?” said Effie anxiously, and Anne nodded a sombre face. “What do -you want me to do, Mrs. Branstone?” - -“I want you to give up giving up. Sam said a thing to me last night. -He said you’d make him find salvation. Well, happen; but what’s certain -sure is that you made him find love. He’s found it, lass, and he mustn’t -lose it, and he will if you leave things where they are. He’s trying -to do a thing that isn’t, possible. He’s trying to live aside of Ada, -loving you. He’ll try to love her for the love of you, and kiss her, -telling himself he’s kissing you, and it will not be you; and the love -he tries to bring her will turn to loathing in his heart. And what’ll -happen then, when love goes sour within him? Eh, lass, you took yon lad -to heaven and you’re sending him to hell.” - -It was not fair to Stewart. It was hardly bearable: he was not her -brother and he hadn’t the feelings of a brother. He saw great happiness -in Effie’s face, as if two happinesses mingled there, the one of giving -up her dream, the other of awakening to a sweet reality. He saw her put -out a hand towards Anne, surrendering, consenting, giving all in one -swift, heady leap from cloud to earth, and then he saw her sway, and -caught her in time to break her fall. - -Anne eyed him sharply. “Have you heard of your sister’s fainting before, -lately?” she asked, busy on her knees with Effie. - -“Yes. Florrie told me. Twice. Can I do anything?” - -“I’ll bring her round,” said Anne. “But you can do something. You can go -to Sam at his office and tell him he’s wanted here. Tell him I want him, -and there’s news for him. Send Florrie up as you go, and you needn’t -take that horsewhip with you, neither.” - -“No. I needn’t take it now.” - -So Dubby, Effie’s brother, went out on an embassy for Anne. “Feeling it? -Feeling?” he thought, “you God-abandoned devil, what right have you to -feel? A journalist. A looker-on. There’s a story in this for you. -There’s the guts of a story given away to you with a cup of tea... on, -no, we didn’t have the tea; given neat, and you can’t be decently -grateful. What’s the title? ‘The Charwoman’s Son’? No, damned if it is. -Something about brother. Brother! Yes, you blighter, brother... brother, -and proud of it. ‘Pride of Kin.’ That’ll do, and God help me to live up -to it.” He turned into Sam’s office and delivered his message in a cold, -unemotional voice. It seemed that Effie, brave herself, was the cause of -bravery in others. - -“Effie! My mother! What have you to do with them?” asked Sam, amazed. - -“I’ve given you a message,” said the taciturn herald. - -“But what’s behind it, Dubby? Is Effie ill?” - -Stewart was silent. - -“Is she--dead?” - -Dubby was tempted to say he didn’t know. It; seemed to him that things -went too happily with Branstone, that it was fit, if only for the twenty -minutes which it would take for him to reach Busholme, to let Sam think -that Effie might be dead, to let him taste the flavour of torture. -Dubby suffered and would suffer, not for twenty minutes but, he gloomily -anticipated, for a lifetime. Let Sam have his minutes of it! Then he -remembered he was Effie’s brother, and before Sam had his hat and coat -on, malice had left him. “It’s all right, man,” he said. “She’s neither -ill nor dead. They’ve got good news for you.” - - - - -CHAPTER XXIV--THE NEW BOOK OF MARTYRS - - -|IF there was news which Anne must send posthaste to hid him come to -hear, and if Effie was neither ill nor dead, he need not overtax his -wits to guess it. Yet he had never thought of this very natural sequel -to the Marbeck week, and the plain fact is that he did not much want to -think of it now. - -“I like your Effie,” Anne told him. “I like her very well. She’s going -to make a grandmother of me.” - -He thought his mother had never been fatuous before: she thought he took -the news morosely, and perhaps her expectation had been too high. She -assumed that a child was the first consideration of a man’s life; which -is not true, even, of all women and true of only a minority of men. - -Nor was Sam, in fact, morose. He had never been more intensely and -silently alive. In itself, this thing was right with a shining exultant -rightness which warmed him to the marrow. It crowned and completed -Marbeck and it crowned and completed him. He who was childless was to be -a father, and by Effie! He had nothing but a thankful emotion for that, -and looked with yearning eyes at Effie, giver of all else, who was now -to give him this. He had not known her wonder could increase. - -He saw that more was expected of him than that he should look at her -adoringly. Anne was on tip-toe with anticipation. Her difficulty, if -indeed she had acknowledged to herself that there was any, had been to -make these visionaries see that love mattered and that Ada did not; -and her success with Effie had been complete. She had never doubted of -success with Sam, the weaker vessel, for there was love, sufficient in -itself; and there was now the added argument of Effie’s child. She could -not see that he had any choice. - -He stood there conscious of the expectancy of their regard, and knew -that he was failing them. He thought they took a blinkered view, seeing -the child and nothing else. To them, apparently, the child came first: -they were hypnotized by what was, really, an afterthought, and there was -the greater need for him to keep a steadfast eye upon the truth. As he -saw it, the truth was that he had put his hand to another plough; on -Hartle Pike he had lighted such a candle by Effie’s grace as he trusted -would never be put out; and he had gone to Ada. True, Ada had gone -from him, but that was temporary and trivial, whereas here was a real -distraction and he saw two loyalties before him--to Effie and the idea, -and to Effie and her child. It seemed to Sam that the first was the -greater of these two. - -He had wrestled with an afterthought before, one which hardly yielded -in temptation to that which now confronted him, and he had thrown it. He -had refused to contest Sandyford because there was not room for politics -in a scheme which included Ada, and still less was there room for Effie. -He felt faint with discouragement at the thought that Effie, unless -appearance belied her, had capitulated to her afterthought, but he stood -firmly by their treaty. They had decided that duty came first; he had -shouldered duty; and he, at any rate, had no room for afterthoughts. - -He was loyal to Effie and the Marbeck pact, duty’s bondsman, Ada’s -husband. He made a gesture of decision, which Anne misinterpreted. - -“Aye,” she said a little smugly, “this settles it all right. It wasn’t -common sense in you to part before, but I reckon there’ll be no parting -now.” - -“No,” said Effie softly, “not now.” She stole a look of shy, glad -confidence at Sam, and he found it extraordinarily difficult to meet -her eye, and still more difficult to say what he must, at any cost, get -said. - -“I’m not so sure,” he said at last, wishing the earth would swallow him. - -At that moment he would cheerfully have given a hand to escape having to -differ from them. They were Effie and his mother: they were his mother -and Effie: the two women to whom he owed everything: more, he loved -Effie so that every fibre in him yearned for her, and, even more than -that, he was delicately sensitive to Effie in her present case. But it -couldn’t change him. His loyalty was engaged, to fanaticism, to another -Effie, high Effie of the hills, of the crusade and the idea; and this -seemed to him somehow, a lower Effie, an Effie who had dipped the -flag of her ideal to a coming baby, whilst he was faithful to the old -unbending Effie who had thrown an imitation wedding ring away. It almost -seemed as if she wanted that ring back, base metal though it was. - -A case, perhaps, of splitting hairs, but, at any rate, the case of a man -with a faith at one extreme and at the other his miserable conviction -that happiness was not for him. He had abandoned happiness when he left -Marbeck, and lived now in a place where happiness was barred by Ada. - -“I’m not so sure,” he repeated drearily. “You see, there’s Ada and I -have to be fair to her.” - -“Ada’s left you,” snapped Anne. A contentious Sam was not going to find -her amiable. - -He chose to put it in another way. “My wife,” he said, “is staying at -present with her father. Yes, mother,” he went on firmly, “I’m going to -be fair to Ada and I’ve to guard against unfairness all the more because -you won’t be fair. You won’t be ordinarily just. You always hated Ada.” - -“Yes,” she agreed viciously. “I’m a clean woman. I always hated vermin.” - -Sam turned to Effle immensely heartened by this virulence. “You see!” he -appealed, calling to witness the hopeless bias of his mother. It was, he -wished to imply, this blind hatred of Anne for Ada which accounted for -his mother’s attitude, her exalting of--well--the mistress over the -wife, her flagrant unmorality. He tried to put all this into his -gesture. “And you,” he reinforced it, “you sent me to her, Effie.” - -She bowed her head, admitting it, but Anne was not prepared to let it go -at that. “Even Effie,” she said “can make a mistake. She would not send -you now.” - -And, looking at Effie, he saw that it was true. He had seen it from the -first and it bothered him profoundly. Effie had changed: there was, in -all they said, this noticeable stressing of the “now,” to differentiate -them from the “then.” What was it? Anne’s arguments, or the baby, or had -Effie, uninfluenced by either, really changed her mind about the Marbeck -treaty? he couldn’t believe that last. Marbeck was infallible and he was -dogged in the faith. He responded to the Marbeck creed like the needle -of a compass to the meridian, and if with this needle also there was -deflection it was corrected by his racial stubbornness. He had his -people’s queer, infatuated pride in the contemplation of their own -tenacity, even when, perhaps mostly when, it hurts to be tenacious. - -Whereas Effie had known ever since Dubby Stewart brought her back from -cloud-land that Marbeck was very fallible indeed, or, rather, Marbeck -was one thing and living up to Marbeck was another. If he had said, -instead of only thinking, that she was a lower Effie now, she would not -have contradicted him, though she did not want a wedding ring of either -metal. She wanted Sam. She was changed from the idealist who thought she -could be happy as a sign-post and a spiritual guide. She had come down -to Mother Earth where men and women live. At Marbeck they were on an -altitude where the air was too rarefied for human lungs, and she wanted -to fall with Sam from selflessness to mere humanity. - -“No,” she agreed again with Anne, “I should not send you now.” - -“I shall have to think this out,” he said. Effie admitted to being -earthly, and he was horribly dismayed! “Effie,” he cried in pain, “don’t -you see?” he wanted desperately to be understood by her, if not by Anne. - -“I see,” she said, and not without pride either. Whatever was fine in -him, whatever reacted from an Eflie come to earth, was due to her, -and she was proud of him even when, as now, he used her tempered steel -against her. - -Anne watched with a grim appreciation his anxiety to make a pikestaff -plain. “We all see,” she said. “You’re none so deep and we’re none so -daft as all that. You’ve got a maggot in your brain, and I know the -shape of it. I’ve had the same in mine, and if you’ll think back ten -years, you’ll know what I mean. We’re the same breed, Sam, and we can -both do silly things and stand by then and suffer for them. I flitted -from you to Madge, and I didn’t set eyes on you from that day till last -night. That’s what I mean by suffering.” - -And there, in those few words, the tragedy of ten years stood confessed. -Parted from Sam, she lived in exile, suffering, and, of course, he had -known it and deliberately forgot it, so that the point of her revelation -was not its truth, but the amazing fact that she should speak of it at -all. Anne had the pride which suffers silently. - -“Mother!” he said, distressed for her. - -“Nay, none of that,” she bade him harshly. “If I were soft enough to -let it hurt me, that’s my look out. But here’s the point, Sam. There’s -another woman soft about you, too, and she’s not the same as me. I’d -had you since I bore you, and I were not young when you and me came to -a parting; but she’s young, and you’ll none make Eflie suffer the road -I suffered while there’s strength in me to say you nay. I’d have gone to -my grave without your knowing this if it hadn’t been for Effie. It’s not -good for a man to know too much. They’re easy stuffed with pride.” - -She pretended, with deep magnanimity, to think that he had not known -until she told him, but they both knew very well that he had always -known. She dwelt deliberately on it now to inform him, not of her -suffering, but of the intensity of her feeling for Effie. It was so -intense that she could speak of her own suffering: for Effie’s sake she -had unveiled, thrown off her stoicism, and flung the spoken truth as a -challenge and a revelation at him. - -He knew what speaking in this manner cost her, but he was stubborn still -in relating all she said to her ungovernable hate of Ada; whereas Anne -did not hate Ada ungovernably, but only when Ada hurt Sam. - -Again he said “Mother!” and got no further with it. - -“I know I’m your mother,” she said, “and you can stop thinking of me now -and think of Effie.” - -“I’m trying to,” he said. - -“Well?” said Anne impatiently. She hadn’t imagined an obstinacy which -would not yield to what she had said. Surely he knew the sacrifice of -pride she made in saying it! And there was Effie, too, who said little -and looked the more. - -“I don’t know,” he despaired. - -“Then others must know for you,” said Anne, and when his lips only -tightened at that, “Sam,” she pleaded, “surely you’ll never go against -the pair of us.” - -But there were two Effies, and he wasn’t “going against” them both, -while he held Anne to be mesmerized by hate of Ada. For all that, it -desolated him to be in opposition to them now, to Anne and Effie, the -women who counted, the women who gave. “Still,” he had to say, “there’s -Ada.” - -He said it, as he hoped to say it, finally. He wanted to get away from -these two, to escape from their distracting presence to a place where he -could think. After all, Hartle Pike had not settled his problem, and -he must try somewhere else--Platt Fields, perhaps. They had a sort of -space. - -But he could not escape--not, at least, till Anne had played her -ace. Anne had not finished yet, though she had hoped ten years in the -wilderness had been enough. It seemed that they were not, and she must -wander still. Well, she could do what she must. - -“Oh, aye,” she said dryly, “there’s Ada. There’s your bad ha’penny, -and I reckon summat’ll have to be done with her. But if you’ll stop -worrying, lad, and if worst comes to the worst, I’ll take Ada on -myself.” - -Effie started towards her. “No, no,” she cried. - -“You hold your hush,” said Anne. This was Anne’s game, not Effie’s. - -Sam was still staring at her. “You!” he said. “What can you do?” - -“I can see you and Effie happy, and I dunno as owt else matters.” It -did not matter what the cost was to Anne. “When you used to come home to -your tea from Mr. Travers’ office, what you left was always good enough -for me, and I can stomach your leavings still.” - -It startled Effie, who had thought herself a specialist in sacrifice. -This was the very ferocity of self-denial. - -So far, tired and overstrained, Effie had found peace in resigning the -leadership to Anne, but here was a lead she could not follow. It was not -that she mistook Anne’s purpose or doubted her capacity. Her faith in -Anne was young but adamantine, and she knew that if Anne replaced -Sam with Ada, and made herself heir to the Marbeck plan, she would -unquestionably do for Ada what Sam had undertaken to do. But the thing -was simply not good enough. - -“No, Mrs. Branstone, no,” she said firmly. - -“Get oft’ with you,” said Anne impolitely. “I can tackle Ada with one -hand tied behind my back.” - -“Of course,” Sam agreed, “you could, but you are not going to. Ada’s my -job.” - -“I can be pig-headed as well as you, my lad,” Anne menaced him. - -“It’s not that, mother.” - -“No, it isn’t that,” said Effie, conceiving perhaps that it was time for -her to enter into this tragicomedy of rivalry in self-surrender. “Sam’s -right. Ada does matter, and it is I who am the failure, I who have -broken faith, I who was arrogant. I thought that I could bear a torch, -and I can only bear a child. But I know now what I have to do. I can go -away. I can disappear.” - -It seemed to Anne that this was serious because obviously it was a way -out; but she thought it a way much more appalling in prospect than the -plan she had proposed for herself of “taking Ada on.” She took alarm. In -another than Effie it might have been heroics, but Effie’s was not the -stuff that mouths bravado. Anne granted that, and saw a tragic chasm -yawn She signalled her alarm to Sam, who answered it with a glance which -made appeal to her, whilst yielding nothing of his obstinacy. - -“If you go away,” he said, “my mother goes with you. I’ve meant that -from the first.” - -Anne nodded without enthusiasm. Certainly that was a solution and -equally not the solution. It gave Sam to Ada, and Effie, it -appeared, was not seeing it as a solution at all. There were strange -possibilities, Anne thought, in this young woman, and she did not want -them to be tested too far. Effie was not a talker, and when she said -a thing she did not overstate. There was danger. Well, Anne was -forewarned, and addressed herself in her most humorous, common-sense -manner to laugh it out of court. One can deal with danger in worse ways -than to apply to it the acid--ridicule. - -She put her arms akimbo and surveyed Effie and Sam appraisingly. “I -dunno,” she said, “that there’s a pin to choose between the three of us -for chuckle-headed foolishness. We’re all fancying ourselves as hard as -we can for martyrs and arranging Ada’s life for her. It hasn’t struck -any of us yet that Ada’s likely to arrange things for herself.” - -And if Sam’s impulse was to say gloomily: “It isn’t likely at all,” he -repressed it when Anne’s eye caught his, and said instead, “That’s so,” - without knowing why he said it and without believing it. - -The flicker of a smile crossed Effie’s face; Sam as conspirator struck -her as crudely humorous. Anne saw the smile and understood, but brazened -it out. “Of course it’s so,” she said, defying Effie. “Ada’s a poor thing -of a woman, but she’s none beyond having a mind and speaking it. I was -always one to take the short road out of trouble, so I’ll go along to -Peter Struggles’ now.” - -“Very well,” consented Effie, and Anne understood her to mean that -the crisis, if one had impended, was postponed. “But,” said Effie, “of -course, I saw.” - -Which was, in its way, a challenge; it was, at any rate, to tell Anne -that Effie knew what had been suspected of her. - -Anne met it as a challenge. “Well?” she said. - -“You were quite wrung, Mrs. Branstone,” said Effie quietly. “I’m not a -coward.” - -Anne was tying her bonnet-si rings, and found it convenient to look -down. She preferred, just then, not to meet Effie’s eye. “I know I’m -overanxious,” she mumbled in apology. - -“And there’s no need,” said Effie, a little cruel in her victory. - -To Sam the conversation seemed to have slipped into another dimension. -He hadn’t the faintest idea what they were talking about. - - - - -CHAPTER XXV--WHOM GOD HATH JOINED - - -|PETER Struggles walked into his tobacconist’s and put his snuff-box on -the counter. There was no need to state his requirements; in fact, he -had not stated them for many years. Shopman and customer understood each -other very well, and business came first; then if there was inclination, -as there usually was, talk followed. - -To-day, however, the shopman gaped at Peter in surprise, and made a -half-turn of his head, so that he could see his calendar Wednesday was -Peter’s day for buying snuff with a regularity to which time had given -the force of a tradition, and the tobacconist had even the habit of -using Peter’s visit as a reminder to a fallible memory that he must -wind his clock. The calendar continued him in his belief that to-day was -Thursday, and he felt sure that Peter had been in as usual on Wednesday. - -Peter had. Snuffing, of course, is a wasteful habit in any case, and a -shaking hand misses the target more freely than a steady one; but, for -all that, Peter, in his mental anguish, had consumed in one night the -better part of his week’s supply of snuff. The box was indubitably -empty. He had not come to replenish it without some conscientious -qualms--an allowance is an allowance--but he felt that life which -comprised Ada in her present mood and did not comprise snuff, was beyond -bearing. Ada was, it seemed, inevitable: he must mitigate Ada. - -“The usual, if you please, Thomas,” he unusually said. - -“Yes, sir,” said Thomas, filling the box. “You’ve had a little -accident?” - -“An accident? Oh!” Then the fitness of that guess struck him. “Yes, -Thomas, a little accident. By the way, do you know anything about -divorce?” - -“Well, sir, I read the _Sunday Judge,_” Thomas replied deprecatingly. -“Very human subject, sir, divorce.” - -“You find it so?” - -“I take a lot of satisfaction in reading about my sinful -fellow-creatures.” - -“Quite, quite,” said Peter vaguely, and went out of the shop, leaving a -puzzled salesman behind him. “Forgot to pay, and all,” thought Thomas. -“Not that I’d grudge it if he didn’t pay, only it’s not like him. He -looks sadly to day. The old boy’s breaking up. Him and divorce! What -does he want to worry his head about divorce for?” - -Peter did not know that he had mentioned divorce, to his tobacconist. -It would have shocked him if he had known. He spoke unconsciously, -and listened mechanically to the man’s reply, but he was, harrowingly, -“worrying his head” about divorce. He took snuff in the street, an -unheard-of occurrence, but it did not clear his aching brain of the -fateful word “divorce.” - -Ada had put it there too firmly in her stupid and invincible malignity. -She had one aim--to do Sam the greatest injury she could. His offence -was rank, and she demanded a proportionate revenge. - -She had lived as a spinster for marriage and as a wife by marriage. -Marriage was not a duty, but a state of beatitude, and she had walked -in the faith of her grotesque illusion that her marriage was singularly -blessed. It was childless, and the more blessed for that: there were no -intruders on the perfect union of man and wife. It was illusion, and -a wilder perversion of the truth than the ordinary self-deceiver can -attain; but illusion is the breath of life, and she had fed on her -deception till, like a drug-taker, she could not live without it. -She had blazoned it abroad in a hundred drawing-rooms. If there were -low-voiced colloquies of this or that affair, if it was hinted that -men were faithless ever, Ada would grow superior and boast the flawless -rectitude of Sam. These were things which happened to other people, who -very likely deserved them, and could by no manner of means occur to her. -She was not so sunk in imbecility as to deny that they did happen, and -to people who were, nominally, married; but they were unsound people, -insecurely married. There was a fundamental difference between their -marriages and hers. She couldn’t explain; it was too obvious for -explanation. She was married, and these others, somehow, were married, -yet not married. They had, through lack of merit, stopped short of the -seventh paradise where nothing could shake consummate bliss. They were -not as she was. - -And now she had to face the fact that the impossible had happened to -her, and not only had it happened, but was known to have happened. That -was where the blow struck home. She had publicly elaborated her case -of absolute conviction, she had vaunted his faithfulness, the cardinal -connubiality of Sam, and Miss Entwistle was spreading the news that she -had been a doting fool! And she hadn’t. She had not doted on Sam. She -had not been infatuated with her husband, but with the idea of her -husband which she had created and maintained. If only she had had the -gumption to defy Miss Entwistle! If only she had concealed her belief -in the story as successfully as she had hidden the fact that Sam had -a separate room! She had been taken by surprise, she had admitted -everything by default, and, worse, she had assured Mrs. Grandage that -she would never see Sam again. She did not doubt, in spite of Mrs. -Grandage’s good-nature, that this little sequel to the story of Miss -Entwistle was in rapid circulation. - -She was humiliated publicly, and, as she saw it, the one course open to -her was to make Sam suffer a humiliation as drastic and as public as her -own. Though it hurt her, he must pay for it; though she died, he must -be punished and, sincerely, she expected it to kill her. She lived in a -garden of lies, and life without the illusion of her marriage would be -as impossible as life without the fragrance of her poisonous flowers to -Rappaccini’s daughter, but no matter for that. Ada must be revenged, -and divorce, though it killed her, would be the greatest injury that she -could do a politician and a pietistic publisher. She managed to square -the circle, too. She was to die and make a murderer of him; she was to -ruin his business and make a bankrupt of him; and at the same time -she was to have the compensation of a handsome alimony. But perhaps -vengeance is always irrational, and that is why it belongs to God. - -She dinned her word into Peter’s ears with the merciless reiteration -of a hurt and howling child. It was her first word and her last, and -appeals based on religion shattered themselves against it as fruitlessly -as the appeal to reason. What she had said she had said: and she had -said “Divorce.” Alternatives did not exist. - -For Peter, divorce ranged itself with the abominations of the world, -a man-made legal subterfuge to evade the law of God. There might, -conceivably, be occasions when divorce was to be condoned as the -comparatively little wrong which did a great right, and he tried very -honestly to see Ada’s as one of those heroic needs. He failed: he could -not even see that Ada was hurt in soul, or in anything but pride. She -was in a mood, not of spiritual revolt, but of peevish discontent. - -Small wonder that he snuffed prodigiously that night. He had his meed -of suffering, and overcharged his small account with dreadful -self-reproach. He, not Ada, and not Sam, was responsible for her -violence and for the cause of it; he and the books upon his shelves; -reading, his darling sin. He blamed himself for consenting too readily -to their marriage. Sam, he had thought, would lead Ada: on what grounds -had he thought it? What had he known of Sam’s leadership--a prolix, -fluent boy at the Concentrics? He had exchanged his daughter for -peaceful, solitary evenings with his books--“Self-seeker!” he -thought--and the exchange was to recoil upon him now. He had abandoned, -after one harsh, undaughterly repulse, his attempt to show her that -wearing a wedding ring was not the whole duty of woman--“The sin of -Pride,” he thought--and had returned to browse amongst his books. Sam -seemed a good fellow, too. There were those Classics, and the texts, and -the prosperous old age of Mr. Carter, who, but for Sam, would certainly -have ended his days in the workhouse. But, failing with Ada, he ought to -have appealed to Sam.... Yes, he ought to have taken a strong line with -Sam, instead of letting Sam’s worldly success dazzle him. Sam had seemed -too big for Peter Struggles to grapple with--the sin of cowardice. - -Now it had come to this! Sam had broken the seventh commandment, and Ada -wished to forget the words which Peter had read over them when he -joined their right hands together, and said, “Those whom God hath joined -together, let no man put asunder.” She commanded a divorce, and it was -useless for Peter to insist, out of his small store of worldly wisdom, -that divorce was not hers to command. Sam had not been “cruel.” - -Her fury only doubled. Gone, vanished like the snows of long ago, was -her painted idyll of domestic bliss. - -“Cruel?” she said. “He’s never been anything but cruel. I’m black and -blue with his atrocities.” - -Very gently he tried to tell her that he did not believe it. “We must -not exaggerate,” he said. - -“Exaggerate!” she blazed. “Won’t you believe me till you see it? I’ll go -upstairs and strip. Come when I call.” - -He soothed her down at that, seeing that she was capable of doing -herself some signal injury to call in evidence. - -“Well, then,” she said, “I want my divorce: get me a divorce.” That was -her simple demand of the priest who married her: it was why Peter took, -unrepentantly, as much snuff in a night as he commonly took in a week, -and why, with replenished stock, he continued next day to take snuff -with a lavish hand. - -It irritated Ada, though she had always associated Peter with a -snuff-box, and the untidiness of the habit could not offend her, who -was never offended by dirt, as any mechanical movement in another will -irritate one whose nerves are ill-controlled. They had talked themselves -to a standstill, and sat in moody silence, broken only by the deplorable -sound of taking snuff. - -She looked viciously at him. “If you do that again, I shall leave the -room,” she said. - -“I’m sorry, my dear,” he said, although, really, it was a pleasant -threat; but when he did it again, it was through pure absent-mindedness, -and he was terribly distressed at his selfishness when Ada flung out -of the room. He had the feelings of a child put in a corner as a -punishment, and to relieve them he took snuff again. She heard him from -the stair, and heard him immediately afterwards poking the fire; and she -thought the loathsome self-absorption of men and their utter callousness -to the anguish of sensitive women were proved beyond the possibility -of doubt. She threw herself on the bed in her old room, alone in a -friendless world.... The bed had a warm eiderdown. - -Peter poked the fire because it needed poking. It often did. The grate -was one of those labour-making contrivances which must be periodically -cleared of ash if the fire is to burn at all, and it was rarely cleared. -The woman who “did for” Peter, did for him badly, and he was at the age -when a man needs artificial warmth: a gaunt, shrunk figure as neglected -as his house. Small wonder that, apart from his attachment to St. -Mary’s, he was still a curate. They had considered him for the living -when his vicar moved some years ago, they had considered the little -circle of rich parishioners who made an oasis of civilization in that -savage place, and they had decided that Peter lacked the social graces. -They had seen his mittens, his unfinished coat... they had seen him eat -an orange: and he remained a curate. - -The fire was gone beyond the reach of his unscientific poking. That, -too, often happened with a man who had the habit of standing by his -bookshelf reading gluttonously, with his austere person frozen into a -grotesque attitude, some book which he had not the patience to carry to -the fireside: and he was now upon his knees making pathetically clumsy -efforts to revitalize the flame when his inefficient housekeeper opened -the door and showed Anne into the room. - -It eased the situation for them both. Anne indeed, was nervous, so -nervous that she had walked three times past the door before she pulled -the bell. She had a befitting awe of the priest, and a tremendous -respect for the man. At Effie’s, because the circumstances there were -tense, it had seemed an easy thing to come to Peter’s, but she had -needed to call on her reserves of courage to keep her place on the -doorstep after she had rung the bell. - -Now, however, when she came into the room and saw what he was at, she -pushed him gently aside, and took the poker from his hand. She nursed -the fire skilfully; she was with familiar things which gave her back her -confidence. - -As to the trouble, she diagnosed it in a moment. “That woman of yours is -a slut,” she said. “And I’ll talk to her before I go. I reckon I’ve the -right, me and you being connections by marriage.” - -She looked at him over her shoulder, and saw that he did not recognize -her. How, indeed, should he? She had avoided Ada’s wedding, and she was -one of a large flock: a face, perhaps, but not a name to him. “I’m Anne -Branstone,” she explained. “Sam’s mother; and I’ll not have you blaming -Sam for this.” - -“For the fire?” asked Peter vaguely, he was rather muddled by her brisk -incursion. - -“No,” said Anne, almost gaily; “for the fat that’s in the fire.” - -She thought she had his measure now--the sort of a man who could live -in a dirty room like this, with a choked ash-pan and fire-irons with the -rust thick on them. But Peter was greater than that. She judged him by -those of his surroundings which had significance for her, and not by -books which expressed everything for him and nothing for her. - -“Mrs. Branstone!” he said, as if realizing now with whom he had to deal. - -“Sam’s mother,” she repeated, rising from a healthy fire; “and I’ve told -you where not to put the blame. You can, maybe, think yourself of the -right place to put it.” - -“Yes,” he surprised her by saying; “on me.” - -“You! Oh, if you want to go to the back of behind, you can blame Adam -and Eve. But that’s not what I meant.” - -“On me,” he said again. “I consented to this marriage. I sanctioned it.” - -“Well,” said Anne, “I’ve not come here to crow, but I’ve the advantage -of you in that. I did not consent,” and her eye strayed involuntarily -to a scar on her hand, memorial of the form of her dissent. “I didn’t -consent because I knew they weren’t in love. I told Sam I knew it.” - -“Then,” said Peter, “you are worthier than I am, Mrs. Branstone.” - -“Because I knew love matters? There’s nowt so wonderful in knowing that, -and nowt so crafty in foreseeing that a marriage where there is no love -is marred from start to finish.” - -“Love matters,” he agreed. “It matters all, for God is love.” - -“We’ll come to an agreement, you and me,” she said appreciatively. -“We’ve the same mind about the root of things.” - -“This is a terrible business, Mrs. Branstone.” - -“I’m none denying it. It’s a terrible thing for a man and wife to live -together when love’s not a lodger in the house; it’s wrong, and the -worst of wrong is that it won’t stay single. Wrong’s got to breed. But, -there,” she finished briskly, “I’m telling you what you know, and when -all’s said, there’s nowt so bad that it’s past mending.” - -“Ada wants a divorce,” said Peter, and a sudden glint of triumph came -into Anne’s eye, only to vanish as quickly as it came. She had said, -without believing it, that Ada might make arrangements, and this was to -arrange indeed. It unmade the hollow marriage, it was a solution which -really solved, it was a clean cut; and she wanted to glorify Ada, who -was proving at the eleventh hour that she had the saving grace of common -sense. - -Peter did a curious thing. He rose and took a book haphazard from his -shelf, came back to his chair and opened the book. He did not read it, -and he was not being rude, but this was an agitation beyond the reach of -snuff. He tried to calm himself by resting his eyes on print. - -Anne was not practised in the ways of bookish men, but, by strange -insight, understood that Peter had gone to a book much as she went to -his grate, to be soothed by its familiarity, and her rejoicing at his -words came to an abrupt end. His action brought home to her, more than -his horror-struck tone, whose significance she almost missed in her joy -at Ada’s practical solution, his loathing of divorce: and it seemed to -her, quite suddenly, that what mattered most in all this business was -that Peter should be happy about it. - -It mattered more than Sam and Ada, and even more than Effie, that Peter, -who was, so to speak, an old and sleeping partner, should be satisfied -by their solution. She did not care if this was to per vert the values: -the remnant of Peter Struggles’ life was of more importance than the -young lives of the active members of the firm. And because she had a -practical mind, and believed that one is happy in soul only when one -is first happy in body, she was already thinking past their present -problem: she was considering how the slut in Peter’s kitchen could be -replaced by her own housewifely self. - -She resolutely consigned that thought to the future, and returned to -the question of to-day. Ada, wonderfully, wanted a divorce: but Anne -required that Peter should be happy about it, and she perceived the -incompatibility. She saw that juxtaposition could hardly be more crude. -He was a priest, the priest who married them, and she wanted him to -acquiesce contentedly in their divorce. - -“Wants a divorce, does she?” she said. “Well, there’s more than Ada to -be thought of.” - -“There is, indeed,” said Peter, thinking of his church. - -“There’s you,” said Anne, thinking of him. “If she gets one, does she -plant herself on you again?” - -He supposed so, unable to disguise his depression at the prospect. - -“Aye,” she rubbed it in, “you were well rid of Ada once. It’s not in -human nature to want her back again.” She was thinking singly of his -comfort. - -Peter, on his part, took her to imply that if he opposed a divorce it -was for interested motives, that he could continue to be “well rid -of Ada.” He saw with dismay that it was an interpretation which could -reasonably be put on any opposition from him. He thought, in his -humility, that it was a reasonable interpretation, whereas, Peter being -Peter, it was a ludicrously unjust interpretation, and, of course, -Anne did not make it. She had only stated as a fact that Ada at home -prejudiced her father’s comfort: and the comfort of Ada’s father had -become a matter which touched Anne Bran-stone nearly. - -“And there are other people, too. There’s Sam,” she went on, “and he is -a desperate bad case. He has no love for Ada. He’s hoisted his notion of -his duty higher than a living love. He wants Ada to come back.” - -“I’m sorry to say,” mourned Peter, “that the more he wants it, the less -likely she is to go.” - -She tried not to exult too openly at that. “And then,” she said, -“there’s Effie.” - -“Effie!” He spoke in scandalized protest. - -“Aye, that’s her name, and yon’s just the tone of voice I had myself -when I first heard of her. I want you to see Effie.” - -“Never!” said Peter, and for a mild man his bitterness was remarkable. - -“Then I must show her to you,” said Anne placidly, “and that’ll mean -going back a bit and showing you other things as well. It’ll mean,” and -she very much regretted it, “showing you this.” She held out her hand -and pointed to the scar. “When Sam told me he wanted to marry Ada, I -came to see her. I saw what I saw, and I told him she’d be the ruin of -him. He didn’t believe me, and I tried to make him see I meant it. I -put my hand into the fire, and I thought to keep it there till he agreed -with me, but he’s stronger in the arm than me, and he got me away.” She -spoke without passion, in simple narrative which Peter found impressed -him deeply. “So I left him and earned my living, and all that. Sam -married her, and the ruin’s come, but it’s not come suddenly. It’s been -coming all the time. I’d date it back,” she reflected, “to the day when -he fooled you about the ‘Social Evil’ pamphlet. He did that because he -wanted a rich husband for Ada.” - -Peter had nothing to say. If he had not known before that Sam had -“fooled” him, he did not doubt it now. - -“And it grew from that. He’s made money because Ada wanted money, and -after that it grew to be a bad habit. He made it then by writing lies -about himself in the papers, and I don’t know how he’s done it since -then, except that it has been by more lies. He began to fancy himself -at politics. He wanted to be a crowing cock, and it didn’t matter if he -crowed on a dung-heap so long as he crowed. And Ada didn’t care. He gave -her money, and she didn’t care. She didn’t love, and he didn’t love, -and there’s a thing you said just now that I’ll remind you of. You said -God’s love. I’ll leave it to you to name what it is when there isn’t -love. - -“And then love came to Sam. Effie came, and you say that God is love. -Sam put it to me in another way. He said he’d found salvation. Well, -it’s a big word, and I dunno. But I do know he found love and it changed -him. He’s done with politics, and he’s done with crowing and with -riches, too. Effie did that by the power of love, and there’s another -thing she did, that’s marked yon lass for me as the finest, strangest -woman in the width of the world. She gave him up and sent him back to -Ada. Well, I’ve heard of sacrifice before, and I’ve done a bit that way -myself, but give up a man she loved and teach him how to make a woman of -his wife, and send him home to do it--it’s more than I can rise to. And -that is Effie Mannering. - -“He went home and he tried, and Ada laughed at him. She couldn’t -understand: there wasn’t the one thing there that could make her -understand: there wasn’t love. And he gave up his politics that night -she laughed at him, to leave himself free to tackle Ada. Now Ada’s left -him, and there’s sum-mat else turned up as well. You can guess.” - He looked up sharply. “Aye, that’s it, and the rum thing is that it -surprised them both. Their love’s that sort of love, and I reckon there -are folk would call it careless of them. I would myself nine cases -out of ten, aye, and ninety-nine in a hundred, but not this case. This -wasn’t a case for care; it was a case of love. But a baby’s coming to -Effie, and you know’ as well as I do that none will ever come to Ada. -I’ve finished telling you about Effie now.” There was a long pause and -it seemed several times that Peter was about to break it, and each time -changed his mind. All that he finally said in comment on Effie was, “A -lawless woman,” and it might have been deduced from his tone that he did -not condemn, if he could not, confessedly, admire. - -“Aye, lawless,” Anne agreed, “but there’s a law of lawless women and she -has not obeyed it. She’s not a breaker. She’s a maker.” - -Peter bowed his head. Perhaps he did not wish Anne to see what was -written in his face. And he lacked conviction when he tried to speak -again. “Whom God hath joined--he began. - -“But God,” Anne said, “is love.” - -He threw up his hands in a despairing gesture of surrender. “I deserve -to be unfrocked for this,” he said, but he closed the book on his knee -and took snuff violently. It marked the passing of a crisis. - -As for Anne, there mingled with her satisfaction at his consent a keen -despondency at his unhappiness. She had both lost and won, and Anne took -little pleasure in a mixed victory. She had not finished yet with Peter -Struggles. - - - - -CHAPTER XXVI--SNOW ON THE FELLS - - -|LIFE is still greater than machines. Machines accomplish marvels and -very wonderfully continue to accomplish them, but life refuses the -mechanical. It was man, and not nature, who invented the wheel, and life -does not revolve upon an axle. Life will not repeat itself: and it can -excel itself. - -They had not thought, when they came back to Marbeck at the turn of the -year, that Marbeck could be better than before. They came hoping, they -said, to recapture the old emotions, and brought Anne with them to show -her their fairyland. They did not recapture the old emotions, because -they were young emotions, a ferment like youth itself, and things were -settled now. They seemed to look back from their equable security to -a wild infancy of their emotion, a fumbling, frenzied, awkward age of -love. Of course they looked back happily, from a place where things were -happy and serene to one where things were happy and impetuous. - -The Dale was full of wonder, with a wonder which now belonged unerringly -to fact and had mellowed in reality. - -For Anne, it was a pretty place, but “lonesome,” and, amazingly to them, -she chafed to leave it. Anne did not suffer holidays gladly. - -They had extolled Anne, they had not thought it credible that she should -fail at anything, and it ruffled them disturbingly to find her fail at -this. They had planned eagerly and, indeed, generously to bring her with -them to Marbeck--generously, because they wanted to be alone, and even -Anne, owe her what they did and be she what she might, was an intruder. -But they wanted her to share with them their wonderland. Marbeck was -theirs, theirs intimately and alone, their holy place, and they could -think of nothing finer, nothing which came more nearly to her deserts of -them, than to initiate her to their secret worship. - -They made her free of Marbeck, relived their week for her as much as for -themselves, showed her where this and that dear folly happened, took -her to view-points whence she could see the tops of hills they climbed, -using the landscape as the ground-plan of an ecstasy which they invited -her to share, and were discomposed to find that Anne, plainly straining -enthusiasm in their behalf, could only say of Marbeck, their Marbeck, -“I’m sure it’s very nice.” - -She damned with faint praise their enchanted valley in whose every -tree they took by now as fierce a joy as if they had created it, and -in despair they dragged her, as a last hope, to the very Holy of their -holies, the top of Hartle Pike. If she failed them there, if she did -not see the beauty and the grace, the penetrating significance and the -absolute sanctity of Hartle Pike, then her greatness was lopsided, -resulting, like a show chrysanthemum, from the atrophy of other -possibilities. - -It was a great day for the fells, when a frozen surface crushed -elastically underfoot and kept one dryshod anywhere, and they walked -in frosty, sun-kissed air, keenly exhilarating yet spicily warm. Snow -capped the greater heights and seemed to clarify an atmosphere already -clear, but the dales were free of snow and never more fit for walking -than now when their boggy surface was dried up and roughened to the -tread by crisp, granulated particles of frost. - -Anne granted to herself that if one must take a holiday, this generous -activity made nearly a venial matter of it. To climb these slopes was -almost as satisfying to her body as to wash a long flight of steps, and -she reached the top feeling as pleasantly tired as if she had done half -a day’s charring. - -Still, she hadn’t charred, and there was in fact nothing which needed -charring, nothing but a cleanliness which positively irritated her. -She itched to be doing something and there was manifestly nothing to do -except to enjoy herself. And if Anne Branstone was not doing a job, she -liked, at any rate, to know that her next job was around the corner. She -began, for the first time in her life, to feel a friendliness -towards dirt. In the midst of this sprawling insolence of triumphant -cleanliness, she hankered for a little humanizing soot. She could have -loved her life-long enemy, and he did not appear... it was not a bit -like Manchester. - -Far to the west, beyond a barrier of gleaming snow, she saw a murky -cloud of smoke where the foul boot of industrialism stamps on the -Lakeland Coast--a message and a call. It spoke, to her of natural dirt -in this great waste of unstained purity; it made her sick for home and -the thing she had to do. - -Effie and Sam stood gazing at the hills, spell-hound by loveliness, and -when they tore their dancing eyes away it was to look into each other’s. -They had no need of words: their eyes exulted in the burnished splendour -of the scene, and with a doubled exultation each in the other’s joy. -Then Sam turned hopefully to Anne and saw that she was looking with a -rapt intensity at the west. At last, it seemed, the hills had touched -her. - -“Where’s yon?” she asked, “yon smoke?” - -His face fell as he told her, but he saw that this explained Anne’s -failure. She had not relished Marbeck because she had not seen it. She -had not been looking at Marbeck, but all the while at something else. - -And why, he questioned, why, now that things had so admirably arranged -themselves, must Anne still live in thought in Manchester? There seemed -to him to be no law, nothing which could conceivably distract her -attention, nothing which had not with genial finality been neatly -finished off. Of course they had stupid legal business to come, but that -was well ahead and, in any case, was not to worry them. - -She could not, surely, be troubling about Ada. It was he who had made -the trouble there, insisting that Ada was “his job.” - -He insisted to the point of almost literally forcing himself upon her in -Peter Struggles’ house, and remembered now with a twinge that desolating -interview, if interview it could be called, and its liberating end; how -Ada had looked at him, and answered nothing to his abject and -passionate appeals (he wondered how he could have made them, but he was -despairingly sincere): how he had pleaded and apologized for the past -and supplicated for the future, all in the mastering grip of his Marbeck -faith, and how she had kept silent till she turned on Peter and told him -she must leave a house which did not shelter her from the deadly insult -of this man’s presence. He remembered the good woman, Mrs. Grandage, -who had carried Ada to a Hydro at Southport, and wrote to Peter that Ada -seemed quite happy there, “nursing her grievance like a child,” and -was looking for a house. He had found something mystifying about the -intervention of Mrs. Grandage: good nature fortified by a bad conscience -was his attempt to explain her attitude, but what emerged clearly -from the letters she wrote to Peter was that Ada had no intention of -returning to Manchester: and when he thought of Southport, he realized -its quintessential rightness as her home. He had not shirked his job; he -had eaten dirt before her in his anxiety to do his job; and he was not -allowed. What she was she must remain, and Southport seemed the aptest -place for her. “Only,” as Mrs. Grandage wrote, “she mast have money.” - -That was not difficult, and the money might have come in many ways: it -came actually in a way which Effie hated and Sam thought exquisitely -right. It came through Stewart, that faithful ally of the publishing -business in its early days. - -Dubby was in Effie’s room, “which is where,” he said, “your brother has -a right to be.” - -“You keep that up,” she smiled. - -“Is the poor dog to get none?” he asked. - -“He is to have whatever he wants,” she said. - -“--that’s going,” he completed her sentence. - -“Yes,” said Effie, not smiling now, and kissed him very simply to seal -his brotherhood. - -He stood silent for a moment, then, with a jerk of his head he, so to -speak, cut his loss and turned to her with the frank confidence of their -settled relationship. “Now we can talk,” he said. “Tell me about old -Sam. What are you going to do with him? And with his business?” - -She evaded his first question. “The business? Oh, he’ll sell that.” - -“Then let me buy.” - -“You! Oh!” - -“Why not?” - -“You know what I think of it.” - -“I’m only the dog, my dear. Do you know any Greek? There’s a connection -between being a dog and being a cynic. In certain circumstances, I’d -have thought with you to the crack of doom, but your brother’s a cynic.” - -“I see,” said Effie sadly. “But he will always be my brother, Dubby.” - -“Thanks, Effie,” he said. “That will keep me on the sweeter side of -currishness. But a dog wants meat. You’ll tell Sam I’m to have the first -refusal of that business. I’ll scrape a syndicate together in a week.” - -So the Stewart Publishing Syndicate, which now has dashing offices near -Covent Garden, came to birth and Ada got her money. When Sam tried to -tell Effie that his investments outside the business were ridiculously -small, she had refused to be impressed. - -“It’s not the means of life that matters, Sam. It’s living: it’s the -quality of life: it’s what we do with life,” she said, and Ada got the -means. - -“She’ll be married in a year to a man from Liverpool,” said Dubby, when -he heard. - -“Why Liverpool?” asked Sam, and Dubby shrugged his shoulders. He thought -Sam’s question stupid. - -“By the way, Sam,” Dubby said, “have you and Effie any plans?” - -“No,” said Effie, when Sam hesitated, but a brother’s curiosity was not -to be stifled like that, and Sam’s face told her, too, how he had -hung on her reply. She resented his anxiety, the proof that he had not -dropped his calculating habit. They had not discussed the question of -plans because she held there was no question to discuss, and Sam, -she thought, deserved a little punishment for thinking otherwise. “I -suppose,” she went on, “we shall stay in Manchester and face the music.” - -“Oh!” said Sam blankly. - -“Well, we must give Mr. Verity his revenge,” she teased. - -“But it can’t hurt me now I’m out of politics,” he said, confessing by -his tone that it would hurt him very much. - -“It will please him, though,” she said. - -“I’d... I’d thought of going to America,” he ventured. - -“America!” scoffed Dubby. “_O sancta simplicitas!_ America’s not El -Dorado, Sam. El Dorado’s been found. I’d even say it’s been found out.” - -“There are big things in America,” Sam defended his idea. - -“As a matter of fact, Dubby,” said Effie, silencing him, “we shall go to -Marbeek for a little while. It’s a good place to begin from.” - -With that a great contentment came to Sam. They were to go to Marbeek; -they were to begin; and he no longer questioned what. He made no hard -and fast surrender of his will, but recognized the fact, not for the -first time, that when Effie made a decision it had a shining rightness. -Perhaps she had retreated from her first decision of Marbeck, but, -if so, Anne helping him, he had retreated with her; and they went to -Marbeek now, not to end, but to begin, and to begin together. - -Reflecting on it all, he could not see the blemish. He couldn’t, for the -life of him, make out why Anne was not content. - -He half explained the valley’s failure to enchant her when he perceived -that she had not really looked at it. At what, then, could she be -looking? And how could she, how in the name of beauty was it possible -for anyone to pick out from all that noble amphitheatre of the hills the -one smoke-clouded spot? - -“Mother,” he cried in downright exasperation, “aren’t you happy here?”, - -“I’d be happier in Manchester,” she said. “Yon smoke’s too far away to -taste. Aye, I think I’ll leave you here and go to-day.” - -“But you’re not going back to Madge’s--to the work in other people’s -houses, I mean. That’s surely over now.” - -“Maybe.” - -“Mother, you’ve done with work.” - -She eyed him grimly. “Not till I’m dead, my lad,” she said. - -“Why won’t you tell me what you’re thinking of?” - -“I’m thinking,” she said, “of yon slut in Peter Struggles’ kitchen. I’ll -have her out of that tomorrow.” - -He glanced at Effie, and then looked again. He fancied he had surprised -a little smile on Effie’s face and looked twice to make sure. And when -he looked he found that Effie was looking back at him in the wise, -humorous way that he had come to know so well. “Don’t you see?” was what -she seemed to say. - -And he did see. He saw that it was not Manchester, but a man in -Manchester; not the woman in Peter Struggles’ kitchen, but the man -in Peter’s parlour who interrupted his mother’s vision of the Marbeck -hills. She lost their beauty in a greater beauty of her own. - -“And don’t be incredulous,” said Effie’s eyes. - -She turned to Anne. “We’ll go down to the Inn at once,” she said, “and -you shall catch the train this afternoon.” - -A quick look passed from Anne to Effie, from which they both excluded -Sam. It almost seemed that Anne was asking Effie for support, and that -Effie understood and nodded imperceptibly. And if Anne had seriously -doubted, her doubts were dissipated by a look which told her that, where -she was concerned, Effie believed in the feasibility of anything. - -Nothing at Marbeck became Anne Branstone like her leaving it. “Why, -mother, how young you look!” he cried when she came downstairs to the -trap. - -“It’s just as well,” said Anne, meeting Effie’s eye over his shoulder. - -Then, after she had gone, and so pat upon her going as to be hardly -decent, life flamed for them ungrudgingly. There was something quite -impudently callous about the haste of it, as if life pulled a face -behind the older generation and turned lightheartedly to burn more -ardently for them. But Anne, and they knew it, would not have thanked -them to be sorry for her. She had gone to Peter Struggles, who needed -her. - -They could not now resume the half amphibious life of their autumn days, -but the air itself from the snow-clad fells had all the stimulation of -a bath. It cleansed and healed by touch and heightened their well-being -till they moved in radiant exhilaration, now clamant at the joy of it, -now dumb before its wonder. - -Happy themselves, they were the cause of happiness in others, not -self-contained in joy, but effervescing to the old black-beamed kitchen -of the Marbeck Inn. - -They had, as Sam cannily observed, the advantages of a private room at -an hotel without paying for it--and abrogated them. In the autumn -they had isolated their joy from others: now it brimmed from them and -affected all the people of the Inn, making the long nights short. Good -listeners were a godsend to the Dale in winter, and the shepherds, -dropping from heaven knew how far, found a rare satisfaction in telling -this attentive audience tales of the fells, of sheep wanderers that -strayed as wide afield as Derbyshire, of dogs that ran amok and ravaged -the flocks they ought to tend, of the epic Beast of Ennerdale, of the -legends of John Peel and all the sagas of the Lakes. It needed little to -make these dalesmen happy, nothing beyond a patient ear for a slow, -rambling narrative--a long chain strung with pearls of racy episode--or -an hour of Effie at the piano, when the dalesmen disappointed her by -knowing no ballads, but having, instead, a sound acquaintance with the -latest music-hall songs stacked in the cupboard at the Inn. In here, in -the smoke room, they were knowing wags, in the kitchen they were -themselves, talking shop, and therefore interesting. Effie and Sam -preferred them in the kitchen, telling their slowly-moving tales, to -seeing them in their smoke-room mood, imitating badly a thing not worth -the imitating. But, in either room, they helped them to be happy. - -Well coated they would go each night from the tobacco-laden air of the -kitchen down the road to the bridge over Marbeck Force. A great peace -brooded there. Even the stream ran softly now when all the surface water -of its gathering ground was frozen hard. - -They stood there on the bridge while the moon rose over Hartle Pike -and scattered silver on the snow. Great shadows leaped to instant birth -below the Pike whose comely top was one black silhouette against the -brightened sky, and the beauty of the valley, seen by day with an almost -Alpine harshness, mellowed in the moonlight to a subtle luminosity. -Behind them were the lights of the friendly Inn; near by the low church -tower saluted God amongst the pines, and all around them spread the -lustrous radiance of the moon-flushed Dale. - -For the hundredth time he restrained his impulse to repeat his words, -“We’ll build a tabernacle here,” and Effie read his thought. - -“We’re making the good beginning here,” she said. “We’re practising and -I think we grow.” - -“We grow in happiness,” he said, which he thought good argument for -staying at Marbeck. - -“Yes. We grow in happiness. We shall have outgrown Marbeck soon. We -shall have grown a sturdy happiness that can withstand the towns. It -might withstand Manchester and I think it will. To love, to work, to -look for other people’s strength and not for other people’s weaknesses: -that is to be happy, Sam. And happiness counts more than all. It roots -and then it spreads. It spreads. Infection isn’t only of disease, -infection is of happiness and youth. There’s too much age, too many men -and women in the world who have forgotten love. We have to build, and -build on happiness.” They gazed at the unguessed future through the -silent night. God knows that there was work ahead for them to do! - - -THE END - - - - - - - -End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Marbeck Inn, by Harold Brighouse - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MARBECK INN *** - -***** This file should be named 50131-0.txt or 50131-0.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/5/0/1/3/50131/ - -Produced by David Widger from page images generously -provided by the Internet Archive - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United -States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of -the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at -www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have -to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. - - - -Title: The Marbeck Inn - A Novel - -Author: Harold Brighouse - -Release Date: October 4, 2015 [EBook #50131] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MARBECK INN *** - - - - -Produced by David Widger from page images generously -provided by the Internet Archive - - - - - - - - - -THE MARBECK INN - -A Novel - -By Harold Brighouse - -Little, Brown, And Company - -1920 - -Copyright, 1920 - - - -[Illustration: 0001] - - -[Illustration: 0009] - - - - - -THE MARBECK INN - - - - -CHAPTER I--THE STARTING-POINT - -|IT falls to some to be born, as they say, with a silver spoon in their -mouths, and the witty have made play with the thought that the wise -child chooses rich parents. - -Sam Branstone lacked the completeness of that wisdom. He was born in -one of those disconsolate streets of Manchester down which the stranger, -passing by tram along a main road, hardly more delectable than its -offshoots, looks and shudders; but was born with this difference from -the many--that he was son to Anne Branstone, a notable woman, and wisdom -may be conceded him for the discrimination of his choice. - -If, however, it was Anne who gave him birth and started him in life, it -was Mr. Councillor Travers who set him on his way from the mean street -of his birth and started his career, and the circumstance which led -to the intervention of Mr. Travers was due, not to Anne, but to the -occupation of Tom Branstone. - -Sam's father, Tom, was a porter at Victoria Station, Manchester, and -there was just time between morning and afternoon school for young Sam -to snatch a meal himself and to carry his father's dinner to him in a -basin tied up in a bandanna handkerchief. In those days Victoria was -an open station and a favourite dinner-hour lounge with boys from the -neighbouring Grammar School. The attractions were partly the trains, -partly the large automatic machines which delivered a packet of sweet -biscuits in return for a penny. First one lunched frugally on the -biscuits and pocketed the balance of one's lunch allowance to buy knives -and other essentials, then one savoured the romance of a large station -from which trains went to Blackpool and to the Yorkshire moors. Often -one saw sailors on the through trains from Liverpool to Newcastle. One -found secluded ends of platforms and ran races with luggage trucks. -One was rather a nuisance, especially when one wrestled hardily at the -platform's giddy edge and a train came in. - -Sam, as a porter's son, was on the other side of the fence. He did not -lark at Victoria Station, and took his opinions of those who did from -his father, adding, perhaps, a touch of jealousy against these chartered -libertines who wore the silver owl upon their caps of dual blue. - -That day he had delivered Tom's dinner to him in the porters' room and -was retracing his steps down the platform when he saw two of the Grammar -School boys emerge in a confused whirl of battle and sag, interlocked, -towards the line, hopelessly unconscious in their struggle of an -incoming train. They reached the edge, deaf to all warning cries, and -long before help could reach them, fell over it in one entangled mass. -One boy, aroused to a sense of their common danger, was on his feet -nimbly enough and across the line to safety: the other, Lance Travers, -stayed where he fell, with a leg broken against the rail. Wits left the -first lad; he could only howl as the engine swept inexorably on, and -adult help, though active, could not avail in time. Sam had no precise -recollection of what followed, and certainly acted on impulse. He dived -to the line and dragged the injured boy across, escaping death for both -by the skin of his teeth. - -After that, all was confusion: an ambulance; inquiries; names taken and -so on; and Sam only came to himself when he discovered that he was being -punished for arriving late at school. It struck him as unfair, but he -did not realize that he was a hero till the evening paper told him -so. He, Samuel Branstone, had his name in the paper! Glory could go -no further, because those were the dark ages of journalism, before the -photograph illustrated all, and to read one's name in print was then the -apogee. We have moved since those dull days, when "heart interest" was -still to be in vented. - -What profound satisfaction Anne Branstone found in that sober paragraph -her son was not to know. She did not think it good for him to know, but -she went about her house with softened eyes, and Sam heard her singing -more than once; so per haps he may have guessed that she was pleased -with him. - -It was more than she allowed Mr. Oscar Travers to guess, he was Lance's -father, an estate agent with a good suburban practice, and Anne met him -at the door in a way which would have marred Sam's future had Travers -not known that Lancashire women are apt to be undemonstrative. She found -a portly gentleman on the doorstep and thought he wore a patronizing -air. They resent patronage in Lancashire. - -As a matter of fact, Travers had come to see what he could do for the -lad who had saved his boy's life. That may be patronage, but he was -thinking of it as the barest decency. - -"Good evening," he said; "my name is Travers." - -"This is a nice upset," she said, without inviting him to come in. -"How's your son?" - -"He's doing very well, thank you." - -"Oh? Well, it's more than he deserves." - -He did not argue that. "I wonder," he said, "if you would allow me to -come in, or would you prefer me to return when your husband is at home?" - -"He's at home now. It's his early night. He's having his tea." - -"Shall I return when he has finished?" asked Travers with a nice -tactfulness. He knew the curious delicacy against being seen eating -by one of a superior class, as if that natural function were a deed -of shame. But Anne was for short cuts and she never considered Tom's -feelings overmuch. - -"If you've owt to say," she said, "you'd better come in and get it -over." - -"I have something to say," said Travers, entering. "Ah," he added, as he -caught sight of Sam, "this is----?" - -"It's him," Anne interrupted. She might have been identifying a -criminal. - -"May I shake your hand?" he asked, and shook it heartily, ignoring -Anne's muttered protest that the hand had not been washed for hours. "I -think you're a very plucky lad." He could have, said more than that, -and felt that as an expression of his gratitude it was hopelessly -inadequate, but Anne's eyes forbade effusiveness, and he wanted to -propitiate Anne. He had something to propose which he had thought they -would agree to rapturously, but was not so sure about the rapture now. -For some reason, he had imagined that Sam would be one of a large family -and was disappointed to find no evidence of other children about -the room A large family would have made his proposal more certain of -acceptance. - -"Any brothers and sisters, Sam?" he asked; but Sam was tongue-tied, -while Anne was silently but unmistakably asking Travers what business -of his that was. However, Tom knew his place. Travers belonged with the -tipping public, whose questions one answered. - -"He has an elder sister, sir. Our Madge. She works out." She was, in -fact, a general servant. - -Travers felt his confidence ebb fast, both at this information and at -Anne's austere disapprobation of Tom's communicativeness. He felt it was -suggested to him that his visit was irrelevant, that Anne, this small -woman, not uncomely, with her hands on her hips, and her black hair -tightly combed into a ridiculous knob at the back, was, in fact, a rock, -and that the impulses and desires of the two hulking men, Travers and -Tom Branstone, would break in ineffectual foam against her adamantine -resolution. - -She glared formidably, hating a "fuss," judging Travers, who had invaded -her home for the purpose of making a fuss. - -"Indeed," said Travers, marking time and hardly attempting to conceal -his dismay. The longer he spent in Anne's presence, the more uneasy he -became. She seemed to divine his purpose, and to be telling him silently -what she thought of him for having such a purpose. He had, indeed, -banked on a large family; porters, he had felt certain, were prolific, -and you may subtract one child from a family of ten without much -heart-burning, whereas an only son is a serious matter. But time brought -no graciousness to Anne's attitude. She even ignored the sacred rites of -hospitality; though tea was on the table, she had not asked him to have -a cup. So he gave up temporizing and decided to broach his purpose at -once, before Anne reduced him to complete incoherence. - -"Of course," he said, "you know me already as Lance's father. I don't -know whether you happen to have heard of me beyond that?" Anne admitted -nothing, and as it was to her he spoke, it did not matter that Tom, who -had naturally spent a gossipy afternoon, was trying to signify that -he realized the importance of Travers. "I'm an estate agent, if you -understand what that means." - -Anne nodded grimly. "Rent-collector said big," she defined. - -"Well," said Travers, intending to suggest an amended definition and -then thinking better of it. "Well, yes. I'm in the Council, too, you -know. Well, now, Mrs. Branstone, I happen to be a widower and Lance is -my only son. He means a great deal to me, and when I think how near I -came to losing him this afternoon, how certainly I had lost him hut for -the splendid presence of mind of this young hero here, I feel I owe a -debt which I can never hope to pay." - -"Mr. Travers," said Anne, "least said is soonest mended, and debts that -you can never hope to pay are best forgotten. It's a kindly thought of -yours to come and look us up to-night, but I'm not in the Council, and -I'm no great hand at listening to long speeches. By your leave, we'll -take the rest as said." - -"By all means, Mrs. Branstone, so far as expressing my thanks goes. But -I have a suggestion to make. Lance, as I said, is my only son. He's a -lonely boy, and he'd be the better for a companion of his own age about -the house. I was wondering if you would allow Sam to come and live with -us? I should send him with Lance to the Grammar School, and I think I -can promise that his future will be secured." - -Sam's heart gave a great leap. He, Sam Bran-stone, a Grammar School boy, -one of the elect, the Olympians whose play he had envied from afar! He -looked at Anne with glittering eyes, faint with hope. - -"Sam," she said, "Mr. Travers wants you to leave us. He's offering to -adopt you as his son. Tell him the answer." - -Anne never doubted that she was mistress of her house, and perhaps -she did not doubt it now, but, for Sam, a child with the dreadful -sensibility of a child, this moment when she demanded calmly, -implacably, in the interests of discipline, that he should himself -pronounce sentence on his soaring hopes was of a pitiable bitterness -which brought him near the breaking-point. At one moment, to be raised -to the heavens of ecstasy, and at the next to be cast down to the -blackest hell of despondency; to be promised all, and to be expected -to refuse! He was not more callous than any other child, and Anne knew -perfectly well that a Land of Heart's Desire had been opened to him. It -was not fair, and she knew that it was not fair, to ask him to speak the -word of refusal; but she thought that it was good for him, and once she -had, by her tone, if not by her actual words, indicated the reply which -she required, she knew that he would suppress his leaping hopes and -answer, in effect, that home, be it ever so humble, was home, and -parents, whatever their status, were parents. He had a wild impulse -to defy her, to tell her that he would come to see her on Saturday -afternoons, that to wear the cap with the silver owl was the dearest -ambition of his life, but he knew that it was hopeless. Even at such -a moment as this, and with such an ally as Mr. Travers, he dared not -challenge Anne. Her ascendancy was what it had always been, absolute. -He shuffled unhappily and tried to meet Mr. Travers' eye bravely, -but succeeded only in looking up as far as the second button of his -waistcoat. - -"No," said Sam Branstone, hero, and fled, a heartbroken, tear-washed -child, to hide his face and choke his sobs upon his pillow. And he was -named for valour in the evening paper! - -"No," repeated Anne, when he had gone, and added, anticipating argument, -"I'm a woman of few words." - -Travers knew he was fighting a losing engagement, but he had a shot in -the locker yet, and a hardy determination not to be worsted by the likes -of Anne Branstone. His pride was up, a pride which, over and above his -benevolence and his sense of the fitness of things, would not allow him -to regard the saving of his son's life lightly. Travers counted, the -saviour of the son of Travers counted. He had offered to lift Sam -Branstone in one way, and if they would not let him do it in that way, -he would do it in another. Sam Branstone, willy nilly, was going to be -lifted. - -"I suppose," he said, covering the retreat from his first position, -"that it is of no use pointing out to you the advantages which -my proposal offers to your son?" She shook her head. "Come, Mrs. -Branstone," he went on, conscious that it was no use and platitudinous -at that, "we all have to make sacrifices for our children." - -"I make them," said Anne curtly. It was true. - -"Yet you will not make this?" - -She was thoughtful for a moment, and Travers began to hope that he was -making an impression. "I'm sure that it's Genesis twenty-two," she said, -"but I disremember the verse." - -"Genesis," he repeated, mystified. - -"Abraham and Isaac," she explained her allusion. "Some sacrifices aren't -looked for from us, and the Lord sent an angel to say so in those days, -but I've to be my own angel in these." - -"But Abraham," he said, "was going to sacrifice his son to the Lord." - -"And I won't," she said, conveying her opinion of Travers, who had tried -to "come God Almighty over her," as she expressed it later to Tom. But -Travers was not to be rebuffed. He had come to play Providence to Sam -(and so far granted that her allusion was apposite), but his providence -could compromise. He wasn't an absolute Jehovah. - -"If Sam may not be Lance's home companion," he said, "at least let -them be school companions. Let me pay his fees at the Grammar School, -and----" He was going to add "for appropriate clothes," but something -in Anne's attitude told him that he had gone far enough, and he stopped -short with the completion of his sentence in mid air. - -Anne believed in education. She wasn't convinced that a Grammar School -education was superior, as education, to a Parish School, but its -associations were. It gave a chance of "getting on" which transcended -anything the Parish School could offer. It was a start in life which set -one automatically above the lower rungs of the ladder. - -"Yes," she said, but said it with a difficulty which Travers noted and, -indeed, applauded. He was Lancastrian himself, and honoured her for her -independence. He knew the mother-pride, the fierce individualism which -she had subdued before she had consented to take a favour even for her -son who earned it, and wasted no more words. "I'm glad," he said. "Good -night," and, shaking hands, was gone. - -"Finish your tea, Tom," she said to her husband who had suspended -operations during the interview. "I want to clear away." She stood a -moment pensively. "I'm a weak woman," she decided. - -Tom Branstone ate his tea, reserving judgment. - - - - -CHAPTER II--WHERE THE SHOE PINCHED - -|WHEN Anne Branstone set her hand to the plough she ploughed deep, and -it was not her fault if the harvest was not immense. But she did not -misdirect her energy; she made certain that the seed was good seed -before she harnessed her plough. To drop metaphor, she let young Sam -prove that he was worth troubling over before she took trouble--trouble, -that is, as Anne understood the word. Of course, she sent him "decent" -to the Grammar School, and if that meant that she and Madge went without -new spring hats that year, well, last year's hats must do. It was no -great matter, and the greater pride swallowed up the less. Mr. Travers -paid the fees, so that her son could associate with his, and Anne saw to -it thoroughly that, in externals, Sam should be worthy to associate with -Lance. - -That was the beginning, and Sam, so far, was untried metal. Then, at -the end of his first term, he came out top of his form at the July -examinations, and, after that, Anne began to take things seriously. - -It was not pure ability which brought Sam to that proud eminence so much -as the fact that he had been put in a form whose standard was really too -low for him, and he had not worked over hard at lessons, being naturally -preoccupied, in a first term, with finding his feet. Nor had that -been too difficult. The Manchester Grammar School was a democratic -institution. Schoolboys, anyhow, are not all snobs, and, in this -instance, the presence amongst the paying boys of a leaven of Foundation -Scholars, often from homes as poor as Sam's, made acclimatization easy -for him. - -But his feat impressed Anne, though all she said, when the lists came -out with the name of "Branstone, S." at the head of II. Alpha, was, "Of -course!" as if any other place were impossible for a son of hers; and -it decided her that Sam would "pay for" taking trouble. She proceeded to -take trouble. - -Tom Branstone's first real inkling of what was passing in Anne's mind -came to that good, easy man when he mentioned that his holidays were due -in a fortnight. - -"You'll take a holiday at home this year, my lad," she informed him. - -"But why's that, Anne?" he asked. "Blackpool's in the same place as it -was, and I get privilege passes on the line." - -"Sam's not in the same place, though," she said. "He's at the Grammar -School. It's a place where other boys wear decent clothes, and I'll see -that Sam shan't fall behind them." - -Tom took a holiday at home, varied with trips on the foot-plates of -friendly engine-drivers, and fortified his soul with the consolations of -tobacco. They were consolations which were not to be vouchsafed to him -much longer. Tobacco cost money, and Anne had need of it. - -In spite of Travers' generosity--or of as much of it as she could bring -herself to accept--it was not an easy thing for Anne to keep her son at -the Grammar School. It was desperately difficult, but Anne was Anne. The -boy had his foot on the educational ladder, and she meant him to go to -the top, rung by rung and scholarship by scholarship. When Sam took -his honours degree at Oxford, Anne would relax; till then, she was -a crusader. She sacrificed all to that ambition. Sam should have his -chance, at no matter what cost to her, to Tom and to Madge. The boy must -be as well dressed as his fellows, and he must play their games. Games -are an essential part of English education, and Anne, with her constant -eye to the main chance, recognized the importance of the playing-fields -in cementing friendships with boys who might be useful to Sam in after -life. But games are expensive, and Tom gave, up smoking when Sam was -put into his class eleven. Anne gave up nothing. She had nothing more to -give. - -Honestly, Sam was grateful. Anne did not boast to him of the sacrifices -which they all made, but with the candour which distinguishes -working-class homes where anything but bare necessity is exceptional, he -was aware of every move, of all their deprivation, and did his best to -square accounts. But it was not a brilliant best, and after that first -term, Anne never repeated the satisfaction of seeing her son carry away -a form prize on Speech Day at the Free Trade Hall. He was a worker, a -safe plodding "swot," taking by sheer application a respectable place in -the lists, but never heading them again, and especially he was weak at -mathematics. - -That troubled Anne distressingly. Mathematics appeared to her the -corner-stone of education, though in truth they mattered little to -Sam, who had followed Lance to the Classical side of the school, where -mathematics were an unconsidered trifle. But Anne recked nothing of -that. She had found the heel of her Achilles, and set herself to make -that vulnerable place secure. You are to picture Anne, with her forty -years of a working woman's life behind her, wrestling with algebra and -trigonometry, blazing a trail for Sam to follow. It was heroic and, by -some mental freak, successful. She taught herself, then tutored him, -and it was not Sam who scraped through to an average place in the -mathematics examinations, but Anne in Sam. Day after day, in the -intervals of cook ing, cleaning, washing, she studied the text-books -which so puzzled him, and at night explained their knotty points to him -with a wonderful clarity. She had no education in particular, nothing -but a general capacity and a monstrous will--a will that surmounted the -obstacle of acquiring knowledge at an age when few can learn, and the -greater obstacle of patient teaching to a boy who had a blind spot for -mathematics. She illumined his darkness, but perhaps she hampered his -classics and made her hopes of Oxford visionary. - -Slowly and painfully, as the terms went by, with Branstone, S. rising -steadily in the school, but keeping regularly to his mediocre place in -class, Anne acknowledged to herself that her goose was not a swan. It -made her the more eager to cultivate what she called the social side; -and through that she met with a defeat. - -From the beginning, Sam's rise in the world had borne heavily on Madge, -his sister, who was of an age for gaiety and of a mind untouched by -ambition, personal or vicarious. When Sam went to the Grammar School, -Madge was in service and very content. Anne had her out of that at once; -she wasn't going to run the risk of Madge being the servant in the house -of one of Sands school companions. It was unusual, but Madge preferred -service, where she was lucky in her employers, to the weaving-shed, -where she had free evenings, but strenuous days with no gossiping -callers at the back door to break their monotony. And it became a -considerable question in Madge's mind whether she would now be able -to outface Anne in the matter of George Chappie. Anne required a -presentable brother-in-law for Sam. - -Like Madge, George was unambitious, except that he wanted her, which -was ambition of a kind. Madge was small, like her mother, but derived -in most else from her father. She had freckles and carroty hair, and -the makings of a querulous shrew, but George saw otherwise, and desired -Madge to have and to hold, for better for worse, and didn't perceive -that the odds were heavily against its being better. He was a wisp of -a man himself, and thought he was enterprising because he was a -window-cleaner; window-cleaning was a new trade then. But Anne did not -concur with that opinion, and Madge was in no very sanguine frame of -mind when George came in one night with an "It's now or never" look -unmistakably in his eye. The trouble was that Anne was not the sort of -mother one defied with impunity. - -He came in shyly enough--a determined George was a contradiction in -terms--but plucked up courage at once when he found that she was -alone but for Sam. Sam's presence was inevitable, but need not be -acknowledged. In a house, not, indeed, of one room, but of one fire and -one gas-jet, Sam had grown apt at insulating himself when he sat with -his books at the table. The business of the house went on, so did Sam's -studies, and neither interfered with the other. Sam, absorbed in his -construe of Cicero's _De Senectute_ for the morrow, was absolutely -unconscious of Madge and George. - -It was not Sam who troubled George, but Madge had truth with her when -she told her suitor that he looked worried. George jerked his thumb -vaguely streetwards. "It's her again," he explained. "I can't think -why God made landladies. I ask you, Madge, is another blanket in this -weather a thing to fly into a temper about?" - -"It's cold," said Madge. "Won't she give you another?" - -"I don't know yet whether she'll give me one or not. But she's had my -last word. Another blanket or I'll flit." - -"You've threatened that so often." - -He admitted it. "I know. It takes an earthquake to shift some folks, and -I reckon I'm one of them. I stay where I'm set." And his tone implied -that conservatism was an admirable virtue. - -Madge did not think so. "That's what my mother says of you," she -observed, a trifle tartly. - -"It's no lie, either," he placidly agreed. "Seems to me," he went on, -with a look, ardent but appealing, at Madge, "that there's only one -thing will flit me from Mrs. Whitehead's. You couldn't give a guess at -it, could you?" - -"Yes, I could," said Madge brazenly. After all, she was Anne's daughter, -and direct. Then, despite herself, she fenced coyly: "You're leaving the -town, I reckon, Mr. Chappie." - -He stood aghast at the revolutionary thought. "Nay," he said earnestly. -"I'm set here and I'll not leave willing. There's something to keep me -where I am." - -"Your job's not worth so much," she said, misunderstanding wilfully. - -"It's steady, though," he defended it, "and a growing trade. My master's -getting a lot of window-cleaning contracts all over the town. But -it's not my job that keeps me here. It's------" He dropped his cap and -fumbled for it nervously, somehow finding a sort of courage in the act, -so that when he rose he faced her with a spirit which was, for him, -quite debonair. "Now, you'll not stop me, will you? I've come on purpose -to get this off my chest and I've worked myself up to a point. I'm a bit -slow at most things and I'm easily put off, so I'll ask you to give my -humble request a patient hearing." - -Madge looked at him acutely, and decided that his resolution was strong -enough to survive something that she very much wanted to say. "I'd -rather this didn't come straight on top of a row with your landlady," -she said. - -"Aye," he agreed, "I can see your meaning, but it's that that roused me -to point. Love's like a pan of soup with me. It's got to seethe a while -before it boils. But I'm boiling now, and I'm here to tell you so. I've -loved you since I saw you, Madge. After Sunday School one day it was, -with a wind on that blew the bonny curls across your eyes. I always -fancied gold and you're gold twice over." Madge was deeply moved at this -idealization of her hair. She had been made more peevishly conscious of -its redness than ever by the unsparing comments of the weaving-shed, but -she did not see wherein she was gold twice over until he explained it. -"I didn't notice that the first day. I only saw your hair. I hadn't the -nerve to come close enough to see the colour of your eyes. But when I -did, and found them all gold-brown as well, that finished me. I was deep -in love to the top of my head. Drowned in it, you might say." - -"You're talking a lot of nonsense, George," said Madge, with a fond -appreciation that belied her words. - -"I'm telling you I love you," he said, "and I'm asking if there's -anything that you could see your way to tell me in return. I know I'm -not smart, Madge, but I'd work my fingers off to make you happy. Can't -you say you love me, lass? Not," he added, "if it isn't true, of course. -I wouldn't ask you to tell a lie even to oblige me." - -"It might not be a lie," said Madge softly, "but----" She paused so that -he was left to guess the rest. - -"But," he suggested, "you don't care to go so far as to say it?" - -He watched her timidly, with courage oozing out of him. She had all but -given him to hope, but now it appeared she had no more to say. "Well, I -can understand," he said, half turning towards the door. "I'm not much -of a chap, and you might easily have put me down much harder than you -did. It's soft letting now, by reason of your tactful ways. I'll... I'll -go and see if Mrs. Whitehead has given me yon other blanket." - -He was at the door before she stopped him. "George!" she said, "come -back. You're getting this all wrong. You know about my brother." George -nearly smiled. "It'ud not be your mother's fault if I didn't," he said. - -"No," she said; "I suppose everybody knows about his going to the -Grammar School. They don't all know what it means." Madge was trying to -be loyal to the family ideal, she was trying not to be bitter, but it -wasn't easy. It was one thing to go without new hats and the accustomed -ways of service, but another to go without George. - -"I'd like you to understand that this family puts itself about a bit for -Sam's sake. We think he'll go a long way up in the world, and the rest -of us aren't doing anything to keep him down. None of us, no matter how -it hurts. Are you seeing what I mean?" - -He saw. "I'm not class enough for you," he said. - -It was a part, but not the whole, of her meaning, and Madge wanted -no misapprehensions. "You're class enough for me," she said, "but I'm -telling you where the doubt comes in. It's a habit we've got in this -family. We think of Sam." That made the matter plain; she loved him, and -while he granted there was a certain impediment through Anne's habit of -subordinating everything to Sam's interests, he saw no just cause why he -should not marry Madge. "I wouldn't knowingly do anything to upset your -mother," he said, "but I've told you I'm boiling with my love for you. -I'm easily put off my purpose as a rule. I mean to say, supposing I ask -Mrs. Whitehead for a kipper for my tea, and she tells me eggs are cheap -and she's got an egg instead, I don't make a song about it--so long as -the egg's not extra stale. But I'll own I didn't think of Sam in this. I -thought it was for you and me to settle by ourselves." - -"Sam's in it," said Madge dully. "He's in everything in this house." - -Then Anne came in and the disturbance of her entrance, together with the -fact that he had finished his passage of "_De Senectute_" made Sam aware -that something was toward. He kept his eyes discreetly on his book, -but fluttered the pages of his dictionary no more. He found youth more -arresting than old age. - -Anne's quick comprehension took the situation in at once. She had been -shopping, and as she put her parcels on the dresser she gave Madge the -benefit of a wordless reproof. She could say a good deal without opening -her mouth, and said it. But Madge was not going to be parted from her -George without a fight. Sam apart, George was eligible, and Madge saw -this as an unique occasion--the occasion for leaving Sam out. At least, -she meant to try. - -George was turned craven at sight of Anne and sidled to the door. "I'll -be getting on home, I think," he said. - -"You wait your hurry," said Madge hardily. "Mother, George has been -asking me to wed him." - -It was the gage of battle, for Anne knew the fact already. The statement -of it was a challenge. She met it coolly. "Has he?" she said. "Well, I -hope you told him gently." - -And at that George found his second wind of courage, and intervened like -a man. "She's told me nothing with her tongue. Nothing for certain. But -a blind man on a galloping horse could read the thoughts of her. Mrs. -Branstone, I love that girl as if she'd put a spell on me. It's the -biggest feeling that's come into my life, and I'm full and bursting with -it, or I'd not have the face to expose my inside thoughts to you like -this. And if you'll only tell me I can take her, the Mayor in his -carriage won't be happier than me." - -"You know how steady George is, mother," Madge seconded him. - -"He needs to be," said Anne dryly. "He's a window-cleaner." - -"I'm steady by nature, Mrs. Branstone, as well as trade. I don't drink. -Somehow one glass of ale is enough to make me whimsical, so I take none -at all. I know I'm being bowdacious in my love, but I'm moved to plead -with you. We'd not be standing in Sam's way. We'd live that quiet and -snug you'd never know we're in the town at all." Anne looked at him with -a faint trace of appreciation drenched in her profound contempt. A -poor creature, but he had his thimbleful of spunk! "It would need to be -quiet," she said, "with two to keep on your wage. Are you contented with -it?" - -Disastrously, he was. "It's a regular job," he said, voicing his pride -at being above the ranks of casual workers. In Anne's view, a hopeless -case. - -"It's a regular rotten job," she retorted, but spoke more softly than -her wont. "I've Sam to consider, Madge. You might live quiet, but Sam's -brother-in-law has got to make a better show of it than to be seen all -over the place at the top of a ladder like a monkey on a stick. I'm not -being hard on you, George Chappie, and I've nothing against you bar that -you're not good enough. You better yourself and you'll do. Stay as you -are, and Madge'ull do the same." - -George opened his mouth to speak, but found that nothing came. It _was_ -a regular job, it satisfied his ambitions, and her objections were -inexplicable. He had shot his bolt and, having no more to say, he went, -relapsing to such invertebracy that when he found that Mrs. Whitehead -had not added the other blanket to his bed he had nothing to say to her -either, but spread a threadbare overcoat on the coverlet and shivered -unhappily to sleep. - - - - -CHAPTER III--THE HELL-PIKE CLUB - - -|TO a schoolboy of sixteen, love is an imbecile emotion, its victims -harmless lunatics, and it is not to be supposed that Sam's interest in -the affair of Madge and George was based on intimate understanding. His -conspiratorial action came rather as a lark: behind, perhaps, was the -recognition that adults did habitually make fools of themselves in -this way, that his loyalty in such a case was to Madge who was of his -generation, and that Anne in obstructing their marriage was outrunning -the constable in her demands for self-sacrifice on his behalf. - -Larking, defined as enjoyable interference with other people for -motives either benevolent or purely egotistic, was a weakness of Samuel -Branstone, and the boy was father to the man. He did not agree with Anne -that the marriage was inimical to his interests. True, George cleaned -windows and balanced hardily at the top of swaying ladders, a precarious -trade, but his own. Apparently it suited the Georgian temperament, and -that funambulist would not wear a placard on his back proclaiming that -he was brother-in law to Branstone of the Classical Fifth. - -Branstone, who was going to rise in the world, would necessarily have -poor relations, and it hardly mattered how poor. Indeed, the poorer they -were the more cheaply he could afterwards play providence to them, since -their standards would be low and their expectations small. - -So it wasn't a nice, impulsive lark, but coldblooded and calculated, -which is almost as objectionable in a lark as organization in Charity. -It is prudent good intentions that pave the way to Hell. - -He saw that there was a difference between this and the elopements -of that romantic literature with which he busied his relaxed hours: -sometimes the lady, but always the lover, was enterprising, while he -knew that George could never instigate anything. But that made things -more amusing for Sam, who could pull strings with absolute assurance -that his puppets would never take to dancing on their own account, or -to any tune but the one he piped; and it is not given to all of us to be -Omnipotence at the price of a ten-pound note. - -As always, Sam had luck. In the romantic elopements whose technique he -began to study with new interest, money was never a difficulty, but the -god in the machine of George Chappie's elopement must put money in his -purse, or there could be no elopement. - -Sam liked money, but he must have liked power more, for, coming -miraculously into money at this time, he devoted it to this end. He -came into money because journalism was swiftly on the up grade since the -days, four years ago, when it couldn't show its readers a photograph of -Sam Branstone, hero, in the evening paper, and had reached the civilized -stage of picture competitions. - -You bought a weekly paper which printed six crude wood-cuts supposed to -disguise the names of (say) famous battles, and it did not strain your -intellect to discover that the picture of a station with "Waterloo" -beneath its clock was intended to represent the battle of that name. -But pause: it was not all so easy as that. Inflamed by avarice and the -childish ease of identifying the battles in the first series, you bought -the next week's number, and the next, until the competition closed, and -you found that the designs were increasingly baffling. It was not quite -money for nothing. It called for some knowledge of history and a sort -of knack in cheap wit to interpret the pictures. A garden syringe, and -a stage Irishman brandishing something that might easily be a cudgel -but wasn't, represented, in fact, the not very renowned battle -of Seringapatam, and there were pictures which could bear two -interpretations. - -It was this last which led Sam to go into partnership with Lance -Travers. Both partners admitted that Sam's wits were the sharper, so -it was only fair that Lance should finance the partnership and buy the -papers. And Sam, sanguine of winning, but desiring secrecy, preferred -that the firm should be registered in Lance's name, so that if and when -Sam became a capitalist, he and not Anne should control his wealth. His -ideas of the uses of capital already went beyond the Post Office Savings -Bank. - -The weekly paper's object was to increase its circulation, so it allowed -and encouraged competitors to send in numerous attempts, and printed -ambiguous drawings to tempt to prodigality. It is to be feared that -Classics suffered an eclipse at this period of journalistic enterprise. -The partners had other and more serious objects in life. And they won! -They won the second prize. It wasn't a house or a motor-car or any of -the fantastic prizes with which still later journalism rewarded its -intelligent readers, but they divided twenty pounds and, for them, ten -pounds each was paradise enow. Lance bought a bicycle. Sam didn't. He -bought a wedding-ring, and he had a talk with Sarah Pullen, who was so -passionately Madge's bosom friend that she had gone into the mill with -her. - -Sarah received him coldly; she looked upon him as the cause of her -friend's martyrdom and thought the cause unworthy. - -Sam cleared the air at once. "I'm on Madge's side. I'm not going to see -her made unhappy for my sake," he said, and Sarah relented so far as to -absolve him of personal malignity. - -"Much you can do to help it, though," she said. "I _can_ do much," he -replied, "but," he flattered her, "perhaps you can do more. You see, -Sarah," he went on confidentially, "Madge trusts you and she doesn't -trust me. Now, between ourselves, she needs a friend's advice. Put -yourself in her place. Would you knuckle under to your mother?" - -"I'd see her further first," said Sarah. - -"I wonder," said Sam, "if you could see your way to communicating your -views to Madge without mentioning that I suggested it?" - -"You!" said Sarah. "You! It'ud take a dozen your size to suggest -anything to me. Get off home and play marbles, or I'll give you a slap -on th' earhole that you'll remember." - -They didn't play marbles in the Classical Fifth, but Sam was content to -put her allusion down to ignorance rather than deliberate insult. He -had gained his point: the atmosphere he desired created was about to he -created. - -He left that pot to simmer and turned his mind to George, whom he judged -less susceptible than Madge to the promptings of a friend. Besides, he -knew no friend of George, and confessed himself at fault. - -One day, shortly before the Whitsuntide holidays, he was staring -gloomily out of the window at the top of the stairs outside the Fifth -Form room, watching the boys of the Chetham's Hospital at play in that -yard of theirs which the Grammar School pretends to scorn but secretly -envies, when he heard behind him a conversation between Lance Travers -and Dubby Stewart which set his brain awhirl. Yet it was not a -distinguished conversation. - -"Who ever heard of anyone in Manchester staying at home in Whit week?" -asked Lance. - -Sam had heard, often. - -"It isn't done," said Dubby, who had earned that abiding name when he -was in the Lower Third, and once read "dubious" aloud with a short "u." - -"But I've to do it," said Lance. "My governor's too busy to get away. -Bit damnable, isn't it?" - -"Matter of fact," said Dubby, "we're not going, either." - -And it presently appeared that out of the form of twenty-four boys there -were as many as six who lived in Manchester and were not going away. "It -will be hell," prophesied one of the unfortunates. - -"It needn't," said Sam Branstone, turning from the window to the -mournful group. - -"You're used to it. We're not," said someone cruelly, and Lance smacked -his head. Allusions to anybody's poverty were bad form. - -"What's the prescription?" asked Dubby, and Sam was silent for a minute. -"Watch him. Something's dawning," chaffed Dubby. It wasn't dawning, it -had dawned; but at first it looked like a risk, and then much less like -one, and Sam smiled beautifully as he realized that he, at least, had -all to gain and nothing to lose. He drew the luckless five mysteriously -aloof. - -"The prescription," he said, "is to have a holiday in Manchester, in -a holiday house." He let that soak for a minute, and then, "Our own -house," he added. "There are six of us. We join together and we take -a house. A small house, and I daresay some of you won't like the -neighbours, but as the neighbours won't like us, that's as broad as it's -long. Swagger neighbours wouldn't stand us anyhow, and the smaller the -house the smaller the rent. Something like four-and-six a week is my -idea. That's nine-pence a week for each of us, and we've a house of our -own for that to do what we like in." - -"By Jove!" said someone admiringly. - -"What shall we call it?" said another, a trifle doubtfully. - -"Call it?" said Lance. "That's obvious. The Hell-fire Club." - -And, of course, if any doubt remained, that settled it. Who would regret -the seaside if he could be a member of the Hell-fire Club? Lance was -commissioned to negotiate with his father, the estate agent, but it was -Sam who really chose their house. It was a house which in Sam's opinion -excellently suited the requirements of a young married couple of the -window-cleaning class. Mr. Travers told Lance that he would stop the -value of any damage out of his pocket-money, and on those conditions let -them the house. But he need not have made that cautionary threat; Sam -saw that there was no damage. - -The Hell fire Club assembled for its initiatory debauch on the first day -of the holidays, and by eleven a.m. three inexpert cigarette-smokers had -had occasion to use the slopstone as a vomitorium. It left them feeling -chilly, and Dubby suggested that a house-warming without a fire was a -solecism, even on a hot day, so a lavish plutocrat brought in two sacks -of coal and a supply of chips. Firelighting is a sport out of which a -certain excitement can be derived, but only for a short time, and the -same evanescent quality attaches to the pleasure of sitting on bare -boards. - -"I'm too stiff to be happy," said Lance. "I vote we furnish this club." - -Carried, _nem. com_. "I'm afraid, though," said Sam, "that I shall not -be able to contribute much." - -"Wait till you're asked, my son," said Dubby. "By the time we five have -finished looting our homes, this place will be a little palace." - -Loot is a brave word, suggestive of the treasures of the purple -East, but it was, in most instances, a case of permitted loot, the -offscourings of lumber rooms. Sandy Reed, however, was the sort of boy -who is happiest with a hammer in his hand, and Dubby had an eye for -chintz. To repair the veteran furniture which they brought struck Sandy -as work for a man. Behind him was his infantile past of fret-work -and model yachts; before him the foremanship of the Hell-fire Club -repair-shop. He worked and was the cause of work in others. And it was -willing work, partly because it was for an idea, partly because that -first day had threatened boredom and here was something definite to do, -mostly because it was making a noise. - -The ill-assorted chairs, tables and sofas which they collected under -their roof had this in common at the end, that they were strong; and -having by their own efforts made them strong, the boys did not by -their rioting make them weak again. They respected their handiwork, and -Dubby's chintz procured a sort of uniformity. - -A club, of course, must eat and drink, and kitchen utensils, mostly odd -but all practicable, were gathered together that they might precede the -pleasures of eating with the pleasures of cooking. It was camp-life in -town, except that they went home to sleep, and so long as the activities -of "settling in" endured, they relished it abundantly. - -About a fortnight was what Sam had mentally set as the life of the -Hell-fire Club, and he had no intentions of paying the rent by himself -for more than a week or so. They had decided that Sunday was not a -club-day--there were difficulties at home--and Sam took George Chappie -for a walk. "I like this street," he said as they turned the corner. -"Madge always fancied this district." - -"Did she?" said George gloomily. - -"We'll go in here," and Sam produced the key and introduced George to -the Club premises. "What do you think of it?" - -The chintz took George's eye at once. "By gum!" he said. - -"Sit down," said Sam. "This is where you're going to live when you're -married to Madge. It isn't your furniture yet, but it's going to be. I'm -going to give it you for a wedding present. There isn't a bed in, as you -see, but there will be, and I ask you, George, is it or is it not better -than Mrs. Whitehead's?" - -"Aye," said George, "but you're going ahead a bit too fast for me." - -"Not at all," said Sam. "Yours is the pace that kills. The slow pace, -not the quick. Now, this place isn't at your disposal yet, but if you'll -put up the banns next Sunday and get married as soon as you can after -the three Sundays, you can walk in here and hang your hat up on that -hook. It's a brass hook, George. We don't approve of nails in this -house. I might mention that it will be all right about the banns. Mother -has dinner to cook on Sundays and doesn't go to morning service, and -to-day is father's Sunday off from the station and lie's on duty for the -next three Sundays. So," he concluded, "there you are." - -"You're promising a lot. Is this house yours?" - -"The rent is four-and-six," said Sam, "which isn't more than you can -afford to pay. And you bind yourself to nothing by putting up the banns. -If I fail to deliver you this house and all that's in it, you needn't -get married. But I've a word of advice for you, George. Let Madge hear -of it first from the parson's lips in church. She won't scream and she -won't faint. We don't, in our family, and it saves you the trouble of -asking her. Is it a bet?" - -George hesitated. "Come upstairs and see the other room," said Sam. -George saw, and marvelled. "I'll come round with you now to church," -said Sam. "We've just nice time to catch the clerk after service." - -"By gum!" said George Chappie. "I'll do it. They can't hang me. But," he -added as he cast a last look at the household gods which Sam Bran-stone -promised should be his, "they may hang you." - -Sam grinned blandly. - - - - -CHAPTER IV--THE COMPLEAT ANGLER - -|HE had succeeded with George beyond expectations, but that easy victory -did not deceive him into thinking that his battle was won. Madge, he had -said, would neither scream nor faint on hearing her banns announced and -he wished he was as confident about it as he had sounded. Much, in his -view too much, depended on the vigour of Sarah Pullen's advice. - -He was taking risks all round, but found he rather liked it. There was -the risk that the Hell-fire Club would not tire of its toy in time. An -encouraging increase in absenteeism amongst the members elated him, -but the steadfast faith of an enthusiastic pair depressed him sadly. He -hoped, however, to find a way out of that wood. - -And there was the risk that some acquaintance of Anne's would mention -the banns to her. He saw no way to counter that. It was a risk he had -to take. Fortunately, his father's best friend, Terry O'Rourke, was a -Catholic. - -As things stood, he saw Madge as the weakest link in his chain. She -collapsed before the will of Anne like an opera hat, and he was candidly -afraid of her making a scene in church, either from pleasure or from -anger, when the banns were read. Not that he shrank on principle from -scenes, only that word of it would undoubtedly be carried to Anne and -the fat be in the fire. - -Rummaging one day that week at a second-hand bookstall in Withy Grove, -without the slightest intention of buying, he was attracted by a -title and recklessly planked his tuppence down. Intrigue, he felt, was -punishing his finances, but this title gave him too good an opening -with Madge to be the subject of economy. The title was "The Clandestine -Marriage," and he knew that Sarah Pullen would be in that night to see -Madge. - -He was reading the play very earnestly when she called, though it rather -bored him and he thought its plot elementary compared with his own. -Sarah was no reader, but she noticed the cover because the word -"marriage" was an unfailing lure. - -"Whatever has the boy got hold of now?" She inquired, taking his bait -sweetly. - -He showed her. "Do you know what it means?" he asked. - -"I know what marriage means," she said. - -"By hearsay," he told the virgin pungently. "But I meant the middle -word." - -She eyed it closely. "You're always bragging your knowledge. I'm not at -the Grammar myself and Greek is Greek to me. Fat lot of good it'ud be in -a weaving-shed, and all." She had a practical mind. - -"This isn't Greek," he said, "it's English." - -"It's not the sort of English we talk in Manchester, choose how." - -"I'll tell you what it means." - -"Wait till you're asked, cheeky." - -He didn't wait. "It means surreptitious." - -"I'm a grand sight the wiser for that. It'll mean a thick ear for you -if you don't stop coming the schoolmaster over me. I'm here to talk to -Madge, not to you." - -He winked at Sarah with the eye which was hidden from Madge. "The Secret -Marriage, Sarah. That's what it means." - -Sarah was interested now. "Does it tell you how to work it?" - -"I might do that myself," he said. - -"Don't talk so foolish, Sam," said his sister. "Are you coming for a -walk, Sarah?" - -"When I'm ready," said Sarah. "Now then, young Sam, spit it out." - -"Oh," said Sam. "It isn't much. Only I happened to be out for a walk -with George Chappie the other day and we went into a house that's pretty -full of furniture." - -"George Chappie with a house of furniture!" cried Madge. - -"I suppose he's getting married," said Sam. "He courted you at one time, -didn't he, Madge? I rather liked his taste in furniture." - -"Taste!" cried Madge with spirit. "I'll taste him. I'll eat him raw for -this. After all he said to me no more than a month ago, to take up with -another wench! What's the hussy's name?" - -"Her name?" said Sam. "Let's see. Sunday to-morrow, isn't it? The banns -might be up. If I were you I'd go and find out." - -"As true as I'm alive I'll tear every hair from her head," said Madge. - -"I wouldn't," said Sam. "You have red hair, but better red than bald." - -"Her!" said Sarah. "Do you mean----?" - -"Look here, Sarah," Sam interrupted, and used a formula which he had -thought out rather carefully. "Do you imagine I'd be giving you a -message like this if he hadn't sent it?" - -"Message! What message?" - -Then Anne came in. - -"Yes, Sarah," she heard Sam saying with a pedagogic air. "The word -clandestine means secret." He resumed with zest the reading of his play -and, though theirs was a small house, managed to avoid being alone with -Madge up to church time on the morrow. He had business out that Saturday -night--to make sure of George, whom he found full of panting resolution -to catch the clerk and cancel the banns. The glamour of that furniture -had lasted this long with George, but the awful hazard of the Sunday -morning eclipsed the glow as it came nearer. George wilted at the -thought of Madge rising in her place with a firm, irrevocable "I forbid -the banns" upon her lips. - -There had begun, too, to be a quality too much like that of an Arabian -night about his visit to the Club. Sam was a wonderful boy and George -granted his high superiority; but even George, the humble, did not quite -see Sam as a miracle-worker. He even began to doubt the existence of the -enchanted Palace which Sam had shown him, and that it was within Sam's -competence to hand over that house to him appeared now ridiculous. Sam -came just in time. - -"Would you care," he said, "to have another look at your house?" - -George would, but he hadn't time then: he was going; to see the clerk, -and till he saw the clerk he was a man obsessed with an idea. "I -suppose," he said sceptically, "that it's still there?" - -"Of course," said Sam, "and has a few more things in since you saw it." - -"Well," said George, "it's a nice house, but I'm going to see yon clerk -to tell him not to put up banns." - -Sam smiled, relieved to know that he was not too late. "Don't do that," -he said. "Madge is pleased." - -"What!" said George. "Say that again." - -"Madge is pleased," repeated Sam brazenly. He was sure she was. He -trusted Sarah Pullen now. - -"Did she tell you so?" asked George. - -"Do you imagine I'd be giving you a message like this if she hadn't sent -it?" - -George took his cap off. "If that's so----" he said. - -"It's so," said Sam, not defining what was so. - -The banns went up, and Sam was able to devote his undivided attention to -Club affairs, as to which he had an idea arising out of the boredom he -suffered while reading "The Clandestine Marriage." That tuppence was a -fruitful investment. - -A wet day came and with it, what was now rare, a full attendance at the -Club. But, since their repairs and decorations were complete, there was -nothing to do except to sit on their reliable chairs and admire their -reliability. - -"For a Hell-fire Club," said Sandy, "we lack hellishness." - -"Lance named us," said Dubby. "He ought to make suggestions." - -"Of a new name?" asked Sandy. "Call it the Eviscerated Emasculates." - -"Call it a damned failure," said another, and was sat upon. They -welcomed the diversion, but the thought had reached home. - -"What's the matter," said Sam, when order was restored, "is that we -aren't serious enough." - -"Oh, hell!" said Lance. - -"I mean it, Lance. We're not a set of kids from the Lower School. If we -were, we might sit round and read Chums and the Boy's Own Paper." Two -men of the Classical Fifth and the Hell-fire Club looked guiltily at -him, but decided that he was not making personal allusions. "As it -is, we have higher interests. Now, there are six of us here and that's -enough, with doubling, to take parts in a Shakesperian play. I vote we -read a play. In fact, I brought some down." - -This suited Lance, who had aspirations towards the stage. "Bags I -Romeo," he said. - -Sandy was less fired to enthusiasm, but, "All right," he said, "if you -choose a play with lots of thick bits in it." - -"We certainly," said Sam, "shall not read an edition prepared for the -use of girls' schoofs." - -"_Merry Wives of Windsor_, then," said Dubby. "Lance can spout Romeo out -of his bedroom window to stop a cat-fight." - -Sam would have preferred a tragedy; he feared they would enjoy reading -The Merry Wives and so, on the whole, they did, but there were only five -promises to turn up next day and two of those were conditional upon its -being wet. Sam wasn't dissatisfied, and as a comedy was postulated chose -_Much Ado about Nothing_, because he thought that it was dull in patches -and also for a reason of his own. He wanted to make certain that he had -nothing to learn as an intriguer from a famous case of match-making. He -found he had. - -Although it rained, _Much Ado_ had only four readers at the opening and -only two at the close. Lance sent postcards that night to the members -announcing _Hamlet_ for the morrow. He wanted to read Hamlet's part, but -if you can't have _Hamlet_ without the Prince, neither can you read it -satisfactorily with one other participant. - -Lance and Sam struggled through an act, then Lance gave in. "I'm getting -tired of this Club," he said. "The members have no brain." - -"It isn't raining," said Sam. - -"No. Lancashire's batting, too. Let's go and see Albert Ward and Frank -Sugg at Old Tafford." - -Next day, the Club was uninhabited, except by the ghost of Sam's -broadest smile, its only tenant for a week. The freeze-out was -accomplished, and its engineer had confidence enough to spend three -pounds of his capital on a bed and bedding, "to await instructions -before delivering." Then he saw Lance Travers and pointed out to him -that there were better uses to be made of ninepence a week than to -waste it on a club which nobody used. - -"Nuisance, though, about the chairs and stuff," said Lance, implying his -agreement that the Club had failed. - -"I can't have them back here, because I'm turning our attic into an -aviary. That's why I've had no time to go to the Club," he explained -with a faint apology, and took Sam up to see his birds. - -"What shall we do about all that furniture at the Club? Pity the fifth -of November is so far off." - -"I'll try to think of something," said Sam, rather terrified at Lance's -incendiary suggestion. "In any case it must be discussed at a full -meeting. Let's call the members together." - -An urgent whip resulted in a full and slightly shame-faced attendance. -Nobody tried to dispute that the Club was a corpse: the only question -was what to do with its bones. "Well," said Sam, "if none of you has -a suggestion to make, I'll make one. Nobody's aching to take the stuff -back where it came from. Now," he went on candidly, "we _could_ sell it -to a dealer, but I'm against that because dealers are thieves and they'd -give us about thirty bob for the lot. But my sister's getting married -and I don't mind offering the Club five pounds for its property. That," -he indicated, "is a pound each for the five of you." - -"Cash on the nail?" asked Dubby, whose forebears came from Scotland. He -distrusted Sam in the character of capitalist. - -"Oh, yes," explained the candid Sam. "You see, when I met Lance -yesterday I said I'd think of a way out of the difficulty and I came -prepared." - -"I vote we take it," said Sandy. "I can buy a lot of tools with a -pound." - -"I don't see why we should pander to your vices," said Lance. "We're -still a Club and this is club money." - -"The Club is dead." - -"Not yet. Not till we've killed it gloriously on Sam's sister's fiver. -There's a hell of a bust in five pounds and we have to drink the bride's -health. Champagne's my drink." - -It wasn't, but it was rather too often his father's, and Lance was -emulous, and, frightened a little of his own suggestion, carried things -now with a rush. "We're the Hell-Fire Club," he said, "and champagne is -the dew of Hell. Any member shirking will be held under the tap for half -an hour." They braved it out, most of them conscience-stricken, and the -Hell-fire Club almost deserved its name in the hour of its extinction. -Things might have been serious had not Sam, by a well-timed push, caused -Lance to shatter a full magnum on the floor. - -As it was, five hangdog members reached home late, but presentable. But -they were most unhappy boys. The sixth boy was happy. He had consumed -a sober and interesting meal at other people's expense, encountering -several delectable sorts of food for the first time and experiencing -that human but reprehensible thrill which results from feeling that one -is a clever fellow. - -Distance of course lent enchantment to the Hell-fire Club. When school -reassembled and boys fresh from the seaside tried to excite the jealousy -of the stay-at-homes with tales of land and sea, they were loftily put -in their places and struck to dumb admiration by legends of the dashing -vice of the Hell-fire Club. It lived in story as it had never lived in -fact. - -Sam visited the premises, on the day after the Club died, to wipe up -the mess, thriftily to salve some untouched edibles for a coming -wedding-feast, and by receiving and installing the bed to dedicate the -house to better uses. Then he put the key in his pocket and took it to -George. He had kept his bargain and now it was for George to keep his. - -There remained the question of Anne, and as a preliminary to its -solution Sam had recommended Madge to look peaked. Madge, naturally -inclined to that condition, had no difficulty in accentuating its -appearance by recourse to the vinegar bottle until even Anne, intolerant -as she was of small weaknesses, had to own that Madge looked unhappy and -unwell. - -On the night before her wedding, Madge shut herself up in her bedroom -whence the sounds as of a very ecstasy of woe penetrated to the kitchen. -Yet her woe was not ecstatic and hardly woe at all. She wept because -she was going to be married next day, because when one is going to -be married next day one weeps. One brims with undefinable emotion and -overflows into tears. - -But Anne, listening from the kitchen, where she sat with Sam, was moved -to unaccustomed softness. "That girl is fretting sadly," she said. "It's -a mort of trouble to be taking over a wastrel like George Chappie." - -"Mother," said Sam speculatively, "I wonder whether you have ever -considered the influence of matter over mind?" - -"I'm considering the influence of something that does not matter," she -replied. "The influence of George Chappie." - -"Suppose," said Sam, "suppose that George Chappie lived in a decent -house of his own, with furniture that he took a pride in, instead of in -those awful lodgings of his. Don't you think that he would live up to -his surroundings? Don't you think that it would make a man of him?" - -"George Chappie is as far from having a decent house as he is from -wedding our Madge." - -"That's true," said Sam, "as far--and as near." - -"As near?" asked Anne suspiciously. "Sithee, Sam, have you been up to -something?" - -"Will you hear me out if I tell you a story?" he asked. - -"Am I going to like it?" she fenced cautiously. "I am hoping," he said -piously, "to have your forgiveness. It's a matter of happiness." - -He told her what he had done and how and why he had done it. "The -wedding's to-morrow," he ended, "and I hope you'll go." He told his -exploit without arrogance and without extenuation, and it is not to be -supposed that Anne was unaware that a nice moralist would have found -much in it to criticize, but Sam had come out on top and that, for Anne, -almost excused his methods. It almost excused his coming out on top of -her. - -"I'll go to the wedding," she said, "and I'll forgive them. They are -no more than a pair of naturals in the hands of a schemer." Sam grinned -appreciatively. "But I'll not let you down so easy," she went on, and -the grin faded. "You're clever, my lad, but you're a schoolboy, and the -place for showing your cleverness is at school. It's too long since you -brought me home a prize, and if you want my forgiveness for letting you -rap my knuckles like this, you'll bring me a prize this Midsummer. Is -that a bargain, Sam?" - -"I always try," he said, which was true. - -"Try harder," said Anne Branstone dryly. - - - - -CHAPTER V--LAST SCHOOL-DAYS - - -|SAM had not a dog's chance of winning the form prize of the Classical -Fifth, and knew it. He learnt with difficulty, retaining what he learnt; -but the process was slow and his form was overshadowed by the brilliance -of two boys who learnt easily and rapidly. - -It annoyed Sam to know that he had no chance against these two. Poetic -justice cried out that he, the railway porter's son, should defeat Bull, -whose father was a professor at the University, and Adams, son of a -merchant prince whose "Hong" was as familiar in the godowns of Shanghai -as his name in Princess Street and on 'Change; but it was hopeless. The -prize lay inevitably between these two who took to classics like -ducks to water and read Homer for (they said) pleasure, whilst their -form-mates struggled with Euripides in acknowledged agony. They were -both unpopular, both prigs, but unassailably pre-eminent; and they were -two. Had it been a case of Bull alone, or Adams alone, Sam might have -worked heroically on the off-chance, that his rival would be ill at -examination time, but it was too far-fetched to hope that both would -simultaneously ail. - -He had long passed beyond Anne's powers of tuition. It was not a -"sound commercial education" that one got on the Classical side, and -mathematics had ceased to figure in his course. He went to the Classical -side because Lance was there and stayed because of Anne's golden dream -of Oxford. The gold, she knew, was tarnished now, but if she no longer -saw in Sam the winner of an open scholarship at Balliol, she had not -abandoned hope that he might carry off one of the close scholarships -which the School commanded. Sam himself was sceptical about even that -qualified ambition. - -But he had to win a prize to satisfy Anne, and if he could not win the -prize of which she was thinking, he would try to win one of which she -did not think. It was certainly a prize, and a handsome prize, open not -only to a form but to the whole school--a prize for reading. - -He had a secondary spur, too, in the fact that Lance, that ardent -elocutionist, looked on this prize as his own, and the thought of -beating Lance on his chosen ground tickled Sam's fancy. Not that he -was cocksure. He knew his handicap too well for that, but he had always -known it, and from the first day of his school life studied to correct -his accent. He did not, even now, even at the price of being thought -pedantic, indulge in slang. Lance, perhaps because he came from a -motherless home, perhaps from a stupid bravado, larded his speech with -silly blasphemies and the current vulgarisms, and, in fact, he did it -with an air; but Sam had to guard his tongue. There is a difference, too -easily detected, between correct slang and incorrect English: one must -first speak correctly before one can dare successfully to be incorrect, -and Sam's handicap was that he came from a home where they used, in -Sarah Pullen's words, "the sort of English we speak in Manchester;" -the other sort was an alien tongue and held to be an affectation of the -insincere. - -There was a set piece--the opening speech in _Comus_--the inefficients -were weeded out, and the elect tested on "unseens." It was the "unseens" -that frightened Sam: he rehearsed _Comus_ till a misplaced aitch was -a physical impossibility, and he was sure of his rhythm and the -intelligence of his rendering; but he knew that aitches were elusive -when he was nervous. "Then don't be nervous," was counsel of perfection: -the ordeal of the "unseen" test intimidated him. - -But he practised, and did not spare himself. If sweat and blood -would win that prize, Sam would spend both. He read aloud by the -hour--classics of course suffering--with a pin in his hand with which he -resolutely drew blood at every aitch he dropped; and in his reading he -was fortunate. He read _The Spectator_ which he had borrowed by pure -chance from the school library, and the judges handed him a passage -from _The Spectator_ to read at the unseen test, and one of the great -speeches of Marlowe's _Tamburlaine_, whose thundering music had so much -attracted Sam that he knew the purple patch by heart. - -He won the prize; staggered across the platform of the Free Trade Hall -with a Gibbon in six sumptuous volumes, calf-bound, stamped with the -school arms; he rode "in triumph through Persepolis," and thought that -it was "sweet and full of pomp;" then, when it was over and the last -"Gaudeamus" of that Speech Day had been sung and the last cheers for the -holidays (always the heartiest) been given, he sought his mother in the -crowd. - -"Well?" said Sam, who had kept this glory as a surprise for her. - -"Aye," said Anne, "but it might be better. You've won a prize and you're -forgiven, but you know well enough that you've diddled me. I wanted a -prize to show that you'd the gift of learning, and you've won one to -show that you've the gift of the gab. I knew it already," she ended -dryly, "and you're nobbut tenth out of the twenty-four in your class. -Will they move you up?" - -She dissembled the genuine pride with which she had seen him cross that -platform and take his bulky prize, because she felt inly that the chief -talent Sam had proved was a talent for deception. This was a prize, but -she thought it too barely within the meaning of the act: it observed the -letter of his bargain and eluded the spirit. - -She did him less than justice. The average hoy came to school knowing -English; Sam had had to learn it, and here was proof, in a prize won -against the whole school and not merely against a form, that he had -learned his lesson well. - -Her disparagement depressed him. He had not reached, and with a -mother like Anne he could not at his age reach, the healthy younger -generation's contempt for the opinions of its elders. He felt weakened -in his belief in the social and economical value of a decent accent and -grew careless in preserving it. His Gibbon lay upon his shelf unread, an -empty glory, and, in the event, his prize was to lead to a calamity. It -was to lead, indirectly, to Tom Branstone's death. - -Sam found himself, after the holidays, moved up to the Transitus, the -last boy to be moved there from the Fifth. He was not sure that it -pleased him. Left in the Fifth he might have been a Triton among the -minnows: in the Transitus he was incurably a minnow. But he discovered -there an atmosphere to which he might have responded better than he did. -Discipline was slacker; one had reached the ante-room to the Sixth and -was assumed to be serious; one had the privilege of a form-room which -was open in the lunch-hour so that one had not to wait with smaller fry -in the corridors; and, above all, the form-master was a gentleman as -well as a scholar. - -He was not blind to these advantages, but he did not, somehow, "come -on" with his classics. The terrible facility of Bull and Adams was -a constant discouragement: mere perseverance was outvied by natural -ability and dragged its leaden weight behind. He knew himself incapable -of shining in this company, and gave up a losing fight the more -readily because the half-term brought a new diversion, and a chance to -coruscate. - -He was cast, as winner of the reading prize, for the Christmas play. -He, Sam Branstone, was to act Shylock at the Conversazione, whilst Lance -Travers was given Bassanio--salt on the still bleeding wound of his -defeat. Greek Tragedy interested Sam no more. He saw Irving's Shylock -from the gallery of the Theatre Royal, and, for comparative purposes, -Benson's. He haunted Cheetham Hill, observing Jewish "types." He came -to the first rehearsal, like any other novice, knowing every line of his -part--and had painfully to unlearn and relearn under the direction of -the brisk little mathematics master who took the play-in hand. - -Anne screened her pride in this distinction. Play-acting was, in any -case, questionable, too newly come to respectable estate to be accepted -unreservedly. But, in secret, she determined that she would be one of -Sam's audience and Tom another. - -Parents were invited to the Conversazione--that was what conversaziones -were for--but Anne and Tom had never accepted the invitation before. It -implied evening dress. - -She decided that she could "manage" with her Sunday dress and two yards -of lace; but Tom, too, must be there, and Tom must not shame Sam. She -thought she saw a way. - -"Nay, nay," said Tom, "I couldn't do it, lass. I'd never dare." - -"You should have thought of that before you became Sam's father," she -replied. "I'm going to see him and I'll none go alone. You're coming -with me. I reckon Mr. O'Rourke will be in to-night as usual." - -"Aye," said Tom, suspecting nothing. - -One basis of his friendship with O'Rourke was that their evenings off -happened to coincide, Tom's from Victoria Station and Terry's from -the old-fashioned commercial hotel in Mosley Street, where he was an -institution. Terry was a waiter, but Tom had not yet seen the connection -between his friend's profession and the Grammar School Conversazione. He -was never very bright. - -Terry had a hard head and a professional style, rather like a successful -doctor's bed-side manner, which wheedled more tips from commercial -travellers than they gave at any other hotel in their rounds, but he had -a sunken vein of poetic superstition and, when Anne interrupted them, he -was explaining to Tom that he tolerated the Royal Hotel because he -could see from its window the green of the grass outside the Infirmary. -Manchester was Manchester because it lacked grass. The "good folk" -couldn't dance on granite sets: only on grass did one find fairy-rings -and only where grass abounded were people blessed. - -"You'll not be wanting your dress-clothes next Wednesday night, I -reckon," said Anne, breaking in without apology. - -"Why, no, Mrs. Branstone," he said. "Wednesday's the night when I dress -like the public. I've gone into a strange hotel and been mistaken for an -ordinary customer on a Wednesday night." - -"Then you'll maybe not object to lending Tom your clothes next week. I -want him to be mistaken for a swell." - -"There's a shine on them," objected Terry, "that you can see your face -in." - -"Dress-clothes," pronounced Anne, "are dressy when they shine. If you'll -put studs and a clean shirt in with them, I'll be obliged, and I'll send -the shirt back washed." - -"But, Anne----" protested Tom. - -"You hold your hush," she said. "It's settled. Go on about the fairies, -Terry." - -Fairies seemed to Anne entirely suitable as a subject of conversation -for those children, men. - -Terry brought the clothes himself and personally assisted at Tom's -transformation from a railway porter into a "swell." His tie, at any -rate, was nicely tied, but "I feel the awkwardest fool alive," said Tom, -as well he might, with clothes which fitted where they touched; Anne, -had she confessed her inward sinking, must have admitted that she was in -no better case herself, but confession was far from her: she had to be -brazen for two. Yet even Anne's high courage failed her in the ladies' -dressing-room: she emerged so humbled by the splendours which she had -seen unveiled that, at a word from Tom, she would have turned tail and -fled. - -But Tom had found countenance. Mr. Travers, meeting him on the stair, -had taken charge of him, and now added Anne to his convoy. It was kindly -tact increased to the power of heroism: he talked hard and sheltered -his waifs from feeling the curious glances which, even in that mixed -company, were directed embarrassingly at them. He ignored a quiet, -well-known alderman, who obviously wanted to speak to him. He shepherded -them to their places in the Lecture Theatre, sat with them and -accomplished the incredible feat of putting Tom Branstone at his ease in -the midst of the tipping public. - -Travers acquired more merit that night than by all his payments of Sam's -school-fees: and Sam himself did nobly, not only on the stage whence -he acted at Anne and bowed to Anne, but afterwards when, still in -his costume, he paraded with her, drank coffee with her, and met -with Shylockian hatred any eye which seemed to hint that he had not -tremendous reason to be proud of his little mother. And what he did for -her, Lance and Mr. Travers did for Tom. - -Undoubtedly, a huge success: a night of nights, carved on the tablets of -memory in letters of gold: never, not by so much as a dubious hint, to -be associated with the illness of Tom Branstone. That was, of course, -caused by overwork at Christmas at the station. It had and could have -nothing to do with the fact that Tom, coming in ecstasy from the heated -school into the cold December night, presently threw off his overcoat -and danced exulting on the pavement: conduct so utterly unprecedented, -so wholly un-Tom-like, that he had footed it merrily for ten minutes -before Anne recovered enough command of him to put an end to the -discreditable performance. Besides, for five of the ten minutes, she -had danced hand in hand with him. She, too, exulted, but neither of them -ever referred to their pagan capering again. - -Poor Tom! He had not had so many nights of triumph in his life that this -should be his last, but he was soon to start upon a journey from which -even Anne's imperious will was powerless to call him back. She helping -him, he struggled hard against pneumonia and made a better fight with -death than he had ever made with life, but his course was run and the -school had not reopened after the holidays when Tom Branstone ceased to -fight. It seemed that, on the night of the Conversazione, he had had his -hour, and - - "men must endure - - Their going hence even as their coming hither: - - Ripeness is all." - -It did not come to Sam as the shattering of his world--only the death of -Anne could have done that--but certainly as a stunning blow. It was -the first time that he had come intimately close to death and he missed -death's beauty and its peace. He saw too well its ugliness and the -detail of a burial. It hurt, not because Tom Branstone had had but -little joy in life, but because he died too soon to see the glory of his -son. In after years, Sam Branstone would have liked to recall how Tom's -death softened him, how he melted to tears before that waxen face and -lovingly bought flowers to put inside the coffin. - -It wouldn't do. It didn't fit the facts. He knew that, honestly, he -had been angry with his father for dying, especially for dying in the -holidays. It spoiled the holidays and it robbed Sam of the day's holiday -he would have had for the funeral had Tom had the gumption to die in -termtime. He resented his father's death as he would have resented an -unjust thrashing from him--if Tom Branstone ever thrashed anybody. Tom -had died prematurely, while he was still useful to Sam. He had bilked -Sam, and Sam was angry. - -Not only had Tom died too soon to see the glory of his son, but his -son's glory was seriously jeopardized by the breadwinner's death. Sam -had, in his innermost soul, given up the idea of Oxford; he was not apt -enough at classics, but he was far from admitting it now. It was Tom's -death, and that alone, which deprived him of that crown. - -Anne felt it deeply. She had loved Tom with something like mother-love -as well as wife's. If she had been hard with him, it was for his good, -and he as well as she had known that her hardness was like the hardness -of a crab's shell, hiding a tender place inside. Now that he was dead -she could hide her grief as she had hidden her love, and went about her -business soberly. Soberly she drew her money from the Sick and Burial -Society and soberly she spent it on "black" for Sam, for George, Madge -and herself, doing those things which Tom would have expected to be done -to dignify his death, but adding nothing that would make his funeral a -neighbours' raree-show. - -She came back from the cemetery with dry eyes and soberly presided at -the inevitable meal (where she had to comfort a lachrymose O'Rourke) -and, on the morrow, soberly set out to visit Mr. Travers, and to tell -him that, of course, she could not now keep Sam at school. It was little -that Travers was allowed to guess from this stoic that this was the end -of her dream for Sam, that with Tom's death the underpinnings of her -world had flopped. And her pride stood where it stood five years ago: no -more now than then would she accept from Travers money to pay expenses. - -She shook her head defiantly. "The lad'ull have to work," she said. - -Travers knew adamant when he saw it. "Then, at least, let him come here -and work in my office." Anne almost glared. "I want a fair field and -no favour. He'll have to start as office-boy, with the wages of an -office-boy." - -"Oh, hardly that, Mrs. Branstone. Remember, he comes to me from the -Classical Transitus." - -"Yes," she said, "and much use that is to an estate agent. He can't add -up a row of figures." - -She had no delusions about the practical value of a public school -education. - -"I think, though, that we must let it count for something," he replied, -and Anne, compromising against the grain, consented to let it count -for fifteen shillings a week "until we see," added Mr. Travers, "how he -shapes." He intended to see very soon. - -Anne nodded grimly. "I'll see he shapes," she said, and Sam, silent -witness of this pregnant interview, was hardly surprised by Anne's first -words on reaching home. "Get out those old arithmetic text-books of -yours," she said, "and look up mensuration. I've not forgotten it, if -you have." - - - - -CHAPTER VI--THE NEST-EGG - - -|TOM Branstone had drawn a wage of a pound a week, and tips may have -averaged ten shillings but more probably did not; your sixpenny tipper -is a rare bird in Manchester. - -Yet Anne had saved steadily, and she had not allowed a life-long habit -to be interrupted by a little thing like the necessity of providing -Sam with Grammar School books and clothes. I do not say that it was -admirable in her, but merely that it was heroic. It was an incredible -feat, but it can be done: it is done every day by people for whom the -word "thrift" has meaning. Perhaps they are often unlovely in their -lives or perhaps they have the robust satisfaction of those who live for -an idea: opinion has always differed as to whether what they do is worth -doing, and modern opinion inclines strongly to the belief that it is -not. Life to these iconoclasts seems more important than the means of -life. - -To Anne it seemed abundantly worth while, and the proof was here now -when she found that the interest on her savings amounted to three and -four-pence weekly. They could live on Sam's earnings and Anne's "means" -without pinching. Her forethought made all the difference now between -too little and enough. - -It was, of course, only to Anne that this seemed enough: Sam took a -larger view, but found his vision cramped for some time to come by the -conditions he met with in Mr. Travers' office. Certainly that generous -soul did not mean to humiliate Sam; he did not mean Sam to begin as -office-boy; but, whatever his intentions, the clerks in his office -defeated them. Sam was a newcomer, the latest arrival, in a minority of -one against the old inhabitants; was there, moreover, obviously to do -as he was told. He was told to sweep the floor in the morning, to copy -letters and to lick stamps. He did these things rebelliously, bitter at -heart that such menial service should be required of an ex-member of the -Classical Transitus, certain that there was some mistake, that he had -only to catch Mr. Travers' eye when he was so shamefully occupied for -that gentleman to take instant and drastic measures with the clerks who -misemployed him. - -Mr. Travers' eye, even though caught at what Sam thought an opportune -moment, While Sam copied letters, unexpectedly failed to disapprove. He -seemed less preoccupied with Sam's affairs than Sam was. As a matter of -fact, he took a long distance view of Sam, and took it, unfortunately, -rather muggily. Travers had the defect of his quality. A generous man, -he was generous in the worst way to himself, and Sam soon learnt the -meaning of a euphemism, current in the office, "Mr. Travers is attending -a property auction." Property auctions are, it is true, usually held on -licensed premises, and whether Mr. Travers was or was not attending an -auction he was certainly on licensed premises more often than was good -for either his business or himself. - -And it was bad for Sam, not because it left him to find his own feet in -the office and to fight unbacked with his superiors (wherein, indeed, -it was good), but because he had figured Travers from afar as a princely -gentleman, without reproach, and the discovery of his failing took Sam -a long way on the road to cynicism. In youth one's faith dies hard, and, -being dead, turns rapidly corrupt. - -The business was an excellent one, rotting slowly from the top, and Sam -found the office a notable place in which to pick up knowledge of the -world; especially, since he lacked good direction, of the shadier -ways of the world. He felt that he had declined in status: his -school-friends, there his equals, had gone either to the Universities -or, with influence behind them, to the professions. If they went to -business, it was as their fathers' sons. They were not scratch men, and -Sam felt that he was starting at the scratch-line. - -Travers had really no intentions that Sam should feel himself misprized. -The boy had to learn the business, and the way to understanding lay -from the bottom upwards. But Sam contrasted himself bitterly with Lance, -first at school and then at Cambridge. In that, indeed, he found a -minimum of consolation. It wasn't rational, but to Anne and consequently -to Sam, university had meant Oxford, and he won a hardy solace from the -thought that Lance was, after all, "only" at Cambridge. - -Meantime, he grew in knowledge of his world, and education came to Sam, -not in the cloistered freedom of the Isis, but where, in Manchester, -he went collecting rents: in country courts where hard laws operated -hardly: and in the office, where men did not greet each other with a -friendly smile, but gave instead the "competition glare." It was not a -kindly school in which he spent the developing years, but one where it -was taught that self's the man, and magnanimity is a mistake. "Get on -or get out," and Sam got on with a sort of choleric zeal which gave no -quarter and expected none. - -But he did not get on fast enough to please himself. He had, he thought, -stepped down from the days of the Grammar School where he belonged with -the caste that rules or, at any rate, administers, the caste that sits -on velvet and overlooks the mob. Now he was in the cockpit, with the mob -that struggles to ascend, and, to Sam, a wage of thirty shillings a -week at the age of twenty was a derisory ascension. Anne thought it -satisfying, and it was her contentment with his rate of progress which -first made him begin to think of her as, after all, a limited person. -You didn't bribe Sam Branstone to be meekly satisfied with thirty -shillings a week. - -"The trouble is," he said to the only man in the office with whom he was -in the least confidential, "that you don't begin to get on till you've -got a bit of capital together. Money breeds money." - -His friend suggested betting as a means to affluence, and offered to -tell him of a dead certainty. - -Sam assumed his cunningest air of a superman of the world. "The best row -of houses where I go for the rents," he said, "belongs to Jack Elsworth, -the bookie. I don't see why I should help him to buy another house." - -"Bookies don't always win," said the optimist. - -"No," said Sam. "It's possible to make money out of betting and it's -possible to get a baby by a harlot, but that isn't what the harlot's -for, and it isn't what the bookie's for." - -At this time, harlots were the pegs on which Sam hung his wit. He had no -other use for them, but had discovered that a coarse turn of phrase was -an asset in his world and therefore wielded it. But the effect of this -little conversation was to crystallize his aim. He wanted that "bit of -capital" badly, and did not intend that, if opportunity presented, a -nice regard for scruple should hold him back from taking anything the -gods might send. He had no ultimate design, but fortune came to -the fortunate and money to the moneyed, so that the first move was, -obviously, to get money. He wanted a jumping-off place; then he would -soar. - -Opportunity walked into the office in the person of Joseph of Arimathea -Minnifie. That was his full baptismal name: analogous with the styles of -certain limited companies, such as John Smith ( of Newcastle) Limited, -to distinguish that Smith from other Smiths. Minnifie's mother had -explained to the parson that she was a New Testament woman. To her -intimates she had put it that she chose the name Joseph because she -liked it, but she also liked a man to be a man. It was deduced that she -supposed the third Joseph in the Bible would have acted differently from -the first in the affair of Potiphar's wife. - -Sam's accent had degenerated since the days of Shylock and the reading -prize. It had kept bad company, and might be known by the company it -kept to-day rather than by that which it used to keep at school; but he -could still, without too great an effort, assume a well-bred speech and -was often sent with a prospective buyer to show off any likely houses on -Mr. Travers' list. Because it was usual for him to go on such errands, -and not because anyone supposed that niceties of speech could or would -have any effect on Mr. Minnifie, he was sent with him in a cab to tour -the suburbs where Travers had property in charge. - -A coarse accent was not likely to offend Joseph Minnifie, who a -fortnight earlier had been a market porter at Shude Hill, but had now -come into money, well invested in the best Brewery securities, from his -uncle, a publican. Minnifie had sold out some of the shares because -he could now satisfy a long ambition and live in his own house. He -proposed, he told Mr. Travers, to retire to the country. - -"The country?" asked Travers, whose practice was suburban. - -"Well," said Minnifie, "summat quiet and homely. I'd like a change from -Rochdale Road. I thought," he went on rather shyly, "of Whalley Range. -It's a good neighbourhood." - -Travers refrained from pointing out that Whalley Range was not usually -regarded as the country, but was, in fact, of the inner ring of -suburbs, a penny tram fare from the centre of Manchester. "Oh, yes, Mr. -Minnifie," he said. "I think I can satisfy you in W'halley Range. I have -several available houses on my books in that district." - -"I'll pay three hundred pound for what I like," said Minnifie, quite -fiercely. "I've got it in my pocket now." He was fierce because he was -not yet quite sure that his legacy was not phantom gold, and he pulled -out a bundle of notes as much to assure himself that they were still -where he had put them as with the idea of proving his good faith to -Travers. - -Travers concealed a smile. After all, commission on three hundred pounds -is not to be sneezed at, but neither was this the sort of client for -whom Traver's disturbed his habits. "I have myself," he said, "a large -property auction to attend in the city, but Mr. Branstone will go with -you to inspect the houses." He smiled kindly on Sam, and added, lest -Minnifie should think his affair, so important to him, underrated by the -agent: "Mr. Branstone is my confidential man. When Mr. Branstone tells -you anything about the houses you are going to see, it is as if I spoke -myself." - -"I see," said Minnifie. "He's your foreman, and you needn't tell me -you'll back him up. I know foremen." - -"Well, his word is certainly as good as mine. I leave you in safe hands, -Mr. Minnifie." And Travers went out to attend his first auction of the -day, which usually happened at eleven o'clock in the morning. - -Sam and the client took a cab to Whalley Range, where Minnifie inspected -several houses which were to be had at about his price. But he was hard -to satisfy, and, what was worse, apparently unable to define his -reasons for dissatisfaction. As Sam praised this and that about a house, -Minnifie admitted that such things were praiseworthy, but he would, -please, see another house. Sam was a little piqued and tried his best -to be genial, suspecting that Minnifie resented being fobbed off with a -"foreman"; and Sam's best was very good, so that presently the ice was -thawed. - -Minnifle stood at the bow-window of a dining-room and looked up and down -the street. It was empty save for a tradesman's boy. From somewhere -round the corner came the diminished rattle of a milk-cart. Minnifle -shook his head sadly. - -"It's quiet," he said. "See that road. Nothing stirring. What is there -for the missus to look at when she sits in the window?" - -"It's morning," said Sam. "Things will be brisker in the afternoon." But -his tone lacked conviction, and he could not resist the temptation to -add: "There's a cat crossing the road now." - -"Come out," said Minnifle. "This'ull none do," and when they stood upon -the door-step he sniffed the air of Whalley Range with disapproval. -"I don't like it and it's no use pretending that I do. It's got a cold -smell to me. It isn't homely." - -"I know what you mean," said Sam, diagnosing the trouble. "Wait a bit." -He gave the cabman an address and was careful to leave the window open. -They came to other streets where the scent of yesterday's fried fish -still lingered in the air and the nose of Mr. Minnifle inhaled it -greedily. "This is better," he pronounced. - -They had come to Greenheys, which, when De Quincey's father built a -country house there in 1791, was "separated from the last outskirts of -Manchester by an entire mile." It is by no means separated now, and good -houses of the mid-Victorian period are to be had cheaply because good -tenants dislike bad neighbours. Travers had one of these survivals from -an urbane past on his books and Sam hugged himself for thinking of it -now: that house had proved itself the whitest of white elephants. - -Mr. Minnifie, exhilarated by the spicy smells of Greenheys, was no -longer a timid excursionist looking only where his guide bade him, but -a house hunter hot upon the trail, with eyes that spied on each side of -their route. - -"Ah!" he called suddenly. "Stop!" - -The cabman stopped. "But we're not there," said Sam, rather blankly. - -"I think we are," said Minnifie, and got out of the cab. - -Sam followed, in that leaden state of mind which often precedes -inspiration. What had attracted Minnifie was a semi-detached house at -a corner, which the trams passed. Opposite were shops, and there was a -lively stir in the street. Certainly, Mrs. Minnifie would have something -to see here when she looked out of the window. - -Sam knew that pair of houses, and what he knew made him fear that he -would not, this time, rid Mr. Travers of the white elephant on his -books. They were good houses enough, but the people who had furniture to -fill them were not the sort of people who welcomed shops opposite their -windows and trams past their gate, so that both had been long empty. -Now, however, they were for sale, under a will, and a quick sale was -wanted that the estate might be wound up. They would certainly go -cheaply on that account, and the more so since two attempted auctions -had proved abortive. There had been no offers. - -And here was Mr. Minnilie plainly delighted, and those houses not in -Travers' charge, but in that of a rival agency! Sam felt depressed, then -as dawn follows darkness, lie thought of what Travers had said, -that Sam's word was as good as his own. It was going to be, and Mr. -Minnifie's money as good in Sam's hands as in those of Calverts', the -legitimate agents for this pair of houses. He stepped out briskly now, -the ardent salesman. - -"One moment, Mr. Minnifie. I haven't the key of this house with me, but -it is at the shop opposite. I will get it." His quick eye had read so -much on Calverts' notice board, but by the time he returned, Minnifie -had also seen that rival name on the board and mentioned the fact. - -"I know," said Sam. "The board has not been altered, but this property -is in my hands now." - -Which was true. - -The house enchanted Minnifie, who had made up his mind in advance to be -enchanted. And, of course, rooms may be in need of decoration, but good -proportions tell, even on a Mr. Minnifie. This house was very different -from the jerry-built villas of Whalley Range. - -"What's price?" he asked. - -"Three hundred and fifteen pounds," said Sam. - -"I said three hundred and I'll none budge." - -"If you will come to the office at six, I shall be able to tell -you," said Sam, naming a queer hour, seeing that the office closed at -half-past five. - -"All right," said Minnifie. "It's a firm offer at three hundred, and I'm -a man of my word." - -Sam devoutly hoped so. He was taking a considerable gamble on it. They -parted, and Sam, as usual, went home for lunch, but, not as usual, -returned with his cheque-book in his pocket. His accumulated savings -were five pounds, but he possessed a cheque-book. He waited rather -carefully until the banks had closed, then he walked into Calverts' -offices and offered them two hundred and fifty pounds for the pair -of semi-detached houses in Greenheys. They accepted two hundred and -seventy-five; and Sam drew a cheque for that amount, and received the -title-deeds in exchange. Then he palpitated, but it was, in any case, -safely after banking hours. Calverts could not present his cheque that -day. - -He was busy at five-thirty, when the clerks left, and proposed to -work late for a while, "to clear things up," he said. At six Minnifie -arrived, true to his word, and Sam could have kissed him. He had spent -the longest half hour of his life. He took Minnifie by the private -door into Travers' office, so that he should not see the empty general -office, and put him in the client's chair, himself usurping Travers' -seat. - -"Well, Mr. Minnifie," he said, "suppose I told you that the price is -still three fifteen, what would you say?" - -"I'd say 'Good-day,'" and Minnifie showed that he meant it by rising to -his feet. Sam went on hurriedly. - -"Ah! Then it's as well that I've succeeded. It has been an infinitude of -trouble---" - -"I reckon," said Minnifie, "that you're here to take trouble. Leastways, -if it's easy money in your line, it's the only line that's made that -way." - -"Oh, we have our troubles, like everybody else. This document," he went -on, "conveys the house to you. The price is three hundred pounds." - -"It's a bargain," said Mr. Minnifie, producing his notes, "count'em." -Sam counted feverishly, then made out a receipt. Nothing short of murder -would have induced him to part with that money now. - -"If you will meet me to-morrow at twelve at that address--a lawyer's--we -will have the conveyance put in proper form." - -"I've seen a bit of lawyers lately over this brass of mine," said -Minnifie, "and I don't like'em. They eat money." - -"But in this case," said Sam magnanimously, "I pay the lawyer's fees." - -"Then I'll be there," said Minnifie. - -Sam was waiting next day for the doors of his bank to open, and breathed -colossal relief when his three hundred pounds were safely in to meet his -cheque. He had a net profit of some twenty pounds, after settling for -the conveyancing, and he had a house to sell. Not long afterwards, he -sold it for one hundred and seventy-five pounds. - -The fact that one of the pair had been thought desirable by somebody -caused somebody else to desire the other: and Sam could only hope that -the new neighbours would not compare notes. If they did, it did not -matter; he had only obeyed the axiom of commerce, "Buy cheap, sell -dear," and it was not his fault that in the one case he had had to sell -less dearly than in the other. - -His bank credit was two hundred pounds. - - - - -CHAPTER VII--THE FLEDGLING CAPITALIST - - -|IN Sam's opinion, nobody had suffered. Mr. Travers lost nothing, -because the corner house had conquered Minnifie at sight, and he would -not in any case have bought the white elephant which Travers had for -sale. Calverts had got as much as they expected to get for the houses, -or they would not have sold, while the beneficiary under the late -owner's will was a charity, and Sam hoped that charity was charitable -enough not to look a gift-horse in the mouth: if it wasn't, it ought to -be. As to the purchasers, who had certainly paid more for the property -than they need have done, that was what purchasers were for. Why did -smart business men exist if not to exploit purchasers? - -All this was highly comforting, but to confess the need for comfort was -to admit to disquiet, and he found that it was one thing to argue in -this strain with his conscience, and another to boast to Anne of his -achievement. Women don't understand business, and he had an uneasy -feeling that the ethics of the transaction would not satisfy Anne. He -decided that he had better not tell her, that he must resist his impulse -of surprising her with the gift of a seal-skin coat, and remained a -capitalist under the rose. There was no hurry, and perhaps his next -stroke, when it came, would be under conditions that would bear the -limelight of her scrutiny. - -But repression was not all. Justify himself as he would, chuckle over -his gains as he did, the matter searched him deeply and reacted sharply -in two ways, of which the first began as that old expedient of -sinners, conscience-money. There are defaulters who find absolution for -themselves by sending notes, under initials, to the Chancellor of the -Exchequer, and by having them acknowledged with impressiveness in the -personal columns of the _Times_. That was not Sam's way: he did not do -good deeds by stealth, and his conscience-money did not go out of the -family. He used it philanthropically, but it was philanthropy and ten -per cent, to begin with, and in the end it was very much more than ten -per cent. It was the Chappie Bill Posting and Window-Cleaning Company. - -He thought that he could, without exciting Anne's suspicions, tell her -that his savings had reached ten pounds, and proposed to spend that sum -for the benefit of George Chappie. - -Inspired, perhaps, by his household gods, George was facing life -bravely, and won a minor place in Anne's good graces when he and Madge -produced a firstborn son, who had the remarkable quality of looking -exactly like the infant Samuel, whose name he bore. But George had not, -in her opinion, deserved Sam's generosity to this extent. - -"You're over-good to them," she said. "You've made a man and woman of a -pair of wastrels, and I'd let them alone to make their own way now." - -"Do you think it will be much of a way?" asked Sam. "They're the sort -that need help." - -"Aye," she said, "they'll lean on you all right. They're good at -leaning." - -"Well," said Sam, drawing himself up. "Let them lean." - -"Sam," said Anne, "I'm not fond, but if I told you what I think of you -for this, you'd have the right to call me fond and foolish. I like you -very well, my son. You're the strong man helping and supporting the -weak." - -She finished suddenly and a thought shamefacedly. She had praised -him openly and considered it a weakness in her. Sam put a hand on -her shoulder. It was not demonstrative, but his gesture was full of -understanding, and Anne turned rapidly away, shaking him off almost with -rudeness, taking very earnestly to her business of clearing away their -tea-things. - -Sam watched appreciatively through the corner of his eye. He relished -praise from Anne, even when, as now, it was not strictly merited. The -strong in Sam's philosophy did not support the weak, but the weak the -strong. He was confirmed in his belief that women could not understand -business. This, however, he reminded himself, was not pure business, it -was conscience-money, which ought not to be unconscionably reproductive: -so he bought George a hand-cart, ladder, bucket and leathers, and -exacted from him not more than ten per cent, on his capital expenditure. -In Travers' business Sam found opportunities of pushing George. A client -took a house, and Sam would suggest with a nicely casual air that the -windows needed cleaning. He would, to save the client trouble, then -offer to send a man round, so that George's connection waxed, and he -prospered to the tune of two amazing pounds a week, till the restless -Sam began to widen his view of George's potentialities. - -His eye for the main chance had always a useful squint which could see -money round the corner as well as in the straight high road, and he -thought that George, with his outfit of ladders, could see his talent -for height in other ways than window cleaning. There was, for example, -bill-posting, a trade whose mysteries Sam deemed it not beyond George's -capabilities to learn. - -The thing grew by degrees, from the first builder's hoarding which -Sam rented venturously for advertising space, to a comfortable little -business that ran itself by its own momentum long after he tired of its -comparative insignificance. With George, the start was all: he could -always plod where Sam had led, and as Sam had time to set the ball -rolling, and money enough to spoon-feed the infant business with -capital, George kept the thing in being by careful, steady management. -He hadn't boasted when he told Anne he was steady. - -Of course, Sam was impatient and deplored his active partner's -inactivity. He grew tired of the gradual increase, but, all the same, -the business was unquestionably successful, and he relished hugely his -sense of being the power behind the throne, if only behind a small, -conservative, so lamentably unambitious throne. Sam also was among the -king makers. - -The other, greater sequel to his reaction led to more pyrotechnical -results, and eventually to Sam's launch on his career. Nothing happened -at first, and indeed for so long that he was feeling himself between -the devil of the estate office and the deep sea of George's persistent -carefulness. The Chappie Bill-Posting Company was good enough for -George, but not for Sam: there were too many com petitors with too great -resources, while the estate office routine bored him, and opportunities -for piratical enterprise did not recur. - -He felt, at twenty-four years of age, and at two pounds ten a week, that -he was growing old in service, he who was not meant to serve but to be -served. - -But then--desolating thought--was he meant to be served? Had he lost, or -was he, at any rate, not losing the accent of speech and mind of those -who are served? He knew that his accent had touched pitch and been -defiled: those bawdy stories of his were told in the tongue of his -hearers, and there had been clients lately who had spoken to him, -when inspecting property, as if he were a clerk, and not a pleasant, -gentlemanly youth of obvious superiority to his present, no doubt -temporary, job. He had a sudden fear that the job might not be temporary -after all, and there followed a time when he was wholly bent on -self-improvement, when he abjured the narrow way of professional -text-books and read that he might become well-read, that he might -bandy allusions with those old school-fellows of his who had gone to -Universities, that he might, if he could not hope to shine, at least be -not outshone. - -It wasn't _pour le bon motif_, and he did not even pretend to like -the greater part of what he read. He crammed against the grain, and a -growing row of the "World's Classics" figured on his shelf as trophies -of his perseverance. Industriously he rubbed away the rust which had -accumulated on his mind since it took its not very brilliant polish of -the Grammar School. He took down the dust-stained Gibbon he had won for -reading, and ploughed heroically through it. - -That reminded him of another chink in his armour. A man of the world -must have the knack of speaking to the world, and Sam became a member of -the Concentrics. As Anne once told him, he had the gift of the gab, but, -except for his present fluent recommendations of houses to prospective -tenants, it was a talent he had buried. Now, however, he proposed to -dig it up and did it in (he thought) the ambitious surroundings of the -Concentrics, who were indeed as mixed a company as he could have found -anywhere, and on that account the better for his purpose. - -The common centre which was supposed to hold the Concentrics together -was a love of literature, but they tended to drop literature for -politics on the slightest pretext. There were literary enthusiasts -amongst them, but it rarely happened that one man's enthusiasm coincided -with another's. It did less than coincide. A member would read a -laborious paper on some man of letters, and the subsequent discussion -would be conducted by men who began their intelligent speeches by -admitting that they had not read a word of, say, Henry James or Lafcadio -Hearn, but that their opinion was nevertheless so and so. Whereas, of -course, nobody ever confessed to ignorance of politics. Politics is like -law, only more so. One is presumed by the law to know the law, which is -highly presumptuous of the law, because not even the lawyers know the -law, and they must often go to judges, at their client's expense, to -find out what the law is: and the "more so," as applied to politics, is -that while laymen hesitate to argue a point of law, and go to an expert, -they never hesitate to argue a point of politics, and _are_ the expert. - -Political discussions amongst the Concentrics were real and passionate, -literary discussions unreal and frigid; and as "social reform" became -a favourite shibboleth about this time, literature took a back seat -in favour of subjects about which men could grow emotional and their -oratory rhetorical. It was all one to Sam, who was here to speak, and -did his reading at home. - -He spoke often, so that he soon improved, and he practised the literary -allusiveness which was the purpose of his reading to such effect that -he attracted the attention of the chairman, who was the Rev. Peter -Struggles. - -It is not, strictly, fair to say that a man is handicapped through life -by a name like Struggles, because the legal process by which one can -change an undesirable name is inexpensive, but Peter had never thought -of such a move, and wore his handicap without being aware of it. In any -case, he failed in life. He had a round face, red hair, side-whiskers: -took snuff and messed his coat: was perfectly futile in practical -affairs and absolutely "a dear." His scholarship was not profound, but -he loved letters genuinely, He had failed steadily for thirty years -to run a private school for boys in a suburb which was degenerating to -industrialism, and late in life had taken orders, quite sincerely, -not in the least with the idea of helping his school with a new -respectability. It was, anyhow, beyond help, and a man who offered -tradesmen's sons a sound commercial education was presently to buy him -out. - -Peter Struggles, well in his fifties, became curate to a vicar of forty, -in the large, rough-and-tumble parish of St. Mary's. One says that he -had failed in life, and, by Sam's standards, he had, and even by the -working standards of his church. A man at fifty-six should not be a -curate with an income of some hundred and twenty pounds a year. But if -a man is happy at fifty-six to be a curate with that income? If he find -satisfaction in it? Snuff was his indulgence, and the chairmanship of -the Concentrics, who were not sectarian, his dissipation. For the rest, -Peter had made harbour. To the pushing educationist who had bought -him out, for a song, and now profaned his old school buildings with -shorthand and the rudiments of bookkeeping, Peter was a failure and -a pathetic failure. He was not conscious of failure himself, nor of -anything but a serene contentment that he had found, if late, the -work that he was fit to do. Through sheer single-minded, inoffensive, -unobtrusive goodness he came to be a figure in that parish, and a power. -Undignified in bearing, and careless in dress, he had a dignity of mind -and soul. - -Sam Branstone despised a worldly failure, here was a man of more than -twice Sam's years, with less money than Sam had, and, by all his canons, -Sam should have despised Peter. But he didn't. It was partly, no doubt, -other people's opinions that influenced Sam--the universal esteem which -Peter Struggles won--but it was by much more the innate nobility of the -old curate. Sam began his speaking at the Concentrics to impress his -fellow members, he ended by caring only for the appreciation of the -quaint, slovenly figure who occupied the chair. - -He got the appreciation he craved. Peter was shrewd enough to discount -Sam's rhetorics, and the flashy tricks of apt quotation: he saw Sam as a -misguided, self-seeking thruster who read only for veneer and spoke -only to impress. But, at least, Sam tried, and Peter could admire -perseverance. The thing was to direct Sam's perseverance well, and Peter -asked him to supper. - -Our man of the world was prodigiously thrilled. The honour was -exceptional, for Peter could not afford to be a host often, and Sam -was aware not only of its rarity, but of Peter's unique standing in -the parish: and, more than that, of Peter's worth. To be singled out by -Peter Struggles, and asked to sup, was, socially, a triumph. It sounds -absurd, and perhaps it is absurd that one good man should shine so -brightly by contrast with the fifteen thousand others of an over-crowded -parish, but that was why Peter was a colossus amongst the pigmies, and -why Sam Branstone was egregiously excited by an invitation to sup at -Peter's little house. - -Peter did not invite Sam to preach at him. It was the boy's mind rather -than his soul that was the target of his aim, and Peter's select library -to which he trusted for influence. Certainly the little meal of -cold beef and cocoa was not calculated to impress, nor the old, worn -furniture, with the gaping rents in its horse-hair coverings, through -which the stuffing poured. He handled books with reverence, and spoke -of them, but Sam was hardly listening. He was under fire from another -battery. - -Ada Struggles met young men at church functions, and spoke with them at -Sunday School, but she had few opportunities of greater intimacy, and -was not the lady to waste so rare a chance as this. Peter droned on -amongst his books and presently was lost in reading one. Ada lost -herself in nothing except a burning desire, to monopolize Sam. Books did -not interest Ada: getting married did. - -The trouble was that in the days of his school's comparative prosperity, -Peter had done Ada rather well. Perhaps as a schoolmaster himself, he -got special consideration over terms, but at any rate he had sent her to -a good boarding school. She had received the education of a lady, and it -wasn't fair, it didn't chime with the fitness of things that she should -now be the daughter of an impractical curate. Her case, to some extent, -was parallel with Sam's: the past of both had augured well, and the -future depended on their wits. - -There, however, the parallel ceased, for Ada had few wits, but she had -moods, and the reverse side of the moping discontent, which was endemic -with her, was the meretricious brilliance she now paraded for Sam's -entanglement. Ada was "all out" after her prey, in her best clothes and -her best, that is, her most captivatingly genial manners. - -Sam thought that she illuminated that dingy book-surrounded room. They -were not gay books with gilded bindings, but solid, well-worn volumes -of ponderous aspect. The books repelled and Ada invited. Youth called to -youth: youth answered to the call. - -He was obsessed with his idea of accent, and the worldly value of -superiority in speech. Ada's first appeal to him, though she did not -know it, was that she spoke well; her second was that she was -her father's daughter; her third, as she knew perfectly, was the -helplessness which she used cunningly to flatter his masculine -importance. She told him without a word that he was a strong, powerful -man, and she a flower which he might pluck and wear. And she did the -anemone business quite effectively. - -There was not much of Ada, and what there was was not remarkable, but -she was fluffy and frilly and feminine in the feebler way. She had on -something that was not silk but suggested the rustle of silk. After -all, it was not Ada's fault that it was not silk, or that her intimate -underclothing was of flannelette; she could only use the opportunities -she had, and they were few. - -But she had the prettiness, the rather silly and never lasting -prettiness, which accompanies anmia. - -It would not wear, and she knew that it would not wear. She was becoming -desperate. Sam was sent by heaven. - -He thought so, too. Old Struggles read "Marcus Aurelius," standing by -his book-shelf, utterly forgetful of his guest, and the guest thought -that Peter's preoccupation was also instructed by heaven. It left him -free for Ada. - -What he said to Ada and what Ada said to him were things of no -importance: their serious conversation was not conducted by their -tongues, but by their eyes. - -This is the sort of thing: - -Ada (her voice): Of course, I remember seeing you quite often in church, -Mr. Branstone. - -(Her eyes): And you found favour in my sight. - -Sam (his voice): Naturally, I always saw you whenever I went. - -(His eyes): It was for you I went to church. - -Ada (her voice): I'm glad that you were able to come in to-night. I am -often lonely in the evenings. Father is so wrapped up in his books. - -(Her eyes): Meeting you is the great moment of my life. I'm an unhappy -princess in an ogre's tower. Rescue me. Rescue me. - -Sam ( his voice): It was most kind of Mr. Struggles to ask me in for a -talk about books. - -(His eyes): Books be damned. I'm fascinated by the sensuous rustle of -your skirts, and I'm a hero sent to kiss the wistful look away from your -pleading eyes. - -And so on. By the end of the evening, had the unsaid speeches or half of -them been written down, Ada had evidence enough to have brought a -breach of promise action against a recalcitrant Sam. Only Sam was not -recalcitrant, but, on the contrary, ardent. It was, Ada congratulated -herself, uncommonly good going for a first meeting. - -Peter emerged from "Marcus Aurelius" with a gentle smile which lighted -up his undistinguished face. "Yes. Pagan but grand," he said, quite -unaware that half an hour had passed since he last spoke. "I'll lend you -this book, Branstone, and now".--he glanced at the clock--"I'm afraid -that I must turn you out. I'd no idea it was so late. How rapidly the -time passes when one is talking about one's books!" - - - - -CHAPTER VIII--ADA STRUGGLES - - -|THERE were moments during that night when Sam imagined that he was in -the stranglehold of a grand passion: times when he quite successfully -deceived himself that he burned for Ada. - -And certainly the experience, unique for him, of a sleepless night lent -colour to the belief that he was passionately in love, whereas he was, -in fact, merely attracted by a girl who had spared no pains to attract; -and what kept Sam awake was not passion but calculation. The affair, -indeed, was as broad as it was long: it had a slender basis of -mutual attraction, and a monstrous superstructure on each side of -self-interest. - -He did not "see through" Ada to the point of being prophetic about her, -but he did even from the beginning perceive that Anne was not likely -to be enthusiastic. But would Anne greet any daughter-in-law with open -arms? Was there born the daughter of Eve whom Anne would think the peer -of her Sam? He did not want to cross his mother, but a man must be a -man, and a mother's fondness and her jealousy of the intending wife were -things about which one had to be callous. The world, as Benedick said, -must be peopled. - -Anne would see eye to eye with him as to the practical advantages of -Ada. Ada was Peter's daughter. - -That parentage had, by way of discount, the defect of its quality. -Socially it was a great thing to be Peter's son-in-law, and not only -socially but ideally. Sam's admiration for the curate was genuine -enough, and he knew that Anne shared it. But there was the question of -money, and Peter had none. Sam kept his mother, and would have to keep -his wife. He saw in Ada an asset which he could ultimately exploit, but, -in the meantime, until there came into his mind the scheme which should -turn his association with Peter into money, he must reckon on a tight -period. Anne would see the tight period, but not the unborn, fruitful -plan on which he counted for their future. And he could not hurry that -plan to birth. His schemes came to him when he least expected them, -spontaneously. They were not to be forced by worry. - -Again, he reminded himself, there was no hurry. He had only just met -Ada, and was planning as if his engagement ring were on her finger. Not -that he had any serious doubts about that ring and Ada's willingness to -wear it, but she did not wear it yet, and there was time in hand, and to -spare, for consideration of these practical affairs. - -Meantime, he loved her, and love, according to the authors, was the most -wonderful thing in the world. He told himself very firmly that he loved -Ada, and that love was wonderful. Reiteration is so potent that before -morning he believed what he wished to believe. He recalled the soft -pressure of her hand when she said "Good night," the froufrou of her -skirt, her melting eye; and persuaded himself that Ada Struggles was a -pearl beyond price. - -He was perfectly sure that he loved her, and for proof there was his -sleeplessness. It occurred to him that as he could not sleep, and was -only thinking in circles, he might as well do something to hasten the -time when he could see Ada again. He could not return "Marcus Aurelius" -to Peter until he had read it, and if he returned it with unexpected -promptitude, he must be ready to face a stiff examination in it; -therefore he lit the gas and read "Marcus Aurelius" by way of serving -Ada, whom he loved. - -Hard service, too, for there was not much in Sam's philosophy which -agreed with the Emperor's, but two nights later he was ringing Peter's -bell with the book under his arm, an ordered prcis of it in his mind, -and some selected passages from it on his tongue. They were not selected -because Sam liked them, but because he thought Peter liked them. - -Peter was out, but Ada was in, and, curiously enough for one who was not -an optimist either by nature or experience, dressed again in her Sunday -clothes. - -She opened the door to him. "Father is out, Mr. Branstone," she said. - -"I only called to return him this book." - -"I do not think he will be long," said Ada promptly, who knew very well -that Peter would certainly be late. "Will you not come in and wait for -him?" - -He came, crossing his Rubicon. The unchaperoned intimacy of that night -struck both of them as a daring short cut to a position to which they -were not entitled--a thing properly done only by the engaged and the -maturely and securely engaged. Luck fought for Ada. - -"I'm afraid I can't stay very long," he hedged desperately. - -Ada sat down and crossed her knees. A neat ankle was effectively on -exhibition. "That chair of father's," she said, "is fairly comfortable." -Also, it faced Ada's, and he drew up another, less inviting, chair, and -placed it flush with the fire. Except by a side-glance, he could not see -her ankle now, and evaded that aphrodisiac, while Peter's chair, -though empty, completed the semi-circle, and seemed to give a sort of -countenance to their interview. Sam drew much comfort from that chair, -and tried to guide their conversation into literary paths of which the -chair would have approved. He discoursed of "Marcus Aurelius," and he -was very dull, but felt virtuous. - -Ada did not believe that it was virtuous to be dull, and mentally cursed -that _tertium quid_, the ghost of Peter Struggles, whom Sam had so -firmly established in his chair; but she saw that the pace was not to be -quickened here, under Peter's roof. - -"I think your knowledge of books is wonderful, Mr. Branstone," she said, -when Sam had exhausted his ideas about "Marcus Aurelius." - -"I never find time to read, myself. Whenever I have the opportunity of -recreation, I go out for exercise." The statement lacked the merit of -truth She never took exercise, but was adept at sitting in front of a -fire doing exactly nothing. The point was that in this house of the good -Peter, Sam's enterprise was burked, and she wanted him where he could -race without a handicap. "Do you ever go to Heaton Park?" she asked -conversationally. "I shall probably be going there on Saturday." - -"With--with your father?" asked Sam. - -"Oh, no," she answered brightly. "Saturday is sermon day. That is why I -am in the way here, although," she added pathetically, "I fear he often -finds me in the way. I am not bookish like you and him." She gave that -explanation suddenly, and it satisfied him. - -"I am not really bookish, either," he said. "Of course you won't be -going alone to Heaton Park." - -She hoped not. "I expect so," she said. - -Sam took the plunge. "Could I have the honour of accompanying you, Miss -Struggles?" - -"Oh, but you are so busy. I must not waste your time." - -"It couldn't be wasted with you," said Sam, and glanced guiltily at -Peter's chair, as if he had exceeded the limits of propriety, but he had -never seen Peter with anything but a benevolent smile, on his face, and -was unable to see him imaginatively now in any other mood. He took fresh -courage. "May I call for you?" - -"That," said Ada, "would never do. It would disturb father at his -sermon. I shall go by tram at about three o'clock." She rose. There was -nothing to be done with Sam in that house, but she pinned her faith to -Heaton Park: and not in vain. - -Allow for the difference in size, distance and the general scale of -things, and Heaton Park may be regarded as the Manchester equivalent to -Richmond Park. - -Once upon a time the Manchester Town Council had a magnificent -opportunity, and lost it. There are legends that they did not mean to -lose it, and that they did not lose it through any fault of theirs. But -they lost it. They lost the chance of buying Trafford Park, which lies -along the banks of the Manchester Ship Canal, and was bought by Mr. -Ernest Terah Hooley. It is said that Trafford Park, now a flourishing -and rather American-look-ing industrial town (even the streets in its -residential area are numbered, and not named, after the American plan, -and railways stray about the roads, _more Americano_), is the one -successful enterprise associated with the name of Hooley. That may or -may not be true: at any rate the Manchester Town Council missed its -chance at Trafford Park, and when Heaton Park, another old estate, came -into the market, the Council did not repeat their mistake. - -One goes, ascending all the way, through Cheetham Hill, the Ghetto, to -the heights of Crumpsall and the Park by a municipal tram, which -is admirably cheap or criminally cheap (according to one's views on -municipal trams), and, in any case, magnificently efficient: and at the -end of the ride, one finds beauty. One may find tea at Heaton Hall, and -pictures that overflow from the meagre Art Gallery in Mosley Street, and -municipal golf-links, but one finds also beauty. - -It is a rolling country, raised above the smoke, dotted with wood and -lake. Old gardens cling about the Hall, with rhododendron glades where -there are sculpture and pools, and the Park rolls free in open air that -is as clean as any air can be within five miles of Manchester Town Hall. -It, lacks of Paradise, and if one can see green hills from Heaton Park, -one cannot kelp but see the factory stacks that crown them or rise up -from the valleys, but beauty lingers here on the outskirts of an ugly -city secure against the jerry-builder and the ultimate defilement. - -Ada was going to Heaton Park. Lovers have gone to Heaton Park before Ada -and they will go when Ada has crumbled to dust. Ada went, and Sam went -with her. - -He went with her, not she with him: but if she led, he was very, very -far from admitting it, though it may have been his obscure, subconscious -knowledge of her leadership which made him outwardly assume the mien and -the gestures of a leader. He asserted, every inch of him, that he was -man, the conqueror, and she permitted the assertion and flattered it. -Leading, indeed, was not a habit of Ada's, who was born to be led, but -it is given to all of us to outstrip our nature on occasion, and this -was Ada's chance. A subtle skill was granted her that she might be -cunning with her opportunity. She was all calculation now, while Sam -forgot to calculate, and walked with Ada on his arm along the main drive -of Heaton Park. - -Romance kept step with him and put a radiant veil between his sober -senses and this witching hour: through glamour he beheld his Ada, and -saw that she was good. He soared to high ambition, either to die or -to possess the nymph, and now, that heady hour, to put all to the test -amongst the rhododendron bushes behind the Hall. - -There, by a patch of ancient turf, he halted her, and found a seat near -the pool where water-lilies thrive: a lovers' nook, love haunted. Who -knows what ardours of the old rgime, when lords and ladies trod that -turf, had passed upon the now decaying stone of that comely seat? What -ghostly lovers in satin and brocade stood round to bless them or to -mock? Wood pigeons cooed above them, calling the tune, and Sam danced to -it in an ecstasy of hot desire. - -She had the sleek self-satisfaction of a cat, the same unhurried -certainty that the mouse was hers to gobble when she chose. Ada was very -happy. - -But apprehension gripped him now. He had not known her for a week, and -she was Ada. Peter's daughter. He stood aghast at his precipitance, -then, with the feeling that it was after all a "stroke" (though a larger -one than ever before), and that he believed in acting promptly, cleared -his throat and plunged into speech. - -"Miss Struggles," he said, "I know that I have only made your -acquaintance during the current week, but I seem to have known you all -my life. It's because I used to see you in church, I daresay. I mean we -were not strangers when we met, and, anyhow," he continued recklessly, -"I don't care if we were. I'm not the hesitating sort. I mean, show me a -thing, and I can tell you right off whether it's good or bad. My mind's -made up in a jiffy: that's the kind of fellow I am. And when my mind's -made up, I act." - -Ada had given a little gasp at the phrasing of his opening--that "during -the current week," an idiom from his business correspondence slipping -in here to mark his nervousness--but he was fairly launched now, and she -purred gently like a cat well lubricated with butter. - -"Yes, Mr. Branstone," she said, "I think men ought to be resolute." - -"So do I," he replied. "And so I am. Quite resolute and quite determined -about you." - -"About me?" She turned innocent eyes wonderingly at him. "I didn't know -you were being personal." - -"Well," he said, "I am. I am," he repeated, and took her hand. - -"Mr. Branstone," she murmured, as one who sees a vision splendid in a -dream, and let her hand lie limp in his. - -He bent to her. "Can't you," he asked hoarsely, "can't you call me Sam?" - -She called him Sam, and he kissed her. - -"Ada!" He spoke her name like a caress. "Ada!" Her name was wonderful; -she was a miracle; Sam was triumphant love. At that moment he was -passionately in love, and he had conquered. He had pressed the lips of -his divinity, shyly, with a revealing inexpertness which should have -charmed her, who, being a woman, knew all about love while Sam was in -short trousers. It didn't charm Ada, it touched no deeper chord than -satisfaction at a good job well done. This was his first, his freshest -love, but she cared only that the fish was on her line, securely hooked. -He saw her face, idealized her face and gloried in her face: she saw a -wedding-ring, she was to be Mrs., she was to escape the book-ridden home -of Peter Struggles. Both had their moment then, but Sam, in his, loved -Ada, and Ada only loved herself. - -"Darling," he said, and sought her lips again She saw the thirst of -him--and used it. - -She drew back. "I do not think you ought to kiss me again until we have -mentioned this to father," said Ada Struggles, digging the hook more -deeply in her fish. "Not," she went on, as she saw him flinch, "that I -do not want you to. Only----" - -"Yes," he said, as she left it at the "only," and allowed him to -appreciate her infinite delicacy. "Yes. Of course. Shall we have tea at -the Hall?" - -"Oh," said Ada, "ought we to?" She was seen to tremble on the brink of -a delicious temptation, and with difficulty to resist. "I'm afraid," she -decided, "not yet. But father will have finished his sermon by now, and -if you came and saw him at once, then... then, Sam..." She eyed -him, languishing, and opened up for him the golden vista of a jocund -courtship--once Peter had been "seen." He came, obediently, to see -Peter, and she relaxed her standard so far as to take his arm down the -drive of Heaton Park. Indeed, just at the corner by the copse, where -they were hidden, he had an arm round her waist: his feet trod air, and -his head was with the stars. - -Ada was thinking, "If he gets the engagement ring to-night, I can show -it after church to-morrow." - - - - -CHAPTER IX--ADA AND A MAD TRAM-CAR - - -|ON general grounds--on the grounds, for instance, of anything so -out-of-date and out of reason as filial piety--Ada was quite indifferent -to Peter's "consent," and wanted it only to shackle Sam more firmly. She -had not much doubt that Peter would consent, as in fact he did, though -not so readily as she had anticipated. She did not exhibit an engagement -ring at church next day for the reason that she had none to exhibit. -Peter kept Sam too late for that. - -Of course Ada was wrong about Peter: she thought him a good man and -consequently a perfect fool, whereas his foolishness was imperfect, and -he was subject, like most unworldly people, to streaks of acumen about -worldly affairs. They come sometimes, these disconcerting fits -of perception, as if a dam had burst, and usually the times are -inconvenient to those who have reckoned on the unworldliness. - -Peter answered her expectation so far as to say, "Bless my soul," and -so far only. After that, he began an elaborate and skilful catechism of -Sam, which pretended to be a friendly talk about books, but was really -an examination of Sam Branstone, his character and disposition. At the -beginning Peter knew little of Sam beyond what his observations at the -Concentrics had told him, and Sam's volunteered remarks about his salary -and his prospects interested Peter to a very slight extent. At the end -Peter decided that Sam was to be trusted to make things easy for Ada on -the material side, and that spiritually he was not beyond hope. - -But he had not, spiritually, been touched as yet. Would Ada touch him? -That was the question for Peter, who knew his Ada. Ada could be led. He -admitted that he himself had failed with her, but he was not a strong -man. A strong man, with love as his ally, could lead Ada, could form -her, and Sam had strength, and, Peter thought, love. It depended, then, -on whether Sam's love for Ada, reacting on him, would quicken his latent -spirituality so that the lead he gave to Ada would be good. And on the -whole Peter thought there was a reasonable chance. He believed in -the power of love, he believed that love is God and God is love, and -confronted with his pair of self-confessed lovers he read their future -optimistically in the light of his belief. What else could Peter do? -They said they were in love, they appeared to be in love, they had -the symptoms of the state of love. He could only judge the case on the -evidence before the court. - -He could not know that with Sam the symptoms, though real, were -temporary, and with Ada an intelligent mimicry. He gave his assent to -their engagement formally and very solemnly. - -Sam left the house late, thrilling with Ada's "Good-night" kiss, but the -glow was quick to fade, and he found himself thinking rather of Peter -than of Ada, whom of course, he loved. If ever probe was gentle, it was -Peter's: nevertheless, Sam had felt the probe antagonistically. He had -shivered naked before Peter's inquisition, he had understood that he -was under examination, and resented it. It was, however disguisedly, -opposition, and the thought of that kindly opponent led him to think of -one from whom, also, opposition was to be expected, and, probably, less -tactfully. It led to Anne. - -Well, that was the fate of lovers: it was the way to deepen love and, -perhaps already a little doubtful of his love, he welcomed the idea of -Anne in opposition. It was curious that, while he thought of Ada as the -one woman in the world, he should expect Anne to be hostile not merely -to the idea of his marriage in general, but to marriage with Ada -in particular. It was hardly loyal to Ada, who should have reigned -unchallengably queen; and he could offer Anne the argument of the -advantages of being Peter Struggles' son-in-law. But, with it all, he -looked for friction, and Anne was not to disappoint him there, although -at first she took it with a calmness which disarmed him. - -He came in, of course, late, and ate his supper, silently hoping that -she would give him an opening, but Anne asked no questions, though she -had not seen him since early morning, and Sam was not often out for -meals. She asked no questions because she wanted to watch him first. It -was clear to her at a glance that he was in one of two conditions: he -was drunk or he was in love, and she wanted to make no mistake. If it -was drink she would move very promptly and directly: if love, cannily -and by devious ways. She found quickly that it was not drink. It was -more serious. - -Her silence awed him. "Mother," he asked by way of breaking it, "aren't -you well?" - -"Aye," she said grimly, "I'm well. Are you?" - -"I've eaten a good supper." - -"I noticed that. I'll clear away now." - -"Wait a bit. I've something to tell you." - -"I reckon it'll keep till morning. You mayn't have known it, but you -came in late. It's bed-time and beyond." - -"Still," he said, "I'd like you to hear this tonight." - -"You sound serious," said Anne, and sat. "What is it, Sam?" - -"It's something rather wonderful, mother." - -"It would be," said Anne. "What's her name?" - -Sam rose, astonished at her perspicacity. "You guessed!" - -"I'm none in my dotage yet." Anne was grim. - -"Mother, I hope you're pleased. You must be pleased. It's all so -wonderful to me." - -"I asked you her name," said Anne. - -"It's Ada Struggles. You know," he went on hurriedly, "how much we all -admire her father." - -"I know, but I don't know Ada." - -"You will soon," said Sam enthusiastically. - -"I will that," said Anne, and there was menace in her voice. She took -her candle. "Good-night, my son," she said, kissing him, which was not -habitual. - -"Is that all?" he asked. "All that you have to say?" - -"I don't know Ada yet," she said, and so was gone to bed. - -Peter and Anne went opposite ways in their search to know whether this -marriage was the right thing for their children's happiness. Peter -ignored the bread and butter problem, or took it for granted: and his -was the higher wisdom. He knew that Sam was not made of the stuff that -starves for bread; not in his body but in his soul was Sam likely to be -pinched. - -Anne took the earthlier view that happiness resulted from home comforts. -Ada, as she knew, was no shining beauty, and the better for that. Beauty -is skin-deep. But she looked frail, only so, for the matter of that, -did some of the toughest girls, and she took it that Sam had had the -horse-sense to make some preliminary inquiries before he committed -himself. Sam, it appeared, had not. - -Was Ada strong and healthy? Was she economical? Could she cook? Was she -her own dressmaker? And when she found that Sam could answer none of -these questions, she said ironically: "Well, at least, you've eyes in -your head. Is their house clean?" - -Sam could only say that he supposed so, and Anne looked witheringly at -him. "Yes, you're in love all right," she said. "They say love's blind. -You're leaving a lot to me." - -"Mother," he said, alarmed, "what are you going to do?" - -"I'm going to get acquainted with Ada," she said. "One of us must know -her, and you don't." - -"If you'll be fair to her," said Sam. "I'm not afraid." - -"I'll be fair," said Anne, and meant to be; but is a mother ever fair to -the prospective wife of her only son? Perhaps, and in that case Anne -went to Ada with an open mind. "After all," she reflected, "I daresay -Tom Branstone's mother didn't think much of me, though Tom was one of -ten and it makes a difference. It oughtn't to, though"----she pulled -herself up. "Anne, you'll be fair to the girl." She looked indulgently -at Ada's curtains and rang Ada's bell. - -But Ada was wearing silver bangles on her wrists and her shoes were made -for show. Anne had the sort of pleasure which comes from having one's -worst fears realized. She may have generalized too sweepingly, but she -held that only shallow people wear silver bangles and shoes whose aim is -daintiness and not durability. - -First impressions, at any rate, went heavily against Ada, but Anne -remembered her promise to be fair. It was possible that when Tom -Branstone took Anne to see his mother, that lady did not like Anne's -way of doing her hair. To each generation the symbols of its youth and -perhaps bangles on Ada were not more skittish than a cairngorn brooch -had been on Anne. - -"I have tea ready, Mrs. Branstone," said Ada. "Sam told me you were -coming." - -"Did he?" Anne was surprised into saying. She had not told Sam of her -intention and his guess at it and his warning of Ada had spoilt her plan -of coming upon Ada unawares. She wanted Ada unprepared and unadorned: -Ada at home, not Ada "at home." And Ada was very much "at home." The -room had been "turned out"--and so had Peter that it might be--company -manners and the company tea-pot were on exhibition, and everything was -formal and obviously thought out. And, as Anne had to admit, not badly -thought out either. Ada had not been to that expensive boarding school -for nothing; she had an air to awe a porter's widow. Anne didn't like -her trick of putting the milk in the cup before she poured the tea, -nor her dogmatic way of asserting that it improved the flavour and that -"everybody did it now." Everybody, did not do it, Anne did not do it; -but, again, perhaps this was the modern touch, and Anne had come to be -fair. - -She made her first score when Ada left the room for hot water. "This -room's been dusted to-day," thought Anne. "I'll see what her dusting is -worth." She put it to the test by running her finger along the top of -the books on one of the shelves, and her finger was very black. - -The only way to keep books clean in Manchester is the way taken by nine -out of ten people: they have no books. Some of the others put books -behind glass, like orchids, the rest have the habit of blowing hard at a -book when they take it from its shelf, and of washing their hands before -opening it. - -Anne did not know that. She kept Sam's few books clean by daily -elbow-grease, and now furtively wiped her dirty finger on her stocking -with the feeling that she had found out Ada. The dust on the books (and -certainly it was thick) confirmed the impression left by the bangles, -and Anne was not in the least ashamed of her spying. Sam had stolen a -march on her by warning Ada and she paid him in his own coin. - -And from then onwards the score rose steadily against Ada. There were -cakes for tea. Now the only excuse for cakes was that one baked them -oneself and Ada confessed that they came from Mrs. Stubbins and made the -further mistake of showing an expert's knowledge in the productions of -Mrs. Stubbins' confectionery shop. "Frivolous in food as well as dress," -was Anne's comment. Her dress, Anne learnt, had been made by Madame -Robinson. - -"She's dear," said Ada, "but quite French. And, of course, she comes to -church." - -No Nonconformists need apply; but Anne was thinking not of Madame's -religion but her bills. The employer of a quite French dressmaker called -Robinson, born Duff, was no wife for Sam Branstone. - -And by way of making Anne's assurance doubly sure, Ada let slip -something about being under the doctor. - -But Anne was not sanguine. She saw clearly enough that it was precisely -Ada's weakness which was her strength with Sam. Sam had been leant upon -by Madge and George, and liked it, as Anne herself, in that case, had -liked it. But that was a different case from this. Madge had the claim -of sisterhood; Anne could see nothing in Ada and Ada's weakness to give -her the claim to lean on Sam: and the leaning in marriage should not be -one-sided. Ada could give Sam nothing except herself, and Anne did not -think that gift worth having. - -Sam, unfortunately, did and Anne doubted her power of changing his mind. -Her first attempt, at all events, must be with Ada, and she felt cramped -in Ada's house, for the reason, perhaps, that it was Peter's house, the -shrine of his simplicity. She wanted Ada cut off from the defences of -the tea-table and her own familiar surroundings, and saying something -about the warmth of the evening, suggested a ride on the top of a -tram-car. - -"I often do it myself," said Anne. "It blows the cobwebs away." - -She did it as a matter of fact not often, for so it would have lost its -quality of a dissipation, but with a wise irregularity she escaped the -thraldom of her house on a tram-car. Tram rides were her romance, her -safety-valve, her glimpse at life. Six-pennyworth of tram is cheaper in -the long run than fourpennyworth of gin: both carry one away, but the -tram-car brings one safely back. - -Anne's lip tightened when she saw that Ada did not change the flimsy -shoes and that her hat eclipsed their flimsiness. A "baby" hat, of -imitation lace, from which her face peeped out like a drooping, sapless -flower. "Yes," thought Anne. "Men being men, that hat is clever. It's a -trap for fools and it caught my fool. Ada Struggles, you're dangerous." - -They took the front seat on the tram and aloud she said, using purposely -her roughest accent: "It's queer to think of our Sam marrying a lady. -I'm not saying he doesn't deserve it, but his father were a railway -porter and mine were a policeman. His sister was in service." - -"Sam wall get on," said Ada, with conviction. - -"I'm none doubting it," said Anne. "But he's had luck and it's a -question if the luck'll hold. Mr. Travers took him up and sent him to -Grammar School, and Sam didn't do too well there. He disappointed me and -he's not gone on as he might have done. The fight's ahead of him yet and -he'll need a fighter by his side. I've done my share for him this long -while and I'm getting old. I shall be glad of a rest, Ada. Sam's an -early riser and it's weary work getting up on a winter's morning to -light the fire and get his breakfast ready. Only that won't trouble you. -You're young." - -"Of course," said Ada, "we shall have a servant." - -"What!" exclaimed Anne, "on two pounds ten a week, with me to keep and -all? I wouldn't reckon on that, if I were you. Later on, perhaps. But I -know it can't be done at present, or Sam would have done it for me." -The idea of Anne Branstone with a wench about her house struck her as -humorous. Anne might have help some day--when she was bed-ridden: till -then, her house was her house. "No," she went on, "you can take it from -me that it'll not run to a servant. I don't know what his idea is about -me, whether he will want me to live with you or not. Likely not. A man -doesn't want his mother about when he's wed." - -"No," agreed Ada hopefully. Anne oppressed her. - -"No. And I can get on with a pound a week from him. That'll leave you -thirty shillings. Well, I've done it, so I know it can be done, though -mind you, it's a struggle all the time and double tides when the babies -begin to come. But of course I'll help you--with advice. I'm not for -forcing myself on you, but naturally I know Sam's ways and his likings -about food. He's a bit difficult at times, too, but that's nothing. All -men are and you'll know that, having had your father to do for. I don't -say Sam's finicky, but he likes what he likes and I hope you're fond of -the same things. It always turned me up to clean a rabbit, and I never -liked the smell of onions, but that's a favourite dish of Sam's and so -I'd just to grin and bear it. And I know you'll do the same for Sam." - -Ada squirmed helplessly. She could have screamed. Anne sat at the -outside of the seat and pinned her to it. The tram seemed a Juggernaut -car which drove implacably over her dreams: a prison where she was -tortured by a coarse old woman with work-roughened hands and an endless -flow of vitriol. She wanted to tell Anne that she lied, that the more -she deprecated Sam the more desirable Ada knew him to be, that her -grapes were neither sour nor to be soured by Anne's insane jealousy; -and she could not do it. The ride seemed more of a nightmare with every -moment that passed. The tram was a mad wheeled cage with a mad driver -and a mad guard. It left the lines and careered wildly into desolation, -and she was fettered in it to an avenging fury who would not stop -talking, but with ruthless common sense pricked all the bubbles of her -hopes. She shut her eyes and abandoned herself to misery. Each minute -seemed an hour. She thought that somebody was throttling her, that the -flying cage was her tomb, that vampires sucked her blood, and her naked, -drained body was shackled to her seat until the car, driving inevitably -through black space, bumped finally against a star in one consuming -smash. She opened her eyes to find that the tram had stopped at its -suburban terminus and that Anne was asking: "Shall we get down for a -walk or shall we go back by the same car?" - -So she was still in the living world, and with the consciousness of -it courage returned to her. For a minute she was silent, fighting her -demons off, catching at facts and weighing them. Anne was not a -vampire, but an old worn woman who had, curiously, the right to call Sam -Branstone son--Ada's future mother-in-law, and a quaint one too; one to -be put firmly and haughtily in her place and kept there. - -"We'll stay on this car," she replied. Its madness had departed. It was -a tram, quite eminently sane and usual. "I think," she went on, "that -you exaggerate the difficulties. I've no doubt that Sam will have more -money by the time we're married. You see, he has me to work for now." - -Not a simper with it either. Pure matter-of-fact statement, and the -truth of it hit Anne, the cool assumption that Ada as a spur to effort -was more competent than Anne. And this to Anne who had learnt algebra -for Sam, to Anne who had underfed herself that he might wear the clothes -a Grammar School boy ought to wear, to Anne who--oh, it was ineffable, -but it defeated her because she knew, bitterly, gallingly, but -undeniably, that it was true. This baby-faced chit, this fool in -petticoats was more to Sam than the mother who bore him. Queen Anne was -dead and Ada Struggles reigned in place of her. - - - - -CHAPTER X--GERALD ADAMS, SOCIOLOGIST - - -|ANNE called at Madge's on her way home. Madge's, in spite of George's -progress, was still the house which had been the premises of the -Hell-fire Club. Anne did not often go there and never without reason, -but Madge was at a loss to know the reason of this visit, nor did she -guess it when Anne unobtrusively dovetailed into The conversation about -young Sam Chappie a question which might have seemed irrelevant. "Have -you done anything yet with that spare room of yours upstairs?" she -asked. - -"No," said Madge. "Nor likely to, I fancy." That was the reason of -the visit. Anne was safeguarding her retreat, though she by no means -admitted that it would come to a retreat. Engagements do not invariably -lead to marriage. Meantime, hers was the waiting game and a rupture with -Sam at this stage was to be avoided. - -When he asked her, not too confidently, if she did not agree with him -about the wonder of Ada, she exercised a noble self-restraint, and all -she said was: "She's not the wife for a poor man, Sam." - -"No," said Sam thoughtfully. "I'd tumbled to that. And I don't mean to -be poor either," and so went out to open the dark chapter of his bright -success. He went to the Concentrics, not knowing that he was going to -his fate. He went because it was the night of their weekly meeting -and he had to go somewhere to avoid Anne's eye, but his mood was not -concentric. "I must get rich for Ada, rich for Ada," was the burden of -his thought--so early did he justify Ada's words to Anne--and it was not -a timely thought for a Concentrics evening. - -He had even forgotten that he had a special interest in this meeting, -where the lecturer was to be Adams, once Sam's pet aversion and -unbeatable rival at the Grammar School. He was reminded of it when -he found himself accosted by a young man whom he could not at first -identify. - -"Jove! If it isn't Sammy Branstone! Are you a member of these fossils?" - -"Dubby Stewart!" said Sam, as recognition dawned on him. - -"Reed's here as well, somewhere," said Stewart. "It's a gathering of the -clan." - -Reed and Stewart, it seemed, were both members, which is to say that -they had come once or twice some time ago and continued to keep up the -small subscription from force of habit or through sheer weakness to -stop paying it. Few societies indeed could exist were it not for -the enthusiasm of the attending nucleus and the subscriptions of the -nonattending mass. - -"We came to hear Gerald Adams make an ass of himself," Stewart -explained. "What a subject!" - -Sam had even forgotten what the subject was. "Rich for Ada, rich for -Ada," was still ringing in his ears. - -The subject was "Social Purity." - -"Which accounts," said Stewart, "for the size of the audience. They've -all come hoping for the worst. I know I have." - -The worst did not happen, or, rather, if it did, it was so skilfully -disguised that nobody recognized it as the worst. It was easy to mistake -it for the best. - -Adams was one part in earnest and two parts impish in the manner of the -superior person who is out for an intellectual lark. He had a constant -preoccupation with that which is known above all other questions as -_the_ social question. It was not a nice preoccupation for a young -man: it was, for instance, remote from the healthy exuberance of Sam's -Rabelaisianism. And, of course, Adams was wily: he wasn't the stuff of -martyrdom. He enjoyed, as an intellectual gymnastic, the treatment of -his subject so that it should at once shock his audience and win him -their approval as an honest man doing an unpleasant job from conviction. - -Sam agreed with Stewart. His old prejudice against Adams was strong -within him and he hoped Adams would come a cropper. That was at the -beginning, when Adams, with an egregious affectation of superiority, -began to read his lecture; but soon, quite soon, Sam changed his -mind and hoped for nothing but that the skilful skater would keep his -balance, on the thin ice. - -"Rich for Ada," and here, as Sam saw it, was a "stroke" indeed if Adams -were successful to the end and if at the end he would listen sensibly to -Sam. - -Adams was in little danger. He was of Oxford, London, the world, and his -audience of Manchester. And he stooped to conquer with a lecture that -was a mosaic of advances and retreats, of blazing indiscretions and smug -apologies, of audacities and diffidence. - -Sam watched the audience keenly, and it would not be unjust to say that -the audience gloated. Not all of them gloated, but as a whole, as an -audience, they lapped up Adams' lecture like mother's milk. He called -it frankness and gave unnecessary detail, he had an appearance of -honest indignation and a reality of bathing in mud with relish. It was -abominable but diabolically clever; indecent to the core, it artfully -evaded anything to warrant a police court charge of indecency; it was -foulness cloaked in piety, marching under the banner of Reform. He was -a crusader in masquerade, flashing beneath their guard of British -reticence a rapier whose hilt was a cross. - -Adams found a curious satisfaction in standing there, like a penitent at -a Salvation Army meeting, pretending to an immense personal knowledge of -evil which was, happily, impossible, and he delighted in the presence -of a cleric in the chair. The thing developed, for him, into an exciting -game, a contest of his wits with Peter's. He had carried his audience, -but the chairman sat aloof and dubious. If Peter saw through him, he had -lost; if not, he won. For Peter he read the condemnatory passages -with vibrant earnestness, and for Peter he read as if reluctantly, -conscience-impelled, the details of his evidence. - -Sam caught the infection, too, but hardly as a game. He hung on Peter's -judgment with a deep anxiety, watched Peter flush and shuffle in his -chair, saw him take snuff nervously, trembled at the moment when Peter -seemed about to interrupt, sighed with relief when Peter sat back -silently again and waited feverishly for the chairman's speech. - -There would probably have been little doubt about Peter's verdict had -Adams been an ordinary Concentric, lecturer and a member of the Society. -But he was neither, and was there by invitation. And he was not only of -Oxford, Peter's University, but brilliantly of Oxford, of Balliol, with -academic honours thick upon him. If Peter thought, as Adams spoke, that -he ought to call him to order, he remembered that Adams was a Double -First, and desisted. He couldn't be a hypocrite--because he had won the -Ireland. He was terribly in earnest now--because he had won the -Greek Verse Prize. He was single-minded, chivalrous, braving the -misapprehension of the scurrilous, open and honest--because he was a -Fellow of Balliol. - -It did not matter to Peter that Adams' father was the richest -parishioner in St. Mary's; it mattered even less that Adams was -exquisitely dressed in exactly the shade of grey appropriate to an -ardent crusader. ("Look at his damned clothes," Reed had whispered to -Stewart. "Hasn't he thought it out?" He had: his clothes were chaste if -his lecture wasn't.) But scholarship did matter to Peter, whose other -name was Charity, and once he had decided that Gerald was sincere, that -all he said was subordinate to and justified by high purpose, he was -generous, and the more generous because he had doubted. - -"The subject of Mr. Adams' lecture," he said, "is like nettles: if it -is not handled boldly, it stings. I have nothing but praise for the -courage, the down rightness, the earnestness of his treatment of this -distressing evil. I think that we have all been deeply stirred by his -instances of man's inhumanity to women. As a churchman I feel a special -responsibility and, may I say, a special gratitude to Mr. Adams for his -study of this subject. Medicine, as we all know, has its martyrs, -its research workers who sacrifice themselves for the health of their -fellowmen. Mr. Adams, who has examined this social sore so thoroughly, -at what cost in pain to himself only the most sensitive amongst us can -guess, deserves to be ranked with the martyrs of science...." And so on, -doubly handsome because he felt ashamed of himself for doubting Gerald's -honesty, and made amends. - -Adams had won his game, hands down. He thought the old boy gloriously -funny and he thought Sam Branstone, who rose when Peter sat down, -funnier still. Sam believed in striking while the iron was hot: he -didn't want Peter to have the opportunity of changing his mind when he -came to think things over coolly. - -Sam began by congratulating himself on the good fortune that had been -his in having been the school-fellow of the distinguished Mr. Adams. -Adams gazed hard at Sam through his austere pince-nez and was observed -perceptibly to start. "Gad," he was thinking, "it's that lout, the -porter's son." But he liked Sam's flattery very well. Sam, it appeared, -had been so deeply impressed by Mr. Adams' admirable, indeed eloquent -and moving address, and by the chairman's very just eulogy of it, -that he thought it would be a tremendous pity if so arresting, so -well-written a paper failed to reach a wider audience than that before -which it had been read. They had been waiting for this paper; its appeal -was wide; the urgency of its need, instinct in every word of it, was -emphasized by the chairman's remarks. He had, therefore, a practical -proposal to make. The paper ought to be printed, and if Mr. Adams could -spare him a few moments after the meeting, Sam hoped that he would let -him arrange the matter. - -He sat down amongst great applause. Under its cover Stewart whispered: -"You inimitable ass!" Sam looked at him in pained surprise. "I want to -see that paper in print," he declared indignantly. - -The debate meandered in the usual futile way. Few had anything to -say, but many liked the sound of their own voices and indulged their -preference at length, till both speakers and talkers had taken their -innings and Sam was able to go up to the platform. Peter had not changed -his mind and was complimenting Adams in his simple, charming way. - -It ought, no doubt, to have made Adams thoroughly ashamed of himself, -but it did not. It hardened his cynicism so that, when Sam came up, all -he was thinking was: "I've gulled the parson. Now to bounce the porter's -son." - -"How are you, Branstone?" he asked. "Glad to meet you again." - -"And I you," said Sam. They shook hands. "Have you had time to think of -what I proposed?" - -"As a matter of fact," said Adams, which is the usual way of beginning a -lie, "I'd thought of sending my little paper to one of the Reviews--the -_Fortnightly_ or the _Contemporary_." - -"Excellent," said Peter. - -Sam could have kicked him. "I venture to differ," he said. "The chief -object should be to reach as wide a public as possible. My own idea was -to do it by itself in the form of a----" he was going to say "pamphlet," -but altered it to "brochure." He thought it sounded more attractive. "In -the heavy reviews it would be read by comparatively few, and it would -not stand alone as in a brochure. It would take its place along with -other articles. And I have heard that contributors to the reviews are -not paid highly." - -Adams had not thought of payment at all, but he thought of it now, with -zest. He was rich, but the idea of despoiling the porter's son, who had -had the assurance to go to school with him, struck him as the crowning -move in a jolly game. This was, transcendently, his night for winning. - -"Oh, I don't know," he said, which was true. "I suppose I should get -about twenty pounds for it." - -"I will give you twenty-five," said Sam. - -"Sam!" protested Peter. He approached the motive (as he understood it), -but considered the offer reckless from a young man who contemplated -matrimony. - -"Twenty-five pounds," repeated Sam firmly. - -"Well," laughed Gerald, quite unable not to laugh at the idiot's -persistence, "if you're as keen on doing good as all that, I'll take the -offer." - -"Right," said Sam. "I'll settle it at once." - -He went to the chairman's table and made out a form of assignment of -copyright. He had a little knowledge of the law, and it was a dangerous -thin--for the other fellow. But both Sam and Adams went home that night -in a state of cherubic self-satisfaction. - -"What a game?" thought Adams. "And what an ass!" - -Curiously, the thoughts of Sammy Branstone were not dissimilar. He had -this advantage over Adams: that Adams had read his paper and had not -watched his audience all the time. Sam had watched the audience and -thought twenty-five pounds a cheap price for that paper. - -He slept on it, and awoke next day with confidence in his investment -undisturbed, but the news which awaited him at the office shook him at -first. It was one thing to see a profitable side-line in the publication -of Adams' address and another to be suddenly obliged to regard the -copyright of that paper as his one sound asset. He feared, in cold -daylight, that it was not quite sound enough for that. - -Yet what had happened did not come as a complete surprise. Sam knew -Travers' habits and knew that men of his habits are liable to die -suddenly. Travers had died in the night, and Sam was very angry. - -He told himself that he had no luck with people's deaths. His father had -died too soon for Sam, and now Travers was dead just when Sam had become -engaged, and when he had undertaken a speculation which, however high -his hopes of it, was after all speculative. - -An estate agent's business is largely personal and, if there is -no obvious successor, no heir apparent already in training for the -succession, is apt to fall to pieces when its head dies. The process of -disintegration in this case had set in long ago; drink had begun what -death now ended; and there was no heir. Lance Travers had decided for -medicine and was, on the material side, little affected by his father's -death, since Travers had bought him a practice a year earlier -somewhere in the South, and the neighbourhood was proving healthily -valetudinarian. - -The office was not a cheerful place that day. Men estimated their -savings and balanced them against the probable weeks of unemployment -before they found new places. A few of them, no doubt, might hope to "go -with" the business to whomever bought it; and they wondered who would -buy and which of them would be engaged by the purchaser. - -They fancied Branstone's chances, and so, in fact, did Sam, but it was -all in the air and exceedingly disturbing just when he had given himself -so much else to think about. Even if he did move with the business, it -could only be as a clerk. He lost the advantage of Travers' friendliness -and, besides, he was not sure that anybody would think the business -worth buying. Travers had no right to die. - -Then the thought struck him that he was taking it lying down. He, a lad -of mettle, was whining like these gutless clerks in the office. He was -betraying his lucky star. Death, even Tom Branstone's, had not been -forbiddingly unkind to him. Tom's death had led him indirectly to -the office, to Minnifie, the Concentrics, Ada, and he began to see in -Travers' death the possibilities of good. It might be the finger of -fate, pointing him away from the office which had served its turn to -a new dispensation to be arranged by the collaborators, Sam and -Providence, upon the rock of Adams' paper. - -They carried on the routine work of the office as men under sentence of -death do little, ordinary things and find a solace in them. Then, -late that afternoon, Lance Travers came. He had travelled since early -morning, had been home, seen his father's doctor and his father's -solicitor and was now come to see Sam. They sat in Travers' private -office, where the blinds were drawn, and in the presence of Travers' -son, who owed his life to him, Sam was conscious of a deeper feeling -than he had ever known before, he was no longer angry because Travers -had died, but mourned him honestly. - -"By the way," said Lance presently, "did my father ever tell you about -his will?" - -"His will!" said Sam. "No. Why should he?" - -"I thought he might have done," said Lance. "He made it last year after -he bought me my practice. He thought then that he ought to do something -for you, but he didn't expect to live long and he put it in his will. -There's a thousand pounds for you." - -Sam took it nicely. "I'd rather," he said, "that he were still alive;" -and, at the moment, he meant it. - -But he had been right. It was the finger of fate. - - - - -CHAPTER XI--UNDER WAY - - -|AS a simple matter of course, Lance offered Sam the first refusal of -his father's business, but was not surprised when Sam declined to think -of it. - -Sam was far more surprised at himself than Lance at Sam. Lance had never -looked upon estate agency as a desirable profession, whereas Sam had -been bored with its routine without losing his respect for its utility, -and only yesterday he would have jumped at the chance of owning the -business. He heard with astonishment the sound of his own voice politely -refusing the offer, but having refused he did not tamper with his swift -decision. - -The fact is, one supposes, that what might be called the quick-firing -part of his intelligence had absorbed and reacted to the fact of his -thousand pounds before the whole of him was properly aware of it. At any -rate, he refused, and, on reflection, approved his refusal. - -His speculation in Gerald Adams wore a different aspect now that he was -a capitalist. "Money," as he had remembered once before, "breeds -money," and he doubted if Travers' business, robbed of Travers' genial -personality, were fecund enough for the pace of money-breeding he -anticipated. Perhaps, too, there was something in the thought that the -Travers' agency was dead man's shoes, while, win or lose, the idea of -publishing Adams' lecture was his own invention. - -Another thing that happened to him with his legacy was the feeling that -he had regained caste; he belonged again with his old school-fellows. -"How many of them," he thought, "can lay hands at a moment's notice on -a thousand pounds?" and walked erectly through the street where, -naturally, since he had not met him in eight years until last night, he -encountered Stewart. - -"Hullo," said Stewart, "how's the patron of letters? And would a drink -be any use to you?" - -Sam hesitated. Did the way to the society of the Olympians lie through -the doors of the public-house? Stewart was undeniably Olympian: he -had the air, the manner, the clothes of well-assured success. He had a -lightness and a poise that excited Sam's envy. He had style, this youth -who might be anything, but who, Sam cynically thought, had probably -not paid for his distinguished clothes, while Sam was the owner of a -thousand pounds. He was, thereby, Olympian in quiet fact, which need not -be shrieked from the house-tops, as Stewart had, apparently, to shriek. -Sam _was_, and there was the possibility that Stewart only appeared -to be. It gave him strength to refuse. Not from principle, but from -economical prejudice Sam was a teetotaller. - -"I don't take alcohol," he said. - -"It's never too late to mend," said Stewart. "Still, there's a caf -here, and we'll drink coffee. It's bad for our hearts, but Balzac wrote -the 'Comdie Humaine' on black coffee, so there may be something in the -vice, though it isn't a habit of mine. Two black coffees, Sophie," he -ordered from the waitress. - -"If it isn't a habit of yours," asked Sam, "how do you come to know the -waitress by name?" - -"'My dear ass!" said Stewart pityingly. - -"Do you call them all Sophie?" - -"Only when it's their name. Your name is Sophie, isn't it?" he said as -the girl returned with their coffee. - -"Yes, sir." - -Stewart appreciated Sam's astonishment. "I know I'm showing off, but I -like it. If you see a girl with an idiotic silver brooch made up of the -letters _SOPHIE_ you can assume that it's her name, and not the name of -her best boy. Simple, when you know how it's done, like all first-rate -conjuring." - -"I hadn't noticed her brooch," said Sam. - -"I had. That's the difference. Still, it isn't fair to blame you. I'm -a professional observer." Sam took Stewart to mean that he was a -detective, but hadn't time to ask for confirmation, because Stewart -asked instead: "And what, by the way, are you?" And threw him into some -embarrassment by the question. What, indeed, at the moment was he? - -"Doesn't your observation tell you?" he fenced. - -"It told me last night that you're a considerable lunatic. Did you buy -that stuff of Adams'?" - -"Yes, I did." - -"Thought I saw you in the act as I went out. Obviously, then, you're a -tripe merchant." - -"I wonder," said Sam, "whether you could help me, Stewart. Seriously, I -mean." - -"In the tripe trade?" - -"I want very much to meet a journalist." He thought a detective ought to -know journalists. - -"But, my dear fellow, this is a caf. It isn't a bar. What do you want a -journalist for?" - -"I will tell that to the journalist." - -"If you want to start a paper and you're looking for an editor, you -needn't look further than me. There have been candid moments in my -life when I have called myself a journalist. At present, I edit the -_Manchester Warden_, but I'm open to conviction." He didn't quite edit -that paper--yet, but reported for it at six pounds a week. He did not -know shorthand, but he quoted Joseph Conrad and Henry James, correctly -and incongruously, when he wrote a notice of a music-hall performance. - -"I'm afraid," said Sam astutely, "that when I said a journalist, I meant -something very different from you, but I will tell you how I stand and -perhaps you will advise me. Last night, as you know, I bought Adams' -paper. I gave him twenty-five pounds for it." - -"Lunacy," said Stewart, "is a mild word for your complaint. Twenty-five -shillings would be a top price for it in a friendly market." - -"To-day I reached the office to learn that my employer had died -suddenly. You remember Lance Travers? It was his father, and with his -death, for all practical purposes the business comes to an end. Well, -you see my position." - -Stewart quoted Sheridan: "'The Spanish Fleet thou canst not see, because -it is not yet in sight.' And much the same applies to your position, my -lad. Its postal address is the Womb of Time." - -"That is true," said Sam. "And I may add that I am engaged to be -married." - -"I can admire thoroughness," said Stewart. "You omit none of the -essentials." - -"Now, with it all," said Sam, "I'm still too proud to go to Adams and -ask him to let me off my bargain." - -"And it wouldn't be any use if you did," said Stewart. "He'd laugh at -you." - -"I can believe it of him. But I'm landed with his paper. It has cost me -twenty-live pounds. I meant to print it, and I mean to print it, but -I mean now to sell it when it is printed." Sam left Stewart to suppose -that, had Travers not died, he would have distributed that pamphlet -free. "Money," he added, "is a necessity." - -He had taken the right line. Stewart's instinctive generosity was -touched, and he meant to give this lame dog a lift over the stile. "I -see where your journalist comes in. All right, Branstone, you can count -on me." - -"On you?" said Sam. "Oh, I couldn't ask it of you." - -"You didn't ask," replied Stewart naively. "I offer. I may edit the -_Manchester Warden_, but Zeus nods sometimes,'busmen have been known to -take a holiday, and there is a paper called the _Sunday Judge_ in whose -chaste columns I have written under the name of Percy Persiflage. Send -me a proof of that pamphlet and Percy shall stamp upon it. He will say -that no decent person could read it without being revolted, and the -pamphlet will boom. It's the Sunday-paper public that you want, and... -No, Percy shall not stamp. Percy shall bless. He will be moved to -admiration of Mr. Adams' earnestness, he will applaud the high moral -purpose, and will do the rest by correspondence. Get your sisters and -your cousins and your aunts to pitch in letters on either side, and I'll -see they get printed. I make this alteration because of the bookstalls." - -"The bookstalls?" asked Sam vaguely. - -"This problem of distribution," said Stewart impressively, "is the -most difficult question of modern life. The producer is here, you; -the consumer (we hope) is everywhere, and the problem is to bring your -pamphlet to the thirsting consumer. The answer is the bookstall, but -the bookstalls are cautious. When I say bookstalls I mean the right -bookstalls. You will never see your money back if the only bookstalls -which will exhibit your pamphlet are those which sell atrociously -printed paperbacked editions of 'Nana' and 'Fanny Hill.' You must -flourish on _the_ bookstalls, and they banned 'Esther Waters.' The -bookstalls, Branstone, are going to call for tact, and tact shall begin -with Percy's appreciation." - -"Or earlier," said Sam. - -"Earlier?" - -"I hadn't thought of the bookstalls, but this may help there, as well as -in other ways. I mean, as far as Manchester is concerned, and if we get -it on the stalls here, they can't very well refuse it in other places." - -"Manchester being Manchester, it isn't likely," said Stewart. "What's -your idea?" - -"Only this," said Sam, and showed him his proposed cover for the -pamphlet. - - - -THE SOCIAL EVIL - -Being an Address - -By Gerald Adams, M.A., - -Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. - -As Read before the Concentric Society with The Rev. Peter Struggles in -the Chair. - - -Stewart looked at it, then he looked at Sam, and Sam seemed to him very -little like a lame dog now. He whistled loudly. "You'll get your money -back, my lad," he said. "But this is rough on Peter." - -"Mr. Struggles approved of the lecture." - -"I wonder if he will approve of this?" said Stewart. - -"He can't go back on his word," said Sam. "Besides, I'm engaged to his -daughter." - -"The thing that troubles me," said Stewart admiringly, "is that I took -you for a harmless lunatic. I'm only a journalist myself, with one foot -in the _Manchester Warden_ and the other in the _Sunday Judge_. I'm a -Tory on Sundays and a Liberal on weekdays. I gave up honesty when I gave -up being young, and I thought I knew the ropes by this time. But when -I think that I took you for a guileless innocent, I want to go into a -corner and kick myself hard." - -Sam found this rather alarming he knew that his use, or misuse, of -Peter's name was cunning, but began to regret that he had shown Stewart -his pro posed cover. "But I get my review in the _Judge?_" he asked -hardily. - -"My son," said Stewart, "you do. I've spent sixpence on coffee and half -an hour on you. There's good copy in this and I can't afford to waste -it. I've my living to earn, and Gerald Adams deserves the worst he's -going to get. At the same time, I'll allow myself the luxury of telling -you that yours is a lowdown game." - -"We didn't make the world what it is, did we?" said Sam. - -"And neither you nor I will leave it any better than we found it," -said Stewart, prophesying rashly with the boundless cynicism of his -twenty-five years. "The worst of coffee," he went on, finishing his cup, -"is that it makes you thirsty. I'm going across the road for a drink. Do -you have one with me?" - -"No, thanks," said Sam. "I have to see a printer." - -"Oh, yes. Well, why not the Judge Press? I daresay I could get you in -there on the ground floor." - -"But they are not quite the right people for this. They print sporting -papers, and----" - -"You'll die from overheated bearings in your brain-box," said Stewart. -"You think of everything." - -Sam had, at least, thought that a printer (however obscure by comparison -was the Judge Press, whose works were a small town in themselves) who -issued a religious paper was better for his purpose than the printers of -the _Sunday Judge, Sporting Notions and the Football Times_. He went to -Carter, Meadowbank & Co., who were on the verge of bankruptcy, but had -the advantage of printing _Christian Comfort_ and the _Church Child's -Weekly_, and arranged with them to print five thousand copies of Adams' -paper. Carter, who was the whole firm, looked askance at the title, but -when Sam pointed out that the Rev. Mr. Struggles had approved of the -contents, Carter succumbed at once, and did not even attempt a protest -when Sam instructed him to print on the whole five thousand: - -"This first edition of one thousand copies is issued at sixpence. -The price for future editions will be one shilling. Samuel Branstone, -Publisher." - -Carter's dingy office was decorated with the chief products of his firm, -texts, the stock-in-trade of commercialized religiosity. Well handled, -there was money in texts, but Carter was an old man with declining -powers and a conservative mind. Meadowbank, who had looked after the -distributive side of the business, was lately dead, and Carter's -nightly prayer was that the concern might last his time. As things were -promising, it seemed unlikely, but here was Sam with an order for him -and no disposition to beat him down in price. Carter did not like the -instruction to describe five thousand copies as one thousand, and he -didn't like the subject of the pamphlet, but he wanted business, and he -couldn't conceive of a pirate sailing under the flag of Mr. Struggles. - -Sam rammed that home, feeling the man's hesitation. "I think it -probable," he said, "that Mr. Struggles will preach a sermon on -this pamphlet. Perhaps I might tell you that I am going to be his -son-in-law." - -That settled Carter, and he took the order. He knew, and was sensitive -to, the influence of Peter Struggles, curate. He knew that in the -parish of. St. Mary's, Peter's smile counted for more than the vicar's -weightiest word, and that while the vicar was unknown outside his -parish, Peter had authority throughout Manchester--an authority which -had lately growm through Peter's refusal of preferment to an easy living -in the country. It hadn't, of course, been Peter who had told of that -refusal, he had not told Ada. But it had leaked out, and Manchester, -which despises selflessness in men, honoured it in the curate; -Mancunians were flattered by his loyalty to St. Mary's and by the -thought that they were fellow citizens to saintliness. - -Emphatically, the name of Peter Struggles on the pamphlet was a _clou_, -but Sam had not told Peter of it yet, and he must do it. He could not -afford an accident, and Peter, he considered, was manageable. - -Ada met him at the door with a bright smile, and raised expectant lips, -but he shook his head, touch ing her shoulder tenderly, and passed -in front of her into the room so that, when she followed, her face -expressed the anxiety he desired. He entered himself as a man crushed by -grief. - -"What is it, Sam?" she asked. "What's the matter?" - -Peter closed "Plotinus" reluctantly: he never found time enough for -reading, and here was one of his few evenings interrupted. He had the -thought, feeling it ungenerous, that interruptions of this kind would -end when Ada was married. - -"I've had sad news to-day. Mr. Travers died in the night. It's... it's -rather a blow." - -Peter disdained priestly conventionalities. "He was a good friend to -you, Sam." - -"A second father," said Sam carefully, not taking the opportunity of -telling that Travers' friendship had lasted beyond death. Perhaps -he thought this moment too sacred for the intrusion of a legacy. "Of -course," he went on, "I've had all day to think of it, and of the -difference this will make to me--to us, that is, Ada, for you and me." - -"What difference, Sam?" she asked sharply. - -"It comes to this," he said dejectedly, "that I am out of work and -competition is so desperate. While he lived, I had his friendship behind -me. Now--I don't say that I'm afraid to stand alone. No doubt it will -be good for me eventually, but, Ada, you see how it may postpone our -hopes." - -Ada saw it. "Plotinus" took that opportunity of slipping from Peter's -knee, and Peter saw it, too, and sighed. "Oh, Sam!" said Ada. - -"And," said Sam, looking at Peter with a fine affectation of guilt, -"there is my recklessness of last night. In my then circumstances, it -was extravagant. To-day it looks worse than that." - -"You couldn't know," said Peter kindly. - -"No," Sam agreed. "I couldn't know, and I have the feeling now that I -must abide by what I did." - -"Very proper, Sam, but Mr. Adams is not poor and I should think that if -you were to go to him------" - -"Oh, please," said Sam, "please don't press me to do that. A bargain, I -feel so strongly, is a bargain and should be kept at all costs." - -Peter felt silently ashamed of himself. "You are perfectly right," he -said. - -"Well," said Sam, "that's how I feel, but in a sense I'm landed with the -thing and I propose to go on with it. As I see it--and I know there's -a certain amount of inappropriateness in thinking at all of these -practical affairs with my benefactor so recently dead, but I must, I -must----" he looked at Ada and it was understood that his thought for -her excused all--"As I see it, it's a case for going on and trying to -pull the chestnuts out of the fire, so to speak. I shall print that -paper, and the good that I hoped to do will not be lost because my -circumstances have altered, but I shall make a small charge for it to -cover expenses as far as possible. And as I naturally want it to sell -well, I had the idea of stating on the cover that it was first read at -the Concentrics under your chairmanship. The point of that is that all -the members were not there last night; it will call their attention -to it; and they will, I hope, buy. It makes certain of a few reliable -purchasers." - -"Quite, quite," said Peter. "It's an excellent idea. Though I can hardly -suppose that mention of my name has any value, the name of the society -should certainly help." - -His modesty was quite incurable. He had not the faintest notion of the -wide-spread influence of Peter Struggles. "I have thought of little else -all day but Mr. Adams' paper. I wondered if it was my duty to speak of -this terrible subject from the pulpit. The Church ought not to be silent -or it may be thought to acquiesce." - -Sam felt his heart leap within him. "Adams thought frankness best," he -said. - -"Yes, yes, at the Concentrics. But there are difficulties for me, -and perhaps I shall speak only to the Young Men's Class at the-Sunday -School. Though that," he reflected, "is perilously near to compromise." - -"But what is it?" asked Ada. "What are you talking about?" - -Sam was silent. So was Peter, and the silence grew till he felt it a -reproach. He looked at Sam. "You see?" he said. "That is the dilemma -of the Church. I shall speak to the young men, and, after that perhaps, -perhaps----" He glanced at Ada. - -"No," he finished decidedly, "I must leave it at that." He was -fifty-six, and most of his life had been lived under Victoria the Good. - - - - -CHAPTER XII--DROPPING THE PILOT - - -|ANNE lived for Sam: and if she rarely showed it, if, for instance, it -appeared sometimes that she lived to make her house the cleanest in the -row, that was no more than a symptom of her stoicism. She lived for Sam, -and he knew it. She belonged to a race which hates ostentation like the -devil and keeps its feelings veiled behind a grim reserve. It conceals -emotion as a hidden treasure and wears a mask which strangers take to -indicate a want of sensibility. She had not the habit of caressing -Sam; she chastened whom she loved; and Sam was very well aware of the -strength of Anne's love. - -She was ready, at the proper time, to give him to the proper woman, but -she held that Ada was not the woman nor this the time. She was ready to -go her ways from Sam, and from life itself, when he made a marriage -of which she could approve, but she was not ready to leave him to Ada -Struggles of whom she disapproved. She was not ready to die for the -likes of Ada Struggles. Let Sam marry Ada, and Anne, meant to live, -because some day he would have need of her and, when the day came, she -would be there. - -Now, Sam would have been pleased if he could have told Anne about the -pamphlet and the legacy. He had hoped after the Minnilie affair that his -next "stroke" would be one of which he could tell Anne, but he did -not see this as tellable. She would naturally ask what the pamphlet was -about, and if Peter could not speak of it to his daughter, Sam could -speak of it even less to his mother. And as to the legacy, what was the -use of mentioning that to a woman who would point out that security was -only to be had with two and a half per cent? Which wasn't at all Sam's -notion of the uses of a thousand pounds. - -After all, he was grown up and a man does not tell his mother -everything. But unless he is a fool, he tells her the things which she -is bound in any case to find out, and if he had foreseen the certainty -of her finding out he would, not being a fool, have told her these. -He did not foresee, because Anne did not read newspapers, but she had -neighbours who did and who told her, with comments, of the storm which -presently broke out in the columns of the _Sunday Judge_, and of Mr. -Travers' will, which received a small paragraph in the paper when it was -proved. - -"There was a time when you and me didn't go in for secrets," she said to -him. "You've not had much to say to me of late and I've not seen much of -you, either, with the hours you're keeping, but I'd put it down to love. -I know a man's not rational when he's courting, but it seems there's a -lot about my son that I've to learn. Why didn't you tell me about Mr. -Travers? Did you think I'd steal the money off you?" - -"Of course not, mother, but I meant to come to you with a finished tale, -not one that's only just begun. I'm engaged in a business affair of -which I was going to tell you when it was complete." - -"_Yes_," she said, "I see. You're risking your money. If you came out on -the right side, you'd tell me about it, and if you lost you'd forget to -tell me. Are you losing?" - -"It's early days to say." - -"Then maybe I'm still in time to nip this in the bud. What's this about -the _Sunday Judge?_" - -"I Have you seen it?" he asked. - -"Aye. You're the talk of the street." - -"That's splendid," he let slip before he was aware of it. - -"Splendid! There's a gentleman writing to the paper to say that you're -trading in immorality." - -"I wrote that letter myself," grinned Sam. - -"You did what?" - -"I'm afraid I shall never make you understand." - -"I doubt you won't. Lying to me like that. Expecting me to believe you -write to the paper about yourself and call yourself hard names. And the -letter's signed 'Truth-teller,' too. It's printed in the paper that my -son has lifted the lid from the cesspool and let loose a smell to make -decent people vomit." - -"Yes. I know. Advertising is a coarse art." - -"Your name's blackened for ever. And it's my name, Sam, and the name -your father gave me. It's the name of honest folk and----" - -"Mother, mother, don't I tell you that it's all advertisement?" - -"What you tell me and what I can believe are coming to be two different -things. I know what an advertisement in the paper is and I know what a -letter is. This is a letter." - -Sam felt the hopelessness of further argument. - -She had a simple-minded faith in the integrity of newspapers and the -printed word, but he could at least show that the word could contradict -itself. "Very well," he said, "it's a letter, and so is this." He took -a copy of the paper from his pocket. Stewart had kept his word, no great -feat since he had a good idea of what his editor supposed the Sunday -public to want, and a column of fervent correspondence flared under the -heading of "The Social Evil.--Is the Pamphlet Justified?" Sam chose a -letter which described Adams as a crusader and Branstone, his publisher, -as a high-souled social reformer courageously risking misapprehension -for principle and the right, calling the endorsement of the Rev. Peter -Struggles to witness in proof of his irreproachable motives. "Well," -said Sam, "am I to be misapprehended after all, and by you?" - -"You told me you wrote the other letter," she said. "Don't you mean that -you wrote this one?" - -"I don't," he said truthfully. He wrote his, attacking himself, on one -side of Stewart's desk, while Stewart at the other defended him. It had -been great fun. - -"And what," she asked, "is the business affair you say you're engaged -on?" - -"Why," he said unguardedly, "it's this." - -"Then I don't misapprehend at all, my son. I apprehend very well. And -you've worked Peter Struggles into it. Was that why you got engaged to -Ada?" - -"Mother!" he protested. "Doubt me if you like, but you must not doubt -Mr. Struggles. He surely is above suspicion." - -"He's keeping bad company just now," said Anne, "and I doubt you've been -too clever for him." - -Sam chose to be offended. "Is that what you think of me?" he asked. - -"That you're clever. Aye. I think that all right. I've known it since -the time when you tricked a parcel of schoolboys out of a house of -furniture and put George Chappie into it. You're clever in the wrong -places, Sam. When you were at school, you were clever out of school. -You're at business now and you ought; to be clever in honesty, and I've -the notion that you're being clever in dishonesty." - -"Of course," he said, "this only shows how right I was not to tell you. -It's the old story. Women don't understand business." - -"I know. Business is a pair of spectacles that makes black into white, -but I don't wear spectacles myself. Are you going to tell me what you're -doing with that thousand pounds?" - -"I told you it isn't decided yet. But if the sales of that pamphlet go -up this week as they did last, I'm going into the publishing business -with it." - -"So that you can publish more of the same sort?" - -"If I can get them. There's a lot of money in it." - -"Sam," she said earnestly, "is that all you're caring about?" - -"You told me yourself that Ada was not the wife for a poor man." He -considered that a very neat score, to seem to make Anne responsible, but -Anne was not to be deceived by any such seeming. As she saw it, Ada had -corrupted Sam, Ada was the motive of this misuse of his cleverness; and -the bitterness for Anne was doubly poignant. She believed in Sam, with -a faith which had never swerved in spite of her disappointment in his -school career; but she realized now that he had been marking time in -Travers' office, that it was Ada and not she who had quickened his -energies to rapid action. Ada had quickened them, where under Anne they -had lain dormant but the quickening had been corrupt. It came from Ada, -poisoned at the source, and took to poisonous ways. - -They had touched bottom now and reached essentials. "Sam," she said, "I -was joking like when I said a man's not rational when he's in love. But -it was a true word spoken in jest. You're not rational or you wouldn't -be doing these things and making a byword of the name of Branstone, and -the reason you're not rational is Ada. If you were in love with a good -woman, you could no more do dishonourable things than fly. But you're in -love with a bad woman and it leads to bad results. Sam, do you think I -like to tell you that you've made a mistake? And do you think I don't -know? Lad, lad, I love you, and I've never reckoned myself a fool. -Choose now, I'm not the sort of fool to be jealous just because you -get wed. I'd none be jealous of the right lass, Sam. I'd take her and -welcome her and know she had a better right to you than me. But Ada -Struggles has no right: she's mean and grasping and she's small in every -way there is. She's----" - -"Stop, mother. Don't forget that I am marrying Ada." - -"And nothing that I say will alter you? Sam, she'll go on as she's begun -by sending you to this." She put her hand on the lurid polemics of the -_Sunday Judge_. "She'll drive you down and down. You may make money and -you may be rich, but there'll be a curse on your riches and on all you -do, and Ada Struggles is the name of the curse." - -Sam attempted a small levity. "That will be all right," he said. "She's -going to change her name." Anne shook her head. "A change of name'ull -none change Ada's nature. It's the best part of your life that's before -you, and life with Ada spells ruin. I'm not telling you what I think. -It's what I know, and I ask you, Sam, to heed my words." - -"I'm heeding them," he said, "but I know you're wrong." - -"That's the last you've got to say?" - -"I'm sorry we don't agree, mother." - -"Agreeing's nowt," she said, "and I'm nowt against your happiness. See, -Sam, I'll prove it. There's a thought at the back of your mind that I've -nothing against Ada but a grudge because she's come between you and me. -I say that girl's no good for you, and I say I'll do anything to force -you to see it. There's nowt of myself in this and maybe this will make -you believe it." - -There was a good fire in the room and she put her hand into it. Sam was -alert enough to drag her away before much damage was done, and he had -oil on the hand in a moment. - -"Don't fuss," said Anne, "but tell me what you think." - -"I think," he said, "that you're plumb crazy--with jealousy." - -It was not craziness, but fanatic devotion to an idea: and the idea -was Sam, Sam's happiness, Sam's future. She put her hand into the -fire hoping to convince, and she would have sat on the fire if she had -thought the larger act would carry a fuller conviction. But he did not -need to be convinced that she objected to Ada; the point was that -her objections were unfounded, and, in the face of Ada's sublime and -stunning merits, idiotic. - -One cannot put a hand into the fire without suffering for it, and Anne -was suffering acutely. Her face was drawn with pain and her lips were -trembling uncontrollably, but her voice was firm. - -"I've done my best to save you, Sam. If you've nothing better to say -than that, you and me have come to a parting." - -"Then," said Sam, "we've come," and turned his back on her. He thought -she would come round, that she would get over her attack of frenzied -jealousy. It was idle threat to talk of a parting. Why, she was -dependent on him, and in more ways than one. He housed and kept her, -but, more than that, she needed him. His presence was the breath of life -to her. He knew that, and he let her go! - -Of course, he thought she would come back, with a sharp lesson well -learnt. She had to learn that he was grown-up, of an age to act for -himself and choose and think without her tutelage. Only, she did not -come back. She went to Madge and stayed with Madge; and the terms on -which she stayed were her terms. "I furnish the room," she said, "and I -pay you a rent for it. Also, I pay for what I eat." - -She paid. At the age of fifty-two the mother of Sara Branstone, of -Branstone and Carter, and the mother-in-law of George Chappie, of the -Chappie Window-Cleaning and Bill Posting Company (a smaller affair -than its name, but the source of a regular five pounds a week), was a -charwoman on three days out of the seven, and it was not lack of offers -which limited her to three days, but the fact that she paid her way on -three days' result. She kept other people's houses as clean as she had -kept her own. - -It was suggested to George Chappie that it was hardly decent in him to -allow his mother-in-law to go out charring at her age--a prosperous man -like him. "I know," he was reported to have replied, "and we've tried -all ways we can. But you can't argue with Mrs. Branstone." - -"She's one of the old sort, isn't she?" said his gossip, who, perhaps, -endured a mother-in-law of another kind. - -"All that," said George succinctly. - - - - -CHAPTER XIII--THE INTERMITTENT COURTSHIP - - -|ONLY by long service does one become an artist, but one becomes married -by a simple ceremony. It is the tragedy of marriage, which is the -most difficult of all the arts, that most people come to it without -apprenticeship. Perhaps the popularity of widows as brides is due to the -fact that the widow is a widow: that she has been broken in to marriage: -that she has not everything to learn: that one, at any rate, of the -contracting parties, is expert. There is much to be said for the policy -of the "trial trip." - -Courtship, if intimate enough, may be a fairish substitute, bowdlerized, -as it were, for a "trial trip," but when Sam married Ada he knew -pitiably little about her. - -He thought that she was wonderful. Not only had he to think it, but he -actually did think it. He had to think it because only for a prodigy -among women could he have treated his mother as he did. He had thought -her crazy when she put her hand into the lire, but he knew it was -heroic. If she were crazy, it was for love for him, and at the core, he -loved her too and felt ashamed of himself, but Ada stood between them, -and he was not going to give up Ada. Then he was busy, time wore on, -custom blunted the prick of conscience, and it finally became a habit -either not to think of Anne at all, or to think comfortably of her as -happy enough with Madge. - -And he actually thought Ada wonderful because the conditions of -his courtship fought for her. He was visibly prospering; he liked -prosperity; it was Ada who had initiated his prosperity; and she was -glamorous for that. Again, he was very busy in those days with the first -steps of his new business, too occupied to play the diligent lover, and -saw her very fitfully. So seen, she did not lose the wonder of surprise, -but came upon him freshly with each of their meetings, able to parade -for each some new attraction from her slender stock of charm. She kept -their intercourse egregiously correct, and he thought her mystery was -infinite. She hid her shallowness behind affected modesty, knowing that -an intimate courtship would discover to him that there was nothing to -discover, and attracted by aloofness. It was immensely clever in its -short-winded way: a cleverness that lasted the course of courtship, -but evaporated when the tape--the altar--was reached. It did not seem -necessary to Ada to go on being clever once that ring was on her finger. -She was married, she had achieved: she was clever for the spurt, and -had no cleverness left, for the Marathon Race. And Sam had many -preoccupations in those days which prevented him from thinking too much -about Ada. - -If he was dull about his courtship, his wits were sharp enough for other -matters. He had the satisfaction, almost from the day of its issue, of -seeing the pamphlet sell steadily. Very quickly it ceased to be a case -of getting his money back, and became merely a question of how many -cents per cent he was going to make. His first edition of five thousand -(the _soi-disant_ thousand) was rapidly exhausted, and the presses of -Carter Meadowbank worked overtime to cope with the demand. He cast bread -upon the waters by sending copies to every name in the Clergy List and -every Member of Parliament; and did not cast in vain. Free advertisement -was lavished upon him. Somehow, he had found one of those times when -the social conscience is stirred: he published, without knowing it, -opportunely, and the diabolic cleverness of Gerald Adams' writing -steered him safely past the rocks of the Public Prosecutor. It seemed -only to stimulate demand when he raised the price to a shilling. - -He had no further trouble with the pamphlet. It sold itself, but sitting -still watching the wheels go round did not appeal to Sam, who had a -thousand pounds to multiply. He hadn't quite the hardihood to -believe that he could multiply his thou sand as rapidly as he had the -twenty-five which he paid Adams, but he felt that he was launched as a -publisher and had nothing to publish. - -His thoughts were diverted from that solecism one day when he went into -Carter's printing-office to speed up the foreman. The foreman admitted -that the pace could be improved. "But I dunno, sir, that the boss wants -it improved. There's nothing in to follow this job of yours. You might -say you've been the saving of Mr. Carter." - -Sam was thoughtful for a minute. He had not looked upon himself as the -saviour of Mr. Carter and did not appreciate that character when it was -thrust upon him. He went into Carter's office. - -"This little tract of mine," he said ("tract" seemed the light -description in that text-hung room), "is selling remarkably well, and -the demand increases. Now, I've nothing to say about the past.-I came in -here a total stranger and you quoted me accordingly. But it's only fair -to warn you that I have gone into prices with other printers and I may -find it necessary to make a change." - -Carter made no effort to hide his dismay. "I hope you won't do that, Mr. -Branstone. At least, give me a chance of revising my price." - -"Once bitten," said Sam, "is twice shy, and you don't deny that you -bit." - -"But surely business," argued Carter, "is business." - -"It is," said Sam grimly, "and if you'll answer me a few questions on -the understanding that this is a business interview and I'm not being -impertinently inquisitive, I shall be obliged." - -"I'll do my best," said Carter. - -"Thank you. How old are your printing-presses?" - -"Twenty years." - -"Consequently they are almost hopelessly out of date?" - -Carter had a tenderness for those presses. They had been young when he -was young, were bought when the world smiled on him and his business -had its hedyay. They had kept him and he could not be disloyal now. "I -believe that they have printed your tract efficiently, Mr. Branstone," -he defended them. - -"Oh, there's life in the old dogs yet," said Sam. "I'm not proposing to -make scrap-iron of them." - -"As they belong to me," said Carter tartly, "it would not make such -difference if you did propose it." - -"Therefore," said Sam, "I don't propose it--yet. Please remember that -I'm talking business. Do you care to tell me what that text cost to -produce and what you get for it?" - -Carter did not care, but, though he wondered at himself, he told. "And -that?" Sam asked, pointing to another; and again Carter told. - -"Then," said Sam, "there are two religious papers which you print for -the proprietors. What----?" - -"Young man," interrupted Carter, "are you proposing to buy my business?" - -"No," said Sam coolly, "only to become your partner in it. What profit -were you going to tell me you made on the papers?" - -Carter told: he was too stupefied to do anything else. "Um," said Sam. -"It isn't much." - -"They are a good work," said Carter, and Sam looked at him sharply, but -the old man was perfectly sincere. It was good work to print religious -magazines and he did it for next to nothing. - -"Well," said Sam, "thank you. Now I won't mince matters: When I came -along with my--tract, I enabled you to postpone filing your petition, -but it was only a postponement, and if you'll look facts in the face the -one big fact for you is bankruptcy." - -"The Lord will provide." Carter had lived from hand to mouth for many -months in that belief. - -"If you like to look at it that way. He has provided: He has provided -me. I will make you a good offer, Mr. Carter. I will introduce five -him dred pounds capital into the business for a halfshare in the plant, -goodwill and future profits of this concern. That is, the printing -business. What I, as publisher, do has nothing to do with you." - -"... I must think it over," said Carter; but they both knew that he had -already decided to accept. - -"The Lord," Carter was thinking, "_has_ provided." Sam, on the -contrary, was thinking, "I may or may not be a fool to go into this -without getting an accountant's report on the books, but I believe in -rapid action, and if I'd offered too high a price I'm certain that he's -imbecile enough to have told me." - -It remained to find something to print, and he wanted Stewart's advice, -but, with the idea of being first on the side of the angels, went to see -Peter Struggles. The battle which had raged round the pamphlet had left -Peter untouched, even though more than one of the clergy who received -it from Sam had thought it their duty to write to Peter's bishop. The -bishop failed to see a case for disciplinary measures: Peter might have -been sinned against but he had not sinned. And the _Sunday Judge_ was -read by neither Peter nor his bishop. (The Church is notoriously out -of touch with modern life, but, after all, it is hardly reasonable -to expect the Church to compliment its rival, the _Sunday Press_, by -reading it.) - -Nevertheless, Peter had, on reflection, felt some wavering doubts about -the pamphlet. His intermittent shrewdness threw a flickering light -through the haze of his charity and gave him moments of discomfort. - -Sam's attitude during this call was admirably calculated to resolve -his doubt. He wanted, with an eye to the future, to make sure of Peter, -whose name he might require another day, and was ready, even if it were -not immediately profitable, to placate Peter now. He explained that he -had joined forces with Mr. Carter, and at once acquired merit in Peter's -eyes. Carter was irreproachable. He did not explain by what means he had -been able to join Carter and it did not occur to Peter to ask. Sam was -not going to tell Peter, who would tell Ada, of his legacy. If she found -out, as Anne had found out, he could not help it, but, meantime, it -was his secret. Ada, like Anne, belonged to the sex which had no -understanding of business. - -"And the point," said Sam, "with a business like Mr. Carter's, is to use -it for good. I take it that the texts do good, but perhaps they are -only for the simple-minded. I hope I don't despise people for their -simplicity, but my own taste runs rather to books and I think you will -agree with me." - -Peter agreed, with a quotation which rather dashed Sam; he had an idea -that poetry did not sell. - -"'Poets are the trumpets which sing to battle. Poets are the -unacknowledged legislators of the world.'" - -"Yes," said Sam. "Quite so. But isn't poetry going to the opposite -extreme? I had the thought of something more direct. Good prose with a -good moral." - -"Excellent," said Peter, off again. - - "'Were not God's laws, - - His gospel laws, In olden time held forth - - By types, shadows and metaphors?'" - -"Of course they were," said Sam, wondering when Peter would close his -mental dictionary of quotations and come down to business, "and that -quotation is very apt because I was thinking of classics. English -classics, you know," he explained hurriedly, "and classics because they -are not copyright." - -"And have stood the test of time," said Peter. - -"Yes. Do you think you could propose a list? I should like to know that -the first books I publish had been selected by you. I don't think they -ought to be exactly theological, but they must be good in every sense of -the word." - -"Why not begin with the book from whose in traduction I just quoted?" - -"Why not indeed?" said Sam, who hadn't the faintest idea of the source -of the quotation. - -"Very well," said Peter. "Suppose you put that down for one." - -Same made vague scratches on paper. He had a bookish reputation to -sustain and he was not going to betray ignorance prematurely. "Then," -said Feter, "there is Law's 'Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life.'" - -"I'm letting myself in for something," thought Sam, but he wrote it -down. - -"'The Imitation of Christ,' and 'The Little Flowers of St. Francis,'" -Peter went on. - -"I think those should be enough to begin with," said Sam hurriedly. - -"Four, isn't it?" said Peter, recapitulating. - -"The 'Pilgrim's Progress '"----("Thank God," thought Sam, "I needn't -give myself away.") - -"Yes, four," he interrupted, reading the now completed list. "And I am -very much obliged to you." - -He wasn't, though, quite sure about it. He had "nobbled" Peter, but he -feared those books would be a millstone round his neck. There might be a -steady sale for the "Pilgrim's Progress" as a prize, but the -others----! Still, he need not print many copies of them, and--consoling -thought--they would be good window-dressing tor his list. He hoped it -would include other, very different, books. - -"I'm sorry Ada is out," Peter was saying, and Sam was rather startled to -realize that he had not missed her. But he was sure of his position -with her: it was his position for her which he had to consolidate. He -proceeded to consolidate it by going in search of Stewart, and found him -where he expected to find him, in a bar. - -"I want your advice," said Sam. - -"Whisky for the gentleman, Flora," said Stewart. "That's my advice and -you'll get no other till you've taken this." - -Sam took it. Business is business and, beyond that, his thrifty -prejudices were less necessary now. - -"You're not unteachable," said Stewart. "It's a point in your favour. -The proper thing when you've drunk that is to ask me if I will have -another. My reply will be in the affirmative and we shall then retire, -with sustaining refreshment, into that corner, where I will advise you -for as long as you can continue to buy whisky for me and drink level. I -hate a shirker." - -Sam told him of his partnership with Carter. "I'm always troubled about -you," said Stewart. "I can never make up my mind whether you're too -clever to live or whether you were born with luck instead of brain. -Obviously, you will publish novels." - -"There are so many kinds," said Sam. - -"No. Only two. Mine and the rest. But I suffer from honesty. Therefore I -tell you that my novel has been refused by every publisher in London. It -is waiting," he said hopefully, "for a man with courage. The difference -between it and the Yellow Book is that my book _is_ yellow." - -"I see," said Sam. "But I have gone into the publishing trade to make my -living." - -"On the whole," decided Stewart, "you are more knave than fool. And you -would call it the publishing trade. It's a benighted world, but there -are still some publishers who aren't in trade--beyond the midriff. Do -you seriously come to me to ask what sort of novels to publish?" - -"Yes." - -"The sort," he said, "that is written for nursemaids by people who ought -to be nursemaids." - -"That's jealousy," said Sam. "They get published and you don't." - -"Perhaps you're right," said Stewart. "But I've always heard that seeing -is believing. Do you ever go to the theatre?" - -"Not often." - -"It's a pity, because if you did, I've a tragedy in blank verse that -you might care to publish. It is great art and will never be produced. -Still, I'm a philanthropist to-night and you will come to the theatre -with me. I happen to be going for the _Warden._" - -"Are you a dramatic critic for the _Warden?_" asked Sam, rather awed. - -"I'm a reporter, old son. This isn't the kind of play they waste a -critic on. Drink up, and we'll go." - -Sam found, to his relief, that he was able to go and decided he had a -strong head. The theatre was crowded when they reached it and Stewart -was young enough to sit self-consciously in one of the two seats kept -for the _Manchester Warden_. Dramatic criticism was taken seriously on -that journal; at least two of the paper's regular critics were men of -genius, and Stewart hoped that he might be mistaken for one of them. But -the audience that night was not the kind which interests itself in the -lions of the higher journalism; rather it justified the contemptuous -reference to drama as the "art of the mob." It would have made a sincere -democrat weep for his convictions. "Behold them," said Stewart. "The -Public." - -Sam beheld them more than he beheld the play. He reminded himself that -he was there on business, to be shown something which Stewart wanted him -to see, and if he had not the gift of detachment, he assumed it. - -When Adams had read his paper to the Concentrics, Sam had listened but -kept his eyes on the audience. In a darkened theatre, the audience was -more difficult to watch, but he could feel its quick response to -the play, could hear its ready laughter and its quite eager ears. -Emphatically, here was a play which seized its audience, gripped them, -tickled them, beslavered them, throttled them, did with them what it -liked and when it liked; all to their immense and vociferous delight. He -tried to keep his aloofness, to see how it was done, to tear the heart -out of this mystery. Here was something which the public wanted; he had -only to diagnose it, and the Open Sesame to fortune was his. - -He couldn't do it. Detachment slipped from him, never to return till the -curtain fell. He wasn't a superman, immune from other men's emotions. -The play took hold of him and swayed him with the rest. He tried -resistance, vainly; told himself that he was here, not, as these others -were, for pleasure, but to learn, to learn; and the play gripped him the -harder for his attempt to take it coldly. - -At the end, Sam was applauding wildly while Stewart watched him with -cynical amusement. "Caught you all right," he said, "and by way of a -confession I'll own that the damned thing nearly got me once. Rum place, -the theatre, isn't it? But," he grew more serious, "I've to write about -that, write without being libellous about that maudlin, sentimental, -erotic, religious trash. It's enough to make a man give up journalism -and take to something honest, like coal-heaving. But I'm forgetting. I -brought you here to teach you something. Have you learnt it? That's a -play, but the same thing applies to a novel. You find novels with 'The -Sign of the Cross' in them, my boy. Queasy sentimentality to sicken a -bee, and, for the rest, don't forget that Jesus died for you to make -money out of novels. This play makes me blasphemous, but I'm doing the -devil's advocate to you to-night, so it's all in the picture. When -I've finished my notice I think I'll try a 'short' on 'The Tradesman -Publisher' or 'The Dignity of Letters.' It will be good for my -conscience." - -"I wish you would," said Sam. "I'll reply to it, with a list of the -classics I am going to publish." - -"Sometimes," said Stewart, "you rather sicken me. I am speaking of the -_Manchester Warden_, not the _Sunday Judge_. Good-night." - -But the vacillations of a journalist with a foot in two camps and an -idealistic standard which he hardly pretended to take seriously himself -left Sam unimpressed. The play and Stewart's description of its essence -had given him furiously to think. He imagined that he knew the sort of -novel he wanted and he was not troubled by Stewart's disease of dual -standards. Sam had one standard, the success standard; and anything else -was muddle-headedness. At the same time he felt most grateful to Stewart -who had advertised the pamphlet and now presented him with a policy. - -It was a policy, but not one for immediate application. _Festina lente_ -was his watchword for the moment, and he devoted himself to putting -new life into the sales of texts and to the issue of the "Branstone -+ Classics." They were, one might note in passing, the Branstone + -Classics: his name loomed large and the names of their authors, the -insignificants like Kempis and Bunyan, were properly small; and he -put the sign of the cross between the Branstone and the Classics. He -intended it to be his trade-mark, and if it were his trade-mark, why not -use it? It infringed nobody's copyright. - -Amongst it all, he had little enough time for Ada, and she knew how much -she gained by being a luxury instead of a habit. But Sam was not engaged -for the sake of being engaged, and as soon as he knew he had made no -mistake in his business venture was eager to be married. There were no -objections from Ada. This intermittent courtship, in which his duties -as a lover took second place to his activities as a business man, suited -Ada well, but marriage, finality, the bond suited her better. - -Even to the end of that engagement it was things for Ada which -preoccupied him, rather than Ada herself, and he took the matter of -furnishing seriously--from a business point of view, interested less in -the furniture he bought than in the discounts he might, by this means or -that, secure. He suffered the usual surprise at the cost of mattresses -and kitchen equipment, but, to Ada, he appeared royally lavish. Ada did -not know of his legacy: she knew that Anne had told her on the top of -a fantastic tram-car that Sam had earned two pounds ten a week with -Travers, and the scale of this furnishing did not square with what a man -could save out of two pounds ten a week. It followed in Ada's mind that -Anne had lied to her, malignantly misrepresenting Sam's position to -frighten her; and the breach between Anne and Ada, which never had much -chance of closing, was permanently open. - -One does not have old connections with an estate agency without being -able to rent a good house cheaply. She was going to be mistress of a -house which fell little short of the dreams of her boarding-school days. -It was certainly "stylish"; she was not sure that it was not positively -"smart." - -Madge wept on the night before her wedding. Ada did not weep. She -was too busy hugging herself because she had surmounted the perils of -courtship. She had accomplished her aim in life. She was going to be -married. - - - - -CHAPTER XIV--HONEYMOONERS - - -|ADA was married in white satin, though Peter sold books to do it and -her trousseau lacked essentials. It depends, though, on one's point of -view. Ada thought white satin essential, while another might have put -underclothing first. But it is fitting to wear a crown at a coronation -and, when the object of one's life has been to get married, to celebrate -in satin the attaining of one's aim. - -It also reminded the congregation that the bride is the central figure -at a wedding. People might otherwise have remembered that they did not -come because Ada was Ada, but because she was Peter's daughter. - -She entered with _rclame_ into the state of being Mrs. Samuel -Branstone, resenting a little the tweeds of Stewart, Sam's best man, -but liking his manners and liking, too, the way in which Sam took it -for granted that the day was hers, not his. He did not even obtrude a -family. - -George was, in fact, obscurely there, hidden among the congregation. He -was there in the spirit of schoolboy, playing truant from Anne, who -was at home with Madge. Ada thought that the conspicuous absence of -Branstones added lustre to her satin. None but the necessary Sam was -there. - -They went to London, where neither of them had been before, and since it -is a bitter thing to have to look back to a boring honeymoon, the choice -of place had great discretion. There was so much besides themselves to -see in London that they postponed looking at each other till they -came home. They saw sights and went to theatres, but though they slept -together and rose together and saw the sights (all but one) together -there was no realization of "togetherness," no birth of a new life -in which they were not Sam and Ada, but these two in one. They were -furiously modest about things which no honeymooner has any right to be -modest about. If they are modest about them, they have no right to be -honeymooners. It may have been in their case something both worse -and better than modesty. It may have been downright shame. Perhaps -subconsciously they knew that this was not a marriage, not the coming -together of two fit mates. It had no passion in it. There was self when -they should have been ecstatically selfless. They were two when they -should have been most one. - -But Sam, if he fell immensely short of ecstasy, was still too much under -her spell to be critical. He wondered a little at the frank delight in -being married which she displayed in public, at her flaunting of her -new wedding ring, at her advertisement that this was a honeymoon, and -contrasted this outward relish with her intimate frigidity; but even -this seemed a disloyalty, and he told himself that Ada in a hotel was -one person and at home would be another. Ada would "settle down," and -meantime they were in London, and London was waiting to be explored with -her. - -They explored chiefly the London which Londoners do not know, the London -of the guide-books, and felt tremendously metropolitan because they went -to the Tower, the British Museum and the National Gallery. The shops -seared Ada. Their windows fascinated but their doors repelled. Probably -Sam would have held her back by main force had she attempted to go in, -but, as it was, she had the same satisfaction in identifying them that -social snobs find in recognizing, at a distance, famous people. These -were the authentic shops which advertised in the papers and they had a -game called "hunting the Harrod" or "looking for Barkers," which led -to a lot of fun with 'buses after they had quartered Oxford Street and -Regent Street. It was all very gay, and gayer, almost naughtily gay, to -go one night to a place called the Coliseum--a music-hall; a thing to -do audaciously, not to be spoken of at home; and yet the place was -very full of really most respectable people. They marvelled at the -emancipation of the Londoner. - -On his honeymoon, Sam became possessed of an ambition. It was not an -extraordinarily fine ambition, but he came to care about, it greatly and -it repaid his care a thousandfold. The way to sanity is to desire -very keenly something which it is just possible one may get, and Sam's -ambition kept him sane in the days when he knew that Ada had failed him. - -Struggles had suggested to our debater of the Concentrics that he ought -to see the House of Commons at debate, and had written to their local -Member for a pass to the Gallery. The result was the most thrilling -experience of Sam's honeymoon! It was, for one thing, unique that Ada -could not be with him: these were the first hours since he married her -that they spent apart and perhaps that, all unconsciously, had gilded -them for Sam. They had almost a tiff before she let him go: not quite, -but she resented his desertion of her and considered it his fault that -she was not allowed to sit with him to hear the legislators who made -laws for her as for him. Not that Ada cared who made her laws, nor cared -to watch the makers at their work, but she managed to put enough snap -into her resentment at his going to lend the added quality of a stolen -pleasure to his experience. - -That gallery, with its foreshortened view of the dingy cock-pit, is not -the first choice of the connoisseur in thrills, but on Sam its effect -was amazing. He must have had some gift, quite undisclosed till now, of -veneration, for it is almost beyond belief that the reality of the House -of Commons can impress. But the idea can and perhaps (to be just) the -reality is more impressive than that of any other Chamber on earth. -Imagination helping him, it caught and held his mind. - -A small stout man of undistinguished appearance was speaking in a -conversational tone not easy to hear from the Gallery, but presently the -orator warmed to his subject and poured out living words in a spate of -real emotion. He was one of those rare men, and this one of those rare -speeches, that really convert an opponent: and Sam's ambition to speak -as this politician spoke, and from those benches, came instantly to -birth. - -Not only did he want to be a Member of Parliament, but a Liberal Member, -because this man of words was Liberal. Up to this time, Sam had not been -a political animal although he had voted, and voted Tory because that -was in general the line of Mr. Travers and the property-owning class he -represented. Now with a swift enthusiasm he was Liberal, knowing nothing -of either side, but caught by sudden hero-worship for a little, pudgy, -snubnosed politician who spoke in sentences of prodigious length and -never lost his way in them. - -In a twinkling he acquired the bias of the politician: his hero's -opponent was palpably a fool; he had no gifts, no argument. Yes, Sam was -doubly right to be a Liberal. They had so obviously all the brains, they -were so undeniably the winning side. He did not understand the technique -of a division and was surprised when he looked at the paper next day -to find that the Liberals were outvoted. It gave him pause, but did -not shake him. When the Liberals came back to power, as with their -superiority in brain they were certain to do, he, Sam Branstone, would -come with them. Let it be only a year or two and he would be ready. He -too would loll upon those padded benches, and catch the Speaker's eye, -and be an orator. - -He walked along the Embankment towards his hotel, and it came into his -mind that he had spent four hours in the Gallery and had not thought of -Ada. Nor could he, though he tried, think of her now. - -Sky-signs still flashed across the river, and as he paused and leaned -against the parapet a young policeman kept a wary eye on him. But Sam -was meditating life, not death. The lights of London gleamed upon the -Thames and made it magical for him. He conquered London in his reverie, -and stepped, a member, from the House to his automobile. His home, he -supposed, was somewhere in Park Lane. - -He thought back now to the theatre where he had seen _The Sign of the -Cross_. It was different from the London Theatres he had seen where -audiences seemed afraid of emotion. Or was it that the plays had not -been right? That was it: they had not the note: they weren't--what was -Stewart's phrase?--erotic religious plays. He wanted to move audiences -as that play had moved its audience. Power! The power of the spoken -word. That was the thing, and since he could not write a play he must -rely upon himself, his oratory, his single voice. He saw himself on -platforms facing crowded halls, gripping his hearers, leading them where -he would, taming the mob till it made an idol of its master. As to where -he would lead, why, he would lead and that was what mattered. Branstone -was Prime Minister that night. - -It was one o'clock before the young policeman felt at liberty to resume -his beat, and Sam left the enchanted river for his little hotel in -Norfolk Street. Ada had her back to him and apparently she slept. -Actually she was wide awake; she was wondering whether it had happened -to any other woman to be treated so abominably on her honeymoon. - -She brushed her hair nest morning with a notable viciousness. Hair has -uses beyond those of mere adornment. It is an admirable veil through -which one can watch without being seen to watch. Ada was watching Sam -and she was also listening to him. - -She listened not because his enthusiasm for the House of Commons -interested her, but because she was waiting for some word of apology. -It did not come. He was full of regret, but only because this was their -last day in town and he could not go to the House again. - -"What time is our train?" she asked. - -He told her. - -"Then I have time to do some shopping first." - -"Shopping?" he asked, but unsuspiciously. - -She nodded. Sam was going to pay for his pleasures. Those blouses she -had seen at Peter Robinson's no longer seemed impossibly expensive. If -Sam chose to enjoy himself in his own way, without her, she would enjoy -herself in hers--with Sam to pay the piper. - -Shopping is a loose term; one shops when one buys a kipper or a diamond -tiara. Ada was putting her hair up and he imagined her to mean that she -wanted a packet of hair-pins. "Oh, yes," he said pensively. "And while -you go, I think I will just slip down to the House of Parliament again." -The House would not be sitting and he could not get in. He knew that, -but he wanted to gaze, to look at the frame which was some day to -contain him. He wanted to be certain that it was still there. - -"I think," she said, "that you will come with me to the shop. I shall -want you there to pay." - -Sam paused in the act of fastening his collar. "To pay?" he asked, not -unsuspiciously now. - -"Are your selfish pleasures all you think about?" Ada wanted to know. -"Isn't it a privilege to be allowed to buy me nice clothes?" - -He had not looked upon it in that light. In budgeting for their future -he had indeed assumed that a trousseau lasted a bride for her first -year. "I see," he said gloomily; then remembering that he was in love -with her, "of course," he added with a smile which might count to him -for heroism. "But we must not forget the fares, and after I have paid -the bill here I shall not have more than two pounds left to spend." - -"Then I spend two pounds on blouses," she said. - -He made a monosyllabic noise which might have been "Yes." It might also -have been "Damn." - -The truth was that he had deliberately kept those two pounds back, -intending to spend some, but not, he hoped, all of it, on a present for -Ada. He had thought of a hand-bag, had imagined her gasp of delight -when he audaciously entered with her one of those forbiddingly inviting -shops, her appreciation of his generosity. - -Last night had driven the thought entirely from his mind, and he was -annoyed now not only at his forgetfulness, but at Ada. She did not ask, -she demanded. A night in the Gallery may be regarded as dissipation, but -at least it is not a crime. It is even patriotic, and he was asked to -foot a bill for two pounds as the price of his patriotism. Ambition, he -thought, would be an expensive luxury if he had to pay in clothes for -Ada every time he went to a political meeting. For that, plainly, was -her attitude: she demanded a _quid pro quo_: she announced a policy of -retaliation. - -There is a queer perverted pleasure in scratching an open wound, in -cutting off one's nose to spite one's face. He had meant to be generous -and he wanted still to be generous, but the money he had laid aside for -generosity was now hypothecated to meet her claim. He would give her her -pound of flesh, but wanted very badly to roast it for her with coals of -fire. - -Gloom lifted from him suddenly. He took off the old tie which he had put -on as being good enough to travel in, and fastened very carefully one -which he had bought "for London." - -"I'll do it," he was thinking. "It is--almost--a stroke." - -At breakfast he was positively gay, so that Ada wondered furtively what -he was up to, and whether the way to raise his spirits would always be -to demand new clothes of him. It did not seem likely, but she proposed -at any rate to experiment freely in that direction. - -He divided his attention between her, breakfast, and the Parliamentary -report of the _Times_. He felt that he had virtually participated in -that debate, and even the shock of reading that the division had gone -against his hero did not spoil the pleasure he found in reading of it. -He read with a prophetic eye. He, too, would be reported in the _Times_ -some day. - -He called the waiter. "Marmalade, sir?" asked the man. - -"No, thanks. Bring me the directory." - -"The directory," protested the waiter, "is in the reading-room." - -"And I," said Sam superbly, "am in the coffee-room." - -The waiter brought him the directory. - -Sam smiled broadly. He was testing his form, and decided that if it -were equal to coercing a waiter into carrying a directory to his -breakfast-table, it would probably not fail him in what he proposed -to do. He consulted the book and noted an address which was not, he -observed, in Park Lane. His respect for Sir William Gatenby suffered a -slight decline. - -Half an hour later he rang the hell of that gentleman's house. Gatenby -was the local member, to whom Peter Struggles had written for Sam's pass -to the Gallery. - -"Sir William in?" he asked. - -"Yes, but----" A trained eye observed his clothes. They were not cut in -Savile Row. - -"He will see me," said Sam serenely. Some people are at their best in -the early morning. - -His card was accepted from him, and he was shown into a library of -severe Blue Books, possibly qualified by a reproduction of Millais' -portrait of Gladstone. Ordinarily, Sam would have been met in the -library by a secretary who earned his salary by his talent for -administering polite snubs to unwanted callers. The secretary was not -earning his salary to-day, but, probably, spending it. It was Derby Day. - -After all, a vote is a vote, and Sir William came in with a show of -geniality. "Good morning, Mr. Branstone," he said, reading Sam's card. -"From the old town. I see." - -"Is that all you remember about me?" asked Sam. - -"At the moment," confessed Sir William warily. His majority was not -large. - -"Well," said Sam, "the Reverend Mr. Struggles is my father-in-law." - -"Sit down," said Sir William. "I am very glad you called. How is Mr. -Struggles?" - -"T left him well, thank you. Perhaps you remember that he wrote to you -to ask you for a pass to the Gallery for me." - -"I was happy to be lucky in the ballot," said the Member. - -"Yes," said Sam, "I went last night. But I mentioned that to establish -my identity. My object in calling upon you is to ask you to lend me five -pounds." - -Sir William thought of his secretary, who should have saved him this. -Thinking of his secretary, he thought of Derby Day and the probable -intentions of a man who chooses that day to ask for a loan. "My dear -sir!" he said. - -"Quite," agreed Sam. "Life would be unbearable to you if every -constituent who came to London tried to borrow money off you. But I -am Branstone. I run the Branstone Press and the Branstone Classics. I -published the 'Social Evil' pamphlet and sent you a copy which, I regret -to say, you did not acknowledge." Sir William thought again of his -secretary, and unkindly. "This," said Sam, "is merely to indicate that I -am a man of substance." - -Sir William Gatenby wore side-whiskers. He was an old man and there was -little left of him besides pomposity and a determination to hold his -seat. He looked, what at this moment he felt, some one in a farce. He -was quite sure that Sam was some one in a farce. They were both in -a farce, and of course five-pound notes fly in farces like gnats in -August. It did not seem to him that there was anything to do but to -produce a five-pound note. - -"Thank you," said Sam, and sat at a desk. "I will give you my cheque for -this." - -It staggered Sir William. He nearly warned Sam of the danger of issuing -a cheque which was not likely to be honoured, but refrained in time. -"Then," he said, "there was really no need for you to come to me at -all?" - -"Only," said Sam, "that I wanted you to remember me." - -"I think I shall do that," said Sir William. - -"Thank you," said Sam calmly. "I wanted to know you because I intend to -go into politics." - -"The Cause," said Sir William solemnly, "demands his best from every -earnest worker." - -"I will work for the Cause," said Sam. Neither of them attempted to -define the Cause, and Sam left without further remark, but his call had -this result: that on finding the cheque honoured Sir William wrote -to his agent to tell him of "a queer fish called Samuel Branstone who -called on me the other day, and offered to work for the Cause. A young -man whom I think you should encourage. He is the son-in-law of -Mr. Struggles, and the Church, alas, is so tepid towards our great -Principles that we must not neglect a promising recruit from that fold." - - - - -CHAPTER XV--OTHER THINGS BESIDE MARRIAGE - -|DEBT appeals to some people. They feel that when they are in debt they -have had more out of life than life owes to them. Sam had given Gatenby -his cheque and was therefore not in debt to him, but he proceeded to -spend the five pounds as recklessly as if it had been borrowed money. - -He meant to astonish Ada, and succeeded, but the surprise he sprang did -not work quite as he anticipated. For a moment, indeed, as he bought -her hats and blouses she glowed with unaffected gratitude, and he tasted -with her the joy of headstrong acquisition. But Ada's glow was quick to -pass. - -She had time in the train to forget the splendour of his presents and -the dash that she would cut next Sunday, and to remember that he had -spent a lot of money; he who denied that he had more than two pounds to -spend had spent seven. Obviously, he had lied to her. - -It was true, she thought, that he had repented of his lie and of his -meanness, and bought handsomely: the more handsome the purchase, the -more demonstrable the lie. - -She recalled her dreadful interview with Anne, Anne's statements of his -means, and how little they conformed to the scale of Sam's furnishing. -She pondered Sam's open-handedness in the blouse-shop, and concluded that -the Branstones were congenital liars about money. - -In the future she would know how to act. Sam had plenty. - -"So you had money up your sleeve all the time," she said. - -Sam winked facetiously. "There are a lot of funny things up my sleeve," -he said. - -"I'm learning that," said Ada. Which he took for a compliment; and -grinned. - -He had long since made up his mind that the way with women was to -mystify them, to treat them like children at a conjuring entertainment, -to surprise them with results, but never to explain. He nearly choked -with pride over his exploit with Sir William Gatenby. But for the -hat-box and the blouses up there on the rack, what he had done was too -good to be true, and certainly it was too good to be told to a woman. -They did not understand business; no woman could appreciate the daring -spirit of his feat. - -If he told Ada that he had borrowed from Gatenby, she would simply say -"Oh, yes," and treat his unexampled audacity as a matter of course. It -was inspiration, brilliantly conceived and brilliantly executed, and its -bright memory was not to be tarnished by a woman's dull acceptance of it -as something not in the least extraordinary. - -He grinned and did not tell, and what did not occur to him was that if -he offered no explanation she would supply one of her own. It is -idiotic to tell a wife everything, but wise to tell nearly everything; -especially when it is open to her to draw a false conclusion. - -Sam did not think a false conclusion open to her, because he still -believed the best of Ada, because he was still in love. But falling out -of love is desperately easy. - -"As a walled town," says Touchstone, "is worthier than a village, so is -the forehead of a married man more honourable than the bare brow of a -bachelor," and Sam was married. He could lay that flattering unction -to his soul, could hold his head higher, because he was a ratepayer and -bore responsibilities, and went home at night to a house with a garden. -He did all that, and it was empty honour because success in marriage, as -in all else, is not to be had ready-made, but depends upon the will to -make adjustments. - -The will can come best from passion, and there was no passion here to -tide them over the awkward age of marriage, the first difficult year -when the adjustments must, if ever, be made. Granted passion, a man can -love a woman whom he knows to be a murderess; let passion lack, and -he can fall out of love because the woman snores or is untidy. Sam's -marriage was not made in heaven, but by Ada in Heaton Park, and with -a marriage so made it is as easy to fall out of love as off a house. -Little things count more than big when there is no passion to create its -life-long mirage. - -If you cannot have the mirage of passion there is a useful substitute -called common sense, another name for compromise, and Ada refused to -compromise. She was for self, unmitigated and supreme. Ada left the -adjustments to Sam, and relaxed in nothing from her perfect selfishness. - -The little thing which counted heavily against her, almost at once, was -simply that Ada was untidy. She did not invent places for things, or, if -she did, they were never used. She left her clothes downstairs after she -had been out, and the piano is not the place for a hat or the sofa -for an umbrella. It annoyed Sam to distraction to find her clothes -distributed about their bedroom, slung carelessly over chair backs, -pitched on the floor. - -Men are not the untidy sex: the virtue of tidiness, like most others, is -evenly distributed. Sam was tidy by nature, and habit is stronger still. -Ada's misfortune was that he was used to Anne, that Anne was neat and -Ada a slut. Sam did not know until he missed it how much he appreciated -Anne's tidiness, how much he needed it and how much he hated untidiness -until he lived with it in Ada. In London, in the hotel, he had excused -what he saw of it, because it was in an hotel; which was also why there -had been little to see, by reason of a good chambermaid. - -At home, it hurt him and he could do nothing. Ada did nothing, either. -She had not married for love, and one does not change a habit without -strong motive. His hints appeared to Ada peevish and unreasonable. -She thought he made mountains out of molehills and despised him for -small-mindedness; he thought a woman who could not put a petticoat into -a drawer when he asked her was wilfully provoking him. - -She was not wilful of set purpose. She simply refused to disturb her -habits, to accommodate herself to him, to make a sacrifice to love. She -had no love to which to sacrifice. - -And presently he found out that he, too, did not love. But that was -all. Then and afterwards that was, damnably, all. He did not love, but -neither did he hate. He had never loved her deeply enough to hate her. -That was the tragedy of Sam's marriage: indifference, the deadliest sin. - -He was indifferent to her, to her untidiness and even to her -extravagance. She could not treat clothes reasonably, she did not know -how to wear them when she had them, but she lusted madly to possess -them. She was grossly, inexcusably extravagant, and he was indifferent. -He was indifferent because he was growing rich, and wanted his energies -for the purpose of growing richer, not of quarrelling with her. - -That was another tragedy. They never quarrelled. They never cleared the -air, they never flushed the drain. They did not make adjustments, but -left things where they were, in a bad place. On honeymoon, they turned -from looking at each other to look at London, and at home, after one -experience of revelation, they did not seek another, but rebounded and -looked anywhere but at themselves. - -But Peter was looking, and Anne, through the eyes of George, was -looking, and it seemed to her that things were happening as she had -expected they would happen. She had said the girl was no good and what -George told her in his fumbling way gave her to see that the girl turned -wife was equally no good. Anne tightened her lips grimly and went on -with her efficient charring. She thought her time would come. - -Peter looked for the coming of love to bless this marriage to which he -had consented in the belief that his God of love would sanctify. He -had trusted to the strength of Sam, and to the hope that Sam's strength -would turn to sweetness; and it only turned to business. It did not -lead Ada from materialism, but drew Peter himself, unwittingly at -first, towards it. Peter found himself selecting texts for Sam's "Church -Child's Calendar," a labour of love, which nevertheless had nothing to -do with Ada, except in the most indirect way, and nothing to do with the -Sam and Ada situation. - -It was the fact that, to them, there seemed to be no situation which -distressed Peter. They simply let things be, and things let be obey -the law of gravity. He hoped, ardently, for children. Children blessed -marriage in the physical sense, and from that blessing the other, the -spiritual blessing, might arise. - -There was at one time hope that Ada might have a child... and then the -hope was blighted, and the doctor told them not to hope again. Ada would -never be a mother. - -"I could have told them that," said Anne. "You'd only to look at the -girl to see it." Which may only have been wisdom after the event, but -certainly did not imply that Anne was disappointed; though Peter was, -and bitterly. - -Sam, too, had wanted a son, but not, as Peter thought, by Ada and -for Ada. He wanted an heir for dynastic reasons. He was the Branstone -Publishing Company, its parent and original, and wanted flesh of his -flesh to publish after him. He dreamed of a young Sam in the cap of the -Grammar School, who should go to the University to which he had not gone -and have the chances he had missed. He built many castles in Spain for -the son who was never born. - -Ada got up from bed and flashed greedily into new clothes. If the -measure of her buying was the measure of her grief, she had been deeply -touched. Perhaps she was touched, for she had aimed at marriage, which -is incomplete without a child. But in the shops, the fashion papers, -her clothes and the clothes of other women she found distraction and -an occupation. She passed a milestone and went on her way. Ada was no -stoic, no hider of her grief, and since she did not complain she must -have thought her childlessness was nothing to complain about. When she -set her heart on marriage, she hadn't, perhaps, looked further than the -ring, the ceremony and the honourable state of being Mrs. Branstone. - -She plunged to shops and spending money, Sam to business and making it; -and some, at any rate, of the now thwarted love he had been storing for -his son passed to the business. Somewhere at the back of his mind he -knew his business was not lovable; that it was pitch; that one cannot -touch pitch without being defiled. But neither can one deal successfully -in pitch without arriving at faith in the virtues of pitch. At intimate -moments he was aware that the "Social Evil" pamphlet was pernicious, -but Sam Branstone, inducing a bookseller to stock it, was more than an -advocate who believes temporarily in his brief: he was a missionary with -faith in his mission. So, too, with the texts. He sold them with the -conviction that it was good for people to have texts on their walls. He -counterfeited sincerity until he came to be sincere, or, at all events, -to forget that he was insincere. - -Further and further into the unsearched recesses of his mind he pressed -the thought that he sold texts because their sales were good for -him, and with his working, everyday, non-introspective mind he had a -sincerity about his wares, convenient but none the less authentic,-which -was invaluable both to his self-respect and as a first aid to success -in salesmanship. He never, in the old days, praised a house with the -ringing voice of absolute conviction which he used about Law's "Serious -Call." He had not read Law, but the sales hung fire till he became -persuaded of Law's tremendous worth. - -He had a serious call of his own, a call to sell good books at -good profits, and the call expressed itself in his clothes and his -appearance. He seemed older, graver, took his frock-coat into daily -wear, used only black in ties and socks, and had the air of one, who, -if not a clergyman, was often in their company, though as a fact he was -more frequently with commercial travellers, and in the hotels at night -his repertoire of smoke-room stories came no less gaily from his tongue -than of old. - -And about this time his moustache began to droop like a curtain over his -resolute mouth. - -Stewart came into the office one day with a parcel under his arm. He had -seen neither Sam nor his office lately, and stared wide-eyed at both. -Carter, partner in the printing business, still occupied the dilapidated -office where Sam had found him, but the Branstone Publishing Company had -ampler premises next door, in a building which Sam rented as warehouse -for his stock. Gilt lettering on its windows called the attention of the -passer-by to the Branstone + Classics. - -Sam still looked after detail, and when Stewart came in was correcting -proofs of a tear-off calendar with a Bible at his elbow. - -"I suppose," said Stewart, "that you _are_ Branstone, but why disguise -yourself as a Scottish Elder?" - -"I am in my usual clothes," said Sam, rather huffed. - -"If the clothes are the man, this is no place for me. Do you often use -the Bible in your business hours?" - -He often did, not only to check with a quite beautiful precision the -texts on his calendars by the Authorised Version, but in another way, -and one which seemed to show, if it showed anything, that he looked -upon the Bible with intimate familiarity. Perhaps one mascot was the -vellum-bound copy of the "Social Evil" pamphlet and the other the Bible. -At any rate, his price code used in the office was made up this way: - -M Y F A T H E R G O D - -1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 20 - -New clerks initiated into that code used to wonder at it for a day. Then -they got used to it. - -"I'm correcting the proofs of this calendar," Sam explained. "You see, -it's a shaving calendar. You hang this up by your shaving-mirror and -study the text for the day while you shave." - -"I don't," said Stewart. "I go to the barber's. My hand's unsteady in -the morning. But I see the idea. First read the text, then wipe your -razor on it." - -"That is not the idea. See." He pointed to the card of the calendar, and -read solemnly: - - "A text a day - - Drives care away." - -"It wouldn't drive my sort of care away," said Stewart. "Mine's -serious." - -"There can be no trouble too serious for you to find consolation in this -calendar." - -"But suppose I have toothache on quarter-day, and the consolation you -offer for that date is consolation to a man who can't pay his rent? -Seriously, Branstone, am I behind the scenes in this office, or do you -never drop the showman? I admit you're in the pi-market, and you've -dressed the pi-man's part and you've got his patter, too, but I don't -know that you need exercise it on me. This stock of yours looks dire," -he commented, strolling round the office. "I suppose it's the stuff that -sells?" - -"My business," said Sam, "is founded on a rock." - -"I came in here to sell you a fortune," said Stewart. "If you're going -to talk cant at me, I'll take the fortune to a London publisher. Your -business may be founded on a rock, but the name of the rock is the -'Social Evil.'" - -"The word rock," said Sam, with a twinkle in his eye, "is also used for -a kind of toffee." - -"Well, now that I know you're sane, I'll talk to you. And I'll talk -toffee, too I didn't think in the days of my earnest youth that I -should come to this, but you never know what debt will do to a man. I've -written a novel. At least, it isn't a novel, it's an outrage on decency. -It's a violent assault on the emotions. It's the sort of thing I deserve -shooting for writing. Treacle is bitter compared with it, and it does -not contain one word of literature. It is a cast-iron certainty." - -"I must read it," said Sam. - -"You're growing distrustful," said Stewart sadly. - -"I don't buy pigs in pokes, even when they're yours," said Sam. "Come -along in a couple of days." - -He read the novel, and was ready for Stewart when he came. - -"I have taken the liberty," he said, "of marking some passages in this -manuscript which you may care to alter." - -"Oh? I know it's mawkish, but I don't believe there is a limit to what -they'll stand--and like." - -"I refer particularly to the character you have called Hetaera." - -"But only once. After that she's called Hetty." - -"Hetty," said Sam severely, "will have to be cut out. She is an impure -woman." - -"Even the most popular of novels should bear some relationship to life." - -"If you wish me to publish this one, Hetty must go. Branstones have a -reputation to sustain." - -"Good God!" said Stewart. "Hetty is the one oasis of truth in a desert -of sloppy sentimentality. She's true because I happen to know her." - -"That is nothing to your credit, Stewart." - -Stewart stared. "Are you pulling my leg, Sam, or is this really -serious?" - -"Why should you doubt my seriousness when I ask that fiction should be -devoid of offence?" - -"Don't you mean devoid of truth?" He recovered his temper and his -perspective. After all, he was very short of money. "All right, Sam," he -said. "Edit me. Censor me. I thought I knew things, but there are deeps -below the lowest depths, and you have reached them. I surrender. What -are the terms?" - -Sam offered terms which were quite generous. He might want Stewart -again. - -The novel was purged of Hetty and published. The three-page prayer of -the distressed heroine was used, in paraphrase, from quite a number of -nonconformist pulpits, and the book was a huge success. It was the -first of that series--Branstone's Happy Novels for Healthy Homes--which -carried the strength of the literary emetic to a point of concentrated -sweetness undreamt of before, and discovered somewhere a public stomach -which did not reject its nauseating jam, but revelled in it. - - - - -CHAPTER XVI--THE POLITICAL ANIMAL - - -|IF only Ada had had the courage of what ought to have been her -convictions, things would have been very different. But she hadn't the -pluck or the zest in life to be anything at all except an almost perfect -negative, and a man will fight for a wife for many reasons, but not for -the reason that she is a full-stop. - -Ada, as Peter knew when he consented to the marriage, could be led: with -even surer hope of good result she could be driven, and if Sam had cared -to drive, to play Petruchio with Ada, he could have turned her negative -into a comparative, if not into a positive. - -Unhappily, his driving powers were otherwise engaged, and his objectives -were on the battlefield, his office, rather than in the dormitory which -he might have turned into a home. And since Ada had all that she was -conscious of wanting, she had a dull contentment. Two servants and -credit at the shops were good enough for Ada, and good enough, too, for -Sam, because they advertised success. If Ada had been actively vicious, -if she had drunk, if men or a man had obsessed her, if indeed she had -been anything that was bad perceptibly, Sam would have abandoned his -indifference and taken a strong and effective line with her. It might, -at first, have been only because a positively vicious Ada would have -been bad for the Branstone + Classics, but it would have ended by being -good for Ada and for Sam: it would have been the beginning of Ada _and_ -Sam, of their dual life which had not yet come to birth. But, as it was, -he saw nothing to fight. There was a superficial rightness; therefore -all was right, he could forget Ada and turn to the things which were -vital to him, business for its own sake, and business considered as a -stepping-stone to politics. - -He was content for some time to leave his political ambitions alone, -because it seemed to him that money, quite a lot of money, was needed -for politics. In truth, he was rather awed by his ambition: the House of -Commons seemed a tremendous distance from his office in Manchester, -and he thought a great deal of money would be needed for the fare. -Fundamentally, he was modest and rarely overrated his abilities, but he -believed that he had luck, and thought money a good first aid to more -luck. Well as he was doing in business, he could not afford to divert -his energies from moneymaking to politics, wherein he did not mean to -begin at the bottom. - -He was not ready yet to make political opportunities for himself, but if -political opportunities came to him, that was another matter. And they -did come. When he interviewed Sir William Gatenby, he threw a pebble -into a pool whose wave was to wash him to high places. - -It washed him into the knowledge of Mr. Charles Wattercouch, who was -agent for the Division. Wattercouch read Gatenby's letter about Sam with -some surprise, as one of his recruiting grounds for voluntary workers -was the Concentrics, and he thought he recalled hearing Sam speak for -the other faction, but he catalogued the name for future reference on -his list of earnest young men. - -Wattercouch, like Sam, was in no hurry. He preferred men to come to him, -not to go in search of them, but Sam did not come, and a letter from -Gatenby was not to be neglected. Though Gatenby had probably dismissed -the subject from his mind, he paid half of Wattercouch's salary, and -he might inquire about Sam some day. So the agent called on Sam at the -office. - -He was a square-built, square-faced man of forty, with a pink, eupeptic -complexion, and light hair which bristled hardily. Your organizer of -victory, like your editor, is apt to be cynical about the politics he is -paid to profess, but Wattercouch kept his perfect faith in Liberalism, -in spite of the fact that he served the Liberal Party, a feat in the -accommodation of blameless principle with unscrupulous opportunism, -which he accomplished with entire sincerity. One can be sincere and -Jesuitical, in fact one can hardly be Jesuitical without being sincere, -and to Mr. Wattercouch the most egregiously illiberal acts of the -Liberal Party were justified because they were the acts of that party, -and must, however improbable it seemed, be means to the end which was -Liberalism. - -This is not to suggest that Mr. Wattercouch was complex, for he was -indeed quite simple, as witness the man's relish in his grotesque name. -He knew the value of being ridiculed when one can turn ridicule into -respect, and much of his popularity resulted from the genial way in -which he took jokes about his name. He made an asset of what might, to a -less good-natured man, have been a handicap. "Indeed," says Ben Jonson, -"there is a woundy luck in names, sir," and Wattercouch turned doubtful -luck to good account. - -Sam had the gift of the gab, which means that he knew both how and -when to speak, and how and when to be silent. He was silent while Mr. -Wattercouch spoke of the valuable work to be done by an earnest labourer -in connection with the annual revision of the register. The point of the -work was to see that all possible known Liberals were on the register, -and all possible objection taken to any known Conservatives, and, -complicated as the work was by the removal habit amongst electors, -it was no light undertaking. Certainly no agent could have carried it -through without the aid of industrious volunteers. - -But Sam did not see himself in the character of an industrious -volunteer, and he was silent for two reasons. The first was that his -silence was causing Mr. Wattercouch visible embarrassment, and Sam liked -the other man to be embarrassed; the second was that he was considering -how to make Mr. Wattercouch see that his suggestion was an absurdity, if -not an insult. - -He smiled with quite polite superiority. "But I think, Mr. Wattercouch, -that you are making a mistake," he said, as one who apologizes for -having to be blunt. - -"Well," admitted Wattercouch, "I had my doubts, because I fancied I'd -heard you support Stephen Verity at the Concentrics." - -"That," said Sam, "is not the mistake to which I allude. I am aware that -I have supported Verity at the Concentrics. And I am aware that the -way to learn how to cut a man's hair is to practise on a sheep's head. -Verity was my sheep's head." - -"I'm afraid I hardly follow," said Wattercouch, who was indeed rather -scandalized by such an allusion to Mr. Verity, who, if a Conservative, -was an alderman and a noted figure in local politics. - -"I will make it easier for you by admitting that even I had to learn," -said Sam. - -"Ah! I see. You have now seen the error of your ways. You realize the -grandeur of Liberalism, the----" - -"I always did," Sam asserted. "When I supported Verity, I was teaching -myself to speak. I was practising on Toryism that I might become perfect -in Liberalism. Those days when I made a convenience of Toryism were the -days of my apprenticeship to the art of speaking. Would you have had me -speak badly for such a cause as Liberalism? No. But if I spoke badly for -Toryism, I damaged nothing. Toryism _is_ nothing unless, as I said, it -is a sheep's head for Liberals to practise on when they are novices, and -the mistake you made is to suppose that I am still a novice, when, as a -matter of fact----" He paused elaborately and hoped that Mr. Wattercouch -would fill in the blank intelligently. "But it is premature to speak -of that," he said. "As to the registration, I can send you one of my -clerks." He made a gesture dismissing as an affair of pygmies that chief -event of an agent's year. - -"I see... I see," said Wattercouch, trying hard to believe that he had -so far been looking at Sam through the wrong end of a telescope. "And -you yourself, Mr. Branstone?" - -It tempted Sam, that tone of quite startled respect which Wattercouch -adopted now. The misfortune of Sam's imaginative flights was that he -never knew when to stop. All that he cared about, at the moment, was to -give Wattercouch the impression that Sam Branstone was too important -to be asked to drudge at registration work. He was in no hurry about -politics, but when he began it would not be as a volunteer clerk. - -"I?" he replied. "Two things. One a fact and the other a prophecy. -The fact is that I am an orator, and the prophecy is that Sir William -Gatenby will not live long and that I shall take his place as member -for the Division. Have you a cold?" he added, as Wattercouch choked with -irresistible stupefaction. - -He had not a cold, neither had he powers of speech just then, and the -silence grew emphatic without in the least disconcerting Sam. Once -launched on the sea of bluff, Sam was a hardy navigator, and he had the -moral support of knowing that his whole purpose just now was to avoid -being a clerk. To avoid being a clerk it is justifiable to do more -than to romance: it is justifiable to commit most of the crimes in the -Newgate Calendar. Sam was hardly asked to do that, but Wattercouch's -cough was a challenge, and a bluff half bluffed is worse than no bluff -at all. It became a matter of pride to convince this unbeliever. - -"I intend," said Sam with aplomb, "to do a good deal of platform for the -Party. If an election comes soon, so much the better. I shall take -the opportunity to make myself more popular with the electors than Sir -William Gatenby is. That is easy. He quotes Latin in election speeches, -and I'm a man of the people. After that, I expect to contest a -by-election for a seat which the Party regards as a forlorn hope. If -it is possible to win that seat for our Great Cause, I shall win it. -If not, I shall trust to two things, the senile decay of Sir William -Gatenby and the discretion of the Whip's office." - -Wattercouch was adapting himself painfully to the new perspective. He -granted that Sam had plausibility, and an assurance which nearly lent -conviction to his astonishing statement. - -"You are in touch with the Whips!" he gasped. - -Sam remembered and varied an old formula. "Do you suppose," he asked -indignantly, "that I should be speaking to you like this if I were not?" - -Wattercouch did not suppose it. For one thing he was acquainted with the -devious ways of Whips, and nothing that those secretive autocrats did -could surprise him: for another, he wished to believe what Sam wished -him to believe. He saw in Sam the way out of a dilemma. - -His dilemma was a common one. A death had caused a vacancy in the -Town Council, and the local Liberal caucus was almost pathetically -embarrassed as to its choice of a candidate. There were at least -three veteran workers for the Cause who expected, with justice, to be -approached and none of the three could be selected without offence being -given to interests which it was impolitic to offend. - -It was all very well for the caucus: they left it to Wattercouch, the -general handy man, to make suggestions, and as he listened to Sam he -thought he had found a candidate who, simply because he was politically -unknown, could offend nobody. If the obvious men were wrong, he must -rely on the rightness of the unexpected, and, after all, Sam might be -speaking the truth. One never knew where one was with Whips, and here -was his chance to propitiate Sam and at the same time to solve the -problem which troubled the caucus. Sam was a dark horse and he wished he -knew more about him; it was startling to come in search of a voluntary -clerk and to find a candidate; but, finally, he saw it as a legitimate -case for taking a risk. - -"I don't know, sir," he said, with a very pretty respect in his voice, -"whether municipal politics will appeal to a man of your calibre, but -there is a vacancy in St. Mary's Ward, and I hardly think there will be -any difficulty about your adoption as candidate if you cared to stand." - -Sam pretended to reflect. The truth was that the prospect of an -immediate seat in the Council made his heart beat fiercely. He had meant -for a while longer to put business before politics, but this sort of -politics was business. The Council took up one's time, but conferred a -prestige on Branstone and the Branstone Publications which would more -than compensate for the waste of time. - -And it was deliciously unexpected. He had not studied to impress -Wattercouch, but had talked exaltedly simply to excuse himself from -the unseen, thankless drudgery of organization: yet it seemed he had -impressed. Virtually, he was offered a seat, He was, this soon, to sit -where Travers had sat, to be a City Father before he was thirty-five. He -had romanced glibly about a bird in the bush, and found himself grasping -a bird in hand, and no contemptible fowl either. - -"We must despise nothing," he said, "which makes for Liberalism." -Wattercouch nodded with enthusiasm. "Of course," Sam went on, "strictly -between ourselves, the Council is small beer. But it is for the Cause, -and if I were asked to stand, you may take it that I should not allow -the larger view I have of my ultimate activities to interfere with my -acceptance. I take pleasure in duty and I see it as my duty, even if it -involves the postponement of my Parliamentary ambitions, to throw myself -wholeheartedly into this conflict." He was wonderfully pious. - -Wattercouch was less emotional. He had heard too many speeches from -prospective candidates to be carried away by Sam's. "Quite probably -there will be no contest," he said dryly. "It's a safe Liberal seat." - -"I should have preferred a fight," Sam lied wistfully. "But I put duty -first." - -As a fact, there was no contest, and if each of the three veteran -workers thought himself aggrieved, he had the consolation of knowing -that the other two shared his grievance. Wattercouch was discreetly -mysterious about Sam in the inner councils of the local Party, used -Gatenby's name freely and managed to convey that Branstone was something -much bigger than he appeared to be. He had, at least, got them out of -their quandary. - -Nor did Sam discredit his sponsor either at the private meeting he -addressed or at the public one which followed. He had said he was an -orator, Wattercouch had repeated it indefatigably, and Sam's audience -believed it implicitly. He was not quite an orator, but was coming along -nicely under the tuition of an old actor who had failed on the stage and -now called himself a professor of elocution. - -He became Mr. Councillor Branstone, and happy little references to the -event began to appear in the papers. The _Sunday Judge_, for instance, -had "no doubt that Mr. Branstone will live to look back upon his -unopposed return to the Council as a minor episode of his political -career, and we speak by the book. Branstone will go far, but, meantime, -it is something even for him to know that he is the most popular man in -St. Mary's Ward. We had almost written in the whole city, but that would -be to anticipate. How is it done? How is such popularity achieved? How, -in other words, did merit become recognized? Mr. Branstone himself only -smiled when we asked him, but his smile is half of his secret and his -rousing, earnest oratory the other half. They are indeed an open smile -and an open secret. But there are other secrets less open. All we shall -say now is, 'Watch Branstone. He will not disappoint you.'" - -There was a low evening paper, run in the Conservative interest, which -fastened on the phrase "other secrets less open" and published the -scurrilous statement that one of the less open secrets was the fact that -Mr. Councillor Branstone's mother was a charwoman, but the paragraph -appeared only in the early edition and unaccountably disappeared from -later issues. It did no harm, as first editions are not published for -politicians, but for sportsmen, and, in any case, there was a brief, but -dignified, eulogy of Mr. Branstone in the _Manchester Warden_ next day. -That paper happened, fortunately, to be Liberal in politics, and indeed -to be, on just occasion, a valiant log-roller. It rolled a log for Sam; -the popularity of Branstone was established, hall-marked by the Press; -and it was about this time that Stewart's second potboiler was accepted -for inclusion in Branstone's Novels. The terms were even more favourable -to the author than before. - - - - -CHAPTER XVII--THE VERITY AFFAIR - - -|THE curse of the Wandering Jew is upon the advertiser: he must move -perpetually. Not that Sam would have been in any case content to sit -idly on a seat in the Council Chamber. He hadn't the sedentary gifts, -nor was he of the breed of Ada, who, the state of matrimony once -achieved, existed in contemplation of a glory which was even more -vegetable than animal. - -He had to do something to justify a paper reputation for popularity and -he had even to convince himself that he would not soon wake up to find -it all a dream. It had happened too easily to be true, or, at least, -safe. Wattercouch had hinted that things were expected of him. - -They were, of course, expected of him as a Liberal, and Sam was not, -in fact, a Liberal but a Conservative. A Conservative is a man who -conserves, who says "Aye" to the words of Giovanni Malatesta. - - "What I have snared, in that I set my teeth - - And lose with agony." - -Sam had snared, he proposed to go on snaring and never to lose what he -had snared. Whereas a Liberal is a Conservative weakened by sentimental -compassion for the dispossessed. He is not the opposite of a -Conservative, but a Conservative who is weak-minded, or timid or -scrupulous enough to think himself a robber and to propose to give the -poor some five per cent of his plunder. The opposite of a Conservative -is an anarchist. - -Politically he was a Liberal because he thought the Liberals certain to -come in for a long innings at the next election, and if there was any -feeling about it at all (beyond a desire to be on the winning side), -it was for the pudgy orator whose tremendous sentences had caught his -imagination when he visited the House of Commons. - -What he did became known as the Verity affair. It might with equal and -perhaps superior justice have been called the Branstone affair but for -that malicious impulse which causes people to refer to a scandal by the -name of the exposed rather than the exposer. It is like the odium which -we attach to a man who has been in prison, where he had already had his -punishment. Mankind is resolute against letting sleeping dogs lie. - -Mr. Alderman Verity was an elder statesman of the Council and a -Conservative of the honest, unyielding type who thought that to approve -of Tory Democracy was to be either a rogue or a fool, and Sam objected -to him not because he was a Conservative, but for deeper reasons. -Verity was the landlord of Sam's offices. Every tenant objects to every -landlord. - -One calls Verity an honest Conservative because he made no concessions, -not because he was himself a fount of honour. He had no sympathy with -the modern mawkishness about pampering the people. He admitted that one -had to make promises, that the way to win elections was to tickle the -elector as if he were a trout, but as an Alderman he sat above the -cockpit of electioneering and frowned upon the Liberal attitudes to -which younger Conservatives descended to catch a vote. And their view -that the Council existed for the people honestly revolted him: it was so -patently the other way about. - -The particular instance was Baths in Hulme. He saw no sense in Baths in -Hulme. He was quite sincere in his belief that to build Baths in Hulme -was to cast pearls before swine. Hulme had not asked for Baths and did -not want Baths. Baths were opportunities for cleanliness and Hulme did -not want to be clean. Hulme would not be Hulme if it were clean. - -The uncleanliness of Hulme was an institution. Conservatives conserve -institutions, and the only thing which could remove his Conservative and -Aldermanic objection to Baths in Hulme was self-interest. - -Self-interest is the greatest institution of them all. - -He continued to oppose the young bloods of his Party because for a long -time he did not see where his self-interest came in. He even opposed -them publicly. He said in public that Baths in Hulme were a nasty, -pandering, Liberal idea and that no decent-minded Conservative could -think of it without nausea. And then, suddenly and silently, he was -found to be with those who proposed that Hulme should bathe if it wanted -to. His change of mind coincided with the discovery that there was no -open space in Hulme where Baths could be erected. Something would have -to come down that the Baths might go up, and what would come down, and -why, was the secret of Mr. Alderman Verity and one or two others of -the Old Gang who had the habit of standing loyally by each other when a -little simple jobbery was in question. Really, it was too simple to -be reprehensible. If a Town Council can by one and the same resolution -clear away a slum, and confer Baths, who benefits, and doubly, but the -Town? Naturally, the slum owner has to be compensated, though adequate -compensation can hardly be put high enough. Slums are so profitable. - -Wattercouch had many preoccupations just now, but his vigilance was -a habit, and he was struck by the change in Mr. Alderman Verity's -attitude. The silence which succeeded his eloquence seemed pregnant -with something, and Wattercouch wondered with what. It was an error of -judgment in the Alderman not to be ill at this time, but he had covered -his tracks and the affair was prejudged, settled before it ever came -before the Council. Verity had neither conscience nor fears about it, -and the Conservative Party, with a prescient eye on the imminent General -Election, was going to use its majority in the Council that it might -figure as the Party which bestowed cleanliness on Hulme. - -Wattercouch wondered why it was Simpson's Buildings which those -benefactors of mankind proposed to buy and demolish so as to clear a -site for their Baths. - -"This might be your opportunity, Branstone," he said. - -"Isn't it asking a good deal of the junior member of the Council to -suggest that he tackle an old hand like Alderman Verity?" asked Sam, -leaning back in his chair with his thumbs in his waistcoat armholes. - -"We all expect great things of you," flattered Wattercouch, who had -still to justify his selection of Sam to the Liberal caucus. - -"I don't intend to fail you, either. But I can't oppose these Baths. As -a Liberal I am in favour of them." - -"So are we all. But we are not in favour of Alderman Verity's being in -favour of them." - -"It's David and Goliath to pit me against Verity, Wattercouch." - -"David won." - -"And Samuel will win. But he will make a condition. The condition is -a free hand. I want no help and no advice and I undertake on that -condition to pulverize Verity." - -"But you'll tell me what you propose to do?" - -"I said a free hand, Wattercouch. Leave this to me and I'll settle it." - -It seemed to Wattercouch that every time he had dealings with Sam he was -asked to take a gambling chance, but he had no plan of action, and the -man without a plan is always at a disadvantage against the man who, with -or without a plan, looks confident. He left it to Sam and there was, as -it happened, nobody to whom he could have left it better. - -Wattercouch had no inside information and only vague suspicions that -Verity's change of mind was rooted in the same earth as Verity's -self-interest. But Sam knew something and was not boasting idly when he -undertook to "pulverize" Verity. - -What he knew, rightly used at the right moment, was dynamic enough, but -he lacked evidence and he did not see how to get evidence. The Council -meeting was at hand and he was finding it each day more difficult to -grin with cheerful assurance at the mutely questioning Wattercouch. He -felt distinctly unassured. - -The facts were clear enough to him. Verity now approved of the Baths -because they were to be erected on the site of Simpson's Buildings, and -Verity owned that dilapidated pile. He did not own it publicly because -respectable aldermen do not own slum property; he owned it in the name -of Mr. Sylvester Lamputt, Verity's second cousin, a man of straw; and -Sam knew that he owned it because he had a good memory, he remembered -a conversation between Lamputt and Mr. Travers, which he had overheard, -and all the present circumstances pointed to the relations of Lamputt -with Verity being as they had been when Sam was in the estate agent's -office. - -Verity was aware that retail profits are higher than wholesale, and -small retail than large retail; that when, for instance, a poor woman -buys an ounce of tea she pays a higher rate for it than when a rich -woman buys a pound or ten pounds, and similarly that when a family rents -a room in a slum property it pays immensely more for it proportionately -than when a cotton king rents a warehouse in the centre of the city. But -it is dignified to let a warehouse to a cotton king, and disreputable -to let single rooms in Hulme, so second cousin Lamputt was the putative -owner of Simpson's Buildings. Sam smiled at the ludicrous thought of -the burly alderman sheltering behind the shrivelled form of his second -cousin Lamputt. It was like trying to hide a bull behind a weasel. - -But he did not smile often in those days. He paid a visit, at dusk, to -Simpson's Buildings, and breathed softly lest Simpson's Buildings should -collapse upon him. Obviously, the alderman was finding his market in the -nick of time. It eliminated doubt, but did not provide proof. - -He knew that in the matter of Simpson's Buildings, Lamputt was identical -with Verity, but he wanted evidence, and to get evidence he must rely -upon the dullness of Mr. Lamputt, and did not think that he was dull. -The totem of Lamputt was certainly a ferret, and Sam credited the ferret -tribe with nimble wit. He had to be more nimble, then. - -He rejected the idea of making Mr. Lamputt gloriously drunk because it -seemed impossible to associate glory, even the glory of intoxication, -with Mr. Lamputt's feeble body. It was a case, as usual with Sam, of -taking chances. - -He did nothing at all until the morning of the meeting which was to -decide if Hulme might bathe, and, even then, left his office only a -little before his usual time for going to the Town Hall. He turned into -a back street, ran up many stairs to the attic office whose door bore -the name of Sylvester Lamputt, Agent (more sins are committed in the -name of agency than of charity), and flung panting into the single room. - -He won the first throw in his game. Sylvester was in. - -He sat on a high office stool writing on the malodorous page of an -enormous ledger, looking for all the world like a diminutive office -boy on whom some one has fitted, in cruel jest, a hoary head. If the -calendars on his walls were trustworthy witnesses, he was agent for half -the insurance companies in the British Isles. Autolycus was Sylvester's -other name. - -He reverenced his ledger as other men reverence the Bible. He kept no -other diary, for the ledger was his book of life, and when Sam burst -upon him he was absorbed in his records. He closed the book mechanically -through pure secretive habit, and closed into it just enough of his wits -to put him at a disadvantage with Sam. - -Sam gave no quarter. "Mr. Verity," he gasped before he was fairly in the -room. "Simpson's Buildings... the title-deeds... here, or has Mr. Verity -got them?" - -It succeeded. Lamputt took him for an urgent special messenger from -Verity. "If Mr. Verity's memory is going," he said with dignity, "mine -is not. The title-deeds are in the third drawer of his safe in his -office." - -"In his name?" asked Sam quickly. - -"Of course," said Lamputt, and then, too late, became suspicious. "I -say," he began, "what-------?" - -But Sam had gone, and though Mr. Lamputt reached his hat and the door in -one bound and careered down his familiar stairs like the office boy -his figure aped, Sam had turned a corner and was lost to sight. Lamputt -raced to Verity's office, only to find that the alderman was then -attending a Council meeting. Lamputt could do no more, indeed for a -man with a weak heart he had already done too much: but he had a strong -foreknowledge of the wrath of Alderman Verity, and goes, an unhappy, -shrinking figure, out of this story to an unknown fate. - -Sam went to the Town Hall with his bomb-shell, and they disapprove of -bombs at Council meetings, so he was sedulous to spare their feelings. -He supported that part of the resolution which referred to the erection -of Baths, but proposed that it should stand alone and that the naming of -a site should be deferred. Curiously, his proposal made the Conservative -majority very angry: the resolution was one and indivisible. Sam -regretted that in order to vote against the misuse of a particular site, -he was forced to vote against the Baths, but standing as he did for -purity in civic life, detesting the very shadow of jobbery, he had no -alternative but to move that the resolution be rejected. Here was a -proposal which, however innocent its wording, did in fact imply that -ratepayers' money was to be handed over to a prominent member of the -party opposite, to a gentleman in whose safe, at whose office, in the -third drawer of the safe, were deposited at that moment the title-deeds -of the property whose acquisition by the city was suggested. He -abhorred personalities, he shrank from mentioning a name, and if the -second part of the resolution were withdrawn, he---- - -It was too much for a young, impetuous innocent opposite. "You dare not -mention a name. You lie." - -Sam hoped the Council would absolve him of causing a scene. - -"Prove your words," cried the rash gentleman. - -"I suggest," said Sam blandly, "that we avoid unpleasantness. I have -made a statement and I am asked to prove it. If a deputation of three -will go with me and Mr. Alderman Verity to his office, the title-deeds -of Simpson's Buildings will be found in the place I have indicated." - -It was the sort of drama which appealed more to the readers of the -evening papers than to the Council. Mr. Mayor, in the chair, was -speechless in embarrassed distress. Sam had the calm of imperishable -rock in wind-tossed surf. In the midst of a breathless excitement, Mr. -Alderman Verity was seen to totter to his feet. "I own the property," he -said, collapsed into his seat and graced that seat no more. - -Impossible even for a Conservative paper to uphold Verity, impossible -to do more than to suggest that Sam's manners were deplorable: while -his own papers made a hero of him, found his manners a model of -consideration and his triumph as graceful as it was complete. - -All Sam cared to know was that he was on the crest of a wave of -popularity and a general election was at hand. Night after night he -spoke, and the tritest platitudes, with Sam's smile behind them, shone -like new-found truth. He was _persona gratissima_ before he opened his -mouth: it gave him confidence, and confidence is half the speaker's -battle. He coined some of those ugly, smart, journal-easy catch-words -which help to win elections, and are quoted in the papers and blossom -on the placards. And, with it all, he became what he had prematurely -called himself, an orator. - -He had the satisfaction of watching audiences sit through the boredom of -Gatenby that they might hear Branstone, and of being himself the "star" -speaker at outlying meetings. Gatenby was returned by a record majority -and it was Bran-stone for whom the mob yelled outside the Town Hall. - -The election was an early one, and Sam was called to speak in other -constituencies. He had wires, not only from agents in quite distant -divisions, but actually from Headquarters. He was in touch with the -Whips! Less than a year after he had lied to Wattercouch, the lie -turned true. He was in touch with the Whips, a wanted speaker, a man of -reputation, a name to be applauded when it was announced on a platform, -for all the world like people applaud when the number of a star -performer goes up on the announcement board of a music-hall. He was not -of the Great Unwanted, but of the few who were wanted. - -Someone discovered at this time the old canard which had once appeared -in the first edition of an evening paper, that his mother was a -charwoman. He did not deny it, but used it as Wattercouch his name, -making an asset of a handicap. He was of the people, blood of their -blood, a democrat by birth, knowing their aspirations and their needs -because he, too, had needed and aspired. In the heat of that election -he became egregiously a Radical. It told, it "went" with the audiences: -that was the thing that mattered to Sam. He hadn't so much as the shadow -of a principle, he was winning, on the winning side, and pleased himself -enormously. - -And by the end of the campaign he stood, actually, where he had aimed -to stand: amongst prospective candidates who fight, as it were, -probationary elections where, they have scarcely a sporting chance, to -pay their footing towards the sort of candidature which gives a man -his seat. If the Conservatives had offered him a tolerably safe seat, -without preliminary fight, he would have ratted eagerly, and the -charwoman his mother would have been pressed into service on the other -side. It was all one to Sam Branstone. - - - - -CHAPTER XVIII--WHEN EFFIE CAME - - -|THEN Effie came with beauty, shattering the life he lived as sunshine -breaks the April clouds. At first he did not know what had happened to -him: there was a radiance, but he thought it nothing greater than -her physical appeal. He was disturbed, moved as nothing had moved him -before--not even applause--but did not see that more had come to him -than loveliness where all had been unlovely. He did not realize that -there were greater things in Effie than her comeliness. - -She was the daughter of a doctor who had lived up to every penny of his -income and died leaving his widow nothing but a cottage in the country, -which had been their week-end haunt. The widow sold the practice and got -for it enough to keep herself, with care, in the cottage. - -There Mrs. Mannering lived unhappily, resentfully, nourishing a grudge -against her poverty, developing a vein of hardy thrift unseen till now. -With management, she had enough, but lacked the gift of management. She -did not see things in proportion, imagined herself deep sunk in poverty -and made unreasoning demands on Effie. On Effie, not on her son who -managed a rubber plantation at Penang and followed the spendthrift -habits of his father. Father and son, the Mannerings were cursed with a -passion for popularity and entertained with open house to all comers. In -the East, it cost Rex Mannering more than it had cost his father at home -and, granted his habits, he was right in saying that he could do nothing -for his mother. He could deny himself nothing. - -It left the more for Effie. She who was not trained to work must go -into the world and fight not only for her bread but for her mother's -luxuries. Augusta Mannering was merciless in her demands. She believed, -quite sincerely, that Eflie was gaining riches in the offices of -Manchester and withholding a share from her in simple self-indulgence. -Was it not by going to offices that Dr. Mannering's rich patients had -been able to pay their bills? And hadn't they an army of friends who -used to eat their salt? - -But the friends, misunderstanding Effie's pride, offered no help of the -kind she could accept. She wanted work, not invitations to houses where, -with dress and servants' tips, it would cost her more to live than in -the rooms she found in Rusholme. She had not the means to be decorative -now, and it occurred to nobody that Effie was a clerk, wanting a clerk's -place. They could not think of her, that brilliant girl, shackled to a -typewriter. They did not offer what she wanted and she was too proud to -ask. - -Then memories are short, especially of the popular men who buy their -popularity across the dining-table and charge high fees to the unwell to -procure high feeding for the well; and when the Mannerings disappeared, -Augusta to her cottage and Effie to Rusholme, there were few inquiries -made. - -Some other entertainer stepped into the breach of local hospitality; -Effie's net-play became a legend on their tennis lawns; and she herself -was deemed to be with her mother in the country, shining on other courts -than theirs. - -It was not pure callousness, but things are as they are, and one cannot -live by money and then lose money without losing more than money. - -Effie went into the city unfriended and alone, and her mother lived, a -miser, in her cottage. She wrote to Effie that she needed this and that; -that Effie must spare of her abundance or her mother must starve, and -Effie out of her thirty shillings a week did send, but her mother did -not buy. She warmed her hands at a bank-book, wore ancient clothes -and watched her credit grow. It was more than a perversion of her old -extravagance, it was insanity and Effie knew it. To keep an insane woman -moderately happy, she sacrificed necessities. That is why she was shabby -when she came into Mr. Branstone's office for the post of typist one -bright, revealing afternoon soon after his party had triumphed at the -polls and he had made himself a figure on the hustings. - -Effie had found companionship in Rusholme, and knew by now the -difference between the friendship which is given and the friendship -which is bought. She had become expert in friendship, and Sam, from -their first encounter, seemed to her more like a friend than an -employer. By then, she had experience of employers. That was why she was -out of work. - -It wasn't, of course, the normal Sam she met, but a Sam exalted, -genuinely raised and not merely puffed up, by his electioneering -notoriety. He had a new self-confidence; it seemed to him that little -was beyond his reach, that he might even hope to come to terms with -Effie. Not, that is to say, to such terms as her last employer had -proposed. Sam was not, in these matters, the average sensual man. The -point was, and it was to his credit, that he discerned something fine -in Effie even at this stage, and the mood of confidence gave him to hope -that he might not seem commonplace to her. Already, that afternoon, he -cared so much. Her opinion mattered. - -It mattered so greatly that he went slowly about the business of -surprising her: for that, of course, was what he thought he had to do. -She might not know things about Branstone which it was good for her to -know. He might be any employer who advertised for a typist, and he was -not any employer. He was Branstone, of the Classics and the Novels; town -councillor; politician; and she must be told about him. She must learn -what manner of man he was. He wanted to tell her how much greater he was -going to be, but decided that could wait. First she must know what he -had done, before it came to telling her what he was going to do, and his -record would come better from others than from himself. In the office -they knew it all and, even if she asked no questions, there was much -which the routine work would tell her of him. - -He curbed impatience and left her for some weeks in the general office, -where it was supposed that she was picking up some knowledge of the -business before beginning to act as his secretary, but what he hoped she -was picking up was some knowledge of him. He had the idea that he was -popular with his staff, and did not think that they would libel him to -her. - -All the time he burned to have her sitting with him in the private -office. It was for that purpose that he had advertised for a -typist-secretary, and to bring her from the general office could excite -no comment. On the contrary, to leave her there so long might look -strange or at least suggest that Effie was a failure. A failure! Much -he cared whether she was efficient at her work. Yet she was splendidly -efficient, and still he coquetted with his purpose of having her with -him. It seemed to him that to call her in would be a step definite and -irrevocable, one which he wanted and even yearned to make, but about -which he hesitated sensuously as a bridegroom might hesitate on the -threshold of the bridal chamber. He neglected to make two certainly -profitable journeys to London at this time because he could not deny -himself the pleasure of seeing her neck as she bent over her typewriter -when he passed through the office. - -And he had hardly spoken to her! But his dreams were vibrant with the -music of her voice, swelling like an organ till it filled his life with -new harmony. It filled his life not because he refused to think of Ada, -but because he could not think of her. Ada wasn't there; she didn't -exist. She never had been there, for Sam, in the true sense, so that the -step from the custom which is nothingness to complete nothingness -was almost imperceptible. She was a ghost from the past fading in the -radiance of the present. The sun puts out the candlelight. - -He was seeing Effie, of course, with quite grotesquely unperceiving -eyes. She might have been, for all he saw of her, the beautiful doll she -emphatically was not. Her outside pleased and satisfied his eye, and he -took it for granted that the woman within would satisfy him in the same -way as the woman without. And so, in the long run, she did, but not till -Sam had made a hurdle race of it and come some awkward croppers on the -course. The harmony of his organ dream might have been true prophecy; -it certainly was not present fact. He wasn't seeing himself as Effie -saw him, or the sidelong glances he cast at her pretty neck might have -expressed more desire to break than to kiss it. - -He seemed to her a jolly monster, quite lovable if trained, but at -present as untrained as a badly brought-up dog, and perhaps too old to -learn. But it might be amusing to see if he could learn, and from her -who was not used to breaking in a mastiff. That made the thing worth -while, his bigness and the lovableness she recognized behind the -rankness of him. Chance might not come her way, and she thought it -unlikely that it would, but if it did, she meant to take it with -both hands. Effie, aged twenty-six, proposed to herself to form Sam -Bran-stone, who was thirty-five and her employer! She smiled at her -preposterous audacity, but the more she saw and the more she heard of -him, the more determination bit into her. Droll, officious, absurd--all -these her idea was, and she liked it because it was fantastic and -because Sam was Sam. In Effie's wise, impertinent eyes fantasy and Sam -seemed bound together. And yet he paid her wages; he was a solid man, -a member of the Council, and a serious politician! She was impertinent -indeed. - -But he could not, either for his sake or hers, keep her for ever on -the threshold. For all his late-won confidence he was quite pitiably -nervous, and held back for days in pure hesitation before the simple -action of calling her into his office. He thought of it as initiation, a -ritual to which a high solemnity attached. He intended to act up to -its solemnity, to usher her into that office with all that was most -impressive, to signify to her the importance of being secretary to -Branstone; and, instead, he who was wordy fumbled for words, he who was -painfully correct dropped two aitches in a sentence, and stood there -most comically aghast at his slip. - -Of course, the ritual was finished; one cannot be ritualistic and -conscious of aitchlessness. Ritual implies the superhuman, the -something, at least, which sets the executant above the common clay, and -to drop an aitch is human. In the moment of solemnity, in the mouth of -the ritualist, it is drolly human. We find incongruity amusing, and the -more solemn the occasion the more readily does an impish mirth intrude -on light pretext. - -Effie giggled. She did not mean to be unkind, but the spectacle of his -confusion was too much for her. She hadn't the strength to resist, and -though she turned her giggle, quite neatly, into a cough, it was not -before he had seen. - -This was his great moment, to which he had looked forward, and she -giggled at him! He felt himself writ down an ass, and wondered for -the fraction of a second whether he would get more satisfaction from -smacking her or from kicking himself. Then he saw her looking at him, -and nothing seemed to matter. He dropped aitches and she giggled. Very -well, then he wasn't a superman, and she wasn't divine. They were human -beings, at this moment in the relationship of employer and employed. - -"In future, you will sit at the little desk in here, Miss Mannering." He -met her eye defiantly as he spoke the "here." - -"If you have your notebook you can take this letter down." - -He was running away from his ruined situation. To dictate a letter to -her had not been in the scheme at all, as he had planned it. It was -a refuge, and a safe one, but as he dictated he saw in the letter -his opportunity to indicate to her that he forgave the giggle. He was -writing to an author about a manuscript, which he intended to publish, -but broke off before he reached that decisive point of his letter. - -"Wait a bit," he said. "Here is the novel I am writing about. I want -your opinion of it to fortify my own before I do anything definite. Will -you have a look at it in here? I'm due at a Council meeting and must -go." - -"Certainly, Mr. Branstone," she said; "but my judgment isn't very -reliable." - -"We don't know that until you try," he said, escaping from his office -to the Town Hall, where he kicked his heels for an hour till the meeting -began Nor did he return to business that day. He had a shyness and a -feeling of deflation. He needed time before he could expand again. - -Effie took her reading of the novel conscientiously rather than -seriously, not supposing that her verdict either way would go for -anything, but appreciating his hint of confidence, and the fact that, -considered as work, novel-reading was pleasant. And not finishing the -manuscript at the office, she took it home with her to Rusholme. - -In Rusholme the landladies are a little humanized from their primitive -Grundyism, partly by the girl clerk, but mainly because few of them have -avoided, at one time or another, the theatrical lodger, a valiant tilter -at conventionalities; and it is possible for a woman in lodgings to be -called upon by a man in the evening without being evicted as a sinner. -One must, of course, choose one's landlady with discretion. - -Effie, who had not had the opportunity of selecting her parents and had -suffered accordingly, chose her landlady with discretion. By now she had -her friends, those she had made in Manchester, not those she inherited -from her father; there were men amongst them, and they came to see her. -Often, in fact, and especially on Sundays, her room was over-crowded; -but a bed, in the semi disguise of a travelling rug, holds many -callers, and they solved the problem of hospitality by bringing each a -contribution to the feast. - -To-night she had one caller, Stewart, who, having been brought one -Sunday by a man who knew a woman who was a fellow-clerk with Effie at -her last-but-one place, had formed the habit of coming as often as he -could. He was not at the _Warden_ office that night, for the same reason -which accounted for his not knowing that she had gone to Branstone's. He -was convalescent after influenza, too limp to write the super-journalism -of the _Warden_, well enough to come out to take the tonic called Effie. - -"I ought not to let you in to-night," she said. "Thank Heaven for -that," he said, coming in. "Doing what one ought is the dullest thing I -know--unless you're really serious, Effie? In which case I'll go." His -hand was on the door-knob. - -"I'm really serious," she said with mock impressiveness. "I'm working -overtime. Behold!" She threw herself on the bed with the manuscript in -hand. "This," she announced, "is Work." - -"I can believe it," he said, "because that looks like the typescript of -a novel. If it were mine it would be a pleasure to read; but as it is -not mine, it is probably work." - -"Oh, it's work all right," she said. "Hard labour, too. I'm reading it -by order of my new chief. He publishes things like this." - -Stewart sat up. "Not Branstone?" he, said. "Don't say you've gone to -Sammy!" - -"Yes. Do you know him?" - -"Know him? I invented him. Bit of a Frankenstein for all that. Better -say I know most of him. He can still spring surprises on me, and you in -his office are one of'em." - -"Why? Don't you like his office?" - -"It's an office. So long as you've to be in an office, you could pick -worse--easily. Sammy's a stream with a lot of shallows in him, but there -are also depths, and I've never fathomed them. There's mud in him, but -it's not the nasty sort of mud." - -"I've seen that much," she said. "Polluted but curable." - -"You're not by any chance thinking of yourself as a Branstone River -Conservancy, are you?" - -"I rather like him, Dubby," she said. - -"Good Lord! You and Sam: I say, old thing, no offence, but you know he's -married?" - -"I know," said Ellie. "What's she like?" - -"Haven't seen her since I was his best man. Wasn't tempted to see more -of her." - -"It's as bad as that?" - -"Oh, rather worse, I believe. Pitch that novel over. I'll tell you in -five minutes if it's any use." - -"Five minutes isn't very fair to the author," she protested. - -"Oh, quite. I'm a reviewer, and reviewing's badly paid. It teaches you -to rip the guts out of a novel quickly. Smoke that cigarette and I'll -tell you all about it by the time you're through." - -He fluttered the pages while she smoked. "Utter," he decided. "Utter." - -"I haven't finished it," she said; "but so far I agree with you." - -"You'll agree with me to the end. Pluperfect trash. Sam will love it." - -"What!" - -"You'll see. It's just his line." - -"Aren't you trying to prejudice me against him?" - -He stared. "I'm trying to save you the trouble of reading the beastly -thing. I've given you expert opinion. It's trash and the brand of trash -that he likes. Didn't I tell you there, was mud in Sam?" - -"You told me you invented him. I don't believe your influence has been -for good." - -"Don't be hard on a fellow, Effie; I only introduced him to the mud. I -didn't know he'd wallow. Anyhow, let's talk of something else." - -"You know," she said, "you do influence people, Dubby." - -"Of course. That's what I'm paid for. I'm a journalist. Have you never -heard of the power of the Press? It means a lot of little journalists -like me writing as their editors tell 'em to. But I don't appear to -have much influence on you. I asked you to change the subject and you're -still thinking about Sam." - -"Yes," she agreed, "I'm still thinking of Sam." - -"You and Sam!" he repeated, looking incredulously at her. - -Effie nodded. "But," she said, "I don't know yet." - -He rose to his feet. "You're sure, Effie? You're sure you don't know -about him yet?" - -"Quite sure." - -"Then you do know about me? Effie, I've got to ask. Are you sure about -me?" - -She met his eyes bravely, knowing that she must hurt. She was sure she -did not love Stewart, who was free, and not sure about Branstone, who -was married. "I am quite, quite sure, Dubby," she said softly. - -"I see," he said. "Well, I'm not the sort that pesters, but if you want -me, Effie, if you find you want me, I'll be there. I... I suppose I'd -better go now. It will take some doing to change the subject after -this." - -"Dubby, I'm sorry. You're not well, and----" - -She could see him trembling. - -"Not that, old thing," he interrupted. "Not pity. That would make me -really ill. Love's just a thing that happens along, but one starter -doesn't make a race." He held out his hand. "Well, doctor's orders to go -to bed early. Good-night." - -"Good-night, Dubby," she said, and added hesitatingly: "You'll come on -Sunday?" - -"Lord, yes," he said. "I don't love and run away. Good-night." - -She sat for a long while staring into vacancy, then found that something -wet was dropping on her hands. She bathed her eyes and took the novel up -again. A proposal occupied, she found, twelve pages of turgid, emotional -dialogue; but, of course, her experience might be limited. Certainly it -did not confirm the book's verbosity. - -She was quite sure that she did not want Dubby Stewart. He did not -strike her as humorous at all. - - - - -CHAPTER XIX--EFFIE IN LOVE - - -|SEVERAL causes combined to make her think of Sam, too, as not at all -humorous when she saw him in the morning. Unlike him, she was not at -her best in the early hours of the day, and the strain of arriving at -an office by nine a.m. was one from which she did not recover for some -time. She hated business, but without that cross of early rising she -might have found it almost tolerable. - -She woke that day to her landlady's rap more resentfully than usual. The -world was disgustingly mismanaged. Why couldn't she love Dubby, who was -free? She couldn't, but she hated Sam for being married, he had no right -to be married. "Damn Mrs. Sam! Damn her!" she said heartily, by way of -a morning prayer, as she ran hairpins viciously into her glorious -hair. "But I'll cure him of mud," she added, as she raced downstairs to -swallow the tea and toast which she took almost in the same rush that -carried her from her bedroom to the tram. - -She reached the office and walked into Sam's room to find him already -in possession. His obvious briskness at that hour struck her as almost -indecent; it was, at any rate, another cause for resentment, and one of -which he was himself quite blandly unaware. - -He was not stealing a march upon her any more than he habitually stole -marches on the rest of the world. He knew that early morning suited him, -and used it to advantage. They were certain in town that Branstone had -luck rather than brains because he was lazy; but if a man arrives at -his office at eight a.m., and puts in two hours of solid work by ten -o'clock, he is well ahead of his fellows of the employing class who go -down to offices on the 9.21 from home. He can afford to appear lazy. - -He liked that uninterrupted hour with the books, opened the letters -himself, and had them annotated before the men came, whose business it -was to deal with their contents. He planned out the day's work, and -saw it in hand before his earliest caller came. After ten, which is the -first hour when it is etiquette for a salesman to call, Sam was never -too busy to talk of matters which were not strictly business--with -the right, the gainful caller. It was known that one could kill time -pleasantly with Branstone. Branstone was a lazy fellow, and his office -a good place to sit in on a wet afternoon, when there was no point in -going to Old Trafford. - -He came this morning even earlier than usual, to be ready for Effie when -she came at nine. He had slept off his embarrassment, and was ready in -his early morning ebullience to pooh-pooh it. It was stupid to be so -extraordinarily sensitive about an aitch. Accent had always troubled -him, but he need not overrate its importance, and especially now that -he wore the political badge of a democrat, and had acknowledged publicly -that his mother was a charwoman. - -So he was here, installed in his chair with the back of his morning's -work broken, waiting for her when she came. - -No, she decided, not at all humorous to-day: formidable, in fact. He -had all the advantages; he was seated; he was first upon the ground, and -that ground his own, and he was abominably awake. He might have run away -yesterday, but this was the morning of retrieval. - -"Good morning," he said, assuming an attitude of leisure. - -"Good morning," she said, then saw that he was looking quizzically at -the parcel she carried, as if, she thought, he mistook it for her lunch. -"I took the novel home to finish," she explained nervously, and called -herself a fool for giving him this readymade chance to open the subject -which of all things she wanted to delay until her suaver hour had come. -She might be able to cure him of mud, but a doctor should have a bedside -manner, and she distrusted her manners until the landlady's knock had -ceased ringing in her ears. - -If she had not given him the chance, he would have made it. He gave no -quarter to bad starters. Had he known of her weakness, he might have -spared her. He might, because she was Effie; but it wasn't his habit to -indulge the weaknesses of others, especially a weakness which he did not -share, did not understand, and denied to be anything but sloth. - -"Yes," he said encouragingly. "And the verdict?" - -"Does my verdict matter, Mr. Branstone?" she asked. He hadn't given her -time to get her jacket off! - -"What? Certainly it matters. I wasn't asking you to waste your time when -I gave you the manuscript to read. The question is whether we ought to -publish it, and the answer depends on your opinion." - -"Is that quite fair--to the author, I mean? My opinions of novels are -inexpert." - -"That author can take care of himself very well," he assured her. "He -won't starve if we refuse his novel." - -"I'm afraid my opinions are also intolerant," she said. - -"Still," he smiled, "I should like to hear them." - -"They might infuriate you, and--well, I'd rather not be sacked if I can -help it." - -"We will forget that it is in my power to sack you. Does that satisfy -you?" - -Oh, how she loathed people who could be magnanimous at nine a.m.! "You -are being very kind," she said. - -"And you are not giving me your opinion. Come, Miss Mannering, you've -read it. What do you think of it?" - -Later in the day she might have put it more gently. Just now she could -manage nothing more kindly than: "I think it's appalling. It's false -from start to finish," and she rejoiced to see how much her vehement -candour disconcerted him. "I've drawn first blood," she thought; but -bleeding as a curative process is discredited. - -"But," he said, "it is very like others of my series. I made sure it -would be popular." - -"I'm not a judge of that. It's possible enough. And now"--she smiled a -little wryly--"I'm afraid you know my opinion of the series. I warned -you," she added hastily, "that my opinions were intolerant. I imagine -you will not ask for them again." She turned resolutely to the -typewriter and took its cover off. She thought she had closed the -discussion, and was suiting action to her word, and sitting at her desk -when he motioned her back to the chair opposite his. It was not the sort -of motion one ignored. - -"I may ask for them again or I may not," he said; "but in the meantime I -have certainly not given you anything to do at that machine, and we were -trying to forget that you are my typist." - -"I thought after what I've said that it might be time to remember it," -she suggested. - -"Not at all," he assured her. "I get to the bottom of things, and, if -you please, we'll have this out." - -"Of course, if this is part of your secretary's work----" she began. - -He cut her short. "It is. Now, you find my novel series appalling?" - -Effie was growing angry. _In vino veritas_--and in anger. "I could go -even further," she said. "I find it degrading." - -He thumped the desk. "But it sells, Miss Mannering, it sells. Did you -know that?" He leant back in his chair in one of the attitudes he took -when he was scoring heavily, thumbs in his waistcoat arm-holes. - -"It's the most popular series of cheap novels on the market. See any -bookstall, if you doubt me." He paused for her apology. - -Effle did not apologize. "That does not alter my opinion of it," she -said coolly. "A public danger isn't less dangerous because it's large. -I'm afraid I can believe that there are no depths to which it is -impossible to degrade the public taste, but that does not make me like -any the better a series which degrades it." - -Now a child is a child. It may be deformed, and its begetter may in -clairvoyant moments have acknowledged the deformity to himself, but he -resents its being pointed out to him. Sam was the father of his series. - -"I say!" he protested. "That's nasty." - -"It's a nasty series," she said hardily. "You are proud of it because it -sells when you ought to be ashamed of it because it's bad." Somehow -she had to say it. She couldn't hedge from what she saw as truth, even -though she expected truth to hurt him and to be hurt in return. But Sam -wonderfully controlled himself. Emphatically, he was forgetting that she -was a typist. He remembered that she was Effie. - -He addressed the ceiling. "The fact is," he mourned, "that women do not -understand business. Even business women don't. Even you don't." - -Mentally she thanked him for his "even you." It seemed to her a good -place to end the matter for that morning. She still distrusted her -manners, and not, she thought, without reason. - -"Consequently," she told him quietly, "my opinion cannot matter," and -moved as if to go to her typewriter. - -He held her to her seat. "That is to beg the question," he replied, "and -we were to have it out." - -"But," she tried, "you have told me that I do not understand business." - -"And you did not believe me." - -He challenged her, in fact. Well, she must pick up his gage. "I do not -understand this about business, Mr. Branstone. What is it about business -which makes a man like you content to be a confectioner selling people -wares that give them mental indigestion? Business! It's the name for -half the meanness and nine-tenths of the ugliness in the world. You see, -women do know something about business to-day. It isn't their fault that -they are not still sitting cosily at home, hugging the old belief that -business is a dignified, majestic thing to which only the masculine -intellect can rise. It's your fault, the men's. You wanted cheap clerks, -and you raised the veil so that women have seen business at close -quarters, and the only thing they do not understand is how men continued -for so long to magnify its low chicane and its infinite humbug into a -cult which deceived them." - -Sam came to the conclusion that Effie was not perfect. She suffered -from hysteria, but she must be answered. "Well," he said, "you don't -think much of business. But you came into it." - -"I needed money," she defended that. - -"So did I," he said dryly. "We're birds of a feather." - -"You hate it, too?" she asked hopefully. - -"Honestly," he said, "I like it. But," he went on with mischief in his -eye, "I can tell you something that will please you. You dislike the -novel series. You think they degrade. You don't think the Classics -degrade?" - -"No." - -"I would much rather that the Classics sold largely than the novels." - -"Why?" She was eager now. "Because they are great literature?" - -"No. That would be being sentimental about business, and it can't be -done. Because they are not copyright, and it saves book-keeping." He -grinned at her discomfiture. "Business," he defined, "is money-getting." -He was feeling tremendously pleased with himself, her master in -argument. He gave her rope indulgently, for she was Effie; then crushed -her utterly, for he was Sam. - -"Isn't it better," she asked, "to win a little money decently than to -gain a great deal by trading in poison? Whether you know it or not, -these books are poisonous." - -"I don't know it," he said brusquely. "They give pleasure." - -"So, I suppose, does opium. There are lots of pleasant poisons. Would -you keep an opium den if it paid? If you were a milkman, would you -adulterate milk and poison babies? You adulterate books and poison -minds. For money! Oh, yes; I, too, needed money, and I, too, came to -business. But we are not birds of a feather. I do not like business. I -don't like having to get money. I don't like money, but I need it. I've -things to do with it." - -"My case again," he capped her. "I've things to do with it." He saw that -she was looking at him curiously, and that she took him to mean that he -wanted money for Ada. Incidentally he did, but essentially he did not. -"Politics," he added. "Power! Power!" He repeated the word ecstatically, -not only because he was admitting her to the intimacy of his private -thought, not only because he felt it an ecstatic idea, but because -he had so thoroughly defeated her in argument. She sat there staring -speechlessly, and he exulted to perceive that she was mute before his -slashing common sense. - -Only, that was not the reason of her silence. She thought that, for a -first attempt, she had gone far enough, and had the hope that something -of what she had said would remain in his mind, perhaps stingingly. -She could only hope. Heaven knew it had been a queer enough interview -between an employer and his typist, and her prayer, as she sat there -permitting his exultation, was for an interruption. - -Her prayer was answered. Just as she thought him on the brink of seeing -that her silence was not entirely acquiescent, the office-boy brought in -the name of a caller he must see, and Effie rose with huge relief. She -hadn't it in her to keep silent much longer, and felt that if she then -let go all that was firing her, she would say more than he could stand. -True, he had stood a good deal, but then she had said little of what -she had to say! She wanted to say it gradually, to lead him, not to spur -him, to her point of view. Already she was taking a more modern view of -the virtues of bleeding her patient. - -She thought, too, that his was the easier part. - -She had ideals for her Sam, but when she attempted to define them, they -seemed nebulous, indeed, against his simple practice of expediency. He -had his theory that what was expedient was just, and she--what was -her theory except that his was not good enough for him? And his was -in possession everywhere, established, honoured, received of all but a -trivial minority. He thought with the mass and she thought mass-thinking -was not good enough for him. It was difficult to explain. He wasn't a -criminal, he wasn't even individual in thought or method; he played the -common game, playing perhaps a little more astutely than the average, -but keeping honestly within the rules. He followed the crowd, and she -wanted him to follow the gleam. A gleam is indefinable, but she thought -she had a chance because she was so much more grown-up than Sam. -Business was a game of marbles, and girls do not play with marbles, but -with dolls. - -He was not to remain for long with the delusion that he had silenced her -in their first talk. There followed many other talks, although she was -coming to the conclusion that talking would not do the business for her. -It helped, it made a preparation of the ground, but it was stubborn clay -in which he had his roots. Talking did not dig deep enough; she must -uproot, she must transplant. - -"Politics," he had said to pulverize her argument. - -"Another thing," she told him, "which is not quite the mystery for women -that it was. Politics, but--why?" - -And he replied with the word which had raised him to ecstasy. "Power,"; -he said. - -"Yes?" she questioned. "Business leads you to money, money to politics, -and politics to power. And after that? You want power--for what?" - -"Why," he cried, "power is power." - -"An end in itself?" - -"At least, it's an ambition," he replied. - -It was, and so had Ada had her ambition to be married, an end, _the_ -end. He did not think of Ada, but he found it difficult to justify -himself. He could not even tell her that he was a Liberal, because he -had a decent hatred of a Tory; he wasn't in politics for a faith which -enabled him to endure their artifice; he relished the artifice, he was -in with an axe to grind, but with no clear idea of the use he wished -to make of his axe when it was sharp. Ambition, purpose narrowed to two -letters--M.P. He wanted to be M.P. for Branstone, that Bran-stone might -hear the voice of Branstone speaking in the House of Commons. - -She watched him slyly, and thought her leaven worked. "Of course," she -said casually, "it would be useful for your business if you were an -M.P." - -"Enormously," he agreed, marching blindly into her little trap. "It -gives prestige to any business." - -"And completes the vicious circle," she said. "Business takes you to -politics and politics brings you back to business." - -He remembered an appointment hastily, and went to keep it. Sam Branstone -stumped for a reply was an unusual phenomenon, and she con gratulated -herself again that it worked. It worked, but slowly. She was not -impatient, but he was still doing unchanged the things she hated to see -him do, and she wanted the change to come. She doubted that it would -ever come by talk alone. One did not convert by conversation. - -She had intended to say so much, to keep a steady pressure on him, and -she couldn't do it, partly because her point of view was difficult of -definition, partly because she thought no talk, no matter how inspired, -could change him of itself. She did not know of Anne, who had talked -and kept the pres sure up, and put sacrifice behind the talk even to the -point of thrusting her hand into the fire; but Effie, too, had sacrifice -in mind. Anne's sacrifice had failed. It wasn't, perhaps, the right -sacrifice: it was, at any rate, the immortal commonplace, the sacrifice -of the older generation to the younger, of the mother to the son, of -age to youth. Spectacular, heroic as it was, it was yet in the scheme of -things, and it is the sacrifice of youth to youth which can surprise by -unexpectedness. - -For some it is a sacrifice to cease talking even when they are convinced -that talk is futile. If Effie was one of these, she made that little -sacrifice at once. She never told him that his life was mean and ugly -and despicable, his triumphs worthless, his success a failure, his -highest ambition to know that people grovelled to him, his money and his -power. She did not say these things, but neither did she yield an inch -of her attitude which implied them. - -"I'll win," she told herself, "I'll win." - -By now she was crusading for the soul of Sammy Branstone, and all the -while her passion grew, fed as much by that in him which irritated her -as by what attracted. She accepted the fact that he was married and -discounted it. It was one with the other irritants, mattering less to -her, for it was irremovable. She could neglect the wife: what mattered -was the man. She must bring beauty to his life. - -They have tamed many wild things in a world growm standardized; they -have tried for centuries to bridle love and make it run in harness; but -love refuses to be tamed and standardized by the marriage service. -You don't scare love away by the bogey-sign, "Trespassers will be -prosecuted." Love's wild, it's free, blind to the handcuffs which Church -and State pathetically try to rivet on a given pair, lawless because -it knows no law, timeless because it know's no time. Sometimes it lasts -while a butterfly could suck a flower's honey, sometimes the space of a -man's life, and they have tried to regulate this love, this volatility, -to pretend that because it sometimes does not evaporate, it never -evaporates till death. They sought to link love with property, and to -control the uncontrollable. They make laws round love, which is like -enclosing an eagle in a cobweb; and we suffer for their laws. We keep -the law and suffer; break it and we suffer. - -She knew that she would suffer, but she would bring beauty to Sam. He -hadn't capitulated to her talk, and she thought that he had no chance -in Manchester. Perhaps her Sam was with her in his dreams, but each dawn -brought him to accustomed ugliness, and habit clogged his days with mud. -He couldn't escape, he wanted wings, and she was there to bring them -him. He did not know there was another side to life, but she would show -it him. He should see her beauty, and, through that, the beauty of the -other side. - -She was presumptuous, but presumption is a quality of faith. She -interfered, but there are three inevitable interferences in life--birth, -love and death--and hers was one of these. It was them all: it was love -and the birth of the new Sam, and the death of the old. She interfered, -where she had right to interfere. She loved. - -Time passed between the day when she came to her decision and the day -when they acted upon it, and she never knew how long it was nor how she -spent it. She belonged to a living fact, and there were shadows in the -world, such as her work, her mother, the silly detail of arranging to go -away, and Stewart, a haunting shadow of one Sunday afternoon, but these -were unrealities and only her idea was real. She never remembered how -she put it to Sam, nor what he said, though she had a hazy memory -that he was desperately shocked and more profoundly humorous than ever -before. But she thought that he was only shocked as the right thing -shocks by rightness, not as the wrong by wrongness: and she knew that -difficulties melted: and they came. - -They came to the Marbeck Inn and entered into their kingdom of a week. - - - - -CHAPTER XX--THE MARBECK INN - - -|SAM was vilely dull about it all at first: his comprehension, stuck in -the mud, failed utterly to rise to the occasion, but before long; he was -looking back with horror on his turgid mental processes when she told -him that they would come away together. - -He had a shadow, not more than a shadow of excuse for his preposterous -misunderstanding of her ease. Sam followed the crowd, accepted readymade -their principles and their lack of principles, their morality and their -immorality, and to the crowd he followed the theory was faithfulness and -the practice as much licence as they could take without being found out. -They made a boast rather than a secret of their affairs with a shopgirl -or a typist, he had never had an affair and was flattered to think that -he was to have one now. - -He thought that an affair was rather a manly thing to have. - -When Effie spoke, he had a great surprise, then cheapened her -insultingly. He decided that he had been wrong about her. After all, she -was nothing more than a pretty typist with whom he was going to have his -first affair, who was going to give him the opportunity to join in that -sly boasting in hotel smoke-rooms which was the habit of his crowd. He, -too, would rank amongst the sportsmen. - -But, even at his worst, he had the grace to doubt that this was of the -same kind as those other affairs. It had a lowest common measure with -them, but--Effie! Cheapen her as he would, he could not think of her as -cheap enough for that. When others did this thing it was, surely, that -they were giving rein to grossness: it was at least charitable to assume -that the women of their amours were of coarser grain than their wives, -and Effie's was not the coarser grain. He drifted, acquiescing and -puzzled, through the fog of his perplexity. - -Illumination came to him, not in the crowded railway carriage, but -in the trap which drove them from the station to the Inn. It came, he -thought, miraculously, but perhaps the miracle was nothing more than -that a man sees clearly in Westmoreland, and sees through dirt in -Manchester. He worshipped Effie who was sacrificing all to him, and -with abasement at the thought that he had meant, with his pitiful -achievements, to surprise her. - -He, shepherded to joy at the Marbeck Inn had set out to surprise Effie! -That was what made it, from the first dawn of understanding, a perfect -wonder-tale. He had not calculated this; it happened, like a dream, in -the air, unrooted in prevision. But that was all it had, except its rapt -intensity, of the quality of dream. It was dreamlike because it was more -vivid than his experience of life, but it was life. Only, he had not -known these things about life before. He had underestimated life. - -The Inn lay in a saucer of the hills at the end of a road which led to -nowhere. As a road, it finished at the Inn and went on only as a rough -cart-track which dwindled and divided into two trails across the passes. -The fells came down in grandeur to the Inn--it wasn't a place from which -one looked at distant hills, but one where the hills were intimately -there--and half a mile away there was the Lake. - -They were twelve miles from a station, at the end of the world, alone -with happiness. Of course, there were other people at the Inn, but Sam -and Effie were alone: they two with the heather and the bracken and the -pines: they two with love. - -The crowd has not discovered Marbeck. The Inn, the Church, the Vicarage, -down by the Lake the Hall, a farmhouse or two along the road, and that -is all. Six miles away there is a post-office. - -He had followed the crowd on his rare holidays. He knew Blackpool -Promenade and Morecambe and the things to do at Douglas. Here, one did -not do those things. One walked and climbed and lay extended on the -heather or in the perfect isolation of high bracken, and bathed in the -Lake or the streams or the tarns, haphazard, naked, where one liked and -when one liked; and all the time one breathed the air. - -It needed no thunderous knocking on the door to get her out of bed into -the Marbeck air. Sam would go for an early dip in the pool below the Inn -where two streams cascaded into a swimmable basin, and when he returned -she would be up or ready to get up that he might brush her hair, or not -up that she might play at being peevish and be lifted out of bed by him. - -And the food, the good rough plenty of the Marbeck Inn! They ate of it -prodigiously and carried to the hills parcels of sandwiches and cakes -and cheese, shamelessly large, which they emptied to the last crumb, and -eked out in the woods with raspberries and nuts. - -She took him on the Lake, with a rod borrowed from the Inn, and showed -him how to fish. He relished it amazingly, catching little but the -spirit of the thing, happy because of the green reflection of the woods -in the water and because of her. His restlessness found pause in a boat -with Effie and she noted with a keen delight that he did not envy the -expert basket of the postman who cycled to Marbeck in the mornings -and fished till he cycled away with the letters in the afternoon. She -registered as a happy gain that he did not want to shine, or try to beat -that seasoned fisher at his game. Nor did the posts distract them. They -had no letters there. - -They bathed continually, for it was hot, and here again he made no -effort to excel, but let it be admitted that she was the better swimmer. -How much the better she did not let him know. She knew that he found the -water here a purer element than in the old Blackfriars Baths where he -had learnt when he was at school, and she tired less rapidly than he -did. But he was wondrously content to own inferiority. - -She had a deep symbolic faith in bathing. They were here to wash his mud -away, and water was cleaner than talk. Talk, indeed, was but a surface -pattern of their time. They hardly needed it, except as levity to -mitigate a deep communion which sometimes grew almost intolerably sweet. - -It was Blea Tarn, one of the many of that name, which they made -peculiarly theirs, their favourite bathing-place, their best lunch-room. -Effie stretched herself luxuriously on the close-cropped turf, at peace -in mind and body. - -"Sam," she asked, "have you noticed that Frump at the Inn? She sits -behind me at dinner." - -"No," said Sam truthfully. "When I'm with you I notice nobody else. And -I don't know how you saw her if she sits behind you." - -"Eyes in the back of my head," she explained. "You have them when you're -a woman. Do you mind if I give her a shock?" - -"You would if she could see you now," he said. "Yes, but she doesn't -deserve it," said Effie complacently. She surveyed herself and Sam did -the same. She pleased them both, taking her sun-bath there on the mossy -turf. "But I may shock her?" - -"You may do anything," he said. - -"Thank God for that," said Effie joyously, and something glittered in -the sun and fell with a splash far into the tarn. "Too deep to dive -for it," she decided. "Bang goes a shilling and I'm glad. I never liked -pretence." - -"I say!" Sam protested, and then fell silent comprehendingly. - -She looked at him and greeted his silence with a nod. "I shan't catch -cold," she said, holding up her finger where the wedding ring had been. -"I feel better now I'm rid of that." - -The remarkable fact was that Sam understood. His education had -progressed and he knew that it was not for the Frump at the Inn that she -shed the imitation wedding ring which for form's sake he had suggested -she should wear: it was for him. The ring was counterfeit, it was a -false symbol of something which was not true: it had no place in the -Marbeck scheme. - -She curled up happily like a stroked cat, partly in sheer physical -well-being, partly in gladness at her scheme's success. "And to think," -she crooned, "that I am a wicked woman!" - -"Effie," he pleaded, taking her hand. "Don't." - -"As if I care," she said, rolling over on to her back and taking his -hand with her to shade her eyes. "I might have been doing this all -my life." Indeed, in her perfect absence of embarrassment, she might. -"Wicked!" She shied a stone after the wedding ring into the tarn and -laughed at a world well lost. "The Frump won't understand, my dear, but -I think you do." - -"I think I do," said Sam, but the fullness of understanding had not come -to him yet. - -Something, indeed, of her fineness he did perceive, but not its whole, -its utter selflessness. He saw, roughly, what she was after: that it -was here, in Westmoreland when she made her sacrifice, here when she -lay beside him in the sun that she expressed in deed what she had been -baffled to express in Manchester. She had brought him away from the murk -and the fog and the place where they rather like dirt than otherwise -because dirt means money, to where nature was beautiful. She had shown -him beauty there, her beauty and the beauty of sacrifice and the beauty -of things. She had taught him that there was beauty in the world. "We'll -never go back," he cried. - -"No. Not back," she said. "But we will go to Manchester." - -"No. No. We'll build a tabernacle here." - -"Here? No. We've been lawless here. We'll go to Manchester." - -It rang in his ears like the trump of doom. So far they had marched in -thought together, and he imagined that in her scheme they were to be -together to the end. He thought her purpose was that they two were -to work together to give shape to beauty--and no bad exercise in -perception, either, for Sam Branstone. - -That was her purpose, but, as she saw it, they were not to work together -in the sense he meant. Her spirit was to go on with him, but she herself -would stand aside, denying herself the right and the joy of sharing his -work with him in physical partnership. She would have done her share at -Marbeck: she was a sign-post whose direction he was to follow but which -he left behind, not a guide to go with him on his way: and she thought -she was content with that. - -She renounced and she imagined that of the two of them it was she who -was the realist and he who was romantic, he was romantic because he -wanted her with him and she the realist because she remembered Ada. She -was not jealous of Ada no'; if she could not bless Ada, neither did she -damn her. Ada had never held him as Effie held him now. She thought it -satisfied her to know that she held him, and to let the days slip -past uncounted. Nothing is infinite except our human capacity for -self-deception. - -For the present, for the Marbeck heyday, it did satisfy her, and she -went about the business of her tutelage with the unruffled serenity of -fulfilled purpose, almost involuntarily now, thinking little, feeling -everything in the passionate intensity of her sacramental love. It would -end and she would suffer: meantime there were only so many days and -it was no use impairing finite days with regrets that they were not -infinite. - -Thought was for before and afterwards, not for now when she crusaded for -the soul of Sammy Branstone with the mystic rapture of a trance, joyful -like the other sorts of true religion. She would wake up, but she would -have taught Sam his lesson; she would have given him his gleam; and she -was selfless after that.... - -Of course she may have deceived herself. There is spiritual love, but -Effie was flesh and blood. - -Sam, at any rate, was not etherealizing things. He did not appreciate -the happiness of renouncing happiness. He wanted it to last, to go on -with the gay days on the hills when she put health into his body and -health into his mind, when it was all a high-spirited riot without -an undertow. For hours on end, they lived their lives unclouded by a -thought... rude, rough, exhilarating exercise on the glamorous fells -like that illustrious day when they climbed the Pike and lost themselves -in mist and found themselves again just where they wished to be, on the -downward trail by Corner Tarn to Yorkdale: then on the steamer down the -Lake, and the lonely moonlight walk across the Moor to Branley, where -the trap from the Inn met them and took them, comfortably tired, to -Marbeck and a giant's feast. And there were other days, more leisured, -on their Lake or in the woods when more seemed to happen in his soul and -less in his body; and their day of Bathes, in five well separated tarns, -with a makeweight bathe in the Marsland Beck for luck. He wanted it to -last. He had intoxication of the hills, of her, of everything. - -He had not seen, he would not and he could not, see the possibility of -her leaving him. He did not know that leaving him was as fundamental a -part of her plan as coming to him. - -"We'll go hack to Manchester," she said, and it seemed to him that he -was ordered hack to hell. "That's where your business is," she added, a -little wickedly. - -Business! Hadn't she shown him the ugliness of his business, and the -beauty of Marbeck? Why should they ever leave the hills? He had all the -extremity of a convert. - -Effie would say no more, and now, as the end of their time grew near, -the magic seemed to him less magical, because he had to leave it, -because she would not stay for ever in that lonely place, but wanted him -to go where other men lived, in an ugly town, where he had a business -she had taught him to despise, and responsibilities, and Ada. - -He plunged to gloom. What was the use of knowing that there was light if -he must go back to darkness? Was it not treachery in her to come so far -with him, then leave him to himself? - -"Effie!" he pleaded, and she consented to make things clear. - -"Don't you see, Sam? We've done what we came here to do. You've seen, -you know, and you will not slide back. I won't allow you to." - -"You won't allow! Then you'll be there?" - -"I hope my spirit will be always there," she said. "Do you doubt that?" - -"Spirit?" he said. "You're overrating me. You're asking more than I can -give. I cannot give what isn't there." - -"I've put it there," she said. "You cannot fail. You can't forget." - -* "I'd not forget, but I should fail. It's we, my dear. Not I alone, but -you and I. Without you I am lost." - -She made a great concession. "Then, if you're sure----" - -"Quite sure," he said, and she decided to indulge his weakness. - -"Then don't dismiss your secretary. Then I'll be there." - -"As secretary?" - -"Of, of course." She spoke impatiently. All else was at the end. - -That only made it more impossible than ever. She was to be there--and -not to be there. There, in his office where he would see her every day, -where he had only to stretch out his hand to touch her, and where he was -not to touch, where he was to forget that he had ever touched. He -wanted her, all of her, the touch, the glow, the life of her, and she -offered--what? A sexless wraith, a spiritual guide, her presence in -asceticism. - -"No," he said. "No. I'd rather die than that." - -"Oh, death is a good arrangement, Sam, but well be brave." - -"There are limits even to bravery." - -"No," said the realist. "There are none." - -So she sent him, though he did not know that the suggestion came from -her, to gather strength in the peace of the everlasting hills. She -sent him to Hartle Pike to think, to see that she was right. He would -remember Ada there. - -He did remember Ada, but it seemed to him, when he tried to sum up his -recollections, that Ada was not the woman who counted in his life. The -women who counted were before Ada and after Ada. They were Anne and -Effie. - -In the gathering dusk on Hartle Pike he tried to be cool about it and to -see things in proportion. Effie had the supreme advantage of immediacy. -It wasn't easy, whilst he lived encircled by her glamour, to see Ada at -all. - -But he had been Ada's husband for ten years, a long time, more than a -quarter of his life. In all those years there must be something which -he could positively remember of her, some definite characteristic; -something, at any rate, which was individual to her. He searched -and found nothing. She had less individuality in his mind than his -sideboard. He supposed that she kept house, or did she? Didn't he -recall that the cook's wages went up one year, and that the cook became -cook-housekeeper? In that case, and he felt certain of it now, Ada did -nothing. He was equally certain that she was nothing. Since he had grown -accustomed to her demands for money, she was not even an irritant. She -was a standing charge, like the warehouse rent. - -Quite suddenly, as he lingered over that definition of his wife, "a -standing charge," he saw that it was double-edged. It cut at him, and -shrewdly. - -Ada, like Effie, was a woman, and he knew from Effie what a woman could -be. There must, at least, have been possibilities in Ada. Dear God, what -had he done with them if she was nothing now? That was the charge--that -he had married her and that she was nothing: that he had permitted -her to become nothing. He could summon no witness for his defence, he -remembered no occasion when he had fought for Ada, as Effie had fought -for him. And as to sacrifice----! Yet he was supposed to have loved Ada. - -He could have howled for very shame, he could not, in fairness, think -that Ada had given him anything, but writhed that he had thought just -now of Anne and Effie as the two women who counted in his life. They -were the women who gave. Was he to take all from women and render -nothing to a woman in return? If he could say of Ada, his wife these -last ten years, that she did not count, then he was very much to blame -and the path was clear before him. He saw to where the gleam that Effie -gave him pointed. To Ada. It annoyed him desperately that it should -point to Ada. - -He began to descend the hill in a cold fury. The world was hideous, -Marbeck an illusion, Effie a fool. No: Effie was right. One could not -run away from facts and hide one's head amongst the hills, and say there -were no facts. She had not brought him there to obscure facts, but to -reveal them. - -It remained to face them, to return to Manchester with new knowledge and -new courage. It needed courage to turn his back on Marbeck, to go away -from happiness to Ada. - -He stamped upon that thought, as on a snake. It was disloyalty to Effie -who had sacrificed to him and shown him all the beauty of her sacrifice. -He, too, would sacrifice and find a beauty in it. - -He found it extraordinarily difficult to meet Effie, and spent an -unnecessarily long time with the landlord of the Inn. Then he went in to -her. - -"I'm leaving," he stammered. "I couldn't stay another night. By driving -fifteen miles I can catch the South Mail at midnight. I've arranged for -you to come to-morrow." - -He jerked each sentence out painfully. - -Effie met his eyes with her serene gaze. "That's infinitely best," she -said. "I'm proud of you." - -He had seen! It was her victory, complete and unequivocal, and she -was proud of him and of herself. He had got rid of mud and he had seen -beauty. Now he was facing the facts as she would have him face them, -clear-eyed, without romance. Like her, he was a realist, and she was -glad... glad. - -But when he went up to their room to pack his bag, Effie left the Inn -quickly and walked hard. She must put space between them: space, that -she might cry unheard. It seemed to her that if he heard her crying he -would not go, and she wanted him to go. She was a realist. She was... -stifling her sobs amongst the heather; triumphing in victory on Marbeck -Ridge. - -She won, as she had said that she would win. But there were limits to -her bravery. - - - - -CHAPTER XXI--SATAN'S SMILE - - -|THE theory that Satan is a subtle devil is one which will not bear -examination. He is a crude fellow, theatrical, Mephistophelean. It may, -of course, be only because his experience of human nature has made a -cynic of him, and certainly his interferences do not as a rule lack -success because they want delicacy. He attacked Sam with a blatant -effrontery which suggested that he thought Sam's a contemptuously easy -case. - -Sam reached Manchester very early in the morning, and spent the rest -of his broken night in a lugubrious hotel near the station. Manchester -hotels rarely make for gaiety, but it is wonderful what even a short -night will do in the way of altering a point of view. - -He expected to be depressed at the very air of Manchester, and, instead, -he sniffed at it as Mr. Minnifie had once relished the odours of -Greenheys, with an exile's greed. He knew that he ought to feel a -loathing of the office, but found that he opened the letters with more -than his usual zest. He knew that it was wrong, all wrong, and checked -his itching fingers. - -There have been prisoners who, when offered freedom, have pleaded to -remain in the familiar cell. - -Was it like that with him, he wondered, as had as that, the jail-fever -so ineradically in him that he must breathe the tainted air to live? -But, was he offered freedom? He had to go to Ada, who was a mill-stone -and implied the other mill-stones. Unless she was not a mill-stone, -unless he could alter her. In the meantime, at all events, she was not -altered, she wanted the things which she had always wanted; and the -office was their source. It seemed to him that he was still in prison, -with the difference that he now knew that it was prison. He found little -comfort in the knowledge. - -His gaze returned to the pile of correspondence. There seemed nothing -else for it to do, and he saw an envelope, addressed not to the firm, -but to himself, which sent the blood whirling to his head in simple -premonition of its contents. From the postmark (S.W.--Satan's Work?) -he saw that it had only come that morning and had not been waiting -his arrival. He thought of that as of a portent. Suppose he had stayed -another day at Marbeck! He might have been too late. - -It was a careful letter, but the facts were that, owing to the sudden -death of Sir Almeric Pannifer, the seat tor the Sandyford Division -of Marlshire was vacated. Mr. Morphew, who had reduced Sir Almeric's -majority in that agricultural constituency to three hundred was, for -private reasons, unable to stand again ("I know these private reasons," -thought Sam. "Morphew considers he has earned a walkover next time"), -but Headquarters were of opinion that a resolute candidate of strong -personality, etc.... - -In short, he was offered the opportunity to be the figurehead in a -demonstration for the Liberal Party. It was no more than that. Morphew -had doubtless nursed the constituency like a mother, and if at the -landslide of the last election he had done no better than to come within -three hundred of his opponents' votes, the chances of a stranger's -capturing the seat were negative. But it was the stepping-stone, the -_liaison_ between obscurity and the House of Commons. It was what he had -aimed at. - -He tried to believe that the letter did not exhilarate him as it would -have done a fortnight earlier, and Satan, the connoisseur of good -resolutions, smiled his age-long smile. - -He looked across at Effie's chair. "My spirit will be always with you," -she had said; he wondered if it were there now, and tried to see her. -Surely now, if ever, was her time; now when he had so lately left her, -when her scent was in his nostrils and her voice in his ears. Her voice -_was_ in his ears. He heard it clearly. She spoke one word, "Renounce." - -"Yes, but, my dear," he argued, "I have renounced. I've renounced you. -I've come back here and I'm going to Ada, to plumb the depths of her, -to find the good in her, and drag it to the top. I'm going to dive for -pearls," he grew almost picturesque as he cited his intentions towards -Ada in his defence, "and I shall grow short of breath. I'm not doubting -that the pearls are there, because Ada's a woman, and so are you, but I -know that they lie deep and I want breath for such a dive as that. I've -renounced you, and I'm going to make a woman of her; don't I deserve -some recompense to make amends? It's here beneath my hand, and I have -only to say 'Yes.' Effie," he pleaded, "if you knew what this meant to -me, you wouldn't frown. It's not backsliding." He denied that it was -backsliding, well knowing that it was. "It's politics, I know, and you -don't like politics. You told me women knew about politics now. Oh, -but you don't know, you don't. Smile at me, Effie, smile as I have seen -women smile when men talked of golf. I know we men are babies, and so do -you. Give me my game. It's nothing but a hobby, like golf, but this is -mine, and I want it so much. Ada is my work and this is my play, and -just as necessary. It will not be a hindrance to what I have to do for -Ada, it will be a help. Effie, tell me that I may have my help." - -He tried to blarney a consenting smile out of the figure of Eflie he -imagined sitting in her chair. He had no difficulty in imagining her -there; he saw her, too easily, too really to imagine a false Effie. He -could not imagine, try as he would, that he had won consent from her. He -was too near the real Effie for that. And Effie said "Renounce." - -Then his cashier came into the office and routine swallowed him for -the day. A score of little points had arisen in his absence and must -be discussed and settled. The thought occurred to him that if he -telegraphed to London in the morning, Headquarters would hear from him -as soon as if he wrote to-day. They might expect a wire to-day; well, -they would not get it. He crammed the letter into his pocket and decided -that he would sleep upon it before he sent them his reply. - -And if Satan still smiled it was wistfully, as if he regretted his lost -subtlety; but there was still Ada, the married woman. - -If Ada was nothing else, she was a married woman; in a world where many -fail, she had succeeded; she had got married, and, like other people who -have reached their earthly paradise, she did not know what to do when -she got there, and did nothing. She stopped growing when she married. - -The emptiness of her life was a thing to marvel at. She slept and ate -and shopped. She was spared the ordinary duties of running a house, and -the trials of servants, because the cook, an elderly, reliable woman, -took (it seemed) a fancy to Sam and became a fixture first and a -housekeeper second, taking from Ada's shoulders the burden of engaging -her underling. She had two "At homes" a week, and went to other people's -"At homes." On Sunday, she went to church, where one can display new -clothes to a larger audience than at the largest private "at home." -She killed the evenings somehow, in company with a friend, or with the -fashion papers. - -Evenings interested her little; they were the time when Sam was often, -but not too often, at home. He was not, strictly, a nuisance, because -he never asked her, after a first experiment, to entertain a business -acquaintance, and did that at hotels. Nor did he ask her to entertain -him. Usually, he read a manuscript, or worked out costs or did something -which made no demand on Ada, except that she be reasonably quiet. She -was very quiet with Sam, for the reason that she had nothing to say. - -She did not go out much in the evenings and told her friends that this -was because she liked to be at home with her husband. They were supposed -to deduce an idyll of conjugal bliss where proximity was perfect -happiness. The real reasons were, first, pure laziness and, second, her -shoulders. Other married women might expose their shoulders in low-cut -dresses, but not Ada. It wasn't modest. Her shoulders were ugly. - -She never went to see Peter, who had given her offence by suggesting the -blessedness of work. He had dared to lecture her, a married woman, -and she let fly at him in such fashion that he never tried again, he -deplored his weakness, but he gave her up. The cobbler's child is the -worst shod, and something analogous often happens with the daughters of -the clergy: Ada was, perhaps, the worst of Peter's flock. He knew and, -knowing the hopes he had had of this marriage, suffered at its failure, -but silently, confessing impotence. There were always books in which he -could forget, and the peace which had come to his house since Ada left -it. It is not easy to be saintly all the time, and her outrageous attack -had been, humanly speaking, unpardonable. - -"There must be something in her," he told himself, as he left the -office, "and I've to find it." - -The day had, naturally, after an absence, been unusually busy, and had -given him no time to think. He was bursting with intention, but it was -vague, unformed, though urgent and doubly urgent because of the letter -in his pocket. If he could make a woman of Ada, if that evening he could -make a fair start, perhaps he could conjure up the figure of Effie, his -ghostly counsellor, with a smile on her face consenting to his standing -for the seat. - -"Oh," Ada greeted him, "I thought you were not coming back till -Saturday." - -"I wasn't," he said. "Something changed my plan a little. I wanted to -get home." - -She looked at him resentfully. There was no reason why he should not -change his plan and come home two days before she expected him, but -she resented the unexpected. And there was something about him which -appeared strange. - -"Tell me you are glad to see me," he said. - -"Well, it wasn't to be till Saturday," she repeated stupidly. - -"Are you thinking of dinner?" he asked. "Kate will manage something." - -She was not thinking of dinner, and no doubt Kate would manage -something. It was Kate's business. - -"You're wearing funny clothes," she said. - -"Country clothes," he explained. "You see, I've been in the country." - -"Oh." She was not curious. - -"Yes. In the country. It was rather beautiful, Ada." - -"I nearly went with Mrs. Grandage to the 'Mtropole,' at Blackpool, but -I don't like dressing for dinner." - -"Blackpool's not beautiful," he said. "Ada, I want to talk to you, and I -hardly know how to begin, except that I want you to understand that I'm -in earnest. It's a serious matter." - -"Money?" said Ada, sitting up sharply in her chair. - -"Not money. We've both been wrong about money, I think. We've both taken -it too seriously." - -"If you're going to tell me that something has gone wrong with your -money, it's very serious indeed." - -"It hasn't. No. This is a larger thing than money. I want, if I can, -to alter things between us, Ada. How can I put it? There's your -father----" - -"I never want to hear his name again," she interrupted. "He insulted -me." - -"You go to church, you know; you listen to him there." - -"People would talk if I didn't go. I needn't listen to him when I am in -church." - -"He's a good old man. I'm sorry we have drifted from him. But I'll not -press that now. If the rest comes right, that will come right with it. -It might even come so right as to include my mother." - -"My word!" she said, "you _are_ digging up the past. I don't see how you -could call things right when they include me with a charwoman." - -"Ada!" he protested. - -"It's what she is." - -"By her own choice. But please forget that, Ada. Yes, it's true that I -am digging in the past. I want to go back to see where we went wrong." - -"Went wrong? When who went wrong?" - -"Why, you and I." - -"I didn't know we had gone wrong." She looked at him. "You look well," -she decided, "but you can't be." - -"I am better than I've ever been," he said, "and stronger, and if need -be I shall use my strength, but I hope the need won't come for that. -Ada, can you tell me this? Can you tell me what it is you want?" - -"You're sure it's all right about your money?" she asked anxiously. - -"Yes, of course it's right," he said impatiently. - -"Then I don't know that I want anything. I could do with more, -naturally. Who couldn't?" - -"More money. Not more beauty? Not a new purpose? Not something to live -for?" - -"I don't know what you're talking about, Sam. You're very strange -to-night." - -"I hardly know myself," he confessed. "I know it's all confused, and I -ought to have got things out of the tangle before I spoke to you. But -I thought you might have seen and so be able to help me out. No: that's -all right, Ada," he went on as she glared at him indignantly. "I'm -blaming no one but myself. It's my responsibility. You don't see it yet, -and I must make you see." - -"If a thing's there, I can see it." - -"Oh, it's there," he said. "We can both see that. It's only the cure for -it that isn't plain." - -"What's there?" - -"The failure of our marriage, if I must put it into words." - -"Failure! But we _are_ married. What do you mean?" What Ada meant was -that the ring was on her finger and the marriage certificate in her -desk. Failure in marriage, if it meant anything to her, meant failure -to get married, a broken engagement, and since their engagement had not -been broken, since they had been formally and legally married in church, -there could be no failure. - -"We didn't exult in marriage," he tried. - -"Exult? I'm sure I was the proudest woman in the parish the day I -married you." It was true. "But afterwards, afterwards!" - -"Oh," she cried, "are you throwing it in my teeth that I didn't have a -baby? Was that my fault?" - -"No, no. But it might have saved us, all the same, and when the baby did -not come we made no effort to save ourselves. There's a light somewhere -in every one of us and you and I have quenched our lights. They may be -small, they may not be a great light like your father's, or... or the -light which I have seen in the country, they may be nothing but a feeble -glow, and we can only give our best. You and I have not given ours. We -have not tried to find our light, but now--now that we have discovered -what has been wrong with us all this while--we can try, and together. We -can all of us give something to the world, not children in our case, but -the something else which we were made to give. We don't know what it -is that you can give and I can give, and we've left it late to begin to -find out, but it is not too late, is it, Ada? Ada," he pleaded, "it is -not too late?" - -She looked at the clock. "If you want to wash your hands before dinner -you'd better do it now," she said, "or you will be late." She rose, but -before she left him, she had a moment of illumination. She thought she -saw what he was driving at, that he must have seen some happy family -while he was away and came back with the cry of the child less man on -his lips. "I suppose this means," she said, "that you want me to adopt a -child. That's what you mean by giving. Well, I won't do it, Sam. I've -something else to do with my time than to look after another woman's -brat." - -"What have you to do?" he asked. "What is it that you want to do?" - -"To eat my dinner," she said. She had a healthy appetite. Perhaps that -was why she wanted nothing else. - -He stood by the door when she had gone, and his hand strayed to his -pocket as though it sought a talisman. He felt the letter crinkle, then -tore his hand away. Ada was work for a man. There wasn't room for Ada -and for politics. "Deeply regret private reasons compel total withdrawal -from politics." Yes, that was the wording of the telegram which he would -send: it was best to be thorough, and, plainly, the man who had Ada in -hand had no time to spare on a hobby or an ambition or whatever it was -that politics represented for him. He had other work to do in the world. - -He stamped upon the ruins of a hope which came to birth ten years ago, -and which he had carried with him in his heart of hearts and, as the -letter in his pocket proved, not a fool's hope either. Yes, he had loved -that hope which was born on his honeymoon. - -It occurred to him that in all he had said, or tried to say, to Ada he -had not mentioned love. It had not seemed the right word for use in a -conversation with Ada, but, he reflected savagely, he had loved his hope -of politics from the time of the honeymoon onwards: and from that time -he had not loved Ada. - -Was that true? Had he neglected the substance for the shadow, used love -upon his hope and not upon his wife? If he had his talk with her again, -could he honestly begin it in another way? Could he begin with love? He -knew that he could not, and squared his shoulders to the fact. It was a -case, then, for the more courage. What was it Effie had said? "There are -no limits to bravery." He wondered, but he meant to see. - -And Satan's smile had faded. There is more joy amongst the devils over -one sinner who back-slideth.... But not this time, Mephistopheles! Effie -was winning still. - - - - -CHAPTER XXII--THE OLD CAMPAIGNER - - -|EFFIE and Sam knew that they ought to be happy in the weeks which -followed, because to be good is, theoretically, to be happy: but they -were not happy. Sam, indeed, was less unhappy than Effie because he had -sunk into one of those leaden, numbed moods of his which he knew of old -as the stage preliminary to his brightest inspirations, and he could -wait resignedly if not happily for the inspiration to emerge. - -Decidedly, he thought, he needed inspiration, He had to discover Ada, to -search for her reality, and, having found it, to drag it out and set it -in the forefront of her being. A big task: one whose success he must not -jeopardize again by rushing at her prematurely without distinct plan. He -had only made her suspicious of him by his first impulsive attempt, and -time must undo the mischief before a return to the attack was either -discreet or opportune. - -He waited, but he did not savour life. When he had quickened Ada, life -would, no doubt, be worth the living, but, meantime, it dragged. He told -himself that he was too young yet at this new business of giving to feel -the joy of it. Certainly, he was not joyful, but he was resolute. There -was a grim tightening of the lips and a dogged look in the eyes which -proclaimed that this was Samuel, the son of Anne. In this mood he could -eat Dead Sea apples and feel they were a proper diet. Politics had gone, -and with them any interest in the Council. And he did not know what to -do about his business. He wanted to ask Effie, and Effie was not there -to be asked. - -It was not that she did not want to be there or that she did not suffer -for her absence. Effie was not numb, and she suffered keenly, but she -thought her absence strengthened Sam. When he came down from Hartle -Pike with his resolution formed she took it that her scheme, as she had -planned it, was complete and that she could forget her weak concession -to return to the office. She was to be there in spirit, and spirit is -strong though flesh is weak. Effie at the office in the flesh would have -wanted to hug Sam and to kiss him, things which it is unbefitting to do -in well-conducted offices. And, of course, she suffered. She had always -known that she would suffer, but not that it would be as bad as this. - -The office was a temptation every day: to go there was to be with him, -it was to find alleviation for her fever, it was to be at peace: but -it was also to fling away hard-won success, and she resisted. That -resistance engrossed her. It was all that she was capable of doing; it -demanded all her strength. - -The obvious, the practical thing, if she was not to go to Sam's office, -was to go to someone else's, to work, both as an antidote and as a means -of livelihood, and she could not rouse herself to do it. She pawned some -of the jewellery which remained to her, memorials of her father's lavish -past, sent the weekly dole to her mother and lived upon the rest. She -had sunk to this, Effie the crusader, Effie the advocate of courage! -With Mlisande, she told herself she was not happy. She was not happy, -she was not well, and she wanted, wanted Sam. She stayed at home lest -she should go to him and ruin all that she had done. It could not last -and she knew it could not last, but neither did she see the end of it. - -Then began the game of consequences: the moves of two pieces, one a -pawn, the other the knight called Dubby Stewart. - -It is a frumpish world, a world where the Frumps, of one or other sex -or of neither sex, in one or other of their manifestations, have a great -deal to do with the ordering of things. That is why it is politic, for -one's ease, never to ignore the Frumps and never, never to challenge -them by an act of gallant defiance such as shying an imitation wedding -ring into the waters of Blea Tarn. - -Effie held, of course, that since she was in any case defying the Frumps -it was honest to defy them in form as well as in substance, but it is -only certain kinds of honesty which are the best policy. - -The Frump who sat behind Effie at meals at the Inn (her name was -Miss Entwistle) had doubted the genuineness of that ring, and when it -disappeared her doubts went with it. The hussy, she saw, had realized -that her ring deceived nobody, and was brazening it out in the shameless -way of hussies. - -Women are wicked, but men are only weak; so that, though Miss Entwistle -faced Sam at dinner from the next table, it was some days before -she could spare her attention from the back of the greater sinner and -transfer it to the face of the lesser. She could stare to her heart's -content; it did not matter to Sam, who had only eyes for Effie: and the -stare of Miss Entwistle was very persistent indeed. It was rude, but -it was also pensive. It seemed to be looking for something it could not -find. - -She could not place him and was annoyed because she felt certain she had -seen him before. She got up early more than once to read the names on -the morning's letters, but did not find one which she could associate -with Sam, and came home to Manchester a disappointed woman. Her failure -to identify him spoiled her holiday. - -But all things come to her who waits, especially, as the world is made, -to Frumps, and Miss Entwistle came by the knowledge she craved one -afternoon when her friend Mrs. Grandage took her to Ada Branstone's "At -Home." - -The two photographs of Sam in Ada's drawing-room were intended to sustain -her reputation for perfect domesticity. She couldn't live without -him; she drew her very breath from him when he was there, and from his -photographs when he was not. And since one was full-face and the other -profile, they supplied Miss Entwistle with reliable identification of -the sinner of Marbeck. - -It was heavenly. Hers was the power and the glory of initiating a -scandal, of exploding a bomb--which would certainly disturb the peace -of quite a number of people, of figuring in a maelstrom of backbiting -tea-parties as the one authentic eyewitness. It was irresistible, -besides plain duty to her injured hostess. - -The drop of gall in her brimming honey-pot was that she did not know -Ada well enough to tell her the secret by herself, but must share the -excitement of that first surprise with Mrs. Grandage. She whispered with -her friend for some close-packed, hectic moments, and the two ladies -stubbornly outstayed the rest of the callers. - -They told Ada with a wonderful tenderness, watching her the while as -cats watch mice, and Ada did not disappoint them. She cast no doubt on -Miss Entwistle's story; she did not tell her that she knew Sam was in -London at the time because she had had letters from him. Though she had -nothing in the world but her marriage, she made no effort to protect its -reputation. She exhibited herself to them in all the fury of her jealous -rage, so that naturally, seeing her instant belief in what they told -her, the ladies formed their own conclusion. - -"It is not the first time," is what the eyes of Mrs. Grandage said, and -the eyes of the spinster looked back at her sepulchrally and said, "It -never is." - -Ada was married. She had the title of wife, and unfaithfulness on her -part was as far removed from her imagination as from her opportunity. -She was married to Sam; she was the woman in possession, with the -title-deeds in her desk and the seal upon her finger, and this was -flagrant outrage. It struck at the roots of her complacency, and -complacency was life. Yet she hadn't the wits to confound these -iconoclasts with one little uninventive lie. It needed only that to -abash Miss Entwistle--men's faces are often alike, she knew perfectly -well that he was in London: anything would have done, anything would -have been better than this abject, immediate betrayal of her citadel. -She struck her flag without firing a shot, and lapsed into a slough of -inarticulate anger. - -"What shall I do? What shall I do?" she wailed as soon as she was able -to speak coherently. - -"That," said Miss Entwistle, "that, you poor dear, is your business." - -She had announced the glad tidings, she had found a titillating pleasure -in watching Ada's reception of them and now she was eager to be off, -to spread the news, to be the first that ever burst into her friends' -drawing-rooms with word of a glorious scandal. She pleaded another call -and escaped to her orgy. - -"I'll make him pay for this," said Ada viciously. - -"My dear," advised Mrs. Grandage, who had a husband of her own, "I hope -you will be tactful." - -"Tactful:" blazed Ada. "Tactful, when--oh! oh!" She screamed her sense -of Sam's enormity. - -"Yes, but you know, men will be men." - -"It isn't men. It's Sam. After all I've done for him! Oh!" and this was -a different "oh" from the others. It made Mrs. Grandage look up sharply. -"The beast! The beast! This explains it all. Ethel, that man came home -to me and asked me to adopt his child. He had the face. Of course I -didn't know it was his own he was speaking of, but I see it now. Ethel, -what shall I do?" - -They seemed to Mrs. Grandage to be drifting into deeper waters than she -had skill to swim in. "I should take advice," she said, meaning nothing -except that neither by advising nor anything else was she going to be -entangled in this affair. - -"A solicitor's?" asked Ada, catching at the phrase. "Yes. Naturally. -Sam shall be made to pay to the uttermost farthing." Her idea of legal -obligations were, perhaps, not vaguer than other people's. - -"Not a solicitor's," said Mrs. Grandage in despair. "At least, my dear, -not yet. Your father's." - -"Yes. My father made me marry Sam. He brought Sam home and threw him -at me. I will go to my father. Of course, in any case, I can't stay -here." - -Mrs. Grandage made a last rally for wordly-wisdom. "Couldn't you bring -yourself to see your husband first?" she asked. - -"See him!" said Ada heroically. "I will never see him again as long as I -live." - -The visitor buttoned her glove. After all, if Ada chose to make a fool -of herself it was no business of hers, and she had tried her best, if a -resolutely non-committal attempt can be a best. She kissed Ada with real -sympathy. - -"My dear," she said, "I'd give a great deal to undo this." And by "this" -she did not mean the peccadillo of Sam Branstone, but the pruriency of -Miss Entwistle. She was an experienced woman, and angry with herself for -having listened to the temptress and for aiding and abetting her. - -When Mrs. Grandage referred in after years to "that woman," it was -understood that she was thinking of Miss Entwistle. - -Ada saw her to the door, and went straight to the kitchen. - -"Kate," she said to her cook, "Mr. Branstone has disgraced himself, he's -been unfaithful. I am going to my father's. Please tell him that I know -everything and that I shall not return." She had no reticence. - -"Very well, mum," said the Capable cook. - -The result was that when Sam went into the drawing-room that night, he -found Anne Branstone sitting there, darning his socks, and perhaps it -was because she was happy that she did not look a day older than when he -saw her last; perhaps charring suited her; or perhaps living for an idea -had kept her young. The idea was that, some day, Sam would need her. - -It wasn't a miracle: there was nothing more wonderful about it than the -fact that Anne was a very good friend of the cook, Kate Earwalker: but -Sam stood gaping helplessly. In his own house, at his age, and after all -these years he stood before his mother, the intruder, like a schoolboy -who knows himself at fault. She lacked nothing of the old ascendancy. - -"Well," she said, "you're nobbut happy when you've got folks talking of -you. But you don't look thriving on it, neither." - -"Mother," he gasped, "what's this?" - -"It's you that will tell me that," said Anne. - -"Where's Ada?" - -"Gone to her father's, and none coming back, she says. Says you're -unfaithful and told Kate she knows everything. What is it, Sam? What's -everything?" - -"Who brought you here?" - -"Kate did," said Anne calmly. "Why, Sam, did you think I've lived with -nothing better than what George Chappie and the papers told me of you? -I'd a fancy for the truth, and it's not a thing to get from men. Kate's -been a spy, like." - -"Has she!" he cried. - -"She has, and you'll bear no grudge for that. You'd have lived in a -pig-sty and fed like a pig if I'd none sent Kate to do for you, but I've -come myself this time. It looks summat beyond Kate." - -"But what's happened? What is it?" - -"You know better than me what it is. You've got folks talking of you and -they've talked to Ada. Unfaithful, she told Kate, and she's gone home to -Peter's." - -"She must come back," said Sam. - -"And why?" asked Anne. "Because folk talk? To stop their mouths?" - -"No. Because I want her here. They're talking, are they? Well, they -can." - -Anne looked at him. "You don't care if they do?" - -"Why should I?" - -"And you a politician?" - -"Oh, politics!" he said. "That's gone." It had, and, as he saw -thankfully, at the right time. He tried to imagine how differently this -would have affected him if it had come in the midst of the Sandyford -election. Electors postulate respectability in a candidate. But that -had gone, and gossip did not matter now. The real things mattered. Ada -mattered. - -"You've had a move on, then," she said, and neither her look nor tone -suggested that she found the move displeasing. - -"I daresay," he said carelessly. "But Ada must come back. I've got to -get her back." - -"Happen she'll come and happen she won't, and I'd have a better chance -of knowing which if you'd told me what's upset her." - -"What did she say?" he asked. "Unfaithful? Yes, it's true. I've been -unfaithful for ten years. I've never been faithful and I've never been -fair. I've thought of the business and politics when I ought to have -been thinking of her. I worked at them and I didn't work at Ada. Don't -blame Ada, mother. I'll not have that. You never liked her, and you -prophesied a failure. It's been a failure, but I made it one; I let -it drift when I ought to have taken hold. But it isn't going to be a -failure now. I've given up the other things and I've come back to -my job, the job I neglected, the job I did not see was there at all -until----" He paused. - -"Till what?" she asked. - -"Till Effie showed it me." - -"Effie?" she asked. "Oh! Then there's something in their talk." - -"Something? There's everything, and everything that's wrong-headed and -abominable. That's where this hurts me, mother. They'll be saying wrong -things of her, of Effie." He began to see that gossip mattered. - -"What would be the right things to say?" asked Anne dryly. "Who's Effie? -And do you mean her when you say you've been unfaithful for ten years?" - -"I meant what I said. That I've put other things in front of Ada." - -"Including Effie?" - -"Effie's a ray from heaven," he said. - -"Oh, aye," said Anne sceptically. - -"Look here, mother, you're not going to misunderstand?" - -"Not if you can make me understand." - -"I can try," he said, "and the chances are that I shall fail. The only -thing that will make you understand Effie is to see her." - -"Try the-other ways first," said Anne grimly. - -"She made me see. She gave me everything. She gave me herself. I found -myself because of her and I'm only living in the light she gave me." -It was difficult to find words for what Effie was and meant to him. "I -don't know if I can ever explain," he faltered. - -"Go on. You're doing very well." He was--Anne's insight helping her. - -"It's like rebirth. It's as if I'd lived till I met her six months ago -with crooked eyesight. I didn't see straight, and then, mother----" He -hesitated as a man will hesitate before voicing a profound conviction, -afraid lest he be thought absurd. "Then I found salvation, I've been a -taker and we're here to give. I took from you------" - -"Leave that," said Anne curtly. "I know it." - -"And I didn't," he replied. "It seems to me that I knew nothing till -Effie come." - -"Why do you want Ada back?" - -"It's time I gave to her." - -"Did Effie show you that?" - -"Yes." - -Anne was silent for a minute. Then: "I'll have a look at Effie," she -said. "You can take me to her." - -"I can't do that," said Sam. "We're not to meet." - -She pondered it, and him. "Kate told me you were looking ill," she said -with apparent inconsequence. "Well, if you can't take me to Effie, I -must go alone. I'm going, either road. Give me her address and I'll go -to-morrow." - -He wrote it down. "Effie Mannering," she read. "Aye," she said grimly, -"I'll give that young woman a piece of my mind." - -"Mother," he said, alarmed, "you'll not be rude to her! You've not -misunderstood?" - -"Maybe," said Anne, "but I don't think so. I think I understand that -you've got your silly heads up in the clouds and it'll do the pair of -you a lot of good to have them brought to earth. I'll know for sure when -I've set eyes on her." - -"You'll see the glory of her, then," he said defiantly. - -"Shall I?" she asked. "If you ask me, Sam, there's been a sight too -much glorification about this business. It shapes to me," she went on, -thwarting the protest which was leaping to his lips. "It shapes to me -like a plain case of love. Aye, and love's too rare a thing in this -world to be thrown away. I was never one to waste." - -So Anne Branstone took control, and Sam sat staring at her helplessly -like a man who dreams. - - - - -CHAPTER XXIII--THE KNIGHT'S MOVE - - -|IT might very well have occurred to Sam to retort that he and Effle had -not "their silly heads in the clouds" any more fantastically than had -Anne her self when she retreated to Madge's and watched her loved son -only through the eyes of Kate Earwalker. But it did not occur to him -and, if it had, Effie at least would have disproved the retort. Effle -outstripped them all. - -The truth was that as soon as Effle knew what was the matter with -her she was not appalled, dismayed, ashamed, or any of the things -appropriate to a young lady in her situation, but simply and purely -exultant. Unhappiness fell from her like a cloak, and left her radiant -with joy. And she had called herself a realist! - -She was a realist; she was engrossed with fact, not with the -circumstantial detail of her fact. She hardly wanted Sam now, she had -him, she was miles and leagues from care, alone in a shining world with -her transcendant fact. Courage returned in full flood to her and she -brimmed with bravery and pride. - -She was out of work and must find work quickly which would pay her -well. She was going to suffer, she was going (to put it mildly) to -be misunderstood. What did it matter, what did anything matter in -comparison with her exultant fact? She was going to be the mother of his -child. Marbeck was not a dream; Marbeck was coming true, and the truth -and the glory of it swept her to a heaven which only women know. - -Perhaps she was a trespasser within the gates, but they had opened to -her and they would not close. She might be prosecuted for her trespass. -Let them try! You cannot hurt invulnerability. She was a world within a -world, self-satisfying, self-complete, not so much derisive of the other -world as utterly forgetful of it. Her cloud of glory hid it from her -eyes, and if she peeped at all through breaches in the cloud she -saw people as one sees them on the road beneath a mountain-top, like -crawling ants. - -A knock came at her door, and she looked bemused through a gap in the -clouds into the eyes of Dubby Stewart, but it was not to look at the -world which did not understand. It was to look at Dubby, who loved her. - -And Dubby knew. It had not been difficult to know. She had refused him, -she had let him see why, and Sam and Effie had been away from Manchester -at the same time. It was not precise evidence, but he had written -leaderettes on evidence not more exact and did not doubt the facts. They -had kept him from her till now, but he could keep away no longer. And -before he went into her room he knew all there was to know. - -"Effie," he said, "I'm not sure if I'm welcome." - -"Oh, but you are," she said. "I ought to have written to you long ago. -I've been home weeks from my holiday." It was no use trying to see -Dubby as a crawling ant, and she gave her hand in friendship. - -"That breaks the ice," he said. - -"If there was ice to break." - -"Well," he reminded her, "I said I didn't love and run away, and I did -more or less run away. I came one Sunday because I said I would, but -I couldn't do it again. The trouble with me is that I ought to be a -journalist, and after about twelve years of it I'm still human." - -"Dubby! I'm sorry!" - -"All right, Effie; I didn't come to bleat. That's only an apology for -not coming before. And now I'm here----" - -"You'll have tea," she said quickly, going to the bell, but he caught -her hand before she pulled. - -"Do you want to put a table between us? Do, if you must"--he released -her hand--"but I'd hoped it would not come to that. Shall I ring the -bell, Miss Mannering?" - -"You needn't punish me by calling names. Don't ring." She armed herself -with courage, and turned to face him. - -"Thanks. Really thanks, Effie. I know I'm a bore, but if the old song -has a good tune to it I don't see why I shouldn't sing twice. It _is_ -a good tune," he went on with a passion which belied his surface -flippancy. "It's the best I have in me, which mayn't be saying much, -because I've a rotten ear for music, but this tune's got me badly, like -the diseases they play on the barrel-organs, and I can't lose it. I -get up to it in the morning, and I go to bed to it at night, and it's -ringing in my ears all day. Effie, I'm not much of a cove and I've -flattered myself that sincerity departed from me when I cut my wisdom -teeth. I tried to live up to that belief and it's only half come off. -I've tried to make a raree-show of life, to sit outside and watch the -puppets play, and life's won. Life's got me down, and I'm inside now. -I'm where you've put me, and a good place too: I'm near the radiator and -it warms the cockles of my heart. But I never liked radiators. Mind you, -I can do with them and I can be grateful for them. If a season ticket -for life for a seat near the radiator is all that you can give me, I can -keep a stiff upper lip and thank you for what I've got. But I never had -a passion for radiators, and I do like fires. There's life in a fire -Must it be just the radiator, or can you make it hearth and home for -us?" - -"Dubby," she said, "I told you before." - -"I know. Nothing doing in second thoughts?" She shook her head. - -"All right. I only got drunk last time. This time it will need the binge -of my life. I'd cherished hopes of this." - -"Drunk," she said reproachfully. "With a stiff upper lip?" - -"Oh, I dunno," he said. "It takes a stiff upper lip to get me to the -dentist's, but I make him use an ansthetic all the same. Still, if -you'd rather I didn't----" - -"I think it would be braver." - -"Right. But I'd like to hit something. There's nobody you'd like me to -hit, is there?" - -"Of course not." - -"Sure?" he said. He had it well in mind that somebody ought to hit Sam. -"Let's get back to where we were before I made a stump oration--to when -I came in and you looked at me like a friend." - -"I hope I always shall." - -"All right. It's the privilege of a friend to be impertinent, and I'm -rather good at impertinence. You see, Effie old thing, you're supposed -to be one of the world's workers, and you're not at the office to-day. -You haven't been at the office for weeks. I know, because I gave Florrie -half a crown." Florrie was the maid. "And it isn't that you've come into -money, because Florrie tells me you've been starving yourself." - -"I've not." Effie was indignant. She had not starved herself. While -all was dreary, food had certainly not attracted her, but neither had -anything else; and she expected to take a lively interest in it now. -"Really I've not." - -"What you say goes," he said. "And Florrie imagined it, but she didn't -imagine the part about your not going to the office, and if anything's -wrong there, don't forget that I know Branstone pretty well. I can talk -to him like a father." - -"There's nothing wrong, anywhere," she said, and, indeed, things were -not only not wrong but exuberantly right, only she could not tell him -why. - -"You're sure of that?" he persisted. "There's nothing you can tell a -pal? Nothing you can tell me, when you know I'd walk through fire for -you? Damn it, I can't pretend. I'm not a friend. I'm a man in love, and -I ask you to be fair." - -"Dubby," she pleaded, "don't make things too hard for me." - -"Is it I who make them hard?" he asked, "oris it Sam?" - -She looked at him amazed, and certainly Effie was stupid then, or, at -least, too wrapped up in her great preoccupation to be alert. "Oh, don't -be petty," she said. "I didn't debit you with jealousy." - -"No? No? And yet I have a certain right to be jealous of him. I think -you won't deny it." - -It wasn't what he said or even the deep bitterness of his tone, it -was something in his eyes, like a hurt animal's, which made her quite -suddenly, and as a thing apart from his words, see what had happened. -But she did not see even now the whole of Dubby's love and the beauty of -his knightly move. - -"You know!" she said. "Dubby, you knew when you spoke just now. You knew -that Sam and I----" - -"I told you I had a word with Florrie." - -"Florrie?" she asked. "What could Florrie tell you?" - -"Nothing," he said, "that she knew she told. Guessing is another of the -things I'm good at." - -She saw it then, to what perceptiveness his love had brought him, to -what high action. It had sped her cloud and she saw, clear-eyed as he, -his fine, impeccable fidelity. - -"Oh! And I called you petty! I told you you were jealous. Dubby, I -didn't know. You'd have done that for me!" - -"Well, you see," he apologized, "I'm in love with you." - -"Why can't we order love? Why does it come all wrong?" she cried. - -"It hasn't come so wrong but I can put it right for you," he said, -making his offer again. - -"I? I didn't mean myself," she said, wondering. "Love's not come wrong -to me. It's you I'm thinking of." - -"But is it right for you?" he asked. - -"Oh, yes," she smiled. "Terrifically." - -"Is it? When Sam has not been near you in weeks?" It was wedged in his -mind that Sam was playing the villain. "When you are here alone, do you -see him, Effie?" - -"No. That's why it's all so right." - -He shook his head, perplexed. "It may be good metaphysics, but it sounds -bad sense. I'll be quite honest with you. I'm suffering pretty badly -from suppressed desire to horsewhip Sam Branstone. I think he deserves -it, I know I'd enjoy it and I think you're trying to head me off it. I -daresay it's primitive of me, but it will do me good and I don't mind -telling you I need good doing to me. Effie, mayn't I go and horsewhip -Sam?" - -"If anybody's going to horsewhip Sam," said a voice, "it's me. I'm in -charge of this job, not you, my lad." - -They had not seen Anne come in. They saw her now, a little old woman -of the working class in her best clothes, with a bugled cape and cotton -gloves, elastic-sided boots and a quaint bonnet tied with ribbon beneath -her chin, and, unaccountably, she filled the room. They would have -passed her in the street without a second glance as one of the throng, -at face value insignificant; but this was not Anne in the street. It -was Anne in arms for Sam, and when Effie and Stewart compared notes -afterwards they each confessed to having had the same thought: that -their eyes were traitors and that what they saw was fantasy and what -they felt was real. - -"I'm Sam's mother," she introduced herself, "and it's like enough I were -overfond of him when he was a lad and didn't thrash enough, but I'm not -too old to start again. You'll be Effie? Aye, I've come round here to -put things in their places. They've got a bit askew amongst the lot of -you, and what I heard when I came in won't help." She looked accusingly -at Dubby. "You'll be her brother, I reckon?" - -It seemed to him the best way out. Anne had come to "put things in their -places," and she reckoned he was Effie's brother, which, now he thought -of it, was exactly his place. Brotherhood was thrust upon him, but he -thought he had achieved it. Plainly, for all Effie's enigmas, there was -nothing else for him, and he let Anne put him in his place. - -"Yes," he said, without a glance at Effie, "her brother." - -"You're a clean-limbed family," she complimented them, and Dubby stole -a look at Effie, half humorous and half defying her to contradict his -brotherhood. "Well, I came to see Effie, but I'll none gainsay that her -brother has a right to stay and listen, if he'll listen quiet." - -"Yes," said Dubby, still challenging Effie, "her brother has a right." -And Effie did not deny him. She had her courage, but the unexpectedness -of Anne and the force of her, as if for all these years she had been -winding up her will, which now came into play like a spring immensely -braced in super-tightened coils, caused her to want an ally and she -agreed that Dubby had a right if not the one conferred on him by Anne. - -"Won't you sit, Mrs. Branstone?" she said. - -"I was wondering when I should hear your voice," said Anne. "You're not -a talker, lass." - -"No," said Effie. - -"More of a doer." Effie was wondering whether that was praise or -condemnation, when Anne added: "I like you the better for that, though -it's a good voice. I haven't heard it much, but I've heard it. I haven't -seen you much, but I've seen enough. I'm on your side, Effie." She -astonished them both by rising as if to go. - -"But," said Dubby, "is that all?" - -Anne looked with humorous sympathy at Effie. "That's men all over, isn't -it?" she said. "They're fond of calling women talkers, but a man's not -happy till a thing's been put in words. Me and your sister understand -each other now." - -"I'm not quite certain that I do," said Effie. - -"Well, maybe you're right," conceded Anne. "It's a fact that I told Sam -last night I was coming round here to give you a piece of my mind, and I -don't notice that I'm doing it. The need seemed to go when I set eyes -on you, and I'm pretty full of a thing I want to do, only I've not quite -got the face to ask." - -"What is it, Mrs. Branstone?" - -"I want to kiss you, lass," said Anne. - -Dubby Stewart had for the second time that day the impression that women -talked, so to speak, in hieroglyphics.... There seemed to be a kind -of feminine shorthand to which only women held the key, and he did not -understand the sudden softening of Ellie's face nor her quick response. -And he did not know why, when Anne kissed her, Effie said, "No, no," nor -why Anne said, "It isn't no. It's yes." A kiss, it seemed, had various -meanings. - -Anne in effect had conveyed to Effie that she thanked her and, more, she -honoured her. Effie denied that she merited honour and Anne maintained -that she did. - -"Aye," said Anne, "he's had two dips in the lucky-bag and he's drawn a -prize this time. It's more than any man deserves, but we'll not grudge -it Sam, will we, Effie?" And to Dubby the thing took on a fresh -aspect of bewilderment. If that meant anything, it meant that Anne was -welcoming a daughter. Didn't the woman know that Sam was married? - -"I've grudged him nothing," Effie said. - -Anne meditated that, then looked at Effie with a touch of what was, for -her, shyness. "You've grudged him nothing," she disagreed, "except your -pride in giving up. And you can do it, you can give up, but Sam's nobbut -a man, and they're a weak flesh, men. He looks the shadow of himself," -she exaggerated resolutely. - -"Does he?" said Effie anxiously, and Anne nodded a sombre face. "What do -you want me to do, Mrs. Branstone?" - -"I want you to give up giving up. Sam said a thing to me last night. -He said you'd make him find salvation. Well, happen; but what's certain -sure is that you made him find love. He's found it, lass, and he mustn't -lose it, and he will if you leave things where they are. He's trying -to do a thing that isn't, possible. He's trying to live aside of Ada, -loving you. He'll try to love her for the love of you, and kiss her, -telling himself he's kissing you, and it will not be you; and the love -he tries to bring her will turn to loathing in his heart. And what'll -happen then, when love goes sour within him? Eh, lass, you took yon lad -to heaven and you're sending him to hell." - -It was not fair to Stewart. It was hardly bearable: he was not her -brother and he hadn't the feelings of a brother. He saw great happiness -in Effie's face, as if two happinesses mingled there, the one of giving -up her dream, the other of awakening to a sweet reality. He saw her put -out a hand towards Anne, surrendering, consenting, giving all in one -swift, heady leap from cloud to earth, and then he saw her sway, and -caught her in time to break her fall. - -Anne eyed him sharply. "Have you heard of your sister's fainting before, -lately?" she asked, busy on her knees with Effie. - -"Yes. Florrie told me. Twice. Can I do anything?" - -"I'll bring her round," said Anne. "But you can do something. You can go -to Sam at his office and tell him he's wanted here. Tell him I want him, -and there's news for him. Send Florrie up as you go, and you needn't -take that horsewhip with you, neither." - -"No. I needn't take it now." - -So Dubby, Effie's brother, went out on an embassy for Anne. "Feeling it? -Feeling?" he thought, "you God-abandoned devil, what right have you to -feel? A journalist. A looker-on. There's a story in this for you. -There's the guts of a story given away to you with a cup of tea... on, -no, we didn't have the tea; given neat, and you can't be decently -grateful. What's the title? 'The Charwoman's Son'? No, damned if it is. -Something about brother. Brother! Yes, you blighter, brother... brother, -and proud of it. 'Pride of Kin.' That'll do, and God help me to live up -to it." He turned into Sam's office and delivered his message in a cold, -unemotional voice. It seemed that Effie, brave herself, was the cause of -bravery in others. - -"Effie! My mother! What have you to do with them?" asked Sam, amazed. - -"I've given you a message," said the taciturn herald. - -"But what's behind it, Dubby? Is Effie ill?" - -Stewart was silent. - -"Is she--dead?" - -Dubby was tempted to say he didn't know. It; seemed to him that things -went too happily with Branstone, that it was fit, if only for the twenty -minutes which it would take for him to reach Busholme, to let Sam think -that Effie might be dead, to let him taste the flavour of torture. -Dubby suffered and would suffer, not for twenty minutes but, he gloomily -anticipated, for a lifetime. Let Sam have his minutes of it! Then he -remembered he was Effie's brother, and before Sam had his hat and coat -on, malice had left him. "It's all right, man," he said. "She's neither -ill nor dead. They've got good news for you." - - - - -CHAPTER XXIV--THE NEW BOOK OF MARTYRS - - -|IF there was news which Anne must send posthaste to hid him come to -hear, and if Effie was neither ill nor dead, he need not overtax his -wits to guess it. Yet he had never thought of this very natural sequel -to the Marbeck week, and the plain fact is that he did not much want to -think of it now. - -"I like your Effie," Anne told him. "I like her very well. She's going -to make a grandmother of me." - -He thought his mother had never been fatuous before: she thought he took -the news morosely, and perhaps her expectation had been too high. She -assumed that a child was the first consideration of a man's life; which -is not true, even, of all women and true of only a minority of men. - -Nor was Sam, in fact, morose. He had never been more intensely and -silently alive. In itself, this thing was right with a shining exultant -rightness which warmed him to the marrow. It crowned and completed -Marbeck and it crowned and completed him. He who was childless was to be -a father, and by Effie! He had nothing but a thankful emotion for that, -and looked with yearning eyes at Effie, giver of all else, who was now -to give him this. He had not known her wonder could increase. - -He saw that more was expected of him than that he should look at her -adoringly. Anne was on tip-toe with anticipation. Her difficulty, if -indeed she had acknowledged to herself that there was any, had been to -make these visionaries see that love mattered and that Ada did not; -and her success with Effie had been complete. She had never doubted of -success with Sam, the weaker vessel, for there was love, sufficient in -itself; and there was now the added argument of Effie's child. She could -not see that he had any choice. - -He stood there conscious of the expectancy of their regard, and knew -that he was failing them. He thought they took a blinkered view, seeing -the child and nothing else. To them, apparently, the child came first: -they were hypnotized by what was, really, an afterthought, and there was -the greater need for him to keep a steadfast eye upon the truth. As he -saw it, the truth was that he had put his hand to another plough; on -Hartle Pike he had lighted such a candle by Effie's grace as he trusted -would never be put out; and he had gone to Ada. True, Ada had gone -from him, but that was temporary and trivial, whereas here was a real -distraction and he saw two loyalties before him--to Effie and the idea, -and to Effie and her child. It seemed to Sam that the first was the -greater of these two. - -He had wrestled with an afterthought before, one which hardly yielded -in temptation to that which now confronted him, and he had thrown it. He -had refused to contest Sandyford because there was not room for politics -in a scheme which included Ada, and still less was there room for Effie. -He felt faint with discouragement at the thought that Effie, unless -appearance belied her, had capitulated to her afterthought, but he stood -firmly by their treaty. They had decided that duty came first; he had -shouldered duty; and he, at any rate, had no room for afterthoughts. - -He was loyal to Effie and the Marbeck pact, duty's bondsman, Ada's -husband. He made a gesture of decision, which Anne misinterpreted. - -"Aye," she said a little smugly, "this settles it all right. It wasn't -common sense in you to part before, but I reckon there'll be no parting -now." - -"No," said Effie softly, "not now." She stole a look of shy, glad -confidence at Sam, and he found it extraordinarily difficult to meet -her eye, and still more difficult to say what he must, at any cost, get -said. - -"I'm not so sure," he said at last, wishing the earth would swallow him. - -At that moment he would cheerfully have given a hand to escape having to -differ from them. They were Effie and his mother: they were his mother -and Effie: the two women to whom he owed everything: more, he loved -Effie so that every fibre in him yearned for her, and, even more than -that, he was delicately sensitive to Effie in her present case. But it -couldn't change him. His loyalty was engaged, to fanaticism, to another -Effie, high Effie of the hills, of the crusade and the idea; and this -seemed to him somehow, a lower Effie, an Effie who had dipped the -flag of her ideal to a coming baby, whilst he was faithful to the old -unbending Effie who had thrown an imitation wedding ring away. It almost -seemed as if she wanted that ring back, base metal though it was. - -A case, perhaps, of splitting hairs, but, at any rate, the case of a man -with a faith at one extreme and at the other his miserable conviction -that happiness was not for him. He had abandoned happiness when he left -Marbeck, and lived now in a place where happiness was barred by Ada. - -"I'm not so sure," he repeated drearily. "You see, there's Ada and I -have to be fair to her." - -"Ada's left you," snapped Anne. A contentious Sam was not going to find -her amiable. - -He chose to put it in another way. "My wife," he said, "is staying at -present with her father. Yes, mother," he went on firmly, "I'm going to -be fair to Ada and I've to guard against unfairness all the more because -you won't be fair. You won't be ordinarily just. You always hated Ada." - -"Yes," she agreed viciously. "I'm a clean woman. I always hated vermin." - -Sam turned to Effle immensely heartened by this virulence. "You see!" he -appealed, calling to witness the hopeless bias of his mother. It was, he -wished to imply, this blind hatred of Anne for Ada which accounted for -his mother's attitude, her exalting of--well--the mistress over the -wife, her flagrant unmorality. He tried to put all this into his -gesture. "And you," he reinforced it, "you sent me to her, Effie." - -She bowed her head, admitting it, but Anne was not prepared to let it go -at that. "Even Effie," she said "can make a mistake. She would not send -you now." - -And, looking at Effie, he saw that it was true. He had seen it from the -first and it bothered him profoundly. Effie had changed: there was, in -all they said, this noticeable stressing of the "now," to differentiate -them from the "then." What was it? Anne's arguments, or the baby, or had -Effie, uninfluenced by either, really changed her mind about the Marbeck -treaty? he couldn't believe that last. Marbeck was infallible and he was -dogged in the faith. He responded to the Marbeck creed like the needle -of a compass to the meridian, and if with this needle also there was -deflection it was corrected by his racial stubbornness. He had his -people's queer, infatuated pride in the contemplation of their own -tenacity, even when, perhaps mostly when, it hurts to be tenacious. - -Whereas Effie had known ever since Dubby Stewart brought her back from -cloud-land that Marbeck was very fallible indeed, or, rather, Marbeck -was one thing and living up to Marbeck was another. If he had said, -instead of only thinking, that she was a lower Effie now, she would not -have contradicted him, though she did not want a wedding ring of either -metal. She wanted Sam. She was changed from the idealist who thought she -could be happy as a sign-post and a spiritual guide. She had come down -to Mother Earth where men and women live. At Marbeck they were on an -altitude where the air was too rarefied for human lungs, and she wanted -to fall with Sam from selflessness to mere humanity. - -"No," she agreed again with Anne, "I should not send you now." - -"I shall have to think this out," he said. Effie admitted to being -earthly, and he was horribly dismayed! "Effie," he cried in pain, "don't -you see?" he wanted desperately to be understood by her, if not by Anne. - -"I see," she said, and not without pride either. Whatever was fine in -him, whatever reacted from an Eflie come to earth, was due to her, -and she was proud of him even when, as now, he used her tempered steel -against her. - -Anne watched with a grim appreciation his anxiety to make a pikestaff -plain. "We all see," she said. "You're none so deep and we're none so -daft as all that. You've got a maggot in your brain, and I know the -shape of it. I've had the same in mine, and if you'll think back ten -years, you'll know what I mean. We're the same breed, Sam, and we can -both do silly things and stand by then and suffer for them. I flitted -from you to Madge, and I didn't set eyes on you from that day till last -night. That's what I mean by suffering." - -And there, in those few words, the tragedy of ten years stood confessed. -Parted from Sam, she lived in exile, suffering, and, of course, he had -known it and deliberately forgot it, so that the point of her revelation -was not its truth, but the amazing fact that she should speak of it at -all. Anne had the pride which suffers silently. - -"Mother!" he said, distressed for her. - -"Nay, none of that," she bade him harshly. "If I were soft enough to -let it hurt me, that's my look out. But here's the point, Sam. There's -another woman soft about you, too, and she's not the same as me. I'd -had you since I bore you, and I were not young when you and me came to -a parting; but she's young, and you'll none make Eflie suffer the road -I suffered while there's strength in me to say you nay. I'd have gone to -my grave without your knowing this if it hadn't been for Effie. It's not -good for a man to know too much. They're easy stuffed with pride." - -She pretended, with deep magnanimity, to think that he had not known -until she told him, but they both knew very well that he had always -known. She dwelt deliberately on it now to inform him, not of her -suffering, but of the intensity of her feeling for Effie. It was so -intense that she could speak of her own suffering: for Effie's sake she -had unveiled, thrown off her stoicism, and flung the spoken truth as a -challenge and a revelation at him. - -He knew what speaking in this manner cost her, but he was stubborn still -in relating all she said to her ungovernable hate of Ada; whereas Anne -did not hate Ada ungovernably, but only when Ada hurt Sam. - -Again he said "Mother!" and got no further with it. - -"I know I'm your mother," she said, "and you can stop thinking of me now -and think of Effie." - -"I'm trying to," he said. - -"Well?" said Anne impatiently. She hadn't imagined an obstinacy which -would not yield to what she had said. Surely he knew the sacrifice of -pride she made in saying it! And there was Effie, too, who said little -and looked the more. - -"I don't know," he despaired. - -"Then others must know for you," said Anne, and when his lips only -tightened at that, "Sam," she pleaded, "surely you'll never go against -the pair of us." - -But there were two Effies, and he wasn't "going against" them both, -while he held Anne to be mesmerized by hate of Ada. For all that, it -desolated him to be in opposition to them now, to Anne and Effie, the -women who counted, the women who gave. "Still," he had to say, "there's -Ada." - -He said it, as he hoped to say it, finally. He wanted to get away from -these two, to escape from their distracting presence to a place where he -could think. After all, Hartle Pike had not settled his problem, and -he must try somewhere else--Platt Fields, perhaps. They had a sort of -space. - -But he could not escape--not, at least, till Anne had played her -ace. Anne had not finished yet, though she had hoped ten years in the -wilderness had been enough. It seemed that they were not, and she must -wander still. Well, she could do what she must. - -"Oh, aye," she said dryly, "there's Ada. There's your bad ha'penny, -and I reckon summat'll have to be done with her. But if you'll stop -worrying, lad, and if worst comes to the worst, I'll take Ada on -myself." - -Effie started towards her. "No, no," she cried. - -"You hold your hush," said Anne. This was Anne's game, not Effie's. - -Sam was still staring at her. "You!" he said. "What can you do?" - -"I can see you and Effie happy, and I dunno as owt else matters." It -did not matter what the cost was to Anne. "When you used to come home to -your tea from Mr. Travers' office, what you left was always good enough -for me, and I can stomach your leavings still." - -It startled Effie, who had thought herself a specialist in sacrifice. -This was the very ferocity of self-denial. - -So far, tired and overstrained, Effie had found peace in resigning the -leadership to Anne, but here was a lead she could not follow. It was not -that she mistook Anne's purpose or doubted her capacity. Her faith in -Anne was young but adamantine, and she knew that if Anne replaced -Sam with Ada, and made herself heir to the Marbeck plan, she would -unquestionably do for Ada what Sam had undertaken to do. But the thing -was simply not good enough. - -"No, Mrs. Branstone, no," she said firmly. - -"Get oft' with you," said Anne impolitely. "I can tackle Ada with one -hand tied behind my back." - -"Of course," Sam agreed, "you could, but you are not going to. Ada's my -job." - -"I can be pig-headed as well as you, my lad," Anne menaced him. - -"It's not that, mother." - -"No, it isn't that," said Effie, conceiving perhaps that it was time for -her to enter into this tragicomedy of rivalry in self-surrender. "Sam's -right. Ada does matter, and it is I who am the failure, I who have -broken faith, I who was arrogant. I thought that I could bear a torch, -and I can only bear a child. But I know now what I have to do. I can go -away. I can disappear." - -It seemed to Anne that this was serious because obviously it was a way -out; but she thought it a way much more appalling in prospect than the -plan she had proposed for herself of "taking Ada on." She took alarm. In -another than Effie it might have been heroics, but Effie's was not the -stuff that mouths bravado. Anne granted that, and saw a tragic chasm -yawn She signalled her alarm to Sam, who answered it with a glance which -made appeal to her, whilst yielding nothing of his obstinacy. - -"If you go away," he said, "my mother goes with you. I've meant that -from the first." - -Anne nodded without enthusiasm. Certainly that was a solution and -equally not the solution. It gave Sam to Ada, and Effie, it -appeared, was not seeing it as a solution at all. There were strange -possibilities, Anne thought, in this young woman, and she did not want -them to be tested too far. Effie was not a talker, and when she said -a thing she did not overstate. There was danger. Well, Anne was -forewarned, and addressed herself in her most humorous, common-sense -manner to laugh it out of court. One can deal with danger in worse ways -than to apply to it the acid--ridicule. - -She put her arms akimbo and surveyed Effie and Sam appraisingly. "I -dunno," she said, "that there's a pin to choose between the three of us -for chuckle-headed foolishness. We're all fancying ourselves as hard as -we can for martyrs and arranging Ada's life for her. It hasn't struck -any of us yet that Ada's likely to arrange things for herself." - -And if Sam's impulse was to say gloomily: "It isn't likely at all," he -repressed it when Anne's eye caught his, and said instead, "That's so," -without knowing why he said it and without believing it. - -The flicker of a smile crossed Effie's face; Sam as conspirator struck -her as crudely humorous. Anne saw the smile and understood, but brazened -it out. "Of course it's so," she said, defying Effie. "Ada's a poor thing -of a woman, but she's none beyond having a mind and speaking it. I was -always one to take the short road out of trouble, so I'll go along to -Peter Struggles' now." - -"Very well," consented Effie, and Anne understood her to mean that -the crisis, if one had impended, was postponed. "But," said Effie, "of -course, I saw." - -Which was, in its way, a challenge; it was, at any rate, to tell Anne -that Effie knew what had been suspected of her. - -Anne met it as a challenge. "Well?" she said. - -"You were quite wrung, Mrs. Branstone," said Effie quietly. "I'm not a -coward." - -Anne was tying her bonnet-si rings, and found it convenient to look -down. She preferred, just then, not to meet Effie's eye. "I know I'm -overanxious," she mumbled in apology. - -"And there's no need," said Effie, a little cruel in her victory. - -To Sam the conversation seemed to have slipped into another dimension. -He hadn't the faintest idea what they were talking about. - - - - -CHAPTER XXV--WHOM GOD HATH JOINED - - -|PETER Struggles walked into his tobacconist's and put his snuff-box on -the counter. There was no need to state his requirements; in fact, he -had not stated them for many years. Shopman and customer understood each -other very well, and business came first; then if there was inclination, -as there usually was, talk followed. - -To-day, however, the shopman gaped at Peter in surprise, and made a -half-turn of his head, so that he could see his calendar Wednesday was -Peter's day for buying snuff with a regularity to which time had given -the force of a tradition, and the tobacconist had even the habit of -using Peter's visit as a reminder to a fallible memory that he must -wind his clock. The calendar continued him in his belief that to-day was -Thursday, and he felt sure that Peter had been in as usual on Wednesday. - -Peter had. Snuffing, of course, is a wasteful habit in any case, and a -shaking hand misses the target more freely than a steady one; but, for -all that, Peter, in his mental anguish, had consumed in one night the -better part of his week's supply of snuff. The box was indubitably -empty. He had not come to replenish it without some conscientious -qualms--an allowance is an allowance--but he felt that life which -comprised Ada in her present mood and did not comprise snuff, was beyond -bearing. Ada was, it seemed, inevitable: he must mitigate Ada. - -"The usual, if you please, Thomas," he unusually said. - -"Yes, sir," said Thomas, filling the box. "You've had a little -accident?" - -"An accident? Oh!" Then the fitness of that guess struck him. "Yes, -Thomas, a little accident. By the way, do you know anything about -divorce?" - -"Well, sir, I read the _Sunday Judge,_" Thomas replied deprecatingly. -"Very human subject, sir, divorce." - -"You find it so?" - -"I take a lot of satisfaction in reading about my sinful -fellow-creatures." - -"Quite, quite," said Peter vaguely, and went out of the shop, leaving a -puzzled salesman behind him. "Forgot to pay, and all," thought Thomas. -"Not that I'd grudge it if he didn't pay, only it's not like him. He -looks sadly to day. The old boy's breaking up. Him and divorce! What -does he want to worry his head about divorce for?" - -Peter did not know that he had mentioned divorce, to his tobacconist. -It would have shocked him if he had known. He spoke unconsciously, -and listened mechanically to the man's reply, but he was, harrowingly, -"worrying his head" about divorce. He took snuff in the street, an -unheard-of occurrence, but it did not clear his aching brain of the -fateful word "divorce." - -Ada had put it there too firmly in her stupid and invincible malignity. -She had one aim--to do Sam the greatest injury she could. His offence -was rank, and she demanded a proportionate revenge. - -She had lived as a spinster for marriage and as a wife by marriage. -Marriage was not a duty, but a state of beatitude, and she had walked -in the faith of her grotesque illusion that her marriage was singularly -blessed. It was childless, and the more blessed for that: there were no -intruders on the perfect union of man and wife. It was illusion, and -a wilder perversion of the truth than the ordinary self-deceiver can -attain; but illusion is the breath of life, and she had fed on her -deception till, like a drug-taker, she could not live without it. -She had blazoned it abroad in a hundred drawing-rooms. If there were -low-voiced colloquies of this or that affair, if it was hinted that -men were faithless ever, Ada would grow superior and boast the flawless -rectitude of Sam. These were things which happened to other people, who -very likely deserved them, and could by no manner of means occur to her. -She was not so sunk in imbecility as to deny that they did happen, and -to people who were, nominally, married; but they were unsound people, -insecurely married. There was a fundamental difference between their -marriages and hers. She couldn't explain; it was too obvious for -explanation. She was married, and these others, somehow, were married, -yet not married. They had, through lack of merit, stopped short of the -seventh paradise where nothing could shake consummate bliss. They were -not as she was. - -And now she had to face the fact that the impossible had happened to -her, and not only had it happened, but was known to have happened. That -was where the blow struck home. She had publicly elaborated her case -of absolute conviction, she had vaunted his faithfulness, the cardinal -connubiality of Sam, and Miss Entwistle was spreading the news that she -had been a doting fool! And she hadn't. She had not doted on Sam. She -had not been infatuated with her husband, but with the idea of her -husband which she had created and maintained. If only she had had the -gumption to defy Miss Entwistle! If only she had concealed her belief -in the story as successfully as she had hidden the fact that Sam had -a separate room! She had been taken by surprise, she had admitted -everything by default, and, worse, she had assured Mrs. Grandage that -she would never see Sam again. She did not doubt, in spite of Mrs. -Grandage's good-nature, that this little sequel to the story of Miss -Entwistle was in rapid circulation. - -She was humiliated publicly, and, as she saw it, the one course open to -her was to make Sam suffer a humiliation as drastic and as public as her -own. Though it hurt her, he must pay for it; though she died, he must -be punished and, sincerely, she expected it to kill her. She lived in a -garden of lies, and life without the illusion of her marriage would be -as impossible as life without the fragrance of her poisonous flowers to -Rappaccini's daughter, but no matter for that. Ada must be revenged, -and divorce, though it killed her, would be the greatest injury that she -could do a politician and a pietistic publisher. She managed to square -the circle, too. She was to die and make a murderer of him; she was to -ruin his business and make a bankrupt of him; and at the same time -she was to have the compensation of a handsome alimony. But perhaps -vengeance is always irrational, and that is why it belongs to God. - -She dinned her word into Peter's ears with the merciless reiteration -of a hurt and howling child. It was her first word and her last, and -appeals based on religion shattered themselves against it as fruitlessly -as the appeal to reason. What she had said she had said: and she had -said "Divorce." Alternatives did not exist. - -For Peter, divorce ranged itself with the abominations of the world, -a man-made legal subterfuge to evade the law of God. There might, -conceivably, be occasions when divorce was to be condoned as the -comparatively little wrong which did a great right, and he tried very -honestly to see Ada's as one of those heroic needs. He failed: he could -not even see that Ada was hurt in soul, or in anything but pride. She -was in a mood, not of spiritual revolt, but of peevish discontent. - -Small wonder that he snuffed prodigiously that night. He had his meed -of suffering, and overcharged his small account with dreadful -self-reproach. He, not Ada, and not Sam, was responsible for her -violence and for the cause of it; he and the books upon his shelves; -reading, his darling sin. He blamed himself for consenting too readily -to their marriage. Sam, he had thought, would lead Ada: on what grounds -had he thought it? What had he known of Sam's leadership--a prolix, -fluent boy at the Concentrics? He had exchanged his daughter for -peaceful, solitary evenings with his books--"Self-seeker!" he -thought--and the exchange was to recoil upon him now. He had abandoned, -after one harsh, undaughterly repulse, his attempt to show her that -wearing a wedding ring was not the whole duty of woman--"The sin of -Pride," he thought--and had returned to browse amongst his books. Sam -seemed a good fellow, too. There were those Classics, and the texts, and -the prosperous old age of Mr. Carter, who, but for Sam, would certainly -have ended his days in the workhouse. But, failing with Ada, he ought to -have appealed to Sam.... Yes, he ought to have taken a strong line with -Sam, instead of letting Sam's worldly success dazzle him. Sam had seemed -too big for Peter Struggles to grapple with--the sin of cowardice. - -Now it had come to this! Sam had broken the seventh commandment, and Ada -wished to forget the words which Peter had read over them when he -joined their right hands together, and said, "Those whom God hath joined -together, let no man put asunder." She commanded a divorce, and it was -useless for Peter to insist, out of his small store of worldly wisdom, -that divorce was not hers to command. Sam had not been "cruel." - -Her fury only doubled. Gone, vanished like the snows of long ago, was -her painted idyll of domestic bliss. - -"Cruel?" she said. "He's never been anything but cruel. I'm black and -blue with his atrocities." - -Very gently he tried to tell her that he did not believe it. "We must -not exaggerate," he said. - -"Exaggerate!" she blazed. "Won't you believe me till you see it? I'll go -upstairs and strip. Come when I call." - -He soothed her down at that, seeing that she was capable of doing -herself some signal injury to call in evidence. - -"Well, then," she said, "I want my divorce: get me a divorce." That was -her simple demand of the priest who married her: it was why Peter took, -unrepentantly, as much snuff in a night as he commonly took in a week, -and why, with replenished stock, he continued next day to take snuff -with a lavish hand. - -It irritated Ada, though she had always associated Peter with a -snuff-box, and the untidiness of the habit could not offend her, who -was never offended by dirt, as any mechanical movement in another will -irritate one whose nerves are ill-controlled. They had talked themselves -to a standstill, and sat in moody silence, broken only by the deplorable -sound of taking snuff. - -She looked viciously at him. "If you do that again, I shall leave the -room," she said. - -"I'm sorry, my dear," he said, although, really, it was a pleasant -threat; but when he did it again, it was through pure absent-mindedness, -and he was terribly distressed at his selfishness when Ada flung out -of the room. He had the feelings of a child put in a corner as a -punishment, and to relieve them he took snuff again. She heard him from -the stair, and heard him immediately afterwards poking the fire; and she -thought the loathsome self-absorption of men and their utter callousness -to the anguish of sensitive women were proved beyond the possibility -of doubt. She threw herself on the bed in her old room, alone in a -friendless world.... The bed had a warm eiderdown. - -Peter poked the fire because it needed poking. It often did. The grate -was one of those labour-making contrivances which must be periodically -cleared of ash if the fire is to burn at all, and it was rarely cleared. -The woman who "did for" Peter, did for him badly, and he was at the age -when a man needs artificial warmth: a gaunt, shrunk figure as neglected -as his house. Small wonder that, apart from his attachment to St. -Mary's, he was still a curate. They had considered him for the living -when his vicar moved some years ago, they had considered the little -circle of rich parishioners who made an oasis of civilization in that -savage place, and they had decided that Peter lacked the social graces. -They had seen his mittens, his unfinished coat... they had seen him eat -an orange: and he remained a curate. - -The fire was gone beyond the reach of his unscientific poking. That, -too, often happened with a man who had the habit of standing by his -bookshelf reading gluttonously, with his austere person frozen into a -grotesque attitude, some book which he had not the patience to carry to -the fireside: and he was now upon his knees making pathetically clumsy -efforts to revitalize the flame when his inefficient housekeeper opened -the door and showed Anne into the room. - -It eased the situation for them both. Anne indeed, was nervous, so -nervous that she had walked three times past the door before she pulled -the bell. She had a befitting awe of the priest, and a tremendous -respect for the man. At Effie's, because the circumstances there were -tense, it had seemed an easy thing to come to Peter's, but she had -needed to call on her reserves of courage to keep her place on the -doorstep after she had rung the bell. - -Now, however, when she came into the room and saw what he was at, she -pushed him gently aside, and took the poker from his hand. She nursed -the fire skilfully; she was with familiar things which gave her back her -confidence. - -As to the trouble, she diagnosed it in a moment. "That woman of yours is -a slut," she said. "And I'll talk to her before I go. I reckon I've the -right, me and you being connections by marriage." - -She looked at him over her shoulder, and saw that he did not recognize -her. How, indeed, should he? She had avoided Ada's wedding, and she was -one of a large flock: a face, perhaps, but not a name to him. "I'm Anne -Branstone," she explained. "Sam's mother; and I'll not have you blaming -Sam for this." - -"For the fire?" asked Peter vaguely, he was rather muddled by her brisk -incursion. - -"No," said Anne, almost gaily; "for the fat that's in the fire." - -She thought she had his measure now--the sort of a man who could live -in a dirty room like this, with a choked ash-pan and fire-irons with the -rust thick on them. But Peter was greater than that. She judged him by -those of his surroundings which had significance for her, and not by -books which expressed everything for him and nothing for her. - -"Mrs. Branstone!" he said, as if realizing now with whom he had to deal. - -"Sam's mother," she repeated, rising from a healthy fire; "and I've told -you where not to put the blame. You can, maybe, think yourself of the -right place to put it." - -"Yes," he surprised her by saying; "on me." - -"You! Oh, if you want to go to the back of behind, you can blame Adam -and Eve. But that's not what I meant." - -"On me," he said again. "I consented to this marriage. I sanctioned it." - -"Well," said Anne, "I've not come here to crow, but I've the advantage -of you in that. I did not consent," and her eye strayed involuntarily -to a scar on her hand, memorial of the form of her dissent. "I didn't -consent because I knew they weren't in love. I told Sam I knew it." - -"Then," said Peter, "you are worthier than I am, Mrs. Branstone." - -"Because I knew love matters? There's nowt so wonderful in knowing that, -and nowt so crafty in foreseeing that a marriage where there is no love -is marred from start to finish." - -"Love matters," he agreed. "It matters all, for God is love." - -"We'll come to an agreement, you and me," she said appreciatively. -"We've the same mind about the root of things." - -"This is a terrible business, Mrs. Branstone." - -"I'm none denying it. It's a terrible thing for a man and wife to live -together when love's not a lodger in the house; it's wrong, and the -worst of wrong is that it won't stay single. Wrong's got to breed. But, -there," she finished briskly, "I'm telling you what you know, and when -all's said, there's nowt so bad that it's past mending." - -"Ada wants a divorce," said Peter, and a sudden glint of triumph came -into Anne's eye, only to vanish as quickly as it came. She had said, -without believing it, that Ada might make arrangements, and this was to -arrange indeed. It unmade the hollow marriage, it was a solution which -really solved, it was a clean cut; and she wanted to glorify Ada, who -was proving at the eleventh hour that she had the saving grace of common -sense. - -Peter did a curious thing. He rose and took a book haphazard from his -shelf, came back to his chair and opened the book. He did not read it, -and he was not being rude, but this was an agitation beyond the reach of -snuff. He tried to calm himself by resting his eyes on print. - -Anne was not practised in the ways of bookish men, but, by strange -insight, understood that Peter had gone to a book much as she went to -his grate, to be soothed by its familiarity, and her rejoicing at his -words came to an abrupt end. His action brought home to her, more than -his horror-struck tone, whose significance she almost missed in her joy -at Ada's practical solution, his loathing of divorce: and it seemed to -her, quite suddenly, that what mattered most in all this business was -that Peter should be happy about it. - -It mattered more than Sam and Ada, and even more than Effie, that Peter, -who was, so to speak, an old and sleeping partner, should be satisfied -by their solution. She did not care if this was to per vert the values: -the remnant of Peter Struggles' life was of more importance than the -young lives of the active members of the firm. And because she had a -practical mind, and believed that one is happy in soul only when one -is first happy in body, she was already thinking past their present -problem: she was considering how the slut in Peter's kitchen could be -replaced by her own housewifely self. - -She resolutely consigned that thought to the future, and returned to -the question of to-day. Ada, wonderfully, wanted a divorce: but Anne -required that Peter should be happy about it, and she perceived the -incompatibility. She saw that juxtaposition could hardly be more crude. -He was a priest, the priest who married them, and she wanted him to -acquiesce contentedly in their divorce. - -"Wants a divorce, does she?" she said. "Well, there's more than Ada to -be thought of." - -"There is, indeed," said Peter, thinking of his church. - -"There's you," said Anne, thinking of him. "If she gets one, does she -plant herself on you again?" - -He supposed so, unable to disguise his depression at the prospect. - -"Aye," she rubbed it in, "you were well rid of Ada once. It's not in -human nature to want her back again." She was thinking singly of his -comfort. - -Peter, on his part, took her to imply that if he opposed a divorce it -was for interested motives, that he could continue to be "well rid -of Ada." He saw with dismay that it was an interpretation which could -reasonably be put on any opposition from him. He thought, in his -humility, that it was a reasonable interpretation, whereas, Peter being -Peter, it was a ludicrously unjust interpretation, and, of course, -Anne did not make it. She had only stated as a fact that Ada at home -prejudiced her father's comfort: and the comfort of Ada's father had -become a matter which touched Anne Bran-stone nearly. - -"And there are other people, too. There's Sam," she went on, "and he is -a desperate bad case. He has no love for Ada. He's hoisted his notion of -his duty higher than a living love. He wants Ada to come back." - -"I'm sorry to say," mourned Peter, "that the more he wants it, the less -likely she is to go." - -She tried not to exult too openly at that. "And then," she said, -"there's Effie." - -"Effie!" He spoke in scandalized protest. - -"Aye, that's her name, and yon's just the tone of voice I had myself -when I first heard of her. I want you to see Effie." - -"Never!" said Peter, and for a mild man his bitterness was remarkable. - -"Then I must show her to you," said Anne placidly, "and that'll mean -going back a bit and showing you other things as well. It'll mean," and -she very much regretted it, "showing you this." She held out her hand -and pointed to the scar. "When Sam told me he wanted to marry Ada, I -came to see her. I saw what I saw, and I told him she'd be the ruin of -him. He didn't believe me, and I tried to make him see I meant it. I -put my hand into the fire, and I thought to keep it there till he agreed -with me, but he's stronger in the arm than me, and he got me away." She -spoke without passion, in simple narrative which Peter found impressed -him deeply. "So I left him and earned my living, and all that. Sam -married her, and the ruin's come, but it's not come suddenly. It's been -coming all the time. I'd date it back," she reflected, "to the day when -he fooled you about the 'Social Evil' pamphlet. He did that because he -wanted a rich husband for Ada." - -Peter had nothing to say. If he had not known before that Sam had -"fooled" him, he did not doubt it now. - -"And it grew from that. He's made money because Ada wanted money, and -after that it grew to be a bad habit. He made it then by writing lies -about himself in the papers, and I don't know how he's done it since -then, except that it has been by more lies. He began to fancy himself -at politics. He wanted to be a crowing cock, and it didn't matter if he -crowed on a dung-heap so long as he crowed. And Ada didn't care. He gave -her money, and she didn't care. She didn't love, and he didn't love, -and there's a thing you said just now that I'll remind you of. You said -God's love. I'll leave it to you to name what it is when there isn't -love. - -"And then love came to Sam. Effie came, and you say that God is love. -Sam put it to me in another way. He said he'd found salvation. Well, -it's a big word, and I dunno. But I do know he found love and it changed -him. He's done with politics, and he's done with crowing and with -riches, too. Effie did that by the power of love, and there's another -thing she did, that's marked yon lass for me as the finest, strangest -woman in the width of the world. She gave him up and sent him back to -Ada. Well, I've heard of sacrifice before, and I've done a bit that way -myself, but give up a man she loved and teach him how to make a woman of -his wife, and send him home to do it--it's more than I can rise to. And -that is Effie Mannering. - -"He went home and he tried, and Ada laughed at him. She couldn't -understand: there wasn't the one thing there that could make her -understand: there wasn't love. And he gave up his politics that night -she laughed at him, to leave himself free to tackle Ada. Now Ada's left -him, and there's sum-mat else turned up as well. You can guess." -He looked up sharply. "Aye, that's it, and the rum thing is that it -surprised them both. Their love's that sort of love, and I reckon there -are folk would call it careless of them. I would myself nine cases -out of ten, aye, and ninety-nine in a hundred, but not this case. This -wasn't a case for care; it was a case of love. But a baby's coming to -Effie, and you know' as well as I do that none will ever come to Ada. -I've finished telling you about Effie now." There was a long pause and -it seemed several times that Peter was about to break it, and each time -changed his mind. All that he finally said in comment on Effie was, "A -lawless woman," and it might have been deduced from his tone that he did -not condemn, if he could not, confessedly, admire. - -"Aye, lawless," Anne agreed, "but there's a law of lawless women and she -has not obeyed it. She's not a breaker. She's a maker." - -Peter bowed his head. Perhaps he did not wish Anne to see what was -written in his face. And he lacked conviction when he tried to speak -again. "Whom God hath joined--he began. - -"But God," Anne said, "is love." - -He threw up his hands in a despairing gesture of surrender. "I deserve -to be unfrocked for this," he said, but he closed the book on his knee -and took snuff violently. It marked the passing of a crisis. - -As for Anne, there mingled with her satisfaction at his consent a keen -despondency at his unhappiness. She had both lost and won, and Anne took -little pleasure in a mixed victory. She had not finished yet with Peter -Struggles. - - - - -CHAPTER XXVI--SNOW ON THE FELLS - - -|LIFE is still greater than machines. Machines accomplish marvels and -very wonderfully continue to accomplish them, but life refuses the -mechanical. It was man, and not nature, who invented the wheel, and life -does not revolve upon an axle. Life will not repeat itself: and it can -excel itself. - -They had not thought, when they came back to Marbeck at the turn of the -year, that Marbeck could be better than before. They came hoping, they -said, to recapture the old emotions, and brought Anne with them to show -her their fairyland. They did not recapture the old emotions, because -they were young emotions, a ferment like youth itself, and things were -settled now. They seemed to look back from their equable security to -a wild infancy of their emotion, a fumbling, frenzied, awkward age of -love. Of course they looked back happily, from a place where things were -happy and serene to one where things were happy and impetuous. - -The Dale was full of wonder, with a wonder which now belonged unerringly -to fact and had mellowed in reality. - -For Anne, it was a pretty place, but "lonesome," and, amazingly to them, -she chafed to leave it. Anne did not suffer holidays gladly. - -They had extolled Anne, they had not thought it credible that she should -fail at anything, and it ruffled them disturbingly to find her fail at -this. They had planned eagerly and, indeed, generously to bring her with -them to Marbeck--generously, because they wanted to be alone, and even -Anne, owe her what they did and be she what she might, was an intruder. -But they wanted her to share with them their wonderland. Marbeck was -theirs, theirs intimately and alone, their holy place, and they could -think of nothing finer, nothing which came more nearly to her deserts of -them, than to initiate her to their secret worship. - -They made her free of Marbeck, relived their week for her as much as for -themselves, showed her where this and that dear folly happened, took -her to view-points whence she could see the tops of hills they climbed, -using the landscape as the ground-plan of an ecstasy which they invited -her to share, and were discomposed to find that Anne, plainly straining -enthusiasm in their behalf, could only say of Marbeck, their Marbeck, -"I'm sure it's very nice." - -She damned with faint praise their enchanted valley in whose every -tree they took by now as fierce a joy as if they had created it, and -in despair they dragged her, as a last hope, to the very Holy of their -holies, the top of Hartle Pike. If she failed them there, if she did -not see the beauty and the grace, the penetrating significance and the -absolute sanctity of Hartle Pike, then her greatness was lopsided, -resulting, like a show chrysanthemum, from the atrophy of other -possibilities. - -It was a great day for the fells, when a frozen surface crushed -elastically underfoot and kept one dryshod anywhere, and they walked -in frosty, sun-kissed air, keenly exhilarating yet spicily warm. Snow -capped the greater heights and seemed to clarify an atmosphere already -clear, but the dales were free of snow and never more fit for walking -than now when their boggy surface was dried up and roughened to the -tread by crisp, granulated particles of frost. - -Anne granted to herself that if one must take a holiday, this generous -activity made nearly a venial matter of it. To climb these slopes was -almost as satisfying to her body as to wash a long flight of steps, and -she reached the top feeling as pleasantly tired as if she had done half -a day's charring. - -Still, she hadn't charred, and there was in fact nothing which needed -charring, nothing but a cleanliness which positively irritated her. -She itched to be doing something and there was manifestly nothing to do -except to enjoy herself. And if Anne Branstone was not doing a job, she -liked, at any rate, to know that her next job was around the corner. She -began, for the first time in her life, to feel a friendliness -towards dirt. In the midst of this sprawling insolence of triumphant -cleanliness, she hankered for a little humanizing soot. She could have -loved her life-long enemy, and he did not appear... it was not a bit -like Manchester. - -Far to the west, beyond a barrier of gleaming snow, she saw a murky -cloud of smoke where the foul boot of industrialism stamps on the -Lakeland Coast--a message and a call. It spoke, to her of natural dirt -in this great waste of unstained purity; it made her sick for home and -the thing she had to do. - -Effie and Sam stood gazing at the hills, spell-hound by loveliness, and -when they tore their dancing eyes away it was to look into each other's. -They had no need of words: their eyes exulted in the burnished splendour -of the scene, and with a doubled exultation each in the other's joy. -Then Sam turned hopefully to Anne and saw that she was looking with a -rapt intensity at the west. At last, it seemed, the hills had touched -her. - -"Where's yon?" she asked, "yon smoke?" - -His face fell as he told her, but he saw that this explained Anne's -failure. She had not relished Marbeck because she had not seen it. She -had not been looking at Marbeck, but all the while at something else. - -And why, he questioned, why, now that things had so admirably arranged -themselves, must Anne still live in thought in Manchester? There seemed -to him to be no law, nothing which could conceivably distract her -attention, nothing which had not with genial finality been neatly -finished off. Of course they had stupid legal business to come, but that -was well ahead and, in any case, was not to worry them. - -She could not, surely, be troubling about Ada. It was he who had made -the trouble there, insisting that Ada was "his job." - -He insisted to the point of almost literally forcing himself upon her in -Peter Struggles' house, and remembered now with a twinge that desolating -interview, if interview it could be called, and its liberating end; how -Ada had looked at him, and answered nothing to his abject and -passionate appeals (he wondered how he could have made them, but he was -despairingly sincere): how he had pleaded and apologized for the past -and supplicated for the future, all in the mastering grip of his Marbeck -faith, and how she had kept silent till she turned on Peter and told him -she must leave a house which did not shelter her from the deadly insult -of this man's presence. He remembered the good woman, Mrs. Grandage, -who had carried Ada to a Hydro at Southport, and wrote to Peter that Ada -seemed quite happy there, "nursing her grievance like a child," and -was looking for a house. He had found something mystifying about the -intervention of Mrs. Grandage: good nature fortified by a bad conscience -was his attempt to explain her attitude, but what emerged clearly -from the letters she wrote to Peter was that Ada had no intention of -returning to Manchester: and when he thought of Southport, he realized -its quintessential rightness as her home. He had not shirked his job; he -had eaten dirt before her in his anxiety to do his job; and he was not -allowed. What she was she must remain, and Southport seemed the aptest -place for her. "Only," as Mrs. Grandage wrote, "she mast have money." - -That was not difficult, and the money might have come in many ways: it -came actually in a way which Effie hated and Sam thought exquisitely -right. It came through Stewart, that faithful ally of the publishing -business in its early days. - -Dubby was in Effie's room, "which is where," he said, "your brother has -a right to be." - -"You keep that up," she smiled. - -"Is the poor dog to get none?" he asked. - -"He is to have whatever he wants," she said. - -"--that's going," he completed her sentence. - -"Yes," said Effie, not smiling now, and kissed him very simply to seal -his brotherhood. - -He stood silent for a moment, then, with a jerk of his head he, so to -speak, cut his loss and turned to her with the frank confidence of their -settled relationship. "Now we can talk," he said. "Tell me about old -Sam. What are you going to do with him? And with his business?" - -She evaded his first question. "The business? Oh, he'll sell that." - -"Then let me buy." - -"You! Oh!" - -"Why not?" - -"You know what I think of it." - -"I'm only the dog, my dear. Do you know any Greek? There's a connection -between being a dog and being a cynic. In certain circumstances, I'd -have thought with you to the crack of doom, but your brother's a cynic." - -"I see," said Effie sadly. "But he will always be my brother, Dubby." - -"Thanks, Effie," he said. "That will keep me on the sweeter side of -currishness. But a dog wants meat. You'll tell Sam I'm to have the first -refusal of that business. I'll scrape a syndicate together in a week." - -So the Stewart Publishing Syndicate, which now has dashing offices near -Covent Garden, came to birth and Ada got her money. When Sam tried to -tell Effie that his investments outside the business were ridiculously -small, she had refused to be impressed. - -"It's not the means of life that matters, Sam. It's living: it's the -quality of life: it's what we do with life," she said, and Ada got the -means. - -"She'll be married in a year to a man from Liverpool," said Dubby, when -he heard. - -"Why Liverpool?" asked Sam, and Dubby shrugged his shoulders. He thought -Sam's question stupid. - -"By the way, Sam," Dubby said, "have you and Effie any plans?" - -"No," said Effie, when Sam hesitated, but a brother's curiosity was not -to be stifled like that, and Sam's face told her, too, how he had -hung on her reply. She resented his anxiety, the proof that he had not -dropped his calculating habit. They had not discussed the question of -plans because she held there was no question to discuss, and Sam, -she thought, deserved a little punishment for thinking otherwise. "I -suppose," she went on, "we shall stay in Manchester and face the music." - -"Oh!" said Sam blankly. - -"Well, we must give Mr. Verity his revenge," she teased. - -"But it can't hurt me now I'm out of politics," he said, confessing by -his tone that it would hurt him very much. - -"It will please him, though," she said. - -"I'd... I'd thought of going to America," he ventured. - -"America!" scoffed Dubby. "_O sancta simplicitas!_ America's not El -Dorado, Sam. El Dorado's been found. I'd even say it's been found out." - -"There are big things in America," Sam defended his idea. - -"As a matter of fact, Dubby," said Effie, silencing him, "we shall go to -Marbeek for a little while. It's a good place to begin from." - -With that a great contentment came to Sam. They were to go to Marbeek; -they were to begin; and he no longer questioned what. He made no hard -and fast surrender of his will, but recognized the fact, not for the -first time, that when Effie made a decision it had a shining rightness. -Perhaps she had retreated from her first decision of Marbeck, but, -if so, Anne helping him, he had retreated with her; and they went to -Marbeek now, not to end, but to begin, and to begin together. - -Reflecting on it all, he could not see the blemish. He couldn't, for the -life of him, make out why Anne was not content. - -He half explained the valley's failure to enchant her when he perceived -that she had not really looked at it. At what, then, could she be -looking? And how could she, how in the name of beauty was it possible -for anyone to pick out from all that noble amphitheatre of the hills the -one smoke-clouded spot? - -"Mother," he cried in downright exasperation, "aren't you happy here?", - -"I'd be happier in Manchester," she said. "Yon smoke's too far away to -taste. Aye, I think I'll leave you here and go to-day." - -"But you're not going back to Madge's--to the work in other people's -houses, I mean. That's surely over now." - -"Maybe." - -"Mother, you've done with work." - -She eyed him grimly. "Not till I'm dead, my lad," she said. - -"Why won't you tell me what you're thinking of?" - -"I'm thinking," she said, "of yon slut in Peter Struggles' kitchen. I'll -have her out of that tomorrow." - -He glanced at Effie, and then looked again. He fancied he had surprised -a little smile on Effie's face and looked twice to make sure. And when -he looked he found that Effie was looking back at him in the wise, -humorous way that he had come to know so well. "Don't you see?" was what -she seemed to say. - -And he did see. He saw that it was not Manchester, but a man in -Manchester; not the woman in Peter Struggles' kitchen, but the man -in Peter's parlour who interrupted his mother's vision of the Marbeck -hills. She lost their beauty in a greater beauty of her own. - -"And don't be incredulous," said Effie's eyes. - -She turned to Anne. "We'll go down to the Inn at once," she said, "and -you shall catch the train this afternoon." - -A quick look passed from Anne to Effie, from which they both excluded -Sam. It almost seemed that Anne was asking Effie for support, and that -Effie understood and nodded imperceptibly. And if Anne had seriously -doubted, her doubts were dissipated by a look which told her that, where -she was concerned, Effie believed in the feasibility of anything. - -Nothing at Marbeck became Anne Branstone like her leaving it. "Why, -mother, how young you look!" he cried when she came downstairs to the -trap. - -"It's just as well," said Anne, meeting Effie's eye over his shoulder. - -Then, after she had gone, and so pat upon her going as to be hardly -decent, life flamed for them ungrudgingly. There was something quite -impudently callous about the haste of it, as if life pulled a face -behind the older generation and turned lightheartedly to burn more -ardently for them. But Anne, and they knew it, would not have thanked -them to be sorry for her. She had gone to Peter Struggles, who needed -her. - -They could not now resume the half amphibious life of their autumn days, -but the air itself from the snow-clad fells had all the stimulation of -a bath. It cleansed and healed by touch and heightened their well-being -till they moved in radiant exhilaration, now clamant at the joy of it, -now dumb before its wonder. - -Happy themselves, they were the cause of happiness in others, not -self-contained in joy, but effervescing to the old black-beamed kitchen -of the Marbeck Inn. - -They had, as Sam cannily observed, the advantages of a private room at -an hotel without paying for it--and abrogated them. In the autumn -they had isolated their joy from others: now it brimmed from them and -affected all the people of the Inn, making the long nights short. Good -listeners were a godsend to the Dale in winter, and the shepherds, -dropping from heaven knew how far, found a rare satisfaction in telling -this attentive audience tales of the fells, of sheep wanderers that -strayed as wide afield as Derbyshire, of dogs that ran amok and ravaged -the flocks they ought to tend, of the epic Beast of Ennerdale, of the -legends of John Peel and all the sagas of the Lakes. It needed little to -make these dalesmen happy, nothing beyond a patient ear for a slow, -rambling narrative--a long chain strung with pearls of racy episode--or -an hour of Effie at the piano, when the dalesmen disappointed her by -knowing no ballads, but having, instead, a sound acquaintance with the -latest music-hall songs stacked in the cupboard at the Inn. In here, in -the smoke room, they were knowing wags, in the kitchen they were -themselves, talking shop, and therefore interesting. Effie and Sam -preferred them in the kitchen, telling their slowly-moving tales, to -seeing them in their smoke-room mood, imitating badly a thing not worth -the imitating. But, in either room, they helped them to be happy. - -Well coated they would go each night from the tobacco-laden air of the -kitchen down the road to the bridge over Marbeck Force. A great peace -brooded there. Even the stream ran softly now when all the surface water -of its gathering ground was frozen hard. - -They stood there on the bridge while the moon rose over Hartle Pike -and scattered silver on the snow. Great shadows leaped to instant birth -below the Pike whose comely top was one black silhouette against the -brightened sky, and the beauty of the valley, seen by day with an almost -Alpine harshness, mellowed in the moonlight to a subtle luminosity. -Behind them were the lights of the friendly Inn; near by the low church -tower saluted God amongst the pines, and all around them spread the -lustrous radiance of the moon-flushed Dale. - -For the hundredth time he restrained his impulse to repeat his words, -"We'll build a tabernacle here," and Effie read his thought. - -"We're making the good beginning here," she said. "We're practising and -I think we grow." - -"We grow in happiness," he said, which he thought good argument for -staying at Marbeck. - -"Yes. We grow in happiness. We shall have outgrown Marbeck soon. We -shall have grown a sturdy happiness that can withstand the towns. It -might withstand Manchester and I think it will. To love, to work, to -look for other people's strength and not for other people's weaknesses: -that is to be happy, Sam. And happiness counts more than all. It roots -and then it spreads. It spreads. Infection isn't only of disease, -infection is of happiness and youth. There's too much age, too many men -and women in the world who have forgotten love. We have to build, and -build on happiness." They gazed at the unguessed future through the -silent night. God knows that there was work ahead for them to do! - - -THE END - - - - - - - -End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Marbeck Inn, by Harold Brighouse - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MARBECK INN *** - -***** This file should be named 50131-8.txt or 50131-8.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/5/0/1/3/50131/ - -Produced by David Widger from page images generously -provided by the Internet Archive - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United -States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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Thus, we do not -necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper -edition. - -Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search -facility: www.gutenberg.org - -This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm, -including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary -Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to -subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks. - diff --git a/old/50131-8.zip b/old/50131-8.zip Binary files differdeleted file mode 100644 index 84dfa86..0000000 --- a/old/50131-8.zip +++ /dev/null diff --git a/old/50131-h.zip b/old/50131-h.zip Binary files differdeleted file mode 100644 index 92d91bd..0000000 --- a/old/50131-h.zip +++ /dev/null diff --git a/old/50131-h/50131-h.htm b/old/50131-h/50131-h.htm deleted file mode 100644 index a687928..0000000 --- a/old/50131-h/50131-h.htm +++ /dev/null @@ -1,11594 +0,0 @@ -<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> - -<!DOCTYPE html - PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" - "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" > - -<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en"> - <head> - <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" /> - <title> - The Marbeck Inn, by Harold Brighouse - </title> - <link rel="coverpage" href="images/cover.jpg" /> - <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve"> - - body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify} - P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; } - H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; } - hr { width: 50%; text-align: center;} - .foot { margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 5%; text-align: justify; font-size: 80%; font-style: italic;} - blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;} - .mynote {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;} - .toc { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;} - .toc2 { margin-left: 20%;} - .indent5 { margin-left: 5%;} - .indent10 { margin-left: 10%;} - .indent15 { margin-left: 15%;} - .indent20 { margin-left: 20%;} - .indent30 { margin-left: 30%;} - .indent40 { margin-left: 40%;} - div.fig { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; } - div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; } - .figleft {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;} - .figright {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;} - .pagenum {position: absolute; right: 1%; font-size: 0.6em; - font-variant: normal; font-style: normal; - text-align: right; background-color: #FFFACD; - border: 1px solid; padding: 0.3em;text-indent: 0em;} - .side { float: left; font-size: 75%; width: 15%; padding-left: 0.8em; - border-left: dashed thin; text-align: left; - text-indent: 0; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; - font-weight: bold; color: black; background: #eeeeee; border: solid 1px;} - .head { float: left; font-size: 90%; width: 98%; padding-left: 0.8em; - border-left: dashed thin; text-align: center; - text-indent: 0; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; - font-weight: bold; color: black; background: #eeeeee; border: solid 1px;} - p.pfirst, p.noindent {text-indent: 0} - span.dropcap { float: left; margin: 0 0.1em 0 0; line-height: 0.8 } - pre { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;} - -</style> - </head> - <body> - - -<pre> - -The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Marbeck Inn, by Harold Brighouse - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most -other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions -whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of -the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at -www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have -to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. - - - -Title: The Marbeck Inn - A Novel - -Author: Harold Brighouse - -Release Date: October 4, 2015 [EBook #50131] -Last Updated: November 1, 2016 - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MARBECK INN *** - - - - -Produced by David Widger from page images generously -provided by the Internet Archive - - - - - - -</pre> - - <div style="height: 8em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h1> - THE MARBECK INN - </h1> - <h3> - A Novel - </h3> - <h2> - By Harold Brighouse - </h2> - <h4> - Little, Brown, And Company - </h4> - <h5> - 1920 - </h5> - <p> - <br /> <br /> <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0001" id="linkimage-0001"> </a> - </p> - <div class="fig" style="width:65%;"> - <img src="images/0001.jpg" alt="0001 " width="100%" /><br /> - </div> - <h5> - <a href="images/0001.jpg"><i>Original</i></a> - </h5> - <p> - <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0009" id="linkimage-0009"> </a> - </p> - <div class="fig" style="width:65%;"> - <img src="images/0009.jpg" alt="0009 " width="100%" /><br /> - </div> - <h5> - <a href="images/0009.jpg"><i>Original</i></a> - </h5> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <p> - <b>CONTENTS</b> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> <b>THE MARBECK INN</b> </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER I—THE STARTING-POINT </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER II—WHERE THE SHOE PINCHED </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER III—THE HELL-PIKE CLUB </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER IV—THE COMPLEAT ANGLER </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER V—LAST SCHOOL-DAYS </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER VI—THE NEST-EGG </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0007"> CHAPTER VII—THE FLEDGLING CAPITALIST </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0008"> CHAPTER VIII—ADA STRUGGLES </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0009"> CHAPTER IX—ADA AND A MAD TRAM-CAR </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0010"> CHAPTER X—GERALD ADAMS, SOCIOLOGIST </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0011"> CHAPTER XI—UNDER WAY </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0012"> CHAPTER XII—DROPPING THE PILOT </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0013"> CHAPTER XIII—THE INTERMITTENT COURTSHIP - </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0014"> CHAPTER XIV—HONEYMOONERS </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0015"> CHAPTER XV—OTHER THINGS BESIDE MARRIAGE - </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0016"> CHAPTER XVI—THE POLITICAL ANIMAL </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0017"> CHAPTER XVII—THE VERITY AFFAIR </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0018"> CHAPTER XVIII—WHEN EFFIE CAME </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0019"> CHAPTER XIX—EFFIE IN LOVE </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0020"> CHAPTER XX—THE MARBECK INN </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0021"> CHAPTER XXI—SATAN’S SMILE </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0022"> CHAPTER XXII—THE OLD CAMPAIGNER </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0023"> CHAPTER XXIII—THE KNIGHT’S MOVE </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0024"> CHAPTER XXIV—THE NEW BOOK OF MARTYRS </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0025"> CHAPTER XXV—WHOM GOD HATH JOINED </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0026"> CHAPTER XXVI—SNOW ON THE FELLS </a> - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <br /><br /> <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - THE MARBECK INN - </h2> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER I—THE STARTING-POINT - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>T falls to some to - be born, as they say, with a silver spoon in their mouths, and the witty - have made play with the thought that the wise child chooses rich parents. - </p> - <p> - Sam Branstone lacked the completeness of that wisdom. He was born in one - of those disconsolate streets of Manchester down which the stranger, - passing by tram along a main road, hardly more delectable than its - offshoots, looks and shudders; but was born with this difference from the - many—that he was son to Anne Branstone, a notable woman, and wisdom - may be conceded him for the discrimination of his choice. - </p> - <p> - If, however, it was Anne who gave him birth and started him in life, it - was Mr. Councillor Travers who set him on his way from the mean street of - his birth and started his career, and the circumstance which led to the - intervention of Mr. Travers was due, not to Anne, but to the occupation of - Tom Branstone. - </p> - <p> - Sam’s father, Tom, was a porter at Victoria Station, Manchester, and there - was just time between morning and afternoon school for young Sam to snatch - a meal himself and to carry his father’s dinner to him in a basin tied up - in a bandanna handkerchief. In those days Victoria was an open station and - a favourite dinner-hour lounge with boys from the neighbouring Grammar - School. The attractions were partly the trains, partly the large automatic - machines which delivered a packet of sweet biscuits in return for a penny. - First one lunched frugally on the biscuits and pocketed the balance of - one’s lunch allowance to buy knives and other essentials, then one - savoured the romance of a large station from which trains went to - Blackpool and to the Yorkshire moors. Often one saw sailors on the through - trains from Liverpool to Newcastle. One found secluded ends of platforms - and ran races with luggage trucks. One was rather a nuisance, especially - when one wrestled hardily at the platform’s giddy edge and a train came - in. - </p> - <p> - Sam, as a porter’s son, was on the other side of the fence. He did not - lark at Victoria Station, and took his opinions of those who did from his - father, adding, perhaps, a touch of jealousy against these chartered - libertines who wore the silver owl upon their caps of dual blue. - </p> - <p> - That day he had delivered Tom’s dinner to him in the porters’ room and was - retracing his steps down the platform when he saw two of the Grammar - School boys emerge in a confused whirl of battle and sag, interlocked, - towards the line, hopelessly unconscious in their struggle of an incoming - train. They reached the edge, deaf to all warning cries, and long before - help could reach them, fell over it in one entangled mass. One boy, - aroused to a sense of their common danger, was on his feet nimbly enough - and across the line to safety: the other, Lance Travers, stayed where he - fell, with a leg broken against the rail. Wits left the first lad; he - could only howl as the engine swept inexorably on, and adult help, though - active, could not avail in time. Sam had no precise recollection of what - followed, and certainly acted on impulse. He dived to the line and dragged - the injured boy across, escaping death for both by the skin of his teeth. - </p> - <p> - After that, all was confusion: an ambulance; inquiries; names taken and so - on; and Sam only came to himself when he discovered that he was being - punished for arriving late at school. It struck him as unfair, but he did - not realize that he was a hero till the evening paper told him so. He, - Samuel Branstone, had his name in the paper! Glory could go no further, - because those were the dark ages of journalism, before the photograph - illustrated all, and to read one’s name in print was then the apogee. We - have moved since those dull days, when “heart interest” was still to be in - vented. - </p> - <p> - What profound satisfaction Anne Branstone found in that sober paragraph - her son was not to know. She did not think it good for him to know, but - she went about her house with softened eyes, and Sam heard her singing - more than once; so per haps he may have guessed that she was pleased with - him. - </p> - <p> - It was more than she allowed Mr. Oscar Travers to guess, he was Lance’s - father, an estate agent with a good suburban practice, and Anne met him at - the door in a way which would have marred Sam’s future had Travers not - known that Lancashire women are apt to be undemonstrative. She found a - portly gentleman on the doorstep and thought he wore a patronizing air. - They resent patronage in Lancashire. - </p> - <p> - As a matter of fact, Travers had come to see what he could do for the lad - who had saved his boy’s life. That may be patronage, but he was thinking - of it as the barest decency. - </p> - <p> - “Good evening,” he said; “my name is Travers.” - </p> - <p> - “This is a nice upset,” she said, without inviting him to come in. “How’s - your son?” - </p> - <p> - “He’s doing very well, thank you.” - </p> - <p> - “Oh? Well, it’s more than he deserves.” - </p> - <p> - He did not argue that. “I wonder,” he said, “if you would allow me to come - in, or would you prefer me to return when your husband is at home?” - </p> - <p> - “He’s at home now. It’s his early night. He’s having his tea.” - </p> - <p> - “Shall I return when he has finished?” asked Travers with a nice - tactfulness. He knew the curious delicacy against being seen eating by one - of a superior class, as if that natural function were a deed of shame. But - Anne was for short cuts and she never considered Tom’s feelings overmuch. - </p> - <p> - “If you’ve owt to say,” she said, “you’d better come in and get it over.” - </p> - <p> - “I have something to say,” said Travers, entering. “Ah,” he added, as he - caught sight of Sam, “this is——?” - </p> - <p> - “It’s him,” Anne interrupted. She might have been identifying a criminal. - </p> - <p> - “May I shake your hand?” he asked, and shook it heartily, ignoring Anne’s - muttered protest that the hand had not been washed for hours. “I think - you’re a very plucky lad.” He could have, said more than that, and felt - that as an expression of his gratitude it was hopelessly inadequate, but - Anne’s eyes forbade effusiveness, and he wanted to propitiate Anne. He had - something to propose which he had thought they would agree to rapturously, - but was not so sure about the rapture now. For some reason, he had - imagined that Sam would be one of a large family and was disappointed to - find no evidence of other children about the room A large family would - have made his proposal more certain of acceptance. - </p> - <p> - “Any brothers and sisters, Sam?” he asked; but Sam was tongue-tied, while - Anne was silently but unmistakably asking Travers what business of his - that was. However, Tom knew his place. Travers belonged with the tipping - public, whose questions one answered. - </p> - <p> - “He has an elder sister, sir. Our Madge. She works out.” She was, in fact, - a general servant. - </p> - <p> - Travers felt his confidence ebb fast, both at this information and at - Anne’s austere disapprobation of Tom’s communicativeness. He felt it was - suggested to him that his visit was irrelevant, that Anne, this small - woman, not uncomely, with her hands on her hips, and her black hair - tightly combed into a ridiculous knob at the back, was, in fact, a rock, - and that the impulses and desires of the two hulking men, Travers and Tom - Branstone, would break in ineffectual foam against her adamantine - resolution. - </p> - <p> - She glared formidably, hating a “fuss,” judging Travers, who had invaded - her home for the purpose of making a fuss. - </p> - <p> - “Indeed,” said Travers, marking time and hardly attempting to conceal his - dismay. The longer he spent in Anne’s presence, the more uneasy he became. - She seemed to divine his purpose, and to be telling him silently what she - thought of him for having such a purpose. He had, indeed, banked on a - large family; porters, he had felt certain, were prolific, and you may - subtract one child from a family of ten without much heart-burning, - whereas an only son is a serious matter. But time brought no graciousness - to Anne’s attitude. She even ignored the sacred rites of hospitality; - though tea was on the table, she had not asked him to have a cup. So he - gave up temporizing and decided to broach his purpose at once, before Anne - reduced him to complete incoherence. - </p> - <p> - “Of course,” he said, “you know me already as Lance’s father. I don’t know - whether you happen to have heard of me beyond that?” Anne admitted - nothing, and as it was to her he spoke, it did not matter that Tom, who - had naturally spent a gossipy afternoon, was trying to signify that he - realized the importance of Travers. “I’m an estate agent, if you - understand what that means.” - </p> - <p> - Anne nodded grimly. “Rent-collector said big,” she defined. - </p> - <p> - “Well,” said Travers, intending to suggest an amended definition and then - thinking better of it. “Well, yes. I’m in the Council, too, you know. - Well, now, Mrs. Branstone, I happen to be a widower and Lance is my only - son. He means a great deal to me, and when I think how near I came to - losing him this afternoon, how certainly I had lost him hut for the - splendid presence of mind of this young hero here, I feel I owe a debt - which I can never hope to pay.” - </p> - <p> - “Mr. Travers,” said Anne, “least said is soonest mended, and debts that - you can never hope to pay are best forgotten. It’s a kindly thought of - yours to come and look us up to-night, but I’m not in the Council, and I’m - no great hand at listening to long speeches. By your leave, we’ll take the - rest as said.” - </p> - <p> - “By all means, Mrs. Branstone, so far as expressing my thanks goes. But I - have a suggestion to make. Lance, as I said, is my only son. He’s a lonely - boy, and he’d be the better for a companion of his own age about the - house. I was wondering if you would allow Sam to come and live with us? I - should send him with Lance to the Grammar School, and I think I can - promise that his future will be secured.” - </p> - <p> - Sam’s heart gave a great leap. He, Sam Bran-stone, a Grammar School boy, - one of the elect, the Olympians whose play he had envied from afar! He - looked at Anne with glittering eyes, faint with hope. - </p> - <p> - “Sam,” she said, “Mr. Travers wants you to leave us. He’s offering to - adopt you as his son. Tell him the answer.” - </p> - <p> - Anne never doubted that she was mistress of her house, and perhaps she did - not doubt it now, but, for Sam, a child with the dreadful sensibility of a - child, this moment when she demanded calmly, implacably, in the interests - of discipline, that he should himself pronounce sentence on his soaring - hopes was of a pitiable bitterness which brought him near the - breaking-point. At one moment, to be raised to the heavens of ecstasy, and - at the next to be cast down to the blackest hell of despondency; to be - promised all, and to be expected to refuse! He was not more callous than - any other child, and Anne knew perfectly well that a Land of Heart’s - Desire had been opened to him. It was not fair, and she knew that it was - not fair, to ask him to speak the word of refusal; but she thought that it - was good for him, and once she had, by her tone, if not by her actual - words, indicated the reply which she required, she knew that he would - suppress his leaping hopes and answer, in effect, that home, be it ever so - humble, was home, and parents, whatever their status, were parents. He had - a wild impulse to defy her, to tell her that he would come to see her on - Saturday afternoons, that to wear the cap with the silver owl was the - dearest ambition of his life, but he knew that it was hopeless. Even at - such a moment as this, and with such an ally as Mr. Travers, he dared not - challenge Anne. Her ascendancy was what it had always been, absolute. He - shuffled unhappily and tried to meet Mr. Travers’ eye bravely, but - succeeded only in looking up as far as the second button of his waistcoat. - </p> - <p> - “No,” said Sam Branstone, hero, and fled, a heartbroken, tear-washed - child, to hide his face and choke his sobs upon his pillow. And he was - named for valour in the evening paper! - </p> - <p> - “No,” repeated Anne, when he had gone, and added, anticipating argument, - “I’m a woman of few words.” - </p> - <p> - Travers knew he was fighting a losing engagement, but he had a shot in the - locker yet, and a hardy determination not to be worsted by the likes of - Anne Branstone. His pride was up, a pride which, over and above his - benevolence and his sense of the fitness of things, would not allow him to - regard the saving of his son’s life lightly. Travers counted, the saviour - of the son of Travers counted. He had offered to lift Sam Branstone in one - way, and if they would not let him do it in that way, he would do it in - another. Sam Branstone, willy nilly, was going to be lifted. - </p> - <p> - “I suppose,” he said, covering the retreat from his first position, “that - it is of no use pointing out to you the advantages which my proposal - offers to your son?” She shook her head. “Come, Mrs. Branstone,” he went - on, conscious that it was no use and platitudinous at that, “we all have - to make sacrifices for our children.” - </p> - <p> - “I make them,” said Anne curtly. It was true. - </p> - <p> - “Yet you will not make this?” - </p> - <p> - She was thoughtful for a moment, and Travers began to hope that he was - making an impression. “I’m sure that it’s Genesis twenty-two,” she said, - “but I disremember the verse.” - </p> - <p> - “Genesis,” he repeated, mystified. - </p> - <p> - “Abraham and Isaac,” she explained her allusion. “Some sacrifices aren’t - looked for from us, and the Lord sent an angel to say so in those days, - but I’ve to be my own angel in these.” - </p> - <p> - “But Abraham,” he said, “was going to sacrifice his son to the Lord.” - </p> - <p> - “And I won’t,” she said, conveying her opinion of Travers, who had tried - to “come God Almighty over her,” as she expressed it later to Tom. But - Travers was not to be rebuffed. He had come to play Providence to Sam (and - so far granted that her allusion was apposite), but his providence could - compromise. He wasn’t an absolute Jehovah. - </p> - <p> - “If Sam may not be Lance’s home companion,” he said, “at least let them be - school companions. Let me pay his fees at the Grammar School, and——” - He was going to add “for appropriate clothes,” but something in Anne’s - attitude told him that he had gone far enough, and he stopped short with - the completion of his sentence in mid air. - </p> - <p> - Anne believed in education. She wasn’t convinced that a Grammar School - education was superior, as education, to a Parish School, but its - associations were. It gave a chance of “getting on” which transcended - anything the Parish School could offer. It was a start in life which set - one automatically above the lower rungs of the ladder. - </p> - <p> - “Yes,” she said, but said it with a difficulty which Travers noted and, - indeed, applauded. He was Lancastrian himself, and honoured her for her - independence. He knew the mother-pride, the fierce individualism which she - had subdued before she had consented to take a favour even for her son who - earned it, and wasted no more words. “I’m glad,” he said. “Good night,” - and, shaking hands, was gone. - </p> - <p> - “Finish your tea, Tom,” she said to her husband who had suspended - operations during the interview. “I want to clear away.” She stood a - moment pensively. “I’m a weak woman,” she decided. - </p> - <p> - Tom Branstone ate his tea, reserving judgment. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER II—WHERE THE SHOE PINCHED - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>HEN Anne Branstone - set her hand to the plough she ploughed deep, and it was not her fault if - the harvest was not immense. But she did not misdirect her energy; she - made certain that the seed was good seed before she harnessed her plough. - To drop metaphor, she let young Sam prove that he was worth troubling over - before she took trouble—trouble, that is, as Anne understood the - word. Of course, she sent him “decent” to the Grammar School, and if that - meant that she and Madge went without new spring hats that year, well, - last year’s hats must do. It was no great matter, and the greater pride - swallowed up the less. Mr. Travers paid the fees, so that her son could - associate with his, and Anne saw to it thoroughly that, in externals, Sam - should be worthy to associate with Lance. - </p> - <p> - That was the beginning, and Sam, so far, was untried metal. Then, at the - end of his first term, he came out top of his form at the July - examinations, and, after that, Anne began to take things seriously. - </p> - <p> - It was not pure ability which brought Sam to that proud eminence so much - as the fact that he had been put in a form whose standard was really too - low for him, and he had not worked over hard at lessons, being naturally - preoccupied, in a first term, with finding his feet. Nor had that been too - difficult. The Manchester Grammar School was a democratic institution. - Schoolboys, anyhow, are not all snobs, and, in this instance, the presence - amongst the paying boys of a leaven of Foundation Scholars, often from - homes as poor as Sam’s, made acclimatization easy for him. - </p> - <p> - But his feat impressed Anne, though all she said, when the lists came out - with the name of “Branstone, S.” at the head of II. Alpha, was, “Of - course!” as if any other place were impossible for a son of hers; and it - decided her that Sam would “pay for” taking trouble. She proceeded to take - trouble. - </p> - <p> - Tom Branstone’s first real inkling of what was passing in Anne’s mind came - to that good, easy man when he mentioned that his holidays were due in a - fortnight. - </p> - <p> - “You’ll take a holiday at home this year, my lad,” she informed him. - </p> - <p> - “But why’s that, Anne?” he asked. “Blackpool’s in the same place as it - was, and I get privilege passes on the line.” - </p> - <p> - “Sam’s not in the same place, though,” she said. “He’s at the Grammar - School. It’s a place where other boys wear decent clothes, and I’ll see - that Sam shan’t fall behind them.” - </p> - <p> - Tom took a holiday at home, varied with trips on the foot-plates of - friendly engine-drivers, and fortified his soul with the consolations of - tobacco. They were consolations which were not to be vouchsafed to him - much longer. Tobacco cost money, and Anne had need of it. - </p> - <p> - In spite of Travers’ generosity—or of as much of it as she could - bring herself to accept—it was not an easy thing for Anne to keep - her son at the Grammar School. It was desperately difficult, but Anne was - Anne. The boy had his foot on the educational ladder, and she meant him to - go to the top, rung by rung and scholarship by scholarship. When Sam took - his honours degree at Oxford, Anne would relax; till then, she was a - crusader. She sacrificed all to that ambition. Sam should have his chance, - at no matter what cost to her, to Tom and to Madge. The boy must be as - well dressed as his fellows, and he must play their games. Games are an - essential part of English education, and Anne, with her constant eye to - the main chance, recognized the importance of the playing-fields in - cementing friendships with boys who might be useful to Sam in after life. - But games are expensive, and Tom gave, up smoking when Sam was put into - his class eleven. Anne gave up nothing. She had nothing more to give. - </p> - <p> - Honestly, Sam was grateful. Anne did not boast to him of the sacrifices - which they all made, but with the candour which distinguishes - working-class homes where anything but bare necessity is exceptional, he - was aware of every move, of all their deprivation, and did his best to - square accounts. But it was not a brilliant best, and after that first - term, Anne never repeated the satisfaction of seeing her son carry away a - form prize on Speech Day at the Free Trade Hall. He was a worker, a safe - plodding “swot,” taking by sheer application a respectable place in the - lists, but never heading them again, and especially he was weak at - mathematics. - </p> - <p> - That troubled Anne distressingly. Mathematics appeared to her the - corner-stone of education, though in truth they mattered little to Sam, - who had followed Lance to the Classical side of the school, where - mathematics were an unconsidered trifle. But Anne recked nothing of that. - She had found the heel of her Achilles, and set herself to make that - vulnerable place secure. You are to picture Anne, with her forty years of - a working woman’s life behind her, wrestling with algebra and - trigonometry, blazing a trail for Sam to follow. It was heroic and, by - some mental freak, successful. She taught herself, then tutored him, and - it was not Sam who scraped through to an average place in the mathematics - examinations, but Anne in Sam. Day after day, in the intervals of cook - ing, cleaning, washing, she studied the text-books which so puzzled him, - and at night explained their knotty points to him with a wonderful - clarity. She had no education in particular, nothing but a general - capacity and a monstrous will—a will that surmounted the obstacle of - acquiring knowledge at an age when few can learn, and the greater obstacle - of patient teaching to a boy who had a blind spot for mathematics. She - illumined his darkness, but perhaps she hampered his classics and made her - hopes of Oxford visionary. - </p> - <p> - Slowly and painfully, as the terms went by, with Branstone, S. rising - steadily in the school, but keeping regularly to his mediocre place in - class, Anne acknowledged to herself that her goose was not a swan. It made - her the more eager to cultivate what she called the social side; and - through that she met with a defeat. - </p> - <p> - From the beginning, Sam’s rise in the world had borne heavily on Madge, - his sister, who was of an age for gaiety and of a mind untouched by - ambition, personal or vicarious. When Sam went to the Grammar School, - Madge was in service and very content. Anne had her out of that at once; - she wasn’t going to run the risk of Madge being the servant in the house - of one of Sands school companions. It was unusual, but Madge preferred - service, where she was lucky in her employers, to the weaving-shed, where - she had free evenings, but strenuous days with no gossiping callers at the - back door to break their monotony. And it became a considerable question - in Madge’s mind whether she would now be able to outface Anne in the - matter of George Chappie. Anne required a presentable brother-in-law for - Sam. - </p> - <p> - Like Madge, George was unambitious, except that he wanted her, which was - ambition of a kind. Madge was small, like her mother, but derived in most - else from her father. She had freckles and carroty hair, and the makings - of a querulous shrew, but George saw otherwise, and desired Madge to have - and to hold, for better for worse, and didn’t perceive that the odds were - heavily against its being better. He was a wisp of a man himself, and - thought he was enterprising because he was a window-cleaner; - window-cleaning was a new trade then. But Anne did not concur with that - opinion, and Madge was in no very sanguine frame of mind when George came - in one night with an “It’s now or never” look unmistakably in his eye. The - trouble was that Anne was not the sort of mother one defied with impunity. - </p> - <p> - He came in shyly enough—a determined George was a contradiction in - terms—but plucked up courage at once when he found that she was - alone but for Sam. Sam’s presence was inevitable, but need not be - acknowledged. In a house, not, indeed, of one room, but of one fire and - one gas-jet, Sam had grown apt at insulating himself when he sat with his - books at the table. The business of the house went on, so did Sam’s - studies, and neither interfered with the other. Sam, absorbed in his - construe of Cicero’s <i>De Senectute</i> for the morrow, was absolutely - unconscious of Madge and George. - </p> - <p> - It was not Sam who troubled George, but Madge had truth with her when she - told her suitor that he looked worried. George jerked his thumb vaguely - streetwards. “It’s her again,” he explained. “I can’t think why God made - landladies. I ask you, Madge, is another blanket in this weather a thing - to fly into a temper about?” - </p> - <p> - “It’s cold,” said Madge. “Won’t she give you another?” - </p> - <p> - “I don’t know yet whether she’ll give me one or not. But she’s had my last - word. Another blanket or I’ll flit.” - </p> - <p> - “You’ve threatened that so often.” - </p> - <p> - He admitted it. “I know. It takes an earthquake to shift some folks, and I - reckon I’m one of them. I stay where I’m set.” And his tone implied that - conservatism was an admirable virtue. - </p> - <p> - Madge did not think so. “That’s what my mother says of you,” she observed, - a trifle tartly. - </p> - <p> - “It’s no lie, either,” he placidly agreed. “Seems to me,” he went on, with - a look, ardent but appealing, at Madge, “that there’s only one thing will - flit me from Mrs. Whitehead’s. You couldn’t give a guess at it, could - you?” - </p> - <p> - “Yes, I could,” said Madge brazenly. After all, she was Anne’s daughter, - and direct. Then, despite herself, she fenced coyly: “You’re leaving the - town, I reckon, Mr. Chappie.” - </p> - <p> - He stood aghast at the revolutionary thought. “Nay,” he said earnestly. - “I’m set here and I’ll not leave willing. There’s something to keep me - where I am.” - </p> - <p> - “Your job’s not worth so much,” she said, misunderstanding wilfully. - </p> - <p> - “It’s steady, though,” he defended it, “and a growing trade. My master’s - getting a lot of window-cleaning contracts all over the town. But it’s not - my job that keeps me here. It’s———” He dropped his cap - and fumbled for it nervously, somehow finding a sort of courage in the - act, so that when he rose he faced her with a spirit which was, for him, - quite debonair. “Now, you’ll not stop me, will you? I’ve come on purpose - to get this off my chest and I’ve worked myself up to a point. I’m a bit - slow at most things and I’m easily put off, so I’ll ask you to give my - humble request a patient hearing.” - </p> - <p> - Madge looked at him acutely, and decided that his resolution was strong - enough to survive something that she very much wanted to say. “I’d rather - this didn’t come straight on top of a row with your landlady,” she said. - </p> - <p> - “Aye,” he agreed, “I can see your meaning, but it’s that that roused me to - point. Love’s like a pan of soup with me. It’s got to seethe a while - before it boils. But I’m boiling now, and I’m here to tell you so. I’ve - loved you since I saw you, Madge. After Sunday School one day it was, with - a wind on that blew the bonny curls across your eyes. I always fancied - gold and you’re gold twice over.” Madge was deeply moved at this - idealization of her hair. She had been made more peevishly conscious of - its redness than ever by the unsparing comments of the weaving-shed, but - she did not see wherein she was gold twice over until he explained it. “I - didn’t notice that the first day. I only saw your hair. I hadn’t the nerve - to come close enough to see the colour of your eyes. But when I did, and - found them all gold-brown as well, that finished me. I was deep in love to - the top of my head. Drowned in it, you might say.” - </p> - <p> - “You’re talking a lot of nonsense, George,” said Madge, with a fond - appreciation that belied her words. - </p> - <p> - “I’m telling you I love you,” he said, “and I’m asking if there’s anything - that you could see your way to tell me in return. I know I’m not smart, - Madge, but I’d work my fingers off to make you happy. Can’t you say you - love me, lass? Not,” he added, “if it isn’t true, of course. I wouldn’t - ask you to tell a lie even to oblige me.” - </p> - <p> - “It might not be a lie,” said Madge softly, “but——” She paused - so that he was left to guess the rest. - </p> - <p> - “But,” he suggested, “you don’t care to go so far as to say it?” - </p> - <p> - He watched her timidly, with courage oozing out of him. She had all but - given him to hope, but now it appeared she had no more to say. “Well, I - can understand,” he said, half turning towards the door. “I’m not much of - a chap, and you might easily have put me down much harder than you did. - It’s soft letting now, by reason of your tactful ways. I’ll... I’ll go and - see if Mrs. Whitehead has given me yon other blanket.” - </p> - <p> - He was at the door before she stopped him. “George!” she said, “come back. - You’re getting this all wrong. You know about my brother.” George nearly - smiled. “It’ud not be your mother’s fault if I didn’t,” he said. - </p> - <p> - “No,” she said; “I suppose everybody knows about his going to the Grammar - School. They don’t all know what it means.” Madge was trying to be loyal - to the family ideal, she was trying not to be bitter, but it wasn’t easy. - It was one thing to go without new hats and the accustomed ways of - service, but another to go without George. - </p> - <p> - “I’d like you to understand that this family puts itself about a bit for - Sam’s sake. We think he’ll go a long way up in the world, and the rest of - us aren’t doing anything to keep him down. None of us, no matter how it - hurts. Are you seeing what I mean?” - </p> - <p> - He saw. “I’m not class enough for you,” he said. - </p> - <p> - It was a part, but not the whole, of her meaning, and Madge wanted no - misapprehensions. “You’re class enough for me,” she said, “but I’m telling - you where the doubt comes in. It’s a habit we’ve got in this family. We - think of Sam.” That made the matter plain; she loved him, and while he - granted there was a certain impediment through Anne’s habit of - subordinating everything to Sam’s interests, he saw no just cause why he - should not marry Madge. “I wouldn’t knowingly do anything to upset your - mother,” he said, “but I’ve told you I’m boiling with my love for you. I’m - easily put off my purpose as a rule. I mean to say, supposing I ask Mrs. - Whitehead for a kipper for my tea, and she tells me eggs are cheap and - she’s got an egg instead, I don’t make a song about it—so long as - the egg’s not extra stale. But I’ll own I didn’t think of Sam in this. I - thought it was for you and me to settle by ourselves.” - </p> - <p> - “Sam’s in it,” said Madge dully. “He’s in everything in this house.” - </p> - <p> - Then Anne came in and the disturbance of her entrance, together with the - fact that he had finished his passage of “<i>De Senectute</i>” made Sam - aware that something was toward. He kept his eyes discreetly on his book, - but fluttered the pages of his dictionary no more. He found youth more - arresting than old age. - </p> - <p> - Anne’s quick comprehension took the situation in at once. She had been - shopping, and as she put her parcels on the dresser she gave Madge the - benefit of a wordless reproof. She could say a good deal without opening - her mouth, and said it. But Madge was not going to be parted from her - George without a fight. Sam apart, George was eligible, and Madge saw this - as an unique occasion—the occasion for leaving Sam out. At least, - she meant to try. - </p> - <p> - George was turned craven at sight of Anne and sidled to the door. “I’ll be - getting on home, I think,” he said. - </p> - <p> - “You wait your hurry,” said Madge hardily. “Mother, George has been asking - me to wed him.” - </p> - <p> - It was the gage of battle, for Anne knew the fact already. The statement - of it was a challenge. She met it coolly. “Has he?” she said. “Well, I - hope you told him gently.” - </p> - <p> - And at that George found his second wind of courage, and intervened like a - man. “She’s told me nothing with her tongue. Nothing for certain. But a - blind man on a galloping horse could read the thoughts of her. Mrs. - Branstone, I love that girl as if she’d put a spell on me. It’s the - biggest feeling that’s come into my life, and I’m full and bursting with - it, or I’d not have the face to expose my inside thoughts to you like - this. And if you’ll only tell me I can take her, the Mayor in his carriage - won’t be happier than me.” - </p> - <p> - “You know how steady George is, mother,” Madge seconded him. - </p> - <p> - “He needs to be,” said Anne dryly. “He’s a window-cleaner.” - </p> - <p> - “I’m steady by nature, Mrs. Branstone, as well as trade. I don’t drink. - Somehow one glass of ale is enough to make me whimsical, so I take none at - all. I know I’m being bowdacious in my love, but I’m moved to plead with - you. We’d not be standing in Sam’s way. We’d live that quiet and snug - you’d never know we’re in the town at all.” Anne looked at him with a - faint trace of appreciation drenched in her profound contempt. A poor - creature, but he had his thimbleful of spunk! “It would need to be quiet,” - she said, “with two to keep on your wage. Are you contented with it?” - </p> - <p> - Disastrously, he was. “It’s a regular job,” he said, voicing his pride at - being above the ranks of casual workers. In Anne’s view, a hopeless case. - </p> - <p> - “It’s a regular rotten job,” she retorted, but spoke more softly than her - wont. “I’ve Sam to consider, Madge. You might live quiet, but Sam’s - brother-in-law has got to make a better show of it than to be seen all - over the place at the top of a ladder like a monkey on a stick. I’m not - being hard on you, George Chappie, and I’ve nothing against you bar that - you’re not good enough. You better yourself and you’ll do. Stay as you - are, and Madge’ull do the same.” - </p> - <p> - George opened his mouth to speak, but found that nothing came. It <i>was</i> - a regular job, it satisfied his ambitions, and her objections were - inexplicable. He had shot his bolt and, having no more to say, he went, - relapsing to such invertebracy that when he found that Mrs. Whitehead had - not added the other blanket to his bed he had nothing to say to her - either, but spread a threadbare overcoat on the coverlet and shivered - unhappily to sleep. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER III—THE HELL-PIKE CLUB - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>O a schoolboy of - sixteen, love is an imbecile emotion, its victims harmless lunatics, and - it is not to be supposed that Sam’s interest in the affair of Madge and - George was based on intimate understanding. His conspiratorial action came - rather as a lark: behind, perhaps, was the recognition that adults did - habitually make fools of themselves in this way, that his loyalty in such - a case was to Madge who was of his generation, and that Anne in - obstructing their marriage was outrunning the constable in her demands for - self-sacrifice on his behalf. - </p> - <p> - Larking, defined as enjoyable interference with other people for motives - either benevolent or purely egotistic, was a weakness of Samuel Branstone, - and the boy was father to the man. He did not agree with Anne that the - marriage was inimical to his interests. True, George cleaned windows and - balanced hardily at the top of swaying ladders, a precarious trade, but - his own. Apparently it suited the Georgian temperament, and that - funambulist would not wear a placard on his back proclaiming that he was - brother-in law to Branstone of the Classical Fifth. - </p> - <p> - Branstone, who was going to rise in the world, would necessarily have poor - relations, and it hardly mattered how poor. Indeed, the poorer they were - the more cheaply he could afterwards play providence to them, since their - standards would be low and their expectations small. - </p> - <p> - So it wasn’t a nice, impulsive lark, but coldblooded and calculated, which - is almost as objectionable in a lark as organization in Charity. It is - prudent good intentions that pave the way to Hell. - </p> - <p> - He saw that there was a difference between this and the elopements of that - romantic literature with which he busied his relaxed hours: sometimes the - lady, but always the lover, was enterprising, while he knew that George - could never instigate anything. But that made things more amusing for Sam, - who could pull strings with absolute assurance that his puppets would - never take to dancing on their own account, or to any tune but the one he - piped; and it is not given to all of us to be Omnipotence at the price of - a ten-pound note. - </p> - <p> - As always, Sam had luck. In the romantic elopements whose technique he - began to study with new interest, money was never a difficulty, but the - god in the machine of George Chappie’s elopement must put money in his - purse, or there could be no elopement. - </p> - <p> - Sam liked money, but he must have liked power more, for, coming - miraculously into money at this time, he devoted it to this end. He came - into money because journalism was swiftly on the up grade since the days, - four years ago, when it couldn’t show its readers a photograph of Sam - Branstone, hero, in the evening paper, and had reached the civilized stage - of picture competitions. - </p> - <p> - You bought a weekly paper which printed six crude wood-cuts supposed to - disguise the names of (say) famous battles, and it did not strain your - intellect to discover that the picture of a station with “Waterloo” - beneath its clock was intended to represent the battle of that name. But - pause: it was not all so easy as that. Inflamed by avarice and the - childish ease of identifying the battles in the first series, you bought - the next week’s number, and the next, until the competition closed, and - you found that the designs were increasingly baffling. It was not quite - money for nothing. It called for some knowledge of history and a sort of - knack in cheap wit to interpret the pictures. A garden syringe, and a - stage Irishman brandishing something that might easily be a cudgel but - wasn’t, represented, in fact, the not very renowned battle of - Seringapatam, and there were pictures which could bear two - interpretations. - </p> - <p> - It was this last which led Sam to go into partnership with Lance Travers. - Both partners admitted that Sam’s wits were the sharper, so it was only - fair that Lance should finance the partnership and buy the papers. And - Sam, sanguine of winning, but desiring secrecy, preferred that the firm - should be registered in Lance’s name, so that if and when Sam became a - capitalist, he and not Anne should control his wealth. His ideas of the - uses of capital already went beyond the Post Office Savings Bank. - </p> - <p> - The weekly paper’s object was to increase its circulation, so it allowed - and encouraged competitors to send in numerous attempts, and printed - ambiguous drawings to tempt to prodigality. It is to be feared that - Classics suffered an eclipse at this period of journalistic enterprise. - The partners had other and more serious objects in life. And they won! - They won the second prize. It wasn’t a house or a motor-car or any of the - fantastic prizes with which still later journalism rewarded its - intelligent readers, but they divided twenty pounds and, for them, ten - pounds each was paradise enow. Lance bought a bicycle. Sam didn’t. He - bought a wedding-ring, and he had a talk with Sarah Pullen, who was so - passionately Madge’s bosom friend that she had gone into the mill with - her. - </p> - <p> - Sarah received him coldly; she looked upon him as the cause of her - friend’s martyrdom and thought the cause unworthy. - </p> - <p> - Sam cleared the air at once. “I’m on Madge’s side. I’m not going to see - her made unhappy for my sake,” he said, and Sarah relented so far as to - absolve him of personal malignity. - </p> - <p> - “Much you can do to help it, though,” she said. “I <i>can</i> do much,” he - replied, “but,” he flattered her, “perhaps you can do more. You see, - Sarah,” he went on confidentially, “Madge trusts you and she doesn’t trust - me. Now, between ourselves, she needs a friend’s advice. Put yourself in - her place. Would you knuckle under to your mother?” - </p> - <p> - “I’d see her further first,” said Sarah. - </p> - <p> - “I wonder,” said Sam, “if you could see your way to communicating your - views to Madge without mentioning that I suggested it?” - </p> - <p> - “You!” said Sarah. “You! It’ud take a dozen your size to suggest anything - to me. Get off home and play marbles, or I’ll give you a slap on th’ - earhole that you’ll remember.” - </p> - <p> - They didn’t play marbles in the Classical Fifth, but Sam was content to - put her allusion down to ignorance rather than deliberate insult. He had - gained his point: the atmosphere he desired created was about to he - created. - </p> - <p> - He left that pot to simmer and turned his mind to George, whom he judged - less susceptible than Madge to the promptings of a friend. Besides, he - knew no friend of George, and confessed himself at fault. - </p> - <p> - One day, shortly before the Whitsuntide holidays, he was staring gloomily - out of the window at the top of the stairs outside the Fifth Form room, - watching the boys of the Chetham’s Hospital at play in that yard of theirs - which the Grammar School pretends to scorn but secretly envies, when he - heard behind him a conversation between Lance Travers and Dubby Stewart - which set his brain awhirl. Yet it was not a distinguished conversation. - </p> - <p> - “Who ever heard of anyone in Manchester staying at home in Whit week?” - asked Lance. - </p> - <p> - Sam had heard, often. - </p> - <p> - “It isn’t done,” said Dubby, who had earned that abiding name when he was - in the Lower Third, and once read “dubious” aloud with a short “u.” - </p> - <p> - “But I’ve to do it,” said Lance. “My governor’s too busy to get away. Bit - damnable, isn’t it?” - </p> - <p> - “Matter of fact,” said Dubby, “we’re not going, either.” - </p> - <p> - And it presently appeared that out of the form of twenty-four boys there - were as many as six who lived in Manchester and were not going away. “It - will be hell,” prophesied one of the unfortunates. - </p> - <p> - “It needn’t,” said Sam Branstone, turning from the window to the mournful - group. - </p> - <p> - “You’re used to it. We’re not,” said someone cruelly, and Lance smacked - his head. Allusions to anybody’s poverty were bad form. - </p> - <p> - “What’s the prescription?” asked Dubby, and Sam was silent for a minute. - “Watch him. Something’s dawning,” chaffed Dubby. It wasn’t dawning, it had - dawned; but at first it looked like a risk, and then much less like one, - and Sam smiled beautifully as he realized that he, at least, had all to - gain and nothing to lose. He drew the luckless five mysteriously aloof. - </p> - <p> - “The prescription,” he said, “is to have a holiday in Manchester, in a - holiday house.” He let that soak for a minute, and then, “Our own house,” - he added. “There are six of us. We join together and we take a house. A - small house, and I daresay some of you won’t like the neighbours, but as - the neighbours won’t like us, that’s as broad as it’s long. Swagger - neighbours wouldn’t stand us anyhow, and the smaller the house the smaller - the rent. Something like four-and-six a week is my idea. That’s nine-pence - a week for each of us, and we’ve a house of our own for that to do what we - like in.” - </p> - <p> - “By Jove!” said someone admiringly. - </p> - <p> - “What shall we call it?” said another, a trifle doubtfully. - </p> - <p> - “Call it?” said Lance. “That’s obvious. The Hell-fire Club.” - </p> - <p> - And, of course, if any doubt remained, that settled it. Who would regret - the seaside if he could be a member of the Hell-fire Club? Lance was - commissioned to negotiate with his father, the estate agent, but it was - Sam who really chose their house. It was a house which in Sam’s opinion - excellently suited the requirements of a young married couple of the - window-cleaning class. Mr. Travers told Lance that he would stop the value - of any damage out of his pocket-money, and on those conditions let them - the house. But he need not have made that cautionary threat; Sam saw that - there was no damage. - </p> - <p> - The Hell fire Club assembled for its initiatory debauch on the first day - of the holidays, and by eleven a.m. three inexpert cigarette-smokers had - had occasion to use the slopstone as a vomitorium. It left them feeling - chilly, and Dubby suggested that a house-warming without a fire was a - solecism, even on a hot day, so a lavish plutocrat brought in two sacks of - coal and a supply of chips. Firelighting is a sport out of which a certain - excitement can be derived, but only for a short time, and the same - evanescent quality attaches to the pleasure of sitting on bare boards. - </p> - <p> - “I’m too stiff to be happy,” said Lance. “I vote we furnish this club.” - </p> - <p> - Carried, <i>nem. com</i>. “I’m afraid, though,” said Sam, “that I shall - not be able to contribute much.” - </p> - <p> - “Wait till you’re asked, my son,” said Dubby. “By the time we five have - finished looting our homes, this place will be a little palace.” - </p> - <p> - Loot is a brave word, suggestive of the treasures of the purple East, but - it was, in most instances, a case of permitted loot, the offscourings of - lumber rooms. Sandy Reed, however, was the sort of boy who is happiest - with a hammer in his hand, and Dubby had an eye for chintz. To repair the - veteran furniture which they brought struck Sandy as work for a man. - Behind him was his infantile past of fret-work and model yachts; before - him the foremanship of the Hell-fire Club repair-shop. He worked and was - the cause of work in others. And it was willing work, partly because it - was for an idea, partly because that first day had threatened boredom and - here was something definite to do, mostly because it was making a noise. - </p> - <p> - The ill-assorted chairs, tables and sofas which they collected under their - roof had this in common at the end, that they were strong; and having by - their own efforts made them strong, the boys did not by their rioting make - them weak again. They respected their handiwork, and Dubby’s chintz - procured a sort of uniformity. - </p> - <p> - A club, of course, must eat and drink, and kitchen utensils, mostly odd - but all practicable, were gathered together that they might precede the - pleasures of eating with the pleasures of cooking. It was camp-life in - town, except that they went home to sleep, and so long as the activities - of “settling in” endured, they relished it abundantly. - </p> - <p> - About a fortnight was what Sam had mentally set as the life of the - Hell-fire Club, and he had no intentions of paying the rent by himself for - more than a week or so. They had decided that Sunday was not a club-day—there - were difficulties at home—and Sam took George Chappie for a walk. “I - like this street,” he said as they turned the corner. “Madge always - fancied this district.” - </p> - <p> - “Did she?” said George gloomily. - </p> - <p> - “We’ll go in here,” and Sam produced the key and introduced George to the - Club premises. “What do you think of it?” - </p> - <p> - The chintz took George’s eye at once. “By gum!” he said. - </p> - <p> - “Sit down,” said Sam. “This is where you’re going to live when you’re - married to Madge. It isn’t your furniture yet, but it’s going to be. I’m - going to give it you for a wedding present. There isn’t a bed in, as you - see, but there will be, and I ask you, George, is it or is it not better - than Mrs. Whitehead’s?” - </p> - <p> - “Aye,” said George, “but you’re going ahead a bit too fast for me.” - </p> - <p> - “Not at all,” said Sam. “Yours is the pace that kills. The slow pace, not - the quick. Now, this place isn’t at your disposal yet, but if you’ll put - up the banns next Sunday and get married as soon as you can after the - three Sundays, you can walk in here and hang your hat up on that hook. - It’s a brass hook, George. We don’t approve of nails in this house. I - might mention that it will be all right about the banns. Mother has dinner - to cook on Sundays and doesn’t go to morning service, and to-day is - father’s Sunday off from the station and lie’s on duty for the next three - Sundays. So,” he concluded, “there you are.” - </p> - <p> - “You’re promising a lot. Is this house yours?” - </p> - <p> - “The rent is four-and-six,” said Sam, “which isn’t more than you can - afford to pay. And you bind yourself to nothing by putting up the banns. - If I fail to deliver you this house and all that’s in it, you needn’t get - married. But I’ve a word of advice for you, George. Let Madge hear of it - first from the parson’s lips in church. She won’t scream and she won’t - faint. We don’t, in our family, and it saves you the trouble of asking - her. Is it a bet?” - </p> - <p> - George hesitated. “Come upstairs and see the other room,” said Sam. George - saw, and marvelled. “I’ll come round with you now to church,” said Sam. - “We’ve just nice time to catch the clerk after service.” - </p> - <p> - “By gum!” said George Chappie. “I’ll do it. They can’t hang me. But,” he - added as he cast a last look at the household gods which Sam Bran-stone - promised should be his, “they may hang you.” - </p> - <p> - Sam grinned blandly. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER IV—THE COMPLEAT ANGLER - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">H</span>E had succeeded - with George beyond expectations, but that easy victory did not deceive him - into thinking that his battle was won. Madge, he had said, would neither - scream nor faint on hearing her banns announced and he wished he was as - confident about it as he had sounded. Much, in his view too much, depended - on the vigour of Sarah Pullen’s advice. - </p> - <p> - He was taking risks all round, but found he rather liked it. There was the - risk that the Hell-fire Club would not tire of its toy in time. An - encouraging increase in absenteeism amongst the members elated him, but - the steadfast faith of an enthusiastic pair depressed him sadly. He hoped, - however, to find a way out of that wood. - </p> - <p> - And there was the risk that some acquaintance of Anne’s would mention the - banns to her. He saw no way to counter that. It was a risk he had to take. - Fortunately, his father’s best friend, Terry O’Rourke, was a Catholic. - </p> - <p> - As things stood, he saw Madge as the weakest link in his chain. She - collapsed before the will of Anne like an opera hat, and he was candidly - afraid of her making a scene in church, either from pleasure or from - anger, when the banns were read. Not that he shrank on principle from - scenes, only that word of it would undoubtedly be carried to Anne and the - fat be in the fire. - </p> - <p> - Rummaging one day that week at a second-hand bookstall in Withy Grove, - without the slightest intention of buying, he was attracted by a title and - recklessly planked his tuppence down. Intrigue, he felt, was punishing his - finances, but this title gave him too good an opening with Madge to be the - subject of economy. The title was “The Clandestine Marriage,” and he knew - that Sarah Pullen would be in that night to see Madge. - </p> - <p> - He was reading the play very earnestly when she called, though it rather - bored him and he thought its plot elementary compared with his own. Sarah - was no reader, but she noticed the cover because the word “marriage” was - an unfailing lure. - </p> - <p> - “Whatever has the boy got hold of now?” She inquired, taking his bait - sweetly. - </p> - <p> - He showed her. “Do you know what it means?” he asked. - </p> - <p> - “I know what marriage means,” she said. - </p> - <p> - “By hearsay,” he told the virgin pungently. “But I meant the middle word.” - </p> - <p> - She eyed it closely. “You’re always bragging your knowledge. I’m not at - the Grammar myself and Greek is Greek to me. Fat lot of good it’ud be in a - weaving-shed, and all.” She had a practical mind. - </p> - <p> - “This isn’t Greek,” he said, “it’s English.” - </p> - <p> - “It’s not the sort of English we talk in Manchester, choose how.” - </p> - <p> - “I’ll tell you what it means.” - </p> - <p> - “Wait till you’re asked, cheeky.” - </p> - <p> - He didn’t wait. “It means surreptitious.” - </p> - <p> - “I’m a grand sight the wiser for that. It’ll mean a thick ear for you if - you don’t stop coming the schoolmaster over me. I’m here to talk to Madge, - not to you.” - </p> - <p> - He winked at Sarah with the eye which was hidden from Madge. “The Secret - Marriage, Sarah. That’s what it means.” - </p> - <p> - Sarah was interested now. “Does it tell you how to work it?” - </p> - <p> - “I might do that myself,” he said. - </p> - <p> - “Don’t talk so foolish, Sam,” said his sister. “Are you coming for a walk, - Sarah?” - </p> - <p> - “When I’m ready,” said Sarah. “Now then, young Sam, spit it out.” - </p> - <p> - “Oh,” said Sam. “It isn’t much. Only I happened to be out for a walk with - George Chappie the other day and we went into a house that’s pretty full - of furniture.” - </p> - <p> - “George Chappie with a house of furniture!” cried Madge. - </p> - <p> - “I suppose he’s getting married,” said Sam. “He courted you at one time, - didn’t he, Madge? I rather liked his taste in furniture.” - </p> - <p> - “Taste!” cried Madge with spirit. “I’ll taste him. I’ll eat him raw for - this. After all he said to me no more than a month ago, to take up with - another wench! What’s the hussy’s name?” - </p> - <p> - “Her name?” said Sam. “Let’s see. Sunday to-morrow, isn’t it? The banns - might be up. If I were you I’d go and find out.” - </p> - <p> - “As true as I’m alive I’ll tear every hair from her head,” said Madge. - </p> - <p> - “I wouldn’t,” said Sam. “You have red hair, but better red than bald.” - </p> - <p> - “Her!” said Sarah. “Do you mean——?” - </p> - <p> - “Look here, Sarah,” Sam interrupted, and used a formula which he had - thought out rather carefully. “Do you imagine I’d be giving you a message - like this if he hadn’t sent it?” - </p> - <p> - “Message! What message?” - </p> - <p> - Then Anne came in. - </p> - <p> - “Yes, Sarah,” she heard Sam saying with a pedagogic air. “The word - clandestine means secret.” He resumed with zest the reading of his play - and, though theirs was a small house, managed to avoid being alone with - Madge up to church time on the morrow. He had business out that Saturday - night—to make sure of George, whom he found full of panting - resolution to catch the clerk and cancel the banns. The glamour of that - furniture had lasted this long with George, but the awful hazard of the - Sunday morning eclipsed the glow as it came nearer. George wilted at the - thought of Madge rising in her place with a firm, irrevocable “I forbid - the banns” upon her lips. - </p> - <p> - There had begun, too, to be a quality too much like that of an Arabian - night about his visit to the Club. Sam was a wonderful boy and George - granted his high superiority; but even George, the humble, did not quite - see Sam as a miracle-worker. He even began to doubt the existence of the - enchanted Palace which Sam had shown him, and that it was within Sam’s - competence to hand over that house to him appeared now ridiculous. Sam - came just in time. - </p> - <p> - “Would you care,” he said, “to have another look at your house?” - </p> - <p> - George would, but he hadn’t time then: he was going; to see the clerk, and - till he saw the clerk he was a man obsessed with an idea. “I suppose,” he - said sceptically, “that it’s still there?” - </p> - <p> - “Of course,” said Sam, “and has a few more things in since you saw it.” - </p> - <p> - “Well,” said George, “it’s a nice house, but I’m going to see yon clerk to - tell him not to put up banns.” - </p> - <p> - Sam smiled, relieved to know that he was not too late. “Don’t do that,” he - said. “Madge is pleased.” - </p> - <p> - “What!” said George. “Say that again.” - </p> - <p> - “Madge is pleased,” repeated Sam brazenly. He was sure she was. He trusted - Sarah Pullen now. - </p> - <p> - “Did she tell you so?” asked George. - </p> - <p> - “Do you imagine I’d be giving you a message like this if she hadn’t sent - it?” - </p> - <p> - George took his cap off. “If that’s so——” he said. - </p> - <p> - “It’s so,” said Sam, not defining what was so. - </p> - <p> - The banns went up, and Sam was able to devote his undivided attention to - Club affairs, as to which he had an idea arising out of the boredom he - suffered while reading “The Clandestine Marriage.” That tuppence was a - fruitful investment. - </p> - <p> - A wet day came and with it, what was now rare, a full attendance at the - Club. But, since their repairs and decorations were complete, there was - nothing to do except to sit on their reliable chairs and admire their - reliability. - </p> - <p> - “For a Hell-fire Club,” said Sandy, “we lack hellishness.” - </p> - <p> - “Lance named us,” said Dubby. “He ought to make suggestions.” - </p> - <p> - “Of a new name?” asked Sandy. “Call it the Eviscerated Emasculates.” - </p> - <p> - “Call it a damned failure,” said another, and was sat upon. They welcomed - the diversion, but the thought had reached home. - </p> - <p> - “What’s the matter,” said Sam, when order was restored, “is that we aren’t - serious enough.” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, hell!” said Lance. - </p> - <p> - “I mean it, Lance. We’re not a set of kids from the Lower School. If we - were, we might sit round and read Chums and the Boy’s Own Paper.” Two men - of the Classical Fifth and the Hell-fire Club looked guiltily at him, but - decided that he was not making personal allusions. “As it is, we have - higher interests. Now, there are six of us here and that’s enough, with - doubling, to take parts in a Shakesperian play. I vote we read a play. In - fact, I brought some down.” - </p> - <p> - This suited Lance, who had aspirations towards the stage. “Bags I Romeo,” - he said. - </p> - <p> - Sandy was less fired to enthusiasm, but, “All right,” he said, “if you - choose a play with lots of thick bits in it.” - </p> - <p> - “We certainly,” said Sam, “shall not read an edition prepared for the use - of girls’ schoofs.” - </p> - <p> - “<i>Merry Wives of Windsor</i>, then,” said Dubby. “Lance can spout Romeo - out of his bedroom window to stop a cat-fight.” - </p> - <p> - Sam would have preferred a tragedy; he feared they would enjoy reading The - Merry Wives and so, on the whole, they did, but there were only five - promises to turn up next day and two of those were conditional upon its - being wet. Sam wasn’t dissatisfied, and as a comedy was postulated chose - <i>Much Ado about Nothing</i>, because he thought that it was dull in - patches and also for a reason of his own. He wanted to make certain that - he had nothing to learn as an intriguer from a famous case of - match-making. He found he had. - </p> - <p> - Although it rained, <i>Much Ado</i> had only four readers at the opening - and only two at the close. Lance sent postcards that night to the members - announcing <i>Hamlet</i> for the morrow. He wanted to read Hamlet’s part, - but if you can’t have <i>Hamlet</i> without the Prince, neither can you - read it satisfactorily with one other participant. - </p> - <p> - Lance and Sam struggled through an act, then Lance gave in. “I’m getting - tired of this Club,” he said. “The members have no brain.” - </p> - <p> - “It isn’t raining,” said Sam. - </p> - <p> - “No. Lancashire’s batting, too. Let’s go and see Albert Ward and Frank - Sugg at Old Tafford.” - </p> - <p> - Next day, the Club was uninhabited, except by the ghost of Sam’s broadest - smile, its only tenant for a week. The freeze-out was accomplished, and - its engineer had confidence enough to spend three pounds of his capital on - a bed and bedding, “to await instructions before delivering.” Then he saw - Lance Travers and pointed out to him that there were better uses to be - made of ninepence a week than to waste it on a club which nobody used. - </p> - <p> - “Nuisance, though, about the chairs and stuff,” said Lance, implying his - agreement that the Club had failed. - </p> - <p> - “I can’t have them back here, because I’m turning our attic into an - aviary. That’s why I’ve had no time to go to the Club,” he explained with - a faint apology, and took Sam up to see his birds. - </p> - <p> - “What shall we do about all that furniture at the Club? Pity the fifth of - November is so far off.” - </p> - <p> - “I’ll try to think of something,” said Sam, rather terrified at Lance’s - incendiary suggestion. “In any case it must be discussed at a full - meeting. Let’s call the members together.” - </p> - <p> - An urgent whip resulted in a full and slightly shame-faced attendance. - Nobody tried to dispute that the Club was a corpse: the only question was - what to do with its bones. “Well,” said Sam, “if none of you has a - suggestion to make, I’ll make one. Nobody’s aching to take the stuff back - where it came from. Now,” he went on candidly, “we <i>could</i> sell it to - a dealer, but I’m against that because dealers are thieves and they’d give - us about thirty bob for the lot. But my sister’s getting married and I - don’t mind offering the Club five pounds for its property. That,” he - indicated, “is a pound each for the five of you.” - </p> - <p> - “Cash on the nail?” asked Dubby, whose forebears came from Scotland. He - distrusted Sam in the character of capitalist. - </p> - <p> - “Oh, yes,” explained the candid Sam. “You see, when I met Lance yesterday - I said I’d think of a way out of the difficulty and I came prepared.” - </p> - <p> - “I vote we take it,” said Sandy. “I can buy a lot of tools with a pound.” - </p> - <p> - “I don’t see why we should pander to your vices,” said Lance. “We’re still - a Club and this is club money.” - </p> - <p> - “The Club is dead.” - </p> - <p> - “Not yet. Not till we’ve killed it gloriously on Sam’s sister’s fiver. - There’s a hell of a bust in five pounds and we have to drink the bride’s - health. Champagne’s my drink.” - </p> - <p> - It wasn’t, but it was rather too often his father’s, and Lance was - emulous, and, frightened a little of his own suggestion, carried things - now with a rush. “We’re the Hell-Fire Club,” he said, “and champagne is - the dew of Hell. Any member shirking will be held under the tap for half - an hour.” They braved it out, most of them conscience-stricken, and the - Hell-fire Club almost deserved its name in the hour of its extinction. - Things might have been serious had not Sam, by a well-timed push, caused - Lance to shatter a full magnum on the floor. - </p> - <p> - As it was, five hangdog members reached home late, but presentable. But - they were most unhappy boys. The sixth boy was happy. He had consumed a - sober and interesting meal at other people’s expense, encountering several - delectable sorts of food for the first time and experiencing that human - but reprehensible thrill which results from feeling that one is a clever - fellow. - </p> - <p> - Distance of course lent enchantment to the Hell-fire Club. When school - reassembled and boys fresh from the seaside tried to excite the jealousy - of the stay-at-homes with tales of land and sea, they were loftily put in - their places and struck to dumb admiration by legends of the dashing vice - of the Hell-fire Club. It lived in story as it had never lived in fact. - </p> - <p> - Sam visited the premises, on the day after the Club died, to wipe up the - mess, thriftily to salve some untouched edibles for a coming - wedding-feast, and by receiving and installing the bed to dedicate the - house to better uses. Then he put the key in his pocket and took it to - George. He had kept his bargain and now it was for George to keep his. - </p> - <p> - There remained the question of Anne, and as a preliminary to its solution - Sam had recommended Madge to look peaked. Madge, naturally inclined to - that condition, had no difficulty in accentuating its appearance by - recourse to the vinegar bottle until even Anne, intolerant as she was of - small weaknesses, had to own that Madge looked unhappy and unwell. - </p> - <p> - On the night before her wedding, Madge shut herself up in her bedroom - whence the sounds as of a very ecstasy of woe penetrated to the kitchen. - Yet her woe was not ecstatic and hardly woe at all. She wept because she - was going to be married next day, because when one is going to be married - next day one weeps. One brims with undefinable emotion and overflows into - tears. - </p> - <p> - But Anne, listening from the kitchen, where she sat with Sam, was moved to - unaccustomed softness. “That girl is fretting sadly,” she said. “It’s a - mort of trouble to be taking over a wastrel like George Chappie.” - </p> - <p> - “Mother,” said Sam speculatively, “I wonder whether you have ever - considered the influence of matter over mind?” - </p> - <p> - “I’m considering the influence of something that does not matter,” she - replied. “The influence of George Chappie.” - </p> - <p> - “Suppose,” said Sam, “suppose that George Chappie lived in a decent house - of his own, with furniture that he took a pride in, instead of in those - awful lodgings of his. Don’t you think that he would live up to his - surroundings? Don’t you think that it would make a man of him?” - </p> - <p> - “George Chappie is as far from having a decent house as he is from wedding - our Madge.” - </p> - <p> - “That’s true,” said Sam, “as far—and as near.” - </p> - <p> - “As near?” asked Anne suspiciously. “Sithee, Sam, have you been up to - something?” - </p> - <p> - “Will you hear me out if I tell you a story?” he asked. - </p> - <p> - “Am I going to like it?” she fenced cautiously. “I am hoping,” he said - piously, “to have your forgiveness. It’s a matter of happiness.” - </p> - <p> - He told her what he had done and how and why he had done it. “The - wedding’s to-morrow,” he ended, “and I hope you’ll go.” He told his - exploit without arrogance and without extenuation, and it is not to be - supposed that Anne was unaware that a nice moralist would have found much - in it to criticize, but Sam had come out on top and that, for Anne, almost - excused his methods. It almost excused his coming out on top of her. - </p> - <p> - “I’ll go to the wedding,” she said, “and I’ll forgive them. They are no - more than a pair of naturals in the hands of a schemer.” Sam grinned - appreciatively. “But I’ll not let you down so easy,” she went on, and the - grin faded. “You’re clever, my lad, but you’re a schoolboy, and the place - for showing your cleverness is at school. It’s too long since you brought - me home a prize, and if you want my forgiveness for letting you rap my - knuckles like this, you’ll bring me a prize this Midsummer. Is that a - bargain, Sam?” - </p> - <p> - “I always try,” he said, which was true. - </p> - <p> - “Try harder,” said Anne Branstone dryly. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER V—LAST SCHOOL-DAYS - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">S</span>AM had not a dog’s - chance of winning the form prize of the Classical Fifth, and knew it. He - learnt with difficulty, retaining what he learnt; but the process was slow - and his form was overshadowed by the brilliance of two boys who learnt - easily and rapidly. - </p> - <p> - It annoyed Sam to know that he had no chance against these two. Poetic - justice cried out that he, the railway porter’s son, should defeat Bull, - whose father was a professor at the University, and Adams, son of a - merchant prince whose “Hong” was as familiar in the godowns of Shanghai as - his name in Princess Street and on ‘Change; but it was hopeless. The prize - lay inevitably between these two who took to classics like ducks to water - and read Homer for (they said) pleasure, whilst their form-mates struggled - with Euripides in acknowledged agony. They were both unpopular, both - prigs, but unassailably pre-eminent; and they were two. Had it been a case - of Bull alone, or Adams alone, Sam might have worked heroically on the - off-chance, that his rival would be ill at examination time, but it was - too far-fetched to hope that both would simultaneously ail. - </p> - <p> - He had long passed beyond Anne’s powers of tuition. It was not a “sound - commercial education” that one got on the Classical side, and mathematics - had ceased to figure in his course. He went to the Classical side because - Lance was there and stayed because of Anne’s golden dream of Oxford. The - gold, she knew, was tarnished now, but if she no longer saw in Sam the - winner of an open scholarship at Balliol, she had not abandoned hope that - he might carry off one of the close scholarships which the School - commanded. Sam himself was sceptical about even that qualified ambition. - </p> - <p> - But he had to win a prize to satisfy Anne, and if he could not win the - prize of which she was thinking, he would try to win one of which she did - not think. It was certainly a prize, and a handsome prize, open not only - to a form but to the whole school—a prize for reading. - </p> - <p> - He had a secondary spur, too, in the fact that Lance, that ardent - elocutionist, looked on this prize as his own, and the thought of beating - Lance on his chosen ground tickled Sam’s fancy. Not that he was cocksure. - He knew his handicap too well for that, but he had always known it, and - from the first day of his school life studied to correct his accent. He - did not, even now, even at the price of being thought pedantic, indulge in - slang. Lance, perhaps because he came from a motherless home, perhaps from - a stupid bravado, larded his speech with silly blasphemies and the current - vulgarisms, and, in fact, he did it with an air; but Sam had to guard his - tongue. There is a difference, too easily detected, between correct slang - and incorrect English: one must first speak correctly before one can dare - successfully to be incorrect, and Sam’s handicap was that he came from a - home where they used, in Sarah Pullen’s words, “the sort of English we - speak in Manchester;” the other sort was an alien tongue and held to be an - affectation of the insincere. - </p> - <p> - There was a set piece—the opening speech in <i>Comus</i>—the - inefficients were weeded out, and the elect tested on “unseens.” It was - the “unseens” that frightened Sam: he rehearsed <i>Comus</i> till a - misplaced aitch was a physical impossibility, and he was sure of his - rhythm and the intelligence of his rendering; but he knew that aitches - were elusive when he was nervous. “Then don’t be nervous,” was counsel of - perfection: the ordeal of the “unseen” test intimidated him. - </p> - <p> - But he practised, and did not spare himself. If sweat and blood would win - that prize, Sam would spend both. He read aloud by the hour—classics - of course suffering—with a pin in his hand with which he resolutely - drew blood at every aitch he dropped; and in his reading he was fortunate. - He read <i>The Spectator</i> which he had borrowed by pure chance from the - school library, and the judges handed him a passage from <i>The Spectator</i> - to read at the unseen test, and one of the great speeches of Marlowe’s <i>Tamburlaine</i>, - whose thundering music had so much attracted Sam that he knew the purple - patch by heart. - </p> - <p> - He won the prize; staggered across the platform of the Free Trade Hall - with a Gibbon in six sumptuous volumes, calf-bound, stamped with the - school arms; he rode “in triumph through Persepolis,” and thought that it - was “sweet and full of pomp;” then, when it was over and the last - “Gaudeamus” of that Speech Day had been sung and the last cheers for the - holidays (always the heartiest) been given, he sought his mother in the - crowd. - </p> - <p> - “Well?” said Sam, who had kept this glory as a surprise for her. - </p> - <p> - “Aye,” said Anne, “but it might be better. You’ve won a prize and you’re - forgiven, but you know well enough that you’ve diddled me. I wanted a - prize to show that you’d the gift of learning, and you’ve won one to show - that you’ve the gift of the gab. I knew it already,” she ended dryly, “and - you’re nobbut tenth out of the twenty-four in your class. Will they move - you up?” - </p> - <p> - She dissembled the genuine pride with which she had seen him cross that - platform and take his bulky prize, because she felt inly that the chief - talent Sam had proved was a talent for deception. This was a prize, but - she thought it too barely within the meaning of the act: it observed the - letter of his bargain and eluded the spirit. - </p> - <p> - She did him less than justice. The average hoy came to school knowing - English; Sam had had to learn it, and here was proof, in a prize won - against the whole school and not merely against a form, that he had - learned his lesson well. - </p> - <p> - Her disparagement depressed him. He had not reached, and with a mother - like Anne he could not at his age reach, the healthy younger generation’s - contempt for the opinions of its elders. He felt weakened in his belief in - the social and economical value of a decent accent and grew careless in - preserving it. His Gibbon lay upon his shelf unread, an empty glory, and, - in the event, his prize was to lead to a calamity. It was to lead, - indirectly, to Tom Branstone’s death. - </p> - <p> - Sam found himself, after the holidays, moved up to the Transitus, the last - boy to be moved there from the Fifth. He was not sure that it pleased him. - Left in the Fifth he might have been a Triton among the minnows: in the - Transitus he was incurably a minnow. But he discovered there an atmosphere - to which he might have responded better than he did. Discipline was - slacker; one had reached the ante-room to the Sixth and was assumed to be - serious; one had the privilege of a form-room which was open in the - lunch-hour so that one had not to wait with smaller fry in the corridors; - and, above all, the form-master was a gentleman as well as a scholar. - </p> - <p> - He was not blind to these advantages, but he did not, somehow, “come on” - with his classics. The terrible facility of Bull and Adams was a constant - discouragement: mere perseverance was outvied by natural ability and - dragged its leaden weight behind. He knew himself incapable of shining in - this company, and gave up a losing fight the more readily because the - half-term brought a new diversion, and a chance to coruscate. - </p> - <p> - He was cast, as winner of the reading prize, for the Christmas play. He, - Sam Branstone, was to act Shylock at the Conversazione, whilst Lance - Travers was given Bassanio—salt on the still bleeding wound of his - defeat. Greek Tragedy interested Sam no more. He saw Irving’s Shylock from - the gallery of the Theatre Royal, and, for comparative purposes, Benson’s. - He haunted Cheetham Hill, observing Jewish “types.” He came to the first - rehearsal, like any other novice, knowing every line of his part—and - had painfully to unlearn and relearn under the direction of the brisk - little mathematics master who took the play-in hand. - </p> - <p> - Anne screened her pride in this distinction. Play-acting was, in any case, - questionable, too newly come to respectable estate to be accepted - unreservedly. But, in secret, she determined that she would be one of - Sam’s audience and Tom another. - </p> - <p> - Parents were invited to the Conversazione—that was what - conversaziones were for—but Anne and Tom had never accepted the - invitation before. It implied evening dress. - </p> - <p> - She decided that she could “manage” with her Sunday dress and two yards of - lace; but Tom, too, must be there, and Tom must not shame Sam. She thought - she saw a way. - </p> - <p> - “Nay, nay,” said Tom, “I couldn’t do it, lass. I’d never dare.” - </p> - <p> - “You should have thought of that before you became Sam’s father,” she - replied. “I’m going to see him and I’ll none go alone. You’re coming with - me. I reckon Mr. O’Rourke will be in to-night as usual.” - </p> - <p> - “Aye,” said Tom, suspecting nothing. - </p> - <p> - One basis of his friendship with O’Rourke was that their evenings off - happened to coincide, Tom’s from Victoria Station and Terry’s from the - old-fashioned commercial hotel in Mosley Street, where he was an - institution. Terry was a waiter, but Tom had not yet seen the connection - between his friend’s profession and the Grammar School Conversazione. He - was never very bright. - </p> - <p> - Terry had a hard head and a professional style, rather like a successful - doctor’s bed-side manner, which wheedled more tips from commercial - travellers than they gave at any other hotel in their rounds, but he had a - sunken vein of poetic superstition and, when Anne interrupted them, he was - explaining to Tom that he tolerated the Royal Hotel because he could see - from its window the green of the grass outside the Infirmary. Manchester - was Manchester because it lacked grass. The “good folk” couldn’t dance on - granite sets: only on grass did one find fairy-rings and only where grass - abounded were people blessed. - </p> - <p> - “You’ll not be wanting your dress-clothes next Wednesday night, I reckon,” - said Anne, breaking in without apology. - </p> - <p> - “Why, no, Mrs. Branstone,” he said. “Wednesday’s the night when I dress - like the public. I’ve gone into a strange hotel and been mistaken for an - ordinary customer on a Wednesday night.” - </p> - <p> - “Then you’ll maybe not object to lending Tom your clothes next week. I - want him to be mistaken for a swell.” - </p> - <p> - “There’s a shine on them,” objected Terry, “that you can see your face - in.” - </p> - <p> - “Dress-clothes,” pronounced Anne, “are dressy when they shine. If you’ll - put studs and a clean shirt in with them, I’ll be obliged, and I’ll send - the shirt back washed.” - </p> - <p> - “But, Anne——” protested Tom. - </p> - <p> - “You hold your hush,” she said. “It’s settled. Go on about the fairies, - Terry.” - </p> - <p> - Fairies seemed to Anne entirely suitable as a subject of conversation for - those children, men. - </p> - <p> - Terry brought the clothes himself and personally assisted at Tom’s - transformation from a railway porter into a “swell.” His tie, at any rate, - was nicely tied, but “I feel the awkwardest fool alive,” said Tom, as well - he might, with clothes which fitted where they touched; Anne, had she - confessed her inward sinking, must have admitted that she was in no better - case herself, but confession was far from her: she had to be brazen for - two. Yet even Anne’s high courage failed her in the ladies’ dressing-room: - she emerged so humbled by the splendours which she had seen unveiled that, - at a word from Tom, she would have turned tail and fled. - </p> - <p> - But Tom had found countenance. Mr. Travers, meeting him on the stair, had - taken charge of him, and now added Anne to his convoy. It was kindly tact - increased to the power of heroism: he talked hard and sheltered his waifs - from feeling the curious glances which, even in that mixed company, were - directed embarrassingly at them. He ignored a quiet, well-known alderman, - who obviously wanted to speak to him. He shepherded them to their places - in the Lecture Theatre, sat with them and accomplished the incredible feat - of putting Tom Branstone at his ease in the midst of the tipping public. - </p> - <p> - Travers acquired more merit that night than by all his payments of Sam’s - school-fees: and Sam himself did nobly, not only on the stage whence he - acted at Anne and bowed to Anne, but afterwards when, still in his - costume, he paraded with her, drank coffee with her, and met with - Shylockian hatred any eye which seemed to hint that he had not tremendous - reason to be proud of his little mother. And what he did for her, Lance - and Mr. Travers did for Tom. - </p> - <p> - Undoubtedly, a huge success: a night of nights, carved on the tablets of - memory in letters of gold: never, not by so much as a dubious hint, to be - associated with the illness of Tom Branstone. That was, of course, caused - by overwork at Christmas at the station. It had and could have nothing to - do with the fact that Tom, coming in ecstasy from the heated school into - the cold December night, presently threw off his overcoat and danced - exulting on the pavement: conduct so utterly unprecedented, so wholly - un-Tom-like, that he had footed it merrily for ten minutes before Anne - recovered enough command of him to put an end to the discreditable - performance. Besides, for five of the ten minutes, she had danced hand in - hand with him. She, too, exulted, but neither of them ever referred to - their pagan capering again. - </p> - <p> - Poor Tom! He had not had so many nights of triumph in his life that this - should be his last, but he was soon to start upon a journey from which - even Anne’s imperious will was powerless to call him back. She helping - him, he struggled hard against pneumonia and made a better fight with - death than he had ever made with life, but his course was run and the - school had not reopened after the holidays when Tom Branstone ceased to - fight. It seemed that, on the night of the Conversazione, he had had his - hour, and - </p> - <p> - <br /> - </p> - <p class="indent30"> - “men must endure - </p> - <p class="indent15"> - Their going hence even as their coming hither: - </p> - <p class="indent15"> - Ripeness is all.” - </p> - <p> - <br /> - </p> - <p> - It did not come to Sam as the shattering of his world—only the death - of Anne could have done that—but certainly as a stunning blow. It - was the first time that he had come intimately close to death and he - missed death’s beauty and its peace. He saw too well its ugliness and the - detail of a burial. It hurt, not because Tom Branstone had had but little - joy in life, but because he died too soon to see the glory of his son. In - after years, Sam Branstone would have liked to recall how Tom’s death - softened him, how he melted to tears before that waxen face and lovingly - bought flowers to put inside the coffin. - </p> - <p> - It wouldn’t do. It didn’t fit the facts. He knew that, honestly, he had - been angry with his father for dying, especially for dying in the - holidays. It spoiled the holidays and it robbed Sam of the day’s holiday - he would have had for the funeral had Tom had the gumption to die in - termtime. He resented his father’s death as he would have resented an - unjust thrashing from him—if Tom Branstone ever thrashed anybody. - Tom had died prematurely, while he was still useful to Sam. He had bilked - Sam, and Sam was angry. - </p> - <p> - Not only had Tom died too soon to see the glory of his son, but his son’s - glory was seriously jeopardized by the breadwinner’s death. Sam had, in - his innermost soul, given up the idea of Oxford; he was not apt enough at - classics, but he was far from admitting it now. It was Tom’s death, and - that alone, which deprived him of that crown. - </p> - <p> - Anne felt it deeply. She had loved Tom with something like mother-love as - well as wife’s. If she had been hard with him, it was for his good, and he - as well as she had known that her hardness was like the hardness of a - crab’s shell, hiding a tender place inside. Now that he was dead she could - hide her grief as she had hidden her love, and went about her business - soberly. Soberly she drew her money from the Sick and Burial Society and - soberly she spent it on “black” for Sam, for George, Madge and herself, - doing those things which Tom would have expected to be done to dignify his - death, but adding nothing that would make his funeral a neighbours’ - raree-show. - </p> - <p> - She came back from the cemetery with dry eyes and soberly presided at the - inevitable meal (where she had to comfort a lachrymose O’Rourke) and, on - the morrow, soberly set out to visit Mr. Travers, and to tell him that, of - course, she could not now keep Sam at school. It was little that Travers - was allowed to guess from this stoic that this was the end of her dream - for Sam, that with Tom’s death the underpinnings of her world had flopped. - And her pride stood where it stood five years ago: no more now than then - would she accept from Travers money to pay expenses. - </p> - <p> - She shook her head defiantly. “The lad’ull have to work,” she said. - </p> - <p> - Travers knew adamant when he saw it. “Then, at least, let him come here - and work in my office.” Anne almost glared. “I want a fair field and no - favour. He’ll have to start as office-boy, with the wages of an - office-boy.” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, hardly that, Mrs. Branstone. Remember, he comes to me from the - Classical Transitus.” - </p> - <p> - “Yes,” she said, “and much use that is to an estate agent. He can’t add up - a row of figures.” - </p> - <p> - She had no delusions about the practical value of a public school - education. - </p> - <p> - “I think, though, that we must let it count for something,” he replied, - and Anne, compromising against the grain, consented to let it count for - fifteen shillings a week “until we see,” added Mr. Travers, “how he - shapes.” He intended to see very soon. - </p> - <p> - Anne nodded grimly. “I’ll see he shapes,” she said, and Sam, silent - witness of this pregnant interview, was hardly surprised by Anne’s first - words on reaching home. “Get out those old arithmetic text-books of - yours,” she said, “and look up mensuration. I’ve not forgotten it, if you - have.” - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER VI—THE NEST-EGG - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>OM Branstone had - drawn a wage of a pound a week, and tips may have averaged ten shillings - but more probably did not; your sixpenny tipper is a rare bird in - Manchester. - </p> - <p> - Yet Anne had saved steadily, and she had not allowed a life-long habit to - be interrupted by a little thing like the necessity of providing Sam with - Grammar School books and clothes. I do not say that it was admirable in - her, but merely that it was heroic. It was an incredible feat, but it can - be done: it is done every day by people for whom the word “thrift” has - meaning. Perhaps they are often unlovely in their lives or perhaps they - have the robust satisfaction of those who live for an idea: opinion has - always differed as to whether what they do is worth doing, and modern - opinion inclines strongly to the belief that it is not. Life to these - iconoclasts seems more important than the means of life. - </p> - <p> - To Anne it seemed abundantly worth while, and the proof was here now when - she found that the interest on her savings amounted to three and - four-pence weekly. They could live on Sam’s earnings and Anne’s “means” - without pinching. Her forethought made all the difference now between too - little and enough. - </p> - <p> - It was, of course, only to Anne that this seemed enough: Sam took a larger - view, but found his vision cramped for some time to come by the conditions - he met with in Mr. Travers’ office. Certainly that generous soul did not - mean to humiliate Sam; he did not mean Sam to begin as office-boy; but, - whatever his intentions, the clerks in his office defeated them. Sam was a - newcomer, the latest arrival, in a minority of one against the old - inhabitants; was there, moreover, obviously to do as he was told. He was - told to sweep the floor in the morning, to copy letters and to lick - stamps. He did these things rebelliously, bitter at heart that such menial - service should be required of an ex-member of the Classical Transitus, - certain that there was some mistake, that he had only to catch Mr. - Travers’ eye when he was so shamefully occupied for that gentleman to take - instant and drastic measures with the clerks who misemployed him. - </p> - <p> - Mr. Travers’ eye, even though caught at what Sam thought an opportune - moment, While Sam copied letters, unexpectedly failed to disapprove. He - seemed less preoccupied with Sam’s affairs than Sam was. As a matter of - fact, he took a long distance view of Sam, and took it, unfortunately, - rather muggily. Travers had the defect of his quality. A generous man, he - was generous in the worst way to himself, and Sam soon learnt the meaning - of a euphemism, current in the office, “Mr. Travers is attending a - property auction.” Property auctions are, it is true, usually held on - licensed premises, and whether Mr. Travers was or was not attending an - auction he was certainly on licensed premises more often than was good for - either his business or himself. - </p> - <p> - And it was bad for Sam, not because it left him to find his own feet in - the office and to fight unbacked with his superiors (wherein, indeed, it - was good), but because he had figured Travers from afar as a princely - gentleman, without reproach, and the discovery of his failing took Sam a - long way on the road to cynicism. In youth one’s faith dies hard, and, - being dead, turns rapidly corrupt. - </p> - <p> - The business was an excellent one, rotting slowly from the top, and Sam - found the office a notable place in which to pick up knowledge of the - world; especially, since he lacked good direction, of the shadier ways of - the world. He felt that he had declined in status: his school-friends, - there his equals, had gone either to the Universities or, with influence - behind them, to the professions. If they went to business, it was as their - fathers’ sons. They were not scratch men, and Sam felt that he was - starting at the scratch-line. - </p> - <p> - Travers had really no intentions that Sam should feel himself misprized. - The boy had to learn the business, and the way to understanding lay from - the bottom upwards. But Sam contrasted himself bitterly with Lance, first - at school and then at Cambridge. In that, indeed, he found a minimum of - consolation. It wasn’t rational, but to Anne and consequently to Sam, - university had meant Oxford, and he won a hardy solace from the thought - that Lance was, after all, “only” at Cambridge. - </p> - <p> - Meantime, he grew in knowledge of his world, and education came to Sam, - not in the cloistered freedom of the Isis, but where, in Manchester, he - went collecting rents: in country courts where hard laws operated hardly: - and in the office, where men did not greet each other with a friendly - smile, but gave instead the “competition glare.” It was not a kindly - school in which he spent the developing years, but one where it was taught - that self’s the man, and magnanimity is a mistake. “Get on or get out,” - and Sam got on with a sort of choleric zeal which gave no quarter and - expected none. - </p> - <p> - But he did not get on fast enough to please himself. He had, he thought, - stepped down from the days of the Grammar School where he belonged with - the caste that rules or, at any rate, administers, the caste that sits on - velvet and overlooks the mob. Now he was in the cockpit, with the mob that - struggles to ascend, and, to Sam, a wage of thirty shillings a week at the - age of twenty was a derisory ascension. Anne thought it satisfying, and it - was her contentment with his rate of progress which first made him begin - to think of her as, after all, a limited person. You didn’t bribe Sam - Branstone to be meekly satisfied with thirty shillings a week. - </p> - <p> - “The trouble is,” he said to the only man in the office with whom he was - in the least confidential, “that you don’t begin to get on till you’ve got - a bit of capital together. Money breeds money.” - </p> - <p> - His friend suggested betting as a means to affluence, and offered to tell - him of a dead certainty. - </p> - <p> - Sam assumed his cunningest air of a superman of the world. “The best row - of houses where I go for the rents,” he said, “belongs to Jack Elsworth, - the bookie. I don’t see why I should help him to buy another house.” - </p> - <p> - “Bookies don’t always win,” said the optimist. - </p> - <p> - “No,” said Sam. “It’s possible to make money out of betting and it’s - possible to get a baby by a harlot, but that isn’t what the harlot’s for, - and it isn’t what the bookie’s for.” - </p> - <p> - At this time, harlots were the pegs on which Sam hung his wit. He had no - other use for them, but had discovered that a coarse turn of phrase was an - asset in his world and therefore wielded it. But the effect of this little - conversation was to crystallize his aim. He wanted that “bit of capital” - badly, and did not intend that, if opportunity presented, a nice regard - for scruple should hold him back from taking anything the gods might send. - He had no ultimate design, but fortune came to the fortunate and money to - the moneyed, so that the first move was, obviously, to get money. He - wanted a jumping-off place; then he would soar. - </p> - <p> - Opportunity walked into the office in the person of Joseph of Arimathea - Minnifie. That was his full baptismal name: analogous with the styles of - certain limited companies, such as John Smith ( of Newcastle) Limited, to - distinguish that Smith from other Smiths. Minnifie’s mother had explained - to the parson that she was a New Testament woman. To her intimates she had - put it that she chose the name Joseph because she liked it, but she also - liked a man to be a man. It was deduced that she supposed the third Joseph - in the Bible would have acted differently from the first in the affair of - Potiphar’s wife. - </p> - <p> - Sam’s accent had degenerated since the days of Shylock and the reading - prize. It had kept bad company, and might be known by the company it kept - to-day rather than by that which it used to keep at school; but he could - still, without too great an effort, assume a well-bred speech and was - often sent with a prospective buyer to show off any likely houses on Mr. - Travers’ list. Because it was usual for him to go on such errands, and not - because anyone supposed that niceties of speech could or would have any - effect on Mr. Minnifie, he was sent with him in a cab to tour the suburbs - where Travers had property in charge. - </p> - <p> - A coarse accent was not likely to offend Joseph Minnifie, who a fortnight - earlier had been a market porter at Shude Hill, but had now come into - money, well invested in the best Brewery securities, from his uncle, a - publican. Minnifie had sold out some of the shares because he could now - satisfy a long ambition and live in his own house. He proposed, he told - Mr. Travers, to retire to the country. - </p> - <p> - “The country?” asked Travers, whose practice was suburban. - </p> - <p> - “Well,” said Minnifie, “summat quiet and homely. I’d like a change from - Rochdale Road. I thought,” he went on rather shyly, “of Whalley Range. - It’s a good neighbourhood.” - </p> - <p> - Travers refrained from pointing out that Whalley Range was not usually - regarded as the country, but was, in fact, of the inner ring of suburbs, a - penny tram fare from the centre of Manchester. “Oh, yes, Mr. Minnifie,” he - said. “I think I can satisfy you in W’halley Range. I have several - available houses on my books in that district.” - </p> - <p> - “I’ll pay three hundred pound for what I like,” said Minnifie, quite - fiercely. “I’ve got it in my pocket now.” He was fierce because he was not - yet quite sure that his legacy was not phantom gold, and he pulled out a - bundle of notes as much to assure himself that they were still where he - had put them as with the idea of proving his good faith to Travers. - </p> - <p> - Travers concealed a smile. After all, commission on three hundred pounds - is not to be sneezed at, but neither was this the sort of client for whom - Traver’s disturbed his habits. “I have myself,” he said, “a large property - auction to attend in the city, but Mr. Branstone will go with you to - inspect the houses.” He smiled kindly on Sam, and added, lest Minnifie - should think his affair, so important to him, underrated by the agent: - “Mr. Branstone is my confidential man. When Mr. Branstone tells you - anything about the houses you are going to see, it is as if I spoke - myself.” - </p> - <p> - “I see,” said Minnifie. “He’s your foreman, and you needn’t tell me you’ll - back him up. I know foremen.” - </p> - <p> - “Well, his word is certainly as good as mine. I leave you in safe hands, - Mr. Minnifie.” And Travers went out to attend his first auction of the - day, which usually happened at eleven o’clock in the morning. - </p> - <p> - Sam and the client took a cab to Whalley Range, where Minnifie inspected - several houses which were to be had at about his price. But he was hard to - satisfy, and, what was worse, apparently unable to define his reasons for - dissatisfaction. As Sam praised this and that about a house, Minnifie - admitted that such things were praiseworthy, but he would, please, see - another house. Sam was a little piqued and tried his best to be genial, - suspecting that Minnifie resented being fobbed off with a “foreman”; and - Sam’s best was very good, so that presently the ice was thawed. - </p> - <p> - Minnifle stood at the bow-window of a dining-room and looked up and down - the street. It was empty save for a tradesman’s boy. From somewhere round - the corner came the diminished rattle of a milk-cart. Minnifle shook his - head sadly. - </p> - <p> - “It’s quiet,” he said. “See that road. Nothing stirring. What is there for - the missus to look at when she sits in the window?” - </p> - <p> - “It’s morning,” said Sam. “Things will be brisker in the afternoon.” But - his tone lacked conviction, and he could not resist the temptation to add: - “There’s a cat crossing the road now.” - </p> - <p> - “Come out,” said Minnifle. “This’ull none do,” and when they stood upon - the door-step he sniffed the air of Whalley Range with disapproval. “I - don’t like it and it’s no use pretending that I do. It’s got a cold smell - to me. It isn’t homely.” - </p> - <p> - “I know what you mean,” said Sam, diagnosing the trouble. “Wait a bit.” He - gave the cabman an address and was careful to leave the window open. They - came to other streets where the scent of yesterday’s fried fish still - lingered in the air and the nose of Mr. Minnifle inhaled it greedily. - “This is better,” he pronounced. - </p> - <p> - They had come to Greenheys, which, when De Quincey’s father built a - country house there in 1791, was “separated from the last outskirts of - Manchester by an entire mile.” It is by no means separated now, and good - houses of the mid-Victorian period are to be had cheaply because good - tenants dislike bad neighbours. Travers had one of these survivals from an - urbane past on his books and Sam hugged himself for thinking of it now: - that house had proved itself the whitest of white elephants. - </p> - <p> - Mr. Minnifie, exhilarated by the spicy smells of Greenheys, was no longer - a timid excursionist looking only where his guide bade him, but a house - hunter hot upon the trail, with eyes that spied on each side of their - route. - </p> - <p> - “Ah!” he called suddenly. “Stop!” - </p> - <p> - The cabman stopped. “But we’re not there,” said Sam, rather blankly. - </p> - <p> - “I think we are,” said Minnifie, and got out of the cab. - </p> - <p> - Sam followed, in that leaden state of mind which often precedes - inspiration. What had attracted Minnifie was a semi-detached house at a - corner, which the trams passed. Opposite were shops, and there was a - lively stir in the street. Certainly, Mrs. Minnifie would have something - to see here when she looked out of the window. - </p> - <p> - Sam knew that pair of houses, and what he knew made him fear that he would - not, this time, rid Mr. Travers of the white elephant on his books. They - were good houses enough, but the people who had furniture to fill them - were not the sort of people who welcomed shops opposite their windows and - trams past their gate, so that both had been long empty. Now, however, - they were for sale, under a will, and a quick sale was wanted that the - estate might be wound up. They would certainly go cheaply on that account, - and the more so since two attempted auctions had proved abortive. There - had been no offers. - </p> - <p> - And here was Mr. Minnilie plainly delighted, and those houses not in - Travers’ charge, but in that of a rival agency! Sam felt depressed, then - as dawn follows darkness, lie thought of what Travers had said, that Sam’s - word was as good as his own. It was going to be, and Mr. Minnifie’s money - as good in Sam’s hands as in those of Calverts’, the legitimate agents for - this pair of houses. He stepped out briskly now, the ardent salesman. - </p> - <p> - “One moment, Mr. Minnifie. I haven’t the key of this house with me, but it - is at the shop opposite. I will get it.” His quick eye had read so much on - Calverts’ notice board, but by the time he returned, Minnifie had also - seen that rival name on the board and mentioned the fact. - </p> - <p> - “I know,” said Sam. “The board has not been altered, but this property is - in my hands now.” - </p> - <p> - Which was true. - </p> - <p> - The house enchanted Minnifie, who had made up his mind in advance to be - enchanted. And, of course, rooms may be in need of decoration, but good - proportions tell, even on a Mr. Minnifie. This house was very different - from the jerry-built villas of Whalley Range. - </p> - <p> - “What’s price?” he asked. - </p> - <p> - “Three hundred and fifteen pounds,” said Sam. - </p> - <p> - “I said three hundred and I’ll none budge.” - </p> - <p> - “If you will come to the office at six, I shall be able to tell you,” said - Sam, naming a queer hour, seeing that the office closed at half-past five. - </p> - <p> - “All right,” said Minnifie. “It’s a firm offer at three hundred, and I’m a - man of my word.” - </p> - <p> - Sam devoutly hoped so. He was taking a considerable gamble on it. They - parted, and Sam, as usual, went home for lunch, but, not as usual, - returned with his cheque-book in his pocket. His accumulated savings were - five pounds, but he possessed a cheque-book. He waited rather carefully - until the banks had closed, then he walked into Calverts’ offices and - offered them two hundred and fifty pounds for the pair of semi-detached - houses in Greenheys. They accepted two hundred and seventy-five; and Sam - drew a cheque for that amount, and received the title-deeds in exchange. - Then he palpitated, but it was, in any case, safely after banking hours. - Calverts could not present his cheque that day. - </p> - <p> - He was busy at five-thirty, when the clerks left, and proposed to work - late for a while, “to clear things up,” he said. At six Minnifie arrived, - true to his word, and Sam could have kissed him. He had spent the longest - half hour of his life. He took Minnifie by the private door into Travers’ - office, so that he should not see the empty general office, and put him in - the client’s chair, himself usurping Travers’ seat. - </p> - <p> - “Well, Mr. Minnifie,” he said, “suppose I told you that the price is still - three fifteen, what would you say?” - </p> - <p> - “I’d say ‘Good-day,’” and Minnifie showed that he meant it by rising to - his feet. Sam went on hurriedly. - </p> - <p> - “Ah! Then it’s as well that I’ve succeeded. It has been an infinitude of - trouble—-” - </p> - <p> - “I reckon,” said Minnifie, “that you’re here to take trouble. Leastways, - if it’s easy money in your line, it’s the only line that’s made that way.” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, we have our troubles, like everybody else. This document,” he went - on, “conveys the house to you. The price is three hundred pounds.” - </p> - <p> - “It’s a bargain,” said Mr. Minnifie, producing his notes, “count’em.” Sam - counted feverishly, then made out a receipt. Nothing short of murder would - have induced him to part with that money now. - </p> - <p> - “If you will meet me to-morrow at twelve at that address—a lawyer’s—we - will have the conveyance put in proper form.” - </p> - <p> - “I’ve seen a bit of lawyers lately over this brass of mine,” said - Minnifie, “and I don’t like’em. They eat money.” - </p> - <p> - “But in this case,” said Sam magnanimously, “I pay the lawyer’s fees.” - </p> - <p> - “Then I’ll be there,” said Minnifie. - </p> - <p> - Sam was waiting next day for the doors of his bank to open, and breathed - colossal relief when his three hundred pounds were safely in to meet his - cheque. He had a net profit of some twenty pounds, after settling for the - conveyancing, and he had a house to sell. Not long afterwards, he sold it - for one hundred and seventy-five pounds. - </p> - <p> - The fact that one of the pair had been thought desirable by somebody - caused somebody else to desire the other: and Sam could only hope that the - new neighbours would not compare notes. If they did, it did not matter; he - had only obeyed the axiom of commerce, “Buy cheap, sell dear,” and it was - not his fault that in the one case he had had to sell less dearly than in - the other. - </p> - <p> - His bank credit was two hundred pounds. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER VII—THE FLEDGLING CAPITALIST - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>N Sam’s opinion, - nobody had suffered. Mr. Travers lost nothing, because the corner house - had conquered Minnifie at sight, and he would not in any case have bought - the white elephant which Travers had for sale. Calverts had got as much as - they expected to get for the houses, or they would not have sold, while - the beneficiary under the late owner’s will was a charity, and Sam hoped - that charity was charitable enough not to look a gift-horse in the mouth: - if it wasn’t, it ought to be. As to the purchasers, who had certainly paid - more for the property than they need have done, that was what purchasers - were for. Why did smart business men exist if not to exploit purchasers? - </p> - <p> - All this was highly comforting, but to confess the need for comfort was to - admit to disquiet, and he found that it was one thing to argue in this - strain with his conscience, and another to boast to Anne of his - achievement. Women don’t understand business, and he had an uneasy feeling - that the ethics of the transaction would not satisfy Anne. He decided that - he had better not tell her, that he must resist his impulse of surprising - her with the gift of a seal-skin coat, and remained a capitalist under the - rose. There was no hurry, and perhaps his next stroke, when it came, would - be under conditions that would bear the limelight of her scrutiny. - </p> - <p> - But repression was not all. Justify himself as he would, chuckle over his - gains as he did, the matter searched him deeply and reacted sharply in two - ways, of which the first began as that old expedient of sinners, - conscience-money. There are defaulters who find absolution for themselves - by sending notes, under initials, to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and - by having them acknowledged with impressiveness in the personal columns of - the <i>Times</i>. That was not Sam’s way: he did not do good deeds by - stealth, and his conscience-money did not go out of the family. He used it - philanthropically, but it was philanthropy and ten per cent, to begin - with, and in the end it was very much more than ten per cent. It was the - Chappie Bill Posting and Window-Cleaning Company. - </p> - <p> - He thought that he could, without exciting Anne’s suspicions, tell her - that his savings had reached ten pounds, and proposed to spend that sum - for the benefit of George Chappie. - </p> - <p> - Inspired, perhaps, by his household gods, George was facing life bravely, - and won a minor place in Anne’s good graces when he and Madge produced a - firstborn son, who had the remarkable quality of looking exactly like the - infant Samuel, whose name he bore. But George had not, in her opinion, - deserved Sam’s generosity to this extent. - </p> - <p> - “You’re over-good to them,” she said. “You’ve made a man and woman of a - pair of wastrels, and I’d let them alone to make their own way now.” - </p> - <p> - “Do you think it will be much of a way?” asked Sam. “They’re the sort that - need help.” - </p> - <p> - “Aye,” she said, “they’ll lean on you all right. They’re good at leaning.” - </p> - <p> - “Well,” said Sam, drawing himself up. “Let them lean.” - </p> - <p> - “Sam,” said Anne, “I’m not fond, but if I told you what I think of you for - this, you’d have the right to call me fond and foolish. I like you very - well, my son. You’re the strong man helping and supporting the weak.” - </p> - <p> - She finished suddenly and a thought shamefacedly. She had praised him - openly and considered it a weakness in her. Sam put a hand on her - shoulder. It was not demonstrative, but his gesture was full of - understanding, and Anne turned rapidly away, shaking him off almost with - rudeness, taking very earnestly to her business of clearing away their - tea-things. - </p> - <p> - Sam watched appreciatively through the corner of his eye. He relished - praise from Anne, even when, as now, it was not strictly merited. The - strong in Sam’s philosophy did not support the weak, but the weak the - strong. He was confirmed in his belief that women could not understand - business. This, however, he reminded himself, was not pure business, it - was conscience-money, which ought not to be unconscionably reproductive: - so he bought George a hand-cart, ladder, bucket and leathers, and exacted - from him not more than ten per cent, on his capital expenditure. In - Travers’ business Sam found opportunities of pushing George. A client took - a house, and Sam would suggest with a nicely casual air that the windows - needed cleaning. He would, to save the client trouble, then offer to send - a man round, so that George’s connection waxed, and he prospered to the - tune of two amazing pounds a week, till the restless Sam began to widen - his view of George’s potentialities. - </p> - <p> - His eye for the main chance had always a useful squint which could see - money round the corner as well as in the straight high road, and he - thought that George, with his outfit of ladders, could see his talent for - height in other ways than window cleaning. There was, for example, - bill-posting, a trade whose mysteries Sam deemed it not beyond George’s - capabilities to learn. - </p> - <p> - The thing grew by degrees, from the first builder’s hoarding which Sam - rented venturously for advertising space, to a comfortable little business - that ran itself by its own momentum long after he tired of its comparative - insignificance. With George, the start was all: he could always plod where - Sam had led, and as Sam had time to set the ball rolling, and money enough - to spoon-feed the infant business with capital, George kept the thing in - being by careful, steady management. He hadn’t boasted when he told Anne - he was steady. - </p> - <p> - Of course, Sam was impatient and deplored his active partner’s inactivity. - He grew tired of the gradual increase, but, all the same, the business was - unquestionably successful, and he relished hugely his sense of being the - power behind the throne, if only behind a small, conservative, so - lamentably unambitious throne. Sam also was among the king makers. - </p> - <p> - The other, greater sequel to his reaction led to more pyrotechnical - results, and eventually to Sam’s launch on his career. Nothing happened at - first, and indeed for so long that he was feeling himself between the - devil of the estate office and the deep sea of George’s persistent - carefulness. The Chappie Bill-Posting Company was good enough for George, - but not for Sam: there were too many com petitors with too great - resources, while the estate office routine bored him, and opportunities - for piratical enterprise did not recur. - </p> - <p> - He felt, at twenty-four years of age, and at two pounds ten a week, that - he was growing old in service, he who was not meant to serve but to be - served. - </p> - <p> - But then—desolating thought—was he meant to be served? Had he - lost, or was he, at any rate, not losing the accent of speech and mind of - those who are served? He knew that his accent had touched pitch and been - defiled: those bawdy stories of his were told in the tongue of his - hearers, and there had been clients lately who had spoken to him, when - inspecting property, as if he were a clerk, and not a pleasant, - gentlemanly youth of obvious superiority to his present, no doubt - temporary, job. He had a sudden fear that the job might not be temporary - after all, and there followed a time when he was wholly bent on - self-improvement, when he abjured the narrow way of professional - text-books and read that he might become well-read, that he might bandy - allusions with those old school-fellows of his who had gone to - Universities, that he might, if he could not hope to shine, at least be - not outshone. - </p> - <p> - It wasn’t <i>pour le bon motif</i>, and he did not even pretend to like - the greater part of what he read. He crammed against the grain, and a - growing row of the “World’s Classics” figured on his shelf as trophies of - his perseverance. Industriously he rubbed away the rust which had - accumulated on his mind since it took its not very brilliant polish of the - Grammar School. He took down the dust-stained Gibbon he had won for - reading, and ploughed heroically through it. - </p> - <p> - That reminded him of another chink in his armour. A man of the world must - have the knack of speaking to the world, and Sam became a member of the - Concentrics. As Anne once told him, he had the gift of the gab, but, - except for his present fluent recommendations of houses to prospective - tenants, it was a talent he had buried. Now, however, he proposed to dig - it up and did it in (he thought) the ambitious surroundings of the - Concentrics, who were indeed as mixed a company as he could have found - anywhere, and on that account the better for his purpose. - </p> - <p> - The common centre which was supposed to hold the Concentrics together was - a love of literature, but they tended to drop literature for politics on - the slightest pretext. There were literary enthusiasts amongst them, but - it rarely happened that one man’s enthusiasm coincided with another’s. It - did less than coincide. A member would read a laborious paper on some man - of letters, and the subsequent discussion would be conducted by men who - began their intelligent speeches by admitting that they had not read a - word of, say, Henry James or Lafcadio Hearn, but that their opinion was - nevertheless so and so. Whereas, of course, nobody ever confessed to - ignorance of politics. Politics is like law, only more so. One is presumed - by the law to know the law, which is highly presumptuous of the law, - because not even the lawyers know the law, and they must often go to - judges, at their client’s expense, to find out what the law is: and the - “more so,” as applied to politics, is that while laymen hesitate to argue - a point of law, and go to an expert, they never hesitate to argue a point - of politics, and <i>are</i> the expert. - </p> - <p> - Political discussions amongst the Concentrics were real and passionate, - literary discussions unreal and frigid; and as “social reform” became a - favourite shibboleth about this time, literature took a back seat in - favour of subjects about which men could grow emotional and their oratory - rhetorical. It was all one to Sam, who was here to speak, and did his - reading at home. - </p> - <p> - He spoke often, so that he soon improved, and he practised the literary - allusiveness which was the purpose of his reading to such effect that he - attracted the attention of the chairman, who was the Rev. Peter Struggles. - </p> - <p> - It is not, strictly, fair to say that a man is handicapped through life by - a name like Struggles, because the legal process by which one can change - an undesirable name is inexpensive, but Peter had never thought of such a - move, and wore his handicap without being aware of it. In any case, he - failed in life. He had a round face, red hair, side-whiskers: took snuff - and messed his coat: was perfectly futile in practical affairs and - absolutely “a dear.” His scholarship was not profound, but he loved - letters genuinely, He had failed steadily for thirty years to run a - private school for boys in a suburb which was degenerating to - industrialism, and late in life had taken orders, quite sincerely, not in - the least with the idea of helping his school with a new respectability. - It was, anyhow, beyond help, and a man who offered tradesmen’s sons a - sound commercial education was presently to buy him out. - </p> - <p> - Peter Struggles, well in his fifties, became curate to a vicar of forty, - in the large, rough-and-tumble parish of St. Mary’s. One says that he had - failed in life, and, by Sam’s standards, he had, and even by the working - standards of his church. A man at fifty-six should not be a curate with an - income of some hundred and twenty pounds a year. But if a man is happy at - fifty-six to be a curate with that income? If he find satisfaction in it? - Snuff was his indulgence, and the chairmanship of the Concentrics, who - were not sectarian, his dissipation. For the rest, Peter had made harbour. - To the pushing educationist who had bought him out, for a song, and now - profaned his old school buildings with shorthand and the rudiments of - bookkeeping, Peter was a failure and a pathetic failure. He was not - conscious of failure himself, nor of anything but a serene contentment - that he had found, if late, the work that he was fit to do. Through sheer - single-minded, inoffensive, unobtrusive goodness he came to be a figure in - that parish, and a power. Undignified in bearing, and careless in dress, - he had a dignity of mind and soul. - </p> - <p> - Sam Branstone despised a worldly failure, here was a man of more than - twice Sam’s years, with less money than Sam had, and, by all his canons, - Sam should have despised Peter. But he didn’t. It was partly, no doubt, - other people’s opinions that influenced Sam—the universal esteem - which Peter Struggles won—but it was by much more the innate - nobility of the old curate. Sam began his speaking at the Concentrics to - impress his fellow members, he ended by caring only for the appreciation - of the quaint, slovenly figure who occupied the chair. - </p> - <p> - He got the appreciation he craved. Peter was shrewd enough to discount - Sam’s rhetorics, and the flashy tricks of apt quotation: he saw Sam as a - misguided, self-seeking thruster who read only for veneer and spoke only - to impress. But, at least, Sam tried, and Peter could admire perseverance. - The thing was to direct Sam’s perseverance well, and Peter asked him to - supper. - </p> - <p> - Our man of the world was prodigiously thrilled. The honour was - exceptional, for Peter could not afford to be a host often, and Sam was - aware not only of its rarity, but of Peter’s unique standing in the - parish: and, more than that, of Peter’s worth. To be singled out by Peter - Struggles, and asked to sup, was, socially, a triumph. It sounds absurd, - and perhaps it is absurd that one good man should shine so brightly by - contrast with the fifteen thousand others of an over-crowded parish, but - that was why Peter was a colossus amongst the pigmies, and why Sam - Branstone was egregiously excited by an invitation to sup at Peter’s - little house. - </p> - <p> - Peter did not invite Sam to preach at him. It was the boy’s mind rather - than his soul that was the target of his aim, and Peter’s select library - to which he trusted for influence. Certainly the little meal of cold beef - and cocoa was not calculated to impress, nor the old, worn furniture, with - the gaping rents in its horse-hair coverings, through which the stuffing - poured. He handled books with reverence, and spoke of them, but Sam was - hardly listening. He was under fire from another battery. - </p> - <p> - Ada Struggles met young men at church functions, and spoke with them at - Sunday School, but she had few opportunities of greater intimacy, and was - not the lady to waste so rare a chance as this. Peter droned on amongst - his books and presently was lost in reading one. Ada lost herself in - nothing except a burning desire, to monopolize Sam. Books did not interest - Ada: getting married did. - </p> - <p> - The trouble was that in the days of his school’s comparative prosperity, - Peter had done Ada rather well. Perhaps as a schoolmaster himself, he got - special consideration over terms, but at any rate he had sent her to a - good boarding school. She had received the education of a lady, and it - wasn’t fair, it didn’t chime with the fitness of things that she should - now be the daughter of an impractical curate. Her case, to some extent, - was parallel with Sam’s: the past of both had augured well, and the future - depended on their wits. - </p> - <p> - There, however, the parallel ceased, for Ada had few wits, but she had - moods, and the reverse side of the moping discontent, which was endemic - with her, was the meretricious brilliance she now paraded for Sam’s - entanglement. Ada was “all out” after her prey, in her best clothes and - her best, that is, her most captivatingly genial manners. - </p> - <p> - Sam thought that she illuminated that dingy book-surrounded room. They - were not gay books with gilded bindings, but solid, well-worn volumes of - ponderous aspect. The books repelled and Ada invited. Youth called to - youth: youth answered to the call. - </p> - <p> - He was obsessed with his idea of accent, and the worldly value of - superiority in speech. Ada’s first appeal to him, though she did not know - it, was that she spoke well; her second was that she was her father’s - daughter; her third, as she knew perfectly, was the helplessness which she - used cunningly to flatter his masculine importance. She told him without a - word that he was a strong, powerful man, and she a flower which he might - pluck and wear. And she did the anemone business quite effectively. - </p> - <p> - There was not much of Ada, and what there was was not remarkable, but she - was fluffy and frilly and feminine in the feebler way. She had on - something that was not silk but suggested the rustle of silk. After all, - it was not Ada’s fault that it was not silk, or that her intimate - underclothing was of flannelette; she could only use the opportunities she - had, and they were few. - </p> - <p> - But she had the prettiness, the rather silly and never lasting prettiness, - which accompanies anæmia. - </p> - <p> - It would not wear, and she knew that it would not wear. She was becoming - desperate. Sam was sent by heaven. - </p> - <p> - He thought so, too. Old Struggles read “Marcus Aurelius,” standing by his - book-shelf, utterly forgetful of his guest, and the guest thought that - Peter’s preoccupation was also instructed by heaven. It left him free for - Ada. - </p> - <p> - What he said to Ada and what Ada said to him were things of no importance: - their serious conversation was not conducted by their tongues, but by - their eyes. - </p> - <p> - This is the sort of thing: - </p> - <p> - Ada (her voice): Of course, I remember seeing you quite often in church, - Mr. Branstone. - </p> - <p> - (Her eyes): And you found favour in my sight. - </p> - <p> - Sam (his voice): Naturally, I always saw you whenever I went. - </p> - <p> - (His eyes): It was for you I went to church. - </p> - <p> - Ada (her voice): I’m glad that you were able to come in to-night. I am - often lonely in the evenings. Father is so wrapped up in his books. - </p> - <p> - (Her eyes): Meeting you is the great moment of my life. I’m an unhappy - princess in an ogre’s tower. Rescue me. Rescue me. - </p> - <p> - Sam ( his voice): It was most kind of Mr. Struggles to ask me in for a - talk about books. - </p> - <p> - (His eyes): Books be damned. I’m fascinated by the sensuous rustle of your - skirts, and I’m a hero sent to kiss the wistful look away from your - pleading eyes. - </p> - <p> - And so on. By the end of the evening, had the unsaid speeches or half of - them been written down, Ada had evidence enough to have brought a breach - of promise action against a recalcitrant Sam. Only Sam was not - recalcitrant, but, on the contrary, ardent. It was, Ada congratulated - herself, uncommonly good going for a first meeting. - </p> - <p> - Peter emerged from “Marcus Aurelius” with a gentle smile which lighted up - his undistinguished face. “Yes. Pagan but grand,” he said, quite unaware - that half an hour had passed since he last spoke. “I’ll lend you this - book, Branstone, and now”.—he glanced at the clock—“I’m afraid - that I must turn you out. I’d no idea it was so late. How rapidly the time - passes when one is talking about one’s books!” - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER VIII—ADA STRUGGLES - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HERE were moments - during that night when Sam imagined that he was in the stranglehold of a - grand passion: times when he quite successfully deceived himself that he - burned for Ada. - </p> - <p> - And certainly the experience, unique for him, of a sleepless night lent - colour to the belief that he was passionately in love, whereas he was, in - fact, merely attracted by a girl who had spared no pains to attract; and - what kept Sam awake was not passion but calculation. The affair, indeed, - was as broad as it was long: it had a slender basis of mutual attraction, - and a monstrous superstructure on each side of self-interest. - </p> - <p> - He did not “see through” Ada to the point of being prophetic about her, - but he did even from the beginning perceive that Anne was not likely to be - enthusiastic. But would Anne greet any daughter-in-law with open arms? Was - there born the daughter of Eve whom Anne would think the peer of her Sam? - He did not want to cross his mother, but a man must be a man, and a - mother’s fondness and her jealousy of the intending wife were things about - which one had to be callous. The world, as Benedick said, must be peopled. - </p> - <p> - Anne would see eye to eye with him as to the practical advantages of Ada. - Ada was Peter’s daughter. - </p> - <p> - That parentage had, by way of discount, the defect of its quality. - Socially it was a great thing to be Peter’s son-in-law, and not only - socially but ideally. Sam’s admiration for the curate was genuine enough, - and he knew that Anne shared it. But there was the question of money, and - Peter had none. Sam kept his mother, and would have to keep his wife. He - saw in Ada an asset which he could ultimately exploit, but, in the - meantime, until there came into his mind the scheme which should turn his - association with Peter into money, he must reckon on a tight period. Anne - would see the tight period, but not the unborn, fruitful plan on which he - counted for their future. And he could not hurry that plan to birth. His - schemes came to him when he least expected them, spontaneously. They were - not to be forced by worry. - </p> - <p> - Again, he reminded himself, there was no hurry. He had only just met Ada, - and was planning as if his engagement ring were on her finger. Not that he - had any serious doubts about that ring and Ada’s willingness to wear it, - but she did not wear it yet, and there was time in hand, and to spare, for - consideration of these practical affairs. - </p> - <p> - Meantime, he loved her, and love, according to the authors, was the most - wonderful thing in the world. He told himself very firmly that he loved - Ada, and that love was wonderful. Reiteration is so potent that before - morning he believed what he wished to believe. He recalled the soft - pressure of her hand when she said “Good night,” the froufrou of her - skirt, her melting eye; and persuaded himself that Ada Struggles was a - pearl beyond price. - </p> - <p> - He was perfectly sure that he loved her, and for proof there was his - sleeplessness. It occurred to him that as he could not sleep, and was only - thinking in circles, he might as well do something to hasten the time when - he could see Ada again. He could not return “Marcus Aurelius” to Peter - until he had read it, and if he returned it with unexpected promptitude, - he must be ready to face a stiff examination in it; therefore he lit the - gas and read “Marcus Aurelius” by way of serving Ada, whom he loved. - </p> - <p> - Hard service, too, for there was not much in Sam’s philosophy which agreed - with the Emperor’s, but two nights later he was ringing Peter’s bell with - the book under his arm, an ordered précis of it in his mind, and some - selected passages from it on his tongue. They were not selected because - Sam liked them, but because he thought Peter liked them. - </p> - <p> - Peter was out, but Ada was in, and, curiously enough for one who was not - an optimist either by nature or experience, dressed again in her Sunday - clothes. - </p> - <p> - She opened the door to him. “Father is out, Mr. Branstone,” she said. - </p> - <p> - “I only called to return him this book.” - </p> - <p> - “I do not think he will be long,” said Ada promptly, who knew very well - that Peter would certainly be late. “Will you not come in and wait for - him?” - </p> - <p> - He came, crossing his Rubicon. The unchaperoned intimacy of that night - struck both of them as a daring short cut to a position to which they were - not entitled—a thing properly done only by the engaged and the - maturely and securely engaged. Luck fought for Ada. - </p> - <p> - “I’m afraid I can’t stay very long,” he hedged desperately. - </p> - <p> - Ada sat down and crossed her knees. A neat ankle was effectively on - exhibition. “That chair of father’s,” she said, “is fairly comfortable.” - Also, it faced Ada’s, and he drew up another, less inviting, chair, and - placed it flush with the fire. Except by a side-glance, he could not see - her ankle now, and evaded that aphrodisiac, while Peter’s chair, though - empty, completed the semi-circle, and seemed to give a sort of countenance - to their interview. Sam drew much comfort from that chair, and tried to - guide their conversation into literary paths of which the chair would have - approved. He discoursed of “Marcus Aurelius,” and he was very dull, but - felt virtuous. - </p> - <p> - Ada did not believe that it was virtuous to be dull, and mentally cursed - that <i>tertium quid</i>, the ghost of Peter Struggles, whom Sam had so - firmly established in his chair; but she saw that the pace was not to be - quickened here, under Peter’s roof. - </p> - <p> - “I think your knowledge of books is wonderful, Mr. Branstone,” she said, - when Sam had exhausted his ideas about “Marcus Aurelius.” - </p> - <p> - “I never find time to read, myself. Whenever I have the opportunity of - recreation, I go out for exercise.” The statement lacked the merit of - truth She never took exercise, but was adept at sitting in front of a fire - doing exactly nothing. The point was that in this house of the good Peter, - Sam’s enterprise was burked, and she wanted him where he could race - without a handicap. “Do you ever go to Heaton Park?” she asked - conversationally. “I shall probably be going there on Saturday.” - </p> - <p> - “With—with your father?” asked Sam. - </p> - <p> - “Oh, no,” she answered brightly. “Saturday is sermon day. That is why I am - in the way here, although,” she added pathetically, “I fear he often finds - me in the way. I am not bookish like you and him.” She gave that - explanation suddenly, and it satisfied him. - </p> - <p> - “I am not really bookish, either,” he said. “Of course you won’t be going - alone to Heaton Park.” - </p> - <p> - She hoped not. “I expect so,” she said. - </p> - <p> - Sam took the plunge. “Could I have the honour of accompanying you, Miss - Struggles?” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, but you are so busy. I must not waste your time.” - </p> - <p> - “It couldn’t be wasted with you,” said Sam, and glanced guiltily at - Peter’s chair, as if he had exceeded the limits of propriety, but he had - never seen Peter with anything but a benevolent smile, on his face, and - was unable to see him imaginatively now in any other mood. He took fresh - courage. “May I call for you?” - </p> - <p> - “That,” said Ada, “would never do. It would disturb father at his sermon. - I shall go by tram at about three o’clock.” She rose. There was nothing to - be done with Sam in that house, but she pinned her faith to Heaton Park: - and not in vain. - </p> - <p> - Allow for the difference in size, distance and the general scale of - things, and Heaton Park may be regarded as the Manchester equivalent to - Richmond Park. - </p> - <p> - Once upon a time the Manchester Town Council had a magnificent - opportunity, and lost it. There are legends that they did not mean to lose - it, and that they did not lose it through any fault of theirs. But they - lost it. They lost the chance of buying Trafford Park, which lies along - the banks of the Manchester Ship Canal, and was bought by Mr. Ernest Terah - Hooley. It is said that Trafford Park, now a flourishing and rather - American-look-ing industrial town (even the streets in its residential - area are numbered, and not named, after the American plan, and railways - stray about the roads, <i>more Americano</i>), is the one successful - enterprise associated with the name of Hooley. That may or may not be - true: at any rate the Manchester Town Council missed its chance at - Trafford Park, and when Heaton Park, another old estate, came into the - market, the Council did not repeat their mistake. - </p> - <p> - One goes, ascending all the way, through Cheetham Hill, the Ghetto, to the - heights of Crumpsall and the Park by a municipal tram, which is admirably - cheap or criminally cheap (according to one’s views on municipal trams), - and, in any case, magnificently efficient: and at the end of the ride, one - finds beauty. One may find tea at Heaton Hall, and pictures that overflow - from the meagre Art Gallery in Mosley Street, and municipal golf-links, - but one finds also beauty. - </p> - <p> - It is a rolling country, raised above the smoke, dotted with wood and - lake. Old gardens cling about the Hall, with rhododendron glades where - there are sculpture and pools, and the Park rolls free in open air that is - as clean as any air can be within five miles of Manchester Town Hall. It, - lacks of Paradise, and if one can see green hills from Heaton Park, one - cannot kelp but see the factory stacks that crown them or rise up from the - valleys, but beauty lingers here on the outskirts of an ugly city secure - against the jerry-builder and the ultimate defilement. - </p> - <p> - Ada was going to Heaton Park. Lovers have gone to Heaton Park before Ada - and they will go when Ada has crumbled to dust. Ada went, and Sam went - with her. - </p> - <p> - He went with her, not she with him: but if she led, he was very, very far - from admitting it, though it may have been his obscure, subconscious - knowledge of her leadership which made him outwardly assume the mien and - the gestures of a leader. He asserted, every inch of him, that he was man, - the conqueror, and she permitted the assertion and flattered it. Leading, - indeed, was not a habit of Ada’s, who was born to be led, but it is given - to all of us to outstrip our nature on occasion, and this was Ada’s - chance. A subtle skill was granted her that she might be cunning with her - opportunity. She was all calculation now, while Sam forgot to calculate, - and walked with Ada on his arm along the main drive of Heaton Park. - </p> - <p> - Romance kept step with him and put a radiant veil between his sober senses - and this witching hour: through glamour he beheld his Ada, and saw that - she was good. He soared to high ambition, either to die or to possess the - nymph, and now, that heady hour, to put all to the test amongst the - rhododendron bushes behind the Hall. - </p> - <p> - There, by a patch of ancient turf, he halted her, and found a seat near - the pool where water-lilies thrive: a lovers’ nook, love haunted. Who - knows what ardours of the old régime, when lords and ladies trod that - turf, had passed upon the now decaying stone of that comely seat? What - ghostly lovers in satin and brocade stood round to bless them or to mock? - Wood pigeons cooed above them, calling the tune, and Sam danced to it in - an ecstasy of hot desire. - </p> - <p> - She had the sleek self-satisfaction of a cat, the same unhurried certainty - that the mouse was hers to gobble when she chose. Ada was very happy. - </p> - <p> - But apprehension gripped him now. He had not known her for a week, and she - was Ada. Peter’s daughter. He stood aghast at his precipitance, then, with - the feeling that it was after all a “stroke” (though a larger one than - ever before), and that he believed in acting promptly, cleared his throat - and plunged into speech. - </p> - <p> - “Miss Struggles,” he said, “I know that I have only made your acquaintance - during the current week, but I seem to have known you all my life. It’s - because I used to see you in church, I daresay. I mean we were not - strangers when we met, and, anyhow,” he continued recklessly, “I don’t - care if we were. I’m not the hesitating sort. I mean, show me a thing, and - I can tell you right off whether it’s good or bad. My mind’s made up in a - jiffy: that’s the kind of fellow I am. And when my mind’s made up, I act.” - </p> - <p> - Ada had given a little gasp at the phrasing of his opening—that - “during the current week,” an idiom from his business correspondence - slipping in here to mark his nervousness—but he was fairly launched - now, and she purred gently like a cat well lubricated with butter. - </p> - <p> - “Yes, Mr. Branstone,” she said, “I think men ought to be resolute.” - </p> - <p> - “So do I,” he replied. “And so I am. Quite resolute and quite determined - about you.” - </p> - <p> - “About me?” She turned innocent eyes wonderingly at him. “I didn’t know - you were being personal.” - </p> - <p> - “Well,” he said, “I am. I am,” he repeated, and took her hand. - </p> - <p> - “Mr. Branstone,” she murmured, as one who sees a vision splendid in a - dream, and let her hand lie limp in his. - </p> - <p> - He bent to her. “Can’t you,” he asked hoarsely, “can’t you call me Sam?” - </p> - <p> - She called him Sam, and he kissed her. - </p> - <p> - “Ada!” He spoke her name like a caress. “Ada!” Her name was wonderful; she - was a miracle; Sam was triumphant love. At that moment he was passionately - in love, and he had conquered. He had pressed the lips of his divinity, - shyly, with a revealing inexpertness which should have charmed her, who, - being a woman, knew all about love while Sam was in short trousers. It - didn’t charm Ada, it touched no deeper chord than satisfaction at a good - job well done. This was his first, his freshest love, but she cared only - that the fish was on her line, securely hooked. He saw her face, idealized - her face and gloried in her face: she saw a wedding-ring, she was to be - Mrs., she was to escape the book-ridden home of Peter Struggles. Both had - their moment then, but Sam, in his, loved Ada, and Ada only loved herself. - </p> - <p> - “Darling,” he said, and sought her lips again She saw the thirst of him—and - used it. - </p> - <p> - She drew back. “I do not think you ought to kiss me again until we have - mentioned this to father,” said Ada Struggles, digging the hook more - deeply in her fish. “Not,” she went on, as she saw him flinch, “that I do - not want you to. Only——” - </p> - <p> - “Yes,” he said, as she left it at the “only,” and allowed him to - appreciate her infinite delicacy. “Yes. Of course. Shall we have tea at - the Hall?” - </p> - <p> - “Oh,” said Ada, “ought we to?” She was seen to tremble on the brink of a - delicious temptation, and with difficulty to resist. “I’m afraid,” she - decided, “not yet. But father will have finished his sermon by now, and if - you came and saw him at once, then... then, Sam...” She eyed him, - languishing, and opened up for him the golden vista of a jocund courtship—once - Peter had been “seen.” He came, obediently, to see Peter, and she relaxed - her standard so far as to take his arm down the drive of Heaton Park. - Indeed, just at the corner by the copse, where they were hidden, he had an - arm round her waist: his feet trod air, and his head was with the stars. - </p> - <p> - Ada was thinking, “If he gets the engagement ring to-night, I can show it - after church to-morrow.” - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER IX—ADA AND A MAD TRAM-CAR - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">O</span>N general grounds—on - the grounds, for instance, of anything so out-of-date and out of reason as - filial piety—Ada was quite indifferent to Peter’s “consent,” and - wanted it only to shackle Sam more firmly. She had not much doubt that - Peter would consent, as in fact he did, though not so readily as she had - anticipated. She did not exhibit an engagement ring at church next day for - the reason that she had none to exhibit. Peter kept Sam too late for that. - </p> - <p> - Of course Ada was wrong about Peter: she thought him a good man and - consequently a perfect fool, whereas his foolishness was imperfect, and he - was subject, like most unworldly people, to streaks of acumen about - worldly affairs. They come sometimes, these disconcerting fits of - perception, as if a dam had burst, and usually the times are inconvenient - to those who have reckoned on the unworldliness. - </p> - <p> - Peter answered her expectation so far as to say, “Bless my soul,” and so - far only. After that, he began an elaborate and skilful catechism of Sam, - which pretended to be a friendly talk about books, but was really an - examination of Sam Branstone, his character and disposition. At the - beginning Peter knew little of Sam beyond what his observations at the - Concentrics had told him, and Sam’s volunteered remarks about his salary - and his prospects interested Peter to a very slight extent. At the end - Peter decided that Sam was to be trusted to make things easy for Ada on - the material side, and that spiritually he was not beyond hope. - </p> - <p> - But he had not, spiritually, been touched as yet. Would Ada touch him? - That was the question for Peter, who knew his Ada. Ada could be led. He - admitted that he himself had failed with her, but he was not a strong man. - A strong man, with love as his ally, could lead Ada, could form her, and - Sam had strength, and, Peter thought, love. It depended, then, on whether - Sam’s love for Ada, reacting on him, would quicken his latent spirituality - so that the lead he gave to Ada would be good. And on the whole Peter - thought there was a reasonable chance. He believed in the power of love, - he believed that love is God and God is love, and confronted with his pair - of self-confessed lovers he read their future optimistically in the light - of his belief. What else could Peter do? They said they were in love, they - appeared to be in love, they had the symptoms of the state of love. He - could only judge the case on the evidence before the court. - </p> - <p> - He could not know that with Sam the symptoms, though real, were temporary, - and with Ada an intelligent mimicry. He gave his assent to their - engagement formally and very solemnly. - </p> - <p> - Sam left the house late, thrilling with Ada’s “Good-night” kiss, but the - glow was quick to fade, and he found himself thinking rather of Peter than - of Ada, whom of course, he loved. If ever probe was gentle, it was - Peter’s: nevertheless, Sam had felt the probe antagonistically. He had - shivered naked before Peter’s inquisition, he had understood that he was - under examination, and resented it. It was, however disguisedly, - opposition, and the thought of that kindly opponent led him to think of - one from whom, also, opposition was to be expected, and, probably, less - tactfully. It led to Anne. - </p> - <p> - Well, that was the fate of lovers: it was the way to deepen love and, - perhaps already a little doubtful of his love, he welcomed the idea of - Anne in opposition. It was curious that, while he thought of Ada as the - one woman in the world, he should expect Anne to be hostile not merely to - the idea of his marriage in general, but to marriage with Ada in - particular. It was hardly loyal to Ada, who should have reigned - unchallengably queen; and he could offer Anne the argument of the - advantages of being Peter Struggles’ son-in-law. But, with it all, he - looked for friction, and Anne was not to disappoint him there, although at - first she took it with a calmness which disarmed him. - </p> - <p> - He came in, of course, late, and ate his supper, silently hoping that she - would give him an opening, but Anne asked no questions, though she had not - seen him since early morning, and Sam was not often out for meals. She - asked no questions because she wanted to watch him first. It was clear to - her at a glance that he was in one of two conditions: he was drunk or he - was in love, and she wanted to make no mistake. If it was drink she would - move very promptly and directly: if love, cannily and by devious ways. She - found quickly that it was not drink. It was more serious. - </p> - <p> - Her silence awed him. “Mother,” he asked by way of breaking it, “aren’t - you well?” - </p> - <p> - “Aye,” she said grimly, “I’m well. Are you?” - </p> - <p> - “I’ve eaten a good supper.” - </p> - <p> - “I noticed that. I’ll clear away now.” - </p> - <p> - “Wait a bit. I’ve something to tell you.” - </p> - <p> - “I reckon it’ll keep till morning. You mayn’t have known it, but you came - in late. It’s bed-time and beyond.” - </p> - <p> - “Still,” he said, “I’d like you to hear this tonight.” - </p> - <p> - “You sound serious,” said Anne, and sat. “What is it, Sam?” - </p> - <p> - “It’s something rather wonderful, mother.” - </p> - <p> - “It would be,” said Anne. “What’s her name?” - </p> - <p> - Sam rose, astonished at her perspicacity. “You guessed!” - </p> - <p> - “I’m none in my dotage yet.” Anne was grim. - </p> - <p> - “Mother, I hope you’re pleased. You must be pleased. It’s all so wonderful - to me.” - </p> - <p> - “I asked you her name,” said Anne. - </p> - <p> - “It’s Ada Struggles. You know,” he went on hurriedly, “how much we all - admire her father.” - </p> - <p> - “I know, but I don’t know Ada.” - </p> - <p> - “You will soon,” said Sam enthusiastically. - </p> - <p> - “I will that,” said Anne, and there was menace in her voice. She took her - candle. “Good-night, my son,” she said, kissing him, which was not - habitual. - </p> - <p> - “Is that all?” he asked. “All that you have to say?” - </p> - <p> - “I don’t know Ada yet,” she said, and so was gone to bed. - </p> - <p> - Peter and Anne went opposite ways in their search to know whether this - marriage was the right thing for their children’s happiness. Peter ignored - the bread and butter problem, or took it for granted: and his was the - higher wisdom. He knew that Sam was not made of the stuff that starves for - bread; not in his body but in his soul was Sam likely to be pinched. - </p> - <p> - Anne took the earthlier view that happiness resulted from home comforts. - Ada, as she knew, was no shining beauty, and the better for that. Beauty - is skin-deep. But she looked frail, only so, for the matter of that, did - some of the toughest girls, and she took it that Sam had had the - horse-sense to make some preliminary inquiries before he committed - himself. Sam, it appeared, had not. - </p> - <p> - Was Ada strong and healthy? Was she economical? Could she cook? Was she - her own dressmaker? And when she found that Sam could answer none of these - questions, she said ironically: “Well, at least, you’ve eyes in your head. - Is their house clean?” - </p> - <p> - Sam could only say that he supposed so, and Anne looked witheringly at - him. “Yes, you’re in love all right,” she said. “They say love’s blind. - You’re leaving a lot to me.” - </p> - <p> - “Mother,” he said, alarmed, “what are you going to do?” - </p> - <p> - “I’m going to get acquainted with Ada,” she said. “One of us must know - her, and you don’t.” - </p> - <p> - “If you’ll be fair to her,” said Sam. “I’m not afraid.” - </p> - <p> - “I’ll be fair,” said Anne, and meant to be; but is a mother ever fair to - the prospective wife of her only son? Perhaps, and in that case Anne went - to Ada with an open mind. “After all,” she reflected, “I daresay Tom - Branstone’s mother didn’t think much of me, though Tom was one of ten and - it makes a difference. It oughtn’t to, though”——she pulled - herself up. “Anne, you’ll be fair to the girl.” She looked indulgently at - Ada’s curtains and rang Ada’s bell. - </p> - <p> - But Ada was wearing silver bangles on her wrists and her shoes were made - for show. Anne had the sort of pleasure which comes from having one’s - worst fears realized. She may have generalized too sweepingly, but she - held that only shallow people wear silver bangles and shoes whose aim is - daintiness and not durability. - </p> - <p> - First impressions, at any rate, went heavily against Ada, but Anne - remembered her promise to be fair. It was possible that when Tom Branstone - took Anne to see his mother, that lady did not like Anne’s way of doing - her hair. To each generation the symbols of its youth and perhaps bangles - on Ada were not more skittish than a cairngorn brooch had been on Anne. - </p> - <p> - “I have tea ready, Mrs. Branstone,” said Ada. “Sam told me you were - coming.” - </p> - <p> - “Did he?” Anne was surprised into saying. She had not told Sam of her - intention and his guess at it and his warning of Ada had spoilt her plan - of coming upon Ada unawares. She wanted Ada unprepared and unadorned: Ada - at home, not Ada “at home.” And Ada was very much “at home.” The room had - been “turned out”—and so had Peter that it might be—company - manners and the company tea-pot were on exhibition, and everything was - formal and obviously thought out. And, as Anne had to admit, not badly - thought out either. Ada had not been to that expensive boarding school for - nothing; she had an air to awe a porter’s widow. Anne didn’t like her - trick of putting the milk in the cup before she poured the tea, nor her - dogmatic way of asserting that it improved the flavour and that “everybody - did it now.” Everybody, did not do it, Anne did not do it; but, again, - perhaps this was the modern touch, and Anne had come to be fair. - </p> - <p> - She made her first score when Ada left the room for hot water. “This - room’s been dusted to-day,” thought Anne. “I’ll see what her dusting is - worth.” She put it to the test by running her finger along the top of the - books on one of the shelves, and her finger was very black. - </p> - <p> - The only way to keep books clean in Manchester is the way taken by nine - out of ten people: they have no books. Some of the others put books behind - glass, like orchids, the rest have the habit of blowing hard at a book - when they take it from its shelf, and of washing their hands before - opening it. - </p> - <p> - Anne did not know that. She kept Sam’s few books clean by daily - elbow-grease, and now furtively wiped her dirty finger on her stocking - with the feeling that she had found out Ada. The dust on the books (and - certainly it was thick) confirmed the impression left by the bangles, and - Anne was not in the least ashamed of her spying. Sam had stolen a march on - her by warning Ada and she paid him in his own coin. - </p> - <p> - And from then onwards the score rose steadily against Ada. There were - cakes for tea. Now the only excuse for cakes was that one baked them - oneself and Ada confessed that they came from Mrs. Stubbins and made the - further mistake of showing an expert’s knowledge in the productions of - Mrs. Stubbins’ confectionery shop. “Frivolous in food as well as dress,” - was Anne’s comment. Her dress, Anne learnt, had been made by Madame - Robinson. - </p> - <p> - “She’s dear,” said Ada, “but quite French. And, of course, she comes to - church.” - </p> - <p> - No Nonconformists need apply; but Anne was thinking not of Madame’s - religion but her bills. The employer of a quite French dressmaker called - Robinson, born Duff, was no wife for Sam Branstone. - </p> - <p> - And by way of making Anne’s assurance doubly sure, Ada let slip something - about being under the doctor. - </p> - <p> - But Anne was not sanguine. She saw clearly enough that it was precisely - Ada’s weakness which was her strength with Sam. Sam had been leant upon by - Madge and George, and liked it, as Anne herself, in that case, had liked - it. But that was a different case from this. Madge had the claim of - sisterhood; Anne could see nothing in Ada and Ada’s weakness to give her - the claim to lean on Sam: and the leaning in marriage should not be - one-sided. Ada could give Sam nothing except herself, and Anne did not - think that gift worth having. - </p> - <p> - Sam, unfortunately, did and Anne doubted her power of changing his mind. - Her first attempt, at all events, must be with Ada, and she felt cramped - in Ada’s house, for the reason, perhaps, that it was Peter’s house, the - shrine of his simplicity. She wanted Ada cut off from the defences of the - tea-table and her own familiar surroundings, and saying something about - the warmth of the evening, suggested a ride on the top of a tram-car. - </p> - <p> - “I often do it myself,” said Anne. “It blows the cobwebs away.” - </p> - <p> - She did it as a matter of fact not often, for so it would have lost its - quality of a dissipation, but with a wise irregularity she escaped the - thraldom of her house on a tram-car. Tram rides were her romance, her - safety-valve, her glimpse at life. Six-pennyworth of tram is cheaper in - the long run than fourpennyworth of gin: both carry one away, but the - tram-car brings one safely back. - </p> - <p> - Anne’s lip tightened when she saw that Ada did not change the flimsy shoes - and that her hat eclipsed their flimsiness. A “baby” hat, of imitation - lace, from which her face peeped out like a drooping, sapless flower. - “Yes,” thought Anne. “Men being men, that hat is clever. It’s a trap for - fools and it caught my fool. Ada Struggles, you’re dangerous.” - </p> - <p> - They took the front seat on the tram and aloud she said, using purposely - her roughest accent: “It’s queer to think of our Sam marrying a lady. I’m - not saying he doesn’t deserve it, but his father were a railway porter and - mine were a policeman. His sister was in service.” - </p> - <p> - “Sam wall get on,” said Ada, with conviction. - </p> - <p> - “I’m none doubting it,” said Anne. “But he’s had luck and it’s a question - if the luck’ll hold. Mr. Travers took him up and sent him to Grammar - School, and Sam didn’t do too well there. He disappointed me and he’s not - gone on as he might have done. The fight’s ahead of him yet and he’ll need - a fighter by his side. I’ve done my share for him this long while and I’m - getting old. I shall be glad of a rest, Ada. Sam’s an early riser and it’s - weary work getting up on a winter’s morning to light the fire and get his - breakfast ready. Only that won’t trouble you. You’re young.” - </p> - <p> - “Of course,” said Ada, “we shall have a servant.” - </p> - <p> - “What!” exclaimed Anne, “on two pounds ten a week, with me to keep and - all? I wouldn’t reckon on that, if I were you. Later on, perhaps. But I - know it can’t be done at present, or Sam would have done it for me.” The - idea of Anne Branstone with a wench about her house struck her as - humorous. Anne might have help some day—when she was bed-ridden: - till then, her house was her house. “No,” she went on, “you can take it - from me that it’ll not run to a servant. I don’t know what his idea is - about me, whether he will want me to live with you or not. Likely not. A - man doesn’t want his mother about when he’s wed.” - </p> - <p> - “No,” agreed Ada hopefully. Anne oppressed her. - </p> - <p> - “No. And I can get on with a pound a week from him. That’ll leave you - thirty shillings. Well, I’ve done it, so I know it can be done, though - mind you, it’s a struggle all the time and double tides when the babies - begin to come. But of course I’ll help you—with advice. I’m not for - forcing myself on you, but naturally I know Sam’s ways and his likings - about food. He’s a bit difficult at times, too, but that’s nothing. All - men are and you’ll know that, having had your father to do for. I don’t - say Sam’s finicky, but he likes what he likes and I hope you’re fond of - the same things. It always turned me up to clean a rabbit, and I never - liked the smell of onions, but that’s a favourite dish of Sam’s and so I’d - just to grin and bear it. And I know you’ll do the same for Sam.” - </p> - <p> - Ada squirmed helplessly. She could have screamed. Anne sat at the outside - of the seat and pinned her to it. The tram seemed a Juggernaut car which - drove implacably over her dreams: a prison where she was tortured by a - coarse old woman with work-roughened hands and an endless flow of vitriol. - She wanted to tell Anne that she lied, that the more she deprecated Sam - the more desirable Ada knew him to be, that her grapes were neither sour - nor to be soured by Anne’s insane jealousy; and she could not do it. The - ride seemed more of a nightmare with every moment that passed. The tram - was a mad wheeled cage with a mad driver and a mad guard. It left the - lines and careered wildly into desolation, and she was fettered in it to - an avenging fury who would not stop talking, but with ruthless common - sense pricked all the bubbles of her hopes. She shut her eyes and - abandoned herself to misery. Each minute seemed an hour. She thought that - somebody was throttling her, that the flying cage was her tomb, that - vampires sucked her blood, and her naked, drained body was shackled to her - seat until the car, driving inevitably through black space, bumped finally - against a star in one consuming smash. She opened her eyes to find that - the tram had stopped at its suburban terminus and that Anne was asking: - “Shall we get down for a walk or shall we go back by the same car?” - </p> - <p> - So she was still in the living world, and with the consciousness of it - courage returned to her. For a minute she was silent, fighting her demons - off, catching at facts and weighing them. Anne was not a vampire, but an - old worn woman who had, curiously, the right to call Sam Branstone son—Ada’s - future mother-in-law, and a quaint one too; one to be put firmly and - haughtily in her place and kept there. - </p> - <p> - “We’ll stay on this car,” she replied. Its madness had departed. It was a - tram, quite eminently sane and usual. “I think,” she went on, “that you - exaggerate the difficulties. I’ve no doubt that Sam will have more money - by the time we’re married. You see, he has me to work for now.” - </p> - <p> - Not a simper with it either. Pure matter-of-fact statement, and the truth - of it hit Anne, the cool assumption that Ada as a spur to effort was more - competent than Anne. And this to Anne who had learnt algebra for Sam, to - Anne who had underfed herself that he might wear the clothes a Grammar - School boy ought to wear, to Anne who—oh, it was ineffable, but it - defeated her because she knew, bitterly, gallingly, but undeniably, that - it was true. This baby-faced chit, this fool in petticoats was more to Sam - than the mother who bore him. Queen Anne was dead and Ada Struggles - reigned in place of her. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER X—GERALD ADAMS, SOCIOLOGIST - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>NNE called at - Madge’s on her way home. Madge’s, in spite of George’s progress, was still - the house which had been the premises of the Hell-fire Club. Anne did not - often go there and never without reason, but Madge was at a loss to know - the reason of this visit, nor did she guess it when Anne unobtrusively - dovetailed into The conversation about young Sam Chappie a question which - might have seemed irrelevant. “Have you done anything yet with that spare - room of yours upstairs?” she asked. - </p> - <p> - “No,” said Madge. “Nor likely to, I fancy.” That was the reason of the - visit. Anne was safeguarding her retreat, though she by no means admitted - that it would come to a retreat. Engagements do not invariably lead to - marriage. Meantime, hers was the waiting game and a rupture with Sam at - this stage was to be avoided. - </p> - <p> - When he asked her, not too confidently, if she did not agree with him - about the wonder of Ada, she exercised a noble self-restraint, and all she - said was: “She’s not the wife for a poor man, Sam.” - </p> - <p> - “No,” said Sam thoughtfully. “I’d tumbled to that. And I don’t mean to be - poor either,” and so went out to open the dark chapter of his bright - success. He went to the Concentrics, not knowing that he was going to his - fate. He went because it was the night of their weekly meeting and he had - to go somewhere to avoid Anne’s eye, but his mood was not concentric. “I - must get rich for Ada, rich for Ada,” was the burden of his thought—so - early did he justify Ada’s words to Anne—and it was not a timely - thought for a Concentrics evening. - </p> - <p> - He had even forgotten that he had a special interest in this meeting, - where the lecturer was to be Adams, once Sam’s pet aversion and unbeatable - rival at the Grammar School. He was reminded of it when he found himself - accosted by a young man whom he could not at first identify. - </p> - <p> - “Jove! If it isn’t Sammy Branstone! Are you a member of these fossils?” - </p> - <p> - “Dubby Stewart!” said Sam, as recognition dawned on him. - </p> - <p> - “Reed’s here as well, somewhere,” said Stewart. “It’s a gathering of the - clan.” - </p> - <p> - Reed and Stewart, it seemed, were both members, which is to say that they - had come once or twice some time ago and continued to keep up the small - subscription from force of habit or through sheer weakness to stop paying - it. Few societies indeed could exist were it not for the enthusiasm of the - attending nucleus and the subscriptions of the nonattending mass. - </p> - <p> - “We came to hear Gerald Adams make an ass of himself,” Stewart explained. - “What a subject!” - </p> - <p> - Sam had even forgotten what the subject was. “Rich for Ada, rich for Ada,” - was still ringing in his ears. - </p> - <p> - The subject was “Social Purity.” - </p> - <p> - “Which accounts,” said Stewart, “for the size of the audience. They’ve all - come hoping for the worst. I know I have.” - </p> - <p> - The worst did not happen, or, rather, if it did, it was so skilfully - disguised that nobody recognized it as the worst. It was easy to mistake - it for the best. - </p> - <p> - Adams was one part in earnest and two parts impish in the manner of the - superior person who is out for an intellectual lark. He had a constant - preoccupation with that which is known above all other questions as <i>the</i> - social question. It was not a nice preoccupation for a young man: it was, - for instance, remote from the healthy exuberance of Sam’s Rabelaisianism. - And, of course, Adams was wily: he wasn’t the stuff of martyrdom. He - enjoyed, as an intellectual gymnastic, the treatment of his subject so - that it should at once shock his audience and win him their approval as an - honest man doing an unpleasant job from conviction. - </p> - <p> - Sam agreed with Stewart. His old prejudice against Adams was strong within - him and he hoped Adams would come a cropper. That was at the beginning, - when Adams, with an egregious affectation of superiority, began to read - his lecture; but soon, quite soon, Sam changed his mind and hoped for - nothing but that the skilful skater would keep his balance, on the thin - ice. - </p> - <p> - “Rich for Ada,” and here, as Sam saw it, was a “stroke” indeed if Adams - were successful to the end and if at the end he would listen sensibly to - Sam. - </p> - <p> - Adams was in little danger. He was of Oxford, London, the world, and his - audience of Manchester. And he stooped to conquer with a lecture that was - a mosaic of advances and retreats, of blazing indiscretions and smug - apologies, of audacities and diffidence. - </p> - <p> - Sam watched the audience keenly, and it would not be unjust to say that - the audience gloated. Not all of them gloated, but as a whole, as an - audience, they lapped up Adams’ lecture like mother’s milk. He called it - frankness and gave unnecessary detail, he had an appearance of honest - indignation and a reality of bathing in mud with relish. It was abominable - but diabolically clever; indecent to the core, it artfully evaded anything - to warrant a police court charge of indecency; it was foulness cloaked in - piety, marching under the banner of Reform. He was a crusader in - masquerade, flashing beneath their guard of British reticence a rapier - whose hilt was a cross. - </p> - <p> - Adams found a curious satisfaction in standing there, like a penitent at a - Salvation Army meeting, pretending to an immense personal knowledge of - evil which was, happily, impossible, and he delighted in the presence of a - cleric in the chair. The thing developed, for him, into an exciting game, - a contest of his wits with Peter’s. He had carried his audience, but the - chairman sat aloof and dubious. If Peter saw through him, he had lost; if - not, he won. For Peter he read the condemnatory passages with vibrant - earnestness, and for Peter he read as if reluctantly, conscience-impelled, - the details of his evidence. - </p> - <p> - Sam caught the infection, too, but hardly as a game. He hung on Peter’s - judgment with a deep anxiety, watched Peter flush and shuffle in his - chair, saw him take snuff nervously, trembled at the moment when Peter - seemed about to interrupt, sighed with relief when Peter sat back silently - again and waited feverishly for the chairman’s speech. - </p> - <p> - There would probably have been little doubt about Peter’s verdict had - Adams been an ordinary Concentric, lecturer and a member of the Society. - But he was neither, and was there by invitation. And he was not only of - Oxford, Peter’s University, but brilliantly of Oxford, of Balliol, with - academic honours thick upon him. If Peter thought, as Adams spoke, that he - ought to call him to order, he remembered that Adams was a Double First, - and desisted. He couldn’t be a hypocrite—because he had won the - Ireland. He was terribly in earnest now—because he had won the Greek - Verse Prize. He was single-minded, chivalrous, braving the misapprehension - of the scurrilous, open and honest—because he was a Fellow of - Balliol. - </p> - <p> - It did not matter to Peter that Adams’ father was the richest parishioner - in St. Mary’s; it mattered even less that Adams was exquisitely dressed in - exactly the shade of grey appropriate to an ardent crusader. (“Look at his - damned clothes,” Reed had whispered to Stewart. “Hasn’t he thought it - out?” He had: his clothes were chaste if his lecture wasn’t.) But - scholarship did matter to Peter, whose other name was Charity, and once he - had decided that Gerald was sincere, that all he said was subordinate to - and justified by high purpose, he was generous, and the more generous - because he had doubted. - </p> - <p> - “The subject of Mr. Adams’ lecture,” he said, “is like nettles: if it is - not handled boldly, it stings. I have nothing but praise for the courage, - the down rightness, the earnestness of his treatment of this distressing - evil. I think that we have all been deeply stirred by his instances of - man’s inhumanity to women. As a churchman I feel a special responsibility - and, may I say, a special gratitude to Mr. Adams for his study of this - subject. Medicine, as we all know, has its martyrs, its research workers - who sacrifice themselves for the health of their fellowmen. Mr. Adams, who - has examined this social sore so thoroughly, at what cost in pain to - himself only the most sensitive amongst us can guess, deserves to be - ranked with the martyrs of science....” And so on, doubly handsome because - he felt ashamed of himself for doubting Gerald’s honesty, and made amends. - </p> - <p> - Adams had won his game, hands down. He thought the old boy gloriously - funny and he thought Sam Branstone, who rose when Peter sat down, funnier - still. Sam believed in striking while the iron was hot: he didn’t want - Peter to have the opportunity of changing his mind when he came to think - things over coolly. - </p> - <p> - Sam began by congratulating himself on the good fortune that had been his - in having been the school-fellow of the distinguished Mr. Adams. Adams - gazed hard at Sam through his austere pince-nez and was observed - perceptibly to start. “Gad,” he was thinking, “it’s that lout, the - porter’s son.” But he liked Sam’s flattery very well. Sam, it appeared, - had been so deeply impressed by Mr. Adams’ admirable, indeed eloquent and - moving address, and by the chairman’s very just eulogy of it, that he - thought it would be a tremendous pity if so arresting, so well-written a - paper failed to reach a wider audience than that before which it had been - read. They had been waiting for this paper; its appeal was wide; the - urgency of its need, instinct in every word of it, was emphasized by the - chairman’s remarks. He had, therefore, a practical proposal to make. The - paper ought to be printed, and if Mr. Adams could spare him a few moments - after the meeting, Sam hoped that he would let him arrange the matter. - </p> - <p> - He sat down amongst great applause. Under its cover Stewart whispered: - “You inimitable ass!” Sam looked at him in pained surprise. “I want to see - that paper in print,” he declared indignantly. - </p> - <p> - The debate meandered in the usual futile way. Few had anything to say, but - many liked the sound of their own voices and indulged their preference at - length, till both speakers and talkers had taken their innings and Sam was - able to go up to the platform. Peter had not changed his mind and was - complimenting Adams in his simple, charming way. - </p> - <p> - It ought, no doubt, to have made Adams thoroughly ashamed of himself, but - it did not. It hardened his cynicism so that, when Sam came up, all he was - thinking was: “I’ve gulled the parson. Now to bounce the porter’s son.” - </p> - <p> - “How are you, Branstone?” he asked. “Glad to meet you again.” - </p> - <p> - “And I you,” said Sam. They shook hands. “Have you had time to think of - what I proposed?” - </p> - <p> - “As a matter of fact,” said Adams, which is the usual way of beginning a - lie, “I’d thought of sending my little paper to one of the Reviews—the - <i>Fortnightly</i> or the <i>Contemporary</i>.” - </p> - <p> - “Excellent,” said Peter. - </p> - <p> - Sam could have kicked him. “I venture to differ,” he said. “The chief - object should be to reach as wide a public as possible. My own idea was to - do it by itself in the form of a——” he was going to say - “pamphlet,” but altered it to “brochure.” He thought it sounded more - attractive. “In the heavy reviews it would be read by comparatively few, - and it would not stand alone as in a brochure. It would take its place - along with other articles. And I have heard that contributors to the - reviews are not paid highly.” - </p> - <p> - Adams had not thought of payment at all, but he thought of it now, with - zest. He was rich, but the idea of despoiling the porter’s son, who had - had the assurance to go to school with him, struck him as the crowning - move in a jolly game. This was, transcendently, his night for winning. - </p> - <p> - “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, which was true. “I suppose I should get about - twenty pounds for it.” - </p> - <p> - “I will give you twenty-five,” said Sam. - </p> - <p> - “Sam!” protested Peter. He approached the motive (as he understood it), - but considered the offer reckless from a young man who contemplated - matrimony. - </p> - <p> - “Twenty-five pounds,” repeated Sam firmly. - </p> - <p> - “Well,” laughed Gerald, quite unable not to laugh at the idiot’s - persistence, “if you’re as keen on doing good as all that, I’ll take the - offer.” - </p> - <p> - “Right,” said Sam. “I’ll settle it at once.” - </p> - <p> - He went to the chairman’s table and made out a form of assignment of - copyright. He had a little knowledge of the law, and it was a dangerous - thin—for the other fellow. But both Sam and Adams went home that - night in a state of cherubic self-satisfaction. - </p> - <p> - “What a game?” thought Adams. “And what an ass!” - </p> - <p> - Curiously, the thoughts of Sammy Branstone were not dissimilar. He had - this advantage over Adams: that Adams had read his paper and had not - watched his audience all the time. Sam had watched the audience and - thought twenty-five pounds a cheap price for that paper. - </p> - <p> - He slept on it, and awoke next day with confidence in his investment - undisturbed, but the news which awaited him at the office shook him at - first. It was one thing to see a profitable side-line in the publication - of Adams’ address and another to be suddenly obliged to regard the - copyright of that paper as his one sound asset. He feared, in cold - daylight, that it was not quite sound enough for that. - </p> - <p> - Yet what had happened did not come as a complete surprise. Sam knew - Travers’ habits and knew that men of his habits are liable to die - suddenly. Travers had died in the night, and Sam was very angry. - </p> - <p> - He told himself that he had no luck with people’s deaths. His father had - died too soon for Sam, and now Travers was dead just when Sam had become - engaged, and when he had undertaken a speculation which, however high his - hopes of it, was after all speculative. - </p> - <p> - An estate agent’s business is largely personal and, if there is no obvious - successor, no heir apparent already in training for the succession, is apt - to fall to pieces when its head dies. The process of disintegration in - this case had set in long ago; drink had begun what death now ended; and - there was no heir. Lance Travers had decided for medicine and was, on the - material side, little affected by his father’s death, since Travers had - bought him a practice a year earlier somewhere in the South, and the - neighbourhood was proving healthily valetudinarian. - </p> - <p> - The office was not a cheerful place that day. Men estimated their savings - and balanced them against the probable weeks of unemployment before they - found new places. A few of them, no doubt, might hope to “go with” the - business to whomever bought it; and they wondered who would buy and which - of them would be engaged by the purchaser. - </p> - <p> - They fancied Branstone’s chances, and so, in fact, did Sam, but it was all - in the air and exceedingly disturbing just when he had given himself so - much else to think about. Even if he did move with the business, it could - only be as a clerk. He lost the advantage of Travers’ friendliness and, - besides, he was not sure that anybody would think the business worth - buying. Travers had no right to die. - </p> - <p> - Then the thought struck him that he was taking it lying down. He, a lad of - mettle, was whining like these gutless clerks in the office. He was - betraying his lucky star. Death, even Tom Branstone’s, had not been - forbiddingly unkind to him. Tom’s death had led him indirectly to the - office, to Minnifie, the Concentrics, Ada, and he began to see in Travers’ - death the possibilities of good. It might be the finger of fate, pointing - him away from the office which had served its turn to a new dispensation - to be arranged by the collaborators, Sam and Providence, upon the rock of - Adams’ paper. - </p> - <p> - They carried on the routine work of the office as men under sentence of - death do little, ordinary things and find a solace in them. Then, late - that afternoon, Lance Travers came. He had travelled since early morning, - had been home, seen his father’s doctor and his father’s solicitor and was - now come to see Sam. They sat in Travers’ private office, where the blinds - were drawn, and in the presence of Travers’ son, who owed his life to him, - Sam was conscious of a deeper feeling than he had ever known before, he - was no longer angry because Travers had died, but mourned him honestly. - </p> - <p> - “By the way,” said Lance presently, “did my father ever tell you about his - will?” - </p> - <p> - “His will!” said Sam. “No. Why should he?” - </p> - <p> - “I thought he might have done,” said Lance. “He made it last year after he - bought me my practice. He thought then that he ought to do something for - you, but he didn’t expect to live long and he put it in his will. There’s - a thousand pounds for you.” - </p> - <p> - Sam took it nicely. “I’d rather,” he said, “that he were still alive;” - and, at the moment, he meant it. - </p> - <p> - But he had been right. It was the finger of fate. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0011" id="link2HCH0011"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER XI—UNDER WAY - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>S a simple matter - of course, Lance offered Sam the first refusal of his father’s business, - but was not surprised when Sam declined to think of it. - </p> - <p> - Sam was far more surprised at himself than Lance at Sam. Lance had never - looked upon estate agency as a desirable profession, whereas Sam had been - bored with its routine without losing his respect for its utility, and - only yesterday he would have jumped at the chance of owning the business. - He heard with astonishment the sound of his own voice politely refusing - the offer, but having refused he did not tamper with his swift decision. - </p> - <p> - The fact is, one supposes, that what might be called the quick-firing part - of his intelligence had absorbed and reacted to the fact of his thousand - pounds before the whole of him was properly aware of it. At any rate, he - refused, and, on reflection, approved his refusal. - </p> - <p> - His speculation in Gerald Adams wore a different aspect now that he was a - capitalist. “Money,” as he had remembered once before, “breeds money,” and - he doubted if Travers’ business, robbed of Travers’ genial personality, - were fecund enough for the pace of money-breeding he anticipated. Perhaps, - too, there was something in the thought that the Travers’ agency was dead - man’s shoes, while, win or lose, the idea of publishing Adams’ lecture was - his own invention. - </p> - <p> - Another thing that happened to him with his legacy was the feeling that he - had regained caste; he belonged again with his old school-fellows. “How - many of them,” he thought, “can lay hands at a moment’s notice on a - thousand pounds?” and walked erectly through the street where, naturally, - since he had not met him in eight years until last night, he encountered - Stewart. - </p> - <p> - “Hullo,” said Stewart, “how’s the patron of letters? And would a drink be - any use to you?” - </p> - <p> - Sam hesitated. Did the way to the society of the Olympians lie through the - doors of the public-house? Stewart was undeniably Olympian: he had the - air, the manner, the clothes of well-assured success. He had a lightness - and a poise that excited Sam’s envy. He had style, this youth who might be - anything, but who, Sam cynically thought, had probably not paid for his - distinguished clothes, while Sam was the owner of a thousand pounds. He - was, thereby, Olympian in quiet fact, which need not be shrieked from the - house-tops, as Stewart had, apparently, to shriek. Sam <i>was</i>, and - there was the possibility that Stewart only appeared to be. It gave him - strength to refuse. Not from principle, but from economical prejudice Sam - was a teetotaller. - </p> - <p> - “I don’t take alcohol,” he said. - </p> - <p> - “It’s never too late to mend,” said Stewart. “Still, there’s a café here, - and we’ll drink coffee. It’s bad for our hearts, but Balzac wrote the - ‘Comédie Humaine’ on black coffee, so there may be something in the vice, - though it isn’t a habit of mine. Two black coffees, Sophie,” he ordered - from the waitress. - </p> - <p> - “If it isn’t a habit of yours,” asked Sam, “how do you come to know the - waitress by name?” - </p> - <p> - “‘My dear ass!” said Stewart pityingly. - </p> - <p> - “Do you call them all Sophie?” - </p> - <p> - “Only when it’s their name. Your name is Sophie, isn’t it?” he said as the - girl returned with their coffee. - </p> - <p> - “Yes, sir.” - </p> - <p> - Stewart appreciated Sam’s astonishment. “I know I’m showing off, but I - like it. If you see a girl with an idiotic silver brooch made up of the - letters <i>SOPHIE</i> you can assume that it’s her name, and not the name - of her best boy. Simple, when you know how it’s done, like all first-rate - conjuring.” - </p> - <p> - “I hadn’t noticed her brooch,” said Sam. - </p> - <p> - “I had. That’s the difference. Still, it isn’t fair to blame you. I’m a - professional observer.” Sam took Stewart to mean that he was a detective, - but hadn’t time to ask for confirmation, because Stewart asked instead: - “And what, by the way, are you?” And threw him into some embarrassment by - the question. What, indeed, at the moment was he? - </p> - <p> - “Doesn’t your observation tell you?” he fenced. - </p> - <p> - “It told me last night that you’re a considerable lunatic. Did you buy - that stuff of Adams’?” - </p> - <p> - “Yes, I did.” - </p> - <p> - “Thought I saw you in the act as I went out. Obviously, then, you’re a - tripe merchant.” - </p> - <p> - “I wonder,” said Sam, “whether you could help me, Stewart. Seriously, I - mean.” - </p> - <p> - “In the tripe trade?” - </p> - <p> - “I want very much to meet a journalist.” He thought a detective ought to - know journalists. - </p> - <p> - “But, my dear fellow, this is a café. It isn’t a bar. What do you want a - journalist for?” - </p> - <p> - “I will tell that to the journalist.” - </p> - <p> - “If you want to start a paper and you’re looking for an editor, you - needn’t look further than me. There have been candid moments in my life - when I have called myself a journalist. At present, I edit the <i>Manchester - Warden</i>, but I’m open to conviction.” He didn’t quite edit that paper—yet, - but reported for it at six pounds a week. He did not know shorthand, but - he quoted Joseph Conrad and Henry James, correctly and incongruously, when - he wrote a notice of a music-hall performance. - </p> - <p> - “I’m afraid,” said Sam astutely, “that when I said a journalist, I meant - something very different from you, but I will tell you how I stand and - perhaps you will advise me. Last night, as you know, I bought Adams’ - paper. I gave him twenty-five pounds for it.” - </p> - <p> - “Lunacy,” said Stewart, “is a mild word for your complaint. Twenty-five - shillings would be a top price for it in a friendly market.” - </p> - <p> - “To-day I reached the office to learn that my employer had died suddenly. - You remember Lance Travers? It was his father, and with his death, for all - practical purposes the business comes to an end. Well, you see my - position.” - </p> - <p> - Stewart quoted Sheridan: “‘The Spanish Fleet thou canst not see, because - it is not yet in sight.’ And much the same applies to your position, my - lad. Its postal address is the Womb of Time.” - </p> - <p> - “That is true,” said Sam. “And I may add that I am engaged to be married.” - </p> - <p> - “I can admire thoroughness,” said Stewart. “You omit none of the - essentials.” - </p> - <p> - “Now, with it all,” said Sam, “I’m still too proud to go to Adams and ask - him to let me off my bargain.” - </p> - <p> - “And it wouldn’t be any use if you did,” said Stewart. “He’d laugh at - you.” - </p> - <p> - “I can believe it of him. But I’m landed with his paper. It has cost me - twenty-live pounds. I meant to print it, and I mean to print it, but I - mean now to sell it when it is printed.” Sam left Stewart to suppose that, - had Travers not died, he would have distributed that pamphlet free. - “Money,” he added, “is a necessity.” - </p> - <p> - He had taken the right line. Stewart’s instinctive generosity was touched, - and he meant to give this lame dog a lift over the stile. “I see where - your journalist comes in. All right, Branstone, you can count on me.” - </p> - <p> - “On you?” said Sam. “Oh, I couldn’t ask it of you.” - </p> - <p> - “You didn’t ask,” replied Stewart naively. “I offer. I may edit the <i>Manchester - Warden</i>, but Zeus nods sometimes, ’busmen have been known to take a - holiday, and there is a paper called the <i>Sunday Judge</i> in whose - chaste columns I have written under the name of Percy Persiflage. Send me - a proof of that pamphlet and Percy shall stamp upon it. He will say that - no decent person could read it without being revolted, and the pamphlet - will boom. It’s the Sunday-paper public that you want, and... No, Percy - shall not stamp. Percy shall bless. He will be moved to admiration of Mr. - Adams’ earnestness, he will applaud the high moral purpose, and will do - the rest by correspondence. Get your sisters and your cousins and your - aunts to pitch in letters on either side, and I’ll see they get printed. I - make this alteration because of the bookstalls.” - </p> - <p> - “The bookstalls?” asked Sam vaguely. - </p> - <p> - “This problem of distribution,” said Stewart impressively, “is the most - difficult question of modern life. The producer is here, you; the consumer - (we hope) is everywhere, and the problem is to bring your pamphlet to the - thirsting consumer. The answer is the bookstall, but the bookstalls are - cautious. When I say bookstalls I mean the right bookstalls. You will - never see your money back if the only bookstalls which will exhibit your - pamphlet are those which sell atrociously printed paperbacked editions of - ‘Nana’ and ‘Fanny Hill.’ You must flourish on <i>the</i> bookstalls, and - they banned ‘Esther Waters.’ The bookstalls, Branstone, are going to call - for tact, and tact shall begin with Percy’s appreciation.” - </p> - <p> - “Or earlier,” said Sam. - </p> - <p> - “Earlier?” - </p> - <p> - “I hadn’t thought of the bookstalls, but this may help there, as well as - in other ways. I mean, as far as Manchester is concerned, and if we get it - on the stalls here, they can’t very well refuse it in other places.” - </p> - <p> - “Manchester being Manchester, it isn’t likely,” said Stewart. “What’s your - idea?” - </p> - <p> - “Only this,” said Sam, and showed him his proposed cover for the pamphlet. - </p> - <h3> - THE SOCIAL EVIL - </h3> - <p> - Being an Address - </p> - <p> - By Gerald Adams, M.A., - </p> - <p> - Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. - </p> - <p> - As Read before the Concentric Society with The Rev. Peter Struggles in the - Chair. - </p> - <p> - Stewart looked at it, then he looked at Sam, and Sam seemed to him very - little like a lame dog now. He whistled loudly. “You’ll get your money - back, my lad,” he said. “But this is rough on Peter.” - </p> - <p> - “Mr. Struggles approved of the lecture.” - </p> - <p> - “I wonder if he will approve of this?” said Stewart. - </p> - <p> - “He can’t go back on his word,” said Sam. “Besides, I’m engaged to his - daughter.” - </p> - <p> - “The thing that troubles me,” said Stewart admiringly, “is that I took you - for a harmless lunatic. I’m only a journalist myself, with one foot in the - <i>Manchester Warden</i> and the other in the <i>Sunday Judge</i>. I’m a - Tory on Sundays and a Liberal on weekdays. I gave up honesty when I gave - up being young, and I thought I knew the ropes by this time. But when I - think that I took you for a guileless innocent, I want to go into a corner - and kick myself hard.” - </p> - <p> - Sam found this rather alarming he knew that his use, or misuse, of Peter’s - name was cunning, but began to regret that he had shown Stewart his pro - posed cover. “But I get my review in the <i>Judge?</i>” he asked hardily. - </p> - <p> - “My son,” said Stewart, “you do. I’ve spent sixpence on coffee and half an - hour on you. There’s good copy in this and I can’t afford to waste it. - I’ve my living to earn, and Gerald Adams deserves the worst he’s going to - get. At the same time, I’ll allow myself the luxury of telling you that - yours is a lowdown game.” - </p> - <p> - “We didn’t make the world what it is, did we?” said Sam. - </p> - <p> - “And neither you nor I will leave it any better than we found it,” said - Stewart, prophesying rashly with the boundless cynicism of his twenty-five - years. “The worst of coffee,” he went on, finishing his cup, “is that it - makes you thirsty. I’m going across the road for a drink. Do you have one - with me?” - </p> - <p> - “No, thanks,” said Sam. “I have to see a printer.” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, yes. Well, why not the Judge Press? I daresay I could get you in - there on the ground floor.” - </p> - <p> - “But they are not quite the right people for this. They print sporting - papers, and——” - </p> - <p> - “You’ll die from overheated bearings in your brain-box,” said Stewart. - “You think of everything.” - </p> - <p> - Sam had, at least, thought that a printer (however obscure by comparison - was the Judge Press, whose works were a small town in themselves) who - issued a religious paper was better for his purpose than the printers of - the <i>Sunday Judge, Sporting Notions and the Football Times</i>. He went - to Carter, Meadowbank & Co., who were on the verge of bankruptcy, but - had the advantage of printing <i>Christian Comfort</i> and the <i>Church - Child’s Weekly</i>, and arranged with them to print five thousand copies - of Adams’ paper. Carter, who was the whole firm, looked askance at the - title, but when Sam pointed out that the Rev. Mr. Struggles had approved - of the contents, Carter succumbed at once, and did not even attempt a - protest when Sam instructed him to print on the whole five thousand: - </p> - <p> - “This first edition of one thousand copies is issued at sixpence. The - price for future editions will be one shilling. Samuel Branstone, - Publisher.” - </p> - <p> - Carter’s dingy office was decorated with the chief products of his firm, - texts, the stock-in-trade of commercialized religiosity. Well handled, - there was money in texts, but Carter was an old man with declining powers - and a conservative mind. Meadowbank, who had looked after the distributive - side of the business, was lately dead, and Carter’s nightly prayer was - that the concern might last his time. As things were promising, it seemed - unlikely, but here was Sam with an order for him and no disposition to - beat him down in price. Carter did not like the instruction to describe - five thousand copies as one thousand, and he didn’t like the subject of - the pamphlet, but he wanted business, and he couldn’t conceive of a pirate - sailing under the flag of Mr. Struggles. - </p> - <p> - Sam rammed that home, feeling the man’s hesitation. “I think it probable,” - he said, “that Mr. Struggles will preach a sermon on this pamphlet. - Perhaps I might tell you that I am going to be his son-in-law.” - </p> - <p> - That settled Carter, and he took the order. He knew, and was sensitive to, - the influence of Peter Struggles, curate. He knew that in the parish of. - St. Mary’s, Peter’s smile counted for more than the vicar’s weightiest - word, and that while the vicar was unknown outside his parish, Peter had - authority throughout Manchester—an authority which had lately growm - through Peter’s refusal of preferment to an easy living in the country. It - hadn’t, of course, been Peter who had told of that refusal, he had not - told Ada. But it had leaked out, and Manchester, which despises - selflessness in men, honoured it in the curate; Mancunians were flattered - by his loyalty to St. Mary’s and by the thought that they were fellow - citizens to saintliness. - </p> - <p> - Emphatically, the name of Peter Struggles on the pamphlet was a <i>clou</i>, - but Sam had not told Peter of it yet, and he must do it. He could not - afford an accident, and Peter, he considered, was manageable. - </p> - <p> - Ada met him at the door with a bright smile, and raised expectant lips, - but he shook his head, touch ing her shoulder tenderly, and passed in - front of her into the room so that, when she followed, her face expressed - the anxiety he desired. He entered himself as a man crushed by grief. - </p> - <p> - “What is it, Sam?” she asked. “What’s the matter?” - </p> - <p> - Peter closed “Plotinus” reluctantly: he never found time enough for - reading, and here was one of his few evenings interrupted. He had the - thought, feeling it ungenerous, that interruptions of this kind would end - when Ada was married. - </p> - <p> - “I’ve had sad news to-day. Mr. Travers died in the night. It’s... it’s - rather a blow.” - </p> - <p> - Peter disdained priestly conventionalities. “He was a good friend to you, - Sam.” - </p> - <p> - “A second father,” said Sam carefully, not taking the opportunity of - telling that Travers’ friendship had lasted beyond death. Perhaps he - thought this moment too sacred for the intrusion of a legacy. “Of course,” - he went on, “I’ve had all day to think of it, and of the difference this - will make to me—to us, that is, Ada, for you and me.” - </p> - <p> - “What difference, Sam?” she asked sharply. - </p> - <p> - “It comes to this,” he said dejectedly, “that I am out of work and - competition is so desperate. While he lived, I had his friendship behind - me. Now—I don’t say that I’m afraid to stand alone. No doubt it will - be good for me eventually, but, Ada, you see how it may postpone our - hopes.” - </p> - <p> - Ada saw it. “Plotinus” took that opportunity of slipping from Peter’s - knee, and Peter saw it, too, and sighed. “Oh, Sam!” said Ada. - </p> - <p> - “And,” said Sam, looking at Peter with a fine affectation of guilt, “there - is my recklessness of last night. In my then circumstances, it was - extravagant. To-day it looks worse than that.” - </p> - <p> - “You couldn’t know,” said Peter kindly. - </p> - <p> - “No,” Sam agreed. “I couldn’t know, and I have the feeling now that I must - abide by what I did.” - </p> - <p> - “Very proper, Sam, but Mr. Adams is not poor and I should think that if - you were to go to him———” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, please,” said Sam, “please don’t press me to do that. A bargain, I - feel so strongly, is a bargain and should be kept at all costs.” - </p> - <p> - Peter felt silently ashamed of himself. “You are perfectly right,” he - said. - </p> - <p> - “Well,” said Sam, “that’s how I feel, but in a sense I’m landed with the - thing and I propose to go on with it. As I see it—and I know there’s - a certain amount of inappropriateness in thinking at all of these - practical affairs with my benefactor so recently dead, but I must, I must——” - he looked at Ada and it was understood that his thought for her excused - all—“As I see it, it’s a case for going on and trying to pull the - chestnuts out of the fire, so to speak. I shall print that paper, and the - good that I hoped to do will not be lost because my circumstances have - altered, but I shall make a small charge for it to cover expenses as far - as possible. And as I naturally want it to sell well, I had the idea of - stating on the cover that it was first read at the Concentrics under your - chairmanship. The point of that is that all the members were not there - last night; it will call their attention to it; and they will, I hope, - buy. It makes certain of a few reliable purchasers.” - </p> - <p> - “Quite, quite,” said Peter. “It’s an excellent idea. Though I can hardly - suppose that mention of my name has any value, the name of the society - should certainly help.” - </p> - <p> - His modesty was quite incurable. He had not the faintest notion of the - wide-spread influence of Peter Struggles. “I have thought of little else - all day but Mr. Adams’ paper. I wondered if it was my duty to speak of - this terrible subject from the pulpit. The Church ought not to be silent - or it may be thought to acquiesce.” - </p> - <p> - Sam felt his heart leap within him. “Adams thought frankness best,” he - said. - </p> - <p> - “Yes, yes, at the Concentrics. But there are difficulties for me, and - perhaps I shall speak only to the Young Men’s Class at the-Sunday School. - Though that,” he reflected, “is perilously near to compromise.” - </p> - <p> - “But what is it?” asked Ada. “What are you talking about?” - </p> - <p> - Sam was silent. So was Peter, and the silence grew till he felt it a - reproach. He looked at Sam. “You see?” he said. “That is the dilemma of - the Church. I shall speak to the young men, and, after that perhaps, - perhaps——” He glanced at Ada. - </p> - <p> - “No,” he finished decidedly, “I must leave it at that.” He was fifty-six, - and most of his life had been lived under Victoria the Good. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0012" id="link2HCH0012"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER XII—DROPPING THE PILOT - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>NNE lived for Sam: - and if she rarely showed it, if, for instance, it appeared sometimes that - she lived to make her house the cleanest in the row, that was no more than - a symptom of her stoicism. She lived for Sam, and he knew it. She belonged - to a race which hates ostentation like the devil and keeps its feelings - veiled behind a grim reserve. It conceals emotion as a hidden treasure and - wears a mask which strangers take to indicate a want of sensibility. She - had not the habit of caressing Sam; she chastened whom she loved; and Sam - was very well aware of the strength of Anne’s love. - </p> - <p> - She was ready, at the proper time, to give him to the proper woman, but - she held that Ada was not the woman nor this the time. She was ready to go - her ways from Sam, and from life itself, when he made a marriage of which - she could approve, but she was not ready to leave him to Ada Struggles of - whom she disapproved. She was not ready to die for the likes of Ada - Struggles. Let Sam marry Ada, and Anne, meant to live, because some day he - would have need of her and, when the day came, she would be there. - </p> - <p> - Now, Sam would have been pleased if he could have told Anne about the - pamphlet and the legacy. He had hoped after the Minnilie affair that his - next “stroke” would be one of which he could tell Anne, but he did not see - this as tellable. She would naturally ask what the pamphlet was about, and - if Peter could not speak of it to his daughter, Sam could speak of it even - less to his mother. And as to the legacy, what was the use of mentioning - that to a woman who would point out that security was only to be had with - two and a half per cent? Which wasn’t at all Sam’s notion of the uses of a - thousand pounds. - </p> - <p> - After all, he was grown up and a man does not tell his mother everything. - But unless he is a fool, he tells her the things which she is bound in any - case to find out, and if he had foreseen the certainty of her finding out - he would, not being a fool, have told her these. He did not foresee, - because Anne did not read newspapers, but she had neighbours who did and - who told her, with comments, of the storm which presently broke out in the - columns of the <i>Sunday Judge</i>, and of Mr. Travers’ will, which - received a small paragraph in the paper when it was proved. - </p> - <p> - “There was a time when you and me didn’t go in for secrets,” she said to - him. “You’ve not had much to say to me of late and I’ve not seen much of - you, either, with the hours you’re keeping, but I’d put it down to love. I - know a man’s not rational when he’s courting, but it seems there’s a lot - about my son that I’ve to learn. Why didn’t you tell me about Mr. Travers? - Did you think I’d steal the money off you?” - </p> - <p> - “Of course not, mother, but I meant to come to you with a finished tale, - not one that’s only just begun. I’m engaged in a business affair of which - I was going to tell you when it was complete.” - </p> - <p> - “<i>Yes</i>,” she said, “I see. You’re risking your money. If you came out - on the right side, you’d tell me about it, and if you lost you’d forget to - tell me. Are you losing?” - </p> - <p> - “It’s early days to say.” - </p> - <p> - “Then maybe I’m still in time to nip this in the bud. What’s this about - the <i>Sunday Judge?</i>” - </p> - <p> - “I Have you seen it?” he asked. - </p> - <p> - “Aye. You’re the talk of the street.” - </p> - <p> - “That’s splendid,” he let slip before he was aware of it. - </p> - <p> - “Splendid! There’s a gentleman writing to the paper to say that you’re - trading in immorality.” - </p> - <p> - “I wrote that letter myself,” grinned Sam. - </p> - <p> - “You did what?” - </p> - <p> - “I’m afraid I shall never make you understand.” - </p> - <p> - “I doubt you won’t. Lying to me like that. Expecting me to believe you - write to the paper about yourself and call yourself hard names. And the - letter’s signed ‘Truth-teller,’ too. It’s printed in the paper that my son - has lifted the lid from the cesspool and let loose a smell to make decent - people vomit.” - </p> - <p> - “Yes. I know. Advertising is a coarse art.” - </p> - <p> - “Your name’s blackened for ever. And it’s my name, Sam, and the name your - father gave me. It’s the name of honest folk and——” - </p> - <p> - “Mother, mother, don’t I tell you that it’s all advertisement?” - </p> - <p> - “What you tell me and what I can believe are coming to be two different - things. I know what an advertisement in the paper is and I know what a - letter is. This is a letter.” - </p> - <p> - Sam felt the hopelessness of further argument. - </p> - <p> - She had a simple-minded faith in the integrity of newspapers and the - printed word, but he could at least show that the word could contradict - itself. “Very well,” he said, “it’s a letter, and so is this.” He took a - copy of the paper from his pocket. Stewart had kept his word, no great - feat since he had a good idea of what his editor supposed the Sunday - public to want, and a column of fervent correspondence flared under the - heading of “The Social Evil.—Is the Pamphlet Justified?” Sam chose a - letter which described Adams as a crusader and Branstone, his publisher, - as a high-souled social reformer courageously risking misapprehension for - principle and the right, calling the endorsement of the Rev. Peter - Struggles to witness in proof of his irreproachable motives. “Well,” said - Sam, “am I to be misapprehended after all, and by you?” - </p> - <p> - “You told me you wrote the other letter,” she said. “Don’t you mean that - you wrote this one?” - </p> - <p> - “I don’t,” he said truthfully. He wrote his, attacking himself, on one - side of Stewart’s desk, while Stewart at the other defended him. It had - been great fun. - </p> - <p> - “And what,” she asked, “is the business affair you say you’re engaged on?” - </p> - <p> - “Why,” he said unguardedly, “it’s this.” - </p> - <p> - “Then I don’t misapprehend at all, my son. I apprehend very well. And - you’ve worked Peter Struggles into it. Was that why you got engaged to - Ada?” - </p> - <p> - “Mother!” he protested. “Doubt me if you like, but you must not doubt Mr. - Struggles. He surely is above suspicion.” - </p> - <p> - “He’s keeping bad company just now,” said Anne, “and I doubt you’ve been - too clever for him.” - </p> - <p> - Sam chose to be offended. “Is that what you think of me?” he asked. - </p> - <p> - “That you’re clever. Aye. I think that all right. I’ve known it since the - time when you tricked a parcel of schoolboys out of a house of furniture - and put George Chappie into it. You’re clever in the wrong places, Sam. - When you were at school, you were clever out of school. You’re at business - now and you ought; to be clever in honesty, and I’ve the notion that - you’re being clever in dishonesty.” - </p> - <p> - “Of course,” he said, “this only shows how right I was not to tell you. - It’s the old story. Women don’t understand business.” - </p> - <p> - “I know. Business is a pair of spectacles that makes black into white, but - I don’t wear spectacles myself. Are you going to tell me what you’re doing - with that thousand pounds?” - </p> - <p> - “I told you it isn’t decided yet. But if the sales of that pamphlet go up - this week as they did last, I’m going into the publishing business with - it.” - </p> - <p> - “So that you can publish more of the same sort?” - </p> - <p> - “If I can get them. There’s a lot of money in it.” - </p> - <p> - “Sam,” she said earnestly, “is that all you’re caring about?” - </p> - <p> - “You told me yourself that Ada was not the wife for a poor man.” He - considered that a very neat score, to seem to make Anne responsible, but - Anne was not to be deceived by any such seeming. As she saw it, Ada had - corrupted Sam, Ada was the motive of this misuse of his cleverness; and - the bitterness for Anne was doubly poignant. She believed in Sam, with a - faith which had never swerved in spite of her disappointment in his school - career; but she realized now that he had been marking time in Travers’ - office, that it was Ada and not she who had quickened his energies to - rapid action. Ada had quickened them, where under Anne they had lain - dormant but the quickening had been corrupt. It came from Ada, poisoned at - the source, and took to poisonous ways. - </p> - <p> - They had touched bottom now and reached essentials. “Sam,” she said, “I - was joking like when I said a man’s not rational when he’s in love. But it - was a true word spoken in jest. You’re not rational or you wouldn’t be - doing these things and making a byword of the name of Branstone, and the - reason you’re not rational is Ada. If you were in love with a good woman, - you could no more do dishonourable things than fly. But you’re in love - with a bad woman and it leads to bad results. Sam, do you think I like to - tell you that you’ve made a mistake? And do you think I don’t know? Lad, - lad, I love you, and I’ve never reckoned myself a fool. Choose now, I’m - not the sort of fool to be jealous just because you get wed. I’d none be - jealous of the right lass, Sam. I’d take her and welcome her and know she - had a better right to you than me. But Ada Struggles has no right: she’s - mean and grasping and she’s small in every way there is. She’s——” - </p> - <p> - “Stop, mother. Don’t forget that I am marrying Ada.” - </p> - <p> - “And nothing that I say will alter you? Sam, she’ll go on as she’s begun - by sending you to this.” She put her hand on the lurid polemics of the <i>Sunday - Judge</i>. “She’ll drive you down and down. You may make money and you may - be rich, but there’ll be a curse on your riches and on all you do, and Ada - Struggles is the name of the curse.” - </p> - <p> - Sam attempted a small levity. “That will be all right,” he said. “She’s - going to change her name.” Anne shook her head. “A change of name’ull none - change Ada’s nature. It’s the best part of your life that’s before you, - and life with Ada spells ruin. I’m not telling you what I think. It’s what - I know, and I ask you, Sam, to heed my words.” - </p> - <p> - “I’m heeding them,” he said, “but I know you’re wrong.” - </p> - <p> - “That’s the last you’ve got to say?” - </p> - <p> - “I’m sorry we don’t agree, mother.” - </p> - <p> - “Agreeing’s nowt,” she said, “and I’m nowt against your happiness. See, - Sam, I’ll prove it. There’s a thought at the back of your mind that I’ve - nothing against Ada but a grudge because she’s come between you and me. I - say that girl’s no good for you, and I say I’ll do anything to force you - to see it. There’s nowt of myself in this and maybe this will make you - believe it.” - </p> - <p> - There was a good fire in the room and she put her hand into it. Sam was - alert enough to drag her away before much damage was done, and he had oil - on the hand in a moment. - </p> - <p> - “Don’t fuss,” said Anne, “but tell me what you think.” - </p> - <p> - “I think,” he said, “that you’re plumb crazy—with jealousy.” - </p> - <p> - It was not craziness, but fanatic devotion to an idea: and the idea was - Sam, Sam’s happiness, Sam’s future. She put her hand into the fire hoping - to convince, and she would have sat on the fire if she had thought the - larger act would carry a fuller conviction. But he did not need to be - convinced that she objected to Ada; the point was that her objections were - unfounded, and, in the face of Ada’s sublime and stunning merits, idiotic. - </p> - <p> - One cannot put a hand into the fire without suffering for it, and Anne was - suffering acutely. Her face was drawn with pain and her lips were - trembling uncontrollably, but her voice was firm. - </p> - <p> - “I’ve done my best to save you, Sam. If you’ve nothing better to say than - that, you and me have come to a parting.” - </p> - <p> - “Then,” said Sam, “we’ve come,” and turned his back on her. He thought she - would come round, that she would get over her attack of frenzied jealousy. - It was idle threat to talk of a parting. Why, she was dependent on him, - and in more ways than one. He housed and kept her, but, more than that, - she needed him. His presence was the breath of life to her. He knew that, - and he let her go! - </p> - <p> - Of course, he thought she would come back, with a sharp lesson well - learnt. She had to learn that he was grown-up, of an age to act for - himself and choose and think without her tutelage. Only, she did not come - back. She went to Madge and stayed with Madge; and the terms on which she - stayed were her terms. “I furnish the room,” she said, “and I pay you a - rent for it. Also, I pay for what I eat.” - </p> - <p> - She paid. At the age of fifty-two the mother of Sara Branstone, of - Branstone and Carter, and the mother-in-law of George Chappie, of the - Chappie Window-Cleaning and Bill Posting Company (a smaller affair than - its name, but the source of a regular five pounds a week), was a charwoman - on three days out of the seven, and it was not lack of offers which - limited her to three days, but the fact that she paid her way on three - days’ result. She kept other people’s houses as clean as she had kept her - own. - </p> - <p> - It was suggested to George Chappie that it was hardly decent in him to - allow his mother-in-law to go out charring at her age—a prosperous - man like him. “I know,” he was reported to have replied, “and we’ve tried - all ways we can. But you can’t argue with Mrs. Branstone.” - </p> - <p> - “She’s one of the old sort, isn’t she?” said his gossip, who, perhaps, - endured a mother-in-law of another kind. - </p> - <p> - “All that,” said George succinctly. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0013" id="link2HCH0013"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER XIII—THE INTERMITTENT COURTSHIP - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">O</span>NLY by long - service does one become an artist, but one becomes married by a simple - ceremony. It is the tragedy of marriage, which is the most difficult of - all the arts, that most people come to it without apprenticeship. Perhaps - the popularity of widows as brides is due to the fact that the widow is a - widow: that she has been broken in to marriage: that she has not - everything to learn: that one, at any rate, of the contracting parties, is - expert. There is much to be said for the policy of the “trial trip.” - </p> - <p> - Courtship, if intimate enough, may be a fairish substitute, bowdlerized, - as it were, for a “trial trip,” but when Sam married Ada he knew pitiably - little about her. - </p> - <p> - He thought that she was wonderful. Not only had he to think it, but he - actually did think it. He had to think it because only for a prodigy among - women could he have treated his mother as he did. He had thought her crazy - when she put her hand into the lire, but he knew it was heroic. If she - were crazy, it was for love for him, and at the core, he loved her too and - felt ashamed of himself, but Ada stood between them, and he was not going - to give up Ada. Then he was busy, time wore on, custom blunted the prick - of conscience, and it finally became a habit either not to think of Anne - at all, or to think comfortably of her as happy enough with Madge. - </p> - <p> - And he actually thought Ada wonderful because the conditions of his - courtship fought for her. He was visibly prospering; he liked prosperity; - it was Ada who had initiated his prosperity; and she was glamorous for - that. Again, he was very busy in those days with the first steps of his - new business, too occupied to play the diligent lover, and saw her very - fitfully. So seen, she did not lose the wonder of surprise, but came upon - him freshly with each of their meetings, able to parade for each some new - attraction from her slender stock of charm. She kept their intercourse - egregiously correct, and he thought her mystery was infinite. She hid her - shallowness behind affected modesty, knowing that an intimate courtship - would discover to him that there was nothing to discover, and attracted by - aloofness. It was immensely clever in its short-winded way: a cleverness - that lasted the course of courtship, but evaporated when the tape—the - altar—was reached. It did not seem necessary to Ada to go on being - clever once that ring was on her finger. She was married, she had - achieved: she was clever for the spurt, and had no cleverness left, for - the Marathon Race. And Sam had many preoccupations in those days which - prevented him from thinking too much about Ada. - </p> - <p> - If he was dull about his courtship, his wits were sharp enough for other - matters. He had the satisfaction, almost from the day of its issue, of - seeing the pamphlet sell steadily. Very quickly it ceased to be a case of - getting his money back, and became merely a question of how many cents per - cent he was going to make. His first edition of five thousand (the <i>soi-disant</i> - thousand) was rapidly exhausted, and the presses of Carter Meadowbank - worked overtime to cope with the demand. He cast bread upon the waters by - sending copies to every name in the Clergy List and every Member of - Parliament; and did not cast in vain. Free advertisement was lavished upon - him. Somehow, he had found one of those times when the social conscience - is stirred: he published, without knowing it, opportunely, and the - diabolic cleverness of Gerald Adams’ writing steered him safely past the - rocks of the Public Prosecutor. It seemed only to stimulate demand when he - raised the price to a shilling. - </p> - <p> - He had no further trouble with the pamphlet. It sold itself, but sitting - still watching the wheels go round did not appeal to Sam, who had a - thousand pounds to multiply. He hadn’t quite the hardihood to believe that - he could multiply his thou sand as rapidly as he had the twenty-five which - he paid Adams, but he felt that he was launched as a publisher and had - nothing to publish. - </p> - <p> - His thoughts were diverted from that solecism one day when he went into - Carter’s printing-office to speed up the foreman. The foreman admitted - that the pace could be improved. “But I dunno, sir, that the boss wants it - improved. There’s nothing in to follow this job of yours. You might say - you’ve been the saving of Mr. Carter.” - </p> - <p> - Sam was thoughtful for a minute. He had not looked upon himself as the - saviour of Mr. Carter and did not appreciate that character when it was - thrust upon him. He went into Carter’s office. - </p> - <p> - “This little tract of mine,” he said (“tract” seemed the light description - in that text-hung room), “is selling remarkably well, and the demand - increases. Now, I’ve nothing to say about the past.-I came in here a total - stranger and you quoted me accordingly. But it’s only fair to warn you - that I have gone into prices with other printers and I may find it - necessary to make a change.” - </p> - <p> - Carter made no effort to hide his dismay. “I hope you won’t do that, Mr. - Branstone. At least, give me a chance of revising my price.” - </p> - <p> - “Once bitten,” said Sam, “is twice shy, and you don’t deny that you bit.” - </p> - <p> - “But surely business,” argued Carter, “is business.” - </p> - <p> - “It is,” said Sam grimly, “and if you’ll answer me a few questions on the - understanding that this is a business interview and I’m not being - impertinently inquisitive, I shall be obliged.” - </p> - <p> - “I’ll do my best,” said Carter. - </p> - <p> - “Thank you. How old are your printing-presses?” - </p> - <p> - “Twenty years.” - </p> - <p> - “Consequently they are almost hopelessly out of date?” - </p> - <p> - Carter had a tenderness for those presses. They had been young when he was - young, were bought when the world smiled on him and his business had its - hedyay. They had kept him and he could not be disloyal now. “I believe - that they have printed your tract efficiently, Mr. Branstone,” he defended - them. - </p> - <p> - “Oh, there’s life in the old dogs yet,” said Sam. “I’m not proposing to - make scrap-iron of them.” - </p> - <p> - “As they belong to me,” said Carter tartly, “it would not make such - difference if you did propose it.” - </p> - <p> - “Therefore,” said Sam, “I don’t propose it—yet. Please remember that - I’m talking business. Do you care to tell me what that text cost to - produce and what you get for it?” - </p> - <p> - Carter did not care, but, though he wondered at himself, he told. “And - that?” Sam asked, pointing to another; and again Carter told. - </p> - <p> - “Then,” said Sam, “there are two religious papers which you print for the - proprietors. What——?” - </p> - <p> - “Young man,” interrupted Carter, “are you proposing to buy my business?” - </p> - <p> - “No,” said Sam coolly, “only to become your partner in it. What profit - were you going to tell me you made on the papers?” - </p> - <p> - Carter told: he was too stupefied to do anything else. “Um,” said Sam. “It - isn’t much.” - </p> - <p> - “They are a good work,” said Carter, and Sam looked at him sharply, but - the old man was perfectly sincere. It was good work to print religious - magazines and he did it for next to nothing. - </p> - <p> - “Well,” said Sam, “thank you. Now I won’t mince matters: When I came along - with my—tract, I enabled you to postpone filing your petition, but - it was only a postponement, and if you’ll look facts in the face the one - big fact for you is bankruptcy.” - </p> - <p> - “The Lord will provide.” Carter had lived from hand to mouth for many - months in that belief. - </p> - <p> - “If you like to look at it that way. He has provided: He has provided me. - I will make you a good offer, Mr. Carter. I will introduce five him dred - pounds capital into the business for a halfshare in the plant, goodwill - and future profits of this concern. That is, the printing business. What - I, as publisher, do has nothing to do with you.” - </p> - <p> - “... I must think it over,” said Carter; but they both knew that he had - already decided to accept. - </p> - <p> - “The Lord,” Carter was thinking, “<i>has</i> provided.” Sam, on the - contrary, was thinking, “I may or may not be a fool to go into this - without getting an accountant’s report on the books, but I believe in - rapid action, and if I’d offered too high a price I’m certain that he’s - imbecile enough to have told me.” - </p> - <p> - It remained to find something to print, and he wanted Stewart’s advice, - but, with the idea of being first on the side of the angels, went to see - Peter Struggles. The battle which had raged round the pamphlet had left - Peter untouched, even though more than one of the clergy who received it - from Sam had thought it their duty to write to Peter’s bishop. The bishop - failed to see a case for disciplinary measures: Peter might have been - sinned against but he had not sinned. And the <i>Sunday Judge</i> was read - by neither Peter nor his bishop. (The Church is notoriously out of touch - with modern life, but, after all, it is hardly reasonable to expect the - Church to compliment its rival, the <i>Sunday Press</i>, by reading it.) - </p> - <p> - Nevertheless, Peter had, on reflection, felt some wavering doubts about - the pamphlet. His intermittent shrewdness threw a flickering light through - the haze of his charity and gave him moments of discomfort. - </p> - <p> - Sam’s attitude during this call was admirably calculated to resolve his - doubt. He wanted, with an eye to the future, to make sure of Peter, whose - name he might require another day, and was ready, even if it were not - immediately profitable, to placate Peter now. He explained that he had - joined forces with Mr. Carter, and at once acquired merit in Peter’s eyes. - Carter was irreproachable. He did not explain by what means he had been - able to join Carter and it did not occur to Peter to ask. Sam was not - going to tell Peter, who would tell Ada, of his legacy. If she found out, - as Anne had found out, he could not help it, but, meantime, it was his - secret. Ada, like Anne, belonged to the sex which had no understanding of - business. - </p> - <p> - “And the point,” said Sam, “with a business like Mr. Carter’s, is to use - it for good. I take it that the texts do good, but perhaps they are only - for the simple-minded. I hope I don’t despise people for their simplicity, - but my own taste runs rather to books and I think you will agree with me.” - </p> - <p> - Peter agreed, with a quotation which rather dashed Sam; he had an idea - that poetry did not sell. - </p> - <p> - “‘Poets are the trumpets which sing to battle. Poets are the - unacknowledged legislators of the world.’” - </p> - <p> - “Yes,” said Sam. “Quite so. But isn’t poetry going to the opposite - extreme? I had the thought of something more direct. Good prose with a - good moral.” - </p> - <p> - “Excellent,” said Peter, off again. - </p> - <p> - <br /> - </p> - <p class="indent30"> - “‘Were not God’s laws, - </p> - <p class="indent15"> - His gospel laws, In olden time held forth - </p> - <p class="indent15"> - By types, shadows and metaphors?’” - </p> - <p> - <br /> - </p> - <p> - “Of course they were,” said Sam, wondering when Peter would close his - mental dictionary of quotations and come down to business, “and that - quotation is very apt because I was thinking of classics. English - classics, you know,” he explained hurriedly, “and classics because they - are not copyright.” - </p> - <p> - “And have stood the test of time,” said Peter. - </p> - <p> - “Yes. Do you think you could propose a list? I should like to know that - the first books I publish had been selected by you. I don’t think they - ought to be exactly theological, but they must be good in every sense of - the word.” - </p> - <p> - “Why not begin with the book from whose in traduction I just quoted?” - </p> - <p> - “Why not indeed?” said Sam, who hadn’t the faintest idea of the source of - the quotation. - </p> - <p> - “Very well,” said Peter. “Suppose you put that down for one.” - </p> - <p> - Same made vague scratches on paper. He had a bookish reputation to sustain - and he was not going to betray ignorance prematurely. “Then,” said Feter, - “there is Law’s ‘Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life.’” - </p> - <p> - “I’m letting myself in for something,” thought Sam, but he wrote it down. - </p> - <p> - “‘The Imitation of Christ,’ and ‘The Little Flowers of St. Francis,’” - Peter went on. - </p> - <p> - “I think those should be enough to begin with,” said Sam hurriedly. - </p> - <p> - “Four, isn’t it?” said Peter, recapitulating. - </p> - <p> - “The ‘Pilgrim’s Progress ‘“——(“Thank God,” thought Sam, “I - needn’t give myself away.”) - </p> - <p> - “Yes, four,” he interrupted, reading the now completed list. “And I am - very much obliged to you.” - </p> - <p> - He wasn’t, though, quite sure about it. He had “nobbled” Peter, but he - feared those books would be a millstone round his neck. There might be a - steady sale for the “Pilgrim’s Progress” as a prize, but the others——! - Still, he need not print many copies of them, and—consoling thought—they - would be good window-dressing tor his list. He hoped it would include - other, very different, books. - </p> - <p> - “I’m sorry Ada is out,” Peter was saying, and Sam was rather startled to - realize that he had not missed her. But he was sure of his position with - her: it was his position for her which he had to consolidate. He proceeded - to consolidate it by going in search of Stewart, and found him where he - expected to find him, in a bar. - </p> - <p> - “I want your advice,” said Sam. - </p> - <p> - “Whisky for the gentleman, Flora,” said Stewart. “That’s my advice and - you’ll get no other till you’ve taken this.” - </p> - <p> - Sam took it. Business is business and, beyond that, his thrifty prejudices - were less necessary now. - </p> - <p> - “You’re not unteachable,” said Stewart. “It’s a point in your favour. The - proper thing when you’ve drunk that is to ask me if I will have another. - My reply will be in the affirmative and we shall then retire, with - sustaining refreshment, into that corner, where I will advise you for as - long as you can continue to buy whisky for me and drink level. I hate a - shirker.” - </p> - <p> - Sam told him of his partnership with Carter. “I’m always troubled about - you,” said Stewart. “I can never make up my mind whether you’re too clever - to live or whether you were born with luck instead of brain. Obviously, - you will publish novels.” - </p> - <p> - “There are so many kinds,” said Sam. - </p> - <p> - “No. Only two. Mine and the rest. But I suffer from honesty. Therefore I - tell you that my novel has been refused by every publisher in London. It - is waiting,” he said hopefully, “for a man with courage. The difference - between it and the Yellow Book is that my book <i>is</i> yellow.” - </p> - <p> - “I see,” said Sam. “But I have gone into the publishing trade to make my - living.” - </p> - <p> - “On the whole,” decided Stewart, “you are more knave than fool. And you - would call it the publishing trade. It’s a benighted world, but there are - still some publishers who aren’t in trade—beyond the midriff. Do you - seriously come to me to ask what sort of novels to publish?” - </p> - <p> - “Yes.” - </p> - <p> - “The sort,” he said, “that is written for nursemaids by people who ought - to be nursemaids.” - </p> - <p> - “That’s jealousy,” said Sam. “They get published and you don’t.” - </p> - <p> - “Perhaps you’re right,” said Stewart. “But I’ve always heard that seeing - is believing. Do you ever go to the theatre?” - </p> - <p> - “Not often.” - </p> - <p> - “It’s a pity, because if you did, I’ve a tragedy in blank verse that you - might care to publish. It is great art and will never be produced. Still, - I’m a philanthropist to-night and you will come to the theatre with me. I - happen to be going for the <i>Warden.</i>” - </p> - <p> - “Are you a dramatic critic for the <i>Warden?</i>” asked Sam, rather awed. - </p> - <p> - “I’m a reporter, old son. This isn’t the kind of play they waste a critic - on. Drink up, and we’ll go.” - </p> - <p> - Sam found, to his relief, that he was able to go and decided he had a - strong head. The theatre was crowded when they reached it and Stewart was - young enough to sit self-consciously in one of the two seats kept for the - <i>Manchester Warden</i>. Dramatic criticism was taken seriously on that - journal; at least two of the paper’s regular critics were men of genius, - and Stewart hoped that he might be mistaken for one of them. But the - audience that night was not the kind which interests itself in the lions - of the higher journalism; rather it justified the contemptuous reference - to drama as the “art of the mob.” It would have made a sincere democrat - weep for his convictions. “Behold them,” said Stewart. “The Public.” - </p> - <p> - Sam beheld them more than he beheld the play. He reminded himself that he - was there on business, to be shown something which Stewart wanted him to - see, and if he had not the gift of detachment, he assumed it. - </p> - <p> - When Adams had read his paper to the Concentrics, Sam had listened but - kept his eyes on the audience. In a darkened theatre, the audience was - more difficult to watch, but he could feel its quick response to the play, - could hear its ready laughter and its quite eager ears. Emphatically, here - was a play which seized its audience, gripped them, tickled them, - beslavered them, throttled them, did with them what it liked and when it - liked; all to their immense and vociferous delight. He tried to keep his - aloofness, to see how it was done, to tear the heart out of this mystery. - Here was something which the public wanted; he had only to diagnose it, - and the Open Sesame to fortune was his. - </p> - <p> - He couldn’t do it. Detachment slipped from him, never to return till the - curtain fell. He wasn’t a superman, immune from other men’s emotions. The - play took hold of him and swayed him with the rest. He tried resistance, - vainly; told himself that he was here, not, as these others were, for - pleasure, but to learn, to learn; and the play gripped him the harder for - his attempt to take it coldly. - </p> - <p> - At the end, Sam was applauding wildly while Stewart watched him with - cynical amusement. “Caught you all right,” he said, “and by way of a - confession I’ll own that the damned thing nearly got me once. Rum place, - the theatre, isn’t it? But,” he grew more serious, “I’ve to write about - that, write without being libellous about that maudlin, sentimental, - erotic, religious trash. It’s enough to make a man give up journalism and - take to something honest, like coal-heaving. But I’m forgetting. I brought - you here to teach you something. Have you learnt it? That’s a play, but - the same thing applies to a novel. You find novels with ‘The Sign of the - Cross’ in them, my boy. Queasy sentimentality to sicken a bee, and, for - the rest, don’t forget that Jesus died for you to make money out of - novels. This play makes me blasphemous, but I’m doing the devil’s advocate - to you to-night, so it’s all in the picture. When I’ve finished my notice - I think I’ll try a ‘short’ on ‘The Tradesman Publisher’ or ‘The Dignity of - Letters.’ It will be good for my conscience.” - </p> - <p> - “I wish you would,” said Sam. “I’ll reply to it, with a list of the - classics I am going to publish.” - </p> - <p> - “Sometimes,” said Stewart, “you rather sicken me. I am speaking of the <i>Manchester - Warden</i>, not the <i>Sunday Judge</i>. Good-night.” - </p> - <p> - But the vacillations of a journalist with a foot in two camps and an - idealistic standard which he hardly pretended to take seriously himself - left Sam unimpressed. The play and Stewart’s description of its essence - had given him furiously to think. He imagined that he knew the sort of - novel he wanted and he was not troubled by Stewart’s disease of dual - standards. Sam had one standard, the success standard; and anything else - was muddle-headedness. At the same time he felt most grateful to Stewart - who had advertised the pamphlet and now presented him with a policy. - </p> - <p> - It was a policy, but not one for immediate application. <i>Festina lente</i> - was his watchword for the moment, and he devoted himself to putting new - life into the sales of texts and to the issue of the “Branstone + - Classics.” They were, one might note in passing, the Branstone + Classics: - his name loomed large and the names of their authors, the insignificants - like à Kempis and Bunyan, were properly small; and he put the sign of the - cross between the Branstone and the Classics. He intended it to be his - trade-mark, and if it were his trade-mark, why not use it? It infringed - nobody’s copyright. - </p> - <p> - Amongst it all, he had little enough time for Ada, and she knew how much - she gained by being a luxury instead of a habit. But Sam was not engaged - for the sake of being engaged, and as soon as he knew he had made no - mistake in his business venture was eager to be married. There were no - objections from Ada. This intermittent courtship, in which his duties as a - lover took second place to his activities as a business man, suited Ada - well, but marriage, finality, the bond suited her better. - </p> - <p> - Even to the end of that engagement it was things for Ada which preoccupied - him, rather than Ada herself, and he took the matter of furnishing - seriously—from a business point of view, interested less in the - furniture he bought than in the discounts he might, by this means or that, - secure. He suffered the usual surprise at the cost of mattresses and - kitchen equipment, but, to Ada, he appeared royally lavish. Ada did not - know of his legacy: she knew that Anne had told her on the top of a - fantastic tram-car that Sam had earned two pounds ten a week with Travers, - and the scale of this furnishing did not square with what a man could save - out of two pounds ten a week. It followed in Ada’s mind that Anne had lied - to her, malignantly misrepresenting Sam’s position to frighten her; and - the breach between Anne and Ada, which never had much chance of closing, - was permanently open. - </p> - <p> - One does not have old connections with an estate agency without being able - to rent a good house cheaply. She was going to be mistress of a house - which fell little short of the dreams of her boarding-school days. It was - certainly “stylish”; she was not sure that it was not positively “smart.” - </p> - <p> - Madge wept on the night before her wedding. Ada did not weep. She was too - busy hugging herself because she had surmounted the perils of courtship. - She had accomplished her aim in life. She was going to be married. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0014" id="link2HCH0014"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER XIV—HONEYMOONERS - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>DA was married in - white satin, though Peter sold books to do it and her trousseau lacked - essentials. It depends, though, on one’s point of view. Ada thought white - satin essential, while another might have put underclothing first. But it - is fitting to wear a crown at a coronation and, when the object of one’s - life has been to get married, to celebrate in satin the attaining of one’s - aim. - </p> - <p> - It also reminded the congregation that the bride is the central figure at - a wedding. People might otherwise have remembered that they did not come - because Ada was Ada, but because she was Peter’s daughter. - </p> - <p> - She entered with <i>réclame</i> into the state of being Mrs. Samuel - Branstone, resenting a little the tweeds of Stewart, Sam’s best man, but - liking his manners and liking, too, the way in which Sam took it for - granted that the day was hers, not his. He did not even obtrude a family. - </p> - <p> - George was, in fact, obscurely there, hidden among the congregation. He - was there in the spirit of schoolboy, playing truant from Anne, who was at - home with Madge. Ada thought that the conspicuous absence of Branstones - added lustre to her satin. None but the necessary Sam was there. - </p> - <p> - They went to London, where neither of them had been before, and since it - is a bitter thing to have to look back to a boring honeymoon, the choice - of place had great discretion. There was so much besides themselves to see - in London that they postponed looking at each other till they came home. - They saw sights and went to theatres, but though they slept together and - rose together and saw the sights (all but one) together there was no - realization of “togetherness,” no birth of a new life in which they were - not Sam and Ada, but these two in one. They were furiously modest about - things which no honeymooner has any right to be modest about. If they are - modest about them, they have no right to be honeymooners. It may have been - in their case something both worse and better than modesty. It may have - been downright shame. Perhaps subconsciously they knew that this was not a - marriage, not the coming together of two fit mates. It had no passion in - it. There was self when they should have been ecstatically selfless. They - were two when they should have been most one. - </p> - <p> - But Sam, if he fell immensely short of ecstasy, was still too much under - her spell to be critical. He wondered a little at the frank delight in - being married which she displayed in public, at her flaunting of her new - wedding ring, at her advertisement that this was a honeymoon, and - contrasted this outward relish with her intimate frigidity; but even this - seemed a disloyalty, and he told himself that Ada in a hotel was one - person and at home would be another. Ada would “settle down,” and meantime - they were in London, and London was waiting to be explored with her. - </p> - <p> - They explored chiefly the London which Londoners do not know, the London - of the guide-books, and felt tremendously metropolitan because they went - to the Tower, the British Museum and the National Gallery. The shops - seared Ada. Their windows fascinated but their doors repelled. Probably - Sam would have held her back by main force had she attempted to go in, - but, as it was, she had the same satisfaction in identifying them that - social snobs find in recognizing, at a distance, famous people. These were - the authentic shops which advertised in the papers and they had a game - called “hunting the Harrod” or “looking for Barkers,” which led to a lot - of fun with ‘buses after they had quartered Oxford Street and Regent - Street. It was all very gay, and gayer, almost naughtily gay, to go one - night to a place called the Coliseum—a music-hall; a thing to do - audaciously, not to be spoken of at home; and yet the place was very full - of really most respectable people. They marvelled at the emancipation of - the Londoner. - </p> - <p> - On his honeymoon, Sam became possessed of an ambition. It was not an - extraordinarily fine ambition, but he came to care about, it greatly and - it repaid his care a thousandfold. The way to sanity is to desire very - keenly something which it is just possible one may get, and Sam’s ambition - kept him sane in the days when he knew that Ada had failed him. - </p> - <p> - Struggles had suggested to our debater of the Concentrics that he ought to - see the House of Commons at debate, and had written to their local Member - for a pass to the Gallery. The result was the most thrilling experience of - Sam’s honeymoon! It was, for one thing, unique that Ada could not be with - him: these were the first hours since he married her that they spent apart - and perhaps that, all unconsciously, had gilded them for Sam. They had - almost a tiff before she let him go: not quite, but she resented his - desertion of her and considered it his fault that she was not allowed to - sit with him to hear the legislators who made laws for her as for him. Not - that Ada cared who made her laws, nor cared to watch the makers at their - work, but she managed to put enough snap into her resentment at his going - to lend the added quality of a stolen pleasure to his experience. - </p> - <p> - That gallery, with its foreshortened view of the dingy cock-pit, is not - the first choice of the connoisseur in thrills, but on Sam its effect was - amazing. He must have had some gift, quite undisclosed till now, of - veneration, for it is almost beyond belief that the reality of the House - of Commons can impress. But the idea can and perhaps (to be just) the - reality is more impressive than that of any other Chamber on earth. - Imagination helping him, it caught and held his mind. - </p> - <p> - A small stout man of undistinguished appearance was speaking in a - conversational tone not easy to hear from the Gallery, but presently the - orator warmed to his subject and poured out living words in a spate of - real emotion. He was one of those rare men, and this one of those rare - speeches, that really convert an opponent: and Sam’s ambition to speak as - this politician spoke, and from those benches, came instantly to birth. - </p> - <p> - Not only did he want to be a Member of Parliament, but a Liberal Member, - because this man of words was Liberal. Up to this time, Sam had not been a - political animal although he had voted, and voted Tory because that was in - general the line of Mr. Travers and the property-owning class he - represented. Now with a swift enthusiasm he was Liberal, knowing nothing - of either side, but caught by sudden hero-worship for a little, pudgy, - snubnosed politician who spoke in sentences of prodigious length and never - lost his way in them. - </p> - <p> - In a twinkling he acquired the bias of the politician: his hero’s opponent - was palpably a fool; he had no gifts, no argument. Yes, Sam was doubly - right to be a Liberal. They had so obviously all the brains, they were so - undeniably the winning side. He did not understand the technique of a - division and was surprised when he looked at the paper next day to find - that the Liberals were outvoted. It gave him pause, but did not shake him. - When the Liberals came back to power, as with their superiority in brain - they were certain to do, he, Sam Branstone, would come with them. Let it - be only a year or two and he would be ready. He too would loll upon those - padded benches, and catch the Speaker’s eye, and be an orator. - </p> - <p> - He walked along the Embankment towards his hotel, and it came into his - mind that he had spent four hours in the Gallery and had not thought of - Ada. Nor could he, though he tried, think of her now. - </p> - <p> - Sky-signs still flashed across the river, and as he paused and leaned - against the parapet a young policeman kept a wary eye on him. But Sam was - meditating life, not death. The lights of London gleamed upon the Thames - and made it magical for him. He conquered London in his reverie, and - stepped, a member, from the House to his automobile. His home, he - supposed, was somewhere in Park Lane. - </p> - <p> - He thought back now to the theatre where he had seen <i>The Sign of the - Cross</i>. It was different from the London Theatres he had seen where - audiences seemed afraid of emotion. Or was it that the plays had not been - right? That was it: they had not the note: they weren’t—what was - Stewart’s phrase?—erotic religious plays. He wanted to move - audiences as that play had moved its audience. Power! The power of the - spoken word. That was the thing, and since he could not write a play he - must rely upon himself, his oratory, his single voice. He saw himself on - platforms facing crowded halls, gripping his hearers, leading them where - he would, taming the mob till it made an idol of its master. As to where - he would lead, why, he would lead and that was what mattered. Branstone - was Prime Minister that night. - </p> - <p> - It was one o’clock before the young policeman felt at liberty to resume - his beat, and Sam left the enchanted river for his little hotel in Norfolk - Street. Ada had her back to him and apparently she slept. Actually she was - wide awake; she was wondering whether it had happened to any other woman - to be treated so abominably on her honeymoon. - </p> - <p> - She brushed her hair nest morning with a notable viciousness. Hair has - uses beyond those of mere adornment. It is an admirable veil through which - one can watch without being seen to watch. Ada was watching Sam and she - was also listening to him. - </p> - <p> - She listened not because his enthusiasm for the House of Commons - interested her, but because she was waiting for some word of apology. It - did not come. He was full of regret, but only because this was their last - day in town and he could not go to the House again. - </p> - <p> - “What time is our train?” she asked. - </p> - <p> - He told her. - </p> - <p> - “Then I have time to do some shopping first.” - </p> - <p> - “Shopping?” he asked, but unsuspiciously. - </p> - <p> - She nodded. Sam was going to pay for his pleasures. Those blouses she had - seen at Peter Robinson’s no longer seemed impossibly expensive. If Sam - chose to enjoy himself in his own way, without her, she would enjoy - herself in hers—with Sam to pay the piper. - </p> - <p> - Shopping is a loose term; one shops when one buys a kipper or a diamond - tiara. Ada was putting her hair up and he imagined her to mean that she - wanted a packet of hair-pins. “Oh, yes,” he said pensively. “And while you - go, I think I will just slip down to the House of Parliament again.” The - House would not be sitting and he could not get in. He knew that, but he - wanted to gaze, to look at the frame which was some day to contain him. He - wanted to be certain that it was still there. - </p> - <p> - “I think,” she said, “that you will come with me to the shop. I shall want - you there to pay.” - </p> - <p> - Sam paused in the act of fastening his collar. “To pay?” he asked, not - unsuspiciously now. - </p> - <p> - “Are your selfish pleasures all you think about?” Ada wanted to know. - “Isn’t it a privilege to be allowed to buy me nice clothes?” - </p> - <p> - He had not looked upon it in that light. In budgeting for their future he - had indeed assumed that a trousseau lasted a bride for her first year. “I - see,” he said gloomily; then remembering that he was in love with her, “of - course,” he added with a smile which might count to him for heroism. “But - we must not forget the fares, and after I have paid the bill here I shall - not have more than two pounds left to spend.” - </p> - <p> - “Then I spend two pounds on blouses,” she said. - </p> - <p> - He made a monosyllabic noise which might have been “Yes.” It might also - have been “Damn.” - </p> - <p> - The truth was that he had deliberately kept those two pounds back, - intending to spend some, but not, he hoped, all of it, on a present for - Ada. He had thought of a hand-bag, had imagined her gasp of delight when - he audaciously entered with her one of those forbiddingly inviting shops, - her appreciation of his generosity. - </p> - <p> - Last night had driven the thought entirely from his mind, and he was - annoyed now not only at his forgetfulness, but at Ada. She did not ask, - she demanded. A night in the Gallery may be regarded as dissipation, but - at least it is not a crime. It is even patriotic, and he was asked to foot - a bill for two pounds as the price of his patriotism. Ambition, he - thought, would be an expensive luxury if he had to pay in clothes for Ada - every time he went to a political meeting. For that, plainly, was her - attitude: she demanded a <i>quid pro quo</i>: she announced a policy of - retaliation. - </p> - <p> - There is a queer perverted pleasure in scratching an open wound, in - cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. He had meant to be generous - and he wanted still to be generous, but the money he had laid aside for - generosity was now hypothecated to meet her claim. He would give her her - pound of flesh, but wanted very badly to roast it for her with coals of - fire. - </p> - <p> - Gloom lifted from him suddenly. He took off the old tie which he had put - on as being good enough to travel in, and fastened very carefully one - which he had bought “for London.” - </p> - <p> - “I’ll do it,” he was thinking. “It is—almost—a stroke.” - </p> - <p> - At breakfast he was positively gay, so that Ada wondered furtively what he - was up to, and whether the way to raise his spirits would always be to - demand new clothes of him. It did not seem likely, but she proposed at any - rate to experiment freely in that direction. - </p> - <p> - He divided his attention between her, breakfast, and the Parliamentary - report of the <i>Times</i>. He felt that he had virtually participated in - that debate, and even the shock of reading that the division had gone - against his hero did not spoil the pleasure he found in reading of it. He - read with a prophetic eye. He, too, would be reported in the <i>Times</i> - some day. - </p> - <p> - He called the waiter. “Marmalade, sir?” asked the man. - </p> - <p> - “No, thanks. Bring me the directory.” - </p> - <p> - “The directory,” protested the waiter, “is in the reading-room.” - </p> - <p> - “And I,” said Sam superbly, “am in the coffee-room.” - </p> - <p> - The waiter brought him the directory. - </p> - <p> - Sam smiled broadly. He was testing his form, and decided that if it were - equal to coercing a waiter into carrying a directory to his - breakfast-table, it would probably not fail him in what he proposed to do. - He consulted the book and noted an address which was not, he observed, in - Park Lane. His respect for Sir William Gatenby suffered a slight decline. - </p> - <p> - Half an hour later he rang the hell of that gentleman’s house. Gatenby was - the local member, to whom Peter Struggles had written for Sam’s pass to - the Gallery. - </p> - <p> - “Sir William in?” he asked. - </p> - <p> - “Yes, but——” A trained eye observed his clothes. They were not - cut in Savile Row. - </p> - <p> - “He will see me,” said Sam serenely. Some people are at their best in the - early morning. - </p> - <p> - His card was accepted from him, and he was shown into a library of severe - Blue Books, possibly qualified by a reproduction of Millais’ portrait of - Gladstone. Ordinarily, Sam would have been met in the library by a - secretary who earned his salary by his talent for administering polite - snubs to unwanted callers. The secretary was not earning his salary - to-day, but, probably, spending it. It was Derby Day. - </p> - <p> - After all, a vote is a vote, and Sir William came in with a show of - geniality. “Good morning, Mr. Branstone,” he said, reading Sam’s card. - “From the old town. I see.” - </p> - <p> - “Is that all you remember about me?” asked Sam. - </p> - <p> - “At the moment,” confessed Sir William warily. His majority was not large. - </p> - <p> - “Well,” said Sam, “the Reverend Mr. Struggles is my father-in-law.” - </p> - <p> - “Sit down,” said Sir William. “I am very glad you called. How is Mr. - Struggles?” - </p> - <p> - “T left him well, thank you. Perhaps you remember that he wrote to you to - ask you for a pass to the Gallery for me.” - </p> - <p> - “I was happy to be lucky in the ballot,” said the Member. - </p> - <p> - “Yes,” said Sam, “I went last night. But I mentioned that to establish my - identity. My object in calling upon you is to ask you to lend me five - pounds.” - </p> - <p> - Sir William thought of his secretary, who should have saved him this. - Thinking of his secretary, he thought of Derby Day and the probable - intentions of a man who chooses that day to ask for a loan. “My dear sir!” - he said. - </p> - <p> - “Quite,” agreed Sam. “Life would be unbearable to you if every constituent - who came to London tried to borrow money off you. But I am Branstone. I - run the Branstone Press and the Branstone Classics. I published the - ‘Social Evil’ pamphlet and sent you a copy which, I regret to say, you did - not acknowledge.” Sir William thought again of his secretary, and - unkindly. “This,” said Sam, “is merely to indicate that I am a man of - substance.” - </p> - <p> - Sir William Gatenby wore side-whiskers. He was an old man and there was - little left of him besides pomposity and a determination to hold his seat. - He looked, what at this moment he felt, some one in a farce. He was quite - sure that Sam was some one in a farce. They were both in a farce, and of - course five-pound notes fly in farces like gnats in August. It did not - seem to him that there was anything to do but to produce a five-pound - note. - </p> - <p> - “Thank you,” said Sam, and sat at a desk. “I will give you my cheque for - this.” - </p> - <p> - It staggered Sir William. He nearly warned Sam of the danger of issuing a - cheque which was not likely to be honoured, but refrained in time. “Then,” - he said, “there was really no need for you to come to me at all?” - </p> - <p> - “Only,” said Sam, “that I wanted you to remember me.” - </p> - <p> - “I think I shall do that,” said Sir William. - </p> - <p> - “Thank you,” said Sam calmly. “I wanted to know you because I intend to go - into politics.” - </p> - <p> - “The Cause,” said Sir William solemnly, “demands his best from every - earnest worker.” - </p> - <p> - “I will work for the Cause,” said Sam. Neither of them attempted to define - the Cause, and Sam left without further remark, but his call had this - result: that on finding the cheque honoured Sir William wrote to his agent - to tell him of “a queer fish called Samuel Branstone who called on me the - other day, and offered to work for the Cause. A young man whom I think you - should encourage. He is the son-in-law of Mr. Struggles, and the Church, - alas, is so tepid towards our great Principles that we must not neglect a - promising recruit from that fold.” - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0015" id="link2HCH0015"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER XV—OTHER THINGS BESIDE MARRIAGE - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">D</span>EBT appeals to - some people. They feel that when they are in debt they have had more out - of life than life owes to them. Sam had given Gatenby his cheque and was - therefore not in debt to him, but he proceeded to spend the five pounds as - recklessly as if it had been borrowed money. - </p> - <p> - He meant to astonish Ada, and succeeded, but the surprise he sprang did - not work quite as he anticipated. For a moment, indeed, as he bought her - hats and blouses she glowed with unaffected gratitude, and he tasted with - her the joy of headstrong acquisition. But Ada’s glow was quick to pass. - </p> - <p> - She had time in the train to forget the splendour of his presents and the - dash that she would cut next Sunday, and to remember that he had spent a - lot of money; he who denied that he had more than two pounds to spend had - spent seven. Obviously, he had lied to her. - </p> - <p> - It was true, she thought, that he had repented of his lie and of his - meanness, and bought handsomely: the more handsome the purchase, the more - demonstrable the lie. - </p> - <p> - She recalled her dreadful interview with Anne, Anne’s statements of his - means, and how little they conformed to the scale of Sam’s furnishing. She - pondered Sam’s open-handedness in the blouse-shop, and concluded that the - Branstones were congenital liars about money. - </p> - <p> - In the future she would know how to act. Sam had plenty. - </p> - <p> - “So you had money up your sleeve all the time,” she said. - </p> - <p> - Sam winked facetiously. “There are a lot of funny things up my sleeve,” he - said. - </p> - <p> - “I’m learning that,” said Ada. Which he took for a compliment; and - grinned. - </p> - <p> - He had long since made up his mind that the way with women was to mystify - them, to treat them like children at a conjuring entertainment, to - surprise them with results, but never to explain. He nearly choked with - pride over his exploit with Sir William Gatenby. But for the hat-box and - the blouses up there on the rack, what he had done was too good to be - true, and certainly it was too good to be told to a woman. They did not - understand business; no woman could appreciate the daring spirit of his - feat. - </p> - <p> - If he told Ada that he had borrowed from Gatenby, she would simply say - “Oh, yes,” and treat his unexampled audacity as a matter of course. It was - inspiration, brilliantly conceived and brilliantly executed, and its - bright memory was not to be tarnished by a woman’s dull acceptance of it - as something not in the least extraordinary. - </p> - <p> - He grinned and did not tell, and what did not occur to him was that if he - offered no explanation she would supply one of her own. It is idiotic to - tell a wife everything, but wise to tell nearly everything; especially - when it is open to her to draw a false conclusion. - </p> - <p> - Sam did not think a false conclusion open to her, because he still - believed the best of Ada, because he was still in love. But falling out of - love is desperately easy. - </p> - <p> - “As a walled town,” says Touchstone, “is worthier than a village, so is - the forehead of a married man more honourable than the bare brow of a - bachelor,” and Sam was married. He could lay that flattering unction to - his soul, could hold his head higher, because he was a ratepayer and bore - responsibilities, and went home at night to a house with a garden. He did - all that, and it was empty honour because success in marriage, as in all - else, is not to be had ready-made, but depends upon the will to make - adjustments. - </p> - <p> - The will can come best from passion, and there was no passion here to tide - them over the awkward age of marriage, the first difficult year when the - adjustments must, if ever, be made. Granted passion, a man can love a - woman whom he knows to be a murderess; let passion lack, and he can fall - out of love because the woman snores or is untidy. Sam’s marriage was not - made in heaven, but by Ada in Heaton Park, and with a marriage so made it - is as easy to fall out of love as off a house. Little things count more - than big when there is no passion to create its life-long mirage. - </p> - <p> - If you cannot have the mirage of passion there is a useful substitute - called common sense, another name for compromise, and Ada refused to - compromise. She was for self, unmitigated and supreme. Ada left the - adjustments to Sam, and relaxed in nothing from her perfect selfishness. - </p> - <p> - The little thing which counted heavily against her, almost at once, was - simply that Ada was untidy. She did not invent places for things, or, if - she did, they were never used. She left her clothes downstairs after she - had been out, and the piano is not the place for a hat or the sofa for an - umbrella. It annoyed Sam to distraction to find her clothes distributed - about their bedroom, slung carelessly over chair backs, pitched on the - floor. - </p> - <p> - Men are not the untidy sex: the virtue of tidiness, like most others, is - evenly distributed. Sam was tidy by nature, and habit is stronger still. - Ada’s misfortune was that he was used to Anne, that Anne was neat and Ada - a slut. Sam did not know until he missed it how much he appreciated Anne’s - tidiness, how much he needed it and how much he hated untidiness until he - lived with it in Ada. In London, in the hotel, he had excused what he saw - of it, because it was in an hotel; which was also why there had been - little to see, by reason of a good chambermaid. - </p> - <p> - At home, it hurt him and he could do nothing. Ada did nothing, either. She - had not married for love, and one does not change a habit without strong - motive. His hints appeared to Ada peevish and unreasonable. She thought he - made mountains out of molehills and despised him for small-mindedness; he - thought a woman who could not put a petticoat into a drawer when he asked - her was wilfully provoking him. - </p> - <p> - She was not wilful of set purpose. She simply refused to disturb her - habits, to accommodate herself to him, to make a sacrifice to love. She - had no love to which to sacrifice. - </p> - <p> - And presently he found out that he, too, did not love. But that was all. - Then and afterwards that was, damnably, all. He did not love, but neither - did he hate. He had never loved her deeply enough to hate her. That was - the tragedy of Sam’s marriage: indifference, the deadliest sin. - </p> - <p> - He was indifferent to her, to her untidiness and even to her extravagance. - She could not treat clothes reasonably, she did not know how to wear them - when she had them, but she lusted madly to possess them. She was grossly, - inexcusably extravagant, and he was indifferent. He was indifferent - because he was growing rich, and wanted his energies for the purpose of - growing richer, not of quarrelling with her. - </p> - <p> - That was another tragedy. They never quarrelled. They never cleared the - air, they never flushed the drain. They did not make adjustments, but left - things where they were, in a bad place. On honeymoon, they turned from - looking at each other to look at London, and at home, after one experience - of revelation, they did not seek another, but rebounded and looked - anywhere but at themselves. - </p> - <p> - But Peter was looking, and Anne, through the eyes of George, was looking, - and it seemed to her that things were happening as she had expected they - would happen. She had said the girl was no good and what George told her - in his fumbling way gave her to see that the girl turned wife was equally - no good. Anne tightened her lips grimly and went on with her efficient - charring. She thought her time would come. - </p> - <p> - Peter looked for the coming of love to bless this marriage to which he had - consented in the belief that his God of love would sanctify. He had - trusted to the strength of Sam, and to the hope that Sam’s strength would - turn to sweetness; and it only turned to business. It did not lead Ada - from materialism, but drew Peter himself, unwittingly at first, towards - it. Peter found himself selecting texts for Sam’s “Church Child’s - Calendar,” a labour of love, which nevertheless had nothing to do with - Ada, except in the most indirect way, and nothing to do with the Sam and - Ada situation. - </p> - <p> - It was the fact that, to them, there seemed to be no situation which - distressed Peter. They simply let things be, and things let be obey the - law of gravity. He hoped, ardently, for children. Children blessed - marriage in the physical sense, and from that blessing the other, the - spiritual blessing, might arise. - </p> - <p> - There was at one time hope that Ada might have a child... and then the - hope was blighted, and the doctor told them not to hope again. Ada would - never be a mother. - </p> - <p> - “I could have told them that,” said Anne. “You’d only to look at the girl - to see it.” Which may only have been wisdom after the event, but certainly - did not imply that Anne was disappointed; though Peter was, and bitterly. - </p> - <p> - Sam, too, had wanted a son, but not, as Peter thought, by Ada and for Ada. - He wanted an heir for dynastic reasons. He was the Branstone Publishing - Company, its parent and original, and wanted flesh of his flesh to publish - after him. He dreamed of a young Sam in the cap of the Grammar School, who - should go to the University to which he had not gone and have the chances - he had missed. He built many castles in Spain for the son who was never - born. - </p> - <p> - Ada got up from bed and flashed greedily into new clothes. If the measure - of her buying was the measure of her grief, she had been deeply touched. - Perhaps she was touched, for she had aimed at marriage, which is - incomplete without a child. But in the shops, the fashion papers, her - clothes and the clothes of other women she found distraction and an - occupation. She passed a milestone and went on her way. Ada was no stoic, - no hider of her grief, and since she did not complain she must have - thought her childlessness was nothing to complain about. When she set her - heart on marriage, she hadn’t, perhaps, looked further than the ring, the - ceremony and the honourable state of being Mrs. Branstone. - </p> - <p> - She plunged to shops and spending money, Sam to business and making it; - and some, at any rate, of the now thwarted love he had been storing for - his son passed to the business. Somewhere at the back of his mind he knew - his business was not lovable; that it was pitch; that one cannot touch - pitch without being defiled. But neither can one deal successfully in - pitch without arriving at faith in the virtues of pitch. At intimate - moments he was aware that the “Social Evil” pamphlet was pernicious, but - Sam Branstone, inducing a bookseller to stock it, was more than an - advocate who believes temporarily in his brief: he was a missionary with - faith in his mission. So, too, with the texts. He sold them with the - conviction that it was good for people to have texts on their walls. He - counterfeited sincerity until he came to be sincere, or, at all events, to - forget that he was insincere. - </p> - <p> - Further and further into the unsearched recesses of his mind he pressed - the thought that he sold texts because their sales were good for him, and - with his working, everyday, non-introspective mind he had a sincerity - about his wares, convenient but none the less authentic,-which was - invaluable both to his self-respect and as a first aid to success in - salesmanship. He never, in the old days, praised a house with the ringing - voice of absolute conviction which he used about Law’s “Serious Call.” He - had not read Law, but the sales hung fire till he became persuaded of - Law’s tremendous worth. - </p> - <p> - He had a serious call of his own, a call to sell good books at good - profits, and the call expressed itself in his clothes and his appearance. - He seemed older, graver, took his frock-coat into daily wear, used only - black in ties and socks, and had the air of one, who, if not a clergyman, - was often in their company, though as a fact he was more frequently with - commercial travellers, and in the hotels at night his repertoire of - smoke-room stories came no less gaily from his tongue than of old. - </p> - <p> - And about this time his moustache began to droop like a curtain over his - resolute mouth. - </p> - <p> - Stewart came into the office one day with a parcel under his arm. He had - seen neither Sam nor his office lately, and stared wide-eyed at both. - Carter, partner in the printing business, still occupied the dilapidated - office where Sam had found him, but the Branstone Publishing Company had - ampler premises next door, in a building which Sam rented as warehouse for - his stock. Gilt lettering on its windows called the attention of the - passer-by to the Branstone + Classics. - </p> - <p> - Sam still looked after detail, and when Stewart came in was correcting - proofs of a tear-off calendar with a Bible at his elbow. - </p> - <p> - “I suppose,” said Stewart, “that you <i>are</i> Branstone, but why - disguise yourself as a Scottish Elder?” - </p> - <p> - “I am in my usual clothes,” said Sam, rather huffed. - </p> - <p> - “If the clothes are the man, this is no place for me. Do you often use the - Bible in your business hours?” - </p> - <p> - He often did, not only to check with a quite beautiful precision the texts - on his calendars by the Authorised Version, but in another way, and one - which seemed to show, if it showed anything, that he looked upon the Bible - with intimate familiarity. Perhaps one mascot was the vellum-bound copy of - the “Social Evil” pamphlet and the other the Bible. At any rate, his price - code used in the office was made up this way: - </p> - <h3> - M Y F A T H E R G O D - </h3> - <h3> - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 20 - </h3> - <p> - New clerks initiated into that code used to wonder at it for a day. Then - they got used to it. - </p> - <p> - “I’m correcting the proofs of this calendar,” Sam explained. “You see, - it’s a shaving calendar. You hang this up by your shaving-mirror and study - the text for the day while you shave.” - </p> - <p> - “I don’t,” said Stewart. “I go to the barber’s. My hand’s unsteady in the - morning. But I see the idea. First read the text, then wipe your razor on - it.” - </p> - <p> - “That is not the idea. See.” He pointed to the card of the calendar, and - read solemnly: - </p> - <p> - <br /> - </p> - <p class="indent30"> - “A text a day - </p> - <p class="indent30"> - Drives care away.” - </p> - <p> - <br /> - </p> - <p> - “It wouldn’t drive my sort of care away,” said Stewart. “Mine’s serious.” - </p> - <p> - “There can be no trouble too serious for you to find consolation in this - calendar.” - </p> - <p> - “But suppose I have toothache on quarter-day, and the consolation you - offer for that date is consolation to a man who can’t pay his rent? - Seriously, Branstone, am I behind the scenes in this office, or do you - never drop the showman? I admit you’re in the pi-market, and you’ve - dressed the pi-man’s part and you’ve got his patter, too, but I don’t know - that you need exercise it on me. This stock of yours looks dire,” he - commented, strolling round the office. “I suppose it’s the stuff that - sells?” - </p> - <p> - “My business,” said Sam, “is founded on a rock.” - </p> - <p> - “I came in here to sell you a fortune,” said Stewart. “If you’re going to - talk cant at me, I’ll take the fortune to a London publisher. Your - business may be founded on a rock, but the name of the rock is the ‘Social - Evil.’” - </p> - <p> - “The word rock,” said Sam, with a twinkle in his eye, “is also used for a - kind of toffee.” - </p> - <p> - “Well, now that I know you’re sane, I’ll talk to you. And I’ll talk - toffee, too I didn’t think in the days of my earnest youth that I should - come to this, but you never know what debt will do to a man. I’ve written - a novel. At least, it isn’t a novel, it’s an outrage on decency. It’s a - violent assault on the emotions. It’s the sort of thing I deserve shooting - for writing. Treacle is bitter compared with it, and it does not contain - one word of literature. It is a cast-iron certainty.” - </p> - <p> - “I must read it,” said Sam. - </p> - <p> - “You’re growing distrustful,” said Stewart sadly. - </p> - <p> - “I don’t buy pigs in pokes, even when they’re yours,” said Sam. “Come - along in a couple of days.” - </p> - <p> - He read the novel, and was ready for Stewart when he came. - </p> - <p> - “I have taken the liberty,” he said, “of marking some passages in this - manuscript which you may care to alter.” - </p> - <p> - “Oh? I know it’s mawkish, but I don’t believe there is a limit to what - they’ll stand—and like.” - </p> - <p> - “I refer particularly to the character you have called Hetaera.” - </p> - <p> - “But only once. After that she’s called Hetty.” - </p> - <p> - “Hetty,” said Sam severely, “will have to be cut out. She is an impure - woman.” - </p> - <p> - “Even the most popular of novels should bear some relationship to life.” - </p> - <p> - “If you wish me to publish this one, Hetty must go. Branstones have a - reputation to sustain.” - </p> - <p> - “Good God!” said Stewart. “Hetty is the one oasis of truth in a desert of - sloppy sentimentality. She’s true because I happen to know her.” - </p> - <p> - “That is nothing to your credit, Stewart.” - </p> - <p> - Stewart stared. “Are you pulling my leg, Sam, or is this really serious?” - </p> - <p> - “Why should you doubt my seriousness when I ask that fiction should be - devoid of offence?” - </p> - <p> - “Don’t you mean devoid of truth?” He recovered his temper and his - perspective. After all, he was very short of money. “All right, Sam,” he - said. “Edit me. Censor me. I thought I knew things, but there are deeps - below the lowest depths, and you have reached them. I surrender. What are - the terms?” - </p> - <p> - Sam offered terms which were quite generous. He might want Stewart again. - </p> - <p> - The novel was purged of Hetty and published. The three-page prayer of the - distressed heroine was used, in paraphrase, from quite a number of - nonconformist pulpits, and the book was a huge success. It was the first - of that series—Branstone’s Happy Novels for Healthy Homes—which - carried the strength of the literary emetic to a point of concentrated - sweetness undreamt of before, and discovered somewhere a public stomach - which did not reject its nauseating jam, but revelled in it. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0016" id="link2HCH0016"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER XVI—THE POLITICAL ANIMAL - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>F only Ada had had - the courage of what ought to have been her convictions, things would have - been very different. But she hadn’t the pluck or the zest in life to be - anything at all except an almost perfect negative, and a man will fight - for a wife for many reasons, but not for the reason that she is a - full-stop. - </p> - <p> - Ada, as Peter knew when he consented to the marriage, could be led: with - even surer hope of good result she could be driven, and if Sam had cared - to drive, to play Petruchio with Ada, he could have turned her negative - into a comparative, if not into a positive. - </p> - <p> - Unhappily, his driving powers were otherwise engaged, and his objectives - were on the battlefield, his office, rather than in the dormitory which he - might have turned into a home. And since Ada had all that she was - conscious of wanting, she had a dull contentment. Two servants and credit - at the shops were good enough for Ada, and good enough, too, for Sam, - because they advertised success. If Ada had been actively vicious, if she - had drunk, if men or a man had obsessed her, if indeed she had been - anything that was bad perceptibly, Sam would have abandoned his - indifference and taken a strong and effective line with her. It might, at - first, have been only because a positively vicious Ada would have been bad - for the Branstone + Classics, but it would have ended by being good for - Ada and for Sam: it would have been the beginning of Ada <i>and</i> Sam, - of their dual life which had not yet come to birth. But, as it was, he saw - nothing to fight. There was a superficial rightness; therefore all was - right, he could forget Ada and turn to the things which were vital to him, - business for its own sake, and business considered as a stepping-stone to - politics. - </p> - <p> - He was content for some time to leave his political ambitions alone, - because it seemed to him that money, quite a lot of money, was needed for - politics. In truth, he was rather awed by his ambition: the House of - Commons seemed a tremendous distance from his office in Manchester, and he - thought a great deal of money would be needed for the fare. Fundamentally, - he was modest and rarely overrated his abilities, but he believed that he - had luck, and thought money a good first aid to more luck. Well as he was - doing in business, he could not afford to divert his energies from - moneymaking to politics, wherein he did not mean to begin at the bottom. - </p> - <p> - He was not ready yet to make political opportunities for himself, but if - political opportunities came to him, that was another matter. And they did - come. When he interviewed Sir William Gatenby, he threw a pebble into a - pool whose wave was to wash him to high places. - </p> - <p> - It washed him into the knowledge of Mr. Charles Wattercouch, who was agent - for the Division. Wattercouch read Gatenby’s letter about Sam with some - surprise, as one of his recruiting grounds for voluntary workers was the - Concentrics, and he thought he recalled hearing Sam speak for the other - faction, but he catalogued the name for future reference on his list of - earnest young men. - </p> - <p> - Wattercouch, like Sam, was in no hurry. He preferred men to come to him, - not to go in search of them, but Sam did not come, and a letter from - Gatenby was not to be neglected. Though Gatenby had probably dismissed the - subject from his mind, he paid half of Wattercouch’s salary, and he might - inquire about Sam some day. So the agent called on Sam at the office. - </p> - <p> - He was a square-built, square-faced man of forty, with a pink, eupeptic - complexion, and light hair which bristled hardily. Your organizer of - victory, like your editor, is apt to be cynical about the politics he is - paid to profess, but Wattercouch kept his perfect faith in Liberalism, in - spite of the fact that he served the Liberal Party, a feat in the - accommodation of blameless principle with unscrupulous opportunism, which - he accomplished with entire sincerity. One can be sincere and Jesuitical, - in fact one can hardly be Jesuitical without being sincere, and to Mr. - Wattercouch the most egregiously illiberal acts of the Liberal Party were - justified because they were the acts of that party, and must, however - improbable it seemed, be means to the end which was Liberalism. - </p> - <p> - This is not to suggest that Mr. Wattercouch was complex, for he was indeed - quite simple, as witness the man’s relish in his grotesque name. He knew - the value of being ridiculed when one can turn ridicule into respect, and - much of his popularity resulted from the genial way in which he took jokes - about his name. He made an asset of what might, to a less good-natured - man, have been a handicap. “Indeed,” says Ben Jonson, “there is a woundy - luck in names, sir,” and Wattercouch turned doubtful luck to good account. - </p> - <p> - Sam had the gift of the gab, which means that he knew both how and when to - speak, and how and when to be silent. He was silent while Mr. Wattercouch - spoke of the valuable work to be done by an earnest labourer in connection - with the annual revision of the register. The point of the work was to see - that all possible known Liberals were on the register, and all possible - objection taken to any known Conservatives, and, complicated as the work - was by the removal habit amongst electors, it was no light undertaking. - Certainly no agent could have carried it through without the aid of - industrious volunteers. - </p> - <p> - But Sam did not see himself in the character of an industrious volunteer, - and he was silent for two reasons. The first was that his silence was - causing Mr. Wattercouch visible embarrassment, and Sam liked the other man - to be embarrassed; the second was that he was considering how to make Mr. - Wattercouch see that his suggestion was an absurdity, if not an insult. - </p> - <p> - He smiled with quite polite superiority. “But I think, Mr. Wattercouch, - that you are making a mistake,” he said, as one who apologizes for having - to be blunt. - </p> - <p> - “Well,” admitted Wattercouch, “I had my doubts, because I fancied I’d - heard you support Stephen Verity at the Concentrics.” - </p> - <p> - “That,” said Sam, “is not the mistake to which I allude. I am aware that I - have supported Verity at the Concentrics. And I am aware that the way to - learn how to cut a man’s hair is to practise on a sheep’s head. Verity was - my sheep’s head.” - </p> - <p> - “I’m afraid I hardly follow,” said Wattercouch, who was indeed rather - scandalized by such an allusion to Mr. Verity, who, if a Conservative, was - an alderman and a noted figure in local politics. - </p> - <p> - “I will make it easier for you by admitting that even I had to learn,” - said Sam. - </p> - <p> - “Ah! I see. You have now seen the error of your ways. You realize the - grandeur of Liberalism, the——” - </p> - <p> - “I always did,” Sam asserted. “When I supported Verity, I was teaching - myself to speak. I was practising on Toryism that I might become perfect - in Liberalism. Those days when I made a convenience of Toryism were the - days of my apprenticeship to the art of speaking. Would you have had me - speak badly for such a cause as Liberalism? No. But if I spoke badly for - Toryism, I damaged nothing. Toryism <i>is</i> nothing unless, as I said, - it is a sheep’s head for Liberals to practise on when they are novices, - and the mistake you made is to suppose that I am still a novice, when, as - a matter of fact——” He paused elaborately and hoped that Mr. - Wattercouch would fill in the blank intelligently. “But it is premature to - speak of that,” he said. “As to the registration, I can send you one of my - clerks.” He made a gesture dismissing as an affair of pygmies that chief - event of an agent’s year. - </p> - <p> - “I see... I see,” said Wattercouch, trying hard to believe that he had so - far been looking at Sam through the wrong end of a telescope. “And you - yourself, Mr. Branstone?” - </p> - <p> - It tempted Sam, that tone of quite startled respect which Wattercouch - adopted now. The misfortune of Sam’s imaginative flights was that he never - knew when to stop. All that he cared about, at the moment, was to give - Wattercouch the impression that Sam Branstone was too important to be - asked to drudge at registration work. He was in no hurry about politics, - but when he began it would not be as a volunteer clerk. - </p> - <p> - “I?” he replied. “Two things. One a fact and the other a prophecy. The - fact is that I am an orator, and the prophecy is that Sir William Gatenby - will not live long and that I shall take his place as member for the - Division. Have you a cold?” he added, as Wattercouch choked with - irresistible stupefaction. - </p> - <p> - He had not a cold, neither had he powers of speech just then, and the - silence grew emphatic without in the least disconcerting Sam. Once - launched on the sea of bluff, Sam was a hardy navigator, and he had the - moral support of knowing that his whole purpose just now was to avoid - being a clerk. To avoid being a clerk it is justifiable to do more than to - romance: it is justifiable to commit most of the crimes in the Newgate - Calendar. Sam was hardly asked to do that, but Wattercouch’s cough was a - challenge, and a bluff half bluffed is worse than no bluff at all. It - became a matter of pride to convince this unbeliever. - </p> - <p> - “I intend,” said Sam with aplomb, “to do a good deal of platform for the - Party. If an election comes soon, so much the better. I shall take the - opportunity to make myself more popular with the electors than Sir William - Gatenby is. That is easy. He quotes Latin in election speeches, and I’m a - man of the people. After that, I expect to contest a by-election for a - seat which the Party regards as a forlorn hope. If it is possible to win - that seat for our Great Cause, I shall win it. If not, I shall trust to - two things, the senile decay of Sir William Gatenby and the discretion of - the Whip’s office.” - </p> - <p> - Wattercouch was adapting himself painfully to the new perspective. He - granted that Sam had plausibility, and an assurance which nearly lent - conviction to his astonishing statement. - </p> - <p> - “You are in touch with the Whips!” he gasped. - </p> - <p> - Sam remembered and varied an old formula. “Do you suppose,” he asked - indignantly, “that I should be speaking to you like this if I were not?” - </p> - <p> - Wattercouch did not suppose it. For one thing he was acquainted with the - devious ways of Whips, and nothing that those secretive autocrats did - could surprise him: for another, he wished to believe what Sam wished him - to believe. He saw in Sam the way out of a dilemma. - </p> - <p> - His dilemma was a common one. A death had caused a vacancy in the Town - Council, and the local Liberal caucus was almost pathetically embarrassed - as to its choice of a candidate. There were at least three veteran workers - for the Cause who expected, with justice, to be approached and none of the - three could be selected without offence being given to interests which it - was impolitic to offend. - </p> - <p> - It was all very well for the caucus: they left it to Wattercouch, the - general handy man, to make suggestions, and as he listened to Sam he - thought he had found a candidate who, simply because he was politically - unknown, could offend nobody. If the obvious men were wrong, he must rely - on the rightness of the unexpected, and, after all, Sam might be speaking - the truth. One never knew where one was with Whips, and here was his - chance to propitiate Sam and at the same time to solve the problem which - troubled the caucus. Sam was a dark horse and he wished he knew more about - him; it was startling to come in search of a voluntary clerk and to find a - candidate; but, finally, he saw it as a legitimate case for taking a risk. - </p> - <p> - “I don’t know, sir,” he said, with a very pretty respect in his voice, - “whether municipal politics will appeal to a man of your calibre, but - there is a vacancy in St. Mary’s Ward, and I hardly think there will be - any difficulty about your adoption as candidate if you cared to stand.” - </p> - <p> - Sam pretended to reflect. The truth was that the prospect of an immediate - seat in the Council made his heart beat fiercely. He had meant for a while - longer to put business before politics, but this sort of politics was - business. The Council took up one’s time, but conferred a prestige on - Branstone and the Branstone Publications which would more than compensate - for the waste of time. - </p> - <p> - And it was deliciously unexpected. He had not studied to impress - Wattercouch, but had talked exaltedly simply to excuse himself from the - unseen, thankless drudgery of organization: yet it seemed he had - impressed. Virtually, he was offered a seat, He was, this soon, to sit - where Travers had sat, to be a City Father before he was thirty-five. He - had romanced glibly about a bird in the bush, and found himself grasping a - bird in hand, and no contemptible fowl either. - </p> - <p> - “We must despise nothing,” he said, “which makes for Liberalism.” - Wattercouch nodded with enthusiasm. “Of course,” Sam went on, “strictly - between ourselves, the Council is small beer. But it is for the Cause, and - if I were asked to stand, you may take it that I should not allow the - larger view I have of my ultimate activities to interfere with my - acceptance. I take pleasure in duty and I see it as my duty, even if it - involves the postponement of my Parliamentary ambitions, to throw myself - wholeheartedly into this conflict.” He was wonderfully pious. - </p> - <p> - Wattercouch was less emotional. He had heard too many speeches from - prospective candidates to be carried away by Sam’s. “Quite probably there - will be no contest,” he said dryly. “It’s a safe Liberal seat.” - </p> - <p> - “I should have preferred a fight,” Sam lied wistfully. “But I put duty - first.” - </p> - <p> - As a fact, there was no contest, and if each of the three veteran workers - thought himself aggrieved, he had the consolation of knowing that the - other two shared his grievance. Wattercouch was discreetly mysterious - about Sam in the inner councils of the local Party, used Gatenby’s name - freely and managed to convey that Branstone was something much bigger than - he appeared to be. He had, at least, got them out of their quandary. - </p> - <p> - Nor did Sam discredit his sponsor either at the private meeting he - addressed or at the public one which followed. He had said he was an - orator, Wattercouch had repeated it indefatigably, and Sam’s audience - believed it implicitly. He was not quite an orator, but was coming along - nicely under the tuition of an old actor who had failed on the stage and - now called himself a professor of elocution. - </p> - <p> - He became Mr. Councillor Branstone, and happy little references to the - event began to appear in the papers. The <i>Sunday Judge</i>, for - instance, had “no doubt that Mr. Branstone will live to look back upon his - unopposed return to the Council as a minor episode of his political - career, and we speak by the book. Branstone will go far, but, meantime, it - is something even for him to know that he is the most popular man in St. - Mary’s Ward. We had almost written in the whole city, but that would be to - anticipate. How is it done? How is such popularity achieved? How, in other - words, did merit become recognized? Mr. Branstone himself only smiled when - we asked him, but his smile is half of his secret and his rousing, earnest - oratory the other half. They are indeed an open smile and an open secret. - But there are other secrets less open. All we shall say now is, ‘Watch - Branstone. He will not disappoint you.’” - </p> - <p> - There was a low evening paper, run in the Conservative interest, which - fastened on the phrase “other secrets less open” and published the - scurrilous statement that one of the less open secrets was the fact that - Mr. Councillor Branstone’s mother was a charwoman, but the paragraph - appeared only in the early edition and unaccountably disappeared from - later issues. It did no harm, as first editions are not published for - politicians, but for sportsmen, and, in any case, there was a brief, but - dignified, eulogy of Mr. Branstone in the <i>Manchester Warden</i> next - day. That paper happened, fortunately, to be Liberal in politics, and - indeed to be, on just occasion, a valiant log-roller. It rolled a log for - Sam; the popularity of Branstone was established, hall-marked by the - Press; and it was about this time that Stewart’s second potboiler was - accepted for inclusion in Branstone’s Novels. The terms were even more - favourable to the author than before. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0017" id="link2HCH0017"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER XVII—THE VERITY AFFAIR - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HE curse of the - Wandering Jew is upon the advertiser: he must move perpetually. Not that - Sam would have been in any case content to sit idly on a seat in the - Council Chamber. He hadn’t the sedentary gifts, nor was he of the breed of - Ada, who, the state of matrimony once achieved, existed in contemplation - of a glory which was even more vegetable than animal. - </p> - <p> - He had to do something to justify a paper reputation for popularity and he - had even to convince himself that he would not soon wake up to find it all - a dream. It had happened too easily to be true, or, at least, safe. - Wattercouch had hinted that things were expected of him. - </p> - <p> - They were, of course, expected of him as a Liberal, and Sam was not, in - fact, a Liberal but a Conservative. A Conservative is a man who conserves, - who says “Aye” to the words of Giovanni Malatesta. - </p> - <p> - <br /> - </p> - <p class="indent15"> - “What I have snared, in that I set my teeth - </p> - <p class="indent30"> - And lose with agony.” - </p> - <p> - <br /> - </p> - <p> - Sam had snared, he proposed to go on snaring and never to lose what he had - snared. Whereas a Liberal is a Conservative weakened by sentimental - compassion for the dispossessed. He is not the opposite of a Conservative, - but a Conservative who is weak-minded, or timid or scrupulous enough to - think himself a robber and to propose to give the poor some five per cent - of his plunder. The opposite of a Conservative is an anarchist. - </p> - <p> - Politically he was a Liberal because he thought the Liberals certain to - come in for a long innings at the next election, and if there was any - feeling about it at all (beyond a desire to be on the winning side), it - was for the pudgy orator whose tremendous sentences had caught his - imagination when he visited the House of Commons. - </p> - <p> - What he did became known as the Verity affair. It might with equal and - perhaps superior justice have been called the Branstone affair but for - that malicious impulse which causes people to refer to a scandal by the - name of the exposed rather than the exposer. It is like the odium which we - attach to a man who has been in prison, where he had already had his - punishment. Mankind is resolute against letting sleeping dogs lie. - </p> - <p> - Mr. Alderman Verity was an elder statesman of the Council and a - Conservative of the honest, unyielding type who thought that to approve of - Tory Democracy was to be either a rogue or a fool, and Sam objected to him - not because he was a Conservative, but for deeper reasons. Verity was the - landlord of Sam’s offices. Every tenant objects to every landlord. - </p> - <p> - One calls Verity an honest Conservative because he made no concessions, - not because he was himself a fount of honour. He had no sympathy with the - modern mawkishness about pampering the people. He admitted that one had to - make promises, that the way to win elections was to tickle the elector as - if he were a trout, but as an Alderman he sat above the cockpit of - electioneering and frowned upon the Liberal attitudes to which younger - Conservatives descended to catch a vote. And their view that the Council - existed for the people honestly revolted him: it was so patently the other - way about. - </p> - <p> - The particular instance was Baths in Hulme. He saw no sense in Baths in - Hulme. He was quite sincere in his belief that to build Baths in Hulme was - to cast pearls before swine. Hulme had not asked for Baths and did not - want Baths. Baths were opportunities for cleanliness and Hulme did not - want to be clean. Hulme would not be Hulme if it were clean. - </p> - <p> - The uncleanliness of Hulme was an institution. Conservatives conserve - institutions, and the only thing which could remove his Conservative and - Aldermanic objection to Baths in Hulme was self-interest. - </p> - <p> - Self-interest is the greatest institution of them all. - </p> - <p> - He continued to oppose the young bloods of his Party because for a long - time he did not see where his self-interest came in. He even opposed them - publicly. He said in public that Baths in Hulme were a nasty, pandering, - Liberal idea and that no decent-minded Conservative could think of it - without nausea. And then, suddenly and silently, he was found to be with - those who proposed that Hulme should bathe if it wanted to. His change of - mind coincided with the discovery that there was no open space in Hulme - where Baths could be erected. Something would have to come down that the - Baths might go up, and what would come down, and why, was the secret of - Mr. Alderman Verity and one or two others of the Old Gang who had the - habit of standing loyally by each other when a little simple jobbery was - in question. Really, it was too simple to be reprehensible. If a Town - Council can by one and the same resolution clear away a slum, and confer - Baths, who benefits, and doubly, but the Town? Naturally, the slum owner - has to be compensated, though adequate compensation can hardly be put high - enough. Slums are so profitable. - </p> - <p> - Wattercouch had many preoccupations just now, but his vigilance was a - habit, and he was struck by the change in Mr. Alderman Verity’s attitude. - The silence which succeeded his eloquence seemed pregnant with something, - and Wattercouch wondered with what. It was an error of judgment in the - Alderman not to be ill at this time, but he had covered his tracks and the - affair was prejudged, settled before it ever came before the Council. - Verity had neither conscience nor fears about it, and the Conservative - Party, with a prescient eye on the imminent General Election, was going to - use its majority in the Council that it might figure as the Party which - bestowed cleanliness on Hulme. - </p> - <p> - Wattercouch wondered why it was Simpson’s Buildings which those - benefactors of mankind proposed to buy and demolish so as to clear a site - for their Baths. - </p> - <p> - “This might be your opportunity, Branstone,” he said. - </p> - <p> - “Isn’t it asking a good deal of the junior member of the Council to - suggest that he tackle an old hand like Alderman Verity?” asked Sam, - leaning back in his chair with his thumbs in his waistcoat armholes. - </p> - <p> - “We all expect great things of you,” flattered Wattercouch, who had still - to justify his selection of Sam to the Liberal caucus. - </p> - <p> - “I don’t intend to fail you, either. But I can’t oppose these Baths. As a - Liberal I am in favour of them.” - </p> - <p> - “So are we all. But we are not in favour of Alderman Verity’s being in - favour of them.” - </p> - <p> - “It’s David and Goliath to pit me against Verity, Wattercouch.” - </p> - <p> - “David won.” - </p> - <p> - “And Samuel will win. But he will make a condition. The condition is a - free hand. I want no help and no advice and I undertake on that condition - to pulverize Verity.” - </p> - <p> - “But you’ll tell me what you propose to do?” - </p> - <p> - “I said a free hand, Wattercouch. Leave this to me and I’ll settle it.” - </p> - <p> - It seemed to Wattercouch that every time he had dealings with Sam he was - asked to take a gambling chance, but he had no plan of action, and the man - without a plan is always at a disadvantage against the man who, with or - without a plan, looks confident. He left it to Sam and there was, as it - happened, nobody to whom he could have left it better. - </p> - <p> - Wattercouch had no inside information and only vague suspicions that - Verity’s change of mind was rooted in the same earth as Verity’s - self-interest. But Sam knew something and was not boasting idly when he - undertook to “pulverize” Verity. - </p> - <p> - What he knew, rightly used at the right moment, was dynamic enough, but he - lacked evidence and he did not see how to get evidence. The Council - meeting was at hand and he was finding it each day more difficult to grin - with cheerful assurance at the mutely questioning Wattercouch. He felt - distinctly unassured. - </p> - <p> - The facts were clear enough to him. Verity now approved of the Baths - because they were to be erected on the site of Simpson’s Buildings, and - Verity owned that dilapidated pile. He did not own it publicly because - respectable aldermen do not own slum property; he owned it in the name of - Mr. Sylvester Lamputt, Verity’s second cousin, a man of straw; and Sam - knew that he owned it because he had a good memory, he remembered a - conversation between Lamputt and Mr. Travers, which he had overheard, and - all the present circumstances pointed to the relations of Lamputt with - Verity being as they had been when Sam was in the estate agent’s office. - </p> - <p> - Verity was aware that retail profits are higher than wholesale, and small - retail than large retail; that when, for instance, a poor woman buys an - ounce of tea she pays a higher rate for it than when a rich woman buys a - pound or ten pounds, and similarly that when a family rents a room in a - slum property it pays immensely more for it proportionately than when a - cotton king rents a warehouse in the centre of the city. But it is - dignified to let a warehouse to a cotton king, and disreputable to let - single rooms in Hulme, so second cousin Lamputt was the putative owner of - Simpson’s Buildings. Sam smiled at the ludicrous thought of the burly - alderman sheltering behind the shrivelled form of his second cousin - Lamputt. It was like trying to hide a bull behind a weasel. - </p> - <p> - But he did not smile often in those days. He paid a visit, at dusk, to - Simpson’s Buildings, and breathed softly lest Simpson’s Buildings should - collapse upon him. Obviously, the alderman was finding his market in the - nick of time. It eliminated doubt, but did not provide proof. - </p> - <p> - He knew that in the matter of Simpson’s Buildings, Lamputt was identical - with Verity, but he wanted evidence, and to get evidence he must rely upon - the dullness of Mr. Lamputt, and did not think that he was dull. The totem - of Lamputt was certainly a ferret, and Sam credited the ferret tribe with - nimble wit. He had to be more nimble, then. - </p> - <p> - He rejected the idea of making Mr. Lamputt gloriously drunk because it - seemed impossible to associate glory, even the glory of intoxication, with - Mr. Lamputt’s feeble body. It was a case, as usual with Sam, of taking - chances. - </p> - <p> - He did nothing at all until the morning of the meeting which was to decide - if Hulme might bathe, and, even then, left his office only a little before - his usual time for going to the Town Hall. He turned into a back street, - ran up many stairs to the attic office whose door bore the name of - Sylvester Lamputt, Agent (more sins are committed in the name of agency - than of charity), and flung panting into the single room. - </p> - <p> - He won the first throw in his game. Sylvester was in. - </p> - <p> - He sat on a high office stool writing on the malodorous page of an - enormous ledger, looking for all the world like a diminutive office boy on - whom some one has fitted, in cruel jest, a hoary head. If the calendars on - his walls were trustworthy witnesses, he was agent for half the insurance - companies in the British Isles. Autolycus was Sylvester’s other name. - </p> - <p> - He reverenced his ledger as other men reverence the Bible. He kept no - other diary, for the ledger was his book of life, and when Sam burst upon - him he was absorbed in his records. He closed the book mechanically - through pure secretive habit, and closed into it just enough of his wits - to put him at a disadvantage with Sam. - </p> - <p> - Sam gave no quarter. “Mr. Verity,” he gasped before he was fairly in the - room. “Simpson’s Buildings... the title-deeds... here, or has Mr. Verity - got them?” - </p> - <p> - It succeeded. Lamputt took him for an urgent special messenger from - Verity. “If Mr. Verity’s memory is going,” he said with dignity, “mine is - not. The title-deeds are in the third drawer of his safe in his office.” - </p> - <p> - “In his name?” asked Sam quickly. - </p> - <p> - “Of course,” said Lamputt, and then, too late, became suspicious. “I say,” - he began, “what———-?” - </p> - <p> - But Sam had gone, and though Mr. Lamputt reached his hat and the door in - one bound and careered down his familiar stairs like the office boy his - figure aped, Sam had turned a corner and was lost to sight. Lamputt raced - to Verity’s office, only to find that the alderman was then attending a - Council meeting. Lamputt could do no more, indeed for a man with a weak - heart he had already done too much: but he had a strong foreknowledge of - the wrath of Alderman Verity, and goes, an unhappy, shrinking figure, out - of this story to an unknown fate. - </p> - <p> - Sam went to the Town Hall with his bomb-shell, and they disapprove of - bombs at Council meetings, so he was sedulous to spare their feelings. He - supported that part of the resolution which referred to the erection of - Baths, but proposed that it should stand alone and that the naming of a - site should be deferred. Curiously, his proposal made the Conservative - majority very angry: the resolution was one and indivisible. Sam regretted - that in order to vote against the misuse of a particular site, he was - forced to vote against the Baths, but standing as he did for purity in - civic life, detesting the very shadow of jobbery, he had no alternative - but to move that the resolution be rejected. Here was a proposal which, - however innocent its wording, did in fact imply that ratepayers’ money was - to be handed over to a prominent member of the party opposite, to a - gentleman in whose safe, at whose office, in the third drawer of the safe, - were deposited at that moment the title-deeds of the property whose - acquisition by the city was suggested. He abhorred personalities, he - shrank from mentioning a name, and if the second part of the resolution - were withdrawn, he—— - </p> - <p> - It was too much for a young, impetuous innocent opposite. “You dare not - mention a name. You lie.” - </p> - <p> - Sam hoped the Council would absolve him of causing a scene. - </p> - <p> - “Prove your words,” cried the rash gentleman. - </p> - <p> - “I suggest,” said Sam blandly, “that we avoid unpleasantness. I have made - a statement and I am asked to prove it. If a deputation of three will go - with me and Mr. Alderman Verity to his office, the title-deeds of - Simpson’s Buildings will be found in the place I have indicated.” - </p> - <p> - It was the sort of drama which appealed more to the readers of the evening - papers than to the Council. Mr. Mayor, in the chair, was speechless in - embarrassed distress. Sam had the calm of imperishable rock in wind-tossed - surf. In the midst of a breathless excitement, Mr. Alderman Verity was - seen to totter to his feet. “I own the property,” he said, collapsed into - his seat and graced that seat no more. - </p> - <p> - Impossible even for a Conservative paper to uphold Verity, impossible to - do more than to suggest that Sam’s manners were deplorable: while his own - papers made a hero of him, found his manners a model of consideration and - his triumph as graceful as it was complete. - </p> - <p> - All Sam cared to know was that he was on the crest of a wave of popularity - and a general election was at hand. Night after night he spoke, and the - tritest platitudes, with Sam’s smile behind them, shone like new-found - truth. He was <i>persona gratissima</i> before he opened his mouth: it - gave him confidence, and confidence is half the speaker’s battle. He - coined some of those ugly, smart, journal-easy catch-words which help to - win elections, and are quoted in the papers and blossom on the placards. - And, with it all, he became what he had prematurely called himself, an - orator. - </p> - <p> - He had the satisfaction of watching audiences sit through the boredom of - Gatenby that they might hear Branstone, and of being himself the “star” - speaker at outlying meetings. Gatenby was returned by a record majority - and it was Bran-stone for whom the mob yelled outside the Town Hall. - </p> - <p> - The election was an early one, and Sam was called to speak in other - constituencies. He had wires, not only from agents in quite distant - divisions, but actually from Headquarters. He was in touch with the Whips! - Less than a year after he had lied to Wattercouch, the lie turned true. He - was in touch with the Whips, a wanted speaker, a man of reputation, a name - to be applauded when it was announced on a platform, for all the world - like people applaud when the number of a star performer goes up on the - announcement board of a music-hall. He was not of the Great Unwanted, but - of the few who were wanted. - </p> - <p> - Someone discovered at this time the old canard which had once appeared in - the first edition of an evening paper, that his mother was a charwoman. He - did not deny it, but used it as Wattercouch his name, making an asset of a - handicap. He was of the people, blood of their blood, a democrat by birth, - knowing their aspirations and their needs because he, too, had needed and - aspired. In the heat of that election he became egregiously a Radical. It - told, it “went” with the audiences: that was the thing that mattered to - Sam. He hadn’t so much as the shadow of a principle, he was winning, on - the winning side, and pleased himself enormously. - </p> - <p> - And by the end of the campaign he stood, actually, where he had aimed to - stand: amongst prospective candidates who fight, as it were, probationary - elections where, they have scarcely a sporting chance, to pay their - footing towards the sort of candidature which gives a man his seat. If the - Conservatives had offered him a tolerably safe seat, without preliminary - fight, he would have ratted eagerly, and the charwoman his mother would - have been pressed into service on the other side. It was all one to Sam - Branstone. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0018" id="link2HCH0018"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER XVIII—WHEN EFFIE CAME - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HEN Effie came - with beauty, shattering the life he lived as sunshine breaks the April - clouds. At first he did not know what had happened to him: there was a - radiance, but he thought it nothing greater than her physical appeal. He - was disturbed, moved as nothing had moved him before—not even - applause—but did not see that more had come to him than loveliness - where all had been unlovely. He did not realize that there were greater - things in Effie than her comeliness. - </p> - <p> - She was the daughter of a doctor who had lived up to every penny of his - income and died leaving his widow nothing but a cottage in the country, - which had been their week-end haunt. The widow sold the practice and got - for it enough to keep herself, with care, in the cottage. - </p> - <p> - There Mrs. Mannering lived unhappily, resentfully, nourishing a grudge - against her poverty, developing a vein of hardy thrift unseen till now. - With management, she had enough, but lacked the gift of management. She - did not see things in proportion, imagined herself deep sunk in poverty - and made unreasoning demands on Effie. On Effie, not on her son who - managed a rubber plantation at Penang and followed the spendthrift habits - of his father. Father and son, the Mannerings were cursed with a passion - for popularity and entertained with open house to all comers. In the East, - it cost Rex Mannering more than it had cost his father at home and, - granted his habits, he was right in saying that he could do nothing for - his mother. He could deny himself nothing. - </p> - <p> - It left the more for Effie. She who was not trained to work must go into - the world and fight not only for her bread but for her mother’s luxuries. - Augusta Mannering was merciless in her demands. She believed, quite - sincerely, that Eflie was gaining riches in the offices of Manchester and - withholding a share from her in simple self-indulgence. Was it not by - going to offices that Dr. Mannering’s rich patients had been able to pay - their bills? And hadn’t they an army of friends who used to eat their - salt? - </p> - <p> - But the friends, misunderstanding Effie’s pride, offered no help of the - kind she could accept. She wanted work, not invitations to houses where, - with dress and servants’ tips, it would cost her more to live than in the - rooms she found in Rusholme. She had not the means to be decorative now, - and it occurred to nobody that Effie was a clerk, wanting a clerk’s place. - They could not think of her, that brilliant girl, shackled to a - typewriter. They did not offer what she wanted and she was too proud to - ask. - </p> - <p> - Then memories are short, especially of the popular men who buy their - popularity across the dining-table and charge high fees to the unwell to - procure high feeding for the well; and when the Mannerings disappeared, - Augusta to her cottage and Effie to Rusholme, there were few inquiries - made. - </p> - <p> - Some other entertainer stepped into the breach of local hospitality; - Effie’s net-play became a legend on their tennis lawns; and she herself - was deemed to be with her mother in the country, shining on other courts - than theirs. - </p> - <p> - It was not pure callousness, but things are as they are, and one cannot - live by money and then lose money without losing more than money. - </p> - <p> - Effie went into the city unfriended and alone, and her mother lived, a - miser, in her cottage. She wrote to Effie that she needed this and that; - that Effie must spare of her abundance or her mother must starve, and - Effie out of her thirty shillings a week did send, but her mother did not - buy. She warmed her hands at a bank-book, wore ancient clothes and watched - her credit grow. It was more than a perversion of her old extravagance, it - was insanity and Effie knew it. To keep an insane woman moderately happy, - she sacrificed necessities. That is why she was shabby when she came into - Mr. Branstone’s office for the post of typist one bright, revealing - afternoon soon after his party had triumphed at the polls and he had made - himself a figure on the hustings. - </p> - <p> - Effie had found companionship in Rusholme, and knew by now the difference - between the friendship which is given and the friendship which is bought. - She had become expert in friendship, and Sam, from their first encounter, - seemed to her more like a friend than an employer. By then, she had - experience of employers. That was why she was out of work. - </p> - <p> - It wasn’t, of course, the normal Sam she met, but a Sam exalted, genuinely - raised and not merely puffed up, by his electioneering notoriety. He had a - new self-confidence; it seemed to him that little was beyond his reach, - that he might even hope to come to terms with Effie. Not, that is to say, - to such terms as her last employer had proposed. Sam was not, in these - matters, the average sensual man. The point was, and it was to his credit, - that he discerned something fine in Effie even at this stage, and the mood - of confidence gave him to hope that he might not seem commonplace to her. - Already, that afternoon, he cared so much. Her opinion mattered. - </p> - <p> - It mattered so greatly that he went slowly about the business of - surprising her: for that, of course, was what he thought he had to do. She - might not know things about Branstone which it was good for her to know. - He might be any employer who advertised for a typist, and he was not any - employer. He was Branstone, of the Classics and the Novels; town - councillor; politician; and she must be told about him. She must learn - what manner of man he was. He wanted to tell her how much greater he was - going to be, but decided that could wait. First she must know what he had - done, before it came to telling her what he was going to do, and his - record would come better from others than from himself. In the office they - knew it all and, even if she asked no questions, there was much which the - routine work would tell her of him. - </p> - <p> - He curbed impatience and left her for some weeks in the general office, - where it was supposed that she was picking up some knowledge of the - business before beginning to act as his secretary, but what he hoped she - was picking up was some knowledge of him. He had the idea that he was - popular with his staff, and did not think that they would libel him to - her. - </p> - <p> - All the time he burned to have her sitting with him in the private office. - It was for that purpose that he had advertised for a typist-secretary, and - to bring her from the general office could excite no comment. On the - contrary, to leave her there so long might look strange or at least - suggest that Effie was a failure. A failure! Much he cared whether she was - efficient at her work. Yet she was splendidly efficient, and still he - coquetted with his purpose of having her with him. It seemed to him that - to call her in would be a step definite and irrevocable, one which he - wanted and even yearned to make, but about which he hesitated sensuously - as a bridegroom might hesitate on the threshold of the bridal chamber. He - neglected to make two certainly profitable journeys to London at this time - because he could not deny himself the pleasure of seeing her neck as she - bent over her typewriter when he passed through the office. - </p> - <p> - And he had hardly spoken to her! But his dreams were vibrant with the - music of her voice, swelling like an organ till it filled his life with - new harmony. It filled his life not because he refused to think of Ada, - but because he could not think of her. Ada wasn’t there; she didn’t exist. - She never had been there, for Sam, in the true sense, so that the step - from the custom which is nothingness to complete nothingness was almost - imperceptible. She was a ghost from the past fading in the radiance of the - present. The sun puts out the candlelight. - </p> - <p> - He was seeing Effie, of course, with quite grotesquely unperceiving eyes. - She might have been, for all he saw of her, the beautiful doll she - emphatically was not. Her outside pleased and satisfied his eye, and he - took it for granted that the woman within would satisfy him in the same - way as the woman without. And so, in the long run, she did, but not till - Sam had made a hurdle race of it and come some awkward croppers on the - course. The harmony of his organ dream might have been true prophecy; it - certainly was not present fact. He wasn’t seeing himself as Effie saw him, - or the sidelong glances he cast at her pretty neck might have expressed - more desire to break than to kiss it. - </p> - <p> - He seemed to her a jolly monster, quite lovable if trained, but at present - as untrained as a badly brought-up dog, and perhaps too old to learn. But - it might be amusing to see if he could learn, and from her who was not - used to breaking in a mastiff. That made the thing worth while, his - bigness and the lovableness she recognized behind the rankness of him. - Chance might not come her way, and she thought it unlikely that it would, - but if it did, she meant to take it with both hands. Effie, aged - twenty-six, proposed to herself to form Sam Bran-stone, who was - thirty-five and her employer! She smiled at her preposterous audacity, but - the more she saw and the more she heard of him, the more determination bit - into her. Droll, officious, absurd—all these her idea was, and she - liked it because it was fantastic and because Sam was Sam. In Effie’s - wise, impertinent eyes fantasy and Sam seemed bound together. And yet he - paid her wages; he was a solid man, a member of the Council, and a serious - politician! She was impertinent indeed. - </p> - <p> - But he could not, either for his sake or hers, keep her for ever on the - threshold. For all his late-won confidence he was quite pitiably nervous, - and held back for days in pure hesitation before the simple action of - calling her into his office. He thought of it as initiation, a ritual to - which a high solemnity attached. He intended to act up to its solemnity, - to usher her into that office with all that was most impressive, to - signify to her the importance of being secretary to Branstone; and, - instead, he who was wordy fumbled for words, he who was painfully correct - dropped two aitches in a sentence, and stood there most comically aghast - at his slip. - </p> - <p> - Of course, the ritual was finished; one cannot be ritualistic and - conscious of aitchlessness. Ritual implies the superhuman, the something, - at least, which sets the executant above the common clay, and to drop an - aitch is human. In the moment of solemnity, in the mouth of the ritualist, - it is drolly human. We find incongruity amusing, and the more solemn the - occasion the more readily does an impish mirth intrude on light pretext. - </p> - <p> - Effie giggled. She did not mean to be unkind, but the spectacle of his - confusion was too much for her. She hadn’t the strength to resist, and - though she turned her giggle, quite neatly, into a cough, it was not - before he had seen. - </p> - <p> - This was his great moment, to which he had looked forward, and she giggled - at him! He felt himself writ down an ass, and wondered for the fraction of - a second whether he would get more satisfaction from smacking her or from - kicking himself. Then he saw her looking at him, and nothing seemed to - matter. He dropped aitches and she giggled. Very well, then he wasn’t a - superman, and she wasn’t divine. They were human beings, at this moment in - the relationship of employer and employed. - </p> - <p> - “In future, you will sit at the little desk in here, Miss Mannering.” He - met her eye defiantly as he spoke the “here.” - </p> - <p> - “If you have your notebook you can take this letter down.” - </p> - <p> - He was running away from his ruined situation. To dictate a letter to her - had not been in the scheme at all, as he had planned it. It was a refuge, - and a safe one, but as he dictated he saw in the letter his opportunity to - indicate to her that he forgave the giggle. He was writing to an author - about a manuscript, which he intended to publish, but broke off before he - reached that decisive point of his letter. - </p> - <p> - “Wait a bit,” he said. “Here is the novel I am writing about. I want your - opinion of it to fortify my own before I do anything definite. Will you - have a look at it in here? I’m due at a Council meeting and must go.” - </p> - <p> - “Certainly, Mr. Branstone,” she said; “but my judgment isn’t very - reliable.” - </p> - <p> - “We don’t know that until you try,” he said, escaping from his office to - the Town Hall, where he kicked his heels for an hour till the meeting - began Nor did he return to business that day. He had a shyness and a - feeling of deflation. He needed time before he could expand again. - </p> - <p> - Effie took her reading of the novel conscientiously rather than seriously, - not supposing that her verdict either way would go for anything, but - appreciating his hint of confidence, and the fact that, considered as - work, novel-reading was pleasant. And not finishing the manuscript at the - office, she took it home with her to Rusholme. - </p> - <p> - In Rusholme the landladies are a little humanized from their primitive - Grundyism, partly by the girl clerk, but mainly because few of them have - avoided, at one time or another, the theatrical lodger, a valiant tilter - at conventionalities; and it is possible for a woman in lodgings to be - called upon by a man in the evening without being evicted as a sinner. One - must, of course, choose one’s landlady with discretion. - </p> - <p> - Effie, who had not had the opportunity of selecting her parents and had - suffered accordingly, chose her landlady with discretion. By now she had - her friends, those she had made in Manchester, not those she inherited - from her father; there were men amongst them, and they came to see her. - Often, in fact, and especially on Sundays, her room was over-crowded; but - a bed, in the semi disguise of a travelling rug, holds many callers, and - they solved the problem of hospitality by bringing each a contribution to - the feast. - </p> - <p> - To-night she had one caller, Stewart, who, having been brought one Sunday - by a man who knew a woman who was a fellow-clerk with Effie at her - last-but-one place, had formed the habit of coming as often as he could. - He was not at the <i>Warden</i> office that night, for the same reason - which accounted for his not knowing that she had gone to Branstone’s. He - was convalescent after influenza, too limp to write the super-journalism - of the <i>Warden</i>, well enough to come out to take the tonic called - Effie. - </p> - <p> - “I ought not to let you in to-night,” she said. “Thank Heaven for that,” - he said, coming in. “Doing what one ought is the dullest thing I know—unless - you’re really serious, Effie? In which case I’ll go.” His hand was on the - door-knob. - </p> - <p> - “I’m really serious,” she said with mock impressiveness. “I’m working - overtime. Behold!” She threw herself on the bed with the manuscript in - hand. “This,” she announced, “is Work.” - </p> - <p> - “I can believe it,” he said, “because that looks like the typescript of a - novel. If it were mine it would be a pleasure to read; but as it is not - mine, it is probably work.” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, it’s work all right,” she said. “Hard labour, too. I’m reading it by - order of my new chief. He publishes things like this.” - </p> - <p> - Stewart sat up. “Not Branstone?” he, said. “Don’t say you’ve gone to - Sammy!” - </p> - <p> - “Yes. Do you know him?” - </p> - <p> - “Know him? I invented him. Bit of a Frankenstein for all that. Better say - I know most of him. He can still spring surprises on me, and you in his - office are one of’em.” - </p> - <p> - “Why? Don’t you like his office?” - </p> - <p> - “It’s an office. So long as you’ve to be in an office, you could pick - worse—easily. Sammy’s a stream with a lot of shallows in him, but - there are also depths, and I’ve never fathomed them. There’s mud in him, - but it’s not the nasty sort of mud.” - </p> - <p> - “I’ve seen that much,” she said. “Polluted but curable.” - </p> - <p> - “You’re not by any chance thinking of yourself as a Branstone River - Conservancy, are you?” - </p> - <p> - “I rather like him, Dubby,” she said. - </p> - <p> - “Good Lord! You and Sam: I say, old thing, no offence, but you know he’s - married?” - </p> - <p> - “I know,” said Ellie. “What’s she like?” - </p> - <p> - “Haven’t seen her since I was his best man. Wasn’t tempted to see more of - her.” - </p> - <p> - “It’s as bad as that?” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, rather worse, I believe. Pitch that novel over. I’ll tell you in five - minutes if it’s any use.” - </p> - <p> - “Five minutes isn’t very fair to the author,” she protested. - </p> - <p> - “Oh, quite. I’m a reviewer, and reviewing’s badly paid. It teaches you to - rip the guts out of a novel quickly. Smoke that cigarette and I’ll tell - you all about it by the time you’re through.” - </p> - <p> - He fluttered the pages while she smoked. “Utter,” he decided. “Utter.” - </p> - <p> - “I haven’t finished it,” she said; “but so far I agree with you.” - </p> - <p> - “You’ll agree with me to the end. Pluperfect trash. Sam will love it.” - </p> - <p> - “What!” - </p> - <p> - “You’ll see. It’s just his line.” - </p> - <p> - “Aren’t you trying to prejudice me against him?” - </p> - <p> - He stared. “I’m trying to save you the trouble of reading the beastly - thing. I’ve given you expert opinion. It’s trash and the brand of trash - that he likes. Didn’t I tell you there, was mud in Sam?” - </p> - <p> - “You told me you invented him. I don’t believe your influence has been for - good.” - </p> - <p> - “Don’t be hard on a fellow, Effie; I only introduced him to the mud. I - didn’t know he’d wallow. Anyhow, let’s talk of something else.” - </p> - <p> - “You know,” she said, “you do influence people, Dubby.” - </p> - <p> - “Of course. That’s what I’m paid for. I’m a journalist. Have you never - heard of the power of the Press? It means a lot of little journalists like - me writing as their editors tell ‘em to. But I don’t appear to have much - influence on you. I asked you to change the subject and you’re still - thinking about Sam.” - </p> - <p> - “Yes,” she agreed, “I’m still thinking of Sam.” - </p> - <p> - “You and Sam!” he repeated, looking incredulously at her. - </p> - <p> - Effie nodded. “But,” she said, “I don’t know yet.” - </p> - <p> - He rose to his feet. “You’re sure, Effie? You’re sure you don’t know about - him yet?” - </p> - <p> - “Quite sure.” - </p> - <p> - “Then you do know about me? Effie, I’ve got to ask. Are you sure about - me?” - </p> - <p> - She met his eyes bravely, knowing that she must hurt. She was sure she did - not love Stewart, who was free, and not sure about Branstone, who was - married. “I am quite, quite sure, Dubby,” she said softly. - </p> - <p> - “I see,” he said. “Well, I’m not the sort that pesters, but if you want - me, Effie, if you find you want me, I’ll be there. I... I suppose I’d - better go now. It will take some doing to change the subject after this.” - </p> - <p> - “Dubby, I’m sorry. You’re not well, and——” - </p> - <p> - She could see him trembling. - </p> - <p> - “Not that, old thing,” he interrupted. “Not pity. That would make me - really ill. Love’s just a thing that happens along, but one starter - doesn’t make a race.” He held out his hand. “Well, doctor’s orders to go - to bed early. Good-night.” - </p> - <p> - “Good-night, Dubby,” she said, and added hesitatingly: “You’ll come on - Sunday?” - </p> - <p> - “Lord, yes,” he said. “I don’t love and run away. Good-night.” - </p> - <p> - She sat for a long while staring into vacancy, then found that something - wet was dropping on her hands. She bathed her eyes and took the novel up - again. A proposal occupied, she found, twelve pages of turgid, emotional - dialogue; but, of course, her experience might be limited. Certainly it - did not confirm the book’s verbosity. - </p> - <p> - She was quite sure that she did not want Dubby Stewart. He did not strike - her as humorous at all. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0019" id="link2HCH0019"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER XIX—EFFIE IN LOVE - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">S</span>EVERAL causes - combined to make her think of Sam, too, as not at all humorous when she - saw him in the morning. Unlike him, she was not at her best in the early - hours of the day, and the strain of arriving at an office by nine a.m. was - one from which she did not recover for some time. She hated business, but - without that cross of early rising she might have found it almost - tolerable. - </p> - <p> - She woke that day to her landlady’s rap more resentfully than usual. The - world was disgustingly mismanaged. Why couldn’t she love Dubby, who was - free? She couldn’t, but she hated Sam for being married, he had no right - to be married. “Damn Mrs. Sam! Damn her!” she said heartily, by way of a - morning prayer, as she ran hairpins viciously into her glorious hair. “But - I’ll cure him of mud,” she added, as she raced downstairs to swallow the - tea and toast which she took almost in the same rush that carried her from - her bedroom to the tram. - </p> - <p> - She reached the office and walked into Sam’s room to find him already in - possession. His obvious briskness at that hour struck her as almost - indecent; it was, at any rate, another cause for resentment, and one of - which he was himself quite blandly unaware. - </p> - <p> - He was not stealing a march upon her any more than he habitually stole - marches on the rest of the world. He knew that early morning suited him, - and used it to advantage. They were certain in town that Branstone had - luck rather than brains because he was lazy; but if a man arrives at his - office at eight a.m., and puts in two hours of solid work by ten o’clock, - he is well ahead of his fellows of the employing class who go down to - offices on the 9.21 from home. He can afford to appear lazy. - </p> - <p> - He liked that uninterrupted hour with the books, opened the letters - himself, and had them annotated before the men came, whose business it was - to deal with their contents. He planned out the day’s work, and saw it in - hand before his earliest caller came. After ten, which is the first hour - when it is etiquette for a salesman to call, Sam was never too busy to - talk of matters which were not strictly business—with the right, the - gainful caller. It was known that one could kill time pleasantly with - Branstone. Branstone was a lazy fellow, and his office a good place to sit - in on a wet afternoon, when there was no point in going to Old Trafford. - </p> - <p> - He came this morning even earlier than usual, to be ready for Effie when - she came at nine. He had slept off his embarrassment, and was ready in his - early morning ebullience to pooh-pooh it. It was stupid to be so - extraordinarily sensitive about an aitch. Accent had always troubled him, - but he need not overrate its importance, and especially now that he wore - the political badge of a democrat, and had acknowledged publicly that his - mother was a charwoman. - </p> - <p> - So he was here, installed in his chair with the back of his morning’s work - broken, waiting for her when she came. - </p> - <p> - No, she decided, not at all humorous to-day: formidable, in fact. He had - all the advantages; he was seated; he was first upon the ground, and that - ground his own, and he was abominably awake. He might have run away - yesterday, but this was the morning of retrieval. - </p> - <p> - “Good morning,” he said, assuming an attitude of leisure. - </p> - <p> - “Good morning,” she said, then saw that he was looking quizzically at the - parcel she carried, as if, she thought, he mistook it for her lunch. “I - took the novel home to finish,” she explained nervously, and called - herself a fool for giving him this readymade chance to open the subject - which of all things she wanted to delay until her suaver hour had come. - She might be able to cure him of mud, but a doctor should have a bedside - manner, and she distrusted her manners until the landlady’s knock had - ceased ringing in her ears. - </p> - <p> - If she had not given him the chance, he would have made it. He gave no - quarter to bad starters. Had he known of her weakness, he might have - spared her. He might, because she was Effie; but it wasn’t his habit to - indulge the weaknesses of others, especially a weakness which he did not - share, did not understand, and denied to be anything but sloth. - </p> - <p> - “Yes,” he said encouragingly. “And the verdict?” - </p> - <p> - “Does my verdict matter, Mr. Branstone?” she asked. He hadn’t given her - time to get her jacket off! - </p> - <p> - “What? Certainly it matters. I wasn’t asking you to waste your time when I - gave you the manuscript to read. The question is whether we ought to - publish it, and the answer depends on your opinion.” - </p> - <p> - “Is that quite fair—to the author, I mean? My opinions of novels are - inexpert.” - </p> - <p> - “That author can take care of himself very well,” he assured her. “He - won’t starve if we refuse his novel.” - </p> - <p> - “I’m afraid my opinions are also intolerant,” she said. - </p> - <p> - “Still,” he smiled, “I should like to hear them.” - </p> - <p> - “They might infuriate you, and—well, I’d rather not be sacked if I - can help it.” - </p> - <p> - “We will forget that it is in my power to sack you. Does that satisfy - you?” - </p> - <p> - Oh, how she loathed people who could be magnanimous at nine a.m.! “You are - being very kind,” she said. - </p> - <p> - “And you are not giving me your opinion. Come, Miss Mannering, you’ve read - it. What do you think of it?” - </p> - <p> - Later in the day she might have put it more gently. Just now she could - manage nothing more kindly than: “I think it’s appalling. It’s false from - start to finish,” and she rejoiced to see how much her vehement candour - disconcerted him. “I’ve drawn first blood,” she thought; but bleeding as a - curative process is discredited. - </p> - <p> - “But,” he said, “it is very like others of my series. I made sure it would - be popular.” - </p> - <p> - “I’m not a judge of that. It’s possible enough. And now”—she smiled - a little wryly—“I’m afraid you know my opinion of the series. I - warned you,” she added hastily, “that my opinions were intolerant. I - imagine you will not ask for them again.” She turned resolutely to the - typewriter and took its cover off. She thought she had closed the - discussion, and was suiting action to her word, and sitting at her desk - when he motioned her back to the chair opposite his. It was not the sort - of motion one ignored. - </p> - <p> - “I may ask for them again or I may not,” he said; “but in the meantime I - have certainly not given you anything to do at that machine, and we were - trying to forget that you are my typist.” - </p> - <p> - “I thought after what I’ve said that it might be time to remember it,” she - suggested. - </p> - <p> - “Not at all,” he assured her. “I get to the bottom of things, and, if you - please, we’ll have this out.” - </p> - <p> - “Of course, if this is part of your secretary’s work——” she - began. - </p> - <p> - He cut her short. “It is. Now, you find my novel series appalling?” - </p> - <p> - Effie was growing angry. <i>In vino veritas</i>—and in anger. “I - could go even further,” she said. “I find it degrading.” - </p> - <p> - He thumped the desk. “But it sells, Miss Mannering, it sells. Did you know - that?” He leant back in his chair in one of the attitudes he took when he - was scoring heavily, thumbs in his waistcoat arm-holes. - </p> - <p> - “It’s the most popular series of cheap novels on the market. See any - bookstall, if you doubt me.” He paused for her apology. - </p> - <p> - Effle did not apologize. “That does not alter my opinion of it,” she said - coolly. “A public danger isn’t less dangerous because it’s large. I’m - afraid I can believe that there are no depths to which it is impossible to - degrade the public taste, but that does not make me like any the better a - series which degrades it.” - </p> - <p> - Now a child is a child. It may be deformed, and its begetter may in - clairvoyant moments have acknowledged the deformity to himself, but he - resents its being pointed out to him. Sam was the father of his series. - </p> - <p> - “I say!” he protested. “That’s nasty.” - </p> - <p> - “It’s a nasty series,” she said hardily. “You are proud of it because it - sells when you ought to be ashamed of it because it’s bad.” Somehow she - had to say it. She couldn’t hedge from what she saw as truth, even though - she expected truth to hurt him and to be hurt in return. But Sam - wonderfully controlled himself. Emphatically, he was forgetting that she - was a typist. He remembered that she was Effie. - </p> - <p> - He addressed the ceiling. “The fact is,” he mourned, “that women do not - understand business. Even business women don’t. Even you don’t.” - </p> - <p> - Mentally she thanked him for his “even you.” It seemed to her a good place - to end the matter for that morning. She still distrusted her manners, and - not, she thought, without reason. - </p> - <p> - “Consequently,” she told him quietly, “my opinion cannot matter,” and - moved as if to go to her typewriter. - </p> - <p> - He held her to her seat. “That is to beg the question,” he replied, “and - we were to have it out.” - </p> - <p> - “But,” she tried, “you have told me that I do not understand business.” - </p> - <p> - “And you did not believe me.” - </p> - <p> - He challenged her, in fact. Well, she must pick up his gage. “I do not - understand this about business, Mr. Branstone. What is it about business - which makes a man like you content to be a confectioner selling people - wares that give them mental indigestion? Business! It’s the name for half - the meanness and nine-tenths of the ugliness in the world. You see, women - do know something about business to-day. It isn’t their fault that they - are not still sitting cosily at home, hugging the old belief that business - is a dignified, majestic thing to which only the masculine intellect can - rise. It’s your fault, the men’s. You wanted cheap clerks, and you raised - the veil so that women have seen business at close quarters, and the only - thing they do not understand is how men continued for so long to magnify - its low chicane and its infinite humbug into a cult which deceived them.” - </p> - <p> - Sam came to the conclusion that Effie was not perfect. She suffered from - hysteria, but she must be answered. “Well,” he said, “you don’t think much - of business. But you came into it.” - </p> - <p> - “I needed money,” she defended that. - </p> - <p> - “So did I,” he said dryly. “We’re birds of a feather.” - </p> - <p> - “You hate it, too?” she asked hopefully. - </p> - <p> - “Honestly,” he said, “I like it. But,” he went on with mischief in his - eye, “I can tell you something that will please you. You dislike the novel - series. You think they degrade. You don’t think the Classics degrade?” - </p> - <p> - “No.” - </p> - <p> - “I would much rather that the Classics sold largely than the novels.” - </p> - <p> - “Why?” She was eager now. “Because they are great literature?” - </p> - <p> - “No. That would be being sentimental about business, and it can’t be done. - Because they are not copyright, and it saves book-keeping.” He grinned at - her discomfiture. “Business,” he defined, “is money-getting.” He was - feeling tremendously pleased with himself, her master in argument. He gave - her rope indulgently, for she was Effie; then crushed her utterly, for he - was Sam. - </p> - <p> - “Isn’t it better,” she asked, “to win a little money decently than to gain - a great deal by trading in poison? Whether you know it or not, these books - are poisonous.” - </p> - <p> - “I don’t know it,” he said brusquely. “They give pleasure.” - </p> - <p> - “So, I suppose, does opium. There are lots of pleasant poisons. Would you - keep an opium den if it paid? If you were a milkman, would you adulterate - milk and poison babies? You adulterate books and poison minds. For money! - Oh, yes; I, too, needed money, and I, too, came to business. But we are - not birds of a feather. I do not like business. I don’t like having to get - money. I don’t like money, but I need it. I’ve things to do with it.” - </p> - <p> - “My case again,” he capped her. “I’ve things to do with it.” He saw that - she was looking at him curiously, and that she took him to mean that he - wanted money for Ada. Incidentally he did, but essentially he did not. - “Politics,” he added. “Power! Power!” He repeated the word ecstatically, - not only because he was admitting her to the intimacy of his private - thought, not only because he felt it an ecstatic idea, but because he had - so thoroughly defeated her in argument. She sat there staring - speechlessly, and he exulted to perceive that she was mute before his - slashing common sense. - </p> - <p> - Only, that was not the reason of her silence. She thought that, for a - first attempt, she had gone far enough, and had the hope that something of - what she had said would remain in his mind, perhaps stingingly. She could - only hope. Heaven knew it had been a queer enough interview between an - employer and his typist, and her prayer, as she sat there permitting his - exultation, was for an interruption. - </p> - <p> - Her prayer was answered. Just as she thought him on the brink of seeing - that her silence was not entirely acquiescent, the office-boy brought in - the name of a caller he must see, and Effie rose with huge relief. She - hadn’t it in her to keep silent much longer, and felt that if she then let - go all that was firing her, she would say more than he could stand. True, - he had stood a good deal, but then she had said little of what she had to - say! She wanted to say it gradually, to lead him, not to spur him, to her - point of view. Already she was taking a more modern view of the virtues of - bleeding her patient. - </p> - <p> - She thought, too, that his was the easier part. - </p> - <p> - She had ideals for her Sam, but when she attempted to define them, they - seemed nebulous, indeed, against his simple practice of expediency. He had - his theory that what was expedient was just, and she—what was her - theory except that his was not good enough for him? And his was in - possession everywhere, established, honoured, received of all but a - trivial minority. He thought with the mass and she thought mass-thinking - was not good enough for him. It was difficult to explain. He wasn’t a - criminal, he wasn’t even individual in thought or method; he played the - common game, playing perhaps a little more astutely than the average, but - keeping honestly within the rules. He followed the crowd, and she wanted - him to follow the gleam. A gleam is indefinable, but she thought she had a - chance because she was so much more grown-up than Sam. Business was a game - of marbles, and girls do not play with marbles, but with dolls. - </p> - <p> - He was not to remain for long with the delusion that he had silenced her - in their first talk. There followed many other talks, although she was - coming to the conclusion that talking would not do the business for her. - It helped, it made a preparation of the ground, but it was stubborn clay - in which he had his roots. Talking did not dig deep enough; she must - uproot, she must transplant. - </p> - <p> - “Politics,” he had said to pulverize her argument. - </p> - <p> - “Another thing,” she told him, “which is not quite the mystery for women - that it was. Politics, but—why?” - </p> - <p> - And he replied with the word which had raised him to ecstasy. “Power,”; he - said. - </p> - <p> - “Yes?” she questioned. “Business leads you to money, money to politics, - and politics to power. And after that? You want power—for what?” - </p> - <p> - “Why,” he cried, “power is power.” - </p> - <p> - “An end in itself?” - </p> - <p> - “At least, it’s an ambition,” he replied. - </p> - <p> - It was, and so had Ada had her ambition to be married, an end, <i>the</i> - end. He did not think of Ada, but he found it difficult to justify - himself. He could not even tell her that he was a Liberal, because he had - a decent hatred of a Tory; he wasn’t in politics for a faith which enabled - him to endure their artifice; he relished the artifice, he was in with an - axe to grind, but with no clear idea of the use he wished to make of his - axe when it was sharp. Ambition, purpose narrowed to two letters—M.P. - He wanted to be M.P. for Branstone, that Bran-stone might hear the voice - of Branstone speaking in the House of Commons. - </p> - <p> - She watched him slyly, and thought her leaven worked. “Of course,” she - said casually, “it would be useful for your business if you were an M.P.” - </p> - <p> - “Enormously,” he agreed, marching blindly into her little trap. “It gives - prestige to any business.” - </p> - <p> - “And completes the vicious circle,” she said. “Business takes you to - politics and politics brings you back to business.” - </p> - <p> - He remembered an appointment hastily, and went to keep it. Sam Branstone - stumped for a reply was an unusual phenomenon, and she con gratulated - herself again that it worked. It worked, but slowly. She was not - impatient, but he was still doing unchanged the things she hated to see - him do, and she wanted the change to come. She doubted that it would ever - come by talk alone. One did not convert by conversation. - </p> - <p> - She had intended to say so much, to keep a steady pressure on him, and she - couldn’t do it, partly because her point of view was difficult of - definition, partly because she thought no talk, no matter how inspired, - could change him of itself. She did not know of Anne, who had talked and - kept the pres sure up, and put sacrifice behind the talk even to the point - of thrusting her hand into the fire; but Effie, too, had sacrifice in - mind. Anne’s sacrifice had failed. It wasn’t, perhaps, the right - sacrifice: it was, at any rate, the immortal commonplace, the sacrifice of - the older generation to the younger, of the mother to the son, of age to - youth. Spectacular, heroic as it was, it was yet in the scheme of things, - and it is the sacrifice of youth to youth which can surprise by - unexpectedness. - </p> - <p> - For some it is a sacrifice to cease talking even when they are convinced - that talk is futile. If Effie was one of these, she made that little - sacrifice at once. She never told him that his life was mean and ugly and - despicable, his triumphs worthless, his success a failure, his highest - ambition to know that people grovelled to him, his money and his power. - She did not say these things, but neither did she yield an inch of her - attitude which implied them. - </p> - <p> - “I’ll win,” she told herself, “I’ll win.” - </p> - <p> - By now she was crusading for the soul of Sammy Branstone, and all the - while her passion grew, fed as much by that in him which irritated her as - by what attracted. She accepted the fact that he was married and - discounted it. It was one with the other irritants, mattering less to her, - for it was irremovable. She could neglect the wife: what mattered was the - man. She must bring beauty to his life. - </p> - <p> - They have tamed many wild things in a world growm standardized; they have - tried for centuries to bridle love and make it run in harness; but love - refuses to be tamed and standardized by the marriage service. You don’t - scare love away by the bogey-sign, “Trespassers will be prosecuted.” - Love’s wild, it’s free, blind to the handcuffs which Church and State - pathetically try to rivet on a given pair, lawless because it knows no - law, timeless because it know’s no time. Sometimes it lasts while a - butterfly could suck a flower’s honey, sometimes the space of a man’s - life, and they have tried to regulate this love, this volatility, to - pretend that because it sometimes does not evaporate, it never evaporates - till death. They sought to link love with property, and to control the - uncontrollable. They make laws round love, which is like enclosing an - eagle in a cobweb; and we suffer for their laws. We keep the law and - suffer; break it and we suffer. - </p> - <p> - She knew that she would suffer, but she would bring beauty to Sam. He - hadn’t capitulated to her talk, and she thought that he had no chance in - Manchester. Perhaps her Sam was with her in his dreams, but each dawn - brought him to accustomed ugliness, and habit clogged his days with mud. - He couldn’t escape, he wanted wings, and she was there to bring them him. - He did not know there was another side to life, but she would show it him. - He should see her beauty, and, through that, the beauty of the other side. - </p> - <p> - She was presumptuous, but presumption is a quality of faith. She - interfered, but there are three inevitable interferences in life—birth, - love and death—and hers was one of these. It was them all: it was - love and the birth of the new Sam, and the death of the old. She - interfered, where she had right to interfere. She loved. - </p> - <p> - Time passed between the day when she came to her decision and the day when - they acted upon it, and she never knew how long it was nor how she spent - it. She belonged to a living fact, and there were shadows in the world, - such as her work, her mother, the silly detail of arranging to go away, - and Stewart, a haunting shadow of one Sunday afternoon, but these were - unrealities and only her idea was real. She never remembered how she put - it to Sam, nor what he said, though she had a hazy memory that he was - desperately shocked and more profoundly humorous than ever before. But she - thought that he was only shocked as the right thing shocks by rightness, - not as the wrong by wrongness: and she knew that difficulties melted: and - they came. - </p> - <p> - They came to the Marbeck Inn and entered into their kingdom of a week. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0020" id="link2HCH0020"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER XX—THE MARBECK INN - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">S</span>AM was vilely dull - about it all at first: his comprehension, stuck in the mud, failed utterly - to rise to the occasion, but before long; he was looking back with horror - on his turgid mental processes when she told him that they would come away - together. - </p> - <p> - He had a shadow, not more than a shadow of excuse for his preposterous - misunderstanding of her ease. Sam followed the crowd, accepted readymade - their principles and their lack of principles, their morality and their - immorality, and to the crowd he followed the theory was faithfulness and - the practice as much licence as they could take without being found out. - They made a boast rather than a secret of their affairs with a shopgirl or - a typist, he had never had an affair and was flattered to think that he - was to have one now. - </p> - <p> - He thought that an affair was rather a manly thing to have. - </p> - <p> - When Effie spoke, he had a great surprise, then cheapened her insultingly. - He decided that he had been wrong about her. After all, she was nothing - more than a pretty typist with whom he was going to have his first affair, - who was going to give him the opportunity to join in that sly boasting in - hotel smoke-rooms which was the habit of his crowd. He, too, would rank - amongst the sportsmen. - </p> - <p> - But, even at his worst, he had the grace to doubt that this was of the - same kind as those other affairs. It had a lowest common measure with - them, but—Effie! Cheapen her as he would, he could not think of her - as cheap enough for that. When others did this thing it was, surely, that - they were giving rein to grossness: it was at least charitable to assume - that the women of their amours were of coarser grain than their wives, and - Effie’s was not the coarser grain. He drifted, acquiescing and puzzled, - through the fog of his perplexity. - </p> - <p> - Illumination came to him, not in the crowded railway carriage, but in the - trap which drove them from the station to the Inn. It came, he thought, - miraculously, but perhaps the miracle was nothing more than that a man - sees clearly in Westmoreland, and sees through dirt in Manchester. He - worshipped Effie who was sacrificing all to him, and with abasement at the - thought that he had meant, with his pitiful achievements, to surprise her. - </p> - <p> - He, shepherded to joy at the Marbeck Inn had set out to surprise Effie! - That was what made it, from the first dawn of understanding, a perfect - wonder-tale. He had not calculated this; it happened, like a dream, in the - air, unrooted in prevision. But that was all it had, except its rapt - intensity, of the quality of dream. It was dreamlike because it was more - vivid than his experience of life, but it was life. Only, he had not known - these things about life before. He had underestimated life. - </p> - <p> - The Inn lay in a saucer of the hills at the end of a road which led to - nowhere. As a road, it finished at the Inn and went on only as a rough - cart-track which dwindled and divided into two trails across the passes. - The fells came down in grandeur to the Inn—it wasn’t a place from - which one looked at distant hills, but one where the hills were intimately - there—and half a mile away there was the Lake. - </p> - <p> - They were twelve miles from a station, at the end of the world, alone with - happiness. Of course, there were other people at the Inn, but Sam and - Effie were alone: they two with the heather and the bracken and the pines: - they two with love. - </p> - <p> - The crowd has not discovered Marbeck. The Inn, the Church, the Vicarage, - down by the Lake the Hall, a farmhouse or two along the road, and that is - all. Six miles away there is a post-office. - </p> - <p> - He had followed the crowd on his rare holidays. He knew Blackpool - Promenade and Morecambe and the things to do at Douglas. Here, one did not - do those things. One walked and climbed and lay extended on the heather or - in the perfect isolation of high bracken, and bathed in the Lake or the - streams or the tarns, haphazard, naked, where one liked and when one - liked; and all the time one breathed the air. - </p> - <p> - It needed no thunderous knocking on the door to get her out of bed into - the Marbeck air. Sam would go for an early dip in the pool below the Inn - where two streams cascaded into a swimmable basin, and when he returned - she would be up or ready to get up that he might brush her hair, or not up - that she might play at being peevish and be lifted out of bed by him. - </p> - <p> - And the food, the good rough plenty of the Marbeck Inn! They ate of it - prodigiously and carried to the hills parcels of sandwiches and cakes and - cheese, shamelessly large, which they emptied to the last crumb, and eked - out in the woods with raspberries and nuts. - </p> - <p> - She took him on the Lake, with a rod borrowed from the Inn, and showed him - how to fish. He relished it amazingly, catching little but the spirit of - the thing, happy because of the green reflection of the woods in the water - and because of her. His restlessness found pause in a boat with Effie and - she noted with a keen delight that he did not envy the expert basket of - the postman who cycled to Marbeck in the mornings and fished till he - cycled away with the letters in the afternoon. She registered as a happy - gain that he did not want to shine, or try to beat that seasoned fisher at - his game. Nor did the posts distract them. They had no letters there. - </p> - <p> - They bathed continually, for it was hot, and here again he made no effort - to excel, but let it be admitted that she was the better swimmer. How much - the better she did not let him know. She knew that he found the water here - a purer element than in the old Blackfriars Baths where he had learnt when - he was at school, and she tired less rapidly than he did. But he was - wondrously content to own inferiority. - </p> - <p> - She had a deep symbolic faith in bathing. They were here to wash his mud - away, and water was cleaner than talk. Talk, indeed, was but a surface - pattern of their time. They hardly needed it, except as levity to mitigate - a deep communion which sometimes grew almost intolerably sweet. - </p> - <p> - It was Blea Tarn, one of the many of that name, which they made peculiarly - theirs, their favourite bathing-place, their best lunch-room. Effie - stretched herself luxuriously on the close-cropped turf, at peace in mind - and body. - </p> - <p> - “Sam,” she asked, “have you noticed that Frump at the Inn? She sits behind - me at dinner.” - </p> - <p> - “No,” said Sam truthfully. “When I’m with you I notice nobody else. And I - don’t know how you saw her if she sits behind you.” - </p> - <p> - “Eyes in the back of my head,” she explained. “You have them when you’re a - woman. Do you mind if I give her a shock?” - </p> - <p> - “You would if she could see you now,” he said. “Yes, but she doesn’t - deserve it,” said Effie complacently. She surveyed herself and Sam did the - same. She pleased them both, taking her sun-bath there on the mossy turf. - “But I may shock her?” - </p> - <p> - “You may do anything,” he said. - </p> - <p> - “Thank God for that,” said Effie joyously, and something glittered in the - sun and fell with a splash far into the tarn. “Too deep to dive for it,” - she decided. “Bang goes a shilling and I’m glad. I never liked pretence.” - </p> - <p> - “I say!” Sam protested, and then fell silent comprehendingly. - </p> - <p> - She looked at him and greeted his silence with a nod. “I shan’t catch - cold,” she said, holding up her finger where the wedding ring had been. “I - feel better now I’m rid of that.” - </p> - <p> - The remarkable fact was that Sam understood. His education had progressed - and he knew that it was not for the Frump at the Inn that she shed the - imitation wedding ring which for form’s sake he had suggested she should - wear: it was for him. The ring was counterfeit, it was a false symbol of - something which was not true: it had no place in the Marbeck scheme. - </p> - <p> - She curled up happily like a stroked cat, partly in sheer physical - well-being, partly in gladness at her scheme’s success. “And to think,” - she crooned, “that I am a wicked woman!” - </p> - <p> - “Effie,” he pleaded, taking her hand. “Don’t.” - </p> - <p> - “As if I care,” she said, rolling over on to her back and taking his hand - with her to shade her eyes. “I might have been doing this all my life.” - Indeed, in her perfect absence of embarrassment, she might. “Wicked!” She - shied a stone after the wedding ring into the tarn and laughed at a world - well lost. “The Frump won’t understand, my dear, but I think you do.” - </p> - <p> - “I think I do,” said Sam, but the fullness of understanding had not come - to him yet. - </p> - <p> - Something, indeed, of her fineness he did perceive, but not its whole, its - utter selflessness. He saw, roughly, what she was after: that it was here, - in Westmoreland when she made her sacrifice, here when she lay beside him - in the sun that she expressed in deed what she had been baffled to express - in Manchester. She had brought him away from the murk and the fog and the - place where they rather like dirt than otherwise because dirt means money, - to where nature was beautiful. She had shown him beauty there, her beauty - and the beauty of sacrifice and the beauty of things. She had taught him - that there was beauty in the world. “We’ll never go back,” he cried. - </p> - <p> - “No. Not back,” she said. “But we will go to Manchester.” - </p> - <p> - “No. No. We’ll build a tabernacle here.” - </p> - <p> - “Here? No. We’ve been lawless here. We’ll go to Manchester.” - </p> - <p> - It rang in his ears like the trump of doom. So far they had marched in - thought together, and he imagined that in her scheme they were to be - together to the end. He thought her purpose was that they two were to work - together to give shape to beauty—and no bad exercise in perception, - either, for Sam Branstone. - </p> - <p> - That was her purpose, but, as she saw it, they were not to work together - in the sense he meant. Her spirit was to go on with him, but she herself - would stand aside, denying herself the right and the joy of sharing his - work with him in physical partnership. She would have done her share at - Marbeck: she was a sign-post whose direction he was to follow but which he - left behind, not a guide to go with him on his way: and she thought she - was content with that. - </p> - <p> - She renounced and she imagined that of the two of them it was she who was - the realist and he who was romantic, he was romantic because he wanted her - with him and she the realist because she remembered Ada. She was not - jealous of Ada no’; if she could not bless Ada, neither did she damn her. - Ada had never held him as Effie held him now. She thought it satisfied her - to know that she held him, and to let the days slip past uncounted. - Nothing is infinite except our human capacity for self-deception. - </p> - <p> - For the present, for the Marbeck heyday, it did satisfy her, and she went - about the business of her tutelage with the unruffled serenity of - fulfilled purpose, almost involuntarily now, thinking little, feeling - everything in the passionate intensity of her sacramental love. It would - end and she would suffer: meantime there were only so many days and it was - no use impairing finite days with regrets that they were not infinite. - </p> - <p> - Thought was for before and afterwards, not for now when she crusaded for - the soul of Sammy Branstone with the mystic rapture of a trance, joyful - like the other sorts of true religion. She would wake up, but she would - have taught Sam his lesson; she would have given him his gleam; and she - was selfless after that.... - </p> - <p> - Of course she may have deceived herself. There is spiritual love, but - Effie was flesh and blood. - </p> - <p> - Sam, at any rate, was not etherealizing things. He did not appreciate the - happiness of renouncing happiness. He wanted it to last, to go on with the - gay days on the hills when she put health into his body and health into - his mind, when it was all a high-spirited riot without an undertow. For - hours on end, they lived their lives unclouded by a thought... rude, - rough, exhilarating exercise on the glamorous fells like that illustrious - day when they climbed the Pike and lost themselves in mist and found - themselves again just where they wished to be, on the downward trail by - Corner Tarn to Yorkdale: then on the steamer down the Lake, and the lonely - moonlight walk across the Moor to Branley, where the trap from the Inn met - them and took them, comfortably tired, to Marbeck and a giant’s feast. And - there were other days, more leisured, on their Lake or in the woods when - more seemed to happen in his soul and less in his body; and their day of - Bathes, in five well separated tarns, with a makeweight bathe in the - Marsland Beck for luck. He wanted it to last. He had intoxication of the - hills, of her, of everything. - </p> - <p> - He had not seen, he would not and he could not, see the possibility of her - leaving him. He did not know that leaving him was as fundamental a part of - her plan as coming to him. - </p> - <p> - “We’ll go hack to Manchester,” she said, and it seemed to him that he was - ordered hack to hell. “That’s where your business is,” she added, a little - wickedly. - </p> - <p> - Business! Hadn’t she shown him the ugliness of his business, and the - beauty of Marbeck? Why should they ever leave the hills? He had all the - extremity of a convert. - </p> - <p> - Effie would say no more, and now, as the end of their time grew near, the - magic seemed to him less magical, because he had to leave it, because she - would not stay for ever in that lonely place, but wanted him to go where - other men lived, in an ugly town, where he had a business she had taught - him to despise, and responsibilities, and Ada. - </p> - <p> - He plunged to gloom. What was the use of knowing that there was light if - he must go back to darkness? Was it not treachery in her to come so far - with him, then leave him to himself? - </p> - <p> - “Effie!” he pleaded, and she consented to make things clear. - </p> - <p> - “Don’t you see, Sam? We’ve done what we came here to do. You’ve seen, you - know, and you will not slide back. I won’t allow you to.” - </p> - <p> - “You won’t allow! Then you’ll be there?” - </p> - <p> - “I hope my spirit will be always there,” she said. “Do you doubt that?” - </p> - <p> - “Spirit?” he said. “You’re overrating me. You’re asking more than I can - give. I cannot give what isn’t there.” - </p> - <p> - “I’ve put it there,” she said. “You cannot fail. You can’t forget.” - </p> - <p> - * “I’d not forget, but I should fail. It’s we, my dear. Not I alone, but - you and I. Without you I am lost.” - </p> - <p> - She made a great concession. “Then, if you’re sure——” - </p> - <p> - “Quite sure,” he said, and she decided to indulge his weakness. - </p> - <p> - “Then don’t dismiss your secretary. Then I’ll be there.” - </p> - <p> - “As secretary?” - </p> - <p> - “Of, of course.” She spoke impatiently. All else was at the end. - </p> - <p> - That only made it more impossible than ever. She was to be there—and - not to be there. There, in his office where he would see her every day, - where he had only to stretch out his hand to touch her, and where he was - not to touch, where he was to forget that he had ever touched. He wanted - her, all of her, the touch, the glow, the life of her, and she offered—what? - A sexless wraith, a spiritual guide, her presence in asceticism. - </p> - <p> - “No,” he said. “No. I’d rather die than that.” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, death is a good arrangement, Sam, but well be brave.” - </p> - <p> - “There are limits even to bravery.” - </p> - <p> - “No,” said the realist. “There are none.” - </p> - <p> - So she sent him, though he did not know that the suggestion came from her, - to gather strength in the peace of the everlasting hills. She sent him to - Hartle Pike to think, to see that she was right. He would remember Ada - there. - </p> - <p> - He did remember Ada, but it seemed to him, when he tried to sum up his - recollections, that Ada was not the woman who counted in his life. The - women who counted were before Ada and after Ada. They were Anne and Effie. - </p> - <p> - In the gathering dusk on Hartle Pike he tried to be cool about it and to - see things in proportion. Effie had the supreme advantage of immediacy. It - wasn’t easy, whilst he lived encircled by her glamour, to see Ada at all. - </p> - <p> - But he had been Ada’s husband for ten years, a long time, more than a - quarter of his life. In all those years there must be something which he - could positively remember of her, some definite characteristic; something, - at any rate, which was individual to her. He searched and found nothing. - She had less individuality in his mind than his sideboard. He supposed - that she kept house, or did she? Didn’t he recall that the cook’s wages - went up one year, and that the cook became cook-housekeeper? In that case, - and he felt certain of it now, Ada did nothing. He was equally certain - that she was nothing. Since he had grown accustomed to her demands for - money, she was not even an irritant. She was a standing charge, like the - warehouse rent. - </p> - <p> - Quite suddenly, as he lingered over that definition of his wife, “a - standing charge,” he saw that it was double-edged. It cut at him, and - shrewdly. - </p> - <p> - Ada, like Effie, was a woman, and he knew from Effie what a woman could - be. There must, at least, have been possibilities in Ada. Dear God, what - had he done with them if she was nothing now? That was the charge—that - he had married her and that she was nothing: that he had permitted her to - become nothing. He could summon no witness for his defence, he remembered - no occasion when he had fought for Ada, as Effie had fought for him. And - as to sacrifice——! Yet he was supposed to have loved Ada. - </p> - <p> - He could have howled for very shame, he could not, in fairness, think that - Ada had given him anything, but writhed that he had thought just now of - Anne and Effie as the two women who counted in his life. They were the - women who gave. Was he to take all from women and render nothing to a woman - in return? If he could say of Ada, his wife these last ten years, that she - did not count, then he was very much to blame and the path was clear - before him. He saw to where the gleam that Effie gave him pointed. To Ada. - It annoyed him desperately that it should point to Ada. - </p> - <p> - He began to descend the hill in a cold fury. The world was hideous, - Marbeck an illusion, Effie a fool. No: Effie was right. One could not run - away from facts and hide one’s head amongst the hills, and say there were - no facts. She had not brought him there to obscure facts, but to reveal - them. - </p> - <p> - It remained to face them, to return to Manchester with new knowledge and - new courage. It needed courage to turn his back on Marbeck, to go away - from happiness to Ada. - </p> - <p> - He stamped upon that thought, as on a snake. It was disloyalty to Effie - who had sacrificed to him and shown him all the beauty of her sacrifice. - He, too, would sacrifice and find a beauty in it. - </p> - <p> - He found it extraordinarily difficult to meet Effie, and spent an - unnecessarily long time with the landlord of the Inn. Then he went in to - her. - </p> - <p> - “I’m leaving,” he stammered. “I couldn’t stay another night. By driving - fifteen miles I can catch the South Mail at midnight. I’ve arranged for - you to come to-morrow.” - </p> - <p> - He jerked each sentence out painfully. - </p> - <p> - Effie met his eyes with her serene gaze. “That’s infinitely best,” she - said. “I’m proud of you.” - </p> - <p> - He had seen! It was her victory, complete and unequivocal, and she was - proud of him and of herself. He had got rid of mud and he had seen beauty. - Now he was facing the facts as she would have him face them, clear-eyed, - without romance. Like her, he was a realist, and she was glad... glad. - </p> - <p> - But when he went up to their room to pack his bag, Effie left the Inn - quickly and walked hard. She must put space between them: space, that she - might cry unheard. It seemed to her that if he heard her crying he would - not go, and she wanted him to go. She was a realist. She was... stifling - her sobs amongst the heather; triumphing in victory on Marbeck Ridge. - </p> - <p> - She won, as she had said that she would win. But there were limits to her - bravery. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0021" id="link2HCH0021"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER XXI—SATAN’S SMILE - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HE theory that - Satan is a subtle devil is one which will not bear examination. He is a - crude fellow, theatrical, Mephistophelean. It may, of course, be only - because his experience of human nature has made a cynic of him, and - certainly his interferences do not as a rule lack success because they - want delicacy. He attacked Sam with a blatant effrontery which suggested - that he thought Sam’s a contemptuously easy case. - </p> - <p> - Sam reached Manchester very early in the morning, and spent the rest of - his broken night in a lugubrious hotel near the station. Manchester hotels - rarely make for gaiety, but it is wonderful what even a short night will - do in the way of altering a point of view. - </p> - <p> - He expected to be depressed at the very air of Manchester, and, instead, - he sniffed at it as Mr. Minnifie had once relished the odours of - Greenheys, with an exile’s greed. He knew that he ought to feel a loathing - of the office, but found that he opened the letters with more than his - usual zest. He knew that it was wrong, all wrong, and checked his itching - fingers. - </p> - <p> - There have been prisoners who, when offered freedom, have pleaded to - remain in the familiar cell. - </p> - <p> - Was it like that with him, he wondered, as had as that, the jail-fever so - ineradically in him that he must breathe the tainted air to live? But, was - he offered freedom? He had to go to Ada, who was a mill-stone and implied - the other mill-stones. Unless she was not a mill-stone, unless he could - alter her. In the meantime, at all events, she was not altered, she wanted - the things which she had always wanted; and the office was their source. - It seemed to him that he was still in prison, with the difference that he - now knew that it was prison. He found little comfort in the knowledge. - </p> - <p> - His gaze returned to the pile of correspondence. There seemed nothing else - for it to do, and he saw an envelope, addressed not to the firm, but to - himself, which sent the blood whirling to his head in simple premonition - of its contents. From the postmark (S.W.—Satan’s Work?) he saw that - it had only come that morning and had not been waiting his arrival. He - thought of that as of a portent. Suppose he had stayed another day at - Marbeck! He might have been too late. - </p> - <p> - It was a careful letter, but the facts were that, owing to the sudden - death of Sir Almeric Pannifer, the seat tor the Sandyford Division of - Marlshire was vacated. Mr. Morphew, who had reduced Sir Almeric’s majority - in that agricultural constituency to three hundred was, for private - reasons, unable to stand again (“I know these private reasons,” thought - Sam. “Morphew considers he has earned a walkover next time”), but - Headquarters were of opinion that a resolute candidate of strong - personality, etc.... - </p> - <p> - In short, he was offered the opportunity to be the figurehead in a - demonstration for the Liberal Party. It was no more than that. Morphew had - doubtless nursed the constituency like a mother, and if at the landslide - of the last election he had done no better than to come within three - hundred of his opponents’ votes, the chances of a stranger’s capturing the - seat were negative. But it was the stepping-stone, the <i>liaison</i> - between obscurity and the House of Commons. It was what he had aimed at. - </p> - <p> - He tried to believe that the letter did not exhilarate him as it would - have done a fortnight earlier, and Satan, the connoisseur of good - resolutions, smiled his age-long smile. - </p> - <p> - He looked across at Effie’s chair. “My spirit will be always with you,” - she had said; he wondered if it were there now, and tried to see her. - Surely now, if ever, was her time; now when he had so lately left her, - when her scent was in his nostrils and her voice in his ears. Her voice <i>was</i> - in his ears. He heard it clearly. She spoke one word, “Renounce.” - </p> - <p> - “Yes, but, my dear,” he argued, “I have renounced. I’ve renounced you. - I’ve come back here and I’m going to Ada, to plumb the depths of her, to - find the good in her, and drag it to the top. I’m going to dive for - pearls,” he grew almost picturesque as he cited his intentions towards Ada - in his defence, “and I shall grow short of breath. I’m not doubting that - the pearls are there, because Ada’s a woman, and so are you, but I know - that they lie deep and I want breath for such a dive as that. I’ve - renounced you, and I’m going to make a woman of her; don’t I deserve some - recompense to make amends? It’s here beneath my hand, and I have only to - say ‘Yes.’ Effie,” he pleaded, “if you knew what this meant to me, you - wouldn’t frown. It’s not backsliding.” He denied that it was backsliding, - well knowing that it was. “It’s politics, I know, and you don’t like - politics. You told me women knew about politics now. Oh, but you don’t - know, you don’t. Smile at me, Effie, smile as I have seen women smile when - men talked of golf. I know we men are babies, and so do you. Give me my - game. It’s nothing but a hobby, like golf, but this is mine, and I want it - so much. Ada is my work and this is my play, and just as necessary. It - will not be a hindrance to what I have to do for Ada, it will be a help. - Effie, tell me that I may have my help.” - </p> - <p> - He tried to blarney a consenting smile out of the figure of Eflie he - imagined sitting in her chair. He had no difficulty in imagining her - there; he saw her, too easily, too really to imagine a false Effie. He - could not imagine, try as he would, that he had won consent from her. He - was too near the real Effie for that. And Effie said “Renounce.” - </p> - <p> - Then his cashier came into the office and routine swallowed him for the - day. A score of little points had arisen in his absence and must be - discussed and settled. The thought occurred to him that if he telegraphed - to London in the morning, Headquarters would hear from him as soon as if - he wrote to-day. They might expect a wire to-day; well, they would not get - it. He crammed the letter into his pocket and decided that he would sleep - upon it before he sent them his reply. - </p> - <p> - And if Satan still smiled it was wistfully, as if he regretted his lost - subtlety; but there was still Ada, the married woman. - </p> - <p> - If Ada was nothing else, she was a married woman; in a world where many - fail, she had succeeded; she had got married, and, like other people who - have reached their earthly paradise, she did not know what to do when she - got there, and did nothing. She stopped growing when she married. - </p> - <p> - The emptiness of her life was a thing to marvel at. She slept and ate and - shopped. She was spared the ordinary duties of running a house, and the - trials of servants, because the cook, an elderly, reliable woman, took (it - seemed) a fancy to Sam and became a fixture first and a housekeeper - second, taking from Ada’s shoulders the burden of engaging her underling. - She had two “At homes” a week, and went to other people’s “At homes.” On - Sunday, she went to church, where one can display new clothes to a larger - audience than at the largest private “at home.” She killed the evenings - somehow, in company with a friend, or with the fashion papers. - </p> - <p> - Evenings interested her little; they were the time when Sam was often, but - not too often, at home. He was not, strictly, a nuisance, because he never - asked her, after a first experiment, to entertain a business acquaintance, - and did that at hotels. Nor did he ask her to entertain him. Usually, he - read a manuscript, or worked out costs or did something which made no - demand on Ada, except that she be reasonably quiet. She was very quiet - with Sam, for the reason that she had nothing to say. - </p> - <p> - She did not go out much in the evenings and told her friends that this was - because she liked to be at home with her husband. They were supposed to - deduce an idyll of conjugal bliss where proximity was perfect happiness. - The real reasons were, first, pure laziness and, second, her shoulders. - Other married women might expose their shoulders in low-cut dresses, but - not Ada. It wasn’t modest. Her shoulders were ugly. - </p> - <p> - She never went to see Peter, who had given her offence by suggesting the - blessedness of work. He had dared to lecture her, a married woman, and she - let fly at him in such fashion that he never tried again, he deplored his - weakness, but he gave her up. The cobbler’s child is the worst shod, and - something analogous often happens with the daughters of the clergy: Ada - was, perhaps, the worst of Peter’s flock. He knew and, knowing the hopes - he had had of this marriage, suffered at its failure, but silently, - confessing impotence. There were always books in which he could forget, - and the peace which had come to his house since Ada left it. It is not - easy to be saintly all the time, and her outrageous attack had been, - humanly speaking, unpardonable. - </p> - <p> - “There must be something in her,” he told himself, as he left the office, - “and I’ve to find it.” - </p> - <p> - The day had, naturally, after an absence, been unusually busy, and had - given him no time to think. He was bursting with intention, but it was - vague, unformed, though urgent and doubly urgent because of the letter in - his pocket. If he could make a woman of Ada, if that evening he could make - a fair start, perhaps he could conjure up the figure of Effie, his ghostly - counsellor, with a smile on her face consenting to his standing for the - seat. - </p> - <p> - “Oh,” Ada greeted him, “I thought you were not coming back till Saturday.” - </p> - <p> - “I wasn’t,” he said. “Something changed my plan a little. I wanted to get - home.” - </p> - <p> - She looked at him resentfully. There was no reason why he should not - change his plan and come home two days before she expected him, but she - resented the unexpected. And there was something about him which appeared - strange. - </p> - <p> - “Tell me you are glad to see me,” he said. - </p> - <p> - “Well, it wasn’t to be till Saturday,” she repeated stupidly. - </p> - <p> - “Are you thinking of dinner?” he asked. “Kate will manage something.” - </p> - <p> - She was not thinking of dinner, and no doubt Kate would manage something. - It was Kate’s business. - </p> - <p> - “You’re wearing funny clothes,” she said. - </p> - <p> - “Country clothes,” he explained. “You see, I’ve been in the country.” - </p> - <p> - “Oh.” She was not curious. - </p> - <p> - “Yes. In the country. It was rather beautiful, Ada.” - </p> - <p> - “I nearly went with Mrs. Grandage to the ‘Métropole,’ at Blackpool, but I - don’t like dressing for dinner.” - </p> - <p> - “Blackpool’s not beautiful,” he said. “Ada, I want to talk to you, and I - hardly know how to begin, except that I want you to understand that I’m in - earnest. It’s a serious matter.” - </p> - <p> - “Money?” said Ada, sitting up sharply in her chair. - </p> - <p> - “Not money. We’ve both been wrong about money, I think. We’ve both taken - it too seriously.” - </p> - <p> - “If you’re going to tell me that something has gone wrong with your money, - it’s very serious indeed.” - </p> - <p> - “It hasn’t. No. This is a larger thing than money. I want, if I can, to - alter things between us, Ada. How can I put it? There’s your father——” - </p> - <p> - “I never want to hear his name again,” she interrupted. “He insulted me.” - </p> - <p> - “You go to church, you know; you listen to him there.” - </p> - <p> - “People would talk if I didn’t go. I needn’t listen to him when I am in - church.” - </p> - <p> - “He’s a good old man. I’m sorry we have drifted from him. But I’ll not - press that now. If the rest comes right, that will come right with it. It - might even come so right as to include my mother.” - </p> - <p> - “My word!” she said, “you <i>are</i> digging up the past. I don’t see how - you could call things right when they include me with a charwoman.” - </p> - <p> - “Ada!” he protested. - </p> - <p> - “It’s what she is.” - </p> - <p> - “By her own choice. But please forget that, Ada. Yes, it’s true that I am - digging in the past. I want to go back to see where we went wrong.” - </p> - <p> - “Went wrong? When who went wrong?” - </p> - <p> - “Why, you and I.” - </p> - <p> - “I didn’t know we had gone wrong.” She looked at him. “You look well,” she - decided, “but you can’t be.” - </p> - <p> - “I am better than I’ve ever been,” he said, “and stronger, and if need be - I shall use my strength, but I hope the need won’t come for that. Ada, can - you tell me this? Can you tell me what it is you want?” - </p> - <p> - “You’re sure it’s all right about your money?” she asked anxiously. - </p> - <p> - “Yes, of course it’s right,” he said impatiently. - </p> - <p> - “Then I don’t know that I want anything. I could do with more, naturally. - Who couldn’t?” - </p> - <p> - “More money. Not more beauty? Not a new purpose? Not something to live - for?” - </p> - <p> - “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Sam. You’re very strange - to-night.” - </p> - <p> - “I hardly know myself,” he confessed. “I know it’s all confused, and I - ought to have got things out of the tangle before I spoke to you. But I - thought you might have seen and so be able to help me out. No: that’s all - right, Ada,” he went on as she glared at him indignantly. “I’m blaming no - one but myself. It’s my responsibility. You don’t see it yet, and I must - make you see.” - </p> - <p> - “If a thing’s there, I can see it.” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, it’s there,” he said. “We can both see that. It’s only the cure for - it that isn’t plain.” - </p> - <p> - “What’s there?” - </p> - <p> - “The failure of our marriage, if I must put it into words.” - </p> - <p> - “Failure! But we <i>are</i> married. What do you mean?” What Ada meant was - that the ring was on her finger and the marriage certificate in her desk. - Failure in marriage, if it meant anything to her, meant failure to get - married, a broken engagement, and since their engagement had not been - broken, since they had been formally and legally married in church, there - could be no failure. - </p> - <p> - “We didn’t exult in marriage,” he tried. - </p> - <p> - “Exult? I’m sure I was the proudest woman in the parish the day I married - you.” It was true. “But afterwards, afterwards!” - </p> - <p> - “Oh,” she cried, “are you throwing it in my teeth that I didn’t have a - baby? Was that my fault?” - </p> - <p> - “No, no. But it might have saved us, all the same, and when the baby did - not come we made no effort to save ourselves. There’s a light somewhere in - every one of us and you and I have quenched our lights. They may be small, - they may not be a great light like your father’s, or... or the light which - I have seen in the country, they may be nothing but a feeble glow, and we - can only give our best. You and I have not given ours. We have not tried - to find our light, but now—now that we have discovered what has been - wrong with us all this while—we can try, and together. We can all of - us give something to the world, not children in our case, but the - something else which we were made to give. We don’t know what it is that - you can give and I can give, and we’ve left it late to begin to find out, - but it is not too late, is it, Ada? Ada,” he pleaded, “it is not too - late?” - </p> - <p> - She looked at the clock. “If you want to wash your hands before dinner - you’d better do it now,” she said, “or you will be late.” She rose, but - before she left him, she had a moment of illumination. She thought she saw - what he was driving at, that he must have seen some happy family while he - was away and came back with the cry of the child less man on his lips. “I - suppose this means,” she said, “that you want me to adopt a child. That’s - what you mean by giving. Well, I won’t do it, Sam. I’ve something else to - do with my time than to look after another woman’s brat.” - </p> - <p> - “What have you to do?” he asked. “What is it that you want to do?” - </p> - <p> - “To eat my dinner,” she said. She had a healthy appetite. Perhaps that was - why she wanted nothing else. - </p> - <p> - He stood by the door when she had gone, and his hand strayed to his pocket - as though it sought a talisman. He felt the letter crinkle, then tore his - hand away. Ada was work for a man. There wasn’t room for Ada and for - politics. “Deeply regret private reasons compel total withdrawal from - politics.” Yes, that was the wording of the telegram which he would send: - it was best to be thorough, and, plainly, the man who had Ada in hand had - no time to spare on a hobby or an ambition or whatever it was that - politics represented for him. He had other work to do in the world. - </p> - <p> - He stamped upon the ruins of a hope which came to birth ten years ago, and - which he had carried with him in his heart of hearts and, as the letter in - his pocket proved, not a fool’s hope either. Yes, he had loved that hope - which was born on his honeymoon. - </p> - <p> - It occurred to him that in all he had said, or tried to say, to Ada he had - not mentioned love. It had not seemed the right word for use in a - conversation with Ada, but, he reflected savagely, he had loved his hope - of politics from the time of the honeymoon onwards: and from that time he - had not loved Ada. - </p> - <p> - Was that true? Had he neglected the substance for the shadow, used love - upon his hope and not upon his wife? If he had his talk with her again, - could he honestly begin it in another way? Could he begin with love? He - knew that he could not, and squared his shoulders to the fact. It was a - case, then, for the more courage. What was it Effie had said? “There are - no limits to bravery.” He wondered, but he meant to see. - </p> - <p> - And Satan’s smile had faded. There is more joy amongst the devils over one - sinner who back-slideth.... But not this time, Mephistopheles! Effie was - winning still. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0022" id="link2HCH0022"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER XXII—THE OLD CAMPAIGNER - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">E</span>FFIE and Sam knew - that they ought to be happy in the weeks which followed, because to be - good is, theoretically, to be happy: but they were not happy. Sam, indeed, - was less unhappy than Effie because he had sunk into one of those leaden, - numbed moods of his which he knew of old as the stage preliminary to his - brightest inspirations, and he could wait resignedly if not happily for - the inspiration to emerge. - </p> - <p> - Decidedly, he thought, he needed inspiration, He had to discover Ada, to - search for her reality, and, having found it, to drag it out and set it in - the forefront of her being. A big task: one whose success he must not - jeopardize again by rushing at her prematurely without distinct plan. He - had only made her suspicious of him by his first impulsive attempt, and - time must undo the mischief before a return to the attack was either - discreet or opportune. - </p> - <p> - He waited, but he did not savour life. When he had quickened Ada, life - would, no doubt, be worth the living, but, meantime, it dragged. He told - himself that he was too young yet at this new business of giving to feel - the joy of it. Certainly, he was not joyful, but he was resolute. There - was a grim tightening of the lips and a dogged look in the eyes which - proclaimed that this was Samuel, the son of Anne. In this mood he could - eat Dead Sea apples and feel they were a proper diet. Politics had gone, - and with them any interest in the Council. And he did not know what to do - about his business. He wanted to ask Effie, and Effie was not there to be - asked. - </p> - <p> - It was not that she did not want to be there or that she did not suffer - for her absence. Effie was not numb, and she suffered keenly, but she - thought her absence strengthened Sam. When he came down from Hartle Pike - with his resolution formed she took it that her scheme, as she had planned - it, was complete and that she could forget her weak concession to return - to the office. She was to be there in spirit, and spirit is strong though - flesh is weak. Effie at the office in the flesh would have wanted to hug - Sam and to kiss him, things which it is unbefitting to do in - well-conducted offices. And, of course, she suffered. She had always known - that she would suffer, but not that it would be as bad as this. - </p> - <p> - The office was a temptation every day: to go there was to be with him, it - was to find alleviation for her fever, it was to be at peace: but it was - also to fling away hard-won success, and she resisted. That resistance - engrossed her. It was all that she was capable of doing; it demanded all - her strength. - </p> - <p> - The obvious, the practical thing, if she was not to go to Sam’s office, - was to go to someone else’s, to work, both as an antidote and as a means - of livelihood, and she could not rouse herself to do it. She pawned some - of the jewellery which remained to her, memorials of her father’s lavish - past, sent the weekly dole to her mother and lived upon the rest. She had - sunk to this, Effie the crusader, Effie the advocate of courage! With - Mélisande, she told herself she was not happy. She was not happy, she was - not well, and she wanted, wanted Sam. She stayed at home lest she should - go to him and ruin all that she had done. It could not last and she knew - it could not last, but neither did she see the end of it. - </p> - <p> - Then began the game of consequences: the moves of two pieces, one a pawn, - the other the knight called Dubby Stewart. - </p> - <p> - It is a frumpish world, a world where the Frumps, of one or other sex or - of neither sex, in one or other of their manifestations, have a great deal - to do with the ordering of things. That is why it is politic, for one’s - ease, never to ignore the Frumps and never, never to challenge them by an - act of gallant defiance such as shying an imitation wedding ring into the - waters of Blea Tarn. - </p> - <p> - Effie held, of course, that since she was in any case defying the Frumps - it was honest to defy them in form as well as in substance, but it is only - certain kinds of honesty which are the best policy. - </p> - <p> - The Frump who sat behind Effie at meals at the Inn (her name was Miss - Entwistle) had doubted the genuineness of that ring, and when it - disappeared her doubts went with it. The hussy, she saw, had realized that - her ring deceived nobody, and was brazening it out in the shameless way of - hussies. - </p> - <p> - Women are wicked, but men are only weak; so that, though Miss Entwistle - faced Sam at dinner from the next table, it was some days before she could - spare her attention from the back of the greater sinner and transfer it to - the face of the lesser. She could stare to her heart’s content; it did not - matter to Sam, who had only eyes for Effie: and the stare of Miss - Entwistle was very persistent indeed. It was rude, but it was also - pensive. It seemed to be looking for something it could not find. - </p> - <p> - She could not place him and was annoyed because she felt certain she had - seen him before. She got up early more than once to read the names on the - morning’s letters, but did not find one which she could associate with - Sam, and came home to Manchester a disappointed woman. Her failure to - identify him spoiled her holiday. - </p> - <p> - But all things come to her who waits, especially, as the world is made, to - Frumps, and Miss Entwistle came by the knowledge she craved one afternoon - when her friend Mrs. Grandage took her to Ada Branstone’s “At Home.” - </p> - <p> - The two photographs of Sam in Ada’s drawing-room were intended to sustain - her reputation for perfect domesticity. She couldn’t live without him; she - drew her very breath from him when he was there, and from his photographs - when he was not. And since one was full-face and the other profile, they - supplied Miss Entwistle with reliable identification of the sinner of - Marbeck. - </p> - <p> - It was heavenly. Hers was the power and the glory of initiating a scandal, - of exploding a bomb—which would certainly disturb the peace of quite - a number of people, of figuring in a maelstrom of backbiting tea-parties - as the one authentic eyewitness. It was irresistible, besides plain duty - to her injured hostess. - </p> - <p> - The drop of gall in her brimming honey-pot was that she did not know Ada - well enough to tell her the secret by herself, but must share the - excitement of that first surprise with Mrs. Grandage. She whispered with - her friend for some close-packed, hectic moments, and the two ladies - stubbornly outstayed the rest of the callers. - </p> - <p> - They told Ada with a wonderful tenderness, watching her the while as cats - watch mice, and Ada did not disappoint them. She cast no doubt on Miss - Entwistle’s story; she did not tell her that she knew Sam was in London at - the time because she had had letters from him. Though she had nothing in - the world but her marriage, she made no effort to protect its reputation. - She exhibited herself to them in all the fury of her jealous rage, so that - naturally, seeing her instant belief in what they told her, the ladies - formed their own conclusion. - </p> - <p> - “It is not the first time,” is what the eyes of Mrs. Grandage said, and - the eyes of the spinster looked back at her sepulchrally and said, “It - never is.” - </p> - <p> - Ada was married. She had the title of wife, and unfaithfulness on her part - was as far removed from her imagination as from her opportunity. She was - married to Sam; she was the woman in possession, with the title-deeds in - her desk and the seal upon her finger, and this was flagrant outrage. It - struck at the roots of her complacency, and complacency was life. Yet she - hadn’t the wits to confound these iconoclasts with one little uninventive - lie. It needed only that to abash Miss Entwistle—men’s faces are - often alike, she knew perfectly well that he was in London: anything would - have done, anything would have been better than this abject, immediate - betrayal of her citadel. She struck her flag without firing a shot, and - lapsed into a slough of inarticulate anger. - </p> - <p> - “What shall I do? What shall I do?” she wailed as soon as she was able to - speak coherently. - </p> - <p> - “That,” said Miss Entwistle, “that, you poor dear, is your business.” - </p> - <p> - She had announced the glad tidings, she had found a titillating pleasure - in watching Ada’s reception of them and now she was eager to be off, to - spread the news, to be the first that ever burst into her friends’ - drawing-rooms with word of a glorious scandal. She pleaded another call - and escaped to her orgy. - </p> - <p> - “I’ll make him pay for this,” said Ada viciously. - </p> - <p> - “My dear,” advised Mrs. Grandage, who had a husband of her own, “I hope - you will be tactful.” - </p> - <p> - “Tactful:” blazed Ada. “Tactful, when—oh! oh!” She screamed her - sense of Sam’s enormity. - </p> - <p> - “Yes, but you know, men will be men.” - </p> - <p> - “It isn’t men. It’s Sam. After all I’ve done for him! Oh!” and this was a - different “oh” from the others. It made Mrs. Grandage look up sharply. - “The beast! The beast! This explains it all. Ethel, that man came home to - me and asked me to adopt his child. He had the face. Of course I didn’t - know it was his own he was speaking of, but I see it now. Ethel, what - shall I do?” - </p> - <p> - They seemed to Mrs. Grandage to be drifting into deeper waters than she - had skill to swim in. “I should take advice,” she said, meaning nothing - except that neither by advising nor anything else was she going to be - entangled in this affair. - </p> - <p> - “A solicitor’s?” asked Ada, catching at the phrase. “Yes. Naturally. Sam - shall be made to pay to the uttermost farthing.” Her idea of legal - obligations were, perhaps, not vaguer than other people’s. - </p> - <p> - “Not a solicitor’s,” said Mrs. Grandage in despair. “At least, my dear, - not yet. Your father’s.” - </p> - <p> - “Yes. My father made me marry Sam. He brought Sam home and threw him at - me. I will go to my father. Of course, in any case, I can’t stay here.” - </p> - <p> - Mrs. Grandage made a last rally for wordly-wisdom. “Couldn’t you bring - yourself to see your husband first?” she asked. - </p> - <p> - “See him!” said Ada heroically. “I will never see him again as long as I - live.” - </p> - <p> - The visitor buttoned her glove. After all, if Ada chose to make a fool of - herself it was no business of hers, and she had tried her best, if a - resolutely non-committal attempt can be a best. She kissed Ada with real - sympathy. - </p> - <p> - “My dear,” she said, “I’d give a great deal to undo this.” And by “this” - she did not mean the peccadillo of Sam Branstone, but the pruriency of - Miss Entwistle. She was an experienced woman, and angry with herself for - having listened to the temptress and for aiding and abetting her. - </p> - <p> - When Mrs. Grandage referred in after years to “that woman,” it was - understood that she was thinking of Miss Entwistle. - </p> - <p> - Ada saw her to the door, and went straight to the kitchen. - </p> - <p> - “Kate,” she said to her cook, “Mr. Branstone has disgraced himself, he’s - been unfaithful. I am going to my father’s. Please tell him that I know - everything and that I shall not return.” She had no reticence. - </p> - <p> - “Very well, mum,” said the Capable cook. - </p> - <p> - The result was that when Sam went into the drawing-room that night, he - found Anne Branstone sitting there, darning his socks, and perhaps it was - because she was happy that she did not look a day older than when he saw - her last; perhaps charring suited her; or perhaps living for an idea had - kept her young. The idea was that, some day, Sam would need her. - </p> - <p> - It wasn’t a miracle: there was nothing more wonderful about it than the - fact that Anne was a very good friend of the cook, Kate Earwalker: but Sam - stood gaping helplessly. In his own house, at his age, and after all these - years he stood before his mother, the intruder, like a schoolboy who knows - himself at fault. She lacked nothing of the old ascendancy. - </p> - <p> - “Well,” she said, “you’re nobbut happy when you’ve got folks talking of - you. But you don’t look thriving on it, neither.” - </p> - <p> - “Mother,” he gasped, “what’s this?” - </p> - <p> - “It’s you that will tell me that,” said Anne. - </p> - <p> - “Where’s Ada?” - </p> - <p> - “Gone to her father’s, and none coming back, she says. Says you’re - unfaithful and told Kate she knows everything. What is it, Sam? What’s - everything?” - </p> - <p> - “Who brought you here?” - </p> - <p> - “Kate did,” said Anne calmly. “Why, Sam, did you think I’ve lived with - nothing better than what George Chappie and the papers told me of you? I’d - a fancy for the truth, and it’s not a thing to get from men. Kate’s been a - spy, like.” - </p> - <p> - “Has she!” he cried. - </p> - <p> - “She has, and you’ll bear no grudge for that. You’d have lived in a - pig-sty and fed like a pig if I’d none sent Kate to do for you, but I’ve - come myself this time. It looks summat beyond Kate.” - </p> - <p> - “But what’s happened? What is it?” - </p> - <p> - “You know better than me what it is. You’ve got folks talking of you and - they’ve talked to Ada. Unfaithful, she told Kate, and she’s gone home to - Peter’s.” - </p> - <p> - “She must come back,” said Sam. - </p> - <p> - “And why?” asked Anne. “Because folk talk? To stop their mouths?” - </p> - <p> - “No. Because I want her here. They’re talking, are they? Well, they can.” - </p> - <p> - Anne looked at him. “You don’t care if they do?” - </p> - <p> - “Why should I?” - </p> - <p> - “And you a politician?” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, politics!” he said. “That’s gone.” It had, and, as he saw thankfully, - at the right time. He tried to imagine how differently this would have - affected him if it had come in the midst of the Sandyford election. - Electors postulate respectability in a candidate. But that had gone, and - gossip did not matter now. The real things mattered. Ada mattered. - </p> - <p> - “You’ve had a move on, then,” she said, and neither her look nor tone - suggested that she found the move displeasing. - </p> - <p> - “I daresay,” he said carelessly. “But Ada must come back. I’ve got to get - her back.” - </p> - <p> - “Happen she’ll come and happen she won’t, and I’d have a better chance of - knowing which if you’d told me what’s upset her.” - </p> - <p> - “What did she say?” he asked. “Unfaithful? Yes, it’s true. I’ve been - unfaithful for ten years. I’ve never been faithful and I’ve never been - fair. I’ve thought of the business and politics when I ought to have been - thinking of her. I worked at them and I didn’t work at Ada. Don’t blame - Ada, mother. I’ll not have that. You never liked her, and you prophesied a - failure. It’s been a failure, but I made it one; I let it drift when I - ought to have taken hold. But it isn’t going to be a failure now. I’ve - given up the other things and I’ve come back to my job, the job I - neglected, the job I did not see was there at all until——” He - paused. - </p> - <p> - “Till what?” she asked. - </p> - <p> - “Till Effie showed it me.” - </p> - <p> - “Effie?” she asked. “Oh! Then there’s something in their talk.” - </p> - <p> - “Something? There’s everything, and everything that’s wrong-headed and - abominable. That’s where this hurts me, mother. They’ll be saying wrong - things of her, of Effie.” He began to see that gossip mattered. - </p> - <p> - “What would be the right things to say?” asked Anne dryly. “Who’s Effie? - And do you mean her when you say you’ve been unfaithful for ten years?” - </p> - <p> - “I meant what I said. That I’ve put other things in front of Ada.” - </p> - <p> - “Including Effie?” - </p> - <p> - “Effie’s a ray from heaven,” he said. - </p> - <p> - “Oh, aye,” said Anne sceptically. - </p> - <p> - “Look here, mother, you’re not going to misunderstand?” - </p> - <p> - “Not if you can make me understand.” - </p> - <p> - “I can try,” he said, “and the chances are that I shall fail. The only - thing that will make you understand Effie is to see her.” - </p> - <p> - “Try the-other ways first,” said Anne grimly. - </p> - <p> - “She made me see. She gave me everything. She gave me herself. I found - myself because of her and I’m only living in the light she gave me.” It - was difficult to find words for what Effie was and meant to him. “I don’t - know if I can ever explain,” he faltered. - </p> - <p> - “Go on. You’re doing very well.” He was—Anne’s insight helping her. - </p> - <p> - “It’s like rebirth. It’s as if I’d lived till I met her six months ago - with crooked eyesight. I didn’t see straight, and then, mother——” - He hesitated as a man will hesitate before voicing a profound conviction, - afraid lest he be thought absurd. “Then I found salvation, I’ve been a - taker and we’re here to give. I took from you———” - </p> - <p> - “Leave that,” said Anne curtly. “I know it.” - </p> - <p> - “And I didn’t,” he replied. “It seems to me that I knew nothing till Effie - come.” - </p> - <p> - “Why do you want Ada back?” - </p> - <p> - “It’s time I gave to her.” - </p> - <p> - “Did Effie show you that?” - </p> - <p> - “Yes.” - </p> - <p> - Anne was silent for a minute. Then: “I’ll have a look at Effie,” she said. - “You can take me to her.” - </p> - <p> - “I can’t do that,” said Sam. “We’re not to meet.” - </p> - <p> - She pondered it, and him. “Kate told me you were looking ill,” she said - with apparent inconsequence. “Well, if you can’t take me to Effie, I must - go alone. I’m going, either road. Give me her address and I’ll go - to-morrow.” - </p> - <p> - He wrote it down. “Effie Mannering,” she read. “Aye,” she said grimly, - “I’ll give that young woman a piece of my mind.” - </p> - <p> - “Mother,” he said, alarmed, “you’ll not be rude to her! You’ve not - misunderstood?” - </p> - <p> - “Maybe,” said Anne, “but I don’t think so. I think I understand that - you’ve got your silly heads up in the clouds and it’ll do the pair of you - a lot of good to have them brought to earth. I’ll know for sure when I’ve - set eyes on her.” - </p> - <p> - “You’ll see the glory of her, then,” he said defiantly. - </p> - <p> - “Shall I?” she asked. “If you ask me, Sam, there’s been a sight too much - glorification about this business. It shapes to me,” she went on, - thwarting the protest which was leaping to his lips. “It shapes to me like - a plain case of love. Aye, and love’s too rare a thing in this world to be - thrown away. I was never one to waste.” - </p> - <p> - So Anne Branstone took control, and Sam sat staring at her helplessly like - a man who dreams. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0023" id="link2HCH0023"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER XXIII—THE KNIGHT’S MOVE - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>T might very well - have occurred to Sam to retort that he and Effle had not “their silly - heads in the clouds” any more fantastically than had Anne her self when - she retreated to Madge’s and watched her loved son only through the eyes - of Kate Earwalker. But it did not occur to him and, if it had, Effie at - least would have disproved the retort. Effle outstripped them all. - </p> - <p> - The truth was that as soon as Effle knew what was the matter with her she - was not appalled, dismayed, ashamed, or any of the things appropriate to a - young lady in her situation, but simply and purely exultant. Unhappiness - fell from her like a cloak, and left her radiant with joy. And she had - called herself a realist! - </p> - <p> - She was a realist; she was engrossed with fact, not with the - circumstantial detail of her fact. She hardly wanted Sam now, she had him, - she was miles and leagues from care, alone in a shining world with her - transcendant fact. Courage returned in full flood to her and she brimmed - with bravery and pride. - </p> - <p> - She was out of work and must find work quickly which would pay her well. - She was going to suffer, she was going (to put it mildly) to be - misunderstood. What did it matter, what did anything matter in comparison - with her exultant fact? She was going to be the mother of his child. - Marbeck was not a dream; Marbeck was coming true, and the truth and the - glory of it swept her to a heaven which only women know. - </p> - <p> - Perhaps she was a trespasser within the gates, but they had opened to her - and they would not close. She might be prosecuted for her trespass. Let - them try! You cannot hurt invulnerability. She was a world within a world, - self-satisfying, self-complete, not so much derisive of the other world as - utterly forgetful of it. Her cloud of glory hid it from her eyes, and if - she peeped at all through breaches in the cloud she saw people as one sees - them on the road beneath a mountain-top, like crawling ants. - </p> - <p> - A knock came at her door, and she looked bemused through a gap in the - clouds into the eyes of Dubby Stewart, but it was not to look at the world - which did not understand. It was to look at Dubby, who loved her. - </p> - <p> - And Dubby knew. It had not been difficult to know. She had refused him, - she had let him see why, and Sam and Effie had been away from Manchester - at the same time. It was not precise evidence, but he had written - leaderettes on evidence not more exact and did not doubt the facts. They - had kept him from her till now, but he could keep away no longer. And - before he went into her room he knew all there was to know. - </p> - <p> - “Effie,” he said, “I’m not sure if I’m welcome.” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, but you are,” she said. “I ought to have written to you long ago. - I’ve been home weeks from my holiday.” It was no use trying to see Dubby - as a crawling ant, and she gave her hand in friendship. - </p> - <p> - “That breaks the ice,” he said. - </p> - <p> - “If there was ice to break.” - </p> - <p> - “Well,” he reminded her, “I said I didn’t love and run away, and I did - more or less run away. I came one Sunday because I said I would, but I - couldn’t do it again. The trouble with me is that I ought to be a - journalist, and after about twelve years of it I’m still human.” - </p> - <p> - “Dubby! I’m sorry!” - </p> - <p> - “All right, Effie; I didn’t come to bleat. That’s only an apology for not - coming before. And now I’m here——” - </p> - <p> - “You’ll have tea,” she said quickly, going to the bell, but he caught her - hand before she pulled. - </p> - <p> - “Do you want to put a table between us? Do, if you must”—he released - her hand—“but I’d hoped it would not come to that. Shall I ring the - bell, Miss Mannering?” - </p> - <p> - “You needn’t punish me by calling names. Don’t ring.” She armed herself - with courage, and turned to face him. - </p> - <p> - “Thanks. Really thanks, Effie. I know I’m a bore, but if the old song has - a good tune to it I don’t see why I shouldn’t sing twice. It <i>is</i> a - good tune,” he went on with a passion which belied his surface flippancy. - “It’s the best I have in me, which mayn’t be saying much, because I’ve a - rotten ear for music, but this tune’s got me badly, like the diseases they - play on the barrel-organs, and I can’t lose it. I get up to it in the - morning, and I go to bed to it at night, and it’s ringing in my ears all - day. Effie, I’m not much of a cove and I’ve flattered myself that - sincerity departed from me when I cut my wisdom teeth. I tried to live up - to that belief and it’s only half come off. I’ve tried to make a - raree-show of life, to sit outside and watch the puppets play, and life’s - won. Life’s got me down, and I’m inside now. I’m where you’ve put me, and - a good place too: I’m near the radiator and it warms the cockles of my - heart. But I never liked radiators. Mind you, I can do with them and I can - be grateful for them. If a season ticket for life for a seat near the - radiator is all that you can give me, I can keep a stiff upper lip and - thank you for what I’ve got. But I never had a passion for radiators, and - I do like fires. There’s life in a fire Must it be just the radiator, or - can you make it hearth and home for us?” - </p> - <p> - “Dubby,” she said, “I told you before.” - </p> - <p> - “I know. Nothing doing in second thoughts?” She shook her head. - </p> - <p> - “All right. I only got drunk last time. This time it will need the binge - of my life. I’d cherished hopes of this.” - </p> - <p> - “Drunk,” she said reproachfully. “With a stiff upper lip?” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, I dunno,” he said. “It takes a stiff upper lip to get me to the - dentist’s, but I make him use an anæsthetic all the same. Still, if you’d - rather I didn’t——” - </p> - <p> - “I think it would be braver.” - </p> - <p> - “Right. But I’d like to hit something. There’s nobody you’d like me to - hit, is there?” - </p> - <p> - “Of course not.” - </p> - <p> - “Sure?” he said. He had it well in mind that somebody ought to hit Sam. - “Let’s get back to where we were before I made a stump oration—to - when I came in and you looked at me like a friend.” - </p> - <p> - “I hope I always shall.” - </p> - <p> - “All right. It’s the privilege of a friend to be impertinent, and I’m - rather good at impertinence. You see, Effie old thing, you’re supposed to - be one of the world’s workers, and you’re not at the office to-day. You - haven’t been at the office for weeks. I know, because I gave Florrie half - a crown.” Florrie was the maid. “And it isn’t that you’ve come into money, - because Florrie tells me you’ve been starving yourself.” - </p> - <p> - “I’ve not.” Effie was indignant. She had not starved herself. While all - was dreary, food had certainly not attracted her, but neither had anything - else; and she expected to take a lively interest in it now. “Really I’ve - not.” - </p> - <p> - “What you say goes,” he said. “And Florrie imagined it, but she didn’t - imagine the part about your not going to the office, and if anything’s - wrong there, don’t forget that I know Branstone pretty well. I can talk to - him like a father.” - </p> - <p> - “There’s nothing wrong, anywhere,” she said, and, indeed, things were not - only not wrong but exuberantly right, only she could not tell him why. - </p> - <p> - “You’re sure of that?” he persisted. “There’s nothing you can tell a pal? - Nothing you can tell me, when you know I’d walk through fire for you? Damn - it, I can’t pretend. I’m not a friend. I’m a man in love, and I ask you to - be fair.” - </p> - <p> - “Dubby,” she pleaded, “don’t make things too hard for me.” - </p> - <p> - “Is it I who make them hard?” he asked, “oris it Sam?” - </p> - <p> - She looked at him amazed, and certainly Effie was stupid then, or, at - least, too wrapped up in her great preoccupation to be alert. “Oh, don’t - be petty,” she said. “I didn’t debit you with jealousy.” - </p> - <p> - “No? No? And yet I have a certain right to be jealous of him. I think you - won’t deny it.” - </p> - <p> - It wasn’t what he said or even the deep bitterness of his tone, it was - something in his eyes, like a hurt animal’s, which made her quite - suddenly, and as a thing apart from his words, see what had happened. But - she did not see even now the whole of Dubby’s love and the beauty of his - knightly move. - </p> - <p> - “You know!” she said. “Dubby, you knew when you spoke just now. You knew - that Sam and I——” - </p> - <p> - “I told you I had a word with Florrie.” - </p> - <p> - “Florrie?” she asked. “What could Florrie tell you?” - </p> - <p> - “Nothing,” he said, “that she knew she told. Guessing is another of the - things I’m good at.” - </p> - <p> - She saw it then, to what perceptiveness his love had brought him, to what - high action. It had sped her cloud and she saw, clear-eyed as he, his - fine, impeccable fidelity. - </p> - <p> - “Oh! And I called you petty! I told you you were jealous. Dubby, I didn’t - know. You’d have done that for me!” - </p> - <p> - “Well, you see,” he apologized, “I’m in love with you.” - </p> - <p> - “Why can’t we order love? Why does it come all wrong?” she cried. - </p> - <p> - “It hasn’t come so wrong but I can put it right for you,” he said, making - his offer again. - </p> - <p> - “I? I didn’t mean myself,” she said, wondering. “Love’s not come wrong to - me. It’s you I’m thinking of.” - </p> - <p> - “But is it right for you?” he asked. - </p> - <p> - “Oh, yes,” she smiled. “Terrifically.” - </p> - <p> - “Is it? When Sam has not been near you in weeks?” It was wedged in his - mind that Sam was playing the villain. “When you are here alone, do you - see him, Effie?” - </p> - <p> - “No. That’s why it’s all so right.” - </p> - <p> - He shook his head, perplexed. “It may be good metaphysics, but it sounds - bad sense. I’ll be quite honest with you. I’m suffering pretty badly from - suppressed desire to horsewhip Sam Branstone. I think he deserves it, I - know I’d enjoy it and I think you’re trying to head me off it. I daresay - it’s primitive of me, but it will do me good and I don’t mind telling you - I need good doing to me. Effie, mayn’t I go and horsewhip Sam?” - </p> - <p> - “If anybody’s going to horsewhip Sam,” said a voice, “it’s me. I’m in - charge of this job, not you, my lad.” - </p> - <p> - They had not seen Anne come in. They saw her now, a little old woman of - the working class in her best clothes, with a bugled cape and cotton - gloves, elastic-sided boots and a quaint bonnet tied with ribbon beneath - her chin, and, unaccountably, she filled the room. They would have passed - her in the street without a second glance as one of the throng, at face - value insignificant; but this was not Anne in the street. It was Anne in - arms for Sam, and when Effie and Stewart compared notes afterwards they - each confessed to having had the same thought: that their eyes were - traitors and that what they saw was fantasy and what they felt was real. - </p> - <p> - “I’m Sam’s mother,” she introduced herself, “and it’s like enough I were - overfond of him when he was a lad and didn’t thrash enough, but I’m not - too old to start again. You’ll be Effie? Aye, I’ve come round here to put - things in their places. They’ve got a bit askew amongst the lot of you, - and what I heard when I came in won’t help.” She looked accusingly at - Dubby. “You’ll be her brother, I reckon?” - </p> - <p> - It seemed to him the best way out. Anne had come to “put things in their - places,” and she reckoned he was Effie’s brother, which, now he thought of - it, was exactly his place. Brotherhood was thrust upon him, but he thought - he had achieved it. Plainly, for all Effie’s enigmas, there was nothing - else for him, and he let Anne put him in his place. - </p> - <p> - “Yes,” he said, without a glance at Effie, “her brother.” - </p> - <p> - “You’re a clean-limbed family,” she complimented them, and Dubby stole a - look at Effie, half humorous and half defying her to contradict his - brotherhood. “Well, I came to see Effie, but I’ll none gainsay that her - brother has a right to stay and listen, if he’ll listen quiet.” - </p> - <p> - “Yes,” said Dubby, still challenging Effie, “her brother has a right.” And - Effie did not deny him. She had her courage, but the unexpectedness of - Anne and the force of her, as if for all these years she had been winding - up her will, which now came into play like a spring immensely braced in - super-tightened coils, caused her to want an ally and she agreed that - Dubby had a right if not the one conferred on him by Anne. - </p> - <p> - “Won’t you sit, Mrs. Branstone?” she said. - </p> - <p> - “I was wondering when I should hear your voice,” said Anne. “You’re not a - talker, lass.” - </p> - <p> - “No,” said Effie. - </p> - <p> - “More of a doer.” Effie was wondering whether that was praise or - condemnation, when Anne added: “I like you the better for that, though - it’s a good voice. I haven’t heard it much, but I’ve heard it. I haven’t - seen you much, but I’ve seen enough. I’m on your side, Effie.” She - astonished them both by rising as if to go. - </p> - <p> - “But,” said Dubby, “is that all?” - </p> - <p> - Anne looked with humorous sympathy at Effie. “That’s men all over, isn’t - it?” she said. “They’re fond of calling women talkers, but a man’s not - happy till a thing’s been put in words. Me and your sister understand each - other now.” - </p> - <p> - “I’m not quite certain that I do,” said Effie. - </p> - <p> - “Well, maybe you’re right,” conceded Anne. “It’s a fact that I told Sam - last night I was coming round here to give you a piece of my mind, and I - don’t notice that I’m doing it. The need seemed to go when I set eyes on - you, and I’m pretty full of a thing I want to do, only I’ve not quite got - the face to ask.” - </p> - <p> - “What is it, Mrs. Branstone?” - </p> - <p> - “I want to kiss you, lass,” said Anne. - </p> - <p> - Dubby Stewart had for the second time that day the impression that women - talked, so to speak, in hieroglyphics.... There seemed to be a kind of - feminine shorthand to which only women held the key, and he did not - understand the sudden softening of Ellie’s face nor her quick response. - And he did not know why, when Anne kissed her, Effie said, “No, no,” nor - why Anne said, “It isn’t no. It’s yes.” A kiss, it seemed, had various - meanings. - </p> - <p> - Anne in effect had conveyed to Effie that she thanked her and, more, she - honoured her. Effie denied that she merited honour and Anne maintained - that she did. - </p> - <p> - “Aye,” said Anne, “he’s had two dips in the lucky-bag and he’s drawn a - prize this time. It’s more than any man deserves, but we’ll not grudge it - Sam, will we, Effie?” And to Dubby the thing took on a fresh aspect of - bewilderment. If that meant anything, it meant that Anne was welcoming a - daughter. Didn’t the woman know that Sam was married? - </p> - <p> - “I’ve grudged him nothing,” Effie said. - </p> - <p> - Anne meditated that, then looked at Effie with a touch of what was, for - her, shyness. “You’ve grudged him nothing,” she disagreed, “except your - pride in giving up. And you can do it, you can give up, but Sam’s nobbut a - man, and they’re a weak flesh, men. He looks the shadow of himself,” she - exaggerated resolutely. - </p> - <p> - “Does he?” said Effie anxiously, and Anne nodded a sombre face. “What do - you want me to do, Mrs. Branstone?” - </p> - <p> - “I want you to give up giving up. Sam said a thing to me last night. He - said you’d make him find salvation. Well, happen; but what’s certain sure - is that you made him find love. He’s found it, lass, and he mustn’t lose - it, and he will if you leave things where they are. He’s trying to do a - thing that isn’t, possible. He’s trying to live aside of Ada, loving you. - He’ll try to love her for the love of you, and kiss her, telling himself - he’s kissing you, and it will not be you; and the love he tries to bring - her will turn to loathing in his heart. And what’ll happen then, when love - goes sour within him? Eh, lass, you took yon lad to heaven and you’re - sending him to hell.” - </p> - <p> - It was not fair to Stewart. It was hardly bearable: he was not her brother - and he hadn’t the feelings of a brother. He saw great happiness in Effie’s - face, as if two happinesses mingled there, the one of giving up her dream, - the other of awakening to a sweet reality. He saw her put out a hand - towards Anne, surrendering, consenting, giving all in one swift, heady - leap from cloud to earth, and then he saw her sway, and caught her in time - to break her fall. - </p> - <p> - Anne eyed him sharply. “Have you heard of your sister’s fainting before, - lately?” she asked, busy on her knees with Effie. - </p> - <p> - “Yes. Florrie told me. Twice. Can I do anything?” - </p> - <p> - “I’ll bring her round,” said Anne. “But you can do something. You can go - to Sam at his office and tell him he’s wanted here. Tell him I want him, - and there’s news for him. Send Florrie up as you go, and you needn’t take - that horsewhip with you, neither.” - </p> - <p> - “No. I needn’t take it now.” - </p> - <p> - So Dubby, Effie’s brother, went out on an embassy for Anne. “Feeling it? - Feeling?” he thought, “you God-abandoned devil, what right have you to - feel? A journalist. A looker-on. There’s a story in this for you. There’s - the guts of a story given away to you with a cup of tea... on, no, we - didn’t have the tea; given neat, and you can’t be decently grateful. - What’s the title? ‘The Charwoman’s Son’? No, damned if it is. Something - about brother. Brother! Yes, you blighter, brother... brother, and proud - of it. ‘Pride of Kin.’ That’ll do, and God help me to live up to it.” He - turned into Sam’s office and delivered his message in a cold, unemotional - voice. It seemed that Effie, brave herself, was the cause of bravery in - others. - </p> - <p> - “Effie! My mother! What have you to do with them?” asked Sam, amazed. - </p> - <p> - “I’ve given you a message,” said the taciturn herald. - </p> - <p> - “But what’s behind it, Dubby? Is Effie ill?” - </p> - <p> - Stewart was silent. - </p> - <p> - “Is she—dead?” - </p> - <p> - Dubby was tempted to say he didn’t know. It; seemed to him that things - went too happily with Branstone, that it was fit, if only for the twenty - minutes which it would take for him to reach Busholme, to let Sam think - that Effie might be dead, to let him taste the flavour of torture. Dubby - suffered and would suffer, not for twenty minutes but, he gloomily - anticipated, for a lifetime. Let Sam have his minutes of it! Then he - remembered he was Effie’s brother, and before Sam had his hat and coat on, - malice had left him. “It’s all right, man,” he said. “She’s neither ill - nor dead. They’ve got good news for you.” - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0024" id="link2HCH0024"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER XXIV—THE NEW BOOK OF MARTYRS - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>F there was news - which Anne must send posthaste to hid him come to hear, and if Effie was - neither ill nor dead, he need not overtax his wits to guess it. Yet he had - never thought of this very natural sequel to the Marbeck week, and the - plain fact is that he did not much want to think of it now. - </p> - <p> - “I like your Effie,” Anne told him. “I like her very well. She’s going to - make a grandmother of me.” - </p> - <p> - He thought his mother had never been fatuous before: she thought he took - the news morosely, and perhaps her expectation had been too high. She - assumed that a child was the first consideration of a man’s life; which is - not true, even, of all women and true of only a minority of men. - </p> - <p> - Nor was Sam, in fact, morose. He had never been more intensely and - silently alive. In itself, this thing was right with a shining exultant - rightness which warmed him to the marrow. It crowned and completed Marbeck - and it crowned and completed him. He who was childless was to be a father, - and by Effie! He had nothing but a thankful emotion for that, and looked - with yearning eyes at Effie, giver of all else, who was now to give him - this. He had not known her wonder could increase. - </p> - <p> - He saw that more was expected of him than that he should look at her - adoringly. Anne was on tip-toe with anticipation. Her difficulty, if - indeed she had acknowledged to herself that there was any, had been to - make these visionaries see that love mattered and that Ada did not; and - her success with Effie had been complete. She had never doubted of success - with Sam, the weaker vessel, for there was love, sufficient in itself; and - there was now the added argument of Effie’s child. She could not see that - he had any choice. - </p> - <p> - He stood there conscious of the expectancy of their regard, and knew that - he was failing them. He thought they took a blinkered view, seeing the - child and nothing else. To them, apparently, the child came first: they - were hypnotized by what was, really, an afterthought, and there was the - greater need for him to keep a steadfast eye upon the truth. As he saw it, - the truth was that he had put his hand to another plough; on Hartle Pike - he had lighted such a candle by Effie’s grace as he trusted would never be - put out; and he had gone to Ada. True, Ada had gone from him, but that was - temporary and trivial, whereas here was a real distraction and he saw two - loyalties before him—to Effie and the idea, and to Effie and her - child. It seemed to Sam that the first was the greater of these two. - </p> - <p> - He had wrestled with an afterthought before, one which hardly yielded in - temptation to that which now confronted him, and he had thrown it. He had - refused to contest Sandyford because there was not room for politics in a - scheme which included Ada, and still less was there room for Effie. He - felt faint with discouragement at the thought that Effie, unless - appearance belied her, had capitulated to her afterthought, but he stood - firmly by their treaty. They had decided that duty came first; he had - shouldered duty; and he, at any rate, had no room for afterthoughts. - </p> - <p> - He was loyal to Effie and the Marbeck pact, duty’s bondsman, Ada’s - husband. He made a gesture of decision, which Anne misinterpreted. - </p> - <p> - “Aye,” she said a little smugly, “this settles it all right. It wasn’t - common sense in you to part before, but I reckon there’ll be no parting - now.” - </p> - <p> - “No,” said Effie softly, “not now.” She stole a look of shy, glad - confidence at Sam, and he found it extraordinarily difficult to meet her - eye, and still more difficult to say what he must, at any cost, get said. - </p> - <p> - “I’m not so sure,” he said at last, wishing the earth would swallow him. - </p> - <p> - At that moment he would cheerfully have given a hand to escape having to - differ from them. They were Effie and his mother: they were his mother and - Effie: the two women to whom he owed everything: more, he loved Effie so - that every fibre in him yearned for her, and, even more than that, he was - delicately sensitive to Effie in her present case. But it couldn’t change - him. His loyalty was engaged, to fanaticism, to another Effie, high Effie - of the hills, of the crusade and the idea; and this seemed to him somehow, - a lower Effie, an Effie who had dipped the flag of her ideal to a coming - baby, whilst he was faithful to the old unbending Effie who had thrown an - imitation wedding ring away. It almost seemed as if she wanted that ring - back, base metal though it was. - </p> - <p> - A case, perhaps, of splitting hairs, but, at any rate, the case of a man - with a faith at one extreme and at the other his miserable conviction that - happiness was not for him. He had abandoned happiness when he left - Marbeck, and lived now in a place where happiness was barred by Ada. - </p> - <p> - “I’m not so sure,” he repeated drearily. “You see, there’s Ada and I have - to be fair to her.” - </p> - <p> - “Ada’s left you,” snapped Anne. A contentious Sam was not going to find - her amiable. - </p> - <p> - He chose to put it in another way. “My wife,” he said, “is staying at - present with her father. Yes, mother,” he went on firmly, “I’m going to be - fair to Ada and I’ve to guard against unfairness all the more because you - won’t be fair. You won’t be ordinarily just. You always hated Ada.” - </p> - <p> - “Yes,” she agreed viciously. “I’m a clean woman. I always hated vermin.” - </p> - <p> - Sam turned to Effle immensely heartened by this virulence. “You see!” he - appealed, calling to witness the hopeless bias of his mother. It was, he - wished to imply, this blind hatred of Anne for Ada which accounted for his - mother’s attitude, her exalting of—well—the mistress over the - wife, her flagrant unmorality. He tried to put all this into his gesture. - “And you,” he reinforced it, “you sent me to her, Effie.” - </p> - <p> - She bowed her head, admitting it, but Anne was not prepared to let it go - at that. “Even Effie,” she said “can make a mistake. She would not send - you now.” - </p> - <p> - And, looking at Effie, he saw that it was true. He had seen it from the - first and it bothered him profoundly. Effie had changed: there was, in all - they said, this noticeable stressing of the “now,” to differentiate them - from the “then.” What was it? Anne’s arguments, or the baby, or had Effie, - uninfluenced by either, really changed her mind about the Marbeck treaty? - he couldn’t believe that last. Marbeck was infallible and he was dogged in - the faith. He responded to the Marbeck creed like the needle of a compass - to the meridian, and if with this needle also there was deflection it was - corrected by his racial stubbornness. He had his people’s queer, - infatuated pride in the contemplation of their own tenacity, even when, - perhaps mostly when, it hurts to be tenacious. - </p> - <p> - Whereas Effie had known ever since Dubby Stewart brought her back from - cloud-land that Marbeck was very fallible indeed, or, rather, Marbeck was - one thing and living up to Marbeck was another. If he had said, instead of - only thinking, that she was a lower Effie now, she would not have - contradicted him, though she did not want a wedding ring of either metal. - She wanted Sam. She was changed from the idealist who thought she could be - happy as a sign-post and a spiritual guide. She had come down to Mother - Earth where men and women live. At Marbeck they were on an altitude where - the air was too rarefied for human lungs, and she wanted to fall with Sam - from selflessness to mere humanity. - </p> - <p> - “No,” she agreed again with Anne, “I should not send you now.” - </p> - <p> - “I shall have to think this out,” he said. Effie admitted to being - earthly, and he was horribly dismayed! “Effie,” he cried in pain, “don’t - you see?” he wanted desperately to be understood by her, if not by Anne. - </p> - <p> - “I see,” she said, and not without pride either. Whatever was fine in him, - whatever reacted from an Eflie come to earth, was due to her, and she was - proud of him even when, as now, he used her tempered steel against her. - </p> - <p> - Anne watched with a grim appreciation his anxiety to make a pikestaff - plain. “We all see,” she said. “You’re none so deep and we’re none so daft - as all that. You’ve got a maggot in your brain, and I know the shape of - it. I’ve had the same in mine, and if you’ll think back ten years, you’ll - know what I mean. We’re the same breed, Sam, and we can both do silly - things and stand by then and suffer for them. I flitted from you to Madge, - and I didn’t set eyes on you from that day till last night. That’s what I - mean by suffering.” - </p> - <p> - And there, in those few words, the tragedy of ten years stood confessed. - Parted from Sam, she lived in exile, suffering, and, of course, he had - known it and deliberately forgot it, so that the point of her revelation - was not its truth, but the amazing fact that she should speak of it at - all. Anne had the pride which suffers silently. - </p> - <p> - “Mother!” he said, distressed for her. - </p> - <p> - “Nay, none of that,” she bade him harshly. “If I were soft enough to let - it hurt me, that’s my look out. But here’s the point, Sam. There’s another - woman soft about you, too, and she’s not the same as me. I’d had you since - I bore you, and I were not young when you and me came to a parting; but - she’s young, and you’ll none make Eflie suffer the road I suffered while - there’s strength in me to say you nay. I’d have gone to my grave without - your knowing this if it hadn’t been for Effie. It’s not good for a man to - know too much. They’re easy stuffed with pride.” - </p> - <p> - She pretended, with deep magnanimity, to think that he had not known until - she told him, but they both knew very well that he had always known. She - dwelt deliberately on it now to inform him, not of her suffering, but of - the intensity of her feeling for Effie. It was so intense that she could - speak of her own suffering: for Effie’s sake she had unveiled, thrown off - her stoicism, and flung the spoken truth as a challenge and a revelation - at him. - </p> - <p> - He knew what speaking in this manner cost her, but he was stubborn still - in relating all she said to her ungovernable hate of Ada; whereas Anne did - not hate Ada ungovernably, but only when Ada hurt Sam. - </p> - <p> - Again he said “Mother!” and got no further with it. - </p> - <p> - “I know I’m your mother,” she said, “and you can stop thinking of me now - and think of Effie.” - </p> - <p> - “I’m trying to,” he said. - </p> - <p> - “Well?” said Anne impatiently. She hadn’t imagined an obstinacy which - would not yield to what she had said. Surely he knew the sacrifice of - pride she made in saying it! And there was Effie, too, who said little and - looked the more. - </p> - <p> - “I don’t know,” he despaired. - </p> - <p> - “Then others must know for you,” said Anne, and when his lips only - tightened at that, “Sam,” she pleaded, “surely you’ll never go against the - pair of us.” - </p> - <p> - But there were two Effies, and he wasn’t “going against” them both, while - he held Anne to be mesmerized by hate of Ada. For all that, it desolated - him to be in opposition to them now, to Anne and Effie, the women who - counted, the women who gave. “Still,” he had to say, “there’s Ada.” - </p> - <p> - He said it, as he hoped to say it, finally. He wanted to get away from - these two, to escape from their distracting presence to a place where he - could think. After all, Hartle Pike had not settled his problem, and he - must try somewhere else—Platt Fields, perhaps. They had a sort of - space. - </p> - <p> - But he could not escape—not, at least, till Anne had played her ace. - Anne had not finished yet, though she had hoped ten years in the - wilderness had been enough. It seemed that they were not, and she must - wander still. Well, she could do what she must. - </p> - <p> - “Oh, aye,” she said dryly, “there’s Ada. There’s your bad ha’penny, and I - reckon summat’ll have to be done with her. But if you’ll stop worrying, - lad, and if worst comes to the worst, I’ll take Ada on myself.” - </p> - <p> - Effie started towards her. “No, no,” she cried. - </p> - <p> - “You hold your hush,” said Anne. This was Anne’s game, not Effie’s. - </p> - <p> - Sam was still staring at her. “You!” he said. “What can you do?” - </p> - <p> - “I can see you and Effie happy, and I dunno as owt else matters.” It did - not matter what the cost was to Anne. “When you used to come home to your - tea from Mr. Travers’ office, what you left was always good enough for me, - and I can stomach your leavings still.” - </p> - <p> - It startled Effie, who had thought herself a specialist in sacrifice. This - was the very ferocity of self-denial. - </p> - <p> - So far, tired and overstrained, Effie had found peace in resigning the - leadership to Anne, but here was a lead she could not follow. It was not - that she mistook Anne’s purpose or doubted her capacity. Her faith in Anne - was young but adamantine, and she knew that if Anne replaced Sam with Ada, - and made herself heir to the Marbeck plan, she would unquestionably do for - Ada what Sam had undertaken to do. But the thing was simply not good - enough. - </p> - <p> - “No, Mrs. Branstone, no,” she said firmly. - </p> - <p> - “Get oft’ with you,” said Anne impolitely. “I can tackle Ada with one hand - tied behind my back.” - </p> - <p> - “Of course,” Sam agreed, “you could, but you are not going to. Ada’s my - job.” - </p> - <p> - “I can be pig-headed as well as you, my lad,” Anne menaced him. - </p> - <p> - “It’s not that, mother.” - </p> - <p> - “No, it isn’t that,” said Effie, conceiving perhaps that it was time for - her to enter into this tragicomedy of rivalry in self-surrender. “Sam’s - right. Ada does matter, and it is I who am the failure, I who have broken - faith, I who was arrogant. I thought that I could bear a torch, and I can - only bear a child. But I know now what I have to do. I can go away. I can - disappear.” - </p> - <p> - It seemed to Anne that this was serious because obviously it was a way - out; but she thought it a way much more appalling in prospect than the - plan she had proposed for herself of “taking Ada on.” She took alarm. In - another than Effie it might have been heroics, but Effie’s was not the - stuff that mouths bravado. Anne granted that, and saw a tragic chasm yawn - She signalled her alarm to Sam, who answered it with a glance which made - appeal to her, whilst yielding nothing of his obstinacy. - </p> - <p> - “If you go away,” he said, “my mother goes with you. I’ve meant that from - the first.” - </p> - <p> - Anne nodded without enthusiasm. Certainly that was a solution and equally - not the solution. It gave Sam to Ada, and Effie, it appeared, was not - seeing it as a solution at all. There were strange possibilities, Anne - thought, in this young woman, and she did not want them to be tested too - far. Effie was not a talker, and when she said a thing she did not - overstate. There was danger. Well, Anne was forewarned, and addressed - herself in her most humorous, common-sense manner to laugh it out of - court. One can deal with danger in worse ways than to apply to it the acid—ridicule. - </p> - <p> - She put her arms akimbo and surveyed Effie and Sam appraisingly. “I - dunno,” she said, “that there’s a pin to choose between the three of us - for chuckle-headed foolishness. We’re all fancying ourselves as hard as we - can for martyrs and arranging Ada’s life for her. It hasn’t struck any of - us yet that Ada’s likely to arrange things for herself.” - </p> - <p> - And if Sam’s impulse was to say gloomily: “It isn’t likely at all,” he - repressed it when Anne’s eye caught his, and said instead, “That’s so,” - without knowing why he said it and without believing it. - </p> - <p> - The flicker of a smile crossed Effie’s face; Sam as conspirator struck her - as crudely humorous. Anne saw the smile and understood, but brazened it - out. “Of course it’s so,” she said, defying Effie. “Ada’s a poor thing of - a woman, but she’s none beyond having a mind and speaking it. I was always - one to take the short road out of trouble, so I’ll go along to Peter - Struggles’ now.” - </p> - <p> - “Very well,” consented Effie, and Anne understood her to mean that the - crisis, if one had impended, was postponed. “But,” said Effie, “of course, - I saw.” - </p> - <p> - Which was, in its way, a challenge; it was, at any rate, to tell Anne that - Effie knew what had been suspected of her. - </p> - <p> - Anne met it as a challenge. “Well?” she said. - </p> - <p> - “You were quite wrung, Mrs. Branstone,” said Effie quietly. “I’m not a - coward.” - </p> - <p> - Anne was tying her bonnet-si rings, and found it convenient to look down. - She preferred, just then, not to meet Effie’s eye. “I know I’m - overanxious,” she mumbled in apology. - </p> - <p> - “And there’s no need,” said Effie, a little cruel in her victory. - </p> - <p> - To Sam the conversation seemed to have slipped into another dimension. He - hadn’t the faintest idea what they were talking about. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0025" id="link2HCH0025"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER XXV—WHOM GOD HATH JOINED - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">P</span>ETER Struggles - walked into his tobacconist’s and put his snuff-box on the counter. There - was no need to state his requirements; in fact, he had not stated them for - many years. Shopman and customer understood each other very well, and - business came first; then if there was inclination, as there usually was, - talk followed. - </p> - <p> - To-day, however, the shopman gaped at Peter in surprise, and made a - half-turn of his head, so that he could see his calendar Wednesday was - Peter’s day for buying snuff with a regularity to which time had given the - force of a tradition, and the tobacconist had even the habit of using - Peter’s visit as a reminder to a fallible memory that he must wind his - clock. The calendar continued him in his belief that to-day was Thursday, - and he felt sure that Peter had been in as usual on Wednesday. - </p> - <p> - Peter had. Snuffing, of course, is a wasteful habit in any case, and a - shaking hand misses the target more freely than a steady one; but, for all - that, Peter, in his mental anguish, had consumed in one night the better - part of his week’s supply of snuff. The box was indubitably empty. He had - not come to replenish it without some conscientious qualms—an - allowance is an allowance—but he felt that life which comprised Ada - in her present mood and did not comprise snuff, was beyond bearing. Ada - was, it seemed, inevitable: he must mitigate Ada. - </p> - <p> - “The usual, if you please, Thomas,” he unusually said. - </p> - <p> - “Yes, sir,” said Thomas, filling the box. “You’ve had a little accident?” - </p> - <p> - “An accident? Oh!” Then the fitness of that guess struck him. “Yes, - Thomas, a little accident. By the way, do you know anything about - divorce?” - </p> - <p> - “Well, sir, I read the <i>Sunday Judge,</i>” Thomas replied deprecatingly. - “Very human subject, sir, divorce.” - </p> - <p> - “You find it so?” - </p> - <p> - “I take a lot of satisfaction in reading about my sinful - fellow-creatures.” - </p> - <p> - “Quite, quite,” said Peter vaguely, and went out of the shop, leaving a - puzzled salesman behind him. “Forgot to pay, and all,” thought Thomas. - “Not that I’d grudge it if he didn’t pay, only it’s not like him. He looks - sadly to day. The old boy’s breaking up. Him and divorce! What does he - want to worry his head about divorce for?” - </p> - <p> - Peter did not know that he had mentioned divorce, to his tobacconist. It - would have shocked him if he had known. He spoke unconsciously, and - listened mechanically to the man’s reply, but he was, harrowingly, - “worrying his head” about divorce. He took snuff in the street, an - unheard-of occurrence, but it did not clear his aching brain of the - fateful word “divorce.” - </p> - <p> - Ada had put it there too firmly in her stupid and invincible malignity. - She had one aim—to do Sam the greatest injury she could. His offence - was rank, and she demanded a proportionate revenge. - </p> - <p> - She had lived as a spinster for marriage and as a wife by marriage. - Marriage was not a duty, but a state of beatitude, and she had walked in - the faith of her grotesque illusion that her marriage was singularly - blessed. It was childless, and the more blessed for that: there were no - intruders on the perfect union of man and wife. It was illusion, and a - wilder perversion of the truth than the ordinary self-deceiver can attain; - but illusion is the breath of life, and she had fed on her deception till, - like a drug-taker, she could not live without it. She had blazoned it - abroad in a hundred drawing-rooms. If there were low-voiced colloquies of - this or that affair, if it was hinted that men were faithless ever, Ada - would grow superior and boast the flawless rectitude of Sam. These were - things which happened to other people, who very likely deserved them, and - could by no manner of means occur to her. She was not so sunk in - imbecility as to deny that they did happen, and to people who were, - nominally, married; but they were unsound people, insecurely married. - There was a fundamental difference between their marriages and hers. She - couldn’t explain; it was too obvious for explanation. She was married, and - these others, somehow, were married, yet not married. They had, through - lack of merit, stopped short of the seventh paradise where nothing could - shake consummate bliss. They were not as she was. - </p> - <p> - And now she had to face the fact that the impossible had happened to her, - and not only had it happened, but was known to have happened. That was - where the blow struck home. She had publicly elaborated her case of - absolute conviction, she had vaunted his faithfulness, the cardinal - connubiality of Sam, and Miss Entwistle was spreading the news that she - had been a doting fool! And she hadn’t. She had not doted on Sam. She had - not been infatuated with her husband, but with the idea of her husband - which she had created and maintained. If only she had had the gumption to - defy Miss Entwistle! If only she had concealed her belief in the story as - successfully as she had hidden the fact that Sam had a separate room! She - had been taken by surprise, she had admitted everything by default, and, - worse, she had assured Mrs. Grandage that she would never see Sam again. - She did not doubt, in spite of Mrs. Grandage’s good-nature, that this - little sequel to the story of Miss Entwistle was in rapid circulation. - </p> - <p> - She was humiliated publicly, and, as she saw it, the one course open to - her was to make Sam suffer a humiliation as drastic and as public as her - own. Though it hurt her, he must pay for it; though she died, he must be - punished and, sincerely, she expected it to kill her. She lived in a - garden of lies, and life without the illusion of her marriage would be as - impossible as life without the fragrance of her poisonous flowers to - Rappaccini’s daughter, but no matter for that. Ada must be revenged, and - divorce, though it killed her, would be the greatest injury that she could - do a politician and a pietistic publisher. She managed to square the - circle, too. She was to die and make a murderer of him; she was to ruin - his business and make a bankrupt of him; and at the same time she was to - have the compensation of a handsome alimony. But perhaps vengeance is - always irrational, and that is why it belongs to God. - </p> - <p> - She dinned her word into Peter’s ears with the merciless reiteration of a - hurt and howling child. It was her first word and her last, and appeals - based on religion shattered themselves against it as fruitlessly as the - appeal to reason. What she had said she had said: and she had said - “Divorce.” Alternatives did not exist. - </p> - <p> - For Peter, divorce ranged itself with the abominations of the world, a - man-made legal subterfuge to evade the law of God. There might, - conceivably, be occasions when divorce was to be condoned as the - comparatively little wrong which did a great right, and he tried very - honestly to see Ada’s as one of those heroic needs. He failed: he could - not even see that Ada was hurt in soul, or in anything but pride. She was - in a mood, not of spiritual revolt, but of peevish discontent. - </p> - <p> - Small wonder that he snuffed prodigiously that night. He had his meed of - suffering, and overcharged his small account with dreadful self-reproach. - He, not Ada, and not Sam, was responsible for her violence and for the - cause of it; he and the books upon his shelves; reading, his darling sin. - He blamed himself for consenting too readily to their marriage. Sam, he - had thought, would lead Ada: on what grounds had he thought it? What had - he known of Sam’s leadership—a prolix, fluent boy at the - Concentrics? He had exchanged his daughter for peaceful, solitary evenings - with his books—“Self-seeker!” he thought—and the exchange was - to recoil upon him now. He had abandoned, after one harsh, undaughterly - repulse, his attempt to show her that wearing a wedding ring was not the - whole duty of woman—“The sin of Pride,” he thought—and had - returned to browse amongst his books. Sam seemed a good fellow, too. There - were those Classics, and the texts, and the prosperous old age of Mr. - Carter, who, but for Sam, would certainly have ended his days in the - workhouse. But, failing with Ada, he ought to have appealed to Sam.... - Yes, he ought to have taken a strong line with Sam, instead of letting - Sam’s worldly success dazzle him. Sam had seemed too big for Peter - Struggles to grapple with—the sin of cowardice. - </p> - <p> - Now it had come to this! Sam had broken the seventh commandment, and Ada - wished to forget the words which Peter had read over them when he joined - their right hands together, and said, “Those whom God hath joined - together, let no man put asunder.” She commanded a divorce, and it was - useless for Peter to insist, out of his small store of worldly wisdom, - that divorce was not hers to command. Sam had not been “cruel.” - </p> - <p> - Her fury only doubled. Gone, vanished like the snows of long ago, was her - painted idyll of domestic bliss. - </p> - <p> - “Cruel?” she said. “He’s never been anything but cruel. I’m black and blue - with his atrocities.” - </p> - <p> - Very gently he tried to tell her that he did not believe it. “We must not - exaggerate,” he said. - </p> - <p> - “Exaggerate!” she blazed. “Won’t you believe me till you see it? I’ll go - upstairs and strip. Come when I call.” - </p> - <p> - He soothed her down at that, seeing that she was capable of doing herself - some signal injury to call in evidence. - </p> - <p> - “Well, then,” she said, “I want my divorce: get me a divorce.” That was - her simple demand of the priest who married her: it was why Peter took, - unrepentantly, as much snuff in a night as he commonly took in a week, and - why, with replenished stock, he continued next day to take snuff with a - lavish hand. - </p> - <p> - It irritated Ada, though she had always associated Peter with a snuff-box, - and the untidiness of the habit could not offend her, who was never - offended by dirt, as any mechanical movement in another will irritate one - whose nerves are ill-controlled. They had talked themselves to a - standstill, and sat in moody silence, broken only by the deplorable sound - of taking snuff. - </p> - <p> - She looked viciously at him. “If you do that again, I shall leave the - room,” she said. - </p> - <p> - “I’m sorry, my dear,” he said, although, really, it was a pleasant threat; - but when he did it again, it was through pure absent-mindedness, and he - was terribly distressed at his selfishness when Ada flung out of the room. - He had the feelings of a child put in a corner as a punishment, and to - relieve them he took snuff again. She heard him from the stair, and heard - him immediately afterwards poking the fire; and she thought the loathsome - self-absorption of men and their utter callousness to the anguish of - sensitive women were proved beyond the possibility of doubt. She threw - herself on the bed in her old room, alone in a friendless world.... The - bed had a warm eiderdown. - </p> - <p> - Peter poked the fire because it needed poking. It often did. The grate was - one of those labour-making contrivances which must be periodically cleared - of ash if the fire is to burn at all, and it was rarely cleared. The woman - who “did for” Peter, did for him badly, and he was at the age when a man - needs artificial warmth: a gaunt, shrunk figure as neglected as his house. - Small wonder that, apart from his attachment to St. Mary’s, he was still a - curate. They had considered him for the living when his vicar moved some - years ago, they had considered the little circle of rich parishioners who - made an oasis of civilization in that savage place, and they had decided - that Peter lacked the social graces. They had seen his mittens, his - unfinished coat... they had seen him eat an orange: and he remained a - curate. - </p> - <p> - The fire was gone beyond the reach of his unscientific poking. That, too, - often happened with a man who had the habit of standing by his bookshelf - reading gluttonously, with his austere person frozen into a grotesque - attitude, some book which he had not the patience to carry to the - fireside: and he was now upon his knees making pathetically clumsy efforts - to revitalize the flame when his inefficient housekeeper opened the door - and showed Anne into the room. - </p> - <p> - It eased the situation for them both. Anne indeed, was nervous, so nervous - that she had walked three times past the door before she pulled the bell. - She had a befitting awe of the priest, and a tremendous respect for the - man. At Effie’s, because the circumstances there were tense, it had seemed - an easy thing to come to Peter’s, but she had needed to call on her - reserves of courage to keep her place on the doorstep after she had rung - the bell. - </p> - <p> - Now, however, when she came into the room and saw what he was at, she - pushed him gently aside, and took the poker from his hand. She nursed the - fire skilfully; she was with familiar things which gave her back her - confidence. - </p> - <p> - As to the trouble, she diagnosed it in a moment. “That woman of yours is a - slut,” she said. “And I’ll talk to her before I go. I reckon I’ve the - right, me and you being connections by marriage.” - </p> - <p> - She looked at him over her shoulder, and saw that he did not recognize - her. How, indeed, should he? She had avoided Ada’s wedding, and she was - one of a large flock: a face, perhaps, but not a name to him. “I’m Anne - Branstone,” she explained. “Sam’s mother; and I’ll not have you blaming - Sam for this.” - </p> - <p> - “For the fire?” asked Peter vaguely, he was rather muddled by her brisk - incursion. - </p> - <p> - “No,” said Anne, almost gaily; “for the fat that’s in the fire.” - </p> - <p> - She thought she had his measure now—the sort of a man who could live - in a dirty room like this, with a choked ash-pan and fire-irons with the - rust thick on them. But Peter was greater than that. She judged him by - those of his surroundings which had significance for her, and not by books - which expressed everything for him and nothing for her. - </p> - <p> - “Mrs. Branstone!” he said, as if realizing now with whom he had to deal. - </p> - <p> - “Sam’s mother,” she repeated, rising from a healthy fire; “and I’ve told - you where not to put the blame. You can, maybe, think yourself of the - right place to put it.” - </p> - <p> - “Yes,” he surprised her by saying; “on me.” - </p> - <p> - “You! Oh, if you want to go to the back of behind, you can blame Adam and - Eve. But that’s not what I meant.” - </p> - <p> - “On me,” he said again. “I consented to this marriage. I sanctioned it.” - </p> - <p> - “Well,” said Anne, “I’ve not come here to crow, but I’ve the advantage of - you in that. I did not consent,” and her eye strayed involuntarily to a - scar on her hand, memorial of the form of her dissent. “I didn’t consent - because I knew they weren’t in love. I told Sam I knew it.” - </p> - <p> - “Then,” said Peter, “you are worthier than I am, Mrs. Branstone.” - </p> - <p> - “Because I knew love matters? There’s nowt so wonderful in knowing that, - and nowt so crafty in foreseeing that a marriage where there is no love is - marred from start to finish.” - </p> - <p> - “Love matters,” he agreed. “It matters all, for God is love.” - </p> - <p> - “We’ll come to an agreement, you and me,” she said appreciatively. “We’ve - the same mind about the root of things.” - </p> - <p> - “This is a terrible business, Mrs. Branstone.” - </p> - <p> - “I’m none denying it. It’s a terrible thing for a man and wife to live - together when love’s not a lodger in the house; it’s wrong, and the worst - of wrong is that it won’t stay single. Wrong’s got to breed. But, there,” - she finished briskly, “I’m telling you what you know, and when all’s said, - there’s nowt so bad that it’s past mending.” - </p> - <p> - “Ada wants a divorce,” said Peter, and a sudden glint of triumph came into - Anne’s eye, only to vanish as quickly as it came. She had said, without - believing it, that Ada might make arrangements, and this was to arrange - indeed. It unmade the hollow marriage, it was a solution which really - solved, it was a clean cut; and she wanted to glorify Ada, who was proving - at the eleventh hour that she had the saving grace of common sense. - </p> - <p> - Peter did a curious thing. He rose and took a book haphazard from his - shelf, came back to his chair and opened the book. He did not read it, and - he was not being rude, but this was an agitation beyond the reach of - snuff. He tried to calm himself by resting his eyes on print. - </p> - <p> - Anne was not practised in the ways of bookish men, but, by strange - insight, understood that Peter had gone to a book much as she went to his - grate, to be soothed by its familiarity, and her rejoicing at his words - came to an abrupt end. His action brought home to her, more than his - horror-struck tone, whose significance she almost missed in her joy at - Ada’s practical solution, his loathing of divorce: and it seemed to her, - quite suddenly, that what mattered most in all this business was that - Peter should be happy about it. - </p> - <p> - It mattered more than Sam and Ada, and even more than Effie, that Peter, - who was, so to speak, an old and sleeping partner, should be satisfied by - their solution. She did not care if this was to per vert the values: the - remnant of Peter Struggles’ life was of more importance than the young - lives of the active members of the firm. And because she had a practical - mind, and believed that one is happy in soul only when one is first happy - in body, she was already thinking past their present problem: she was - considering how the slut in Peter’s kitchen could be replaced by her own - housewifely self. - </p> - <p> - She resolutely consigned that thought to the future, and returned to the - question of to-day. Ada, wonderfully, wanted a divorce: but Anne required - that Peter should be happy about it, and she perceived the - incompatibility. She saw that juxtaposition could hardly be more crude. He - was a priest, the priest who married them, and she wanted him to acquiesce - contentedly in their divorce. - </p> - <p> - “Wants a divorce, does she?” she said. “Well, there’s more than Ada to be - thought of.” - </p> - <p> - “There is, indeed,” said Peter, thinking of his church. - </p> - <p> - “There’s you,” said Anne, thinking of him. “If she gets one, does she - plant herself on you again?” - </p> - <p> - He supposed so, unable to disguise his depression at the prospect. - </p> - <p> - “Aye,” she rubbed it in, “you were well rid of Ada once. It’s not in human - nature to want her back again.” She was thinking singly of his comfort. - </p> - <p> - Peter, on his part, took her to imply that if he opposed a divorce it was - for interested motives, that he could continue to be “well rid of Ada.” He - saw with dismay that it was an interpretation which could reasonably be - put on any opposition from him. He thought, in his humility, that it was a - reasonable interpretation, whereas, Peter being Peter, it was a - ludicrously unjust interpretation, and, of course, Anne did not make it. - She had only stated as a fact that Ada at home prejudiced her father’s - comfort: and the comfort of Ada’s father had become a matter which touched - Anne Bran-stone nearly. - </p> - <p> - “And there are other people, too. There’s Sam,” she went on, “and he is a - desperate bad case. He has no love for Ada. He’s hoisted his notion of his - duty higher than a living love. He wants Ada to come back.” - </p> - <p> - “I’m sorry to say,” mourned Peter, “that the more he wants it, the less - likely she is to go.” - </p> - <p> - She tried not to exult too openly at that. “And then,” she said, “there’s - Effie.” - </p> - <p> - “Effie!” He spoke in scandalized protest. - </p> - <p> - “Aye, that’s her name, and yon’s just the tone of voice I had myself when - I first heard of her. I want you to see Effie.” - </p> - <p> - “Never!” said Peter, and for a mild man his bitterness was remarkable. - </p> - <p> - “Then I must show her to you,” said Anne placidly, “and that’ll mean going - back a bit and showing you other things as well. It’ll mean,” and she very - much regretted it, “showing you this.” She held out her hand and pointed - to the scar. “When Sam told me he wanted to marry Ada, I came to see her. - I saw what I saw, and I told him she’d be the ruin of him. He didn’t - believe me, and I tried to make him see I meant it. I put my hand into the - fire, and I thought to keep it there till he agreed with me, but he’s - stronger in the arm than me, and he got me away.” She spoke without - passion, in simple narrative which Peter found impressed him deeply. “So I - left him and earned my living, and all that. Sam married her, and the - ruin’s come, but it’s not come suddenly. It’s been coming all the time. - I’d date it back,” she reflected, “to the day when he fooled you about the - ‘Social Evil’ pamphlet. He did that because he wanted a rich husband for - Ada.” - </p> - <p> - Peter had nothing to say. If he had not known before that Sam had “fooled” - him, he did not doubt it now. - </p> - <p> - “And it grew from that. He’s made money because Ada wanted money, and - after that it grew to be a bad habit. He made it then by writing lies - about himself in the papers, and I don’t know how he’s done it since then, - except that it has been by more lies. He began to fancy himself at - politics. He wanted to be a crowing cock, and it didn’t matter if he - crowed on a dung-heap so long as he crowed. And Ada didn’t care. He gave - her money, and she didn’t care. She didn’t love, and he didn’t love, and - there’s a thing you said just now that I’ll remind you of. You said God’s - love. I’ll leave it to you to name what it is when there isn’t love. - </p> - <p> - “And then love came to Sam. Effie came, and you say that God is love. Sam - put it to me in another way. He said he’d found salvation. Well, it’s a - big word, and I dunno. But I do know he found love and it changed him. - He’s done with politics, and he’s done with crowing and with riches, too. - Effie did that by the power of love, and there’s another thing she did, - that’s marked yon lass for me as the finest, strangest woman in the width - of the world. She gave him up and sent him back to Ada. Well, I’ve heard - of sacrifice before, and I’ve done a bit that way myself, but give up a - man she loved and teach him how to make a woman of his wife, and send him - home to do it—it’s more than I can rise to. And that is Effie - Mannering. - </p> - <p> - “He went home and he tried, and Ada laughed at him. She couldn’t - understand: there wasn’t the one thing there that could make her - understand: there wasn’t love. And he gave up his politics that night she - laughed at him, to leave himself free to tackle Ada. Now Ada’s left him, - and there’s sum-mat else turned up as well. You can guess.” He looked up - sharply. “Aye, that’s it, and the rum thing is that it surprised them - both. Their love’s that sort of love, and I reckon there are folk would - call it careless of them. I would myself nine cases out of ten, aye, and - ninety-nine in a hundred, but not this case. This wasn’t a case for care; - it was a case of love. But a baby’s coming to Effie, and you know’ as well - as I do that none will ever come to Ada. I’ve finished telling you about - Effie now.” There was a long pause and it seemed several times that Peter - was about to break it, and each time changed his mind. All that he finally - said in comment on Effie was, “A lawless woman,” and it might have been - deduced from his tone that he did not condemn, if he could not, - confessedly, admire. - </p> - <p> - “Aye, lawless,” Anne agreed, “but there’s a law of lawless women and she - has not obeyed it. She’s not a breaker. She’s a maker.” - </p> - <p> - Peter bowed his head. Perhaps he did not wish Anne to see what was written - in his face. And he lacked conviction when he tried to speak again. “Whom - God hath joined—he began. - </p> - <p> - “But God,” Anne said, “is love.” - </p> - <p> - He threw up his hands in a despairing gesture of surrender. “I deserve to - be unfrocked for this,” he said, but he closed the book on his knee and - took snuff violently. It marked the passing of a crisis. - </p> - <p> - As for Anne, there mingled with her satisfaction at his consent a keen - despondency at his unhappiness. She had both lost and won, and Anne took - little pleasure in a mixed victory. She had not finished yet with Peter - Struggles. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0026" id="link2HCH0026"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER XXVI—SNOW ON THE FELLS - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">L</span>IFE is still - greater than machines. Machines accomplish marvels and very wonderfully - continue to accomplish them, but life refuses the mechanical. It was man, - and not nature, who invented the wheel, and life does not revolve upon an - axle. Life will not repeat itself: and it can excel itself. - </p> - <p> - They had not thought, when they came back to Marbeck at the turn of the - year, that Marbeck could be better than before. They came hoping, they - said, to recapture the old emotions, and brought Anne with them to show - her their fairyland. They did not recapture the old emotions, because they - were young emotions, a ferment like youth itself, and things were settled - now. They seemed to look back from their equable security to a wild - infancy of their emotion, a fumbling, frenzied, awkward age of love. Of - course they looked back happily, from a place where things were happy and - serene to one where things were happy and impetuous. - </p> - <p> - The Dale was full of wonder, with a wonder which now belonged unerringly - to fact and had mellowed in reality. - </p> - <p> - For Anne, it was a pretty place, but “lonesome,” and, amazingly to them, - she chafed to leave it. Anne did not suffer holidays gladly. - </p> - <p> - They had extolled Anne, they had not thought it credible that she should - fail at anything, and it ruffled them disturbingly to find her fail at - this. They had planned eagerly and, indeed, generously to bring her with - them to Marbeck—generously, because they wanted to be alone, and - even Anne, owe her what they did and be she what she might, was an - intruder. But they wanted her to share with them their wonderland. Marbeck - was theirs, theirs intimately and alone, their holy place, and they could - think of nothing finer, nothing which came more nearly to her deserts of - them, than to initiate her to their secret worship. - </p> - <p> - They made her free of Marbeck, relived their week for her as much as for - themselves, showed her where this and that dear folly happened, took her - to view-points whence she could see the tops of hills they climbed, using - the landscape as the ground-plan of an ecstasy which they invited her to - share, and were discomposed to find that Anne, plainly straining - enthusiasm in their behalf, could only say of Marbeck, their Marbeck, “I’m - sure it’s very nice.” - </p> - <p> - She damned with faint praise their enchanted valley in whose every tree - they took by now as fierce a joy as if they had created it, and in despair - they dragged her, as a last hope, to the very Holy of their holies, the - top of Hartle Pike. If she failed them there, if she did not see the - beauty and the grace, the penetrating significance and the absolute - sanctity of Hartle Pike, then her greatness was lopsided, resulting, like - a show chrysanthemum, from the atrophy of other possibilities. - </p> - <p> - It was a great day for the fells, when a frozen surface crushed - elastically underfoot and kept one dryshod anywhere, and they walked in - frosty, sun-kissed air, keenly exhilarating yet spicily warm. Snow capped - the greater heights and seemed to clarify an atmosphere already clear, but - the dales were free of snow and never more fit for walking than now when - their boggy surface was dried up and roughened to the tread by crisp, - granulated particles of frost. - </p> - <p> - Anne granted to herself that if one must take a holiday, this generous - activity made nearly a venial matter of it. To climb these slopes was - almost as satisfying to her body as to wash a long flight of steps, and - she reached the top feeling as pleasantly tired as if she had done half a - day’s charring. - </p> - <p> - Still, she hadn’t charred, and there was in fact nothing which needed - charring, nothing but a cleanliness which positively irritated her. She - itched to be doing something and there was manifestly nothing to do except - to enjoy herself. And if Anne Branstone was not doing a job, she liked, at - any rate, to know that her next job was around the corner. She began, for - the first time in her life, to feel a friendliness towards dirt. In the - midst of this sprawling insolence of triumphant cleanliness, she hankered - for a little humanizing soot. She could have loved her life-long enemy, - and he did not appear... it was not a bit like Manchester. - </p> - <p> - Far to the west, beyond a barrier of gleaming snow, she saw a murky cloud - of smoke where the foul boot of industrialism stamps on the Lakeland Coast—a - message and a call. It spoke, to her of natural dirt in this great waste - of unstained purity; it made her sick for home and the thing she had to - do. - </p> - <p> - Effie and Sam stood gazing at the hills, spell-hound by loveliness, and - when they tore their dancing eyes away it was to look into each other’s. - They had no need of words: their eyes exulted in the burnished splendour - of the scene, and with a doubled exultation each in the other’s joy. Then - Sam turned hopefully to Anne and saw that she was looking with a rapt - intensity at the west. At last, it seemed, the hills had touched her. - </p> - <p> - “Where’s yon?” she asked, “yon smoke?” - </p> - <p> - His face fell as he told her, but he saw that this explained Anne’s - failure. She had not relished Marbeck because she had not seen it. She had - not been looking at Marbeck, but all the while at something else. - </p> - <p> - And why, he questioned, why, now that things had so admirably arranged - themselves, must Anne still live in thought in Manchester? There seemed to - him to be no law, nothing which could conceivably distract her attention, - nothing which had not with genial finality been neatly finished off. Of - course they had stupid legal business to come, but that was well ahead - and, in any case, was not to worry them. - </p> - <p> - She could not, surely, be troubling about Ada. It was he who had made the - trouble there, insisting that Ada was “his job.” - </p> - <p> - He insisted to the point of almost literally forcing himself upon her in - Peter Struggles’ house, and remembered now with a twinge that desolating - interview, if interview it could be called, and its liberating end; how - Ada had looked at him, and answered nothing to his abject and passionate - appeals (he wondered how he could have made them, but he was despairingly - sincere): how he had pleaded and apologized for the past and supplicated - for the future, all in the mastering grip of his Marbeck faith, and how - she had kept silent till she turned on Peter and told him she must leave a - house which did not shelter her from the deadly insult of this man’s - presence. He remembered the good woman, Mrs. Grandage, who had carried Ada - to a Hydro at Southport, and wrote to Peter that Ada seemed quite happy - there, “nursing her grievance like a child,” and was looking for a house. - He had found something mystifying about the intervention of Mrs. Grandage: - good nature fortified by a bad conscience was his attempt to explain her - attitude, but what emerged clearly from the letters she wrote to Peter was - that Ada had no intention of returning to Manchester: and when he thought - of Southport, he realized its quintessential rightness as her home. He had - not shirked his job; he had eaten dirt before her in his anxiety to do his - job; and he was not allowed. What she was she must remain, and Southport - seemed the aptest place for her. “Only,” as Mrs. Grandage wrote, “she mast - have money.” - </p> - <p> - That was not difficult, and the money might have come in many ways: it - came actually in a way which Effie hated and Sam thought exquisitely - right. It came through Stewart, that faithful ally of the publishing - business in its early days. - </p> - <p> - Dubby was in Effie’s room, “which is where,” he said, “your brother has a - right to be.” - </p> - <p> - “You keep that up,” she smiled. - </p> - <p> - “Is the poor dog to get none?” he asked. - </p> - <p> - “He is to have whatever he wants,” she said. - </p> - <p> - “—that’s going,” he completed her sentence. - </p> - <p> - “Yes,” said Effie, not smiling now, and kissed him very simply to seal his - brotherhood. - </p> - <p> - He stood silent for a moment, then, with a jerk of his head he, so to - speak, cut his loss and turned to her with the frank confidence of their - settled relationship. “Now we can talk,” he said. “Tell me about old Sam. - What are you going to do with him? And with his business?” - </p> - <p> - She evaded his first question. “The business? Oh, he’ll sell that.” - </p> - <p> - “Then let me buy.” - </p> - <p> - “You! Oh!” - </p> - <p> - “Why not?” - </p> - <p> - “You know what I think of it.” - </p> - <p> - “I’m only the dog, my dear. Do you know any Greek? There’s a connection - between being a dog and being a cynic. In certain circumstances, I’d have - thought with you to the crack of doom, but your brother’s a cynic.” - </p> - <p> - “I see,” said Effie sadly. “But he will always be my brother, Dubby.” - </p> - <p> - “Thanks, Effie,” he said. “That will keep me on the sweeter side of - currishness. But a dog wants meat. You’ll tell Sam I’m to have the first - refusal of that business. I’ll scrape a syndicate together in a week.” - </p> - <p> - So the Stewart Publishing Syndicate, which now has dashing offices near - Covent Garden, came to birth and Ada got her money. When Sam tried to tell - Effie that his investments outside the business were ridiculously small, - she had refused to be impressed. - </p> - <p> - “It’s not the means of life that matters, Sam. It’s living: it’s the - quality of life: it’s what we do with life,” she said, and Ada got the - means. - </p> - <p> - “She’ll be married in a year to a man from Liverpool,” said Dubby, when he - heard. - </p> - <p> - “Why Liverpool?” asked Sam, and Dubby shrugged his shoulders. He thought - Sam’s question stupid. - </p> - <p> - “By the way, Sam,” Dubby said, “have you and Effie any plans?” - </p> - <p> - “No,” said Effie, when Sam hesitated, but a brother’s curiosity was not to - be stifled like that, and Sam’s face told her, too, how he had hung on her - reply. She resented his anxiety, the proof that he had not dropped his - calculating habit. They had not discussed the question of plans because - she held there was no question to discuss, and Sam, she thought, deserved - a little punishment for thinking otherwise. “I suppose,” she went on, “we - shall stay in Manchester and face the music.” - </p> - <p> - “Oh!” said Sam blankly. - </p> - <p> - “Well, we must give Mr. Verity his revenge,” she teased. - </p> - <p> - “But it can’t hurt me now I’m out of politics,” he said, confessing by his - tone that it would hurt him very much. - </p> - <p> - “It will please him, though,” she said. - </p> - <p> - “I’d... I’d thought of going to America,” he ventured. - </p> - <p> - “America!” scoffed Dubby. “<i>O sancta simplicitas!</i> America’s not El - Dorado, Sam. El Dorado’s been found. I’d even say it’s been found out.” - </p> - <p> - “There are big things in America,” Sam defended his idea. - </p> - <p> - “As a matter of fact, Dubby,” said Effie, silencing him, “we shall go to - Marbeek for a little while. It’s a good place to begin from.” - </p> - <p> - With that a great contentment came to Sam. They were to go to Marbeek; - they were to begin; and he no longer questioned what. He made no hard and - fast surrender of his will, but recognized the fact, not for the first - time, that when Effie made a decision it had a shining rightness. Perhaps - she had retreated from her first decision of Marbeck, but, if so, Anne - helping him, he had retreated with her; and they went to Marbeek now, not - to end, but to begin, and to begin together. - </p> - <p> - Reflecting on it all, he could not see the blemish. He couldn’t, for the - life of him, make out why Anne was not content. - </p> - <p> - He half explained the valley’s failure to enchant her when he perceived - that she had not really looked at it. At what, then, could she be looking? - And how could she, how in the name of beauty was it possible for anyone to - pick out from all that noble amphitheatre of the hills the one - smoke-clouded spot? - </p> - <p> - “Mother,” he cried in downright exasperation, “aren’t you happy here?”, - </p> - <p> - “I’d be happier in Manchester,” she said. “Yon smoke’s too far away to - taste. Aye, I think I’ll leave you here and go to-day.” - </p> - <p> - “But you’re not going back to Madge’s—to the work in other people’s - houses, I mean. That’s surely over now.” - </p> - <p> - “Maybe.” - </p> - <p> - “Mother, you’ve done with work.” - </p> - <p> - She eyed him grimly. “Not till I’m dead, my lad,” she said. - </p> - <p> - “Why won’t you tell me what you’re thinking of?” - </p> - <p> - “I’m thinking,” she said, “of yon slut in Peter Struggles’ kitchen. I’ll - have her out of that tomorrow.” - </p> - <p> - He glanced at Effie, and then looked again. He fancied he had surprised a - little smile on Effie’s face and looked twice to make sure. And when he - looked he found that Effie was looking back at him in the wise, humorous - way that he had come to know so well. “Don’t you see?” was what she seemed - to say. - </p> - <p> - And he did see. He saw that it was not Manchester, but a man in - Manchester; not the woman in Peter Struggles’ kitchen, but the man in - Peter’s parlour who interrupted his mother’s vision of the Marbeck hills. - She lost their beauty in a greater beauty of her own. - </p> - <p> - “And don’t be incredulous,” said Effie’s eyes. - </p> - <p> - She turned to Anne. “We’ll go down to the Inn at once,” she said, “and you - shall catch the train this afternoon.” - </p> - <p> - A quick look passed from Anne to Effie, from which they both excluded Sam. - It almost seemed that Anne was asking Effie for support, and that Effie - understood and nodded imperceptibly. And if Anne had seriously doubted, - her doubts were dissipated by a look which told her that, where she was - concerned, Effie believed in the feasibility of anything. - </p> - <p> - Nothing at Marbeck became Anne Branstone like her leaving it. “Why, - mother, how young you look!” he cried when she came downstairs to the - trap. - </p> - <p> - “It’s just as well,” said Anne, meeting Effie’s eye over his shoulder. - </p> - <p> - Then, after she had gone, and so pat upon her going as to be hardly - decent, life flamed for them ungrudgingly. There was something quite - impudently callous about the haste of it, as if life pulled a face behind - the older generation and turned lightheartedly to burn more ardently for - them. But Anne, and they knew it, would not have thanked them to be sorry - for her. She had gone to Peter Struggles, who needed her. - </p> - <p> - They could not now resume the half amphibious life of their autumn days, - but the air itself from the snow-clad fells had all the stimulation of a - bath. It cleansed and healed by touch and heightened their well-being till - they moved in radiant exhilaration, now clamant at the joy of it, now dumb - before its wonder. - </p> - <p> - Happy themselves, they were the cause of happiness in others, not - self-contained in joy, but effervescing to the old black-beamed kitchen of - the Marbeck Inn. - </p> - <p> - They had, as Sam cannily observed, the advantages of a private room at an - hotel without paying for it—and abrogated them. In the autumn they - had isolated their joy from others: now it brimmed from them and affected - all the people of the Inn, making the long nights short. Good listeners - were a godsend to the Dale in winter, and the shepherds, dropping from - heaven knew how far, found a rare satisfaction in telling this attentive - audience tales of the fells, of sheep wanderers that strayed as wide - afield as Derbyshire, of dogs that ran amok and ravaged the flocks they - ought to tend, of the epic Beast of Ennerdale, of the legends of John Peel - and all the sagas of the Lakes. It needed little to make these dalesmen - happy, nothing beyond a patient ear for a slow, rambling narrative—a - long chain strung with pearls of racy episode—or an hour of Effie at - the piano, when the dalesmen disappointed her by knowing no ballads, but - having, instead, a sound acquaintance with the latest music-hall songs - stacked in the cupboard at the Inn. In here, in the smoke room, they were - knowing wags, in the kitchen they were themselves, talking shop, and - therefore interesting. Effie and Sam preferred them in the kitchen, - telling their slowly-moving tales, to seeing them in their smoke-room - mood, imitating badly a thing not worth the imitating. But, in either - room, they helped them to be happy. - </p> - <p> - Well coated they would go each night from the tobacco-laden air of the - kitchen down the road to the bridge over Marbeck Force. A great peace - brooded there. Even the stream ran softly now when all the surface water - of its gathering ground was frozen hard. - </p> - <p> - They stood there on the bridge while the moon rose over Hartle Pike and - scattered silver on the snow. Great shadows leaped to instant birth below - the Pike whose comely top was one black silhouette against the brightened - sky, and the beauty of the valley, seen by day with an almost Alpine - harshness, mellowed in the moonlight to a subtle luminosity. Behind them - were the lights of the friendly Inn; near by the low church tower saluted - God amongst the pines, and all around them spread the lustrous radiance of - the moon-flushed Dale. - </p> - <p> - For the hundredth time he restrained his impulse to repeat his words, - “We’ll build a tabernacle here,” and Effie read his thought. - </p> - <p> - “We’re making the good beginning here,” she said. “We’re practising and I - think we grow.” - </p> - <p> - “We grow in happiness,” he said, which he thought good argument for - staying at Marbeck. - </p> - <p> - “Yes. We grow in happiness. We shall have outgrown Marbeck soon. We shall - have grown a sturdy happiness that can withstand the towns. It might - withstand Manchester and I think it will. To love, to work, to look for - other people’s strength and not for other people’s weaknesses: that is to - be happy, Sam. And happiness counts more than all. It roots and then it - spreads. It spreads. Infection isn’t only of disease, infection is of - happiness and youth. There’s too much age, too many men and women in the - world who have forgotten love. We have to build, and build on happiness.” - They gazed at the unguessed future through the silent night. God knows - that there was work ahead for them to do! - </p> - <h3> - THE END - </h3> - <div style="height: 6em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - - - - - - - -<pre> - - - - - -End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Marbeck Inn, by Harold Brighouse - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MARBECK INN *** - -***** This file should be named 50131-h.htm or 50131-h.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/5/0/1/3/50131/ - -Produced by David Widger from page images generously -provided by the Internet Archive - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United -States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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-<pre>
-
-The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Marbeck Inn, by Harold Brighouse
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
-
-
-
-Title: The Marbeck Inn
- A Novel
-
-Author: Harold Brighouse
-
-Release Date: October 4, 2015 [EBook #50131]
-Last Updated: November 1, 2016
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MARBECK INN ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by David Widger from page images generously
-provided by the Internet Archive
-
-
-
-
-
-
-</pre>
-
- <div style="height: 8em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h1>
- THE MARBECK INN
- </h1>
- <h3>
- A Novel
- </h3>
- <h2>
- By Harold Brighouse
- </h2>
- <h4>
- Little, Brown, And Company
- </h4>
- <h5>
- 1920
- </h5>
- <p>
- <br /> <br /> <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0001" id="linkimage-0001"> </a>
- </p>
- <div class="fig" style="width:65%;">
- <img src="images/0001.jpg" alt="0001 " width="100%" /><br />
- </div>
- <h5>
- <a href="images/0001.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
- </h5>
- <p>
- <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0009" id="linkimage-0009"> </a>
- </p>
- <div class="fig" style="width:65%;">
- <img src="images/0009.jpg" alt="0009 " width="100%" /><br />
- </div>
- <h5>
- <a href="images/0009.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
- </h5>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <p>
- <b>CONTENTS</b>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> <b>THE MARBECK INN</b> </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER I—THE STARTING-POINT </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER II—WHERE THE SHOE PINCHED </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER III—THE HELL-PIKE CLUB </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER IV—THE COMPLEAT ANGLER </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER V—LAST SCHOOL-DAYS </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER VI—THE NEST-EGG </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0007"> CHAPTER VII—THE FLEDGLING CAPITALIST </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0008"> CHAPTER VIII—ADA STRUGGLES </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0009"> CHAPTER IX—ADA AND A MAD TRAM-CAR </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0010"> CHAPTER X—GERALD ADAMS, SOCIOLOGIST </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0011"> CHAPTER XI—UNDER WAY </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0012"> CHAPTER XII—DROPPING THE PILOT </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0013"> CHAPTER XIII—THE INTERMITTENT COURTSHIP
- </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0014"> CHAPTER XIV—HONEYMOONERS </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0015"> CHAPTER XV—OTHER THINGS BESIDE MARRIAGE
- </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0016"> CHAPTER XVI—THE POLITICAL ANIMAL </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0017"> CHAPTER XVII—THE VERITY AFFAIR </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0018"> CHAPTER XVIII—WHEN EFFIE CAME </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0019"> CHAPTER XIX—EFFIE IN LOVE </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0020"> CHAPTER XX—THE MARBECK INN </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0021"> CHAPTER XXI—SATAN’S SMILE </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0022"> CHAPTER XXII—THE OLD CAMPAIGNER </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0023"> CHAPTER XXIII—THE KNIGHT’S MOVE </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0024"> CHAPTER XXIV—THE NEW BOOK OF MARTYRS </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0025"> CHAPTER XXV—WHOM GOD HATH JOINED </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0026"> CHAPTER XXVI—SNOW ON THE FELLS </a>
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <br /><br /> <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- THE MARBECK INN
- </h2>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER I—THE STARTING-POINT
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>T falls to some to
- be born, as they say, with a silver spoon in their mouths, and the witty
- have made play with the thought that the wise child chooses rich parents.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam Branstone lacked the completeness of that wisdom. He was born in one
- of those disconsolate streets of Manchester down which the stranger,
- passing by tram along a main road, hardly more delectable than its
- offshoots, looks and shudders; but was born with this difference from the
- many—that he was son to Anne Branstone, a notable woman, and wisdom
- may be conceded him for the discrimination of his choice.
- </p>
- <p>
- If, however, it was Anne who gave him birth and started him in life, it
- was Mr. Councillor Travers who set him on his way from the mean street of
- his birth and started his career, and the circumstance which led to the
- intervention of Mr. Travers was due, not to Anne, but to the occupation of
- Tom Branstone.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam’s father, Tom, was a porter at Victoria Station, Manchester, and there
- was just time between morning and afternoon school for young Sam to snatch
- a meal himself and to carry his father’s dinner to him in a basin tied up
- in a bandanna handkerchief. In those days Victoria was an open station and
- a favourite dinner-hour lounge with boys from the neighbouring Grammar
- School. The attractions were partly the trains, partly the large automatic
- machines which delivered a packet of sweet biscuits in return for a penny.
- First one lunched frugally on the biscuits and pocketed the balance of
- one’s lunch allowance to buy knives and other essentials, then one
- savoured the romance of a large station from which trains went to
- Blackpool and to the Yorkshire moors. Often one saw sailors on the through
- trains from Liverpool to Newcastle. One found secluded ends of platforms
- and ran races with luggage trucks. One was rather a nuisance, especially
- when one wrestled hardily at the platform’s giddy edge and a train came
- in.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam, as a porter’s son, was on the other side of the fence. He did not
- lark at Victoria Station, and took his opinions of those who did from his
- father, adding, perhaps, a touch of jealousy against these chartered
- libertines who wore the silver owl upon their caps of dual blue.
- </p>
- <p>
- That day he had delivered Tom’s dinner to him in the porters’ room and was
- retracing his steps down the platform when he saw two of the Grammar
- School boys emerge in a confused whirl of battle and sag, interlocked,
- towards the line, hopelessly unconscious in their struggle of an incoming
- train. They reached the edge, deaf to all warning cries, and long before
- help could reach them, fell over it in one entangled mass. One boy,
- aroused to a sense of their common danger, was on his feet nimbly enough
- and across the line to safety: the other, Lance Travers, stayed where he
- fell, with a leg broken against the rail. Wits left the first lad; he
- could only howl as the engine swept inexorably on, and adult help, though
- active, could not avail in time. Sam had no precise recollection of what
- followed, and certainly acted on impulse. He dived to the line and dragged
- the injured boy across, escaping death for both by the skin of his teeth.
- </p>
- <p>
- After that, all was confusion: an ambulance; inquiries; names taken and so
- on; and Sam only came to himself when he discovered that he was being
- punished for arriving late at school. It struck him as unfair, but he did
- not realize that he was a hero till the evening paper told him so. He,
- Samuel Branstone, had his name in the paper! Glory could go no further,
- because those were the dark ages of journalism, before the photograph
- illustrated all, and to read one’s name in print was then the apogee. We
- have moved since those dull days, when “heart interest” was still to be in
- vented.
- </p>
- <p>
- What profound satisfaction Anne Branstone found in that sober paragraph
- her son was not to know. She did not think it good for him to know, but
- she went about her house with softened eyes, and Sam heard her singing
- more than once; so per haps he may have guessed that she was pleased with
- him.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was more than she allowed Mr. Oscar Travers to guess, he was Lance’s
- father, an estate agent with a good suburban practice, and Anne met him at
- the door in a way which would have marred Sam’s future had Travers not
- known that Lancashire women are apt to be undemonstrative. She found a
- portly gentleman on the doorstep and thought he wore a patronizing air.
- They resent patronage in Lancashire.
- </p>
- <p>
- As a matter of fact, Travers had come to see what he could do for the lad
- who had saved his boy’s life. That may be patronage, but he was thinking
- of it as the barest decency.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Good evening,” he said; “my name is Travers.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “This is a nice upset,” she said, without inviting him to come in. “How’s
- your son?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “He’s doing very well, thank you.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh? Well, it’s more than he deserves.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He did not argue that. “I wonder,” he said, “if you would allow me to come
- in, or would you prefer me to return when your husband is at home?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “He’s at home now. It’s his early night. He’s having his tea.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Shall I return when he has finished?” asked Travers with a nice
- tactfulness. He knew the curious delicacy against being seen eating by one
- of a superior class, as if that natural function were a deed of shame. But
- Anne was for short cuts and she never considered Tom’s feelings overmuch.
- </p>
- <p>
- “If you’ve owt to say,” she said, “you’d better come in and get it over.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I have something to say,” said Travers, entering. “Ah,” he added, as he
- caught sight of Sam, “this is——?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It’s him,” Anne interrupted. She might have been identifying a criminal.
- </p>
- <p>
- “May I shake your hand?” he asked, and shook it heartily, ignoring Anne’s
- muttered protest that the hand had not been washed for hours. “I think
- you’re a very plucky lad.” He could have, said more than that, and felt
- that as an expression of his gratitude it was hopelessly inadequate, but
- Anne’s eyes forbade effusiveness, and he wanted to propitiate Anne. He had
- something to propose which he had thought they would agree to rapturously,
- but was not so sure about the rapture now. For some reason, he had
- imagined that Sam would be one of a large family and was disappointed to
- find no evidence of other children about the room A large family would
- have made his proposal more certain of acceptance.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Any brothers and sisters, Sam?” he asked; but Sam was tongue-tied, while
- Anne was silently but unmistakably asking Travers what business of his
- that was. However, Tom knew his place. Travers belonged with the tipping
- public, whose questions one answered.
- </p>
- <p>
- “He has an elder sister, sir. Our Madge. She works out.” She was, in fact,
- a general servant.
- </p>
- <p>
- Travers felt his confidence ebb fast, both at this information and at
- Anne’s austere disapprobation of Tom’s communicativeness. He felt it was
- suggested to him that his visit was irrelevant, that Anne, this small
- woman, not uncomely, with her hands on her hips, and her black hair
- tightly combed into a ridiculous knob at the back, was, in fact, a rock,
- and that the impulses and desires of the two hulking men, Travers and Tom
- Branstone, would break in ineffectual foam against her adamantine
- resolution.
- </p>
- <p>
- She glared formidably, hating a “fuss,” judging Travers, who had invaded
- her home for the purpose of making a fuss.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Indeed,” said Travers, marking time and hardly attempting to conceal his
- dismay. The longer he spent in Anne’s presence, the more uneasy he became.
- She seemed to divine his purpose, and to be telling him silently what she
- thought of him for having such a purpose. He had, indeed, banked on a
- large family; porters, he had felt certain, were prolific, and you may
- subtract one child from a family of ten without much heart-burning,
- whereas an only son is a serious matter. But time brought no graciousness
- to Anne’s attitude. She even ignored the sacred rites of hospitality;
- though tea was on the table, she had not asked him to have a cup. So he
- gave up temporizing and decided to broach his purpose at once, before Anne
- reduced him to complete incoherence.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Of course,” he said, “you know me already as Lance’s father. I don’t know
- whether you happen to have heard of me beyond that?” Anne admitted
- nothing, and as it was to her he spoke, it did not matter that Tom, who
- had naturally spent a gossipy afternoon, was trying to signify that he
- realized the importance of Travers. “I’m an estate agent, if you
- understand what that means.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Anne nodded grimly. “Rent-collector said big,” she defined.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well,” said Travers, intending to suggest an amended definition and then
- thinking better of it. “Well, yes. I’m in the Council, too, you know.
- Well, now, Mrs. Branstone, I happen to be a widower and Lance is my only
- son. He means a great deal to me, and when I think how near I came to
- losing him this afternoon, how certainly I had lost him hut for the
- splendid presence of mind of this young hero here, I feel I owe a debt
- which I can never hope to pay.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Mr. Travers,” said Anne, “least said is soonest mended, and debts that
- you can never hope to pay are best forgotten. It’s a kindly thought of
- yours to come and look us up to-night, but I’m not in the Council, and I’m
- no great hand at listening to long speeches. By your leave, we’ll take the
- rest as said.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “By all means, Mrs. Branstone, so far as expressing my thanks goes. But I
- have a suggestion to make. Lance, as I said, is my only son. He’s a lonely
- boy, and he’d be the better for a companion of his own age about the
- house. I was wondering if you would allow Sam to come and live with us? I
- should send him with Lance to the Grammar School, and I think I can
- promise that his future will be secured.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam’s heart gave a great leap. He, Sam Bran-stone, a Grammar School boy,
- one of the elect, the Olympians whose play he had envied from afar! He
- looked at Anne with glittering eyes, faint with hope.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Sam,” she said, “Mr. Travers wants you to leave us. He’s offering to
- adopt you as his son. Tell him the answer.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Anne never doubted that she was mistress of her house, and perhaps she did
- not doubt it now, but, for Sam, a child with the dreadful sensibility of a
- child, this moment when she demanded calmly, implacably, in the interests
- of discipline, that he should himself pronounce sentence on his soaring
- hopes was of a pitiable bitterness which brought him near the
- breaking-point. At one moment, to be raised to the heavens of ecstasy, and
- at the next to be cast down to the blackest hell of despondency; to be
- promised all, and to be expected to refuse! He was not more callous than
- any other child, and Anne knew perfectly well that a Land of Heart’s
- Desire had been opened to him. It was not fair, and she knew that it was
- not fair, to ask him to speak the word of refusal; but she thought that it
- was good for him, and once she had, by her tone, if not by her actual
- words, indicated the reply which she required, she knew that he would
- suppress his leaping hopes and answer, in effect, that home, be it ever so
- humble, was home, and parents, whatever their status, were parents. He had
- a wild impulse to defy her, to tell her that he would come to see her on
- Saturday afternoons, that to wear the cap with the silver owl was the
- dearest ambition of his life, but he knew that it was hopeless. Even at
- such a moment as this, and with such an ally as Mr. Travers, he dared not
- challenge Anne. Her ascendancy was what it had always been, absolute. He
- shuffled unhappily and tried to meet Mr. Travers’ eye bravely, but
- succeeded only in looking up as far as the second button of his waistcoat.
- </p>
- <p>
- “No,” said Sam Branstone, hero, and fled, a heartbroken, tear-washed
- child, to hide his face and choke his sobs upon his pillow. And he was
- named for valour in the evening paper!
- </p>
- <p>
- “No,” repeated Anne, when he had gone, and added, anticipating argument,
- “I’m a woman of few words.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Travers knew he was fighting a losing engagement, but he had a shot in the
- locker yet, and a hardy determination not to be worsted by the likes of
- Anne Branstone. His pride was up, a pride which, over and above his
- benevolence and his sense of the fitness of things, would not allow him to
- regard the saving of his son’s life lightly. Travers counted, the saviour
- of the son of Travers counted. He had offered to lift Sam Branstone in one
- way, and if they would not let him do it in that way, he would do it in
- another. Sam Branstone, willy nilly, was going to be lifted.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I suppose,” he said, covering the retreat from his first position, “that
- it is of no use pointing out to you the advantages which my proposal
- offers to your son?” She shook her head. “Come, Mrs. Branstone,” he went
- on, conscious that it was no use and platitudinous at that, “we all have
- to make sacrifices for our children.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I make them,” said Anne curtly. It was true.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yet you will not make this?”
- </p>
- <p>
- She was thoughtful for a moment, and Travers began to hope that he was
- making an impression. “I’m sure that it’s Genesis twenty-two,” she said,
- “but I disremember the verse.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Genesis,” he repeated, mystified.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Abraham and Isaac,” she explained her allusion. “Some sacrifices aren’t
- looked for from us, and the Lord sent an angel to say so in those days,
- but I’ve to be my own angel in these.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “But Abraham,” he said, “was going to sacrifice his son to the Lord.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “And I won’t,” she said, conveying her opinion of Travers, who had tried
- to “come God Almighty over her,” as she expressed it later to Tom. But
- Travers was not to be rebuffed. He had come to play Providence to Sam (and
- so far granted that her allusion was apposite), but his providence could
- compromise. He wasn’t an absolute Jehovah.
- </p>
- <p>
- “If Sam may not be Lance’s home companion,” he said, “at least let them be
- school companions. Let me pay his fees at the Grammar School, and——”
- He was going to add “for appropriate clothes,” but something in Anne’s
- attitude told him that he had gone far enough, and he stopped short with
- the completion of his sentence in mid air.
- </p>
- <p>
- Anne believed in education. She wasn’t convinced that a Grammar School
- education was superior, as education, to a Parish School, but its
- associations were. It gave a chance of “getting on” which transcended
- anything the Parish School could offer. It was a start in life which set
- one automatically above the lower rungs of the ladder.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes,” she said, but said it with a difficulty which Travers noted and,
- indeed, applauded. He was Lancastrian himself, and honoured her for her
- independence. He knew the mother-pride, the fierce individualism which she
- had subdued before she had consented to take a favour even for her son who
- earned it, and wasted no more words. “I’m glad,” he said. “Good night,”
- and, shaking hands, was gone.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Finish your tea, Tom,” she said to her husband who had suspended
- operations during the interview. “I want to clear away.” She stood a
- moment pensively. “I’m a weak woman,” she decided.
- </p>
- <p>
- Tom Branstone ate his tea, reserving judgment.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER II—WHERE THE SHOE PINCHED
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>HEN Anne Branstone
- set her hand to the plough she ploughed deep, and it was not her fault if
- the harvest was not immense. But she did not misdirect her energy; she
- made certain that the seed was good seed before she harnessed her plough.
- To drop metaphor, she let young Sam prove that he was worth troubling over
- before she took trouble—trouble, that is, as Anne understood the
- word. Of course, she sent him “decent” to the Grammar School, and if that
- meant that she and Madge went without new spring hats that year, well,
- last year’s hats must do. It was no great matter, and the greater pride
- swallowed up the less. Mr. Travers paid the fees, so that her son could
- associate with his, and Anne saw to it thoroughly that, in externals, Sam
- should be worthy to associate with Lance.
- </p>
- <p>
- That was the beginning, and Sam, so far, was untried metal. Then, at the
- end of his first term, he came out top of his form at the July
- examinations, and, after that, Anne began to take things seriously.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was not pure ability which brought Sam to that proud eminence so much
- as the fact that he had been put in a form whose standard was really too
- low for him, and he had not worked over hard at lessons, being naturally
- preoccupied, in a first term, with finding his feet. Nor had that been too
- difficult. The Manchester Grammar School was a democratic institution.
- Schoolboys, anyhow, are not all snobs, and, in this instance, the presence
- amongst the paying boys of a leaven of Foundation Scholars, often from
- homes as poor as Sam’s, made acclimatization easy for him.
- </p>
- <p>
- But his feat impressed Anne, though all she said, when the lists came out
- with the name of “Branstone, S.” at the head of II. Alpha, was, “Of
- course!” as if any other place were impossible for a son of hers; and it
- decided her that Sam would “pay for” taking trouble. She proceeded to take
- trouble.
- </p>
- <p>
- Tom Branstone’s first real inkling of what was passing in Anne’s mind came
- to that good, easy man when he mentioned that his holidays were due in a
- fortnight.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You’ll take a holiday at home this year, my lad,” she informed him.
- </p>
- <p>
- “But why’s that, Anne?” he asked. “Blackpool’s in the same place as it
- was, and I get privilege passes on the line.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Sam’s not in the same place, though,” she said. “He’s at the Grammar
- School. It’s a place where other boys wear decent clothes, and I’ll see
- that Sam shan’t fall behind them.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Tom took a holiday at home, varied with trips on the foot-plates of
- friendly engine-drivers, and fortified his soul with the consolations of
- tobacco. They were consolations which were not to be vouchsafed to him
- much longer. Tobacco cost money, and Anne had need of it.
- </p>
- <p>
- In spite of Travers’ generosity—or of as much of it as she could
- bring herself to accept—it was not an easy thing for Anne to keep
- her son at the Grammar School. It was desperately difficult, but Anne was
- Anne. The boy had his foot on the educational ladder, and she meant him to
- go to the top, rung by rung and scholarship by scholarship. When Sam took
- his honours degree at Oxford, Anne would relax; till then, she was a
- crusader. She sacrificed all to that ambition. Sam should have his chance,
- at no matter what cost to her, to Tom and to Madge. The boy must be as
- well dressed as his fellows, and he must play their games. Games are an
- essential part of English education, and Anne, with her constant eye to
- the main chance, recognized the importance of the playing-fields in
- cementing friendships with boys who might be useful to Sam in after life.
- But games are expensive, and Tom gave, up smoking when Sam was put into
- his class eleven. Anne gave up nothing. She had nothing more to give.
- </p>
- <p>
- Honestly, Sam was grateful. Anne did not boast to him of the sacrifices
- which they all made, but with the candour which distinguishes
- working-class homes where anything but bare necessity is exceptional, he
- was aware of every move, of all their deprivation, and did his best to
- square accounts. But it was not a brilliant best, and after that first
- term, Anne never repeated the satisfaction of seeing her son carry away a
- form prize on Speech Day at the Free Trade Hall. He was a worker, a safe
- plodding “swot,” taking by sheer application a respectable place in the
- lists, but never heading them again, and especially he was weak at
- mathematics.
- </p>
- <p>
- That troubled Anne distressingly. Mathematics appeared to her the
- corner-stone of education, though in truth they mattered little to Sam,
- who had followed Lance to the Classical side of the school, where
- mathematics were an unconsidered trifle. But Anne recked nothing of that.
- She had found the heel of her Achilles, and set herself to make that
- vulnerable place secure. You are to picture Anne, with her forty years of
- a working woman’s life behind her, wrestling with algebra and
- trigonometry, blazing a trail for Sam to follow. It was heroic and, by
- some mental freak, successful. She taught herself, then tutored him, and
- it was not Sam who scraped through to an average place in the mathematics
- examinations, but Anne in Sam. Day after day, in the intervals of cook
- ing, cleaning, washing, she studied the text-books which so puzzled him,
- and at night explained their knotty points to him with a wonderful
- clarity. She had no education in particular, nothing but a general
- capacity and a monstrous will—a will that surmounted the obstacle of
- acquiring knowledge at an age when few can learn, and the greater obstacle
- of patient teaching to a boy who had a blind spot for mathematics. She
- illumined his darkness, but perhaps she hampered his classics and made her
- hopes of Oxford visionary.
- </p>
- <p>
- Slowly and painfully, as the terms went by, with Branstone, S. rising
- steadily in the school, but keeping regularly to his mediocre place in
- class, Anne acknowledged to herself that her goose was not a swan. It made
- her the more eager to cultivate what she called the social side; and
- through that she met with a defeat.
- </p>
- <p>
- From the beginning, Sam’s rise in the world had borne heavily on Madge,
- his sister, who was of an age for gaiety and of a mind untouched by
- ambition, personal or vicarious. When Sam went to the Grammar School,
- Madge was in service and very content. Anne had her out of that at once;
- she wasn’t going to run the risk of Madge being the servant in the house
- of one of Sands school companions. It was unusual, but Madge preferred
- service, where she was lucky in her employers, to the weaving-shed, where
- she had free evenings, but strenuous days with no gossiping callers at the
- back door to break their monotony. And it became a considerable question
- in Madge’s mind whether she would now be able to outface Anne in the
- matter of George Chappie. Anne required a presentable brother-in-law for
- Sam.
- </p>
- <p>
- Like Madge, George was unambitious, except that he wanted her, which was
- ambition of a kind. Madge was small, like her mother, but derived in most
- else from her father. She had freckles and carroty hair, and the makings
- of a querulous shrew, but George saw otherwise, and desired Madge to have
- and to hold, for better for worse, and didn’t perceive that the odds were
- heavily against its being better. He was a wisp of a man himself, and
- thought he was enterprising because he was a window-cleaner;
- window-cleaning was a new trade then. But Anne did not concur with that
- opinion, and Madge was in no very sanguine frame of mind when George came
- in one night with an “It’s now or never” look unmistakably in his eye. The
- trouble was that Anne was not the sort of mother one defied with impunity.
- </p>
- <p>
- He came in shyly enough—a determined George was a contradiction in
- terms—but plucked up courage at once when he found that she was
- alone but for Sam. Sam’s presence was inevitable, but need not be
- acknowledged. In a house, not, indeed, of one room, but of one fire and
- one gas-jet, Sam had grown apt at insulating himself when he sat with his
- books at the table. The business of the house went on, so did Sam’s
- studies, and neither interfered with the other. Sam, absorbed in his
- construe of Cicero’s <i>De Senectute</i> for the morrow, was absolutely
- unconscious of Madge and George.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was not Sam who troubled George, but Madge had truth with her when she
- told her suitor that he looked worried. George jerked his thumb vaguely
- streetwards. “It’s her again,” he explained. “I can’t think why God made
- landladies. I ask you, Madge, is another blanket in this weather a thing
- to fly into a temper about?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It’s cold,” said Madge. “Won’t she give you another?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I don’t know yet whether she’ll give me one or not. But she’s had my last
- word. Another blanket or I’ll flit.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You’ve threatened that so often.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He admitted it. “I know. It takes an earthquake to shift some folks, and I
- reckon I’m one of them. I stay where I’m set.” And his tone implied that
- conservatism was an admirable virtue.
- </p>
- <p>
- Madge did not think so. “That’s what my mother says of you,” she observed,
- a trifle tartly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It’s no lie, either,” he placidly agreed. “Seems to me,” he went on, with
- a look, ardent but appealing, at Madge, “that there’s only one thing will
- flit me from Mrs. Whitehead’s. You couldn’t give a guess at it, could
- you?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes, I could,” said Madge brazenly. After all, she was Anne’s daughter,
- and direct. Then, despite herself, she fenced coyly: “You’re leaving the
- town, I reckon, Mr. Chappie.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He stood aghast at the revolutionary thought. “Nay,” he said earnestly.
- “I’m set here and I’ll not leave willing. There’s something to keep me
- where I am.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Your job’s not worth so much,” she said, misunderstanding wilfully.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It’s steady, though,” he defended it, “and a growing trade. My master’s
- getting a lot of window-cleaning contracts all over the town. But it’s not
- my job that keeps me here. It’s———” He dropped his cap
- and fumbled for it nervously, somehow finding a sort of courage in the
- act, so that when he rose he faced her with a spirit which was, for him,
- quite debonair. “Now, you’ll not stop me, will you? I’ve come on purpose
- to get this off my chest and I’ve worked myself up to a point. I’m a bit
- slow at most things and I’m easily put off, so I’ll ask you to give my
- humble request a patient hearing.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Madge looked at him acutely, and decided that his resolution was strong
- enough to survive something that she very much wanted to say. “I’d rather
- this didn’t come straight on top of a row with your landlady,” she said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Aye,” he agreed, “I can see your meaning, but it’s that that roused me to
- point. Love’s like a pan of soup with me. It’s got to seethe a while
- before it boils. But I’m boiling now, and I’m here to tell you so. I’ve
- loved you since I saw you, Madge. After Sunday School one day it was, with
- a wind on that blew the bonny curls across your eyes. I always fancied
- gold and you’re gold twice over.” Madge was deeply moved at this
- idealization of her hair. She had been made more peevishly conscious of
- its redness than ever by the unsparing comments of the weaving-shed, but
- she did not see wherein she was gold twice over until he explained it. “I
- didn’t notice that the first day. I only saw your hair. I hadn’t the nerve
- to come close enough to see the colour of your eyes. But when I did, and
- found them all gold-brown as well, that finished me. I was deep in love to
- the top of my head. Drowned in it, you might say.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You’re talking a lot of nonsense, George,” said Madge, with a fond
- appreciation that belied her words.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m telling you I love you,” he said, “and I’m asking if there’s anything
- that you could see your way to tell me in return. I know I’m not smart,
- Madge, but I’d work my fingers off to make you happy. Can’t you say you
- love me, lass? Not,” he added, “if it isn’t true, of course. I wouldn’t
- ask you to tell a lie even to oblige me.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It might not be a lie,” said Madge softly, “but——” She paused
- so that he was left to guess the rest.
- </p>
- <p>
- “But,” he suggested, “you don’t care to go so far as to say it?”
- </p>
- <p>
- He watched her timidly, with courage oozing out of him. She had all but
- given him to hope, but now it appeared she had no more to say. “Well, I
- can understand,” he said, half turning towards the door. “I’m not much of
- a chap, and you might easily have put me down much harder than you did.
- It’s soft letting now, by reason of your tactful ways. I’ll... I’ll go and
- see if Mrs. Whitehead has given me yon other blanket.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He was at the door before she stopped him. “George!” she said, “come back.
- You’re getting this all wrong. You know about my brother.” George nearly
- smiled. “It’ud not be your mother’s fault if I didn’t,” he said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “No,” she said; “I suppose everybody knows about his going to the Grammar
- School. They don’t all know what it means.” Madge was trying to be loyal
- to the family ideal, she was trying not to be bitter, but it wasn’t easy.
- It was one thing to go without new hats and the accustomed ways of
- service, but another to go without George.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’d like you to understand that this family puts itself about a bit for
- Sam’s sake. We think he’ll go a long way up in the world, and the rest of
- us aren’t doing anything to keep him down. None of us, no matter how it
- hurts. Are you seeing what I mean?”
- </p>
- <p>
- He saw. “I’m not class enough for you,” he said.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was a part, but not the whole, of her meaning, and Madge wanted no
- misapprehensions. “You’re class enough for me,” she said, “but I’m telling
- you where the doubt comes in. It’s a habit we’ve got in this family. We
- think of Sam.” That made the matter plain; she loved him, and while he
- granted there was a certain impediment through Anne’s habit of
- subordinating everything to Sam’s interests, he saw no just cause why he
- should not marry Madge. “I wouldn’t knowingly do anything to upset your
- mother,” he said, “but I’ve told you I’m boiling with my love for you. I’m
- easily put off my purpose as a rule. I mean to say, supposing I ask Mrs.
- Whitehead for a kipper for my tea, and she tells me eggs are cheap and
- she’s got an egg instead, I don’t make a song about it—so long as
- the egg’s not extra stale. But I’ll own I didn’t think of Sam in this. I
- thought it was for you and me to settle by ourselves.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Sam’s in it,” said Madge dully. “He’s in everything in this house.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Then Anne came in and the disturbance of her entrance, together with the
- fact that he had finished his passage of “<i>De Senectute</i>” made Sam
- aware that something was toward. He kept his eyes discreetly on his book,
- but fluttered the pages of his dictionary no more. He found youth more
- arresting than old age.
- </p>
- <p>
- Anne’s quick comprehension took the situation in at once. She had been
- shopping, and as she put her parcels on the dresser she gave Madge the
- benefit of a wordless reproof. She could say a good deal without opening
- her mouth, and said it. But Madge was not going to be parted from her
- George without a fight. Sam apart, George was eligible, and Madge saw this
- as an unique occasion—the occasion for leaving Sam out. At least,
- she meant to try.
- </p>
- <p>
- George was turned craven at sight of Anne and sidled to the door. “I’ll be
- getting on home, I think,” he said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You wait your hurry,” said Madge hardily. “Mother, George has been asking
- me to wed him.”
- </p>
- <p>
- It was the gage of battle, for Anne knew the fact already. The statement
- of it was a challenge. She met it coolly. “Has he?” she said. “Well, I
- hope you told him gently.”
- </p>
- <p>
- And at that George found his second wind of courage, and intervened like a
- man. “She’s told me nothing with her tongue. Nothing for certain. But a
- blind man on a galloping horse could read the thoughts of her. Mrs.
- Branstone, I love that girl as if she’d put a spell on me. It’s the
- biggest feeling that’s come into my life, and I’m full and bursting with
- it, or I’d not have the face to expose my inside thoughts to you like
- this. And if you’ll only tell me I can take her, the Mayor in his carriage
- won’t be happier than me.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You know how steady George is, mother,” Madge seconded him.
- </p>
- <p>
- “He needs to be,” said Anne dryly. “He’s a window-cleaner.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m steady by nature, Mrs. Branstone, as well as trade. I don’t drink.
- Somehow one glass of ale is enough to make me whimsical, so I take none at
- all. I know I’m being bowdacious in my love, but I’m moved to plead with
- you. We’d not be standing in Sam’s way. We’d live that quiet and snug
- you’d never know we’re in the town at all.” Anne looked at him with a
- faint trace of appreciation drenched in her profound contempt. A poor
- creature, but he had his thimbleful of spunk! “It would need to be quiet,”
- she said, “with two to keep on your wage. Are you contented with it?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Disastrously, he was. “It’s a regular job,” he said, voicing his pride at
- being above the ranks of casual workers. In Anne’s view, a hopeless case.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It’s a regular rotten job,” she retorted, but spoke more softly than her
- wont. “I’ve Sam to consider, Madge. You might live quiet, but Sam’s
- brother-in-law has got to make a better show of it than to be seen all
- over the place at the top of a ladder like a monkey on a stick. I’m not
- being hard on you, George Chappie, and I’ve nothing against you bar that
- you’re not good enough. You better yourself and you’ll do. Stay as you
- are, and Madge’ull do the same.”
- </p>
- <p>
- George opened his mouth to speak, but found that nothing came. It <i>was</i>
- a regular job, it satisfied his ambitions, and her objections were
- inexplicable. He had shot his bolt and, having no more to say, he went,
- relapsing to such invertebracy that when he found that Mrs. Whitehead had
- not added the other blanket to his bed he had nothing to say to her
- either, but spread a threadbare overcoat on the coverlet and shivered
- unhappily to sleep.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER III—THE HELL-PIKE CLUB
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>O a schoolboy of
- sixteen, love is an imbecile emotion, its victims harmless lunatics, and
- it is not to be supposed that Sam’s interest in the affair of Madge and
- George was based on intimate understanding. His conspiratorial action came
- rather as a lark: behind, perhaps, was the recognition that adults did
- habitually make fools of themselves in this way, that his loyalty in such
- a case was to Madge who was of his generation, and that Anne in
- obstructing their marriage was outrunning the constable in her demands for
- self-sacrifice on his behalf.
- </p>
- <p>
- Larking, defined as enjoyable interference with other people for motives
- either benevolent or purely egotistic, was a weakness of Samuel Branstone,
- and the boy was father to the man. He did not agree with Anne that the
- marriage was inimical to his interests. True, George cleaned windows and
- balanced hardily at the top of swaying ladders, a precarious trade, but
- his own. Apparently it suited the Georgian temperament, and that
- funambulist would not wear a placard on his back proclaiming that he was
- brother-in law to Branstone of the Classical Fifth.
- </p>
- <p>
- Branstone, who was going to rise in the world, would necessarily have poor
- relations, and it hardly mattered how poor. Indeed, the poorer they were
- the more cheaply he could afterwards play providence to them, since their
- standards would be low and their expectations small.
- </p>
- <p>
- So it wasn’t a nice, impulsive lark, but coldblooded and calculated, which
- is almost as objectionable in a lark as organization in Charity. It is
- prudent good intentions that pave the way to Hell.
- </p>
- <p>
- He saw that there was a difference between this and the elopements of that
- romantic literature with which he busied his relaxed hours: sometimes the
- lady, but always the lover, was enterprising, while he knew that George
- could never instigate anything. But that made things more amusing for Sam,
- who could pull strings with absolute assurance that his puppets would
- never take to dancing on their own account, or to any tune but the one he
- piped; and it is not given to all of us to be Omnipotence at the price of
- a ten-pound note.
- </p>
- <p>
- As always, Sam had luck. In the romantic elopements whose technique he
- began to study with new interest, money was never a difficulty, but the
- god in the machine of George Chappie’s elopement must put money in his
- purse, or there could be no elopement.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam liked money, but he must have liked power more, for, coming
- miraculously into money at this time, he devoted it to this end. He came
- into money because journalism was swiftly on the up grade since the days,
- four years ago, when it couldn’t show its readers a photograph of Sam
- Branstone, hero, in the evening paper, and had reached the civilized stage
- of picture competitions.
- </p>
- <p>
- You bought a weekly paper which printed six crude wood-cuts supposed to
- disguise the names of (say) famous battles, and it did not strain your
- intellect to discover that the picture of a station with “Waterloo”
- beneath its clock was intended to represent the battle of that name. But
- pause: it was not all so easy as that. Inflamed by avarice and the
- childish ease of identifying the battles in the first series, you bought
- the next week’s number, and the next, until the competition closed, and
- you found that the designs were increasingly baffling. It was not quite
- money for nothing. It called for some knowledge of history and a sort of
- knack in cheap wit to interpret the pictures. A garden syringe, and a
- stage Irishman brandishing something that might easily be a cudgel but
- wasn’t, represented, in fact, the not very renowned battle of
- Seringapatam, and there were pictures which could bear two
- interpretations.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was this last which led Sam to go into partnership with Lance Travers.
- Both partners admitted that Sam’s wits were the sharper, so it was only
- fair that Lance should finance the partnership and buy the papers. And
- Sam, sanguine of winning, but desiring secrecy, preferred that the firm
- should be registered in Lance’s name, so that if and when Sam became a
- capitalist, he and not Anne should control his wealth. His ideas of the
- uses of capital already went beyond the Post Office Savings Bank.
- </p>
- <p>
- The weekly paper’s object was to increase its circulation, so it allowed
- and encouraged competitors to send in numerous attempts, and printed
- ambiguous drawings to tempt to prodigality. It is to be feared that
- Classics suffered an eclipse at this period of journalistic enterprise.
- The partners had other and more serious objects in life. And they won!
- They won the second prize. It wasn’t a house or a motor-car or any of the
- fantastic prizes with which still later journalism rewarded its
- intelligent readers, but they divided twenty pounds and, for them, ten
- pounds each was paradise enow. Lance bought a bicycle. Sam didn’t. He
- bought a wedding-ring, and he had a talk with Sarah Pullen, who was so
- passionately Madge’s bosom friend that she had gone into the mill with
- her.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sarah received him coldly; she looked upon him as the cause of her
- friend’s martyrdom and thought the cause unworthy.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam cleared the air at once. “I’m on Madge’s side. I’m not going to see
- her made unhappy for my sake,” he said, and Sarah relented so far as to
- absolve him of personal malignity.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Much you can do to help it, though,” she said. “I <i>can</i> do much,” he
- replied, “but,” he flattered her, “perhaps you can do more. You see,
- Sarah,” he went on confidentially, “Madge trusts you and she doesn’t trust
- me. Now, between ourselves, she needs a friend’s advice. Put yourself in
- her place. Would you knuckle under to your mother?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’d see her further first,” said Sarah.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I wonder,” said Sam, “if you could see your way to communicating your
- views to Madge without mentioning that I suggested it?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You!” said Sarah. “You! It’ud take a dozen your size to suggest anything
- to me. Get off home and play marbles, or I’ll give you a slap on th’
- earhole that you’ll remember.”
- </p>
- <p>
- They didn’t play marbles in the Classical Fifth, but Sam was content to
- put her allusion down to ignorance rather than deliberate insult. He had
- gained his point: the atmosphere he desired created was about to he
- created.
- </p>
- <p>
- He left that pot to simmer and turned his mind to George, whom he judged
- less susceptible than Madge to the promptings of a friend. Besides, he
- knew no friend of George, and confessed himself at fault.
- </p>
- <p>
- One day, shortly before the Whitsuntide holidays, he was staring gloomily
- out of the window at the top of the stairs outside the Fifth Form room,
- watching the boys of the Chetham’s Hospital at play in that yard of theirs
- which the Grammar School pretends to scorn but secretly envies, when he
- heard behind him a conversation between Lance Travers and Dubby Stewart
- which set his brain awhirl. Yet it was not a distinguished conversation.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Who ever heard of anyone in Manchester staying at home in Whit week?”
- asked Lance.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam had heard, often.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It isn’t done,” said Dubby, who had earned that abiding name when he was
- in the Lower Third, and once read “dubious” aloud with a short “u.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “But I’ve to do it,” said Lance. “My governor’s too busy to get away. Bit
- damnable, isn’t it?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Matter of fact,” said Dubby, “we’re not going, either.”
- </p>
- <p>
- And it presently appeared that out of the form of twenty-four boys there
- were as many as six who lived in Manchester and were not going away. “It
- will be hell,” prophesied one of the unfortunates.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It needn’t,” said Sam Branstone, turning from the window to the mournful
- group.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You’re used to it. We’re not,” said someone cruelly, and Lance smacked
- his head. Allusions to anybody’s poverty were bad form.
- </p>
- <p>
- “What’s the prescription?” asked Dubby, and Sam was silent for a minute.
- “Watch him. Something’s dawning,” chaffed Dubby. It wasn’t dawning, it had
- dawned; but at first it looked like a risk, and then much less like one,
- and Sam smiled beautifully as he realized that he, at least, had all to
- gain and nothing to lose. He drew the luckless five mysteriously aloof.
- </p>
- <p>
- “The prescription,” he said, “is to have a holiday in Manchester, in a
- holiday house.” He let that soak for a minute, and then, “Our own house,”
- he added. “There are six of us. We join together and we take a house. A
- small house, and I daresay some of you won’t like the neighbours, but as
- the neighbours won’t like us, that’s as broad as it’s long. Swagger
- neighbours wouldn’t stand us anyhow, and the smaller the house the smaller
- the rent. Something like four-and-six a week is my idea. That’s nine-pence
- a week for each of us, and we’ve a house of our own for that to do what we
- like in.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “By Jove!” said someone admiringly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “What shall we call it?” said another, a trifle doubtfully.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Call it?” said Lance. “That’s obvious. The Hell-fire Club.”
- </p>
- <p>
- And, of course, if any doubt remained, that settled it. Who would regret
- the seaside if he could be a member of the Hell-fire Club? Lance was
- commissioned to negotiate with his father, the estate agent, but it was
- Sam who really chose their house. It was a house which in Sam’s opinion
- excellently suited the requirements of a young married couple of the
- window-cleaning class. Mr. Travers told Lance that he would stop the value
- of any damage out of his pocket-money, and on those conditions let them
- the house. But he need not have made that cautionary threat; Sam saw that
- there was no damage.
- </p>
- <p>
- The Hell fire Club assembled for its initiatory debauch on the first day
- of the holidays, and by eleven a.m. three inexpert cigarette-smokers had
- had occasion to use the slopstone as a vomitorium. It left them feeling
- chilly, and Dubby suggested that a house-warming without a fire was a
- solecism, even on a hot day, so a lavish plutocrat brought in two sacks of
- coal and a supply of chips. Firelighting is a sport out of which a certain
- excitement can be derived, but only for a short time, and the same
- evanescent quality attaches to the pleasure of sitting on bare boards.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m too stiff to be happy,” said Lance. “I vote we furnish this club.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Carried, <i>nem. com</i>. “I’m afraid, though,” said Sam, “that I shall
- not be able to contribute much.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Wait till you’re asked, my son,” said Dubby. “By the time we five have
- finished looting our homes, this place will be a little palace.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Loot is a brave word, suggestive of the treasures of the purple East, but
- it was, in most instances, a case of permitted loot, the offscourings of
- lumber rooms. Sandy Reed, however, was the sort of boy who is happiest
- with a hammer in his hand, and Dubby had an eye for chintz. To repair the
- veteran furniture which they brought struck Sandy as work for a man.
- Behind him was his infantile past of fret-work and model yachts; before
- him the foremanship of the Hell-fire Club repair-shop. He worked and was
- the cause of work in others. And it was willing work, partly because it
- was for an idea, partly because that first day had threatened boredom and
- here was something definite to do, mostly because it was making a noise.
- </p>
- <p>
- The ill-assorted chairs, tables and sofas which they collected under their
- roof had this in common at the end, that they were strong; and having by
- their own efforts made them strong, the boys did not by their rioting make
- them weak again. They respected their handiwork, and Dubby’s chintz
- procured a sort of uniformity.
- </p>
- <p>
- A club, of course, must eat and drink, and kitchen utensils, mostly odd
- but all practicable, were gathered together that they might precede the
- pleasures of eating with the pleasures of cooking. It was camp-life in
- town, except that they went home to sleep, and so long as the activities
- of “settling in” endured, they relished it abundantly.
- </p>
- <p>
- About a fortnight was what Sam had mentally set as the life of the
- Hell-fire Club, and he had no intentions of paying the rent by himself for
- more than a week or so. They had decided that Sunday was not a club-day—there
- were difficulties at home—and Sam took George Chappie for a walk. “I
- like this street,” he said as they turned the corner. “Madge always
- fancied this district.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Did she?” said George gloomily.
- </p>
- <p>
- “We’ll go in here,” and Sam produced the key and introduced George to the
- Club premises. “What do you think of it?”
- </p>
- <p>
- The chintz took George’s eye at once. “By gum!” he said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Sit down,” said Sam. “This is where you’re going to live when you’re
- married to Madge. It isn’t your furniture yet, but it’s going to be. I’m
- going to give it you for a wedding present. There isn’t a bed in, as you
- see, but there will be, and I ask you, George, is it or is it not better
- than Mrs. Whitehead’s?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Aye,” said George, “but you’re going ahead a bit too fast for me.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Not at all,” said Sam. “Yours is the pace that kills. The slow pace, not
- the quick. Now, this place isn’t at your disposal yet, but if you’ll put
- up the banns next Sunday and get married as soon as you can after the
- three Sundays, you can walk in here and hang your hat up on that hook.
- It’s a brass hook, George. We don’t approve of nails in this house. I
- might mention that it will be all right about the banns. Mother has dinner
- to cook on Sundays and doesn’t go to morning service, and to-day is
- father’s Sunday off from the station and lie’s on duty for the next three
- Sundays. So,” he concluded, “there you are.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You’re promising a lot. Is this house yours?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “The rent is four-and-six,” said Sam, “which isn’t more than you can
- afford to pay. And you bind yourself to nothing by putting up the banns.
- If I fail to deliver you this house and all that’s in it, you needn’t get
- married. But I’ve a word of advice for you, George. Let Madge hear of it
- first from the parson’s lips in church. She won’t scream and she won’t
- faint. We don’t, in our family, and it saves you the trouble of asking
- her. Is it a bet?”
- </p>
- <p>
- George hesitated. “Come upstairs and see the other room,” said Sam. George
- saw, and marvelled. “I’ll come round with you now to church,” said Sam.
- “We’ve just nice time to catch the clerk after service.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “By gum!” said George Chappie. “I’ll do it. They can’t hang me. But,” he
- added as he cast a last look at the household gods which Sam Bran-stone
- promised should be his, “they may hang you.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam grinned blandly.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER IV—THE COMPLEAT ANGLER
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">H</span>E had succeeded
- with George beyond expectations, but that easy victory did not deceive him
- into thinking that his battle was won. Madge, he had said, would neither
- scream nor faint on hearing her banns announced and he wished he was as
- confident about it as he had sounded. Much, in his view too much, depended
- on the vigour of Sarah Pullen’s advice.
- </p>
- <p>
- He was taking risks all round, but found he rather liked it. There was the
- risk that the Hell-fire Club would not tire of its toy in time. An
- encouraging increase in absenteeism amongst the members elated him, but
- the steadfast faith of an enthusiastic pair depressed him sadly. He hoped,
- however, to find a way out of that wood.
- </p>
- <p>
- And there was the risk that some acquaintance of Anne’s would mention the
- banns to her. He saw no way to counter that. It was a risk he had to take.
- Fortunately, his father’s best friend, Terry O’Rourke, was a Catholic.
- </p>
- <p>
- As things stood, he saw Madge as the weakest link in his chain. She
- collapsed before the will of Anne like an opera hat, and he was candidly
- afraid of her making a scene in church, either from pleasure or from
- anger, when the banns were read. Not that he shrank on principle from
- scenes, only that word of it would undoubtedly be carried to Anne and the
- fat be in the fire.
- </p>
- <p>
- Rummaging one day that week at a second-hand bookstall in Withy Grove,
- without the slightest intention of buying, he was attracted by a title and
- recklessly planked his tuppence down. Intrigue, he felt, was punishing his
- finances, but this title gave him too good an opening with Madge to be the
- subject of economy. The title was “The Clandestine Marriage,” and he knew
- that Sarah Pullen would be in that night to see Madge.
- </p>
- <p>
- He was reading the play very earnestly when she called, though it rather
- bored him and he thought its plot elementary compared with his own. Sarah
- was no reader, but she noticed the cover because the word “marriage” was
- an unfailing lure.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Whatever has the boy got hold of now?” She inquired, taking his bait
- sweetly.
- </p>
- <p>
- He showed her. “Do you know what it means?” he asked.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I know what marriage means,” she said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “By hearsay,” he told the virgin pungently. “But I meant the middle word.”
- </p>
- <p>
- She eyed it closely. “You’re always bragging your knowledge. I’m not at
- the Grammar myself and Greek is Greek to me. Fat lot of good it’ud be in a
- weaving-shed, and all.” She had a practical mind.
- </p>
- <p>
- “This isn’t Greek,” he said, “it’s English.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It’s not the sort of English we talk in Manchester, choose how.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’ll tell you what it means.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Wait till you’re asked, cheeky.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He didn’t wait. “It means surreptitious.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m a grand sight the wiser for that. It’ll mean a thick ear for you if
- you don’t stop coming the schoolmaster over me. I’m here to talk to Madge,
- not to you.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He winked at Sarah with the eye which was hidden from Madge. “The Secret
- Marriage, Sarah. That’s what it means.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Sarah was interested now. “Does it tell you how to work it?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I might do that myself,” he said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Don’t talk so foolish, Sam,” said his sister. “Are you coming for a walk,
- Sarah?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “When I’m ready,” said Sarah. “Now then, young Sam, spit it out.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh,” said Sam. “It isn’t much. Only I happened to be out for a walk with
- George Chappie the other day and we went into a house that’s pretty full
- of furniture.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “George Chappie with a house of furniture!” cried Madge.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I suppose he’s getting married,” said Sam. “He courted you at one time,
- didn’t he, Madge? I rather liked his taste in furniture.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Taste!” cried Madge with spirit. “I’ll taste him. I’ll eat him raw for
- this. After all he said to me no more than a month ago, to take up with
- another wench! What’s the hussy’s name?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Her name?” said Sam. “Let’s see. Sunday to-morrow, isn’t it? The banns
- might be up. If I were you I’d go and find out.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “As true as I’m alive I’ll tear every hair from her head,” said Madge.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I wouldn’t,” said Sam. “You have red hair, but better red than bald.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Her!” said Sarah. “Do you mean——?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Look here, Sarah,” Sam interrupted, and used a formula which he had
- thought out rather carefully. “Do you imagine I’d be giving you a message
- like this if he hadn’t sent it?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Message! What message?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Then Anne came in.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes, Sarah,” she heard Sam saying with a pedagogic air. “The word
- clandestine means secret.” He resumed with zest the reading of his play
- and, though theirs was a small house, managed to avoid being alone with
- Madge up to church time on the morrow. He had business out that Saturday
- night—to make sure of George, whom he found full of panting
- resolution to catch the clerk and cancel the banns. The glamour of that
- furniture had lasted this long with George, but the awful hazard of the
- Sunday morning eclipsed the glow as it came nearer. George wilted at the
- thought of Madge rising in her place with a firm, irrevocable “I forbid
- the banns” upon her lips.
- </p>
- <p>
- There had begun, too, to be a quality too much like that of an Arabian
- night about his visit to the Club. Sam was a wonderful boy and George
- granted his high superiority; but even George, the humble, did not quite
- see Sam as a miracle-worker. He even began to doubt the existence of the
- enchanted Palace which Sam had shown him, and that it was within Sam’s
- competence to hand over that house to him appeared now ridiculous. Sam
- came just in time.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Would you care,” he said, “to have another look at your house?”
- </p>
- <p>
- George would, but he hadn’t time then: he was going; to see the clerk, and
- till he saw the clerk he was a man obsessed with an idea. “I suppose,” he
- said sceptically, “that it’s still there?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Of course,” said Sam, “and has a few more things in since you saw it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well,” said George, “it’s a nice house, but I’m going to see yon clerk to
- tell him not to put up banns.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam smiled, relieved to know that he was not too late. “Don’t do that,” he
- said. “Madge is pleased.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “What!” said George. “Say that again.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Madge is pleased,” repeated Sam brazenly. He was sure she was. He trusted
- Sarah Pullen now.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Did she tell you so?” asked George.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Do you imagine I’d be giving you a message like this if she hadn’t sent
- it?”
- </p>
- <p>
- George took his cap off. “If that’s so——” he said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It’s so,” said Sam, not defining what was so.
- </p>
- <p>
- The banns went up, and Sam was able to devote his undivided attention to
- Club affairs, as to which he had an idea arising out of the boredom he
- suffered while reading “The Clandestine Marriage.” That tuppence was a
- fruitful investment.
- </p>
- <p>
- A wet day came and with it, what was now rare, a full attendance at the
- Club. But, since their repairs and decorations were complete, there was
- nothing to do except to sit on their reliable chairs and admire their
- reliability.
- </p>
- <p>
- “For a Hell-fire Club,” said Sandy, “we lack hellishness.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Lance named us,” said Dubby. “He ought to make suggestions.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Of a new name?” asked Sandy. “Call it the Eviscerated Emasculates.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Call it a damned failure,” said another, and was sat upon. They welcomed
- the diversion, but the thought had reached home.
- </p>
- <p>
- “What’s the matter,” said Sam, when order was restored, “is that we aren’t
- serious enough.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, hell!” said Lance.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I mean it, Lance. We’re not a set of kids from the Lower School. If we
- were, we might sit round and read Chums and the Boy’s Own Paper.” Two men
- of the Classical Fifth and the Hell-fire Club looked guiltily at him, but
- decided that he was not making personal allusions. “As it is, we have
- higher interests. Now, there are six of us here and that’s enough, with
- doubling, to take parts in a Shakesperian play. I vote we read a play. In
- fact, I brought some down.”
- </p>
- <p>
- This suited Lance, who had aspirations towards the stage. “Bags I Romeo,”
- he said.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sandy was less fired to enthusiasm, but, “All right,” he said, “if you
- choose a play with lots of thick bits in it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “We certainly,” said Sam, “shall not read an edition prepared for the use
- of girls’ schoofs.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “<i>Merry Wives of Windsor</i>, then,” said Dubby. “Lance can spout Romeo
- out of his bedroom window to stop a cat-fight.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam would have preferred a tragedy; he feared they would enjoy reading The
- Merry Wives and so, on the whole, they did, but there were only five
- promises to turn up next day and two of those were conditional upon its
- being wet. Sam wasn’t dissatisfied, and as a comedy was postulated chose
- <i>Much Ado about Nothing</i>, because he thought that it was dull in
- patches and also for a reason of his own. He wanted to make certain that
- he had nothing to learn as an intriguer from a famous case of
- match-making. He found he had.
- </p>
- <p>
- Although it rained, <i>Much Ado</i> had only four readers at the opening
- and only two at the close. Lance sent postcards that night to the members
- announcing <i>Hamlet</i> for the morrow. He wanted to read Hamlet’s part,
- but if you can’t have <i>Hamlet</i> without the Prince, neither can you
- read it satisfactorily with one other participant.
- </p>
- <p>
- Lance and Sam struggled through an act, then Lance gave in. “I’m getting
- tired of this Club,” he said. “The members have no brain.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It isn’t raining,” said Sam.
- </p>
- <p>
- “No. Lancashire’s batting, too. Let’s go and see Albert Ward and Frank
- Sugg at Old Tafford.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Next day, the Club was uninhabited, except by the ghost of Sam’s broadest
- smile, its only tenant for a week. The freeze-out was accomplished, and
- its engineer had confidence enough to spend three pounds of his capital on
- a bed and bedding, “to await instructions before delivering.” Then he saw
- Lance Travers and pointed out to him that there were better uses to be
- made of ninepence a week than to waste it on a club which nobody used.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Nuisance, though, about the chairs and stuff,” said Lance, implying his
- agreement that the Club had failed.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I can’t have them back here, because I’m turning our attic into an
- aviary. That’s why I’ve had no time to go to the Club,” he explained with
- a faint apology, and took Sam up to see his birds.
- </p>
- <p>
- “What shall we do about all that furniture at the Club? Pity the fifth of
- November is so far off.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’ll try to think of something,” said Sam, rather terrified at Lance’s
- incendiary suggestion. “In any case it must be discussed at a full
- meeting. Let’s call the members together.”
- </p>
- <p>
- An urgent whip resulted in a full and slightly shame-faced attendance.
- Nobody tried to dispute that the Club was a corpse: the only question was
- what to do with its bones. “Well,” said Sam, “if none of you has a
- suggestion to make, I’ll make one. Nobody’s aching to take the stuff back
- where it came from. Now,” he went on candidly, “we <i>could</i> sell it to
- a dealer, but I’m against that because dealers are thieves and they’d give
- us about thirty bob for the lot. But my sister’s getting married and I
- don’t mind offering the Club five pounds for its property. That,” he
- indicated, “is a pound each for the five of you.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Cash on the nail?” asked Dubby, whose forebears came from Scotland. He
- distrusted Sam in the character of capitalist.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, yes,” explained the candid Sam. “You see, when I met Lance yesterday
- I said I’d think of a way out of the difficulty and I came prepared.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I vote we take it,” said Sandy. “I can buy a lot of tools with a pound.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I don’t see why we should pander to your vices,” said Lance. “We’re still
- a Club and this is club money.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “The Club is dead.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Not yet. Not till we’ve killed it gloriously on Sam’s sister’s fiver.
- There’s a hell of a bust in five pounds and we have to drink the bride’s
- health. Champagne’s my drink.”
- </p>
- <p>
- It wasn’t, but it was rather too often his father’s, and Lance was
- emulous, and, frightened a little of his own suggestion, carried things
- now with a rush. “We’re the Hell-Fire Club,” he said, “and champagne is
- the dew of Hell. Any member shirking will be held under the tap for half
- an hour.” They braved it out, most of them conscience-stricken, and the
- Hell-fire Club almost deserved its name in the hour of its extinction.
- Things might have been serious had not Sam, by a well-timed push, caused
- Lance to shatter a full magnum on the floor.
- </p>
- <p>
- As it was, five hangdog members reached home late, but presentable. But
- they were most unhappy boys. The sixth boy was happy. He had consumed a
- sober and interesting meal at other people’s expense, encountering several
- delectable sorts of food for the first time and experiencing that human
- but reprehensible thrill which results from feeling that one is a clever
- fellow.
- </p>
- <p>
- Distance of course lent enchantment to the Hell-fire Club. When school
- reassembled and boys fresh from the seaside tried to excite the jealousy
- of the stay-at-homes with tales of land and sea, they were loftily put in
- their places and struck to dumb admiration by legends of the dashing vice
- of the Hell-fire Club. It lived in story as it had never lived in fact.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam visited the premises, on the day after the Club died, to wipe up the
- mess, thriftily to salve some untouched edibles for a coming
- wedding-feast, and by receiving and installing the bed to dedicate the
- house to better uses. Then he put the key in his pocket and took it to
- George. He had kept his bargain and now it was for George to keep his.
- </p>
- <p>
- There remained the question of Anne, and as a preliminary to its solution
- Sam had recommended Madge to look peaked. Madge, naturally inclined to
- that condition, had no difficulty in accentuating its appearance by
- recourse to the vinegar bottle until even Anne, intolerant as she was of
- small weaknesses, had to own that Madge looked unhappy and unwell.
- </p>
- <p>
- On the night before her wedding, Madge shut herself up in her bedroom
- whence the sounds as of a very ecstasy of woe penetrated to the kitchen.
- Yet her woe was not ecstatic and hardly woe at all. She wept because she
- was going to be married next day, because when one is going to be married
- next day one weeps. One brims with undefinable emotion and overflows into
- tears.
- </p>
- <p>
- But Anne, listening from the kitchen, where she sat with Sam, was moved to
- unaccustomed softness. “That girl is fretting sadly,” she said. “It’s a
- mort of trouble to be taking over a wastrel like George Chappie.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Mother,” said Sam speculatively, “I wonder whether you have ever
- considered the influence of matter over mind?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m considering the influence of something that does not matter,” she
- replied. “The influence of George Chappie.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Suppose,” said Sam, “suppose that George Chappie lived in a decent house
- of his own, with furniture that he took a pride in, instead of in those
- awful lodgings of his. Don’t you think that he would live up to his
- surroundings? Don’t you think that it would make a man of him?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “George Chappie is as far from having a decent house as he is from wedding
- our Madge.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “That’s true,” said Sam, “as far—and as near.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “As near?” asked Anne suspiciously. “Sithee, Sam, have you been up to
- something?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Will you hear me out if I tell you a story?” he asked.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Am I going to like it?” she fenced cautiously. “I am hoping,” he said
- piously, “to have your forgiveness. It’s a matter of happiness.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He told her what he had done and how and why he had done it. “The
- wedding’s to-morrow,” he ended, “and I hope you’ll go.” He told his
- exploit without arrogance and without extenuation, and it is not to be
- supposed that Anne was unaware that a nice moralist would have found much
- in it to criticize, but Sam had come out on top and that, for Anne, almost
- excused his methods. It almost excused his coming out on top of her.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’ll go to the wedding,” she said, “and I’ll forgive them. They are no
- more than a pair of naturals in the hands of a schemer.” Sam grinned
- appreciatively. “But I’ll not let you down so easy,” she went on, and the
- grin faded. “You’re clever, my lad, but you’re a schoolboy, and the place
- for showing your cleverness is at school. It’s too long since you brought
- me home a prize, and if you want my forgiveness for letting you rap my
- knuckles like this, you’ll bring me a prize this Midsummer. Is that a
- bargain, Sam?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I always try,” he said, which was true.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Try harder,” said Anne Branstone dryly.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER V—LAST SCHOOL-DAYS
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">S</span>AM had not a dog’s
- chance of winning the form prize of the Classical Fifth, and knew it. He
- learnt with difficulty, retaining what he learnt; but the process was slow
- and his form was overshadowed by the brilliance of two boys who learnt
- easily and rapidly.
- </p>
- <p>
- It annoyed Sam to know that he had no chance against these two. Poetic
- justice cried out that he, the railway porter’s son, should defeat Bull,
- whose father was a professor at the University, and Adams, son of a
- merchant prince whose “Hong” was as familiar in the godowns of Shanghai as
- his name in Princess Street and on ‘Change; but it was hopeless. The prize
- lay inevitably between these two who took to classics like ducks to water
- and read Homer for (they said) pleasure, whilst their form-mates struggled
- with Euripides in acknowledged agony. They were both unpopular, both
- prigs, but unassailably pre-eminent; and they were two. Had it been a case
- of Bull alone, or Adams alone, Sam might have worked heroically on the
- off-chance, that his rival would be ill at examination time, but it was
- too far-fetched to hope that both would simultaneously ail.
- </p>
- <p>
- He had long passed beyond Anne’s powers of tuition. It was not a “sound
- commercial education” that one got on the Classical side, and mathematics
- had ceased to figure in his course. He went to the Classical side because
- Lance was there and stayed because of Anne’s golden dream of Oxford. The
- gold, she knew, was tarnished now, but if she no longer saw in Sam the
- winner of an open scholarship at Balliol, she had not abandoned hope that
- he might carry off one of the close scholarships which the School
- commanded. Sam himself was sceptical about even that qualified ambition.
- </p>
- <p>
- But he had to win a prize to satisfy Anne, and if he could not win the
- prize of which she was thinking, he would try to win one of which she did
- not think. It was certainly a prize, and a handsome prize, open not only
- to a form but to the whole school—a prize for reading.
- </p>
- <p>
- He had a secondary spur, too, in the fact that Lance, that ardent
- elocutionist, looked on this prize as his own, and the thought of beating
- Lance on his chosen ground tickled Sam’s fancy. Not that he was cocksure.
- He knew his handicap too well for that, but he had always known it, and
- from the first day of his school life studied to correct his accent. He
- did not, even now, even at the price of being thought pedantic, indulge in
- slang. Lance, perhaps because he came from a motherless home, perhaps from
- a stupid bravado, larded his speech with silly blasphemies and the current
- vulgarisms, and, in fact, he did it with an air; but Sam had to guard his
- tongue. There is a difference, too easily detected, between correct slang
- and incorrect English: one must first speak correctly before one can dare
- successfully to be incorrect, and Sam’s handicap was that he came from a
- home where they used, in Sarah Pullen’s words, “the sort of English we
- speak in Manchester;” the other sort was an alien tongue and held to be an
- affectation of the insincere.
- </p>
- <p>
- There was a set piece—the opening speech in <i>Comus</i>—the
- inefficients were weeded out, and the elect tested on “unseens.” It was
- the “unseens” that frightened Sam: he rehearsed <i>Comus</i> till a
- misplaced aitch was a physical impossibility, and he was sure of his
- rhythm and the intelligence of his rendering; but he knew that aitches
- were elusive when he was nervous. “Then don’t be nervous,” was counsel of
- perfection: the ordeal of the “unseen” test intimidated him.
- </p>
- <p>
- But he practised, and did not spare himself. If sweat and blood would win
- that prize, Sam would spend both. He read aloud by the hour—classics
- of course suffering—with a pin in his hand with which he resolutely
- drew blood at every aitch he dropped; and in his reading he was fortunate.
- He read <i>The Spectator</i> which he had borrowed by pure chance from the
- school library, and the judges handed him a passage from <i>The Spectator</i>
- to read at the unseen test, and one of the great speeches of Marlowe’s <i>Tamburlaine</i>,
- whose thundering music had so much attracted Sam that he knew the purple
- patch by heart.
- </p>
- <p>
- He won the prize; staggered across the platform of the Free Trade Hall
- with a Gibbon in six sumptuous volumes, calf-bound, stamped with the
- school arms; he rode “in triumph through Persepolis,” and thought that it
- was “sweet and full of pomp;” then, when it was over and the last
- “Gaudeamus” of that Speech Day had been sung and the last cheers for the
- holidays (always the heartiest) been given, he sought his mother in the
- crowd.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well?” said Sam, who had kept this glory as a surprise for her.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Aye,” said Anne, “but it might be better. You’ve won a prize and you’re
- forgiven, but you know well enough that you’ve diddled me. I wanted a
- prize to show that you’d the gift of learning, and you’ve won one to show
- that you’ve the gift of the gab. I knew it already,” she ended dryly, “and
- you’re nobbut tenth out of the twenty-four in your class. Will they move
- you up?”
- </p>
- <p>
- She dissembled the genuine pride with which she had seen him cross that
- platform and take his bulky prize, because she felt inly that the chief
- talent Sam had proved was a talent for deception. This was a prize, but
- she thought it too barely within the meaning of the act: it observed the
- letter of his bargain and eluded the spirit.
- </p>
- <p>
- She did him less than justice. The average hoy came to school knowing
- English; Sam had had to learn it, and here was proof, in a prize won
- against the whole school and not merely against a form, that he had
- learned his lesson well.
- </p>
- <p>
- Her disparagement depressed him. He had not reached, and with a mother
- like Anne he could not at his age reach, the healthy younger generation’s
- contempt for the opinions of its elders. He felt weakened in his belief in
- the social and economical value of a decent accent and grew careless in
- preserving it. His Gibbon lay upon his shelf unread, an empty glory, and,
- in the event, his prize was to lead to a calamity. It was to lead,
- indirectly, to Tom Branstone’s death.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam found himself, after the holidays, moved up to the Transitus, the last
- boy to be moved there from the Fifth. He was not sure that it pleased him.
- Left in the Fifth he might have been a Triton among the minnows: in the
- Transitus he was incurably a minnow. But he discovered there an atmosphere
- to which he might have responded better than he did. Discipline was
- slacker; one had reached the ante-room to the Sixth and was assumed to be
- serious; one had the privilege of a form-room which was open in the
- lunch-hour so that one had not to wait with smaller fry in the corridors;
- and, above all, the form-master was a gentleman as well as a scholar.
- </p>
- <p>
- He was not blind to these advantages, but he did not, somehow, “come on”
- with his classics. The terrible facility of Bull and Adams was a constant
- discouragement: mere perseverance was outvied by natural ability and
- dragged its leaden weight behind. He knew himself incapable of shining in
- this company, and gave up a losing fight the more readily because the
- half-term brought a new diversion, and a chance to coruscate.
- </p>
- <p>
- He was cast, as winner of the reading prize, for the Christmas play. He,
- Sam Branstone, was to act Shylock at the Conversazione, whilst Lance
- Travers was given Bassanio—salt on the still bleeding wound of his
- defeat. Greek Tragedy interested Sam no more. He saw Irving’s Shylock from
- the gallery of the Theatre Royal, and, for comparative purposes, Benson’s.
- He haunted Cheetham Hill, observing Jewish “types.” He came to the first
- rehearsal, like any other novice, knowing every line of his part—and
- had painfully to unlearn and relearn under the direction of the brisk
- little mathematics master who took the play-in hand.
- </p>
- <p>
- Anne screened her pride in this distinction. Play-acting was, in any case,
- questionable, too newly come to respectable estate to be accepted
- unreservedly. But, in secret, she determined that she would be one of
- Sam’s audience and Tom another.
- </p>
- <p>
- Parents were invited to the Conversazione—that was what
- conversaziones were for—but Anne and Tom had never accepted the
- invitation before. It implied evening dress.
- </p>
- <p>
- She decided that she could “manage” with her Sunday dress and two yards of
- lace; but Tom, too, must be there, and Tom must not shame Sam. She thought
- she saw a way.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Nay, nay,” said Tom, “I couldn’t do it, lass. I’d never dare.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You should have thought of that before you became Sam’s father,” she
- replied. “I’m going to see him and I’ll none go alone. You’re coming with
- me. I reckon Mr. O’Rourke will be in to-night as usual.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Aye,” said Tom, suspecting nothing.
- </p>
- <p>
- One basis of his friendship with O’Rourke was that their evenings off
- happened to coincide, Tom’s from Victoria Station and Terry’s from the
- old-fashioned commercial hotel in Mosley Street, where he was an
- institution. Terry was a waiter, but Tom had not yet seen the connection
- between his friend’s profession and the Grammar School Conversazione. He
- was never very bright.
- </p>
- <p>
- Terry had a hard head and a professional style, rather like a successful
- doctor’s bed-side manner, which wheedled more tips from commercial
- travellers than they gave at any other hotel in their rounds, but he had a
- sunken vein of poetic superstition and, when Anne interrupted them, he was
- explaining to Tom that he tolerated the Royal Hotel because he could see
- from its window the green of the grass outside the Infirmary. Manchester
- was Manchester because it lacked grass. The “good folk” couldn’t dance on
- granite sets: only on grass did one find fairy-rings and only where grass
- abounded were people blessed.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You’ll not be wanting your dress-clothes next Wednesday night, I reckon,”
- said Anne, breaking in without apology.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why, no, Mrs. Branstone,” he said. “Wednesday’s the night when I dress
- like the public. I’ve gone into a strange hotel and been mistaken for an
- ordinary customer on a Wednesday night.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Then you’ll maybe not object to lending Tom your clothes next week. I
- want him to be mistaken for a swell.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “There’s a shine on them,” objected Terry, “that you can see your face
- in.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Dress-clothes,” pronounced Anne, “are dressy when they shine. If you’ll
- put studs and a clean shirt in with them, I’ll be obliged, and I’ll send
- the shirt back washed.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “But, Anne——” protested Tom.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You hold your hush,” she said. “It’s settled. Go on about the fairies,
- Terry.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Fairies seemed to Anne entirely suitable as a subject of conversation for
- those children, men.
- </p>
- <p>
- Terry brought the clothes himself and personally assisted at Tom’s
- transformation from a railway porter into a “swell.” His tie, at any rate,
- was nicely tied, but “I feel the awkwardest fool alive,” said Tom, as well
- he might, with clothes which fitted where they touched; Anne, had she
- confessed her inward sinking, must have admitted that she was in no better
- case herself, but confession was far from her: she had to be brazen for
- two. Yet even Anne’s high courage failed her in the ladies’ dressing-room:
- she emerged so humbled by the splendours which she had seen unveiled that,
- at a word from Tom, she would have turned tail and fled.
- </p>
- <p>
- But Tom had found countenance. Mr. Travers, meeting him on the stair, had
- taken charge of him, and now added Anne to his convoy. It was kindly tact
- increased to the power of heroism: he talked hard and sheltered his waifs
- from feeling the curious glances which, even in that mixed company, were
- directed embarrassingly at them. He ignored a quiet, well-known alderman,
- who obviously wanted to speak to him. He shepherded them to their places
- in the Lecture Theatre, sat with them and accomplished the incredible feat
- of putting Tom Branstone at his ease in the midst of the tipping public.
- </p>
- <p>
- Travers acquired more merit that night than by all his payments of Sam’s
- school-fees: and Sam himself did nobly, not only on the stage whence he
- acted at Anne and bowed to Anne, but afterwards when, still in his
- costume, he paraded with her, drank coffee with her, and met with
- Shylockian hatred any eye which seemed to hint that he had not tremendous
- reason to be proud of his little mother. And what he did for her, Lance
- and Mr. Travers did for Tom.
- </p>
- <p>
- Undoubtedly, a huge success: a night of nights, carved on the tablets of
- memory in letters of gold: never, not by so much as a dubious hint, to be
- associated with the illness of Tom Branstone. That was, of course, caused
- by overwork at Christmas at the station. It had and could have nothing to
- do with the fact that Tom, coming in ecstasy from the heated school into
- the cold December night, presently threw off his overcoat and danced
- exulting on the pavement: conduct so utterly unprecedented, so wholly
- un-Tom-like, that he had footed it merrily for ten minutes before Anne
- recovered enough command of him to put an end to the discreditable
- performance. Besides, for five of the ten minutes, she had danced hand in
- hand with him. She, too, exulted, but neither of them ever referred to
- their pagan capering again.
- </p>
- <p>
- Poor Tom! He had not had so many nights of triumph in his life that this
- should be his last, but he was soon to start upon a journey from which
- even Anne’s imperious will was powerless to call him back. She helping
- him, he struggled hard against pneumonia and made a better fight with
- death than he had ever made with life, but his course was run and the
- school had not reopened after the holidays when Tom Branstone ceased to
- fight. It seemed that, on the night of the Conversazione, he had had his
- hour, and
- </p>
- <p>
- <br />
- </p>
- <p class="indent30">
- “men must endure
- </p>
- <p class="indent15">
- Their going hence even as their coming hither:
- </p>
- <p class="indent15">
- Ripeness is all.”
- </p>
- <p>
- <br />
- </p>
- <p>
- It did not come to Sam as the shattering of his world—only the death
- of Anne could have done that—but certainly as a stunning blow. It
- was the first time that he had come intimately close to death and he
- missed death’s beauty and its peace. He saw too well its ugliness and the
- detail of a burial. It hurt, not because Tom Branstone had had but little
- joy in life, but because he died too soon to see the glory of his son. In
- after years, Sam Branstone would have liked to recall how Tom’s death
- softened him, how he melted to tears before that waxen face and lovingly
- bought flowers to put inside the coffin.
- </p>
- <p>
- It wouldn’t do. It didn’t fit the facts. He knew that, honestly, he had
- been angry with his father for dying, especially for dying in the
- holidays. It spoiled the holidays and it robbed Sam of the day’s holiday
- he would have had for the funeral had Tom had the gumption to die in
- termtime. He resented his father’s death as he would have resented an
- unjust thrashing from him—if Tom Branstone ever thrashed anybody.
- Tom had died prematurely, while he was still useful to Sam. He had bilked
- Sam, and Sam was angry.
- </p>
- <p>
- Not only had Tom died too soon to see the glory of his son, but his son’s
- glory was seriously jeopardized by the breadwinner’s death. Sam had, in
- his innermost soul, given up the idea of Oxford; he was not apt enough at
- classics, but he was far from admitting it now. It was Tom’s death, and
- that alone, which deprived him of that crown.
- </p>
- <p>
- Anne felt it deeply. She had loved Tom with something like mother-love as
- well as wife’s. If she had been hard with him, it was for his good, and he
- as well as she had known that her hardness was like the hardness of a
- crab’s shell, hiding a tender place inside. Now that he was dead she could
- hide her grief as she had hidden her love, and went about her business
- soberly. Soberly she drew her money from the Sick and Burial Society and
- soberly she spent it on “black” for Sam, for George, Madge and herself,
- doing those things which Tom would have expected to be done to dignify his
- death, but adding nothing that would make his funeral a neighbours’
- raree-show.
- </p>
- <p>
- She came back from the cemetery with dry eyes and soberly presided at the
- inevitable meal (where she had to comfort a lachrymose O’Rourke) and, on
- the morrow, soberly set out to visit Mr. Travers, and to tell him that, of
- course, she could not now keep Sam at school. It was little that Travers
- was allowed to guess from this stoic that this was the end of her dream
- for Sam, that with Tom’s death the underpinnings of her world had flopped.
- And her pride stood where it stood five years ago: no more now than then
- would she accept from Travers money to pay expenses.
- </p>
- <p>
- She shook her head defiantly. “The lad’ull have to work,” she said.
- </p>
- <p>
- Travers knew adamant when he saw it. “Then, at least, let him come here
- and work in my office.” Anne almost glared. “I want a fair field and no
- favour. He’ll have to start as office-boy, with the wages of an
- office-boy.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, hardly that, Mrs. Branstone. Remember, he comes to me from the
- Classical Transitus.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes,” she said, “and much use that is to an estate agent. He can’t add up
- a row of figures.”
- </p>
- <p>
- She had no delusions about the practical value of a public school
- education.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I think, though, that we must let it count for something,” he replied,
- and Anne, compromising against the grain, consented to let it count for
- fifteen shillings a week “until we see,” added Mr. Travers, “how he
- shapes.” He intended to see very soon.
- </p>
- <p>
- Anne nodded grimly. “I’ll see he shapes,” she said, and Sam, silent
- witness of this pregnant interview, was hardly surprised by Anne’s first
- words on reaching home. “Get out those old arithmetic text-books of
- yours,” she said, “and look up mensuration. I’ve not forgotten it, if you
- have.”
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER VI—THE NEST-EGG
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>OM Branstone had
- drawn a wage of a pound a week, and tips may have averaged ten shillings
- but more probably did not; your sixpenny tipper is a rare bird in
- Manchester.
- </p>
- <p>
- Yet Anne had saved steadily, and she had not allowed a life-long habit to
- be interrupted by a little thing like the necessity of providing Sam with
- Grammar School books and clothes. I do not say that it was admirable in
- her, but merely that it was heroic. It was an incredible feat, but it can
- be done: it is done every day by people for whom the word “thrift” has
- meaning. Perhaps they are often unlovely in their lives or perhaps they
- have the robust satisfaction of those who live for an idea: opinion has
- always differed as to whether what they do is worth doing, and modern
- opinion inclines strongly to the belief that it is not. Life to these
- iconoclasts seems more important than the means of life.
- </p>
- <p>
- To Anne it seemed abundantly worth while, and the proof was here now when
- she found that the interest on her savings amounted to three and
- four-pence weekly. They could live on Sam’s earnings and Anne’s “means”
- without pinching. Her forethought made all the difference now between too
- little and enough.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was, of course, only to Anne that this seemed enough: Sam took a larger
- view, but found his vision cramped for some time to come by the conditions
- he met with in Mr. Travers’ office. Certainly that generous soul did not
- mean to humiliate Sam; he did not mean Sam to begin as office-boy; but,
- whatever his intentions, the clerks in his office defeated them. Sam was a
- newcomer, the latest arrival, in a minority of one against the old
- inhabitants; was there, moreover, obviously to do as he was told. He was
- told to sweep the floor in the morning, to copy letters and to lick
- stamps. He did these things rebelliously, bitter at heart that such menial
- service should be required of an ex-member of the Classical Transitus,
- certain that there was some mistake, that he had only to catch Mr.
- Travers’ eye when he was so shamefully occupied for that gentleman to take
- instant and drastic measures with the clerks who misemployed him.
- </p>
- <p>
- Mr. Travers’ eye, even though caught at what Sam thought an opportune
- moment, While Sam copied letters, unexpectedly failed to disapprove. He
- seemed less preoccupied with Sam’s affairs than Sam was. As a matter of
- fact, he took a long distance view of Sam, and took it, unfortunately,
- rather muggily. Travers had the defect of his quality. A generous man, he
- was generous in the worst way to himself, and Sam soon learnt the meaning
- of a euphemism, current in the office, “Mr. Travers is attending a
- property auction.” Property auctions are, it is true, usually held on
- licensed premises, and whether Mr. Travers was or was not attending an
- auction he was certainly on licensed premises more often than was good for
- either his business or himself.
- </p>
- <p>
- And it was bad for Sam, not because it left him to find his own feet in
- the office and to fight unbacked with his superiors (wherein, indeed, it
- was good), but because he had figured Travers from afar as a princely
- gentleman, without reproach, and the discovery of his failing took Sam a
- long way on the road to cynicism. In youth one’s faith dies hard, and,
- being dead, turns rapidly corrupt.
- </p>
- <p>
- The business was an excellent one, rotting slowly from the top, and Sam
- found the office a notable place in which to pick up knowledge of the
- world; especially, since he lacked good direction, of the shadier ways of
- the world. He felt that he had declined in status: his school-friends,
- there his equals, had gone either to the Universities or, with influence
- behind them, to the professions. If they went to business, it was as their
- fathers’ sons. They were not scratch men, and Sam felt that he was
- starting at the scratch-line.
- </p>
- <p>
- Travers had really no intentions that Sam should feel himself misprized.
- The boy had to learn the business, and the way to understanding lay from
- the bottom upwards. But Sam contrasted himself bitterly with Lance, first
- at school and then at Cambridge. In that, indeed, he found a minimum of
- consolation. It wasn’t rational, but to Anne and consequently to Sam,
- university had meant Oxford, and he won a hardy solace from the thought
- that Lance was, after all, “only” at Cambridge.
- </p>
- <p>
- Meantime, he grew in knowledge of his world, and education came to Sam,
- not in the cloistered freedom of the Isis, but where, in Manchester, he
- went collecting rents: in country courts where hard laws operated hardly:
- and in the office, where men did not greet each other with a friendly
- smile, but gave instead the “competition glare.” It was not a kindly
- school in which he spent the developing years, but one where it was taught
- that self’s the man, and magnanimity is a mistake. “Get on or get out,”
- and Sam got on with a sort of choleric zeal which gave no quarter and
- expected none.
- </p>
- <p>
- But he did not get on fast enough to please himself. He had, he thought,
- stepped down from the days of the Grammar School where he belonged with
- the caste that rules or, at any rate, administers, the caste that sits on
- velvet and overlooks the mob. Now he was in the cockpit, with the mob that
- struggles to ascend, and, to Sam, a wage of thirty shillings a week at the
- age of twenty was a derisory ascension. Anne thought it satisfying, and it
- was her contentment with his rate of progress which first made him begin
- to think of her as, after all, a limited person. You didn’t bribe Sam
- Branstone to be meekly satisfied with thirty shillings a week.
- </p>
- <p>
- “The trouble is,” he said to the only man in the office with whom he was
- in the least confidential, “that you don’t begin to get on till you’ve got
- a bit of capital together. Money breeds money.”
- </p>
- <p>
- His friend suggested betting as a means to affluence, and offered to tell
- him of a dead certainty.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam assumed his cunningest air of a superman of the world. “The best row
- of houses where I go for the rents,” he said, “belongs to Jack Elsworth,
- the bookie. I don’t see why I should help him to buy another house.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Bookies don’t always win,” said the optimist.
- </p>
- <p>
- “No,” said Sam. “It’s possible to make money out of betting and it’s
- possible to get a baby by a harlot, but that isn’t what the harlot’s for,
- and it isn’t what the bookie’s for.”
- </p>
- <p>
- At this time, harlots were the pegs on which Sam hung his wit. He had no
- other use for them, but had discovered that a coarse turn of phrase was an
- asset in his world and therefore wielded it. But the effect of this little
- conversation was to crystallize his aim. He wanted that “bit of capital”
- badly, and did not intend that, if opportunity presented, a nice regard
- for scruple should hold him back from taking anything the gods might send.
- He had no ultimate design, but fortune came to the fortunate and money to
- the moneyed, so that the first move was, obviously, to get money. He
- wanted a jumping-off place; then he would soar.
- </p>
- <p>
- Opportunity walked into the office in the person of Joseph of Arimathea
- Minnifie. That was his full baptismal name: analogous with the styles of
- certain limited companies, such as John Smith ( of Newcastle) Limited, to
- distinguish that Smith from other Smiths. Minnifie’s mother had explained
- to the parson that she was a New Testament woman. To her intimates she had
- put it that she chose the name Joseph because she liked it, but she also
- liked a man to be a man. It was deduced that she supposed the third Joseph
- in the Bible would have acted differently from the first in the affair of
- Potiphar’s wife.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam’s accent had degenerated since the days of Shylock and the reading
- prize. It had kept bad company, and might be known by the company it kept
- to-day rather than by that which it used to keep at school; but he could
- still, without too great an effort, assume a well-bred speech and was
- often sent with a prospective buyer to show off any likely houses on Mr.
- Travers’ list. Because it was usual for him to go on such errands, and not
- because anyone supposed that niceties of speech could or would have any
- effect on Mr. Minnifie, he was sent with him in a cab to tour the suburbs
- where Travers had property in charge.
- </p>
- <p>
- A coarse accent was not likely to offend Joseph Minnifie, who a fortnight
- earlier had been a market porter at Shude Hill, but had now come into
- money, well invested in the best Brewery securities, from his uncle, a
- publican. Minnifie had sold out some of the shares because he could now
- satisfy a long ambition and live in his own house. He proposed, he told
- Mr. Travers, to retire to the country.
- </p>
- <p>
- “The country?” asked Travers, whose practice was suburban.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well,” said Minnifie, “summat quiet and homely. I’d like a change from
- Rochdale Road. I thought,” he went on rather shyly, “of Whalley Range.
- It’s a good neighbourhood.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Travers refrained from pointing out that Whalley Range was not usually
- regarded as the country, but was, in fact, of the inner ring of suburbs, a
- penny tram fare from the centre of Manchester. “Oh, yes, Mr. Minnifie,” he
- said. “I think I can satisfy you in W’halley Range. I have several
- available houses on my books in that district.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’ll pay three hundred pound for what I like,” said Minnifie, quite
- fiercely. “I’ve got it in my pocket now.” He was fierce because he was not
- yet quite sure that his legacy was not phantom gold, and he pulled out a
- bundle of notes as much to assure himself that they were still where he
- had put them as with the idea of proving his good faith to Travers.
- </p>
- <p>
- Travers concealed a smile. After all, commission on three hundred pounds
- is not to be sneezed at, but neither was this the sort of client for whom
- Traver’s disturbed his habits. “I have myself,” he said, “a large property
- auction to attend in the city, but Mr. Branstone will go with you to
- inspect the houses.” He smiled kindly on Sam, and added, lest Minnifie
- should think his affair, so important to him, underrated by the agent:
- “Mr. Branstone is my confidential man. When Mr. Branstone tells you
- anything about the houses you are going to see, it is as if I spoke
- myself.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I see,” said Minnifie. “He’s your foreman, and you needn’t tell me you’ll
- back him up. I know foremen.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, his word is certainly as good as mine. I leave you in safe hands,
- Mr. Minnifie.” And Travers went out to attend his first auction of the
- day, which usually happened at eleven o’clock in the morning.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam and the client took a cab to Whalley Range, where Minnifie inspected
- several houses which were to be had at about his price. But he was hard to
- satisfy, and, what was worse, apparently unable to define his reasons for
- dissatisfaction. As Sam praised this and that about a house, Minnifie
- admitted that such things were praiseworthy, but he would, please, see
- another house. Sam was a little piqued and tried his best to be genial,
- suspecting that Minnifie resented being fobbed off with a “foreman”; and
- Sam’s best was very good, so that presently the ice was thawed.
- </p>
- <p>
- Minnifle stood at the bow-window of a dining-room and looked up and down
- the street. It was empty save for a tradesman’s boy. From somewhere round
- the corner came the diminished rattle of a milk-cart. Minnifle shook his
- head sadly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It’s quiet,” he said. “See that road. Nothing stirring. What is there for
- the missus to look at when she sits in the window?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It’s morning,” said Sam. “Things will be brisker in the afternoon.” But
- his tone lacked conviction, and he could not resist the temptation to add:
- “There’s a cat crossing the road now.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Come out,” said Minnifle. “This’ull none do,” and when they stood upon
- the door-step he sniffed the air of Whalley Range with disapproval. “I
- don’t like it and it’s no use pretending that I do. It’s got a cold smell
- to me. It isn’t homely.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I know what you mean,” said Sam, diagnosing the trouble. “Wait a bit.” He
- gave the cabman an address and was careful to leave the window open. They
- came to other streets where the scent of yesterday’s fried fish still
- lingered in the air and the nose of Mr. Minnifle inhaled it greedily.
- “This is better,” he pronounced.
- </p>
- <p>
- They had come to Greenheys, which, when De Quincey’s father built a
- country house there in 1791, was “separated from the last outskirts of
- Manchester by an entire mile.” It is by no means separated now, and good
- houses of the mid-Victorian period are to be had cheaply because good
- tenants dislike bad neighbours. Travers had one of these survivals from an
- urbane past on his books and Sam hugged himself for thinking of it now:
- that house had proved itself the whitest of white elephants.
- </p>
- <p>
- Mr. Minnifie, exhilarated by the spicy smells of Greenheys, was no longer
- a timid excursionist looking only where his guide bade him, but a house
- hunter hot upon the trail, with eyes that spied on each side of their
- route.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Ah!” he called suddenly. “Stop!”
- </p>
- <p>
- The cabman stopped. “But we’re not there,” said Sam, rather blankly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I think we are,” said Minnifie, and got out of the cab.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam followed, in that leaden state of mind which often precedes
- inspiration. What had attracted Minnifie was a semi-detached house at a
- corner, which the trams passed. Opposite were shops, and there was a
- lively stir in the street. Certainly, Mrs. Minnifie would have something
- to see here when she looked out of the window.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam knew that pair of houses, and what he knew made him fear that he would
- not, this time, rid Mr. Travers of the white elephant on his books. They
- were good houses enough, but the people who had furniture to fill them
- were not the sort of people who welcomed shops opposite their windows and
- trams past their gate, so that both had been long empty. Now, however,
- they were for sale, under a will, and a quick sale was wanted that the
- estate might be wound up. They would certainly go cheaply on that account,
- and the more so since two attempted auctions had proved abortive. There
- had been no offers.
- </p>
- <p>
- And here was Mr. Minnilie plainly delighted, and those houses not in
- Travers’ charge, but in that of a rival agency! Sam felt depressed, then
- as dawn follows darkness, lie thought of what Travers had said, that Sam’s
- word was as good as his own. It was going to be, and Mr. Minnifie’s money
- as good in Sam’s hands as in those of Calverts’, the legitimate agents for
- this pair of houses. He stepped out briskly now, the ardent salesman.
- </p>
- <p>
- “One moment, Mr. Minnifie. I haven’t the key of this house with me, but it
- is at the shop opposite. I will get it.” His quick eye had read so much on
- Calverts’ notice board, but by the time he returned, Minnifie had also
- seen that rival name on the board and mentioned the fact.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I know,” said Sam. “The board has not been altered, but this property is
- in my hands now.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Which was true.
- </p>
- <p>
- The house enchanted Minnifie, who had made up his mind in advance to be
- enchanted. And, of course, rooms may be in need of decoration, but good
- proportions tell, even on a Mr. Minnifie. This house was very different
- from the jerry-built villas of Whalley Range.
- </p>
- <p>
- “What’s price?” he asked.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Three hundred and fifteen pounds,” said Sam.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I said three hundred and I’ll none budge.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “If you will come to the office at six, I shall be able to tell you,” said
- Sam, naming a queer hour, seeing that the office closed at half-past five.
- </p>
- <p>
- “All right,” said Minnifie. “It’s a firm offer at three hundred, and I’m a
- man of my word.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam devoutly hoped so. He was taking a considerable gamble on it. They
- parted, and Sam, as usual, went home for lunch, but, not as usual,
- returned with his cheque-book in his pocket. His accumulated savings were
- five pounds, but he possessed a cheque-book. He waited rather carefully
- until the banks had closed, then he walked into Calverts’ offices and
- offered them two hundred and fifty pounds for the pair of semi-detached
- houses in Greenheys. They accepted two hundred and seventy-five; and Sam
- drew a cheque for that amount, and received the title-deeds in exchange.
- Then he palpitated, but it was, in any case, safely after banking hours.
- Calverts could not present his cheque that day.
- </p>
- <p>
- He was busy at five-thirty, when the clerks left, and proposed to work
- late for a while, “to clear things up,” he said. At six Minnifie arrived,
- true to his word, and Sam could have kissed him. He had spent the longest
- half hour of his life. He took Minnifie by the private door into Travers’
- office, so that he should not see the empty general office, and put him in
- the client’s chair, himself usurping Travers’ seat.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, Mr. Minnifie,” he said, “suppose I told you that the price is still
- three fifteen, what would you say?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’d say ‘Good-day,’” and Minnifie showed that he meant it by rising to
- his feet. Sam went on hurriedly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Ah! Then it’s as well that I’ve succeeded. It has been an infinitude of
- trouble—-”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I reckon,” said Minnifie, “that you’re here to take trouble. Leastways,
- if it’s easy money in your line, it’s the only line that’s made that way.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, we have our troubles, like everybody else. This document,” he went
- on, “conveys the house to you. The price is three hundred pounds.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It’s a bargain,” said Mr. Minnifie, producing his notes, “count’em.” Sam
- counted feverishly, then made out a receipt. Nothing short of murder would
- have induced him to part with that money now.
- </p>
- <p>
- “If you will meet me to-morrow at twelve at that address—a lawyer’s—we
- will have the conveyance put in proper form.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’ve seen a bit of lawyers lately over this brass of mine,” said
- Minnifie, “and I don’t like’em. They eat money.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “But in this case,” said Sam magnanimously, “I pay the lawyer’s fees.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Then I’ll be there,” said Minnifie.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam was waiting next day for the doors of his bank to open, and breathed
- colossal relief when his three hundred pounds were safely in to meet his
- cheque. He had a net profit of some twenty pounds, after settling for the
- conveyancing, and he had a house to sell. Not long afterwards, he sold it
- for one hundred and seventy-five pounds.
- </p>
- <p>
- The fact that one of the pair had been thought desirable by somebody
- caused somebody else to desire the other: and Sam could only hope that the
- new neighbours would not compare notes. If they did, it did not matter; he
- had only obeyed the axiom of commerce, “Buy cheap, sell dear,” and it was
- not his fault that in the one case he had had to sell less dearly than in
- the other.
- </p>
- <p>
- His bank credit was two hundred pounds.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER VII—THE FLEDGLING CAPITALIST
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>N Sam’s opinion,
- nobody had suffered. Mr. Travers lost nothing, because the corner house
- had conquered Minnifie at sight, and he would not in any case have bought
- the white elephant which Travers had for sale. Calverts had got as much as
- they expected to get for the houses, or they would not have sold, while
- the beneficiary under the late owner’s will was a charity, and Sam hoped
- that charity was charitable enough not to look a gift-horse in the mouth:
- if it wasn’t, it ought to be. As to the purchasers, who had certainly paid
- more for the property than they need have done, that was what purchasers
- were for. Why did smart business men exist if not to exploit purchasers?
- </p>
- <p>
- All this was highly comforting, but to confess the need for comfort was to
- admit to disquiet, and he found that it was one thing to argue in this
- strain with his conscience, and another to boast to Anne of his
- achievement. Women don’t understand business, and he had an uneasy feeling
- that the ethics of the transaction would not satisfy Anne. He decided that
- he had better not tell her, that he must resist his impulse of surprising
- her with the gift of a seal-skin coat, and remained a capitalist under the
- rose. There was no hurry, and perhaps his next stroke, when it came, would
- be under conditions that would bear the limelight of her scrutiny.
- </p>
- <p>
- But repression was not all. Justify himself as he would, chuckle over his
- gains as he did, the matter searched him deeply and reacted sharply in two
- ways, of which the first began as that old expedient of sinners,
- conscience-money. There are defaulters who find absolution for themselves
- by sending notes, under initials, to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and
- by having them acknowledged with impressiveness in the personal columns of
- the <i>Times</i>. That was not Sam’s way: he did not do good deeds by
- stealth, and his conscience-money did not go out of the family. He used it
- philanthropically, but it was philanthropy and ten per cent, to begin
- with, and in the end it was very much more than ten per cent. It was the
- Chappie Bill Posting and Window-Cleaning Company.
- </p>
- <p>
- He thought that he could, without exciting Anne’s suspicions, tell her
- that his savings had reached ten pounds, and proposed to spend that sum
- for the benefit of George Chappie.
- </p>
- <p>
- Inspired, perhaps, by his household gods, George was facing life bravely,
- and won a minor place in Anne’s good graces when he and Madge produced a
- firstborn son, who had the remarkable quality of looking exactly like the
- infant Samuel, whose name he bore. But George had not, in her opinion,
- deserved Sam’s generosity to this extent.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You’re over-good to them,” she said. “You’ve made a man and woman of a
- pair of wastrels, and I’d let them alone to make their own way now.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Do you think it will be much of a way?” asked Sam. “They’re the sort that
- need help.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Aye,” she said, “they’ll lean on you all right. They’re good at leaning.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well,” said Sam, drawing himself up. “Let them lean.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Sam,” said Anne, “I’m not fond, but if I told you what I think of you for
- this, you’d have the right to call me fond and foolish. I like you very
- well, my son. You’re the strong man helping and supporting the weak.”
- </p>
- <p>
- She finished suddenly and a thought shamefacedly. She had praised him
- openly and considered it a weakness in her. Sam put a hand on her
- shoulder. It was not demonstrative, but his gesture was full of
- understanding, and Anne turned rapidly away, shaking him off almost with
- rudeness, taking very earnestly to her business of clearing away their
- tea-things.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam watched appreciatively through the corner of his eye. He relished
- praise from Anne, even when, as now, it was not strictly merited. The
- strong in Sam’s philosophy did not support the weak, but the weak the
- strong. He was confirmed in his belief that women could not understand
- business. This, however, he reminded himself, was not pure business, it
- was conscience-money, which ought not to be unconscionably reproductive:
- so he bought George a hand-cart, ladder, bucket and leathers, and exacted
- from him not more than ten per cent, on his capital expenditure. In
- Travers’ business Sam found opportunities of pushing George. A client took
- a house, and Sam would suggest with a nicely casual air that the windows
- needed cleaning. He would, to save the client trouble, then offer to send
- a man round, so that George’s connection waxed, and he prospered to the
- tune of two amazing pounds a week, till the restless Sam began to widen
- his view of George’s potentialities.
- </p>
- <p>
- His eye for the main chance had always a useful squint which could see
- money round the corner as well as in the straight high road, and he
- thought that George, with his outfit of ladders, could see his talent for
- height in other ways than window cleaning. There was, for example,
- bill-posting, a trade whose mysteries Sam deemed it not beyond George’s
- capabilities to learn.
- </p>
- <p>
- The thing grew by degrees, from the first builder’s hoarding which Sam
- rented venturously for advertising space, to a comfortable little business
- that ran itself by its own momentum long after he tired of its comparative
- insignificance. With George, the start was all: he could always plod where
- Sam had led, and as Sam had time to set the ball rolling, and money enough
- to spoon-feed the infant business with capital, George kept the thing in
- being by careful, steady management. He hadn’t boasted when he told Anne
- he was steady.
- </p>
- <p>
- Of course, Sam was impatient and deplored his active partner’s inactivity.
- He grew tired of the gradual increase, but, all the same, the business was
- unquestionably successful, and he relished hugely his sense of being the
- power behind the throne, if only behind a small, conservative, so
- lamentably unambitious throne. Sam also was among the king makers.
- </p>
- <p>
- The other, greater sequel to his reaction led to more pyrotechnical
- results, and eventually to Sam’s launch on his career. Nothing happened at
- first, and indeed for so long that he was feeling himself between the
- devil of the estate office and the deep sea of George’s persistent
- carefulness. The Chappie Bill-Posting Company was good enough for George,
- but not for Sam: there were too many com petitors with too great
- resources, while the estate office routine bored him, and opportunities
- for piratical enterprise did not recur.
- </p>
- <p>
- He felt, at twenty-four years of age, and at two pounds ten a week, that
- he was growing old in service, he who was not meant to serve but to be
- served.
- </p>
- <p>
- But then—desolating thought—was he meant to be served? Had he
- lost, or was he, at any rate, not losing the accent of speech and mind of
- those who are served? He knew that his accent had touched pitch and been
- defiled: those bawdy stories of his were told in the tongue of his
- hearers, and there had been clients lately who had spoken to him, when
- inspecting property, as if he were a clerk, and not a pleasant,
- gentlemanly youth of obvious superiority to his present, no doubt
- temporary, job. He had a sudden fear that the job might not be temporary
- after all, and there followed a time when he was wholly bent on
- self-improvement, when he abjured the narrow way of professional
- text-books and read that he might become well-read, that he might bandy
- allusions with those old school-fellows of his who had gone to
- Universities, that he might, if he could not hope to shine, at least be
- not outshone.
- </p>
- <p>
- It wasn’t <i>pour le bon motif</i>, and he did not even pretend to like
- the greater part of what he read. He crammed against the grain, and a
- growing row of the “World’s Classics” figured on his shelf as trophies of
- his perseverance. Industriously he rubbed away the rust which had
- accumulated on his mind since it took its not very brilliant polish of the
- Grammar School. He took down the dust-stained Gibbon he had won for
- reading, and ploughed heroically through it.
- </p>
- <p>
- That reminded him of another chink in his armour. A man of the world must
- have the knack of speaking to the world, and Sam became a member of the
- Concentrics. As Anne once told him, he had the gift of the gab, but,
- except for his present fluent recommendations of houses to prospective
- tenants, it was a talent he had buried. Now, however, he proposed to dig
- it up and did it in (he thought) the ambitious surroundings of the
- Concentrics, who were indeed as mixed a company as he could have found
- anywhere, and on that account the better for his purpose.
- </p>
- <p>
- The common centre which was supposed to hold the Concentrics together was
- a love of literature, but they tended to drop literature for politics on
- the slightest pretext. There were literary enthusiasts amongst them, but
- it rarely happened that one man’s enthusiasm coincided with another’s. It
- did less than coincide. A member would read a laborious paper on some man
- of letters, and the subsequent discussion would be conducted by men who
- began their intelligent speeches by admitting that they had not read a
- word of, say, Henry James or Lafcadio Hearn, but that their opinion was
- nevertheless so and so. Whereas, of course, nobody ever confessed to
- ignorance of politics. Politics is like law, only more so. One is presumed
- by the law to know the law, which is highly presumptuous of the law,
- because not even the lawyers know the law, and they must often go to
- judges, at their client’s expense, to find out what the law is: and the
- “more so,” as applied to politics, is that while laymen hesitate to argue
- a point of law, and go to an expert, they never hesitate to argue a point
- of politics, and <i>are</i> the expert.
- </p>
- <p>
- Political discussions amongst the Concentrics were real and passionate,
- literary discussions unreal and frigid; and as “social reform” became a
- favourite shibboleth about this time, literature took a back seat in
- favour of subjects about which men could grow emotional and their oratory
- rhetorical. It was all one to Sam, who was here to speak, and did his
- reading at home.
- </p>
- <p>
- He spoke often, so that he soon improved, and he practised the literary
- allusiveness which was the purpose of his reading to such effect that he
- attracted the attention of the chairman, who was the Rev. Peter Struggles.
- </p>
- <p>
- It is not, strictly, fair to say that a man is handicapped through life by
- a name like Struggles, because the legal process by which one can change
- an undesirable name is inexpensive, but Peter had never thought of such a
- move, and wore his handicap without being aware of it. In any case, he
- failed in life. He had a round face, red hair, side-whiskers: took snuff
- and messed his coat: was perfectly futile in practical affairs and
- absolutely “a dear.” His scholarship was not profound, but he loved
- letters genuinely, He had failed steadily for thirty years to run a
- private school for boys in a suburb which was degenerating to
- industrialism, and late in life had taken orders, quite sincerely, not in
- the least with the idea of helping his school with a new respectability.
- It was, anyhow, beyond help, and a man who offered tradesmen’s sons a
- sound commercial education was presently to buy him out.
- </p>
- <p>
- Peter Struggles, well in his fifties, became curate to a vicar of forty,
- in the large, rough-and-tumble parish of St. Mary’s. One says that he had
- failed in life, and, by Sam’s standards, he had, and even by the working
- standards of his church. A man at fifty-six should not be a curate with an
- income of some hundred and twenty pounds a year. But if a man is happy at
- fifty-six to be a curate with that income? If he find satisfaction in it?
- Snuff was his indulgence, and the chairmanship of the Concentrics, who
- were not sectarian, his dissipation. For the rest, Peter had made harbour.
- To the pushing educationist who had bought him out, for a song, and now
- profaned his old school buildings with shorthand and the rudiments of
- bookkeeping, Peter was a failure and a pathetic failure. He was not
- conscious of failure himself, nor of anything but a serene contentment
- that he had found, if late, the work that he was fit to do. Through sheer
- single-minded, inoffensive, unobtrusive goodness he came to be a figure in
- that parish, and a power. Undignified in bearing, and careless in dress,
- he had a dignity of mind and soul.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam Branstone despised a worldly failure, here was a man of more than
- twice Sam’s years, with less money than Sam had, and, by all his canons,
- Sam should have despised Peter. But he didn’t. It was partly, no doubt,
- other people’s opinions that influenced Sam—the universal esteem
- which Peter Struggles won—but it was by much more the innate
- nobility of the old curate. Sam began his speaking at the Concentrics to
- impress his fellow members, he ended by caring only for the appreciation
- of the quaint, slovenly figure who occupied the chair.
- </p>
- <p>
- He got the appreciation he craved. Peter was shrewd enough to discount
- Sam’s rhetorics, and the flashy tricks of apt quotation: he saw Sam as a
- misguided, self-seeking thruster who read only for veneer and spoke only
- to impress. But, at least, Sam tried, and Peter could admire perseverance.
- The thing was to direct Sam’s perseverance well, and Peter asked him to
- supper.
- </p>
- <p>
- Our man of the world was prodigiously thrilled. The honour was
- exceptional, for Peter could not afford to be a host often, and Sam was
- aware not only of its rarity, but of Peter’s unique standing in the
- parish: and, more than that, of Peter’s worth. To be singled out by Peter
- Struggles, and asked to sup, was, socially, a triumph. It sounds absurd,
- and perhaps it is absurd that one good man should shine so brightly by
- contrast with the fifteen thousand others of an over-crowded parish, but
- that was why Peter was a colossus amongst the pigmies, and why Sam
- Branstone was egregiously excited by an invitation to sup at Peter’s
- little house.
- </p>
- <p>
- Peter did not invite Sam to preach at him. It was the boy’s mind rather
- than his soul that was the target of his aim, and Peter’s select library
- to which he trusted for influence. Certainly the little meal of cold beef
- and cocoa was not calculated to impress, nor the old, worn furniture, with
- the gaping rents in its horse-hair coverings, through which the stuffing
- poured. He handled books with reverence, and spoke of them, but Sam was
- hardly listening. He was under fire from another battery.
- </p>
- <p>
- Ada Struggles met young men at church functions, and spoke with them at
- Sunday School, but she had few opportunities of greater intimacy, and was
- not the lady to waste so rare a chance as this. Peter droned on amongst
- his books and presently was lost in reading one. Ada lost herself in
- nothing except a burning desire, to monopolize Sam. Books did not interest
- Ada: getting married did.
- </p>
- <p>
- The trouble was that in the days of his school’s comparative prosperity,
- Peter had done Ada rather well. Perhaps as a schoolmaster himself, he got
- special consideration over terms, but at any rate he had sent her to a
- good boarding school. She had received the education of a lady, and it
- wasn’t fair, it didn’t chime with the fitness of things that she should
- now be the daughter of an impractical curate. Her case, to some extent,
- was parallel with Sam’s: the past of both had augured well, and the future
- depended on their wits.
- </p>
- <p>
- There, however, the parallel ceased, for Ada had few wits, but she had
- moods, and the reverse side of the moping discontent, which was endemic
- with her, was the meretricious brilliance she now paraded for Sam’s
- entanglement. Ada was “all out” after her prey, in her best clothes and
- her best, that is, her most captivatingly genial manners.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam thought that she illuminated that dingy book-surrounded room. They
- were not gay books with gilded bindings, but solid, well-worn volumes of
- ponderous aspect. The books repelled and Ada invited. Youth called to
- youth: youth answered to the call.
- </p>
- <p>
- He was obsessed with his idea of accent, and the worldly value of
- superiority in speech. Ada’s first appeal to him, though she did not know
- it, was that she spoke well; her second was that she was her father’s
- daughter; her third, as she knew perfectly, was the helplessness which she
- used cunningly to flatter his masculine importance. She told him without a
- word that he was a strong, powerful man, and she a flower which he might
- pluck and wear. And she did the anemone business quite effectively.
- </p>
- <p>
- There was not much of Ada, and what there was was not remarkable, but she
- was fluffy and frilly and feminine in the feebler way. She had on
- something that was not silk but suggested the rustle of silk. After all,
- it was not Ada’s fault that it was not silk, or that her intimate
- underclothing was of flannelette; she could only use the opportunities she
- had, and they were few.
- </p>
- <p>
- But she had the prettiness, the rather silly and never lasting prettiness,
- which accompanies anæmia.
- </p>
- <p>
- It would not wear, and she knew that it would not wear. She was becoming
- desperate. Sam was sent by heaven.
- </p>
- <p>
- He thought so, too. Old Struggles read “Marcus Aurelius,” standing by his
- book-shelf, utterly forgetful of his guest, and the guest thought that
- Peter’s preoccupation was also instructed by heaven. It left him free for
- Ada.
- </p>
- <p>
- What he said to Ada and what Ada said to him were things of no importance:
- their serious conversation was not conducted by their tongues, but by
- their eyes.
- </p>
- <p>
- This is the sort of thing:
- </p>
- <p>
- Ada (her voice): Of course, I remember seeing you quite often in church,
- Mr. Branstone.
- </p>
- <p>
- (Her eyes): And you found favour in my sight.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam (his voice): Naturally, I always saw you whenever I went.
- </p>
- <p>
- (His eyes): It was for you I went to church.
- </p>
- <p>
- Ada (her voice): I’m glad that you were able to come in to-night. I am
- often lonely in the evenings. Father is so wrapped up in his books.
- </p>
- <p>
- (Her eyes): Meeting you is the great moment of my life. I’m an unhappy
- princess in an ogre’s tower. Rescue me. Rescue me.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam ( his voice): It was most kind of Mr. Struggles to ask me in for a
- talk about books.
- </p>
- <p>
- (His eyes): Books be damned. I’m fascinated by the sensuous rustle of your
- skirts, and I’m a hero sent to kiss the wistful look away from your
- pleading eyes.
- </p>
- <p>
- And so on. By the end of the evening, had the unsaid speeches or half of
- them been written down, Ada had evidence enough to have brought a breach
- of promise action against a recalcitrant Sam. Only Sam was not
- recalcitrant, but, on the contrary, ardent. It was, Ada congratulated
- herself, uncommonly good going for a first meeting.
- </p>
- <p>
- Peter emerged from “Marcus Aurelius” with a gentle smile which lighted up
- his undistinguished face. “Yes. Pagan but grand,” he said, quite unaware
- that half an hour had passed since he last spoke. “I’ll lend you this
- book, Branstone, and now”.—he glanced at the clock—“I’m afraid
- that I must turn you out. I’d no idea it was so late. How rapidly the time
- passes when one is talking about one’s books!”
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER VIII—ADA STRUGGLES
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HERE were moments
- during that night when Sam imagined that he was in the stranglehold of a
- grand passion: times when he quite successfully deceived himself that he
- burned for Ada.
- </p>
- <p>
- And certainly the experience, unique for him, of a sleepless night lent
- colour to the belief that he was passionately in love, whereas he was, in
- fact, merely attracted by a girl who had spared no pains to attract; and
- what kept Sam awake was not passion but calculation. The affair, indeed,
- was as broad as it was long: it had a slender basis of mutual attraction,
- and a monstrous superstructure on each side of self-interest.
- </p>
- <p>
- He did not “see through” Ada to the point of being prophetic about her,
- but he did even from the beginning perceive that Anne was not likely to be
- enthusiastic. But would Anne greet any daughter-in-law with open arms? Was
- there born the daughter of Eve whom Anne would think the peer of her Sam?
- He did not want to cross his mother, but a man must be a man, and a
- mother’s fondness and her jealousy of the intending wife were things about
- which one had to be callous. The world, as Benedick said, must be peopled.
- </p>
- <p>
- Anne would see eye to eye with him as to the practical advantages of Ada.
- Ada was Peter’s daughter.
- </p>
- <p>
- That parentage had, by way of discount, the defect of its quality.
- Socially it was a great thing to be Peter’s son-in-law, and not only
- socially but ideally. Sam’s admiration for the curate was genuine enough,
- and he knew that Anne shared it. But there was the question of money, and
- Peter had none. Sam kept his mother, and would have to keep his wife. He
- saw in Ada an asset which he could ultimately exploit, but, in the
- meantime, until there came into his mind the scheme which should turn his
- association with Peter into money, he must reckon on a tight period. Anne
- would see the tight period, but not the unborn, fruitful plan on which he
- counted for their future. And he could not hurry that plan to birth. His
- schemes came to him when he least expected them, spontaneously. They were
- not to be forced by worry.
- </p>
- <p>
- Again, he reminded himself, there was no hurry. He had only just met Ada,
- and was planning as if his engagement ring were on her finger. Not that he
- had any serious doubts about that ring and Ada’s willingness to wear it,
- but she did not wear it yet, and there was time in hand, and to spare, for
- consideration of these practical affairs.
- </p>
- <p>
- Meantime, he loved her, and love, according to the authors, was the most
- wonderful thing in the world. He told himself very firmly that he loved
- Ada, and that love was wonderful. Reiteration is so potent that before
- morning he believed what he wished to believe. He recalled the soft
- pressure of her hand when she said “Good night,” the froufrou of her
- skirt, her melting eye; and persuaded himself that Ada Struggles was a
- pearl beyond price.
- </p>
- <p>
- He was perfectly sure that he loved her, and for proof there was his
- sleeplessness. It occurred to him that as he could not sleep, and was only
- thinking in circles, he might as well do something to hasten the time when
- he could see Ada again. He could not return “Marcus Aurelius” to Peter
- until he had read it, and if he returned it with unexpected promptitude,
- he must be ready to face a stiff examination in it; therefore he lit the
- gas and read “Marcus Aurelius” by way of serving Ada, whom he loved.
- </p>
- <p>
- Hard service, too, for there was not much in Sam’s philosophy which agreed
- with the Emperor’s, but two nights later he was ringing Peter’s bell with
- the book under his arm, an ordered précis of it in his mind, and some
- selected passages from it on his tongue. They were not selected because
- Sam liked them, but because he thought Peter liked them.
- </p>
- <p>
- Peter was out, but Ada was in, and, curiously enough for one who was not
- an optimist either by nature or experience, dressed again in her Sunday
- clothes.
- </p>
- <p>
- She opened the door to him. “Father is out, Mr. Branstone,” she said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I only called to return him this book.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I do not think he will be long,” said Ada promptly, who knew very well
- that Peter would certainly be late. “Will you not come in and wait for
- him?”
- </p>
- <p>
- He came, crossing his Rubicon. The unchaperoned intimacy of that night
- struck both of them as a daring short cut to a position to which they were
- not entitled—a thing properly done only by the engaged and the
- maturely and securely engaged. Luck fought for Ada.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m afraid I can’t stay very long,” he hedged desperately.
- </p>
- <p>
- Ada sat down and crossed her knees. A neat ankle was effectively on
- exhibition. “That chair of father’s,” she said, “is fairly comfortable.”
- Also, it faced Ada’s, and he drew up another, less inviting, chair, and
- placed it flush with the fire. Except by a side-glance, he could not see
- her ankle now, and evaded that aphrodisiac, while Peter’s chair, though
- empty, completed the semi-circle, and seemed to give a sort of countenance
- to their interview. Sam drew much comfort from that chair, and tried to
- guide their conversation into literary paths of which the chair would have
- approved. He discoursed of “Marcus Aurelius,” and he was very dull, but
- felt virtuous.
- </p>
- <p>
- Ada did not believe that it was virtuous to be dull, and mentally cursed
- that <i>tertium quid</i>, the ghost of Peter Struggles, whom Sam had so
- firmly established in his chair; but she saw that the pace was not to be
- quickened here, under Peter’s roof.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I think your knowledge of books is wonderful, Mr. Branstone,” she said,
- when Sam had exhausted his ideas about “Marcus Aurelius.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I never find time to read, myself. Whenever I have the opportunity of
- recreation, I go out for exercise.” The statement lacked the merit of
- truth She never took exercise, but was adept at sitting in front of a fire
- doing exactly nothing. The point was that in this house of the good Peter,
- Sam’s enterprise was burked, and she wanted him where he could race
- without a handicap. “Do you ever go to Heaton Park?” she asked
- conversationally. “I shall probably be going there on Saturday.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “With—with your father?” asked Sam.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, no,” she answered brightly. “Saturday is sermon day. That is why I am
- in the way here, although,” she added pathetically, “I fear he often finds
- me in the way. I am not bookish like you and him.” She gave that
- explanation suddenly, and it satisfied him.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I am not really bookish, either,” he said. “Of course you won’t be going
- alone to Heaton Park.”
- </p>
- <p>
- She hoped not. “I expect so,” she said.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam took the plunge. “Could I have the honour of accompanying you, Miss
- Struggles?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, but you are so busy. I must not waste your time.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It couldn’t be wasted with you,” said Sam, and glanced guiltily at
- Peter’s chair, as if he had exceeded the limits of propriety, but he had
- never seen Peter with anything but a benevolent smile, on his face, and
- was unable to see him imaginatively now in any other mood. He took fresh
- courage. “May I call for you?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “That,” said Ada, “would never do. It would disturb father at his sermon.
- I shall go by tram at about three o’clock.” She rose. There was nothing to
- be done with Sam in that house, but she pinned her faith to Heaton Park:
- and not in vain.
- </p>
- <p>
- Allow for the difference in size, distance and the general scale of
- things, and Heaton Park may be regarded as the Manchester equivalent to
- Richmond Park.
- </p>
- <p>
- Once upon a time the Manchester Town Council had a magnificent
- opportunity, and lost it. There are legends that they did not mean to lose
- it, and that they did not lose it through any fault of theirs. But they
- lost it. They lost the chance of buying Trafford Park, which lies along
- the banks of the Manchester Ship Canal, and was bought by Mr. Ernest Terah
- Hooley. It is said that Trafford Park, now a flourishing and rather
- American-look-ing industrial town (even the streets in its residential
- area are numbered, and not named, after the American plan, and railways
- stray about the roads, <i>more Americano</i>), is the one successful
- enterprise associated with the name of Hooley. That may or may not be
- true: at any rate the Manchester Town Council missed its chance at
- Trafford Park, and when Heaton Park, another old estate, came into the
- market, the Council did not repeat their mistake.
- </p>
- <p>
- One goes, ascending all the way, through Cheetham Hill, the Ghetto, to the
- heights of Crumpsall and the Park by a municipal tram, which is admirably
- cheap or criminally cheap (according to one’s views on municipal trams),
- and, in any case, magnificently efficient: and at the end of the ride, one
- finds beauty. One may find tea at Heaton Hall, and pictures that overflow
- from the meagre Art Gallery in Mosley Street, and municipal golf-links,
- but one finds also beauty.
- </p>
- <p>
- It is a rolling country, raised above the smoke, dotted with wood and
- lake. Old gardens cling about the Hall, with rhododendron glades where
- there are sculpture and pools, and the Park rolls free in open air that is
- as clean as any air can be within five miles of Manchester Town Hall. It,
- lacks of Paradise, and if one can see green hills from Heaton Park, one
- cannot kelp but see the factory stacks that crown them or rise up from the
- valleys, but beauty lingers here on the outskirts of an ugly city secure
- against the jerry-builder and the ultimate defilement.
- </p>
- <p>
- Ada was going to Heaton Park. Lovers have gone to Heaton Park before Ada
- and they will go when Ada has crumbled to dust. Ada went, and Sam went
- with her.
- </p>
- <p>
- He went with her, not she with him: but if she led, he was very, very far
- from admitting it, though it may have been his obscure, subconscious
- knowledge of her leadership which made him outwardly assume the mien and
- the gestures of a leader. He asserted, every inch of him, that he was man,
- the conqueror, and she permitted the assertion and flattered it. Leading,
- indeed, was not a habit of Ada’s, who was born to be led, but it is given
- to all of us to outstrip our nature on occasion, and this was Ada’s
- chance. A subtle skill was granted her that she might be cunning with her
- opportunity. She was all calculation now, while Sam forgot to calculate,
- and walked with Ada on his arm along the main drive of Heaton Park.
- </p>
- <p>
- Romance kept step with him and put a radiant veil between his sober senses
- and this witching hour: through glamour he beheld his Ada, and saw that
- she was good. He soared to high ambition, either to die or to possess the
- nymph, and now, that heady hour, to put all to the test amongst the
- rhododendron bushes behind the Hall.
- </p>
- <p>
- There, by a patch of ancient turf, he halted her, and found a seat near
- the pool where water-lilies thrive: a lovers’ nook, love haunted. Who
- knows what ardours of the old régime, when lords and ladies trod that
- turf, had passed upon the now decaying stone of that comely seat? What
- ghostly lovers in satin and brocade stood round to bless them or to mock?
- Wood pigeons cooed above them, calling the tune, and Sam danced to it in
- an ecstasy of hot desire.
- </p>
- <p>
- She had the sleek self-satisfaction of a cat, the same unhurried certainty
- that the mouse was hers to gobble when she chose. Ada was very happy.
- </p>
- <p>
- But apprehension gripped him now. He had not known her for a week, and she
- was Ada. Peter’s daughter. He stood aghast at his precipitance, then, with
- the feeling that it was after all a “stroke” (though a larger one than
- ever before), and that he believed in acting promptly, cleared his throat
- and plunged into speech.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Miss Struggles,” he said, “I know that I have only made your acquaintance
- during the current week, but I seem to have known you all my life. It’s
- because I used to see you in church, I daresay. I mean we were not
- strangers when we met, and, anyhow,” he continued recklessly, “I don’t
- care if we were. I’m not the hesitating sort. I mean, show me a thing, and
- I can tell you right off whether it’s good or bad. My mind’s made up in a
- jiffy: that’s the kind of fellow I am. And when my mind’s made up, I act.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Ada had given a little gasp at the phrasing of his opening—that
- “during the current week,” an idiom from his business correspondence
- slipping in here to mark his nervousness—but he was fairly launched
- now, and she purred gently like a cat well lubricated with butter.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes, Mr. Branstone,” she said, “I think men ought to be resolute.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “So do I,” he replied. “And so I am. Quite resolute and quite determined
- about you.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “About me?” She turned innocent eyes wonderingly at him. “I didn’t know
- you were being personal.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well,” he said, “I am. I am,” he repeated, and took her hand.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Mr. Branstone,” she murmured, as one who sees a vision splendid in a
- dream, and let her hand lie limp in his.
- </p>
- <p>
- He bent to her. “Can’t you,” he asked hoarsely, “can’t you call me Sam?”
- </p>
- <p>
- She called him Sam, and he kissed her.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Ada!” He spoke her name like a caress. “Ada!” Her name was wonderful; she
- was a miracle; Sam was triumphant love. At that moment he was passionately
- in love, and he had conquered. He had pressed the lips of his divinity,
- shyly, with a revealing inexpertness which should have charmed her, who,
- being a woman, knew all about love while Sam was in short trousers. It
- didn’t charm Ada, it touched no deeper chord than satisfaction at a good
- job well done. This was his first, his freshest love, but she cared only
- that the fish was on her line, securely hooked. He saw her face, idealized
- her face and gloried in her face: she saw a wedding-ring, she was to be
- Mrs., she was to escape the book-ridden home of Peter Struggles. Both had
- their moment then, but Sam, in his, loved Ada, and Ada only loved herself.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Darling,” he said, and sought her lips again She saw the thirst of him—and
- used it.
- </p>
- <p>
- She drew back. “I do not think you ought to kiss me again until we have
- mentioned this to father,” said Ada Struggles, digging the hook more
- deeply in her fish. “Not,” she went on, as she saw him flinch, “that I do
- not want you to. Only——”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes,” he said, as she left it at the “only,” and allowed him to
- appreciate her infinite delicacy. “Yes. Of course. Shall we have tea at
- the Hall?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh,” said Ada, “ought we to?” She was seen to tremble on the brink of a
- delicious temptation, and with difficulty to resist. “I’m afraid,” she
- decided, “not yet. But father will have finished his sermon by now, and if
- you came and saw him at once, then... then, Sam...” She eyed him,
- languishing, and opened up for him the golden vista of a jocund courtship—once
- Peter had been “seen.” He came, obediently, to see Peter, and she relaxed
- her standard so far as to take his arm down the drive of Heaton Park.
- Indeed, just at the corner by the copse, where they were hidden, he had an
- arm round her waist: his feet trod air, and his head was with the stars.
- </p>
- <p>
- Ada was thinking, “If he gets the engagement ring to-night, I can show it
- after church to-morrow.”
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER IX—ADA AND A MAD TRAM-CAR
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">O</span>N general grounds—on
- the grounds, for instance, of anything so out-of-date and out of reason as
- filial piety—Ada was quite indifferent to Peter’s “consent,” and
- wanted it only to shackle Sam more firmly. She had not much doubt that
- Peter would consent, as in fact he did, though not so readily as she had
- anticipated. She did not exhibit an engagement ring at church next day for
- the reason that she had none to exhibit. Peter kept Sam too late for that.
- </p>
- <p>
- Of course Ada was wrong about Peter: she thought him a good man and
- consequently a perfect fool, whereas his foolishness was imperfect, and he
- was subject, like most unworldly people, to streaks of acumen about
- worldly affairs. They come sometimes, these disconcerting fits of
- perception, as if a dam had burst, and usually the times are inconvenient
- to those who have reckoned on the unworldliness.
- </p>
- <p>
- Peter answered her expectation so far as to say, “Bless my soul,” and so
- far only. After that, he began an elaborate and skilful catechism of Sam,
- which pretended to be a friendly talk about books, but was really an
- examination of Sam Branstone, his character and disposition. At the
- beginning Peter knew little of Sam beyond what his observations at the
- Concentrics had told him, and Sam’s volunteered remarks about his salary
- and his prospects interested Peter to a very slight extent. At the end
- Peter decided that Sam was to be trusted to make things easy for Ada on
- the material side, and that spiritually he was not beyond hope.
- </p>
- <p>
- But he had not, spiritually, been touched as yet. Would Ada touch him?
- That was the question for Peter, who knew his Ada. Ada could be led. He
- admitted that he himself had failed with her, but he was not a strong man.
- A strong man, with love as his ally, could lead Ada, could form her, and
- Sam had strength, and, Peter thought, love. It depended, then, on whether
- Sam’s love for Ada, reacting on him, would quicken his latent spirituality
- so that the lead he gave to Ada would be good. And on the whole Peter
- thought there was a reasonable chance. He believed in the power of love,
- he believed that love is God and God is love, and confronted with his pair
- of self-confessed lovers he read their future optimistically in the light
- of his belief. What else could Peter do? They said they were in love, they
- appeared to be in love, they had the symptoms of the state of love. He
- could only judge the case on the evidence before the court.
- </p>
- <p>
- He could not know that with Sam the symptoms, though real, were temporary,
- and with Ada an intelligent mimicry. He gave his assent to their
- engagement formally and very solemnly.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam left the house late, thrilling with Ada’s “Good-night” kiss, but the
- glow was quick to fade, and he found himself thinking rather of Peter than
- of Ada, whom of course, he loved. If ever probe was gentle, it was
- Peter’s: nevertheless, Sam had felt the probe antagonistically. He had
- shivered naked before Peter’s inquisition, he had understood that he was
- under examination, and resented it. It was, however disguisedly,
- opposition, and the thought of that kindly opponent led him to think of
- one from whom, also, opposition was to be expected, and, probably, less
- tactfully. It led to Anne.
- </p>
- <p>
- Well, that was the fate of lovers: it was the way to deepen love and,
- perhaps already a little doubtful of his love, he welcomed the idea of
- Anne in opposition. It was curious that, while he thought of Ada as the
- one woman in the world, he should expect Anne to be hostile not merely to
- the idea of his marriage in general, but to marriage with Ada in
- particular. It was hardly loyal to Ada, who should have reigned
- unchallengably queen; and he could offer Anne the argument of the
- advantages of being Peter Struggles’ son-in-law. But, with it all, he
- looked for friction, and Anne was not to disappoint him there, although at
- first she took it with a calmness which disarmed him.
- </p>
- <p>
- He came in, of course, late, and ate his supper, silently hoping that she
- would give him an opening, but Anne asked no questions, though she had not
- seen him since early morning, and Sam was not often out for meals. She
- asked no questions because she wanted to watch him first. It was clear to
- her at a glance that he was in one of two conditions: he was drunk or he
- was in love, and she wanted to make no mistake. If it was drink she would
- move very promptly and directly: if love, cannily and by devious ways. She
- found quickly that it was not drink. It was more serious.
- </p>
- <p>
- Her silence awed him. “Mother,” he asked by way of breaking it, “aren’t
- you well?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Aye,” she said grimly, “I’m well. Are you?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’ve eaten a good supper.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I noticed that. I’ll clear away now.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Wait a bit. I’ve something to tell you.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I reckon it’ll keep till morning. You mayn’t have known it, but you came
- in late. It’s bed-time and beyond.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Still,” he said, “I’d like you to hear this tonight.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You sound serious,” said Anne, and sat. “What is it, Sam?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It’s something rather wonderful, mother.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It would be,” said Anne. “What’s her name?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam rose, astonished at her perspicacity. “You guessed!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m none in my dotage yet.” Anne was grim.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Mother, I hope you’re pleased. You must be pleased. It’s all so wonderful
- to me.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I asked you her name,” said Anne.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It’s Ada Struggles. You know,” he went on hurriedly, “how much we all
- admire her father.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I know, but I don’t know Ada.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You will soon,” said Sam enthusiastically.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I will that,” said Anne, and there was menace in her voice. She took her
- candle. “Good-night, my son,” she said, kissing him, which was not
- habitual.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Is that all?” he asked. “All that you have to say?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I don’t know Ada yet,” she said, and so was gone to bed.
- </p>
- <p>
- Peter and Anne went opposite ways in their search to know whether this
- marriage was the right thing for their children’s happiness. Peter ignored
- the bread and butter problem, or took it for granted: and his was the
- higher wisdom. He knew that Sam was not made of the stuff that starves for
- bread; not in his body but in his soul was Sam likely to be pinched.
- </p>
- <p>
- Anne took the earthlier view that happiness resulted from home comforts.
- Ada, as she knew, was no shining beauty, and the better for that. Beauty
- is skin-deep. But she looked frail, only so, for the matter of that, did
- some of the toughest girls, and she took it that Sam had had the
- horse-sense to make some preliminary inquiries before he committed
- himself. Sam, it appeared, had not.
- </p>
- <p>
- Was Ada strong and healthy? Was she economical? Could she cook? Was she
- her own dressmaker? And when she found that Sam could answer none of these
- questions, she said ironically: “Well, at least, you’ve eyes in your head.
- Is their house clean?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam could only say that he supposed so, and Anne looked witheringly at
- him. “Yes, you’re in love all right,” she said. “They say love’s blind.
- You’re leaving a lot to me.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Mother,” he said, alarmed, “what are you going to do?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m going to get acquainted with Ada,” she said. “One of us must know
- her, and you don’t.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “If you’ll be fair to her,” said Sam. “I’m not afraid.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’ll be fair,” said Anne, and meant to be; but is a mother ever fair to
- the prospective wife of her only son? Perhaps, and in that case Anne went
- to Ada with an open mind. “After all,” she reflected, “I daresay Tom
- Branstone’s mother didn’t think much of me, though Tom was one of ten and
- it makes a difference. It oughtn’t to, though”——she pulled
- herself up. “Anne, you’ll be fair to the girl.” She looked indulgently at
- Ada’s curtains and rang Ada’s bell.
- </p>
- <p>
- But Ada was wearing silver bangles on her wrists and her shoes were made
- for show. Anne had the sort of pleasure which comes from having one’s
- worst fears realized. She may have generalized too sweepingly, but she
- held that only shallow people wear silver bangles and shoes whose aim is
- daintiness and not durability.
- </p>
- <p>
- First impressions, at any rate, went heavily against Ada, but Anne
- remembered her promise to be fair. It was possible that when Tom Branstone
- took Anne to see his mother, that lady did not like Anne’s way of doing
- her hair. To each generation the symbols of its youth and perhaps bangles
- on Ada were not more skittish than a cairngorn brooch had been on Anne.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I have tea ready, Mrs. Branstone,” said Ada. “Sam told me you were
- coming.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Did he?” Anne was surprised into saying. She had not told Sam of her
- intention and his guess at it and his warning of Ada had spoilt her plan
- of coming upon Ada unawares. She wanted Ada unprepared and unadorned: Ada
- at home, not Ada “at home.” And Ada was very much “at home.” The room had
- been “turned out”—and so had Peter that it might be—company
- manners and the company tea-pot were on exhibition, and everything was
- formal and obviously thought out. And, as Anne had to admit, not badly
- thought out either. Ada had not been to that expensive boarding school for
- nothing; she had an air to awe a porter’s widow. Anne didn’t like her
- trick of putting the milk in the cup before she poured the tea, nor her
- dogmatic way of asserting that it improved the flavour and that “everybody
- did it now.” Everybody, did not do it, Anne did not do it; but, again,
- perhaps this was the modern touch, and Anne had come to be fair.
- </p>
- <p>
- She made her first score when Ada left the room for hot water. “This
- room’s been dusted to-day,” thought Anne. “I’ll see what her dusting is
- worth.” She put it to the test by running her finger along the top of the
- books on one of the shelves, and her finger was very black.
- </p>
- <p>
- The only way to keep books clean in Manchester is the way taken by nine
- out of ten people: they have no books. Some of the others put books behind
- glass, like orchids, the rest have the habit of blowing hard at a book
- when they take it from its shelf, and of washing their hands before
- opening it.
- </p>
- <p>
- Anne did not know that. She kept Sam’s few books clean by daily
- elbow-grease, and now furtively wiped her dirty finger on her stocking
- with the feeling that she had found out Ada. The dust on the books (and
- certainly it was thick) confirmed the impression left by the bangles, and
- Anne was not in the least ashamed of her spying. Sam had stolen a march on
- her by warning Ada and she paid him in his own coin.
- </p>
- <p>
- And from then onwards the score rose steadily against Ada. There were
- cakes for tea. Now the only excuse for cakes was that one baked them
- oneself and Ada confessed that they came from Mrs. Stubbins and made the
- further mistake of showing an expert’s knowledge in the productions of
- Mrs. Stubbins’ confectionery shop. “Frivolous in food as well as dress,”
- was Anne’s comment. Her dress, Anne learnt, had been made by Madame
- Robinson.
- </p>
- <p>
- “She’s dear,” said Ada, “but quite French. And, of course, she comes to
- church.”
- </p>
- <p>
- No Nonconformists need apply; but Anne was thinking not of Madame’s
- religion but her bills. The employer of a quite French dressmaker called
- Robinson, born Duff, was no wife for Sam Branstone.
- </p>
- <p>
- And by way of making Anne’s assurance doubly sure, Ada let slip something
- about being under the doctor.
- </p>
- <p>
- But Anne was not sanguine. She saw clearly enough that it was precisely
- Ada’s weakness which was her strength with Sam. Sam had been leant upon by
- Madge and George, and liked it, as Anne herself, in that case, had liked
- it. But that was a different case from this. Madge had the claim of
- sisterhood; Anne could see nothing in Ada and Ada’s weakness to give her
- the claim to lean on Sam: and the leaning in marriage should not be
- one-sided. Ada could give Sam nothing except herself, and Anne did not
- think that gift worth having.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam, unfortunately, did and Anne doubted her power of changing his mind.
- Her first attempt, at all events, must be with Ada, and she felt cramped
- in Ada’s house, for the reason, perhaps, that it was Peter’s house, the
- shrine of his simplicity. She wanted Ada cut off from the defences of the
- tea-table and her own familiar surroundings, and saying something about
- the warmth of the evening, suggested a ride on the top of a tram-car.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I often do it myself,” said Anne. “It blows the cobwebs away.”
- </p>
- <p>
- She did it as a matter of fact not often, for so it would have lost its
- quality of a dissipation, but with a wise irregularity she escaped the
- thraldom of her house on a tram-car. Tram rides were her romance, her
- safety-valve, her glimpse at life. Six-pennyworth of tram is cheaper in
- the long run than fourpennyworth of gin: both carry one away, but the
- tram-car brings one safely back.
- </p>
- <p>
- Anne’s lip tightened when she saw that Ada did not change the flimsy shoes
- and that her hat eclipsed their flimsiness. A “baby” hat, of imitation
- lace, from which her face peeped out like a drooping, sapless flower.
- “Yes,” thought Anne. “Men being men, that hat is clever. It’s a trap for
- fools and it caught my fool. Ada Struggles, you’re dangerous.”
- </p>
- <p>
- They took the front seat on the tram and aloud she said, using purposely
- her roughest accent: “It’s queer to think of our Sam marrying a lady. I’m
- not saying he doesn’t deserve it, but his father were a railway porter and
- mine were a policeman. His sister was in service.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Sam wall get on,” said Ada, with conviction.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m none doubting it,” said Anne. “But he’s had luck and it’s a question
- if the luck’ll hold. Mr. Travers took him up and sent him to Grammar
- School, and Sam didn’t do too well there. He disappointed me and he’s not
- gone on as he might have done. The fight’s ahead of him yet and he’ll need
- a fighter by his side. I’ve done my share for him this long while and I’m
- getting old. I shall be glad of a rest, Ada. Sam’s an early riser and it’s
- weary work getting up on a winter’s morning to light the fire and get his
- breakfast ready. Only that won’t trouble you. You’re young.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Of course,” said Ada, “we shall have a servant.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “What!” exclaimed Anne, “on two pounds ten a week, with me to keep and
- all? I wouldn’t reckon on that, if I were you. Later on, perhaps. But I
- know it can’t be done at present, or Sam would have done it for me.” The
- idea of Anne Branstone with a wench about her house struck her as
- humorous. Anne might have help some day—when she was bed-ridden:
- till then, her house was her house. “No,” she went on, “you can take it
- from me that it’ll not run to a servant. I don’t know what his idea is
- about me, whether he will want me to live with you or not. Likely not. A
- man doesn’t want his mother about when he’s wed.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No,” agreed Ada hopefully. Anne oppressed her.
- </p>
- <p>
- “No. And I can get on with a pound a week from him. That’ll leave you
- thirty shillings. Well, I’ve done it, so I know it can be done, though
- mind you, it’s a struggle all the time and double tides when the babies
- begin to come. But of course I’ll help you—with advice. I’m not for
- forcing myself on you, but naturally I know Sam’s ways and his likings
- about food. He’s a bit difficult at times, too, but that’s nothing. All
- men are and you’ll know that, having had your father to do for. I don’t
- say Sam’s finicky, but he likes what he likes and I hope you’re fond of
- the same things. It always turned me up to clean a rabbit, and I never
- liked the smell of onions, but that’s a favourite dish of Sam’s and so I’d
- just to grin and bear it. And I know you’ll do the same for Sam.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Ada squirmed helplessly. She could have screamed. Anne sat at the outside
- of the seat and pinned her to it. The tram seemed a Juggernaut car which
- drove implacably over her dreams: a prison where she was tortured by a
- coarse old woman with work-roughened hands and an endless flow of vitriol.
- She wanted to tell Anne that she lied, that the more she deprecated Sam
- the more desirable Ada knew him to be, that her grapes were neither sour
- nor to be soured by Anne’s insane jealousy; and she could not do it. The
- ride seemed more of a nightmare with every moment that passed. The tram
- was a mad wheeled cage with a mad driver and a mad guard. It left the
- lines and careered wildly into desolation, and she was fettered in it to
- an avenging fury who would not stop talking, but with ruthless common
- sense pricked all the bubbles of her hopes. She shut her eyes and
- abandoned herself to misery. Each minute seemed an hour. She thought that
- somebody was throttling her, that the flying cage was her tomb, that
- vampires sucked her blood, and her naked, drained body was shackled to her
- seat until the car, driving inevitably through black space, bumped finally
- against a star in one consuming smash. She opened her eyes to find that
- the tram had stopped at its suburban terminus and that Anne was asking:
- “Shall we get down for a walk or shall we go back by the same car?”
- </p>
- <p>
- So she was still in the living world, and with the consciousness of it
- courage returned to her. For a minute she was silent, fighting her demons
- off, catching at facts and weighing them. Anne was not a vampire, but an
- old worn woman who had, curiously, the right to call Sam Branstone son—Ada’s
- future mother-in-law, and a quaint one too; one to be put firmly and
- haughtily in her place and kept there.
- </p>
- <p>
- “We’ll stay on this car,” she replied. Its madness had departed. It was a
- tram, quite eminently sane and usual. “I think,” she went on, “that you
- exaggerate the difficulties. I’ve no doubt that Sam will have more money
- by the time we’re married. You see, he has me to work for now.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Not a simper with it either. Pure matter-of-fact statement, and the truth
- of it hit Anne, the cool assumption that Ada as a spur to effort was more
- competent than Anne. And this to Anne who had learnt algebra for Sam, to
- Anne who had underfed herself that he might wear the clothes a Grammar
- School boy ought to wear, to Anne who—oh, it was ineffable, but it
- defeated her because she knew, bitterly, gallingly, but undeniably, that
- it was true. This baby-faced chit, this fool in petticoats was more to Sam
- than the mother who bore him. Queen Anne was dead and Ada Struggles
- reigned in place of her.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER X—GERALD ADAMS, SOCIOLOGIST
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>NNE called at
- Madge’s on her way home. Madge’s, in spite of George’s progress, was still
- the house which had been the premises of the Hell-fire Club. Anne did not
- often go there and never without reason, but Madge was at a loss to know
- the reason of this visit, nor did she guess it when Anne unobtrusively
- dovetailed into The conversation about young Sam Chappie a question which
- might have seemed irrelevant. “Have you done anything yet with that spare
- room of yours upstairs?” she asked.
- </p>
- <p>
- “No,” said Madge. “Nor likely to, I fancy.” That was the reason of the
- visit. Anne was safeguarding her retreat, though she by no means admitted
- that it would come to a retreat. Engagements do not invariably lead to
- marriage. Meantime, hers was the waiting game and a rupture with Sam at
- this stage was to be avoided.
- </p>
- <p>
- When he asked her, not too confidently, if she did not agree with him
- about the wonder of Ada, she exercised a noble self-restraint, and all she
- said was: “She’s not the wife for a poor man, Sam.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No,” said Sam thoughtfully. “I’d tumbled to that. And I don’t mean to be
- poor either,” and so went out to open the dark chapter of his bright
- success. He went to the Concentrics, not knowing that he was going to his
- fate. He went because it was the night of their weekly meeting and he had
- to go somewhere to avoid Anne’s eye, but his mood was not concentric. “I
- must get rich for Ada, rich for Ada,” was the burden of his thought—so
- early did he justify Ada’s words to Anne—and it was not a timely
- thought for a Concentrics evening.
- </p>
- <p>
- He had even forgotten that he had a special interest in this meeting,
- where the lecturer was to be Adams, once Sam’s pet aversion and unbeatable
- rival at the Grammar School. He was reminded of it when he found himself
- accosted by a young man whom he could not at first identify.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Jove! If it isn’t Sammy Branstone! Are you a member of these fossils?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Dubby Stewart!” said Sam, as recognition dawned on him.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Reed’s here as well, somewhere,” said Stewart. “It’s a gathering of the
- clan.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Reed and Stewart, it seemed, were both members, which is to say that they
- had come once or twice some time ago and continued to keep up the small
- subscription from force of habit or through sheer weakness to stop paying
- it. Few societies indeed could exist were it not for the enthusiasm of the
- attending nucleus and the subscriptions of the nonattending mass.
- </p>
- <p>
- “We came to hear Gerald Adams make an ass of himself,” Stewart explained.
- “What a subject!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam had even forgotten what the subject was. “Rich for Ada, rich for Ada,”
- was still ringing in his ears.
- </p>
- <p>
- The subject was “Social Purity.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Which accounts,” said Stewart, “for the size of the audience. They’ve all
- come hoping for the worst. I know I have.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The worst did not happen, or, rather, if it did, it was so skilfully
- disguised that nobody recognized it as the worst. It was easy to mistake
- it for the best.
- </p>
- <p>
- Adams was one part in earnest and two parts impish in the manner of the
- superior person who is out for an intellectual lark. He had a constant
- preoccupation with that which is known above all other questions as <i>the</i>
- social question. It was not a nice preoccupation for a young man: it was,
- for instance, remote from the healthy exuberance of Sam’s Rabelaisianism.
- And, of course, Adams was wily: he wasn’t the stuff of martyrdom. He
- enjoyed, as an intellectual gymnastic, the treatment of his subject so
- that it should at once shock his audience and win him their approval as an
- honest man doing an unpleasant job from conviction.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam agreed with Stewart. His old prejudice against Adams was strong within
- him and he hoped Adams would come a cropper. That was at the beginning,
- when Adams, with an egregious affectation of superiority, began to read
- his lecture; but soon, quite soon, Sam changed his mind and hoped for
- nothing but that the skilful skater would keep his balance, on the thin
- ice.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Rich for Ada,” and here, as Sam saw it, was a “stroke” indeed if Adams
- were successful to the end and if at the end he would listen sensibly to
- Sam.
- </p>
- <p>
- Adams was in little danger. He was of Oxford, London, the world, and his
- audience of Manchester. And he stooped to conquer with a lecture that was
- a mosaic of advances and retreats, of blazing indiscretions and smug
- apologies, of audacities and diffidence.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam watched the audience keenly, and it would not be unjust to say that
- the audience gloated. Not all of them gloated, but as a whole, as an
- audience, they lapped up Adams’ lecture like mother’s milk. He called it
- frankness and gave unnecessary detail, he had an appearance of honest
- indignation and a reality of bathing in mud with relish. It was abominable
- but diabolically clever; indecent to the core, it artfully evaded anything
- to warrant a police court charge of indecency; it was foulness cloaked in
- piety, marching under the banner of Reform. He was a crusader in
- masquerade, flashing beneath their guard of British reticence a rapier
- whose hilt was a cross.
- </p>
- <p>
- Adams found a curious satisfaction in standing there, like a penitent at a
- Salvation Army meeting, pretending to an immense personal knowledge of
- evil which was, happily, impossible, and he delighted in the presence of a
- cleric in the chair. The thing developed, for him, into an exciting game,
- a contest of his wits with Peter’s. He had carried his audience, but the
- chairman sat aloof and dubious. If Peter saw through him, he had lost; if
- not, he won. For Peter he read the condemnatory passages with vibrant
- earnestness, and for Peter he read as if reluctantly, conscience-impelled,
- the details of his evidence.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam caught the infection, too, but hardly as a game. He hung on Peter’s
- judgment with a deep anxiety, watched Peter flush and shuffle in his
- chair, saw him take snuff nervously, trembled at the moment when Peter
- seemed about to interrupt, sighed with relief when Peter sat back silently
- again and waited feverishly for the chairman’s speech.
- </p>
- <p>
- There would probably have been little doubt about Peter’s verdict had
- Adams been an ordinary Concentric, lecturer and a member of the Society.
- But he was neither, and was there by invitation. And he was not only of
- Oxford, Peter’s University, but brilliantly of Oxford, of Balliol, with
- academic honours thick upon him. If Peter thought, as Adams spoke, that he
- ought to call him to order, he remembered that Adams was a Double First,
- and desisted. He couldn’t be a hypocrite—because he had won the
- Ireland. He was terribly in earnest now—because he had won the Greek
- Verse Prize. He was single-minded, chivalrous, braving the misapprehension
- of the scurrilous, open and honest—because he was a Fellow of
- Balliol.
- </p>
- <p>
- It did not matter to Peter that Adams’ father was the richest parishioner
- in St. Mary’s; it mattered even less that Adams was exquisitely dressed in
- exactly the shade of grey appropriate to an ardent crusader. (“Look at his
- damned clothes,” Reed had whispered to Stewart. “Hasn’t he thought it
- out?” He had: his clothes were chaste if his lecture wasn’t.) But
- scholarship did matter to Peter, whose other name was Charity, and once he
- had decided that Gerald was sincere, that all he said was subordinate to
- and justified by high purpose, he was generous, and the more generous
- because he had doubted.
- </p>
- <p>
- “The subject of Mr. Adams’ lecture,” he said, “is like nettles: if it is
- not handled boldly, it stings. I have nothing but praise for the courage,
- the down rightness, the earnestness of his treatment of this distressing
- evil. I think that we have all been deeply stirred by his instances of
- man’s inhumanity to women. As a churchman I feel a special responsibility
- and, may I say, a special gratitude to Mr. Adams for his study of this
- subject. Medicine, as we all know, has its martyrs, its research workers
- who sacrifice themselves for the health of their fellowmen. Mr. Adams, who
- has examined this social sore so thoroughly, at what cost in pain to
- himself only the most sensitive amongst us can guess, deserves to be
- ranked with the martyrs of science....” And so on, doubly handsome because
- he felt ashamed of himself for doubting Gerald’s honesty, and made amends.
- </p>
- <p>
- Adams had won his game, hands down. He thought the old boy gloriously
- funny and he thought Sam Branstone, who rose when Peter sat down, funnier
- still. Sam believed in striking while the iron was hot: he didn’t want
- Peter to have the opportunity of changing his mind when he came to think
- things over coolly.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam began by congratulating himself on the good fortune that had been his
- in having been the school-fellow of the distinguished Mr. Adams. Adams
- gazed hard at Sam through his austere pince-nez and was observed
- perceptibly to start. “Gad,” he was thinking, “it’s that lout, the
- porter’s son.” But he liked Sam’s flattery very well. Sam, it appeared,
- had been so deeply impressed by Mr. Adams’ admirable, indeed eloquent and
- moving address, and by the chairman’s very just eulogy of it, that he
- thought it would be a tremendous pity if so arresting, so well-written a
- paper failed to reach a wider audience than that before which it had been
- read. They had been waiting for this paper; its appeal was wide; the
- urgency of its need, instinct in every word of it, was emphasized by the
- chairman’s remarks. He had, therefore, a practical proposal to make. The
- paper ought to be printed, and if Mr. Adams could spare him a few moments
- after the meeting, Sam hoped that he would let him arrange the matter.
- </p>
- <p>
- He sat down amongst great applause. Under its cover Stewart whispered:
- “You inimitable ass!” Sam looked at him in pained surprise. “I want to see
- that paper in print,” he declared indignantly.
- </p>
- <p>
- The debate meandered in the usual futile way. Few had anything to say, but
- many liked the sound of their own voices and indulged their preference at
- length, till both speakers and talkers had taken their innings and Sam was
- able to go up to the platform. Peter had not changed his mind and was
- complimenting Adams in his simple, charming way.
- </p>
- <p>
- It ought, no doubt, to have made Adams thoroughly ashamed of himself, but
- it did not. It hardened his cynicism so that, when Sam came up, all he was
- thinking was: “I’ve gulled the parson. Now to bounce the porter’s son.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “How are you, Branstone?” he asked. “Glad to meet you again.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “And I you,” said Sam. They shook hands. “Have you had time to think of
- what I proposed?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “As a matter of fact,” said Adams, which is the usual way of beginning a
- lie, “I’d thought of sending my little paper to one of the Reviews—the
- <i>Fortnightly</i> or the <i>Contemporary</i>.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Excellent,” said Peter.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam could have kicked him. “I venture to differ,” he said. “The chief
- object should be to reach as wide a public as possible. My own idea was to
- do it by itself in the form of a——” he was going to say
- “pamphlet,” but altered it to “brochure.” He thought it sounded more
- attractive. “In the heavy reviews it would be read by comparatively few,
- and it would not stand alone as in a brochure. It would take its place
- along with other articles. And I have heard that contributors to the
- reviews are not paid highly.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Adams had not thought of payment at all, but he thought of it now, with
- zest. He was rich, but the idea of despoiling the porter’s son, who had
- had the assurance to go to school with him, struck him as the crowning
- move in a jolly game. This was, transcendently, his night for winning.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, which was true. “I suppose I should get about
- twenty pounds for it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I will give you twenty-five,” said Sam.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Sam!” protested Peter. He approached the motive (as he understood it),
- but considered the offer reckless from a young man who contemplated
- matrimony.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Twenty-five pounds,” repeated Sam firmly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well,” laughed Gerald, quite unable not to laugh at the idiot’s
- persistence, “if you’re as keen on doing good as all that, I’ll take the
- offer.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Right,” said Sam. “I’ll settle it at once.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He went to the chairman’s table and made out a form of assignment of
- copyright. He had a little knowledge of the law, and it was a dangerous
- thin—for the other fellow. But both Sam and Adams went home that
- night in a state of cherubic self-satisfaction.
- </p>
- <p>
- “What a game?” thought Adams. “And what an ass!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Curiously, the thoughts of Sammy Branstone were not dissimilar. He had
- this advantage over Adams: that Adams had read his paper and had not
- watched his audience all the time. Sam had watched the audience and
- thought twenty-five pounds a cheap price for that paper.
- </p>
- <p>
- He slept on it, and awoke next day with confidence in his investment
- undisturbed, but the news which awaited him at the office shook him at
- first. It was one thing to see a profitable side-line in the publication
- of Adams’ address and another to be suddenly obliged to regard the
- copyright of that paper as his one sound asset. He feared, in cold
- daylight, that it was not quite sound enough for that.
- </p>
- <p>
- Yet what had happened did not come as a complete surprise. Sam knew
- Travers’ habits and knew that men of his habits are liable to die
- suddenly. Travers had died in the night, and Sam was very angry.
- </p>
- <p>
- He told himself that he had no luck with people’s deaths. His father had
- died too soon for Sam, and now Travers was dead just when Sam had become
- engaged, and when he had undertaken a speculation which, however high his
- hopes of it, was after all speculative.
- </p>
- <p>
- An estate agent’s business is largely personal and, if there is no obvious
- successor, no heir apparent already in training for the succession, is apt
- to fall to pieces when its head dies. The process of disintegration in
- this case had set in long ago; drink had begun what death now ended; and
- there was no heir. Lance Travers had decided for medicine and was, on the
- material side, little affected by his father’s death, since Travers had
- bought him a practice a year earlier somewhere in the South, and the
- neighbourhood was proving healthily valetudinarian.
- </p>
- <p>
- The office was not a cheerful place that day. Men estimated their savings
- and balanced them against the probable weeks of unemployment before they
- found new places. A few of them, no doubt, might hope to “go with” the
- business to whomever bought it; and they wondered who would buy and which
- of them would be engaged by the purchaser.
- </p>
- <p>
- They fancied Branstone’s chances, and so, in fact, did Sam, but it was all
- in the air and exceedingly disturbing just when he had given himself so
- much else to think about. Even if he did move with the business, it could
- only be as a clerk. He lost the advantage of Travers’ friendliness and,
- besides, he was not sure that anybody would think the business worth
- buying. Travers had no right to die.
- </p>
- <p>
- Then the thought struck him that he was taking it lying down. He, a lad of
- mettle, was whining like these gutless clerks in the office. He was
- betraying his lucky star. Death, even Tom Branstone’s, had not been
- forbiddingly unkind to him. Tom’s death had led him indirectly to the
- office, to Minnifie, the Concentrics, Ada, and he began to see in Travers’
- death the possibilities of good. It might be the finger of fate, pointing
- him away from the office which had served its turn to a new dispensation
- to be arranged by the collaborators, Sam and Providence, upon the rock of
- Adams’ paper.
- </p>
- <p>
- They carried on the routine work of the office as men under sentence of
- death do little, ordinary things and find a solace in them. Then, late
- that afternoon, Lance Travers came. He had travelled since early morning,
- had been home, seen his father’s doctor and his father’s solicitor and was
- now come to see Sam. They sat in Travers’ private office, where the blinds
- were drawn, and in the presence of Travers’ son, who owed his life to him,
- Sam was conscious of a deeper feeling than he had ever known before, he
- was no longer angry because Travers had died, but mourned him honestly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “By the way,” said Lance presently, “did my father ever tell you about his
- will?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “His will!” said Sam. “No. Why should he?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I thought he might have done,” said Lance. “He made it last year after he
- bought me my practice. He thought then that he ought to do something for
- you, but he didn’t expect to live long and he put it in his will. There’s
- a thousand pounds for you.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam took it nicely. “I’d rather,” he said, “that he were still alive;”
- and, at the moment, he meant it.
- </p>
- <p>
- But he had been right. It was the finger of fate.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0011" id="link2HCH0011"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER XI—UNDER WAY
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>S a simple matter
- of course, Lance offered Sam the first refusal of his father’s business,
- but was not surprised when Sam declined to think of it.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam was far more surprised at himself than Lance at Sam. Lance had never
- looked upon estate agency as a desirable profession, whereas Sam had been
- bored with its routine without losing his respect for its utility, and
- only yesterday he would have jumped at the chance of owning the business.
- He heard with astonishment the sound of his own voice politely refusing
- the offer, but having refused he did not tamper with his swift decision.
- </p>
- <p>
- The fact is, one supposes, that what might be called the quick-firing part
- of his intelligence had absorbed and reacted to the fact of his thousand
- pounds before the whole of him was properly aware of it. At any rate, he
- refused, and, on reflection, approved his refusal.
- </p>
- <p>
- His speculation in Gerald Adams wore a different aspect now that he was a
- capitalist. “Money,” as he had remembered once before, “breeds money,” and
- he doubted if Travers’ business, robbed of Travers’ genial personality,
- were fecund enough for the pace of money-breeding he anticipated. Perhaps,
- too, there was something in the thought that the Travers’ agency was dead
- man’s shoes, while, win or lose, the idea of publishing Adams’ lecture was
- his own invention.
- </p>
- <p>
- Another thing that happened to him with his legacy was the feeling that he
- had regained caste; he belonged again with his old school-fellows. “How
- many of them,” he thought, “can lay hands at a moment’s notice on a
- thousand pounds?” and walked erectly through the street where, naturally,
- since he had not met him in eight years until last night, he encountered
- Stewart.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Hullo,” said Stewart, “how’s the patron of letters? And would a drink be
- any use to you?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam hesitated. Did the way to the society of the Olympians lie through the
- doors of the public-house? Stewart was undeniably Olympian: he had the
- air, the manner, the clothes of well-assured success. He had a lightness
- and a poise that excited Sam’s envy. He had style, this youth who might be
- anything, but who, Sam cynically thought, had probably not paid for his
- distinguished clothes, while Sam was the owner of a thousand pounds. He
- was, thereby, Olympian in quiet fact, which need not be shrieked from the
- house-tops, as Stewart had, apparently, to shriek. Sam <i>was</i>, and
- there was the possibility that Stewart only appeared to be. It gave him
- strength to refuse. Not from principle, but from economical prejudice Sam
- was a teetotaller.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I don’t take alcohol,” he said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It’s never too late to mend,” said Stewart. “Still, there’s a café here,
- and we’ll drink coffee. It’s bad for our hearts, but Balzac wrote the
- ‘Comédie Humaine’ on black coffee, so there may be something in the vice,
- though it isn’t a habit of mine. Two black coffees, Sophie,” he ordered
- from the waitress.
- </p>
- <p>
- “If it isn’t a habit of yours,” asked Sam, “how do you come to know the
- waitress by name?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “‘My dear ass!” said Stewart pityingly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Do you call them all Sophie?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Only when it’s their name. Your name is Sophie, isn’t it?” he said as the
- girl returned with their coffee.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes, sir.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Stewart appreciated Sam’s astonishment. “I know I’m showing off, but I
- like it. If you see a girl with an idiotic silver brooch made up of the
- letters <i>SOPHIE</i> you can assume that it’s her name, and not the name
- of her best boy. Simple, when you know how it’s done, like all first-rate
- conjuring.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I hadn’t noticed her brooch,” said Sam.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I had. That’s the difference. Still, it isn’t fair to blame you. I’m a
- professional observer.” Sam took Stewart to mean that he was a detective,
- but hadn’t time to ask for confirmation, because Stewart asked instead:
- “And what, by the way, are you?” And threw him into some embarrassment by
- the question. What, indeed, at the moment was he?
- </p>
- <p>
- “Doesn’t your observation tell you?” he fenced.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It told me last night that you’re a considerable lunatic. Did you buy
- that stuff of Adams’?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes, I did.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Thought I saw you in the act as I went out. Obviously, then, you’re a
- tripe merchant.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I wonder,” said Sam, “whether you could help me, Stewart. Seriously, I
- mean.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “In the tripe trade?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I want very much to meet a journalist.” He thought a detective ought to
- know journalists.
- </p>
- <p>
- “But, my dear fellow, this is a café. It isn’t a bar. What do you want a
- journalist for?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I will tell that to the journalist.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “If you want to start a paper and you’re looking for an editor, you
- needn’t look further than me. There have been candid moments in my life
- when I have called myself a journalist. At present, I edit the <i>Manchester
- Warden</i>, but I’m open to conviction.” He didn’t quite edit that paper—yet,
- but reported for it at six pounds a week. He did not know shorthand, but
- he quoted Joseph Conrad and Henry James, correctly and incongruously, when
- he wrote a notice of a music-hall performance.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m afraid,” said Sam astutely, “that when I said a journalist, I meant
- something very different from you, but I will tell you how I stand and
- perhaps you will advise me. Last night, as you know, I bought Adams’
- paper. I gave him twenty-five pounds for it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Lunacy,” said Stewart, “is a mild word for your complaint. Twenty-five
- shillings would be a top price for it in a friendly market.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “To-day I reached the office to learn that my employer had died suddenly.
- You remember Lance Travers? It was his father, and with his death, for all
- practical purposes the business comes to an end. Well, you see my
- position.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Stewart quoted Sheridan: “‘The Spanish Fleet thou canst not see, because
- it is not yet in sight.’ And much the same applies to your position, my
- lad. Its postal address is the Womb of Time.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “That is true,” said Sam. “And I may add that I am engaged to be married.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I can admire thoroughness,” said Stewart. “You omit none of the
- essentials.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Now, with it all,” said Sam, “I’m still too proud to go to Adams and ask
- him to let me off my bargain.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “And it wouldn’t be any use if you did,” said Stewart. “He’d laugh at
- you.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I can believe it of him. But I’m landed with his paper. It has cost me
- twenty-live pounds. I meant to print it, and I mean to print it, but I
- mean now to sell it when it is printed.” Sam left Stewart to suppose that,
- had Travers not died, he would have distributed that pamphlet free.
- “Money,” he added, “is a necessity.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He had taken the right line. Stewart’s instinctive generosity was touched,
- and he meant to give this lame dog a lift over the stile. “I see where
- your journalist comes in. All right, Branstone, you can count on me.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “On you?” said Sam. “Oh, I couldn’t ask it of you.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You didn’t ask,” replied Stewart naively. “I offer. I may edit the <i>Manchester
- Warden</i>, but Zeus nods sometimes, ’busmen have been known to take a
- holiday, and there is a paper called the <i>Sunday Judge</i> in whose
- chaste columns I have written under the name of Percy Persiflage. Send me
- a proof of that pamphlet and Percy shall stamp upon it. He will say that
- no decent person could read it without being revolted, and the pamphlet
- will boom. It’s the Sunday-paper public that you want, and... No, Percy
- shall not stamp. Percy shall bless. He will be moved to admiration of Mr.
- Adams’ earnestness, he will applaud the high moral purpose, and will do
- the rest by correspondence. Get your sisters and your cousins and your
- aunts to pitch in letters on either side, and I’ll see they get printed. I
- make this alteration because of the bookstalls.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “The bookstalls?” asked Sam vaguely.
- </p>
- <p>
- “This problem of distribution,” said Stewart impressively, “is the most
- difficult question of modern life. The producer is here, you; the consumer
- (we hope) is everywhere, and the problem is to bring your pamphlet to the
- thirsting consumer. The answer is the bookstall, but the bookstalls are
- cautious. When I say bookstalls I mean the right bookstalls. You will
- never see your money back if the only bookstalls which will exhibit your
- pamphlet are those which sell atrociously printed paperbacked editions of
- ‘Nana’ and ‘Fanny Hill.’ You must flourish on <i>the</i> bookstalls, and
- they banned ‘Esther Waters.’ The bookstalls, Branstone, are going to call
- for tact, and tact shall begin with Percy’s appreciation.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Or earlier,” said Sam.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Earlier?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I hadn’t thought of the bookstalls, but this may help there, as well as
- in other ways. I mean, as far as Manchester is concerned, and if we get it
- on the stalls here, they can’t very well refuse it in other places.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Manchester being Manchester, it isn’t likely,” said Stewart. “What’s your
- idea?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Only this,” said Sam, and showed him his proposed cover for the pamphlet.
- </p>
- <h3>
- THE SOCIAL EVIL
- </h3>
- <p>
- Being an Address
- </p>
- <p>
- By Gerald Adams, M.A.,
- </p>
- <p>
- Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford.
- </p>
- <p>
- As Read before the Concentric Society with The Rev. Peter Struggles in the
- Chair.
- </p>
- <p>
- Stewart looked at it, then he looked at Sam, and Sam seemed to him very
- little like a lame dog now. He whistled loudly. “You’ll get your money
- back, my lad,” he said. “But this is rough on Peter.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Mr. Struggles approved of the lecture.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I wonder if he will approve of this?” said Stewart.
- </p>
- <p>
- “He can’t go back on his word,” said Sam. “Besides, I’m engaged to his
- daughter.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “The thing that troubles me,” said Stewart admiringly, “is that I took you
- for a harmless lunatic. I’m only a journalist myself, with one foot in the
- <i>Manchester Warden</i> and the other in the <i>Sunday Judge</i>. I’m a
- Tory on Sundays and a Liberal on weekdays. I gave up honesty when I gave
- up being young, and I thought I knew the ropes by this time. But when I
- think that I took you for a guileless innocent, I want to go into a corner
- and kick myself hard.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam found this rather alarming he knew that his use, or misuse, of Peter’s
- name was cunning, but began to regret that he had shown Stewart his pro
- posed cover. “But I get my review in the <i>Judge?</i>” he asked hardily.
- </p>
- <p>
- “My son,” said Stewart, “you do. I’ve spent sixpence on coffee and half an
- hour on you. There’s good copy in this and I can’t afford to waste it.
- I’ve my living to earn, and Gerald Adams deserves the worst he’s going to
- get. At the same time, I’ll allow myself the luxury of telling you that
- yours is a lowdown game.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “We didn’t make the world what it is, did we?” said Sam.
- </p>
- <p>
- “And neither you nor I will leave it any better than we found it,” said
- Stewart, prophesying rashly with the boundless cynicism of his twenty-five
- years. “The worst of coffee,” he went on, finishing his cup, “is that it
- makes you thirsty. I’m going across the road for a drink. Do you have one
- with me?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No, thanks,” said Sam. “I have to see a printer.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, yes. Well, why not the Judge Press? I daresay I could get you in
- there on the ground floor.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “But they are not quite the right people for this. They print sporting
- papers, and——”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You’ll die from overheated bearings in your brain-box,” said Stewart.
- “You think of everything.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam had, at least, thought that a printer (however obscure by comparison
- was the Judge Press, whose works were a small town in themselves) who
- issued a religious paper was better for his purpose than the printers of
- the <i>Sunday Judge, Sporting Notions and the Football Times</i>. He went
- to Carter, Meadowbank & Co., who were on the verge of bankruptcy, but
- had the advantage of printing <i>Christian Comfort</i> and the <i>Church
- Child’s Weekly</i>, and arranged with them to print five thousand copies
- of Adams’ paper. Carter, who was the whole firm, looked askance at the
- title, but when Sam pointed out that the Rev. Mr. Struggles had approved
- of the contents, Carter succumbed at once, and did not even attempt a
- protest when Sam instructed him to print on the whole five thousand:
- </p>
- <p>
- “This first edition of one thousand copies is issued at sixpence. The
- price for future editions will be one shilling. Samuel Branstone,
- Publisher.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Carter’s dingy office was decorated with the chief products of his firm,
- texts, the stock-in-trade of commercialized religiosity. Well handled,
- there was money in texts, but Carter was an old man with declining powers
- and a conservative mind. Meadowbank, who had looked after the distributive
- side of the business, was lately dead, and Carter’s nightly prayer was
- that the concern might last his time. As things were promising, it seemed
- unlikely, but here was Sam with an order for him and no disposition to
- beat him down in price. Carter did not like the instruction to describe
- five thousand copies as one thousand, and he didn’t like the subject of
- the pamphlet, but he wanted business, and he couldn’t conceive of a pirate
- sailing under the flag of Mr. Struggles.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam rammed that home, feeling the man’s hesitation. “I think it probable,”
- he said, “that Mr. Struggles will preach a sermon on this pamphlet.
- Perhaps I might tell you that I am going to be his son-in-law.”
- </p>
- <p>
- That settled Carter, and he took the order. He knew, and was sensitive to,
- the influence of Peter Struggles, curate. He knew that in the parish of.
- St. Mary’s, Peter’s smile counted for more than the vicar’s weightiest
- word, and that while the vicar was unknown outside his parish, Peter had
- authority throughout Manchester—an authority which had lately growm
- through Peter’s refusal of preferment to an easy living in the country. It
- hadn’t, of course, been Peter who had told of that refusal, he had not
- told Ada. But it had leaked out, and Manchester, which despises
- selflessness in men, honoured it in the curate; Mancunians were flattered
- by his loyalty to St. Mary’s and by the thought that they were fellow
- citizens to saintliness.
- </p>
- <p>
- Emphatically, the name of Peter Struggles on the pamphlet was a <i>clou</i>,
- but Sam had not told Peter of it yet, and he must do it. He could not
- afford an accident, and Peter, he considered, was manageable.
- </p>
- <p>
- Ada met him at the door with a bright smile, and raised expectant lips,
- but he shook his head, touch ing her shoulder tenderly, and passed in
- front of her into the room so that, when she followed, her face expressed
- the anxiety he desired. He entered himself as a man crushed by grief.
- </p>
- <p>
- “What is it, Sam?” she asked. “What’s the matter?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Peter closed “Plotinus” reluctantly: he never found time enough for
- reading, and here was one of his few evenings interrupted. He had the
- thought, feeling it ungenerous, that interruptions of this kind would end
- when Ada was married.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’ve had sad news to-day. Mr. Travers died in the night. It’s... it’s
- rather a blow.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Peter disdained priestly conventionalities. “He was a good friend to you,
- Sam.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “A second father,” said Sam carefully, not taking the opportunity of
- telling that Travers’ friendship had lasted beyond death. Perhaps he
- thought this moment too sacred for the intrusion of a legacy. “Of course,”
- he went on, “I’ve had all day to think of it, and of the difference this
- will make to me—to us, that is, Ada, for you and me.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “What difference, Sam?” she asked sharply.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It comes to this,” he said dejectedly, “that I am out of work and
- competition is so desperate. While he lived, I had his friendship behind
- me. Now—I don’t say that I’m afraid to stand alone. No doubt it will
- be good for me eventually, but, Ada, you see how it may postpone our
- hopes.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Ada saw it. “Plotinus” took that opportunity of slipping from Peter’s
- knee, and Peter saw it, too, and sighed. “Oh, Sam!” said Ada.
- </p>
- <p>
- “And,” said Sam, looking at Peter with a fine affectation of guilt, “there
- is my recklessness of last night. In my then circumstances, it was
- extravagant. To-day it looks worse than that.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You couldn’t know,” said Peter kindly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “No,” Sam agreed. “I couldn’t know, and I have the feeling now that I must
- abide by what I did.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Very proper, Sam, but Mr. Adams is not poor and I should think that if
- you were to go to him———”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, please,” said Sam, “please don’t press me to do that. A bargain, I
- feel so strongly, is a bargain and should be kept at all costs.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Peter felt silently ashamed of himself. “You are perfectly right,” he
- said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well,” said Sam, “that’s how I feel, but in a sense I’m landed with the
- thing and I propose to go on with it. As I see it—and I know there’s
- a certain amount of inappropriateness in thinking at all of these
- practical affairs with my benefactor so recently dead, but I must, I must——”
- he looked at Ada and it was understood that his thought for her excused
- all—“As I see it, it’s a case for going on and trying to pull the
- chestnuts out of the fire, so to speak. I shall print that paper, and the
- good that I hoped to do will not be lost because my circumstances have
- altered, but I shall make a small charge for it to cover expenses as far
- as possible. And as I naturally want it to sell well, I had the idea of
- stating on the cover that it was first read at the Concentrics under your
- chairmanship. The point of that is that all the members were not there
- last night; it will call their attention to it; and they will, I hope,
- buy. It makes certain of a few reliable purchasers.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Quite, quite,” said Peter. “It’s an excellent idea. Though I can hardly
- suppose that mention of my name has any value, the name of the society
- should certainly help.”
- </p>
- <p>
- His modesty was quite incurable. He had not the faintest notion of the
- wide-spread influence of Peter Struggles. “I have thought of little else
- all day but Mr. Adams’ paper. I wondered if it was my duty to speak of
- this terrible subject from the pulpit. The Church ought not to be silent
- or it may be thought to acquiesce.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam felt his heart leap within him. “Adams thought frankness best,” he
- said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes, yes, at the Concentrics. But there are difficulties for me, and
- perhaps I shall speak only to the Young Men’s Class at the-Sunday School.
- Though that,” he reflected, “is perilously near to compromise.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “But what is it?” asked Ada. “What are you talking about?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam was silent. So was Peter, and the silence grew till he felt it a
- reproach. He looked at Sam. “You see?” he said. “That is the dilemma of
- the Church. I shall speak to the young men, and, after that perhaps,
- perhaps——” He glanced at Ada.
- </p>
- <p>
- “No,” he finished decidedly, “I must leave it at that.” He was fifty-six,
- and most of his life had been lived under Victoria the Good.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0012" id="link2HCH0012"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER XII—DROPPING THE PILOT
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>NNE lived for Sam:
- and if she rarely showed it, if, for instance, it appeared sometimes that
- she lived to make her house the cleanest in the row, that was no more than
- a symptom of her stoicism. She lived for Sam, and he knew it. She belonged
- to a race which hates ostentation like the devil and keeps its feelings
- veiled behind a grim reserve. It conceals emotion as a hidden treasure and
- wears a mask which strangers take to indicate a want of sensibility. She
- had not the habit of caressing Sam; she chastened whom she loved; and Sam
- was very well aware of the strength of Anne’s love.
- </p>
- <p>
- She was ready, at the proper time, to give him to the proper woman, but
- she held that Ada was not the woman nor this the time. She was ready to go
- her ways from Sam, and from life itself, when he made a marriage of which
- she could approve, but she was not ready to leave him to Ada Struggles of
- whom she disapproved. She was not ready to die for the likes of Ada
- Struggles. Let Sam marry Ada, and Anne, meant to live, because some day he
- would have need of her and, when the day came, she would be there.
- </p>
- <p>
- Now, Sam would have been pleased if he could have told Anne about the
- pamphlet and the legacy. He had hoped after the Minnilie affair that his
- next “stroke” would be one of which he could tell Anne, but he did not see
- this as tellable. She would naturally ask what the pamphlet was about, and
- if Peter could not speak of it to his daughter, Sam could speak of it even
- less to his mother. And as to the legacy, what was the use of mentioning
- that to a woman who would point out that security was only to be had with
- two and a half per cent? Which wasn’t at all Sam’s notion of the uses of a
- thousand pounds.
- </p>
- <p>
- After all, he was grown up and a man does not tell his mother everything.
- But unless he is a fool, he tells her the things which she is bound in any
- case to find out, and if he had foreseen the certainty of her finding out
- he would, not being a fool, have told her these. He did not foresee,
- because Anne did not read newspapers, but she had neighbours who did and
- who told her, with comments, of the storm which presently broke out in the
- columns of the <i>Sunday Judge</i>, and of Mr. Travers’ will, which
- received a small paragraph in the paper when it was proved.
- </p>
- <p>
- “There was a time when you and me didn’t go in for secrets,” she said to
- him. “You’ve not had much to say to me of late and I’ve not seen much of
- you, either, with the hours you’re keeping, but I’d put it down to love. I
- know a man’s not rational when he’s courting, but it seems there’s a lot
- about my son that I’ve to learn. Why didn’t you tell me about Mr. Travers?
- Did you think I’d steal the money off you?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Of course not, mother, but I meant to come to you with a finished tale,
- not one that’s only just begun. I’m engaged in a business affair of which
- I was going to tell you when it was complete.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “<i>Yes</i>,” she said, “I see. You’re risking your money. If you came out
- on the right side, you’d tell me about it, and if you lost you’d forget to
- tell me. Are you losing?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It’s early days to say.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Then maybe I’m still in time to nip this in the bud. What’s this about
- the <i>Sunday Judge?</i>”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I Have you seen it?” he asked.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Aye. You’re the talk of the street.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “That’s splendid,” he let slip before he was aware of it.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Splendid! There’s a gentleman writing to the paper to say that you’re
- trading in immorality.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I wrote that letter myself,” grinned Sam.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You did what?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m afraid I shall never make you understand.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I doubt you won’t. Lying to me like that. Expecting me to believe you
- write to the paper about yourself and call yourself hard names. And the
- letter’s signed ‘Truth-teller,’ too. It’s printed in the paper that my son
- has lifted the lid from the cesspool and let loose a smell to make decent
- people vomit.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes. I know. Advertising is a coarse art.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Your name’s blackened for ever. And it’s my name, Sam, and the name your
- father gave me. It’s the name of honest folk and——”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Mother, mother, don’t I tell you that it’s all advertisement?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “What you tell me and what I can believe are coming to be two different
- things. I know what an advertisement in the paper is and I know what a
- letter is. This is a letter.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam felt the hopelessness of further argument.
- </p>
- <p>
- She had a simple-minded faith in the integrity of newspapers and the
- printed word, but he could at least show that the word could contradict
- itself. “Very well,” he said, “it’s a letter, and so is this.” He took a
- copy of the paper from his pocket. Stewart had kept his word, no great
- feat since he had a good idea of what his editor supposed the Sunday
- public to want, and a column of fervent correspondence flared under the
- heading of “The Social Evil.—Is the Pamphlet Justified?” Sam chose a
- letter which described Adams as a crusader and Branstone, his publisher,
- as a high-souled social reformer courageously risking misapprehension for
- principle and the right, calling the endorsement of the Rev. Peter
- Struggles to witness in proof of his irreproachable motives. “Well,” said
- Sam, “am I to be misapprehended after all, and by you?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You told me you wrote the other letter,” she said. “Don’t you mean that
- you wrote this one?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I don’t,” he said truthfully. He wrote his, attacking himself, on one
- side of Stewart’s desk, while Stewart at the other defended him. It had
- been great fun.
- </p>
- <p>
- “And what,” she asked, “is the business affair you say you’re engaged on?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why,” he said unguardedly, “it’s this.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Then I don’t misapprehend at all, my son. I apprehend very well. And
- you’ve worked Peter Struggles into it. Was that why you got engaged to
- Ada?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Mother!” he protested. “Doubt me if you like, but you must not doubt Mr.
- Struggles. He surely is above suspicion.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “He’s keeping bad company just now,” said Anne, “and I doubt you’ve been
- too clever for him.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam chose to be offended. “Is that what you think of me?” he asked.
- </p>
- <p>
- “That you’re clever. Aye. I think that all right. I’ve known it since the
- time when you tricked a parcel of schoolboys out of a house of furniture
- and put George Chappie into it. You’re clever in the wrong places, Sam.
- When you were at school, you were clever out of school. You’re at business
- now and you ought; to be clever in honesty, and I’ve the notion that
- you’re being clever in dishonesty.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Of course,” he said, “this only shows how right I was not to tell you.
- It’s the old story. Women don’t understand business.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I know. Business is a pair of spectacles that makes black into white, but
- I don’t wear spectacles myself. Are you going to tell me what you’re doing
- with that thousand pounds?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I told you it isn’t decided yet. But if the sales of that pamphlet go up
- this week as they did last, I’m going into the publishing business with
- it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “So that you can publish more of the same sort?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “If I can get them. There’s a lot of money in it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Sam,” she said earnestly, “is that all you’re caring about?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You told me yourself that Ada was not the wife for a poor man.” He
- considered that a very neat score, to seem to make Anne responsible, but
- Anne was not to be deceived by any such seeming. As she saw it, Ada had
- corrupted Sam, Ada was the motive of this misuse of his cleverness; and
- the bitterness for Anne was doubly poignant. She believed in Sam, with a
- faith which had never swerved in spite of her disappointment in his school
- career; but she realized now that he had been marking time in Travers’
- office, that it was Ada and not she who had quickened his energies to
- rapid action. Ada had quickened them, where under Anne they had lain
- dormant but the quickening had been corrupt. It came from Ada, poisoned at
- the source, and took to poisonous ways.
- </p>
- <p>
- They had touched bottom now and reached essentials. “Sam,” she said, “I
- was joking like when I said a man’s not rational when he’s in love. But it
- was a true word spoken in jest. You’re not rational or you wouldn’t be
- doing these things and making a byword of the name of Branstone, and the
- reason you’re not rational is Ada. If you were in love with a good woman,
- you could no more do dishonourable things than fly. But you’re in love
- with a bad woman and it leads to bad results. Sam, do you think I like to
- tell you that you’ve made a mistake? And do you think I don’t know? Lad,
- lad, I love you, and I’ve never reckoned myself a fool. Choose now, I’m
- not the sort of fool to be jealous just because you get wed. I’d none be
- jealous of the right lass, Sam. I’d take her and welcome her and know she
- had a better right to you than me. But Ada Struggles has no right: she’s
- mean and grasping and she’s small in every way there is. She’s——”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Stop, mother. Don’t forget that I am marrying Ada.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “And nothing that I say will alter you? Sam, she’ll go on as she’s begun
- by sending you to this.” She put her hand on the lurid polemics of the <i>Sunday
- Judge</i>. “She’ll drive you down and down. You may make money and you may
- be rich, but there’ll be a curse on your riches and on all you do, and Ada
- Struggles is the name of the curse.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam attempted a small levity. “That will be all right,” he said. “She’s
- going to change her name.” Anne shook her head. “A change of name’ull none
- change Ada’s nature. It’s the best part of your life that’s before you,
- and life with Ada spells ruin. I’m not telling you what I think. It’s what
- I know, and I ask you, Sam, to heed my words.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m heeding them,” he said, “but I know you’re wrong.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “That’s the last you’ve got to say?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m sorry we don’t agree, mother.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Agreeing’s nowt,” she said, “and I’m nowt against your happiness. See,
- Sam, I’ll prove it. There’s a thought at the back of your mind that I’ve
- nothing against Ada but a grudge because she’s come between you and me. I
- say that girl’s no good for you, and I say I’ll do anything to force you
- to see it. There’s nowt of myself in this and maybe this will make you
- believe it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- There was a good fire in the room and she put her hand into it. Sam was
- alert enough to drag her away before much damage was done, and he had oil
- on the hand in a moment.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Don’t fuss,” said Anne, “but tell me what you think.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I think,” he said, “that you’re plumb crazy—with jealousy.”
- </p>
- <p>
- It was not craziness, but fanatic devotion to an idea: and the idea was
- Sam, Sam’s happiness, Sam’s future. She put her hand into the fire hoping
- to convince, and she would have sat on the fire if she had thought the
- larger act would carry a fuller conviction. But he did not need to be
- convinced that she objected to Ada; the point was that her objections were
- unfounded, and, in the face of Ada’s sublime and stunning merits, idiotic.
- </p>
- <p>
- One cannot put a hand into the fire without suffering for it, and Anne was
- suffering acutely. Her face was drawn with pain and her lips were
- trembling uncontrollably, but her voice was firm.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’ve done my best to save you, Sam. If you’ve nothing better to say than
- that, you and me have come to a parting.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Then,” said Sam, “we’ve come,” and turned his back on her. He thought she
- would come round, that she would get over her attack of frenzied jealousy.
- It was idle threat to talk of a parting. Why, she was dependent on him,
- and in more ways than one. He housed and kept her, but, more than that,
- she needed him. His presence was the breath of life to her. He knew that,
- and he let her go!
- </p>
- <p>
- Of course, he thought she would come back, with a sharp lesson well
- learnt. She had to learn that he was grown-up, of an age to act for
- himself and choose and think without her tutelage. Only, she did not come
- back. She went to Madge and stayed with Madge; and the terms on which she
- stayed were her terms. “I furnish the room,” she said, “and I pay you a
- rent for it. Also, I pay for what I eat.”
- </p>
- <p>
- She paid. At the age of fifty-two the mother of Sara Branstone, of
- Branstone and Carter, and the mother-in-law of George Chappie, of the
- Chappie Window-Cleaning and Bill Posting Company (a smaller affair than
- its name, but the source of a regular five pounds a week), was a charwoman
- on three days out of the seven, and it was not lack of offers which
- limited her to three days, but the fact that she paid her way on three
- days’ result. She kept other people’s houses as clean as she had kept her
- own.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was suggested to George Chappie that it was hardly decent in him to
- allow his mother-in-law to go out charring at her age—a prosperous
- man like him. “I know,” he was reported to have replied, “and we’ve tried
- all ways we can. But you can’t argue with Mrs. Branstone.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “She’s one of the old sort, isn’t she?” said his gossip, who, perhaps,
- endured a mother-in-law of another kind.
- </p>
- <p>
- “All that,” said George succinctly.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0013" id="link2HCH0013"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER XIII—THE INTERMITTENT COURTSHIP
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">O</span>NLY by long
- service does one become an artist, but one becomes married by a simple
- ceremony. It is the tragedy of marriage, which is the most difficult of
- all the arts, that most people come to it without apprenticeship. Perhaps
- the popularity of widows as brides is due to the fact that the widow is a
- widow: that she has been broken in to marriage: that she has not
- everything to learn: that one, at any rate, of the contracting parties, is
- expert. There is much to be said for the policy of the “trial trip.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Courtship, if intimate enough, may be a fairish substitute, bowdlerized,
- as it were, for a “trial trip,” but when Sam married Ada he knew pitiably
- little about her.
- </p>
- <p>
- He thought that she was wonderful. Not only had he to think it, but he
- actually did think it. He had to think it because only for a prodigy among
- women could he have treated his mother as he did. He had thought her crazy
- when she put her hand into the lire, but he knew it was heroic. If she
- were crazy, it was for love for him, and at the core, he loved her too and
- felt ashamed of himself, but Ada stood between them, and he was not going
- to give up Ada. Then he was busy, time wore on, custom blunted the prick
- of conscience, and it finally became a habit either not to think of Anne
- at all, or to think comfortably of her as happy enough with Madge.
- </p>
- <p>
- And he actually thought Ada wonderful because the conditions of his
- courtship fought for her. He was visibly prospering; he liked prosperity;
- it was Ada who had initiated his prosperity; and she was glamorous for
- that. Again, he was very busy in those days with the first steps of his
- new business, too occupied to play the diligent lover, and saw her very
- fitfully. So seen, she did not lose the wonder of surprise, but came upon
- him freshly with each of their meetings, able to parade for each some new
- attraction from her slender stock of charm. She kept their intercourse
- egregiously correct, and he thought her mystery was infinite. She hid her
- shallowness behind affected modesty, knowing that an intimate courtship
- would discover to him that there was nothing to discover, and attracted by
- aloofness. It was immensely clever in its short-winded way: a cleverness
- that lasted the course of courtship, but evaporated when the tape—the
- altar—was reached. It did not seem necessary to Ada to go on being
- clever once that ring was on her finger. She was married, she had
- achieved: she was clever for the spurt, and had no cleverness left, for
- the Marathon Race. And Sam had many preoccupations in those days which
- prevented him from thinking too much about Ada.
- </p>
- <p>
- If he was dull about his courtship, his wits were sharp enough for other
- matters. He had the satisfaction, almost from the day of its issue, of
- seeing the pamphlet sell steadily. Very quickly it ceased to be a case of
- getting his money back, and became merely a question of how many cents per
- cent he was going to make. His first edition of five thousand (the <i>soi-disant</i>
- thousand) was rapidly exhausted, and the presses of Carter Meadowbank
- worked overtime to cope with the demand. He cast bread upon the waters by
- sending copies to every name in the Clergy List and every Member of
- Parliament; and did not cast in vain. Free advertisement was lavished upon
- him. Somehow, he had found one of those times when the social conscience
- is stirred: he published, without knowing it, opportunely, and the
- diabolic cleverness of Gerald Adams’ writing steered him safely past the
- rocks of the Public Prosecutor. It seemed only to stimulate demand when he
- raised the price to a shilling.
- </p>
- <p>
- He had no further trouble with the pamphlet. It sold itself, but sitting
- still watching the wheels go round did not appeal to Sam, who had a
- thousand pounds to multiply. He hadn’t quite the hardihood to believe that
- he could multiply his thou sand as rapidly as he had the twenty-five which
- he paid Adams, but he felt that he was launched as a publisher and had
- nothing to publish.
- </p>
- <p>
- His thoughts were diverted from that solecism one day when he went into
- Carter’s printing-office to speed up the foreman. The foreman admitted
- that the pace could be improved. “But I dunno, sir, that the boss wants it
- improved. There’s nothing in to follow this job of yours. You might say
- you’ve been the saving of Mr. Carter.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam was thoughtful for a minute. He had not looked upon himself as the
- saviour of Mr. Carter and did not appreciate that character when it was
- thrust upon him. He went into Carter’s office.
- </p>
- <p>
- “This little tract of mine,” he said (“tract” seemed the light description
- in that text-hung room), “is selling remarkably well, and the demand
- increases. Now, I’ve nothing to say about the past.-I came in here a total
- stranger and you quoted me accordingly. But it’s only fair to warn you
- that I have gone into prices with other printers and I may find it
- necessary to make a change.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Carter made no effort to hide his dismay. “I hope you won’t do that, Mr.
- Branstone. At least, give me a chance of revising my price.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Once bitten,” said Sam, “is twice shy, and you don’t deny that you bit.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “But surely business,” argued Carter, “is business.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It is,” said Sam grimly, “and if you’ll answer me a few questions on the
- understanding that this is a business interview and I’m not being
- impertinently inquisitive, I shall be obliged.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’ll do my best,” said Carter.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Thank you. How old are your printing-presses?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Twenty years.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Consequently they are almost hopelessly out of date?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Carter had a tenderness for those presses. They had been young when he was
- young, were bought when the world smiled on him and his business had its
- hedyay. They had kept him and he could not be disloyal now. “I believe
- that they have printed your tract efficiently, Mr. Branstone,” he defended
- them.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, there’s life in the old dogs yet,” said Sam. “I’m not proposing to
- make scrap-iron of them.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “As they belong to me,” said Carter tartly, “it would not make such
- difference if you did propose it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Therefore,” said Sam, “I don’t propose it—yet. Please remember that
- I’m talking business. Do you care to tell me what that text cost to
- produce and what you get for it?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Carter did not care, but, though he wondered at himself, he told. “And
- that?” Sam asked, pointing to another; and again Carter told.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Then,” said Sam, “there are two religious papers which you print for the
- proprietors. What——?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Young man,” interrupted Carter, “are you proposing to buy my business?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No,” said Sam coolly, “only to become your partner in it. What profit
- were you going to tell me you made on the papers?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Carter told: he was too stupefied to do anything else. “Um,” said Sam. “It
- isn’t much.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “They are a good work,” said Carter, and Sam looked at him sharply, but
- the old man was perfectly sincere. It was good work to print religious
- magazines and he did it for next to nothing.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well,” said Sam, “thank you. Now I won’t mince matters: When I came along
- with my—tract, I enabled you to postpone filing your petition, but
- it was only a postponement, and if you’ll look facts in the face the one
- big fact for you is bankruptcy.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “The Lord will provide.” Carter had lived from hand to mouth for many
- months in that belief.
- </p>
- <p>
- “If you like to look at it that way. He has provided: He has provided me.
- I will make you a good offer, Mr. Carter. I will introduce five him dred
- pounds capital into the business for a halfshare in the plant, goodwill
- and future profits of this concern. That is, the printing business. What
- I, as publisher, do has nothing to do with you.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “... I must think it over,” said Carter; but they both knew that he had
- already decided to accept.
- </p>
- <p>
- “The Lord,” Carter was thinking, “<i>has</i> provided.” Sam, on the
- contrary, was thinking, “I may or may not be a fool to go into this
- without getting an accountant’s report on the books, but I believe in
- rapid action, and if I’d offered too high a price I’m certain that he’s
- imbecile enough to have told me.”
- </p>
- <p>
- It remained to find something to print, and he wanted Stewart’s advice,
- but, with the idea of being first on the side of the angels, went to see
- Peter Struggles. The battle which had raged round the pamphlet had left
- Peter untouched, even though more than one of the clergy who received it
- from Sam had thought it their duty to write to Peter’s bishop. The bishop
- failed to see a case for disciplinary measures: Peter might have been
- sinned against but he had not sinned. And the <i>Sunday Judge</i> was read
- by neither Peter nor his bishop. (The Church is notoriously out of touch
- with modern life, but, after all, it is hardly reasonable to expect the
- Church to compliment its rival, the <i>Sunday Press</i>, by reading it.)
- </p>
- <p>
- Nevertheless, Peter had, on reflection, felt some wavering doubts about
- the pamphlet. His intermittent shrewdness threw a flickering light through
- the haze of his charity and gave him moments of discomfort.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam’s attitude during this call was admirably calculated to resolve his
- doubt. He wanted, with an eye to the future, to make sure of Peter, whose
- name he might require another day, and was ready, even if it were not
- immediately profitable, to placate Peter now. He explained that he had
- joined forces with Mr. Carter, and at once acquired merit in Peter’s eyes.
- Carter was irreproachable. He did not explain by what means he had been
- able to join Carter and it did not occur to Peter to ask. Sam was not
- going to tell Peter, who would tell Ada, of his legacy. If she found out,
- as Anne had found out, he could not help it, but, meantime, it was his
- secret. Ada, like Anne, belonged to the sex which had no understanding of
- business.
- </p>
- <p>
- “And the point,” said Sam, “with a business like Mr. Carter’s, is to use
- it for good. I take it that the texts do good, but perhaps they are only
- for the simple-minded. I hope I don’t despise people for their simplicity,
- but my own taste runs rather to books and I think you will agree with me.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Peter agreed, with a quotation which rather dashed Sam; he had an idea
- that poetry did not sell.
- </p>
- <p>
- “‘Poets are the trumpets which sing to battle. Poets are the
- unacknowledged legislators of the world.’”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes,” said Sam. “Quite so. But isn’t poetry going to the opposite
- extreme? I had the thought of something more direct. Good prose with a
- good moral.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Excellent,” said Peter, off again.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br />
- </p>
- <p class="indent30">
- “‘Were not God’s laws,
- </p>
- <p class="indent15">
- His gospel laws, In olden time held forth
- </p>
- <p class="indent15">
- By types, shadows and metaphors?’”
- </p>
- <p>
- <br />
- </p>
- <p>
- “Of course they were,” said Sam, wondering when Peter would close his
- mental dictionary of quotations and come down to business, “and that
- quotation is very apt because I was thinking of classics. English
- classics, you know,” he explained hurriedly, “and classics because they
- are not copyright.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “And have stood the test of time,” said Peter.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes. Do you think you could propose a list? I should like to know that
- the first books I publish had been selected by you. I don’t think they
- ought to be exactly theological, but they must be good in every sense of
- the word.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why not begin with the book from whose in traduction I just quoted?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why not indeed?” said Sam, who hadn’t the faintest idea of the source of
- the quotation.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Very well,” said Peter. “Suppose you put that down for one.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Same made vague scratches on paper. He had a bookish reputation to sustain
- and he was not going to betray ignorance prematurely. “Then,” said Feter,
- “there is Law’s ‘Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life.’”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m letting myself in for something,” thought Sam, but he wrote it down.
- </p>
- <p>
- “‘The Imitation of Christ,’ and ‘The Little Flowers of St. Francis,’”
- Peter went on.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I think those should be enough to begin with,” said Sam hurriedly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Four, isn’t it?” said Peter, recapitulating.
- </p>
- <p>
- “The ‘Pilgrim’s Progress ‘“——(“Thank God,” thought Sam, “I
- needn’t give myself away.”)
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes, four,” he interrupted, reading the now completed list. “And I am
- very much obliged to you.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He wasn’t, though, quite sure about it. He had “nobbled” Peter, but he
- feared those books would be a millstone round his neck. There might be a
- steady sale for the “Pilgrim’s Progress” as a prize, but the others——!
- Still, he need not print many copies of them, and—consoling thought—they
- would be good window-dressing tor his list. He hoped it would include
- other, very different, books.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m sorry Ada is out,” Peter was saying, and Sam was rather startled to
- realize that he had not missed her. But he was sure of his position with
- her: it was his position for her which he had to consolidate. He proceeded
- to consolidate it by going in search of Stewart, and found him where he
- expected to find him, in a bar.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I want your advice,” said Sam.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Whisky for the gentleman, Flora,” said Stewart. “That’s my advice and
- you’ll get no other till you’ve taken this.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam took it. Business is business and, beyond that, his thrifty prejudices
- were less necessary now.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You’re not unteachable,” said Stewart. “It’s a point in your favour. The
- proper thing when you’ve drunk that is to ask me if I will have another.
- My reply will be in the affirmative and we shall then retire, with
- sustaining refreshment, into that corner, where I will advise you for as
- long as you can continue to buy whisky for me and drink level. I hate a
- shirker.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam told him of his partnership with Carter. “I’m always troubled about
- you,” said Stewart. “I can never make up my mind whether you’re too clever
- to live or whether you were born with luck instead of brain. Obviously,
- you will publish novels.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “There are so many kinds,” said Sam.
- </p>
- <p>
- “No. Only two. Mine and the rest. But I suffer from honesty. Therefore I
- tell you that my novel has been refused by every publisher in London. It
- is waiting,” he said hopefully, “for a man with courage. The difference
- between it and the Yellow Book is that my book <i>is</i> yellow.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I see,” said Sam. “But I have gone into the publishing trade to make my
- living.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “On the whole,” decided Stewart, “you are more knave than fool. And you
- would call it the publishing trade. It’s a benighted world, but there are
- still some publishers who aren’t in trade—beyond the midriff. Do you
- seriously come to me to ask what sort of novels to publish?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “The sort,” he said, “that is written for nursemaids by people who ought
- to be nursemaids.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “That’s jealousy,” said Sam. “They get published and you don’t.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Perhaps you’re right,” said Stewart. “But I’ve always heard that seeing
- is believing. Do you ever go to the theatre?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Not often.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It’s a pity, because if you did, I’ve a tragedy in blank verse that you
- might care to publish. It is great art and will never be produced. Still,
- I’m a philanthropist to-night and you will come to the theatre with me. I
- happen to be going for the <i>Warden.</i>”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Are you a dramatic critic for the <i>Warden?</i>” asked Sam, rather awed.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m a reporter, old son. This isn’t the kind of play they waste a critic
- on. Drink up, and we’ll go.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam found, to his relief, that he was able to go and decided he had a
- strong head. The theatre was crowded when they reached it and Stewart was
- young enough to sit self-consciously in one of the two seats kept for the
- <i>Manchester Warden</i>. Dramatic criticism was taken seriously on that
- journal; at least two of the paper’s regular critics were men of genius,
- and Stewart hoped that he might be mistaken for one of them. But the
- audience that night was not the kind which interests itself in the lions
- of the higher journalism; rather it justified the contemptuous reference
- to drama as the “art of the mob.” It would have made a sincere democrat
- weep for his convictions. “Behold them,” said Stewart. “The Public.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam beheld them more than he beheld the play. He reminded himself that he
- was there on business, to be shown something which Stewart wanted him to
- see, and if he had not the gift of detachment, he assumed it.
- </p>
- <p>
- When Adams had read his paper to the Concentrics, Sam had listened but
- kept his eyes on the audience. In a darkened theatre, the audience was
- more difficult to watch, but he could feel its quick response to the play,
- could hear its ready laughter and its quite eager ears. Emphatically, here
- was a play which seized its audience, gripped them, tickled them,
- beslavered them, throttled them, did with them what it liked and when it
- liked; all to their immense and vociferous delight. He tried to keep his
- aloofness, to see how it was done, to tear the heart out of this mystery.
- Here was something which the public wanted; he had only to diagnose it,
- and the Open Sesame to fortune was his.
- </p>
- <p>
- He couldn’t do it. Detachment slipped from him, never to return till the
- curtain fell. He wasn’t a superman, immune from other men’s emotions. The
- play took hold of him and swayed him with the rest. He tried resistance,
- vainly; told himself that he was here, not, as these others were, for
- pleasure, but to learn, to learn; and the play gripped him the harder for
- his attempt to take it coldly.
- </p>
- <p>
- At the end, Sam was applauding wildly while Stewart watched him with
- cynical amusement. “Caught you all right,” he said, “and by way of a
- confession I’ll own that the damned thing nearly got me once. Rum place,
- the theatre, isn’t it? But,” he grew more serious, “I’ve to write about
- that, write without being libellous about that maudlin, sentimental,
- erotic, religious trash. It’s enough to make a man give up journalism and
- take to something honest, like coal-heaving. But I’m forgetting. I brought
- you here to teach you something. Have you learnt it? That’s a play, but
- the same thing applies to a novel. You find novels with ‘The Sign of the
- Cross’ in them, my boy. Queasy sentimentality to sicken a bee, and, for
- the rest, don’t forget that Jesus died for you to make money out of
- novels. This play makes me blasphemous, but I’m doing the devil’s advocate
- to you to-night, so it’s all in the picture. When I’ve finished my notice
- I think I’ll try a ‘short’ on ‘The Tradesman Publisher’ or ‘The Dignity of
- Letters.’ It will be good for my conscience.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I wish you would,” said Sam. “I’ll reply to it, with a list of the
- classics I am going to publish.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Sometimes,” said Stewart, “you rather sicken me. I am speaking of the <i>Manchester
- Warden</i>, not the <i>Sunday Judge</i>. Good-night.”
- </p>
- <p>
- But the vacillations of a journalist with a foot in two camps and an
- idealistic standard which he hardly pretended to take seriously himself
- left Sam unimpressed. The play and Stewart’s description of its essence
- had given him furiously to think. He imagined that he knew the sort of
- novel he wanted and he was not troubled by Stewart’s disease of dual
- standards. Sam had one standard, the success standard; and anything else
- was muddle-headedness. At the same time he felt most grateful to Stewart
- who had advertised the pamphlet and now presented him with a policy.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was a policy, but not one for immediate application. <i>Festina lente</i>
- was his watchword for the moment, and he devoted himself to putting new
- life into the sales of texts and to the issue of the “Branstone +
- Classics.” They were, one might note in passing, the Branstone + Classics:
- his name loomed large and the names of their authors, the insignificants
- like à Kempis and Bunyan, were properly small; and he put the sign of the
- cross between the Branstone and the Classics. He intended it to be his
- trade-mark, and if it were his trade-mark, why not use it? It infringed
- nobody’s copyright.
- </p>
- <p>
- Amongst it all, he had little enough time for Ada, and she knew how much
- she gained by being a luxury instead of a habit. But Sam was not engaged
- for the sake of being engaged, and as soon as he knew he had made no
- mistake in his business venture was eager to be married. There were no
- objections from Ada. This intermittent courtship, in which his duties as a
- lover took second place to his activities as a business man, suited Ada
- well, but marriage, finality, the bond suited her better.
- </p>
- <p>
- Even to the end of that engagement it was things for Ada which preoccupied
- him, rather than Ada herself, and he took the matter of furnishing
- seriously—from a business point of view, interested less in the
- furniture he bought than in the discounts he might, by this means or that,
- secure. He suffered the usual surprise at the cost of mattresses and
- kitchen equipment, but, to Ada, he appeared royally lavish. Ada did not
- know of his legacy: she knew that Anne had told her on the top of a
- fantastic tram-car that Sam had earned two pounds ten a week with Travers,
- and the scale of this furnishing did not square with what a man could save
- out of two pounds ten a week. It followed in Ada’s mind that Anne had lied
- to her, malignantly misrepresenting Sam’s position to frighten her; and
- the breach between Anne and Ada, which never had much chance of closing,
- was permanently open.
- </p>
- <p>
- One does not have old connections with an estate agency without being able
- to rent a good house cheaply. She was going to be mistress of a house
- which fell little short of the dreams of her boarding-school days. It was
- certainly “stylish”; she was not sure that it was not positively “smart.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Madge wept on the night before her wedding. Ada did not weep. She was too
- busy hugging herself because she had surmounted the perils of courtship.
- She had accomplished her aim in life. She was going to be married.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0014" id="link2HCH0014"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER XIV—HONEYMOONERS
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>DA was married in
- white satin, though Peter sold books to do it and her trousseau lacked
- essentials. It depends, though, on one’s point of view. Ada thought white
- satin essential, while another might have put underclothing first. But it
- is fitting to wear a crown at a coronation and, when the object of one’s
- life has been to get married, to celebrate in satin the attaining of one’s
- aim.
- </p>
- <p>
- It also reminded the congregation that the bride is the central figure at
- a wedding. People might otherwise have remembered that they did not come
- because Ada was Ada, but because she was Peter’s daughter.
- </p>
- <p>
- She entered with <i>réclame</i> into the state of being Mrs. Samuel
- Branstone, resenting a little the tweeds of Stewart, Sam’s best man, but
- liking his manners and liking, too, the way in which Sam took it for
- granted that the day was hers, not his. He did not even obtrude a family.
- </p>
- <p>
- George was, in fact, obscurely there, hidden among the congregation. He
- was there in the spirit of schoolboy, playing truant from Anne, who was at
- home with Madge. Ada thought that the conspicuous absence of Branstones
- added lustre to her satin. None but the necessary Sam was there.
- </p>
- <p>
- They went to London, where neither of them had been before, and since it
- is a bitter thing to have to look back to a boring honeymoon, the choice
- of place had great discretion. There was so much besides themselves to see
- in London that they postponed looking at each other till they came home.
- They saw sights and went to theatres, but though they slept together and
- rose together and saw the sights (all but one) together there was no
- realization of “togetherness,” no birth of a new life in which they were
- not Sam and Ada, but these two in one. They were furiously modest about
- things which no honeymooner has any right to be modest about. If they are
- modest about them, they have no right to be honeymooners. It may have been
- in their case something both worse and better than modesty. It may have
- been downright shame. Perhaps subconsciously they knew that this was not a
- marriage, not the coming together of two fit mates. It had no passion in
- it. There was self when they should have been ecstatically selfless. They
- were two when they should have been most one.
- </p>
- <p>
- But Sam, if he fell immensely short of ecstasy, was still too much under
- her spell to be critical. He wondered a little at the frank delight in
- being married which she displayed in public, at her flaunting of her new
- wedding ring, at her advertisement that this was a honeymoon, and
- contrasted this outward relish with her intimate frigidity; but even this
- seemed a disloyalty, and he told himself that Ada in a hotel was one
- person and at home would be another. Ada would “settle down,” and meantime
- they were in London, and London was waiting to be explored with her.
- </p>
- <p>
- They explored chiefly the London which Londoners do not know, the London
- of the guide-books, and felt tremendously metropolitan because they went
- to the Tower, the British Museum and the National Gallery. The shops
- seared Ada. Their windows fascinated but their doors repelled. Probably
- Sam would have held her back by main force had she attempted to go in,
- but, as it was, she had the same satisfaction in identifying them that
- social snobs find in recognizing, at a distance, famous people. These were
- the authentic shops which advertised in the papers and they had a game
- called “hunting the Harrod” or “looking for Barkers,” which led to a lot
- of fun with ‘buses after they had quartered Oxford Street and Regent
- Street. It was all very gay, and gayer, almost naughtily gay, to go one
- night to a place called the Coliseum—a music-hall; a thing to do
- audaciously, not to be spoken of at home; and yet the place was very full
- of really most respectable people. They marvelled at the emancipation of
- the Londoner.
- </p>
- <p>
- On his honeymoon, Sam became possessed of an ambition. It was not an
- extraordinarily fine ambition, but he came to care about, it greatly and
- it repaid his care a thousandfold. The way to sanity is to desire very
- keenly something which it is just possible one may get, and Sam’s ambition
- kept him sane in the days when he knew that Ada had failed him.
- </p>
- <p>
- Struggles had suggested to our debater of the Concentrics that he ought to
- see the House of Commons at debate, and had written to their local Member
- for a pass to the Gallery. The result was the most thrilling experience of
- Sam’s honeymoon! It was, for one thing, unique that Ada could not be with
- him: these were the first hours since he married her that they spent apart
- and perhaps that, all unconsciously, had gilded them for Sam. They had
- almost a tiff before she let him go: not quite, but she resented his
- desertion of her and considered it his fault that she was not allowed to
- sit with him to hear the legislators who made laws for her as for him. Not
- that Ada cared who made her laws, nor cared to watch the makers at their
- work, but she managed to put enough snap into her resentment at his going
- to lend the added quality of a stolen pleasure to his experience.
- </p>
- <p>
- That gallery, with its foreshortened view of the dingy cock-pit, is not
- the first choice of the connoisseur in thrills, but on Sam its effect was
- amazing. He must have had some gift, quite undisclosed till now, of
- veneration, for it is almost beyond belief that the reality of the House
- of Commons can impress. But the idea can and perhaps (to be just) the
- reality is more impressive than that of any other Chamber on earth.
- Imagination helping him, it caught and held his mind.
- </p>
- <p>
- A small stout man of undistinguished appearance was speaking in a
- conversational tone not easy to hear from the Gallery, but presently the
- orator warmed to his subject and poured out living words in a spate of
- real emotion. He was one of those rare men, and this one of those rare
- speeches, that really convert an opponent: and Sam’s ambition to speak as
- this politician spoke, and from those benches, came instantly to birth.
- </p>
- <p>
- Not only did he want to be a Member of Parliament, but a Liberal Member,
- because this man of words was Liberal. Up to this time, Sam had not been a
- political animal although he had voted, and voted Tory because that was in
- general the line of Mr. Travers and the property-owning class he
- represented. Now with a swift enthusiasm he was Liberal, knowing nothing
- of either side, but caught by sudden hero-worship for a little, pudgy,
- snubnosed politician who spoke in sentences of prodigious length and never
- lost his way in them.
- </p>
- <p>
- In a twinkling he acquired the bias of the politician: his hero’s opponent
- was palpably a fool; he had no gifts, no argument. Yes, Sam was doubly
- right to be a Liberal. They had so obviously all the brains, they were so
- undeniably the winning side. He did not understand the technique of a
- division and was surprised when he looked at the paper next day to find
- that the Liberals were outvoted. It gave him pause, but did not shake him.
- When the Liberals came back to power, as with their superiority in brain
- they were certain to do, he, Sam Branstone, would come with them. Let it
- be only a year or two and he would be ready. He too would loll upon those
- padded benches, and catch the Speaker’s eye, and be an orator.
- </p>
- <p>
- He walked along the Embankment towards his hotel, and it came into his
- mind that he had spent four hours in the Gallery and had not thought of
- Ada. Nor could he, though he tried, think of her now.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sky-signs still flashed across the river, and as he paused and leaned
- against the parapet a young policeman kept a wary eye on him. But Sam was
- meditating life, not death. The lights of London gleamed upon the Thames
- and made it magical for him. He conquered London in his reverie, and
- stepped, a member, from the House to his automobile. His home, he
- supposed, was somewhere in Park Lane.
- </p>
- <p>
- He thought back now to the theatre where he had seen <i>The Sign of the
- Cross</i>. It was different from the London Theatres he had seen where
- audiences seemed afraid of emotion. Or was it that the plays had not been
- right? That was it: they had not the note: they weren’t—what was
- Stewart’s phrase?—erotic religious plays. He wanted to move
- audiences as that play had moved its audience. Power! The power of the
- spoken word. That was the thing, and since he could not write a play he
- must rely upon himself, his oratory, his single voice. He saw himself on
- platforms facing crowded halls, gripping his hearers, leading them where
- he would, taming the mob till it made an idol of its master. As to where
- he would lead, why, he would lead and that was what mattered. Branstone
- was Prime Minister that night.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was one o’clock before the young policeman felt at liberty to resume
- his beat, and Sam left the enchanted river for his little hotel in Norfolk
- Street. Ada had her back to him and apparently she slept. Actually she was
- wide awake; she was wondering whether it had happened to any other woman
- to be treated so abominably on her honeymoon.
- </p>
- <p>
- She brushed her hair nest morning with a notable viciousness. Hair has
- uses beyond those of mere adornment. It is an admirable veil through which
- one can watch without being seen to watch. Ada was watching Sam and she
- was also listening to him.
- </p>
- <p>
- She listened not because his enthusiasm for the House of Commons
- interested her, but because she was waiting for some word of apology. It
- did not come. He was full of regret, but only because this was their last
- day in town and he could not go to the House again.
- </p>
- <p>
- “What time is our train?” she asked.
- </p>
- <p>
- He told her.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Then I have time to do some shopping first.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Shopping?” he asked, but unsuspiciously.
- </p>
- <p>
- She nodded. Sam was going to pay for his pleasures. Those blouses she had
- seen at Peter Robinson’s no longer seemed impossibly expensive. If Sam
- chose to enjoy himself in his own way, without her, she would enjoy
- herself in hers—with Sam to pay the piper.
- </p>
- <p>
- Shopping is a loose term; one shops when one buys a kipper or a diamond
- tiara. Ada was putting her hair up and he imagined her to mean that she
- wanted a packet of hair-pins. “Oh, yes,” he said pensively. “And while you
- go, I think I will just slip down to the House of Parliament again.” The
- House would not be sitting and he could not get in. He knew that, but he
- wanted to gaze, to look at the frame which was some day to contain him. He
- wanted to be certain that it was still there.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I think,” she said, “that you will come with me to the shop. I shall want
- you there to pay.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam paused in the act of fastening his collar. “To pay?” he asked, not
- unsuspiciously now.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Are your selfish pleasures all you think about?” Ada wanted to know.
- “Isn’t it a privilege to be allowed to buy me nice clothes?”
- </p>
- <p>
- He had not looked upon it in that light. In budgeting for their future he
- had indeed assumed that a trousseau lasted a bride for her first year. “I
- see,” he said gloomily; then remembering that he was in love with her, “of
- course,” he added with a smile which might count to him for heroism. “But
- we must not forget the fares, and after I have paid the bill here I shall
- not have more than two pounds left to spend.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Then I spend two pounds on blouses,” she said.
- </p>
- <p>
- He made a monosyllabic noise which might have been “Yes.” It might also
- have been “Damn.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The truth was that he had deliberately kept those two pounds back,
- intending to spend some, but not, he hoped, all of it, on a present for
- Ada. He had thought of a hand-bag, had imagined her gasp of delight when
- he audaciously entered with her one of those forbiddingly inviting shops,
- her appreciation of his generosity.
- </p>
- <p>
- Last night had driven the thought entirely from his mind, and he was
- annoyed now not only at his forgetfulness, but at Ada. She did not ask,
- she demanded. A night in the Gallery may be regarded as dissipation, but
- at least it is not a crime. It is even patriotic, and he was asked to foot
- a bill for two pounds as the price of his patriotism. Ambition, he
- thought, would be an expensive luxury if he had to pay in clothes for Ada
- every time he went to a political meeting. For that, plainly, was her
- attitude: she demanded a <i>quid pro quo</i>: she announced a policy of
- retaliation.
- </p>
- <p>
- There is a queer perverted pleasure in scratching an open wound, in
- cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. He had meant to be generous
- and he wanted still to be generous, but the money he had laid aside for
- generosity was now hypothecated to meet her claim. He would give her her
- pound of flesh, but wanted very badly to roast it for her with coals of
- fire.
- </p>
- <p>
- Gloom lifted from him suddenly. He took off the old tie which he had put
- on as being good enough to travel in, and fastened very carefully one
- which he had bought “for London.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’ll do it,” he was thinking. “It is—almost—a stroke.”
- </p>
- <p>
- At breakfast he was positively gay, so that Ada wondered furtively what he
- was up to, and whether the way to raise his spirits would always be to
- demand new clothes of him. It did not seem likely, but she proposed at any
- rate to experiment freely in that direction.
- </p>
- <p>
- He divided his attention between her, breakfast, and the Parliamentary
- report of the <i>Times</i>. He felt that he had virtually participated in
- that debate, and even the shock of reading that the division had gone
- against his hero did not spoil the pleasure he found in reading of it. He
- read with a prophetic eye. He, too, would be reported in the <i>Times</i>
- some day.
- </p>
- <p>
- He called the waiter. “Marmalade, sir?” asked the man.
- </p>
- <p>
- “No, thanks. Bring me the directory.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “The directory,” protested the waiter, “is in the reading-room.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “And I,” said Sam superbly, “am in the coffee-room.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The waiter brought him the directory.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam smiled broadly. He was testing his form, and decided that if it were
- equal to coercing a waiter into carrying a directory to his
- breakfast-table, it would probably not fail him in what he proposed to do.
- He consulted the book and noted an address which was not, he observed, in
- Park Lane. His respect for Sir William Gatenby suffered a slight decline.
- </p>
- <p>
- Half an hour later he rang the hell of that gentleman’s house. Gatenby was
- the local member, to whom Peter Struggles had written for Sam’s pass to
- the Gallery.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Sir William in?” he asked.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes, but——” A trained eye observed his clothes. They were not
- cut in Savile Row.
- </p>
- <p>
- “He will see me,” said Sam serenely. Some people are at their best in the
- early morning.
- </p>
- <p>
- His card was accepted from him, and he was shown into a library of severe
- Blue Books, possibly qualified by a reproduction of Millais’ portrait of
- Gladstone. Ordinarily, Sam would have been met in the library by a
- secretary who earned his salary by his talent for administering polite
- snubs to unwanted callers. The secretary was not earning his salary
- to-day, but, probably, spending it. It was Derby Day.
- </p>
- <p>
- After all, a vote is a vote, and Sir William came in with a show of
- geniality. “Good morning, Mr. Branstone,” he said, reading Sam’s card.
- “From the old town. I see.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Is that all you remember about me?” asked Sam.
- </p>
- <p>
- “At the moment,” confessed Sir William warily. His majority was not large.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well,” said Sam, “the Reverend Mr. Struggles is my father-in-law.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Sit down,” said Sir William. “I am very glad you called. How is Mr.
- Struggles?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “T left him well, thank you. Perhaps you remember that he wrote to you to
- ask you for a pass to the Gallery for me.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I was happy to be lucky in the ballot,” said the Member.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes,” said Sam, “I went last night. But I mentioned that to establish my
- identity. My object in calling upon you is to ask you to lend me five
- pounds.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Sir William thought of his secretary, who should have saved him this.
- Thinking of his secretary, he thought of Derby Day and the probable
- intentions of a man who chooses that day to ask for a loan. “My dear sir!”
- he said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Quite,” agreed Sam. “Life would be unbearable to you if every constituent
- who came to London tried to borrow money off you. But I am Branstone. I
- run the Branstone Press and the Branstone Classics. I published the
- ‘Social Evil’ pamphlet and sent you a copy which, I regret to say, you did
- not acknowledge.” Sir William thought again of his secretary, and
- unkindly. “This,” said Sam, “is merely to indicate that I am a man of
- substance.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Sir William Gatenby wore side-whiskers. He was an old man and there was
- little left of him besides pomposity and a determination to hold his seat.
- He looked, what at this moment he felt, some one in a farce. He was quite
- sure that Sam was some one in a farce. They were both in a farce, and of
- course five-pound notes fly in farces like gnats in August. It did not
- seem to him that there was anything to do but to produce a five-pound
- note.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Thank you,” said Sam, and sat at a desk. “I will give you my cheque for
- this.”
- </p>
- <p>
- It staggered Sir William. He nearly warned Sam of the danger of issuing a
- cheque which was not likely to be honoured, but refrained in time. “Then,”
- he said, “there was really no need for you to come to me at all?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Only,” said Sam, “that I wanted you to remember me.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I think I shall do that,” said Sir William.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Thank you,” said Sam calmly. “I wanted to know you because I intend to go
- into politics.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “The Cause,” said Sir William solemnly, “demands his best from every
- earnest worker.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I will work for the Cause,” said Sam. Neither of them attempted to define
- the Cause, and Sam left without further remark, but his call had this
- result: that on finding the cheque honoured Sir William wrote to his agent
- to tell him of “a queer fish called Samuel Branstone who called on me the
- other day, and offered to work for the Cause. A young man whom I think you
- should encourage. He is the son-in-law of Mr. Struggles, and the Church,
- alas, is so tepid towards our great Principles that we must not neglect a
- promising recruit from that fold.”
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0015" id="link2HCH0015"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER XV—OTHER THINGS BESIDE MARRIAGE
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">D</span>EBT appeals to
- some people. They feel that when they are in debt they have had more out
- of life than life owes to them. Sam had given Gatenby his cheque and was
- therefore not in debt to him, but he proceeded to spend the five pounds as
- recklessly as if it had been borrowed money.
- </p>
- <p>
- He meant to astonish Ada, and succeeded, but the surprise he sprang did
- not work quite as he anticipated. For a moment, indeed, as he bought her
- hats and blouses she glowed with unaffected gratitude, and he tasted with
- her the joy of headstrong acquisition. But Ada’s glow was quick to pass.
- </p>
- <p>
- She had time in the train to forget the splendour of his presents and the
- dash that she would cut next Sunday, and to remember that he had spent a
- lot of money; he who denied that he had more than two pounds to spend had
- spent seven. Obviously, he had lied to her.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was true, she thought, that he had repented of his lie and of his
- meanness, and bought handsomely: the more handsome the purchase, the more
- demonstrable the lie.
- </p>
- <p>
- She recalled her dreadful interview with Anne, Anne’s statements of his
- means, and how little they conformed to the scale of Sam’s furnishing. She
- pondered Sam’s open-handedness in the blouse-shop, and concluded that the
- Branstones were congenital liars about money.
- </p>
- <p>
- In the future she would know how to act. Sam had plenty.
- </p>
- <p>
- “So you had money up your sleeve all the time,” she said.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam winked facetiously. “There are a lot of funny things up my sleeve,” he
- said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m learning that,” said Ada. Which he took for a compliment; and
- grinned.
- </p>
- <p>
- He had long since made up his mind that the way with women was to mystify
- them, to treat them like children at a conjuring entertainment, to
- surprise them with results, but never to explain. He nearly choked with
- pride over his exploit with Sir William Gatenby. But for the hat-box and
- the blouses up there on the rack, what he had done was too good to be
- true, and certainly it was too good to be told to a woman. They did not
- understand business; no woman could appreciate the daring spirit of his
- feat.
- </p>
- <p>
- If he told Ada that he had borrowed from Gatenby, she would simply say
- “Oh, yes,” and treat his unexampled audacity as a matter of course. It was
- inspiration, brilliantly conceived and brilliantly executed, and its
- bright memory was not to be tarnished by a woman’s dull acceptance of it
- as something not in the least extraordinary.
- </p>
- <p>
- He grinned and did not tell, and what did not occur to him was that if he
- offered no explanation she would supply one of her own. It is idiotic to
- tell a wife everything, but wise to tell nearly everything; especially
- when it is open to her to draw a false conclusion.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam did not think a false conclusion open to her, because he still
- believed the best of Ada, because he was still in love. But falling out of
- love is desperately easy.
- </p>
- <p>
- “As a walled town,” says Touchstone, “is worthier than a village, so is
- the forehead of a married man more honourable than the bare brow of a
- bachelor,” and Sam was married. He could lay that flattering unction to
- his soul, could hold his head higher, because he was a ratepayer and bore
- responsibilities, and went home at night to a house with a garden. He did
- all that, and it was empty honour because success in marriage, as in all
- else, is not to be had ready-made, but depends upon the will to make
- adjustments.
- </p>
- <p>
- The will can come best from passion, and there was no passion here to tide
- them over the awkward age of marriage, the first difficult year when the
- adjustments must, if ever, be made. Granted passion, a man can love a
- woman whom he knows to be a murderess; let passion lack, and he can fall
- out of love because the woman snores or is untidy. Sam’s marriage was not
- made in heaven, but by Ada in Heaton Park, and with a marriage so made it
- is as easy to fall out of love as off a house. Little things count more
- than big when there is no passion to create its life-long mirage.
- </p>
- <p>
- If you cannot have the mirage of passion there is a useful substitute
- called common sense, another name for compromise, and Ada refused to
- compromise. She was for self, unmitigated and supreme. Ada left the
- adjustments to Sam, and relaxed in nothing from her perfect selfishness.
- </p>
- <p>
- The little thing which counted heavily against her, almost at once, was
- simply that Ada was untidy. She did not invent places for things, or, if
- she did, they were never used. She left her clothes downstairs after she
- had been out, and the piano is not the place for a hat or the sofa for an
- umbrella. It annoyed Sam to distraction to find her clothes distributed
- about their bedroom, slung carelessly over chair backs, pitched on the
- floor.
- </p>
- <p>
- Men are not the untidy sex: the virtue of tidiness, like most others, is
- evenly distributed. Sam was tidy by nature, and habit is stronger still.
- Ada’s misfortune was that he was used to Anne, that Anne was neat and Ada
- a slut. Sam did not know until he missed it how much he appreciated Anne’s
- tidiness, how much he needed it and how much he hated untidiness until he
- lived with it in Ada. In London, in the hotel, he had excused what he saw
- of it, because it was in an hotel; which was also why there had been
- little to see, by reason of a good chambermaid.
- </p>
- <p>
- At home, it hurt him and he could do nothing. Ada did nothing, either. She
- had not married for love, and one does not change a habit without strong
- motive. His hints appeared to Ada peevish and unreasonable. She thought he
- made mountains out of molehills and despised him for small-mindedness; he
- thought a woman who could not put a petticoat into a drawer when he asked
- her was wilfully provoking him.
- </p>
- <p>
- She was not wilful of set purpose. She simply refused to disturb her
- habits, to accommodate herself to him, to make a sacrifice to love. She
- had no love to which to sacrifice.
- </p>
- <p>
- And presently he found out that he, too, did not love. But that was all.
- Then and afterwards that was, damnably, all. He did not love, but neither
- did he hate. He had never loved her deeply enough to hate her. That was
- the tragedy of Sam’s marriage: indifference, the deadliest sin.
- </p>
- <p>
- He was indifferent to her, to her untidiness and even to her extravagance.
- She could not treat clothes reasonably, she did not know how to wear them
- when she had them, but she lusted madly to possess them. She was grossly,
- inexcusably extravagant, and he was indifferent. He was indifferent
- because he was growing rich, and wanted his energies for the purpose of
- growing richer, not of quarrelling with her.
- </p>
- <p>
- That was another tragedy. They never quarrelled. They never cleared the
- air, they never flushed the drain. They did not make adjustments, but left
- things where they were, in a bad place. On honeymoon, they turned from
- looking at each other to look at London, and at home, after one experience
- of revelation, they did not seek another, but rebounded and looked
- anywhere but at themselves.
- </p>
- <p>
- But Peter was looking, and Anne, through the eyes of George, was looking,
- and it seemed to her that things were happening as she had expected they
- would happen. She had said the girl was no good and what George told her
- in his fumbling way gave her to see that the girl turned wife was equally
- no good. Anne tightened her lips grimly and went on with her efficient
- charring. She thought her time would come.
- </p>
- <p>
- Peter looked for the coming of love to bless this marriage to which he had
- consented in the belief that his God of love would sanctify. He had
- trusted to the strength of Sam, and to the hope that Sam’s strength would
- turn to sweetness; and it only turned to business. It did not lead Ada
- from materialism, but drew Peter himself, unwittingly at first, towards
- it. Peter found himself selecting texts for Sam’s “Church Child’s
- Calendar,” a labour of love, which nevertheless had nothing to do with
- Ada, except in the most indirect way, and nothing to do with the Sam and
- Ada situation.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was the fact that, to them, there seemed to be no situation which
- distressed Peter. They simply let things be, and things let be obey the
- law of gravity. He hoped, ardently, for children. Children blessed
- marriage in the physical sense, and from that blessing the other, the
- spiritual blessing, might arise.
- </p>
- <p>
- There was at one time hope that Ada might have a child... and then the
- hope was blighted, and the doctor told them not to hope again. Ada would
- never be a mother.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I could have told them that,” said Anne. “You’d only to look at the girl
- to see it.” Which may only have been wisdom after the event, but certainly
- did not imply that Anne was disappointed; though Peter was, and bitterly.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam, too, had wanted a son, but not, as Peter thought, by Ada and for Ada.
- He wanted an heir for dynastic reasons. He was the Branstone Publishing
- Company, its parent and original, and wanted flesh of his flesh to publish
- after him. He dreamed of a young Sam in the cap of the Grammar School, who
- should go to the University to which he had not gone and have the chances
- he had missed. He built many castles in Spain for the son who was never
- born.
- </p>
- <p>
- Ada got up from bed and flashed greedily into new clothes. If the measure
- of her buying was the measure of her grief, she had been deeply touched.
- Perhaps she was touched, for she had aimed at marriage, which is
- incomplete without a child. But in the shops, the fashion papers, her
- clothes and the clothes of other women she found distraction and an
- occupation. She passed a milestone and went on her way. Ada was no stoic,
- no hider of her grief, and since she did not complain she must have
- thought her childlessness was nothing to complain about. When she set her
- heart on marriage, she hadn’t, perhaps, looked further than the ring, the
- ceremony and the honourable state of being Mrs. Branstone.
- </p>
- <p>
- She plunged to shops and spending money, Sam to business and making it;
- and some, at any rate, of the now thwarted love he had been storing for
- his son passed to the business. Somewhere at the back of his mind he knew
- his business was not lovable; that it was pitch; that one cannot touch
- pitch without being defiled. But neither can one deal successfully in
- pitch without arriving at faith in the virtues of pitch. At intimate
- moments he was aware that the “Social Evil” pamphlet was pernicious, but
- Sam Branstone, inducing a bookseller to stock it, was more than an
- advocate who believes temporarily in his brief: he was a missionary with
- faith in his mission. So, too, with the texts. He sold them with the
- conviction that it was good for people to have texts on their walls. He
- counterfeited sincerity until he came to be sincere, or, at all events, to
- forget that he was insincere.
- </p>
- <p>
- Further and further into the unsearched recesses of his mind he pressed
- the thought that he sold texts because their sales were good for him, and
- with his working, everyday, non-introspective mind he had a sincerity
- about his wares, convenient but none the less authentic,-which was
- invaluable both to his self-respect and as a first aid to success in
- salesmanship. He never, in the old days, praised a house with the ringing
- voice of absolute conviction which he used about Law’s “Serious Call.” He
- had not read Law, but the sales hung fire till he became persuaded of
- Law’s tremendous worth.
- </p>
- <p>
- He had a serious call of his own, a call to sell good books at good
- profits, and the call expressed itself in his clothes and his appearance.
- He seemed older, graver, took his frock-coat into daily wear, used only
- black in ties and socks, and had the air of one, who, if not a clergyman,
- was often in their company, though as a fact he was more frequently with
- commercial travellers, and in the hotels at night his repertoire of
- smoke-room stories came no less gaily from his tongue than of old.
- </p>
- <p>
- And about this time his moustache began to droop like a curtain over his
- resolute mouth.
- </p>
- <p>
- Stewart came into the office one day with a parcel under his arm. He had
- seen neither Sam nor his office lately, and stared wide-eyed at both.
- Carter, partner in the printing business, still occupied the dilapidated
- office where Sam had found him, but the Branstone Publishing Company had
- ampler premises next door, in a building which Sam rented as warehouse for
- his stock. Gilt lettering on its windows called the attention of the
- passer-by to the Branstone + Classics.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam still looked after detail, and when Stewart came in was correcting
- proofs of a tear-off calendar with a Bible at his elbow.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I suppose,” said Stewart, “that you <i>are</i> Branstone, but why
- disguise yourself as a Scottish Elder?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I am in my usual clothes,” said Sam, rather huffed.
- </p>
- <p>
- “If the clothes are the man, this is no place for me. Do you often use the
- Bible in your business hours?”
- </p>
- <p>
- He often did, not only to check with a quite beautiful precision the texts
- on his calendars by the Authorised Version, but in another way, and one
- which seemed to show, if it showed anything, that he looked upon the Bible
- with intimate familiarity. Perhaps one mascot was the vellum-bound copy of
- the “Social Evil” pamphlet and the other the Bible. At any rate, his price
- code used in the office was made up this way:
- </p>
- <h3>
- M Y F A T H E R G O D
- </h3>
- <h3>
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 20
- </h3>
- <p>
- New clerks initiated into that code used to wonder at it for a day. Then
- they got used to it.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m correcting the proofs of this calendar,” Sam explained. “You see,
- it’s a shaving calendar. You hang this up by your shaving-mirror and study
- the text for the day while you shave.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I don’t,” said Stewart. “I go to the barber’s. My hand’s unsteady in the
- morning. But I see the idea. First read the text, then wipe your razor on
- it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “That is not the idea. See.” He pointed to the card of the calendar, and
- read solemnly:
- </p>
- <p>
- <br />
- </p>
- <p class="indent30">
- “A text a day
- </p>
- <p class="indent30">
- Drives care away.”
- </p>
- <p>
- <br />
- </p>
- <p>
- “It wouldn’t drive my sort of care away,” said Stewart. “Mine’s serious.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “There can be no trouble too serious for you to find consolation in this
- calendar.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “But suppose I have toothache on quarter-day, and the consolation you
- offer for that date is consolation to a man who can’t pay his rent?
- Seriously, Branstone, am I behind the scenes in this office, or do you
- never drop the showman? I admit you’re in the pi-market, and you’ve
- dressed the pi-man’s part and you’ve got his patter, too, but I don’t know
- that you need exercise it on me. This stock of yours looks dire,” he
- commented, strolling round the office. “I suppose it’s the stuff that
- sells?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “My business,” said Sam, “is founded on a rock.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I came in here to sell you a fortune,” said Stewart. “If you’re going to
- talk cant at me, I’ll take the fortune to a London publisher. Your
- business may be founded on a rock, but the name of the rock is the ‘Social
- Evil.’”
- </p>
- <p>
- “The word rock,” said Sam, with a twinkle in his eye, “is also used for a
- kind of toffee.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, now that I know you’re sane, I’ll talk to you. And I’ll talk
- toffee, too I didn’t think in the days of my earnest youth that I should
- come to this, but you never know what debt will do to a man. I’ve written
- a novel. At least, it isn’t a novel, it’s an outrage on decency. It’s a
- violent assault on the emotions. It’s the sort of thing I deserve shooting
- for writing. Treacle is bitter compared with it, and it does not contain
- one word of literature. It is a cast-iron certainty.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I must read it,” said Sam.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You’re growing distrustful,” said Stewart sadly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I don’t buy pigs in pokes, even when they’re yours,” said Sam. “Come
- along in a couple of days.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He read the novel, and was ready for Stewart when he came.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I have taken the liberty,” he said, “of marking some passages in this
- manuscript which you may care to alter.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh? I know it’s mawkish, but I don’t believe there is a limit to what
- they’ll stand—and like.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I refer particularly to the character you have called Hetaera.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “But only once. After that she’s called Hetty.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Hetty,” said Sam severely, “will have to be cut out. She is an impure
- woman.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Even the most popular of novels should bear some relationship to life.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “If you wish me to publish this one, Hetty must go. Branstones have a
- reputation to sustain.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Good God!” said Stewart. “Hetty is the one oasis of truth in a desert of
- sloppy sentimentality. She’s true because I happen to know her.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “That is nothing to your credit, Stewart.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Stewart stared. “Are you pulling my leg, Sam, or is this really serious?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why should you doubt my seriousness when I ask that fiction should be
- devoid of offence?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Don’t you mean devoid of truth?” He recovered his temper and his
- perspective. After all, he was very short of money. “All right, Sam,” he
- said. “Edit me. Censor me. I thought I knew things, but there are deeps
- below the lowest depths, and you have reached them. I surrender. What are
- the terms?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam offered terms which were quite generous. He might want Stewart again.
- </p>
- <p>
- The novel was purged of Hetty and published. The three-page prayer of the
- distressed heroine was used, in paraphrase, from quite a number of
- nonconformist pulpits, and the book was a huge success. It was the first
- of that series—Branstone’s Happy Novels for Healthy Homes—which
- carried the strength of the literary emetic to a point of concentrated
- sweetness undreamt of before, and discovered somewhere a public stomach
- which did not reject its nauseating jam, but revelled in it.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0016" id="link2HCH0016"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER XVI—THE POLITICAL ANIMAL
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>F only Ada had had
- the courage of what ought to have been her convictions, things would have
- been very different. But she hadn’t the pluck or the zest in life to be
- anything at all except an almost perfect negative, and a man will fight
- for a wife for many reasons, but not for the reason that she is a
- full-stop.
- </p>
- <p>
- Ada, as Peter knew when he consented to the marriage, could be led: with
- even surer hope of good result she could be driven, and if Sam had cared
- to drive, to play Petruchio with Ada, he could have turned her negative
- into a comparative, if not into a positive.
- </p>
- <p>
- Unhappily, his driving powers were otherwise engaged, and his objectives
- were on the battlefield, his office, rather than in the dormitory which he
- might have turned into a home. And since Ada had all that she was
- conscious of wanting, she had a dull contentment. Two servants and credit
- at the shops were good enough for Ada, and good enough, too, for Sam,
- because they advertised success. If Ada had been actively vicious, if she
- had drunk, if men or a man had obsessed her, if indeed she had been
- anything that was bad perceptibly, Sam would have abandoned his
- indifference and taken a strong and effective line with her. It might, at
- first, have been only because a positively vicious Ada would have been bad
- for the Branstone + Classics, but it would have ended by being good for
- Ada and for Sam: it would have been the beginning of Ada <i>and</i> Sam,
- of their dual life which had not yet come to birth. But, as it was, he saw
- nothing to fight. There was a superficial rightness; therefore all was
- right, he could forget Ada and turn to the things which were vital to him,
- business for its own sake, and business considered as a stepping-stone to
- politics.
- </p>
- <p>
- He was content for some time to leave his political ambitions alone,
- because it seemed to him that money, quite a lot of money, was needed for
- politics. In truth, he was rather awed by his ambition: the House of
- Commons seemed a tremendous distance from his office in Manchester, and he
- thought a great deal of money would be needed for the fare. Fundamentally,
- he was modest and rarely overrated his abilities, but he believed that he
- had luck, and thought money a good first aid to more luck. Well as he was
- doing in business, he could not afford to divert his energies from
- moneymaking to politics, wherein he did not mean to begin at the bottom.
- </p>
- <p>
- He was not ready yet to make political opportunities for himself, but if
- political opportunities came to him, that was another matter. And they did
- come. When he interviewed Sir William Gatenby, he threw a pebble into a
- pool whose wave was to wash him to high places.
- </p>
- <p>
- It washed him into the knowledge of Mr. Charles Wattercouch, who was agent
- for the Division. Wattercouch read Gatenby’s letter about Sam with some
- surprise, as one of his recruiting grounds for voluntary workers was the
- Concentrics, and he thought he recalled hearing Sam speak for the other
- faction, but he catalogued the name for future reference on his list of
- earnest young men.
- </p>
- <p>
- Wattercouch, like Sam, was in no hurry. He preferred men to come to him,
- not to go in search of them, but Sam did not come, and a letter from
- Gatenby was not to be neglected. Though Gatenby had probably dismissed the
- subject from his mind, he paid half of Wattercouch’s salary, and he might
- inquire about Sam some day. So the agent called on Sam at the office.
- </p>
- <p>
- He was a square-built, square-faced man of forty, with a pink, eupeptic
- complexion, and light hair which bristled hardily. Your organizer of
- victory, like your editor, is apt to be cynical about the politics he is
- paid to profess, but Wattercouch kept his perfect faith in Liberalism, in
- spite of the fact that he served the Liberal Party, a feat in the
- accommodation of blameless principle with unscrupulous opportunism, which
- he accomplished with entire sincerity. One can be sincere and Jesuitical,
- in fact one can hardly be Jesuitical without being sincere, and to Mr.
- Wattercouch the most egregiously illiberal acts of the Liberal Party were
- justified because they were the acts of that party, and must, however
- improbable it seemed, be means to the end which was Liberalism.
- </p>
- <p>
- This is not to suggest that Mr. Wattercouch was complex, for he was indeed
- quite simple, as witness the man’s relish in his grotesque name. He knew
- the value of being ridiculed when one can turn ridicule into respect, and
- much of his popularity resulted from the genial way in which he took jokes
- about his name. He made an asset of what might, to a less good-natured
- man, have been a handicap. “Indeed,” says Ben Jonson, “there is a woundy
- luck in names, sir,” and Wattercouch turned doubtful luck to good account.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam had the gift of the gab, which means that he knew both how and when to
- speak, and how and when to be silent. He was silent while Mr. Wattercouch
- spoke of the valuable work to be done by an earnest labourer in connection
- with the annual revision of the register. The point of the work was to see
- that all possible known Liberals were on the register, and all possible
- objection taken to any known Conservatives, and, complicated as the work
- was by the removal habit amongst electors, it was no light undertaking.
- Certainly no agent could have carried it through without the aid of
- industrious volunteers.
- </p>
- <p>
- But Sam did not see himself in the character of an industrious volunteer,
- and he was silent for two reasons. The first was that his silence was
- causing Mr. Wattercouch visible embarrassment, and Sam liked the other man
- to be embarrassed; the second was that he was considering how to make Mr.
- Wattercouch see that his suggestion was an absurdity, if not an insult.
- </p>
- <p>
- He smiled with quite polite superiority. “But I think, Mr. Wattercouch,
- that you are making a mistake,” he said, as one who apologizes for having
- to be blunt.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well,” admitted Wattercouch, “I had my doubts, because I fancied I’d
- heard you support Stephen Verity at the Concentrics.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “That,” said Sam, “is not the mistake to which I allude. I am aware that I
- have supported Verity at the Concentrics. And I am aware that the way to
- learn how to cut a man’s hair is to practise on a sheep’s head. Verity was
- my sheep’s head.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m afraid I hardly follow,” said Wattercouch, who was indeed rather
- scandalized by such an allusion to Mr. Verity, who, if a Conservative, was
- an alderman and a noted figure in local politics.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I will make it easier for you by admitting that even I had to learn,”
- said Sam.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Ah! I see. You have now seen the error of your ways. You realize the
- grandeur of Liberalism, the——”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I always did,” Sam asserted. “When I supported Verity, I was teaching
- myself to speak. I was practising on Toryism that I might become perfect
- in Liberalism. Those days when I made a convenience of Toryism were the
- days of my apprenticeship to the art of speaking. Would you have had me
- speak badly for such a cause as Liberalism? No. But if I spoke badly for
- Toryism, I damaged nothing. Toryism <i>is</i> nothing unless, as I said,
- it is a sheep’s head for Liberals to practise on when they are novices,
- and the mistake you made is to suppose that I am still a novice, when, as
- a matter of fact——” He paused elaborately and hoped that Mr.
- Wattercouch would fill in the blank intelligently. “But it is premature to
- speak of that,” he said. “As to the registration, I can send you one of my
- clerks.” He made a gesture dismissing as an affair of pygmies that chief
- event of an agent’s year.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I see... I see,” said Wattercouch, trying hard to believe that he had so
- far been looking at Sam through the wrong end of a telescope. “And you
- yourself, Mr. Branstone?”
- </p>
- <p>
- It tempted Sam, that tone of quite startled respect which Wattercouch
- adopted now. The misfortune of Sam’s imaginative flights was that he never
- knew when to stop. All that he cared about, at the moment, was to give
- Wattercouch the impression that Sam Branstone was too important to be
- asked to drudge at registration work. He was in no hurry about politics,
- but when he began it would not be as a volunteer clerk.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I?” he replied. “Two things. One a fact and the other a prophecy. The
- fact is that I am an orator, and the prophecy is that Sir William Gatenby
- will not live long and that I shall take his place as member for the
- Division. Have you a cold?” he added, as Wattercouch choked with
- irresistible stupefaction.
- </p>
- <p>
- He had not a cold, neither had he powers of speech just then, and the
- silence grew emphatic without in the least disconcerting Sam. Once
- launched on the sea of bluff, Sam was a hardy navigator, and he had the
- moral support of knowing that his whole purpose just now was to avoid
- being a clerk. To avoid being a clerk it is justifiable to do more than to
- romance: it is justifiable to commit most of the crimes in the Newgate
- Calendar. Sam was hardly asked to do that, but Wattercouch’s cough was a
- challenge, and a bluff half bluffed is worse than no bluff at all. It
- became a matter of pride to convince this unbeliever.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I intend,” said Sam with aplomb, “to do a good deal of platform for the
- Party. If an election comes soon, so much the better. I shall take the
- opportunity to make myself more popular with the electors than Sir William
- Gatenby is. That is easy. He quotes Latin in election speeches, and I’m a
- man of the people. After that, I expect to contest a by-election for a
- seat which the Party regards as a forlorn hope. If it is possible to win
- that seat for our Great Cause, I shall win it. If not, I shall trust to
- two things, the senile decay of Sir William Gatenby and the discretion of
- the Whip’s office.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Wattercouch was adapting himself painfully to the new perspective. He
- granted that Sam had plausibility, and an assurance which nearly lent
- conviction to his astonishing statement.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You are in touch with the Whips!” he gasped.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam remembered and varied an old formula. “Do you suppose,” he asked
- indignantly, “that I should be speaking to you like this if I were not?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Wattercouch did not suppose it. For one thing he was acquainted with the
- devious ways of Whips, and nothing that those secretive autocrats did
- could surprise him: for another, he wished to believe what Sam wished him
- to believe. He saw in Sam the way out of a dilemma.
- </p>
- <p>
- His dilemma was a common one. A death had caused a vacancy in the Town
- Council, and the local Liberal caucus was almost pathetically embarrassed
- as to its choice of a candidate. There were at least three veteran workers
- for the Cause who expected, with justice, to be approached and none of the
- three could be selected without offence being given to interests which it
- was impolitic to offend.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was all very well for the caucus: they left it to Wattercouch, the
- general handy man, to make suggestions, and as he listened to Sam he
- thought he had found a candidate who, simply because he was politically
- unknown, could offend nobody. If the obvious men were wrong, he must rely
- on the rightness of the unexpected, and, after all, Sam might be speaking
- the truth. One never knew where one was with Whips, and here was his
- chance to propitiate Sam and at the same time to solve the problem which
- troubled the caucus. Sam was a dark horse and he wished he knew more about
- him; it was startling to come in search of a voluntary clerk and to find a
- candidate; but, finally, he saw it as a legitimate case for taking a risk.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I don’t know, sir,” he said, with a very pretty respect in his voice,
- “whether municipal politics will appeal to a man of your calibre, but
- there is a vacancy in St. Mary’s Ward, and I hardly think there will be
- any difficulty about your adoption as candidate if you cared to stand.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam pretended to reflect. The truth was that the prospect of an immediate
- seat in the Council made his heart beat fiercely. He had meant for a while
- longer to put business before politics, but this sort of politics was
- business. The Council took up one’s time, but conferred a prestige on
- Branstone and the Branstone Publications which would more than compensate
- for the waste of time.
- </p>
- <p>
- And it was deliciously unexpected. He had not studied to impress
- Wattercouch, but had talked exaltedly simply to excuse himself from the
- unseen, thankless drudgery of organization: yet it seemed he had
- impressed. Virtually, he was offered a seat, He was, this soon, to sit
- where Travers had sat, to be a City Father before he was thirty-five. He
- had romanced glibly about a bird in the bush, and found himself grasping a
- bird in hand, and no contemptible fowl either.
- </p>
- <p>
- “We must despise nothing,” he said, “which makes for Liberalism.”
- Wattercouch nodded with enthusiasm. “Of course,” Sam went on, “strictly
- between ourselves, the Council is small beer. But it is for the Cause, and
- if I were asked to stand, you may take it that I should not allow the
- larger view I have of my ultimate activities to interfere with my
- acceptance. I take pleasure in duty and I see it as my duty, even if it
- involves the postponement of my Parliamentary ambitions, to throw myself
- wholeheartedly into this conflict.” He was wonderfully pious.
- </p>
- <p>
- Wattercouch was less emotional. He had heard too many speeches from
- prospective candidates to be carried away by Sam’s. “Quite probably there
- will be no contest,” he said dryly. “It’s a safe Liberal seat.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I should have preferred a fight,” Sam lied wistfully. “But I put duty
- first.”
- </p>
- <p>
- As a fact, there was no contest, and if each of the three veteran workers
- thought himself aggrieved, he had the consolation of knowing that the
- other two shared his grievance. Wattercouch was discreetly mysterious
- about Sam in the inner councils of the local Party, used Gatenby’s name
- freely and managed to convey that Branstone was something much bigger than
- he appeared to be. He had, at least, got them out of their quandary.
- </p>
- <p>
- Nor did Sam discredit his sponsor either at the private meeting he
- addressed or at the public one which followed. He had said he was an
- orator, Wattercouch had repeated it indefatigably, and Sam’s audience
- believed it implicitly. He was not quite an orator, but was coming along
- nicely under the tuition of an old actor who had failed on the stage and
- now called himself a professor of elocution.
- </p>
- <p>
- He became Mr. Councillor Branstone, and happy little references to the
- event began to appear in the papers. The <i>Sunday Judge</i>, for
- instance, had “no doubt that Mr. Branstone will live to look back upon his
- unopposed return to the Council as a minor episode of his political
- career, and we speak by the book. Branstone will go far, but, meantime, it
- is something even for him to know that he is the most popular man in St.
- Mary’s Ward. We had almost written in the whole city, but that would be to
- anticipate. How is it done? How is such popularity achieved? How, in other
- words, did merit become recognized? Mr. Branstone himself only smiled when
- we asked him, but his smile is half of his secret and his rousing, earnest
- oratory the other half. They are indeed an open smile and an open secret.
- But there are other secrets less open. All we shall say now is, ‘Watch
- Branstone. He will not disappoint you.’”
- </p>
- <p>
- There was a low evening paper, run in the Conservative interest, which
- fastened on the phrase “other secrets less open” and published the
- scurrilous statement that one of the less open secrets was the fact that
- Mr. Councillor Branstone’s mother was a charwoman, but the paragraph
- appeared only in the early edition and unaccountably disappeared from
- later issues. It did no harm, as first editions are not published for
- politicians, but for sportsmen, and, in any case, there was a brief, but
- dignified, eulogy of Mr. Branstone in the <i>Manchester Warden</i> next
- day. That paper happened, fortunately, to be Liberal in politics, and
- indeed to be, on just occasion, a valiant log-roller. It rolled a log for
- Sam; the popularity of Branstone was established, hall-marked by the
- Press; and it was about this time that Stewart’s second potboiler was
- accepted for inclusion in Branstone’s Novels. The terms were even more
- favourable to the author than before.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0017" id="link2HCH0017"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER XVII—THE VERITY AFFAIR
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HE curse of the
- Wandering Jew is upon the advertiser: he must move perpetually. Not that
- Sam would have been in any case content to sit idly on a seat in the
- Council Chamber. He hadn’t the sedentary gifts, nor was he of the breed of
- Ada, who, the state of matrimony once achieved, existed in contemplation
- of a glory which was even more vegetable than animal.
- </p>
- <p>
- He had to do something to justify a paper reputation for popularity and he
- had even to convince himself that he would not soon wake up to find it all
- a dream. It had happened too easily to be true, or, at least, safe.
- Wattercouch had hinted that things were expected of him.
- </p>
- <p>
- They were, of course, expected of him as a Liberal, and Sam was not, in
- fact, a Liberal but a Conservative. A Conservative is a man who conserves,
- who says “Aye” to the words of Giovanni Malatesta.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br />
- </p>
- <p class="indent15">
- “What I have snared, in that I set my teeth
- </p>
- <p class="indent30">
- And lose with agony.”
- </p>
- <p>
- <br />
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam had snared, he proposed to go on snaring and never to lose what he had
- snared. Whereas a Liberal is a Conservative weakened by sentimental
- compassion for the dispossessed. He is not the opposite of a Conservative,
- but a Conservative who is weak-minded, or timid or scrupulous enough to
- think himself a robber and to propose to give the poor some five per cent
- of his plunder. The opposite of a Conservative is an anarchist.
- </p>
- <p>
- Politically he was a Liberal because he thought the Liberals certain to
- come in for a long innings at the next election, and if there was any
- feeling about it at all (beyond a desire to be on the winning side), it
- was for the pudgy orator whose tremendous sentences had caught his
- imagination when he visited the House of Commons.
- </p>
- <p>
- What he did became known as the Verity affair. It might with equal and
- perhaps superior justice have been called the Branstone affair but for
- that malicious impulse which causes people to refer to a scandal by the
- name of the exposed rather than the exposer. It is like the odium which we
- attach to a man who has been in prison, where he had already had his
- punishment. Mankind is resolute against letting sleeping dogs lie.
- </p>
- <p>
- Mr. Alderman Verity was an elder statesman of the Council and a
- Conservative of the honest, unyielding type who thought that to approve of
- Tory Democracy was to be either a rogue or a fool, and Sam objected to him
- not because he was a Conservative, but for deeper reasons. Verity was the
- landlord of Sam’s offices. Every tenant objects to every landlord.
- </p>
- <p>
- One calls Verity an honest Conservative because he made no concessions,
- not because he was himself a fount of honour. He had no sympathy with the
- modern mawkishness about pampering the people. He admitted that one had to
- make promises, that the way to win elections was to tickle the elector as
- if he were a trout, but as an Alderman he sat above the cockpit of
- electioneering and frowned upon the Liberal attitudes to which younger
- Conservatives descended to catch a vote. And their view that the Council
- existed for the people honestly revolted him: it was so patently the other
- way about.
- </p>
- <p>
- The particular instance was Baths in Hulme. He saw no sense in Baths in
- Hulme. He was quite sincere in his belief that to build Baths in Hulme was
- to cast pearls before swine. Hulme had not asked for Baths and did not
- want Baths. Baths were opportunities for cleanliness and Hulme did not
- want to be clean. Hulme would not be Hulme if it were clean.
- </p>
- <p>
- The uncleanliness of Hulme was an institution. Conservatives conserve
- institutions, and the only thing which could remove his Conservative and
- Aldermanic objection to Baths in Hulme was self-interest.
- </p>
- <p>
- Self-interest is the greatest institution of them all.
- </p>
- <p>
- He continued to oppose the young bloods of his Party because for a long
- time he did not see where his self-interest came in. He even opposed them
- publicly. He said in public that Baths in Hulme were a nasty, pandering,
- Liberal idea and that no decent-minded Conservative could think of it
- without nausea. And then, suddenly and silently, he was found to be with
- those who proposed that Hulme should bathe if it wanted to. His change of
- mind coincided with the discovery that there was no open space in Hulme
- where Baths could be erected. Something would have to come down that the
- Baths might go up, and what would come down, and why, was the secret of
- Mr. Alderman Verity and one or two others of the Old Gang who had the
- habit of standing loyally by each other when a little simple jobbery was
- in question. Really, it was too simple to be reprehensible. If a Town
- Council can by one and the same resolution clear away a slum, and confer
- Baths, who benefits, and doubly, but the Town? Naturally, the slum owner
- has to be compensated, though adequate compensation can hardly be put high
- enough. Slums are so profitable.
- </p>
- <p>
- Wattercouch had many preoccupations just now, but his vigilance was a
- habit, and he was struck by the change in Mr. Alderman Verity’s attitude.
- The silence which succeeded his eloquence seemed pregnant with something,
- and Wattercouch wondered with what. It was an error of judgment in the
- Alderman not to be ill at this time, but he had covered his tracks and the
- affair was prejudged, settled before it ever came before the Council.
- Verity had neither conscience nor fears about it, and the Conservative
- Party, with a prescient eye on the imminent General Election, was going to
- use its majority in the Council that it might figure as the Party which
- bestowed cleanliness on Hulme.
- </p>
- <p>
- Wattercouch wondered why it was Simpson’s Buildings which those
- benefactors of mankind proposed to buy and demolish so as to clear a site
- for their Baths.
- </p>
- <p>
- “This might be your opportunity, Branstone,” he said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Isn’t it asking a good deal of the junior member of the Council to
- suggest that he tackle an old hand like Alderman Verity?” asked Sam,
- leaning back in his chair with his thumbs in his waistcoat armholes.
- </p>
- <p>
- “We all expect great things of you,” flattered Wattercouch, who had still
- to justify his selection of Sam to the Liberal caucus.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I don’t intend to fail you, either. But I can’t oppose these Baths. As a
- Liberal I am in favour of them.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “So are we all. But we are not in favour of Alderman Verity’s being in
- favour of them.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It’s David and Goliath to pit me against Verity, Wattercouch.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “David won.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “And Samuel will win. But he will make a condition. The condition is a
- free hand. I want no help and no advice and I undertake on that condition
- to pulverize Verity.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “But you’ll tell me what you propose to do?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I said a free hand, Wattercouch. Leave this to me and I’ll settle it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- It seemed to Wattercouch that every time he had dealings with Sam he was
- asked to take a gambling chance, but he had no plan of action, and the man
- without a plan is always at a disadvantage against the man who, with or
- without a plan, looks confident. He left it to Sam and there was, as it
- happened, nobody to whom he could have left it better.
- </p>
- <p>
- Wattercouch had no inside information and only vague suspicions that
- Verity’s change of mind was rooted in the same earth as Verity’s
- self-interest. But Sam knew something and was not boasting idly when he
- undertook to “pulverize” Verity.
- </p>
- <p>
- What he knew, rightly used at the right moment, was dynamic enough, but he
- lacked evidence and he did not see how to get evidence. The Council
- meeting was at hand and he was finding it each day more difficult to grin
- with cheerful assurance at the mutely questioning Wattercouch. He felt
- distinctly unassured.
- </p>
- <p>
- The facts were clear enough to him. Verity now approved of the Baths
- because they were to be erected on the site of Simpson’s Buildings, and
- Verity owned that dilapidated pile. He did not own it publicly because
- respectable aldermen do not own slum property; he owned it in the name of
- Mr. Sylvester Lamputt, Verity’s second cousin, a man of straw; and Sam
- knew that he owned it because he had a good memory, he remembered a
- conversation between Lamputt and Mr. Travers, which he had overheard, and
- all the present circumstances pointed to the relations of Lamputt with
- Verity being as they had been when Sam was in the estate agent’s office.
- </p>
- <p>
- Verity was aware that retail profits are higher than wholesale, and small
- retail than large retail; that when, for instance, a poor woman buys an
- ounce of tea she pays a higher rate for it than when a rich woman buys a
- pound or ten pounds, and similarly that when a family rents a room in a
- slum property it pays immensely more for it proportionately than when a
- cotton king rents a warehouse in the centre of the city. But it is
- dignified to let a warehouse to a cotton king, and disreputable to let
- single rooms in Hulme, so second cousin Lamputt was the putative owner of
- Simpson’s Buildings. Sam smiled at the ludicrous thought of the burly
- alderman sheltering behind the shrivelled form of his second cousin
- Lamputt. It was like trying to hide a bull behind a weasel.
- </p>
- <p>
- But he did not smile often in those days. He paid a visit, at dusk, to
- Simpson’s Buildings, and breathed softly lest Simpson’s Buildings should
- collapse upon him. Obviously, the alderman was finding his market in the
- nick of time. It eliminated doubt, but did not provide proof.
- </p>
- <p>
- He knew that in the matter of Simpson’s Buildings, Lamputt was identical
- with Verity, but he wanted evidence, and to get evidence he must rely upon
- the dullness of Mr. Lamputt, and did not think that he was dull. The totem
- of Lamputt was certainly a ferret, and Sam credited the ferret tribe with
- nimble wit. He had to be more nimble, then.
- </p>
- <p>
- He rejected the idea of making Mr. Lamputt gloriously drunk because it
- seemed impossible to associate glory, even the glory of intoxication, with
- Mr. Lamputt’s feeble body. It was a case, as usual with Sam, of taking
- chances.
- </p>
- <p>
- He did nothing at all until the morning of the meeting which was to decide
- if Hulme might bathe, and, even then, left his office only a little before
- his usual time for going to the Town Hall. He turned into a back street,
- ran up many stairs to the attic office whose door bore the name of
- Sylvester Lamputt, Agent (more sins are committed in the name of agency
- than of charity), and flung panting into the single room.
- </p>
- <p>
- He won the first throw in his game. Sylvester was in.
- </p>
- <p>
- He sat on a high office stool writing on the malodorous page of an
- enormous ledger, looking for all the world like a diminutive office boy on
- whom some one has fitted, in cruel jest, a hoary head. If the calendars on
- his walls were trustworthy witnesses, he was agent for half the insurance
- companies in the British Isles. Autolycus was Sylvester’s other name.
- </p>
- <p>
- He reverenced his ledger as other men reverence the Bible. He kept no
- other diary, for the ledger was his book of life, and when Sam burst upon
- him he was absorbed in his records. He closed the book mechanically
- through pure secretive habit, and closed into it just enough of his wits
- to put him at a disadvantage with Sam.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam gave no quarter. “Mr. Verity,” he gasped before he was fairly in the
- room. “Simpson’s Buildings... the title-deeds... here, or has Mr. Verity
- got them?”
- </p>
- <p>
- It succeeded. Lamputt took him for an urgent special messenger from
- Verity. “If Mr. Verity’s memory is going,” he said with dignity, “mine is
- not. The title-deeds are in the third drawer of his safe in his office.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “In his name?” asked Sam quickly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Of course,” said Lamputt, and then, too late, became suspicious. “I say,”
- he began, “what———-?”
- </p>
- <p>
- But Sam had gone, and though Mr. Lamputt reached his hat and the door in
- one bound and careered down his familiar stairs like the office boy his
- figure aped, Sam had turned a corner and was lost to sight. Lamputt raced
- to Verity’s office, only to find that the alderman was then attending a
- Council meeting. Lamputt could do no more, indeed for a man with a weak
- heart he had already done too much: but he had a strong foreknowledge of
- the wrath of Alderman Verity, and goes, an unhappy, shrinking figure, out
- of this story to an unknown fate.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam went to the Town Hall with his bomb-shell, and they disapprove of
- bombs at Council meetings, so he was sedulous to spare their feelings. He
- supported that part of the resolution which referred to the erection of
- Baths, but proposed that it should stand alone and that the naming of a
- site should be deferred. Curiously, his proposal made the Conservative
- majority very angry: the resolution was one and indivisible. Sam regretted
- that in order to vote against the misuse of a particular site, he was
- forced to vote against the Baths, but standing as he did for purity in
- civic life, detesting the very shadow of jobbery, he had no alternative
- but to move that the resolution be rejected. Here was a proposal which,
- however innocent its wording, did in fact imply that ratepayers’ money was
- to be handed over to a prominent member of the party opposite, to a
- gentleman in whose safe, at whose office, in the third drawer of the safe,
- were deposited at that moment the title-deeds of the property whose
- acquisition by the city was suggested. He abhorred personalities, he
- shrank from mentioning a name, and if the second part of the resolution
- were withdrawn, he——
- </p>
- <p>
- It was too much for a young, impetuous innocent opposite. “You dare not
- mention a name. You lie.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam hoped the Council would absolve him of causing a scene.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Prove your words,” cried the rash gentleman.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I suggest,” said Sam blandly, “that we avoid unpleasantness. I have made
- a statement and I am asked to prove it. If a deputation of three will go
- with me and Mr. Alderman Verity to his office, the title-deeds of
- Simpson’s Buildings will be found in the place I have indicated.”
- </p>
- <p>
- It was the sort of drama which appealed more to the readers of the evening
- papers than to the Council. Mr. Mayor, in the chair, was speechless in
- embarrassed distress. Sam had the calm of imperishable rock in wind-tossed
- surf. In the midst of a breathless excitement, Mr. Alderman Verity was
- seen to totter to his feet. “I own the property,” he said, collapsed into
- his seat and graced that seat no more.
- </p>
- <p>
- Impossible even for a Conservative paper to uphold Verity, impossible to
- do more than to suggest that Sam’s manners were deplorable: while his own
- papers made a hero of him, found his manners a model of consideration and
- his triumph as graceful as it was complete.
- </p>
- <p>
- All Sam cared to know was that he was on the crest of a wave of popularity
- and a general election was at hand. Night after night he spoke, and the
- tritest platitudes, with Sam’s smile behind them, shone like new-found
- truth. He was <i>persona gratissima</i> before he opened his mouth: it
- gave him confidence, and confidence is half the speaker’s battle. He
- coined some of those ugly, smart, journal-easy catch-words which help to
- win elections, and are quoted in the papers and blossom on the placards.
- And, with it all, he became what he had prematurely called himself, an
- orator.
- </p>
- <p>
- He had the satisfaction of watching audiences sit through the boredom of
- Gatenby that they might hear Branstone, and of being himself the “star”
- speaker at outlying meetings. Gatenby was returned by a record majority
- and it was Bran-stone for whom the mob yelled outside the Town Hall.
- </p>
- <p>
- The election was an early one, and Sam was called to speak in other
- constituencies. He had wires, not only from agents in quite distant
- divisions, but actually from Headquarters. He was in touch with the Whips!
- Less than a year after he had lied to Wattercouch, the lie turned true. He
- was in touch with the Whips, a wanted speaker, a man of reputation, a name
- to be applauded when it was announced on a platform, for all the world
- like people applaud when the number of a star performer goes up on the
- announcement board of a music-hall. He was not of the Great Unwanted, but
- of the few who were wanted.
- </p>
- <p>
- Someone discovered at this time the old canard which had once appeared in
- the first edition of an evening paper, that his mother was a charwoman. He
- did not deny it, but used it as Wattercouch his name, making an asset of a
- handicap. He was of the people, blood of their blood, a democrat by birth,
- knowing their aspirations and their needs because he, too, had needed and
- aspired. In the heat of that election he became egregiously a Radical. It
- told, it “went” with the audiences: that was the thing that mattered to
- Sam. He hadn’t so much as the shadow of a principle, he was winning, on
- the winning side, and pleased himself enormously.
- </p>
- <p>
- And by the end of the campaign he stood, actually, where he had aimed to
- stand: amongst prospective candidates who fight, as it were, probationary
- elections where, they have scarcely a sporting chance, to pay their
- footing towards the sort of candidature which gives a man his seat. If the
- Conservatives had offered him a tolerably safe seat, without preliminary
- fight, he would have ratted eagerly, and the charwoman his mother would
- have been pressed into service on the other side. It was all one to Sam
- Branstone.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0018" id="link2HCH0018"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER XVIII—WHEN EFFIE CAME
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HEN Effie came
- with beauty, shattering the life he lived as sunshine breaks the April
- clouds. At first he did not know what had happened to him: there was a
- radiance, but he thought it nothing greater than her physical appeal. He
- was disturbed, moved as nothing had moved him before—not even
- applause—but did not see that more had come to him than loveliness
- where all had been unlovely. He did not realize that there were greater
- things in Effie than her comeliness.
- </p>
- <p>
- She was the daughter of a doctor who had lived up to every penny of his
- income and died leaving his widow nothing but a cottage in the country,
- which had been their week-end haunt. The widow sold the practice and got
- for it enough to keep herself, with care, in the cottage.
- </p>
- <p>
- There Mrs. Mannering lived unhappily, resentfully, nourishing a grudge
- against her poverty, developing a vein of hardy thrift unseen till now.
- With management, she had enough, but lacked the gift of management. She
- did not see things in proportion, imagined herself deep sunk in poverty
- and made unreasoning demands on Effie. On Effie, not on her son who
- managed a rubber plantation at Penang and followed the spendthrift habits
- of his father. Father and son, the Mannerings were cursed with a passion
- for popularity and entertained with open house to all comers. In the East,
- it cost Rex Mannering more than it had cost his father at home and,
- granted his habits, he was right in saying that he could do nothing for
- his mother. He could deny himself nothing.
- </p>
- <p>
- It left the more for Effie. She who was not trained to work must go into
- the world and fight not only for her bread but for her mother’s luxuries.
- Augusta Mannering was merciless in her demands. She believed, quite
- sincerely, that Eflie was gaining riches in the offices of Manchester and
- withholding a share from her in simple self-indulgence. Was it not by
- going to offices that Dr. Mannering’s rich patients had been able to pay
- their bills? And hadn’t they an army of friends who used to eat their
- salt?
- </p>
- <p>
- But the friends, misunderstanding Effie’s pride, offered no help of the
- kind she could accept. She wanted work, not invitations to houses where,
- with dress and servants’ tips, it would cost her more to live than in the
- rooms she found in Rusholme. She had not the means to be decorative now,
- and it occurred to nobody that Effie was a clerk, wanting a clerk’s place.
- They could not think of her, that brilliant girl, shackled to a
- typewriter. They did not offer what she wanted and she was too proud to
- ask.
- </p>
- <p>
- Then memories are short, especially of the popular men who buy their
- popularity across the dining-table and charge high fees to the unwell to
- procure high feeding for the well; and when the Mannerings disappeared,
- Augusta to her cottage and Effie to Rusholme, there were few inquiries
- made.
- </p>
- <p>
- Some other entertainer stepped into the breach of local hospitality;
- Effie’s net-play became a legend on their tennis lawns; and she herself
- was deemed to be with her mother in the country, shining on other courts
- than theirs.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was not pure callousness, but things are as they are, and one cannot
- live by money and then lose money without losing more than money.
- </p>
- <p>
- Effie went into the city unfriended and alone, and her mother lived, a
- miser, in her cottage. She wrote to Effie that she needed this and that;
- that Effie must spare of her abundance or her mother must starve, and
- Effie out of her thirty shillings a week did send, but her mother did not
- buy. She warmed her hands at a bank-book, wore ancient clothes and watched
- her credit grow. It was more than a perversion of her old extravagance, it
- was insanity and Effie knew it. To keep an insane woman moderately happy,
- she sacrificed necessities. That is why she was shabby when she came into
- Mr. Branstone’s office for the post of typist one bright, revealing
- afternoon soon after his party had triumphed at the polls and he had made
- himself a figure on the hustings.
- </p>
- <p>
- Effie had found companionship in Rusholme, and knew by now the difference
- between the friendship which is given and the friendship which is bought.
- She had become expert in friendship, and Sam, from their first encounter,
- seemed to her more like a friend than an employer. By then, she had
- experience of employers. That was why she was out of work.
- </p>
- <p>
- It wasn’t, of course, the normal Sam she met, but a Sam exalted, genuinely
- raised and not merely puffed up, by his electioneering notoriety. He had a
- new self-confidence; it seemed to him that little was beyond his reach,
- that he might even hope to come to terms with Effie. Not, that is to say,
- to such terms as her last employer had proposed. Sam was not, in these
- matters, the average sensual man. The point was, and it was to his credit,
- that he discerned something fine in Effie even at this stage, and the mood
- of confidence gave him to hope that he might not seem commonplace to her.
- Already, that afternoon, he cared so much. Her opinion mattered.
- </p>
- <p>
- It mattered so greatly that he went slowly about the business of
- surprising her: for that, of course, was what he thought he had to do. She
- might not know things about Branstone which it was good for her to know.
- He might be any employer who advertised for a typist, and he was not any
- employer. He was Branstone, of the Classics and the Novels; town
- councillor; politician; and she must be told about him. She must learn
- what manner of man he was. He wanted to tell her how much greater he was
- going to be, but decided that could wait. First she must know what he had
- done, before it came to telling her what he was going to do, and his
- record would come better from others than from himself. In the office they
- knew it all and, even if she asked no questions, there was much which the
- routine work would tell her of him.
- </p>
- <p>
- He curbed impatience and left her for some weeks in the general office,
- where it was supposed that she was picking up some knowledge of the
- business before beginning to act as his secretary, but what he hoped she
- was picking up was some knowledge of him. He had the idea that he was
- popular with his staff, and did not think that they would libel him to
- her.
- </p>
- <p>
- All the time he burned to have her sitting with him in the private office.
- It was for that purpose that he had advertised for a typist-secretary, and
- to bring her from the general office could excite no comment. On the
- contrary, to leave her there so long might look strange or at least
- suggest that Effie was a failure. A failure! Much he cared whether she was
- efficient at her work. Yet she was splendidly efficient, and still he
- coquetted with his purpose of having her with him. It seemed to him that
- to call her in would be a step definite and irrevocable, one which he
- wanted and even yearned to make, but about which he hesitated sensuously
- as a bridegroom might hesitate on the threshold of the bridal chamber. He
- neglected to make two certainly profitable journeys to London at this time
- because he could not deny himself the pleasure of seeing her neck as she
- bent over her typewriter when he passed through the office.
- </p>
- <p>
- And he had hardly spoken to her! But his dreams were vibrant with the
- music of her voice, swelling like an organ till it filled his life with
- new harmony. It filled his life not because he refused to think of Ada,
- but because he could not think of her. Ada wasn’t there; she didn’t exist.
- She never had been there, for Sam, in the true sense, so that the step
- from the custom which is nothingness to complete nothingness was almost
- imperceptible. She was a ghost from the past fading in the radiance of the
- present. The sun puts out the candlelight.
- </p>
- <p>
- He was seeing Effie, of course, with quite grotesquely unperceiving eyes.
- She might have been, for all he saw of her, the beautiful doll she
- emphatically was not. Her outside pleased and satisfied his eye, and he
- took it for granted that the woman within would satisfy him in the same
- way as the woman without. And so, in the long run, she did, but not till
- Sam had made a hurdle race of it and come some awkward croppers on the
- course. The harmony of his organ dream might have been true prophecy; it
- certainly was not present fact. He wasn’t seeing himself as Effie saw him,
- or the sidelong glances he cast at her pretty neck might have expressed
- more desire to break than to kiss it.
- </p>
- <p>
- He seemed to her a jolly monster, quite lovable if trained, but at present
- as untrained as a badly brought-up dog, and perhaps too old to learn. But
- it might be amusing to see if he could learn, and from her who was not
- used to breaking in a mastiff. That made the thing worth while, his
- bigness and the lovableness she recognized behind the rankness of him.
- Chance might not come her way, and she thought it unlikely that it would,
- but if it did, she meant to take it with both hands. Effie, aged
- twenty-six, proposed to herself to form Sam Bran-stone, who was
- thirty-five and her employer! She smiled at her preposterous audacity, but
- the more she saw and the more she heard of him, the more determination bit
- into her. Droll, officious, absurd—all these her idea was, and she
- liked it because it was fantastic and because Sam was Sam. In Effie’s
- wise, impertinent eyes fantasy and Sam seemed bound together. And yet he
- paid her wages; he was a solid man, a member of the Council, and a serious
- politician! She was impertinent indeed.
- </p>
- <p>
- But he could not, either for his sake or hers, keep her for ever on the
- threshold. For all his late-won confidence he was quite pitiably nervous,
- and held back for days in pure hesitation before the simple action of
- calling her into his office. He thought of it as initiation, a ritual to
- which a high solemnity attached. He intended to act up to its solemnity,
- to usher her into that office with all that was most impressive, to
- signify to her the importance of being secretary to Branstone; and,
- instead, he who was wordy fumbled for words, he who was painfully correct
- dropped two aitches in a sentence, and stood there most comically aghast
- at his slip.
- </p>
- <p>
- Of course, the ritual was finished; one cannot be ritualistic and
- conscious of aitchlessness. Ritual implies the superhuman, the something,
- at least, which sets the executant above the common clay, and to drop an
- aitch is human. In the moment of solemnity, in the mouth of the ritualist,
- it is drolly human. We find incongruity amusing, and the more solemn the
- occasion the more readily does an impish mirth intrude on light pretext.
- </p>
- <p>
- Effie giggled. She did not mean to be unkind, but the spectacle of his
- confusion was too much for her. She hadn’t the strength to resist, and
- though she turned her giggle, quite neatly, into a cough, it was not
- before he had seen.
- </p>
- <p>
- This was his great moment, to which he had looked forward, and she giggled
- at him! He felt himself writ down an ass, and wondered for the fraction of
- a second whether he would get more satisfaction from smacking her or from
- kicking himself. Then he saw her looking at him, and nothing seemed to
- matter. He dropped aitches and she giggled. Very well, then he wasn’t a
- superman, and she wasn’t divine. They were human beings, at this moment in
- the relationship of employer and employed.
- </p>
- <p>
- “In future, you will sit at the little desk in here, Miss Mannering.” He
- met her eye defiantly as he spoke the “here.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “If you have your notebook you can take this letter down.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He was running away from his ruined situation. To dictate a letter to her
- had not been in the scheme at all, as he had planned it. It was a refuge,
- and a safe one, but as he dictated he saw in the letter his opportunity to
- indicate to her that he forgave the giggle. He was writing to an author
- about a manuscript, which he intended to publish, but broke off before he
- reached that decisive point of his letter.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Wait a bit,” he said. “Here is the novel I am writing about. I want your
- opinion of it to fortify my own before I do anything definite. Will you
- have a look at it in here? I’m due at a Council meeting and must go.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Certainly, Mr. Branstone,” she said; “but my judgment isn’t very
- reliable.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “We don’t know that until you try,” he said, escaping from his office to
- the Town Hall, where he kicked his heels for an hour till the meeting
- began Nor did he return to business that day. He had a shyness and a
- feeling of deflation. He needed time before he could expand again.
- </p>
- <p>
- Effie took her reading of the novel conscientiously rather than seriously,
- not supposing that her verdict either way would go for anything, but
- appreciating his hint of confidence, and the fact that, considered as
- work, novel-reading was pleasant. And not finishing the manuscript at the
- office, she took it home with her to Rusholme.
- </p>
- <p>
- In Rusholme the landladies are a little humanized from their primitive
- Grundyism, partly by the girl clerk, but mainly because few of them have
- avoided, at one time or another, the theatrical lodger, a valiant tilter
- at conventionalities; and it is possible for a woman in lodgings to be
- called upon by a man in the evening without being evicted as a sinner. One
- must, of course, choose one’s landlady with discretion.
- </p>
- <p>
- Effie, who had not had the opportunity of selecting her parents and had
- suffered accordingly, chose her landlady with discretion. By now she had
- her friends, those she had made in Manchester, not those she inherited
- from her father; there were men amongst them, and they came to see her.
- Often, in fact, and especially on Sundays, her room was over-crowded; but
- a bed, in the semi disguise of a travelling rug, holds many callers, and
- they solved the problem of hospitality by bringing each a contribution to
- the feast.
- </p>
- <p>
- To-night she had one caller, Stewart, who, having been brought one Sunday
- by a man who knew a woman who was a fellow-clerk with Effie at her
- last-but-one place, had formed the habit of coming as often as he could.
- He was not at the <i>Warden</i> office that night, for the same reason
- which accounted for his not knowing that she had gone to Branstone’s. He
- was convalescent after influenza, too limp to write the super-journalism
- of the <i>Warden</i>, well enough to come out to take the tonic called
- Effie.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I ought not to let you in to-night,” she said. “Thank Heaven for that,”
- he said, coming in. “Doing what one ought is the dullest thing I know—unless
- you’re really serious, Effie? In which case I’ll go.” His hand was on the
- door-knob.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m really serious,” she said with mock impressiveness. “I’m working
- overtime. Behold!” She threw herself on the bed with the manuscript in
- hand. “This,” she announced, “is Work.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I can believe it,” he said, “because that looks like the typescript of a
- novel. If it were mine it would be a pleasure to read; but as it is not
- mine, it is probably work.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, it’s work all right,” she said. “Hard labour, too. I’m reading it by
- order of my new chief. He publishes things like this.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Stewart sat up. “Not Branstone?” he, said. “Don’t say you’ve gone to
- Sammy!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes. Do you know him?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Know him? I invented him. Bit of a Frankenstein for all that. Better say
- I know most of him. He can still spring surprises on me, and you in his
- office are one of’em.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why? Don’t you like his office?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It’s an office. So long as you’ve to be in an office, you could pick
- worse—easily. Sammy’s a stream with a lot of shallows in him, but
- there are also depths, and I’ve never fathomed them. There’s mud in him,
- but it’s not the nasty sort of mud.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’ve seen that much,” she said. “Polluted but curable.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You’re not by any chance thinking of yourself as a Branstone River
- Conservancy, are you?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I rather like him, Dubby,” she said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Good Lord! You and Sam: I say, old thing, no offence, but you know he’s
- married?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I know,” said Ellie. “What’s she like?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Haven’t seen her since I was his best man. Wasn’t tempted to see more of
- her.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It’s as bad as that?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, rather worse, I believe. Pitch that novel over. I’ll tell you in five
- minutes if it’s any use.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Five minutes isn’t very fair to the author,” she protested.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, quite. I’m a reviewer, and reviewing’s badly paid. It teaches you to
- rip the guts out of a novel quickly. Smoke that cigarette and I’ll tell
- you all about it by the time you’re through.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He fluttered the pages while she smoked. “Utter,” he decided. “Utter.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I haven’t finished it,” she said; “but so far I agree with you.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You’ll agree with me to the end. Pluperfect trash. Sam will love it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “What!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You’ll see. It’s just his line.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Aren’t you trying to prejudice me against him?”
- </p>
- <p>
- He stared. “I’m trying to save you the trouble of reading the beastly
- thing. I’ve given you expert opinion. It’s trash and the brand of trash
- that he likes. Didn’t I tell you there, was mud in Sam?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You told me you invented him. I don’t believe your influence has been for
- good.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Don’t be hard on a fellow, Effie; I only introduced him to the mud. I
- didn’t know he’d wallow. Anyhow, let’s talk of something else.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You know,” she said, “you do influence people, Dubby.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Of course. That’s what I’m paid for. I’m a journalist. Have you never
- heard of the power of the Press? It means a lot of little journalists like
- me writing as their editors tell ‘em to. But I don’t appear to have much
- influence on you. I asked you to change the subject and you’re still
- thinking about Sam.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes,” she agreed, “I’m still thinking of Sam.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You and Sam!” he repeated, looking incredulously at her.
- </p>
- <p>
- Effie nodded. “But,” she said, “I don’t know yet.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He rose to his feet. “You’re sure, Effie? You’re sure you don’t know about
- him yet?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Quite sure.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Then you do know about me? Effie, I’ve got to ask. Are you sure about
- me?”
- </p>
- <p>
- She met his eyes bravely, knowing that she must hurt. She was sure she did
- not love Stewart, who was free, and not sure about Branstone, who was
- married. “I am quite, quite sure, Dubby,” she said softly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I see,” he said. “Well, I’m not the sort that pesters, but if you want
- me, Effie, if you find you want me, I’ll be there. I... I suppose I’d
- better go now. It will take some doing to change the subject after this.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Dubby, I’m sorry. You’re not well, and——”
- </p>
- <p>
- She could see him trembling.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Not that, old thing,” he interrupted. “Not pity. That would make me
- really ill. Love’s just a thing that happens along, but one starter
- doesn’t make a race.” He held out his hand. “Well, doctor’s orders to go
- to bed early. Good-night.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Good-night, Dubby,” she said, and added hesitatingly: “You’ll come on
- Sunday?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Lord, yes,” he said. “I don’t love and run away. Good-night.”
- </p>
- <p>
- She sat for a long while staring into vacancy, then found that something
- wet was dropping on her hands. She bathed her eyes and took the novel up
- again. A proposal occupied, she found, twelve pages of turgid, emotional
- dialogue; but, of course, her experience might be limited. Certainly it
- did not confirm the book’s verbosity.
- </p>
- <p>
- She was quite sure that she did not want Dubby Stewart. He did not strike
- her as humorous at all.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0019" id="link2HCH0019"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER XIX—EFFIE IN LOVE
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">S</span>EVERAL causes
- combined to make her think of Sam, too, as not at all humorous when she
- saw him in the morning. Unlike him, she was not at her best in the early
- hours of the day, and the strain of arriving at an office by nine a.m. was
- one from which she did not recover for some time. She hated business, but
- without that cross of early rising she might have found it almost
- tolerable.
- </p>
- <p>
- She woke that day to her landlady’s rap more resentfully than usual. The
- world was disgustingly mismanaged. Why couldn’t she love Dubby, who was
- free? She couldn’t, but she hated Sam for being married, he had no right
- to be married. “Damn Mrs. Sam! Damn her!” she said heartily, by way of a
- morning prayer, as she ran hairpins viciously into her glorious hair. “But
- I’ll cure him of mud,” she added, as she raced downstairs to swallow the
- tea and toast which she took almost in the same rush that carried her from
- her bedroom to the tram.
- </p>
- <p>
- She reached the office and walked into Sam’s room to find him already in
- possession. His obvious briskness at that hour struck her as almost
- indecent; it was, at any rate, another cause for resentment, and one of
- which he was himself quite blandly unaware.
- </p>
- <p>
- He was not stealing a march upon her any more than he habitually stole
- marches on the rest of the world. He knew that early morning suited him,
- and used it to advantage. They were certain in town that Branstone had
- luck rather than brains because he was lazy; but if a man arrives at his
- office at eight a.m., and puts in two hours of solid work by ten o’clock,
- he is well ahead of his fellows of the employing class who go down to
- offices on the 9.21 from home. He can afford to appear lazy.
- </p>
- <p>
- He liked that uninterrupted hour with the books, opened the letters
- himself, and had them annotated before the men came, whose business it was
- to deal with their contents. He planned out the day’s work, and saw it in
- hand before his earliest caller came. After ten, which is the first hour
- when it is etiquette for a salesman to call, Sam was never too busy to
- talk of matters which were not strictly business—with the right, the
- gainful caller. It was known that one could kill time pleasantly with
- Branstone. Branstone was a lazy fellow, and his office a good place to sit
- in on a wet afternoon, when there was no point in going to Old Trafford.
- </p>
- <p>
- He came this morning even earlier than usual, to be ready for Effie when
- she came at nine. He had slept off his embarrassment, and was ready in his
- early morning ebullience to pooh-pooh it. It was stupid to be so
- extraordinarily sensitive about an aitch. Accent had always troubled him,
- but he need not overrate its importance, and especially now that he wore
- the political badge of a democrat, and had acknowledged publicly that his
- mother was a charwoman.
- </p>
- <p>
- So he was here, installed in his chair with the back of his morning’s work
- broken, waiting for her when she came.
- </p>
- <p>
- No, she decided, not at all humorous to-day: formidable, in fact. He had
- all the advantages; he was seated; he was first upon the ground, and that
- ground his own, and he was abominably awake. He might have run away
- yesterday, but this was the morning of retrieval.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Good morning,” he said, assuming an attitude of leisure.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Good morning,” she said, then saw that he was looking quizzically at the
- parcel she carried, as if, she thought, he mistook it for her lunch. “I
- took the novel home to finish,” she explained nervously, and called
- herself a fool for giving him this readymade chance to open the subject
- which of all things she wanted to delay until her suaver hour had come.
- She might be able to cure him of mud, but a doctor should have a bedside
- manner, and she distrusted her manners until the landlady’s knock had
- ceased ringing in her ears.
- </p>
- <p>
- If she had not given him the chance, he would have made it. He gave no
- quarter to bad starters. Had he known of her weakness, he might have
- spared her. He might, because she was Effie; but it wasn’t his habit to
- indulge the weaknesses of others, especially a weakness which he did not
- share, did not understand, and denied to be anything but sloth.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes,” he said encouragingly. “And the verdict?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Does my verdict matter, Mr. Branstone?” she asked. He hadn’t given her
- time to get her jacket off!
- </p>
- <p>
- “What? Certainly it matters. I wasn’t asking you to waste your time when I
- gave you the manuscript to read. The question is whether we ought to
- publish it, and the answer depends on your opinion.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Is that quite fair—to the author, I mean? My opinions of novels are
- inexpert.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “That author can take care of himself very well,” he assured her. “He
- won’t starve if we refuse his novel.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m afraid my opinions are also intolerant,” she said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Still,” he smiled, “I should like to hear them.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “They might infuriate you, and—well, I’d rather not be sacked if I
- can help it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “We will forget that it is in my power to sack you. Does that satisfy
- you?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Oh, how she loathed people who could be magnanimous at nine a.m.! “You are
- being very kind,” she said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “And you are not giving me your opinion. Come, Miss Mannering, you’ve read
- it. What do you think of it?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Later in the day she might have put it more gently. Just now she could
- manage nothing more kindly than: “I think it’s appalling. It’s false from
- start to finish,” and she rejoiced to see how much her vehement candour
- disconcerted him. “I’ve drawn first blood,” she thought; but bleeding as a
- curative process is discredited.
- </p>
- <p>
- “But,” he said, “it is very like others of my series. I made sure it would
- be popular.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m not a judge of that. It’s possible enough. And now”—she smiled
- a little wryly—“I’m afraid you know my opinion of the series. I
- warned you,” she added hastily, “that my opinions were intolerant. I
- imagine you will not ask for them again.” She turned resolutely to the
- typewriter and took its cover off. She thought she had closed the
- discussion, and was suiting action to her word, and sitting at her desk
- when he motioned her back to the chair opposite his. It was not the sort
- of motion one ignored.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I may ask for them again or I may not,” he said; “but in the meantime I
- have certainly not given you anything to do at that machine, and we were
- trying to forget that you are my typist.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I thought after what I’ve said that it might be time to remember it,” she
- suggested.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Not at all,” he assured her. “I get to the bottom of things, and, if you
- please, we’ll have this out.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Of course, if this is part of your secretary’s work——” she
- began.
- </p>
- <p>
- He cut her short. “It is. Now, you find my novel series appalling?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Effie was growing angry. <i>In vino veritas</i>—and in anger. “I
- could go even further,” she said. “I find it degrading.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He thumped the desk. “But it sells, Miss Mannering, it sells. Did you know
- that?” He leant back in his chair in one of the attitudes he took when he
- was scoring heavily, thumbs in his waistcoat arm-holes.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It’s the most popular series of cheap novels on the market. See any
- bookstall, if you doubt me.” He paused for her apology.
- </p>
- <p>
- Effle did not apologize. “That does not alter my opinion of it,” she said
- coolly. “A public danger isn’t less dangerous because it’s large. I’m
- afraid I can believe that there are no depths to which it is impossible to
- degrade the public taste, but that does not make me like any the better a
- series which degrades it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Now a child is a child. It may be deformed, and its begetter may in
- clairvoyant moments have acknowledged the deformity to himself, but he
- resents its being pointed out to him. Sam was the father of his series.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I say!” he protested. “That’s nasty.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It’s a nasty series,” she said hardily. “You are proud of it because it
- sells when you ought to be ashamed of it because it’s bad.” Somehow she
- had to say it. She couldn’t hedge from what she saw as truth, even though
- she expected truth to hurt him and to be hurt in return. But Sam
- wonderfully controlled himself. Emphatically, he was forgetting that she
- was a typist. He remembered that she was Effie.
- </p>
- <p>
- He addressed the ceiling. “The fact is,” he mourned, “that women do not
- understand business. Even business women don’t. Even you don’t.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Mentally she thanked him for his “even you.” It seemed to her a good place
- to end the matter for that morning. She still distrusted her manners, and
- not, she thought, without reason.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Consequently,” she told him quietly, “my opinion cannot matter,” and
- moved as if to go to her typewriter.
- </p>
- <p>
- He held her to her seat. “That is to beg the question,” he replied, “and
- we were to have it out.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “But,” she tried, “you have told me that I do not understand business.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “And you did not believe me.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He challenged her, in fact. Well, she must pick up his gage. “I do not
- understand this about business, Mr. Branstone. What is it about business
- which makes a man like you content to be a confectioner selling people
- wares that give them mental indigestion? Business! It’s the name for half
- the meanness and nine-tenths of the ugliness in the world. You see, women
- do know something about business to-day. It isn’t their fault that they
- are not still sitting cosily at home, hugging the old belief that business
- is a dignified, majestic thing to which only the masculine intellect can
- rise. It’s your fault, the men’s. You wanted cheap clerks, and you raised
- the veil so that women have seen business at close quarters, and the only
- thing they do not understand is how men continued for so long to magnify
- its low chicane and its infinite humbug into a cult which deceived them.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam came to the conclusion that Effie was not perfect. She suffered from
- hysteria, but she must be answered. “Well,” he said, “you don’t think much
- of business. But you came into it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I needed money,” she defended that.
- </p>
- <p>
- “So did I,” he said dryly. “We’re birds of a feather.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You hate it, too?” she asked hopefully.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Honestly,” he said, “I like it. But,” he went on with mischief in his
- eye, “I can tell you something that will please you. You dislike the novel
- series. You think they degrade. You don’t think the Classics degrade?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I would much rather that the Classics sold largely than the novels.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why?” She was eager now. “Because they are great literature?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No. That would be being sentimental about business, and it can’t be done.
- Because they are not copyright, and it saves book-keeping.” He grinned at
- her discomfiture. “Business,” he defined, “is money-getting.” He was
- feeling tremendously pleased with himself, her master in argument. He gave
- her rope indulgently, for she was Effie; then crushed her utterly, for he
- was Sam.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Isn’t it better,” she asked, “to win a little money decently than to gain
- a great deal by trading in poison? Whether you know it or not, these books
- are poisonous.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I don’t know it,” he said brusquely. “They give pleasure.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “So, I suppose, does opium. There are lots of pleasant poisons. Would you
- keep an opium den if it paid? If you were a milkman, would you adulterate
- milk and poison babies? You adulterate books and poison minds. For money!
- Oh, yes; I, too, needed money, and I, too, came to business. But we are
- not birds of a feather. I do not like business. I don’t like having to get
- money. I don’t like money, but I need it. I’ve things to do with it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “My case again,” he capped her. “I’ve things to do with it.” He saw that
- she was looking at him curiously, and that she took him to mean that he
- wanted money for Ada. Incidentally he did, but essentially he did not.
- “Politics,” he added. “Power! Power!” He repeated the word ecstatically,
- not only because he was admitting her to the intimacy of his private
- thought, not only because he felt it an ecstatic idea, but because he had
- so thoroughly defeated her in argument. She sat there staring
- speechlessly, and he exulted to perceive that she was mute before his
- slashing common sense.
- </p>
- <p>
- Only, that was not the reason of her silence. She thought that, for a
- first attempt, she had gone far enough, and had the hope that something of
- what she had said would remain in his mind, perhaps stingingly. She could
- only hope. Heaven knew it had been a queer enough interview between an
- employer and his typist, and her prayer, as she sat there permitting his
- exultation, was for an interruption.
- </p>
- <p>
- Her prayer was answered. Just as she thought him on the brink of seeing
- that her silence was not entirely acquiescent, the office-boy brought in
- the name of a caller he must see, and Effie rose with huge relief. She
- hadn’t it in her to keep silent much longer, and felt that if she then let
- go all that was firing her, she would say more than he could stand. True,
- he had stood a good deal, but then she had said little of what she had to
- say! She wanted to say it gradually, to lead him, not to spur him, to her
- point of view. Already she was taking a more modern view of the virtues of
- bleeding her patient.
- </p>
- <p>
- She thought, too, that his was the easier part.
- </p>
- <p>
- She had ideals for her Sam, but when she attempted to define them, they
- seemed nebulous, indeed, against his simple practice of expediency. He had
- his theory that what was expedient was just, and she—what was her
- theory except that his was not good enough for him? And his was in
- possession everywhere, established, honoured, received of all but a
- trivial minority. He thought with the mass and she thought mass-thinking
- was not good enough for him. It was difficult to explain. He wasn’t a
- criminal, he wasn’t even individual in thought or method; he played the
- common game, playing perhaps a little more astutely than the average, but
- keeping honestly within the rules. He followed the crowd, and she wanted
- him to follow the gleam. A gleam is indefinable, but she thought she had a
- chance because she was so much more grown-up than Sam. Business was a game
- of marbles, and girls do not play with marbles, but with dolls.
- </p>
- <p>
- He was not to remain for long with the delusion that he had silenced her
- in their first talk. There followed many other talks, although she was
- coming to the conclusion that talking would not do the business for her.
- It helped, it made a preparation of the ground, but it was stubborn clay
- in which he had his roots. Talking did not dig deep enough; she must
- uproot, she must transplant.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Politics,” he had said to pulverize her argument.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Another thing,” she told him, “which is not quite the mystery for women
- that it was. Politics, but—why?”
- </p>
- <p>
- And he replied with the word which had raised him to ecstasy. “Power,”; he
- said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes?” she questioned. “Business leads you to money, money to politics,
- and politics to power. And after that? You want power—for what?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why,” he cried, “power is power.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “An end in itself?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “At least, it’s an ambition,” he replied.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was, and so had Ada had her ambition to be married, an end, <i>the</i>
- end. He did not think of Ada, but he found it difficult to justify
- himself. He could not even tell her that he was a Liberal, because he had
- a decent hatred of a Tory; he wasn’t in politics for a faith which enabled
- him to endure their artifice; he relished the artifice, he was in with an
- axe to grind, but with no clear idea of the use he wished to make of his
- axe when it was sharp. Ambition, purpose narrowed to two letters—M.P.
- He wanted to be M.P. for Branstone, that Bran-stone might hear the voice
- of Branstone speaking in the House of Commons.
- </p>
- <p>
- She watched him slyly, and thought her leaven worked. “Of course,” she
- said casually, “it would be useful for your business if you were an M.P.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Enormously,” he agreed, marching blindly into her little trap. “It gives
- prestige to any business.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “And completes the vicious circle,” she said. “Business takes you to
- politics and politics brings you back to business.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He remembered an appointment hastily, and went to keep it. Sam Branstone
- stumped for a reply was an unusual phenomenon, and she con gratulated
- herself again that it worked. It worked, but slowly. She was not
- impatient, but he was still doing unchanged the things she hated to see
- him do, and she wanted the change to come. She doubted that it would ever
- come by talk alone. One did not convert by conversation.
- </p>
- <p>
- She had intended to say so much, to keep a steady pressure on him, and she
- couldn’t do it, partly because her point of view was difficult of
- definition, partly because she thought no talk, no matter how inspired,
- could change him of itself. She did not know of Anne, who had talked and
- kept the pres sure up, and put sacrifice behind the talk even to the point
- of thrusting her hand into the fire; but Effie, too, had sacrifice in
- mind. Anne’s sacrifice had failed. It wasn’t, perhaps, the right
- sacrifice: it was, at any rate, the immortal commonplace, the sacrifice of
- the older generation to the younger, of the mother to the son, of age to
- youth. Spectacular, heroic as it was, it was yet in the scheme of things,
- and it is the sacrifice of youth to youth which can surprise by
- unexpectedness.
- </p>
- <p>
- For some it is a sacrifice to cease talking even when they are convinced
- that talk is futile. If Effie was one of these, she made that little
- sacrifice at once. She never told him that his life was mean and ugly and
- despicable, his triumphs worthless, his success a failure, his highest
- ambition to know that people grovelled to him, his money and his power.
- She did not say these things, but neither did she yield an inch of her
- attitude which implied them.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’ll win,” she told herself, “I’ll win.”
- </p>
- <p>
- By now she was crusading for the soul of Sammy Branstone, and all the
- while her passion grew, fed as much by that in him which irritated her as
- by what attracted. She accepted the fact that he was married and
- discounted it. It was one with the other irritants, mattering less to her,
- for it was irremovable. She could neglect the wife: what mattered was the
- man. She must bring beauty to his life.
- </p>
- <p>
- They have tamed many wild things in a world growm standardized; they have
- tried for centuries to bridle love and make it run in harness; but love
- refuses to be tamed and standardized by the marriage service. You don’t
- scare love away by the bogey-sign, “Trespassers will be prosecuted.”
- Love’s wild, it’s free, blind to the handcuffs which Church and State
- pathetically try to rivet on a given pair, lawless because it knows no
- law, timeless because it know’s no time. Sometimes it lasts while a
- butterfly could suck a flower’s honey, sometimes the space of a man’s
- life, and they have tried to regulate this love, this volatility, to
- pretend that because it sometimes does not evaporate, it never evaporates
- till death. They sought to link love with property, and to control the
- uncontrollable. They make laws round love, which is like enclosing an
- eagle in a cobweb; and we suffer for their laws. We keep the law and
- suffer; break it and we suffer.
- </p>
- <p>
- She knew that she would suffer, but she would bring beauty to Sam. He
- hadn’t capitulated to her talk, and she thought that he had no chance in
- Manchester. Perhaps her Sam was with her in his dreams, but each dawn
- brought him to accustomed ugliness, and habit clogged his days with mud.
- He couldn’t escape, he wanted wings, and she was there to bring them him.
- He did not know there was another side to life, but she would show it him.
- He should see her beauty, and, through that, the beauty of the other side.
- </p>
- <p>
- She was presumptuous, but presumption is a quality of faith. She
- interfered, but there are three inevitable interferences in life—birth,
- love and death—and hers was one of these. It was them all: it was
- love and the birth of the new Sam, and the death of the old. She
- interfered, where she had right to interfere. She loved.
- </p>
- <p>
- Time passed between the day when she came to her decision and the day when
- they acted upon it, and she never knew how long it was nor how she spent
- it. She belonged to a living fact, and there were shadows in the world,
- such as her work, her mother, the silly detail of arranging to go away,
- and Stewart, a haunting shadow of one Sunday afternoon, but these were
- unrealities and only her idea was real. She never remembered how she put
- it to Sam, nor what he said, though she had a hazy memory that he was
- desperately shocked and more profoundly humorous than ever before. But she
- thought that he was only shocked as the right thing shocks by rightness,
- not as the wrong by wrongness: and she knew that difficulties melted: and
- they came.
- </p>
- <p>
- They came to the Marbeck Inn and entered into their kingdom of a week.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0020" id="link2HCH0020"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER XX—THE MARBECK INN
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">S</span>AM was vilely dull
- about it all at first: his comprehension, stuck in the mud, failed utterly
- to rise to the occasion, but before long; he was looking back with horror
- on his turgid mental processes when she told him that they would come away
- together.
- </p>
- <p>
- He had a shadow, not more than a shadow of excuse for his preposterous
- misunderstanding of her ease. Sam followed the crowd, accepted readymade
- their principles and their lack of principles, their morality and their
- immorality, and to the crowd he followed the theory was faithfulness and
- the practice as much licence as they could take without being found out.
- They made a boast rather than a secret of their affairs with a shopgirl or
- a typist, he had never had an affair and was flattered to think that he
- was to have one now.
- </p>
- <p>
- He thought that an affair was rather a manly thing to have.
- </p>
- <p>
- When Effie spoke, he had a great surprise, then cheapened her insultingly.
- He decided that he had been wrong about her. After all, she was nothing
- more than a pretty typist with whom he was going to have his first affair,
- who was going to give him the opportunity to join in that sly boasting in
- hotel smoke-rooms which was the habit of his crowd. He, too, would rank
- amongst the sportsmen.
- </p>
- <p>
- But, even at his worst, he had the grace to doubt that this was of the
- same kind as those other affairs. It had a lowest common measure with
- them, but—Effie! Cheapen her as he would, he could not think of her
- as cheap enough for that. When others did this thing it was, surely, that
- they were giving rein to grossness: it was at least charitable to assume
- that the women of their amours were of coarser grain than their wives, and
- Effie’s was not the coarser grain. He drifted, acquiescing and puzzled,
- through the fog of his perplexity.
- </p>
- <p>
- Illumination came to him, not in the crowded railway carriage, but in the
- trap which drove them from the station to the Inn. It came, he thought,
- miraculously, but perhaps the miracle was nothing more than that a man
- sees clearly in Westmoreland, and sees through dirt in Manchester. He
- worshipped Effie who was sacrificing all to him, and with abasement at the
- thought that he had meant, with his pitiful achievements, to surprise her.
- </p>
- <p>
- He, shepherded to joy at the Marbeck Inn had set out to surprise Effie!
- That was what made it, from the first dawn of understanding, a perfect
- wonder-tale. He had not calculated this; it happened, like a dream, in the
- air, unrooted in prevision. But that was all it had, except its rapt
- intensity, of the quality of dream. It was dreamlike because it was more
- vivid than his experience of life, but it was life. Only, he had not known
- these things about life before. He had underestimated life.
- </p>
- <p>
- The Inn lay in a saucer of the hills at the end of a road which led to
- nowhere. As a road, it finished at the Inn and went on only as a rough
- cart-track which dwindled and divided into two trails across the passes.
- The fells came down in grandeur to the Inn—it wasn’t a place from
- which one looked at distant hills, but one where the hills were intimately
- there—and half a mile away there was the Lake.
- </p>
- <p>
- They were twelve miles from a station, at the end of the world, alone with
- happiness. Of course, there were other people at the Inn, but Sam and
- Effie were alone: they two with the heather and the bracken and the pines:
- they two with love.
- </p>
- <p>
- The crowd has not discovered Marbeck. The Inn, the Church, the Vicarage,
- down by the Lake the Hall, a farmhouse or two along the road, and that is
- all. Six miles away there is a post-office.
- </p>
- <p>
- He had followed the crowd on his rare holidays. He knew Blackpool
- Promenade and Morecambe and the things to do at Douglas. Here, one did not
- do those things. One walked and climbed and lay extended on the heather or
- in the perfect isolation of high bracken, and bathed in the Lake or the
- streams or the tarns, haphazard, naked, where one liked and when one
- liked; and all the time one breathed the air.
- </p>
- <p>
- It needed no thunderous knocking on the door to get her out of bed into
- the Marbeck air. Sam would go for an early dip in the pool below the Inn
- where two streams cascaded into a swimmable basin, and when he returned
- she would be up or ready to get up that he might brush her hair, or not up
- that she might play at being peevish and be lifted out of bed by him.
- </p>
- <p>
- And the food, the good rough plenty of the Marbeck Inn! They ate of it
- prodigiously and carried to the hills parcels of sandwiches and cakes and
- cheese, shamelessly large, which they emptied to the last crumb, and eked
- out in the woods with raspberries and nuts.
- </p>
- <p>
- She took him on the Lake, with a rod borrowed from the Inn, and showed him
- how to fish. He relished it amazingly, catching little but the spirit of
- the thing, happy because of the green reflection of the woods in the water
- and because of her. His restlessness found pause in a boat with Effie and
- she noted with a keen delight that he did not envy the expert basket of
- the postman who cycled to Marbeck in the mornings and fished till he
- cycled away with the letters in the afternoon. She registered as a happy
- gain that he did not want to shine, or try to beat that seasoned fisher at
- his game. Nor did the posts distract them. They had no letters there.
- </p>
- <p>
- They bathed continually, for it was hot, and here again he made no effort
- to excel, but let it be admitted that she was the better swimmer. How much
- the better she did not let him know. She knew that he found the water here
- a purer element than in the old Blackfriars Baths where he had learnt when
- he was at school, and she tired less rapidly than he did. But he was
- wondrously content to own inferiority.
- </p>
- <p>
- She had a deep symbolic faith in bathing. They were here to wash his mud
- away, and water was cleaner than talk. Talk, indeed, was but a surface
- pattern of their time. They hardly needed it, except as levity to mitigate
- a deep communion which sometimes grew almost intolerably sweet.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was Blea Tarn, one of the many of that name, which they made peculiarly
- theirs, their favourite bathing-place, their best lunch-room. Effie
- stretched herself luxuriously on the close-cropped turf, at peace in mind
- and body.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Sam,” she asked, “have you noticed that Frump at the Inn? She sits behind
- me at dinner.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No,” said Sam truthfully. “When I’m with you I notice nobody else. And I
- don’t know how you saw her if she sits behind you.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Eyes in the back of my head,” she explained. “You have them when you’re a
- woman. Do you mind if I give her a shock?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You would if she could see you now,” he said. “Yes, but she doesn’t
- deserve it,” said Effie complacently. She surveyed herself and Sam did the
- same. She pleased them both, taking her sun-bath there on the mossy turf.
- “But I may shock her?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You may do anything,” he said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Thank God for that,” said Effie joyously, and something glittered in the
- sun and fell with a splash far into the tarn. “Too deep to dive for it,”
- she decided. “Bang goes a shilling and I’m glad. I never liked pretence.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I say!” Sam protested, and then fell silent comprehendingly.
- </p>
- <p>
- She looked at him and greeted his silence with a nod. “I shan’t catch
- cold,” she said, holding up her finger where the wedding ring had been. “I
- feel better now I’m rid of that.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The remarkable fact was that Sam understood. His education had progressed
- and he knew that it was not for the Frump at the Inn that she shed the
- imitation wedding ring which for form’s sake he had suggested she should
- wear: it was for him. The ring was counterfeit, it was a false symbol of
- something which was not true: it had no place in the Marbeck scheme.
- </p>
- <p>
- She curled up happily like a stroked cat, partly in sheer physical
- well-being, partly in gladness at her scheme’s success. “And to think,”
- she crooned, “that I am a wicked woman!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Effie,” he pleaded, taking her hand. “Don’t.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “As if I care,” she said, rolling over on to her back and taking his hand
- with her to shade her eyes. “I might have been doing this all my life.”
- Indeed, in her perfect absence of embarrassment, she might. “Wicked!” She
- shied a stone after the wedding ring into the tarn and laughed at a world
- well lost. “The Frump won’t understand, my dear, but I think you do.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I think I do,” said Sam, but the fullness of understanding had not come
- to him yet.
- </p>
- <p>
- Something, indeed, of her fineness he did perceive, but not its whole, its
- utter selflessness. He saw, roughly, what she was after: that it was here,
- in Westmoreland when she made her sacrifice, here when she lay beside him
- in the sun that she expressed in deed what she had been baffled to express
- in Manchester. She had brought him away from the murk and the fog and the
- place where they rather like dirt than otherwise because dirt means money,
- to where nature was beautiful. She had shown him beauty there, her beauty
- and the beauty of sacrifice and the beauty of things. She had taught him
- that there was beauty in the world. “We’ll never go back,” he cried.
- </p>
- <p>
- “No. Not back,” she said. “But we will go to Manchester.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No. No. We’ll build a tabernacle here.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Here? No. We’ve been lawless here. We’ll go to Manchester.”
- </p>
- <p>
- It rang in his ears like the trump of doom. So far they had marched in
- thought together, and he imagined that in her scheme they were to be
- together to the end. He thought her purpose was that they two were to work
- together to give shape to beauty—and no bad exercise in perception,
- either, for Sam Branstone.
- </p>
- <p>
- That was her purpose, but, as she saw it, they were not to work together
- in the sense he meant. Her spirit was to go on with him, but she herself
- would stand aside, denying herself the right and the joy of sharing his
- work with him in physical partnership. She would have done her share at
- Marbeck: she was a sign-post whose direction he was to follow but which he
- left behind, not a guide to go with him on his way: and she thought she
- was content with that.
- </p>
- <p>
- She renounced and she imagined that of the two of them it was she who was
- the realist and he who was romantic, he was romantic because he wanted her
- with him and she the realist because she remembered Ada. She was not
- jealous of Ada no’; if she could not bless Ada, neither did she damn her.
- Ada had never held him as Effie held him now. She thought it satisfied her
- to know that she held him, and to let the days slip past uncounted.
- Nothing is infinite except our human capacity for self-deception.
- </p>
- <p>
- For the present, for the Marbeck heyday, it did satisfy her, and she went
- about the business of her tutelage with the unruffled serenity of
- fulfilled purpose, almost involuntarily now, thinking little, feeling
- everything in the passionate intensity of her sacramental love. It would
- end and she would suffer: meantime there were only so many days and it was
- no use impairing finite days with regrets that they were not infinite.
- </p>
- <p>
- Thought was for before and afterwards, not for now when she crusaded for
- the soul of Sammy Branstone with the mystic rapture of a trance, joyful
- like the other sorts of true religion. She would wake up, but she would
- have taught Sam his lesson; she would have given him his gleam; and she
- was selfless after that....
- </p>
- <p>
- Of course she may have deceived herself. There is spiritual love, but
- Effie was flesh and blood.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam, at any rate, was not etherealizing things. He did not appreciate the
- happiness of renouncing happiness. He wanted it to last, to go on with the
- gay days on the hills when she put health into his body and health into
- his mind, when it was all a high-spirited riot without an undertow. For
- hours on end, they lived their lives unclouded by a thought... rude,
- rough, exhilarating exercise on the glamorous fells like that illustrious
- day when they climbed the Pike and lost themselves in mist and found
- themselves again just where they wished to be, on the downward trail by
- Corner Tarn to Yorkdale: then on the steamer down the Lake, and the lonely
- moonlight walk across the Moor to Branley, where the trap from the Inn met
- them and took them, comfortably tired, to Marbeck and a giant’s feast. And
- there were other days, more leisured, on their Lake or in the woods when
- more seemed to happen in his soul and less in his body; and their day of
- Bathes, in five well separated tarns, with a makeweight bathe in the
- Marsland Beck for luck. He wanted it to last. He had intoxication of the
- hills, of her, of everything.
- </p>
- <p>
- He had not seen, he would not and he could not, see the possibility of her
- leaving him. He did not know that leaving him was as fundamental a part of
- her plan as coming to him.
- </p>
- <p>
- “We’ll go hack to Manchester,” she said, and it seemed to him that he was
- ordered hack to hell. “That’s where your business is,” she added, a little
- wickedly.
- </p>
- <p>
- Business! Hadn’t she shown him the ugliness of his business, and the
- beauty of Marbeck? Why should they ever leave the hills? He had all the
- extremity of a convert.
- </p>
- <p>
- Effie would say no more, and now, as the end of their time grew near, the
- magic seemed to him less magical, because he had to leave it, because she
- would not stay for ever in that lonely place, but wanted him to go where
- other men lived, in an ugly town, where he had a business she had taught
- him to despise, and responsibilities, and Ada.
- </p>
- <p>
- He plunged to gloom. What was the use of knowing that there was light if
- he must go back to darkness? Was it not treachery in her to come so far
- with him, then leave him to himself?
- </p>
- <p>
- “Effie!” he pleaded, and she consented to make things clear.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Don’t you see, Sam? We’ve done what we came here to do. You’ve seen, you
- know, and you will not slide back. I won’t allow you to.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You won’t allow! Then you’ll be there?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I hope my spirit will be always there,” she said. “Do you doubt that?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Spirit?” he said. “You’re overrating me. You’re asking more than I can
- give. I cannot give what isn’t there.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’ve put it there,” she said. “You cannot fail. You can’t forget.”
- </p>
- <p>
- * “I’d not forget, but I should fail. It’s we, my dear. Not I alone, but
- you and I. Without you I am lost.”
- </p>
- <p>
- She made a great concession. “Then, if you’re sure——”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Quite sure,” he said, and she decided to indulge his weakness.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Then don’t dismiss your secretary. Then I’ll be there.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “As secretary?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Of, of course.” She spoke impatiently. All else was at the end.
- </p>
- <p>
- That only made it more impossible than ever. She was to be there—and
- not to be there. There, in his office where he would see her every day,
- where he had only to stretch out his hand to touch her, and where he was
- not to touch, where he was to forget that he had ever touched. He wanted
- her, all of her, the touch, the glow, the life of her, and she offered—what?
- A sexless wraith, a spiritual guide, her presence in asceticism.
- </p>
- <p>
- “No,” he said. “No. I’d rather die than that.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, death is a good arrangement, Sam, but well be brave.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “There are limits even to bravery.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No,” said the realist. “There are none.”
- </p>
- <p>
- So she sent him, though he did not know that the suggestion came from her,
- to gather strength in the peace of the everlasting hills. She sent him to
- Hartle Pike to think, to see that she was right. He would remember Ada
- there.
- </p>
- <p>
- He did remember Ada, but it seemed to him, when he tried to sum up his
- recollections, that Ada was not the woman who counted in his life. The
- women who counted were before Ada and after Ada. They were Anne and Effie.
- </p>
- <p>
- In the gathering dusk on Hartle Pike he tried to be cool about it and to
- see things in proportion. Effie had the supreme advantage of immediacy. It
- wasn’t easy, whilst he lived encircled by her glamour, to see Ada at all.
- </p>
- <p>
- But he had been Ada’s husband for ten years, a long time, more than a
- quarter of his life. In all those years there must be something which he
- could positively remember of her, some definite characteristic; something,
- at any rate, which was individual to her. He searched and found nothing.
- She had less individuality in his mind than his sideboard. He supposed
- that she kept house, or did she? Didn’t he recall that the cook’s wages
- went up one year, and that the cook became cook-housekeeper? In that case,
- and he felt certain of it now, Ada did nothing. He was equally certain
- that she was nothing. Since he had grown accustomed to her demands for
- money, she was not even an irritant. She was a standing charge, like the
- warehouse rent.
- </p>
- <p>
- Quite suddenly, as he lingered over that definition of his wife, “a
- standing charge,” he saw that it was double-edged. It cut at him, and
- shrewdly.
- </p>
- <p>
- Ada, like Effie, was a woman, and he knew from Effie what a woman could
- be. There must, at least, have been possibilities in Ada. Dear God, what
- had he done with them if she was nothing now? That was the charge—that
- he had married her and that she was nothing: that he had permitted her to
- become nothing. He could summon no witness for his defence, he remembered
- no occasion when he had fought for Ada, as Effie had fought for him. And
- as to sacrifice——! Yet he was supposed to have loved Ada.
- </p>
- <p>
- He could have howled for very shame, he could not, in fairness, think that
- Ada had given him anything, but writhed that he had thought just now of
- Anne and Effie as the two women who counted in his life. They were the
- women who gave. Was he to take all from women and render nothing to a woman
- in return? If he could say of Ada, his wife these last ten years, that she
- did not count, then he was very much to blame and the path was clear
- before him. He saw to where the gleam that Effie gave him pointed. To Ada.
- It annoyed him desperately that it should point to Ada.
- </p>
- <p>
- He began to descend the hill in a cold fury. The world was hideous,
- Marbeck an illusion, Effie a fool. No: Effie was right. One could not run
- away from facts and hide one’s head amongst the hills, and say there were
- no facts. She had not brought him there to obscure facts, but to reveal
- them.
- </p>
- <p>
- It remained to face them, to return to Manchester with new knowledge and
- new courage. It needed courage to turn his back on Marbeck, to go away
- from happiness to Ada.
- </p>
- <p>
- He stamped upon that thought, as on a snake. It was disloyalty to Effie
- who had sacrificed to him and shown him all the beauty of her sacrifice.
- He, too, would sacrifice and find a beauty in it.
- </p>
- <p>
- He found it extraordinarily difficult to meet Effie, and spent an
- unnecessarily long time with the landlord of the Inn. Then he went in to
- her.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m leaving,” he stammered. “I couldn’t stay another night. By driving
- fifteen miles I can catch the South Mail at midnight. I’ve arranged for
- you to come to-morrow.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He jerked each sentence out painfully.
- </p>
- <p>
- Effie met his eyes with her serene gaze. “That’s infinitely best,” she
- said. “I’m proud of you.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He had seen! It was her victory, complete and unequivocal, and she was
- proud of him and of herself. He had got rid of mud and he had seen beauty.
- Now he was facing the facts as she would have him face them, clear-eyed,
- without romance. Like her, he was a realist, and she was glad... glad.
- </p>
- <p>
- But when he went up to their room to pack his bag, Effie left the Inn
- quickly and walked hard. She must put space between them: space, that she
- might cry unheard. It seemed to her that if he heard her crying he would
- not go, and she wanted him to go. She was a realist. She was... stifling
- her sobs amongst the heather; triumphing in victory on Marbeck Ridge.
- </p>
- <p>
- She won, as she had said that she would win. But there were limits to her
- bravery.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0021" id="link2HCH0021"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER XXI—SATAN’S SMILE
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HE theory that
- Satan is a subtle devil is one which will not bear examination. He is a
- crude fellow, theatrical, Mephistophelean. It may, of course, be only
- because his experience of human nature has made a cynic of him, and
- certainly his interferences do not as a rule lack success because they
- want delicacy. He attacked Sam with a blatant effrontery which suggested
- that he thought Sam’s a contemptuously easy case.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam reached Manchester very early in the morning, and spent the rest of
- his broken night in a lugubrious hotel near the station. Manchester hotels
- rarely make for gaiety, but it is wonderful what even a short night will
- do in the way of altering a point of view.
- </p>
- <p>
- He expected to be depressed at the very air of Manchester, and, instead,
- he sniffed at it as Mr. Minnifie had once relished the odours of
- Greenheys, with an exile’s greed. He knew that he ought to feel a loathing
- of the office, but found that he opened the letters with more than his
- usual zest. He knew that it was wrong, all wrong, and checked his itching
- fingers.
- </p>
- <p>
- There have been prisoners who, when offered freedom, have pleaded to
- remain in the familiar cell.
- </p>
- <p>
- Was it like that with him, he wondered, as had as that, the jail-fever so
- ineradically in him that he must breathe the tainted air to live? But, was
- he offered freedom? He had to go to Ada, who was a mill-stone and implied
- the other mill-stones. Unless she was not a mill-stone, unless he could
- alter her. In the meantime, at all events, she was not altered, she wanted
- the things which she had always wanted; and the office was their source.
- It seemed to him that he was still in prison, with the difference that he
- now knew that it was prison. He found little comfort in the knowledge.
- </p>
- <p>
- His gaze returned to the pile of correspondence. There seemed nothing else
- for it to do, and he saw an envelope, addressed not to the firm, but to
- himself, which sent the blood whirling to his head in simple premonition
- of its contents. From the postmark (S.W.—Satan’s Work?) he saw that
- it had only come that morning and had not been waiting his arrival. He
- thought of that as of a portent. Suppose he had stayed another day at
- Marbeck! He might have been too late.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was a careful letter, but the facts were that, owing to the sudden
- death of Sir Almeric Pannifer, the seat tor the Sandyford Division of
- Marlshire was vacated. Mr. Morphew, who had reduced Sir Almeric’s majority
- in that agricultural constituency to three hundred was, for private
- reasons, unable to stand again (“I know these private reasons,” thought
- Sam. “Morphew considers he has earned a walkover next time”), but
- Headquarters were of opinion that a resolute candidate of strong
- personality, etc....
- </p>
- <p>
- In short, he was offered the opportunity to be the figurehead in a
- demonstration for the Liberal Party. It was no more than that. Morphew had
- doubtless nursed the constituency like a mother, and if at the landslide
- of the last election he had done no better than to come within three
- hundred of his opponents’ votes, the chances of a stranger’s capturing the
- seat were negative. But it was the stepping-stone, the <i>liaison</i>
- between obscurity and the House of Commons. It was what he had aimed at.
- </p>
- <p>
- He tried to believe that the letter did not exhilarate him as it would
- have done a fortnight earlier, and Satan, the connoisseur of good
- resolutions, smiled his age-long smile.
- </p>
- <p>
- He looked across at Effie’s chair. “My spirit will be always with you,”
- she had said; he wondered if it were there now, and tried to see her.
- Surely now, if ever, was her time; now when he had so lately left her,
- when her scent was in his nostrils and her voice in his ears. Her voice <i>was</i>
- in his ears. He heard it clearly. She spoke one word, “Renounce.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes, but, my dear,” he argued, “I have renounced. I’ve renounced you.
- I’ve come back here and I’m going to Ada, to plumb the depths of her, to
- find the good in her, and drag it to the top. I’m going to dive for
- pearls,” he grew almost picturesque as he cited his intentions towards Ada
- in his defence, “and I shall grow short of breath. I’m not doubting that
- the pearls are there, because Ada’s a woman, and so are you, but I know
- that they lie deep and I want breath for such a dive as that. I’ve
- renounced you, and I’m going to make a woman of her; don’t I deserve some
- recompense to make amends? It’s here beneath my hand, and I have only to
- say ‘Yes.’ Effie,” he pleaded, “if you knew what this meant to me, you
- wouldn’t frown. It’s not backsliding.” He denied that it was backsliding,
- well knowing that it was. “It’s politics, I know, and you don’t like
- politics. You told me women knew about politics now. Oh, but you don’t
- know, you don’t. Smile at me, Effie, smile as I have seen women smile when
- men talked of golf. I know we men are babies, and so do you. Give me my
- game. It’s nothing but a hobby, like golf, but this is mine, and I want it
- so much. Ada is my work and this is my play, and just as necessary. It
- will not be a hindrance to what I have to do for Ada, it will be a help.
- Effie, tell me that I may have my help.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He tried to blarney a consenting smile out of the figure of Eflie he
- imagined sitting in her chair. He had no difficulty in imagining her
- there; he saw her, too easily, too really to imagine a false Effie. He
- could not imagine, try as he would, that he had won consent from her. He
- was too near the real Effie for that. And Effie said “Renounce.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Then his cashier came into the office and routine swallowed him for the
- day. A score of little points had arisen in his absence and must be
- discussed and settled. The thought occurred to him that if he telegraphed
- to London in the morning, Headquarters would hear from him as soon as if
- he wrote to-day. They might expect a wire to-day; well, they would not get
- it. He crammed the letter into his pocket and decided that he would sleep
- upon it before he sent them his reply.
- </p>
- <p>
- And if Satan still smiled it was wistfully, as if he regretted his lost
- subtlety; but there was still Ada, the married woman.
- </p>
- <p>
- If Ada was nothing else, she was a married woman; in a world where many
- fail, she had succeeded; she had got married, and, like other people who
- have reached their earthly paradise, she did not know what to do when she
- got there, and did nothing. She stopped growing when she married.
- </p>
- <p>
- The emptiness of her life was a thing to marvel at. She slept and ate and
- shopped. She was spared the ordinary duties of running a house, and the
- trials of servants, because the cook, an elderly, reliable woman, took (it
- seemed) a fancy to Sam and became a fixture first and a housekeeper
- second, taking from Ada’s shoulders the burden of engaging her underling.
- She had two “At homes” a week, and went to other people’s “At homes.” On
- Sunday, she went to church, where one can display new clothes to a larger
- audience than at the largest private “at home.” She killed the evenings
- somehow, in company with a friend, or with the fashion papers.
- </p>
- <p>
- Evenings interested her little; they were the time when Sam was often, but
- not too often, at home. He was not, strictly, a nuisance, because he never
- asked her, after a first experiment, to entertain a business acquaintance,
- and did that at hotels. Nor did he ask her to entertain him. Usually, he
- read a manuscript, or worked out costs or did something which made no
- demand on Ada, except that she be reasonably quiet. She was very quiet
- with Sam, for the reason that she had nothing to say.
- </p>
- <p>
- She did not go out much in the evenings and told her friends that this was
- because she liked to be at home with her husband. They were supposed to
- deduce an idyll of conjugal bliss where proximity was perfect happiness.
- The real reasons were, first, pure laziness and, second, her shoulders.
- Other married women might expose their shoulders in low-cut dresses, but
- not Ada. It wasn’t modest. Her shoulders were ugly.
- </p>
- <p>
- She never went to see Peter, who had given her offence by suggesting the
- blessedness of work. He had dared to lecture her, a married woman, and she
- let fly at him in such fashion that he never tried again, he deplored his
- weakness, but he gave her up. The cobbler’s child is the worst shod, and
- something analogous often happens with the daughters of the clergy: Ada
- was, perhaps, the worst of Peter’s flock. He knew and, knowing the hopes
- he had had of this marriage, suffered at its failure, but silently,
- confessing impotence. There were always books in which he could forget,
- and the peace which had come to his house since Ada left it. It is not
- easy to be saintly all the time, and her outrageous attack had been,
- humanly speaking, unpardonable.
- </p>
- <p>
- “There must be something in her,” he told himself, as he left the office,
- “and I’ve to find it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The day had, naturally, after an absence, been unusually busy, and had
- given him no time to think. He was bursting with intention, but it was
- vague, unformed, though urgent and doubly urgent because of the letter in
- his pocket. If he could make a woman of Ada, if that evening he could make
- a fair start, perhaps he could conjure up the figure of Effie, his ghostly
- counsellor, with a smile on her face consenting to his standing for the
- seat.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh,” Ada greeted him, “I thought you were not coming back till Saturday.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I wasn’t,” he said. “Something changed my plan a little. I wanted to get
- home.”
- </p>
- <p>
- She looked at him resentfully. There was no reason why he should not
- change his plan and come home two days before she expected him, but she
- resented the unexpected. And there was something about him which appeared
- strange.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Tell me you are glad to see me,” he said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, it wasn’t to be till Saturday,” she repeated stupidly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Are you thinking of dinner?” he asked. “Kate will manage something.”
- </p>
- <p>
- She was not thinking of dinner, and no doubt Kate would manage something.
- It was Kate’s business.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You’re wearing funny clothes,” she said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Country clothes,” he explained. “You see, I’ve been in the country.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh.” She was not curious.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes. In the country. It was rather beautiful, Ada.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I nearly went with Mrs. Grandage to the ‘Métropole,’ at Blackpool, but I
- don’t like dressing for dinner.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Blackpool’s not beautiful,” he said. “Ada, I want to talk to you, and I
- hardly know how to begin, except that I want you to understand that I’m in
- earnest. It’s a serious matter.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Money?” said Ada, sitting up sharply in her chair.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Not money. We’ve both been wrong about money, I think. We’ve both taken
- it too seriously.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “If you’re going to tell me that something has gone wrong with your money,
- it’s very serious indeed.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It hasn’t. No. This is a larger thing than money. I want, if I can, to
- alter things between us, Ada. How can I put it? There’s your father——”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I never want to hear his name again,” she interrupted. “He insulted me.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You go to church, you know; you listen to him there.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “People would talk if I didn’t go. I needn’t listen to him when I am in
- church.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “He’s a good old man. I’m sorry we have drifted from him. But I’ll not
- press that now. If the rest comes right, that will come right with it. It
- might even come so right as to include my mother.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “My word!” she said, “you <i>are</i> digging up the past. I don’t see how
- you could call things right when they include me with a charwoman.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Ada!” he protested.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It’s what she is.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “By her own choice. But please forget that, Ada. Yes, it’s true that I am
- digging in the past. I want to go back to see where we went wrong.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Went wrong? When who went wrong?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why, you and I.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I didn’t know we had gone wrong.” She looked at him. “You look well,” she
- decided, “but you can’t be.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I am better than I’ve ever been,” he said, “and stronger, and if need be
- I shall use my strength, but I hope the need won’t come for that. Ada, can
- you tell me this? Can you tell me what it is you want?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You’re sure it’s all right about your money?” she asked anxiously.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes, of course it’s right,” he said impatiently.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Then I don’t know that I want anything. I could do with more, naturally.
- Who couldn’t?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “More money. Not more beauty? Not a new purpose? Not something to live
- for?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Sam. You’re very strange
- to-night.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I hardly know myself,” he confessed. “I know it’s all confused, and I
- ought to have got things out of the tangle before I spoke to you. But I
- thought you might have seen and so be able to help me out. No: that’s all
- right, Ada,” he went on as she glared at him indignantly. “I’m blaming no
- one but myself. It’s my responsibility. You don’t see it yet, and I must
- make you see.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “If a thing’s there, I can see it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, it’s there,” he said. “We can both see that. It’s only the cure for
- it that isn’t plain.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “What’s there?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “The failure of our marriage, if I must put it into words.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Failure! But we <i>are</i> married. What do you mean?” What Ada meant was
- that the ring was on her finger and the marriage certificate in her desk.
- Failure in marriage, if it meant anything to her, meant failure to get
- married, a broken engagement, and since their engagement had not been
- broken, since they had been formally and legally married in church, there
- could be no failure.
- </p>
- <p>
- “We didn’t exult in marriage,” he tried.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Exult? I’m sure I was the proudest woman in the parish the day I married
- you.” It was true. “But afterwards, afterwards!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh,” she cried, “are you throwing it in my teeth that I didn’t have a
- baby? Was that my fault?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No, no. But it might have saved us, all the same, and when the baby did
- not come we made no effort to save ourselves. There’s a light somewhere in
- every one of us and you and I have quenched our lights. They may be small,
- they may not be a great light like your father’s, or... or the light which
- I have seen in the country, they may be nothing but a feeble glow, and we
- can only give our best. You and I have not given ours. We have not tried
- to find our light, but now—now that we have discovered what has been
- wrong with us all this while—we can try, and together. We can all of
- us give something to the world, not children in our case, but the
- something else which we were made to give. We don’t know what it is that
- you can give and I can give, and we’ve left it late to begin to find out,
- but it is not too late, is it, Ada? Ada,” he pleaded, “it is not too
- late?”
- </p>
- <p>
- She looked at the clock. “If you want to wash your hands before dinner
- you’d better do it now,” she said, “or you will be late.” She rose, but
- before she left him, she had a moment of illumination. She thought she saw
- what he was driving at, that he must have seen some happy family while he
- was away and came back with the cry of the child less man on his lips. “I
- suppose this means,” she said, “that you want me to adopt a child. That’s
- what you mean by giving. Well, I won’t do it, Sam. I’ve something else to
- do with my time than to look after another woman’s brat.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “What have you to do?” he asked. “What is it that you want to do?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “To eat my dinner,” she said. She had a healthy appetite. Perhaps that was
- why she wanted nothing else.
- </p>
- <p>
- He stood by the door when she had gone, and his hand strayed to his pocket
- as though it sought a talisman. He felt the letter crinkle, then tore his
- hand away. Ada was work for a man. There wasn’t room for Ada and for
- politics. “Deeply regret private reasons compel total withdrawal from
- politics.” Yes, that was the wording of the telegram which he would send:
- it was best to be thorough, and, plainly, the man who had Ada in hand had
- no time to spare on a hobby or an ambition or whatever it was that
- politics represented for him. He had other work to do in the world.
- </p>
- <p>
- He stamped upon the ruins of a hope which came to birth ten years ago, and
- which he had carried with him in his heart of hearts and, as the letter in
- his pocket proved, not a fool’s hope either. Yes, he had loved that hope
- which was born on his honeymoon.
- </p>
- <p>
- It occurred to him that in all he had said, or tried to say, to Ada he had
- not mentioned love. It had not seemed the right word for use in a
- conversation with Ada, but, he reflected savagely, he had loved his hope
- of politics from the time of the honeymoon onwards: and from that time he
- had not loved Ada.
- </p>
- <p>
- Was that true? Had he neglected the substance for the shadow, used love
- upon his hope and not upon his wife? If he had his talk with her again,
- could he honestly begin it in another way? Could he begin with love? He
- knew that he could not, and squared his shoulders to the fact. It was a
- case, then, for the more courage. What was it Effie had said? “There are
- no limits to bravery.” He wondered, but he meant to see.
- </p>
- <p>
- And Satan’s smile had faded. There is more joy amongst the devils over one
- sinner who back-slideth.... But not this time, Mephistopheles! Effie was
- winning still.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0022" id="link2HCH0022"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER XXII—THE OLD CAMPAIGNER
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">E</span>FFIE and Sam knew
- that they ought to be happy in the weeks which followed, because to be
- good is, theoretically, to be happy: but they were not happy. Sam, indeed,
- was less unhappy than Effie because he had sunk into one of those leaden,
- numbed moods of his which he knew of old as the stage preliminary to his
- brightest inspirations, and he could wait resignedly if not happily for
- the inspiration to emerge.
- </p>
- <p>
- Decidedly, he thought, he needed inspiration, He had to discover Ada, to
- search for her reality, and, having found it, to drag it out and set it in
- the forefront of her being. A big task: one whose success he must not
- jeopardize again by rushing at her prematurely without distinct plan. He
- had only made her suspicious of him by his first impulsive attempt, and
- time must undo the mischief before a return to the attack was either
- discreet or opportune.
- </p>
- <p>
- He waited, but he did not savour life. When he had quickened Ada, life
- would, no doubt, be worth the living, but, meantime, it dragged. He told
- himself that he was too young yet at this new business of giving to feel
- the joy of it. Certainly, he was not joyful, but he was resolute. There
- was a grim tightening of the lips and a dogged look in the eyes which
- proclaimed that this was Samuel, the son of Anne. In this mood he could
- eat Dead Sea apples and feel they were a proper diet. Politics had gone,
- and with them any interest in the Council. And he did not know what to do
- about his business. He wanted to ask Effie, and Effie was not there to be
- asked.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was not that she did not want to be there or that she did not suffer
- for her absence. Effie was not numb, and she suffered keenly, but she
- thought her absence strengthened Sam. When he came down from Hartle Pike
- with his resolution formed she took it that her scheme, as she had planned
- it, was complete and that she could forget her weak concession to return
- to the office. She was to be there in spirit, and spirit is strong though
- flesh is weak. Effie at the office in the flesh would have wanted to hug
- Sam and to kiss him, things which it is unbefitting to do in
- well-conducted offices. And, of course, she suffered. She had always known
- that she would suffer, but not that it would be as bad as this.
- </p>
- <p>
- The office was a temptation every day: to go there was to be with him, it
- was to find alleviation for her fever, it was to be at peace: but it was
- also to fling away hard-won success, and she resisted. That resistance
- engrossed her. It was all that she was capable of doing; it demanded all
- her strength.
- </p>
- <p>
- The obvious, the practical thing, if she was not to go to Sam’s office,
- was to go to someone else’s, to work, both as an antidote and as a means
- of livelihood, and she could not rouse herself to do it. She pawned some
- of the jewellery which remained to her, memorials of her father’s lavish
- past, sent the weekly dole to her mother and lived upon the rest. She had
- sunk to this, Effie the crusader, Effie the advocate of courage! With
- Mélisande, she told herself she was not happy. She was not happy, she was
- not well, and she wanted, wanted Sam. She stayed at home lest she should
- go to him and ruin all that she had done. It could not last and she knew
- it could not last, but neither did she see the end of it.
- </p>
- <p>
- Then began the game of consequences: the moves of two pieces, one a pawn,
- the other the knight called Dubby Stewart.
- </p>
- <p>
- It is a frumpish world, a world where the Frumps, of one or other sex or
- of neither sex, in one or other of their manifestations, have a great deal
- to do with the ordering of things. That is why it is politic, for one’s
- ease, never to ignore the Frumps and never, never to challenge them by an
- act of gallant defiance such as shying an imitation wedding ring into the
- waters of Blea Tarn.
- </p>
- <p>
- Effie held, of course, that since she was in any case defying the Frumps
- it was honest to defy them in form as well as in substance, but it is only
- certain kinds of honesty which are the best policy.
- </p>
- <p>
- The Frump who sat behind Effie at meals at the Inn (her name was Miss
- Entwistle) had doubted the genuineness of that ring, and when it
- disappeared her doubts went with it. The hussy, she saw, had realized that
- her ring deceived nobody, and was brazening it out in the shameless way of
- hussies.
- </p>
- <p>
- Women are wicked, but men are only weak; so that, though Miss Entwistle
- faced Sam at dinner from the next table, it was some days before she could
- spare her attention from the back of the greater sinner and transfer it to
- the face of the lesser. She could stare to her heart’s content; it did not
- matter to Sam, who had only eyes for Effie: and the stare of Miss
- Entwistle was very persistent indeed. It was rude, but it was also
- pensive. It seemed to be looking for something it could not find.
- </p>
- <p>
- She could not place him and was annoyed because she felt certain she had
- seen him before. She got up early more than once to read the names on the
- morning’s letters, but did not find one which she could associate with
- Sam, and came home to Manchester a disappointed woman. Her failure to
- identify him spoiled her holiday.
- </p>
- <p>
- But all things come to her who waits, especially, as the world is made, to
- Frumps, and Miss Entwistle came by the knowledge she craved one afternoon
- when her friend Mrs. Grandage took her to Ada Branstone’s “At Home.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The two photographs of Sam in Ada’s drawing-room were intended to sustain
- her reputation for perfect domesticity. She couldn’t live without him; she
- drew her very breath from him when he was there, and from his photographs
- when he was not. And since one was full-face and the other profile, they
- supplied Miss Entwistle with reliable identification of the sinner of
- Marbeck.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was heavenly. Hers was the power and the glory of initiating a scandal,
- of exploding a bomb—which would certainly disturb the peace of quite
- a number of people, of figuring in a maelstrom of backbiting tea-parties
- as the one authentic eyewitness. It was irresistible, besides plain duty
- to her injured hostess.
- </p>
- <p>
- The drop of gall in her brimming honey-pot was that she did not know Ada
- well enough to tell her the secret by herself, but must share the
- excitement of that first surprise with Mrs. Grandage. She whispered with
- her friend for some close-packed, hectic moments, and the two ladies
- stubbornly outstayed the rest of the callers.
- </p>
- <p>
- They told Ada with a wonderful tenderness, watching her the while as cats
- watch mice, and Ada did not disappoint them. She cast no doubt on Miss
- Entwistle’s story; she did not tell her that she knew Sam was in London at
- the time because she had had letters from him. Though she had nothing in
- the world but her marriage, she made no effort to protect its reputation.
- She exhibited herself to them in all the fury of her jealous rage, so that
- naturally, seeing her instant belief in what they told her, the ladies
- formed their own conclusion.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It is not the first time,” is what the eyes of Mrs. Grandage said, and
- the eyes of the spinster looked back at her sepulchrally and said, “It
- never is.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Ada was married. She had the title of wife, and unfaithfulness on her part
- was as far removed from her imagination as from her opportunity. She was
- married to Sam; she was the woman in possession, with the title-deeds in
- her desk and the seal upon her finger, and this was flagrant outrage. It
- struck at the roots of her complacency, and complacency was life. Yet she
- hadn’t the wits to confound these iconoclasts with one little uninventive
- lie. It needed only that to abash Miss Entwistle—men’s faces are
- often alike, she knew perfectly well that he was in London: anything would
- have done, anything would have been better than this abject, immediate
- betrayal of her citadel. She struck her flag without firing a shot, and
- lapsed into a slough of inarticulate anger.
- </p>
- <p>
- “What shall I do? What shall I do?” she wailed as soon as she was able to
- speak coherently.
- </p>
- <p>
- “That,” said Miss Entwistle, “that, you poor dear, is your business.”
- </p>
- <p>
- She had announced the glad tidings, she had found a titillating pleasure
- in watching Ada’s reception of them and now she was eager to be off, to
- spread the news, to be the first that ever burst into her friends’
- drawing-rooms with word of a glorious scandal. She pleaded another call
- and escaped to her orgy.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’ll make him pay for this,” said Ada viciously.
- </p>
- <p>
- “My dear,” advised Mrs. Grandage, who had a husband of her own, “I hope
- you will be tactful.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Tactful:” blazed Ada. “Tactful, when—oh! oh!” She screamed her
- sense of Sam’s enormity.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes, but you know, men will be men.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It isn’t men. It’s Sam. After all I’ve done for him! Oh!” and this was a
- different “oh” from the others. It made Mrs. Grandage look up sharply.
- “The beast! The beast! This explains it all. Ethel, that man came home to
- me and asked me to adopt his child. He had the face. Of course I didn’t
- know it was his own he was speaking of, but I see it now. Ethel, what
- shall I do?”
- </p>
- <p>
- They seemed to Mrs. Grandage to be drifting into deeper waters than she
- had skill to swim in. “I should take advice,” she said, meaning nothing
- except that neither by advising nor anything else was she going to be
- entangled in this affair.
- </p>
- <p>
- “A solicitor’s?” asked Ada, catching at the phrase. “Yes. Naturally. Sam
- shall be made to pay to the uttermost farthing.” Her idea of legal
- obligations were, perhaps, not vaguer than other people’s.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Not a solicitor’s,” said Mrs. Grandage in despair. “At least, my dear,
- not yet. Your father’s.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes. My father made me marry Sam. He brought Sam home and threw him at
- me. I will go to my father. Of course, in any case, I can’t stay here.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Mrs. Grandage made a last rally for wordly-wisdom. “Couldn’t you bring
- yourself to see your husband first?” she asked.
- </p>
- <p>
- “See him!” said Ada heroically. “I will never see him again as long as I
- live.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The visitor buttoned her glove. After all, if Ada chose to make a fool of
- herself it was no business of hers, and she had tried her best, if a
- resolutely non-committal attempt can be a best. She kissed Ada with real
- sympathy.
- </p>
- <p>
- “My dear,” she said, “I’d give a great deal to undo this.” And by “this”
- she did not mean the peccadillo of Sam Branstone, but the pruriency of
- Miss Entwistle. She was an experienced woman, and angry with herself for
- having listened to the temptress and for aiding and abetting her.
- </p>
- <p>
- When Mrs. Grandage referred in after years to “that woman,” it was
- understood that she was thinking of Miss Entwistle.
- </p>
- <p>
- Ada saw her to the door, and went straight to the kitchen.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Kate,” she said to her cook, “Mr. Branstone has disgraced himself, he’s
- been unfaithful. I am going to my father’s. Please tell him that I know
- everything and that I shall not return.” She had no reticence.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Very well, mum,” said the Capable cook.
- </p>
- <p>
- The result was that when Sam went into the drawing-room that night, he
- found Anne Branstone sitting there, darning his socks, and perhaps it was
- because she was happy that she did not look a day older than when he saw
- her last; perhaps charring suited her; or perhaps living for an idea had
- kept her young. The idea was that, some day, Sam would need her.
- </p>
- <p>
- It wasn’t a miracle: there was nothing more wonderful about it than the
- fact that Anne was a very good friend of the cook, Kate Earwalker: but Sam
- stood gaping helplessly. In his own house, at his age, and after all these
- years he stood before his mother, the intruder, like a schoolboy who knows
- himself at fault. She lacked nothing of the old ascendancy.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well,” she said, “you’re nobbut happy when you’ve got folks talking of
- you. But you don’t look thriving on it, neither.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Mother,” he gasped, “what’s this?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It’s you that will tell me that,” said Anne.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Where’s Ada?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Gone to her father’s, and none coming back, she says. Says you’re
- unfaithful and told Kate she knows everything. What is it, Sam? What’s
- everything?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Who brought you here?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Kate did,” said Anne calmly. “Why, Sam, did you think I’ve lived with
- nothing better than what George Chappie and the papers told me of you? I’d
- a fancy for the truth, and it’s not a thing to get from men. Kate’s been a
- spy, like.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Has she!” he cried.
- </p>
- <p>
- “She has, and you’ll bear no grudge for that. You’d have lived in a
- pig-sty and fed like a pig if I’d none sent Kate to do for you, but I’ve
- come myself this time. It looks summat beyond Kate.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “But what’s happened? What is it?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You know better than me what it is. You’ve got folks talking of you and
- they’ve talked to Ada. Unfaithful, she told Kate, and she’s gone home to
- Peter’s.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “She must come back,” said Sam.
- </p>
- <p>
- “And why?” asked Anne. “Because folk talk? To stop their mouths?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No. Because I want her here. They’re talking, are they? Well, they can.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Anne looked at him. “You don’t care if they do?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why should I?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “And you a politician?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, politics!” he said. “That’s gone.” It had, and, as he saw thankfully,
- at the right time. He tried to imagine how differently this would have
- affected him if it had come in the midst of the Sandyford election.
- Electors postulate respectability in a candidate. But that had gone, and
- gossip did not matter now. The real things mattered. Ada mattered.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You’ve had a move on, then,” she said, and neither her look nor tone
- suggested that she found the move displeasing.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I daresay,” he said carelessly. “But Ada must come back. I’ve got to get
- her back.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Happen she’ll come and happen she won’t, and I’d have a better chance of
- knowing which if you’d told me what’s upset her.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “What did she say?” he asked. “Unfaithful? Yes, it’s true. I’ve been
- unfaithful for ten years. I’ve never been faithful and I’ve never been
- fair. I’ve thought of the business and politics when I ought to have been
- thinking of her. I worked at them and I didn’t work at Ada. Don’t blame
- Ada, mother. I’ll not have that. You never liked her, and you prophesied a
- failure. It’s been a failure, but I made it one; I let it drift when I
- ought to have taken hold. But it isn’t going to be a failure now. I’ve
- given up the other things and I’ve come back to my job, the job I
- neglected, the job I did not see was there at all until——” He
- paused.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Till what?” she asked.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Till Effie showed it me.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Effie?” she asked. “Oh! Then there’s something in their talk.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Something? There’s everything, and everything that’s wrong-headed and
- abominable. That’s where this hurts me, mother. They’ll be saying wrong
- things of her, of Effie.” He began to see that gossip mattered.
- </p>
- <p>
- “What would be the right things to say?” asked Anne dryly. “Who’s Effie?
- And do you mean her when you say you’ve been unfaithful for ten years?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I meant what I said. That I’ve put other things in front of Ada.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Including Effie?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Effie’s a ray from heaven,” he said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, aye,” said Anne sceptically.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Look here, mother, you’re not going to misunderstand?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Not if you can make me understand.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I can try,” he said, “and the chances are that I shall fail. The only
- thing that will make you understand Effie is to see her.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Try the-other ways first,” said Anne grimly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “She made me see. She gave me everything. She gave me herself. I found
- myself because of her and I’m only living in the light she gave me.” It
- was difficult to find words for what Effie was and meant to him. “I don’t
- know if I can ever explain,” he faltered.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Go on. You’re doing very well.” He was—Anne’s insight helping her.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It’s like rebirth. It’s as if I’d lived till I met her six months ago
- with crooked eyesight. I didn’t see straight, and then, mother——”
- He hesitated as a man will hesitate before voicing a profound conviction,
- afraid lest he be thought absurd. “Then I found salvation, I’ve been a
- taker and we’re here to give. I took from you———”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Leave that,” said Anne curtly. “I know it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “And I didn’t,” he replied. “It seems to me that I knew nothing till Effie
- come.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why do you want Ada back?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It’s time I gave to her.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Did Effie show you that?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Anne was silent for a minute. Then: “I’ll have a look at Effie,” she said.
- “You can take me to her.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I can’t do that,” said Sam. “We’re not to meet.”
- </p>
- <p>
- She pondered it, and him. “Kate told me you were looking ill,” she said
- with apparent inconsequence. “Well, if you can’t take me to Effie, I must
- go alone. I’m going, either road. Give me her address and I’ll go
- to-morrow.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He wrote it down. “Effie Mannering,” she read. “Aye,” she said grimly,
- “I’ll give that young woman a piece of my mind.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Mother,” he said, alarmed, “you’ll not be rude to her! You’ve not
- misunderstood?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Maybe,” said Anne, “but I don’t think so. I think I understand that
- you’ve got your silly heads up in the clouds and it’ll do the pair of you
- a lot of good to have them brought to earth. I’ll know for sure when I’ve
- set eyes on her.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You’ll see the glory of her, then,” he said defiantly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Shall I?” she asked. “If you ask me, Sam, there’s been a sight too much
- glorification about this business. It shapes to me,” she went on,
- thwarting the protest which was leaping to his lips. “It shapes to me like
- a plain case of love. Aye, and love’s too rare a thing in this world to be
- thrown away. I was never one to waste.”
- </p>
- <p>
- So Anne Branstone took control, and Sam sat staring at her helplessly like
- a man who dreams.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0023" id="link2HCH0023"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER XXIII—THE KNIGHT’S MOVE
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>T might very well
- have occurred to Sam to retort that he and Effle had not “their silly
- heads in the clouds” any more fantastically than had Anne her self when
- she retreated to Madge’s and watched her loved son only through the eyes
- of Kate Earwalker. But it did not occur to him and, if it had, Effie at
- least would have disproved the retort. Effle outstripped them all.
- </p>
- <p>
- The truth was that as soon as Effle knew what was the matter with her she
- was not appalled, dismayed, ashamed, or any of the things appropriate to a
- young lady in her situation, but simply and purely exultant. Unhappiness
- fell from her like a cloak, and left her radiant with joy. And she had
- called herself a realist!
- </p>
- <p>
- She was a realist; she was engrossed with fact, not with the
- circumstantial detail of her fact. She hardly wanted Sam now, she had him,
- she was miles and leagues from care, alone in a shining world with her
- transcendant fact. Courage returned in full flood to her and she brimmed
- with bravery and pride.
- </p>
- <p>
- She was out of work and must find work quickly which would pay her well.
- She was going to suffer, she was going (to put it mildly) to be
- misunderstood. What did it matter, what did anything matter in comparison
- with her exultant fact? She was going to be the mother of his child.
- Marbeck was not a dream; Marbeck was coming true, and the truth and the
- glory of it swept her to a heaven which only women know.
- </p>
- <p>
- Perhaps she was a trespasser within the gates, but they had opened to her
- and they would not close. She might be prosecuted for her trespass. Let
- them try! You cannot hurt invulnerability. She was a world within a world,
- self-satisfying, self-complete, not so much derisive of the other world as
- utterly forgetful of it. Her cloud of glory hid it from her eyes, and if
- she peeped at all through breaches in the cloud she saw people as one sees
- them on the road beneath a mountain-top, like crawling ants.
- </p>
- <p>
- A knock came at her door, and she looked bemused through a gap in the
- clouds into the eyes of Dubby Stewart, but it was not to look at the world
- which did not understand. It was to look at Dubby, who loved her.
- </p>
- <p>
- And Dubby knew. It had not been difficult to know. She had refused him,
- she had let him see why, and Sam and Effie had been away from Manchester
- at the same time. It was not precise evidence, but he had written
- leaderettes on evidence not more exact and did not doubt the facts. They
- had kept him from her till now, but he could keep away no longer. And
- before he went into her room he knew all there was to know.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Effie,” he said, “I’m not sure if I’m welcome.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, but you are,” she said. “I ought to have written to you long ago.
- I’ve been home weeks from my holiday.” It was no use trying to see Dubby
- as a crawling ant, and she gave her hand in friendship.
- </p>
- <p>
- “That breaks the ice,” he said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “If there was ice to break.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well,” he reminded her, “I said I didn’t love and run away, and I did
- more or less run away. I came one Sunday because I said I would, but I
- couldn’t do it again. The trouble with me is that I ought to be a
- journalist, and after about twelve years of it I’m still human.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Dubby! I’m sorry!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “All right, Effie; I didn’t come to bleat. That’s only an apology for not
- coming before. And now I’m here——”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You’ll have tea,” she said quickly, going to the bell, but he caught her
- hand before she pulled.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Do you want to put a table between us? Do, if you must”—he released
- her hand—“but I’d hoped it would not come to that. Shall I ring the
- bell, Miss Mannering?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You needn’t punish me by calling names. Don’t ring.” She armed herself
- with courage, and turned to face him.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Thanks. Really thanks, Effie. I know I’m a bore, but if the old song has
- a good tune to it I don’t see why I shouldn’t sing twice. It <i>is</i> a
- good tune,” he went on with a passion which belied his surface flippancy.
- “It’s the best I have in me, which mayn’t be saying much, because I’ve a
- rotten ear for music, but this tune’s got me badly, like the diseases they
- play on the barrel-organs, and I can’t lose it. I get up to it in the
- morning, and I go to bed to it at night, and it’s ringing in my ears all
- day. Effie, I’m not much of a cove and I’ve flattered myself that
- sincerity departed from me when I cut my wisdom teeth. I tried to live up
- to that belief and it’s only half come off. I’ve tried to make a
- raree-show of life, to sit outside and watch the puppets play, and life’s
- won. Life’s got me down, and I’m inside now. I’m where you’ve put me, and
- a good place too: I’m near the radiator and it warms the cockles of my
- heart. But I never liked radiators. Mind you, I can do with them and I can
- be grateful for them. If a season ticket for life for a seat near the
- radiator is all that you can give me, I can keep a stiff upper lip and
- thank you for what I’ve got. But I never had a passion for radiators, and
- I do like fires. There’s life in a fire Must it be just the radiator, or
- can you make it hearth and home for us?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Dubby,” she said, “I told you before.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I know. Nothing doing in second thoughts?” She shook her head.
- </p>
- <p>
- “All right. I only got drunk last time. This time it will need the binge
- of my life. I’d cherished hopes of this.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Drunk,” she said reproachfully. “With a stiff upper lip?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, I dunno,” he said. “It takes a stiff upper lip to get me to the
- dentist’s, but I make him use an anæsthetic all the same. Still, if you’d
- rather I didn’t——”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I think it would be braver.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Right. But I’d like to hit something. There’s nobody you’d like me to
- hit, is there?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Of course not.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Sure?” he said. He had it well in mind that somebody ought to hit Sam.
- “Let’s get back to where we were before I made a stump oration—to
- when I came in and you looked at me like a friend.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I hope I always shall.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “All right. It’s the privilege of a friend to be impertinent, and I’m
- rather good at impertinence. You see, Effie old thing, you’re supposed to
- be one of the world’s workers, and you’re not at the office to-day. You
- haven’t been at the office for weeks. I know, because I gave Florrie half
- a crown.” Florrie was the maid. “And it isn’t that you’ve come into money,
- because Florrie tells me you’ve been starving yourself.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’ve not.” Effie was indignant. She had not starved herself. While all
- was dreary, food had certainly not attracted her, but neither had anything
- else; and she expected to take a lively interest in it now. “Really I’ve
- not.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “What you say goes,” he said. “And Florrie imagined it, but she didn’t
- imagine the part about your not going to the office, and if anything’s
- wrong there, don’t forget that I know Branstone pretty well. I can talk to
- him like a father.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “There’s nothing wrong, anywhere,” she said, and, indeed, things were not
- only not wrong but exuberantly right, only she could not tell him why.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You’re sure of that?” he persisted. “There’s nothing you can tell a pal?
- Nothing you can tell me, when you know I’d walk through fire for you? Damn
- it, I can’t pretend. I’m not a friend. I’m a man in love, and I ask you to
- be fair.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Dubby,” she pleaded, “don’t make things too hard for me.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Is it I who make them hard?” he asked, “oris it Sam?”
- </p>
- <p>
- She looked at him amazed, and certainly Effie was stupid then, or, at
- least, too wrapped up in her great preoccupation to be alert. “Oh, don’t
- be petty,” she said. “I didn’t debit you with jealousy.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No? No? And yet I have a certain right to be jealous of him. I think you
- won’t deny it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- It wasn’t what he said or even the deep bitterness of his tone, it was
- something in his eyes, like a hurt animal’s, which made her quite
- suddenly, and as a thing apart from his words, see what had happened. But
- she did not see even now the whole of Dubby’s love and the beauty of his
- knightly move.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You know!” she said. “Dubby, you knew when you spoke just now. You knew
- that Sam and I——”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I told you I had a word with Florrie.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Florrie?” she asked. “What could Florrie tell you?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Nothing,” he said, “that she knew she told. Guessing is another of the
- things I’m good at.”
- </p>
- <p>
- She saw it then, to what perceptiveness his love had brought him, to what
- high action. It had sped her cloud and she saw, clear-eyed as he, his
- fine, impeccable fidelity.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh! And I called you petty! I told you you were jealous. Dubby, I didn’t
- know. You’d have done that for me!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, you see,” he apologized, “I’m in love with you.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why can’t we order love? Why does it come all wrong?” she cried.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It hasn’t come so wrong but I can put it right for you,” he said, making
- his offer again.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I? I didn’t mean myself,” she said, wondering. “Love’s not come wrong to
- me. It’s you I’m thinking of.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “But is it right for you?” he asked.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, yes,” she smiled. “Terrifically.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Is it? When Sam has not been near you in weeks?” It was wedged in his
- mind that Sam was playing the villain. “When you are here alone, do you
- see him, Effie?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No. That’s why it’s all so right.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He shook his head, perplexed. “It may be good metaphysics, but it sounds
- bad sense. I’ll be quite honest with you. I’m suffering pretty badly from
- suppressed desire to horsewhip Sam Branstone. I think he deserves it, I
- know I’d enjoy it and I think you’re trying to head me off it. I daresay
- it’s primitive of me, but it will do me good and I don’t mind telling you
- I need good doing to me. Effie, mayn’t I go and horsewhip Sam?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “If anybody’s going to horsewhip Sam,” said a voice, “it’s me. I’m in
- charge of this job, not you, my lad.”
- </p>
- <p>
- They had not seen Anne come in. They saw her now, a little old woman of
- the working class in her best clothes, with a bugled cape and cotton
- gloves, elastic-sided boots and a quaint bonnet tied with ribbon beneath
- her chin, and, unaccountably, she filled the room. They would have passed
- her in the street without a second glance as one of the throng, at face
- value insignificant; but this was not Anne in the street. It was Anne in
- arms for Sam, and when Effie and Stewart compared notes afterwards they
- each confessed to having had the same thought: that their eyes were
- traitors and that what they saw was fantasy and what they felt was real.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m Sam’s mother,” she introduced herself, “and it’s like enough I were
- overfond of him when he was a lad and didn’t thrash enough, but I’m not
- too old to start again. You’ll be Effie? Aye, I’ve come round here to put
- things in their places. They’ve got a bit askew amongst the lot of you,
- and what I heard when I came in won’t help.” She looked accusingly at
- Dubby. “You’ll be her brother, I reckon?”
- </p>
- <p>
- It seemed to him the best way out. Anne had come to “put things in their
- places,” and she reckoned he was Effie’s brother, which, now he thought of
- it, was exactly his place. Brotherhood was thrust upon him, but he thought
- he had achieved it. Plainly, for all Effie’s enigmas, there was nothing
- else for him, and he let Anne put him in his place.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes,” he said, without a glance at Effie, “her brother.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You’re a clean-limbed family,” she complimented them, and Dubby stole a
- look at Effie, half humorous and half defying her to contradict his
- brotherhood. “Well, I came to see Effie, but I’ll none gainsay that her
- brother has a right to stay and listen, if he’ll listen quiet.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes,” said Dubby, still challenging Effie, “her brother has a right.” And
- Effie did not deny him. She had her courage, but the unexpectedness of
- Anne and the force of her, as if for all these years she had been winding
- up her will, which now came into play like a spring immensely braced in
- super-tightened coils, caused her to want an ally and she agreed that
- Dubby had a right if not the one conferred on him by Anne.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Won’t you sit, Mrs. Branstone?” she said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I was wondering when I should hear your voice,” said Anne. “You’re not a
- talker, lass.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No,” said Effie.
- </p>
- <p>
- “More of a doer.” Effie was wondering whether that was praise or
- condemnation, when Anne added: “I like you the better for that, though
- it’s a good voice. I haven’t heard it much, but I’ve heard it. I haven’t
- seen you much, but I’ve seen enough. I’m on your side, Effie.” She
- astonished them both by rising as if to go.
- </p>
- <p>
- “But,” said Dubby, “is that all?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Anne looked with humorous sympathy at Effie. “That’s men all over, isn’t
- it?” she said. “They’re fond of calling women talkers, but a man’s not
- happy till a thing’s been put in words. Me and your sister understand each
- other now.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m not quite certain that I do,” said Effie.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, maybe you’re right,” conceded Anne. “It’s a fact that I told Sam
- last night I was coming round here to give you a piece of my mind, and I
- don’t notice that I’m doing it. The need seemed to go when I set eyes on
- you, and I’m pretty full of a thing I want to do, only I’ve not quite got
- the face to ask.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “What is it, Mrs. Branstone?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I want to kiss you, lass,” said Anne.
- </p>
- <p>
- Dubby Stewart had for the second time that day the impression that women
- talked, so to speak, in hieroglyphics.... There seemed to be a kind of
- feminine shorthand to which only women held the key, and he did not
- understand the sudden softening of Ellie’s face nor her quick response.
- And he did not know why, when Anne kissed her, Effie said, “No, no,” nor
- why Anne said, “It isn’t no. It’s yes.” A kiss, it seemed, had various
- meanings.
- </p>
- <p>
- Anne in effect had conveyed to Effie that she thanked her and, more, she
- honoured her. Effie denied that she merited honour and Anne maintained
- that she did.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Aye,” said Anne, “he’s had two dips in the lucky-bag and he’s drawn a
- prize this time. It’s more than any man deserves, but we’ll not grudge it
- Sam, will we, Effie?” And to Dubby the thing took on a fresh aspect of
- bewilderment. If that meant anything, it meant that Anne was welcoming a
- daughter. Didn’t the woman know that Sam was married?
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’ve grudged him nothing,” Effie said.
- </p>
- <p>
- Anne meditated that, then looked at Effie with a touch of what was, for
- her, shyness. “You’ve grudged him nothing,” she disagreed, “except your
- pride in giving up. And you can do it, you can give up, but Sam’s nobbut a
- man, and they’re a weak flesh, men. He looks the shadow of himself,” she
- exaggerated resolutely.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Does he?” said Effie anxiously, and Anne nodded a sombre face. “What do
- you want me to do, Mrs. Branstone?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I want you to give up giving up. Sam said a thing to me last night. He
- said you’d make him find salvation. Well, happen; but what’s certain sure
- is that you made him find love. He’s found it, lass, and he mustn’t lose
- it, and he will if you leave things where they are. He’s trying to do a
- thing that isn’t, possible. He’s trying to live aside of Ada, loving you.
- He’ll try to love her for the love of you, and kiss her, telling himself
- he’s kissing you, and it will not be you; and the love he tries to bring
- her will turn to loathing in his heart. And what’ll happen then, when love
- goes sour within him? Eh, lass, you took yon lad to heaven and you’re
- sending him to hell.”
- </p>
- <p>
- It was not fair to Stewart. It was hardly bearable: he was not her brother
- and he hadn’t the feelings of a brother. He saw great happiness in Effie’s
- face, as if two happinesses mingled there, the one of giving up her dream,
- the other of awakening to a sweet reality. He saw her put out a hand
- towards Anne, surrendering, consenting, giving all in one swift, heady
- leap from cloud to earth, and then he saw her sway, and caught her in time
- to break her fall.
- </p>
- <p>
- Anne eyed him sharply. “Have you heard of your sister’s fainting before,
- lately?” she asked, busy on her knees with Effie.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes. Florrie told me. Twice. Can I do anything?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’ll bring her round,” said Anne. “But you can do something. You can go
- to Sam at his office and tell him he’s wanted here. Tell him I want him,
- and there’s news for him. Send Florrie up as you go, and you needn’t take
- that horsewhip with you, neither.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No. I needn’t take it now.”
- </p>
- <p>
- So Dubby, Effie’s brother, went out on an embassy for Anne. “Feeling it?
- Feeling?” he thought, “you God-abandoned devil, what right have you to
- feel? A journalist. A looker-on. There’s a story in this for you. There’s
- the guts of a story given away to you with a cup of tea... on, no, we
- didn’t have the tea; given neat, and you can’t be decently grateful.
- What’s the title? ‘The Charwoman’s Son’? No, damned if it is. Something
- about brother. Brother! Yes, you blighter, brother... brother, and proud
- of it. ‘Pride of Kin.’ That’ll do, and God help me to live up to it.” He
- turned into Sam’s office and delivered his message in a cold, unemotional
- voice. It seemed that Effie, brave herself, was the cause of bravery in
- others.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Effie! My mother! What have you to do with them?” asked Sam, amazed.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’ve given you a message,” said the taciturn herald.
- </p>
- <p>
- “But what’s behind it, Dubby? Is Effie ill?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Stewart was silent.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Is she—dead?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Dubby was tempted to say he didn’t know. It; seemed to him that things
- went too happily with Branstone, that it was fit, if only for the twenty
- minutes which it would take for him to reach Busholme, to let Sam think
- that Effie might be dead, to let him taste the flavour of torture. Dubby
- suffered and would suffer, not for twenty minutes but, he gloomily
- anticipated, for a lifetime. Let Sam have his minutes of it! Then he
- remembered he was Effie’s brother, and before Sam had his hat and coat on,
- malice had left him. “It’s all right, man,” he said. “She’s neither ill
- nor dead. They’ve got good news for you.”
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0024" id="link2HCH0024"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER XXIV—THE NEW BOOK OF MARTYRS
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>F there was news
- which Anne must send posthaste to hid him come to hear, and if Effie was
- neither ill nor dead, he need not overtax his wits to guess it. Yet he had
- never thought of this very natural sequel to the Marbeck week, and the
- plain fact is that he did not much want to think of it now.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I like your Effie,” Anne told him. “I like her very well. She’s going to
- make a grandmother of me.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He thought his mother had never been fatuous before: she thought he took
- the news morosely, and perhaps her expectation had been too high. She
- assumed that a child was the first consideration of a man’s life; which is
- not true, even, of all women and true of only a minority of men.
- </p>
- <p>
- Nor was Sam, in fact, morose. He had never been more intensely and
- silently alive. In itself, this thing was right with a shining exultant
- rightness which warmed him to the marrow. It crowned and completed Marbeck
- and it crowned and completed him. He who was childless was to be a father,
- and by Effie! He had nothing but a thankful emotion for that, and looked
- with yearning eyes at Effie, giver of all else, who was now to give him
- this. He had not known her wonder could increase.
- </p>
- <p>
- He saw that more was expected of him than that he should look at her
- adoringly. Anne was on tip-toe with anticipation. Her difficulty, if
- indeed she had acknowledged to herself that there was any, had been to
- make these visionaries see that love mattered and that Ada did not; and
- her success with Effie had been complete. She had never doubted of success
- with Sam, the weaker vessel, for there was love, sufficient in itself; and
- there was now the added argument of Effie’s child. She could not see that
- he had any choice.
- </p>
- <p>
- He stood there conscious of the expectancy of their regard, and knew that
- he was failing them. He thought they took a blinkered view, seeing the
- child and nothing else. To them, apparently, the child came first: they
- were hypnotized by what was, really, an afterthought, and there was the
- greater need for him to keep a steadfast eye upon the truth. As he saw it,
- the truth was that he had put his hand to another plough; on Hartle Pike
- he had lighted such a candle by Effie’s grace as he trusted would never be
- put out; and he had gone to Ada. True, Ada had gone from him, but that was
- temporary and trivial, whereas here was a real distraction and he saw two
- loyalties before him—to Effie and the idea, and to Effie and her
- child. It seemed to Sam that the first was the greater of these two.
- </p>
- <p>
- He had wrestled with an afterthought before, one which hardly yielded in
- temptation to that which now confronted him, and he had thrown it. He had
- refused to contest Sandyford because there was not room for politics in a
- scheme which included Ada, and still less was there room for Effie. He
- felt faint with discouragement at the thought that Effie, unless
- appearance belied her, had capitulated to her afterthought, but he stood
- firmly by their treaty. They had decided that duty came first; he had
- shouldered duty; and he, at any rate, had no room for afterthoughts.
- </p>
- <p>
- He was loyal to Effie and the Marbeck pact, duty’s bondsman, Ada’s
- husband. He made a gesture of decision, which Anne misinterpreted.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Aye,” she said a little smugly, “this settles it all right. It wasn’t
- common sense in you to part before, but I reckon there’ll be no parting
- now.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No,” said Effie softly, “not now.” She stole a look of shy, glad
- confidence at Sam, and he found it extraordinarily difficult to meet her
- eye, and still more difficult to say what he must, at any cost, get said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m not so sure,” he said at last, wishing the earth would swallow him.
- </p>
- <p>
- At that moment he would cheerfully have given a hand to escape having to
- differ from them. They were Effie and his mother: they were his mother and
- Effie: the two women to whom he owed everything: more, he loved Effie so
- that every fibre in him yearned for her, and, even more than that, he was
- delicately sensitive to Effie in her present case. But it couldn’t change
- him. His loyalty was engaged, to fanaticism, to another Effie, high Effie
- of the hills, of the crusade and the idea; and this seemed to him somehow,
- a lower Effie, an Effie who had dipped the flag of her ideal to a coming
- baby, whilst he was faithful to the old unbending Effie who had thrown an
- imitation wedding ring away. It almost seemed as if she wanted that ring
- back, base metal though it was.
- </p>
- <p>
- A case, perhaps, of splitting hairs, but, at any rate, the case of a man
- with a faith at one extreme and at the other his miserable conviction that
- happiness was not for him. He had abandoned happiness when he left
- Marbeck, and lived now in a place where happiness was barred by Ada.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m not so sure,” he repeated drearily. “You see, there’s Ada and I have
- to be fair to her.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Ada’s left you,” snapped Anne. A contentious Sam was not going to find
- her amiable.
- </p>
- <p>
- He chose to put it in another way. “My wife,” he said, “is staying at
- present with her father. Yes, mother,” he went on firmly, “I’m going to be
- fair to Ada and I’ve to guard against unfairness all the more because you
- won’t be fair. You won’t be ordinarily just. You always hated Ada.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes,” she agreed viciously. “I’m a clean woman. I always hated vermin.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam turned to Effle immensely heartened by this virulence. “You see!” he
- appealed, calling to witness the hopeless bias of his mother. It was, he
- wished to imply, this blind hatred of Anne for Ada which accounted for his
- mother’s attitude, her exalting of—well—the mistress over the
- wife, her flagrant unmorality. He tried to put all this into his gesture.
- “And you,” he reinforced it, “you sent me to her, Effie.”
- </p>
- <p>
- She bowed her head, admitting it, but Anne was not prepared to let it go
- at that. “Even Effie,” she said “can make a mistake. She would not send
- you now.”
- </p>
- <p>
- And, looking at Effie, he saw that it was true. He had seen it from the
- first and it bothered him profoundly. Effie had changed: there was, in all
- they said, this noticeable stressing of the “now,” to differentiate them
- from the “then.” What was it? Anne’s arguments, or the baby, or had Effie,
- uninfluenced by either, really changed her mind about the Marbeck treaty?
- he couldn’t believe that last. Marbeck was infallible and he was dogged in
- the faith. He responded to the Marbeck creed like the needle of a compass
- to the meridian, and if with this needle also there was deflection it was
- corrected by his racial stubbornness. He had his people’s queer,
- infatuated pride in the contemplation of their own tenacity, even when,
- perhaps mostly when, it hurts to be tenacious.
- </p>
- <p>
- Whereas Effie had known ever since Dubby Stewart brought her back from
- cloud-land that Marbeck was very fallible indeed, or, rather, Marbeck was
- one thing and living up to Marbeck was another. If he had said, instead of
- only thinking, that she was a lower Effie now, she would not have
- contradicted him, though she did not want a wedding ring of either metal.
- She wanted Sam. She was changed from the idealist who thought she could be
- happy as a sign-post and a spiritual guide. She had come down to Mother
- Earth where men and women live. At Marbeck they were on an altitude where
- the air was too rarefied for human lungs, and she wanted to fall with Sam
- from selflessness to mere humanity.
- </p>
- <p>
- “No,” she agreed again with Anne, “I should not send you now.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I shall have to think this out,” he said. Effie admitted to being
- earthly, and he was horribly dismayed! “Effie,” he cried in pain, “don’t
- you see?” he wanted desperately to be understood by her, if not by Anne.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I see,” she said, and not without pride either. Whatever was fine in him,
- whatever reacted from an Eflie come to earth, was due to her, and she was
- proud of him even when, as now, he used her tempered steel against her.
- </p>
- <p>
- Anne watched with a grim appreciation his anxiety to make a pikestaff
- plain. “We all see,” she said. “You’re none so deep and we’re none so daft
- as all that. You’ve got a maggot in your brain, and I know the shape of
- it. I’ve had the same in mine, and if you’ll think back ten years, you’ll
- know what I mean. We’re the same breed, Sam, and we can both do silly
- things and stand by then and suffer for them. I flitted from you to Madge,
- and I didn’t set eyes on you from that day till last night. That’s what I
- mean by suffering.”
- </p>
- <p>
- And there, in those few words, the tragedy of ten years stood confessed.
- Parted from Sam, she lived in exile, suffering, and, of course, he had
- known it and deliberately forgot it, so that the point of her revelation
- was not its truth, but the amazing fact that she should speak of it at
- all. Anne had the pride which suffers silently.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Mother!” he said, distressed for her.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Nay, none of that,” she bade him harshly. “If I were soft enough to let
- it hurt me, that’s my look out. But here’s the point, Sam. There’s another
- woman soft about you, too, and she’s not the same as me. I’d had you since
- I bore you, and I were not young when you and me came to a parting; but
- she’s young, and you’ll none make Eflie suffer the road I suffered while
- there’s strength in me to say you nay. I’d have gone to my grave without
- your knowing this if it hadn’t been for Effie. It’s not good for a man to
- know too much. They’re easy stuffed with pride.”
- </p>
- <p>
- She pretended, with deep magnanimity, to think that he had not known until
- she told him, but they both knew very well that he had always known. She
- dwelt deliberately on it now to inform him, not of her suffering, but of
- the intensity of her feeling for Effie. It was so intense that she could
- speak of her own suffering: for Effie’s sake she had unveiled, thrown off
- her stoicism, and flung the spoken truth as a challenge and a revelation
- at him.
- </p>
- <p>
- He knew what speaking in this manner cost her, but he was stubborn still
- in relating all she said to her ungovernable hate of Ada; whereas Anne did
- not hate Ada ungovernably, but only when Ada hurt Sam.
- </p>
- <p>
- Again he said “Mother!” and got no further with it.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I know I’m your mother,” she said, “and you can stop thinking of me now
- and think of Effie.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m trying to,” he said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well?” said Anne impatiently. She hadn’t imagined an obstinacy which
- would not yield to what she had said. Surely he knew the sacrifice of
- pride she made in saying it! And there was Effie, too, who said little and
- looked the more.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I don’t know,” he despaired.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Then others must know for you,” said Anne, and when his lips only
- tightened at that, “Sam,” she pleaded, “surely you’ll never go against the
- pair of us.”
- </p>
- <p>
- But there were two Effies, and he wasn’t “going against” them both, while
- he held Anne to be mesmerized by hate of Ada. For all that, it desolated
- him to be in opposition to them now, to Anne and Effie, the women who
- counted, the women who gave. “Still,” he had to say, “there’s Ada.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He said it, as he hoped to say it, finally. He wanted to get away from
- these two, to escape from their distracting presence to a place where he
- could think. After all, Hartle Pike had not settled his problem, and he
- must try somewhere else—Platt Fields, perhaps. They had a sort of
- space.
- </p>
- <p>
- But he could not escape—not, at least, till Anne had played her ace.
- Anne had not finished yet, though she had hoped ten years in the
- wilderness had been enough. It seemed that they were not, and she must
- wander still. Well, she could do what she must.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, aye,” she said dryly, “there’s Ada. There’s your bad ha’penny, and I
- reckon summat’ll have to be done with her. But if you’ll stop worrying,
- lad, and if worst comes to the worst, I’ll take Ada on myself.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Effie started towards her. “No, no,” she cried.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You hold your hush,” said Anne. This was Anne’s game, not Effie’s.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sam was still staring at her. “You!” he said. “What can you do?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I can see you and Effie happy, and I dunno as owt else matters.” It did
- not matter what the cost was to Anne. “When you used to come home to your
- tea from Mr. Travers’ office, what you left was always good enough for me,
- and I can stomach your leavings still.”
- </p>
- <p>
- It startled Effie, who had thought herself a specialist in sacrifice. This
- was the very ferocity of self-denial.
- </p>
- <p>
- So far, tired and overstrained, Effie had found peace in resigning the
- leadership to Anne, but here was a lead she could not follow. It was not
- that she mistook Anne’s purpose or doubted her capacity. Her faith in Anne
- was young but adamantine, and she knew that if Anne replaced Sam with Ada,
- and made herself heir to the Marbeck plan, she would unquestionably do for
- Ada what Sam had undertaken to do. But the thing was simply not good
- enough.
- </p>
- <p>
- “No, Mrs. Branstone, no,” she said firmly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Get oft’ with you,” said Anne impolitely. “I can tackle Ada with one hand
- tied behind my back.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Of course,” Sam agreed, “you could, but you are not going to. Ada’s my
- job.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I can be pig-headed as well as you, my lad,” Anne menaced him.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It’s not that, mother.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No, it isn’t that,” said Effie, conceiving perhaps that it was time for
- her to enter into this tragicomedy of rivalry in self-surrender. “Sam’s
- right. Ada does matter, and it is I who am the failure, I who have broken
- faith, I who was arrogant. I thought that I could bear a torch, and I can
- only bear a child. But I know now what I have to do. I can go away. I can
- disappear.”
- </p>
- <p>
- It seemed to Anne that this was serious because obviously it was a way
- out; but she thought it a way much more appalling in prospect than the
- plan she had proposed for herself of “taking Ada on.” She took alarm. In
- another than Effie it might have been heroics, but Effie’s was not the
- stuff that mouths bravado. Anne granted that, and saw a tragic chasm yawn
- She signalled her alarm to Sam, who answered it with a glance which made
- appeal to her, whilst yielding nothing of his obstinacy.
- </p>
- <p>
- “If you go away,” he said, “my mother goes with you. I’ve meant that from
- the first.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Anne nodded without enthusiasm. Certainly that was a solution and equally
- not the solution. It gave Sam to Ada, and Effie, it appeared, was not
- seeing it as a solution at all. There were strange possibilities, Anne
- thought, in this young woman, and she did not want them to be tested too
- far. Effie was not a talker, and when she said a thing she did not
- overstate. There was danger. Well, Anne was forewarned, and addressed
- herself in her most humorous, common-sense manner to laugh it out of
- court. One can deal with danger in worse ways than to apply to it the acid—ridicule.
- </p>
- <p>
- She put her arms akimbo and surveyed Effie and Sam appraisingly. “I
- dunno,” she said, “that there’s a pin to choose between the three of us
- for chuckle-headed foolishness. We’re all fancying ourselves as hard as we
- can for martyrs and arranging Ada’s life for her. It hasn’t struck any of
- us yet that Ada’s likely to arrange things for herself.”
- </p>
- <p>
- And if Sam’s impulse was to say gloomily: “It isn’t likely at all,” he
- repressed it when Anne’s eye caught his, and said instead, “That’s so,”
- without knowing why he said it and without believing it.
- </p>
- <p>
- The flicker of a smile crossed Effie’s face; Sam as conspirator struck her
- as crudely humorous. Anne saw the smile and understood, but brazened it
- out. “Of course it’s so,” she said, defying Effie. “Ada’s a poor thing of
- a woman, but she’s none beyond having a mind and speaking it. I was always
- one to take the short road out of trouble, so I’ll go along to Peter
- Struggles’ now.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Very well,” consented Effie, and Anne understood her to mean that the
- crisis, if one had impended, was postponed. “But,” said Effie, “of course,
- I saw.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Which was, in its way, a challenge; it was, at any rate, to tell Anne that
- Effie knew what had been suspected of her.
- </p>
- <p>
- Anne met it as a challenge. “Well?” she said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You were quite wrung, Mrs. Branstone,” said Effie quietly. “I’m not a
- coward.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Anne was tying her bonnet-si rings, and found it convenient to look down.
- She preferred, just then, not to meet Effie’s eye. “I know I’m
- overanxious,” she mumbled in apology.
- </p>
- <p>
- “And there’s no need,” said Effie, a little cruel in her victory.
- </p>
- <p>
- To Sam the conversation seemed to have slipped into another dimension. He
- hadn’t the faintest idea what they were talking about.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0025" id="link2HCH0025"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER XXV—WHOM GOD HATH JOINED
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">P</span>ETER Struggles
- walked into his tobacconist’s and put his snuff-box on the counter. There
- was no need to state his requirements; in fact, he had not stated them for
- many years. Shopman and customer understood each other very well, and
- business came first; then if there was inclination, as there usually was,
- talk followed.
- </p>
- <p>
- To-day, however, the shopman gaped at Peter in surprise, and made a
- half-turn of his head, so that he could see his calendar Wednesday was
- Peter’s day for buying snuff with a regularity to which time had given the
- force of a tradition, and the tobacconist had even the habit of using
- Peter’s visit as a reminder to a fallible memory that he must wind his
- clock. The calendar continued him in his belief that to-day was Thursday,
- and he felt sure that Peter had been in as usual on Wednesday.
- </p>
- <p>
- Peter had. Snuffing, of course, is a wasteful habit in any case, and a
- shaking hand misses the target more freely than a steady one; but, for all
- that, Peter, in his mental anguish, had consumed in one night the better
- part of his week’s supply of snuff. The box was indubitably empty. He had
- not come to replenish it without some conscientious qualms—an
- allowance is an allowance—but he felt that life which comprised Ada
- in her present mood and did not comprise snuff, was beyond bearing. Ada
- was, it seemed, inevitable: he must mitigate Ada.
- </p>
- <p>
- “The usual, if you please, Thomas,” he unusually said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes, sir,” said Thomas, filling the box. “You’ve had a little accident?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “An accident? Oh!” Then the fitness of that guess struck him. “Yes,
- Thomas, a little accident. By the way, do you know anything about
- divorce?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, sir, I read the <i>Sunday Judge,</i>” Thomas replied deprecatingly.
- “Very human subject, sir, divorce.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You find it so?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I take a lot of satisfaction in reading about my sinful
- fellow-creatures.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Quite, quite,” said Peter vaguely, and went out of the shop, leaving a
- puzzled salesman behind him. “Forgot to pay, and all,” thought Thomas.
- “Not that I’d grudge it if he didn’t pay, only it’s not like him. He looks
- sadly to day. The old boy’s breaking up. Him and divorce! What does he
- want to worry his head about divorce for?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Peter did not know that he had mentioned divorce, to his tobacconist. It
- would have shocked him if he had known. He spoke unconsciously, and
- listened mechanically to the man’s reply, but he was, harrowingly,
- “worrying his head” about divorce. He took snuff in the street, an
- unheard-of occurrence, but it did not clear his aching brain of the
- fateful word “divorce.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Ada had put it there too firmly in her stupid and invincible malignity.
- She had one aim—to do Sam the greatest injury she could. His offence
- was rank, and she demanded a proportionate revenge.
- </p>
- <p>
- She had lived as a spinster for marriage and as a wife by marriage.
- Marriage was not a duty, but a state of beatitude, and she had walked in
- the faith of her grotesque illusion that her marriage was singularly
- blessed. It was childless, and the more blessed for that: there were no
- intruders on the perfect union of man and wife. It was illusion, and a
- wilder perversion of the truth than the ordinary self-deceiver can attain;
- but illusion is the breath of life, and she had fed on her deception till,
- like a drug-taker, she could not live without it. She had blazoned it
- abroad in a hundred drawing-rooms. If there were low-voiced colloquies of
- this or that affair, if it was hinted that men were faithless ever, Ada
- would grow superior and boast the flawless rectitude of Sam. These were
- things which happened to other people, who very likely deserved them, and
- could by no manner of means occur to her. She was not so sunk in
- imbecility as to deny that they did happen, and to people who were,
- nominally, married; but they were unsound people, insecurely married.
- There was a fundamental difference between their marriages and hers. She
- couldn’t explain; it was too obvious for explanation. She was married, and
- these others, somehow, were married, yet not married. They had, through
- lack of merit, stopped short of the seventh paradise where nothing could
- shake consummate bliss. They were not as she was.
- </p>
- <p>
- And now she had to face the fact that the impossible had happened to her,
- and not only had it happened, but was known to have happened. That was
- where the blow struck home. She had publicly elaborated her case of
- absolute conviction, she had vaunted his faithfulness, the cardinal
- connubiality of Sam, and Miss Entwistle was spreading the news that she
- had been a doting fool! And she hadn’t. She had not doted on Sam. She had
- not been infatuated with her husband, but with the idea of her husband
- which she had created and maintained. If only she had had the gumption to
- defy Miss Entwistle! If only she had concealed her belief in the story as
- successfully as she had hidden the fact that Sam had a separate room! She
- had been taken by surprise, she had admitted everything by default, and,
- worse, she had assured Mrs. Grandage that she would never see Sam again.
- She did not doubt, in spite of Mrs. Grandage’s good-nature, that this
- little sequel to the story of Miss Entwistle was in rapid circulation.
- </p>
- <p>
- She was humiliated publicly, and, as she saw it, the one course open to
- her was to make Sam suffer a humiliation as drastic and as public as her
- own. Though it hurt her, he must pay for it; though she died, he must be
- punished and, sincerely, she expected it to kill her. She lived in a
- garden of lies, and life without the illusion of her marriage would be as
- impossible as life without the fragrance of her poisonous flowers to
- Rappaccini’s daughter, but no matter for that. Ada must be revenged, and
- divorce, though it killed her, would be the greatest injury that she could
- do a politician and a pietistic publisher. She managed to square the
- circle, too. She was to die and make a murderer of him; she was to ruin
- his business and make a bankrupt of him; and at the same time she was to
- have the compensation of a handsome alimony. But perhaps vengeance is
- always irrational, and that is why it belongs to God.
- </p>
- <p>
- She dinned her word into Peter’s ears with the merciless reiteration of a
- hurt and howling child. It was her first word and her last, and appeals
- based on religion shattered themselves against it as fruitlessly as the
- appeal to reason. What she had said she had said: and she had said
- “Divorce.” Alternatives did not exist.
- </p>
- <p>
- For Peter, divorce ranged itself with the abominations of the world, a
- man-made legal subterfuge to evade the law of God. There might,
- conceivably, be occasions when divorce was to be condoned as the
- comparatively little wrong which did a great right, and he tried very
- honestly to see Ada’s as one of those heroic needs. He failed: he could
- not even see that Ada was hurt in soul, or in anything but pride. She was
- in a mood, not of spiritual revolt, but of peevish discontent.
- </p>
- <p>
- Small wonder that he snuffed prodigiously that night. He had his meed of
- suffering, and overcharged his small account with dreadful self-reproach.
- He, not Ada, and not Sam, was responsible for her violence and for the
- cause of it; he and the books upon his shelves; reading, his darling sin.
- He blamed himself for consenting too readily to their marriage. Sam, he
- had thought, would lead Ada: on what grounds had he thought it? What had
- he known of Sam’s leadership—a prolix, fluent boy at the
- Concentrics? He had exchanged his daughter for peaceful, solitary evenings
- with his books—“Self-seeker!” he thought—and the exchange was
- to recoil upon him now. He had abandoned, after one harsh, undaughterly
- repulse, his attempt to show her that wearing a wedding ring was not the
- whole duty of woman—“The sin of Pride,” he thought—and had
- returned to browse amongst his books. Sam seemed a good fellow, too. There
- were those Classics, and the texts, and the prosperous old age of Mr.
- Carter, who, but for Sam, would certainly have ended his days in the
- workhouse. But, failing with Ada, he ought to have appealed to Sam....
- Yes, he ought to have taken a strong line with Sam, instead of letting
- Sam’s worldly success dazzle him. Sam had seemed too big for Peter
- Struggles to grapple with—the sin of cowardice.
- </p>
- <p>
- Now it had come to this! Sam had broken the seventh commandment, and Ada
- wished to forget the words which Peter had read over them when he joined
- their right hands together, and said, “Those whom God hath joined
- together, let no man put asunder.” She commanded a divorce, and it was
- useless for Peter to insist, out of his small store of worldly wisdom,
- that divorce was not hers to command. Sam had not been “cruel.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Her fury only doubled. Gone, vanished like the snows of long ago, was her
- painted idyll of domestic bliss.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Cruel?” she said. “He’s never been anything but cruel. I’m black and blue
- with his atrocities.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Very gently he tried to tell her that he did not believe it. “We must not
- exaggerate,” he said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Exaggerate!” she blazed. “Won’t you believe me till you see it? I’ll go
- upstairs and strip. Come when I call.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He soothed her down at that, seeing that she was capable of doing herself
- some signal injury to call in evidence.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, then,” she said, “I want my divorce: get me a divorce.” That was
- her simple demand of the priest who married her: it was why Peter took,
- unrepentantly, as much snuff in a night as he commonly took in a week, and
- why, with replenished stock, he continued next day to take snuff with a
- lavish hand.
- </p>
- <p>
- It irritated Ada, though she had always associated Peter with a snuff-box,
- and the untidiness of the habit could not offend her, who was never
- offended by dirt, as any mechanical movement in another will irritate one
- whose nerves are ill-controlled. They had talked themselves to a
- standstill, and sat in moody silence, broken only by the deplorable sound
- of taking snuff.
- </p>
- <p>
- She looked viciously at him. “If you do that again, I shall leave the
- room,” she said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m sorry, my dear,” he said, although, really, it was a pleasant threat;
- but when he did it again, it was through pure absent-mindedness, and he
- was terribly distressed at his selfishness when Ada flung out of the room.
- He had the feelings of a child put in a corner as a punishment, and to
- relieve them he took snuff again. She heard him from the stair, and heard
- him immediately afterwards poking the fire; and she thought the loathsome
- self-absorption of men and their utter callousness to the anguish of
- sensitive women were proved beyond the possibility of doubt. She threw
- herself on the bed in her old room, alone in a friendless world.... The
- bed had a warm eiderdown.
- </p>
- <p>
- Peter poked the fire because it needed poking. It often did. The grate was
- one of those labour-making contrivances which must be periodically cleared
- of ash if the fire is to burn at all, and it was rarely cleared. The woman
- who “did for” Peter, did for him badly, and he was at the age when a man
- needs artificial warmth: a gaunt, shrunk figure as neglected as his house.
- Small wonder that, apart from his attachment to St. Mary’s, he was still a
- curate. They had considered him for the living when his vicar moved some
- years ago, they had considered the little circle of rich parishioners who
- made an oasis of civilization in that savage place, and they had decided
- that Peter lacked the social graces. They had seen his mittens, his
- unfinished coat... they had seen him eat an orange: and he remained a
- curate.
- </p>
- <p>
- The fire was gone beyond the reach of his unscientific poking. That, too,
- often happened with a man who had the habit of standing by his bookshelf
- reading gluttonously, with his austere person frozen into a grotesque
- attitude, some book which he had not the patience to carry to the
- fireside: and he was now upon his knees making pathetically clumsy efforts
- to revitalize the flame when his inefficient housekeeper opened the door
- and showed Anne into the room.
- </p>
- <p>
- It eased the situation for them both. Anne indeed, was nervous, so nervous
- that she had walked three times past the door before she pulled the bell.
- She had a befitting awe of the priest, and a tremendous respect for the
- man. At Effie’s, because the circumstances there were tense, it had seemed
- an easy thing to come to Peter’s, but she had needed to call on her
- reserves of courage to keep her place on the doorstep after she had rung
- the bell.
- </p>
- <p>
- Now, however, when she came into the room and saw what he was at, she
- pushed him gently aside, and took the poker from his hand. She nursed the
- fire skilfully; she was with familiar things which gave her back her
- confidence.
- </p>
- <p>
- As to the trouble, she diagnosed it in a moment. “That woman of yours is a
- slut,” she said. “And I’ll talk to her before I go. I reckon I’ve the
- right, me and you being connections by marriage.”
- </p>
- <p>
- She looked at him over her shoulder, and saw that he did not recognize
- her. How, indeed, should he? She had avoided Ada’s wedding, and she was
- one of a large flock: a face, perhaps, but not a name to him. “I’m Anne
- Branstone,” she explained. “Sam’s mother; and I’ll not have you blaming
- Sam for this.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “For the fire?” asked Peter vaguely, he was rather muddled by her brisk
- incursion.
- </p>
- <p>
- “No,” said Anne, almost gaily; “for the fat that’s in the fire.”
- </p>
- <p>
- She thought she had his measure now—the sort of a man who could live
- in a dirty room like this, with a choked ash-pan and fire-irons with the
- rust thick on them. But Peter was greater than that. She judged him by
- those of his surroundings which had significance for her, and not by books
- which expressed everything for him and nothing for her.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Mrs. Branstone!” he said, as if realizing now with whom he had to deal.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Sam’s mother,” she repeated, rising from a healthy fire; “and I’ve told
- you where not to put the blame. You can, maybe, think yourself of the
- right place to put it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes,” he surprised her by saying; “on me.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You! Oh, if you want to go to the back of behind, you can blame Adam and
- Eve. But that’s not what I meant.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “On me,” he said again. “I consented to this marriage. I sanctioned it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well,” said Anne, “I’ve not come here to crow, but I’ve the advantage of
- you in that. I did not consent,” and her eye strayed involuntarily to a
- scar on her hand, memorial of the form of her dissent. “I didn’t consent
- because I knew they weren’t in love. I told Sam I knew it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Then,” said Peter, “you are worthier than I am, Mrs. Branstone.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Because I knew love matters? There’s nowt so wonderful in knowing that,
- and nowt so crafty in foreseeing that a marriage where there is no love is
- marred from start to finish.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Love matters,” he agreed. “It matters all, for God is love.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “We’ll come to an agreement, you and me,” she said appreciatively. “We’ve
- the same mind about the root of things.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “This is a terrible business, Mrs. Branstone.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m none denying it. It’s a terrible thing for a man and wife to live
- together when love’s not a lodger in the house; it’s wrong, and the worst
- of wrong is that it won’t stay single. Wrong’s got to breed. But, there,”
- she finished briskly, “I’m telling you what you know, and when all’s said,
- there’s nowt so bad that it’s past mending.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Ada wants a divorce,” said Peter, and a sudden glint of triumph came into
- Anne’s eye, only to vanish as quickly as it came. She had said, without
- believing it, that Ada might make arrangements, and this was to arrange
- indeed. It unmade the hollow marriage, it was a solution which really
- solved, it was a clean cut; and she wanted to glorify Ada, who was proving
- at the eleventh hour that she had the saving grace of common sense.
- </p>
- <p>
- Peter did a curious thing. He rose and took a book haphazard from his
- shelf, came back to his chair and opened the book. He did not read it, and
- he was not being rude, but this was an agitation beyond the reach of
- snuff. He tried to calm himself by resting his eyes on print.
- </p>
- <p>
- Anne was not practised in the ways of bookish men, but, by strange
- insight, understood that Peter had gone to a book much as she went to his
- grate, to be soothed by its familiarity, and her rejoicing at his words
- came to an abrupt end. His action brought home to her, more than his
- horror-struck tone, whose significance she almost missed in her joy at
- Ada’s practical solution, his loathing of divorce: and it seemed to her,
- quite suddenly, that what mattered most in all this business was that
- Peter should be happy about it.
- </p>
- <p>
- It mattered more than Sam and Ada, and even more than Effie, that Peter,
- who was, so to speak, an old and sleeping partner, should be satisfied by
- their solution. She did not care if this was to per vert the values: the
- remnant of Peter Struggles’ life was of more importance than the young
- lives of the active members of the firm. And because she had a practical
- mind, and believed that one is happy in soul only when one is first happy
- in body, she was already thinking past their present problem: she was
- considering how the slut in Peter’s kitchen could be replaced by her own
- housewifely self.
- </p>
- <p>
- She resolutely consigned that thought to the future, and returned to the
- question of to-day. Ada, wonderfully, wanted a divorce: but Anne required
- that Peter should be happy about it, and she perceived the
- incompatibility. She saw that juxtaposition could hardly be more crude. He
- was a priest, the priest who married them, and she wanted him to acquiesce
- contentedly in their divorce.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Wants a divorce, does she?” she said. “Well, there’s more than Ada to be
- thought of.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “There is, indeed,” said Peter, thinking of his church.
- </p>
- <p>
- “There’s you,” said Anne, thinking of him. “If she gets one, does she
- plant herself on you again?”
- </p>
- <p>
- He supposed so, unable to disguise his depression at the prospect.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Aye,” she rubbed it in, “you were well rid of Ada once. It’s not in human
- nature to want her back again.” She was thinking singly of his comfort.
- </p>
- <p>
- Peter, on his part, took her to imply that if he opposed a divorce it was
- for interested motives, that he could continue to be “well rid of Ada.” He
- saw with dismay that it was an interpretation which could reasonably be
- put on any opposition from him. He thought, in his humility, that it was a
- reasonable interpretation, whereas, Peter being Peter, it was a
- ludicrously unjust interpretation, and, of course, Anne did not make it.
- She had only stated as a fact that Ada at home prejudiced her father’s
- comfort: and the comfort of Ada’s father had become a matter which touched
- Anne Bran-stone nearly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “And there are other people, too. There’s Sam,” she went on, “and he is a
- desperate bad case. He has no love for Ada. He’s hoisted his notion of his
- duty higher than a living love. He wants Ada to come back.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m sorry to say,” mourned Peter, “that the more he wants it, the less
- likely she is to go.”
- </p>
- <p>
- She tried not to exult too openly at that. “And then,” she said, “there’s
- Effie.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Effie!” He spoke in scandalized protest.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Aye, that’s her name, and yon’s just the tone of voice I had myself when
- I first heard of her. I want you to see Effie.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Never!” said Peter, and for a mild man his bitterness was remarkable.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Then I must show her to you,” said Anne placidly, “and that’ll mean going
- back a bit and showing you other things as well. It’ll mean,” and she very
- much regretted it, “showing you this.” She held out her hand and pointed
- to the scar. “When Sam told me he wanted to marry Ada, I came to see her.
- I saw what I saw, and I told him she’d be the ruin of him. He didn’t
- believe me, and I tried to make him see I meant it. I put my hand into the
- fire, and I thought to keep it there till he agreed with me, but he’s
- stronger in the arm than me, and he got me away.” She spoke without
- passion, in simple narrative which Peter found impressed him deeply. “So I
- left him and earned my living, and all that. Sam married her, and the
- ruin’s come, but it’s not come suddenly. It’s been coming all the time.
- I’d date it back,” she reflected, “to the day when he fooled you about the
- ‘Social Evil’ pamphlet. He did that because he wanted a rich husband for
- Ada.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Peter had nothing to say. If he had not known before that Sam had “fooled”
- him, he did not doubt it now.
- </p>
- <p>
- “And it grew from that. He’s made money because Ada wanted money, and
- after that it grew to be a bad habit. He made it then by writing lies
- about himself in the papers, and I don’t know how he’s done it since then,
- except that it has been by more lies. He began to fancy himself at
- politics. He wanted to be a crowing cock, and it didn’t matter if he
- crowed on a dung-heap so long as he crowed. And Ada didn’t care. He gave
- her money, and she didn’t care. She didn’t love, and he didn’t love, and
- there’s a thing you said just now that I’ll remind you of. You said God’s
- love. I’ll leave it to you to name what it is when there isn’t love.
- </p>
- <p>
- “And then love came to Sam. Effie came, and you say that God is love. Sam
- put it to me in another way. He said he’d found salvation. Well, it’s a
- big word, and I dunno. But I do know he found love and it changed him.
- He’s done with politics, and he’s done with crowing and with riches, too.
- Effie did that by the power of love, and there’s another thing she did,
- that’s marked yon lass for me as the finest, strangest woman in the width
- of the world. She gave him up and sent him back to Ada. Well, I’ve heard
- of sacrifice before, and I’ve done a bit that way myself, but give up a
- man she loved and teach him how to make a woman of his wife, and send him
- home to do it—it’s more than I can rise to. And that is Effie
- Mannering.
- </p>
- <p>
- “He went home and he tried, and Ada laughed at him. She couldn’t
- understand: there wasn’t the one thing there that could make her
- understand: there wasn’t love. And he gave up his politics that night she
- laughed at him, to leave himself free to tackle Ada. Now Ada’s left him,
- and there’s sum-mat else turned up as well. You can guess.” He looked up
- sharply. “Aye, that’s it, and the rum thing is that it surprised them
- both. Their love’s that sort of love, and I reckon there are folk would
- call it careless of them. I would myself nine cases out of ten, aye, and
- ninety-nine in a hundred, but not this case. This wasn’t a case for care;
- it was a case of love. But a baby’s coming to Effie, and you know’ as well
- as I do that none will ever come to Ada. I’ve finished telling you about
- Effie now.” There was a long pause and it seemed several times that Peter
- was about to break it, and each time changed his mind. All that he finally
- said in comment on Effie was, “A lawless woman,” and it might have been
- deduced from his tone that he did not condemn, if he could not,
- confessedly, admire.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Aye, lawless,” Anne agreed, “but there’s a law of lawless women and she
- has not obeyed it. She’s not a breaker. She’s a maker.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Peter bowed his head. Perhaps he did not wish Anne to see what was written
- in his face. And he lacked conviction when he tried to speak again. “Whom
- God hath joined—he began.
- </p>
- <p>
- “But God,” Anne said, “is love.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He threw up his hands in a despairing gesture of surrender. “I deserve to
- be unfrocked for this,” he said, but he closed the book on his knee and
- took snuff violently. It marked the passing of a crisis.
- </p>
- <p>
- As for Anne, there mingled with her satisfaction at his consent a keen
- despondency at his unhappiness. She had both lost and won, and Anne took
- little pleasure in a mixed victory. She had not finished yet with Peter
- Struggles.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0026" id="link2HCH0026"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER XXVI—SNOW ON THE FELLS
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">L</span>IFE is still
- greater than machines. Machines accomplish marvels and very wonderfully
- continue to accomplish them, but life refuses the mechanical. It was man,
- and not nature, who invented the wheel, and life does not revolve upon an
- axle. Life will not repeat itself: and it can excel itself.
- </p>
- <p>
- They had not thought, when they came back to Marbeck at the turn of the
- year, that Marbeck could be better than before. They came hoping, they
- said, to recapture the old emotions, and brought Anne with them to show
- her their fairyland. They did not recapture the old emotions, because they
- were young emotions, a ferment like youth itself, and things were settled
- now. They seemed to look back from their equable security to a wild
- infancy of their emotion, a fumbling, frenzied, awkward age of love. Of
- course they looked back happily, from a place where things were happy and
- serene to one where things were happy and impetuous.
- </p>
- <p>
- The Dale was full of wonder, with a wonder which now belonged unerringly
- to fact and had mellowed in reality.
- </p>
- <p>
- For Anne, it was a pretty place, but “lonesome,” and, amazingly to them,
- she chafed to leave it. Anne did not suffer holidays gladly.
- </p>
- <p>
- They had extolled Anne, they had not thought it credible that she should
- fail at anything, and it ruffled them disturbingly to find her fail at
- this. They had planned eagerly and, indeed, generously to bring her with
- them to Marbeck—generously, because they wanted to be alone, and
- even Anne, owe her what they did and be she what she might, was an
- intruder. But they wanted her to share with them their wonderland. Marbeck
- was theirs, theirs intimately and alone, their holy place, and they could
- think of nothing finer, nothing which came more nearly to her deserts of
- them, than to initiate her to their secret worship.
- </p>
- <p>
- They made her free of Marbeck, relived their week for her as much as for
- themselves, showed her where this and that dear folly happened, took her
- to view-points whence she could see the tops of hills they climbed, using
- the landscape as the ground-plan of an ecstasy which they invited her to
- share, and were discomposed to find that Anne, plainly straining
- enthusiasm in their behalf, could only say of Marbeck, their Marbeck, “I’m
- sure it’s very nice.”
- </p>
- <p>
- She damned with faint praise their enchanted valley in whose every tree
- they took by now as fierce a joy as if they had created it, and in despair
- they dragged her, as a last hope, to the very Holy of their holies, the
- top of Hartle Pike. If she failed them there, if she did not see the
- beauty and the grace, the penetrating significance and the absolute
- sanctity of Hartle Pike, then her greatness was lopsided, resulting, like
- a show chrysanthemum, from the atrophy of other possibilities.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was a great day for the fells, when a frozen surface crushed
- elastically underfoot and kept one dryshod anywhere, and they walked in
- frosty, sun-kissed air, keenly exhilarating yet spicily warm. Snow capped
- the greater heights and seemed to clarify an atmosphere already clear, but
- the dales were free of snow and never more fit for walking than now when
- their boggy surface was dried up and roughened to the tread by crisp,
- granulated particles of frost.
- </p>
- <p>
- Anne granted to herself that if one must take a holiday, this generous
- activity made nearly a venial matter of it. To climb these slopes was
- almost as satisfying to her body as to wash a long flight of steps, and
- she reached the top feeling as pleasantly tired as if she had done half a
- day’s charring.
- </p>
- <p>
- Still, she hadn’t charred, and there was in fact nothing which needed
- charring, nothing but a cleanliness which positively irritated her. She
- itched to be doing something and there was manifestly nothing to do except
- to enjoy herself. And if Anne Branstone was not doing a job, she liked, at
- any rate, to know that her next job was around the corner. She began, for
- the first time in her life, to feel a friendliness towards dirt. In the
- midst of this sprawling insolence of triumphant cleanliness, she hankered
- for a little humanizing soot. She could have loved her life-long enemy,
- and he did not appear... it was not a bit like Manchester.
- </p>
- <p>
- Far to the west, beyond a barrier of gleaming snow, she saw a murky cloud
- of smoke where the foul boot of industrialism stamps on the Lakeland Coast—a
- message and a call. It spoke, to her of natural dirt in this great waste
- of unstained purity; it made her sick for home and the thing she had to
- do.
- </p>
- <p>
- Effie and Sam stood gazing at the hills, spell-hound by loveliness, and
- when they tore their dancing eyes away it was to look into each other’s.
- They had no need of words: their eyes exulted in the burnished splendour
- of the scene, and with a doubled exultation each in the other’s joy. Then
- Sam turned hopefully to Anne and saw that she was looking with a rapt
- intensity at the west. At last, it seemed, the hills had touched her.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Where’s yon?” she asked, “yon smoke?”
- </p>
- <p>
- His face fell as he told her, but he saw that this explained Anne’s
- failure. She had not relished Marbeck because she had not seen it. She had
- not been looking at Marbeck, but all the while at something else.
- </p>
- <p>
- And why, he questioned, why, now that things had so admirably arranged
- themselves, must Anne still live in thought in Manchester? There seemed to
- him to be no law, nothing which could conceivably distract her attention,
- nothing which had not with genial finality been neatly finished off. Of
- course they had stupid legal business to come, but that was well ahead
- and, in any case, was not to worry them.
- </p>
- <p>
- She could not, surely, be troubling about Ada. It was he who had made the
- trouble there, insisting that Ada was “his job.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He insisted to the point of almost literally forcing himself upon her in
- Peter Struggles’ house, and remembered now with a twinge that desolating
- interview, if interview it could be called, and its liberating end; how
- Ada had looked at him, and answered nothing to his abject and passionate
- appeals (he wondered how he could have made them, but he was despairingly
- sincere): how he had pleaded and apologized for the past and supplicated
- for the future, all in the mastering grip of his Marbeck faith, and how
- she had kept silent till she turned on Peter and told him she must leave a
- house which did not shelter her from the deadly insult of this man’s
- presence. He remembered the good woman, Mrs. Grandage, who had carried Ada
- to a Hydro at Southport, and wrote to Peter that Ada seemed quite happy
- there, “nursing her grievance like a child,” and was looking for a house.
- He had found something mystifying about the intervention of Mrs. Grandage:
- good nature fortified by a bad conscience was his attempt to explain her
- attitude, but what emerged clearly from the letters she wrote to Peter was
- that Ada had no intention of returning to Manchester: and when he thought
- of Southport, he realized its quintessential rightness as her home. He had
- not shirked his job; he had eaten dirt before her in his anxiety to do his
- job; and he was not allowed. What she was she must remain, and Southport
- seemed the aptest place for her. “Only,” as Mrs. Grandage wrote, “she mast
- have money.”
- </p>
- <p>
- That was not difficult, and the money might have come in many ways: it
- came actually in a way which Effie hated and Sam thought exquisitely
- right. It came through Stewart, that faithful ally of the publishing
- business in its early days.
- </p>
- <p>
- Dubby was in Effie’s room, “which is where,” he said, “your brother has a
- right to be.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You keep that up,” she smiled.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Is the poor dog to get none?” he asked.
- </p>
- <p>
- “He is to have whatever he wants,” she said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “—that’s going,” he completed her sentence.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes,” said Effie, not smiling now, and kissed him very simply to seal his
- brotherhood.
- </p>
- <p>
- He stood silent for a moment, then, with a jerk of his head he, so to
- speak, cut his loss and turned to her with the frank confidence of their
- settled relationship. “Now we can talk,” he said. “Tell me about old Sam.
- What are you going to do with him? And with his business?”
- </p>
- <p>
- She evaded his first question. “The business? Oh, he’ll sell that.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Then let me buy.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You! Oh!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why not?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You know what I think of it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m only the dog, my dear. Do you know any Greek? There’s a connection
- between being a dog and being a cynic. In certain circumstances, I’d have
- thought with you to the crack of doom, but your brother’s a cynic.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I see,” said Effie sadly. “But he will always be my brother, Dubby.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Thanks, Effie,” he said. “That will keep me on the sweeter side of
- currishness. But a dog wants meat. You’ll tell Sam I’m to have the first
- refusal of that business. I’ll scrape a syndicate together in a week.”
- </p>
- <p>
- So the Stewart Publishing Syndicate, which now has dashing offices near
- Covent Garden, came to birth and Ada got her money. When Sam tried to tell
- Effie that his investments outside the business were ridiculously small,
- she had refused to be impressed.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It’s not the means of life that matters, Sam. It’s living: it’s the
- quality of life: it’s what we do with life,” she said, and Ada got the
- means.
- </p>
- <p>
- “She’ll be married in a year to a man from Liverpool,” said Dubby, when he
- heard.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why Liverpool?” asked Sam, and Dubby shrugged his shoulders. He thought
- Sam’s question stupid.
- </p>
- <p>
- “By the way, Sam,” Dubby said, “have you and Effie any plans?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No,” said Effie, when Sam hesitated, but a brother’s curiosity was not to
- be stifled like that, and Sam’s face told her, too, how he had hung on her
- reply. She resented his anxiety, the proof that he had not dropped his
- calculating habit. They had not discussed the question of plans because
- she held there was no question to discuss, and Sam, she thought, deserved
- a little punishment for thinking otherwise. “I suppose,” she went on, “we
- shall stay in Manchester and face the music.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh!” said Sam blankly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, we must give Mr. Verity his revenge,” she teased.
- </p>
- <p>
- “But it can’t hurt me now I’m out of politics,” he said, confessing by his
- tone that it would hurt him very much.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It will please him, though,” she said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’d... I’d thought of going to America,” he ventured.
- </p>
- <p>
- “America!” scoffed Dubby. “<i>O sancta simplicitas!</i> America’s not El
- Dorado, Sam. El Dorado’s been found. I’d even say it’s been found out.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “There are big things in America,” Sam defended his idea.
- </p>
- <p>
- “As a matter of fact, Dubby,” said Effie, silencing him, “we shall go to
- Marbeek for a little while. It’s a good place to begin from.”
- </p>
- <p>
- With that a great contentment came to Sam. They were to go to Marbeek;
- they were to begin; and he no longer questioned what. He made no hard and
- fast surrender of his will, but recognized the fact, not for the first
- time, that when Effie made a decision it had a shining rightness. Perhaps
- she had retreated from her first decision of Marbeck, but, if so, Anne
- helping him, he had retreated with her; and they went to Marbeek now, not
- to end, but to begin, and to begin together.
- </p>
- <p>
- Reflecting on it all, he could not see the blemish. He couldn’t, for the
- life of him, make out why Anne was not content.
- </p>
- <p>
- He half explained the valley’s failure to enchant her when he perceived
- that she had not really looked at it. At what, then, could she be looking?
- And how could she, how in the name of beauty was it possible for anyone to
- pick out from all that noble amphitheatre of the hills the one
- smoke-clouded spot?
- </p>
- <p>
- “Mother,” he cried in downright exasperation, “aren’t you happy here?”,
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’d be happier in Manchester,” she said. “Yon smoke’s too far away to
- taste. Aye, I think I’ll leave you here and go to-day.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “But you’re not going back to Madge’s—to the work in other people’s
- houses, I mean. That’s surely over now.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Maybe.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Mother, you’ve done with work.”
- </p>
- <p>
- She eyed him grimly. “Not till I’m dead, my lad,” she said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why won’t you tell me what you’re thinking of?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m thinking,” she said, “of yon slut in Peter Struggles’ kitchen. I’ll
- have her out of that tomorrow.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He glanced at Effie, and then looked again. He fancied he had surprised a
- little smile on Effie’s face and looked twice to make sure. And when he
- looked he found that Effie was looking back at him in the wise, humorous
- way that he had come to know so well. “Don’t you see?” was what she seemed
- to say.
- </p>
- <p>
- And he did see. He saw that it was not Manchester, but a man in
- Manchester; not the woman in Peter Struggles’ kitchen, but the man in
- Peter’s parlour who interrupted his mother’s vision of the Marbeck hills.
- She lost their beauty in a greater beauty of her own.
- </p>
- <p>
- “And don’t be incredulous,” said Effie’s eyes.
- </p>
- <p>
- She turned to Anne. “We’ll go down to the Inn at once,” she said, “and you
- shall catch the train this afternoon.”
- </p>
- <p>
- A quick look passed from Anne to Effie, from which they both excluded Sam.
- It almost seemed that Anne was asking Effie for support, and that Effie
- understood and nodded imperceptibly. And if Anne had seriously doubted,
- her doubts were dissipated by a look which told her that, where she was
- concerned, Effie believed in the feasibility of anything.
- </p>
- <p>
- Nothing at Marbeck became Anne Branstone like her leaving it. “Why,
- mother, how young you look!” he cried when she came downstairs to the
- trap.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It’s just as well,” said Anne, meeting Effie’s eye over his shoulder.
- </p>
- <p>
- Then, after she had gone, and so pat upon her going as to be hardly
- decent, life flamed for them ungrudgingly. There was something quite
- impudently callous about the haste of it, as if life pulled a face behind
- the older generation and turned lightheartedly to burn more ardently for
- them. But Anne, and they knew it, would not have thanked them to be sorry
- for her. She had gone to Peter Struggles, who needed her.
- </p>
- <p>
- They could not now resume the half amphibious life of their autumn days,
- but the air itself from the snow-clad fells had all the stimulation of a
- bath. It cleansed and healed by touch and heightened their well-being till
- they moved in radiant exhilaration, now clamant at the joy of it, now dumb
- before its wonder.
- </p>
- <p>
- Happy themselves, they were the cause of happiness in others, not
- self-contained in joy, but effervescing to the old black-beamed kitchen of
- the Marbeck Inn.
- </p>
- <p>
- They had, as Sam cannily observed, the advantages of a private room at an
- hotel without paying for it—and abrogated them. In the autumn they
- had isolated their joy from others: now it brimmed from them and affected
- all the people of the Inn, making the long nights short. Good listeners
- were a godsend to the Dale in winter, and the shepherds, dropping from
- heaven knew how far, found a rare satisfaction in telling this attentive
- audience tales of the fells, of sheep wanderers that strayed as wide
- afield as Derbyshire, of dogs that ran amok and ravaged the flocks they
- ought to tend, of the epic Beast of Ennerdale, of the legends of John Peel
- and all the sagas of the Lakes. It needed little to make these dalesmen
- happy, nothing beyond a patient ear for a slow, rambling narrative—a
- long chain strung with pearls of racy episode—or an hour of Effie at
- the piano, when the dalesmen disappointed her by knowing no ballads, but
- having, instead, a sound acquaintance with the latest music-hall songs
- stacked in the cupboard at the Inn. In here, in the smoke room, they were
- knowing wags, in the kitchen they were themselves, talking shop, and
- therefore interesting. Effie and Sam preferred them in the kitchen,
- telling their slowly-moving tales, to seeing them in their smoke-room
- mood, imitating badly a thing not worth the imitating. But, in either
- room, they helped them to be happy.
- </p>
- <p>
- Well coated they would go each night from the tobacco-laden air of the
- kitchen down the road to the bridge over Marbeck Force. A great peace
- brooded there. Even the stream ran softly now when all the surface water
- of its gathering ground was frozen hard.
- </p>
- <p>
- They stood there on the bridge while the moon rose over Hartle Pike and
- scattered silver on the snow. Great shadows leaped to instant birth below
- the Pike whose comely top was one black silhouette against the brightened
- sky, and the beauty of the valley, seen by day with an almost Alpine
- harshness, mellowed in the moonlight to a subtle luminosity. Behind them
- were the lights of the friendly Inn; near by the low church tower saluted
- God amongst the pines, and all around them spread the lustrous radiance of
- the moon-flushed Dale.
- </p>
- <p>
- For the hundredth time he restrained his impulse to repeat his words,
- “We’ll build a tabernacle here,” and Effie read his thought.
- </p>
- <p>
- “We’re making the good beginning here,” she said. “We’re practising and I
- think we grow.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “We grow in happiness,” he said, which he thought good argument for
- staying at Marbeck.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes. We grow in happiness. We shall have outgrown Marbeck soon. We shall
- have grown a sturdy happiness that can withstand the towns. It might
- withstand Manchester and I think it will. To love, to work, to look for
- other people’s strength and not for other people’s weaknesses: that is to
- be happy, Sam. And happiness counts more than all. It roots and then it
- spreads. It spreads. Infection isn’t only of disease, infection is of
- happiness and youth. There’s too much age, too many men and women in the
- world who have forgotten love. We have to build, and build on happiness.”
- They gazed at the unguessed future through the silent night. God knows
- that there was work ahead for them to do!
- </p>
- <h3>
- THE END
- </h3>
- <div style="height: 6em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-<pre>
-
-
-
-
-
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