ON general grounds—on the grounds, for instance, of anything so out-of-date and out of reason as filial piety—Ada was quite indifferent to Peter’s “consent,” and wanted it only to shackle Sam more firmly.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.
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.
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.
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.