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.