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.