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.