“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.