He expected to be depressed at the very air of Manchester, and, instead, he sniffed at it as Mr. Minnifie had once relished the odours of Greenheys, with an exile’s greed. He knew that he ought to feel a loathing of the office, but found that he opened the letters with more than his usual zest. He knew that it was wrong, all wrong, and checked his itching fingers.
There have been prisoners who, when offered freedom, have pleaded to remain in the familiar cell.
Was it like that with him, he wondered, as had as that, the jail-fever so ineradically in him that he must breathe the tainted air to live? But, was he offered freedom? He had to go to Ada, who was a mill-stone and implied the other mill-stones. Unless she was not a mill-stone, unless he could alter her. In the meantime, at all events, she was not altered, she wanted the things which she had always wanted; and the office was their source. It seemed to him that he was still in prison, with the difference that he now knew that it was prison. He found little comfort in the knowledge.
His gaze returned to the pile of correspondence. There seemed nothing else for it to do, and he saw an envelope, addressed not to the firm, but to himself, which sent the blood whirling to his head in simple premonition of its contents. From the postmark (S.W.—Satan’s Work?) he saw that it had only come that morning and had not been waiting his arrival. He thought of that as of a portent. Suppose he had stayed another day at Marbeck! He might have been too late.
It was a careful letter, but the facts were that, owing to the sudden death of Sir Almeric Pannifer, the seat tor the Sandyford Division of Marlshire was vacated. Mr. Morphew, who had reduced Sir Almeric’s majority in that agricultural constituency to three hundred was, for private reasons, unable to stand again (“I know these private reasons,” thought Sam. “Morphew considers he has earned a walkover next time”), but Headquarters were of opinion that a resolute candidate of strong personality, etc....
In short, he was offered the opportunity to be the figurehead in a demonstration for the Liberal Party. It was no more than that. Morphew had doubtless nursed the constituency like a mother, and if at the landslide of the last election he had done no better than to come within three hundred of his opponents’ votes, the chances of a stranger’s capturing the seat were negative. But it was the stepping-stone, the liaison between obscurity and the House of Commons. It was what he had aimed at.
He tried to believe that the letter did not exhilarate him as it would have done a fortnight earlier, and Satan, the connoisseur of good resolutions, smiled his age-long smile.
He looked across at Effie’s chair. “My spirit will be always with you,” she had said; he wondered if it were there now, and tried to see her. Surely now, if ever, was her time; now when he had so lately left her, when her scent was in his nostrils and her voice in his ears. Her voice was in his ears. He heard it clearly. She spoke one word, “Renounce.”
“Yes, but, my dear,” he argued, “I have renounced. I’ve renounced you. I’ve come back here and I’m going to Ada, to plumb the depths of her, to find the good in her, and drag it to the top. I’m going to dive for pearls,” he grew almost picturesque as he cited his intentions towards Ada in his defence, “and I shall grow short of breath. I’m not doubting that the pearls are there, because Ada’s a woman, and so are you, but I know that they lie deep and I want breath for such a dive as that. I’ve renounced you, and I’m going to make a woman of her; don’t I deserve some recompense to make amends? It’s here beneath my hand, and I have only to say ‘Yes.’ Effie,” he pleaded, “if you knew what this meant to me, you wouldn’t frown. It’s not backsliding.” He denied that it was backsliding, well knowing that it was. “It’s politics, I know, and you don’t like politics. You told me women knew about politics now. Oh, but you don’t know, you don’t. Smile at me, Effie, smile as I have seen women smile when men talked of golf. I know we men are babies, and so do you. Give me my game. It’s nothing but a hobby, like golf, but this is mine, and I want it so much. Ada is my work and this is my play, and just as necessary. It will not be a hindrance to what I have to do for Ada, it will be a help. Effie, tell me that I may have my help.”
He tried to blarney a consenting smile out of the figure of Eflie he imagined sitting in her chair. He had no difficulty in imagining her there; he saw her, too easily, too really to imagine a false Effie. He could not imagine, try as he would, that he had won consent from her. He was too near the real Effie for that. And Effie said “Renounce.”