He saw that there was a difference between this and the elopements of that romantic literature with which he busied his relaxed hours: sometimes the lady, but always the lover, was enterprising, while he knew that George could never instigate anything. But that made things more amusing for Sam, who could pull strings with absolute assurance that his puppets would never take to dancing on their own account, or to any tune but the one he piped; and it is not given to all of us to be Omnipotence at the price of a ten-pound note.
As always, Sam had luck. In the romantic elopements whose technique he began to study with new interest, money was never a difficulty, but the god in the machine of George Chappie’s elopement must put money in his purse, or there could be no elopement.
Sam liked money, but he must have liked power more, for, coming miraculously into money at this time, he devoted it to this end. He came into money because journalism was swiftly on the up grade since the days, four years ago, when it couldn’t show its readers a photograph of Sam Branstone, hero, in the evening paper, and had reached the civilized stage of picture competitions.
You bought a weekly paper which printed six crude wood-cuts supposed to disguise the names of (say) famous battles, and it did not strain your intellect to discover that the picture of a station with “Waterloo” beneath its clock was intended to represent the battle of that name. But pause: it was not all so easy as that. Inflamed by avarice and the childish ease of identifying the battles in the first series, you bought the next week’s number, and the next, until the competition closed, and you found that the designs were increasingly baffling. It was not quite money for nothing. It called for some knowledge of history and a sort of knack in cheap wit to interpret the pictures. A garden syringe, and a stage Irishman brandishing something that might easily be a cudgel but wasn’t, represented, in fact, the not very renowned battle of Seringapatam, and there were pictures which could bear two interpretations.
It was this last which led Sam to go into partnership with Lance Travers. Both partners admitted that Sam’s wits were the sharper, so it was only fair that Lance should finance the partnership and buy the papers. And Sam, sanguine of winning, but desiring secrecy, preferred that the firm should be registered in Lance’s name, so that if and when Sam became a capitalist, he and not Anne should control his wealth. His ideas of the uses of capital already went beyond the Post Office Savings Bank.
The weekly paper’s object was to increase its circulation, so it allowed and encouraged competitors to send in numerous attempts, and printed ambiguous drawings to tempt to prodigality. It is to be feared that Classics suffered an eclipse at this period of journalistic enterprise. The partners had other and more serious objects in life. And they won! They won the second prize. It wasn’t a house or a motor-car or any of the fantastic prizes with which still later journalism rewarded its intelligent readers, but they divided twenty pounds and, for them, ten pounds each was paradise enow. Lance bought a bicycle. Sam didn’t. He bought a wedding-ring, and he had a talk with Sarah Pullen, who was so passionately Madge’s bosom friend that she had gone into the mill with her.
Sarah received him coldly; she looked upon him as the cause of her friend’s martyrdom and thought the cause unworthy.
Sam cleared the air at once. “I’m on Madge’s side. I’m not going to see her made unhappy for my sake,” he said, and Sarah relented so far as to absolve him of personal malignity.
“Much you can do to help it, though,” she said. “I can do much,” he replied, “but,” he flattered her, “perhaps you can do more. You see, Sarah,” he went on confidentially, “Madge trusts you and she doesn’t trust me. Now, between ourselves, she needs a friend’s advice. Put yourself in her place. Would you knuckle under to your mother?”
“I’d see her further first,” said Sarah.