The business was an excellent one, rotting slowly from the top, and Sam found the office a notable place in which to pick up knowledge of the world; especially, since he lacked good direction, of the shadier ways of the world. He felt that he had declined in status: his school-friends, there his equals, had gone either to the Universities or, with influence behind them, to the professions. If they went to business, it was as their fathers’ sons. They were not scratch men, and Sam felt that he was starting at the scratch-line.
Travers had really no intentions that Sam should feel himself misprized. The boy had to learn the business, and the way to understanding lay from the bottom upwards. But Sam contrasted himself bitterly with Lance, first at school and then at Cambridge. In that, indeed, he found a minimum of consolation. It wasn’t rational, but to Anne and consequently to Sam, university had meant Oxford, and he won a hardy solace from the thought that Lance was, after all, “only” at Cambridge.
Meantime, he grew in knowledge of his world, and education came to Sam, not in the cloistered freedom of the Isis, but where, in Manchester, he went collecting rents: in country courts where hard laws operated hardly: and in the office, where men did not greet each other with a friendly smile, but gave instead the “competition glare.” It was not a kindly school in which he spent the developing years, but one where it was taught that self’s the man, and magnanimity is a mistake. “Get on or get out,” and Sam got on with a sort of choleric zeal which gave no quarter and expected none.
But he did not get on fast enough to please himself. He had, he thought, stepped down from the days of the Grammar School where he belonged with the caste that rules or, at any rate, administers, the caste that sits on velvet and overlooks the mob. Now he was in the cockpit, with the mob that struggles to ascend, and, to Sam, a wage of thirty shillings a week at the age of twenty was a derisory ascension. Anne thought it satisfying, and it was her contentment with his rate of progress which first made him begin to think of her as, after all, a limited person. You didn’t bribe Sam Branstone to be meekly satisfied with thirty shillings a week.
“The trouble is,” he said to the only man in the office with whom he was in the least confidential, “that you don’t begin to get on till you’ve got a bit of capital together. Money breeds money.”
His friend suggested betting as a means to affluence, and offered to tell him of a dead certainty.
Sam assumed his cunningest air of a superman of the world. “The best row of houses where I go for the rents,” he said, “belongs to Jack Elsworth, the bookie. I don’t see why I should help him to buy another house.”
“Bookies don’t always win,” said the optimist.
“No,” said Sam. “It’s possible to make money out of betting and it’s possible to get a baby by a harlot, but that isn’t what the harlot’s for, and it isn’t what the bookie’s for.”
At this time, harlots were the pegs on which Sam hung his wit. He had no other use for them, but had discovered that a coarse turn of phrase was an asset in his world and therefore wielded it. But the effect of this little conversation was to crystallize his aim. He wanted that “bit of capital” badly, and did not intend that, if opportunity presented, a nice regard for scruple should hold him back from taking anything the gods might send. He had no ultimate design, but fortune came to the fortunate and money to the moneyed, so that the first move was, obviously, to get money. He wanted a jumping-off place; then he would soar.