That reminded him of another chink in his armour. A man of the world must have the knack of speaking to the world, and Sam became a member of the Concentrics. As Anne once told him, he had the gift of the gab, but, except for his present fluent recommendations of houses to prospective tenants, it was a talent he had buried. Now, however, he proposed to dig it up and did it in (he thought) the ambitious surroundings of the Concentrics, who were indeed as mixed a company as he could have found anywhere, and on that account the better for his purpose.
The common centre which was supposed to hold the Concentrics together was a love of literature, but they tended to drop literature for politics on the slightest pretext. There were literary enthusiasts amongst them, but it rarely happened that one man’s enthusiasm coincided with another’s. It did less than coincide. A member would read a laborious paper on some man of letters, and the subsequent discussion would be conducted by men who began their intelligent speeches by admitting that they had not read a word of, say, Henry James or Lafcadio Hearn, but that their opinion was nevertheless so and so. Whereas, of course, nobody ever confessed to ignorance of politics. Politics is like law, only more so. One is presumed by the law to know the law, which is highly presumptuous of the law, because not even the lawyers know the law, and they must often go to judges, at their client’s expense, to find out what the law is: and the “more so,” as applied to politics, is that while laymen hesitate to argue a point of law, and go to an expert, they never hesitate to argue a point of politics, and are the expert.
Political discussions amongst the Concentrics were real and passionate, literary discussions unreal and frigid; and as “social reform” became a favourite shibboleth about this time, literature took a back seat in favour of subjects about which men could grow emotional and their oratory rhetorical. It was all one to Sam, who was here to speak, and did his reading at home.
He spoke often, so that he soon improved, and he practised the literary allusiveness which was the purpose of his reading to such effect that he attracted the attention of the chairman, who was the Rev. Peter Struggles.
It is not, strictly, fair to say that a man is handicapped through life by a name like Struggles, because the legal process by which one can change an undesirable name is inexpensive, but Peter had never thought of such a move, and wore his handicap without being aware of it. In any case, he failed in life. He had a round face, red hair, side-whiskers: took snuff and messed his coat: was perfectly futile in practical affairs and absolutely “a dear.” His scholarship was not profound, but he loved letters genuinely, He had failed steadily for thirty years to run a private school for boys in a suburb which was degenerating to industrialism, and late in life had taken orders, quite sincerely, not in the least with the idea of helping his school with a new respectability. It was, anyhow, beyond help, and a man who offered tradesmen’s sons a sound commercial education was presently to buy him out.
Peter Struggles, well in his fifties, became curate to a vicar of forty, in the large, rough-and-tumble parish of St. Mary’s. One says that he had failed in life, and, by Sam’s standards, he had, and even by the working standards of his church. A man at fifty-six should not be a curate with an income of some hundred and twenty pounds a year. But if a man is happy at fifty-six to be a curate with that income? If he find satisfaction in it? Snuff was his indulgence, and the chairmanship of the Concentrics, who were not sectarian, his dissipation. For the rest, Peter had made harbour. To the pushing educationist who had bought him out, for a song, and now profaned his old school buildings with shorthand and the rudiments of bookkeeping, Peter was a failure and a pathetic failure. He was not conscious of failure himself, nor of anything but a serene contentment that he had found, if late, the work that he was fit to do. Through sheer single-minded, inoffensive, unobtrusive goodness he came to be a figure in that parish, and a power. Undignified in bearing, and careless in dress, he had a dignity of mind and soul.
Sam Branstone despised a worldly failure, here was a man of more than twice Sam’s years, with less money than Sam had, and, by all his canons, Sam should have despised Peter. But he didn’t. It was partly, no doubt, other people’s opinions that influenced Sam—the universal esteem which Peter Struggles won—but it was by much more the innate nobility of the old curate. Sam began his speaking at the Concentrics to impress his fellow members, he ended by caring only for the appreciation of the quaint, slovenly figure who occupied the chair.
He got the appreciation he craved. Peter was shrewd enough to discount Sam’s rhetorics, and the flashy tricks of apt quotation: he saw Sam as a misguided, self-seeking thruster who read only for veneer and spoke only to impress. But, at least, Sam tried, and Peter could admire perseverance. The thing was to direct Sam’s perseverance well, and Peter asked him to supper.
Our man of the world was prodigiously thrilled. The honour was exceptional, for Peter could not afford to be a host often, and Sam was aware not only of its rarity, but of Peter’s unique standing in the parish: and, more than that, of Peter’s worth. To be singled out by Peter Struggles, and asked to sup, was, socially, a triumph. It sounds absurd, and perhaps it is absurd that one good man should shine so brightly by contrast with the fifteen thousand others of an over-crowded parish, but that was why Peter was a colossus amongst the pigmies, and why Sam Branstone was egregiously excited by an invitation to sup at Peter’s little house.
Peter did not invite Sam to preach at him. It was the boy’s mind rather than his soul that was the target of his aim, and Peter’s select library to which he trusted for influence. Certainly the little meal of cold beef and cocoa was not calculated to impress, nor the old, worn furniture, with the gaping rents in its horse-hair coverings, through which the stuffing poured. He handled books with reverence, and spoke of them, but Sam was hardly listening. He was under fire from another battery.