Sam agreed with Stewart. His old prejudice against Adams was strong within him and he hoped Adams would come a cropper. That was at the beginning, when Adams, with an egregious affectation of superiority, began to read his lecture; but soon, quite soon, Sam changed his mind and hoped for nothing but that the skilful skater would keep his balance, on the thin ice.
“Rich for Ada,” and here, as Sam saw it, was a “stroke” indeed if Adams were successful to the end and if at the end he would listen sensibly to Sam.
Adams was in little danger. He was of Oxford, London, the world, and his audience of Manchester. And he stooped to conquer with a lecture that was a mosaic of advances and retreats, of blazing indiscretions and smug apologies, of audacities and diffidence.
Sam watched the audience keenly, and it would not be unjust to say that the audience gloated. Not all of them gloated, but as a whole, as an audience, they lapped up Adams’ lecture like mother’s milk. He called it frankness and gave unnecessary detail, he had an appearance of honest indignation and a reality of bathing in mud with relish. It was abominable but diabolically clever; indecent to the core, it artfully evaded anything to warrant a police court charge of indecency; it was foulness cloaked in piety, marching under the banner of Reform. He was a crusader in masquerade, flashing beneath their guard of British reticence a rapier whose hilt was a cross.
Adams found a curious satisfaction in standing there, like a penitent at a Salvation Army meeting, pretending to an immense personal knowledge of evil which was, happily, impossible, and he delighted in the presence of a cleric in the chair. The thing developed, for him, into an exciting game, a contest of his wits with Peter’s. He had carried his audience, but the chairman sat aloof and dubious. If Peter saw through him, he had lost; if not, he won. For Peter he read the condemnatory passages with vibrant earnestness, and for Peter he read as if reluctantly, conscience-impelled, the details of his evidence.
Sam caught the infection, too, but hardly as a game. He hung on Peter’s judgment with a deep anxiety, watched Peter flush and shuffle in his chair, saw him take snuff nervously, trembled at the moment when Peter seemed about to interrupt, sighed with relief when Peter sat back silently again and waited feverishly for the chairman’s speech.
There would probably have been little doubt about Peter’s verdict had Adams been an ordinary Concentric, lecturer and a member of the Society. But he was neither, and was there by invitation. And he was not only of Oxford, Peter’s University, but brilliantly of Oxford, of Balliol, with academic honours thick upon him. If Peter thought, as Adams spoke, that he ought to call him to order, he remembered that Adams was a Double First, and desisted. He couldn’t be a hypocrite—because he had won the Ireland. He was terribly in earnest now—because he had won the Greek Verse Prize. He was single-minded, chivalrous, braving the misapprehension of the scurrilous, open and honest—because he was a Fellow of Balliol.
It did not matter to Peter that Adams’ father was the richest parishioner in St. Mary’s; it mattered even less that Adams was exquisitely dressed in exactly the shade of grey appropriate to an ardent crusader. (“Look at his damned clothes,” Reed had whispered to Stewart. “Hasn’t he thought it out?” He had: his clothes were chaste if his lecture wasn’t.) But scholarship did matter to Peter, whose other name was Charity, and once he had decided that Gerald was sincere, that all he said was subordinate to and justified by high purpose, he was generous, and the more generous because he had doubted.
“The subject of Mr. Adams’ lecture,” he said, “is like nettles: if it is not handled boldly, it stings. I have nothing but praise for the courage, the down rightness, the earnestness of his treatment of this distressing evil. I think that we have all been deeply stirred by his instances of man’s inhumanity to women. As a churchman I feel a special responsibility and, may I say, a special gratitude to Mr. Adams for his study of this subject. Medicine, as we all know, has its martyrs, its research workers who sacrifice themselves for the health of their fellowmen. Mr. Adams, who has examined this social sore so thoroughly, at what cost in pain to himself only the most sensitive amongst us can guess, deserves to be ranked with the martyrs of science....” And so on, doubly handsome because he felt ashamed of himself for doubting Gerald’s honesty, and made amends.
Adams had won his game, hands down. He thought the old boy gloriously funny and he thought Sam Branstone, who rose when Peter sat down, funnier still. Sam believed in striking while the iron was hot: he didn’t want Peter to have the opportunity of changing his mind when he came to think things over coolly.