When Adams had read his paper to the Concentrics, Sam had listened but kept his eyes on the audience. In a darkened theatre, the audience was more difficult to watch, but he could feel its quick response to the play, could hear its ready laughter and its quite eager ears. Emphatically, here was a play which seized its audience, gripped them, tickled them, beslavered them, throttled them, did with them what it liked and when it liked; all to their immense and vociferous delight. He tried to keep his aloofness, to see how it was done, to tear the heart out of this mystery. Here was something which the public wanted; he had only to diagnose it, and the Open Sesame to fortune was his.
He couldn’t do it. Detachment slipped from him, never to return till the curtain fell. He wasn’t a superman, immune from other men’s emotions. The play took hold of him and swayed him with the rest. He tried resistance, vainly; told himself that he was here, not, as these others were, for pleasure, but to learn, to learn; and the play gripped him the harder for his attempt to take it coldly.
At the end, Sam was applauding wildly while Stewart watched him with cynical amusement. “Caught you all right,” he said, “and by way of a confession I’ll own that the damned thing nearly got me once. Rum place, the theatre, isn’t it? But,” he grew more serious, “I’ve to write about that, write without being libellous about that maudlin, sentimental, erotic, religious trash. It’s enough to make a man give up journalism and take to something honest, like coal-heaving. But I’m forgetting. I brought you here to teach you something. Have you learnt it? That’s a play, but the same thing applies to a novel. You find novels with ‘The Sign of the Cross’ in them, my boy. Queasy sentimentality to sicken a bee, and, for the rest, don’t forget that Jesus died for you to make money out of novels. This play makes me blasphemous, but I’m doing the devil’s advocate to you to-night, so it’s all in the picture. When I’ve finished my notice I think I’ll try a ‘short’ on ‘The Tradesman Publisher’ or ‘The Dignity of Letters.’ It will be good for my conscience.”
“I wish you would,” said Sam. “I’ll reply to it, with a list of the classics I am going to publish.”
“Sometimes,” said Stewart, “you rather sicken me. I am speaking of the Manchester Warden, not the Sunday Judge. Good-night.”
But the vacillations of a journalist with a foot in two camps and an idealistic standard which he hardly pretended to take seriously himself left Sam unimpressed. The play and Stewart’s description of its essence had given him furiously to think. He imagined that he knew the sort of novel he wanted and he was not troubled by Stewart’s disease of dual standards. Sam had one standard, the success standard; and anything else was muddle-headedness. At the same time he felt most grateful to Stewart who had advertised the pamphlet and now presented him with a policy.
It was a policy, but not one for immediate application. Festina lente was his watchword for the moment, and he devoted himself to putting new life into the sales of texts and to the issue of the “Branstone + Classics.” They were, one might note in passing, the Branstone + Classics: his name loomed large and the names of their authors, the insignificants like à Kempis and Bunyan, were properly small; and he put the sign of the cross between the Branstone and the Classics. He intended it to be his trade-mark, and if it were his trade-mark, why not use it? It infringed nobody’s copyright.
Amongst it all, he had little enough time for Ada, and she knew how much she gained by being a luxury instead of a habit. But Sam was not engaged for the sake of being engaged, and as soon as he knew he had made no mistake in his business venture was eager to be married. There were no objections from Ada. This intermittent courtship, in which his duties as a lover took second place to his activities as a business man, suited Ada well, but marriage, finality, the bond suited her better.
Even to the end of that engagement it was things for Ada which preoccupied him, rather than Ada herself, and he took the matter of furnishing seriously—from a business point of view, interested less in the furniture he bought than in the discounts he might, by this means or that, secure. He suffered the usual surprise at the cost of mattresses and kitchen equipment, but, to Ada, he appeared royally lavish. Ada did not know of his legacy: she knew that Anne had told her on the top of a fantastic tram-car that Sam had earned two pounds ten a week with Travers, and the scale of this furnishing did not square with what a man could save out of two pounds ten a week. It followed in Ada’s mind that Anne had lied to her, malignantly misrepresenting Sam’s position to frighten her; and the breach between Anne and Ada, which never had much chance of closing, was permanently open.
One does not have old connections with an estate agency without being able to rent a good house cheaply. She was going to be mistress of a house which fell little short of the dreams of her boarding-school days. It was certainly “stylish”; she was not sure that it was not positively “smart.”