THE MARBECK INN

IT falls to some to be born, as they say, with a silver spoon in their mouths, and the witty have made play with the thought that the wise child chooses rich parents.

Sam Branstone lacked the completeness of that wisdom. He was born in one of those disconsolate streets of Manchester down which the stranger, passing by tram along a main road, hardly more delectable than its offshoots, looks and shudders; but was born with this difference from the many—that he was son to Anne Branstone, a notable woman, and wisdom may be conceded him for the discrimination of his choice.

If, however, it was Anne who gave him birth and started him in life, it was Mr. Councillor Travers who set him on his way from the mean street of his birth and started his career, and the circumstance which led to the intervention of Mr. Travers was due, not to Anne, but to the occupation of Tom Branstone.

Sam’s father, Tom, was a porter at Victoria Station, Manchester, and there was just time between morning and afternoon school for young Sam to snatch a meal himself and to carry his father’s dinner to him in a basin tied up in a bandanna handkerchief. In those days Victoria was an open station and a favourite dinner-hour lounge with boys from the neighbouring Grammar School. The attractions were partly the trains, partly the large automatic machines which delivered a packet of sweet biscuits in return for a penny. First one lunched frugally on the biscuits and pocketed the balance of one’s lunch allowance to buy knives and other essentials, then one savoured the romance of a large station from which trains went to Blackpool and to the Yorkshire moors. Often one saw sailors on the through trains from Liverpool to Newcastle. One found secluded ends of platforms and ran races with luggage trucks. One was rather a nuisance, especially when one wrestled hardily at the platform’s giddy edge and a train came in.

Sam, as a porter’s son, was on the other side of the fence. He did not lark at Victoria Station, and took his opinions of those who did from his father, adding, perhaps, a touch of jealousy against these chartered libertines who wore the silver owl upon their caps of dual blue.

That day he had delivered Tom’s dinner to him in the porters’ room and was retracing his steps down the platform when he saw two of the Grammar School boys emerge in a confused whirl of battle and sag, interlocked, towards the line, hopelessly unconscious in their struggle of an incoming train. They reached the edge, deaf to all warning cries, and long before help could reach them, fell over it in one entangled mass. One boy, aroused to a sense of their common danger, was on his feet nimbly enough and across the line to safety: the other, Lance Travers, stayed where he fell, with a leg broken against the rail. Wits left the first lad; he could only howl as the engine swept inexorably on, and adult help, though active, could not avail in time. Sam had no precise recollection of what followed, and certainly acted on impulse. He dived to the line and dragged the injured boy across, escaping death for both by the skin of his teeth.

After that, all was confusion: an ambulance; inquiries; names taken and so on; and Sam only came to himself when he discovered that he was being punished for arriving late at school. It struck him as unfair, but he did not realize that he was a hero till the evening paper told him so. He, Samuel Branstone, had his name in the paper! Glory could go no further, because those were the dark ages of journalism, before the photograph illustrated all, and to read one’s name in print was then the apogee. We have moved since those dull days, when “heart interest” was still to be in vented.

What profound satisfaction Anne Branstone found in that sober paragraph her son was not to know. She did not think it good for him to know, but she went about her house with softened eyes, and Sam heard her singing more than once; so per haps he may have guessed that she was pleased with him.

It was more than she allowed Mr. Oscar Travers to guess, he was Lance’s father, an estate agent with a good suburban practice, and Anne met him at the door in a way which would have marred Sam’s future had Travers not known that Lancashire women are apt to be undemonstrative. She found a portly gentleman on the doorstep and thought he wore a patronizing air. They resent patronage in Lancashire.

As a matter of fact, Travers had come to see what he could do for the lad who had saved his boy’s life. That may be patronage, but he was thinking of it as the barest decency.

“Good evening,” he said; “my name is Travers.”

“This is a nice upset,” she said, without inviting him to come in. “How’s your son?”

“He’s doing very well, thank you.”

“Oh? Well, it’s more than he deserves.”

He did not argue that. “I wonder,” he said, “if you would allow me to come in, or would you prefer me to return when your husband is at home?”

“He’s at home now. It’s his early night. He’s having his tea.”

“Shall I return when he has finished?” asked Travers with a nice tactfulness. He knew the curious delicacy against being seen eating by one of a superior class, as if that natural function were a deed of shame. But Anne was for short cuts and she never considered Tom’s feelings overmuch.

“If you’ve owt to say,” she said, “you’d better come in and get it over.”

“I have something to say,” said Travers, entering. “Ah,” he added, as he caught sight of Sam, “this is——?”

“It’s him,” Anne interrupted. She might have been identifying a criminal.

“May I shake your hand?” he asked, and shook it heartily, ignoring Anne’s muttered protest that the hand had not been washed for hours. “I think you’re a very plucky lad.” He could have, said more than that, and felt that as an expression of his gratitude it was hopelessly inadequate, but Anne’s eyes forbade effusiveness, and he wanted to propitiate Anne. He had something to propose which he had thought they would agree to rapturously, but was not so sure about the rapture now. For some reason, he had imagined that Sam would be one of a large family and was disappointed to find no evidence of other children about the room A large family would have made his proposal more certain of acceptance.

“Any brothers and sisters, Sam?” he asked; but Sam was tongue-tied, while Anne was silently but unmistakably asking Travers what business of his that was. However, Tom knew his place. Travers belonged with the tipping public, whose questions one answered.

“He has an elder sister, sir. Our Madge. She works out.” She was, in fact, a general servant.

Travers felt his confidence ebb fast, both at this information and at Anne’s austere disapprobation of Tom’s communicativeness. He felt it was suggested to him that his visit was irrelevant, that Anne, this small woman, not uncomely, with her hands on her hips, and her black hair tightly combed into a ridiculous knob at the back, was, in fact, a rock, and that the impulses and desires of the two hulking men, Travers and Tom Branstone, would break in ineffectual foam against her adamantine resolution.

She glared formidably, hating a “fuss,” judging Travers, who had invaded her home for the purpose of making a fuss.

“Indeed,” said Travers, marking time and hardly attempting to conceal his dismay. The longer he spent in Anne’s presence, the more uneasy he became. She seemed to divine his purpose, and to be telling him silently what she thought of him for having such a purpose. He had, indeed, banked on a large family; porters, he had felt certain, were prolific, and you may subtract one child from a family of ten without much heart-burning, whereas an only son is a serious matter. But time brought no graciousness to Anne’s attitude. She even ignored the sacred rites of hospitality; though tea was on the table, she had not asked him to have a cup. So he gave up temporizing and decided to broach his purpose at once, before Anne reduced him to complete incoherence.

“Of course,” he said, “you know me already as Lance’s father. I don’t know whether you happen to have heard of me beyond that?” Anne admitted nothing, and as it was to her he spoke, it did not matter that Tom, who had naturally spent a gossipy afternoon, was trying to signify that he realized the importance of Travers. “I’m an estate agent, if you understand what that means.”

Anne nodded grimly. “Rent-collector said big,” she defined.

“Well,” said Travers, intending to suggest an amended definition and then thinking better of it. “Well, yes. I’m in the Council, too, you know. Well, now, Mrs. Branstone, I happen to be a widower and Lance is my only son. He means a great deal to me, and when I think how near I came to losing him this afternoon, how certainly I had lost him hut for the splendid presence of mind of this young hero here, I feel I owe a debt which I can never hope to pay.”

“Mr. Travers,” said Anne, “least said is soonest mended, and debts that you can never hope to pay are best forgotten. It’s a kindly thought of yours to come and look us up to-night, but I’m not in the Council, and I’m no great hand at listening to long speeches. By your leave, we’ll take the rest as said.”

“By all means, Mrs. Branstone, so far as expressing my thanks goes. But I have a suggestion to make. Lance, as I said, is my only son. He’s a lonely boy, and he’d be the better for a companion of his own age about the house. I was wondering if you would allow Sam to come and live with us? I should send him with Lance to the Grammar School, and I think I can promise that his future will be secured.”

Sam’s heart gave a great leap. He, Sam Bran-stone, a Grammar School boy, one of the elect, the Olympians whose play he had envied from afar! He looked at Anne with glittering eyes, faint with hope.

“Sam,” she said, “Mr. Travers wants you to leave us. He’s offering to adopt you as his son. Tell him the answer.”

Anne never doubted that she was mistress of her house, and perhaps she did not doubt it now, but, for Sam, a child with the dreadful sensibility of a child, this moment when she demanded calmly, implacably, in the interests of discipline, that he should himself pronounce sentence on his soaring hopes was of a pitiable bitterness which brought him near the breaking-point. At one moment, to be raised to the heavens of ecstasy, and at the next to be cast down to the blackest hell of despondency; to be promised all, and to be expected to refuse! He was not more callous than any other child, and Anne knew perfectly well that a Land of Heart’s Desire had been opened to him. It was not fair, and she knew that it was not fair, to ask him to speak the word of refusal; but she thought that it was good for him, and once she had, by her tone, if not by her actual words, indicated the reply which she required, she knew that he would suppress his leaping hopes and answer, in effect, that home, be it ever so humble, was home, and parents, whatever their status, were parents. He had a wild impulse to defy her, to tell her that he would come to see her on Saturday afternoons, that to wear the cap with the silver owl was the dearest ambition of his life, but he knew that it was hopeless. Even at such a moment as this, and with such an ally as Mr. Travers, he dared not challenge Anne. Her ascendancy was what it had always been, absolute. He shuffled unhappily and tried to meet Mr. Travers’ eye bravely, but succeeded only in looking up as far as the second button of his waistcoat.

“No,” said Sam Branstone, hero, and fled, a heartbroken, tear-washed child, to hide his face and choke his sobs upon his pillow. And he was named for valour in the evening paper!

“No,” repeated Anne, when he had gone, and added, anticipating argument, “I’m a woman of few words.”

Travers knew he was fighting a losing engagement, but he had a shot in the locker yet, and a hardy determination not to be worsted by the likes of Anne Branstone. His pride was up, a pride which, over and above his benevolence and his sense of the fitness of things, would not allow him to regard the saving of his son’s life lightly. Travers counted, the saviour of the son of Travers counted. He had offered to lift Sam Branstone in one way, and if they would not let him do it in that way, he would do it in another. Sam Branstone, willy nilly, was going to be lifted.

“I suppose,” he said, covering the retreat from his first position, “that it is of no use pointing out to you the advantages which my proposal offers to your son?” She shook her head. “Come, Mrs. Branstone,” he went on, conscious that it was no use and platitudinous at that, “we all have to make sacrifices for our children.”

“I make them,” said Anne curtly. It was true.

“Yet you will not make this?”

She was thoughtful for a moment, and Travers began to hope that he was making an impression. “I’m sure that it’s Genesis twenty-two,” she said, “but I disremember the verse.”

“Genesis,” he repeated, mystified.

“Abraham and Isaac,” she explained her allusion. “Some sacrifices aren’t looked for from us, and the Lord sent an angel to say so in those days, but I’ve to be my own angel in these.”

“But Abraham,” he said, “was going to sacrifice his son to the Lord.”

“And I won’t,” she said, conveying her opinion of Travers, who had tried to “come God Almighty over her,” as she expressed it later to Tom. But Travers was not to be rebuffed. He had come to play Providence to Sam (and so far granted that her allusion was apposite), but his providence could compromise. He wasn’t an absolute Jehovah.

“If Sam may not be Lance’s home companion,” he said, “at least let them be school companions. Let me pay his fees at the Grammar School, and——” He was going to add “for appropriate clothes,” but something in Anne’s attitude told him that he had gone far enough, and he stopped short with the completion of his sentence in mid air.

Anne believed in education. She wasn’t convinced that a Grammar School education was superior, as education, to a Parish School, but its associations were. It gave a chance of “getting on” which transcended anything the Parish School could offer. It was a start in life which set one automatically above the lower rungs of the ladder.

“Yes,” she said, but said it with a difficulty which Travers noted and, indeed, applauded. He was Lancastrian himself, and honoured her for her independence. He knew the mother-pride, the fierce individualism which she had subdued before she had consented to take a favour even for her son who earned it, and wasted no more words. “I’m glad,” he said. “Good night,” and, shaking hands, was gone.

“Finish your tea, Tom,” she said to her husband who had suspended operations during the interview. “I want to clear away.” She stood a moment pensively. “I’m a weak woman,” she decided.

Tom Branstone ate his tea, reserving judgment.

CHAPTER II—WHERE THE SHOE PINCHED

WHEN Anne Branstone set her hand to the plough she ploughed deep, and it was not her fault if the harvest was not immense. But she did not misdirect her energy; she made certain that the seed was good seed before she harnessed her plough. To drop metaphor, she let young Sam prove that he was worth troubling over before she took trouble—trouble, that is, as Anne understood the word. Of course, she sent him “decent” to the Grammar School, and if that meant that she and Madge went without new spring hats that year, well, last year’s hats must do. It was no great matter, and the greater pride swallowed up the less. Mr. Travers paid the fees, so that her son could associate with his, and Anne saw to it thoroughly that, in externals, Sam should be worthy to associate with Lance.

That was the beginning, and Sam, so far, was untried metal. Then, at the end of his first term, he came out top of his form at the July examinations, and, after that, Anne began to take things seriously.

It was not pure ability which brought Sam to that proud eminence so much as the fact that he had been put in a form whose standard was really too low for him, and he had not worked over hard at lessons, being naturally preoccupied, in a first term, with finding his feet. Nor had that been too difficult. The Manchester Grammar School was a democratic institution. Schoolboys, anyhow, are not all snobs, and, in this instance, the presence amongst the paying boys of a leaven of Foundation Scholars, often from homes as poor as Sam’s, made acclimatization easy for him.

But his feat impressed Anne, though all she said, when the lists came out with the name of “Branstone, S.” at the head of II. Alpha, was, “Of course!” as if any other place were impossible for a son of hers; and it decided her that Sam would “pay for” taking trouble. She proceeded to take trouble.

Tom Branstone’s first real inkling of what was passing in Anne’s mind came to that good, easy man when he mentioned that his holidays were due in a fortnight.

“You’ll take a holiday at home this year, my lad,” she informed him.

“But why’s that, Anne?” he asked. “Blackpool’s in the same place as it was, and I get privilege passes on the line.”

“Sam’s not in the same place, though,” she said. “He’s at the Grammar School. It’s a place where other boys wear decent clothes, and I’ll see that Sam shan’t fall behind them.”

Tom took a holiday at home, varied with trips on the foot-plates of friendly engine-drivers, and fortified his soul with the consolations of tobacco. They were consolations which were not to be vouchsafed to him much longer. Tobacco cost money, and Anne had need of it.

In spite of Travers’ generosity—or of as much of it as she could bring herself to accept—it was not an easy thing for Anne to keep her son at the Grammar School. It was desperately difficult, but Anne was Anne. The boy had his foot on the educational ladder, and she meant him to go to the top, rung by rung and scholarship by scholarship. When Sam took his honours degree at Oxford, Anne would relax; till then, she was a crusader. She sacrificed all to that ambition. Sam should have his chance, at no matter what cost to her, to Tom and to Madge. The boy must be as well dressed as his fellows, and he must play their games. Games are an essential part of English education, and Anne, with her constant eye to the main chance, recognized the importance of the playing-fields in cementing friendships with boys who might be useful to Sam in after life. But games are expensive, and Tom gave, up smoking when Sam was put into his class eleven. Anne gave up nothing. She had nothing more to give.

Honestly, Sam was grateful. Anne did not boast to him of the sacrifices which they all made, but with the candour which distinguishes working-class homes where anything but bare necessity is exceptional, he was aware of every move, of all their deprivation, and did his best to square accounts. But it was not a brilliant best, and after that first term, Anne never repeated the satisfaction of seeing her son carry away a form prize on Speech Day at the Free Trade Hall. He was a worker, a safe plodding “swot,” taking by sheer application a respectable place in the lists, but never heading them again, and especially he was weak at mathematics.

That troubled Anne distressingly. Mathematics appeared to her the corner-stone of education, though in truth they mattered little to Sam, who had followed Lance to the Classical side of the school, where mathematics were an unconsidered trifle. But Anne recked nothing of that. She had found the heel of her Achilles, and set herself to make that vulnerable place secure. You are to picture Anne, with her forty years of a working woman’s life behind her, wrestling with algebra and trigonometry, blazing a trail for Sam to follow. It was heroic and, by some mental freak, successful. She taught herself, then tutored him, and it was not Sam who scraped through to an average place in the mathematics examinations, but Anne in Sam. Day after day, in the intervals of cook ing, cleaning, washing, she studied the text-books which so puzzled him, and at night explained their knotty points to him with a wonderful clarity. She had no education in particular, nothing but a general capacity and a monstrous will—a will that surmounted the obstacle of acquiring knowledge at an age when few can learn, and the greater obstacle of patient teaching to a boy who had a blind spot for mathematics. She illumined his darkness, but perhaps she hampered his classics and made her hopes of Oxford visionary.

Slowly and painfully, as the terms went by, with Branstone, S. rising steadily in the school, but keeping regularly to his mediocre place in class, Anne acknowledged to herself that her goose was not a swan. It made her the more eager to cultivate what she called the social side; and through that she met with a defeat.

From the beginning, Sam’s rise in the world had borne heavily on Madge, his sister, who was of an age for gaiety and of a mind untouched by ambition, personal or vicarious. When Sam went to the Grammar School, Madge was in service and very content. Anne had her out of that at once; she wasn’t going to run the risk of Madge being the servant in the house of one of Sands school companions. It was unusual, but Madge preferred service, where she was lucky in her employers, to the weaving-shed, where she had free evenings, but strenuous days with no gossiping callers at the back door to break their monotony. And it became a considerable question in Madge’s mind whether she would now be able to outface Anne in the matter of George Chappie. Anne required a presentable brother-in-law for Sam.

Like Madge, George was unambitious, except that he wanted her, which was ambition of a kind. Madge was small, like her mother, but derived in most else from her father. She had freckles and carroty hair, and the makings of a querulous shrew, but George saw otherwise, and desired Madge to have and to hold, for better for worse, and didn’t perceive that the odds were heavily against its being better. He was a wisp of a man himself, and thought he was enterprising because he was a window-cleaner; window-cleaning was a new trade then. But Anne did not concur with that opinion, and Madge was in no very sanguine frame of mind when George came in one night with an “It’s now or never” look unmistakably in his eye. The trouble was that Anne was not the sort of mother one defied with impunity.

He came in shyly enough—a determined George was a contradiction in terms—but plucked up courage at once when he found that she was alone but for Sam. Sam’s presence was inevitable, but need not be acknowledged. In a house, not, indeed, of one room, but of one fire and one gas-jet, Sam had grown apt at insulating himself when he sat with his books at the table. The business of the house went on, so did Sam’s studies, and neither interfered with the other. Sam, absorbed in his construe of Cicero’s De Senectute for the morrow, was absolutely unconscious of Madge and George.

It was not Sam who troubled George, but Madge had truth with her when she told her suitor that he looked worried. George jerked his thumb vaguely streetwards. “It’s her again,” he explained. “I can’t think why God made landladies. I ask you, Madge, is another blanket in this weather a thing to fly into a temper about?”

“It’s cold,” said Madge. “Won’t she give you another?”

“I don’t know yet whether she’ll give me one or not. But she’s had my last word. Another blanket or I’ll flit.”

“You’ve threatened that so often.”

He admitted it. “I know. It takes an earthquake to shift some folks, and I reckon I’m one of them. I stay where I’m set.” And his tone implied that conservatism was an admirable virtue.

Madge did not think so. “That’s what my mother says of you,” she observed, a trifle tartly.

“It’s no lie, either,” he placidly agreed. “Seems to me,” he went on, with a look, ardent but appealing, at Madge, “that there’s only one thing will flit me from Mrs. Whitehead’s. You couldn’t give a guess at it, could you?”

“Yes, I could,” said Madge brazenly. After all, she was Anne’s daughter, and direct. Then, despite herself, she fenced coyly: “You’re leaving the town, I reckon, Mr. Chappie.”

He stood aghast at the revolutionary thought. “Nay,” he said earnestly. “I’m set here and I’ll not leave willing. There’s something to keep me where I am.”

“Your job’s not worth so much,” she said, misunderstanding wilfully.

“It’s steady, though,” he defended it, “and a growing trade. My master’s getting a lot of window-cleaning contracts all over the town. But it’s not my job that keeps me here. It’s———” He dropped his cap and fumbled for it nervously, somehow finding a sort of courage in the act, so that when he rose he faced her with a spirit which was, for him, quite debonair. “Now, you’ll not stop me, will you? I’ve come on purpose to get this off my chest and I’ve worked myself up to a point. I’m a bit slow at most things and I’m easily put off, so I’ll ask you to give my humble request a patient hearing.”

Madge looked at him acutely, and decided that his resolution was strong enough to survive something that she very much wanted to say. “I’d rather this didn’t come straight on top of a row with your landlady,” she said.

“Aye,” he agreed, “I can see your meaning, but it’s that that roused me to point. Love’s like a pan of soup with me. It’s got to seethe a while before it boils. But I’m boiling now, and I’m here to tell you so. I’ve loved you since I saw you, Madge. After Sunday School one day it was, with a wind on that blew the bonny curls across your eyes. I always fancied gold and you’re gold twice over.” Madge was deeply moved at this idealization of her hair. She had been made more peevishly conscious of its redness than ever by the unsparing comments of the weaving-shed, but she did not see wherein she was gold twice over until he explained it. “I didn’t notice that the first day. I only saw your hair. I hadn’t the nerve to come close enough to see the colour of your eyes. But when I did, and found them all gold-brown as well, that finished me. I was deep in love to the top of my head. Drowned in it, you might say.”

“You’re talking a lot of nonsense, George,” said Madge, with a fond appreciation that belied her words.

“I’m telling you I love you,” he said, “and I’m asking if there’s anything that you could see your way to tell me in return. I know I’m not smart, Madge, but I’d work my fingers off to make you happy. Can’t you say you love me, lass? Not,” he added, “if it isn’t true, of course. I wouldn’t ask you to tell a lie even to oblige me.”

“It might not be a lie,” said Madge softly, “but——” She paused so that he was left to guess the rest.

“But,” he suggested, “you don’t care to go so far as to say it?”

He watched her timidly, with courage oozing out of him. She had all but given him to hope, but now it appeared she had no more to say. “Well, I can understand,” he said, half turning towards the door. “I’m not much of a chap, and you might easily have put me down much harder than you did. It’s soft letting now, by reason of your tactful ways. I’ll... I’ll go and see if Mrs. Whitehead has given me yon other blanket.”

He was at the door before she stopped him. “George!” she said, “come back. You’re getting this all wrong. You know about my brother.” George nearly smiled. “It’ud not be your mother’s fault if I didn’t,” he said.

“No,” she said; “I suppose everybody knows about his going to the Grammar School. They don’t all know what it means.” Madge was trying to be loyal to the family ideal, she was trying not to be bitter, but it wasn’t easy. It was one thing to go without new hats and the accustomed ways of service, but another to go without George.

“I’d like you to understand that this family puts itself about a bit for Sam’s sake. We think he’ll go a long way up in the world, and the rest of us aren’t doing anything to keep him down. None of us, no matter how it hurts. Are you seeing what I mean?”

He saw. “I’m not class enough for you,” he said.

It was a part, but not the whole, of her meaning, and Madge wanted no misapprehensions. “You’re class enough for me,” she said, “but I’m telling you where the doubt comes in. It’s a habit we’ve got in this family. We think of Sam.” That made the matter plain; she loved him, and while he granted there was a certain impediment through Anne’s habit of subordinating everything to Sam’s interests, he saw no just cause why he should not marry Madge. “I wouldn’t knowingly do anything to upset your mother,” he said, “but I’ve told you I’m boiling with my love for you. I’m easily put off my purpose as a rule. I mean to say, supposing I ask Mrs. Whitehead for a kipper for my tea, and she tells me eggs are cheap and she’s got an egg instead, I don’t make a song about it—so long as the egg’s not extra stale. But I’ll own I didn’t think of Sam in this. I thought it was for you and me to settle by ourselves.”

“Sam’s in it,” said Madge dully. “He’s in everything in this house.”

Then Anne came in and the disturbance of her entrance, together with the fact that he had finished his passage of “De Senectute” made Sam aware that something was toward. He kept his eyes discreetly on his book, but fluttered the pages of his dictionary no more. He found youth more arresting than old age.

Anne’s quick comprehension took the situation in at once. She had been shopping, and as she put her parcels on the dresser she gave Madge the benefit of a wordless reproof. She could say a good deal without opening her mouth, and said it. But Madge was not going to be parted from her George without a fight. Sam apart, George was eligible, and Madge saw this as an unique occasion—the occasion for leaving Sam out. At least, she meant to try.

George was turned craven at sight of Anne and sidled to the door. “I’ll be getting on home, I think,” he said.

“You wait your hurry,” said Madge hardily. “Mother, George has been asking me to wed him.”

It was the gage of battle, for Anne knew the fact already. The statement of it was a challenge. She met it coolly. “Has he?” she said. “Well, I hope you told him gently.”

And at that George found his second wind of courage, and intervened like a man. “She’s told me nothing with her tongue. Nothing for certain. But a blind man on a galloping horse could read the thoughts of her. Mrs. Branstone, I love that girl as if she’d put a spell on me. It’s the biggest feeling that’s come into my life, and I’m full and bursting with it, or I’d not have the face to expose my inside thoughts to you like this. And if you’ll only tell me I can take her, the Mayor in his carriage won’t be happier than me.”

“You know how steady George is, mother,” Madge seconded him.

“He needs to be,” said Anne dryly. “He’s a window-cleaner.”

“I’m steady by nature, Mrs. Branstone, as well as trade. I don’t drink. Somehow one glass of ale is enough to make me whimsical, so I take none at all. I know I’m being bowdacious in my love, but I’m moved to plead with you. We’d not be standing in Sam’s way. We’d live that quiet and snug you’d never know we’re in the town at all.” Anne looked at him with a faint trace of appreciation drenched in her profound contempt. A poor creature, but he had his thimbleful of spunk! “It would need to be quiet,” she said, “with two to keep on your wage. Are you contented with it?”

Disastrously, he was. “It’s a regular job,” he said, voicing his pride at being above the ranks of casual workers. In Anne’s view, a hopeless case.

“It’s a regular rotten job,” she retorted, but spoke more softly than her wont. “I’ve Sam to consider, Madge. You might live quiet, but Sam’s brother-in-law has got to make a better show of it than to be seen all over the place at the top of a ladder like a monkey on a stick. I’m not being hard on you, George Chappie, and I’ve nothing against you bar that you’re not good enough. You better yourself and you’ll do. Stay as you are, and Madge’ull do the same.”

George opened his mouth to speak, but found that nothing came. It was a regular job, it satisfied his ambitions, and her objections were inexplicable. He had shot his bolt and, having no more to say, he went, relapsing to such invertebracy that when he found that Mrs. Whitehead had not added the other blanket to his bed he had nothing to say to her either, but spread a threadbare overcoat on the coverlet and shivered unhappily to sleep.

CHAPTER III—THE HELL-PIKE CLUB

TO a schoolboy of sixteen, love is an imbecile emotion, its victims harmless lunatics, and it is not to be supposed that Sam’s interest in the affair of Madge and George was based on intimate understanding. His conspiratorial action came rather as a lark: behind, perhaps, was the recognition that adults did habitually make fools of themselves in this way, that his loyalty in such a case was to Madge who was of his generation, and that Anne in obstructing their marriage was outrunning the constable in her demands for self-sacrifice on his behalf.

Larking, defined as enjoyable interference with other people for motives either benevolent or purely egotistic, was a weakness of Samuel Branstone, and the boy was father to the man. He did not agree with Anne that the marriage was inimical to his interests. True, George cleaned windows and balanced hardily at the top of swaying ladders, a precarious trade, but his own. Apparently it suited the Georgian temperament, and that funambulist would not wear a placard on his back proclaiming that he was brother-in law to Branstone of the Classical Fifth.

Branstone, who was going to rise in the world, would necessarily have poor relations, and it hardly mattered how poor. Indeed, the poorer they were the more cheaply he could afterwards play providence to them, since their standards would be low and their expectations small.

So it wasn’t a nice, impulsive lark, but coldblooded and calculated, which is almost as objectionable in a lark as organization in Charity. It is prudent good intentions that pave the way to Hell.

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.

“I wonder,” said Sam, “if you could see your way to communicating your views to Madge without mentioning that I suggested it?”

“You!” said Sarah. “You! It’ud take a dozen your size to suggest anything to me. Get off home and play marbles, or I’ll give you a slap on th’ earhole that you’ll remember.”

They didn’t play marbles in the Classical Fifth, but Sam was content to put her allusion down to ignorance rather than deliberate insult. He had gained his point: the atmosphere he desired created was about to he created.

He left that pot to simmer and turned his mind to George, whom he judged less susceptible than Madge to the promptings of a friend. Besides, he knew no friend of George, and confessed himself at fault.

One day, shortly before the Whitsuntide holidays, he was staring gloomily out of the window at the top of the stairs outside the Fifth Form room, watching the boys of the Chetham’s Hospital at play in that yard of theirs which the Grammar School pretends to scorn but secretly envies, when he heard behind him a conversation between Lance Travers and Dubby Stewart which set his brain awhirl. Yet it was not a distinguished conversation.

“Who ever heard of anyone in Manchester staying at home in Whit week?” asked Lance.

Sam had heard, often.

“It isn’t done,” said Dubby, who had earned that abiding name when he was in the Lower Third, and once read “dubious” aloud with a short “u.”

“But I’ve to do it,” said Lance. “My governor’s too busy to get away. Bit damnable, isn’t it?”

“Matter of fact,” said Dubby, “we’re not going, either.”

And it presently appeared that out of the form of twenty-four boys there were as many as six who lived in Manchester and were not going away. “It will be hell,” prophesied one of the unfortunates.

“It needn’t,” said Sam Branstone, turning from the window to the mournful group.

“You’re used to it. We’re not,” said someone cruelly, and Lance smacked his head. Allusions to anybody’s poverty were bad form.

“What’s the prescription?” asked Dubby, and Sam was silent for a minute. “Watch him. Something’s dawning,” chaffed Dubby. It wasn’t dawning, it had dawned; but at first it looked like a risk, and then much less like one, and Sam smiled beautifully as he realized that he, at least, had all to gain and nothing to lose. He drew the luckless five mysteriously aloof.

“The prescription,” he said, “is to have a holiday in Manchester, in a holiday house.” He let that soak for a minute, and then, “Our own house,” he added. “There are six of us. We join together and we take a house. A small house, and I daresay some of you won’t like the neighbours, but as the neighbours won’t like us, that’s as broad as it’s long. Swagger neighbours wouldn’t stand us anyhow, and the smaller the house the smaller the rent. Something like four-and-six a week is my idea. That’s nine-pence a week for each of us, and we’ve a house of our own for that to do what we like in.”

“By Jove!” said someone admiringly.

“What shall we call it?” said another, a trifle doubtfully.

“Call it?” said Lance. “That’s obvious. The Hell-fire Club.”

And, of course, if any doubt remained, that settled it. Who would regret the seaside if he could be a member of the Hell-fire Club? Lance was commissioned to negotiate with his father, the estate agent, but it was Sam who really chose their house. It was a house which in Sam’s opinion excellently suited the requirements of a young married couple of the window-cleaning class. Mr. Travers told Lance that he would stop the value of any damage out of his pocket-money, and on those conditions let them the house. But he need not have made that cautionary threat; Sam saw that there was no damage.

The Hell fire Club assembled for its initiatory debauch on the first day of the holidays, and by eleven a.m. three inexpert cigarette-smokers had had occasion to use the slopstone as a vomitorium. It left them feeling chilly, and Dubby suggested that a house-warming without a fire was a solecism, even on a hot day, so a lavish plutocrat brought in two sacks of coal and a supply of chips. Firelighting is a sport out of which a certain excitement can be derived, but only for a short time, and the same evanescent quality attaches to the pleasure of sitting on bare boards.

“I’m too stiff to be happy,” said Lance. “I vote we furnish this club.”

Carried, nem. com. “I’m afraid, though,” said Sam, “that I shall not be able to contribute much.”

“Wait till you’re asked, my son,” said Dubby. “By the time we five have finished looting our homes, this place will be a little palace.”

Loot is a brave word, suggestive of the treasures of the purple East, but it was, in most instances, a case of permitted loot, the offscourings of lumber rooms. Sandy Reed, however, was the sort of boy who is happiest with a hammer in his hand, and Dubby had an eye for chintz. To repair the veteran furniture which they brought struck Sandy as work for a man. Behind him was his infantile past of fret-work and model yachts; before him the foremanship of the Hell-fire Club repair-shop. He worked and was the cause of work in others. And it was willing work, partly because it was for an idea, partly because that first day had threatened boredom and here was something definite to do, mostly because it was making a noise.

The ill-assorted chairs, tables and sofas which they collected under their roof had this in common at the end, that they were strong; and having by their own efforts made them strong, the boys did not by their rioting make them weak again. They respected their handiwork, and Dubby’s chintz procured a sort of uniformity.

A club, of course, must eat and drink, and kitchen utensils, mostly odd but all practicable, were gathered together that they might precede the pleasures of eating with the pleasures of cooking. It was camp-life in town, except that they went home to sleep, and so long as the activities of “settling in” endured, they relished it abundantly.

About a fortnight was what Sam had mentally set as the life of the Hell-fire Club, and he had no intentions of paying the rent by himself for more than a week or so. They had decided that Sunday was not a club-day—there were difficulties at home—and Sam took George Chappie for a walk. “I like this street,” he said as they turned the corner. “Madge always fancied this district.”

“Did she?” said George gloomily.

“We’ll go in here,” and Sam produced the key and introduced George to the Club premises. “What do you think of it?”

The chintz took George’s eye at once. “By gum!” he said.

“Sit down,” said Sam. “This is where you’re going to live when you’re married to Madge. It isn’t your furniture yet, but it’s going to be. I’m going to give it you for a wedding present. There isn’t a bed in, as you see, but there will be, and I ask you, George, is it or is it not better than Mrs. Whitehead’s?”

“Aye,” said George, “but you’re going ahead a bit too fast for me.”

“Not at all,” said Sam. “Yours is the pace that kills. The slow pace, not the quick. Now, this place isn’t at your disposal yet, but if you’ll put up the banns next Sunday and get married as soon as you can after the three Sundays, you can walk in here and hang your hat up on that hook. It’s a brass hook, George. We don’t approve of nails in this house. I might mention that it will be all right about the banns. Mother has dinner to cook on Sundays and doesn’t go to morning service, and to-day is father’s Sunday off from the station and lie’s on duty for the next three Sundays. So,” he concluded, “there you are.”

“You’re promising a lot. Is this house yours?”

“The rent is four-and-six,” said Sam, “which isn’t more than you can afford to pay. And you bind yourself to nothing by putting up the banns. If I fail to deliver you this house and all that’s in it, you needn’t get married. But I’ve a word of advice for you, George. Let Madge hear of it first from the parson’s lips in church. She won’t scream and she won’t faint. We don’t, in our family, and it saves you the trouble of asking her. Is it a bet?”

George hesitated. “Come upstairs and see the other room,” said Sam. George saw, and marvelled. “I’ll come round with you now to church,” said Sam. “We’ve just nice time to catch the clerk after service.”

“By gum!” said George Chappie. “I’ll do it. They can’t hang me. But,” he added as he cast a last look at the household gods which Sam Bran-stone promised should be his, “they may hang you.”

Sam grinned blandly.

CHAPTER IV—THE COMPLEAT ANGLER

HE had succeeded with George beyond expectations, but that easy victory did not deceive him into thinking that his battle was won. Madge, he had said, would neither scream nor faint on hearing her banns announced and he wished he was as confident about it as he had sounded. Much, in his view too much, depended on the vigour of Sarah Pullen’s advice.

He was taking risks all round, but found he rather liked it. There was the risk that the Hell-fire Club would not tire of its toy in time. An encouraging increase in absenteeism amongst the members elated him, but the steadfast faith of an enthusiastic pair depressed him sadly. He hoped, however, to find a way out of that wood.

And there was the risk that some acquaintance of Anne’s would mention the banns to her. He saw no way to counter that. It was a risk he had to take. Fortunately, his father’s best friend, Terry O’Rourke, was a Catholic.

As things stood, he saw Madge as the weakest link in his chain. She collapsed before the will of Anne like an opera hat, and he was candidly afraid of her making a scene in church, either from pleasure or from anger, when the banns were read. Not that he shrank on principle from scenes, only that word of it would undoubtedly be carried to Anne and the fat be in the fire.

Rummaging one day that week at a second-hand bookstall in Withy Grove, without the slightest intention of buying, he was attracted by a title and recklessly planked his tuppence down. Intrigue, he felt, was punishing his finances, but this title gave him too good an opening with Madge to be the subject of economy. The title was “The Clandestine Marriage,” and he knew that Sarah Pullen would be in that night to see Madge.

He was reading the play very earnestly when she called, though it rather bored him and he thought its plot elementary compared with his own. Sarah was no reader, but she noticed the cover because the word “marriage” was an unfailing lure.

“Whatever has the boy got hold of now?” She inquired, taking his bait sweetly.

He showed her. “Do you know what it means?” he asked.

“I know what marriage means,” she said.

“By hearsay,” he told the virgin pungently. “But I meant the middle word.”

She eyed it closely. “You’re always bragging your knowledge. I’m not at the Grammar myself and Greek is Greek to me. Fat lot of good it’ud be in a weaving-shed, and all.” She had a practical mind.

“This isn’t Greek,” he said, “it’s English.”

“It’s not the sort of English we talk in Manchester, choose how.”

“I’ll tell you what it means.”

“Wait till you’re asked, cheeky.”

He didn’t wait. “It means surreptitious.”

“I’m a grand sight the wiser for that. It’ll mean a thick ear for you if you don’t stop coming the schoolmaster over me. I’m here to talk to Madge, not to you.”

He winked at Sarah with the eye which was hidden from Madge. “The Secret Marriage, Sarah. That’s what it means.”

Sarah was interested now. “Does it tell you how to work it?”

“I might do that myself,” he said.

“Don’t talk so foolish, Sam,” said his sister. “Are you coming for a walk, Sarah?”

“When I’m ready,” said Sarah. “Now then, young Sam, spit it out.”

“Oh,” said Sam. “It isn’t much. Only I happened to be out for a walk with George Chappie the other day and we went into a house that’s pretty full of furniture.”

“George Chappie with a house of furniture!” cried Madge.

“I suppose he’s getting married,” said Sam. “He courted you at one time, didn’t he, Madge? I rather liked his taste in furniture.”

“Taste!” cried Madge with spirit. “I’ll taste him. I’ll eat him raw for this. After all he said to me no more than a month ago, to take up with another wench! What’s the hussy’s name?”

“Her name?” said Sam. “Let’s see. Sunday to-morrow, isn’t it? The banns might be up. If I were you I’d go and find out.”

“As true as I’m alive I’ll tear every hair from her head,” said Madge.

“I wouldn’t,” said Sam. “You have red hair, but better red than bald.”

“Her!” said Sarah. “Do you mean——?”

“Look here, Sarah,” Sam interrupted, and used a formula which he had thought out rather carefully. “Do you imagine I’d be giving you a message like this if he hadn’t sent it?”

“Message! What message?”

Then Anne came in.

“Yes, Sarah,” she heard Sam saying with a pedagogic air. “The word clandestine means secret.” He resumed with zest the reading of his play and, though theirs was a small house, managed to avoid being alone with Madge up to church time on the morrow. He had business out that Saturday night—to make sure of George, whom he found full of panting resolution to catch the clerk and cancel the banns. The glamour of that furniture had lasted this long with George, but the awful hazard of the Sunday morning eclipsed the glow as it came nearer. George wilted at the thought of Madge rising in her place with a firm, irrevocable “I forbid the banns” upon her lips.

There had begun, too, to be a quality too much like that of an Arabian night about his visit to the Club. Sam was a wonderful boy and George granted his high superiority; but even George, the humble, did not quite see Sam as a miracle-worker. He even began to doubt the existence of the enchanted Palace which Sam had shown him, and that it was within Sam’s competence to hand over that house to him appeared now ridiculous. Sam came just in time.

“Would you care,” he said, “to have another look at your house?”

George would, but he hadn’t time then: he was going; to see the clerk, and till he saw the clerk he was a man obsessed with an idea. “I suppose,” he said sceptically, “that it’s still there?”

“Of course,” said Sam, “and has a few more things in since you saw it.”

“Well,” said George, “it’s a nice house, but I’m going to see yon clerk to tell him not to put up banns.”

Sam smiled, relieved to know that he was not too late. “Don’t do that,” he said. “Madge is pleased.”

“What!” said George. “Say that again.”

“Madge is pleased,” repeated Sam brazenly. He was sure she was. He trusted Sarah Pullen now.

“Did she tell you so?” asked George.

“Do you imagine I’d be giving you a message like this if she hadn’t sent it?”

George took his cap off. “If that’s so——” he said.

“It’s so,” said Sam, not defining what was so.

The banns went up, and Sam was able to devote his undivided attention to Club affairs, as to which he had an idea arising out of the boredom he suffered while reading “The Clandestine Marriage.” That tuppence was a fruitful investment.

A wet day came and with it, what was now rare, a full attendance at the Club. But, since their repairs and decorations were complete, there was nothing to do except to sit on their reliable chairs and admire their reliability.

“For a Hell-fire Club,” said Sandy, “we lack hellishness.”

“Lance named us,” said Dubby. “He ought to make suggestions.”

“Of a new name?” asked Sandy. “Call it the Eviscerated Emasculates.”

“Call it a damned failure,” said another, and was sat upon. They welcomed the diversion, but the thought had reached home.

“What’s the matter,” said Sam, when order was restored, “is that we aren’t serious enough.”

“Oh, hell!” said Lance.

“I mean it, Lance. We’re not a set of kids from the Lower School. If we were, we might sit round and read Chums and the Boy’s Own Paper.” Two men of the Classical Fifth and the Hell-fire Club looked guiltily at him, but decided that he was not making personal allusions. “As it is, we have higher interests. Now, there are six of us here and that’s enough, with doubling, to take parts in a Shakesperian play. I vote we read a play. In fact, I brought some down.”

This suited Lance, who had aspirations towards the stage. “Bags I Romeo,” he said.

Sandy was less fired to enthusiasm, but, “All right,” he said, “if you choose a play with lots of thick bits in it.”

“We certainly,” said Sam, “shall not read an edition prepared for the use of girls’ schoofs.”

“Merry Wives of Windsor, then,” said Dubby. “Lance can spout Romeo out of his bedroom window to stop a cat-fight.”

Sam would have preferred a tragedy; he feared they would enjoy reading The Merry Wives and so, on the whole, they did, but there were only five promises to turn up next day and two of those were conditional upon its being wet. Sam wasn’t dissatisfied, and as a comedy was postulated chose Much Ado about Nothing, because he thought that it was dull in patches and also for a reason of his own. He wanted to make certain that he had nothing to learn as an intriguer from a famous case of match-making. He found he had.

Although it rained, Much Ado had only four readers at the opening and only two at the close. Lance sent postcards that night to the members announcing Hamlet for the morrow. He wanted to read Hamlet’s part, but if you can’t have Hamlet without the Prince, neither can you read it satisfactorily with one other participant.

Lance and Sam struggled through an act, then Lance gave in. “I’m getting tired of this Club,” he said. “The members have no brain.”

“It isn’t raining,” said Sam.

“No. Lancashire’s batting, too. Let’s go and see Albert Ward and Frank Sugg at Old Tafford.”

Next day, the Club was uninhabited, except by the ghost of Sam’s broadest smile, its only tenant for a week. The freeze-out was accomplished, and its engineer had confidence enough to spend three pounds of his capital on a bed and bedding, “to await instructions before delivering.” Then he saw Lance Travers and pointed out to him that there were better uses to be made of ninepence a week than to waste it on a club which nobody used.

“Nuisance, though, about the chairs and stuff,” said Lance, implying his agreement that the Club had failed.

“I can’t have them back here, because I’m turning our attic into an aviary. That’s why I’ve had no time to go to the Club,” he explained with a faint apology, and took Sam up to see his birds.

“What shall we do about all that furniture at the Club? Pity the fifth of November is so far off.”

“I’ll try to think of something,” said Sam, rather terrified at Lance’s incendiary suggestion. “In any case it must be discussed at a full meeting. Let’s call the members together.”

An urgent whip resulted in a full and slightly shame-faced attendance. Nobody tried to dispute that the Club was a corpse: the only question was what to do with its bones. “Well,” said Sam, “if none of you has a suggestion to make, I’ll make one. Nobody’s aching to take the stuff back where it came from. Now,” he went on candidly, “we could sell it to a dealer, but I’m against that because dealers are thieves and they’d give us about thirty bob for the lot. But my sister’s getting married and I don’t mind offering the Club five pounds for its property. That,” he indicated, “is a pound each for the five of you.”

“Cash on the nail?” asked Dubby, whose forebears came from Scotland. He distrusted Sam in the character of capitalist.

“Oh, yes,” explained the candid Sam. “You see, when I met Lance yesterday I said I’d think of a way out of the difficulty and I came prepared.”

“I vote we take it,” said Sandy. “I can buy a lot of tools with a pound.”

“I don’t see why we should pander to your vices,” said Lance. “We’re still a Club and this is club money.”

“The Club is dead.”

“Not yet. Not till we’ve killed it gloriously on Sam’s sister’s fiver. There’s a hell of a bust in five pounds and we have to drink the bride’s health. Champagne’s my drink.”

It wasn’t, but it was rather too often his father’s, and Lance was emulous, and, frightened a little of his own suggestion, carried things now with a rush. “We’re the Hell-Fire Club,” he said, “and champagne is the dew of Hell. Any member shirking will be held under the tap for half an hour.” They braved it out, most of them conscience-stricken, and the Hell-fire Club almost deserved its name in the hour of its extinction. Things might have been serious had not Sam, by a well-timed push, caused Lance to shatter a full magnum on the floor.

As it was, five hangdog members reached home late, but presentable. But they were most unhappy boys. The sixth boy was happy. He had consumed a sober and interesting meal at other people’s expense, encountering several delectable sorts of food for the first time and experiencing that human but reprehensible thrill which results from feeling that one is a clever fellow.

Distance of course lent enchantment to the Hell-fire Club. When school reassembled and boys fresh from the seaside tried to excite the jealousy of the stay-at-homes with tales of land and sea, they were loftily put in their places and struck to dumb admiration by legends of the dashing vice of the Hell-fire Club. It lived in story as it had never lived in fact.

Sam visited the premises, on the day after the Club died, to wipe up the mess, thriftily to salve some untouched edibles for a coming wedding-feast, and by receiving and installing the bed to dedicate the house to better uses. Then he put the key in his pocket and took it to George. He had kept his bargain and now it was for George to keep his.

There remained the question of Anne, and as a preliminary to its solution Sam had recommended Madge to look peaked. Madge, naturally inclined to that condition, had no difficulty in accentuating its appearance by recourse to the vinegar bottle until even Anne, intolerant as she was of small weaknesses, had to own that Madge looked unhappy and unwell.

On the night before her wedding, Madge shut herself up in her bedroom whence the sounds as of a very ecstasy of woe penetrated to the kitchen. Yet her woe was not ecstatic and hardly woe at all. She wept because she was going to be married next day, because when one is going to be married next day one weeps. One brims with undefinable emotion and overflows into tears.

But Anne, listening from the kitchen, where she sat with Sam, was moved to unaccustomed softness. “That girl is fretting sadly,” she said. “It’s a mort of trouble to be taking over a wastrel like George Chappie.”

“Mother,” said Sam speculatively, “I wonder whether you have ever considered the influence of matter over mind?”

“I’m considering the influence of something that does not matter,” she replied. “The influence of George Chappie.”

“Suppose,” said Sam, “suppose that George Chappie lived in a decent house of his own, with furniture that he took a pride in, instead of in those awful lodgings of his. Don’t you think that he would live up to his surroundings? Don’t you think that it would make a man of him?”

“George Chappie is as far from having a decent house as he is from wedding our Madge.”

“That’s true,” said Sam, “as far—and as near.”

“As near?” asked Anne suspiciously. “Sithee, Sam, have you been up to something?”

“Will you hear me out if I tell you a story?” he asked.

“Am I going to like it?” she fenced cautiously. “I am hoping,” he said piously, “to have your forgiveness. It’s a matter of happiness.”

He told her what he had done and how and why he had done it. “The wedding’s to-morrow,” he ended, “and I hope you’ll go.” He told his exploit without arrogance and without extenuation, and it is not to be supposed that Anne was unaware that a nice moralist would have found much in it to criticize, but Sam had come out on top and that, for Anne, almost excused his methods. It almost excused his coming out on top of her.

“I’ll go to the wedding,” she said, “and I’ll forgive them. They are no more than a pair of naturals in the hands of a schemer.” Sam grinned appreciatively. “But I’ll not let you down so easy,” she went on, and the grin faded. “You’re clever, my lad, but you’re a schoolboy, and the place for showing your cleverness is at school. It’s too long since you brought me home a prize, and if you want my forgiveness for letting you rap my knuckles like this, you’ll bring me a prize this Midsummer. Is that a bargain, Sam?”

“I always try,” he said, which was true.

“Try harder,” said Anne Branstone dryly.

CHAPTER V—LAST SCHOOL-DAYS

SAM had not a dog’s chance of winning the form prize of the Classical Fifth, and knew it. He learnt with difficulty, retaining what he learnt; but the process was slow and his form was overshadowed by the brilliance of two boys who learnt easily and rapidly.

It annoyed Sam to know that he had no chance against these two. Poetic justice cried out that he, the railway porter’s son, should defeat Bull, whose father was a professor at the University, and Adams, son of a merchant prince whose “Hong” was as familiar in the godowns of Shanghai as his name in Princess Street and on ‘Change; but it was hopeless. The prize lay inevitably between these two who took to classics like ducks to water and read Homer for (they said) pleasure, whilst their form-mates struggled with Euripides in acknowledged agony. They were both unpopular, both prigs, but unassailably pre-eminent; and they were two. Had it been a case of Bull alone, or Adams alone, Sam might have worked heroically on the off-chance, that his rival would be ill at examination time, but it was too far-fetched to hope that both would simultaneously ail.

He had long passed beyond Anne’s powers of tuition. It was not a “sound commercial education” that one got on the Classical side, and mathematics had ceased to figure in his course. He went to the Classical side because Lance was there and stayed because of Anne’s golden dream of Oxford. The gold, she knew, was tarnished now, but if she no longer saw in Sam the winner of an open scholarship at Balliol, she had not abandoned hope that he might carry off one of the close scholarships which the School commanded. Sam himself was sceptical about even that qualified ambition.

But he had to win a prize to satisfy Anne, and if he could not win the prize of which she was thinking, he would try to win one of which she did not think. It was certainly a prize, and a handsome prize, open not only to a form but to the whole school—a prize for reading.

He had a secondary spur, too, in the fact that Lance, that ardent elocutionist, looked on this prize as his own, and the thought of beating Lance on his chosen ground tickled Sam’s fancy. Not that he was cocksure. He knew his handicap too well for that, but he had always known it, and from the first day of his school life studied to correct his accent. He did not, even now, even at the price of being thought pedantic, indulge in slang. Lance, perhaps because he came from a motherless home, perhaps from a stupid bravado, larded his speech with silly blasphemies and the current vulgarisms, and, in fact, he did it with an air; but Sam had to guard his tongue. There is a difference, too easily detected, between correct slang and incorrect English: one must first speak correctly before one can dare successfully to be incorrect, and Sam’s handicap was that he came from a home where they used, in Sarah Pullen’s words, “the sort of English we speak in Manchester;” the other sort was an alien tongue and held to be an affectation of the insincere.

There was a set piece—the opening speech in Comus—the inefficients were weeded out, and the elect tested on “unseens.” It was the “unseens” that frightened Sam: he rehearsed Comus till a misplaced aitch was a physical impossibility, and he was sure of his rhythm and the intelligence of his rendering; but he knew that aitches were elusive when he was nervous. “Then don’t be nervous,” was counsel of perfection: the ordeal of the “unseen” test intimidated him.

But he practised, and did not spare himself. If sweat and blood would win that prize, Sam would spend both. He read aloud by the hour—classics of course suffering—with a pin in his hand with which he resolutely drew blood at every aitch he dropped; and in his reading he was fortunate. He read The Spectator which he had borrowed by pure chance from the school library, and the judges handed him a passage from The Spectator to read at the unseen test, and one of the great speeches of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, whose thundering music had so much attracted Sam that he knew the purple patch by heart.

He won the prize; staggered across the platform of the Free Trade Hall with a Gibbon in six sumptuous volumes, calf-bound, stamped with the school arms; he rode “in triumph through Persepolis,” and thought that it was “sweet and full of pomp;” then, when it was over and the last “Gaudeamus” of that Speech Day had been sung and the last cheers for the holidays (always the heartiest) been given, he sought his mother in the crowd.

“Well?” said Sam, who had kept this glory as a surprise for her.

“Aye,” said Anne, “but it might be better. You’ve won a prize and you’re forgiven, but you know well enough that you’ve diddled me. I wanted a prize to show that you’d the gift of learning, and you’ve won one to show that you’ve the gift of the gab. I knew it already,” she ended dryly, “and you’re nobbut tenth out of the twenty-four in your class. Will they move you up?”

She dissembled the genuine pride with which she had seen him cross that platform and take his bulky prize, because she felt inly that the chief talent Sam had proved was a talent for deception. This was a prize, but she thought it too barely within the meaning of the act: it observed the letter of his bargain and eluded the spirit.

She did him less than justice. The average hoy came to school knowing English; Sam had had to learn it, and here was proof, in a prize won against the whole school and not merely against a form, that he had learned his lesson well.

Her disparagement depressed him. He had not reached, and with a mother like Anne he could not at his age reach, the healthy younger generation’s contempt for the opinions of its elders. He felt weakened in his belief in the social and economical value of a decent accent and grew careless in preserving it. His Gibbon lay upon his shelf unread, an empty glory, and, in the event, his prize was to lead to a calamity. It was to lead, indirectly, to Tom Branstone’s death.

Sam found himself, after the holidays, moved up to the Transitus, the last boy to be moved there from the Fifth. He was not sure that it pleased him. Left in the Fifth he might have been a Triton among the minnows: in the Transitus he was incurably a minnow. But he discovered there an atmosphere to which he might have responded better than he did. Discipline was slacker; one had reached the ante-room to the Sixth and was assumed to be serious; one had the privilege of a form-room which was open in the lunch-hour so that one had not to wait with smaller fry in the corridors; and, above all, the form-master was a gentleman as well as a scholar.

He was not blind to these advantages, but he did not, somehow, “come on” with his classics. The terrible facility of Bull and Adams was a constant discouragement: mere perseverance was outvied by natural ability and dragged its leaden weight behind. He knew himself incapable of shining in this company, and gave up a losing fight the more readily because the half-term brought a new diversion, and a chance to coruscate.

He was cast, as winner of the reading prize, for the Christmas play. He, Sam Branstone, was to act Shylock at the Conversazione, whilst Lance Travers was given Bassanio—salt on the still bleeding wound of his defeat. Greek Tragedy interested Sam no more. He saw Irving’s Shylock from the gallery of the Theatre Royal, and, for comparative purposes, Benson’s. He haunted Cheetham Hill, observing Jewish “types.” He came to the first rehearsal, like any other novice, knowing every line of his part—and had painfully to unlearn and relearn under the direction of the brisk little mathematics master who took the play-in hand.

Anne screened her pride in this distinction. Play-acting was, in any case, questionable, too newly come to respectable estate to be accepted unreservedly. But, in secret, she determined that she would be one of Sam’s audience and Tom another.

Parents were invited to the Conversazione—that was what conversaziones were for—but Anne and Tom had never accepted the invitation before. It implied evening dress.

She decided that she could “manage” with her Sunday dress and two yards of lace; but Tom, too, must be there, and Tom must not shame Sam. She thought she saw a way.

“Nay, nay,” said Tom, “I couldn’t do it, lass. I’d never dare.”

“You should have thought of that before you became Sam’s father,” she replied. “I’m going to see him and I’ll none go alone. You’re coming with me. I reckon Mr. O’Rourke will be in to-night as usual.”

“Aye,” said Tom, suspecting nothing.

One basis of his friendship with O’Rourke was that their evenings off happened to coincide, Tom’s from Victoria Station and Terry’s from the old-fashioned commercial hotel in Mosley Street, where he was an institution. Terry was a waiter, but Tom had not yet seen the connection between his friend’s profession and the Grammar School Conversazione. He was never very bright.

Terry had a hard head and a professional style, rather like a successful doctor’s bed-side manner, which wheedled more tips from commercial travellers than they gave at any other hotel in their rounds, but he had a sunken vein of poetic superstition and, when Anne interrupted them, he was explaining to Tom that he tolerated the Royal Hotel because he could see from its window the green of the grass outside the Infirmary. Manchester was Manchester because it lacked grass. The “good folk” couldn’t dance on granite sets: only on grass did one find fairy-rings and only where grass abounded were people blessed.

“You’ll not be wanting your dress-clothes next Wednesday night, I reckon,” said Anne, breaking in without apology.

“Why, no, Mrs. Branstone,” he said. “Wednesday’s the night when I dress like the public. I’ve gone into a strange hotel and been mistaken for an ordinary customer on a Wednesday night.”

“Then you’ll maybe not object to lending Tom your clothes next week. I want him to be mistaken for a swell.”

“There’s a shine on them,” objected Terry, “that you can see your face in.”

“Dress-clothes,” pronounced Anne, “are dressy when they shine. If you’ll put studs and a clean shirt in with them, I’ll be obliged, and I’ll send the shirt back washed.”

“But, Anne——” protested Tom.

“You hold your hush,” she said. “It’s settled. Go on about the fairies, Terry.”

Fairies seemed to Anne entirely suitable as a subject of conversation for those children, men.

Terry brought the clothes himself and personally assisted at Tom’s transformation from a railway porter into a “swell.” His tie, at any rate, was nicely tied, but “I feel the awkwardest fool alive,” said Tom, as well he might, with clothes which fitted where they touched; Anne, had she confessed her inward sinking, must have admitted that she was in no better case herself, but confession was far from her: she had to be brazen for two. Yet even Anne’s high courage failed her in the ladies’ dressing-room: she emerged so humbled by the splendours which she had seen unveiled that, at a word from Tom, she would have turned tail and fled.

But Tom had found countenance. Mr. Travers, meeting him on the stair, had taken charge of him, and now added Anne to his convoy. It was kindly tact increased to the power of heroism: he talked hard and sheltered his waifs from feeling the curious glances which, even in that mixed company, were directed embarrassingly at them. He ignored a quiet, well-known alderman, who obviously wanted to speak to him. He shepherded them to their places in the Lecture Theatre, sat with them and accomplished the incredible feat of putting Tom Branstone at his ease in the midst of the tipping public.

Travers acquired more merit that night than by all his payments of Sam’s school-fees: and Sam himself did nobly, not only on the stage whence he acted at Anne and bowed to Anne, but afterwards when, still in his costume, he paraded with her, drank coffee with her, and met with Shylockian hatred any eye which seemed to hint that he had not tremendous reason to be proud of his little mother. And what he did for her, Lance and Mr. Travers did for Tom.

Undoubtedly, a huge success: a night of nights, carved on the tablets of memory in letters of gold: never, not by so much as a dubious hint, to be associated with the illness of Tom Branstone. That was, of course, caused by overwork at Christmas at the station. It had and could have nothing to do with the fact that Tom, coming in ecstasy from the heated school into the cold December night, presently threw off his overcoat and danced exulting on the pavement: conduct so utterly unprecedented, so wholly un-Tom-like, that he had footed it merrily for ten minutes before Anne recovered enough command of him to put an end to the discreditable performance. Besides, for five of the ten minutes, she had danced hand in hand with him. She, too, exulted, but neither of them ever referred to their pagan capering again.

Poor Tom! He had not had so many nights of triumph in his life that this should be his last, but he was soon to start upon a journey from which even Anne’s imperious will was powerless to call him back. She helping him, he struggled hard against pneumonia and made a better fight with death than he had ever made with life, but his course was run and the school had not reopened after the holidays when Tom Branstone ceased to fight. It seemed that, on the night of the Conversazione, he had had his hour, and

“men must endure

Their going hence even as their coming hither:

Ripeness is all.”

It did not come to Sam as the shattering of his world—only the death of Anne could have done that—but certainly as a stunning blow. It was the first time that he had come intimately close to death and he missed death’s beauty and its peace. He saw too well its ugliness and the detail of a burial. It hurt, not because Tom Branstone had had but little joy in life, but because he died too soon to see the glory of his son. In after years, Sam Branstone would have liked to recall how Tom’s death softened him, how he melted to tears before that waxen face and lovingly bought flowers to put inside the coffin.

It wouldn’t do. It didn’t fit the facts. He knew that, honestly, he had been angry with his father for dying, especially for dying in the holidays. It spoiled the holidays and it robbed Sam of the day’s holiday he would have had for the funeral had Tom had the gumption to die in termtime. He resented his father’s death as he would have resented an unjust thrashing from him—if Tom Branstone ever thrashed anybody. Tom had died prematurely, while he was still useful to Sam. He had bilked Sam, and Sam was angry.

Not only had Tom died too soon to see the glory of his son, but his son’s glory was seriously jeopardized by the breadwinner’s death. Sam had, in his innermost soul, given up the idea of Oxford; he was not apt enough at classics, but he was far from admitting it now. It was Tom’s death, and that alone, which deprived him of that crown.

Anne felt it deeply. She had loved Tom with something like mother-love as well as wife’s. If she had been hard with him, it was for his good, and he as well as she had known that her hardness was like the hardness of a crab’s shell, hiding a tender place inside. Now that he was dead she could hide her grief as she had hidden her love, and went about her business soberly. Soberly she drew her money from the Sick and Burial Society and soberly she spent it on “black” for Sam, for George, Madge and herself, doing those things which Tom would have expected to be done to dignify his death, but adding nothing that would make his funeral a neighbours’ raree-show.

She came back from the cemetery with dry eyes and soberly presided at the inevitable meal (where she had to comfort a lachrymose O’Rourke) and, on the morrow, soberly set out to visit Mr. Travers, and to tell him that, of course, she could not now keep Sam at school. It was little that Travers was allowed to guess from this stoic that this was the end of her dream for Sam, that with Tom’s death the underpinnings of her world had flopped. And her pride stood where it stood five years ago: no more now than then would she accept from Travers money to pay expenses.

She shook her head defiantly. “The lad’ull have to work,” she said.

Travers knew adamant when he saw it. “Then, at least, let him come here and work in my office.” Anne almost glared. “I want a fair field and no favour. He’ll have to start as office-boy, with the wages of an office-boy.”

“Oh, hardly that, Mrs. Branstone. Remember, he comes to me from the Classical Transitus.”

“Yes,” she said, “and much use that is to an estate agent. He can’t add up a row of figures.”

She had no delusions about the practical value of a public school education.

“I think, though, that we must let it count for something,” he replied, and Anne, compromising against the grain, consented to let it count for fifteen shillings a week “until we see,” added Mr. Travers, “how he shapes.” He intended to see very soon.

Anne nodded grimly. “I’ll see he shapes,” she said, and Sam, silent witness of this pregnant interview, was hardly surprised by Anne’s first words on reaching home. “Get out those old arithmetic text-books of yours,” she said, “and look up mensuration. I’ve not forgotten it, if you have.”

CHAPTER VI—THE NEST-EGG

TOM Branstone had drawn a wage of a pound a week, and tips may have averaged ten shillings but more probably did not; your sixpenny tipper is a rare bird in Manchester.

Yet Anne had saved steadily, and she had not allowed a life-long habit to be interrupted by a little thing like the necessity of providing Sam with Grammar School books and clothes. I do not say that it was admirable in her, but merely that it was heroic. It was an incredible feat, but it can be done: it is done every day by people for whom the word “thrift” has meaning. Perhaps they are often unlovely in their lives or perhaps they have the robust satisfaction of those who live for an idea: opinion has always differed as to whether what they do is worth doing, and modern opinion inclines strongly to the belief that it is not. Life to these iconoclasts seems more important than the means of life.

To Anne it seemed abundantly worth while, and the proof was here now when she found that the interest on her savings amounted to three and four-pence weekly. They could live on Sam’s earnings and Anne’s “means” without pinching. Her forethought made all the difference now between too little and enough.

It was, of course, only to Anne that this seemed enough: Sam took a larger view, but found his vision cramped for some time to come by the conditions he met with in Mr. Travers’ office. Certainly that generous soul did not mean to humiliate Sam; he did not mean Sam to begin as office-boy; but, whatever his intentions, the clerks in his office defeated them. Sam was a newcomer, the latest arrival, in a minority of one against the old inhabitants; was there, moreover, obviously to do as he was told. He was told to sweep the floor in the morning, to copy letters and to lick stamps. He did these things rebelliously, bitter at heart that such menial service should be required of an ex-member of the Classical Transitus, certain that there was some mistake, that he had only to catch Mr. Travers’ eye when he was so shamefully occupied for that gentleman to take instant and drastic measures with the clerks who misemployed him.

Mr. Travers’ eye, even though caught at what Sam thought an opportune moment, While Sam copied letters, unexpectedly failed to disapprove. He seemed less preoccupied with Sam’s affairs than Sam was. As a matter of fact, he took a long distance view of Sam, and took it, unfortunately, rather muggily. Travers had the defect of his quality. A generous man, he was generous in the worst way to himself, and Sam soon learnt the meaning of a euphemism, current in the office, “Mr. Travers is attending a property auction.” Property auctions are, it is true, usually held on licensed premises, and whether Mr. Travers was or was not attending an auction he was certainly on licensed premises more often than was good for either his business or himself.

And it was bad for Sam, not because it left him to find his own feet in the office and to fight unbacked with his superiors (wherein, indeed, it was good), but because he had figured Travers from afar as a princely gentleman, without reproach, and the discovery of his failing took Sam a long way on the road to cynicism. In youth one’s faith dies hard, and, being dead, turns rapidly corrupt.

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.

Opportunity walked into the office in the person of Joseph of Arimathea Minnifie. That was his full baptismal name: analogous with the styles of certain limited companies, such as John Smith ( of Newcastle) Limited, to distinguish that Smith from other Smiths. Minnifie’s mother had explained to the parson that she was a New Testament woman. To her intimates she had put it that she chose the name Joseph because she liked it, but she also liked a man to be a man. It was deduced that she supposed the third Joseph in the Bible would have acted differently from the first in the affair of Potiphar’s wife.

Sam’s accent had degenerated since the days of Shylock and the reading prize. It had kept bad company, and might be known by the company it kept to-day rather than by that which it used to keep at school; but he could still, without too great an effort, assume a well-bred speech and was often sent with a prospective buyer to show off any likely houses on Mr. Travers’ list. Because it was usual for him to go on such errands, and not because anyone supposed that niceties of speech could or would have any effect on Mr. Minnifie, he was sent with him in a cab to tour the suburbs where Travers had property in charge.

A coarse accent was not likely to offend Joseph Minnifie, who a fortnight earlier had been a market porter at Shude Hill, but had now come into money, well invested in the best Brewery securities, from his uncle, a publican. Minnifie had sold out some of the shares because he could now satisfy a long ambition and live in his own house. He proposed, he told Mr. Travers, to retire to the country.

“The country?” asked Travers, whose practice was suburban.

“Well,” said Minnifie, “summat quiet and homely. I’d like a change from Rochdale Road. I thought,” he went on rather shyly, “of Whalley Range. It’s a good neighbourhood.”

Travers refrained from pointing out that Whalley Range was not usually regarded as the country, but was, in fact, of the inner ring of suburbs, a penny tram fare from the centre of Manchester. “Oh, yes, Mr. Minnifie,” he said. “I think I can satisfy you in W’halley Range. I have several available houses on my books in that district.”

“I’ll pay three hundred pound for what I like,” said Minnifie, quite fiercely. “I’ve got it in my pocket now.” He was fierce because he was not yet quite sure that his legacy was not phantom gold, and he pulled out a bundle of notes as much to assure himself that they were still where he had put them as with the idea of proving his good faith to Travers.

Travers concealed a smile. After all, commission on three hundred pounds is not to be sneezed at, but neither was this the sort of client for whom Traver’s disturbed his habits. “I have myself,” he said, “a large property auction to attend in the city, but Mr. Branstone will go with you to inspect the houses.” He smiled kindly on Sam, and added, lest Minnifie should think his affair, so important to him, underrated by the agent: “Mr. Branstone is my confidential man. When Mr. Branstone tells you anything about the houses you are going to see, it is as if I spoke myself.”

“I see,” said Minnifie. “He’s your foreman, and you needn’t tell me you’ll back him up. I know foremen.”

“Well, his word is certainly as good as mine. I leave you in safe hands, Mr. Minnifie.” And Travers went out to attend his first auction of the day, which usually happened at eleven o’clock in the morning.

Sam and the client took a cab to Whalley Range, where Minnifie inspected several houses which were to be had at about his price. But he was hard to satisfy, and, what was worse, apparently unable to define his reasons for dissatisfaction. As Sam praised this and that about a house, Minnifie admitted that such things were praiseworthy, but he would, please, see another house. Sam was a little piqued and tried his best to be genial, suspecting that Minnifie resented being fobbed off with a “foreman”; and Sam’s best was very good, so that presently the ice was thawed.

Minnifle stood at the bow-window of a dining-room and looked up and down the street. It was empty save for a tradesman’s boy. From somewhere round the corner came the diminished rattle of a milk-cart. Minnifle shook his head sadly.

“It’s quiet,” he said. “See that road. Nothing stirring. What is there for the missus to look at when she sits in the window?”

“It’s morning,” said Sam. “Things will be brisker in the afternoon.” But his tone lacked conviction, and he could not resist the temptation to add: “There’s a cat crossing the road now.”

“Come out,” said Minnifle. “This’ull none do,” and when they stood upon the door-step he sniffed the air of Whalley Range with disapproval. “I don’t like it and it’s no use pretending that I do. It’s got a cold smell to me. It isn’t homely.”

“I know what you mean,” said Sam, diagnosing the trouble. “Wait a bit.” He gave the cabman an address and was careful to leave the window open. They came to other streets where the scent of yesterday’s fried fish still lingered in the air and the nose of Mr. Minnifle inhaled it greedily. “This is better,” he pronounced.

They had come to Greenheys, which, when De Quincey’s father built a country house there in 1791, was “separated from the last outskirts of Manchester by an entire mile.” It is by no means separated now, and good houses of the mid-Victorian period are to be had cheaply because good tenants dislike bad neighbours. Travers had one of these survivals from an urbane past on his books and Sam hugged himself for thinking of it now: that house had proved itself the whitest of white elephants.

Mr. Minnifie, exhilarated by the spicy smells of Greenheys, was no longer a timid excursionist looking only where his guide bade him, but a house hunter hot upon the trail, with eyes that spied on each side of their route.

“Ah!” he called suddenly. “Stop!”

The cabman stopped. “But we’re not there,” said Sam, rather blankly.

“I think we are,” said Minnifie, and got out of the cab.

Sam followed, in that leaden state of mind which often precedes inspiration. What had attracted Minnifie was a semi-detached house at a corner, which the trams passed. Opposite were shops, and there was a lively stir in the street. Certainly, Mrs. Minnifie would have something to see here when she looked out of the window.

Sam knew that pair of houses, and what he knew made him fear that he would not, this time, rid Mr. Travers of the white elephant on his books. They were good houses enough, but the people who had furniture to fill them were not the sort of people who welcomed shops opposite their windows and trams past their gate, so that both had been long empty. Now, however, they were for sale, under a will, and a quick sale was wanted that the estate might be wound up. They would certainly go cheaply on that account, and the more so since two attempted auctions had proved abortive. There had been no offers.

And here was Mr. Minnilie plainly delighted, and those houses not in Travers’ charge, but in that of a rival agency! Sam felt depressed, then as dawn follows darkness, lie thought of what Travers had said, that Sam’s word was as good as his own. It was going to be, and Mr. Minnifie’s money as good in Sam’s hands as in those of Calverts’, the legitimate agents for this pair of houses. He stepped out briskly now, the ardent salesman.

“One moment, Mr. Minnifie. I haven’t the key of this house with me, but it is at the shop opposite. I will get it.” His quick eye had read so much on Calverts’ notice board, but by the time he returned, Minnifie had also seen that rival name on the board and mentioned the fact.

“I know,” said Sam. “The board has not been altered, but this property is in my hands now.”

Which was true.

The house enchanted Minnifie, who had made up his mind in advance to be enchanted. And, of course, rooms may be in need of decoration, but good proportions tell, even on a Mr. Minnifie. This house was very different from the jerry-built villas of Whalley Range.

“What’s price?” he asked.

“Three hundred and fifteen pounds,” said Sam.

“I said three hundred and I’ll none budge.”

“If you will come to the office at six, I shall be able to tell you,” said Sam, naming a queer hour, seeing that the office closed at half-past five.

“All right,” said Minnifie. “It’s a firm offer at three hundred, and I’m a man of my word.”

Sam devoutly hoped so. He was taking a considerable gamble on it. They parted, and Sam, as usual, went home for lunch, but, not as usual, returned with his cheque-book in his pocket. His accumulated savings were five pounds, but he possessed a cheque-book. He waited rather carefully until the banks had closed, then he walked into Calverts’ offices and offered them two hundred and fifty pounds for the pair of semi-detached houses in Greenheys. They accepted two hundred and seventy-five; and Sam drew a cheque for that amount, and received the title-deeds in exchange. Then he palpitated, but it was, in any case, safely after banking hours. Calverts could not present his cheque that day.

He was busy at five-thirty, when the clerks left, and proposed to work late for a while, “to clear things up,” he said. At six Minnifie arrived, true to his word, and Sam could have kissed him. He had spent the longest half hour of his life. He took Minnifie by the private door into Travers’ office, so that he should not see the empty general office, and put him in the client’s chair, himself usurping Travers’ seat.

“Well, Mr. Minnifie,” he said, “suppose I told you that the price is still three fifteen, what would you say?”

“I’d say ‘Good-day,’” and Minnifie showed that he meant it by rising to his feet. Sam went on hurriedly.

“Ah! Then it’s as well that I’ve succeeded. It has been an infinitude of trouble—-”

“I reckon,” said Minnifie, “that you’re here to take trouble. Leastways, if it’s easy money in your line, it’s the only line that’s made that way.”

“Oh, we have our troubles, like everybody else. This document,” he went on, “conveys the house to you. The price is three hundred pounds.”

“It’s a bargain,” said Mr. Minnifie, producing his notes, “count’em.” Sam counted feverishly, then made out a receipt. Nothing short of murder would have induced him to part with that money now.

“If you will meet me to-morrow at twelve at that address—a lawyer’s—we will have the conveyance put in proper form.”

“I’ve seen a bit of lawyers lately over this brass of mine,” said Minnifie, “and I don’t like’em. They eat money.”

“But in this case,” said Sam magnanimously, “I pay the lawyer’s fees.”

“Then I’ll be there,” said Minnifie.

Sam was waiting next day for the doors of his bank to open, and breathed colossal relief when his three hundred pounds were safely in to meet his cheque. He had a net profit of some twenty pounds, after settling for the conveyancing, and he had a house to sell. Not long afterwards, he sold it for one hundred and seventy-five pounds.

The fact that one of the pair had been thought desirable by somebody caused somebody else to desire the other: and Sam could only hope that the new neighbours would not compare notes. If they did, it did not matter; he had only obeyed the axiom of commerce, “Buy cheap, sell dear,” and it was not his fault that in the one case he had had to sell less dearly than in the other.

His bank credit was two hundred pounds.

CHAPTER VII—THE FLEDGLING CAPITALIST

IN Sam’s opinion, nobody had suffered. Mr. Travers lost nothing, because the corner house had conquered Minnifie at sight, and he would not in any case have bought the white elephant which Travers had for sale. Calverts had got as much as they expected to get for the houses, or they would not have sold, while the beneficiary under the late owner’s will was a charity, and Sam hoped that charity was charitable enough not to look a gift-horse in the mouth: if it wasn’t, it ought to be. As to the purchasers, who had certainly paid more for the property than they need have done, that was what purchasers were for. Why did smart business men exist if not to exploit purchasers?

All this was highly comforting, but to confess the need for comfort was to admit to disquiet, and he found that it was one thing to argue in this strain with his conscience, and another to boast to Anne of his achievement. Women don’t understand business, and he had an uneasy feeling that the ethics of the transaction would not satisfy Anne. He decided that he had better not tell her, that he must resist his impulse of surprising her with the gift of a seal-skin coat, and remained a capitalist under the rose. There was no hurry, and perhaps his next stroke, when it came, would be under conditions that would bear the limelight of her scrutiny.

But repression was not all. Justify himself as he would, chuckle over his gains as he did, the matter searched him deeply and reacted sharply in two ways, of which the first began as that old expedient of sinners, conscience-money. There are defaulters who find absolution for themselves by sending notes, under initials, to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and by having them acknowledged with impressiveness in the personal columns of the Times. That was not Sam’s way: he did not do good deeds by stealth, and his conscience-money did not go out of the family. He used it philanthropically, but it was philanthropy and ten per cent, to begin with, and in the end it was very much more than ten per cent. It was the Chappie Bill Posting and Window-Cleaning Company.

He thought that he could, without exciting Anne’s suspicions, tell her that his savings had reached ten pounds, and proposed to spend that sum for the benefit of George Chappie.

Inspired, perhaps, by his household gods, George was facing life bravely, and won a minor place in Anne’s good graces when he and Madge produced a firstborn son, who had the remarkable quality of looking exactly like the infant Samuel, whose name he bore. But George had not, in her opinion, deserved Sam’s generosity to this extent.

“You’re over-good to them,” she said. “You’ve made a man and woman of a pair of wastrels, and I’d let them alone to make their own way now.”

“Do you think it will be much of a way?” asked Sam. “They’re the sort that need help.”

“Aye,” she said, “they’ll lean on you all right. They’re good at leaning.”

“Well,” said Sam, drawing himself up. “Let them lean.”

“Sam,” said Anne, “I’m not fond, but if I told you what I think of you for this, you’d have the right to call me fond and foolish. I like you very well, my son. You’re the strong man helping and supporting the weak.”

She finished suddenly and a thought shamefacedly. She had praised him openly and considered it a weakness in her. Sam put a hand on her shoulder. It was not demonstrative, but his gesture was full of understanding, and Anne turned rapidly away, shaking him off almost with rudeness, taking very earnestly to her business of clearing away their tea-things.

Sam watched appreciatively through the corner of his eye. He relished praise from Anne, even when, as now, it was not strictly merited. The strong in Sam’s philosophy did not support the weak, but the weak the strong. He was confirmed in his belief that women could not understand business. This, however, he reminded himself, was not pure business, it was conscience-money, which ought not to be unconscionably reproductive: so he bought George a hand-cart, ladder, bucket and leathers, and exacted from him not more than ten per cent, on his capital expenditure. In Travers’ business Sam found opportunities of pushing George. A client took a house, and Sam would suggest with a nicely casual air that the windows needed cleaning. He would, to save the client trouble, then offer to send a man round, so that George’s connection waxed, and he prospered to the tune of two amazing pounds a week, till the restless Sam began to widen his view of George’s potentialities.

His eye for the main chance had always a useful squint which could see money round the corner as well as in the straight high road, and he thought that George, with his outfit of ladders, could see his talent for height in other ways than window cleaning. There was, for example, bill-posting, a trade whose mysteries Sam deemed it not beyond George’s capabilities to learn.

The thing grew by degrees, from the first builder’s hoarding which Sam rented venturously for advertising space, to a comfortable little business that ran itself by its own momentum long after he tired of its comparative insignificance. With George, the start was all: he could always plod where Sam had led, and as Sam had time to set the ball rolling, and money enough to spoon-feed the infant business with capital, George kept the thing in being by careful, steady management. He hadn’t boasted when he told Anne he was steady.

Of course, Sam was impatient and deplored his active partner’s inactivity. He grew tired of the gradual increase, but, all the same, the business was unquestionably successful, and he relished hugely his sense of being the power behind the throne, if only behind a small, conservative, so lamentably unambitious throne. Sam also was among the king makers.

The other, greater sequel to his reaction led to more pyrotechnical results, and eventually to Sam’s launch on his career. Nothing happened at first, and indeed for so long that he was feeling himself between the devil of the estate office and the deep sea of George’s persistent carefulness. The Chappie Bill-Posting Company was good enough for George, but not for Sam: there were too many com petitors with too great resources, while the estate office routine bored him, and opportunities for piratical enterprise did not recur.

He felt, at twenty-four years of age, and at two pounds ten a week, that he was growing old in service, he who was not meant to serve but to be served.

But then—desolating thought—was he meant to be served? Had he lost, or was he, at any rate, not losing the accent of speech and mind of those who are served? He knew that his accent had touched pitch and been defiled: those bawdy stories of his were told in the tongue of his hearers, and there had been clients lately who had spoken to him, when inspecting property, as if he were a clerk, and not a pleasant, gentlemanly youth of obvious superiority to his present, no doubt temporary, job. He had a sudden fear that the job might not be temporary after all, and there followed a time when he was wholly bent on self-improvement, when he abjured the narrow way of professional text-books and read that he might become well-read, that he might bandy allusions with those old school-fellows of his who had gone to Universities, that he might, if he could not hope to shine, at least be not outshone.

It wasn’t pour le bon motif, and he did not even pretend to like the greater part of what he read. He crammed against the grain, and a growing row of the “World’s Classics” figured on his shelf as trophies of his perseverance. Industriously he rubbed away the rust which had accumulated on his mind since it took its not very brilliant polish of the Grammar School. He took down the dust-stained Gibbon he had won for reading, and ploughed heroically through it.

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.

Ada Struggles met young men at church functions, and spoke with them at Sunday School, but she had few opportunities of greater intimacy, and was not the lady to waste so rare a chance as this. Peter droned on amongst his books and presently was lost in reading one. Ada lost herself in nothing except a burning desire, to monopolize Sam. Books did not interest Ada: getting married did.

The trouble was that in the days of his school’s comparative prosperity, Peter had done Ada rather well. Perhaps as a schoolmaster himself, he got special consideration over terms, but at any rate he had sent her to a good boarding school. She had received the education of a lady, and it wasn’t fair, it didn’t chime with the fitness of things that she should now be the daughter of an impractical curate. Her case, to some extent, was parallel with Sam’s: the past of both had augured well, and the future depended on their wits.

There, however, the parallel ceased, for Ada had few wits, but she had moods, and the reverse side of the moping discontent, which was endemic with her, was the meretricious brilliance she now paraded for Sam’s entanglement. Ada was “all out” after her prey, in her best clothes and her best, that is, her most captivatingly genial manners.

Sam thought that she illuminated that dingy book-surrounded room. They were not gay books with gilded bindings, but solid, well-worn volumes of ponderous aspect. The books repelled and Ada invited. Youth called to youth: youth answered to the call.

He was obsessed with his idea of accent, and the worldly value of superiority in speech. Ada’s first appeal to him, though she did not know it, was that she spoke well; her second was that she was her father’s daughter; her third, as she knew perfectly, was the helplessness which she used cunningly to flatter his masculine importance. She told him without a word that he was a strong, powerful man, and she a flower which he might pluck and wear. And she did the anemone business quite effectively.

There was not much of Ada, and what there was was not remarkable, but she was fluffy and frilly and feminine in the feebler way. She had on something that was not silk but suggested the rustle of silk. After all, it was not Ada’s fault that it was not silk, or that her intimate underclothing was of flannelette; she could only use the opportunities she had, and they were few.

But she had the prettiness, the rather silly and never lasting prettiness, which accompanies anæmia.

It would not wear, and she knew that it would not wear. She was becoming desperate. Sam was sent by heaven.

He thought so, too. Old Struggles read “Marcus Aurelius,” standing by his book-shelf, utterly forgetful of his guest, and the guest thought that Peter’s preoccupation was also instructed by heaven. It left him free for Ada.

What he said to Ada and what Ada said to him were things of no importance: their serious conversation was not conducted by their tongues, but by their eyes.

This is the sort of thing:

Ada (her voice): Of course, I remember seeing you quite often in church, Mr. Branstone.

(Her eyes): And you found favour in my sight.

Sam (his voice): Naturally, I always saw you whenever I went.

(His eyes): It was for you I went to church.

Ada (her voice): I’m glad that you were able to come in to-night. I am often lonely in the evenings. Father is so wrapped up in his books.

(Her eyes): Meeting you is the great moment of my life. I’m an unhappy princess in an ogre’s tower. Rescue me. Rescue me.

Sam ( his voice): It was most kind of Mr. Struggles to ask me in for a talk about books.

(His eyes): Books be damned. I’m fascinated by the sensuous rustle of your skirts, and I’m a hero sent to kiss the wistful look away from your pleading eyes.

And so on. By the end of the evening, had the unsaid speeches or half of them been written down, Ada had evidence enough to have brought a breach of promise action against a recalcitrant Sam. Only Sam was not recalcitrant, but, on the contrary, ardent. It was, Ada congratulated herself, uncommonly good going for a first meeting.

Peter emerged from “Marcus Aurelius” with a gentle smile which lighted up his undistinguished face. “Yes. Pagan but grand,” he said, quite unaware that half an hour had passed since he last spoke. “I’ll lend you this book, Branstone, and now”.—he glanced at the clock—“I’m afraid that I must turn you out. I’d no idea it was so late. How rapidly the time passes when one is talking about one’s books!”

CHAPTER VIII—ADA STRUGGLES

THERE were moments during that night when Sam imagined that he was in the stranglehold of a grand passion: times when he quite successfully deceived himself that he burned for Ada.

And certainly the experience, unique for him, of a sleepless night lent colour to the belief that he was passionately in love, whereas he was, in fact, merely attracted by a girl who had spared no pains to attract; and what kept Sam awake was not passion but calculation. The affair, indeed, was as broad as it was long: it had a slender basis of mutual attraction, and a monstrous superstructure on each side of self-interest.

He did not “see through” Ada to the point of being prophetic about her, but he did even from the beginning perceive that Anne was not likely to be enthusiastic. But would Anne greet any daughter-in-law with open arms? Was there born the daughter of Eve whom Anne would think the peer of her Sam? He did not want to cross his mother, but a man must be a man, and a mother’s fondness and her jealousy of the intending wife were things about which one had to be callous. The world, as Benedick said, must be peopled.

Anne would see eye to eye with him as to the practical advantages of Ada. Ada was Peter’s daughter.

That parentage had, by way of discount, the defect of its quality. Socially it was a great thing to be Peter’s son-in-law, and not only socially but ideally. Sam’s admiration for the curate was genuine enough, and he knew that Anne shared it. But there was the question of money, and Peter had none. Sam kept his mother, and would have to keep his wife. He saw in Ada an asset which he could ultimately exploit, but, in the meantime, until there came into his mind the scheme which should turn his association with Peter into money, he must reckon on a tight period. Anne would see the tight period, but not the unborn, fruitful plan on which he counted for their future. And he could not hurry that plan to birth. His schemes came to him when he least expected them, spontaneously. They were not to be forced by worry.

Again, he reminded himself, there was no hurry. He had only just met Ada, and was planning as if his engagement ring were on her finger. Not that he had any serious doubts about that ring and Ada’s willingness to wear it, but she did not wear it yet, and there was time in hand, and to spare, for consideration of these practical affairs.

Meantime, he loved her, and love, according to the authors, was the most wonderful thing in the world. He told himself very firmly that he loved Ada, and that love was wonderful. Reiteration is so potent that before morning he believed what he wished to believe. He recalled the soft pressure of her hand when she said “Good night,” the froufrou of her skirt, her melting eye; and persuaded himself that Ada Struggles was a pearl beyond price.

He was perfectly sure that he loved her, and for proof there was his sleeplessness. It occurred to him that as he could not sleep, and was only thinking in circles, he might as well do something to hasten the time when he could see Ada again. He could not return “Marcus Aurelius” to Peter until he had read it, and if he returned it with unexpected promptitude, he must be ready to face a stiff examination in it; therefore he lit the gas and read “Marcus Aurelius” by way of serving Ada, whom he loved.

Hard service, too, for there was not much in Sam’s philosophy which agreed with the Emperor’s, but two nights later he was ringing Peter’s bell with the book under his arm, an ordered précis of it in his mind, and some selected passages from it on his tongue. They were not selected because Sam liked them, but because he thought Peter liked them.

Peter was out, but Ada was in, and, curiously enough for one who was not an optimist either by nature or experience, dressed again in her Sunday clothes.

She opened the door to him. “Father is out, Mr. Branstone,” she said.

“I only called to return him this book.”

“I do not think he will be long,” said Ada promptly, who knew very well that Peter would certainly be late. “Will you not come in and wait for him?”

He came, crossing his Rubicon. The unchaperoned intimacy of that night struck both of them as a daring short cut to a position to which they were not entitled—a thing properly done only by the engaged and the maturely and securely engaged. Luck fought for Ada.

“I’m afraid I can’t stay very long,” he hedged desperately.

Ada sat down and crossed her knees. A neat ankle was effectively on exhibition. “That chair of father’s,” she said, “is fairly comfortable.” Also, it faced Ada’s, and he drew up another, less inviting, chair, and placed it flush with the fire. Except by a side-glance, he could not see her ankle now, and evaded that aphrodisiac, while Peter’s chair, though empty, completed the semi-circle, and seemed to give a sort of countenance to their interview. Sam drew much comfort from that chair, and tried to guide their conversation into literary paths of which the chair would have approved. He discoursed of “Marcus Aurelius,” and he was very dull, but felt virtuous.

Ada did not believe that it was virtuous to be dull, and mentally cursed that tertium quid, the ghost of Peter Struggles, whom Sam had so firmly established in his chair; but she saw that the pace was not to be quickened here, under Peter’s roof.

“I think your knowledge of books is wonderful, Mr. Branstone,” she said, when Sam had exhausted his ideas about “Marcus Aurelius.”

“I never find time to read, myself. Whenever I have the opportunity of recreation, I go out for exercise.” The statement lacked the merit of truth She never took exercise, but was adept at sitting in front of a fire doing exactly nothing. The point was that in this house of the good Peter, Sam’s enterprise was burked, and she wanted him where he could race without a handicap. “Do you ever go to Heaton Park?” she asked conversationally. “I shall probably be going there on Saturday.”

“With—with your father?” asked Sam.

“Oh, no,” she answered brightly. “Saturday is sermon day. That is why I am in the way here, although,” she added pathetically, “I fear he often finds me in the way. I am not bookish like you and him.” She gave that explanation suddenly, and it satisfied him.

“I am not really bookish, either,” he said. “Of course you won’t be going alone to Heaton Park.”

She hoped not. “I expect so,” she said.

Sam took the plunge. “Could I have the honour of accompanying you, Miss Struggles?”

“Oh, but you are so busy. I must not waste your time.”

“It couldn’t be wasted with you,” said Sam, and glanced guiltily at Peter’s chair, as if he had exceeded the limits of propriety, but he had never seen Peter with anything but a benevolent smile, on his face, and was unable to see him imaginatively now in any other mood. He took fresh courage. “May I call for you?”

“That,” said Ada, “would never do. It would disturb father at his sermon. I shall go by tram at about three o’clock.” She rose. There was nothing to be done with Sam in that house, but she pinned her faith to Heaton Park: and not in vain.

Allow for the difference in size, distance and the general scale of things, and Heaton Park may be regarded as the Manchester equivalent to Richmond Park.

Once upon a time the Manchester Town Council had a magnificent opportunity, and lost it. There are legends that they did not mean to lose it, and that they did not lose it through any fault of theirs. But they lost it. They lost the chance of buying Trafford Park, which lies along the banks of the Manchester Ship Canal, and was bought by Mr. Ernest Terah Hooley. It is said that Trafford Park, now a flourishing and rather American-look-ing industrial town (even the streets in its residential area are numbered, and not named, after the American plan, and railways stray about the roads, more Americano), is the one successful enterprise associated with the name of Hooley. That may or may not be true: at any rate the Manchester Town Council missed its chance at Trafford Park, and when Heaton Park, another old estate, came into the market, the Council did not repeat their mistake.

One goes, ascending all the way, through Cheetham Hill, the Ghetto, to the heights of Crumpsall and the Park by a municipal tram, which is admirably cheap or criminally cheap (according to one’s views on municipal trams), and, in any case, magnificently efficient: and at the end of the ride, one finds beauty. One may find tea at Heaton Hall, and pictures that overflow from the meagre Art Gallery in Mosley Street, and municipal golf-links, but one finds also beauty.

It is a rolling country, raised above the smoke, dotted with wood and lake. Old gardens cling about the Hall, with rhododendron glades where there are sculpture and pools, and the Park rolls free in open air that is as clean as any air can be within five miles of Manchester Town Hall. It, lacks of Paradise, and if one can see green hills from Heaton Park, one cannot kelp but see the factory stacks that crown them or rise up from the valleys, but beauty lingers here on the outskirts of an ugly city secure against the jerry-builder and the ultimate defilement.

Ada was going to Heaton Park. Lovers have gone to Heaton Park before Ada and they will go when Ada has crumbled to dust. Ada went, and Sam went with her.

He went with her, not she with him: but if she led, he was very, very far from admitting it, though it may have been his obscure, subconscious knowledge of her leadership which made him outwardly assume the mien and the gestures of a leader. He asserted, every inch of him, that he was man, the conqueror, and she permitted the assertion and flattered it. Leading, indeed, was not a habit of Ada’s, who was born to be led, but it is given to all of us to outstrip our nature on occasion, and this was Ada’s chance. A subtle skill was granted her that she might be cunning with her opportunity. She was all calculation now, while Sam forgot to calculate, and walked with Ada on his arm along the main drive of Heaton Park.

Romance kept step with him and put a radiant veil between his sober senses and this witching hour: through glamour he beheld his Ada, and saw that she was good. He soared to high ambition, either to die or to possess the nymph, and now, that heady hour, to put all to the test amongst the rhododendron bushes behind the Hall.

There, by a patch of ancient turf, he halted her, and found a seat near the pool where water-lilies thrive: a lovers’ nook, love haunted. Who knows what ardours of the old régime, when lords and ladies trod that turf, had passed upon the now decaying stone of that comely seat? What ghostly lovers in satin and brocade stood round to bless them or to mock? Wood pigeons cooed above them, calling the tune, and Sam danced to it in an ecstasy of hot desire.

She had the sleek self-satisfaction of a cat, the same unhurried certainty that the mouse was hers to gobble when she chose. Ada was very happy.

But apprehension gripped him now. He had not known her for a week, and she was Ada. Peter’s daughter. He stood aghast at his precipitance, then, with the feeling that it was after all a “stroke” (though a larger one than ever before), and that he believed in acting promptly, cleared his throat and plunged into speech.

“Miss Struggles,” he said, “I know that I have only made your acquaintance during the current week, but I seem to have known you all my life. It’s because I used to see you in church, I daresay. I mean we were not strangers when we met, and, anyhow,” he continued recklessly, “I don’t care if we were. I’m not the hesitating sort. I mean, show me a thing, and I can tell you right off whether it’s good or bad. My mind’s made up in a jiffy: that’s the kind of fellow I am. And when my mind’s made up, I act.”

Ada had given a little gasp at the phrasing of his opening—that “during the current week,” an idiom from his business correspondence slipping in here to mark his nervousness—but he was fairly launched now, and she purred gently like a cat well lubricated with butter.

“Yes, Mr. Branstone,” she said, “I think men ought to be resolute.”

“So do I,” he replied. “And so I am. Quite resolute and quite determined about you.”

“About me?” She turned innocent eyes wonderingly at him. “I didn’t know you were being personal.”

“Well,” he said, “I am. I am,” he repeated, and took her hand.

“Mr. Branstone,” she murmured, as one who sees a vision splendid in a dream, and let her hand lie limp in his.

He bent to her. “Can’t you,” he asked hoarsely, “can’t you call me Sam?”

She called him Sam, and he kissed her.

“Ada!” He spoke her name like a caress. “Ada!” Her name was wonderful; she was a miracle; Sam was triumphant love. At that moment he was passionately in love, and he had conquered. He had pressed the lips of his divinity, shyly, with a revealing inexpertness which should have charmed her, who, being a woman, knew all about love while Sam was in short trousers. It didn’t charm Ada, it touched no deeper chord than satisfaction at a good job well done. This was his first, his freshest love, but she cared only that the fish was on her line, securely hooked. He saw her face, idealized her face and gloried in her face: she saw a wedding-ring, she was to be Mrs., she was to escape the book-ridden home of Peter Struggles. Both had their moment then, but Sam, in his, loved Ada, and Ada only loved herself.

“Darling,” he said, and sought her lips again She saw the thirst of him—and used it.

She drew back. “I do not think you ought to kiss me again until we have mentioned this to father,” said Ada Struggles, digging the hook more deeply in her fish. “Not,” she went on, as she saw him flinch, “that I do not want you to. Only——”

“Yes,” he said, as she left it at the “only,” and allowed him to appreciate her infinite delicacy. “Yes. Of course. Shall we have tea at the Hall?”

“Oh,” said Ada, “ought we to?” She was seen to tremble on the brink of a delicious temptation, and with difficulty to resist. “I’m afraid,” she decided, “not yet. But father will have finished his sermon by now, and if you came and saw him at once, then... then, Sam...” She eyed him, languishing, and opened up for him the golden vista of a jocund courtship—once Peter had been “seen.” He came, obediently, to see Peter, and she relaxed her standard so far as to take his arm down the drive of Heaton Park. Indeed, just at the corner by the copse, where they were hidden, he had an arm round her waist: his feet trod air, and his head was with the stars.

Ada was thinking, “If he gets the engagement ring to-night, I can show it after church to-morrow.”

CHAPTER IX—ADA AND A MAD TRAM-CAR

ON general grounds—on the grounds, for instance, of anything so out-of-date and out of reason as filial piety—Ada was quite indifferent to Peter’s “consent,” and wanted it only to shackle Sam more firmly. She had not much doubt that Peter would consent, as in fact he did, though not so readily as she had anticipated. She did not exhibit an engagement ring at church next day for the reason that she had none to exhibit. Peter kept Sam too late for that.

Of course Ada was wrong about Peter: she thought him a good man and consequently a perfect fool, whereas his foolishness was imperfect, and he was subject, like most unworldly people, to streaks of acumen about worldly affairs. They come sometimes, these disconcerting fits of perception, as if a dam had burst, and usually the times are inconvenient to those who have reckoned on the unworldliness.

Peter answered her expectation so far as to say, “Bless my soul,” and so far only. After that, he began an elaborate and skilful catechism of Sam, which pretended to be a friendly talk about books, but was really an examination of Sam Branstone, his character and disposition. At the beginning Peter knew little of Sam beyond what his observations at the Concentrics had told him, and Sam’s volunteered remarks about his salary and his prospects interested Peter to a very slight extent. At the end Peter decided that Sam was to be trusted to make things easy for Ada on the material side, and that spiritually he was not beyond hope.

But he had not, spiritually, been touched as yet. Would Ada touch him? That was the question for Peter, who knew his Ada. Ada could be led. He admitted that he himself had failed with her, but he was not a strong man. A strong man, with love as his ally, could lead Ada, could form her, and Sam had strength, and, Peter thought, love. It depended, then, on whether Sam’s love for Ada, reacting on him, would quicken his latent spirituality so that the lead he gave to Ada would be good. And on the whole Peter thought there was a reasonable chance. He believed in the power of love, he believed that love is God and God is love, and confronted with his pair of self-confessed lovers he read their future optimistically in the light of his belief. What else could Peter do? They said they were in love, they appeared to be in love, they had the symptoms of the state of love. He could only judge the case on the evidence before the court.

He could not know that with Sam the symptoms, though real, were temporary, and with Ada an intelligent mimicry. He gave his assent to their engagement formally and very solemnly.

Sam left the house late, thrilling with Ada’s “Good-night” kiss, but the glow was quick to fade, and he found himself thinking rather of Peter than of Ada, whom of course, he loved. If ever probe was gentle, it was Peter’s: nevertheless, Sam had felt the probe antagonistically. He had shivered naked before Peter’s inquisition, he had understood that he was under examination, and resented it. It was, however disguisedly, opposition, and the thought of that kindly opponent led him to think of one from whom, also, opposition was to be expected, and, probably, less tactfully. It led to Anne.

Well, that was the fate of lovers: it was the way to deepen love and, perhaps already a little doubtful of his love, he welcomed the idea of Anne in opposition. It was curious that, while he thought of Ada as the one woman in the world, he should expect Anne to be hostile not merely to the idea of his marriage in general, but to marriage with Ada in particular. It was hardly loyal to Ada, who should have reigned unchallengably queen; and he could offer Anne the argument of the advantages of being Peter Struggles’ son-in-law. But, with it all, he looked for friction, and Anne was not to disappoint him there, although at first she took it with a calmness which disarmed him.

He came in, of course, late, and ate his supper, silently hoping that she would give him an opening, but Anne asked no questions, though she had not seen him since early morning, and Sam was not often out for meals. She asked no questions because she wanted to watch him first. It was clear to her at a glance that he was in one of two conditions: he was drunk or he was in love, and she wanted to make no mistake. If it was drink she would move very promptly and directly: if love, cannily and by devious ways. She found quickly that it was not drink. It was more serious.

Her silence awed him. “Mother,” he asked by way of breaking it, “aren’t you well?”

“Aye,” she said grimly, “I’m well. Are you?”

“I’ve eaten a good supper.”

“I noticed that. I’ll clear away now.”

“Wait a bit. I’ve something to tell you.”

“I reckon it’ll keep till morning. You mayn’t have known it, but you came in late. It’s bed-time and beyond.”

“Still,” he said, “I’d like you to hear this tonight.”

“You sound serious,” said Anne, and sat. “What is it, Sam?”

“It’s something rather wonderful, mother.”

“It would be,” said Anne. “What’s her name?”

Sam rose, astonished at her perspicacity. “You guessed!”

“I’m none in my dotage yet.” Anne was grim.

“Mother, I hope you’re pleased. You must be pleased. It’s all so wonderful to me.”

“I asked you her name,” said Anne.

“It’s Ada Struggles. You know,” he went on hurriedly, “how much we all admire her father.”

“I know, but I don’t know Ada.”

“You will soon,” said Sam enthusiastically.

“I will that,” said Anne, and there was menace in her voice. She took her candle. “Good-night, my son,” she said, kissing him, which was not habitual.

“Is that all?” he asked. “All that you have to say?”

“I don’t know Ada yet,” she said, and so was gone to bed.

Peter and Anne went opposite ways in their search to know whether this marriage was the right thing for their children’s happiness. Peter ignored the bread and butter problem, or took it for granted: and his was the higher wisdom. He knew that Sam was not made of the stuff that starves for bread; not in his body but in his soul was Sam likely to be pinched.

Anne took the earthlier view that happiness resulted from home comforts. Ada, as she knew, was no shining beauty, and the better for that. Beauty is skin-deep. But she looked frail, only so, for the matter of that, did some of the toughest girls, and she took it that Sam had had the horse-sense to make some preliminary inquiries before he committed himself. Sam, it appeared, had not.

Was Ada strong and healthy? Was she economical? Could she cook? Was she her own dressmaker? And when she found that Sam could answer none of these questions, she said ironically: “Well, at least, you’ve eyes in your head. Is their house clean?”

Sam could only say that he supposed so, and Anne looked witheringly at him. “Yes, you’re in love all right,” she said. “They say love’s blind. You’re leaving a lot to me.”

“Mother,” he said, alarmed, “what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to get acquainted with Ada,” she said. “One of us must know her, and you don’t.”

“If you’ll be fair to her,” said Sam. “I’m not afraid.”

“I’ll be fair,” said Anne, and meant to be; but is a mother ever fair to the prospective wife of her only son? Perhaps, and in that case Anne went to Ada with an open mind. “After all,” she reflected, “I daresay Tom Branstone’s mother didn’t think much of me, though Tom was one of ten and it makes a difference. It oughtn’t to, though”——she pulled herself up. “Anne, you’ll be fair to the girl.” She looked indulgently at Ada’s curtains and rang Ada’s bell.

But Ada was wearing silver bangles on her wrists and her shoes were made for show. Anne had the sort of pleasure which comes from having one’s worst fears realized. She may have generalized too sweepingly, but she held that only shallow people wear silver bangles and shoes whose aim is daintiness and not durability.

First impressions, at any rate, went heavily against Ada, but Anne remembered her promise to be fair. It was possible that when Tom Branstone took Anne to see his mother, that lady did not like Anne’s way of doing her hair. To each generation the symbols of its youth and perhaps bangles on Ada were not more skittish than a cairngorn brooch had been on Anne.

“I have tea ready, Mrs. Branstone,” said Ada. “Sam told me you were coming.”

“Did he?” Anne was surprised into saying. She had not told Sam of her intention and his guess at it and his warning of Ada had spoilt her plan of coming upon Ada unawares. She wanted Ada unprepared and unadorned: Ada at home, not Ada “at home.” And Ada was very much “at home.” The room had been “turned out”—and so had Peter that it might be—company manners and the company tea-pot were on exhibition, and everything was formal and obviously thought out. And, as Anne had to admit, not badly thought out either. Ada had not been to that expensive boarding school for nothing; she had an air to awe a porter’s widow. Anne didn’t like her trick of putting the milk in the cup before she poured the tea, nor her dogmatic way of asserting that it improved the flavour and that “everybody did it now.” Everybody, did not do it, Anne did not do it; but, again, perhaps this was the modern touch, and Anne had come to be fair.

She made her first score when Ada left the room for hot water. “This room’s been dusted to-day,” thought Anne. “I’ll see what her dusting is worth.” She put it to the test by running her finger along the top of the books on one of the shelves, and her finger was very black.

The only way to keep books clean in Manchester is the way taken by nine out of ten people: they have no books. Some of the others put books behind glass, like orchids, the rest have the habit of blowing hard at a book when they take it from its shelf, and of washing their hands before opening it.

Anne did not know that. She kept Sam’s few books clean by daily elbow-grease, and now furtively wiped her dirty finger on her stocking with the feeling that she had found out Ada. The dust on the books (and certainly it was thick) confirmed the impression left by the bangles, and Anne was not in the least ashamed of her spying. Sam had stolen a march on her by warning Ada and she paid him in his own coin.

And from then onwards the score rose steadily against Ada. There were cakes for tea. Now the only excuse for cakes was that one baked them oneself and Ada confessed that they came from Mrs. Stubbins and made the further mistake of showing an expert’s knowledge in the productions of Mrs. Stubbins’ confectionery shop. “Frivolous in food as well as dress,” was Anne’s comment. Her dress, Anne learnt, had been made by Madame Robinson.

“She’s dear,” said Ada, “but quite French. And, of course, she comes to church.”

No Nonconformists need apply; but Anne was thinking not of Madame’s religion but her bills. The employer of a quite French dressmaker called Robinson, born Duff, was no wife for Sam Branstone.

And by way of making Anne’s assurance doubly sure, Ada let slip something about being under the doctor.

But Anne was not sanguine. She saw clearly enough that it was precisely Ada’s weakness which was her strength with Sam. Sam had been leant upon by Madge and George, and liked it, as Anne herself, in that case, had liked it. But that was a different case from this. Madge had the claim of sisterhood; Anne could see nothing in Ada and Ada’s weakness to give her the claim to lean on Sam: and the leaning in marriage should not be one-sided. Ada could give Sam nothing except herself, and Anne did not think that gift worth having.

Sam, unfortunately, did and Anne doubted her power of changing his mind. Her first attempt, at all events, must be with Ada, and she felt cramped in Ada’s house, for the reason, perhaps, that it was Peter’s house, the shrine of his simplicity. She wanted Ada cut off from the defences of the tea-table and her own familiar surroundings, and saying something about the warmth of the evening, suggested a ride on the top of a tram-car.

“I often do it myself,” said Anne. “It blows the cobwebs away.”

She did it as a matter of fact not often, for so it would have lost its quality of a dissipation, but with a wise irregularity she escaped the thraldom of her house on a tram-car. Tram rides were her romance, her safety-valve, her glimpse at life. Six-pennyworth of tram is cheaper in the long run than fourpennyworth of gin: both carry one away, but the tram-car brings one safely back.

Anne’s lip tightened when she saw that Ada did not change the flimsy shoes and that her hat eclipsed their flimsiness. A “baby” hat, of imitation lace, from which her face peeped out like a drooping, sapless flower. “Yes,” thought Anne. “Men being men, that hat is clever. It’s a trap for fools and it caught my fool. Ada Struggles, you’re dangerous.”

They took the front seat on the tram and aloud she said, using purposely her roughest accent: “It’s queer to think of our Sam marrying a lady. I’m not saying he doesn’t deserve it, but his father were a railway porter and mine were a policeman. His sister was in service.”

“Sam wall get on,” said Ada, with conviction.

“I’m none doubting it,” said Anne. “But he’s had luck and it’s a question if the luck’ll hold. Mr. Travers took him up and sent him to Grammar School, and Sam didn’t do too well there. He disappointed me and he’s not gone on as he might have done. The fight’s ahead of him yet and he’ll need a fighter by his side. I’ve done my share for him this long while and I’m getting old. I shall be glad of a rest, Ada. Sam’s an early riser and it’s weary work getting up on a winter’s morning to light the fire and get his breakfast ready. Only that won’t trouble you. You’re young.”

“Of course,” said Ada, “we shall have a servant.”

“What!” exclaimed Anne, “on two pounds ten a week, with me to keep and all? I wouldn’t reckon on that, if I were you. Later on, perhaps. But I know it can’t be done at present, or Sam would have done it for me.” The idea of Anne Branstone with a wench about her house struck her as humorous. Anne might have help some day—when she was bed-ridden: till then, her house was her house. “No,” she went on, “you can take it from me that it’ll not run to a servant. I don’t know what his idea is about me, whether he will want me to live with you or not. Likely not. A man doesn’t want his mother about when he’s wed.”

“No,” agreed Ada hopefully. Anne oppressed her.

“No. And I can get on with a pound a week from him. That’ll leave you thirty shillings. Well, I’ve done it, so I know it can be done, though mind you, it’s a struggle all the time and double tides when the babies begin to come. But of course I’ll help you—with advice. I’m not for forcing myself on you, but naturally I know Sam’s ways and his likings about food. He’s a bit difficult at times, too, but that’s nothing. All men are and you’ll know that, having had your father to do for. I don’t say Sam’s finicky, but he likes what he likes and I hope you’re fond of the same things. It always turned me up to clean a rabbit, and I never liked the smell of onions, but that’s a favourite dish of Sam’s and so I’d just to grin and bear it. And I know you’ll do the same for Sam.”

Ada squirmed helplessly. She could have screamed. Anne sat at the outside of the seat and pinned her to it. The tram seemed a Juggernaut car which drove implacably over her dreams: a prison where she was tortured by a coarse old woman with work-roughened hands and an endless flow of vitriol. She wanted to tell Anne that she lied, that the more she deprecated Sam the more desirable Ada knew him to be, that her grapes were neither sour nor to be soured by Anne’s insane jealousy; and she could not do it. The ride seemed more of a nightmare with every moment that passed. The tram was a mad wheeled cage with a mad driver and a mad guard. It left the lines and careered wildly into desolation, and she was fettered in it to an avenging fury who would not stop talking, but with ruthless common sense pricked all the bubbles of her hopes. She shut her eyes and abandoned herself to misery. Each minute seemed an hour. She thought that somebody was throttling her, that the flying cage was her tomb, that vampires sucked her blood, and her naked, drained body was shackled to her seat until the car, driving inevitably through black space, bumped finally against a star in one consuming smash. She opened her eyes to find that the tram had stopped at its suburban terminus and that Anne was asking: “Shall we get down for a walk or shall we go back by the same car?”

So she was still in the living world, and with the consciousness of it courage returned to her. For a minute she was silent, fighting her demons off, catching at facts and weighing them. Anne was not a vampire, but an old worn woman who had, curiously, the right to call Sam Branstone son—Ada’s future mother-in-law, and a quaint one too; one to be put firmly and haughtily in her place and kept there.

“We’ll stay on this car,” she replied. Its madness had departed. It was a tram, quite eminently sane and usual. “I think,” she went on, “that you exaggerate the difficulties. I’ve no doubt that Sam will have more money by the time we’re married. You see, he has me to work for now.”

Not a simper with it either. Pure matter-of-fact statement, and the truth of it hit Anne, the cool assumption that Ada as a spur to effort was more competent than Anne. And this to Anne who had learnt algebra for Sam, to Anne who had underfed herself that he might wear the clothes a Grammar School boy ought to wear, to Anne who—oh, it was ineffable, but it defeated her because she knew, bitterly, gallingly, but undeniably, that it was true. This baby-faced chit, this fool in petticoats was more to Sam than the mother who bore him. Queen Anne was dead and Ada Struggles reigned in place of her.

CHAPTER X—GERALD ADAMS, SOCIOLOGIST

ANNE called at Madge’s on her way home. Madge’s, in spite of George’s progress, was still the house which had been the premises of the Hell-fire Club. Anne did not often go there and never without reason, but Madge was at a loss to know the reason of this visit, nor did she guess it when Anne unobtrusively dovetailed into The conversation about young Sam Chappie a question which might have seemed irrelevant. “Have you done anything yet with that spare room of yours upstairs?” she asked.

“No,” said Madge. “Nor likely to, I fancy.” That was the reason of the visit. Anne was safeguarding her retreat, though she by no means admitted that it would come to a retreat. Engagements do not invariably lead to marriage. Meantime, hers was the waiting game and a rupture with Sam at this stage was to be avoided.

When he asked her, not too confidently, if she did not agree with him about the wonder of Ada, she exercised a noble self-restraint, and all she said was: “She’s not the wife for a poor man, Sam.”

“No,” said Sam thoughtfully. “I’d tumbled to that. And I don’t mean to be poor either,” and so went out to open the dark chapter of his bright success. He went to the Concentrics, not knowing that he was going to his fate. He went because it was the night of their weekly meeting and he had to go somewhere to avoid Anne’s eye, but his mood was not concentric. “I must get rich for Ada, rich for Ada,” was the burden of his thought—so early did he justify Ada’s words to Anne—and it was not a timely thought for a Concentrics evening.

He had even forgotten that he had a special interest in this meeting, where the lecturer was to be Adams, once Sam’s pet aversion and unbeatable rival at the Grammar School. He was reminded of it when he found himself accosted by a young man whom he could not at first identify.

“Jove! If it isn’t Sammy Branstone! Are you a member of these fossils?”

“Dubby Stewart!” said Sam, as recognition dawned on him.

“Reed’s here as well, somewhere,” said Stewart. “It’s a gathering of the clan.”

Reed and Stewart, it seemed, were both members, which is to say that they had come once or twice some time ago and continued to keep up the small subscription from force of habit or through sheer weakness to stop paying it. Few societies indeed could exist were it not for the enthusiasm of the attending nucleus and the subscriptions of the nonattending mass.

“We came to hear Gerald Adams make an ass of himself,” Stewart explained. “What a subject!”

Sam had even forgotten what the subject was. “Rich for Ada, rich for Ada,” was still ringing in his ears.

The subject was “Social Purity.”

“Which accounts,” said Stewart, “for the size of the audience. They’ve all come hoping for the worst. I know I have.”

The worst did not happen, or, rather, if it did, it was so skilfully disguised that nobody recognized it as the worst. It was easy to mistake it for the best.

Adams was one part in earnest and two parts impish in the manner of the superior person who is out for an intellectual lark. He had a constant preoccupation with that which is known above all other questions as the social question. It was not a nice preoccupation for a young man: it was, for instance, remote from the healthy exuberance of Sam’s Rabelaisianism. And, of course, Adams was wily: he wasn’t the stuff of martyrdom. He enjoyed, as an intellectual gymnastic, the treatment of his subject so that it should at once shock his audience and win him their approval as an honest man doing an unpleasant job from conviction.

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.

Sam began by congratulating himself on the good fortune that had been his in having been the school-fellow of the distinguished Mr. Adams. Adams gazed hard at Sam through his austere pince-nez and was observed perceptibly to start. “Gad,” he was thinking, “it’s that lout, the porter’s son.” But he liked Sam’s flattery very well. Sam, it appeared, had been so deeply impressed by Mr. Adams’ admirable, indeed eloquent and moving address, and by the chairman’s very just eulogy of it, that he thought it would be a tremendous pity if so arresting, so well-written a paper failed to reach a wider audience than that before which it had been read. They had been waiting for this paper; its appeal was wide; the urgency of its need, instinct in every word of it, was emphasized by the chairman’s remarks. He had, therefore, a practical proposal to make. The paper ought to be printed, and if Mr. Adams could spare him a few moments after the meeting, Sam hoped that he would let him arrange the matter.

He sat down amongst great applause. Under its cover Stewart whispered: “You inimitable ass!” Sam looked at him in pained surprise. “I want to see that paper in print,” he declared indignantly.

The debate meandered in the usual futile way. Few had anything to say, but many liked the sound of their own voices and indulged their preference at length, till both speakers and talkers had taken their innings and Sam was able to go up to the platform. Peter had not changed his mind and was complimenting Adams in his simple, charming way.

It ought, no doubt, to have made Adams thoroughly ashamed of himself, but it did not. It hardened his cynicism so that, when Sam came up, all he was thinking was: “I’ve gulled the parson. Now to bounce the porter’s son.”

“How are you, Branstone?” he asked. “Glad to meet you again.”

“And I you,” said Sam. They shook hands. “Have you had time to think of what I proposed?”

“As a matter of fact,” said Adams, which is the usual way of beginning a lie, “I’d thought of sending my little paper to one of the Reviews—the Fortnightly or the Contemporary.”

“Excellent,” said Peter.

Sam could have kicked him. “I venture to differ,” he said. “The chief object should be to reach as wide a public as possible. My own idea was to do it by itself in the form of a——” he was going to say “pamphlet,” but altered it to “brochure.” He thought it sounded more attractive. “In the heavy reviews it would be read by comparatively few, and it would not stand alone as in a brochure. It would take its place along with other articles. And I have heard that contributors to the reviews are not paid highly.”

Adams had not thought of payment at all, but he thought of it now, with zest. He was rich, but the idea of despoiling the porter’s son, who had had the assurance to go to school with him, struck him as the crowning move in a jolly game. This was, transcendently, his night for winning.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, which was true. “I suppose I should get about twenty pounds for it.”

“I will give you twenty-five,” said Sam.

“Sam!” protested Peter. He approached the motive (as he understood it), but considered the offer reckless from a young man who contemplated matrimony.

“Twenty-five pounds,” repeated Sam firmly.

“Well,” laughed Gerald, quite unable not to laugh at the idiot’s persistence, “if you’re as keen on doing good as all that, I’ll take the offer.”

“Right,” said Sam. “I’ll settle it at once.”

He went to the chairman’s table and made out a form of assignment of copyright. He had a little knowledge of the law, and it was a dangerous thin—for the other fellow. But both Sam and Adams went home that night in a state of cherubic self-satisfaction.

“What a game?” thought Adams. “And what an ass!”

Curiously, the thoughts of Sammy Branstone were not dissimilar. He had this advantage over Adams: that Adams had read his paper and had not watched his audience all the time. Sam had watched the audience and thought twenty-five pounds a cheap price for that paper.

He slept on it, and awoke next day with confidence in his investment undisturbed, but the news which awaited him at the office shook him at first. It was one thing to see a profitable side-line in the publication of Adams’ address and another to be suddenly obliged to regard the copyright of that paper as his one sound asset. He feared, in cold daylight, that it was not quite sound enough for that.

Yet what had happened did not come as a complete surprise. Sam knew Travers’ habits and knew that men of his habits are liable to die suddenly. Travers had died in the night, and Sam was very angry.

He told himself that he had no luck with people’s deaths. His father had died too soon for Sam, and now Travers was dead just when Sam had become engaged, and when he had undertaken a speculation which, however high his hopes of it, was after all speculative.

An estate agent’s business is largely personal and, if there is no obvious successor, no heir apparent already in training for the succession, is apt to fall to pieces when its head dies. The process of disintegration in this case had set in long ago; drink had begun what death now ended; and there was no heir. Lance Travers had decided for medicine and was, on the material side, little affected by his father’s death, since Travers had bought him a practice a year earlier somewhere in the South, and the neighbourhood was proving healthily valetudinarian.

The office was not a cheerful place that day. Men estimated their savings and balanced them against the probable weeks of unemployment before they found new places. A few of them, no doubt, might hope to “go with” the business to whomever bought it; and they wondered who would buy and which of them would be engaged by the purchaser.

They fancied Branstone’s chances, and so, in fact, did Sam, but it was all in the air and exceedingly disturbing just when he had given himself so much else to think about. Even if he did move with the business, it could only be as a clerk. He lost the advantage of Travers’ friendliness and, besides, he was not sure that anybody would think the business worth buying. Travers had no right to die.

Then the thought struck him that he was taking it lying down. He, a lad of mettle, was whining like these gutless clerks in the office. He was betraying his lucky star. Death, even Tom Branstone’s, had not been forbiddingly unkind to him. Tom’s death had led him indirectly to the office, to Minnifie, the Concentrics, Ada, and he began to see in Travers’ death the possibilities of good. It might be the finger of fate, pointing him away from the office which had served its turn to a new dispensation to be arranged by the collaborators, Sam and Providence, upon the rock of Adams’ paper.

They carried on the routine work of the office as men under sentence of death do little, ordinary things and find a solace in them. Then, late that afternoon, Lance Travers came. He had travelled since early morning, had been home, seen his father’s doctor and his father’s solicitor and was now come to see Sam. They sat in Travers’ private office, where the blinds were drawn, and in the presence of Travers’ son, who owed his life to him, Sam was conscious of a deeper feeling than he had ever known before, he was no longer angry because Travers had died, but mourned him honestly.

“By the way,” said Lance presently, “did my father ever tell you about his will?”

“His will!” said Sam. “No. Why should he?”

“I thought he might have done,” said Lance. “He made it last year after he bought me my practice. He thought then that he ought to do something for you, but he didn’t expect to live long and he put it in his will. There’s a thousand pounds for you.”

Sam took it nicely. “I’d rather,” he said, “that he were still alive;” and, at the moment, he meant it.

But he had been right. It was the finger of fate.

CHAPTER XI—UNDER WAY

AS a simple matter of course, Lance offered Sam the first refusal of his father’s business, but was not surprised when Sam declined to think of it.

Sam was far more surprised at himself than Lance at Sam. Lance had never looked upon estate agency as a desirable profession, whereas Sam had been bored with its routine without losing his respect for its utility, and only yesterday he would have jumped at the chance of owning the business. He heard with astonishment the sound of his own voice politely refusing the offer, but having refused he did not tamper with his swift decision.

The fact is, one supposes, that what might be called the quick-firing part of his intelligence had absorbed and reacted to the fact of his thousand pounds before the whole of him was properly aware of it. At any rate, he refused, and, on reflection, approved his refusal.

His speculation in Gerald Adams wore a different aspect now that he was a capitalist. “Money,” as he had remembered once before, “breeds money,” and he doubted if Travers’ business, robbed of Travers’ genial personality, were fecund enough for the pace of money-breeding he anticipated. Perhaps, too, there was something in the thought that the Travers’ agency was dead man’s shoes, while, win or lose, the idea of publishing Adams’ lecture was his own invention.

Another thing that happened to him with his legacy was the feeling that he had regained caste; he belonged again with his old school-fellows. “How many of them,” he thought, “can lay hands at a moment’s notice on a thousand pounds?” and walked erectly through the street where, naturally, since he had not met him in eight years until last night, he encountered Stewart.

“Hullo,” said Stewart, “how’s the patron of letters? And would a drink be any use to you?”

Sam hesitated. Did the way to the society of the Olympians lie through the doors of the public-house? Stewart was undeniably Olympian: he had the air, the manner, the clothes of well-assured success. He had a lightness and a poise that excited Sam’s envy. He had style, this youth who might be anything, but who, Sam cynically thought, had probably not paid for his distinguished clothes, while Sam was the owner of a thousand pounds. He was, thereby, Olympian in quiet fact, which need not be shrieked from the house-tops, as Stewart had, apparently, to shriek. Sam was, and there was the possibility that Stewart only appeared to be. It gave him strength to refuse. Not from principle, but from economical prejudice Sam was a teetotaller.

“I don’t take alcohol,” he said.

“It’s never too late to mend,” said Stewart. “Still, there’s a café here, and we’ll drink coffee. It’s bad for our hearts, but Balzac wrote the ‘Comédie Humaine’ on black coffee, so there may be something in the vice, though it isn’t a habit of mine. Two black coffees, Sophie,” he ordered from the waitress.

“If it isn’t a habit of yours,” asked Sam, “how do you come to know the waitress by name?”

“‘My dear ass!” said Stewart pityingly.

“Do you call them all Sophie?”

“Only when it’s their name. Your name is Sophie, isn’t it?” he said as the girl returned with their coffee.

“Yes, sir.”

Stewart appreciated Sam’s astonishment. “I know I’m showing off, but I like it. If you see a girl with an idiotic silver brooch made up of the letters SOPHIE you can assume that it’s her name, and not the name of her best boy. Simple, when you know how it’s done, like all first-rate conjuring.”

“I hadn’t noticed her brooch,” said Sam.

“I had. That’s the difference. Still, it isn’t fair to blame you. I’m a professional observer.” Sam took Stewart to mean that he was a detective, but hadn’t time to ask for confirmation, because Stewart asked instead: “And what, by the way, are you?” And threw him into some embarrassment by the question. What, indeed, at the moment was he?

“Doesn’t your observation tell you?” he fenced.

“It told me last night that you’re a considerable lunatic. Did you buy that stuff of Adams’?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Thought I saw you in the act as I went out. Obviously, then, you’re a tripe merchant.”

“I wonder,” said Sam, “whether you could help me, Stewart. Seriously, I mean.”

“In the tripe trade?”

“I want very much to meet a journalist.” He thought a detective ought to know journalists.

“But, my dear fellow, this is a café. It isn’t a bar. What do you want a journalist for?”

“I will tell that to the journalist.”

“If you want to start a paper and you’re looking for an editor, you needn’t look further than me. There have been candid moments in my life when I have called myself a journalist. At present, I edit the Manchester Warden, but I’m open to conviction.” He didn’t quite edit that paper—yet, but reported for it at six pounds a week. He did not know shorthand, but he quoted Joseph Conrad and Henry James, correctly and incongruously, when he wrote a notice of a music-hall performance.

“I’m afraid,” said Sam astutely, “that when I said a journalist, I meant something very different from you, but I will tell you how I stand and perhaps you will advise me. Last night, as you know, I bought Adams’ paper. I gave him twenty-five pounds for it.”

“Lunacy,” said Stewart, “is a mild word for your complaint. Twenty-five shillings would be a top price for it in a friendly market.”

“To-day I reached the office to learn that my employer had died suddenly. You remember Lance Travers? It was his father, and with his death, for all practical purposes the business comes to an end. Well, you see my position.”

Stewart quoted Sheridan: “‘The Spanish Fleet thou canst not see, because it is not yet in sight.’ And much the same applies to your position, my lad. Its postal address is the Womb of Time.”

“That is true,” said Sam. “And I may add that I am engaged to be married.”

“I can admire thoroughness,” said Stewart. “You omit none of the essentials.”

“Now, with it all,” said Sam, “I’m still too proud to go to Adams and ask him to let me off my bargain.”

“And it wouldn’t be any use if you did,” said Stewart. “He’d laugh at you.”

“I can believe it of him. But I’m landed with his paper. It has cost me twenty-live pounds. I meant to print it, and I mean to print it, but I mean now to sell it when it is printed.” Sam left Stewart to suppose that, had Travers not died, he would have distributed that pamphlet free. “Money,” he added, “is a necessity.”

He had taken the right line. Stewart’s instinctive generosity was touched, and he meant to give this lame dog a lift over the stile. “I see where your journalist comes in. All right, Branstone, you can count on me.”

“On you?” said Sam. “Oh, I couldn’t ask it of you.”

“You didn’t ask,” replied Stewart naively. “I offer. I may edit the Manchester Warden, but Zeus nods sometimes, ’busmen have been known to take a holiday, and there is a paper called the Sunday Judge in whose chaste columns I have written under the name of Percy Persiflage. Send me a proof of that pamphlet and Percy shall stamp upon it. He will say that no decent person could read it without being revolted, and the pamphlet will boom. It’s the Sunday-paper public that you want, and... No, Percy shall not stamp. Percy shall bless. He will be moved to admiration of Mr. Adams’ earnestness, he will applaud the high moral purpose, and will do the rest by correspondence. Get your sisters and your cousins and your aunts to pitch in letters on either side, and I’ll see they get printed. I make this alteration because of the bookstalls.”

“The bookstalls?” asked Sam vaguely.

“This problem of distribution,” said Stewart impressively, “is the most difficult question of modern life. The producer is here, you; the consumer (we hope) is everywhere, and the problem is to bring your pamphlet to the thirsting consumer. The answer is the bookstall, but the bookstalls are cautious. When I say bookstalls I mean the right bookstalls. You will never see your money back if the only bookstalls which will exhibit your pamphlet are those which sell atrociously printed paperbacked editions of ‘Nana’ and ‘Fanny Hill.’ You must flourish on the bookstalls, and they banned ‘Esther Waters.’ The bookstalls, Branstone, are going to call for tact, and tact shall begin with Percy’s appreciation.”

“Or earlier,” said Sam.

“Earlier?”

“I hadn’t thought of the bookstalls, but this may help there, as well as in other ways. I mean, as far as Manchester is concerned, and if we get it on the stalls here, they can’t very well refuse it in other places.”

“Manchester being Manchester, it isn’t likely,” said Stewart. “What’s your idea?”

“Only this,” said Sam, and showed him his proposed cover for the pamphlet.

THE SOCIAL EVIL

Being an Address

By Gerald Adams, M.A.,

Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford.

As Read before the Concentric Society with The Rev. Peter Struggles in the Chair.

Stewart looked at it, then he looked at Sam, and Sam seemed to him very little like a lame dog now. He whistled loudly. “You’ll get your money back, my lad,” he said. “But this is rough on Peter.”

“Mr. Struggles approved of the lecture.”

“I wonder if he will approve of this?” said Stewart.

“He can’t go back on his word,” said Sam. “Besides, I’m engaged to his daughter.”

“The thing that troubles me,” said Stewart admiringly, “is that I took you for a harmless lunatic. I’m only a journalist myself, with one foot in the Manchester Warden and the other in the Sunday Judge. I’m a Tory on Sundays and a Liberal on weekdays. I gave up honesty when I gave up being young, and I thought I knew the ropes by this time. But when I think that I took you for a guileless innocent, I want to go into a corner and kick myself hard.”

Sam found this rather alarming he knew that his use, or misuse, of Peter’s name was cunning, but began to regret that he had shown Stewart his pro posed cover. “But I get my review in the Judge?” he asked hardily.

“My son,” said Stewart, “you do. I’ve spent sixpence on coffee and half an hour on you. There’s good copy in this and I can’t afford to waste it. I’ve my living to earn, and Gerald Adams deserves the worst he’s going to get. At the same time, I’ll allow myself the luxury of telling you that yours is a lowdown game.”

“We didn’t make the world what it is, did we?” said Sam.

“And neither you nor I will leave it any better than we found it,” said Stewart, prophesying rashly with the boundless cynicism of his twenty-five years. “The worst of coffee,” he went on, finishing his cup, “is that it makes you thirsty. I’m going across the road for a drink. Do you have one with me?”

“No, thanks,” said Sam. “I have to see a printer.”

“Oh, yes. Well, why not the Judge Press? I daresay I could get you in there on the ground floor.”

“But they are not quite the right people for this. They print sporting papers, and——”

“You’ll die from overheated bearings in your brain-box,” said Stewart. “You think of everything.”

Sam had, at least, thought that a printer (however obscure by comparison was the Judge Press, whose works were a small town in themselves) who issued a religious paper was better for his purpose than the printers of the Sunday Judge, Sporting Notions and the Football Times. He went to Carter, Meadowbank & Co., who were on the verge of bankruptcy, but had the advantage of printing Christian Comfort and the Church Child’s Weekly, and arranged with them to print five thousand copies of Adams’ paper. Carter, who was the whole firm, looked askance at the title, but when Sam pointed out that the Rev. Mr. Struggles had approved of the contents, Carter succumbed at once, and did not even attempt a protest when Sam instructed him to print on the whole five thousand:

“This first edition of one thousand copies is issued at sixpence. The price for future editions will be one shilling. Samuel Branstone, Publisher.”

Carter’s dingy office was decorated with the chief products of his firm, texts, the stock-in-trade of commercialized religiosity. Well handled, there was money in texts, but Carter was an old man with declining powers and a conservative mind. Meadowbank, who had looked after the distributive side of the business, was lately dead, and Carter’s nightly prayer was that the concern might last his time. As things were promising, it seemed unlikely, but here was Sam with an order for him and no disposition to beat him down in price. Carter did not like the instruction to describe five thousand copies as one thousand, and he didn’t like the subject of the pamphlet, but he wanted business, and he couldn’t conceive of a pirate sailing under the flag of Mr. Struggles.

Sam rammed that home, feeling the man’s hesitation. “I think it probable,” he said, “that Mr. Struggles will preach a sermon on this pamphlet. Perhaps I might tell you that I am going to be his son-in-law.”

That settled Carter, and he took the order. He knew, and was sensitive to, the influence of Peter Struggles, curate. He knew that in the parish of. St. Mary’s, Peter’s smile counted for more than the vicar’s weightiest word, and that while the vicar was unknown outside his parish, Peter had authority throughout Manchester—an authority which had lately growm through Peter’s refusal of preferment to an easy living in the country. It hadn’t, of course, been Peter who had told of that refusal, he had not told Ada. But it had leaked out, and Manchester, which despises selflessness in men, honoured it in the curate; Mancunians were flattered by his loyalty to St. Mary’s and by the thought that they were fellow citizens to saintliness.

Emphatically, the name of Peter Struggles on the pamphlet was a clou, but Sam had not told Peter of it yet, and he must do it. He could not afford an accident, and Peter, he considered, was manageable.

Ada met him at the door with a bright smile, and raised expectant lips, but he shook his head, touch ing her shoulder tenderly, and passed in front of her into the room so that, when she followed, her face expressed the anxiety he desired. He entered himself as a man crushed by grief.

“What is it, Sam?” she asked. “What’s the matter?”

Peter closed “Plotinus” reluctantly: he never found time enough for reading, and here was one of his few evenings interrupted. He had the thought, feeling it ungenerous, that interruptions of this kind would end when Ada was married.

“I’ve had sad news to-day. Mr. Travers died in the night. It’s... it’s rather a blow.”

Peter disdained priestly conventionalities. “He was a good friend to you, Sam.”

“A second father,” said Sam carefully, not taking the opportunity of telling that Travers’ friendship had lasted beyond death. Perhaps he thought this moment too sacred for the intrusion of a legacy. “Of course,” he went on, “I’ve had all day to think of it, and of the difference this will make to me—to us, that is, Ada, for you and me.”

“What difference, Sam?” she asked sharply.

“It comes to this,” he said dejectedly, “that I am out of work and competition is so desperate. While he lived, I had his friendship behind me. Now—I don’t say that I’m afraid to stand alone. No doubt it will be good for me eventually, but, Ada, you see how it may postpone our hopes.”

Ada saw it. “Plotinus” took that opportunity of slipping from Peter’s knee, and Peter saw it, too, and sighed. “Oh, Sam!” said Ada.

“And,” said Sam, looking at Peter with a fine affectation of guilt, “there is my recklessness of last night. In my then circumstances, it was extravagant. To-day it looks worse than that.”

“You couldn’t know,” said Peter kindly.

“No,” Sam agreed. “I couldn’t know, and I have the feeling now that I must abide by what I did.”

“Very proper, Sam, but Mr. Adams is not poor and I should think that if you were to go to him———”

“Oh, please,” said Sam, “please don’t press me to do that. A bargain, I feel so strongly, is a bargain and should be kept at all costs.”

Peter felt silently ashamed of himself. “You are perfectly right,” he said.

“Well,” said Sam, “that’s how I feel, but in a sense I’m landed with the thing and I propose to go on with it. As I see it—and I know there’s a certain amount of inappropriateness in thinking at all of these practical affairs with my benefactor so recently dead, but I must, I must——” he looked at Ada and it was understood that his thought for her excused all—“As I see it, it’s a case for going on and trying to pull the chestnuts out of the fire, so to speak. I shall print that paper, and the good that I hoped to do will not be lost because my circumstances have altered, but I shall make a small charge for it to cover expenses as far as possible. And as I naturally want it to sell well, I had the idea of stating on the cover that it was first read at the Concentrics under your chairmanship. The point of that is that all the members were not there last night; it will call their attention to it; and they will, I hope, buy. It makes certain of a few reliable purchasers.”

“Quite, quite,” said Peter. “It’s an excellent idea. Though I can hardly suppose that mention of my name has any value, the name of the society should certainly help.”

His modesty was quite incurable. He had not the faintest notion of the wide-spread influence of Peter Struggles. “I have thought of little else all day but Mr. Adams’ paper. I wondered if it was my duty to speak of this terrible subject from the pulpit. The Church ought not to be silent or it may be thought to acquiesce.”

Sam felt his heart leap within him. “Adams thought frankness best,” he said.

“Yes, yes, at the Concentrics. But there are difficulties for me, and perhaps I shall speak only to the Young Men’s Class at the-Sunday School. Though that,” he reflected, “is perilously near to compromise.”

“But what is it?” asked Ada. “What are you talking about?”

Sam was silent. So was Peter, and the silence grew till he felt it a reproach. He looked at Sam. “You see?” he said. “That is the dilemma of the Church. I shall speak to the young men, and, after that perhaps, perhaps——” He glanced at Ada.

“No,” he finished decidedly, “I must leave it at that.” He was fifty-six, and most of his life had been lived under Victoria the Good.

CHAPTER XII—DROPPING THE PILOT

ANNE lived for Sam: and if she rarely showed it, if, for instance, it appeared sometimes that she lived to make her house the cleanest in the row, that was no more than a symptom of her stoicism. She lived for Sam, and he knew it. She belonged to a race which hates ostentation like the devil and keeps its feelings veiled behind a grim reserve. It conceals emotion as a hidden treasure and wears a mask which strangers take to indicate a want of sensibility. She had not the habit of caressing Sam; she chastened whom she loved; and Sam was very well aware of the strength of Anne’s love.

She was ready, at the proper time, to give him to the proper woman, but she held that Ada was not the woman nor this the time. She was ready to go her ways from Sam, and from life itself, when he made a marriage of which she could approve, but she was not ready to leave him to Ada Struggles of whom she disapproved. She was not ready to die for the likes of Ada Struggles. Let Sam marry Ada, and Anne, meant to live, because some day he would have need of her and, when the day came, she would be there.

Now, Sam would have been pleased if he could have told Anne about the pamphlet and the legacy. He had hoped after the Minnilie affair that his next “stroke” would be one of which he could tell Anne, but he did not see this as tellable. She would naturally ask what the pamphlet was about, and if Peter could not speak of it to his daughter, Sam could speak of it even less to his mother. And as to the legacy, what was the use of mentioning that to a woman who would point out that security was only to be had with two and a half per cent? Which wasn’t at all Sam’s notion of the uses of a thousand pounds.

After all, he was grown up and a man does not tell his mother everything. But unless he is a fool, he tells her the things which she is bound in any case to find out, and if he had foreseen the certainty of her finding out he would, not being a fool, have told her these. He did not foresee, because Anne did not read newspapers, but she had neighbours who did and who told her, with comments, of the storm which presently broke out in the columns of the Sunday Judge, and of Mr. Travers’ will, which received a small paragraph in the paper when it was proved.

“There was a time when you and me didn’t go in for secrets,” she said to him. “You’ve not had much to say to me of late and I’ve not seen much of you, either, with the hours you’re keeping, but I’d put it down to love. I know a man’s not rational when he’s courting, but it seems there’s a lot about my son that I’ve to learn. Why didn’t you tell me about Mr. Travers? Did you think I’d steal the money off you?”

“Of course not, mother, but I meant to come to you with a finished tale, not one that’s only just begun. I’m engaged in a business affair of which I was going to tell you when it was complete.”

“Yes,” she said, “I see. You’re risking your money. If you came out on the right side, you’d tell me about it, and if you lost you’d forget to tell me. Are you losing?”

“It’s early days to say.”

“Then maybe I’m still in time to nip this in the bud. What’s this about the Sunday Judge?”

“I Have you seen it?” he asked.

“Aye. You’re the talk of the street.”

“That’s splendid,” he let slip before he was aware of it.

“Splendid! There’s a gentleman writing to the paper to say that you’re trading in immorality.”

“I wrote that letter myself,” grinned Sam.

“You did what?”

“I’m afraid I shall never make you understand.”

“I doubt you won’t. Lying to me like that. Expecting me to believe you write to the paper about yourself and call yourself hard names. And the letter’s signed ‘Truth-teller,’ too. It’s printed in the paper that my son has lifted the lid from the cesspool and let loose a smell to make decent people vomit.”

“Yes. I know. Advertising is a coarse art.”

“Your name’s blackened for ever. And it’s my name, Sam, and the name your father gave me. It’s the name of honest folk and——”

“Mother, mother, don’t I tell you that it’s all advertisement?”

“What you tell me and what I can believe are coming to be two different things. I know what an advertisement in the paper is and I know what a letter is. This is a letter.”

Sam felt the hopelessness of further argument.

She had a simple-minded faith in the integrity of newspapers and the printed word, but he could at least show that the word could contradict itself. “Very well,” he said, “it’s a letter, and so is this.” He took a copy of the paper from his pocket. Stewart had kept his word, no great feat since he had a good idea of what his editor supposed the Sunday public to want, and a column of fervent correspondence flared under the heading of “The Social Evil.—Is the Pamphlet Justified?” Sam chose a letter which described Adams as a crusader and Branstone, his publisher, as a high-souled social reformer courageously risking misapprehension for principle and the right, calling the endorsement of the Rev. Peter Struggles to witness in proof of his irreproachable motives. “Well,” said Sam, “am I to be misapprehended after all, and by you?”

“You told me you wrote the other letter,” she said. “Don’t you mean that you wrote this one?”

“I don’t,” he said truthfully. He wrote his, attacking himself, on one side of Stewart’s desk, while Stewart at the other defended him. It had been great fun.

“And what,” she asked, “is the business affair you say you’re engaged on?”

“Why,” he said unguardedly, “it’s this.”

“Then I don’t misapprehend at all, my son. I apprehend very well. And you’ve worked Peter Struggles into it. Was that why you got engaged to Ada?”

“Mother!” he protested. “Doubt me if you like, but you must not doubt Mr. Struggles. He surely is above suspicion.”

“He’s keeping bad company just now,” said Anne, “and I doubt you’ve been too clever for him.”

Sam chose to be offended. “Is that what you think of me?” he asked.

“That you’re clever. Aye. I think that all right. I’ve known it since the time when you tricked a parcel of schoolboys out of a house of furniture and put George Chappie into it. You’re clever in the wrong places, Sam. When you were at school, you were clever out of school. You’re at business now and you ought; to be clever in honesty, and I’ve the notion that you’re being clever in dishonesty.”

“Of course,” he said, “this only shows how right I was not to tell you. It’s the old story. Women don’t understand business.”

“I know. Business is a pair of spectacles that makes black into white, but I don’t wear spectacles myself. Are you going to tell me what you’re doing with that thousand pounds?”

“I told you it isn’t decided yet. But if the sales of that pamphlet go up this week as they did last, I’m going into the publishing business with it.”

“So that you can publish more of the same sort?”

“If I can get them. There’s a lot of money in it.”

“Sam,” she said earnestly, “is that all you’re caring about?”

“You told me yourself that Ada was not the wife for a poor man.” He considered that a very neat score, to seem to make Anne responsible, but Anne was not to be deceived by any such seeming. As she saw it, Ada had corrupted Sam, Ada was the motive of this misuse of his cleverness; and the bitterness for Anne was doubly poignant. She believed in Sam, with a faith which had never swerved in spite of her disappointment in his school career; but she realized now that he had been marking time in Travers’ office, that it was Ada and not she who had quickened his energies to rapid action. Ada had quickened them, where under Anne they had lain dormant but the quickening had been corrupt. It came from Ada, poisoned at the source, and took to poisonous ways.

They had touched bottom now and reached essentials. “Sam,” she said, “I was joking like when I said a man’s not rational when he’s in love. But it was a true word spoken in jest. You’re not rational or you wouldn’t be doing these things and making a byword of the name of Branstone, and the reason you’re not rational is Ada. If you were in love with a good woman, you could no more do dishonourable things than fly. But you’re in love with a bad woman and it leads to bad results. Sam, do you think I like to tell you that you’ve made a mistake? And do you think I don’t know? Lad, lad, I love you, and I’ve never reckoned myself a fool. Choose now, I’m not the sort of fool to be jealous just because you get wed. I’d none be jealous of the right lass, Sam. I’d take her and welcome her and know she had a better right to you than me. But Ada Struggles has no right: she’s mean and grasping and she’s small in every way there is. She’s——”

“Stop, mother. Don’t forget that I am marrying Ada.”

“And nothing that I say will alter you? Sam, she’ll go on as she’s begun by sending you to this.” She put her hand on the lurid polemics of the Sunday Judge. “She’ll drive you down and down. You may make money and you may be rich, but there’ll be a curse on your riches and on all you do, and Ada Struggles is the name of the curse.”

Sam attempted a small levity. “That will be all right,” he said. “She’s going to change her name.” Anne shook her head. “A change of name’ull none change Ada’s nature. It’s the best part of your life that’s before you, and life with Ada spells ruin. I’m not telling you what I think. It’s what I know, and I ask you, Sam, to heed my words.”

“I’m heeding them,” he said, “but I know you’re wrong.”

“That’s the last you’ve got to say?”

“I’m sorry we don’t agree, mother.”

“Agreeing’s nowt,” she said, “and I’m nowt against your happiness. See, Sam, I’ll prove it. There’s a thought at the back of your mind that I’ve nothing against Ada but a grudge because she’s come between you and me. I say that girl’s no good for you, and I say I’ll do anything to force you to see it. There’s nowt of myself in this and maybe this will make you believe it.”

There was a good fire in the room and she put her hand into it. Sam was alert enough to drag her away before much damage was done, and he had oil on the hand in a moment.

“Don’t fuss,” said Anne, “but tell me what you think.”

“I think,” he said, “that you’re plumb crazy—with jealousy.”

It was not craziness, but fanatic devotion to an idea: and the idea was Sam, Sam’s happiness, Sam’s future. She put her hand into the fire hoping to convince, and she would have sat on the fire if she had thought the larger act would carry a fuller conviction. But he did not need to be convinced that she objected to Ada; the point was that her objections were unfounded, and, in the face of Ada’s sublime and stunning merits, idiotic.

One cannot put a hand into the fire without suffering for it, and Anne was suffering acutely. Her face was drawn with pain and her lips were trembling uncontrollably, but her voice was firm.

“I’ve done my best to save you, Sam. If you’ve nothing better to say than that, you and me have come to a parting.”

“Then,” said Sam, “we’ve come,” and turned his back on her. He thought she would come round, that she would get over her attack of frenzied jealousy. It was idle threat to talk of a parting. Why, she was dependent on him, and in more ways than one. He housed and kept her, but, more than that, she needed him. His presence was the breath of life to her. He knew that, and he let her go!

Of course, he thought she would come back, with a sharp lesson well learnt. She had to learn that he was grown-up, of an age to act for himself and choose and think without her tutelage. Only, she did not come back. She went to Madge and stayed with Madge; and the terms on which she stayed were her terms. “I furnish the room,” she said, “and I pay you a rent for it. Also, I pay for what I eat.”

She paid. At the age of fifty-two the mother of Sara Branstone, of Branstone and Carter, and the mother-in-law of George Chappie, of the Chappie Window-Cleaning and Bill Posting Company (a smaller affair than its name, but the source of a regular five pounds a week), was a charwoman on three days out of the seven, and it was not lack of offers which limited her to three days, but the fact that she paid her way on three days’ result. She kept other people’s houses as clean as she had kept her own.

It was suggested to George Chappie that it was hardly decent in him to allow his mother-in-law to go out charring at her age—a prosperous man like him. “I know,” he was reported to have replied, “and we’ve tried all ways we can. But you can’t argue with Mrs. Branstone.”

“She’s one of the old sort, isn’t she?” said his gossip, who, perhaps, endured a mother-in-law of another kind.

“All that,” said George succinctly.

CHAPTER XIII—THE INTERMITTENT COURTSHIP

ONLY by long service does one become an artist, but one becomes married by a simple ceremony. It is the tragedy of marriage, which is the most difficult of all the arts, that most people come to it without apprenticeship. Perhaps the popularity of widows as brides is due to the fact that the widow is a widow: that she has been broken in to marriage: that she has not everything to learn: that one, at any rate, of the contracting parties, is expert. There is much to be said for the policy of the “trial trip.”

Courtship, if intimate enough, may be a fairish substitute, bowdlerized, as it were, for a “trial trip,” but when Sam married Ada he knew pitiably little about her.

He thought that she was wonderful. Not only had he to think it, but he actually did think it. He had to think it because only for a prodigy among women could he have treated his mother as he did. He had thought her crazy when she put her hand into the lire, but he knew it was heroic. If she were crazy, it was for love for him, and at the core, he loved her too and felt ashamed of himself, but Ada stood between them, and he was not going to give up Ada. Then he was busy, time wore on, custom blunted the prick of conscience, and it finally became a habit either not to think of Anne at all, or to think comfortably of her as happy enough with Madge.

And he actually thought Ada wonderful because the conditions of his courtship fought for her. He was visibly prospering; he liked prosperity; it was Ada who had initiated his prosperity; and she was glamorous for that. Again, he was very busy in those days with the first steps of his new business, too occupied to play the diligent lover, and saw her very fitfully. So seen, she did not lose the wonder of surprise, but came upon him freshly with each of their meetings, able to parade for each some new attraction from her slender stock of charm. She kept their intercourse egregiously correct, and he thought her mystery was infinite. She hid her shallowness behind affected modesty, knowing that an intimate courtship would discover to him that there was nothing to discover, and attracted by aloofness. It was immensely clever in its short-winded way: a cleverness that lasted the course of courtship, but evaporated when the tape—the altar—was reached. It did not seem necessary to Ada to go on being clever once that ring was on her finger. She was married, she had achieved: she was clever for the spurt, and had no cleverness left, for the Marathon Race. And Sam had many preoccupations in those days which prevented him from thinking too much about Ada.

If he was dull about his courtship, his wits were sharp enough for other matters. He had the satisfaction, almost from the day of its issue, of seeing the pamphlet sell steadily. Very quickly it ceased to be a case of getting his money back, and became merely a question of how many cents per cent he was going to make. His first edition of five thousand (the soi-disant thousand) was rapidly exhausted, and the presses of Carter Meadowbank worked overtime to cope with the demand. He cast bread upon the waters by sending copies to every name in the Clergy List and every Member of Parliament; and did not cast in vain. Free advertisement was lavished upon him. Somehow, he had found one of those times when the social conscience is stirred: he published, without knowing it, opportunely, and the diabolic cleverness of Gerald Adams’ writing steered him safely past the rocks of the Public Prosecutor. It seemed only to stimulate demand when he raised the price to a shilling.

He had no further trouble with the pamphlet. It sold itself, but sitting still watching the wheels go round did not appeal to Sam, who had a thousand pounds to multiply. He hadn’t quite the hardihood to believe that he could multiply his thou sand as rapidly as he had the twenty-five which he paid Adams, but he felt that he was launched as a publisher and had nothing to publish.

His thoughts were diverted from that solecism one day when he went into Carter’s printing-office to speed up the foreman. The foreman admitted that the pace could be improved. “But I dunno, sir, that the boss wants it improved. There’s nothing in to follow this job of yours. You might say you’ve been the saving of Mr. Carter.”

Sam was thoughtful for a minute. He had not looked upon himself as the saviour of Mr. Carter and did not appreciate that character when it was thrust upon him. He went into Carter’s office.

“This little tract of mine,” he said (“tract” seemed the light description in that text-hung room), “is selling remarkably well, and the demand increases. Now, I’ve nothing to say about the past.-I came in here a total stranger and you quoted me accordingly. But it’s only fair to warn you that I have gone into prices with other printers and I may find it necessary to make a change.”

Carter made no effort to hide his dismay. “I hope you won’t do that, Mr. Branstone. At least, give me a chance of revising my price.”

“Once bitten,” said Sam, “is twice shy, and you don’t deny that you bit.”

“But surely business,” argued Carter, “is business.”

“It is,” said Sam grimly, “and if you’ll answer me a few questions on the understanding that this is a business interview and I’m not being impertinently inquisitive, I shall be obliged.”

“I’ll do my best,” said Carter.

“Thank you. How old are your printing-presses?”

“Twenty years.”

“Consequently they are almost hopelessly out of date?”

Carter had a tenderness for those presses. They had been young when he was young, were bought when the world smiled on him and his business had its hedyay. They had kept him and he could not be disloyal now. “I believe that they have printed your tract efficiently, Mr. Branstone,” he defended them.

“Oh, there’s life in the old dogs yet,” said Sam. “I’m not proposing to make scrap-iron of them.”

“As they belong to me,” said Carter tartly, “it would not make such difference if you did propose it.”

“Therefore,” said Sam, “I don’t propose it—yet. Please remember that I’m talking business. Do you care to tell me what that text cost to produce and what you get for it?”

Carter did not care, but, though he wondered at himself, he told. “And that?” Sam asked, pointing to another; and again Carter told.

“Then,” said Sam, “there are two religious papers which you print for the proprietors. What——?”

“Young man,” interrupted Carter, “are you proposing to buy my business?”

“No,” said Sam coolly, “only to become your partner in it. What profit were you going to tell me you made on the papers?”

Carter told: he was too stupefied to do anything else. “Um,” said Sam. “It isn’t much.”

“They are a good work,” said Carter, and Sam looked at him sharply, but the old man was perfectly sincere. It was good work to print religious magazines and he did it for next to nothing.

“Well,” said Sam, “thank you. Now I won’t mince matters: When I came along with my—tract, I enabled you to postpone filing your petition, but it was only a postponement, and if you’ll look facts in the face the one big fact for you is bankruptcy.”

“The Lord will provide.” Carter had lived from hand to mouth for many months in that belief.

“If you like to look at it that way. He has provided: He has provided me. I will make you a good offer, Mr. Carter. I will introduce five him dred pounds capital into the business for a halfshare in the plant, goodwill and future profits of this concern. That is, the printing business. What I, as publisher, do has nothing to do with you.”

“... I must think it over,” said Carter; but they both knew that he had already decided to accept.

“The Lord,” Carter was thinking, “has provided.” Sam, on the contrary, was thinking, “I may or may not be a fool to go into this without getting an accountant’s report on the books, but I believe in rapid action, and if I’d offered too high a price I’m certain that he’s imbecile enough to have told me.”

It remained to find something to print, and he wanted Stewart’s advice, but, with the idea of being first on the side of the angels, went to see Peter Struggles. The battle which had raged round the pamphlet had left Peter untouched, even though more than one of the clergy who received it from Sam had thought it their duty to write to Peter’s bishop. The bishop failed to see a case for disciplinary measures: Peter might have been sinned against but he had not sinned. And the Sunday Judge was read by neither Peter nor his bishop. (The Church is notoriously out of touch with modern life, but, after all, it is hardly reasonable to expect the Church to compliment its rival, the Sunday Press, by reading it.)

Nevertheless, Peter had, on reflection, felt some wavering doubts about the pamphlet. His intermittent shrewdness threw a flickering light through the haze of his charity and gave him moments of discomfort.

Sam’s attitude during this call was admirably calculated to resolve his doubt. He wanted, with an eye to the future, to make sure of Peter, whose name he might require another day, and was ready, even if it were not immediately profitable, to placate Peter now. He explained that he had joined forces with Mr. Carter, and at once acquired merit in Peter’s eyes. Carter was irreproachable. He did not explain by what means he had been able to join Carter and it did not occur to Peter to ask. Sam was not going to tell Peter, who would tell Ada, of his legacy. If she found out, as Anne had found out, he could not help it, but, meantime, it was his secret. Ada, like Anne, belonged to the sex which had no understanding of business.

“And the point,” said Sam, “with a business like Mr. Carter’s, is to use it for good. I take it that the texts do good, but perhaps they are only for the simple-minded. I hope I don’t despise people for their simplicity, but my own taste runs rather to books and I think you will agree with me.”

Peter agreed, with a quotation which rather dashed Sam; he had an idea that poetry did not sell.

“‘Poets are the trumpets which sing to battle. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’”

“Yes,” said Sam. “Quite so. But isn’t poetry going to the opposite extreme? I had the thought of something more direct. Good prose with a good moral.”

“Excellent,” said Peter, off again.

“‘Were not God’s laws,

His gospel laws, In olden time held forth

By types, shadows and metaphors?’”

“Of course they were,” said Sam, wondering when Peter would close his mental dictionary of quotations and come down to business, “and that quotation is very apt because I was thinking of classics. English classics, you know,” he explained hurriedly, “and classics because they are not copyright.”

“And have stood the test of time,” said Peter.

“Yes. Do you think you could propose a list? I should like to know that the first books I publish had been selected by you. I don’t think they ought to be exactly theological, but they must be good in every sense of the word.”

“Why not begin with the book from whose in traduction I just quoted?”

“Why not indeed?” said Sam, who hadn’t the faintest idea of the source of the quotation.

“Very well,” said Peter. “Suppose you put that down for one.”

Same made vague scratches on paper. He had a bookish reputation to sustain and he was not going to betray ignorance prematurely. “Then,” said Feter, “there is Law’s ‘Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life.’”

“I’m letting myself in for something,” thought Sam, but he wrote it down.

“‘The Imitation of Christ,’ and ‘The Little Flowers of St. Francis,’” Peter went on.

“I think those should be enough to begin with,” said Sam hurriedly.

“Four, isn’t it?” said Peter, recapitulating.

“The ‘Pilgrim’s Progress ‘“——(“Thank God,” thought Sam, “I needn’t give myself away.”)

“Yes, four,” he interrupted, reading the now completed list. “And I am very much obliged to you.”

He wasn’t, though, quite sure about it. He had “nobbled” Peter, but he feared those books would be a millstone round his neck. There might be a steady sale for the “Pilgrim’s Progress” as a prize, but the others——! Still, he need not print many copies of them, and—consoling thought—they would be good window-dressing tor his list. He hoped it would include other, very different, books.

“I’m sorry Ada is out,” Peter was saying, and Sam was rather startled to realize that he had not missed her. But he was sure of his position with her: it was his position for her which he had to consolidate. He proceeded to consolidate it by going in search of Stewart, and found him where he expected to find him, in a bar.

“I want your advice,” said Sam.

“Whisky for the gentleman, Flora,” said Stewart. “That’s my advice and you’ll get no other till you’ve taken this.”

Sam took it. Business is business and, beyond that, his thrifty prejudices were less necessary now.

“You’re not unteachable,” said Stewart. “It’s a point in your favour. The proper thing when you’ve drunk that is to ask me if I will have another. My reply will be in the affirmative and we shall then retire, with sustaining refreshment, into that corner, where I will advise you for as long as you can continue to buy whisky for me and drink level. I hate a shirker.”

Sam told him of his partnership with Carter. “I’m always troubled about you,” said Stewart. “I can never make up my mind whether you’re too clever to live or whether you were born with luck instead of brain. Obviously, you will publish novels.”

“There are so many kinds,” said Sam.

“No. Only two. Mine and the rest. But I suffer from honesty. Therefore I tell you that my novel has been refused by every publisher in London. It is waiting,” he said hopefully, “for a man with courage. The difference between it and the Yellow Book is that my book is yellow.”

“I see,” said Sam. “But I have gone into the publishing trade to make my living.”

“On the whole,” decided Stewart, “you are more knave than fool. And you would call it the publishing trade. It’s a benighted world, but there are still some publishers who aren’t in trade—beyond the midriff. Do you seriously come to me to ask what sort of novels to publish?”

“Yes.”

“The sort,” he said, “that is written for nursemaids by people who ought to be nursemaids.”

“That’s jealousy,” said Sam. “They get published and you don’t.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” said Stewart. “But I’ve always heard that seeing is believing. Do you ever go to the theatre?”

“Not often.”

“It’s a pity, because if you did, I’ve a tragedy in blank verse that you might care to publish. It is great art and will never be produced. Still, I’m a philanthropist to-night and you will come to the theatre with me. I happen to be going for the Warden.”

“Are you a dramatic critic for the Warden?” asked Sam, rather awed.

“I’m a reporter, old son. This isn’t the kind of play they waste a critic on. Drink up, and we’ll go.”

Sam found, to his relief, that he was able to go and decided he had a strong head. The theatre was crowded when they reached it and Stewart was young enough to sit self-consciously in one of the two seats kept for the Manchester Warden. Dramatic criticism was taken seriously on that journal; at least two of the paper’s regular critics were men of genius, and Stewart hoped that he might be mistaken for one of them. But the audience that night was not the kind which interests itself in the lions of the higher journalism; rather it justified the contemptuous reference to drama as the “art of the mob.” It would have made a sincere democrat weep for his convictions. “Behold them,” said Stewart. “The Public.”

Sam beheld them more than he beheld the play. He reminded himself that he was there on business, to be shown something which Stewart wanted him to see, and if he had not the gift of detachment, he assumed it.

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.”

Madge wept on the night before her wedding. Ada did not weep. She was too busy hugging herself because she had surmounted the perils of courtship. She had accomplished her aim in life. She was going to be married.

CHAPTER XIV—HONEYMOONERS

ADA was married in white satin, though Peter sold books to do it and her trousseau lacked essentials. It depends, though, on one’s point of view. Ada thought white satin essential, while another might have put underclothing first. But it is fitting to wear a crown at a coronation and, when the object of one’s life has been to get married, to celebrate in satin the attaining of one’s aim.

It also reminded the congregation that the bride is the central figure at a wedding. People might otherwise have remembered that they did not come because Ada was Ada, but because she was Peter’s daughter.

She entered with réclame into the state of being Mrs. Samuel Branstone, resenting a little the tweeds of Stewart, Sam’s best man, but liking his manners and liking, too, the way in which Sam took it for granted that the day was hers, not his. He did not even obtrude a family.

George was, in fact, obscurely there, hidden among the congregation. He was there in the spirit of schoolboy, playing truant from Anne, who was at home with Madge. Ada thought that the conspicuous absence of Branstones added lustre to her satin. None but the necessary Sam was there.

They went to London, where neither of them had been before, and since it is a bitter thing to have to look back to a boring honeymoon, the choice of place had great discretion. There was so much besides themselves to see in London that they postponed looking at each other till they came home. They saw sights and went to theatres, but though they slept together and rose together and saw the sights (all but one) together there was no realization of “togetherness,” no birth of a new life in which they were not Sam and Ada, but these two in one. They were furiously modest about things which no honeymooner has any right to be modest about. If they are modest about them, they have no right to be honeymooners. It may have been in their case something both worse and better than modesty. It may have been downright shame. Perhaps subconsciously they knew that this was not a marriage, not the coming together of two fit mates. It had no passion in it. There was self when they should have been ecstatically selfless. They were two when they should have been most one.

But Sam, if he fell immensely short of ecstasy, was still too much under her spell to be critical. He wondered a little at the frank delight in being married which she displayed in public, at her flaunting of her new wedding ring, at her advertisement that this was a honeymoon, and contrasted this outward relish with her intimate frigidity; but even this seemed a disloyalty, and he told himself that Ada in a hotel was one person and at home would be another. Ada would “settle down,” and meantime they were in London, and London was waiting to be explored with her.

They explored chiefly the London which Londoners do not know, the London of the guide-books, and felt tremendously metropolitan because they went to the Tower, the British Museum and the National Gallery. The shops seared Ada. Their windows fascinated but their doors repelled. Probably Sam would have held her back by main force had she attempted to go in, but, as it was, she had the same satisfaction in identifying them that social snobs find in recognizing, at a distance, famous people. These were the authentic shops which advertised in the papers and they had a game called “hunting the Harrod” or “looking for Barkers,” which led to a lot of fun with ‘buses after they had quartered Oxford Street and Regent Street. It was all very gay, and gayer, almost naughtily gay, to go one night to a place called the Coliseum—a music-hall; a thing to do audaciously, not to be spoken of at home; and yet the place was very full of really most respectable people. They marvelled at the emancipation of the Londoner.

On his honeymoon, Sam became possessed of an ambition. It was not an extraordinarily fine ambition, but he came to care about, it greatly and it repaid his care a thousandfold. The way to sanity is to desire very keenly something which it is just possible one may get, and Sam’s ambition kept him sane in the days when he knew that Ada had failed him.

Struggles had suggested to our debater of the Concentrics that he ought to see the House of Commons at debate, and had written to their local Member for a pass to the Gallery. The result was the most thrilling experience of Sam’s honeymoon! It was, for one thing, unique that Ada could not be with him: these were the first hours since he married her that they spent apart and perhaps that, all unconsciously, had gilded them for Sam. They had almost a tiff before she let him go: not quite, but she resented his desertion of her and considered it his fault that she was not allowed to sit with him to hear the legislators who made laws for her as for him. Not that Ada cared who made her laws, nor cared to watch the makers at their work, but she managed to put enough snap into her resentment at his going to lend the added quality of a stolen pleasure to his experience.

That gallery, with its foreshortened view of the dingy cock-pit, is not the first choice of the connoisseur in thrills, but on Sam its effect was amazing. He must have had some gift, quite undisclosed till now, of veneration, for it is almost beyond belief that the reality of the House of Commons can impress. But the idea can and perhaps (to be just) the reality is more impressive than that of any other Chamber on earth. Imagination helping him, it caught and held his mind.

A small stout man of undistinguished appearance was speaking in a conversational tone not easy to hear from the Gallery, but presently the orator warmed to his subject and poured out living words in a spate of real emotion. He was one of those rare men, and this one of those rare speeches, that really convert an opponent: and Sam’s ambition to speak as this politician spoke, and from those benches, came instantly to birth.

Not only did he want to be a Member of Parliament, but a Liberal Member, because this man of words was Liberal. Up to this time, Sam had not been a political animal although he had voted, and voted Tory because that was in general the line of Mr. Travers and the property-owning class he represented. Now with a swift enthusiasm he was Liberal, knowing nothing of either side, but caught by sudden hero-worship for a little, pudgy, snubnosed politician who spoke in sentences of prodigious length and never lost his way in them.

In a twinkling he acquired the bias of the politician: his hero’s opponent was palpably a fool; he had no gifts, no argument. Yes, Sam was doubly right to be a Liberal. They had so obviously all the brains, they were so undeniably the winning side. He did not understand the technique of a division and was surprised when he looked at the paper next day to find that the Liberals were outvoted. It gave him pause, but did not shake him. When the Liberals came back to power, as with their superiority in brain they were certain to do, he, Sam Branstone, would come with them. Let it be only a year or two and he would be ready. He too would loll upon those padded benches, and catch the Speaker’s eye, and be an orator.

He walked along the Embankment towards his hotel, and it came into his mind that he had spent four hours in the Gallery and had not thought of Ada. Nor could he, though he tried, think of her now.

Sky-signs still flashed across the river, and as he paused and leaned against the parapet a young policeman kept a wary eye on him. But Sam was meditating life, not death. The lights of London gleamed upon the Thames and made it magical for him. He conquered London in his reverie, and stepped, a member, from the House to his automobile. His home, he supposed, was somewhere in Park Lane.

He thought back now to the theatre where he had seen The Sign of the Cross. It was different from the London Theatres he had seen where audiences seemed afraid of emotion. Or was it that the plays had not been right? That was it: they had not the note: they weren’t—what was Stewart’s phrase?—erotic religious plays. He wanted to move audiences as that play had moved its audience. Power! The power of the spoken word. That was the thing, and since he could not write a play he must rely upon himself, his oratory, his single voice. He saw himself on platforms facing crowded halls, gripping his hearers, leading them where he would, taming the mob till it made an idol of its master. As to where he would lead, why, he would lead and that was what mattered. Branstone was Prime Minister that night.

It was one o’clock before the young policeman felt at liberty to resume his beat, and Sam left the enchanted river for his little hotel in Norfolk Street. Ada had her back to him and apparently she slept. Actually she was wide awake; she was wondering whether it had happened to any other woman to be treated so abominably on her honeymoon.

She brushed her hair nest morning with a notable viciousness. Hair has uses beyond those of mere adornment. It is an admirable veil through which one can watch without being seen to watch. Ada was watching Sam and she was also listening to him.

She listened not because his enthusiasm for the House of Commons interested her, but because she was waiting for some word of apology. It did not come. He was full of regret, but only because this was their last day in town and he could not go to the House again.

“What time is our train?” she asked.

He told her.

“Then I have time to do some shopping first.”

“Shopping?” he asked, but unsuspiciously.

She nodded. Sam was going to pay for his pleasures. Those blouses she had seen at Peter Robinson’s no longer seemed impossibly expensive. If Sam chose to enjoy himself in his own way, without her, she would enjoy herself in hers—with Sam to pay the piper.

Shopping is a loose term; one shops when one buys a kipper or a diamond tiara. Ada was putting her hair up and he imagined her to mean that she wanted a packet of hair-pins. “Oh, yes,” he said pensively. “And while you go, I think I will just slip down to the House of Parliament again.” The House would not be sitting and he could not get in. He knew that, but he wanted to gaze, to look at the frame which was some day to contain him. He wanted to be certain that it was still there.

“I think,” she said, “that you will come with me to the shop. I shall want you there to pay.”

Sam paused in the act of fastening his collar. “To pay?” he asked, not unsuspiciously now.

“Are your selfish pleasures all you think about?” Ada wanted to know. “Isn’t it a privilege to be allowed to buy me nice clothes?”

He had not looked upon it in that light. In budgeting for their future he had indeed assumed that a trousseau lasted a bride for her first year. “I see,” he said gloomily; then remembering that he was in love with her, “of course,” he added with a smile which might count to him for heroism. “But we must not forget the fares, and after I have paid the bill here I shall not have more than two pounds left to spend.”

“Then I spend two pounds on blouses,” she said.

He made a monosyllabic noise which might have been “Yes.” It might also have been “Damn.”

The truth was that he had deliberately kept those two pounds back, intending to spend some, but not, he hoped, all of it, on a present for Ada. He had thought of a hand-bag, had imagined her gasp of delight when he audaciously entered with her one of those forbiddingly inviting shops, her appreciation of his generosity.

Last night had driven the thought entirely from his mind, and he was annoyed now not only at his forgetfulness, but at Ada. She did not ask, she demanded. A night in the Gallery may be regarded as dissipation, but at least it is not a crime. It is even patriotic, and he was asked to foot a bill for two pounds as the price of his patriotism. Ambition, he thought, would be an expensive luxury if he had to pay in clothes for Ada every time he went to a political meeting. For that, plainly, was her attitude: she demanded a quid pro quo: she announced a policy of retaliation.

There is a queer perverted pleasure in scratching an open wound, in cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. He had meant to be generous and he wanted still to be generous, but the money he had laid aside for generosity was now hypothecated to meet her claim. He would give her her pound of flesh, but wanted very badly to roast it for her with coals of fire.

Gloom lifted from him suddenly. He took off the old tie which he had put on as being good enough to travel in, and fastened very carefully one which he had bought “for London.”

“I’ll do it,” he was thinking. “It is—almost—a stroke.”

At breakfast he was positively gay, so that Ada wondered furtively what he was up to, and whether the way to raise his spirits would always be to demand new clothes of him. It did not seem likely, but she proposed at any rate to experiment freely in that direction.

He divided his attention between her, breakfast, and the Parliamentary report of the Times. He felt that he had virtually participated in that debate, and even the shock of reading that the division had gone against his hero did not spoil the pleasure he found in reading of it. He read with a prophetic eye. He, too, would be reported in the Times some day.

He called the waiter. “Marmalade, sir?” asked the man.

“No, thanks. Bring me the directory.”

“The directory,” protested the waiter, “is in the reading-room.”

“And I,” said Sam superbly, “am in the coffee-room.”

The waiter brought him the directory.

Sam smiled broadly. He was testing his form, and decided that if it were equal to coercing a waiter into carrying a directory to his breakfast-table, it would probably not fail him in what he proposed to do. He consulted the book and noted an address which was not, he observed, in Park Lane. His respect for Sir William Gatenby suffered a slight decline.

Half an hour later he rang the hell of that gentleman’s house. Gatenby was the local member, to whom Peter Struggles had written for Sam’s pass to the Gallery.

“Sir William in?” he asked.

“Yes, but——” A trained eye observed his clothes. They were not cut in Savile Row.

“He will see me,” said Sam serenely. Some people are at their best in the early morning.

His card was accepted from him, and he was shown into a library of severe Blue Books, possibly qualified by a reproduction of Millais’ portrait of Gladstone. Ordinarily, Sam would have been met in the library by a secretary who earned his salary by his talent for administering polite snubs to unwanted callers. The secretary was not earning his salary to-day, but, probably, spending it. It was Derby Day.

After all, a vote is a vote, and Sir William came in with a show of geniality. “Good morning, Mr. Branstone,” he said, reading Sam’s card. “From the old town. I see.”

“Is that all you remember about me?” asked Sam.

“At the moment,” confessed Sir William warily. His majority was not large.

“Well,” said Sam, “the Reverend Mr. Struggles is my father-in-law.”

“Sit down,” said Sir William. “I am very glad you called. How is Mr. Struggles?”

“T left him well, thank you. Perhaps you remember that he wrote to you to ask you for a pass to the Gallery for me.”

“I was happy to be lucky in the ballot,” said the Member.

“Yes,” said Sam, “I went last night. But I mentioned that to establish my identity. My object in calling upon you is to ask you to lend me five pounds.”

Sir William thought of his secretary, who should have saved him this. Thinking of his secretary, he thought of Derby Day and the probable intentions of a man who chooses that day to ask for a loan. “My dear sir!” he said.

“Quite,” agreed Sam. “Life would be unbearable to you if every constituent who came to London tried to borrow money off you. But I am Branstone. I run the Branstone Press and the Branstone Classics. I published the ‘Social Evil’ pamphlet and sent you a copy which, I regret to say, you did not acknowledge.” Sir William thought again of his secretary, and unkindly. “This,” said Sam, “is merely to indicate that I am a man of substance.”

Sir William Gatenby wore side-whiskers. He was an old man and there was little left of him besides pomposity and a determination to hold his seat. He looked, what at this moment he felt, some one in a farce. He was quite sure that Sam was some one in a farce. They were both in a farce, and of course five-pound notes fly in farces like gnats in August. It did not seem to him that there was anything to do but to produce a five-pound note.

“Thank you,” said Sam, and sat at a desk. “I will give you my cheque for this.”

It staggered Sir William. He nearly warned Sam of the danger of issuing a cheque which was not likely to be honoured, but refrained in time. “Then,” he said, “there was really no need for you to come to me at all?”

“Only,” said Sam, “that I wanted you to remember me.”

“I think I shall do that,” said Sir William.

“Thank you,” said Sam calmly. “I wanted to know you because I intend to go into politics.”

“The Cause,” said Sir William solemnly, “demands his best from every earnest worker.”

“I will work for the Cause,” said Sam. Neither of them attempted to define the Cause, and Sam left without further remark, but his call had this result: that on finding the cheque honoured Sir William wrote to his agent to tell him of “a queer fish called Samuel Branstone who called on me the other day, and offered to work for the Cause. A young man whom I think you should encourage. He is the son-in-law of Mr. Struggles, and the Church, alas, is so tepid towards our great Principles that we must not neglect a promising recruit from that fold.”

CHAPTER XV—OTHER THINGS BESIDE MARRIAGE

DEBT appeals to some people. They feel that when they are in debt they have had more out of life than life owes to them. Sam had given Gatenby his cheque and was therefore not in debt to him, but he proceeded to spend the five pounds as recklessly as if it had been borrowed money.

He meant to astonish Ada, and succeeded, but the surprise he sprang did not work quite as he anticipated. For a moment, indeed, as he bought her hats and blouses she glowed with unaffected gratitude, and he tasted with her the joy of headstrong acquisition. But Ada’s glow was quick to pass.

She had time in the train to forget the splendour of his presents and the dash that she would cut next Sunday, and to remember that he had spent a lot of money; he who denied that he had more than two pounds to spend had spent seven. Obviously, he had lied to her.

It was true, she thought, that he had repented of his lie and of his meanness, and bought handsomely: the more handsome the purchase, the more demonstrable the lie.

She recalled her dreadful interview with Anne, Anne’s statements of his means, and how little they conformed to the scale of Sam’s furnishing. She pondered Sam’s open-handedness in the blouse-shop, and concluded that the Branstones were congenital liars about money.

In the future she would know how to act. Sam had plenty.

“So you had money up your sleeve all the time,” she said.

Sam winked facetiously. “There are a lot of funny things up my sleeve,” he said.

“I’m learning that,” said Ada. Which he took for a compliment; and grinned.

He had long since made up his mind that the way with women was to mystify them, to treat them like children at a conjuring entertainment, to surprise them with results, but never to explain. He nearly choked with pride over his exploit with Sir William Gatenby. But for the hat-box and the blouses up there on the rack, what he had done was too good to be true, and certainly it was too good to be told to a woman. They did not understand business; no woman could appreciate the daring spirit of his feat.

If he told Ada that he had borrowed from Gatenby, she would simply say “Oh, yes,” and treat his unexampled audacity as a matter of course. It was inspiration, brilliantly conceived and brilliantly executed, and its bright memory was not to be tarnished by a woman’s dull acceptance of it as something not in the least extraordinary.

He grinned and did not tell, and what did not occur to him was that if he offered no explanation she would supply one of her own. It is idiotic to tell a wife everything, but wise to tell nearly everything; especially when it is open to her to draw a false conclusion.

Sam did not think a false conclusion open to her, because he still believed the best of Ada, because he was still in love. But falling out of love is desperately easy.

“As a walled town,” says Touchstone, “is worthier than a village, so is the forehead of a married man more honourable than the bare brow of a bachelor,” and Sam was married. He could lay that flattering unction to his soul, could hold his head higher, because he was a ratepayer and bore responsibilities, and went home at night to a house with a garden. He did all that, and it was empty honour because success in marriage, as in all else, is not to be had ready-made, but depends upon the will to make adjustments.

The will can come best from passion, and there was no passion here to tide them over the awkward age of marriage, the first difficult year when the adjustments must, if ever, be made. Granted passion, a man can love a woman whom he knows to be a murderess; let passion lack, and he can fall out of love because the woman snores or is untidy. Sam’s marriage was not made in heaven, but by Ada in Heaton Park, and with a marriage so made it is as easy to fall out of love as off a house. Little things count more than big when there is no passion to create its life-long mirage.

If you cannot have the mirage of passion there is a useful substitute called common sense, another name for compromise, and Ada refused to compromise. She was for self, unmitigated and supreme. Ada left the adjustments to Sam, and relaxed in nothing from her perfect selfishness.