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. “Icando 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.
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 choseMuch 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 Adohad only four readers at the opening and only two at the close. Lance sent postcards that night to the members announcingHamletfor the morrow. He wanted to read Hamlet’s part, but if you can’t haveHamletwithout 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, “wecouldsell 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.
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 inComus—the inefficients were weeded out, and the elect tested on “unseens.” It was the “unseens” that frightened Sam: he rehearsedComustill 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 readThe Spectatorwhich he had borrowed by pure chance from the school library, and the judges handed him a passage fromThe Spectatorto read at the unseen test, and one of the great speeches of Marlowe’sTamburlaine, 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.”