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.
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 theTimes. 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’tpour 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, andarethe 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!”
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 thattertium 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.”