THEN Effie came with beauty, shattering the life he lived as sunshine breaks the April clouds. At first he did not know what had happened to him: there was a radiance, but he thought it nothing greater than her physical appeal. He was disturbed, moved as nothing had moved him before—not even applause—but did not see that more had come to him than loveliness where all had been unlovely. He did not realize that there were greater things in Effie than her comeliness.
She was the daughter of a doctor who had lived up to every penny of his income and died leaving his widow nothing but a cottage in the country, which had been their week-end haunt. The widow sold the practice and got for it enough to keep herself, with care, in the cottage.
There Mrs. Mannering lived unhappily, resentfully, nourishing a grudge against her poverty, developing a vein of hardy thrift unseen till now. With management, she had enough, but lacked the gift of management. She did not see things in proportion, imagined herself deep sunk in poverty and made unreasoning demands on Effie. On Effie, not on her son who managed a rubber plantation at Penang and followed the spendthrift habits of his father. Father and son, the Mannerings were cursed with a passion for popularity and entertained with open house to all comers. In the East, it cost Rex Mannering more than it had cost his father at home and, granted his habits, he was right in saying that he could do nothing for his mother. He could deny himself nothing.
It left the more for Effie. She who was not trained to work must go into the world and fight not only for her bread but for her mother’s luxuries. Augusta Mannering was merciless in her demands. She believed, quite sincerely, that Eflie was gaining riches in the offices of Manchester and withholding a share from her in simple self-indulgence. Was it not by going to offices that Dr. Mannering’s rich patients had been able to pay their bills? And hadn’t they an army of friends who used to eat their salt?
But the friends, misunderstanding Effie’s pride, offered no help of the kind she could accept. She wanted work, not invitations to houses where, with dress and servants’ tips, it would cost her more to live than in the rooms she found in Rusholme. She had not the means to be decorative now, and it occurred to nobody that Effie was a clerk, wanting a clerk’s place. They could not think of her, that brilliant girl, shackled to a typewriter. They did not offer what she wanted and she was too proud to ask.
Then memories are short, especially of the popular men who buy their popularity across the dining-table and charge high fees to the unwell to procure high feeding for the well; and when the Mannerings disappeared, Augusta to her cottage and Effie to Rusholme, there were few inquiries made.
Some other entertainer stepped into the breach of local hospitality; Effie’s net-play became a legend on their tennis lawns; and she herself was deemed to be with her mother in the country, shining on other courts than theirs.
It was not pure callousness, but things are as they are, and one cannot live by money and then lose money without losing more than money.
Effie went into the city unfriended and alone, and her mother lived, a miser, in her cottage. She wrote to Effie that she needed this and that; that Effie must spare of her abundance or her mother must starve, and Effie out of her thirty shillings a week did send, but her mother did not buy. She warmed her hands at a bank-book, wore ancient clothes and watched her credit grow. It was more than a perversion of her old extravagance, it was insanity and Effie knew it. To keep an insane woman moderately happy, she sacrificed necessities. That is why she was shabby when she came into Mr. Branstone’s office for the post of typist one bright, revealing afternoon soon after his party had triumphed at the polls and he had made himself a figure on the hustings.
Effie had found companionship in Rusholme, and knew by now the difference between the friendship which is given and the friendship which is bought. She had become expert in friendship, and Sam, from their first encounter, seemed to her more like a friend than an employer. By then, she had experience of employers. That was why she was out of work.
It wasn’t, of course, the normal Sam she met, but a Sam exalted, genuinely raised and not merely puffed up, by his electioneering notoriety. He had a new self-confidence; it seemed to him that little was beyond his reach, that he might even hope to come to terms with Effie. Not, that is to say, to such terms as her last employer had proposed. Sam was not, in these matters, the average sensual man. The point was, and it was to his credit, that he discerned something fine in Effie even at this stage, and the mood of confidence gave him to hope that he might not seem commonplace to her. Already, that afternoon, he cared so much. Her opinion mattered.
It mattered so greatly that he went slowly about the business of surprising her: for that, of course, was what he thought he had to do. She might not know things about Branstone which it was good for her to know. He might be any employer who advertised for a typist, and he was not any employer. He was Branstone, of the Classics and the Novels; town councillor; politician; and she must be told about him. She must learn what manner of man he was. He wanted to tell her how much greater he was going to be, but decided that could wait. First she must know what he had done, before it came to telling her what he was going to do, and his record would come better from others than from himself. In the office they knew it all and, even if she asked no questions, there was much which the routine work would tell her of him.
He curbed impatience and left her for some weeks in the general office, where it was supposed that she was picking up some knowledge of the business before beginning to act as his secretary, but what he hoped she was picking up was some knowledge of him. He had the idea that he was popular with his staff, and did not think that they would libel him to her.
All the time he burned to have her sitting with him in the private office. It was for that purpose that he had advertised for a typist-secretary, and to bring her from the general office could excite no comment. On the contrary, to leave her there so long might look strange or at least suggest that Effie was a failure. A failure! Much he cared whether she was efficient at her work. Yet she was splendidly efficient, and still he coquetted with his purpose of having her with him. It seemed to him that to call her in would be a step definite and irrevocable, one which he wanted and even yearned to make, but about which he hesitated sensuously as a bridegroom might hesitate on the threshold of the bridal chamber. He neglected to make two certainly profitable journeys to London at this time because he could not deny himself the pleasure of seeing her neck as she bent over her typewriter when he passed through the office.
And he had hardly spoken to her! But his dreams were vibrant with the music of her voice, swelling like an organ till it filled his life with new harmony. It filled his life not because he refused to think of Ada, but because he could not think of her. Ada wasn’t there; she didn’t exist. She never had been there, for Sam, in the true sense, so that the step from the custom which is nothingness to complete nothingness was almost imperceptible. She was a ghost from the past fading in the radiance of the present. The sun puts out the candlelight.
He was seeing Effie, of course, with quite grotesquely unperceiving eyes. She might have been, for all he saw of her, the beautiful doll she emphatically was not. Her outside pleased and satisfied his eye, and he took it for granted that the woman within would satisfy him in the same way as the woman without. And so, in the long run, she did, but not till Sam had made a hurdle race of it and come some awkward croppers on the course. The harmony of his organ dream might have been true prophecy; it certainly was not present fact. He wasn’t seeing himself as Effie saw him, or the sidelong glances he cast at her pretty neck might have expressed more desire to break than to kiss it.
He seemed to her a jolly monster, quite lovable if trained, but at present as untrained as a badly brought-up dog, and perhaps too old to learn. But it might be amusing to see if he could learn, and from her who was not used to breaking in a mastiff. That made the thing worth while, his bigness and the lovableness she recognized behind the rankness of him. Chance might not come her way, and she thought it unlikely that it would, but if it did, she meant to take it with both hands. Effie, aged twenty-six, proposed to herself to form Sam Bran-stone, who was thirty-five and her employer! She smiled at her preposterous audacity, but the more she saw and the more she heard of him, the more determination bit into her. Droll, officious, absurd—all these her idea was, and she liked it because it was fantastic and because Sam was Sam. In Effie’s wise, impertinent eyes fantasy and Sam seemed bound together. And yet he paid her wages; he was a solid man, a member of the Council, and a serious politician! She was impertinent indeed.
But he could not, either for his sake or hers, keep her for ever on the threshold. For all his late-won confidence he was quite pitiably nervous, and held back for days in pure hesitation before the simple action of calling her into his office. He thought of it as initiation, a ritual to which a high solemnity attached. He intended to act up to its solemnity, to usher her into that office with all that was most impressive, to signify to her the importance of being secretary to Branstone; and, instead, he who was wordy fumbled for words, he who was painfully correct dropped two aitches in a sentence, and stood there most comically aghast at his slip.
Of course, the ritual was finished; one cannot be ritualistic and conscious of aitchlessness. Ritual implies the superhuman, the something, at least, which sets the executant above the common clay, and to drop an aitch is human. In the moment of solemnity, in the mouth of the ritualist, it is drolly human. We find incongruity amusing, and the more solemn the occasion the more readily does an impish mirth intrude on light pretext.
Effie giggled. She did not mean to be unkind, but the spectacle of his confusion was too much for her. She hadn’t the strength to resist, and though she turned her giggle, quite neatly, into a cough, it was not before he had seen.
This was his great moment, to which he had looked forward, and she giggled at him! He felt himself writ down an ass, and wondered for the fraction of a second whether he would get more satisfaction from smacking her or from kicking himself. Then he saw her looking at him, and nothing seemed to matter. He dropped aitches and she giggled. Very well, then he wasn’t a superman, and she wasn’t divine. They were human beings, at this moment in the relationship of employer and employed.
“In future, you will sit at the little desk in here, Miss Mannering.” He met her eye defiantly as he spoke the “here.”
“If you have your notebook you can take this letter down.”
He was running away from his ruined situation. To dictate a letter to her had not been in the scheme at all, as he had planned it. It was a refuge, and a safe one, but as he dictated he saw in the letter his opportunity to indicate to her that he forgave the giggle. He was writing to an author about a manuscript, which he intended to publish, but broke off before he reached that decisive point of his letter.
“Wait a bit,” he said. “Here is the novel I am writing about. I want your opinion of it to fortify my own before I do anything definite. Will you have a look at it in here? I’m due at a Council meeting and must go.”
“Certainly, Mr. Branstone,” she said; “but my judgment isn’t very reliable.”
“We don’t know that until you try,” he said, escaping from his office to the Town Hall, where he kicked his heels for an hour till the meeting began Nor did he return to business that day. He had a shyness and a feeling of deflation. He needed time before he could expand again.
Effie took her reading of the novel conscientiously rather than seriously, not supposing that her verdict either way would go for anything, but appreciating his hint of confidence, and the fact that, considered as work, novel-reading was pleasant. And not finishing the manuscript at the office, she took it home with her to Rusholme.
In Rusholme the landladies are a little humanized from their primitive Grundyism, partly by the girl clerk, but mainly because few of them have avoided, at one time or another, the theatrical lodger, a valiant tilter at conventionalities; and it is possible for a woman in lodgings to be called upon by a man in the evening without being evicted as a sinner. One must, of course, choose one’s landlady with discretion.
Effie, who had not had the opportunity of selecting her parents and had suffered accordingly, chose her landlady with discretion. By now she had her friends, those she had made in Manchester, not those she inherited from her father; there were men amongst them, and they came to see her. Often, in fact, and especially on Sundays, her room was over-crowded; but a bed, in the semi disguise of a travelling rug, holds many callers, and they solved the problem of hospitality by bringing each a contribution to the feast.
To-night she had one caller, Stewart, who, having been brought one Sunday by a man who knew a woman who was a fellow-clerk with Effie at her last-but-one place, had formed the habit of coming as often as he could. He was not at theWardenoffice that night, for the same reason which accounted for his not knowing that she had gone to Branstone’s. He was convalescent after influenza, too limp to write the super-journalism of theWarden, well enough to come out to take the tonic called Effie.
“I ought not to let you in to-night,” she said. “Thank Heaven for that,” he said, coming in. “Doing what one ought is the dullest thing I know—unless you’re really serious, Effie? In which case I’ll go.” His hand was on the door-knob.
“I’m really serious,” she said with mock impressiveness. “I’m working overtime. Behold!” She threw herself on the bed with the manuscript in hand. “This,” she announced, “is Work.”
“I can believe it,” he said, “because that looks like the typescript of a novel. If it were mine it would be a pleasure to read; but as it is not mine, it is probably work.”
“Oh, it’s work all right,” she said. “Hard labour, too. I’m reading it by order of my new chief. He publishes things like this.”
Stewart sat up. “Not Branstone?” he, said. “Don’t say you’ve gone to Sammy!”
“Yes. Do you know him?”
“Know him? I invented him. Bit of a Frankenstein for all that. Better say I know most of him. He can still spring surprises on me, and you in his office are one of’em.”
“Why? Don’t you like his office?”
“It’s an office. So long as you’ve to be in an office, you could pick worse—easily. Sammy’s a stream with a lot of shallows in him, but there are also depths, and I’ve never fathomed them. There’s mud in him, but it’s not the nasty sort of mud.”
“I’ve seen that much,” she said. “Polluted but curable.”
“You’re not by any chance thinking of yourself as a Branstone River Conservancy, are you?”
“I rather like him, Dubby,” she said.
“Good Lord! You and Sam: I say, old thing, no offence, but you know he’s married?”
“I know,” said Ellie. “What’s she like?”
“Haven’t seen her since I was his best man. Wasn’t tempted to see more of her.”
“It’s as bad as that?”
“Oh, rather worse, I believe. Pitch that novel over. I’ll tell you in five minutes if it’s any use.”
“Five minutes isn’t very fair to the author,” she protested.
“Oh, quite. I’m a reviewer, and reviewing’s badly paid. It teaches you to rip the guts out of a novel quickly. Smoke that cigarette and I’ll tell you all about it by the time you’re through.”
He fluttered the pages while she smoked. “Utter,” he decided. “Utter.”
“I haven’t finished it,” she said; “but so far I agree with you.”
“You’ll agree with me to the end. Pluperfect trash. Sam will love it.”
“What!”
“You’ll see. It’s just his line.”
“Aren’t you trying to prejudice me against him?”
He stared. “I’m trying to save you the trouble of reading the beastly thing. I’ve given you expert opinion. It’s trash and the brand of trash that he likes. Didn’t I tell you there, was mud in Sam?”
“You told me you invented him. I don’t believe your influence has been for good.”
“Don’t be hard on a fellow, Effie; I only introduced him to the mud. I didn’t know he’d wallow. Anyhow, let’s talk of something else.”
“You know,” she said, “you do influence people, Dubby.”
“Of course. That’s what I’m paid for. I’m a journalist. Have you never heard of the power of the Press? It means a lot of little journalists like me writing as their editors tell ‘em to. But I don’t appear to have much influence on you. I asked you to change the subject and you’re still thinking about Sam.”
“Yes,” she agreed, “I’m still thinking of Sam.”
“You and Sam!” he repeated, looking incredulously at her.
Effie nodded. “But,” she said, “I don’t know yet.”
He rose to his feet. “You’re sure, Effie? You’re sure you don’t know about him yet?”
“Quite sure.”
“Then you do know about me? Effie, I’ve got to ask. Are you sure about me?”
She met his eyes bravely, knowing that she must hurt. She was sure she did not love Stewart, who was free, and not sure about Branstone, who was married. “I am quite, quite sure, Dubby,” she said softly.
“I see,” he said. “Well, I’m not the sort that pesters, but if you want me, Effie, if you find you want me, I’ll be there. I... I suppose I’d better go now. It will take some doing to change the subject after this.”
“Dubby, I’m sorry. You’re not well, and——”
She could see him trembling.
“Not that, old thing,” he interrupted. “Not pity. That would make me really ill. Love’s just a thing that happens along, but one starter doesn’t make a race.” He held out his hand. “Well, doctor’s orders to go to bed early. Good-night.”
“Good-night, Dubby,” she said, and added hesitatingly: “You’ll come on Sunday?”
“Lord, yes,” he said. “I don’t love and run away. Good-night.”
She sat for a long while staring into vacancy, then found that something wet was dropping on her hands. She bathed her eyes and took the novel up again. A proposal occupied, she found, twelve pages of turgid, emotional dialogue; but, of course, her experience might be limited. Certainly it did not confirm the book’s verbosity.
She was quite sure that she did not want Dubby Stewart. He did not strike her as humorous at all.
SEVERAL causes combined to make her think of Sam, too, as not at all humorous when she saw him in the morning. Unlike him, she was not at her best in the early hours of the day, and the strain of arriving at an office by nine a.m. was one from which she did not recover for some time. She hated business, but without that cross of early rising she might have found it almost tolerable.
She woke that day to her landlady’s rap more resentfully than usual. The world was disgustingly mismanaged. Why couldn’t she love Dubby, who was free? She couldn’t, but she hated Sam for being married, he had no right to be married. “Damn Mrs. Sam! Damn her!” she said heartily, by way of a morning prayer, as she ran hairpins viciously into her glorious hair. “But I’ll cure him of mud,” she added, as she raced downstairs to swallow the tea and toast which she took almost in the same rush that carried her from her bedroom to the tram.
She reached the office and walked into Sam’s room to find him already in possession. His obvious briskness at that hour struck her as almost indecent; it was, at any rate, another cause for resentment, and one of which he was himself quite blandly unaware.
He was not stealing a march upon her any more than he habitually stole marches on the rest of the world. He knew that early morning suited him, and used it to advantage. They were certain in town that Branstone had luck rather than brains because he was lazy; but if a man arrives at his office at eight a.m., and puts in two hours of solid work by ten o’clock, he is well ahead of his fellows of the employing class who go down to offices on the 9.21 from home. He can afford to appear lazy.
He liked that uninterrupted hour with the books, opened the letters himself, and had them annotated before the men came, whose business it was to deal with their contents. He planned out the day’s work, and saw it in hand before his earliest caller came. After ten, which is the first hour when it is etiquette for a salesman to call, Sam was never too busy to talk of matters which were not strictly business—with the right, the gainful caller. It was known that one could kill time pleasantly with Branstone. Branstone was a lazy fellow, and his office a good place to sit in on a wet afternoon, when there was no point in going to Old Trafford.
He came this morning even earlier than usual, to be ready for Effie when she came at nine. He had slept off his embarrassment, and was ready in his early morning ebullience to pooh-pooh it. It was stupid to be so extraordinarily sensitive about an aitch. Accent had always troubled him, but he need not overrate its importance, and especially now that he wore the political badge of a democrat, and had acknowledged publicly that his mother was a charwoman.
So he was here, installed in his chair with the back of his morning’s work broken, waiting for her when she came.
No, she decided, not at all humorous to-day: formidable, in fact. He had all the advantages; he was seated; he was first upon the ground, and that ground his own, and he was abominably awake. He might have run away yesterday, but this was the morning of retrieval.
“Good morning,” he said, assuming an attitude of leisure.
“Good morning,” she said, then saw that he was looking quizzically at the parcel she carried, as if, she thought, he mistook it for her lunch. “I took the novel home to finish,” she explained nervously, and called herself a fool for giving him this readymade chance to open the subject which of all things she wanted to delay until her suaver hour had come. She might be able to cure him of mud, but a doctor should have a bedside manner, and she distrusted her manners until the landlady’s knock had ceased ringing in her ears.
If she had not given him the chance, he would have made it. He gave no quarter to bad starters. Had he known of her weakness, he might have spared her. He might, because she was Effie; but it wasn’t his habit to indulge the weaknesses of others, especially a weakness which he did not share, did not understand, and denied to be anything but sloth.
“Yes,” he said encouragingly. “And the verdict?”
“Does my verdict matter, Mr. Branstone?” she asked. He hadn’t given her time to get her jacket off!
“What? Certainly it matters. I wasn’t asking you to waste your time when I gave you the manuscript to read. The question is whether we ought to publish it, and the answer depends on your opinion.”
“Is that quite fair—to the author, I mean? My opinions of novels are inexpert.”
“That author can take care of himself very well,” he assured her. “He won’t starve if we refuse his novel.”
“I’m afraid my opinions are also intolerant,” she said.
“Still,” he smiled, “I should like to hear them.”
“They might infuriate you, and—well, I’d rather not be sacked if I can help it.”
“We will forget that it is in my power to sack you. Does that satisfy you?”
Oh, how she loathed people who could be magnanimous at nine a.m.! “You are being very kind,” she said.
“And you are not giving me your opinion. Come, Miss Mannering, you’ve read it. What do you think of it?”
Later in the day she might have put it more gently. Just now she could manage nothing more kindly than: “I think it’s appalling. It’s false from start to finish,” and she rejoiced to see how much her vehement candour disconcerted him. “I’ve drawn first blood,” she thought; but bleeding as a curative process is discredited.
“But,” he said, “it is very like others of my series. I made sure it would be popular.”
“I’m not a judge of that. It’s possible enough. And now”—she smiled a little wryly—“I’m afraid you know my opinion of the series. I warned you,” she added hastily, “that my opinions were intolerant. I imagine you will not ask for them again.” She turned resolutely to the typewriter and took its cover off. She thought she had closed the discussion, and was suiting action to her word, and sitting at her desk when he motioned her back to the chair opposite his. It was not the sort of motion one ignored.
“I may ask for them again or I may not,” he said; “but in the meantime I have certainly not given you anything to do at that machine, and we were trying to forget that you are my typist.”
“I thought after what I’ve said that it might be time to remember it,” she suggested.
“Not at all,” he assured her. “I get to the bottom of things, and, if you please, we’ll have this out.”
“Of course, if this is part of your secretary’s work——” she began.
He cut her short. “It is. Now, you find my novel series appalling?”
Effie was growing angry.In vino veritas—and in anger. “I could go even further,” she said. “I find it degrading.”
He thumped the desk. “But it sells, Miss Mannering, it sells. Did you know that?” He leant back in his chair in one of the attitudes he took when he was scoring heavily, thumbs in his waistcoat arm-holes.
“It’s the most popular series of cheap novels on the market. See any bookstall, if you doubt me.” He paused for her apology.
Effle did not apologize. “That does not alter my opinion of it,” she said coolly. “A public danger isn’t less dangerous because it’s large. I’m afraid I can believe that there are no depths to which it is impossible to degrade the public taste, but that does not make me like any the better a series which degrades it.”
Now a child is a child. It may be deformed, and its begetter may in clairvoyant moments have acknowledged the deformity to himself, but he resents its being pointed out to him. Sam was the father of his series.
“I say!” he protested. “That’s nasty.”
“It’s a nasty series,” she said hardily. “You are proud of it because it sells when you ought to be ashamed of it because it’s bad.” Somehow she had to say it. She couldn’t hedge from what she saw as truth, even though she expected truth to hurt him and to be hurt in return. But Sam wonderfully controlled himself. Emphatically, he was forgetting that she was a typist. He remembered that she was Effie.
He addressed the ceiling. “The fact is,” he mourned, “that women do not understand business. Even business women don’t. Even you don’t.”
Mentally she thanked him for his “even you.” It seemed to her a good place to end the matter for that morning. She still distrusted her manners, and not, she thought, without reason.
“Consequently,” she told him quietly, “my opinion cannot matter,” and moved as if to go to her typewriter.
He held her to her seat. “That is to beg the question,” he replied, “and we were to have it out.”
“But,” she tried, “you have told me that I do not understand business.”
“And you did not believe me.”
He challenged her, in fact. Well, she must pick up his gage. “I do not understand this about business, Mr. Branstone. What is it about business which makes a man like you content to be a confectioner selling people wares that give them mental indigestion? Business! It’s the name for half the meanness and nine-tenths of the ugliness in the world. You see, women do know something about business to-day. It isn’t their fault that they are not still sitting cosily at home, hugging the old belief that business is a dignified, majestic thing to which only the masculine intellect can rise. It’s your fault, the men’s. You wanted cheap clerks, and you raised the veil so that women have seen business at close quarters, and the only thing they do not understand is how men continued for so long to magnify its low chicane and its infinite humbug into a cult which deceived them.”
Sam came to the conclusion that Effie was not perfect. She suffered from hysteria, but she must be answered. “Well,” he said, “you don’t think much of business. But you came into it.”
“I needed money,” she defended that.
“So did I,” he said dryly. “We’re birds of a feather.”
“You hate it, too?” she asked hopefully.
“Honestly,” he said, “I like it. But,” he went on with mischief in his eye, “I can tell you something that will please you. You dislike the novel series. You think they degrade. You don’t think the Classics degrade?”
“No.”
“I would much rather that the Classics sold largely than the novels.”
“Why?” She was eager now. “Because they are great literature?”
“No. That would be being sentimental about business, and it can’t be done. Because they are not copyright, and it saves book-keeping.” He grinned at her discomfiture. “Business,” he defined, “is money-getting.” He was feeling tremendously pleased with himself, her master in argument. He gave her rope indulgently, for she was Effie; then crushed her utterly, for he was Sam.
“Isn’t it better,” she asked, “to win a little money decently than to gain a great deal by trading in poison? Whether you know it or not, these books are poisonous.”
“I don’t know it,” he said brusquely. “They give pleasure.”
“So, I suppose, does opium. There are lots of pleasant poisons. Would you keep an opium den if it paid? If you were a milkman, would you adulterate milk and poison babies? You adulterate books and poison minds. For money! Oh, yes; I, too, needed money, and I, too, came to business. But we are not birds of a feather. I do not like business. I don’t like having to get money. I don’t like money, but I need it. I’ve things to do with it.”
“My case again,” he capped her. “I’ve things to do with it.” He saw that she was looking at him curiously, and that she took him to mean that he wanted money for Ada. Incidentally he did, but essentially he did not. “Politics,” he added. “Power! Power!” He repeated the word ecstatically, not only because he was admitting her to the intimacy of his private thought, not only because he felt it an ecstatic idea, but because he had so thoroughly defeated her in argument. She sat there staring speechlessly, and he exulted to perceive that she was mute before his slashing common sense.
Only, that was not the reason of her silence. She thought that, for a first attempt, she had gone far enough, and had the hope that something of what she had said would remain in his mind, perhaps stingingly. She could only hope. Heaven knew it had been a queer enough interview between an employer and his typist, and her prayer, as she sat there permitting his exultation, was for an interruption.
Her prayer was answered. Just as she thought him on the brink of seeing that her silence was not entirely acquiescent, the office-boy brought in the name of a caller he must see, and Effie rose with huge relief. She hadn’t it in her to keep silent much longer, and felt that if she then let go all that was firing her, she would say more than he could stand. True, he had stood a good deal, but then she had said little of what she had to say! She wanted to say it gradually, to lead him, not to spur him, to her point of view. Already she was taking a more modern view of the virtues of bleeding her patient.
She thought, too, that his was the easier part.
She had ideals for her Sam, but when she attempted to define them, they seemed nebulous, indeed, against his simple practice of expediency. He had his theory that what was expedient was just, and she—what was her theory except that his was not good enough for him? And his was in possession everywhere, established, honoured, received of all but a trivial minority. He thought with the mass and she thought mass-thinking was not good enough for him. It was difficult to explain. He wasn’t a criminal, he wasn’t even individual in thought or method; he played the common game, playing perhaps a little more astutely than the average, but keeping honestly within the rules. He followed the crowd, and she wanted him to follow the gleam. A gleam is indefinable, but she thought she had a chance because she was so much more grown-up than Sam. Business was a game of marbles, and girls do not play with marbles, but with dolls.
He was not to remain for long with the delusion that he had silenced her in their first talk. There followed many other talks, although she was coming to the conclusion that talking would not do the business for her. It helped, it made a preparation of the ground, but it was stubborn clay in which he had his roots. Talking did not dig deep enough; she must uproot, she must transplant.
“Politics,” he had said to pulverize her argument.
“Another thing,” she told him, “which is not quite the mystery for women that it was. Politics, but—why?”
And he replied with the word which had raised him to ecstasy. “Power,”; he said.
“Yes?” she questioned. “Business leads you to money, money to politics, and politics to power. And after that? You want power—for what?”
“Why,” he cried, “power is power.”
“An end in itself?”
“At least, it’s an ambition,” he replied.
It was, and so had Ada had her ambition to be married, an end,theend. He did not think of Ada, but he found it difficult to justify himself. He could not even tell her that he was a Liberal, because he had a decent hatred of a Tory; he wasn’t in politics for a faith which enabled him to endure their artifice; he relished the artifice, he was in with an axe to grind, but with no clear idea of the use he wished to make of his axe when it was sharp. Ambition, purpose narrowed to two letters—M.P. He wanted to be M.P. for Branstone, that Bran-stone might hear the voice of Branstone speaking in the House of Commons.
She watched him slyly, and thought her leaven worked. “Of course,” she said casually, “it would be useful for your business if you were an M.P.”
“Enormously,” he agreed, marching blindly into her little trap. “It gives prestige to any business.”
“And completes the vicious circle,” she said. “Business takes you to politics and politics brings you back to business.”
He remembered an appointment hastily, and went to keep it. Sam Branstone stumped for a reply was an unusual phenomenon, and she con gratulated herself again that it worked. It worked, but slowly. She was not impatient, but he was still doing unchanged the things she hated to see him do, and she wanted the change to come. She doubted that it would ever come by talk alone. One did not convert by conversation.
She had intended to say so much, to keep a steady pressure on him, and she couldn’t do it, partly because her point of view was difficult of definition, partly because she thought no talk, no matter how inspired, could change him of itself. She did not know of Anne, who had talked and kept the pres sure up, and put sacrifice behind the talk even to the point of thrusting her hand into the fire; but Effie, too, had sacrifice in mind. Anne’s sacrifice had failed. It wasn’t, perhaps, the right sacrifice: it was, at any rate, the immortal commonplace, the sacrifice of the older generation to the younger, of the mother to the son, of age to youth. Spectacular, heroic as it was, it was yet in the scheme of things, and it is the sacrifice of youth to youth which can surprise by unexpectedness.
For some it is a sacrifice to cease talking even when they are convinced that talk is futile. If Effie was one of these, she made that little sacrifice at once. She never told him that his life was mean and ugly and despicable, his triumphs worthless, his success a failure, his highest ambition to know that people grovelled to him, his money and his power. She did not say these things, but neither did she yield an inch of her attitude which implied them.
“I’ll win,” she told herself, “I’ll win.”
By now she was crusading for the soul of Sammy Branstone, and all the while her passion grew, fed as much by that in him which irritated her as by what attracted. She accepted the fact that he was married and discounted it. It was one with the other irritants, mattering less to her, for it was irremovable. She could neglect the wife: what mattered was the man. She must bring beauty to his life.
They have tamed many wild things in a world growm standardized; they have tried for centuries to bridle love and make it run in harness; but love refuses to be tamed and standardized by the marriage service. You don’t scare love away by the bogey-sign, “Trespassers will be prosecuted.” Love’s wild, it’s free, blind to the handcuffs which Church and State pathetically try to rivet on a given pair, lawless because it knows no law, timeless because it know’s no time. Sometimes it lasts while a butterfly could suck a flower’s honey, sometimes the space of a man’s life, and they have tried to regulate this love, this volatility, to pretend that because it sometimes does not evaporate, it never evaporates till death. They sought to link love with property, and to control the uncontrollable. They make laws round love, which is like enclosing an eagle in a cobweb; and we suffer for their laws. We keep the law and suffer; break it and we suffer.
She knew that she would suffer, but she would bring beauty to Sam. He hadn’t capitulated to her talk, and she thought that he had no chance in Manchester. Perhaps her Sam was with her in his dreams, but each dawn brought him to accustomed ugliness, and habit clogged his days with mud. He couldn’t escape, he wanted wings, and she was there to bring them him. He did not know there was another side to life, but she would show it him. He should see her beauty, and, through that, the beauty of the other side.
She was presumptuous, but presumption is a quality of faith. She interfered, but there are three inevitable interferences in life—birth, love and death—and hers was one of these. It was them all: it was love and the birth of the new Sam, and the death of the old. She interfered, where she had right to interfere. She loved.
Time passed between the day when she came to her decision and the day when they acted upon it, and she never knew how long it was nor how she spent it. She belonged to a living fact, and there were shadows in the world, such as her work, her mother, the silly detail of arranging to go away, and Stewart, a haunting shadow of one Sunday afternoon, but these were unrealities and only her idea was real. She never remembered how she put it to Sam, nor what he said, though she had a hazy memory that he was desperately shocked and more profoundly humorous than ever before. But she thought that he was only shocked as the right thing shocks by rightness, not as the wrong by wrongness: and she knew that difficulties melted: and they came.
They came to the Marbeck Inn and entered into their kingdom of a week.