DEBT appeals to some people. They feel that when they are in debt they have had more out of life than life owes to them. Sam had given Gatenby his cheque and was therefore not in debt to him, but he proceeded to spend the five pounds as recklessly as if it had been borrowed money.
He meant to astonish Ada, and succeeded, but the surprise he sprang did not work quite as he anticipated. For a moment, indeed, as he bought her hats and blouses she glowed with unaffected gratitude, and he tasted with her the joy of headstrong acquisition. But Ada’s glow was quick to pass.
She had time in the train to forget the splendour of his presents and the dash that she would cut next Sunday, and to remember that he had spent a lot of money; he who denied that he had more than two pounds to spend had spent seven. Obviously, he had lied to her.
It was true, she thought, that he had repented of his lie and of his meanness, and bought handsomely: the more handsome the purchase, the more demonstrable the lie.
She recalled her dreadful interview with Anne, Anne’s statements of his means, and how little they conformed to the scale of Sam’s furnishing. She pondered Sam’s open-handedness in the blouse-shop, and concluded that the Branstones were congenital liars about money.
In the future she would know how to act. Sam had plenty.
“So you had money up your sleeve all the time,” she said.
Sam winked facetiously. “There are a lot of funny things up my sleeve,” he said.
“I’m learning that,” said Ada. Which he took for a compliment; and grinned.
He had long since made up his mind that the way with women was to mystify them, to treat them like children at a conjuring entertainment, to surprise them with results, but never to explain. He nearly choked with pride over his exploit with Sir William Gatenby. But for the hat-box and the blouses up there on the rack, what he had done was too good to be true, and certainly it was too good to be told to a woman. They did not understand business; no woman could appreciate the daring spirit of his feat.
If he told Ada that he had borrowed from Gatenby, she would simply say “Oh, yes,” and treat his unexampled audacity as a matter of course. It was inspiration, brilliantly conceived and brilliantly executed, and its bright memory was not to be tarnished by a woman’s dull acceptance of it as something not in the least extraordinary.
He grinned and did not tell, and what did not occur to him was that if he offered no explanation she would supply one of her own. It is idiotic to tell a wife everything, but wise to tell nearly everything; especially when it is open to her to draw a false conclusion.
Sam did not think a false conclusion open to her, because he still believed the best of Ada, because he was still in love. But falling out of love is desperately easy.
“As a walled town,” says Touchstone, “is worthier than a village, so is the forehead of a married man more honourable than the bare brow of a bachelor,” and Sam was married. He could lay that flattering unction to his soul, could hold his head higher, because he was a ratepayer and bore responsibilities, and went home at night to a house with a garden. He did all that, and it was empty honour because success in marriage, as in all else, is not to be had ready-made, but depends upon the will to make adjustments.
The will can come best from passion, and there was no passion here to tide them over the awkward age of marriage, the first difficult year when the adjustments must, if ever, be made. Granted passion, a man can love a woman whom he knows to be a murderess; let passion lack, and he can fall out of love because the woman snores or is untidy. Sam’s marriage was not made in heaven, but by Ada in Heaton Park, and with a marriage so made it is as easy to fall out of love as off a house. Little things count more than big when there is no passion to create its life-long mirage.
If you cannot have the mirage of passion there is a useful substitute called common sense, another name for compromise, and Ada refused to compromise. She was for self, unmitigated and supreme. Ada left the adjustments to Sam, and relaxed in nothing from her perfect selfishness.
The little thing which counted heavily against her, almost at once, was simply that Ada was untidy. She did not invent places for things, or, if she did, they were never used. She left her clothes downstairs after she had been out, and the piano is not the place for a hat or the sofa for an umbrella. It annoyed Sam to distraction to find her clothes distributed about their bedroom, slung carelessly over chair backs, pitched on the floor.
Men are not the untidy sex: the virtue of tidiness, like most others, is evenly distributed. Sam was tidy by nature, and habit is stronger still. Ada’s misfortune was that he was used to Anne, that Anne was neat and Ada a slut. Sam did not know until he missed it how much he appreciated Anne’s tidiness, how much he needed it and how much he hated untidiness until he lived with it in Ada. In London, in the hotel, he had excused what he saw of it, because it was in an hotel; which was also why there had been little to see, by reason of a good chambermaid.
At home, it hurt him and he could do nothing. Ada did nothing, either. She had not married for love, and one does not change a habit without strong motive. His hints appeared to Ada peevish and unreasonable. She thought he made mountains out of molehills and despised him for small-mindedness; he thought a woman who could not put a petticoat into a drawer when he asked her was wilfully provoking him.
She was not wilful of set purpose. She simply refused to disturb her habits, to accommodate herself to him, to make a sacrifice to love. She had no love to which to sacrifice.
And presently he found out that he, too, did not love. But that was all. Then and afterwards that was, damnably, all. He did not love, but neither did he hate. He had never loved her deeply enough to hate her. That was the tragedy of Sam’s marriage: indifference, the deadliest sin.
He was indifferent to her, to her untidiness and even to her extravagance. She could not treat clothes reasonably, she did not know how to wear them when she had them, but she lusted madly to possess them. She was grossly, inexcusably extravagant, and he was indifferent. He was indifferent because he was growing rich, and wanted his energies for the purpose of growing richer, not of quarrelling with her.
That was another tragedy. They never quarrelled. They never cleared the air, they never flushed the drain. They did not make adjustments, but left things where they were, in a bad place. On honeymoon, they turned from looking at each other to look at London, and at home, after one experience of revelation, they did not seek another, but rebounded and looked anywhere but at themselves.
But Peter was looking, and Anne, through the eyes of George, was looking, and it seemed to her that things were happening as she had expected they would happen. She had said the girl was no good and what George told her in his fumbling way gave her to see that the girl turned wife was equally no good. Anne tightened her lips grimly and went on with her efficient charring. She thought her time would come.
Peter looked for the coming of love to bless this marriage to which he had consented in the belief that his God of love would sanctify. He had trusted to the strength of Sam, and to the hope that Sam’s strength would turn to sweetness; and it only turned to business. It did not lead Ada from materialism, but drew Peter himself, unwittingly at first, towards it. Peter found himself selecting texts for Sam’s “Church Child’s Calendar,” a labour of love, which nevertheless had nothing to do with Ada, except in the most indirect way, and nothing to do with the Sam and Ada situation.
It was the fact that, to them, there seemed to be no situation which distressed Peter. They simply let things be, and things let be obey the law of gravity. He hoped, ardently, for children. Children blessed marriage in the physical sense, and from that blessing the other, the spiritual blessing, might arise.
There was at one time hope that Ada might have a child... and then the hope was blighted, and the doctor told them not to hope again. Ada would never be a mother.
“I could have told them that,” said Anne. “You’d only to look at the girl to see it.” Which may only have been wisdom after the event, but certainly did not imply that Anne was disappointed; though Peter was, and bitterly.
Sam, too, had wanted a son, but not, as Peter thought, by Ada and for Ada. He wanted an heir for dynastic reasons. He was the Branstone Publishing Company, its parent and original, and wanted flesh of his flesh to publish after him. He dreamed of a young Sam in the cap of the Grammar School, who should go to the University to which he had not gone and have the chances he had missed. He built many castles in Spain for the son who was never born.
Ada got up from bed and flashed greedily into new clothes. If the measure of her buying was the measure of her grief, she had been deeply touched. Perhaps she was touched, for she had aimed at marriage, which is incomplete without a child. But in the shops, the fashion papers, her clothes and the clothes of other women she found distraction and an occupation. She passed a milestone and went on her way. Ada was no stoic, no hider of her grief, and since she did not complain she must have thought her childlessness was nothing to complain about. When she set her heart on marriage, she hadn’t, perhaps, looked further than the ring, the ceremony and the honourable state of being Mrs. Branstone.
She plunged to shops and spending money, Sam to business and making it; and some, at any rate, of the now thwarted love he had been storing for his son passed to the business. Somewhere at the back of his mind he knew his business was not lovable; that it was pitch; that one cannot touch pitch without being defiled. But neither can one deal successfully in pitch without arriving at faith in the virtues of pitch. At intimate moments he was aware that the “Social Evil” pamphlet was pernicious, but Sam Branstone, inducing a bookseller to stock it, was more than an advocate who believes temporarily in his brief: he was a missionary with faith in his mission. So, too, with the texts. He sold them with the conviction that it was good for people to have texts on their walls. He counterfeited sincerity until he came to be sincere, or, at all events, to forget that he was insincere.
Further and further into the unsearched recesses of his mind he pressed the thought that he sold texts because their sales were good for him, and with his working, everyday, non-introspective mind he had a sincerity about his wares, convenient but none the less authentic,-which was invaluable both to his self-respect and as a first aid to success in salesmanship. He never, in the old days, praised a house with the ringing voice of absolute conviction which he used about Law’s “Serious Call.” He had not read Law, but the sales hung fire till he became persuaded of Law’s tremendous worth.
He had a serious call of his own, a call to sell good books at good profits, and the call expressed itself in his clothes and his appearance. He seemed older, graver, took his frock-coat into daily wear, used only black in ties and socks, and had the air of one, who, if not a clergyman, was often in their company, though as a fact he was more frequently with commercial travellers, and in the hotels at night his repertoire of smoke-room stories came no less gaily from his tongue than of old.
And about this time his moustache began to droop like a curtain over his resolute mouth.
Stewart came into the office one day with a parcel under his arm. He had seen neither Sam nor his office lately, and stared wide-eyed at both. Carter, partner in the printing business, still occupied the dilapidated office where Sam had found him, but the Branstone Publishing Company had ampler premises next door, in a building which Sam rented as warehouse for his stock. Gilt lettering on its windows called the attention of the passer-by to the Branstone + Classics.
Sam still looked after detail, and when Stewart came in was correcting proofs of a tear-off calendar with a Bible at his elbow.
“I suppose,” said Stewart, “that youareBranstone, but why disguise yourself as a Scottish Elder?”
“I am in my usual clothes,” said Sam, rather huffed.
“If the clothes are the man, this is no place for me. Do you often use the Bible in your business hours?”
He often did, not only to check with a quite beautiful precision the texts on his calendars by the Authorised Version, but in another way, and one which seemed to show, if it showed anything, that he looked upon the Bible with intimate familiarity. Perhaps one mascot was the vellum-bound copy of the “Social Evil” pamphlet and the other the Bible. At any rate, his price code used in the office was made up this way:
New clerks initiated into that code used to wonder at it for a day. Then they got used to it.
“I’m correcting the proofs of this calendar,” Sam explained. “You see, it’s a shaving calendar. You hang this up by your shaving-mirror and study the text for the day while you shave.”
“I don’t,” said Stewart. “I go to the barber’s. My hand’s unsteady in the morning. But I see the idea. First read the text, then wipe your razor on it.”
“That is not the idea. See.” He pointed to the card of the calendar, and read solemnly:
“A text a day
Drives care away.”
“It wouldn’t drive my sort of care away,” said Stewart. “Mine’s serious.”
“There can be no trouble too serious for you to find consolation in this calendar.”
“But suppose I have toothache on quarter-day, and the consolation you offer for that date is consolation to a man who can’t pay his rent? Seriously, Branstone, am I behind the scenes in this office, or do you never drop the showman? I admit you’re in the pi-market, and you’ve dressed the pi-man’s part and you’ve got his patter, too, but I don’t know that you need exercise it on me. This stock of yours looks dire,” he commented, strolling round the office. “I suppose it’s the stuff that sells?”
“My business,” said Sam, “is founded on a rock.”
“I came in here to sell you a fortune,” said Stewart. “If you’re going to talk cant at me, I’ll take the fortune to a London publisher. Your business may be founded on a rock, but the name of the rock is the ‘Social Evil.’”
“The word rock,” said Sam, with a twinkle in his eye, “is also used for a kind of toffee.”
“Well, now that I know you’re sane, I’ll talk to you. And I’ll talk toffee, too I didn’t think in the days of my earnest youth that I should come to this, but you never know what debt will do to a man. I’ve written a novel. At least, it isn’t a novel, it’s an outrage on decency. It’s a violent assault on the emotions. It’s the sort of thing I deserve shooting for writing. Treacle is bitter compared with it, and it does not contain one word of literature. It is a cast-iron certainty.”
“I must read it,” said Sam.
“You’re growing distrustful,” said Stewart sadly.
“I don’t buy pigs in pokes, even when they’re yours,” said Sam. “Come along in a couple of days.”
He read the novel, and was ready for Stewart when he came.
“I have taken the liberty,” he said, “of marking some passages in this manuscript which you may care to alter.”
“Oh? I know it’s mawkish, but I don’t believe there is a limit to what they’ll stand—and like.”
“I refer particularly to the character you have called Hetaera.”
“But only once. After that she’s called Hetty.”
“Hetty,” said Sam severely, “will have to be cut out. She is an impure woman.”
“Even the most popular of novels should bear some relationship to life.”
“If you wish me to publish this one, Hetty must go. Branstones have a reputation to sustain.”
“Good God!” said Stewart. “Hetty is the one oasis of truth in a desert of sloppy sentimentality. She’s true because I happen to know her.”
“That is nothing to your credit, Stewart.”
Stewart stared. “Are you pulling my leg, Sam, or is this really serious?”
“Why should you doubt my seriousness when I ask that fiction should be devoid of offence?”
“Don’t you mean devoid of truth?” He recovered his temper and his perspective. After all, he was very short of money. “All right, Sam,” he said. “Edit me. Censor me. I thought I knew things, but there are deeps below the lowest depths, and you have reached them. I surrender. What are the terms?”
Sam offered terms which were quite generous. He might want Stewart again.
The novel was purged of Hetty and published. The three-page prayer of the distressed heroine was used, in paraphrase, from quite a number of nonconformist pulpits, and the book was a huge success. It was the first of that series—Branstone’s Happy Novels for Healthy Homes—which carried the strength of the literary emetic to a point of concentrated sweetness undreamt of before, and discovered somewhere a public stomach which did not reject its nauseating jam, but revelled in it.
IF only Ada had had the courage of what ought to have been her convictions, things would have been very different. But she hadn’t the pluck or the zest in life to be anything at all except an almost perfect negative, and a man will fight for a wife for many reasons, but not for the reason that she is a full-stop.
Ada, as Peter knew when he consented to the marriage, could be led: with even surer hope of good result she could be driven, and if Sam had cared to drive, to play Petruchio with Ada, he could have turned her negative into a comparative, if not into a positive.
Unhappily, his driving powers were otherwise engaged, and his objectives were on the battlefield, his office, rather than in the dormitory which he might have turned into a home. And since Ada had all that she was conscious of wanting, she had a dull contentment. Two servants and credit at the shops were good enough for Ada, and good enough, too, for Sam, because they advertised success. If Ada had been actively vicious, if she had drunk, if men or a man had obsessed her, if indeed she had been anything that was bad perceptibly, Sam would have abandoned his indifference and taken a strong and effective line with her. It might, at first, have been only because a positively vicious Ada would have been bad for the Branstone + Classics, but it would have ended by being good for Ada and for Sam: it would have been the beginning of AdaandSam, of their dual life which had not yet come to birth. But, as it was, he saw nothing to fight. There was a superficial rightness; therefore all was right, he could forget Ada and turn to the things which were vital to him, business for its own sake, and business considered as a stepping-stone to politics.
He was content for some time to leave his political ambitions alone, because it seemed to him that money, quite a lot of money, was needed for politics. In truth, he was rather awed by his ambition: the House of Commons seemed a tremendous distance from his office in Manchester, and he thought a great deal of money would be needed for the fare. Fundamentally, he was modest and rarely overrated his abilities, but he believed that he had luck, and thought money a good first aid to more luck. Well as he was doing in business, he could not afford to divert his energies from moneymaking to politics, wherein he did not mean to begin at the bottom.
He was not ready yet to make political opportunities for himself, but if political opportunities came to him, that was another matter. And they did come. When he interviewed Sir William Gatenby, he threw a pebble into a pool whose wave was to wash him to high places.
It washed him into the knowledge of Mr. Charles Wattercouch, who was agent for the Division. Wattercouch read Gatenby’s letter about Sam with some surprise, as one of his recruiting grounds for voluntary workers was the Concentrics, and he thought he recalled hearing Sam speak for the other faction, but he catalogued the name for future reference on his list of earnest young men.
Wattercouch, like Sam, was in no hurry. He preferred men to come to him, not to go in search of them, but Sam did not come, and a letter from Gatenby was not to be neglected. Though Gatenby had probably dismissed the subject from his mind, he paid half of Wattercouch’s salary, and he might inquire about Sam some day. So the agent called on Sam at the office.
He was a square-built, square-faced man of forty, with a pink, eupeptic complexion, and light hair which bristled hardily. Your organizer of victory, like your editor, is apt to be cynical about the politics he is paid to profess, but Wattercouch kept his perfect faith in Liberalism, in spite of the fact that he served the Liberal Party, a feat in the accommodation of blameless principle with unscrupulous opportunism, which he accomplished with entire sincerity. One can be sincere and Jesuitical, in fact one can hardly be Jesuitical without being sincere, and to Mr. Wattercouch the most egregiously illiberal acts of the Liberal Party were justified because they were the acts of that party, and must, however improbable it seemed, be means to the end which was Liberalism.
This is not to suggest that Mr. Wattercouch was complex, for he was indeed quite simple, as witness the man’s relish in his grotesque name. He knew the value of being ridiculed when one can turn ridicule into respect, and much of his popularity resulted from the genial way in which he took jokes about his name. He made an asset of what might, to a less good-natured man, have been a handicap. “Indeed,” says Ben Jonson, “there is a woundy luck in names, sir,” and Wattercouch turned doubtful luck to good account.
Sam had the gift of the gab, which means that he knew both how and when to speak, and how and when to be silent. He was silent while Mr. Wattercouch spoke of the valuable work to be done by an earnest labourer in connection with the annual revision of the register. The point of the work was to see that all possible known Liberals were on the register, and all possible objection taken to any known Conservatives, and, complicated as the work was by the removal habit amongst electors, it was no light undertaking. Certainly no agent could have carried it through without the aid of industrious volunteers.
But Sam did not see himself in the character of an industrious volunteer, and he was silent for two reasons. The first was that his silence was causing Mr. Wattercouch visible embarrassment, and Sam liked the other man to be embarrassed; the second was that he was considering how to make Mr. Wattercouch see that his suggestion was an absurdity, if not an insult.
He smiled with quite polite superiority. “But I think, Mr. Wattercouch, that you are making a mistake,” he said, as one who apologizes for having to be blunt.
“Well,” admitted Wattercouch, “I had my doubts, because I fancied I’d heard you support Stephen Verity at the Concentrics.”
“That,” said Sam, “is not the mistake to which I allude. I am aware that I have supported Verity at the Concentrics. And I am aware that the way to learn how to cut a man’s hair is to practise on a sheep’s head. Verity was my sheep’s head.”
“I’m afraid I hardly follow,” said Wattercouch, who was indeed rather scandalized by such an allusion to Mr. Verity, who, if a Conservative, was an alderman and a noted figure in local politics.
“I will make it easier for you by admitting that even I had to learn,” said Sam.
“Ah! I see. You have now seen the error of your ways. You realize the grandeur of Liberalism, the——”
“I always did,” Sam asserted. “When I supported Verity, I was teaching myself to speak. I was practising on Toryism that I might become perfect in Liberalism. Those days when I made a convenience of Toryism were the days of my apprenticeship to the art of speaking. Would you have had me speak badly for such a cause as Liberalism? No. But if I spoke badly for Toryism, I damaged nothing. Toryismisnothing unless, as I said, it is a sheep’s head for Liberals to practise on when they are novices, and the mistake you made is to suppose that I am still a novice, when, as a matter of fact——” He paused elaborately and hoped that Mr. Wattercouch would fill in the blank intelligently. “But it is premature to speak of that,” he said. “As to the registration, I can send you one of my clerks.” He made a gesture dismissing as an affair of pygmies that chief event of an agent’s year.
“I see... I see,” said Wattercouch, trying hard to believe that he had so far been looking at Sam through the wrong end of a telescope. “And you yourself, Mr. Branstone?”
It tempted Sam, that tone of quite startled respect which Wattercouch adopted now. The misfortune of Sam’s imaginative flights was that he never knew when to stop. All that he cared about, at the moment, was to give Wattercouch the impression that Sam Branstone was too important to be asked to drudge at registration work. He was in no hurry about politics, but when he began it would not be as a volunteer clerk.
“I?” he replied. “Two things. One a fact and the other a prophecy. The fact is that I am an orator, and the prophecy is that Sir William Gatenby will not live long and that I shall take his place as member for the Division. Have you a cold?” he added, as Wattercouch choked with irresistible stupefaction.
He had not a cold, neither had he powers of speech just then, and the silence grew emphatic without in the least disconcerting Sam. Once launched on the sea of bluff, Sam was a hardy navigator, and he had the moral support of knowing that his whole purpose just now was to avoid being a clerk. To avoid being a clerk it is justifiable to do more than to romance: it is justifiable to commit most of the crimes in the Newgate Calendar. Sam was hardly asked to do that, but Wattercouch’s cough was a challenge, and a bluff half bluffed is worse than no bluff at all. It became a matter of pride to convince this unbeliever.
“I intend,” said Sam with aplomb, “to do a good deal of platform for the Party. If an election comes soon, so much the better. I shall take the opportunity to make myself more popular with the electors than Sir William Gatenby is. That is easy. He quotes Latin in election speeches, and I’m a man of the people. After that, I expect to contest a by-election for a seat which the Party regards as a forlorn hope. If it is possible to win that seat for our Great Cause, I shall win it. If not, I shall trust to two things, the senile decay of Sir William Gatenby and the discretion of the Whip’s office.”
Wattercouch was adapting himself painfully to the new perspective. He granted that Sam had plausibility, and an assurance which nearly lent conviction to his astonishing statement.
“You are in touch with the Whips!” he gasped.
Sam remembered and varied an old formula. “Do you suppose,” he asked indignantly, “that I should be speaking to you like this if I were not?”
Wattercouch did not suppose it. For one thing he was acquainted with the devious ways of Whips, and nothing that those secretive autocrats did could surprise him: for another, he wished to believe what Sam wished him to believe. He saw in Sam the way out of a dilemma.
His dilemma was a common one. A death had caused a vacancy in the Town Council, and the local Liberal caucus was almost pathetically embarrassed as to its choice of a candidate. There were at least three veteran workers for the Cause who expected, with justice, to be approached and none of the three could be selected without offence being given to interests which it was impolitic to offend.
It was all very well for the caucus: they left it to Wattercouch, the general handy man, to make suggestions, and as he listened to Sam he thought he had found a candidate who, simply because he was politically unknown, could offend nobody. If the obvious men were wrong, he must rely on the rightness of the unexpected, and, after all, Sam might be speaking the truth. One never knew where one was with Whips, and here was his chance to propitiate Sam and at the same time to solve the problem which troubled the caucus. Sam was a dark horse and he wished he knew more about him; it was startling to come in search of a voluntary clerk and to find a candidate; but, finally, he saw it as a legitimate case for taking a risk.
“I don’t know, sir,” he said, with a very pretty respect in his voice, “whether municipal politics will appeal to a man of your calibre, but there is a vacancy in St. Mary’s Ward, and I hardly think there will be any difficulty about your adoption as candidate if you cared to stand.”
Sam pretended to reflect. The truth was that the prospect of an immediate seat in the Council made his heart beat fiercely. He had meant for a while longer to put business before politics, but this sort of politics was business. The Council took up one’s time, but conferred a prestige on Branstone and the Branstone Publications which would more than compensate for the waste of time.
And it was deliciously unexpected. He had not studied to impress Wattercouch, but had talked exaltedly simply to excuse himself from the unseen, thankless drudgery of organization: yet it seemed he had impressed. Virtually, he was offered a seat, He was, this soon, to sit where Travers had sat, to be a City Father before he was thirty-five. He had romanced glibly about a bird in the bush, and found himself grasping a bird in hand, and no contemptible fowl either.
“We must despise nothing,” he said, “which makes for Liberalism.” Wattercouch nodded with enthusiasm. “Of course,” Sam went on, “strictly between ourselves, the Council is small beer. But it is for the Cause, and if I were asked to stand, you may take it that I should not allow the larger view I have of my ultimate activities to interfere with my acceptance. I take pleasure in duty and I see it as my duty, even if it involves the postponement of my Parliamentary ambitions, to throw myself wholeheartedly into this conflict.” He was wonderfully pious.
Wattercouch was less emotional. He had heard too many speeches from prospective candidates to be carried away by Sam’s. “Quite probably there will be no contest,” he said dryly. “It’s a safe Liberal seat.”
“I should have preferred a fight,” Sam lied wistfully. “But I put duty first.”
As a fact, there was no contest, and if each of the three veteran workers thought himself aggrieved, he had the consolation of knowing that the other two shared his grievance. Wattercouch was discreetly mysterious about Sam in the inner councils of the local Party, used Gatenby’s name freely and managed to convey that Branstone was something much bigger than he appeared to be. He had, at least, got them out of their quandary.
Nor did Sam discredit his sponsor either at the private meeting he addressed or at the public one which followed. He had said he was an orator, Wattercouch had repeated it indefatigably, and Sam’s audience believed it implicitly. He was not quite an orator, but was coming along nicely under the tuition of an old actor who had failed on the stage and now called himself a professor of elocution.
He became Mr. Councillor Branstone, and happy little references to the event began to appear in the papers. TheSunday Judge, for instance, had “no doubt that Mr. Branstone will live to look back upon his unopposed return to the Council as a minor episode of his political career, and we speak by the book. Branstone will go far, but, meantime, it is something even for him to know that he is the most popular man in St. Mary’s Ward. We had almost written in the whole city, but that would be to anticipate. How is it done? How is such popularity achieved? How, in other words, did merit become recognized? Mr. Branstone himself only smiled when we asked him, but his smile is half of his secret and his rousing, earnest oratory the other half. They are indeed an open smile and an open secret. But there are other secrets less open. All we shall say now is, ‘Watch Branstone. He will not disappoint you.’”
There was a low evening paper, run in the Conservative interest, which fastened on the phrase “other secrets less open” and published the scurrilous statement that one of the less open secrets was the fact that Mr. Councillor Branstone’s mother was a charwoman, but the paragraph appeared only in the early edition and unaccountably disappeared from later issues. It did no harm, as first editions are not published for politicians, but for sportsmen, and, in any case, there was a brief, but dignified, eulogy of Mr. Branstone in theManchester Wardennext day. That paper happened, fortunately, to be Liberal in politics, and indeed to be, on just occasion, a valiant log-roller. It rolled a log for Sam; the popularity of Branstone was established, hall-marked by the Press; and it was about this time that Stewart’s second potboiler was accepted for inclusion in Branstone’s Novels. The terms were even more favourable to the author than before.
THE curse of the Wandering Jew is upon the advertiser: he must move perpetually. Not that Sam would have been in any case content to sit idly on a seat in the Council Chamber. He hadn’t the sedentary gifts, nor was he of the breed of Ada, who, the state of matrimony once achieved, existed in contemplation of a glory which was even more vegetable than animal.
He had to do something to justify a paper reputation for popularity and he had even to convince himself that he would not soon wake up to find it all a dream. It had happened too easily to be true, or, at least, safe. Wattercouch had hinted that things were expected of him.
They were, of course, expected of him as a Liberal, and Sam was not, in fact, a Liberal but a Conservative. A Conservative is a man who conserves, who says “Aye” to the words of Giovanni Malatesta.
“What I have snared, in that I set my teeth
And lose with agony.”
Sam had snared, he proposed to go on snaring and never to lose what he had snared. Whereas a Liberal is a Conservative weakened by sentimental compassion for the dispossessed. He is not the opposite of a Conservative, but a Conservative who is weak-minded, or timid or scrupulous enough to think himself a robber and to propose to give the poor some five per cent of his plunder. The opposite of a Conservative is an anarchist.
Politically he was a Liberal because he thought the Liberals certain to come in for a long innings at the next election, and if there was any feeling about it at all (beyond a desire to be on the winning side), it was for the pudgy orator whose tremendous sentences had caught his imagination when he visited the House of Commons.
What he did became known as the Verity affair. It might with equal and perhaps superior justice have been called the Branstone affair but for that malicious impulse which causes people to refer to a scandal by the name of the exposed rather than the exposer. It is like the odium which we attach to a man who has been in prison, where he had already had his punishment. Mankind is resolute against letting sleeping dogs lie.
Mr. Alderman Verity was an elder statesman of the Council and a Conservative of the honest, unyielding type who thought that to approve of Tory Democracy was to be either a rogue or a fool, and Sam objected to him not because he was a Conservative, but for deeper reasons. Verity was the landlord of Sam’s offices. Every tenant objects to every landlord.
One calls Verity an honest Conservative because he made no concessions, not because he was himself a fount of honour. He had no sympathy with the modern mawkishness about pampering the people. He admitted that one had to make promises, that the way to win elections was to tickle the elector as if he were a trout, but as an Alderman he sat above the cockpit of electioneering and frowned upon the Liberal attitudes to which younger Conservatives descended to catch a vote. And their view that the Council existed for the people honestly revolted him: it was so patently the other way about.
The particular instance was Baths in Hulme. He saw no sense in Baths in Hulme. He was quite sincere in his belief that to build Baths in Hulme was to cast pearls before swine. Hulme had not asked for Baths and did not want Baths. Baths were opportunities for cleanliness and Hulme did not want to be clean. Hulme would not be Hulme if it were clean.
The uncleanliness of Hulme was an institution. Conservatives conserve institutions, and the only thing which could remove his Conservative and Aldermanic objection to Baths in Hulme was self-interest.
Self-interest is the greatest institution of them all.
He continued to oppose the young bloods of his Party because for a long time he did not see where his self-interest came in. He even opposed them publicly. He said in public that Baths in Hulme were a nasty, pandering, Liberal idea and that no decent-minded Conservative could think of it without nausea. And then, suddenly and silently, he was found to be with those who proposed that Hulme should bathe if it wanted to. His change of mind coincided with the discovery that there was no open space in Hulme where Baths could be erected. Something would have to come down that the Baths might go up, and what would come down, and why, was the secret of Mr. Alderman Verity and one or two others of the Old Gang who had the habit of standing loyally by each other when a little simple jobbery was in question. Really, it was too simple to be reprehensible. If a Town Council can by one and the same resolution clear away a slum, and confer Baths, who benefits, and doubly, but the Town? Naturally, the slum owner has to be compensated, though adequate compensation can hardly be put high enough. Slums are so profitable.
Wattercouch had many preoccupations just now, but his vigilance was a habit, and he was struck by the change in Mr. Alderman Verity’s attitude. The silence which succeeded his eloquence seemed pregnant with something, and Wattercouch wondered with what. It was an error of judgment in the Alderman not to be ill at this time, but he had covered his tracks and the affair was prejudged, settled before it ever came before the Council. Verity had neither conscience nor fears about it, and the Conservative Party, with a prescient eye on the imminent General Election, was going to use its majority in the Council that it might figure as the Party which bestowed cleanliness on Hulme.
Wattercouch wondered why it was Simpson’s Buildings which those benefactors of mankind proposed to buy and demolish so as to clear a site for their Baths.
“This might be your opportunity, Branstone,” he said.
“Isn’t it asking a good deal of the junior member of the Council to suggest that he tackle an old hand like Alderman Verity?” asked Sam, leaning back in his chair with his thumbs in his waistcoat armholes.
“We all expect great things of you,” flattered Wattercouch, who had still to justify his selection of Sam to the Liberal caucus.
“I don’t intend to fail you, either. But I can’t oppose these Baths. As a Liberal I am in favour of them.”
“So are we all. But we are not in favour of Alderman Verity’s being in favour of them.”
“It’s David and Goliath to pit me against Verity, Wattercouch.”
“David won.”
“And Samuel will win. But he will make a condition. The condition is a free hand. I want no help and no advice and I undertake on that condition to pulverize Verity.”
“But you’ll tell me what you propose to do?”
“I said a free hand, Wattercouch. Leave this to me and I’ll settle it.”
It seemed to Wattercouch that every time he had dealings with Sam he was asked to take a gambling chance, but he had no plan of action, and the man without a plan is always at a disadvantage against the man who, with or without a plan, looks confident. He left it to Sam and there was, as it happened, nobody to whom he could have left it better.
Wattercouch had no inside information and only vague suspicions that Verity’s change of mind was rooted in the same earth as Verity’s self-interest. But Sam knew something and was not boasting idly when he undertook to “pulverize” Verity.
What he knew, rightly used at the right moment, was dynamic enough, but he lacked evidence and he did not see how to get evidence. The Council meeting was at hand and he was finding it each day more difficult to grin with cheerful assurance at the mutely questioning Wattercouch. He felt distinctly unassured.
The facts were clear enough to him. Verity now approved of the Baths because they were to be erected on the site of Simpson’s Buildings, and Verity owned that dilapidated pile. He did not own it publicly because respectable aldermen do not own slum property; he owned it in the name of Mr. Sylvester Lamputt, Verity’s second cousin, a man of straw; and Sam knew that he owned it because he had a good memory, he remembered a conversation between Lamputt and Mr. Travers, which he had overheard, and all the present circumstances pointed to the relations of Lamputt with Verity being as they had been when Sam was in the estate agent’s office.
Verity was aware that retail profits are higher than wholesale, and small retail than large retail; that when, for instance, a poor woman buys an ounce of tea she pays a higher rate for it than when a rich woman buys a pound or ten pounds, and similarly that when a family rents a room in a slum property it pays immensely more for it proportionately than when a cotton king rents a warehouse in the centre of the city. But it is dignified to let a warehouse to a cotton king, and disreputable to let single rooms in Hulme, so second cousin Lamputt was the putative owner of Simpson’s Buildings. Sam smiled at the ludicrous thought of the burly alderman sheltering behind the shrivelled form of his second cousin Lamputt. It was like trying to hide a bull behind a weasel.
But he did not smile often in those days. He paid a visit, at dusk, to Simpson’s Buildings, and breathed softly lest Simpson’s Buildings should collapse upon him. Obviously, the alderman was finding his market in the nick of time. It eliminated doubt, but did not provide proof.
He knew that in the matter of Simpson’s Buildings, Lamputt was identical with Verity, but he wanted evidence, and to get evidence he must rely upon the dullness of Mr. Lamputt, and did not think that he was dull. The totem of Lamputt was certainly a ferret, and Sam credited the ferret tribe with nimble wit. He had to be more nimble, then.
He rejected the idea of making Mr. Lamputt gloriously drunk because it seemed impossible to associate glory, even the glory of intoxication, with Mr. Lamputt’s feeble body. It was a case, as usual with Sam, of taking chances.
He did nothing at all until the morning of the meeting which was to decide if Hulme might bathe, and, even then, left his office only a little before his usual time for going to the Town Hall. He turned into a back street, ran up many stairs to the attic office whose door bore the name of Sylvester Lamputt, Agent (more sins are committed in the name of agency than of charity), and flung panting into the single room.
He won the first throw in his game. Sylvester was in.
He sat on a high office stool writing on the malodorous page of an enormous ledger, looking for all the world like a diminutive office boy on whom some one has fitted, in cruel jest, a hoary head. If the calendars on his walls were trustworthy witnesses, he was agent for half the insurance companies in the British Isles. Autolycus was Sylvester’s other name.
He reverenced his ledger as other men reverence the Bible. He kept no other diary, for the ledger was his book of life, and when Sam burst upon him he was absorbed in his records. He closed the book mechanically through pure secretive habit, and closed into it just enough of his wits to put him at a disadvantage with Sam.
Sam gave no quarter. “Mr. Verity,” he gasped before he was fairly in the room. “Simpson’s Buildings... the title-deeds... here, or has Mr. Verity got them?”
It succeeded. Lamputt took him for an urgent special messenger from Verity. “If Mr. Verity’s memory is going,” he said with dignity, “mine is not. The title-deeds are in the third drawer of his safe in his office.”
“In his name?” asked Sam quickly.
“Of course,” said Lamputt, and then, too late, became suspicious. “I say,” he began, “what———-?”
But Sam had gone, and though Mr. Lamputt reached his hat and the door in one bound and careered down his familiar stairs like the office boy his figure aped, Sam had turned a corner and was lost to sight. Lamputt raced to Verity’s office, only to find that the alderman was then attending a Council meeting. Lamputt could do no more, indeed for a man with a weak heart he had already done too much: but he had a strong foreknowledge of the wrath of Alderman Verity, and goes, an unhappy, shrinking figure, out of this story to an unknown fate.
Sam went to the Town Hall with his bomb-shell, and they disapprove of bombs at Council meetings, so he was sedulous to spare their feelings. He supported that part of the resolution which referred to the erection of Baths, but proposed that it should stand alone and that the naming of a site should be deferred. Curiously, his proposal made the Conservative majority very angry: the resolution was one and indivisible. Sam regretted that in order to vote against the misuse of a particular site, he was forced to vote against the Baths, but standing as he did for purity in civic life, detesting the very shadow of jobbery, he had no alternative but to move that the resolution be rejected. Here was a proposal which, however innocent its wording, did in fact imply that ratepayers’ money was to be handed over to a prominent member of the party opposite, to a gentleman in whose safe, at whose office, in the third drawer of the safe, were deposited at that moment the title-deeds of the property whose acquisition by the city was suggested. He abhorred personalities, he shrank from mentioning a name, and if the second part of the resolution were withdrawn, he——
It was too much for a young, impetuous innocent opposite. “You dare not mention a name. You lie.”
Sam hoped the Council would absolve him of causing a scene.
“Prove your words,” cried the rash gentleman.
“I suggest,” said Sam blandly, “that we avoid unpleasantness. I have made a statement and I am asked to prove it. If a deputation of three will go with me and Mr. Alderman Verity to his office, the title-deeds of Simpson’s Buildings will be found in the place I have indicated.”
It was the sort of drama which appealed more to the readers of the evening papers than to the Council. Mr. Mayor, in the chair, was speechless in embarrassed distress. Sam had the calm of imperishable rock in wind-tossed surf. In the midst of a breathless excitement, Mr. Alderman Verity was seen to totter to his feet. “I own the property,” he said, collapsed into his seat and graced that seat no more.
Impossible even for a Conservative paper to uphold Verity, impossible to do more than to suggest that Sam’s manners were deplorable: while his own papers made a hero of him, found his manners a model of consideration and his triumph as graceful as it was complete.
All Sam cared to know was that he was on the crest of a wave of popularity and a general election was at hand. Night after night he spoke, and the tritest platitudes, with Sam’s smile behind them, shone like new-found truth. He waspersona gratissimabefore he opened his mouth: it gave him confidence, and confidence is half the speaker’s battle. He coined some of those ugly, smart, journal-easy catch-words which help to win elections, and are quoted in the papers and blossom on the placards. And, with it all, he became what he had prematurely called himself, an orator.
He had the satisfaction of watching audiences sit through the boredom of Gatenby that they might hear Branstone, and of being himself the “star” speaker at outlying meetings. Gatenby was returned by a record majority and it was Bran-stone for whom the mob yelled outside the Town Hall.
The election was an early one, and Sam was called to speak in other constituencies. He had wires, not only from agents in quite distant divisions, but actually from Headquarters. He was in touch with the Whips! Less than a year after he had lied to Wattercouch, the lie turned true. He was in touch with the Whips, a wanted speaker, a man of reputation, a name to be applauded when it was announced on a platform, for all the world like people applaud when the number of a star performer goes up on the announcement board of a music-hall. He was not of the Great Unwanted, but of the few who were wanted.
Someone discovered at this time the old canard which had once appeared in the first edition of an evening paper, that his mother was a charwoman. He did not deny it, but used it as Wattercouch his name, making an asset of a handicap. He was of the people, blood of their blood, a democrat by birth, knowing their aspirations and their needs because he, too, had needed and aspired. In the heat of that election he became egregiously a Radical. It told, it “went” with the audiences: that was the thing that mattered to Sam. He hadn’t so much as the shadow of a principle, he was winning, on the winning side, and pleased himself enormously.
And by the end of the campaign he stood, actually, where he had aimed to stand: amongst prospective candidates who fight, as it were, probationary elections where, they have scarcely a sporting chance, to pay their footing towards the sort of candidature which gives a man his seat. If the Conservatives had offered him a tolerably safe seat, without preliminary fight, he would have ratted eagerly, and the charwoman his mother would have been pressed into service on the other side. It was all one to Sam Branstone.