|TO a schoolboy of sixteen, love is an imbecile emotion, its victims
harmless lunatics, and it is not to be supposed that Sam’s interest in
the affair of Madge and George was based on intimate understanding. His
conspiratorial action came rather as a lark: behind, perhaps, was the
recognition that adults did habitually make fools of themselves in
this way, that his loyalty in such a case was to Madge who was of his
generation, and that Anne in obstructing their marriage was outrunning
the constable in her demands for self-sacrifice on his behalf.
Larking, defined as enjoyable interference with other people for
motives either benevolent or purely egotistic, was a weakness of Samuel
Branstone, and the boy was father to the man. He did not agree with Anne
that the marriage was inimical to his interests. True, George cleaned
windows and balanced hardily at the top of swaying ladders, a precarious
trade, but his own. Apparently it suited the Georgian temperament, and
that funambulist would not wear a placard on his back proclaiming that
he was brother-in law to Branstone of the Classical Fifth.
Branstone, who was going to rise in the world, would necessarily have
poor relations, and it hardly mattered how poor. Indeed, the poorer they
were the more cheaply he could afterwards play providence to them, since
their standards would be low and their expectations small.
So it wasn’t a nice, impulsive lark, but coldblooded and calculated,
which is almost as objectionable in a lark as organization in Charity.
It is prudent good intentions that pave the way to Hell.
He saw that there was a difference between this and the elopements
of that romantic literature with which he busied his relaxed hours:
sometimes the lady, but always the lover, was enterprising, while he
knew that George could never instigate anything. But that made things
more amusing for Sam, who could pull strings with absolute assurance
that his puppets would never take to dancing on their own account, or
to any tune but the one he piped; and it is not given to all of us to be
Omnipotence at the price of a ten-pound note.
As always, Sam had luck. In the romantic elopements whose technique he
began to study with new interest, money was never a difficulty, but the
god in the machine of George Chappie’s elopement must put money in his
purse, or there could be no elopement.
Sam liked money, but he must have liked power more, for, coming
miraculously into money at this time, he devoted it to this end. He
came into money because journalism was swiftly on the up grade since the
days, four years ago, when it couldn’t show its readers a photograph of
Sam Branstone, hero, in the evening paper, and had reached the civilized
stage of picture competitions.
You bought a weekly paper which printed six crude wood-cuts supposed to
disguise the names of (say) famous battles, and it did not strain your
intellect to discover that the picture of a station with “Waterloo”
beneath its clock was intended to represent the battle of that name.
But pause: it was not all so easy as that. Inflamed by avarice and the
childish ease of identifying the battles in the first series, you bought
the next week’s number, and the next, until the competition closed, and
you found that the designs were increasingly baffling. It was not quite
money for nothing. It called for some knowledge of history and a sort
of knack in cheap wit to interpret the pictures. A garden syringe, and
a stage Irishman brandishing something that might easily be a cudgel
but wasn’t, represented, in fact, the not very renowned battle
of Seringapatam, and there were pictures which could bear two
interpretations.
It was this last which led Sam to go into partnership with Lance
Travers. Both partners admitted that Sam’s wits were the sharper, so
it was only fair that Lance should finance the partnership and buy the
papers. And Sam, sanguine of winning, but desiring secrecy, preferred
that the firm should be registered in Lance’s name, so that if and when
Sam became a capitalist, he and not Anne should control his wealth. His
ideas of the uses of capital already went beyond the Post Office Savings
Bank.
The weekly paper’s object was to increase its circulation, so it allowed
and encouraged competitors to send in numerous attempts, and printed
ambiguous drawings to tempt to prodigality. It is to be feared that
Classics suffered an eclipse at this period of journalistic enterprise.
The partners had other and more serious objects in life. And they won!
They won the second prize. It wasn’t a house or a motor-car or any of
the fantastic prizes with which still later journalism rewarded its
intelligent readers, but they divided twenty pounds and, for them, ten
pounds each was paradise enow. Lance bought a bicycle. Sam didn’t. He
bought a wedding-ring, and he had a talk with Sarah Pullen, who was so
passionately Madge’s bosom friend that she had gone into the mill with
her.
Sarah received him coldly; she looked upon him as the cause of her
friend’s martyrdom and thought the cause unworthy.
Sam cleared the air at once. “I’m on Madge’s side. I’m not going to see
her made unhappy for my sake,” he said, and Sarah relented so far as to
absolve him of personal malignity.
“Much you can do to help it, though,” she said. “I _can_ do much,” he
replied, “but,” he flattered her, “perhaps you can do more. You see,
Sarah,” he went on confidentially, “Madge trusts you and she doesn’t
trust me. Now, between ourselves, she needs a friend’s advice. Put
yourself in her place. Would you knuckle under to your mother?”
“I’d see her further first,” said Sarah.
“I wonder,” said Sam, “if you could see your way to communicating your
views to Madge without mentioning that I suggested it?”
“You!” said Sarah. “You! It’ud take a dozen your size to suggest
anything to me. Get off home and play marbles, or I’ll give you a slap
on th’ earhole that you’ll remember.”
They didn’t play marbles in the Classical Fifth, but Sam was content to
put her allusion down to ignorance rather than deliberate insult. He
had gained his point: the atmosphere he desired created was about to he
created.
He left that pot to simmer and turned his mind to George, whom he judged
less susceptible than Madge to the promptings of a friend. Besides, he
knew no friend of George, and confessed himself at fault.
One day, shortly before the Whitsuntide holidays, he was staring
gloomily out of the window at the top of the stairs outside the Fifth
Form room, watching the boys of the Chetham’s Hospital at play in that
yard of theirs which the Grammar School pretends to scorn but secretly
envies, when he heard behind him a conversation between Lance Travers
and Dubby Stewart which set his brain awhirl. Yet it was not a
distinguished conversation.
“Who ever heard of anyone in Manchester staying at home in Whit week?”
asked Lance.
Sam had heard, often.
“It isn’t done,” said Dubby, who had earned that abiding name when he
was in the Lower Third, and once read “dubious” aloud with a short “u.”
“But I’ve to do it,” said Lance. “My governor’s too busy to get away.
Bit damnable, isn’t it?”
“Matter of fact,” said Dubby, “we’re not going, either.”
And it presently appeared that out of the form of twenty-four boys there
were as many as six who lived in Manchester and were not going away. “It
will be hell,” prophesied one of the unfortunates.
“It needn’t,” said Sam Branstone, turning from the window to the
mournful group.
“You’re used to it. We’re not,” said someone cruelly, and Lance smacked
his head. Allusions to anybody’s poverty were bad form.
“What’s the prescription?” asked Dubby, and Sam was silent for a minute.
“Watch him. Something’s dawning,” chaffed Dubby. It wasn’t dawning, it
had dawned; but at first it looked like a risk, and then much less like
one, and Sam smiled beautifully as he realized that he, at least, had
all to gain and nothing to lose. He drew the luckless five mysteriously
aloof.
“The prescription,” he said, “is to have a holiday in Manchester, in
a holiday house.” He let that soak for a minute, and then, “Our own
house,” he added. “There are six of us. We join together and we take
a house. A small house, and I daresay some of you won’t like the
neighbours, but as the neighbours won’t like us, that’s as broad as it’s
long. Swagger neighbours wouldn’t stand us anyhow, and the smaller the
house the smaller the rent. Something like four-and-six a week is my
idea. That’s nine-pence a week for each of us, and we’ve a house of our
own for that to do what we like in.”
“By Jove!” said someone admiringly.
“What shall we call it?” said another, a trifle doubtfully.
“Call it?” said Lance. “That’s obvious. The Hell-fire Club.”
And, of course, if any doubt remained, that settled it. Who would regret
the seaside if he could be a member of the Hell-fire Club? Lance was
commissioned to negotiate with his father, the estate agent, but it was
Sam who really chose their house. It was a house which in Sam’s opinion
excellently suited the requirements of a young married couple of the
window-cleaning class. Mr. Travers told Lance that he would stop the
value of any damage out of his pocket-money, and on those conditions let
them the house. But he need not have made that cautionary threat; Sam
saw that there was no damage.
The Hell fire Club assembled for its initiatory debauch on the first day
of the holidays, and by eleven a.m. three inexpert cigarette-smokers had
had occasion to use the slopstone as a vomitorium. It left them feeling
chilly, and Dubby suggested that a house-warming without a fire was a
solecism, even on a hot day, so a lavish plutocrat brought in two sacks
of coal and a supply of chips. Firelighting is a sport out of which a
certain excitement can be derived, but only for a short time, and the
same evanescent quality attaches to the pleasure of sitting on bare
boards.
“I’m too stiff to be happy,” said Lance. “I vote we furnish this club.”
Carried, _nem. com_. “I’m afraid, though,” said Sam, “that I shall not
be able to contribute much.”
“Wait till you’re asked, my son,” said Dubby. “By the time we five have
finished looting our homes, this place will be a little palace.”
Loot is a brave word, suggestive of the treasures of the purple
East, but it was, in most instances, a case of permitted loot, the
offscourings of lumber rooms. Sandy Reed, however, was the sort of boy
who is happiest with a hammer in his hand, and Dubby had an eye for
chintz. To repair the veteran furniture which they brought struck Sandy
as work for a man. Behind him was his infantile past of fret-work
and model yachts; before him the foremanship of the Hell-fire Club
repair-shop. He worked and was the cause of work in others. And it was
willing work, partly because it was for an idea, partly because that
first day had threatened boredom and here was something definite to do,
mostly because it was making a noise.
The ill-assorted chairs, tables and sofas which they collected under
their roof had this in common at the end, that they were strong; and
having by their own efforts made them strong, the boys did not by
their rioting make them weak again. They respected their handiwork, and
Dubby’s chintz procured a sort of uniformity.
A club, of course, must eat and drink, and kitchen utensils, mostly odd
but all practicable, were gathered together that they might precede the
pleasures of eating with the pleasures of cooking. It was camp-life in
town, except that they went home to sleep, and so long as the activities
of “settling in” endured, they relished it abundantly.
About a fortnight was what Sam had mentally set as the life of the
Hell-fire Club, and he had no intentions of paying the rent by himself
for more than a week or so. They had decided that Sunday was not a
club-day--there were difficulties at home--and Sam took George Chappie
for a walk. “I like this street,” he said as they turned the corner.
“Madge always fancied this district.”
“Did she?” said George gloomily.
“We’ll go in here,” and Sam produced the key and introduced George to
the Club premises. “What do you think of it?”
The chintz took George’s eye at once. “By gum!” he said.
“Sit down,” said Sam. “This is where you’re going to live when you’re
married to Madge. It isn’t your furniture yet, but it’s going to be. I’m
going to give it you for a wedding present. There isn’t a bed in, as you
see, but there will be, and I ask you, George, is it or is it not better
than Mrs. Whitehead’s?”
“Aye,” said George, “but you’re going ahead a bit too fast for me.”
“Not at all,” said Sam. “Yours is the pace that kills. The slow pace,
not the quick. Now, this place isn’t at your disposal yet, but if you’ll
put up the banns next Sunday and get married as soon as you can after
the three Sundays, you can walk in here and hang your hat up on that
hook. It’s a brass hook, George. We don’t approve of nails in this
house. I might mention that it will be all right about the banns. Mother
has dinner to cook on Sundays and doesn’t go to morning service, and
to-day is father’s Sunday off from the station and lie’s on duty for the
next three Sundays. So,” he concluded, “there you are.”
“You’re promising a lot. Is this house yours?”
“The rent is four-and-six,” said Sam, “which isn’t more than you can
afford to pay. And you bind yourself to nothing by putting up the banns.
If I fail to deliver you this house and all that’s in it, you needn’t
get married. But I’ve a word of advice for you, George. Let Madge hear
of it first from the parson’s lips in church. She won’t scream and she
won’t faint. We don’t, in our family, and it saves you the trouble of
asking her. Is it a bet?”
George hesitated. “Come upstairs and see the other room,” said Sam.
George saw, and marvelled. “I’ll come round with you now to church,”
said Sam. “We’ve just nice time to catch the clerk after service.”
“By gum!” said George Chappie. “I’ll do it. They can’t hang me. But,” he
added as he cast a last look at the household gods which Sam Bran-stone
promised should be his, “they may hang you.”
Sam grinned blandly.