|IN Sam’s opinion, nobody had suffered. Mr. Travers lost nothing,
because the corner house had conquered Minnifie at sight, and he would
not in any case have bought the white elephant which Travers had for
sale. Calverts had got as much as they expected to get for the houses,
or they would not have sold, while the beneficiary under the late
owner’s will was a charity, and Sam hoped that charity was charitable
enough not to look a gift-horse in the mouth: if it wasn’t, it ought to
be. As to the purchasers, who had certainly paid more for the property
than they need have done, that was what purchasers were for. Why did
smart business men exist if not to exploit purchasers?
All this was highly comforting, but to confess the need for comfort was
to admit to disquiet, and he found that it was one thing to argue in
this strain with his conscience, and another to boast to Anne of his
achievement. Women don’t understand business, and he had an uneasy
feeling that the ethics of the transaction would not satisfy Anne. He
decided that he had better not tell her, that he must resist his impulse
of surprising her with the gift of a seal-skin coat, and remained a
capitalist under the rose. There was no hurry, and perhaps his next
stroke, when it came, would be under conditions that would bear the
limelight of her scrutiny.
But repression was not all. Justify himself as he would, chuckle over
his gains as he did, the matter searched him deeply and reacted sharply
in two ways, of which the first began as that old expedient of
sinners, conscience-money. There are defaulters who find absolution for
themselves by sending notes, under initials, to the Chancellor of the
Exchequer, and by having them acknowledged with impressiveness in the
personal columns of the _Times_. That was not Sam’s way: he did not do
good deeds by stealth, and his conscience-money did not go out of the
family. He used it philanthropically, but it was philanthropy and ten
per cent, to begin with, and in the end it was very much more than ten
per cent. It was the Chappie Bill Posting and Window-Cleaning Company.
He thought that he could, without exciting Anne’s suspicions, tell her
that his savings had reached ten pounds, and proposed to spend that sum
for the benefit of George Chappie.
Inspired, perhaps, by his household gods, George was facing life
bravely, and won a minor place in Anne’s good graces when he and Madge
produced a firstborn son, who had the remarkable quality of looking
exactly like the infant Samuel, whose name he bore. But George had not,
in her opinion, deserved Sam’s generosity to this extent.
“You’re over-good to them,” she said. “You’ve made a man and woman of a
pair of wastrels, and I’d let them alone to make their own way now.”
“Do you think it will be much of a way?” asked Sam. “They’re the sort
that need help.”
“Aye,” she said, “they’ll lean on you all right. They’re good at
leaning.”
“Well,” said Sam, drawing himself up. “Let them lean.”
“Sam,” said Anne, “I’m not fond, but if I told you what I think of you
for this, you’d have the right to call me fond and foolish. I like you
very well, my son. You’re the strong man helping and supporting the
weak.”
She finished suddenly and a thought shamefacedly. She had praised
him openly and considered it a weakness in her. Sam put a hand on
her shoulder. It was not demonstrative, but his gesture was full of
understanding, and Anne turned rapidly away, shaking him off almost with
rudeness, taking very earnestly to her business of clearing away their
tea-things.
Sam watched appreciatively through the corner of his eye. He relished
praise from Anne, even when, as now, it was not strictly merited. The
strong in Sam’s philosophy did not support the weak, but the weak the
strong. He was confirmed in his belief that women could not understand
business. This, however, he reminded himself, was not pure business, it
was conscience-money, which ought not to be unconscionably reproductive:
so he bought George a hand-cart, ladder, bucket and leathers, and
exacted from him not more than ten per cent, on his capital expenditure.
In Travers’ business Sam found opportunities of pushing George. A client
took a house, and Sam would suggest with a nicely casual air that the
windows needed cleaning. He would, to save the client trouble, then
offer to send a man round, so that George’s connection waxed, and he
prospered to the tune of two amazing pounds a week, till the restless
Sam began to widen his view of George’s potentialities.
His eye for the main chance had always a useful squint which could see
money round the corner as well as in the straight high road, and he
thought that George, with his outfit of ladders, could see his talent
for height in other ways than window cleaning. There was, for example,
bill-posting, a trade whose mysteries Sam deemed it not beyond George’s
capabilities to learn.
The thing grew by degrees, from the first builder’s hoarding which
Sam rented venturously for advertising space, to a comfortable little
business that ran itself by its own momentum long after he tired of its
comparative insignificance. With George, the start was all: he could
always plod where Sam had led, and as Sam had time to set the ball
rolling, and money enough to spoon-feed the infant business with
capital, George kept the thing in being by careful, steady management.
He hadn’t boasted when he told Anne he was steady.
Of course, Sam was impatient and deplored his active partner’s
inactivity. He grew tired of the gradual increase, but, all the same,
the business was unquestionably successful, and he relished hugely his
sense of being the power behind the throne, if only behind a small,
conservative, so lamentably unambitious throne. Sam also was among the
king makers.
The other, greater sequel to his reaction led to more pyrotechnical
results, and eventually to Sam’s launch on his career. Nothing happened
at first, and indeed for so long that he was feeling himself between
the devil of the estate office and the deep sea of George’s persistent
carefulness. The Chappie Bill-Posting Company was good enough for
George, but not for Sam: there were too many com petitors with too great
resources, while the estate office routine bored him, and opportunities
for piratical enterprise did not recur.
He felt, at twenty-four years of age, and at two pounds ten a week, that
he was growing old in service, he who was not meant to serve but to be
served.
But then--desolating thought--was he meant to be served? Had he lost, or
was he, at any rate, not losing the accent of speech and mind of those
who are served? He knew that his accent had touched pitch and been
defiled: those bawdy stories of his were told in the tongue of his
hearers, and there had been clients lately who had spoken to him,
when inspecting property, as if he were a clerk, and not a pleasant,
gentlemanly youth of obvious superiority to his present, no doubt
temporary, job. He had a sudden fear that the job might not be temporary
after all, and there followed a time when he was wholly bent on
self-improvement, when he abjured the narrow way of professional
text-books and read that he might become well-read, that he might
bandy allusions with those old school-fellows of his who had gone to
Universities, that he might, if he could not hope to shine, at least be
not outshone.
It wasn’t _pour le bon motif_, and he did not even pretend to like
the greater part of what he read. He crammed against the grain, and a
growing row of the “World’s Classics” figured on his shelf as trophies
of his perseverance. Industriously he rubbed away the rust which had
accumulated on his mind since it took its not very brilliant polish of
the Grammar School. He took down the dust-stained Gibbon he had won for
reading, and ploughed heroically through it.
That reminded him of another chink in his armour. A man of the world
must have the knack of speaking to the world, and Sam became a member of
the Concentrics. As Anne once told him, he had the gift of the gab, but,
except for his present fluent recommendations of houses to prospective
tenants, it was a talent he had buried. Now, however, he proposed to
dig it up and did it in (he thought) the ambitious surroundings of the
Concentrics, who were indeed as mixed a company as he could have found
anywhere, and on that account the better for his purpose.
The common centre which was supposed to hold the Concentrics together
was a love of literature, but they tended to drop literature for
politics on the slightest pretext. There were literary enthusiasts
amongst them, but it rarely happened that one man’s enthusiasm coincided
with another’s. It did less than coincide. A member would read a
laborious paper on some man of letters, and the subsequent discussion
would be conducted by men who began their intelligent speeches by
admitting that they had not read a word of, say, Henry James or Lafcadio
Hearn, but that their opinion was nevertheless so and so. Whereas, of
course, nobody ever confessed to ignorance of politics. Politics is like
law, only more so. One is presumed by the law to know the law, which is
highly presumptuous of the law, because not even the lawyers know the
law, and they must often go to judges, at their client’s expense, to
find out what the law is: and the “more so,” as applied to politics, is
that while laymen hesitate to argue a point of law, and go to an expert,
they never hesitate to argue a point of politics, and _are_ the expert.
Political discussions amongst the Concentrics were real and passionate,
literary discussions unreal and frigid; and as “social reform” became
a favourite shibboleth about this time, literature took a back seat
in favour of subjects about which men could grow emotional and their
oratory rhetorical. It was all one to Sam, who was here to speak, and
did his reading at home.
He spoke often, so that he soon improved, and he practised the literary
allusiveness which was the purpose of his reading to such effect that
he attracted the attention of the chairman, who was the Rev. Peter
Struggles.
It is not, strictly, fair to say that a man is handicapped through life
by a name like Struggles, because the legal process by which one can
change an undesirable name is inexpensive, but Peter had never thought
of such a move, and wore his handicap without being aware of it. In any
case, he failed in life. He had a round face, red hair, side-whiskers:
took snuff and messed his coat: was perfectly futile in practical
affairs and absolutely “a dear.” His scholarship was not profound, but
he loved letters genuinely, He had failed steadily for thirty years
to run a private school for boys in a suburb which was degenerating to
industrialism, and late in life had taken orders, quite sincerely,
not in the least with the idea of helping his school with a new
respectability. It was, anyhow, beyond help, and a man who offered
tradesmen’s sons a sound commercial education was presently to buy him
out.
Peter Struggles, well in his fifties, became curate to a vicar of forty,
in the large, rough-and-tumble parish of St. Mary’s. One says that he
had failed in life, and, by Sam’s standards, he had, and even by the
working standards of his church. A man at fifty-six should not be a
curate with an income of some hundred and twenty pounds a year. But if
a man is happy at fifty-six to be a curate with that income? If he find
satisfaction in it? Snuff was his indulgence, and the chairmanship of
the Concentrics, who were not sectarian, his dissipation. For the rest,
Peter had made harbour. To the pushing educationist who had bought
him out, for a song, and now profaned his old school buildings with
shorthand and the rudiments of bookkeeping, Peter was a failure and
a pathetic failure. He was not conscious of failure himself, nor of
anything but a serene contentment that he had found, if late, the
work that he was fit to do. Through sheer single-minded, inoffensive,
unobtrusive goodness he came to be a figure in that parish, and a power.
Undignified in bearing, and careless in dress, he had a dignity of mind
and soul.
Sam Branstone despised a worldly failure, here was a man of more than
twice Sam’s years, with less money than Sam had, and, by all his canons,
Sam should have despised Peter. But he didn’t. It was partly, no doubt,
other people’s opinions that influenced Sam--the universal esteem which
Peter Struggles won--but it was by much more the innate nobility of the
old curate. Sam began his speaking at the Concentrics to impress his
fellow members, he ended by caring only for the appreciation of the
quaint, slovenly figure who occupied the chair.
He got the appreciation he craved. Peter was shrewd enough to discount
Sam’s rhetorics, and the flashy tricks of apt quotation: he saw Sam as a
misguided, self-seeking thruster who read only for veneer and spoke
only to impress. But, at least, Sam tried, and Peter could admire
perseverance. The thing was to direct Sam’s perseverance well, and Peter
asked him to supper.
Our man of the world was prodigiously thrilled. The honour was
exceptional, for Peter could not afford to be a host often, and Sam
was aware not only of its rarity, but of Peter’s unique standing in
the parish: and, more than that, of Peter’s worth. To be singled out by
Peter Struggles, and asked to sup, was, socially, a triumph. It sounds
absurd, and perhaps it is absurd that one good man should shine so
brightly by contrast with the fifteen thousand others of an over-crowded
parish, but that was why Peter was a colossus amongst the pigmies, and
why Sam Branstone was egregiously excited by an invitation to sup at
Peter’s little house.
Peter did not invite Sam to preach at him. It was the boy’s mind rather
than his soul that was the target of his aim, and Peter’s select library
to which he trusted for influence. Certainly the little meal of
cold beef and cocoa was not calculated to impress, nor the old, worn
furniture, with the gaping rents in its horse-hair coverings, through
which the stuffing poured. He handled books with reverence, and spoke
of them, but Sam was hardly listening. He was under fire from another
battery.
Ada Struggles met young men at church functions, and spoke with them at
Sunday School, but she had few opportunities of greater intimacy, and
was not the lady to waste so rare a chance as this. Peter droned on
amongst his books and presently was lost in reading one. Ada lost
herself in nothing except a burning desire, to monopolize Sam. Books did
not interest Ada: getting married did.
The trouble was that in the days of his school’s comparative prosperity,
Peter had done Ada rather well. Perhaps as a schoolmaster himself, he
got special consideration over terms, but at any rate he had sent her to
a good boarding school. She had received the education of a lady, and it
wasn’t fair, it didn’t chime with the fitness of things that she should
now be the daughter of an impractical curate. Her case, to some extent,
was parallel with Sam’s: the past of both had augured well, and the
future depended on their wits.
There, however, the parallel ceased, for Ada had few wits, but she had
moods, and the reverse side of the moping discontent, which was endemic
with her, was the meretricious brilliance she now paraded for Sam’s
entanglement. Ada was “all out” after her prey, in her best clothes and
her best, that is, her most captivatingly genial manners.
Sam thought that she illuminated that dingy book-surrounded room. They
were not gay books with gilded bindings, but solid, well-worn volumes
of ponderous aspect. The books repelled and Ada invited. Youth called to
youth: youth answered to the call.
He was obsessed with his idea of accent, and the worldly value of
superiority in speech. Ada’s first appeal to him, though she did not
know it, was that she spoke well; her second was that she was
her father’s daughter; her third, as she knew perfectly, was the
helplessness which she used cunningly to flatter his masculine
importance. She told him without a word that he was a strong, powerful
man, and she a flower which he might pluck and wear. And she did the
anemone business quite effectively.
There was not much of Ada, and what there was was not remarkable, but
she was fluffy and frilly and feminine in the feebler way. She had on
something that was not silk but suggested the rustle of silk. After
all, it was not Ada’s fault that it was not silk, or that her intimate
underclothing was of flannelette; she could only use the opportunities
she had, and they were few.
But she had the prettiness, the rather silly and never lasting
prettiness, which accompanies anæmia.
It would not wear, and she knew that it would not wear. She was becoming
desperate. Sam was sent by heaven.
He thought so, too. Old Struggles read “Marcus Aurelius,” standing by
his book-shelf, utterly forgetful of his guest, and the guest thought
that Peter’s preoccupation was also instructed by heaven. It left him
free for Ada.
What he said to Ada and what Ada said to him were things of no
importance: their serious conversation was not conducted by their
tongues, but by their eyes.
This is the sort of thing:
Ada (her voice): Of course, I remember seeing you quite often in church,
Mr. Branstone.
(Her eyes): And you found favour in my sight.
Sam (his voice): Naturally, I always saw you whenever I went.
(His eyes): It was for you I went to church.
Ada (her voice): I’m glad that you were able to come in to-night. I am
often lonely in the evenings. Father is so wrapped up in his books.
(Her eyes): Meeting you is the great moment of my life. I’m an unhappy
princess in an ogre’s tower. Rescue me. Rescue me.
Sam ( his voice): It was most kind of Mr. Struggles to ask me in for a
talk about books.
(His eyes): Books be damned. I’m fascinated by the sensuous rustle of
your skirts, and I’m a hero sent to kiss the wistful look away from your
pleading eyes.
And so on. By the end of the evening, had the unsaid speeches or half of
them been written down, Ada had evidence enough to have brought a
breach of promise action against a recalcitrant Sam. Only Sam was not
recalcitrant, but, on the contrary, ardent. It was, Ada congratulated
herself, uncommonly good going for a first meeting.
Peter emerged from “Marcus Aurelius” with a gentle smile which lighted
up his undistinguished face. “Yes. Pagan but grand,” he said, quite
unaware that half an hour had passed since he last spoke. “I’ll lend you
this book, Branstone, and now”.--he glanced at the clock--“I’m afraid
that I must turn you out. I’d no idea it was so late. How rapidly the
time passes when one is talking about one’s books!”