|ANNE called at Madge’s on her way home. Madge’s, in spite of George’s
progress, was still the house which had been the premises of the
Hell-fire Club. Anne did not often go there and never without reason,
but Madge was at a loss to know the reason of this visit, nor did she
guess it when Anne unobtrusively dovetailed into The conversation about
young Sam Chappie a question which might have seemed irrelevant. “Have
you done anything yet with that spare room of yours upstairs?” she
asked.
“No,” said Madge. “Nor likely to, I fancy.” That was the reason of
the visit. Anne was safeguarding her retreat, though she by no means
admitted that it would come to a retreat. Engagements do not invariably
lead to marriage. Meantime, hers was the waiting game and a rupture with
Sam at this stage was to be avoided.
When he asked her, not too confidently, if she did not agree with him
about the wonder of Ada, she exercised a noble self-restraint, and all
she said was: “She’s not the wife for a poor man, Sam.”
“No,” said Sam thoughtfully. “I’d tumbled to that. And I don’t mean to
be poor either,” and so went out to open the dark chapter of his bright
success. He went to the Concentrics, not knowing that he was going to
his fate. He went because it was the night of their weekly meeting
and he had to go somewhere to avoid Anne’s eye, but his mood was not
concentric. “I must get rich for Ada, rich for Ada,” was the burden of
his thought--so early did he justify Ada’s words to Anne--and it was not
a timely thought for a Concentrics evening.
He had even forgotten that he had a special interest in this meeting,
where the lecturer was to be Adams, once Sam’s pet aversion and
unbeatable rival at the Grammar School. He was reminded of it when
he found himself accosted by a young man whom he could not at first
identify.
“Jove! If it isn’t Sammy Branstone! Are you a member of these fossils?”
“Dubby Stewart!” said Sam, as recognition dawned on him.
“Reed’s here as well, somewhere,” said Stewart. “It’s a gathering of the
clan.”
Reed and Stewart, it seemed, were both members, which is to say that
they had come once or twice some time ago and continued to keep up the
small subscription from force of habit or through sheer weakness to
stop paying it. Few societies indeed could exist were it not for
the enthusiasm of the attending nucleus and the subscriptions of the
nonattending mass.
“We came to hear Gerald Adams make an ass of himself,” Stewart
explained. “What a subject!”
Sam had even forgotten what the subject was. “Rich for Ada, rich for
Ada,” was still ringing in his ears.
The subject was “Social Purity.”
“Which accounts,” said Stewart, “for the size of the audience. They’ve
all come hoping for the worst. I know I have.”
The worst did not happen, or, rather, if it did, it was so skilfully
disguised that nobody recognized it as the worst. It was easy to mistake
it for the best.
Adams was one part in earnest and two parts impish in the manner of the
superior person who is out for an intellectual lark. He had a constant
preoccupation with that which is known above all other questions as
_the_ social question. It was not a nice preoccupation for a young
man: it was, for instance, remote from the healthy exuberance of Sam’s
Rabelaisianism. And, of course, Adams was wily: he wasn’t the stuff of
martyrdom. He enjoyed, as an intellectual gymnastic, the treatment of
his subject so that it should at once shock his audience and win him
their approval as an honest man doing an unpleasant job from conviction.
Sam agreed with Stewart. His old prejudice against Adams was strong
within him and he hoped Adams would come a cropper. That was at the
beginning, when Adams, with an egregious affectation of superiority,
began to read his lecture; but soon, quite soon, Sam changed his
mind and hoped for nothing but that the skilful skater would keep his
balance, on the thin ice.
“Rich for Ada,” and here, as Sam saw it, was a “stroke” indeed if Adams
were successful to the end and if at the end he would listen sensibly to
Sam.
Adams was in little danger. He was of Oxford, London, the world, and his
audience of Manchester. And he stooped to conquer with a lecture that
was a mosaic of advances and retreats, of blazing indiscretions and smug
apologies, of audacities and diffidence.
Sam watched the audience keenly, and it would not be unjust to say that
the audience gloated. Not all of them gloated, but as a whole, as an
audience, they lapped up Adams’ lecture like mother’s milk. He called
it frankness and gave unnecessary detail, he had an appearance of
honest indignation and a reality of bathing in mud with relish. It was
abominable but diabolically clever; indecent to the core, it artfully
evaded anything to warrant a police court charge of indecency; it was
foulness cloaked in piety, marching under the banner of Reform. He was
a crusader in masquerade, flashing beneath their guard of British
reticence a rapier whose hilt was a cross.
Adams found a curious satisfaction in standing there, like a penitent at
a Salvation Army meeting, pretending to an immense personal knowledge of
evil which was, happily, impossible, and he delighted in the presence
of a cleric in the chair. The thing developed, for him, into an exciting
game, a contest of his wits with Peter’s. He had carried his audience,
but the chairman sat aloof and dubious. If Peter saw through him, he had
lost; if not, he won. For Peter he read the condemnatory passages
with vibrant earnestness, and for Peter he read as if reluctantly,
conscience-impelled, the details of his evidence.
Sam caught the infection, too, but hardly as a game. He hung on Peter’s
judgment with a deep anxiety, watched Peter flush and shuffle in his
chair, saw him take snuff nervously, trembled at the moment when Peter
seemed about to interrupt, sighed with relief when Peter sat back
silently again and waited feverishly for the chairman’s speech.
There would probably have been little doubt about Peter’s verdict had
Adams been an ordinary Concentric, lecturer and a member of the Society.
But he was neither, and was there by invitation. And he was not only of
Oxford, Peter’s University, but brilliantly of Oxford, of Balliol, with
academic honours thick upon him. If Peter thought, as Adams spoke, that
he ought to call him to order, he remembered that Adams was a Double
First, and desisted. He couldn’t be a hypocrite--because he had won the
Ireland. He was terribly in earnest now--because he had won the
Greek Verse Prize. He was single-minded, chivalrous, braving the
misapprehension of the scurrilous, open and honest--because he was a
Fellow of Balliol.
It did not matter to Peter that Adams’ father was the richest
parishioner in St. Mary’s; it mattered even less that Adams was
exquisitely dressed in exactly the shade of grey appropriate to an
ardent crusader. (“Look at his damned clothes,” Reed had whispered to
Stewart. “Hasn’t he thought it out?” He had: his clothes were chaste if
his lecture wasn’t.) But scholarship did matter to Peter, whose other
name was Charity, and once he had decided that Gerald was sincere, that
all he said was subordinate to and justified by high purpose, he was
generous, and the more generous because he had doubted.
“The subject of Mr. Adams’ lecture,” he said, “is like nettles: if it
is not handled boldly, it stings. I have nothing but praise for the
courage, the down rightness, the earnestness of his treatment of this
distressing evil. I think that we have all been deeply stirred by his
instances of man’s inhumanity to women. As a churchman I feel a special
responsibility and, may I say, a special gratitude to Mr. Adams for his
study of this subject. Medicine, as we all know, has its martyrs,
its research workers who sacrifice themselves for the health of their
fellowmen. Mr. Adams, who has examined this social sore so thoroughly,
at what cost in pain to himself only the most sensitive amongst us can
guess, deserves to be ranked with the martyrs of science....” And so on,
doubly handsome because he felt ashamed of himself for doubting Gerald’s
honesty, and made amends.
Adams had won his game, hands down. He thought the old boy gloriously
funny and he thought Sam Branstone, who rose when Peter sat down,
funnier still. Sam believed in striking while the iron was hot: he
didn’t want Peter to have the opportunity of changing his mind when he
came to think things over coolly.
Sam began by congratulating himself on the good fortune that had been
his in having been the school-fellow of the distinguished Mr. Adams.
Adams gazed hard at Sam through his austere pince-nez and was observed
perceptibly to start. “Gad,” he was thinking, “it’s that lout, the
porter’s son.” But he liked Sam’s flattery very well. Sam, it appeared,
had been so deeply impressed by Mr. Adams’ admirable, indeed eloquent
and moving address, and by the chairman’s very just eulogy of it,
that he thought it would be a tremendous pity if so arresting, so
well-written a paper failed to reach a wider audience than that before
which it had been read. They had been waiting for this paper; its appeal
was wide; the urgency of its need, instinct in every word of it, was
emphasized by the chairman’s remarks. He had, therefore, a practical
proposal to make. The paper ought to be printed, and if Mr. Adams could
spare him a few moments after the meeting, Sam hoped that he would let
him arrange the matter.
He sat down amongst great applause. Under its cover Stewart whispered:
“You inimitable ass!” Sam looked at him in pained surprise. “I want to
see that paper in print,” he declared indignantly.
The debate meandered in the usual futile way. Few had anything to
say, but many liked the sound of their own voices and indulged their
preference at length, till both speakers and talkers had taken their
innings and Sam was able to go up to the platform. Peter had not changed
his mind and was complimenting Adams in his simple, charming way.
It ought, no doubt, to have made Adams thoroughly ashamed of himself,
but it did not. It hardened his cynicism so that, when Sam came up, all
he was thinking was: “I’ve gulled the parson. Now to bounce the porter’s
son.”
“How are you, Branstone?” he asked. “Glad to meet you again.”
“And I you,” said Sam. They shook hands. “Have you had time to think of
what I proposed?”
“As a matter of fact,” said Adams, which is the usual way of beginning a
lie, “I’d thought of sending my little paper to one of the Reviews--the
_Fortnightly_ or the _Contemporary_.”
“Excellent,” said Peter.
Sam could have kicked him. “I venture to differ,” he said. “The chief
object should be to reach as wide a public as possible. My own idea was
to do it by itself in the form of a----” he was going to say “pamphlet,”
but altered it to “brochure.” He thought it sounded more attractive. “In
the heavy reviews it would be read by comparatively few, and it would
not stand alone as in a brochure. It would take its place along with
other articles. And I have heard that contributors to the reviews are
not paid highly.”
Adams had not thought of payment at all, but he thought of it now, with
zest. He was rich, but the idea of despoiling the porter’s son, who had
had the assurance to go to school with him, struck him as the crowning
move in a jolly game. This was, transcendently, his night for winning.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, which was true. “I suppose I should get
about twenty pounds for it.”
“I will give you twenty-five,” said Sam.
“Sam!” protested Peter. He approached the motive (as he understood it),
but considered the offer reckless from a young man who contemplated
matrimony.
“Twenty-five pounds,” repeated Sam firmly.
“Well,” laughed Gerald, quite unable not to laugh at the idiot’s
persistence, “if you’re as keen on doing good as all that, I’ll take the
offer.”
“Right,” said Sam. “I’ll settle it at once.”
He went to the chairman’s table and made out a form of assignment of
copyright. He had a little knowledge of the law, and it was a dangerous
thin--for the other fellow. But both Sam and Adams went home that night
in a state of cherubic self-satisfaction.
“What a game?” thought Adams. “And what an ass!”
Curiously, the thoughts of Sammy Branstone were not dissimilar. He had
this advantage over Adams: that Adams had read his paper and had not
watched his audience all the time. Sam had watched the audience and
thought twenty-five pounds a cheap price for that paper.
He slept on it, and awoke next day with confidence in his investment
undisturbed, but the news which awaited him at the office shook him at
first. It was one thing to see a profitable side-line in the publication
of Adams’ address and another to be suddenly obliged to regard the
copyright of that paper as his one sound asset. He feared, in cold
daylight, that it was not quite sound enough for that.
Yet what had happened did not come as a complete surprise. Sam knew
Travers’ habits and knew that men of his habits are liable to die
suddenly. Travers had died in the night, and Sam was very angry.
He told himself that he had no luck with people’s deaths. His father had
died too soon for Sam, and now Travers was dead just when Sam had become
engaged, and when he had undertaken a speculation which, however high
his hopes of it, was after all speculative.
An estate agent’s business is largely personal and, if there is
no obvious successor, no heir apparent already in training for the
succession, is apt to fall to pieces when its head dies. The process of
disintegration in this case had set in long ago; drink had begun what
death now ended; and there was no heir. Lance Travers had decided for
medicine and was, on the material side, little affected by his father’s
death, since Travers had bought him a practice a year earlier
somewhere in the South, and the neighbourhood was proving healthily
valetudinarian.
The office was not a cheerful place that day. Men estimated their
savings and balanced them against the probable weeks of unemployment
before they found new places. A few of them, no doubt, might hope to “go
with” the business to whomever bought it; and they wondered who would
buy and which of them would be engaged by the purchaser.
They fancied Branstone’s chances, and so, in fact, did Sam, but it was
all in the air and exceedingly disturbing just when he had given himself
so much else to think about. Even if he did move with the business, it
could only be as a clerk. He lost the advantage of Travers’ friendliness
and, besides, he was not sure that anybody would think the business
worth buying. Travers had no right to die.
Then the thought struck him that he was taking it lying down. He, a lad
of mettle, was whining like these gutless clerks in the office. He was
betraying his lucky star. Death, even Tom Branstone’s, had not been
forbiddingly unkind to him. Tom’s death had led him indirectly to
the office, to Minnifie, the Concentrics, Ada, and he began to see in
Travers’ death the possibilities of good. It might be the finger of
fate, pointing him away from the office which had served its turn to
a new dispensation to be arranged by the collaborators, Sam and
Providence, upon the rock of Adams’ paper.
They carried on the routine work of the office as men under sentence of
death do little, ordinary things and find a solace in them. Then,
late that afternoon, Lance Travers came. He had travelled since early
morning, had been home, seen his father’s doctor and his father’s
solicitor and was now come to see Sam. They sat in Travers’ private
office, where the blinds were drawn, and in the presence of Travers’
son, who owed his life to him, Sam was conscious of a deeper feeling
than he had ever known before, he was no longer angry because Travers
had died, but mourned him honestly.
“By the way,” said Lance presently, “did my father ever tell you about
his will?”
“His will!” said Sam. “No. Why should he?”
“I thought he might have done,” said Lance. “He made it last year after
he bought me my practice. He thought then that he ought to do something
for you, but he didn’t expect to live long and he put it in his will.
There’s a thousand pounds for you.”
Sam took it nicely. “I’d rather,” he said, “that he were still alive;”
and, at the moment, he meant it.
But he had been right. It was the finger of fate.