|AS a simple matter of course, Lance offered Sam the first refusal of
his father’s business, but was not surprised when Sam declined to think
of it.
Sam was far more surprised at himself than Lance at Sam. Lance had never
looked upon estate agency as a desirable profession, whereas Sam had
been bored with its routine without losing his respect for its utility,
and only yesterday he would have jumped at the chance of owning the
business. He heard with astonishment the sound of his own voice politely
refusing the offer, but having refused he did not tamper with his swift
decision.
The fact is, one supposes, that what might be called the quick-firing
part of his intelligence had absorbed and reacted to the fact of his
thousand pounds before the whole of him was properly aware of it. At any
rate, he refused, and, on reflection, approved his refusal.
His speculation in Gerald Adams wore a different aspect now that he was
a capitalist. “Money,” as he had remembered once before, “breeds
money,” and he doubted if Travers’ business, robbed of Travers’ genial
personality, were fecund enough for the pace of money-breeding he
anticipated. Perhaps, too, there was something in the thought that the
Travers’ agency was dead man’s shoes, while, win or lose, the idea of
publishing Adams’ lecture was his own invention.
Another thing that happened to him with his legacy was the feeling that
he had regained caste; he belonged again with his old school-fellows.
“How many of them,” he thought, “can lay hands at a moment’s notice on
a thousand pounds?” and walked erectly through the street where,
naturally, since he had not met him in eight years until last night, he
encountered Stewart.
“Hullo,” said Stewart, “how’s the patron of letters? And would a drink
be any use to you?”
Sam hesitated. Did the way to the society of the Olympians lie through
the doors of the public-house? Stewart was undeniably Olympian: he
had the air, the manner, the clothes of well-assured success. He had a
lightness and a poise that excited Sam’s envy. He had style, this youth
who might be anything, but who, Sam cynically thought, had probably
not paid for his distinguished clothes, while Sam was the owner of a
thousand pounds. He was, thereby, Olympian in quiet fact, which need not
be shrieked from the house-tops, as Stewart had, apparently, to shriek.
Sam _was_, and there was the possibility that Stewart only appeared
to be. It gave him strength to refuse. Not from principle, but from
economical prejudice Sam was a teetotaller.
“I don’t take alcohol,” he said.
“It’s never too late to mend,” said Stewart. “Still, there’s a café
here, and we’ll drink coffee. It’s bad for our hearts, but Balzac wrote
the ‘Comédie Humaine’ on black coffee, so there may be something in the
vice, though it isn’t a habit of mine. Two black coffees, Sophie,” he
ordered from the waitress.
“If it isn’t a habit of yours,” asked Sam, “how do you come to know the
waitress by name?”
“‘My dear ass!” said Stewart pityingly.
“Do you call them all Sophie?”
“Only when it’s their name. Your name is Sophie, isn’t it?” he said as
the girl returned with their coffee.
“Yes, sir.”
Stewart appreciated Sam’s astonishment. “I know I’m showing off, but I
like it. If you see a girl with an idiotic silver brooch made up of the
letters _SOPHIE_ you can assume that it’s her name, and not the name of
her best boy. Simple, when you know how it’s done, like all first-rate
conjuring.”
“I hadn’t noticed her brooch,” said Sam.
“I had. That’s the difference. Still, it isn’t fair to blame you. I’m
a professional observer.” Sam took Stewart to mean that he was a
detective, but hadn’t time to ask for confirmation, because Stewart
asked instead: “And what, by the way, are you?” And threw him into some
embarrassment by the question. What, indeed, at the moment was he?
“Doesn’t your observation tell you?” he fenced.
“It told me last night that you’re a considerable lunatic. Did you buy
that stuff of Adams’?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Thought I saw you in the act as I went out. Obviously, then, you’re a
tripe merchant.”
“I wonder,” said Sam, “whether you could help me, Stewart. Seriously, I
mean.”
“In the tripe trade?”
“I want very much to meet a journalist.” He thought a detective ought to
know journalists.
“But, my dear fellow, this is a café. It isn’t a bar. What do you want a
journalist for?”
“I will tell that to the journalist.”
“If you want to start a paper and you’re looking for an editor, you
needn’t look further than me. There have been candid moments in my
life when I have called myself a journalist. At present, I edit the
_Manchester Warden_, but I’m open to conviction.” He didn’t quite edit
that paper--yet, but reported for it at six pounds a week. He did not
know shorthand, but he quoted Joseph Conrad and Henry James, correctly
and incongruously, when he wrote a notice of a music-hall performance.
“I’m afraid,” said Sam astutely, “that when I said a journalist, I meant
something very different from you, but I will tell you how I stand and
perhaps you will advise me. Last night, as you know, I bought Adams’
paper. I gave him twenty-five pounds for it.”
“Lunacy,” said Stewart, “is a mild word for your complaint. Twenty-five
shillings would be a top price for it in a friendly market.”
“To-day I reached the office to learn that my employer had died
suddenly. You remember Lance Travers? It was his father, and with his
death, for all practical purposes the business comes to an end. Well,
you see my position.”
Stewart quoted Sheridan: “‘The Spanish Fleet thou canst not see, because
it is not yet in sight.’ And much the same applies to your position, my
lad. Its postal address is the Womb of Time.”
“That is true,” said Sam. “And I may add that I am engaged to be
married.”
“I can admire thoroughness,” said Stewart. “You omit none of the
essentials.”
“Now, with it all,” said Sam, “I’m still too proud to go to Adams and
ask him to let me off my bargain.”
“And it wouldn’t be any use if you did,” said Stewart. “He’d laugh at
you.”
“I can believe it of him. But I’m landed with his paper. It has cost me
twenty-live pounds. I meant to print it, and I mean to print it, but
I mean now to sell it when it is printed.” Sam left Stewart to suppose
that, had Travers not died, he would have distributed that pamphlet
free. “Money,” he added, “is a necessity.”
He had taken the right line. Stewart’s instinctive generosity was
touched, and he meant to give this lame dog a lift over the stile. “I
see where your journalist comes in. All right, Branstone, you can count
on me.”
“On you?” said Sam. “Oh, I couldn’t ask it of you.”
“You didn’t ask,” replied Stewart naively. “I offer. I may edit the
_Manchester Warden_, but Zeus nods sometimes, ’busmen have been known to
take a holiday, and there is a paper called the _Sunday Judge_ in whose
chaste columns I have written under the name of Percy Persiflage. Send
me a proof of that pamphlet and Percy shall stamp upon it. He will say
that no decent person could read it without being revolted, and the
pamphlet will boom. It’s the Sunday-paper public that you want, and...
No, Percy shall not stamp. Percy shall bless. He will be moved to
admiration of Mr. Adams’ earnestness, he will applaud the high moral
purpose, and will do the rest by correspondence. Get your sisters and
your cousins and your aunts to pitch in letters on either side, and I’ll
see they get printed. I make this alteration because of the bookstalls.”
“The bookstalls?” asked Sam vaguely.
“This problem of distribution,” said Stewart impressively, “is the
most difficult question of modern life. The producer is here, you;
the consumer (we hope) is everywhere, and the problem is to bring your
pamphlet to the thirsting consumer. The answer is the bookstall, but
the bookstalls are cautious. When I say bookstalls I mean the right
bookstalls. You will never see your money back if the only bookstalls
which will exhibit your pamphlet are those which sell atrociously
printed paperbacked editions of ‘Nana’ and ‘Fanny Hill.’ You must
flourish on _the_ bookstalls, and they banned ‘Esther Waters.’ The
bookstalls, Branstone, are going to call for tact, and tact shall begin
with Percy’s appreciation.”
“Or earlier,” said Sam.
“Earlier?”
“I hadn’t thought of the bookstalls, but this may help there, as well as
in other ways. I mean, as far as Manchester is concerned, and if we get
it on the stalls here, they can’t very well refuse it in other places.”
“Manchester being Manchester, it isn’t likely,” said Stewart. “What’s
your idea?”
“Only this,” said Sam, and showed him his proposed cover for the
pamphlet.
THE SOCIAL EVIL
Being an Address
By Gerald Adams, M.A.,
Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford.
As Read before the Concentric Society with The Rev. Peter Struggles in
the Chair.
Stewart looked at it, then he looked at Sam, and Sam seemed to him very
little like a lame dog now. He whistled loudly. “You’ll get your money
back, my lad,” he said. “But this is rough on Peter.”
“Mr. Struggles approved of the lecture.”
“I wonder if he will approve of this?” said Stewart.
“He can’t go back on his word,” said Sam. “Besides, I’m engaged to his
daughter.”
“The thing that troubles me,” said Stewart admiringly, “is that I took
you for a harmless lunatic. I’m only a journalist myself, with one foot
in the _Manchester Warden_ and the other in the _Sunday Judge_. I’m a
Tory on Sundays and a Liberal on weekdays. I gave up honesty when I gave
up being young, and I thought I knew the ropes by this time. But when
I think that I took you for a guileless innocent, I want to go into a
corner and kick myself hard.”
Sam found this rather alarming he knew that his use, or misuse, of
Peter’s name was cunning, but began to regret that he had shown Stewart
his pro posed cover. “But I get my review in the _Judge?_” he asked
hardily.
“My son,” said Stewart, “you do. I’ve spent sixpence on coffee and half
an hour on you. There’s good copy in this and I can’t afford to waste
it. I’ve my living to earn, and Gerald Adams deserves the worst he’s
going to get. At the same time, I’ll allow myself the luxury of telling
you that yours is a lowdown game.”
“We didn’t make the world what it is, did we?” said Sam.
“And neither you nor I will leave it any better than we found it,”
said Stewart, prophesying rashly with the boundless cynicism of his
twenty-five years. “The worst of coffee,” he went on, finishing his cup,
“is that it makes you thirsty. I’m going across the road for a drink. Do
you have one with me?”
“No, thanks,” said Sam. “I have to see a printer.”
“Oh, yes. Well, why not the Judge Press? I daresay I could get you in
there on the ground floor.”
“But they are not quite the right people for this. They print sporting
papers, and----”
“You’ll die from overheated bearings in your brain-box,” said Stewart.
“You think of everything.”
Sam had, at least, thought that a printer (however obscure by comparison
was the Judge Press, whose works were a small town in themselves) who
issued a religious paper was better for his purpose than the printers of
the _Sunday Judge, Sporting Notions and the Football Times_. He went to
Carter, Meadowbank & Co., who were on the verge of bankruptcy, but had
the advantage of printing _Christian Comfort_ and the _Church Child’s
Weekly_, and arranged with them to print five thousand copies of Adams’
paper. Carter, who was the whole firm, looked askance at the title, but
when Sam pointed out that the Rev. Mr. Struggles had approved of the
contents, Carter succumbed at once, and did not even attempt a protest
when Sam instructed him to print on the whole five thousand:
“This first edition of one thousand copies is issued at sixpence.
The price for future editions will be one shilling. Samuel Branstone,
Publisher.”
Carter’s dingy office was decorated with the chief products of his firm,
texts, the stock-in-trade of commercialized religiosity. Well handled,
there was money in texts, but Carter was an old man with declining
powers and a conservative mind. Meadowbank, who had looked after the
distributive side of the business, was lately dead, and Carter’s
nightly prayer was that the concern might last his time. As things were
promising, it seemed unlikely, but here was Sam with an order for him
and no disposition to beat him down in price. Carter did not like the
instruction to describe five thousand copies as one thousand, and he
didn’t like the subject of the pamphlet, but he wanted business, and he
couldn’t conceive of a pirate sailing under the flag of Mr. Struggles.
Sam rammed that home, feeling the man’s hesitation. “I think it
probable,” he said, “that Mr. Struggles will preach a sermon on
this pamphlet. Perhaps I might tell you that I am going to be his
son-in-law.”
That settled Carter, and he took the order. He knew, and was sensitive
to, the influence of Peter Struggles, curate. He knew that in the
parish of. St. Mary’s, Peter’s smile counted for more than the vicar’s
weightiest word, and that while the vicar was unknown outside his
parish, Peter had authority throughout Manchester--an authority which
had lately growm through Peter’s refusal of preferment to an easy living
in the country. It hadn’t, of course, been Peter who had told of that
refusal, he had not told Ada. But it had leaked out, and Manchester,
which despises selflessness in men, honoured it in the curate;
Mancunians were flattered by his loyalty to St. Mary’s and by the
thought that they were fellow citizens to saintliness.
Emphatically, the name of Peter Struggles on the pamphlet was a _clou_,
but Sam had not told Peter of it yet, and he must do it. He could not
afford an accident, and Peter, he considered, was manageable.
Ada met him at the door with a bright smile, and raised expectant lips,
but he shook his head, touch ing her shoulder tenderly, and passed
in front of her into the room so that, when she followed, her face
expressed the anxiety he desired. He entered himself as a man crushed by
grief.
“What is it, Sam?” she asked. “What’s the matter?”
Peter closed “Plotinus” reluctantly: he never found time enough for
reading, and here was one of his few evenings interrupted. He had the
thought, feeling it ungenerous, that interruptions of this kind would
end when Ada was married.
“I’ve had sad news to-day. Mr. Travers died in the night. It’s... it’s
rather a blow.”
Peter disdained priestly conventionalities. “He was a good friend to
you, Sam.”
“A second father,” said Sam carefully, not taking the opportunity of
telling that Travers’ friendship had lasted beyond death. Perhaps
he thought this moment too sacred for the intrusion of a legacy. “Of
course,” he went on, “I’ve had all day to think of it, and of the
difference this will make to me--to us, that is, Ada, for you and me.”
“What difference, Sam?” she asked sharply.
“It comes to this,” he said dejectedly, “that I am out of work and
competition is so desperate. While he lived, I had his friendship behind
me. Now--I don’t say that I’m afraid to stand alone. No doubt it will
be good for me eventually, but, Ada, you see how it may postpone our
hopes.”
Ada saw it. “Plotinus” took that opportunity of slipping from Peter’s
knee, and Peter saw it, too, and sighed. “Oh, Sam!” said Ada.
“And,” said Sam, looking at Peter with a fine affectation of guilt,
“there is my recklessness of last night. In my then circumstances, it
was extravagant. To-day it looks worse than that.”
“You couldn’t know,” said Peter kindly.
“No,” Sam agreed. “I couldn’t know, and I have the feeling now that I
must abide by what I did.”
“Very proper, Sam, but Mr. Adams is not poor and I should think that if
you were to go to him------”
“Oh, please,” said Sam, “please don’t press me to do that. A bargain, I
feel so strongly, is a bargain and should be kept at all costs.”
Peter felt silently ashamed of himself. “You are perfectly right,” he
said.
“Well,” said Sam, “that’s how I feel, but in a sense I’m landed with the
thing and I propose to go on with it. As I see it--and I know there’s
a certain amount of inappropriateness in thinking at all of these
practical affairs with my benefactor so recently dead, but I must, I
must----” he looked at Ada and it was understood that his thought for
her excused all--“As I see it, it’s a case for going on and trying to
pull the chestnuts out of the fire, so to speak. I shall print that
paper, and the good that I hoped to do will not be lost because my
circumstances have altered, but I shall make a small charge for it to
cover expenses as far as possible. And as I naturally want it to sell
well, I had the idea of stating on the cover that it was first read at
the Concentrics under your chairmanship. The point of that is that all
the members were not there last night; it will call their attention
to it; and they will, I hope, buy. It makes certain of a few reliable
purchasers.”
“Quite, quite,” said Peter. “It’s an excellent idea. Though I can hardly
suppose that mention of my name has any value, the name of the society
should certainly help.”
His modesty was quite incurable. He had not the faintest notion of the
wide-spread influence of Peter Struggles. “I have thought of little else
all day but Mr. Adams’ paper. I wondered if it was my duty to speak of
this terrible subject from the pulpit. The Church ought not to be silent
or it may be thought to acquiesce.”
Sam felt his heart leap within him. “Adams thought frankness best,” he
said.
“Yes, yes, at the Concentrics. But there are difficulties for me,
and perhaps I shall speak only to the Young Men’s Class at the-Sunday
School. Though that,” he reflected, “is perilously near to compromise.”
“But what is it?” asked Ada. “What are you talking about?”
Sam was silent. So was Peter, and the silence grew till he felt it a
reproach. He looked at Sam. “You see?” he said. “That is the dilemma
of the Church. I shall speak to the young men, and, after that perhaps,
perhaps----” He glanced at Ada.
“No,” he finished decidedly, “I must leave it at that.” He was
fifty-six, and most of his life had been lived under Victoria the Good.