|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 was _persona gratissima_ before 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.