|SEVERAL causes combined to make her think of Sam, too, as not at all
humorous when she saw him in the morning. Unlike him, she was not at
her best in the early hours of the day, and the strain of arriving at
an office by nine a.m. was one from which she did not recover for some
time. She hated business, but without that cross of early rising she
might have found it almost tolerable.
She woke that day to her landlady’s rap more resentfully than usual. The
world was disgustingly mismanaged. Why couldn’t she love Dubby, who was
free? She couldn’t, but she hated Sam for being married, he had no right
to be married. “Damn Mrs. Sam! Damn her!” she said heartily, by way of
a morning prayer, as she ran hairpins viciously into her glorious
hair. “But I’ll cure him of mud,” she added, as she raced downstairs to
swallow the tea and toast which she took almost in the same rush that
carried her from her bedroom to the tram.
She reached the office and walked into Sam’s room to find him already
in possession. His obvious briskness at that hour struck her as almost
indecent; it was, at any rate, another cause for resentment, and one of
which he was himself quite blandly unaware.
He was not stealing a march upon her any more than he habitually stole
marches on the rest of the world. He knew that early morning suited him,
and used it to advantage. They were certain in town that Branstone had
luck rather than brains because he was lazy; but if a man arrives at
his office at eight a.m., and puts in two hours of solid work by ten
o’clock, he is well ahead of his fellows of the employing class who go
down to offices on the 9.21 from home. He can afford to appear lazy.
He liked that uninterrupted hour with the books, opened the letters
himself, and had them annotated before the men came, whose business it
was to deal with their contents. He planned out the day’s work, and
saw it in hand before his earliest caller came. After ten, which is the
first hour when it is etiquette for a salesman to call, Sam was never
too busy to talk of matters which were not strictly business--with
the right, the gainful caller. It was known that one could kill time
pleasantly with Branstone. Branstone was a lazy fellow, and his office
a good place to sit in on a wet afternoon, when there was no point in
going to Old Trafford.
He came this morning even earlier than usual, to be ready for Effie when
she came at nine. He had slept off his embarrassment, and was ready in
his early morning ebullience to pooh-pooh it. It was stupid to be so
extraordinarily sensitive about an aitch. Accent had always troubled
him, but he need not overrate its importance, and especially now that
he wore the political badge of a democrat, and had acknowledged publicly
that his mother was a charwoman.
So he was here, installed in his chair with the back of his morning’s
work broken, waiting for her when she came.
No, she decided, not at all humorous to-day: formidable, in fact. He
had all the advantages; he was seated; he was first upon the ground, and
that ground his own, and he was abominably awake. He might have run away
yesterday, but this was the morning of retrieval.
“Good morning,” he said, assuming an attitude of leisure.
“Good morning,” she said, then saw that he was looking quizzically at
the parcel she carried, as if, she thought, he mistook it for her lunch.
“I took the novel home to finish,” she explained nervously, and called
herself a fool for giving him this readymade chance to open the subject
which of all things she wanted to delay until her suaver hour had come.
She might be able to cure him of mud, but a doctor should have a bedside
manner, and she distrusted her manners until the landlady’s knock had
ceased ringing in her ears.
If she had not given him the chance, he would have made it. He gave no
quarter to bad starters. Had he known of her weakness, he might have
spared her. He might, because she was Effie; but it wasn’t his habit to
indulge the weaknesses of others, especially a weakness which he did not
share, did not understand, and denied to be anything but sloth.
“Yes,” he said encouragingly. “And the verdict?”
“Does my verdict matter, Mr. Branstone?” she asked. He hadn’t given her
time to get her jacket off!
“What? Certainly it matters. I wasn’t asking you to waste your time when
I gave you the manuscript to read. The question is whether we ought to
publish it, and the answer depends on your opinion.”
“Is that quite fair--to the author, I mean? My opinions of novels are
inexpert.”
“That author can take care of himself very well,” he assured her. “He
won’t starve if we refuse his novel.”
“I’m afraid my opinions are also intolerant,” she said.
“Still,” he smiled, “I should like to hear them.”
“They might infuriate you, and--well, I’d rather not be sacked if I can
help it.”
“We will forget that it is in my power to sack you. Does that satisfy
you?”
Oh, how she loathed people who could be magnanimous at nine a.m.! “You
are being very kind,” she said.
“And you are not giving me your opinion. Come, Miss Mannering, you’ve
read it. What do you think of it?”
Later in the day she might have put it more gently. Just now she could
manage nothing more kindly than: “I think it’s appalling. It’s false
from start to finish,” and she rejoiced to see how much her vehement
candour disconcerted him. “I’ve drawn first blood,” she thought; but
bleeding as a curative process is discredited.
“But,” he said, “it is very like others of my series. I made sure it
would be popular.”
“I’m not a judge of that. It’s possible enough. And now”--she smiled a
little wryly--“I’m afraid you know my opinion of the series. I warned
you,” she added hastily, “that my opinions were intolerant. I imagine
you will not ask for them again.” She turned resolutely to the
typewriter and took its cover off. She thought she had closed the
discussion, and was suiting action to her word, and sitting at her desk
when he motioned her back to the chair opposite his. It was not the sort
of motion one ignored.
“I may ask for them again or I may not,” he said; “but in the meantime I
have certainly not given you anything to do at that machine, and we were
trying to forget that you are my typist.”
“I thought after what I’ve said that it might be time to remember it,”
she suggested.
“Not at all,” he assured her. “I get to the bottom of things, and, if
you please, we’ll have this out.”
“Of course, if this is part of your secretary’s work----” she began.
He cut her short. “It is. Now, you find my novel series appalling?”
Effie was growing angry. _In vino veritas_--and in anger. “I could go
even further,” she said. “I find it degrading.”
He thumped the desk. “But it sells, Miss Mannering, it sells. Did you
know that?” He leant back in his chair in one of the attitudes he took
when he was scoring heavily, thumbs in his waistcoat arm-holes.
“It’s the most popular series of cheap novels on the market. See any
bookstall, if you doubt me.” He paused for her apology.
Effle did not apologize. “That does not alter my opinion of it,” she
said coolly. “A public danger isn’t less dangerous because it’s large.
I’m afraid I can believe that there are no depths to which it is
impossible to degrade the public taste, but that does not make me like
any the better a series which degrades it.”
Now a child is a child. It may be deformed, and its begetter may in
clairvoyant moments have acknowledged the deformity to himself, but he
resents its being pointed out to him. Sam was the father of his series.
“I say!” he protested. “That’s nasty.”
“It’s a nasty series,” she said hardily. “You are proud of it because it
sells when you ought to be ashamed of it because it’s bad.” Somehow
she had to say it. She couldn’t hedge from what she saw as truth, even
though she expected truth to hurt him and to be hurt in return. But Sam
wonderfully controlled himself. Emphatically, he was forgetting that she
was a typist. He remembered that she was Effie.
He addressed the ceiling. “The fact is,” he mourned, “that women do not
understand business. Even business women don’t. Even you don’t.”
Mentally she thanked him for his “even you.” It seemed to her a good
place to end the matter for that morning. She still distrusted her
manners, and not, she thought, without reason.
“Consequently,” she told him quietly, “my opinion cannot matter,” and
moved as if to go to her typewriter.
He held her to her seat. “That is to beg the question,” he replied, “and
we were to have it out.”
“But,” she tried, “you have told me that I do not understand business.”
“And you did not believe me.”
He challenged her, in fact. Well, she must pick up his gage. “I do not
understand this about business, Mr. Branstone. What is it about business
which makes a man like you content to be a confectioner selling people
wares that give them mental indigestion? Business! It’s the name for
half the meanness and nine-tenths of the ugliness in the world. You see,
women do know something about business to-day. It isn’t their fault that
they are not still sitting cosily at home, hugging the old belief that
business is a dignified, majestic thing to which only the masculine
intellect can rise. It’s your fault, the men’s. You wanted cheap clerks,
and you raised the veil so that women have seen business at close
quarters, and the only thing they do not understand is how men continued
for so long to magnify its low chicane and its infinite humbug into a
cult which deceived them.”
Sam came to the conclusion that Effie was not perfect. She suffered
from hysteria, but she must be answered. “Well,” he said, “you don’t
think much of business. But you came into it.”
“I needed money,” she defended that.
“So did I,” he said dryly. “We’re birds of a feather.”
“You hate it, too?” she asked hopefully.
“Honestly,” he said, “I like it. But,” he went on with mischief in his
eye, “I can tell you something that will please you. You dislike the
novel series. You think they degrade. You don’t think the Classics
degrade?”
“No.”
“I would much rather that the Classics sold largely than the novels.”
“Why?” She was eager now. “Because they are great literature?”
“No. That would be being sentimental about business, and it can’t be
done. Because they are not copyright, and it saves book-keeping.” He
grinned at her discomfiture. “Business,” he defined, “is money-getting.”
He was feeling tremendously pleased with himself, her master in
argument. He gave her rope indulgently, for she was Effie; then crushed
her utterly, for he was Sam.
“Isn’t it better,” she asked, “to win a little money decently than to
gain a great deal by trading in poison? Whether you know it or not,
these books are poisonous.”
“I don’t know it,” he said brusquely. “They give pleasure.”
“So, I suppose, does opium. There are lots of pleasant poisons. Would
you keep an opium den if it paid? If you were a milkman, would you
adulterate milk and poison babies? You adulterate books and poison
minds. For money! Oh, yes; I, too, needed money, and I, too, came to
business. But we are not birds of a feather. I do not like business. I
don’t like having to get money. I don’t like money, but I need it. I’ve
things to do with it.”
“My case again,” he capped her. “I’ve things to do with it.” He saw that
she was looking at him curiously, and that she took him to mean that he
wanted money for Ada. Incidentally he did, but essentially he did not.
“Politics,” he added. “Power! Power!” He repeated the word ecstatically,
not only because he was admitting her to the intimacy of his private
thought, not only because he felt it an ecstatic idea, but because
he had so thoroughly defeated her in argument. She sat there staring
speechlessly, and he exulted to perceive that she was mute before his
slashing common sense.
Only, that was not the reason of her silence. She thought that, for a
first attempt, she had gone far enough, and had the hope that something
of what she had said would remain in his mind, perhaps stingingly.
She could only hope. Heaven knew it had been a queer enough interview
between an employer and his typist, and her prayer, as she sat there
permitting his exultation, was for an interruption.
Her prayer was answered. Just as she thought him on the brink of seeing
that her silence was not entirely acquiescent, the office-boy brought in
the name of a caller he must see, and Effie rose with huge relief. She
hadn’t it in her to keep silent much longer, and felt that if she then
let go all that was firing her, she would say more than he could stand.
True, he had stood a good deal, but then she had said little of what
she had to say! She wanted to say it gradually, to lead him, not to spur
him, to her point of view. Already she was taking a more modern view of
the virtues of bleeding her patient.
She thought, too, that his was the easier part.
She had ideals for her Sam, but when she attempted to define them, they
seemed nebulous, indeed, against his simple practice of expediency. He
had his theory that what was expedient was just, and she--what was
her theory except that his was not good enough for him? And his was
in possession everywhere, established, honoured, received of all but a
trivial minority. He thought with the mass and she thought mass-thinking
was not good enough for him. It was difficult to explain. He wasn’t a
criminal, he wasn’t even individual in thought or method; he played the
common game, playing perhaps a little more astutely than the average,
but keeping honestly within the rules. He followed the crowd, and she
wanted him to follow the gleam. A gleam is indefinable, but she thought
she had a chance because she was so much more grown-up than Sam.
Business was a game of marbles, and girls do not play with marbles, but
with dolls.
He was not to remain for long with the delusion that he had silenced her
in their first talk. There followed many other talks, although she was
coming to the conclusion that talking would not do the business for her.
It helped, it made a preparation of the ground, but it was stubborn clay
in which he had his roots. Talking did not dig deep enough; she must
uproot, she must transplant.
“Politics,” he had said to pulverize her argument.
“Another thing,” she told him, “which is not quite the mystery for women
that it was. Politics, but--why?”
And he replied with the word which had raised him to ecstasy. “Power,”;
he said.
“Yes?” she questioned. “Business leads you to money, money to politics,
and politics to power. And after that? You want power--for what?”
“Why,” he cried, “power is power.”
“An end in itself?”
“At least, it’s an ambition,” he replied.
It was, and so had Ada had her ambition to be married, an end, _the_
end. He did not think of Ada, but he found it difficult to justify
himself. He could not even tell her that he was a Liberal, because he
had a decent hatred of a Tory; he wasn’t in politics for a faith which
enabled him to endure their artifice; he relished the artifice, he was
in with an axe to grind, but with no clear idea of the use he wished
to make of his axe when it was sharp. Ambition, purpose narrowed to two
letters--M.P. He wanted to be M.P. for Branstone, that Bran-stone might
hear the voice of Branstone speaking in the House of Commons.
She watched him slyly, and thought her leaven worked. “Of course,” she
said casually, “it would be useful for your business if you were an
M.P.”
“Enormously,” he agreed, marching blindly into her little trap. “It
gives prestige to any business.”
“And completes the vicious circle,” she said. “Business takes you to
politics and politics brings you back to business.”
He remembered an appointment hastily, and went to keep it. Sam Branstone
stumped for a reply was an unusual phenomenon, and she con gratulated
herself again that it worked. It worked, but slowly. She was not
impatient, but he was still doing unchanged the things she hated to see
him do, and she wanted the change to come. She doubted that it would
ever come by talk alone. One did not convert by conversation.
She had intended to say so much, to keep a steady pressure on him, and
she couldn’t do it, partly because her point of view was difficult of
definition, partly because she thought no talk, no matter how inspired,
could change him of itself. She did not know of Anne, who had talked
and kept the pres sure up, and put sacrifice behind the talk even to the
point of thrusting her hand into the fire; but Effie, too, had sacrifice
in mind. Anne’s sacrifice had failed. It wasn’t, perhaps, the right
sacrifice: it was, at any rate, the immortal commonplace, the sacrifice
of the older generation to the younger, of the mother to the son, of
age to youth. Spectacular, heroic as it was, it was yet in the scheme of
things, and it is the sacrifice of youth to youth which can surprise by
unexpectedness.
For some it is a sacrifice to cease talking even when they are convinced
that talk is futile. If Effie was one of these, she made that little
sacrifice at once. She never told him that his life was mean and ugly
and despicable, his triumphs worthless, his success a failure, his
highest ambition to know that people grovelled to him, his money and his
power. She did not say these things, but neither did she yield an inch
of her attitude which implied them.
“I’ll win,” she told herself, “I’ll win.”
By now she was crusading for the soul of Sammy Branstone, and all the
while her passion grew, fed as much by that in him which irritated her
as by what attracted. She accepted the fact that he was married and
discounted it. It was one with the other irritants, mattering less to
her, for it was irremovable. She could neglect the wife: what mattered
was the man. She must bring beauty to his life.
They have tamed many wild things in a world growm standardized; they
have tried for centuries to bridle love and make it run in harness; but
love refuses to be tamed and standardized by the marriage service.
You don’t scare love away by the bogey-sign, “Trespassers will be
prosecuted.” Love’s wild, it’s free, blind to the handcuffs which Church
and State pathetically try to rivet on a given pair, lawless because
it knows no law, timeless because it know’s no time. Sometimes it lasts
while a butterfly could suck a flower’s honey, sometimes the space of a
man’s life, and they have tried to regulate this love, this volatility,
to pretend that because it sometimes does not evaporate, it never
evaporates till death. They sought to link love with property, and to
control the uncontrollable. They make laws round love, which is like
enclosing an eagle in a cobweb; and we suffer for their laws. We keep
the law and suffer; break it and we suffer.
She knew that she would suffer, but she would bring beauty to Sam. He
hadn’t capitulated to her talk, and she thought that he had no chance
in Manchester. Perhaps her Sam was with her in his dreams, but each dawn
brought him to accustomed ugliness, and habit clogged his days with mud.
He couldn’t escape, he wanted wings, and she was there to bring them
him. He did not know there was another side to life, but she would show
it him. He should see her beauty, and, through that, the beauty of the
other side.
She was presumptuous, but presumption is a quality of faith. She
interfered, but there are three inevitable interferences in life--birth,
love and death--and hers was one of these. It was them all: it was love
and the birth of the new Sam, and the death of the old. She interfered,
where she had right to interfere. She loved.
Time passed between the day when she came to her decision and the day
when they acted upon it, and she never knew how long it was nor how she
spent it. She belonged to a living fact, and there were shadows in the
world, such as her work, her mother, the silly detail of arranging to go
away, and Stewart, a haunting shadow of one Sunday afternoon, but these
were unrealities and only her idea was real. She never remembered how
she put it to Sam, nor what he said, though she had a hazy memory
that he was desperately shocked and more profoundly humorous than ever
before. But she thought that he was only shocked as the right thing
shocks by rightness, not as the wrong by wrongness: and she knew that
difficulties melted: and they came.
They came to the Marbeck Inn and entered into their kingdom of a week.