|THE theory that Satan is a subtle devil is one which will not bear
examination. He is a crude fellow, theatrical, Mephistophelean. It may,
of course, be only because his experience of human nature has made a
cynic of him, and certainly his interferences do not as a rule lack
success because they want delicacy. He attacked Sam with a blatant
effrontery which suggested that he thought Sam’s a contemptuously easy
case.
Sam reached Manchester very early in the morning, and spent the rest
of his broken night in a lugubrious hotel near the station. Manchester
hotels rarely make for gaiety, but it is wonderful what even a short
night will do in the way of altering a point of view.
He expected to be depressed at the very air of Manchester, and, instead,
he sniffed at it as Mr. Minnifie had once relished the odours of
Greenheys, with an exile’s greed. He knew that he ought to feel a
loathing of the office, but found that he opened the letters with more
than his usual zest. He knew that it was wrong, all wrong, and checked
his itching fingers.
There have been prisoners who, when offered freedom, have pleaded to
remain in the familiar cell.
Was it like that with him, he wondered, as had as that, the jail-fever
so ineradically in him that he must breathe the tainted air to live?
But, was he offered freedom? He had to go to Ada, who was a mill-stone
and implied the other mill-stones. Unless she was not a mill-stone,
unless he could alter her. In the meantime, at all events, she was not
altered, she wanted the things which she had always wanted; and the
office was their source. It seemed to him that he was still in prison,
with the difference that he now knew that it was prison. He found little
comfort in the knowledge.
His gaze returned to the pile of correspondence. There seemed nothing
else for it to do, and he saw an envelope, addressed not to the firm,
but to himself, which sent the blood whirling to his head in simple
premonition of its contents. From the postmark (S.W.--Satan’s Work?)
he saw that it had only come that morning and had not been waiting
his arrival. He thought of that as of a portent. Suppose he had stayed
another day at Marbeck! He might have been too late.
It was a careful letter, but the facts were that, owing to the sudden
death of Sir Almeric Pannifer, the seat tor the Sandyford Division
of Marlshire was vacated. Mr. Morphew, who had reduced Sir Almeric’s
majority in that agricultural constituency to three hundred was, for
private reasons, unable to stand again (“I know these private reasons,”
thought Sam. “Morphew considers he has earned a walkover next time”),
but Headquarters were of opinion that a resolute candidate of strong
personality, etc....
In short, he was offered the opportunity to be the figurehead in a
demonstration for the Liberal Party. It was no more than that. Morphew
had doubtless nursed the constituency like a mother, and if at the
landslide of the last election he had done no better than to come within
three hundred of his opponents’ votes, the chances of a stranger’s
capturing the seat were negative. But it was the stepping-stone, the
_liaison_ between obscurity and the House of Commons. It was what he had
aimed at.
He tried to believe that the letter did not exhilarate him as it would
have done a fortnight earlier, and Satan, the connoisseur of good
resolutions, smiled his age-long smile.
He looked across at Effie’s chair. “My spirit will be always with you,”
she had said; he wondered if it were there now, and tried to see her.
Surely now, if ever, was her time; now when he had so lately left her,
when her scent was in his nostrils and her voice in his ears. Her voice
_was_ in his ears. He heard it clearly. She spoke one word, “Renounce.”
“Yes, but, my dear,” he argued, “I have renounced. I’ve renounced you.
I’ve come back here and I’m going to Ada, to plumb the depths of her,
to find the good in her, and drag it to the top. I’m going to dive for
pearls,” he grew almost picturesque as he cited his intentions towards
Ada in his defence, “and I shall grow short of breath. I’m not doubting
that the pearls are there, because Ada’s a woman, and so are you, but I
know that they lie deep and I want breath for such a dive as that. I’ve
renounced you, and I’m going to make a woman of her; don’t I deserve
some recompense to make amends? It’s here beneath my hand, and I have
only to say ‘Yes.’ Effie,” he pleaded, “if you knew what this meant to
me, you wouldn’t frown. It’s not backsliding.” He denied that it was
backsliding, well knowing that it was. “It’s politics, I know, and you
don’t like politics. You told me women knew about politics now. Oh,
but you don’t know, you don’t. Smile at me, Effie, smile as I have seen
women smile when men talked of golf. I know we men are babies, and so do
you. Give me my game. It’s nothing but a hobby, like golf, but this is
mine, and I want it so much. Ada is my work and this is my play, and
just as necessary. It will not be a hindrance to what I have to do for
Ada, it will be a help. Effie, tell me that I may have my help.”
He tried to blarney a consenting smile out of the figure of Eflie he
imagined sitting in her chair. He had no difficulty in imagining her
there; he saw her, too easily, too really to imagine a false Effie. He
could not imagine, try as he would, that he had won consent from her. He
was too near the real Effie for that. And Effie said “Renounce.”
Then his cashier came into the office and routine swallowed him for
the day. A score of little points had arisen in his absence and must
be discussed and settled. The thought occurred to him that if he
telegraphed to London in the morning, Headquarters would hear from him
as soon as if he wrote to-day. They might expect a wire to-day; well,
they would not get it. He crammed the letter into his pocket and decided
that he would sleep upon it before he sent them his reply.
And if Satan still smiled it was wistfully, as if he regretted his lost
subtlety; but there was still Ada, the married woman.
If Ada was nothing else, she was a married woman; in a world where many
fail, she had succeeded; she had got married, and, like other people who
have reached their earthly paradise, she did not know what to do when
she got there, and did nothing. She stopped growing when she married.
The emptiness of her life was a thing to marvel at. She slept and ate
and shopped. She was spared the ordinary duties of running a house, and
the trials of servants, because the cook, an elderly, reliable woman,
took (it seemed) a fancy to Sam and became a fixture first and a
housekeeper second, taking from Ada’s shoulders the burden of engaging
her underling. She had two “At homes” a week, and went to other people’s
“At homes.” On Sunday, she went to church, where one can display new
clothes to a larger audience than at the largest private “at home.”
She killed the evenings somehow, in company with a friend, or with the
fashion papers.
Evenings interested her little; they were the time when Sam was often,
but not too often, at home. He was not, strictly, a nuisance, because
he never asked her, after a first experiment, to entertain a business
acquaintance, and did that at hotels. Nor did he ask her to entertain
him. Usually, he read a manuscript, or worked out costs or did something
which made no demand on Ada, except that she be reasonably quiet. She
was very quiet with Sam, for the reason that she had nothing to say.
She did not go out much in the evenings and told her friends that this
was because she liked to be at home with her husband. They were supposed
to deduce an idyll of conjugal bliss where proximity was perfect
happiness. The real reasons were, first, pure laziness and, second, her
shoulders. Other married women might expose their shoulders in low-cut
dresses, but not Ada. It wasn’t modest. Her shoulders were ugly.
She never went to see Peter, who had given her offence by suggesting the
blessedness of work. He had dared to lecture her, a married woman,
and she let fly at him in such fashion that he never tried again, he
deplored his weakness, but he gave her up. The cobbler’s child is the
worst shod, and something analogous often happens with the daughters of
the clergy: Ada was, perhaps, the worst of Peter’s flock. He knew and,
knowing the hopes he had had of this marriage, suffered at its failure,
but silently, confessing impotence. There were always books in which he
could forget, and the peace which had come to his house since Ada left
it. It is not easy to be saintly all the time, and her outrageous attack
had been, humanly speaking, unpardonable.
“There must be something in her,” he told himself, as he left the
office, “and I’ve to find it.”
The day had, naturally, after an absence, been unusually busy, and had
given him no time to think. He was bursting with intention, but it was
vague, unformed, though urgent and doubly urgent because of the letter
in his pocket. If he could make a woman of Ada, if that evening he could
make a fair start, perhaps he could conjure up the figure of Effie, his
ghostly counsellor, with a smile on her face consenting to his standing
for the seat.
“Oh,” Ada greeted him, “I thought you were not coming back till
Saturday.”
“I wasn’t,” he said. “Something changed my plan a little. I wanted to
get home.”
She looked at him resentfully. There was no reason why he should not
change his plan and come home two days before she expected him, but
she resented the unexpected. And there was something about him which
appeared strange.
“Tell me you are glad to see me,” he said.
“Well, it wasn’t to be till Saturday,” she repeated stupidly.
“Are you thinking of dinner?” he asked. “Kate will manage something.”
She was not thinking of dinner, and no doubt Kate would manage
something. It was Kate’s business.
“You’re wearing funny clothes,” she said.
“Country clothes,” he explained. “You see, I’ve been in the country.”
“Oh.” She was not curious.
“Yes. In the country. It was rather beautiful, Ada.”
“I nearly went with Mrs. Grandage to the ‘Métropole,’ at Blackpool, but
I don’t like dressing for dinner.”
“Blackpool’s not beautiful,” he said. “Ada, I want to talk to you, and I
hardly know how to begin, except that I want you to understand that I’m
in earnest. It’s a serious matter.”
“Money?” said Ada, sitting up sharply in her chair.
“Not money. We’ve both been wrong about money, I think. We’ve both taken
it too seriously.”
“If you’re going to tell me that something has gone wrong with your
money, it’s very serious indeed.”
“It hasn’t. No. This is a larger thing than money. I want, if I can,
to alter things between us, Ada. How can I put it? There’s your
father----”
“I never want to hear his name again,” she interrupted. “He insulted
me.”
“You go to church, you know; you listen to him there.”
“People would talk if I didn’t go. I needn’t listen to him when I am in
church.”
“He’s a good old man. I’m sorry we have drifted from him. But I’ll not
press that now. If the rest comes right, that will come right with it.
It might even come so right as to include my mother.”
“My word!” she said, “you _are_ digging up the past. I don’t see how you
could call things right when they include me with a charwoman.”
“Ada!” he protested.
“It’s what she is.”
“By her own choice. But please forget that, Ada. Yes, it’s true that I
am digging in the past. I want to go back to see where we went wrong.”
“Went wrong? When who went wrong?”
“Why, you and I.”
“I didn’t know we had gone wrong.” She looked at him. “You look well,”
she decided, “but you can’t be.”
“I am better than I’ve ever been,” he said, “and stronger, and if need
be I shall use my strength, but I hope the need won’t come for that.
Ada, can you tell me this? Can you tell me what it is you want?”
“You’re sure it’s all right about your money?” she asked anxiously.
“Yes, of course it’s right,” he said impatiently.
“Then I don’t know that I want anything. I could do with more,
naturally. Who couldn’t?”
“More money. Not more beauty? Not a new purpose? Not something to live
for?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Sam. You’re very strange
to-night.”
“I hardly know myself,” he confessed. “I know it’s all confused, and I
ought to have got things out of the tangle before I spoke to you. But
I thought you might have seen and so be able to help me out. No: that’s
all right, Ada,” he went on as she glared at him indignantly. “I’m
blaming no one but myself. It’s my responsibility. You don’t see it yet,
and I must make you see.”
“If a thing’s there, I can see it.”
“Oh, it’s there,” he said. “We can both see that. It’s only the cure for
it that isn’t plain.”
“What’s there?”
“The failure of our marriage, if I must put it into words.”
“Failure! But we _are_ married. What do you mean?” What Ada meant was
that the ring was on her finger and the marriage certificate in her
desk. Failure in marriage, if it meant anything to her, meant failure
to get married, a broken engagement, and since their engagement had not
been broken, since they had been formally and legally married in church,
there could be no failure.
“We didn’t exult in marriage,” he tried.
“Exult? I’m sure I was the proudest woman in the parish the day I
married you.” It was true. “But afterwards, afterwards!”
“Oh,” she cried, “are you throwing it in my teeth that I didn’t have a
baby? Was that my fault?”
“No, no. But it might have saved us, all the same, and when the baby did
not come we made no effort to save ourselves. There’s a light somewhere
in every one of us and you and I have quenched our lights. They may be
small, they may not be a great light like your father’s, or... or the
light which I have seen in the country, they may be nothing but a feeble
glow, and we can only give our best. You and I have not given ours. We
have not tried to find our light, but now--now that we have discovered
what has been wrong with us all this while--we can try, and together. We
can all of us give something to the world, not children in our case, but
the something else which we were made to give. We don’t know what it
is that you can give and I can give, and we’ve left it late to begin to
find out, but it is not too late, is it, Ada? Ada,” he pleaded, “it is
not too late?”
She looked at the clock. “If you want to wash your hands before dinner
you’d better do it now,” she said, “or you will be late.” She rose, but
before she left him, she had a moment of illumination. She thought she
saw what he was driving at, that he must have seen some happy family
while he was away and came back with the cry of the child less man on
his lips. “I suppose this means,” she said, “that you want me to adopt a
child. That’s what you mean by giving. Well, I won’t do it, Sam. I’ve
something else to do with my time than to look after another woman’s
brat.”
“What have you to do?” he asked. “What is it that you want to do?”
“To eat my dinner,” she said. She had a healthy appetite. Perhaps that
was why she wanted nothing else.
He stood by the door when she had gone, and his hand strayed to his
pocket as though it sought a talisman. He felt the letter crinkle, then
tore his hand away. Ada was work for a man. There wasn’t room for Ada
and for politics. “Deeply regret private reasons compel total withdrawal
from politics.” Yes, that was the wording of the telegram which he would
send: it was best to be thorough, and, plainly, the man who had Ada in
hand had no time to spare on a hobby or an ambition or whatever it was
that politics represented for him. He had other work to do in the world.
He stamped upon the ruins of a hope which came to birth ten years ago,
and which he had carried with him in his heart of hearts and, as the
letter in his pocket proved, not a fool’s hope either. Yes, he had loved
that hope which was born on his honeymoon.
It occurred to him that in all he had said, or tried to say, to Ada he
had not mentioned love. It had not seemed the right word for use in a
conversation with Ada, but, he reflected savagely, he had loved his hope
of politics from the time of the honeymoon onwards: and from that time
he had not loved Ada.
Was that true? Had he neglected the substance for the shadow, used love
upon his hope and not upon his wife? If he had his talk with her again,
could he honestly begin it in another way? Could he begin with love? He
knew that he could not, and squared his shoulders to the fact. It was a
case, then, for the more courage. What was it Effie had said? “There are
no limits to bravery.” He wondered, but he meant to see.
And Satan’s smile had faded. There is more joy amongst the devils over
one sinner who back-slideth.... But not this time, Mephistopheles! Effie
was winning still.