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greatly and it repaid his care a thousandfold. The way to sanity is to
desire very keenly something which it is just possible one may get,
and Sam’s ambition kept him sane in the days when he knew that
Ada had failed him.
Struggles had suggested to our debater of the Concentrics that he
ought to see the House of Commons at debate, and had written to
their local Member for a pass to the Gallery. The result was the most
thrilling experience of Sam’s honeymoon! It was, for one thing,
unique that Ada could not be with him: these were the first hours
since he married her that they spent apart and perhaps that, all
unconsciously, had gilded them for Sam. They had almost a tiff
before she let him go: not quite, but she resented his desertion of
her and considered it his fault that she was not allowed to sit with
him to hear the legislators who made laws for her as for him. Not
that Ada cared who made her laws, nor cared to watch the makers
at their work, but she managed to put enough snap into her
resentment at his going to lend the added quality of a stolen
pleasure to his experience.
That gallery, with its foreshortened view of the dingy cock-pit, is
not the first choice of the connoisseur in thrills, but on Sam its effect
was amazing. He must have had some gift, quite undisclosed till
now, of veneration, for it is almost beyond belief that the reality of
the House of Commons can impress. But the idea can and perhaps
(to be just) the reality is more impressive than that of any other
Chamber on earth. Imagination helping him, it caught and held his
mind.
A small stout man of undistinguished appearance was speaking in
a conversational tone not easy to hear from the Gallery, but
presently the orator warmed to his subject and poured out living
words in a spate of real emotion. He was one of those rare men, and
this one of those rare speeches, that really convert an opponent:
and Sam’s ambition to speak as this politician spoke, and from those
benches, came instantly to birth.
Not only did he want to be a Member of Parliament, but a Liberal
Member, because this man of words was Liberal. Up to this time,
Sam had not been a political animal although he had voted, and
voted Tory because that was in general the line of Mr. Travers and
the property-owning class he represented. Now with a swift
enthusiasm he was Liberal, knowing nothing of either side, but
caught by sudden hero-worship for a little, pudgy, snubnosed
politician who spoke in sentences of prodigious length and never lost
his way in them.
In a twinkling he acquired the bias of the politician: his hero’s
opponent was palpably a fool; he had no gifts, no argument. Yes,
Sam was doubly right to be a Liberal. They had so obviously all the
brains, they were so undeniably the winning side. He did not
understand the technique of a division and was surprised when he
looked at the paper next day to find that the Liberals were outvoted.
It gave him pause, but did not shake him. When the Liberals came
back to power, as with their superiority in brain they were certain to
do, he, Sam Branstone, would come with them. Let it be only a year
or two and he would be ready. He too would loll upon those padded
benches, and catch the Speaker’s eye, and be an orator.
He walked along the Embankment towards his hotel, and it came
into his mind that he had spent four hours in the Gallery and had not
thought of Ada. Nor could he, though he tried, think of her now.
Sky-signs still flashed across the river, and as he paused and
leaned against the parapet a young policeman kept a wary eye on
him. But Sam was meditating life, not death. The lights of London
gleamed upon the Thames and made it magical for him. He
conquered London in his reverie, and stepped, a member, from the
House to his automobile. His home, he supposed, was somewhere in
Park Lane.
He thought back now to the theatre where he had seen The Sign
of the Cross. It was different from the London Theatres he had seen
where audiences seemed afraid of emotion. Or was it that the plays
had not been right? That was it: they had not the note: they weren’t
—what was Stewart’s phrase?—erotic religious plays. He wanted to
move audiences as that play had moved its audience. Power! The
power of the spoken word. That was the thing, and since he could
not write a play he must rely upon himself, his oratory, his single
voice. He saw himself on platforms facing crowded halls, gripping his
hearers, leading them where he would, taming the mob till it made
an idol of its master. As to where he would lead, why, he would lead
and that was what mattered. Branstone was Prime Minister that
night.
It was one o’clock before the young policeman felt at liberty to
resume his beat, and Sam left the enchanted river for his little hotel
in Norfolk Street. Ada had her back to him and apparently she slept.
Actually she was wide awake; she was wondering whether it had
happened to any other woman to be treated so abominably on her
honeymoon.
She brushed her hair nest morning with a notable viciousness.
Hair has uses beyond those of mere adornment. It is an admirable
veil through which one can watch without being seen to watch. Ada
was watching Sam and she was also listening to him.
She listened not because his enthusiasm for the House of
Commons interested her, but because she was waiting for some
word of apology. It did not come. He was full of regret, but only
because this was their last day in town and he could not go to the
House again.
“What time is our train?” she asked.
He told her.
“Then I have time to do some shopping first.”
“Shopping?” he asked, but unsuspiciously.
She nodded. Sam was going to pay for his pleasures. Those
blouses she had seen at Peter Robinson’s no longer seemed
impossibly expensive. If Sam chose to enjoy himself in his own way,
without her, she would enjoy herself in hers—with Sam to pay the
piper.
Shopping is a loose term; one shops when one buys a kipper or a
diamond tiara. Ada was putting her hair up and he imagined her to
mean that she wanted a packet of hair-pins. “Oh, yes,” he said
pensively. “And while you go, I think I will just slip down to the
House of Parliament again.” The House would not be sitting and he
could not get in. He knew that, but he wanted to gaze, to look at the
frame which was some day to contain him. He wanted to be certain
that it was still there.
“I think,” she said, “that you will come with me to the shop. I shall
want you there to pay.”
Sam paused in the act of fastening his collar. “To pay?” he asked,
not unsuspiciously now.
“Are your selfish pleasures all you think about?” Ada wanted to
know. “Isn’t it a privilege to be allowed to buy me nice clothes?”
He had not looked upon it in that light. In budgeting for their
future he had indeed assumed that a trousseau lasted a bride for her
first year. “I see,” he said gloomily; then remembering that he was in
love with her, “of course,” he added with a smile which might count
to him for heroism. “But we must not forget the fares, and after I
have paid the bill here I shall not have more than two pounds left to
spend.”
“Then I spend two pounds on blouses,” she said.
He made a monosyllabic noise which might have been “Yes.” It
might also have been “Damn.”
The truth was that he had deliberately kept those two pounds
back, intending to spend some, but not, he hoped, all of it, on a
present for Ada. He had thought of a hand-bag, had imagined her
gasp of delight when he audaciously entered with her one of those
forbiddingly inviting shops, her appreciation of his generosity.
Last night had driven the thought entirely from his mind, and he
was annoyed now not only at his forgetfulness, but at Ada. She did
not ask, she demanded. A night in the Gallery may be regarded as
dissipation, but at least it is not a crime. It is even patriotic, and he
was asked to foot a bill for two pounds as the price of his patriotism.
Ambition, he thought, would be an expensive luxury if he had to pay
in clothes for Ada every time he went to a political meeting. For that,
plainly, was her attitude: she demanded a quid pro quo: she
announced a policy of retaliation.
 There is a queer perverted pleasure in scratching an open wound,
in cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. He had meant to be
generous and he wanted still to be generous, but the money he had
laid aside for generosity was now hypothecated to meet her claim.
He would give her her pound of flesh, but wanted very badly to
roast it for her with coals of fire.
Gloom lifted from him suddenly. He took off the old tie which he
had put on as being good enough to travel in, and fastened very
carefully one which he had bought “for London.”
“I’ll do it,” he was thinking. “It is—almost—a stroke.”
At breakfast he was positively gay, so that Ada wondered furtively
what he was up to, and whether the way to raise his spirits would
always be to demand new clothes of him. It did not seem likely, but
she proposed at any rate to experiment freely in that direction.
He divided his attention between her, breakfast, and the
Parliamentary report of the Times. He felt that he had virtually
participated in that debate, and even the shock of reading that the
division had gone against his hero did not spoil the pleasure he
found in reading of it. He read with a prophetic eye. He, too, would
be reported in the Times some day.
He called the waiter. “Marmalade, sir?” asked the man.
“No, thanks. Bring me the directory.”
“The directory,” protested the waiter, “is in the reading-room.”
“And I,” said Sam superbly, “am in the coffee-room.”
The waiter brought him the directory.
Sam smiled broadly. He was testing his form, and decided that if it
were equal to coercing a waiter into carrying a directory to his
breakfast-table, it would probably not fail him in what he proposed
to do. He consulted the book and noted an address which was not,
he observed, in Park Lane. His respect for Sir William Gatenby
suffered a slight decline.
Half an hour later he rang the hell of that gentleman’s house.
Gatenby was the local member, to whom Peter Struggles had written
for Sam’s pass to the Gallery.
“Sir William in?” he asked.
“Yes, but——” A trained eye observed his clothes. They were not
cut in Savile Row.
“He will see me,” said Sam serenely. Some people are at their best
in the early morning.
His card was accepted from him, and he was shown into a library
of severe Blue Books, possibly qualified by a reproduction of Millais’
portrait of Gladstone. Ordinarily, Sam would have been met in the
library by a secretary who earned his salary by his talent for
administering polite snubs to unwanted callers. The secretary was
not earning his salary to-day, but, probably, spending it. It was
Derby Day.
After all, a vote is a vote, and Sir William came in with a show of
geniality. “Good morning, Mr. Branstone,” he said, reading Sam’s
card. “From the old town. I see.”
“Is that all you remember about me?” asked Sam.
“At the moment,” confessed Sir William warily. His majority was
not large.
“Well,” said Sam, “the Reverend Mr. Struggles is my father-in-law.”
“Sit down,” said Sir William. “I am very glad you called. How is Mr.
Struggles?”
“T left him well, thank you. Perhaps you remember that he wrote
to you to ask you for a pass to the Gallery for me.”
“I was happy to be lucky in the ballot,” said the Member.
“Yes,” said Sam, “I went last night. But I mentioned that to
establish my identity. My object in calling upon you is to ask you to
lend me five pounds.”
Sir William thought of his secretary, who should have saved him
this. Thinking of his secretary, he thought of Derby Day and the
probable intentions of a man who chooses that day to ask for a loan.
“My dear sir!” he said.
 “Quite,” agreed Sam. “Life would be unbearable to you if every
constituent who came to London tried to borrow money off you. But
I am Branstone. I run the Branstone Press and the Branstone
Classics. I published the ‘Social Evil’ pamphlet and sent you a copy
which, I regret to say, you did not acknowledge.” Sir William thought
again of his secretary, and unkindly. “This,” said Sam, “is merely to
indicate that I am a man of substance.”
Sir William Gatenby wore side-whiskers. He was an old man and
there was little left of him besides pomposity and a determination to
hold his seat. He looked, what at this moment he felt, some one in a
farce. He was quite sure that Sam was some one in a farce. They
were both in a farce, and of course five-pound notes fly in farces like
gnats in August. It did not seem to him that there was anything to
do but to produce a five-pound note.
“Thank you,” said Sam, and sat at a desk. “I will give you my
cheque for this.”
It staggered Sir William. He nearly warned Sam of the danger of
issuing a cheque which was not likely to be honoured, but refrained
in time. “Then,” he said, “there was really no need for you to come
to me at all?”
“Only,” said Sam, “that I wanted you to remember me.”
“I think I shall do that,” said Sir William.
“Thank you,” said Sam calmly. “I wanted to know you because I
intend to go into politics.”
“The Cause,” said Sir William solemnly, “demands his best from
every earnest worker.”
“I will work for the Cause,” said Sam. Neither of them attempted
to define the Cause, and Sam left without further remark, but his call
had this result: that on finding the cheque honoured Sir William
wrote to his agent to tell him of “a queer fish called Samuel
Branstone who called on me the other day, and offered to work for
the Cause. A young man whom I think you should encourage. He is
the son-in-law of Mr. Struggles, and the Church, alas, is so tepid
towards our great Principles that we must not neglect a promising
recruit from that fold.”
 CHAPTER XV—OTHER THINGS
BESIDE MARRIAGE

D
EBT appeals to some people. They feel that when they are in
debt they have had more out of life than life owes to them.
Sam had given Gatenby his cheque and was therefore not in
debt to him, but he proceeded to spend the five pounds as
recklessly as if it had been borrowed money.
He meant to astonish Ada, and succeeded, but the surprise he
sprang did not work quite as he anticipated. For a moment, indeed,
as he bought her hats and blouses she glowed with unaffected
gratitude, and he tasted with her the joy of headstrong acquisition.
But Ada’s glow was quick to pass.
She had time in the train to forget the splendour of his presents
and the dash that she would cut next Sunday, and to remember that
he had spent a lot of money; he who denied that he had more than
two pounds to spend had spent seven. Obviously, he had lied to her.
It was true, she thought, that he had repented of his lie and of his
meanness, and bought handsomely: the more handsome the
purchase, the more demonstrable the lie.
She recalled her dreadful interview with Anne, Anne’s statements
of his means, and how little they conformed to the scale of Sam’s
furnishing. She pondered Sam’s open-handedness in the blouse-
shop, and concluded that the Branstones were congenital liars about
money.
In the future she would know how to act. Sam had plenty.
“So you had money up your sleeve all the time,” she said.
Sam winked facetiously. “There are a lot of funny things up my
sleeve,” he said.
 “I’m learning that,” said Ada. Which he took for a compliment; and
grinned.
He had long since made up his mind that the way with women
was to mystify them, to treat them like children at a conjuring
entertainment, to surprise them with results, but never to explain.
He nearly choked with pride over his exploit with Sir William
Gatenby. But for the hat-box and the blouses up there on the rack,
what he had done was too good to be true, and certainly it was too
good to be told to a woman. They did not understand business; no
woman could appreciate the daring spirit of his feat.
If he told Ada that he had borrowed from Gatenby, she would
simply say “Oh, yes,” and treat his unexampled audacity as a matter
of course. It was inspiration, brilliantly conceived and brilliantly
executed, and its bright memory was not to be tarnished by a
woman’s dull acceptance of it as something not in the least
extraordinary.
He grinned and did not tell, and what did not occur to him was
that if he offered no explanation she would supply one of her own. It
is idiotic to tell a wife everything, but wise to tell nearly everything;
especially when it is open to her to draw a false conclusion.
Sam did not think a false conclusion open to her, because he still
believed the best of Ada, because he was still in love. But falling out
of love is desperately easy.
“As a walled town,” says Touchstone, “is worthier than a village, so
is the forehead of a married man more honourable than the bare
brow of a bachelor,” and Sam was married. He could lay that
flattering unction to his soul, could hold his head higher, because he
was a ratepayer and bore responsibilities, and went home at night to
a house with a garden. He did all that, and it was empty honour
because success in marriage, as in all else, is not to be had ready-
made, but depends upon the will to make adjustments.
The will can come best from passion, and there was no passion
here to tide them over the awkward age of marriage, the first
difficult year when the adjustments must, if ever, be made. Granted
passion, a man can love a woman whom he knows to be a
murderess; let passion lack, and he can fall out of love because the
woman snores or is untidy. Sam’s marriage was not made in heaven,
but by Ada in Heaton Park, and with a marriage so made it is as
easy to fall out of love as off a house. Little things count more than
big when there is no passion to create its life-long mirage.
If you cannot have the mirage of passion there is a useful
substitute called common sense, another name for compromise, and
Ada refused to compromise. She was for self, unmitigated and
supreme. Ada left the adjustments to Sam, and relaxed in nothing
from her perfect selfishness.
The little thing which counted heavily against her, almost at once,
was simply that Ada was untidy. She did not invent places for things,
or, if she did, they were never used. She left her clothes downstairs
after she had been out, and the piano is not the place for a hat or
the sofa for an umbrella. It annoyed Sam to distraction to find her
clothes distributed about their bedroom, slung carelessly over chair
backs, pitched on the floor.
Men are not the untidy sex: the virtue of tidiness, like most others,
is evenly distributed. Sam was tidy by nature, and habit is stronger
still. Ada’s misfortune was that he was used to Anne, that Anne was
neat and Ada a slut. Sam did not know until he missed it how much
he appreciated Anne’s tidiness, how much he needed it and how
much he hated untidiness until he lived with it in Ada. In London, in
the hotel, he had excused what he saw of it, because it was in an
hotel; which was also why there had been little to see, by reason of
a good chambermaid.
At home, it hurt him and he could do nothing. Ada did nothing,
either. She had not married for love, and one does not change a
habit without strong motive. His hints appeared to Ada peevish and
unreasonable. She thought he made mountains out of molehills and
despised him for small-mindedness; he thought a woman who could
not put a petticoat into a drawer when he asked her was wilfully
provoking him.
 She was not wilful of set purpose. She simply refused to disturb
her habits, to accommodate herself to him, to make a sacrifice to
love. She had no love to which to sacrifice.
And presently he found out that he, too, did not love. But that was
all. Then and afterwards that was, damnably, all. He did not love,
but neither did he hate. He had never loved her deeply enough to
hate her. That was the tragedy of Sam’s marriage: indifference, the
deadliest sin.
He was indifferent to her, to her untidiness and even to her
extravagance. She could not treat clothes reasonably, she did not
know how to wear them when she had them, but she lusted madly
to possess them. She was grossly, inexcusably extravagant, and he
was indifferent. He was indifferent because he was growing rich, and
wanted his energies for the purpose of growing richer, not of
quarrelling with her.
That was another tragedy. They never quarrelled. They never
cleared the air, they never flushed the drain. They did not make
adjustments, but left things where they were, in a bad place. On
honeymoon, they turned from looking at each other to look at
London, and at home, after one experience of revelation, they did
not seek another, but rebounded and looked anywhere but at
themselves.
But Peter was looking, and Anne, through the eyes of George, was
looking, and it seemed to her that things were happening as she had
expected they would happen. She had said the girl was no good and
what George told her in his fumbling way gave her to see that the
girl turned wife was equally no good. Anne tightened her lips grimly
and went on with her efficient charring. She thought her time would
come.
Peter looked for the coming of love to bless this marriage to which
he had consented in the belief that his God of love would sanctify.
He had trusted to the strength of Sam, and to the hope that Sam’s
strength would turn to sweetness; and it only turned to business. It
did not lead Ada from materialism, but drew Peter himself,
unwittingly at first, towards it. Peter found himself selecting texts for
Sam’s “Church Child’s Calendar,” a labour of love, which nevertheless
had nothing to do with Ada, except in the most indirect way, and
nothing to do with the Sam and Ada situation.
It was the fact that, to them, there seemed to be no situation
which distressed Peter. They simply let things be, and things let be
obey the law of gravity. He hoped, ardently, for children. Children
blessed marriage in the physical sense, and from that blessing the
other, the spiritual blessing, might arise.
There was at one time hope that Ada might have a child... and
then the hope was blighted, and the doctor told them not to hope
again. Ada would never be a mother.
“I could have told them that,” said Anne. “You’d only to look at the
girl to see it.” Which may only have been wisdom after the event,
but certainly did not imply that Anne was disappointed; though Peter
was, and bitterly.
Sam, too, had wanted a son, but not, as Peter thought, by Ada
and for Ada. He wanted an heir for dynastic reasons. He was the
Branstone Publishing Company, its parent and original, and wanted
flesh of his flesh to publish after him. He dreamed of a young Sam in
the cap of the Grammar School, who should go to the University to
which he had not gone and have the chances he had missed. He
built many castles in Spain for the son who was never born.
Ada got up from bed and flashed greedily into new clothes. If the
measure of her buying was the measure of her grief, she had been
deeply touched. Perhaps she was touched, for she had aimed at
marriage, which is incomplete without a child. But in the shops, the
fashion papers, her clothes and the clothes of other women she
found distraction and an occupation. She passed a milestone and
went on her way. Ada was no stoic, no hider of her grief, and since
she did not complain she must have thought her childlessness was
nothing to complain about. When she set her heart on marriage, she
hadn’t, perhaps, looked further than the ring, the ceremony and the
honourable state of being Mrs. Branstone.
 She plunged to shops and spending money, Sam to business and
making it; and some, at any rate, of the now thwarted love he had
been storing for his son passed to the business. Somewhere at the
back of his mind he knew his business was not lovable; that it was
pitch; that one cannot touch pitch without being defiled. But neither
can one deal successfully in pitch without arriving at faith in the
virtues of pitch. At intimate moments he was aware that the “Social
Evil” pamphlet was pernicious, but Sam Branstone, inducing a
bookseller to stock it, was more than an advocate who believes
temporarily in his brief: he was a missionary with faith in his mission.
So, too, with the texts. He sold them with the conviction that it was
good for people to have texts on their walls. He counterfeited
sincerity until he came to be sincere, or, at all events, to forget that
he was insincere.
Further and further into the unsearched recesses of his mind he
pressed the thought that he sold texts because their sales were
good for him, and with his working, everyday, non-introspective
mind he had a sincerity about his wares, convenient but none the
less authentic,-which was invaluable both to his self-respect and as a
first aid to success in salesmanship. He never, in the old days,
praised a house with the ringing voice of absolute conviction which
he used about Law’s “Serious Call.” He had not read Law, but the
sales hung fire till he became persuaded of Law’s tremendous worth.
He had a serious call of his own, a call to sell good books at good
profits, and the call expressed itself in his clothes and his
appearance. He seemed older, graver, took his frock-coat into daily
wear, used only black in ties and socks, and had the air of one, who,
if not a clergyman, was often in their company, though as a fact he
was more frequently with commercial travellers, and in the hotels at
night his repertoire of smoke-room stories came no less gaily from
his tongue than of old.
And about this time his moustache began to droop like a curtain
over his resolute mouth.
Stewart came into the office one day with a parcel under his arm.
He had seen neither Sam nor his office lately, and stared wide-eyed
at both. Carter, partner in the printing business, still occupied the
dilapidated office where Sam had found him, but the Branstone
Publishing Company had ampler premises next door, in a building
which Sam rented as warehouse for his stock. Gilt lettering on its
windows called the attention of the passer-by to the Branstone +
Classics.
Sam still looked after detail, and when Stewart came in was
correcting proofs of a tear-off calendar with a Bible at his elbow.
“I suppose,” said Stewart, “that you are Branstone, but why
disguise yourself as a Scottish Elder?”
“I am in my usual clothes,” said Sam, rather huffed.
“If the clothes are the man, this is no place for me. Do you often
use the Bible in your business hours?”
He often did, not only to check with a quite beautiful precision the
texts on his calendars by the Authorised Version, but in another way,
and one which seemed to show, if it showed anything, that he
looked upon the Bible with intimate familiarity. Perhaps one mascot
was the vellum-bound copy of the “Social Evil” pamphlet and the
other the Bible. At any rate, his price code used in the office was
made up this way:

MYFATHERGOD

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 20
New clerks initiated into that code used to wonder at it for a day.
Then they got used to it.
“I’m correcting the proofs of this calendar,” Sam explained. “You
see, it’s a shaving calendar. You hang this up by your shaving-mirror
and study the text for the day while you shave.”
“I don’t,” said Stewart. “I go to the barber’s. My hand’s unsteady
in the morning. But I see the idea. First read the text, then wipe
your razor on it.”
 “That is not the idea. See.” He pointed to the card of the calendar,
and read solemnly:

“A text a day
Drives care away.”

“It wouldn’t drive my sort of care away,” said Stewart. “Mine’s

serious.”
“There can be no trouble too serious for you to find consolation in
this calendar.”
“But suppose I have toothache on quarter-day, and the
consolation you offer for that date is consolation to a man who can’t
pay his rent? Seriously, Branstone, am I behind the scenes in this
office, or do you never drop the showman? I admit you’re in the pi-
market, and you’ve dressed the pi-man’s part and you’ve got his
patter, too, but I don’t know that you need exercise it on me. This
stock of yours looks dire,” he commented, strolling round the office.
“I suppose it’s the stuff that sells?”
“My business,” said Sam, “is founded on a rock.”
“I came in here to sell you a fortune,” said Stewart. “If you’re
going to talk cant at me, I’ll take the fortune to a London publisher.
Your business may be founded on a rock, but the name of the rock
is the ‘Social Evil.’”
“The word rock,” said Sam, with a twinkle in his eye, “is also used
for a kind of toffee.”
“Well, now that I know you’re sane, I’ll talk to you. And I’ll talk
toffee, too I didn’t think in the days of my earnest youth that I
should come to this, but you never know what debt will do to a man.
I’ve written a novel. At least, it isn’t a novel, it’s an outrage on
decency. It’s a violent assault on the emotions. It’s the sort of thing I
deserve shooting for writing. Treacle is bitter compared with it, and
it does not contain one word of literature. It is a cast-iron certainty.”
“I must read it,” said Sam.
 “You’re growing distrustful,” said Stewart sadly.
“I don’t buy pigs in pokes, even when they’re yours,” said Sam.
“Come along in a couple of days.”
He read the novel, and was ready for Stewart when he came.
“I have taken the liberty,” he said, “of marking some passages in
this manuscript which you may care to alter.”
“Oh? I know it’s mawkish, but I don’t believe there is a limit to
what they’ll stand—and like.”
“I refer particularly to the character you have called Hetaera.”
“But only once. After that she’s called Hetty.”
“Hetty,” said Sam severely, “will have to be cut out. She is an
impure woman.”
“Even the most popular of novels should bear some relationship to
life.”
“If you wish me to publish this one, Hetty must go. Branstones
have a reputation to sustain.”
“Good God!” said Stewart. “Hetty is the one oasis of truth in a
desert of sloppy sentimentality. She’s true because I happen to know
her.”
“That is nothing to your credit, Stewart.”
Stewart stared. “Are you pulling my leg, Sam, or is this really
serious?”
“Why should you doubt my seriousness when I ask that fiction
should be devoid of offence?”
“Don’t you mean devoid of truth?” He recovered his temper and
his perspective. After all, he was very short of money. “All right,
Sam,” he said. “Edit me. Censor me. I thought I knew things, but
there are deeps below the lowest depths, and you have reached
them. I surrender. What are the terms?”
Sam offered terms which were quite generous. He might want
Stewart again.
 The novel was purged of Hetty and published. The three-page
prayer of the distressed heroine was used, in paraphrase, from quite
a number of nonconformist pulpits, and the book was a huge
success. It was the first of that series—Branstone’s Happy Novels for
Healthy Homes—which carried the strength of the literary emetic to
a point of concentrated sweetness undreamt of before, and
discovered somewhere a public stomach which did not reject its
nauseating jam, but revelled in it.
 CHAPTER XVI—THE POLITICAL
ANIMAL

I
F only Ada had had the courage of what ought to have been her
convictions, things would have been very different. But she
hadn’t the pluck or the zest in life to be anything at all except an
almost perfect negative, and a man will fight for a wife for many
reasons, but not for the reason that she is a full-stop.
Ada, as Peter knew when he consented to the marriage, could be
led: with even surer hope of good result she could be driven, and if
Sam had cared to drive, to play Petruchio with Ada, he could have
turned her negative into a comparative, if not into a positive.
Unhappily, his driving powers were otherwise engaged, and his
objectives were on the battlefield, his office, rather than in the
dormitory which he might have turned into a home. And since Ada
had all that she was conscious of wanting, she had a dull
contentment. Two servants and credit at the shops were good
enough for Ada, and good enough, too, for Sam, because they
advertised success. If Ada had been actively vicious, if she had
drunk, if men or a man had obsessed her, if indeed she had been
anything that was bad perceptibly, Sam would have abandoned his
indifference and taken a strong and effective line with her. It might,
at first, have been only because a positively vicious Ada would have
been bad for the Branstone + Classics, but it would have ended by
being good for Ada and for Sam: it would have been the beginning
of Ada and Sam, of their dual life which had not yet come to birth.
But, as it was, he saw nothing to fight. There was a superficial
rightness; therefore all was right, he could forget Ada and turn to
the things which were vital to him, business for its own sake, and
business considered as a stepping-stone to politics.
 He was content for some time to leave his political ambitions
alone, because it seemed to him that money, quite a lot of money,
was needed for politics. In truth, he was rather awed by his
ambition: the House of Commons seemed a tremendous distance
from his office in Manchester, and he thought a great deal of money
would be needed for the fare. Fundamentally, he was modest and
rarely overrated his abilities, but he believed that he had luck, and
thought money a good first aid to more luck. Well as he was doing in
business, he could not afford to divert his energies from
moneymaking to politics, wherein he did not mean to begin at the
bottom.
He was not ready yet to make political opportunities for himself,
but if political opportunities came to him, that was another matter.
And they did come. When he interviewed Sir William Gatenby, he
threw a pebble into a pool whose wave was to wash him to high
places.
It washed him into the knowledge of Mr. Charles Wattercouch,
who was agent for the Division. Wattercouch read Gatenby’s letter
about Sam with some surprise, as one of his recruiting grounds for
voluntary workers was the Concentrics, and he thought he recalled
hearing Sam speak for the other faction, but he catalogued the
name for future reference on his list of earnest young men.
Wattercouch, like Sam, was in no hurry. He preferred men to come
to him, not to go in search of them, but Sam did not come, and a
letter from Gatenby was not to be neglected. Though Gatenby had
probably dismissed the subject from his mind, he paid half of
Wattercouch’s salary, and he might inquire about Sam some day. So
the agent called on Sam at the office.
He was a square-built, square-faced man of forty, with a pink,
eupeptic complexion, and light hair which bristled hardily. Your
organizer of victory, like your editor, is apt to be cynical about the
politics he is paid to profess, but Wattercouch kept his perfect faith
in Liberalism, in spite of the fact that he served the Liberal Party, a
feat in the accommodation of blameless principle with unscrupulous
opportunism, which he accomplished with entire sincerity. One can
be sincere and Jesuitical, in fact one can hardly be Jesuitical without
being sincere, and to Mr. Wattercouch the most egregiously illiberal
acts of the Liberal Party were justified because they were the acts of
that party, and must, however improbable it seemed, be means to
the end which was Liberalism.
This is not to suggest that Mr. Wattercouch was complex, for he
was indeed quite simple, as witness the man’s relish in his grotesque
name. He knew the value of being ridiculed when one can turn
ridicule into respect, and much of his popularity resulted from the
genial way in which he took jokes about his name. He made an
asset of what might, to a less good-natured man, have been a
handicap. “Indeed,” says Ben Jonson, “there is a woundy luck in
names, sir,” and Wattercouch turned doubtful luck to good account.
Sam had the gift of the gab, which means that he knew both how
and when to speak, and how and when to be silent. He was silent
while Mr. Wattercouch spoke of the valuable work to be done by an
earnest labourer in connection with the annual revision of the
register. The point of the work was to see that all possible known
Liberals were on the register, and all possible objection taken to any
known Conservatives, and, complicated as the work was by the
removal habit amongst electors, it was no light undertaking.
Certainly no agent could have carried it through without the aid of
industrious volunteers.
But Sam did not see himself in the character of an industrious
volunteer, and he was silent for two reasons. The first was that his
silence was causing Mr. Wattercouch visible embarrassment, and
Sam liked the other man to be embarrassed; the second was that he
was considering how to make Mr. Wattercouch see that his
suggestion was an absurdity, if not an insult.
He smiled with quite polite superiority. “But I think, Mr.
Wattercouch, that you are making a mistake,” he said, as one who
apologizes for having to be blunt.
“Well,” admitted Wattercouch, “I had my doubts, because I fancied
I’d heard you support Stephen Verity at the Concentrics.”
 “That,” said Sam, “is not the mistake to which I allude. I am aware
that I have supported Verity at the Concentrics. And I am aware that
the way to learn how to cut a man’s hair is to practise on a sheep’s
head. Verity was my sheep’s head.”
“I’m afraid I hardly follow,” said Wattercouch, who was indeed
rather scandalized by such an allusion to Mr. Verity, who, if a
Conservative, was an alderman and a noted figure in local politics.
“I will make it easier for you by admitting that even I had to
learn,” said Sam.
“Ah! I see. You have now seen the error of your ways. You realize
the grandeur of Liberalism, the——”
“I always did,” Sam asserted. “When I supported Verity, I was
teaching myself to speak. I was practising on Toryism that I might
become perfect in Liberalism. Those days when I made a
convenience of Toryism were the days of my apprenticeship to the
art of speaking. Would you have had me speak badly for such a
cause as Liberalism? No. But if I spoke badly for Toryism, I damaged
nothing. Toryism is nothing unless, as I said, it is a sheep’s head for
Liberals to practise on when they are novices, and the mistake you
made is to suppose that I am still a novice, when, as a matter of fact
——” He paused elaborately and hoped that Mr. Wattercouch would
fill in the blank intelligently. “But it is premature to speak of that,” he
said. “As to the registration, I can send you one of my clerks.” He
made a gesture dismissing as an affair of pygmies that chief event of
an agent’s year.
“I see... I see,” said Wattercouch, trying hard to believe that he
had so far been looking at Sam through the wrong end of a
telescope. “And you yourself, Mr. Branstone?”
It tempted Sam, that tone of quite startled respect which
Wattercouch adopted now. The misfortune of Sam’s imaginative
flights was that he never knew when to stop. All that he cared
about, at the moment, was to give Wattercouch the impression that
Sam Branstone was too important to be asked to drudge at
registration work. He was in no hurry about politics, but when he
began it would not be as a volunteer clerk.
“I?” he replied. “Two things. One a fact and the other a prophecy.
The fact is that I am an orator, and the prophecy is that Sir William
Gatenby will not live long and that I shall take his place as member
for the Division. Have you a cold?” he added, as Wattercouch choked
with irresistible stupefaction.
He had not a cold, neither had he powers of speech just then, and
the silence grew emphatic without in the least disconcerting Sam.
Once launched on the sea of bluff, Sam was a hardy navigator, and
he had the moral support of knowing that his whole purpose just
now was to avoid being a clerk. To avoid being a clerk it is justifiable
to do more than to romance: it is justifiable to commit most of the
crimes in the Newgate Calendar. Sam was hardly asked to do that,
but Wattercouch’s cough was a challenge, and a bluff half bluffed is
worse than no bluff at all. It became a matter of pride to convince
this unbeliever.
“I intend,” said Sam with aplomb, “to do a good deal of platform
for the Party. If an election comes soon, so much the better. I shall
take the opportunity to make myself more popular with the electors
than Sir William Gatenby is. That is easy. He quotes Latin in election
speeches, and I’m a man of the people. After that, I expect to
contest a by-election for a seat which the Party regards as a forlorn
hope. If it is possible to win that seat for our Great Cause, I shall
win it. If not, I shall trust to two things, the senile decay of Sir
William Gatenby and the discretion of the Whip’s office.”
Wattercouch was adapting himself painfully to the new
perspective. He granted that Sam had plausibility, and an assurance
which nearly lent conviction to his astonishing statement.
“You are in touch with the Whips!” he gasped.
Sam remembered and varied an old formula. “Do you suppose,”
he asked indignantly, “that I should be speaking to you like this if I
were not?”
 Wattercouch did not suppose it. For one thing he was acquainted
with the devious ways of Whips, and nothing that those secretive
autocrats did could surprise him: for another, he wished to believe
what Sam wished him to believe. He saw in Sam the way out of a
dilemma.
His dilemma was a common one. A death had caused a vacancy in
the Town Council, and the local Liberal caucus was almost
pathetically embarrassed as to its choice of a candidate. There were
at least three veteran workers for the Cause who expected, with
justice, to be approached and none of the three could be selected
without offence being given to interests which it was impolitic to
offend.
It was all very well for the caucus: they left it to Wattercouch, the
general handy man, to make suggestions, and as he listened to Sam
he thought he had found a candidate who, simply because he was
politically unknown, could offend nobody. If the obvious men were
wrong, he must rely on the rightness of the unexpected, and, after
all, Sam might be speaking the truth. One never knew where one
was with Whips, and here was his chance to propitiate Sam and at
the same time to solve the problem which troubled the caucus. Sam
was a dark horse and he wished he knew more about him; it was
startling to come in search of a voluntary clerk and to find a
candidate; but, finally, he saw it as a legitimate case for taking a
risk.
“I don’t know, sir,” he said, with a very pretty respect in his voice,
“whether municipal politics will appeal to a man of your calibre, but
there is a vacancy in St. Mary’s Ward, and I hardly think there will be
any difficulty about your adoption as candidate if you cared to
stand.”
Sam pretended to reflect. The truth was that the prospect of an
immediate seat in the Council made his heart beat fiercely. He had
meant for a while longer to put business before politics, but this sort
of politics was business. The Council took up one’s time, but
conferred a prestige on Branstone and the Branstone Publications
which would more than compensate for the waste of time.
 And it was deliciously unexpected. He had not studied to impress
Wattercouch, but had talked exaltedly simply to excuse himself from
the unseen, thankless drudgery of organization: yet it seemed he
had impressed. Virtually, he was offered a seat, He was, this soon,
to sit where Travers had sat, to be a City Father before he was
thirty-five. He had romanced glibly about a bird in the bush, and
found himself grasping a bird in hand, and no contemptible fowl
either.
“We must despise nothing,” he said, “which makes for Liberalism.”
Wattercouch nodded with enthusiasm. “Of course,” Sam went on,
“strictly between ourselves, the Council is small beer. But it is for the
Cause, and if I were asked to stand, you may take it that I should
not allow the larger view I have of my ultimate activities to interfere
with my acceptance. I take pleasure in duty and I see it as my duty,
even if it involves the postponement of my Parliamentary ambitions,
to throw myself wholeheartedly into this conflict.” He was
wonderfully pious.
Wattercouch was less emotional. He had heard too many
speeches from prospective candidates to be carried away by Sam’s.
“Quite probably there will be no contest,” he said dryly. “It’s a safe
Liberal seat.”
“I should have preferred a fight,” Sam lied wistfully. “But I put
duty first.”
As a fact, there was no contest, and if each of the three veteran
workers thought himself aggrieved, he had the consolation of
knowing that the other two shared his grievance. Wattercouch was
discreetly mysterious about Sam in the inner councils of the local
Party, used Gatenby’s name freely and managed to convey that
Branstone was something much bigger than he appeared to be. He
had, at least, got them out of their quandary.
Nor did Sam discredit his sponsor either at the private meeting he
addressed or at the public one which followed. He had said he was
an orator, Wattercouch had repeated it indefatigably, and Sam’s
audience believed it implicitly. He was not quite an orator, but was
coming along nicely under the tuition of an old actor who had failed
on the stage and now called himself a professor of elocution.
He became Mr. Councillor Branstone, and happy little references to
the event began to appear in the papers. The Sunday Judge, for
instance, had “no doubt that Mr. Branstone will live to look back
upon his unopposed return to the Council as a minor episode of his
political career, and we speak by the book. Branstone will go far, but,
meantime, it is something even for him to know that he is the most
popular man in St. Mary’s Ward. We had almost written in the whole
city, but that would be to anticipate. How is it done? How is such
popularity achieved? How, in other words, did merit become
recognized? Mr. Branstone himself only smiled when we asked him,
but his smile is half of his secret and his rousing, earnest oratory the
other half. They are indeed an open smile and an open secret. But
there are other secrets less open. All we shall say now is, ‘Watch
Branstone. He will not disappoint you.’”
There was a low evening paper, run in the Conservative interest,
which fastened on the phrase “other secrets less open” and
published the scurrilous statement that one of the less open secrets
was the fact that Mr. Councillor Branstone’s mother was a
charwoman, but the paragraph appeared only in the early edition
and unaccountably disappeared from later issues. It did no harm, as
first editions are not published for politicians, but for sportsmen,
and, in any case, there was a brief, but dignified, eulogy of Mr.
Branstone in the Manchester Warden next day. That paper
happened, fortunately, to be Liberal in politics, and indeed to be, on
just occasion, a valiant log-roller. It rolled a log for Sam; the
popularity of Branstone was established, hall-marked by the Press;
and it was about this time that Stewart’s second potboiler was
accepted for inclusion in Branstone’s Novels. The terms were even
more favourable to the author than before.
 CHAPTER XVII—THE VERITY
AFFAIR

T
HE 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.
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