TO a schoolboy of sixteen, love is an imbecile emotion, its victims harmless lunatics, and it is not to be supposed that Sam’s interest in the affair of Madge and George was based on intimate understanding. His conspiratorial action came rather as a lark: behind, perhaps, was the recognition that adults did habitually make fools of themselves in this way, that his loyalty in such a case was to Madge who was of his generation, and that Anne in obstructing their marriage was outrunning the constable in her demands for self-sacrifice on his behalf.

Larking, defined as enjoyable interference with other people for motives either benevolent or purely egotistic, was a weakness of Samuel Branstone, and the boy was father to the man. He did not agree with Anne that the marriage was inimical to his interests. True, George cleaned windows and balanced hardily at the top of swaying ladders, a precarious trade, but his own. Apparently it suited the Georgian temperament, and that funambulist would not wear a placard on his back proclaiming that he was brother-in law to Branstone of the Classical Fifth.

Branstone, who was going to rise in the world, would necessarily have poor relations, and it hardly mattered how poor. Indeed, the poorer they were the more cheaply he could afterwards play providence to them, since their standards would be low and their expectations small.

So it wasn’t a nice, impulsive lark, but coldblooded and calculated, which is almost as objectionable in a lark as organization in Charity. It is prudent good intentions that pave the way to Hell.

He saw that there was a difference between this and the elopements of that romantic literature with which he busied his relaxed hours: sometimes the lady, but always the lover, was enterprising, while he knew that George could never instigate anything. But that made things more amusing for Sam, who could pull strings with absolute assurance that his puppets would never take to dancing on their own account, or to any tune but the one he piped; and it is not given to all of us to be Omnipotence at the price of a ten-pound note.

As always, Sam had luck. In the romantic elopements whose technique he began to study with new interest, money was never a difficulty, but the god in the machine of George Chappie’s elopement must put money in his purse, or there could be no elopement.

Sam liked money, but he must have liked power more, for, coming miraculously into money at this time, he devoted it to this end. He came into money because journalism was swiftly on the up grade since the days, four years ago, when it couldn’t show its readers a photograph of Sam Branstone, hero, in the evening paper, and had reached the civilized stage of picture competitions.

You bought a weekly paper which printed six crude wood-cuts supposed to disguise the names of (say) famous battles, and it did not strain your intellect to discover that the picture of a station with “Waterloo” beneath its clock was intended to represent the battle of that name. But pause: it was not all so easy as that. Inflamed by avarice and the childish ease of identifying the battles in the first series, you bought the next week’s number, and the next, until the competition closed, and you found that the designs were increasingly baffling. It was not quite money for nothing. It called for some knowledge of history and a sort of knack in cheap wit to interpret the pictures. A garden syringe, and a stage Irishman brandishing something that might easily be a cudgel but wasn’t, represented, in fact, the not very renowned battle of Seringapatam, and there were pictures which could bear two interpretations.

It was this last which led Sam to go into partnership with Lance Travers. Both partners admitted that Sam’s wits were the sharper, so it was only fair that Lance should finance the partnership and buy the papers. And Sam, sanguine of winning, but desiring secrecy, preferred that the firm should be registered in Lance’s name, so that if and when Sam became a capitalist, he and not Anne should control his wealth. His ideas of the uses of capital already went beyond the Post Office Savings Bank.

The weekly paper’s object was to increase its circulation, so it allowed and encouraged competitors to send in numerous attempts, and printed ambiguous drawings to tempt to prodigality. It is to be feared that Classics suffered an eclipse at this period of journalistic enterprise. The partners had other and more serious objects in life. And they won! They won the second prize. It wasn’t a house or a motor-car or any of the fantastic prizes with which still later journalism rewarded its intelligent readers, but they divided twenty pounds and, for them, ten pounds each was paradise enow. Lance bought a bicycle. Sam didn’t. He bought a wedding-ring, and he had a talk with Sarah Pullen, who was so passionately Madge’s bosom friend that she had gone into the mill with her.

Sarah received him coldly; she looked upon him as the cause of her friend’s martyrdom and thought the cause unworthy.

Sam cleared the air at once. “I’m on Madge’s side. I’m not going to see her made unhappy for my sake,” he said, and Sarah relented so far as to absolve him of personal malignity.

“Much you can do to help it, though,” she said. “I can do much,” he replied, “but,” he flattered her, “perhaps you can do more. You see, Sarah,” he went on confidentially, “Madge trusts you and she doesn’t trust me. Now, between ourselves, she needs a friend’s advice. Put yourself in her place. Would you knuckle under to your mother?”

“I’d see her further first,” said Sarah.

“I wonder,” said Sam, “if you could see your way to communicating your views to Madge without mentioning that I suggested it?”

“You!” said Sarah. “You! It’ud take a dozen your size to suggest anything to me. Get off home and play marbles, or I’ll give you a slap on th’ earhole that you’ll remember.”

They didn’t play marbles in the Classical Fifth, but Sam was content to put her allusion down to ignorance rather than deliberate insult. He had gained his point: the atmosphere he desired created was about to he created.

He left that pot to simmer and turned his mind to George, whom he judged less susceptible than Madge to the promptings of a friend. Besides, he knew no friend of George, and confessed himself at fault.

One day, shortly before the Whitsuntide holidays, he was staring gloomily out of the window at the top of the stairs outside the Fifth Form room, watching the boys of the Chetham’s Hospital at play in that yard of theirs which the Grammar School pretends to scorn but secretly envies, when he heard behind him a conversation between Lance Travers and Dubby Stewart which set his brain awhirl. Yet it was not a distinguished conversation.

“Who ever heard of anyone in Manchester staying at home in Whit week?” asked Lance.

Sam had heard, often.

“It isn’t done,” said Dubby, who had earned that abiding name when he was in the Lower Third, and once read “dubious” aloud with a short “u.”

“But I’ve to do it,” said Lance. “My governor’s too busy to get away. Bit damnable, isn’t it?”

“Matter of fact,” said Dubby, “we’re not going, either.”

And it presently appeared that out of the form of twenty-four boys there were as many as six who lived in Manchester and were not going away. “It will be hell,” prophesied one of the unfortunates.

“It needn’t,” said Sam Branstone, turning from the window to the mournful group.

“You’re used to it. We’re not,” said someone cruelly, and Lance smacked his head. Allusions to anybody’s poverty were bad form.

“What’s the prescription?” asked Dubby, and Sam was silent for a minute. “Watch him. Something’s dawning,” chaffed Dubby. It wasn’t dawning, it had dawned; but at first it looked like a risk, and then much less like one, and Sam smiled beautifully as he realized that he, at least, had all to gain and nothing to lose. He drew the luckless five mysteriously aloof.

“The prescription,” he said, “is to have a holiday in Manchester, in a holiday house.” He let that soak for a minute, and then, “Our own house,” he added. “There are six of us. We join together and we take a house. A small house, and I daresay some of you won’t like the neighbours, but as the neighbours won’t like us, that’s as broad as it’s long. Swagger neighbours wouldn’t stand us anyhow, and the smaller the house the smaller the rent. Something like four-and-six a week is my idea. That’s nine-pence a week for each of us, and we’ve a house of our own for that to do what we like in.”

“By Jove!” said someone admiringly.

“What shall we call it?” said another, a trifle doubtfully.

“Call it?” said Lance. “That’s obvious. The Hell-fire Club.”

And, of course, if any doubt remained, that settled it. Who would regret the seaside if he could be a member of the Hell-fire Club? Lance was commissioned to negotiate with his father, the estate agent, but it was Sam who really chose their house. It was a house which in Sam’s opinion excellently suited the requirements of a young married couple of the window-cleaning class. Mr. Travers told Lance that he would stop the value of any damage out of his pocket-money, and on those conditions let them the house. But he need not have made that cautionary threat; Sam saw that there was no damage.

The Hell fire Club assembled for its initiatory debauch on the first day of the holidays, and by eleven a.m. three inexpert cigarette-smokers had had occasion to use the slopstone as a vomitorium. It left them feeling chilly, and Dubby suggested that a house-warming without a fire was a solecism, even on a hot day, so a lavish plutocrat brought in two sacks of coal and a supply of chips. Firelighting is a sport out of which a certain excitement can be derived, but only for a short time, and the same evanescent quality attaches to the pleasure of sitting on bare boards.

“I’m too stiff to be happy,” said Lance. “I vote we furnish this club.”

Carried, nem. com. “I’m afraid, though,” said Sam, “that I shall not be able to contribute much.”

“Wait till you’re asked, my son,” said Dubby. “By the time we five have finished looting our homes, this place will be a little palace.”

Loot is a brave word, suggestive of the treasures of the purple East, but it was, in most instances, a case of permitted loot, the offscourings of lumber rooms. Sandy Reed, however, was the sort of boy who is happiest with a hammer in his hand, and Dubby had an eye for chintz. To repair the veteran furniture which they brought struck Sandy as work for a man. Behind him was his infantile past of fret-work and model yachts; before him the foremanship of the Hell-fire Club repair-shop. He worked and was the cause of work in others. And it was willing work, partly because it was for an idea, partly because that first day had threatened boredom and here was something definite to do, mostly because it was making a noise.

The ill-assorted chairs, tables and sofas which they collected under their roof had this in common at the end, that they were strong; and having by their own efforts made them strong, the boys did not by their rioting make them weak again. They respected their handiwork, and Dubby’s chintz procured a sort of uniformity.

A club, of course, must eat and drink, and kitchen utensils, mostly odd but all practicable, were gathered together that they might precede the pleasures of eating with the pleasures of cooking. It was camp-life in town, except that they went home to sleep, and so long as the activities of “settling in” endured, they relished it abundantly.

About a fortnight was what Sam had mentally set as the life of the Hell-fire Club, and he had no intentions of paying the rent by himself for more than a week or so. They had decided that Sunday was not a club-day—there were difficulties at home—and Sam took George Chappie for a walk. “I like this street,” he said as they turned the corner. “Madge always fancied this district.”

“Did she?” said George gloomily.

“We’ll go in here,” and Sam produced the key and introduced George to the Club premises. “What do you think of it?”

The chintz took George’s eye at once. “By gum!” he said.

“Sit down,” said Sam. “This is where you’re going to live when you’re married to Madge. It isn’t your furniture yet, but it’s going to be. I’m going to give it you for a wedding present. There isn’t a bed in, as you see, but there will be, and I ask you, George, is it or is it not better than Mrs. Whitehead’s?”

“Aye,” said George, “but you’re going ahead a bit too fast for me.”

“Not at all,” said Sam. “Yours is the pace that kills. The slow pace, not the quick. Now, this place isn’t at your disposal yet, but if you’ll put up the banns next Sunday and get married as soon as you can after the three Sundays, you can walk in here and hang your hat up on that hook. It’s a brass hook, George. We don’t approve of nails in this house. I might mention that it will be all right about the banns. Mother has dinner to cook on Sundays and doesn’t go to morning service, and to-day is father’s Sunday off from the station and lie’s on duty for the next three Sundays. So,” he concluded, “there you are.”

“You’re promising a lot. Is this house yours?”

“The rent is four-and-six,” said Sam, “which isn’t more than you can afford to pay. And you bind yourself to nothing by putting up the banns. If I fail to deliver you this house and all that’s in it, you needn’t get married. But I’ve a word of advice for you, George. Let Madge hear of it first from the parson’s lips in church. She won’t scream and she won’t faint. We don’t, in our family, and it saves you the trouble of asking her. Is it a bet?”

George hesitated. “Come upstairs and see the other room,” said Sam. George saw, and marvelled. “I’ll come round with you now to church,” said Sam. “We’ve just nice time to catch the clerk after service.”

“By gum!” said George Chappie. “I’ll do it. They can’t hang me. But,” he added as he cast a last look at the household gods which Sam Bran-stone promised should be his, “they may hang you.”

Sam grinned blandly.