AS a simple matter of course, Lance offered Sam the first refusal of his father’s business, but was not surprised when Sam declined to think of it.

Sam was far more surprised at himself than Lance at Sam. Lance had never looked upon estate agency as a desirable profession, whereas Sam had been bored with its routine without losing his respect for its utility, and only yesterday he would have jumped at the chance of owning the business. He heard with astonishment the sound of his own voice politely refusing the offer, but having refused he did not tamper with his swift decision.

The fact is, one supposes, that what might be called the quick-firing part of his intelligence had absorbed and reacted to the fact of his thousand pounds before the whole of him was properly aware of it. At any rate, he refused, and, on reflection, approved his refusal.

His speculation in Gerald Adams wore a different aspect now that he was a capitalist. “Money,” as he had remembered once before, “breeds money,” and he doubted if Travers’ business, robbed of Travers’ genial personality, were fecund enough for the pace of money-breeding he anticipated. Perhaps, too, there was something in the thought that the Travers’ agency was dead man’s shoes, while, win or lose, the idea of publishing Adams’ lecture was his own invention.

Another thing that happened to him with his legacy was the feeling that he had regained caste; he belonged again with his old school-fellows. “How many of them,” he thought, “can lay hands at a moment’s notice on a thousand pounds?” and walked erectly through the street where, naturally, since he had not met him in eight years until last night, he encountered Stewart.

“Hullo,” said Stewart, “how’s the patron of letters? And would a drink be any use to you?”

Sam hesitated. Did the way to the society of the Olympians lie through the doors of the public-house? Stewart was undeniably Olympian: he had the air, the manner, the clothes of well-assured success. He had a lightness and a poise that excited Sam’s envy. He had style, this youth who might be anything, but who, Sam cynically thought, had probably not paid for his distinguished clothes, while Sam was the owner of a thousand pounds. He was, thereby, Olympian in quiet fact, which need not be shrieked from the house-tops, as Stewart had, apparently, to shriek. Sam was, and there was the possibility that Stewart only appeared to be. It gave him strength to refuse. Not from principle, but from economical prejudice Sam was a teetotaller.

“I don’t take alcohol,” he said.

“It’s never too late to mend,” said Stewart. “Still, there’s a cafÉ here, and we’ll drink coffee. It’s bad for our hearts, but Balzac wrote the ‘ComÉdie Humaine’ on black coffee, so there may be something in the vice, though it isn’t a habit of mine. Two black coffees, Sophie,” he ordered from the waitress.

“If it isn’t a habit of yours,” asked Sam, “how do you come to know the waitress by name?”

“‘My dear ass!” said Stewart pityingly.

“Do you call them all Sophie?”

“Only when it’s their name. Your name is Sophie, isn’t it?” he said as the girl returned with their coffee.

“Yes, sir.”

Stewart appreciated Sam’s astonishment. “I know I’m showing off, but I like it. If you see a girl with an idiotic silver brooch made up of the letters SOPHIE you can assume that it’s her name, and not the name of her best boy. Simple, when you know how it’s done, like all first-rate conjuring.”

“I hadn’t noticed her brooch,” said Sam.

“I had. That’s the difference. Still, it isn’t fair to blame you. I’m a professional observer.” Sam took Stewart to mean that he was a detective, but hadn’t time to ask for confirmation, because Stewart asked instead: “And what, by the way, are you?” And threw him into some embarrassment by the question. What, indeed, at the moment was he?

“Doesn’t your observation tell you?” he fenced.

“It told me last night that you’re a considerable lunatic. Did you buy that stuff of Adams’?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Thought I saw you in the act as I went out. Obviously, then, you’re a tripe merchant.”

“I wonder,” said Sam, “whether you could help me, Stewart. Seriously, I mean.”

“In the tripe trade?”

“I want very much to meet a journalist.” He thought a detective ought to know journalists.

“But, my dear fellow, this is a cafÉ. It isn’t a bar. What do you want a journalist for?”

“I will tell that to the journalist.”

“If you want to start a paper and you’re looking for an editor, you needn’t look further than me. There have been candid moments in my life when I have called myself a journalist. At present, I edit the Manchester Warden, but I’m open to conviction.” He didn’t quite edit that paper—yet, but reported for it at six pounds a week. He did not know shorthand, but he quoted Joseph Conrad and Henry James, correctly and incongruously, when he wrote a notice of a music-hall performance.

“I’m afraid,” said Sam astutely, “that when I said a journalist, I meant something very different from you, but I will tell you how I stand and perhaps you will advise me. Last night, as you know, I bought Adams’ paper. I gave him twenty-five pounds for it.”

“Lunacy,” said Stewart, “is a mild word for your complaint. Twenty-five shillings would be a top price for it in a friendly market.”

“To-day I reached the office to learn that my employer had died suddenly. You remember Lance Travers? It was his father, and with his death, for all practical purposes the business comes to an end. Well, you see my position.”

Stewart quoted Sheridan: “‘The Spanish Fleet thou canst not see, because it is not yet in sight.’ And much the same applies to your position, my lad. Its postal address is the Womb of Time.”

“That is true,” said Sam. “And I may add that I am engaged to be married.”

“I can admire thoroughness,” said Stewart. “You omit none of the essentials.”

“Now, with it all,” said Sam, “I’m still too proud to go to Adams and ask him to let me off my bargain.”

“And it wouldn’t be any use if you did,” said Stewart. “He’d laugh at you.”

“I can believe it of him. But I’m landed with his paper. It has cost me twenty-live pounds. I meant to print it, and I mean to print it, but I mean now to sell it when it is printed.” Sam left Stewart to suppose that, had Travers not died, he would have distributed that pamphlet free. “Money,” he added, “is a necessity.”

He had taken the right line. Stewart’s instinctive generosity was touched, and he meant to give this lame dog a lift over the stile. “I see where your journalist comes in. All right, Branstone, you can count on me.”

“On you?” said Sam. “Oh, I couldn’t ask it of you.”

“You didn’t ask,” replied Stewart naively. “I offer. I may edit the Manchester Warden, but Zeus nods sometimes, ’busmen have been known to take a holiday, and there is a paper called the Sunday Judge in whose chaste columns I have written under the name of Percy Persiflage. Send me a proof of that pamphlet and Percy shall stamp upon it. He will say that no decent person could read it without being revolted, and the pamphlet will boom. It’s the Sunday-paper public that you want, and... No, Percy shall not stamp. Percy shall bless. He will be moved to admiration of Mr. Adams’ earnestness, he will applaud the high moral purpose, and will do the rest by correspondence. Get your sisters and your cousins and your aunts to pitch in letters on either side, and I’ll see they get printed. I make this alteration because of the bookstalls.”

“The bookstalls?” asked Sam vaguely.

“This problem of distribution,” said Stewart impressively, “is the most difficult question of modern life. The producer is here, you; the consumer (we hope) is everywhere, and the problem is to bring your pamphlet to the thirsting consumer. The answer is the bookstall, but the bookstalls are cautious. When I say bookstalls I mean the right bookstalls. You will never see your money back if the only bookstalls which will exhibit your pamphlet are those which sell atrociously printed paperbacked editions of ‘Nana’ and ‘Fanny Hill.’ You must flourish on the bookstalls, and they banned ‘Esther Waters.’ The bookstalls, Branstone, are going to call for tact, and tact shall begin with Percy’s appreciation.”

“Or earlier,” said Sam.

“Earlier?”

“I hadn’t thought of the bookstalls, but this may help there, as well as in other ways. I mean, as far as Manchester is concerned, and if we get it on the stalls here, they can’t very well refuse it in other places.”

“Manchester being Manchester, it isn’t likely,” said Stewart. “What’s your idea?”

“Only this,” said Sam, and showed him his proposed cover for the pamphlet.

THE SOCIAL EVIL

Being an Address

By Gerald Adams, M.A.,

Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford.

As Read before the Concentric Society with The Rev. Peter Struggles in the Chair.

Stewart looked at it, then he looked at Sam, and Sam seemed to him very little like a lame dog now. He whistled loudly. “You’ll get your money back, my lad,” he said. “But this is rough on Peter.”

“Mr. Struggles approved of the lecture.”

“I wonder if he will approve of this?” said Stewart.

“He can’t go back on his word,” said Sam. “Besides, I’m engaged to his daughter.”

“The thing that troubles me,” said Stewart admiringly, “is that I took you for a harmless lunatic. I’m only a journalist myself, with one foot in the Manchester Warden and the other in the Sunday Judge. I’m a Tory on Sundays and a Liberal on weekdays. I gave up honesty when I gave up being young, and I thought I knew the ropes by this time. But when I think that I took you for a guileless innocent, I want to go into a corner and kick myself hard.”

Sam found this rather alarming he knew that his use, or misuse, of Peter’s name was cunning, but began to regret that he had shown Stewart his pro posed cover. “But I get my review in the Judge?” he asked hardily.

“My son,” said Stewart, “you do. I’ve spent sixpence on coffee and half an hour on you. There’s good copy in this and I can’t afford to waste it. I’ve my living to earn, and Gerald Adams deserves the worst he’s going to get. At the same time, I’ll allow myself the luxury of telling you that yours is a lowdown game.”

“We didn’t make the world what it is, did we?” said Sam.

“And neither you nor I will leave it any better than we found it,” said Stewart, prophesying rashly with the boundless cynicism of his twenty-five years. “The worst of coffee,” he went on, finishing his cup, “is that it makes you thirsty. I’m going across the road for a drink. Do you have one with me?”

“No, thanks,” said Sam. “I have to see a printer.”

“Oh, yes. Well, why not the Judge Press? I daresay I could get you in there on the ground floor.”

“But they are not quite the right people for this. They print sporting papers, and——”

“You’ll die from overheated bearings in your brain-box,” said Stewart. “You think of everything.”

Sam had, at least, thought that a printer (however obscure by comparison was the Judge Press, whose works were a small town in themselves) who issued a religious paper was better for his purpose than the printers of the Sunday Judge, Sporting Notions and the Football Times. He went to Carter, Meadowbank & Co., who were on the verge of bankruptcy, but had the advantage of printing Christian Comfort and the Church Child’s Weekly, and arranged with them to print five thousand copies of Adams’ paper. Carter, who was the whole firm, looked askance at the title, but when Sam pointed out that the Rev. Mr. Struggles had approved of the contents, Carter succumbed at once, and did not even attempt a protest when Sam instructed him to print on the whole five thousand:

“This first edition of one thousand copies is issued at sixpence. The price for future editions will be one shilling. Samuel Branstone, Publisher.”

Carter’s dingy office was decorated with the chief products of his firm, texts, the stock-in-trade of commercialized religiosity. Well handled, there was money in texts, but Carter was an old man with declining powers and a conservative mind. Meadowbank, who had looked after the distributive side of the business, was lately dead, and Carter’s nightly prayer was that the concern might last his time. As things were promising, it seemed unlikely, but here was Sam with an order for him and no disposition to beat him down in price. Carter did not like the instruction to describe five thousand copies as one thousand, and he didn’t like the subject of the pamphlet, but he wanted business, and he couldn’t conceive of a pirate sailing under the flag of Mr. Struggles.

Sam rammed that home, feeling the man’s hesitation. “I think it probable,” he said, “that Mr. Struggles will preach a sermon on this pamphlet. Perhaps I might tell you that I am going to be his son-in-law.”

That settled Carter, and he took the order. He knew, and was sensitive to, the influence of Peter Struggles, curate. He knew that in the parish of. St. Mary’s, Peter’s smile counted for more than the vicar’s weightiest word, and that while the vicar was unknown outside his parish, Peter had authority throughout Manchester—an authority which had lately growm through Peter’s refusal of preferment to an easy living in the country. It hadn’t, of course, been Peter who had told of that refusal, he had not told Ada. But it had leaked out, and Manchester, which despises selflessness in men, honoured it in the curate; Mancunians were flattered by his loyalty to St. Mary’s and by the thought that they were fellow citizens to saintliness.

Emphatically, the name of Peter Struggles on the pamphlet was a clou, but Sam had not told Peter of it yet, and he must do it. He could not afford an accident, and Peter, he considered, was manageable.

Ada met him at the door with a bright smile, and raised expectant lips, but he shook his head, touch ing her shoulder tenderly, and passed in front of her into the room so that, when she followed, her face expressed the anxiety he desired. He entered himself as a man crushed by grief.

“What is it, Sam?” she asked. “What’s the matter?”

Peter closed “Plotinus” reluctantly: he never found time enough for reading, and here was one of his few evenings interrupted. He had the thought, feeling it ungenerous, that interruptions of this kind would end when Ada was married.

“I’ve had sad news to-day. Mr. Travers died in the night. It’s... it’s rather a blow.”

Peter disdained priestly conventionalities. “He was a good friend to you, Sam.”

“A second father,” said Sam carefully, not taking the opportunity of telling that Travers’ friendship had lasted beyond death. Perhaps he thought this moment too sacred for the intrusion of a legacy. “Of course,” he went on, “I’ve had all day to think of it, and of the difference this will make to me—to us, that is, Ada, for you and me.”

“What difference, Sam?” she asked sharply.

“It comes to this,” he said dejectedly, “that I am out of work and competition is so desperate. While he lived, I had his friendship behind me. Now—I don’t say that I’m afraid to stand alone. No doubt it will be good for me eventually, but, Ada, you see how it may postpone our hopes.”

Ada saw it. “Plotinus” took that opportunity of slipping from Peter’s knee, and Peter saw it, too, and sighed. “Oh, Sam!” said Ada.

“And,” said Sam, looking at Peter with a fine affectation of guilt, “there is my recklessness of last night. In my then circumstances, it was extravagant. To-day it looks worse than that.”

“You couldn’t know,” said Peter kindly.

“No,” Sam agreed. “I couldn’t know, and I have the feeling now that I must abide by what I did.”

“Very proper, Sam, but Mr. Adams is not poor and I should think that if you were to go to him———”

“Oh, please,” said Sam, “please don’t press me to do that. A bargain, I feel so strongly, is a bargain and should be kept at all costs.”

Peter felt silently ashamed of himself. “You are perfectly right,” he said.

“Well,” said Sam, “that’s how I feel, but in a sense I’m landed with the thing and I propose to go on with it. As I see it—and I know there’s a certain amount of inappropriateness in thinking at all of these practical affairs with my benefactor so recently dead, but I must, I must——” he looked at Ada and it was understood that his thought for her excused all—“As I see it, it’s a case for going on and trying to pull the chestnuts out of the fire, so to speak. I shall print that paper, and the good that I hoped to do will not be lost because my circumstances have altered, but I shall make a small charge for it to cover expenses as far as possible. And as I naturally want it to sell well, I had the idea of stating on the cover that it was first read at the Concentrics under your chairmanship. The point of that is that all the members were not there last night; it will call their attention to it; and they will, I hope, buy. It makes certain of a few reliable purchasers.”

“Quite, quite,” said Peter. “It’s an excellent idea. Though I can hardly suppose that mention of my name has any value, the name of the society should certainly help.”

His modesty was quite incurable. He had not the faintest notion of the wide-spread influence of Peter Struggles. “I have thought of little else all day but Mr. Adams’ paper. I wondered if it was my duty to speak of this terrible subject from the pulpit. The Church ought not to be silent or it may be thought to acquiesce.”

Sam felt his heart leap within him. “Adams thought frankness best,” he said.

“Yes, yes, at the Concentrics. But there are difficulties for me, and perhaps I shall speak only to the Young Men’s Class at the-Sunday School. Though that,” he reflected, “is perilously near to compromise.”

“But what is it?” asked Ada. “What are you talking about?”

Sam was silent. So was Peter, and the silence grew till he felt it a reproach. He looked at Sam. “You see?” he said. “That is the dilemma of the Church. I shall speak to the young men, and, after that perhaps, perhaps——” He glanced at Ada.

“No,” he finished decidedly, “I must leave it at that.” He was fifty-six, and most of his life had been lived under Victoria the Good.