DEBT 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:

M Y F A T H E R G O D

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.