THE 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.

He rejected the idea of making Mr. Lamputt gloriously drunk because it seemed impossible to associate glory, even the glory of intoxication, with Mr. Lamputt’s feeble body. It was a case, as usual with Sam, of taking chances.

He did nothing at all until the morning of the meeting which was to decide if Hulme might bathe, and, even then, left his office only a little before his usual time for going to the Town Hall. He turned into a back street, ran up many stairs to the attic office whose door bore the name of Sylvester Lamputt, Agent (more sins are committed in the name of agency than of charity), and flung panting into the single room.

He won the first throw in his game. Sylvester was in.

He sat on a high office stool writing on the malodorous page of an enormous ledger, looking for all the world like a diminutive office boy on whom some one has fitted, in cruel jest, a hoary head. If the calendars on his walls were trustworthy witnesses, he was agent for half the insurance companies in the British Isles. Autolycus was Sylvester’s other name.

He reverenced his ledger as other men reverence the Bible. He kept no other diary, for the ledger was his book of life, and when Sam burst upon him he was absorbed in his records. He closed the book mechanically through pure secretive habit, and closed into it just enough of his wits to put him at a disadvantage with Sam.

Sam gave no quarter. “Mr. Verity,” he gasped before he was fairly in the room. “Simpson’s Buildings... the title-deeds... here, or has Mr. Verity got them?”

It succeeded. Lamputt took him for an urgent special messenger from Verity. “If Mr. Verity’s memory is going,” he said with dignity, “mine is not. The title-deeds are in the third drawer of his safe in his office.”

“In his name?” asked Sam quickly.

“Of course,” said Lamputt, and then, too late, became suspicious. “I say,” he began, “what———-?”

But Sam had gone, and though Mr. Lamputt reached his hat and the door in one bound and careered down his familiar stairs like the office boy his figure aped, Sam had turned a corner and was lost to sight. Lamputt raced to Verity’s office, only to find that the alderman was then attending a Council meeting. Lamputt could do no more, indeed for a man with a weak heart he had already done too much: but he had a strong foreknowledge of the wrath of Alderman Verity, and goes, an unhappy, shrinking figure, out of this story to an unknown fate.

Sam went to the Town Hall with his bomb-shell, and they disapprove of bombs at Council meetings, so he was sedulous to spare their feelings. He supported that part of the resolution which referred to the erection of Baths, but proposed that it should stand alone and that the naming of a site should be deferred. Curiously, his proposal made the Conservative majority very angry: the resolution was one and indivisible. Sam regretted that in order to vote against the misuse of a particular site, he was forced to vote against the Baths, but standing as he did for purity in civic life, detesting the very shadow of jobbery, he had no alternative but to move that the resolution be rejected. Here was a proposal which, however innocent its wording, did in fact imply that ratepayers’ money was to be handed over to a prominent member of the party opposite, to a gentleman in whose safe, at whose office, in the third drawer of the safe, were deposited at that moment the title-deeds of the property whose acquisition by the city was suggested. He abhorred personalities, he shrank from mentioning a name, and if the second part of the resolution were withdrawn, he——

It was too much for a young, impetuous innocent opposite. “You dare not mention a name. You lie.”

Sam hoped the Council would absolve him of causing a scene.

“Prove your words,” cried the rash gentleman.

“I suggest,” said Sam blandly, “that we avoid unpleasantness. I have made a statement and I am asked to prove it. If a deputation of three will go with me and Mr. Alderman Verity to his office, the title-deeds of Simpson’s Buildings will be found in the place I have indicated.”

It was the sort of drama which appealed more to the readers of the evening papers than to the Council. Mr. Mayor, in the chair, was speechless in embarrassed distress. Sam had the calm of imperishable rock in wind-tossed surf. In the midst of a breathless excitement, Mr. Alderman Verity was seen to totter to his feet. “I own the property,” he said, collapsed into his seat and graced that seat no more.

Impossible even for a Conservative paper to uphold Verity, impossible to do more than to suggest that Sam’s manners were deplorable: while his own papers made a hero of him, found his manners a model of consideration and his triumph as graceful as it was complete.

All Sam cared to know was that he was on the crest of a wave of popularity and a general election was at hand. Night after night he spoke, and the tritest platitudes, with Sam’s smile behind them, shone like new-found truth. He was persona gratissima before he opened his mouth: it gave him confidence, and confidence is half the speaker’s battle. He coined some of those ugly, smart, journal-easy catch-words which help to win elections, and are quoted in the papers and blossom on the placards. And, with it all, he became what he had prematurely called himself, an orator.

He had the satisfaction of watching audiences sit through the boredom of Gatenby that they might hear Branstone, and of being himself the “star” speaker at outlying meetings. Gatenby was returned by a record majority and it was Bran-stone for whom the mob yelled outside the Town Hall.

The election was an early one, and Sam was called to speak in other constituencies. He had wires, not only from agents in quite distant divisions, but actually from Headquarters. He was in touch with the Whips! Less than a year after he had lied to Wattercouch, the lie turned true. He was in touch with the Whips, a wanted speaker, a man of reputation, a name to be applauded when it was announced on a platform, for all the world like people applaud when the number of a star performer goes up on the announcement board of a music-hall. He was not of the Great Unwanted, but of the few who were wanted.

Someone discovered at this time the old canard which had once appeared in the first edition of an evening paper, that his mother was a charwoman. He did not deny it, but used it as Wattercouch his name, making an asset of a handicap. He was of the people, blood of their blood, a democrat by birth, knowing their aspirations and their needs because he, too, had needed and aspired. In the heat of that election he became egregiously a Radical. It told, it “went” with the audiences: that was the thing that mattered to Sam. He hadn’t so much as the shadow of a principle, he was winning, on the winning side, and pleased himself enormously.

And by the end of the campaign he stood, actually, where he had aimed to stand: amongst prospective candidates who fight, as it were, probationary elections where, they have scarcely a sporting chance, to pay their footing towards the sort of candidature which gives a man his seat. If the Conservatives had offered him a tolerably safe seat, without preliminary fight, he would have ratted eagerly, and the charwoman his mother would have been pressed into service on the other side. It was all one to Sam Branstone.