A month later Tod Western returned to Shaston-on-Sea and entered the
establishment of John Snape, chemist, in King William Street.
Various people had had a hand in launching this new adventure.
Tod himself had initiated the idea. Balked in a second attempt to
persuade Uncle Remus to let him become a student of medicine, he had
piqued himself with pleasant memories of chemists’ shops, liking the
scent and the cleanness of them and the idea of handing out mysterious
cures to suffering humanity. He imagined that he would find nothing of
the Flowerdew fraudulencies in such a place. Moreover, he had not
forgotten Kitty Flowerdew. He still had dreams of indulging in some
piratical excursion into the Flowerdew household, and of rescuing Kitty
from the clutches of Edwin Rook.
When Tod made his suggestion to Uncle Remus, Uncle Remus said “Humph,
want to mix physic and sell soap, do you? I suppose there’ll always be
fools who want to drink physic and wash. Toothbrushes, too.” Uncle Remus
never used one.
Dr. Vance was consulted, and agreed that the idea was a sound one. He
happened to know John Snape of Shaston, Snape had once dispensed for
him, and he wrote to the chemist and spoke highly of Tod. Mr. Snape
suggested an interview, and confessed that he needed an intelligent
assistant to serve in the shop and learn dispensing. Mr. Snape
interviewed Tod, and then made the further suggestion that Tod should
“see how he liked it” for six months, and that if he suited Mr. Snape,
he could then enter on a three years’ apprenticeship and train for the
examinations of the Pharmaceutical Society. The reference to the
“Pharmaceutical Society” rather impressed Uncle Remus; it sounded so
respectable and Mesopotamian; besides, it was backed and reinforced by
those indispensable articles—toothbrushes and soap.
So Tod went to Mr. Snape, and was found a bed-sitting room, food, and a
smell of domesticity in the house of a certain Mrs. Budd. Mrs. Budd was
a good soul, and she and Tod clasped hands at once. She had a little
house in Laburnum Road, not far from Shaston Gardens, a little
cabbage-rose of a house, buxom and easy, like Mrs. Budd herself. Mrs.
Budd was a widow, and her children were all launched on the world.
“You make yourself at ’ome, dear,” she said to Tod; “I always believe in
plenty of butter on the toast.”
Mr. Snape was not quite so obvious and easy as Mrs. Budd. He was sandy
and pink, and wore gold-rimmed spectacles. Tod thought him something of
a dandy, and he was so polite that you wondered whether he was trying to
be sarcastic. There was an air of prosperity and rosy health about John
Snape and his business, and he looked like a good advertisement for
somebody’s shaving soap, or Rumbelow’s Iron Pills.
Snape gave Tod some shrewd advice and handed him over to a middle-aged
assistant, a laconic, earthy-faced man named Wisdon. Wisdon had a short
brown beard and a moustache; he wore a dicky and removable cuffs, cuffs
that he covered each morning with the clean white pieces of paper that
were used for wrapping up bottles. His black coat was shiny at the
elbows, and he had some special concoction for dealing with this
shininess, but it never grew any less shiny. Wisdon’s inspiration was
the word “economy.” He economised in razors and shaving soap, in his
laundry, in his conversation, in his food. There was something rather
melancholy and pathetic and suppressed about the man; he always looked
tired, and he had a perennial cold in his head.
Tod nicknamed Wisdon “Mr. Any-think-else.” That was the final phrase he
used to each customer on handing over the customer’s purchases.
The other assistant was a young man named Cook. He was a certified
dispenser, and Tod disliked him from the first day. Cook was a shallow,
cocky sarcastic young gentleman who never troubled to hide his contempt
for the snuffy and much worried Wisdon. Tod noticed that Mr. Snape
treated Cook with consideration, whereas he bullied and hectored the
older man, and Wisdom took it like a quiet and depressed old dog.
Tod began by liking Mr. Snape’s shop. He liked the smell of it, the
airiness and cleanness, the rows and rows of mysterious bottles, the
glass cases full of scent and boxes of soap, and the hundred and one
articles connected with a well washed and well groomed body. Even the
phraseology of the craft fascinated him, all that quaint Latinity that
smelt of the Pharmacopœia and suggested old world herbalists and the
romance of alchemy. There was no dust in Mr. Snape’s shop. Everything
glistened. And there was so much of everything. Drawers full of new
white toothbrushes, of chip and cardboard pill and ointment boxes,
stacks of bottles, oceans of soap, sponges by the hundred, scissors,
rows of hot water bottles, and unimagined wealth of all sorts of scent,
toilet powders, manicure sets; cohorts of combs, ointments, razors,
shaving-brushes, siphons of potash and soda water. Then there were all
the patent medicines and proprietary preparations. Tod was less
interested in these, and perhaps from the first he viewed them with a
slight distrust. They advertised themselves rather too blatantly, and
had not the restrained solemnity of the tinctures, extracts, and
infusions on the dispensing shelves. You could look up the latter in the
Pharmacopœia, that Doomsday Book of the drugs, and find out just what
they were and what they pretended to be. The patent medicines were
rather like women; they wore petticoats, and led you to believe that the
world’s most wonderful mystery was hidden upon their persons.
Tod’s thoughts were constantly fluttering round that house in Ponsonby
Place. He made a point of walking past it in the evening, but he had
never a glimpse of Kitty, and he had no desire to meet Mr. Flowerdew or
his elder daughter. They might suspect him of some possible act of
piracy, and take precaution against it. Tod was cautious.
One Sunday evening he went to St. Jude’s Church, and sitting in one of
the back seats, saw Rook and Kitty come in together and take their
places in the familiar pew. Tod shadowed them home to Ponsonby Place.
They walked arm and arm, and Tod felt savage and depressed.
Chance gave him the opportunity he had so long desired. He had been
wandering along the beach in an aimless sort of way, and was watching
some men winding up the bathing machines under the White Cliff, when he
became aware of a girl sitting on the shingle, with a book in her lap. A
big hat hid her face, but she raised her head as Tod passed, and the
face was the face of Kitty.
Tod turned straight towards her, trying to convince himself that it was
not tears that he saw in her eyes. She sat there, staring up at him, as
though she had lost both the power of speech and of movement. It struck
Tod that she looked older, and that she did not flush in her old
sensitive and girlish way.
“May I speak to you, Kitty?”
“Oh, please——” she began.
Tod sat down beside her, and saw her glance towards the town.
“Edwin’s coming, any moment.”
Then Tod rebelled, and talked all sorts of wild and tender nonsense that
brought her to the edge of tears. There was no rebellion to be roused in
Kitty Flowerdew. She had accepted the system, was terrorised by system,
and her poor scared face made Tod feel a beast.
“Oh, don’t, please, Tod. I’ve promised to marry Edwin Rook. It was
father’s wish.”
And suddenly Tod grew very gentle and tender.
“Poor Kitty,” he said; “I don’t want to hurt you, dear. But I wish I
thought you were happy.”
“Of course I am going to be happy,” she protested; “Father has been so
good to Edwin; he is a partner now, and we are going to have a dear
little house near St. Jude’s.”
She showed Tod her ring, a diamond and sapphire hoop.
“Isn’t it pretty?”
“Very,” said Tod, wishing he could kill Rook.
“And we are buying the furniture, such nice furniture.”
She was talking defensively, holding Tod and her own emotion at arm’s
length, and all the while she kept looking anxiously towards the town.
Tod’s heart smote him. He understood at last the hopelessness and the
helplessness of Kitty, and that he was only torturing her by persuading
her to cry for the moon.
“I hope you will be very happy,” he said.
“Thank you, Tod.”
“I think I ought to be going now.”
Her look of relief was obvious to him, and with a tragic glance at her
he got up and went. But he felt very miserable and very bitter, and
betaking himself to Rose Cottage he poured his bitterness into the lap
of Mrs. Budd, not as a confessional, but as the vague yet fiery
discontent of a young man balked of his desire.
Mrs. Budd was a comfortable opportunist. She had rounded off all her
angles, and if the world bumped her it bumped against something soft and
elastic. She had learnt to circumvent by yielding, to flow round
obstructions, to be comfortable even when you had to sit six aside in a
third-class carriage.
“Don’t go looking for trouble, my dear. You’ll get plenty of it in the
world without looking. What, you say people cheat? Of course they cheat,
if it pays ’em. Not all, mind you, but most.”
“It ought to be altered,” said Tod; “my father used to say that anyone
who made too much money was a rogue.”
“Well, my dear, if you take that line, you will be up against the
elephant. The elephant will tread on you. Much better give it buns.”
“You are a coward, Mrs. Budd.”
“No, I’m not, my dear; I’ve used my eyes and my ears. Unless you’re a
gent, it pays to be polite. Never you be too clever. Clever people ain’t
popular. Soft soap and stoopidity; that’s the stuff that gets you along
comfortable in this world.”
Tod remained in a rebel mood, and consorted more than ever with Bob
Twine and Mossup and one or two other young men who did not like life as
it was. Twine roared with laughter when Tod gave a rather shame-faced
account of how he had been bundled out of the Flowerdew household.
“What! Oh, you pippin! Wanted to send that book back, and to tell
everybody that all the worm-holes in the shop were fakes! No wonder that
chap Rook got a strangle-hold on you.”
“Well, wasn’t I right?” flared Tod.
“Too right, kid. I wish half the world was half as right as you. Suppose
there’ll be a second suicide in the Flowerdew family?”
But Tod’s fierce face warned him to gibe no farther.
“Sorry, kid. I’m a coarse beast sometimes. And how do you like old
Snape?”
“I don’t know yet,” said Tod.
“You and I’ll end in the army, kid; that’s what will happen to us.
P’r’aps we’ll emigrate. And there’s poor old Mossup wanting to marry a
girl at the glove counter and shove his little capital into a draper’s
shop in Pondicherry Street. Poor old blighter!”
“Aren’t you going to marry, Bob?” Tod asked.
“Me marry! Not as things are, my boy, thank you. That’s the last knot
the blasted system ties on you. I’m not going to make my woman eat
dirt.”
“My father married, and he didn’t eat dirt,” said Tod.
“No, kid; I dare say he was a better man than I am. I’m the sort of chap
that must have a girl. P’r’aps you’re too young, old man, but you’ll
find out in time. Let’s have a swim to-night.”
“All right,” said Tod.
As to John Snape’s, it was a serious improvement on Mr. Flowerdew’s,
yet, as Tod had said, he wanted to see more of it before he gave it his
approval. Tod had inherited his father’s love of looking facts straight
in the face. There are quite a number of people who look Truth in the
face and then make great haste to get away round the nearest corner. Tod
was not like that. He stood and stared till he was satisfied, and if he
did not like what he saw he said so. Most boys are such irresponsible
creatures, absorbed in the green springtide of their own youth, that
they accept the crookedness and oddities of life as a jest, a suit of
motley that does not matter, but Tod had the uncomfortable knack of
asking questions and of remaining unsatisfied until they were answered.
Now “Mr. Any-think-else” had a grubby little book that he used to poke
his nose into at odd moments. It always lay handy on the shelf below the
desk, and Tod grew curious about that book. He got hold of it one
afternoon and found that it was called “How to be Your Own Doctor.” Tod
was interested. Perhaps Old Wisdon had ambitions and dreams of entering
the great profession!
A snuffy old lady in a black bonnet and dress all covered with crape
toddled into the shop the same afternoon and became engaged in a
mumbling and confidential conversation with Mr. Wisdon. Both Mr. Snape
and Cook were out of the shop, and Tod was wrapping up some bottles in
the dispensing department.
He stood still and listened.
“My daughter’s got a pain in the chest,” said the old lady, “and she
coughs something terrible. I’ve rubbed her with turps, and she’s ’ad
some of that lung tonic, but it ’asn’t done her any good.”
“Where’s the pain?” asked Wisdon in a confidential voice; “in the front
or the side?”
“Just about the breast-bone.”
“Does she expectorate?”
“What’s that?”
“Spit phlegm.”
“Yes, frothy stuff.”
“Doesn’t perspire at night, does she?”
“Don’t think so. She hasn’t said.”
“I expect it’s a slight attack of bronchitis. There’s been a lot dust
blowing about, and an east wind. Suppose you try a bottle of our
cough-cure.”
“Is it good?”
“Works like magic. It’s modelled on the prescription of a leading London
doctor.”
“I’ll try a bottle. How much it is?”
“Half a crown.”
The old lady paid her half-crown, dropped the bottle of Snape’s Cough
Cure into a string-bag and toddled off. Tod, emerging from the
dispenser’s corner, began to ask “Mr. Any-think-else” ingenious and
interested questions.
“Didn’t know you knew anything about doctoring, Mr. Wisdon.”
“Oh, didn’t you?”
“Do you get it all out of that little book?”
Wisdon gave Tod a worried look.
“It’s a very good book,” he said.
“How do you know the old lady’s daughter had bronchitis?”
“By the symptoms.”
“But mightn’t she have consumption or something?”
“She might, of course.”
“When my mother had a cough,” said Tod, “Dr. Vance listened to her chest
with a thing he called a steffescope. You could hear all the bubbles and
clicks, he said, and all that was going on.”
“Dare say he could,” said Mr. Wisdon, showing symptoms of being bored
with the subject.
“Don’t you think the woman ought to see a doctor, Mr. Wisdon?”
And then the patient, much enduring assistant turned on him with sudden
wrath.
“Look ’ere, don’t you ask so many questions.”
Tod liked old Wisdon, and had no idea of hurting him.
“Sorry,” he said. “I wanted to know—how——”
“You want to know too much, young Western; the less you think about
things in this rotten world the better it’ll be for your peace of mind,
and don’t you forget it.”
Tod had never seen “Mr. Any-think-else” so ruffled and combative and
upset about something. He banged bottles back in their places, kicked a
drawer to, and began to dust the counter with furious energy.
“Think I like it, do you? I have my orders, and I carry ’em out. You
can’t be saucy on eighty pounds a year.”
Then he grew suddenly afraid and went down the shop to make sure that he
and Tod were alone.
“But I’m not saying anything against it. I’m better off here than I was
before. You have to take life as you find it, Western, and don’t ask too
many questions. People don’t like it.”
“You mean Mr. Snape wouldn’t like it?”
“Look here”—and then a customer came into the shop and Mr. Wisdon
escaped from Tod’s inquisition.
Tod’s eyes had been opened, and in the future he placed quite a
different construction on those confidential little interviews that were
always taking place in Mr. Snape’s shop. He saw Cook studying a book
like Mr. Wisdon’s. He began to understand that the fatherly interest
John Snape took in certain customers was not a casual asking as to their
health and a polite passing of the time of day. Mr. Snape talked in a
subdued voice to mothers with babies. There were occasions when he took
sheepish-looking men into his back room and served them himself with an
air of sleek mystery. Tod wondered what Mr. Snape gave these gentlemen.
He had the curiosity to note the particular drawer from which Mr. Snape
took what he wanted. Tod discovered later that the drawer contained
small glass syringes.
One Thursday afternoon when business seemed very stagnant Cook hailed
Tod.
“Here, Western, I’ve got a job for you.”
“What is it?” said Tod.
“You can fill up these bottles with water, cork ’em, dry ’em, and paste
on those labels. Our stock’s getting low.”
Cook had a couple of biggish bottles and a measuring-glass on the
dispensing counter, and a whole phalanx of eight-ounce bottles ranged in
two neat rows. He began to measure some brown stuff and some pink stuff
into a glass, and to pour an equal amount of the mixture into each empty
bottle. He worked with great rapidity and with that cynical and gay air
of his that rather puzzled Tod.
“What’s this?” Tod asked.
Cook gave him a wink.
“This, my boy, is Snape’s Magic Cough Cure, an absolute elixir, priced
at half a crown a bottle.”
“Oh, is it?” said Tod, immensely interested. “What’s in it?”
“What’s in it! That’s a trade secret, but I’ll tell you. You’ve got to
swallow the physic and get used to the taste. We give ’em a little
ipecacuanha and some sugar water coloured pink. It doesn’t do ’em any
harm.”
“Must be rather cheap,” said Tod.
“Costs twopence—including the bottle, perhaps. You can work it out.
Then there are those pretty labels and the corks. Yes, it’s good biz.”
Tod’s blue eyes took on a sulky look.
“I thought it was from the prescription of a big London doctor.”
“Oh, did you! Suppose you heard old Wisdon guffing.”
“Well, I call it a swindle,” said Tod.
Mr. Cook gave him an amused look.
“Better not say that to Snape. He’d kick you out.”
“What about you?” asked Tod.
“Me? Snape can’t play games with me. It wouldn’t be worth his while. I
could make things nasty. Besides, we’re only small fry at that.”
“What do you mean?”
Cook indicated a case full of patent medicines, jerking the hand that
held the empty measuring-glass in their direction.
“What price all that stuff? Some of it’s not so bad; most of it is just
muck. Take Prettyman’s Pills, for instance; twenty pills for two and
six, and they’ve got nothing in ’em but bread and a little aloes.
Prettyman must be a millionaire.”
“Why, it’s thieving,” said Tod.
“No, it’s just cheek and advertising. Besides, Prettyman’s a great
philanthropist. He gave £50,000 to a hospital the other day.”
“It wasn’t Prettyman who gave it,” said Tod.
“Who, then?”
“Why, the people he’d swindled.”
Cook gave one of his gay laughs.
“You’d better get into a monastery, young Western. Anyhow, what about
all those bottles?”