Tod began to be discouraged. He lost his interest in Mr. Snape’s shop
and in all those mysterious bottles of physic and proprietary
preparations that pretended to heal the sick. It was the profit on them
that troubled Tod. He still had vivid memories of his mother’s last
illness, and he could picture men and women buying those sure cures for
poor souls in a like tragic state. It seemed to him to be heartless
cheating.
“And if some people will always be fools,” as Cook had put it, why
didn’t the wise people try to prevent them being fools? Surely it was
someone’s business!
He put that question to a new friend, a Mr. Burgetrode, one of Shaston’s
eccentrics.
“It’s the Englishman’s privilege to be a fool, young man, his legal
right. Be careful how you interfere with it.”
It was in June that Tod made the acquaintance of Mr. Burgetrode, and
made it in rather a queer way. Tod had had a solitary fit, and had taken
to country walks, fierce and lonely Sabbath rambles with a bottle of
ginger beer in one pocket and some bread and cheese in the other. He was
coming back down a wild, gorse-grown valley that cut deep into the
rolling and wooded country to the west of Shaston, a valley sacred to a
semi-defunct golf club and a number of sheep. It was known as Summer
Valley; through it a stalwart little stream shouldered its way through
masses of blackberry and brier. The bells of the Shaston churches were
ringing for evening service, and down yonder on the green slopes a few
scattered figures were playing golf. Tod leapt an old rail fence, came
round a couple of big thorn bushes, and found an old gentleman sitting
on the grass, with one boot off, and a blue-socked foot looking rather
big and funny.
The old gentleman had a queer, lean face, rather fierce and alarming,
with blue eyes packed away under big eyebrows, and a little tuft of
greyish black hair between his lower lip and chin. He was wearing a
shapeless grey tweed hat, a brown jacket and grey flannel trousers. His
red tie was passed through a big gold ring. Tod had never seen anybody
or anything quite like him before. He had not the Shaston look, either
working-day or Sabbath.
“Hallo, boy!”
“Hallo!” said Tod.
The old gentleman stared at him.
“Damn those church bells, and damn those golfing fools. I have been
shouting and waving. Might as well be on the raft of the _Medusa_.”
“You’ve sprained your ankle,” said Tod.
“Solomon in a straw hat! What do you think made me want to jump that
fence?”
“Curiosity, sir,” said Tod.
The old gentleman bunched his eyebrows together, and stared at Tod still
more fixedly.
“No fool like an old fool! I could clear four feet ten in my day. Well,
what’s to be done, young man.”
Tod considered.
“You can’t walk, or you wouldn’t be sitting there like that. It’s a good
mile to the Lignor road. Tell you what, sir, I’ll run down to that
golf-house and telephone for a cab to come up there. Then I’ll come back
and we’ll do a three-legged walk down to the golf-house.”
The old gentleman said “Ha!” rather fiercely. It was one of his tricks.
“You help me down to the club-house, and I’ll raise the conveyance.
What’s your name?”
“Western. Tod Western.”
“All right, Western. And you will come back and have dinner with me at
the Majestic Hotel. That’s a bargain. My name is Burgetrode.”
Tod helped Mr. Burgetrode down to the club-house, and he had—for
him—the unique experience of dining at the Hotel Majestic. Tod was
rather shy and awkward; the great room was full of wonderful people—men
and women in evening dress—and Tod felt that everybody was staring at
him. Mr. Burgetrode had a little table in a corner near a window. A very
important-looking waiter had helped the old gentleman across the room,
and now stood waiting for orders.
“Dinner for two, sir?”
“Of course, Reynolds, of course.”
The waiter beamed at Tod.
“Thick or clear soup, sir?”
“Whichever you like,” said Tod, rather embarrassed and wanting to return
the waiter’s politeness.
Old Burgetrode looked up sharply.
“Clear, Reynolds, for both. Go straight through. And bring us two ginger
beers.”
Tod remembered that bottle in his pocket, and a surreptitious hand
discovered the stopper and stone top protruding for all the world to
see. He suppressed that bottle and carefully turned down the flap of his
pocket.
Then Mr. Burgetrode began to talk. He talked rather jerkily, and with a
sort of playful and biting ferocity that puzzled Tod. He asked Tod all
sorts of questions, queer, unexpected questions that came at you all
ways and danced round you like a Chinese cracker. Tod noticed that the
waiter was extraordinarily polite to Mr. Burgetrode. What with eating
his dinner and answering Mr. Burgetrode’s questions, Tod had enough to
do. Presently a very gorgeous and charming lady in black who had been
sitting at another table rustled across and spoke to Mr. Burgetrode on
her way out.
“I do hope you have not sprained your foot very badly, Mr. Burgetrode?”
Tod saw Mr. Burgetrode’s eyes turn all red.
“I’ve sprained it; that ought to be good enough, I think.”
The gorgeous lady purred over him.
“How witty you are. We are having a little concert in the
recreation-room to-morrow night——”
“Have it, madam, have it. I shan’t stop it. Put me down for a guinea.”
The gorgeous lady looked at Tod as though she were ready to kiss him,
and then floated away.
“Sausage and Schnapps!” said Mr. Burgetrode, irrelevantly, “and her
second husband is still alive.”
He dismissed Tod in a queer, curt, yet friendly way.
“You will find me near the bandstand between six and seven, Western, on
most evenings.”
“We don’t close till seven, sir.”
“Then make it eight till nine.”
“Thank you, sir.”
That was all that Mr. Burgetrode said to him. In Tod’s ears it had
sounded strangely like an order, but Mr. Burgetrode seemed to be the
sort of person who had an inherent right to issue orders. Most people
were afraid of him. Tod was not.
Mr. Burgetrode came into Tod’s life at a moment when young Western was
fighting with a series of disillusionments. On the way home from the
Hotel Majestic he met Kitty Flowerdew and Edwin Rook walking arm in arm
along the Parade, and Kitty refused to see him. Not so Edwin Rook. The
shopman nodded at Tod in a very complacent and patronising way, and when
he had passed them Tod heard them laughing. He did not know that there
was pain and shame in Kitty’s laughter. The jest rankled. He thought of
the way in which Mr. Burgetrode had snubbed that gorgeous lady who had
come and purred round his table. Perhaps Mr. Burgetrode had no use for
women and believed that anything in petticoats was made for the
humiliation and enslaving of men?
Tod spent a very difficult Monday in Mr. Snape’s shop. Mr. Snape was in
a very bad temper about something or other, and Tod happened to be the
person who got in his way. It began by Tod breaking the glass in one of
the big cabinet doors just when one of the richest women in Shaston was
buying scent from “Mr. Any-think-else.”
“You clumsy young brute,” said Snape, when the lady had left the shop.
Tod coloured up.
“Don’t you speak to me like that. I’ll pay for it.”
“I guess you will,” said Mr. Snape sarcastically, “and I don’t want any
impertinence from my assistants, thank you.”
Tod fell into trouble again in the afternoon. Cook was dispensing; Old
Wisdon had gone to unpack some drugs, and Tod was left in charge of the
shop. A woman came in and asked him if Sowerby’s Sea Salts were any use
for sore feet. Tod said he didn’t know. Mr. Snape, emerging from his
back room, happened to overhear Tod’s crass and futile confession of
ignorance.
The woman was leaving the shop when Snape appeared behind the counter.
He let her go, and then fell heavily on Tod.
“What do you mean by answering a lady like that?”
“Like what?” Tod asked. “I wasn’t rude.”
“You told her that you didn’t know whether Sowerby’s Salts were good for
sore feet.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Tod.
Mr. Snape grew very pink.
“Don’t let me ever hear you say I don’t know again in my shop.”
“What am I to say?” asked Tod.
“Use your wits, you young idiot. You are here to sell things. You can
come and ask me or one of the others, can’t you?”
“All right,” said Tod, restraining himself; “I’m learning.”
He described the incident to “Mr. Any-think-else,” and appealed to him
for sympathy.
“I only told the truth,” Tod argued. “How was I to know whether the
stuff was any good for people’s feet? Is it?”
“Don’t know,” said Wisdon sulkily.
“Well, would you tell the truth?”
“Tell the truth! Great Scott, Western, I’ve got a wife and three
children.”
Tod said no more, but he thought a great deal about the problem of old
Wisdon and his wife and children.
He fell in that evening with Arthur Mossup from Horrox and Horrox’s, and
Mossup, who had a shy man’s affection for him, named him for an
adventure.
“Like a walk, Western?”
“Right-o! Where are you going?”
Mossup showed him a handful of keys.
“House-hunting. It’s the only time I’ve got, and an agent friend of mine
obliged me with these. I’m after a little place, and we have two hours’
daylight.”
“What fun,” said Tod.
They walked in the direction of Blackberry Hill, and for the first time
in his life Tod felt the lure of houses. There was something very
fascinating in poking about in those back streets, finding your house
all empty and waiting, in unlocking its door and exploring all its
possibilities and its secrets. Tod developed a keenness and an
enthusiasm that surprised Mossup. They measured rooms, inspected rusty
kitchen stoves, ferreted about in lugubrious back yards, took note of
cupboards, coppers, sanitary arrangements and the invariable absence of
a bath. Mossup was a serious and prematurely old young man. He would
stand and meditate like a stork on one leg, his weak eyes glazed behind
his spectacles, a tuft of flaxen hair standing up on his head like a
plume. His ambitions were very modest. His romance ran to a rental of
£20 a year, with the furniture for one bedroom and a sitting-room, and
the stocking of a kitchen. There was something pathetic about his
cautiousness, and the way he kept consulting a little notebook in which
the adventure was tabulated to the last penny.
They were poor little houses, obvious little houses, cheap, shabby, and
hopelessly ugly. All the windows looked at other houses of exactly the
same type. One or two of them had a very grimed and greasy air. An
occasional whiff of sewer gas sent Mossup sniffing into dark places like
a solemn and suspicious dog. There seemed a lamentable absence of fresh
whitewash everywhere, and Tod could not see any appetising corner where
you would care to keep food. The larders and little sculleries
were—well, you just said “Poof!” Yet the fascination of the quest
gripped Tod. Mossup interested him. He was equally interested in the
house in which Mossup might choose to live.
“We have to be very careful—very careful,” said Mossup, jotting down
notes in his book.
“I don’t like any of these houses.”
“Don’t you, Western?” and Mossup looked pained.
“They’re dirty and stuffy and ugly. Where’s the gardens, too? I don’t
call any of those cat-walks gardens.”
“Can’t afford more than twenty pounds. You have to put up with things,
sometimes.”
“I don’t see it,” said Tod. “Why can’t things be arranged differently.
They could be, if somebody bothered.”
Tod spent two more evenings in house-hunting with Arthur Mossup. At last
they found a little old house, in a blind lane off Paradise Row, one of
those solid and unaffected little houses that had lived in the country
until the splurge of the Shaston suburbs had swallowed it. It had a
green latticed porch, green window frames, a tiled roof and a bit of
garden. Mossup grew greatly excited. He wanted to rush down to the
agents and take the place that very night.
“Somebody else may get it. Olive will just shout when she sees this
cottage.”
“Plenty of time,” said Tod, “go round first thing in the morning. Rather
wish I was a house agent. Must be quite jolly finding homes for people.”
The idea fermented. It was working in Tod’s head when he strolled along
to the bandstand on Wednesday evening in search of Mr. Burgetrode. He
found him in a bath-chair by the parade railings, and looking as though
he hated it. The bath-chair man was leaning over the railing, smoking a
pipe.
“Smith,” said Mr. Burgetrode.
“Sir?”
“Go and get a drink; go and get two drinks, and come back in half an
hour. Here’s the money.”
Tod perched himself on the railings.
“How is your foot, sir?”
“My foot doesn’t interest me, Western; let it alone. We’ll leave it with
the doctor. I expected to see you before, young man.”
Tod looked down unabashed into Mr. Burgetrode’s fierce brown face.
“Sorry, sir; I’ve been house-hunting.”
“What?”
“House-hunting with a friend who is getting married.”
“Why doesn’t he do something else! And did you find a house?”
“After three evenings at it,” said Tod; “we looked at all sorts of
mouldy places where you wouldn’t expect to find anything but
blackbeetles and cats. Houses are very interesting, sir, don’t you
think?”
“Almost as interesting as men, Western, and not quite such fools. Houses
are alive.”
“Yes, aren’t they?” said Tod. “I have begun to feel I should like to
live with houses, know all about houses, put people into houses.”
Old Burgetrode gave a quick lift of his head.
“You don’t like your present place, then?”
“No,” said Tod.
“Why not?”
“They don’t want you to tell the truth.”
“Ha!” said Mr. Burgetrode fiercely.
Tod edged himself nearer to the bath-chair. He had a feeling that he
could talk to Mr. Burgetrode.
“They want you to lie about things. It was the same in the other shop I
was in, and I got chucked for that—and something else.”
Mr. Burgetrode was watching him with great intentness.
“So you don’t like it?”
“I loathe it,” said Tod. “Why should you have to lie to people?”
“It means money, Western, more money.”
“Well, we ought to get rid of money. Or supposing there was so much
money that it was cheap as the shingle down there, people wouldn’t tell
lies to get it.”
“That’s a problem, young man. You seem to have discovered the trick of
running your head against problems.”
The Shaston Corporation Orchestra who inhabited the bandstand, woke to
sudden life after an interval of twenty minutes. Mr. Burgetrode grew
impatient.
“Take me away from that noise, will you?”
Tod descended from the railings and trundled the bath-chair in the
direction of the Hotel Majestic.
“That will do,” said Mr. Burgetrode; “it will take my friend Smith
another ten minutes to find us. Do you play any games, young Ajax?”
“Cricket,” said Tod, “and I played right-half for Shaston last winter. I
can swim a mile, and box a bit.”
“Keep it up, Western. What did you want to be before you got trapped in
a shop?”
“A doctor.”
Mr. Burgetrode did not seem prejudiced in favour of such a career. He
gave Tod to understand that there were doctors and doctors, and that if
you wanted to become a first-class surgeon you might count on earning
very little money for fifteen years. He talked rather strangely about
doctors trying to patch the roof, when the foundations were rotten. He
said that the doctors were not to blame, and that you could not get at
the foundations, because the Vested Interest fence kept you out.
“What’s a Vested Interest?” Tod asked.
“You have got to find that out,” said Mr. Burgetrode.
Then he made a sudden suggestion.
“Would you like to take up houses, Western?”
“I think I should, sir.”
“Study them inside out, and from top to bottom, how they are built, and
how they shouldn’t be built?”
“That’s it,” said Tod.
Mr. Burgetrode looked hard at him with those queer, fierce eyes of his.
“Very well, Ajax. I shall be at that hotel for another month. If you
want me, you will know where to find me.”