Someone had once nicknamed Mr. Burgetrode “Old Mischief.” That was ten
years ago, and if Shaston had been asked to place and describe Mr.
Julian Burgetrode, Shaston would have stared at you uncomprehendingly,
or would have asked whether you were referring to “that old chap who
stayed at the Majestic?” Even the Hotel Majestic knew very little about
Mr. Burgetrode. He was sarcastic, and fierce and laconic. He had an
abundance of money, and he appeared to despise money, judging by the
size of his tips. People gossiped about him. He was mysterious,
eccentric, fabulously wealthy. The old ladies who sat in the
drawing-room and read Marie Corelli, and Mr. Garvice and “The Rosary,”
spun all sorts of romances about Mr. Burgetrode. They said he was a
misogamist, an atheist and other unwholesome and unnatural things. His
wife had committed suicide, or run away with another man, and he had
chronic dyspepsia, and took drugs. Mr. Burgetrode did not care at all
what the old ladies said of him. He disliked old ladies, disliked them
as much as a fierce dog hates cats, and he never attempted to
compromise.
“Reynolds,” he once said to the head waiter, “I’ll give you ten pounds a
week if you promise not to put one of those minute guns within ten yards
of me.”
“Minute guns, sir?”
“Old women, Reynolds, old women.”
“Rather difficult, sir; you see——”
“Yes, I know; it rains old women and caps and artificial fringes, and
bead bags and novels, in a place like this. Put something young, or
something in trousers at those tables, something that doesn’t want to
grin at you like a Cheshire cat.”
“I’ll see what I can do, sir,” said Reynolds.
The queer part of it was that the “staff” of the Hotel Majestic liked
Mr. Burgetrode. They rather sympathised with him about the old ladies.
The maid who looked after his bedroom and private sitting-room laid it
down as an axiom that she would rather “do” for ten Mr. Burgetrodes than
for one of those old cats. “He’s a sport,” she asserted; “he’s got a
tongue on him, but if you’ve got anything straight to say, he don’t mind
you answering back.” The lift boys were Mr. Burgetrode’s devoted slaves.
Nor did largesse account for it all. There was something fiercely human
about the old man; he could be extraordinarily severe and
extraordinarily kind.
There were, however, one or two people in Shaston-on-Sea who knew who
and what Mr. Julian Burgetrode was in the larger world up north. He came
south to escape from the roar and the smother of the factory and the
market, Shaston was a sort of toy-town to him, and he strolled about and
looked down on it like an amused Colossus. Yet there was a memory behind
it all, a smell of the blue sea, a glory of golden broom and white
black-thorn, a girl and a boy honeymooning in one of the old white
Georgian houses under the cliff. Ten days of marriage, and then death,
death in the blue sea on a sweet spring morning. In one of the Old Town
churchyards there was a stone that told how Elsie Burgetrode had been
buried there nearly forty years ago.
Such was Shaston’s sentimental hold on Julian Burgetrode. He liked the
slothfulness of the place after the hard shallowness of the North. He
came south when he wanted to think, and went tramping for miles over the
beech-covered hills and into the soft blueness of the Weald. Away in the
north men were dominated by the idea of the machine. They had forgotten
to wonder how green life started in the dim slime of primeval seas.
Burgetrode was lord of many machines, but never the slave of one of
them. He could still jump a fence, delight in Anatole France, and sit up
thinking with Bergson.
Shaston was his toy-town. How much of it was his and what a grip his
brown hands had on it, very few people suspected. One lawyer knew; so
did a bank-manager; so did Rathbone Cragg of Rathbone Cragg and Son,
Estate and House Agents. And when Julian Burgetrode limped into the
office of Rathbone Cragg in Caroline Place, old Cragg fell from his
perch of supercilious greed and flopped and squawked most unctuously
upon the floor.
“Good morning, sir. Will you please come in my private room, sir.”
“I want a few words with you, Mr. Cragg.”
“Quite so, sir. Thomas, will you see that we are not disturbed?”
Burgetrode detested Mr. Cragg. The man was such a Lord Chief Justice to
little people, yet he was so easily mastered by a dog bigger than
himself.
“You would be able to find room in your office for a youngster of
eighteen or nineteen?”
“For instruction, sir?”
“Yes, in the ordinary way of business. He would start at the bottom and
work his way up. I happen to be interested in a boy whom I want to
train. When he had spent two or three years with you, I should put him
to a builder.”
Mr. Cragg nodded.
“It shall be done, to oblige you, Mr. Burgetrode. I presume——”
“The boy is not to know that I have any ultimate interest in his future.
I want you to understand that, Mr. Cragg. Any breach of confidence——”
“You can rely on me, sir, absolutely.”
“Very good. The youngster’s name is Western. He will call on you one day
with a letter from me. I want you to treat him as you would treat any
other clerk in your office. Good morning.”
Tod guessed nothing of Mr. Burgetrode’s sudden interest in him. It had
not struck Tod that he was something of a phenomenon, a lad in a shop
who was sturdily set against the telling of lies. Mr. Burgetrode had
been handling men all his life, dull men, grumbling men, good men, bad
men, men who were contented provided they got beer, men who would have
been discontented if they had been drowned in that beverage. Then there
was the new type of man, the keen-witted, implacable revolutionist, who
knew what he wanted and meant to get it. Mr. Burgetrode was making a
special study of that type of man, for he saw in him the man of the
future. He needed mellowing; he needed a little more honest pudding in
his stomach, and less poison under his tongue. At present the new man
was ugly, and Mr. Burgetrode detested ugliness.
He had been impressed at once by the unusualness of Tod. He liked the
lad’s intelligent square head, his brown face, and alert unfearing eyes.
The boy was sensitive too, and not in the least arrogant. He looked at
life and asked questions, the very questions that a thinker like Julian
Burgetrode knew to be the great questions that the world had to answer.
The boy’s sincerity was a thing of wonderful significance. It was like
one of those magic swords, hammered out by goblins in the underworld,
and then belted to some blue-eyed, innocent, fate-predestined hero.
Meanwhile Tod was feeling very unheroic in John Snape’s shop. The
regular dispensing of prescriptions was but a small part of the
business. There was plenty of honest stuff to sell, from photographic
plates to toothpicks, but Tod could never forget those quack medicines
and the sham doctoring that was carried on by Snape and his assistants.
Tod foresaw that his days were numbered. He was getting discredited.
Some day there would be a row, and Mr. Snape would suggest his returning
to the farm.
Tod felt the storm gathering. Mr. Snape had taken to bullying him, and
using a dry sarcasm on every possible occasion. For a pink, well-fed man
he had a most ingenious and spiteful tongue.
“Is that the way you wrap up bottles, Western? Here, let me show you.
You’ve got no snap or neatness in your fingers, bodgering a bottle in
paper till it looks as though it were dressed in a dirty nightshirt!”
“A place for everything, Western, and everything in its place. For
goodness’ sake get some method in that head of yours. And your hair
wants cutting.”
“You had better oil that voice of yours, young man. This isn’t a school
playground.”
Tod took all this heckling as a good boxer takes punishment, but it was
providing him with the justification for getting in a good straight
punch to Mr. Snape’s jaw. He was not like poor old Wisdon with his wife
and three children and his eighty pounds a year. Wisdon was not a
certified dispenser, he was just so much casual labour, living in
perpetual fear of being out of work. Snape bullied Wisdon, and daily cut
the throat of his hired man’s self-respect, and Wisdon went like a sheep
to the slaughter, offering the neck of his man’s pride so that his
children might live.
Tod saw Mr. Burgetrode on several evenings, and entered into long
discussions with his new friend. He put forward the case of “Mr.
Any-think-else,” arguing hotly that a man of Wisdon’s age should not be
so placed in life that he could be bullied and sneered at by a man
younger than himself.
“Money again,” said Mr. Burgetrode; “your Mr. Snape seems something of a
swashbuckler.”
“I couldn’t stand what old Wisdon has to stand,” said Tod; “I’m just
waiting, and one day I’ll land Snape one and walk out of the shop.”
“Just for love, young Ajax?”
“No, sir, I’m waiting till he comes at me crooked over something I
should have lied about, and then I’ll hit out straight.”
“Ha!” said Mr. Burgetrode in his fierce way; “come and tell me about it
when it happens.”
It happened the very next day. About half an hour before closing time a
pale woman with tired eyes walked into the shop, and it fell to Tod to
serve her. Cook had left early; old Wisdon was in one of the stock rooms
upstairs looking out trusses; Tod knew that Mr. Snape was in his office
at the back of the shop. Tod noticed that the pale woman looked rather
shabby, and that her face made him think of his mother as he remembered
her six months before her death.
“Have you got Bartrup’s Consumption Cure?”
“Yes,” said Tod.
“Is it—is it any good?” asked the pale woman.
Tod happened to know something about Bartrup’s Consumption Cure. Cook
had told him that he had seen the analysis of that very popular remedy
and that the best thing to do with it was to pour it down the drain.
Tod looked straight into the woman’s tired eyes.
“It’s rubbish,” he said.
“Rubbish!” echoed the woman.
“I’d see a doctor,” Tod added, “before I touched any drugs.”
The woman thanked Tod and left the shop, and it was then that Tod became
aware of Mr. Snape standing at the far end of the counter like a little
pink Napoleon who had caught one of his sentries giving secret
information to an enemy patrol.
“So Bartrup’s Consumption Cure is rubbish, Mr. Western, is it?”
“I have been told so,” said Tod stubbornly.
“And who gave you that valuable information?”
“It’s not my business to tell.”
John Snape lost his temper, and came and stood very close to Tod, so
close that he spluttered in Tod’s face.
“You’re a damned fool, that’s what you are, Western. Nice sort of idiot
for a man to have in his shop. Get me discredited—discredited! D’you
understand? Supposing Bartrups were informed that their preparation had
been called rubbish in my shop? You’d get me tabooed by Bartrups; they
might take legal action——”
Mr. Snape drew breath, and Tod waited, blinking a little because he did
not like Mr. Snape’s splutter.
“Where’s your loyalty to me? Didn’t I take you in here to give you a
chance, and all you can do is to blab silly lies over the counter!”
“They’re not lies,” said Tod; “half the quack stuff we sell is just
cheating.”
“Cheating!”
Mr. Snape gasped, and took a deep breath, but Tod got his blow in first.
“I’m leaving this evening,” he said, “this sort of business doesn’t suit
me.”
“Well, of all the impertinent young cubs——!”
“You needn’t call me names,” said Tod; “I’m not going to be responsible
for Bartrup and Co., that’s all.”