A change had come over Tod’s career. He had ceased to be one of the
young gods of the world with the light of the morning shining in his
face. He became a serious and contriving Tod, a young man whose thoughts
were in shop windows and furniture catalogues, who refused to buy
himself new ties, and who was very careful of the pennies in his
pockets.
“I’ve got responsibilities,” he explained to Mr. Lavender; “no more
Turkish cigarettes, you know.”
Mr. Lavender, being an old bachelor, was a romanticist.
“Giving up is gaining,” he told Tod, “and yet nature is a spendthrift. I
always did believe in young people marrying in May, a bit of spring
recklessness.”
Tod was not feeling reckless. Every page of his day-book carried those
uncompromising figures—“£67 12s. a year.” The immediate and unfailing
retort of his youth was “Yes, and the mortgages make another forty. We
shall have to manage on a hundred or so to start with.” He was making
grim efforts to save money out of his weekly pay, money that was
necessary for the equipping of a little house, but Millie was so alive
and so gay, so fond of chocolates and sweet cakes and the best seats in
the Pier Pavilion! Tod had never forgotten the incident of that
German-silver ring. Besides, he had a lover’s pride and the generous
man’s hatred of miserliness. He was engaged to marry the prettiest girl
in Shaston, and if she liked chocolates and fine clothes—well, there
was some excuse for it, and even Tod’s shrewdness could not kill the
love of a fine and swaggering gesture.
“Two stalls, please,” or “A pound of the best in the shop.”
Before many weeks had passed Tod realised that Millicent had ambitions.
Her social ideas were not to be expressed by an income of one hundred
pounds a year.
“I want a suite like that for the drawing-room.”
They were standing in front of a furniture shop window and looking at a
mahogany suite, whose chairs were upholstered in pink brocade. Tod was
heard to say something about the price.
“Oh, your Mr. Burgetrode will help.”
That was her answer to everything, and Tod began to grow rather weary of
Mr. Burgetrode’s empty name. There were times when he wished that he had
told Millie that the great man had cast them off, and that he—Tod—had
had to choose between a girl and a career, but he shirked making the
confession. He did not like the idea of presenting himself as a martyr,
and perhaps his pride was piqued. Confound Mr. Burgetrode! He could
manage his own adventure without being haunted by that old man of the
sea.
“I couldn’t expect him to do that, you know.”
“Why not?”
“I want to be independent,” said Tod.
Houses inspired the same social dream. They used to walk about Shaston
in the long summer evenings, and look at houses, but not the sort of
houses Tod had seen himself inhabiting. Millie had a particular
affection for a little red villa called “Carnarvon” in Guildford Lane, a
villa with casement windows and a sort of little pepper-pot of a turret
stuck on at one corner, and gables that were filled with imitation oak.
There were two little lawns in front, with beds of geranium and
calceolaria, and six standard roses on each side of the gravel path.
“Isn’t it sweet?”
“It’s bigger than we should want, dear.”
“Oh, Tod, we don’t want a shabby, poky little place.”
Tod squeezed her arm.
“Nothing’s too good for you.”
She had begun to debauch him.
He showed a new touchiness and the faint suspicion of a swagger in the
office of Rathbone Cragg & Son, for it was evident to Tod that the
favour of the gods had changed. Old Cragg showed him a new curtness, a
peremptoriness that made Tod know himself to be an underling. Frederick
Cragg had long refrained from cultivating Mr. Julian Burgetrode’s
protégé, and his attitude towards Tod was one of casual and superior
indifference. Tod had lapsed. And Tod did not feel humble; he resented
the subtle insult to his personal pride. They had been obliging Mr.
Burgetrode, had they? Some day he would show them a thing or two. The
woman was teaching him to strut and to crow.
In August Tod became one-and-twenty, and the hands of Uncle Remus became
impotent and obsolete. Tod went over to see his uncle, and spent a night
at Burnt Farm. Uncle Remus talked a good deal about Tod’s “little bit o’
property,” what an asset it was, and how a wise man never gambled with
his capital. “Suppose you’ll be leaving the money where it is?”
“At present,” said Tod, “but I’m going to be married. I may want a
little of it for furnishing.”
Uncle Remus sat up stiff and straight in his chair.
“You’re goin’ to be married?”
“Yes.”
“And only just turned twenty-one.”
“Why shouldn’t I get married?” Tod asked.
“Who’s the girl?”
“A young lady in Shaston. She was in Horrox’s shop.”
“A shop-girl?”
“Yes.”
A cunning look came over Uncle Remus’s thin face. He leant forward, and
pointed the stem of his pipe at Tod.
“She ain’t drivin’ you, is she?”
“What do you mean?”
“You ain’t got her into trouble?”
Tod lost his temper, and said angry things to Uncle Remus, but Uncle
Remus was quite unmoved.
“’Tain’t no use losing your temper,” he said; “pity is it ain’t as I
hinted. Five bob a week’s cheaper than a wife. I ain’t no believer in
gels.”
“What about my mother?”
“Your mother was a pedigree,” said Uncle Remus; “you’ll never find a gel
like her.”
The heavens looked like falling when Tod made his fiancée realise the
truth, that they would have to live on about a hundred pounds a year.
She wept, and Tod behaved like a guilty fool.
“I don’t want to stay in a shop, Tod; they are all so horrid to me.”
“But you are not going to stay at Horrox’s, my darling; we are going to
get married quite soon.”
“I—I couldn’t ask you to keep me when you have only a hundred a year.
And I do want you, Tod—I want you awful bad at times.”
They were lying in the bracken of one of the little woods in Summer
Valley, and Tod took the girl in his arms.
“I want you—too.”
They kissed, and Millie pulled Tod over to her and lay with him very
close.
“Oh, I want to be married! Why can’t you get that old Mr. Burgetrode to
help us?”
“Because I can’t,” said Tod, obstinate even in her arms; “he expects me
to be independent, and not to cadge. We have got to manage somehow.”
“Perhaps he’s only waiting to see how we get on?”
“Perhaps.”
“Putting us on our trial.”
“Perhaps.”
“Oh, Tod, why can’t you have a business of your own?”
“Well, why not? What sort of business?”
“Let’s think. You have some capital. Lots of chaps have succeeded with
half your money and half your brains.”
“It’s an idea,” said Tod, sitting up rather flushed and excited. “Why
shouldn’t we do something on our own?”
Eve had suggested the adventure, and it was Eve who discovered the
inevitable inspiration. Tod lay awake half the night, thinking of all
the possible ways of making money, and of how he could apply that £1,000
of his so that it should give him a share of gold pieces to pour into
the lap of his beloved. Tod’s experience was very limited, but
imagination rushed in where his experience failed him. Farming? No, he
could not imagine Millicent living on a farm. A shop? But what sort of
shop? And his bile rose at the thought of a life behind the counter. He
might become an agent for something—what he could not quite say. He had
heard of men making quite a lot of money by starting a big
boarding-house or a small hotel, but he did not think that Millie would
approve of the idea. He knew a good deal about houses, and a little
about the building of houses, and he wondered whether any of the Shaston
builders would be willing to take an enterprising partner? There were so
many possibilities, but they were so vague and nebulous that Tod
continued to grope and to grasp nothing.
“I’m going to take you for a walk,” said Millie.
“Looking at houses?”
“No; just a walk.”
It was a Wednesday afternoon, a hot and sweltering day in the thick of
the Shaston holiday season. The town was full of young women in white
dresses, young women with red arms and necks, and sun patterns scorched
on their chests, and wearing white stockings that looked tired and
overworked. Youths lounged about in badly washed flannel trousers,
hatless, working up a manly tan. Perspiring people from London, fat
women with shiny faces, bored men in Sunday clothes carrying buckets and
spades, swarms of children, all looking for the joy of life that was
pappy and soft as a stale cucumber. Hawkers pushing barrows of fruit.
Dirty women with very white aprons selling shrimps. Motors and human
things that smelt. All the tawdriness and trash and pathos of a “holiday
resort” in August.
Miss Hornblower led her lover towards the railway station.
“What’s the idea?” he asked her.
“Nothing. Just watching the crowds.”
She looked very cool and comely in a white dress flecked with touches of
cerise. Tod compared her with all these overheated, sun-scorched,
unstarched women, and his pride in her challenged the spirit of
adventure. How could a man fail to succeed with such a charming young
woman to fight for? His love was yearning to take the world by the
throat and compel it to surrender happiness and riches.
A London train had just poured its crowd into Shaston station, not the
cheapest of crowds, but people who travelled by an afternoon train and
meant to stay more than a week. A couple of taxis were loading up
luggage, and three or four flies had been fought for by pushful fathers
of families. There were little piles of luggage and groups of impatient
humans dotted about the pavement. Even outside porters had an artificial
importance.
“I-want-a-taxi,” a fat man was saying to a porter, a fat man in grey
tweeds and a Homburg hat, an emphatic man, a swollenly self-important
man. “I tell you-I-want-a-taxi. What’s the matter with this confounded
town?”
“There ain’t no taxis, sir; all engaged.”
“I’ve seen two, just two,” said the fat man truculently, “two taxis to
meet a London train. It’s a damned scandal!”
Miss Hornblower and Tod overheard the man’s accusation, and his damning
of the enterprise of Shaston.
“Seems to feel the heat,” said Tod.
“He’s right. There ought to be more taxis.”
She watched Tod’s face, but her hero had not caught the inspiration.
They wandered back down the town, but there was a purpose in the girl’s
pilgrimage. She led Tod down Queen Street to where a certain Pumpelly
kept a shop and garage, a rather dingy place that always seemed packed
with a chaotic mass of cars, and where irritable amateur drivers wanted
to know how they were to get in or how they were to get out.
Six or seven private cars were lined up along the pavement. A very
greasy young man in dirty overalls was doing something to one of them.
One long, grey touring car was full of very superior gentlewomen who
were inciting their man to find out, and find out with vigour, why they
were not being attended to. A fat man, rather like the fat man at the
railway station, was standing at the garage entrance and making his
presence felt.
“Is there anybody in charge here?”
“Try the office, sir,” said a small boy.
The fat man tried the office, and met Mr. Pumpelly in person.
“I have been waiting here for ten minutes.”
“Sorry, sir, no more petrol till this evening.”
“No petrol! I call it a scandal in a town like this. Up north—we know
how to do things.”
“You had better get back up north, sir,” said Mr. Pumpelly.
Millicent Hornblower and Tod had more than a glimpse of all this
stultified prosperity, and Tod stood on the opposite sidewalk, with his
hands in his pocket, and his eyes at gaze. There was a very distinct
block in the flow of Mr. Pumpelly’s functions. It was obvious that he
wanted more enterprise, more men, more accommodation.
“Do you see it now?” asked the voice of the girl.
Tod turned on her with a flash of his blue eyes.
“Taxis—a garage—of course!”
And then, in that public highway, he pinched Millie’s ear.
“You clever darling; you’ve got a head! Why didn’t I think of it
before?”