So Tod’s boyhood died. It just faded away and left him, and he hardly
noticed that it had gone, and that it lay in the grave of his dead
mother. With it had passed all that was fine and adventurous and free in
Tod, that light of the morning look, the spirit of the boy bathing in
the sea.
He was a preoccupied young man, sometimes with a frown on his face, and
an air of sulky puzzlement. The business had begun to be irritating; it
absorbed the whole of Tod, was never satisfied, kept him awake at night,
and yet—like a fractious baby—was none the better for all the
fussiness lavished on it. All sorts of exasperating things happened, and
they happened in a way that made Tod feel very angry and very helpless.
Tod had become commercialised. Delilah had shorn the young Sampson, and
he had become the slave of the Philistines. The curse of the
civilisation of the West was upon him, the superstition that man was
born to make things, sell things, and to accumulate money, that nothing
mattered but money. And Tod was getting himself tangled up in the system
just as thousands of other young men get entangled in it and come to
believe that modern commercialism has been and is and will be for ever.
“Carnarvon” drove him daily into the scuffle with little half-petulant,
half-wheedling cries.
“Oh, Toddy, we must have a Chesterfield sofa.”
Or “Clara Brown has got one of those new musquash coats.”
Display had meant expansion, and expansion had brought Tod into the
presence of the economic god—Competition.
Mr. Julian Burgetrode could have lectured Tod on the subject of
competition. He would have said that it was part of Nature, a heritage
inherent in man, even wrapped up in his subconscious soul. It was
emulation, virile pride, the spirit of adventure, the beads and feathers
of the amorous savage, the jewel in the hilt of the sword of the hero.
He would have told Tod that the wrong sort of people had got hold of the
competition spirit. In other days there had been the Competition of
Prophets, the Competition of Knights, the Competition of Poets, Painters
and Scholars, the Competition of Cities over something finer than a herd
of swine, the Competition of Builders in the soaring spires of their
churches. These were noble emulations, emulations that the commercial
man had trodden into the hog-wash of his sty. Mr. Julian Burgetrode had
a ferocious contempt for the purely commercial man, and for the spirit
of industrialism of nineteenth-century England. He had fought his way to
the summit of things, he was a great captain of industry, he had
explored the great barrack from cellar to roof. And that is what he
called it: “A barrack.” “It won’t last,” he wrote to an American friend,
“and if we try to make it last, it will come down and bury us. And I’m
not so sure that I shall not be one of the first to get at the rotten
brickwork with a pick.”
There were other sayings of Mr. Burgetrode’s that might have reminded
Tod of his own father.
“We have created another sphinx and another riddle. The industrial
revolution and our concentration on purely material things made us
overpopulate ourselves with a swarm of slaves. The slaves are waking up,
only to find that we are still the slaves of the god we have created.
Too many millions of people—and food to be got for all! Our materialism
is a chain round our necks. No wonder the Sphinx grins like a cynic.”
“Competition, yes—it’s necessary—as things are. It may be brutal and
sordid, but it is the plain man’s only defence against greedy
commercialists. These gentlemen have to use their knives on each other.
Thanks to competition, they cannot give all their attention to cutting
their pounds of flesh off the poor ass.”
“Trusts and Combines. There should be no trust or combine that is not
state-owned for the benefit of everybody. I would have all trust
magnates treated as highwaymen or pirates.”
“The joy in the job. We have got to get back to that, or perish.”
Tod Western was just beginning to butt his head blindly against all
these problems, like a young man who was conscious of obstacles—and
rivals. Man does a lot of butting before he learns to stand still, to
reflect and to think. Most men can do nothing but butt all their lives,
till Death comes behind and kicks them into oblivion. And Tod was
getting well down and into the thick of it; but he played fair; that was
his great disadvantage.
He was generous to his wife, and she wasted his money and worried him
with her petty extravagances.
He trusted Love his mechanic, and Love robbed him in ingenious little
ways that Tod was too big to notice.
He trusted his two new drivers, and they too robbed him, filching
petrol, tools and oil, for Tod was an “employer,” and there is a certain
sort of new citizen who thinks that it is his right to perpetrate any
meanness upon the man who employs him.
These were minor matters. Tod did not notice them, for his consciousness
was absorbed in sensing a vague obstruction that baffled the expansion
of his business.
He began to remark all sorts of queer things.
None of the leading hotels ever ’phoned to Western’s garage for a car.
He had been unable to get himself appointed as agent by any of the
bigger manufacturing firms, and he inferred that old Pumpelly had sucked
that melon dry.
Nor was Tod satisfied with the work his taxis did at the station. So
dissatisfied was he during the second summer that he played private
investigator, and made the curious discovery that the porters appeared
to hail a Pumpelly taxi before one of Western’s. His own drivers loafed
in their seats, and did not seem concerned over the possible loss of
fares and tips, but Tod saw that it was bad business if Pumpelly did
three journeys to his two. And Pumpelly’s cars were more smartly kept
than Tod’s; there was no doubt about it all.
Tod tackled his men. He was generous and hated accusing other men of
slackness, but he had yet to learn that there is a type of man that
responds only to necessity and fear.
“Look here, you chaps, I want you to be brisker. What about that dirty
radiator? Take out your cushions, Smith, and let’s have a look at them.”
Smith’s cushions were a disgrace, and he roused Tod’s bile by being
insolent over it.
“Look here, Smith, if you’ve got no conscience, find one, or I’ll sack
you.”
Smith found a lick-and-a-scrape apology for a conscience, but he made up
his mind to do Tod down. He was that sort of man.
Tod happened to be out on the London Road one evening, and he saw a big
new boarding standing on a bank above the road. It warned tourists to
Shaston that Pumpelly’s Garage was the best, and the only garage usable
by a gentleman who respected his car. In fact Mr. Pumpelly lifted his
leg over Tod and any other rival in the town. He was the leading agent
for everything; he kept expert mechanics, even a consulting engineer.
And Tod was annoyed.
He had an even larger board erected higher up the London Road, so that
Western’s should be read before Pumpelly’s.
About that time Tod had his first quarrel with his wife, and like most
first quarrels it was an absurd affair. Millie had indulged in some
particular bit of selfish extravagance, and the arrival of the bill
coincided with the rise in the level of Tod’s financial worries.
“It isn’t sport,” he told her hotly. “Haven’t I enough worry without
this gorgeous waste of money?”
Millie passed from sulkiness to a fine, ranting fury, and from fury to
tears, and the fool man was beaten when that dear dew ran down into her
red mouth. It was the first time she had used the device against Tod,
and he surrendered instantly on that occasion.
There was a reconciliation of sorts, and they sat on the sofa with Tod’s
arm round his wife’s waist, and he tried to explain to her that he was
puzzled and worried. And Millie was vaguely alarmed. She had regarded
the business as booming, and Tod had never hinted at the malign
influence that appeared to be checking its expansion.
“Of course it’s old Pumpelly,” she said.
“But there is plenty of room for both of us. I can’t see myself going
out to spoil another man’s pitch.”
Tod’s wife had far more cunning than her man, and far more of the
suspicious business spirit, the spirit that applauds honesty when
honesty happens to pay.
“It’s business,” she told him; “any fool could tell you that. I’ll find
out.”
She was as good as her word, and she discovered more in a week than Tod
would have discovered in a year. Intuition helped her, the intuition of
a young woman who had no false ideas on public morality, and who could
put a plump forefinger unerringly on the sore that was eating into
Western’s prosperity. Moreover, she had certain gossips and friends, and
among them the wives of the local station-master and of a manager of one
of the smaller hotels. They told her just what she had expected them to
tell her. It was all so simple and so obvious that she thought Tod a
fool for not having used the same methods of persuasion, and she was
amazed with him for his lack of “smartness.”
“You are a kid,” she said a little contemptuously; “you have got a lot
to learn, Toddy.”
“What’s wrong?” he asked good-temperedly.
“You don’t look after your own interests. Suppose you’ve gone round the
hotels?”
“I sent them my card.”
She tittered, a vulgar little expression of scorn.
“Your card! You ought to have gone and seen all the hotel porters.”
“What for?”
“Who rings up for taxis? Why, the hotel porters, of course! Old Pumpelly
tips them all, and that’s why he gets the orders.”
“I don’t believe it,” said Tod.
“Well, if you are so green as all that——! And I’ve found out that old
Pumpelly has a ten-pound note divided up among the station porters each
Christmas. You see, they are smarter than you each time.”
“It depends on how you look at it.”
“Does it? I thought you wanted to make the business a success! I
shouldn’t be surprised, too, if Pumpelly hasn’t got at your drivers.”
“What d’you mean?” said Tod, with the battle-light in his blue eyes.
“Bribes ’em to be slack and let you down. Don’t be so simple. What
you’ve got to do is to out-tip old Pumpelly. Go round to the hotels and
tip the hotel porters a quid a-piece. You’ll get orders, and it will
pay. And I’d sack Love and the others.”
Tod flared up as his father had flared up before him.
“Go round and bribe people! No, thank you. I’m hanged if I’ll do it.”
“You’re a fool,” she said tartly; “it’s money that counts.”