Mr. Charlie Britt, the nasty, dark, dapper little fellow, now junior
partner of the firm of Pumpelly & Britt, had set out to smash Western’s
Garage. He had no spite against Tod as Tod, but Britt was combative and
greedy, and he belonged to the cut-throat school of business men who
believed in showing no mercy, and in tolerating no rival, if that rival
could be eliminated. Charles Britt’s methods were the methods of the
garrotter. Even political economists have admitted that business is
non-moral and that the man who sets out to be nothing but a trader has
logic on his side when he shuts up his Sunday conscience in his safe and
uses his wits as a wrestler uses his cunning. But Britt was one of those
men who work in the dark. He met Tod once or twice and was particularly
pleasant and polite to him, and Tod’s nature was too generous and open
for him to suspect of deliberately fouling him.
Western’s Garage had a run of bad luck. Two of Tod’s taxis were out of
action during the summer’s busiest month, one with a seized engine, the
other with a badly broken back axle. Smith was the offender in the
matter of the seized engine, a deliberate offender perhaps, and Tod
sacked him, but the mischief was done. Then Tod had trouble with a
private owner whose car was said to have lost a couple of electric
headlights in Western’s garage. The owner was so positive and so
combative that Tod paid him the value of the headlights, but the
incident worried him more than the loss of the money. He hated
suspecting people, especially men who worked with and about him every
day of the week. He spoke to Love about it, and Love’s self-assurance
frothed like beer.
“I have an idea where they went all right. No, it wasn’t Sid Smith.
D’you remember a tourin’ car with a dirty little Belgian chofer—stayed
’ere two nights? I guess the Belgian had ’em.”
Tod had to be satisfied with that.
The hoped-for expansion did not develop, and Tod began to realise that
he was living beyond his means. He had his monthly payments to make to
the Semite of Wardour Street, and these payments competed with the
demands of “Carnarvon.” Tod saw that the obvious and sensible thing to
do was to cut down his domestic expenses, concentrate everything on the
business, and to bide his time.
He walked home one evening, having made up his mind that Millie would
have to economise, and for the first time since his marriage he found
himself driven into a critical attitude towards his wife. Something
within him foresaw a “scene,” and Tod hated scenes, and in hating them,
asked himself why they should be necessary. Surely it was his wife’s
duty to back him up, and not to pout those red lips of hers whenever he
tried to talk about money?
And suddenly he became aware of the stranger in his wife, a woman whom
he did not know. Tod had been very much the slave of the business during
the past year; he had met Millie across the table, behaved as the
natural man to the natural woman, and yet he felt that they had drifted
apart. He had glimpses of Millie as a golden-haired young woman floating
about in a blue or cerise-coloured knitted coat, playing tennis, eating
chocolates, reading cheap novels, gadding about to other women’s houses,
and receiving other women into hers. She was out a very great deal, and
knew people whom Tod had never met. There were phases of her life and of
her day of which he was completely ignorant; he had never troubled his
head about how she passed her time or where she went, not because he did
not care, but because the world seemed good when she was happy. Yet, of
late, there had been less sunshine at “Carnarvon,” less of that
rhapsodic childishness and those melting exclamations of “Oh, Toddy, how
lovely!” Clouds? Yes, Tod had been conscious of clouds, but he had not
realised their significance.
He left that serious talk till after supper, and then lighting his pipe,
began with the jocular air of a man who felt uncomfortable.
“I say, Old Thing, I want to have a talk with you.”
Millie was instantly on the alert. When a man pretends to be cheerful he
is about to speak on those horrid subjects, retrenchment and reform.
“Oh? What about?”
“The business and the house. Come and sit on the sofa.”
But Millie preferred to stay where she was, and to hold sentiment and
emotion in reserve.
“I knew you were going to be a sport, dear. The fact is we have had a
run of bad luck, and I have got to go easy until I have paid off old
Goldstein. What we must do is to live quietly until we have the business
solidly established, and all the cars paid for.”
Millie asked him a question.
“What’s living quietly? Aren’t we living quietly now?”
It was a flank attack, an ambuscade, and Tod was thrown on the
defensive.
“We seem to spend a lot. There must be some things we can cut out.”
“Supposing you tell me what they are.”
“You ought to know more about it than I do. Besides, I don’t want to be
mean, dear; but you ought to be able to help.”
She held aloof and left him the responsibility of suggesting economies,
knowing that she held Tod at a disadvantage.
“If you think I’m extravagant, I’d like you to say how I might do things
differently.”
“We seem to spend a lot on cakes and stuff like that,” Tod blurted.
“Couldn’t you make them at home?”
“With only one servant?”
“You might make them yourself, dear.”
“And my clothes, too, I suppose?”
“Some of them. Hang it all, it has got to be done, Old Thing. I’m saving
every penny I can in the shop.”
She regarded him coldly.
“Have you been round the hotels yet?”
“No, and I don’t mean to.”
She shrugged.
“There you are; it’s always the way; a man expects a woman to do all the
dirty work and the scraping.”
“Don’t,” said Tod. “Don’t talk like that, dear. It hurts.”
She had meant it to hurt, but she let him kiss her.
“All right; we’ll cut things down in the house, but don’t grumble
if——”
“I shan’t grumble.”
He didn’t, even though his wife advertised her economies, and served
them like a bad egg under his nose. Millicent’s theory was that if you
make a man uncomfortable and deprive him of his little luxuries, he will
develop energy and show a more aggressive spirit in the acquisition of
money. She cut off Tod’s egg at breakfast, served him up unsavoury sorts
of hashes, limited him to milk puddings, and warned him against wasting
the gas. She made herself a dress, a flagrantly ugly and dowdy dress,
and wore it like a martyr when Tod was there to see. Once or twice when
he came home in the evening he found her lying on the sofa and
complaining that she had a headache, and Tod was the tender husband.
“Poor wifey! How did it happen?”
“I’m tired. It’s the work in the house. I’ve been doing the washing.”
She had washed three handkerchiefs and a camisole; Bella—the maid—had
dealt with the rest. But Tod was impressed, and he accepted his reduced
rations and all the main discomforts of his wife’s economies, and he
never murmured. His patience and his good temper annoyed Millie. The
primitive woman in her would have had more respect for a man who got up
and raged, and then rushed out with violence to spoil his neighbour. She
did not understand Tod; she began to think him a fool.
But Millie’s personal economies were not prominent. She did not curtail
her own pleasures, her gossips and her gaddings about, the little social
excitements of which Tod knew nothing. She ate her sweet cakes at tea,
when Tod had a sloppy cup and a couple of dry biscuits at the shop; she
bought her chocolates, went to the theatre and the cinema, and ran bills
at the drapers. She did not wear that home-made dress on any of her
expeditions, and her vanity found Shaston seafront a mirror of delight.
Tod had friends in Shaston who were wiser in the ways of Western’s wife
than the husband who stood grimly to business in his garage. Mrs.
Western was “fast.” She was not fastidious, and not too proud to amuse
herself with “pick-ups” on the front, strange young men who were out for
the sex adventure during their holidays by the sea. Millie bathed. She
went to the beach concerts, and struck up an acquaintance with the funny
man of the troupe, a swarthy person with a look of sensual
self-assurance and a prominent lower lip. Millie thought him
“frightfully funny and so smart.” Also, he was rather deliciously bold
and gave her guilty thrills.
People noticed her. It was part of her tragedy that she could never
escape notice, with that red mouth and that shining head of hair. It was
not the girl’s fault. Nature had designed her to be a woman of pleasure,
a creature of strong appetites, and, provoking the same appetites in
others, richly coloured creature to be captured and embraced. In
Millie’s case it was marriage that was wrong. She was a provider of
pleasure, not for one man, but many.
Bob Twine had taken an interest in Tod’s marriage, and he was one of
those who beheld the ripening of Tod’s wife. Twine hated her as a man
often hates a woman when he has had his will of her and then sees her
fool his friend. Twine was a moocher, a “parade monger,” an expert in
his knowledge of “girls.” He avoided Millie, and yet held her in view,
and that roving soldier’s eye of his saw all that was happening.
Bob Twine had yet another man inside himself. He was a lovable
reprobate, amusing, cynical, generous, an admirer of the virtues that he
himself would not cultivate. He had an affection for Mossup and a clear
admiration for Mossup’s wife. “She’s straight,” that was all he had to
say of her, “and it takes something for a pretty woman to be straight.”
He went often to the Mossups’ cottage, and sometimes they talked of Tod
and Tod’s marriage, seriously and like good friends who wished Tod
nothing but happiness.
“The kid’s made a mess of it,” Twine confided to Mossup. “How do I know?
Because I’m a bad lot myself, and you want to be a bad lot to know
anything about women.”
“How about me, Bob?”
“You! You know as much about women as I know about the Bible. One of the
few good ones took you by the collar and you ought to be grateful.”
“I am, Twine, I’m very grateful,” and his weak eyes grew moist; “but do
you think that Tod’s wife is—is immoral?”
Twine gave one of his short laughs.
“Same as me. I can’t keep away from the women, old chap; they’re so
gorgeous. And Millie Western is just like me—with a difference. She
can’t keep away from the men, the men who can bite. But she’s a liar,
I’m not a liar.”
Arthur Mossup looked worried, and worry had tended to become a fixed
factor in his life during the last six months. Like Tod, he was
struggling in the world of unbridled competition, and the little
business was like a half stifled plant making a pathetic struggle to get
at the light and the public. Mossup was hard up, desperately hard up,
and Olive was expecting a baby. The good fellow was not only a much
harassed draper but a household drudge, and his wife adored him.
“Arthur’s such a dear,” she told Twine. “If only we could have a little
bit of luck!”
“You deserve it,” he said, and added savagely, “some day I’ll go round
with a red flag and a hatchet.”
He left half a sovereign in Mossup’s pocket after they had come near
quarrelling over that piece of gold.
“Take it, you silly blighter. What do I want it for? It would only be
thrown away.”
“You’re a good chap, Twine; you don’t do yourself justice.”
“Don’t I? You go and ask some of the girls.”
Now poor Mossup’s worries culminated in a crisis that caught his pale
pride shivering like a half starved saint in a winter wind. Olive had
given birth to a boy; she had been very near death in the anguish of
that night, and her husband had about five shillings in his cashbox.
They were in debt, too, to the tradesmen, and Olive wanted coal and
delicacies. Poor Mossup’s heart was sore.
Tod was smoking his pipe in his den at “Carnarvon” and reading a trade
journal, when he heard the door-bell ring. It was the maid’s evening
out, and Millie was posing on the sofa with one of her headaches, so Tod
went to the front door. He found Arthur Mossup standing there, a
melancholy figure in the raw murk of a November evening, his spectacles
wet with rain and his seedy old black mackintosh flapping open at the
throat.
“Hallo, Arthur! Come in.”
Mossup was nervous and confidential.
“Can I have a few words with you, Western—alone, I mean?”
“Come along to my den, old chap.”
The drawing-room door opened while Mossup was making a great business of
wiping his boots on the door-mat, and Tod’s wife came to see to whom Tod
was speaking in the hall. Mossup looked frightened directly she
appeared.
“Oh, it’s you!”
“Good evening, Mrs. Western.”
“Arthur has just strolled in for a chat. We are going to have a smoke in
my den.”
Tod carried him off, and Tod’s wife sat in the drawing-room and listened
to the sound of their voices. It was Mossup who did most of the talking,
and in a jerky, excited and yet apologetic way, Tod’s voice breaking in
sympathetically from time to time. Mossup did not stay long. Millie
heard the two men come into the hall, and Tod opened the front door
while Mossup was putting on his mackintosh.
“God bless you, Western, God bless you, old man.”
Poor Mossup gulped out his gratitude, made a blind grab at Tod’s hand,
shook it, and blundered out into the night.
Tod was the son of his father, and perhaps he remembered that evening so
many years ago when Mr. Jacks had taken away those crisp notes from No.
13 Spaniards Row. Tod turned back with a glow at the heart and found his
wife standing in the doorway of the drawing-room. Her part was to play
the part of Tod’s mother; but her hands were not the hands of Nancy
Western, but the greedy paws of a selfish and sensual young woman.
“What did he want?”
Her voice was sharp and suspicious.
“Olive has just had a baby, and the poor old chap’s hard up.”
“I thought he had sneaked in to cadge. You didn’t give him anything?”
“Of course I did,” said Tod.
“How much?”
“Ten pounds.”
“You fool!” she said, “you silly fool!”
She was furious, and her mean fury astonished Tod.
“Chucking money away like that, and then expecting me to scrape in the
house! You soft-headed idiot! He’ll never pay you back.”
“I don’t expect him to,” said Tod. “I suppose I can do what I like with
my own money.”
The glow had gone out of his heart, and there was a frost in his blue
eyes. He remembered suddenly how his mother had kissed his father on
that night. And the pride fell out of Tod’s enterprise, his pride in the
business and the home. He walked past his wife, slammed the door of his
den, lit a pipe and smoked furiously. The woman had revealed herself,
and the revelation was the beginning of Tod’s disillusionment.