A week later Tod met Mr. Burgetrode.
He was standing with his hands in his pockets on the edge of a little
crowd of holiday folk who were watching a Punch and Judy show on the
beach below the parade. It was a Saturday afternoon, and Tod was alone,
so much alone that he envied that busy old Blackguard of a doll who
appeared to spend his life hammering other dolls with a stick. Mrs. Judy
had just been dealt with, and tossed into oblivion on the end of the
aforesaid stick. The crowd laughed, but Tod was frowning, frowning over
the problem that was eating into his vitals, his thoughts arrested by
the broad and human cynicism of the puppet show. The moral of the thing
was as old as time. This hook-nosed, hunchbacked scoundrel had studied
the philosophy of the big stick. The only doll who scored off him was
the clown, the merry fool who was never serious.
Mr. Burgetrode saw Tod before Tod saw Mr. Burgetrode, and Mr. Burgetrode
watched Tod while Tod was watching the puppet show. He had a complete
view of the young man’s “thinking” face, of his faded tie and clean
collar frayed slightly in the wash. Tod’s blue eyes were sullen and
unhappy; he looked hungry, and the food that he lacked was not bread and
meat.
Mr. Burgetrode edged his way to Tod’s side.
“Curious, isn’t it,” he said as though he had been talking to Tod for
hours, “that the only really successful person is the clown?”
Tod’s chin gave a jerk. He looked into “Old Mischief’s” lean brown face,
and then looked away again.
“It’s a puzzle,” he confessed; “what is success?”
“Ah, there you have me,” said Mr. Burgetrode; “I have been looking for
it all my life. People say I have found it. Have I? Now, a merely happy,
unserious animal like that clown——!”
They stood side by side till the show was over, very conscious of each
other, yet part of the crowd.
“Suppose we go and see the place where I sprained my ankle,” said the
big man with a sort of fantastic irrelevancy.
Tod turned with him.
“I’m back in Craggs’ office, you know,” he said with a sensitive boy’s
abruptness.
“I—did—know. I’m boxing you to-day, Tod, and I’m hitting hard. What
about these wasted years?”
“Is anything wasted?” said Tod.
“Never.”
“I’ve learnt things. I couldn’t have learnt them in any other way. But
it’s when you get tied up in them like a rabbit in a ferreting net.”
“The great thing is to try and avoid being a rabbit. It’s better to be
the ferret, better still to be the man who owns and sets the nets.”
“But why nets, sir?”
“You used the word yourself, young man. There always will be nets. Your
net may cover a rabbit hole or half a continent, but it’s there.”
“Seems rather hopeless,” said Tod.
“Not a bit of it. Think of that clown. If your birdcage is the whole
world, and the stars are just gold blobs on it, isn’t it big enough? The
moral is, don’t be a canary.”
“Canaries may be happy,” said Tod.
“Oh, happiness!” quoth Mr. Burgetrode with scorn. “What happiness is
there for man but doing things and trying to do them well? Does Nature
go round asking the canary if it is happy, or request the Hottentot to
inform her if the climate is just what he desires? Nature doesn’t care a
hang. She’s got bigger things to do. If we don’t please her she scraps
us.”
“That seems rather hopeless too,” said Tod.
“Nonsense. Nature is always doing things. She sets the nets for us; she
wants us to learn. Think about it, and you’ll see it must be so. You
talk about Nature being cruel. She’s not; she’s big; she can’t help
treading on people sometimes. You have trodden on lots of ants and
worms, my boy, and never known about it. As for calculating cruelty, men
beat her at it every time. Nature’s always at work, improving things,
trying a new world or a new sort of beast. I suppose she’s been trying
man, and he’s not done so badly. Who spun the fable about the Garden of
Eden, a man having to go out and work? Adam must have been a dull dog
till God set him digging. And there is a sort of modern fool who thinks
it would be rather fine and Utopian to get back to the workless, loafing
Adam. Nature will tread on such people; snuff ’em out, that’s all.”
They swung along the parade together, Tod having to step out to keep
pace with “the Tiger’s” long, agile legs. There was something
invigorating about walking with Mr. Burgetrode. He made you think of an
east wind blowing on a cold sunny morning. No sitting under a banyan
tree, no Oriental quietism for Mr. Burgetrode.
“We’re northerners,” he told Tod, “we’ve got to work or die. Nature’s
way, my man; she has shoved us up against necessity, just a whim
perhaps, as an experiment. She may think that the future is with the
Patagonians, and we’re one of her amusing side-shows, her after-dinner
jest. Who knows? Anyway, we are here, and there is plenty of good work
to do.”
“Some things might be done better,” said Tod.
“Well, do them better; don’t talk about it.”
“If it wasn’t such a dirty scramble for money——”
“Get money, and then you won’t abuse it; not too much money, mind you.”
“That’s all very well,” said Tod, “but it seems to me that if you’re a
sportsman, the mean people have you beaten every time.”
“Not always. And if it is so, it’s your own fault, the fault of Tod
Western, citizen, and every other Tod Western in the world. If all the
Tod Westerns got together and proceeded to sit on the heads of the
Semites; if every decent Englishman, instead of praying or grumbling,
daily kicked the rump of some commercial tout—well, things might
happen. The whole trouble began when we mixed up work and money. Work’s
the great necessity, the blood tax we have to pay to Nature. It’s no use
offering her a five-pound note.”
“What about the rich people?”
“They buy other people’s work, some of ’em. But don’t imagine, young
man, that because a man is rich he is a slacker. He may be one of
Nature’s vitalisers, and she pays him well, either with the joy of work
he does or the power she gives him. Do you think Nature cares twopence
about a goods-porter, so long as he is nothing but a goods-porter? She
treads on such people as you tread on an ant. Let them strike for ever
and ever. Nature says, ‘Work—you slave.’ There’s nothing of the
ca’-canny about Nature. She wants energy, movement, change, not a pair
of sulky hob-nail boots and a mouth that blabs the stuff out of the
halfpenny papers.”
“Then we are slaves?” said Tod.
“Just so long as we feel like it. Damn it, boy, the wide world is not a
bad playground, and even your plain sailor man can see a good deal of
it. You can’t get off the earth, you know, but Nature has given the best
of us a pretty long rope.”
“I’d like to see all men big,” said Tod.
“They have got to learn to be big first. You are never big without work.
Shove that in the mouths of the trade union bosses. I’ve worked sixteen
hours a day in my time.”
“But then you had brains,” said Tod.
Mr. Burgetrode laughed.
“We are getting personal, are we? And here are our old friends playing
golf just as usual, though the European situation is what the
journalists call threatening. Let’s sit down under this thorn bush.”
They sat down, Tod looking morose and puzzled.
“Life’s queer,” he said slowly. “One seems to get shoved into things
without any plan. Oh—I’m sick, sick of the whole business!”
Mr. Burgetrode lay flat, his hands under his head, his hat flung aside
on the grass. Tod saw that his eyes were closed, and that his face had
the flicker of a smile hidden somewhere.
“Why did you throw up the motor business?”
Tod frowned. It was news to him that Mr. Burgetrode knew anything about
Western’s Garage.
“I had to,” said Tod; “self-respect. I wanted to pay people before I
smashed.”
“Didn’t it pay?”
“It paid, but it didn’t pay enough. You see——”
“Extravagance,” said the great man tersely.
And Tod could say nothing. He began to suspect that “the Tiger” knew
everything that was to be known.
“I dare say it was my fault,” he confessed.
“One of the oldest faults on earth, Tod. I warned you. But you had to
fight your first fight, and get blooded—and beaten. Nature again. One
of her ways of eliminating weaklings. Well, what about it, now?”
“About what?” said Tod.
“Ambition, the man’s game, or office life in a sleepy, sea coast town.”
Tod’s eyes flashed. He sat with his chin in his fists, thinking.
“You mean that what you said to me that night in the hotel, about my
training for some big job?”
“Exactly,” said Mr. Burgetrode, sitting up and watching Tod’s eyes and
mouth.
Tod said nothing for nearly a minute.
“It was a mistake,” he said gruffly, digging one heel into the grass.
“Where was the mistake?”
“My marrying. I have never said so before to any living soul, but it’s
the truth. I’ve known it for months. She killed the last bit of love in
me last week.”
“How?” asked the big one softly.
“I—I wanted a kid,” said Tod. “I’ve been so lonely, and she wouldn’t do
it. I know it means pain and work for a woman, but, after all, what’s
marriage for?”
Mr. Burgetrode smiled.
“I’ve often wanted a kid, Tod,” he said, “but the want didn’t come to me
till I was old. I’d been too busy doing things. Supposing—you think it
over.”
“What about my wife?” Tod asked.
“Will she complain if your income doubles?”
“I don’t think so,” said Tod.
They walked back to Shaston, and Tod had tea at the familiar old Hotel
Majestic. He sat on the balcony of Mr. Burgetrode’s sitting-room, saying
little, but looking over the sea with eyes that had sighted the sails of
a strange ship rising above the horizon.
“I’ve got him,” said Mr. Burgetrode to himself; “I thought I should get
him some day.”
When Tod went back to his rooms at Tom Lavender’s, he found Millie
sulking over a book. He had promised to take her on the pier, and he had
forgotten all about it.
“Where’ve you been?” she asked suspiciously.
“Walking with a friend?”
“A man, I suppose?”
“Yes, a man I used to know years ago; met him by chance.”
He did not tell her that it was Mr. Burgetrode, and his wife thought
that he had been philandering with a girl.
Tod stayed up late that night talking to Tom Lavender. He wanted the
cool hand of Tom’s wisdom to touch him after that strenuous bout with
Mr. Burgetrode, and he developed to Tom all the vigour of the great
man’s creed of work and the joy of work. The lover of birds had no
selfish net to spread for Tod, though he was sadder than Tod knew at the
thought of losing him.
“It’s a great opportunity,” he said, “and opportunity’s a horse so few
men ever get a lift on. I’d take it, old chap!”
Tod lunched next day with Mr. Burgetrode.
* * * * *
Yet this plan of the great man was overset by circumstances that were
stronger than Mr. Burgetrode, and he—like Tod—was to be but a fierce
striving figure in the huge fresco of a world upheaval, a figure out of
the brain of Michael Angelo the great. Julian Burgetrode met the
inevitable, and smiled at it with some of the pride of a father. The man
he had chosen could but prove himself a man.
In the sunlight of an August morning these two met on the white steps of
the hotel; Tod with a deep light in his eyes and the tense fire of youth
touched with a new heroism; Mr. Burgetrode with the day’s paper in his
hand, and a kind of grimness about his mouth.
He looked at Tod, and he knew at once what Tod had come to say.
“Well, young Ajax?”
“I must go,” said Tod; “I wanted to come and tell you, sir. It’s right,
isn’t it, even if I have to throw up everything? I am going round to the
drill hall to sign on.”
Mr. Burgetrode held out a hand to Tod.
“Ajax couldn’t do anything else, boy. You’re right, utterly right. But
when you come back, I shall want you to come to me.”
“I’ll come,” said Tod, much moved; “but there’s just one thing.”
“Out with it, boy. What is worrying you?”
“My wife,” said Tod. “I have some money left, but it’s capital; and army
pay won’t keep a wife. If I handed you the money, sir?”
Mr. Burgetrode’s eyes had lost all their fierceness.
“I’ll see to your wife, Tod; she shan’t suffer.”
“God bless you, sir,” said Tod; “I don’t suppose I shall have much
trouble with the doctor.”
“But the Germans will with you,” said Mr. Burgetrode to himself. “Ave
triumphans, little Great Heart—and may thousands of the same breed go
with you. Why didn’t this happen when I was young!”