Tod spent a week of his leave with Julian Burgetrode and then went to
Shaston. The town had a few pleasant memories for him, memories of Tom
Lavender, the Mossups, and of poor Kitty who was dead. He put up at the
Brunswick, a quiet hotel on the front, and spent his first evening with
Tom Lavender.
Old Lavender was the same tranquil soul, but he had aged, and his
clothes looked shabby, and the cuffs of his shirt were frayed. Tod
noticed these rather pathetic details, also a certain waxy whiteness of
his old friend’s face. Tod had seen that look in France—on the faces of
old Frenchmen who had not enough to eat.
“I can’t walk as I did,” Tom told him; “if I can get to Ashurst Wood I’m
satisfied. After all, you haven’t to go far to find beauty and a few
birds.”
“The beauty is inside you,” Tod said to himself, “and you ought to have
birds singing round your deathbed.”
But he contrived to sneak a secret interview with Mrs. Jelf, a Mrs. Jelf
who looked thinner and sharper about the face.
“Mr. Lavender isn’t well,” said Tod.
The old woman gave him an almost fierce look.
“If I could help it I would,” she said; “I can manage on potatoes and
porridge and tea, and a little bread and margarine. He’s proud—terribly
proud.”
Tod was shocked.
“Do you mean to say——”
Mrs. Jelf held his sleeve between a sharp forefinger and thumb. She was
on the verge of senility, but loyal to the last.
“He thinks I have meat,” she said with a cunning air, putting her face
close to Tod’s; “he thinks I have meat every day! Poor dear! I tell him
lies; I pretend.”
“So—he—has all the meat, Mrs. Jelf?”
“It isn’t much.”
Tod sat down and pulled out his pocket-book.
“He’s never got to know of this. You’ll promise?”
“He’ll never know,” said Mrs. Jelf; “I pretend I’m such a manager. He’s
just like one of his birds, you know.”
Tod handed her two five-pound notes.
“Money’s for use. I’ll send you something every now and again. Doesn’t
the shop pay?”
“It never did pay very much,” said Mrs. Jelf, “but then money never did
matter to him; he’s above money.”
And then she grew fierce again.
“And to see those sluts all dressed up and showing off their clothes on
the seafront! And the money some of the greedy beasts have been making!
It near drives me mad sometimes, and him—not enough to eat. I could go
out and pull the clothes off their backs, I could.”
“He shan’t go hungry in the future,” said Tod.
“You always was a sort of son to him,” said Mrs. Jelf, beginning to
weep.
It amused Tod to stroll round Shaston and look into the shops he had
known and register a second impression of some of the people who had had
the handling of his youth. He walked into Mr. Snape’s shop and bought a
dozen new razor blades. “Mr.-Any-think-Else” had disappeared, but Snape
was there more pink and polite than ever.
He did not recognise Tod.
“Be-ootiful weather for the time of year, sir.”
“Splendid,” said Tod, and he could not resist pulling Snape’s leg. “Do
you happen to keep Bartrup’s Consumption Cure?”
The chemist looked a little puzzled.
“We do stock it. Three-and-ninepence the bottle, sir.”
“Is it any good?”
Snape pursed up his lips. He did not think it wise to advertise the
stuff to an educated customer.
“Well, sir, of course, as you know, phthisis is a bacterial infection.
Bartrups contend that their mixture contains a specific remedy, some
particular drug——”
“It used to be just ipecac, and sugar,” said Tod, “and was dear at half
a crown. Three-and-nine, now, is it?”
Mr. Snape stared at him.
“Yes, three-and-nine. War price, sir.”
“The war has been very useful to a lot of people,” said Tod; “no, I
don’t want that rubbish. Good morning.”
He left Mr. Snape still staring, and raking his mental kitchen-midden
for some lost memory.
“Seem to have seen him before—somewhere. Fancy his asking for
Bartrup’s. Sidey sort of man. I don’t like these army chaps.”
Tod walked down Ponsonby Place and rediscovered the establishment of
Flowerdew & Rook. It had been enlarged, and had refined itself into a
very superior concern, showing you in one window a room furnished in the
Jacobean style, and another in which Sheraton was reproduced with
meticulous accuracy in all its details. The place was full of antiques,
beautiful old pieces of furniture, china, glass, Sheffield plate, and
some big trays full of exquisite enamels. A grey four-seater touring car
was standing outside the shop, and just as Tod strolled by, Rook came
out and entered the car.
Rook happened to glance at Tod, and recognised him. The two men stared
back at each other for a moment, but it was Rook whose eyes flinched and
shrank away.
“The Majestic,” he said to the chauffeur, “and hurry up, I’m late.”
Tod walked on.
“Rook has made money,” was Tod’s reflection, “and poor old Tom Lavender
hasn’t enough to eat.”
Tod was in search of the Mossup family, and the family proved elusive.
The old white cottage with its green porch and green front door had
passed into other hands. “We’ve bin here two years,” the old woman who
opened the door told him; “yes, Mossup was the name. A delikit chap that
kept a shop and was bankrupt. You might try Friday Street down by the
gas works.”
Tod tried Friday Street, appealing to a good-natured looking soul who
was scrubbing her steps.
“Mossup? The Mossups live in Love Lane. First on the right. It’s number
six, I think.”
Tod turned into Love Lane, a little black backwater of a street with the
great red gasometers towering over it, and a high wall blinding the
lower windows. No. 6 was one of about thirty tightly compressed houses
with a door and a window on the ground floor and two windows above. The
door of No. 6 was grained in imitation of some imaginary wood, probably
oak. The doorstep was clean, and the black door-knocker had just been
repainted.
Tod knocked.
A little girl of five opened the door. She had pale eyes, a white face,
and a scar on her neck where glands had been removed.
“Does Mr. Arthur Mossup live here?”
The child looked at Tod with solemn wonder.
“Yes, that’s Father. Father’s in the yard, sawing wood.”
“May I come in? I’m a friend of your father’s.”
“Yes, come in,” said the child.
Tod stepped straight into the front parlour, and Miss Mossup closed the
door. Tod heard sounds of activity coming from the back of the house,
the rasping of a saw, and then the sound of a man coughing.
“Supposing I go through?” he said to the child.
He was smiling, and when Tod smiled at children they smiled back at him.
“Yes, you may. I’ll take you to Daddy.”
She took hold of Tod’s hand, and her little fingers felt cold.
The yard at the back of the house was about twelve feet long and eight
feet broad—a respectable tank. Someone had built a small shed in one
corner, using old egg-boxes, and squares of tin cut from biscuit tins
for the roof. In the other corner lay a pile of old wood, bits of old
fence poles and posts. In the centre of the yard a man in shabby black
trousers and an old white sweater was sawing at a length of wood, using
a packing case with notches cut in it as a sawing-tool. The back of the
man’s neck looked thin and yellow. He was wearing carpet slippers, and
he had not shaved.
“Hallo, old man!” said Tod.
Mossup turned on him, an aged, shrewish, thin-haired Mossup, with the
eyes of a man who slept badly.
“Bless my soul!”
He flushed up in his old shy way, and reached for Tod’s hand.
“Heard you were some sort of big pot, now. How did you find out——?”
“By asking. And Miss Mossup——”
The child was watching Tod.
“Run away, Nan,” said her father, with sudden irritability, “we’re
busy.”
The child went slowly into the house, and Tod felt uncomfortable, cooped
up in this tank with a man who was so obviously sick in soul and in
body.
“Mind if I go on working, old man?” said Mossup.
“Not a bit. I’ll light a pipe. Do you smoke, Arthur? You didn’t use to.”
“Can’t afford it.”
Mossup turned to his sawing-stool. The saw was working badly; it wanted
sharpening and setting, but the man in the dirty white sweater struggled
with it with a sort of evil and angry patience. He got out of breath,
and the veins grew big on his forehead.
Tod felt still more uncomfortable.
“Good exercise, that,” he said.
“Saves a little money,” panted the sawyer. “I got this lot cheap, and
it’s cheaper than coal.”
He paused to rest.
“Drat this saw!”
“You’ve been ill, old man,” said Tod abruptly, forcing his way to close
quarters.
“Ill? I’m always ill. When the business broke——”
He resumed his sawing.
“I went back to Horrox’s. No good for the army. Then I tried
munitioning. Got bronchitis. Now I’ve always got bronchitis or
something. No good for work. Oh, damn this saw!”
His chest was heaving, his lower lip thrust out. Then he began to cough.
“Let me have a go,” said Tod.
He almost pushed Mossup aside. The man in the sweater stood and coughed
and panted.
“Must do something. Olive manages the millinery in a new shop in King
William Street. She works like a horse. Food’s so dear; it’s damnable.”
He caught hold of Tod.
“Ninepence for a loaf, Western, ninepence! And if I want a new pair of
boots——”
He began coughing again, and the cough smothered his anger. Tod went on
sawing, bending his head over it, the man in him shocked and hurt. Poor,
kindly, simple old Mossup! He had been such a good chap, and in his
place Tod saw this querulous, sick, soured failure, this pathetic thing
that could not bear to be watched by its own child.
“You want a holiday, old man,” he said softly.
“Holiday!”
There was a snarl in Mossup’s voice.
“This is a holiday. This rotten body of mine isn’t fit for anything
else. What holiday does Olive get? I’m just a household drudge, an old
woman; that’s all I’m fit for.”
“She doesn’t think so,” said Tod.
Mossup gulped something like a sob, and his voice became more human even
in its querulousness.
“It’s so humiliating, old man. If you only knew how I——”
He sat down suddenly on an old sugar box.
“She’s an angel, an absolute angel. And I’m—I’m a cantankerous,
snarling beast. I always feel sore in the head; I make her miserable.
It’s sordid; it’s horrible. I see it all, and yet—somehow—I can’t help
it.”
Tod could not bear it any longer. He left the saw standing in the notch
and turned to his old friend.
“Look here, old chap——”
“I never paid you that ten pounds, you know,” said Mossup quickly; “I
meant to.”
Tod’s eyes were almost angry.
“I gave it you,” he said. “Now, look here, old chap, are you seeing a
doctor?”
“What good’s a doctor to me? It’s my self-respect that’s ill. He can’t
physic that, can he?”
“But I know somebody who can.”
And then Mossup showed the hysterical and cantankerous temper of a weak
man whom life had humiliated.
“Yourself, I suppose?”
“Perhaps.”
“That’s it, that’s just it. You’ve been a success, Western. Your people
didn’t fit you out with a rotten body, and now you come swanking around
here making me look like a miserable fool before my wife. I won’t have
it! I tell you——”
“Old man, shut up.”
It was the soldier who spoke in Tod, the man who had the instinct of
authority.
“You are not going to talk like that, Arthur. Do you understand?”
Mossup looked at him vacantly. He thought that Tod was angry, and
anger—other people’s anger—frightened him.
“I didn’t mean——”
“You’re ill, old man; that’s what’s the matter. You want your strength
back, and then you want work.”
“No one wants me,” began the derelict.
“Shut up! I can get you a job in half an hour, directly you are fit for
it, and a good job. I happen to have been lucky. Now, I want you and
Olive and Nan to have dinner with me to-night—”
“But I haven’t got any——”
“Go in and shave,” said Tod, “or by George, old man, I’ll do it for
you.”
And Mossup went. A clean chin was the beginning of his recovery.
Tod hired a horse one morning and rode over to Pentworth. He stabled the
horse at The George and walked by way of Spaniards Row to the little
cemetery beyond the railway station. No. 13 was the same queer old
lovable lunatic of a house, but the shop had become a saddler’s, and
someone had cut down all the sooty laurels and aucubas where Tod’s great
snake had lived. Pentworth smelt vividly of his childhood. The northern
end of Spaniards Row was littered with the leaves of the great chestnuts
and elms, and it had the same damp perfume. Tod could picture the lights
beginning to blink out in the little town when the dusk came down like
fog from the sea.
Tod found the grass and weeds long and rank over the grave of William
and Nancy Western. He had written to a local florist and gardener about
the grave and paid the man a yearly fee for the keeping of it. Tod was
hurt and angry, and he called at the florist’s shop on his way back to
The George.
The proprietor was a surly, off-hand, take-it-or-leave-it sort of
person.
“Can’t get the labour,” he said. “We’ve had something better to do than
bother about graves.”
“Is that so?” said Tod. “We’ve been rather busy, too, out there. But you
took the money, didn’t you?”
The man blustered.
“What money?”
“I paid you by cheques,” said Tod, “and I happened to notice that the
cheques went through the bank. That grave hasn’t been touched.”
“You can have the money and you can get out of my shop,” said the man.
“Because you’re a colonel or something you needn’t think——”
Tod looked at him very steadily.
“I’m not going to make a row with you about that grave, but I shall call
on the rector and tell him to expect a cheque from you and that he can
use it as he pleases. Will you have it that way, or shall I put the
matter into the hands of my lawyers? I call it fraud.”
And quite suddenly the man became polite.
“You needn’t be so rough about it, sir. I’ve been worried to death what
with labour and prices. I’ll look up the amount.”
“Right,” said Tod; “don’t forget. And I think you will send a man down
to cut that grass.”
“To-morrow if possible.”
“To-morrow? I think I may be in Pentworth again to-morrow. Good
morning.”
Tod had an early lunch at The George and rode back to Shaston, touching
at Burnt Farm on the way. He found Uncle Remus in bed—the old man had
been hemiplegic for a year—and the carter’s wife looked after the house
for him, her husband managing the farm. The woman, a very decent and
quiet little body, was glad of a talk to Tod.
“He’s that trying and cantankerous,” she said, “that me and my man
wouldn’t stay here if we hadn’t worked for him all these years. He’s
always thinking we are after his money.”
Uncle Remus had his iron bedstead by the window where he could look out
on the farm. There was no fire in the room and no carpet on the floor,
and the old man’s grey head and bluish face contrasted with the red
coverlet on the bed.
Uncle Remus was senile, and yet the one great inspiration of his life
still dominated him. He was pleased to see Tod, and he crowed at him
like a baby.
“What’s them things on your sleeve, Nephew?”
Tod had drawn a chair beside the bed. Uncle Remus had withdrawn one claw
of a hand from under the clothes, and was fingering Tod’s sleeve.
“That means I’m a colonel, Uncle.”
“A colonel!” And Uncle Remus opened his pale eyes very wide. “Ain’t we
grown? And you killed plenty of Germans?”
“A few.”
“What’s them bits of ribbons?”
He passed a wavering forefinger across Tod’s chest, showing a child’s
desire to touch and finger things.
“Medals I have won, Uncle.”
“My!” said Uncle Remus. “You must have killed lots of Germans! Little
Tod Western grown up to be a colonel! I’m proud of the boy.”
And then he grew cunning and sly, leaning over and leering at Tod and
taking him by the sleeve.
“I’ve left you all my money, every bit of it.”
“It’s very good of you, Uncle Remus.”
“Come here; I don’t want to speak loud. I’ve saved four thousand pounds.
You’ll get it.”
He swung back in the bed and sat looking at Tod with an air of sly
exultation.
“What d’you think o’ that?”
“I think I’d like you to have a fire in your room, Uncle.”
“Fire! What do I want with a fire? Four thousand pounds! Worth more than
a row of ribbons, my boy, though I won’t say I ain’t proud of ’em. I’m a
warm man; I don’t want no fire.”
He bent forward again, tapped Tod on the knee, and pointed to the floor.
“She thinks she’s going to get some of it,” he said, with an attempt at
a wink.
“Who? Mrs. Dodds?”
“She comes purring round me like a cat. I let her think I’ve left her a
hundred pounds.”
“And haven’t you?”
“Not a farthing!”
And Uncle Remus crowed and rocked in the bed as though he had
perpetrated the great jest of his life.
“Not a farthing! I’ll be even with her for trying to fool me. Uncle
Remus wasn’t easy to fool, was he, my boy?”
“No,” said Tod, thinking that if the old man’s money came to him, Mrs.
Dodds should have her hundred pounds, and that Tom Lavender and poor old
Mossup would not be the poorer.
He said good-bye to Uncle Remus, promising to come over and see him
again, and made westwards into the red glow of a winter sunset. From the
high ground above Redling he could see the sea, the sea that lay between
him and France. Tod’s thoughts were in old Picardy, in that village not
far from St. Valery at the mouth of the Somme, that village where Claire
Vignard taught in the school.
A great restlessness came upon him, a sense of something precious
slipping out of his life while he remained silent, waiting. Matters were
going forward; Julian Burgetrode’s lawyers asserted that the case was
beautifully simple—a mere bit of legal machinery. And yet——
“I wonder if I might write to her?” said Tod.
A voice within him answered, “No.”
Perhaps some Frenchman had returned to Myonville, and Claire was happy
and forgetting? Tod set his horse at a canter, his blue eyes staring
straight into the sunset.
“I wonder?” he said to himself.
And then:
“Why shouldn’t I write to Josephine? I’ll tell her not to breathe a word
of it to Claire.”
He wrote to Josephine Lorellard that very night.
Four days later he was back with his division in Belgium, schooling
himself to face the months ahead of him and the coming of his liberty.
In March Tod was demobilised. Julian Burgetrode met him on Folkestone
pier.
“You will be free in two months or so,” he said to Tod.
Tod said nothing.