PART ONE (continued 2)

“Why, have you got one?”

“Yes. Young Tod Western, my dead niece’s son. He’s leaving Chipperton’s school in a month or two. He’s a good boy, strong and healthy, and he’ll have a thousand pounds when he comes of age.”

Eli Flowerdew frowned at his boots.

“I could do with a boy in the shop to help Rook. But he’d have to be quick and nippy, and have nice manners. We get a lot of women in; you know, people with style.”

“Tod’s got very good manners,” said Uncle Remus, “and he’d learn what solid business was with you, Eli.”

“If I like the look of the lad I’ll take him. I’d give him his board to start with, and then pay him as he shaped.”

Uncle Remus grew quite animated.

“Why, that’s an offer, a generous offer. It just entered my head sudden-like, and I hadn’t thought about it one way or the other. The boy’d learn the business, and some day he could start on his own, or you might go so far as to take him in, with that little capital of his.”

“I might,” said Mr. Flowerdew guardedly, “supposing I see the boy?”

Tod happened to be at Burnt Farm for the half-term holiday. He was found by Uncle Remus and sent up to put on his Sunday suit and a clean collar. The farmer was solemn and mysterious about it.

“I’ve opened a new furrow for you, young man. Here’s Mr. Eli Flowerdew, one of the leading men at Shaston, ready to take you in and teach you his business. It’s a favour to me.”

“What’s the business?” asked Tod.

“We’ll talk about that later. Mr. Flowerdew wants a young chap with good manners. Don’t you forget to put on that clean collar.”

So Tod was introduced to Mr. Flowerdew, a tall man who held himself very straight, and had a sharp, red-brown face and blue eyes that made you think that he was angry. There were three deep lines on Eli Flowerdew’s forehead, lines that ran down and met at the root of his nose; the skin between those lines used to bulge and grow red when anything annoyed him. Tod noticed that he had a little greyish tuft of hair on his chin; his lips looked too small to cover his teeth, so that his lips appeared tight and stretched. When he smiled he showed his fangs like a dog, and those teeth of his were long and crowded together, and all yellow.

“Here’s young Tod, Eli.”

Mr. Flowerdew held out a hand.

“So this is Tod. How are you, young man?”

“Very well, thank you, sir.”

The “sir” settled it. Tod was of no serious importance to Mr. Flowerdew. The boy was not an oaf; he had an intelligent face, and looked well grown and strong. Also he seemed a little shy and impressed. All boys were much the same to Mr. Flowerdew; he hated the whole genus, and his attitude towards them was that of a ferocious dog.

“Seems a quiet sort of boy,” he said when Tod had been inspected and dismissed.

“Takes after his mother. Mr. Chipperton, of Pentworth, thinks a lot of the lad. He ain’t over quick at his lessons, but they tell me he has character.”

“I hope he is a religious boy, because if I take him into my family——”

Uncle Remus side-stepped with great adroitness.

“He ain’t a lad as is always after the girls.”

“I’ll take him,” said Mr. Flowerdew, and he also took the pewter at a price that was very acceptable to Uncle Remus.

About a month later the farmer drove Tod in his market cart over to Shaston-on-Sea, and left the lad and a little old leather trunk at the house of Mr. Eli Flowerdew. It was a tall, serious-looking house in Ponsonby Place, a house that still seemed to be worrying over the fact that the lower part of its front had been turned into a shop. It stood abashed under the eyes of the house across the way, a house that retained the title of a “gentleman’s residence,” a swanking, arrogant sort of house with a lot of white and green paint, brass-work and bright curtains. A doctor lived there, on the sunny side of the street. Eli Flowerdew’s house had its face in the shadow. It looked smutty and depressed. Its back view was a little more cheerful and prepossessing. There was a strip of garden that ended in a shrubbery, and from the top windows you could see the sea.

It was a very grey sea that day. Summer had lost itself for a week, and a south-west wind played Pan-pipes with the chimney-pots, and drenched Shaston with occasional scuds of rain. Tod’s stomach felt empty. His uncle had dropped him at the door of Flowerdew’s shop, and driven off to dodge the rain-storms.

Tod found a supercilious and cold-eyed young man in the shop. He wore rimless pince-nez, and had a suave but brutal mouth.

“Hallo, what do you want?”

“I’m Tod Western,” said Tod, lugging that portmanteau of his through the swing doors.

“Oh, you are, are you! Get that thing round the back. This isn’t a pawnshop.”

The young man went back to a desk in a far corner, and left Tod to guess what “round the back” meant. He was more depressed than annoyed by the young man’s indifference.

“Not that way. Door on the left. And mind the table with the china on it.”

Tod and his portmanteau bundled themselves into a dismal passage hung with old prints. He saw a flight of stairs covered with linoleum, and a landing window at the top, and he was hesitating whether he should climb the stairs when a voice descended on him.

“Who’s that?” It was a sharp, shrill voice, a voice that was made for the harrying of servants.

“It’s me,” said Tod inelegantly.

A figure followed the voice, the figure of a girl with a lot of fluffy hair, and a face that made Tod think of the face of a horse.

“What do you want? That’s the way into the shop.”

“That chap sent me here. I’m Tod Western.”

The girl stared at him. She was extraordinarily like her father, and had the same hard eyes and ugly mouth.

“Oh, it’s young Western, is it? Your room’s right at the top. Looks out on the street. You’d better carry that thing up, and don’t you mark the paint.”

Tod had not the heart to ask Miss Lena Flowerdew for any further directions. He discovered his room by using the method of trial by error, butting first into an apartment that was obviously feminine, and backing out with great briskness. His own room was a dingy little tank with a stain on the ceiling and a strip of old red stair carpet down the middle. The chest of drawers and the washstand had once been yellow, but some enthusiast had streaked them over with a coat of cream paint. The chest of drawers wobbled on three legs, and was an article of severe virtue, all its drawers showing a great unreadiness to open to Tod’s blandishments. There was a text over the bed which cried, “God bless our Home.”

When Tod had distributed his belongings he sat down on the bed and felt acutely miserable. This heartache was reinforced by an attack of sensitive shyness, a panic mood that held him tied to his room. He did not know whether he ought to go downstairs; he felt that he would be sure to arrive in the wrong room. Moreover, he did not think he wanted to meet Miss Lena Flowerdew again, until fate or hunger brought them together.

Tod sat down for an hour, quite ready to blubber in spite of his seventeen years, wishing himself back at Burnt Farm, anywhere but where he was. He had thoughts of making a bolt for it, but that poor old brown portmanteau appealed against desertion. The thing had belonged to his father.

And then Tod heard someone coming up the stairs. The footsteps paused outside the door, and someone knocked.

“Hallo,” said Tod.

Tod had never been called Mr. Western before, and the title sent a thrill through him. Moreover, the voice was quite a different sort of voice from that of Miss Lena Flowerdew. It was gentle and soft, and rather deprecating.

Tod got up and opened the door, and found a girl standing there, a shy girl with dark eyes, brown hair, and a quick colour. She looked fragile and pretty, and not much older than Tod.

“Good afternoon,” he said.

“Tea’s ready. We have it at five.”

“Been unpacking my things,” he explained, blushing.

Her brown eyes smiled at him, the first gleam of human sympathy he had caught in that house.

“I’m Kitty.”

“My name’s Tod, short for Todhunter, Miss Flowerdew.”

“It’s quite a nice name,” she answered, “I’ll show you the way down.”

She did more than that, for she saved him from being overwhelmed by the solemnity of the Flowerdew tea-table. Mr. Flowerdew was drinking tea as though he had to catch a train. He showed his teeth at Tod in what was meant for a smile.

“Sit down, Western. My two girls, Lena and Kitty. Mr. Rook—my assistant. Pass the butter, Rook will you.”

Tod sat down next to Kitty, and was given tea by Miss Flowerdew. She also pushed a tin of sardines towards him with perfunctory suggestiveness, and Tod felt that she was watching how many he took. Edwin Rook eyed him all the while with cynical curiosity. Mr. Flowerdew took no more notice of him at all. It was Kitty who saved him from utter demoralisation and from choking himself over his tea.

She cut bread for him.

“Have some jam, Mr. Western.”

Tod had jam, lots of jam. He began to think that he liked Kitty Flowerdew very much indeed.

Chapter Seven

The town of Shaston-on-Sea had shaped itself very much like the Nile, that Lily of the Desert with its flower-head on the sea and its stem trailing towards the equator. Shaston had flowered along the seafront in solid masses of white Georgian and grey stuccoed Victorian houses, and the Edwardian red villa craze had coloured the fringe of its petals a hard red. The high, commercial part of Shaston lay in the calyx of the flower, grouped about King William Street that joined the seafront to the stalk of the town, and there the simile ended. The Georgians had planned solidly and well, but the commercial individualists who had followed them had been men in a hurry to make money. The haste and the hideousness of it showed everywhere in the long valley behind the town. Bricks and stucco and slate had been slopped down in great yellow puddles that had trickled and met and intermingled till the ugliness was complete. There were rows upon rows of flat-faced, wall-eyed houses, crowding back to back with miserable little spaces, called “gardens,” between them. The creators of this base, cynically cheap rubbish heap may have taken Bermondsey or Bethnal Green as their models. Some sardonic humorist had flung names about. Blackberry Hill, Alsatia, Bilson’s Bottom, Rope Alley, Mug’s Lane, Victoria Road, Sea View Terrace. All this nastiness was within two miles of the Whiteholt beech woods, and less than a mile from the sea.

Tod Western accepted Shaston-on-Sea as a healthy boy accepts his dinner. It was there, on the plate, waiting to be eaten, and Tod swallowed it with relish, not yet having arrived at that analytical stage when a man worries about his proteids, fats and carbohydrates. The place was new to Tod, and full of life and mystery. Mr. Flowerdew let the lad out every afternoon the first week, not from any wish that Tod should enjoy life, but rather to let him satiate himself with Shaston.

“Let a boy gorge himself with strawberries and he’ll give up wanting them.”

Tod explored Shaston from the fashionable quarter of St. Margarets in the West to certain picturesque slums called “The Shingles” and “Red Ruin” that lay under the shadow of the White Cliff. He went on the pier, tried the various penny-in-the-slot machines, listened to the band, went for a sail in one of the pleasure yachts, roared with laughter at Punch and Judy, got up early and bathed and made friends with a swarthy young man from Horrox & Horrox’s drapery establishment who promised to teach him to swim. This Mr. Robert Twine appeared to find Tod very breezy and refreshing. He was always calling him “You kid” or “You jolly green apple.” Tod was green, healthily and innocently green. He accepted life, and he accepted Shaston, putting his penny in the slot of each day and getting his chocolate or his nougat.

At the end of a week he was whole-heartedly in love with Miss Kitty Flowerdew. She was a shy girl who had gathered up her brown hair and lengthened her skirts less than six months ago, and whose prettiness was the prettiness of a soft dark pansy. She played the piano, and sang in a pleasant, bird-like way, such songs as “The Carnival,” “Good-bye” and “Annie Laurie.” She was religious, going to the weekday services at St. Jude’s, and never missing early communion on Sunday.

Tod fell into such depths of shyness in her presence that he became very slow over his meals, and was always late for pudding. His adoration gazed and gazed, and might have gone on gazing in the same blind and devoted way had not Miss Lena Flowerdew taken it in hand.

“Wake up, moon-calf.”

There was nothing soft or subtle about Lena Flowerdew. She was as ready to rend Tod’s feelings as though they were calico, and she had no love for her sister Kitty.

Mr. Rook, who had dinner and tea with the family, seconded her in de-romancing Tod. Tod did not understand Mr. Edwin Rook in those early days. The fellow was always quizzing him in a sneering, cold-blooded sort of way. He was particularly witty if Mr. Flowerdew happened to be absent.

“Mind you don’t fall into it, Western.”

“Fall into what?” asked Tod.

“Your plate, of course. You ought to look where you’re going.”

Tod glared and blushed, while Miss Flowerdew gave a snigger.

“Expect to see them rolling round the table any moment. Sure they are in tight, Western?”

“What d’you mean?” and Tod glanced at his buttons.

“Why, your googlies, old chap, those nice, round marble eyes of yours.”

“Shut up,” said Tod.

Kitty would look uncomfortable and a little frightened, and Tod began to suspect that she was afraid of her sister. He noticed too that she hardly ever looked at Edwin Rook, but that Edwin Rook often looked at her. He stared at her in a way that puzzled Tod, his lower lip thrust out, his pale eyes all big and funny behind his glasses. And once Tod happened to glance at Lena Flowerdew when Rook was looking at her sister in that way, and the elder girl’s face shocked Tod. It was a face of evil hatred, jealousy and scorn, the nostrils pinched and sneering, the mouth thin and cruel, with its lips stretched tight over Miss Flowerdew’s prominent teeth.

Quite a number of things began to puzzle Tod.

Why was Kitty Flowerdew so utterly unlike her father or her sister?

Why did Lena Flowerdew hate Kitty? The elder girl was very much the mistress of her father’s house. She was capable, hard, domineering; she managed the housekeeping, bullied the little general servant, and paid the bills. Her voice dominated the place, and the only person whom she feared was her father. Tod often heard her sneering and gibing at her sister. She had the most sarcastic, virulent tongue; the tradesmen’s boys hated her. Tod had caught Kitty with wet eyes, and had felt her brush past him in a hurry, and he more than suspected that Miss Flowerdew was responsible.

Edwin Rook puzzled him; he was such a cold fish, such a queer, sarcastic beast. He showed extraordinary suavity to anyone entering the shop, and talked with a glibness that fascinated Tod. Rook’s real self came to life again when the customer had returned to the street. He used to indulge in little snarling phrases.

“Good day, Mrs. Snobson. Vewy enervating wevver to-day, what! Yes, we have—ah—a wig-table—ah—don’t ch’you know. Quite the recherché article—ah—yes. Shall we—ah—pack it in cotton-wool—ah—and dispatch it to you—madam—in a van—ah?”

As a rule he was more terse and bitter.

“Dirty shoppies, that’s what we are, young Western, and don’t you forget it.”

“Fleeced the old fool that time! Good biz!”

“Bargains? We bargain ’em. We stuff ’em in worm-holes, or send ’em to Birmingham.”

Tod was almost equally puzzled by Mr. Eli Flowerdew. There appeared to be three Mr. Flowerdews—the Flowerdew of the shop, the Flowerdew of the house, the Flowerdew of the Sabbath. The Flowerdew of the shop was bland, obliging, persuasive, spouting a Sheraton and Sheffield plate jargon that Tod had yet to learn. The Flowerdew of the house scolded, made a noise when it drank, sucked its teeth, was vulgarly hard and overbearing, kicked the cat, was greedy at meals. The Flowerdew of the Sabbath came down to breakfast in a very bad temper, put on a frock coat and a top hat, went to church as though its nostrils were closed against the smell of original sin, acted as church-warden with an air of severe serenity, called itself a “mis-er-able sinner,” came home to a hot dinner, slept on the sofa with a handkerchief over its face, had tea, went to church again, sang “Rock of Ages,” and spent the rest of the evening working out the week’s profits. There was yet another and more compact edition of the Sabbath Flowerdew that was issued on Wednesday evenings. It appeared at the meeting of the local Social Purity League, a very fastidious Flowerdew, one of the lily-white angels who guarded Shaston’s honour.

Tod spoke of his puzzlement to that new friend of his, Bob Twine. They had just splashed back from the sea, and were drying themselves on the shingle.

“Can’t make old Flowerdew out at all,” said Tod

“What’s worrying you, kid?”

“He’s such a rum mixture. I go to church with them, you know.”

Bob Twine chuckled. He was a rather farouche young man who had been born and bred in Shaston.

“Six days with the devil and one with God! Do you know old Flowerdew killed his wife?”

“What!” said Tod with horror. “You’re rotting.”

“No, I’m not. He made life so sweet for her that she went off her head and drowned herself.”

“Good Lord!”

“Yes, just about here. That second girl of hers is just like her.”

Tod scratched a bare leg and stared at the shingle.

“But how’d you know?”

“My mother told me.”

“But he goes to church,” said Tod, “and he’s great at those Christian Purity Meetings, or whatever you call ’em.”

“Oh, chuck it!” quoth Mr. Twine, “the society for getting searchlights fixed on the pier to prevent a man kissing a girl on the beach after dark.”

Tod’s last puzzlement was provided by the shop and warehouse. He was taking the business seriously, and living in a chaos of old books, oak chests and gate-legged tables, Chippendale chairs, Sheraton sideboards, Boule tables, bureaux, pictures, prints, old china, pewter, Sheffield plate, Toby jugs, grandfather clocks, brass candlesticks, warming-pans, mirrors, fire-backs, dogs, Dinanderie, Dutch tiles, knife boxes, fenders, wine coolers, samplers in frames, old pistols, blunderbusses, candelabra, Oriental plates, tall-boys, Welsh dressers. It was all very queer and confusing. Nothing seemed to have the value which you would have expected it to have. Ladies of obvious wealth and intelligence came in and paid what seemed to Tod absurd sums for ugly little pot sheep and spotted cows and snuff-boxes, and shabby old worm-eaten chairs. Tod noticed too that the prices varied most queerly. Old Flowerdew and Mr. Rook seemed to have a game of their own, a game of which Tod was destined to learn the rudiments.

Mr. Flowerdew had urged him to play the shadow to Edwin Rook.

“Knowledge is money, Western, especially in a business such as this. Rook’s worth double what he was when he came to me.”

Rook was no very willing instructor, and he did not like Tod, but necessity and Mr. Flowerdew persuaded him to part with a portion of his knowledge. He tried to teach Tod the elements of value in the world of Wardour Street, and he advised Tod to specialise in old books.

“You take that catalogue of Porteous’s and mug at it on your spare time. Then you’ll know what to watch for and how to grab a prize when the chance comes. I’ve got enough to do without bothering about books.”

Tod was expected to familiarise himself also with the prices of the various articles in the shop. Rook started him on furniture, and used to hold a daily viva-voce examination, running Tod from Sheraton card-tables to Jacobean chairs. Tod found it rather amusing, and would have found it more so if Rook had not been such a cold-blooded beast. He had a suspicion that Rook had never wanted him in the shop, that he was jealous of him for some reason or other, and Tod wondered why.

As for his love affair it continued to be rather shy and tentative. He had given up spilling his devotion over the tea-table, largely because he had realised that Lena Flowerdew and the shopman were ready to use it as a weapon against Kitty. And Kitty herself gave him a shy hint.

“Tod——”

She called him Tod now.

“Yes——”

“I wish you wouldn’t look at me so much at meals.”

Tod flared scarlet.

“Sorry—I—I didn’t know I did. Of course—you wouldn’t like it.”

She looked at him quickly, approvingly.

“No, it isn’t that, Tod. But Lena—Lena is so quick-tempered.”

“She’s a yellow-faced cat,” said Tod, “but I’d do anything in the world you asked me to, Kitty.”

Her soft face flushed prettily.

“I think you would, dear.”

So Tod became a model of discretion and of chivalry. There were moments when Kitty Flowerdew reminded him of his mother, especially in the quick way her eyes lit up, in the soft wave of her hair, in the poise of her head when she was working or reading a book. But Kitty Flowerdew lacked Nancy Western’s strength. She was what our fathers called a “sweet creature,” sensitive, pliant, easily frightened or suppressed. She was afraid of her sister, and she was also afraid of Edwin Rook, but she had no fear of Tod.

Tod had five shillings a week pocket-money, the sum that Uncle Remus allowed him out of his yearly £40, and nearly all Tod’s pocket-money found itself being spent in Kitty’s service. He bought her sweets, flowers, little bottles of scent which she did not dare to use, because scent always exasperated her father. Her mother had used it.

“Faugh! I won’t have these loose and filthy habits in my house.”

Once or twice she let Tod take her to a concert on the pier, going with him quite publicly, but not advertising the adventure to the family. The lad was very much in love with her, and behaved to her always like a shrewd and big-hearted man. His boyish pride and delight in her would have touched a few harder hearts than Kitty Flowerdew’s. There is no doubt that she loved Tod in her shy and rather frightened way, liking his sturdiness, his brown and intelligent head, and his eyes that always looked at you as straight as the eyes of a dog, but she was afraid of her father and her sister, and she was afraid of Edwin Rook.

“I say, how pretty you look.”

“Do I?”

“You’ve got such wonderful hair, Kitty.”

“I don’t think you ought to tell me I am pretty,” she would say, with a secret and half guilty thrill.

“But it’s the truth. You are.”

Tod went to church with the Flowerdew family, and sat between Kitty and her father. He had always loathed churchgoing, but even the dismal St. Jude’s at Shaston was made mysterious and beautiful by Kitty’s presence. He loved to kneel beside her, feel the soft rustle of her clothes, and listen to the murmur of her voice when she joined in a public prayer. He would cast furtive and devoted glances at her soft profile; she charmed him particularly when her eyes were closed, and her long dark lashes made sweet and gentle shadows on her cheeks. He almost forgot Mr. Flowerdew, and the aggressive voice that insisted on reminding God that he was a “mis-er-able sinner.”

An incident that occurred late in the autumn taught Tod to look at life and Kitty Flowerdew with a new alertness. They had arranged to meet one Saturday afternoon and to walk along the cliffs to Melling Gap. It was one of those innocent little conspiracies so dear to the hearts of a boy and a girl, and had Tod been challenged to account for it to the Pharisees of Shaston he might have flared into that fighting mood that dares prurience to come out into the open.

It was one of those tranquil autumn days and they were sitting on a rough seat under a windblown thorn tree not far from the edge of the cliff when a man, who was strolling along the path, stopped and looked hard at them. He stood there at their backs for fully a minute, grinning now and again, but not with pleasure. He was about to walk on again, when Tod happened to look round and so discovered his presence.

“Hallo; it’s Rook!”

Kitty Flowerdew went white, and remained still and motionless for a moment like a startled bird. Tod felt her shrink from him in a queer, frightened way.

“Hallo, Rook.”

The shopman grinned maliciously at Tod.

“Thought you were cycling to Pentworth?”

“Did I say so?” asked Tod.

“Mind you don’t fall over that cliff after such a whopper.”

Tod stood up, with a red face, but Edwin Rook walked on.

“Tod——”

He glanced at Kitty and saw a blackness of fear in her soft eyes.

“He’ll tell, Tod.”

“Let him. What’s the harm?”

“Oh, you don’t understand, dear,” she said.

Chapter Eight

Tod never knew when Edwin Rook blabbed of the affair at Melling Gap. He did not see the man again till the Monday, and Rook went discreetly about his business while Mr. Flowerdew was in the shop. There was a sale at a house in Virginia Gardens, at eleven, and Mr. Flowerdew had decided to attend it in quest of possible bargains.

Tod was extricating some books from under a mahogany sideboard when a man’s hand struck him a resounding whack from behind.

“Hallo, Don Juan!”

Tod faced round. He had never known Rook to indulge in playfulness, and there had been a vicious sting in that smack.

“Chuck that!”

“Well, Don Juan, how’s life?”

“What d’you mean?” said Tod.

Rook looked at him in a queer, mocking way, and began to rearrange some china.

“Don’t be a young fool, that’s all,” he remarked suggestively.

Tod was getting red and combative.

“You keep your jokes to yourself, Rook.”

“Right-o, my lad, I shall. Why don’t you pick up a kid of fifteen; that’s about your size.”

“Look here, you shut up,” said Tod, “don’t you say anything about Miss Kitty Flowerdew.”

Rook turned on him with an insolent laugh, and bobbed a china cow up and down in front of Tod’s face.

“Moo-moo, cocky! The boy’s on his dignity, by Jove! Why, you cuckoo, she’s only practising on you.”

“She’s not,” said Tod fiercely. “She’s not that sort of girl.”

Mr. Rook addressed himself confidentially to the china cow.

“Hark at him, old girl. He knows all about you women. He’s a regular man about town; Beautiful Bountiful Bertie, what! All done by kindness at the age of eighteen.”

“I’m old enough to punch your head, anyhow,” said Tod.

And then Edwin Rook left him alone.

The man had all the cleverness of a mean beast who was jealous, and in three days he had Tod helplessly and hopelessly enraged. The lad soon discovered that there was some conspiracy between Lena Flowerdew and the shopman. Rook had blabbed to the elder sister, and Miss Flowerdew had told her father. And Tod saw that it was Kitty who was in disgrace. The condemnation of that moral household was emptied upon her head, while Tod was made to feel a silly young fool. The girl had her hair up; she was old enough to know better.

But the true maliciousness of the two conspirators betrayed itself when Eli Flowerdew happened to be out to meals. Lena hated her sister and wanted to hurt her; Rook hated Tod and wanted to disgust the girl with her lover by making the affair ridiculous and paltry.

“Going to do a little more practising to-day, dear? Why not take Mr. Western to Melling Gap?”

Rook adopted a jocular tone and pretended to be very much afraid of Tod.

“Western’s a terrible fellow. I’d advise any girl to be careful of Western. He’s a fascinator. He’ll be the Shah of Shaston, and you’ll hear him boasting about it too.”

Tod, conscious of Kitty’s miserable and abashed face, and remembering that he had heard loud voices, and had caught her rushing upstairs in tears, did all that a shrewd boy could do by keeping the remnants of his temper, and accepting the business as a joke. His hatred of Lena Flowerdew was so fierce that he could not save himself from one or two frank and deadly tilts at her, and perhaps he hurt her more bitterly than he knew.

“Nice place, Melling Gap, Mr. Western. Suppose you take me there next Saturday? Mr. Rook will look after Kitty.”

Tod was getting tired of the vulgarity of the thing.

“No, thank you,” he said.

“Why not?”

“I don’t like ugly women.”

Lena Flowerdew gave him one glare of the eyes, and laid that saying to her sister’s credit.

Tod was alone in the room behind the shop that evening, sorting some second-hand books that had been bought at a sale, when the door opened and Kitty slipped in. They happened to be alone in the house for ten minutes, and Kitty had waited for that chance.

“Tod——”

She stood there, downcast, dismayed, and he could see that she had been weeping.

“Tod, don’t speak to Lena like that, dear, please.”

“Why not? And I couldn’t help it.”

“For my sake, don’t. You don’t know how horrible Lena can be. And Father——”

She had more to tell him, but her heart failed her, as her courage failed her in that moment of trial.

“You don’t understand, Tod, how miserable they can make me.”

Tod’s love could hold back no longer. Here was his most dear lady, persecuted, humiliated, and all because of her kindness to him.

“Kitty! You know I love you, Kitty. I can’t stand them being such beasts to you.”

He crossed over to her, his blue eyes alight, and tried to take her hands, but she put them behind her suddenly, and began to weep anew.

“Tod, dear——”

“Why shouldn’t we be engaged? I’m eighteen. And there’s no one——”

“Don’t, Tod, oh—don’t—please,” she said brokenly. “You don’t understand—and I—I can’t tell you. Father would be so angry, and they would just mock at you.”

“I’m not afraid of that, dear.”

“It can’t be. And I have to ask you, Tod, not to look at me or talk to me much. We can be just friends——”

“I see how it is,” he said sturdily, “they think I’m a silly kid, and that I can’t be serious. If you would wait for me, Kitty.”

“I can’t, Tod, dear, I can’t. Father wouldn’t let me.”

“I’ll—I’ll make him,” but she fled out of the room and away up the dark stairs, and Tod could hear her sobbing as she went.

Tod was puzzled, but he suppressed the hot chivalry of his youth and the desire to do something heroic. The Flowerdews’ house was not a tilting ground for heroism, and the more Tod pondered the matter, the less sanguine he felt. Sir Galahad would have been met here with ridicule and a shower of rotten eggs. The lad began to understand Kitty’s sensitive dread and her shrinking from the malicious vulgarities of her sister’s tongue.

Tod made up his mind to dissemble. If it helped Kitty and saved her from further domestic storms, so much the better. He told himself that he would wait. In three years he would have that £1,000, and could talk to Mr. Eli Flowerdew as one man to another. And he found that his self-suppression, cheerfully and shrewdly advertised, had a very distinct influence upon the other members of the Flowerdew family. He talked more to Lena Flowerdew and made it his business to pass her the butter and the jam, and actually allowed her to take him out to a tea-party at the Lagos’s who ran a big grocery shop in King William Street.

Eli Flowerdew seemed to have made up his mind to approve of Tod, and Tod encouraged that spirit of approval, even though it led him into the dismal experience of being enrolled as a junior member of the local Social Purity League. Eli Flowerdew took him to the men’s Wednesday evening meetings in the Shaston Public Hall, where he listened to sacred music as rendered by the Shaston Glee Singers, and heard sundry eloquent gentlemen give flamboyant addresses upon civic and domestic virtue.

The whole crowd made Tod think of a lot of unwholesome people getting into a stuffy corner and solemnly holding their noses because of the smell. They were so drearily unhuman and self-complacent. Tod had a feeling that they rather liked smells, and enjoyed holding their noses, and gloating self-righteously over the iniquity of the other people’s drains.

He asked Bod Twine about it, because he had come to regard that swarthy young man as violently and savagely honest.

“I don’t see that it does anybody any good,” he argued.

“Course it doesn’t kid. It’s like telling a chap who’s healthy that he’s got a worm. They like it, you know—makes ’em feel warm and good inside like a glass of gin; they don’t want things to be different, not really. Get outside; that’s my motto.”

“Outside what?”

“Why, out into the country, you pippin. There’s nothing wrong with the sea, or the fields, or the open road, is there? And there’s nothing wrong with a chap wanting to be in love with a girl. If so, what are we here for? If a man tries to come the pious over me, I always think he has got dirty feet. Say, when are you going to join our footer club?”

Twine had taught Tod to swim; he also taught him to box, and young Western began to be one of the pets of the local football club. He had shaped well as a half-back at Chipperton’s, and before Christmas he was playing right-half for Shaston Town, and was beloved of the local crowd. “Worry-’em-Western” was his nickname, and even Mr. Flowerdew approved. It was an advertisement. “That’s young Western from Flowerdew’s.” The commercial eye sees a placard everywhere, and pastes up a pious “poster” whenever it looks publicly upon its God.

Yet even Clarence Todhunter Western had his worries. The Flowerdews household had made inroads on his youth, and changed him from the irresponsible boy to the young man who was finding life rather a queer and puzzling business. His silent and restrained loyalty to Kitty made him all the more jealous and observant. He began to notice that Edwin Rook was always sneaking out of the shop and into the house when Eli Flowerdew was not about. He noticed, too, that Rook’s eyes were for ever watching Kitty during meals, but that she hardly ever looked at him in return. Rook seemed to frighten her and to reduce her to silence. Moreover, Miss Lena Flowerdew grew very snappy and sarcastic towards the shopman, and Tod caught her watching him trying to ingratiate himself with her sister. Miss Flowerdew’s face was never very pleasant or amiable, but on those occasions Tod thought her the ugliest thing he had ever seen.

Then Edwin Rook took to attending St. Jude’s church and sat in the Flowerdew pew, displacing Tod, who was pushed to the far end by the pillar. Tod was annoyed but contemptuous. He had a healthy scorn for Rook, a fellow who wore glasses, never played any games, and was, Tod suspected, a physical coward. Tod, the romanticist, blindly refused to accept Rook as a serious rival, which wild faith of his betrayed how ignorant he was of the real inwardness of the Flowerdew family.

But it was the shop and the business that were puzzling the sportsman in Tod. You bought as cheaply as you could and you sold as dearly as you could; that seemed fairly obvious and reasonable, and yet Tod was not satisfied. When some old woman received three and sixpence for an article which Mr. Flowerdew sold to a wealthy stockbroker’s wife three days later for five guineas, the gap seemed too greedy. Tod began to see a good deal of this buying and selling, and it left him with an uneasy and guilty feeling. Also it became very plain to him that in a shop you were not supposed to tell the truth. You romanced, you exaggerated—in short, you lied.

“Those candlesticks, madam? Yes, we picked them up only a week ago and at a fancy price. They won’t remain with us very long; the first connoisseur who sees them——”

Now Tod knew that these candlesticks had been bought at a sale three months ago, and that Mr. Flowerdew had given exactly seven shillings for them. The lady, a visitor to Shaston, bought them for three pounds ten.

Moreover, for subtle reason known only to himself, Edwin Rook set himself to try and debauch and commercialise Tod. He was cynical, jocular, and facetious, and he took a delight in airing all the trade cynicisms, and flaunting them in front of Tod’s eyes.

“You’ve got to watch your customer, my lad. If it’s a ‘regular’ and one who knows a bit, go easy. If it’s a stranger, why then you can do a bit of fibbing and push the price.”

“Be jolly careful of duchessy looking ladies in fine clothes. They don’t swallow things easily. They can be really nasty if they think you have cheated them.”

“Always back down and eat dirt if you are found out.”

“Expert knowledge! What do we want to know for? Why, it’s the whole game. You can score off the people who don’t know, get ’em to take sixpence for something that’s worth a quid. That’s business.”

“Sentiment. There’s no sentiment in a shop. Only oil, my boy, oil.”

Tod disliked Rook all the more thoroughly for these cynicisms of his. At first, he did not take them too seriously. Rook was a glib talker, rather pleased with his own cleverness, but as the weeks went by, Tod began to realise that Rook was telling him the truth. The discovery depressed Tod very seriously. He felt that he was getting mixed up in a sordid sort of game, a game in which your main endeavour was to cheat. Tod called it “cheating” to himself, quite frankly and with no reservations. If you tried to foul in the football field, the referee dropped on you, and the crowd, if it was not too bigoted a crowd, hooted.

And then came the incident of that book.

Mr. Flowerdew had been present at one of those “sales of necessity.” A doctor had died and left a widow and three children, and a small balance at the bank. Mr. Flowerdew bought a few lots at the sale, and among them an odd number of books that cost him thirteen shillings. Tod was sorting these books two days after the sale when he came across a queer old volume that sent him running for Messrs. Porteous’s price catalogue of second-hand books.

There seemed no doubt about it. That particular book was valued at fifteen guineas.

Tod, full of enthusiasm, announced the fact to Rook.

“I say, there’s been a mistake. We have bought a valuable book mixed up in a lot of rubbish.”

“Where’s the mistake?” asked the shopman with cynical sangfroid.

“But the governor only paid thirteen bob for the lot, and this book is priced at fifteen guineas. The people who sold it didn’t know. We shall have to send it back.”

“Do what?” squealed Mr. Rook.

“Why, send it back. It wouldn’t be fair or sporting to keep it. I don’t suppose Flowerdew knew when he bought the lot.”

Rook stared at Tod, and then gave a queer laugh.

“Suggest it, old chap. If the auctioneers didn’t do their work properly, and the governor had the luck——”

“You mean you’d keep it and say nothing?”

“You soft egg!” said Mr. Rook.

Tod was challenged. He said nothing more to Rook, but waited for Mr. Flowerdew to give a judgment of Solomon. Rook was out when the interview occurred, and he missed one of the most cynical comedies that had ever been played in Mr. Flowerdew’s shop.

“Excuse me, sir, but you bought a valuable book the other day by mistake.”

Mr. Flowerdew was totting up some figures in a notebook, and he looked at Tod with interested approval.

“What’s that, Western? You are learning to use your wits, are you? What about it?”

Tod explained, and Eli Flowerdew listened with fatherly satisfaction until Tod made the extraordinary suggestion that the book should be returned.

Mr. Flowerdew’s thin lips slipped back over his yellow teeth.

“Say that again, Western?”

Tod said it again.

And then Eli Flowerdew gave Tod a solemn and biblical description of what business was and how it should be conducted. He expatiated on the necessity for loyalty between master and assistant, and how that his—Mr. Flowerdew’s—interest was Tod’s. He trounced Tod’s sentimental obtuseness, and assured him that commerce and civilisation would be impossible if people behaved in the way Tod had suggested.

“You have got to get the business spirit, Western,” he said grimly, “if you want to rise in this world. Competition doesn’t say ‘After you, please.’ If you hold yourself responsible for other peoples mistakes, you are a fool, young man. Don’t you mix sentiment and business. And don’t let me hear any more of this nonsense.”

Chapter Nine

Towards the end of the winter Tod began to be very restless. Kitty Flowerdew had been away for a month, and there had been nothing to relieve the ugliness of the house in Ponsonby Place; Tod was growing a little weary of serving like a boy Jacob for his Rachael. Edwin Rook’s cynicisms, and a more intimate knowledge of Eli Flowerdew’s methods of making money, had killed Tod’s interest in the business. He began to hate the shop and everything in it, almost as much as he hated the atmosphere of the Flowerdew house. Some of those queer sayings of his father’s cropped up like sharp flints under his feet.

“I’m not a penny-in-the-slot machine.” “This country with its penny-three-farthing soul!” “Pray publicly to God, and cheat your neighbour!”

There were elements of rebellion stirring in Tod. He lost some of his frankness, and grew rather morose and thoughtful, and he showed a new fierceness towards Edwin Rook. He began to take long prowls after closing time, and forgathered with Bob Twine and two or three other young men who liked the rush of the sea air on their faces. Tod found that it was agreed that life as a shopkeeper’s assistant was doomed to suck all the virility out of a man’s soul. Yet these rebels had no alternative paths of adventure to suggest, save joining the Army of running after girls. Mossup, a mild, flaxen-haired, and rather serious soul who wore spectacles, hoped to attain liberty by acquiring a shop of his own.

“You’re welcome to it, old man,” said Twine; “you ain’t rogue enough. You’ll be dodging bankruptcy till it makes you grey. I’m turning Socialist.”

Tod happened to mention the word “Socialist” to Edwin Rook, and was puzzled by the shopman’s slimy and secretive smile.

“So you know some Socialists, do you, Western?”

“I know one,” said Tod.

The information was passed on in a casual and inconsidered manner to Mr. Flowerdew. Tod did not suspect it then, but Rook had decided that Western was in his way, and Rook set about edging Tod overboard with the methodical shrewdness of the born sneak and coward. He dropped hints that Tod was getting into loose company and loafing about the town at night. He even hinted at “girls.” All girls, save his own, were anathema to Eli Flowerdew.

Two days before Kitty Flowerdew was expected home, Rook laid a deliberate trap for Tod. A couple of packing-cases had arrived from Birmingham, and Rook called Tod to help him unpack them.

“One of our confidential jobs, my son. Now what do you think of that brass door-knocker?”

“It looks old,” said Tod.

They unpacked a pretty selection of mock antiques in metal—candlesticks, tinder-boxes, sconces, and the like. Rook chatted jocularly, and in a cynically confidential way to Tod.

“The fools will have old things, so we have to get ’em.”

“Aren’t these old?” Tod asked.

“Fakes, reproductions, the whole lot of them.”

“But we don’t sell them as old?”

“Oh, don’t we! You’ll sell tons before you’ve done.”

Tod was kneeling, and with two hands on the edge of the case he faced Rook across it.

“I’m dashed if I will. It’s not honest.”

“Just tell that to the boss.”

“I will, if he asks me. And what’s more, if I see you trying to sell the stuff as old—I’ll—I’ll——”

“Hoity-toity!” said Mr. Rook.

But he had manœuvered Tod into a desperate position, and he made haste to let Mr. Flowerdew appreciate Tod’s pose of defiance and its possibilities.

“Can I have a few words with you, sir?”

“What’s the matter, Rook?”

“It’s about Western, sir. I don’t like playing the sneak, but I’m worried about Western. Besides, I’m thinking of my loyalty to you and the business.”

“Come into my room.”

With a certain air of diffidence and unwillingness Rook described Tod’s rebellious attitude and the threats he had used.

“Of course, I was teasing the chap really, but he’s likely to be a bit of a problem, sir. He doesn’t understand being loyal, and I think Western’s getting rather wild.”

“Confound that boy!” said Mr. Flowerdew.

He walked up and down, cleared his throat, and then gave the assistant an enigmatic look.

“Not a word about this.”

“Not a word, sir.”

“I’ll think it over. We don’t want a row, and a boy with a reckless tongue might make trouble. Besides, I don’t want to be hard.”

He smiled, and moistened his lips.

“But I appreciate your attitude, Rook. You are always backing me up; making the business a personal affair.”

Rook gave a simper and appeared embarrassed.

“It’s a fact, sir. I owe you my job. And I’ll admit I’m ambitious.”

“No harm in that, man; ambition in you suits me.”

And then Rook plunged and showed both his heart and his hand. Flowerdew listened to him with a slight frown, and the stare of a shrewd and unwinking bird.

“So that’s it, Rook?”

“Don’t take it as impertinence, sir. You have been very kind to me, and I’m human. And I’m a steady sort of chap; I mean to get on, and if Miss Kitty——”

Flowerdew patted Rook on the shoulder.

“I’ll think it over, Rook. I’m not so sure you wouldn’t make me a very sound partner, some day.”

Tod was destined to strike one of those adventurous and pugilistic passages in his life before he ceased from the Flowerdew household. Romance caught him, romance and a sudden glimpse of Kitty, Kitty unseen for a whole month, and drifting in like the spring with an armful of daffodils. Perhaps it was not wholly by chance that Tod happened to be there to rush out and carry in her box. This sudden meeting surprised them both into a flutter of naturalness, a quick and dear delight in each other that couldn’t be hid.

“Tod——”

He was conscious of her as a creature with brown, shimmering eyes, and a quick rich colour. She gave him her hand, and he held it a moment. She looked a little wild and shy, like a bird.

“It’s been such a long month,” he said.

“Oh, Tod, I wish——”

But he never heard what her wish was, for Miss Flowerdew intervened, and Tod saw Kitty’s happy face close up like a flower.

“Thought you were coming by the 2.30.”

“No, by the four o’clock, Lena.”

“Look at those messy flowers; you have let the stalks dribble all down your dress.”

“Have I? Well, it doesn’t matter.”

Tod was playing the strong man, struggling up the narrow stairs with Kitty’s trunk, and telling himself that he was not going to stand it any longer. It was somebody’s business to rescue Kitty, and Tod decided that that somebody was himself.

He heard voices that night; Mr. Flowerdew’s voice very hard and emphatic, much the same voice that Flowerdew used at the meetings of the Social Purity League. He was speaking to Kitty in the drawing-room and Tod left his bedroom door open in order to listen. He could not distinguish what was said, but he could hear Kitty piping occasional notes like a pathetic and appealing thrush. The duologue ended with a lengthy, harsh and emphatic grumble from Mr. Flowerdew’s voice. Tod heard Kitty go to her room with the flutter of a bird escaping from a rough hand. Later Tod fancied that he could catch the sound of weeping.

Two days passed, wrathful, volcanic days, with Tod ready to erupt. Kitty went about the house with the strange air of a doomed thing in disgrace. She hardly spoke, left her food almost untouched, and her frightened eyes avoided Tod’s. Tod noticed that Rook had a peculiarly sleek and bland look, like a cat in a good temper. Miss Flowerdew ignored both Rook and her sister. Old Flowerdew read the paper at meals, and made occasional snapping sounds such as “Butter,” “More tea,” “Pass the bread.”

Tod had no business in the garden on that fateful evening just when dusk was falling. From the back-room window he glimpsed Kitty walking slowly down the path towards the shrubbery where a few scraggy lilacs were pushing out green buds and making the euonymus and the holly look black and fusty. Rook appeared to have left the place, and Tod entered the garden by the passage that led through from the street. There was a ramshackle rustic summer-house in the middle of the shrubbery, one of those bourgeois and urban touches that make the real countryman smile. Tod saw Kitty enter the summer-house, her hands hanging limply, her brown head bowed down.

Tod was half-way across the garden when he heard the sound of a struggle, and Kitty’s voice appealing with a fear that feared to protest.

“Don’t, oh, don’t!”

“Please let go, please, Mr. Rook.”

Tod went in at the gallop like a true knight errant. He found Rook holding Kitty in his arms, and thrusting that ugly mouth of his in search of her averted face. His arms had pinned hers to her body, and she was trying to free them when Tod interfered.

“Let go, you cad!”

Tod never forgot the change that came over Rook’s face. At one moment he had been a greedy, gloating thing about to suck the honey that he had long desired; the next he was looking balked, furious, sheepish, and a little afraid.

“You dirty cad! Come outside.”

“Look here, young Western, boys aren’t wanted. You clear out.”

“Kitty,” said Tod, “will you please let me——”

“Oh, Tod, dear——”

She slipped out of the summer-house, soft, pathetic, ineffectual, and Tod faced Edwin Rook.

“Come outside.”

Rook did a thin bluster.

“Look here, kid, I don’t want to hurt you. It’s no business of yours if I’m engaged to Miss Kitty Flowerdew.”

“It’s a lie,” said Tod, and went in after the rat since the rat would not come to him.

Rook was a weedy man and no fighter, though he patted and hooked at Tod like an angry cat. Tod smashed his glasses, split his lip, and bundled him twice against the rotten wall of the summer-house. Rook closed with the lad, and they were in an angry and dishevelled tangle on the floor when Mr. Eli Flowerdew stormed in. Tod was uppermost, with a good grip in Rook’s collar, and riding his man victoriously in spite of the jerks and contortions of the shopman’s legs.

“What the—— Get up, Western. Get up, Rook. What the devil——”

Old Flowerdew was very angry, and his voice rasped like a saw.

“The boy’s mad,” said Rook, picking himself up, panting, “he came at me like an——”

“I’ve thrashed you, that’s all,” said Tod, “for being a dirty cad.”

Flowerdew caught Tod by the collar.

“Silence, you young savage. What do you mean by——”

“Mean?” said Tod, looking quite ready to deal with Mr. Flowerdew as he had dealt with Rook, “he’d insulted Kitty.”

Mr. Flowerdew let go of Tod as though the lad were hot iron.

“Oh, that’s it, is it! I see. Savage jealousy, I suppose. And may I ask what it has to do with you, Mr. Tod Western?”

He sneered down at Tod with grizzled and grinning irony.

“I suppose the man who is going to marry my daughter has a right to be a little—affectionate. You are too big for your boots, my boy. Go upstairs to bed. I’ll talk to you like a father to-morrow.”

All the fine fury seemed to fall out of Tod’s chivalry. He gave Mr. Flowerdew a blank and bewildered look, put his hands in his pockets, and disappeared.

Tod passed a Byronic and very miserable night. It was as though some Eastern giant had reached down a great hand, lifted the world’s lid, and shown Tod all sorts of strange secrets and knavish devices. Tod understood the Flowerdew household as he had never understood it before. He remembered that saying of Bob Twine’s that Eli Flowerdew had driven his wife to suicide, and that Kitty was the daughter of her mother. Rook wanted Kitty, he had wanted her all the while; Tod understood that now, and why Rook hated him. But Kitty did not want Edwin Rook, and the inference was obvious. Eli Flowerdew was giving the girl to Rook, compelling her, even against her great loathing, to surrender herself to this lover, this cold, weedy beast with his bland “selling” manner, and his venomous tongue.

And why?

The answer to that question stuck in Tod’s throat, but he was constrained to swallow it. Rook was a useful man to Eli Flowerdew. He knew all the chicanery of the business, and practised it like a man who loved it. It was possible that he knew so much that he had to be part of the family, part of the conspiracy.

Tod tossed to and fro in bed, bit his pillow, and schemed all sorts of mad and impossible schemes for the rescuing of Kitty. He felt that he loved her as he had never loved her before, since he had seen her twisting in Rook’s arms. Rook shouldn’t have her! He would see her to-morrow and appeal to her to run away with him. Yes, and on what? Tod’s shrewdness saved him from being a mere sentimental and adventurous young fool. He knew that he had about three shillings in his trousers pocket, no very noble purse for an eloping couple.

No, he would be perfectly straight with old Flowerdew. He would stand up to him like a man and say, “I love Kitty, and I think Kitty loves me. I’m young, but I mean to get on. You can’t give Kitty to Rook.”

Yes, and that would entail his staying in the business, and swallowing all the humbug and the trickery. What a slimy and clever devil that chap Rook was! Tod realised that he had been driven into a corner, and that though he had punched Rook’s head, the fellow had him tied up like a fly. And the beastliness of it all, old Flowerdew of the Social Purity League, buying a man’s loyalty by giving him the body of his daughter!

Tod went downstairs next morning, red-eyed, and prepared to fight, but the Flowerdew household surprised and nonplussed him, and smothered the attack. Kitty did not appear at breakfast; she was locked in her room, and Tod did not have a glimpse of her that morning. Lena Flowerdew had never been so smiling or so pleasant; Tod had buttered eggs with his bacon, and three lumps of sugar in his tea. Miss Flowerdew’s friendliness held him mute. He did not understand it, or guess that she was gloating over his trouncing of Edwin Rook. He had not heard that gibe of hers, “Nice sort of man you are, to be licked by a mere boy.” But Mr. Flowerdew himself was the surprise of the morning. It was the Sabbath Flowerdew that appeared at the breakfast-table, solemn, sententious, oracular, dressed in its Sunday clothes. It was polite and patriarchal towards Tod, a figure that took him by the elbow and marched him into an atmosphere of surplices and “mis-er-able sinners.”

“Now, Western, if you please.”

Tod found himself in the Flowerdew drawing-room, sitting opposite to Mr. Eli Flowerdew, and listening with a feeling of helplessness to arguments that he could not answer.

“I feel that I have a grave responsibility—a fatherly responsibility towards you, Western. The fact is, you are not suited to a business such as mine. You appear to have picked up a lot of queer ideas from somewhere, ideas that won’t work in this world. You have got to learn to be a practical business man. Now I don’t want to be unkind to you, my boy, but I have felt for a long while that you don’t suit me, and perhaps my business doesn’t suit you.”

Tod was nonplussed.

“Some of it doesn’t go down, sir,” he said gloomily, “but I wanted to talk to you about——”

Mr. Flowerdew caught him up.

“About my daughter. Exactly. Now let’s talk this over like men, Western. How old are you?”

“Just eighteen.”

“And my daughter is a year older than you are. And when do you expect to be able to keep a wife?”

Tod fidgeted on his chair.

“I shall have a £1,000 when I’m twenty-one. I mean to get on, sir. And she doesn’t, I mean, Kitty doesn’t——”

Mr. Flowerdew smiled at Tod.

“Western, my boy, you are very green and inexperienced. You think that my daughter doesn’t want to marry Mr. Rook. You mustn’t jump at conclusions in this world, and I may as well tell you that you did yourself a very bad service last night.”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“My daughter was pained, disgusted, Western. You whom we had treated as one of the family, raising a vulgar brawl and assaulting my daughter’s fiancé! Women are queer creatures, Western; they often pretend to dislike a man when they really want him. My daughter is much more attached to Mr. Rook than you imagine.”

“If she would tell me so,” blurted Tod.

Mr. Flowerdew sat forward in his chair, and wagged an emphatic forefinger.

“Listen to me, young man; do you think I am going to have my girl’s future happiness compromised by a wild boy who isn’t old enough to know his own mind? Certainly not, Western, certainly not. I have duties as a father. Mr. Rook has earned a position of trust. I know Rook—I believe in Rook; I say, ‘There is a steady fellow who can give a girl a good Christian home.’ And Mr. Rook is going to marry my daughter. Put all that nonsense out of your head, my boy. I have had you in here and talked to you like a man of the world and a father, but of course you realise that you can’t stay any longer in my house.”

“I realise that,” said Tod.

“Very well, then; that’s a sensible answer. There are plenty of chances for a steady fellow in a town like this. I’m quite ready to help you, Western, or you can go back to your uncle for a while.”

“I’ll go back to my uncle,” said Tod.

And that was the end of it. Mr. Flowerdew had his gig out that afternoon and drove Tod and his box over to Burnt Farm. He had a somewhat lengthy interview with Uncle Remus, while Tod idled about the garden and listened in a wild and rebel mood to a blackbird’s singing.

He kept out of the way till Mr. Flowerdew had gone, and then went in to face his uncle.

“You darned young fool!” was all that the farmer said to him.

Chapter Ten

A month later Tod Western returned to Shaston-on-Sea and entered the establishment of John Snape, chemist, in King William Street.

Various people had had a hand in launching this new adventure.

Tod himself had initiated the idea. Balked in a second attempt to persuade Uncle Remus to let him become a student of medicine, he had piqued himself with pleasant memories of chemists’ shops, liking the scent and the cleanness of them and the idea of handing out mysterious cures to suffering humanity. He imagined that he would find nothing of the Flowerdew fraudulencies in such a place. Moreover, he had not forgotten Kitty Flowerdew. He still had dreams of indulging in some piratical excursion into the Flowerdew household, and of rescuing Kitty from the clutches of Edwin Rook.

When Tod made his suggestion to Uncle Remus, Uncle Remus said “Humph, want to mix physic and sell soap, do you? I suppose there’ll always be fools who want to drink physic and wash. Toothbrushes, too.” Uncle Remus never used one.

Dr. Vance was consulted, and agreed that the idea was a sound one. He happened to know John Snape of Shaston, Snape had once dispensed for him, and he wrote to the chemist and spoke highly of Tod. Mr. Snape suggested an interview, and confessed that he needed an intelligent assistant to serve in the shop and learn dispensing. Mr. Snape interviewed Tod, and then made the further suggestion that Tod should “see how he liked it” for six months, and that if he suited Mr. Snape, he could then enter on a three years’ apprenticeship and train for the examinations of the Pharmaceutical Society. The reference to the “Pharmaceutical Society” rather impressed Uncle Remus; it sounded so respectable and Mesopotamian; besides, it was backed and reinforced by those indispensable articles—toothbrushes and soap.

So Tod went to Mr. Snape, and was found a bed-sitting room, food, and a smell of domesticity in the house of a certain Mrs. Budd. Mrs. Budd was a good soul, and she and Tod clasped hands at once. She had a little house in Laburnum Road, not far from Shaston Gardens, a little cabbage-rose of a house, buxom and easy, like Mrs. Budd herself. Mrs. Budd was a widow, and her children were all launched on the world.

“You make yourself at ’ome, dear,” she said to Tod; “I always believe in plenty of butter on the toast.”

Mr. Snape was not quite so obvious and easy as Mrs. Budd. He was sandy and pink, and wore gold-rimmed spectacles. Tod thought him something of a dandy, and he was so polite that you wondered whether he was trying to be sarcastic. There was an air of prosperity and rosy health about John Snape and his business, and he looked like a good advertisement for somebody’s shaving soap, or Rumbelow’s Iron Pills.

Snape gave Tod some shrewd advice and handed him over to a middle-aged assistant, a laconic, earthy-faced man named Wisdon. Wisdon had a short brown beard and a moustache; he wore a dicky and removable cuffs, cuffs that he covered each morning with the clean white pieces of paper that were used for wrapping up bottles. His black coat was shiny at the elbows, and he had some special concoction for dealing with this shininess, but it never grew any less shiny. Wisdon’s inspiration was the word “economy.” He economised in razors and shaving soap, in his laundry, in his conversation, in his food. There was something rather melancholy and pathetic and suppressed about the man; he always looked tired, and he had a perennial cold in his head.

Tod nicknamed Wisdon “Mr. Any-think-else.” That was the final phrase he used to each customer on handing over the customer’s purchases.

The other assistant was a young man named Cook. He was a certified dispenser, and Tod disliked him from the first day. Cook was a shallow, cocky sarcastic young gentleman who never troubled to hide his contempt for the snuffy and much worried Wisdon. Tod noticed that Mr. Snape treated Cook with consideration, whereas he bullied and hectored the older man, and Wisdom took it like a quiet and depressed old dog.

Tod began by liking Mr. Snape’s shop. He liked the smell of it, the airiness and cleanness, the rows and rows of mysterious bottles, the glass cases full of scent and boxes of soap, and the hundred and one articles connected with a well washed and well groomed body. Even the phraseology of the craft fascinated him, all that quaint Latinity that smelt of the Pharmacopœia and suggested old world herbalists and the romance of alchemy. There was no dust in Mr. Snape’s shop. Everything glistened. And there was so much of everything. Drawers full of new white toothbrushes, of chip and cardboard pill and ointment boxes, stacks of bottles, oceans of soap, sponges by the hundred, scissors, rows of hot water bottles, and unimagined wealth of all sorts of scent, toilet powders, manicure sets; cohorts of combs, ointments, razors, shaving-brushes, siphons of potash and soda water. Then there were all the patent medicines and proprietary preparations. Tod was less interested in these, and perhaps from the first he viewed them with a slight distrust. They advertised themselves rather too blatantly, and had not the restrained solemnity of the tinctures, extracts, and infusions on the dispensing shelves. You could look up the latter in the Pharmacopœia, that Doomsday Book of the drugs, and find out just what they were and what they pretended to be. The patent medicines were rather like women; they wore petticoats, and led you to believe that the world’s most wonderful mystery was hidden upon their persons.

Tod’s thoughts were constantly fluttering round that house in Ponsonby Place. He made a point of walking past it in the evening, but he had never a glimpse of Kitty, and he had no desire to meet Mr. Flowerdew or his elder daughter. They might suspect him of some possible act of piracy, and take precaution against it. Tod was cautious.

One Sunday evening he went to St. Jude’s Church, and sitting in one of the back seats, saw Rook and Kitty come in together and take their places in the familiar pew. Tod shadowed them home to Ponsonby Place. They walked arm and arm, and Tod felt savage and depressed.

Chance gave him the opportunity he had so long desired. He had been wandering along the beach in an aimless sort of way, and was watching some men winding up the bathing machines under the White Cliff, when he became aware of a girl sitting on the shingle, with a book in her lap. A big hat hid her face, but she raised her head as Tod passed, and the face was the face of Kitty.

Tod turned straight towards her, trying to convince himself that it was not tears that he saw in her eyes. She sat there, staring up at him, as though she had lost both the power of speech and of movement. It struck Tod that she looked older, and that she did not flush in her old sensitive and girlish way.

“May I speak to you, Kitty?”

“Oh, please——” she began.

Tod sat down beside her, and saw her glance towards the town.

“Edwin’s coming, any moment.”

Then Tod rebelled, and talked all sorts of wild and tender nonsense that brought her to the edge of tears. There was no rebellion to be roused in Kitty Flowerdew. She had accepted the system, was terrorised by system, and her poor scared face made Tod feel a beast.

“Oh, don’t, please, Tod. I’ve promised to marry Edwin Rook. It was father’s wish.”

And suddenly Tod grew very gentle and tender.

“Poor Kitty,” he said; “I don’t want to hurt you, dear. But I wish I thought you were happy.”

“Of course I am going to be happy,” she protested; “Father has been so good to Edwin; he is a partner now, and we are going to have a dear little house near St. Jude’s.”

She showed Tod her ring, a diamond and sapphire hoop.

“Isn’t it pretty?”

“Very,” said Tod, wishing he could kill Rook.

“And we are buying the furniture, such nice furniture.”

She was talking defensively, holding Tod and her own emotion at arm’s length, and all the while she kept looking anxiously towards the town. Tod’s heart smote him. He understood at last the hopelessness and the helplessness of Kitty, and that he was only torturing her by persuading her to cry for the moon.

“I hope you will be very happy,” he said.

“Thank you, Tod.”

“I think I ought to be going now.”

Her look of relief was obvious to him, and with a tragic glance at her he got up and went. But he felt very miserable and very bitter, and betaking himself to Rose Cottage he poured his bitterness into the lap of Mrs. Budd, not as a confessional, but as the vague yet fiery discontent of a young man balked of his desire.

Mrs. Budd was a comfortable opportunist. She had rounded off all her angles, and if the world bumped her it bumped against something soft and elastic. She had learnt to circumvent by yielding, to flow round obstructions, to be comfortable even when you had to sit six aside in a third-class carriage.

“Don’t go looking for trouble, my dear. You’ll get plenty of it in the world without looking. What, you say people cheat? Of course they cheat, if it pays ’em. Not all, mind you, but most.”

“It ought to be altered,” said Tod; “my father used to say that anyone who made too much money was a rogue.”

“Well, my dear, if you take that line, you will be up against the elephant. The elephant will tread on you. Much better give it buns.”

“You are a coward, Mrs. Budd.”

“No, I’m not, my dear; I’ve used my eyes and my ears. Unless you’re a gent, it pays to be polite. Never you be too clever. Clever people ain’t popular. Soft soap and stoopidity; that’s the stuff that gets you along comfortable in this world.”

Tod remained in a rebel mood, and consorted more than ever with Bob Twine and Mossup and one or two other young men who did not like life as it was. Twine roared with laughter when Tod gave a rather shame-faced account of how he had been bundled out of the Flowerdew household.

“What! Oh, you pippin! Wanted to send that book back, and to tell everybody that all the worm-holes in the shop were fakes! No wonder that chap Rook got a strangle-hold on you.”

“Well, wasn’t I right?” flared Tod.

“Too right, kid. I wish half the world was half as right as you. Suppose there’ll be a second suicide in the Flowerdew family?”

But Tod’s fierce face warned him to gibe no farther.

“Sorry, kid. I’m a coarse beast sometimes. And how do you like old Snape?”

“I don’t know yet,” said Tod.

“You and I’ll end in the army, kid; that’s what will happen to us. P’r’aps we’ll emigrate. And there’s poor old Mossup wanting to marry a girl at the glove counter and shove his little capital into a draper’s shop in Pondicherry Street. Poor old blighter!”

“Aren’t you going to marry, Bob?” Tod asked.

“Me marry! Not as things are, my boy, thank you. That’s the last knot the blasted system ties on you. I’m not going to make my woman eat dirt.”

“My father married, and he didn’t eat dirt,” said Tod.

“No, kid; I dare say he was a better man than I am. I’m the sort of chap that must have a girl. P’r’aps you’re too young, old man, but you’ll find out in time. Let’s have a swim to-night.”

“All right,” said Tod.

As to John Snape’s, it was a serious improvement on Mr. Flowerdew’s, yet, as Tod had said, he wanted to see more of it before he gave it his approval. Tod had inherited his father’s love of looking facts straight in the face. There are quite a number of people who look Truth in the face and then make great haste to get away round the nearest corner. Tod was not like that. He stood and stared till he was satisfied, and if he did not like what he saw he said so. Most boys are such irresponsible creatures, absorbed in the green springtide of their own youth, that they accept the crookedness and oddities of life as a jest, a suit of motley that does not matter, but Tod had the uncomfortable knack of asking questions and of remaining unsatisfied until they were answered.

Now “Mr. Any-think-else” had a grubby little book that he used to poke his nose into at odd moments. It always lay handy on the shelf below the desk, and Tod grew curious about that book. He got hold of it one afternoon and found that it was called “How to be Your Own Doctor.” Tod was interested. Perhaps Old Wisdon had ambitions and dreams of entering the great profession!

A snuffy old lady in a black bonnet and dress all covered with crape toddled into the shop the same afternoon and became engaged in a mumbling and confidential conversation with Mr. Wisdon. Both Mr. Snape and Cook were out of the shop, and Tod was wrapping up some bottles in the dispensing department.

He stood still and listened.

“My daughter’s got a pain in the chest,” said the old lady, “and she coughs something terrible. I’ve rubbed her with turps, and she’s ’ad some of that lung tonic, but it ’asn’t done her any good.”

“Where’s the pain?” asked Wisdon in a confidential voice; “in the front or the side?”

“Just about the breast-bone.”

“Does she expectorate?”

“What’s that?”

“Spit phlegm.”

“Yes, frothy stuff.”

“Doesn’t perspire at night, does she?”

“Don’t think so. She hasn’t said.”

“I expect it’s a slight attack of bronchitis. There’s been a lot dust blowing about, and an east wind. Suppose you try a bottle of our cough-cure.”

“Is it good?”

“Works like magic. It’s modelled on the prescription of a leading London doctor.”

“I’ll try a bottle. How much it is?”

“Half a crown.”

The old lady paid her half-crown, dropped the bottle of Snape’s Cough Cure into a string-bag and toddled off. Tod, emerging from the dispenser’s corner, began to ask “Mr. Any-think-else” ingenious and interested questions.

“Didn’t know you knew anything about doctoring, Mr. Wisdon.”

“Oh, didn’t you?”

“Do you get it all out of that little book?”

Wisdon gave Tod a worried look.

“It’s a very good book,” he said.

“How do you know the old lady’s daughter had bronchitis?”

“By the symptoms.”

“But mightn’t she have consumption or something?”

“She might, of course.”

“When my mother had a cough,” said Tod, “Dr. Vance listened to her chest with a thing he called a steffescope. You could hear all the bubbles and clicks, he said, and all that was going on.”

“Dare say he could,” said Mr. Wisdon, showing symptoms of being bored with the subject.

“Don’t you think the woman ought to see a doctor, Mr. Wisdon?”

And then the patient, much enduring assistant turned on him with sudden wrath.

“Look ’ere, don’t you ask so many questions.”

Tod liked old Wisdon, and had no idea of hurting him.

“Sorry,” he said. “I wanted to know—how——”

“You want to know too much, young Western; the less you think about things in this rotten world the better it’ll be for your peace of mind, and don’t you forget it.”

Tod had never seen “Mr. Any-think-else” so ruffled and combative and upset about something. He banged bottles back in their places, kicked a drawer to, and began to dust the counter with furious energy.

“Think I like it, do you? I have my orders, and I carry ’em out. You can’t be saucy on eighty pounds a year.”

Then he grew suddenly afraid and went down the shop to make sure that he and Tod were alone.

“But I’m not saying anything against it. I’m better off here than I was before. You have to take life as you find it, Western, and don’t ask too many questions. People don’t like it.”

“You mean Mr. Snape wouldn’t like it?”

“Look here”—and then a customer came into the shop and Mr. Wisdon escaped from Tod’s inquisition.

Tod’s eyes had been opened, and in the future he placed quite a different construction on those confidential little interviews that were always taking place in Mr. Snape’s shop. He saw Cook studying a book like Mr. Wisdon’s. He began to understand that the fatherly interest John Snape took in certain customers was not a casual asking as to their health and a polite passing of the time of day. Mr. Snape talked in a subdued voice to mothers with babies. There were occasions when he took sheepish-looking men into his back room and served them himself with an air of sleek mystery. Tod wondered what Mr. Snape gave these gentlemen. He had the curiosity to note the particular drawer from which Mr. Snape took what he wanted. Tod discovered later that the drawer contained small glass syringes.

One Thursday afternoon when business seemed very stagnant Cook hailed Tod.

“Here, Western, I’ve got a job for you.”

“What is it?” said Tod.

“You can fill up these bottles with water, cork ’em, dry ’em, and paste on those labels. Our stock’s getting low.”

Cook had a couple of biggish bottles and a measuring-glass on the dispensing counter, and a whole phalanx of eight-ounce bottles ranged in two neat rows. He began to measure some brown stuff and some pink stuff into a glass, and to pour an equal amount of the mixture into each empty bottle. He worked with great rapidity and with that cynical and gay air of his that rather puzzled Tod.

“What’s this?” Tod asked.

Cook gave him a wink.

“This, my boy, is Snape’s Magic Cough Cure, an absolute elixir, priced at half a crown a bottle.”

“Oh, is it?” said Tod, immensely interested. “What’s in it?”

“What’s in it! That’s a trade secret, but I’ll tell you. You’ve got to swallow the physic and get used to the taste. We give ’em a little ipecacuanha and some sugar water coloured pink. It doesn’t do ’em any harm.”

“Must be rather cheap,” said Tod.

“Costs twopence—including the bottle, perhaps. You can work it out. Then there are those pretty labels and the corks. Yes, it’s good biz.”

Tod’s blue eyes took on a sulky look.

“I thought it was from the prescription of a big London doctor.”

“Oh, did you! Suppose you heard old Wisdon guffing.”

“Well, I call it a swindle,” said Tod.

Mr. Cook gave him an amused look.

“Better not say that to Snape. He’d kick you out.”

“What about you?” asked Tod.

“Me? Snape can’t play games with me. It wouldn’t be worth his while. I could make things nasty. Besides, we’re only small fry at that.”

“What do you mean?”

Cook indicated a case full of patent medicines, jerking the hand that held the empty measuring-glass in their direction.

“What price all that stuff? Some of it’s not so bad; most of it is just muck. Take Prettyman’s Pills, for instance; twenty pills for two and six, and they’ve got nothing in ’em but bread and a little aloes. Prettyman must be a millionaire.”

“Why, it’s thieving,” said Tod.

“No, it’s just cheek and advertising. Besides, Prettyman’s a great philanthropist. He gave £50,000 to a hospital the other day.”

“It wasn’t Prettyman who gave it,” said Tod.

“Who, then?”

“Why, the people he’d swindled.”

Cook gave one of his gay laughs.

“You’d better get into a monastery, young Western. Anyhow, what about all those bottles?”

Chapter Eleven

Tod began to be discouraged. He lost his interest in Mr. Snape’s shop and in all those mysterious bottles of physic and proprietary preparations that pretended to heal the sick. It was the profit on them that troubled Tod. He still had vivid memories of his mother’s last illness, and he could picture men and women buying those sure cures for poor souls in a like tragic state. It seemed to him to be heartless cheating.

“And if some people will always be fools,” as Cook had put it, why didn’t the wise people try to prevent them being fools? Surely it was someone’s business!

He put that question to a new friend, a Mr. Burgetrode, one of Shaston’s eccentrics.

“It’s the Englishman’s privilege to be a fool, young man, his legal right. Be careful how you interfere with it.”

It was in June that Tod made the acquaintance of Mr. Burgetrode, and made it in rather a queer way. Tod had had a solitary fit, and had taken to country walks, fierce and lonely Sabbath rambles with a bottle of ginger beer in one pocket and some bread and cheese in the other. He was coming back down a wild, gorse-grown valley that cut deep into the rolling and wooded country to the west of Shaston, a valley sacred to a semi-defunct golf club and a number of sheep. It was known as Summer Valley; through it a stalwart little stream shouldered its way through masses of blackberry and brier. The bells of the Shaston churches were ringing for evening service, and down yonder on the green slopes a few scattered figures were playing golf. Tod leapt an old rail fence, came round a couple of big thorn bushes, and found an old gentleman sitting on the grass, with one boot off, and a blue-socked foot looking rather big and funny.

The old gentleman had a queer, lean face, rather fierce and alarming, with blue eyes packed away under big eyebrows, and a little tuft of greyish black hair between his lower lip and chin. He was wearing a shapeless grey tweed hat, a brown jacket and grey flannel trousers. His red tie was passed through a big gold ring. Tod had never seen anybody or anything quite like him before. He had not the Shaston look, either working-day or Sabbath.

“Hallo, boy!”

“Hallo!” said Tod.

The old gentleman stared at him.

“Damn those church bells, and damn those golfing fools. I have been shouting and waving. Might as well be on the raft of the Medusa.”

“You’ve sprained your ankle,” said Tod.

“Solomon in a straw hat! What do you think made me want to jump that fence?”

“Curiosity, sir,” said Tod.

The old gentleman bunched his eyebrows together, and stared at Tod still more fixedly.

“No fool like an old fool! I could clear four feet ten in my day. Well, what’s to be done, young man.”

Tod considered.

“You can’t walk, or you wouldn’t be sitting there like that. It’s a good mile to the Lignor road. Tell you what, sir, I’ll run down to that golf-house and telephone for a cab to come up there. Then I’ll come back and we’ll do a three-legged walk down to the golf-house.”

The old gentleman said “Ha!” rather fiercely. It was one of his tricks.

“You help me down to the club-house, and I’ll raise the conveyance. What’s your name?”

“Western. Tod Western.”

“All right, Western. And you will come back and have dinner with me at the Majestic Hotel. That’s a bargain. My name is Burgetrode.”

Tod helped Mr. Burgetrode down to the club-house, and he had—for him—the unique experience of dining at the Hotel Majestic. Tod was rather shy and awkward; the great room was full of wonderful people—men and women in evening dress—and Tod felt that everybody was staring at him. Mr. Burgetrode had a little table in a corner near a window. A very important-looking waiter had helped the old gentleman across the room, and now stood waiting for orders.

“Dinner for two, sir?”

“Of course, Reynolds, of course.”

The waiter beamed at Tod.

“Thick or clear soup, sir?”

“Whichever you like,” said Tod, rather embarrassed and wanting to return the waiter’s politeness.

Old Burgetrode looked up sharply.

“Clear, Reynolds, for both. Go straight through. And bring us two ginger beers.”

Tod remembered that bottle in his pocket, and a surreptitious hand discovered the stopper and stone top protruding for all the world to see. He suppressed that bottle and carefully turned down the flap of his pocket.

Then Mr. Burgetrode began to talk. He talked rather jerkily, and with a sort of playful and biting ferocity that puzzled Tod. He asked Tod all sorts of questions, queer, unexpected questions that came at you all ways and danced round you like a Chinese cracker. Tod noticed that the waiter was extraordinarily polite to Mr. Burgetrode. What with eating his dinner and answering Mr. Burgetrode’s questions, Tod had enough to do. Presently a very gorgeous and charming lady in black who had been sitting at another table rustled across and spoke to Mr. Burgetrode on her way out.

“I do hope you have not sprained your foot very badly, Mr. Burgetrode?”

Tod saw Mr. Burgetrode’s eyes turn all red.

“I’ve sprained it; that ought to be good enough, I think.”

The gorgeous lady purred over him.

“How witty you are. We are having a little concert in the recreation-room to-morrow night——”

“Have it, madam, have it. I shan’t stop it. Put me down for a guinea.”

The gorgeous lady looked at Tod as though she were ready to kiss him, and then floated away.

“Sausage and Schnapps!” said Mr. Burgetrode, irrelevantly, “and her second husband is still alive.”

He dismissed Tod in a queer, curt, yet friendly way.

“You will find me near the bandstand between six and seven, Western, on most evenings.”

“We don’t close till seven, sir.”

“Then make it eight till nine.”

“Thank you, sir.”

That was all that Mr. Burgetrode said to him. In Tod’s ears it had sounded strangely like an order, but Mr. Burgetrode seemed to be the sort of person who had an inherent right to issue orders. Most people were afraid of him. Tod was not.

Mr. Burgetrode came into Tod’s life at a moment when young Western was fighting with a series of disillusionments. On the way home from the Hotel Majestic he met Kitty Flowerdew and Edwin Rook walking arm in arm along the Parade, and Kitty refused to see him. Not so Edwin Rook. The shopman nodded at Tod in a very complacent and patronising way, and when he had passed them Tod heard them laughing. He did not know that there was pain and shame in Kitty’s laughter. The jest rankled. He thought of the way in which Mr. Burgetrode had snubbed that gorgeous lady who had come and purred round his table. Perhaps Mr. Burgetrode had no use for women and believed that anything in petticoats was made for the humiliation and enslaving of men?

Tod spent a very difficult Monday in Mr. Snape’s shop. Mr. Snape was in a very bad temper about something or other, and Tod happened to be the person who got in his way. It began by Tod breaking the glass in one of the big cabinet doors just when one of the richest women in Shaston was buying scent from “Mr. Any-think-else.”

“You clumsy young brute,” said Snape, when the lady had left the shop.

Tod coloured up.

“Don’t you speak to me like that. I’ll pay for it.”

“I guess you will,” said Mr. Snape sarcastically, “and I don’t want any impertinence from my assistants, thank you.”

Tod fell into trouble again in the afternoon. Cook was dispensing; Old Wisdon had gone to unpack some drugs, and Tod was left in charge of the shop. A woman came in and asked him if Sowerby’s Sea Salts were any use for sore feet. Tod said he didn’t know. Mr. Snape, emerging from his back room, happened to overhear Tod’s crass and futile confession of ignorance.

The woman was leaving the shop when Snape appeared behind the counter. He let her go, and then fell heavily on Tod.

“What do you mean by answering a lady like that?”

“Like what?” Tod asked. “I wasn’t rude.”

“You told her that you didn’t know whether Sowerby’s Salts were good for sore feet.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Tod.

Mr. Snape grew very pink.

“Don’t let me ever hear you say I don’t know again in my shop.”

“What am I to say?” asked Tod.

“Use your wits, you young idiot. You are here to sell things. You can come and ask me or one of the others, can’t you?”

“All right,” said Tod, restraining himself; “I’m learning.”

He described the incident to “Mr. Any-think-else,” and appealed to him for sympathy.

“I only told the truth,” Tod argued. “How was I to know whether the stuff was any good for people’s feet? Is it?”

“Don’t know,” said Wisdon sulkily.

“Well, would you tell the truth?”

“Tell the truth! Great Scott, Western, I’ve got a wife and three children.”

Tod said no more, but he thought a great deal about the problem of old Wisdon and his wife and children.

He fell in that evening with Arthur Mossup from Horrox and Horrox’s, and Mossup, who had a shy man’s affection for him, named him for an adventure.

“Like a walk, Western?”

“Right-o! Where are you going?”

Mossup showed him a handful of keys.

“House-hunting. It’s the only time I’ve got, and an agent friend of mine obliged me with these. I’m after a little place, and we have two hours’ daylight.”

“What fun,” said Tod.

They walked in the direction of Blackberry Hill, and for the first time in his life Tod felt the lure of houses. There was something very fascinating in poking about in those back streets, finding your house all empty and waiting, in unlocking its door and exploring all its possibilities and its secrets. Tod developed a keenness and an enthusiasm that surprised Mossup. They measured rooms, inspected rusty kitchen stoves, ferreted about in lugubrious back yards, took note of cupboards, coppers, sanitary arrangements and the invariable absence of a bath. Mossup was a serious and prematurely old young man. He would stand and meditate like a stork on one leg, his weak eyes glazed behind his spectacles, a tuft of flaxen hair standing up on his head like a plume. His ambitions were very modest. His romance ran to a rental of £20 a year, with the furniture for one bedroom and a sitting-room, and the stocking of a kitchen. There was something pathetic about his cautiousness, and the way he kept consulting a little notebook in which the adventure was tabulated to the last penny.

They were poor little houses, obvious little houses, cheap, shabby, and hopelessly ugly. All the windows looked at other houses of exactly the same type. One or two of them had a very grimed and greasy air. An occasional whiff of sewer gas sent Mossup sniffing into dark places like a solemn and suspicious dog. There seemed a lamentable absence of fresh whitewash everywhere, and Tod could not see any appetising corner where you would care to keep food. The larders and little sculleries were—well, you just said “Poof!” Yet the fascination of the quest gripped Tod. Mossup interested him. He was equally interested in the house in which Mossup might choose to live.

“We have to be very careful—very careful,” said Mossup, jotting down notes in his book.

“I don’t like any of these houses.”

“Don’t you, Western?” and Mossup looked pained.

“They’re dirty and stuffy and ugly. Where’s the gardens, too? I don’t call any of those cat-walks gardens.”

“Can’t afford more than twenty pounds. You have to put up with things, sometimes.”

“I don’t see it,” said Tod. “Why can’t things be arranged differently. They could be, if somebody bothered.”

Tod spent two more evenings in house-hunting with Arthur Mossup. At last they found a little old house, in a blind lane off Paradise Row, one of those solid and unaffected little houses that had lived in the country until the splurge of the Shaston suburbs had swallowed it. It had a green latticed porch, green window frames, a tiled roof and a bit of garden. Mossup grew greatly excited. He wanted to rush down to the agents and take the place that very night.

“Somebody else may get it. Olive will just shout when she sees this cottage.”

“Plenty of time,” said Tod, “go round first thing in the morning. Rather wish I was a house agent. Must be quite jolly finding homes for people.”

The idea fermented. It was working in Tod’s head when he strolled along to the bandstand on Wednesday evening in search of Mr. Burgetrode. He found him in a bath-chair by the parade railings, and looking as though he hated it. The bath-chair man was leaning over the railing, smoking a pipe.

“Smith,” said Mr. Burgetrode.

“Sir?”

“Go and get a drink; go and get two drinks, and come back in half an hour. Here’s the money.”

Tod perched himself on the railings.

“How is your foot, sir?”

“My foot doesn’t interest me, Western; let it alone. We’ll leave it with the doctor. I expected to see you before, young man.”

Tod looked down unabashed into Mr. Burgetrode’s fierce brown face.

“Sorry, sir; I’ve been house-hunting.”

“What?”

“House-hunting with a friend who is getting married.”

“Why doesn’t he do something else! And did you find a house?”

“After three evenings at it,” said Tod; “we looked at all sorts of mouldy places where you wouldn’t expect to find anything but blackbeetles and cats. Houses are very interesting, sir, don’t you think?”

“Almost as interesting as men, Western, and not quite such fools. Houses are alive.”

“Yes, aren’t they?” said Tod. “I have begun to feel I should like to live with houses, know all about houses, put people into houses.”