PART ONE (continued 5)

“Hallo, Arthur! Come in.”

Mossup was nervous and confidential.

“Can I have a few words with you, Western—alone, I mean?”

“Come along to my den, old chap.”

The drawing-room door opened while Mossup was making a great business of wiping his boots on the door-mat, and Tod’s wife came to see to whom Tod was speaking in the hall. Mossup looked frightened directly she appeared.

“Oh, it’s you!”

“Good evening, Mrs. Western.”

“Arthur has just strolled in for a chat. We are going to have a smoke in my den.”

Tod carried him off, and Tod’s wife sat in the drawing-room and listened to the sound of their voices. It was Mossup who did most of the talking, and in a jerky, excited and yet apologetic way, Tod’s voice breaking in sympathetically from time to time. Mossup did not stay long. Millie heard the two men come into the hall, and Tod opened the front door while Mossup was putting on his mackintosh.

“God bless you, Western, God bless you, old man.”

Poor Mossup gulped out his gratitude, made a blind grab at Tod’s hand, shook it, and blundered out into the night.

Tod was the son of his father, and perhaps he remembered that evening so many years ago when Mr. Jacks had taken away those crisp notes from No. 13 Spaniards Row. Tod turned back with a glow at the heart and found his wife standing in the doorway of the drawing-room. Her part was to play the part of Tod’s mother; but her hands were not the hands of Nancy Western, but the greedy paws of a selfish and sensual young woman.

“What did he want?”

Her voice was sharp and suspicious.

“Olive has just had a baby, and the poor old chap’s hard up.”

“I thought he had sneaked in to cadge. You didn’t give him anything?”

“Of course I did,” said Tod.

“How much?”

“Ten pounds.”

“You fool!” she said, “you silly fool!”

She was furious, and her mean fury astonished Tod.

“Chucking money away like that, and then expecting me to scrape in the house! You soft-headed idiot! He’ll never pay you back.”

“I don’t expect him to,” said Tod. “I suppose I can do what I like with my own money.”

The glow had gone out of his heart, and there was a frost in his blue eyes. He remembered suddenly how his mother had kissed his father on that night. And the pride fell out of Tod’s enterprise, his pride in the business and the home. He walked past his wife, slammed the door of his den, lit a pipe and smoked furiously. The woman had revealed herself, and the revelation was the beginning of Tod’s disillusionment.

Chapter Twenty-three

That winter saw the beginning of an unlovely home.

Tod’s wife had called him a fool for being generous to an old friend, and those bitter words of hers were never recalled. Millie had all the obtuseness of the little egoist. She did not know how deeply she had wounded her man, that she had challenged and affronted all that was best in him, and that such an insult is not forgotten. Tod might have forgiven her, but she did not seem to realise that she had sinned against the man in him, and that forgiveness was necessary.

And so they entered upon that most damnable of all states, a state of silent and gradual hostility and of spiritual estrangement. The sex spell had passed; the glamour of it had ceased to blind the man’s eyes, and there was no beautiful comradeship to take its place. The boy and girl affair was dead, and Tod found himself living with a woman who began to betray a moral obtuseness that shocked his secret soul. The “Giggles” of Pentworth had reappeared, and Tod stared at the apparition with eyes of profound dismay.

She had called him a fool because his heart had gone out to poor old Mossup, who wanted coal and food for a sick wife!

There were moments when Tod struggled passionately against this disillusionment. He was lonely, worried, troubled about the future, and he tried to get the woman in Millie back into his arms, but she had grown strangely cold, and Tod was sensitive.

“Oh, shut up; I don’t want to be worried.”

So he left her alone, wondering why she had changed towards him, and searching his own heart on the chance that the fault might be his own. He could not help dating her change of temper from the time when the business had ceased to thrive and money had become difficult. He had forced economies upon her, and he remembered so well that the “Giggles” of Pentworth had scorned the boy who had no pocket-money to spend.

Tod did a foolish but lovable thing. He went out into King William Street one afternoon, bought a set of silver fox furs, and took them home with him that night. He would show her that, though he had to be careful, he was not mean, and that he had not forgotten her economies.

He hid the box under the sofa, and played the lover’s game.

“Someone has left a parcel,” he told her, with a touch of his old affectionate shyness.

“Oh, what parcel?”

“You had better look.”

She glanced round the room, and then at Tod’s mock solemn face.

“What’s the joke?”

“I think it’s rather a nice joke.”

“I’m not good at guessing,” she said tartly.

Tod winced, and made haste to see something under the sofa.

“What’s that—a cardboard box?”

He had expected her to dash at it like a child, tear off the string, and turn back the tissue paper; but she put a slow hand under the sofa, drew out the box, and her face was the face of a woman preparing to tell a lie.

“Gifford’s! I haven’t bought anything at Gifford’s for six months.”

“But I have,” said Tod.

And then she understood.

“Oh, Toddy!”

She had the fur stole round her throat, and her hands in the muff, and she was looking in the mirror. She ran and kissed Tod.

“Aren’t they just lovely! You are a dear boy.”

That night they were lovers again, and her red mouth gave him kisses.

Tod’s fragment of a St. Luke’s summer lasted just three days. He was opening his letters in the office when he came across one that made him feel strangely sick at heart. It was a bill from Horrox & Horrox’s for thirty-three pounds five shillings and sixpence, and it was accompanied by a curt note that galled Tod’s pride. “We beg to remind you that this account has been outstanding for over a year, and has been rendered to Mrs. Western thrice previously. Unless it is settled immediately we regret to say we shall be compelled to take other measures.”

Tod pulled out his cheque book, set his teeth, wrote a cheque for the amount, and sent it round to Horrox & Horrox’s by the hands of the garage boy. The paying of that bill necessitated his drawing upon money that he had been scraping together to pay his quarterly tribute to the Semite of Wardour Street. Tod was angry, and with the anger of a man who felt that he had been deceived. Why had she hidden that bill? Why hadn’t she told him?

He did not go home till late in the evening, for he had not the heart to go home. And yet, after all, it was such a petty thing. Perhaps she had forgotten, perhaps she had been saving money out of her housekeeping allowance in order to pay that bill. Tod walked five miles before he turned in at his own gate; he had been trying to invent excuses for Millie, to save that little warmth of summer that had come back into their lives.

Millie had been playing bridge at a house across the road. He found her sitting in front of the fire, her shoes lying by the fender, and a box of chocolates in her lap. She had been annoyed by something that had happened during the evening, and Tod’s glum and worried face suggested bad news.

He pulled up a chair and sat down.

“Tired, little girl?”

He was quite gentle, hating that bit of paper in his pocket, and hoping with all heart that she would be able to explain it away.

“Where have you been? I thought you were coming to the Spencers’ with me?”

“I’ve been rather worried, and I stayed late at the shop.”

“You always are worried,” she said peevishly.

And then Tod pulled out Horrox & Horrox’s receipted bill.

“I got this to-day, Millie. It rather upset my calculations.”

“What is it?” she asked him sharply, with a narrowing of the eyes and one hand outstretched.

“A bill.”

Her whole face hardened.

“Nothing very wonderful in that, is there?”

“I didn’t expect it, that’s all. You might have told me, Millie.”

He passed her the bill, and she sat up and stared at it, pulling at her lower lip with a crooked forefinger. She was angry—angry with Horrox’s and angry with Tod.

“The fools shouldn’t have sent it to you.”

His eyes brightened.

“You were going to pay it?”

“Me?”

Her hard and sulky eyes killed the light in Tod’s.

“How was I going to pay it? Save farthings out of the grocer’s bill! I wanted it kept back till things were going better.”

“Well, I’ve paid it,” said Tod grimly, “but it hasn’t made things easier for me.”

And then he softened to her, hating to see her face so hard and sullen.

“I wish you’d tell me things, dear. I haven’t kept anything back from you. Besides, it’s not good for the business to be threatened for not paying your bills. Horrox’s letter made me mad.”

She gave him a quick, appraising glance, and then stared sulkily at the fire.

“It’s not the only one,” she said; “you may as well know.”

He looked at her blankly, mastered a sudden spasm of anger, and became more quietly and grimly serious. Tod was no whimperer. Games had taught him not to squeal when he was hurt.

“You had better tell me. How much do you owe?”

She jigged a foot.

“About seventy pounds.”

“As much as that! It’s got to be settled.”

She expected him to explode, make a scene, and she would have understood such a storm and known how to meet it; but Tod did not explode. He seemed to grow quieter. And his self-control irritated his wife and baffled her. It was like storming at a man who kept reading a book.

“I want you to realise what all this means.”

He pulled his chair close to hers, picked up a book, and, using the back of Horrox’s bill, he began to jot down figures. His deliberation and his calmness frightened her a little. She had no complete understanding of the real Tod in her husband, and she noticed his compressed lips and the intent steadiness of his blue eyes, and almost hated him for his self-restraint. There was no flurry, no jerking movement of the hand that was pencilling figures on the back of Horrox’s bill. In the words of the vulgarly undisciplined: “I could have screamed.” That was the effect Tod’s patience had upon his wife. What a silly, serious fool he was! Why didn’t he stamp about and swear? Why didn’t he hit her in the face—master her with his man’s strength? Her sensual nature would have reacted to physical violence. She might have fought back at him like a wild cat, but she would have ended by wiping his shoes.

Tod was too finely made to be the mate or master of such a woman, but he succeeded in frightening her, and she hated him for the grave and dispassionate way in which he did it.

“I want to go through these figures with you, Millie.”

“Oh, all right!”

He bent sideways towards her, using the pencil as a pointer.

“This shows what we have in hand, and what the business brings in roughly each month. This column here shows what I owe, and what the business and the house cost each month. It makes a pretty serious sum on the wrong side. I had kept a hundred pounds out of the thousand as a reserve in case of emergencies. I shall have to use it to pay these bills.”

She stared at the pencilled figures, and swung a restless and rebellious foot.

“I thought you were going to make such a success of it,” she said.

Tod held his temper fast by the throat.

“And so I may. This is going to cripple me for a time. Can’t you realise, dear, that a young business has to be nursed, that it can’t carry bills like this? We are sailing on the edge of bankruptcy. If matters don’t mend we shall have to give up this house.”

He had frightened her, and frightened her so seriously that she began to hate him. She was sullen, and quite untouched by his gentleness, the gentleness of a man who was utterly in earnest. But she did not want to give up “Carnarvon.” Her fear roused in her a strange spirit of comradeship, the comradeship that unites two people who are in danger of being swamped in an open boat. She began to look round for something that she could use as a baler, while Tod stuck to the oars and kept the boat’s nose towards the shore.

It is more than probable that Tod’s wife could have saved the business if she had been given full authority and allowed to use her cunning. She had an instinctive appreciation of what “business” meant in a town like Shaston, and she had none of Tod’s scruples. Messrs. Pumpelly and Britt would have found her a very notable rival, a handsome young woman with a complete and natural knowledge of how to bribe men and make them serve her. Had Tod been a man with a commercial imagination and a cynical determination to make money, he would have stuck to the office and the garage, put Millie in a car and let her play the part of out-of-door partner. No sly women touting for votes at an election would have shown more ingenuity. And she would have had no mercy on the men whom she employed. Tod was too generous and too straight.

She even proposed some such adventure, seeing herself as a golden-haired young fascinatress, interviewing hotel managers and dropping smiles and half-sovereigns into the hands of persuadable porters.

“I bet I’d make things hum.”

But Tod would not have it. He was not inclined to see his wife turning herself into a business tout.

Then Tod caught “flu,” and lay worrying himself to death over the quarterly tribute that was due to the Semite of Wardour Street. He was short of the money by ten pounds, and he could think of nothing else. Worry and aspirin scuffled together over the question of his temperature, and the drug had the worst of the squabble.

He kept babbling about selling things, and in the weakness of his fever he allowed the truth about Mr. Burgetrode to slip into his wife’s hands. She had wanted him to write to Mr. Burgetrode.

“I can’t. He cut me off, you know.”

“When you married me?”

“What’s it matter? I want an orange, dear. I want to suck an orange.”

The woman in her was touched for the moment, but much of her tenderness was swallowed up in her anger against Mr. Burgetrode. “Thought I wasn’t good enough, did he? Mean old beast!”

Tod talked delirious nonsense half the night.

“Ten pounds—I want ten pounds. Arthur had it; can’t ask Arthur. Beastly Jew. Sell the piano and send him a cheque. Oh, darling, my head aches so!”

Listening to his child’s anguish, Millie came by an idea. Tod was better next morning, but utterly miserable and weak.

“I am going up to see that man in Wardour Street,” she said.

He protested. “But you can’t.”

“Of course I can. What’s his name—Goldstein?”

“Yes—Maurice Goldstein. But—Millie——”

“Don’t you worry, old dear. I’ll talk him around and explain things. I dare say he’s not a bad sort, some bald-headed old blighter——”

“He’s quite young,” said Tod, “not more than forty. If he’d give me another month——”

“You leave it to me,” laughed the young woman.

So Millie dressed herself in those silver fox furs and her most fashionable hat, scented herself, gave her eyelashes the faintest of touches, and travelled up to town to interview Mr. Goldstein.

Chapter Twenty-four

Tod’s wife found Mr. Maurice Goldstein sitting in a revolving chair in front of a rolled-top desk. She had been kept waiting in the outer office for half an hour before Mr. Goldstein troubled to see her, and he did not look up when the clerk showed her into his private room.

Maurice Goldstein was writing a letter.

“Excuse me a moment.”

The politeness was purely perfunctory. He sat at the desk like a gourmand absorbed in a meal, his chin thrust forward with a queer suggestion of truculence, the penholder looking lost in his fat white hand. Millie, the woman, collected her impressions. The man was prematurely bald, a ring of curly black hair running like a wreath round an egg-shaped head. His neck was the neck of middle age, with an incipient overflow where it met his collar. He wore white spats, and his thighs and buttocks were huge. Millie had only a partial view of his face, a glimpse of thick pouting lips between the full curve of nose and chin.

He was deliberate. The letter was put into an envelope, addressed, and the pen laid on its brass holder before his fat thighs swung round in the pedestal chair. He had begun to speak while the chair was still swinging and before he had seen Millie’s face.

“What is it you want? I’ve got an appointment in ten minutes.”

And then his sensual brown eyes seemed to set in a surprised stare.

Millie, the woman, smiled at him.

“I’m sorry to trouble you, Mr. Goldstein, but I have come to see you for my husband.”

The Jew looked and said nothing. The sex in her was flowing into him like wine.

“My husband is ill with influenza. He owes you a cheque or something. I don’t know anything about money; and he was worrying, so I said I would come and see you.”

Mr. Goldstein’s eyes filled suddenly with an amused, brown light.

“So many people owe me money, but it is not often, madam, that I see their wives.”

“Do they? How jolly to be owed money.”

He made a fat movement of his chin.

“And not to get it—what!”

“Oh, you get it all right,” she said audaciously.

The Jew was pleased.

“My husband’s too easy, you know,” she went on with confidential friendliness. “I know you helped to start him, but he wants a few straight talks from a man who can make money. I’ve tried——”

He was rubbing one big fist in the palm of his other hand.

“And you said you knew nothing.”

“Did I?” and she laughed. “Anyhow, I do the economising. No, I don’t like it.”

“You wouldn’t,” he said with an insolent and intimate gleam of the eyes.

He sat there and basked while she told him of Tod’s difficulties. In fact, Tod cut a sorry figure in Maurice Goldstein’s office, having all his money assets exposed to the cynical eyes of the Jew, and his moral parts figured and discussed by a young woman who did not know the meaning of the word loyalty. Goldstein was amused, more than amused. He was astride of a great advantage, and he made the most of his mount.

“Excuse me. I’ll look up the transaction.”

He did not ring for a clerk, but turned up “Western’s Garage” in a private ledger of his own. The figures seemed to amuse him, for Millie saw him smiling over the book.

“You come from Shaston-on-Sea, Mrs. Western. I happen to be interested in Shaston.”

“Oh?” said Millie. “How?”

Goldstein pulled out his watch.

“Lunching anywhere?” he asked curtly.

“Somewhere, by myself.”

“I’d like the honour of giving you lunch.”

“What about that appointment?”

His brown eyes held hers.

“It’s off. Will you come?”

“It’s very nice of you, Mr. Goldstein, but I——”

“Please yourself,” he said, with a sensual smile and a bluntness that she understood. “I want to have a talk about Shaston and your husband’s business.”

“I really am rather hungry,” she allowed, looking up at him under mischievous lashes.

He rang the bell.

“Smith, get a taxi. I shan’t be back till three.”

Tod’s wife returned to Shaston like a cat that has been lapping cream. It appeared that Maurice Goldstein was interested financially in the new Regent’s Hotel that was to be opened on the seafront. It was a very big hotel, one among half a dozen that were being floated by a syndicate in various south coast towns. Goldstein had his big hands in the business; he had his big hands in many businesses, and the smell of his money had entered Millie’ nostrils. He was the sort of powerful and cynically sensual man who can be very attractive to a sensual woman. The Assyrian bull in him was more than symbolical.

Tod was eating an orange when his wife opened the bedroom door. He looked gaunt and grey in the gaslight; his head an untidy mop, his chin all brown stubble. And, somehow, he looked poor.

“I settled it,” she began, vaguely patronising. “Goldstein’s not a bad sort. He won’t press you.”

Tod’s big eyes filled with relief.

“That’s good. I’ve been lying here all day, worrying my head off. How did you manage it?”

“Just common sense. Besides, you old silly, it’s the first time you have been late with the money, and Goldstein’s out to back you, and not smash you up. It’s just common sense.”

She did not tell Tod that she had lunched with Goldstein, or that the man was interested in the new Regent’s Hotel. It was no business of Tod’s to know that Goldstein was coming down to stay at Shaston. Millie foresaw possibilities in the situation, a chance of dabbling with her own hands in financial experiments. She knew that men could be very useful, but Tod was too touchy a fool to be told about such diplomacies. She fancied she knew how to manipulate Maurice Goldstein.

Of that very sinister period in Tod’s life there is little that is worth the telling. Its culminating incident collected the whole glare of the affair’s significance. Some three months passed, and in spite of all his efforts Tod still owed the Semite of Wardour Street some sixty pounds, but the summer season was at hand, and Tod forecasted a new briskness in the business. He had not been swamped by any more unexpected bills, and Millie appeared to be spending less money. She had developed a new penchant for going up to town once a week and buying her groceries and household necessaries at the Stores, and Tod had nothing to say against it, since she could prove that it saved money. Also, she seemed more contented, more satisfied with something.

Early in May Tod went North to take the delivery of a client’s new car at the Sangster Company’s works, and to drive it down to Shaston. He told Millie that he expected to be away for two nights, as the new car was rather an expensive production, and he had no intention of pushing her through a speed trial on the way down. He meant to stay a night in the North, and break the journey somewhere near Oxford. Millie said that she envied him the drive, gave him a packet of sandwiches to put in his little black handbag, and then darted out and sent a telegram.

The Regent’s Hotel had just opened for the summer season, and she dined there that night with Maurice Goldstein. The Jew had a big car with him, and after dinner they went out in the car, Goldstein driving himself, and they got lost in the lanes among the Bramber woods. The lights were out when they drove back to Shaston.

Now if Tod had kept to his programme, and not bustled the new “Sangster” southwards on the afternoon of his arrival, he might have remained the blind man in the home for months to come. “You can take her away at once,” said the works manager, “she’s O.K., and won’t want touching for a hundred miles.” So Tod took her away, knocked a hundred and fifty miles off the journey before putting up for the night, and at five o’clock next afternoon he was within ten miles of Shaston and speeding along the London road with the woods all green under a clean, spring sky.

“Wonder if she’d do Furnace Hill on second?” thought Tod.

The experiment challenged him. He swung the car to the left at the next lane, and saw an A. A. scout peddling up the hill, looking very hot and thirsty.

The man got off his machine and signalled to Tod to stop.

“Not going Shaston way are you, sir?”

“I am,” said Tod.

“I just got a message from a boy that there’s a car broke down the other side of Furnace Hill. I’m going to ’phone up a garage.”

“I’m your man,” said Tod. “I’m Western of Western’s Garage. I’m going round by Furnace Hill, and I can stop and see what’s wrong.”

“Then I can leave it to you,” said the scout; “I want my tea. Get it at Lamb’s Corner.”

Tod drove blindly towards his disillusionment. The new car soared up Furnace Hill on second speed, and Tod let her “free wheel” down the opposite slope, delighting in the noiseless glide of her and the taut silence of her youth. Furnace Hill had formed part of the old forest, yet had remained a wilderness of gorse, broom, bracken and brambles, with thickets of Scots fir and groves of straggling oaks. Tod knew it well, and by the bend where a famous old yew sent its black plumes up into the blue Tod came upon a yellow car standing derelict at the side of the road. Tod’s car had come coasting silently round the corner. He pulled up, got out, and looked about for some sign of the owner of the yellow car.

Then he heard voices, and a woman’s laugh—a laugh that ended in an ecstatic and giggling scream. There was a little wood here, full of bluebells and surrounded by masses of yellow broom. Tod pushed through a gap in the brushwood, and came upon a grassy space, a smooth trickle of green that lost itself like water in the shadows of the wood. He saw a girl and a man here. The man was bending over the girl, kissing her throat with a sort of savage violence. Her bright hair and face were visible above his dark and gluttonous head, and her eyes were closed like the eyes of a dreaming, sensual cat. Her arms were round the man’s neck.

And Tod recognised his wife.

He remembered making some sort of noise in his throat. He remembered the two figures disentangling themselves, the man getting up clumsily on his hands and knees, and turning a savage and sheepish jowl. The woman sat up, dead white, patting her hair with her hands, and staring at nothing with expressionless blue eyes.

Tod recognised Maurice Goldstein.

“What do you mean by kissing my wife?”

Even in the thick of his anger he felt the paltriness of it all, the sordid smear on the face of his wrath.

The man grinned. He looked yellow, but there was a savage tawniness in his eyes.

“Because she asked me to.”

“You cad!” said Tod.

He felt that nothing mattered—nothing but the necessity for hammering this bulk of blackguardism with his fists. And hammer him he did, though Goldstein made a fight of it with a heavy, blundering ferocity that panted and got out of breath. Tod smashed him in the face till the white bulge of it was all blood, and his big mouth a dripping thing full of teeth and redness.

Tod’s wife stood and watched, pulling at her lower lip with her forefinger, her nostrils quivering. There was something in Tod’s eyes that fascinated her, a blue glare, a quick, calculating fury. She heard the smashes he landed on the other man’s face.

Goldstein went down, dazed, his teeth showing in a bloody, snarling grin.

Tod’s wife fawned suddenly upon her man.

“Oh, Tod, you licked him.”

Tod just turned his head slightly, and gave her an oblique stare.

“Come on,” he said, “come on, damn you!”

She followed him with extraordinary meekness, but loitered a moment by the yellow car.

“My coat’s in here.”

She reached for a fur coat, but Tod’s eyes had become the merciless eyes of a man who had been shocked out of all illusions.

“Leave that alone. I didn’t give it you.”

She left it alone, and, following him into the other car, sat staring stiffly in front of her.

Tod drove down the hill, that blue glare still in his eyes, and Goldstein’s blood showing on his knuckles. He felt that he had come to the end of the world, that all the conscious pride had gone out of his life, and that there was nothing left to him now that he had thrashed the man who had debauched his wife. He had trusted her, and the reaction was all the more fierce.

“How long has this been going on?” he asked her suddenly.

He was the master for the moment, and there was a whimpering note in her voice.

“Oh, Tod, don’t be so horrid! I couldn’t help it. He took me by surprise.”

“How?”

“I’d been out with him in the car, and we had a breakdown, and we were just waiting for help. He seemed to go mad suddenly just before you came.”

Tod did not believe her.

“Did he give you that fur coat?”

“He made me take it. I didn’t want to offend him.”

“But what were you with him for at all? It can’t have been the first time.”

“How beastly you are! I was trying to help you and the business. He’s got such influence. Don’t you see?”

“Good God!”

His nausea was complete. Her moral obliquity, the coarse cynicism of her confession shocked the very deeps of his manhood. And he did not believe her. He could not forget that look of sensual rapture he had seen upon her face.

“Well, that’s the end of it,” he said.

“What d’you mean?”

“I have got to pay that blackguard what I owe him. I shall sell things and give up the house. I don’t see that the business is much use—now.”

She said nothing. Tod’s face convinced her that there was nothing to be said. But she began to hate him again, this inopportune, straightforward fool who had blundered in and spoilt the cunning of her intrigue. She would have looked at it as a “bit of fun,” fooling two men and getting what she wanted. Lots of women did it.

She told him so, and he flashed round at her with sudden fury.

“Shut up—damn you! You don’t understand.”

He drove with cool recklessness into Shaston, and pulled up at the end of Duke Street.

“You’d better go—back to the house.”

He had refused to say “home,” and she noticed it.

“All right. Are you coming?”

He drove on as though he had not heard her.

Chapter Twenty-five

Tod drove the new car into his garage and switched off the engine, and when the steel heart of the machine ceased to beat, something in Tod gave up also. He felt tired, unstrung, yet curiously callous. He mooned vacantly about the place for five minutes, like a man on the edge of some great sickness, and then habit caught him and sent him into the little office to see if there were any letters.

He was opening an envelope when he noticed Maurice Goldstein’s blood on his hands.

“Filth!”

Strangely nauseated, he went out and shouted to Love, who was changing a burst tyre on one of the taxis.

“Get me a bucket of water and some soap, will you?”

He stood there and washed, and the act of washing touched some live memory in him, a memory of his father’s bloody knuckles and all the passionate idealism of his own childhood. He remembered his mother and the white flame of her scorn and her anger, and how that other blackguard had been thrashed and paid. A sudden surge of emotion rose in Tod’s throat. He straightened and stood wiping his clenched hands on his handkerchief, realising this money-shop of his and the things that it had made him suffer. He seemed to see everywhere the fat white face of that Jew, the face he had punched into a bloody pulp. The white cans of oil on the shelf had the colour of it; the greasy smears on the floor were like the slimy marks of a beast’s track.

“Good God!” said Tod; “it’s his, it belongs to him. I wouldn’t touch it again.”

He turned to Love.

“Here, you can leave that tyre; I want to lock up.”

Love scratched his nose with a black thumb.

“Jim’s out, at the station. And there’s a theatre to do at eight.”

“All right. That can finish the day.”

He walked back into the office and wrote a letter to the owner of the new car. He wrote also to a firm of solicitors in Shaston, Newton and Smythe, and asked for an appointment with the senior partner at eleven o’clock next morning. Later, he locked up the shop, posted the letters at the general office, and loitered a moment as though undecided where to go.

Some impulse sent him wandering into old Shaston, the Shaston of his early days, the Shaston of the Flowerdews and of Kitty of the soft eyes. And Tod wandered and dreamed. He knew that something tragic had happened to his life, that all the little strivings and ambitions of the last three years had left him at the crossroads, with a stick and a bundle in his hand. “Carnarvon” had come tumbling down like a child’s house of bricks. “Giggles,” the little minx of Pentworth, had proved herself the mother of the woman.

Tod’s mind was like a room hung with many pictures—memories; memories that were so vivid and so significant that he marvelled at his own blindness. Had not his mother said to him: “Tod, never marry until you have been in love ten times.” Yet what a wonderful comradeship it had been, that marriage of his mother and his father, and Tod’s heart yearned that night towards the memory of those parents who were dead. If only his mother had been alive, if he could have talked to her, put his head on her knees! Yes, he felt like that.

And Mr. Burgetrode! Mr. Burgetrode had told him the truth. What had he got out of marriage, anyway? It had made a money slave of him, tempted him to do mean and cowardly things, and ended by mocking the elemental pride of his manhood. His woman had——! But Tod fought the vile thoughts off and thrust them aside, realising even in the depths of his disillusionment, that foul thoughts make a man cruel and a coward. He did not mean to be either cruel or a coward, even if life had proved him a fool.

Tod wandered down Ponsonby Place, looking up at Mr. Eli Flowerdew’s name on the familiar shop. He found himself wondering whether he would have been happy with Kitty, and some boyish instinct cried out that she would have loved him as his mother had loved his father. Memories, memories; they were big and heavy in this throat! Dusk was falling, and he saw the White Cliff, like a great grey ghost watching over the black fishing boats and the sea. Bob Twine had taught him to swim down yonder, and under the White Cliff he had spoken his last words to Kitty Flowerdew.

Tod crunched along the shingle towards the blue hollow of the night, past the black fishing boats, till there was nothing but the lonely sweep of the beach and the swish of the sea. An old hull lay derelict here with shingle banked high about its black rump, and Tod sat down with his back to the boat and watched the tide come in. It was very dark now, and darkness lay upon the waters, but a stealthy sheen of silver in the east told him the moon was rising.

He did not want to go back to that house; he did not want to move; he felt he could sit there all night. It was clean and beautiful and still, and Shaston seemed far away. Good God! how he hated the place, how he hated everything save the quiet sea and the rising moon. What beasts people were! And then he thought again of his mother and little Kitty Flowerdew. No, there were good people in the world, and Tod’s sturdiness stiffened its back. He had got to make a fresh start, somehow, get out of that doll’s-house. And Millie——? He felt a great loathing and a great pity for his wife.

Tod had dreamed there for an hour, and the moon was a great white shield over the sea, when he heard someone walking on the shingle. The footsteps came his way; slow, heedless footsteps that seemed to take no account of distance or of time. Tod looked up and saw the black shape of a girl. Her face was turned towards the sea, and there was something poignantly familiar to him in the slim shape of her, the slight droop of her head, and the curve of her throat. She stood there a moment, a figure of indescribable hopelessness and desolation, not seeing the man sitting with his back against the boat, conscious of nothing but herself and the sea.

“Oh, Mother, Mother!”

Tod heard the words quite distinctly, and the voice was the voice of Kitty Flowerdew. She seemed to hesitate a moment, and Tod’s heart seemed to stand still. It was Edwin Rook’s wife, Kitty of the soft eyes, following in the footsteps of her mother, that mother who had drowned herself on Shaston beach.

Suddenly, he saw her unpin her hat, drop it on the shingle, and walk towards the soft swish of the incoming tide. Tod was up instantly, the moonlight in his face.

“Kitty!”

She stopped dead and stood in an anguish of terror and helplessness, but she did not turn to see who had called her by name. She heard Tod’s footsteps on the shingle, and shivered like a woman who has borne a child and is weak and cold with pain.

“Kitty. It’s Tod.”

She drooped, and suddenly began to weep, and Tod stood there, greatly shocked, and wanting to hold her hand. The bitterness of his own tragedy lost itself in her tears.

“Kitty, what’s the matter, dear?”

She wept unrestrainedly and with the frank anguish of a child.

“Oh—don’t—please—Tod.”

He remembered so well that little, helpless cry of hers. He had taken her hand.

“Come and sit down, dear. It’s so quiet and peaceful.”

She let him take her to the old boat, and they sat down in its shadow, Tod deep in the waters of pity, the girl still weeping out her heart.

“I want to drown myself—oh—I want to drown myself,” she said, with an anguish that was naked and unconcealed.

Tod’s upper lip quivered.

“Tell me all about it—dear. I came here because I was miserable, and you came here too.”

“I can’t bear it,” she said, “I can’t bear it any longer. Let me drown myself, Tod—dear Tod. I’m only in the way.”

Tod felt torn between a sense of his own helplessness and a fierce desire to go and smash somebody, the man who had been a brute to this child.

“You mustn’t, dear. Try and talk to me. I’ve been very unhappy, Kitty. It ought to make us friends.”

“I can’t talk about it,” she said brokenly; “they want me out of the way.”

“Who are ‘they’?” Tod asked very gently.

“Edwin—and——”

“Don’t tell me if it hurts too much.”

“And—my sister.”

“Good God!” said Tod.

A second sex horror thrust itself upon him, a horror that was more brutal than the tragedy of his own marriage. So Rook had tired of this dark-eyed child, and found that vixen of a sister ready to intrigue with him? Lena Flowerdew had always been jealous of Kitty, and Tod had fancied that she had wanted Edwin Rook, but how had it happened, how could two people have been so devilishly callous?

He did not know what to say to Kitty. There seemed nothing to be said.

“Are you sure, dear?” he asked her.

She caught her breath and shuddered.

“Yes, I saw them. Oh, I can’t talk about it! And Edwin hates me now; he thinks me a fool, and he was angry when baby died. He was only angry—but it broke my heart.”

“Poor Kitty!” said Tod, putting an arm round her.

She whimpered again, for she had been a lonely and frightened little woman with no one to talk to.

“Of course he ought to have married Lena. Lena always wanted him, and hated me because he wanted me then. She’s more suited to him; she’s hard, and thinks of nothing but business and money; and she wouldn’t be afraid of him.”

Tod’s teeth came together. So she was afraid of Rook; he bullied her. It seemed like torturing a caged bird.

“I don’t understand,” he said; “I couldn’t understand anybody being rough to you, Kitty. What’s to be done?”

“There’s nothing to be done,” she answered, with tragic simplicity. “I ought to do what Mother did. If baby had lived I might have borne it, but now——”

She broke down again, and Tod sat and stared fiercely at the sea.

“Have you told your father?”

“He wouldn’t believe me, and Lena’s his favourite.”

“Haven’t you any friends, dear?”

“Not real friends. I couldn’t talk to anybody as I’ve talked to you.”

He lifted one of her hands and kissed it.

“That’s the finest thing I have ever had said to me, Kitty. Well, I’m going to be your friend, and you can always trust me, dear. I’ll think it all over. Now I want you to let me take you home.”

“Oh, Tod, I can’t!”

“But, dear, try and bear it till something can be done. You know, I used to be in love with you; I wanted to marry you.”

“I wish I had married you, Tod,” she said; “you wouldn’t have been cruel.”

He tried to talk to her calmly and sensibly, and to make her realise that he was in utter earnest when he said he meant to be her friend, and so broken was she in spirit that she obeyed him with a meekness that touched his heart. He led her back to Shaston along the shingle, trying to speak to her as he thought his own mother would have spoken. He felt her flinch when they reached the street in which she lived, but she went on, and then paused a little way from the house.

“Don’t come any farther, Tod.”

“I must see you again, Kitty. I’ll walk out there every night till you come.”

“Dear Tod,” she said, and slipped away in the darkness.

Tod walked home with the soul of him purged and strengthened. There was no light in “Carnarvon,” and Tod let himself in silently, lit the gas in the hall, and looked into the empty rooms. Millie had gone to her bedroom; Tod could hear her moving about in the room above, and the thought of her nearness and of her share in his life brought back the vivid presence of his own problem. Kitty Rook’s misery had softened him, but he felt that he could not go near his own wife. The physical man in him rebelled.

But he went up and knocked at Millie’s door.

“Yes?” said her voice, toneless and sulky; “the door’s locked.”

“Good night,” Tod said mechanically.

He improvised himself a bed in the little spare room, and lay awake thinking of the future. Poor Kitty’s tragedy outbid his own. She was so helpless, so humiliated, so much the child hungry for affection, and Tod wondered what he could do to help her.

But his chivalry was a thing of the air, a dream that was to die with the news of the morning.

Kitty Rook had drowned herself, and in spite of Tod. Some fresh impulse of despair had seized her after he had left her and when the comfort of his comradeship had been withdrawn. She had gone back to the beach, and some boys who were bathing found her body floating next morning under the White Cliff.

Chapter Twenty-six

Tod breakfasted alone. Millie had shirked meeting the expected challenge of his face, and she took her meal in bed, and waited for the sound of Tod’s going.

Habit kept him to the clock. He walked down to Duke Street, smoking his favourite bull-dog pipe, and thinking over the things that he had to do. Goldstein would have to be paid at once, some of the furniture sold, and a prospective tenant found for “Carnarvon.” Tod was still in doubt about the business, whether he should go on fighting, and trust to the summer season to pull it through. Kitty’s eyes seemed to be watching him, and he remembered that he had posed as the strong friend, and had urged her to make a fight for it, while he—Tod—thought over the possibilities. He could not tell a girl to make a fight of it, and then back down himself.

Tod found a letter waiting for him from Newton and Smythe. Love handed it to him with his usually dirty hand.

“A boy brought it.”

Tod was asked to see Mr. Newton at twelve o’clock. The senior partner was engaged at eleven.

Then the owner of the new car called, a middle-aged person who was as excited as a boy.

“She’s smart, Western, isn’t she? Nice lines, what? And she’s fast, I suppose?”

“Climbed Furnace Hill on second,” said Tod, wearily.

“Some car! Let’s have a look at the engine. I want to take her out and try her.”

It was a quarter to twelve when Tod walked down Duke Street on his way to the office of Newton and Smythe. By the clock tower where Duke Street met King William Street and Marlborough Crescent, Tod’s path crossed that of a newsboy who was selling the early edition of a local paper.

“Lady drowned at Shaston,” shouted the boy.

Tod stopped with a jerk.

“Paper.”

“Right, sir.”

He stopped by the clock tower and read the news of Kitty’s death.

“We regret to announce that the body of Mrs. Kitty Rook was found in the sea this morning near the White Cliff. Mrs. Rook was the younger daughter of our well-known townsman Mr. Eli Flowerdew,” &c.

Tod was shocked, shocked to the deeps. So she had drowned herself after all, poor, wounded, broken Kitty, even as her mother had drowned herself fifteen years ago?

“There’s nothing else to do, Tod.”

Was she right?

Tod had a lump in his throat and the wandering steps of a man who saw nothing for the moment. The driver of one of Mr. Pumpelly’s new motor-buses swung the steering-wheel round and bawled at him.

“ ’Ere, wake up! Are you going to market?”

“Sorry,” said Tod.

“With blokes like you about a man’s life ain’t worth livin’.”

Tod laughed with laughter that was near to tears.

But somehow Kitty’s death had shocked the last remnants of commercial vanity out of him. What a sorry game it was, a scramble with men like Flowerdew and Edwin Rook, that fat old cynic Pumpelly, and such money-beasts as Goldstein! There were some men who played the game cleanly, but there were others who would foul you whenever they could do it safely or with advantage, and Tod had an idea that the men who fouled were the men who won. How was it that he had let himself be drawn into this little back-street, swindling business, when he might have been soldiering or sailoring or out in the wilds somewhere, living like a man? Mr. Burgetrode was right, damnably right. He remembered his father’s saying about people with penny-three-farthing souls.

So Tod walked into the office of Newton and Smythe, and presented a new and steel-bright decision to a phlegmatic old solicitor whose creed in life was compromise.

“I want to get out of this business and pay everybody, and I want to get out of it at once,” said Tod, “and I want to pay this chap Goldstein to-day.”

Mr. Sobersides tried to smooth Tod down.

“There is no need to do anything rash, Mr. Western.”

“I’m not doing anything rash,” said Tod; “I’m only having a wash and getting rid of my dirty clothes. The furniture in my house is all paid for; so is one of the taxis. Can’t you raise money on that?”

“Certainly, when the security has been looked into. Am I to understand that you want us to act between you and this Goldstein, to wind up the business, settle with all your creditors, and reserve as much of your capital as we can?”

“I want everybody paid,” said Tod, “and the thing done cleanly. There might be a clear hundred or two left over, but I’m not counting on anything.”

Mr. Newton scratched his chin with the end of a pen.

“Look here, my young friend,” he said; “let me advise you to hold your tongue for a week and say nothing about selling. Leave it to us. The business is a going concern, and we can sell it as such. You can let us have your books?”

“Of course.”

“And perhaps you would like us to hold the matter up for a day or two while you think it over?”

“If I thought it over for ten years,” said Tod, “it wouldn’t make any difference. It’s a question of conscience.”

Old Mr. Newton thought Tod an excitable and rather overinflated young man, but there appeared to be a woman in the case, though Tod had said very little about his wife.

“So you will let me have your books, Mr. Western, and all outstanding accounts, and your pass-book, and the copy of any agreement with this Mr. Goldstein?”

“You shall have them to-night,” said Tod.

He walked out of Mr. Newton’s office, feeling that he had flung something off his shoulders and that the day was the better for it. He wanted to be conscious of nothing but Kitty, Kitty who in her anguish had refused to accept any compromise and who had carried her secret with her to the sea. There was only one street in Shaston for Tod that morning, the street where she had lived and where he had parted with her only a few hours ago, and he walked down it, and saw the drawn blinds of the house and a few people gaping at it with vulgar curiosity.

Tod stood a moment against the railings of the house opposite, and wondered what Edwin Rook thought of his wife’s death. He felt that he wanted to get Rook by the collar, and drag him into the most crowded street of Shaston and thrash him as he deserved to be thrashed. And then someone bumped against Tod, a silly old woman with a vacant face and a claw-like hand clutching a bag.

“Beg pardon. She’s in there, isn’t she?”

“Who?” Tod asked.

“Why, the woman who drowned herself. Suppose she’d got into some sort of trouble.”

Tod froze. The old woman was looking at the drawn blinds and smiling as though death and life were a mere circus procession.

“They say she had all her clothes on, so it must have been sooicide.”

“You old beast,” said Tod and walked on.

But in spite of his anger, his heart was softened, and any thought of dramatic and physical interference melted out of his mind. Kitty lay asleep somewhere in that house, the long sleep that even the hands of silly old women could not jeopardise. She was beyond all recriminations, humiliations, anguish, shame. She had kept her secret, and if there were a merciful God, Tod knew that God held her soul, and that these people who had killed her would have to answer for it to Him. And Tod told himself that he would hold her secret sacred. It was too tragic and poignant a thing to be brawled over and advertised by using the toe of a boot. What was the use of telling Rook and the Flowerdews that they were swine? If Kitty’s death had not made them realise it, no human words would ever do so.

Tod walked on along the beach to where the old black boat lay half buried in shingle under the White Cliff. He sat down there just where he and Kitty had sat the night before, and the sun shone on him full and clear. It was an exquisite May day, a soft turquoise sky and a calm grey-blue sea, with just the gentlest swish of little waves along the shingle; and the fishing fleet was out, the brown sails dark on the horizon. Far out an old tramp steamer trailed a plume of black smoke, an old blackguard of a boat contentedly smoking its pipe.

Tod sat there in the sun, and suffered this tragedy of a girl’s life to turn the edge of his own bitterness. Dead Kitty seemed to plead with him for that other woman, and Tod’s heart was softened towards his wife.

“I married her,” he said to himself, “and perhaps I have been to blame. People are made differently and want different things. I’m responsible for her in a way. It’s no use making a worse mess of it, and being mean; we have got to try and make a fresh start and be patient with each other.”

In some such mood as this he returned to “Carnarvon,” where the little red may tree and the two laburnums were in bloom. There were buds on the standard roses, and Ginger the sandy cat was asleep in the sun on the drawing-room window-sill. Tod realised “Carnarvon” as he had never realised it before; it was a little chocolate-box of a home, the house of a woman whose ideals were all wrong.

“It’s got to go,” said Tod; “we’ll start differently next time.”

He found Millie in the drawing-room, sewing aimlessly at some superfluous bit of finery. She gave him a momentary and sulky stare of her blue eyes, and Tod saw that she was afraid.

“Sorry I have been away so long. I had a lot to do.”

She gave him a second glance, a look of surprise. She had been puzzled by the unexpectedness of Tod, and she liked men to be obvious.

“Don’t apologise, please.”

He sat down, and sat down with an air of a man who was in no hurry, a man who had made himself master of the situation. His bull-dog pipe came out. He filled it, lit the tobacco, and puffed with obvious enjoyment.

“I want to talk to you, Millie.”

She bent her head over her work, and remained in that attitude during all the time that he was speaking.

And Tod was gentle, extraordinarily gentle.

“We seem to have got adrift, somehow,” he told her, “and I want to make a new beginning. I don’t think that we have understood each other, or made allowances for each other. I want to get away from the money idea, the idea that money and show matter more than anything else in the world.”

She remained with bent head, saying nothing, astonished by his gentleness, waiting to hear what he had to offer her in the way of life and a home.

“We shall have to leave this house and sell most of the furniture, and the business will have to go too. I have put everything in the hands of Newton and Smythe. We’ll take rooms and live quietly and I’ll get a job somewhere; I might even go back to the Craggs.”

Her silence betrayed nothing.

“We shall have to face it, Millie, and the only thing is to try and face it like pals. We’ve drifted apart these last months, and all sorts of things happen when people drift apart. I’m thinking how happy we were three years ago.”

“Three years is a long time,” she said.

And she despised him for his gentleness. If he had thrashed her as he had thrashed that Jew, he would have regained all his physical ascendancy, and she would have been his woman. Spiritual fineness had no meaning for Tod’s wife.

Chapter Twenty-seven

On the day that Kitty was buried Tod went to see Mr. Rathbone Cragg. He coerced his pride, and walked with an air of briskness in the direction of West Shaston, but when he reached the familiar doorway in Caroline Crescent, Tod’s pride was taken sick and caused him a moment’s anguish and indecision on the doorstep.

He was staring at the glass swing doors and at the notices of sales pasted on the walls of the vestibule, when a girl’s figure appeared, and pushing through, came face to face with Tod.

“Why—it’s Tod!”

And then she corrected herself.

“It’s a long time since we met, Mr. Western.”

Tod lifted his hat and looked into the fresh eyes of his old playmate. Bertha Cragg had aged a little, not in any physical sense, for her pleasantly plain face was still the face of a girl, but there was a maturity about her, the purposefulness of a clever woman who had work to do, work that she had learnt to love.

“It is a long time,” said Tod awkwardly. “Are you still in Shaston?”

“For a holiday. I work, you know; I’m helping to run a girls’ club in London. Were you going in to see Father?”

“Yes,” said Tod, “I had thought of doing so.”

His eyes were the eyes of a man who was unhappy. Nor was he the Tod whom she had known, the Tod of the sea and the tennis-court and the wild tramps through Sussex gorse, but a troubled Tod, a man who was shouldering his way through disillusionment, and looking for something that he had lost.

She wanted to talk to him; she wanted him to tell her why he was unhappy, but life had taught her the finer reticences of life, and to be careful how she laid a meddling hand on other people’s pride.

“You’ll find Father in his room. I’ll take you in.”

It was a generous thought, a sensitive bit of intuition, a glimpsing of Tod as a man who had fallen on evil times and who had come to ask some sort of favour. She saved him the wait in the outer office, and all those little paltry details that a proud man resents, and more especially did she save him from falling into the supercilious hands of her brother Fred. By her own judging “Fred had become impossible.” His intellectual priggishness fitted him like a well-cut coat.

“Here is Mr. Western, Father. We just met on the doorstep. He wants to see you.”

She smiled Tod into the inner office, closed the door on him, and walked calmly past her brother, who was looking at her with the irritable eyes of a man who had been too late to intervene.

Mr. Rathbone Cragg was embarrassed, but he was less embarrassed than Tod.

“Sit down, Western. What can we do for you? Find you a house?”

“You can let mine if you like,” said Tod; “I’m getting out of it, and selling the business.”

“Tired of it?”

“Partly that. I have private reasons for getting out of it.”

There was a pause. Mr. Cragg’s hands were fidgeting with his watch chain, and Tod seemed to be interested in his own boots. Both men were shy of each other, but Mr. Cragg was a tough old worldling and had learnt not to mix sentiment with business.

“I was sorry when you left here, Western, but, of course, conditions are different now. I should have liked you back in the office.”

Tod’s brightening eyes betrayed him to Mr. Cragg.

“I was very happy here,” said Tod, “and I was keen on houses, but I suppose you have no room now?”

“None—none at all. Besides—I expect you are feeling too big for the old terms, Western?”

“I couldn’t expect anything better.”

Mr. Cragg saw how it was with him. Old Cragg was a far better man than his son, and he had mellowed of late years, but he was extraordinarily cautious. Big Mr. Julian Burgetrode was still of considerable importance.

“Why don’t you write to Mr. Burgetrode?” he asked Tod with sudden directness.

Tod stared at him.

“What for?”

“Well, he was a little interested in you, Western.”

Tod’s eyes grew obstinate.

“I couldn’t do it; private reasons. I thought I would just come and see if there was any chance.”

Tod got up, feeling himself mortified and superfluous.

“I don’t foresee anything at the moment, Western, but there is just a chance that we may be opening a branch agency at Pentworth.”

“Pentworth! Why, I was born there,” said Tod.

“But it’s quite undecided,” Mr. Cragg went on, ignoring the sentimental possibilities of Tod’s remark. “If anything materialises and there happens to be an opening, I’ll write to you, Western.”

“Thank you,” said Tod, and made his escape, receiving a casual nod from Fred Cragg as he passed through the outer office.

But old Rathbone Cragg was not suffered to go to bed before he had reconsidered his attitude towards Tod. After dinner Bertha followed him into the library, and sat on the edge of the table and smoked her cigarette. Old Cragg was very fond of Bertha; also—he was a little afraid of her. She was a young woman of surprise, a young woman with a heart that was bigger and a head that was broader than the hearts and heads of the Cragg family. She made her brother appear just a cocky, conceited “swat” from school, and old Cragg loved her little finger better than Fred’s whole body.

“What did Tod Western want, Father?”

Old Cragg tried to take refuge in the daily paper, but Bertha extracted him from its paragraphs and made him pay attention. There were times when she “managed” him, and the hard old boy chuckled in secret, and rather liked it. He disapproved of that cigarette of hers; but then—it was Bertha’s cigarette.

“Western? Oh, young Western? Business—that’s all.”

“I wondered—I had an idea—and I’m just wondering whether I was right. He wanted to come back to you?”

Mr. Cragg gave a little heave in his chin, a heave that said, “Confound the girl!”

“Of course, I could not take him,” he admitted; “Reeves is very satisfactory, and there is no room.”

“So he did want to come back! He’s very unhappy, Daddy, about something.”

“I don’t wonder,” said her father; “they say he’s bankrupt. That fool of a wife of his.”

Bertha’s memories winced.

“I’m going away to-morrow, Daddy, you know. It would rather please me if you tried to take Tod back.”

Old Cragg showed a certain testiness.

“I don’t think it is your—your business—to interest yourself in Western, my dear. After all——”

“After all, I used to be rather fond of him, Daddy. You see, I’m not ashamed of it. He had the making of rather a fine man.”

“Well, he shouldn’t have married that little——”

“We all do things we shouldn’t do. What about that new office at Pentworth?”

“My dear Bertha!”

“There”—and she went over and kissed him—“I’m not going to worry you. We have always been such good friends, you and I, and you can be—rather generous sometimes.”

Mr. Cragg disbelieved her. He was not generous, and never had been generous, but he supposed he would have to reconsider his attitude towards Tod.

“If Reeves goes to Pentworth I might take Western in.”

“I don’t think you would regret it,” she said.

“There’s Fred to be considered. I don’t think that Fred would approve.”

“Fred approves of nothing but himself, Daddy.”

Old Cragg chuckled. There were times when he disliked his son.

Tod, meanwhile, was in search of rooms. He had arranged to have his furniture sold, and to leave “Carnarvon” at the end of the month, and in his quest for rooms he appealed to Tom Lavender, sitting on one of the cane-topped stools in Mr. Lavender’s little shop and talking to him as to a friend who understood.

The big, blond lover of birds was the very man to lay a cooling hand on Tod’s feverishness.

“What kind of rooms do you want?”

“Something simple and cheap, with a bit of garden to look at. We should have to do our own cooking.”

Mr. Lavender smiled at Tod.

“I have a couple of rooms upstairs that I never use; they would want a little extra furniture. If you care to look at them——”

Tod’s worried face lit up eagerly.

“It’s awfully good of you, Tom. I’d try not to be any trouble.”

“Come up and have a look.”

They were pleasant rooms at the top of Mr. Lavender’s old house, with lilacs in bloom in the garden below, and all Mr. Lavender’s roses ready to celebrate June. The carpets were worn and the furniture casual and decrepit, but Tod saw the possibilities of such a home. The atmosphere of the house was so calm and clean, for it held the soul of a man who was happy.

“Your wife could use the kitchen. I’ll arrange that with Mrs. Jelf.”

“And what shall I pay you, Tom?” Tod asked.

“I don’t see that you need pay me anything; just your share of the coal and gas.”

“That won’t do, old man,” said Tod.

“Well, I don’t know what to ask?” smiled the lover of birds.

“Let Mrs. Jelf settle it.”

Mrs. Jelf was Tom Lavender’s cook-housekeeper. So Mrs. Jelf was asked to arbitrate, after Tod had explained to her she was not to be called upon to do any extra work, and that if she disapproved of Millie using the kitchen for a short time each day, he—Tod—would buy an oil-cooker.

“Beastly things,” said Mrs. Jelf. “I don’t mind a little company.”

For Mrs. Jelf happened to be a foolish old woman who thought Mr. Tom Lavender one of the greatest men on earth. Everything he did was right, and everything he said was the essence of wisdom, nor were Mrs. Jelf’s prejudices wholly contemptible. “He’s always doing kind things,” she said, “and I’ve never known him out of temper, never even cross over his food.” Mrs. Jelf thought him a saint.

Tod walked out of Mr. Lavender’s shop a very much happier man. He had had a long talk with Tom, and he felt as though he had been for one of those long tramps through the green ways of Sussex or climbing the downs with the sea wind in his face. Tom Lavender was a healer. He lived for the love of living and the love of all living things, and not for money.

When Tod returned to the garage in Duke Street, he found a bumptious little man very busy in his shirt-sleeves, standing by one of the taxis, with his right hand all grease. It was Mr. Charlie Britt of the firm of Pumpelly and Britt, who had been puddling in the car’s gear-box to satisfy himself as to the state of the gears. Love was crouching at the back of the car unscrewing the nuts holding the inspection plate of the differential, so that Mr. Britt could take a look at the crown wheel.

“Morning, Western. Don’t mind me poking my nose into things, I suppose.”

“What’s the reason?” Tod asked.

“We may make an offer for your show. It’s for sale, isn’t it?”

“It is,” said Tod.

Mr. Britt wiped his hands on a lump of cotton waste.

“No pig in a poke for me, thank you. Those gears aren’t so bad, but your man tells me one big-end wants seeing to.”

“She knocks awful,” said Love from behind the car.

Tod felt annoyed, and yet he realised the inevitableness of Mr. Britt’s suspicions. Moreover, he was not pleased to think of old Pumpelly buying up his business. The thing smacked of defeat and of failure, and Tod’s teeth were on edge.

“There’s not much wrong with the cars. I’d tell you if there were.”

“Oh, no doubt,” said the little man, pushing rudely past Tod and joining Love at the rear of the car.

Tod stood there listlessly, telling himself that it was sheer foolishness for him to resent Charlie Britt’s casual scepticism. Britt believed in disbelieving everybody and trusting to his own sharp wits; and he had found that it paid. Especially was it necessary to believe that most of the men who worked for you were liars.

“Yes, not so bad,” said the brisk voice from behind the car, “but those back springs look a little bit wheezy. Rock her, will you?”

This was to Tod, but Tod did not move. Britt stood up and gave him a quick look.

“Sulky,” he thought. “Well, we’ve smashed you, anyway.”

When Pumpelly’s partner had looked at the cars, he bustled round the whole place with the air of a prospective proprietor. Tod went into the office and sat down at his desk. Charles Britt was making him feel very sore.

The little man hunted him out.

“You’ve let your chaps slack pretty badly, Western.”

“Have I?” said Tod, resenting the tone of patronage.

“Some of your petrol cans are only two-thirds full. A bit of private trade been going on somewhere. And I should think half your tools must be missing.”

“Well, you’re not buying the missing ones.”

Britt pulled out a pair of nail-scissors and cleaned his nails. He believed in a smart exterior.

“There’s only one way to handle the English workingman, and that’s to keep him under, Western, keep him afraid. Fear’s the only thing that keeps ’em afraid. You’ve been too soft on your men.”

“Much obliged,” said Tod. “Have a cigarette.”

Britt polished the nails of his left hand by rubbing them on the back of his right-hand fingers.

“Always calling themselves skilled men too, and their bally trade union tosh! Why, I learnt more than most of ’em know and learnt it in two months. Booze and no-brain-piece; that’s what’s wrong with most of them. Good morning to you.”

“Good morning,” said Tod, realising in a dull sort of way why he had been unable to compete with such an alert and cynical little devil.

At “Carnarvon” that evening Tod was able to tell Millie that he had found rooms, and she received the news with the sulky bitterness that had characterised her since his discovery of her intrigue with Maurice Goldstein. She accepted all Tod’s plans for the future, apathetically and without comment, as depressed as a cat that had been turned out into the rain. A natural indolence made her surrender all the more easy. She had no alternative to offer. She would sit at the closed window of her fate till someone came and opened it.

“Tom Lavender’s such a sportsman, and they’re quite jolly rooms,” said Tod, “a sitting-room and a bedroom, and the use of the kitchen.”

“I can’t cook,” said his wife.

Tod stared. He had thought that all women could cook.

“Well, you’ll soon learn, and I dare say Mrs. Jelf will help you to begin with. We can live quite quietly there, while I look around. No more building of top stories until we have made sure of the foundations.”

His cheerfulness amazed her, even though she guessed that his cheerfulness was artificial. To the sensual and richly coloured young woman the picture that he painted of life in Shaston lodgings was utterly dreary and banal. Making beds, emptying slops, messing in the kitchen, going out with a basket to buy food, getting meals ready, always meals with a hungry man waiting for them, and then the disgusting business of washing up. It was plain that Tod expected her to do all this and saw nothing strange in her doing it.

And then—her clothes. Where was she going to put them all? For her wardrobe had been something of a Pandora’s box, and Tod was not supposed to know the whole extent of her extravagance. And he would always be messing about in her bedroom. Even at Horrox and Horrox’s she had had a little room of her own.

“Beastly!” was her verdict.

But to Tod she said nothing. For the future she would sit like a cat, waiting.

Chapter Twenty-eight

Tod’s chief recollection of those first days in Tom Lavender’s house was the badness of Millie’s cooking. The very execrableness of it was a protest against the economies he had planned for her, and though Tod tried to smile over some of her unsavoury messes, his interior refused to retain one particular meal. Millie had had trouble with her saucepans, or to be more correct she had not troubled about them at all, and Tod was most gloriously sick.

“I told you I couldn’t cook,” she said stubbornly, when he reproached her with the queer taste of that particularly poisonous and dirty hash, “and that woman makes things as awkward as she can.”

“What, Mrs. Jelf? I thought——”

“She’s an old cat.”

“I’m sorry,” said Tod.

But Mrs. Jelf was equally emphatic in her opinion of Millie. Tom Lavender hauled Tod into his little study, and with an air of disquieted shyness, proceeded to make a suggestion.

“Mrs. Jelf wants to do your cooking. She says she can manage it better.”

“Very good of her,” said Tod; “the fact is—my wife——”

Tom Lavender nodded.

“She hasn’t got the hands for it. Supposing——”

“I’ll pay Mrs. Jelf so much a week, Tom. Besides—I was a bit doubtful about interfering in your kitchen.”

“That’s all right, old chap. But that old lady is a born cook; she loves it.”

So it was arranged that Mrs. Jelf should cook for the Westerns, and Millie dispossessed herself of that piece of feminine responsibility. But Tom Lavender could not tell Tod what Mrs. Jelf had said of his wife, that she had called her “a dirty, lazy, stuck-up slut with silk stockings and no conscience.”

The larger part of Tod’s life was running in smoother and more pleasant fashion. He was back at Caroline Crescent, sitting in the familiar room and working with enthusiasm, and continuing to ignore the impertinences of Frederick Cragg. Father and son had had a skirmish over the return of Tod; Fred’s opposition had roused the older man’s obstinacy and had made Tod’s return more sure, yet Western did not suspect that a woman had stretched out a hand to help him, and that Bertha had armed the father against the son’s sneers. As to Western’s Garage, it had passed into the power of Pumpelly and Britt, but Tod’s lawyers had salved a portion of their client’s capital, and Tod found that he was the owner of about three hundred pounds. He invested the money in New Zealand Government stock. Moreover he was living in the same house as Tom Lavender. They smoked their pipes together at night, sitting out under the laburnums and lilacs, talking about life and books and birds. Tod was to go out tramping with Tom on alternate Sundays; the other days he gave to Millie.

Tod was trying very hard to understand his wife. The innate chivalry that Nancy Western had given to her boy refused to let itself be seduced into accepting a purely cynical and materialistic view of marriage. Tod was affectionate, and he felt responsible, and he tried to put that memory of Maurice Goldstein out of his head. There was always the thought that he had been to blame, that he had let himself get absorbed in the business, and that he had forgotten that his wife was a woman.

For Tod was cursed or blessed with ideals, and very sturdy ideals, and poor Kitty’s death had opened a vein of deep tenderness in him. He treated Millie as he would have treated a sick woman or a hurt child, taking her out to occasional concerts, trying to persuade her to like boyish adventures in the country, buying her chocolates once a week. He had very happy memories of those Pentworth picnics, and how sweet those simple country days had seemed to his father and mother. Nancy Western was living in her son, shedding a soft radiance over him, inspiring him to try and reach that wife of his to use the ways of a freer youth, but Tod’s wife did not wish for wings, the innocent, unsmirched wings he sought to give her.

She seemed apathetic, casual, bored.

She had not forgiven him for his failure to make money. She would never forgive him for having blundered in upon her affair with Maurice Goldstein, and Tod did not realise the elemental antipathy the incident had roused in her. Tod had ceased to be sexually attractive to his wife. She resented this stuffy life in a couple of rooms; she resented Tod’s kindness. He was trying to fasten his ideals upon her and they galled her like a girdle of thorns. Tod’s wife was no saint.

Admiration, colour, thrills, movement, pretty frocks! How could a young man working in an estate office give her these? Tod was dull; and so disgustingly kind and good tempered when she was ripe and almost yearning for a row. She was a fierce young animal in her sex cravings, and there was no fierceness about Tod. He kissed her as though he were kissing his mother.

“It’s beastly!” was her favourite expression, uttered in the monotony of her long silence.

And so it was, beastly for both of them, though a second blindness had fallen upon Tod. His thoughts were set upon being kind to his wife, and she detested him for it, and longed to use her claws. His good temper threw her back upon a negative sulkiness, and smothered her when her inclination was to scream.

A man who is trying to save a drowning girl is conscious of but few things: the nearness of the shore, the sea, her struggles, her wet hair, his efforts to calm her, perhaps the deadly weakening of his own strength. Watchers on the cliff above have a more complete and a more pregnant view of the struggle, and so it was in Tod’s blind effort to pull his marriage out of the sea. Even casual spectators saw more than he did.

Mrs. Jelf saw as much as anybody. She had her glimpses of Millie, the Millie who put on her clothes and went out, “Just to show off,” as Mrs. Jelf expressed it, “while her young man’s working.” And such clothes too! “Pink stockings and white shoes, and an ’at for every day in the week.” She knew, too, that Tod’s wife scuffled home in time to change these clothes and lay the table for her husband. When Millie was out Mrs. Jelf would make a tour of inspection, and her woman’s eyes saw all the slackness of Tod’s home, the frowsy bed left unaired and unmade, the slops not cleared, dirt everywhere.

“Dear me, what a fine lady we are!” said Lavender’s housekeeper. “Too fine to be the poor boy’s wife.”

The ubiquitous Bob Twine saw Tod’s wife as the deckchair girl, sunning herself on the parade and collecting the homage of casual males. Twine wondered whether Tod knew of it. One man could not tell another man that his wife was little better than a woman of pleasure, but he did attack Millie one Wednesday afternoon, planting himself on the chair next to her.

“Same old game, madam!”

“You shut up,” said the girl.

“Suppose Tod knows? I guess not! Why don’t you play the game by the kid? He’s the best little sportsman you’ll ever meet.”

“He’s too good,” said the girl viciously; “he’s so good that he’s dull. It’s no use you snarling at me, Bob; I never ought to have married him.”

Twine softened to her at this flash of sincerity.

“True enough. But, hang it all, why not have a shot at making him happy? I never told him, you know.”

“You can tell him—if you like. I’m so sick of it, I don’t care.”

“Good lord!” said Twine, “is it as bad as that! I tried to tell him once, and couldn’t. I’m not going to now.”

“Well, what are you fussing about? If you are afraid to tell him you had better leave me alone.”

“I will,” said Twine. “Good day,” and he got up and left her.

Tod was making desperate struggles to get beauty and a sense of goodness of things back into his life. He felt that he wanted to remain a boy, the boy he had remembered at Pentworth, for Tod knew that he had changed and that the soul of him had grown worried and wrinkled. Also there was less of the smile of the shrewd and happy boxer. There were times when Tod had a scowl, and he knew it, and there were times when he lost his temper. Little things irritated him most absurdly. He could remember smashing the little green-topped card-table that never would stand squarely on four legs.

Millie had looked up at him quite hopefully.

“Oh, temper!”

“Sorry,” said Tod, contrite and flabby.

He had spent the rest of the evening trying to mend that table and even Millie could have told him that some things are better broken, unhappy marriages as well as rickety tables.

He talked to old Lavender on one of the Sunday rambles, but he was loyal and said nothing about his wife.

“Do you remember a time, Tom, when it began to hurt you to live?”

Lavender lied.

“I remember it quite well,” he said.

Tod smiled.

“You have a queer, sore feeling inside you, and the things outside you seem to take pleasure in going wrong. You are always knocking your soul’s shins against something.”

“You’ll get over it,” said Lavender gravely, “you are bound to get over it. Don’t fret. Work, work like the devil, and set your teeth when the storm comes.”

“What storm?” Tod asked.

But Lavender hid himself in symbolical excuses. He knew that Tod’s marriage was all wrong, and that the woman was hurting the soul of him. And Lavender prayed that she would go off with some other man, some fine Assyrian bull, and leave Tod holding the hand of his own youth.

Early in July Tod had a second vivid glimpse into the heart of his wife. There was a new little bungalow town squatting beyond West Shaston like a flock of geese on a village green, and to get to it you walked along the sea wall with the shingle on one side of you and dyked meadows on the other. Tod had the keys of two of the new bungalows, and he was to make a list of the fixtures.

The blue sweep of the sky, the breadth of the sea and the meadowland, and the curve of the white foam along the shingle, brought back a memory to Tod’s heart. He could remember walking with his father in some such place on a breezy day in the spring of the year, and his father had gone along waving his hat and shouting the words of some song. Tod remembered how they had thrown stones at an old tin can that his father had set afloat, and Tod had sunk it. And suddenly the spirit of fatherhood entered Tod. He wanted a boy, a boy of his own, something to play with, something to work for, something that mattered.

A girl in a white dress and a cerise-coloured jersey was sitting on the beach, reading. She looked up as Tod came along the seawall, and Tod recognized his wife. Surely this was a God-given coincidence, the secret key for the opening of a woman’s heart, the prattler’s gate leading into the great playground!

Tod sprang down, forgetting all about the bungalows. His wife looked with quick eyes at his suddenly radiant face. She had been expecting a man, another man, not Tod.

“I say, dear, I’m coming to sit down for ten minutes. Isn’t it gorgeous out here, so clean and big.”

“It’s quite nice,” said the wife, wondering why he had turned up, and whether he suspected.

“Bungalow Town can wait for half an hour.”

“Oh, you are going there?”

“Making lists of fixtures. Oh, hang business! Millie—I want something; it has just come to me; perhaps you have been wanting it too.”

He leant over towards her with bright eyes.

“What is it?” she asked him.

“Millie, I want a child, a kid, just what I may have been to my dad. Perhaps all this time—you have been wanting one—too.”

Her face hardened. What a fool he was!

“Rot!” she said. “What are you getting sentimental about children for?”

“It’s a sort of hunger,” he began.

“We can’t afford that sort of hunger.” She sneered at him: “Fancy having a kid and living in two rooms. We haven’t got the money. Be sensible.”

“But other people have children, with less money than we have.”

“Well, I’m not going to be one of them. Very nice of you, I dare say, but who has all the pain and all the work, and the economising? I’m not having babies on eighty pounds a year, thank you.”

Tod left her and went on his way, and all the joy had gone out of the morning. Money, always money, and a woman who had to be bribed!

Chapter Twenty-nine

A week later Tod met Mr. Burgetrode.

He was standing with his hands in his pockets on the edge of a little crowd of holiday folk who were watching a Punch and Judy show on the beach below the parade. It was a Saturday afternoon, and Tod was alone, so much alone that he envied that busy old Blackguard of a doll who appeared to spend his life hammering other dolls with a stick. Mrs. Judy had just been dealt with, and tossed into oblivion on the end of the aforesaid stick. The crowd laughed, but Tod was frowning, frowning over the problem that was eating into his vitals, his thoughts arrested by the broad and human cynicism of the puppet show. The moral of the thing was as old as time. This hook-nosed, hunchbacked scoundrel had studied the philosophy of the big stick. The only doll who scored off him was the clown, the merry fool who was never serious.

Mr. Burgetrode saw Tod before Tod saw Mr. Burgetrode, and Mr. Burgetrode watched Tod while Tod was watching the puppet show. He had a complete view of the young man’s “thinking” face, of his faded tie and clean collar frayed slightly in the wash. Tod’s blue eyes were sullen and unhappy; he looked hungry, and the food that he lacked was not bread and meat.

Mr. Burgetrode edged his way to Tod’s side.

“Curious, isn’t it,” he said as though he had been talking to Tod for hours, “that the only really successful person is the clown?”

Tod’s chin gave a jerk. He looked into “Old Mischief’s” lean brown face, and then looked away again.

“It’s a puzzle,” he confessed; “what is success?”

“Ah, there you have me,” said Mr. Burgetrode; “I have been looking for it all my life. People say I have found it. Have I? Now, a merely happy, unserious animal like that clown——!”

They stood side by side till the show was over, very conscious of each other, yet part of the crowd.

“Suppose we go and see the place where I sprained my ankle,” said the big man with a sort of fantastic irrelevancy.

Tod turned with him.

“I’m back in Craggs’ office, you know,” he said with a sensitive boy’s abruptness.

“I—did—know. I’m boxing you to-day, Tod, and I’m hitting hard. What about these wasted years?”

“Is anything wasted?” said Tod.

“Never.”

“I’ve learnt things. I couldn’t have learnt them in any other way. But it’s when you get tied up in them like a rabbit in a ferreting net.”

“The great thing is to try and avoid being a rabbit. It’s better to be the ferret, better still to be the man who owns and sets the nets.”

“But why nets, sir?”

“You used the word yourself, young man. There always will be nets. Your net may cover a rabbit hole or half a continent, but it’s there.”

“Seems rather hopeless,” said Tod.

“Not a bit of it. Think of that clown. If your birdcage is the whole world, and the stars are just gold blobs on it, isn’t it big enough? The moral is, don’t be a canary.”

“Canaries may be happy,” said Tod.

“Oh, happiness!” quoth Mr. Burgetrode with scorn. “What happiness is there for man but doing things and trying to do them well? Does Nature go round asking the canary if it is happy, or request the Hottentot to inform her if the climate is just what he desires? Nature doesn’t care a hang. She’s got bigger things to do. If we don’t please her she scraps us.”

“That seems rather hopeless too,” said Tod.

“Nonsense. Nature is always doing things. She sets the nets for us; she wants us to learn. Think about it, and you’ll see it must be so. You talk about Nature being cruel. She’s not; she’s big; she can’t help treading on people sometimes. You have trodden on lots of ants and worms, my boy, and never known about it. As for calculating cruelty, men beat her at it every time. Nature’s always at work, improving things, trying a new world or a new sort of beast. I suppose she’s been trying man, and he’s not done so badly. Who spun the fable about the Garden of Eden, a man having to go out and work? Adam must have been a dull dog till God set him digging. And there is a sort of modern fool who thinks it would be rather fine and Utopian to get back to the workless, loafing Adam. Nature will tread on such people; snuff ’em out, that’s all.”

They swung along the parade together, Tod having to step out to keep pace with “the Tiger’s” long, agile legs. There was something invigorating about walking with Mr. Burgetrode. He made you think of an east wind blowing on a cold sunny morning. No sitting under a banyan tree, no Oriental quietism for Mr. Burgetrode.

“We’re northerners,” he told Tod, “we’ve got to work or die. Nature’s way, my man; she has shoved us up against necessity, just a whim perhaps, as an experiment. She may think that the future is with the Patagonians, and we’re one of her amusing side-shows, her after-dinner jest. Who knows? Anyway, we are here, and there is plenty of good work to do.”

“Some things might be done better,” said Tod.

“Well, do them better; don’t talk about it.”

“If it wasn’t such a dirty scramble for money——”

“Get money, and then you won’t abuse it; not too much money, mind you.”

“That’s all very well,” said Tod, “but it seems to me that if you’re a sportsman, the mean people have you beaten every time.”

“Not always. And if it is so, it’s your own fault, the fault of Tod Western, citizen, and every other Tod Western in the world. If all the Tod Westerns got together and proceeded to sit on the heads of the Semites; if every decent Englishman, instead of praying or grumbling, daily kicked the rump of some commercial tout—well, things might happen. The whole trouble began when we mixed up work and money. Work’s the great necessity, the blood tax we have to pay to Nature. It’s no use offering her a five-pound note.”

“What about the rich people?”

“They buy other people’s work, some of ’em. But don’t imagine, young man, that because a man is rich he is a slacker. He may be one of Nature’s vitalisers, and she pays him well, either with the joy of work he does or the power she gives him. Do you think Nature cares twopence about a goods-porter, so long as he is nothing but a goods-porter? She treads on such people as you tread on an ant. Let them strike for ever and ever. Nature says, ‘Work—you slave.’ There’s nothing of the ca’-canny about Nature. She wants energy, movement, change, not a pair of sulky hob-nail boots and a mouth that blabs the stuff out of the halfpenny papers.”

“Then we are slaves?” said Tod.

“Just so long as we feel like it. Damn it, boy, the wide world is not a bad playground, and even your plain sailor man can see a good deal of it. You can’t get off the earth, you know, but Nature has given the best of us a pretty long rope.”

“I’d like to see all men big,” said Tod.

“They have got to learn to be big first. You are never big without work. Shove that in the mouths of the trade union bosses. I’ve worked sixteen hours a day in my time.”

“But then you had brains,” said Tod.

Mr. Burgetrode laughed.

“We are getting personal, are we? And here are our old friends playing golf just as usual, though the European situation is what the journalists call threatening. Let’s sit down under this thorn bush.”

They sat down, Tod looking morose and puzzled.

“Life’s queer,” he said slowly. “One seems to get shoved into things without any plan. Oh—I’m sick, sick of the whole business!”

Mr. Burgetrode lay flat, his hands under his head, his hat flung aside on the grass. Tod saw that his eyes were closed, and that his face had the flicker of a smile hidden somewhere.

“Why did you throw up the motor business?”

Tod frowned. It was news to him that Mr. Burgetrode knew anything about Western’s Garage.

“I had to,” said Tod; “self-respect. I wanted to pay people before I smashed.”

“Didn’t it pay?”

“It paid, but it didn’t pay enough. You see——”

“Extravagance,” said the great man tersely.

And Tod could say nothing. He began to suspect that “the Tiger” knew everything that was to be known.