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.”

Old Burgetrode gave a quick lift of his head.

“You don’t like your present place, then?”

“No,” said Tod.

“Why not?”

“They don’t want you to tell the truth.”

“Ha!” said Mr. Burgetrode fiercely.

Tod edged himself nearer to the bath-chair. He had a feeling that he could talk to Mr. Burgetrode.

“They want you to lie about things. It was the same in the other shop I was in, and I got chucked for that—and something else.”

Mr. Burgetrode was watching him with great intentness.

“So you don’t like it?”

“I loathe it,” said Tod. “Why should you have to lie to people?”

“It means money, Western, more money.”

“Well, we ought to get rid of money. Or supposing there was so much money that it was cheap as the shingle down there, people wouldn’t tell lies to get it.”

“That’s a problem, young man. You seem to have discovered the trick of running your head against problems.”

The Shaston Corporation Orchestra who inhabited the bandstand, woke to sudden life after an interval of twenty minutes. Mr. Burgetrode grew impatient.

“Take me away from that noise, will you?”

Tod descended from the railings and trundled the bath-chair in the direction of the Hotel Majestic.

“That will do,” said Mr. Burgetrode; “it will take my friend Smith another ten minutes to find us. Do you play any games, young Ajax?”

“Cricket,” said Tod, “and I played right-half for Shaston last winter. I can swim a mile, and box a bit.”

“Keep it up, Western. What did you want to be before you got trapped in a shop?”

“A doctor.”

Mr. Burgetrode did not seem prejudiced in favour of such a career. He gave Tod to understand that there were doctors and doctors, and that if you wanted to become a first-class surgeon you might count on earning very little money for fifteen years. He talked rather strangely about doctors trying to patch the roof, when the foundations were rotten. He said that the doctors were not to blame, and that you could not get at the foundations, because the Vested Interest fence kept you out.

“What’s a Vested Interest?” Tod asked.

“You have got to find that out,” said Mr. Burgetrode.

Then he made a sudden suggestion.

“Would you like to take up houses, Western?”

“I think I should, sir.”

“Study them inside out, and from top to bottom, how they are built, and how they shouldn’t be built?”

“That’s it,” said Tod.

Mr. Burgetrode looked hard at him with those queer, fierce eyes of his.

“Very well, Ajax. I shall be at that hotel for another month. If you want me, you will know where to find me.”