So Tod plunged.

There was an empty shop in Duke Street, a long tunnel of a shop that had been the home of a local iron-monger who had failed to meet his creditors. The owner of the premises showed himself to be a very adaptable and progressive person. He agreed to spend a hundred pounds on the place, refit it, put in a new front with big glass doors, and knock down part of a back wall so that cars could circulate by way of a backyard and side lane. He added ten pounds to the rent—but Tod was delighted; he did not grudge his landlord his ten per cent.

Western’s Garage was opened on New Year’s Day. The shop front was painted red; and a big blue-and-white sign jutted out on an iron bracket and let everybody know that there was a garage in Duke Street. Tod, under Miss Hornblower’s inspiration, had been very lavish with his gold lettering on the plate-glass windows. Orders were “promptly attended to”—“All trains met”—“Touring cars for hire.” The shop window was full of lamps, horns, tools, an assortment of tyres, jacks, oil cans, and the like. The garage held one taxi and one American touring car, both obtained under a system of deferred payments. The staff consisted of Tod, a driver-mechanic, and a boy.

Tod had learnt to drive a car. He had read all the automobile journals with great diligence, and paid various visits to London and the Midlands. Someone in Wardour Street offered him certain commercial facilities, one of those keen gentlemen who are so clever at making money out of other people’s enterprise and energy. Tod was “advised” by this Semite in Wardour Street. He obtained various agencies, but they were agencies for rather second-rate firms who built the cheaper and more dubious sort of car. Old Pumpelly had snaffled all the others. But the business moved; Tod’s taxi snorted about quite busily, took people to the station and to theatres, and staggered home again without an accident. The American touring car had a rather more gentlemanly and luxurious life, but then it was a summer car, and Tod had no spare driver. Miss Hornblower would commandeer it on occasions, and make Tod drive her up and down the front. He had bought her a fur coat, and all the young women in Horrox & Horrox’s were aware of Millie and her coat.

But the business moved. People came into the shop and bought things, tyres, petrol, oil, grease, repairing outfits, French chalk, sparking plugs, oil cans. Tod advertised himself as ready to undertake repairs, and Love—his driver-mechanic—was put to the test. Love was a fat little man, sallow, greasy, with a slight squint and an immense display of superficial self-assurance. He talked Tod into believing him an expert, pouring out streams of technical jargon with a sort of biblical gusto. “The mag” needed attention, or the “brasspot had a bit o’ fluff in its tummy.” Somebody’s “gears were bottoming,” or “she wanted her big-end rebushing.” Mr. Love always spoke of a car as “she,” and with an intimate and affectionate shrewdness that embraced the whole sex. Tod got a little breathless in trying to follow Mr. Love through all these feminine details and subtleties, poring over motor-manuals at night, and going to bed with his head full of “crown wheels” and “short circuits,” “lay shafts” and “forced-feed lubrication.” He did not desire this man Love to be a Mumbo-Jumbo, a Witch-doctor, a Priest of all the Mysteries in his business. He wanted to keep a grip on the greasy seat of Mr. Love’s trousers.

The driver-mechanic appeared to perform quite creditably upon one or two ramshackle machines that were entrusted to “Western’s Garage” for repairs. They ran when they left the repair shop, and that was good enough for Mr. Love.

“Good enough.” That was his great phrase, containing a philosophy so dear to the heart of the lazier sort of English artisan. If a car came back again at the end of a week, Mr. Love insinuated his greasy person into its entrails, spat, rubbed his hands on his trousers, and was ready with a learned explanation.

“Old, bag o’ bolts. She’d shake something loose every hundred miles.”

He talked the owners into dazed acquiescence.

“She wants ’er timing-wheels resetting, sir. Had ’em done by the village blacksmith—what? Of course. And the universal joint wants looking to, and her water-pipes are all fur and muck. There’s not much I don’t know about cars.”

Tod was very busy and very happy, and business shaped so well those first few months that Tod began to buy furniture and to think of marriage. He wanted Milly, and he wanted her very badly, for she had begun to provoke the natural man in him and spring was in the air.

She came hurrying into the garage one Wednesday afternoon, and found Tod in the little glass box of an office, entering up his books. Last month’s receipts were more than respectable, and Tod was remembering that he needed a summer suit.

“Oh, Toddy, dear!”

“Hallo!”

“It’s free—it’s to let.”

“What’s to let?”

“Why, our little house—that ducky house in Guildford Lane.”

She was flushed and greatly excited, and her enthusiasm had all the seduction of her sex.

“I’ve just seen the board up. The people are going out next week. I went in and asked.”

Tod got off his stool and kissed her.

“You want it, dear?”

She snuggled in close, ignoring Mr. Love, who was deep in the “innards” of a derelict car.

“Of course I want it. Don’t you, Toddy?”

“I want all sorts of things, and I want them so badly——”

“Oh, naughty boy! But it will be rather nice, won’t it, just you and me in that dinky house?”

“Let’s go and look at it,” said Tod, putting business behind him.

Needless to say, they took “Carnarvon,” with its pepper-pot turret, mock oak, casement windows, gravel path, and standard roses. Tod prepared to be married in June. The sun shone. All the pessimism of Uncle Remus and Mr. Rathbone Cragg seemed like so much senile snivelling.

About a week before Tod’s marriage Bob Twine strolled up Guildford Lane and slouched self-consciously through the gate of “Carnarvon.” It was six o’clock and he found Tod pottering about the house. Tod was in his shirt-sleeves, and his hair was rumpled, and Bob Twine caught him on his hands and knees in the kitchen, nailing down linoleum.

“Hallo, kid.”

Tod looked hot and happy, but quite pleased to see Twine.

“Hallo, Bob. What do you think of this pattern?”

“Classy. All alone, are you, and learning to be the handy man?”

“Come and look at the house,” said Tod, getting up with all the enthusiasm of a house-proud husband; “I’ve got the carpets down and most of the furniture in.”

“Hire purchase, system, old chap?”

“Well, it’s easier to begin with. I hope to wipe off the lot by next Christmas. Now look at this dining room suite. Millie chose it.”

“She did, did she? Mind if I light a cigarette?”

“Have one of mine. Aren’t those chairs jolly? And I think the carpet’s just splendid.”

They strolled over the house, and even the obtusely happy Tod could not help noticing that Bob Twine seemed glum and uneasy. The generous and innocent Tod explained his friend’s depression by wondering whether he was rubbing his own happiness into the raw of some discontent, and whether Bob Twine yearned greatly for a home of his own.

“Why don’t you get married and settle down?”

Twine stared, swallowed something, and laughed.

“I’m not made that way, old chap, and I haven’t the money.”

“But you’ll want to get married some day.”

“Talk about something else,” said Twine flippantly. “Wish I was in the army, somewhere east of Suez. God, that chap Kipling knows a bit.”

He threw the fag end of his cigarette into an empty grate, and became boisterously cheerful.

“Well, kid, you’ll be the solemn father of a family in ten years. Taking ’em down to paddle, and teaching ’em to swim. Queer, isn’t it, and you’re only a kid yourself. But—damn it—I wish you the best of luck, and I hope the girl knows you deserve it. Think I’ll be toddling. So long.”

Tod, holding a hammer in one hand and a box of tin-tacks in the other, watched the swarthy man slouch down the path.

“Poor old Bob,” he thought; “he wants a home and won’t say so.”

Twine was cursing women and himself.

“I ought to have told him, but, damn it—how could I? He’s like a blessed cherub blowing about with a hammer and a box of nails. Happy? My God! Oh, you little devil, I hope you’ll play game by him.”

A week later Tod was married. It was a quiet wedding, not nearly so decorative as Millie Hornblower would have desired. Her mother was the only relative who attended it, and Tod wondered why Mrs. Hornblower smelt of drink. The two bridesmaids came from Horrox’s, and Mr. Mann of the Furnishing Department gave Miss Hornblower away.

Old Tom Lavender served as Tod’s best man. Millie had said that he was far too old for it, but Tod had proved obstinate, for Tom Lavender had a younger heart than most young men. Uncle Remus was not there, and he sent no present. And away in the north the great Mr. Burgetrode was as silent as death.

The honeymoon lasted four days, Tod not caring to leave the business to Mr. Love and the garage boy. They spent the days at Maidenhead, Millie Hornblower’s choice, and they did much lolling in a punt on the river, a punt that refused to humour Tod’s first activities with a punt pole. But who cared about progress? There were over-hanging and shadowy trees, cushions, and a girl, a girl like a soft, white, sensuous flower with lips tinted red.

For the first six months of his marriage Tod was supremely happy. He had married a highly sexed young woman, a young woman who woke the dormant man in him and taught him to delight in new physical experiences. During those months Tod was the most passionate and uxorious of young husbands, and his wife’s sensual frankness rather pleased him. She wanted him and she wanted him with passion. His habits changed. His early morning swim became a thing of the past. He ceased to play games, for sex was the game of the moment, and Millie played it in all its variations. But she did not want children.

“Just you and me together—for a while—Toddy. Besides, we can’t afford them.”

They couldn’t.

The fact became very obvious to Tod. “Carnarvon” was a thirsty little house, and Tod had begun to glimpse his wife’s social ambitions. He was astonished at the number of things that appeared to be required for the efficient functioning of a genteel house. They had no piano, but a piano seemed to be a sign and symbol of grace, even though Millie could not play it. People were beginning to call, and Millie gave little afternoon bridge parties, and the cakes these people ate, and the cost of them, worried Tod. His wife’s clothes became a problem. Two good suits were sufficient for Tod, but the hunger of a woman’s wardrobe appeared to be insatiable. She wheedled Tod into sundry extravagances; but that was not the end of the tale, for when the finery had been bought, it had to be displayed. Tod found himself taking stalls at the local theatre and going there in evening dress. He even discovered himself in church, walking up the aisle with a young woman who rustled, a young woman who would never have set foot in the place had she been dressed in sackcloth.

That red mouth and those plump white arms dominated him during the first months of his marriage. He was proud of his wife, and rather proud of “Carnarvon,” and the calceolarias and the dog, and the maid in white cap and apron.

At the end of six months Tod began “doing figures.” The business was prospering, but Tod realised that its prosperity was not commensurate with Millie’s ideas upon expenditure.

Tod saw that he would have to expand.

He travelled up to town and saw the Semite of Wardour Street, produced figures, and stated his reasons for believing in a possible expansion of his venture. The result was the addition of two more taxis to Tod’s stud, supplied on a system of deferred payments; and the hiring of two more drivers. Tod had a weekly advertisement in the _Shaston Gazette_. The red-fronted garage in Duke Street had an air of industrious prosperity, and the garage boy began to call him “sir.”

But the surest proof of Tod’s success was the coming of Mr. Pumpelly. He was a succulent and cheerful old Christian with a facial resemblance to Father Christmas, and a partiality for loud check suits. Mr. Pumpelly had been the principal jobmaster in Shaston before the birth of the autocar, and he looked more the man of the horse than of the machine. Geniality was his great weapon. “Good old Josh—one of the best, do anything for anybody.” That was how Mr. Pumpelly glimpsed himself, and there was a bland and worldly cunning under his rosy good humour, a shrewdness that stood broad-bellied in the sunlight, and smiled.

Pumpelly strolled into Tod’s garage, and looked round with an air of obvious approval, and then discovered Tod, Tod who had just booked an order that spelt fifty pounds.

“Morning, Mr. Western. Nice little place you’ve got here.”

“It’s not bad,” said Tod.

“I was passing, and I dropped in to see whether you happened to have a couple of 700 by 85 Avons in stock. I’m out; they’re wanted urgently.”

“Afraid I haven’t. I could let you have a pair of Speedwells.”

“No thanks. Don’t touch ’em. This your office, is it? Mind me strolling in?”

Mr. Pumpelly strolled in with the genial casualness of a friend. He looked at everything with interest, even at Tod’s stool. Then he lit a cigarette.

“I’ll wire my London agents. Yes, a snug little place, and quite handy.”

And suddenly Mr. Pumpelly’s face beamed with the light of inspiration.

“Look here, Western, here’s an idea. Why shouldn’t we two fix up Shaston between us? We’d tap different ends, and we’d keep other people out. It’s an idea, ain’t it?”

“You mean we should go into partnership?” said Tod.

“That’s it. Why not?”

There was something in Tod that did not like Mr. Pumpelly, and he made one of those swift decisions that was to prove catastrophic so far as his future was concerned.

“Thanks, I prefer being on my own, but I’m obliged for the suggestion.”

“Think it over,” said Mr. Pumpelly with fatherly impressiveness; “it would be a good thing for you.”

Tod thought it over, and two days later he wrote a private letter to Mr. Pumpelly, refusing the offer of partnership. Mr. Pumpelly showed the letter to a nasty, dark, dapper little fellow who had become interested in Mr. Pumpelly’s business and was acting as manager.

“He’s one of the independent sort, Britt.”

Mr. Charles Britt passed a dirty forefinger across his little black moustache.

“If he wants competition he’ll get it. I didn’t work five years with the Solomons for nothing.”