Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/142

 "I feel the same, sir,—but then"

"I know. You have got that boy of yours. We'll hang on as we are. I don't believe—yet—that giving people the best—means bankruptcy."

The spring came and the Pelican's average rose gradually to 33. The Easter holidays took it to 57, and Sorrell's forehead began to clear, but a week later the average had fallen to 39. Yet Sorrell happened to know that the George and the Black Bear, two very indifferent inns in Winstonbury itself, were doing good trade. Gossip reached him. The tobacconist from whom he bought his tobacco, a rosy and garrulously cheerful person, asked him bluntly whether "Roland hadn't bitten off more than he could chew?"

Sorrell said something sarcastic.

"That depends on what the public wants."

"The public knows what it wants," said the fat man arrogantly.

"The trouble is that it doesn't."

"Well,—I'm not worrying. It's not my funeral."

He beamed. He appeared to regard anyone else's failure as a tribute to his own self-complacency.

"Too swanky, you know,—too refined. Hardly trouble to serve a caller with a drink. A regular snob-hole I call it."

Sorrell guessed that certain unwelcomed commercial travellers had been talking. Roland had offended a large and mobile class of customers in closing the commercial room.

A snob-hole!

Yes,—but wasn't snobbery of a sort universal? Refine it slightly and it became a useful aspiration. Carry it still higher and it shows itself as man's love of mystery, beauty, queerness, something a little different from himself. Snobbery is the foot-stool at the feet of reverence.

To put it in the language of the journalist—"What the Pelican needed was to become the Motorists' 'Mecca,' the goal of the sentimental, sensation-loving public, a place where some astoundingly romantic or astoundingly sordid thing had happened. If you could put up a notice across the road 'The notorious Nemo murdered his French mistress here,' or 'It was here that the Bishop stayed when he spent the night with a lady from London.