1
In a day in June, at the hour when London moves abroad in quest
of lunch, a young man stood at the entrance of the Bandolero
Restaurant looking earnestly up Shaftesbury Avenue--a large young
man in excellent condition, with a pleasant, good-humoured, brown,
clean-cut face. He paid no attention to the stream of humanity
that flowed past him. His mouth was set and his eyes wore a
serious, almost a wistful expression. He was frowning slightly.
One would have said that here was a man with a secret sorrow.
William FitzWilliam Delamere Chalmers, Lord Dawlish, had no secret
sorrow. All that he was thinking of at that moment was the best
method of laying a golf ball dead in front of the Palace Theatre.
It was his habit to pass the time in mental golf when Claire
Fenwick was late in keeping her appointments with him. On one
occasion she had kept him waiting so long that he had been able to
do nine holes, starting at the Savoy Grill and finishing up near
Hammersmith. His was a simple mind, able to amuse itself with
simple things.
As he stood there, gazing into the middle distance, an individual
of dishevelled aspect sidled up, a vagrant of almost the maximum
seediness, from whose midriff there protruded a trayful of a
strange welter of collar-studs, shoe-laces, rubber rings,
buttonhooks, and dying roosters. For some minutes he had been
eyeing his lordship appraisingly from the edge of the kerb, and
now, secure in the fact that there seemed to be no policeman in
the immediate vicinity, he anchored himself in front of him and
observed that he had a wife and four children at home, all
starving.
This sort of thing was always happening to Lord Dawlish. There was
something about him, some atmosphere of unaffected kindliness,
that invited it.
In these days when everything, from the shape of a man's hat to
his method of dealing with asparagus, is supposed to be an index
to character, it is possible to form some estimate of Lord Dawlish
from the fact that his vigil in front of the Bandolero had been
expensive even before the advent of the Benedict with the studs
and laces. In London, as in New York, there are spots where it is
unsafe for a man of yielding disposition to stand still, and the
corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and Piccadilly Circus is one of them.
Scrubby, impecunious men drift to and fro there, waiting for the
gods to provide something easy; and the prudent man, conscious of
the possession of loose change, whizzes through the danger zone at
his best speed, 'like one that on a lonesome road doth walk in
fear and dread, and having once turned round walks on, and turns
no more his head, because he knows a frightful fiend doth close
behind him tread.' In the seven minutes he had been waiting two
frightful fiends closed in on Lord Dawlish, requesting loans of
five shillings till Wednesday week and Saturday week respectively,
and he had parted with the money without a murmur.
A further clue to his character is supplied by the fact that both
these needy persons seemed to know him intimately, and that each
called him Bill. All Lord Dawlish's friends called him Bill, and
he had a catholic list of them, ranging from men whose names were
in 'Debrett' to men whose names were on the notice boards of
obscure clubs in connexion with the non-payment of dues. He was
the sort of man one instinctively calls Bill.
The anti-race-suicide enthusiast with the rubber rings did not call
Lord Dawlish Bill, but otherwise his manner was intimate. His
lordship's gaze being a little slow in returning from the middle
distance--for it was not a matter to be decided carelessly and
without thought, this problem of carrying the length of Shaftesbury
Avenue with a single brassy shot--he repeated the gossip from the
home. Lord Dawlish regarded him thoughtfully.
'It could be done,' he said, 'but you'd want a bit of pull on it.
I'm sorry; I didn't catch what you said.'
The other obliged with his remark for the third time, with
increased pathos, for constant repetition was making him almost
believe it himself.
'Four starving children?'
'Four, guv'nor, so help me!'
'I suppose you don't get much time for golf then, what?' said Lord
Dawlish, sympathetically.
It was precisely three days, said the man, mournfully inflating a
dying rooster, since his offspring had tasted bread.
This did not touch Lord Dawlish deeply. He was not very fond of
bread. But it seemed to be troubling the poor fellow with the
studs a great deal, so, realizing that tastes differ and that
there is no accounting for them, he looked at him commiseratingly.
'Of course, if they like bread, that makes it rather rotten,
doesn't it? What are you going to do about it?'
'Buy a dying rooster, guv'nor,' he advised. 'Causes great fun and
laughter.'
Lord Dawlish eyed the strange fowl without enthusiasm.
'No,' he said, with a slight shudder.
There was a pause. The situation had the appearance of being at a
deadlock.
'I'll tell you what,' said Lord Dawlish, with the air of one who,
having pondered, has been rewarded with a great idea: 'the fact
is, I really don't want to buy anything. You seem by bad luck to
be stocked up with just the sort of things I wouldn't be seen dead
in a ditch with. I can't stand rubber rings, never could. I'm not
really keen on buttonhooks. And I don't want to hurt your
feelings, but I think that squeaking bird of yours is about the
beastliest thing I ever met. So suppose I give you a shilling and
call it square, what?'
'Gawd bless yer, guv'nor.'
'Not at all. You'll be able to get those children of yours some
bread--I expect you can get a lot of bread for a shilling. Do they
really like it? Rum kids!'
And having concluded this delicate financial deal Lord Dawlish
turned, the movement bringing him face to face with a tall girl in
white.
During the business talk which had just come to an end this girl
had been making her way up the side street which forms a short cut
between Coventry Street and the Bandolero, and several admirers of
feminine beauty who happened to be using the same route had almost
dislocated their necks looking after her. She was a strikingly
handsome girl. She was tall and willowy. Her eyes, shaded by her
hat, were large and grey. Her nose was small and straight, her
mouth, though somewhat hard, admirably shaped, and she carried
herself magnificently. One cannot blame the policeman on duty in
Leicester Square for remarking to a cabman as she passed that he
envied the bloke that that was going to meet.
Bill Dawlish was this fortunate bloke, but, from the look of him
as he caught sight of her, one would have said that he did not
appreciate his luck. The fact of the matter was that he had only
just finished giving the father of the family his shilling, and he
was afraid that Claire had seen him doing it. For Claire, dear
girl, was apt to be unreasonable about these little generosities
of his. He cast a furtive glance behind him in the hope that the
disseminator of expiring roosters had vanished, but the man was
still at his elbow. Worse, he faced them, and in a hoarse but
carrying voice he was instructing Heaven to bless his benefactor.
'Halloa, Claire darling!' said Lord Dawlish, with a sort of
sheepish breeziness. 'Here you are.'
Claire was looking after the stud merchant, as, grasping his
wealth, he scuttled up the avenue.
'Only a bob,' his lordship hastened to say. 'Rather a sad case,
don't you know. Squads of children at home demanding bread. Didn't
want much else, apparently, but were frightfully keen on bread.'
'He has just gone into a public-house.'
'He may have gone to telephone or something, what?'
'I wish,' said Claire, fretfully, leading the way down the
grillroom stairs, 'that you wouldn't let all London sponge on you
like this. I keep telling you not to. I should have thought that
if any one needed to keep what little money he has got it was
you.'
Certainly Lord Dawlish would have been more prudent not to have
parted with even eleven shillings, for he was not a rich man.
Indeed, with the single exception of the Earl of Wetherby, whose
finances were so irregular that he could not be said to possess an
income at all, he was the poorest man of his rank in the British
Isles.
It was in the days of the Regency that the Dawlish coffers first
began to show signs of cracking under the strain, in the era of
the then celebrated Beau Dawlish. Nor were his successors backward
in the spending art. A breezy disregard for the preservation of
the pence was a family trait. Bill was at Cambridge when his
predecessor in the title, his Uncle Philip, was performing the
concluding exercises of the dissipation of the Dawlish doubloons,
a feat which he achieved so neatly that when he died there was
just enough cash to pay the doctors, and no more. Bill found
himself the possessor of that most ironical thing, a moneyless
title. He was then twenty-three.
Until six months before, when he had become engaged to Claire
Fenwick, he had found nothing to quarrel with in his lot. He was
not the type to waste time in vain regrets. His tastes were
simple. As long as he could afford to belong to one or two golf
clubs and have something over for those small loans which, in
certain of the numerous circles in which he moved, were the
inevitable concomitant of popularity, he was satisfied. And this
modest ambition had been realized for him by a group of what he
was accustomed to refer to as decent old bucks, who had installed
him as secretary of that aristocratic and exclusive club, Brown's
in St James Street, at an annual salary of four hundred pounds.
With that wealth, added to free lodging at one of the best clubs
in London, perfect health, a steadily-diminishing golf handicap,
and a host of friends in every walk of life, Bill had felt that it
would be absurd not to be happy and contented.
But Claire had made a difference. There was no question of that.
In the first place, she resolutely declined to marry him on four
hundred pounds a year. She scoffed at four hundred pounds a year.
To hear her talk, you would have supposed that she had been
brought up from the cradle to look on four hundred pounds a year
as small change to be disposed of in tips and cab fares. That in
itself would have been enough to sow doubts in Bill's mind as to
whether he had really got all the money that a reasonable man
needed; and Claire saw to it that these doubts sprouted, by
confining her conversation on the occasions of their meeting
almost entirely to the great theme of money, with its minor
sub-divisions of How to Get It, Why Don't You Get It? and I'm Sick
and Tired of Not Having It.
She developed this theme to-day, not only on the stairs leading to
the grillroom, but even after they had seated themselves at their
table. It was a relief to Bill when the arrival of the waiter with
food caused a break in the conversation and enabled him adroitly
to change the subject.
'What have you been doing this morning?' he asked.
'I went to see Maginnis at the theatre.'
'Oh!'
'I had a wire from him asking me to call. They want me to take up
Claudia Winslow's part in the number one company.'
'That's good.'
'Why?'
'Well--er--what I mean--well, isn't it? What I mean is, leading
part, and so forth.'
'In a touring company?'
'Yes, I see what you mean,' said Lord Dawlish, who didn't at all.
He thought rather highly of the number one companies that hailed
from the theatre of which Mr Maginnis was proprietor.
'And anyhow, I ought to have had the part in the first place
instead of when the tour's half over. They are at Southampton this
week. He wants me to join them there and go on to Portsmouth with
them.'
'You'll like Portsmouth.'
'Why?'
'Well--er--good links quite near.'
'You know I don't play golf.'
'Nor do you. I was forgetting. Still, it's quite a jolly place.'
'It's a horrible place. I loathe it. I've half a mind not to go.'
'Oh, I don't know.'
'What do you mean?'
Lord Dawlish was feeling a little sorry for himself. Whatever he
said seemed to be the wrong thing. This evidently was one of the
days on which Claire was not so sweet-tempered as on some other
days. It crossed his mind that of late these irritable moods of
hers had grown more frequent. It was not her fault, poor girl! he
told himself. She had rather a rotten time.
It was always Lord Dawlish's habit on these occasions to make this
excuse for Claire. It was such a satisfactory excuse. It covered
everything. But, as a matter of fact, the rather rotten time which
she was having was not such a very rotten one. Reducing it to its
simplest terms, and forgetting for the moment that she was an
extraordinarily beautiful girl--which his lordship found it
impossible to do--all that it amounted to was that, her mother
having but a small income, and existence in the West Kensington
flat being consequently a trifle dull for one with a taste for the
luxuries of life, Claire had gone on the stage. By birth she
belonged to a class of which the female members are seldom called
upon to earn money at all, and that was one count of her grievance
against Fate. Another was that she had not done as well on the
stage as she had expected to do. When she became engaged to Bill
she had reached a point where she could obtain without difficulty
good parts in the touring companies of London successes, but
beyond that it seemed it was impossible for her to soar. It was
not, perhaps, a very exhilarating life, but, except to the eyes of
love, there was nothing tragic about it. It was the cumulative
effect of having a mother in reduced circumstances and grumbling
about it, of being compelled to work and grumbling about that, and
of achieving in her work only a semi-success and grumbling about
that also, that--backed by her looks--enabled Claire to give quite
a number of people, and Bill Dawlish in particular, the impression
that she was a modern martyr, only sustained by her indomitable
courage.
So Bill, being requested in a peevish voice to explain what he
meant by saying, 'Oh, I don't know,' condoned the peevishness. He
then bent his mind to the task of trying to ascertain what he had
meant.
'Well,' he said, 'what I mean is, if you don't show up won't it be
rather a jar for old friend Maginnis? Won't he be apt to foam at
the mouth a bit and stop giving you parts in his companies?'
'I'm sick of trying to please Maginnis. What's the good? He never
gives me a chance in London. I'm sick of being always on tour. I'm
sick of everything.'
'It's the heat,' said Lord Dawlish, most injudiciously.
'It isn't the heat. It's you!'
'Me? What have I done?'
'It's what you've not done. Why can't you exert yourself and make
some money?'
Lord Dawlish groaned a silent groan. By a devious route, but with
unfailing precision, they had come homing back to the same old
subject.
'We have been engaged for six months, and there seems about as
much chance of our ever getting married as of--I can't think of
anything unlikely enough. We shall go on like this till we're
dead.'
'But, my dear girl!'
'I wish you wouldn't talk to me as if you were my grandfather.
What were you going to say?'
'Only that we can get married this afternoon if you'll say the
word.'
'Oh, don't let us go into all that again! I'm not going to marry
on four hundred a year and spend the rest of my life in a pokey
little flat on the edge of London. Why can't you make more money?'
'I did have a dash at it, you know. I waylaid old Bodger--Colonel
Bodger, on the committee of the club, you know--and suggested over
a whisky-and-soda that the management of Brown's would be behaving
like sportsmen if they bumped my salary up a bit, and the old boy
nearly strangled himself trying to suck down Scotch and laugh at
the same time. I give you my word, he nearly expired on the
smoking-room floor. When he came to he said that he wished I
wouldn't spring my good things on him so suddenly, as he had a
weak heart. He said they were only paying me my present salary
because they liked me so much. You know, it was decent of the old
boy to say that.'
'What is the good of being liked by the men in your club if you
won't make any use of it?'
'How do you mean?'
'There are endless things you could do. You could have got Mr
Breitstein elected at Brown's if you had liked. They wouldn't have
dreamed of blackballing any one proposed by a popular man like you,
and Mr Breitstein asked you personally to use your influence--you
told me so.'
'But, my dear girl--I mean my darling--Breitstein! He's the limit!
He's the worst bounder in London.'
'He's also one of the richest men in London. He would have done
anything for you. And you let him go! You insulted him!'
'Insulted him?'
'Didn't you send him an admission ticket to the Zoo?'
'Oh, well, yes, I did do that. He thanked me and went the
following Sunday. Amazing how these rich Johnnies love getting
something for nothing. There was that old American I met down at
Marvis Bay last year--'
'You threw away a wonderful chance of making all sorts of money.
Why, a single tip from Mr Breitstein would have made your
fortune.'
'But, Claire, you know, there are some things--what I mean is, if
they like me at Brown's, it's awfully decent of them and all that,
but I couldn't take advantage of it to plant a fellow like
Breitstein on them. It wouldn't be playing the game.'
'Oh, nonsense!'
Lord Dawlish looked unhappy, but said nothing. This matter of Mr
Breitstein had been touched upon by Claire in previous conversations,
and it was a subject for which he had little liking. Experience had
taught him that none of the arguments which seemed so conclusive
to him--to wit, that the financier had on two occasions only just
escaped imprisonment for fraud, and, what was worse, made a
noise when he drank soup, like water running out of a bathtub--had
the least effect upon her. The only thing to do when Mr Breitstein
came up in the course of chitchat over the festive board was to
stay quiet until he blew over.
'That old American you met at Marvis Bay,' said Claire, her memory
flitting back to the remark which she had interrupted; 'well,
there's another case. You could easily have got him to do
something for you.'
'Claire, really!' said his goaded lordship, protestingly. 'How on
earth? I only met the man on the links.'
'But you were very nice to him. You told me yourself that you
spent hours helping him to get rid of his slice, whatever that
is.'
'We happened to be the only two down there at the time, so I was
as civil as I could manage. If you're marooned at a Cornish
seaside resort out of the season with a man, you can't spend your
time dodging him. And this man had a slice that fascinated me. I
felt at the time that it was my mission in life to cure him, so I
had a dash at it. But I don't see how on the strength of that I
could expect the old boy to adopt me. He probably forgot my
existence after I had left.'
'You said you met him in London a month or two afterwards, and he
hadn't forgotten you.'
'Well, yes, that's true. He was walking up the Haymarket and I was
walking down. I caught his eye, and he nodded and passed on. I
don't see how I could construe that into an invitation to go and
sit on his lap and help myself out of his pockets.'
'You couldn't expect him to go out of his way to help you; but
probably if you had gone to him he would have done something.'
'You haven't the pleasure of Mr Ira Nutcombe's acquaintance,
Claire, or you wouldn't talk like that. He wasn't the sort of man
you could get things out of. He didn't even tip the caddie.
Besides, can't you see what I mean? I couldn't trade on a chance
acquaintance of the golf links to--'
'That is just what I complain of in you. You're too diffident.'
'It isn't diffidence exactly. Talking of old Nutcombe, I was
speaking to Gates again the other night. He was telling me about
America. There's a lot of money to be made over there, you know,
and the committee owes me a holiday. They would give me a few
weeks off any time I liked.
'What do you say? Shall I pop over and have a look round? I might
happen to drop into something. Gates was telling me about fellows
he knew who had dropped into things in New York.'
'What's the good of putting yourself to all the trouble and
expense of going to America? You can easily make all you want in
London if you will only try. It isn't as if you had no chances.
You have more chances than almost any man in town. With your title
you could get all the directorships in the City that you wanted.'
'Well, the fact is, this business of taking directorships has
never quite appealed to me. I don't know anything about the game,
and I should probably run up against some wildcat company. I can't
say I like the directorship wheeze much. It's the idea of knowing
that one's name would be being used as a bait. Every time I saw it
on a prospectus I should feel like a trout fly.'
Claire bit her lip.
'It's so exasperating!' she broke out. 'When I first told my
friends that I was engaged to Lord Dawlish they were tremendously
impressed. They took it for granted that you must have lots of
money. Now I have to keep explaining to them that the reason we
don't get married is that we can't afford to. I'm almost as badly
off as poor Polly Davis who was in the Heavenly Waltz Company with
me when she married that man, Lord Wetherby. A man with a title
has no right not to have money. It makes the whole thing farcical.
'If I were in your place I should have tried a hundred things by
now, but you always have some silly objection. Why couldn't you,
for instance, have taken on the agency of that what-d'you-call-it
car?'
'What I called it would have been nothing to what the poor devils
who bought it would have called it.'
'You could have sold hundreds of them, and the company would have
given you any commission you asked. You know just the sort of
people they wanted to get in touch with.'
'But, darling, how could I? Planting Breitstein on the club would
have been nothing compared with sowing these horrors about London.
I couldn't go about the place sticking my pals with a car which, I
give you my honest word, was stuck together with chewing-gum and
tied up with string.'
'Why not? It would be their fault if they bought a car that wasn't
any good. Why should you have to worry once you had it sold?'
It was not Lord Dawlish's lucky afternoon. All through lunch he
had been saying the wrong thing, and now he put the coping-stone
on his misdeeds. Of all the ways in which he could have answered
Claire's question he chose the worst.
'Er--well,' he said, '_noblesse oblige_, don't you know, what?'
For a moment Claire did not speak. Then she looked at her watch
and got up.
'I must be going,' she said, coldly.
'But you haven't had your coffee yet.'
'I don't want any coffee.'
'What's the matter, dear?'
'Nothing is the matter. I have to go home and pack. I'm going to
Southampton this afternoon.'
She began to move towards the door. Lord Dawlish, anxious to
follow, was detained by the fact that he had not yet paid the
bill. The production and settling of this took time, and when
finally he turned in search of Claire she was nowhere visible.
Bounding upstairs on the swift feet of love, he reached the
street. She had gone.
2
A grey sadness surged over Bill Dawlish. The sun hid itself behind
a cloud, the sky took on a leaden hue, and a chill wind blew
through the world. He scanned Shaftesbury Avenue with a jaundiced
eye, and thought that he had never seen a beastlier thoroughfare.
Piccadilly, however, into which he shortly dragged himself, was
even worse. It was full of men and women and other depressing
things.
He pitied himself profoundly. It was a rotten world to live in,
this, where a fellow couldn't say _noblesse oblige_ without
upsetting the universe. Why shouldn't a fellow say _noblesse
oblige?_ Why--? At this juncture Lord Dawlish walked into a
lamp-post.
The shock changed his mood. Gloom still obsessed him, but blended
now with remorse. He began to look at the matter from Claire's
viewpoint, and his pity switched from himself to her. In the first
place, the poor girl had rather a rotten time. Could she be blamed
for wanting him to make money? No. Yet whenever she made suggestions
as to how the thing was to be done, he snubbed her by saying
_noblesse oblige_. Naturally a refined and sensitive young girl
objected to having things like _noblesse oblige_ said to her. Where
was the sense in saying _noblesse oblige_? Such a confoundedly silly
thing to say. Only a perfect ass would spend his time rushing about
the place saying _noblesse oblige_ to people.
'By Jove!' Lord Dawlish stopped in his stride. He disentangled
himself from a pedestrian who had rammed him on the back. 'I'll do
it!'
He hailed a passing taxi and directed the driver to make for the
Pen and Ink Club.
The decision at which Bill had arrived with such dramatic
suddenness in the middle of Piccadilly was the same at which some
centuries earlier Columbus had arrived in the privacy of his home.
'Hang it!' said Bill to himself in the cab, 'I'll go to America!'
The exact words probably which Columbus had used, talking the
thing over with his wife.
Bill's knowledge of the great republic across the sea was at this
period of his life a little sketchy. He knew that there had been
unpleasantness between England and the United States in
seventeen-something and again in eighteen-something, but that
things had eventually been straightened out by Miss Edna May
and her fellow missionaries of the Belle of New York Company,
since which time there had been no more trouble. Of American
cocktails he had a fair working knowledge, and he appreciated
ragtime. But of the other great American institutions he was
completely ignorant.
He was on his way now to see Gates. Gates was a comparatively
recent addition to his list of friends, a New York newspaperman
who had come to England a few months before to act as his paper's
London correspondent. He was generally to be found at the Pen and
Ink Club, an institution affiliated with the New York Players, of
which he was a member.
Gates was in. He had just finished lunch.
'What's the trouble, Bill?' he inquired, when he had deposited his
lordship in a corner of the reading-room, which he had selected
because silence was compulsory there, thus rendering it possible
for two men to hear each other speak. 'What brings you charging in
here looking like the Soul's Awakening?'
'I've had an idea, old man.'
'Proceed. Continue.'
'Oh! Well, you remember what you were saying about America?'
'What was I saying about America?'
'The other day, don't you remember? What a lot of money there was
to be made there and so forth.'
'Well?'
'I'm going there.'
'To America?'
'Yes.'
'To make money?'
'Rather.'
Gates nodded--sadly, it seemed to Bill. He was rather a melancholy
young man, with a long face not unlike a pessimistic horse.
'Gosh!' he said.
Bill felt a little damped. By no mental juggling could he construe
'Gosh!' into an expression of enthusiastic approbation.
Gates looked at Bill curiously. 'What's the idea?' he said. 'I
could have understood it if you had told me that you were going to
New York for pleasure, instructing your man Willoughby to see that
the trunks were jolly well packed and wiring to the skipper of
your yacht to meet you at Liverpool. But you seem to have sordid
motives. You talk about making money. What do you want with more
money?'
'Why, I'm devilish hard up.'
'Tenantry a bit slack with the rent?' said Gates sympathetically.
Bill laughed.
'My dear chap, I don't know what on earth you're talking about.
How much money do you think I've got? Four hundred pounds a year,
and no prospect of ever making more unless I sweat for it.'
'What! I always thought you were rolling in money.'
'What gave you that idea?'
'You have a prosperous look. It's a funny thing about England.
I've known you four months, and I know men who know you; but I've
never heard a word about your finances. In New York we all wear
labels, stating our incomes and prospects in clear lettering.
Well, if it's like that it's different, of course. There certainly
is more money to be made in America than here. I don't quite see
what you think you're going to do when you get there, but that's
up to you.
'There's no harm in giving the city a trial. Anyway, I can give
you a letter or two that might help.'
'That's awfully good of you.'
'You won't mind my alluding to you as my friend William Smith?'
'William Smith?'
'You can't travel under your own name if you are really serious
about getting a job. Mind you, if my letters lead to anything it
will probably be a situation as an earnest bill-clerk or an
effervescent office-boy, for Rockefeller and Carnegie and that lot
have swiped all the soft jobs. But if you go over as Lord Dawlish
you won't even get that. Lords are popular socially in America,
but are not used to any great extent in the office. If you try to
break in under your right name you'll get the glad hand and be
asked to stay here and there and play a good deal of golf and
dance quite a lot, but you won't get a job. A gentle smile will
greet all your pleadings that you be allowed to come in and save
the firm.'
'I see.'
'We may look on Smith as a necessity.'
'Do you know, I'm not frightfully keen on the name Smith. Wouldn't
something else do?'
'Sure. We aim to please. How would Jones suit you?'
'The trouble is, you know, that if I took a name I wasn't used to
I might forget it.'
'If you've the sort of mind that would forget Jones I doubt if
ever you'll be a captain of industry.'
'Why not Chalmers?'
'You think it easier to memorize than Jones?'
'It used to be my name, you see, before I got the title.'
'I see. All right. Chalmers then. When do you think of starting?'
'To-morrow.'
'You aren't losing much time. By the way, as you're going to New
York you might as well use my flat.'
'It's awfully good of you.'
'Not a bit. You would be doing me a favour. I had to leave at a
moment's notice, and I want to know what's been happening to the
place. I left some Japanese prints there, and my favourite
nightmare is that someone has broken in and sneaked them. Write
down the address--Forty-three East Twenty-seventh Street. I'll
send you the key to Brown's to-night with those letters.'
Bill walked up the Strand, glowing with energy. He made his way to
Cockspur Street to buy his ticket for New York. This done, he set
out to Brown's to arrange with the committee the details of his
departure.
He reached Brown's at twenty minutes past two and left it again at
twenty-three minutes past; for, directly he entered, the hall
porter had handed him a telephone message. The telephone
attendants at London clubs are masters of suggestive brevity. The
one in the basement of Brown's had written on Bill's slip of paper
the words: '1 p.m. Will Lord Dawlish as soon as possible call upon
Mr Gerald Nichols at his office?' To this was appended a message
consisting of two words: 'Good news.'
It was stimulating. The probability was that all Jerry Nichols
wanted to tell him was that he had received stable information
about some horse or had been given a box for the Empire, but for
all that it was stimulating.
Bill looked at his watch. He could spare half an hour. He set out
at once for the offices of the eminent law firm of Nichols,
Nichols, Nichols, and Nichols, of which aggregation of Nicholses
his friend Jerry was the last and smallest.
3
On a west-bound omnibus Claire Fenwick sat and raged silently in the
June sunshine. She was furious. What right had Lord Dawlish to look
down his nose and murmur '_Noblesse oblige_' when she asked him a
question, as if she had suggested that he should commit some crime?
It was the patronizing way he had said it that infuriated her, as if
he were a superior being of some kind, governed by codes which she
could not be expected to understand. Everybody nowadays did the sort
of things she suggested, so what was the good of looking shocked and
saying '_Noblesse oblige_'?
The omnibus rolled on towards West Kensington. Claire hated the
place with the bitter hate of one who had read society novels, and
yearned for Grosvenor Square and butlers and a general atmosphere
of soft cushions and pink-shaded lights and maids to do one's
hair. She hated the cheap furniture of the little parlour, the
penetrating contralto of the cook singing hymns in the kitchen,
and the ubiquitousness of her small brother. He was only ten, and
small for his age, yet he appeared to have the power of being in
two rooms at the same time while making a nerve-racking noise in
another.
It was Percy who greeted her to-day as she entered the flat.
'Halloa, Claire! I say, Claire, there's a letter for you. It came
by the second post. I say, Claire, it's got an American stamp on
it. Can I have it, Claire? I haven't got one in my collection.'
His sister regarded him broodingly. 'For goodness' sake don't
bellow like that!' she said. 'Of course, you can have the stamp. I
don't want it. Where is the letter?'
Claire took the envelope from him, extracted the letter, and
handed back the envelope. Percy vanished into the dining-room with
a shattering squeal of pleasure.