đ Uneasy Money (day 1)
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joi, 16 mai, 01:53 (acum 3 zile)
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Uneasy Money
I
On 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-humored, 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 Theater. 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.
Some men in the circumstances in which Lord Dawlish found himself would have fidgeted and looked at their watches; some would have prowled up and down; others might have sought solace at the excellent bar which the management of the Bandolero maintains for just such emergencies. Lord Dawlish preferred mental golf.
As he stood there, gazing into the middle distance, an individual of disheveled aspect sidled up, a vagrant of almost the maximum seediness, from whose midriff there protruded a trayful of a strange welter of collar studs, shoelaces, rubber rings, buttonhooks and dying roosters. For some minutes he had been eyeing his lordship appraisingly from the edge of the curb, 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. Total strangers who had made imprudent marriages without asking his advice were forever stopping him in the street and expecting him to finance the ventures. They did it generally with a touch of reproach in their voices, as if they felt a little wounded that he had not done something about it before.
In these days when everything, from the shape of a manâs 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, âlike 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.â 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 Dawlishâs 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 connection with the nonpayment 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 lordshipâs gaze being a little slow in returning from the middle distanceâ âfor 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 shotâ âhe repeated the gossip from the home. Lord Dawlish regarded him thoughtfully.
âIt could be done,â he said, âbut youâd want a bit of pull on it. Iâm sorry; I didnât catch what you said.â
The other obliged with his remark for the third time, with increased pathos, for constant repetition was making him almost believe it himself.
âFour starving children?â
âFour, govânor, so help me!â
âI suppose you donât get much time for golf then, what?â 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.
âOf course if they like breadâ âthat makes it rather rotten, doesnât it? What are you going to do about it?â
The man permitted the dying rooster to die noisily.
âBuy a dying rooster, govânor,â he advised. âCauses great fun and laughter.â
Lord Dawlish eyed the strange fowl without enthusiasm.
âNo,â he said with a slight shudder.
âBuy a rubber ring, govânor. Always useful about the little home.â
âI shouldnât know what to do with it.â
âBuy a nice collar stud.â
âIâve got a nice collar stud.â
There was a pause. The situation had the appearance of being at a deadlock.
âIâll tell you what,â said Lord Dawlish with the air of one who, having pondered, has been rewarded with a great idea: âThe fact is, I really donât want to buy anything. You seem by bad luck to be stocked up with just the sort of things I wouldnât be seen dead in a ditch with. I canât stand rubber ringsâ ânever could. Iâm not really keen on buttonhooks. And I donât 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?â
âGawd bless yer, govânor!â
âNot at all. Youâll be able to get those children of yours some breadâ âI expect you can get a lot of bread for a shilling. Do they really like it? Rum kids!â
And having concluded this delicate financial deal Lord Dawlish turned, it being his intention to inspect the fountain in Piccadilly Circus and estimate whether a supposititious hole beneath it could be reached with a single putt, or whether, as he suspected, a preliminary use of the iron would be necessary. The movement brought 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 shortcut 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 gray. 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.
âHello, Claire darling,â said Lord Dawlish with a sort of sheepish breeziness. âHere you are!â
Claire was looking after the stud merchant, as, grasping his wealth, he scuttled up the avenue.
âWere you giving that man money, Bill?â
âOnly a bob,â his lordship hastened to say. âRather a sad case, donât you know. Squads of children at home demanding bread. Didnât want much else apparently, but were frightfully keen on bread.â
âHe has just gone into a public house.â
âHe may have gone to telephone or something, what?â
âI wish,â said Claire fretfully, leading the way down the grillroom stairs, âthat you wouldnât let all London sponge on you like this. I keep telling you not to. I should have thought that if anyone needed to keep what little money he has got, it was you.â
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. Judging from contemporary portraits of this gentleman, there would seem to be no reason why he should have been given or should have assumed that prenomen. But it is pretty generally recognized now that in the good old days anybody with a hundred and ten suits of clothes, a few pet pugilists, and a taste for high stakes at piquet could call himself âBeauâ and get away with it. These qualifications Billâs ancestor had possessed to a remarkable degree.
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, Brownâs in St. Jamesâs 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 Billâs 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 subdivisions of How to Get It, Why Donât You Get It? and Iâm Sick and Tired of Not Having It.
She developed this theme today, 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.
âWhat have you been doing this morning?â he asked.
âI went to see Maginnis at the theater.â
âOh!â
âI had a wire from him asking me to call. They want me to take up Claudia Winslowâs part in the number one company.â
âThatâs good.â
âWhy?â
âWellâ âerâ âwhat I meanâ âwell; isnât it? What I mean is, leading part, and so forth.â
âIn a touring company?â
âYes, I see what you mean,â said Lord Dawlish, who didnât at all. He thought rather highly of the number one companies that hailed from the theater of which Mr. Maginnis was proprietor.
âAnd anyhow, I ought to have had the part in the first place instead of when the tourâs half over. They are at Southampton this week. He wants me to join them there and go on to Portsmouth with them.â
âYouâll like Portsmouth.â
âWhy?â
âWellâ âerâ âgood links quite near.â
âYou know I donât play golf.â
âNor do you. I was forgetting. Still, itâs quite a jolly place.â
âItâs a horrible place. I loathe it. Iâve half a mind not to go.â
âOh, I donât know.â
âWhat do you mean?â
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 Dawlishâs 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 girlâ âwhich his lordship found it impossible to doâ âall 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 road 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, thatâ âbacked by her looksâ âenabled 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, âOh, I donât know,â condoned the peevishness. He then bent his mind to the task of trying to ascertain what he had meant.
âWell,â he said, âwhat I mean is, if you donât show up wonât it be rather a jar for old friend Maginnis? Wonât he be apt to foam at the mouth a bit and stop giving you parts in his companies?â
âIâm sick of trying to please Maginnis. Whatâs the good? He never gives me a chance in London. Iâm sick of being always on the road. Iâm sick of everything.â
âItâs the heat,â said Lord Dawlish most injudiciously.
âIt isnât the heat. Itâs you!â
âMe?â
His lordship choked. This unexpected frontal attack had taken him by surprise and caused him to swallow a chipped potato with less than his usual dexterity. He sipped water, and, when he could speak, spoke plaintively:
âWhat have I done?â
âItâs what youâve not done. Why canât you exert yourself and make some money?â
Lord Dawlish groaned a silent groan. By a devious route, but with unfailing precision, they had come homing back to the same old subject.
âWe have been engaged for six months, and there seems about as much chance of our ever getting married as ofâ âI canât think of anything unlikely enough. We shall go on like this till weâre dead.â
âBut, my dear girl!â
âI wish you wouldnât talk to me as if you were my grandfather. What were you going to say?â
âOnly that we can get married this afternoon, if youâll say the word.â
âOh, donât let us go into all that again! Iâm not going to marry on four hundred a year and spend the rest of my life in a poky little flat on the edge of London. Why canât you make more money?â
âI did have a dash at it, you know. I waylaid old Bodgerâ âColonel Bodger, on the committee of the club, you knowâ âand suggested over a whisky-and-soda that the management of Brownâs 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 wouldnât 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.â
âWhat is the good of being liked by the men in your club if you wonât make any use of it?â
âHow do you mean?â
âThere are endless things you could do. You could have got Mr. Breitstein elected at Brownâs if you had liked. They wouldnât have dreamed of blackballing anyone proposed by a popular man like you, and Mr. Breitstein asked you personally to use your influenceâ âyou told me so.â
âBut, my dear girlâ âI mean, my darlingâ âBreitstein! Heâs the limit! Heâs the worst bounder in London.â
âHeâs also one of the richest men in London. He would have done anything for you. And you let him go! You insulted him!â
âInsulted him?â
âDidnât you send him an admission ticket to the Zoo?â
âOh, 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 yearâ ââ
âYou threw away a wonderful chance of making all sorts of money. Why, a single tip from Mr. Breitstein would have made your fortune.â
âBut, Claire, you know, there are some thingsâ âwhat I mean is, if they like me at Brownâs itâs awfully decent of them and all that, but I couldnât take advantage of it to plant a fellow like Breitstein on them. It wouldnât be playing the game.â
âOh, nonsense!â
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 himâ âto 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 bathtubâ âhad 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.
But today Claire was waging war with Maxims, not with squirrel guns. She was firing at random into the brown of his shortcomings, and if she missed one she was sure to hit another. And rashly he had himself directed her attention to a misdemeanor only second in importance to the Breitstein sin. He had reminded her of Mr. Ira Nutcombe.
âThat old American you met at Marvis Bay,â said Claire, her memory flitting back to the remark which she had interrupted; âwell, thereâs another case. You could easily have got him to do something for you.â
âClaire, really!â said his goaded lordship protestingly. âHow on earth? I only met the man on the links.â
âBut 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.â
âWe happened to be the only two down there at the time, so I was as civil as I could manage. If youâre marooned at a Cornish seaside resort out of the season with a man, you canât 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 donât 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.â
âYou said you met him in London a month or two afterward, and he hadnât forgotten you.â
âWell, yes, thatâs true. He was walking up the Haymarket and I was walking down. I caught his eye, and he nodded and passed on. I donât see how I could construe that into an invitation to go and sit on his lap and help myself out of his pockets.â
âYou couldnât expect him to go out of his way to help you; but, probably, if you had gone to him he would have done something.â
âYou havenât the pleasure of Mr. Ira Nutcombeâs acquaintance, Claire, or you wouldnât talk like that. He wasnât the sort of man you could get things out of. He didnât even tip the caddie. Besides, canât you see what I mean? I couldnât trade on a chance acquaintance of the golf links toâ ââ
âThat is just what I complain of in you. Youâre too diffident.â
âIt isnât diffidence exactly. Talking of old Nutcombe, I was speaking to Gates again the other night. He was telling me about America. Thereâs a lot of money to be made over there, you know, and the committee owes me a vacation. They would give me a few weeks off any time I liked.
âWhat do you say? Shall I pop over and have a look round? I might happen just to drop into something. Gates was telling me about fellows he knew who had dropped into things in New York.â
âWhatâs 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 isnât 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.â
âWell, the fact is, this business of taking directorships has never quite appealed to me. I donât know anything about the game and I should probably run up against some wildcat company. I canât say I like the directorship wheeze much. Itâs the idea of knowing that oneâs name would be being used as a bait. Every time I saw it on a prospectus I should feel like a trout fly.â
Claire bit her lip.
âItâs so exasperating!â she broke out. âWhen 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 donât get married is that we canât afford to. Iâm 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.
âIf I were in your place I should have tried a hundred things by now, but you always have some silly objection. Why couldnât you, for instance, have taken on the agency of that what-dâyou-call-it car?â
âWhat I called it would have been nothing to what the poor devils who bought it would have called it.â
âYou 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.â
âBut, darling, how could I? Planting Breitstein on the club would have been nothing compared with sowing these horrors about London. I couldnât 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.â
âWhy not? It would be their fault if they bought a car that wasnât any good. Why should you have to worry once you had it sold?â
It was not Lord Dawlishâs 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 Claireâs question he chose the worst.
âErâ âwell,â he said, ânoblesse oblige, donât you know, what?â
For a moment Claire did not speak. Then she looked at her watch and got up.
âI must be going,â she said coldly.
âBut you havenât had your coffee yet.â
âI donât want any coffee.â
âWhatâs the matter, dear?â
âNothing is the matter. I have to go home and pack. Iâm going to Southampton this afternoon.â
She began to move toward the door. Lord Dawlish, anxious to follow, was detained by the fact that he had not yet paid the check. 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.
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