Uneasy Money / Wodehouse, P. G. (Pelham Grenville), 1881-1975

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Title: Uneasy Money

Author: P.G. Wodehouse

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UNEASY MONEY



By P. G. Wodehouse




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 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-blank 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.

A voice spoke from behind a half-opened door--

'Is that you, Claire?'

'Yes, mother; I've come back to pack. They want me to go to
Southampton to-night to take up Claudia Winslow's part.'

'What train are you catching?'

'The three-fifteen.'

'You will have to hurry.'

'I'm going to hurry,' said Claire, clenching her fists as two
simultaneous bursts of song, in different keys and varying tempos,
proceeded from the dining-room and kitchen. A girl has to be in a
sunnier mood than she was to bear up without wincing under the
infliction of a duet consisting of the Rock of Ages and Waiting
for the Robert E. Lee. Assuredly Claire proposed to hurry. She
meant to get her packing done in record time and escape from this
place. She went into her bedroom and began to throw things
untidily into her trunk. She had put the letter in her pocket
against a more favourable time for perusal. A glance had told her
that it was from her friend Polly, Countess of Wetherby: that
Polly Davis of whom she had spoken to Lord Dawlish. Polly Davis,
now married for better or for worse to that curious invertebrate
person, Algie Wetherby, was the only real friend Claire had made
on the stage. A sort of shivering gentility had kept her aloof
from the rest of her fellow-workers, but it took more than a
shivering gentility to stave off Polly.

Claire had passed through the various stages of intimacy with her,
until on the occasion of Polly's marriage she had acted as her
bridesmaid.

It was a long letter, too long to be read until she was at
leisure, and written in a straggling hand that made reading
difficult. She was mildly surprised that Polly should have written
her, for she had been back in America a year or more now, and this
was her first letter. Polly had a warm heart and did not forget
her friends, but she was not a good correspondent.

The need of getting her things ready at once drove the letter from
Claire's mind. She was in the train on her way to Southampton
before she remembered its existence.

It was dated from New York.

MY DEAR OLD CLAIRE,--Is this really my first letter to you? Isn't
that awful! Gee! A lot's happened since I saw you last. I must
tell you first about my hit. Some hit! Claire, old girl, I own New
York. I daren't tell you what my salary is. You'd faint.

I'm doing barefoot dancing. You know the sort of stuff. I started
it in vaudeville, and went so big that my agent shifted me to the
restaurants, and they have to call out the police reserves to
handle the crowd. You can't get a table at Reigelheimer's, which
is my pitch, unless you tip the head waiter a small fortune and
promise to mail him your clothes when you get home. I dance during
supper with nothing on my feet and not much anywhere else, and it
takes three vans to carry my salary to the bank.

Of course, it's the title that does it: 'Lady Pauline Wetherby!'
Algie says it oughtn't to be that, because I'm not the daughter of
a duke, but I don't worry about that. It looks good, and that's
all that matters. You can't get away from the title. I was born in
Carbondale, Illinois, but that doesn't matter--I'm an English
countess, doing barefoot dancing to work off the mortgage on the
ancestral castle, and they eat me. Take it from me, Claire, I'm a
riot.

Well, that's that. What I am really writing about is to tell you
that you have got to come over here. I've taken a house at
Brookport, on Long Island, for the summer. You can stay with me
till the fall, and then I can easily get you a good job in New
York. I have some pull these days, believe me. Not that you'll
need my help. The managers have only got to see you and they'll
all want you. I showed one of them that photograph you gave me,
and he went up in the air. They pay twice as big salaries over
here, you know, as in England, so come by the next boat.

Claire, darling, you must come. I'm wretched. Algie has got my
goat the worst way. If you don't know what that means it means
that he's behaving like a perfect pig. I hardly know where to
begin. Well, it was this way: directly I made my hit my press
agent, a real bright man named Sherriff, got busy, of course.
Interviews, you know, and Advice to Young Girls in the evening
papers, and How I preserve my beauty, and all that sort of thing.
Well, one thing he made me do was to buy a snake and a monkey.
Roscoe Sherriff is crazy about animals as aids to advertisement.
He says an animal story is the thing he does best. So I bought
them.

Algie kicked from the first. I ought to tell you that since we
left England he has taken up painting footling little pictures,
and has got the artistic temperament badly. All his life he's been
starting some new fool thing. When I first met him he prided
himself on having the finest collection of photographs of
race-horses in England. Then he got a craze for model engines.
After that he used to work the piano player till I nearly went
crazy. And now it's pictures.

I don't mind his painting. It gives him something to do and keeps
him out of mischief. He has a studio down in Washington Square,
and is perfectly happy messing about there all day.

Everything would be fine if he didn't think it necessary to tack
on the artistic temperament to his painting. He's developed the
idea that he has nerves and everything upsets them.

Things came to a head this morning at breakfast. Clarence, my
snake, has the cutest way of climbing up the leg of the table and
looking at you pleadingly in the hope that you will give him
soft-boiled egg, which he adores. He did it this morning, and no
sooner had his head appeared above the table than Algie, with a kind
of sharp wail, struck him a violent blow on the nose with a teaspoon.
Then he turned to me, very pale, and said: 'Pauline, this must
end! The time has come to speak up. A nervous, highly-strung man
like myself should not, and must not, be called upon to live in a
house where he is constantly meeting snakes and monkeys without
warning. Choose between me and--'

We had got as far as this when Eustace, the monkey, who I didn't
know was in the room at all, suddenly sprang on to his back. He is
very fond of Algie.

Would you believe it? Algie walked straight out of the house, still
holding the teaspoon, and has not returned. Later in the day he
called me up on the phone and said that, though he realized that a
man's place was the home, he declined to cross the threshold again
until I had got rid of Eustace and Clarence. I tried to reason with
him. I told him that he ought to think himself lucky it wasn't
anything worse than a monkey and a snake, for the last person Roscoe
Sherriff handled, an emotional actress named Devenish, had to keep a
young puma. But he wouldn't listen, and the end of it was that he
rang off and I have not seen or heard of him since.

I am broken-hearted. I won't give in, but I am having an awful time.
So, dearest Claire, do come over and help me. If you could possibly
sail by the _Atlantic_, leaving Southampton on the twenty-fourth of
this month, you would meet a friend of mine whom I think you would
like. His name is Dudley Pickering, and he made a fortune in
automobiles. I expect you have heard of the Pickering automobiles?

Darling Claire, do come, or I know I shall weaken and yield to
Algie's outrageous demands, for, though I would like to hit him
with a brick, I love him dearly.

Your affectionate
POLLY WETHERBY

Claire sank back against the cushioned seat and her eyes filled
with tears of disappointment. Of all the things which would have
chimed in with her discontented mood at that moment a sudden
flight to America was the most alluring. Only one consideration
held her back--she had not the money for her fare.

Polly might have thought of that, she reflected, bitterly. She
took the letter up again and saw that on the last page there was a
postscript--

PS.--I don't know how you are fixed for money, old girl, but if
things are the same with you as in the old days you can't be
rolling. So I have paid for a passage for you with the liner
people this side, and they have cabled their English office, so
you can sail whenever you want to. Come right over.

An hour later the manager of the Southampton branch of the White
Star Line was dazzled by an apparition, a beautiful girl who burst
in upon him with flushed face and shining eyes, demanding a berth on
the steamship _Atlantic_ and talking about a Lady Wetherby. Ten
minutes later, her passage secured, Claire was walking to the local
theatre to inform those in charge of the destinies of The Girl and
the Artist number one company that they must look elsewhere for a
substitute for Miss Claudia Winslow. Then she went back to her hotel
to write a letter home, notifying her mother of her plans.

She looked at her watch. It was six o'clock. Back in West
Kensington a rich smell of dinner would be floating through the
flat; the cook, watching the boiling cabbage, would be singing A
Few More Years Shall Roll; her mother would be sighing; and her
little brother Percy would be employed upon some juvenile
deviltry, the exact nature of which it was not possible to
conjecture, though one could be certain that it would be something
involving a deafening noise.

Claire smiled a happy smile.




4


The offices of Messrs Nichols, Nichols, Nichols, and Nichols were
in Lincoln's Inn Fields. The first Nichols had been dead since the
reign of King William the Fourth, the second since the jubilee
year of Queen Victoria. The remaining brace were Lord Dawlish's
friend Jerry and his father, a formidable old man who knew all the
shady secrets of all the noble families in England.

Bill walked up the stairs and was shown into the room where Jerry,
when his father's eye was upon him, gave his daily imitation of a
young man labouring with diligence and enthusiasm at the law. His
father being at the moment out at lunch, the junior partner was
practising putts with an umbrella and a ball of paper.

Jerry Nichols was not the typical lawyer. At Cambridge, where Bill
had first made his acquaintance, he had been notable for an
exuberance of which Lincoln's Inn Fields had not yet cured him.
There was an airy disregard for legal formalities about him which
exasperated his father, an attorney of the old school. He came to
the point, directly Bill entered the room, with a speed and levity
that would have appalled Nichols Senior, and must have caused the
other two Nicholses to revolve in their graves.

'Halloa, Bill, old man,' he said, prodding him amiably in the
waistcoat with the ferrule of the umbrella. 'How's the boy? Fine!
So'm I. So you got my message? Wonderful invention, the
telephone.'

'I've just come from the club.'

'Take a chair.'

'What's the matter?'

Jerry Nichols thrust Bill into a chair and seated himself on the
table.

'Now look here, Bill,' he said, 'this isn't the way we usually do
this sort of thing, and if the governor were here he would spend
an hour and a half rambling on about testators and beneficiary
legatees, and parties of the first part, and all that sort of rot.
But as he isn't here I want to know, as one pal to another, what
you've been doing to an old buster of the name of Nutcombe.'

'Nutcombe?'

'Nutcombe.'

'Not Ira Nutcombe?'

'Ira J. Nutcombe, formerly of Chicago, later of London, now a
disembodied spirit.'

'Is he dead?'

'Yes. And he's left you something like a million pounds.'

Lord Dawlish looked at his watch.

'Joking apart, Jerry, old man,' he said, 'what did you ask me to
come here for? The committee expects me to spend some of my time
at the club, and if I hang about here all the afternoon I shall
lose my job. Besides, I've got to get back to ask them for--'

Jerry Nichols clutched his forehead with both hands, raised both
hands to heaven, and then, as if despairing of calming himself by
these means, picked up a paper-weight from the desk and hurled it
at a portrait of the founder of the firm, which hung over the
mantelpiece. He got down from the table and crossed the room to
inspect the ruins.

Then, having taken a pair of scissors and cut the cord, he allowed
the portrait to fall to the floor.

He rang the bell. The prematurely-aged office-boy, who was
undoubtedly destined to become a member of the firm some day,
answered the ring.

'Perkins.'

'Yes, sir?'

'Inspect yonder _soufflee_.'

'Yes, sir.'

'You have observed it?'

'Yes, sir.'

'You are wondering how it got there?'

'Yes, sir.'

'I will tell you. You and I were in here, discussing certain legal
minutiae in the interests of the firm, when it suddenly fell. We
both saw it and were very much surprised and startled. I soothed
your nervous system by giving you this half-crown. The whole
incident was very painful. Can you remember all this to tell my
father when he comes in? I shall be out lunching then.'

'Yes, sir.'

'An admirable lad that,' said Jerry Nichols as the door closed.
'He has been here two years, and I have never heard him say
anything except "Yes, sir." He will go far. Well, now that I am
calmer let us return to your little matter. Honestly, Bill, you
make me sick. When I contemplate you the iron enters my soul. You
stand there talking about your tuppenny-ha'penny job as if it
mattered a cent whether you kept it or not. Can't you understand
plain English? Can't you realize that you can buy Brown's and turn
it into a moving-picture house if you like? You're a millionaire!'

Bill's face expressed no emotion whatsoever. Outwardly he appeared
unmoved. Inwardly he was a riot of bewilderment, incapable of
speech. He stared at Jerry dumbly.

'We've got the will in the old oak chest,' went on Jerry Nichols.
'I won't show it to you, partly because the governor has got the
key and he would have a fit if he knew that I was giving you early
information like this, and partly because you wouldn't understand
it. It is full of "whereases" and "peradventures" and "heretofores"
and similar swank, and there aren't any stops in it. It takes the legal
mind, like mine, to tackle wills. What it says, when you've peeled
off a few of the long words which they put in to make it more
interesting, is that old Nutcombe leaves you the money because
you are the only man who ever did him a disinterested kindness--and
what I want to get out of you is, what was the disinterested kindness?
Because I'm going straight out to do it to every elderly, rich-looking
man I can find till I pick a winner.'

Lord Dawlish found speech.

'Jerry, is this really true?'

'Gospel.'

'You aren't pulling my leg?'

'Pulling your leg? Of course I'm not pulling your leg. What do you
take me for? I'm a dry, hard-headed lawyer. The firm of Nichols,
Nichols, Nichols, and Nichols doesn't go about pulling people's
legs!'

'Good Lord!'

'It appears from the will that you worked this disinterested gag,
whatever it was, at Marvis Bay no longer ago than last year.
Wherein you showed a lot of sense, for Ira J., having altered his
will in your favour, apparently had no time before he died to
alter it again in somebody else's, which he would most certainly
have done if he had lived long enough, for his chief recreation
seems to have been making his will. To my certain knowledge he has
made three in the last two years. I've seen them. He was one of
those confirmed will-makers. He got the habit at an early age, and
was never able to shake it off. Do you remember anything about the
man?'

'It isn't possible!'

'Anything's possible with a man cracked enough to make freak wills
and not cracked enough to have them disputed on the ground of
insanity. What did you do to him at Marvis Bay? Save him from
drowning?'

'I cured him of slicing.'

'You did what?'

'He used to slice his approach shots. I cured him.'

'The thing begins to hang together. A certain plausibility creeps
into it. The late Nutcombe was crazy about golf. The governor used
to play with him now and then at Walton Heath. It was the only
thing Nutcombe seemed to live for. That being so, if you got rid
of his slice for him it seems to me, that you earned your money.
The only point that occurs to me is, how does it affect your
amateur status? It looks to me as if you were now a pro.'

'But, Jerry, it's absurd. All I did was to give him a tip or two.
We were the only men down there, as it was out of the season, and
that drew us together. And when I spotted this slice of his I just
gave him a bit of advice. I give you my word that was all. He
can't have left me a fortune on the strength of that!'

'You don't tell the story right, Bill. I can guess what really
happened--to wit, that you gave up all your time to helping the
old fellow improve his game, regardless of the fact that it
completely ruined your holiday.'

'Oh, no!'

'It's no use sitting there saying "Oh, no!" I can see you at it.
The fact is, you're such an infernally good chap that something of
this sort was bound to happen to you sooner or later. I think
making you his heir was the only sensible thing old Nutcombe ever
did. In his place I'd have done the same.'

'But he didn't even seem decently grateful at the time.'

'Probably not. He was a queer old bird. He had a most almighty row
with the governor in this office only a month or two ago about
absolutely nothing. They disagreed about something trivial, and
old Nutcombe stalked out and never came in again. That's the sort
of old bird he was.'

'Was he sane, do you think?'

'Absolutely, for legal purposes. We have three opinions from leading
doctors--collected by him in case of accidents, I suppose--each of
which declares him perfectly sound from the collar upward. But a
man can be pretty far gone, you know, without being legally insane,
and old Nutcombe--well, suppose we call him whimsical. He seems to
have zigzagged between the normal and the eccentric.

'His only surviving relatives appear to be a nephew and a niece.
The nephew dropped out of the running two years ago when his aunt,
old Nutcombe's wife, who had divorced old Nutcombe, left him her
money. This seems to have soured the old boy on the nephew, for in
the first of his wills that I've seen--you remember I told you I
had seen three--he leaves the niece the pile and the nephew only
gets twenty pounds. Well, so far there's nothing very eccentric
about old Nutcombe's proceedings. But wait!

'Six months after he had made that will he came in here and made
another. This left twenty pounds to the nephew as before, but
nothing at all to the niece. Why, I don't know. There was nothing
in the will about her having done anything to offend him during
those six months, none of those nasty slams you see in wills about
"I bequeath to my only son John one shilling and sixpence. Now
perhaps he's sorry he married the cook." As far as I can make out
he changed his will just as he did when he left the money to you,
purely through some passing whim. Anyway, he did change it. He
left the pile to support the movement those people are running for
getting the Jews back to Palestine.

'He didn't seem, on second thoughts, to feel that this was quite
such a brainy scheme as he had at first, and it wasn't long before
he came trotting back to tear up this second will and switch back
to the first one--the one leaving the money to the niece. That
restoration to sanity lasted till about a month ago, when he broke
loose once more and paid his final visit here to will you the
contents of his stocking. This morning I see he's dead after a
short illness, so you collect. Congratulations!'

Lord Dawlish had listened to this speech in perfect silence. He now
rose and began to pace the room. He looked warm and uncomfortable.
His demeanour, in fact, was by no means the accepted demeanour of
the lucky heir.

'This is awful!' he said. 'Good Lord, Jerry, it's frightful!'

'Awful!--being left a million pounds?'

'Yes, like this. I feel like a bally thief.'

'Why on earth?'

'If it hadn't been for me this girl--what's her name?'

'Her name is Boyd--Elizabeth Boyd.'

'She would have had the whole million if it hadn't been for me.
Have you told her yet?'

'She's in America. I was writing her a letter just before you came
in--informal, you know, to put her out of her misery. If I had
waited for the governor to let her know in the usual course of red
tape we should never have got anywhere. Also one to the nephew,
telling him about his twenty pounds. I believe in humane treatment
on these occasions. The governor would write them a legal letter
with so many "hereinbefores" in it that they would get the idea
that they had been left the whole pile. I just send a cheery line
saying "It's no good, old top. Abandon hope," and they know just
where they are. Simple and considerate.'

A glance at Bill's face moved him to further speech.

'I don't see why you should worry, Bill. How, by any stretch of
the imagination, can you make out that you are to blame for this
Boyd girl's misfortune? It looks to me as if these eccentric wills
of old Nutcombe's came in cycles, as it were. Just as he was due
for another outbreak he happened to meet you. It's a moral
certainty that if he hadn't met you he would have left all his
money to a Home for Superannuated Caddies or a Fund for Supplying
the Deserving Poor with Niblicks. Why should you blame yourself?'

'I don't blame myself. It isn't exactly that. But--but, well, what
would you feel like in my place?'

'A two-year-old.'

'Wouldn't you do anything?'

'I certainly would. By my halidom, I would! I would spend that
money with a vim and speed that would make your respected
ancestor, the Beau, look like a village miser.'

'You wouldn't--er--pop over to America and see whether something
couldn't be arranged?'

'What!'

'I mean--suppose you were popping in any case. Suppose you had
happened to buy a ticket for New York on to-morrow's boat,
wouldn't you try to get in touch with this girl when you got to
America, and see if you couldn't--er--fix up something?'

Jerry Nichols looked at him in honest consternation. He had always
known that old Bill was a dear old ass, but he had never dreamed
that he was such an infernal old ass as this.

'You aren't thinking of doing that?' he gasped.

'Well, you see, it's a funny coincidence, but I was going to
America, anyhow, to-morrow. I don't see why I shouldn't try to fix
up something with this girl.'

'What do you mean--fix up something? You don't suggest that you
should give the money up, do you?'

'I don't know. Not exactly that, perhaps. How would it be if I
gave her half, what? Anyway, I should like to find out about her,
see if she's hard up, and so on. I should like to nose round, you
know, and--er--and so forth, don't you know. Where did you say the
girl lived?'

'I didn't say, and I'm not sure that I shall. Honestly, Bill, you
mustn't be so quixotic.'

'There's no harm in my nosing round, is there? Be a good chap and
give me the address.'

'Well'--with misgivings--'Brookport, Long Island.'

'Thanks.'

'Bill, are you really going to make a fool of yourself?'

'Not a bit of it, old chap. I'm just going to--er--'

'To nose round?'

'To nose round,' said Bill.

Jerry Nichols accompanied his friend to the door, and once more
peace reigned in the offices of Nichols, Nichols, Nichols, and
Nichols.

The time of a man who has at a moment's notice decided to leave
his native land for a sojourn on foreign soil is necessarily taken
up with a variety of occupations; and it was not till the
following afternoon, on the boat at Liverpool, that Bill had
leisure to write to Claire, giving her the news of what had
befallen him. He had booked his ticket by a Liverpool boat in
preference to one that sailed from Southampton because he had not
been sure how Claire would take the news of his sudden decision to
leave for America. There was the chance that she might ridicule or
condemn the scheme, and he preferred to get away without seeing
her. Now that he had received this astounding piece of news from
Jerry Nichols he was relieved that he had acted in this way.
Whatever Claire might have thought of the original scheme, there
was no doubt at all what she would think of his plan of seeking
out Elizabeth Boyd with a view to dividing the legacy with her.

He was guarded in his letter. He mentioned no definite figures. He
wrote that Ira Nutcombe of whom they had spoken so often had most
surprisingly left him in his will a large sum of money, and eased
his conscience by telling himself that half of a million pounds
undeniably was a large sum of money.

The addressing of the letter called for thought. She would have
left Southampton with the rest of the company before it could
arrive. Where was it that she said they were going next week?
Portsmouth, that was it. He addressed the letter Care of The Girl
and the Artist Company, to the King's Theatre, Portsmouth.




5


The village of Brookport, Long Island, is a summer place. It
lives, like the mosquitoes that infest it, entirely on its summer
visitors. At the time of the death of Mr Ira Nutcombe, the only
all-the-year-round inhabitants were the butcher, the grocer, the
chemist, the other customary fauna of villages, and Miss Elizabeth
Boyd, who rented the ramshackle farm known locally as Flack's and
eked out a precarious livelihood by keeping bees.

If you take down your _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, Volume III,
AUS to BIS, you will find that bees are a 'large and natural
family of the zoological order Hymenoptera, characterized by the
plumose form of many of their hairs, by the large size of the
basal segment of the foot ... and by the development of a "tongue"
for sucking liquid food,' the last of which peculiarities, it is
interesting to note, they shared with Claude Nutcombe Boyd,
Elizabeth's brother, who for quite a long time--till his money ran
out--had made liquid food almost his sole means of sustenance.
These things, however, are by the way. We are not such snobs as to
think better or worse of a bee because it can claim kinship with
the _Hymenoptera_ family, nor so ill-bred as to chaff it for
having large feet. The really interesting passage in the article
occurs later, where it says: 'The bee industry prospers greatly in
America.'

This is one of those broad statements that invite challenge.
Elizabeth Boyd would have challenged it. She had not prospered
greatly. With considerable trouble she contrived to pay her way,
and that was all.

Again referring to the 'Encyclopaedia,' we find the words: 'Before
undertaking the management of a modern apiary, the beekeeper
should possess a certain amount of aptitude for the pursuit.' This
was possibly the trouble with Elizabeth's venture, considered from
a commercial point of view. She loved bees, but she was not an
expert on them. She had started her apiary with a small capital, a
book of practical hints, and a second-hand queen, principally
because she was in need of some occupation that would enable her
to live in the country. It was the unfortunate condition of Claude
Nutcombe which made life in the country a necessity. At that time
he was spending the remains of the money left him by his aunt, and
Elizabeth had hardly settled down at Brookport and got her venture
under way when she found herself obliged to provide for Nutty a
combination of home and sanatorium. It had been the poor lad's
mistaken view that he could drink up all the alcoholic liquor in
America.

It is a curious law of Nature that the most undeserving brothers
always have the best sisters. Thrifty, plodding young men, who get
up early, and do it now, and catch the employer's eye, and save
half their salaries, have sisters who never speak civilly to them
except when they want to borrow money. To the Claude Nutcombes of
the world are vouchsafed the Elizabeths.

The great aim of Elizabeth's life was to make a new man of Nutty.
It was her hope that the quiet life and soothing air of Brookport,
with--unless you counted the money-in-the-slot musical box at the
store--its absence of the fiercer excitements, might in time pull
him together and unscramble his disordered nervous system. She
liked to listen of a morning to the sound of Nutty busy in the
next room with a broom and a dustpan, for in the simple lexicon of
Flack's there was no such word as 'help'. The privy purse would
not run to a maid. Elizabeth did the cooking and Claude Nutcombe
the housework.

Several days after Claire Fenwick and Lord Dawlish, by different
routes, had sailed from England, Elizabeth Boyd sat up in bed and
shook her mane of hair from her eyes, yawning. Outside her window
the birds were singing, and a shaft of sunlight intruded itself
beneath the blind. But what definitely convinced her that it was
time to get up was the plaintive note of James, the cat,
patrolling the roof of the porch. An animal of regular habits,
James always called for breakfast at eight-thirty sharp.

Elizabeth got out of bed, wrapped her small body in a pink kimono,
thrust her small feet into a pair of blue slippers, yawned again,
and went downstairs. Having taken last night's milk from the ice-box,
she went to the back door, and, having filled James's saucer,
stood on the grass beside it, sniffing the morning air.

Elizabeth Boyd was twenty-one, but standing there with her hair
tumbling about her shoulders she might have been taken by a
not-too-close observer for a child. It was only when you saw her eyes
and the resolute tilt of the chin that you realized that she was a
young woman very well able to take care of herself in a difficult
world. Her hair was very fair, her eyes brown and very bright, and
the contrast was extraordinarily piquant. They were valiant eyes,
full of spirit; eyes, also, that saw the humour of things. And her
mouth was the mouth of one who laughs easily. Her chin, small like
the rest of her, was strong; and in the way she held herself there
was a boyish jauntiness. She looked--and was--a capable little
person.

She stood besides James like a sentinel, watching over him as he
breakfasted. There was a puppy belonging to one of the neighbours
who sometimes lumbered over and stole James's milk, disposing of
it in greedy gulps while its rightful proprietor looked on with
piteous helplessness. Elizabeth was fond of the puppy, but her
sense of justice was keen and she was there to check this
brigandage.

It was a perfect day, cloudless and still. There was peace in the
air. James, having finished his milk, began to wash himself. A
squirrel climbed cautiously down from a linden tree. From the
orchard came the murmur of many bees.

Aesthetically Elizabeth was fond of still, cloudless days, but
experience had taught her to suspect them. As was the custom in
that locality, the water supply depended on a rickety windwheel.
It was with a dark foreboding that she returned to the kitchen and
turned on one of the taps. For perhaps three seconds a stream of
the dimension of a darning-needle emerged, then with a sad gurgle
the tap relapsed into a stolid inaction. There is no stolidity so
utter as that of a waterless tap.

'Confound it!' said Elizabeth.

She passed through the dining-room to the foot of the stairs.

'Nutty!'

There was no reply.

'Nutty, my precious lamb!'

Upstairs in the room next to her own a long, spare form began to
uncurl itself in bed; a face with a receding chin and a small
forehead raised itself reluctantly from the pillow, and Claude
Nutcombe Boyd signalized the fact that he was awake by scowling at
the morning sun and uttering an aggrieved groan.

Alas, poor Nutty! This was he whom but yesterday Broadway had
known as the Speed Kid, on whom head-waiters had smiled and lesser
waiters fawned; whose snake-like form had nestled in so many a
front-row orchestra stall.

Where were his lobster Newburgs now, his cold quarts that were
wont to set the table in a roar?

Nutty Boyd conformed as nearly as a human being may to Euclid's
definition of a straight line. He was length without breadth. From
boyhood's early day he had sprouted like a weed, till now in the
middle twenties he gave startled strangers the conviction that it
only required a sharp gust of wind to snap him in half. Lying in
bed, he looked more like a length of hose-pipe than anything else.
While he was unwinding himself the door opened and Elizabeth came
into the room.

'Good morning, Nutty!'

'What's the time?' asked her brother, hollowly.

'Getting on towards nine. It's a lovely day. The birds are
singing, the bees are buzzing, summer's in the air. It's one of
those beautiful, shiny, heavenly, gorgeous days.'

A look of suspicion came into Nutty's eyes. Elizabeth was not
often as lyrical as this.

'There's a catch somewhere,' he said.

'Well, as a matter of fact,' said Elizabeth, carelessly, 'the
water's off again.'

'Confound it!'

'I said that. I'm afraid we aren't a very original family.'

'What a ghastly place this is! Why can't you see old Flack and
make him mend that infernal wheel?'

'I'm going to pounce on him and have another try directly I see
him. Meanwhile, darling Nutty, will you get some clothes on and go
round to the Smiths and ask them to lend us a pailful?'

'Oh, gosh, it's over a mile!'

'No, no, not more than three-quarters.'

'Lugging a pail that weighs a ton! The last time I went there
their dog bit me.'

'I expect that was because you slunk in all doubled up, and he got
suspicious. You should hold your head up and throw your chest out
and stride up as if you were a military friend of the family.'

Self-pity lent Nutty eloquence.

'For Heaven's sake! You drag me out of bed at some awful hour of
the morning when a rational person would just be turning in; you
send me across country to fetch pailfuls of water when I'm feeling
like a corpse; and on top of that you expect me to behave like a
drum-major!'

'Dearest, you can wriggle on your tummy, if you like, so long as
you get the fluid. We must have water. I can't fetch it. I'm a
delicately-nurtured female.'

'We ought to have a man to do these ghastly jobs.'

'But we can't afford one. Just at present all I ask is to be able
to pay expenses. And, as a matter of fact, you ought to be very
thankful that you have got--'

'A roof over my head? I know. You needn't keep rubbing it in.'

Elizabeth flushed.

'I wasn't going to say that at all. What a pig you are sometimes,
Nutty. As if I wasn't only too glad to have you here. What I was
going to say was that you ought to be very thankful that you have
got to draw water and hew wood--'

A look of absolute alarm came into Nutty's pallid face.

'You don't mean to say that you want some wood chopped?'

'I was speaking figuratively. I meant hustle about and work in the
open air. The sort of life you are leading now is what millionaires
pay hundreds of dollars for at these physical-culture places. It
has been the making of you.'

'I don't feel made.'

'Your nerves are ever so much better.'

'They aren't.'

Elizabeth looked at him in alarm.

'Oh, Nutty, you haven't been--seeing anything again, have you?'

'Not seeing, dreaming. I've been dreaming about monkeys. Why
should I dream about monkeys if my nerves were all right?'

'I often dream about all sorts of queer things.'

'Have you ever dreamed that you were being chased up Broadway by a
chimpanzee in evening dress?'

'Never mind, dear, you'll be quite all right again when you have
been living this life down here a little longer.'

Nutty glared balefully at the ceiling.

'What's that darned thing up there on the ceiling? It looks like a
hornet. How on earth do these things get into the house?'

'We ought to have nettings. I am going to pounce on Mr Flack about
that too.'

'Thank goodness this isn't going to last much longer. It's nearly
two weeks since Uncle Ira died. We ought to be hearing from the
lawyers any day now. There might be a letter this morning.'

'Do you think he has left us his money?'

'Do I? Why, what else could he do with it? We are his only
surviving relatives, aren't we? I've had to go through life with a
ghastly name like Nutcombe as a compliment to him, haven't I? I
wrote to him regularly at Christmas and on his birthday, didn't I?
Well, then! I have a feeling there will be a letter from the
lawyers to-day. I wish you would get dressed and go down to the
post-office while I'm fetching that infernal water. I can't think
why the fools haven't cabled. You would have supposed they would
have thought of that.'

Elizabeth returned to her room to dress. She was conscious of a
feeling that nothing was quite perfect in this world. It would be
nice to have a great deal of money, for she had a scheme in her
mind which called for a large capital; but she was sorry that it
could come to her only through the death of her uncle, of whom,
despite his somewhat forbidding personality, she had always been
fond. She was also sorry that a large sum of money was coming to
Nutty at that particular point in his career, just when there
seemed the hope that the simple life might pull him together. She
knew Nutty too well not to be able to forecast his probable
behaviour under the influence of a sudden restoration of wealth.

While these thoughts were passing through her mind she happened to
glance out of the window. Nutty was shambling through the garden
with his pail, a bowed, shuffling pillar of gloom. As Elizabeth
watched, he dropped the pail and lashed the air violently for a
while. From her knowledge of bees ('It is needful to remember that
bees resent outside interference and will resolutely defend
themselves,' _Encyc. Brit._, Vol. III, AUS to BIS) Elizabeth
deduced that one of her little pets was annoying him. This episode
concluded, Nutty resumed his pail and the journey, and at this
moment there appeared over the hedge the face of Mr John Prescott,
a neighbour. Mr Prescott, who had dismounted from a bicycle,
called to Nutty and waved something in the air. To a stranger the
performance would have been obscure, but Elizabeth understood it.
Mr Prescott was intimating that he had been down to the post-office
for his own letters and, as was his neighbourly custom on these
occasions, had brought back also letters for Flack's.

Nutty foregathered with Mr Prescott and took the letters from him.
Mr Prescott disappeared. Nutty selected one of the letters and
opened it. Then, having stood perfectly still for some moments, he
suddenly turned and began to run towards the house.

The mere fact that her brother, whose usual mode of progression
was a languid saunter, should be actually running, was enough to
tell Elizabeth that the letter which Nutty had read was from the
London lawyers. No other communication could have galvanized him
into such energy. Whether the contents of the letter were good or
bad it was impossible at that distance to say. But when she
reached the open air, just as Nutty charged up, she saw by his
face that it was anguish not joy that had spurred him on. He was
gasping and he bubbled unintelligible words. His little eyes
gleamed wildly.

'Nutty, darling, what is it?' cried Elizabeth, every maternal
instinct in her aroused.

He was thrusting a sheet of paper at her, a sheet of paper that
bore the superscription of Nichols, Nichols, Nichols, and Nichols,
with a London address.

'Uncle Ira--' Nutty choked. 'Twenty pounds! He's left me twenty
pounds, and all the rest to a--to a man named Dawlish!'

In silence Elizabeth took the letter. It was even as he had said.
A few moments before Elizabeth had been regretting the imminent
descent of wealth upon her brother. Now she was inconsistent
enough to boil with rage at the shattering blow which had befallen
him. That she, too, had lost her inheritance hardly occurred to
her. Her thoughts were all for Nutty. It did not need the sight of
him, gasping and gurgling before her, to tell her how overwhelming
was his disappointment.

It was useless to be angry with the deceased Mr Nutcombe. He was
too shadowy a mark. Besides, he was dead. The whole current of her
wrath turned upon the supplanter, this Lord Dawlish. She pictured
him as a crafty adventurer, a wretched fortune-hunter. For some
reason or other she imagined him a sinister person with a black
moustache, a face thin and hawk-like, and unpleasant eyes. That
was the sort of man who would be likely to fasten his talons into
poor Uncle Ira.

She had never hated any one in her life before, but as she stood
there at that moment she felt that she loathed and detested
William Lord Dawlish--unhappy, well-meaning Bill, who only a few
hours back had set foot on American soil in his desire to nose
round and see if something couldn't be arranged.

Nutty fetched the water. Life is like that. There is nothing
clean-cut about it, no sense of form. Instead of being permitted
to concentrate his attention on his tragedy Nutty had to trudge
three-quarters of a mile, conciliate a bull-terrier, and trudge
back again carrying a heavy pail. It was as if one of the heroes
of Greek drama, in the middle of his big scene, had been asked to
run round the corner to a provision store.

The exercise did not act as a restorative. The blow had been too
sudden, too overwhelming. Nutty's reason--such as it was--tottered
on its throne. Who was Lord Dawlish? What had he done to
ingratiate himself with Uncle Ira? By what insidious means, with
what devilish cunning, had he wormed his way into the old man's
favour? These were the questions that vexed Nutty's mind when he
was able to think at all coherently.

Back at the farm Elizabeth cooked breakfast and awaited her
brother's return with a sinking heart. She was a soft-hearted
girl, easily distressed by the sight of suffering; and she was
aware that Nutty was scarcely of the type that masks its woes
behind a brave and cheerful smile. Her heart bled for Nutty.

There was a weary step outside. Nutty entered, slopping water. One
glance at his face was enough to tell Elizabeth that she had
formed a too conservative estimate of his probable gloom. Without
a word he coiled his long form in a chair. There was silence in
the stricken house.

'What's the time?'

Elizabeth glanced at her watch.

'Half-past nine.'

'About now,' said Nutty, sepulchrally, 'the blighter is ringing
for his man to prepare his bally bath and lay out his gold-leaf
underwear. After that he will drive down to the bank and draw some
of our money.'

The day passed wearily for Elizabeth. Nutty having the air of one
who is still engaged in picking up the pieces, she had not the
heart to ask him to play his customary part in the household
duties, so she washed the dishes and made the beds herself. After
that she attended to the bees. After that she cooked lunch.

Nutty was not chatty at lunch. Having observed 'About now the
blighter is cursing the waiter for bringing the wrong brand of
champagne,' he relapsed into a silence which he did not again
break.

Elizabeth was busy again in the afternoon. At four o'clock,
feeling tired out, she went to her room to lie down until the next
of her cycle of domestic duties should come round.

It was late when she came downstairs, for she had fallen asleep.
The sun had gone down. Bees were winging their way heavily back to
the hives with their honey. She went out into the grounds to try
to find Nutty. There had been no signs of him in the house. There
were no signs of him about the grounds. It was not like him to
have taken a walk, but it seemed the only possibility. She went
back to the house to wait. Eight o'clock came, and nine, and it
was then the truth dawned upon her--Nutty had escaped. He had
slipped away and gone up to New York.




6


Lord Dawlish sat in the New York flat which had been lent him by
his friend Gates. The hour was half-past ten in the evening; the
day, the second day after the exodus of Nutty Boyd from the farm.
Before him on the table lay a letter. He was smoking pensively.

Lord Dawlish had found New York enjoyable, but a trifle fatiguing.
There was much to be seen in the city, and he had made the mistake
of trying to see it all at once. It had been his intention, when
he came home after dinner that night, to try to restore the
balance of things by going to bed early. He had sat up longer than
he had intended, because he had been thinking about this letter.

Immediately upon his arrival in America, Bill had sought out a
lawyer and instructed him to write to Elizabeth Boyd, offering her
one-half of the late Ira Nutcombe's money. He had had time during
the voyage to think the whole matter over, and this seemed to him
the only possible course. He could not keep it all. He would feel
like the despoiler of the widow and the orphan. Nor would it be
fair to Claire to give it all up. If he halved the legacy
everybody would be satisfied.

That at least had been his view until Elizabeth's reply had
arrived. It was this reply that lay on the table--a brief, formal
note, setting forth Miss Boyd's absolute refusal to accept any
portion of the money. This was a development which Bill had not
foreseen, and he was feeling baffled. What was the next step? He
had smoked many pipes in the endeavour to find an answer to this
problem, and was lighting another when the door-bell rang.

He opened the door and found himself confronting an extraordinarily
tall and thin young man in evening-dress.

Lord Dawlish was a little startled. He had taken it for granted,
when the bell rang, that his visitor was Tom, the liftman from
downstairs, a friendly soul who hailed from London and had been
dropping in at intervals during the past two days to acquire the
latest news from his native land. He stared at this changeling
inquiringly. The solution of the mystery came with the stranger's
first words--

'Is Gates in?'

He spoke eagerly, as if Gates were extremely necessary to his
well-being. It distressed Lord Dawlish to disappoint him, but
there was nothing else to be done.

'Gates is in London,' he said.

'What! When did he go there?'

'About four months ago.'

'May I come in a minute?'

'Yes, rather, do.'

He led the way into the sitting-room. The stranger gave abruptly
in the middle, as if he were being folded up by some invisible
agency, and in this attitude sank into a chair, where he lay back
looking at Bill over his knees, like a sorrowful sheep peering
over a sharp-pointed fence.

'You're from England, aren't you?'

'Yes.'

'Been in New York long?'

'Only a couple of days.'

The stranger folded himself up another foot or so until his knees
were higher than his head, and lit a cigarette.

'The curse of New York,' he said, mournfully, 'is the way
everything changes in it. You can't take your eyes off it for a
minute. The population's always shifting. It's like a railway
station. You go away for a bit and come back and try to find your
old pals, and they're all gone: Ike's in Arizona, Mike's in a
sanatorium, Spike's in jail, and nobody seems to know where the
rest of them have got to. I came up from the country two days ago,
expecting to find the old gang along Broadway the same as ever,
and I'm dashed if I've been able to put my hands on one of them!
Not a single, solitary one of them! And it's only six months since
I was here last.'

Lord Dawlish made sympathetic noises.

'Of course,' proceeded the other, 'the time of year may have
something to do with it. Living down in the country you lose count
of time, and I forgot that it was July, when people go out of the
city. I guess that must be what happened. I used to know all sorts
of fellows, actors and fellows like that, and they're all away
somewhere. I tell you,' he said, with pathos, 'I never knew I
could be so infernally lonesome as I have been these last two
days. If I had known what a rotten time I was going to have I
would never have left Brookport.'

'Brookport!'

'It's a place down on Long Island.'

Bill was not by nature a plotter, but the mere fact of travelling
under an assumed name had developed a streak of wariness in him.
He checked himself just as he was about to ask his companion if he
happened to know a Miss Elizabeth Boyd, who also lived at
Brookport. It occurred to him that the question would invite a
counter-question as to his own knowledge of Miss Boyd, and he knew
that he would not be able to invent a satisfactory answer to that
offhand.

'This evening,' said the thin young man, resuming his dirge, 'I
was sweating my brain to try to think of somebody I could hunt up
in this ghastly, deserted city. It isn't so easy, you know, to
think of fellows' names and addresses. I can get the names all
right, but unless the fellow's in the telephone-book, I'm done.
Well, I was trying to think of some of my pals who might still be
around the place, and I remembered Gates. Remembered his address,
too, by a miracle. You're a pal of his, of course?'

'Yes, I knew him in London.'

'Oh, I see. And when you came over here he lent you his flat? By
the way, I didn't get your name?'

'My name's Chalmers.'

'Well, as I say, I remembered Gates and came down here to look him
up. We used to have a lot of good times together a year ago. And
now he's gone too!'

'Did you want to see him about anything important?'

'Well, it's important to me. I wanted him to come out to supper.
You see, it's this way: I'm giving supper to-night to a girl who's
in that show at the Forty-ninth Street Theatre, a Miss Leonard,
and she insists on bringing a pal. She says the pal is a good
sport, which sounds all right--' Bill admitted that it sounded all
right. 'But it makes the party three. And of all the infernal
things a party of three is the ghastliest.'

Having delivered himself of this undeniable truth the stranger
slid a little farther into his chair and paused. 'Look here, what
are you doing to-night?' he said.

'I was thinking of going to bed.'

'Going to bed!' The stranger's voice was shocked, as if he had
heard blasphemy. 'Going to bed at half-past ten in New York! My
dear chap, what you want is a bit of supper. Why don't you come
along?'

Amiability was, perhaps, the leading quality of Lord Dawlish's
character. He did not want to have to dress and go out to supper,
but there was something almost pleading in the eyes that looked at
him between the sharply-pointed knees.

'It's awfully good of you--' He hesitated.

'Not a bit; I wish you would. You would be a life-saver.'

Bill felt that he was in for it. He got up.

'You will?' said the other. 'Good boy! You go and get into some
clothes and come along. I'm sorry, what did you say your name
was?'

'Chalmers.'

'Mine's Boyd--Nutcombe Boyd.'

'Boyd!' cried Bill.

Nutty took his astonishment, which was too great to be concealed,
as a compliment. He chuckled.

'I thought you would know the name if you were a pal of Gates's. I
expect he's always talking about me. You see, I was pretty well
known in this old place before I had to leave it.'

Bill walked down the long passage to his bedroom with no trace of
the sleepiness which had been weighing on him five minutes before.
He was galvanized by a superstitious thrill. It was fate,
Elizabeth Boyd's brother turning up like this and making friendly
overtures right on top of that letter from her. This astonishing
thing could not have been better arranged if he had planned it
himself. From what little he had seen of Nutty he gathered that
the latter was not hard to make friends with. It would be a simple
task to cultivate his acquaintance. And having done so, he could
renew negotiations with Elizabeth. The desire to rid himself of
half the legacy had become a fixed idea with Bill. He had the
impression that he could not really feel clean again until he had
made matters square with his conscience in this respect. He felt
that he was probably a fool to take that view of the thing, but
that was the way he was built and there was no getting away from
it.

This irruption of Nutty Boyd into his life was an omen. It meant
that all was not yet over. He was conscious of a mild surprise
that he had ever intended to go to bed. He felt now as if he never
wanted to go to bed again. He felt exhilarated.

In these days one cannot say that a supper-party is actually given
in any one place. Supping in New York has become a peripatetic
pastime. The supper-party arranged by Nutty Boyd was scheduled to
start at Reigelheimer's on Forty-second Street, and it was there
that the revellers assembled.

Nutty and Bill had been there a few minutes when Miss Daisy
Leonard arrived with her friend. And from that moment Bill was
never himself again.

The Good Sport was, so to speak, an outsize in Good Sports. She
loomed up behind the small and demure Miss Leonard like a liner
towed by a tug. She was big, blonde, skittish, and exuberant; she
wore a dress like the sunset of a fine summer evening, and she
effervesced with spacious good will to all men. She was one of
those girls who splash into public places like stones into quiet
pools. Her form was large, her eyes were large, her teeth were
large, and her voice was large. She overwhelmed Bill. She hit his
astounded consciousness like a shell. She gave him a buzzing in
the ears. She was not so much a Good Sport as some kind of an
explosion.

He was still reeling from the spiritual impact with this female
tidal wave when he became aware, as one who, coming out of a
swoon, hears voices faintly, that he was being addressed by Miss
Leonard. To turn from Miss Leonard's friend to Miss Leonard
herself was like hearing the falling of gentle rain after a
thunderstorm. For a moment he revelled in the sense of being
soothed; then, as he realized what she was saying, he started
violently. Miss Leonard was looking at him curiously.

'I beg your pardon?' said Bill.

'I'm sure I've met you before, Mr Chalmers.'

'Er--really?'

'But I can't think where.'

'I'm sure,' said the Good Sport, languishingly, like a sentimental
siege-gun, 'that if I had ever met Mr Chalmers before I shouldn't
have forgotten him.'

'You're English, aren't you?' asked Miss Leonard.

'Yes.'

The Good Sport said she was crazy about Englishmen.

'I thought so from your voice.'

The Good Sport said that she was crazy about the English accent.

'It must have been in London that I met you. I was in the revue at
the Alhambra last year.'

'By George, I wish I had seen you!' interjected the infatuated
Nutty.

The Good Sport said that she was crazy about London.

'I seem to remember,' went on Miss Leonard, 'meeting you out at
supper. Do you know a man named Delaney in the Coldstream Guards?'

Bill would have liked to deny all knowledge of Delaney, though the
latter was one of his best friends, but his natural honesty
prevented him.

'I'm sure I met you at a supper he gave at Oddy's one Friday
night. We all went on to Covent Garden. Don't you remember?'

'Talking of supper,' broke in Nutty, earning Bill's hearty
gratitude thereby, 'where's the dashed head-waiter? I want to find
my table.'

He surveyed the restaurant with a melancholy eye.

'Everything changed!' He spoke sadly, as Ulysses might have done
when his boat put in at Ithaca. 'Every darned thing different
since I was here last. New waiter, head-waiter I never saw before
in my life, different-coloured carpet--'

'Cheer up, Nutty, old thing!' said Miss Leonard. 'You'll feel
better when you've had something to eat. I hope you had the sense
to tip the head-waiter, or there won't be any table. Funny how
these places go up and down in New York. A year ago the whole
management would turn out and kiss you if you looked like spending
a couple of dollars here. Now it costs the earth to get in at
all.'

'Why's that?' asked Nutty.

'Lady Pauline Wetherby, of course. Didn't you know this was where
she danced?'

'Never heard of her,' said Nutty, in a sort of ecstasy of wistful
gloom. 'That will show you how long I've been away. Who is she?'

Miss Leonard invoked the name of Mike.

'Don't you ever get the papers in your village, Nutty?'

'I never read the papers. I don't suppose I've read a paper for
years. I can't stand 'em. Who is Lady Pauline Wetherby?'

'She does Greek dances--at least, I suppose they're Greek. They
all are nowadays, unless they're Russian. She's an English
peeress.'

Miss Leonard's friend said she was crazy about these picturesque
old English families; and they went in to supper.

       *       *       *       *       *

Looking back on the evening later and reviewing its leading
features, Lord Dawlish came to the conclusion that he never
completely recovered from the first shock of the Good Sport. He
was conscious all the time of a dream-like feeling, as if he were
watching himself from somewhere outside himself. From some
conning-tower in this fourth dimension he perceived himself eating
broiled lobster and drinking champagne and heard himself bearing
an adequate part in the conversation; but his movements were
largely automatic.

Time passed. It seemed to Lord Dawlish, watching from without,
that things were livening up. He seemed to perceive a quickening
of the _tempo_ of the revels, an added abandon. Nutty was
getting quite bright. He had the air of one who recalls the good
old days, of one who in familiar scenes re-enacts the joys of his
vanished youth. The chastened melancholy induced by many months of
fetching of pails of water, of scrubbing floors with a mop, and of
jumping like a firecracker to avoid excited bees had been purged
from him by the lights and the music and the wine. He was telling
a long anecdote, laughing at it, throwing a crust of bread at an
adjacent waiter, and refilling his glass at the same time. It is
not easy to do all these things simultaneously, and the fact that
Nutty did them with notable success was proof that he was picking
up.

Miss Daisy Leonard was still demure, but as she had just slipped a
piece of ice down the back of Nutty's neck one may assume that she
was feeling at her ease and had overcome any diffidence or shyness
which might have interfered with her complete enjoyment of the
festivities. As for the Good Sport, she was larger, blonder, and
more exuberant than ever and she was addressing someone as 'Bill'.

Perhaps the most remarkable phenomenon of the evening, as it
advanced, was the change it wrought in Lord Dawlish's attitude
toward this same Good Sport. He was not conscious of the beginning
of the change; he awoke to the realization of it suddenly. At the
beginning of supper his views on her had been definite and clear.
When they had first been introduced to each other he had had a
stunned feeling that this sort of thing ought not to be allowed at
large, and his battered brain had instinctively recalled that line
of Tennyson: 'The curse is come upon me.' But now, warmed with
food and drink and smoking an excellent cigar, he found that a
gentler, more charitable mood had descended upon him.

He argued with himself in extenuation of the girl's peculiar
idiosyncrasies. Was it, he asked himself, altogether her fault
that she was so massive and spoke as if she were addressing an
open-air meeting in a strong gale? Perhaps it was hereditary.
Perhaps her father had been a circus giant and her mother the
strong woman of the troupe. And for the unrestraint of her manner
defective training in early girlhood would account. He began to
regard her with a quiet, kindly commiseration, which in its turn
changed into a sort of brotherly affection. He discovered that he
liked her. He liked her very much. She was so big and jolly and
robust, and spoke in such a clear, full voice. He was glad that
she was patting his hand. He was glad that he had asked her to
call him Bill.

People were dancing now. It has been claimed by patriots that
American dyspeptics lead the world. This supremacy, though partly
due, no doubt, to vast supplies of pie absorbed in youth, may be
attributed to a certain extent also to the national habit of
dancing during meals. Lord Dawlish had that sturdy reverence for
his interior organism which is the birthright of every Briton. And
at the beginning of supper he had resolved that nothing should
induce him to court disaster in this fashion. But as the time went
on he began to waver.

The situation was awkward. Nutty and Miss Leonard were repeatedly
leaving the table to tread the measure, and on these occasions the
Good Sport's wistfulness was a haunting reproach. Nor was the
spectacle of Nutty in action without its effect on Bill's
resolution. Nutty dancing was a sight to stir the most stolid.

Bill wavered. The music had started again now, one of those
twentieth-century eruptions of sound that begin like a train going
through a tunnel and continue like audible electric shocks, that
set the feet tapping beneath the table and the spine thrilling
with an unaccustomed exhilaration. Every drop of blood in his body
cried to him 'Dance!' He could resist no longer.

'Shall we?' he said.

Bill should not have danced. He was an estimable young man,
honest, amiable, with high ideals. He had played an excellent game
of football at the university; his golf handicap was plus two; and
he was no mean performer with the gloves. But we all of us have
our limitations, and Bill had his. He was not a good dancer. He
was energetic, but he required more elbow room than the ordinary
dancing floor provides. As a dancer, in fact, he closely resembled
a Newfoundland puppy trying to run across a field.

It takes a good deal to daunt the New York dancing man, but the
invasion of the floor by Bill and the Good Sport undoubtedly
caused a profound and even painful sensation. Linked together they
formed a living projectile which might well have intimidated the
bravest. Nutty was their first victim. They caught him in
mid-step--one of those fancy steps which he was just beginning to
exhume from the cobwebbed recesses of his memory--and swept him
away. After which they descended resistlessly upon a stout
gentleman of middle age, chiefly conspicuous for the glittering
diamonds which he wore and the stoical manner in which he danced
to and fro on one spot of not more than a few inches in size in
the exact centre of the room. He had apparently staked out a claim
to this small spot, a claim which the other dancers had decided to
respect; but Bill and the Good Sport, coming up from behind, had
him two yards away from it at the first impact. Then, scattering
apologies broadcast like a medieval monarch distributing largesse,
Bill whirled his partner round by sheer muscular force and began
what he intended to be a movement toward the farther corner,
skirting the edge of the floor. It was his simple belief that
there was more safety there than in the middle.

He had not reckoned with Heinrich Joerg. Indeed, he was not aware
of Heinrich Joerg's existence. Yet fate was shortly to bring them
together, with far-reaching results. Heinrich Joerg had left the
Fatherland a good many years before with the prudent purpose of
escaping military service. After various vicissitudes in the land
of his adoption--which it would be extremely interesting to
relate, but which must wait for a more favourable opportunity--he
had secured a useful and not ill-recompensed situation as one of
the staff of Reigelheimer's Restaurant. He was, in point of fact,
a waiter, and he comes into the story at this point bearing a tray
full of glasses, knives, forks, and pats of butter on little
plates. He was setting a table for some new arrivals, and in order
to obtain more scope for that task he had left the crowded aisle
beyond the table and come round to the edge of the dancing-floor.

He should not have come out on to the dancing-floor. In another
moment he was admitting that himself. For just as he was lowering
his tray and bending over the table in the pursuance of his
professional duties, along came Bill at his customary high rate
of speed, propelling his partner before him, and for the first
time since he left home Heinrich was conscious of a regret that he
had done so. There are worse things than military service!

It was the table that saved Bill. He clutched at it and it
supported him. He was thus enabled to keep the Good Sport from
falling and to assist Heinrich to rise from the morass of glasses,
knives, and pats of butter in which he was wallowing. Then, the
dance having been abandoned by mutual consent, he helped his now
somewhat hysterical partner back to their table.

Remorse came upon Bill. He was sorry that he had danced; sorry
that he had upset Heinrich; sorry that he had subjected the Good
Sport's nervous system to such a strain; sorry that so much glass
had been broken and so many pats of butter bruised beyond repair.
But of one thing, even in that moment of bleak regrets, he was
distinctly glad, and that was that all these things had taken
place three thousand miles away from Claire Fenwick. He had not
been appearing at his best, and he was glad that Claire had not
seen him.

As he sat and smoked the remains of his cigar, while renewing his
apologies and explanations to his partner and soothing the ruffled
Nutty with well-chosen condolences, he wondered idly what Claire
was doing at that moment.

Claire at that moment, having been an astonished eye-witness of
the whole performance, was resuming her seat at a table at the
other end of the room.




7


There were two reasons why Lord Dawlish was unaware of Claire
Fenwick's presence at Reigelheimer's Restaurant: Reigelheimer's is
situated in a basement below a ten-storey building, and in order
to prevent this edifice from falling into his patrons' soup the
proprietor had been obliged to shore up his ceiling with massive
pillars. One of these protruded itself between the table which
Nutty had secured for his supper-party and the table at which
Claire was sitting with her friend, Lady Wetherby, and her steamer
acquaintance, Mr Dudley Pickering. That was why Bill had not seen
Claire from where he sat; and the reason that he had not seen her
when he left his seat and began to dance was that he was not one
of your dancers who glance airily about them. When Bill danced he
danced.

He would have been stunned with amazement if he had known that
Claire was at Reigelheimer's that night. And yet it would have
been remarkable, seeing that she was the guest of Lady Wetherby,
if she had not been there. When you have travelled three thousand
miles to enjoy the hospitality of a friend who does near-Greek
dances at a popular restaurant, the least you can do is to go to
the restaurant and watch her step. Claire had arrived with Polly
Wetherby and Mr Dudley Pickering at about the time when Nutty, his
gloom melting rapidly, was instructing the waiter to open the
second bottle.

Of Claire's movements between the time when she secured her ticket
at the steamship offices at Southampton and the moment when she
entered Reigelheimer's Restaurant it is not necessary to give a
detailed record. She had had the usual experiences of the ocean
voyager. She had fed, read, and gone to bed. The only notable
event in her trip had been her intimacy with Mr Dudley Pickering.

Dudley Pickering was a middle-aged Middle Westerner, who by thrift
and industry had amassed a considerable fortune out of automobiles.
Everybody spoke well of Dudley Pickering. The papers spoke well of
him, Bradstreet spoke well of him, and he spoke well of himself. On
board the liner he had poured the saga of his life into Claire's
attentive ears, and there was a gentle sweetness in her manner which
encouraged Mr Pickering mightily, for he had fallen in love with
Claire on sight.

It would seem that a schoolgirl in these advanced days would know
what to do when she found that a man worth millions was in love
with her; yet there were factors in the situation which gave
Claire pause. Lord Dawlish, of course, was one of them. She had
not mentioned Lord Dawlish to Mr Pickering, and--doubtless lest
the sight of it might pain him--she had abstained from wearing her
engagement ring during the voyage. But she had not completely lost
sight of the fact that she was engaged to Bill. Another thing that
caused her to hesitate was the fact that Dudley Pickering, however
wealthy, was a most colossal bore. As far as Claire could
ascertain on their short acquaintance, he had but one subject of
conversation--automobiles.

To Claire an automobile was a shiny thing with padded seats, in
which you rode if you were lucky enough to know somebody who owned
one. She had no wish to go more deeply into the matter. Dudley
Pickering's attitude towards automobiles, on the other hand, more
nearly resembled that of a surgeon towards the human body. To him
a car was something to dissect, something with an interior both
interesting to explore and fascinating to talk about. Claire
listened with a radiant display of interest, but she had her
doubts as to whether any amount of money would make it worth while
to undergo this sort of thing for life. She was still in this
hesitant frame of mind when she entered Reigelheimer's Restaurant,
and it perturbed her that she could not come to some definite
decision on Mr Pickering, for those subtle signs which every woman
can recognize and interpret told her that the latter, having paved
the way by talking machinery for a week, was about to boil over
and speak of higher things.

At the very next opportunity, she was certain, he intended to
propose.

The presence of Lady Wetherby acted as a temporary check on the
development of the situation, but after they had been seated at
their table a short time the lights of the restaurant were
suddenly lowered, a coloured limelight became manifest near the
roof, and classical music made itself heard from the fiddles in
the orchestra.

You could tell it was classical, because the banjo players were
leaning back and chewing gum; and in New York restaurants only
death or a classical speciality can stop banjoists.

There was a spatter of applause, and Lady Wetherby rose.

'This,' she explained to Claire, 'is where I do my stunt. Watch
it. I invented the steps myself. Classical stuff. It's called the
Dream of Psyche.'

It was difficult for one who knew her as Claire did to associate
Polly Wetherby with anything classical. On the road, in England,
when they had been fellow-members of the Number Two company of
_The Heavenly Waltz_, Polly had been remarkable chiefly for a
fund of humorous anecdote and a gift, amounting almost to genius,
for doing battle with militant landladies. And renewing their
intimacy after a hiatus of a little less than a year Claire had
found her unchanged.

It was a truculent affair, this Dream of Psyche. It was not so much
dancing as shadow boxing. It began mildly enough to the accompaniment
of _pizzicato_ strains from the orchestra--Psyche in her training
quarters. _Rallentando_--Psyche punching the bag. _Diminuendo_--Psyche
using the medicine ball. _Presto_--Psyche doing road work. _Forte_--The
night of the fight. And then things began to move to a climax. With
the fiddles working themselves to the bone and the piano bounding
under its persecutor's blows, Lady Wetherby ducked, side-stepped,
rushed, and sprang, moving her arms in a manner that may have been
classical Greek, but to the untrained eye looked much more like the
last round of some open-air bout.

It was half-way through the exhibition, when you could smell the
sawdust and hear the seconds shouting advice under the ropes, that
Claire, who, never having seen anything in her life like this
extraordinary performance, had been staring spellbound, awoke to
the realization that Dudley Pickering was proposing to her. It
required a woman's intuition to divine this fact, for Mr Pickering
was not coherent. He did not go straight to the point. He rambled.
But Claire understood, and it came to her that this thing had
taken her before she was ready. In a brief while she would have to
give an answer of some sort, and she had not clearly decided what
answer she meant to give.

Then, while he was still skirting his subject, before he had
wandered to what he really wished to say, the music stopped, the
applause broke out again, and Lady Wetherby returned to the table
like a pugilist seeking his corner at the end of a round. Her face
was flushed and she was breathing hard.

'They pay me money for that!' she observed, genially. 'Can you
beat it?'

The spell was broken. Mr Pickering sank back in his chair in a
punctured manner. And Claire, making monosyllabic replies to her
friend's remarks, was able to bend her mind to the task of finding
out how she stood on this important Pickering issue. That he would
return to the attack as soon as possible she knew; and the next
time she must have her attitude clearly defined one way or the
other.

Lady Wetherby, having got the Dance of Psyche out of her system,
and replaced it with a glass of iced coffee, was inclined for
conversation.

'Algie called me up on the phone this evening, Claire.'

'Yes?'

Claire was examining Mr Pickering with furtive side glances. He
was not handsome, nor, on the other hand, was he repulsive.
'Undistinguished' was the adjective that would have described him.
He was inclined to stoutness, but not unpardonably so; his hair
was thin, but he was not aggressively bald; his face was dull, but
certainly not stupid. There was nothing in his outer man which his
millions would not offset. As regarded his other qualities, his
conversation was certainly not exhilarating. But that also was
not, under certain conditions, an unforgivable thing. No, looking
at the matter all round and weighing it with care, the real
obstacle, Claire decided, was not any quality or lack of qualities
in Dudley Pickering--it was Lord Dawlish and the simple fact that
it would be extremely difficult, if she discarded him in favour of a
richer man without any ostensible cause, to retain her self-respect.

'I think he's weakening.'

'Yes?'

Yes, that was the crux of the matter. She wanted to retain her
good opinion of herself. And in order to achieve that end it was
essential that she find some excuse, however trivial, for breaking
off the engagement.

'Yes?'

A waiter approached the table.

'Mr Pickering!'

The thwarted lover came to life with a start.

'Eh?'

'A gentleman wishes to speak to you on the telephone.'

'Oh, yes. I was expecting a long-distance call, Lady Wetherby, and
left word I would be here. Will you excuse me?'

Lady Wetherby watched him as he bustled across the room.

'What do you think of him, Claire?'

'Mr Pickering? I think he's very nice.'

'He admires you frantically. I hoped he would. That's why I wanted
you to come over on the same ship with him.'

'Polly! I had no notion you were such a schemer.'

'I would just love to see you two fix it up,' continued Lady
Wetherby, earnestly. 'He may not be what you might call a genius,
but he's a darned good sort; and all his millions help, don't
they? You don't want to overlook these millions, Claire!'

'I do like Mr Pickering.'

'Claire, he asked me if you were engaged.'

'What!'

'When I told him you weren't, he beamed. Honestly, you've only got
to lift your little finger and--Oh, good Lord, there's Algie!'

Claire looked up. A dapper, trim little man of about forty was
threading his way among the tables in their direction. It was a
year since Claire had seen Lord Wetherby, but she recognized him
at once. He had a red, weather-beaten face with a suspicion of
side-whiskers, small, pink-rimmed eyes with sandy eyebrows, the
smoothest of sandy hair, and a chin so cleanly shaven that it was
difficult to believe that hair had ever grown there. Although his
evening-dress was perfect in every detail, he conveyed a subtle
suggestion of horsiness. He reached the table and sat down without
invitation in the vacant chair.

'Pauline!' he said, sorrowfully.

'Algie!' said Lady Wetherby, tensely. 'I don't know what you've
come here for, and I don't remember asking you to sit down and put
your elbows on that table, but I want to begin by saying that I
will not be called Pauline. My name's Polly. You've got a way of
saying Pauline, as if it were a gentlemanly cuss-word, that makes
me want to scream. And while you're about it, why don't you say
how-d'you-do to Claire? You ought to remember her, she was my
bridesmaid.'

'How do you do, Miss Fenwick. Of course, I remember you perfectly.
I'm glad to see you again.'

'And now, Algie, what is it? Why have you come here?' Lord
Wetherby looked doubtfully at Claire. 'Oh, that's all right,' said
Lady Wetherby. 'Claire knows all about it--I told her.'

'Then I appeal to Miss Fenwick, if, as you say, she knows all the
facts of the case, to say whether it is reasonable to expect a man
of my temperament, a nervous, highly-strung artist, to welcome the
presence of snakes at the breakfast-table. I trust that I am not
an unreasonable man, but I decline to admit that a long, green
snake is a proper thing to keep about the house.'

'You had no right to strike the poor thing.'

'In that one respect I was perhaps a little hasty. I happened to
be stirring my tea at the moment his head rose above the edge of
the table. I was not entirely myself that morning. My nerves were
somewhat disordered. I had lain awake much of the night planning a
canvas.'

'Planning a what?'

'A canvas--a picture.'

Lady Wetherby turned to Claire.

'I want you to listen to Algie, Claire. A year ago he did not know
one end of a paint-brush from the other. He didn't know he had any
nerves. If you had brought him the artistic temperament on a plate
with a bit of watercress round it, he wouldn't have recognized it.
And now, just because he's got a studio, he thinks he has a right
to go up in the air if you speak to him suddenly and run about the
place hitting snakes with teaspoons as if he were Michelangelo!'

'You do me an injustice. It is true that as an artist I developed
late--But why should we quarrel? If it will help to pave the way
to a renewed understanding between us, I am prepared to apologize
for striking Clarence. That is conciliatory, I think, Miss
Fenwick?'

'Very.'

'Miss Fenwick considers my attitude conciliatory.'

'It's something,' admitted Lady Wetherby, grudgingly.

Lord Wetherby drained the whisky-and-soda which Dudley Pickering
had left behind him, and seemed to draw strength from it, for he
now struck a firmer note.

'But, though expressing regret for my momentary loss of self-control,
I cannot recede from the position I have taken up as regards the
essential unfitness of Clarence's presence in the home.'

Lady Wetherby looked despairingly at Claire.

'The very first words I heard Algie speak, Claire, were at
Newmarket during the three o'clock race one May afternoon. He was
hanging over the rail, yelling like an Indian, and what he was
yelling was, "Come on, you blighter, come on! By the living jingo,
Brickbat wins in a walk!" And now he's talking about receding from
essential positions! Oh, well, he wasn't an artist then!'

'My dear Pau--Polly. I am purposely picking my words on the
present occasion in order to prevent the possibility of further
misunderstandings. I consider myself an ambassador.'

'You would be shocked if you knew what I consider you!'

'I am endeavouring to the best of my ability--'

'Algie, listen to me! I am quite calm at present, but there's no
knowing how soon I may hit you with a chair if you don't come to
earth quick and talk like an ordinary human being. What is it that
you are driving at?'

'Very well, it's this: I'll come home if you get rid of that
snake.'

'Never!'

'It's surely not much to ask of you, Polly?'

'I won't!'

Lord Wetherby sighed.

'When I led you to the altar,' he said, reproachfully, 'you
promised to love, honour, and obey me. I thought at the time it
was a bit of swank!'

Lady Wetherby's manner thawed. She became more friendly.

'When you talk like that, Algie, I feel there's hope for you after
all. That's how you used to talk in the dear old days when you'd
come to me to borrow half-a-crown to put on a horse! Listen, now
that at last you seem to be getting more reasonable; I wish I
could make you understand that I don't keep Clarence for sheer
love of him. He's a commercial asset. He's an advertisement. You
must know that I have got to have something to--'

'I admit that may be so as regards the monkey, Eustace. Monkeys as
aids to publicity have, I believe, been tested and found valuable
by other artistes. I am prepared to accept Eustace, but the snake
is worthless.'

'Oh, you don't object to Eustace, then?'

'I do strongly, but I concede his uses.'

'You would live in the same house as Eustace?'

'I would endeavour to do so. But not in the same house as Eustace
and Clarence.'

There was a pause.

'I don't know that I'm so stuck on Clarence myself,' said Lady
Wetherby, weakly.

'My darling!'

'Wait a minute. I've not said I would get rid of him.'

'But you will?'

Lady Wetherby's hesitation lasted but a moment. 'All right, Algie.
I'll send him to the Zoo to-morrow.'

'My precious pet!'

A hand, reaching under the table, enveloped Claire's in a loving
clasp.

From the look on Lord Wetherby's face she supposed that he was
under the delusion that he was bestowing this attention on his
wife.

'You know, Algie, darling,' said Lady Wetherby, melting completely,
'when you get that yearning note in your voice I just flop and take
the full count.'

'My sweetheart, when I saw you doing that Dream of
What's-the-girl's-bally-name dance just now, it was all I could
do to keep from rushing out on to the floor and hugging you.'

'Algie!'

'Polly!'

'Do you mind letting go of my hand, please, Lord Wetherby?' said
Claire, on whom these saccharine exchanges were beginning to have
a cloying effect.

For a moment Lord Wetherby seemed somewhat confused, but, pulling
himself together, he covered his embarrassment with a pomposity
that blended poorly with his horsy appearance.

'Married life, Miss Fenwick,' he said, 'as you will no doubt
discover some day, must always be a series of mutual compromises,
of cheerful give and take. The lamp of love--'

His remarks were cut short by a crash at the other end of the
room. There was a sharp cry and the splintering of glass. The
place was full of a sudden, sharp confusion. They jumped up with
one accord. Lady Wetherby spilled her iced coffee; Lord Wetherby
dropped the lamp of love. Claire, who was nearest the pillar that
separated them from the part of the restaurant where the accident
had happened, was the first to see what had taken place.

A large man, dancing with a large girl, appeared to have charged
into a small waiter, upsetting him and his tray and the contents
of his tray. The various actors in the drama were now engaged in
sorting themselves out from the ruins. The man had his back toward
her, and it seemed to Claire that there was something familiar
about that back. Then he turned, and she recognized Lord Dawlish.

She stood transfixed. For a moment surprise was her only emotion.
How came Bill to be in America? Then other feelings blended with
her surprise. It is a fact that Lord Dawlish was looking
singularly uncomfortable.

Claire's eyes travelled from Bill to his partner and took in with
one swift feminine glance her large, exuberant blondeness. There
is no denying that, seen with a somewhat biased eye, the Good
Sport resembled rather closely a poster advertising a revue.

Claire returned to her seat. Lord and Lady Wetherby continued to
talk, but she allowed them to conduct the conversation without her
assistance.

'You're very quiet, Claire,' said Polly.

'I'm thinking.'

'A very good thing, too, so they tell me. I've never tried it
myself. Algie, darling, he was a bad boy to leave his nice home,
wasn't he? He didn't deserve to have his hand held.'




8


It had been a great night for Nutty Boyd. If the vision of his
sister Elizabeth, at home at the farm speculating sadly on the
whereabouts of her wandering boy, ever came before his mental eye
he certainly did not allow it to interfere with his appreciation
of the festivities. At Frolics in the Air, whither they moved
after draining Reigelheimer's of what joys it had to offer, and at
Peale's, where they went after wearying of Frolics in the Air, he
was in the highest spirits. It was only occasionally that the
recollection came to vex him that this could not last, that--since
his Uncle Ira had played him false--he must return anon to the
place whence he had come.

Why, in a city of all-night restaurants, these parties ever break
up one cannot say, but a merciful Providence sees to it that they
do, and just as Lord Dawlish was contemplating an eternity of the
company of Nutty and his two companions, the end came. Miss
Leonard said that she was tired. Her friend said that it was a
shame to go home at dusk like this, but, if the party was going to
be broken up, she supposed there was nothing else for it. Bill was
too sleepy to say anything.

The Good Sport lived round the corner, and only required Lord
Dawlish's escort for a couple of hundred yards. But Miss Leonard's
hotel was in the neighbourhood of Washington Square, and it was
Nutty's pleasing task to drive her thither. Engaged thus, he
received a shock that electrified him.

'That pal of yours,' said Miss Leonard, drowsily--she was
half-asleep--'what did you say his name was?'

'Chalmers, he told me. I only met him to-night.'

'Well, it isn't; it's something else. It'--Miss Leonard
yawned--'it's Lord something.'

'How do you mean, "Lord something"?'

'He's a lord--at least, he was when I met him in London.'

'Are you sure you met him in London?'

'Of course I'm sure. He was at that supper Captain Delaney gave at
Oddy's. There can't be two men in England who dance like that!'

The recollection of Bill's performance stimulated Miss Leonard
into a temporary wakefulness, and she giggled.

'He danced just the same way that night in London. I wish I could
remember his name. I almost had it a dozen times tonight. It's
something with a window in it.'

'A window?' Nutty's brain was a little fatigued and he felt
himself unequal to grasping this. 'How do you mean, a window?'

'No, not a window--a door! I knew it was something about a house.
I know now, his name's Lord Dawlish.'

Nutty's fatigue fell from him like a garment.

'It can't be!'

'It is.'

Miss Leonard's eyes had closed and she spoke in a muffled voice.

'Are you sure?'

'Mm-mm.'

'By gad!'

Nutty was wide awake now and full of inquiries; but his companion
unfortunately was asleep, and he could not put them to her. A
gentleman cannot prod a lady--and his guest, at that--in the ribs
in order to wake her up and ask her questions. Nutty sat back and
gave himself up to feverish thought.

He could think of no reason why Lord Dawlish should have come to
America calling himself William Chalmers, but that was no reason
why he should not have done so. And Daisy Leonard, who all along
had remembered meeting him in London, had identified him.

Nutty was convinced. Arriving finally at Miss Leonard's hotel, he
woke her up and saw her in at the door; then, telling the man to
drive to the lodgings of his new friend, he urged his mind to
rapid thought. He had decided as a first step in the following up
of this matter to invite Bill down to Elizabeth's farm, and the
thought occurred to him that this had better be done to-night, for
he knew by experience that on the morning after these little
jaunts he was seldom in the mood to seek people out and invite
them to go anywhere.

All the way to the flat he continued to think, and it was
wonderful what possibilities there seemed to be in this little
scheme of courting the society of the man who had robbed him of
his inheritance. He had worked on Bill's feelings so successfully
as to elicit a loan of a million dollars, and was just proceeding
to marry him to Elizabeth, when the cab stopped with the sudden
sharpness peculiar to New York cabs, and he woke up, to find
himself at his destination.

Bill was in bed when the bell rang, and received his late host in
his pyjamas, wondering, as he did so, whether this was the New
York custom, to foregather again after a party had been broken up,
and chat till breakfast. But Nutty, it seemed, had come with a
motive, not from a desire for more conversation.

'Sorry to disturb you, old man,' said Nutty. 'I looked in to tell
you that I was going down to the country to-morrow. I wondered
whether you would care to come and spend a day or two with us.'

Bill was delighted. This was better than he had hoped for.

'Rather!' he said. 'Thanks awfully!'

'There are plenty of trains in the afternoon,' said Nutty. 'I
don't suppose either of us will feel like getting up early. I'll
call for you here at half-past six, and we'll have an early dinner
and catch the seven-fifteen, shall we? We live very simply, you
know. You won't mind that?'

'My dear chap!'

'That's all right, then,' said Nutty, closing the door. 'Good
night.'




9


Elizabeth entered Nutty's room and, seating herself on the bed,
surveyed him with a bright, quiet eye that drilled holes in her
brother's uneasy conscience. This was her second visit to him that
morning. She had come an hour ago, bearing breakfast on a tray,
and had departed without saying a word. It was this uncanny
silence of hers even more than the effects--which still lingered--of
his revels in the metropolis that had interfered with Nutty's
enjoyment of the morning meal. Never a hearty breakfaster, he had
found himself under the influence of her wordless disapproval
physically unable to consume the fried egg that confronted him. He
had given it one look; then, endorsing the opinion which he had
once heard a character in a play utter in somewhat similar
circumstances--that there was nothing on earth so homely as an
egg--he had covered it with a handkerchief and tried to pull
himself round with hot tea. He was now smoking a sad cigarette and
waiting for the blow to fall.

Her silence had puzzled him. Though he had tried to give her no
opportunity of getting him alone on the previous evening when he
had arrived at the farm with Lord Dawlish, he had fully expected
that she would have broken in upon him with abuse and recrimination
in the middle of the night. Yet she had not done this, nor had she
spoken to him when bringing him his breakfast. These things found
their explanation in Elizabeth's character, with which Nutty, though
he had known her so long, was but imperfectly acquainted. Elizabeth
had never been angrier with her brother, but an innate goodness of
heart had prevented her falling upon him before he had had rest and
refreshment.

She wanted to massacre him, but at the same time she told herself
that the poor dear must be feeling very, very ill, and should have
a reasonable respite before the slaughter commenced.

It was plain that in her opinion this respite had now lasted long
enough. She looked over her shoulder to make sure that she had
closed the door, then leaned a little forward and spoke.

'Now, Nutty!'

The wretched youth attempted bluster.

'What do you mean--"Now, Nutty"? What's the use of looking at a
fellow like that and saying "Now, Nutty"? Where's the sense--'

His voice trailed off. He was not a very intelligent young man,
but even he could see that his was not a position where righteous
indignation could be assumed with any solid chance of success. As
a substitute he tried pathos.

'Oo-oo, my head does ache!'

'I wish it would burst,' said his sister, unkindly.

'That's a nice thing to say to a fellow!'

'I'm sorry. I wouldn't have said it--'

'Oh, well!'

'Only I couldn't think of anything worse.'

It began to seem to Nutty that pathos was a bit of a failure too.
As a last resort he fell back on silence. He wriggled as far down
as he could beneath the sheets and breathed in a soft and wounded
sort of way. Elizabeth took up the conversation.

'Nutty,' she said, 'I've struggled for years against the
conviction that you were a perfect idiot. I've forced myself,
against my better judgement, to tr