Uneasy Money

I

On a day in June, at the hour when London moves abroad in quest of lunch, a young man stood at the entrance of the Bandolero Restaurant looking earnestly up Shaftesbury Avenue: a large young man in excellent condition, with a pleasant, good-humored, brown, clean-cut face. He paid no attention to the stream of humanity that flowed past him. His mouth was set and his eyes wore a serious, almost a wistful expression. He was frowning slightly. One would have said that here was a man with a secret sorrow.

William FitzWilliam Delamere Chalmers, Lord Dawlish, had no secret sorrow. All that he was thinking of at that moment was the best method of laying a golf ball dead in front of the Palace Theater. It was his habit to pass the time in mental golf when Claire Fenwick was late in keeping her appointments with him. On one occasion she had kept him waiting so long that he had been able to do nine holes, starting at the Savoy Grill and finishing up near Hammersmith. His was a simple mind, able to amuse itself with simple things.

Some men in the circumstances in which Lord Dawlish found himself would have fidgeted and looked at their watches; some would have prowled up and down; others might have sought solace at the excellent bar which the management of the Bandolero maintains for just such emergencies. Lord Dawlish preferred mental golf.

As he stood there, gazing into the middle distance, an individual of disheveled aspect sidled up, a vagrant of almost the maximum seediness, from whose midriff there protruded a trayful of a strange welter of collar studs, shoelaces, rubber rings, buttonhooks and dying roosters. For some minutes he had been eyeing his lordship appraisingly from the edge of the curb, and now, secure in the fact that there seemed to be no policeman in the immediate vicinity, he anchored himself in front of him and observed that he had a wife and four children at home, all starving.

This sort of thing was always happening to Lord Dawlish. There was something about him, some atmosphere of unaffected kindliness, that invited it. Total strangers who had made imprudent marriages without asking his advice were forever stopping him in the street and expecting him to finance the ventures. They did it generally with a touch of reproach in their voices, as if they felt a little wounded that he had not done something about it before.