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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 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