Produced by Suzanne L. Shell, Tom Allen, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
By P. G. Wodehouse
1
In a day in June, at the hour when London moves abroad in questof lunch, a young man stood at the entrance of the BandoleroRestaurant looking earnestly up Shaftesbury Avenue—a large youngman in excellent condition, with a pleasant, good-humoured, brown,clean-cut face. He paid no attention to the stream of humanitythat flowed past him. His mouth was set and his eyes wore aserious, 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 secretsorrow. All that he was thinking of at that moment was the bestmethod of laying a golf ball dead in front of the Palace Theatre.It was his habit to pass the time in mental golf when ClaireFenwick was late in keeping her appointments with him. On oneoccasion she had kept him waiting so long that he had been able todo nine holes, starting at the Savoy Grill and finishing up nearHammersmith. His was a simple mind, able to amuse itself withsimple things.
As he stood there, gazing into the middle distance, an individualof dishevelled aspect sidled up, a vagrant of almost the maximumseediness, from whose midriff there protruded a trayful of astrange welter of collar-studs, shoe-laces, rubber rings,buttonhooks, and dying roosters. For some minutes he had beeneyeing his lordship appraisingly from the edge of the kerb, andnow, secure in the fact that there seemed to be no policeman inthe immediate vicinity, he anchored himself in front of him andobserved that he had a wife and four children at home, allstarving.
This sort of thing was always happening to Lord Dawlish. There wassomething about him, some atmosphere of unaffected kindliness,that invited it.
In these days when everything, from the shape of a man's hat tohis method of dealing with asparagus, is supposed to be an indexto character, it is possible to form some estimate of Lord Dawlishfrom the fact that his vigil in front of the Bandolero had beenexpensive even before the advent of the Benedict with the studsand laces. In London, as in New York, there are spots where it isunsafe for a man of yielding disposition to stand still, and thecorner of Shaftesbury Avenue and Piccadilly Circus is one of them.Scrubby, impecunious men drift to and fro there, waiting for thegods to provide something easy; and the prudent man, conscious ofthe possession of loose change, whizzes through the danger zone athis best speed, 'like one that on a lonesome road doth walk infear and dread, and having once turned round walks on, and turnsno more his head, because he knows a frightful fiend doth closebehind him tread.' In the seven minutes he had been waiting twofrightful fiends closed in on Lord Dawlish, requesting loans offive 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 boththese needy persons seemed to know him intimately, and that eachcalled him Bill. All Lord Dawlish's friends called him Bill, andhe had a catholic list of them, ranging from men whose names werein 'Debrett' to men whose names were on the notice boards ofobscure clubs in connexion with the non-payment of dues. He wasthe sort of man one instinctively calls Bill.
The anti-race-suicide enthusiast with the rubber rings did not callLord Daw