"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, "n.o.blesse 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 n.o.blesse oblige without upsetting the universe. Why shouldn"t a fellow say n.o.blesse 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 n.o.blesse oblige. Naturally a refined and sensitive young girl objected to having things like n.o.blesse oblige said to her. Where was the sense in saying n.o.blesse oblige? Such a confoundedly silly thing to say. Only a perfect a.s.s would spend his time rushing about the place saying n.o.blesse 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 pa.s.sing 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 c.o.c.ktails he had a fair working knowledge, and he appreciated ragtime. But of the other great American inst.i.tutions 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 inst.i.tution 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?"