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, gov’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?”
The man permitted the dying rooster to die noisily.
“Buy a dying rooster, gov’nor,” he advised. “Causes great fun and laughter.”
Lord Dawlish eyed the strange fowl without enthusiasm.
“No,” he said with a slight shudder.
“Buy a rubber ring, gov’nor. Always useful about the little home.”
“I shouldn’t know what to do with it.”
“Buy a nice collar stud.”
“I’ve got a nice collar stud.”
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, gov’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, it being his intention to inspect the fountain in Piccadilly Circus and estimate whether a supposititious hole beneath it could be reached with a single putt, or whether, as he suspected, a preliminary use of the iron would be necessary. The movement brought 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 shortcut 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 gray. 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.
“Hello, 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.
“Were you giving that man money, Bill?”
“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 anyone 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. Judging from contemporary portraits of this gentleman, there would seem to be no reason why he should have been given or should have assumed that prenomen. But it is pretty generally recognized now that in the good old days anybody with a hundred and ten suits of clothes, a few pet pugilists, and a taste for high stakes at piquet could call himself “Beau” and get away with it. These qualifications Bill’s ancestor had possessed to a remarkable degree.
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
