“I see. All right. Chalmers then. When do you think of starting?”
“Tomorrow.”
“You aren’t losing much time. By the way, as you’re going to New York you might as well use my apartment.”
“It’s awfully good of you.”
“Not a bit. You would be doing me a favor. I had to leave at a moment’s notice, and I want to know what’s been happening to the place. I left some Japanese prints there, and my favorite nightmare is that someone has broken in and sneaked them. Write down the address—Forty-three East Twenty-seventh Street. I’ll mail you the key to Brown’s tonight with those letters.”
Bill walked up the Strand glowing with energy. He made his way to Cockspur Street to buy his ticket for New York. This done, he set out to Brown’s to arrange with the committee the details of his departure.
He reached Brown’s at twenty minutes past two and left it again at twenty-three minutes past; for, directly he entered, the hall porter had handed him a telephone message. The telephone attendants at London clubs are masters of suggestive brevity. The one in the basement of Brown’s had written on Bill’s slip of paper the words: “1 p.m. Will Lord Dawlish as soon as possible call upon Mr. Gerald Nichols at his office.” To this was appended a message consisting of two words: “Good news.”
It was stimulating. The probability was that all Jerry Nichols wanted to tell him was that he had received stable information about some horse or had been given a box for the Empire, but for all that it was stimulating.
Bill looked at his watch. He could spare half an hour. He set out at once for the offices of the eminent law firm of Nichols, Nichols, Nichols and Nichols, of which aggregation of Nicholses his friend Jerry was the last and smallest.
III
On a westbound omnibus Claire Fenwick sat and raged silently in the June sunshine. She was furious. What right had Lord Dawlish to look down his nose and murmur, “Noblesse oblige” when she asked him a question, as if she had suggested that he should commit some crime? It was the patronizing way he had said it that infuriated her, as if he were a superior being of some kind, governed by codes which she could not be expected to understand. Everybody nowadays did the sort of things she suggested, so what was the good of looking shocked and saying, “Noblesse oblige?”
The omnibus rolled on. It passed through Piccadilly, full of opulent-looking people who could afford taxis and private cars. It halted long enough at the foot of Sloane Street to enable Claire to look down a vista of desirable residences without a single five-roomed flat among them. Then it turned up toward Kensington Gardens, when every revolution of the wheels took it farther from civilization and nearer London’s Harlem, those realms of outer darkness where the genteelly poor live on top of one another in layers.
Claire hated West Kensington. She hated it with the bitter hate of one who had read society novels, and yearned for Grosvenor Square and butlers and a general atmosphere of soft cushions and pink-shaded lights and maids to do one’s hair. She hated the cheap furniture of the little parlor, the penetrating contralto of the cook singing hymns in the kitchen, and the ubiquitousness of her small brother, who seemed sometimes to her excited imagination to pervade the flat like a species of poison gas. He was only ten, and small for his age, yet he appeared to have the power of being in two rooms at the same time while making a nerve-racking noise in another. After ten years of little Percy’s acquaintance, the only thing which Claire found herself able to detect as a positive merit in him was the fact that he was not twins.
It was Percy who greeted her today as she entered the flat. He came pouring out of the parlor as if the dam had burst.
“Hello, Claire! I say, Claire, there’s a letter for you. It came by the second post. I say, Claire, it’s got an American stamp on it. I want it for my collection. Can I have it for my collection, Claire? I haven’t got one in my collection. Can I have it for my collection, Claire? Claire, can I have it for my collection?”
His sister regarded him broodingly. The heat of the afternoon, the unexpected summons to work, and the insufferable behavior of William, Lord Dawlish, had combined to engender a mood in which this lad with his open boyish face was even more repulsive to her than usual. There were many times, and this was one of them, when it struck Claire forcibly that King Herod had had the right idea.
“For goodness’ sake, don’t bellow like that!” she said. “Of course you can have the stamp. I don’t want it. Where is the letter?”
“Here it is, Claire. I say, Claire, how much do you think a stamp like that’s worth? It’s got ‘two cents’ written on it. I wonder if it’s rare, Claire.”
Claire took the envelope from him. He had been holding it in his hand for safety, and it was damp and seemed to simmer with a gentle glow. A Bertillon expert would have been interested in the perfect reproduction of the lines of Percy’s little thumb in the left hand corner.
She examined it with a pained loathing. For years the question of the infrequency and inadequacy of his ablutions had been an issue bitterly fought out between her brother and herself, in a series on her side of verbal notes couched in terms of unfaltering firmness and holding him to a strict accountability; on his, of replies sedulously avoiding the main issue. It was too hot today to reopen the subject, so holding the envelope delicately she extracted the letter and handed back the shell. Percy vanished into the dining room with
