Author: P.G. Wodehouse
Release Date: October, 2004 [EBook #6684] [Yes,
we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This
file was first posted on January 12, 2003] [Date last
updated: February 27, 2005]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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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
