Uneasy Money

On 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-humored, 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 Theater. 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.

Some men in the circumstances in which Lord Dawlish found himself would have fidgeted and looked at their watches; some would have prowled up and down; others might have sought solace at the excellent bar which the management of the Bandolero maintains for just such emergencies. Lord Dawlish preferred mental golf.

“Now look here, Bill,” he said, “this isn’t the way we usually do this sort of thing, and if the governor were here he would spend an hour and a half rambling on about testators, and beneficiary legatees, and parties of the first part, and all that sort of rot. But as he isn’t here I want to know, as one pal to another, what you’ve been doing to an old buster of the name of Nutcombe.”

“Nutcombe?”

“Nutcombe.”

“Not Ira Nutcombe?”

“Ira J. Nutcombe, formerly of Chicago, later of London, now a disembodied spirit.”

“Is he dead?”

“Yes. And he’s left you five million dollars.”

Lord Dawlish looked at his watch.

“Joking apart, Jerry, old man,” he said, “what did you ask me to come here for? The committee expects me to spend some of my time at the club, and if I hang about here all afternoon I shall lose my job. Besides, I’ve got to get back to ask them for⁠—”

Jerry Nichols clutched his forehead with both hands, raised both hands to heaven, and then, as if despairing of calming himself by these means, picked up a paperweight from the desk and hurled it at a portrait of the founder of the firm, which hung over the mantelpiece. He got down from the table and crossed the room to inspect the ruins.

Then, having taken a pair of scissors and cut the cord, he allowed the portrait to fall to the floor.

He rang the bell. The prematurely aged office boy, who was undoubtedly destined to become a member of the firm some day, answered the ring.

“Its appearance is the best part of it,” said Elizabeth. “It is a deceptive place. The bay looks beautiful, but you can’t bathe in it because of the jellyfish. The woods are lovely, but you daren’t go near them because of the ticks.”

“Ticks?”

“They jump on you and suck your blood,” said Elizabeth carelessly. “And the nights are gorgeous, but you have to stay indoors after dusk because of the mosquitoes.” She paused to mark the effect of these horrors on her visitor. “And then, of course,” she went on, as he showed no signs of flying to the house to pack his bag and catch the next train, “the bees are always stinging you. I hope you are not afraid of bees, Mr. Chalmers?”

“Rather not. Jolly little chaps!”

A gleam appeared in Elizabeth’s eye.

“If you are so fond of them perhaps you wouldn’t mind coming and helping me open one of the hives?”

“Rather!”

“I’ll go and fetch the things.”

She went into the house and ran up to Nutty’s room, waking that sufferer from a troubled sleep.

“Nutty, he’s bitten.”

Nutty sat up violently.

“Good Lord; what by?”

“You don’t understand. What I meant was that I invited your Mr. Chalmers to help me open a hive, and he said ‘Rather!’ and is waiting to do it now. Be ready to say goodbye to him. If he comes out of this alive his first act, after bathing the wounds with ammonia, will be to leave us forever.”

“But look here, he’s a visitor⁠—”

He reached out for the bottle, and as he grasped it his eye was caught by something on the floor. A brown monkey with a long gray tail was sitting there staring at him.

There was one of those painful pauses. Nutty looked at the monkey, rather like an elongated Macbeth inspecting the ghost of Banquo. The monkey looked at Nutty. The pause continued. Nutty shut his eyes, counted ten slowly and opened them. The monkey was still there. “Boo!” said Nutty in an apprehensive undertone.

The monkey looked at him.

Nutty shut his eyes again. He would count sixty this time. A cold fear had laid its clammy fingers on his heart. This was what that doctor⁠—not such a chump after all⁠—must have meant!

Nutty began to count. There seemed to be a heavy lump inside him and his mouth was dry; but otherwise he felt all right. That was the gruesome part of it⁠—this dreadful thing had come upon him at a moment when he could have sworn that he was as sound as a bell. If this had happened in the days when he ranged the Great White Way, sucking up deleterious moisture like a cloud, it would have been intelligible. But it had sneaked upon him like a thief in the night; it had stolen unheralded into his life when he had practically reformed. What was the good of practically reforming if this sort of thing was going to happen to one?

Boyhood, like measles, is one of those complaints which a man should catch young and have done with, for when it comes in middle life it is apt to be serious. Dudley Pickering had escaped boyhood at the time when his contemporaries were contracting it. It is true that for a few years after leaving the cradle he had exhibited a certain immatureness, but as soon as he put on knickerbockers and began to go about a little he outgrew all that. He avoided altogether the chaotic period which usually lies between the years of ten and fourteen. At ten he was a thoughtful and sober-minded young man, at fourteen almost an old fogy. A love of machinery, developing early, helped the steadying process. While other boys were breaking windows or laying the foundations for home runs and flying tackles that would afterward enable them to pass with credit through college, Dudley Pickering was scrutinizing engines, studying textbooks, talking on terms of grave equality with mechanicians.

And now⁠—thirty-odd years overdue⁠—boyhood had come upon him. As he examined the revolver in his bedroom wild and unfamiliar emotions seethed within him. He did not realize it, but they were the emotions which should have come to him thirty years before and driven him out to hunt Indians in the garden. An imagination which might well have become atrophied through disuse had him as thoroughly in its control as ever he had had his Pickering Giant.

He believed almost with devoutness in the plot which he had detected for the spoliation of Lord Wetherby’s summer home, that plot of which he held Lord Dawlish to be the mainspring.