Uneasy Money | Page 6

up against some wildcat company. I can't say I like the
directorship wheeze much. It's the idea of knowing that one's name
would be being used as a bait. Every time I saw it on a prospectus I
should feel like a trout fly.'
Claire bit her lip.
'It's so exasperating!' she broke out. 'When I first told my friends that I
was engaged to Lord Dawlish they were tremendously impressed. They
took it for granted that you must have lots of money. Now I have to
keep explaining to them that the reason we don't get married is that we
can't afford to. I'm almost as badly off as poor Polly Davis who was in

the Heavenly Waltz Company with me when she married that man,
Lord Wetherby. A man with a title has no right not to have money. It
makes the whole thing farcical.
'If I were in your place I should have tried a hundred things by now, but
you always have some silly objection. Why couldn't you, for instance,
have taken on the agency of that what-d'you-call-it car?'
'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, '_noblesse 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 noblesse oblige without upsetting the
universe. Why shouldn't a fellow say _noblesse 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 noblesse
oblige. Naturally a refined and sensitive young girl objected to having
things like noblesse oblige said to her. Where was the sense in saying
_noblesse oblige?_ Such a confoundedly silly thing to say. Only a
perfect ass would spend his time rushing about the place saying
noblesse 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 passing 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