CHAPTER FOUR
SCENE OUTSIDE FASHIONABLE NIGHT-CLUB
THE mental condition of a man who at half past eleven at night suddenly finds himself penniless and without shelter in the heart of the great city must necessarily be for a while somewhat confused. Sam’s first coherent thought was to go back and try to recover that half-crown from the wandering minstrel. After a very brief reflection, however, he dismissed this scheme as too visionary for practical consideration. His acquaintance with the other had been slight, but he had seen enough of him to gather that he was not one of those rare spiritual fellows who give half-crowns back. The minstrel was infirm and old, but many years would have to elapse before he became senile enough for that. No, some solution on quite different lines was required; and, thinking deeply, Sam began to move slowly in the direction of Charing Cross.
He was as yet far from being hopeless. Indeed, his mood at this point might have been called optimistic; for he realised that, if this disaster had been decreed by fate from the beginning of time—and he supposed it had been, though that palmist had made no mention of it—it could hardly have happened at a more convenient spot. The Old Wrykynian dinner had only just broken up, which meant that this portion of London must be full of men who had been at school with him and would doubtless be delighted to help him out with a temporary loan. At any moment now he might run into some kindly old schoolfellow.
And almost immediately he did. Or, rather, the old schoolfellow ran into him. He had reached the Vaudeville Theatre and had paused, debating within himself the advisability of crossing the street and seeing how the hunting was on the other side, when a solid body rammed him in the back.
“Oh, sorry! Frightfully sorry! I say, awfully sorry!”
It was a voice which had been absent from Sam’s life for some years, but he recognised it almost before he had recovered his balance. He wheeled joyfully round on the stout and red-faced young man who was with some difficulty retrieving his hat from the gutter.
“Excuse me,” he said, “but you are extraordinarily like a man I used to know named J. W. Braddock.”
“I am J. W. Braddock.”
“Ah,” said Sam, “that accounts for the resemblance.”
He contemplated his erstwhile study companion with affection. He would have been glad at any time to meet the old Bradder, but he was particularly glad to meet him now. As Mr. Braddock himself might have put it, he was glad, delighted, pleased, happy and overjoyed. Willoughby Braddock, bearing out the words of the two exquisites, was obviously in a somewhat vinous condition, but Sam was no Puritan and was not offended by this. The thing about Mr. Braddock that impressed itself upon him to the exclusion of all else was the fact that he looked remarkably rich. He had that air, than which there is none more delightful, of being the sort of man who would lend a fellow a fiver without a moment’s hesitation.
Willoughby Braddock had secured his hat, and he now replaced it in a sketchy fashion on his head. His face was flushed, and his eyes, always slightly prominent, seemed to protrude like those of a snail—and an extremely inebriated snail, at that.
“Imarraspeesh,” he said.
“I beg your pardon?” said Sam.
“I made a speesh.”
“Yes, so I heard.”
“You heard my speesh?”
“I heard that you had made one.”
“How did you hear my speesh?” said Mr. Braddock, plainly mystified. “You weren’t at the dinner.”
“No, but——”
“You couldn’t have been at the dinner,” proceeded Mr. Braddock, reasoning closely, “because evening dress was obliggery and you aren’t obliggery. I’ll tell you what—between you and me, I don’t know who the deuce you are.”
“You don’t know me?”
“No, I don’t know you.”
“Pull yourself together, Bradder. I’m Sam Shotter.”
“Sham Sotter?”
“If you prefer it that way certainly. I’ve always pronounced it Sam Shotter myself.”
“That’s right.”
Mr. Braddock eyed him narrowly.
“Look here,” he said, “I’ll tell you something—something that’ll interest you—something that’ll interest you very much. You’re Sam Shotter.”
“That’s it.”
“We were at school together.”
“We were.”
“The dear old school.”
“Exactly.”
Intense delight manifested itself in Mr. Braddock’s face. He seized Sam’s hand and wrung it warmly.
“How are you, my dear old chap, how are you?” he cried. “Old Sham Spotter, by gad! By Jove! By George! My goodness! Fancy that! Well, good-bye.”
And with a beaming smile he suddenly swooped across the road and was lost to sight.
The stoutest heart may have its black moments. Depression claimed Sam for its own. There is no agony like that of the man who has intended to borrow money and finds that he has postponed the request till too late. With bowed shoulders, he made his way eastward. He turned up Charing Cross Road, and thence by way of Green Street into Leicester Square. He moved listlessly along the lower end of the square, and presently, glancing up, perceived graven upon the wall the words, “Panton Street.”
He halted. The name seemed somehow familiar. Then he remembered. The Angry Cheese, that haunt of wealth and fashion to which those fellows, Bates and Tresidder, had been going, was in Panton Street.
Hope revived in Sam. An instant before, the iron had seemed to have entered his soul, but now he squared his shoulder and quickened his steps. Good old Bates! Splendid old Tresidder! They were the men to help him out of this mess.
He saw clearly now how mistaken can be the callow judgments which we form when young. As an immature lad at school, he had looked upon Bates and Tresidder with a jaundiced eye. He had summed them up in his mind, after the hasty fashion of youth, as ticks and blisters. Aye, and even when he had encountered them half an hour ago after the lapse of years, their true nobility had not been made plain to him. It was only now, as he padded along Panton Street like a leopard on the trail, that he realised what excellent fellows they were and how fond he was of them. They were great chaps—corkers, both of them. And when he remembered that with a boy’s blindness to his sterling qualities he had once given Bates six of the juiciest with a walking stick, he burned with remorse and shame.
It was not difficult to find the Angry Cheese. About this newest of London’s night-clubs there was nothing coy or reticent. Its doorway stood open to the street, and cabs were drawing up in a constant stream and discharging fair women and well-tailored men. Furthermore, to render identification easy for the very dullest, there stood on the pavement outside a vast commissionaire, brilliantly attired in the full-dress uniform of a Czecho-Slovakian field-marshal and wearing on his head a peaked cap circled by a red band, which bore in large letters of gold the words “Angry Cheese.”
“Good evening,” said Sam, curvetting buoyantly up to this spectacular person. “I want to speak to Mr. Bates.”
The field-marshal eyed him distantly. The man, one would have said, was not in sympathy with him. Sam could not imagine why. With the prospect of a loan in sight, he himself was liking everybody.
“Misteroo?”
“Mr. Bates.”
“Mr. Yates?”
“Mr. Bates. Mr. Bates. You know Mr. Bates?” said Sam. And such was the stimulating rhythm of the melody into which the unseen orchestra had just burst that he very nearly added, “He’s a bear, he’s a bear, he’s a bear.”
“Bates?”
“Or Tresidder.”
“Make up your mind,” said the field-marshal petulantly.
At this moment, on the opposite side of the street, there appeared the figure of Mr. Willoughby Braddock, walking with extraordinary swiftness. His eyes were staring straight in front of him. He had lost his hat.
“Bradder!” cried Sam.
Mr. Braddock looked over his shoulder, waved his hand, smiled a smile of piercing sweetness and passed rapidly into the night.
Sam was in a state of indecision similar to that of the dog in the celebrated substance-and-shadow fable. Should he pursue this will-o’-the-wisp, or should he stick to the sound Conservative policy of touching the man on the spot? What would Napoleon have done?
He decided to remain.
“Fellow who was at school with me,” he remarked explanatorily.
“Ho!” said the field-marshal, looking like a stuffed sergeant-major.
“And now,” said Sam, “can I see Mr. Bates?”
“You cannot.”
“But he’s in there.”
“And you’re out ’ere,” said the field-marshal.
He moved away to assist a young lady of gay exterior to alight from a taxicab. And as he did so, someone spoke from the steps.
“Ah, there you are!”
Sam looked up, relieved. Dear old Bates was standing in the lighted doorway.
Of the four persons who made up the little group collected about the threshold of the Angry Cheese, three now spoke simultaneously.
Dear old Bates said, “This is topping! Thought you weren’t coming.”
The lady said, “Awfully sorry I’m late, old cork.”
Sam said, “Oh, Bates.”
He was standing some little space removed from the main body when he spoke, and the words did not register. The lady passed on into the building. Bates was preparing to follow her, when Sam spoke again. And this time nobody within any reasonable radius could have failed to hear him.
“Hey!” said the field-marshal, massaging his ear with a look of reproach and dislike.
Bates turned, and as he saw Sam, there spread itself over his face the startled look of one who, wandering gayly along some primrose path, sees gaping before him a frightful chasm or a fearful serpent or some menacing lion in the undergrowth. In this crisis, Claude Bates did not hesitate. With a single backward spring—which, if he could have remembered it and reproduced it later on the dancing floor, would have made him the admired of all—he disappeared, leaving Sam staring blankly after him.
A large fat hand, placed in no cordial spirit on his shoulder, awoke Sam from his reverie. The field-marshal was gazing at him with a loathing which he now made no attempt to conceal.
“You ’op it,” said the field-marshal. “We don’t want none of your sort ’ere.”
“But I was at school with him,” stammered Sam. The thing had been so sudden that even now he could not completely realise that what practically amounted to his own flesh and blood had thrown him down cold.
“At school with ’im too, was you?” said the field-marshal. “The only school you was ever at was Borstal. You ’op it, and quick. That’s what you do, before I call a policeman.”
Inside the night-club, Claude Bates, restoring his nervous system with a whisky and soda, was relating to his friend Tresidder the tale of his narrow escape.
“Absolutely lurking on the steps!” said Bates.
“Ghastly!” said Tresidder.