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?”