Jill was hardly aware that he had asked her a question. She was suffering that momentary sense of unreality which comes to us when the years roll away and we are thrown abruptly back into the days of our childhood. The logical side of her mind was quite aware that there was nothing remarkable in the fact that Wally Mason, who had been to her all these years a boy in an Eton suit, should now present himself as a grown man. But for all that the transformation had something of the effect of a conjuring-trick. It was not only the alteration in his appearance that startled her: it was the amazing change in his personality. Wally Mason had been the bête noire of her childhood. She had never failed to look back at the episode of the garden-hose with the feeling that she had acted well, that--however she might have strayed in those early days from the straight and narrow path--in that one particular crisis she had done the right thing. And now she had taken an instant liking for him. Easily as she made friends, she had seldom before felt so immediately drawn to a strange man. Gone was the ancient hostility, and in its place a soothing sense of comradeship. The direct effect of this was to make Jill feel suddenly old. It was as if some link that joined her to her childhood had been snapped.
She glanced down the Embankment. Close by, to the left, Waterloo Bridge loomed up, dark and massive against the steel-grey sky. A tram-car, full of home-bound travellers, clattered past over rails that shone with the peculiarly frost-bitten gleam that seems to herald snow. Across the river everything was dark and mysterious, except for an occasional lamp-post and the dim illumination of the wharves. It was a depressing prospect, and the thought crossed her mind that to the derelicts whose nightly resting-place was a seat on the Embankment the view must seem even bleaker than it did to herself. She gave a little shiver. Somehow this sudden severance from the old days had brought with it a forlornness. She seemed to be standing alone in a changed world.
"Cold?" said Wally Mason.
"A little."
"Let's walk."
They moved westwards. Cleopatra's Needle shot up beside them, a pointing finger. Down on the silent river below, coffin-like row-boats lay moored to the wall. Through a break in the trees the clock over the Houses of Parliament shone for an instant as if suspended in the sky, then vanished as the trees closed in. A distant barge in the direction of Battersea wailed and was still. It had a mournful and foreboding sound. Jill shivered again. It annoyed her that she could not shake off this quite uncalled-for melancholy, but it withstood every effort. Why she should have felt that a chapter, a pleasant chapter, in the book of her life had been closed, she could not have said, but the feeling lingered.
"Correct me if I am wrong," said Wally Mason, breaking a silence that had lasted several minutes, "but you seem to me to be freezing in your tracks. Ever since I came to London I've had a habit of heading for the Embankment in times of mental stress, but perhaps the middle of winter is not quite the moment for communing with the night. The Savoy is handy, if we stop walking away from it. I think we might celebrate this re-union with a little supper, don't you?"
Jill's depression disappeared magically. Her mercurial temperament asserted itself.
"Lights!" she said. "Music!"
"And food! To an ethereal person like you that remark may seem gross, but I had no dinner."
"You poor dear! Why not?"
"Just nervousness."
"Why, of course." The interlude of the fire had caused her to forget his private and personal connection with the night's events. Her mind went back to something he had said in the theatre. "Wally--" She stopped, a little embarrassed. "I suppose I ought to call you Mr. Mason, but I've always thought of you...."
"Wally, if you please, Jill. It's not as though we were strangers. I haven't my book of etiquette with me, but I fancy that about eleven gallons of cold water down the neck constitutes an introduction. What were you going to say?"
"It was what you said to Freddie about putting up money. Did you really?"
"Put up the money for that ghastly play? I did. Every cent. It was the only way to get it put on."
"But why...? I forget what I was going to say!"
"Why did I want it put on? Well, it does seem odd, but I give you my honest word that until to-night I thought the darned thing a masterpiece. I've been writing musical comedies for the last few years, and after you've done that for a while your soul rises up within you and says, 'Come, come, my lad! You can do better than this!' That's what mine said, and I believed it. Subsequent events have proved that Sidney the Soul was pulling my leg!"
"But--then you've lost a great deal of money?"
"The hoarded wealth, if you don't mind my being melodramatic for a moment, of a lifetime. And no honest old servitor who dangled me on his knee as a baby to come along and offer me his savings! They don't make servitors like that in America, worse luck. There is a Swedish lady who looks after my simple needs back there, but instinct tells me that, if I were to approach her on the subject of loosening up for the benefit of the young master, she would call a cop. Still, I've gained experience, which they say is just as good as cash, and I've enough money left to pay the bill, at any rate, so come along."
In the supper-room of the Savoy Hotel there was, as anticipated, food and light and music. It was still early, and the theatres had not yet emptied themselves, so that the big room was as yet but half full. Wally Mason had found a table in the corner, and proceeded to order with the concentration of a hungry man.
"Forgive my dwelling so tensely on the bill-of-fare," he said, when the waiter had gone. "You don't know what it means to one in my condition to have to choose between poulet en casserole and kidneys à la mâitre d'hôtel. A man's cross-roads!"
Jill smiled happily across the table at him. She could hardly believe that this old friend with whom she had gone through the perils of the night and with whom she was now about to feast was the sinister figure that had cast a shadow on her childhood. He looked positively incapable of pulling a little girl's hair--as no doubt he was.
"You always were greedy," she commented. "Just before I turned the hose on you, I remember you had made yourself thoroughly disliked by pocketing a piece of my birthday cake."
"Do you remember that?" His eyes lit up and he smiled back at her. He had an ingratiating smile. His mouth was rather wide, and it seemed to stretch right across his face. He reminded Jill more than ever of a big, friendly dog. "I can feel it now--all squashy in my pocket, inextricably mingled with a catapult, a couple of marbles, a box of matches, and some string. I was quite the human general store in those days. Which reminds me that we have been some time settling down to an exchange of our childish reminiscences, haven't we?"
"I've been trying to realize that you are Wally Mason. You have altered so."
"For the better?"
"Very much for the better! You were a horrid little brute. You used to terrify me. I never knew when you were going to bound out at me from behind a tree or something. I remember your chasing me for miles, shrieking at the top of your voice!"
"Sheer embarrassment! I told you just now how I used to worship you. If I shrieked a little, it was merely because I was shy. I did it to hide my devotion."
"You certainly succeeded. I never even suspected it."
Wally sighed.
"How like life! I never told my love, but let concealment like a worm i' the bud...."
"Talking of worms, you once put one down my back!"
"No, no," said Wally in a shocked voice. "Not that! I was boisterous, perhaps, but surely always the gentleman."
"You did! In the shrubbery. There had been a thunderstorm and...."
"I remember the incident now. A mere misunderstanding. I had done with the worm, and thought you might be glad to have it."
"You were always doing things like that. Once you held me over the pond and threatened to drop me into the water--in the winter! Just before Christmas. It was a particularly mean thing to do, because I couldn't even kick your shins for fear you would let me fall. Luckily Uncle Chris came up and made you stop."
"You considered that a fortunate occurrence, did you?" said Wally. "Well, perhaps from your point of view it may have been. I saw the thing from a different angle. Your uncle had a whangee with him. My friends sometimes wonder what I mean when I say that my old wound troubles me in frosty weather. By the way, how is your uncle?"
"Oh, he's very well. Just as lazy as ever. He's away at present, down at Brighton."
"He didn't strike me as lazy," said Wally thoughtfully. "Dynamic would express it better. But perhaps I happened to encounter him in a moment of energy. Ah!" The waiter had returned with a loaded tray. "The food! Forgive me if I seem a little distrait for a moment or two. There is man's work before me!"
"And later on, I suppose, you would like a chop or something to take away in your pocket?"
"I will think it over. Possibly a little soup. My needs are very simple these days."
Jill watched him with a growing sense of satisfaction. There was something boyishly engaging about this man. She felt at home with him. He affected her in much the same way as did Freddie Rooke. He was a definite addition to the things that went to make her happy.
She liked him particularly for being such a good loser. She had always been a good loser herself, and the quality was one which she admired. It was nice of him to dismiss from his conversation--and apparently from his thoughts--that night's fiasco and all that it must have cost him. She wondered how much he had lost. Certainly something very substantial. Yet it seemed to trouble him not at all. Jill considered his behaviour gallant, and her heart warmed to him. This was how a man ought to take the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
Wally sighed contentedly, and leaned back in his chair.
"An unpleasant exhibition!" he said apologetically. "But unavoidable. And, anyway, I take it that you prefer to have me well-fed and happy about the place than swooning on the floor with starvation. A wonderful thing, food! I am now ready to converse intelligently on any subject you care to suggest. I have eaten rose-leaves and am no more a golden ass, so to speak. What shall we talk about?"
"Tell me about yourself."
"There is no nobler topic. But what aspect of myself do you wish me to touch on? My thoughts, my tastes, my amusements, my career, or what? I can talk about myself for hours. My friends in New York often complain about it bitterly."
"New York?" said Jill. "Oh, then you live in America?"
"Yes. I only came over here to see that darned false alarm of a play of mine put on."
"Why didn't you put it on in New York?"
"Too many of the lads of the village know me over there. This was a new departure, you see. What the critics in those parts expect from me is something entitled 'Wow! Wow!' or 'The Girl from Yonkers.' It would have unsettled their minds to find me breaking out in poetic drama. They are men of coarse fibre and ribald mind and they would have been funny about it. I thought it wiser to come over here among strangers, little thinking that I should sit in the next seat to somebody I had known all my life."
"But when did you go to America? And why?"
"I think it must have been four--five--well, quite a number of years after the hose episode. Probably you didn't observe that I wasn't still around, but we crept silently out of the neighbourhood round about that time and went to live in London." His tone lost its lightness momentarily. "My father died, you know, and that sort of broke things up. He didn't leave any too much money, either. Apparently we had been living on rather too expensive a scale during the time I knew you. At any rate, I was more or less up against it until your father got me a job in an office in New York."
"My father!"
"Yes. It was wonderfully good of him to bother about me. I didn't suppose he would have known me by sight, and, even if he had remembered me, I shouldn't have imagined that the memory would have been a pleasant one. But he couldn't have taken more trouble if I had been a blood-relation."
"That was just like father," said Jill softly.
"He was a prince."
"But you aren't in the office now?"
"No. I found I had a knack of writing verses and things, and I wrote a few vaudeville songs. Then I came across a man named Bevan at a music publisher's. He was just starting to write music, and we got together and turned out some vaudeville sketches, and then a manager sent for us to fix up a show that was dying on the road and we had the good luck to turn it into a success, and after that it was pretty good going. George Bevan got married the other day. Lucky devil!"
"Are you married?"
"No."
"You were faithful to my memory?" said Jill with a smile.
"I was."
"It can't last," said Jill, shaking her head. "One of these days you'll meet some lovely American girl and then you'll put a worm down her back or pull her hair or whatever it is you do when you want to show your devotion, and.... What are you looking at? Is something interesting going on behind me?"
He had been looking past her out into the room.
"It's nothing," he said. "Only there's a statuesque old lady about two tables back of you who has been staring at you, with intervals for refreshment, for the last five minutes. You seem to fascinate her."
"An old lady?"
"Yes. With a glare! She looks like Dunsany's Bird of the Difficult Eye. Count ten and turn carelessly round, There, at that table. Almost behind you."
"Good Heavens!" exclaimed Jill.
She turned quickly round again.
"What's the matter? Do you know her? Somebody you don't want to meet?"
"It's Lady Underhill! And Derek's with her!"
Wally had been lifting his glass. He put it down rather suddenly.
"Derek?" he said.
"Derek Underhill. The man I'm engaged to marry."
There was a moment's silence.
"Oh!" said Wally thoughtfully. "The man you're engaged to marry? Yes, I see!"
He raised his glass again, and drank its contents quickly.
