Chapter 11
"Same here. Well, it's been an exciting evening. Started slow, I admit, but warmed up later! What I seem to need at the moment is a restorative stroll along the Embankment. Do you know, Sir Chester Portwood didn't like the t.i.tle of my play. He said 'Tried by Fire' was too melodramatic. Well, he can't say now it wasn't appropriate."
They made their way towards the river, avoiding the street which was blocked by the crowds and the fire-engines. As they crossed the Strand, the man looked back. A red glow was in the sky.
"A great blaze!" he said. "What you might call--in fact what the papers _will_ call--a holocaust. Quite a treat for the populace."
"Do you think they will be able to put it out?"
"Not a chance. It's got too much of a hold. It's a pity you hadn't that garden-hose of yours with you, isn't it?"
Jill stopped, wide-eyed.
"Garden-hose?"
"Don't you remember the garden-hose? I do! I can feel that clammy feeling of the water trickling down my back now!"
Memory, always a laggard by the wayside that redeems itself by an eleventh-hour rush, raced back to Jill. The Embankment turned to a sun-lit garden, and the January night to a July day. She stared at him. He was looking at her with a whimsical smile. It was a smile which, pleasant to-day, had seemed mocking and hostile on that afternoon years ago. She had always felt then that he was laughing at her, and at the age of twelve she had resented laughter at her expense.
"You surely can't be Wally Mason!" "I was wondering when you would remember." "But the programme called you something else--John something."
"That was a cunning disguise. Wally Mason is the only genuine and official name. And, by Jove! I've just remembered yours. It was Mariner. By the way,"--he paused for an almost imperceptible instant--"is it still?"
CHAPTER IV
THE LAST OF THE ROOKES TAKES A HAND
I
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 _bete 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 comrades.h.i.+p. 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 ma.s.sive 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.
"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 s.h.i.+vered 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 a.s.serted 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 embarra.s.sed. "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 const.i.tutes 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 h.o.a.rded 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 antic.i.p.ated, 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 ca.s.serole_ and kidneys _a la maitre d'hotel_. 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 embarra.s.sment! I told you just now how I used to wors.h.i.+p 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...."