Jill the Reckless by P. G. Wodehouse (best historical biographies .txt) 📕

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[57] 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[58] 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.

II

Jill looked at her companion anxiously. Recent events had caused her completely to forget the existence of Lady Underhill. She was always so intensely interested in what she happened to be doing at the moment that she often suffered these temporary lapses of memory. It occurred to her now—too late, as usual—that the Savoy Hotel was the last place in London where she should have come to supper with Wally. It was the hotel where Lady Underhill was staying. She frowned. Life had suddenly ceased to be careless and happy, and had become a problem-ridden thing, full of perplexity and misunderstandings.

"What shall I do?"

Wally Mason started at the sound of her voice. He appeared to be deep in thoughts of his own.

"I beg your pardon?"

"What shall I do?"

"I shouldn't be worried."

"Derek will be awfully cross."

Wally's good-humoured mouth tightened almost imperceptibly.

"Why?" he said. "There's nothing wrong in your having supper with an old friend."

"N-no," said Jill doubtfully. "But...."

"Derek Underhill," said Wally reflectively. "Is that Sir[59] Derek Underhill, whose name one's always seeing in the papers?"

"Derek is in the papers a lot. He's an M.P. and all sorts of things."

"Good-looking fellow. Ah, here's the coffee."

"I don't want any, thanks."

"Nonsense. Why spoil your meal because of this? Do you smoke?"

"No, thanks."

"Given it up, eh? Daresay you're wise. Stunts the growth and increases the expenses."

"Given it up?"

"Don't you remember sharing one of your father's cigars with me behind the haystack in the meadow? We cut it in half. I finished my half, but I fancy about three puffs were enough for you. Those were happy days!"

"That one wasn't! Of course I remember it now. I don't suppose I shall ever forget it."

"The thing was my fault, as usual. I recollect I dared you."

"Yes. I always took a dare."

"Do you still?"

"What do you mean?"

Wally knocked the ash off his cigarette.

"Well," he said slowly, "suppose I were to dare you to get up and walk over to that table and look your fiancé in the eye and say, 'Stop scowling at my back hair! I've a perfect right to be supping with an old friend!'—would you do it?"

"Is he?" said Jill startled.

"Scowling? Can't you feel it on the back of your head?" He drew thoughtfully at his cigarette. "If I were you I should stop that sort of thing at the source. It's a habit that can't be discouraged in a husband too early. Scowling is the civilized man's substitute for wife-beating."

Jill moved uncomfortably in her chair. Her quick temper resented his tone. There was a hostility, a hardly veiled contempt in his voice which stung her. Derek was sacred. Whoever criticised him, presumed. Wally, a few minutes before a friend and an agreeable companion, seemed to her to have changed. He was once more the boy whom she had disliked in the old days. There was a gleam in her eyes which should have warned him, but he went on.[60]

"I should imagine that this Derek of yours is not one of our leading sunbeams. Well, I suppose he could hardly be, if that's his mother and there is anything in heredity."

"Please don't criticise Derek," said Jill coldly.

"I was only saying...."

"Never mind. I don't like it."

A slow flush crept over Wally's face. He made no reply, and there fell between them a silence that was like a shadow, Jill sipped her coffee miserably. She was regretting that little spurt of temper. She wished she could have recalled the words. Not that it was the actual words that had torn asunder this gossamer thing, the friendship which they had begun to weave like some fragile web: it was her manner, the manner of the princess rebuking an underling. She knew that, if she had struck him, she could not have offended Wally more deeply. There are some men whose ebullient natures enable them to rise unscathed from the worst snub. Wally, her intuition told her, was not that kind of man.

There was only one way of mending the matter. In these clashes of human temperaments, these sudden storms that spring up out of a clear sky, it is possible sometimes to repair the damage, if the psychological moment is resolutely seized, by talking rapidly and with detachment on neutral topics. Words have made the rift, and words alone can bridge it. But neither Jill nor her companion could find words, and the silence lengthened grimly. When Wally spoke, it was in the level tones of a polite stranger.

"Your friends have gone."

His voice was the voice in which, when she went on railway journeys, fellow-travellers in the carriage enquired of Jill if she would prefer the window up or down. It had the effect of killing her regrets and feeding her resentment. She was a girl who never refused a challenge, and she set herself to be as frigidly polite and aloof as he.

"Really?" she said. "When did they leave?"

"A moment ago." The lights gave the warning flicker that announces the arrival of the hour of closing. In the momentary darkness they both rose. Wally scrawled his name across the bill which the waiter had insinuated upon his attention. "I suppose we had better be moving?"

They crossed the room in silence. Everybody was moving in the same direction. The broad stairway leading to the[61] lobby was crowded with chattering supper-parties. The light had gone up again.

At the cloak-room Wally stopped.

"I see Underhill waiting up there," he said casually. "To take you home, I suppose. Shall we say good-night? I'm staying in the hotel."

Jill glanced towards the head of the stairs. Derek was there. He was alone. Lady Underhill presumably had gone up to her room in the elevator.

Wally was holding out his hand. His face was stolid and his eyes avoided hers.

"Good-bye," he said.

"Good-bye," said Jill.

She felt curiously embarrassed. At this last moment hostility had weakened, and she was conscious of a desire to make amends. She and this man had been through much together that night, much that was perilous and much that was pleasant. A sudden feeling of remorse came over her.

"You'll come and see us, won't you?" she said a little wistfully. "I'm sure my uncle would like to meet you again."

"It's very good of you," said Wally, "but I'm afraid I shall be going back to America at any moment now."

Pique, that ally of the devil, regained its slipping grip upon Jill.

"Oh? I'm sorry," she said indifferently. "Well, good-bye, then."

"Good-bye."

"I hope you have a pleasant voyage."

"Thanks."

He turned into the cloak-room, and Jill went up the stairs to join Derek. She felt angry and depressed, full of a sense of the futility of things. People flashed into one's life and out again. Where was the sense of it?

III

Derek had been scowling, and Derek still scowled. His eyebrows were formidable, and his mouth smiled no welcome at Jill as she approached him. The evening, portions of which Jill had found so enjoyable, had contained no pleasant portions for Derek. Looking back over a lifetime whose events had been almost uniformly agreeable, he told himself[62] that he could not recall another day which had gone so completely awry. It had started with the fog. He hated fog. Then had come that meeting with his mother at Charing Cross, which had been enough to upset him by itself. After that, rising to a crescendo of unpleasantness, the day had provided that appalling situation at the Albany, the recollection of which still made him tingle; and there had followed the silent dinner, the boredom of the early part of the play, the fire at the theatre, the undignified scramble for the exits, and now this discovery of the girl whom he was engaged to marry supping at the Savoy with a fellow he didn't remember ever having seen in his life. All these things combined to induce in Derek a mood bordering on ferocity. His birth and income combining to make him one of the spoiled children of the world, had fitted him ill for such a series of catastrophes. He received