“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 reunion 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 tonight 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 check, 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 fog 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 a la maitre d’hotel. A man’s cross-roads!”