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 behavior 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 would 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.”
Wally beamed.
“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 very 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 neighborhood 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 expansive 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. Managers are just like sheep. They know nothing whatever about the show business themselves, and they come flocking after anybody who looks as if he could turn out the right stuff. They never think any one any good except the fellow who had the last hit. So, while your luck lasts, you have to keep them off with a stick. Then you have a couple of failures, and they skip off after somebody else, till you have another success, and then they all come skipping back again, bleating plaintively. George Bevan got married the other day—you probably read about it—he married Lord Marshmoreton’s daughter. Lucky devil!”