Jill the Reckless. P. G. Wodehouse
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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.
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 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.
"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