The Little Warrior Part 11

"'Opped it!" replied the other briefly, and coughed raspingly as he swallowed smoke.

"Strange," said the man in Jill's ear, as he pulled her along. "This way. Stick to me. Strange how the drama antic.i.p.ates life! At the end of act two there was a scene where Sir Chester had to creep sombrely out into the night, and now he's gone and done it! Ah!"

They had stumbled through a doorway and were out in a narrow pa.s.sage, where the air, though tainted, was comparatively fresh. Jill drew a deep breath. Her companion turned to the stage-hand and felt in his pocket.

"Here, Rollo!" A coin changed hands. "Go and get a drink. You need it after all this."

"Thank you, sir."

"Don't mention it. You've saved our lives. Suppose you hadn't come up and told us, and we had never noticed there was a fire! Charred bones, believed to be those of a man and a woman, were found in the ruined edifice!"

He turned to Jill. "Here's the stage-door. Shall we creep sombrely out into the night?"

The guardian of the stage-door was standing in the entrance of his little hutch, plainly perplexed. He was a slow thinker and a man whose life was ruled by routine: and the events of the evening had left him uncertain how to act.

"Wot's all this about a fire?" he demanded.

Jill's friend stopped.

"A fire?" He looked at Jill. "Did you hear anything about a fire?"

"They all come bustin' past 'ere yelling there's a fire," persisted the door-man.

"By George! Now I come to think of it, you're perfectly right! There _is_ a fire! If you wait here a little longer, you'll get it in the small of the back. Take the advice of an old friend who means you well and vanish. In the inspired words of the lad we've just parted from, 'op it!"

The stage-door man turned this over in his mind for a s.p.a.ce.

"But I'm supposed to stay 'ere till eleven-thirty and lock up!" he said. "That's what I'm supposed to do. Stay 'ere till eleven-thirty and lock up! And it ain't but ten-forty-five now."

"I see the difficulty," said Jill's companion thoughtfully. "It's what you might call an _impa.s.se_. French! Well, Casabianca, I'm afraid I don't see how to help you. It's a matter for your own conscience. I don't want to lure you from the burning deck: on the other hand, if you stick on here, you'll most certainly be fried on both sides ... But, tell me. You spoke about locking up something at eleven-thirty. What are you supposed to lock up?"

"Why, the theatre."

"Then that's all right. By eleven-thirty there won't be a theatre. If I were you, I should leave quietly and unostentatiously now.

Tomorrow, if you wish it, and if they've cooled off sufficiently, you can come and sit on the ruins. Good night!"

2.

Outside, the air was cold and crisp. Jill drew her warm cloak closer.

Round the corner there was noise and shouting. Fire-engines had arrived. Jill's companion lit a cigarette.

"Do you wish to stop and see the conflagration?" he asked.

Jill s.h.i.+vered. She was more shaken than she had realized.

"I've seen all the conflagration I want."

"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 Portwood Chester 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 sunlit 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 today, 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 FOUR

1.

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 hack 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-gray sky, A tram-car, full of home-bound travellers, clattered past over rails that shone with the peculiarly frostbitten 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.

It was a depressing prospect, and the thought crossed her mind that to the derelicts whose nightly resting-place was a seat on the Embankment the view must seem even bleaker than it did to herself.

She gave a little s.h.i.+ver. Somehow this sudden severance from the old days had brought with it a forlornness. She seemed to be standing alone in a changed world.

"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 reunion with a little supper, don't you?"

Jill's depression disappeared magically. Her mercurial temperament a.s.serted itself.