The Little Warrior

"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 comradeship. 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 massive 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 shiver. 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 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."