“He nodded. ‘That’s why I want to do something for you. You’ve done me the greatest service that anyone has ever done me. I have a very happy home and three very happy children, and but for you I don’t think I should have ever married.’
“That made me laugh. ‘So you heard me sing: “Love me in a cottage by the sea,” and caught the next train to Margate?’
“‘Oh, no, no! Something—something perhaps you’d rather not be reminded of. But, do you remember when “The Eastern Princess” was running at the Clarion, and you flung up your part at a moment’s notice and weren’t seen again in London for six months?’
“I nodded. One of the landmarks in my life, that show was.
“‘Well,’ he said, ‘I was twenty-seven then. I’d just passed my first medical exam. in Ireland and had come up to London to open a practice in Richmond. I wasn’t badly off. I had good prospects. I was a sportsman. For eight years, ever since I had gone up to Oxford, I had been working really hard. All my friends told me that my innings was just going to begin. “You’ll have a wonderful time,” they said; “there’s no place like London.”’
“‘And then I fell in love with a very young and very unsophisticated girl, the daughter of a country parson whom I had got to know during a cricket tour. My friends did their very best to dissuade me. “It’s perfect madness,” they said, “you’re going to chuck your life away before you’ve started it. You could have a wonderful time. My dear chap, don’t be an ass!” And they took me to dancing clubs, and the heat and colour mounted to my brain. I began to agree with them: marriage was a fetter, a prison house. One didn’t chuck one’s life away.
“‘And then I heard a rumour about you. They were saying that you had gone away because—well, your name was coupled with the producer’s there. What was his name? Ah, yes, Clive Ferguson,—and they said that you were—well—er—very ill.
“‘It’ll surprise you, but I don’t think anything’s ever shocked me quite so much. I had heard you sing a great many times. I had made a sort of ideal of you, as young men will of actresses. You had become the embodiment to me of the gay, brightly coloured butterfly life of London; and, when I heard that rumour, your ruin seemed a criticism of the whole life you represented. That’s where it ends, I told myself. I thought of you as I had last seen you, singing in that great silver dress of yours. And then I thought of what life would be to you from then on. And I don’t know, but beneath its warmth and glitter that life seemed hard and cruel and revengeful. A month later I was married, and I’ve been very, very happy. And—well, it’s a bit late, I’m afraid, but if I can I should like to be able to do something for you now.’”
Pussy Willow stopped speaking, tossed back her head and smiled. “And that’s the way I got my beer money for life.”
“And was it true?” I asked.