It had cost Mr. McEachern some pains to learn this lesson, but he had done it.
He shook hands and gruffly acknowledged the acquaintanceship.
“Really, really!” chirped Sir Thomas amiably. “So you find yourself among old friends, Mr. Pitt.”
“Old friends,” echoed Jimmy, painfully conscious of the ex-policeman’s eyes, which were boring holes in him.
“Excellent, excellent! Let me take you to your room. It is just opposite my own. This way.”
They parted from Mr. McEachern on the first landing, but Jimmy could still feel those eyes. The policeman’s stare had been of the sort which turns corners, goes upstairs, and pierces walls.
★ 13 ★
Spike’s Views
Nevertheless, it was in a very exalted frame of mind that he dressed for dinner. It seemed to him that he had awakened from a sort of stupor. Life, so grey yesterday, now appeared full of colour and possibilities. Most men who, either from choice or necessity, have knocked about the world for any length of time are more or less fatalists. Jimmy was an optimistic fatalist. He had always looked on fate not as a blind dispenser at random of gifts good and bad, but rather as a benevolent being with a pleasing bias in his favour. He had almost a Napoleonic faith in his star. At various periods of his life—notably at the time when, as he had told Lord Dreever, he had breakfasted on birdseed—he had been in uncommonly tight corners, but his luck had always extricated him. It struck him that it would be an unthinkable piece of bad sportsmanship on Fate’s part to see him through so much and then to abandon him just as he had arrived in sight of what was by far the biggest thing of his life. Of course, his view of what constituted the biggest thing in life had changed with the years. Every ridge of the Hill of Supreme Moments in turn had been mistaken by him for the summit; but this last, he felt instinctively, was genuine. For good or bad, Molly was woven into the texture of his life. In the stormy period of the early twenties he had thought the same of other girls, who were now mere memories as dim as those of figures in a half-forgotten play. In their case his convalescence had been temporarily painful, but brief. Force of will and an active life had worked the cure. He had merely braced himself up and firmly ejected them from his mind. A week or two of aching emptiness, and his heart had been once more in readiness—all nicely swept and done up—for the next lodger.
But in the case of Molly it was different. He had passed the age of instantaneous susceptibility. Like a landlord who had been cheated by previous tenants, he had become wary. He mistrusted his powers of recuperation in case of disaster. The will in these matters, just like the mundane “bouncer”, gets past his work. For some years now Jimmy had had a feeling that the next arrival would come to stay, and he had adopted, in consequence, a gently defensive attitude towards the other sex. Molly had broken through this, and he saw that his estimate of his willpower had been just. Methods which had proved excellent in the past were useless now. There was no trace here of that dimly-consoling feeling of earlier years that there were other girls in the world. He did not try to deceive himself. He knew that he had passed the age when a man can fall in love with any one of a number of types.
This was the finish, one way or the other. There was no second throw. She had him. However it might end, he belonged to her.