The Coming of Bill

by P. G. Wodehouse

Ruth was playing the piano softly. She had turned out all the lights except one, which hung above her head, shining on her white arms as they moved. From where he sat Kirk could see her profile. Her eyes were half closed.

The sight of her, as it always did, sent a thrill through him, but he was conscious of an ache behind it. He had hoped so much that Hank would pass, and he knew that he had not. Why was it that two people so completely one as Ruth and himself could not see Hank with the same eyes?

He knew that she had thought him uncouth and impossible. Why could not Hank have exerted himself more, instead of sitting there in that stuffed way? Why could not Ruth have unbent? Why had not he himself done something to save the situation? Of the three, he blamed himself most. He was the one who should have taken the lead and made things pleasant for everybody instead of forcing out conversational platitudes.

Once or twice he had caught Hank’s eye, and had hated himself for understanding what it said and not being able to deny it. He had marked the end of their old relationship, the parting of the ways, and that a tragedy had been played out that night.

He found himself thinking of Hank as of a friend who had died. What times they had had! How smoothly they had got on together! He could not recall a single occasion on which they had fallen out, from the time when they had fought as boys at the prep. school and cemented their friendship the next day. After that there had been periods when they had parted, sometimes for more than a year, but they had always come together again and picked up the threads as neatly as if there had been no gap in their intimacy.

He had gone to college: Hank had started on the roving life which suited his temperament. But they had never lost touch with each other. And now it was all over. They would meet again, but it would not be the same. The angel with the flaming sword stood between them.

For the first time since the delirium of marriage had seized upon him, Kirk was conscious of a feeling that all was not for the best in a best of all possible worlds, a feeling of regret, not that he had married—the mere thought would have been a blasphemy—but that marriage was such a complicated affair. He liked a calm life, free from complications, and now they were springing up on every side.

There was the matter of the models. Kirk had supposed that it was only in the comic papers that the artist’s wife objected to his employing models. He had classed it with the mother-in-law joke, respecting it for its antiquity, but not imagining that it ever really happened. And Ruth had brought this absurd situation into the sphere of practical politics only a few days ago.

Since his marriage Kirk had dropped his work almost entirely. There had seemed to be no time for it. He liked to spend his days going round the stores with Ruth, buying her things, or looking in at the windows of Fifth Avenue shops and choosing what he would buy her when he had made his fortune. It was agreed upon between them that he was to make his fortune some day.

Kirk’s painting had always been more of a hobby with him than a profession. He knew that he had talent, but talent without hard work is a poor weapon, and he had always shirked hard work. He had an instinct for colour, but his drawing was uncertain. He hated linework, while knowing that only through steady practice at linework could he achieve his artistic salvation. He was an amateur, and a lazy amateur.