“Nobody,” said Algy judicially, “has got enough money of his own. Underhill thought he was marrying a girl with a sizeable chunk of the ready, and, when the fuse blew out, he decided it wasn’t good enough. For Heaven’s sake don’t let’s talk any more about the blighter. It gives me a pain to think of him.”
And Algy Martyn, suppressing every effort which Freddie made to reopen the subject, turned the conversation to more general matters.
§ 2.
Freddie returned to the Albany in a state of gloom and uneasiness. Algy’s remarks, coming on top of the Wally Mason episode, had shaken him. The London in which he and Derek moved and had their being is nothing but a village, and it was evident that village gossip was hostile to Derek. People were talking about him. Local opinion had decided that he had behaved badly. Already one man had cut him. Freddie blenched at a sudden vision of street-fulls of men, long Piccadillys of men, all cutting him, one after the other. Something had got to be done. He was devoted to Derek. This sort of thing was as bad as being cut himself. Whatever Freddie’s limitations in the matter of brain, he had a large heart and an infinite capacity for faithfulness in his friendships.
The subject was not an easy one to broach to his somewhat forbidding friend, as he discovered when the latter arrived about half an hour later. Derek had been attending the semi-annual banquet of the Worshipful Dry-Salters Company down in the City, understudying one of the speakers, a leading member of Parliament, who had been unable to appear; and he was still in the grip of that feeling of degraded repletion which city dinners induce. The dry-salters, on these occasions when they cast off for a night the cares and anxieties of dry-salting, do their guests well, and Derek had that bloated sense of foreboding which comes to a man whose stomach is not his strong point after twelve courses and a multitude of mixed wines. A goose, qualifying for the role of a pot of pate de foies gras, probably has exactly the same jaundiced outlook.
Yet, unfavorably disposed as, judging by his silence and the occasional moody grunts he uttered, he appeared to be to a discussion of his private affairs, it seemed to Freddie impossible that the night should be allowed to pass without some word spoken on the subject. He thought of Ronny and what Ronny had said, of Algy and what Algy had said, of Wally Mason and how Wally had behaved in this very room; and he nerved himself to the task.
“Derek, old top.”
A grunt.
“I say, Derek, old bean.”
Derek roused himself, and looked gloomily across the room to where he stood, warming his legs at the blaze.