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"It was good of you to put me up here," he went on, "but I think I won't trespass on your hospitality any longer. Perhaps you'll ask Parker to pack my things tomorrow." Derek moved, as majestically as an ex-guest of the Worshipful Company of Dry-Salters may, in the direction of the door. "I shall go to the Savoy." "Oh, I say, old man! No need to do that." "Good night." "But, I say . . ."
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.
One would say that Derek became himself again, but that the mood of gentle remorse which came upon him as he lay in the arm-chair was one so foreign to his nature. Freddie had never seen him so subdued. He was like a convalescent child. Between them, the all-night chemist and the Dry-Salters seemed to have wrought a sort of miracle.
"Oh, well . . ." "They are quite right. I did." "Oh, I shouldn't say that, you know. Faults on both sides and all that sort of rot." "I did!" Derek stared into the fire. Scattered all over London at that moment, probably, a hundred worshipful Dry-Salters were equally sleepless and subdued, looking wide-eyed into black pasts. "Is it true she has gone to America, Freddie?"
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.
One's mind fell back on the idea of law conveyancing seemed probable but his face lacked sharpness, and the alternative of confidential clerk to a firm of dry-salters was contradicted by an air of authority that raised observations on the weather to the level of a state document. The truth came upon me a flash of inspiration as I saw Mr. Perkins coming home one evening.
"It is like those good dry-salters and drapers of London town, who have helped out our enterprise, to expect us, landing on this barren shore in the depth of winter, to fall on fishing before we break our fast, or build a shelter for our wives and children. Our first work is to subdue the salvages, to cut down the forest, to build houses, and plant crops.
"Well . . ." Freddie hesitated. "That it's a bit tough . . . On Jill, you know." "They think I behaved badly?" "Well . . . Oh, well, you know!" Derek smiled a ghastly smile. This was not wholly due to mental disturbance. The dull heaviness which was the legacy of the Dry-Salters' dinner had begun to change to something more actively unpleasant.
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