P G Wodehouse - Man Upstairs

by Man Upstairs

  Sally had watched the proceedings, sick and horrified. She had never seen men fight before, and the terror of it overwhelmed her. Her vanity received no pleasant stimulation from the thought that it was for her sake that this storm had been let loose. For the moment her vanity was dead, stunned by collision with the realities. She found herself watching in a dream. She saw Ted fall, rise, fall again, and lie where he had fallen; and then she was aware that Tom was speaking.

  "Come along!"

  She hung back. Ted was lying very still. Gruesome ideas presented themselves. She had just accepted them as truth when Ted wriggled. He wriggled again. Then he sat up suddenly, looked at her with unseeing eyes, and said something in a thick voice. She gave a little sob of relief. It was ghastly, but not so ghastly as what she had been imagining.

  Somebody touched her arm. Tom was by her side, grim and formidable. He was wiping blood from his face.

  "Come along!"

  She followed him without a word. And presently, behold, in another field, whistling meditatively and regardless of impending ill, Albert Parsons.

  In everything that he did Tom was a man of method. He did not depart from his chosen formula.

  "Albert," he said, "there's been a mistake."

  And Albert gaped, as Ted had gaped.

  Tom kissed Sally with the gravity of one performing a ritual.

  The uglinesses of life, as we grow accustomed to them, lose their power to shock, and there is no doubt that Sally looked with a different eye upon this second struggle. She was conscious of a thrill of excitement, very different from the shrinking horror which had seized her before. Her stunned vanity began to tingle into life again. The fight was raging furiously over the trampled turf, and quite suddenly, as she watched, she was aware that her heart was with Tom.

  It was no longer two strange brutes fighting in a field. It was her man battling for her sake.

  She desired overwhelmingly that he should win, that he should not be hurt, that he should sweep triumphantly over Albert Parsons as he had swept over Ted Pringle.

  Unfortunately, it was evident, even to her, that he was being hurt, and that he was very far from sweeping triumphantly over Albert Parsons. He had not allowed himself time to recover from his first battle, and his blows were slow and weary. Albert, moreover, was made of sterner stuff than Ted. Though now a peaceful tender of cows, there had been a time in his hot youth when, travelling with a circus, he had fought, week in, week out, relays of just such rustic warriors as Tom. He knew their methods-their headlong rushes, their swinging blows. They were the merest commonplaces of life to him. He slipped Tom, he side-stepped Tom, he jabbed Tom; he did everything to Tom that a trained boxer can do to a reckless novice, except knock the fight out of him, until presently, through the sheer labour of hitting, he, too, grew weary.

  Now, in the days when Albert Parsons had fought whole families of Toms in an evening, he had fought in rounds, with the boss holding the watch, and half-minute rests, and water to refresh him, and all orderly and proper. To-day there were no rounds, no rests, no water, and the peaceful tending of cows had caused flesh to grow where there had been only muscle. Tom's headlong rushes became less easy to sidestep, his swinging blows more swift than the scientific counter that shot out to check them. As he tired Tom seemed to regain strength. The tide of the battle began to ebb. He clinched, and Tom threw him off. He feinted, and while he was feinting Tom was on him. It was the climax of the battle-the last rally. Down went Albert, and stayed down. Physically, he was not finished; but in his mind a question had framed itself-the question, "Was it worth it?"-and he was answering, "No." There were other girls in the world. No girl was worth all this trouble.

  He did not rise.

  "Come along!" said Tom.

  He spoke thickly. His breath was coming in gasps. He was a terrible spectacle, but Sally was past the weaker emotions. She was back in the Stone Age, and her only feeling was one of passionate pride. She tried to speak, She struggled to put all she felt into words, but something kept her dumb, and she followed him in silence.

  In the lane outside his cottage, down by the creek, Joe Blossom was clipping a hedge. The sound of footsteps made him turn.

  He did not recognise Tom till he spoke.

  "Joe, there's been a mistake," said Tom.

  "Been a gunpowder explosion, more like," said Joe, a simple, practical man. "What you been doin' to your face?"

  "She's going to marry me, Joe."

  Joe eyed Sally inquiringly.

  "Eh? You promised to marry me."

  "She promised to marry all of us. You, me, Ted Pringle, and Albert Parsons."

  "Promised-to-marry-all-of-us!"

  "That's where the mistake was. She's only going to marry me. I-I've arranged it with Ted and Albert, and now I've come to explain to you, Joe."

  "You promised to marry-!"

  The colossal nature of Sally's deceit was plainly troubling Joe Blossom. He expelled his breath in a long note of amazement. Then he summed up.

  "Why, you're nothing more nor less than a Joshua!"

  The years that had passed since Joe had attended the village Sunday-school had weakened his once easy familiarity with the characters of the Old Testament. It is possible that he had somebody else in his mind.

  Tom stuck doggedly to his point.

  "You can't marry her, Joe."

  Joe Blossom raised his shears and clipped a protruding branch. The point under discussion seemed to have ceased to interest him.

  "Who wants to?" he said. "Good riddance!"

  They went down the lane. Silence still brooded over them. The words she wanted continued to evade her.

  They came to a grassy bank. Tom sat down. He was feeling unutterably tired.

  "Tom!"

  He looked up. His mind was working dizzily.

  "You're going to marry me," he muttered.

  She sat down beside him.

  "I know," she said. "Tom, dear, lay your head on my lap and go to sleep."

  If this story proves anything (beyond the advantage of being in good training when you fight), it proves that you cannot get away from the moving pictures even in a place like Millbourne; for as Sally sat there, nursing Tom, it suddenly struck her that this was the very situation with which that "Romance of the Middle Ages" film ended. You know the one I mean. Sir Percival Ye Something (which has slipped my memory for the moment) goes out after the Holy Grail; meets damsel in distress; overcomes her persecutors; rescues her? gets wounded, and is nursed back to life in her arms. Sally had seen it a dozen times. And every time she had reflected that the days of romance are dead, and that that sort of thing can't happen nowadays.

  Deep Waters

  Historians of the social life of the later Roman Empire speak of a certain young man of Ariminum, who would jump into rivers and swim in 'em. When his friends said, "You fish!" he would answer, "Oh, pish! Fish can't swim like me, they've no vim in 'em."

  Just such another was George Barnert Callender.

  On land, in his land clothes, George was a young man who excited little remark. He looked very much like other young men. He was much about the ordinary height. His carriage suggested the possession of an ordinary amount of physical strength. Such was George-on shore. But remove his clothes, drape him in a bathing-suit, and insert him in the water, and instantly, like the gentleman in The Tempest, he "suffered a sea-change into something rich and strange." Other men puffed, snorted, and splashed. George passed through the ocean with the silent dignity of a torpedo. Other men swallowed water, here a mouthful, there a pint, anon, maybe, a quart or so, and returned to the shore like foundering derelicts. George's mouth had all the exclusiveness of a fashionable club. His breast-stroke was a thing to see and wonder at. When he did the crawl, strong men gasped. When he swam on his back, you felt that that was the only possible method of progression.

  George came to Marvis Bay at about five o'clock one evening in July. Marvis Bay has a well-established reputation as a sum
mer resort, and, while not perhaps in every respect the paradise which the excitable writer of the local guidebook asserts it to be, on the whole it earns its reputation. Its sands are smooth and firm, sloping almost imperceptibly into the ocean. There is surf for those who like it, and smoother water beyond for those whose ideals in bathing are not confined to jumping up and down on a given jelly-fish. At the northern end of the beach there is a long pier. It was to this that George made his way on his arrival.

  It was pleasant on the pier. Once you had passed the initial zareba of fruit stands, souvenir stands, ice- cream stands, and the lair of the enthusiast whose aim in life it was to sell you picture post cards, and had won through to the long walk where the seats were, you were practically alone with Nature. At this hour of the day the place was deserted; George had it to himself. He strolled alowly along. The water glittered under the sun-rays, breaking into a flurry of white foam as it reached the beach. A cool breeze blew. The whole scenic arrangements were a great improvement on the stuffy city he had left. Not that George had come to Marvis Bay with the single aim of finding an antidote to metropolitan stuffiness. There was a more important reason. In three days Marvis Bay was to be the scene of the production of Fate's Footballs, a comedy in four acts by G. Barnert Callender. For George, though you would not have suspected it from his exterior, was one of those in whose cerebra the grey matter splashes restlessly about, producing strong curtains and crisp dialogue. The company was due at Marvis Bay on the following evening for the last spasm of rehearsals.

  George's mind, as he paced the pier, was divided between the beauties of Nature and the forthcoming crisis in his affairs in the ratio of one-eighth to the former and seven-eighths to the latter. At the moment when he had left London, thoroughly disgusted with the entire theatrical world in general and the company which was rehearsing Fate's Footballs in particular, rehearsals had just reached that stage of brisk delirium when the author toys with his bottle of poison and the stage-manager becomes icily polite. The Footpills-as Arthur Mifflin, the leading juvenile in the great play, insisted upon calling it, much to George's disapproval-was his first piece. Never before had he been in one of those kitchens where many cooks prepare, and sometimes spoil, the theatrical broth. Consequently the chaos seemed to him unique. Had he been a more experienced dramatist, he would have said to himself, " 'Twas ever thus." As it was, what he said to himself-and others-was more forcible.

  He was trying to dismiss the whole thing from his mind-a feat which had hitherto proved beyond his powers-when Fate, in an unusually kindly mood, enabled him to do so in a flash by presenting to his jaundiced gaze what, on consideration, he decided was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. "When a man's afraid," shrewdly sings the bard, "a beautiful maid is a cheering sight to see." In the present instance the sight acted on George like a tonic. He forgot that the lady to whom an injudicious management had assigned the role of heroine in Fate's Footballs invariably-no doubt from the best motives-omitted to give the cynical roue his cue for the big speech in act three. His mind no longer dwelt on the fact that Arthur Mifflin, an estimable person in private life, and one who had been a friend of his at Cambridge, preferred to deliver the impassioned lines of the great renunciation scene in a manner suggesting a small boy (and a sufferer from nasal catarrh at that) speaking a piece at a Sunday-school treat. The recollection of the hideous depression and gloom which the leading comedian had radiated in great clouds fled from him like some grisly nightmare before the goddess of day. Every cell in his brain was occupied, to the exclusion of all other thoughts, by the girl swimming in the water below.

  She swam well. His practised eye saw that. Her strong, easy strokes carried her swiftly over the swell of the waves. He stared, transfixed. He was a well-brought-up young man, and he knew how ill-bred it was to stare; but this was a special occasion. Ordinary rules of conventional etiquette could not apply to a case like this. He stared. More, he gaped. As the girl passed on into the shadow of the pier he leaned further over the rail, and his neck extended in joints like a telescope.

  At this point the girl turned to swim on her back. Her eyes met his. Hers were deep and clear; his, bulging. For what seemed an eternity to George, she continued to look at him. Then, turning over again, she shot past under the pier.

  George's neck was now at its full stretch. No power of will or muscle could add another yard to it. Realising this, he leaned farther over the rail, and farther still. His hat slid from his hand. He grabbed at it, and, overbalancing, fell with a splash into the water.

  Now, in ordinary circumstances, to fall twelve feet into the ocean with all his clothes on would have incommoded George little. He would hardly have noticed it. He would have swum to shore with merely a feeling of amused self-reproach akin to that of the man who absent-mindedly walks into a lamp-post in the street. When, therefore, he came to the surface he prepared without agitation to strike out in his usual bold fashion. At this moment, however, two hands, grasping him beneath the arms, lifted his head still farther from the waves, and a voice in his ear said, "Keep still; don't struggle. There's no danger."

  George did not struggle. His brain, working with the cool rapidity of a buzz-saw in an ice-box, had planned a line of action. Few things are more difficult in this world for a young man than the securing of an introduction to the right girl under just the right conditions. When he is looking his best he is presented to her in the midst of a crowd, and is swept away after a rapid hand-shake. When there is no crowd he has toothache, or the sun has just begun to make his nose peel. Thousands of young lives have been saddened in this manner.

  How different was George's case! By this simple accident, he reflected, as, helping the good work along with an occasional surreptitious leg-stroke, he was towed shorewards, there had been formed an acquaintanceship, if nothing more, which could not lightly be broken. A girl who has saved a man from drowning cannot pass him by next day with a formal bow. And what a girl, too! There had been a time, in extreme youth, when his feminine ideal was the sort of girl who has fuzzy, golden hair, and drops things. Indeed in his first year at the University he had said-and written-as much to one of the type, the episode concluding with a strong little drama, in which a wrathful, cheque-signing father had starred, supported by a subdued, misogynistic son. Which things, aided by the march of time, had turned George's tastes towards the healthy, open-air girl, who did things instead of dropping them.

  The pleasantest functions must come to an end sooner or later; and in due season George felt his heels grate on the sand. His preserver loosed her hold. They stood up and faced each other. George began to express his gratitude as best he could-it was not easy to find neat, convincing sentences on the spur of the moment-but she cut him short.

  "Of course, it was nothing. Nothing at all," she said, brushing the sea-water from her eyes. "It was just lucky I happened to be there."

  "It was splendid," said the infatuated dramatist. "It was magnificent. It-"

  He saw that she was smiling.

  "You're very wet," she said.

  George glanced down at his soaked clothes. It had been a nice suit once.

  "Hadn't you better hurry back and change into something dry?"

  Looking round about him, George perceived that sundry of the inquisitive were swooping down, with speculation in their eyes. It was time to depart.

  "Have you far to go?"

  "Not far. I'm staying at the Beach View Hotel."

  "Why, so am I. I hope we shall meet again."

  "We shall," said George confidently.

  "How did you happen to fall in?"

  "I was-er-I was looking at something in the water."

  "I thought you were," said the girl, quietly.

  George blushed.

  "I know," he said, "it was abominably rude of me to stare like that; but-"

  "You should learn to swim," interrupted the girl. "I can't understand why every boy in the country isn't made to learn to swim before he's ten years old. A
nd it isn't a bit difficult, really. I could teach you in a week."

  The struggle between George and George's conscience was brief. The conscience, weak by nature and flabby from long want of exercise, had no sort of chance from the start.

  "I wish you would," said George. And with those words he realised that he had definitely committed himself to his hypocritical role. Till that moment explanation would have been difficult, but possible. Now it was impossible.

  "I will," said the girl. "I'll start to-morrow if you like." She waded into the water.

  "We'll talk it over at the hotel," she said, hastily. "Here comes a crowd of horrid people. I'm going to swim out again."

  She hurried into deeper water, while George, turning, made his way through a growing throng of goggling spectators. Of the fifteen who got within speaking distance of him, six told him that he was wet. The other nine asked him if he had fallen in.

  Her name was Vaughan, and she was visiting Marvis Bay in company with an aunt. So much George ascertained from the management of the hotel. Later, after dinner, meeting both ladies on the esplanade, he gleaned further information-to wit, that her first name was Mary, that her aunt was glad to make his acquaintance, liked Marvis Bay but preferred Trouville, and thought it was getting a little chilly and would go indoors.

  The elimination of the third factor had a restorative effect upon George's conversation, which had begun to languish. In feminine society as a rule he was apt to be constrained, but with Mary Vaughan it was different. Within a couple of minutes he was pouring out his troubles. The cue-with-holding leading lady, the stick-like Mifflin, the funereal comedian-up they all came, and she, gently sympathetic, was endeavouring, not without success, to prove to him that things were not so bad as they seemed.