P G Wodehouse - Man Upstairs

by Man Upstairs

  As a rule, her conversation, though pleasing was discursive and lacked central motive, but one morning she had genuine news to impart.

  "Owen"-her voice was excited-"have you seen the paper to-day? Then listen. I'll read it out. Are you listening? This is what it says: 'The Piccadilly Theatre will reopen shortly with a dramatized version of Miss Edith Butler's popular novel, White Roses, prepared by the authoress herself. A strong cast is being engaged, including-' And then a lot of names. What are you going to do about it, Owen?"

  "What am I going to do?"

  "Don't you see what's happened? That awful woman has stolen your play. She has waited all these years, hoping you would forget. What are you laughing at?"

  "I wasn't laughing."

  "Yes, you were. It tickled my ear. I'll ring off if you do it again. You don't believe me. Well, you wait and see if I'm not-"

  "Edith Butler's incapable of such a thing."

  There was a slight pause at the other end of the wire.

  "I thought you said you didn't know her," said Audrey, jealously.

  "I don't-I don't," said Owen, hastily. "But I've read her books. They're simply chunks of superfatted sentiment. She's a sort of literary onion. She compels tears. A woman like that couldn't steal a play if she tried."

  "You can't judge authors from their books. You must go and see the play when it comes on. Then you'll see I'm right. I'm absolutely certain that woman is trying to swindle you. Don't laugh in that horrid way. Very well, I told you I should ring off, and now I'm going to."

  At the beginning of the next month Owen's annual holiday arrived. The authorities of the London and Suburban Bank were no niggards. They recognized that a man is not a machine. They gave their employés ten days in the year in which to tone up their systems for another twelve months' work.

  Owen had spent his boyhood in the Shropshire village of which his father had been rector, and thither he went when his holiday came round, to the farm of one Dorman. He was glad of the chance to get to Shropshire. There is something about the country there, with its green fields and miniature rivers, that soothes the wounded spirit and forms a pleasant background for sentimental musings.

  It was comfortable at the farm. The household consisted of Mr. Dorman, an old acquaintance, his ten- year-old son George, and Mr. Dorman's mother, an aged lady with a considerable local reputation as a wise woman. Rumour had it that the future held no mysteries for her, and it was known that she could cure warts, bruised fingers, and even the botts by means of spells.

  Except for these, Owen had fancied that he was alone in the house. It seemed not, however. There was a primeval piano in his sitting-room, and on the second morning it suited his mood to sit down at this and sing "Asthore," the fruity pathos of which ballad appealed to him strongly at this time, accompanying himself by an ingenious arrangement in three chords. He had hardly begun, however, when Mr. Dorman appeared, somewhat agitated.

  "If you don't mind, Mr. Owen," he said. "I forgot to tell you. There's a lit'ery gent boarding with me in the room above, and he can't bear to be disturbed."

  A muffled stamping from the ceiling bore out his words.

  "Writing a book, he is," continued Mr. Dorman. "He caught young George a clip over the ear-'ole yesterday for blowing his trumpet on the stairs. Gave him sixpence afterwards, and said he'd skin him if he ever did it again. So, if you don't mind-"

  "Oh, all right," said Owen. "Who is he?"

  "Gentleman of the name of Prosser."

  Owen could not recollect having come across any work by anyone of that name; but he was not a wide reader; and, whether the man above was a celebrity or not, he was entitled to quiet.

  "I never heard of him," he said, "but that's no reason why I should disturb him. Let him rip. I'll cut out the musical effects in future."

  The days passed smoothly by. The literary man remained invisible, though occasionally audible, tramping the floor in the frenzy of composition. Nor, until the last day of his visit, did Owen see old Mrs. Dorman.

  That she was not unaware of his presence in the house, however, was indicated on the last morning. He was smoking an after-breakfast pipe at the open window and waiting for the dog-cart that was to take him to the station, when George, the son of the house, entered.

  George stood in the doorway, grinned, and said:

  "Farsezjerligranmatellyerforchbythercards?"

  "Eh?" said Owen.

  The youth repeated the word.

  "Once again."

  On the second repetition light began to creep in. A boyhood spent in the place, added to this ten days' stay, had made Owen something of a linguist.

  "Father says would I like grandma to do what?"

  "Tell yer forch'n by ther cards."

  "Where is she?"

  "Backyarnder."

  Owen followed him into the kitchen, where he found Mr. Dorman, the farmer, and, seated at the table, fumbling with a pack of cards, an old woman, whom he remembered well.

  "Mother wants to tell your fortune," said Mr. Dorman, in a hoarse aside. "She always will tell visitors' fortunes. She told Mr. Prosser's, and he didn't half like it, because she said he'd be engaged in two months and married inside the year. He said wild horses wouldn't make him do it."

  "She can tell me that if she likes. I sha'n't object."

  "Mother, here's Mr. Owen."

  "I seed him fast enough," said the old woman, briskly. "Shuffle, an' cut three times."

  She then performed mysterious manœuvres with the cards.

  "I see pots o' money," announced the sibyl.

  "If she says it, it's there right enough," said her son.

  "She means my bonus," said Owen. "But that's only ten pounds. And I lose it if I'm late twice more before Christmas."

  "It'll come sure enough."

  "Pots," said the old woman, and she was still mumbling the encouraging word when Owen left the kitchen and returned to the sitting-room.

  He laughed rather ruefully. At that moment he could have found a use for pots o' money.

  He walked to the window, and looked out. It was a glorious morning. The heat-mist was dancing over the meadow beyond the brook, and from the farmyard came the liquid charawks of care-free fowls. It seemed wicked to leave these haunts of peace for London on such a day.

  An acute melancholy seized him. Absently, he sat down at the piano. The prejudices of literary Mr. Prosser had slipped from his mind. Softly at first, then gathering volume as the spirit of the song gripped him, he began to sing "Asthore." He became absorbed.

  He had just, for the sixth time, won through to "Iyam-ah waiting for-er theeee-yass-thorre," and was doing some intricate three-chord work preparatory to starting over again, when a loaf of bread whizzed past his ear. It missed him by an inch, and crashed against a plaster statuette of the Infant Samuel on the top of the piano.

  It was a standard loaf, containing eighty per cent. of the semolina, and it practically wiped the Infant Samuel out of existence. At the same moment, at his back, there sounded a loud, wrathful snort.

  He spun round. The door was open, and at the other side of the table was standing a large, black-bearded, shirt-sleeved man, in an attitude rather reminiscent of Ajax defying the lightning. His hands trembled. His beard bristled. His eyes gleamed ferociously beneath enormous eyebrows. As Owen turned, he gave tongue in a voice like the discharge of a broadside.

  "Stop it!"

  Owen's mind, wrenched too suddenly from the dreamy future to the vivid present, was not yet completely under control. He gaped.

  "Stop-that-infernal-noise!" roared the man.

  He shot through the door, banging it after him, and pounded up the stairs.

  Owen was annoyed. The artistic temperament was all very well, but there were limits. It was absurd that obscure authors should behave in this way. Prosser! Who on earth was Prosser? Had anyone ever heard of him? No! Yet here he was going about the country clipping small boys over the ear-hole, and flinging loaves of bread at bank-c
lerks as if he were Henry James or Marie Corelli. Owen reproached himself bitterly for his momentary loss of presence of mind. If he had only kept his head, he could have taken a flying shot at the man with the marmalade-pot. It had been within easy reach. Instead of which, he had merely stood and gaped. Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, "It might have been."

  His manly regret was interrupted by the entrance of Mr. Dorman with the information that the dog-cart was at the door.

  Audrey was out of town when Owen arrived in London, but she returned a week later. The sound of her voice through the telephone did much to cure the restlessness from which he had been suffering since the conclusion of his holiday. But the thought that she was so near yet so inaccessible produced in him a meditative melancholy which enveloped him like a cloud that would not lift. His manner became distrait. He lost weight.

  If customers were not vaguely pained by his sad, pale face, it was only because the fierce rush of modern commercial life leaves your business man little leisure for observing pallor in bank-clerks. What did pain them was the gentle dreaminess with which he performed his duties. He was in the Inward Bills Department, one of the features of which was the sudden inrush towards the end of each afternoon, of hatless, energetic young men with leather bags strapped to their left arms, clamouring for mysterious crackling documents, much fastened with pins. Owen had never quite understood what it was that these young men did want, and now his detached mind refused even more emphatically to grapple with the problem. He distributed the documents at random with the air of a preoccupied monarch scattering largess to the mob, and the subsequent chaos had to be handled by a wrathful head of the department in person.

  Man's power of endurance is limited. At the end of the second week the overwrought head appealed passionately for relief, and Owen was removed to the Postage Department, where, when he had leisure from answering Audrey's telephone calls, he entered the addresses of letters in a large book and took them to the post. He was supposed also to stamp them, but a man in love cannot think of everything, and he was apt at times to overlook this formality.

  One morning, receiving from one of the bank messengers the usual intimation that a lady wished to speak to him on the telephone, he went to the box and took up the receiver.

  "Is that you, Owen? Owen, I went to White Roses last night. Have you been yet?"

  "Not yet."

  "Then you must go to-night. Owen, I'm certain you wrote it. It's perfectly lovely. I cried my eyes out. If you don't go to-night, I'll never speak to you again, even on the telephone. Promise."

  "Must I?"

  "Yes, you must. Why, suppose it is yours! It may mean a fortune. The stalls were simply packed. I'm going to ring up the theatre now and engage a seat for you, and pay for it myself."

  "No-I say-" protested Owen.

  "Yes, I shall. I can't trust you to go if I don't. And I'll ring up early to-morrow to hear all about it. Good- bye."

  Owen left the box somewhat depressed. Life was quite gloomy enough as it was, without going out of one's way to cry one's eyes out over sentimental plays.

  His depression was increased by the receipt, on his return to his department, of a message from the manager, stating that he would like to see Mr. Bentley in his private room for a moment. Owen never enjoyed these little chats with Authority. Out of office hours, in the circle of his friends, he had no doubt the manager was a delightful and entertaining companion; but in his private room his conversation was less enjoyable.

  The manager was seated at his table, thoughtfully regarding the ceiling. His resemblance to a stuffed trout, always striking, was subtly accentuated, and Owen, an expert in these matters, felt that his fears

  had been well founded-there was trouble in the air. Somebody had been complaining of him, and he was now about, as the phrase went, to be "run in."

  A large man, seated with his back to the door, turned as he entered, and Owen recognized the well- remembered features of Mr. Prosser, the literary loaf-slinger.

  Owen regarded him without resentment. Since returning to London he had taken the trouble of looking up his name in Who's Who? and had found that he was not so undistinguished as he had supposed. He was, it appeared, a Regius Professor and the author of some half-dozen works on sociology-a record, Owen felt, that almost justified loaf-flinging and ear-hole clipping in moments of irritation.

  The manager started to speak, but the man of letters anticipated him.

  "Is this the fool!" he roared. "Young man, I have no wish to be hard on a congenital idiot who is not responsible for his actions, but I must insist on an explanation. I understand that you are in charge of the correspondence in this office. Well, during the last week you have three times sent unstamped letters to my fiancée, Miss Vera Delane, Woodlands, Southbourne, Hants. What's the matter with you? Do you think she likes paying twopence a time, or what is it?"

  Owen's mind leaped back at the words. They recalled something to him. Then he remembered.

  He was conscious of a not unpleasant thrill. He had not known that he was superstitious, but for some reason he had not been able to get those absurd words of Mr. Dorman's mother out of his mind. And here was another prediction of hers, equally improbable, fulfilled to the latter.

  "Great Scott!" he cried. "Are you going to be married?"

  Mr. Prosser and the manager started simultaneously.

  "Mrs. Dorman said you would be," said Owen. "Don't you remember?"

  Mr. Prosser looked keenly at him.

  "Why, I've seen you before," he said. "You're the young turnip-headed scallywag at the farm."

  "That's right," said Owen.

  "I've been wanting to meet you again. I thought the whole thing over, and it struck me," said Mr. Prosser, handsomely, "that I may have seemed a little abrupt at our last meeting."

  "No, no."

  "The fact is, I was in the middle of an infernally difficult passage of my book that morning, and when you began-"

  "It was my fault entirely. I quite understand."

  Mr. Prosser produced a card-case.

  "We must see more of each other," he said. "Come and have a bit of dinner some night. Come to-night."

  "I'm very sorry. I have to go to the theatre to-night."

  "Then come and have a bit of supper afterwards. Excellent. Meet me at the Savoy at eleven-fifteen. I'm glad I didn't hit you with that loaf. Abruptness has been my failing through life. My father was just the same. Eleven-fifteen at the Savoy, then."

  The manager, who had been listening with some restlessness to the conversation, now intervened. He was a man with a sense of fitness of things, and he objected to having his private room made the scene of what appeared to be a reunion of old college chums. He hinted as much.

  "Ha! Prrumph!" he observed, disapprovingly. "Er-Mr. Bentley, that is all. You may return to your work-ah h'mmm! Kindly be more careful another time in stamping the letters."

  "Yes, by Jove," said Mr. Prosser, suddenly reminded of his wrongs, "that's right. Exercise a little ordinary care, you ivory-skulled young son of a gun. Do you think Miss Delane is made of twopences? Keep an eye on him," he urged the manager. "These young fellows nowadays want someone standing over them with a knout all the time. Be more careful another time, young man. Eleven-fifteen, remember. Make a note of it, or you'll go forgetting that."

  The seat which Audrey had bought for him at the Piccadilly Theatre proved to be in the centre of the sixth row of stalls-practically a death-trap. Whatever his sufferings might be, escape was impossible. He was securely wedged in.

  The cheaper parts of the house were sparsely occupied, but the stalls were full. Owen, disapproving of the whole business, refused to buy a programme, and settled himself in his seat prepared for the worst. He had a vivid recollection of White Roses, the novel, and he did not anticipate any keen enjoyment from it in its dramatized form. He had long ceased to be a member of that large public for which Miss Edith Butler catered. The sentimental adventures of g
overnesses in ducal houses-the heroine of White Roses was a governess-no longer contented his soul.

  There is always a curiously dream-like atmosphere about a play founded on a book. One seems to have seen it all before. During the whole of the first act Owen attributed to this his feeling of familiarity with what was going on on the stage. At the beginning of the second act he found himself anticipating events. But it was not till the third act that the truth sank in.

  The third was the only act in which, in his dramatization, he had taken any real liberties with the text of the novel. But in this act he had introduced a character who did not appear in the novel-a creature of his own imagination. And now, with bulging eyes, he observed this creature emerge from the wings, and heard him utter lines which he now clearly remembered having written.

  Audrey had been right! Serpent Edith Butler had stolen his play.

  His mind, during the remainder of the play, was active. By the time the final curtain fell and he passed out into the open air he had perceived some of the difficulties of the case. To prove oneself the author of an original play is hard, but not impossible. Friends to whom one had sketched the plot may come forward as witnesses. One may have preserved rough notes. But a dramatization of a novel is another matter. All dramatizations of any given novel must necessarily be very much alike.

  He started to walk along Piccadilly, and had reached Hyde Park Corner before he recollected that he had an engagement to take supper with Mr. Prosser at the Savoy Hotel. He hailed a cab.

  "You're late," boomed the author of sociological treatises, as he appeared. "You're infernally late. I suppose, in your woollen-headed way, you forgot all about it. Come along. We'll just have time for an olive and a glass of something before they turn the lights out."

  Owen was still thinking deeply as he began his supper. Surely there was some way by which he could prove his claims. What had he done with the original manuscript? He remembered now. He had burnt it. It had seemed mere useless litter then. Probably, he felt bitterly, the woman Butler had counted on this.