The Adventures of Sally

by Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

  "I—er—oh, I didn't tell you that. I'm sort of—er—mixed up in the show. Cracknell—you remember he was at college with me—suggested that I should come down and look at it. Shouldn't wonder if he wants me to put money into it and so on."

  "I thought he had all the money in the world."

  "Yes, he has a lot, but these fellows like to let a pal in on a good thing."

  "Is it a good thing?"

  "The play's fine."

  "That's what Mr. Faucitt said. But Mabel Hobson..."

  Fillmore's ample face registered emotion.

  "She's an awful woman, Sally! She can't act, and she throws her weight about all the time. The other day there was a fuss about a paper-knife..."

  "How do you mean, a fuss about a paper-knife?"

  "One of the props, you know. It got mislaid. I'm certain it wasn't my fault..."

  "How could it have been your fault?" asked Sally wonderingly. Love seemed to have the worst effects on Fillmore's mentality.

  "Well—er—you know how it is. Angry woman... blames the first person she sees... This paper-knife..."

  Fillmore's voice trailed off into pained silence.

  "Mr. Faucitt said Elsa Doland was good."

  "Oh, she's all right," said Fillmore indifferently. "But—" His face brightened and animation crept into his voice. "But the girl you want to watch is Miss Winch. Gladys Winch. She plays the maid. She's only in the first act, and hasn't much to say, except 'Did you ring, madam?' and things like that. But it's the way she says 'em! Sally, that girl's a genius! The greatest character actress in a dozen years! You mark my words, in a darned little while you'll see her name up on Broadway in electric light. Personality? Ask me! Charm? She wrote the words and music! Looks?..."

  "All right! All right! I know all about it, Fill. And will you kindly inform me how you dared to get engaged without consulting me?"

  Fillmore blushed richly.

  "Oh, do you know?"

  "Yes. Mr. Faucitt told me."

  "Well..."

  "Well?"

  "Well, I'm only human," argued Fillmore.

  "I call that a very handsome admission. You've got quite modest, Fill."

  He had certainly changed for the better since their last meeting.

  It was as if someone had punctured him and let out all the pomposity. If this was due, as Mr. Faucitt had suggested, to the influence of Miss Winch, Sally felt that she could not but approve of the romance.

  "I'll introduce you sometime,' said Fillmore.

  "I want to meet her very much."

  "I'll have to be going now. I've got to see Bunbury. I thought he might be in here."

  "Who's Bunbury?"

  "The producer. I suppose he is breakfasting in his room. I'd better go up."

  "You are busy, aren't you. Little marvel! It's lucky they've got you to look after them."

  Fillmore retired and Sally settled down to wait for Gerald, no longer hurt by his manner over the telephone. Poor Gerald! No wonder he had seemed upset.

  A few minutes later he came in.

  "Oh, Jerry darling," said Sally, as he reached the table, "I'm so sorry. I've just been hearing about it."

  Gerald sat down. His appearance fulfilled the promise of his voice over the telephone. A sort of nervous dullness wrapped him about like a garment.

  "It's just my luck," he said gloomily. "It's the kind of thing that couldn't happen to anyone but me. Damned fools! Where's the sense in shutting the theatres, even if there is influenza about? They let people jam against one another all day in the stores. If that doesn't hurt them why should it hurt them to go to theatres? Besides, it's all infernal nonsense about this thing. I don't believe there is such a thing as Spanish influenza. People get colds in their heads and think they're dying. It's all a fake scare."

  "I don't think it's that," said Sally. "Poor Mr. Faucitt had it quite badly. That's why I couldn't come earlier."

  Gerald did not seem interested either by the news of Mr. Faucitt's illness or by the fact that Sally, after delay, had at last arrived. He dug a spoon sombrely into his grape-fruit.

  "We've been hanging about here day after day, getting bored to death all the time... The company's going all to pieces. They're sick of rehearsing and rehearsing when nobody knows if we'll ever open. They were all keyed up a week ago, and they've been sagging ever since. It will ruin the play, of course. My first chance! Just chucked away."

  Sally was listening with a growing feeling of desolation. She tried to be fair, to remember that he had had a terrible disappointment and was under a great strain. And yet... it was unfortunate that self-pity was a thing she particularly disliked in a man. Her vanity, too, was hurt. It was obvious that her arrival, so far from acting as a magic restorative, had effected nothing. She could not help remembering, though it made her feel disloyal, what Mr. Faucitt had said about Gerald. She had never noticed before that he was remarkably self-centred, but he was thrusting the fact upon her attention now.

  "That Hobson woman is beginning to make trouble," went on Gerald, prodding in a despairing sort of way at scrambled eggs. "She ought never to have had the part, never. She can't handle it. Elsa Doland could play it a thousand times better. I wrote Elsa in a few lines the other day, and the Hobson woman went right up in the air. You don't know what a star is till you've seen one of these promoted clothes-props from the Follies trying to be one. It took me an hour to talk her round and keep her from throwing up her part."

  "Why not let her throw up her part?"

  "For heaven's sake talk sense," said Gerald querulously. "Do you suppose that man Cracknell would keep the play on if she wasn't in it? He would close the show in a second, and where would I be then? You don't seem to realize that this is a big chance for me. I'd look a fool throwing it away."

  "I see," said Sally, shortly. She had never felt so wretched in her life. Foreign travel, she decided, was a mistake. It might be pleasant and broadening to the mind, but it seemed to put you so out of touch with people when you got back. She analysed her sensations, and arrived at the conclusion that what she was resenting was the fact that Gerald was trying to get the advantages of two attitudes simultaneously. A man in trouble may either be the captain of his soul and superior to pity, or he may be a broken thing for a woman to pet and comfort. Gerald, it seemed to her, was advertising himself as an object for her commiseration, and at the same time raising a barrier against it. He appeared to demand her sympathy while holding himself aloof from it. She had the uncomfortable sensation of feeling herself shut out and useless.

  "By the way," said Gerald, "there's one thing. I have to keep her jollying along all the time, so for goodness' sake don't go letting it out that we're engaged."

  Sally's chin went up with a jerk. This was too much.

  "If you find it a handicap being engaged to me..."

  "Don't be silly." Gerald took refuge in pathos. "Good God! It's tough! Here am I, worried to death, and you..."

  Before he could finish the sentence, Sally's mood had undergone one of those swift changes which sometimes made her feel that she must be lacking in character. A simple, comforting thought had come to her, altering her entire outlook. She had come off the train tired and gritty, and what seemed the general out-of-jointness of the world was entirely due, she decided, to the fact that she had not had a bath and that her hair was all anyhow. She felt suddenly tranquil. If it was merely her grubby and dishevelled condition that made Gerald seem to her so different, all was well. She put her hand on his with a quick gesture of penitence.

  "I'm so sorry," she said. "I've been a brute, but I do sympathize, really."

  "I've had an awful time," mumbled Gerald.

  "I know, I know. But you never told me you were glad to see me."

  "Of course I'm glad to see you."

  "Why didn't you say so, then, you poor fish? And why didn't you ask me if I had enjoyed myself in Europe?"

  "Did you enjoy yourself?"

  "Yes, except that I missed
you so much. There! Now we can consider my lecture on foreign travel finished, and you can go on telling me your troubles."

  Gerald accepted the invitation. He spoke at considerable length, though with little variety. It appeared definitely established in his mind that Providence had invented Spanish influenza purely with a view to wrecking his future. But now he seemed less aloof, more open to sympathy. The brief thunderstorm had cleared the air. Sally lost that sense of detachment and exclusion which had weighed upon her.

  "Well," said Gerald, at length, looking at his watch, "I suppose I had better be off."

  "Rehearsal?"

  "Yes, confound it. It's the only way of getting through the day. Are you coming along?"

  "I'll come directly I've unpacked and tidied myself up."

  "See you at the theatre, then."

  Sally went out and rang for the lift to take her up to her room.

  2

  The rehearsal had started when she reached the theatre. As she entered the dark auditorium, voices came to her with that thin and reedy effect which is produced by people talking in an empty building. She sat down at the back of the house, and, as her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, was able to see Gerald sitting in the front row beside a man with a bald head fringed with orange hair whom she took correctly to be Mr. Bunbury, the producer. Dotted about the house in ones and twos were members of the company whose presence was not required in the first act. On the stage, Elsa Doland, looking very attractive, was playing a scene with a man in a bowler hat. She was speaking a line, as Sally came in.

  "Why, what do you mean, father?"

  "Tiddly-omty-om," was the bowler-hatted one's surprising reply. "Tiddly-omty-om... long speech ending in 'find me in the library.' And exit," said the man in the bowler hat, starting to do so.

  For the first time Sally became aware of the atmosphere of nerves. Mr. Bunbury, who seemed to be a man of temperament, picked up his walking-stick, which was leaning against the next seat, and flung it with some violence across the house.

  "For God's sake!" said Mr. Bunbury.

  "Now what?" inquired the bowler hat, interested, pausing hallway across the stage.

  "Do speak the lines, Teddy," exclaimed Gerald. "Don't skip them in that sloppy fashion."

  "You don't want me to go over the whole thing?" asked the bowler hat, amazed.

  "Yes!"

  "Not the whole damn thing?" queried the bowler hat, fighting with incredulity.

  "This is a rehearsal," snapped Mr. Bunbury. "If we are not going to do it properly, what's the use of doing it at all?"

  This seemed to strike the erring Teddy, if not as reasonable, at any rate as one way of looking at it. He delivered the speech in an injured tone and shuffled off. The atmosphere of tenseness was unmistakable now. Sally could feel it. The world of the theatre is simply a large nursery and its inhabitants children who readily become fretful if anything goes wrong. The waiting and the uncertainty, the loafing about in strange hotels in a strange city, the dreary rehearsing of lines which had been polished to the last syllable more than a week ago—these things had sapped the nerve of the Primrose Way company and demoralization had set in. It would require only a trifle to produce an explosion.

  Elsa Doland now moved to the door, pressed a bell, and, taking a magazine from the table, sat down in a chair near the footlights. A moment later, in answer to the ring, a young woman entered, to be greeted instantly by an impassioned bellow from Mr. Bunbury.

  "Miss Winch!"

  The new arrival stopped and looked out over the footlights, not in the pained manner of the man in the bowler hat, but with the sort of genial indulgence of one who has come to a juvenile party to amuse the children. She was a square, wholesome, good-humoured looking girl with a serious face, the gravity of which was contradicted by the faint smile that seemed to lurk about the corner of her mouth. She was certainly not pretty, and Sally, watching her with keen interest, was surprised that Fillmore had had the sense to disregard surface homeliness and recognize her charm. Deep down in Fillmore, Sally decided, there must lurk an unsuspected vein of intelligence.

  "Hello?" said Miss Winch, amiably.

  Mr. Bunbury seemed profoundly moved.

  "Miss Winch, did I or did I not ask you to refrain from chewing gum during rehearsal?"

  "That's right, so you did," admitted Miss Winch, chummily.

  "Then why are you doing it?"

  Fillmore's fiancée revolved the criticized refreshment about her tongue for a moment before replying.

  "Bit o' business," she announced, at length.

  "What do you mean, a bit of business?"

  "Character stuff," explained Miss Winch in her pleasant, drawling voice. "Thought it out myself. Maids chew gum, you know."

  Mr. Bunbury ruffled his orange hair in an over-wrought manner with the palm of his right hand.

  "Have you ever seen a maid?" he asked, despairingly.

  "Yes, sir. And they chew gum."

  "I mean a parlour-maid in a smart house," moaned Mr. Bunbury. "Do you imagine for a moment that in a house such as this is supposed to be the parlour-maid would be allowed to come into the drawing-room champing that disgusting, beastly stuff?"

  Miss Winch considered the point.

  "Maybe you're right." She brightened. "Listen! Great idea! Mr. Foster can write in a line for Elsa, calling me down, and another giving me a good come-back, and then another for Elsa saying something else, and then something really funny for me, and so on. We can work it up into a big comic scene. Five or six minutes, all laughs."

  This ingenious suggestion had the effect of depriving the producer momentarily of speech, and while he was struggling for utterance, there dashed out from the wings a gorgeous being in blue velvet and a hat of such unimpeachable smartness that Sally ached at the sight of it with a spasm of pure envy.

  "Say!"

  Miss Mabel Hobson had practically every personal advantage which nature can bestow with the exception of a musical voice. Her figure was perfect, her face beautiful, and her hair a mass of spun gold; but her voice in moments of emotion was the voice of a peacock.

  "Say, listen to me for just one moment!"

  Mr. Bunbury recovered from his trance.

  "Miss Hobson! Please!"

  "Yes, that's all very well..."

  "You are interrupting the rehearsal."

  "You bet your sorrowful existence I'm interrupting the rehearsal," agreed Miss Hobson, with emphasis. "And, if you want to make a little easy money, you go and bet somebody ten seeds that I'm going to interrupt it again every time there's any talk of writing up any darned part in the show except mine. Write up other people's parts? Not while I have my strength!"

  A young man with butter-coloured hair, who had entered from the wings in close attendance on the injured lady, attempted to calm the storm.

  "Now, sweetie!"

  "Oh, can it, Reggie!" said Miss Hobson, curtly.

  Mr. Cracknell obediently canned it. He was not one of your brutal cave-men. He subsided into the recesses of a high collar and began to chew the knob of his stick.

  "I'm the star," resumed Miss Hobson, vehemently, "and, if you think anybody else's part's going to be written up... well, pardon me while I choke with laughter! If so much as a syllable is written into anybody's part, I walk straight out on my two feet. You won't see me go, I'll be so quick."

  Mr. Bunbury sprang to his feet and waved his hands.

  "For heaven's sake! Are we rehearsing, or is this a debating society? Miss Hobson, nothing is going to be written into anybody's part. Now are you satisfied?"

  "She said..."

  "Oh, never mind," observed Miss Winch, equably. "It was only a random thought. Working for the good of the show all the time. That's me."

  "Now, sweetie!" pleaded Mr. Cracknell, emerging from the collar like a tortoise.

  Miss Hobson reluctantly allowed herself to be reassured.

  "Oh, well, that's all right, then. But don't forget I know how to look aft
er myself," she said, stating a fact which was abundantly obvious to all who had had the privilege of listening to her. "Any raw work, and out I walk so quick it'll make you giddy."

  She retired, followed by Mr. Cracknell, and the wings swallowed her up.

  "Shall I say my big speech now?" inquired Miss Winch, over the footlights.

  "Yes, yes! Get on with the rehearsal. We've wasted half the morning."

  "Did you ring, madam?" said Miss Winch to Elsa, who had been reading her magazine placidly through the late scene.

  The rehearsal proceeded, and Sally watched it with a sinking heart. It was all wrong. Novice as she was in things theatrical, she could see that. There was no doubt that Miss Hobson was superbly beautiful and would have shed lustre on any part which involved the minimum of words and the maximum of clothes: but in the pivotal role of a serious play, her very physical attributes only served to emphasize and point her hopeless incapacity. Sally remembered Mr. Faucitt's story of the lady who got the bird at Wigan. She did not see how history could fail to repeat itself. The theatrical public of America will endure much from youth and beauty, but there is a limit.

  A shrill, passionate cry from the front row, and Mr. Bunbury was on his feet again. Sally could not help wondering whether things were going particularly wrong to-day, or whether this was one of Mr. Bunbury's ordinary mornings.

  "Miss Hobson!"

  The action of the drama had just brought that emotional lady on left centre and had taken her across to the desk which stood on the other side of the stage. The desk was an important feature of the play, for it symbolized the absorption in business which, exhibited by her husband, was rapidly breaking Miss Hobson's heart. He loved his desk better than his young wife, that was what it amounted to, and no wife can stand that sort of thing.

  "Oh, gee!" said Miss Hobson, ceasing to be the distressed wife and becoming the offended star. "What's it this time?"

  "I suggested at the last rehearsal and at the rehearsal before and the rehearsal before that, that, on that line, you, should pick up the paper-knife and toy negligently with it. You did it yesterday, and to-day you've forgotten it again."

  "My God!" cried Miss Hobson, wounded to the quick. "If this don't beat everything! How the heck can I toy negligently with a paper-knife when there's no paper-knife for me to toy negligently with?"