Books: Jill the Reckless)
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P. G. Wodehouse >> Jill the Reckless)
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He disappeared, and Uncle Chris turned slowly to descend the stairs.
As he reached the floor below, the door of the stage-box opened, and
Mrs Peagrim came out.
"Oh, Major Selby!" cried the radiant and vivacious hostess. "I
couldn't think where you had got to. I have been looking for you
everywhere."
Uncle Chris quivered slightly, but braced himself to do his duty.
"May I have the pleasure . . . ?" he began, then broke off as he saw
the man who had come out of the box behind his hostess. "Underhill!"
He grasped his hand and shook it warmly. "My dear fellow! I had no
notion that you had arrived!"
"Sir Derek came just a moment ago," said Mrs Peagrim.
"How are you, Major Selby?" said Derek. He was a little surprised at
the warmth of his reception. He had not anticipated this geniality.
"My dear fellow, I'm delighted to see you," cried Uncle Chris. "But,
as I was saying, Mrs Peagrim, may I have the pleasure of this dance?"
"I don't think I will dance this one," said Mrs Peagrim surprisingly.
"I'm sure you two must have ever so much to talk about. Why don't you
take Sir Derek and give him a cup of coffee?"
"Capital idea!" said Uncle Chris. "Come this way, my dear fellow. As
Mrs Peagrim says, I have ever so much to talk about. Along this
passage, my boy. Be careful. There's a step. Weil, well, well! It's
delightful to see you again!" He massaged Derek's arm affectionately.
Every time he had met Mrs Peagrim that evening he had quailed
inwardly at what lay before him, should some hitch occur to prevent
the re-union of Derek and Jill: and, now that the other was actually
here, handsomer than ever and more than ever the sort of man no girl
could resist, he declined to admit the possibility of a hitch. His
spirits soared. "You haven't seen Jill yet, of course?"
"No." Derek hesitated. "Is Jill . . . Does she . . . I mean . . ."
Uncle Chris resumed his osteopathy. He kneaded his companion's
coat-sleeve with a jovial hand.
"My dear fellow, of course! I am sure that a word or two from you
will put everything right. We all make mistakes. I have made them
myself. I am convinced that everything will be perfectly all right
. . . Ah, there she is. Jill, my dear, here is an old friend to see
you!"
2.
Since the hurried departure of Mr Pilkington, Jill had been sitting
in the auditorium, lazily listening to the music and watching the
couples dancing on the stage. She did not feel like dancing herself,
but it was pleasant to be there and too much exertion to get up and
go home. She found herself drifting into a mood of gentle
contentment, and was at a loss to account for this. She was
happy,--quietly and peacefully happy, when she was aware that she
ought to have been both agitated and apprehensive. When she had
anticipated the recent interview with Otis Pilkington, which she had
known was bound to come sooner or later, it had been shrinkingly and
with foreboding. She hated hurting people's feelings, and, though she
read Mr Pilkington's character accurately enough to know that time
would heal any anguish which she might cause him, she had had no
doubt that the temperamental surface of that long young man, when he
succeeded in getting her alone, was going to be badly bruised. And it
had fallen out just as she had expected. Mr Pilkington had said his
say and departed, a pitiful figure, a spectacle which should have
wrung her heart. It had not wrung her heart. Except for one fleeting
instant when she was actually saying the fatal words, it had not
interfered with her happiness at all; and already she was beginning
to forget that the incident had ever happened.
And, if the past should have depressed her, the future might have
been expected to depress her even more. There was nothing in it,
either immediate or distant, which could account for her feeling
gently contented. The future was a fog, into which she had to grope
her way blindly. She could not see a step ahead. And yet, as she
leaned back in her seat, her heart was dancing in time to the
dance-music of Mrs Peagrim's hired orchestra. It puzzled Jill.
And then, quite suddenly yet with no abruptness or sense of
discovery, just as if it were something which she had known all
along, the truth came upon her. It was Wally, the thought of Wally,
the knowledge that Wally existed, that made her happy. He was a
solid, comforting, reassuring fact in a world of doubts and
perplexities. She did not need to be with him to be fortified, it was
enough just to think of him. Present or absent, his personality
heartened her like fine weather or music or a sea-breeze,--or like
that friendly, soothing night-light which they used to leave in her
nursery when she was little, to scare away the goblins and see her
safely over the road that led to the gates of the city of dreams.
Suppose there were no Wally . . .
Jill gave a sudden gasp, and sat up, tingling. She felt as she had
sometimes felt as a child, when, on the edge of sleep, she had
dreamed that she was stepping of a precipice and had woken, tense and
alert, to find that there was no danger after all. But there was a
difference between that feeling and this. She had woken, but to find
that there was danger. It was as though some inner voice was calling
to her to be careful, to take thought. Suppose there were no Wally?
. . . And why should there always be Wally? He had said confidently
enough that there would never be another girl . . . But there were
thousands of other girls, millions of other girls, and could she
suppose that one of them would not have the sense to snap up a
treasure like Wally? A sense of blank desolation swept over Jill. Her
quick imagination, leaping ahead, had made the vague possibility of a
distant future an accomplished fact. She felt, absurdly, a sense of
overwhelming loss.
Into her mind, never far distant from it, came the thought of Derek.
And, suddenly, Jill made another discovery. She was thinking of
Derek, and it was not hurting. She was thinking of him quite coolly
and clearly and her heart was not aching.
She sat back and screwed her eyes tight, as she had always done when
puzzled. Something had happened to her, but how it had happened and
when it had happened and why it had happened she could not
understand. She only knew that now for the first time she had been
granted a moment of clear vision and was seeing things truly.
She wanted Wally. She wanted him in the sense that she could not do
without him. She felt nothing of the fiery tumult which had come upon
her when she first met Derek. She and Wally would come together with
a smile and build their life on an enduring foundation of laughter
and happiness and good-fellowship. Wally had never shaken and never
would shake her senses as Derek had done. If that was love, then she
did not love Wally. But her clear vision told her that it was not
love. It might be the blazing and crackling of thorns, but it was not
the fire. She wanted Wally. She needed him as she needed the air and
the sunlight.
She opened her eyes, and saw Uncle Chris coming down the aisle
towards her. There was a man with him, and, as they moved closer in
the dim light, Jill saw that it was Derek.
"Jill, my dear," said Uncle Chris, "here is an old friend to see
you!"
And, having achieved their bringing together, he proceeded to
withdraw delicately whence he had come. It is pleasant to be able to
record that he was immediately seized upon by Mrs Peagrim, who had
changed her mind about not dancing, and led off to be her partner in
a fox-trot, in the course of which she trod on his feet three times.
"Why, Derek!" said Jill cheerfully. She got up and moved down the
line of seats. Except for a mild wonder how he came to be there, she
found herself wholly unaffected by the sight of him. "Whatever are
you doing here?"
Derek sat down beside her. The cordiality of her tone had relieved
yet at the same time disconcerted him. Man seldom attains to perfect
contentment in this world, and Derek, while pleased that Jill
apparently bore him no ill-will, seemed to miss something in her
manner which he would have been glad to find there.
"Jill!" he said huskily.
It deemed to Derek only decent to speak huskily. To his orderly mind
this situation could be handled only in one way. It was a plain,
straight issue of the strong man humbling himself--not too much, of
course, but sufficiently: and it called, in his opinion, for the low
voice, the clenched hand, and the broken whisper. Speaking as he had
spoken, he had given the scene the right key from the start,--or
would have done if she had not got in ahead of him and opened it on a
note of absurd cheeriness. Derek found himself resenting her
cheeriness. Often as he had attempted during the voyage from England
to visualize to himself this first meeting, he had never pictured
Jill smiling brightly at him. It was a jolly smile, and made her look
extremely pretty, but it jarred upon him. A moment before he had been
half relieved, half disconcerted: now he was definitely disconcerted.
He searched in his mind for a criticism of her attitude, and came to
the conclusion that what was wrong with it was that it was too
friendly. Friendliness is well enough in its way, but in what should
have been a tense clashing of strong emotions it did not seem to
Derek fitting.
"Did you have a pleasant trip?" asked Jill. "Have you come over on
business?"
A feeling of bewilderment came upon Derek. It was wrong, it was all
wrong. Of course, she might be speaking like this to cloak intense
feeling, but, if so, she had certainly succeeded. From her manner, he
and she might be casual acquaintances. A pleasant trip! In another
minute she would be asking him how he had come out on the sweepstake
on the ship's run. With a sense of putting his shoulder to some heavy
weight and heaving at it, he sought to lift the conversation to a
higher plane.
"I came to find _you!_" he said; still huskily but not so huskily as
before. There are degrees of huskiness, and Derek's was sharpened a
little by a touch of irritation.
"Yes?" said Jill.
Derek was now fermenting. What she ought to have said, he did not
know, but he knew that it was not "Yes?" "Yes?" in the circumstances
was almost as bad as "Really?"
There was a pause. Jill was looking at him with a frank and
unembarrassed gaze which somehow deepened his sense of annoyance. Had
she looked at him coldly, he could have understood and even
appreciated it. He had been expecting coldness, and had braced
himself to combat it. He was still not quite sure in his mind whether
he was playing the role of a penitent or a King Cophetua, but in
either character he might have anticipated a little temporary
coldness, which it would have been his easy task to melt. But he had
never expected to be looked at as if he were a specimen in a museum,
and that was how he was feeling now. Jill was not looking at him--she
was inspecting him, examining him, and he chafed under the process.
Jill, unconscious of the discomfort she was causing, continued to
gaze. She was trying to discover in just what respect he had changed
from the god he had been. Certainly not in looks. He was as handsome
as ever,--handsomer, indeed, for the sunshine and clean breezes of
the Atlantic had given him an exceedingly becoming coat of tan. And
yet he must have changed, for now she could look upon him quite
dispassionately and criticize him without a tremor. It was like
seeing a copy of a great painting. Everything was there, except the
one thing that mattered, the magic and the glamour. It was like . . .
She suddenly remembered a scene in the dressing-room when the company
had been in Baltimore. Lois Denham, duly the recipient of the
sunburst which her friend Izzy had promised her, had unfortunately,
in a spirit of girlish curiosity, taken it to a jeweller to be
priced, and the jeweller had blasted her young life by declaring it a
paste imitation. Jill recalled how the stricken girl--previous to
calling Izzy on the long distance and telling him a number of things
which, while probably not news to him, must have been painful
hearing--had passed the vile object round the dressing-room for
inspection. The imitation was perfect. It had been impossible for the
girls to tell that the stones were not real diamonds. Yet the
jeweller, with his sixth sense, had seen through them in a trifle
under ten seconds. Jill come to the conclusion that her
newly-discovered love for Wally Mason had equipped her with a sixth
sense, and that by its aid she was really for the first time seeing
Derek as he was.
Derek had not the privilege of being able to read Jill's thoughts.
All he could see was the outer Jill, and the outer Jill, as she had
always done, was stirring his emotions. Her daintiness afflicted him.
Not for the first, the second, or the third time since they had come
into each other's lives, he was astounded at the strength of the
appeal which Jill had for him when they were together, as contrasted
with its weakness when they were apart. He made another attempt to
establish the scene on a loftier plane.
"What a fool I was!" he sighed. "Jill! Can you ever forgive me?"
He tried to take her hand. Jill skilfully eluded him.
"Why, of course I've forgiven you, Derek, if there was anything to
forgive."
"Anything to forgive!" Derek began to get into his stride. These were
the lines on which he had desired the interview to develop. "I was a
brute! A cad!"
"Oh, no!"
"I was. Oh, I have been through hell!"
Jill turned her head away. She did not want to hurt him, but nothing
could have kept her from smiling. She had been so sure that he would
say that sooner or later.
"Jill!" Derek had misinterpreted the cause of her movement, and had
attributed it to emotion. "Tell me that everything is as it was
before."
Jill turned.
"I'm afraid I can't say that, Derek."
"Of course not!" agreed Derek in a comfortable glow of manly remorse.
He liked himself in the character of the strong man abased. "It would
be too much, to expect, I know. But, when we are married . . ."
"Do you really want to marry me?"
"Jill!"
"I wonder!"
"How can you doubt it?"
Jill looked at him.
"Have you thought what it would mean?"
"What it would mean?"
"Well, your mother . . ."
"Oh!" Derek dismissed Lady Underhill with a grand gesture.
"Yes," persisted Jill, "but, if she disapproved of your marrying me
before, wouldn't she disapprove a good deal more now, when I haven't
a penny in the world and am just in the chorus . . ."
A sort of strangled sound proceeded from Derek's throat.
"In the chorus!"
"Didn't you know? I thought Freddie must have told you."
"In the chorus!" Derek stammered. "I thought you were here as a guest
of Mrs Peagrim's."
"So I am,--like all the rest of the company."
"But . . . But . . ."
"You see, it would be bound to make everything a little difficult,"
said Jill. Her face was grave, but her lips were twitching. "I mean,
you are rather a prominent man, aren't you, and if you married a
chorus-girl . . ."
"Nobody would know," said Derek limply.
Jill opened her eyes.
"Nobody would _know!_" She laughed. "But, of course, you've never met
our press-agent. If you think that nobody would know that a girl in
the company had married a baronet who was a member of parliament and
expected to be in the Cabinet in a few years, you're wronging him!
The news would be on the front page of all the papers the very next
day--columns of it, with photographs. There would be articles about it
in the Sunday papers. Illustrated! And then it would be cabled to
England and would appear in the papers there . . . You see, you're a
very important person, Derek."
Derek sat clutching the arms of his chair. His face was chalky.
Though he had never been inclined to underestimate his importance as
a figure in the public eye, he had overlooked the disadvantages
connected with such an eminence. He gurgled wordlessly. He had been
prepared to brave Lady Underhill's wrath and assert his right to marry
whom he pleased, but this was different.
Jill watched him curiously and with a certain pity. It was so easy to
read what was passing in his mind. She wondered what he would say,
how he would flounder out of his unfortunate position. She had no
illusions about him now. She did not even contemplate the possibility
of chivalry winning the battle which was going on within him.
"It would be very awkward, wouldn't it?" she said.
And then pity had its way with Jill. He had treated her badly; for a
time she had thought that he had crushed all the heart out of her:
but he was suffering, and she hated to see anybody suffer.
"Besides," she said, "I'm engaged to somebody else."
As a suffocating man, his lips to the tube of oxygen, gradually comes
back to life, Derek revived,--slowly as the meaning of her words sank
into his mind, then with a sudden abruptness.
"What!" he cried.
"I'm going to marry somebody else. A man named Wally Mason."
Derek swallowed. The chalky look died out of his face, and he flushed
hotly. His eyes, half relieved, half indignant, glowed under their
pent-house of eyebrow. He sat for a moment in silence.
"I think you might have told me before!" he said huffily.
Jill laughed.
"Yes, I suppose I ought to have told you before."
"Leading me on . . . !"
Jill patted him on the arm.
"Never mind, Derek! It's all over now. And it was great fun, wasn't it!"
"Fun!"
"Shall we go and dance? The music is just starting."
"I _won't_ dance!"
Jill got up.
"I must," she said. "I'm so happy I can't keep still. Well, good-bye,
Derek, in case I don't see you again. It was nice meeting after all
this time. You haven't altered a bit!"
Derek watched her flit down the aisle, saw her jump up the little
ladder onto the stage, watched her vanish into the swirl of the
dance. He reached for a cigarette, opened his case, and found it
empty. He uttered a mirthless, Byronic laugh. The thing seemed to him
symbolic.
3.
Not having a cigarette of his own, Derek got up and went to look for
the only man he knew who could give him one: and after a search of a
few minutes came upon Freddie all alone in a dark corner, apart from
the throng. It was a very different Freddie from the moody youth who
had returned to the box after his conversation with Uncle Chris. He
was leaning against a piece of scenery with his head tilted back and
a beam of startled happiness on his face. So rapt was he in his
reflections that he did not become aware of Derek's approach until
the latter spoke.
"Got a cigarette, Freddie?"
Freddie withdrew his gaze from the roof.
"Hullo, old son! Cigarette? Certainly and by all means. Cigarettes?
Where are the cigarettes? Mr. Rooke, forward! Show cigarettes." He
extended his case to Derek, who helped himself in sombre silence,
finding his boyhood's friend's exuberance hard to bear. "I say,
Derek, old scream, the most extraordinary thing has happened! You'll
never guess. To cut a long story short and come to the blow-out of
the scenario, I'm engaged! Engaged, old crumpet! You know what I
mean--engaged to be married!"
"Uh?" said Derek gruffly, frowning over his cigarette.
"Don't wonder you're surprised," said Freddie, looking at him a
little wistfully, for his friend had scarcely been gushing, and he
would have welcomed a bit of enthusiasm. "Can hardly believe it
myself."
Derek awoke to a sense of the conventions.
"Congratulate you," he said. "Do I know her?"
"Not yet, but you soon will. She's a girl in the company,--in the
chorus, as a matter of fact. Girl named Nelly Bryant. An absolute
corker. I'll go further--a topper. You'll like her, old man."
Derek was looking at him, amazed.
"Good Heavens!" he said.
"Extraordinary how these things happen," proceeded Freddie. "Looking
back, I can see, of course, that I always thought her a topper, but
the idea of getting engaged--I don't know--sort of thing that doesn't
occur to a chappie, if you know what I mean. What I mean to say is,
we had always been the greatest of pals and all that, but it never
struck me that she would think it much of a wheeze getting hooked up
for life with a chap like me. We just sort of drifted along and so
forth. All very jolly and what not. And then this evening--I don't
know. I had a bit of a hump, what with one thing and another, and she
was most dashed sweet and patient and soothing and--and--well, and
what not, don't you know, and suddenly--deuced rummy sensation--the
jolly old scales seemed to fall, if you follow me, from my good old
eyes; I don't know if you get the idea. I suddenly seemed to look
myself squarely in the eyeball and say to myself, 'Freddie, old top,
how do we go? Are we not missing a good thing?' And, by Jove,
thinking it over, I found that I was absolutely correct-o! You've no
notion how dashed sympathetic she is, old man! I mean to say, I had
this hump, you know, owing to one thing and another, and was feeling
that life was more or less of a jolly old snare and delusion, and she
bucked me up and all that, and suddenly I found myself kissing her
and all that sort of rot, and she was kissing me and so on and so
forth, and she's got the most ripping eyes, and there was nobody
about, and the long and the short of it was, old boy, that I said,
'Let's get married!' and she said, 'When?' and that was that, if you
see what I mean. The scheme now is to pop down to the City Hall and
get a license, which it appears you have to have if you want to bring
this sort of binge off with any success and vim, and then what ho for
the padre! Looking at it from every angle, a bit of a good egg,
what! Happiest man in the world, and all that sort of thing."
At this point in his somewhat incoherent epic Freddie paused. It had
occurred to him that he had perhaps laid himself open to a charge of
monopolizing the conversation.
"I say! You'll forgive my dwelling a bit on this thing, won't you?
Never found a girl who would look twice at me before, and it's rather
unsettled the old bean. Just occurred to me that I may have been
talking about my own affairs a bit. Your turn now, old thing. Sit
down, as the blighters in the novels used to say, and tell me the
story of your life. You've seen Jill, of course?"
"Yes," said Derek shortly.
"And it's all right, eh? Fine! We'll make a double wedding of it,
what? Not a bad idea, that! I mean to say, the man of God might make
a reduction for quantity and shade his fee a bit. Do the job half
price!"
Derek threw down the end of his cigarette, and crushed it with his
heel. A closer observer than Freddie would have detected long ere
this the fact that his demeanor was not that of a happy and
successful wooer.
"Jill and I are not going to be married," he said.
A look of blank astonishment came into Freddie's cheerful face. He
could hardly believe that he had heard correctly. It is true that, in
gloomier mood, he had hazarded the theory to Uncle Chris that Jill's
independence might lead her to refuse Derek, but he had not really
believed in the possibility of such a thing even at the time, and
now, in the full flood of optimism consequent on his own engagement,
it seemed even more incredible.
"Great Scott!" he cried. "Did she give you the raspberry?"
It is to be doubted whether the pride of the Underhills would have
permitted Derek to reply in the affirmative, even if Freddie had
phrased his question differently: but the brutal directness of the
query made such a course impossible for him. Nothing was dearer to
Derek than his self-esteem, and, even at the expense of the truth, he
was resolved to shield it from injury. To face Freddie and confess
that any girl in the world had given him, Derek Underhill, what he
coarsely termed the raspberry was a task so revolting as to be
utterly beyond his powers.
"Nothing of the kind!" he snapped. "It was because we both saw that
the thing would be impossible. Why didn't you tell me that Jill was
in the chorus of this damned piece?"
Freddie's mouth slowly opened. He was trying not to realize the
meaning of what his friend was saying. His was a faithful soul, and
for years--to all intents and purposes for practically the whole of
his life--he had looked up to Derek and reverenced him. He absolutely
refused to believe that Derek was intending to convey what he seemed
to be trying to convey: for, if he was, well . . . by Jove . . . it
was too rotten and Algy Martyn had been right after all and the
fellow was simply . . .
"You don't mean, old man," said Freddie with an almost pleading note
in his voice, "that you're going to back out of marrying Jill because
she's in the chorus?"
Derek looked away, and scowled. He was finding Freddie, in the
capacity of inquisitor, as trying as he had found him in the role of
exuberant _fiancé_. It offended his pride to have to make
explanations to one whom he had always regarded with a patronizing
tolerance as not a bad fellow in his way but in every essential
respect negligible.
"I have to be sensible," he said, chafing as the indignity of his
position intruded itself more and more. "You know what it would mean
. . . Paragraphs in all the papers . . . photographs . . . the news
cabled to England . . . everybody reading it and misunderstanding . . .
I've got my career to think of . . . It would cripple me . . ."
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