The Adventures of Sally 16 – Wodehouse · Verses Across
Literature · Humor
The Adventures of Sally 16Part 4 · Chapter 4
18
Literature · Humor
The Adventures of Sally 16
Part 4 · Chapter 4
WodehouseEnglish
Fillmore had the air of a man who thought it wasn't loaded. A wild, startled expression had settled itself upon his face and he was breathing heavily.
“Cheer up!” said Sally. Fillmore jumped like a stricken jelly. “Tell me all,” said Sally, sitting down beside him. “I leave you a gentleman of large and independent means, and I come back and find you one of the wage-slaves again. How did it all happen?”
“Sally,” said Fillmore, “I will be frank with you. Can you lend me ten dollars?”
“I don't see how you make that out an answer to my question, but here you are.”
“Thanks.” Fillmore pocketed the bill. “I'll let you have it back next week. I want to take Miss Winch out to lunch.”
“If that's what you want it for, don't look on it as a loan, take it as a gift with my blessing thrown in.” She looked over her shoulder at Miss Winch, who, the cares of rehearsal being temporarily suspended, was practising golf-shots with an umbrella at the other side of the stage. “However did you have the sense to fall in love with her, Fill?”
“Do you like her?” asked Fillmore, brightening.
“I love her.”
“I knew you would. She's just the right girl for me, isn't she?”
“She certainly is.”
“So sympathetic.”
“Yes.”
“So kind.”
“Yes.”
“And she's got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need.”
Fillmore drew himself up with as much hauteur as a stout man sitting in a low chair can achieve.
“Some day I will make you believe in me, Sally.”
“Less of the Merchant Prince, my lad,” said Sally, firmly. “You just confine yourself to explaining how you got this way, instead of taking up my valuable time telling me what you mean to do in the future. You've lost all your money?”
“I have suffered certain reverses,” said Fillmore, with dignity, “which have left me temporarily... Yes, every bean,” he concluded simply.
“How?”
“Well...” Fillmore hesitated. “I've had bad luck, you know. First I bought Consolidated Rails for the rise, and they fell. So that went wrong.”
“Yes?”
“And then I bought Russian Roubles for the fall, and they rose. So that went wrong.”
“Good gracious! Why, I've heard all this before.”
“Who told you?”
“No, I remember now. It's just that you remind me of a man I met at Roville. He was telling me the story of his life, and how he had made a hash of everything. Well, that took all you had, I suppose?”
“Not quite. I had a few thousand left, and I went into a deal that really did look cast-iron.”
“And that went wrong!”
“It wasn't my fault,” said Fillmore querulously. “It was just my poisonous luck. A man I knew got me to join a syndicate which had bought up a lot of whisky. The idea was to ship it into Chicago in herring-barrels. We should have cleaned up big, only a mutt of a detective took it into his darned head to go fooling about with a crowbar. Officious ass! It wasn't as if the barrels weren't labelled 'Herrings' as plainly as they could be,” said Fillmore with honest indignation. He shuddered. “I nearly got arrested.”
“But that went wrong? Well, that's something to be thankful for. Stripes wouldn't suit your figure.” Sally gave his arm a squeeze. She was very fond of Fillmore, though for the good of his soul she generally concealed her affection beneath a manner which he had once compared, not without some reason, to that of a governess who had afflicted their mutual childhood. “Never mind, you poor ill-used martyr. Things are sure to come right. We shall see you a millionaire some day. And, oh heavens, brother Fillmore, what a bore you'll be when you are! I can just see you being interviewed and giving hints to young men on how to make good. 'Mr. Nicholas attributes his success to sheer hard work. He can lay his hand on his bulging waistcoat and say that he has never once indulged in those rash get-rich-quick speculations, where you buy for the rise and watch things fall and then rush out and buy for the fall and watch 'em rise.' Fill... I'll tell you what I'll do. They all say it's the first bit of money that counts in building a vast fortune. I'll lend you some of mine.”
“You will? Sally, I always said you were an ace.”
“I never heard you. You oughtn't to mumble so.”
“Will you lend me twenty thousand dollars?”
Sally patted his hand soothingly.
“Come slowly down to earth,” she said. “Two hundred was the sum I had in mind.”
“I want twenty thousand.”
“You'd better rob a bank. Any policeman will direct you to a good bank.”
“I'll tell you why I want twenty thousand.”
“You might just mention it.”
“If I had twenty thousand, I'd buy this production from Cracknell. He'll be back in a few minutes to tell us that the Hobson woman has quit: and, if she really has, you take it from me that he will close the show. And, even if he manages to jolly her along this time and she comes back, it's going to happen sooner or later. It's a shame to let a show like this close. I believe in it, Sally. It's a darn good play. With Elsa Doland in the big part, it couldn't fail.”
Sally started. Her money was too recent for her to have grown fully accustomed to it, and she had never realized that she was in a position to wave a wand and make things happen on any big scale. The financing of a theatrical production had always been to her something mysterious and out of the reach of ordinary persons like herself. Fillmore, that spacious thinker, had brought it into the sphere of the possible.
“He'd sell for less than that, of course, but one would need a bit in hand. You have to face a loss on the road before coming into New York. I'd give you ten per cent on your money, Sally.”
Sally found herself wavering. The prudent side of her nature, which hitherto had steered her safely through most of life's rapids, seemed oddly dormant. Sub-consciously she was aware that on past performances Fillmore was decidedly not the man to be allowed control of anybody's little fortune, but somehow the thought did not seem to grip her. He had touched her imagination.
“It's a gold-mine!”
Sally's prudent side stirred in its sleep. Fillmore had chosen an unfortunate expression. To the novice in finance the word gold-mine had repellent associations. If there was one thing in which Sally had proposed not to invest her legacy, it was a gold-mine; what she had had in view, as a matter of fact, had been one of those little fancy shops which are called Ye Blue Bird or Ye Corner Shoppe, or something like that, where you sell exotic bric-a-brac to the wealthy at extortionate prices. She knew two girls who were doing splendidly in that line. As Fillmore spoke those words, Ye Corner Shoppe suddenly looked very good to her.
At this moment, however, two things happened. Gerald and Mr. Bunbury, in the course of their perambulations, came into the glow of the footlights, and she was able to see Gerald's face: and at the same time Mr. Reginald Cracknell hurried on to the stage, his whole demeanour that of the bearer of evil tidings.
The sight of Gerald's face annihilated Sally's prudence at a single stroke. Ye Corner Shoppe, which a moment before had been shining brightly before her mental eye, flickered and melted out. The whole issue became clear and simple. Gerald was miserable and she had it in her power to make him happy. He was sullenly awaiting disaster and she with a word could avert it. She wondered that she had ever hesitated.
“All right,” she said simply.
Fillmore quivered from head to foot. A powerful electric shock could not have produced a stronger convulsion. He knew Sally of old as cautious and clear-headed, by no means to be stampeded by a brother's eloquence; and he had never looked on this thing as anything better than a hundred to one shot.
“You'll do it?” he whispered, and held his breath. After all he might not have heard correctly.
“Yes.”
All the complex emotion in Fillmore's soul found expression in one vast whoop. It rang through the empty theatre like the last trump, beating against the back wall and rising in hollow echoes to the very gallery. Mr. Bunbury, conversing in low undertones with Mr. Cracknell across the footlights, shied like a startled mule. There was reproach and menace in the look he cast at Fillmore, and a minute earlier it would have reduced that financial magnate to apologetic pulp. But Fillmore was not to be intimidated now by a look. He strode down to the group at the footlights,
“Cracknell,” he said importantly, “one moment, I should like a word with you.”
CHAPTER VII. SOME MEDITATIONS ON SUCCESS
If actors and actresses are like children in that they are readily depressed by disaster, they have the child's compensating gift of being easily uplifted by good fortune. It amazed Sally that any one mortal should have been able to spread such universal happiness as she had done by the simple act of lending her brother Fillmore twenty thousand dollars. If the Millennium had arrived, the members of the Primrose Way Company could not have been on better terms with themselves. The lethargy and dispiritedness, caused by their week of inaction, fell from them like a cloak. The sudden elevation of that creature of the abyss, the assistant stage manager, to the dizzy height of proprietor of the show appealed to their sense of drama. Most of them had played in pieces where much the same thing had happened to the persecuted heroine round about eleven o'clock, and the situation struck them as theatrically sound. Also, now that she had gone, the extent to which Miss Hobson had acted as a blight was universally recognized.
A spirit of optimism reigned, and cheerful rumours became current. The bowler-hatted Teddy had it straight from the lift-boy at his hotel that the ban on the theatres was to be lifted on Tuesday at the latest; while no less an authority than the cigar-stand girl at the Pontchatrain had informed the man who played the butler that Toledo and Cleveland were opening to-morrow. It was generally felt that the sun was bursting through the clouds and that Fate would soon despair of the hopeless task of trying to keep good men down.
Fillmore was himself again. We all have our particular mode of self-expression in moments of elation. Fillmore's took the shape of buying a new waistcoat and a hundred half-dollar cigars and being very fussy about what he had for lunch. It may have been an optical illusion, but he appeared to Sally to put on at least six pounds in weight on the first day of the new regime. As a serf looking after paper-knives and other properties, he had been--for him--almost slim. As a manager he blossomed out into soft billowy curves, and when he stood on the sidewalk in front of the theatre, gloating over the new posters which bore the legend,
FILLMORE NICHOLAS
PRESENTS
the populace had to make a detour to get round him.
In this era of bubbling joy, it was hard that Sally, the fairy godmother responsible for it all, should not have been completely happy too; and it puzzled her why she was not. But whatever it was that cast the faint shadow refused obstinately to come out from the back of her mind and show itself and be challenged. It was not till she was out driving in a hired car with Gerald one afternoon on Belle Isle that enlightenment came.
Gerald, since the departure of Miss Hobson, had been at his best. Like Fillmore, he was a man who responded to the sunshine of prosperity. His moodiness had vanished, and all his old charm had returned. And yet... it seemed to Sally, as the car slid smoothly through the pleasant woods and fields by the river, that there was something that jarred.
Gerald was cheerful and talkative. He, at any rate, found nothing wrong with life. He held forth spaciously on the big things he intended to do.
“If this play get over--and it's going to--I'll show 'em!” His jaw was squared, and his eyes glowed as they stared into the inviting future. “One success--that's all I need--then watch me! I haven't had a chance yet, but...”
His voice rolled on, but Sally had ceased to listen. It was the time of year when the chill of evening follows swiftly on the mellow warmth of afternoon. The sun had gone behind the trees, and a cold wind was blowing up from the river. And quite suddenly, as though it was the wind that had cleared her mind, she understood what it was that had been lurking at the back of her thoughts. For an instant it stood out nakedly without concealment, and the world became a forlorn place. She had realized the fundamental difference between man's outlook on life and woman's.
Success! How men worshipped it, and how little of themselves they had to spare for anything else. Ironically, it was the theme of this very play of Gerald's which she had saved from destruction. Of all the men she knew, how many had any view of life except as a race which they must strain every nerve to win, regardless of what they missed by the wayside in their haste? Fillmore--Gerald--all of them. There might be a woman in each of their lives, but she came second--an afterthought--a thing for their spare time. Gerald was everything to her. His success would never be more than a side-issue as far as she was concerned. He himself, without any of the trappings of success, was enough for her. But she was not enough for him. A spasm of futile jealousy shook her. She shivered.
“Cold?” said Gerald. “I'll tell the man to drive back... I don't see any reason why this play shouldn't run a year in New York. Everybody says it's good... if it does get over, they'll all be after me. I...”
Sally stared out into a bleak world. The sky was a leaden grey, and the wind from the river blew with a dismal chill.
CHAPTER VIII. REAPPEARANCE OF MR. CARMYLE--AND GINGER
