The Little Warrior by P. G. Wodehouse (top 50 books to read txt) 📗

brilliant spectacle. He wore no jewelry, but this, no doubt, was due to a private distaste for display. As there was no one else of humbler rank at hand from whom Jill could solicit an introduction and the privilege of an audience, she took the bold step of addressing him directly.

“I want to see Major Selby, please.”

The Guatemalan general arrested for a moment the rhythmic action of his jaws, lowered his paper and looked at her with raised eyebrows. At first Jill thought that he was registering haughty contempt, then she saw what she had taken for scorn was surprise.

“Major Selby?”

“Major Selby.”

“No Major Selby living here.”

“Major Christopher Selby.”

“Not here,” said the associate of ambassadors and the pampered pet of Guatemala’s proudest beauties. “Never heard of him in my life!”

§ 2.

Jill had read works of fiction in which at certain crises everything had “seemed to swim” in front of the heroine’s eyes, but never till this moment had she experienced that remarkable sensation herself. The Savior of Guatemala did not actually swim, perhaps, but he certainly flickered. She had to blink to restore his prismatic outlines to their proper sharpness. Already the bustle and noise of New York had begun to induce in her that dizzy condition of unreality which one feels in dreams, and this extraordinary statement added the finishing touch.

Perhaps the fact that she had said “please” to him when she opened the conversation touched the heart of the hero of a thousand revolutions. Dignified and beautiful as he was to the eye of the stranger, it is unpleasant to have to record that he lived in a world which rather neglected the minor courtesies of speech. People did not often say “please” to him. “Here!” “Hi!” and “Gosh darn you!” yes; but seldom “please.” He seemed to approve of Jill, for he shifted his chewing-gum to a position which facilitated speech, and began to be helpful.

“What was the name again?”

“Selby.”

“Howja spell it?”

“S-e-l-b-y.”

“S-e-l-b-y. Oh, Selby?”

“Yes, Selby.”

“What was the first name?”

“Christopher.”

“Christopher?”

“Yes, Christopher.”

“Christopher Selby? No one of that name living here.”

“But there must be.”

The veteran shook his head with an indulgent smile.

“You want Mr Sipperley,” he said tolerantly. In Guatemala these mistakes are always happening. “Mr George Sipperley. He’s on the fourth floor. What name shall I say?”

He had almost reached the telephone when Jill stopped him. This is an age of just-as-good substitutes, but she refused to accept any unknown Sipperley as a satisfactory alternative for Uncle Chris.

“I don’t want Mr Sipperley. I want Major Selby.”

“Howja spell it once more?”

“S-e-l-b-y.”

“S-e-l-b-y. No one of that name living here. Mr. Sipperley—”—he spoke in a wheedling voice, as if determined, in spite of herself, to make Jill see what was in her best interests—“Mr Sipperley’s on the fourth floor. Gentleman in the real estate business,” he added insinuatingly. “He’s got blond hair and a Boston bull-dog.”

“He may be all you say, and he may have a dozen bulldogs …”

“Only one. Jack his name is.”

“… But he isn’t the right man. It’s absurd. Major Selby wrote to me from this address. This is Eighteen East Fifty-seventh Street?”

“This is Eighteen East Fifty-seventh Street,” conceded the other cautiously.

“I’ve got his letter here.” She opened her bag, and gave an exclamation of dismay. “It’s gone!”

“Mr Sipperley used to have a friend staying with him last Fall. A Mr Robertson. Dark-complected man with a mustache.”

“I took it out to look at the address, and I was sure I put it back. I must have dropped it.”

“There’s a Mr Rainsby on the seventh floor. He’s a broker down on Wall Street. Short man with an impediment in his speech.”

Jill snapped the clasp of her bag.

“Never mind,” she said. “I must have made a mistake. I was quite sure that this was the address, but it evidently isn’t. Thank you so much. I’m so sorry to have bothered you.”

She walked away, leaving the Terror of Paraguay and all points west speechless: for people who said “Thank you so much” to him were even rarer than those who said “please.” He followed her with an affectionate eye till she was out of sight, then, restoring his chewing-gum to circulation, returned to the perusal of his paper. A momentary suggestion presented itself to his mind that what Jill had really wanted was Mr Willoughby on the eighth floor, but it was too late to say so now: and soon, becoming absorbed in the narrative of a spirited householder in Kansas who had run amuck with a hatchet and slain six, he dismissed the matter from his mind.

§ 3.

Jill walked back to Fifth Avenue, crossed it, and made her way thoughtfully along the breezy street which, flanked on one side by the Park and on the other by the green-roofed Plaza Hotel and the apartment houses of the wealthy, ends in the humbler and more democratic spaces of Columbus Circle. She perceived that she was in that position, familiar to melodrama, of being alone in a great city. The reflection brought with it a certain discomfort. The bag that dangled from her wrist contained all the money she had in the world, the very broken remains of the twenty dollars which Uncle Chris had sent her at Brookport. She had nowhere to go, nowhere to sleep, and no immediately obvious means of adding to her capital. It was a situation which she had not foreseen when she set out to walk to Brookport station.

She pondered over the mystery of Uncle Chris’ disappearance, and found no solution. The thing was inexplicable. She was as sure of the address he had given in his letter as she was of anything in the world. Yet at that address nothing had been heard of him. His name was not even known. These were deeper waters than Jill was able to fathom.

She walked on, aimlessly. Presently she came to Columbus Circle, and, crossing Broadway at the point where that street breaks out into an eruption of automobile stores, found herself suddenly hungry, opposite a restaurant whose entire front was a sheet of plate glass. On the other side of this glass, at marble-topped tables, apparently careless of their total lack of privacy, sat the impecunious, lunching, their every mouthful a spectacle for the passer-by. It reminded Jill of looking at fishes in an aquarium. In the center of the window, gazing out in a distrait manner over piles of apples and grape-fruit, a white-robed ministrant at a stove juggled ceaselessly with buckwheat cakes. He struck the final note in the candidness of the establishment, a priest whose ritual contained no mysteries. Spectators with sufficient time on their hands to permit them to stand and watch were enabled to witness a New York mid-day meal in every stage of its career, from its protoplasmic beginnings as a stream of yellowish-white liquid poured on top of the stove to its ultimate Nirvana in the interior of the luncher in the form of an appetising cake. It was a spectacle which no hungry girl could resist. Jill went in, and, as she made her way among the tables, a voice spoke her name.

“Miss Mariner!”

Jill jumped, and thought for a moment that the thing must have been an hallucination. It was impossible that anybody in the place should have called her name. Except for Uncle Chris, wherever he might be, she knew no one in New York. Then the voice spoke again, competing valiantly with a clatter of crockery so uproarious as to be more like something solid than a mere sound.

“I couldn’t believe it was you!”

A girl in blue had risen from the nearest table, and was staring at her in astonishment, Jill recognized her instantly. Those big, pathetic eyes, like a lost child’s, were unmistakable. It was the parrot girl, the girl whom she and Freddie Rooke had found in the drawing-room, at Ovington Square that afternoon when the foundations of the world had given way and chaos had begun.

“Good gracious!” cried Jill. “I thought you were in London!”

That feeling of emptiness and panic, the result of her interview with the Guatemalan general at the apartment house, vanished magically. She sat down at this unexpected friend’s table with a light heart.

“Whatever are you doing in New York?” asked the girl. “I never knew you meant to come over.”

“It was a little sudden. Still, here I am. And I’m starving. What are those things you’re eating?”

“Buckwheat cakes.”

“Oh, yes. I remember Uncle Chris talking about them on the boat. I’ll have some.”

“But when did you come over?”

“I landed about ten days ago. I’ve been down at a place called Brookport on Long Island. How funny running into you like this!”

“I was surprised that you remembered me.”

“I’ve forgotten your name,” admitted Jill frankly. “But that’s nothing. I always forget names.”

“My name’s Nelly Bryant.”

“Of course. And you’re on the stage, aren’t you?”

“Yes. I’ve just got work with Goble and Cohn. … Hullo, Phil!”

A young man with a lithe figure and smooth black hair brushed straight back from his forehead had paused at the table on his way to the cashier’s desk.

“Hello, Nelly.”

“I didn’t know you lunched here.”

“Don’t often. Been rehearsing with Joe up at the Century Roof, and had a quarter of an hour to get a bite. Can I sit down?”

“Sure. This is my friend, Miss Mariner.”

The young man shook hands with Jill, flashing an approving glance at her out of his dark, restless eyes.

“Pleased to meet you.”

“This is Phil Brown,” said Nelly. “He plays the straight for Joe Widgeon. They’re the best jazz-and-hokum team on the Keith Circuit.”

“Oh, hush!” said Mr Brown modestly. “You always were a great little booster, Nelly.”

“Well, you know you are! Weren’t you held over at the Palace last time! Well, then!”

“That’s true,” admitted the young man. “Maybe we didn’t gool ’em, eh? Stop me on the street and ask me! Only eighteen bows second house Saturday!”

Jill was listening, fascinated.

“I can’t understand a word,” she said. “It’s like another language.”

“You’re from the other side, aren’t you?” asked Mr Brown.

“She only landed a week ago,” said Nelly.

“I thought so from the accent,” said Mr Brown. “So our talk sort of goes over the top, does it? Well, you’ll learn American soon, if you stick around.”

“I’ve learned some already,” said Jill. The relief of meeting Nelly had made her feel very happy. She liked this smooth-haired young man. “A man on the train this morning said to me, ‘Would you care for the morning paper, sister?’ I said, ‘No, thanks, brother, I want to look out of the window and think!’”

“You meet a lot of fresh guys on trains,” commented Mr Brown austerely. “You want to give ’em the cold-storage eye.” He turned to Nelly. “Did you go down to Ike, as I told you?”

“Yes.”

“Did you cop?”

“Yes. I never felt so happy in my life. I’d waited over an hour on that landing of theirs, and then Johnny Miller came along, and I yelled in his ear that I was after work, and he told me it would be all right. He’s awfully good to girls who’ve worked in shows for him before. If it hadn’t been for him I might have been waiting there still.”

“Who,” enquired Jill, anxious to be abreast of the conversation, “is Ike?”

“Mr Goble. Where I’ve just got work. Goble and Cohn, you know.”

“I never heard of them!”

The young man extended his hand.

“Put it there!” he said. “They never heard of me! At least, the fellow I saw when I went down to the office hadn’t! Can you beat it?”

“Oh, did you go down there, too?” asked Nelly.

“Sure. Joe wanted to get in another show on Broadway. He’d sort of got tired of vodevil. Say, I don’t want to scare you, Nelly, but, if you ask me, that show they’re putting out down there is a citron! I don’t think Ike’s got a cent of his own money in it. My belief is that he’s running it for a lot of amateurs. Why, say, listen! Joe and I blow in there to see if there’s anything for us, and there’s a tall guy in tortoiseshell cheaters sitting in Ike’s office. Said he was the author and was engaging the principals. We told him who we were, and it didn’t make any hit with him at all. He said he had never heard of us. And, when we explained, he said no, there wasn’t going to be any of our sort of work in the show. Said he was making an effort to give the public something rather better than the usual sort of thing. No specialties required. He said it was an effort to restore the Gilbert and Sullivan tradition. Say, who are these Gilbert and Sullivan guys, anyway? They get written up in the papers all the time, and I never met any one who’d run across them. If you want my opinion,