The Little Warrior by P. G. Wodehouse (best romance ebooks txt) 📕

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.

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 rôle 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 …”

His voice trailed off, and there was silence for a moment. Then Freddie burst into speech. His good-natured face was hard with unwonted scorn. Its cheerful vacuity had changed to stony contempt. For the second time in the evening the jolly old scales had fallen from Freddie’s good