Introduction to Sally

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

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Among the opera-glasses that raked Sally as she followed Laura into the stage box three minutes before the curtain went up on Mr. Gillespie’s new play, were Terry’s. She was in the stalls, with the young man who just then was, as the Pinners would have said, walking out with her. He too was looking at Sally.

‘Laura’s latest,’ remarked Terry, turning to him after a prolonged incredulous stare at the astonishing contents of the box; for Laura was well known for her successive discoveries of every kind—saints, geniuses, rugged men of labour—each of which, after a brief blare of publicity, disappeared and was not heard of again.

The young man’s face, however, had the kind of expression on it as he looked at Sally that is apt to annoy the woman one is with; and Terry, who was strictly monogamous during each of her affairs, and expected the other person to be so too, didn’t like it.

‘Who is she?’ asked her young friend.

‘God knows,’ said Terry, shrugging her shoulders.

The curtain went up and the lights went down, and Sally disappeared into the darkness. When next she was visible, Charles Moulsford and Lord Streatley had joined their sister in the box. They were talking to Sally. She was politely smiling. The house had eyes for nothing else.

‘Who is she?’ asked Terry’s young friend again, with a warmer insistence.

‘You’d better go and ask her,’ said Terry, cross.

‘All right, I will,’ said her young friend; and got up and left her; for by this time she had been monogamous with him for six months, and he long had wished she would love him less.

The other three acts of the play took place in bright summer weather, and the glorious sunshine on the stage lit up Sally too in the stage box. The house had eyes only for her. Mr. Gillespie’s play accordingly fell flat. Nobody called for him at the end, what applause there was was absent-minded, and next morning the leading newspaper, after a perfunctory résumé of that which it unkindly described as the alleged plot, ended by remarking languidly, ‘Mr. Gillespie must try again.’

It was a strange evening. The actors, who began well, seemed to get more and more bloodless as the play proceeded. Mr. Gillespie, crouching in the darkest corner of the box above Laura’s, a shelter out of which nothing would have dragged him except the most frenzied cries of enthusiasm, couldn’t imagine what was the matter with his players; but they had felt almost at once that no notice was being taken of them, and presently, discovering the reason, a blight settled on them, and its ravages, as the evening went on, became more marked. By the end there was practically complete anaemia, and Mr. Gillespie, fleeing from the theatre before the final curtain so as to see and hear nothing more, so as to get away, so as to meet neither managers nor actors, so as to wipe from his mind that he had ever written plays, or ever hoped, or ever believed, or ever had dreams and ambitions, went straight for comfort to his friend Lady Laura Moulsford, who had been so kind and encouraging, and who had told him to come round to her that evening, laughingly promising to have the laurels ready.

Laurels! Poor Mr. Gillespie now only wanted to hide his head in her kind lap. He winced to remember how happily he too had laughed, how sure he had been. But that was because of the great success of his first play; and this one, his second, was twenty times better, and was going to be twenty times greater a success.

And so it would have been except for Sally. When, presently, after he had waited three quarters of an hour alone in the library at Goring House because Sally was being so much crowded round coming out of the theatre that it took all that time to extricate her and get her away, she came in with Laura and Laura’s brothers, he instantly realised what had happened; and even as Mr. Soper hadn’t grudged her his stew, though feeling aggrieved, so did Mr. Gillespie, though feeling heartbroken, not grudge her the laurels that should have been his.

He turned very red; he bent low over her hand when Laura introduced him; he murmured, ‘I lay my failure at your feet and glory in it,’—this being the way Mr. Gillespie talked; and Sally, nervous and bewildered, but indomitably polite, said, ‘Pardon?’