Introduction to Sally

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

She leaned out of the window, and waved. A chauffeur came running down the platform and opened the door; a car was waiting; and in another minute Sally was in it, once more sunk in softness, and once more with a lovely fur rug over her knees, while sitting next to her, talking and laughing, was her new friend, and sitting opposite her, neither talking nor laughing, a smart young lady in black, carrying a bag, who had appeared from nowhere and wasn’t taken any notice of, and who looked steadily out of the window.

‘What a day I’m ’avin’, thought Sally.

But when presently the car stopped at a big house in a great square with trees in the middle, and a footman appeared at the door, and in the hall Sally could see another one just like him, and then another, and yet another, she was definitely frightened.

‘Oh lor,’ she whispered, shrinking back into the car.

‘No—Laura,’ said her new friend, laughing and taking her hand; and drawing it through her arm she led her up the steps of the house, and into the middle of the first real fleshpots of her life.

§

Fleshpots.

She had thought her honeymoon was a honeymoon of fleshpots; she had been sure Almond Tree Cottage was the very home of them; but now she saw the real thing: fleshpots in excelsis.

Her father had said, ‘Beware of fleshpots,’ when he was expounding the doings of the Children of Israel to her of a Sunday afternoon, ‘they don’t do no one no good.’ And she had been brought up so carefully, so piously, so privately, that she had never come across that literature of luxury, those epics of fat things, that are lavishly provided for the poor and skimped. The flunkeys and the frocks, the country castles and the town palaces, the food, the jewels and the dukes, had remained outside her imaginative experience. What she had read had been her Bible, and a few books of her mother’s childhood in which people were sad, and good and ill, and died saying things that made her cry very much. There was nothing to set her dreaming in these. Life, she thought, was like that, except for the lucky ones such as herself, who had kind parents and a nice back parlour to sit and sew in when their work was done. There were the gentry, of course; they existed, she knew, but only knew vaguely. Entirely vague they had been in her mind till she became a Luke, and found herself engulfed by them; and what an awe-inspiring engulfing it had seemed to her, with Ammond handing round everything at meals, and tea on a table you didn’t sit up at!

Now, as her new friend’s arm propelled her past the blank-faced footmen, across the great marble-floored and columned hall, she realised that Almond Tree Cottage had been the merest wheelbarrow in size and fittings compared to this. This was grand. More—this was terrible. It was her idea of a cathedral or a museum, but not of a place human beings washed their hands in, and talked out loud.