Introduction to Sally

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

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?’

§

She kept on saying ‘Pardon?’ that evening. She found it difficult to follow the things they all said. They were kind, and seemed to want to make her happy, but their language was obscure. So was Mr. Luke’s, if it came to that, only he, except at intervals, wasn’t kind. No, she couldn’t call Mr. Luke a kind man; but then he was her husband, and these weren’t, though they all behaved, she thought, rather as if they would like to be,—that is, there were curious and unmistakable resemblances between their way of looking at her and speaking to her and Jocelyn’s when he was courting. Lords, too, two of them. Who would have thought lords would forget themselves like this? For they knew she was married, and that it was sheer sin to look at her as though they were going to be husbands. And they so grand and good in the newspapers, making speeches, and opening hospitals! Sally was much shocked. One of them was very old; he couldn’t, she decided, be far off his dying breath. Oughtn’t he to be thinking what he was going to do about it, instead of sitting up late at a party behaving as if he would like to be a husband?

The only thing that comforted her for being at a party after all was that Jocelyn wasn’t there. She felt she could manage parties much best single-handed, without him watching and being angry. None of these people were angry, or minded about how she spoke; on the contrary, they seemed to like it, and laughed,—except one, the younger lord, who sat as grave as a church. There was, when all was said and done, a certain feeling of space in being without one’s husband; and after she had drunk a little champagne,—a very little, because it was so nasty, and reminded her of fizzy lemonade gone bad—this feeling of space increased, and she was able to listen to the things the gentlemen kept on saying to her with the same mild patience, tinged with regret, with which on her one visit to the Zoo she had contemplated the behaviour of the monkeys. Laura’s relations seemed to Sally, as she sat listening to them, as difficult to account for as the monkeys. One couldn’t account for them. But even as these, she reminded herself, they belonged to God.

‘They’re God’s,’ Mr. Pinner had said that day at the Zoo, when asked by her to explain why the monkeys behaved in the way they did; and that being so there was nothing further to worry about.

As for Laura, whose heart, being a Moulsford’s, was good, though it sometimes in moments of excitement forgot to be, she had several qualms during that evening, and soon began to think that perhaps she oughtn’t to have kidnapped Sally, or, having kidnapped her, ought to have kept her hidden till she took her to Cambridge and handed her over to her husband.

Yet she was even more of an overwhelming success than Laura had expected. Streatley was idiotic about her, Charles had fallen in love at last, Mr. Gillespie worshipped and forgave, the dramatic critic was fatuous, Terry was indignant, and the leading lady had been so furious when she saw Sally in the box, and knew why she herself and the play were being failures, that she had refused to come round to supper.

‘What a success,’ thought Laura, looking round her table, the vacant place at which was filled by Lady Streatley, who had drifted in unexpectedly because she didn’t see why Streatley should make a fool of himself with that actress woman unchecked. She had come to check him, and found him needing checking at an entirely different pair of feet. ‘What a success,’ thought Laura, suddenly ashamed.