Introduction to Sally

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

But what faces was she to make, then? All Sally’s faces were pleasant from the point of view of the beholder, whatever sort she made; and if she, by a great effort, and contrary to her nature, frowned at anybody, as likely as not she would be gaped at harder than ever, and asked if she wouldn’t mind doing that again.

Mr. Pinner was distracted. Even the clergy came to his shop,—came with breezy tales of being henpecked, and driven out by tyrant wives to purchase currants; and even the doctor came,—old enough surely, Mr. Pinner thought, to be ashamed of himself, running after a girl he had himself brought into the world, and pretending that what he was after was biscuits.

What he was after was, very plainly, not biscuits, nor were the clergy after currants. One and all were after Sally. And it horrified Mr. Pinner, who took round the plate on Sundays, that a child of his, so good and modest, should be the innocent cause of producing in the hearts of her fellow-creatures a desire to sin. That they desired to sin was only too evident to Mr. Pinner, driven by fear to the basest suspicions. These married gentlemen—what could it be but sin they had in their minds? They wished to sin with Sally, to sin the sin of sins; with his Sally, his spotless lamb, a child of God, an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven.

For a year Mr. Pinner endured it, struggling with his responsibilities and his black suspicions. The milk of his natural kindliness and respect for his betters went sour. He grew to hate the gentry. His face took on a twist of fear that became permanent. The other grocers were furious with him, accusing him among themselves of using his daughter as a decoy; and unable to bear this, for it of course got round to him, and worn out by the constant dread lest worse were yet to come, and some fine day a young whipper-snapper of a lord should be going for a walk in Islington and chance to stroll into his shop and see Sally, and then good-bye to virtue—for was any girl good enough and modest enough to stand out against the onslaughts of a lord? Mr. Pinner asked himself, who had never consciously come across any lords, and therefore was apt to think of them highly—Mr. Pinner determined to move.

He moved. After several Sundays given up to fruitless and ill-organised excursions into other suburbs, he heard by chance of a village buried far away in what seemed to him, whose England consisted of Hampstead Heath, Hampton Court, and, once, Southend, a savage and uninhabited district in Cambridgeshire, where the man who kept its one shop was weary of solitude, and wanted to come nearer London. What could be nearer London than London itself? Mr. Pinner hurried to Woodles, leaving Sally under the strictest vows not to put her terribly complicating nose out of doors.

He thought he had never seen such a place. Used to streets and crowds, he couldn’t have believed there were spots in the world so empty. It was raining, and there wasn’t a soul about. A few cottages, the shop, a church and vicarage, and a sad wet pig grunting along a ditch,—that was all. Three miles from a branch-line station, embedded in a network of muddy lanes, and the Vicar—Mr. Pinner inquired—seventy-eight with no sons, Woodles was surely the ideal place for him and Sally. Over a bottle of ginger beer he made friends with the shopkeeper, and arranged that he should come up to Islington with a view to exchanging. He came; and the exchange, after some regrettable incidents in connection with Sally which very nearly upset the whole thing, was made, and by Christmas Islington knew the Pinners no more.

§

All went well at Woodles for the first few weeks. It was a hamlet, Mr. Pinner rejoiced to discover, lived in practically exclusively by ladies. These ladies, attracted to it by the tumbledownness of its cottages, which made it both picturesque and cheap, had either never had husbands or had lost them, and accordingly, as so often happens in such circumstances, were poor. Well, Mr. Pinner didn’t mind that. He only wanted to live. He had no desire to make more than was just necessary to feed Sally. More merely meant responsibility and bother, and of those he had as much as he could do with because of Sally. He settled down, very content and safe among his widow and virgin customers, and spent a thankful Christmas, entering with hope into the New Year.

Then, one day towards the end of January, two young men rent the peace of the sunny afternoon with the unpleasant noise motor-bicycles, rushing at high speed, appear, Mr. Pinner thought, kindly even towards these, not to be able to help making, and a lady customer who chanced to be in the shop remarked, ‘It has begun.’

Mr. Pinner inquired politely what had begun, and the lady said term had, and Mr. Pinner, who didn’t know what she meant but was unwilling to show his ignorance, said, ‘And high time too.’