Introduction to Sally

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

The grin spread to the face of the ferryman, and began to appear on the faces piled up over the top of the charabanc.

Jocelyn saw it, and suddenly froze into icy impassiveness. Whatever the damned horn chose to do he wasn’t going to provide entertainment for a lot of blasted trippers. Besides—was he losing his temper? He, who had supposed for years that he hadn’t got one?

He slammed the bonnet to, flung the tools back into their box, got into his seat again, and sat waiting to drive off the ferry with a completely expressionless face, just as if nothing at all were happening; and Sally, deluded by his calm into supposing that he thought the horn was now all right, after waiting a moment anxiously and seeing that he didn’t do anything more, nudged him gently and told him it was still blowing.

‘Is it?’ said Jocelyn; and there was something in the look he gave her that made her more sure than ever that speech with Usband was a mistake.

It blew all the way to Truro. That was the nearest place where the thing could be taken to a garage, and kicked to pieces if nothing else would stop it. For ten miles it blew steadily. They streamed, shrieking, along the lanes and out on to the main road. The drive was a nightmare of astonished faces, of people rushing out of cottages, of children shouting, of laughter flashing and gone, to be succeeded by more and more, till the whole of every mile seemed one huge exclamation.

Sally squeezed terror-stricken into her corner. Such speed as this she had never dreamed of, nor had it ever yet been got out of the Morris-Cowley. She could only cling and hope. The noise was deafening. The little car leapt into the air at every bump in the road. Jocelyn’s face was like a marble mask. The charabanc, being bound for Falmouth, turned off to the left at the main road, and the passengers rose as one man in their seats and waved handkerchiefs of farewell; while Sally, even at such a moment unable not to be polite, let go the side of the car an instant to search with trembling fingers for her handkerchief and wave it back.

§

At Truro he stopped at the first garage he saw, a small one in the outlying part of the town, where there were few passers-by. The few there were, however, immediately collected round the car that swooped down the hill on them hooting, and still went on hooting in spite of having stopped.

How simple, if it had been his mother who was with him, to have asked her to walk on to an hotel or a confectioner’s, and wait for him while he had the horn seen to. She would have proceeded through the town unobserved and unmolested, and the hotel or confectioner would have received her without curiosity, and attended respectfully to her wants. Or she might have waited in the car, and there too she would have aroused neither interest nor comment. A lady, you see. A lady, turning, like a decent Italian house, her plain and expressionless side to the public of the street, and keeping her other side, her strictly private and delightful other side, for her family and friends.

He hurried Sally into the garage, into the furthermost depths of the garage. Not for her, he felt, were quiet walks alone through streets and unquestioning acceptance at hotels; not for him the convenience, the comfort, of a companion who in a crisis needn’t be bothered about, who automatically became effaced. Nothing effaced Sally. Her deplorable conspicuousness made it impossible for her to go anywhere without him. She had to be accompanied and protected as watchfully as if she were the Crown Jewels. Yes, or a perambulator with a baby in it that could never be left alone for an instant, and was always having to be pushed about by somebody. That somebody was himself, Jocelyn Luke; Jocelyn Luke, who as recently as a month ago was working away, hopeful and absorbed, immersed in profoundly interesting and important studies, independent, with nothing at all to trammel him or hinder him—with, on the contrary, everything and everybody conspiring to leave him as untrammelled and unhindered as possible. What was he now? Why, the perambulator’s nursemaid. Just that: the perambulator’s attendant nursemaid.