The Little Warrior

by P. G. Wodehouse

Doctors, laying down the law in their usual confident way, tell us that the vitality of the human body is at its lowest at two o’clock in the morning: and that it is then, as a consequence, that the mind is least able to contemplate the present with equanimity, the future with fortitude, and the past without regret. Every thinking man, however, knows that this is not so. The true zero hour, desolate, gloom-ridden, and specter-haunted, occurs immediately before dinner while we are waiting for that cocktail. It is then that, stripped for a brief moment of our armor of complacency and self-esteem, we see ourselves as we are,—frightful chumps in a world where nothing goes right; a gray world in which, hoping to click, we merely get the raspberry; where, animated by the best intentions, we nevertheless succeed in perpetrating the scaliest bloomers and landing our loved ones neck-deep in the gumbo.

So reflected Freddie Rooke, that priceless old bean, sitting disconsolately in an arm-chair at the Drones Club about two weeks after Jill’s departure from England, waiting for his friend Algy Martyn to trickle in and give him dinner.

Surveying Freddie, as he droops on his spine in the yielding leather, one is conscious of one’s limitations as a writer. Gloom like his calls for the pen of a master. Zola could have tackled it nicely. Gorky might have made a stab at it. Dostoievsky would have handled it with relish. But for oneself the thing is too vast. One cannot wangle it. It intimidates. It would have been bad enough in any case, for Algy Martyn was late as usual and it always gave Freddie the pip to have to wait for dinner: but what made it worse was the fact that the Drones was not one of Freddie’s clubs and so, until the blighter Algy arrived, it was impossible for him to get his cocktail. There he sat, surrounded by happy, laughing young men, each grasping a glass of the good old mixture-as-before, absolutely unable to connect. Some of them, casual acquaintances, had nodded to him, waved, and gone on lowering the juice,—a spectacle which made Freddie feel much as the wounded soldier would have felt if Sir Philip Sidney, instead of offering him the cup of water, had placed it to his own lips and drained it with a careless “Cheerio!” No wonder Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoi’s Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day’s work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city reservoir, he turns to the cupboard, only to find the vodka-bottle empty.

Freddie gave himself up to despondency: and, as always in these days when he was mournful, he thought of Jill. Jill’s sad case was a continual source of mental anguish to him. From the first he had blamed himself for the breaking-off of her engagement with Derek. If he had not sent the message to Derek from the police-station, the latter would never have known about their arrest, and all would have been well. And now, a few days ago, had come the news of her financial disaster, with its attendant complications.

It had descended on Freddie like a thunderbolt through the medium of Ronny Devereux.

“I say,” Ronny had said, “have you heard the latest? Your pal, Underhill, has broken off his engagement with Jill Mariner.”

“I know; rather rotten, what!”

“Rotten? I should say so! It isn’t done. I mean to say, chap can’t chuck a girl just because she’s lost her money. Simply isn’t on the board, old man!”

“Lost her money? What do you mean?”

Ronny was surprised. Hadn’t Freddie heard? Yes, absolute fact. He had it from the best authority. Didn’t know how it had happened and all that, but Jill Mariner had gone completely bust; Underhill had given her the miss-in-baulk; and the poor girl had legged it, no one knew where. Oh, Freddie had met her and she had told him she was going to America? Well, then, legged it to America. But the point was that the swine Underhill had handed her the mitten just because she was broke, and that was what Ronny thought so bally rotten. Broker a girl is, Ronny meant to say, more a fellow should stick to her.