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CHAPTER NINE
1.
New York welcomed Jill, as she came out of the Pennsylvania Station
into Seventh Avenue, with a whirl of powdered snow that touched her
cheek like a kiss, the cold, bracing kiss one would expect from this
vivid city. She stood at the station entrance, a tiny figure beside
the huge pillars, looking round her with eager eyes. A wind was
whipping down the avenue. The sky was a clear, brilliant tent of the
brightest blue. Energy was in the air, and hopefulness. She wondered
if Mr Elmer Mariner ever came to New York. It was hard to see how
even his gloom would contrive to remain unaffected by the
exhilaration of the place.
Yes, New York looked good . . . good and exciting, with all the
taxi-cabs rattling in at the dark tunnel beside her, with all the
people hurrying in and hurrying out, with all this medley of
street-cars and sky-signs and crushed snow and drays and horses and
policemen, and that vast hotel across the street, towering to heaven
like a cliff. It even smelt good. She remembered an old picture in
Punch, of two country visitors standing on the step of their railway
carriage at a London terminus, one saying ecstatically to other:
"Don't speak! Just sniff! Doesn't it smell of the Season!" She knew
exactly how they had felt, and she approved of their attitude. That
was the right way to behave on being introduced to a great
metropolis. She stood and sniffed reverently. But for the presence of
the hurrying crowds, she could almost have imitated the example of
that king who kissed the soil of his country on landing from his
ship.
She took Uncle Chris' letter from her bag. He had written from an
address on East Fifty-seventh Street. There would be just time to
catch him before he went out to lunch. She hailed a taxi-cab which
was coming out of the station.
It was a slow ride, halted repeatedly by congestion of the traffic,
but a short one for Jill. She was surprised at herself, a Londoner of
long standing, for feeling so provincial and being so impressed. But
London was far away. It belonged to a life that seemed years ago and
a world from which she had parted for ever. Moreover, this was
undeniably a stupendous city through which her taxi-cab was carrying
her. At Times Square the stream of the traffic plunged into a
whirlpool, swinging out of Broadway to meet the rapids which poured
in from east, west, and north. On Fifth Avenue all the automobiles in
the world were gathered together. On the sidewalks, pedestrians,
muffled against the nipping chill of the crisp air, hurried to and
fro. And, above, that sapphire sky spread a rich velvet curtain which
made the tops of the buildings stand out like the white minarets of
some eastern city of romance.
The cab drew up in front of a stone apartment house; and Jill,
getting out, passed under an awning through a sort of mediaeval
courtyard, gay with potted shrubs, to an inner door. She was
impressed. The very atmosphere was redolent of riches, and she
wondered how in the world Uncle Chris had managed to acquire wealth
on this scale in the extremely short space of time which had elapsed
since his landing. There bustled past her an obvious millionaire--or,
more probably, a greater monarch of finance who looked down upon mere
millionaires and out of the goodness of his heart tried to check a
tendency to speak patronisingly to them. He was concealed to the
eyebrows in a fur coat, and, reaching the sidewalk, was instantly
absorbed in a large limousine. Two expensive-looking ladies followed
him. Jill began to feel a little dazed. Evidently the tales one heard
of fortunes accumulated overnight in this magic city were true, and
one of them must have fallen to the lot of Uncle Chris. For nobody to
whom money was a concern could possibly afford to live in a place
like this. If Croesus and the Count of Monte Cristo had applied for
lodging there, the authorities would probably have looked on them a
little doubtfully at first and hinted at the desirability of a
month's rent in advance.
In a glass case behind the inner door, reading a newspaper and
chewing gum, sat a dignified old man in the rich uniform of a general
in the Guatemalan army. He was a brilliant spectacle. He wore no
jewelry, but this, no doubt, was due to a private distaste for
display. As there was no one else of humbler rank at hand from whom
Jill could solicit an introduction and the privilege of an audience,
she took the bold step of addressing him directly.
"I want to see Major Selby, please."
The Guatemalan general arrested for a moment the rhythmic action of
his jaws, lowered his paper and looked at her with raised eyebrows.
At first Jill thought that he was registering haughty contempt, then
she saw what she had taken for scorn was surprise.
"Major Selby?"
"Major Selby."
"No Major Selby living here."
"Major Christopher Selby."
"Not here," said the associate of ambassadors and the pampered pet of
Guatemala's proudest beauties. "Never heard of him in my life!"
2.
Jill had read works of fiction in which at certain crises everything
had "seemed to swim" in front of the heroine's eyes, but never till
this moment had she experienced that remarkable sensation herself.
The Savior of Guatemala did not actually swim, perhaps, but he
certainly flickered. She had to blink to restore his prismatic
outlines to their proper sharpness. Already the bustle and noise of
New York had begun to induce in her that dizzy condition of unreality
which one feels in dreams, and this extraordinary statement added the
finishing touch.
Perhaps the fact that she had said "please" to him when she opened
the conversation touched the heart of the hero of a thousand
revolutions. Dignified and beautiful as he was to the eye of the
stranger, it is unpleasant to have to record that he lived in a world
which rather neglected the minor courtesies of speech. People did not
often say "please" to him. "Here!" "Hi!" and "Gosh darn you!" yes;
but seldom "please." He seemed to approve of Jill, for he shifted his
chewing-gum to a position which facilitated speech, and began to be
helpful.
"What was the name again?"
"Selby."
"Howja spell it?"
"S-e-l-b-y."
"S-e-l-b-y. Oh, Selby?"
"Yes, Selby."
"What was the first name?"
"Christopher."
"Christopher?"
"Yes, Christopher."
"Christopher Selby? No one of that name living here."
"But there must be."
The veteran shook his head with an indulgent smile.
"You want Mr Sipperley," he said tolerantly. In Guatemala these
mistakes are always happening. "Mr George Sipperley. He's on the
fourth floor. What name shall I say?"
He had almost reached the telephone when Jill stopped him. This is an
age of just-as-good substitutes, but she refused to accept any
unknown Sipperley as a satisfactory alternative for Uncle Chris.
"I don't want Mr Sipperley. I want Major Selby."
"Howja spell it once more?"
"S-e-l-b-y."
"S-e-l-b-y. No one of that name living here. Mr. Sipperley--"--he
spoke in a wheedling voice, as if determined, in spite of herself, to
make Jill see what was in her best interests--"Mr Sipperley's on the
fourth floor. Gentleman in the real estate business," he added
insinuatingly. "He's got blond hair and a Boston bull-dog."
"He may be all you say, and he may have a dozen bulldogs . . ."
"Only one. Jack his name is."
". . . But he isn't the right man. It's absurd. Major Selby wrote to
me from this address. This _is_ Eighteen East Fifty-seventh Street?"
"This is Eighteen East Fifty-seventh Street," conceded the other
cautiously.
"I've got his letter here." She opened her bag, and gave an
exclamation of dismay. "It's gone!"
"Mr Sipperley used to have a friend staying with him last Fall. A Mr
Robertson. Dark-complected man with a mustache."
"I took it out to look at the address, and I was sure I put it back.
I must have dropped it."
"There's a Mr Rainsby on the seventh floor. He's a broker down on
Wall Street. Short man with an impediment in his speech."
Jill snapped the clasp of her bag.
"Never mind," she said. "I must have made a mistake. I was quite sure
that this was the address, but it evidently isn't. Thank you so much.
I'm so sorry to have bothered you."
She walked away, leaving the Terror of Paraguay and all points west
speechless: for people who said "Thank you so much" to him were even
rarer than those who said "please." He followed her with an
affectionate eye till she was out of sight, then, restoring his
chewing-gum to circulation, returned to the perusal of his paper. A
momentary suggestion presented itself to his mind that what Jill had
really wanted was Mr Willoughby on the eighth floor, but it was too
late to say so now: and soon, becoming absorbed in the narrative of a
spirited householder in Kansas who had run amuck with a hatchet and
slain six, he dismissed the matter from his mind.
3.
Jill walked back to Fifth Avenue, crossed it, and made her way
thoughtfully along the breezy street which, flanked on one side by
the Park and on the other by the green-roofed Plaza Hotel and the
apartment houses of the wealthy, ends in the humbler and more
democratic spaces of Columbus Circle. She perceived that she was in
that position, familiar to melodrama, of being alone in a great city.
The reflection brought with it a certain discomfort. The bag that
dangled from her wrist contained all the money she had in the world,
the very broken remains of the twenty dollars which Uncle Chris had
sent her at Brookport. She had nowhere to go, nowhere to sleep, and
no immediately obvious means of adding to her capital. It was a
situation which she had not foreseen when she set out to walk to
Brookport station.
She pondered over the mystery of Uncle Chris' disappearance, and
found no solution. The thing was inexplicable. She was as sure of the
address he had given in his letter as she was of anything in the
world. Yet at that address nothing had been heard of him. His name
was not even known. These were deeper waters than Jill was able to
fathom.
She walked on, aimlessly. Presently she came to Columbus Circle, and,
crossing Broadway at the point where that street breaks out into an
eruption of automobile stores, found herself suddenly hungry,
opposite a restaurant whose entire front was a sheet of plate glass.
On the other side of this glass, at marble-topped tables, apparently
careless of their total lack of privacy, sat the impecunious,
lunching, their every mouthful a spectacle for the passer-by. It
reminded Jill of looking at fishes in an aquarium. In the center of
the window, gazing out in a distrait manner over piles of apples and
grape-fruit, a white-robed ministrant at a stove juggled ceaselessly
with buckwheat cakes. He struck the final note in the candidness of
the establishment, a priest whose ritual contained no mysteries.
Spectators with sufficient time on their hands to permit them to
stand and watch were enabled to witness a New York mid-day meal in
every stage of its career, from its protoplasmic beginnings as a
stream of yellowish-white liquid poured on top of the stove to its
ultimate Nirvana in the interior of the luncher in the form of an
appetising cake. It was a spectacle which no hungry girl could
resist. Jill went in, and, as she made her way among the tables, a
voice spoke her name.
"Miss Mariner!"
Jill jumped, and thought for a moment that the thing must have been
an hallucination. It was impossible that anybody in the place should
have called her name. Except for Uncle Chris, wherever he might be,
she knew no one in New York. Then the voice spoke again, competing
valiantly with a clatter of crockery so uproarious as to be more like
something solid than a mere sound.
"I couldn't believe it was you!"
A girl in blue had risen from the nearest table, and was staring at
her in astonishment, Jill recognized her instantly. Those big,
pathetic eyes, like a lost child's, were unmistakable. It was the
parrot girl, the girl whom she and Freddie Rooke had found in the
drawing-room, at Ovington Square that afternoon when the foundations
of the world had given way and chaos had begun.
"Good gracious!" cried Jill. "I thought you were in London!"
That feeling of emptiness and panic, the result of her interview with
the Guatemalan general at the apartment house, vanished magically.
She sat down at this unexpected friend's table with a light heart.
"Whatever are you doing in New York?" asked the girl. "I never knew
you meant to come over."
"It was a little sudden. Still, here I am. And I'm starving. What are
those things you're eating?"
"Buckwheat cakes."
"Oh, yes. I remember Uncle Chris talking about them on the boat. I'll
have some."
"But when did you come over?"
"I landed about ten days ago. I've been down at a place called
Brookport on Long Island. How funny running into you like this!"
"I was surprised that you remembered me."
"I've forgotten your name," admitted Jill frankly. "But that's
nothing. I always forget names."
"My name's Nelly Bryant."
"Of course. And you're on the stage, aren't you?"
"Yes. I've just got work with Goble and Cohn. . . . Hullo, Phil!"
A young man with a lithe figure and smooth black hair brushed
straight back from his forehead had paused at the table on his way to
the cashier's desk.
"Hello, Nelly."
"I didn't know you lunched here."
"Don't often. Been rehearsing with Joe up at the Century Roof, and
had a quarter of an hour to get a bite. Can I sit down?"
"Sure. This is my friend, Miss Mariner."
The young man shook hands with Jill, flashing an approving glance at
her out of his dark, restless eyes.
"Pleased to meet you."
"This is Phil Brown," said Nelly. "He plays the straight for Joe
Widgeon. They're the best jazz-and-hokum team on the Keith Circuit."
"Oh, hush!" said Mr Brown modestly. "You always were a great little
booster, Nelly."
"Well, you know you are! Weren't you held over at the Palace last
time! Well, then!"
"That's true," admitted the young man. "Maybe we didn't gool 'em, eh?
Stop me on the street and ask me! Only eighteen bows second house
Saturday!"
Jill was listening, fascinated.
"I can't understand a word," she said. "It's like another language."
"You're from the other side, aren't you?" asked Mr Brown.
"She only landed a week ago," said Nelly.
"I thought so from the accent," said Mr Brown. "So our talk sort of
goes over the top, does it? Well, you'll learn American soon, if you
stick around."
"I've learned some already," said Jill. The relief of meeting Nelly
had made her feel very happy. She liked this smooth-haired young man.
"A man on the train this morning said to me, 'Would you care for the
morning paper, sister?' I said, 'No, thanks, brother, I want to look
out of the window and think!'"
"You meet a lot of fresh guys on trains," commented Mr Brown
austerely. "You want to give 'em the cold-storage eye." He turned to
Nelly. "Did you go down to Ike, as I told you?"
"Yes."
"Did you cop?"
"Yes. I never felt so happy in my life. I'd waited over an hour on
that landing of theirs, and then Johnny Miller came along, and I
yelled in his ear that I was after work, and he told me it would be
all right. He's awfully good to girls who've worked in shows for him
before. If it hadn't been for him I might have been waiting there
still."
"Who," enquired Jill, anxious to be abreast of the conversation, "is
Ike?"
"Mr Goble. Where I've just got work. Goble and Cohn, you know."
"I never heard of them!"
The young man extended his hand.
"Put it there!" he said. "They never heard of me! At least, the
fellow I saw when I went down to the office hadn't! Can you beat it?"
"Oh, did you go down there, too?" asked Nelly.
"Sure. Joe wanted to get in another show on Broadway. He'd sort of
got tired of vodevil. Say, I don't want to scare you, Nelly, but, if
you ask me, that show they're putting out down there is a citron! I
don't think Ike's got a cent of his own money in it. My belief is
that he's running it for a lot of amateurs. Why, say, listen! Joe and
I blow in there to see if there's anything for us, and there's a tall
guy in tortoiseshell cheaters sitting in Ike's office. Said he was
the author and was engaging the principals. We told him who we were,
and it didn't make any hit with him at all. He said he had never
heard of us. And, when we explained, he said no, there wasn't going
to be any of our sort of work in the show. Said he was making an
effort to give the public something rather better than the usual sort
of thing. No specialties required. He said it was an effort to
restore the Gilbert and Sullivan tradition. Say, who are these
Gilbert and Sullivan guys, anyway? They get written up in the papers
all the time, and I never met any one who'd run across them. If you
want my opinion, that show down there is a comic opera!"
"For heaven's sake!" Nelly had the musical comedy performer's horror
of the older-established form of entertainment. "Why, comic opera
died in the year one!"
"Well, these guys are going to dig it up. That's the way it looks to
me." He lowered his voice. "Say, I saw Clarice last night," he said
in a confidential undertone. "It's all right."
"It is?"
"We've made it up. It was like this . . ."
His conversation took an intimate turn. He expounded for Nelly's
benefit the inner history, with all its ramifications, of a recent
unfortunate rift between himself and "the best little girl in
Flatbush,"--what he had said, what she had said, what her sister had
said, and how it all come right in the end. Jill might have felt a
little excluded, but for the fact that a sudden and exciting idea had
come to her. She sat back, thinking. . . . After all, what else was
she to do? She must do something. . . .
She bent forward and interrupted Mr Brown in his description of a
brisk passage of arms between himself and the best little girl's
sister, who seemed to be an unpleasant sort of person in every way.
"Mr Brown."
"Hello?"
"Do you think there would be any chance for me if I asked for work at
Goble and Cohn's?"
"You're joking!" cried Nelly.
"I'm not at all."
"But what do you want with work?"
"I've got to find some. And right away, too."
"I don't understand."
Jill hesitated. She disliked discussing her private affairs, but
there was obviously no way of avoiding it. Nelly was round-eyed and
mystified, and Mr Brown had manifestly no intention whatever of
withdrawing tactfully. He wanted to hear all.
"I've lost my money," said Jill.
"Lost your money! Do you mean . . . ?"
"I've lost it all. Every penny I had in the world."
"Tough!" interpolated Mr Brown judicially. "I broke once way out in a
tank-town in Oklahoma. The manager skipped with our salaries. Last we
saw of him he was doing the trip to Canada in nothing flat."
"But how?" gasped Nelly.
"It happened about the time we met in London. Do you remember Freddie
Rooke, who was at our house that after-noon?"
A dreamy look came into Nelly's eyes. There had not been an hour
since their parting when she had not thought of that immaculate
sportsman. It would have amazed Freddie, could he have known, but to
Nelly Bryant he was the one perfect man in an imperfect world.
"Do I!" she sighed ecstatically.
Mr Brown shot a keen glance at her.
"Aha!" he cried facetiously. "Who is he, Nelly? Who is this blue-eyed
boy?"
"If you want to know," said Nelly, defiance in her tone, "he's the
fellow who gave me fifty pounds, with no strings tied to it,--get
that!--when I was broke in London! If it hadn't been for him, I'd be
there still."
"Did he?" cried Jill. "Freddie!"
"Yes. Oh, Gee!" Nelly sighed once more. "I suppose I'll never see him
again in this world."
"Introduce me to him, if you do," said Mr Brown. "He sounds just the
sort of little pal I'd like to have!"
"You remember hearing Freddie say something about losing money in a
slump on the Stock Exchange," proceeded Jill. "Well, that was how I
lost mine. It's a long story, and it's not worth talking about, but
that's how things stand, and I've got to find work of some sort, and
it looks to me as if I should have a better chance of finding it on
the stage than anywhere else."
"I'm terribly sorry."
"Oh, it's all right. How much would these people Goble and Cohn give
me if I got an engagement?"
"Only forty a week."
"Forty dollars a week! It's wealth! Where are they?"
"Over at the Gotham Theatre in Forty-second Street."
"I'll go there at once."
"But you'll hate it. You don't realize what it's like. You wait hours
and hours and nobody sees you."
"Why shouldn't I walk straight in and say that I've come for work?"
Nelly's big eyes grew bigger.
"But you couldn't!"
"Why not?"
"Why, you couldn't!"
"I don't see why."
Mr Brown intervened with decision.
"You're dead right," he said to Jill approvingly. "If you ask me,
that's the only sensible thing to do. Where's the sense of hanging
around and getting stalled? Managers are human guys, some of 'em.
Probably, if you were to try it, they'd appreciate a bit of gall. It
would show 'em you'd got pep. You go down there and try walking
straight in. They can't eat you. It makes me sick when I see all
those poor devils hanging about outside these offices, waiting to get
noticed and nobody ever paying any attention to them. You push the
office-boy in the face if he tries to stop you, and go in and make
'em take notice. And, whatever you do, don't leave your name and
address! That's the old, moth-eaten gag they're sure to try to pull
on you. Tell 'em there's nothing doing. Say you're out for a quick
decision! Stand 'em on their heads!"
Jill got up, fired by this eloquence. She called for her check.
"Good-bye," she said. "I'm going to do exactly as you say. Where can
I find you afterwards?" she said to Nelly.
"You aren't really going?"
"I am!"
Nelly scribbled on a piece of paper.
"Here's my address. I'll be in all evening."
"I'll come and see you. Good-bye, Mr Brown. And thank you."
"You're welcome!" said Mr Brown.
Nelly watched Jill depart with wide eyes.
"Why did you tell her to do that?" she said.
"Why not?" said Mr Brown. "I started something, didn't I? Well, I
guess I'll have to be leaving, too. Got to get back to rehearsal.
Say, I like that friend of yours, Nelly. There's no yellow streak
about her! I wish her luck!"
Content of CHAPTER NINE [P G Wodehouse's novel: The Little Warrior]
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