P G Wodehouse – Man Upstairs

He selected Millbourne because he had been butler at the Hall there, and because his sister Jane, who had been a parlourmaid at the Rectory, was now married and living in the village.

Certainly he could not have chosen a more promising reformatory for Sally. Here, if anywhere, might she forget the heady joys of the cinema. Tucked away in the corner of its little bay, which an accommodating island converts into a still lagoon, Millbourne lies dozing. In all sleepy Hampshire there is no sleepier spot. It is a place of calm-eyed men and drowsy dogs. Things crumble away and are not replaced. Tradesmen book orders, and then lose interest and forget to deliver the goods. Only centenarians die, and nobody worries about anything-or did not until Sally came and gave them something to worry about.

Next door to Sally’s Aunt Jane, in a cosy little cottage with a wonderful little garden, lived Thomas Kitchener, a large, grave, self-sufficing young man, who, by sheer application to work, had become already, though only twenty-five, second gardener at the Hall. Gardening absorbed him. When he was not working at the Hall he was working at home. On the morning following Sally’s arrival, it being a Thursday and his day off, he was crouching in a constrained attitude in his garden, every fibre of his being concentrated on the interment of a plump young bulb. Consequently, when a chunk of mud came sailing over the fence, he did not notice it.

A second, however, compelled attention by bursting like a shell on the back of his neck. He looked up, startled. Nobody was in sight. He was puzzled. It could hardly be raining mud. Yet the alternative theory, that someone in the next garden was throwing it, was hardly less bizarre. The nature of his friendship with Sally’s Aunt Jane and old Mr. Williams, her husband, was comfortable rather than rollicking. It was inconceivable that they should be flinging clods at him.

As he stood wondering whether he should go to the fence and look over, or simply accept the phenomenon as one of those things which no fellow can understand, there popped up before him the head and shoulders of a girl. Poised in her right hand was a third clod, which, seeing that there was now no need for its services, she allowed to fall to the ground.

“Halloa!” she said. “Good morning.”

She was a pretty girl, small and trim. Tom was by way of being the strong, silent man with a career to think of and no time for bothering about girls, but he saw that. There was, moreover, a certain alertness in her expression rarely found in the feminine population of Millbourne, who were apt to be slightly bovine.

“What do you think you’re messing about at?” she said, affably.

Tom was a slow-minded young man, who liked to have his thoughts well under control before he spoke. He was not one of your gay rattlers. Besides, there was something about this girl which confused him to an extraordinary extent. He was conscious of new and strange emotions. He stood staring silently.

“What’s your name, anyway?”

He could answer that. He did so.

“Oh! Mine’s Sally Preston. Mrs. Williams is my aunt. I’ve come from London.”

Tom had no remarks to make about London.

“Have you lived here all your life?”

“Yes,” said Tom.

“My goodness! Don’t you ever feel fed up? Don’t you want a change?”

Tom considered the point.

“No,” he said.

“Well, I do. I want one now.”

“It’s a nice place,” hazarded Tom.

“It’s nothing of the sort. It’s the beastliest hole in existence. It’s absolutely chronic. Perhaps you wonder why I’m here. Don’t think I wanted to come here. Not me! I was sent. It was like this.” She gave him a rapid summary of her troubles. “There! Don’t you call it a bit thick?” she concluded.

Tom considered this point, too.

“You make must the best of it,” he said, at length.

“I won’t! I’ll make father take me back.”

Tom considered this point also. Rarely, if ever, had he been given so many things to think about in one morning.

“How?” he inquired, at length.