The Little Warrior by P. G. Wodehouse

CHAPTER SEVEN

1.

In the lives of each one of us, as we look back and review them in retrospect, there are certain desert wastes from which memory winces like some tired traveller faced with a dreary stretch of road. Even from the security of later happiness we cannot contemplate them without a shudder. Time robs our sorrows of their sharp vividness, but the horror of those blank, gray days never wholly passes. It remains for ever at the back of our consciousness to remind us that, though we may have struggled through it to the heights, there is an abyss. We may dwell, like the Pilgrim, on the Delectable Mountains, but we never forget the Slough of Despond. Years afterwards, Jill could not bring herself to think of that brief but age-long period which lay between the evening when she read Derek’s letter and the morning when, with the wet sea-wind in her face and the cry of the wheeling sea-gulls in her ears, she stood on the deck of the liner that was taking her to the land where she could begin a new life. It brooded behind her like a great, dank cloud, shutting out the sunshine.

The conditions of modern life are singularly inimical to swift and dramatic action when we wish to escape from surroundings that have become intolerable. In the old days, your hero would leap on his charger and ride out into the sunset. Now, he is compelled to remain for a week or so to settle his affairs,—especially if he is an Uncle Chris—and has got those affairs into such a tangle that hardened lawyers knit their brows at the sight of them. It took one of the most competent firms in the metropolis four days to produce some sort of order in the confusion resulting from Major Selby’s financial operations; and during those days Jill existed in a state of being which could be defined as living only in that she breathed and ate and comported herself outwardly like a girl and not a ghost.

Boards announcing that the house was for sale appeared against the railings through which Jane the parlormaid conducted her daily conversations with the tradesmen. Strangers roamed the rooms eyeing and appraising the furniture. Uncle Chris, on whom disaster had had a quickening and vivifying effect, was everywhere at once, an impressive figure of energy. One may be wronging Uncle Chris, but to the eye of the casual observer he seemed in these days of trial to be having the time of his life.

Jill varied the monotony of sitting in her room—which was the only place in the house where one might be sure of not encountering a furniture-broker’s man with a note-book and pencil—by taking long walks. She avoided as far as possible the small area which had once made up the whole of London for her, but even so she was not always successful in escaping from old acquaintances. Once, cutting through Lennox Gardens on her way to that vast, desolate King’s Road which stretches its length out into regions unknown to those whose London is the West End, she happened upon Freddie Rooke, who had been paying a call in his best hat and a pair of white spats which would have cut his friend Henry to the quick. It was not an enjoyable meeting. Freddie, keenly alive to the awkwardness of the situation, was scarlet and incoherent; and Jill, who desired nothing less than to talk with one so intimately connected in her mind with all that she had lost, was scarcely more collected. They parted without regret. The only satisfaction that came to Jill from the encounter was the knowledge that Derek was still out of town. He had wired for his things, said Freddie and had retreated further north. Freddie, it seemed, had been informed of the broken engagement by Lady Underhill in an interview which appeared to have left a lasting impression on his mind. Of Jill’s monetary difficulties he had heard nothing.

After this meeting, Jill felt a slight diminution of the oppression which weighed upon her. She could not have borne to have come unexpectedly upon Derek, and, now that there was no danger of that, she found life a little easier. The days passed somehow, and finally there came the morning when, accompanied by Uncle Chris—voluble and explanatory about the details of what he called “getting everything settled”—she rode in a taxi to take the train for Southampton. Her last impression of London was of rows upon rows of mean houses, of cats wandering in back-yards among groves of home-washed underclothing, and a smoky grayness which gave way, as the train raced on, to the clearer gray of the suburbs and the good green and brown of the open country.

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