The Little Warrior by P. G. Wodehouse (accelerated reader books .TXT) 📖

once more and emerged with another possibility.

“Or Charlie—Charlie what was it?—Charlie Field?”

“You wound me! Have you forgotten that Charlie Field wore velvet Lord Fauntleroy suits and long golden curls? My past is not smirched with anything like that.”

“Would I remember your name if you told me?”

“I don’t know. I’ve forgotten yours. Your surname, that is. Of course I remember that your Christian name was Jill. It has always seemed to me the prettiest monosyllable in the language.” He looked at her thoughtfully. “It’s odd how little you’ve altered in looks. Freddie’s just the same, too, only larger. And he didn’t wear an eye-glass in those days, though I can see he was bound to later on. And yet I’ve changed so much that you can’t place me. It shows what a wearing life I must have led. I feel like Rip van Winkle. Old and withered. But that may be just the result of watching this play.”

“It is pretty terrible, isn’t it?”

“Worse than that. Looking at it dispassionately, I find it the extreme, ragged, outermost edge of the limit. Freddie had the correct description of it. He’s a great critic.”

“I really do think it’s the worst thing I have ever seen.”

“I don’t know what plays you have seen, but I feel you’re right.”

“Perhaps the second act’s better,” said Jill optimistically.

“It’s worse. I know that sounds like boasting, but it’s true. I feel like getting up and making a public apology.”

“But … Oh!”

Jill turned scarlet. A monstrous suspicion had swept over her.

“The only trouble is,” went on her companion, “that the audience would undoubtedly lynch me. And, though it seems improbable just at the present moment, it may be that life holds some happiness for me that’s worth waiting for. Anyway I’d rather not be torn limb from limb. A messy finish! I can just see them rending me asunder in a spasm of perfectly justifiable fury. ‘She loves me!’ Off comes a leg. ‘She loves me not!’ Off comes an arm. No, I think on the whole I’ll lie low. Besides, why should I care? Let ’em suffer. It’s their own fault. They would come!”

Jill had been trying to interrupt the harangue. She was greatly concerned.

“Did you write the play?”

The man nodded.

“You are quite right to speak in that horrified tone. But, between ourselves and on the understanding that you don’t get up and denounce me, I did.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry!”

“Not half so sorry as I am, believe me!”

“I mean, I wouldn’t have said …”

“Never mind. You didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know.” The lights began to go down. He rose. “Well, they’re off again. Perhaps you will excuse me? I don’t feel quite equal to assisting any longer at the wake. If you want something to occupy your mind during the next act, try to remember my name.”

He slid from his seat and disappeared. Jill clutched at Derek.

“Oh, Derek, it’s too awful. I’ve just been talking to the man who wrote this play, and I told him it was the worst thing I had ever seen!”

“Did you?” Derek snorted. “Well, it’s about time somebody told him!” A thought seemed to strike him. “Why, who is he? I didn’t know you knew him.”

“I don’t. I don’t even know his name.”

“His name, according to the programme, is John Grant. Never heard of him before. Jill, I wish you would not talk to people you don’t know,” said Derek with a note of annoyance in his voice. “You can never tell who they are.”

“But …”

“Especially with my mother here. You must be more careful.”

The curtain rose. Jill saw the stage mistily. From childhood up, she had never been able to cure herself of an unfortunate sensitiveness when sharply spoken to by those she loved. A rebuking world she could face with a stout heart, but there had always been just one or two people whose lightest word of censure could crush her. Her father had always had that effect upon her, and now Derek had taken his place.

But if there had only been time to explain … Derek could not object to her chatting with a friend of her childhood, even if she had completely forgotten him and did not remember his name even now. John Grant? Memory failed to produce any juvenile John Grant for her inspection.

Puzzling over this problem, Jill missed much of the beginning of the second act. Hers was a detachment which the rest of the audience would gladly have shared. For the poetic drama, after a bad start, was now plunging into worse depths of dulness. The coughing had become almost continuous. The stalls, supported by the presence of large droves of Sir Chester’s personal friends, were struggling gallantly to maintain a semblance of interest, but the pit and gallery had plainly given up hope. The critic of a weekly paper of small circulation, who had been shoved up in the upper circle, grimly jotted down the phrase “apathetically received” on his programme. He had come to the theatre that night in an aggrieved mood, for managers usually put him in the dress-circle. He got out his pencil again. Another phrase had occurred to him, admirable for the opening of his article. “At the Leicester Theatre,” he wrote, “where Sir Chester Portwood presented ‘Tried by Fire,’ dulness reigned supreme. …”

But you never know. Call no evening dull till it is over. However uninteresting its early stages may have been, that night was to be as animated and exciting as any audience could desire,—a night to be looked back to and talked about. For just as the critic of London Gossip wrote those damning words on his programme, guiding his pencil uncertainly in the dark, a curious yet familiar odor stole over the house.

The stalls got it first, and sniffed. It rose to the dress-circle, and the dress-circle sniffed. Floating up, it smote the silent gallery. And, suddenly, coming to life with a single-minded abruptness, the gallery ceased to be silent.

“Fire!”

Sir Chester Portwood, ploughing his way through a long speech, stopped and looked apprehensively over his shoulder. The girl with the lisp, who had been listening in a perfunctory manner to the long speech, screamed loudly. The voice of an unseen stage-hand called thunderously to an invisible “Bill” to cummere quick. And from the scenery on the prompt side there curled lazily across the stage a black wisp of smoke.

“Fire! Fire! Fire!”

“Just,” said a voice at Jill’s elbow, “what the play needed!” The mysterious author was back in his seat again.