INTRODUCTION
TO SALLY
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA · MADRAS
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
DALLAS · SAN FRANCISCO
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
INTRODUCTION
TO SALLY
BY THE AUTHOR OF
“ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN”
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1926
COPYRIGHT
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
BY R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, EDINBURGH
I
§
Mr. Pinner was a God-fearing man, who was afraid of everything except
respectability. He married Mrs. Pinner when they were both twenty, and
by the time they were both thirty if he had had to do it again he
wouldn’t have. For Mrs. Pinner had several drawbacks. One was, she
quarrelled; and Mr. Pinner, who prized peace, was obliged to quarrel
too. Another was, she appeared to be unable to have children; and Mr.
Pinner, who was fond of children, accordingly couldn’t have them either.
And another, which while it lasted was in some ways the worst, was that
she was excessively pretty.
This was most awkward in a shop. It continually put Mr. Pinner in false
positions. And it seemed to go on so long. There seemed to be no end to
the years of Mrs. Pinner’s prettiness. They did end, however; and when
she was about thirty-five, worn out by her own unquiet spirit and the
work of helping Mr. Pinner in the shop, as well as keeping house for
him, which included doing everything single-handed, by God’s mercy she
at last began to fade.
Mr. Pinner was pleased. For though her behaviour had been beyond
criticism, and she had invariably, by a system of bridling and
head-tossing, kept off familiarity on the part of male customers, still
those customers had undoubtedly been more numerous than the others, and
Mr. Pinner hadn’t liked it. It was highly unnatural, he knew, for
gentlemen on their way home from their offices to wish to buy rice, for
instance, when it had been bought earlier in the day by their wives or
mothers. There was something underhand about it; and he, who being timid
was also honest, found himself not able to be happy if there were a
shadow of doubt in his mind as to the honourableness of any of his
transactions. He never got used to these purchases, and was glad when
the gradual disappearance of his wife’s beauty caused the gradual
disappearance of the customers who made them. Money, it was true, was
lost, but he preferred to lose it than to make it by means that verged
in his opinion on shady.
As Mrs. Pinner faded and custom dropped off, he and she had more time on
their hands, and went to bed earlier; for Mrs. Pinner, who had an
untiring tongue when she was awake, and inveigled her husband into many
quarrels, was obliged to leave off talking when she was asleep, and he,
pretending it was because of the gas bills, got her to go to bed earlier
and earlier. Besides, he wished more heartily than ever that she might
have a child, if only to take her attention off him. But he longed for a
child himself as well, for he was affectionate without passion, and it
was his secret opinion--all his opinions were secret, because if he let
them out Mrs. Pinner quarrelled--that such men are born good fathers.
Something, however, had to be born besides themselves before they could
show their capabilities, and Mrs. Pinner, who was passionate without
affection, which in Mr. Pinner’s opinion was rather shocking, for she
sometimes quite frightened him in bed, and he was sure it wasn’t at all
respectable for a wife to do that, especially as next day she didn’t
seem to like him any better than before, hadn’t been able to produce
what was needed.
Certain it was that he couldn’t become a father without her. In this one
thing he depended utterly on her; for though she believed she ruled him
through and through, in every other matter at the back of his soul Mr.
Pinner always secretly managed very well for himself. But here he was
helpless. If she didn’t, he couldn’t. Nothing doing at all without Mrs.
Pinner.
Therefore, as a first step, every evening at nine o’clock, instead of at
eleven or twelve as had been their habit in the busy, tiring years,
after a day of only too much leisure they went to bed. There they
tossed, because of its being so early; or, rather, Mrs. Pinner tossed,
while he lay quiet, such being his nature. And whether it was these
regular hours, or whether it was God, who favours families, at last
taking pity on the Pinners, just as Mr. Pinner was coming to the
conclusion that he had best perhaps now let well alone, for he and his
wife were drawing near forty, Mrs. Pinner inexplicably began to do that
which she ought to have done twenty years earlier, and proceeded to go
through those bodily changes, one after the other and all strictly
according to precedent, which were bound to end, though for many months
Mr. Pinner didn’t believe it, in either a boy or a girl; or
perhaps--this was his secret longing--in both.
They ended in one girl.
‘I’m blest,’ said Mr. Pinner to himself, seeing his wife’s complete,
impassioned absorption, ‘if that kid ain’t goin’ to be my salvation.’
And he wanted to have it christened Salvation, but Mrs. Pinner objected,
because it wasn’t a girl’s name at all, she said; and, as she had no
heart just then for quarrelling, they compromised on Salvatia.
§
Thus was Salvatia projected into the world, who afterwards became Sally.
Her parents struggled against her being called Sally, because they
thought it common. Their struggles, however, were vain. People were
unteachable. And the child herself, from the moment she could talk,
persisted in saying she was Sally.
She grew up so amazingly pretty that it soon became the Pinners’ chief
concern how best to hide her. Such beauty, which began by being their
pride, quickly became their anxiety. By the time Sally was twelve they
were always hiding her. She was quite easy to hide, for she went meekly
where she was told and stayed there, having not only inherited her
father’s mild goodness, but also, partly from him and more from some
unknown forbear, for she had much more of it than Mr. Pinner at his most
obliging, a great desire to give satisfaction and do what was asked of
her. She had none of that artfulness of the weak that was so marked a
feature of Mr. Pinner. She never was different at the back of her mind
from what she was on the surface of her behaviour. Life hadn’t yet
forced her, as it had forced Mr. Pinner, to be secretive; it hadn’t had
time. Besides, said Mr. Pinner to himself, she wasn’t married.
From her mother she had inherited nothing but her looks; translating,
however, the darkness into fairness, and the prettiness into
beauty,--beauty authentic, indisputable, apparent to the most
unobservant. Mr. Pinner was divided between pride and fear. Mrs. Pinner
concentrated entirely on her child, and was the best of prudent
mothers. There, in their back parlour, they kept this secret treasure,
and, like other treasures, its possession produced anxiety as well as
joy. Till she was about twelve she did as other children, and went off
to school by herself every day, illuminating Islington, as she passed
along its streets, like a flame. Then the Pinners got a fright: she was
followed. Not once or twice, but several times; and came home one day
happy, her hands full of chocolates she said a gentleman had given her.
The Pinners began to hide her. Mrs. Pinner took her to school and
fetched her away again every day, and in between hid her in the back
parlour. Mr. Pinner did Mrs. Pinner’s work as well as his own while she
was gone, and just managed to because his wife was fleet of foot and ran
most of the way; otherwise it would have broken his back, for he wasn’t
able to afford to keep an assistant, and had little staying power. At
night, when the dear object of their love and fear was asleep, they
earnestly in bed discussed what was best to be done so as to secure to
her the greatest happiness together with the greatest safety. Their
common care and love had harmonised them. In the child they were
completely at one. No longer did Mrs. Pinner rail, and Mr. Pinner, after
a time, be obliged to answer back; no longer was he forced, contrary to
his nature, into quarrels. Peace prevailed, and the affection that comes
from a common absorbing interest.
‘It’s all that there Sally,’ said Mr. Pinner, content at last in his
married life, and unable--for he had few words--to put what he felt more
glowingly.
§
But when Sally was sixteen Mrs. Pinner died; died in a few days, of a
cold no worse than dozens of colds she had caught in her life and hadn’t
died of.
Mr. Pinner was left with no one to help him, either in his shop or with
Sally. It was an immense misfortune. He didn’t know which way to turn.
He lived within the narrowest margin of safety, for in Islington there
were many grocers, and he was one of the very smallest, never having had
any ambition beyond the ambition for peace and enough to eat.
It was impossible for him to run the shop without help, and without the
shop he and Sally would starve, so there was nothing for it but to let
her take her mother’s place; and within a week his custom was doubled,
and went on doubling and doubling till the local supply of males was
exhausted.
It was a repetition of twenty years earlier, only much worse. Mr. Pinner
was most unhappy. Sally couldn’t help smiling back when anybody smiled
at her,--it was her nature; and as everybody, the minute they saw her,
did smile, she was in a continual condition of radiance, and the shop
seemed full of light. Mr. Pinner was distracted. He hired an assistant,
having made money, announced that his daughter had gone away to
boarding-school, and hid her in the back parlour. The custom dropped
off, and the assistant had to go. Out came Sally again, and back came
the custom. What a situation, thought Mr. Pinner, irritable and
perspiring. He was worn out keeping his eye on Sally, and weighing out
coffee and bacon at the same time. His responsibilities crushed him. The
only solution of his difficulties would be to get the girl married to
some steady fellow able to take care of her. There seemed to him to be
no steady fellows in the crowd in his shop, except the ones who were
already married, and they couldn’t really be steady or they wouldn’t be
there. How could a married man be called steady who eagerly waited for
Sally to sell him groceries he would only afterwards have to conceal
from his wife? While as for the rest, they were a weedy lot of
overworked and underpaid young clerks who couldn’t possibly afford to
marry. Sally smiled at them all. She had none of the bridling, of the
keep-off-the-grass-_if_-you-please, of her mother.
‘For mercy’s sake,’ Mr. Pinner would hiss in her ear, tugging her elbow
as he hurried past, ‘don’t go keepin’ on makin’ pleasant faces at ’em
like that.’
But what faces was she to make, then? All Sally’s faces were pleasant
from the point of view of the beholder, whatever sort she made; and if
she, by a great effort, and contrary to her nature, frowned at anybody,
as likely as not she would be gaped at harder than ever, and asked if
she wouldn’t mind doing that again.
Mr. Pinner was distracted. Even the clergy came to his shop,--came with
breezy tales of being henpecked, and driven out by tyrant wives to
purchase currants; and even the doctor came,--old enough surely, Mr.
Pinner thought, to be ashamed of himself, running after a girl he had
himself brought into the world, and pretending that what he was after
was biscuits.
What he was after was, very plainly, not biscuits, nor were the clergy
after currants. One and all were after Sally. And it horrified Mr.
Pinner, who took round the plate on Sundays, that a child of his, so
good and modest, should be the innocent cause of producing in the
hearts of her fellow-creatures a desire to sin. That they desired to
sin was only too evident to Mr. Pinner, driven by fear to the basest
suspicions. These married gentlemen--what could it be but sin they had
in their minds? They wished to sin with Sally, to sin the sin of sins;
with his Sally, his spotless lamb, a child of God, an inheritor of the
kingdom of heaven.
For a year Mr. Pinner endured it, struggling with his responsibilities
and his black suspicions. The milk of his natural kindliness and respect
for his betters went sour. He grew to hate the gentry. His face took on
a twist of fear that became permanent. The other grocers were furious
with him, accusing him among themselves of using his daughter as a
decoy; and unable to bear this, for it of course got round to him, and
worn out by the constant dread lest worse were yet to come, and some
fine day a young whipper-snapper of a lord should be going for a walk in
Islington and chance to stroll into his shop and see Sally, and then
good-bye to virtue--for was any girl good enough and modest enough to
stand out against the onslaughts of a lord? Mr. Pinner asked himself,
who had never consciously come across any lords, and therefore was apt
to think of them highly--Mr. Pinner determined to move.
He moved. After several Sundays given up to fruitless and ill-organised
excursions into other suburbs, he heard by chance of a village buried
far away in what seemed to him, whose England consisted of Hampstead
Heath, Hampton Court, and, once, Southend, a savage and uninhabited
district in Cambridgeshire, where the man who kept its one shop was
weary of solitude, and wanted to come nearer London. What could be
nearer London than London itself? Mr. Pinner hurried to Woodles,
leaving Sally under the strictest vows not to put her terribly
complicating nose out of doors.
He thought he had never seen such a place. Used to streets and crowds,
he couldn’t have believed there were spots in the world so empty. It was
raining, and there wasn’t a soul about. A few cottages, the shop, a
church and vicarage, and a sad wet pig grunting along a ditch,--that was
all. Three miles from a branch-line station, embedded in a network of
muddy lanes, and the Vicar--Mr. Pinner inquired--seventy-eight with no
sons, Woodles was surely the ideal place for him and Sally. Over a
bottle of ginger beer he made friends with the shopkeeper, and arranged
that he should come up to Islington with a view to exchanging. He came;
and the exchange, after some regrettable incidents in connection with
Sally which very nearly upset the whole thing, was made, and by
Christmas Islington knew the Pinners no more.
§
All went well at Woodles for the first few weeks. It was a hamlet, Mr.
Pinner rejoiced to discover, lived in practically exclusively by ladies.
These ladies, attracted to it by the tumbledownness of its cottages,
which made it both picturesque and cheap, had either never had husbands
or had lost them, and accordingly, as so often happens in such
circumstances, were poor. Well, Mr. Pinner didn’t mind that. He only
wanted to live. He had no desire to make more than was just necessary to
feed Sally. More merely meant responsibility and bother, and of those he
had as much as he could do with because of Sally. He settled down, very
content and safe among his widow and virgin customers, and spent a
thankful Christmas, entering with hope into the New Year.
Then, one day towards the end of January, two young men rent the peace
of the sunny afternoon with the unpleasant noise motor-bicycles, rushing
at high speed, appear, Mr. Pinner thought, kindly even towards these,
not to be able to help making, and a lady customer who chanced to be in
the shop remarked, ‘It has begun.’
Mr. Pinner inquired politely what had begun, and the lady said term had,
and Mr. Pinner, who didn’t know what she meant but was unwilling to show
his ignorance, said, ‘And high time too.’
After that, hardly an afternoon went by without young men hurrying
through Woodles. Sometimes they were on motor-bicycles, sometimes they
were on horses, sometimes they were in cars, but always they hurried.
Where did they all come from? Mr. Pinner was astonished, and wondered
uneasily whether Sally were not somehow at the bottom of it. But she
couldn’t have been, for they never so much as glanced at the shop
window, from behind whose jars of bulls’-eyes and mounds of toffee he
and Sally secretly observed them.
Then, gradually, he became aware of Cambridge. He hadn’t given it a
thought when he came to Woodles. It was ten miles away--a place, he
knew, where toffs were taught, but a place ten miles away hadn’t worried
him. There he had changed, on that first visit, for the branch-line that
took him within three miles of Woodles, and the village, asleep beneath
its blanket of rain, had been entirely deserted, the last word in dank
and misty isolation. And when he moved in, it was still asleep--asleep,
this time, in the silence of the Christmas vacation, and only faintly
stirred every now and again by the feeble movements of unmated ladies.
It was so much out of the way that if it hadn’t been for Cambridge it
would have slept for ever. But young men are restless and get
everywhere. Bursting with energy, they rushed through Woodles as they
rushed through all places within rushable distance. But they rushed,
they didn’t stop; and Mr. Pinner consoled himself with that, and also
with the knowledge he presently acquired that it was only for a few
months--weeks, one might almost say, in the year, that this happened.
He bade Sally keep indoors during the afternoon hours, and hoped for the
best.
§
Then, on a gusty afternoon in early March, when the mud in the lanes had
turned to dust and was tearing in clouds down the street, the door
opened violently, because of the wind, and a young man was blown in, and
had to use all his strength to get the door shut again.
No sound of a motor had preceded him; he appeared just as one of the
ladies might have appeared; and Sally was in the shop.
She was on some steps, rummaging aloft among the tins of Huntley and
Palmer, and he didn’t immediately see her, and addressed himself to Mr.
Pinner.
‘Have you any petrol?’ he asked.
‘No, sir,’ said Mr. Pinner quickly, hoping he would go away at once
without noticing Sally. ‘We don’t keep it.’
‘Do you know where I can----’
The young man broke off, and stood staring upwards. ‘Christ’--he
whispered under his breath, ‘Christ----’
‘Now, now,’ said Mr. Pinner with extreme irritability, only too well
aware of what had happened, and in his fear slapping his knuckly little
hand on the counter, ‘no blasphemy ’ere, sir, if _you_ please----’
But he needn’t have been so angry and frightened, for this, if he had
only known it, was his future son-in-law; the person who was to solve
all his problems by taking over the responsibility of Sally. In a word
it was, as Mr. Pinner ever afterwards described him, Mr. Luke.