A Damsel in Distress

by Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

  “It’s a darned shame,” said Billie indignantly. “Babe is only a kid. This is the first show she’s been in. And I happen to know there’s an awfully nice boy over in New York crazy to marry her. And I’m certain this gink is giving her a raw deal. He tried to get hold of me about a week ago, but I turned him down hard; and I suppose he thinks Babe is easier. And it’s no good talking to her; she thinks he’s wonderful. That’s another kick I have against the show business. It seems to make girls such darned chumps. Well, I wonder how much longer Mr. Arbuckle is going to be retrieving my mail. What ho, within there, Fatty!”

  Mac came out, apologetic, carrying letters.

  “Sorry, miss. By an oversight I put you among the G’s.”

  “All’s well that ends well. ‘Put me among the G’s.’ There’s a good title for a song for you, George. Excuse me while I grapple with the correspondence. I’ll bet half of these are mash notes. I got three between the first and second acts last night. Why the nobility and gentry of this burg should think that I’m their affinity just because I’ve got golden hair—which is perfectly genuine, Mac; I can show you the pedigree—and because I earn an honest living singing off the key, is more than I can understand.”

  Mac leaned his massive shoulders comfortably against the building, and resumed his chat.

  “I expect you’re feeling very ‘appy today, sir?”

  George pondered. He was certainly feeling better since he had seen Billie Dore, but he was far from being himself.

  “I ought to be, I suppose. But I’m not.”

  “Ah, you’re getting blarzy, sir, that’s what it is. You’ve ‘ad too much of the fat, you ‘ave. This piece was a big ‘it in America, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. It ran over a year in New York, and there are three companies of it out now.”

  “That’s ‘ow it is, you see. You’ve gone and got blarzy. Too big a ‘elping of success, you’ve ‘ad.” Mac wagged a head like a harvest moon. “You aren’t a married man, are you, sir?”

  Billie Dore finished skimming through her mail, and crumpled the letters up into a large ball, which she handed to Mac.

  “Here’s something for you to read in your spare moments, Mac. Glance through them any time you have a suspicion you may be a chump, and you’ll have the comfort of knowing that there are others. What were you saying about being married?”

  “Mr. Bevan and I was ‘aving a talk about ‘im being blarzy, miss.”

  “Are you blarzy, George?”

  “So Mac says.”

  “And why is he blarzy, miss?” demanded Mac rhetorically.

  “Don’t ask me,” said Billie. “It’s not my fault.”

  “It’s because, as I was saying, ‘e’s ‘ad too big a ‘elping of success, and because ‘e ain’t a married man. You did say you wasn’t a married man, didn’t you, sir?”

  “I didn’t. But I’m not.”

  “That’s ‘ow it is, you see. You pretty soon gets sick of pulling off good things, if you ain’t got nobody to pat you on the back for doing of it. Why, when I was single, if I got ‘old of a sure thing for the three o’clock race and picked up a couple of quid, the thrill of it didn’t seem to linger somehow. But now, if some of the gentlemen that come ‘ere put me on to something safe and I make a bit, ‘arf the fascination of it is taking the stuff ‘ome and rolling it on to the kitchen table and ‘aving ‘er pat me on the back.”

  “How about when you lose?”

  “I don’t tell ‘er,” said Mac simply.

  “You seem to understand the art of being happy, Mac.”

  “It ain’t an art, sir. It’s just gettin’ ‘old of the right little woman, and ‘aving a nice little ‘ome of your own to go back to at night.”

  “Mac,” said Billie admiringly, “you talk like a Tin Pan Alley song hit, except that you’ve left out the scent of honeysuckle and Old Mister Moon climbing up over the trees. Well, you’re quite right. I’m all for the simple and domestic myself. If I could find the right man, and he didn’t see me coming and duck, I’d become one of the Mendelssohn’s March Daughters right away. Are you going, George? There’s a rehearsal at two-thirty for cuts.”

  “I want to get the evening papers and send off a cable or two. See you later.”

  “We shall meet at Philippi.”

  Mac eyed George’s retreating back till he had turned the corner.

  “A nice pleasant gentleman, Mr. Bevan,” he said. “Too bad ‘e’s got the pip the way ‘e ‘as, just after ‘avin’ a big success like this ‘ere. Comes of bein’ a artist, I suppose.”

  Miss Dore dived into her vanity case and produced a puff with which she proceeded to powder her nose.

  “All composers are nuts, Mac. I was in a show once where the manager was panning the composer because there wasn’t a number in the score that had a tune to it. The poor geek admitted they weren’t very tuney, but said the thing about his music was that it had such a wonderful aroma. They all get that way. The jazz seems to go to their heads. George is all right, though, and don’t let anyone tell you different.”

  “Have you know him long, miss?”

  “About five years. I was a stenographer in the house that published his songs when I first met him. And there’s another thing you’ve got to hand it to George for. He hasn’t let success give him a swelled head. The money that boy makes is sinful, Mac. He wears thousand dollar bills next to his skin winter and summer. But he’s just the same as he was when I first knew him, when he was just hanging around Broadway, looking out for a chance to be allowed to slip a couple of interpolated numbers into any old show that came along. Yes. Put it in your diary, Mac, and write it on your cuff, George Bevan’s all right. He’s an ace.”

  Unconscious of these eulogies, which, coming from one whose judgment he respected, might have cheered him up, George wandered down Shaftesbury Avenue feeling more depressed than ever. The sun had gone in for the time being, and the east wind was frolicking round him like a playful puppy, patting him with a cold paw, nuzzling his ankles, bounding away and bounding back again, and behaving generally as east winds do when they discover a victim who has come out without his spring overcoat. It was plain to George now that the sun and the wind were a couple of confidence tricksters working together as a team. The sun had disarmed him with specious promises and an air of cheery goodfellowship, and had delivered him into the hands of the wind, which was now going through him with the swift thoroughness of the professional hold-up artist. He quickened his steps, and began to wonder if he was so sunk in senile decay as to have acquired a liver.

  He discarded the theory as repellent. And yet there must be a reason for his depression. Today of all days, as Mac had pointed out, he had everything to make him happy. Popular as he was in America, this was the first piece of his to be produced in London, and there was no doubt that it was a success of unusual dimensions. And yet he felt no elation.

  He reached Piccadilly and turned westwards. And then, as he passed the gates of the In and Out Club, he had a moment of clear vision and understood everything. He was depressed because he was bored, and he was bored because he was lonely. Mac, that solid thinker, had been right. The solution of the problem of life was to get hold of the right girl and have a home to go back to at night. He was mildly surprised that he had tried in any other direction for an explanation of his gloom. It was all the more inexplicable in that fully 80 per cent of the lyrics which he had set in the course of his musical comedy career had had that thought at the back of them.

  George gave himself up to an orgy of sentimentality. He seemed to be alone in the world which had paired itself off into a sort of seething welter of happy couples. Taxicabs full of happy couples rolled by every minute. Passing omnibuses creaked beneath the weight of happy couples. The very policeman across the Street had just grinned at a flitting shop girl, and she had smiled back at him. The only female in London who did not appear to be attached was a girl in brown who was coming along the sidewalk at a leisurely pace, look
ing about her in a manner that suggested that she found Piccadilly a new and stimulating spectacle.

  As far as George could see she was an extremely pretty girl, small and dainty, with a proud little tilt to her head and the jaunty walk that spoke of perfect health. She was, in fact, precisely the sort of girl that George felt he could love with all the stored-up devotion of an old buffer of twenty-seven who had squandered none of his rich nature in foolish flirtations. He had just begun to weave a rose-tinted romance about their two selves, when a cold reaction set in. Even as he paused to watch the girl threading her way through the crowd, the east wind jabbed an icy finger down the back of his neck, and the chill of it sobered him. After all, he reflected bitterly, this girl was only alone because she was on her way somewhere to meet some confounded man. Besides there was no earthly chance of getting to know her. You can’t rush up to pretty girls in the street and tell them you are lonely. At least, you can, but it doesn’t get you anywhere except the police station. George’s gloom deepened—a thing he would not have believed possible a moment before. He felt that he had been born too late. The restraints of modern civilization irked him. It was not, he told himself, like this in the good old days.

  In the Middle Ages, for example, this girl would have been a Damsel; and in that happy time practically everybody whose technical rating was that of Damsel was in distress and only too willing to waive the formalities in return for services rendered by the casual passer-by. But the twentieth century is a prosaic age, when girls are merely girls and have no troubles at all. Were he to stop this girl in brown and assure her that his aid and comfort were at her disposal, she would undoubtedly call that large policeman from across the way, and the romance would begin and end within the space of thirty seconds, or, if the policeman were a quick mover, rather less.

  Better to dismiss dreams and return to the practical side of life by buying the evening papers from the shabby individual beside him, who had just thrust an early edition in his face. After all notices are notices, even when the heart is aching. George felt in his pocket for the necessary money, found emptiness, and remembered that he had left all his ready funds at his hotel. It was just one of the things he might have expected on a day like this.

  The man with the papers had the air of one whose business is conducted on purely cash principles. There was only one thing to be done, return to the hotel, retrieve his money, and try to forget the weight of the world and its cares in lunch. And from the hotel he could despatch the two or three cables which he wanted to send to New York.

  The girl in brown was quite close now, and George was enabled to get a clearer glimpse of her. She more than fulfilled the promise she had given at a distance. Had she been constructed to his own specifications, she would not have been more acceptable in George’s sight. And now she was going out of his life for ever. With an overwhelming sense of pathos, for there is no pathos more bitter than that of parting from someone we have never met, George hailed a taxicab which crawled at the side of the road; and, with all the refrains of all the sentimental song hits he had ever composed ringing in his ears, he got in and passed away.

  “A rotten world,” he mused, as the cab, after proceeding a couple of yards, came to a standstill in a block of the traffic. “A dull, flat bore of a world, in which nothing happens or ever will happen. Even when you take a cab it just sticks and doesn’t move.”

  At this point the door of the cab opened, and the girl in brown jumped in.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said breathlessly, “but would you mind hiding me, please.”

  Chapter 3

  George hid her. He did it, too, without wasting precious time by asking questions. In a situation which might well have thrown the quickest-wined of men off his balance, he acted with promptitude, intelligence and despatch. The fact is, George had for years been an assiduous golfer; and there is no finer school for teaching concentration and a strict attention to the matter in hand. Few crises, however unexpected, have the power to disturb a man who has so conquered the weakness of the flesh as to have trained himself to bend his left knee, raise his left heel, swing his arms well out from the body, twist himself into the shape of a corkscrew and use the muscle of the wrist, at the same time keeping his head still and his eye on the ball. It is estimated that there are twenty-three important points to be borne in mind simultaneously while making a drive at golf; and to the man who has mastered the art of remembering them all the task of hiding girls in taxicabs is mere child’s play. To pull down the blinds on the side of the vehicle nearest the kerb was with George the work of a moment. Then he leaned out of the centre window in such a manner as completely to screen the interior of the cab from public view.

  “Thank you so much,” murmured a voice behind him. It seemed to come from the floor.

  “Not at all,” said George, trying a sort of vocal chip-shot out of the corner of his mouth, designed to lift his voice backwards and lay it dead inside the cab.

  He gazed upon Piccadilly with eyes from which the scales had fallen. Reason told him that he was still in Piccadilly. Otherwise it would have seemed incredible to him that this could be the same street which a moment before he had passed judgment upon and found flat and uninteresting. True, in its salient features it had altered little. The same number of stodgy-looking people moved up and down. The buildings retained their air of not having had a bath since the days of the Tudors. The east wind still blew. But, though superficially the same, in reality Piccadilly had altered completely. Before it had been just Piccadilly. Now it was a golden street in the City of Romance, a main thoroughfare of Bagdad, one of the principal arteries of the capital of Fairyland. A rose-coloured mist swam before George’s eyes. His spirits, so low but a few moments back, soared like a good niblick shot out of the bunker of Gloom. The years fell away from him till, in an instant, from being a rather poorly preserved, liverish greybeard of sixty-five or so, he became a sprightly lad of twenty-one in a world of springtime and flowers and laughing brooks. In other words, taking it by and large, George felt pretty good. The impossible had happened; Heaven had sent him an adventure, and he didn’t care if it snowed.

  It was possibly the rose-coloured mist before his eyes that prevented him from observing the hurried approach of a faultlessly attired young man, aged about twenty-one, who during George’s preparations for ensuring privacy in his cab had been galloping in pursuit in a resolute manner that suggested a well-dressed bloodhound somewhat overfed and out of condition. Only when this person stopped and began to pant within a few inches of his face did he become aware of his existence.

  “You, sir!” said the bloodhound, removing a gleaming silk hat, mopping a pink forehead, and replacing the luminous superstructure once more in position. “You, sir!”

  Whatever may be said of the possibility of love at first sight, in which theory George was now a confirmed believer, there can be no doubt that an exactly opposite phenomenon is of frequent occurrence. After one look at some people even friendship is impossible. Such a one, in George’s opinion, was this gurgling excrescence underneath the silk hat. He comprised in his single person practically all the qualities which George disliked most. He was, for a young man, extraordinarily obese. Already a second edition of his chin had been published, and the perfectly-cut morning coat which encased his upper section bulged out in an opulent semi-circle. He wore a little moustache, which to George’s prejudiced eye seemed more a complaint than a moustache. His face was red, his manner dictatorial, and he was touched in the wind. Take him for all in all he looked like a bit of bad news.

  George had been educated at Lawrenceville and Harvard, and had subsequently had the privilege of mixing socially with many of New York’s most prominent theatrical managers; so he knew how to behave himself. No Vere de Vere could have exhibited greater repose of manner.

  “And what,” he inquired suavely, leaning a little further out of the cab, “is eating you, Bill?”

  A messenger boy, two shabby men engaged in
non-essential industries, and a shop girl paused to observe the scene. Time was not of the essence to these confirmed sightseers. The shop girl was late already, so it didn’t matter if she was any later; the messenger boy had nothing on hand except a message marked “Important: Rush”; and as for the two shabby men, their only immediate plans consisted of a vague intention of getting to some public house and leaning against the wall; so George’s time was their time. One of the pair put his head on one side and said: “What ho!”; the other picked up a cigar stub from the gutter and began to smoke.

  “A young lady just got into your cab,” said the stout young man.

  “Surely not?” said George.

  “What the devil do you mean—surely not?”

  “I’ve been in the cab all the time, and I should have noticed it.”

  At this juncture the block in the traffic was relieved, and the cab bowled smartly on for some fifty yards when it was again halted. George, protruding from the window like a snail, was entertained by the spectacle of the pursuit. The hunt was up. Short of throwing his head up and baying, the stout young man behaved exactly as a bloodhound in similar circumstances would have conducted itself. He broke into a jerky gallop, attended by his self-appointed associates; and, considering that the young man was so stout, that the messenger boy considered it unprofessional to hurry, that the shop girl had doubts as to whether sprinting was quite ladylike, and that the two Bohemians were moving at a quicker gait than a shuffle for the first occasion in eleven years, the cavalcade made good time. The cab was still stationary when they arrived in a body.

  “Here he is, guv’nor,” said the messenger boy, removing a bead of perspiration with the rush message.

  “Here he is, guv’nor,” said the non-smoking Bohemian. “What oh!”

  “Here I am!” agreed George affably. “And what can I do for you?” The smoker spat appreciatively at a passing dog. The point seemed to him well taken. Not for many a day had he so enjoyed himself. In an arid world containing too few goes of gin and too many policemen, a world in which the poor were oppressed and could seldom even enjoy a quiet cigar without having their fingers trodden upon, he found himself for the moment contented, happy, and expectant. This looked like a row between toffs, and of all things which most intrigued him a row between toffs ranked highest.