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I've joked a little bit about Baxter being so uninterested in the extremely attractive Polly in the shortened Uncle Fred in the Springtime, but in fact it brings something new to light in the story: his absolute distaste for her is rooted in the fact that he sees her job specifically as one that trades in sex appeal. In the long version where Horace is the one who knows/dances with Polly, Baxter briefly thinks of her as a pretty girl, something he's previously observed in Eve Halliday and Sue Brown (as "Myra Schoonmaker"). In the short version he thinks no such thing. He was willing to think of Eve as pleasant and attractive even when he thought she was a thief's accomplice, but Sue and SEP Polly are different in some way.
Because contrary to popular opinion, sex does exist in Wodehouse. (There's a good article about that in this issue of Plum Lines, starting on page 1.) It comes up regularly in the Blandings novels, perhaps nowhere more so than Summer Lightning and Heavy Weather, where the reason Sue is an unsuitable mate for Ronnie is made very close to explicit: she's not just poor, she has a job that involves being pretty for an audience, and could even, possibly, be sexually active herself.
Lady Constance kicks off Summer Lightning with a warning that kickstarts much of the conflict:
"Mr. Carmody," she said, "is just the sort of young man your Uncle Galahad would like. No doubt he reminds him of the horrible men he used to go about London with in his young days."
"Mr. Carmody isn't a bit like that."
"Indeed?" Lady Constance sniffed again. "Well, I dislike mentioning it to you, Millicent, for I am old-fashioned enough to think that young girls should be shielded from a knowledge of the world, but I happen to know that Mr. Carmody is not at all a nice young man. I have it on the most excellent authority that he is entangled with some impossible chorus girl."
Chorus girls have a reputation for being pushy, for entrapping high-class men with their sexually-tinged wiles. On the job, they show off their legs and their--well, the legs are what Wodehouse focuses on. Hugo has been seen lunching and dancing with Sue, a chorus girl; therefore he is not a nice young man: on one level this is being used in the traditional sense of being pleasant, but it also echoes another phrase: "Nice girls don't." Lady Constance doesn't think he's sleeping with Sue, or she'd have him thrown off the premises, job or no job. But to be presumed dating her is enough. Lady Constance is very clearly thinking of sex existing, and is displeased.
The sequel Heavy Weather makes this even more explicit:
"Do you remember, years ago, Galahad getting entangled with a woman named Henderson, a music-hall singer?"
"Certainly. Well?"
"This girl is her daughter."
Lady Julia was silent for a moment.
"I see. Galahad's daughter, too?"
"I believe not. But that explains his interest in her."
Constance explains to her sister Julia why Galahad has to be taken seriously even though they share an extreme disdain for him because of his wild past. In an incredibly rare moment in Wodehouse's fiction, the existence of extramarital sex is brought up quite casually--and Connie, of all people, responds with equal casualness. Whether or not Gally was sexually active with all those barmaids we hear about, his sisters believe he was.
(The difference between the sisters is highlighted here: Connie, for all her open toughness, is easily the most earnest of the Threepwood girls. She believes that Galahad could have these protective feelings for Sue on that basis, while Julia says that sentiment is the last thing she'd ever expect Gally of possessing. It falls to Julia to actually ask him the question later.)
"But, great heavens above, Julia, surely you can see that Sue isn't the sort of girl you mean when you say 'chorus-girls' in that beastly sniffy way?"
"You can't expect me to classify and tabulate chorus-girls. I haven't your experience. They're all chorus-girls to me."
"There are moments, Julia," said the Hon. Galahad meditatively, "when I should like to drown you in a bucket."
"A butt of malmsey would have been more in your line, I should have thought."
"Your attitude about young Sue infuriates me. Can't you see the girl's a nice girl... a sweet girl... and a lady, if it comes to that."
"Tell me, Gally," said Lady Julia, "just as a matter of interest, is she your daughter?"
The Hon. Galahad bristled.
"She is not. Her father was a man in the Irish Guards, named Cotterleigh. He and Dolly were married when I was in South Africa."
Here again, "nice" is carrying a double meaning. Sue isn't like the chorus girls Julia's thinking of. She's a good person, not a schemer trying to infiltrate the family for money... and then Julia makes the subtext clear. Galahad has extensive experience with chorus girls. And, by the way, did he father a child with one of them?
Here Gally defends Sue, but possibly cuts a less impressive figure for himself in the larger picture. He's downright offended at the suggestion, meaning he considers it insulting to imply Dolly would have slept with him, or any man, out of wedlock. He insists that Sue was conceived in the proper way. If he was sexually active with other girls, this makes him look like a pretty typical son of privilege who slept with the lower class when he's in the mood, but thinks of sexually active women as debased. It hardly seems to fit the man we see in later books, the one who remembers the sexually appealing and thrice-married Maudie Stubbs fondly and encourages her to come stay at the castle, dressed as "spectacularly" as she pleases, his only concern being whether Constance will accept her looks. Maybe something of the Victorian crept back into Wodehouse as he was writing this scene. Dolly must, after all, be acceptable to a mainstream audience.
Never again does Gally seem to pass any kind of judgment on Dolly or her job; he completely accepts that her dancing "in pink tights" made her appealing to many other men. Indeed, in a very late Blandings book he thinks to himself, in an emotional scene that Wodehouse had basically stopped writing at that point, that Dolly was too good for him, and better off with another man.
Heavy Weather also contains an anecdote from Gally that is clearly heavily bowdlerized:
"[He] took a girl to supper once at the Garden. Supper scarcely concluded when angry old gentleman plunges into the room and starts shaking his fist in Boko's face. Boko rises with chivalrous gesture. 'Have no fear, sir. I am a man of honour. I will marry your daughter.' "Daughter?' says old gentleman, foaming a little at the mouth. 'Damn it, that's my wife.' Took all Boko's tact to pass it off, I believe."
Boko Bagshott, one of Gally's old hard-drinking, hard-parting friends, announced he would do the right thing by marrying a woman he'd been caught... having a public supper with? The husband "plunged into the room"? This must have been something Gally cleaned up for Sue's ears, but there's no possible way Wodehouse expected his readers to take this at face value. We hear an a few off-color jokes like the one he told in Summer Light info about a girl threatening to lock a man in her room all night to ruin both their reputations, and Uncle Fred and Gally both tell the occasional more "blue" joke that we never get to hear for ourselves. Heavy Weather goes a rare step further on every level.
Where does this bring us back to with Baxter? Well, the usual interpretation people place on his rejection of Sue is that he was disgusted to learn she was an imposter. It's true that his love clearly dies then and there. But I submit that he's far more disgusted to learn of her profession. He shares Lady Constance's opinion of chorus girls, and the fact that Sue us a chorus girl, engaged to Ronnie, an earl's nephew, is the second piece of information he chooses to share with the group before he storms out. He cannot leave without telling them that, and that's precisely the information that makes Lady Constance take on the aspect of a saber-toothed tiger. The fake name was one thing; he briefly thought to himself back in Leave It to Psmith that Eve Halliday was pretty and polite for a conspirator. The fact that he was planning to marry a woman who turned out to be one of those? Unforgivable.
So that, in the shortened version of Uncle Fred, is what he seems to think of Polly as well. This may or may not have been unintentional, but it creates a further subtext on top of that. Baxter thinks Polly's job makes her unsuitable to marry into the higher classes; this job has a seeming sexual undertone to him; he proceeds to spend several weeks paying her to perform this job while still looking down his nose at her and considering her worthless. So the allegory is quite clear, however inadvertent it may have been.
