by A. A. Milne
‘I want one of the men to drive over to the Trevors’,’ he said as he sealed up the note to Mr. Pim, ‘deliver this letter, and then bring Mr. Pim back here. Is that clear?’
‘Yes, sir.’
He handed over the letter and went back to the terrace. Lady Marden and Olivia were talking in an uninterested and desultory way, and his aunt shook herself off with a sigh of relief as soon as George appeared.
‘Well, are we going down to see the pigs?’
No, that was something that George would not do.
‘Take Dinah down, won’t you, Aunt Julia? There’s a little business, I have to discuss with Olivia. I’ll join you later.’
‘Very well. Where is the girl?’
Where was she? Gone off with that fellow Strange somewhere. This was damnable. ‘Dinah!’ he called threateningly.
‘Hallo!’ from the morning-room.
Thank heavens!
Dinah came out, followed by Brian.
‘Do you want me?’
‘Aunt Julia wants to see the pigs, dear,’ said Olivia. ‘I wish you would take her down. Your uncle has some business to attend to, and’—she smiled adorably at Dinah—‘I’m rather tired.’
‘Right-o.’
‘I’ve always said that you don’t take enough exercise, Olivia,’ put in Lady Marden. ‘Look at me!—sixty-five and proud of it.’
Brian looked at her wonderingly.
‘Yes, Aunt Julia, you’re marvelous,’ said Olivia gently.
But Dinah was not going to stand any criticism of her deity.
‘How old would Olivia be if she did take exercise?’ she asked innocently.
The maddened George broke in.
‘Don’t stand about asking silly questions, Dinah. Your aunt hasn’t too much time.’
Brian asked if he might come, too—the first sensible thing which George had heard him say at Marden House.
‘Well, a little exercise wouldn’t do you any harm, Mr. Strange.’ She looked him over with a professional eye. ‘You’re an artist, ain’t you?’
‘Well, I try to paint.’
Dinah hastily explained that he had sold a picture last March for——
‘Yes, yes, never mind that now,’ shouted George.
‘Unhealthy fife,’ was Lady Marden’s comment on the profession. She strode down the steps of the terrace, throwing the invitation ‘Well, come along!’ over her shoulder at them. They came along.
‘At last!’ said George.
‘Poor George!’ said Olivia tenderly. She gave a little reassuring pat to his arm, and walked into the morning-room. He followed her. . . .
But what were they going to do?
Chapter Nine
A Good Man’s Conscience
WHAT undramatic lives we lead, most of us. We get up, we eat, we work, we play, we go to bed, and in the morning we get up again. Sometimes we are not very well, sometimes we are not very lucky. We make more money to-day than yesterday, or yesterday than to-day; we are annoyed, amused, flattered, offended, happy, unhappy. That is all. We experience how few of the big emotions, how few of the big events. We do not even die until it is too late to be aware of it.
We do well enough without the big emotions. The big emotions are generally uncomfortable, and it is fitting that they should be reserved for others. For we cannot get rid of the idea that there is a Special Providence looking after us, a Providence much more interested, much more careful, than the one which is looking after our neighbour. Others may be run over as they cross the crowded street; that would not surprise us. But it is incredible that it could happen to ourselves. Our first emotion would be not fear, but amazement. Surely a mistake has been made!
So George felt. The thing was unbelievable. He, George Marden, had lived for five years with a woman who was not his wife. It was absurd; it was unreal; it was some fantastic dream for which he had no adequate mental equipment. It was the sort of thing which had happened in books, not in real life, or, if in real life, only to the other people. Not to him, not to George Marden.
He looked across at Olivia, who had gone back placidly to her curtains.
‘Well?’ he said.
‘Well?’ said Olivia. ‘Now we can talk.’
‘At last!’ And then he broke out indignantly. ‘I’m always glad to see Aunt Julia in my house, but I feel that she needn’t have chosen to-day of all days to come to lunch.’
Olivia could not help smiling at the unfairness of this.
‘It was really Mr. Pim who chose the wrong day,’ she said.
He strode up to her and took her by the arm, almost as if he would shake her out of this incredible dream.
‘Good heavens, Olivia, is it true?’
‘About Jacob Telworthy?’
‘You told me that he was dead. You always said that he was dead. Wasn’t he dead?’
‘Well, I always thought that he was. He was as dead as anybody could be. All the papers said he was dead.’
‘The papers!’ said George scornfully.
‘The Times said he was dead,’ she added, as if for George that would be the last word on the subject.
‘Oh!’ he stuttered, almost in apology.
‘Apparently even his death was fraudulent.’
Yet if one could not believe The Times, what could one believe? No, it was not Olivia’s fault that she had been deceived.
‘But what are we going to do?—that’s the question. My God, it’s horrible! You don’t seem to understand, Olivia—you’ve never been married to me at all!’
‘It is a little difficult to realize. You see, it doesn’t seem to have made any difference to our happiness.’
‘No, that’s what’s so terrible.’
‘Terrible?’ Olivia looked at him in amazement.
‘I mean,’ stumbled George, ‘I mean—that is—well, of course, we were quite innocent in the matter. But at the same time nothing can get over the fact that we had no—no right to be happy.’
No right to be happy? But—‘Would you rather we had been miserable?’ she asked.
Perhaps not that. Yet he felt, poor George, that somehow they had done wrong. The fact that their marriage was not a real Church-blessed, Law-blessed, Heaven-blessed marriage should not have been without its effect. There should have been forebodings, a vague feeling of guilt, an uneasiness; inexplicable until the cause came to light. Then the relief with which he could have said ‘No wonder!’ It would have been absolution in itself.
George had inherited the religious faith of his fathers, and held it no less firmly than he held their lands, their money, and their political convictions. His face to the east, he proclaimed the details of this faith once every Sunday, a faith which he had taken on trust from his elders, which he had not examined, but which, nevertheless, was his true comfort, inspiration and discipline. He believed in discipline, and not only (as is commonly alleged against his class) in discipline for others. He was eager to obey the particular ‘Thou shalts’ and ‘Thou shalt nots,’ under whose protection he had placed himself.
To Olivia, who thought more freely than he, his religious views may have seemed narrow, but it was for their narrowness at first that she had loved him. Telworthy’s had been so very broad. To mix again with men and women who divided good from evil, and, having divided them (rightly or wrongly, it mattered not), sought to follow the good, this had been happiness enough for Telworthy’s widow.
Ah, but she had never been his widow!
‘You’re his wife, that’s what you don’t seem to understand,’ cried George, trying to beat it into her brain. ‘You’re Telworthy’s wife! You—er——’ He hesitated before he made the awful statement. ‘Forgive me, my dear, but it’s the horrible truth—you committed bigamy when you married me.’ He threw up his hands to the amazing Heaven which had allowed such a thing to happe
n, and cried again, ‘Bigamy!’
‘It is an ugly word, isn’t it?’ said Olivia sympathetically. Words had never frightened her, but she knew how terrifying they were to men.
George looked at her in astonishment, wondering how she could be so calm. Why, from the way she behaved, Mr. Pim might never——
A sudden wild hope flashed into his brain. He strode across the room and seized her hands.
‘Look here, Olivia, old girl,’ he pleaded, with a pathetic attempt at a smile, ‘the whole thing is nonsense, eh? It isn’t your husband at all; it’s some other Telworthy whom this fellow met.’ He laughed a little unnaturally, to show that he would be the first to appreciate the humour of it. ‘Some other shady swindler who turned up on the boat, eh? I mean, this sort of thing doesn’t happen to us, committing bigamy and all that. Some other fellow.’
She was silent.
‘Olivia!’ he pleaded. ‘Oh, Olivia, say it was some other fellow!’
She shook her head sadly.
‘I knew all the shady swindlers in Sydney, George.’ She looked into the past again and summed up the five years of her life with Telworthy. ‘They came to dinner. . . .’
His head comes round her bedroom door.
‘Full war-paint to-night, Livvy. We’ve got a visitor.’
‘One of the usual visitors?’
‘Pooley. Don’t think you know him. Be kind to him. He may be useful.’
Half an hour later. ‘My dear, this is Mr. Pooley.’
She gives him her hand, the hand that will never be clean again.
‘Glad to meet you, Mrs. Telworthy. Heard so much about you.’
The horrible dinner. The visitor, uneasy, ingratiating, vulgarly deferential; her husband, amused as always, enjoying his guest’s discomfort, enjoying his wife’s aloofness. ‘I know he isn’t quite our form,’ his smile says to her across the table, ‘but we can’t all be gentlemen.’ The horrible dinner.
It ends at last. She rises.
‘I’ll leave you to your cigars,’ she says, meaning ‘to your plots.’
The visitor’s clumsy haste to be a gentleman and get to the door first. Her husband still smiling. . . . Then she is out of the room, and they are alone to work out whatever new method of robbing the public seems most promising. And she—she is one of them.
But there were no others called Telworthy. He was himself, incomparable. . . .
George dropped into a chair, head in hands. No, he had never really hoped. Telworthy, her husband, was alive.
‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘what are we going to do?’
Olivia came back to the present.
‘You sent Mr. Pim away so quickly,’ she said. ‘We had no time to ask him anything. You hurried him away so quickly.’
‘He’ll be here directly. I’ve sent him a note. My one idea at the moment was to get him out of the house—to hush things up.’
She shook her head and smiled sadly.
‘You can’t hush up two husbands.’
‘You can’t,’ groaned George. ‘Everybody will know. Everybody.’
‘The children, Aunt Julia, they may as well know now as later. Mr. Pim, of course——’
He interrupted to say with dignity that he did not propose to discuss his affairs, his private affairs, with Mr. Pim. He would only ask him one question: ‘Are you absolutely certain that this man’s name was Telworthy?’ That was all. He could ask it without letting Mr. Pim know the reason for the inquiry. Tactfully.
‘You couldn’t make a mistake about a name like Telworthy,’ said Olivia. ‘You can’t invent a name like that. But he might tell us something about Telworthy’s plans.’
‘His plans?’
‘Yes. Perhaps he’s going back to Australia at once. Perhaps he thinks I’m dead, too. Perhaps—oh, there are so many things I want to know.’
George looked at her in astonishment. What did all this matter? Then, realizing that the shock must have upset her balance a little, he went over to her and spoke soothingly.
‘Yes, yes, dear, of course, that would be very interesting. Naturally, we should like to know these things. But you do see, dear, that it doesn’t make any difference.’
It was now Olivia’s turn to be astonished.
‘No difference?’
‘Well, obviously you’re as much his wife if he is in Australia as you are if he is in England.’
She shook her head, slowly and with absolute conviction.
‘I am not his wife at all.’
‘Olivia,’ he protested, almost peevishly, ‘surely you understand the position.’
‘Jacob Telworthy may be alive, but I am not his wife. I ceased to be his wife when I became yours.’
‘You never were my wife,’ he burst out. ‘That is the terrible part of it. Our union—you make me say it, Olivia—has been unhallowed by the Church, unhallowed even by the Law.’ He groaned at the thought of it. ‘Legally, we have been living in——’ No, it was too awful. ‘Living in——’ He couldn’t get the terrible word out. Yet it was true. They had been living in sin for five years!
She looked up at him, surprised, as if she hardly knew what he was talking about. Then back to her curtains again.
‘The point is,’ he went on, ‘how does the Law stand?’
The Law? What had the Law got to do with right and wrong?
‘I imagine,’ said the unhappy George, ‘that Telworthy could get a divorce!’ With himself as co-respondent! Oh, that such things could be happening to him! Surely he would wake up soon—out of this terrible nightmare.
‘A divorce!’ said Olivia eagerly. ‘But then we could really get married, and we shouldn’t be living in—living in—whatever we were living in before.’
She smiled at him happily. She knew that ‘in the eyes of the Law’ George and she were no longer husband and wife, but like most women she was entirely without respect for the Law. She had given herself to George five years ago, and it was dazzlingly clear to her that nothing that had happened since could have any effect upon that. Right, Wrong, Law, Church, simply had nothing to do with it. But she understood George’s sensitiveness to the opinions of his neighbours. If George’s Law and Church, which was another way of saying George’s neighbours, maintained that he and Olivia were not husband and wife, George would be unhappy. A divorce from Telworthy, a re-marriage to George, would make him happy again.
But apparently George was still not quite happy.
‘I don’t understand you,’ he said. ‘You talk about it so calmly—as if there were nothing blameworthy in being divorced, as if there were nothing unusual in my marrying a divorced woman, as if there were nothing wrong in our having lived together for years without having been married.’
Very simply, very touchingly, Olivia announced her creed.
‘What seems wrong to me is that I lived for five years with a bad man whom I hated. What seems right to me is that I lived for five years with a good man whom I love.’
Tenderly she held out her hand to him: to her friend, to the good man she loved. He took it, patted it . . . but could come no nearer to her.
‘Yes, yes, my dear,’ he said, as if explaining to a child. ‘But right and wrong don’t settle themselves as easily as that. We’ve been living together when you were Telworthy’s wife. That’s wrong.’
She withdrew her hand, and said coolly, ‘Do you mean wicked?’
‘Well, no doubt,’ he hedged, ‘the court would consider that we acted in perfect innocence——’
In a hard cold voice which he had never heard from her before, she asked, ‘What court?’ He blundered on.
‘These things would have to be done legally, of course. I believe the proper method is a nullity suit, declaring our marriage null and—er—void. It would, so to speak, wipe out these years of—er——’
‘Wicke
dness?’
‘Of irregular union, and—er—then——’ He hesitated, and she finished the sentence for him.
‘Then I could go back to Jacob.’ She turned to him, so that he should see her full face, and asked, a note of warning in her voice, ‘Do you really mean that, George?’
He shifted uncomfortably.
‘Well, dear, you see—that’s how things are—one can’t get away from the facts.’
‘Yes, let us keep to the facts. I want this quite clear, so that there can be no mistake about it.’ She was silent for a moment, thinking how best to put it. ‘What you feel is that Telworthy has the greater claim? Is that right? You are prepared to—to make way for him?’
He did not answer directly, but the most direct answer could not have been more clear.
‘Both the Church and the Law would say that I had no claim at all, I’m afraid. Well, I—I suppose I haven’t.’
‘I see.’ She looked at him gravely for a while. Then gave a little nod of understanding. ‘Thank you for making it so clear to me.’
So it happened that way after all. The unbelievable was true. He was prepared to let her go, a, sacrifice to the high gods of Propriety. Even in these last few minutes, while the shadow of its coming was growing darker and darker, she had refused to believe it. But now it was true.
If he had only given her one word of love, given her one speech to show that he felt for her, no less than for himself! But he had said nothing. The scandal, the immorality, his mind was full of these only. Even the fact that their happy fife together was to end now was of less importance to him than the fact (as he regarded it) that their life together had been immoral. If he had cried passionately, ‘I can’t let you go!—and yet I must!’ ah! how she would have warmed to him, how she would have stretched out her arms to him, so foolish to say ‘I must,’ so dear to say ‘I can’t.’ No, it was not his narrowness which hurt her, his rigid ‘I must’; it was the seeming absence of hurt to him; it was the ease with which he let her go.
Yet he loved her; she was sure of that. It was only that he lacked imagination. He had not seen himself alone again at Marden House, he had not seen his wife, Olivia, back again with Telworthy. His mind travelled so slowly. Well, he should see it. She was not his wife any more? She belonged to Telworthy now? Very well, then she was not his wife any more. Now, George, see how you like it.
