by A. A. Milne
‘Well, of course. Next to Shakespeare, he’s——’
‘You think that?’ said Ormsby eagerly, putting down his knife and fork.
‘I do.’
‘Runs second to Shakespeare?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did I tell you?’ he said to Raglan. He turned to Reginald. ‘Your book reminded me of Dickens.’
‘Oh no, Bob,’ said Raglan gently.
‘It did,’ said Ormsby stubbornly, ‘and I know what I’m talking about. You can’t tell me anything about form, you can’t tell me anything about newspaper production, and you can’t tell me anything about Dickens. I’d read every blasted book of Dickens when I was thirteen, Wellard. Bought ’em myself out of three shillings a week.’
‘Did you like them?’ asked Reginald.
‘Well, what the hell do you think I bought ’em for?’
‘What I meant was——’
‘I’ve got a colt out of Lovely Lady that’s going to beat the world. You wait. And what d’you think I’m going to call him?’
Lovely Lady! That was Sylvia.
‘Mr. Whiffers. There, that shows you what I think of Dickens.’
Reginald’s laugh of assent was not quite good enough.
‘Remember Mr. Whiffers in Pickwick?’ demanded Ormsby.
‘Well, not for the moment,’ confessed Reginald.
‘No good asking you, Ambrose.’
‘I’m afraid not. Who was Mr. Whiffers?’
‘He was employed to look out of the hall-window as much as possible, in company with another gentleman. That convey anything to you?’
‘The swarry?’ hazarded Reginald, and received a nod and a friendly smile.
‘O’ course. You and I are educated men, not like Raglan here.’
‘When did you last read Pickwick?’ asked Raglan.
‘Same as I told you, when I was thirteen.’
‘Good Heavens, and I thought you took him to bed with you every night.’
‘I don’t take a book to bed with me,’ chuckled Ormsby.
Vulgar beast. Detestable beast. But somehow, likeable beast, thought Reginald.
‘And you remember Mr.—— What was his name?’
‘Whiffers. He’d once had to eat salt butter. Remember that, Wellard? Funny thing, I like salt butter.’
‘You remember Mr. Whiffers forty years afterwards?’
Ormsby produced another laugh from the salad, and leant confidentially over to Reginald.
‘He doesn’t understand, poor old Ambrose doesn’t. He’s the Greatest Living Expert on Literature, and he can tell you exactly when George Colman the Younger invented mustard, but he doesn’t know why Dickens is a great man.’ He turned back to Raglan. ‘That’s why, old boy. Because I remember Mr. Whiffers. Forty years afterwards.’
‘Rubbish. You remember him because he didn’t like salt butter, and you do. If there’d been a man in Wellard’s book that didn’t like salad, you’d be talking about him when you were ninety-three.’
‘Well, damn it, that’s what I’m telling you. He’s like Dickens.’
Absurd to blush when I’m forty-one, but I’m doing it, thought Reginald. To blush at praise from Ormsby!
‘Well now, let’s get to business. How many copies have you sold?’
Reginald laughed and said that he hadn’t the faintest idea.
‘You’d better keep an eye on Pump,’ said Raglan.
‘Now how on earth do I keep an eye on Pump? I live in the country, and come to London about once in three weeks.’
‘Pump’s a churchwarden,’ said Ormsby, ‘which means that if there’s a legal way of swindling you, he won’t ask Mother if he may.’
‘Does that only apply to churchwardens?’
‘It’s a good general rule to apply to any man, but churchwardens bring a holy zeal to the business which leaves nothing on the plate. “Whoever thy hand findeth to do, do him with all thy might” is their motto.’
‘Cheer up, Wellard,’ smiled Raglan. ‘You do get a royalty, I suppose?’
‘Oh, yes. Ten per cent.’
‘That all? Right through?’
‘I think so.’
‘Oh, well, you’ll get that. Pump isn’t going to prison for ten per cent.’
‘We’ll keep an eye on him for you,’ said Ormsby, getting to work with his tooth-pick. ‘People are going to buy your book—Raglan and I are seeing to that—and you may as well get the boodle as any blasted unhygienic Pump. Want it?’
Raglan shivered a little. Even after eighteen months. Reginald smiled, and said that he supposed every man wanted money, more or less.
‘He does, my boy. Money and women. And one means the other. Give him those two, and let him sock some other man in the eye now and then, and he’s perfectly happy.’
Raglan was watching Reginald, and saw him stiffen.
‘Whom does Mr. Wellard want to—how did you phrase it?—sock in the eye?’ he asked gently. ‘Our friend Pump?’
‘No,’ said Reginald slowly. ‘Not our friend Pump. Not just at the moment.’
‘I thought not,’ murmured Raglan, smiling to himself.
Ormsby wasn’t listening, being busy with his tooth-pick.
III
Mr. Pump was in. Mr. Pump would see Mr. Wellard. Ah, good afternoon, Mr. Wellard. Sit down, won’t you? What can I do for you?
Well, what?
Now that he was here, Reginald wondered why he was here. To receive Mr. Pump’s congratulations was, he supposed, the real reason why he had come. To be flattered, praised, made much of. You could hardly say so to the other man, if he didn’t feel it for himself. Or was it to keep an eye on Mr. Pump, as advised by Raglan? All right, he was keeping an eye on Mr. Pump. Unfortunately at the moment Mr. Pump wasn’t faking accounts, forging cheques or taking money from the till. He wasn’t even, as far as Reginald could see, counting thirteen as twelve. Just how did one keep an eye on Mr. Pump? ‘The fact is I came to keep an eye on you.’ You see, one couldn’t say that.
However, we must say something.
‘I happened to be in London to-day—I don’t often come—so I thought I’d just look in.’ He gave a self-conscious little laugh and added, ‘Just to see how the book was getting on.’
‘Ah, yes, the book. Let me see. That would be—er——’ He turned over papers on his table as if to refresh his memory.
‘Bindweed,’ explained Reginald.
‘Bindweed, of course.’
Is there any one more naïf than a business man? Never will he lose his ingenuous belief in patter and tricks which would not deceive a child. I suppose, thought Reginald, business men are so stupid that, even when they are successful, they do not know what has brought them success, and dare not give up any of their stale properties lest, so doing, they discard the magic talisman. For how many years has Mr. Pump waited thus to be prompted by the author? Bindweed; of course!
‘Well, Mr. Wellard, you will be glad to hear that Bindweed has been doing very nicely, very nicely indeed.’ He caressed his benevolent beard. ‘It has been a bad season, of course, for publishers, but we have been fortunate. Not a wholly undeserved fortune, Mr. Wellard, if I may say so. We have been building up for many years, and now we are reaping the harvest.’ He referred, or pretended to refer, to a slip of paper at his elbow. ‘Bindweed, A Maid though Married and The Surprising Honeymoon have been our most notable successes, although The Life Class has run them close. In fact, really our only disappointment has been An Island Bride. It has done well, of course, but not quite what I expected.’
‘Oh, yes.’ No good leaving it at that. ‘Er—just how many copies of Bindweed have you sold?’
‘Bindweed? I haven’t got the actual figures here. You will have a full statement, of course, when the time comes, and I think you will be surpri
sed to find how many we have sold. It isn’t always easy to get a new book before the public. I could get you the figures, of course, if you care to wait, but——’
Reginald, or, at least, a voice from his chair, hastened to say that it didn’t really matter.
‘Well, you will see when we send you your cheque along. I think you will find the figures on the cheque more interesting than any I could give you now.’ He laughed automatically, and automatically Reginald responded.
‘I’m glad it’s doing well,’ said Reginald. ‘Of course Raglan’s notice must have helped enormously. It was very lucky to get that.’
‘Lucky if you like to put it so,’ said Mr. Pump, holding his beard firmly in his left hand. ‘As it happened, I had called his particular attention to it when sending the book out. It struck me as the sort of book which would appeal to Raglan. One has to consider the class of book, and the appeal it makes.’
‘So that’s how it was. I wondered.’
‘And when are we to have your new book?’
‘New book?’ said Reginald, startled by the idea. ‘I’m not writing another.’
‘Oh come, Mr. Wellard,’ said Mr. Pump, shaking the end of his beard at him waggishly, ‘you can’t let your public down like that. You can’t let us down. You—— What is it?’
Reginald was staring at the mantelpiece with his mouth open.
‘Is that the time?’
‘Approximately,’ said Mr. Pump, turning round. ‘As I was saying——’
‘Good Heavens!’ Reginald jumped up. ‘I’m terribly sorry. I shall miss my train. Good afternoon. I say!——’ He hurried to the door, called over his shoulder, ‘I’ll write,’ as if he had anything to write about, and dashed down the stairs into the street. Taxi! Hi! Here you are! Victoria—like hell. . . .
Victoria in five minutes? Impossible. What an idiot ever to have gone to Pump’s. And there was Sylvia walking five miles to meet him at the station!
Just a chance. If we can get through here without being held up . . . Damn, that settles it. Now then, what? No good worrying now. We’ve missed it. Let’s think. May as well think in the taxi as anywhere.
Sylvia darling, I’m terribly sorry. You said you loved meeting me. I can’t bear to think of your walking all that way and expecting to meet me every moment, and not meeting me. And I love meeting you. We must meet. Darling, I am a beast. Telegraph and say the next train? But she would start at about half-past three. How long would a telegram take? No, that’s no good.
Darling, I am terribly sorry. Now let’s see. You’ll walk to the common, anyway. That’s where I should have expected you. Sitting on the common, your hat in your lap, in that lovely careless way you have, that way of dropping to the ground and being at rest there instantly, as if a painter with a flick or two of the brush had put you into an empty landscape. Yes, that is where you would have been. Well, now what will happen? You won’t have a watch; you’ll get tired of waiting, you will walk slowly on. You will get to the station, you will see the car there—well, that won’t be so bad—you will guess what has happened. Then what will you do? Wait for the next train. . . . But if you have got a watch, then what? You will be waiting on the common, looking at your watch, wondering if I have had an accident. You will keep looking at your watch, and working it out again, and saying, ‘Perhaps the train is late,’ and then not believing it, and feeling frightened suddenly, and——
No, dash it, I can’t.
He put his head out of the window. ‘Never mind Victoria. Drive me to some place where I can hire a car.’ He dropped back on to the seat and thought, ‘That’s what people call throwing away five pounds. Idiots! What’s the use of money? None unless you can buy happiness with it, or prevent unhappiness. I threw away a hundred pounds’ worth of happiness by fooling about at Pump’s, and now I’m buying it back for five pounds. The best value for the money I shall ever get.’
He looked at his watch again. If he could get a fast car at once and a good driver, he could just do it. . . .
IV
For the twentieth time he looked at his watch. Fifteen miles to the station, half an hour before the train was due, open country. Only fifteen miles now. He was safe. Thank God. . . .
How like Milburn to say that he had recommended my book to Raglan. One of those fat white men who spread all over an arm-chair, and when you tell them that Lloyd George has gone over to Rome, wheeze, ‘Yes, I know. As a matter of fact it was something I said in here——’ Gone over to Rome: extraordinary expression. Could a Roman Catholic ‘go over’ to London? Probably he wouldn’t want to. The whole point of being a Roman Catholic was that you were safe. Didn’t have to bother any more. When strange people in railway-carriages asked you suddenly if you were saved, what they really meant was, ‘Are you safe?’ Have you stopped bothering? Like getting into the Four Hundred in New York. You are a lady, and no more questions asked.
It would be nice to be certain of a God; not for myself, but for other people. ‘God bless my darling Sylvia, and keep her safe’—well, I say it now, and oh! God, I mean it with all my heart, and it’s the only prayer I ever want You to consider. No, it isn’t, here’s another one. ‘May she always go on loving me.’ Oh Lord, that doesn’t end it: ‘May I always go on loving her’—that’s the important one. We can put those two into one if You like: May we always go on loving each other. There! And if You like, Pump can swindle me. I don’t mind. . . .
Now, what about Ormsby? He was a difficult problem. What was going to happen to him in the next world? I believe Hell is an entire invention of Man’s for the storing of people he doesn’t like. Must put ’em somewhere, but can’t have ’em with Us. Now take Betty Baxter. If we meet in the next world, it’s Hell. If we don’t, it’s Heaven. Well, I mean, that makes it difficult. It doesn’t seem to depend on me as it ought to. Or take it the other way round. If I went to Hell, then there would be no Heaven available for Sylvia at all. She would have to be with me—in which case it would be heavenly for me, but jolly bad luck on her. Of course that’s equally true in this world. No good woman can be happy if she loves a bad man. But the whole idea of the next world is that it makes up for the inequalities and unfairnesses of this one. How can it? . . .
Also, the more you feel certain that the next world makes up for the unfairness of this, the less you trouble to remedy that unfairness. Isn’t that so? I mean, if you were plumb certain that this was the only world, you would have to put all you knew into making it better. As it is, all the really good men are concentrating on the next world. A pity.
Anyway, what’s the matter with this one? It has been in existence a million years, and we have just discovered wireless. Which means that wireless has been waiting a million years for us to discover. Which means that even if we go on another million years before we discover anything else, it will have been waiting for us all that time. Two million years. Really it does seem as if we had everything in this world, if only we looked for it properly.
We! I haven’t discovered much. . . . Except the combination of Sylvia and Westaways. . . .
Those sheep we’ve put in that field so as to keep the grass short for mashie-shots. Splendid idea, but what do the sheep think about it? Well, of course they think they are there because I take an interest in them. But I don’t. Only in the field. Supposing God only takes an interest in the world; not in us. Awful thought. But it might be. After all, the interest must end somewhere. We have a million bacteria alive in us. So they say. Terrible liars, scientists. Well, naturally these bacteria think that they are It. And if one little bacterium, living happily in the world of Ormsby, and bowling along a country vein going to meet his Sylvia, suddenly began to wonder whether God only took an interest in Ormsby and not in himself, well, he might be right, mightn’t he? In spite of the bacterium-theologian. And the bacterium-scientist, with a laboratory in the left-hand corner of Ormsby’s liver, would be quite wrong in s
aying dogmatically that Ormsby was the only inhabited world. Just as we may be wrong about all the other worlds. Just as, to God, the world may be the individual, with a soul to which each of us makes his infinitesimal contribution.
Odd people, scientists. Almost as odd as fundamentalists, or whatever you call them. Of course geologians have entirely proved the absurdity of the book of Genesis . . . and yet an omnipotent God who couldn’t make a world, and shove fossil remains, and strata, and anything else He liked, into it, for His own purposes, is hardly an omnipotent God. So what’s the truth about anything? God knows—and that’s the only answer. . . .
Reginald took out his watch for the twenty-first time. Another mile and one more minute to do it in. Well, the train might have been a minute or two late. Sylvia wouldn’t worry about that. Bless her. I’m going to meet you, Sylvia! Hooray! You utterly lovely, unfathomable wonder. There must be a God.
Chapter Eight
I
REGINALD was contemplating his three ducks. It was getting difficult now to say which was the mother and which were the babies. Sylvia knew, or said she did—‘There, that one, darling.’ But when he was alone again, the difficulty remained. However, that didn’t matter. What mattered was that nobody knew whether the babies were ducks or drakes, because nobody does know until the end of September. It’s very odd, thought Reginald, that a drake should look his own magnificent self in the winter, and be content to masquerade as a duck all the summer. It was also very exciting watching the three ducks at the end of July, and trying to detect the first faint signs of change. Surely Ellen’s chest is lighter this evening? No? Oh, well! What do you think, Marmalade?
Marmalade sat a little way off, as indifferent as only a cat can be. Ducks and pigeons no longer disturbed him. There was a time, in his youth, when he had supposed them to be birds, but Mr. Wellard had smacked his head in a way which looked as if some people thought that they were really vegetables. Well, if the man Wellard thought that they were really vegetables, one must humour him. All this head-smacking didn’t do a cat any good. Vegetables, are they? All right, what about it? Who wants to bother about three up-ended vegetables in a pond?
