by A. A. Milne
No answer from Marmalade. Difficult to talk to the fur-collar round your neck, but what do you think, John Wesley? John Wesley, purring happily to himself, accelerated loudly for a moment at sound of the loved voice, and went to sleep again, leaving his engine running.
Then Reginald too heard the voice which he loved.
‘Hallo, darling.’
‘Hallo, Sylvia Wellard. You’re just what I wanted. Stand about somewhere, will you? Everything looks so gorgeous this evening.’
‘Doesn’t it? Don’t forget that the Hildershams are coming to dinner.’
‘Oh lord, not so gorgeous. I had forgotten.’
‘I’m just going to dress. I thought I’d better remind you.’
‘Oh, bother and blow. Oh, curse and dash.’
‘Darling,’ said Sylvia anxiously, ‘you do like the Hildershams, don’t you? I know you said you liked Grace. That’s why I asked them.’
‘I love them deeply, but nobody ought to dress for dinner in the country. It means throwing away the best half-hour of the day.’
‘Oh, but, darling, you couldn’t just go in to dinner as you are, when people are coming.’
‘I could, easily. I might squander a minute in washing my hands, but that’s all.’
‘Darling, you will dress, won’t you, because of course they will.’
‘On one condition,’ said Reginald solemnly.
‘What?’
‘That you wear the lowest and most utterly improper frock you have, so that I can gaze upon you madly all the evening.’
Sylvia blushed her lovely wild-rose colour—he knew she would, and wanted her to—and murmured, ‘Dresses aren’t low now.’
‘Then the highest—starting from the ground.’
The wild-rose deepened. ‘You are silly,’ she said, looking at him bravely, and no sooner had the words registered themselves in his mind as ugly and commonplace, than in the magic which her eyes were weaving over him, the words had never been said.
‘I’ll wear a very pretty one, darling,’ she promised.
‘Anyhow, you will look lovely in it, and I shall love you in it.’
‘Well, don’t be long.’
‘Quarter of an hour.’
‘Thank you, darling.’ She turned slowly and left him.
‘And I shall go with Mrs. Wellard,’ said Marmalade, following her.
So Reginald looked a perfect gentleman when the Hildershams were announced—‘Mr. and Mrs. Fairlie Hildersham’—and Sylvia looked so that Grace Hildersham caught her breath and said without knowing it, ‘Oh, you lovely thing!’ and Reginald murmured to Sylvia, ‘She means me.’ Then they all laughed—how easily in any social encounter one laughs—and were ready for cocktails.
Fairlie Hildersham was, like his wife, large and pink and fair, and, obviously, was called ‘Fairy’ when standing drinks. He had, among other qualities, what he called a sense of public duty, which meant that he could only find occupation for his mind from the outside, not from the inside. He was Guardian, County Councillor, Justice of the Peace, Conservator, Vicar’s Churchwarden and whatever else was possible, and had a friendly contempt for a man like Wellard who wouldn’t even join the Country Gentleman’s Association. There was no chair which he would not take, no subject on which he would not speak, no enterprise which he would not declare open, no petition which he would neither sign nor countersign. ‘Fairlie always knows his own mind,’ his wife would say proudly, but did not add whether there was much to know. She herself had many indecisions, particularly in the matter of dress. Before the evening is over, she will ask Sylvia to tell her frankly whether the apricot velvet suits her. Reginald felt that you couldn’t help loving a woman like that. It was as if a man asked you earnestly what you thought of his sense of humour.
‘You’ve signed the petition, of course?’ said Hildersham.
‘I’m not a very good signer. Which one’s that?’
‘Bringing water down to Little Malling.’
‘Oh, that? No, rather not,’ said Reginald. ‘I should hate it.’
Hildersham stared at him; looked round at the ladies confidently for support, but finding that they were occupied with each other, provided as best he could his own atmosphere of disapproval.
‘Oh! And why?’
‘Once you’ve got water, you’ll have bungalows and week-end cottages springing up everywhere. As it is——’
‘As it is, in a dry season some of the cottagers have to go a mile for water. As it is, the sanitary conditions——’
‘No, no,’ protested Reginald, ‘not just before dinner.’
‘Exactly,’ said Hildersham, with an air of sitting down and looking at the jury. ‘You can’t even bear to talk about it. They have to live with it.’
‘Well, then, they’ve signed the petition, I suppose.’
‘Naturally.’
‘Well, that’s all right. They want the water and they’ve asked for it. I don’t, and I haven’t.’
‘My dear fellow, isn’t that rather an uncivic attitude to take?’
‘It seems rather sensible to me.’
‘I thought you prided yourself on being a democrat.’
‘I am. If the majority wants anything, let ’em have it. But you’ll never know whether it is really a majority that wants it, if people start voting for what they think other people want.’
Hildersham looked round at the ladies again, but they were still in a world of their own. A pity, for a little badinage in which they could have joined seemed the best way of meeting these extraordinary arguments.
‘Have another,’ said Reginald, taking his glass from him.
‘No, thanks. It seems to me that a sense of public duty should teach one to consider the public welfare of the neighbourhood.’
‘I am. I do. Oh, emphatically. Think of all the horrid little bungalows with water and gas laid on——’
‘I don’t mean that. I mean one’s neighbours. You can think of us all here as a little state in ourselves. What is for the good of the state?’
‘You know, Hildersham,’ said Reginald with a smile, ‘you’re always doing things for the good of the public, and the good of the state, but you’re always doing it from outside; benevolently. You never realize that you are just one of the public yourself. Now I do. I see myself as a very modest member of the public, and when great men ask me what I want, I tell them. But I don’t tell them what anybody else wants, because I don’t presume to know.’
‘In this case you do know. You know, for instance, what your man Edwards wants. You know that he has certainly signed the petition.’
‘How do I know?’ asked Reginald, beginning to enjoy the evening more than he had thought he was going to.
‘My dear man, it stands to reason that he wants——’
‘That he wants the Company’s water, of course. But suppose he’s being civic and democratic and all that, and saying, “I mustn’t think of myself only, I must think of Mr. Wellard. Mr. Wellard would hate it!”
Luckily Alice arrived in time to say that dinner was served. ‘Shall we go in?’ said Sylvia, and in they went.
When Hildersham had absolved his fair moustache from its last suspicion of grape-fruit, he returned, more genially, to the discussion, bringing the ladies into it with his big, charming air of taking them under his protection and seeing them safely through.
‘I’ve been scolding your husband again, Mrs. Wellard, but I’m afraid he’s hopeless.’ He turned to his wife. ‘These authors, dear, you know what they are. Can’t expect them to see things as other people do. Eh, Wellard? Still, just keep it in your mind. I think you’ll find I’m right.’
‘What have you been doing, darling?’ asked Sylvia in surprise.
‘Nothing, nothing, Mrs. Wellard. Just a little matter of local politics. Mustn’t bother you with it.�
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‘The water, Sylvia.’
‘Oh, yes.’ She thought for a moment. ‘We don’t want that, do we? You did explain to me.’ The explanation came back to her. ‘Of course the pumping’s a nuisance, but it wouldn’t seem like country, would it, if you had water and gas and electric light and everything.’
‘Well, of course,’ said Hildersham courteously, ‘there are the cottagers to think of, Mrs. Wellard.’
‘My dear Sylvia,’ said his wife, ‘if you’d been into some of those cottages——’ She threw up her shoulders and her eyes to Heaven.
‘Well, but I do sometimes. I stop and look at their gardens, and we get talking, and they ask me in——’
(Of course they do, thought Reginald. Who wouldn’t?)
‘If you’ll forgive me, Mrs. Wellard, that isn’t quite what Grace meant.’
‘Hildersham means you don’t really examine the drains, darling.’ Sylvia examining drains. What a horrible idea.
‘Now, now, Mr. Wellard!’
‘Pass him something, Grace,’ said Hildersham good-humouredly. ‘I’m talking seriously to Mrs. Wellard.’
Sylvia looked adorably puzzled.
‘If you were behind the scenes,’ said Hildersham with one of his impressive metaphors, ‘you would know what I mean. Water, electric light, gas, would simply revolutionize their lives. Revolutionize them.’
‘Oh!’ said Sylvia.
‘And all this from a churchwarden!’ murmured Reginald to himself.
‘What do you mean?’ He became heavily and not unattractively playful. ‘You go and write another book, old man. Let’s see, what are you up to now? Twenty-fifth edition or something, is it?’
‘What did you mean, darling?’
‘Yes,’ said Grace. ‘Tell us.’
‘Oh, nothing very much. Only it always seems to me that the more a man is conscious of the immortality of the spirit, the more he discounts spiritual values in this world. You, Mrs. Hildersham, believe that we are preparing our souls for the adventure of the next world. That adventure lasts, you believe, for ever—immortality—and we’ve only got an infinitesimally short time here for preparation. How shall we spend our time?’
He looked up at Sylvia and found himself caught in the depths of her eyes. Blue, blue-violet, periwinkle blue—how would you describe them? Such a short time here, and only a little of that with Sylvia. She would grow old and be Sylvia no longer; then she would die; and then for ten million years he would commune with her spirit. No, no! What could life beyond the grave be without a Sylvia to see, to touch, to hold in the arms? Ah, but beauty must die. Underneath this stone—how did it go? Underneath this stone doth lie As much Beauty as must die. Oh well, I shall have had my day.
In the silence Sylvia caught Alice’s eye and carried it across the room to Hildersham’s glass.
‘Thanks,’ said Hildersham, putting up a finger. ‘Thanks. Quite so, I see your point, of course. But surely if we’ve only got such a short time, it’s our first duty to see that we don’t lose any of it.’
On the silver-grey table in the silver-grey panelled room in blue glass candle-sticks blue candles stood, waiting to be lit, but as yet unlighted; for the golden sun, now fallen suddenly below the line of the hill, had left that incredible aftermath of beauty behind it, when it is as if each flower had snatched at its last moment of life, to conspire in one glowing intensity of colour. Then, as it were in a breath, the glory will be gone. As much Beauty as must die.
‘I see what you mean,’ said Sylvia, since Reginald was still staring through the opened windows.
Hildersham, turning himself over in his mind, realized that he was becoming unanswerable.
‘In other words,’ he said, clinching the matter, ‘our first duty is to preserve that life both for ourselves and others.’
Grace agreed. Grace always liked the way Sylvia did her fish. She made a note in her mind to ask her about it again . . . to send on Jimmy’s wicket-keeping gloves . . . and to take round those flannels to old Mrs. Heathcote. One oughtn’t to talk about religion with Alice in the room. It put ideas into her head.
‘What are we going to do in the next world?’ asked Reginald, coming back with a sigh to this one. ‘I’m not arguing, I’m wondering.’
‘It will be a different sort of life, obviously. One can’t speculate. Presumably our duty will be as clear to us there, as it seems to me to be here.’ The words came back to him as he said them: good, measured words. He felt that an intelligent man was weighing his words. Very good wine, too. Lovely woman, Mrs. Wellard. He felt sure and at ease.
‘Dear, you do have such marvellous fish. Doesn’t she, Fairlie? We always say——’
Alice was out of the room now. One could talk about fish and immortality with freedom.
‘Do you like it?’ said Sylvia eagerly. ‘I’ll tell Mrs. Hosken. She’s always glad when you two come to dinner, because she knows how you like things.’
‘I like this hock of yours,’ said Hildersham to his fellow-man, asserting his sex. ‘Very delicate.’
‘Do you mind going on with it?’
‘Delighted. Much prefer it, in fact. You must tell me about it.’ He tasted it again with the air of one listening for something. ‘Ninety-seven, isn’t it?’
Reginald was tempted to say ‘Yes’, but decided at random to say ‘Ninety-nine’. Hildersham said ‘Ah!’ accepting the correction as somehow more confirmatory of his taste than confirmation would have been. Grace marvelled again at men’s expert knowledge of wine. Reginald marvelled again at the ease with which one gives the impression of expert knowledge. Sylvia said, ‘I’m afraid we shall have to light the candles. Do you mind, darling?’ And the candles are lighted.
II
They came into the living-room, Grace and Sylvia. Grace with her big, fair, flushed, untidy head and pink neck escaping from the top of an ample apricot velvet which might have hidden anything; Sylvia with her delicate, shining head, no more revealed, no more unrevealed, than the golden body of which it was, this evening, part.
‘You don’t wear your clothes,’ Reginald had said to her. ‘You turn into them. Do you ever put one dress on the top of another by mistake?’
Grace, over her shoulder as they came in at the door, said:
‘Jimmy’s staying with a school friend for the first week of the holidays. Did I tell you? Playing cricket. A Mrs. Taylor wrote to me. I never quite like letting them go off like this to people I don’t know. But I suppose it’s all right. She wrote very nicely.’
‘Jimmy’s getting quite good at cricket, isn’t he? Shall we stay here, or go out?’
‘Just as you like, dear. Well, let’s sit down for a moment. That is a lovely dress, Sylvia.’
‘Do you like it?’
‘I think this suits me, don’t you? Fairlie doesn’t, but men are so funny. Is your husband like that?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Not liking things, without being able to tell you why. I was wearing a pink chiffon when Fairlie proposed to me—do you remember the fashions then? No, you wouldn’t. Nineteen hundred and eight? Almost everything I wear—well, of course their own clothes hardly alter at all.’
‘Reginald always notices everything. I mean if I have a new hat-brooch even, or anything. He’s lovely like that.’
‘Of course, Fairlie’s so busy nowadays. And you can’t expect to keep your figure after four children. At least, if you’re that sort. The thin ones do, of course. Still, I wouldn’t be without them. But he always comes back to that pink dress, whatever I wear. That is a new ring, isn’t it?’
Sylvia slipped it off her finger and offered it for inspection.
‘Because of the book. Isn’t it lovely? I love the setting so.’
‘How do you get paid for a book? So much a copy?’
‘Yes. Not very much. Ninepence.’
‘Still, it adds up. How many ninepences are there in a pound? That’s the sort of thing Jimmy would know at once.’
‘Forty sixpences, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, so that would be sixty ninepences, so if you sold sixty copies—— Oh, no, it can’t be sixty, can it? Because if it’s forty sixpences——’ She gave Sylvia her ring. ‘Yes, it’s lovely. Did you ever see this?’ She pulled off one of her own rings, screwing up her face a little. ‘It was my great-great-aunt Ramsay’s, that’s my mother’s great-aunt. I haven’t been wearing it lately, I meant to get it made bigger, but I simply had to put it on to-night. Look what’s written. Of course to-day you’d think it wasn’t a real stone, but they used to set them like that.’
Sylvia read, written in tiny copper-plate on the gold backing of the emerald: ‘Agatha—Richard. Till death.’
‘That was her engagement ring. He was killed in a duel on Calais sands the day after.’
‘Oh, how awful! About—her?’
‘Yes. It was in a club, Almacks or whatever it was, she was rather a beauty of those days and everybody wanted her, I mean wanted to marry her, and Richard Penross, that was his name, came in just as one man was saying—well really, dear, he was betting, well, like they do in Shakespeare sometimes, that he would spend the night with her. Of course nobody knew about Richard and her—well, naturally, he wouldn’t have said it if he had known, and then Richard came in—well, you can imagine!’
‘Grace, how awful!’
‘It’s perfectly true, dear. My mother told me. After I was married, of course. The other man wasn’t hurt, but he had to stay abroad. That was what was so unfair about duels, the wrong man got killed—I’m glad they’ve stopped them.’
Sylvia was still reading that tiny copper-plate writing: ‘Agatha—Richard. Till death.’
‘Grace, was it true?’ she asked; in a whisper, lest the world should hear.
‘About being—that sort of woman?’
Sylvia nodded, but at the ring.
‘Oh, no, dear!’ said Grace, shocked at the suggestion. Then, after an interval for thought, ‘Well, of course, she was only a great-great-aunt. I mean, it was her brother who—and in those days, I suppose—— Well, they’re bad enough now from all accounts. Thank you, dear.’ Sylvia had handed back the ring. ‘I’d never thought of that. Perhaps she was.’
