by A. A. Milne
‘Why did you say “that of all places”?’ she asked.
‘Well, you know who Veno is.’
She shook her head. ‘Veno? What a funny name.’
‘He’s the half-caste who put the show on.’
‘Oh! But what——’
‘Ormsby finances him—on condition that he has first choice.’ Reginald laughed contemptuously, and added, ‘You might say that he owns the Preference Shares.’
For what seemed a long time nothing more was said. The Dresden shepherdess clock on Mrs. Carstairs’ mantelpiece ticked—ticked—ticked. Irrevocable moments. Irrevocable words. But every moment is irrevocable, every word is irrevocable, and the world goes on, and nobody is very much changed, and nothing has really happened. Silly to think that all this is going to make any difference. It can’t, Sylvia, can it? Tick—tick—tick. . . .
With a long mournful sigh Sylvia stood up.
‘I had been so terribly happy,’ she said. ‘You’ve spoilt my happiness.’
She moved slowly, mournfully, towards the door.
‘Sylvia!’
Slowly, mournfully, she took her loveliness, and all the peace and rest and comfort which went with her, from the room.
Chapter Seventeen
I
REGINALD lay awake in his dressing-room, going over it in his mind. He had been perfectly right all through. Ormsby was that sort of man; nobody could want his wife to be seen about with that sort of man; nobody could help being annoyed if his wife, without consulting him, had gone out at night with that sort of man. He had been perfectly right all through. (How nice to be perfectly right.)
Just consider a moment. Everybody in London knew Ormsby by sight. Well, not quite everybody, but everybody in the stalls at the first-night of a musical show. Nobody knew Sylvia. To the stalls she would just be an astoundingly beautiful young woman; unknown; not, therefore, in what was called Society; not before seen at a first-night; some new arrival to the stage, presumably then, which absorbed and discharged so many beautiful young women. Presumably then, also, of the musical-comedy stage. With Ormsby! At Veno’s first-night! What would they think?
Did it matter what they thought, since, thinking this, they could not possibly know Sylvia? Did he mind what people, strangers, said about him? ‘Bindweed? Oh, that’s that fellow Wellard. You’ve heard about Wellard, haven’t you?’ And then some idiotic lie, or disgusting scandal. How many such lies, such scandals, he had heard at the club about his acquaintances. Did one mind if people who didn’t know you thought you were this, that or the other? No. But one’s wife. . . .
If it comes to that, thought Reginald suddenly, all that I know about Ormsby is just hearsay. I don’t know anything. How can I? He went on thinking about this for some time, a little ashamed; and then remembered with relief that five minutes’ conversation with Ormsby made it sufficiently certain that he was what he was said to be. How absolutely right, then, I was, he thought, to say what I did to Sylvia. (How nice to be absolutely right.)
So much for Reginald, the man who is always right. Now let us consider the erring Sylvia. He tried to put himself in Sylvia’s place.
You are taken by your husband to the house of a friend of his. You meet your host and hostess. Later your hostess asks you to lunch, and you meet your host again. Later still he comes to your house; naturally you are hospitable to him. He calls again, not knowing that your husband is out (how could he know?) and suggests taking you to a theatre. It happens that your husband has unexpectedly left you to your own resources that night, so naturally you accept. All eagerness and joyous anticipation. And then you come home, full of your happy evening, longing to tell your husband all about it, and suddenly, crashingly out of a blue sky, he spoils your happiness.
‘You’ve spoilt my happiness.’ . . .
He was forty-one. She was twenty-six. A child. He had spoilt her happiness. How dared he marry her? How dared he, married to her, so take her love for granted? How dared he question her who had condescended to him so royally?
‘You’ve spoilt my happiness.’
If the door would open now, and she would come in! How wonderful of her to come in now and be friends again. Listen! A rustling outside the door. Look! The door is opening. Oh, Sylvia, you darling! . . . No, how could it? It was he who had spoilt her happiness; it was for him to ask to be forgiven.
He went over in his mind all the other quarrels which they had had. Not quarrels, disagreements. Never like this. Never before had they carried a disagreement over into the next day. A quarrel, an apology, friends again, lovers again. That was the way when, as Coral Bell put it, you were still on the higher plane, still in love. Once safely on the lower plane, your quarrels need not be made up. You were cross, you went to bed, you woke up un-cross, and all went on as comfortably as before. But when you were still in love, everything mattered so terribly, for each could still hurt the other with a word, with a look, and every wound, left untended, slowly festered.
He pictured her in the next room, awake, miserable, wondering if he would come to her, wondering if she should, after all, go to him. Suddenly he felt that it would be a very shameful thing if she came in now to say that she was sorry, when the fault was his. No, he would go to her, lying there awake, miserable, and ask her forgiveness. Somehow they must be friends again to-night.
He went to her, gladly, eagerly. Eagerly he opened her door and called ‘Sylvia!’ He turned up the light by her bed, eagerly. There she lay . . . deeply, beautifully, utterly, asleep.
So it all meant nothing to her! He went back to his room resentfully, slammed the door and lay awake for another hour. Then he too went to sleep.
In the morning he had not forgotten. She was already among the breakfast-cups when he came down, deep in The Times. At the opening of the door, she was up and close to him, the paper on the floor. What was he going to say, what was he going to do? He seemed to have no choice; the words came unsought to his mouth, the movement to his hand; a friendly ‘Hallo, darling’, an affectionate pat on her shoulder, and he had slipped past her to his chair. Thus the happy husbands on the lower plane greeted their wives, blending their casual salute of a club acquaintance with something of the warmer intimacy reserved for a favourite animal. He had achieved it triumphantly.
Yet he did not feel triumphant as he buttered his toast. There’s a devil in me, he thought. I wanted to take her in my arms. Why wouldn’t he let me?
‘The paper, darling?’ She passed it across to him.
‘Oh, thanks.’
It was open at the theatre page. She had been reading about the first-night. He felt angry again; glad that he had not surrendered to her.
‘Sure you’ve finished with it?’ That was how happy husbands talked. He had listened to them in plays.
‘It’s all right, thank you, darling.’ That was how happy wives always answered. He had heard them.
He read, silently. She peeled an apple; silently. . . . Time he said something.
‘Seems to have been pretty good last night,’ he said, and registered it as the correct line to take. ‘Last night’ was brought safely to the lower plane and took its place among the incidental ups and downs of a happy marriage. Now they were both happy again.
‘Awfully good,’ said Sylvia. ‘I wish you could have come.’
‘Well, I wasn’t asked.’ Excellently said, with just the right shade of friendly irony, the right smile.
‘Of course you were asked, darling! We had the two tickets for both of us, and then when I had to give them back because you couldn’t come, Lord Ormsby asked if I could come with him. It would have been lovely if you’d just been coming home in the ordinary way, and I could have told you about it, and we could have gone together.’
‘Oh, that’s how it was?’ said Reginald.
So that’s how it was. If he had not made this unnecessary visit to this un
necessary play, if he had not forced himself on Lattimer and Nixon and Coral Bell, all concerned with business, he with pleasure only, then that unhappy night, this unhappy morning, would never have been. . . .
Her head out of her bedroom door as he comes upstairs.
‘Hurry, darling, you’ve only got twenty minutes.’
‘But why—it’s only——’
‘Guess!’
‘We’re going out somewhere? Clever of me. How do you do?’ He shakes her hand.
‘Well, just one.’ She comes into his arms. ‘But you must hurry, darling. And white waistcoat and everything. They’re all put out for you.’
‘Righto. Buckingham Palace? What about the knee-breeches?’
‘Not Buckingham, darling.’
‘I say, we’re not going——’
She nods excitedly.
‘However——?’
‘You must hurry, darling. I’11 tell you at dinner. Isn’t it fun?’
That’s how it would have been. And this morning they would have been talking about it happily, saying to each other, ‘Didn’t you love the way he——’ and ‘Oh, but much the best thing really——’ and ‘Funny how the critics never seem to notice the things which everybody else notices’. And then suddenly from him, ‘I’ve got rather an idea. Why don’t you come along to a rehearsal with me now? . . . Of course they wouldn’t mind. And they’d all simply love to see you. We’d collect somebody for lunch, if you liked.’
Well, he could say all this now. It was easy . . . Now!
He found that he couldn’t. How was he to begin? Last night was over, forgotten, it would be silly to drag it up again; and yet he knew that they could not go happily off together with the faint spectre of that night still between them, unexorcized. At least, he could not. After the way she slept last night, it could not be supposed to matter much to her. So how could he refer to it again? She would hardly, he thought bitterly, know what I was talking about.
‘More coffee, darling?’
‘Thanks.’
The moment had passed. If his apology had not come, now it was not coming. I’m being a sulky child, he thought, I can feel myself being one, I can stand outside myself and watch myself contemptuously, but I can’t do anything. Anyway, there’s nothing to do. If I did apologize, she’d say, ‘Oh, but I’d forgotten all about that!’
‘Going to the theatre, darling?’
Silly question. She knew quite well he was going. She only said it to make it look as if he were wasting his time going to the theatre; to let him know that she knew quite well how unnecessary this theatre-going was; to make him feel awkward if he spoke to another woman there.
What was the answer? He thought:
If one hated one’s wife, one would say, ‘Well, naturally,’ in the coldest voice possible.
If one loved one’s wife, one would say eagerly, ‘Yes, if you’ll come with me. Do!’
Going to the theatre, darling?
‘Well, naturally,’ said Reginald in the coldest voice possible.
II
Reginald out of the house, Sylvia went about her business. First, a few letters to write, a few bills to pay. Then to Mrs. Stoker and her slate.
Mrs. Stoker liked Mrs. Wellard; thought her the most lovely thing which had ever come into her kitchen. One of the Good Ones too, not going where some of the others were going, with their paint and their fastness and their loose talk. They smiled at each other and discussed the day’s meals, Sylvia leaning against the kitchen table, Mrs. Stoker standing opposite to her, slate propped against her waist. They were agreed on the necessity of feeding Mr. Wellard up, but differed as to Mrs. Wellard’s need.
‘You can’t hardly call that a luncheon,’ said Mrs. Stoker gloomily. ‘What I say is good food never did anybody any harm.’
‘I never want a very big lunch,’ said Sylvia.
‘You don’t eat more breakfast than a sparrow,’ said Mrs. Stoker. ‘A good-sized sparrow. Still, I will say you look well on it.’
Sylvia began to tell her about ‘last night’. Mrs. Stoker had never been inside a theatre. Her father ceased to hold with the theatre from the night when he came home slightly drunk, and found, to his relief, that his wife had just left him for the impresario of a Performing Elephant Act at the local music-hall. His manhood demanded its customary assertion. An elopement in the company of three elephants being easily traced, Mr. Bagsworthy followed it successfully, but was less successful than he had hoped in knocking the other fellow’s head off. He returned home with a prejudice against all forms of public entertainment, which expressed itself bitterly in the word ‘Mummers!’ For some reason this word gave him a satisfaction which no arrangement of expletives could have brought. ‘Mummers,’ he muttered through the sponge, as he bathed his eye, ‘that’s what they are. Mummers!’ From that day the dangers of mumming, and of any association with mummers, were kept in front of his daughter. ‘All mummers,’ Mr. Bagsworthy would say mournfully, as he led her past some brightly lit building, ‘all the whole lot of ’em, elephants and all. Just mummers.’ And Mr. Stoker, when his turn came to listen to the Bagsworthy creed, proved to be equally orthodox. ‘That’s all right, my girl,’ he said. ‘We’ll have no money to waste on fripperies of that sort. Look at Rome. Panem et circenses and all that, if you see what I’m referring to. Eh, Bags?’ Mr. Bagsworthy, who strongly objected to being called ‘Bags’ by his future son-in-law, even if he had picked up a bit of Greek, said ‘Ah!’ with the air of one adding a scholarly footnote.
But Mrs. Stoker’s views had broadened with her widowhood. She still felt that a personal appearance in ballet-skirts before a lot of strangers would be sinful, but as long as her mistresses did not ask her to do that, she was prepared to acquiesce in their play-going, and to admit that even the current parlourmaid, though better without it, might balance her account by good work in other directions. Sometimes she regretted her increased breadth of view; as when asked by an argumentative house-painter to ‘look at Shakespeare’ . . . and she had looked at Shakespeare. But she still found a fascination in the gossip about the theatre (that fountainhead of gossip) which was now beginning to come her way.
‘You must have enjoyed yourself, madam,’ she said to Sylvia. ‘Now I wonder if Sir Edgar Baines was there. Sure to be, I should think.’
‘I shouldn’t have known him, anyhow,’ said Sylvia. ‘Who is he?’
‘Sir Edgar Baines, Baronet? Oh, he’s very well known, madam. A great friend of Mrs. Carstairs. Many a time he’s been to luncheon here. And dinner. He’d be sure to be there.’
‘Perhaps Lord Ormsby did point him out to me. There were so many I simply couldn’t remember them all.’
‘Ah well, he’d be there, and his lordship would know him, I’ve no doubt.’
‘Lord Ormsby did say he’d met Mrs. Carstairs. Did he ever come to dinner here?’
‘His lordship? No, madam.’ Mrs. Stoker’s lips were compressed ever so slightly.
‘Oh?’ said Sylvia, and was for going on to other matters, when the telephone-bell rang.
‘Excuse me, madam.’ And then, ‘A Mr. Bellamy, least it sounded like,’ said Mrs. Stoker, putting down the receiver. ‘I expect you’d like to speak to him upstairs comfortably.’
‘I don’t think I know—— Are you sure it’s for me?’
‘He said Mrs. Wellard, madam.’
Sylvia went to her bedroom, took off the receiver and settled down comfortably.
‘Hallo!’
‘Is that Mrs. Wellard?’
‘Yes?’
‘This is Mr. Fondeveril. I don’t know if you remember me. We met——’
‘Oh! Of course I do! They said Bellamy!’
‘Perhaps I should have given my full name. John Fondeveril. They used to say in the clubs, you know, I dare say you’ve heard—Always the same, always game, Jo
hn Fondeveril.’ He laughed it off carelessly, and there was an answering laugh from the other end of the telephone. ‘Mrs. Wellard, I wondered if you would give me the great pleasure of your company at lunch to-day.’
There was a momentary hesitation at Mrs. Wellard’s end. Was Sylvia perhaps wondering what his reputation with women was like? What husbands said when their wives went about with him?
‘I should love to.’
‘That is most kind of you. Would the Ivy suit you? They give you a very good Sole Veronique there. Or is there anywhere else——’
‘No, that would be lovely, thank you.’
‘Then shall we say one-fifteen?’ There was a click, as it might be of a gold inscribed hunter being brought into consultation. Undoubtedly one-fifteen was an authentic moment.
‘One-fifteen. That will be lovely.’
‘Till one-fifteen then, at the Ivy. Au revoir.’
‘Good-bye.’
For Mr. Fondeveril also had been at the Palace; and, seeing his son-in-law and the lovely Mrs. Wellard together, he had remembered what his daughter had said to him all those weeks ago. If she was anxious about Bob then, how much more anxious must she be now. He decided that he must Do Something. Something diplomatic, delicate. A word to Wellard? Then his son-in-law’s character would be in the open, and it would be possible no longer for him to pretend ignorance of it. Something tactful, then, to Mrs. Wellard; asserting nothing, excusing nothing, condemning nothing, but just talking in a large general way of Care and A Woman’s Good Name and Jewels, in the detached manner of an Elder Statesman. At lunch, say; over a glass of good wine.
He was there, waiting for her. He bowed over her hand, as, he hoped she would feel, he (or was it somebody else?) had bowed over the dear Queen’s hand in the days when even the young men had leisure for courtesy. He led her to a seat, as he had so nearly led Lady Randolph Churchill on a Melba night at Covent Garden. They sat down side by side.
