by A. A. Milne
It was one of those April days which hold their own for ever in the memory against all the bleak statistics of April, so that ‘April’ means just a day like this, and for the hope of a day like this one can suffer much from April without disfavouring her. At first, as Reginald and Sylvia hurried here and there in the garden, they talked eagerly, exclaiming at each new discovery, pointing out to each other the promise of this, the fulfilment of that, lamenting here a casualty, welcoming there a revival; but gradually the content of the morning took possession of them, and they found themselves silent in a world suddenly alive with happy sound: a thrush urgent in the pear-tree, bees visiting in the aubrietia, the first cuckoo echoing from a distant wood. As they sat there, Reginald felt rather than thought, This is Westaways, I am one with it again, and his mind registered no beauty, analysed no impression of beauty, but brought only that happy acceptance which it brings to a beautiful dream.
II
The dream went on through the magical afternoon, as they picked their flowers together, but at tea-time the world broke in on them again, for with tea came the Hildershams.
‘Sylvia! Say you don’t mind our bursting in on you like this, your first day back, but we heard you were coming, and it seems such ages since we saw you.’
‘Grace, of course! It’s lovely of you to have come.’
Even Reginald was glad to see them. They were part of it, they belonged to the country. Ages since we have seen them. How absurd of us never to have come down for the weekend. Why didn’t we? Just didn’t, I suppose. After all, we’re not week-enders. We belong to the country too. I’m glad we didn’t now. It makes it more like coming home.
‘Well, you’ve had a great success,’ said Hildersham, a little as if he were responsible for it, or, at the least, had maintained its probability against the rest of the world.
‘Well—I hope so,’ said Reginald.
‘The Times said so,’ said Hildersham, opening his blue eyes at the doubter. ‘I read it this morning.’ And lest this should not settle the matter, he added that he had also specially bought the Post, the Mail, the Telegraph and the News in the village, and they all said so.
‘Good,’ said Reginald. ‘I haven’t really seen the papers yet.’
‘Oh, they did,’ put in Grace. ‘Fairlie brought them back, all except the News, and I read them.’
Hildersham, avoiding Reginald’s admiring eye, uttered something about the impossibility of being too careful in These Days. When Bolshevism was Rampant. ‘Actually’, he said, ‘it was Mrs. Coleman’s carelessness. I distinctly asked for the Express.’
They talked a little of London, Grace wanting to know if skirts really were longer, ‘I don’t mean for evening, of course, but the afternoon. Is it just a few fashionable people, or is it General? Of course in the country, well, we simply couldn’t do it’; Fairlie wanting to know what they said in London about the chances of an election in the autumn. The Wellards spoke for London in these matters as well as they were able. But as soon as the tea-things were settled, and there was no further anxiety to be felt about Alice, Fairlie and Grace looked at each other, and Grace seemed to be imploring ‘Do let me tell them, Fairlie! After all, I told you’, and Fairlie’s answering look said, ‘I think you had better leave this to me, my dear. This is no longer just a piece of idle gossip. You shall have your turn later.’ And then he put down his cup, wiped his moustache, and said gravely, ‘You haven’t heard our news, I suppose?’
For one ridiculous moment Reginald supposed that Mrs. Hildersham was going to have another, and struggled with a compelling impulse to look at her. I suppose Sylvia knew at once, he thought. Possibly Hildersham read his thought, for he went on quickly, ‘About the Baxters?’
‘No. What?’
‘Mrs. Baxter is divorcing him.’
‘Good lord! Who?—or just——’
‘I’m afraid so. Quite definitely. A Miss—Voles, is it?’ He looked at his wife for confirmation.
‘Miss Voles,’ said Grace eagerly. ‘He knew her years ago, and then they met again suddenly. Isn’t it dreadful?’
‘It isn’t Right,’ said Hildersham, shaking his head. ‘It’s—— In These Times. We can’t Afford—— I mean Anything Like That——Of course they never really belonged. Still, there they were. One can’t just Please Oneself. One has to Consider.’
Reginald and Sylvia found themselves looking at each other; considering.
‘Oh, did you meet her?’ cried Grace.
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, what’s she like? How old is she? Quite young, I suppose. Would you call her pretty, Sylvia?’
‘She must be as old as Betty. Older.’
‘Not exactly pretty, Grace.’
‘Attractive? Well, I suppose she must be.’
‘Very,’ said Reginald slowly. ‘Oh, yes . . . Very.’
‘Poor Betty! How awful for her,’ said Grace. ‘Just think what it would be like, Sylvia! What should I do if Fairlie ran off with some other woman?’
Flattered and self-conscious at this indirect tribute to his virility, Fairlie looked down his nose, with the air of a man who had broken many a heart by his insistent faithfulness to his wife.
‘Of course,’ said Grace, developing the theme, ‘it would be worse for me because of the children.’
Fairlie’s conduct now became almost heroic. One seemed to see the Beauty Chorus offering itself to him one by one. In vain.
‘Well,’ said Fairlie modestly, ‘I don’t think—— But in any case this isn’t just a personal matter. Not as I see it. Noblesse oblige; though I believe Baxter’s father—— Still, there he was, at Seven Streams; and now every Tom, Dick and Harry talks of it. That sort of thing Does No Good.’
‘Noblesse so often doesn’t oblige,’ murmured Reginald.
‘There are blacklegs in every camp, of course, but the principle is the same.’ He helped himself to a potted meat sandwich, and thought: ‘If it comes to that, our host and hostess are hardly doing their duty to their country. Let’s see, how long have they been married?’ Grace was thinking: ‘Really, I wonder sometimes he doesn’t. He’s just as young as ever, and they are so attractive nowadays. I couldn’t stay here possibly, but I suppose I’d soon get used to it somewhere else. Is it half the income you get or a third? And of course I should have the children.’ Reginald was thinking: ‘Can you have a “blackleg” in a “camp”? Oh, well, never mind. Baxter! The turmoil that must have been going on inside that sleek head!’ And in Sylvia’s transfigured face you could read the thought: ‘All those years!’
‘Did you guess anything, Sylvia?’ asked Grace. She was almost married again by this time, and hardly liked to trust herself any longer with her thoughts. Sylvia looked at her, as if puzzled how to answer.
‘It was—he had only just found her again. That evening.’
‘Still, you must have seen.’
Hildersham produced a cough which deceived nobody. Grace brought it into the open by saying, ‘Oh, Fairlie, but we’re all friends here,’ and explained, ‘Fairlie hates gossip.’
Hildersham looked across at Reginald and said, ‘It’s no good expecting a woman to understand.’
‘Understand what?’ asked Grace.
‘Exactly.’
‘We only just met her that once,’ explained Sylvia, ‘and there were a lot of other people there.’
Grace nodded, as if in the secret, and said, ‘Oh, well, wait till I get you alone.’
Women have no reserves but the one, thought Reginald; the reserve of their body from the marauding male. In all but this how much more shy, more modest, more sensitive, are men. Or is it that we are just the greater hypocrites?
‘You women!’ said Hildersham, shaking his head genially at Sylvia. ‘Come on, dear, they must have a hundred things to do.’
Grace got up, and said to Sylvia, ‘Don’t you
hate the way men always talk about women, just as though we were all alike?’
Sylvia looked at Reginald as if for the answer.
‘One can generalize about land and water,’ he smiled, ‘and, you know, they are different. But that doesn’t mean that one thinks the Regent’s Park Canal is the same as the Pacific.’
‘Good,’ said Hildersham. ‘That’s how it is, dear. Come on, Grace.’
On their way home he found himself thinking that it would be rather exciting to have an entirely new wife. Like Baxter. For the honeymoon, anyway. Decency had its disadvantages. Perhaps in the next world one would get rewarded for it. A succession of Sylvia Wellards, for instance. . . .
‘Didn’t she look lovely to-day, Fairlie? London’s done her good.’
‘’m.’
Oh, well, there were plenty of other things in life.
III
They were alone in the garden again, with this astonishing news between them.
‘Baxter!’ said Reginald.
‘Are you surprised, darling?’
‘Staggered. People divorce each other every day, and one thinks nothing of it, and then it happens to somebody one knows, and it seems unbelievable. Doesn’t it to you?’
‘I saw them together in London. One afternoon.’
‘You never told me,’ said Reginald, and immediately thought of all the things which he hadn’t told Sylvia.
‘There wasn’t much to tell, darling. I didn’t speak to them.’
‘Did you think then——’
‘They were so utterly happy, and away from everybody else.’
‘What were they doing?’
‘Nothing. Looking at a shop-window. Just being together. It was lovely just to see them being together.’
‘Yes, but——’ Dash it, thought Reginald, there’s more to it than that.
‘Are you sorry about it, darling? I’m not. I’m glad.’
‘No, not sorry exactly——’
‘You never liked Betty, did you?’
How personal women always were!
‘I’m not worrying about Betty.’
‘She’ll marry again, don’t you think? She’s attractive to men. I mean most men.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘What is it, darling?’
‘Nothing. But I always wonder a little about the—the morality of it. I mean of that sort of thing generally.’
‘Morality?’ said Sylvia, looking puzzled. ‘Like Mr. Hildersham?’
‘Well, no,’ smiled Reginald, ‘not quite like that, but I suppose there is a moral question involved. I mean, if you swear eternal things to a woman, there is a case for keeping to them. Of course there is also a case for saying that real love is so much the most beautiful thing in the world that it must be found at whatever cost. Which is right?’
Sylvia was silent; and then, pointing with her foot at a saxifrage in the wall, said, ‘Isn’t that pretty?’
‘Yes. I wish they didn’t lose their colour. They all do.’
‘If I’d been married when we first met, wouldn’t you have asked me to come away with you?’
Reginald looked at her for a long time, and then shook his head.
‘Why not?’
‘It simply wouldn’t have occurred to me, Sylvia.’ ‘I would have come.’
‘Would you leave me now, if you loved somebody else?’
‘I couldn’t love anybody else—now, darling. How could I?’
Reginald laughed at her lovingly and said, ‘Sweetheart, you make it all very difficult. I never know how you managed to love me, and I never know why you don’t get tired of me. You were like something out of a fairy-story to me when I first saw you. You are still. I hardly dared to ask you even as it was. If you had been married, I should have known that your husband adored you, and I should have supposed that in some magic way you loved him. How could I have dared to push myself in between you?’
Sylvia put her hand in his and said, ‘I’m glad I wasn’t married. I’m glad I didn’t make a mistake before I saw you.’
‘That’s the trouble, you see. What is one to do about the people who make mistakes? And if they make it the first time, mightn’t they make it the second time? That’s really the case for tying you up so tightly in marriage, so that you don’t easily give way to every new fancy which comes into your head.’
‘Mr. Baxter’s wasn’t a new one, it was a very, very old one.’
‘Yes; well, let’s hope that he hasn’t made a mistake about it this time—as he evidently did when he married Betty.’
‘Darling,’ said Sylvia anxiously, ‘you aren’t——? Grace said something about Fairlie not wanting her to know Miss Voles, if they—— You aren’t——?’
‘Good Heavens, no. I’m longing to see them both. Well, of course! I only—I say, this is frightful. You didn’t think—— I mean Hildersham——!’
‘They were so happy that day. Sort of peaceful and entranced.’
‘There you are, that’s good enough. It’s really pretty difficult to be bad and happy at the same time. Peacefully happy. I’m sure Baxter couldn’t manage it. But I do just feel, you know, that deserting a wife isn’t necessarily a noble thing in itself, and worthy of admiration. That’s all. My one point of contact with Hildersham.’
‘Of course it isn’t, darling.’
‘A good many people talk as if it were.’
‘What I think’, said Sylvia earnestly, ‘is that marriage without love is much worse than love without marriage.’
‘You’re perfectly right, sweetheart,’ said Reginald, surprised that she had put it so well. (Did I really think once, he wondered, that I couldn’t talk to Sylvia?) She was right. It was love which made marriage holy, not marriage which sanctified love.
‘You see,’ he said, following his thoughts, ‘at the back of all the argument about marriage and divorce is this horrible religious idea that love is a wicked thing in itself, and only allowable because it produces children. So they say, reluctantly, “Well, you may love, if you’ll take a frightful oath that you’ll only do it with one person as a sort of religious ceremony, and with the sole idea of bringing a child into the world.’ That’s why they always——’
‘Who’s “they”, darling?’
‘They?’ Reginald laughed. ‘I don’t know who They is exactly, but he’s the fellow who runs most things in this world. I never liked They.’ He thought for a moment and said, ‘If you can imagine a policeman in holy orders, with the blood-lust of a tribal god, and the appearance and manner of an Oxford don rather high up in the Civil Service—no, I never liked him.’
Sylvia said, holding on to his arm, ‘Do you think it’s wrong, loving and not having children?’
Reginald looked at her in astonishment.
‘Sweetheart! How could——’ He was silent, his hand on hers, and then said gently, ‘What made you—suddenly——’
‘I was so happy, darling. I wondered if you were.’
‘You know I am.’
‘Would it make you happier if you had a child?’
‘If one bought them at the Stores, perhaps I might ask you some day if you’d like a nice one. Because if so——’
‘A very small one, just like you, darling, might be rather lovely.’
‘They are very small at the start, I believe,’ said Reginald, smiling at her.
Sylvia gave him her smile in reply, and then said, almost in apology, ‘I expect you can’t be a wife and a mother. I expect after I’ve been a wife, there isn’t much left of me, darling. I do love you so dreadfully.’
‘My lovely one, I’m more than content.’
‘But if——’
‘Sweetheart, I’m utterly happy with you. I can’t bear to think of your being frightened and ill and so terribly hurt. I should be terrified.�
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‘I am frightened, but I don’t think I ought to be. That’s why I’ve been wondering if you’d like it.’
‘No, no, no!’
‘But if it ever did happen, you’d forgive me, darling?’
‘Oh, my sweetheart!’ cried Reginald, in sudden shame of himself, of his sex, of all that women have suffered from men.
Sylvia nodded to herself and said: ‘I just wanted to know.’
IV
Sylvia had gone into the kitchen to tell Mrs. Hosken all about London. Probably Mrs. Hosken was hoping to tell Mrs. Wellard all about the country; which meant now all about the Baxters. Not only every Tom, Dick and Harry, but every Harriet was talking of it. It’s odd, thought Reginald, walking amongst his azaleas (full of bud, this was going to be their best year)—it’s odd that I should be revolted at the idea of discussing the Baxters with Edwards, and that Sylvia should think it quite natural to discuss them with Mrs. Hosken. Why was there this strange freemasonry among women? The Colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady. A sort of defensive alliance, I suppose, against the masterfulness of men, heritage of the days when women were really slaves. If Woman lacks that sense of honour, of good form, of sportsmanship, on which Man so prides himself, it is because subconsciously she is always at war, and in war there are no such things as honour, good form, and sportsmanship. All is fair in love and war, says Man, and then blames Woman for living up to it.
This silly generalization about Man and Woman! And yet not so silly. Silly to say that if you toss a penny six times, you will get three heads and three tails, but true to say that the more you toss it, the more you notice a tendency toward that distribution.
His eye was suddenly caught by the ceanothus (gloire de Versailles) whose barren stalks, as usual, showed no sign of the blue loveliness to come. He wondered again if it justified its preservation. Nature oughtn’t to do this sort of thing. A tree in winter showed a different beauty; a delphinium in winter at least showed nothing; it simply wasn’t there, until its first delicate pale green excited your imagination; but this was an offence to the eye until it became a pleasure, and one ought to weigh the one against the other before deciding. Damn! There was that bindweed again . . .
