The Sunny Side

by A. A. Milne

  “I promise,” I said readily. That gave me about sixty years to do something in.

  “I’m like—who was it who saw something of another man’s and wouldn’t be happy till he got it?”

  “The baby in the soap advertisement.”

  “No, no, some king in history.”

  “I believe you are thinking of Ahab, but you aren’t a bit like him, really. Besides, we’re not coveting Stopes. All we want to know is, does Barlow ever let it in the summer?”

  “That’s it,” said Celia eagerly.

  “And, if so,” I went on, “will he lend us the money to pay the rent with?”

  “Er—yes,” said Celia. “That’s it.”

  So for a month we have lived in our Castle of Stopes. I see Celia there in her pink sun-bonnet, gathering the flowers lovingly, bringing an armful of them into the hall, disturbing me sometimes in the library with “Aren’t they beauties? No, I only just looked in—good luck to you.” And she sees me ordering a man about importantly, or waving my hand to her as I ride through the old barn on my road to the golf course.

  But this morning she had an idea.

  “Suppose,” she said timidly, “you wrote about Stopes, and Mr. Barlow happened to see it, and knew how much we wanted it, and—”

  “Well!”

  “Then,” said Celia firmly, “if he were a gentleman he would give it to us.”

  Very well. Now we shall see if Mr. Barlow is a gentleman.

  The Sands of Pleasure

  Ladies first, so we will start with Jenny. Jenny is only nine, but she has been to the seaside before and knows all about it. She wears the fashionable costume de plage, which consists of a white linen hat, a jersey and an overcrowded pair of bathing-drawers, into which not only Jenny, but the rest of her wardrobe, has had to fit itself. Two slim brown legs emerge to bear the burden, and one feels that if she fell over she would have to stay there until somebody picked her up.

  She is holding Richard Henry by the hand. Richard Henry is four, and this is the first time he has seen the sea. Jenny is showing it to him. Privately he thinks that it has been over-rated. There was a good deal of talk about it in his suburb (particularly from Jenny, who had been there before) and naturally one expected something rather—well, rather more like what they had been saying it was like. However, perhaps it would be as well to keep in with Jenny and not to let her see that he is disappointed, so every time she says, “Isn’t the sea lovely?” he echoes, “Lovely,” and now and then he adds (just to humour her), “Is ‘at the sea?” and then she has the chance to say again, “Yes, that’s the sea, darling. Isn’t it lovely?” It is obvious that she is proud of it. Apparently she put it there. Anyway, it seems to be hers now.

  Jenny has brought Father and Mother as well as Richard Henry. There they are, over there. When she came before she had to leave them behind, much to their disappointment. Father was saying, “Form fours, left,” before going off to France again, and Mother was buying wool to make him some more socks. It was a great relief to them to know that they were being taken this time, and that they would have Jenny to tell them all about it.

  Father is lying in a deck-chair, smoking his pipe. There has been an interesting discussion this afternoon as to whether he is a coward or not. Father thought he wasn’t, but Mother wasn’t quite so sure. Jenny said that of course he couldn’t really be, because the King gave him a medal for not being one, but Mother explained that it was only a medal he had over, and Father happened to be passing by the window.

  “I don’t see what this has to do with it,” said Father. “I simply prefer bathing in the morning.”

  “Oo, you said this morning you preferred bathing in the afternoon,” says Jenny like a flash.

  “I know; but since then I’ve had time to think it over, and I see that I was hasty. The morning is the best time.”

  “I’m afraid he is a coward,” said Mother sadly, wondering why she had married him.

  “The whole point is, why did Jenny bring me here?”

  “To enjoy yourself,” said Jenny promptly.

  “Well, I am,” said Father, closing his eyes.

  But we do not feel so sure that Mother is enjoying herself. She has just read in the paper about a mine that floated ashore and exploded. Nobody was near at the time, but supposing one of the children had been playing with it.

  “Which one?” said Father lazily.

  “Jenny.”

  “Then we should have lost Jenny.”

  This being so, Jenny promises solemnly not to play with any mine that comes ashore, nor to let Richard Henry play with it, nor to allow it to play with Richard Henry, nor—

  “I suppose I may just point it out to him and say, ‘Look, that’s a mine’?” says Jenny wistfully. If she can’t do this, it doesn’t seem to be much use coming to the seaside at all.

  “I don’t think there would be any harm in that,” says Father. “But don’t engage it in conversation.”

  “Thank you very much,” says Jenny, and she and Richard Henry go off together.

  Mother watches them anxiously. Father closes his eyes.

  “Now,” says Jenny eagerly, “I’m going to show you a darling little crab. Won’t that be lovely?”

  Richard Henry, having been deceived, as he feels, about the sea, is not too hopeful about that crab. However, he asks politely, “What’s a crab?”

  “You’ll see directly, darling,” says Jenny; and he has to be content with that.

  “Crab,” he murmurs to himself.

  Suddenly an idea occurs to him. He lets go of Jenny’s hand and trots up to an old gentleman with white whiskers.

  “Going to see a crab,” he announces.

  “Going to see a crab, are you, my little man?” says the old gentleman kindly.

  “Going to see a crab,” says Richard Henry, determined to keep up his end of the conversation.

  “Well, I never! So you’re going to see a crab!” says the old gentleman, doing his best with it.

  Richard Henry nods two or three times. “Going to see a crab,” he says firmly.

  Luckily Jenny comes up and rescues him, otherwise they would still be at it. “Come along, darling, and see the crab,” she says, picking up his hand; and Richard Henry looks triumphantly at the old gentleman. There you are. Perhaps he will believe a fellow another time.

  Jenny has evidently made an arrangement with a particular crab for this afternoon. It is to be hoped that the appointment will be kept, for she has hurried Richard Henry past all sorts of wonderful things which he wanted to stop with for a little. But the thought of this lovely crab, which Jenny thinks so much of, forbids protest. Quite right not to keep it waiting. What will it be like? Will it be bigger than the sea?

  We have reached the rendezvous. We see now that we need not have been in such a hurry.

  “There!” says Jenny excitedly. “Isn’t he a darling little crab? He’s asleep.” (That’s why we need not have hurried.)

  Richard Henry says nothing. He can’t think of the words for what he is feeling. What he wants to say is that Jenny has let him down again. They passed a lot of these funny little things on their way here, but Jenny wouldn’t stop because she was going to show him a Crab, a great, big, enormous darling little Crab—which might have been anything—and now it’s only just this. No wonder the old gentleman didn’t believe him.

  Swindled—that’s the word he wants. However, he can’t think of it for the moment, so he tries something else.

  “Darling little crab,” he says.

  They leave the dead crab there and hurry back.

  “What shall I show you now?” says Jenny.

  The Problem of Life

  The noise of the retreating sea came pleasantly to us from a distance. Celia was lying on her—I never know how to put this nicely—well, she was lying face downwards on a rock and gazing into a little pool which the tide had forgotten about and left behind. I sat beside her and annoyed a limpet. Three minutes ago I had tak
en it suddenly by surprise and with an Herculean effort moved it an eighteenth of a millimetre westwards. My silence since then was lulling it into a false security, and in another two minutes I hoped to get a move on it again.

  “Do you know,” said Celia with a puzzled look on her face, “sometimes I think I’m quite an ordinary person after all.”

  “You aren’t a little bit,” I said lazily; “you’re just like nobody else in the world.”

  “Well, of course, you had to say that.”

  “No, I hadn’t. Lots of husbands would merely have yawned.” I felt one coming and stopped it just in time. Waiting for limpets to go to sleep is drowsy work. “But why are you so morbid about yourself suddenly?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Only every now and then I find myself thinking the most obvious thoughts.”

  “We all do,” I answered, as I stroked my limpet gently. The noise of our conversation had roused it, but a gentle stroking motion (I am told by those to whom it has confided) will frequently cause its muscles to relax. “The great thing is not to speak them. Still, you’d better tell me now. What is it?”

  “Well,” she said, her cheeks perhaps a little pinker than usual, “I was just thinking that life was very wonderful. But it’s a silly thing to say.”

  “It’s holiday time,” I reminded her. “The need for sprinkling our remarks with thoughtful words like ‘economic’ and ‘sporadic’ is over for a bit. Let us be silly.” I scratched in the rock the goal to which I was urging my limpet and took out my watch. “Three thirty-five. I shall get him there by four.”

  Celia was gazing at two baby fishes who played in and out a bunch of sea-weed. Above the seaweed an anemone sat fatly.

  “I suppose they’re all just as much alive as we are,” she said thoughtfully. “They marry”—I looked at my limpet with a new interest—“and bring up families and go about their business, and it all means just as much to them as it does to us.”

  “My limpet’s business affairs mean nothing to me,” I said firmly. “I am only wrapped up in him as a sprinter.”

  “Aren’t you going to try to move him again?”

  “He’s not quite ready yet. He still has his suspicions.”

  Celia dropped into silence. Her next question showed that she had left the pool for a moment.

  “Are there any people in Mars?” she asked.

  “People down here say that there aren’t. A man told me the other day that he knew this for a fact. On the other hand, people in Mars know for a fact that there isn’t anybody on the Earth. Probably they are both wrong.”

  “I should like to know a lot about things,” sighed Celia. “Do you know anything about limpets?”

  “Only that they stick like billy-o.”

  “I suppose more about them is known than that?”

  “I suppose so. By people who have made a specialty of them. For one who has preferred to amass general knowledge rather than to specialize, it is considered enough to know that they stick like billy-o.”

  “You haven’t specialized in anything, have you?”

  “Only in wives.”

  Celia smiled and went on. “How do you make a specialty of limpets?”

  “Well, I suppose you—er—study them. You sit down and—and watch them. Probably after dark they get up and do something. And of course, in any case, you can always dissect one and see what he’s had for breakfast. One way and another you get to know things about them.”

  “They must have a lot of time for thinking,” said Celia, regarding my limpet with her head on one side. “Tell me, how do they know that there are no men in Mars?”

  I sat up with a sigh.

  “Celia, you do dodge about so. I have barely brought together and classified my array of facts about things in this world, when you’ve dashed up to another one. What is the connexion between Mars and limpets? If there are any limpets in Mars they are freshwater ones. In the canals.”

  “Oh, I just wondered,” she said. “I mean”—she wrinkled her forehead in the effort to find words for her thoughts—“I’m wondering what everything means, and why we’re all here, and what limpets are for, and, supposing there are people in Mars, if we’re the real people whom the world was made for, or if they are.” She stopped and added, “One evening after dinner, when we get home, you must tell me all about everything”

  Celia has a beautiful idea that I can explain everything to her. I suppose I must have explained a stymie or a no-ball very cleverly once.

  “Well,” I said, “I can tell you what limpets are for now. They’re like sheep and cows and horses and pheasants and—and any other animal. They’re just for us. At least so the wise people say.”

  “But we don’t eat limpets.”

  “No, but they can amuse us. This one”—and with a sudden leap I was behind him as he dozed, and I had dashed him forward another eighteenth of a millimetre—“this one has amused me.”

  “Perhaps,” said Celia thoughtfully, and I don’t think it was quite a nice thing for a young woman to say, “perhaps we’re only meant to amuse the people in Mars.”

  “Then,” I said lazily, “let’s hope that they are amused.”

  Ten days later the Great War began. Celia said no more on the subject, but she used to look at me curiously sometimes, and I fear that the problem of life left her more puzzled than ever. At the risk of betraying myself to her as “quite an ordinary person after all” I confess that there are times when it leaves me puzzled too.

  War-Time

  Armageddon

  The conversation had turned, as it always does in the smoking-rooms of golf clubs, to the state of poor old England, and Porkins had summed the matter up. He had marched round in ninety-seven that morning, followed by a small child with an umbrella and an arsenal of weapons, and he felt in form with himself.

  “What England wants,” he said, leaning back and puffing at his cigar,—“what England wants is a war. (Another whisky and soda, waiter.) We’re getting flabby. All this pampering of the poor is playing the very deuce with the country. A bit of a scrap with a foreign power would do us all the good in the world.” He disposed of his whisky at a draught. “We’re flabby,” he repeated. “The lower classes seem to have no sense of discipline nowadays. We want a war to brace us up.”

  It is well understood in Olympus that Porkins must not be disappointed. What will happen to him in the next world I do not know, but it will be something extremely humorous; in this world, however, he is to have all that he wants. Accordingly the gods got to work.

  In the little village of Ospovat, which is in the southeastern corner of Ruritania, there lived a maiden called Maria Strultz, who was engaged to marry Captain Tomsk.

  (“I fancy,” said one of the gods, “that it might be rather funny if Maria jilted the Captain. I have an idea that it would please Porkins.”

  “Whatever has Maria—” began a very young god, but he was immediately suppressed.

  “Really,” said the other, “I should have thought it was sufficiently obvious. You know what these mortals are.” He looked round to them all.

  “Is it agreed then?”

  It was agreed.)

  So Maria Strultz jilted the Captain.

  Now this, as you may imagine, annoyed Captain Tomsk. He commanded a frontier fort on the boundary between Ruritania and Essenland, and his chief amusement in a dull life was to play cards with the Essenland captain, who commanded the fort on the other side of the river. When Maria’s letter came, he felt that the only thing to do was to drown himself; on second thoughts he decided to drown his sorrows first. He did this so successfully that at the end of the evening he was convinced that it was not Maria who had jilted him, but the Essenland captain who had jilted Maria; whereupon he rowed across the river and poured his revolver into the Essenland flag which was flying over the fort. Maria thus revenged, he went home to bed, and woke next morning with a bad headache.

  (“Now we’re off,” said the gods in Olympus.)


  In Diedeldorf, the capital of Essenland, the leader-writers proceeded to remove their coats.

  “The blood of every true Essenlander,” said the leader-writer of the “Diedeldorf Patriot”, after sending out for another pot of beer, “will boil when it hears of this fresh insult to our beloved flag, an insult which can only be wiped out with blood.” Then seeing that he had two “bloods” in one sentence, he crossed the second one out, substituted “the sword,” and lit a fresh cigarette. “For years Essenland has writhed under the provocations of Ruritania, but has preserved a dignified silence; this last insult is more than flesh and blood can stand.” Another “blood” had got in, but it was a new sentence and he thought it might be allowed to remain. “We shall not be accused of exaggeration if we say that Essenland would lose, and rightly lose, her prestige in the eyes of Europe if she let this affront pass unnoticed. In a day she would sink from a first-rate to a fifth-rate power.” But he didn’t say how.

  The Chancellor of Essenland, in a speech gravely applauded by both sides of the House, announced the steps he had taken. An ultimatum had been sent to Ruritania demanding an apology, an indemnity of a hundred thousand marks, and the public degradation of Captain Tomsk, whose epaulettes were to be torn off by the Commander-in-Chief of the Essenland Army in the presence of a full corps of cinematograph artists. Failing this, war would be declared.

  Ruritania offered the apology, the indemnity, and the public degradation of Captain Tomsk, but urged that this last ceremony would be better performed by the Commander-in-Chief of the Ruritanian Army; otherwise Ruritania might as well cease to be a sovereign state, for she would lose her prestige in the eyes of Europe, and sink to the level of a fifth-rate power.

  There was only one possible reply to this, and Essenland made it. She invaded Ruritania.

  (“Aren’t they wonderful?” said the gods in Olympus to each other.

  “But haven’t you made a mistake?” asked the very young god. “Porkins lives in England, not Essenland.”