Happy Half-Hours

by A. A. Milne

– In London –

  I was very fond of London; so fond of it, in fact, that I liked it for what it was and not for what it might have been. When I was a boy, or perhaps a little earlier, whiskered young men called Edwin used to assure bashful young women called Angelina that they were the most divine and peerless angels in the world, without fault or blemish; and if Angelina suggested modestly from beneath drooping eyelashes that sometimes she feared that her temper was a little short (or her nose a little long), Edwin would protest passionately that indeed no, his darling was utterly, utterly perfect. This is one sort of love. Cowper, less deeply enamoured, was inspired to say, ‘England, with all thy faults I love thee still’, which was very handsome of him, though it was no way to talk to a lady. However, no doubt he felt like that even about Mrs Unwin. But the true lover neither maintains that the loved one is faultless, nor feels the need to explain that he loves her in spite of her faults. He recognizes the faults as themselves objects of affection. With a more beautiful nose Angelina would not be Angelina. It is her absurd nose which makes her so much more lovable than Cleopatra. And that is just how I have always felt about London.

  The test question for the lover of London is to be found on the Surrey side of the river. Before there was any talk of Festivals, did you want to improve the Surrey side or didn’t you? If all those old wharves and warehouses were pulled down – or, in the case of the wharves, pulled up – if all the wharves and warehouses were destroyed, and a nice new Embankment were built like the nice fairly new Embankment on the north side of the river, then we should have an Embankment on each side of the Thames in London, just as they have an Embankment on each side of the Seine in Paris. Wouldn’t that be nice?

  For myself I cannot understand the passion for making things, places, people like something or somebody else. The only lasting virtue is individuality. The charm of London to a lover of London is that it is not in the least like Paris; just as the charm of Paris to a Parisian is that it is not in the least like London. It is true that of this and that we may say that they order these things better in France, but let us go to France and watch them doing it … and then come back to London. Don’t ask me to tell you why I love the King’s Road (there is only one King’s Road: down which Charles II travelled to call upon his Nell in Chelsea); travel down it yourself from Eaton Square to World’s End, and tell yourself that of all the unlovely roads … well, but think how many mothers love unlovely sons, and wouldn’t change them for the most beautiful film star. Silly, but that is how we get to feel.

  I am afraid that I have been carried away, as I always am when I think of the vandals who would improve London into something which was not London, and spoil my river for me. For the London which I meant to write about was not a collection of bricks and stone, nor a smudge on an atlas, but a state of being. A man who confessed that he was living in Sin might give the impression that he was some sort of an Anglo-Indian, just as a woman living in Holy Wedlock could be visualized as tucked away in Shropshire. It sounds much the same whether you live in Luxor or Luxury, and a Yorkshireman could undoubtedly live in something like Idleness. Living in London has an equally deceptive sound at first hearing. ‘So that’s where he lives,’ you say to yourself, when you should be saying ‘So that’s how he lives.’

  The charm of London which remains, however often other people have written about it, is that one can live there as an individual and not as one of a community. I suppose that one is born with or without the communal feeling, and that to be born without it is to be uncivic, unpatriotic, selfish, and totally unworthy to be (as I rather think I am) Vice-President of the local Horticultural Society. Am I uncivic? Very well, then, I am uncivic. I can love a place without loving all the people in it; I can be proud of what its heroes have done without wanting to kiss them. (As they do in France, by the way.) For nothing can make me want to know people, just because they are handy. If I do meet them, I am as capable of liking them as anybody else, but I don’t go about thinking, ‘Oh, if only I could meet somebody!’ as people with the communal sense seem to do. I prefer to choose my friends because I like them, not because they are neighbours; and if this means often enough that they don’t choose me because they don’t like me, well, how right they are.

  In all the years when I lived in a flat I never knew the man below. It is true that I continually corresponded with him in (on my part) dignified and courtly phrases, beginning ‘Dear Sir’ and ending ‘Yours faithfully’, and explaining in between just why my bath-water came through his ceiling – a simple mathematical explanation, invoking the Law of Archimedes and the Law of Gravity, which I need not bother you with now. But I never spoke to him; and if I did meet him on the stairs or in the street, it was not to recognize him as the gentleman who was getting his head wet. In all the years during which I lived in a London house I never knew my neighbours on either side. On one occasion, in the household’s absence, a burglar visited us and withdrew with a bagful of loot. One of our neighbours, suspecting after ten years’ proximity that this was not the lawful owner coming out, followed behind in some vague hope of giving evidence if a policeman intervened, or of picking up the bag if it were accidentally dropped. Whatever his intentions, he gave me written information of the burglary (which, indeed, had already proclaimed itself), and of the fact that he had so nearly arrested the intruder. Naturally I wrote and thanked him. But I still didn’t know what he looked like.

  Well, that was my London. I liked the look of it and the feel of it and the blessed independence of it. I also liked much of the entertainment which it offered. And since I would rather read the news than have it read aloud to me, I liked being able to go round the corner for a Late Night Final. I didn’t know the paper-man’s name, nor he mine, but we smiled at each other in a friendly way. I liked that too. I like to be free to smile at the person who serves me, without struggling to remember whether the baby is a boy or a girl, whether lettuces or rheumatism should be the object of my congratulation or concern. In short, I am damnably uncivic.

  – The Painter –

  Mr Paul Samways was in a mood of deep depression. The artistic temperament is peculiarly subject to these moods, but in Paul’s case there was reason why he should take a gloomy view of things. His masterpiece, ‘The Shot Tower from Battersea Bridge’, together with the companion picture, ‘Battersea Bridge from the Shot Tower’, had been purchased by a dealer for seventeen and sixpence. His sepia monochrome, ‘Night,’ had brought him an IOU for five shillings. These were his sole earnings for the last six weeks, and starvation stared him in the face.

  ‘If only I had a little capital!’ he cried aloud in despair, ‘Enough to support me until my Academy picture is finished.’ His Academy picture was a masterly study entitled, ‘Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll,’ and he had been compelled to stop halfway across the Channel through sheer lack of ultramarine.

  The clock struck two, reminding him that he had not lunched. He rose wearily and went to the little cupboard which served as a larder. There was but little there to make a satisfying meal – half a loaf of bread, a corner of cheese, and a small tube of Chinese-white. Mechanically he set the things out …

  He had finished, and was clearing away, when there came a knock at the door. His charwoman, whose duty it was to clean his brushes every week, came in with a card.

  ‘A lady to see you, sir,’ she said.

  Paul read the card in astonishment.

  ‘The Duchess of Winchester,’ he exclaimed. ‘What on earth. Show her in, please.’ Hastily picking up a brush and the first tube which came to hand, he placed himself in a dramatic position before his easel and set to work.

  ‘How do you do, Mr Samways?’ said the Duchess.

  ‘G – good afternoon,’ said Paul, embarrassed both by the presence of a duchess in his studio and by his sudden discovery that he was touching up a sunset with a tube of carbolic tooth-paste.

  ‘Our mutual friend, Lord Ernest Topwood, recommended me to come to you.
’

  Paul, who had never met Lord Ernest, but had once seen his name in a ha’penny paper beneath a photograph of Mr Arnold Bennett, bowed silently.

  ‘As you probably guess, I want you to paint my daughter’s portrait.’

  Paul opened his mouth to say that he was only a landscape painter, and then closed it again. After all, it was hardly fair to bother her Grace with technicalities.

  ‘I hope you can undertake this commission,’ she said, pleadingly.

  ‘I shall be delighted,’ said Paul. ‘I am rather busy just now, but I could begin at two o’clock on Monday.’ ‘Excellent!’ said the Duchess. ‘Till Monday, then.’ And Paul, still clutching the toothpaste, conducted her to her carriage.

  Punctually at three-fifteen on Monday Lady Hermione appeared. Paul drew a deep breath of astonishment when he saw her, for she was lovely beyond compare. All his skill as a landscape painter would be needed if he were to do justice to her beauty. As quickly as possible he placed her in position and set to work.

  ‘May I let my face go for a moment?’ said Lady Hermione after three hours of it.

  ‘Yes, let us stop,’ said Paul. He had outlined her in charcoal and burnt cork, and it would be too dark to do any more that evening.

  ‘Tell me where you first met Lord Ernest?’ she asked as she came down to the fire.

  ‘At the Savoy, in June,’ said Paul boldly.

  Lady Hermione laughed merrily. Paul, who had not regarded his last remark as one of his best things, looked at her in surprise.

  ‘But your portrait of him was in the Academy in May!’ she smiled.

  Paul made up his mind quickly.

  ‘Lady Hermione,’ he said with gravity, ‘do not speak to me of Lord Ernest again. ‘Nor’, he added hurriedly, ‘to Lord Ernest of me. When your picture is finished I will tell you why. Now it is time you went.’ He woke the Duchess up, and made a few commonplace remarks about the weather. ‘Remember,’ he whispered to Lady Hermione as he saw them to their car. She nodded and smiled.

  The sittings went on daily. Sometimes Paul would paint rapidly with great sweeps of the brush; sometimes he would spend an hour trying to get on his palette the exact shade of green bice for the famous Winchester emeralds, sometimes in despair he would take a sponge and wipe the whole picture out, and then start madly again. And sometimes he would stop work altogether and tell Lady Hermione about his home-life in Worcestershire. But always, when he woke the Duchess up at the end of the sitting, he would say, ‘Remember!’ and Lady Hermione would nod back at him.

  It was a spring-like day in March when the picture was finished, and nothing remained to do but to paint in the signature.

  ‘It is beautiful!’ said Lady Hermione with enthusiasm, ‘Beautiful! Is it at all like me?’

  Paul looked from her to the picture, and back to her again.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘not a bit. You know, I am really a landscape painter.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she cried. ‘You are Peter Samways, A.R.A., the famous portrait painter!’

  ‘No,’ he said sadly. ‘That was my secret. I am Paul Samways. A member of the Amateur Rowing Association, it is true, but only an unknown landscape painter. Peter Samways lives in the next studio, and he is not even a relation.’

  ‘Then you have deceived me! You have brought me here under false pretences!’ She stamped her foot angrily, ‘My father will not buy that picture, and I forbid you to exhibit it as a portrait of myself.’

  ‘My dear Lady Hermione,’ said Paul, ‘you need not be alarmed. I propose to exhibit the picture as “When the Heart is Young”. Nobody will recognize a likeness to you in it. And if the Duke does not buy it, I have no doubt that some other purchaser will come along.’

  Lady Hermione looked at him thoughtfully. ‘Why did you do it?’ she asked gently.

  ‘Because I fell in love with you.’

  She dropped her eyes, and then raised them gaily to his. ‘Mother is still asleep,’ she whispered.

  ‘Hermione!’ he cried, dropping his palette and putting his brush behind his ear.

  She held out her arms to him.

  As everybody remembers, ‘When the Heart is Young,’ by Paul Samways, was the feature of the Exhibition. It was bought for £10,000 by a retired bottle manufacturer, whom it reminded a little of his late mother. Paul woke to find himself famous. But the success which began for him from this day did not spoil his simple and generous nature. He never forgot his brother artists, whose feet were not yet on the top of the ladder. Indeed, one of his first acts after he was married was to give a commission to Peter Samways, A.R.A. – nothing less than the painting of his wife’s portrait. And Lady Hermione was delighted with the result.

  – The Younger Son –

  It is a hard thing to be the younger son of an ancient but impoverished family. The fact that your brother Thomas is taking most of the dibs restricts your inheritance to a paltry two thousand a year, while pride of blood forbids you to supplement this by following any of the common professions. Impossible for a St Verax to be a doctor, a policeman, or an architect. He must find some nobler means of existence.

  For three years Roger St Verax had lived precariously by betting. To be a St Verax was always to be a sportsman. Roger’s father had created a record in the sporting world by winning the Derby and the Waterloo Cup with the same animal – though, in each case, it narrowly escaped disqualification. Roger himself almost created another record by making betting pay. His book, showing how to do it, was actually in the press when disaster overtook him.

  He began by dropping (in sporting parlance) a cool thousand on the Jack Joel Selling Plate at Newmarket. On the next race he dropped a cool five hundred, and later on in the afternoon a cool seventy-five pounds ten. The following day found him at Lingfield, where he dropped a cool monkey (to persevere with the language of the racing stable) on the Solly Joel Cup, picked it up on the next race, dropped a cool pony, dropped another cool monkey, dropped a cool wallaby, picked up a cool hippopotamus, and finally, in the last race of the day, dropped a couple of lukewarm ferrets. In short, he was (as they say at Tattersall’s Corner) entirely cleaned out.

  When a younger son is cleaned out there is only one thing for him to do. Roger St Verax knew instinctively what it was. He bought a new silk hat and a short black coat, and went into the City.

  What a wonderful place, dear reader, is the City! You, madam, who read this in your daintily upholstered boudoir, can know but little of the great heart of the City, even though you have driven through its arteries on your way to Liverpool Street Station, and have noted the bare and smoothly brushed polls of the younger natives. You, sir, in your country vicarage, are no less innocent, even though on sultry afternoons you have covered your head with the Financial Supplement of The Times in mistake for the Literary Supplement, and have thus had thrust upon you the stirring news that Bango-Bangos were going up. And I, dear friends, am equally ignorant of the secrets of the Stock Exchange. I know that its members frequently walk to Brighton, and still more frequently stay there; that while finding a home for all the good stories which have been going the rounds for years, they sometimes invent entirely new ones for themselves about the Chancellor of the Exchequer; and that they sing the National anthem very sternly in unison when occasion demands it. But there must be something more in it than this, or why are Bango-Bangos still going up?

  I don’t know. And I am sorry to say that even Roger St Verax, a Director of the Bango-Bango Development Company, is not very clear about it all.

  It was as a Director of the Bango-Bango Exploration Company that he took up his life in the City. As its name implies, the Company was originally formed to explore Bango-Bango, an impenetrable district in North Australia; but when it came to the point it was found much more profitable to explore Hampstead, Clapham Common, Blackheath, Ealing, and other rich and fashionable suburbs, A number of hopeful ladies and gentlemen having been located in these parts, the Company went ahead rapidly, and in 1907 a ne
w prospector was sent out to replace the one who was assumed to have been eaten.

  In 1908 Roger first heard the magic word ‘reconstruction’, and to his surprise found himself in possession of twenty thousand pounds and a Directorship of the new Bango-Bango Mining Company.

  In 1909 a piece of real gold was identified, and the shares went up like a rocket.

  In 1910 the Stock Exchange suddenly woke to the fact that rubber tyres were made of rubber, and in a moment the Great Boom was sprung upon an amazed City. The Bango-Bango Development Company was immediately formed to take over the Bango-Bango Mining Company (together with its prospector, if alive, its plants, shafts and other property, not forgetting the piece of gold), and more particularly to develop the vegetable resources of the district with a view to planting rubber trees in the immediate future. A neatly compiled prospectus put matters very clearly before the stay-at-home Englishman. It explained quite concisely that, supposing the trees were planted so many feet apart throughout the whole property of five thousand square miles, and allowing a certain period for the growth of a tree to maturity, and putting the average yield of rubber per tree at, in round figures, so much, and assuming for the sake of convenience that rubber would remain at its present price, and estimating the cost of working the plantation at say, roughly, £100,000, why, then it was obvious that the profits would be anything you liked up to two billion a year – while (this was important) more land could doubtless be acquired if the shareholders thought fit. And even if you were certain that a rubber tree couldn’t possibly grow in the Bango-Bango district (as in confidence it couldn’t), still it was worth taking shares purely as an investment, seeing how rapidly rubber was going up; not to mention the fact that Roger St Verax, the well-known financier, was a Director … and so on.

  In short, the Bango-Bango Development Company was, in the language of the City, a safe thing.