by A. A. Milne
‘Not at the supper. I have seen her since. Lady Ormsby brought her to tea.’
‘Oh?’ Again he felt a little surprised and a little hurt. ‘I didn’t——’ He broke off and said casually, ‘She’s a dear, isn’t she?’
‘She’s a lovely person.’
‘I met her quite by accident in Piccadilly the other day, and—— Oh, thanks.’ The oysters were put before Madame, before Monsieur. ‘Well, she didn’t seem—— Thanks, thanks.’ Brown bread and butter, lemon, etceteras.
‘What will Monsieur have to follow?’
‘Oh, curse this,’ murmured Reginald. ‘Darling, what will you have?’
‘I don’t want much,’ said Sylvia, looking vaguely at the menu.
‘Have a kidney omelette and fried potatoes and a Japanese salad?’ said Reginald in one brilliant inspiration.
‘All right, darling.’
‘Two, then,’ said Reginald to the waiter, and, turning to Sylvia and his story, saw Filby Nixon coming in, as beautifully as any hero of his plays.
‘Well, she was—— I say, there’s Nixon. I must just introduce him to you.’
Nixon caught his eye and came up to them.
‘Sylvia, this is Mr. Filby Nixon. My wife.’
They shook hands with a smile.
‘We have met,’ said Nixon, ‘though perhaps Mrs. Wellard doesn’t remember. At Lady Edgemoor’s at lunch the other day.’
‘Good Heavens,’ thought Reginald.
‘Of course I remember,’ said Sylvia. ‘I told you, darling, didn’t I, and how well the play was going on?’
‘Of course,’ said Reginald. What has happened to us, he thought. I suppose I was thinking of something else again. Or reading the paper at breakfast. ‘I say, sit down a moment, can you, and tell us some more about the play.’
‘I’m waiting for Ethel. I’ll just sit down till she comes if I may. She’s always late. I expect you’ve found that.’
‘Is that Ethel Prentice?’ asked Sylvia. Damn it, thought Reginald, that’s the actress. If you know her too, if you know everybody, and I’m just the country cousin who knows nobody, I shall scream.
It turned out that Sylvia only knew her by name.
‘I’ll introduce her if I may. As a matter of fact, she’s rather keen about playing Sally.’
If she’s to play Sally, thought Reginald, she must be as lovely as Sylvia, for Sylvia was Sally. Well, in parts. Only Sally was—well, of course she had a sense of humour. Well, I mean——
‘You see everybody here,’ Nixon apologized, making his fourth bow since he had sat down. By everybody he meant everybody in the theatrical world, his world.
‘Who was that?’ asked Sylvia. ‘I know his face so well.’
‘Willie? The tall, thin one? Willie Evans. The writer.’
‘Oh! No, then I don’t know him.’
‘You mean it wasn’t his face, darling.’
‘Well, it’s awfully like somebody. An actor or somebody.’
‘It’s a bit late for the actors,’ explained Nixon. ‘Unless they’re out of a job, or rehearsing.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Ten past eight. We’re getting near Ethel’s idea of eight.’
‘Isn’t Miss Prentice acting now?’ asked Sylvia.
‘Luckily, no. That’s why she wants Bindweed.’
‘Has she ever acted with Cassells before?’ asked Reginald. ‘They’d make a very popular pair, I should think.’
‘Well, as a matter of fact,’ said Nixon, ‘Wilmer—I saw him last night as it happens. He’s terribly sick about it, but he’s under contract to do that French play. We could wait, of course, till he got through with that, but I thought—— You know, I’m not really certain that he’s the right man. And as Ethel—ah, here she is.’ He got up and went to the door. Sylvia gave Reginald the briefest possible glance of excited anticipation, and touched his foot lovingly with hers under the table.
Reginald got up. Introductions were made. The men hovered uncertainly. Miss Prentice, well up-stage, stayed there firmly while delivering her lines. She adored Bindweed. Aren’t you very proud of him, Mrs. Wellard? ‘Very proud. Are you really going to play Sally?’ Ah, well! Of course she’d adore to, but she might have to go to America. And there was a film she’d been asked to do. How d’you do, how d’you do, how d’you do, how d’you do—smiles to four tables. But she would have adored to. Phil darling, we mustn’t be late—how d’you do—and we’re keeping Mr. and Mrs. Wellard from their oysters. Don’t you adore oysters? Good-bye, Mrs. Wellard. Good-bye, so delightful to meet you, it will make a divine play. Another radiant smile, snapped off the moment her face began to turn away, and she was gone. Nixon bowed his farewells with an added courtesy, as if to apologize for her, or perhaps for stage-folk generally, in that their excess of charm shows up so plainly all that it seeks to hide.
‘I didn’t know you knew Nixon,’ said Reginald, still a little resentfully, as he sat down.
‘Yes, darling. He was at lunch at Lady Edgemoor’s.’
‘Yes, but I didn’t even know——’
‘I did tell you, darling, but you were reading The Times.’
‘When was that?’
‘Last Thursday was the lunch, but I said at breakfast——’
‘Thursday. Oh, then that was after.’
‘After what, darling? Was that what you were going to tell me?’
‘Yes. You see, I happened to meet her in Piccadilly just as I was——’
‘She told me she’d had tea with you.’
Reginald felt ashamed suddenly.
‘Sweetheart, I meant to tell you. I’m awfully sorry. Say you didn’t mind.’
‘It’s all right, darling. There doesn’t seem to be so much time for telling in London, does there? And I love to think of her having tea with you. She’s sweet, I think.’
‘Did she tell you what we did?’
‘No. Except about tea.’
Reginald made his confession.
‘You do see how it happened, don’t you?’ he urged. ‘There she was, and there I was, and there Hopkins was——’
‘Of course, darling. Do you think I shall like them?’
‘I expect so,’ said Reginald coldly. He felt absurdly annoyed because she was so little hurt. Were all their happy little memories memories for him only? But at the back of his mind he knew that, if she had been even a little hurt, he would have been annoyed at that too.
‘I should have hated it if we had been in the country,’ said Sylvia. ‘I do so love meeting you at that bookshop and then going on with you. But it’s different in London.’
‘Yes, it is,’ agreed Reginald, feeling much happier suddenly. You darling, he thought, now you’ve said exactly the right thing.
‘There are so many other people.’
‘I suppose that’s it.’
He wondered suddenly if Sylvia compared him with all the other people, as he compared her. The thought was rather disturbing.
III
Mr. Fondeveril was dining at the Ivy tonight with his daughter. She was late. He strode magnificently from the inner room to the swing-doors, stood a moment while country cousins asked ‘Who’s that?’ and strode magnificently back to his table, looking at his watch in the manner of one who had been kept waiting on a certain historic occasion by Paul Kruger, and was amazed that the lesson he had had to teach the fellow had not been learnt by others.
Lady Ormsby and her father were much in each other’s company. Ormsby had an amused tolerance for his father-in-law, which sometimes, to his surprise, degenerated into a sort of affectionate admiration. The old boy was as mad as a hatter, of course, but he was distinctly a figure. It seems absurd that a man of fifty-five, and Robert, first Baron Ormsby at that, should have a father-in-law at all, but if he must have one, let him be anything rather than a nonentity. E
verybody in London knew Mr. Fondeveril by sight; everybody was either impressed by him or amused. Of how many fathers-in-law could that be said? Ormsby could afford to show his gratitude.
He showed it. Mr. Fondeveril became a feature of the official Ormsby establishment. Maggie was encouraged to have him about the house, to display him at parties, even to console herself with him at week-ends when Bob was, unfortunately, called away. Better keep a room for him, eh, old girl, and any time you feel lonely——? And I’ll see to it that he’s all right. By all right he meant had money to spend. It was as well that he did see to it, for the pension from the tea-broker’s might just have kept its late accountant in dress-shirts for the innumerable supper-parties, but would do no more. Ormsby, feeling an unaccustomed virtue in the action, furnished a flat for his father-in-law in New Cavendish Street, the district being chosen with the good-humoured mischief of one who knew his man. Mr. Fondeveril could imagine himself, if he liked, a man-about-town with a West End address, or, just as easily, if he preferred it, a fashionable consultant with a home elsewhere. Mr. Fondeveril did both. Ordering this or that from a stationer’s, he might choose to say, ‘I think you had better send it to my consulting-rooms’, and then, raising his hand and frowning to himself, ‘No! On second thoughts to my flat,’ or he might say, ‘Send it round to my flat—no, no, what am I thinking about? To my consulting-rooms’; but in either case he could give an address which carried conviction.
In a sense they really were his consulting-rooms, for in them he consulted freely his dictionaries and encyclopaedias. A successful newspaper proprietor can always pension off a father-in-law without hurt to his feelings or harm to the public. For many years the column in Ormsby’s Home Elevator entitled ‘The Wonderful World We Live In’ was written by a John Fondeveril who (as a Public Man) preferred to use the nom-de-guerre of ‘James Fountain B.A.’ The subject exactly suited his oratio recta style, for in these weekly articles he could take his reader by the hand and introduce him personally to the subject. ‘Now supposing I were a Bank Manager, and you came to me and said “Ah, good morning, Mr. Fountain, I want to raise Ten Thousand Pounds”. Well, I should say, “Very good, Mr. Smithers, but what Security can you offer me?” ’—and so on, in ‘This Week’s Talk on Banking’. The B.A. at the end of his adopted name was put in by the editor, who thought it would inspire confidence. Mr. Fondeveril, a little shocked when he first saw it, confided to his son-in-law his doubts as to the propriety of it, seeing that he was not ‘strictly speaking’ a Bachelor of Arts; to which replied Ormsby genially, cigar in mouth and a bottle inside him, ‘But I expect you were a Bloodyrotten Accountant, old boy.’ So the matter was left over, and it was not long before Mr. Fondeveril was talking, with regret for the time wasted there, of his College days.
With the coming of the Cinema de Luxe and the Palais de Danse, the number of people who were willing to elevate themselves at home was insufficient to pay a dividend, and James Fountain, B.A., died in his hood; one Thursday explaining loosely, but with an air of being largely responsible for it, the Reason Why his readers saw their faces upside-down in a spoon, the next Thursday back for ever into the void from which our Wonderful World had itself once emerged. For a little while the allowance made by Ormsby to his father-in-law was regarded between them as a retaining fee, and it was almost developing into a pension to James Fountain’s dependants when, just in time, the Cross-Word fever took possession of the country. Always the same, always game, John Fondeveril returned to business as ‘Macedon’ of the Sunday Sun. The new office suited him no less well than the old. Writing, as the clue for ‘13 across,’ ‘I am a gasteropod with a trochiform shell and a low visceral hump’ he could lose himself in a world of speculation as easily as when, in the old days, he had imagined himself Mr. Gladstone or Sir Garnet Wolseley, as easily as when, in later days, he had assumed a personal share in the laws of banking or refraction.
He looked at his watch again as Lady Ormsby came quietly up to his table.
‘I’m sorry, dear,’ she apologized. ‘I stopped to talk to the Wellards.’
‘Eight-fifteen,’ said Mr. Fondeveril, snapping his inscribed gold hunter and lowering it back into his pocket with both hands. ‘Eight-fifteen, Maggie.’
‘Ah, then I should have been late, anyhow. Did you see the Wellards?’
‘I bowed to Mrs. Wellard. A charming woman.’
‘Lovely.’
‘You don’t remember Mrs. Langtry in her prime? No, no, of course, you wouldn’t. Ah, there were beautiful women in those days. I have ordered a few oysters to begin with, bearded in their shells. Will that suit you?’
‘Thank you, dear.’
‘I always used to say that Mrs. Langtry, Lady Randolph Churchill and your mother were the three most beautiful women I knew. Mrs. Langtry didn’t hunt, of course. Her beauty was more exotic. We used to stand on chairs in Hyde Park to see Mrs. Langtry go past.’
‘They wouldn’t now, would they? Father, I’m a little anxious about Bob.’
‘Bob?’ said Mr. Fondeveril, affecting surprise. ‘Oh? Ah!’ He busied himself in the wine-list.
But though he was not surprised that Bob had been causing anxiety, he was surprised that Maggie should have referred to it in front of him. He knew all about Ormsby’s love-affairs, of course; who didn’t? But there had always seemed to be a sort of understanding between Maggie and himself that he didn’t really know—not officially. If he had known, surely he would have said something to his son-in-law; something virile; something as man to man; or, perhaps, something, though now much less, as man-of-the-world to man-of-the-world. But definitely something. Awkward, of course, to have to tell your son-in-law, who was supporting you, that he was a cad; so awkward that the convenience of not realizing that he was a cad, and therefore, of not having to put yourself in this awkward situation, presented itself to the mind almost without conscious thought. It had only to present itself at the portals of Mr. Fondeveril’s mind to be made thoroughly at home. He was convinced that he did not know; that as a Public Man it was his business not to know; or that, if he did know, his silence was an heroic sacrifice of his own happiness, even of that of his well-loved child, to the public weal.
‘I’m sorry, dear,’ said Maggie, with one of her wistful little smiles, understanding so well his discomfort. ‘But you are so helpful to me sometimes.’
He patted her hand forgivingly.
‘My dear Maggie, I regard you as a sacred trust. I told your dear mother so, when she lay dying. “A sacred trust, Caroline,” I said. “My constant care. I cannot, alas! afford her the advantages which you had as a child, the beautiful and stately home, the constant life in the saddle, but I will devote myself to her, be sure of that.” She knew. She died happy.’
Maggie pressed his hand and let it go. ‘I know, dear.’
‘And we did have good times together, didn’t we?’ he asked with a pathetic eagerness. ‘Didn’t we, Maggie? D’you remember how we used to go to the Zoo and Madame Tussaud’s, and Ramsgate, wasn’t it, that first summer, and the niggers, and I got talking to one, and we brought him back to tea, and he sang his songs to us——’
‘Rather, darling! Of course I remember,’ said Lady Ormsby, her face lighting up, so that she looked almost like that little Maggie for a moment. ‘Why I can remember the songs he sang. One was “Hi-tiddley-hi-ti” and one was “I asked Johnny Jones and now I know”, and——’
‘Ah! Yes,’ said Mr. Fondeveril, also remembering. ‘A certain robust humour, perhaps——’
‘Darling, I loved them, and didn’t understand a word of them. We’ve had heavenly times together.’
‘Well, well, what is it about Bob?’
Lady Ormsby hesitated, and then said, ‘Oh, nothing really. It’s just——’ She gave a nod towards the outer room. ‘Those two.’
‘Tut-tut! You don’t mean——’
‘No, I don’t mean anything.
I’m just a little anxious. She’s so lovely, and so—innocent.’
‘But——’ Mr. Fondeveril began on a note of expostulation, and turned it into a perturbed cough. What he had been about to say was, ‘Surely Bob’s women are always—er—professionals? Nobody falls in love with Bob.’ He remembered in time that he knew nothing about Bob’s habits.
She read his thought, as she always did.
‘It isn’t that,’ she said. ‘It’s just that people will talk, if they go about together. His reputation—it’s a pity. She’s so sweet. And people are so horrid.’
‘Are they—do they go about together?’
‘Well, they hardly know each other yet. She came to lunch, and Bob was there some of the time—I didn’t know he was going to be, and he did say he’d seen her since.’
‘Oh, well, if he said so,’ said Mr. Fondeveril, eager to reassure himself.
She shook her head. ‘You see, I know Bob. I’ve seen him looking at her. I don’t think he would—’ she hesitated, and ended, ‘well, he never has yet. Not my own friends. Besides, she’s quite different, and much too much in love with her husband to think of anybody else. But anybody as lovely as that—— Poor Bob! He fancies himself, you know, and yet he always has to pay. It’s rather sad.’
Mr. Fondeveril wanted to express horror at his little Maggie’s calm acceptance of her husband’s infidelities, but didn’t quite see how he could reconcile it with his own ignorance of them. So he said:
‘I don’t think there’s much to worry about, dear. You saw them together just now. As happy a married couple as England has to show.’
‘It’s only that I know Bob. There’ll be talk. And the nice little Wellards will be hurt.’
‘Little!’ said Mr. Fondeveril, seeing a chance of diversion. ‘From a shrimp like you!’
‘You know what I mean, dear.’
So she had not quite finished. Well, well, he must sum the matter up.
‘As I see it, you think he will want to be seen about with her, and that if he is, people will put an utterly unjustifiable construction upon it. Well, why not say a word to him, in a friendly way? Or to her? Or even to Wellard?’