Two People Read online

  Title

  A. A. Milne

  TWO PEOPLE

  Contents

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  About the Author

  Dedication

  To

  Daphne

  In her garden

  Chapter One

  I

  REGINALD WELLARD made a pretence of filling his pipe while he waited for his wife’s comment. It came.

  ‘Fancy!’ she said.

  Reginald, for some reason which he couldn’t explain, felt suddenly on the defensive.

  ‘After all,’ he said, ‘a man must do something.’

  ‘Darling,’ smiled Sylvia lovingly, ‘I’m not blaming you.’

  Reginald thought this over for a moment. It seemed to him that he now definitely had his back to the wall. Absurd!

  ‘When a man tells his wife that he has written a novel,’ he began, ‘the entire absence of blame is in itself, no doubt, a sort of encouragement. At the same time, if anything more enthusiastic should be offered him——’

  ‘But, darling,’ said Sylvia, ‘all I said was “Fancy!”’

  ‘I know. That was all.’

  ‘I was just taken by surprise. Because I think it’s so wonderful of you. I’m sure I couldn’t write a novel to save my life.’

  Reginald Wellard opened his mouth to answer this, and then closed it again. What was the answer? There was none. The conversation had to die there. A pity. When Shakespeare told Ann Hathaway that he had written Othello, did she say ‘Fancy! I’m sure I couldn’t’? Probably not. Well, as it happened, he had left her before he wrote it, so—— But when Milton told his wife that he had written Paradise Lost, do you suppose she—no, that wouldn’t do either. Milton dictated Paradise Lost to his wife, didn’t he, so naturally she told him she’d written it. Well, when Keats—no, he wasn’t married. Dash these fellows. Well, anyhow, Sylvia had said the wrong thing again. A pity to be as sweet and pretty and lovable as she, and yet to say the wrong thing almost instinctively. A pity also that he had registered this wrongness instinctively of late. He loved her just as much. In its way a tribute to their love for each other.

  He began the conversation again.

  ‘Well, would you like to read it now, or wait until it’s really in print?’ He laughed at his own hopefulness. ‘I mean, if it ever is.’

  ‘But of course it will be, darling.’

  That should have encouraged him, but somehow it didn’t.

  ‘I mean,’ she went on, ‘if you’ve written a book, of course any publisher would be only too glad to publish it.’

  Reginald now had no hope at all of his book being published.

  ‘Well?’ he said. ‘Which?’

  ‘I think when it’s a real book, don’t you? Think how exciting to find it on my plate one morning, and curl up on the sofa with it.’

  Wellard told himself that this was the answer he had hoped she would give . . . and wondered why it wasn’t.

  ‘Besides,’ she went on, ‘ordinary writing is always so difficult to read.’

  ‘This is typed,’ he explained.

  ‘You have been secret about it all, haven’t you?’ she laughed. And he laughed too. And she caught at his hand as he went past her, and kissed it lightly and suddenly, and looked suddenly more sweet and pretty and lovable than ever, and he had to stop and tell her so. To which she said ‘Am I?’ and waited for him to tell her so again. But she said no more of the book. Nor did he.

  Certainly he had been secret about it. He was forty. He had been married six years. Even now she was only twenty-five. They lived in the country, with occasional visits to Town, and he weeded the garden and took an interest in twelve bee-hives. They don’t pay you as much for this as they should; but as he had what is called ‘money of his own’, by which is meant money which is left to you when the owner has no further use for it, not money which you have earned your own self, he did not bother about the economics either of hives or weeds. In fact, he spent his time very happily, proving to the drones in their twelve establishments that they had chosen the better part of it, after all.

  However, when you have made quite sure that your wife is happy too, and have weeded the garden, and have walked past twelve beehives, you are, on this or that day, left with a certain amount of time in which to wonder whether it is time to weed the garden again. Now it has been said that every one of us has within him the material for at least one book—this in addition to the knowledge necessary for taking an interest in twelve bee-hives, or whatever it may be; and on a day when Reginald was contemplating a ceanothus (Gloire de Versailles) which was climbing up a convolvulus, or being climbed up by it, it was difficult to say which, he suddenly began to laugh. . . . And five minutes later, the convolvulus still being there, he said to himself, ‘You know, that would make rather a good story.’

  At first it seemed to him the sort of joke which you tell to Baxter (of Seven Streams), whose nephew writes for Punch (or, anyhow, to it); and then it seemed rather better than that. Good enough, next week, to tell Hildersham (of Mallows) who had once met W. W. Jacobs. Jacobs might like to work it up into a short story. Then, a week later, it seemed good enough to tell Coleby (of Redding Farm) who knew a man who had played golf with P. G. Wodehouse. Wodehouse could almost make a novel of it. . . . But as the days went on, and he watched a sow-thistle which had got into his sidalceas change into a sidalcea which had got into his sow-thistles, he began to see the story grow without this precarious aid; grow under his own sudden leadership, grow to his own eager following, into a story, a novel, which he (why not?) would write himself.

  He began. He had a room, known to Sylvia as his office, in which, from time to time, he multiplied the number of hives by something small, subtracted something rather more, and wrote a cheque for the remainder. Sylvia liked him to be busy in here. She was not actually absorbed in bees; but her manner of looking into the office, saying, ‘Busy, darling? I won’t disturb you,’ and, with an exaggerated noiselessness, closing the door again, seemed to put her on full partnership terms in this exhausting business of bee-farming. In his office he could write in secret. After all, there is nothing to prevent a man tearing up anything which he has written. He would just write (for the fun of it) and see what happened. He could always tear it up.

  He did not tear it up. The weeks went on. The novel went on. Summer changed to autumn, autumn to winter. Nor were the changes in Reginald Wellard’s novel less complete. The story still showed what the New Statesman subsequently called, without over-stating the case, ‘this vein of humour’; there were passages in it which The Times itself could describe as ‘not unamusing’; but Reginald had fallen too much in love with his characters, even before the frost had killed his dahlias, to leave them with no deeper roots than this. They had become living, emotional people to him; so much so, indeed, that at times the inter-play of emotion between them would land him into scenes rightly adjudged by the Saturday Review as ‘not without pathos’, and by the Morning Post as ‘not lacking in a certain pleasing sentiment’.
But, of course, Reginald did not know about this until later. Through the autumn and winter he was merely telling himself that it was ‘not bad’. It is curious how easily a book comes to be described in terms of the things which it isn’t.

  II

  ‘Dear Sir,’ wrote Mr. Albert Pump, ‘I am very interested in your story “Bindweed”, and if you can make it convenient to call upon me at 3 o’clock any afternoon I shall be glad to discuss it with you.’

  So Reginald Wellard made it convenient on Thursday. He put his tall, lean figure, with the permanent wave in it, into his other pair of trousers, he brushed, more carefully than usual, his unruly hair, he kissed Sylvia good-bye and then came back to kiss her again, he climbed into a car two sizes too small for him, tried to start it without turning on the petrol, and (subsequently) without switching on the engine, and (subsequently again) without taking off the brake, and then, having caught the 11.3 (which runs on Sundays only) by a triumphant thirty seconds, sat down in Little Malling station to wait, with an automatic machine to keep him company, until the 12.5 should be ready for him. Was this the man to do business on equal terms with a publisher like Mr. Pump? No.

  Mr. Pump received him graciously. Mr. Pump talked to him on general topics for five minutes. At the end of that time Mr. Pump had summed him up as the sort of man who might know every weed, and even every bee, in his garden by name, but who would certainly catch a Sundays-only train on a Thursday morning. Whereupon Mr. Pump produced what he called ‘the usual agreement between author and publisher’. By this he meant that he usually tried it on an inexperienced author and generally got away with it.

  ‘Ah!’ said Reginald, frowning at it. The agreement gave a 10 per cent. royalty to Reginald, and, among other things, a half-share in translation rights, play-rights, film-rights, broadcasting-rights, gramophone-rights and all other possible rights to Mr. Pump. If you ask why these things should be given to Mr. Pump, the only answer is that he wanted the money.

  Reginald Wellard did not ask why. He was trying to work out a 10 per cent. royalty on 150,000 copies at 7s. 6d. each. It was an impossible sum to do in the head; in fact, really a case for the office. Perhaps to-morrow morning—— Meanwhile, all that the words in front of him were saying, nay, shouting aloud, was that the book, his book, was going to be published! He signed the agreement eagerly. Mr. Pump watched him with a sort of wistful remorse, thinking that he might have got off his other agreement after all: ‘the customary agreement between author and publisher’, by which Mr. Wellard gives Mr. Pump the copyright of the book and £ 150, and Mr. Pump gives Mr. Wellard six free copies. Even now it might not be too late. But something made him hesitate; not so much conscience as the set of Reginald’s jaw as he wrote, and the length of him. A fool for the plucking, but even fools get angry after they are plucked.

  And now Reginald is coming home again. He is coming by the 4.20 from Victoria, which doesn’t stop at Little Malling on Thursdays. His car, however, does not know about this, and is still waiting for him at Little Malling under the friendly eye of the station-master. Does it matter whether he walks from Burdon (six miles) or waits two hours for a train back? It does not matter. He gets home again.

  He sees Sylvia again.

  When they have kissed, Sylvia says:

  ‘But you haven’t, darling!’

  ‘Haven’t what?’

  ‘Got it cut.’

  Reginald remembers that he was going to London to get his hair cut.

  ‘Oh? Oh, that. Sorry, Sylvia, but the fact is I had some business in London.’

  Sylvia purses up her lips and nods with complete understanding. The farm, prices, outgoings, exports, imports—big business. She understands exactly how it is. A woman less used to bee-farming would have said ‘What?’ stupidly.

  The ‘What?’ not coming, Reginald has to explain. Nonchalantly.

  ‘I’ve been arranging with a publisher about my book.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Sylvia, really quite interested, ‘when’s it coming out?’

  Reginald sighs to himself. All his cleverness in finding Mr. Pump, all his firmness in doing business with Mr. Pump, gone for nothing. Sylvia has skipped that part of the conversation. Oh, well.

  ‘In the spring. About April.’

  ‘Darling! You are clever!’

  Sylvia is really looking ridiculously beautiful this evening, but she will be so general in her praise. ‘Clever’ means nothing, said like that.

  And then suddenly Reginald felt ashamed of himself.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ he says, ‘now that I’ve got this book off my mind, is there anywhere you’d like to go to specially?’

  ‘How do you mean, darling?’

  ‘Holiday — Jaunt — Expedition. Riviera — Switzerland — South Sea Islands. London. Anything.’

  With a wrinkle in her pretty forehead Sylvia pays all these places the briefest possible visit.

  ‘I’m perfectly happy here, darling,’ she announces, ‘if you are.’

  ‘I shouldn’t mind a change.’

  ‘Sure you wouldn’t rather go away by yourself? Or play golf?’

  ‘Quite.’

  She gives a little sigh of happiness.

  ‘I should simply love it,’ she says like an eager child. ‘Let’s go to Switzerland.’

  Well, dash it, what can you do with a wife like that but kiss her?

  III

  Reginald was talking to Edwards about half-hardy annuals when the first batch of proofs came down the steps of the kitchen garden and, seeing Mr. Wellard, saved themselves a journey to the back door. He put them in his pocket.

  There were two gardeners at Westaways: Challinor who attended to the bees and looked after the garden in his spare time, and Edwards who attended to the garden and looked after the bees in his spare time. Each grudgingly took orders from the other when off his own ground, and it was difficult to say which was head-man of the estate. Edwards had the higher wage. Challinor had the cottage. Reginald had had Challinor longer, but was more afraid of Edwards.

  Challinor was a quick, black little man with quick, black eyes and a black waterfall moustache. He was really neither a bee-man nor a gardener by trade, he was just the handiest man of the neighbourhood, and he had become, anyhow to Reginald, a specialist in bees, not because he knew more about them than about flowers, tools or cows, but because other people, Reginald anyhow, knew less. Challinor wore black trousers, a black waistcoat with a brass watch-chain from which depended the badge of some secret society, and a grey shirt, rolled up to the elbows so that the bees could sting him better.

  ‘But of course,’ said Reginald to Sylvia, ‘the idea really is to establish a mutual confidence with the bees. They go about saying to each other, “We can’t sting a man like this, it wouldn’t be fair. He trusts us. Let’s sting the man Wellard instead.’”

  ‘I suppose so, darling,’ said Sylvia, and then, as Reginald still seemed to be waiting for something, gave her charming little laugh. ‘Darling, you are absurd. They haven’t really stung you again, have they?’

  ‘No, Sylvia, no.’ He looked at her almost unbelievable white arms, and added, ‘If a single bee ever dares to sting you, I’ll brain him.’

  Edwards was a slow, heavy-footed, thick-fingered man. He would take a dozen young birches, which had been lying out for a week as they had come from the nurseryman’s, with their roots exposed, dig a dozen holes in the places which Mr. Wellard had carefully rejected for them, stamp them in with his heavy boots, and go back to the work which Mr. Wellard had thus interrupted . . . and the young birches would love it, and grow as birches never grew before.

  ‘And look at me,’ said Reginald to Sylvia, who was looking at the goldfish. ‘Endowed by Nature with delicate hands’—he held one up and admired it—‘and delightful feet, can I prick out or plant a single blessed thing as Edwards can? How he ever separates one snap-drago
n from another, working entirely with two bunches of sausages, is a mystery to me. Yet nothing ever dies on Edwards. Remarkable.’

  ‘I’m sure you could do it as well if you tried, darling,’ said Sylvia. ‘Besides, he’s used to it.’

  Reginald watched her silently, as silently she watched the goldfish in their pool. ‘Isn’t that a pretty one?’ she said suddenly, pointing a foot at it.

  ‘Yes,’ said Reginald, ‘yes. And why I talk about my own delightful feet, I don’t know. Yours are a song.’

  Sylvia’s cheeks went a little pinker.

  ‘Well,’ said Reginald, ‘I suppose I must get busy.’

  ‘Of course, darling. I won’t disturb you.’

  ‘I meant these.’ He took them from his pocket. ‘Proofs.’

  Surely Sylvia will want to know what proofs are.

  She doesn’t.

  Or she knows, and is thinking of something else.

  ‘I won’t disturb you, darling,’ she says again.

  So Reginald goes in with his proofs. There are two sets, each going up to page 64. Why two sets? Has he got to correct both? There is a note begging him not to make more corrections than are absolutely necessary. He promises not to.

  He begins to read. As he reads, he notices one or two little mistakes; not many, for Mr. Pump, or whoever does the actual printing, however one actually does the printing, has done his work well. Just one or two. He will go through it again afterwards and correct them. For the moment it is interesting to read the story straight off—well, up to page 64—and see how it strikes him. Funny how much better it seems in print. Sylvia was right to wait . . .

  ‘It was not too much to say that if . . .’ Bother! Now we shall have to wait for page 65.

  He turned to page 1 again. He read the sixty-four pages again. He is imagining himself Sylvia, curled up on the sofa. Does she smile here? Does a tear come for a moment there to her throat? How strange is it to her that he, her husband, should have written this? He reads, wondering.

  ‘It was not too much to say that if . . .’ Bother! Now Sylvia will have to wait for page 65.