_By_ A. A. Milne
_Royal Warwick Regiment_
I
It was April, and in his little bedroom in the Muswell Hill
boarding-house, where Mrs. Morrison (assisted, as you found out later,
by Miss Gertie Morrison) took in a few select paying guests, George
Crosby was packing. Spring came in softly through his open window; it
whispered to him tales of green hedges and misty woods and close-cropped
rolling grass. “Collars,” said George, trying to shut his ears to it,
“handkerchiefs, ties—I knew I’d forgotten something: ties.” He pulled
open a drawer. “Ties, shirts—where’s my list?—shirts, ties.” He wandered
to the window and looked out. Muswell Hill was below him, but he hardly
saw it. “Three weeks,” he murmured. “Heaven for three weeks, and it
hasn’t even begun yet.” There was the splendour of it. It hadn’t begun;
it didn’t begin till to-morrow. He went back in a dream to his packing.
“Collars,” he said, “shirts, ties—ties——”
Miss Gertie Morrison had not offered to help him this year. She had not
forgotten that she had put herself forward the year before, when George
had stammered and blushed (he found blushing very easy in the Muswell
Hill boarding-house), and Algy Traill, the humorist of the
establishment, had winked and said, “George, old boy, you’re in luck;
Gertie never packs for me.” Algy had continued the joke by smacking his
left hand with his right, and saying in an undertone, “Naughty boy, how
dare you call her Gertie?” and then in a falsetto voice: “Oh, Mr.
Crosby, I’m sure I never meant to put myself forward!” Then Mrs.
Morrison from her end of the table called out——
But I can see that I shall have to explain the Muswell Hill ménage to
you. I can do it quite easily while George is finishing his packing. He
is looking for his stockings now, and that always takes him a long time,
because he hasn’t worn them since last April, and they are probably
under the bed.
Well, Mrs. Morrison sits at one end of the table and carves. Suppose it
is Tuesday evening. “Cold beef or hash, Mr. Traill?” she asks, and Algy
probably says “Yes, please,” which makes two of the boarders laugh.
These are two pale brothers called Fossett, younger than you who read
this have ever been, and enthusiastic admirers of Algy Traill. Their
great ambition is to paint the town red one Saturday night. They have
often announced their intention of doing this, but so far they do not
seem to have left their mark on London to any extent. Very different is
it with their hero and mentor. On Boat-race night four years ago Algy
Traill was actually locked up—and dismissed next morning with a caution.
Since then he has often talked as if he were a Cambridge man; the
presence of an Emmanuel lacrosse blue in the adjoining cell having
decided him in the choice of a university.
Meanwhile his hash is getting cold. Let us follow it quickly. It is
carried by the servant to Miss Gertie Morrison at the other end of the
table, who slaps in a helping of potatoes and cabbage. “What, asparagus
_again_?” says Algy, seeing the cabbage. “We _are_ in luck.” Mrs.
Morrison throws up her eyes at Mr. Ransom on her right, as much as to
say, “Was there ever such a boy?” and Miss Gertie threatens him with the
potato spoon, and tells him not to be silly. Mr. Ransom looks
approvingly across the table at Traill. He has a feeling that the Navy,
the Empire, and the Old Country are in some way linked up with men of
the world such as Algy, or that (to put it in another way) a Radical
Nonconformist would strongly disapprove of him. It comes to the same
thing; you can’t help liking the fellow. Mr. Ransom is wearing an M.C.C.
tie; partly because the bright colours make him look younger, partly
because unless he changes _something_ for dinner he never feels quite
clean, you know. In his own house he would dress every night. He is
fifty; tall, dark, red-faced, black-moustached, growing stout; an
insurance agent. It is his great sorrow that the country is going to the
dogs, and he dislikes the setting of class against class. The proper
thing to do is to shoot them down.
Opposite him, and looking always as if he had slept in his clothes, is
Mr. Owen-Jones—called Mr. Joen-Owns by Algy. He argues politics fiercely
across Mrs. Morrison. “My dear fellow,” he cries to Ransom, “you’re
nothing but a reactionary!”—to which Ransom, who is a little doubtful
what a reactionary is, replies, “All I want is to live at peace with my
neighbours. I don’t interfere with them; why should they interfere with
me?” Whereupon Mrs. Morrison says peaceably, “Live and let live. After
all, there are two side to _every_ question—a little more hash, Mr.
Owen-Jones?”
George has just remembered that his stockings are under the bed, so I
must hurry on. As it happens, the rest of the boarders do not interest
me much. There are two German clerks and one French clerk, whose broken
English is always amusing, and somebody with a bald, dome-shaped head
who takes in _Answers_ every week. Three years ago he had sung “Annie
Laurie” after dinner one evening, and Mrs. Morrison still remembers
sometimes to say, “Won’t you sing something, Mr. ——?” whatever his name
was, but he always refuses. He says that he has the new number of
_Answers_ to read.
There you are; now you know everybody. Let us go upstairs again to
George Crosby.
Is there anything in the world jollier than packing up for a holiday? If
there is, I do not know it. It was the hour (or two hours or three
hours) of George’s life. It was more than that; for days beforehand he
had been packing to himself; sorting out his clothes, while he bent over
the figures at his desk, making and drawing up lists of things that he
really mustn’t forget. In the luncheon hour he would look in at hosiers’
windows and nearly buy a blue shirt because it went so well with his
brown knickerbocker suit. You or I would have bought it; it was only
five and sixpence. Every evening he would escape from the
drawing-room—that terrible room—and hurry upstairs to his little
bedroom, and there sit with his big brown kit-bag open before him ...
dreaming. Every evening he had meant to pack a few things just to begin
with: his tweed suit and stockings and nailed shoes, for instance; but
he was always away in the country, following the white path over the
hills, as soon as ever his bag was between his knees. How he ached to
take his body there too ... it was only three weeks to wait, two weeks,
a week, three days—to-morrow! To-morrow—he was almost frightened to
think of it lest he should wake up.
Perhaps you wonder that George Crosby hated the Muswell Hill
boarding-house; perhaps you don’t. For my part I agree with Mrs.
Morrison that it takes all sorts to make a world, and that as Mr. —— (I
forget his name: the dome-shaped gentleman) once surprised us by saying,
“There is good in everybody if only you can find it out.” At any rate
there is humour. I think if George had tried to see the humorous side of
Mrs. Morrison’s select guests he might have found life tolerable. And
yet the best joke languishes after five years.
I had hoped to have gone straight ahead with this story, but I shall
have to take you back five years; it won’t be for long. Believe me, no
writer likes this diving back into the past. He is longing to get to the
great moment when Rosamund puts her head on George’s shoulder and
says—but we shall come to that. What I must tell you now, before my pen
runs away with me, is that five years ago George was at Oxford with
plenty of money in his pocket, and a vague idea in his head that he
would earn a living somehow when he went down. Then his only near
relation, his father, died ... and George came down with no money in his
pocket, and the knowledge that he would have to earn his living at once.
He knew little of London east of the Savoy, where he had once lunched
with his father; I doubt if he even knew the Gaiety by sight. When his
father’s solicitor recommended a certain Islington boarding-house as an
establishment where a man of means could be housed and fed for as little
as thirty shillings a week, and a certain firm in Fenchurch Street as
another establishment where a man of gifts could earn as much as forty
shillings a week, George found out where Islington and Fenchurch Street
were, and fell mechanically into the routine suggested for him. That he
might have been happier alone, looking after himself, cooking his own
meals or sampling alone the cheaper restaurants, hardly occurred to him.
Life was become suddenly a horrible dream, and the boarding-house was
just a part of it.
However, three years of Islington was enough for him. He pulled himself
together ... and moved to Muswell Hill.
There, we have him back at Muswell Hill now, and I have not been long,
have I? He has been two years with Mrs. Morrison. I should like to say
that he is happy with Mrs. Morrison, but he is not. The terrible thing
is that he cannot get hardened to it. He hates Muswell Hill; he hates
Traill and the Fossetts and Ransom; he hates Miss Gertie Morrison. The
whole vulgar, familiar, shabby, sociable atmosphere of the place he
hates. Some day, perhaps, he will pull himself together and move again.
There is a boarding-house at Finsbury Park he has heard of....