The Sunny Side (11 page)

“Well, you read it,” she said, handing me the paper.

I took the paper with a trembling hand, and read. She was right! If the paper was to be believed, all Second Lieutenants were to become Lieutenants after eighteen years' service. At last my chance had come.

“My dear, this is wonderful,” I said. “In another fifteen years we shall be there. You might buy two more stars this afternoon and practise sewing them on, in order to be ready. You mustn't be taken by surprise when the actual moment comes.”

“But you're a Lieutenant
now
,” she said, “if that's true. It says that ‘after eighteen months—'”

I snatched up the paper again. Good Heavens! it was eighteen
months
—not years.

“Then I
am
a Lieutenant,” I said.

We had a bottle of champagne for dinner that night, and Celia got the paper and read it aloud to my tunic. And just for practice she took the two
stars off my other tunic and sewed them on this one—thus:

 

And we had a very happy evening.

“I suppose it will be a few days before it's officially announced,” I said.

“Bother, I suppose it will,” said Celia, and very reluctantly she took one star off each shoulder, leaving the matter—so:

 

And the years rolled on…

And I am still a Second Lieutenant…

I do not complain; indeed I am even rather proud of it. If I am not gaining on my original one star, at least I am keeping pace with it. I might so easily have been a corporal by now.

But I should like to have seen a little more notice taken of me in the “Gazette.” I scan it every day, hoping for some such announcement as this:

“
Second Lieutenant M——to remain a Second Lieutenant.
”

Or this:

“
Second Lieutenant M——to be seconded and to retain his present rank of Second Lieutenant
.”

Or even this:

“
Second Lieutenant M——relinquishes the rank of Acting Second Lieutenant on ceasing to command a Battalion, and reverts to the rank of Second Lieutenant
.”

Failing this, I have thought sometimes of making an announcement in the Personal Column of “The Times”:

“Second Lieutenant M——regrets that his duties as a Second Lieutenant prevent him from replying personally to the many kind inquiries he has received, and begs to take this opportunity of announcing that he still retains a star on each shoulder. Both doing well.”

But perhaps that is unnecessary now. I think that by this time I have made it clear just how many stars I possess.

One on the right shoulder. So:

 

And one on the left shoulder. So:

 

That is all.

O.B.E.

The Joke: A Tragedy

C
HAPTER
I

The Joke was born one October day in the trench called Mechanics, not so far from Loos. We had just come back into the line after six days in reserve, and, the afternoon being quiet, I was writing my daily letter to Celia. I was telling her about our cat, imported into our dug-out in the hope that it would keep the rats down, when suddenly the Joke came. I was so surprised by it that I added in brackets, “This is quite my own. I've only just thought of it.” Later on the Post-Corporal came, and the Joke started on its way to England.

C
HAPTER
II

Chapter II finds me some months later at home again.

“Do you remember that joke about the rats in one of your letters?” said Celia one evening.

“Yes. You never told me if you liked it.”

“I simply loved it. You aren't going to waste it, are you?”

“If you simply loved it, it wasn't wasted.”

“But I want everybody else—Couldn't you use it in the Revue?”

I was supposed to be writing a Revue at this time for a certain impresario. I wasn't getting on very fast, because whenever I suggested a scene to him, he either said, “Oh, that's been done,” which killed it, or else he said, “Oh, but that's never been done,” which killed it even more completely.

“Good idea,” I said to Celia. “We'll have a Trench Scene.”

I suggested it to the impresario when next I saw him.

“Oh, that's been done,” he said.

“Mine will be quite different from anybody else's,” I said firmly.

He brightened up a little.

“All right, try it,” he said.

I seemed to have discovered the secret of successful revue-writing.

The Trench Scene was written. It was written round the Joke, whose bright beams, like a perfect jewel in a perfect setting—However, I said all that
to Celia at the time. She was just going to have said it herself, she told me.

So far, so good. But a month later the Revue collapsed. The impresario and I agreed upon many things—as, for instance, that the War would be a long one, and that Hindenburg was no fool—but there were two points upon which we could never quite agree: (1) What was funny, and (2) which of us was writing the Revue. So, with mutual expressions of goodwill, and hopes that one day we might write a tragedy together, we parted.

That ended the Revue; it ended the Trench Scene; and, for the moment, it ended the Joke.

C
HAPTER
III

Chapter III finds the war over and Celia still at it.

“You haven't got that Joke in yet.”

She had just read an article of mine called “Autumn in a Country Vicarage.”

“It wouldn't go in there very well,” I said.

“It would go in anywhere where there were rats. There might easily be rats in a vicarage.”

“Not in this one.”

“You talk about ‘poor as a church mouse.'”

“I am an artist,” I said, thumping my heart and forehead and other seats of the emotions. “I don't happen to
see
rats there, and if I don't see them I can't write about them. Anyhow, they wouldn't be secular rats, like the ones I made my joke about.”

“I don't mind whether the rats are secular or circular,” said Celia, “but do get them in soon.”

Well, I tried. I really did try, but for months I couldn't get those rats in. It was a near thing sometimes, and I would think that I had them, but at the last moment they would whisk off and back into their holes again. I even wrote an article about “Cooking in the Great War,” feeling that that would surely tempt them, but they were not to be drawn…

C
HAPTER
IV

But at last the perfect opportunity came. I received a letter from a botanical paper asking for an article on the Flora of Trench Life.

“Hooray!” said Celia. “There you are.”

I sat down and wrote the article. Working up gradually to the subject of rats, and even more gradually intertwining it, so to speak, with the
subject of cats, I brought off in one perfect climax the great Joke.

“Lovely!” said Celia excitedly.

“There is one small point which has occurred to me. Rats are
fauna
, not
flora
; I've just remembered.”

“Oh, does it matter?”

“For a botanical paper, yes.”

And then Celia had a brilliant inspiration.

“Send it to another paper,” she said.

I did. Two days later it appeared. Considering that I hadn't had a proof, it came out extraordinarily well. There was only one misprint. It was at the critical word of the Joke

C
HAPTER
V

“That's torn it,” I said to Celia.

“I suppose it has,” she said sadly.

“The world will never hear the Joke now. It's had it wrong, but still it's had it, and I can't repeat it.”

Celia began to smile.

“It's sickening,” she said; “but it's really rather funny, you know.”

And then she had another brilliant inspiration.

“In fact you might write an article about it.”

And, as you see, I have.

E
PILOGUE

Having read thus far, Celia says, “But you still haven't got the Joke in.”

Oh, well, here goes.

Extract from letter
: “We came back to the line to-day to find that the cat had kittened. However, as all the rats seem to have rottened we are much as we were.”

“Rottened” was misprinted “rattened,” which seems to me to spoil the Joke…

Yet I must confess that there are times now when I feel that perhaps after all I may have overrated it…

But it was a pleasant joke in its day.

The Way Down

Sydney Smith, or Napoleon or Marcus Aurelius (somebody about that time) said that after ten days any letter would answer itself. You see what he meant. Left to itself your invitation from the Duchess to lunch next Tuesday is no longer a matter to worry about by Wednesday morning. You were either there or not there; it is unnecessary to write now and say that a previous invitation from the Prime Minister—and so on. It was Napoleon's idea (or Dr. Johnson's or Mark Antony's—one of that circle) that all correspondence can be treated in this manner.

I have followed these early Masters (or whichever one it was) to the best of my ability. At any given moment in the last few years there have been ten letters that I absolutely
must
write, thirty which I
ought
to write, and fifty which any other person in my position
would
have written. Probably I have written two. After all, when your profession
is writing, you have some excuse for demanding a change of occupation in your leisure hours. No doubt if I were a coal-heaver by day, my wife would see to the fire after dinner while I wrote letters. As it is, she does the correspondence, while I gaze into the fire and think about things.

You will say, no doubt, that this was all very well before the War, but that in the Army a little writing would be a pleasant change after the day's duties. Allow me to disillusion you. If, years ago, I had ever conceived a glorious future in which my autograph might be of value to the more promiscuous collectors, that conception has now been shattered. Four years in the Army has absolutely spoilt the market. Even were I revered in the year 2000 A.D. as Shakespeare is revered now, my half-million autographs, scattered so lavishly on charge-sheets, passes, chits, requisitions, indents and applications would keep the price at a dead level of about ten a penny. No, I have had enough of writing in the Army and I never want to sign my own name again. “Yours sincerely, Herbert Asquith,” “Faithfully yours, J. Jellicoe”—these by all means; but not my own.

However, I wrote a letter in the third year of the
war; it was to the bank. It informed the Manager that I had arrived in London from France and should be troubling them again shortly, London being to all appearances an expensive place. It also called attention to my new address—a small furnished flat in which Celia and I could just turn round if we did it separately. When it was written, then came the question of posting it. I was all for waiting till the next morning, but Celia explained that there was actually a letterbox on our own floor, twenty yards down the passage. I took the letter along and dropped it into the slit.

Then a wonderful thing happened. It went

Flipperty—flipperty—flipperty—flipperty—flipperty—flipperty—flipperty—flipperty—flipperty—flipperty—FLOP
.

I listened intently, hoping for more…but that was all. Deeply disappointed that it was over, but absolutely thrilled with my discovery, I hurried back to Celia.

“Any letters you want posted?” I said in an offhand way.

“No, thank you,” she said.

“Have you written any while we've been here?”

“I don't think I've had anything to write.”

“I think,” I said reproachfully, “it's quite time you wrote to your—your bank or your mother or somebody.”

She looked at me and seemed to be struggling for words.

“I know exactly what you're going to say,” I said, “but don't say it; write a little letter instead.”

“Well, as a matter of fact I
must
just write a note to the laundress.”

“To the laundress,” I said. “Of course, just a note.”

When it was written I insisted on her coming with me to post it. With great generosity I allowed her to place it in the slit. A delightful thing happened. It went
Flipperty—flipperty—flipperty—flipperty—flipperty—flipperty—flipperty—flipperty—flipperty—flipperty—FLOP
.

Right down to the letter-box in the hall. Two flipperties a floor. (A simple calculation shows that we are perched on the fifth floor. I am glad now that we live so high. It must be very dull to be on the fourth floor with only eight flipperties, unbearable to be on the first with only two.)

“
O-oh!
How
fas
-cinating!” said Celia.

“Now don't you think you ought to write to your mother?”

“Oh, I
must
.”

She wrote. We posted it. It went.

Flipperty—flipperty
—However, you know all about that now.

Since this great discovery of mine, life has been a more pleasurable business. We feel now that there are romantic possibilities about Letters setting forth on their journey from our floor. To start life with so many flipperties might lead to anything. Each time that we send a letter off we listen in a tremble of excitement for the final FLOP, and when it comes I think we both feel vaguely that we are still waiting for something. We are waiting to hear some magic letter go
flipperty—flipperty—flipperty—flipperty
…and behold! there is no FLOP…and still it goes on—
flipperty—flipperty—flipperty—flipperty
—growing fainter in the distance…until it arrives at some wonderland of its own. One day it must happen so. For we cannot listen always for that
FLOP
, and hear it always; nothing in this world is as inevitable as that. One day we shall look at each other with awe in our faces and say, “But it's still flipperting!” and from that time forward the Hill of Campden will be a place holy and enchanted.
Perhaps on Midsummer Eve—

At any rate I am sure that it is the only way in which to post a letter to Father Christmas.

Well, what I want to say is this: if I have been a bad correspondent in the past I am a good one now; and Celia, who was always a good one, is a better one. It takes at least ten letters a day to satisfy us, and we prefer to catch ten different posts. With the ten in your hand together there is always a temptation to waste them in one wild rush of flipperties, all catching each other up. It would be a great moment, but I do not think we can afford it yet; we must wait until we get more practised at letter-writing. And even then I am doubtful; for it might be that, lost in the confusion of that one wild rush, the magic letter would start on its way—
flipperty—flipperty
—to the never-land, and we should forever have missed it.

So, friends, acquaintances, yes, and even strangers, I beg you now to give me another chance. I will answer your letters, how gladly. I still think that Napoleon (or Canute or the younger Pliny—one of the pre-Raphaelites) took a perfectly correct view of his correspondence…but then
he
never had
a letter-box which went

Flipperty—flipperty—flipperty—flipperty—flipperty—flipperty—flipperty—flipperty—flipperty—flipperty—FLOP.

Heavy Work

Every now and then doctors slap me about and ask me if I was always as thin as this.

“As thin as what?” I say with as much dignity as is possible to a man who has had his shirt taken away from him.

“As thin as this,” says the doctor, hooking his stethoscope on to one of my ribs, and then going round to the other side to see how I am getting on there.

I am slightly better on the other side, but he runs his pencil up and down me and produces that pleasing noise which small boys get by dragging a stick along railings.

I explain that I was always delicately slender, but that latterly my ribs have been overdoing it.

“You must put on more flesh,” he says sternly, running his pencil up and down them again. (He must have been a great nuisance as a small boy.)

“I will,” I say fervently, “I will.”

Satisfied by my promise he gives me back my shirt.

But it is not only the doctor who complains; Celia is even more upset by it. She says tearfully that I remind her of a herring. Unfortunately she does not like herrings. It is my hope some day to remind her of a turbot and make her happy. She, too, has my promise that I will put on flesh.

We had a fortnight's leave a little while ago, which seemed to give me a good opportunity of putting some on. So we retired to a house in the country where there is a weighing-machine in the bathroom. We felt that the mere sight of this weighing-machine twice daily would stimulate the gaps between my ribs. They would realize that they had been brought down there on business.

The first morning I weighed myself just before stepping into the water. When I got down to breakfast I told Celia the result.

“You
are
a herring,” she said sadly.

“But think what an opportunity it gives me. If I started the right weight, the rest of the fortnight would be practically wasted. By the way, the doctor talks about putting on flesh, but he didn't say how much he wanted. What do you think would be a nice amount?”

“About another stone,” said Celia. “You were just a
nice size before the War.”

“All right. Perhaps I had better tell the weighing-machine. This is a co-operative job; I can't do it all myself.”

The next morning I was the same as before, and the next, and the next, and the next.

“Really,” said Celia, pathetically, “we might just as well have gone to a house where there wasn't a weighing-machine at all. I don't believe it's trying. Are you sure you stand on it long enough?”

“Long enough for me. It's a bit cold, you know.”

“Well, make quite sure to-morrow. I must have you not quite so herringy.”

I made quite sure the next morning. I had eight stone and a half on the weight part, and the-little-thing-you-move-up-and-down was on the “4” notch, and the bar balanced midway between the top and the bottom. To have had a crowd in to see would have been quite unnecessary; the whole machine was shouting eight-stone-eleven as loudly as it could.

“I expect it's got used to you,” said Celia when I told her the sad state of affairs. “It likes eight-stone-eleven people.”

“We will give it,” I said, “one more chance.”

Next morning the weights were as I had left them, and I stepped on without much hope, expecting that the bar would come slowly up to its midway position of rest. To my immense delight, however, it never hesitated but went straight up to the top. At last I had put on flesh!

Very delicately I moved the-thing-you-move-up-and-down to its next notch. Still the bar stayed at the top. I had put on at least another ounce of flesh!

I continued to put on more ounces. Still the bar remained up! I was eight-stone-thirteen…Good heavens, I was eight-stone-fourteen!

I pushed the-thing-you-move-up-and-down back to the zero position, and exchanged the half-stone weight for a stone one. Excited but a trifle cold, for it was a fresh morning, and the upper part of the window was wide open, I went up from nine stone ounce by ounce…

At nine-stone-twelve I jumped off for a moment and shut the window…

At eleven-stone-eight I had to get off again in order to attend to the bath, which was in danger of overflowing…

At fifteen-stone-eleven the breakfast gong went…

At nineteen-stone-nine I realized that I had overdone it. However I decided to know the worst. The worst that the machine could tell me was twenty-stone-seven. At twenty-stone-seven I left it.

Celia, who had nearly finished breakfast, looked up eagerly as I came in.

“Well?” she said.

“I am sorry I am late,” I apologized, “but I have been putting on flesh.”

“Have you really gone up?” she asked excitedly.

“Yes.” I began mechanically to help myself to porridge, and then stopped.

“No, perhaps not,” I said thoughtfully.

“Have you gone up much?”

“Much,” I said. “Quite much.”

“How much? Quick!”

“Celia,” I said sadly, “I am twenty-stone-seven. I may be more; the weighing-machine gave out then.”

“Oh, but, darling, that's much too much.”

“Still, it's what we came here for,” I pointed out. “No, no bacon, thanks; a small piece of dry toast.”

“I suppose the machine couldn't have made a mistake?”

“It seemed very decided about it. It didn't hesitate at all.”

“Just try again after breakfast to make sure.”

“Perhaps I'd better try now,” I said, getting up, “because if I turned out to be only twenty-stone-six I might venture on a little porridge after all. I shan't be long.”

I went upstairs. I didn't dare face that weighing-machine in my clothes after the way in which I had already strained it without them. I took them off hurriedly and stepped on. To my joy the bar stayed in its downward position. I took off an ounce…then another ounce. The bar remained down…

At eighteen-stone-two I jumped off for a moment in order to shut the window, which some careless housemaid had opened again…