Two People by A. A. Milne

Author:A. A. Milne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2017-09-20T09:37:38+00:00

Chapter Twelve

I

AS his lordship said from time to time, Margaret Ormsby was a very remarkable woman. But this was not surprising; for her father, John Fondeveril, had always been a very remarkable man.

John Fondeveril was one of those unworldly souls who ‘might have been anything’ if they had really cared about it, but who, unfortunately for their country, preferred to go on being accountants in a tea-broker’s. At Philpot Lane, saying ‘Yes, sir’ and ‘No, sir’ to the partners, Mr. Fondeveril could wrap himself up in his illusion of greatness without subjecting it to any strain. His appearance helped him; a magnificently whiskered six-foot-three was obviously Somebody. No doubt his name helped him too. To hear that this magnificent gentleman was Mr. Smith would leave one unmoved; to hear that he was Mr. Fondeveril set one asking, ‘Who is Mr. Fondeveril? I know I’ve seen him somewhere.’ He was lavish with his name. He would give it to a chance acquaintance before the other had time to ask for it, adding, as a matter of popular interest, ‘Always the same, always game, John Fon Deveril.’ Possibly somebody had so toasted him in the ‘eighties; possibly not; but he was assured by now that so they had always toasted him. His romantic interest in himself never wavered.

He married a Miss Stokes from some small Midland town; ‘a Stokes of Leicestershire, the great hunting country’, as he would explain to his friends, adding, with one of his inevitable flights of imagination, ‘Ah, she misses it now, poor girl.’ Certainly she had felt the loss of the country, if not of the sport, and after ten years of the Kilburn end of Maida Vale, she returned, in the picturesque phrase of her husband, ‘to the happy hunting-fields’. Mr. Fondeveril bore her loss bravely. His friends knew his motto:

Always the same,

Always game,

John

Fon

Deveril.

Perhaps he realized that six-foot-three of magnificent mourning had lost nothing in romantic interest for the travellers on his omnibus. Descending from his seat next to the driver (his almost by right) he would make for Philpot Lane as for an exit up-stage, leaving, as he well knew, the driver and the other front-seat passenger in conversation. ‘That’s Mr. Fondeveril I was talking to, just lost his wife, poor gentleman,’ the other passenger would hear, and ‘Dear, dear’ would say, wondering, as everybody did, who Mr. Fondeveril was. And sometimes Mr. Fondeveril himself would wonder. This transmigration of souls which that fellow had been talking about. What more natural than that the soul of (say) the great Alexander should return to earth, seeking suitable quarters? He hummed lightly to himself at the thought, and returned the salute of the commissionaire with the preoccupied but military gesture which Alexander would have given it. An Alexander who had just lost a general.

He had been fond of his wife, in the rather absent way in which great men are fond of their wives, and faithful to her, for she had been a good listener. Fortunately she had left an even better listener behind her: a nine-year-old Maggie.

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