If I May by A. A. Milne

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It is, of course, impossible to thank every donor of a joint gift; one
simply thanks the first person whose eye one happens to catch.
Sometimes William's eye was caught, sometimes not. But he was spared
all embarrassment; and I can recommend his solution of the problem
with perfect confidence to those who may be in a similar predicament
next Christmas.

There is a minor sort of Christmas present about which also a few
words must be said; I refer to the Christmas card.

The Christmas card habit is a very pleasant one, but it, too, needs to
be disciplined. I doubt if many people understand its proper function.
This is partly the result of our bringing up; as children we were
allowed (quite rightly) to run wild in the Christmas card shop, with
one of two results. Either we still run wild, or else the reaction has
set in and we avoid the Christmas card shop altogether. We convey our
printed wishes for a happy Christmas to everybody or to nobody. This
is a mistake. In our middle-age we should discriminate.

The child does not need to discriminate. It has two shillings in the
hand and about twenty-four relations. Even in my time two shillings
did not go far among twenty-four people. But though presents were out
of the question, one could get twenty-four really beautiful Christmas
cards for the money, and if some of them were ha'penny ones, then one
could afford real snow on a threepenny one for the most important
uncle, meaning by "most important," perhaps (but I have forgotten
now), the one most likely to be generous in return. Of the fun of
choosing those twenty-four cards I need not now speak, nor of the best
method of seeing to it that somebody else paid for the necessary
twenty-four stamps. But certainly one took more trouble in suiting the
tastes of those who were to receive the cards than the richest and
most leisured grown-up would take in selecting a diamond necklace for
his wife's stocking or motor-cars for his sons-in-law. It was not only
a question of snow, but also of the words in which the old, old wish
was expressed. If the aunt who was known to be fond of poetry did not
get something suitable from Eliza Cook, one might regard her Christmas
as ruined. How could one grudge the trouble necessary to make her
Christmas really happy for her? One might even explore the fourpenny
box.

But in middle-age--by which I mean anything over twenty and under
ninety--one knows too many people. One cannot give them a Christmas
card each; there is not enough powdered glass to go round. One has to
discriminate, and the way in which most of us discriminate is either
to send no cards to anybody or else to send them to the first twenty
or fifty or hundred of our friends (according to our income and
energy) whose names come into our minds. Such cards are meaningless;
but if we sent our Christmas cards to the right people, we could make
the simple words upon them mean something very much more than a mere
wish that the recipient's Christmas shall be "merry" (which it will
be anyhow, if he likes merriness) and his New Year "bright" (which,
let us hope, it will not be).

"A merry Christmas," with an old church in the background and a
robin in the foreground, surrounded by a wreath of holly-leaves. It
might mean so much. What I feel that it ought to mean is something
like this:--

"You live at Potters Bar and I live at Petersham. Of course, if we
did happen to meet at the Marble Arch one day, it would be awfully
jolly, and we could go and have lunch together somewhere, and talk
about old times. But our lives have drifted apart since those old
days. It is partly the fault of the train-service, no doubt. Glad as I
should be to see you, I don't like to ask you to come all the way to
Petersham to dinner, and if you asked me to Potters Bar--well, I
should come, but it would be something of a struggle, and I thank you
for not asking me. Besides, we have made different friends now, and
our tastes are different. After we had talked about the old days, I
doubt if we should have much to say to each other. Each of us would
think the other a bit of a bore, and our wives would wonder why we had
ever been friends at Liverpool. But don't think I have forgotten you.
I just send this card to let you know that I am still alive, still at
the same address, and that I still remember you. No need, if we ever
do meet, or if we ever want each other's help, to begin by saying: `I
suppose you have quite forgotten those old days at Liverpool.' We have
neither of us forgotten; and so let us send to each other, once a
year, a sign that we have not forgotten, and that once upon a time we
were friends. 'A merry Christmas to you.'"

That is what a Christmas card should say. It is absurd to say this to
a man or woman whom one is perpetually ringing up on the telephone; to
somebody whom one met last week or with whom one is dining the week
after; to a man whom one may run across at the club on almost any day,
or a woman whom one knows to shop daily at the same stores as oneself.
It is absurd to say it to a correspondent to whom one often writes.
Let us reserve our cards for the old friends who have dropped out of
our lives, and let them reserve their cards for us.

But, of course, we must have kept their addresses; otherwise we have
to print our cards publicly--as I am doing now. "Old friends will
please accept this, the only intimation."

The Future

The recent decision that, if a fortune-teller honestly believes what
she is saying, she is not defrauding her client, may be good law, but
it does not sound like good sense. To a layman like myself it would
seem more sensible to say that, if the client honestly believes what
the fortune-teller is saying, then the client is not being defrauded.

For instance, a fortune-teller may inform you, having pocketed your
two guineas, that a rich uncle in Australia is going to leave you a
million pounds next year. She doesn't promise you the million pounds
herself; obviously that is coming to you anyhow, fortune-teller or no
fortune-teller. There is no suggestion on her part that she is
arranging your future for you. All that she promises to do for two
guineas is to give you a little advance information. She tells you
that you are coming into a million pounds next year, and if you
believe it, I should say that it was well worth the money. You have a
year's happiness (if that sort of thing makes you happy), a year in
which to tell yourself in every trouble, "Never mind, there's a good
time coming"; a year in which to make glorious plans for the future,
to build castles in the air, or (if your taste is not for castles)
country cottages and Mayfair flats. And all this for two guineas; it
is amazingly cheap.

And now consider what happens when the year is over. The
fortune-teller has done her part; she has given you a year's happiness
for two guineas. It is now your uncle's turn to step forward. He is
going to give you twenty years' happiness by leaving you a million
pounds. Probably he doesn't; he hasn't got a million pounds to leave;
he has, in fact, just written to you to ask you to lend him a fiver.
Well, surely it is the uncle who has let you down, not the
fortune-teller. Curse him by all means, cut him out of your will, but
don't blame the fortune-teller, who fulfilled her part of the
contract. The only reason why you went to her was to get your
happiness in advance. Well, you got it in advance; and seeing that it
was the only happiness you got, her claim on your gratitude shines out
the more clearly. You might decently send her another guinea.

This is the case if you honestly believe your fortune-teller. Now let
us suppose that you don't believe. It seems to me that in this case
you are entitled to the return of your money.

Of course, I am not supposing that you are a complete sceptic about
these things. It is plainly impossible for a fortune-teller to defraud
a sceptic, otherwise than by telling him the truth. For if a sceptic
went to consult the crystal, and was told that he would marry again
before the month was out, when in fact he was a bachelor, then he has
not been defrauded, for he is now in a position to tell all his
friends that fortune-telling is absolute nonsense--on evidence for
which he deliberately paid two guineas. Indeed, it is just on this
ground that police prosecutions seem to me to fail. For a policeman
(suitably disguised) pays his money simply for the purpose of getting
evidence against the crystal-gazer. Having got his evidence, it is
ridiculous of him to pretend that he has been cheated. But if he
wasted two guineas of the public money, and was told nothing but the
truth about himself and his family, then he could indeed complain that
the money had been taken from him under false pretences.

However, to get back to your own case. You, we assume, are not a
sceptic. You believe that certain inspired people can tell your
future, and that the fee which they ask for doing this is a reasonable
one. But on this particular occasion the spirits are not working
properly, and all that emerges is that your uncle in Australia----

But with the best will in the world you cannot believe this. The
spirits must have got mixed; they are slightly under-proof this
morning; you have no uncle. The fortune-teller gives you her word of
honour that she firmly believes you to have at least three uncles in
Australia, one of whom will shortly leave you a mill---- It is no
good. You cannot believe it. And it seems to me that on the morning's
transaction you have certainly been defrauded. You must insist on "a
tall dark man from India" at the next sitting.

It is "the tall dark man" which the amateur crystal-gazer really
wants. He doesn't want the future. There is so little to foretell in
most of our lives. Nobody is going to pay two guineas to be told that
he will be off his drive next Saturday and have a stomach-ache on the
following Monday. He wants something a little more romantic than that.
Even if he is never going to be influenced by a tall dark man from
India, it makes life a little more interesting to be told that he is
going to be.

For the average man finds life very uninteresting as it is. And I
think that the reason why he finds it uninteresting is that he is
always waiting for something to happen to him instead of setting to
work to make things happen. For one person who dreams of earning fifty
thousand pounds, a hundred people dream of being left fifty thousand
pounds. I imagine that if a young man went to a crystal-gazer and was
told that he would work desperately hard for the next twenty years,
and would by that time have earned (and saved) a fortune, he would be
very disappointed. Probably he would ask for his money back.

The Largest Circulation

There died recently a gentleman named Nat Gould, twenty million copies
of whose books had been sold. They were hardly ever reviewed in the
literary papers; advertisements of them rarely appeared; no puffs nor
photographs of the author were thrust upon one, Unostentatiously he
wrote them--five in a year--and his million public was assured to him.
It is perhaps too late now to begin to read them, but we cannot help
wondering whence came his enormous popularity.

Mr. Gould, as all the world knows, wrote racing novels. They were
called, _Won by a Neck_, or _Lost by a Head_, or _Odds On_, or _The
Stable-lad's Dilemma_. Every third man in the Army carried one about
with him. I was unlucky in this matter, for all my men belonged to the
other two-thirds; they read detective stories about a certain Sexton
Blake, who kept bursting into rooms and finding finger-marks. In your
innocence you may think that Sherlock Holmes is the supreme British
detective, but he is a child to Blake. If I learnt nothing else in the
Army, I learnt that. Possibly these detective stories were a side-line
of Mr. Gould's, or possibly my regiment was the one anti-Gould
regiment in the Army. At any rate, I was demobilized without any
acquaintance with the _Won by a Neck_ stories.

There must be something about the followers of racing which makes them
different from the followers of any other sport. I suppose that I am
at least as keen on the Lunch Scores as any other man can be on the
Two-thirty Winner; yet I have no desire whatever to read a succession
of stories entitled _How's That, Umpire?_ or _Run Out_, or _Lost by a
Wicket_. I can waste my time and money with as much pleasure on the
golf-course as Mr. Gould's readers can on the race-course, but those
great works, _Stymied_ and _The Foozle on the Fifth Tee_, leave me
cold. My lack of interest in racing explains my lack of interest in
racing novels, but why is there no twenty million public for
_Off-side_ and _Fouled on the Touchline_? It is a mystery.

Though I have never read a racing novel, I can imagine it quite
easily. Lord Newmarket's old home is mortgaged, mortgaged everywhere.
His house is mortgaged, his park is mortgaged, his stud is mortgaged,
his tie-pin is mortgaged; yet he wants to marry Lady Angela. How can
he restore his old home to its earlier glories? There is only one
chance. He must put his shirt (the only thing that isn't mortgaged) on
Fido for the Portland Vase. Fido is a rank outsider--most of the
bookmakers thought that he was a fox-terrier, not a horse--and he is
starting at a thousand to one. When the starting-gate goes up, Fido
will carry not only Lord Newmarket's shirt, but Lady Angela's
happiness. Was there ever such a race before in the history of racing?
Only in the five thousand other racing novels. But Lord Newmarket is
reckoning without Rupert Blacknose. Blacknose has not only sworn to
wed Lady Angela, but it is he who holds the mortgages on Lord
Newmarket's old home. It is at Newmarket Villa that he means to settle
down when he is married. If Fido wins, his dreams are shattered. At
dead of night he climbs into Fido's stable, and paints him white with
a few black splotches. Surely _now_ he will be disqualified as a
fox-terrier! He climbs out again, laughing sardonically to himself....
The day of the great race dawns. The Portland Vasel Who has not heard
of it? In the far-away Malay Archipelago... in the remotest parts of
the Australian bush... in West Kensington... etc., etc. Anyway, the
downs were black with people, and the stands were black with more
people, and the paddock was packed with black people. But of all these
people none concealed beneath a mask of impassivity a heart more
anxious than Lord Newmarket's. He wandered restlessly into the
weighing-room. He weighed himself. He had gone down a pound. He
wandered out again. The downs were still black with humanity. Then
came a hoarse cry from twenty thousand throats. _"They're off!"_

Yes, well, Mr. Gould's novels are probably better than that. But it is
a terrifying thought that he wrote a hundred and thirty of them. A
hundred and thirty times he described that hoarse cry from twenty
thousand throats, "They're off!" A hundred and thirty times he
described the downs black with humanity, and the grandstand, and the
race itself, and what the bookmakers were saying, and the scene in the
paddock. How did he do it? Had he a special rubber stamp for all these
usual features, which saved him the trouble of writing them every
time? Or did he come quite fresh to it with each book? He wrote five
of them every year; did he forget in March what he said in January,
only to forget in June and visualize the scene afresh? To describe a
race-course a hundred thirty times--what a man!

Yet perhaps, after all, it is not difficult to understand why he was
so popular, why he had a following even greater than Mr. Garvice. Mr.
Garvice wrote love-stories, stories of that sweet and fair young
English girl and that charming, handsome, athletic young Englishman.
Every one who is not yet in love, or who is unhappily married, dreams
of meeting one or the other, and to read such stories transports the
loveless for a moment into the land where they would be. But then
there are many more moneyless people in the world than loveless; many
more people who want money than who want love. It is these people who
are transported by Mr. Nat Gould. He does not (I imagine) write of the
stern-chinned, silent millionaire who has forced his way to the top by
solid grit; we have no hopes of getting rich that way. But he does (I
imagine) write of the lucky fellow who puts his shirt both ways on an
outsider and pulls off a cool thousand. Well, that might happen to any
of us. It never has yet... but five times a year Mr. Gould carried us
away from the world where it never has into that beautiful dream-world
where it happens quite naturally. No wonder that he was popular.

The Watson Touch

There used to be a song which affirmed (how truly, I do not know) that
every nice girl loved a sailor. I am prepared to state, though I do
not propose to make a song about it, that every nice man loves a
detective story. This week I have been reading the last adventures of
Sherlock Holmes--I mean really the last adventures, ending with his
triumph over the German spy in 1914. Having saved the Empire, Holmes
returned to his farm on the Sussex downs, and there, for all I mind,
he may stay. I have no great affection for the twentieth-century
Holmes. But I will give the warmest welcome to as many adventures of
the Baker Street Holmes as Watson likes to reconstruct for us. There
is no reason why the supply of these should ever give out. "It was, I
remember, at the close of a winter's day in 1894"--when Watson begins
like this, then I am prepared to listen. Fortunately, all the stories
in this last book, with the exception of the very indifferent spy
story, are of the Baker Street days, the days when Watson said,
"Holmes, this is marvellous!" Reading them now--with, I suppose, a
more critical mind than I exhibited twenty years ago--I see that
Holmes was not only a great detective, but a very lucky one. There is
an occasion when he suddenly asks the doctor why he had a Turkish
bath. Utterly unnerved, Watson asks how he knew, to which the great
detective says that it is as obvious as is the fact that the doctor
had shared a hansom with a friend that morning. But when Holmes
explains further, we see how lucky he is. Watson, he says, has some
mud on his left trouser; therefore he sat on the left side of a
hansom; therefore he shared it with a friend, for otherwise he would
have sat in the middle. Watson's boots, he continues, had obviously
been tied by a stranger; therefore he has had them off in a Turkish
bath or a boot shop, and since the newness of the boots makes it
unlikely that he has been buying another pair, therefore he must have
been to a Turkish bath. "Holmes," says Watson, "this is
marvellous!"

Marvellously lucky, anyway. For, however new his boots, poor old
Watson might have been buying a pair of pumps, or bedroom slippers, or
tennis shoes that morning, or even, if the practice allowed such
extravagance, a second pair of boots. And there was, of course, no
reason whatever why he should not have sat at the side of his hansom,
even if alone. It is much more comfortable, and is, in fact, what one
always did in the hansom days, and still does in a taxi. So if Holmes
was right on this occasion, he was right by luck and not by deduction.

But that must be the best of writing a detective story, that you can
always make the lucky shots come off. In no other form of fiction, I
imagine, does the author feel so certainly that he is the captain of
the ship. If he wants it so, he has it so. Is the solution going to be
too easy! Then he puts in an unexpected footprint in the geranium bed,
or a strange face at the window, and makes it more difficult, Is the
reader being kept too much in the dark? Then a conversation overheard
in the library will make it easier for him. The author's only trouble
is that he can never be certain whether his plot is too obscure or too
obvious. He knows himself that the governess is guilty, and, in
consequence, she can hardly raise her eyebrows without seeming to him
to give the whole thing away.

There was a time when I began to write a detective story for myself.
My murder, I thought, was rather cleverly carried out. The villain
sent a letter to his victim, enclosing a stamped addressed envelope
for an answer. The gum of the envelope was poisoned. I did not know,
nor did I bother to find out, whether it was possible, but this, as I
said just now, is the beauty of writing a detective story. If there is
no such quick-working poison, then you invent one. If up to the moment
when the doubt occurs to you, your villain had been living in Brixton,
you immediately send him to Central Africa, where he extracts a poison
from a "deadly root" according to the prescription of the chief
medicine-man. ("It is the poison into which the Swabiji dip their
arrows," you tell the reader casually, as if he really ought to have
known it for himself.) Well, then, I invented my poison, and my
villain put it on the gum of a self-addressed envelope, and enclosed
it with a letter asking for his victim's autograph. He then posted the
letter, whereupon a very tragic thing happened.

What happened was that, having left the letter in the post for some
years while I formed fours and saluted, I picked up a magazine in the
Mess one day and began to read a detective story. It was a very
baffling one, and I really didn't see how the murderer could possibly
have committed his foul deed. But the detective was on to it at once.
He searched the wastepaper basket, and, picking an envelope therefrom,
said "Ha!" It was just about then that I said "Ha!" too, and also
other things, for my half-finished story was now useless. Somebody
else had thought of the same idea. But though I was very sorry for
this, I could not help feeling proud that my idea made such a good
story. Indeed, since then I have fancied myself rather as a
detective-story-writer, and if only I could think of something which
nobody else would think of while I was thinking of it, I would try
again.

Some Old Companions

In the days of the last-war-but-thirty-seven, when (as you will
remember) the Peers were fighting the People, Lord Curzon defended the
hereditary system by telling us that it worked very well in India,
where a tailor's son invariably became a tailor. The obvious answer,
if anyone bothered to give it, was that the tailor's son, having had
his career mapped out for him at birth, presumably prepared to be a
tailor, whereas a peer's eldest son, as far as one observed, did not
prepare to be a statesman. Indeed, the only profession in this country
to which one is apprenticed in one's childhood is that of royalty. The
future King can begin to learn the "tactful smile," the "memory for
faces," the knowledge of foreign languages and orders, almost as soon
as he begins to learn anything. He alone need not regret his youth and
say, "If only I had been taught this, that, and the other instead!"

These gloomy reflections have been forced on me by the re-discovery of
all those educational books which I absorbed, or was supposed to have
absorbed, at school and college. They made an imposing collection when
I had got them all together; fifty mathematical works by eminent Den,
from a well-thumbed, dog's-eared _Euclid_ to a clean uncut copy of
_Functions of a Quaternion_. It is doubtful if you even know what a
quaternion is, still less how it functions; probably you think of it
as a small four-legged animal with a hard shell. You may be right--it
is so long since I bought the book. But once I knew all about
quaternions; kept them, possibly, at the bottom of the garden; and now
I ask myself in Latin (for I learnt Latin too), _"Cui bono?"_ How
much better if I had learnt this, that, and the other instead!

History for instance. How useful a knowledge of history would be to me
now. To lighten an article like this with a reference to what
Garibaldi said to Cavour in '53; to round off a sentence with the
casual remark, "As was the custom in Alexander's day"; to trace back
a religious tendency, or a fair complexion, or the price of boots to
some barbarian invasion of a thousand years ago--how delightfully easy
it would be, I tell myself, to write with such knowledge at one's
disposal. One would never be at a loss for a subject, and plots for
stories, plays, and historical novels would be piled up in one's brain
for the choosing. But what can one do with mathematics--save count the
words of an article (when written) with rather more quickness and
accuracy than one's fellow writer? Did I spend ten years at
mathematics for this? The waste of it!

But perhaps those years were not so wasted as they seem to have been.
Not only Functions of a Quaternion, but other of these books, chatty
books about hydro-mechanics and dynamics of a particle (no, not an
article--that might have been helpful--a particle), gossipy books
about optics and differential equations, many of these have a
comforting air of cleanness; as if, having bought them at the
instigation of my instructor, I had felt that this was enough, and
that their mere presence in my bookcase was a sufficient talisman; a
talisman the more effective because my instructor had marked some of
the chapters "R"--meaning, no doubt, _"Read carefully"_--and other
chapters "RR" or _"Read twice as carefully."_ For these seem to be
the only marks in some of the books, and there are no traces of
midnight oil nor of that earnest thumb which one might expect from the
perspiring seeker after knowledge.

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