Reginald | Page 9

is only sin deep."
Amabel began to realise that the battle is not always to the
strong-minded. With the immemorial resource of her sex, she
abandoned the frontal attack, and laid stress on her unassisted labours
in parish work, her mental loneliness, her discouragements--and at the
right moment she produced strawberries and cream. Reginald was
obviously affected by the latter, and when his preceptress suggested
that he might begin the strenuous life by helping her to supervise the
annual outing of the bucolic infants who composed the local choir, his
eyes shone with the dangerous enthusiasm of a convert.
Reginald entered on the strenuous life alone, as far as Amabel was
concerned. The most virtuous women are not proof against damp grass,
and Amabel kept her bed with a cold. Reginald called it a dispensation;
it had been the dream of his life to stage-manage a choir outing. With
strategic insight, he led his shy, bullet-headed charges to the nearest
woodland stream and allowed them to bathe; then he seated himself on
their discarded garments and discoursed on their immediate future,
which, he decreed, was to embrace a Bacchanalian procession through
the village. Forethought had provided the occasion with a supply of tin
whistles, but the introduction of a he-goat from a neighbouring orchard
was a brilliant afterthought. Properly, Reginald explained, there should

have been an outfit of panther skins; as it was, those who had spotted
handkerchiefs were allowed to wear them, which they did with
thankfulness. Reginald recognised the impossibility, in the time at his
disposal, of teaching his shivering neophytes a chant in honour of
Bacchus, so he started them off with a more familiar, if less appropriate,
temperance hymn. After all, he said, it is the spirit of the thing that
counts. Following the etiquette of dramatic authors on first nights, he
remained discreetly in the background while the procession, with
extreme diffidence and the goat, wound its way lugubriously towards
the village. The singing had died down long before the main street was
reached, but the miserable wailing of pipes brought the inhabitants to
their doors. Reginald said he had seen something like it in pictures; the
villagers had seen nothing like it in their lives, and remarked as much
freely.
Reginald's family never forgave him. They had no sense of humour.

REGINALD ON WORRIES

I have (said Reginald) an aunt who worries. She's not really an aunt--a
sort of amateur one, and they aren't really worries. She is a social
success, and has no domestic tragedies worth speaking of, so she
adopts any decorative sorrows that are going, myself included. In that
way she's the antithesis, or whatever you call it, to those sweet,
uncomplaining women one knows who have seen trouble, and worn
blinkers ever since. Of course, one just loves them for it, but I must
confess they make me uncomfy; they remind one so of a duck that goes
flapping about with forced cheerfulness long after its head's been cut
off. Ducks have NO repose. Now, my aunt has a shade of hair that suits
her, and a cook who quarrels with the other servants, which is always a
hopeful sign, and a conscience that's absentee for about eleven months
of the year, and only turns up at Lent to annoy her husband's people,
who are considerably Lower than the angels, so to speak: with all these
natural advantages--she says her particular tint of bronze is a natural
advantage, and there can be no two opinions as to the advantage--of

course she has to send out for her afflictions, like those restaurants
where they haven't got a licence. The system has this advantage, that
you can fit your unhappinesses in with your other engagements,
whereas real worries have a way of arriving at meal-times, and when
you're dressing, or other solemn moments. I knew a canary once that
had been trying for months and years to hatch out a family, and
everyone looked upon it as a blameless infatuation, like the sale of
Delagoa Bay, which would be an annual loss to the Press agencies if it
ever came to pass; and one day the bird really did bring it off, in the
middle of family prayers. I say the middle, but it was also the end: you
can't go on being thankful for daily bread when you are wondering
what on earth very new canaries expect to be fed on.
At present she's rather in a Balkan state of mind about the treatment of
the Jews in Roumania. Personally, I think the Jews have estimable
qualities; they're so kind to their poor- -and to our rich. I daresay in
Roumania the cost of living beyond one's income isn't so great. Over
here the trouble is that so many people who