The day's play

by A. A. Milne

"I suppose not," I said. "Well, I'll let you have my decision in a few days. The rent with the cupboard, you say, is——" And I named the price.

"Yes, with the cupboard."

So that settled the cupboard question.

Settled it so far as it concerned him. For me it was only the beginning. In the year that followed my eyes were opened, so that I learned at last to put the right value on a cupboard. I appreciate now the power of the mind which conceived this thing, the nobility of the great heart which included it among the fixtures. And I am not ungrateful.

You may tell a newly married man by the way he talks of his garden. The pretence is that he grows things there—verbenas and hymantifilums and cinerarias, anything which sounds; but of course one knows that what he really uses it for is to bury in it things which he doesn't want. Some day I shall have a garden of my own in which to conduct funerals with the best of them; until that day I content myself with my cupboard.

It is marvellous how things lie about and accumulate. Until they are safely in the cupboard we are never quite at ease; they have so much to say outside, and they put themselves just where you want to step, and sometimes they fall on you. Yet even when I have them in the cupboard I am not without moments of regret. For later on I have to open it to introduce companions, and then the sight of some old friend saddens me with the thought of what might have been. "Oh, and I did mean to hang you up over the writing-desk," I say remorsefully.

I am thinking now of a certain picture—a large portrait of my old headmaster. It lay in a corner for months, waiting to be framed, getting more dingy and dirty every day. For the first few weeks I said to myself, "I must clean that before I send it to the shop. A piece of bread will do it." Later, "It's extraordinary how clever these picture people are. You'd think it was hopeless now, but I've no doubt, when I take it round to-morrow——"

A month after that somebody trod on it....

Now, then, I ask you—what could I do with it but put it in the cupboard? You cannot give a large photograph of a headmaster, bent across the waistcoat, to a housekeeper, and tell her that you have finished with it. Nor would a dustman make it his business to collect pedagogues along with the usual cabbage stalks. A married man would have buried it under the begonia; but having no garden....

That is my difficulty. For a bachelor in chambers who cannot bury, there should be some other consuming element than fire. In the winter I might possibly have burnt it is small quantities—Monday the head, Tuesday the watch-chain—but in the summer what does one do with it? And what does one do with the thousands of other things which have had their day—the old magazines, letters, papers, collars, chair legs, broken cups? You may say that, with the co-operation of my housekeeper, a firmer line could be adopted towards some of them. Perhaps so; but, alas! she is a willing accessory to my weakness. I fancy that once, a long time ago, she must have thrown away a priceless MS. in an old waistcoat; now she takes no risks with either. In principle it is a virtue; in practice I think I would chance it.