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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of James Pethel, by Max Beerbohm
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: James Pethel
+
+Author: Max Beerbohm
+
+Posting Date: July 23, 2008 [EBook #759]
+Release Date: December, 1996
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JAMES PETHEL ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Judith Boss.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+James Pethel
+
+
+By
+
+MAX BEERBOHM
+
+
+
+I was shocked this morning when I saw in my newspaper a paragraph
+announcing his sudden death.  I do not say that the shock was very
+disagreeable.  One reads a newspaper for the sake of news.  Had I never
+met James Pethel, belike I should never have heard of him: and my
+knowledge of his death, coincident with my knowledge that he had
+existed, would have meant nothing at all to me.  If you learn suddenly
+that one of your friends is dead, you are wholly distressed.  If the
+death is that of a mere acquaintance whom you have recently seen, you
+are disconcerted, pricked is your sense of mortality; but you do find
+great solace in telling other people that you met "the poor fellow"
+only the other day, and that he was "so full of life and spirits," and
+that you remember he said--whatever you may remember of his sayings.
+If the death is that of a mere acquaintance whom you have not seen for
+years, you are touched so lightly as to find solace enough in even such
+faded reminiscence as is yours to offer.  Seven years have passed since
+the day when last I saw James Pethel, and that day was the morrow of my
+first meeting with him.
+
+I had formed the habit of spending August in Dieppe.  The place was
+then less overrun by trippers than it is now.  Some pleasant English
+people shared it with some pleasant French people.  We used rather to
+resent the race-week--the third week of the month--as an intrusion on
+our privacy.  We sneered as we read in the Paris edition of "The New
+York Herald" the names of the intruders, though by some of these we
+were secretly impressed.  We disliked the nightly crush in the
+baccarat-room of the casino, and the croupiers' obvious excitement at
+the high play.  I made a point of avoiding that room during that week,
+for the special reason that the sight of serious, habitual gamblers has
+always filled me with a depression bordering on disgust.  Most of the
+men, by some subtle stress of their ruling passion, have grown so
+monstrously fat, and most of the women so harrowingly thin.  The rest
+of the women seem to be marked out for apoplexy, and the rest of the
+men to be wasting away.  One feels that anything thrown at them would
+be either embedded or shattered, and looks vainly among them for one
+person furnished with a normal amount of flesh.  Monsters they are, all
+of them, to the eye, though I believe that many of them have excellent
+moral qualities in private life; but just as in an American town one
+goes sooner or later--goes against one's finer judgment, but somehow
+goes--into the dime-museum, so year by year, in Dieppe's race-week,
+there would be always one evening when I drifted into the
+baccarat-room.  It was on such an evening that I first saw the man
+whose memory I here celebrate.  My gaze was held by him for the very
+reason that he would have passed unnoticed elsewhere.  He was
+conspicuous not in virtue of the mere fact that he was taking the bank
+at the principal table, but because there was nothing at all odd about
+him.
+
+He alone, among his fellow-players, looked as if he were not to die
+before the year was out.  Of him alone I said to myself that he was
+destined to die normally at a ripe old age.  Next day, certainly, I
+would not have made this prediction, would not have "given" him the
+seven years that were still in store for him, nor the comparatively
+normal death that has been his.  But now, as I stood opposite to him,
+behind the croupier, I was refreshed by my sense of his wholesome
+durability.  Everything about him, except the amount of money he had
+been winning, seemed moderate.  Just as he was neither fat nor thin, so
+had his face neither that extreme pallor nor that extreme redness which
+belongs to the faces of seasoned gamblers: it was just a clear pink.
+And his eyes had neither the unnatural brightness nor the unnatural
+dullness of the eyes about him: they were ordinarily clear eyes, of an
+ordinary gray.  His very age was moderate: a putative thirty-six, not
+more.  ("Not less," I would have said in those days.) He assumed no air
+of nonchalance.  He did not deal out the cards as though they bored
+him, but he had no look of grim concentration.  I noticed that the
+removal of his cigar from his mouth made never the least difference to
+his face, for he kept his lips pursed out as steadily as ever when he
+was not smoking.  And this constant pursing of his lips seemed to
+denote just a pensive interest.
+
+His bank was nearly done now; there were only a few cards left.
+Opposite to him was a welter of party-colored counters that the
+croupier had not yet had time to sort out and add to the rouleaux
+already made; there were also a fair accumulation of notes and several
+little stacks of gold--in all, not less than five-hundred pounds,
+certainly.  Happy banker!  How easily had he won in a few minutes more
+than I, with utmost pains, could win in many months!  I wished I were
+he.  His lucre seemed to insult me personally.  I disliked him, and yet
+I hoped he would not take another bank.  I hoped he would have the good
+sense to pocket his winnings and go home.  Deliberately to risk the
+loss of all those riches would intensify the insult to me.
+
+"Messieurs, la banque est aux encheres."  There was some brisk bidding
+while the croupier tore open and shuffled two new packs.  But it was as
+I feared: the gentleman whom I resented kept his place.
+
+"Messieurs, la banque est faite.  Quinze-mille francs a la banque.
+Messieurs, les cartes passent.  Messieurs, les cartes passent."
+
+Turning to go, I encountered a friend, one of the race-weekers, but in
+a sense a friend.
+
+"Going to play?" I asked.
+
+"Not while Jimmy Pethel's taking the bank," he answered, with a laugh.
+
+"Is that the man's name?"
+
+"Yes.  Don't you know him?  I thought every one knew old Jimmy Pethel."
+
+I asked what there was so wonderful about "old Jimmy Pethel" that every
+one should be supposed to know him.
+
+"Oh, he's a great character.  Has extraordinary luck--always."
+
+I do not think my friend was versed in the pretty theory that good luck
+is the subconscious wisdom of them who in previous incarnations have
+been consciously wise.  He was a member of the stock exchange, and I
+smiled as at a certain quaintness in his remark.  I asked in what ways
+besides luck the "great character" was manifested.  Oh, well, Pethel
+had made a huge "scoop" on the stock exchange when he was only
+twenty-three, and very soon had doubled that and doubled it again; then
+retired.  He wasn't more than thirty-five now, And then?  Oh, well, he
+was a regular all-round sportsman; had gone after big game all over the
+world and had a good many narrow shaves.  Great steeple-chaser, too.
+Rather settled down now.  Lived in Leicestershire mostly.  Had a big
+place there.  Hunted five times a week.  Still did an occasional
+flutter, though.  Cleared eighty-thousand in Mexicans last February.
+Wife had been a barmaid at Cambridge; married her when he was nineteen.
+Thing seemed to have turned out quite well.  Altogether, a great
+character.
+
+Possibly, thought I.  But my cursory friend, accustomed to quick
+transactions and to things accepted "on the nod," had not proved his
+case to my slower, more literary intelligence.  It was to him, though,
+that I owed, some minutes later, a chance of testing his opinion.  At
+the cry of "Messieurs, la banque est aux encheres," we looked round and
+saw that the subject of our talk was preparing to rise from his place.
+"Now one can punt," said Grierson (this was my friend's name), and
+turned to the bureau at which counters are for sale.  "If old Jimmy
+Pethel punts," he added, "I shall just follow his luck."  But this
+lode-star was not to be.  While my friend was buying his counters, and
+I was wondering whether I, too, could buy some, Pethel himself came up
+to the bureau.  With his lips no longer pursed, he had lost his air of
+gravity, and looked younger.  Behind him was an attendant bearing a big
+wooden bowl--that plain, but romantic, bowl supplied by the
+establishment to a banker whose gains are too great to be pocketed.  He
+and Grierson greeted each other.  He said he had arrived in Dieppe this
+afternoon, was here for a day or two.  We were introduced.  He spoke to
+me with empressement, saying he was a "very great admirer" of my work.
+I no longer disliked him.  Grierson, armed with counters, had now
+darted away to secure a place that had just been vacated.  Pethel, with
+a wave of his hand toward the tables, said:
+
+"I suppose you never condescend to this sort of thing."
+
+"Well--" I smiled indulgently.
+
+"Awful waste of time," he admitted.
+
+I glanced down at the splendid mess of counters and gold and notes that
+were now becoming, under the swift fingers of the little man at the
+bureau, an orderly array.  I did not say aloud that it pleased me to
+be, and to be seen, talking on terms of equality to a man who had won
+so much.  I did not say how wonderful it seemed to me that he, whom I
+had watched just now with awe and with aversion, had all the while been
+a great admirer of my work.  I did but say, again indulgently, that I
+supposed baccarat to be as good a way of wasting time as another.
+
+"Ah, but you despise us all the same."  He added that he always envied
+men who had resources within themselves.  I laughed lightly, to imply
+that it WAS very pleasant to have such resources, but that I didn't
+want to boast.  And, indeed, I had never felt humbler, flimsier, than
+when the little man at the bureau, naming a fabulous sum, asked its
+owner whether he would take the main part in notes of mille francs,
+cinq-mille, dix-mille--quoi? Had it been mine, I should have asked to
+have it all in five-franc pieces.  Pethel took it in the most
+compendious form, and crumpled it into his pocket.  I asked if he were
+going to play any more to-night.
+
+"Oh, later on," he said.  "I want to get a little sea air into my lungs
+now."  He asked, with a sort of breezy diffidence, if I would go with
+him.  I was glad to do so.  It flashed across my mind that yonder on
+the terrace he might suddenly blurt out: "I say, look here, don't think
+me awfully impertinent, but this money's no earthly use to me.  I do
+wish you'd accept it as a very small return for all the pleasure your
+work has given me, and--  There, PLEASE! Not another word!"--all with
+such candor, delicacy, and genuine zeal that I should be unable to
+refuse.  But I must not raise false hopes in my reader.  Nothing of the
+sort happened.  Nothing of that sort ever does happen.
+
+We were not long on the terrace.  It was not a night on which you could
+stroll and talk; there was a wind against which  you had to stagger,
+holding your hat on tightly, and shouting such remarks as might occur
+to you.  Against that wind acquaintance could make no headway.  Yet I
+see now that despite that wind, or, rather, because of it, I ought
+already to have known Pethel a little better than I did when we
+presently sat down together inside the cafe of the casino.  There had
+been a point in our walk, or our stagger, when we paused to lean over
+the parapet, looking down at the black and driven sea.  And Pethel had
+shouted that it would be great fun to be out in a sailing-boat
+to-night, and that at one time he had been very fond of sailing.
+
+As we took our seats in the cafe, he looked about him with boyish
+interest and pleasure; then squaring his arms on the little table, he
+asked me what I would drink.  I protested that I was the host, a
+position which he, with the quick courtesy of the very rich, yielded to
+me at once.  I feared he would ask for champagne, and was gladdened by
+his demand for water.
+
+"Apollinaris, St. Galmier, or what?" I asked.  He preferred plain
+water.  I ventured to warn him that such water was never "safe" in
+these places.  He said he had often heard that, but would risk it.  I
+remonstrated, but he was firm.  "Alors," I told the waiter, "pour
+Monsieur un verre de l'eau fraiche, et pour moi un demi blonde."
+
+Pethel asked me to tell him who every one was.  I told him no one was
+any one in particular, and suggested that we should talk about
+ourselves.
+
+"You mean," he laughed, "that you want to know who the devil I am?"
+
+I assured him that I had often heard of him.  At this he was
+unaffectedly pleased.
+
+"But," I added, "it's always more interesting to hear a man talked
+about by himself."  And indeed, since he had NOT handed his winnings
+over to me, I did hope he would at any rate give me some glimpses into
+that "great character" of his.  Full though his life had been, he
+seemed but like a rather clever schoolboy out on a holiday.  I wanted
+to know more.
+
+"That beer looks good," he admitted when the waiter came back.  I asked
+him to change his mind, but he shook his head, raised to his lips the
+tumbler of water that had been placed before him, and meditatively
+drank a deep draft.  "I never," he then said, "touch alcohol of any
+sort." He looked solemn; but all men do look solemn when they speak of
+their own habits, whether positive or negative, and no matter how
+trivial; and so, though I had really no warrant for not supposing him a
+reclaimed drunkard, I dared ask him for what reason he abstained.
+
+"When I say I NEVER touch alcohol," he said hastily, in a tone as of
+self-defense, "I mean that I don't touch it often, or, at any
+rate--well, I never touch it when I'm gambling, you know.  It--it takes
+the edge off."
+
+His tone did make me suspicious.  For a moment I wondered whether he
+had married the barmaid rather for what she symbolized than for what in
+herself she was.  But no, surely not; he had been only nineteen years
+old.  Nor in any way had he now, this steady, brisk, clear-eyed fellow,
+the aspect of one who had since fallen.
+
+"The edge off the excitement?" I asked.
+
+"Rather.  Of course that sort of excitement seems awfully stupid to
+YOU; but--no use denying it--I do like a bit of a flutter, just
+occasionally, you know.  And one has to be in trim for it.  Suppose a
+man sat down dead-drunk to a game of chance, what fun would it be for
+him?  None.  And it's only a question of degree.  Soothe yourself ever
+so little with alcohol, and you don't get QUITE the full sensation of
+gambling.  You do lose just a little something of the proper tremors
+before a coup, the proper throes during a coup, the proper thrill of
+joy or anguish after a coup.  You're bound to, you know," he added,
+purposely making this bathos when he saw me smiling at the heights to
+which he had risen.
+
+"And to-night," I asked, remembering his prosaically pensive demeanor
+in taking the bank, "were you feeling these throes and thrills to the
+utmost?"
+
+
+He nodded.
+
+"And you'll feel them again to-night?"
+
+"I hope so."
+
+"I wonder you can stay away."
+
+"Oh, one gets a bit deadened after an hour or so.  One needs to be
+freshened up.  So long as I don't bore you--"
+
+I laughed, and held out my cigarette-case.
+
+"I rather wonder you smoke," I murmured, after giving him a light.
+"Nicotine's a sort of drug.  Doesn't it soothe you?  Don't you lose
+just a little something of the tremors and things?"
+
+He looked at me gravely.
+
+"By Jove!" he ejaculated, "I never thought of that.  Perhaps you're
+right.  'Pon my word, I must think that over."
+
+I wondered whether he were secretly laughing at me.  Here was a man to
+whom--so I conceived, with an effort of the imagination--the loss or
+gain of a few hundred pounds could hardly matter.  I told him I had
+spoken in jest.  "To give up tobacco might," I said, "intensify the
+pleasant agonies of a gambler staking his little all.  But in your
+case--well, I don't see where the pleasant agonies come in."
+
+"You mean because I'm beastly rich?"
+
+"Rich," I amended.
+
+"All depends on what you call rich.  Besides, I'm not the sort of
+fellow who's content with three per cent.  A couple of months ago--I
+tell you this in confidence--I risked virtually all I had in an
+Argentine deal."
+
+"And lost it?"
+
+"No; as a matter of fact, I made rather a good thing out of it.  I did
+rather well last February, too.  But there's no knowing the future.  A
+few errors of judgment, a war here, a revolution there, a big strike
+somewhere else, and--" He blew a jet of smoke from his lips, and then
+looked at me as at one whom he could trust to feel for him in a crash
+already come.
+
+My sympathy lagged, and I stuck to the point of my inquiry.
+
+"Meanwhile," I suggested, "and all the more because you aren't merely a
+rich man, but also an active taker of big risks, how can these tiny
+little baccarat risks give you so much emotion?"
+
+"There you rather have me," he laughed.  "I've often wondered at that
+myself.  I suppose," he puzzled it out, "I do a good lot of
+make-believe.  While I'm playing a game like this game to-night, I
+IMAGINE the stakes are huge.  And I IMAGINE I haven't another penny in
+the world."
+
+"Ah, so that with you it's always a life-and-death affair?"
+
+He looked away.
+
+"Oh, no, I don't say that."
+
+"Stupid phrase," I admitted.  "But"--there was yet one point I would
+put to him--"if you have extraordinary luck always--"
+
+"There's no such thing as luck."
+
+"No, strictly, I suppose, there isn't.  But if in point of fact you
+always do win, then--well, surely, perfect luck driveth out fear."
+
+"Who ever said I always won?" he asked sharply.
+
+I waved my hands and said, "Oh, you have the reputation, you know, for
+extraordinary luck."
+
+"That isn't the same thing as always winning.  Besides, I HAVEN'T
+extraordinary luck, never HAVE had.  Good heavens!" he exclaimed, "if I
+thought I had any more chance of winning than of losing, I'd--I'd--"
+
+"Never again set foot in that baccarat-room to-night," I soothingly
+suggested.
+
+"Oh, baccarat be blowed!  I wasn't thinking of baccarat.  I was
+thinking of--oh, lots of things; baccarat included, yes."
+
+"What things?" I ventured to ask.
+
+"What things?"  He pushed back his chair.  "Look here," he said with a
+laugh, "don't pretend I haven't been boring your head off with all this
+talk about myself.  You've been too patient.  I'm off.  Shall I see you
+to-morrow?  Perhaps you'd lunch with us to-morrow?  It would be a great
+pleasure for my wife.  We're at the Grand Hotel."
+
+I said I should be most happy, and called the waiter; at sight of whom
+my friend said he had talked himself thirsty, and asked for another
+glass of water.  He mentioned that he had brought his car over with
+him: his little daughter (by the news of whose existence I felt
+idiotically surprised) was very keen on motoring, and they were all
+three starting the day after to-morrow on a little tour through France.
+Afterward they were going on to Switzerland "for some climbing."  Did I
+care about motoring?  If so, we might go for a spin after luncheon, to
+Rouen or somewhere.  He drank his glass of water, and, linking a
+friendly arm in mine, passed out with me into the corridor.  He asked
+what I was writing now, and said that he looked to me to "do something
+big one of these days," and that he was sure I had it in me.  This
+remark, though of course I pretended to be pleased by it, irritated me
+very much.  It was destined, as you shall see, to irritate me very much
+more in recollection.
+
+Yet I was glad he had asked me to luncheon--glad because I liked him
+and glad because I dislike mysteries.  Though you may think me very
+dense for not having thoroughly understood Pethel in the course of my
+first meeting with him, the fact is that I was only aware, and that
+dimly, of something more in him than he had cared to reveal--some veil
+behind which perhaps lurked his right to the title so airily bestowed
+on him by Grierson.  I assured myself, as I walked home, that if veil
+there was, I should to-morrow find an eyelet.  But one's intuition when
+it is off duty seems always a much more powerful engine than it does on
+active service; and next day, at sight of Pethel awaiting me outside
+his hotel, I became less confident.  His, thought I, was a face which,
+for all its animation, would tell nothing--nothing, at any rate, that
+mattered.  It expressed well enough that he was pleased to see me; but
+for the rest I was reminded that it had a sort of frank inscrutability.
+Besides, it was at all points so very usual a face--a face that
+couldn't (so I then thought), even if it had leave to, betray
+connection with a "great character."  It was a strong face, certainly;
+but so are yours and mine.
+
+And very fresh it looked, though, as he confessed, Pethel had sat up in
+"that beastly baccarat-room" till five A.M.  I asked, had he lost?
+Yes, he had lost steadily for four hours (proudly he laid stress on
+this), but in the end--well, he had won it all back "and a bit more."
+"By the way," he murmured as we were about to enter the hall, "don't
+ever happen to mention to my wife what I told you about that Argentine
+deal.  She's always rather nervous about--investments.  I don't tell
+her about them.  She's rather a nervous woman altogether, I'm sorry to
+say."
+
+This did not square with my preconception of her.  Slave that I am to
+traditional imagery, I had figured her as "flaunting," as
+golden-haired, as haughty to most men, but with a provocative smile
+across the shoulder for some.  Nor, indeed, did her husband's words
+save me the suspicion that my eyes deceived me when anon I was
+presented to a very pale, small lady whose hair was rather white than
+gray.  And the "little daughter!"  This prodigy's hair was as yet
+"down," but looked as if it might be up at any moment: she was nearly
+as tall as her father, whom she very much resembled in face and figure
+and heartiness of hand-shake.  Only after a rapid mental calculation
+could I account for her.
+
+"I must warn you, she's in a great rage this morning," said her father.
+"Do try to soothe her."  She blushed, laughed, and bade her father not
+be so silly.  I asked her the cause of her great rage.  She said:
+
+"He only means I was disappointed.  And he was just as disappointed as
+I was.  WEREN'T you, now, Father?"
+
+"I suppose they meant well, Peggy," he laughed.
+
+"They were QUITE right," said Mrs. Pethel, evidently not for the first
+time.
+
+"They," as I presently learned, were the authorities of the
+bathing-establishment.  Pethel had promised his daughter he would take
+her for a swim; but on their arrival at the bathing-cabins they were
+ruthlessly told that bathing was defendu a cause du mauvais temps.
+This embargo was our theme as we sat down to luncheon.  Miss Peggy was
+of opinion that the French were cowards.  I pleaded for them that even
+in English watering-places bathing was forbidden when the sea was VERY
+rough.  She did not admit that the sea was very rough to-day.  Besides,
+she appealed to me, where was the fun of swimming in absolutely calm
+water?  I dared not say that this was the only sort of water I liked to
+swim in.
+
+"They were QUITE right," said Mrs. Pethel again.
+
+"Yes, but, darling Mother, you can't swim.  Father and I are both
+splendid swimmers."
+
+To gloss over the mother's disability, I looked brightly at Pethel, as
+though in ardent recognition of his prowess among waves.  With a
+movement of his head he indicated his daughter--indicated that there
+was no one like her in the whole world.  I beamed agreement.  Indeed, I
+did think her rather nice.  If one liked the father (and I liked Pethel
+all the more in that capacity), one couldn't help liking the daughter,
+the two were so absurdly alike.  Whenever he was looking at her (and it
+was seldom that he looked away from her), the effect, if you cared to
+be fantastic, was that of a very vain man before a mirror.  It might
+have occurred to me that, if there was any mystery in him, I could
+solve it through her.  But, in point of fact, I had forgotten all about
+that possible mystery.  The amateur detective was lost in the
+sympathetic observer of a father's love.  That Pethel did love his
+daughter I have never doubted.  One passion is not less true because
+another predominates.  No one who ever saw that father with that
+daughter could doubt that he loved her intensely.  And this intensity
+gages for me the strength of what else was in him.
+
+Mrs. Pethel's love, though less explicit, was not less evidently
+profound.  But the maternal instinct is less attractive to an onlooker,
+because he takes it more for granted than the paternal.  What endeared
+poor Mrs. Pethel to me was--well, the inevitability of the epithet I
+give her.  She seemed, poor thing, so essentially out of it; and by
+"it" is meant the glowing mutual affinity of husband and child.  Not
+that she didn't, in her little way, assert herself during the meal.
+But she did so, I thought, with the knowledge that she didn't count,
+and never would count.  I wondered how it was that she had, in that
+Cambridge bar-room long ago, counted for Pethel to the extent of
+matrimony.  But from any such room she seemed so utterly remote that
+she might well be in all respects now an utterly changed woman.  She
+did preeminently look as if much had by some means been taken out of
+her, with no compensatory process of putting in.  Pethel looked so very
+young for his age, whereas she would have had to be really old to look
+young for hers.  I pitied her as one might a governess with two charges
+who were hopelessly out of hand.  But a governess, I reflected, can
+always give notice.  Love tied poor Mrs. Pethel fast to her present
+situation.
+
+As the three of them were to start next day on their tour through
+France, and as the four of us were to make a tour to Rouen this
+afternoon, the talk was much about motoring, a theme which Miss Peggy's
+enthusiasm made almost tolerable.  I said to Mrs. Pethel, with more
+good-will than truth, that I supposed she was "very keen on it."  She
+replied that she was.
+
+"But, darling Mother, you aren't.  I believe you hate it.  You're
+ALWAYS asking father to go slower.  And what IS the fun of just
+crawling along?"
+
+"Oh, come, Peggy, we never crawl!" said her father.
+
+"No, indeed," said her mother in a tone of which Pethel laughingly said
+it would put me off coming out with them this afternoon.  I said, with
+an expert air to reassure Mrs. Pethel, that it wasn't fast driving, but
+only bad driving, that was a danger.
+
+"There, Mother!" cried Peggy.  "Isn't that what we're always telling
+you?"
+
+I felt that they were always either telling Mrs. Pethel something or,
+as in the matter of that intended bath, not telling her something.  It
+seemed to me possible that Peggy advised her father about his
+"investments."  I wondered whether they had yet told Mrs. Pethel of
+their intention to go on to Switzerland for some climbing.
+
+Of his secretiveness for his wife's sake I had a touching little
+instance after luncheon.  We had adjourned to have coffee in front of
+the hotel.  The car was already in attendance, and Peggy had darted off
+to make her daily inspection of it.  Pethel had given me a cigar, and
+his wife presently noticed that he himself was not smoking.  He
+explained to her that he thought he had smoked too much lately, and
+that he was going to "knock it off" for a while.  I would not have
+smiled if he had met my eye, but his avoidance of it made me quite sure
+that he really had been "thinking over" what I had said last night
+about nicotine and its possibly deleterious action on the gambling
+thrill.
+
+Mrs. Pethel saw the smile that I could not repress.  I explained that I
+was wishing _I_ could knock off tobacco, and envying her husband's
+strength of character.  She smiled, too, but wanly, with her eyes on
+him.
+
+"Nobody has so much strength of character as he has," she said.
+
+"Nonsense!" he laughed.  "I'm the weakest of men."
+
+"Yes," she said quietly; "that's true, too, James."
+
+Again he laughed, but he flushed.  I saw that Mrs. Pethel also had
+faintly flushed, and I became horribly aware of following suit.  In the
+sudden glow and silence created by Mrs. Pethel's paradox, I was
+grateful to the daughter for bouncing back among us, and asking how
+soon we should be ready to start.
+
+Pethel looked at his wife, who looked at me and rather strangely asked
+if I was sure I wanted to go with them.  I protested that of course I
+did.  Pethel asked her if SHE really wanted to come.
+
+"You see, dear, there was the run yesterday from Calais.  And to-morrow
+you'll be on the road again, and all the days after."
+
+"Yes," said Peggy; "I'm SURE you'd much rather stay at home, darling
+Mother, and have a good rest."
+
+"Shall we go and put on our things, Peggy?" replied Mrs. Pethel, rising
+from her chair.  She asked her husband whether he was taking the
+chauffeur with him.  He said he thought not.
+
+"Oh, hurrah!" cried Peggy.  "Then I can be on the front seat!"
+
+"No, dear," said her mother.  "I am sure Mr. Beerbohms would like to be
+on the front seat."
+
+"You'd like to be with mother, wouldn't you?" the girl appealed.  I
+replied with all possible emphasis that I should like to be with Mrs.
+Pethel.  But presently, when the mother and daughter reappeared in the
+guise of motorists, it became clear that my aspiration had been set
+aside.  "I am to be with mother," said Peggy.
+
+I was inwardly glad that Mrs. Pethel could, after all, assert herself
+to some purpose.  Had I thought she disliked me, I should have been
+hurt; but I was sure her desire that I should not sit with her was due
+merely to a belief that, in case of accident, a person on the front
+seat was less safe than a person behind.  And of course I did not
+expect her to prefer my life  to her daughter's.  Poor lady!  My heart
+was with her.  As the car glided along the sea-front and then under the
+Norman archway, through the town, and past the environs, I wished that
+her husband inspired in her as much confidence as he did in me.  For me
+the sight of his clear, firm profile (he did not wear motor-goggles)
+was an assurance in itself.  From time to time (for I, too, was
+ungoggled) I looked round to nod and smile cheerfully at his wife.  She
+always returned the nod, but left the smile to be returned by the
+daughter.
+
+Pethel, like the good driver he was, did not talk; just drove.  But as
+we came out on to the Rouen road he did say that in France he always
+rather missed the British police-traps.  "Not," he added, "that I've
+ever fallen into one.  But the chance that a policeman MAY at any
+moment dart out, and land you in a bit of a scrape does rather add to
+the excitement, don't you think?"  Though I answered in the tone of one
+to whom the chance of a police-trap is the very salt of life, I did not
+inwardly like the spirit of his remark.  However, I dismissed it from
+my mind.  The sun was shining, and the wind had dropped: it was an
+ideal day for motoring, and the Norman landscape had never looked
+lovelier to me in its width of sober and silvery grace.
+
+
+*The other names in this memoir are, for good reason, pseudonyms.
+
+
+I presently felt that this landscape was not, after all, doing itself
+full justice.  Was it not rushing rather too quickly past?  "James!"
+said a shrill, faint voice from behind, and gradually--"Oh, darling
+Mother, really!" protested another voice--the landscape slackened pace.
+But after a while, little by little, the landscape lost patience,
+forgot its good manners, and flew faster and faster than before.  The
+road rushed furiously beneath us, like a river in spate.  Avenues of
+poplars flashed past us, every tree of them on each side hissing and
+swishing angrily in the draft we made.  Motors going Rouen-ward seemed
+to be past as quickly as motors that bore down on us.  Hardly had I
+espied in the landscape ahead a chateau or other object of interest
+before I was craning my neck round for a final glimpse of it as it
+faded on the backward horizon.  An endless uphill road was breasted and
+crested in a twinkling and transformed into a decline near the end of
+which our car leaped straight across to the opposite ascent,
+and--"James!" again, and again by degrees the laws of nature were
+reestablished, but again by degrees revoked.  I did not doubt that
+speed in itself was no danger; but, when the road was about to make a
+sharp curve, why shouldn't Pethel, just as a matter of form, slow down
+slightly, and sound a note or two of the hooter?  Suppose another car
+were--well, that was all right: the road was clear; but at the next
+turning, when our car neither slackened nor hooted and WAS for an
+instant full on the wrong side of the road, I had within me a
+contraction which (at thought of what must have been if--) lasted
+though all was well.  Loath to betray fear, I hadn't turned my face to
+Pethel.  Eyes front!  And how about that wagon ahead, huge hay-wagon
+plodding with its back to us, seeming to occupy whole road?  Surely
+Pethel would slacken, hoot.  No.  Imagine a needle threaded with one
+swift gesture from afar.  Even so was it that we shot, between wagon
+and road's-edge, through; whereon, confronting us within a few
+yards--inches now, but we swerved--was a cart that incredibly we grazed
+not as we rushed on, on.  Now indeed I had turned my eyes on Pethel's
+profile; and my eyes saw there that which stilled, with a greater
+emotion, all fear and wonder in me.
+
+I think that for the first instant, oddly, what I felt was merely
+satisfaction, not hatred; for I all but asked him whether, by not
+smoking to-day, he had got a keener edge to his thrills.  I understood
+him, and for an instant this sufficed me.  Those pursed-out lips, so
+queerly different from the compressed lips of the normal motorist, and
+seeming, as elsewhere last night, to denote no more than pensive
+interest, had told me suddenly all that I needed to know about Pethel.
+Here, as there,--and, oh, ever so much better here than there!--he
+could gratify the passion that was in him.  No need of any
+"make-believe" here.  I remembered the queer look he had given when I
+asked if his gambling were always "a life-and-death affair."  Here was
+the real thing, the authentic game, for the highest stakes.  And here
+was I, a little extra stake tossed on to the board. He had vowed I had
+it in me to do "something big."  Perhaps, though, there had been a
+touch of make-believe about that.  I am afraid it was not before my
+thought about myself that my moral sense began to operate and my hatred
+of Pethel set in.  Put it to my credit that I did see myself as a mere
+detail in his villainy.  You deprecate the word "villainy"?  Understand
+all, forgive all?  No doubt.  But between the acts of understanding and
+forgiving an interval may sometimes be condoned.  Condone it in this
+instance.  Even at the time I gave Pethel due credit for risking his
+own life, for having doubtless risked it--it and none other--again and
+again in the course of his adventurous (and abstemious) life by field
+and flood.  I was even rather touched by memory of his insistence last
+night on another glass of that water which just MIGHT give him typhoid;
+rather touched by memory of his unsaying that he "never" touched
+alcohol--he who, in point of fact, had to be ALWAYS gambling on
+something or other.  I gave him due credit, too, for his devotion to
+his daughter.  But his use of that devotion, his cold use of it to
+secure for himself the utmost thrill of hazard, did seem utterly
+abominable to me.
+
+And it was even more for the mother than for the daughter that I was
+incensed.  That daughter did not know him, did but innocently share his
+damnable love of chances; but that wife had for years known him at
+least as well as I knew him now.  Here again I gave him credit for
+wishing, though he didn't love her, to spare her what he could.  That
+he didn't love her I presumed from his indubitable willingness not to
+stake her in this afternoon's game.  That he never had loved her--had
+taken her in his precocious youth simply as a gigantic chance against
+him, was likely enough.  So much the more credit to him for such
+consideration as he showed her, though this was little enough.  He
+could wish to save her from being a looker-on at his game, but he
+could--he couldn't not--go on playing.  Assuredly she was right in
+deeming him at once the strongest and the weakest of men.  "Rather a
+nervous woman!"  I remembered an engraving that had hung in my room at
+Oxford, and in scores of other rooms there: a presentment by Sir Marcus
+(then Mr.) Stone of a very pretty young person in a Gainsborough hat,
+seated beneath an ancestral elm, looking as though she were about to
+cry, and entitled "A Gambler's Wife."  Mrs. Pethel was not like that.
+Of her there were no engravings for undergraduate hearts to melt at.
+But there was one man, certainly, whose compassion was very much at her
+service.  How was he going to help her?
+
+I know not how many hair's-breadth escapes we may have had while these
+thoughts passed through my brain.  I had closed my eyes.  So
+preoccupied was I that but for the constant rush of air against my face
+I might, for aught I knew, have been sitting ensconced in an armchair
+at home.  After a while I was aware that this rush had abated; I opened
+my eyes to the old familiar streets of Rouen.  We were to have tea at
+the Hotel d'Angleterre.  What was to be my line of action?  Should I
+take Pethel aside and say: "Swear to me, on your word of honor as a
+gentleman, that you will never again touch the driving-gear, or
+whatever you call it, of a motor-car.  Otherwise, I shall expose you to
+the world.  Meanwhile, we shall return to Dieppe by train"?  He might
+flush (for I knew him capable of flushing) as he asked me to explain.
+And after?  He would laugh in my face.  He would advise me not to go
+motoring any more.  He might even warn me not to go back to Dieppe in
+one of those dangerous railway-trains.  He might even urge me to wait
+until a nice Bath chair had been sent out for me from England.
+
+I heard a voice (mine, alas!) saying brightly, "Well, here we are!"  I
+helped the ladies to descend.  Tea was ordered.  Pethel refused that
+stimulant and had a glass of water.  I had a liqueur brandy.  It was
+evident to me that tea meant much to Mrs. Pethel.  She looked stronger
+after her second cup, and younger after her third.  Still, it was my
+duty to help her if I could.  While I talked and laughed, I did not
+forget that.  But what on earth was I to do?  I am no hero.  I hate to
+be ridiculous.  I am inveterately averse to any sort of fuss.  Besides,
+how was I to be sure that my own personal dread of the return journey
+hadn't something to do with my intention of tackling Pethel?  I rather
+thought it had.  What this woman would dare daily because she was a
+mother could not I dare once?  I reminded myself of this man's
+reputation for invariable luck.  I reminded myself that he was an
+extraordinarily skilful driver.  To that skill and luck I would pin my
+faith.
+
+What I seem to myself, do you ask of me?
+
+But I answered your question a few lines back.  Enough that my faith
+was rewarded: we did arrive safely in Dieppe.  I still marvel that we
+did.
+
+That evening, in the vestibule of the casino, Grierson came up to me.
+
+"Seen Jimmy Pethel?" he asked.  "He was asking for you.  Wants to see
+you particularly.  He's in the baccarat-room, punting, winning hand
+over fist, OF course.  Said he'd seldom met a man he liked more than
+you.  Great character, what?"
+
+One is always glad to be liked, and I pleaded guilty to a moment's
+gratification at the announcement that Pethel liked me.  But I did not
+go and seek him in the baccarat-room.  A great character assuredly he
+was, but of a kind with which (I say it at the risk of seeming
+priggish) I prefer not to associate.
+
+Why he had particularly wanted to see me was made clear in a note sent
+by him to my room early next morning.  He wondered if I could be
+induced to join them in their little tour.  He hoped I wouldn't think
+it great cheek, his asking me.  He thought it might rather amuse me to
+come.  It would be a very great pleasure to his wife.  He hoped I
+wouldn't say no.  Would I send a line by bearer?  They would be
+starting at three o'clock.  He was mine sincerely.
+
+It was not too late to tackle him even now.  Should I go round to his
+hotel?  I hesitated and--well, I told you at the outset that my last
+meeting with him was on the morrow of my first.  I forget what I wrote
+to him, but am sure that the excuse I made for myself was a good and
+graceful one, and that I sent my kindest regards to Mrs. Pethel.  She
+had not (I am sure of that, too) authorized her husband to say she
+would like me to come with them.  Else would not the thought of her,
+the pity of her, have haunted me, as it did for a very long time.  I do
+not know whether she is still alive.  No mention is made of her in the
+obituary notice which awoke these memories in me.  This notice I will,
+however, transcribe, because it is, for all its crudeness of
+phraseology, rather interesting both as an echo and as an
+amplification.  Its title is "Death of Wealthy Aviator," and its text
+is:
+
+
+Wide-spread regret will be felt in Leicestershire at the tragic death
+of Mr. James Pethel, who had long resided there and was very popular as
+an all-round sportsman.  In recent years he had been much interested in
+aviation, and had had a private aerodrome erected on his property.
+Yesterday afternoon he fell down dead quite suddenly as he was
+returning to his house, apparently in his usual health and spirits,
+after descending from a short flight which despite a strong wind he had
+made on a new type of aeroplane, and on which he was accompanied by his
+married daughter and her infant son.  It is not expected that an
+inquest will be necessary, as his physician, Dr. Saunders, has
+certified death to be due to heart-disease, from which, it appears, the
+deceased gentleman had been suffering for many years.  Dr. Saunders
+adds that he had repeatedly warned deceased that any strain on the
+nervous system might prove fatal.
+
+
+Thus--for I presume that his ailment had its origin in his
+habits--James Pethel did not, despite that merely pensive look of his,
+live his life with impunity.  And by reason of that life he died.  As
+for the manner of his death, enough that he did die.  Let not our
+hearts be vexed that his great luck was with him to the end.
+
+
+
+
+[Transcriber's Note: I have closed contractions in the text; e.g.,
+"does n't" has become "doesn't" etc.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of James Pethel, by Max Beerbohm
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+
+
+
+
+James Pethel
+
+
+By MAX BEERBOHM
+
+
+
+
+
+I WAS shocked this morning when I saw in my newspaper a paragraph
+announcing his sudden death.  I do not say that the shock was very
+disagreeable.  One reads a newspaper for the sake of news.  Had I never
+met James Pethel, belike I should never have heard of him: and my
+knowledge of his death, coincident with my knowledge that he had
+existed, would have meant nothing at all to me.  If you learn suddenly
+that one of your friends is dead, you are wholly distressed.  If the death is
+that of a mere acquaintance whom you have recently seen, you are
+disconcerted, pricked is your sense of mortality; but you do find great
+solace in telling other people that you met "the poor fellow" only the
+other day, and that he was "so full of life and spirits," and that you
+remember he said--whatever you may remember of his sayings.  If the
+death is that of a mere acquaintance whom you have not seen for years,
+you are touched so lightly as to find solace enough in even such faded
+reminiscence as is yours to offer.  Seven years have passed since the day
+when last I saw James Pethel, and that day was the morrow of my first
+meeting with him.
+
+I had formed the habit of spending August in Dieppe.  The place
+was then less overrun by trippers than it is now.  Some pleasant English
+people shared it with some pleasant French people.  We used rather to
+resent the race-week--the third week of the month--as an intrusion on our
+privacy.  We sneered as we read in the Paris edition of "The New York
+Herald" the names of the intruders, though by some of these we were
+secretly impressed.  We disliked the nightly crush in the baccarat-room of
+the casino, and the croupiers' obvious excitement at the high play.  I
+made a point of avoiding that room during that week, for the special
+reason that the sight of serious, habitual gamblers has always filled me
+with a depression bordering on disgust.  Most of the men, by some subtle
+stress of their ruling passion, have grown so monstrously fat, and most of
+the women so harrowingly thin.  The rest of the women seem to be
+marked out for apoplexy, and the rest of the men to be wasting away.
+One feels that anything thrown at them would be either embedded or
+shattered, and looks vainly among them for one person furnished with a
+normal amount of flesh.  Monsters they are, all of them, to the eye,
+though I believe that many of them have excellent moral qualities in
+private life; but just as in an American town one goes sooner or
+later--goes against one's finer judgment, but somehow goes--into the
+dime-museum, so year by year, in Dieppe's race-week, there would be
+always one evening when I drifted into the baccarat-room.  It was on
+such an evening that I first saw the man whose memory I here celebrate. 
+My gaze was held by him for the very reason that he would have passed
+unnoticed elsewhere.  He was conspicuous not in virtue of the mere fact
+that he was taking the bank at the principal table, but because there was
+nothing at all odd about him.
+
+He alone, among his fellow-players, looked as if he were not to die
+before the year was out.  Of him alone I said to myself that he was
+destined to die normally at a ripe old age.  Next day, certainly, I would
+not have made this prediction, would not have "given" him the seven
+years that were still in store for him, nor the comparatively normal death
+that has been his.  But now, as I stood opposite to him, behind the
+croupier, I was refreshed by my sense of his wholesome durability.
+Everything about him, except the amount of money he had been winning,
+seemed moderate.  Just as he was neither fat nor thin, so had his face
+neither that extreme pallor nor that extreme redness which belongs to the
+faces of seasoned gamblers: it was just a clear pink.  And his eyes had
+neither the unnatural brightness nor the unnatural dullness of the eyes
+about him: they were ordinarily clear eyes, of an ordinary gray.  His very
+age was moderate: a putative thirty-six, not more.  ("Not less," I would
+have said in those days.) He assumed no air of nonchalance.  He did not
+deal out the cards as though they bored him, but he had no look of grim
+concentration.  I noticed that the removal of his cigar from his mouth
+made never the least difference to his face, for he kept his lips pursed out
+as steadily as ever when he was not smoking.  And this constant pursing
+of his lips seemed to denote just a pensive interest.
+
+His bank was nearly done now; there were only a few cards left.
+Opposite to him was a welter of party-colored counters that the croupier
+had not yet had time to sort out and add to the rouleaux already made;
+there were also a fair accumulation of notes and several little stacks of
+gold--in all, not less than five-hundred pounds, certainly.  Happy banker!
+How easily had he won in a few minutes more than I, with utmost pains,
+could win in many months!  I wished I were he.  His lucre seemed to
+insult me personally.  I disliked him, and yet I hoped he would not take
+another bank.  I hoped he would have the good sense to pocket his
+winnings and go home.  Deliberately to risk the loss of all those riches
+would intensify the insult to me.
+
+"Messieurs, la banque est aux encheres."  There was some
+brisk bidding while the croupier tore open and shuffled two new packs.
+But it was as I feared: the gentleman whom I resented kept his place.
+
+"Messieurs, la banque est faite.  Quinze-mille francs a la
+banque.  Messieurs, les cartes passent.  Messieurs, les cartes passent."
+
+Turning to go, I encountered a friend, one of the race-weekers, but
+in a sense a friend.
+
+"Going to play?" I asked.
+
+"Not while Jimmy Pethel's taking the bank," he answered, with a
+laugh.
+
+"Is that the man's name?"
+
+"Yes.  Don't you know him?  I thought every one knew old Jimmy
+Pethel."
+
+I asked what there was so wonderful about "old Jimmy Pethel" that
+every one should be supposed to know him.
+
+"Oh, he's a great character.  Has extraordinary luck--always."
+
+I do not think my friend was versed in the pretty theory that good
+luck is the subconscious wisdom of them who in previous incarnations
+have been consciously wise.  He was a member of the stock exchange,
+and I smiled as at a certain quaintness in his remark.  I asked in what
+ways besides luck the "great character" was manifested.  Oh, well, Pethel
+had made a huge "scoop" on the stock exchange when he was only
+twenty-three, and very soon had doubled that and doubled it again; then
+retired.  He wasn't more than thirty-five now, And then?  Oh,
+well, he was a regular all-round sportsman; had gone after big game all
+over the world and had a good many narrow shaves.  Great
+steeple-chaser, too.  Rather settled down now.  Lived in Leicestershire
+mostly.  Had a big place there.  Hunted five times a week.  Still did an
+occasional flutter, though.  Cleared eighty-thousand in Mexicans last
+February.  Wife had been a barmaid at Cambridge; married her when he
+was nineteen.  Thing seemed to have turned out quite well.  Altogether, a
+great character.
+
+Possibly, thought I.  But my cursory friend, accustomed to quick
+transactions and to things accepted "on the nod," had not proved his case
+to my slower, more literary intelligence.  It was to him, though, that I
+owed, some minutes later, a chance of testing his opinion.  At the cry of
+"Messieurs, la banque est aux encheres," we looked round and
+saw that the subject of our talk was preparing to rise from his place.
+"Now one can punt," said Grierson (this was my friend's name), and
+turned to the bureau at which counters are for sale.  "If old Jimmy Pethel
+punts," he added, "I shall just follow his luck."  But this lode-star was not
+to be.  While my friend was buying his counters, and I was wondering
+whether I, too, could buy some, Pethel himself came up to the bureau.
+With his lips no longer pursed, he had lost his air of gravity, and looked
+younger.  Behind him was an attendant bearing a big wooden bowl--that
+plain, but romantic, bowl supplied by the establishment to a banker
+whose gains are too great to be pocketed.  He and Grierson greeted each
+other.  He said he had arrived in Dieppe this afternoon, was here for a
+day or two.  We were introduced.  He spoke to me with
+empressement, saying he was a "very great admirer" of my work.
+I no longer disliked him.  Grierson, armed with counters, had now darted
+away to secure a place that had just been vacated.  Pethel, with a wave of
+his hand toward the tables, said:
+
+"I suppose you never condescend to this sort of thing."
+
+"Well--" I smiled indulgently.
+
+"Awful waste of time," he admitted.
+
+I glanced down at the splendid mess of counters and gold and notes
+that were now becoming, under the swift fingers of the little man at the
+bureau, an orderly array.  I did not say aloud that it pleased me to be, and
+to be seen, talking on terms of equality to a man who had won so much. 
+I did not say how wonderful it seemed to me that he, whom I had
+watched just now with awe and with aversion, had all the while been a
+great admirer of my work.  I did but say, again indulgently, that I
+supposed baccarat to be as good a way of wasting time as another.
+
+"Ah, but you despise us all the same."  He added that he always
+envied men who had resources within themselves.  I laughed lightly, to
+imply that it WAS very pleasant to have such resources, but that I
+didn't want to boast.  And, indeed, I had never felt humbler, flimsier, than
+when the little man at the bureau, naming a fabulous sum, asked its
+owner whether he would take the main part in notes of mille francs,
+cinq-mille, dix-mille--quoi? Had it been mine, I should have asked to
+have it all in five-franc pieces.  Pethel took it in the most compendious
+form, and crumpled it into his pocket.  I asked if he were going to play
+any more to-night.
+
+"Oh, later on," he said.  "I want to get a little sea air into my lungs
+now."  He asked, with a sort of breezy diffidence, if I would go with him.
+I was glad to do so.  It flashed across my mind that yonder on the terrace
+he might suddenly blurt out: "I say, look here, don't think me awfully
+impertinent, but this money's no earthly use to me.  I do wish you'd
+accept it as a very small return for all the pleasure your work has given
+me, and-- There, PLEASE! Not another word!"--all with such
+candor, delicacy, and genuine zeal that I should be unable to refuse.  But
+I must not raise false hopes in my reader.  Nothing of the sort happened.
+Nothing of that sort ever does happen.
+
+We were not long on the terrace.  It was not a night on which you could stroll
+and talk; there was a wind against which  you had to stagger, holding your hat
+on tightly, and shouting such remarks as might occur to you.  Against that
+wind acquaintance could make no headway.  Yet I see now that despite
+that wind, or, rather, because of it, I ought already to have known Pethel
+a little better than I did when we presently sat down together inside the
+cafe of the casino.  There had been a point in our walk, or our stagger,
+when we paused to lean over the parapet, looking down at the black
+and driven sea.  And Pethel had shouted that it would be great fun
+to be out in a sailing-boat to-night, and that at one time he had been very
+fond of sailing.
+
+As we took our seats in the cafe, he looked about him with
+boyish interest and pleasure; then squaring his arms on the little table, he
+asked me what I would drink.  I protested that I was the host, a position
+which he, with the quick courtesy of the very rich, yielded to me at once.
+I feared he would ask for champagne, and was gladdened by his demand
+for water.
+
+"Apollinaris, St. Galmier, or what?" I asked.  He preferred plain
+water.  I ventured to warn him that such water was never "safe" in these
+places.  He said he had often heard that, but would risk it.  I
+remonstrated, but he was firm.  "Alors," I told the waiter, "pour Monsieur
+un verre de l'eau fraiche, et pour moi un demi blonde."
+
+Pethel asked me to tell him who every one was.  I told him no one
+was any one in particular, and suggested that we should talk about
+ourselves.
+
+"You mean," he laughed, "that you want to know who the devil I
+am?"
+
+I assured him that I had often heard of him.  At this he was
+unaffectedly pleased.
+
+"But," I added, "it's always more interesting to hear a man talked
+about by himself."  And indeed, since he had NOT handed his
+winnings over to me, I did hope he would at any rate give me some
+glimpses into that "great character" of his.  Full though his life had been,
+he seemed but like a rather clever schoolboy out on a holiday.  I wanted
+to know more.
+
+"That beer looks good," he admitted when the waiter came back.  I
+asked him to change his mind, but he shook his head, raised to his lips
+the tumbler of water that had been placed before him, and meditatively
+drank a deep draft.  "I never," he then said, "touch alcohol of any sort."
+He looked solemn; but all men do look solemn when they speak of their
+own habits, whether positive or negative, and no matter how trivial; and
+so, though I had really no warrant for not supposing him a reclaimed
+drunkard, I dared ask him for what reason he abstained.
+
+"When I say I NEVER touch alcohol," he said hastily, in a
+tone as of self-defense, "I mean that I don't touch it often, or, at any
+rate--well, I never touch it when I'm gambling, you know.  It--it takes the
+edge off."
+
+His tone did make me suspicious.  For a moment I wondered
+whether he had married the barmaid rather for what she symbolized than
+for what in herself she was.  But no, surely not; he had been only
+nineteen years old.  Nor in any way had he now, this steady, brisk,
+clear-eyed fellow, the aspect of one who had since fallen.
+
+"The edge off the excitement?" I asked.
+
+"Rather.  Of course that sort of excitement seems awfully stupid to
+YOU; but--no use denying it--I do like a bit of a flutter, just
+occasionally, you know.  And one has to be in trim for it.  Suppose a man
+sat down dead-drunk to a game of chance, what fun would it be for him?
+None.  And it's only a question of degree.  Soothe yourself ever so little
+with alcohol, and you don't get QUITE the full sensation of
+gambling.  You do lose just a little something of the proper tremors
+before a coup, the proper throes during a coup, the proper thrill of joy or
+anguish after a coup.  You're bound to, you know," he added, purposely
+making this bathos when he saw me smiling at the heights to which he
+had risen.
+
+"And to-night," I asked, remembering his prosaically pensive
+demeanor in taking the bank, "were you feeling these throes and thrills to
+the utmost?"
+
+
+He nodded.
+
+"And you'll feel them again to-night?"
+
+"I hope so."
+
+"I wonder you can stay away."
+
+"Oh, one gets a bit deadened after an hour or so.  One needs to be
+freshened up.  So long as I don't bore you--"
+
+I laughed, and held out my cigarette-case.
+
+"I rather wonder you smoke," I murmured, after giving him a light.
+"Nicotine's a sort of drug.  Doesn't it soothe you?  Don't you lose just a
+little something of the tremors and things?"
+
+He looked at me gravely.
+
+"By Jove!" he ejaculated, "I never thought of that.  Perhaps you're
+right.  'Pon my word, I must think that over."
+
+I wondered whether he were secretly laughing at me.  Here was a
+man to whom--so I conceived, with an effort of the imagination--the loss
+or gain of a few hundred pounds could hardly matter.  I told him I had
+spoken in jest.  "To give up tobacco might," I said, "intensify the pleasant
+agonies of a gambler staking his little all.  But in your case--well, I don't
+see where the pleasant agonies come in."
+
+"You mean because I'm beastly rich?"
+
+"Rich," I amended.
+
+"All depends on what you call rich.  Besides, I'm not the sort of
+fellow who's content with three per cent.  A couple of months ago--I tell
+you this in confidence--I risked virtually all I had in an Argentine deal."
+
+"And lost it?"
+
+"No; as a matter of fact, I made rather a good thing out of it.  I did
+rather well last February, too.  But there's no knowing the future.  A few
+errors of judgment, a war here, a revolution there, a big strike somewhere
+else, and--" He blew a jet of smoke from his lips, and then looked at me
+as at one whom he could trust to feel for him in a crash already come.
+
+My sympathy lagged, and I stuck to the point of my inquiry.
+
+"Meanwhile," I suggested, "and all the more because you aren't
+merely a rich man, but also an active taker of big risks, how can these
+tiny little baccarat risks give you so much emotion?"
+
+"There you rather have me," he laughed.  "I've often wondered at
+that myself.  I suppose," he puzzled it out, "I do a good lot of
+make-believe.  While I'm playing a game like this game to-night, I
+IMAGINE the stakes are huge.  And I IMAGINE I haven't
+another penny in the world."
+
+"Ah, so that with you it's always a life-and-death affair?"
+
+He looked away.
+
+"Oh, no, I don't say that."
+
+"Stupid phrase," I admitted.  "But"--there was yet one point I would
+put to him--"if you have extraordinary luck always--"
+
+"There's no such thing as luck."
+
+"No, strictly, I suppose, there isn't.  But if in point of fact you
+always do win, then--well, surely, perfect luck driveth out fear."
+
+"Who ever said I always won?" he asked sharply.
+
+I waved my hands and said, "Oh, you have the reputation, you
+know, for extraordinary luck."
+
+"That isn't the same thing as always winning.  Besides, I
+HAVEN'T extraordinary luck, never HAVE had.  Good
+heavens!" he exclaimed, "if I thought I had any more chance of winning
+than of losing, I'd--I'd--"
+
+"Never again set foot in that baccarat-room to-night," I soothingly
+suggested.
+
+"Oh, baccarat be blowed!  I wasn't thinking of baccarat.  I was
+thinking of--oh, lots of things; baccarat included, yes."
+
+"What things?" I ventured to ask.
+
+"What things?"  He pushed back his chair.  "Look here," he said
+with a laugh, "don't pretend I haven't been boring your head off with all
+this talk about myself.  You've been too patient.  I'm off.  Shall I see you
+to-morrow?  Perhaps you'd lunch with us to-morrow?  It would be a great
+pleasure for my wife.  We're at the Grand Hotel."
+
+I said I should be most happy, and called the waiter; at sight of
+whom my friend said he had talked himself thirsty, and asked for another
+glass of water.  He mentioned that he had brought his car over
+with him: his little daughter (by the news of whose existence I felt
+idiotically surprised) was very keen on motoring, and they were all three
+starting the day after to-morrow on a little tour through France.
+Afterward they were going on to Switzerland "for some climbing."  Did I
+care about motoring?  If so, we might go for a spin after luncheon, to
+Rouen or somewhere.  He drank his glass of water, and, linking a
+friendly arm in mine, passed out with me into the corridor.  He asked
+what I was writing now, and said that he looked to me to "do something
+big one of these days," and that he was sure I had it in me.  This remark,
+though of course I pretended to be pleased by it, irritated me very much. 
+It was destined, as you shall see, to irritate me very much more in
+recollection.
+
+Yet I was glad he had asked me to luncheon--glad because I liked
+him and glad because I dislike mysteries.  Though you may think me very
+dense for not having thoroughly understood Pethel in the course of my
+first meeting with him, the fact is that I was only aware, and that dimly,
+of something more in him than he had cared to reveal--some veil behind
+which perhaps lurked his right to the title so airily bestowed on him by
+Grierson.  I assured myself, as I walked home, that if veil there was, I
+should to-morrow find an eyelet.  But one's intuition when it is off duty
+seems always a much more powerful engine than it does on active
+service; and next day, at sight of Pethel awaiting me outside his hotel, I
+became less confident.  His, thought I, was a face which, for all its
+animation, would tell nothing--nothing, at any rate, that mattered.  It
+expressed well enough that he was pleased to see me; but for the rest I
+was reminded that it had a sort of frank inscrutability.  Besides, it was at
+all points so very usual a face--a face that couldn't (so I then thought),
+even if it had leave to, betray connection with a "great character."  It was
+a strong face, certainly; but so are yours and mine.
+
+And very fresh it looked, though, as he confessed, Pethel had sat up
+in "that beastly baccarat-room" till five A.M.  I asked, had he lost?  Yes,
+he had lost steadily for four hours (proudly he laid stress on this), but in
+the end--well, he had won it all back "and a bit more."  "By the way," he
+murmured as we were about to enter the hall, "don't ever happen to
+mention to my wife what I told you about that Argentine deal.  She's
+always rather nervous about--investments.  I don't tell her about them.
+She's rather a nervous woman altogether, I'm sorry to say."
+
+This did not square with my preconception of her.  Slave that I am
+to traditional imagery, I had figured her as "flaunting," as golden-haired,
+as haughty to most men, but with a provocative smile across the shoulder
+for some.  Nor, indeed, did her husband's words save me the suspicion
+that my eyes deceived me when anon I was presented to a very pale,
+small lady whose hair was rather white than gray.  And the "little
+daughter!"  This prodigy's hair was as yet "down," but looked as if it
+might be up at any moment: she was nearly as tall as her father, whom
+she very much resembled in face and figure and heartiness of
+hand-shake.  Only after a rapid mental calculation could I account for
+her.
+
+"I must warn you, she's in a great rage this morning," said her
+father.  "Do try to soothe her."  She blushed, laughed, and bade her father
+not be so silly.  I asked her the cause of her great rage.  She said:
+
+"He only means I was disappointed.  And he was just as
+disappointed as I was.  WEREN'T you, now, Father?"
+
+"I suppose they meant well, Peggy," he laughed.
+
+"They were QUITE right," said Mrs. Pethel, evidently not for
+the first time.
+
+"They," as I presently learned, were the authorities of the
+bathing-establishment.  Pethel had promised his daughter he would
+take her for a swim; but on their arrival at the bathing-cabins they were
+ruthlessly told that bathing was defendu a cause du
+mauvais temps.  This embargo was our theme as we sat down to
+luncheon.  Miss Peggy was of opinion that the French were
+cowards.  I pleaded for them that even in English watering-places bathing
+was forbidden when the sea was VERY rough.  She did not admit
+that the sea was very rough to-day.  Besides, she appealed to me, where
+was the fun of swimming in absolutely calm water?  I dared not say that
+this was the only sort of water I liked to swim in.
+
+"They were QUITE right," said Mrs. Pethel again.
+
+"Yes, but, darling Mother, you can't swim.  Father and I are both
+splendid swimmers."
+
+To gloss over the mother's disability, I looked brightly at Pethel, as
+though in ardent recognition of his prowess among waves.  With a
+movement of his head he indicated his daughter--indicated that there was
+no one like her in the whole world.  I beamed agreement.  Indeed, I did
+think her rather nice.  If one liked the father (and I liked Pethel all the
+more in that capacity), one couldn't help liking the daughter, the two
+were so absurdly alike.  Whenever he was looking at her (and it was
+seldom that he looked away from her), the effect, if you cared to be
+fantastic, was that of a very vain man before a mirror.  It might have
+occurred to me that, if there was any mystery in him, I could solve it
+through her.  But, in point of fact, I had forgotten all about that possible
+mystery.  The amateur detective was lost in the sympathetic observer of a
+father's love.  That Pethel did love his daughter I have never doubted.
+One passion is not less true because another predominates.  No one who
+ever saw that father with that daughter could doubt that he loved her
+intensely.  And this intensity gages for me the strength of what else was
+in him.
+
+Mrs. Pethel's love, though less explicit, was not less evidently
+profound.  But the maternal instinct is less attractive to an onlooker,
+because he takes it more for granted than the paternal.  What endeared
+poor Mrs. Pethel to me was--well, the inevitability of the epithet I give
+her.  She seemed, poor thing, so essentially out of it; and by "it" is meant
+the glowing mutual affinity of husband and child.  Not that she didn't, in
+her little way, assert herself during the meal.  But she did so, I thought,
+with the knowledge that she didn't count, and never would count.  I
+wondered how it was that she had, in that Cambridge bar-room long ago,
+counted for Pethel to the extent of matrimony.  But from any such room
+she seemed so utterly remote that she might well be in all respects now
+an utterly changed woman.  She did preeminently look as if much
+had by some means been taken out of her, with no compensatory process
+of putting in.  Pethel looked so very young for his age, whereas she
+would have had to be really old to look young for hers.  I pitied her as
+one might a governess with two charges who were hopelessly out of
+hand.  But a governess, I reflected, can always give notice.  Love tied
+poor Mrs. Pethel fast to her present situation.
+
+As the three of them were to start next day on their tour through
+France, and as the four of us were to make a tour to Rouen this
+afternoon, the talk was much about motoring, a theme which Miss
+Peggy's enthusiasm made almost tolerable.  I said to Mrs. Pethel, with
+more good-will than truth, that I supposed she was "very keen on it."  She
+replied that she was.
+
+"But, darling Mother, you aren't.  I believe you hate it.  You're
+ALWAYS asking father to go slower.  And what IS the fun of 
+just crawling along?"
+
+"Oh, come, Peggy, we never crawl!" said her father.
+
+"No, indeed," said her mother in a tone of which Pethel laughingly
+said it would put me off coming out with them this afternoon.  I said,
+with an expert air to reassure Mrs. Pethel, that it wasn't fast driving, but
+only bad driving, that was a danger.
+
+"There, Mother!" cried Peggy.  "Isn't that what we're always telling
+you?"
+
+I felt that they were always either telling Mrs. Pethel something or,
+as in the matter of that intended bath, not telling her something.  It
+seemed to me possible that Peggy advised her father about his
+"investments."  I wondered whether they had yet told Mrs.
+Pethel of their intention to go on to Switzerland for some climbing.
+
+Of his secretiveness for his wife's sake I had a touching little
+instance after luncheon.  We had adjourned to have coffee in front of the
+hotel.  The car was already in attendance, and Peggy had darted off to
+make her daily inspection of it.  Pethel had given me a cigar, and his wife 
+presently noticed that he himself was not smoking.  He explained to her
+that he thought he had smoked too much lately, and that he was going to
+"knock it off" for a while.  I would not have smiled if he had met my eye,
+but his avoidance of it made me quite sure that he really had been
+"thinking over" what I had said last night about nicotine and its possibly
+deleterious action on the gambling thrill.
+
+Mrs. Pethel saw the smile that I could not repress.  I explained that I
+was wishing _I_ could knock off tobacco, and envying her
+husband's strength of character.  She smiled, too, but wanly, with her
+eyes on him.
+
+"Nobody has so much strength of character as he has," she said.
+
+"Nonsense!" he laughed.  "I'm the weakest of men."
+
+"Yes," she said quietly; "that's true, too, James."
+
+Again he laughed, but he flushed.  I saw that Mrs. Pethel also had
+faintly flushed, and I became horribly aware of following suit.  In the
+sudden glow and silence created by Mrs. Pethel's paradox, I was grateful
+to the daughter for bouncing back among us, and asking how soon we
+should be ready to start.
+
+Pethel looked at his wife, who looked at me and rather strangely
+asked if I was sure I wanted to go with them.  I protested that of course I
+did.  Pethel asked her if SHE really wanted to come.
+
+"You see, dear, there was the run yesterday from Calais.  And
+to-morrow you'll be on the road again, and all the days after."
+
+"Yes," said Peggy; "I'm SURE you'd much rather stay at
+home, darling Mother, and have a good rest."
+
+"Shall we go and put on our things, Peggy?" replied Mrs. Pethel,
+rising from her chair.  She asked her husband whether he was taking the
+chauffeur with him.  He said he thought not.
+
+"Oh, hurrah!" cried Peggy.  "Then I can be on the front seat!"
+
+"No, dear," said her mother.  "I am sure Mr. Beerbohms
+would like to be on the front seat."
+
+"You'd like to be with mother, wouldn't you?" the girl appealed.  I
+replied with all possible emphasis that I should like to be with Mrs.
+Pethel.  But presently, when the mother and daughter reappeared in the  
+guise of motorists, it became clear that my aspiration had been set aside.
+"I am to be with mother," said Peggy.
+
+I was inwardly glad that Mrs. Pethel could, after all, assert herself
+to some purpose.  Had I thought she disliked me, I should have been hurt;
+but I was sure her desire that I should not sit with her was due merely to a
+belief that, in case of accident, a person on the front seat was less safe
+than a person behind.  And of course I did not expect her to prefer my
+life  to her daughter's.  Poor lady!  My heart was with her.  As the car
+glided along the sea-front and then under the Norman archway, through
+the town, and past the environs, I wished that her husband inspired in her
+as much confidence as he did in me.  For me the sight of his clear, firm  
+profile (he did not wear motor-goggles) was an assurance in itself.  From
+time to time (for I, too, was ungoggled) I looked round to nod and smile
+cheerfully at his wife.  She always returned the nod, but left the smile to
+be returned by the daughter.
+
+Pethel, like the good driver he was, did not talk; just drove.  But as
+we came out on to the Rouen road he did say that in France he always
+rather missed the British police-traps.  "Not," he added, "that I've ever
+fallen into one.  But the chance that a policeman MAY at any
+moment dart out, and land you in a bit of a scrape does rather add to the
+excitement, don't you think?"  Though I answered in the tone of one to whom
+the chance of a police-trap is the very salt of life, I did not inwardly
+like the spirit of his remark.  However, I dismissed it from my mind.
+The sun was shining, and the wind had dropped: it was an ideal day
+for motoring, and the Norman landscape had never looked lovelier to me
+in its width of sober and silvery grace.
+
+
+*The other names in this memoir are, for good reason, pseudonyms.
+
+
+I presently felt that this landscape was not, after all, doing itself full
+justice.  Was it not rushing rather too quickly past?  "James!" said a
+shrill, faint voice from behind, and gradually--"Oh, darling Mother,
+really!" protested another voice--the landscape slackened pace.  But after
+a while, little by little, the landscape lost patience, forgot its good
+manners, and flew faster and faster than before.  The road rushed
+furiously beneath us, like a river in spate.  Avenues of poplars flashed
+past us, every tree of them on each side hissing and swishing angrily in
+the draft we made.  Motors going Rouen-ward seemed to be past as
+quickly as motors that bore down on us.  Hardly had I espied in the
+landscape ahead a chateau or other object of interest before I was
+craning my neck round for a final glimpse of it as it faded on the
+backward horizon.  An endless uphill road was breasted and crested in a
+twinkling and transformed into a decline near the end of which our car
+leaped straight across to the opposite ascent, and--"James!" again, and
+again by degrees the laws of nature were reestablished, but again
+by degrees revoked.  I did not doubt that speed in itself was no danger;
+but, when the road was about to make a sharp curve, why shouldn't
+Pethel, just as a matter of form, slow down slightly, and sound a note or
+two of the hooter?  Suppose another car were--well, that was all right: the
+road was clear; but at the next turning, when our car neither slackened
+nor hooted and WAS for an instant full on the wrong side of the
+road, I had within me a contraction which (at thought of what must have
+been if--) lasted though all was well.  Loath to betray fear, I hadn't turned
+my face to Pethel.  Eyes front!  And how about that wagon ahead, huge
+hay-wagon plodding with its back to us, seeming to occupy whole road? 
+Surely Pethel would slacken, hoot.  No.  Imagine a needle threaded with
+one swift gesture from afar.  Even so was it that we shot, between wagon
+and road's-edge, through; whereon, confronting us within a few
+yards--inches now, but we swerved--was a cart that incredibly we grazed
+not as we rushed on, on.  Now indeed I had turned my eyes on Pethel's
+profile; and my eyes saw there that which stilled, with a greater emotion,
+all fear and wonder in me.
+
+I think that for the first instant, oddly, what I felt was merely
+satisfaction, not hatred; for I all but asked him whether, by not smoking
+to-day, he had got a keener edge to his thrills.  I understood him, and for
+an instant this sufficed me.  Those pursed-out lips, so queerly different
+from the compressed lips of the normal motorist, and seeming, as
+elsewhere last night, to denote no more than pensive interest, had told me
+suddenly all that I needed to know about Pethel.  Here, as there,--and, oh,
+ever so much better here than there!--he could gratify the passion that
+was in him.  No need of any "make-believe" here.  I remembered the
+queer look he had given when I asked if his gambling were always "a
+life-and-death affair."  Here was the real thing, the authentic game, for
+the highest stakes.  And here was I, a little extra stake tossed on to the
+board. He had vowed I had it in me to do "something big."  Perhaps,
+though, there had been a touch of make-believe about that.  I am afraid it
+was not before my thought about myself that my moral sense began to
+operate and my hatred of Pethel set in.  Put it to my credit that I did see
+myself as a mere detail in his villainy.  You deprecate the word
+"villainy"?  Understand all, forgive all?  No doubt.  But between the acts
+of understanding and forgiving an interval may sometimes be condoned.
+Condone it in this instance.  Even at the time I gave Pethel due credit for
+risking his own life, for having doubtless risked it--it and none
+other--again and again in the course of his adventurous (and
+abstemious) life by field and flood.  I was even rather touched by
+memory of his insistence last night on another glass of that water which
+just MIGHT give him typhoid; rather touched by memory of his
+unsaying that he "never" touched alcohol--he who, in point of fact, had to
+be ALWAYS gambling on something or other.  I gave him due
+credit, too, for his devotion to his daughter.  But his use of that devotion,
+his cold use of it to secure for himself the utmost thrill of hazard, did
+seem utterly abominable to me.
+
+And it was even more for the mother than for the daughter that I
+was incensed.  That daughter did not know him, did but innocently share
+his damnable love of chances; but that wife had for years known him at
+least as well as I knew him now.  Here again I gave him credit for
+wishing, though he didn't love her, to spare her what he could.  That he
+didn't love her I presumed from his indubitable willingness not to stake
+her in this afternoon's game.  That he never had loved her--had taken her
+in his precocious youth simply as a gigantic chance against him, was
+likely enough.  So much the more credit to him for such consideration as
+he showed her, though this was little enough.  He could wish to save her
+from being a looker-on at his game, but he could--he couldn't not--go on
+playing.  Assuredly she was right in deeming him at once the strongest
+and the weakest of men.  "Rather a nervous woman!"  I remembered an
+engraving that had hung in my room at Oxford, and in scores of other
+rooms there: a presentment by Sir Marcus (then Mr.) Stone of a very
+pretty young person in a Gainsborough hat, seated beneath an ancestral
+elm, looking as though she were about to cry, and entitled "A Gambler's
+Wife."  Mrs. Pethel was not like that.  Of her there were no engravings
+for undergraduate hearts to melt at.  But there was one man, certainly,
+whose compassion was very much at her service.  How was he going to
+help her?
+
+I know not how many hair's-breadth escapes we may have had
+while these thoughts passed through my brain.  I had closed my eyes.  So
+preoccupied was I that but for the constant rush of air against my face I
+might, for aught I knew, have been sitting ensconced in an armchair at
+home.  After a while I was aware that this rush had abated; I opened my
+eyes to the old familiar streets of Rouen.  We were to have tea at the
+Hotel d'Angleterre.  What was to be my line of action?  Should I
+take Pethel aside and say: "Swear to me, on your word of honor as a
+gentleman, that you will never again touch the driving-gear, or whatever
+you call it, of a motor-car.  Otherwise, I shall expose you to the world.
+Meanwhile, we shall return to Dieppe by train"?  He might flush (for I
+knew him capable of flushing) as he asked me to explain.  And after?  He
+would laugh in my face.  He would advise me not to go motoring any
+more.  He might even warn me not to go back to Dieppe in one of those
+dangerous railway-trains.  He might even urge me to wait until a nice
+Bath chair had been sent out for me from England.
+
+I heard a voice (mine, alas!) saying brightly, "Well, here we are!"  I
+helped the ladies to descend.  Tea was ordered.  Pethel refused that
+stimulant and had a glass of water.  I had a liqueur brandy.  It was
+evident to me that tea meant much to Mrs. Pethel.  She looked stronger
+after her second cup, and younger after her third.  Still, it was my duty to
+help her if I could.  While I talked and laughed, I did not forget that.  But
+what on earth was I to do?  I am no hero.  I hate to be ridiculous.  I am
+inveterately averse to any sort of fuss.  Besides, how was I to be sure that
+my own personal dread of the return journey hadn't something to do with
+my intention of tackling Pethel?  I rather thought it had.  What this
+woman would dare daily because she was a mother could not I dare
+once?  I reminded myself of this man's reputation for invariable luck.  I
+reminded myself that he was an extraordinarily skilful driver.  To that
+skill and luck I would pin my faith.
+
+What I seem to myself, do you ask of me?
+But I answered your question a few lines back.  Enough that my faith was
+rewarded: we did arrive safely in Dieppe.  I still marvel that we did.
+
+That evening, in the vestibule of the casino, Grierson came up to
+me.
+
+"Seen Jimmy Pethel?" he asked.  "He was asking for you.  Wants to
+see you particularly.  He's in the baccarat-room, punting, winning hand
+over fist, OF course.  Said he'd seldom met a man he liked more
+than you.  Great character, what?"
+
+One is always glad to be liked, and I pleaded guilty to a moment's
+gratification at the announcement that Pethel liked me.  But I did not go
+and seek him in the baccarat-room.  A great character assuredly he was,
+but of a kind with which (I say it at the risk of seeming priggish) I prefer
+not to associate.
+
+Why he had particularly wanted to see me was made clear in a note
+sent by him to my room early next morning.  He wondered if I could be
+induced to join them in their little tour.  He hoped I wouldn't think it
+great cheek, his asking me.  He thought it might rather amuse me to
+come.  It would be a very great pleasure to his wife.  He hoped I wouldn't
+say no.  Would I send a line by bearer?  They would be starting at three
+o'clock.  He was mine sincerely.
+
+It was not too late to tackle him even now.  Should I go round to his
+hotel?  I hesitated and--well, I told you at the outset that my last meeting
+with him was on the morrow of my first.  I forget what I wrote to him,
+but am sure that the excuse I made for myself was a good and graceful
+one, and that I sent my kindest regards to Mrs. Pethel.  She had not (I am
+sure of that, too) authorized her husband to say she would like me to
+come with them.  Else would not the thought of her, the pity of her, have
+haunted me, as it did for a very long time.  I do not know whether she is
+still alive.  No mention is made of her in the obituary notice which awoke
+these memories in me.  This notice I will, however, transcribe, because it
+is, for all its crudeness of phraseology, rather interesting both as an echo
+and as an amplification.  Its title is "Death of Wealthy Aviator," and its
+text is:
+
+
+Wide-spread regret will be felt in Leicestershire at the tragic death
+of Mr. James Pethel, who had long resided there and was very popular as
+an all-round sportsman.  In recent years he had been much interested in
+aviation, and had had a private aerodrome erected on his property.
+Yesterday afternoon he fell down dead quite suddenly as he was
+returning to his house, apparently in his usual health and spirits, after
+descending from a short flight which despite a strong wind he had made
+on a new type of aeroplane, and on which he was accompanied by
+his married daughter and her infant son.  It is not expected that an inquest
+will be necessary, as his physician, Dr. Saunders, has certified death to be
+due to heart-disease, from which, it appears, the deceased gentleman had
+been suffering for many years.  Dr. Saunders adds that he had repeatedly
+warned deceased that any strain on the nervous system might prove fatal.
+
+
+Thus--for I presume that his ailment had its origin in his
+habits--James Pethel did not, despite that merely pensive look of his, live
+his life with impunity.  And by reason of that life he died.  As for the
+manner of his death, enough that he did die.  Let not our hearts be vexed
+that his great luck was with him to the end.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of James Pethel, by Max Beerbohm
+
+
+
+
+
+Note: I have closed contractions in the text; e.g., "does n't" has become
+"doesn't" etc.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of James Pethel, by Max Beerbohm
+
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