H. de Vere Stacpoole and Margaret Stacpoole

“ On the iron fire and burglar-proof floor and by the deed boxes stood the sherry bottle and the cut-glass satellite wineglasses, while upon the topmost deed box reposed a flat, black leather wallet.
Simon's eyes were fixed on the wallet. The thing seemed to hold him spellbound, as if he were gazing into the devilish, diamond eyes of a coiled snake. The wallet had not been there when he last closed the safe. There had been nothing in the safe but the boxes, the bottle, and the glasses, and of the safe there were but two keys, one at the bank, one in his pocket. ”

“ Then they went in to a bar where Simon imbibed a cocktail, and from the bar they went upstairs.
Pugeot opened a door and disclosed Monte Carlo—a Monte Carlo shrunk to one room and one table. This was the Wilderness Club, and around the table were grouped men of all ages and sizes, some of them of the highest social standing.
The stakes were high. Just as a child gobbles a stolen apple so these gentlemen seemed to be trying to make as much out of their furtive business as they could, and get away, winners or losers, as soon as possible, lest worse befall them. ”

“ Bobby explained.
“Well,” said Tozer, “I forgive you. It was good intent spoiled by atavism. You returned to your old self for a moment, like your uncle Simon. Do you know, Bobby, I believe this disease of your uncle's is more prevalent than one would imagine—though, of course, in a less acute form. We are all always returning to our old selves, by fits and starts—and paying for the return. You see what you have done to-day. Your uncle Simon has done nothing more foolish. You both found your old selves. ”

“ Mr. Pettigrew has had a good lot of clothes lately, Mr. Meyer.”
“He has,” said Meyer with a twinkle in his eye. “Suits and suits—almost as if he were going to be married.”
“Married!” cried the other. “What put that into your head, Mr. Meyer? He's not a marrying man. Why, I've never seen him as much as glance an eye at a female.”
“Oh, it was only my joke,” said Meyer.
Now, in Mudd's soul there had lain for years an uneasiness, a crumpled rose-leaf of thought that touched him sometimes as he turned at night in bed. It was the fear that some day Simon might ruin Mudd's life with a mistress. ”

“ Higgs, not knowing, said nothing, moving about now, puttings things in order and getting his master's bath ready.
“I've lost an old gentleman, Higgs,” said Pugeot, for Higgs was a confidential servant as well as a valet.
“Indeed, sir,” said Higgs, as if losing old gentlemen were as common as losing umbrellas.
“And the whole business is so funny I can scarcely believe it's true. I haven't a touch of the jimjams, have I, Higgs?”
“Lord, sir, no! You're all right.”
“Am I? See here, Higgs: yesterday morning I met old Mr. Simon Pettigrew, the lawyer. ”

“ I am rich!' No bourgeois could have done that without offending, without giving one a shiver of the skin.”
“You have said it,” replied madame. “A little boy—a great and good man, yet a little boy. He is not in his first youth, but there are people like Pierre Pan who never lose youth. It is so I have seen it.”
“Simon Pettigrew,” murmured Cerise with a little laugh.
A knock came at the door and a little maid of all work and down at heel, entered with a huge bouquet, one of those bouquets youth flings at prima donnas. ”

“ Simon seemed to find it all right. Puffing his cigar, he ordered a brandy cold—a brandy cold!—and sipping his brandy cold he took a stock of the men around. Even his innocence and newness, despite the crave for companionship now on him, recognized that these were undesirables, and as for the two girls, they were frozen images—for him. They were laughing and changing words with all sorts of young men, counter jumpers, and horsey men, but for him they had nothing but brandy cold and monsyllables. He was beginning to get irritated with women. ”

“ He had always held that no young man ought to inherit till he was twenty-five, and, Heaven knows, that opinion had a firm basis in experience. He had always, in law, looked askance on youth and its doings. In practice, he had been tolerant enough, though indeed, youth comes little in the way of a hard-working and prominent elderly solicitor, but in law, and he was mostly law, he had little tolerance, no respect.
And here was youth with his property in its arms, or what was, perhaps, even worse—the imminent dread of that unholy alliance. ”

“ Then, one day his actress turned out an actress and the following night he came out of the Cocoa Tree owing a gambling debt of a thousand pounds that he could not pay. His father paid, on his promising to turn over a new leaf, which he did. But his youth was checked, his brightness eclipsed, and arm in arm with common sense he set out on the long journey that led him at last to the high position of a joyless, loveless, desolate, wealthy solicitor of sixty—respected, very much respected; in fact, less a man than a firm. ”

“ Well, Lethmann's disease is just this: a man, say of twenty, suddenly checked in the course of his youth, becomes practically another person. You, for instance, became or fancied you became another person; you suddenly checked yourself and became sensible, as you put it, but you did not destroy that old foolish self. Nothing is destructible in mind as long as the brain tissue is normal. You put it in prison, and after the lapse of many years, owing perhaps to some slight declension in brain power, it broke out, dominated you, and lived again. Youth must be served. ”

“ Craving for some one to help him to think, he had welded himself to Julia with this family secret for solder. The idea of a little hotel in the country with Julia, ever ready for embracements and passionate scenes; the knowledge that he was almost half engaged to her; the instinct that she would suck him into cozy corners and arbors—all this frankly frightened him. He was beginning to recognize that Julia was quite light and almost brilliant in the street when love making was impossible, but impossibly heavy and dull, though mesmeric, when alone with him with her head on his shoulder ”

“ The bouquet was not extraordinarily large, but it seemed to grow larger and to fill the omnibus.
Madame explained. Cerise, arranging the flowers, joined in. They waxed enthusiastic. Never had Mudd been so chattered to before. He saw the whole business and guessed how the land lay now. He felt deeply relieved. Madame inspired him with instinctive confidence; Cerise in her youth and innocence repelled any idea of marriage between herself and Simon; but they'd got to be warned, somehow, that Simon was off the spot. ”

“ I feel as if I was helping to run a sort of beastly factory—a mad sort of show where we're trying to condense folly and make it consume its own smoke—an illicit whisky still—for we're trying to hide our business all the time, and it gives me the jimjams to think that at any moment a client may turn up and see him like that. ”

“ They lunched together and discussed dogs, girls, and mutual friends. It was like old times again, but over the liqueurs and over the cigarette smoke there suddenly appeared to Bobby the vision of Tozer. He said good-by to the affluent one and departed. “I've got to work,” said he.
His momentary lapse from the direction of the target only served to pull him together, and it seemed, now, as though the luncheon and the lapse had made things easier. He told himself that if he hadn't brains enough to scare up some sort of plot for a six-shilling novel, he had better drown himself. ”

“ Just as the Roman road narrows at the beginning of the High Street, so the life of a stranger coming, say from London, narrows at the beginning of his or her residence in Upton. If you are a villager, you find yourself under a microscope, with three hundred eyes at the eyepiece. If you are a genteel person but without introductions, you find yourself the target of half a score of telescopes leveled at you by the residents. ”

“ Of the ten thousand only five thousand remained.”
“Five thousand in a month,” said Oppenshaw. “Well, you paid the price of your temporary youth. Tell me,” said he, “and be quite frank. What were you like when you were young? I mean in mind and conduct.”
Simon moved wearily.
“I was a fool for a while,” said he. “Then I suddenly checked myself and became sensible.”
Oppenshaw rapped twice with his fingers on his desk as if in triumph over his own perception.
“That clears matters,” said he. “You were undoubtedly suffering from Lethmann's disease.” ”

“ Simon, the last of the firm, unmarried, and without near relation, was at the time of this story turned sixty, a clean-shaven, bright-eyed, old-fashioned type of man, sedate, famed for his cellar, and a member of the Athenæum—a man you never, never would have imagined to possess such a thing as a past; never would have imagined to have been filled with that semidiabolical, semiangelical joy of life which leads to the follies of youth. ”

“ It was patently foolish to think that a man could be under the dominion of a story-book disease. He had read “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” that wild fiction. Why, if this thing were true it would be a fiction just as wild. Oceans of comfort suddenly came to him. It gave him a new grip on the situation, pointing out that the whole of this business as suggested by Oppenshaw was on a level with a “silly, sensational story;” on a level with the impossible, therefore impossible. ”

“ What a delight even in a dream! To be young and absolutely free from all restrait, free from all ties, unconscious of relatives, unconscious of everything but immediate surroundings, with virginal appetites and desires and countless sovereigns to meet them with. Dangling his heels, and with his straw hat beside him, he gloated on his treasure; then, picking out three ten-pound notes and putting the remainder in the wallet, he locked the wallet away in his portmanteau and put the key under the wardrobe. ”

“ Julia thought for a while. Then she got up to go.
“If you want my opinion,” said Tozer, “I think the whole lot want looking after. They seemed quite a pleasant party, but responsibility seemed somewhat absent. The old lady, charming though she was, seemed to me scarcely enough ballast for so much youth.”
“I understand,” said Julia. Then she went off and Tozer lit a pipe.
The pretty young French girl was troubling him. She had charmed even him, and he knew Bobby, and his wisdom indicated that a penniless beauty was not the first rung of the ladder to success in life. ”

“ Simon seemed happy enough, talking to a dowager-looking woman and drinking his tea, but Bobby was not happy. It all seemed wrong, somehow, and he abused Pugeot in his heart. Pugeot had said himself that a moated grange was the proper place for uncle Simon and that even then he might tumble into the moat, and now, with the splendid inconsequence of his nature, he had tumbled him into this whirl of local society. This was not seclusion in the country. Why, some of these people might, by chance, be Simon's clients. ”

“ A little after ten Simon reached Old Sergeant's Inn and entered his office.
Brownlow, the chief clerk, had just arrived and Simon, nodding to him, passed into his private room where his letters were laid out, hung up his hat and coat, and set to business.
It was a sight to watch his face as he read letter after letter, laying each in order under a marble paper weight. One might have fancied oneself watching law at work, in seclusion and unadorned with robes. He did not need glasses; his eyes were still the eyes of a young man. ”

“ Mudd's dreaded imaginary mistress had always figured in his mind's eyes as a stout lady—eminently a lady—who would interfere with his ideas of how the brasses ought to be polished, interfere with tradesmen, order Mudd about, and make herself generally a nuisance; this new imaginary horror was a “painted slut,” who would bring ridicule and disgrace on Simon and all belonging to him.
Mudd had the fine feelings of an old maid on matters like this, backed by a fine knowledge of what elderly men are capable of in the way of folly with women. ”

“ There are black minds and brown minds and muddy-colored minds and gray minds and blue minds. Bobby's was a blue mind; though, needed, it sometimes almost seemed green. Cerise's was blue, a happy blue, like the blue of her eyes.
They had been two and a half days now in pretty close propinquity, and had got to know each other well despite uncle Simon, or rather, perhaps, because of him. ”

“ The Ravenshaws were a proud race, and the old admiral, Bobby's father, who lost all his money in Patagonian bonds, was the proudest of the lot and he had handed his pride to his son.
Yes, leaving even the office aside, uncle Simon must be looked after. Now, if uncle Simon had been a lunatic, the task would have been abominable but simple. But a man who had suddenly developed extraordinary youth, yet was, so the doctor said, sane, a man who must be just humored and led, was a worse proposition. ”

“ The horrible irregularity of the whole of this business was poisoning Brownlow's mind—hunting for the head of a firm who ought to be at his office and who held possession of a client's vitally important document. ”

“ The love of low company, which is sometimes a distinguishing feature of the youthful, comes from several causes—a taste for dubious sport, a kicking against restraint, simply the love of low company, or a kind of megalomania, and a wish to be first person in the company present, a wish easily satisfied at the cost of a few pounds.
In Simon's case it was probably a compound of the lot. In the bar of the Bricklayers' Arms he was first person by a mile, and this evening, owing to hay-harvest work, he was first by twenty miles, for the only occupant of the bar was Dick Horn. ”

“ The shock of the poaching business had left him untouched, unshaken, but Cerise, in some strange way, was his center of gravity, his compass, and sometimes his rudder. He loved Cerise; the other girls were phantoms. ”

“ You will have noticed in life that quite a lot of people don't convince. They may be good, they may be earnest, but they don't convince. Selling a full-grown dog in the world's market, they have little chance against a convincing competitor selling a pup.
Oppenshaw's twenty-five thousand a year came, in good part, from this quality. He had convinced Simon of the fact that inside Simon lay youth that was once Simon; youth that, though unseen and unknown to the world, could still dominate its container, even to the extent of meddling with his bank balance. ”

“ The taxi man started with the full intention of robbery, not by force but by strategy—robbery on the clock. It was not theater-turning-out time yet and he would have the chance of earning a few dishonest shillings. He turned every corner he could, for every time a taxi turns a corner the “clock” increases in speed. He drove here and there but he never reached the Leicester 'Otel, for in Full Moon Street, the home of bishops and and earls, the noise inside the vehicle made him halt. He opened the door and Simon burst out, radiant with humor and now much steadier on his legs. ”

“ Bobby was an orphan, an Oxford man, without a degree, and with a taste for literature and fine clothes. He was absolutely irresponsible. Five hundred a year, derived from a relative, of whose only sister he was the son, and an instinct for bridge that was worth another two hundred and fifty, supported Bobby in a sort of lame way, assisted by friends, confiding tailors, and bootmakers, and a genial money lender who was also a cigar merchant. ”

“ The lady had given her the letter to take; that was all she knew.
“He's alive, anyhow,” said Bobby.
“The Lord knows!” said Mudd.
The little girl let them in, with a key and, Mudd leading the way, up the stairs they went.
Mudd knocked at the door of the sitting room.
Madame and Cerise were there, quite calm, and evidently waiting. Of Simon there was not a trace.
“Oh, Mr. Modd!” cried the old lady. “How fortunate you have received my letter. Poor Monsieur Pattigrew is——”
“He ain't dead?” cried Mudd.
No, Simon was not dead. ”

“ Oh, if only a few people more could do the same—become young, do foolish things instead of this eternal grind of common sense, hard business, and everything that ruins the world.”
Bobby tried to imagine the world with an increased population of the brand of uncle Simon and failed.
“I know,” he said, “but it will be the ruin of his business and reputation. Abstractedly I don't deny there's something to be said for it, but in the concrete it doesn't work. Do think and let's try to find a way out.”
“I'm thinking,” said Julia. Then, after a pause, “You must get him away from London.” ”

“ Pugeot laughed.
That explained the summer garb and straw hat, but the frankness came to him with the weest bit of a shock. However, he was used to shocks, and if old Simon Pettigrew was running after girls, it was no affair of his. It was a good joke, though, despite the fact that he could never tell it. Pugeot was not the man to tell tales out of school.
“Look here,” said Simon, suddenly producing his notes. “I want to change a hundred. Been trying to do it in a lot of shops. You can't have any fun without some money.” ”

“ It was the third or fourth time he had given her these instructions.
“He's out of his mind,” said Mrs. Jukes, as she watched him go. She wasn't far wrong.
Mudd had been used to a rut, a rut forty years deep. His light and pleasant duties carried him easily through the day. Of evenings when Simon was dining out, he would join a social circle in the private room of a highly respectable tavern close by, smoke his pipe, drink two hot gins, and depart for home at ten-thirty. When Simon was in, he could smoke his pipe and read his paper in his own private room. ”

“ He was saved from bothering Oppenshaw again by an instinctive feeling that it would be useless. You cannot extract the follies of youth by an operation. He went on trending toward Oxford Street, but still without object.
What made his position worse was his instinct as a solicitor. For forty years he had, among other work, been engaged in tying up youth so that it could not get at property, extracting youth from pitfalls it had tumbled into while carrying property in its arms. The very words “youth” and “property,” innocent in themselves, were obnoxious to Simon when combined. ”

“ When he's with her he's a different person; out of sight of her he's another man.”
“Look here, Mudd,” said the other. “He can't be in love with her, for there's not a girl he sees he doesn't cast his eye after.”
“Maybe,” said Mudd, “but when he's with her he's in love with her. I've been watching him and I know. He worships her, I believe, and if she wasn't so sensible I'd be afeard of it. it's a blessing he came across here; she's the only hold on him, and a good hold she is.”
“It is a blessing,” said Bobby. ”

“ Playing bear leader to a young fool was an entirely different thing from being a young fool oneself. Even his experience of an hour ago told Bobby this. That short experience was his first sharp lesson in the disgustingness of folly. He shied at the prospect of going on with the task. But uncle Simon must be looked after. Bobby couldn't get over or under that fence.
“Well, I'll do what I can,” said he. “I'll come round to-morrow morning. But see here, Mudd, where does he get his money from?”
“He's got ten thousand pounds hid somewhere,” said Mudd. ”

“ All the same, Simon, between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-two, had raked the town vigorously more than viciously, haunted Evans' supper rooms, fallen madly in love with an actress, enjoyed life as only the young can enjoy life in the gorgeous, dazzling, deceitful country of Youth. ”