H. De Vere Stacpoole

“ That's a good name for it, 'business.' 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 jim-jams to think that at any moment a client may turn up and see him like that. I feel sometimes, Mudd, as fellows must feel when they have the police after them. ”

“ Mudd, with the ten-pound note and the written address, had started that morning with the intention of doing another errand as well. He first took a cab to King Charles Street. It was a relief to find it there, and that the house had not been burned down in the night. Fire was one of Mudd's haunting dreads—fire and the fear of a mistress. He had extinguishing-bombs hung in every passage, besides red, cone-shaped extinguishers. If he could have had bombs to put out the flames of love and keep women away he no doubt would have had them. ”

“ Pettigrew's man," said Mudd, "and he asked me to bring you these flowers."
"Ah, Monsieur Seemon Pattigrew," cried the old lady, her face lighting. "Come in, monsieur. Cerise!—Cerise!—a gentilmon from Mr. Pattigrew. Will you not take a seat, monsieur?"
Mudd, handing over the flowers, sat down, and at that moment in came Cerise from the bedroom adjoining. Cerise, fresh and dainty, with wide blue eyes that took in Mudd and the flowers, that seemed to take in at the same time the whole of spring and summer.
"Poor, but decent," said Mudd to himself. ”

“ CHAPTER VII THE WALLET
He awoke to Mudd drawing the blinds and to another perfect day—a summer morning, luxurious and warm, beautiful even in London. He had lost clutch of Tidd and Renshaw in the land of sleep, but he had found his strength and self-confidence again.
The terror of Lethmann's disease had vanished; the thing was absurd, he had been frightened by a bogey. Oppenshaw was a clever man, but he was a specialist, always thinking of nerve diseases, living in an atmosphere of them. Sir Ralph Puttick, on the contrary, was a man of solid understanding and wider views—a sane man. ”

“ In this whirlpool of amazement, like Poe's man in the descent of the maelstrom, who, clinging to a barrel, found that he was being sucked down slower, Mudd, clinging now to the female saving-something—sense, clarity of outlook, goodness, call it what you will—found comfort.
He had opened his mind, the nightmare had lifted somewhat. Opening his mind to Bobby had not relieved him in the least; on the contrary, talking with Bobby, the situation had seemed more insane than ever. The two rigid masculine minds had followed one another, incapable of mutual help ”

“ What a delight even in a dream! To be young and absolutely free from all restraint, 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. ”

“ An ordinary person, unknowing, would have accepted Simon as all right, but it seemed to Bobby, now, that it would have been much better if his companion had been decently and honestly mad, less uncanny. He was obviously sane, though a bit divorced from things; obviously sane, and eating scrambled eggs after sausages with the abandon of a schoolboy on a holiday after a long term at a cheap school; sane, and enjoying himself after a night like that—yet he was Simon Pettigrew. ”

“ The toot of a motor-horn came from outside.
Julia rose and left the room.
Bobby followed and stopped her in the passage.
"Julia," said he, "if you can get him out of this and save his name being in the papers, you'll be a brick. You are a brick, and I've been a—a——"
"I know," said Julia, "but you could not help yourself—nor can I. I'm not Cerise. Love is lunacy and the world's all wrong. Now go back and tell your uncle to say nothing in court and to pretend he's a fool. If Pugeot is the man you say he is, he'll save his name. Old Mr. Pettigrew has got to be camouflaged." ”

“ 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. ”

“ Had Uncle Simon added burglary to knocker-snatching, broken into a jeweller's and disposed of his takings to a "fence," committed robbery? All these thoughts strayed over his mind, harmless because of Cerise.
The unfortunate young man, who had fooled so long with girls, had met the girl who had been waiting for him since the beginning of the world. There is always that; she may be blowsy, she may be plain, or lovely like Cerise—she is Fate. ”

“ Lord, I don't want to see him any younger than he is; if this is youth, give me old age."
"You'll get it fast enough," said Tozer, "don't you worry; and this will be a reminder to you to keep old. There's an Arab proverb that says, 'There are two things colder than ice, an old young man and a young old man.'"
"Colder than ice!" said Bobby. "I wish you had five minutes with Uncle Simon." ”

“ He knew quite well the suggestion that lay in the tone and the words of Mudd, but a visit to his tailors was almost on a par with a visit to his dentists, and new clothes were an abhorrence. It took him a fortnight to get used to a new coat, and as to being shabby, why, a decent shabbiness was part of his personality and, vaguely perhaps, of his pride in life. He could afford to be shabby.
Mudd having vanished, Simon rose and began his toilet, tubbing in a tin bath—a flat Victorian tin bath—and shaving with a razor taken from a case of seven, each marked with a day of the week. ”

“ 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 levelled at you by the residents. ”

“ Now if U. S. 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 humoured and led—was a worse proposition.
Playing bear-leader to a young fool was an entirely different thing to 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. ”

“ He explained the case of Simon as well as he could.
Julia did not seem in the least shocked.
"But I think it's beautiful," she broke out. "Strange—but in a way beautiful and pathetic. Oh, if only a few more people 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. ”

“ CHAPTER III SIMON'S OLD-FASHIONED NIGHT IN TOWN
Madame Rossignol was a charming old lady of sixty, a production of France—no other country could have produced her. She lived in Duke Street, Leicester Square, supporting herself and her daughter Cerise by translating English books into French. Cerise did millinery. Madame combined absolute innocence with absolute instinct. She knew all about things; her innocence was not ignorance, it was purity—rising above a knowledge of the world, and disdaining to look at evil. ”

“ The bouquet was not extraordinarily large, but it seemed to grow larger.
Condemned to take an omnibus in lieu of a cab, it seemed to fill the omnibus; people looked at it and then at Mudd. It seemed to him that he was condemned to carry Simon's folly bare in the face of the world. Then he remembered what he had said about the recipient going to be married. Was that an omen?
Mudd believed in omens. If his elbow itched—and it had itched yesterday—he was going to sleep in a strange bed; he never killed spiders, and he tested "strangers" in the tea-cup to see if they were male or female. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He felt as though he were in a skidding car, but nothing happened, no accusing voice rose to give him the lie, and the Bench retired to consider its sentence, which was one guinea fine for Sigismond and a month for Horn.
"You've married them," said Julia, as they walked back to the hotel, leaving the others to follow. "I never meant you to say that. But perhaps it's for the best; she's a good woman and will look after him, and he'll have to finish the business, won't he?"
"Rather, and a jolly good job!" said Pugeot. ”

“ 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 Pattigrew," murmured Cerise, with a little laugh.
A knock came to 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, after leaving the Rossignols, had struck a flower shop—this was the result. ”

“ He opened the car door and Simon hopped in; then he gave the address to the driver and the car drove off.
"Well, I never expected to see you this morning," said Pugeot. "Never can feel grateful enough to you either—you've nothing special to do, have you? Anywhere I can drive you to?"
"I've got to see a girl," said Simon, "but she can wait."
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. ”

“ People were turned away from his door as from a theatre where a wildly successful play is running. The main craving of fashionable neurotics, a craving beyond, though often inspired by the craving for, the opium alkaloids [Pg 21] and cocaine, was to see Oppenshaw. Yet he was not much to see: a little bald man like a turnip, with the manners of a butcher, and gold-rimmed spectacles.
Dukes inspired with the desire to see Oppenshaw had to wait their turn often behind tradesmen, yet he was at Simon Pettigrew's command. Simon was his sometime lawyer. ”

“ 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 towards Oxford Street, but still without object.
What made his position worse was his instinct as a solicitor. For forty years he had, amongst other work, been engaged in tying up Youth so that it could not get at Property, extracting Youth from pitfalls it had tumbled into whilst carrying Property in its arms. The very words "youth" and "property," innocent in themselves, were obnoxious to Simon when combined. ”

“ Mudd alone remains unmarried out of all these people, for the simple and efficient reason that there is no one to marry him to. He lives with the Pettigrews in Charles Street, and his only trouble in life is dread of another outbreak on the part of Simon. This has not occurred yet—will never occur, if there is any truth in the dictum of Oppenshaw that marriage is the only cure for the delusions of youth. ”

“ Mudd was Simon's factotum, butler, and minister of inferior affairs. Mudd was sixty-five and a bit; he had been in the services of the Pettigrew family forty-five years, and had grown up, so to say, side by side with Simon. For the last twenty years every morning Mudd had brought up his master's tea, drawn up his blinds and set out his clothes—seven thousand times or thereabouts, allowing for holidays and illnesses. He was a clean-shaven old man, with rounded shoulders and a way that had become blunt with long use ”

“ No, Mudd, just swallow your feelings and trot off and get those flowers, and, meanwhile, I'll do what I can to divert his mind. And see here, Mudd, you might just see what that girl is like."
"Shall I tell her he's off his head and that maybe she'll have the law on her if she goes on fooling with him?" suggested Mudd.
"No," said the more worldly-wise Bobby; "if she's the wrong sort that would only make her more keen. She'd say to herself, 'Here's a queer old chap with money, half off his nut, and not under restraint ”

“ Bobby was young, generous, forgetful and easy to forgive, so the fact that the Relative had deserted him and cut him off with a shilling never occurred to his open soul at this critical moment.
Uncle Simon had to be looked after. He felt the truth of Mudd's words about the office. If this thing were known it would knock the business to pieces. Bobby was no fool, and he knew something of Simon's responsibilities; he administered estates, he had charge of trust-money, he was the most respected solicitor in London. Heavens! ”

“ 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 befel them. Added to the uneasiness of the gambler was the uneasiness of the law-breaker, the two uneasinesses, combined making a mental cocktail that, to a large number of the frequenters, had a charm far above anything to be obtained in a legitimate gambling-shop on the Continent.
This place supplied Oppenshaw with some of his male patients.
Pugeot played and lost, and then Simon plunged. ”