>>>  YOU ARE VIEWING A 200 LINE SAMPLE OF EBOOK# E03675  <<<

TITLE: JAMES PETHEL
AUTHOR: MAX BEERBOHM
EBOOK: E03675 (O'Briens Book Cellar)

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

<<<  END OF SAMPLE... (THE FULL EBOOK HAS 42778 TOTAL CHARACTERS)  >>>