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Ebook has 112 lines and 10930 words, and 3 pages

James Pethel

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. 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.

"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.

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.

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