James Pethel
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Max Beerbohm >> James Pethel
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.