James Pethel

by Sir Max Beerbohm

"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?