The golden journey of Mr. Paradyne

Mr. Cosmo Paradyne, K.C., awoke. He awoke to an intense consciousness of being wide awake. It was dark. He damned his ill-luck, for he knew that insomnia had marked him for its own for the rest of the night. ‘Phillibert v. Phillibert, Cohen & Smith,’ would dance through his head till morning. He threw himself into an impatient turn and all but fell out of bed. Indeed, one foot touched the floor. He swung towards the other side and immediately came into contact with a wooden wall.

He lay on his back for some time, his hands over his eyes, wondering. Then he laughed to himself. Why, of course, he was in a ship’s bunk. How silly not to realize it at once. It was the Whitsuntide recess, and he and his wife were going on a much needed holiday. He turned over again and composed himself to sleep. But the important will case of ‘Phillibert v. Phillibert, Cohen & Smith’ worried him. He should have made application to the Judge in the Chancery Court before starting on his journey. For the life of him he couldn’t remember to have done so. To his client the point was of vast importance.

He racked his brains. On Saturday there had been the consultation at his Chambers with Miss Phillibert and Griffiths, her solicitor. It was arranged that he should make the application on Monday.

That was yesterday.

It was the oddest thing in the world. Even if he himself had forgotten the appointment--a most improbable thing--his clerk would have reminded him; his clerk, Gregson, a pallid, clock-faced man, as infallible and implacable as a machine. He shrugged his shoulders. He must have appeared in court and forgotten it. It was high time for him to take a rest. He had been working at high pressure for months, and was dead tired; fagged out.... That old fool of a Phillibert was certainly under undue influence when he made the will. The letter of Mrs. Cohen.... He tossed impatiently. He would dismiss the case from his mind. The only value of a holiday was to clean out your brain and give it a rest. He made mighty resolve to sleep. The blanket slipped and he found himself a-cold. He cursed the hardness and discomfort of ships’ bunks as he groped for it on the floor.

It was a very curious ship. There was no creak of the woodwork, no throb of the engines, no motion. The silence of death was only broken by a queer, rhythmical scrunching sound, which seemed like the lap of idle waves against the vessel’s side. Either the engines had broken down or the ship was becalmed or befogged.... He snuggled up in the retrieved blanket, all the bedclothes that the ship afforded, and resigned himself to circumstances. After all, it was rest that mattered. Golf was but a means of attaining rest, and Le Touquet....

Le Touquet!

The thought hit him like a hammer. What on earth was he doing on board ship, at dead of night, on his way to Le Touquet which was a cab-drive from Boulogne? He swung out of bed and, standing up, realized for the first time that his legs were bare. His hands plucking at his only garment proved it to be a flannel shirt open at the neck. Never had the unadventurous Paradyne gone to bed in a flannel shirt. For night attire a suit of plate-armour would have been as customary. A bit of the truth flashed upon him. He was not on board ship at all. But where the devil was he? A crowing cock tore the stillness and told him that he was on dry land.

Where the devil was he? In a train? He fumbled round about the bunk for an electric switch and found nothing to correspond with a sleeping-car’s accessories. His bare feet trod bare and gritty boards. A swept-out hand hit--so that his knuckles were grazed--something cold and hard, which in its turn rattled loud against a similar substance. He stood still and sweated.

Presently, his eyes accustomed to the darkness, he recognized on the ground a yard-long slit of pale light by the bunk head. That meant a doorway at any rate. He fumbled till he found a key in a lock, thrust the opened door outwards, and stood on the threshold amazed, gazing out into a strange world in the dimmest light of dawn.

There was a road which the near distance swallowed up into nothingness. Vague trees loomed like sentinels. Immediately below three wooden steps at his feet swept a broad stretch of grass bordering the road. Far away across an infinite vastness of plain shimmered the dull lemon and green reflection of some radiance. The rhythmical scrunching sound went on. It was somewhere behind him.

He descended the three steps, recognized that what he had taken for a ship was but a sort of gipsy caravan, and that the noise was made by a tethered horse comfortably munching the wayside grass.

The most bewildered of young and brilliant leaders of the Chancery Bar, clad only in a flannel shirt reaching to his knees, a vesture of humility for any man counting as religion the decencies of life, returned to the caravan steps and in the dusk of the growing twilight made out that which was therein. Pots and pans and brooms and brushes hanging from roof and walls in a nightmare medley. The bunk was but a thinly cushioned plank, the blanket some dark horror. He entered and his feet grew entangled in what, stooping down, he found to be articles of raiment. He groped and gradually collected a pair of cotton socks, canvas trousers, curiously unfamiliar; yet, on the other hand, his familiar golfing shoes and Norfolk jacket. He dressed himself gladly, for he shivered in the cold of the dawn.

Both phenomena, the cold and the dawn, he realized. Blanket around him, he sat on the threshold of the absurd structure in which, without question, he had his immediate being, clasped his head in his hands and concentrated his mind on the solution of the amazing problem:

‘Where am I? And what the devil am I doing here, wherever I am?’

Loss of memory? No. Absurd! He was Cosmo Paradyne, K.C., aged forty-two. All his past life lay an open book to him. Winchester; King’s College, Cambridge; the Bar. From childhood an honourable history of ambition, work and success. He was certainly not wandering about like a fool not knowing who he was.

Yet his present circumstances needed elucidation.

Let him trace back things to Friday--or rather start with Friday, the day of Viola’s wedding. Viola was his daughter, a very young and modern girl who had made socially, though not financially, an excellent marriage. As Earls and Judges and Cabinet Ministers and their wives could not be expected to turn up at Ealing, where he dwelt, the wedding reception was held at the Hyde Park Hotel. There were two or three hundred people, a band and champagne and wedding presents and detectives and photographers and journalists and a young bridegroom with an Honourable before his name; everything that girlish bride could desire. A great success.

When Cosmo Paradyne came to say good-bye to his daughter, it occurred to him that he was but distantly acquainted with her. Still, he performed his paternal duty.

‘My dear,’ he said, ‘I wish you weren’t going out to India, it’s so very far away.’

Whereat she laughed. ‘You never supposed I was going to live in Ealing all my life.’

He shrugged his shoulders. After all, it mattered very little where one lived.

He remembered the shrug and the reflection. Everything was perfectly clear. His wife drove home in the car. He took a cab to his chambers where some work awaited him, papers to read in connection with that infernal ‘Phillibert v. Phillibert, Cohen & Smith.’ He took the train to Ealing, dressed, dined alone with Martha. The dinner was not particularly good. He was the last man in the world to insist on delicate cookery. He had neither the time nor the thought for pleasures of the table. But tough mutton was tough mutton; bad for the digestion and therefore bad for work.

His wife, in her thin-lipped, acid, final voice, replied to his remonstrance:

‘I think it’s exceedingly good mutton. Roach is the best butcher in the neighbourhood. If he weren’t, I shouldn’t go to him.’

He did not press the point, having given up argument with Martha this many a year. He resumed their disconnected talk about the wedding and mentioned Viola’s scornful repudiation of Ealing.

‘Perhaps it’s a bit suburban,’ he said, with a smile.

‘It’s where I shall end my days,’ replied Martha. ‘And where, if Viola hadn’t married, she would have ended hers.’

She looked, with the pride of possession, around the decorous dining-room, its walls deadly with gloomy oil paintings; two full-length of her father and mother, ugly and awe-inspiring personages. For it was her own house, bequeathed to her (together with other worldly goods) by her father, a prosperous solicitor who had given Cosmo his first brief; and into it had she entered as a bride; and in it had she constructed and developed her own virtuous, dutiful and rigid life.

‘You’re not getting dissatisfied and wanting to change, I hope?’

‘Oh, no, no,’ he replied hastily. ‘It’s good for me to live out of town.’

‘You get your fresh air and your golf.’

‘I do,’ said he.

He remembered that when the butler came round with a cheese soufflé he waved it away.

‘I assure you there’s nothing wrong with that,’ said his wife.

He passed his hand over his lined, clean-shaven face and apologized courteously. During all the twenty years of his married life he had never quarrelled with Martha. He regarded her as a cosmic condition of his existence, like breakfast, rain and fog, and, again like these phenomena, remote from his vital interests. He had no appetite, he said; was too tired to eat; dog-weary; she must forgive him.

‘Of course I do,’ she replied politely. ‘But, all the same, it isn’t funny looking after a dead man.’

He was a dry, pragmatic fellow, accustomed to interpret the exact signification of words.

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Nothing more than what I said, Cosmo.’