The man who found himself (Smith's Magazine 1920)/Chapter 20

We must go back to three o'clock. At three o'clock Bobby, walking in the garden smoking a cigarette, had crossed the front of the arbor—arbor No. 1. The grass path, soundless as a Turkey carpet, did not betray his footsteps.

There were two people in the arbor and they were “cannoodling.” They were Simon and Julia Delyse. She was keeping her hand in, perhaps, or the attraction Simon had always had for her had betrayed her into allowing him to hold her hand. Anyhow, he was holding it. Bobby looked at her and Julia snatched her hand away. Simon laughed. He seemed to think it a good joke, and his vain soul was doubtless pleased with having got the better of Bobby with Bobby's girl.

Bobby passed on, saying: “I beg your pardon.” It was the only thing he could think of to say. Then, when out of hearing, he, too, laughed. He had got the better of Julia.

An hour later Simon, walking in the garden alone and in meditation, reached the bowling green. He drew close to arbor No. 2, the grass silencing his footsteps. The two people there did not see him for a moment, then they unlocked. It was Cerise and Bobby.

Simon stood, mouth open, stock-still, and his cigar dropped on to the grass. He had laughed when Bobby had caught him with Julia. He did not laugh now.

The shock of the poaching business had left him untouched, unshaken, but Cerise, in some strange way, was his center of gravity, his compass, and sometimes his rudder. He loved Cerise; the other girls were phantoms. Perhaps Cerise was the only real thing in his mental state.

Then, suddenly he began to scream like a naughty child and as he screamed he seemed to change. It was as if his youth were escaping,

Then he stopped and clapped his hand to his head like a man stunned.

Bobby ran to him and caught him.

“Where am I?” said uncle Simon. “Oh—oh—I see.” He leaned heavily on Bobby, looking about him in a dazed way like a man half awakened.

Then Bobby gently, very gently, began to lead him back to the house. As they drew near the back entrance three men, one following the other, came out. Simon stopped. He had recognized Tidd. He seemed also to recognize his own position and to remember.

“Why, this is Mr. Tidd,” said Simon

“Mr. Pettigrew,” said Tidd, “where are my papers—the papers in the case of Renshaw?”

“Tidd vs. Renshaw,” rehearsed Simon's accurate mind. “They are in the top left-hand drawer of my bureau in King Charles Street, Westminster.”

The first and most horrible shock to the recovered Simon was the fact that he had forgotten those papers. The second was his necessary appearance before Colonel Salmon and a full bench of magistrates with Horn, who had been captured. The affair was kept out of the papers. The third shock was the fact that he had made seven hundred pounds by gambling. The fourth shock was an attack of gout from too much good living, an attack through which Madame Rossignol nursed him.

He was an older and a wiser Simon when these things had finished with him—a Simon in search of a wife. Oppenshaw insisted on his marrying just as he had insisted on lithia water.

“You will be lost without a wife,” said Oppenshaw. And what better wife could he have had than Madame Rossignol? Or Bobby than Cerise?

Bobby told me this little story. He is not hunting for plots now. He does not want it. He has gone into business. Tea. He is very sedate, really reformed, the man of this little tale who found himself, for Simon only found his youth—a thing we all regret, yet a thing, perhaps, better lost.

Julia Delyse is not married yet—or rather only to Fiction, and as for Pugeot, he drives more slowly through life these days, his license heavily indorsed with the wigging given him by his relative, Sir Squire Simpson, for “landing on me and the countryside that set of deplorable people. An absolute disgrace, sir, to you, an absolute disgrace!”