Fancies and Goodnights (3 page)

Annihilating all that

There is a great deal of devilry in a bright and windy midnight
in the month of March. A little naked moon rides high over Fairlawn
Avenue in the heart of the Sweetholme building development. The new
houses are chalk-masked by its light, except for their darkened
windows, which glare broodingly, like deep-set eyes, or the sockets
of eyes. There are some young almond trees, which ordinarily look
as if drawn by a childish hand. Now, as the wind sets their weak
branches gibbering, they seem like shamanistic scratches on the
white bone of the brittle bright night.

The wind causes a man to tuck his chin into his coat collar, to
become a mere rag, curved against the wind. His bowler-hatted
moon-shadow, apparently cut from a sheet of tin, scythes its way
implacably through the asphalt, and seems the better man of the
two, probably the real man, the genuine Mr. Watkins. Around the
bend, just out of sight, comes another figure, bowler-hatted also,
scythe-curved also, also chopping its way through the icy air. It
might be the shadow of the shadow. It might be Death. It is,
however, only Mr. Gosport.

The carriage from which he alighted out of the midnight train
was the farthest from the station barrier. Also, his shoelace came
undone. There is an explanation for everything: sometimes two
explanations. These two explain why Mr. Gosport was a hundred yards
or so behind Mr. Wat-kins.

Mr. Watkins, with his little grin slipped in like a scarf-pin
behind his upturned lapels, observed with a stare of desolate and
hopeless superiority the monotony of the houses of Fairlawn Avenue.
This was the vilest ingratitude, for the uniformity was due to the
fact that each was the best possible house at the figure. Watkins,
however, having drunk and sung away the Saturday evening in
exclusively male company, was full of blood and villainy,
intolerant of caution and incapable of gratitude. He decided that
on Monday he would rob the bank at which he was employed, and fly
to South America, where he would set up a seraglio.

How different were the thoughts of Mr. Gosport, as out of sight,
around the bend, he sheared his way into the wind and also regarded
the monotony of Fairlawn Avenue! The good Gosport fully realized
that each house was the best possible at the price; he knew that
each chalky bump was a vertebra in the backbone of the country; he
had read that the life of the little man was as full of romance and
high adventure as that of any buccaneer of old; columnists had told
him that the Fairlawn Avenues of the world are its very jewels, its
necklaces of simple joys and sorrows, its rosaries in which each
well matched home is a pearl. The only trouble was, he had no great
fondness for jewelry, and wished that he was dead.

The house they call the Engineer

A young man, with a bowler hat, cane, flaxen mustache, and blue
suit, was looking at a gorilla in a zoo. All about him were cages
floored with squares of desert. On these yellow flats, like precise
false statements of equatorial latitudes, lay the shadows of bars.
There were nutshells, banana skins, fading lettuce; there were the
cries of birds who believed themselves mewed up because they were
mad, the obeisances of giraffes, the yawns of lions. In an
imitation of moon crags, mountain goats bore about ignobly eyes
that were pieces of moon. The elephants, grey in a humidity of
grass and dung, shifted from one foot to another. Jurassic days, it
seemed, would quite definitely never be here again. Mice, moving
with the speed of a nervous twitch, were bold in the freedom of a
catastrophe of values.

Perceiving that they were alone, the gorilla addressed the young
man in an imitation of the American accent, which he affected for
reasons of his own.

Annoyed with the world, I took a large studio in Hampstead. Here
I resolved to live in utter aloofness, until the world should
approach me on its knees, whining its apologies.

The studio was large and high; so was the rent. Fortunately my
suit was strongly made, and I had a tireless appetite for herrings.
I lived here happily and frugally, pleased with the vast and
shadowy room, and with the absurd little musicians

The Hotel Bixbee is as commercial an hotel as any in Chicago.
The brass-rail surmounts the banisters; the cuspidor gleams dimly
in the shade of the potted palm. The air in the corridors is very
still, and appears to have been de-odorized a few days ago. The
rates are moderate.

Walter Davies

Edward Laxton had everything in the world that he wanted except
a sweetheart, fianc

A young man entered the office of a well-known psychiatrist,
whom he addressed as follows:

There was in those days

As soon as Einstein declared that space was finite, the price of
building sites, both in Heaven and Hell, soared outrageously. A
number of petty fiends, who had been living in snug squalor in the
remoter infernal provinces, found themselves evicted from their
sorry shacks, and had not the wherewithal to buy fresh plots at the
new prices. There was nothing for it but to emigrate. They
scattered themselves over the various habitable planets of our
universe; one of them arrived in London at about the hour of
midnight in the October of last year.

Some angels in like case took similar measures, and by a
coincidence one of them descended at the same hour into the same
northern suburb.

Beings of this order, when they take on the appearance of
humans, have the privilege of assuming whichever sex they choose.
Things being as they are, and both angels and devils knowing very
well what

The Vascal System is the most reliable, the most up-to-date, and
the most scientific method of foretelling the future by cards. It
is true the operator cannot tell his own fortune, but that drawback
seems to be common to all methods, and in every other way the
successes of the Vascal System have been prodigious.

A wife, who studied a Vascal in her spare time, laid out the
cards for her husband on the breakfast table. She revealed to him
that he would be involved in an unfortunate collision, and suffer a
severe jolt at the very least, if by any chance he drove his car
home between three and five that afternoon. He now regularly
desires his wife to lay out the cards for him, and never drives
home before the hour she announces as propitious, with the result
that he is almost the only person in the whole block who has not
been severely jolted during the period in question.

A young girl, holder of a Grade A. Vascal Diploma, was able to
warn her still younger sister that she might that evening expect to
lose something she had possessed all her life, through the agency
of a tall, dark man, but though this would cause her some little
distress at the outset, it would in the end lead to lasting
happiness and satisfaction. Sure enough, the young sister left for
a blind date that evening in such haste that she forgot to lock the
door behind her. A sneak thief, entering, took away her baby
seed-pearl necklace, which was a tatty little number anyway, and
she was successful in gypping the insurance people for at least
three times its value, and bought that very same rhinestone clip
which first attracted the attention of Mr. Jerry Horrabin, now her
fianc

I came again to Doyle

A young man, who was looking extremely pale, walked to the
middle of Westminster Bridge and clambered onto the parapet. A
swarthy gentleman, some years his senior, in evening dress, with
dark red carnation, Inverness cape, monocle, and short imperial,
appeared as if from nowhere, and had him by the ankle.

There was a young sculptor named Eustace whose work was
altogether too life-like for the modern taste. Consequently he was
often under the necessity of dropping in upon his friends at about
seven in the evening, in the hungry hope of being pressed to stay
for dinner.

Young men with open faces, red cheeks, and brown hair all behave
in the same way, and nothing in the world could be more reasonable.
They fall into a job or in love with the utmost readiness and
enthusiasm. If oil and Lucille let them down, they pretty soon
console themselves with steel and Estelle.

Other young men seem born for one passion only, or maybe two,
one job and one woman. If both passions are there they run
together, like railway lines; they are strong as steel, and as
devoid of romantic colouring. They go on forever, and if one or
other fails the results are apt to be serious. Young men of this
sort are sometimes very tall, lean to emaciation, with skull-like
faces, deep-set and rather burning eyes, and mouths either terribly
sensitive or terribly cruel, it is hard to say which. If they are
poor they look like nothing on earth; if they are rich they look
like Lincoln in the rail-splitting period.

Such young men frequently devote themselves to science;
sometimes to medicine. The research side appeals to them. If they
are brilliant enough, and have money enough, they study under the
world

There was a young woman, the daughter of a retired colonel,
resident in one of London

Give the commuter Spring! Because, where the white walls are
clustered close among the rocks and woods, the first daffodil is a
portent most regarded; because among the companionable roofs there
are more planes, more variously coloured lilac, plum and rose, for
the last hoarfrost to moisten, glisten, and steam upon; because of
the ice-break tinkle in the voices of children, and the appeal of
their small rubbers; because of the untrustworthy lustre of the sky
over Tarrytown and the east wind yet guerrilla on the plain,
because of the glad heartbreaking babble at the breakfast table,
and the bill beside the plate, give the commuter Spring!

Henry Sanford II, somewhat sloping about the shoulders, but
dark, slim, and hollow of abdomen, clad in loosely fitting grey
with a tweedy touch to it, and a well-worn tweedy touch at that,
was granted his full share of this delectable season. It was the
last morning in April. The wood

Alan Austen, as nervous as a kitten, went up certain dark and
creaky stairs in the neighbourhood of Pell Street, and peered about
for a long time on the dim landing before he found the name he
wanted written obscurely on one of the doors.

He pushed open this door, as he had been told to do, and found
himself in a tiny room, which contained no furniture but a plain
kitchen table, rocking chair, and an ordinary chair. On one of the
dirty buff-coloured walls were a couple of shelves, containing in
all perhaps a dozen bottles and jars. An old man sat in the rocking
chair, reading a newspaper. Alan, without a word, handed him the
card he had been given.