SIMON THE JESTER
BY
WILLIAM J. LOCKE
CHAPTER I
I met Renniker the other day at the club. He is a man who knows
everything--from the method of trimming a puppy's tail for a dog-show,
without being disqualified, to the innermost workings of the mind of
every European potentate. If I want information on any subject under
heaven I ask Renniker.
"Can you tell me," said I, "the most God-forsaken spot in England?"
Renniker, being in a flippant mood, mentioned a fashionable watering-
place on the South Coast. I pleaded the seriousness of my question.
"What I want," said I, "is a place compared to which Golgotha,
Aceldama, the Dead Sea, the Valley of Jehoshaphat, and the Bowery
would be leafy bowers of uninterrupted delight."
"Then Murglebed-on-Sea is what you're looking for," said Renniker.
"Are you going there at once?"
"At once," said I.
"It's November," said he, "and a villainous November at that; so
you'll see Murglebed-on-Sea in the fine flower of its desolation."
I thanked him, went home, and summoned my excellent man Rogers.
"Rogers," said I, "I am going to the seaside. I heard that Murglebed
is a nice quiet little spot. You will go down and inspect it for me
and bring back a report."
He went blithe and light-hearted, though he thought me insane; he
returned with the air of a serving-man who, expecting to find a well-
equipped pantry, had wandered into a charnel house.
"It's an awful place, sir. It's sixteen miles from a railway station.
The shore is a mud flat. There's no hotel, and the inhabitants are
like cannibals."
"I start for Murglebed-on-Sea to-morrow," said I.
Rogers started at me. His loose mouth quivered like that of a child
preparing to cry.
"We can't possibly stay there, sir," he remonstrated.
"/We/ are not going to try," I retorted. "I'm going by myself."
His face brightened. Almost cheerfully he assured me that I should
find nothing to eat in Murglebed.
"You can amuse yourself," said I, "by sending me down a daily hamper
of provisions."
"There isn't even a church," he continued.
"Then you can send me down a tin one from Humphreys'. I believe they
can supply one with everything from a tin rabbit-hutch to a town
hall."
He sighed and departed, and the next day I found myself here, in
Murglebed-on-Sea.
On a murky, sullen November day Murglebed exhibits unimagined horrors
of scenic depravity. It snarls at you malignantly. It is like a bit of
waste land in Gehenna. There is a lowering, soap-suddy thing a mile
away from the more or less dry land which local ignorance and
superstition call the sea. The interim is mud--oozy, brown, malevolent
mud. Sometimes it seems to heave as if with the myriad bodies of slimy
crawling eels and worms and snakes. A few foul boats lie buried in it.
Here and there, on land, a surly inhabitant spits into it. If you
address him he snorts at you unintelligibly. If you turn your back to
the sea you are met by a prospect of unimagined despair. There are no
trees. The country is flat and barren. A dismal creek runs miles
inland--an estuary fed by the River Murgle. A few battered cottages, a
general shop, a couple of low public-houses, and three perky red-brick
villas all in a row form the city, or town, or village, or what you
will, of Murglebed-on-Sea. Renniker is a wonderful man.
I have rented a couple of furnished rooms in one of the villas. It has
a decayed bit of front garden in which a gnarled, stunted stick is
planted, and it is called The Laburnums. My landlord, the owner of the
villas, is a builder. What profits he can get from building in
Murglebed, Heaven alone knows; but, as he mounts a bicycle in the
morning and disappears for the rest of the day, I presume he careers
over the waste, building as he goes. In the evenings he gets drunk at
the Red Cow; so I know little of him, save that he is a red-faced man,
with a Moustache like a tooth-brush and two great hands like hams.
His wife is taciturn almost to dumbness. She is a thick-set, black-
haired woman, and looks at me disapprovingly out of the corner of her
eye as if I were a blackbeetle which she would like to squash under
foot. She tolerates me, however, on account of the tongues and other
sustenance sent by Rogers from Benoist, of which she consumes
prodigious quantities. She wonders, as far as the power of wonder is
given to her dull brain, what on earth I am doing here. I see her
whispering to her friends as I enter the house, and I know they are
wondering what I am doing here. The whole village regards me as a
humorous zoological freak, and wonders what I am doing here among
normal human beings.
And what am I doing here--I, Simon de Gex, M.P., the spoilt darling of
fortune, as my opponent in the Labour interest called me during the
last electoral campaign? My disciple and secretary, young Dale
Kynnersley, the only mortal besides Rogers who knows my whereabouts,
trembles for my reason. In the eyes of the excellent Rogers I am horn-
mad. What my constituents would think did they see me taking the muddy
air on a soggy afternoon, I have no conception. Dale keeps them at
bay. He also baffles the curiosity of my sisters, and by his diplomacy
has sent Eleanor Faversham on a huffy trip to Sicily. She cannot
understand why I bury myself in bleak solitude, instead of making
cheerful holiday among the oranges and lemons of the South.
Eleanor is a girl with a thousand virtues, each of which she expects
to find in counterpart in the man to whom she is affianced. Until a
week or two ago I actually thought myself in love with Eleanor. There
seemed a whimsical attraction in the idea of marrying a girl with a
thousand virtues. Before me lay the pleasant prospect of reducing them
--say, ten at a time--until I reached the limit at which life was
possible, and then one by one until life became entertaining. I
admired her exceedingly--a strapping, healthy English girl who looked
you straight in the eyes and gripped you fearlessly by the hand.
My friends "lucky-dog'd" me until I began to smirk to myself at my own
good fortune. She visited the constituency and comported herself as if
she had been a Member's wife since infancy, thereby causing my heart
to swell with noble pride. This unparalleled young person compelled me
to take my engagement almost seriously. If I shot forth a jest, it
struck against a virtue and fell blunted to the earth. Indeed, even
now I am sorry I can't marry Eleanor. But marriage is out of the
question.
I have been told by the highest medical authorities that I may manage
to wander in the flesh about this planet for another six months. After
that I shall have to do what wandering I yearn for through the medium
of my ghost. There is a certain humourousness in the prospect. Save
for an occasional pain somewhere inside me, I am in the most robust
health.
But this same little pain has been diagnosed by the Faculty as the
symptom of an obscure disease. An operation, they tell me, would kill
me on the spot. What it is called I cannot for the life of me
remember. They gave it a kind of lingering name, which I wrote down on
my shirt-cuff.
The name or characteristics of the thing, however, do not matter a
fig. I have always hated people who talked about their insides, and I
am not going to talk about mine, even to myself. Clearly, if it is
only going to last me six months, it is not worth talking about. But
the quaint fact of its brief duration is worth the attention of a
contemplative mind.
It is in order perfectly to focus this attention that I have come to
Murglebed-on-Sea. Here I am alone with the murk and the mud and my own
indrawn breath of life. There are no flowers, blue sky, smiling eyes,
and dainty faces--none of the adventitious distractions of the earth.
There are no Blue-books. Before the Faculty made their jocular
pronouncement I had been filling my head with statistics on pauper
lunacy so as to please my constituency, in which the rate has
increased alarmingly of late years. Perhaps that is why I found myself
their representative in Parliament. I was to father a Bill on the
subject next session. Now the labour will fall on other shoulders. I
interest myself in pauper lunacy no more. A man requires less flippant
occupation for the premature sunset of his days. Well, in Murglebed I
can think, I can weigh the /pros/ and /cons/ of existence with an even
mind, I can accustom myself to the concept of a Great Britain without
Simon de Gex. M.P.
Of course, when I go I shall "cast one longing, lingering look
behind." I don't particularly want to die. In fact, having otherwise
the prospect of an entertaining life, I regard my impending
dissolution in the light of a grievance. But I am not afraid. I shall
go through the dismal formality with a graceful air and as much of a
smile on my face as the pain in my inside will physically permit.
My dear but somewhat sober-sided friend Marcus Aurelius says: "Let
death surprise me when it will, and where it will, I may be
/eumoiros/, or a happy man, nevertheless. For he is a happy man who in
his lifetime dealeth unto himself a happy lot and portion. A happy lot
and portion in good inclinations of the soul, good desires, good
actions."
The word /eumoiros/ according to the above definition, tickles my
fancy. I would give a great deal to be eumoirous. What a thing to say:
"I have achieved eumoiriety,"--namely the quintessence of happy-
fatedness dealt unto oneself by a perfect altruism!
I don't think that hitherto my soul has been very evilly inclined, my
desires base, or my actions those of a scoundrel. Still, the negatives
do not qualify one for eumoiriety. One wants something positive. I
have an idea, therefore, of actively dealing unto myself a happy lot
or portion according to the Marcian definition during the rest of the
time I am allowed to breathe the upper air. And this will be fairly
easy; for no matter how excellently a man's soul may be inclined to
the performance of a good action, in ninety cases out of a hundred he
is driven away from it by dread of the consequences. Your moral
teachers seldom think of this--that the consequences of a good action
are often more disastrous than those of an evil one. But if a man is
going to die, he can do good with impunity. He can simply wallow in
practical virtue. When the boomerang of his beneficence comes back to
hit him on the head--/he won't be there to feel it/. He can thus hoist
Destiny with its own petard, and, besides, being eumoirous, can spend
a month or two in a peculiarly diverting manner. The more I think of
the idea the more am I in love with it. I am going to have a seraph of
a time. I am going to play the archangel.
I shall always have pleasant memories of Murglebed. Such an idea could
not have germinated in any other atmosphere. In the scented groves of
sunny lands there would have been sown Seeds of Regret, which would
have blossomed eventually into Flowers of Despair. I should have gone
about the world, a modern Admetus, snivelling at my accursed luck,
without even the chance of persuading a soft-hearted Alcestis to die
for me. I should have been a dismal nuisance to society.
"Bless you," I cried this afternoon, waving, as I leaned against a
post, my hand to the ambient mud, "Renniker was wrong! You are not a
God-forsaken place. You are impregnated with divine inspiration."
A muddy man in a blue jersey and filthy beard who occupied the next
post looked at me and spat contemptuously. I laughed.
"If you were Marcus Aurelius," said I, "I would make a joke--a short
life and an eumoiry one--and he would have looked as pained as you."
"What?" he bawled. He was to windward of me.
I knew that if I repeated my observation he would offer to fight me. I
approached him suavely.
"I was wondering," I said, "as it's impossible to strike a match in
this wind, whether you would let me light my pipe from yours."
"It's empty," he growled.
"Take a fill from my pouch," said I.
The mud-turtle loaded his pipe, handed me my pouch without
acknowledgment, stuck his pipe in his breeches pocket, spat again,
and, deliberately turning his back, on me, lounged off to another post
on a remoter and less lunatic-ridden portion of the shore. Again I
laughed, feeling, as the poet did with the daffodils, that one could
not but be gay in such a jocund company.
There are no amenities or urbanities of life in Murglebed to choke the
growth of the Idea. This evening it flourishes so exceedingly that I
think it safe to transplant it in the alien soil of Q 3, The Albany,
where the good Rogers must be leading an idle existence peculiarly
deleterious to his morals.
This gives one furiously to think. One of the responsibilities of
eumoiriety must be the encouragement and development of virtue in my
manservant.
Also in my young friend and secretary, Dale Kynnersley. He is more to
me than Rogers. I may confess that, so long as Rogers is a sober,
honest, me-fearing valet, in my heart of hearts I don't care a hang
about Rogers's morals. But about those of Dale Kynnersley I do. I care
a great deal for his career and happiness. I have a notion that he is
erring after strange goddesses and neglecting the little girl who is
in love with him. He must be delivered. He must marry Maisie Ellerton,
and the two of them must bring lots of capable, clear-eyed Kynnersleys
into the world. I long to be their ghostly godfather.
Then there's Eleanor Faversham--but if I begin to draw up a programme
I shall lose that spontaneity of effort which, I take it, is one of
the chief charms of dealing unto oneself a happy lot and portion. No;
my soul abhors tabulation. It would make even six months' life as
jocular as Bradshaw's Railway Guide or the dietary of a prison. I
prefer to look on what is before me as a high adventure, and with that
prospect in view I propose to jot down my experiences from time to
time, so that when I am wandering, a pale shade by Acheron, young Dale
Kynnersley may have not only documentary evidence wherewith to
convince my friends and relations that my latter actions were not
those of a lunatic, but also, at the same time, an up-to-date version
of Jeremy Taylor's edifying though humour-lacking treatise on the act
of dying, which I am sorely tempted to label "The Rule and Example of
Eumoiriety." I shall resist the temptation, however. Dale Kynnersley--
such is the ignorance of the new generation--would have no sense of
the allusion. He would shake his head and say, "Dotty, poor old chap,
dotty!" I can hear him. And if, in order to prepare him, I gave him a
copy of the "Meditations," he would fling the book across the room and
qualify Marcus Aurelius as a "rotter."
Dale is a very shrewd fellow, and will make an admirable legislator
when his time comes. Although his highest intellectual recreation is
reiterated attendance at the musical comedy that has caught his fancy
for the moment and his favourite literature the sporting pages of the
daily papers, he has a curious feline pounce on the salient facts of a
political situation, and can thread the mazes of statistics with the
certainty of a Hampton Court guide. His enthusiastic researches (on my
behalf) into pauper lunacy are remarkable in one so young. I foresee
him an invaluable chairman of committee. But he will never become a
statesman. He has too passionate a faith in facts and figures, and has
not cultivated a sense of humour at the expense of the philosophers.
Young men who do not read them lose a great deal of fun.
Well, to-morrow I leave Murglebed for ever; it has my benison.
Democritus returns to London.
