Part 1

_The Golden Journey of Mr. Paradyne_

_BY WILLIAM J. LOCKE_

IDOLS JAFFERY SEPTIMUS DERELICTS THE USURPER STELLA MARIS WHERE LOVE IS THE WHITE DOVE THE RED PLANET FAR AWAY STORIES SIMON THE JESTER A STUDY IN SHADOWS THE FORTUNATE YOUTH THE ROUGH ROAD THE WONDERFUL YEAR THE BELOVED VAGABOND AT THE GATE OF SAMARIA THE MORALS OF MARCUS ORDEYNE THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE THE GLORY OF CLEMENTINA WING THE JOYOUS ADVENTURES OF ARISTIDE PUJOL THE HOUSE OF BALTAZAR THE MOUNTEBANK THE TALE OF TRIONA MOORDIUS AND CO. A CHRISTMAS MYSTERY THE COMING OF AMOS

_THE BODLEY HEAD_

_The Golden Journey of Mr. Paradyne_

BY WILLIAM J. LOCKE

_Illustrated in Colour and Black and White by_ MARCIA LANE FOSTER

LONDON: JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD LTD. TORONTO: LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.

_First published in 1924_

_Made and Printed in Great Britain at The Curwen Press Plaistow E.13_

_The colour plates by Geo. Gibbons & Co., Leicester._

_List of Illustrations_

FACING PAGE

Frontispiece

The young man ceased suddenly 16

He marched on along the white, respectable road 22

‘Why Chartres, Monsieur, ten kilometres’ 24

He lit another pipe 30

The horse, without his conscious guidance, took the bewildered man to Chartres 32

‘_Tiens_, she had a husband!’ 36

The Plain, whose horizon is as vast as that of mid-ocean 50

_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.’

Sitting on the steps of the caravan, he repeated, as these incidents passed through his mind:

‘Yes, what the devil did she mean by that?’

He continued his review.

The dull meal over, he lit his after-dinner cigar, his one concession to the hedonistic, and smoked it as usual, in solitude. Mrs. Paradyne allowed cigarettes, on necessary occasions, in her drawing-room, but never cigars. As it tasted bitter, he threw it away half-smoked and joined his wife, whom he found casting up wedding accounts at her escritoire. After a short while, he bade her good night, kissed a half-turned cheek and, according to unvarying custom when at home, went into his study to work. He was in the middle of a book, _The Relations of Equity to Common Law_, which, luminously written, would supply a long-felt want. He sat down and opened out his manuscript.

There his memory failed. What had happened after that? Instinctively he searched his right-hand pocket for his pipe. He found it; but he found something else, too, which caused him mighty astonishment. It was a very short, though somewhat elaborate, silver flageolet.

The dim light of dawn had now overspread the earth so that objects near and far were visible; but, for the next few moments, all that he saw was the bright and alluring instrument in his hands.

Now, Cosmo Paradyne was a musician in a dry and scientific way; furthermore, an authority on the history and use of wind instruments. He had founded the Ealing Symphonic Society and once a month or so played oboe or clarinet at their concerts. He had a fair collection in his study. But this silver flageolet had never been in his possession. He had never seen one like it.

He stared at it, put it to his lips, and, fingering the stops and keys, began to play, without premeditated act of volition, an extraordinary air. But after a few phrases he leaped to his feet in a shiver of fright, dropping the flageolet on the grass. How had this Puckish melody come into his head?

Then, returning memory flashed a clear picture.

He had fallen asleep over his _Relations of Equity to Common Law_, to be awakened late by clear and curious music outside the house. His study and his bedroom leading off it were on the ground floor. His study window lay open to the lawn. He stepped out, walked a few paces, and there at the angle of the building by the curve of the entrance drive stood the musician. He was an ordinary young man in a soft felt hat, and he played a flageolet which gleamed silver in the starlight. Cosmo Paradyne stood bemused and fascinated, for never had he heard such wonder from a flageolet. It was like the song of birds; the song of trees, of streams, of woods; the song of laughter, of dainty frolic, of elfin devilry. Now it broke into trills of a joy so exquisite that he caught his breath; now into phrases of longing that gripped his heart. And it was all based on a _motif_ which he had not heard before, of which he had not dreamed of hearing, simple as the music of the wind, yet subtle as though it harped upon the rays of a star.

The young man ceased suddenly, advanced, took off his hat and held it out for alms.

‘I’m glad you don’t mind my playing,’ said he. ‘Many people turn me away. Last night I had a dog set on me, to my extreme discomfort.’

‘But you’re a musician. An extraordinary musician,’ said Paradyne.

The young man laughed frankly. ‘I rather think I am,’ said he. And he edged his hat an inch or two nearer.

To bestow upon this amazing minstrel the largess of a shilling were impossible. He fumbled in his case and dropped a pound note into the hat.

‘I thank you, sir, for your bounty,’ said the young man, pocketing the note. He put on his hat with a flourish and prepared to turn.

‘Excuse me,’ said Paradyne, ‘I happen to be an amateur clarinettist, and I thought I knew as much as any man living of the music written for wind-instruments; but the thing you were playing just now I can’t recognize.’

‘I’m sure you can’t,’ replied the young man pleasantly. ‘It is my own composition, and it has never even been set down on paper; much less published for amateurs--saving your presence--to make a hash of. Again, sir, a million thanks. Good night.’

He swept a bow and marched off. Paradyne went into the house, with the music ringing through his brain.

The next morning to chambers. It was all perfectly clear. Griffiths had brought his elderly client, Miss Phillibert, to consultation.

Wait a bit. He sat on the caravan steps again. Something rather funny had happened. Yes. In the middle of it he had started to whistle and had been brought back to his senses only by the staggered expression on the faces of solicitor and client. He had been whistling this damned tune.

He lunched at his club, at a solitary table, not feeling equal to jaunty companionship. Then home to Ealing where, feeling ill and jaded, he went to bed. There, in spite of his wife’s protests, did he remain. Martha did not believe in people staying in bed unless they came out in spots or betrayed _malaise_ by other unmistakable physical symptoms. It upset the routine of the house. Still, he was the master. She would give the necessary orders. For dinner he had a sole which Martha called fried, but which he, with elementary humour, called dried; whereupon she went off, taking leave of him with acerb courtesy.

Later, servants came to make his bed and see to the comfort of his night. He rose, put on his dressing-gown, and felt very much the better for his rest. He bade the butler set out his golfing things in readiness for the morrow--Sunday. He went into his study next door. Being at a loose end, for to-night no work was possible, he bethought him of Tuesday’s early start for Boulogne. Better get everything in readiness now, there being no principles in life more imperative than foresight and method. So, idly, he got together, from the mentally docketed and locked drawers in which they lay, his bundle of ten-pound notes, his store of French money left over from last year’s golfing holiday, his yellow Cook’s tickets procured a few days ago with their reservations of Pullman and Private Cabin, his letter from the Le Touquet hotel confirming his order for rooms, a little wad of visiting cards, a prescription for tonic and another for indigestion pills and a very dirty card setting forth, in tabulated form, the mathematical rules for the banker’s draw at Chemin de Fer. Having passed the lot in review he stuffed them into his special leather holiday wallet, which, entering his now prepared bedroom, he laid upon the dressing-table, intending to lock it up in the drawer.

Now, did he, or didn’t he? He couldn’t remember.

At any rate, what was certain was that, when he re-entered his study to turn out the light preparatory to going to bed, he heard the infernal young man in the garden playing his fantastically diabolical tune. Again he went forth--this time in pyjamas and dressing-gown--and again he stood entranced till the musician ended and came forward smiling, with outstretched hat.

‘Go on, go on,’ cried Paradyne.

‘Alas, I have but one piece,’ said the young man, ‘and I only play it once.’

Paradyne flapped his hands against empty night pockets.

‘I’m sorry----’ he began.

‘Don’t mention it.’

‘I must go into the house, and----’

‘I pray you, don’t.’

‘Will you come to-morrow night?’

The young man cocked his head at a humorous angle and smiled, holding up a protesting hand. ‘I only came to-night because you seemed to appreciate my music. But to-morrow----? Do you think I’m going to spend my life in Ealing?’

The very words of his daughter, Viola. He put his hands up to his temples as though to steady an odd rocking.

He said:

‘Who are you? Tell me. I should very much like to know.’

‘Ah, that’s my secret,’ laughed the young man.

And mockingly he put the flageolet to his lips and played a few bars, the _motif_ of his melody.

‘Wait, please,’ cried Paradyne. ‘You interest me enormously. I can’t let you go without----I shan’t be a moment.’

He turned the corner, crossed the lawn, and entered the house through the French window of the study. When he returned, Treasury note in hand, the musician had disappeared. He opened the wooden gate of the circular entrance drive and looked up and down the road in vain search for the musician.

Sleep was impossible. It was a hot night in early June. Through his brain rang the tantalizing music. He rose.

‘I’m going crazy,’ said he. ‘I must walk it off.’

Never had he done such a thing in his decorous life as to get out of bed and take a midnight walk. But now he did it. He clad himself in his golfing things, laid ready to his hand, and going through his study, locking the door behind him and putting the key in his pocket, he marched out. He marched out along the white respectable road bordered by the grounds of respectable villas, swinging his stick, with a feeling of schoolboy freedom. And, suddenly, in the distance he heard the abominable tune.

And then? And, then, all was blank. Behind that and his present awakening, blank, nothingness, darkness, what you will.

He argued it out in lawyer-fashion. There was the young man’s silver flageolet on the grass. That meant that he must have overtaken him and by some means got possession of the instrument. Possibly he had wandered some distance in his company, and had fainted by the way. He realized that he had been on the verge of a nervous breakdown. What more simple explanation than that, he cracking up altogether, his friend had stuffed him into this gipsy caravan, while he and the owner had gone off to the nearest town for medical assistance? So it was Sunday morning after all, and his walking terror lest he should have missed his Monday application before the Judge was futile.

‘Splendid,’ said he, ‘splendid!’ He rose and thrust his hands into the pockets of his Norfolk jacket. In the left-hand pocket he felt the key of his study window. He laughed aloud and called himself a silly ass.

It was now broad daylight. A wooden gate a few yards ahead of him opened, and a small girl in a blue smock emerged, holding in her hand a bottle of milk. She came towards him and piped childishly:

‘_Voici le lait, Monsieur._’

‘What?’

It was a roar of bewilderment at which the child shrank back, frightened.

‘_C’est le lait que Monsieur a commandé, hier soir._’

‘My God,’ said he.

‘_C’est six sous, Monsieur_,’ said the child, holding out her hand.

He was in France after all. Of that he now had no need to be assured by the child’s speech and attire. A glance around the infinite plain, dotted sparsely with red-roofed farm buildings and crossed by dead straight line of poplars marking roads like the one in front of him gave him full evidence. But how he had got to France, what he was doing there with a hawker’s caravan and a horse, he had no notion. And whereabouts in France was he? Certainly not near Le Touquet.

‘Where does this road lead to?’ he asked, waving a hand.

‘Why Chartres, Monsieur. Ten kilometres. Are you not going to the fair?’

She touched a chord that awakened echoes of dreamland. His sub-conscious self had already registered a long while ago, it seemed, the fact of the fair at Chartres. The child still held out her hand and murmured her claim for six sous. A plunge into his trousers pocket brought up a handful of French money. He gave her a franc and waved her away. She ran off somewhat scared by his madness, but exuberant at his generosity.

‘I give it up,’ said Cosmo Paradyne.

But he didn’t. In the breast-pocket of his golfing jacket he found the travelling wallet which he had filled that Saturday night at Ealing. He examined its contents. One first-class ticket for London to Boulogne--that was obviously the one destined for Martha; his own he must have used; three ten-pound notes--he had put ten into the wallet; so he must have changed seventy pounds English money. A wad of French hundred-franc notes. Cards and prescriptions. The soiled Chemin de Fer card. Also a new document or two. One, a dirty piece of coarse paper which he unfolded, was a receipt in French, villainously written and spelled, for the purchase of the caravan, stock and horse. It was made out in his name, Monsieur Cosmo Paradyne. It was duly stamped, signed Galéo Gaspard, and dated the twelfth of June. He scratched a puzzled head. That was Tuesday in Whitsun week. The dates in his mind were clear. The Courts rose on the eighth. He had decided to start for Le Touquet on the fifth. The night when he went forth from his house, key in pocket, was that of Saturday the second of June. Ten days therefore had elapsed between his midnight walk and his purchase of this ridiculous outfit.

Another document, stamped with the stamp of the Republic, was a hawker’s licence.

He sighed and entered the caravan, hung, roof and sides, with pots and pans and gaudy scarves and encumbered with battered cases of cheap cutlery, and perceived at the end a cupboard, which, when opened, he found to be stored with food and cooking utensils. There was half a vast circular loaf; eggs, butter, coffee, a good twelve inches of mighty sausage. On the floor stood a tin ewer filled with water. He found also an elementary toilet equipment which, certainly, had never seen Ealing.

For Cosmo Paradyne the history of the next hour or two was surprise piled on astonishment. A glimpse in a small hanging mirror showed a bronzed almost youthful face and clear eyes. His hands were brown and the palms curiously hardened. To make coffee and boil eggs for the satisfaction of an unprecedented hunger seemed a matter of everyday habit. He ate the food with extraordinary relish. As he shaved and washed, there lurked at the back of his mind a dim consciousness of having gone through the same performances amid the same surroundings for a long time past. He seemed to know that stuffed away at the bottom of the cupboard were his golf stockings and knickerbockers and cap. A prescient glance around showed him on a ledge a coarse, peasant’s straw hat with a floppy brim which he recognized as his ordinary daily wear. He put it on and went out into the early morning sunshine and drew great breaths of the sweet air.

He laughed, exhilarated by a new sensation as though he had undergone a radical physical change. What was it? It took him some time to realize that never before had he been conscious of such supreme and exhilarating health. It was a joy to feel the spring in his mere tread. He lit his pipe and hands in pockets stared, with proprietary air, over the illimitable landscape of La Beauce. Then he walked round his perambulating property. A big-boned brown horse ceased his munching as he approached and thrust forth a questing muzzle. At the back of the vehicle he found a bag of provender and a wooden pail of water from which he administered to the animal’s needs.