MR. PETRE

Mr. Petre wondering who or what he may have been.

MR. PETRE

A novel by

HILAIRE BELLOC

Illustrated by

G. K. CHESTERTON

Robert M. McBride & Company

NEW YORK MCMXXV

COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY PUBLISHED AUGUST 1925 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Dedication To All Poor Gentlemen

ILLUSTRATIONS

MR. PETRE

MR. PETRE

CHAPTER I

It was the 3rd of April, 1953. As the big rotor came up through the Sound at the end of her ten days’ passage from New York, a passenger standing alone forward upon her decks looked at the very shores of Devon close at hand on either side, and delighted in the Spring.

It was nearly two years since he had seen his own country, and he felt the eagerness of his return almost as though he were a boy again. He was a short, rather stout man in later middle age, with gray curling hair, clean shaven, and in his gesture and expression most unmistakably English. His clothes and his boots were American, and his hat; and what was more, when he spoke there was just that trace of American accent and that habitual use of American locutions which so often mark the man who has lived, though for no more than a few months, in wholly American surroundings.

Everything was ready for his landing. He would not be troubled with so much as a handbag. The blessed abolition of passports in 1933 as for Englishmen landing in England saved him the trouble of even that small encumbrance; and as he hated his pockets bulging with papers, he had locked all, down to the least important notes, in a little dispatch box and handed it to his steward. He had nothing on him but one of the tickets under the new system, the ordinary railway ticket for London which they exchange on board against the steamship receipt; and a good wad of £63 in English notes, with a handful of change; he had not even kept a nickel for remembrance. He could recover what he required by the time he had taken his seat in the train; and all this disembarrassment, coupled with the long vacuity of the sea voyage, gave him an odd sense of freedom.

Odd ... and he knew that it was odd. It was a little too complete. His mind seemed to be holding nothing but the scene before him: the vigorous sky, the leaping water and the green above the gray of the rocks with their white fringe of foam.

He felt unnaturally careless. And when his thoughts turned to his luggage and its arrangement, to the petty incidents of that same morning, they were blurred and faded. Nor did he concern himself with their increasing faintness ... he enjoyed relief in it. But he knew that the relief was strange.

His daily life in America had been too much preoccupied, and that for a long time past. He had gone over to judge and help direct an investment in land, which had not turned out too brilliantly. He had not even been able to sell out as he wished; he was still held to it and its mortgage. He had not put things right. He had found it of no purpose to remain. He had turned back homewards—and yet he suffered an uneasy fear that in his absence things might go worse. Too much of his small fortune had been locked up in that venture, and the prospect before him, when he should reach his rooms in London, was not over bright. He was not sure that he could keep up the modest scale of living on which he had arranged his life for the last ten years before this voyage to the States. The place he had inherited in Dorsetshire, and which had been at his disposal since his mother’s death fifteen years earlier, he had let; but there were heavy charges upon it, and he could see little income in what remained of its revenue.

Nevertheless, he did now feel that curious sense of lightness and of carelessness. It was not connected with the returning home: it seemed a new mood of a kind by itself. It came in deep successive waves, each washing out, while it lasted, all responsibility and care; and twice, as they neared the breakwater, he went through an abnormal moment or two of complete freedom, like that of a man who has just wakened from a profound sleep, and has not yet remembered the burdens and details of life.

When he had landed with the other passengers that unknown mood returned upon him with greatly increased force and with more permanence. It enveloped him like a mist. It made him neglectful of all appointment and watch. He forgot his steward altogether; and his luggage, as though it had never been. He found himself doing only that which he could do without any effort of recollection. His empty-handedness, his neglect, made him the first to walk up the platform along the train for London. He took no heed of the reserved places. He chose out an empty seat in a first-class carriage at the head of the train and took a corner looking forward. There he sat in the same continued mood of content and vacuity.

The train filled, and the crush of porters hurrying and crossing each other upon the platform made confusion all along its line. One in particular, badly chivied by an anxious steward, who had implored leave to land in search of a missing client, was asking what he should do. That porter had put a dispatch box, a rug and a small strapped packet upon a reserved place. He had noted the name. But no one had come to claim them. The porter and the steward, looking back to where a couple of belated men were running, saw no sign of the expected figure. The glorious official to whom a clamorous appeal was made refused to delay the train. The whistle sounded, the rotor buzzed, the train drew out. The porter and the steward felt each in his own degree that agony of loss which greater men know when they open their paper of a morning and read of a slump. The one was widowed of a sovereign. The other of half a crown.

Meanwhile the author of their misfortunes sat all alone in his comfortable carriage, looking at the houses slipping by and the beginning of the countryside. Then he grew drowsy and sank into his corner and fell asleep. He half awoke at a hand tapping upon his shoulder and a voice asking him for his ticket. He had it upon him; he felt for it, found it in an inside pocket and handed it over, and in a moment was asleep again.

When he woke it was but slowly, for evidently he had been more fatigued than he knew, and the strain of a rough voyage had weighed upon him. The express was already roaring past Newbury Race-course.

He recognized the place and suddenly connected it in his mind with a name ... the name of some one living thereabouts.... Yes, ... it was certainly some one connected with those trees and heaths beyond ... but what was the name? He sought and sought, and nothing would come. It was very aggravating, this little lapse. He remembered how often of late he had had slight trouble of that kind. Then he set out to try and recover the name by a chain. He had passed a race-course. He knew it of old. He would connect things up link by link. First he looked at his watch. It was just at 12.30. He had started from.... Where had he started from?

That really $1m> exasperating ... that was even serious.

He shook his head with the sharp gesture a man makes when he is trying to be rid of some passing nervous affection, and he did what the efficiency men call “concentrating.” But his concentration was poor. Not a word would come.

Then overwhelmingly, in a flash, the truth broke upon him. He had lost all conception of his past: every image of it. He knew where he was. All about him, the landscape, the type of railway carriage—everything was familiar, but of any name or place or action or movement in connection with himself prior to that sleep nothing whatsoever remained.

He passed his hand across his forehead, and stared at the empty cushions opposite him, waiting for this very unpleasant mental gap to close up, and for his normal self to return. It did not return. What was worse, he felt a sort of certitude within him that it had gone for ever—that it was no good looking for it. It was as though he had died.

Through all the remaining hour of the run into Paddington he was seeking, seeking, seeking. The Thames, distant Windsor, Slough went past, the first houses of London: he knew them all as well as he knew his own voice; but of any link between these and himself, of any action or emotion of his past identity, there was no trace at all. It was not even blank. It was nothingness.

The train drew up, the herd of passengers bundled out, and he, at the head of the train, among the first. He went uncertainly sauntering down the platform. He was half inclined to ask some one where the train had come from. He even found himself listening to one or two groups of people in the hope that he should hear its name; but he was ashamed to listen too long, and still more ashamed to put the question which had at first occurred to him. It was a pity. If he had acted there and then he would have saved himself a great deal of coming trouble. But he had already begun to feel a mixture of shame and fear lest his humiliation should be discovered. That dangerous mood was to grow.

Mechanically he hailed one of the new rotor taxis—he recognized them, though he could not tell where or how (they had just been coming in the year before he left England; but of that year there was nothing now in his mind). It suddenly broke upon him that he could not tell the taxi where to drive.

Now the man who drove the taxi judged tips by wealth and wealth by external signs. So he said, with simple judgment, “The Splendide?”

His fare nodded hastily and got in. Anywhere would do. Here again the name was perfectly familiar to him. The picture of the big hotel in his mind was quite clear. He could have told you exactly where it was in London. But for the soul of him he couldn’t have told you how he knew. He nodded, and the rotor cab jerked and plunged and pulled up sharp and jerked forward again for its half-hour to the Splendide, with the stricken man inside concentrating away for dear life and getting nowhere.

During the Berkeley Street block, and to the whirring of the mighty little engine and the shaking of the cab, he suddenly shouted PETRE at the top of his voice. The driver opened the door sharply and barked at him, “What say?”

“Nothing,” said the greatly relieved man, sighing deeply. “I was talking to myself.”

The taxi driver slammed the door, looked at the policeman whose hand still barred the traffic, jerked his thumb towards the inside of his cab, touched his forehead and smiled. The policeman also deigned to smile. Then the flood was released and they jerked off again.

Petre, that was it ... Petre.... That was his name! But what Petre? He could not tell. The sound was perfectly clear and perfectly familiar.... Petre. Petre it was: he was quite certain of that.—Thank God, he was certain of that!... And during the next three blocks in the traffic his certitude grew firmer and firmer. He clung to the protection of that word Petre as does a drowning man to a deck chair. That was something to go on, anyhow.... He could not see it as P-e-t-e-r or P-e-t-r-e. It was only the sound he was sure of. But when he came to think of it, it must be Petre, for he had not in his mind any savor, not even the slightest, of a grotesque connotation, and if it had been “Peter,” however familiar to him, it would have sounded a little silly in his ears.... No, it must certainly be Petre. It was a good name.... There was—he had a vague idea—a Lord Petre. He did not think he was—or had been—a lord. He would have remembered that at least, though all the rest had gone. No, it was Mr. Petre all right.... Mr. something Petre, as Mr. J. Petre.... But what

was that Christian name, or those Christian names?

He had reached the Splendide. Mr. Petre (for he could now securely call himself by his right name, an anchor-hold in such an awful tide) got out and vastly overpaid the cab. The new rotor cabs had the fare marked up in large red ticking figures inside. It was a rule brought in by Jessie Anderson when she was at the Home Office in the last Administration. It had always annoyed her to peer through the glass, and she was no longer young. Mr. Petre quite understood the meaning of those figures; shillings and pence were familiar to him and the connection of their symbols with the coins in his hand was part of himself, though he could not have told you where or when he had last handled such coins.

Now and then he would hesitate over a detail. He had puzzled a minute before getting the name of Oxford Street as they crossed it. But the run of London life was as common to him as to any of the myriads around. It was only the bond between them and his past self that had snapped.

He knew the Splendide. He knew the ritual of registration. He even knew the liveries with their absurd gold crowns. He knew it was strange to take a room without luggage. He feared resentment. Yet he rightly judged such eccentricity stood a better chance at the more expensive hotels than the less.

He was full of the ordeal before him, and he approached it rather nervously. But he put on as bold a front as he could, and gave the name “Petre” in rather a loud voice, and with that slight American intonation which was his though he knew it not.

He was surprised at a certain note in the clerk’s reply, something between the tone in which a man addresses a great lady advanced in years and that in which he would address (were addresses paid to such things) a unicorn or any other apparition; and the voice using these tones said quite low, so that no one around should hear, and with a certain thrill of reverence displayed and of astonishment controlled:

“Mr. John K. Petre?”

Mr. Petre nodded rapidly. It was no good seeking for the real Christian names: these would do as well as any other for the time being.

He was relieved to see the right spelling coming out from the tip of the clerk’s pen in the register: “John K. Petre.” No place of residence followed. The clerk knew too much for that. He made an inclination that was nearly a bow as he sent for the boy in buttons, and begged Mr. Petre in a still lower voice to let him know if the suite he had chosen would do: it had only three rooms, he said, but it was the best unoccupied and over the garden. Two hundred dollars—forty pounds.

“... As though he were a Unicorn.”

Mr. Petre recollected the £63 he had upon him and the very strange condition under which he was attacking this stronghold. He firmly refused anything but a plain bedroom and bathroom. He would not even have a sitting-room, and the clerk this time really did bow, as a worshiper might incline to a saint who was beyond the pale of mortal kind. He whispered rather than spoke the number “44,” and Mr. Petre, before going to the lift, said:

“One moment, I have no luggage.” He said it in the over-emphatic tone which men use to say anything startling that has to be forced down; he repeated it in that same firm voice in which the slight American accent was emphasised: “I have no luggage.”

The clerk showed no surprise at all. If Mr. John K. Petre chose to travel without luggage, it seemed to be in the clerk’s eyes but one more evidence of more than human greatness.

“I shall go out and buy what I need,” continued Mr. Petre, still firmly, “when I have washed, in a few minutes.”

“Can we——” insinuated the clerk.

“No,” said Mr. Petre yet more firmly, and almost readily. “I always do these things myself.”

But when and where he had done these things himself he could not possibly have told, for Mr. Petre had no idea what things he did and what things he did not do. His new life had begun less than a couple of hours before, and the old one was lost.

He followed the boy to the lift, and as he went he was reassured. For he said to himself, “I am some one of consequence. I am known.” But on that thought followed its terrifying successors—The more imperative his need for caution (the lift was taking him up to No. 44); the worse the ridicule if his secret were discovered before he had found himself (the lift had reached the landing); the deeper his humiliation and (the door of 44 was opened for him—no, he needed nothing; it shut upon him and he was seated alone in despair) the more intolerable his lot. What if that unknown life of his had been passed in some great household, a grandeur of spouse and children and domestics; lived for years with intimates who should know what had befallen him? He would be marked. A diminished man. One who had “had an accident.” Pitied, despised, his relapse awaited. He recoiled at the thought!...

No! There must be no discovery by others. With infinite caution, catching and comparing every word, he would pick up piece by piece the truth about himself. He would secretly effect his own restoration. But what of questions? How should he answer them?

While Mr. Petre was moving towards the lift, magnificently waved forward by dazzling liveries and piloted in procession by the boy in buttons, a young fellow who had been sitting in the lounge of the hotel talking to an older man got up and sauntered towards the registration counter.

He had heard a name—and that name was gold. For though the clerk had whispered Mr. Petre had spoken loudly and without discretion.

The young man dug his hands into his trousers pockets, looked for a moment through the windows toward the street, and then turned sharply beyond the register book to the office where inquiries were made. As he did so he kept his head well to the left, outwards from the counter; but his eyes shot furtively to the right, and he spotted the name upon the open page. It was John K. Petre all right. He had thought as much.

At the Inquiry he asked whether there was a telegram for Gadget, and was not surprised to hear that there was none; indeed, he had only that moment made up the name. But such is the spell of association over even the sharpest crook that he could not help saying, “John K. Gadget”; so much was the famous name of John K. Petre now branded upon his brain.

He sauntered back again to his chair, sank down, and took up speech again with his companion.

The young man himself was tall, just an inch or two overdressed, with black hair, greased, brushed back over a high narrow forehead and thin face, of the bony sort, which is also called “distinguished,” the long narrow chin and the high narrow forehead were each a long way from the advanced cape of the squeezed nose. He made delicate gestures with his right hand. He spoke leisurely and high.

His companion was of no such exalted station. He was squat, round-headed, double-chinned, with a thick, frowsy, gray mustache; short, ill-combed hair; and dressed in clothes so loose and creased that they disgraced that cavern of the rich. His boots were shameful, and even his collar was dubious.

“Well, Arthur?” said he to the young man.

“Well, Batterby, he’s come here.”

“Oh, he has, has he? I told you so!” said Batterby, not without pride.

“Yep,” answered the more elegant Arthur. “There’s the name right enough. John K. Petre. But you know what I told you. He makes it a point to keep low and dark. I’d use it—but I wouldn’t print it. I’ve heard what he does when he’s given away. Oh! He’s savage! The clerks are paid in all these places to keep it quiet whenever he does come over. Once they did get hold of him in the Howl, when he came over four years ago, and they printed a story about him. Then they found he controlled half the poison ads.: Rodney’s Cure, and the Pain-killer and Voler’s Pills—and he made ’em print a denial too, displayed. And then he broke ’em! Oh! he’s savage.”