Fancies and Goodnights

Franklin Fletcher dreamed of luxury in the form of tiger-skins
and beautiful women. He was prepared, at a pinch, to forgo the
tiger-skins. Unfortunately the beautiful women seemed equally rare
and inaccessible. At his office and at his boarding-house the girls
were mere mice, or cattish, or kittenish, or had insufficiently
read the advertisements. He met no others. At thirty-five he gave
up, and decided he must console himself with a hobby, which is a
very miserable second-best.

He prowled about in odd corners of the town, looking in at the
windows of antique dealers and junk-shops, wondering what on earth
he might collect. He came upon a poor shop, in a poor alley, in
whose dusty window stood a single object: it was a full-rigged ship
in a bottle. Feeling rather like that himself, he decided to go in
and ask the price.

The shop was small and bare. Some shabby racks were ranged about
the walls, and these racks bore a large number of bottles, of every
shape and size, containing a variety of objects which were
interesting only because they were in bottles. While Franklin still
looked about, a little door opened, and out shuffled the
proprietor, a wizened old man in a smoking-cap, who seemed mildly
surprised and mildly pleased to have a customer.

He showed Franklin bouquets, and birds of paradise, and the
Battle of Gettysburg, and miniature Japanese gardens, and even a
shrunken human head, all stoppered up in bottles.

Mr. Rankin was a large and rawboned man on whom the newest suit
at once appeared outdated, like a suit in a photograph of twenty
years ago. This was due to the squareness and flatness of his
torso, which might have been put together by a manufacturer of
packing cases. His face also had a wooden and a roughly constructed
look; his hair was wiglike and resentful of the comb. He had those
huge and clumsy hands which can be an asset to a doctor in a small
upstate town where people still retain a rural relish for paradox,
thinking that the more apelike the paw, the more precise it can be
in the delicate business of a tonsillectomy.

This conclusion was perfectly justified in the case of Dr.
Rankin. For example, on this particular fine morning, though his
task was nothing more ticklish than the cementing over of a large
patch on his cellar floor, he managed those large and clumsy hands
with all the unflurried certainty of one who would never leave a
sponge within or create an unsightly scar without.

The doctor surveyed his handiwork from all angles. He added a
touch here and a touch there till he had achieved a smoothness
altogether professional. He swept up a few last crumbs of soil and
dropped them into the furnace. He paused before putting away the
pick and shovel he had been using, and found occasion for yet
another artistic sweep of his trowel, which made the new surface
precisely flush with the surrounding floor. At this moment of
supreme concentration the porch door upstairs slammed with the
report of a minor piece of artillery, which, appropriately enough,
caused Dr. Rankin to jump as if he had been shot.

The Doctor lifted a frowning face and an attentive ear. He heard
two pairs of heavy feet clump across the resonant floor of the
porch. He heard the house door opened and the visitors enter the
hall, with which his cellar communicated by a short flight of
steps. He heard whistling and then the voices of Buck and Bud
crying,

In a pad of Highlife Bond, bought by Miss Sadie Brodribb at
Bracey

Foiral had taken a load of cork up to the high road, where he
met the motor truck from Perpignan. He was on his way back to the
village, walking harmlessly beside his mule, and thinking of
nothing at all, when he was passed by a striding madman, half
naked, and of a type never seen before in this district of the
Pyr

In the country, I accept the normal and traditional routine,
doing what every man does: rising early, eating when I should,
turning up my coat collar when it rains. I see the reason for it,
and shave at the same hour every morning.

Not so in town. When I live in town I feel no impulse in the
starling migrations of the rush hours. There is no tide, in any
submarine cave, anywhere, that is not more to me than the inflow
and outflow at the cold mouths of offices or the hot mouths of
restaurants. I find no growth in time, no need for rain, no sense
in sobriety, no joy in drinking, no point in paying, no plan in
living. I exist, in this alien labyrinth, like an insect among men,
or a man in a city of the ants.

I despise the inconsiderable superiority of the glum day over
the starless night. My curtains are always drawn; I sleep when my
eyes close, eat when I remember to, and read and smoke without
ceasing, allowing my soul to leave my wastrel and untended carcase,
and seldom do I question it when it returns.

My chambers are in the stoniest of the Inns of Court. I keep no
servant here, for I mean always to go back to the country within
the week, though sometimes I stay for months, or

In Hell, as in other places we know of, conditions are damnably
disagreeable. Well-adjusted, energetic, and ambitious devils take
this very much in their stride. They expect to improve their lot
and ultimately to become friends of distinction.

In the great mass of ordinary, plodding, run-of-the-mill devils,
any escapist tendencies are sufficiently ventilated by
entertainments akin to radio and television, which offer them
glimpses of what they take to be Paradise, interrupted by screaming
commercials.

There are, however, certain idle, worthless, and altogether
undevilish devils who dream incessantly of getting away from it
all, and a few of them have actually managed to do so. The
authorities are at no great pains to recapture them, for they are
invariably chronic unemployables and nothing but a burden on the
community.

Some of the fugitives have established themselves on sundry
minute planetoids which are scattered here and there along the
outer fringes of the Pleiades. These tiny worlds rise like green
atolls in the everlasting blue. Here the deserters build their
sorry shacks, and subsist on a little desultory soul-fishing. They
live like beachcombers, growing fatter and lazier every year, and
they compare themselves to the mutineers of the
Bounty
.

When they want a bit of change, they take a swim in the azure
ether, and sometimes go as far as the cliffs of Heaven, just to
take a look at the girls, who, naturally enough, are as beautiful
as angels.

The cliffs of Heaven, you may be sure, are studded with summer
resorts and well-supervised bathing beaches. There are also some
quiet creeks and unfrequented bays where the ether washes in
sapphire waves upon golden rocks, and over sands of a quality to
make any honest digger call for spade and pail. Here, where no
lifeguard stands with unfolded pinions, bathing is strictly
prohibited. This is because of the occasional presence of one of
those lurking, sharkish, runaway devils, and whoever goes in in
defiance of the regulations must be prepared to face the
consequences. But in spite of the risk, or because of it, some of
the younger set of Heaven take a huge delight in breaking the
rules, as the younger set do everywhere.

Thus a certain delightful young she-angel came down one morning
into one of these forbidden caves. The weather was heavenly and her
heart was as vibrant as one of her own harpstrings. She felt that
her blissful existence might blossom into something even more
blissful at any moment She sat a long while on an overhanging rock,
and sang as gaily as the lark of the morning. Then she stood up,
made a pose or two, she hardly knew why, and finally she took off
with a swan-dive into the exhilarating ether.

An elderly, fat, and most unprepossessing devil had been hanging
off-shore in the shallows for no other purpose than to play the
Peeping Tom. The sight of this lovely creature aroused a ticklish
and insistent longing in the old reprobate; it rose up in his black
heart like a belch in a tar caldron. He swung in and seized her as
a shark might seize on a bathing beauty, and he swept her swooning
off to his little verdant planet, and on to the rickety porch of
his cabin, which jutted out from the rocks for all the world like
one of those fishing shacks that are to be found on any island in
the tropics.

She came to herself with a gasp, and looked with horror at her
repulsive captor, whose paunch sagged over his greasy belt, and
whose tattered jeans scarcely sufficed to conceal his devilishness.
He, with a rusty pair of shears, was already at work clipping her
wings, and, gathering up the feathers:

A dozen big firms subsidize our mineralogical institute, and
most of them keep at least one man permanently on research there.
The library has the intimate and smoky atmosphere of a club. Logan
and I had been there longest and had the two tables in the big
window bay. Against the wall, just at the edge of the bay, where
the light was bad, was a small table which was left for newcomers
or transients.

One morning a new man was sitting at this table. It was not
necessary to look at the books he had taken from the shelves to
know that he was on statistics rather than formulae. He had one of
those skull-like faces on which the skin seems stretched painfully
tight. These are almost a hallmark of the statistician. His mouth
was intensely disciplined but became convulsive at the least
relaxation. His hands were the focal point of a minor morbidity.
When he had occasion to stretch them both out together

Dreaming of money as I lay half asleep on the Malibu sand, a
desolate cry reached me from out of the middle air. It was nothing
but a gull, visible only as a burning, floating flake of white in
the hot, colourless sky, but wings and whiteness and a certain deep
pessimism in the croak it uttered made me think it might be my
guardian angel.

Next moment, from the dank interior of the beach house, the
black telephone raised its beguiling voice, and I obeyed. It was,
of course, my agent.

It was July. In the large, dull house they were imprisoned by
the swish and the gurgle and all the hundred sounds of rain. They
were in the drawing-room, behind four tall and weeping windows, in
a lake of damp and faded chintz.

This house, ill-kept and unprepossessing, was necessary to Mr.
Princey, who detested his wife, his daughter, and his hulking son.
His life was to walk through the village, touching his hat, not
smiling. His cold pleasure was to recapture snapshot memories of
the infinitely remote summers of his childhood

I had what appeared to be the misfortune to fall in love with a
superb creature, an Amazon, a positive Diana. Her penthouse
pied-

Louis Thurlow, having decided to take his own life, felt that at
least he might take his own time also. He consulted his bank-book;
there was a little over a hundred pounds left.

Ringwood was the last of an Anglo-Irish family which had played
the devil in County Clare for a matter of three centuries. At last
all their big houses were sold up, or burned down by the
long-suffering Irish, and of all their thousands of acres not a
single foot remained. Ringwood, however, had a few hundred a year
of his own, and if the family estates had vanished he at least
inherited a family instinct, which prompted him to regard all
Ireland as his domain, and to rejoice in its abundance of horses,
foxes, salmon, game, and girls.

In pursuit of these delights Ringwood ranged and roved from
Donegal to Wexford through all the seasons of the year. There were
not many hunts he had not led at some time or other on a borrowed
mount, nor many bridges he had not leaned over through half a May
morning, nor many inn parlours where he had not snored away a wet
winter afternoon in front of the fire.

He had an intimate by the name of Bates, who was another of the
same breed and the same kidney. Bates was equally long and lean,
and equally hard-up, and he had the same wind-flushed bony face,
the same shabby arrogance, and the same seignorial approach to the
little girls in the cottages and cowsheds.

Neither of these blades ever wrote a letter, but each generally
knew where the other was to be found. The ticket collector,
respectfully blind as he snipped Ringwood

Mr. Beaseley, while shaving on the day after his fiftieth
birthday, eyed his reflection, and admitted his remarkable
resemblance to a mouse.