James Pethel | Page 3

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James Pethel
By MAX BEERBOHM

I WAS shocked this morning when I saw in my newspaper a paragraph
announcing his sudden death. I do not say that the shock was very
disagreeable. One reads a newspaper for the sake of news. Had I never
met James Pethel, belike I should never have heard of him: and my
knowledge of his death, coincident with my knowledge that he had
existed, would have meant nothing at all to me. If you learn suddenly
that one of your friends is dead, you are wholly distressed. If the death
is that of a mere acquaintance whom you have recently seen, you are
disconcerted, pricked is your sense of mortality; but you do find great
solace in telling other people that you met "the poor fellow" only the
other day, and that he was "so full of life and spirits," and that you
remember he said--whatever you may remember of his sayings. If the
death is that of a mere acquaintance whom you have not seen for years,
you are touched so lightly as to find solace enough in even such faded
reminiscence as is yours to offer. Seven years have passed since the day
when last I saw James Pethel, and that day was the morrow of my first
meeting with him.
I had formed the habit of spending August in Dieppe. The place was

then less overrun by trippers than it is now. Some pleasant English
people shared it with some pleasant French people. We used rather to
resent the race-week--the third week of the month--as an intrusion on
our privacy. We sneered as we read in the Paris edition of "The New
York Herald" the names of the intruders, though by some of these we
were secretly impressed. We disliked the nightly crush in the
baccarat-room of the casino, and the croupiers' obvious excitement at
the high play. I made a point of avoiding that room during that week,
for the special reason that the sight of serious, habitual gamblers has
always filled me with a depression bordering on disgust. Most of the
men, by some subtle stress of their ruling passion, have grown so
monstrously fat, and most of the women so harrowingly thin. The rest
of the women seem to be marked out for apoplexy, and the rest of the
men to be wasting away. One feels that anything thrown at them would
be either embedded or shattered, and looks vainly among them for one
person furnished with a normal amount of flesh. Monsters they are, all
of them, to the eye, though I believe that many of them have excellent
moral qualities in private life; but just as in an American town one goes
sooner or later--goes against one's finer judgment, but somehow
goes--into the dime-museum, so year by year, in Dieppe's race-week,
there would be always one evening when I drifted into the
baccarat-room. It was on such an evening that I first saw the man
whose memory I here celebrate. My gaze was held by him for the very
reason that he would have passed unnoticed elsewhere. He was
conspicuous not in virtue of the mere fact that he was taking the bank at
the principal table, but because there was nothing at all odd about him.
He alone, among his fellow-players, looked as if he were not to die
before the year was out. Of him alone I said to myself that he was
destined to die normally at a ripe old age. Next day, certainly, I would
not have made this prediction, would not have "given" him the seven
years that were still in store for him, nor the comparatively normal
death that has been his. But now, as I stood opposite to him, behind the
croupier, I was refreshed by my sense of his wholesome durability.
Everything about him, except the amount of money he had