My Bankruptcy Was Dismissed May 2012 When Can I File Again

  A. V. Laider

By MAX BEERBOHM

Author of "Enoch Soames," "Zuleika Dobson," etc.

I UNPACKED my things and went downwardly to await luncheon.

It was good to be here over again in this fiddling quondam sleepy hostel by the sea. Hostel I say, though information technology spelt itself without an "southward" and even placed a circumflex to a higher place the "o." It made no other pretension. It was very cozy indeed.

I had been here just a year before, in mid-February, afterwards an attack of flu. And now I had returned, afterward an attack of influenza. Zilch was changed. Information technology had been raining when I left, and the waiter-- in that location was only a single, a very old waiter--had told me information technology was just a shower. That waiter was still hither, not a day older. And the shower had not ceased.

Steadfastly information technology roughshod on to the sands, steadfastly into the iron-gray bounding main. I stood looking out at it from the windows of the hall, admiring it very much. There seemed to be little else to practice. What petty in that location was I did. I mastered the contents of a blueish hand-neb which, pinned to the wall only beneath the framed engraving of Queen Victoria's Coronation, gave token of a concert that was to be held--or, rather, was to accept been held some weeks ago--in the town hall for the benefit of the Life-Boat Fund. I looked at the barometer, tapped it, was not the wiser. I wandered to the letter of the alphabet-board.

These letter of the alphabet-boards always fascinate me. Usually some ii or iii of the envelops stuck into the cross-garterings have a certain newness and freshness. They seem sure they will yet be claimed. Why not? Why shouldn't John Doe, Esq., or Mrs. Richard Roe turn up at any moment? I do not know. I can simply say that nothing in the world seems to me more unlikely. Thus it is that these young vivid envelops touch my heart fifty-fifty more than do their dusty and sallowed seniors. Sour resignation is less touching than impatience for what volition not exist, than the eagerness that has to wane and wither. Soured beyond measure out these quondam envelops are. They are not nearly and then nice as they should exist to the young ones. They lose no chance of sneering and discouraging. Such dialogues as this are only too frequent:

A Very Young Envelop: Something in me whispers that he will come to-day!

A Very Onetime Envelop: He? Well, that's good! Ha, ha, ha! Why didn't he come last week, when you came? What reason have you for supposing he'll ever come now? It isn't equally if he were a frequenter of the place. He's never been here. His name is utterly unknown here. You don't suppose he's coming on the chance of finding you?

A. 5. Y. E.: It may seem lightheaded, simply--something in me whispers--

A. V. O. E.: Something in you lot? I has simply to look at you to encounter in that location'south cypher in you but a note scribbled to him by a cousin. Await at me! In that location are three sheets, closely written, in me. The lady to whom I am addressed--

A. 5. Y. E.: Yeah, sir, aye; you told me all about her yesterday.

A. Five. O. Eastward.: And I shall practise then to-24-hour interval and to-morrow and every twenty-four hour period and all day long. That young lady was a widow. She stayed here many times. She was delicate, and the air suited her. She was poor, and the tariff was simply within her means. She was lone, and had demand of honey. I have in me for her a passionate boast and strictly honorable proposal, written to her, after many rough copies, past a gentleman who had fabricated her acquaintance nether this very roof. He was rich, he was charming, he was in the prime of life. He had asked if he might write to her. She had flutteringly granted his request. He posted me to her the day later on his render to London. I looked forward to being torn open by her. I was very certain she would wear me and my contents adjacent to her bosom. She was gone. She had left no address. She never returned. This I tell you lot, and shall keep to tell you lot, non because I want whatever of your callow sympathy,--no, give thanks y'all!--but that you lot may judge how much less than slight are the probabilities that you yourself--

Just my reader has overheard these dialogues equally often equally I. He wants to know what was odd about this particular alphabetic character-board before which I was continuing. At first glance I saw aught odd about it. But presently I distinguished a handwriting that was vaguely familiar. Information technology was mine. I stared, I wondered. There is always a slight shock in seeing an envelop of i'due south own afterward it has gone through the post. It looks as if it had gone through and so much. But this was the kickoff time I had ever seen an envelop of mine eating its middle out in chains on a letter of the alphabet-board. This was outrageous. This was hardly to exist believed. Sheer kindness had impelled me to write to "A. V. Laider, Esq.," and this was the issue! I hadn't minded receiving no answer. But now, indeed, did I remember that I hadn't received one. In multitudinous London the memory of A. V. Laider and his problem had soon passed from my mind. But--well, what a lesson not to go out of ane'southward way to write to casual acquaintances!

My envelop seemed not to recognize me as its author. Its gaze was the more piteous for beingness blank. Even then had I once been gazed at by a dog that I had lost and, after many days, found in the Battersea Home. "I don't know who you are, simply, whoever you are, claim me, take me out of this!" That was my dog's entreatment. This was the appeal of my envelop.

I raised my paw to the letter of the alphabet-board, pregnant to effect a swift and lawless rescue, merely paused at audio of a footstep behind me. The old waiter had come up to tell me that my dejeuner was ready. I followed him out of the hall, not, nonetheless, without a brilliant glance across my shoulder to reassure the little captive that I should come up back.

I had the sharp ambition of the convalescent, and this the bounding main air had whetted already to a effectively border. In bear on with a dozen oysters, and with stout, I soon shed away the unreasoning anger I had felt against A. V. Laider. I became merely distressing for him that he had non received a letter which might maybe have comforted him. In bear on with cutlets, I felt how sorely he had needed comfort. And betimes, by the large bright fireside of that small dark smoking-room where, a twelvemonth ago, on the last evening of my stay here, he and I had at length spoken to each other, I reviewed in detail the tragic experience he had told me; and I but reveled in reminiscent sympathy with him.

A. V. LAIDER--I had looked him upward in the visitors'-volume on the nighttime of his arrival. I myself had arrived the 24-hour interval before, and had been rather sorry at that place was no one else staying here. A convalescent by the sea likes to accept some one to discover, to wonder about, at meal-time. I was glad when, on my second evening, I found seated at the table opposite to mine another guest. I was the gladder because he was but the right kind of invitee. He was enigmatic. Past this I mean that he did non look soldierly or financial or artistic or annihilation definite at all. He offered a make clean slate for speculation. And, thank heaven! he evidently wasn't going to spoil the fun by engaging me in chat later. A decently unsociable man, anxious to be left lonely.

The heartiness of his appetite, in contrast with his extreme fragility of attribute and limpness of demeanor, assured me that he, besides, had just had influenza. I liked him for that. At present and again our eyes met and were instantly parted. Nosotros managed, every bit a rule, to detect each other indirectly. I was sure it was not just considering he had been ill that he looked interesting. Nor did it seem to me that a spiritual melancholy, though I imagined him sad at the best of times, was his sole asset. I conjectured that he was clever. I thought he might also exist imaginative. At offset glance I had mistrusted him. A daze of white pilus, combined with a young face and dark eyebrows, does somehow make a man look like a adventurer. But it is foolish to exist guided by an blow of colour. I had soon rejected my kickoff impression of my young man-diner. I found him very sympathetic.

Anywhere simply in England it would exist impossible for two solitary men, howsoever much reduced past flu, to spend v or 6 days in the same hostel and non exchange a single word. That is 1 of the charms of England. Had Laider and I been born and bred in whatever other country than Eng we should have become acquainted before the stop of our first evening in the pocket-sized smoking-room, and take found ourselves irrevocably committed to go on talking to each other throughout the rest of our visit. We migh

t, it is true, have happened to like each other more than any 1 nosotros had e'er met. This off chance may have occurred to united states both. Just information technology counted for null against the certain surrender of quietude and freedom. We slightly bowed to each other as we entered or left the dining-room or smoking-room, and as we met on the wide-spread sands or in the store that had a small and faded circulating library. That was all. Our mutual aloofness was a positive bail between us.

Had he been much older than I, the responsibility for our silence would of form have been his alone. But he was not, I judged, more than than five or vi years ahead of me, and thus I might without venial have taken it on myself to perform that hard and perilous feat which English people call, with a shiver, "breaking the ice." He had reason, therefore, to be equally grateful to me as I to him. Each of us, not the less frankly considering silently, recognized his obligation to the other. And when, on the last evening of my stay, the ice actually was broken in that location was no ill-will between us: neither of us was to blame.

It was a Sunday evening. I had been out for a long last walk and had come up in very late to dinner. Laider had left his tabular array about directly afterward I sat downwardly to mine. When I entered the smoking-room I found him reading a weekly review which I had bought the twenty-four hour period before. It was a crisis. He could not silently offering nor could I have silently accustomed, vi-pence. Information technology was a crisis. We faced it like men. He fabricated, past word of mouth, a graceful apology. Verbally, not by signs, I besought him to keep reading. But this, of course, was a vain counsel of perfection. The social code forced us to talk now. We obeyed it like men. To reassure him that our position was not and then desperate equally it might seem, I took the earliest opportunity to mention that I was going away early next morning. In the tone of his "Oh, are you lot?" he tried bravely to imply that he was sorry, fifty-fifty at present, to hear that. In a mode, perhaps, he actually was sorry. We had got on so well together, he and I. Nothing could efface the memory of that. Nay, we seemed to be hitting information technology off fifty-fifty now. Influenza was not our sole theme. We passed from that to the aforesaid weekly review, and to a correspondence that was raging therein on organized religion and reason.

This correspondence had now reached its fourth and penultimate stage--its Australian stage. It is hard to see why these correspondences spring upwardly; one only knows that they exercise bound up, of a sudden, like street crowds. There comes, it would seem, a moment when the whole English-speaking race is unconsciously bursting to have its say about some one thing--the split infinitive, or the habits of migratory birds, or faith and reason, or what-not. Whatever weekly review happens at such a moment to contain a reference, withal remote, to the theme in question reaps the tempest. Gusts of letters come in from all corners of the British Isles. These are presently reinforced past Canada in total blast. A few weeks later the Anglo-Indians weigh in. In due course we have the help of our Australian cousins. By that time, however, nosotros of the female parent country accept got our second air current, and and then adamant are nosotros to brand the well-nigh of information technology that at concluding even the editor of a sudden loses patience and says, "This correspondence must now cease.--Ed." and wonders why on earth he ever allowed anything so tedious and idiotic to begin.

I pointed out to Laider one of the Australian letters that had especially pleased me in the electric current event. It was from "A Melbourne Homo," and was of the abrupt kind which declares that "all your correspondents have been groping in the dark" and and so settles the whole matter in ane short sharp wink. The flash in this instance was "Reason is faith, faith reason--that is all we know on earth and all we need to know." The writer then inclosed his card and was, etc., "A Melbourne Homo." I said to Laider how very restful information technology was, afterwards influenza, to read anything that meant naught whatsoever. Laider was inclined to have the letter more than seriously than I, and to be mildly metaphysical. I said that for me faith and reason were two separate things, and as I am no good at metaphysics, notwithstanding balmy, I offered a definite example, to coax the talk on to footing where I should be safer.

"Palmistry, for example," I said. "Deep downwards in my heart I believe in palmistry."

Laider turned in his chair.

"Yous believe in palmistry?"

I hesitated.

"Yes, somehow I practice. Why? I haven't the slightest notion. I tin give myself all sorts of reasons for laughing it to scorn. My common sense utterly rejects it. Of class the shape of the mitt ways something, is more or less an index of graphic symbol. But the thought that my past and future are neatly mapped out on my palms--" I shrugged my shoulders.

"You don't like that idea?" asked Laider in his gentle, rather academic voice.

"I only say it'due south a grotesque idea."

"Yet you do believe in information technology?"

"I've a grotesque belief in it, yes."

"Are you sure your reason for calling this thought 'grotesque' isn't only that yous dislike it?"

"Well," I said, with the thrilling hope that he was a companion in absurdity, "doesn't it seem grotesque to you?"

"It seems foreign."

"You believe in it?"

"Oh, admittedly."

"Hurrah!"

He smiled at my pleasance, and I, at the risk of reëntanglement in metaphysics, claimed him as standing shoulder to shoulder with me against "A Melbourne Man." This claim he gently disputed.

"Yous may think me very prosaic," he said, "but I can't believe without show."

"Well, I'm equally prosaic and equally at a disadvantage: I can't take my own conventionalities as evidence, and I've no other show to go on."

He asked me if I had ever made a written report of palmistry. I said I had read 1 of Desbarolles'south books years ago, and ane of Heron-Allen's. But, he asked, had I tried to test them by the lines on my ain hands or on the hands of my friends? I confessed that my actual practice in palmistry had been of a merely passive kind--the prompt extension of my palm to whatever one who would exist then adept as to "read" it and truckle for a few minutes to my egoism. (I hoped Laider might do this.)

"So I about wonder," he said, with his lamentable smile, "that yous haven't lost your belief, after all the nonsense you must have heard. There are so many young girls who go in for palmistry. I am sure all the five foolish virgins were 'clumsily keen on information technology' and used to say, 'You can be led, just not driven,' and, 'You are probable to have a serious disease between the ages of forty and xl-5,' and, 'Yous are past nature rather lazy, just tin be very energetic by fits and starts.' And most of the professionals, I'1000 told, are as airheaded as the immature girls."

For the accolade of the profession, I named 3 practitioners whom I had found actually good at reading character. He asked whether any of them had been right about past events. I confessed that, as a matter of fact, all 3 of them had been right in the chief. This seemed to amuse him. He asked whether any of them had predicted anything which had since come truthful. I confessed that all 3 had predicted that I should practise several things which I had since done rather unexpectedly. He asked if I didn't accept this as, at any rate, a fleck of evidence. I said I could only regard information technology as a fluke--a rather remarkable fluke.

The superiority of his sad grin was starting time to go on my nerves. I wanted him to meet that he was as cool equally I.

"Suppose," I said--"suppose, for the sake of statement, that yous and I are nothing but helpless automata created to do just this and that, and to take simply that and this washed to us. Suppose, in fact, we haven't any free volition whatsoever. Is it likely or conceivable that the Power which fashioned us would take the trouble to jot down in cipher on our hands merely what was in shop for us?"

Laider did not answer this question; he did simply annoyingly inquire me some other.

"Yous believe in free volition?"

"Yes, of form. I'll exist hanged if I'm an automaton."

"And you believe in free will just equally in palmistry--without whatsoever reason?"

"Oh, no. Everything points to our having gratuitous volition."

"Everything? What, for instance?"

This rather cornered me. I dodged out, as lightly equally I could, by maxim:

"I suppose you lot would say it'south written in my hand that I should be a believer in gratuitous will."

"Ah, I've no dubiousness it is."

I held out my palms. But, to my great disappointment, he looked quickly away from them. He had ceased to smile. At that place was agitation in his vocalization as he explained that he never looked at people's hands now. "Never now--never again." He shook his head every bit though to beat off some retentivity.

I was much embarrassed by my indiscretion. I hastened to tide over the bad-mannered moment by saying that if I could read easily I wouldn't, for fear of the awful things I might see there.

"Awful things, yes," he whispered, nodding at the fire.

"Not," I said in cocky-defense, "that there's annihilation very awful, and then far as I know, to be read in my easily."

He turned his gaze from the burn down to me.

"You aren't a murderer, for case?"

"Oh, no," I replied, with a nervous laugh.

"I am."

This was a more than awkward, information technology was a painful, moment for me; and I am afraid I must take started or winced, for he instantly begged my pardon.

"I don't know," he exclaimed, "why I said it. I'm commonly a very reticent man. But sometimes--" He pressed his brow. "What yous must retrieve of me!"

I begged him to dismiss the matter from his mind.

"It'southward very skilful of y'all to say that; but--I've placed myself as well as you lot in a false position. I enquire you to believe that I'm non the sort of man who is 'wanted' or ever was 'wanted' by the police force. I should exist bowed out of any law-station at which I gave myself up. I'm not a murderer in any bald sense of the word. No."

My face must have perceptibly brightened, for, "Ah," he said, "don't imagine I'thousand not a murderer at all. Morally, I am." He looked at the clock. I pointed out that the night was young. He assured me that his story was not a long i. I assured him that I hoped it was. He said I was very kind. I denied this. He warned me that what he had to tell might rather tend to stiffen my unwilling faith in palmistry, and to shake my opposite and cherished religion in free volition. I said, "Never mind." He stretched his hands pensively toward the fire. I settled myself back in my chair.

"My hands," he said, staring at the backs of them, "are the hands of a very weak man. I dare say yous know enough of palmistry to meet that for yourself. Y'all notice the slightness of the thumbs and of he two 'little' fingers. They are the easily of a weak and over-sensitive man--a man without confidence, a homo who would certainly waver in an emergency. Rather Hamletish hands," he mused. "And I'm like Hamlet in other respects, too: I'm no fool, and I've rather a noble disposition, and I'm unlucky. Just Hamlet was luckier than I in one thing: he was a murderer by accident, whereas the murders that I committed 1 24-hour interval 14 years ago--for I must tell you lot it wasn't one murder, only many murders that I committed--were all of them due to the wretched inherent weakness of my own wretched cocky.

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