THE MAN WHO LOST HIMSELF (7)
By:
March 23, 2018
This year marks the 100th anniversary of a forgotten Avenger/Artful Dodger-type adventure novel, The Man Who Lost Himself. A man down on his luck wakes up after a drunken night in London only to discover… that he has somehow slipped into the identity of a wealthy aristocrat! HiLoBooks is pleased to serialize this funny, thrilling yarn by H. De Vere Stacpoole — best known as author of The Blue Lagoon — here at HILOBROW.
He had lunched at the Constitutional with a chance acquaintance picked up on his first week in London, so he knew something of the ways of English clubs, yet the vast hall of this place daunted him for a moment.
However, the club servants seeming to know him, and recognising that indecision is the most fatal weakness of man, he crossed the hall, and seeing some gentlemen going up the great staircase he followed to a door in the first landing.
He saw through the glass swing doors that this was the great luncheon room of the club, and having made this discovery he came downstairs again where good fortune, in the form of a bald-headed man without hat or stick, coming through a passage way, indicated the cloak room to him.
Here he washed his hands and brushed his hair, and looking at himself in a glass judged his appearance to be conservative and all right. He, a democrat of the Democrats in this hive of Aristocracy and old crusted conservatism, might have felt qualms of political conscience, but for the fact that earthly politics, social theories, and social instincts were less to him now than to an inhabitant of the dark body that tumbles and fumbles around Sirius. Less than the difference between the minnow and the roach to the roach in the landing net.
Leaving the place he almost ran into the arms of a gentleman who was entering, and who gave him a curt “H’do.”
He knew that man. He had seen his newspaper portrait in America as well as England. It was the leader of His Majesty’s Opposition, the Queen bee of this hive where he was about to sit down to lunch. The Queen bee did not seem very friendly, a fact that augured ill for the attitude of the workers and the drones.
Arrived at the glass swing doors before mentioned, he looked in.
The place was crowded.
It looked to him as though for the space of a mile and a half or so, lay tables, tables, tables, all occupied by twos and threes and fours of men. Conservative-looking men, and no doubt mostly Lords.
It was too late to withdraw without shattering his own self-respect and self-confidence. The cold bath was before him, and there was no use putting a toe in.
He opened the door and entered, walking between the tables and looking the luncheon parties in the face.
The man seated has a tremendous advantage over the man standing in this sort of game. One or two of the members met by the newcomer’s glance, bowed in the curious manner of the seated Briton, the eyes of others fell away, others nodded frigidly, it seemed to Jones. Then, like a pilot fish before a shark leading him to his food, a club waiter developed and piloted him to a small unoccupied table, where he took a seat and looked at a menu handed to him by the pilot.
He ordered fillet of sole, roast chicken, salad, and strawberry ice. They were the easiest things to order. He would have ordered roast elephant’s trunk had it been easier and on the menu.
A man after the storming of Hell Gate, or just dismounted after the Charge of the Light Brigade, would have possessed as little instinct for menu hunting as Jones.
He had pierced the ranks of the British Aristocracy; that was nothing — he was seated at their camp fire, sharing their food, and they were all inimical towards him; that was everything.
He felt the draught. He felt that these men had a down on him; felt it by all sorts of senses that seemed newly developed. Not a down on him, Jones, but a down on him, Rochester, Arthur Coningsby Delamere, 21st Earl of.
And the extraordinary thing was that he felt it. What on earth did it matter to him if these men looked coldly upon another man? It did. It mattered quite a lot, more than perhaps it ever mattered to the other man. Is the soul such a shallow and blind thing that it cannot sort the true from the false, the material from the immaterial, cannot see that an insult levelled at a likeness is not an insult levelled at it?
Surely not, and yet the soul of Victor Jones resented the coolness of others towards the supposed body of Rochester, as though it were a personal insult.
It was the first intimation to Jones that when the actor puts on his part he puts on more than a cloak or trunk hose, that the personality he had put on had nerves curiously associated with his own nerves, and that, though he might say to himself a hundred times with respect to the attitudes of other people, “Pah! they don’t mean me,” that formula was no charm against disdain.
The wine butler, a gentleman not unlike Mr. Church, was now at his elbow, and he found himself contemplating the wine card of the Senior Conservative, a serious document, if one may judge by the faces of the men who peruse it.
It is in fact the Almanach de Gotha of wines. The old kings of wine are here, the princess and all the aristocracy. Unlike the Almanach de Gotha, however, the price of each is set down. Unlike the Almanach de Gotha, the names of a few commoners are admitted.
Macon was here, and even Blackways’ Cyder, the favourite tipple of the old Duke of Taunton.
Jones ran his eye over the list without enthusiasm. He had taken a dislike to alcohol even in its mildest guise.
“Er — what minerals have you got?” asked he.
“Minerals!”
The man with the wine card was nonplussed. Jones saw his mistake.
“Soda water,” said he. “Get me some soda water.”
The fillet of sole with sauce Tartare was excellent. Nothing, not even the minerals could dim that fact. As he ate he looked about him, and with all the more ease, because he found now that nobody was looking at him; his self-consciousness died down, and he began speculating on the men around, their probable rank, fortune, and intellect. It seemed to Jones that the latter factor was easier of determination than the other two.
What struck him more forcibly was a weird resemblance between them all, a phantom thing, a link undiscoverable yet somehow there. This tribal expression is one of the strangest phenomena eternally comforting and battering our senses.
Just as men grow like their wives, so do they grow like their fellow tradesmen, waiters like waiters, grooms like grooms, lawyers like lawyers, politicians like politicians. More, it has been undeniably proved that landowners grow like landowners, just as shepherds grow like sheep, and aristocrats like aristocrats.
A common idea moulds faces to its shape, and a common want of ideas allows external circumstances to do the moulding.
So, English Conservative Politicians of the higher order, being worked upon by external circumstances of a similar nature, have perhaps a certain similar expression. Radical Politicians on the other hand, shape to a common idea — evil — but still an idea. Jones was not thinking this, he was just recognising that all these men belonged to the same class, and he felt in himself that, not only did he not belong to that class, but that Rochester also, probably, had found himself in the same position.
That might have accounted for the wildness and eccentricity of Rochester, as demonstrated in that mad carouse and hinted at by the woman in the feather boa. The wildness of a monkey condemned to live amongst goats, hanging on to their horns, and clutching at their scuts, and playing all the tricks that contrariness might suggest to a contrary nature.
Something of this sort was passing through Jones’ mind, and as he attacked his strawberry ice, for the first time since reading that momentous piece of news in the evening newspaper his mental powers became focussed on the question that lay at the very heart of all this business. It struck him now so very forcibly that he laid down his spoon and stared before him, forgetful of the place where he was and the people around him.
“Why did that guy commit suicide?”
That was the question.
He could find no answer to it.
A man does not as a rule commit suicide simply because he is eccentric or because he has made a mess of his estates, or because being a practical joker he suddenly finds his twin image to defraud. Rochester had evidently done nothing to bar him from society. Though perhaps coldly received by his club, he was still received by it. Had he done something that society did not know of, something that might suddenly obtrude itself?
Jones was brought back from his reverie with a snap. One of the confounded waiters was making off with his half-eaten ice.
“Hi,” cried he. “What you doing? Bring that back.”
His voice rang through the room, people turned to look. He mentally cursed the ice and the creature who had snapped it from him, finished it, devoured a wafer, and then, rising to his feet, left the room. It was easier to leave than to come in, other men were leaving, and in the general break up he felt less observed.
Downstairs he looked through glass doors into a room where men were smoking, correct men in huge arm chairs, men with legs stretched out, men smoking big cigars and talking politics no doubt. He wanted to smoke, but he did not want to smoke in that place.
He went to the cloak room, fetched his hat and cane and gloves and left the club.
Outside in Pall Mall he remembered that he had not told the waiter to credit him with the luncheon, but a trifle like that did not bother him now. They would be sure to put it down.
What did trouble him was the still unanswered question, “Why did that guy commit suicide?”
Suppose Rochester had murdered some man and had committed suicide to escape the consequences? This thought gave him a cold grue such as he had never experienced before. For a moment he saw himself hauled before a British Court of Justice; for a moment, and for the first time in his life, he found himself wondering what a hangman might be like.
But Victor Jones, though a visionary sometimes in business, was at base a business man. More used to his position now, and looking it fairly in the face, he found that he had little to fear even if Rochester had committed a murder. He could, if absolutely driven to it, prove his identity. Driven to it, he could prove his life in Philadelphia, bring witnesses and relate circumstances. His tale would all hang together, simply because it was the truth. This inborn assurance heartened him a lot, and, more cheerful now, he began to recognise more of the truth. His position was very solid. Every one had accepted him. Unless he came an awful bump over some crime committed by the late defunct, he could go on forever as the Earl of Rochester. He did not want to go on forever as the Earl of Rochester; he wanted to get back to the States and just be himself, and he intended so to do having scraped a little money together. But the idea tickled him just as it had done in Charing Cross Station, and it had lost its monstrous appearance and had become humorous, a highly dangerous appearance for a dangerous idea to take.
Jones was a great walker, exercise always cleared his mind and strengthened his judgment. He set off on a long walk now, passing the National Gallery to Regent Circus, then up Regent Street and Oxford Street, and along Oxford Street towards the West. He found himself in High Street Kensington, in Hammersmith, and then in those dismal regions where the country struggles with the town.
Oh, those suburbs of London! Within easy reach of the city! Those battalions of brick houses, bits of corpses, of what once were fields; those villas, laundries —
The contrast between this place and Pall Mall came as a sudden revelation to Jones, the contrast between the power, ease, affluence and splendour of the surroundings of the Earl of Rochester, and the surroundings of the bank clerks and small people who dwelt here.
The view point is everything. From here Carlton House Terrace seemed almost pleasing.
Jones, like a good Democrat, had all his life professed a contempt for rank. Titles had seemed as absurd to him as feathers in a monkey’s cap. It was here in ultra Hammersmith that he began to review this question from a more British standpoint.
Tell it not in Gath, he was beginning to feel the vaguest antipathetic stirring against little houses and ultra people.
He turned and began to retrace his steps. It was seven o’clock when he reached the door of 10A, Carlton House Terrace.
NOTE: P.G. Wodehouse’s stories describe a fictitious Senior Conservative Club in London, based on the real-life Constitutional.
SERIALIZED BY HILOBOOKS: Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague | Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”) | Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt | H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook | Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins | William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land | J.D. Beresford’s Goslings | E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man | Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage | Muriel Jaeger’s The Man With Six Senses | Jack London’s “The Red One” | Philip Francis Nowlan’s Armageddon 2419 A.D. | Homer Eon Flint’s The Devolutionist | W.E.B. DuBois’s “The Comet” | Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Moon Men | Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland | Sax Rohmer’s “The Zayat Kiss” | Eimar O’Duffy’s King Goshawk and the Birds | Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Lost Prince | Morley Roberts’s The Fugitives | Helen MacInnes’s The Unconquerable | Geoffrey Household’s Watcher in the Shadows | William Haggard’s The High Wire | Hammond Innes’s Air Bridge | James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen | John Buchan’s “No Man’s Land” | John Russell’s “The Fourth Man” | E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” | John Buchan’s Huntingtower | Arthur Conan Doyle’s When the World Screamed | Victor Bridges’ A Rogue By Compulsion | Jack London’s The Iron Heel | H. De Vere Stacpoole’s The Man Who Lost Himself | P.G. Wodehouse’s Leave It to Psmith | Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game” | Houdini and Lovecraft’s “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs” | Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Sussex Vampire”.
RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION: “Radium Age” is HILOBROW’s name for the 1904–33 era, which saw the discovery of radioactivity, the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. This era also saw the publication of genre-shattering writing by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sax Rohmer, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Karel Čapek, H.P. Lovecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Philip Gordon Wylie, and other pioneers of post-Verne/Wells, pre-Golden Age “science fiction.” More info here.
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