Fancies and Goodnights Read Online Free PDF

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

THREE BEARS COTTAGE

PICTURES IN THE FIRE
    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.

WET SATURDAY
    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

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

HALFWAY TO HELL
    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.

THE LADY ON THE GREY
    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

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

OVER INSURANCE
    Alice and Irwin were as simple and as happy as any young couple
in a family-style motion picture. In fact, they were even happier,
for people were not looking at them all the time and their joys
were not restricted by the censorship code. It is therefore
impossible to describe the transports with which Alice flew to
embrace Irwin on his return from work, or the rapture with which
Irwin returned