by Max Beerbohm
"I was twenty-six--no, twenty-seven years old, and rather a nondescript person, as I am now. I was supposed to have been called to the bar. In fact, I believe I had been called to the bar. I hadn't listened to the call. I never intended to practise, and I never did practise. I only wanted an excuse in the eyes of the world for existing. I suppose the nearest I have ever come to practicing is now at this moment: I am defending a murderer. My father had left me well enough provided with money. I was able to go my own desultory way, riding my hobbies where I would. I had a good stableful of hobbies. Palmistry was one of them. I was rather ashamed of this one. It seemed to me absurd, as it seems to you. Like you, though, I believed in it. Unlike you, I had done more than merely read a book about it. I had read innumerable books about it. I had taken casts of all my friends' hands. I had tested and tested again the points at which Desbarolles dissented from the Gipsies, and--well, enough that I had gone into it all rather thoroughly, and was as sound a palmist, as a man may be without giving his whole life to palmistry.
"One of the first things I had seen in my own hand, as soon as I had learned to read it, was that at about the age of twenty-six I should have a narrow escape from death--from a violent death. There was a clean break in the life-line, and a square joining it--the protective square, you know. The markings were precisely the same in both hands. It was to be the narrowest escape possible. And I wasn't going to escape without injury, either. That is what bothered me. There was a faint line connecting the break in the lifeline with a star on the line of health. Against that star was another square. I was to recover from the injury, whatever it might be. Still, I didn't exactly look forward to it. Soon after I had reached the age of twenty-five, I began to feel uncomfortable. The thing might be going to happen at any moment. In palmistry, you know, it is impossible to pin an event down hard and fast to one year. This particular event was to be when I was about twenty-six; it mightn't be till I was twenty-seven; it might be while I was only twenty-five.
"And I used to tell myself it mightn't be at all. My reason rebelled against the whole notion of palmistry, just as yours does. I despised my faith in the thing, just as you despise yours. I used to try not to be so ridiculously careful as I was whenever I crossed a street. I lived in London at that time. Motor-cars had not yet come in, but--what hours, all told, I must have spent standing on curbs, very circumspect, very lamentable! It was a pity, I suppose, that I had no definite occupation-- something to take me out of myself. I was one of the victims of private means. There came a time when I drove in four-wheelers rather than in hansoms, and was doubtful of four-wheelers. Oh, I assure you, I was very lamentable indeed.
"If a railway-journey could be avoided, I avoided it. My uncle had a place in Hampshire. I was very fond of him and of his wife. Theirs was the only house I ever went to stay in now. I was there for a week in November, not long after my twenty-seventh birthday. There were other people staying there, and at the end of the week we all traveled back to London together. There were six of us in the carriage: Colonel Elbourn and his wife and their daughter, a girl of seventeen; and another married couple, the Bretts. I had been at Winchester with Brett, but had hardly seen him since that time. He was in the Indian Civil, and was home on leave. He was sailing for India next week. His wife was to remain in England for some months, and then join him out there. They had been married five years. She was now just twenty-four years old. He told me that this was her age. The Elbourns I had never met before. They were charming people. We had all been very happy together. The only trouble had been that on the last night, at dinner, my uncle asked me if I still went in for 'the Gipsy business,' as he always called it; and of course the three ladies were immensely excited, and implored me to 'do' their hands. I told them it was all nonsense, I said I had forgotten all I once knew, I made various excuses; and the matter dropped. It was quite true that I had given up reading hands. I avoided anything that might remind me of what was in my own hands. And so, next morning, it was a great bore to me when, soon after the train started, Mrs. Elbourn said it would be 'too cruel' of me if I refused to do their hands now. Her daughter and Mrs. Brett also said it would be 'brutal'; and they were all taking off their gloves, and--well, of course I had to give in.
"I went to work methodically on Mrs. Elbourn's hands, in the usual way, you know, first sketching the character from the backs of them; and there was the usual hush, broken by the usual little noises-- grunts of assent from the husband, cooings of recognition from the daughter. Presently I asked to see the palms, and from them I filled in the details of Mrs. Elbourn's character before going on to the events in her life. But while I talked I was calculating how old Mrs. Elbourn might be. In my first glance at her palms I had seen that she could not have been less than twenty-five when she married. The daughter was seventeen. Suppose the daughter had been born a year later--how old would the mother be? Forty-three, yes. Not less than that, poor woman!"
Laider looked at me.
"Why 'poor woman!' you wonder? Well, in that first glance I had seen other things than her marriage-line. I had seen a very complete break in the lines of life and of fate. I had seen violent death there. At what age? Not later, not possibly later, than forty-three. While I talked to her about the things that had happened in her girlhood, the back of my brain was hard at work on those marks of catastrophe. I was horribly wondering that she was still alive. It was impossible that between her and that catastrophe there could be more than a few short months. And all the time I was talking; and I suppose I acquitted myself well, for I remember that when I ceased I had a sort of ovation from the Elbourns.
"It was a relief to turn to another pair of hands. Mrs. Brett was an amusing young creature, and her hands were very characteristic, and prettily odd in form. I allowed myself to be rather whimsical about her nature, and having begun in that vein, I went on in it, somehow, even after she had turned her palms. In those palms were reduplicated the signs I had seen in Mrs. Elbourn's. It was as though they had been copied neatly out. The only difference was in the placing of them; and it was this difference that was the most horrible point. The fatal age in Mrs. Brett's hands was--not past, no, for here she was. But she might have died when she was twenty-one. Twenty-three seemed to be the utmost span. She was twenty-four, you know.
"I have said that I am a weak man. And you will have good proof of that directly. Yet I showed a certain amount of strength that day--yes, even on that day which has humiliated and saddened the rest of my life. Neither my face nor my voice betrayed me when in the palms of Dorothy Elbourn I was again confronted with those same signs. She was all for knowing the future, poor child! I believe I told her all manner of things that were to be. And she had no future--none, none in this world--except--
"And then, while I talked, there came to me suddenly a suspicion. I wondered it hadn't come before. You guess what it was? It made me feel very cold and strange. I went on talking. But, also, I went on--quite separately--thinking. The suspicion wasn't a certainty. This mother and daughter were always together. What was to befall the one might anywhere--anywhere--befall the other. But a like fate, in an equally near future, was in store for that other lady. The coincidence was curious, very. Here we all were together--here, they and I--I who was narrowly to escape, so soon now, what they, so soon now, were to suffer. Oh, there was an inference to be drawn. Not a sure inference, I told myself. And always I was talking, talking, and the train was swinging and swaying noisily along--to what? It was a fast train. Our carriage was near the engine. I was talking loudly. Full well I had known what I should see in the colonel's hands. I told myself I had not known. I told myself that even now the thing I dreaded was not sure to be. Don't think I was dreading it for myself. I wasn't so 'lamentable' as all that--now. It was only of them that I thought--only for them. I hurried over the colonel's character and career; I was perfunctory. It was Brett's hands that I wanted. They were the hands that mattered. If they had the marks-- Remember, Brett was to start for India in th
e coming week, his wife was to remain in England. They would be apart. Therefore--
"And the marks were there. And I did nothing--nothing but hold forth on the subtleties of Brett's character. There was a thing for me to do. I wanted to do it. I wanted to spring to the window and pull the communication-cord. Quite a simple thing to do. Nothing easier than to stop a train. You just give a sharp pull, and the train slows down, comes to a standstill. And the guard appears at your window. You explain to the guard.
"Nothing easier than to tell him there is going to be a collision. Nothing easier than to insist that you and your friends and every other passenger in the train must get out at once. There are easier things than this? Things that need less courage than this? Some of them I could have done, I dare say. This thing I was going to do. Oh, I was determined that I would do it--directly.
"I had said all I had to say about Brett's hands. I had brought my entertainment to an end. I had been thanked and complimented all round. I was quite at liberty. I was going to do what I had to do. I was determined, yes.
"We were near the outskirts of London. The air was gray, thickening; and Dorothy Elbourn had said: 'Oh, this horrible old London! I suppose there's the same old fog!' And presently I heard her father saying something about 'prevention' and 'a short act of Parliament' and 'anthracite.' And I sat and listened and agreed and--"
Laider closed his eyes. He passed his hand slowly through the air.
"I had a racking headache. And when I said so, I was told not to talk. I was in bed, and the nurses were always telling me not to talk. I was in a hospital. I knew that; but I didn't know why I was there. One day I thought I should like to know why, and so I asked. I was feeling much better now. They told me by degrees that I had had concussion of the brain. I had been brought there unconscious, and had remained unconscious for forty-eight hours. I had been in an accident--a railway-accident. This seemed to me odd. I had arrived quite safely at my uncle's place, and I had no memory of any journey since that. In cases of concussion, you know, it's not uncommon for the patient to forget all that happened just before the accident; there may be a blank for several hours. So it was in my case. One day my uncle was allowed to come and see me. And somehow, suddenly, at sight of him, the blank was filled in. I remembered, in a flash, everything. I was quite calm, though. Or I made myself seem so, for I wanted to know how the collision had happened. My uncle told me that the engine-driver had failed to see a signal because of the fog, and our train had crashed into a goods-train.
"I didn't ask him about the people who were with me. You see, there was no need to ask.
"Very gently my uncle began to tell me, but--I had begun to talk strangely, I suppose. I remember the frightened look of my uncle's face, and the nurse scolding him in whispers.
"After that, all a blur. It seems that I became very ill indeed, wasn't expected to live.
"However, I live."
There was a long silence. Laider did not look at me, nor I at him. The fire was burning low, and he watched it.
At length he spoke:
"You despise me. Naturally. I despise myself."
"No, I don't despise you; but--"
"You blame me." I did not meet his gaze. "You blame me," he repeated.
"Yes."
"And there, if I may say so, you are a little unjust. It isn't my fault that I was born weak."
"But a man may conquer his weakness."
"Yes, if he is endowed with the strength for that."
His fatalism drew from me a gesture of disgust.
"Do you really mean," I asked, "that because you didn't pull that cord, you couldn't have pulled it?"
"Yes."
"And it's written in your hands that you couldn't?"
He looked at the palms of his hands.
"They are the hands of a very weak man," he said. "A man so weak that he cannot believe in the possibility of free will for himself or for any one?"
"They are the hands of an intelligent man, who can weigh evidence and see things as they are."
"But answer me: Was it foreordained that you should not pull that cord?"
"It was foreordained."
"And was it actually marked in your hands that you were not going to pull it?"
"Ah, well, you see, it is rather the things one is going to do that are actually marked. The things one isn't going to do,--the innumerable negative things,--how could one expect them to be marked?"
"But the consequences of what one leaves undone may be positive?"
"Horribly positive. My hand is the hand of a man who has suffered a great deal in later life."
"And was it the hand of a man destined to suffer?"
"Oh, yes. I thought I told you that."
There was a pause.
"Well," I said, with awkward sympathy, "I suppose all hands are the hands of people destined to suffer."
"Not of people destined to suffer so much as I have suffered--as I still suffer."
The insistence of his self-pity chilled me, and I harked back to a question he had not straightly answered.
"Tell me: Was it marked in your hands that you were not going to pull that cord?"
Again he looked at his hands, and then, having pressed them for a moment to his face, "It was marked very clearly," he answered, "in their hands."
Two or three days after this colloquy there had occurred to me in London an idea--an ingenious and comfortable doubt. How was Laider to be sure that his brain, recovering from concussion, had remembered what happened in the course of that railway-journey? How was he to know that his brain hadn't simply, in its abeyance, invented all this for him? It might be that he had never seen those signs in those hands. Assuredly, here was a bright loophole. I had forthwith written to Laider, pointing it out.
This was the letter which now, at my second visit, I had found miserably pent on the letter-board. I remembered my promise to rescue it. I arose from the retaining fireside, stretched my arms, yawned, and went forth to fulfil my Christian purpose. There was no one in the hall. The "shower" had at length ceased. The sun had positively come out, and the front door had been thrown open in its honor. Everything along the sea-front was beautifully gleaming, drying, shimmering. But I was not to be diverted from my purpose. I went to the letter-board. And--my letter was not there! Resourceful and plucky little thing--it had escaped! I did hope it would not be captured and brought back. Perhaps the alarm had already been raised by the tolling of that great bell which warns the inhabitants for miles around that a letter has broken loose from the letter-board. I had a vision of my envelop skimming wildly along the coast-line, pursued by the old, but active, waiter and a breathless pack of local worthies. I saw it outdistancing them all, dodging past coast-guards, doubling on its tracks, leaping breakwaters, unluckily injuring itself, losing speed, and at last, in a splendor of desperation, taking to the open sea. But suddenly I had another idea. Perhaps Laider had returned?
He had. I espied afar on the sands a form that was recognizably, by the listless droop of it, his. I was glad and sorry--rather glad, because he completed the scene of last year; and very sorry, because this time we should be at each other's mercy: no restful silence and liberty for either of us this time. Perhaps he had been told I was here, and had gone out to avoid me while he yet could. Oh weak, weak! Why palter? I put on my hat and coat, and marched out to meet him.
"Influenza, of course?" we asked simultaneously.
There is a limit to the time which one man may spend in talking to another about his own influenza; and presently, as we paced the sands, I felt that Laider had passed this limit. I wondered that he didn't break off and thank me now for my letter. He must have read it. He ought to have thanked me for it at once. It was a very good letter, a remarkable letter. But surely he wasn't waiting to answer it by post? His silence about it gave me the absurd sense of having taken a liberty, confound him! He was evidently ill at ease while he talked. But it wasn't for me to help him out of his difficulty, whatever that migh
t be. It was for him to remove the strain imposed on myself.
Abruptly, after a long pause, he did now manage to say:
"It was--very good of you to--to write me that letter." He told me he had only just got it, and he drifted away into otiose explanations of this fact. I thought he might at least say it was a remarkable letter; and you can imagine my annoyance when he said, after another interval, "I was very much touched indeed." I had wished to be convincing, not touching. I can't bear to be called touching.
"Don't you," I asked, "think it is quite possible that your brain invented all those memories of what--what happened before that accident?"
He drew a sharp sigh.
"You make me feel very guilty."
"That's exactly what I tried to make you not feel!"
"I know, yes. That's why I feel so guilty."
We had paused in our walk. He stood nervously prodding the hard wet sand with his walking-stick.
"In a way," he said, "your theory was quite right. But--it didn't go far enough. It's not only possible, it's a fact, that I didn't see those signs in those hands. I never examined those hands. They weren't there. I wasn't there. I haven't an uncle in Hampshire, even. I never had."
I, too, prodded the sand.
"Well," I said at length, "I do feel rather a fool."
"I've no right even to beg your pardon, but--''
