The Small Bachelor quotes

The words, delivered at a distance of two feet in the man’s immediate rear, were spoken in the sharp, resonant voice of one who Gets Things Done—which, in its essentials, is rather like the note of a seal barking for fish. The result was that

Mullett, who was highly strung, sprang some eighteen inches into the air and swallowed his chewing-gum.

Owing to that great thinker’s practice of wearing No-Jar Rubber Soles (“They Save the Spine”), he had had no warning of Mr. Beamish’s approach.

And when Hamilton Beamish said “All wrong!” it meant “All wrong!” He was a man who thought clearly and judged boldly, without hedging or vacillation.

He called a Ford a Ford.

“Wrong, sir?” faltered Mullett, when, realising that there had been no bomb-outrage after all, he was able to speak.

“You have, sir—very serious temptation. But I welcome temptation, Mr. Finch. Every time I’m left alone with your pearl studs, I have a bout with the Tempter. ‘Why don’t you take them, Mullett?’ he says to me, ‘Why don’t you take them?’

It’s splendid moral exercise, sir.

”

“You have, sir—very serious temptation. But I welcome temptation, Mr. Finch.

Every time I’m left alone with your pearl studs, I have a bout with the Tempter.

‘Why don’t you take them, Mullett?’ he says to me, ‘Why don’t you take them?’ It’s splendid moral exercise, sir.”

“Shall I tell you something?”

“Mullett,” said George Finch, “I, too, love.”

“You may have noticed that I have been fussy about my clothing of late, Mullett?”

“Sigsbee H. Waddington,” he said, “is one of those men who must, I think, during the formative years of their boyhood have been kicked on the head by a mule.

It has been well said of Sigsbee H. Waddington that, if men were dominoes, he would be the double-blank.

One of the numerous things about him that rule him out of serious consideration by intelligent persons is the fact that he is a synthetic Westerner.”

Both Sigsbee H. and Mrs. Waddington do much to bear out this theory. I am loath to speak ill of a woman, but it is no use trying to conceal the fact that

Mrs. Waddington is a bounder and a snob and has a soul like the underside of a flat stone.

She worships wealth and importance. She likes only the rich and the titled. As a matter of fact, I happen to know that there is an English lord hanging about the place whom she wants Molly to marry.”

You are going out of your class. It is not as if you were one of these dashing, young Lochinvar fellows. You are mild and shy. You are diffident and timid.

I class you among Nature’s white mice.

It would take a woman like Mrs. Sigsbee Waddington about two and a quarter minutes to knock you for a row of Portuguese ashcans—er, as Mullett would say,” added Hamilton Beamish with a touch of confusion.

His lordship closed the door behind Mrs. Waddington and stood for some moments in profound thought.

He may have been wondering what was the earliest he could expect a cocktail, or he may have been musing on some deeper subject⁠—if there is a deeper subject.

Mrs. Waddington navigated upstairs, and paused before a door near the second landing.

It would be idle to deny that, at this particular moment, Sigsbee H. Waddington was in a dangerous mood. The history of nations shows that the wildest upheavals come from those peoples that have been most rigorously oppressed: and it is so with individuals.

There is no man so terrible in his spasmodic fury as the henpecked husband during his short spasms of revolt.

Even Mrs. Waddington recognised that, no matter how complete her control normally, Sigsbee H., when having one of his spells, practically amounted to a rogue elephant. Her policy was to keep out of his way till the fever passed, and then to discipline him severely.

Waddington’s eye, which kept shooting down the table at intervals and reducing him to pulp at those very moments when he was beginning to feel that, if treated with gentle care and kindness, he might eventually recover.

It was an eye that, like a thermos flask, could be alternately extremely hot and intensely cold.

When George met it during the soup course he had the feeling of having encountered a simoom while journeying across an African desert.

“Mr. Brewster Bodthorne has been asking for you particularly. He wants to play checkers.”

“Hell,” said Mr. Waddington, with the air of quoting something out of Dante, “is full of Brewster Bodthornes.”

Molly put her arms round her father’s neck and kissed him fondly—a proceeding which drew from George a low, sharp howl of suffering like the bubbling cry of some strong swimmer in his agony. There is a limit to what the flesh can bear.

I can’t remember when I’ve ever heard a man talk so arrestingly. Mr. Winch has held me spellbound. Positively spellbound. And my name,” he concluded, a little incoherently, groping for the door-handle, “is Sigsbee Horatio Waddington and I don’t care who knows it.”

The chief drawback to being a shy man is that in the actual crises of real life you are a very different person from the dashing and resourceful individual whom you have pictured in your solitary daydreams.

George Finch, finding himself in the position in which he had so often yearned to be—alone with the girl he loved, felt as if his true self had been suddenly withdrawn and an incompetent understudy substituted at the last moment.

The door opened. Ferris, the butler, appeared.

“All goods,” said Ferris, regarding George dispassionately, “must be delivered in the rear.”

“I want to see Miss Waddington.”

“Mrs. Waddington is not at home,” he said once more.

“The weather appears to be clement,” agreed Ferris.

George then tumbled backwards down the steps, and the interview concluded.

“Though, as a matter of fact,” said Hamilton Beamish, “I always say that what one objects to is not the heat but the humidity.”

Which simply goes to prove that even efficiency experts, when they fall in love at first sight, can babble like any man of inferior intellect in the same circumstances.

Strange and violent emotions were racking Hamilton Beamish’s bosom:

Mrs. Waddington looked on her antipathy to George Finch as one of those deep, natural, fundamental impulses which the sensible person takes for granted.

Broadly speaking, she objected to George because he was George. It was, as it were, his essential Georgeness that offended her.

But, seeing that she was expected to be analytical, she forced her mind to the task.

“The opportunity of a dozen lifetimes,” said Mr. Waddington. “And that’s the way to get on in the world—by grabbing your opportunities.

Why, what’s Big Ben but a wristwatch that saw its chance and made good?

” Mr. Waddington paused. His forehead wrinkled. He snatched the bundle of stock from his companion’s grasp and made a movement towards his pocket. “No!” he said, “No! I can’t do it. I can’t let you have it, after all!”

“

Isn’t money the devil!

” he said. “Isn’t it terrible the way it saps all a fellow’s principles and good resolutions! Sheer greed, that was what was the matter with me, when I said I wouldn’t let you have this stock. Sheer, grasping greed.

“I didn’t see you take it.”

“Nobody don’t ever see me take it,” said Fanny proudly, stating a profound truth.

“Well, then, now you’ve witnessed the demonstration, perhaps you’ll believe me when I say that I’m not so worse. If Freddy can do it, I can do it.”

“The poor fish!” said George warmly. “What does he want to go doing that sort of thing for at a time like this?

A man ought to decide once and for all at the outset of his career whether he is a clergyman or an acrobat and never deviate from his chosen path.

This is awful news, Hamilton. I must rush about and try to find a substitute. Good heavens! An hour or so before the wedding, and no clergyman!”

“Perhaps that would be as well. But I still feel that my scheme would be the ideal one, if only we could find the girl. It is too bad that you have not a dark past.”

“My dark past,” said George bitterly, “is all ahead of me.”

He turned and hurried down the drive. Hamilton Beamish, still meditating, made his way towards the house.

“I ought to, of course.”

“Yes, but it’s a lot better fun doing things that you oughtn’t, isn’t it?”

“Well, the point is, I have a friend who is in a difficulty, and it occurs to me that you can get him out.”

“I see. Did you think all this out by yourself?”

“You’re too clever for one man. You ought to incorporate.”

It seemed to Hamilton Beamish that the moment had arrived to speak out frankly and without subterfuge, to reveal in the neatest phrases at his disposal the love which had been swelling in his heart like some yeasty ferment ever since he had first taken …

… Hamilton Beamish, the descendant of ancestors who had conducted their love affairs with stout clubs and who, on seeing a rival, wasted no time in calm reflection but jumped on him like a ton of bricks and did their best to bite his head off.

If you had given him a bearskin and taken away his spectacles, Hamilton Beamish at this moment would have been Prehistoric Man.

“But, May, you know you don’t love me. …”

“He did, did he?” said Mr. Beamish, snorting a little. “Why?”

“Because I brought May flowers.”

“That’s quite enough,” said Hamilton Beamish, not without reason. “I should like to remind you, Finch, that this lady is engaged to me.”

“I suppose the English country’s nice?”

“I believe it gives uniform satisfaction, sir.”

George felt damped. In his mood of relief he had hoped that Ferris might have brought himself to sink the butler in the friend.

“But there are only a few.”

“I disapprove of even one mosquito, sir.”

“I suppose everybody downstairs is very excited about the wedding, Ferris?”

“Many of them are Swedes, sir, and the rest are Irish.”

“Their heads are too square, sir.”

“And you disapprove of the Irish?”

“I’m sorry weddings depress you, Ferris. Surely when two people love each other and mean to go on loving each other. …”

“Marriage is not a process for prolonging the life of love. It merely mummifies its corpse.”

“But, Ferris, if there were no marriages, what would become of posterity?”

“But, Ferris, if there were no marriages, what would become of posterity?”

“I see no necessity for posterity, sir.”

George walked pensively out on to the drive in front of the house. He was conscious of a diminution of the exuberant happiness which had led him to engage the butler in conversation.

A wistful look came into Mrs. Waddington’s face. She seemed to be feeling that luck like that could not hold.

“I, personally,” she said, “have had a presentiment right from the beginning that this marriage would never take place.”

“Now, that is very curious,” said the Rev. Gideon. “I am a strong believer in presentiments.”

“I think they are sent to warn us—to help us to prepare ourselves for disaster.”

“In the present instance,” said Mrs. Waddington, “the word disaster is not the one I would have selected.”

George tottered away. Once more there was creeping over him that grey foreboding which had come to him earlier in the day. So reduced was his nervous system that he actually sought comfort in the society of Sigsbee Horatio.

It was Sigsbee H., returning from his travels.

He walked apprehensively, like a cat that expects a half-brick.

Oh, sings the poet, to be home again, home again, home again: but Sigsbee H. Waddington could not bring himself to share that sunny viewpoint.

Mr. Waddington’s eyes were now protruding to such a dangerous extent that a sharp jerk would have caused them to drop off.

“Sweet suffering soupspoons! What happened then?”

“There was considerable uproar and confusion, so my informant tells me. The bridegroom was noticeably taken aback, and protested with some urgency that it was all a mistake. To which Mrs. Waddington replied that it was just what she had foreseen all along.

“

Mrs. Waddington refused to permit the wedding to take place.

The guests returned to New York. Mr. Finch, after uttering certain protests which my informant could not hear distinctly but which appear to have been incoherent and unconvincing, also took his departure. Mrs.

“What you call sense, perhaps, but not what anyone outside the walls of an institution for the feebleminded would call sense.”

“Is zat so?” Mr. Waddington put his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat and felt rather conquering.

“Well, let me tell you that that girl simply pretended to be what she wasn’t so as to fool you into thinking she wasn’t what she was.”

The thought of defying this overpowering woman did not enter Lord Hunstanton’s mind.

Nobody ever defied Mrs. Waddington.

And so, some little time later, a cab drew up outside the Sheridan Apartment House and two figures proceeded to climb the stairs—for it was one of the pleasing features of the Sheridan that the elevator was practically always out of order.

Already, while standing on the roof, she had been aware of certain pangs, and now she realised beyond all possibility of doubt that she was hungry. She quivered from head to foot.

The smell of that soup seemed to call to the deeps of her being like the voice of an old, old love.

Moving forward like one in a trance, she groped along the wall, and found herself in an open doorway that appeared to lead into a passage. Here, away from the window, the darkness was blacker than ever:

She had come twenty miles to see George. She had waited for George for what seemed several hours. And here George was. She did the sensible thing. Uttering a little squeak of rapture, she ran at him like a rabbit.

One lives and learns.

George found that he had been all wrong, and that his preconceived ideas about dreams and what could and could not happen in them must be revised. For, so far from vanishing when touched, his wraith appeared to be growing more substantial every moment.

“Molly,” said George, weighing his words, “you are without exception the dearest, sweetest, loveliest, most perfect and angelic thing that ever lived.”

“I know. Aren’t you lucky?”

“You saw at once that the girl was mad, didn’t you? You realised immediately that she was suffering from some sort of obsession, poor soul, which made her. …”

A striking change had taken place in the man’s appearance since Mrs. Waddington had last seen him. He now wore the carefree and debonair expression of one who has dined and dined well.

The sparkle in his eye spoke of clear soup, the smile on his lips was eloquent of roast duck and green peas.

To Mrs. Waddington, who had not broken bread since lunchtime, he seemed the most repellant object on which she had ever gazed.

Waddington would have swooned. Fortunately, the other was covered with a piece of raw steak and a bandage, and so was out of action.

There is little in the word “Ah!” when you write it down and take a look at it to suggest that under certain conditions it can be one of the most sinister words in the language.

But hear it spoken by a policeman in whose face you have recently thrown pepper, and you will be surprised. To Mrs.

His eyes were sparkling with an almost human intelligence. “I’ve got a smart business head, Pinch,” he said, shooting the cigar from due east to due west with a single movement of his upper lip.

“I’m the guy with the big brain.”

Although all the data which he had been able to accumulate in the course of their acquaintanceship went directly to prove the opposite, George was not inclined to combat the statement.