The Weird Crime by Talmage Powell & Fletcher Flora & Robert Moore Williams & Rufus King & H. L. Mencken

Author:Talmage Powell & Fletcher Flora & Robert Moore Williams & Rufus King & H. L. Mencken
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: mystery, detective, fantasy, horror, science fiction
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2015-10-25T16:00:00+00:00

THE MAN WHO LOST HIS HEAD, by Thomas Burke

Originally published in Night-Pieces: Eighteen Tales, 1935.

The accident that befell Peter Smothe was no such accident as is met by compensation from our popular daily papers. Their catholic and imaginative lists stop short of that kind of accident.

It is said of many of us when, in times demanding the packed thought of an hour, we are unable to attain even a moments reflection—that we have lost our heads. The term is one of those passionately tropical images which fall so glibly from the lips of accountants, stockbrokers, cricket-umpires and other repressed poets. But with Peter Smothe the thing happened. He did actually lose his head, and lived to know that he had lost it.

It began in that restiveness which comes to many a man at fifty. He came to see his life as flat and unprofitable. He looked about him and saw—or thought he saw—other men leading vivid-coloured lives; lives as full of zest and effulgence as a fire-opal; while his own had been safe, warm—and dull. He was fifty, and he had had none of that highly-charged life of which he read in the newspapers. He forgot, of course, that they were they, and he was he; and that a man cannot choose his way of life. He can be only what his chemistry and his karma allow him to be. He can be only himself. To seek to be something else is to throw the whole mechanism of his being out of gear.

But Peter Smothe was sick of being himself, and at fifty he decided to be something else; anything else. He felt it a sorry thing that a man’s life should run on one set of rails. That a man should spend his little span in being but one kind of man—a soldier, an actor, a geologist, a scholar, a lawyer, a painter. Why couldn’t he have a little of each? He realized that at fifty it was too late to try for a little of each, but at least he would have something different. He had had enough of his rails, and since most of his life was gone, this was the time, if ever, while he was yet able and healthy, to try something new; something utterly alien to his previous experience.

So, upon a fine morning, he packed a small bag, and left his Kensington flat without any word of his intention; and was never again seen in it.

He had no clear plan, other than escape into a new world. A passing delivery van gave him his first pointer. He saw the words “Pentonville Road,” and he hailed a taxi, and said, “Pentonville Road.” He stopped the taxi half-way up the long ascent of that road, and went down a side turning. There he took the first turning on the right. He walked down this littered street, studying its decrepit houses. One of them, not so decrepit as the rest, had a card in its window—“Lodgings for a Respectable Single Man.

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