Arnold Bennett - Arnold Bennett - Buried Alive, The Old Wives' Tale & The Card (3 Books in One Edition)

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The hero of a novel Buried Alive is Mr Priam Farll, a painter of considerable ability. He is, however, extremely shy – so shy that when his valet, Henry Leek, dies suddenly, the doctor believes the dead man to be Priam Farll and the live man the valet. The artist does not try to disabuse him. After the funeral , Priam Farll marries a widow and lives a happy life until the loss of his wife's money means he has to take up painting again. A connoisseur of art recognises his style but thinks the paintings are by an imposter. He makes a fortune by buying his works through a small dealer and selling them in America as genuine. Meanwhile Priam Farll refuses through his obstinate shyness to prove his own identity. The Old Wives Tale (1908), a novel set in part in the Potteries district of North Staffordshire, where Bennett grew up, is generally considered his single masterpiece. The Card is a short comic novel written by Arnold Bennett in 1911. It chronicles the rise of Edward Henry («Denry») Machin from washerwoman's son to Mayor of Bursley (a fictitious town based on Burslem). This is accomplished through luck, initiative and a fair bit of chutzpah (in slang a card is a 'character', an 'original'; a clever, audacious, person).
Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) was an English journalist, novelist, and writer. After working as a rent collector and solicitor's clerk, Bennett won a writing contest which convinced him to become a journalist. He later turned to the writing of novels, including his most famous Clayhanger and Anna of the five towns.

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Arnold Bennett

Arnold Bennett: Buried Alive, The Old Wives' Tale & The Card

(3 Books in One Edition)

Published by

Books Advanced Digital Solutions HighQuality eBook Formatting - фото 1Books

Advanced Digital Solutions & High-Quality eBook Formatting

musaicumbooks@okpublishing.info2017 OK Publishing ISBN 978-80-272-3392-2

Table of Contents

Buried Alive

1 The Puce Dressing-gown

2 A Pail

3 The Photograph

4 A Scoop

5 Alice On Hotels

6 A Putney Morning

7 The Confession

8 An Invasion

9 A Glossy Male

10 The Secret

11 An Escape

12 Alice's Performances

The Old Wives' Tale

Preface to this Edition

Book i: Mrs. Baines

1 The Square

2 The Tooth

3 A Battle

4 Elephant

5 The Traveller

6 Escapade

7 A Defeat

Book ii: Constance

1 Revolution

2 Christmas and the Future

3 Cyril

4 Crime

5 Another Crime

6 The Widow

7 Bricks and Mortar

8 The Proudest Mother

Book iii: Sophia

1 The Elopement

2 Supper

3 An Ambition Satisfied

4 A Crisis for Gerald

5 Fever

6 The Siege

7 Success

Book iv: What Life is

1 Frensham’s

2 The Meeting

3 Towards Hotel Life

4 End of Sophia

5 End of Constance

The Card

1 The Dance

2 The Widow Hullins's House

3 The Pantechnicon

4 Wrecking Of A Life

5 The Mercantile Marine

6 His Burglary

7 The Rescuer Of Dames

8 Raising A Wigwam

9 The Great Newspaper War

10 His Infamy

11 In The Alps

12 The Supreme Honour

Buried Alive

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

The Puce Dressing-gown

Table of Contents

The peculiar angle of the earth's axis to the plane of the ecliptic--that angle which is chiefly responsible for our geography and therefore for our history--had caused the phenomenon known in London as summer. The whizzing globe happened to have turned its most civilized face away from the sun, thus producing night in Selwood Terrace, South Kensington. In No. 91 Selwood Terrace two lights, on the ground-floor and on the first-floor, were silently proving that man's ingenuity can outwit nature's. No. 91 was one of about ten thousand similar houses between South Kensington Station and North End Road. With its grimy stucco front, its cellar kitchen, its hundred stairs and steps, its perfect inconvenience, and its conscience heavy with the doing to death of sundry general servants, it uplifted tin chimney-cowls to heaven and gloomily awaited the day of judgment for London houses, sublimely ignoring the axial and orbital velocities of the earth and even the reckless flight of the whole solar system through space. You felt that No. 91 was unhappy, and that it could only be rendered happy by a 'To let' standard in its front patch and a 'No bottles' card in its cellar-windows. It possessed neither of these specifics. Though of late generally empty, it was never untenanted. In the entire course of its genteel and commodious career it had never once been to let.

Go inside, and breathe its atmosphere of a bored house that is generally empty yet never untenanted. All its twelve rooms dark and forlorn, save two; its cellar kitchen dark and forlorn; just these two rooms, one on the top of the other like boxes, pitifully struggling against the inveterate gloom of the remaining ten! Stand in the dark hall and get this atmosphere into your lungs.

The principal, the startling thing in the illuminated room on the ground-floor was a dressing-gown, of the colour, between heliotrope and purple, known to a previous generation as puce; a quilted garment stuffed with swansdown, light as hydrogen--nearly, and warm as the smile of a kind heart; old, perhaps, possibly worn in its outlying regions and allowing fluffs of feathery white to escape through its satin pores; but a dressing-gown to dream of. It dominated the unkempt, naked apartment, its voluptuous folds glittering crudely under the sun-replacing oil lamp which was set on a cigar-box on the stained deal table. The oil lamp had a glass reservoir, a chipped chimney, and a cardboard shade, and had probably cost less than a florin; five florins would have purchased the table; and all the rest of the furniture, including the arm-chair in which the dressing-gown reclined, a stool, an easel, three packets of cigarettes and a trouser-stretcher, might have been replaced for another ten florins. Up in the corners of the ceiling, obscure in the eclipse of the cardboard shade, was a complicated system of cobwebs to match the dust on the bare floor.

Within the dressing-gown there was a man. This man had reached the interesting age. I mean the age when you think you have shed all the illusions of infancy, when you think you understand life, and when you are often occupied in speculating upon the delicious surprises which existence may hold for you; the age, in sum, that is the most romantic and tender of all ages--for a male. I mean the age of fifty. An age absurdly misunderstood by all those who have not reached it! A thrilling age! Appearances are tragically deceptive.

The inhabitant of the puce dressing-gown had a short greying beard and moustache; his plenteous hair was passing from pepper into salt; there were many minute wrinkles in the hollows between his eyes and the fresh crimson of his cheeks; and the eyes were sad; they were very sad. Had he stood erect and looked perpendicularly down, he would have perceived, not his slippers, but a protuberant button of the dressing-gown. Understand me: I conceal nothing; I admit the figures written in the measurement-book of his tailor. He was fifty. Yet, like most men of fifty, he was still very young, and, like most bachelors of fifty, he was rather helpless. He was quite sure that he had not had the best of luck. If he had excavated his soul he would have discovered somewhere in its deeps a wistful, appealing desire to be taken care of, to be sheltered from the inconveniences and harshness of the world. But he would not have admitted the discovery. A bachelor of fifty cannot be expected to admit that he resembles a girl of nineteen. Nevertheless it is a strange fact that the resemblance between the heart of an experienced, adventurous bachelor of fifty and the simple heart of a girl of nineteen is stronger than girls of nineteen imagine; especially when the bachelor of fifty is sitting solitary and unfriended at two o'clock in the night, in the forlorn atmosphere of a house that has outlived its hopes. Bachelors of fifty alone will comprehend me.

It has never been decided what young girls do meditate upon when they meditate; young girls themselves cannot decide. As a rule the lonely fancies of middle-aged bachelors are scarcely less amenable to definition. But the case of the inhabitant of the puce dressing-gown was an exception to the rule. He knew, and he could have said, precisely what he was thinking about. In that sad hour and place, his melancholy thoughts were centred upon the resplendent, unique success in life of a gifted and glorious being known to nations and newspapers as Priam Farll.

Riches and Renown

In the days when the New Gallery was new, a picture, signed by the unknown name of Priam Farll, was exhibited there, and aroused such terrific interest that for several months no conversation among cultured persons was regarded as complete without some reference to it.

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