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Updated: May 27, 2025
They all fancied themselves so real. They all had schemes in their heads, as if they were going to live a thousand years. I walked westwards past the great clubs, moralising as I went, and feeling the reaction from the excitement of Murglebed-on-Sea.
Renniker, being in a flippant mood, mentioned a fashionable watering-place on the South Coast. I pleaded the seriousness of my question. "What I want," said I, "is a place compared to which Golgotha, Aceldama, the Dead Sea, the Valley of Jehoshaphat, and the Bowery would be leafy bowers of uninterrupted delight." "Then Murglebed-on-Sea is what you're looking for," said Renniker.
There's no hotel, and the inhabitants are like cannibals." "I start for Murglebed-on-Sea to-morrow," said I. Rogers started at me. His loose mouth quivered like that of a child preparing to cry. "We can't possibly stay there, sir," he remonstrated. "We are not going to try," I retorted. "I'm going by myself." His face brightened.
I shall conduct no more inquiries into pauper lunacy, thank Heaven! And as for the public engagements which Dale Kynnersley made for me during my Thebaid existence on Murglebed-on-Sea, the deuce can take them all I am free. I only await the stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds, for which quaint post under the Crown I applied, to cease to be a Member of Parliament.
He sighed and departed, and the next day I found myself here, in Murglebed-on-Sea. On a murky, sullen November day Murglebed exhibits unimagined horrors of scenic depravity. It snarls at you malignantly. It is like a bit of waste land in Gehenna. There is a lowering, soap-suddy thing a mile away from the more or less dry land which local ignorance and superstition call the sea.
"Are you going there at once?" "At once," said I. "It's November," said he, "and a villainous November at that; so you'll see Murglebed-on-Sea in the fine flower of its desolation." I thanked him, went home, and summoned my excellent man Rogers. "Rogers," said I, "I am going to the seaside. I heard that Murglebed is a nice quiet little spot.
The country is flat and barren. A dismal creek runs miles inland an estuary fed by the River Murgle. A few battered cottages, a general shop, a couple of low public-houses, and three perky red-brick villas all in a row form the city, or town, or village, or what you will, of Murglebed-on-Sea. Renniker is a wonderful man. I have rented a couple of furnished rooms in one of the villas.
Indeed, such a chivalrous adventure had vaguely passed through my mind during my exalted mood at Murglebed-on-Sea. But then I knew little beyond the fact that Dale was fluttering round an undesirable candle. Till now I had no idea of the extent to which his wings were singed. "Hasn't Dale spoken to you about this creature?" his mother asked.
But for me, in my present eumoirous disposition of mind; for me, a half-disembodied spirit who had cast all vain and disturbing human emotions into the mud of Murglebed-on-Sea; for me who had a spirit's calm disregard for the petty passions and interests of mankind and walked through the world with no other object than healing a few human woes; for me who already saw death on the other side of the river and found serious occupation in exchanging airy badinage with him; for me with an abominable little pain inside inexorably eating my life out and wasting me away literally and perceptibly like a shadow and twisting me up half a dozen times a day in excruciating agony; for me, in this delectable condition of soul and this deplorable condition of body, to think of running hundreds of miles from home with to say the least of it so inconvenient a creature as a big, bronze-haired woman, the idea was inexpressibly and weirdly comic.
But the quaint fact of its brief duration is worth the attention of a contemplative mind. It is in order perfectly to focus this attention that I have come to Murglebed-on-Sea. Here I am alone with the murk and the mud and my own indrawn breath of life. There are no flowers, blue sky, smiling eyes, and dainty faces none of the adventitious distractions of the earth. There are no Blue-books.
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