Page 117 - DENG202_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_III

Elective English—III

Notes 9.7 The Traveller’s Story of a Terribly Strange Bed – Summary

‘The Traveller’s Story of a Terribly Strange Bed’ was originally published on 24 April 1852 as
Collins’s first contribution to Household Words.

Faulkner, the narrator, tells how as a young man he visited a low class-gambling house in Paris.
After breaking the bank, he accepts accommodation rather than risk taking his large winnings
home late at night. The canopy of the four-poster bed is attached to a screw by which it can be
lowered from the room above to suffocate unsuspecting victims. Unable to sleep, Faulkner
discovers the danger, escaping to return with the police.

Did u know? Greville Phillimore (1881) used the same plot in Uncle Z: and for ‘The Inn of
the Two Witches’ (1913), a tale by Joseph Conrad who claimed never to have read Collins’s
story.

9.8 The Traveller’s Story of a Terribly Strange Bed – Story

Shortly after my education at college was finished, I happened to be staying at Paris with an
English friend. We were both young men then, and lived, I am afraid, rather a wild life, in the
delightful city of our sojourn. One night we were idling about the neighbourhood of the Palais
Royal, doubtful to what amusement we should next betake ourselves. My friend proposed a
visit to Frascati’s; but his suggestion was not to my taste. I knew Frascati’s, as the French saying
is, by heart; had lost and won plenty of five-franc pieces there, merely for amusement’s sake,
until it was amusement no longer, and was thoroughly tired, in fact, of all the ghastly
respectabilities of such a social nomaly as a respectable gambling-house. “For Heaven’s sake,”
said I to my friend, “let us go somewhere where we can see a little genuine, blackguard, poverty-
stricken gaming with no false gingerbread glitter thrown over it all. Let us get away from
fashionable Frascati’s, to a house where they don’t mind letting in a man with a ragged coat, or
a man with no coat, ragged or otherwise.” “Very well,” said my friend, “we needn’t go out of the
Palais Royal to find the sort of company you want. Here’s the place just before us; as blackguard
a place, by all report, as you could possibly wish to see.” In another minute we arrived at the
door, and entered the house, the back of which you have drawn in your sketch.
When we got upstairs, and had left our hats and sticks with the doorkeeper, we were admitted
into the chief gambling-room. We did not find many people assembled there. However, few as
the men were who looked up at us on our entrance; they were all types—lamentably true
types—of their respective classes.
We had come to see blackguards; but these men were something worse. There is a comic side,
more or less appreciable, in all blackguardism—here there was nothing but tragedy—mute,
weird tragedy. The quiet in the room was horrible. The thin, haggard, longhaired young man,
whose sunken eyes fiercely watched the turning up of the cards, never spoke. The flabby,
fat-faced, pimply player, who pricked his piece of pasteboard perseveringly, to register how
often black won, and how often red—never spoke. The dirty, wrinkled old man, with the
vulture eyes and the darned greatcoat, who had lost his last soul, and still looked on desperately,
after he could play no longer—never spoke. Even the voice of the croupier sounded as if it were
strangely dulled and thickened in the atmosphere of the room. I had entered the place to laugh,
but the spectacle before me was something to weep over. I soon found it necessary to take refuge
in excitement from the depression of spirits, which was fast stealing on me. Unfortunately,
I sought the nearest excitement, by going to the table and beginning to play. Still more

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