Short Stories From Magazines: 'Ambroise Polichinelle was an actor at the Comédie Francaise''

By May Sinclair

Mary Amelia St. Clair was born on the 24th August 1863 in Rock Ferry, Cheshire.

Her father was a Liverpool shipowner who, after being made bankrupt, became an alcoholic and died whilst May was still a child. The family then moved to Ilford, just outside London and, after a solitary year of education, May was required to stay home and help look after her older brothers, four of whom were suffering from fatal congenital heart disease.

Despite this difficult start May was determined to pursue a literary career. From 1896 May wrote professionally to support herself and her mother. By the turn of the century she was producing not only poetry volumes but short stories, novels and some non-fiction. She was an active feminist and supporter of the Suffrage Movement, her literary talents help to shred ideas that the suffragists were driven by sexual frustration because of the shortage of men.

Her 1913 novel ‘The Combined Maze’, the story of a London clerk and the two women he loves, was highly praised by many, including George Orwell, while Agatha Christie considered it one of the greatest English novels of its time.

In 1914, she volunteered to join the Munro Ambulance Corps on the Western Front in Flanders. Although her time there was short-lived the experience was later reflected in both prose and poetry.

She published several poetry volumes as well as writing early criticism on Imagism and several poets of the movement. Her novels were now also influenced by modernist techniques and her supernatural short stories are increasingly seen as valuable additions to the genre.

From the late 1920s, she suffered from the onset of Parkinson's disease, and her writing career was effectively over.

May Sinclair died on the 14th November 1946. She was 83 and buried at St John-at-Hampstead's churchyard, London.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Miniature Masterpieces
• Release date: Jun 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9781803549347

Book preview

Short Stories From Magazines by Bernard Capes

Bernard Edward Joseph Capes was born on 30th August 1854 in London. He was one of 11 children.

His early work was as a journalist and this developed into writing many short stories for the periodicals of the time including Blackwood's, Butterfly, Cassell's, Cornhill Magazine, Hutton's Magazine, Illustrated London News, Lippincott's, Macmillan's Magazine, Literature, New Witness, Pall Mall Magazine, Pearson's Magazine, The Idler, The New Weekly, and The Queen.

It took him many years to decide that writing full-time could be a sustainable career path.  His initial success came with ‘The Mill of Silence’.  As well as being published it garnered second prize at a competition sponsored by the Chicago Record.  He exceeded that by winning it the following year with ‘The Lake of Wine’. 

Capes quickly became both prolific and popular.  As well as his stories and articles for the periodicals he wrote around 40 volumes across novels, poetry, history as well as romance and mystery novels.

Bernard Capes died on 2nd November 1918 in the flu pandemic.

Index of Contents

A True Princess

An Ugly Customer

The Widow's Clock

The Red Captain

The Strength of the Rope

Arcades Ambo

Priscilla Pipkin

A Danse-Macabre

A TRUE PRINCESS

Dr. Brent softly closed the door of the sick-room and, softly descending the stairs, turned into the library. A gentleman, much younger than he, tall, brisk, alert, with a disciplined gravity of deportment, rose to greet him on his entrance, and held out his hand.

Well, said this person, and what now?

He glanced arrestingly at the clock on the mantelpiece as he spoke, as if every second ticked off were an unfulfilled opportunity.

The older doctor looked up at his congener with an expression rather wistfully envious. He seemed always to see in this professional élégant, as opposed to himself, the triumph of galvanism, so to speak, over backbone.

Nowadays, he would think, success goes to the honeyed phrase and the passionless tabloid. Rough-hewn science is out of date. It is time I walked off with my jalap and my calomel, and left the field to these gloved dispensers of cachets.

Hannan, said he, I have been constrained to ask you to this consultation.

He was bearded, blunt, thickset, and he wore gold-rimmed spectacles. In his bourrue-bienfaisance, in his honesty, and in his brusque insuavity towards such as would compel his sympathy without justification, he was the very type of the dogmatic family doctor—of the gruffly practical allopathist of the old school.

The younger man, quite pleasantly conscious of all that was implied in the infelicitous form of words—a chafing protest, to wit, against this enforced identification of a youthful empiric with an elderly savant—accepted the form with a complacent serenity, that implied in its turn a full recognition of the sentiments that dictated it. For he knew himself to have undesignedly withdrawn, in the space of some twenty odd months, by the simple method of confidence inspired of a self-confident personality, two-thirds of the game from the other's traditional preserves.

I am always honoured to be associated with you, he said drily. I am at your service for— He consulted his watch significantly.

As long as your engagements will permit—I know, I know. You may extend or abbreviate your examination to suit yourself. The case, I confess, puzzles me; but I am willing to acknowledge myself a professional anachronism in these days of psychomachy and neurosis and all the rest of the fashionable twaddle.

Terms, my dear sir, said Hannan good-humouredly, are just the shuttlecock bandied between one age and another. And while it flies the game goes on—up to eighteen hundred and ninety eight strokes, if you will. Vapours or nervous debility—what does it matter? The treatment does not alter. Shall we go upstairs?

A word first, if you please. I should like to admit to you, in plain justice, that this invitation to meet me is none of my suggestion. I am free to allow that, had my wishes been deferred to, I should have called in a practitioner more of my own age and understanding.

I see. But as I cannot forgo the right to dissent, in case my judgment fails to jump with yours, perhaps it would be better even now to—

No! said Dr. Brent, sharply.

He showed some concern in his face; possibly a little shame also.

I have the fullest confidence in your capacity, of course, he went on hurriedly, only—

But there he stuck. He could not devise any form of explanation sufficiently polite and ambiguous to conceal his dread that this upstart might unpremeditatedly rob him of yet another of the few patients of prosperous quality that remained to him.

Well, said Hannan, with easy condonation (he knew well enough where the shoe pinched), let us get to work. The case, I understand, is that of the lady of the house.

Exactly—of Miss Tighe-Lacy—at the particular request of whose brother, Lord Quellhorst, I have invited you to a consultation.

Ah! I had the pleasure of meeting and exchanging a few words with his lordship last week.

H'mph! At—

Just so. At Charleshope, during the festivities in connection with the coming of age of the Marquis of Dinmont's eldest son, Lord Skye.

Dr. Brent humoured a scarce audible grunt that was as pregnant of meaning as an Olympian nod. Beggars on horseback! it expressed. Brain and grit were my recommendations to favour. Now, in these days of the apotheosis of the play-actor, any puppy of a 'walking-gentleman,' fresh from the schools, with the assurance to pretend to a new reading of his Materia Medica, may take his pick from a perfect Tom-Tiddler's ground of duchesses.

Well, for your diagnosis, he said. The case, I repeat, hips me. I know nothing of the lady's constitution. She comes, as you are probably aware, of a very old county family; but has only latterly settled here, in Twycross.

Spinster?

Miss Tighe-Lacy, my dear sir. I need not tell you, Hannan, that it is of some importance to me to retain what little old-fashioned credit is yet associated professionally with my name.

The younger man nodded comprehendingly.

Poor decent old beggar, he was thinking. His anxiety, not to be ousted by a tyro, makes him appear unnaturally churlish.

Aloud, he said: To the entire fruits of my opinion, Dr. Brent, you are, of course, welcome.

Then, said the other, let us go and see if you can unravel a problemless problem.

The Honorable Prudence Tighe-Lacy lay propped upon pillows in her very comfortable bed. Her eyes were closed; her face was flushed and a little swollen; her lank grizzled hair dropped about her shoulders.

By the bedside, wedged back into an easy chair, sat her brother—a gentleman whose expression gave earnest that his years were well in advance of his intellect. Both his face and the patient's had a contour which, viewed in profile, suggested that of a particularly supercilious llama carved in wood and in bas-relief.

With the entrance of the doctors, Lord Quellhorst rose, vouchsafed a little oblique bow to the new-comer, and, walking to the fireplace, lifted his coat-tails to the glow, and stood loftily expectant. Hannan noticed, with some surprise, that a picture that hung on the wall above his lordship's head had been turned, apparently that its back should present itself to the gaze of the invalid opposite.

The confident young practitioner produced his stethoscope, approached the bed, and made his examination. The patient demurred to nothing; but she uttered no word. To all enquiry she but shook her head, with closed eyes, like royalty deprecating a petition. She bestowed her pulse as if it were an order; she put out her tongue with a mechanical resignation that implied publicity to be the chief penalty of greatness.

Presently Hannan, rising, signified that he was