Robert W Chambers

The Adventures of a Modest Man Robert W Chambers

The Adventures of a Modest Man by Robert W. Chambers

A collection of short stories in a frame. The narrator is a widower with two daughters, who happily settles down at a rather heavy middle age and rejects his daughter's suitors so that his daughters live with him a little longer. A younger neighbor convinces him to buy a pig, then bets him that the boredom of life has so "petrified" his intellect that he won't be smart enough to stop someone from stealing it. If the narrator loses the bet, he will jump out of his routine by going to Paris. The inevitable, of course, happens. And, via the narrator goes to Paris, taking his daughters with him.

Most of the stories are told by Williams, a man the narrator knew as a young man and meets again on the boat to France. They are love stories, with the usual subtle courtship dance of the early 20th century. A touch of the hands, a look, a reddening of the skin, a whispered conversation: these are the nuances that Chambers explores in the stories.

There is a certain amount of "cute meet" here: a young man sitting next to a lovely young woman on a train bends over to re-tie his shoelaces and accidentally ties his laces to his; two young men save two young women (and their teacher), who are dressed as a knight and a water nymph for a performance; a young man trying to get off a train at "Beverly" misunderstands the conductor's accent and instead gets off at "Peverly" and ends up at a house party he wasn't invited to. There is the moth captured by the graceful golfer; there is the fisherman who climbs a wall on a moonlit night and impulsively kisses the mysterious woman on the other side.