CROAKER'S QUEST.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 158, 6 July 1937, Page 17

CROAKER'S QUEST.

SHORT STORY.

IT all came about—eo my friend Murphin told me—because John H. Croaker was jilted. At the age of 20, Mr. Murpliin continued, John H. Croaker was a very sensitive young man, modern in his views and drawn towards the more obscure forms of art. As far as he was concerned a curve was a cube, and a poem was not a poem unless it had a different number of feet in each line and was unpunctuated. All his friends used to smile at him, and even those of them who disagreed with his principles would cautiously admit that there might be genius in him. Croaker, having led a sheltered life from his infancy upwards, never loved until he was twenty. At that age he affected long hair, and, being an impetuous youth, the faint beginnings of a moustache.

Considering all things, it was unfortunate that the young lady to whom he fell a victim—for the first and last time —should have been some years older than he was and an enthusiastic golfer. Such are the tricks that love plays. It is not surprising then that the girl—whose name was Joan —jilted John H. Croaker. She had let herself, in an unthinking moment at a cocktail party become engaged to him. A few days later she ran away with a .stockbroker —his name was John, too — and was married with all possible speed. John H. Croaker was left flat. He decided at once that life was no longer" worth living. He would accept his fate and pake a gallant exit. This unfaithful girl and her stockbroker husband should know that one heart had splintered in the artistic manner across their marital path. He would die. • • • • Now here —said my friend Murphin—a curious complication arose. John H. Croaker, whose sheltered upbringing we have already mentioned, had an inbred repulsion to the idea of self-destruction. His great-grandfather had thrown himself into a well in the 'fifties, and hie father had ended his days with his head in a gas stove. John, no doubt, had been told many times of these undistinguished endings to otherwise uneventful careers, and he had grown up determined not to follow in the family footsteps. He had a great horror of wells and gas etoves, Xow he was jilted and wanted to die, but death was not due for him, end he could not bring it upon himself to create it. An unpleasant situation for a highly-strung, temperamental young man. This is what John H. Croaker reflected ari he was about to caat himself into the Mississippi near Memphis. Tennessee. The result was that the river flowed on undisturbed, and John H. Croaker walked away into a new life. His idea was to seek death honourably. He would welcome danger with wide-open arms, but would be perfectly honest in facing it. He could not, on principle, take hie own life; but he would give Death ample opportunity of seeking him out awl claiming him without leaving another blot on the name of Croaker. He would be recklees, and hope for the worst; but he would be fair with himself. In this frame of mind he started a journey from the river bank in Tennessee which was to take him across the world and lead him to the peak of notoriety. Everybody must have heard of the John H. Croaker expedition to the Xorth Pole, with its remarkable contributions to our modern knowledge of meteorology. Nearly all of us will remember the epic crossing of the Xorth Atlantic which John H. Croaker made in a balloon, flying solo, in seven and a half days. But not everyone—Mr. Murphin assured me —realises that these famous feats were in truth the desperate measures of a man who had devoted his life to the pursuit of death. Moreover, so great hae been the limelight thrown upon these two voyages that hardly anybody to-day recalls John H. Croaker'e earlier and equally noteworthy performances. For example—here my friend Murphin began to tick off items on his Angers—it hae never been common knowledge that at one time he became a lion-tamer. This lasted for e few months only; he soon discovered that the lions he had to tame were tame already, and that even i£ he put his head ineide their very mouths they would refuse to bite. • • • • Disappointed at this failure, John H. Croaker—who at the time was travelling with a email circus in the. Middle Weet—taught himself to walk the tightrope. When he was proficient he did an act in the top of the tent, and during it took a large pinch of snuff, which caused him to sneeze and lose his balance. This is the only time that he ever really cheated. As he hurtled downwards from his rope there wae a beautiful smile on hie face, for he was certain now to break hie neck. He landed on top of the clown.

By J. B. SAUNDERS.

When he got to his feet and found that it was the clown's neck which was broken, John H. Croaker uttered a mirthless laugh, sneezed again, and melted grimly into the night. We next hear of him at an egg-eating contest in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he ate 202 eggs at a sitting. This did not. as he had hoped, ruin his constitution, but simply caused him to put on a. little extra weight. • • • • The following year, with about 100.000 dollars in his pocket. John H. Croaker set out on hie death-seeking tour roundthe world.

His exploits were too numerous, ami ar e too well remembered to he worth cataloguing here; but I must remind you (insisted Mr. Murphin) of the celebrated occasion on which he broke the iee on his Arctic voyage and had an early morning dip only a hundred miles

from the Pole; and of the way in which he crossed the Aljie barefooted, in the depth of winter, for wagers totalling some three thousand guineas; and, again, of his killing a shark with his bare hands in the Timor Sea. It is not surprising, therefore, that at the age of 30 John H. Croaker was a remarkably healthy young man, with ead features and a bank roll of upwards of a million dollars. It was an intimate friend who at last suggested the best way out of this increasingly tedious situation. John H. Croaker despaired, by this time, of dying. With the exception of the earlv snuff-taking incident he had never cheated. When throwing the dice with Death he had always played fair, and he had invariably won the game; his parachute —to mix the metaphor—had never failed to open. Now this intimate friend—whose name, sighed Mr. Murphin, I shall not mention—put forward the suggestion that John H. Croaker should stop chafing danger; that he should change his tactics and seek to prolong hi* life to the uttermost; and that then the contest would l>e reversed, and Death, if it did the square thing by him. would turn round end pounce on its victim in lefiA than no time. The race of Croakers, so the friend prophesied, would be extinct within the month. That is the reason—smiled Mr. Murphin—why John H. Croaker, for the remaining 43 yeans of his life, haunted spas, hydros and watering-places, fed on vitamins A to E, took mud baths and electric massage, and had his regular doses of ultra-violet light and ozone. In short, he rapidly became, and loni? remained, a crank as regarded his health. • • • • He went back to Xature and lived without clothes in Italy; when he tired of that he bought a limousine and a fur coat and drank spa waters for a year or two. Periodically he took a sea voyage for the good of his lungs; and he consulted a different specialist every month. In this way he came to live to a good old age. and was always a remarkably rosy-cheeked, upstanding figure of a man, at whom, though he remained a bachelor, women of all sizes and ages were perpetually setting their cape. It seems a sad thin? —concluded my friend Murphin—that John H. Croaker should have died of blood poisoning just as he was beginning to enjoy life —and all because he sat. one afternoon at Xice. on such a simple little thing as a drawing-pin.