The Golden Journey of Mr. Paradyne

Cosmo Paradyne, K.C., wakes in the dark and cannot fall out of bed, because on the other side there is a wooden wall. He decides he is at sea, and that the engines have stopped. Then he notices that his legs are bare and that he is wearing a flannel shirt, a thing he has never in his life gone to bed in.

He is forty-two, a leader of the Chancery Bar, Winchester and King's College, an honourable history of ambition and work and success — and he is standing barefoot on the steps of a gipsy caravan somewhere on the plain of Beauce, in the last dark before dawn, listening to a tethered horse eat grass. His golfing shoes and his Norfolk jacket are inside. Nothing else about the last three days will come back to him.

What follows is not a mystery so much as a reprieve. Locke lets a man who has spent twenty years being sensible walk out of his own life for a week, on a French road, with a horse and no plan, and the joke turns out to have a great deal of tenderness in it.

First published in 1924 by John Lane at The Bodley Head. Locke wrote The Beloved Vagabond; this is the same argument at novella length.