EPISTLE III

R.Y.S. Dido, OFF COWES, August 4th.

Dearest Patricia,—

How admirably, I must say, is everything in life ordained by prescient Kismet! Fate, for instance, clearly forsees the appalling total of torn frills which, at the close of the season, must be replaced by new ones, and with August gives the social rosebud just the time she needs by putting her into flannel—and Cowes. Then how the sea-water bath, distributed over her fagged limbs by means of a small organdie-muslin bag filled with bran and benzoin, which Aphrodite so loved, that she arose from it each morning only with the greatest possible reluctance, causes her to glow and tingle! Under its mellifluent influences I have already ceased to trouble my head about Evelyn, who, with a system of love-making so amateurish that it comes within the Colonial Secretary's definition of "unskilled labour," wishes to know the reason for my not writing to him!

Is not that a man all over? He regards plighting his troth in the light of setting his foot upon my neck and holding me in bondage till he is ready to slay his passion by indulging it. No, no, Sammy Slow, no modern woman with a grain of sense ever sends little notes to an unmarried man—not until after she is married, anyway. Moreover, most girls are partial to most things that begin with f—flowers, and fruit, and flirting, for three instances—and it is not because you squeezed my waist at Ascot that I should now sit at your feet and gaze into your eyes till I die with my head in your lap. When a man extorts from a woman a promise of love, he looks for a certain show of gratitude with it. Little less exacting than the crude Walcheren Islander who expects his bride elect to go out into the fields to gather sufficient wild carrots to pay the priest and to stand and sell them in the market-place without violating the proprieties, he digs no subway himself; even should he make a sacrifice at all, it is only with an incipient heartache and a profound conviction of regret to follow.

Men are creatures of insane impulses; recall, if you please, Archie Toddington, whose wardrobe (since he never went out until the evening) consisted entirely of dress suits and overcoats. I am inclined to the belief, by the way, that he was but one of a numerous type, for I heard them talking at dinner the other evening of a certain young gentleman, the son of a rural Bishop, who once took his father to dine at the Orleans Club, the boy belonging only to a now defunct institution called the Pelican besides. Now the Prelate was not without some misgivings concerning the Orleans as a manger for the cloth, but whatever were his prejudices they were dissipated on the instant of his entering the dining-room, at the sight of a gentleman, immaculately clean and most correctly clothed, who was dining all alone off a long-bone chop, a little toast, and—a pot of tea!

"Dear me!" exclaimed the Bishop, as he took his seat, "I had no idea, Octavius, that the members of this club had such simple, pastoral tastes. I am indeed agreeably surprised to find that one of them at least drinks tea with his dinner."

"I ask your pardon, sir," replied Octavius, "but will you kindly speak a little lower lest Mr Thornhill should overhear you. Tea, I would not impertinently remind you, is an ideal beverage for a deep thinker, and my friend yonder is quite the ruling brain of the Athenæum. His cogitative faculties, I have no doubt, are even now immersed in some profound distich for his next edition."

Never did a Bishop feel in better company; whereas, as a matter of fact, Mr Thornhill, being only just out of bed, was taking his "early evening breakfast" and inwardly debating whether he should devote himself to Bessie Bellwood at the Pavilion or Lottie Dettmar at the Trocadero, and which of the two houses possessed the easiest fauteuils to go to sleep in!

But I am neglecting Archie Toddington of the chronic dress suit.

On a certain Sunday evening at nine o'clock, then, Archie, feeling fearfully stale and solitary, and, like all misanthropists believing himself to be the repository of the whole world's suffering, strolled into St George's Chapel in Albemarle Street, pausing on the threshold to cough, lest his sudden entrance should cause too great a shock. It was an "after dinner evensong," and the little proprietary chapel-of-ease (now alas! swept away) where evening dress was "indispensable" in the sofa-pews, optional in the gallery, and ladies' bonnets only allowed in the organ-loft, was very full of smart people who had dined late. Brave men, groomed to the last gasp of dilettante exquisiteness, and fair women from whose billowing bosoms diamonds flashed like beams of white light from Gris-nez, sat and listened with polished languor to a short, thin discourse on "Behold a woman came." Then the organ commanded closer attention by uttering an imperious peal, and Mrs Cora Brown-Potter, looking like every bird in the tree, in a ravishing low-necked evening frock of amber silk covered with black Chantilly lace, rendered slightly less décolleté by a white lace berthe, headed by a band of chiffon, and depending from the bared shoulders, stood forth. The hat surmounting her shapely head was of white transparent lace-straw; its raised crown, supported by circles of mauve and white lilac in entrancing combinations, the cachepeignes being black cherries and the faint perfume of fleur-qui-meurt giving the correct signature to the only possible chapeau in which the beautiful wearer could accurately realise the entangled and difficult "atmosphere" of The Holy City. It was simply perfection; for a burnt-brown straw, a sheaf of Annunciation lilies, two silver thistles, a pot of musk, a splash of amethyst miroir velvet—all of which suggestions emanated from amiable worshippers in the front rows—would have ruined all.

And then she spoke her allotted lines—slowly and with measured bleat at first, but louder and louder as the organist, warming to his work, took up the running, until finally she broke into the the melody itself, and——

Archibald Toddington sank down within his pew, deeply and seriously (though happily not fatally) stung. Thirty years had rolled away in half as many minutes, and once again he was a boy at Eton, hopelessly in love with the little daughter of the boat-builder, and fearing nothing but a famine at Layton's. Remorse is, after all, a thoroughly wholesome and healthy secretion: with what bitter anguish do we recall those awful early virtues which we now know to have been only wasted opportunities!

His penitence was very real: from that hour forward he resolved to reform and lead a new life. He would begin by having a ginger ale, neat, at the Badminton, that he might the sooner grow accustomed to that harmless stomachic; again, should he live to be a hundred, he would be scrupulously careful in future always to substitute "blooming" for the ordinary embellishments to conversation. Then with regard to——

An unbidden sigh came from the very pit of his stomach as he dived his right hand into an unusually deep pocket inserted in the left breast of his waistcoat and pulled out about two hundred of their visiting cards. With moisture in his eyes he read the top one:

Of course I forgive you, but as for believing you, that is quite another thing. Am leaving Lupus Street to-night. Going to some ripping rooms in Claverton Street, close to the old pitch. Have changed name to Ida Onslowe. If you come up bring some cold stuff from that shop in Piccadilly, as my landlady's brat has got the ringworm, and I am not taking any tiffin from downstairs. Do come. KID.

Poor little Ida; and what a thorough little sportsman she always was! Yet she was but one out of his last two hundred, who, as their bits of pasteboard attested, haled from half the best-known streets and roads of the honeymoon districts of this great metropolis. He rose to leave the chapel and walked towards the door with the cards still clutched in his right hand. As he joined the fringe of the communicants who were politely shoving one another through the exit, he could move forward only at the rate of six inches a shuffle; but here again was a blessing in disguise. For as he passed through the porch, there stared him in the face a brass-bound box of polished oak, having in its lid an oblong aperture, above which was inscribed in white and gold:

"FOR THE ADDRESSES OF THOSE WHO WISH TO BE VISITED BY THE CLERGY."

Without an instant's hesitation he raised his hand and dropped the ten score cards into the slit; so real, so visible, so conspicuous was the peril of these girls, that no movement tending to their redemption could possibly be adjudged too momentous. Experiencing that peculiar glow of satisfaction which comes of earning a halo and earning it cheaply, Archibald Toddington turned to the right into Piccadilly, and strolled down the incline to the Badminton.

Never in your life I suppose, dear, have you tasted a drink called "Three-cornered Sarah," which is said to have been invented by a subaltern of the King's Dragoon Guards, stationed at Rawal Pindi, who wished not only to forget the past, but to be oblivious of the present and contemptuous of the future? Anyway, Archie fell in with a doughty representative of this famous regiment, and, after a couple or three goes of "Sarah," felt like carrying civilisation into the Congo, or putting down an insurrectionary hill tribe single-handed. The spell of the amber silk frock covered with black Chantilly was broken into pieces and the pieces lost; the enchantment of the white lilac hat with the black cherry cachepeignes had evaporated into thin air, and been blown into Iceland by a gale from the south. Within one short hour, indeed, Archie, who had undertaken not only to give the Dragoon a merry evening, but to ring in miracles on him in the peacherino line, so poignantly repented the loss of all his addresses, that he was found hammering on the door of the chapel and objurgating the housekeepers of the surrounding premises because none of them knew where lived the old verger-johnnie, or whatever they call him, who kept the keys of the place! Thus the cards were for ever lost to him; though doubtless the spiritual needs of the addressees received attention, for that the old-fashioned, one-idea'd bigot is not believed to exist in the Church in the present day was amply proved on the night when the Bishop of Barchester was followed from St James's Hall to the very doorstep of the house opposite the Green Park, where he was staying for the May meetings, by a foreign lady who thought that she recognised him. As she dumbly but persistently refused to accept his assurances that he had never met her in society—and he would now probably deny the incident in toto, but that I have, curiously enough, preserved the cutting from the church paper to which he wrote for editorial advice as to how a gentleman should get rid of a female who was too persistent in the street, and the editor suggested going into a Turkish bath and suddenly disrobing—he had finally to make a swift bolt indoors and slam the door violently in her face. So loud and despotic, however, was the subsequent knocking, that the Bishop himself returned to find not only the lady, but a police constable, on the doorstep, and about three thousand idle persons gathered around them. "I 'umbly beg yer lordship's pardon for knockin'," said the policeman, respectful to the verge of servility, "but when you was a-lettin' this young lady out just now, you shut her skirt in the door!"

I have often thought that if only our police-constables, who affect to be Curii, but in private live like Bacchanals, were drawn from a more æsthetic class than is the case, they would, by exercising a greater sense of delicacy, cause less suffering to the susceptible. Let me illustrate my contention by admitting that I have for years been endeavouring in vain to find out what it is that the loquacious hawker at the street corner has in the pillbox. I have listened to his breezy bleat so often that I know his yarn by heart (and sometimes "give" it in congenial company), but never yet have I heard its conclusion, nor have I beheld the little animal. On every occasion, just as the Autolycan has been going to raise the lid of the box, odious P.C. 797 has arrived from the clouds and blue-pencilled the show. Only yesterday, at the corner of a cul-de-sac in Regent Street, I came upon the patient person of bilious temperament and doubtless sedentary habits, who experiences so many commercial cancellations at the hands of the police. As usual, he had an admiring, if not a monied audience; and he cried:

"Laidies an' gentlemen,—May I claim yer kind an' perlite attention for the purpus' of introjuicin' to yer notice a livin' novelty from the new world beneath the Southern Cross, where every prospec' pleases, an' female modesty is so pronounced that the clean things from the laundry is never aired afore the kitchen fire for fear of upsettin' the mental balance o' the butcher's boy when he brings round the j'int for dinner, an' looks in at the airy winder? Thanks. I 'ave 'ere—I say I 'ave 'ere, contained in this small box, the only insec' overlooked by Adam when he took his seat on the rainbow to christen the marv'llous creations o' the animal world. It is well known to, an' 'ighly respected by, the black aboriginals o' Burragorang, from its intelligent 'abit of manufacturin' its own lan'marks as it traverses the jungle, by spittin' on the grass an' stoppin' it from growin', thus renderin' return easy an' loss-o'-bearin's out o' the question. Though many attempts 'ave been made to subdue, an' so tame, the little creature, the feat has been accomplished only thrice within 'istory; once by Timandra Ventidius, the Macedonian Amazon as led her countrymen in the insurrection against Turkey, armed with nothin' but an ordinary 'at-pin (tho' carryin' a quartern o' chloroform in her jeans, in case she should fall into the 'ands o' the Turks); secondly, by the celebrated Austrian savant, Yagerwohl, patentee o' the world-famed sensitised toilet-ware for hospitals, which, ev'ry time a patient washes his 'ands causes a bell to ring in the matron's room; and, thirdly, by myself, who 'ad it from a well-known 'Arley Street medical man, what went off his dot after runnin'-up in a local billiard 'andicap, an' who is at present immured in a private 'ome for the potty, practisin' nursery-cannons on the kitchen dresser with a tomato, a Spanish onion, an' a 'ard-boiled egg. But mere assertion is 'ardly the same thing as proof; what each one of you a-standin' round me requires is ocular demonstration. With yer kind permission I shall therefore proceed at once to——"

"Pass away, now, pass away!" cried P.C.s 797 and 798 in chorus, and the persecuted wizard of the pillbox, bearing his adversity with as philosophical a fortitude as he could summon, sighed heavily and sneaked off. But anon, anon.

By all who do not permit the state of the markets to interfere with social duty, Cowes Regatta is unanimously recognised as the only possible sequel to Goodwood; but the distinguished tenants of many of the tiny villas and cottages, half buried in the trees that cluster on the heights above the town, were witnesses of the diverting sequel to a much earlier festivity yesterday morning. But perhaps it would be better for me to present you with the events constituting the latest edition of The Earl and the Girl—to say nothing of the Countess—in their chronological order. Let us sit upon the ground, as Richard II. says.

You have heard of Lord Catterick, haven't you? A none too affluent but sound old sexagenarian sportsman, dear Kid, with a heart as big as a hyacinth farm in Zeeland, but matrimonially shackled to an ogress of fifty, too ill-tempered, domineering, and utterly unreasonable to exist save in a Trollopian novel. Colour is lent to the supposition that he married her to win an after-dinner bet by his seemingly incurable mania for making love to every mortal thing in petticoats that crosses his path; though that may be no more than carelessness, since Virtue itself is only a continual struggle against the promptings of Nature, as I daresay you have found it. Moreover, he had been much impressed, ten or twelve years ago, by a certain passage in an erotic novel which said that the only thing to properly wake up a man suffering from acute melancholia, was a rapid love-affair with a flamingly red-haired woman, to damage whose reputation it would be necessary to hug her in broad daylight in front of the Mansion House—a none too accurate reference to Miss Jessica Dux, who is a pronounced blonde. Though only a cloak model, Miss Dux came, I understand, of a good, but impoverished family who for years accepted money reluctantly from relations, and, when these dried up, went fut. Then the seven noble girls drew lots to determine which one of them should sacrifice herself to save pater from going out to work, and—Jessica pulled out the black bean.

But for the incessant tight-lacing in the showrooms, the wearying attentions of the manager, and the grotesque air of immeasurable superiority assumed by the customers before whom she had to strut, to turn, to pose at command, clad in creations of golden spider's-web, Jessica would cheerfully have dropped everything else to have stayed on at Madame Junon's, for though she didn't turn a very deep furrow in the pay roll, the work was very gratifying and her hips were much admired. Then, all on a morning early, Lord Catterick in new-milk innocence dropped in to see a frock "tried on" his liege-madam. His eyes encountered Jessica's; he pencilled a few warm words on a (must have been asbestos) visiting card, and that night Miss Dux made her first acquaintance with the half-guinea dinner at the Berkeley.

It was about four months later, or a week ago, that Lady Catterick opened a letter addressed to her husband which had come by the evening post. Seldom or never before had she descended to this particular meanness, but the indented die on the back of the envelope—"Impératrice et Cie, Clifford Street, W."—proved an irresistible lure, and she broke the seal before she fully realised what she was doing. And it was a half-dead woman she was, dear Pat, as her little grey eyes ran down the many items in a bill full fourteen inches long, with a total of £368, 18s. 4d., and a final tag to the effect that Impératrice et Cie would be glad to receive a cheque from his lordship at his early convenience!

Smothered gasps and little muffled screams escaped her as she read such lines as "Chestnut Sunday, May 17th: Tagg's Island toilette of biscuit Donegal linen trimmed broderie Anglaise with Valenciennes insertions, £31, 10s.," and "May 22nd: Lemon-tinted chiffon Opera gown with corsage of pink fuchsias a la Philemon et Baucis, £47, 5s." Then came on "June 3rd: Ascot toilette of rose-silk voile over white louisine with Alençon flounces, £52, 10s.," and on the 6th: "Southend-on-Sea boudoir gown in crépe-de-chine, lined Japanese silk, £15, 15s.," followed by "Third-class railway fare of special-delivery porter (Saturday evening), 4s. 4d." Other entries, scarcely less disturbing, included a "Creation in white mousseline velours encrusted with black pailletté (Lingfield Park), £63, 0s.," a "Golden straw plait chapeau with white feathers en suite, £7, 7s. 0d.," and, somewhat lower down, an "Evening frock of ultramarine chiffon embroidered silver sequins (Ponymoore's Ball), with bunches of shaded pink fruit on the décolletage, £21, 0s. 0d.," the lot amounting, as I said before, to the quite respectable sum of £368, 18s. 4d.! And all this, my dear, to a woman whose very feminine idea of limiting male extravagance consisted in continually demonstrating how frocks could be bought for less money than suits of clothes!

Between 7 P.M. and half-past midnight, Lady Catterick fairly fed on that bill, like the "elderly naval man," who "ate that cook in a week, or less," and the poison had time to soak in. So that when, somewhere in the neighbourhood of 12.50 A.M., Catterick's uncertain footsteps sounded on the stairs, the Countess arose half-mast high in her bed and cleared her throat to get rid of some honest prose—for, though an unfaithful husband may dabble heavily in poetry, his deceived wife will in nine cases out of ten rely (while speech lasts, at any rate) wholly upon such plain sentences as drop from the tongue without apparent effort. Addressing him as "you Tarquin of Tagg's Island!" and "you gin-and-cockling Lothario!" by turns—the latter being an undoubted allusion to the Southend item—her ladyship crowded enough novel and up-to-date abuse into the next twenty minutes to have warranted the assumption that her life had been spent among soles and flounders rather than Courts and coronets; yet Catterick yawned through it all in absolute indifference. In reality, his oblivion was due to alcohol and, with the highly-rectified cunning which accords with alcoholisation and protects its votaries, he made no attempt to cut into trouble of any sort, though here and there in the indictment he caught a fugitive word which seemed to call for thought. When the Countess's vituperation had run its course, therefore, he stumbled across the chamber—or lurched across the room, if you prefer it—and, laying the hand of remonstrance on his wife's frilled shoulder, observed:

"Goo' ni', Rox'lana, goo' ni'. I'll say wha've got t' say in morn'ng: much too tire' t' ni'. But this mush I will r'mark: you're a swee' woman, you're a p'ffic lady, also a d'vout lover of Art, 'n'earnest stood'nt of Lit'rachoor, an' a class'cal 'thority on Hist'ry, but as a wom'n of th' world—I say as a wom'n of th' world, Rox'lana—you're a varnish! Goo' ni'!"

The rapidity with which the sound of his snoring succeeded his exit, caused the worried woman even more uneasiness than the first sight of the modiste's bill had done. Surely no guilty man could fall asleep so readily? Racked by the anguished reflection that people who are supposed to marry largely for the sake of being happy may be presumed, if they subsequently remain silent, to have gained what they desired, Lady Catterick passed a sleepless night, and turned up at the breakfast table next morning looking positively hideous.

The Earl was, on the contrary, quite breezily cheerful. Adopting a tone of amused pity—a no-matter-what-you-do-it-runs-in-your-family air—he even demanded the offending milliner's bill, adding:

"I hate to seem to reproach you in any way, Roxalana, but upon my honour you were the human limit last night! And your phrases!—odds, blud o' the murdered missionaries in Zanzibar, your phrases! Where do you cull it all? From which of the Sunday penn'orths do you draw inspiration? Nevertheless, despite your eccentricities, I will remain your friend. Give me the obnoxious invoice—good—ere the lamps are lighted it shall be manifest to at least one practical joker that his sense of humour has got beyond proper control. Adios; I shall not be in to lunch."

As a "rare old plant" this successful bit of bluff was about a stone and a neck in front of "the ivy green," yet, once outdoors, Lord Catterick's demeanour became serious rather than jubilant. An appearance in the Divorce Court he feared less on account of any social paralysis which might supervene than of absolute financial death. No matter at what cost, therefore, Impératrice's bill would have to be met that day.

To look towards Israel for assistance was useless. Lord Catterick had a record in Jewry that the Shylocks themselves kept sweet only as an antidote to gluttony. He turned, therefore, to an old Harrow chum who was now an electioneering agent, with an invalid wife in the Engadine, an easy-going roysterer who was nearly always at the Club in order to get his affectionate wife's letters, and so avoid the fearful scene that would happen if one of those epistles fell into the hands of his typewriter. This good soul grew a trifle beetle-browed at first, but eventually filled out a pink slip for £370, on the strict understanding that it didn't extend over Saturday, and Catterick started for the bank with as much front as a fortification.

Probably the world seems not so bad after all to the man who, having devoted the best part of the day to solicitation and whisky sours, has at last achieved his object, but the thing that did seem hard to Catterick was having to part with that £368 odd without keeping back a little bit of pewter for himself. Much ruminating seemed only to increase the hardship until, arriving at the milliners, he conceived and bare the brilliant scheme of paying £250 off the bill and reserving £120 for a brief congress of illicit joy away from town—why not a quiet and unpretentious run over to the Island? So entirely admirable did the idea seem that, having dropped the ten ponies to Impératrice's, he found it hard to hold himself down while a hansom carried him to Miss Dux's preposterously bijou flat. That self-same evening Miss Dux commenced her packing, and on the following day the pair set out for Cowes.

It was by the first post on the day following that of the Earl and the girl's departure, that a second envelope, bearing the indented die of the odious couturieres in Clifford Street, turned up at the Catterick mansion, and all but decided the Countess to track down her husband and shoot him. The "all but" took the shape of her family solicitor who, being personally desirous of showing up in the vicinity of Castle Garden, persuaded his client that it would be better to tickle the law into turning one foot-loose than to pay the extreme penalty for a man with a heart two sizes smaller than a golf ball. For, no longer to keep you in suspense, dear, the second communication from Imperatrice's was far too significant to admit of doubt, and ran:

To bill delivered . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . £368 18 4 By Cash on account next day . . . . . . 250 0 0 ————— Balance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . £118 18 4

P.S.—The favour of your Lordship's cheque is politely but imperatively requested, since the person to whom the goods were supplied, by your Lordship's order and selection, has lately disappeared from her flat in Ridgmount Gardens, leaving nothing behind but an unsettled milk bill. I. ET CIE.

I can safely leave to your vivid imagination the "scene," enacted within the range of the windows of Nubia House, which terminated this little comedy yesterday, for, notwithstanding Lady Catterick's pronounced hostility towards the Island and all its inhabitants since the day when a rustic clod of a railway porter stuck his head into the carriage in which she was travelling from Ventnor with her three somewhat shelf-worn sisters and addressing the quartette, all as sombre as convent postulants and erect as Easter candles, asked gruffly, "All Cowes in 'ere?" she turned up full of vigour, accompanied by her solicitor and a couple of hunting crops!

The sailor-man who periodically goes ashore in the dinghy for letters, has just brought me a wire from dear Phyllis Waring—don't you remember how we all used to sing in muffled tones in the old dormitories at the pensionnat:

—to say she cannot come yotting for a day or two, as she has lost the latchkey of her flat, and is quite unable to lock up until she gets another. With customary good nature, she lent it late the other evening to be dropped down the back of a young lady whose nose was bleeding outside the Continental, and it has not since been seen. It certainly was not in the young lady's garments when she was undressed at Vine Street police-station a little later on; everybody present can swear to that. She is coming over, however, on Thursday; meanwhile my curiosity to learn all about her fall-out with Eustace Doorstep (or whatever was his surname) comes near consuming me. As I think I once told you, Eustace lately heard from some busybody all about Phyllis's earlier affaire with Geoffrey, and he raged and stormed for a time like that spoiled and undersmacked brat who did not reach the bazaar with his nurse until the gates were closed, and consequently "didn't get a drum." Eustace is one of those simple, countrified men who want to marry a girl who has loved no one else, but whom any amount of others have idolised from a respectful distance. What logic, or—want of it! Would the honeysuckle attract the bee if it yielded no pollen?

Yours, for the next twenty minutes on a deck-chair couchant, lazily absorbing Nature's sermon that lives in the blue vault above,

Vi.