EPISTLE V

EATON SQUARE, Tuesday, October 3rd.

My Dear Patricia,—

Let me implore you at the outset to repress the hilarity which any reasonable person must naturally feel at the sight of a quite unexpected letter in my familiar handwriting, for I am in no joking mood to-day. In short, there have been ructions here; I have read them the Riot Act with the stringbark on it and locked myself in my own apartments; for, even if I had entertained no thought of melting to-morrow before the warm rays of a tear-blotted cheque for the price of a new dinner frock, there is something so incomparably more dignified about an exit with dilated nostrils and a defiant snort than in a meek slink-off in the soul-grilling fit of remorse which is bound to follow a return to baneful Belgravia from so sweet a living toy as Dinard.

And what, pray, had I to do with the fact that reliable domestic servants were not to be got; what (advancing another pace) that, even when captured occasionally, they rapidly became unreliable in a household where, when Rio Tinto's stood at 62, an operatic artiste arose from the floral centre-piece of a banquet served with Roman splendour and sang the menu, course by course; while, two days later, when Rio's dropped to one-and-eight a quire, "the Poor's Rates put in" and pinched the very dining table? No Countess in the Peerage who habitually had less than seventy men staying in the house at the same time could possibly get servants to accept such elementary principles of give and take! But it was when Féo rorted me upon my frequent absences from her house—"her house," my griefs!—that the proud chieftain's daughter moulted an eagle's feather.

"And a model house it is, madam!" I cried, with the withering bitterness of the impoverished nobleman whose I.O.U. for a-pint-and-two-slices had been scorned by the korfy-stall keeper, "a mighty regular and methodical house! Its many virtues, too humorous to mention, lie in the broken decanter at the foot of your dressing-table, the gold kid Court slipper behind the dining-room clock, the bottle of Odol on the drawing-room hearthrug; or they are to seek among the tennis balls in the music case, in the nest of mice beneath the broken wires of the piano, or in the sanitary dustbin wherein profane hands deposited my treasured button from Jan Kubelik's dress waistcoat! Od's, hog's puddings and hung beef! if the house round the corner in Lower Belgrave Street of the motherly old lady in the black satin skirt and the red velvet bonnet, who got three months last Saturday, was a more 'disorderly' house than this is, then my reason's twisted and my name's M'Gizzick!"

Here, locked in my vestal chamber which is sufficiently contiguous to the kitchen to afford that peculiar atmosphere of internecine culinary warfare familiar to all inhabitants of Flatland, will I dip into the Diary which I found upon the boat between St Malo and Southampton, and which, very curiously, refers to the three giddy gushers of the obscure hotel at deevie Dinard. It is obviously in the handwriting of a married man of the middle station, whom a vagrant generosity would impel to look into shop windows at articles ticketed "Suitable present for a barmaid" and whom a deeper-rooted penuriousness would incite to haggle with his wife at parting as to his share of the expense of framing and glazing the judicial separation order which she has obtained against him; and, roughly pencilled in a scribbling book, it runs—

Monday, Sept. 1st.—-It is now nine days since any caller other than a dun or a peddler of washleathers has entered my office, the last prospective client of good intent having been Mr Asphalte, the famous turf-accountant from the lamp-post at the corner of Bucklersbury. His suggestion that I should receive telegrams on his behalf, also ninepence in the £ out of the Sender's losings, I foolishly declined to entertain, over-estimating, probably, the value of the commission which I had just received from Miss Béguinette Strathcona, of Broad Court Mansions, to find her a sober and presentable "mother" for Thursday afternoon next, when she has to interview the family solicitors of the Earl of Guernsey, who is settling five thousand a year upon her on condition that she never misses the last bus, or something. The young Earl would probably have married the bird could he have broken her of her artless habit of joining in the choruses whenever he took her to a music hall; though the interesting fact remains that what will lose a deserving girl a nobleman's partnership will not necessarily cost her his patronage. But where the brimstone is my personal discomfort to end? If I attempt to go across to the "Green Man" I shall get a judgment-summons on the way, and if I don't go across to the "Green Man" I shall die of thirst; meanwhile—Somebody in the outer office! Will you step in, please? Well, well, well! May I be—er, yours and so forth; my old chums Billie Bunn and Dickie Scales! This is the sort of meeting that makes work for barmen; say, boys, were there any signs of a seedy old devil with a black leather bag around the doorway as you came in? No? Then all is quiet in the Shipka Pass. Come across the road!

Tuesday, Sept. 2nd.—My oath! there were no bottle-green winged insects on last night as a model of a quiet, intellectual little evening, but—I really do wish that I could rest my head for awhile on something extremely soft and yet intensely cold. Rather took their hind wheels off, I think, by the way I mixed the Moselle cup! Absolutely astonished myself; though it only shows you what you could do if you could command the materials. Am rather taken with the Run-across-to-the-Republic—(Vive l'drapeau rouge!)—notion, too, and don't see why I shouldn't go as their joint guest, seeing that they have won an independency at old Ebor; and more especially since I have volunteered to stake them to three little Broad Court chorus chicks, neighbours of Béguinette's, that I hear have gone to Dinard. Heigho! Had some men but one-fifth of what any successful stockbroker would consider an absurdly insufficient income, what pure jouisseur's would some men be; a bit pale in the morn, perhaps, but growing ripe as luncheon time arrived, and rubicund at eve with the rubicundity that comes only of repeated "splits." Funny thing I should dream only last night that I was counting money!

Wednesday, Sept. 3rd.—The Channel a positive dream—even though I have to close one eye to make out the shipping with any distinctness. We should hear considerably less about "the sinful artificiality of modern life," if some of the pessimists had, like myself, an occasional opportunity to make up for lost time. Man can't have a "past" if he doesn't possess the cash to overtake it. My vivid descriptions of the three birds are truly amazing—seeing that I barely remember one of them! There's Effie, who used to correspond regularly with a pal of mine until the G.P.O. people chipped in and forbade it on the ground that her letters scorched holes in the mail-bags. There's Connie, who fairly electrified the young bloods when she came on with a copper can in the second act of Sweet Nancy, and asked "Hot water, sir?" quite inimitably, and whom Sir Charles Muckross would have married in spite of his family, but for the persistency with which Effie's fool of a grey parrot kept on shouting one evening, "No, Georgie, not to-night!" Finally there's the dark one whose name I can't remember, but she's particularly hunky-perdoodlum, has Spanish blood in her veins—oh, I rubbed it into them until their only trouble was that they couldn't bribe the captain of the boat to send the girls a Marconi to get busy with their curling-tongs and turn up at the ferry to meet us.

Thursday, Sept. 4th.—Dinard. Déjeuner'd on arrival at the Hotel Steak and Vedge—no, no, Chateaubriand—where Billie and Dickie sate and sipped the liqueurs which add so much to autumn's rich content, whilst I went in search of the birds. Discovered them at a small hotel by the Casino, and introduced myself—no blistering task in a place where you meet a little sideline in the surf at noon, and call on it at its hotel not more than twenty minutes later; but they're no sparkling revelations. So far do they fall short of my word-pictures painted aboard the boat, that I am fain to invent, on my way back to the Steak and Vedge, dramatic endings for the fabled Erne, for Connie from dreamland, for the dark 'un. She that needed the asbestos notepaper, I announce, purchased a 200 franc robe-de-nuit, renovated her visiting cards with benzine, and returned to England yesterday, her solicitor having called her attention to the fact that the last of her debts was barred by the statute of limitations on the 30th ult.; Connie had been sandbagged in error by a near-sighted French gentleman, who had since taken advantage of the low rates between Havre and New York to start for America on the day fixed for his marriage with his landlord's daughter; the dark 'un with the tar in her system had just entered a convent after secretly wedding an assistant-something in the Niger Protectorate, who had imprudently disembarked among a wrong tribe, and been eaten on his honeymoon. The gorged but affable indifference with which these details are received by Billie and Dickie is heightened rather than dispelled when I escort them to call on the blondines, and I begin to regret that in a febrile, ebullient moment I suggested that their ancient and moustached landlady—obviously also the Perpetual Lady President of the Norman Branch of the Anti-Savon and Water Society—might hold herself in readiness for a little dinner for six at sunset. The more so since Heine's dictum that rich men are so unhappy that they need benevolent institutions to mitigate their misery, breeds no false joy in the breast of the Bucklers-buryite in Dinard with only one-and-eight and a feeding appointment with a tall, blonde kid, with whom he has already exchanged a labial kiss, though assured by her that if her "people" ever suspected that she done such they would feel as sore as proselytes to Judaism about it.

The Same, 9 P.M.—Two hours have passed since we should have called and fed the canaries; meantime Billie Bunn has been outed by a bouillabaise that looked like Westgate at low water, and smelt stronger than a pearl-fishing lugger, and Dickie Scales has not been sober since 3.15. Some philosophy there is which holds that except to give an order, the greatest sin is to execute it; I do devoutly trust that Mère Jeanniot, the bearded hostesse, is a practical disciple of this creed; but what of my little prize pansy, Irene Treadwater? My brain works luminously enough till the wronged Irene and the misery of my one-and-eight enter it. How mutable a thing is man! He starteth, bent on opening a bale of Roman orgies on the noble lines laid down by Petronius Arbiter; he windeth up on streaky bacon, fried on a shovel in a cabmen's shelter! I should have known by now, I must tell Irene, with simulated chafing, that Cupid could not operate in a crowd; I must make it my personal business to see that she gets the leading part in one of the best of the coming provincial pantomimes: I must send her a real Norfolk turkey, also a motor car, for Christmas. Heartily sick of the whole business, yet anxious to get out of it as politely as possible, I leave my feeble friends and start for the abode of offended beauty.

Much Later.—I am back from their hotel. The birds had risen, in mastodonic wrath, and gone, but—Mère Jeanniot was there. My monstrous "might-have-waited" bluff—femininity in its most fatuous phase—she fathomed at a glance, and conspuez'd (and worse'd) me as heartily as though I had been the town liar. Much that she said outdistanced my Ollendorf, but her text, I gathered from a phrase here and there, was that axiomatic dictum of the incensed fair, "I like a man to be a man"; whereupon, angered but always a gentleman, I shouted, with great restraint, "Shut up, sale bête! I am an Englishman, and Englishmen perform their promises!" "Poo-poo! poo-poo!" snarled the hag, with considerable sarcasm; "if so that be, where then are your friends, the other Englishmen?" Countered, I wavered for an instant, then, reckless in my desperation, I fired the temporal and banal lie, "Not a bit of it: they were no Englishmen!" Momentarily her parchment brows were knit, her bristling eyebrows raised. "Not Engleeshmen?" cried she, "pray what then were they?" "AMERICANS!" I cried, with happy inspiration, and for a few minutes the ogress's revengeful dial relaxed, and my only fear was that she would embrace me. But her puzzled look gave way at length: the shadows gathered again, and she cried, "A bas, monteur! Non, non, deceive am I not thus to be! For did not l'homme Américain visite Mademoiselle Iréne but yesterday, and was not he as is your chapeau, black—très, black? Decidement, jeune homme, vous voulez——." But I fled; moreover, I leave this mill to-morrow, grist or no grist. Dickie Scales is pulling round, and sends to say——

But here the entry ends abruptly.

Pessimists of the smart set are shaking their heads with ill-concealed mirth over Lady Hilda Chinewood's diminishing prospects of ever getting a decree nisi, a speculation into which she has already heroically socked about three thousand pounds of her winnings since Goodwood, with little prospect, so far, of securing any return. For Lord Percy continues to lead a blameless life in the Bloomsbury garret to which Hilda's dole of thirty shillings a week confines him, despite the promise, wrung from him with many tears and threats, to be guilty of the technical "misconduct" which the law insists upon. With no assets save two pairs of patent-leather boots ready to be sent to be soled and heeled, he sits and smokes cigarettes all day, carelessly, unconsciously forcing upon poor Hilda the conviction that worldly happiness is a wild singing-bird which may not be caught and tamed. He certainly refrains, with the gentlemanly consideration of our common forefather, Adam, from attacking the previous character of the lady, but he has already jotted down in lead-pencil on the back of the citation the seven separate grounds of justification which he intends to plead in defence of his having married her. And they are:—

1. The weather at the time was beastly cold and uncongenial.

2. The roads were confoundedly sloppy.

3. Respondent could not afford two guineas a day for a cab; and

4. Respondent's walking boots admitted water in large quantities.

5. Respondent's chest was weak, and his doctor had ordered him "generous living."

6. Respondent was unable to obtain same, he having signally failed to get his paper done, even with the endorsements of "A. de Rothschild," "W. W. Astor," and "A. Carnegie," though he has since been informed that poor dear old Sam recognised the shade of ink in use at the "Blue Posts."

7. Process-servers had at the instance of (1) Messrs Bellamy Brothers; (2) Messrs Warren and Craik; (3) Messrs Justerini and Brooks, already penetrated to respondent's bedroom.

Lady Hilda, whose ineradicable habit of making love to every man she meets has turned out such particularly sour pickles on her, fatuously imagined that a woman who could hold her own with the bookmakers upon a racecourse would be more than a match for a lazy, feminine, Carlylean boy who falls asleep directly after dinner whenever he has been out in the fresh air during the afternoon, and she took him against everyone's advice. At Lincoln they were closer than onions on a string; but between the Grand National and the Guineas', her infatuation waned to comparative boredom, and, by Epsom, boredom had given way to positive loathing. At Ascot he proved a hopelessly out-of-date dervish; and she brought him to the London Cup at Alexandra Park only because she had lately discovered a particularly smart cabman, called "Mint-sauce Fred," on the Wilton Road rank, and the man seemed inclined to get too pally. But the climax came at Goodwood, where Hilda had looked forward to a very big week, not only because tips to servants are expected to be lavish, but by reason of the subsequent draining month's "rest," in which nerves and glands and organs and muscles have to be renewed, while one is not winning a single steever.

The mid-day sun had spurred back the morning haze peculiar to the Southdowns, as Hilda and her marital incubus drove up the hill to Goodwood, from where Lavant lay buried in the quiet bosom of the woods. To any woman whose cheval-glass had spoken as eloquently on the subject of white serge as Hilda's had done, it should have been a day, if not of triumph, still of heavenly peace; yet the rapturous song of the lark and the happy droning of the bees only served to accentuate the misery of her merciless matrimonial mistake and dangle it before her eyes. It was maddening only to think of what she must endure during the next four days with the highly-necessary bookmakers on the one hand and the utterly unprofitable mature male suckling on the other. When the carriage drew up at the wicket-gate, Hilda was at boiling point, and, turning to the right and leading the way into the plantation of elms and beeches, beneath the boughs of which full half a thousand powdered lackeys unpacked huge hampers of damask napery and shimmering glass and glistening silver, she cried aloud with withering scorn to the lord and master she despised:

"Now, dog, which tree will you sit under while I go and get you your living?"

Stung to the quick, whatever that may be, Percy, like Cambronne, hissed but a single word; the next instant strong but servile hands were hauling him out of the wreck of the Duke of Ravensbury's cold collation, and five score of astonished onlookers realised that if a hand only does take 5¾ in white suede gloves, it is astounding how hard and how straight it can hit. By what subterfuge he, being practically penniless, contrived to return to town is not known, but as he was last seen entering a small calico tent on which was legibly inscribed "ACCOMMODATION," it is reasonable to assume that he had recourse to these nomadic, but extremely convenient, financiers of the racecourse for the purpose of raising upon his gun-metal watch a small sum sufficient to pay his railway fare to London; meanwhile, as "language" is constructive "cruelty" in the eye of the law, Hilda will probably pursue Percy on the first day when there is no racing, and hit him again.

But, speaking of nomads, what an extraordinary vogue the Bond Street fortune-tellers are enjoying! Clairvoyantes is, perhaps, the more acceptable term, though no two of the visionists acknowledge the same denomination nor pursue the same mystic methods. Thus, Madame Hagar, of Grafton Street, poises a crystal ball upon a flower vase, while Madame la Moravie, of Bruton Street, toys only with the subject's finger-tips. Again, Madame Belisardas Brown, of Clifford Street, psychometrises over a lady's glove, whereas Madame Teresona Topping, of Cork Street, her sister—(and many believers in the "blood-thicker-than-water" aphorism readily allow Belisardas and Teresona to be thicker than both put together)—has been known to call loudly for, and even detain, a gentleman's trousers. It is, after all, the observant and intelligent crossing-sweeper at the corner who crystallises all the clairvoyancy that has come under his notice into, "'Ere, it's this way: Laidy arrives in a bro'um—Interval o' two minnits—Toff drives up in an 'ansom. 'Cleer-voyancy' yer calls it? Well, I'm—-tongue-tied!"

It was as late as half-past eight the other evening, when all the world was supposed to be at dinner, that Captain Throatlash, the gallant society playwright who, should his country suddenly require his presence, would be quite prepared to tread the icy Steppes of Russia in his dress pumps, ascended Madame Hagar's little dark staircase in Grafton Street, and awaited with some impatience the arrival of Lady Constance Edenhall. Each wished, from perfectly innocent and dissimilar motives, no doubt, to consult the oracle; the Captain, possibly, because he had an appalling access of dramatic work to get through in which the present state of affairs in the Far East constituted a perpetual menace to his personal peace; Lady Constance, perhaps, because she feared to order a new evening frock before ascertaining if it be true that, according to all the bibles, vedams, and alcorans of the Rue de la Paix, the waist-line is shortly to vanish entirely. But Lady Constance was shockingly late; indeed it was not until 8.49 that the noble Captain, hearing the stairs squeak, arose quickly from his chair, and pulling open the door beheld—Lord Huntley Edenhall!

"Hullo, Reggie, old sportsman!" cried his lordship, genuinely surprised, "why, what the blazes attracts a chap like you to such a peep-show as this?"

"Fact is, dear lad," replied Reginald Throatlash, "my little woman left her—er—umbrella either here or elsewhere this morning and I called in on the off-chance of hearing of it. Same time I'd have laid a million to one against meeting you here?"

"Yes—er—well," drawled Lord Huntley, wondering if the kid from Daly's could possibly have been such a silly little devil, after his most explicit instructions, as to go to the other Grafton Street in the wilds of Fitzroy Square; "it's a dam funny coincidence, don't ye know, but my little missis was here this morning, too, in order to—er—er, see if the—er, magic ball, could indicate the present whereabouts of her long lost—er, lucky pig—yes, yes, her lucky pig, and I just dropped in to inquire in what manner the—er, miraculous crystal had acquitted itself of the mandamus of confidence she had given it. But, of course, it's all tommy-rot, isn't it?"

"With all deference, I think not," replied Throatlash, with the impudent reassurance of one who has suddenly spotted the way out of the maze, "I may, indeed, tell you, quite soberly and seriously, that I not only believe in, but actually practice, these occult sciences, and I have already attained sufficient power in them to compel at will—mark me, Huntley, I say again, compel—the attendance of any living person within the salt boundaries of the British Isles. Let me give you a demonstration: name somebody?"

"G'wan! You don't mean it, surely?"

"Never was more in earnest in my life: come, name somebody?"

"Right oh, old sporty; take your pick—Hackenschmidt—Tolstoi—that little girl that keeps the humming-top stall at the Exhibition—the captain of the Pinafore—Marie Corelli—Sunny Jim——"

"Tut, tut!" ejaculated Throatlash, pettishly "I did not invite you to play the fool."

"Nor did I invite you to take me for one, Throatlash, please remember that!" retaliated Lord Edenhall, hotly.

"I have done nothing of the kind. I shall proceed, as I said, to demonstrate——"

"Nonsense, nonsense!" cut in Edenhall. "You are talking as though you were the birdcage-man at the music-halls. Is it intoxication or indigestion: drink or only a dressed-crab? Because——"

"It is neither, sir, neither!" shouted Throatlash, "I mean to make you admit——"

"Don't shout at me, sir," interposed Edenhall, imperiously. "Remember never to raise your voice to a gentleman unless your house is on fire."

"I ask your pardon," apologised Throatlash, with magnificent bitterness; then swallowing his choler with all the desperation of an emu taking down a football, he bowed like any shopwalker and humbly begged that, as a parting favour, his erstwhile friend would answer him one question—one only. Was the admirable Lady Constance at present at home at Grosvenor Gardens?

"Not this evening," laughed Edenhall, with amused contempt.

"H'm. Is it too much of me to ask where she may be?" continued Throatlash, mildly, yet not without confidence.

"It's twice as much as you had permission to ask," replied Lord Percy, wearily, "but I don't mind gratifying your vulgar curiosity: Lady Constance is presiding over a Watercress Mission, at Battersea."

"IS she?" screamed Reginald Throatlash, his bloodshot eyes flashing their resentment as, throwing up his arms and becoming a human ikon, he executed a rapid series of cabalistic calisthenics as though he were drawing from the ceiling itself the invisible fishing-nets of Wynken, Blynken, and Nod. Then in dramatic tones he cried, "Approach, Constance Isobel Bobitwell Edenhall!" and before the echo of his voice had time to die away, or Mother Hagar could withdraw her affrighted countenance from between the curtains which masked the inner chamber, a familiar footfall sounded on the creaking stairs and—in strode the Lady Constance Edenhall!

"Now, sir," bellowed Throatlash, rushing up to the beautiful woman who stood, mute, pale and with dilated eyes, and grasping her chin before her wholly unaffected stupor should turn to hysterics, "now, sir, what about your 'drink and dressed-crabs'; now, sir, what are the extreme odds that you offer about 'the birdcage-man at the music-halls,' eh?"

"Marvellous! Stupendous! I am whacked to the world!" exclaimed Lord Percy, extending his hand. "Old friend, I ask ten thousand pardons; if you have no better place to lunch at to-morrow, will you—-

"Softly, softly, do not wake her; we can talk of lunch some other time," said the magnanimous Throatlash. "Take her home quietly and hand her over to her maid, lest the shock affect her brain. Good-bye."

Ever of thee, VIOLA D.