EPISTLE X

ROYAL YORK HOTEL, BRIGHTON, March 11th.

Dearest Patricia,—

Your little note, forwarded to me from Eaton Square, came to hand yesterday, and just as soon as I have finished my breakfast I purpose forwarding to you in commemoration of the birthday of which you unselfishly remind me—(I would, by the way, cheerfully send you my breakfast also, but that a delicious kedgeree and a perfect champagne cup would be quite thrown away on a person whose changeless morning meal for years has consisted of a stiff brandy-and-soda and a splitting headache)—a beautiful little sapphire and diamond spittoon, which I fortunately saw in a shop window in King's Road yesterday. My memory is less definite concerning the total of your years, but considering you have had about four birthdays per annum since you became acquainted with the fact that I possess real money in my own right, you cannot be far short of sixty.

Careless of your highly probable comment that you are being continually chevvied through life by utterly uninteresting information, I may tell you, Patricia, that a week ago I had serious thoughts of going in for athletics—fencing, punting, rowing, and especially wrestling. Bridge is all very well in its way, motoring is not so insufferably rotten, and golf, played to sacred music, satisfies the elderly, but it is the feat of honest labour that gives a girl the elasticity, the baudelarian swing of the hips, and the sweet self-confidence that she so much desires. And I had been a long-distance worshipper of athletes time enough to look upon them all as Olympian gods until my muscular chum Dot Warnford—why is it that the girl who is physically capable of throttling a Lothario with a "full-nelson," or throwing a Tarquin over her head with a "flying-mare," invariably bears a name like "Dot"?—came down last week-end. As a matter of fact I wired for her, purely and simply that she, who can infuse poetry into white canvas gymnastic shoes, or swing Indian clubs till the other girls in her environment look like a set of cripples, might feast her eyes as I have daily done upon "Socrates Aristides' Phalanx of Undefeated Graeco-Roman Champions," now giving performances on the Pier. You have surely heard of Socrates Aristides at the London variety theatres: he is alternatively called The Aggravating Athenian? He is a truly splendid fellow, with just such a torso as they used to depict in the advertisements of Argosy braces—so widely dissimilar to that of the fashionable young man of to-day whose only exercise is betting on the tape. Aristides is, so to speak, the basic and fundamental principle of the whole show, the eight magnificent oysters adhering to the rock being the Intimidating Israelite, the Appalling Abyssinian, the Hideous Hessian, the Paralysing Parthian, the Dreadful Dalmatian, the Frightful Finn, the Horrible Hebrew, and the Terror of Tullamore. To the voice of Aristides I had listened enthralled, on many successive afternoons, as from the stage he offered to back any member of his troupe to inflict upon any comer more "falls" in one hour than the busiest woman in the Peerage would willingly acknowledge in a lifetime. Frequently some fatuous British amateur (for to our national shame no insular professors appear to be in the business at all) would essay a bout, whereat the noble Greek would call forward—say the Horrible Hebrew, who, having hitched up his worsted tubulars so that nothing might occur to mar the complete enjoyment of the programme, would proceed to put an armlock upon the stranger that would cause him to cry peccavi in quite a loud tone of voice.

One vigorous, conclusive blow from Dot Warnford has completely shattered the rose jar! To some stomachs the bare and brutal truth is food, and tonic, and medicament, but my own digestive apparatus positively refuses to form chyle from crude or even unadroitly disguised veracities. The finest wine-cellar in all Mayfair may be raised upon concrete, bricked to stand for ever, and majestic in its very mustiness; but to my mind it passes swiftly away—crumbles into atomless nothingness—from the instant that an impoverished tenant begins to keep coals in it; in other words, Dot had not only seen the "Phalanx of Undefeated Graeco-Roman Champions" several times previously, but knew intimately each one of them, or, as she put it, had "met them on the mat." And thus did she proceed to strip them:

The Intimidating Israelite, said she, won his title with a pack of cards while keeping a Leytonstone livery-stable tidy at eighteen bits per week; and the Appalling Abyssinian came to this country in charge of a performing elephant, but so outdid the pachyderm in sea-sickness all the way that he was thrown overboard in Gravesend Reach by the coarse, but facetious, sea-captain, who dearly loved a joke and thought the place not inappropriate. The Hideous Hessian came from Shepherd's Bush; it was a noted kind of grease-paint to be bought in Garrick Street, Covent Garden, that gave to him the pale sea-green complexion of a turtle's stomach. The Paralysing Parthian and the Dreadful Dalmatian never appeared together on the same platform—indeed the parts were played by one and the same man on alternate nights in knee-pads of a different colour. Far from his being either "dreadful" or "paralysing," his late chums, at the Westbourne Park Loco Sheds (G. W. Ry.), where he had been an esteemed foreman engine-wiper, spoke of him as being "as quiet a bloke as ever grafted in a boiler works." The Frightful Finn was better known at Barnet Fair as "Dirty Mickey" who used to do a catch-as-catch-can with a bear in a boxing booth until, becoming unduly intoxicated one night, he so ragged the bear that it shouted, "Aisy, Mick, ye something fool!" and eventually drew a knife from its hind leg on him; an unfortunate affair which consummately ruined the show. The Horrible Hebrew, who originally sold patent medicines from a waggonette at market street-corners, had had the bad luck, one busy night, to get an entire batch of bile beans contaminated by coming in contact with his naphtha lamps, thereby ruining for ever his chances of succeeding in the medical profession; while the Terror of Tullamore nobody, either here or in Ireland, seemed to know anything about. Dot had herself been so curious to learn something of the Terror's doubtless lurid past that she had addressed a personal note of interrogation to the Chief Constable of Leinster. This polite official, however, after making the most exhaustive and exhausting inquiries, replied that the only "terror" that had been known in Tullamore during the last half century, was a certain old lady who was in receipt of eight shillings a week from a firm of widows'-pension teamen in London, and who, immediately on receipt of postal order every Friday, expended the whole of the money in bottled porter, and then, after removing most of her clothing, proceeded to delight the populace by dancing in the streets, varying the performance occasionally by standing on her head. Why is it, I wonder, that elderly ladies invariably dance when under the influence of alcohol?

Thus passes my infatuation of yesterday, and with the departure of the athletic Dot, with her dumb-bells and developers and her efficacious substitute for heavy bedclothes, the very mention of which has often caused a sudden suffusion of blood to the temples of a modest listener of the adverse sex—"You don't catch me in bed," says she, "without a Sportsman between the blankets!"; only meaning, of course, that the journal of that name, being printed on particularly good paper, gives warmth without weight—I shall subside to my former feminality, contemptuous neither of mice nor men.

It always amuses me to recall your bygone but well-remembered remark, that life in Brighton consisted principally in changing clothes and inquiring for letters, for it never fails to set me wondering whether, at the time of your last visit to the Sussex shore, you were too young to be ardent—an overgrown, scraggy schoolgirl to be kept out of mischief by close surveillance—or old enough to be jaded—a mere gawky and uninteresting cipher in that desert of humanity, the big hotel. In all probability, however, you would have sound economical motives for visiting Brighton during June or July, when the leaders of the aristocracy in the King's Road are the second bride of the great cereal breakfast-food, or the mamma and daughters of the sixpenny summer-drink crystals, "pure, wholesome, and possessing the pleasant aroma and refreshing acidity of the fresh-cut lemon?" It makes all the difference.

As I close these sentences the woman whose ripe beauty and rich millinery have been the talk of Brighton for a month past, is weeping herself hideous across two lawn pillows and behind drawn blinds in the costliest mansion in Hove, while the youth who was harpooned three weeks ago, and who resigned himself to her absolute despotism until yesterday, is on his way to Ghargaroo in the Unfriendly Islands. The conquest of young Mr Bruton Berkeley by Mrs Lottsmore Barres, the junobusted relict of the late Colonel B. Gopher Barres, who founded the famous American trust for manufacturing baking-powder from the eggs of the sea-urchin and who met his death through getting his feet wet while playing the hose on his stocks, had startled even Brighton (for whose benefit matrimony is locally supposed to have been exclusively invented) by its suddenness. For Mr Berkeley had seemed (and probably was) quite a shy and blameless youth, satisfying neither the eye nor the judgment, and remarkable only for the uniform vapidity of his expressions. Meeting Mrs Barres, whose evening lace stockings and patent-leather Richelieu shoes are a byword down here, at a dance-supper at the Dome, however, the boy formed the instant opinion that she fairly out-classed all other representatives of her sex, and on telling her as much, was invited to call upon her on the following afternoon. It was whilst paying this pleasant call that he got what was coming to him.

It was indeed within five minutes of his arrival, while his charming hostess, dressed to within an inch of her life, had him alone in the Louis-the-Something drawing-room, telling him of her unhappy married life with the late Colonel, and just how the Supreme Court gave her a decree on her substantiating her complaint that the respondent refused to divide his popcorn fairly that, without any warning, her nose began to bleed quite freely. Ever resourceful and ready for emergencies, Mr Berkeley rushed to the door, turned and took the key, and promptly rammed it down Mrs Lottsmore Barres's well-covered back, doubtless noticing as he did so that she would act wisely in future in renouncing all such nourishing foodstuffs as sweet potatoes, butter, cream, sugar, new bread, and chocolates. At that moment steps were heard in the corridor outside; some one tried the door, and finding it locked, began to knock. Upon realising the awfulness of the position, and the further fact that she could not return the key without disrobing in the presence of an acquaintance of only one day's standing, Mrs Lottsmore Barres promptly fainted, and—well, in true Lovelacian acknowledgment of the thoughtless way in which he had compromised the lady, Mr Bruton Berkeley empowered the sixteen male and female servants who at this juncture burst in the door to announce his immediate and formal engagement to their mistress. In place of the prosaic handshake with which his arrival had been greeted, Mr Berkeley departed with a warm and affectionate kiss upon his lips and a large panel photograph by Sarony, measuring 17x36, without the massive silver frame, beneath his arm. It may have been not recently taken, but it showed the upper two-thirds of Mrs Lottsmore Barres in half-tone profile, laughing artlessly over her right shoulder at an imaginary husband who was being taken to prison for her dressmaker's bill, and was calling back to enjoin her not to forget during the coming sixty days that she was still a married woman. In return, Mr Berkeley sent Mrs Barres a hurried tinograph of himself taken on the beach, not as a permanent record but as a sort of carry-over until the photographers in East Street could finish for him a set of cabinets; which done, he set up the magnificent picture of his fiancée on a gilt and plush easel in his hotel bedroom.

Alas! why does not some unseen power obliterate us all, just as we have reached and sat for awhile on the topmost pinnacle of earthly happiness? What heartaches might be spared were we in the midst of all our glory to be eternally debarred from drifting back into the muddy pool of humdrum conventionality! That night Mr Berkeley lay gazing upon the limned presentment of his love by the light of the expiring fire, precisely as did Wordsworth—or perhaps I should have said Shelley—when he wrote, his languid eyes still fixed upon her portrait:

Eight hours later, during the comparatively disagreeable moments of returning consciousness which preface the superlatively disgusting necessity for getting out of bed, Mr Berkeley noticed that his window was wide open, that the lace curtains were floating and flapping like pennants in the morning breeze. He next observed that towering above the quite ordinary disorder of a varnished pump on the washstand, a shower of silver coins on the hearthrug, and a dress-coat in the fender, there existed a more definite and significant disarrangement of his chamber's ameublement. Diamond pins and ruby rings and pearl shirt-studs bestrewed the floor: money and jewellery were scattered on all sides. Here lay a bureau drawer, all ransacked and upturned; there a jewel-case, wrenched and rummaged, but not robbed; the lock of yonder wardrobe had been raped, the sartorial contents of the wardrobe searched and flung about, but neither damaged nor depleted; nothing did the scene suggest so vividly as the tousled track over which an irascible woman had hunted in vain for a fugitive but favourite hat-pin.

But stay—

From the golden easel the panel portrait of Hortensia Lottsmore Barres had alone been stolen! The survey of a single instant served to show that there now adhered to the gilt ledge upon which the cherished likeness had so lately stood nothing but a scrawled note, written apparently with much haste, and the charcoal end of a burned match. Jumping out of bed and clutching the precious document, Mr Bruton Berkeley read:

"Slumbering Unknown,—

"This is a let-off for you, and no sanguinary error! Much, however, as I need fresh financial underpinning, I cannot 'ease' you with her eyes watching me. With one exception, you will find your props as safe, if not as undisturbed, as if they had been spiked down: I have half-inched nothing but the portrait of—MY MOTHER! I had been told she was in Heaven: I lament the lie, but hope, as the next best, that she's still in Society—not that I go out much; in the daytime, anyway. If I now ask you not to marry her, it is less on account of caring whether you are lynched for bigamy, than that you don't somehow connect with a dream I had of my next stepfather.

"Yours for a true bill, "PYTHAG THE PORCH-CLIMBER."

Inasmuch as the burglar had left untouched quite five hundred pounds worth of property, not including the two ham sandwiches which he had tied beneath his boot soles to deaden the sound of his footsteps, and which were fully identified by the barmaids from the railway station later in the day, the genuineness of his letter was beyond reasonable questioning; yet Mr Berkeley timidly but successfully shunned Mrs Lottsmore Barres until the evening. Then, with the rare daring that is born of drink, he burst into her presence and inquired with all the confidence possessed by one who feels that things are coming his way, what she thought of the old Greek philosophers in general, and of Plato and Pythagoras in particular? Suspecting nothing, Mrs Barres replied that she had always regarded Plato as a bit of a hold-over, but as for dear old J. H. Pythag—how fateful was the abbreviation!—"why, he should have been nothing less than a Vanderbilt, 'specially for his brainy distinctions 'tween the soul an' the body!"

That was enough! Like a true squire of dames, Mr Bruton Berkeley held his peace at the time, but pulled his freight out of Brighton with the coming of night. He is now upon the high seas, and his friends here are sanguine that he will fare well. There is little risk, after all, in consigning an easy-going, good-natured lad of mettle, totally devoid of either solidity or ambition, to a horde of friendly cannibals; whereas an older person of high morals and credentials going out to such a place as Buenos Ayres to take up an official position, would certainly be preceded by his reputation for strict integrity and incorruptibility, and on that ground alone would be instantly murdered on arrival. As for Mrs Lottsmore Barres, her wound will quickly heal. Like the racing peer who could never set eyes on the late Mr Weatherby without feeling an irresistible desire to scratch something, the mere sight of an eligible bachelor steels her for conquest. She will array her form in new frocks and her soul in new sentiments and, with a yellow dog for a mascotte, re-enter the fray. I do not know that I myself may not risk paying her a visit of condolence this afternoon: man-hunting is not contagious, is it?

Almost the only drawback to being out of town at this season is that one rather fails to grasp some of the allusions to "What the Little Birds are Saying" in the only possible ladies' newspaper; so, dear, though well aware that you cannot take up a pen without losing a lie, may I ask you to furnish me with the diagrams to the following:—

OVERHEARD BY THE LITTLE BIRD

In Chesterfield Gardens—"That Lady Alberta would certainly do well to swear off for a season and give it a much-needed rest."

At the same—"That her coronet only kept on her head by the timely aid of her left ear at the christening of the new torpedo-destroyer last Thursday."

At the same—"And that when it came to naming the vessel Polyhymnia, she simply couldn't stick it."

On The Lees—"That the gallant and much-to-be-pitied Major acted foolishly in going for the Rajah as he did."

At the same—"That all Folkstone has known about it for weeks, but never expected anything half so rich as last Saturday's free, al-fresco entertainment."

At the same—"That the genial old soldier's sporting instincts came out strongly even in his wrath when he kicked the whitey-brown, half-clad co-respondent in embryo three times round the new golf links, of which he is such an enthusiastic hon. sec."

At the same—"That it never would have happened if the timepiece in the boudoir had not been forty minutes slow—despite the fact that when Cupid gets both arms full he is apt to forget to keep an eye on the clock."

In Great Maryborough Street—"That His Lordship's friends would certainly have succeeded in finding the required bail: but that it was Her Ladyship who prevented them."

At Holloway—"That it was additionally unfeeling of Her Ladyship to restrain His Lordship's friends from providing him with suitable food, but that he contrived to support existence till the morning on some Nubian blacking and a sickly pot of egg-plants which had been abandoned by a former occupant."

On Deeside—"That it is quite true, as the Honourable Mrs Tufflold-Knutt informed the Era interviewer after her recent private theatricals, that she doesn't really know how old she is."

At the same—"That if we were anything approaching the same age we wouldn't want to know, either."

At the Hotel Sessil—"That Mr Pierpoint Morgan, who is carrying everything but his coattails before him, is about to subsidise the Jaffa-Jerusalem Railway (which connects also with Joppa by sacred-bull team) so that the 10.45 A.M. daily from Tyre (the famous "Flying Levite") will now be electrified and re-upholstered; and ice-water, boxes of figs, and cheap editions of 'The Strenuous Life' and 'Mr Dooley' will be obtainable on all cars."

In Jermyn Street—"That the mystery surrounding the disappearance of the Honourable Hughie's socks, whilst their owner was being massaged on Tuesday, has not been cleared up; meanwhile the attendant declares on oath that Hugh brought none with him."

At the same (in the Cooling Room)—"That Hugh prized them more particularly from the fact that he bought them years ago in a tavern bar in Old Broad Street of a now leading light of the Kaffir market."

At the Bazaar in Aid of the Asylum for Disabled Thought Readers—"That Lady Ena considers the husband who goes to Lhassa and remains there a greater benefactor than the one who returns home unexpectedly."

At the same—"That the introduction of the flurried individual as 'the famous telepathic faith-healer from Athens' was an exceedingly clever bit of invention, all in sixty seconds, although the 'faith-healer' more than once came perilously near wrecking everything by causing the Athenian to chatter alternately the pidgin of a Bowlamine Chinaman and brogue of a music-hall Irishman."

At the same—"That blind faith, insatiable hope, and boundless charity are unquestionably the principal ingredients in Lord Samuel's composition."

Grieved indeed am I to hear that a bad oyster, carelessly swallowed while laughing at Lord Archbold's diverting story of the old donkey-woman at Ramsgate, who neglected Sterne's admonition to keep one's eye on one's ass has kept you to your room of late, but if your winning enough to take you to Lincoln depends on my telling you of a "fetid, mephitic outsider which will be certain to fiddle into the first three in the Handicap," you will stay away from bleak Carholme this spring; but from your remark that you are experiencing a "stern touch of stuckology," I judge that the last litter of blue Persians was a flam. Though this is perhaps as well, since prosperity swallows up one's energy and obscures one's virtues, I regret that I cannot at the moment indicate a prize strain of felines that will reproduce its species for the sale-bench once a fortnight, while their owner is mastering the primary principles of Bridge. Should I hear of one at the Dome, during "Israel in Egypt" to-night, however, I will put a blue tag on it and reserve it for you.

What odd things servants do say at times! Do you know, Patricia, as Marshall was dressing my hair this morning, she suddenly exclaimed, "Aren't you surprised to learn, my lady, as how the Earl o' Mintstalk was once a domestic servant?" And when I asked her what on earth she meant, she said "Anyway he admitted before Sir Francis Joon yesterday, that for years before they was married her leddyship was his mistress!"

But there goes the dinner gong and, as an admirable chef is easily slighted and I am just about as ravenous as a hyæna with tapeworm, adios, little one, adios!

Your affectionate friend, VIOLA.