Chapter V: Part 5

On Tuesday evening, Féo having promptly gone out to play Bridge, on being told by our housekeeper that the cellar needed re-coaling--and as it is only when she revokes that she wins, her winning is never in doubt--I put into practice the theory of that one of the saints who said that, if people only knew it, there were bushels of fun to be got out of being good, by "observing" Lent at the delightful Shrove Tuesday Ball at Covent Garden; and the only living being that knows how I returned at daybreak on Ash Wednesday is the obliging market porter who drove my car home, my chauffeur having been laid out during a misunderstanding with the coachman of the brougham immediately in his rear concerning the smell of his escaping petrol. Our chauffeur, I have heard Mr Contango say, entertains the idea that he can "go a bit with his fly-dusters," in which case the man from the brougham must have been a veritable specialist, for our white-mackintoshed servitor went out like an egg-shell caught in a whirlwind. Even when the police recovered all that was left of him, there was no place to lay it out, so many dancing couples from the country having turned up quite unexpectedly, that the limited accommodation of the Bijou Temperance Hotel was dreadfully over-taxed--indeed, the last Earl and Countess to arrive, yawning like craters, had, I am told, to put up with the boot cupboard on the lower landing.

This particular Ball was promoted, I imagine, in a purely devotional spirit, Messrs Rendle and Forsyth believing, with some accuracy, that men fast more willingly and spontaneously after an all-night tag; though it differs, I am also informed, from the dramatic annuals of other days in that the gentlemen who come chiefly to fight are never allowed to get in the way of the dancers. Save that, in the grand-circle, Lord Staffa of Iona (who is said to be so deeply interested in the dramatic career of Miss Elfie Delorme, of Daly's, and who was giving supper to a small party) dealt out a black eye to the Viscount Tynwald, one of his guests, for facetiously passing the Chateau Lafitte to a lady who had only asked for the vinegar; and that, in the corridor, two gentlemen from the Stock Exchange had a lightning mix-up on one remarking on being introduced to the other's lady, that formalities were a bit superfluous seeing that he had been fairly rancid on the bird himself some seven years ago; one might have been in almost any Belgravian drawing-room.

Oh yes! there was one other gentleman who drew a Jonah ticket. For the moment I forget his name, but it was in all the papers some few months ago, when he staggered humanity by marrying his mother's maid instead of strangling her; and on Tuesday night he suddenly recognised her, though dominoed and masked, by the exceptional colour of her silk hose when she fell down during the Lancers. Of course, she was under the escort of her husband's oldest and dearest college chum (just as, in lower circles and the popular ballad, it is always that fun-loving economist "the lodger"); and, in order to plaster the walls of their private box on the second tier with the brains of the guilty pair, the wretched youth borrowed a hatchet from a fireman and ascended the stairs. He hammered on the box door; but, even as it flew open, his courage failed him, and murmuring, "No, no, I still love her too much to kill her," would have retired, axe and all, but for the numerous cohort of disappointed dancers that had followed for the express purpose of seeing that he did not do so. No sooner therefore did the guilty woman, grasping the situation, ask the crowd what it meant by this intrusion, since the cavalier at her side was the kindest friend she knew, and a real good old thing while he lasted, than an athletic young stranger who had been handling iron bridges on the Upper Nile, stepped out and gave hubby one on the submaxillary gland and two on the bugle before he could exclaim, "Ooch!" and they took him away, I am told, on a hooded stretcher.

As to the dresses, dear, many of them were ravishing enough to have restored a madman to his senses! One of the most daring was, perhaps, "Appendicitis," worn by a shapely blonde girl attired in a mere ham-frill of aseptic nun's-veiling, caught up at the side by a scalpel and a bistoury, crossed; completeness being secured by a large grape-seed carried between the fair wearer's languourous red lips. She was awarded by acclamation a huge kettle, and was told to take it home and treasure it as it would be her last whisper in _that_ show. Many men turned round to look a second time at "Skip the Gutter," an ordinary champagne muslin walking-dress, the skirt of which was carried knee high to display cochineal silk socks and opera sandals. I wish I had been able to ascertain the name of the builder of this striking creation, but before I could get through the crowd, the fair wearer had disappeared--slipped out to see if the weather seemed likely to clear up, the policeman at the door said. A beautiful St John's Wood widow, who since her gallant young husband's death at the front, has gone every night to some function or other, being too nervous to sleep alone and having not a friend on earth except the man who happens to be with her, looked perfectly distracting in whipped cream crêpe de chine, with pink Banksia roses and raspberry underpinning--an exceedingly rococo combination.

Much more I might have had to tell you had I not been most effectually held up on the staircase by the Earl of Thirstington, who had temporarily renounced everything but whisky-and-seltzer, and who, not penetrating my disguise, would certainly have hugged me where I stood had I not addressed him sternly by his family title and threatened him with all sorts of dire penalties if he did not permit me instantly to pass. Steadied somewhat by the sound of his own name, he implored me to unmask, but finding me inflexible, he assured me that since mating unhappily in order to please his people, about two years ago, he had continually prayed that Death might overtake him, in which earnest petition his inapposite spouse had frequently joined. He had now happened to hear by the merest accident that divorces were practically free in a place called Oklahoma, and if I would only accompany him to some lonely island where we could live Crusoe fashion until he got his decree and Southern Pacific's went above 63 again, he would be a white man and make me his Countess! Only think of it, Patricia! And it was only in October last that we all went down to his private chapel at Drouth Park to the unveiling of the stained glass window which he erected to the memory of his wife who, in the previous August, died of grief at realising that he did not kiss her as ardently as formerly!

It was a very realistic bit of acting that I put in then, Kid! Giving him my left glove, and permitting him to kiss the tips of my fingers only, I told him he might inscribe his tablets with the name of "Elsie" and ring up 55793, Holborn, some time when he had a lighter load on. Fitly humbled by this admonition, he replied that in about ten hours he should ask me to join him at lunch at the Imperial, and if from any cause I could not or would not turn up, I should be performing a distinct service to his family by calling at Vine Street, and requesting the police to have the fountain basins in Trafalgar Square dragged.

But, like Cinderella, I must do a timely duck; besides, February is all too short for long letters.

Thine,
VIOLA.

EPISTLE X

ROYAL YORK HOTEL, BRIGHTON, _March_ 11_th._

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:

"Of herself but a mere reminder
Till the shadows began to creep,
Then, taking one 'tot' as a binder,
I suddenly fell asleep."

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.

EPISTLE XI

EATON SQUARE, _Friday, April_ 8_th._

DEAREST PATRICIA,--

Should you chance to have by you such a thing as a disused buffalo motor-coat, a suit of cast-off oilskins, or any other old garment which is too conspicuous to donate to the ordinary social leper, would you kindly send it to the P. and O. Agents at Marseilles--in the Rue Noailles, I think--to await the return of poor Euphemia Hulcot, whose high motives have been so shamefully tampered with by the Japanese Censor at the front that she is returning to pickle the walnuts and label the jam at her home in Kent, but desires to re-enter London unobserved? Arriving with the Imperial Army at Wiju, literally tingling with the desire to nurse back to health the victims of the spiteful _jui-jitsu_ (or whatever is the name of the national ambidextrous cussedness) and incidentally to paint comprehensive word pictures for the _Ladies Sphere_, she found it not at all nice to be allocated, under fixed arms, to a quiet hamlet consisting of a house and barn, once made of rice paper, containing a wild cat and a pack of cards, and situated on a sandy ridge between two millet fields. She certainly had told off to see that she didn't go away, two little brown men with half a pair of crimson overalls between them, who told Japanese stories which no lady could possibly have heard had they not been related with an accent that was simply delicious to listen to; also she was given a bamboo gun that would carry popcorn as far as where the sitting-room window had been knocked out (and most of the wall along with it) but with strict instructions in the event of an outbreak to return the weapon at once to the sentries.

All this was well enough in a way, but the disabilities far outweighed the advantages, and at any reference to war the little brown men became mentally opaque. Thus when Euphemia attempted to "draw" them by comparing the situation to the first campaign in Italy in 1796, they professed not to have heard of Napoleon as a fighter, though they remembered all the others, including Jack Dempsey and Gus Ruhlin; moreover the only accommodation offered a lady correspondent wishing to change her garments was the open country behind the ha-ha, or mimosa, bush.

At first Euphemia merely protested in a formal way, but finding this of no avail, she ultimately insisted on being taken before General Kuroki, to whom (despite his many polite protests that he was already five minutes overdue on a previous engagement to hold a hand-to-hand argument with General Kuropatkin in a mudfield at Ping Yang) she explained that it might be just as well if he understood that, although she had temporarily assumed the duties of special correspondent to the _Ladies Sphere_, she was the most strictly virtuous and religious unmarried lady that ever came out of a country where the easiest thing imaginable for a smart girl to do was to marry any man she wanted to; that though the average Japanese lady was so inviolably sacred that she was kept indoors till she degenerated into a sort of tit-bit of family furniture, you couldn't come that racket on the rosebuds of the West, where no man was obliged to feel the burden of daughters who took proper care of their early education. She didn't see anything in that to grin at. Her family had fought and bled for Great Britain since before boxing-gloves were invented--till, in fact, it had come to be regarded as the country's standing Gibraltar; and she didn't propose to travel twelve thousand miles to be shut up in a tissue-paper bandbox with nothing but an Asiatic wild cat to which she had not been properly introduced, to suit the likes of anybody. Representatives of allied nations--she should not particularise--might get transitorily dippy over winning one or two skirmishes with hairy convicts done up in padded ulsters; but "who was't betrayed the Capitol; who lost Marc Antony the world; who was the cause of a long ten years' war and laid at last old Troy in ashes"? A snubbed lady correspondent at the front, she believed.

The General made no reply--a man's real character is only visible in moments of intense emotion--but, signalling for a fountain pen to a soldier who had just got a hammer-lock on a Seoul ploughboy whom he had spotted passing with a pocketful of contraband gingerbread, he wrote out the following and gave it to Euphemia with a kiss and a large red apple which he had brought with him from Anju:

"_To our Soldiers in General, and the_ 10_th Osaka Mounted Assassins in especialty. See to it:_

"_That our well-beloved sister, Euphemia of the Greyhound Legs, the Unwon Bosom, the acquired staccato trot of Tokio; being neither geisha, fleur-de-lit, nor ex-swell rag from the Transwaal, stayeth out of doors as late as she listeth. She doth it for the love of us, and she's copyright, she is. Nix general orders; to the C Division say she is our laidifriend and has our private countersign, 'Pass the beancake. Banzai!_'

"_May your wounds be as halfpence in the Dai Ichi Ginko,_

"_KUROKI._"

Being an advanced disciple of freethought and consequently holding no superstitions as to the eating of apples, Euphemia at once publicly consumed one half of the red pippin, giving the remaining half, with the large, fat worm in it, to the sentry; but matey as the General had seemed, he really had neither soul nor conscience behind his little brown eyes. From the time Euphemia accepted that special permit, she was as nobly a fool-on-furlough as the darkest African belle that ever was satisfied with a piece of red cloth or a handful of glass beads. Honeyed as that written watchword looked, it was substantially the roughest turn-down that ever was put into cipher. Officers to whom Euphemia produced it shed torrents of tears out of formal politeness, but knew exactly how many pieces of luggage she was carrying, and precisely what sort of stockings she had on; and daily she realised that she was drawing nearer, nearer, nearer to the outposts. One evening a lieutenant-colonel of infantry, so repulsively plain that his poor face actually ached from the pain caused by its terrible shape, put a mark like a Whistlerian butterfly on the top corner of the passport, and thereafter, the soldiers who inspected it--and Euphemia--simply whistled through their teeth at her. At Feng-huan-cheng she was imprisoned for ten hours and slapped on parade before all ranks for applying the term "a nasty, insulting, old barn-choote" to a brigadier-general who had passed upon her some remark which, though unintelligible, was doubtless coarse, since it caused the sentries to drop their weapons and roll on the floor with laughter: at Taku-shan the captain of the blockhouse read the warrant, smiled at Euphemia, counted his money, then shrugged his shoulders and motioned to her to pass away; it was the same all through the lines. To this or that person in high office she applied, day by day, in docile and submissive mood, but, like the small boy who was eaten by the domesticated lion in the circus at Barnsley, went away in a pet.

Everywhere and all the day, she says, the stranger's leg is vigorously pulled. Even the little Jap who, during his convalescence after being wounded at Souchou, embroidered for her with alleged cherry-blossoms a square of black satin, gave her his name as Ohara Whirroo; and she has since discovered that the silk-stitched blossom bears a strange and striking resemblance to the potato-plant. Ultimately catching the infectious habit of dissembling the most unpleasant convictions, she taught herself at last to round-off the most conventional common-places with some such phrase as "Thanks, thou colossal and incomparable object of envy to Ananias; thanks!"

But her pity for the wounded Russians who fell into her hands was very real--as well it might be. They were brought to fight from the prisons on the convict island of Sakahalin, and had to bear the brunt of the battle in proportion to their past offences. Thus, the first line of defence was composed of murderers, money-lenders, manufacturers of inflammable flannelette underclothing, and pleaders of the Gaming Act. The second consisted chiefly of stewards of hunt-meetings, burglars, baby-farmers, and dermatologists from West Virginia convicted of grafting male skin on to female chins to supply the market with bearded ladies for freak museums; the last line of all being the defaulters of alimony and the unmuzzled dog summonses. The greatest grievance of all was perhaps that which was cherished by an exile from Warsaw, whose internal clockwork had been rudely disarranged by eighteen inches of triangular steel at the end of a Nagasaki musket at Chongju.

"It's all very well for these here Japs to blow about dispensin' justice distilled to an essence," he remarked to Euphemia, "but to be bayoneted in the _gutz_* for failin' to abate a smoky chimney is a bit sultry, ain't it?"

* A purely Muscovite idiom for the pantry parts, the seeming crudity of which is to be deplored.

A few days ago, Phyllis Waring was keenly desirous that I should accompany her to Paris to see if _Monsieur le Matou_ is a suitable piece to put on at the forthcoming performance by the Copthebird Strollers in aid of the Asylum for the Indignant Blind, but as I am rather fed up with the French (to say nothing of the idiotic Strollers, whose sixteen skittish lady amateurs are already quarrelling as to which first takes "Dick" when _Whittington_ is produced next Christmas) who sorely need some good and true friend to point out to them that, having invented matrimony, as they are fully persuaded they did do, it was unlike them not to patent it and thereby secure their just fees and royalties; and as, unlike myself, Phyllis evinces no desire to shun the ephemeral intimacies that travellers are so ready to establish, she would be sure to find some chivalrous male person aboard the boat to hold her head at the taffrail, I did not go. And now it seems that _Monsieur le Matou_ is but a rehashing of the old, old _ménage à trois_ idea, for knowing naught of which poor Uriah of Scripture history got steered against his Waterloo. Poor Uriah! Himself entertaining Hittitic objections to bathing--(he simply hated sanitation and always swore that it would hasten his end)--he still had gentlemanliness enough to relax his customary surveillance while his fair wife performed the ablutions which he admired but did not understand, and he sate down outside on the little cork mat, smiling to think how well-beloved he was quite apart from any question of money. He smiled again in a self-satisfied way as he heard the water splashing within, for he remembered how he had said on first seeing the laving tank when he took over the new house, "Aha! Some silly fool will be drowned in this, but it won't be me!" and there and then did he renew his vow that the only way they should ever get him into the thing would be to chloroform him first. Poor Uriah! How little did he suspect that, even at that moment, there was creeping on his royal stomach across the tiles--

But I must not bore you to death with all this moralising, dear.

In _Monsieur le Matou_ the tertium quid is an operatic tenor who, adoring Madame la Chatte for her dulcet tones alone, drops in to try her voice, while M. le Matou is at the chase, pursuing the bloodthirsty hare, the fierce hedge-sparrow. At the psychological moment--just as Madame closes her eyes to take the upper C--Monsieur bursts in, a plume in his hat, a tasselled bag hanging from his neck, a very arsenal bristling in his brown belt. Instantly the wretched pair, while imploring him to spare their lives, fall at his feet, implying that, if the worst comes to the worst, they will, like the man who was on a hiding to nothing the first time Tom Sayers saw him, "take it lying down."

"No, no!" cries M. le Matou, pronouncing the tag as the stage hands take hold of the guy ropes in readiness for a quick curtain, "I do not purpose to destroy you here, but you will find that my terms are worse than death itself (sensation). They are that you, sir, do this very night take her with you to Marseilles (increased sensation) by the 9.15 on the Paris-Lyons-et-Méditerranée!" (loud groans and hisses, several ladies in the audience who have in the course of their checkered careers been inveigled into this train, swooning away in their fauteuils).

After the manner of British adventurers into France, Phyllis rends the restaurants (and the native tongue) without mercy, but she will have to be told that there is really no such word in the French, or any other language, as "Kwezeen," and no necessity for it; though, truly, it was commendable moderation in her not to write "Kweezeen," as is commonly done by the otherwise gifted authoress of "How to Give a Monday Lunch for a Dozen without Spending a Tosser." The correct thing is "cuisine," and to spell things with a "K" which look softer with a "C" is to prove that one was born when the sign was wrong. It is news, however, that the wearing of captive insects is again _de rigueur_; and Phyllis was fortunate enough to secure a magnificent specimen of a dark green hunting-cased cockchafer, held by a gold chain. It must have looked awfully chic, she says, as she sat in the fauteuils of the Odeon, but it unfortunately got into a fight with the armour-plated tiger-beetle of the lady sitting behind, and, losing its off forceps in the second round, was pounced upon by the watchful harlequin scarabæus, or "Cairo timberman," of the lady on Phyllis's left, with which it more than held its own until the audience yelled for M. Poe to enter the ring and separate them. Phyllis does not despair of nursing the great green beauty back to its former health, but it has incurred a fearful "mouse," she says, and will hereafter wear a "thick ear" to its dying day.

The first flower that blooms in the spring, dear, is the nettle, and though mere seasonage never yet caused Féo's perennial human poisonous plant a second's uneasiness, Mr Contango has just stung her "good and plenty," as they say at the Sessil, by getting run in on a consolidated charge of assault and battery, also defamation of the character of prosecutor's sister, obstructing the thoroughfare of Swallow Street, Regent Street, whilst drunk and incapable, and damaging a constable's uniform. It is a narrow and craven story, though the verification of some of the charges at the first hearing, which terminated in a remand, brought a sweet-and-twenty smile to the stern-and-sixty dial of the salaried Solon who exists only to side-pocket his patrons.

To a lady who resided in Burleigh Mansions and who, while appearing in court in a tight-fitting frock of blue silk with a white Panama pulled well down over her eyebrows, claimed the modern privilege of remaining heavily veiled and testifying as "Mrs X.," Mr Contango had given a cheque for five pounds, the only consideration being (he said) that it was to form the nucleus of a fund which "Mrs X.," and several other society ladies were promoting to purchase the penny steamboat _Citizen_, now moored off Cleopatra's Needle, and fit her up as a hospital ship for service in the Yellow Sea. Though "Mrs X.'s" family, counsel said, was a notable old Saxon one and might have altered English History had not her early ancestor, who treated Edward the Confessor for scrofula, met his death whilst cat shooting in the Royal Forest of Pimlico, owing to the bullet leaving his weapon at the butt, she undoubtedly had a brother who was at the present time a cabman. She admitted having mentioned this person to the prisoner with reference to the hospital ship, her relative, who had frequently observed that "cabbing was no conjure," having said give him a barrel of bitter and the run of a bedstead shop, and he would transform the _Citizen_ into the talk of the Thames. She had also seven sisters, six of whom were willing to leave the stage to become hospital-ship nurses, but the seventh, who had freckles and a cock eye, had permanently settled in the postal service. But the payment of five pounds had nothing whatever to do with marine matters and she didn't think any the more of the prisoner, who _called_ himself a gentleman, for trying to shift the cut on her in that way.

Meantime the cheque, having been enthusiastically dishonoured, was returned to "Mrs X.," who subsequently sold it for two shillings as a natural curiosity to another of her brothers, who, as Charlie Upham, kept a starting-price office for military turfites of approved references in Swallow Street. In this capacity Upham was quite well acquainted, and occasionally did business, with Mr Contango, up to the time when the latter had five half-dollars on Pitch Battle at Nottingham, at 100 to 12, and was offered, in settlement, his own discredited stumer, a postal for three bob, and twenty-eight half-penny stamps. It was then that he assaulted and battered Upham in his office, and was flung out of the window, amid the thunder of the captains and the shouting; and the humane C Division of police, finding him lying on his back, too frail to withstand the contamination and wickedness of the outer world, reversed him by his wrists and ankles, and carried him inside.

Féo no sooner heard of it than, with the promptitude of a Napier, she rang up that old and trusted repository of shameful secrets, our family solicitor--by which please do not misunderstand me to mean our City, or put-and-call solicitor, who is so bewitching a figure at dramatic first nights; our smart solicitor, who hangs up his red golf jacket and takes down the _Cause List_ with a large yawn; or our mere buffer solicitor, who is rude to rural benches over our furious-driving summonses; but our old family solicitor. She rang up Mr Coke and bleated that her latest needs were far too sacred to be related over the phone with Gerrard listening, but would he take the very first vehicle on the rank, no matter if it were only a dust-cart, and come to her instantly. And he did.

It was raining rather smartly as they left the house, some twenty minutes later, and the old lawyer had brought no brolly; but Féo could not possibly order the carriage for such an odious destination as Brixton Stir; she could not even suffer a hansom to be whistled to the door.

"Give Mr Coke an umbrella," she cried, as though she herself were contemptuous of the weather, and two footmen in powder instantly drew from the stand an elegant parapluie with an ebon stick, surmounted by a crutch of tortoise shell bound and heeled with eighteen-carat gold.

All through the long ride to the prison at Brixton, Féo lay back in the shadows of the four-wheeler's cushions in gloomy silence, her bosom rent by conflicting emotions. For years past she had lain her very life--she who had the figure of Diana and the beauty of an Aphrodite--at the clay feet of a man who now regarded her only as nine stone of stale cake. Against his myriad infidelities she had promulgated no decree, well knowing that it would only be disobeyed in such hearty fashion as to reduce to _débris_ the prestige of wifely authority; but her soul had sunk within her when she had heard how her Sandown badge had been worn by the kitchenmaid at the Skittle Club; she had groaned aloud when asked to believe that such a wire as "For heaven's sake send her a 'monkey' to shut up" was merely an impassioned appeal by an unknown London solicitor to a perfect stranger, on behalf of a ruined old lady litigant who only yearned for an ape to keep in confinement and make a pet of. For any woman in the throes of such woe as this, it was the refinement of torture to read of the Chinaman who believes implicitly in his wife's fidelity so long as he sneezes once in an hour, and whose wife persuades him always to wear a wet handkerchief inside his hat to keep his dear old shaved pate cool. Yet China was a cultured nation a thousand years before Britain showed the slightest sign of becoming the delightful Nonconformist poultry-yard she is to-day. Socially, no less than matrimonially, Contango was a complete fizzle. A sable evening suit he simply loathed, but took a positive pride in the frayed and unravelled "County-court" shirt in which he "appeared" before tribunals, which reduced the claims of his more importunate creditors to crossing-sweepers' doles of a crown a month, and sometimes he got judicial "orders" set aside indefinitely. He did daily homage to his judgment-summons alpaca-jacket, and bowed down and worshipped his judge-in-chambers brown billycock; but all these things were as goads and undergarments of horsehair to Féo, who, now that the miserable backslider was under lock and key, could not decide whether in view of future peace of mind it was not more desirable to keep him in than to get him out.