Part 11

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.