Part 5

"The new spirit-glasses, y'r lordship. I've been shockin' unlucky with 'em I'll admit, y'r lordship, but oh! they _are_ fraygile an' no kid! That word was stencilled on the case as they arrived in, an' William, the carver, he says to me at the time, y'r lordship, 'Henry,' he says, 'every time as you handles these glasses,' he says, 'bear that word in mind--Fraygile. It's French,' he says, 'an' it means, "Bound to be Broke, Anyway,"' he says, an' it's my humble opinion, y'r lordship----"

"Enough! My hat and stick, at once!" shouted Caedmon, and strode out of the place. "Of course, of course, fool that I am, I see it all now!" he wailed as he strode up Mount Street; "she referred to her promise to that damned South African!"

Plunging his fists into his breeches pockets and pulling out two brimming handsful of gold and silver, he thrust them upon an Italian murderer who, though curfew had long sounded, stood churning from an automatic piano the symphony to--

"Will you--be true--to aeies--of blue When they look into aeies of ba-rown?"

and plunged into the velvet darkness of Grosvenor Square.

Only yesterday I received a lengthy epistle from Mrs Mortimer Toddpush, who left town about a week ago in order to witness the Passion Play at Horitz, but sidetracked at Zermatt after hearing in Paris how Eve, a hussy who also made shell boxes at Bohmerwald, had secretly married Adam, who also stoked a steamer on the Po, while on tour in the provinces some seven months back, and would now be quite unable to appear for a few weeks. Eve's friend, too, a big shield-tailed python, had been in a state of torpor for an usually prolonged period after swallowing a tourist from the Highlands, so that the whole show was, if the accurate expression is admissible, clear out of plumb. Beyond the fact that a Reverend Mr Somebody, who was staying at the famous Smearkase Hotel half way up the Matterhorn, had stepped through a back door in the dark and fallen a mile, more or less, down the glacier (though the more pious of the guides assured the rest of the party that the old gentleman would have earned his harp three times over before striking the bottom) there seemed to be nothing doing at Zermatt, more particularly since the chubby bridegroom and touch-me-not bride in whom local interest mainly centred, were not speaking to one another when the post left, having quarrelled as to which loved the other the more, and each being afraid to give in for fear of offending the other.

But this sort of fever usually subsides, I am told, within a month, man's inborn nature being to philander, often to the dire distress of the trusting young wife who fondly imagines that a husband to be constant should be frequent. I remember hearing (no matter how) when last I was in Brighton--that very stamping ground for honeymooners and others who carry their happiness about with them--of a certain old gentleman who was ventilating, in the smoking-room of one of the hotels, his views upon a current _cause célèbre_. Incidentally he averred that it was all very well for a man to go into the witness-box and swear that he had never under any circumstances been untrue to the partnership entered into at the altar rails; it was better still if he could induce the jury to believe him; yet no married man could absolutely prove that he never had sinned--on that point he would freely wager a thirty-shilling hat!

Then there arose from a corner seat a young gentleman who had Percy literally stamped upon him, and who had been unable to keep his cigarette alight for yawning, and he claimed that hat.

"And I invite you to substantiate your claim, sir," rejoined the pleasant old gentleman.

"Oh, it's an absolute walk-over!" cried Percy, with another yawn, "my wife and I were married only yesterday afternoon, and--er, well, we've only just come down to breakfast!"

Highly interesting as this explanation may seem, it was, after all, mere baby food compared to the diverting details which each of the other twenty-seven gentlemen had to invent at a moment's notice when asked by his wife why he had not instantly and peremptorily laid claim to the thirty-shilling hat.

Speaking of winning wildly sporting wagers, I suppose that all will admit that Society contains no more beautiful or accomplished woman than Lady Ellaline Dives, yet I hate her with a great personal hatred, if only for the mean way in which she welshed--that is the hard but accurate appellation--me out of a fiver at the Cossie's Club only a week before I left England. You know the Cossie's, of course? It was of the parent club of them all that Io Mayleigh (who has emptied her Philistine life of everything but dogs) wrote:

"Observe the erstwhile Tub Hotel; Note the 'B.T.,' or tea-room smell; Ensconced behind its muslin blinds, Now matrons with contented minds, Discuss, with much patrician fun, The tea--the cake--the buttered bun."

Well, in the course of an impersonal discussion at the Cossie's on the mistakes of anatomy, I, who have fed up on the subject, offered to bet anyone in the room a fiver that she had a vermiform appendix, and Ellaline Dives took me on. And as soon as the money was posted and covered, we adjourned to the Gazing Room, where she showed us the scar where she had had it removed!

Mightily close to sharping, don't you think? I felt much inclined to have her up before the committee; yet, poor thing, she needs the fiver more than I do, for, owing to the fabulous prices paid by our Army in South Africa for petits fours and plovers' eggs, her income will be sorely depleted for the next century or so. I know quite well, dear, that her sweet but small house in South Audley Street--squeezed in between the wine merchant's and the coachbuilder's it looks just about a convenient size for a convivial tomtit--holds so many "auctioneers," as she calls them, that she and Sir Edward habitually sit on the stairs, owing to the men-in-possession occupying all that remains of the crested saddlebag suite. Even their faithful butler resigned with a curse after jabbing a hole about as big as Pimlico in his left hand, whilst endeavouring to open a sevenpenny tin of sheep's tongue, though Lady Ellaline adroitly arranged with the hospital authorities to inform the Press that it was _gastrodynia_, induced by a surfeit of foie gras. To repair all these ravages, Lady Ellaline lately accepted a roving commission from Messrs Outsize and Squeale, the distinguished hosiers; for if, as she truly says, Lady Barnhowrie can accept an appointment to sell cod liver oil, and the Countess of Barcalwhey can turn her impoverished self into a limited company--oho! Bankers: the Hole Under the Hearthstone!--to supply all who will buy with fresh eggs and butter (which she delivers daily in her own motors), then "why not your little Ellaline?" Nowanights therefore at the small dance, the man who gets a polka with her must breathe a couple of dozen of silk socks or blue gridiron singlets into her shell-like ear; she will not grant even a galop under twelve fine flannel shirts with tucked or pleated fronts and necks, finished with French muslin collars for six guineas, which (next to her reliable bullet-proof travelling nighties for co-respondents) is her "star" line. It must be anything but the pleasantest of work, however, for I am told that the Duchess of Whitehall handed her a fearful dab in the eye on the Stand on the Champagne Stakes day at Doncaster, simply because she had asked, incautiously but purely in a business way, "Aren't those pink silk pants of the dear Duke's getting woefully shabby?"

Excepting only the two or three English theatrical hussies who purposely return from the water to the wrong bathing tents--Number 12 instead of Number 21, and so on--with the deliberate intention of being suddenly discovered by some brilliantined and bearded fool of a Frenchman, whom they then send to fetch from their rightful disrobing places, garments which are supposed to have no public career before them, we do not bathe at Dinard: rather do we diligently "sand." To actually enter the dishevelling surf is to display an excess of zeal only equalled by the cock who crowed himself overboard from the bowsprit of Lord Dufferin's yacht in his frantic attempts to salute the rising sun in Scandinavia; but I think if only you could have seen me walking the plank promenade on the _plage_ this morning in a skin-tight silk suit of bereavement violet, with silk stockings to match and chrome strapped shoes with paste buckles, you would have admitted, in disagreement with the _passé_ soprano who budded too late, that there are other ways of securing public attention besides giving lessons on the posthorn from the top of Nelson's monument. For a girl to simulate a pretence of using the hot sea-water footbath which is brought to her from the beach-cauldron on returning to her _cabinet de bain_ is surely less fuzzy than the male Berkshire pretence of kissing all the pretty women and extorting silver from the men under the name of "Hocktide tutty" (and you can safely bet a level pony if the custom had been to get the money out of the women and kiss the men, it would have been entombed with Alumid, whose last favourable Press notice appeared in the Domesday Book!); and neither puritanical flam nor structural imperfections need stand in the way of her extending the joyous mitt to her pals to join her in a cigarette in her machine, since the floor and the seats are never, like those of the archaic Margate article, so soaking wet that you cannot sit down without ruining your _création_. Unfortunately the French jump too precipitately at conclusions, and, though it takes a pretty good deal at any time to create surprise at a Gallic watering-place, a distinctly false and an altogether too comprehensive impression of pudic British maidenhood has been indelibly stamped on the minds of the irrepressible _gommeux_ here through one of their number having politely inquired of one of the copper-haired drabs on the steps of her obscure hotel the other morning if there was anything that he could do for her, and received the reply:

"Oh, it's very sweet of you, old dear, but if you'd give us a kiss, stand us a bottle, tell us an easy blue story, and take us into the Casino to show us how to play those 'little horses,' I should take it pal-ish, for what with your croupiers speakin' so quick and usin' their rakes so handy, all as I seem to do is to plank down my quid and take up nothing!"

Not that they really are ignorant of _petits-chevaux_ and _roulette_, of the conventions of continental hotel life or--anything else! for, only yesterday, having received but few visitors, one of them took a camel-hair brush and a bottle of boot-varnish, and deftly inscribed upon her door the double-zero, and, within the next five minutes----

But the tiny red-brown fishing-boat which has been threading its way between the pygmean rocky islets in the bay, now touches the beach, whither I fly to glean new schemes of colour from the glint of the dying mackerel.

Tiens, kid, VIOLA.

EPISTLE V

EATON SQUARE, _Tuesday, October_ 3_rd._

MY DEAR PATRICIA,--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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