Part 8
"Forgive my exuberance, doctor," continued the Duke, more seriously, "and be good enough to draw your chair a little more this way. That's it. Now, you were sent for the other day by a--ahem, a valued tenant of mine, whose horse had given her a rather bad fall in the hunting-field and bruised her pretty severely----"
"I have no recollection of the case whatever!" interposed Moxon, innocently enough.
"Probably not, sir, probably not," the Duke added, with a broad smile and a distinctly plebeian wink, "but as a gallant gentleman you will, I feel sure, permit my diagnosis to supersede your own. You would, I am firmly convinced, cheerfully die in defence of the austere morality, the impeccable reputation, the obdurate purity of any one of the adorable creatures who periodically grace these parts during the hunting season, and in whose fair hands St Anthony himself would have been as potter's clay. We will, therefore, please, say it was a severe, uncompromising bruising which lately affected Lady Winifred Brandon----"
"Number four!" gasped Moxon beneath his breath.
"But that is not the point, which rather is that although, like the immortal Gilpin, you rode with speed--the best of which your grey dobbin, whose loss I formally deplore, was capable--there was necessarily far more delay than if you had driven over on a motor-car. This reflection, and a sense of gratitude to you for your care of my--er, my valued tenant--yes, yes, my valued tenant, impel me to ask you to accept as a little present, a very pretty four-cylinder Darracq, just come from Suresnes, which----"
But Dr Moxon had staggered to his feet, his brain reeling with the drawing of many psychological conclusions, and he moved in a dazed way and emitting choking noises towards the open French window. A few turns round the Italian garden served to revive him; but how could he go back? How could he ever face the Duke after making such an irrational exit? Thus absorbed, he crept through the quickset hedge, and took the route through the woods to his home, arriving with burrs in his hair and garter-snakes in the folds of his trousers. Next day there arrived the bruise-blue Darracq, now known as "ECCHYMOSIS"; since when the overstocked doctor has assiduously advertised the machines on the thirteenth page of the _Telegraph_ as duplicate wedding presents with all the familiar allurements--Sacrifice, Unused, Approval before Payment, etc.--and much against the advice of his prudent housekeeper, who sanguinely predicts a transference to London and a garage in Long Acre, if only Lady Winifred hunts from Melton for another season.
I am so pleased to hear, dear, that your sister Aenid's baby is going on so nicely, though, never even having had the sinister finger of suspicion directed at me, let alone possessed a baby of any kind, I have not even a passing notion of what they should endure and what escape before appearing in public. Reports of cases presenting specially interesting symptoms usually are concealed by publication in the "Mother's Corner" of the _Kennel Gazette_, I believe; the mothers themselves being mysteriously counselled with regard to their dietetical errors in feeding their offspring, in such cryptic sentences as "Stop the B.F. diet and report in a month," or, "Give baby the shredded pin-feathers of a young onion before retiring, and lie her on her other side." Nor can I express an opinion as to whether your sister's nurse's panacea for the pain in your sister's baby's stomach was good or otherwise, since, on reference to the huge old book of pasted-in recipes for every ill allied to maternity, which Féo once conscientiously kept up, I find that the point was raised, but not settled, in the celebrated Salisbury Baby Claimant case some years ago. As you may or may not have read, a witness named Jane Lawrence deposed that after the birth of the child she gave her sister some weak brandy and water. She also gave the baby some butter and sugar (laughter). It was the usual custom, she said, to do so.
Mr Justice Hawkins asked Mr Jelf whether that was so.
Mr Jelf appealed to his learned friend, Mr Dickens, whether that was _not_ so.
Mr Dickens had received no instructions upon the point; in fact, he protested that he knew nothing about it.
Thereupon Mr Justice Hawkins said that the case must clearly be adjourned till eleven o'clock on the following morning.
Immediately beneath this cutting there appears in pencil: "Gt. Eastern Handicap, Amandier, Missal, Royal Mask. Twelve ran"; not that any affinity could possibly exist between the two events.
Marshall has just brought to me an imperious command to join Lady Thursa Rosacre at Lowndes Square in twenty minutes' time to mote to Brighton, her husband, probably considering his freedom cheap at the sacrifice, having lent her his car for the week on condition that she drives it herself. An atmosphere of steam is a daily necessity of life to the Rosacres; and I daresay you remember how, when the Zoological Society proposed to send its leading elephant on tour to help expenses, how Thursa drove straight off to the offices in Hanover Square, and offered to ride the dear pachyderm three times round Regent's Park on the Saturday afternoon before Ascot, attired as Lady Godiva--purely in the cause of charity, of course. She reckoned it would bring in, she said, enough money to keep the Zoo out of the hole for two hundred years at least, if, indeed, it didn't create such a stampede at the turnstiles that such points as Gloucester and Clarence Gates would be over a week burying their dead.
But motoring in December is too dishevelling, and the bud who has ridden fifty-two miles in the teeth of a dust-storm and held her life in her hands one-hundred-and-twenty-seven distinct times between Piccadilly and Pyecombe, makes about as effective an entrance into Brighton as the last stone-bruised idiot in the shopboys' annual walk. And while Reginald Rosacre is none too deft in handling his own car, one really needs, to ride beside Thursa, nerves equal to those of the racing gentleman who, on his way back from the Slough railway accident, shot seventeen pigeons running in a £5 sweepstakes, but was partially paralysed and completely prostrated by shock when the railway company's doctor called on the following morning to ascertain the extent of his injuries. Why, was not it only in August last, dear, that she and he and the dandy chauffeur sustained their memorable break-down on this very road? Did not they start out, on one of those gummy, thunder-laden evenings, when the ceaseless ambition for sleep is only thwarted by the pestiferous attentions of the insects which everywhere abound, and fiercely attack all unprotected flesh with their little spiked shoes, to run down to Brighton and empty their lives of everything but petrol until Doncaster? And what happened?
Along about the middle watches of that night, when only a white streak marked the road and the travellers were exchanging the luscious dews of Surrey for the first suggestions of the salt sea-fret of Sussex, that car, which was popularly supposed not to know what a hill was, even if you showed it one, gave three spits and a conquassative tremor and came to a sudden stop. All in vain did the dapper stoker key-up this and tighten that, and pour fresh bituminous drinks carefully over the thing's appalling thirst; to no effect did Lord Reginald Rosacre unload the astounding anthology of profanity which he had at great pains acquired from one of the most celebrated of the three hundred million professors of the art in Asia; as a vehicle of progression that car was 99 in 100 behind a crippled goat.
Through a hole in a hedge that hemmed about a redskin-flourball pasture, the two men pushed and butted the inoperative box of cylinders, Thursa, with her skirts held knee-high to elude the agile and amatory potato-bug, looking on with an air of persecuted resignation. She was elegantly dressed, as all women whose beauty is due more to art than inheritance invariably are; and Balzac's crude old line which, sterilised and disinfected, says that men love not the woman, but the woman's clothes, arose with unpleasant suggestiveness in Reginald's mind whenever he thought of going in search of succour, and leaving the chauffeur to look after Thursa. Equally impracticable did it seem to send forward Balzac's compatriot of the cigarette-fingers and the steering-wheel, since he spoke no language but his own; so ultimately the fair, over-dressed child-wife had to be left at the mercy of the bugs with many misgivings, but definite instructions to sound a loud horn should danger seem impending.
Four miles and a quarter further on, there reposed in a Sleepy Hollow ten cottages, a baker's, a harness shop, and a Georgian inn; but Reginald Rosacre died ten deaths in reaching it. The first streaks of dawn were coming from between the quaint old sixteenth-century bungalows on Hogg's Hill and falling on his lordship's left cheek, all grimy and grey with dust, as he staggered up to the tavern's oaken door and rapped upon it with a long steel monkey-wrench. A horse and trap--no matter at what cost--would still get them into Brighton ere most folks were up.
"Oho, there! Within, within!" he cried, lambasting the brave ilexian door with his puny implement.
A window sash, immediately above his head, was raised noisily, and a red-faced, half-awakened man looked out and asked what the future torment was the matter.
"Say, have you any flys heah?" cried Lord Rosacre.
"Millions an' millions of 'em, damyer!" roared the irate innkeeper, really using a much coarser objurgation. "But we don't buy our fly-papers in the middle o' the gory night! Take that!"
And, catching up two huge flower-bowls, or something, in the liquid contents of which some such pungent stalks as those of mignonette or wallflower had been stagnating for a week or more, he drenched his unexpected visitors as freely and liberally as, in the wild old days on the Euphrates, the magnificent Lucius Verus did his guests when he emptied murrhine vases filled with nard upon their heads before being carried up drunk to bed in a coverlet of camel-hair.
No, Marshall, say please that I have gone to Turkey to gather arum lilies.
Thine, dear, VIOLA.
EPISTLE VIII
BUCKTHORN MANSE, SURREY, _January_ 6_th._
MY DEAREST PATRICIA,--
When you ingenuously asked in your refreshingly-conventional Yuletide rigmarole whether I duly suspended my stocking on Christmas Eve and, if so, what I got out of it, you were actuated more, I believe, by a vapid desire to appear "seasonable" than by a spirit of idle inquiry as to whether I had sensibly cloven the continuity of a ghastly practice; but in either case it cheers me greatly to be able to inform you that, though my shins are still covered with woven brown silk to a point that is defiant of criticism, I really _did_ find it convenient to hang up my enamelled garters for a tenner, and, thanks to subsequent investments at the Buckthorn Park New Year's Hunt Meeting, that sum has been multiplied sevenfold. A hunt meeting _per se_ would mean less than nothing to you, dear, but when one is staying, as I am, with the people who are the breath in the nostrils of the whole thing, one becomes a part of the meeting itself and appreciates with a new perception the points which previously were unseen or unrecognised. Unlike such foxy fixtures as Ascot and Epsom and Goodwood, where the roguery of the owner is too often reflected in the reluctance of the racehorse, an atmosphere of probity and rectitude envelops the hunt meeting and inspires its votaries to pursue the same policy of frank, unbuckled integrity and veracious candour by which alone it sternly silences the ever-ready tongue of scandal. Not as in flat-racing, where all is whispered and inscrutable, there is no concealment here from first to last--from the titled stewards meeting in the lavatory regularly before each race to equitably arrange the rates of betting; the humane trainers giving their horses a refreshing bucket of water apiece before sending them to the starting-post; the returning jockey of the winner pulling up without dismounting at the paddock bar and taking three large, courage-giving drinks and a pork pie before going in to scale; and finally the principal bookmaker driving off the course in a dogcart behind the hot favourite who was so unfortunately left at the post in the opening event. To me the whole thing is completely bewitching, for though, in the absence of trains reserved exclusively for the use of "Club" members, one may have to travel in the company of persons whose knowledge of attenuated English classics is limited and whose conversations, even when ostentatiously suppressed, are distinctly not anæmic, there is ample compensation to be had in the overheard narrative of the drinking of strong wines from reeking gourds, to say nothing of the conversational "pointers" which accompany it. How I should _love_ to stay in the dining-room with the men to-night whence all (the petticoats) but I had fled, to, like a gramophone, repeat this memoir of my journey down:
"Did ye 'ear about Bill Willis an' Tom Reeder a-goin' to Plumpton, George?"
"Which Bill Willis d'ye mean, 'Arry; him as set the old woman on the fire at Doncaster?"
"No, no; not him. The Bill Willis what the doctor in the Sunday paper told to eat a raw inion at each meal--him as they used to call 'Ev'ry-Morn-I-Bring-Thee-Vi'lets'?"
"Oh, _him_! Why, what happened to 'em?"
"They set out about a week ago to carry on the noble work at Plumpton Steeplechases, an', as both felt as they could do with a bit of a change, they arranges to stop 'private' in Brighton, at a little case in Black Lion Street where Tom Reeder annually took his old woman every August. It's not by no means a fash'nable lodgin' for society ducks--in fact, as showin' that the lan'lady wasn't expectin' winter lodgers, Bill and Tom found as she'd been snowballin' the layout, or in other words, stuffin' all the settin'-room furniture, with that chemical moth-stuff what looks like candles but hums like as if the gas was turned on. There was only one bedroom, too, but it had a brace o' kips in it as well as a big double wardrobe for to 'ang yer clothes in; in every respec' as good a place as a man need want, and all comin' at a figure that didn't compel ye to give the lan'lady the frozen face on the last day o' the meetin' unless things went _extra_ kerteever. You follow me, George?"
"Abso-pleadin'-lutely, 'Arry. Well?"
"Well--but you know what Brighton is, George; the wettest part o' the glorious place lies north o' the beach, not south. You stroll along the front fully intendin' to give yer old liver a good washin' in Schilling's beautiful natural sel'zer water, an', before you're half way to the Metropole, you've done eight or ten splits, a pint o' stout along o' the oysters what you've 'ad at the little shop behind the Star an' Garter, so many gins-an'-bitters that yer stomach, originally humbugged into believin' it was a-goin' to have a square meal, refuses to take any further notice of 'em, a stray slosh o' bay rum where you got shaved in Ship Street, two or three drops o' that stuff as you took when the doctor told yer to do all as you could to be sick--
"Ver-mooth."
"Aye, ver-mooth; an' by the time you oughter be half way to the racecourse you're still a-lookin' for a conveyance round about Castle Square, an' a-gapin' to such an extent that street boys comes up to you an' offers to show yer the chemist's shop in East Street where they sells the infallible yawn drops. But there's one thing I _will_ say for the Brighton atmosphere: you seem to pull yerself round again just as quick as you seemed to get oiled--consequently Bill Willis an' Tom Reeder spent a thoroughly enj'yable an' int'lectual week of it."
"I'm sure!"
"Any'ow, on the Saturday mornin' just about nine o'clock, Bill marches into the 'Swan' in Ship Street with his tongue a-feelin' like a ash-heap an' literally a-gaspin' for his mornin's mornin'. Now the 'Swan' in Ship Street is a sort of 'ome-from-'ome for families an' sportsmen visitin' Brighton, an' from goin' there so frequent like, both Bill an' Tom had come to know the manager. So, as Bill glides softly in, lookin' as if he'd just seen Hell in a nightmare, the manager wishes him good-mornin' an' asks him if he hadn't slep' well last night. 'Fact is, mister,' said Bill, 'I've only a hazy remembrance of 'ow I got to bed at all, an' it certainly wasn't till close on four this mornin' in any case. That gentleman-friend o' mine an' me had two other gents to dinner at our lodgin's--I dessay you remember we took eight bottles o' Scotch away from here with us?--an' I must have had the devil's own luck at cards, for although I seemed to get whacked every time as I went the bundle, jiggered if I didn't wake up this mornin' with close on twelve quid in my kick--a state o' things that whistles aloud for a bottle o' the best. Give us yer wine list, an' set out one tumbler for yerself.' But the manager, though producin' the wine list, says he makes it a rule never to drink so early; besides he's jest had one; also it's the brewery traveller's day for comin' down, an' that'll mean another. So Bill Willis, with that glorious feelin' of affluence that comes from a well-lined kick--when one feels matey with all the world, an' seriously considers why he don't write to the brewery an' ask for special terms for a wholesale order--sings a bottle o' something extra sec at fourteen-an'-a-tanner, an' takes it from a half-pint tumbler. 'Drink 'earty, boy!' he says to himself aloud as he fills his second glass, an'--well, just as he said the words, in rushes Tom Reeder!"
"Just in time, eh?"
"No, a wee bit late. Tom's awfully hot-under-the-collar about something or other, for he no sooner sets eyes on Bill, than he bellers out, 'Gawdstroth, Bill, I've run half over Brighton to find yer!' 'Well, you should have took a fly,' says Vi'lets, bold with the booze; 'but what's the matter?' 'Matter enough!' shouts Tom, 'when you went to that ruddy wardrobe this mornin' you put on _my_ trahsers!"
It may not have been a very convincing _argumentum ad judicium_ (as they said at Weatherby's when a certain racing countess wanted to register "Haste to the Wedding" as the name of a gelding) for one so well posted to have purchased before the eyes of all men a shilling card from a racecourse tipster, whose wardrobe would have precluded his obtaining employment at delivering coals, but I stood by the rails to listen to the engaging story of how he never failed to find the winner, but that it was his fearful thirst which seemed to keep him broke; how he should "be 'aving something very 'ot" for the last race, cabled straight to him by Slod Toan, who was at present schooling yearlings for President Roosevelt in the Phillypeanut Islands, on to which he wanted us to get our money into action quick, tear up our return briefs, and ride 'ome in an airship. Up to now, he continued, the Ring didn't even know that such an 'orse existed; but owner, trainer, and jockey had tried it to give two stone to Pretty Polly, and were surprised to find it even so much better than _that_, that they had wired to Coutts's to reserve room in their new premises for another scuttleful. All that he asked us to do was to get on before the Ring rumbled, and show his card to our friends afterwards.
Oh yes, dear; to anticipate your inevitable inquiry, I "done it," as my tipster would have said, but it did not finish in the first eight. The horse that won was owned by the brother-in-law of the authorised printer of the official racecard, was bedded in the jockey's ambulance room on dried seaweed, patented and sold on commission by the handicapper, and came up and ate loaf-sugar out of the hand of the clerk-of-the-scales. Nevertheless, no sooner had "All right!" been called, than the preposterous horse-watcher was peacocking up and down the course in front of the lawn, closely followed by an all-night souse without shoes or socks and blackballed in perpetuity at the Rowton Residences, but shouting, with well assumed enthusiasm, "Brayvo! He's bin an' done it agen. Brayvo!" If only the poor thing had realised his possibilities, and taken a short, graduating course in one of the advertisement-concocting colleges (as the clerk of the course, who took half the profits on the tipster's cards as the price of giving permission to sell them, observed, as he stood beside me and checked the man's sales) what couldn't he have torn off the public with some more refined thimble-game, such as a new sawdust health-food, a heal-the-blind "institute," or a dud encyclopedia?
But I must on no account omit to tell you of an ingenuous incident which followed the decision of the antepenultimate event--"A Handicap Hurdle Plate of 30 sovs. (to quote the card), for the produce of mares that have never thrown a winner under any rules; gentlemen riders, Members of the Postman's Knock Hunt who have touched twice over one race to carry 7 lb. extra; the winner to be sold for 40 sovs. Two miles, over eight flights of hurdles. Six subs."
This valuable prize had just been taken by a ten-to-one shot, ridden most admirably by the acquitted co-respondent of the noble horseman who had bunkered the favourite down the wrong course, and we all filed round to the back of the stand to see the winner bought in. It was about the only thing there was to do for ten minutes or so, wherefore all but the tactiturn, the tired, and the tight-booted trapesed round to the rostrum with a Cleopatra-going-to-meet-Antony hopefulness. Round and round a small railed-in grass plot, a stable lad paced a still panting mare, whose sides were pinked by the spur, and whose knees were so far ahead of her toes, that when she stood still she looked as though she were getting ready to make a jump. There would surely be a vitriolic battle-royal to possess her, and, anticipating much spirited bidding, and being anxious not to begin till all were assembled, the rural auctioneer stood in his pulpit rubbing his hands together like the handkerchiefless person who eats prawns in a race-train, and grinning as if he had suddenly contracted gas on the brain. Nor was he disappointed. Opposed by a venal bunch of leather-legginged get-rich-quick's, Bronzewing's owner had to go to sixty-five guineas to retain her; and then, for a moment, we looked like languishing again, for even the excitement attaching to the attempted dispersal of a sensational stud of one soon dies down. "But don't go away, please," cried the auctioneer, to our intense relief, "I've one here that also ran. Williams, bring in Little Breeches."
And Williams did. Little Breeches, a nine-year-old gelding, standing about 17.2, came into the ring sideways like a one-eyed ghost reluctantly winging its way to heaven. Little Breeches had been given a pint and a half of the celebrated "Flying Hornet" preserving whisky before going to the post, and had tried three times to hang himself in the starting-gate; now that the first effects of the powerful stimulant were working off, there remained only a splitting headache, whose mission it was to beat it into him that he had been played, and, still too doped to show resentment, he walked round and round as though in a trance.
"Now, gentlemen," cried the auction person, "I claim your attention to Little Breeches, by Gumsucker out of Sewing Girl, by Gozo, by Wild Oats. A nice, handy animal, gentlemen, and one that is sure to pick up a perfect roll of money this winter. He's in the Sluggard's Plate at Sandown Park next Tuesday at a nice weight, and only needs keying up to concert pitch; now what may I say for him?"
But answer there came none.