Part 9
"Come, gentlemen, come," rated the auctioneer, in a tone of astonished reproach, "it only wants one of you to give me a start; may I put him in at five guineas? Walk him round again, Williams. A great, slashing colt like this--he was fairly on terms with the winner at the last hurdle--and five guineas only bid! Five--five in two places--six, thank you, sir. Six guineas only for Little Breeches! About a tenth of what he'd fetch to pull an omnibus! Seven, seven--against you, sir, at seven--eight. And eight I'm only offered; have you all done at--nine, thank you, nine; may I make it ten for you, sir? Ten--going at ten----"
But even as the auctioneer hung upon his own words there came running from the inner recesses of the refreshment room a burly, fatherly man of fifty, who had the hansom-cab industry stamped indelibly all over him. He seemed amazed to find that the sale had progressed so far, while he had been painting the future of cabbing in rosy colours and bottled stout, and he pushed and elbowed his way through the throng as though eager to retrieve lost opportunities. Ducking beneath the railings and entering the sale-ring, he stooped and ran his critical right-hand fingers up and down the forelegs of Little Breeches.
"What's this one, mister?" he asked the auctioneer.
"Little Breeches, sir, by Gumsucker out of Sewing Girl," replied the alert salesman, and added, "and it is against you at ten. Now have you all done at ten----"
"AND SIX!" advanced the representative of the Shoful Trust, with the guileless air of one who hails from near to Nature's heart; and in two ticks he was being roughly hustled towards the bleak high road by a posse of the pantomimic pensioners done up in football pads, known as the racecourse police.
But there are more takedowns at this game of racing than are suspected by those who "do" their Derby dryfooted at their favourite music-hall--even if one gives them in the takedown by the exhilarated gentleman who is so pleased with himself at having worn dark blue and yellow braces, that he enters the stalls with them dangling at his heels for the racegoers in the pit to see and applaud. Though these stallites, after seeing St Amant spring from somewhere underneath the orchestra, execute a few wild buck and wing steps in Barnard's Ring, and then shoot bodily over the top of Mr Sherwood's cottage, may say of the sporting press what David said in his haste of all concerned, the dark thought and aching heart of desperation and despair are as often seen in racing, as the black eye and splitting headache of delirious joy. For instance, estimate if you can, the weight of anguish that is but faintly shadowed in the following letter, picked up by me from the platform at Victoria:
"PEAVINE VILLA, NEW YEAR'S NIGHT.
"MY DEAR FATHER AND MOTHER,--
Having cried over your sympathetic letter of yesterday until I have started my nose a-bleeding, I have now hypothecated my wedding ring and keeper, as you advised, and propose to stack my drapery and return to dear old Saffron Walden to-morrow by the 10.25 from Liverpool Street. Heav'n knows I have loved James Henry (who has again recently lost his voice in formally applying for a rise in his salary) as ardently as any woman could; but the accursed Yellow Card has come between us. How little did I dream when, nine months ago, James Henry offered me his heart, his hand, and whatever was left in the weekly envelope after sweetening Topping and Spindler; and I promised that even if he could not make me completely happy no other should ever try to do so; that he entertained no thought of forsaking the double-your-stake-but-stick-to-your-martingale system!
"For many months past James Henry, whose views on the true methods of banishing poverty lend themselves felicitously to the purposes of the vigilant humorist, has been strenuously endeavouring to choke a firm at Flushing (postage 2½d.), and take it away from them. Meantime the rent has fallen two quarters in arrear, and our butcher has had the immortal rind to stop supplies entirely. The wretched grocer has followed suit, and--from the quires of circulars telling how an eighty-shilling income should carry a £200 bill-of-sale, which are dropped into our letter-box--has mentioned the matter more than once across his counter. The climax came on Tuesday evening, when, during Henry's absence, the landlord called. He had a bunch of bananas, a bottle of whisky, and six mince pies in a paper bag; and, saying he would rather meet me than a mowing machine any day, he chased me thirty-three times round the sitting-room sofa, and nearly forgot that he was a gentleman. I judged it better, however, to tell James Henry that Mr Groundrent's demeanour was extremely frigid and bitterly threatening; for no wreck of matrimony can destroy its high ideals or take from her, who was judicious while it lasted, the gain to her own soul of unselfishly endeavouring to preserve peace at any sacrifice; whereupon James Henry wrote as follows:
"'Look here, Groundrent, dear old soul; it galls me like sin to have to hand you the ice-bowl once again, but all my stocks are falling--Bath Tramways, Allsopp's Ordinary, Cotton Spinners' Deferred, and Schweppe's Pref.--and I can't even book a date till one of them goes up. Knowing, however, that you occasionally make out a little bit of paper when you hear of any goods of an extra-superior quality, I want you to keep your mouth shut and absorb the following right straight into your system: You must have a pony each way to-morrow, Broiled Bird in the Hardware Plate, and when it has rollicked home, just pay yourself the two quarters' rent due, and act honourably by dropping a little cheque for half of the diff. remaining into any pillar-box, addressed to--Yours and so forth.'
"The occasional charwoman's little boy took the letter round, and was unreflectingly detained in the hall--I say unreflectingly for the reason that the youth was sucking a heavy line in paregoric lozenges at the time--while Mr Groundrent penned the following reply:--
"'Sir, you omit, intentionally, or otherwise, the Turf alias of the bug-eyed slanderer who averred that I occasionally pricked the garter; but I respect your confidence, and even beg to slip you a bigger cert than changing a shilling for a blind man. I want you to take the cotton batting out of your ears and let the good thing soak right in--Bum Bailiff for the Man in Possession Stakes, first thing in the morning. Act honourably, as he has imperative orders to nail anything to the floor if he catches you trying to shift it--Yours and all, N. G.'
"Broiled Bird did not, I regret to say, connect; but Mr Groundrent's nominee arrived before we were up. He is at this moment gridironing a kipper at the kitchen fire and reading aloud to our small servant the more mirth provoking paragraphs from the "They say" column of _Stubbs's Mercantile Gazette_. Please have the spare bed well aired. I can walk up from the station, and leave my trunk in the cloakroom till later, since you say that old Snowdrop is nearly due to foal. Since Louisa took it to Southend it only fastens with a hairpin, but lord knows there's nothing in it to shock a married railway man. So no more, with love and kisses,
HENRIETTA."
And here must I break off, for the first bell has gone, and to-night dinner is to be followed by that fine old country-house frolic which has been the beginning of so many flourishing society divorces--snapdragon with the lights out.
Thine, VIOLA.
EPISTLE IX
EATON SQUARE, _Tuesday, February_ 15_th._
MY DEAR PATRICIA,--
How extremely dead are the pretty customs of St Valentine's Day! Time was when the bright, lively girl who for two or three seasons had been, as it were, a rag on every bush, used to look forward to the 14th of February to "get the office" to become the whole garment to some deserving young bachelor who had been reared with care. For such, St Valentine was a sort of last chance for late chickens, as the incubator persons say; but youths do not seem to take seriously to matrimony now, and if by chance one proposes to a girl in a conservatory or on the stairs, he calls round in the morning to apologise. And valentines--the earliest of which, dear, a red brick engraved with "Only one girl in the world for me," in cuneiform characters, which was handed by King David, the first royal co-respondent, through the transom in Uriah's roof, you still may see in the British Museum--are quite things of the past. Lovesick swains do not give, but expect to receive, valentines in these days; and only yesterday Lady Mabel Smoothleigh was telling me how her latest "boy" had importuned her to "send me something you have kissed." But Mabel acted rather meanly, I think, in sending him her great athletic husband, a person of biceps rather than a beau, and one who while paying Mabel little attention himself is most handy at rushing up and sticking his knee in the pit of a weakling's stomach, if he catches a weakling even looking at Mabel on the rare occasions when he takes her out. I have quite frequently noticed that these burly, impetuous bridegrooms who, before marriage, exact the most definite promises that ducksie will never, never leave their sides--not even to go to the bathroom by herself--are the first to tire of propinquity and to yearn to get back to the mud of the football field on Saturday to see the Kensal Green Hotspurs lay out the Brompton Cemetery Uniteds. The unfortunate "best boy" is dreadfully damaged, I fear, and principally through his not putting himself, as the old-fashioned Methodists used to say, "in a suitable attitude to receive the blessing," but really these light-weight Josephs should make fuller inquiries.
Yesterday, let me tell you, I came perilously near falling into a new and insensate hobby: to-day I am happily again as free and unfettered as the yellow heathen who, getting no answer to his latest prayer, pitches his Joss out into the back yard and dances a wild fandango on its breast. Yesterday I hung for awhile over the yawning chasm in which are immured "the Fancy": to-day I resume my former belief that the toy dog, with its asthma and its silk coat, and its velvet pad and its chronic snuffles, amounts to a public calamity. Write down in wine upon a rose-leaf scroll, as old Omar says, that I have had a very close shave of Caniolatry, but have got out.
I had strolled round to Grosvenor Place to carry a message from Féo to the widowed Lady Steyning, whose only daughter is so vitiated by having always been given her own way that she positively breeds Blenheim spaniels in the cream-and-gold drawing room which her anguished mother had specially modelled on that of the Viscountess Hayashi, in "the Gardens," lower down. But Io Venusta Falconrouge Mayleigh--a rather ancient and honourable name to be giving a pug-nosed tyke a carbolic bath with--simply exists for her dogs; she reads and writes and talks and dreams of nothing else--indeed she told me in confidence she veritably believed that the fascinating animal who tempted Eve was a fabled but unattainable ideal "cross" between the Schipperke and the Redwillow Airedale. Such a contention would surely have entangled even Solomon himself--though, to be sure, the scriptural embodiment of wisdom who admitted that "the way of a man with a maid" had him beaten out of his boots would not take much losing nowadays. I felt dreadfully sorry for poor Lady Steyning, however, when the last little animal to receive its ablutions precipitated the complete outfit--basin, unguents, brushes, everything--partly over her lovely new oyster-blue moire and liberally upon the equally beautiful green Wilton pile carpet, for her nerves are not strong and she suffers from a rheumatic affection of the eyes which constant weeping only aggravates.
But maternal tears have no effect upon Io; she has long accustomed herself to criticise her hysterical mother with considerable precision and an utter absence of sympathy; so, with a brusque but not unkindly "There, there, chop out the twaddle and turn off the tears and Vi and I may come back from the Dog Show in time to take lunch with you," she dragged me downstairs, bundled me into a hansom, and almost before I had realised it we were bowling along the newly-made roads inside Buckingham Gate and traversing a perfect forest of labourers, all swinging their picks and shovels and other armorial bearings of the fine old Brassey family.
"I confess that her eyes give her some trouble," remarked IO, as she drew her suede gloves on in the cab, "but she's a jolly sight too fond of calling her soul her own. The amount of 'footle,' as Mr Crosland calls it, that my brother Bill and I put up with from her exceeds human belief. _I_ invariably talk back at her, but Bill, male-like, is more compassionate: he usually says nothing, taps the butler for a tenner---that's the best of paying servants regularly: you can always touch them for a bit if you run short--and then comes back in three days to see how the land lies. He'd have gone to Australia years ago, but for transportation being abolished and an idiotic system called 'passage-money' substituted. Aha! here's Piccadilly Circus; what do you say to a sherry and curacoa at the Cri.; north of this point all alcohol is outside the pale of Christian toleration?"
She has quite lost the girlishness that took Girton by storm, dear, and the charmingly confident way in which she entered the wine bar, and, sitting down at a small table and summoning a waiter, cried "Small elevens for two shareholders, and get a gait on you; we're keeping a 'fresh' horse waiting," would have compelled your admiration. Nor was she one whit less at home at the Dog Show itself. In her long tweed coat, cut loose enough in the back to give play to her gathered short skirt, and the high, tan, laced boots which only the neat-footed can wear with absolute confidence, she strutted up and down the sawdust aisles, disinterestedly accepting a saddle-soap or hound-glove catalogue here and criticising a "nicked" or "trimmed" ear there, or declaring to some sister enthusiast that fish-biscuit manufacturers were every bit as mendacious as restaurateurs--stick to them for a month or two, and you are well done; after that you must hunt up somebody new who has got a name to make. I felt such an unqualified novice in dog matters that I could have screamed out of sheer exasperation; although I feel sure that I seemed quite deeply "in it" to Io by the hearty way she laughed when I told her how "we"--(it was an old, old story of Mr Contango's which I fortunately remembered)--won the Waterloo Cup with a dog who was trained exclusively on '48 brandy, and to whose tail a firework was adroitly attached at the psychological instant of the starting-gate going up.
We returned to Grosvenor Place to find Lady Steyning still tearful and distinctly not making the most of the placid middle age which should be her welcome portion. "I do wish you had been here an hour ago, Io, instead of dallying with your everlasting dogs," she bleated, "Sir David Fenner, from Harley Street, has been and he associates my _iritis_ with the gouty diathesis--_arthritic iritis_, I think he called it. And I grieve to tell you--" (here the inevitable weeping started)--"he made no secret of the pro-bab-b-b-bility--" (here she broke down piteously)--"of my becoming stone b-b-blind before very long!"
For a moment Io was manifestly embarrassed. She did not weep, but strolling mechanically to the piano, upon the music rack of which stood an autographed first copy of _Get Your Hair Cut_, she struck a few treble chords to regain her composure. Then, turning, she went and laid her right hand kindly on her mother's shoulder.
"Never mind, old sportie," she said, "you have always hated my 'everlasting' dogs; now, perhaps, you will discover the utility of them. With 'Spotty,' or 'Dearie,' or 'Flossie' on the end of a bit of string, and a stick to tap the pavements with, you can still toddle round Belgravia for many years to come!"
Suiting the action to the suggestion, Io closed her eyes and, shuffling across the room, cried in an assumed and whining voice, "Buy a box o' lights, sir, pity the poor blind, the poor blind!" For some reason or other, Lady Steyning burst into tears and rushed from the room: probably, as Io hazarded, "That blessed brother of mine has been bothering her again: he's _constantly_ upsetting her."
I think that if I were Io I should take a firmer hand with a brother than she does. For a younger child he enjoys too many privileges--and naturally abuses them. Lady Steyning (whom he greatly shocked one night at the Opera by shouting out to Edouard de Reszke, during his greatest scene in _Faust_, "Dy'e mind singing a bit slower, old man; my French is a bit rusty and I'm blowed if I can follow you!") thinks, for instance, that by encouraging him to go to all the best theatres and recitals, his better nature may eventually be appealed to and his baser propensities subdued. To this end she has given him _carte blanche_ to ring up on the telephone her box-office agents in Bond Street, and to have put down to her account whatever seats he needs. He may be slowly assimilating music--and Io says she will back him to make more noise at a music-hall bar than Handel and Mozart and Rossini rolled together--but it is scarcely in accordance with old-fashioned views of propriety that a firm of high-standing in the musical world should have to render such a bill as the following to--
THE RIGHT HONOURABLE THE COUNTESS OF STEYNING.
_In account with_ ---- and ----
157A Old Bond Street, W.
_To_
Feb. 10th. 1 Stage Box. Red Barn Varieties, Kilburn (Grand "Corder" Night) . . . . . . . . . £2 2 0
" 11th. 10 Resvd. Fauteuils. Peckham Parthenon (Testimonial to "Pills," head waiter) . 3 15 0
" 12th. 4 Dress Circles. Tabnab's Tottenham Empire (First night of "Toffy's Trotter, or Tannhauser in Ten Minutes") . . . . . . 0 8 0
Feb. 13th. 2 Sofa Stalls. Poplar Pavilion (Wrestling Matinee, Acton Jim _versus_ Gunnersbury Joe) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0 15 0
" 14th. Grande Loge. Bow Tivoli (Compy. Benft., Widow and Childn. of Fireman Gaspipe) . 3 3 0
" 15th. 2 Standing Rooms. Club Row Parthenon, Brick Lane, E. ("Pearly" King's Select Dog Fight) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 0 0 -------- £14 3 0
And it is made all the more mortifying by the unctuous leer of the shopman in Bond Street, who, when poor Lady Steyning (not having perused the account) calls in to change a book or get a new piece of music, remarks:
"Might we ask yer leddyship to favour us with yer leddyship's orders for theatre tickets a little earlier, if possible? We very nearly missed the four dress circ's for 'Toffy's Trotter' last Wen's'dy through Tabnab's Empire not bein' on the telephone."
Pray what _do_ you think that preposterous girl, Euphemia Hulcot, has just done? Being still under the impression that the "rich military blood of Uncle Joseph" flows in her veins, she has procured an appointment as a field-nurse in this Russo-Japanese unpleasantness, positively! In truth, Uncle Joseph's military record was so conspicuously unbloody that, like Dod Grile's hero, his friends sought for him the Humane Society's leather medal for saving life; nor did he lose his leg at Inkerman, but in the Marylebone Road while spending the evening at the house of a man who was not at home himself, though his wife was. Uncle's involuntary host came home quite unexpectedly, however, and, thinking the place seemed too crowded, picked up the blunderbuss with which his ancestor fought (on both sides, by the way) at Naseby, and put about twelve ounces of buckshot, some old garden nails, and various other marine stores into Uncle Joseph's left leg just as Uncle Joseph was doing Follow-the-man-from-Cook's out of the window--"a Joseph never was a stayer!" as Mrs Potiphar remarked when she cast the coat-tail into the rag-bag. Six of the smartest surgeons in all England received Euphemia's kinsman at St Mary's Hospital, and, an hour later, when he recovered consciousness, they told him not to worry over his lost limb, but to consider it as a contribution to his mashing record.
To her fugitive knowledge of surgery, gathered from the four corners of _Hahnemann Undone, or How I Spiked Homeopathy's Battery_, she has added a course of campaign training, chiefly consisting of sleeping on a seaweed palliasse out in the bicycle shed, and now she is literally bursting to ring the bell on the Red Cross League. Nothing but the Rembrandtesque hue of her tresses secured her the official permit to join the fighting line. Said the extremely exalted Jap person who gave it, "Every time I look at that ginger nut of yours, puss, I think of a little bit of stuff that I left behind in Nagasaki, and for her sweet sake alone I will slip you the trysting place of the 10th Osaka Mounted Assassins. Hand this to their Colonel"--here he presented her with a Chinatown washing bill--"and he will give you the put-and-call of the field coffee-stall, such as it is. Fare you well!"
Please the pigs and she's not pinched, Euphemia will leave Western barbarians and the Albert Docks on Wednesday next, wearing a loose shirtette of wax-red pongee girded to the ear-lobe with whalebone, and confined at the waist by a gold and matrix buckle. A plain gold necklet with topaz collets and a lucky pig charm, Harris tweed knickerbockers held in place by orange silk galluses, and pegamoid putties with hand-painted chrysanthemums, will complete the toilette. She will carry a somewhat darker blouse for evening wear, and cricket shoes, in the full expectation of having to stand in some slippery places before she gets back; also a silver whist-register and marking pencil, a "Little Wonder" printing-press for marking her linen, combination purse and card-case, glove-fastener, and a small wrist-bag containing loose change for 'bus fares, etc. Thus equipped she will travel with every confidence, and is not a bit afraid of falling in with Cossacks since she is quite an adept at climbing a telegraph pole. As her aged Uncle Joseph says, she will be more in touch with life than he was at eighteen, when he swarmed up the lightning rod at the Girls' High School and then found the window fastened.