that bill, like the "elderly naval man," who "ate that cook in a
week, or less," and the poison had time to soak in. So that when,
somewhere in the neighbourhood of 12.50 A.M., Catterick's uncertain
footsteps sounded on the stairs, the Countess arose half-mast high in
her bed and cleared her throat to get rid of some honest prose--for,
though an unfaithful husband may dabble heavily in poetry, his
deceived wife will in nine cases out of ten rely (while speech lasts,
at any rate) wholly upon such plain sentences as drop from the tongue
without apparent effort. Addressing him as "you Tarquin of Tagg's
Island!" and "you gin-and-cockling Lothario!" by turns--the latter
being an undoubted allusion to the Southend item--her ladyship
crowded enough novel and up-to-date abuse into the next twenty
minutes to have warranted the assumption that her life had been spent
among soles and flounders rather than Courts and coronets; yet
Catterick yawned through it all in absolute indifference. In
reality, his oblivion was due to alcohol and, with the
highly-rectified cunning which accords with alcoholisation and
protects its votaries, he made no attempt to cut into trouble of any
sort, though here and there in the indictment he caught a fugitive
word which seemed to call for thought. When the Countess's
vituperation had run its course, therefore, he stumbled across the
chamber--or lurched across the room, if you prefer it--and, laying
the hand of remonstrance on his wife's frilled shoulder, observed:
"Goo' ni', Rox'lana, goo' ni'. I'll say wha've got t' say in
morn'ng: much too tire' t' ni'. But this mush I _will_ r'mark:
you're a swee' woman, you're a p'ffic lady, also a d'vout lover of
Art, 'n'earnest stood'nt of Lit'rachoor, an' a class'cal 'thority on
Hist'ry, but as a wom'n of th' world--I say as a wom'n of th' world,
Rox'lana--you're a varnish! Goo' ni'!"
The rapidity with which the sound of his snoring succeeded his exit,
caused the worried woman even more uneasiness than the first sight of
the modiste's bill had done. Surely no guilty man could fall asleep
so readily? Racked by the anguished reflection that people who are
supposed to marry largely for the sake of being happy may be
presumed, if they subsequently remain silent, to have gained what
they desired, Lady Catterick passed a sleepless night, and turned up
at the breakfast table next morning looking positively hideous.
The Earl was, on the contrary, quite breezily cheerful. Adopting a
tone of amused pity--a no-matter-what-you-do-it-runs-in-your-family
air--he even demanded the offending milliner's bill, adding:
"I hate to seem to reproach you in any way, Roxalana, but upon my
honour you were the human limit last night! And your phrases!--odds,
blud o' the murdered missionaries in Zanzibar, your phrases! Where
do you cull it all? From which of the Sunday penn'orths do you draw
inspiration? Nevertheless, despite your eccentricities, I will
remain your friend. Give me the obnoxious invoice--good--ere the
lamps are lighted it shall be manifest to at least one practical
joker that his sense of humour has got beyond proper control.
_Adios_; I shall not be in to lunch."
As a "rare old plant" this successful bit of bluff was about a stone
and a neck in front of "the ivy green," yet, once outdoors, Lord
Catterick's demeanour became serious rather than jubilant. An
appearance in the Divorce Court he feared less on account of any
social paralysis which might supervene than of absolute financial
death. No matter at what cost, therefore, Impératrice's bill would
have to be met that day.
To look towards Israel for assistance was useless. Lord Catterick
had a record in Jewry that the Shylocks themselves kept sweet only as
an antidote to gluttony. He turned, therefore, to an old Harrow chum
who was now an electioneering agent, with an invalid wife in the
Engadine, an easy-going roysterer who was nearly always at the Club
in order to get his affectionate wife's letters, and so avoid the
fearful scene that would happen if one of those epistles fell into
the hands of his typewriter. This good soul grew a trifle
beetle-browed at first, but eventually filled out a pink slip for
£370, on the strict understanding that it didn't extend over
Saturday, and Catterick started for the bank with as much front as a
fortification.
Probably the world seems not so bad after all to the man who, having
devoted the best part of the day to solicitation and whisky sours,
has at last achieved his object, but the thing that did seem hard to
Catterick was having to part with that £368 odd without keeping back
a little bit of pewter for himself. Much ruminating seemed only to
increase the hardship until, arriving at the milliners, he conceived
and bare the brilliant scheme of paying £250 off the bill and
reserving £120 for a brief congress of illicit joy away from
town--why not a quiet and unpretentious run over to the Island? So
entirely admirable did the idea seem that, having dropped the ten
ponies to Impératrice's, he found it hard to hold himself down while
a hansom carried him to Miss Dux's preposterously bijou flat. That
self-same evening Miss Dux commenced her packing, and on the
following day the pair set out for Cowes.
It was by the first post on the day following that of the Earl and
the girl's departure, that a second envelope, bearing the indented
die of the odious couturieres in Clifford Street, turned up at the
Catterick mansion, and all but decided the Countess to track down her
husband and shoot him. The "all but" took the shape of her family
solicitor who, being personally desirous of showing up in the
vicinity of Castle Garden, persuaded his client that it would be
better to tickle the law into turning one foot-loose than to pay the
extreme penalty for a man with a heart two sizes smaller than a golf
ball. For, no longer to keep you in suspense, dear, the second
communication from Imperatrice's was far too significant to admit of
doubt, and ran:
_To bill delivered_ . . . . . . . . . . . £368 18 4
_By Cash on account next day_ . . . . . . 250 0 0
----------
_Balance_ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . £118 18 4
P.S.--_The favour of your Lordship's cheque is politely but
imperatively requested, since the person to whom the goods were
supplied, by your Lordship's order and selection, has lately
disappeared from her flat in Ridgmount Gardens, leaving nothing
behind but an unsettled milk bill._ I. ET CIE.
I can safely leave to your vivid imagination the "scene," enacted
within the range of the windows of Nubia House, which terminated this
little comedy yesterday, for, notwithstanding Lady Catterick's
pronounced hostility towards the Island and all its inhabitants since
the day when a rustic clod of a railway porter stuck his head into
the carriage in which she was travelling from Ventnor with her three
somewhat shelf-worn sisters and addressing the quartette, all as
sombre as convent postulants and erect as Easter candles, asked
gruffly, "All Cowes in 'ere?" she turned up full of vigour,
accompanied by her solicitor and a couple of hunting crops!
The sailor-man who periodically goes ashore in the dinghy for
letters, has just brought me a wire from dear Phyllis Waring--don't
you remember how we all used to sing in muffled tones in the old
dormitories at the _pensionnat_:
Me name's Betsy Waring,
Wot goes aht a-chairing?
--to say she cannot come yotting for a day or two, as she has lost
the latchkey of her flat, and is quite unable to lock up until she
gets another. With customary good nature, she lent it late the other
evening to be dropped down the back of a young lady whose nose was
bleeding outside the Continental, and it has not since been seen. It
certainly was not in the young lady's garments when she was undressed
at Vine Street police-station a little later on; everybody present
can swear to that. She is coming over, however, on Thursday;
meanwhile my curiosity to learn all about her fall-out with Eustace
Doorstep (or whatever was his surname) comes near consuming me. As I
think I once told you, Eustace lately heard from some busybody all
about Phyllis's earlier _affaire_ with Geoffrey, and he raged and
stormed for a time like that spoiled and undersmacked brat who did
not reach the bazaar with his nurse until the gates were closed, and
consequently "didn't get a drum." Eustace is one of those simple,
countrified men who want to marry a girl who has loved no one else,
but whom any amount of others have idolised from a respectful
distance. What logic, or--want of it! Would the honeysuckle attract
the bee if it yielded no pollen?
Yours, for the next twenty minutes on a deck-chair _couchant_, lazily
absorbing Nature's sermon that lives in the blue vault above,
Vi.
EPISTLE IV
HOTEL VASISTAS, DINARD, _Septembre_ 4_re._
DEAREST PATRICIA,--
I am pencilling these lines to you while eating strawberry ices under
a warm sun in a perfectly idyllic garden full of royal roses, and
within two rods and a bittock of a turquoise sea from which, just
across a toy estuary, rise the imperishable crested beauties of St
Malo. Here are aromatic breezes, American bars, health, vigour,
culture, Parisian revue stars sea-bathing in picture hats and
passionate silk stockings, the loveliest crevettes imaginable,
well-aired beds, comely female servants strictly engaged without
characters, petits-chevaux and the musical glasses; and still I am
not happy. Since your two most prominent characteristics, next to
your cheekbones, are curiosity and love of listening, I will tell you
why. If there be any bottom to the theological dogma of that
profound, albeit prolix, metaphysician, Bhikku Ananda Maitriya, of
Rangoon, there was a new star born in the Middle Way on Monday night,
for during the small dog watches, Evelyn Godolphin Mountprospect,
fourth and youngest son of the Earl of Atholbrose, passed in his
dinner pail.
He met his end in the shape of the new regimental mess waistcoat, or
rather in his suicidal efforts to get into it: he died of tight
lacing. Poor little Evelyn! In fancy I can see the flush of anger
on his cheeks, the contemptuous coiling of his spiral nostrils as he
struggled vainly with the conquering corset, breaking a whalebone
here or rending the broché-batiste there, but never quite succeeding
in completing the frightful misplacement of the internal clockwork of
the body which only the anatomist can fully describe, and the War
Office is absolutely oblivious to. Sad indeed it is to see the very
flower of military chivalry stagger and fall, not on the battlefield
but the parade ground, there to lie prone with its staylaces cut, the
while the Army Medical Corps burns a feather.
That I ever really felt up to breaking home ties for the boy's own
sweet sake is extremely problematical. Society is an over-girled
community and the debutante whose female parent cares nothing for
decking her out and putting her where she will be well seen is apt to
have her head turned by coach-panels as richly emblazoned as are the
Atholbrose's; they are cream and gold, you may remember, with the
figure of a roysterer, rampant, in a restaurant, bar sinister, above
the family motto "One more won't hurt us!" But Evelyn himself was
something of a featherweight; the clinging vine rather than the
sturdy oak, and the direct antithesis to what a society schoolgirl
designates a hummer. Though art-gallery and shop-broke, he was more
fitted to become the dog Tray of a young married woman than the
money-getter to a fashionable bride of his own; and his three
brothers had been much the same.
For instance, Caedmon, the eldest, who in a previous state of
existence had probably been a lowing white Chillingham bull-calf, had
been reared side by side with a pretty chocolate-red Hereford cow
with whom (to cut the bovine metaphor) he had made love from his
perambulator in Kensington Gardens. Her name was Lorna Porter, and
her family tree was every bit as genteel and starchy as the acacia
itself. From Eton Caedmon had sent her pretty little weekly notes
enclosing buttercups and daisies privately picked from _les plancher
des vaches_--(Pray overlook it for once, dear. Phyllis Waring, just
off to gather champignons, is chattering at my elbow, and the French
language is _so_ infectious!)--and from Oxford he consigned further
fickle screeds and fritillaries--need I explain that I allude to the
wild flowers which abound at Abingdon and not to any kind of lingerie?
Miss Porter's people, however, entertained other matrimonial views
concerning her, and eventually betrothed her to a South African
person who proposed to settle something like forty-thousand a year on
her for fencing foils and skipping ropes--indispensable articles in
the daily pursuit of flexibility and youthfulness--alone. She being
a Warwickshire beauty, her sacrificial outfit was built in Birmingham
and her passage was booked to the Cape, whither she was shortly to
proceed in the keeping of all manner of stern relations. To Caedmon,
who suddenly made the belated discovery that years of propinquity had
meant something more than mere lukewarm amusement, it was an
overwhelming blow, nor could he discern the slightest prospect of
ever again squeezing her velvety paws or treading delicately beneath
the table on the only footwear in London which would have had
Cinderella beaten to pulp. The thought was maddening; yet in Lorna's
impending departure Caedmon could see nothing but his own finish--a
year of reckless drinking, a month's disinheritance, a family
reconciliation, and a hateful future with a homespun consort.
Gold--red gold which will achieve almost anything in existence save
immunity from gout to the devotee of sparkling ales--was at length
accountable for Miss Porter finding on her window-sill one morning,
an impassioned petition from Caedmon, in which he attempted to pour
forth the left lobe of his soul, but only ran to about one
composing-stick of third-class seaside-novelette dead-weight.
Nevertheless his burning plea to be granted one brief evening of her
society ere she passed out of his blighted life for ever, was
expressed with sufficient clarity to appeal to any woman's inherited
and cultivated love of playing with fire, and Lorna Porter inwardly
and instantly resolved upon making the concession. No matter on how
transparent a subterfuge, her last night in England should be given
to Caedmon; her own hungering heart no less than her love for burning
incense dictated it. She sent an unsigned wire to warn Caedmon that
he might get his wish at any moment; after which she stood in front
of her mirror and changed her jewellery six times while wondering
what on earth could have first given her the idea that he was a sort
of modern St Anthony at about five-stone-seven!
Now, waiting many days for a telegram in a West-end club which has
been given over to the pail-and-brush mechanic for autumn renovation
is not an ideal pastime for an epicure and a man of fashion. To be
compelled to sit and yawn in an atmosphere of size and varnish, in
halls temporarily tenanted by voluble and irascible artisans to whom
one's very presence in the month of holidays and deserted streets is
sufficient evidence of one's constitutional bent for shifting the cut
on the working classes, is singularly tortuous. Blobs of whitening
are apt to fall in perilous proximity to one's coat; jets of slopwash
descend suddenly in hazardous contiguousness to one's hat, until one
grows in time to jump aside for one's very life out of the line of a
swinging platform, or the range of a falling trestle, at the faintest
echo of "Stan' by the sidebar rope, Josh!" or "Lower your endabit,
Bill!"; yet for more than half a week Lord Caedmon bravely faced it
all.
Then at last there came a wire. It was coded from the fair town
whose name is so unpleasantly suggestive of cannibalistic intolerance
of chastity--"Nuneaten, 5.24 P.M."--and it ran:
"_Little parcel will arrive Euston to-night,_ 8.30, _legibly
inscribed Fragile._"
It bore no signature, not another word; that was all. Yet Caedmon,
as he read it forty times, felt the sunshine penetrate his soul anew.
There arose before his eyes a vista of a refined and beautiful girl
in white Mechlin lace and orange-blossoms, turning from a chancel
filled with tulips and palms and begonias and white hyacinths, on all
of which the soft rose light filtered in through a great stained
east-window, to--to cast all aside for a vulgar assignation at a
railway station! "Fragile" was not the word for it: it was frail
beyond the limit of human comprehension.
With Lorna's self-reproachful adjective inscribed upon his brain,
Caedmon jumped into a cab and drove to the most intensely respectable
hotel in Berkeley Square, an establishment so finnickingly exclusive
that its maitre would hardly look at gold and lands unless tendered
by one who had previously submitted references; and ordered dinner.
Surely, he reasoned, if Lorna, for the old love's sake, were willing
to incur this peril, she should be dragged to no ostentatious Palm
Room, nor exposed to the leers of _hoi polloi_ in the best-accredited
"smart" restaurant. "Fragile!" Sweet vestal! Though she clearly
realised the ineffable jeopardy in which the promptings of her heart
involved her, her innate sense of culture made her shrink from the
use of the meaner, but more appropriate vulgarism, "risky!"
Long before his time, and with the stealthy step of an ogre on his
way to rob a cradle, Lord Caedmon alighted from a muffled brougham,
passed beneath the frowning arch of Euston Station, and awaited the
coming of the restaurant train from Warwickshire. And no sooner had
it slidden silently in, than the door of a reserved-first opened, and
Lorna Porter, apparently in evening dress, but completely enveloped
in a travelling cloak and hood of soap-sud grey, stepped out.
Caedmon positively pounced upon her.
"How fearfy good of Twee-est to come!" he cried, taking both her
hands in his.
"Oh, not so vewy fearfy, my twee," answered Lorna, for she too was an
adept in the pidgin; adding with a wicked wistfulness in her great
brown eyes, "though Twee-est would get awfy, _awfy_ ratin' if pals
found out, and Twee-est is scary of ratin'!"
"Twee-est let ratin' go hang; Twee give Twee-est deevie ickle dinnie,
and Twee-est buck-up!" said Caedmon, consolingly; by which time they
were mercifully at the brougham. But the same conversational fog
enveloped his intellect throughout a long and elaborate dinner, and
it was not until Lorna, who was quite a red-corpuscled person when
she wished to be, had waited for it to lift until the coffee and
liqueurs came, that she wondered whether it might be that he was
squiffy. Not that such was the case at all, dear. In reality, he
had brooded over her password "Fragile" until he had brought on a
series of neurotic attacks which the French would call collectively
_le petit mal_. At Market Harboro, two years ago, I had a hunter, a
rare fleabitten grey, similarly affected. The unfortunate beast
remembered having one day staked himself on a thickset hedge, so that
ever afterwards when he came to one, he dropped his ears, screwed his
head slightly to the right, and, with wide-open eyes and tail erect,
squatted. Caedmon's bleat was mild and vapid, but nevertheless
regular so long as he prattled of the extraordinary vogue that
_pendie_ (appendicitis) was having; of the new restaurant being
awfully _deevie_ (delightful) but deucedly _expie_; of Lord Jimmie
being fearfully _diskie_ at finding his wife giving him some
anti-drink stuff in his coffee at _brekker_, simply because he
occasionally got so frightfully _moppie_; but whenever through
Lorna's omission to utter a weary, or an acid, "Really?" there came a
pause, he caught sight of the one word "FRAGILE!" emblazoned on the
wall, and, like my old grey, he died away behind the saddle, and
tried to swallow his palate.
Dinner over, Lord Caedmon led Lorna to the Billiard Room where nobody
ever went. The place was, as usual, empty and shadowy, whereupon
Caedmon instantly--rang loudly for the marker. Neither this servant
or Caedmon observed any peculiarity in the demeanour of Miss Porter
as she opened the game in effective style by stringing together 17,
nor did she pass any remark when she broke down at her next stroke
through using the jigger at a very simple, single-cushion cannon. As
Caedmon went to the table, however, Lorna left the room, presumably
to chalk her cue or something, and--well, that was the last that was
seen of her!
His lordship, suspecting nothing, waited five minutes after taking an
ineffective shot, and then lit a cigarette. After ten minutes he
grew uneasy; after twelve, a second footman came in and mentioned the
fact that "her ladyship" had been gone some little time, in a hansom!
As the man ceased speaking and walked away, the dreaded word appeared
in letters of fire upon the wall, and the future lord of Atholbrose
gasped for breath and clenched his fists.
"I beg y'r lordship's pardon, but is y'r lordship feelin' faint; the
room _is_ somewhat 'ot?" asked the marker.
"Naw, naw," groaned Caedmon in tones strangely Irvingian, "b-b-but
tell me, man, what is your personal conception of the meaning of
'fragile'?"
The man went as pink as a lobster cutlet at Hampton Court, but
parleyed, politely:
"Y'r lordship's pleased to be facetious, but probably y'r lordship's
'eard 'ow I've got the sack over it?"
"Over what, pray?"
"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.