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.
_Much Later._--I am back from their hotel. The birds had risen, in
mastodonic wrath, and gone, but--Mère Jeanniot was there. My
monstrous "might-have-waited" bluff--femininity in its most fatuous
phase--she fathomed at a glance, and conspuez'd (and worse'd) me as
heartily as though I had been the town liar. Much that she said
outdistanced my Ollendorf, but her text, I gathered from a phrase
here and there, was that axiomatic dictum of the incensed fair, "I
like a man to be a man"; whereupon, angered but always a gentleman, I
shouted, with great restraint, "Shut up, _sale bête_! I am an
Englishman, and Englishmen perform their promises!" "Poo-poo!
poo-poo!" snarled the hag, with considerable sarcasm; "if so that be,
where then are your friends, the other Englishmen?" Countered, I
wavered for an instant, then, reckless in my desperation, I fired the
temporal and banal lie, "Not a bit of it: _they_ were no Englishmen!"
Momentarily her parchment brows were knit, her bristling eyebrows
raised. "Not Engleeshmen?" cried she, "pray what then were they?"
"AMERICANS!" I cried, with happy inspiration, and for a few minutes
the ogress's revengeful dial relaxed, and my only fear was that she
would embrace me. But her puzzled look gave way at length: the
shadows gathered again, and she cried, "_A bas, monteur! Non, non,_
deceive am I not thus to be! For did not _l'homme Américain_ visite
Mademoiselle Iréne but yesterday, and was not he as is your
_chapeau_, black--_très_, black? _Decidement, jeune homme, vous
voulez_----." But I fled; moreover, I leave this mill to-morrow,
grist or no grist. Dickie Scales is pulling round, and sends to
say----
But here the entry ends abruptly.
Pessimists of the smart set are shaking their heads with
ill-concealed mirth over Lady Hilda Chinewood's diminishing prospects
of ever getting a decree nisi, a speculation into which she has
already heroically socked about three thousand pounds of her winnings
since Goodwood, with little prospect, so far, of securing any return.
For Lord Percy continues to lead a blameless life in the Bloomsbury
garret to which Hilda's dole of thirty shillings a week confines him,
despite the promise, wrung from him with many tears and threats, to
be guilty of the technical "misconduct" which the law insists upon.
With no assets save two pairs of patent-leather boots ready to be
sent to be soled and heeled, he sits and smokes cigarettes all day,
carelessly, unconsciously forcing upon poor Hilda the conviction that
worldly happiness is a wild singing-bird which may not be caught and
tamed. He certainly refrains, with the gentlemanly consideration of
our common forefather, Adam, from attacking the previous character of
the lady, but he has already jotted down in lead-pencil on the back
of the citation the seven separate grounds of justification which he
intends to plead in defence of his having married her. And they
are:--
1. The weather at the time was beastly cold and uncongenial.
2. The roads were confoundedly sloppy.
3. Respondent could not afford two guineas a day for a cab; and
4. Respondent's walking boots admitted water in large quantities.
5. Respondent's chest was weak, and his doctor had ordered him
"generous living."
6. Respondent was unable to obtain same, he having signally failed
to get his paper done, even with the endorsements of "A. de
Rothschild," "W. W. Astor," and "A. Carnegie," though he has since
been informed that poor dear old Sam recognised the shade of ink in
use at the "Blue Posts."
7. Process-servers had at the instance of (1) Messrs Bellamy
Brothers; (2) Messrs Warren and Craik; (3) Messrs Justerini and
Brooks, already penetrated to respondent's bedroom.