continually chevvied through life by utterly uninteresting
information, I may tell you, Patricia, that a week ago I had serious
thoughts of going in for athletics--fencing, punting, rowing, and
especially wrestling. Bridge is all very well in its way, motoring
is not so insufferably rotten, and golf, played to sacred music,
satisfies the elderly, but it is the feat of honest labour that gives
a girl the elasticity, the baudelarian swing of the hips, and the
sweet self-confidence that she so much desires. And I had been a
long-distance worshipper of athletes time enough to look upon them
all as Olympian gods until my muscular chum Dot Warnford--why is it
that the girl who is physically capable of throttling a Lothario with
a "full-nelson," or throwing a Tarquin over her head with a
"flying-mare," invariably bears a name like "Dot"?--came down last
week-end. As a matter of fact I wired for her, purely and simply
that she, who can infuse poetry into white canvas gymnastic shoes, or
swing Indian clubs till the other girls in her environment look like
a set of cripples, might feast her eyes as I have daily done upon
"Socrates Aristides' Phalanx of Undefeated Graeco-Roman Champions,"
now giving performances on the Pier. You have surely heard of
Socrates Aristides at the London variety theatres: he is
alternatively called The Aggravating Athenian? He is a truly
splendid fellow, with just such a torso as they used to depict in the
advertisements of Argosy braces--so widely dissimilar to that of the
fashionable young man of to-day whose only exercise is betting on the
tape. Aristides is, so to speak, the basic and fundamental principle
of the whole show, the eight magnificent oysters adhering to the rock
being the Intimidating Israelite, the Appalling Abyssinian, the
Hideous Hessian, the Paralysing Parthian, the Dreadful Dalmatian, the
Frightful Finn, the Horrible Hebrew, and the Terror of Tullamore. To
the voice of Aristides I had listened enthralled, on many successive
afternoons, as from the stage he offered to back any member of his
troupe to inflict upon any comer more "falls" in one hour than the
busiest woman in the Peerage would willingly acknowledge in a
lifetime. Frequently some fatuous British amateur (for to our
national shame no insular professors appear to be in the business at
all) would essay a bout, whereat the noble Greek would call
forward--say the Horrible Hebrew, who, having hitched up his worsted
tubulars so that nothing might occur to mar the complete enjoyment of
the programme, would proceed to put an armlock upon the stranger that
would cause him to cry peccavi in quite a loud tone of voice.
One vigorous, conclusive blow from Dot Warnford has completely
shattered the rose jar! To some stomachs the bare and brutal truth
is food, and tonic, and medicament, but my own digestive apparatus
positively refuses to form chyle from crude or even unadroitly
disguised veracities. The finest wine-cellar in all Mayfair may be
raised upon concrete, bricked to stand for ever, and majestic in its
very mustiness; but to my mind it passes swiftly away--crumbles into
atomless nothingness--from the instant that an impoverished tenant
begins to keep coals in it; in other words, Dot had not only seen the
"Phalanx of Undefeated Graeco-Roman Champions" several times
previously, but knew intimately each one of them, or, as she put it,
had "met them on the mat." And thus did she proceed to strip them:
The Intimidating Israelite, said she, won his title with a pack of
cards while keeping a Leytonstone livery-stable tidy at eighteen bits
per week; and the Appalling Abyssinian came to this country in charge
of a performing elephant, but so outdid the pachyderm in sea-sickness
all the way that he was thrown overboard in Gravesend Reach by the
coarse, but facetious, sea-captain, who dearly loved a joke and
thought the place not inappropriate. The Hideous Hessian came from
Shepherd's Bush; it was a noted kind of grease-paint to be bought in
Garrick Street, Covent Garden, that gave to him the pale sea-green
complexion of a turtle's stomach. The Paralysing Parthian and the
Dreadful Dalmatian never appeared together on the same
platform--indeed the parts were played by one and the same man on
alternate nights in knee-pads of a different colour. Far from his
being either "dreadful" or "paralysing," his late chums, at the
Westbourne Park Loco Sheds (G. W. Ry.), where he had been an esteemed
foreman engine-wiper, spoke of him as being "as quiet a bloke as ever
grafted in a boiler works." The Frightful Finn was better known at
Barnet Fair as "Dirty Mickey" who used to do a catch-as-catch-can
with a bear in a boxing booth until, becoming unduly intoxicated one
night, he so ragged the bear that it shouted, "Aisy, Mick, ye
something fool!" and eventually drew a knife from its hind leg on
him; an unfortunate affair which consummately ruined the show. The
Horrible Hebrew, who originally sold patent medicines from a
waggonette at market street-corners, had had the bad luck, one busy
night, to get an entire batch of bile beans contaminated by coming in
contact with his naphtha lamps, thereby ruining for ever his chances
of succeeding in the medical profession; while the Terror of
Tullamore nobody, either here or in Ireland, seemed to know anything
about. Dot had herself been so curious to learn something of the
Terror's doubtless lurid past that she had addressed a personal note
of interrogation to the Chief Constable of Leinster. This polite
official, however, after making the most exhaustive and exhausting
inquiries, replied that the only "terror" that had been known in
Tullamore during the last half century, was a certain old lady who
was in receipt of eight shillings a week from a firm of
widows'-pension teamen in London, and who, immediately on receipt of
postal order every Friday, expended the whole of the money in bottled
porter, and then, after removing most of her clothing, proceeded to
delight the populace by dancing in the streets, varying the
performance occasionally by standing on her head. Why is it, I
wonder, that elderly ladies invariably dance when under the influence
of alcohol?
Thus passes my infatuation of yesterday, and with the departure of
the athletic Dot, with her dumb-bells and developers and her
efficacious substitute for heavy bedclothes, the very mention of
which has often caused a sudden suffusion of blood to the temples of
a modest listener of the adverse sex--"You don't catch me in bed,"
says she, "without a _Sportsman_ between the blankets!"; only
meaning, of course, that the journal of that name, being printed on
particularly good paper, gives warmth without weight--I shall subside
to my former feminality, contemptuous neither of mice nor men.
It always amuses me to recall your bygone but well-remembered remark,
that life in Brighton consisted principally in changing clothes and
inquiring for letters, for it never fails to set me wondering
whether, at the time of your last visit to the Sussex shore, you were
too young to be ardent--an overgrown, scraggy schoolgirl to be kept
out of mischief by close surveillance--or old enough to be jaded--a
mere gawky and uninteresting cipher in that desert of humanity, the
big hotel. In all probability, however, you would have sound
economical motives for visiting Brighton during June or July, when
the leaders of the aristocracy in the King's Road are the second
bride of the great cereal breakfast-food, or the mamma and daughters
of the sixpenny summer-drink crystals, "pure, wholesome, and
possessing the pleasant aroma and refreshing acidity of the fresh-cut
lemon?" It makes all the difference.
As I close these sentences the woman whose ripe beauty and rich
millinery have been the talk of Brighton for a month past, is weeping
herself hideous across two lawn pillows and behind drawn blinds in
the costliest mansion in Hove, while the youth who was harpooned
three weeks ago, and who resigned himself to her absolute despotism
until yesterday, is on his way to Ghargaroo in the Unfriendly
Islands. The conquest of young Mr Bruton Berkeley by Mrs Lottsmore
Barres, the junobusted relict of the late Colonel B. Gopher Barres,
who founded the famous American trust for manufacturing baking-powder
from the eggs of the sea-urchin and who met his death through getting
his feet wet while playing the hose on his stocks, had startled even
Brighton (for whose benefit matrimony is locally supposed to have
been exclusively invented) by its suddenness. For Mr Berkeley had
seemed (and probably was) quite a shy and blameless youth, satisfying
neither the eye nor the judgment, and remarkable only for the uniform
vapidity of his expressions. Meeting Mrs Barres, whose evening lace
stockings and patent-leather Richelieu shoes are a byword down here,
at a dance-supper at the Dome, however, the boy formed the instant
opinion that she fairly out-classed all other representatives of her
sex, and on telling her as much, was invited to call upon her on the
following afternoon. It was whilst paying this pleasant call that he
got what was coming to him.
It was indeed within five minutes of his arrival, while his charming
hostess, dressed to within an inch of her life, had him alone in the
Louis-the-Something drawing-room, telling him of her unhappy married
life with the late Colonel, and just how the Supreme Court gave her a
decree on her substantiating her complaint that the respondent
refused to divide his popcorn fairly that, without any warning, her
nose began to bleed quite freely. Ever resourceful and ready for
emergencies, Mr Berkeley rushed to the door, turned and took the key,
and promptly rammed it down Mrs Lottsmore Barres's well-covered back,
doubtless noticing as he did so that she would act wisely in future
in renouncing all such nourishing foodstuffs as sweet potatoes,
butter, cream, sugar, new bread, and chocolates. At that moment
steps were heard in the corridor outside; some one tried the door,
and finding it locked, began to knock. Upon realising the awfulness
of the position, and the further fact that she could not return the
key without disrobing in the presence of an acquaintance of only one
day's standing, Mrs Lottsmore Barres promptly fainted, and--well, in
true Lovelacian acknowledgment of the thoughtless way in which he had
compromised the lady, Mr Bruton Berkeley empowered the sixteen male
and female servants who at this juncture burst in the door to
announce his immediate and formal engagement to their mistress. In
place of the prosaic handshake with which his arrival had been
greeted, Mr Berkeley departed with a warm and affectionate kiss upon
his lips and a large panel photograph by Sarony, measuring 17x36,
without the massive silver frame, beneath his arm. It may have been
not recently taken, but it showed the upper two-thirds of Mrs
Lottsmore Barres in half-tone profile, laughing artlessly over her
right shoulder at an imaginary husband who was being taken to prison
for her dressmaker's bill, and was calling back to enjoin her not to
forget during the coming sixty days that she was still a married
woman. In return, Mr Berkeley sent Mrs Barres a hurried tinograph of
himself taken on the beach, not as a permanent record but as a sort
of carry-over until the photographers in East Street could finish for
him a set of cabinets; which done, he set up the magnificent picture
of his fiancée on a gilt and plush easel in his hotel bedroom.
Alas! why does not some unseen power obliterate us all, just as we
have reached and sat for awhile on the topmost pinnacle of earthly
happiness? What heartaches might be spared were we in the midst of
all our glory to be eternally debarred from drifting back into the
muddy pool of humdrum conventionality! That night Mr Berkeley lay
gazing upon the limned presentment of his love by the light of the
expiring fire, precisely as did Wordsworth--or perhaps I should have
said Shelley--when he wrote, his languid eyes still fixed upon her
portrait:
"Of herself but a mere reminder
Till the shadows began to creep,
Then, taking one 'tot' as a binder,
I suddenly fell asleep."
Eight hours later, during the comparatively disagreeable moments of
returning consciousness which preface the superlatively disgusting
necessity for getting out of bed, Mr Berkeley noticed that his window
was wide open, that the lace curtains were floating and flapping like
pennants in the morning breeze. He next observed that towering above
the quite ordinary disorder of a varnished pump on the washstand, a
shower of silver coins on the hearthrug, and a dress-coat in the
fender, there existed a more definite and significant disarrangement
of his chamber's ameublement. Diamond pins and ruby rings and pearl
shirt-studs bestrewed the floor: money and jewellery were scattered
on all sides. Here lay a bureau drawer, all ransacked and upturned;
there a jewel-case, wrenched and rummaged, but not robbed; the lock
of yonder wardrobe had been raped, the sartorial contents of the
wardrobe searched and flung about, but neither damaged nor depleted;
nothing did the scene suggest so vividly as the tousled track over
which an irascible woman had hunted in vain for a fugitive but
favourite hat-pin.
But stay--
From the golden easel the panel portrait of Hortensia Lottsmore
Barres had alone been stolen! The survey of a single instant served
to show that there now adhered to the gilt ledge upon which the
cherished likeness had so lately stood nothing but a scrawled note,
written apparently with much haste, and the charcoal end of a burned
match. Jumping out of bed and clutching the precious document, Mr
Bruton Berkeley read:
"SLUMBERING UNKNOWN,--
"This is a let-off for you, and no sanguinary error! Much, however,
as I need fresh financial underpinning, I cannot 'ease' you with her
eyes watching me. With one exception, you will find your props as
safe, if not as undisturbed, as if they had been spiked down: I have
half-inched nothing but the portrait of--MY MOTHER! I had been told
she was in Heaven: I lament the lie, but hope, as the next best, that
she's still in Society--not that _I_ go out much; in the daytime,
anyway. If I now ask you not to marry her, it is less on account of
caring whether you are lynched for bigamy, than that you don't
somehow connect with a dream I had of my next stepfather.
"Yours for a true bill,
"PYTHAG THE PORCH-CLIMBER."
Inasmuch as the burglar had left untouched quite five hundred pounds
worth of property, not including the two ham sandwiches which he had
tied beneath his boot soles to deaden the sound of his footsteps, and
which were fully identified by the barmaids from the railway station
later in the day, the genuineness of his letter was beyond reasonable
questioning; yet Mr Berkeley timidly but successfully shunned Mrs
Lottsmore Barres until the evening. Then, with the rare daring that
is born of drink, he burst into her presence and inquired with all
the confidence possessed by one who feels that things are coming his
way, what she thought of the old Greek philosophers in general, and
of Plato and Pythagoras in particular? Suspecting nothing, Mrs
Barres replied that she had always regarded Plato as a bit of a
hold-over, but as for dear old J. H. Pythag--how fateful was the
abbreviation!--"why, he should have been nothing less than a
Vanderbilt, 'specially for his brainy distinctions 'tween the soul
an' the body!"
_That_ was enough! Like a true squire of dames, Mr Bruton Berkeley
held his peace at the time, but pulled his freight out of Brighton
with the coming of night. He is now upon the high seas, and his
friends here are sanguine that he will fare well. There is little
risk, after all, in consigning an easy-going, good-natured lad of
mettle, totally devoid of either solidity or ambition, to a horde of
friendly cannibals; whereas an older person of high morals and
credentials going out to such a place as Buenos Ayres to take up an
official position, would certainly be preceded by his reputation for
strict integrity and incorruptibility, and on that ground alone would
be instantly murdered on arrival. As for Mrs Lottsmore Barres, her
wound will quickly heal. Like the racing peer who could never set
eyes on the late Mr Weatherby without feeling an irresistible desire
to scratch something, the mere sight of an eligible bachelor steels
her for conquest. She will array her form in new frocks and her soul
in new sentiments and, with a yellow dog for a mascotte, re-enter the
fray. I do not know that I myself may not risk paying her a visit of
condolence this afternoon: man-hunting is not contagious, is it?
Almost the only drawback to being out of town at this season is that
one rather fails to grasp some of the allusions to "What the Little
Birds are Saying" in the only possible ladies' newspaper; so, dear,
though well aware that you cannot take up a pen without losing a lie,
may I ask you to furnish me with the diagrams to the following:--
OVERHEARD BY THE LITTLE BIRD
In Chesterfield Gardens--"That Lady Alberta would certainly do well
to swear off for a season and give it a much-needed rest."
At the same--"That her coronet only kept on her head by the timely
aid of her left ear at the christening of the new torpedo-destroyer
last Thursday."
At the same--"And that when it came to naming the vessel
_Polyhymnia_, she simply couldn't stick it."
On The Lees--"That the gallant and much-to-be-pitied Major acted
foolishly in going for the Rajah as he did."
At the same--"That all Folkstone has known about it for weeks, but
never expected anything half so rich as last Saturday's free,
_al-fresco_ entertainment."
At the same--"That the genial old soldier's sporting instincts came
out strongly even in his wrath when he kicked the whitey-brown,
half-clad co-respondent in embryo three times round the new golf
links, of which he is such an enthusiastic hon. sec."
At the same--"That it never would have happened if the timepiece in
the boudoir had not been forty minutes slow--despite the fact that
when Cupid gets both arms full he is apt to forget to keep an eye on
the clock."
In Great Maryborough Street--"That His Lordship's friends would
certainly have succeeded in finding the required bail: but that it
was Her Ladyship who prevented them."
At Holloway--"That it was additionally unfeeling of Her Ladyship to
restrain His Lordship's friends from providing him with suitable
food, but that he contrived to support existence till the morning on
some Nubian blacking and a sickly pot of egg-plants which had been
abandoned by a former occupant."
On Deeside--"That it is quite true, as the Honourable Mrs
Tufflold-Knutt informed the _Era_ interviewer after her recent
private theatricals, that she doesn't _really_ know how old she is."
At the same--"That if we were anything approaching the same age we
wouldn't want to know, either."
At the Hotel Sessil--"That Mr Pierpoint Morgan, who is carrying
everything but his coattails before him, is about to subsidise the
Jaffa-Jerusalem Railway (which connects also with Joppa by
sacred-bull team) so that the 10.45 A.M. daily from Tyre (the famous
"Flying Levite") will now be electrified and re-upholstered; and
ice-water, boxes of figs, and cheap editions of 'The Strenuous Life'
and 'Mr Dooley' will be obtainable on all cars."
In Jermyn Street--"That the mystery surrounding the disappearance of
the Honourable Hughie's socks, whilst their owner was being massaged
on Tuesday, has not been cleared up; meanwhile the attendant declares
on oath that Hugh brought none with him."
At the same (in the Cooling Room)--"That Hugh prized them more
particularly from the fact that he bought them years ago in a tavern
bar in Old Broad Street of a now leading light of the Kaffir market."
At the Bazaar in Aid of the Asylum for Disabled Thought
Readers--"That Lady Ena considers the husband who goes to Lhassa and
remains there a greater benefactor than the one who returns home
unexpectedly."
At the same--"That the introduction of the flurried individual as
'the famous telepathic faith-healer from Athens' was an exceedingly
clever bit of invention, all in sixty seconds, although the
'faith-healer' more than once came perilously near wrecking
everything by causing the Athenian to chatter alternately the pidgin
of a Bowlamine Chinaman and brogue of a music-hall Irishman."
At the same--"That blind faith, insatiable hope, and boundless
charity are unquestionably the principal ingredients in Lord Samuel's
composition."
Grieved indeed am I to hear that a bad oyster, carelessly swallowed
while laughing at Lord Archbold's diverting story of the old
donkey-woman at Ramsgate, who neglected Sterne's admonition to keep
one's eye on one's ass has kept you to your room of late, but if your
winning enough to take you to Lincoln depends on my telling you of a
"fetid, mephitic outsider which will be certain to fiddle into the
first three in the Handicap," you will stay away from bleak Carholme
this spring; but from your remark that you are experiencing a "stern
touch of stuckology," I judge that the last litter of blue Persians
was a flam. Though this is perhaps as well, since prosperity
swallows up one's energy and obscures one's virtues, I regret that I
cannot at the moment indicate a prize strain of felines that will
reproduce its species for the sale-bench once a fortnight, while
their owner is mastering the primary principles of Bridge. Should I
hear of one at the Dome, during "Israel in Egypt" to-night, however,
I will put a blue tag on it and reserve it for you.
What odd things servants do say at times! Do you know, Patricia, as
Marshall was dressing my hair this morning, she suddenly exclaimed,
"Aren't you surprised to learn, my lady, as how the Earl o' Mintstalk
was once a domestic servant?" And when I asked her what on earth she
meant, she said "Anyway he admitted before Sir Francis Joon
yesterday, that for years before they was married her leddyship was
his _mistress_!"
But there goes the dinner gong and, as an admirable chef is easily
slighted and I am just about as ravenous as a hyæna with tapeworm,
adios, little one, adios!
Your affectionate friend,
VIOLA.
EPISTLE XI
EATON SQUARE, _Friday, April_ 8_th._
DEAREST PATRICIA,--
Should you chance to have by you such a thing as a disused buffalo
motor-coat, a suit of cast-off oilskins, or any other old garment
which is too conspicuous to donate to the ordinary social leper,
would you kindly send it to the P. and O. Agents at Marseilles--in
the Rue Noailles, I think--to await the return of poor Euphemia
Hulcot, whose high motives have been so shamefully tampered with by
the Japanese Censor at the front that she is returning to pickle the
walnuts and label the jam at her home in Kent, but desires to
re-enter London unobserved? Arriving with the Imperial Army at Wiju,
literally tingling with the desire to nurse back to health the
victims of the spiteful _jui-jitsu_ (or whatever is the name of the
national ambidextrous cussedness) and incidentally to paint
comprehensive word pictures for the _Ladies Sphere_, she found it not
at all nice to be allocated, under fixed arms, to a quiet hamlet
consisting of a house and barn, once made of rice paper, containing a
wild cat and a pack of cards, and situated on a sandy ridge between
two millet fields. She certainly had told off to see that she didn't
go away, two little brown men with half a pair of crimson overalls
between them, who told Japanese stories which no lady could possibly
have heard had they not been related with an accent that was simply
delicious to listen to; also she was given a bamboo gun that would
carry popcorn as far as where the sitting-room window had been
knocked out (and most of the wall along with it) but with strict
instructions in the event of an outbreak to return the weapon at once
to the sentries.