outweighed the advantages, and at any reference to war the little
brown men became mentally opaque. Thus when Euphemia attempted to
"draw" them by comparing the situation to the first campaign in Italy
in 1796, they professed not to have heard of Napoleon as a fighter,
though they remembered all the others, including Jack Dempsey and Gus
Ruhlin; moreover the only accommodation offered a lady correspondent
wishing to change her garments was the open country behind the ha-ha,
or mimosa, bush.
At first Euphemia merely protested in a formal way, but finding this
of no avail, she ultimately insisted on being taken before General
Kuroki, to whom (despite his many polite protests that he was already
five minutes overdue on a previous engagement to hold a hand-to-hand
argument with General Kuropatkin in a mudfield at Ping Yang) she
explained that it might be just as well if he understood that,
although she had temporarily assumed the duties of special
correspondent to the _Ladies Sphere_, she was the most strictly
virtuous and religious unmarried lady that ever came out of a country
where the easiest thing imaginable for a smart girl to do was to
marry any man she wanted to; that though the average Japanese lady
was so inviolably sacred that she was kept indoors till she
degenerated into a sort of tit-bit of family furniture, you couldn't
come that racket on the rosebuds of the West, where no man was
obliged to feel the burden of daughters who took proper care of their
early education. She didn't see anything in that to grin at. Her
family had fought and bled for Great Britain since before
boxing-gloves were invented--till, in fact, it had come to be
regarded as the country's standing Gibraltar; and she didn't propose
to travel twelve thousand miles to be shut up in a tissue-paper
bandbox with nothing but an Asiatic wild cat to which she had not
been properly introduced, to suit the likes of anybody.
Representatives of allied nations--she should not
particularise--might get transitorily dippy over winning one or two
skirmishes with hairy convicts done up in padded ulsters; but "who
was't betrayed the Capitol; who lost Marc Antony the world; who was
the cause of a long ten years' war and laid at last old Troy in
ashes"? A snubbed lady correspondent at the front, she believed.
The General made no reply--a man's real character is only visible in
moments of intense emotion--but, signalling for a fountain pen to a
soldier who had just got a hammer-lock on a Seoul ploughboy whom he
had spotted passing with a pocketful of contraband gingerbread, he
wrote out the following and gave it to Euphemia with a kiss and a
large red apple which he had brought with him from Anju:
"_To our Soldiers in General, and the_ 10_th Osaka Mounted Assassins
in especialty. See to it:_
"_That our well-beloved sister, Euphemia of the Greyhound Legs, the
Unwon Bosom, the acquired staccato trot of Tokio; being neither
geisha, fleur-de-lit, nor ex-swell rag from the Transwaal, stayeth
out of doors as late as she listeth. She doth it for the love of us,
and she's copyright, she is. Nix general orders; to the C Division
say she is our laidifriend and has our private countersign, 'Pass the
beancake. Banzai!_'
"_May your wounds be as halfpence in the Dai Ichi Ginko,_
"_KUROKI._"
Being an advanced disciple of freethought and consequently holding no
superstitions as to the eating of apples, Euphemia at once publicly
consumed one half of the red pippin, giving the remaining half, with
the large, fat worm in it, to the sentry; but matey as the General
had seemed, he really had neither soul nor conscience behind his
little brown eyes. From the time Euphemia accepted that special
permit, she was as nobly a fool-on-furlough as the darkest African
belle that ever was satisfied with a piece of red cloth or a handful
of glass beads. Honeyed as that written watchword looked, it was
substantially the roughest turn-down that ever was put into cipher.
Officers to whom Euphemia produced it shed torrents of tears out of
formal politeness, but knew exactly how many pieces of luggage she
was carrying, and precisely what sort of stockings she had on; and
daily she realised that she was drawing nearer, nearer, nearer to the
outposts. One evening a lieutenant-colonel of infantry, so
repulsively plain that his poor face actually ached from the pain
caused by its terrible shape, put a mark like a Whistlerian butterfly
on the top corner of the passport, and thereafter, the soldiers who
inspected it--and Euphemia--simply whistled through their teeth at
her. At Feng-huan-cheng she was imprisoned for ten hours and slapped
on parade before all ranks for applying the term "a nasty, insulting,
old barn-choote" to a brigadier-general who had passed upon her some
remark which, though unintelligible, was doubtless coarse, since it
caused the sentries to drop their weapons and roll on the floor with
laughter: at Taku-shan the captain of the blockhouse read the
warrant, smiled at Euphemia, counted his money, then shrugged his
shoulders and motioned to her to pass away; it was the same all
through the lines. To this or that person in high office she
applied, day by day, in docile and submissive mood, but, like the
small boy who was eaten by the domesticated lion in the circus at
Barnsley, went away in a pet.
Everywhere and all the day, she says, the stranger's leg is
vigorously pulled. Even the little Jap who, during his convalescence
after being wounded at Souchou, embroidered for her with alleged
cherry-blossoms a square of black satin, gave her his name as Ohara
Whirroo; and she has since discovered that the silk-stitched blossom
bears a strange and striking resemblance to the potato-plant.
Ultimately catching the infectious habit of dissembling the most
unpleasant convictions, she taught herself at last to round-off the
most conventional common-places with some such phrase as "Thanks,
thou colossal and incomparable object of envy to Ananias; thanks!"
But her pity for the wounded Russians who fell into her hands was
very real--as well it might be. They were brought to fight from the
prisons on the convict island of Sakahalin, and had to bear the brunt
of the battle in proportion to their past offences. Thus, the first
line of defence was composed of murderers, money-lenders,
manufacturers of inflammable flannelette underclothing, and pleaders
of the Gaming Act. The second consisted chiefly of stewards of
hunt-meetings, burglars, baby-farmers, and dermatologists from West
Virginia convicted of grafting male skin on to female chins to supply
the market with bearded ladies for freak museums; the last line of
all being the defaulters of alimony and the unmuzzled dog summonses.
The greatest grievance of all was perhaps that which was cherished by
an exile from Warsaw, whose internal clockwork had been rudely
disarranged by eighteen inches of triangular steel at the end of a
Nagasaki musket at Chongju.
"It's all very well for these here Japs to blow about dispensin'
justice distilled to an essence," he remarked to Euphemia, "but to be
bayoneted in the _gutz_* for failin' to abate a smoky chimney is a
bit sultry, ain't it?"
* A purely Muscovite idiom for the pantry parts, the seeming crudity
of which is to be deplored.
A few days ago, Phyllis Waring was keenly desirous that I should
accompany her to Paris to see if _Monsieur le Matou_ is a suitable
piece to put on at the forthcoming performance by the Copthebird
Strollers in aid of the Asylum for the Indignant Blind, but as I am
rather fed up with the French (to say nothing of the idiotic
Strollers, whose sixteen skittish lady amateurs are already
quarrelling as to which first takes "Dick" when _Whittington_ is
produced next Christmas) who sorely need some good and true friend to
point out to them that, having invented matrimony, as they are fully
persuaded they did do, it was unlike them not to patent it and
thereby secure their just fees and royalties; and as, unlike myself,
Phyllis evinces no desire to shun the ephemeral intimacies that
travellers are so ready to establish, she would be sure to find some
chivalrous male person aboard the boat to hold her head at the
taffrail, I did not go. And now it seems that _Monsieur le Matou_ is
but a rehashing of the old, old _ménage à trois_ idea, for knowing
naught of which poor Uriah of Scripture history got steered against
his Waterloo. Poor Uriah! Himself entertaining Hittitic objections
to bathing--(he simply hated sanitation and always swore that it
would hasten his end)--he still had gentlemanliness enough to relax
his customary surveillance while his fair wife performed the
ablutions which he admired but did not understand, and he sate down
outside on the little cork mat, smiling to think how well-beloved he
was quite apart from any question of money. He smiled again in a
self-satisfied way as he heard the water splashing within, for he
remembered how he had said on first seeing the laving tank when he
took over the new house, "Aha! Some silly fool will be drowned in
this, but it won't be me!" and there and then did he renew his vow
that the only way they should ever get him into the thing would be to
chloroform him first. Poor Uriah! How little did he suspect that,
even at that moment, there was creeping on his royal stomach across
the tiles--
But I must not bore you to death with all this moralising, dear.
In _Monsieur le Matou_ the tertium quid is an operatic tenor who,
adoring Madame la Chatte for her dulcet tones alone, drops in to try
her voice, while M. le Matou is at the chase, pursuing the
bloodthirsty hare, the fierce hedge-sparrow. At the psychological
moment--just as Madame closes her eyes to take the upper C--Monsieur
bursts in, a plume in his hat, a tasselled bag hanging from his neck,
a very arsenal bristling in his brown belt. Instantly the wretched
pair, while imploring him to spare their lives, fall at his feet,
implying that, if the worst comes to the worst, they will, like the
man who was on a hiding to nothing the first time Tom Sayers saw him,
"take it lying down."
"No, no!" cries M. le Matou, pronouncing the tag as the stage hands
take hold of the guy ropes in readiness for a quick curtain, "I do
not purpose to destroy you here, but you will find that my terms are
worse than death itself (sensation). They are that you, sir, do this
very night take her with you to Marseilles (increased sensation) by
the 9.15 on the Paris-Lyons-et-Méditerranée!" (loud groans and
hisses, several ladies in the audience who have in the course of
their checkered careers been inveigled into this train, swooning away
in their fauteuils).
After the manner of British adventurers into France, Phyllis rends
the restaurants (and the native tongue) without mercy, but she will
have to be told that there is really no such word in the French, or
any other language, as "Kwezeen," and no necessity for it; though,
truly, it was commendable moderation in her not to write "Kweezeen,"
as is commonly done by the otherwise gifted authoress of "How to Give
a Monday Lunch for a Dozen without Spending a Tosser." The correct
thing is "cuisine," and to spell things with a "K" which look softer
with a "C" is to prove that one was born when the sign was wrong. It
is news, however, that the wearing of captive insects is again _de
rigueur_; and Phyllis was fortunate enough to secure a magnificent
specimen of a dark green hunting-cased cockchafer, held by a gold
chain. It must have looked awfully chic, she says, as she sat in the
fauteuils of the Odeon, but it unfortunately got into a fight with
the armour-plated tiger-beetle of the lady sitting behind, and,
losing its off forceps in the second round, was pounced upon by the
watchful harlequin scarabæus, or "Cairo timberman," of the lady on
Phyllis's left, with which it more than held its own until the
audience yelled for M. Poe to enter the ring and separate them.
Phyllis does not despair of nursing the great green beauty back to
its former health, but it has incurred a fearful "mouse," she says,
and will hereafter wear a "thick ear" to its dying day.
The first flower that blooms in the spring, dear, is the nettle, and
though mere seasonage never yet caused Féo's perennial human
poisonous plant a second's uneasiness, Mr Contango has just stung her
"good and plenty," as they say at the Sessil, by getting run in on a
consolidated charge of assault and battery, also defamation of the
character of prosecutor's sister, obstructing the thoroughfare of
Swallow Street, Regent Street, whilst drunk and incapable, and
damaging a constable's uniform. It is a narrow and craven story,
though the verification of some of the charges at the first hearing,
which terminated in a remand, brought a sweet-and-twenty smile to the
stern-and-sixty dial of the salaried Solon who exists only to
side-pocket his patrons.
To a lady who resided in Burleigh Mansions and who, while appearing
in court in a tight-fitting frock of blue silk with a white Panama
pulled well down over her eyebrows, claimed the modern privilege of
remaining heavily veiled and testifying as "Mrs X.," Mr Contango had
given a cheque for five pounds, the only consideration being (he
said) that it was to form the nucleus of a fund which "Mrs X.," and
several other society ladies were promoting to purchase the penny
steamboat _Citizen_, now moored off Cleopatra's Needle, and fit her
up as a hospital ship for service in the Yellow Sea. Though "Mrs
X.'s" family, counsel said, was a notable old Saxon one and might
have altered English History had not her early ancestor, who treated
Edward the Confessor for scrofula, met his death whilst cat shooting
in the Royal Forest of Pimlico, owing to the bullet leaving his
weapon at the butt, she undoubtedly had a brother who was at the
present time a cabman. She admitted having mentioned this person to
the prisoner with reference to the hospital ship, her relative, who
had frequently observed that "cabbing was no conjure," having said
give him a barrel of bitter and the run of a bedstead shop, and he
would transform the _Citizen_ into the talk of the Thames. She had
also seven sisters, six of whom were willing to leave the stage to
become hospital-ship nurses, but the seventh, who had freckles and a
cock eye, had permanently settled in the postal service. But the
payment of five pounds had nothing whatever to do with marine matters
and she didn't think any the more of the prisoner, who _called_
himself a gentleman, for trying to shift the cut on her in that way.
Meantime the cheque, having been enthusiastically dishonoured, was
returned to "Mrs X.," who subsequently sold it for two shillings as a
natural curiosity to another of her brothers, who, as Charlie Upham,
kept a starting-price office for military turfites of approved
references in Swallow Street. In this capacity Upham was quite well
acquainted, and occasionally did business, with Mr Contango, up to
the time when the latter had five half-dollars on Pitch Battle at
Nottingham, at 100 to 12, and was offered, in settlement, his own
discredited stumer, a postal for three bob, and twenty-eight
half-penny stamps. It was then that he assaulted and battered Upham
in his office, and was flung out of the window, amid the thunder of
the captains and the shouting; and the humane C Division of police,
finding him lying on his back, too frail to withstand the
contamination and wickedness of the outer world, reversed him by his
wrists and ankles, and carried him inside.
Féo no sooner heard of it than, with the promptitude of a Napier, she
rang up that old and trusted repository of shameful secrets, our
family solicitor--by which please do not misunderstand me to mean our
City, or put-and-call solicitor, who is so bewitching a figure at
dramatic first nights; our smart solicitor, who hangs up his red golf
jacket and takes down the _Cause List_ with a large yawn; or our mere
buffer solicitor, who is rude to rural benches over our
furious-driving summonses; but our old family solicitor. She rang up
Mr Coke and bleated that her latest needs were far too sacred to be
related over the phone with Gerrard listening, but would he take the
very first vehicle on the rank, no matter if it were only a
dust-cart, and come to her instantly. And he did.
It was raining rather smartly as they left the house, some twenty
minutes later, and the old lawyer had brought no brolly; but Féo
could not possibly order the carriage for such an odious destination
as Brixton Stir; she could not even suffer a hansom to be whistled to
the door.
"Give Mr Coke an umbrella," she cried, as though she herself were
contemptuous of the weather, and two footmen in powder instantly drew
from the stand an elegant parapluie with an ebon stick, surmounted by
a crutch of tortoise shell bound and heeled with eighteen-carat gold.
All through the long ride to the prison at Brixton, Féo lay back in
the shadows of the four-wheeler's cushions in gloomy silence, her
bosom rent by conflicting emotions. For years past she had lain her
very life--she who had the figure of Diana and the beauty of an
Aphrodite--at the clay feet of a man who now regarded her only as
nine stone of stale cake. Against his myriad infidelities she had
promulgated no decree, well knowing that it would only be disobeyed
in such hearty fashion as to reduce to _débris_ the prestige of
wifely authority; but her soul had sunk within her when she had heard
how her Sandown badge had been worn by the kitchenmaid at the Skittle
Club; she had groaned aloud when asked to believe that such a wire as
"For heaven's sake send her a 'monkey' to shut up" was merely an
impassioned appeal by an unknown London solicitor to a perfect
stranger, on behalf of a ruined old lady litigant who only yearned
for an ape to keep in confinement and make a pet of. For any woman
in the throes of such woe as this, it was the refinement of torture
to read of the Chinaman who believes implicitly in his wife's
fidelity so long as he sneezes once in an hour, and whose wife
persuades him always to wear a wet handkerchief inside his hat to
keep his dear old shaved pate cool. Yet China was a cultured nation
a thousand years before Britain showed the slightest sign of becoming
the delightful Nonconformist poultry-yard she is to-day. Socially,
no less than matrimonially, Contango was a complete fizzle. A sable
evening suit he simply loathed, but took a positive pride in the
frayed and unravelled "County-court" shirt in which he "appeared"
before tribunals, which reduced the claims of his more importunate
creditors to crossing-sweepers' doles of a crown a month, and
sometimes he got judicial "orders" set aside indefinitely. He did
daily homage to his judgment-summons alpaca-jacket, and bowed down
and worshipped his judge-in-chambers brown billycock; but all these
things were as goads and undergarments of horsehair to Féo, who, now
that the miserable backslider was under lock and key, could not
decide whether in view of future peace of mind it was not more
desirable to keep him in than to get him out.
They found him in his cell at Brixton, sprawling in a wooden chair in
a Martin Harvey attitude, but not wholly broken in spirit--indeed, he
had only recently passed some remarks about the administration of the
civil law in England, of such a character that the head warder had
resigned his long-coveted office simply in order to avoid future
contiguity to Middlesex debtors in general. Though Féo tearfully
addressed Contango by his pet name, he only stared at her vacantly
and bit his nails. Then his wandering eyes fell, for the first time
ever, upon the old attorney, and the result of their brief inspection
was clearly unfavourable. His first glance of scornful indifference
quickly hardened into a deeply interested stare, and the debtor even
raised himself upon his elbows and finally inclined his body
forwards, the closer to continue his scrutiny. Tinge by tinge the
passion rose in his face till at last he sprang from his seat. In a
burst of fury he turned upon the octogenarian from the Temple.
"Strike me up a plum tree, this is too, too thick! You may have
taken advantage of my temporary incarceration to supplant me in the
affections of my wife, you hoary remnant of sin and senility!" he
shrieked, "but I'll be eternally damned if you, or any other man,
holds successional rights in my best umbrella! Come on!"
With that he literally showered blows--roughly estimated by a
visiting J.P. who was slowly recovering from the jumps--at 300,000 in
number, but probably less, since Mr Coke's prostrate body was
recovered, minus the umbrella, within nine or ten minutes; whereas,
even if the punches came at the rate of 250 a minute, which is quick
work----
But I am not sure that I do not prefer to run downstairs to lunch,
and leave the problem, if they care to solve it, to the bright young
mathematicians of the seventh page of the _Daily Mail_, who, given
three figures and a bit of chalk, can be backed to figure the knocker
off the front door at any time.
Au revoir, ma chère,
VIOLA.
EPISTLE XII
EATON SQUARE, _Friday, May_ 12_th._.
DEAREST PATRICIA,--
The postmark on your cheery little note to hand this morning throws a
lurid light on the cat-like sneak you executed out of Charbonell's
last Friday afternoon, after positively insisting that I should drink
a dish of tea with you. As I told you at the time, I once swore to a
relative, since dead, never to touch tea until I wanted it; but I had
no idea that you contemplated wolfing three chocolate eclairs and a
buttered scone and proceeding direct to Paris, even though, as you
aver, you acted upon a sudden impulse to write a Rita-like series of
articles for _The Gentlewoman_ entitled "What I saw in Montmartre."
A graphic description from a capable pen of what you did not see in
Montmartre would be far more likely, I think, to increase the
circulation of any newspaper. I had meant asking you on which three
nights of this week you could make use of our box at the Opera, but
as your letter is headed merely "Wednesday," which I didn't seem to
think would find you in a big place like Paris, I simply couldn't--as
the fair candidate for the chorus of the new musical-comedy remarked
on observing that her mother had put out a pink flannelette set for
her to go and have her voice "tried" in. Anyway, I hope that you may
have an exciting and adventurous time in Lutetia, a desire which I
express with increased confidence since reading in this morning's
newspapers, that bands of impoverished but resourceful Parisians are
earning a precarious livelihood by throwing young women, ostensibly
of the unfortunate class, into the Seine, and then rescuing them
under the eyes of the benevolent.
I have, by the way, something more than a fanciful and fantastic
notion that Paris may hold me within the next forty-eight hours, for
our household is at the moment as intolerable to me as was that of
the ambitious young gentleman who, in defence of his alleged want of
family pride, pleaded that it was expecting too much of one whose
father was in Dartmoor, whose sister was in Regent Street, and whose
mother was going about London with a wen as big as a diving-bell. As
usual, Mr Contango is at the bottom of the spasm. But while the
brilliancy and variety of that man's errors throw a reflected glory
upon his inventive genius and effectually preclude the possibility of
his turning over a new leaf without investing in an entirely fresh
book, his repeated backslidings are surely undermining the nerves,
and consuming the very molecules and corpuscles of Féo's delicate
physical adjustment. No sooner is one epoch of recidivation bottled
up by a sickening course of vespertinal canoodling than another
severe slump, calculated to cause the entire building to vibrate, is
ripening in some other quarter, until it really seems that the only
domain in which Mr Contango could be confidently relied upon to keep
out of trouble, would be an iron-barred niche high on the face of the
most inaccessible peak of Popocatapetl.