Chapter II: Part 2

Is not that a man all over? He regards plighting his troth in the light of setting his foot upon my neck and holding me in bondage till he is ready to slay his passion by indulging it. No, no, Sammy Slow, no modern woman with a grain of sense ever sends little notes to an unmarried man--not until after she is married, anyway. Moreover, most girls are partial to most things that begin with f--flowers, and fruit, and flirting, for three instances--and it is not because you squeezed my waist at Ascot that I should now sit at your feet and gaze into your eyes till I die with my head in your lap. When a man extorts from a woman a promise of love, he looks for a certain show of gratitude with it. Little less exacting than the crude Walcheren Islander who expects his bride elect to go out into the fields to gather sufficient wild carrots to pay the priest and to stand and sell them in the market-place without violating the proprieties, he digs no subway himself; even should he make a sacrifice at all, it is only with an incipient heartache and a profound conviction of regret to follow.

Men are creatures of insane impulses; recall, if you please, Archie Toddington, whose wardrobe (since he never went out until the evening) consisted entirely of dress suits and overcoats. I am inclined to the belief, by the way, that he was but one of a numerous type, for I heard them talking at dinner the other evening of a certain young gentleman, the son of a rural Bishop, who once took his father to dine at the Orleans Club, the boy belonging only to a now defunct institution called the Pelican besides. Now the Prelate was not without some misgivings concerning the Orleans as a manger for the cloth, but whatever were his prejudices they were dissipated on the instant of his entering the dining-room, at the sight of a gentleman, immaculately clean and most correctly clothed, who was dining all alone off a long-bone chop, a little toast, and--a pot of tea!

"Dear me!" exclaimed the Bishop, as he took his seat, "I had no idea, Octavius, that the members of this club had such simple, pastoral tastes. I am indeed agreeably surprised to find that one of them at least drinks tea with his dinner."

"I ask your pardon, sir," replied Octavius, "but will you kindly speak a little lower lest Mr Thornhill should overhear you. Tea, I would not impertinently remind you, is an ideal beverage for a deep thinker, and my friend yonder is quite the ruling brain of the _Athenæum_. His cogitative faculties, I have no doubt, are even now immersed in some profound distich for his next edition."

Never did a Bishop feel in better company; whereas, as a matter of fact, Mr Thornhill, being only just out of bed, was taking his "early evening breakfast" and inwardly debating whether he should devote himself to Bessie Bellwood at the Pavilion or Lottie Dettmar at the Trocadero, and which of the two houses possessed the easiest fauteuils to go to sleep in!

But I am neglecting Archie Toddington of the chronic dress suit.

On a certain Sunday evening at nine o'clock, then, Archie, feeling fearfully stale and solitary, and, like all misanthropists believing himself to be the repository of the whole world's suffering, strolled into St George's Chapel in Albemarle Street, pausing on the threshold to cough, lest his sudden entrance should cause too great a shock. It was an "after dinner evensong," and the little proprietary chapel-of-ease (now alas! swept away) where evening dress was "indispensable" in the sofa-pews, optional in the gallery, and ladies' bonnets only allowed in the organ-loft, was very full of smart people who had dined late. Brave men, groomed to the last gasp of dilettante exquisiteness, and fair women from whose billowing bosoms diamonds flashed like beams of white light from Gris-nez, sat and listened with polished languor to a short, thin discourse on "Behold a woman came." Then the organ commanded closer attention by uttering an imperious peal, and Mrs Cora Brown-Potter, looking like every bird in the tree, in a ravishing low-necked evening frock of amber silk covered with black Chantilly lace, rendered slightly less décolleté by a white lace berthe, headed by a band of chiffon, and depending from the bared shoulders, stood forth. The hat surmounting her shapely head was of white transparent lace-straw; its raised crown, supported by circles of mauve and white lilac in entrancing combinations, the cachepeignes being black cherries and the faint perfume of fleur-qui-meurt giving the correct signature to the only possible chapeau in which the beautiful wearer could accurately realise the entangled and difficult "atmosphere" of _The Holy City_. It was simply perfection; for a burnt-brown straw, a sheaf of Annunciation lilies, two silver thistles, a pot of musk, a splash of amethyst miroir velvet--all of which suggestions emanated from amiable worshippers in the front rows--would have ruined all.

And then she spoke her allotted lines--slowly and with measured bleat at first, but louder and louder as the organist, warming to his work, took up the running, until finally she broke into the the melody itself, and----

Archibald Toddington sank down within his pew, deeply and seriously (though happily not fatally) stung. Thirty years had rolled away in half as many minutes, and once again he was a boy at Eton, hopelessly in love with the little daughter of the boat-builder, and fearing nothing but a famine at Layton's. Remorse is, after all, a thoroughly wholesome and healthy secretion: with what bitter anguish do we recall those awful early virtues which we now know to have been only wasted opportunities!

His penitence was very real: from that hour forward he resolved to reform and lead a new life. He would begin by having a ginger ale, neat, at the Badminton, that he might the sooner grow accustomed to that harmless stomachic; again, should he live to be a hundred, he would be scrupulously careful in future always to substitute "blooming" for the ordinary embellishments to conversation. Then with regard to----

An unbidden sigh came from the very pit of his stomach as he dived his right hand into an unusually deep pocket inserted in the left breast of his waistcoat and pulled out about two hundred of their visiting cards. With moisture in his eyes he read the top one:

+-----------------------------------------------------+
| |
| Of course I forgive you, but as for believing |
| you, that is quite another thing. Am leaving |
| Lupus Street to-night. Going to some ripping |
| rooms in Claverton Street, close to the old pitch. |
| Have changed name to Ida Onslowe. If you |
| come up bring some cold stuff from that shop in |
| Piccadilly, as my landlady's brat has got the |
| ringworm, and I am not taking any tiffin from |
| downstairs. _Do come_. KID. |
| |
+-----------------------------------------------------+

Poor little Ida; and what a thorough little sportsman she always was! Yet she was but one out of his last two hundred, who, as their bits of pasteboard attested, haled from half the best-known streets and roads of the honeymoon districts of this great metropolis. He rose to leave the chapel and walked towards the door with the cards still clutched in his right hand. As he joined the fringe of the communicants who were politely shoving one another through the exit, he could move forward only at the rate of six inches a shuffle; but here again was a blessing in disguise. For as he passed through the porch, there stared him in the face a brass-bound box of polished oak, having in its lid an oblong aperture, above which was inscribed in white and gold:

"FOR THE ADDRESSES OF THOSE WHO WISH
TO BE VISITED BY THE CLERGY."

Without an instant's hesitation he raised his hand and dropped the ten score cards into the slit; so real, so visible, so conspicuous was the peril of these girls, that no movement tending to their redemption could possibly be adjudged too momentous. Experiencing that peculiar glow of satisfaction which comes of earning a halo and earning it cheaply, Archibald Toddington turned to the right into Piccadilly, and strolled down the incline to the Badminton.

Never in your life I suppose, dear, have you tasted a drink called "Three-cornered Sarah," which is said to have been invented by a subaltern of the King's Dragoon Guards, stationed at Rawal Pindi, who wished not only to forget the past, but to be oblivious of the present and contemptuous of the future? Anyway, Archie fell in with a doughty representative of this famous regiment, and, after a couple or three goes of "Sarah," felt like carrying civilisation into the Congo, or putting down an insurrectionary hill tribe single-handed. The spell of the amber silk frock covered with black Chantilly was broken into pieces and the pieces lost; the enchantment of the white lilac hat with the black cherry cachepeignes had evaporated into thin air, and been blown into Iceland by a gale from the south. Within one short hour, indeed, Archie, who had undertaken not only to give the Dragoon a merry evening, but to ring in miracles on him in the peacherino line, so poignantly repented the loss of all his addresses, that he was found hammering on the door of the chapel and objurgating the housekeepers of the surrounding premises because none of them knew where lived the old verger-johnnie, or whatever they call him, who kept the keys of the place! Thus the cards were for ever lost to him; though doubtless the spiritual needs of the addressees received attention, for that the old-fashioned, one-idea'd bigot is not believed to exist in the Church in the present day was amply proved on the night when the Bishop of Barchester was followed from St James's Hall to the very doorstep of the house opposite the Green Park, where he was staying for the May meetings, by a foreign lady who thought that she recognised him. As she dumbly but persistently refused to accept his assurances that he had never met her in society--and he would now probably deny the incident in toto, but that I have, curiously enough, preserved the cutting from the church paper to which he wrote for editorial advice as to how a gentleman should get rid of a female who was too persistent in the street, and the editor suggested going into a Turkish bath and suddenly disrobing--he had finally to make a swift bolt indoors and slam the door violently in her face. So loud and despotic, however, was the subsequent knocking, that the Bishop himself returned to find not only the lady, but a police constable, on the doorstep, and about three thousand idle persons gathered around them. "I 'umbly beg yer lordship's pardon for knockin'," said the policeman, respectful to the verge of servility, "but when you was a-lettin' this young lady out just now, you shut her skirt in the door!"

I have often thought that if only our police-constables, who affect to be _Curii_, but in private live like Bacchanals, were drawn from a more æsthetic class than is the case, they would, by exercising a greater sense of delicacy, cause less suffering to the susceptible. Let me illustrate my contention by admitting that I have for years been endeavouring in vain to find out what it is that the loquacious hawker at the street corner has in the pillbox. I have listened to his breezy bleat so often that I know his yarn by heart (and sometimes "give" it in congenial company), but never yet have I heard its conclusion, nor have I beheld the little animal. On every occasion, just as the Autolycan has been going to raise the lid of the box, odious P.C. 797 has arrived from the clouds and blue-pencilled the show. Only yesterday, at the corner of a _cul-de-sac_ in Regent Street, I came upon the patient person of bilious temperament and doubtless sedentary habits, who experiences so many commercial cancellations at the hands of the police. As usual, he had an admiring, if not a monied audience; and he cried:

"Laidies an' gentlemen,--May I claim yer kind an' perlite attention for the purpus' of introjuicin' to yer notice a livin' novelty from the new world beneath the Southern Cross, where every prospec' pleases, an' female modesty is so pronounced that the clean things from the laundry is never aired afore the kitchen fire for fear of upsettin' the mental balance o' the butcher's boy when he brings round the j'int for dinner, an' looks in at the airy winder? Thanks. I 'ave 'ere--I say I 'ave 'ere, contained in this small box, the only insec' overlooked by Adam when he took his seat on the rainbow to christen the marv'llous creations o' the animal world. It is well known to, an' 'ighly respected by, the black aboriginals o' Burragorang, from its intelligent 'abit of manufacturin' its own lan'marks as it traverses the jungle, by spittin' on the grass an' stoppin' it from growin', thus renderin' return easy an' loss-o'-bearin's out o' the question. Though many attempts 'ave been made to subdue, an' so tame, the little creature, the feat has been accomplished only thrice within 'istory; once by Timandra Ventidius, the Macedonian Amazon as led her countrymen in the insurrection against Turkey, armed with nothin' but an ordinary 'at-pin (tho' carryin' a quartern o' chloroform in her jeans, in case she should fall into the 'ands o' the Turks); secondly, by the celebrated Austrian savant, Yagerwohl, patentee o' the world-famed sensitised toilet-ware for hospitals, which, ev'ry time a patient washes his 'ands causes a bell to ring in the matron's room; and, thirdly, by myself, who 'ad it from a well-known 'Arley Street medical man, what went off his dot after runnin'-up in a local billiard 'andicap, an' who is at present immured in a private 'ome for the potty, practisin' nursery-cannons on the kitchen dresser with a tomato, a Spanish onion, an' a 'ard-boiled egg. But mere assertion is 'ardly the same thing as proof; what each one of you a-standin' round me requires is ocular demonstration. With yer kind permission I shall therefore proceed at once to----"

"Pass away, now, pass away!" cried P.C.s 797 and 798 in chorus, and the persecuted wizard of the pillbox, bearing his adversity with as philosophical a fortitude as he could summon, sighed heavily and sneaked off. But anon, anon.

By all who do not permit the state of the markets to interfere with social duty, Cowes Regatta is unanimously recognised as the only possible sequel to Goodwood; but the distinguished tenants of many of the tiny villas and cottages, half buried in the trees that cluster on the heights above the town, were witnesses of the diverting sequel to a much earlier festivity yesterday morning. But perhaps it would be better for me to present you with the events constituting the latest edition of The Earl and the Girl--to say nothing of the Countess--in their chronological order. Let us sit upon the ground, as Richard II. says.

You have heard of Lord Catterick, haven't you? A none too affluent but sound old sexagenarian sportsman, dear Kid, with a heart as big as a hyacinth farm in Zeeland, but matrimonially shackled to an ogress of fifty, too ill-tempered, domineering, and utterly unreasonable to exist save in a Trollopian novel. Colour is lent to the supposition that he married her to win an after-dinner bet by his seemingly incurable mania for making love to every mortal thing in petticoats that crosses his path; though that may be no more than carelessness, since Virtue itself is only a continual struggle against the promptings of Nature, as I daresay you have found it. Moreover, he had been much impressed, ten or twelve years ago, by a certain passage in an erotic novel which said that the only thing to properly wake up a man suffering from acute melancholia, was a rapid love-affair with a flamingly red-haired woman, to damage whose reputation it would be necessary to hug her in broad daylight in front of the Mansion House--a none too accurate reference to Miss Jessica Dux, who is a pronounced blonde. Though only a cloak model, Miss Dux came, I understand, of a good, but impoverished family who for years accepted money reluctantly from relations, and, when these dried up, went fut. Then the seven noble girls drew lots to determine which one of them should sacrifice herself to save pater from going out to work, and--Jessica pulled out the black bean.

But for the incessant tight-lacing in the showrooms, the wearying attentions of the manager, and the grotesque air of immeasurable superiority assumed by the customers before whom she had to strut, to turn, to pose at command, clad in creations of golden spider's-web, Jessica would cheerfully have dropped everything else to have stayed on at Madame Junon's, for though she didn't turn a very deep furrow in the pay roll, the work was very gratifying and her hips were much admired. Then, all on a morning early, Lord Catterick in new-milk innocence dropped in to see a frock "tried on" his liege-madam. His eyes encountered Jessica's; he pencilled a few warm words on a (must have been asbestos) visiting card, and that night Miss Dux made her first acquaintance with the half-guinea dinner at the Berkeley.

It was about four months later, or a week ago, that Lady Catterick opened a letter addressed to her husband which had come by the evening post. Seldom or never before had she descended to this particular meanness, but the indented die on the back of the envelope--"Impératrice et Cie, Clifford Street, W."--proved an irresistible lure, and she broke the seal before she fully realised what she was doing. And it was a half-dead woman she was, dear Pat, as her little grey eyes ran down the many items in a bill full fourteen inches long, with a total of £368, 18s. 4d., and a final tag to the effect that Impératrice et Cie would be glad to receive a cheque from his lordship at his early convenience!

Smothered gasps and little muffled screams escaped her as she read such lines as "Chestnut Sunday, May 17th: Tagg's Island toilette of biscuit Donegal linen trimmed broderie Anglaise with Valenciennes insertions, £31, 10s.," and "May 22nd: Lemon-tinted chiffon Opera gown with corsage of pink fuchsias a la Philemon et Baucis, £47, 5s." Then came on "June 3rd: Ascot toilette of rose-silk voile over white louisine with Alençon flounces, £52, 10s.," and on the 6th: "Southend-on-Sea boudoir gown in crépe-de-chine, lined Japanese silk, £15, 15s.," followed by "Third-class railway fare of special-delivery porter (Saturday evening), 4s. 4d." Other entries, scarcely less disturbing, included a "Creation in white mousseline velours encrusted with black pailletté (Lingfield Park), £63, 0s.," a "Golden straw plait chapeau with white feathers en suite, £7, 7s. 0d.," and, somewhat lower down, an "Evening frock of ultramarine chiffon embroidered silver sequins (Ponymoore's Ball), with bunches of shaded pink fruit on the décolletage, £21, 0s. 0d.," the lot amounting, as I said before, to the quite respectable sum of £368, 18s. 4d.! And all this, my dear, to a woman whose very feminine idea of limiting male extravagance consisted in continually demonstrating how frocks could be bought for less money than suits of clothes!

Between 7 P.M. and half-past midnight, Lady Catterick fairly fed on 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.

But this sort of fever usually subsides, I am told, within a month, 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.