Chapter III: Part 3

And what, pray, had _I_ to do with the fact that reliable domestic servants were not to be got; what (advancing another pace) that, even when captured occasionally, they rapidly became unreliable in a household where, when Rio Tinto's stood at 62, an operatic artiste arose from the floral centre-piece of a banquet served with Roman splendour and sang the menu, course by course; while, two days later, when Rio's dropped to one-and-eight a quire, "the Poor's Rates put in" and pinched the very dining table? No Countess in the Peerage who habitually had less than seventy men staying in the house at the same time could possibly get servants to accept such elementary principles of give and take! But it was when Féo rorted me upon my frequent absences from her house--"her house," my griefs!--that the proud chieftain's daughter moulted an eagle's feather.

"And a model house it is, madam!" I cried, with the withering bitterness of the impoverished nobleman whose I.O.U. for a-pint-and-two-slices had been scorned by the korfy-stall keeper, "a mighty regular and methodical house! Its many virtues, too humorous to mention, lie in the broken decanter at the foot of your dressing-table, the gold kid Court slipper behind the dining-room clock, the bottle of Odol on the drawing-room hearthrug; or they are to seek among the tennis balls in the music case, in the nest of mice beneath the broken wires of the piano, or in the sanitary dustbin wherein profane hands deposited my treasured button from Jan Kubelik's dress waistcoat! Od's, hog's puddings and hung beef! if the house round the corner in Lower Belgrave Street of the motherly old lady in the black satin skirt and the red velvet bonnet, who got three months last Saturday, was a more 'disorderly' house than this is, then my reason's twisted and my name's M'Gizzick!"

Here, locked in my vestal chamber which is sufficiently contiguous to the kitchen to afford that peculiar atmosphere of internecine culinary warfare familiar to all inhabitants of Flatland, will I dip into the Diary which I found upon the boat between St Malo and Southampton, and which, very curiously, refers to the three giddy gushers of the obscure hotel at deevie Dinard. It is obviously in the handwriting of a married man of the middle station, whom a vagrant generosity would impel to look into shop windows at articles ticketed "Suitable present for a barmaid" and whom a deeper-rooted penuriousness would incite to haggle with his wife at parting as to his share of the expense of framing and glazing the judicial separation order which she has obtained against him; and, roughly pencilled in a scribbling book, it runs--

_Monday, Sept._ 1_st._---It is now nine days since any caller other than a dun or a peddler of washleathers has entered my office, the last prospective client of good intent having been Mr Asphalte, the famous turf-accountant from the lamp-post at the corner of Bucklersbury. His suggestion that I should receive telegrams on his behalf, also ninepence in the £ out of the Sender's losings, I foolishly declined to entertain, over-estimating, probably, the value of the commission which I had just received from Miss Béguinette Strathcona, of Broad Court Mansions, to find her a sober and presentable "mother" for Thursday afternoon next, when she has to interview the family solicitors of the Earl of Guernsey, who is settling five thousand a year upon her on condition that she never misses the last bus, or something. The young Earl would probably have married the bird could he have broken her of her artless habit of joining in the choruses whenever he took her to a music hall; though the interesting fact remains that what will lose a deserving girl a nobleman's partnership will not necessarily cost her his patronage. But where the brimstone is my personal discomfort to end? If I attempt to go across to the "Green Man" I shall get a judgment-summons on the way, and if I don't go across to the "Green Man" I shall die of thirst; meanwhile--Somebody in the outer office! Will you step in, please? Well, well, well! May I be--er, yours and so forth; my old chums Billie Bunn and Dickie Scales! This is the sort of meeting that makes work for barmen; say, boys, were there any signs of a seedy old devil with a black leather bag around the doorway as you came in? No? Then all is quiet in the Shipka Pass. Come across the road!

_Tuesday, Sept._ 2_nd._--My oath! there were no bottle-green winged insects on last night as a model of a quiet, intellectual little evening, but--I really do wish that I could rest my head for awhile on something extremely soft and yet intensely cold. Rather took their hind wheels off, I think, by the way I mixed the Moselle cup! Absolutely astonished myself; though it only shows you what you could do if you could command the materials. Am rather taken with the Run-across-to-the-Republic--(_Vive l'drapeau rouge!_)--notion, too, and don't see why I _shouldn't_ go as their joint guest, seeing that they have won an independency at old Ebor; and more especially since I have volunteered to stake them to three little Broad Court chorus chicks, neighbours of Béguinette's, that I hear have gone to Dinard. Heigho! Had _some_ men but one-fifth of what any successful stockbroker would consider an absurdly insufficient income, what pure _jouisseur's_ would some men be; a bit pale in the morn, perhaps, but growing ripe as luncheon time arrived, and rubicund at eve with the rubicundity that comes only of repeated "splits." Funny thing I should dream only last night that I was counting money!

_Wednesday, Sept._ 3_rd._--The Channel a positive dream--even though I have to close one eye to make out the shipping with any distinctness. We should hear considerably less about "the sinful artificiality of modern life," if some of the pessimists had, like myself, an occasional opportunity to make up for lost time. Man can't have a "past" if he doesn't possess the cash to overtake it. My vivid descriptions of the three birds are truly amazing--seeing that I barely remember one of them! There's Effie, who used to correspond regularly with a pal of mine until the G.P.O. people chipped in and forbade it on the ground that her letters scorched holes in the mail-bags. There's Connie, who fairly electrified the young bloods when she came on with a copper can in the second act of _Sweet Nancy_, and asked "Hot water, sir?" quite inimitably, and whom Sir Charles Muckross would have married in spite of his family, but for the persistency with which Effie's fool of a grey parrot kept on shouting one evening, "No, Georgie, not to-night!" Finally there's the dark one whose name I can't remember, but she's particularly hunky-perdoodlum, has Spanish blood in her veins--oh, I rubbed it into them until their only trouble was that they couldn't bribe the captain of the boat to send the girls a Marconi to get busy with their curling-tongs and turn up at the ferry to meet us.

_Thursday, Sept._ 4_th._--Dinard. Déjeuner'd on arrival at the Hotel Steak and Vedge--no, no, Chateaubriand--where Billie and Dickie sate and sipped the liqueurs which add so much to autumn's rich content, whilst I went in search of the birds. Discovered them at a small hotel by the Casino, and introduced myself--no blistering task in a place where you meet a little sideline in the surf at noon, and call on it at its hotel not more than twenty minutes later; but they're no sparkling revelations. So far do they fall short of my word-pictures painted aboard the boat, that I am fain to invent, on my way back to the Steak and Vedge, dramatic endings for the fabled Erne, for Connie from dreamland, for the dark 'un. She that needed the asbestos notepaper, I announce, purchased a 200 franc robe-de-nuit, renovated her visiting cards with benzine, and returned to England yesterday, her solicitor having called her attention to the fact that the last of her debts was barred by the statute of limitations on the 30th ult.; Connie had been sandbagged in error by a near-sighted French gentleman, who had since taken advantage of the low rates between Havre and New York to start for America on the day fixed for his marriage with his landlord's daughter; the dark 'un with the tar in her system had just entered a convent after secretly wedding an assistant-something in the Niger Protectorate, who had imprudently disembarked among a wrong tribe, and been eaten on his honeymoon. The gorged but affable indifference with which these details are received by Billie and Dickie is heightened rather than dispelled when I escort them to call on the blondines, and I begin to regret that in a febrile, ebullient moment I suggested that their ancient and moustached landlady--obviously also the Perpetual Lady President of the Norman Branch of the Anti-Savon and Water Society--might hold herself in readiness for a little dinner for six at sunset. The more so since Heine's dictum that rich men are so unhappy that they need benevolent institutions to mitigate their misery, breeds no false joy in the breast of the Bucklers-buryite in Dinard with only one-and-eight and a feeding appointment with a tall, blonde kid, with whom he has already exchanged a labial kiss, though assured by her that if her "people" ever suspected that she done such they would feel as sore as proselytes to Judaism about it.

_The Same_, 9 P.M.--Two hours have passed since we should have called and fed the canaries; meantime Billie Bunn has been outed by a _bouillabaise_ that looked like Westgate at low water, and smelt stronger than a pearl-fishing lugger, and Dickie Scales has not been sober since 3.15. Some philosophy there is which holds that except to give an order, the greatest sin is to execute it; I do devoutly trust that Mère Jeanniot, the bearded _hostesse_, is a practical disciple of this creed; but what of my little prize pansy, Irene Treadwater? My brain works luminously enough till the wronged Irene and the misery of my one-and-eight enter it. How mutable a thing is man! He starteth, bent on opening a bale of Roman orgies on the noble lines laid down by Petronius Arbiter; he windeth up on streaky bacon, fried on a shovel in a cabmen's shelter! I should have known by now, I must tell Irene, with simulated chafing, that Cupid could not operate in a crowd; I must make it my personal business to see that she gets the leading part in one of the best of the coming provincial pantomimes: I must send her a real Norfolk turkey, also a motor car, for Christmas. Heartily sick of the whole business, yet anxious to get out of it as politely as possible, I leave my feeble friends and start for the abode of offended beauty.

_Much Later._--I am back from their hotel. The birds had risen, in mastodonic wrath, and gone, but--Mère Jeanniot was there. My monstrous "might-have-waited" bluff--femininity in its most fatuous phase--she fathomed at a glance, and conspuez'd (and worse'd) me as heartily as though I had been the town liar. Much that she said outdistanced my Ollendorf, but her text, I gathered from a phrase here and there, was that axiomatic dictum of the incensed fair, "I like a man to be a man"; whereupon, angered but always a gentleman, I shouted, with great restraint, "Shut up, _sale bête_! I am an Englishman, and Englishmen perform their promises!" "Poo-poo! poo-poo!" snarled the hag, with considerable sarcasm; "if so that be, where then are your friends, the other Englishmen?" Countered, I wavered for an instant, then, reckless in my desperation, I fired the temporal and banal lie, "Not a bit of it: _they_ were no Englishmen!" Momentarily her parchment brows were knit, her bristling eyebrows raised. "Not Engleeshmen?" cried she, "pray what then were they?" "AMERICANS!" I cried, with happy inspiration, and for a few minutes the ogress's revengeful dial relaxed, and my only fear was that she would embrace me. But her puzzled look gave way at length: the shadows gathered again, and she cried, "_A bas, monteur! Non, non,_ deceive am I not thus to be! For did not _l'homme Américain_ visite Mademoiselle Iréne but yesterday, and was not he as is your _chapeau_, black--_très_, black? _Decidement, jeune homme, vous voulez_----." But I fled; moreover, I leave this mill to-morrow, grist or no grist. Dickie Scales is pulling round, and sends to say----

But here the entry ends abruptly.

Pessimists of the smart set are shaking their heads with ill-concealed mirth over Lady Hilda Chinewood's diminishing prospects of ever getting a decree nisi, a speculation into which she has already heroically socked about three thousand pounds of her winnings since Goodwood, with little prospect, so far, of securing any return. For Lord Percy continues to lead a blameless life in the Bloomsbury garret to which Hilda's dole of thirty shillings a week confines him, despite the promise, wrung from him with many tears and threats, to be guilty of the technical "misconduct" which the law insists upon. With no assets save two pairs of patent-leather boots ready to be sent to be soled and heeled, he sits and smokes cigarettes all day, carelessly, unconsciously forcing upon poor Hilda the conviction that worldly happiness is a wild singing-bird which may not be caught and tamed. He certainly refrains, with the gentlemanly consideration of our common forefather, Adam, from attacking the previous character of the lady, but he has already jotted down in lead-pencil on the back of the citation the seven separate grounds of justification which he intends to plead in defence of his having married her. And they are:--

1. The weather at the time was beastly cold and uncongenial.

2. The roads were confoundedly sloppy.

3. Respondent could not afford two guineas a day for a cab; and

4. Respondent's walking boots admitted water in large quantities.

5. Respondent's chest was weak, and his doctor had ordered him "generous living."

6. Respondent was unable to obtain same, he having signally failed to get his paper done, even with the endorsements of "A. de Rothschild," "W. W. Astor," and "A. Carnegie," though he has since been informed that poor dear old Sam recognised the shade of ink in use at the "Blue Posts."

7. Process-servers had at the instance of (1) Messrs Bellamy Brothers; (2) Messrs Warren and Craik; (3) Messrs Justerini and Brooks, already penetrated to respondent's bedroom.

Lady Hilda, whose ineradicable habit of making love to every man she meets has turned out such particularly sour pickles on her, fatuously imagined that a woman who could hold her own with the bookmakers upon a racecourse would be more than a match for a lazy, feminine, Carlylean boy who falls asleep directly after dinner whenever he has been out in the fresh air during the afternoon, and she took him against everyone's advice. At Lincoln they were closer than onions on a string; but between the Grand National and the Guineas', her infatuation waned to comparative boredom, and, by Epsom, boredom had given way to positive loathing. At Ascot he proved a hopelessly out-of-date dervish; and she brought him to the London Cup at Alexandra Park only because she had lately discovered a particularly smart cabman, called "Mint-sauce Fred," on the Wilton Road rank, and the man seemed inclined to get too pally. But the climax came at Goodwood, where Hilda had looked forward to a very big week, not only because tips to servants are expected to be lavish, but by reason of the subsequent draining month's "rest," in which nerves and glands and organs and muscles have to be renewed, while one is not winning a single steever.

The mid-day sun had spurred back the morning haze peculiar to the Southdowns, as Hilda and her marital incubus drove up the hill to Goodwood, from where Lavant lay buried in the quiet bosom of the woods. To any woman whose cheval-glass had spoken as eloquently on the subject of white serge as Hilda's had done, it should have been a day, if not of triumph, still of heavenly peace; yet the rapturous song of the lark and the happy droning of the bees only served to accentuate the misery of her merciless matrimonial mistake and dangle it before her eyes. It was maddening only to think of what she must endure during the next four days with the highly-necessary bookmakers on the one hand and the utterly unprofitable mature male suckling on the other. When the carriage drew up at the wicket-gate, Hilda was at boiling point, and, turning to the right and leading the way into the plantation of elms and beeches, beneath the boughs of which full half a thousand powdered lackeys unpacked huge hampers of damask napery and shimmering glass and glistening silver, she cried aloud with withering scorn to the lord and master she despised:

"Now, dog, which tree will you sit under while I go and get you your living?"

Stung to the quick, whatever that may be, Percy, like Cambronne, hissed but a single word; the next instant strong but servile hands were hauling him out of the wreck of the Duke of Ravensbury's cold collation, and five score of astonished onlookers realised that if a hand only does take 5¾ in white suede gloves, it is astounding how hard and how straight it can hit. By what subterfuge he, being practically penniless, contrived to return to town is not known, but as he was last seen entering a small calico tent on which was legibly inscribed "ACCOMMODATION," it is reasonable to assume that he had recourse to these nomadic, but extremely convenient, financiers of the racecourse for the purpose of raising upon his gun-metal watch a small sum sufficient to pay his railway fare to London; meanwhile, as "language" is constructive "cruelty" in the eye of the law, Hilda will probably pursue Percy on the first day when there is no racing, and hit him again.

But, speaking of nomads, what an extraordinary vogue the Bond Street fortune-tellers are enjoying! Clairvoyantes is, perhaps, the more acceptable term, though no two of the visionists acknowledge the same denomination nor pursue the same mystic methods. Thus, Madame Hagar, of Grafton Street, poises a crystal ball upon a flower vase, while Madame la Moravie, of Bruton Street, toys only with the subject's finger-tips. Again, Madame Belisardas Brown, of Clifford Street, psychometrises over a lady's glove, whereas Madame Teresona Topping, of Cork Street, her sister--(and many believers in the "blood-thicker-than-water" aphorism readily allow Belisardas and Teresona to be thicker than both put together)--has been known to call loudly for, and even detain, a gentleman's trousers. It is, after all, the observant and intelligent crossing-sweeper at the corner who crystallises all the clairvoyancy that has come under his notice into, "'Ere, it's this way: Laidy arrives in a bro'um--Interval o' two minnits--Toff drives up in an 'ansom. 'Cleer-voyancy' yer calls it? Well, I'm---tongue-tied!"

It was as late as half-past eight the other evening, when all the world was supposed to be at dinner, that Captain Throatlash, the gallant society playwright who, should his country suddenly require his presence, would be quite prepared to tread the icy Steppes of Russia in his dress pumps, ascended Madame Hagar's little dark staircase in Grafton Street, and awaited with some impatience the arrival of Lady Constance Edenhall. Each wished, from perfectly innocent and dissimilar motives, no doubt, to consult the oracle; the Captain, possibly, because he had an appalling access of dramatic work to get through in which the present state of affairs in the Far East constituted a perpetual menace to his personal peace; Lady Constance, perhaps, because she feared to order a new evening frock before ascertaining if it be true that, according to all the bibles, vedams, and alcorans of the Rue de la Paix, the waist-line is shortly to vanish entirely. But Lady Constance was shockingly late; indeed it was not until 8.49 that the noble Captain, hearing the stairs squeak, arose quickly from his chair, and pulling open the door beheld--Lord Huntley Edenhall!

"Hullo, Reggie, old sportsman!" cried his lordship, genuinely surprised, "why, what the blazes attracts a chap like you to such a peep-show as this?"

"Fact is, dear lad," replied Reginald Throatlash, "my little woman left her--er--_umbrella_ either here or elsewhere this morning and I called in on the off-chance of hearing of it. Same time I'd have laid a million to one against meeting you here?"

"Yes--er--well," drawled Lord Huntley, wondering if the kid from Daly's could possibly have been such a silly little devil, after his most explicit instructions, as to go to the _other_ Grafton Street in the wilds of Fitzroy Square; "it's a dam funny coincidence, don't ye know, but my little missis was here this morning, too, in order to--er--er, see if the--er, magic ball, could indicate the present whereabouts of her long lost--er, lucky pig--yes, yes, her _lucky pig_, and I just dropped in to inquire in what manner the--er, miraculous crystal had acquitted itself of the mandamus of confidence she had given it. But, of course, it's all tommy-rot, isn't it?"

"With all deference, I think _not_," replied Throatlash, with the impudent reassurance of one who has suddenly spotted the way out of the maze, "I may, indeed, tell you, quite soberly and seriously, that I not only believe in, but actually practice, these occult sciences, and I have already attained sufficient power in them to compel at will--mark me, Huntley, I say again, compel--the attendance of any living person within the salt boundaries of the British Isles. Let me give you a demonstration: name somebody?"

"G'wan! You don't mean it, surely?"

"Never was more in earnest in my life: come, name somebody?"

"Right oh, old sporty; take your pick--Hackenschmidt--Tolstoi--that little girl that keeps the humming-top stall at the Exhibition--the captain of the _Pinafore_--Marie Corelli--Sunny Jim----"

"Tut, tut!" ejaculated Throatlash, pettishly "I did not invite you to play the fool."

"Nor did I invite you to take me for one, Throatlash, please remember _that_!" retaliated Lord Edenhall, hotly.

"I have done nothing of the kind. I shall proceed, as I said, to demonstrate----"

"Nonsense, nonsense!" cut in Edenhall. "You are talking as though you were the birdcage-man at the music-halls. Is it intoxication or indigestion: drink or only a dressed-crab? Because----"

"It is neither, sir, neither!" shouted Throatlash, "I mean to make you admit----"

"Don't shout at me, sir," interposed Edenhall, imperiously. "Remember never to raise your voice to a gentleman unless your house is on fire."

"I ask your pardon," apologised Throatlash, with magnificent bitterness; then swallowing his choler with all the desperation of an emu taking down a football, he bowed like any shopwalker and humbly begged that, as a parting favour, his erstwhile friend would answer him one question--one only. Was the admirable Lady Constance at present at home at Grosvenor Gardens?

"Not this evening," laughed Edenhall, with amused contempt.

"H'm. Is it too much of me to ask where she may be?" continued Throatlash, mildly, yet not without confidence.

"It's twice as much as you had permission to ask," replied Lord Percy, wearily, "but I don't mind gratifying your vulgar curiosity: Lady Constance is presiding over a Watercress Mission, at Battersea."

"IS she?" screamed Reginald Throatlash, his bloodshot eyes flashing their resentment as, throwing up his arms and becoming a human ikon, he executed a rapid series of cabalistic calisthenics as though he were drawing from the ceiling itself the invisible fishing-nets of Wynken, Blynken, and Nod. Then in dramatic tones he cried, "Approach, Constance Isobel Bobitwell Edenhall!" and before the echo of his voice had time to die away, or Mother Hagar could withdraw her affrighted countenance from between the curtains which masked the inner chamber, a familiar footfall sounded on the creaking stairs and--in strode the Lady Constance Edenhall!

"_Now_, sir," bellowed Throatlash, rushing up to the beautiful woman who stood, mute, pale and with dilated eyes, and grasping her chin before her wholly unaffected stupor should turn to hysterics, "now, sir, what about your 'drink and dressed-crabs'; now, sir, what are the extreme odds that you offer about 'the birdcage-man at the music-halls,' eh?"

"Marvellous! Stupendous! I am whacked to the world!" exclaimed Lord Percy, extending his hand. "Old friend, I ask ten thousand pardons; if you have no better place to lunch at to-morrow, will you---

"Softly, softly, do not wake her; we can talk of lunch some other time," said the magnanimous Throatlash. "Take her home quietly and hand her over to her maid, lest the shock affect her brain. Good-bye."

Ever of thee,
VIOLA D.

EPISTLE VI

EATON SQUARE, _Tuesday, Novr._ 3_rd._

DEAREST PATRICIA,--

Though there mercifully exists for all who like yourself lack brains, the consolation of religion, you have too long denied yourself the diversion of consulting Mother Hagar, for the police called upon her yesterday; and all that is to be seen in her deserted room to-day is the ivy garland which she sometimes wore, smiling in pathetic significance from the dirty hearthstone upon which it fell when the rough-and-tumble started. When Hagar assumed her flame-coloured robe this morning it was, alas! her final assumption; the taking down of her raven locks, her antepenultimate take-down. None know definitely who "put her away"; probably her own recklessness, born of undreamt of success, was the chief cause. Her sugared impertinences went down well enough for a while but she should have been more careful to master the art of walking on eggs without breaking them before the gin began to tell on her. Quite likely is it that her dissolution was brought about through her foolishly promising some billowy-bosomed barmaid enjoyments and sensations which are dogmatically denied to the working-classes; or she may have carelessly given to some married woman being sued by her dress-makers, the address of a millionaire who had been three months dead and buried; or there is yet one other possibility:

I daresay you remember (for the sequel is too long to go into the preceding sentence) the celebrated cause of Smith _versus_ Smith and Dounecastle, the reports of which caused more than one bursting society bud of three seasons ago to recant Rosetti and embrace the _Evening Standard_? Also how, as soon as a long-empanelled jury, that was fading visibly for want of fresh air and red meat with gravy, had recorded its verdict and, rising as one man, had warmly complimented Mr Smith on regaining his freedom from wedlock with a woman with whom marriage was so entirely superfluous, the simple old peer bigamously married Mrs Smith at a registry office, foolishly committing perjury for the purpose? Well, he has since become the father of two girl babies--at least, so their mother says, but you never can tell--and as a son and heir was more ardently to be desired and something of the kind was daily imminent, he last week sought to ease his mind by consulting Madame Hagar.

Much that she told him--as, for instance, that he would go to the Empire and meet a tall "spade" girl who had been insulted by her landlady and was going to move round into Winchester Street as soon as she could afford it; that, in another large building, of Moorish architecture, he would speak to a "heart" girl with blue eyes, who would look ten years worse for wear than when he last saw her in '99, and she also would allude to money matters, being urgently pressed for a sufficient sum to bury her deceased mother, to send her invalid little sister on a sea voyage, and to replace eight pounds belonging to another girl which the slavey had stolen from the vase on the mantelpiece; finally, that while riding in a public, white conveyance towards an _al fresco_ entertainment with military bands and boats, he would pinch the knee of a perfect stranger and ultimately undertake a journey with her--was doubtless true, but highly irrelevant; it is the nature of necromancers, however, to prevaricate. Eventually she discerned within the crystal a fleeting current event, and cried:

"Yes, yes! All is over--thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen; the gods on high Olympus have once more frosted you from head to foot--seventeen, eighteen, nineteen; it an another girl!"

"Too bad to be true! Too bad to be true!" gasped the peer, with a dreadfully dished look in his eyes as he collapsed into a curule chair made out of a beer-stand. "For heaven's sake have another look, missis?"

In mute obedience, the harridan burnished the crystal globe with her flannel sleeve and peered into it again, but she only shook her head dolefully. Then did a none too opulent son of a marquis, whose future seemed to consist mainly in populating the burlesque stage of 1922, steer straight for his club, there to wallow in old brandy as only one can whose simple faith in all mankind has been mercilessly arm-locked and thrown clear off the mat.

Judge, then, of the Earl's great joy next morning when the club servant who restored him to consciousness with prussic acid, showed him in the _Times_ the announcement of the birth of a son! Imagine also the righteous ire, unequalled even by that of the pious, but somewhat deaf, old lady who threw a water-bottle at Nansen for speaking jokingly of the Equator, with which he started out for Grafton Street to rate the specious charlatan who had clumsily condemned him for four-and-twenty hours to alcohol and blank despair! Nor would the obstinate old thing admit that she was miffed. Being without a servant, she said, her globes had not been properly polished that morning, and, the crystal becoming somewhat finger-marked and mottled, must account for her making one or two trifling miscues. It is not surprising if at boiling point old Dounecastle petitioned the police to blue-pencil Hagar vigorously.

But necromancy is not the new fad you think it, indeed, I have wondered for years how a sensible old gentleman like Victor Hugo, the greatest lyrical poet that France has seen (though some of the more stiff-necked of the Immortals never could forgive his singing "I'm living with mother now" at one of their banquets, and then excusing himself on the ground that the girl looked old enough to be, anyway), ever could have been a wizard's dupe. But it now transpires that he was a mere tool in the hands of the fascinating Comtesse de Camembert, who, detecting in him unmistakable signs of fatty degeneration of the cerebrator, got him at the _planchette_, and, between the Comte, her husband (compelled by his wife to wear a galvanic belt, and wrathfully attributing it to the poet's recommendation) pulling in front, and herself shoving behind, they had poor Victor at loggerheads with his dearest friends nearly all of the time. The charming Comtesse, of whom contemporary writers speak as having been "all there and full measure," and whom the jealous Comte would probably have divorced had she not been the only woman in Paris who understood how to cut his corns properly, obtained such complete control over the cheery old poet that, whenever he received his quarterly envelope from his publisher, his only way of reserving it for his own use was to bury it behind the shrubbery, or leave it in his locker at the Turkish Bath. Otherwise the delightful lady, whose great-grandfather (more to the shame of her great-grandmother) was of royal blood, thought nothing of sending to the Rue de la Paix for a new lilac _Samedi-à-Lundi_ turn-out, and then crying scornfully to Victor, as she shoved Virot's bill under his nose, "Have you got the sand to endorse that?" Nine times out of ten he did so, for the Comtesse, tall and slender as a young poplar, was an imposing figure, when well frocked, for a struggling man of letters to be seen about with after the bright-lights had dawned and cab fares were doubled; moreover, the couple had an amiable and economical understanding between themselves by which she invariably chalked up their little dinner at Paillard's to her husband, while Hugo's own visiting-card was always good for two fauteuils at any of the houses where they were not playing to over much money.

All this was long, long ago, dear, yet many persons believe to this day in the _planchette_ as a means of increasing the value of handwriting from a scientific standpoint; indeed, only last July young Monty Clondalkin (who got his troop at Hounslow after heroically suppressing a civilian riot, caused by an electric car conductor's refusal to allow an elderly native lady to ride as far as Twickenham, without paying full fare for a hive of live bees which she was carrying in her lap; the man contending that the hive should have occupied a seat, even if the bees had been left to select their own seats, or stand; but who, with countervailing misfortune, had to retire on half pay after being dangerously hit in the antipodes of his face by a paleozoic boulder from a jingal during the firing of a _feu de joie_ by our allies at Thibet) was telling us at dinner one night of a very striking manifestation which he himself had witnessed. Knowing that he could catch nothing which he hadn't had about twice already, he boldly visited in a one-roomed cellar somewhere off the Euston Road, a certain Madame Ingomar, and, having straddled the ante, asked how to gain the lasting affection of the girl he loved and was to meet at Henley. The reply from the other world, via _planchette_, ran: "Win a million on Egyptian Beauty at Alexandra Park, and let her look at it"; and, though he had to lay eight millions to one on, dear, he brought it off!

This so impressed me with the virtues of the little board that, in the week before Goodwood, being sick of the sweet sisterhood which sticks to the Plantation, and yet needing the golden pinions with which to fly to the Ring, I hunted up dear old Phyllis Waring, who has made it up with Eustace, and is living in Knightsbridge in a delightful flat whose back windows overlook the Park, and begged her to get a _planchette_ between us. Neither she nor I had the faintest notion where such things were sold, but after much searching, Phyllis found one in a small _bric-à-brac_ shop in that queer neighbourhood which lies between the Royalty and Palace theatres, where Madonna-like ladies, attired chiefly in white tarlatan chemisettes, peep out of upper windows, and where black bearded men loll about the doorways of little pink and gold restaurants as though perpetually waiting for something to happen. Did not the Reverend Somebody, of the Church and Stage Guild, once have a chapel here in which the choristers appeared in tights? I fancy so.

Anyhow, Phyllis no sooner got it home than she summoned me to inspect it--a small wooden disc, dear, resembling nothing so much as an artist's palette. For an alleged novelty, it struck me as being rather soiled and dusty, but Phyllis assured me that we had the veritable thing; that the ancients knew it well, the two best remembered apothegms of Terence being "You can always make a market with a bear _planchette_," and _Actum ne agas_, or, "Don't overdo it." Upon a small table placed in the centre of the room, Phyllis deposited the little board and switched off the electric light. For several minutes an awful and oppressive stillness reigned, broken only by a faint, half-stifled feminine voice exclaiming, "You _will_ marry me, won't you?" which Phyllis said came from the Park at the back, and was no part of the séance whatever. Slowly, very slowly, the moments dragged along; then presently there came a slight sound as of a penholder tapping on a pill box, and Phyllis said, hoarsely and in sepulchral tones:

"The spirit of Madame Rachel asks the loan of an ear. She might as well bowl her hoop without wasting our time, I think; what with electric rollers and frown plasters we've got her ticketed as a mummy?"

I nodded assent, and many more moments of silence elapsed, followed by a grating noise as of the run down of a musical box.

"According to the old woman at the shop," said Phyllis, "the spirits notify that it's up to us to tilt back to them."

"Do they take this for a jackpot?" I asked, quite inoffensively.

"Never mind what they take it for," snapped Phyllis, "let us get them to give us an option in something on the Stock Exchange that is going to go a bit higher."

"Oh, fiddles to _that_!" said I, having no more desire to know anything of the kind than How-to-tell-the-gas-meter, illustrated by diagrams. "Rather get them to slip us the winner of the Steward's Cup?"

Sullenly, Phyllis amended her pleadings and submitted my question. In about five minutes, during which period the low plumbean purring of a marking-pencil was distinctly audible, there came the click which denotes the termination of a message, and Phyllis, snatching up the prize, carried it out into the light. Bristling with joyous anticipation, I followed, but only in time to hear her swear and see her smash the wooden thing across her knee and pitch it out of the window on to the moonlight prowlers in the Park.

"You were quite right about that dust, Vi," she said, sourly. "I have been lumbered on to a fake that was timed to strike seventeen years ago. The thing napped 'Crafton, win and shop!'"

Did I tell you, I wonder, in my last how those awful people, the Invernairne's, had fallen out again? Everyone is saying how worn and rundown she is beginning to look, and how much better it would be if only she could go away for a time. I don't mean to one of those dreadful places where seemingly intelligent old gentlemen caterwaul and hide themselves in mignonette beds, and perfectly blameless old ladies disrobe suddenly at the dinner-table and weep copiously into the soup tureen, because they are not as pure and unsullied as new milk-cans, but to some nerve-restoring retreat where she could recuperate without having strangers stare holes in her. Poor Maisie! when she married the middle-aged Invernairne she was quite one of the wits of the smart set, and, if not exactly a belle of letters herself, she had received many and many a bushel from the beaux of literature, principally respecting appointments. Never an ardent advocate of the tied-house system, her cultured soul and innate good taste had rebelled against the constant and vulgar propinquity of matrimony, which she had endeavoured to vary by bolting on seven different occasions with men who were all that could be desired, socially. Her prosaic husband had followed her up on each occasion, however, and, begging her to give marriage a fair and dispassionate trial, had brought her back again and again, until her once pellucid spirit became crushed and broken, and she was no more fun to talk to than a Trappist.

Quite lately she imported from Lausanne a tall, dark Swiss maid who had repented of some early rashness, and vowed that her future life should be one unending struggle against the promptings of nature. Gowned demurely in some simple clinging material which, as the _Family Herald_ says, accentuated rather than hid her graceful outline, Fanchon flitted lightly and swiftly up and down the Invernairne staircases, save when the Earl detained her on a landing to tell her how nicely her new bodice fitted her.

One fine morning at breakfast, the Earl remarked that as his physicians and also his bankers had ordered him to visit a lumber camp in Norway, he feared that he might not be back until the following day, and he felt it was an excellent opportunity, he said, for Maisie to go to bed at the same hour as the canaries, and have a real good rest. Then he called loudly to his man not to forget to pack his snowshoes, his caribou gun, plenty of ground bait for the trout, and disinfectants for the riper ryper, and took his departure. That selfsame night, in about the middle watch, poor Maisie, sleeping lightly and nervously, fancied that she heard the stairs creak in a guilty way, and tremblingly got up. Slipping into a tight-fitting lace dressing-gown with three deep flounces shooting boldly from below the knees, she crept out upon the stairs in time to see a familiar form, plainly silhouetted in the moonlight, just one flight above her, and still climbing. Invernairne had clandestinely returned!

Though Maisie entertained no Victorian views regarding the fidelity of husbands, and even knew that in clubland several men who had lately allowed their hearts to be true to their Polls, had been expelled on the ground that their conduct was unbecoming gentlemen, the situation seemed so promising of advantage to herself that she instinctively followed the figure, keeping close to the wall, where stairs are quietest. Precisely at the point anticipated, the spectral Invernairne crossed a landing and laid his hand softly upon the knob of the long suspected door. As the handle slowly turned and the door, opening inwards, suffered a strong shaft of light from a cheerful, crackling fire to cleave the darkness--Maisie, poor, impulsive fool, shouted imperiously, "STOP!"

Invernairne, with man's inborn craft, stopped instantly, and accurately grasping the situation, acted without a moment's pause. Stopping dead upon the threshold of the girl's room, he shouted into it angrily:

"How _dare_ you burn my coals in this way, you abandoned hussy? Douse that fire with your water-jug immediately, and prepare yourself for a bitter reckoning to-morrow!"

Then, turning back towards the stairs, he gasped the old Criterion gag, "My wife!"

"And pray what brings you here to-night?" Maisie asked, by this time realising how completely she had sacrificed the position to her own impetuosity.

"Economy, my love, sheer economy," replied the ready liar. "Found, when I got to Hull, that the Wilsons owned the boats and the fare was seven pounds. Far better spend the seven pounds on dear Maisie, thought I, and write to the Wilsons to send me a complimentary pass--perpetual free pass, in fact--besides, the Wilsons would never speak to me again if they ever heard of such a thing as my paying to travel by their line--preposterous! Back then I came--worn, weary, jaded, but self-satisfied--only to behold, on approaching the beloved goal, the unmistakable reflection in the clouds of a huge fire somewhere in my own dwelling. What great good fortune that I had turned back! How Providence provides! I adopted my old trapper tactics--stalking stealthily--from crest to crest--birchbark and woodcraft--aha! And blest if that Swiss hoyden of yours hadn't got a fire half way up her chimney, madam, and Cockerell's charging me thirty-five shillings a ton! Out of this house she goes to-morrow morning, mark that!"

"May the Lord have mercy on your miserable soul!" was all that Lady Invernairne could say as, trembling with suppressed agitation, she motioned him to the spare room and, a moment later, locked him in. And now the very natural question is What, oh What, will the Harvest be?

I really cannot conclude without thanking you for the hearty laugh you gave me by your humorous inquiry about my "going to the Lord Mayor's Show" next Wednesday. You have evidently not forgotten, dear soul, that the feeblest manifestation of the undying spirit of Thackeray's Jenkins never fails to move me to laughter; but really I prefer to leave to you and your sort the fragrance of the asphalte and the watermen's garments, also the fat and greasy citizens in furs and chains. Fortunately, like the pigs in France which have, since Villon dreamt he was a swine rooting in the streets of Paris, had to keep outside the fortifications, these dear old civic creatures are, like the pigs, only brought into these regions to be bled; and I will wager a fiver that when the worthy alderman who assisted Féo at her flower stall at the last bazaar is taken round to Dover Street to-morrow, he will bow to my opinion that she has not spent the last three weeks getting pinned up in fitting-rooms for nothing!

Thine
VIOLA.

EPISTLE VII

THE LADIES' RAG, _December_ 3_rd._

DEAREST PATRICIA,--

All day long there has been ringing in my ears the immortal observation of the extremely fastidious and highly cultured damsel who remarked, you may remember, as she finished her first riding-lesson, "M'yes, the sensation is agreeable enough, but the motion is highly ridiculous," for my morning mail is mainly of those who are hunting the fox. Housed in the Honourable Winnie Brandon's admirable hunting box--the adjective is justified by her many excellent domestic rules, one of which, for instance, is to have a loud gong sounded in the hall at ten minutes to six each morning, so that when the servants bring up the cups of tea at six precisely, they may find the guests all in their proper rooms and sound asleep--at Melton, are some of the smartest people that ever publicly strained at the most insignificant gnats and privately swallowed the most enormous camels. Not the least noteworthy among her guests is Lady Sheila Crampton, who since she got to learn the truth about her husband's audacious acquaintance with the Honourable Win, has assiduously made an intimate friend of her, though whether with a view to cut out in her own spouse's affections the beautiful Diana, or to effect an economy by the cheaper and easier method of watching one person instead of paying detectives to keep an unflagging look-out on two, has not yet been decided in eggshell china circles. Winnie is, to say the least, dreadfully "raw" over the business, though less so, in another sense, than Sheila, who, being unaccustomed to so much occupancy of the saddle, metaphorically moans in mauve ink for a recipe for restoring lost leather. If hot and then cold water, and tincture of myrrh, with a final top-dressing of zinc ointment, will not toughen her cuticle like a sjambok, then has Bermondsey lost her bearings and the fabled jolly tanner his art; but what of the lovers meanwhile? Finding it no longer necessary to outdistance the poor, unpractised lady and her equally bothered horse--"a-blowin' like a pair o' June brides," as the first said to the second whip--they may flirt along side by side to the great amusement of the field and the making of much new history.

And Melton has not yet satisfied itself as to what it was that caused the Honourable Winnie to miss her hunting for the first five weeks of last season, though, with truly ingrowing nerve, it has sought for a whole year to pry open the inscrutable. All it knows is that it saw on one Autumn evening of twelve months ago, a groom with a petrified countenance ride out from the stables of Brandon Towers and through the town, to return, more than an hour later, with the eccentric Dr Moxon from Swanzey Constable.

Though a bunch of five local practitioners, striving to fill out a six-day week, mutely resented the intrusion, old Dr Moxon continued to ride into Melton every afternoon thereafter on the fifteen-year-old pony which was almost beyond its office. With the second week he started sporting a white vest, and a neighbouring parson with elderly daughters thought seriously of asking him to dinner; but none were quite bold enough to risk a throw-down, and the mystery of Brandon Towers remained unsolved. Five weeks later, as the philosophic old doctor was making a hearty breakfast off a cold grouse which was dead enough to call for disinfectants, a servant announced Lord Willoughby de Sambre, and was in fact followed into the little dining-room by that breezy nobleman.

"Beg a thousand pardons for disturbin' you with the nosebag on, sir," said the peer, whose lachrymal glands indicated early transactions with brandy and soda, "but I've called to thank you very heartily for all you have done for Lady Brandon, and to ask you to accept this little cheque. Above all, I don't want it known what's been the matter with her; do you mind recording it in your books as small-pox? Thanks, awfully! There's one other little matter, sir. Lady Brandon--to whom I'm, ahem, closely related--tells me your old pony is none too efficient. Now, I'm putting on the rail to you a little red Daimler which will buzz you round and keep you more in touch with events. No--no thanks, you'll get it to-morrow; don't forget--smallpox!"

And Lord de Sambre vanished. Next day, a glistening little spark-waggon, as red as sealing-wax, arrived, and old Dr Moxon there and then christened it, lest he might forget his benefactor's last request, "VARIOLA," and wheeled it into his stable.

As he was in the act of recrossing his garden in the direction of his surgery, the elderly medico beheld a tall, military man with a frozen smile alight from the station fly and advance towards him, hat in hand.

"Ah, my dear Doctor Moxon," he cried, "this is lavender indeed for me! Pray accept this small cheque, miserably insufficient as it is, for all your goodness towards Lady Brandon, my--er, sister-in-law. It's like violating every principle of gratitude from A to Z to ask a further favour of you, but _do_ you mind bein' mum--absolutely G.H.!--as to the exact nature of Lady B.'s indisposition? Could you refer to it as--say bile or green cussedness of some sort? She is awfully sick, by the way, at your having to cover the Cosmos on a perambulating organism too far gone to stand doping, and I'm sending you--oh, fie, fie, I shall take no denials!--a little Panhard that'll skim round the corners like the pictures on the screen. Not a word, not a word; it'll be here to-morrow; but remember--headachy sickness an' all that caper!"

Long after the stranger had taken his departure, the good old doctor in his temporary perplexity scratched the shining pate which offended Nature had tonsured at 69 to resent the overwearing of the halo in all weathers, and gazed at the cheque which still lay where it had fallen on the floor. He could salve his conscience, he reflected, by destroying the superfluous draft; but with the entrancing little green tonneau which a railway rustic delivered at the door next morning, it was entirely different. So winsome was the diminutive car, with its fluted varnished bonnet, its bravely burnished lamps, and its intricate and interesting steel gear, that no soul only lately converted to automobilism could possibly have returned it--even had not the princely donor countered even that feasibility by scrupulously concealing his identity. So Doctor Moxon accepted the situation with the sigh of a philosopher, and, naming the green car "CHLOROSIS" as if by a happy inspiration, he strolled out into the quiet churchyard to try and forget all about the beautiful Lady Brandon among the quaint obituary puffs of the old tombstones.

Returning, much relieved, he was surprised to find a genial elderly gentleman with a ripston-pippin face and silk-lined clothes, sitting demurely in the cottage surgery and earnestly endeavouring to become deeply interested in Burckhardt's _Atlas of Electric Cystoscopy_.

"Doctor Moxon, I presume?" said this bland person, laying Burckhardt aside as the old physician entered; and, receiving an affirmative nod, continued: "Of course, my dear sir, you haven't the faintest notion as to who I may be, but it will suffice for me to tell you that I was--er, eh--yes, yes, Lady Brandon's former ward in Chancery--eh, no--tut, tut, how very foolish!--I mean, of course, that she was _mine_--egad, bless her heart, yes!--and--er, in that case, you will readily understand how deeply grateful I must feel towards the Galenian genius to whom she probably owes life itself to-day. Meantime, my dear Doctor Moxon, there are one or two reasons--purely private and family reasons--why the world at large should remain in ignorance of the precise nature of Lady Brandon's indisposition, and I feel sure that you will respect them--aye, that you will even waive personal veracity as well as professional etiquette to oblige a very delightful and charming woman, and--er, eh--be good enough to inform the curious that she has simply been suffering with a very aggravated attack of--er, toothache!"

"Really, sir----"

"Pray don't interrupt me, doctor!" cried the pippin, warming with enthusiasm; "but it occurred to dear Lady Brandon in all her dental agony--ha-ha, ho-ho!--that your slight, but not inconsiderable, delay in responding to her summons was solely attributable to the poverty of your horseflesh. Now, my dear sir, you mustn't be offended at what I am about to say, but what were formerly luxuries for the few are now necessities for the many, and what a country doctor surely needs is a swift and reliable motor-car. It fortunately happens----"

"Inexplicable! Do you know, sir----"