"DEADLY DASH."
A STORY TOLD ON THE OFF DAY.
On the off-day after the Derby everybody, except the great winners, is, it will be generally admitted, the resigned prey to a certain gentle sadness, not to say melancholy, that will only dissipate itself under a prolonged regimen of S. and B., seidlitz well dashed with Amontillado, or certain heavenly West Indian decoctions;—this indisposition, I would suggest, we should call, delicately and dubiously, Epsomitis. It will serve to describe innumerable forms and degrees of the reactionary malady.
There is the severest shape of all, "dead money," that covers four figures, dropped irretrievably, and lost to the "milkers;" lost always you say because of a cough, or because of a close finish, or because of something dark, or because of a strain in the practising gallops, or because of a couple of brutes that cannoned just at the start; and never, of course, because the horse you had fancied was sheerly and simply only fit for a plater. There is the second severe form, when you awake with a cheerful expectation of a summons for driving "at twelve miles an hour" (as if that wasn't moderate and discreet!), and for thereby smashing a greengrocer's cart into the middle of next week, and running a waggonette into an omnibus, as you came back from the Downs, of which you have no more remembrance than that there was a crash, and a smash, and a woman's screams, and a man's "d—n the swells!" and a tintamarre of roaring conductor and bellowing greengrocer, and infuriated females, through which you dashed somehow with a cheer—more shame for you—and a most inappropriate l'Africaine chorus from the men on your drag. There is the milder form, which is only the rueful recollection of seeing, in a wild ecstasy, the chestnut with the white blaze sweep with his superb stride to the front, and of having, in your moment of rapturous gratitude to the red and blue, rushed, unintentionally, during the discussion of Fortnum and Mason's hamper, into a promise to take Euphrosyne Brown to Baden in August, where you know very well she will cost you more than all your sums netted through Gladiateur. There are the slenderer touches of the malady, which give you, over your breakfast coffee, a certain dolorous meditation as to how you could have been such a fool as to have placed all your trust in Danebury, or to have put in a hole through Spring Cottage just what your yacht costs for three months; which makes you wonder why on earth you took that lot of actresses on to the hill, and threw money enough away on them in those wages of idiotcy (or wages of sin, as your uncle the dean would translate it), of cashmeres, eau de Cologne, gloves, and bracelets, to have purchased those two weight-carriers offered you at £600 the pair, and dirt-cheap at that; or which makes you only dully and headachily conscious that you drank champagne up on the box-seat as if you were a young fellow from Eton, and now pay for the juvenile folly, as you know you deserve to do, when that beautiful white Burgundy at your club, or your own cool perfect claret at home, seems to stare you in the face and ask, "Why did you crack all those bottles of Dry on the Downs?"
There are symptoms and varieties innumerable of the malady that I propose shall be known henceforward as Epsomitis; therefore, the off-day finds everybody more or less slightly done-up and mournful. Twenty-four hours and the Oaks, if properly prepared for by a strictly medicinal course of brûles-gueules, as the Chasseurs say, smoked perseveringly, will bring all patients round on the Friday; but during the twenty-four hours a sense that all on and off the course is vanity and vexation of spirit will generally and somnolently predominate in the universal and fashionable disease of Epsomitis.
One off-day, after the magnificent victory of Monarque's unrivalled son, an acquaintance of mine, suffering considerably from these symptoms, sought my philosophy and my prescriptions. A very sharp irritant for Epsomitis may be administered in the form of "I told you so? It's all your own fault!" But this species of blister and douche bath combined is rarely given unless the patient be mad enough to let his wife, if he unluckily have one, learn what ails him. As far as I was concerned, I was much too sympathetic with the sufferer to be down upon him with the triumphant reminder that I had cautioned him all along not to place his trust in Russley. I, instead, prescribed him cool wines, and led him on to talk of other people's misfortunes, the very best way to get reconciled with your own. We talked of old times, of old memories, of old acquaintance, in the twilight, between Derby and Oaks. We got a little melancholy; too much champagne is always productive on the morrow of a gently sentimental tinge, and a man is always inclined to look on the world as a desert when he has the conviction that he himself has been made a fool in it. Among other names, that of Deadly Dash came up between us. What had become of him? I did not know; he did. He told me; and I will tell it here, for the story is of the past now.