“I see. An Oliver twist,” said Collette sweetly.
De Leuville called on me once in Fleet Street while I was editing a weekly paper. One of my contributors had fallen foul of a poem bearing the nobleman’s name. The reviewer had discovered in the verses every fault which the author of a poetical composition could by any possibility commit. De Leuville’s principal object in seeking an interview was, he declared, to prove to me that “shore” was a true rhyme to “Samoa.” He did not quite succeed. He was a man with a big, round, foolish face; he wore a moustache and imperial. He had very broad shoulders, and wore his collar so low as to give him something of a décolleté appearance. His black tie was big and flamboyant, and suggested the boulevards—as it was, no doubt, intended to do. His hair was long, and his broad-brimmed silk hat was worn slightly tilted to one side, indicating that he was rather a dog of a Marquis. He wore stays, which had the effect of adding, apparently, to the width of his shoulders. On his fingers were large rings of eccentric design. And the man literally stank—there is no other word for it—of unguents and essences. That was the first occasion on which I had the doubtful pleasure of seeing the Marquis De Leuville. The last time I encountered him was about three years since at Boulogne. He was a greatly altered marquis. His long grey hair fell over his shoulders; he wore a black soft felt hat, a black velvet dinner-jacket. He looked a rather seedy and shrivelled Marquis. Altogether he had the appearance of a stunted Buffalo Bill fallen upon evil days. He was accompanied in his visits to the établissement by a group of octogenarian lady admirers. He lived in an hotel at one side of the estuary; they lived in a hotel on the other. Everything was entirely respectable and platonic. And it was quite pathetic, I thought, to hear the shrill voice of the merry widow—for the “Marky,” like the Pope, was still supported by “Peters’ Pence”—rebuking a friend, and announcing emphatically:
“My dear, the Marquis has a soul above gambling!”
Messengers came and went between the hotels, and a pleasant interchange of amenities was constantly taking place. The Marquis, from his retreat near the railway-station, despatched little presents of scent and trifling sonnets to his mistress’s eyebrow. These manuscripts the recipient read in her high piping voice to her satellites, describing them as “p’tee morr-sow.” And I suppose in exchange for the bottles of strange smells and the poems there was a generous supply of “Peters’ pence.”
During his stay in Boulogne the Marquis invented a new boot-varnish, the secret of applying which belonged to himself alone. He spent quite an hour a day varnishing his boots, the result being that he was evicted, one after another, from half the hotels in the town. His varnish had a nasty habit of communicating itself to table-linen, carpets, or any other hotel property that happened to touch it. But Oliver stuck to his boot-varnish, and permitted himself to be driven from hostelry to hostelry rather than abandon it. He afforded a fine example of the old nobility sacrificing itself on the altar of principle. A year after I had seen him in Boulogne I read of his death; and the devoted chatelaine of the Priory, Kilburn, soon followed him into a realm where charlatanism is, we may imagine, at a discount.
Colonel Whitehead was another gentleman who thought it well to establish relations with gentlemen on the Press—on the principle, I suppose, that it is well to make friends of the mammon of unrighteousness. The Colonel was a great admirer of the stage, more particularly that department of the stage which devotes itself to the encouragement of histrionic talent in good-looking young women. He was a haunter of stage-doors, was admitted, here and there, to the coulisses, and was one of those patrons of the drama whose patronage takes a practical turn in the case of its female professors. In order to indulge his tastes in this direction, he leased the Canterbury for a season, revived the ballet with some of its ancient glory, and thoroughly enjoyed himself among the members of the corps. But the experiment was a costly one, and his operations were subsequently carried on at a less ruinous scale of expenditure.
He was one of the original members of Russell’s Club for Ladies. Here he would turn up of a night with the largest shirt-front in London, in the middle of which sparkled a diamond of prodigious size. The Colonel was sitting one night in the drawing-room of the club, waiting, no doubt, for one of those ladies for whose special convenience Russell had founded his club. A boyish officer in one of the regiments of Guards was sitting not far off staring at the Colonel, whose get-up fascinated him. The youthful Guardsman was not nearly as sober as he might have been. Having gazed, fascinated, for a length of time at the Colonel, he called out: “Waiter!”
“Yessir,” said the servant who answered the summons.
“Oh—er—waiter, who’s (hic) that man with the lighthouse in his stomach?”
From that day to the day of his death Whitehead was known as Colonel Lighthouse. The Colonel had a big house outside Margate, to which at week-ends he invited his theatrical and literary friends. And the highest sort of high-jinks were carried on there.