IN WHICH ALE IS SHOWN TO HAVE ONE QUALITY OF WINE
To proclaim that yon ribs of beef and yonder ruddy Britons have met, is
to furnish matter for an hour’s comfortable meditation.
Digest the fact. Here the Fates have put their seal to something Nature
clearly devised. It was intended; and it has come to pass. A thing has
come to pass which we feel to be right! The machinery of the world,
then, is not entirely dislocated: there is harmony, on one point, among
the mysterious powers who have to do with us.
Apart from its eloquent and consoling philosophy, the picture is
pleasant. You see two rows of shoulders resolutely set for action:
heads in divers degrees of proximity to their plates: eyes variously
twinkling, or hypocritically composed: chaps in vigorous exercise. Now
leans a fellow right back with his whole face to the firmament: Ale is
his adoration. He sighs not till he sees the end of the mug. Now from
one a laugh is sprung; but, as if too early tapped, he turns off the
cock, and primes himself anew. Occupied by their own requirements,
these Britons allow that their neighbours have rights: no cursing at
waste of time is heard when plates have to be passed: disagreeable, it
is still duty. Field-Marshal Duty, the Briton’s chief star, shines
here. If one usurps more than his allowance of elbow-room, bring your
charge against them that fashioned him: work away to arrive at some
compass yourself.
Now the mustard ceases to travel, and the salt: the guests have leisure
to contemplate their achievements. Laughs are more prolonged, and come
from the depths.
Now Ale, which is to Beef what Eve was to Adam, threatens to take
possession of the field. Happy they who, following Nature’s direction,
admitted not bright ale into their Paradise till their manhood was
strengthened with beef. Some, impatient, had thirsted; had satisfied
their thirst; and the ale, the light though lovely spirit, with nothing
to hold it down, had mounted to their heads; just as Eve will do when
Adam is not mature: just as she did—Alas!
Now, the ruins of the feast being removed, and a clear course left for
the flow of ale, Farmer Broadmead, facing the chairman, rises. He
stands in an attitude of midway. He speaks:
“Gentlemen! ’Taint fust time you and I be met here, to salbrate this
here occasion. I say, not fust time, not by many a time, ’taint. Well,
gentlemen, I ain’t much of a speaker, gentlemen, as you know. Howsever,
here I be. No denyin’ that. I’m on my legs. This here’s a strange
enough world, and a man’s a gentleman, I say, we ought for to be glad
when we got ’m. You know: I’m coming to it shortly. I ain’t much of a
speaker, and if you wants somethin’ new, you must ax elsewhere: but
what I say is—Bang it! here’s good health and long life to Mr. Tom, up
there!”
“No names!” shouts the chairman, in the midst of a tremendous clatter.
Farmer Broadmead moderately disengages his breadth from the seat. He
humbly axes pardon, which is accorded him with a blunt nod.
Ale (to Beef what Eve was to Adam) circulates beneath a dazzling foam,
fair as the first woman.
Mr. Tom (for the breach of the rules in mentioning whose name on a
night when identities are merged, we offer sincere apologies every
other minute), Mr. Tom is toasted. His parents, who selected that day
sixty years ago, for his bow to be made to the world, are alluded to
with encomiums, and float down to posterity on floods of liquid amber.
But to see all the subtle merits that now begin to bud out from Mr.
Tom, the chairman and giver of the feast; and also rightly to
appreciate the speeches, we require to be enormously charged with Ale.
Mr. Raikes did his best to keep his head above the surface of the rapid
flood. He conceived the chairman in brilliant colours, and probably
owing to the energy called for by his brain, the legs of the young man
failed him twice, as he tried them. Attention was demanded. Mr. Raikes
addressed the meeting.
The three young gentlemen-cricketers had hitherto behaved with a
certain propriety. It did not offend Mr. Raikes to see them conduct
themselves as if they were at a play, and the rest of the company paid
actors. He had likewise taken a position, and had been the first to
laugh aloud at a particular slip of grammar; while his shrugs at the
aspirates transposed and the pronunciation prevalent, had almost
established a free-masonry between him and one of the three young
gentlemen-cricketers—a fair-haired youth, with a handsome, reckless
face, who leaned on the table, humorously eyeing the several speakers,
and exchanging by-words and laughs with his friends on each side of
him.
But Mr. Raikes had the disadvantage of having come to the table empty
in stomach—thirsty exceedingly; and, I repeat, that as, without
experience, you are the victim of divinely given Eve, so, with no
foundation to receive it upon, are you the victim of good sound Ale. He
very soon lost his head. He would otherwise have seen that he must
produce a wonderfully-telling speech if he was to keep the position he
had taken, and had better not attempt one. The three young cricketers
were hostile from the beginning. All of them leant forward, calling
attention loudly laughing for the fun to come.
“Gentlemen!” he said: and said it twice. The gap was wide, and he said,
“Gentlemen!” again.
This commencement of a speech proves that you have made the plunge, but
not that you can swim. At a repetition of “Gentlemen!” expectancy
resolved into cynicism.
“Gie’n a help,” sang out a son of the plough to a neighbour of the
orator.
“Hang it!” murmured another, “we ain’t such gentlemen as that comes
to.”
Mr. Raikes was politely requested to “tune his pipe.”
With a gloomy curiosity as to the results of Jack’s adventurous
undertaking, and a touch of anger at the three whose bearing throughout
had displeased him, Evan regarded his friend. He, too, had drunk, and
upon emptiness. Bright ale had mounted to his brain. A hero should be
held as sacred as the Grand Llama: so let no more be said than that he
drank still, nor marked the replenishing of his glass.
Raikes cleared his throat for a final assault: he had got an image, and
was dashing off; but, unhappily, as if to make the start seem fair, he
was guilty of his reiteration, “Gentlemen.”
Everybody knew that it was a real start this time, and indeed he had
made an advance, and had run straight through half a sentence. It was
therefore manifestly unfair, inimical, contemptuous, overbearing, and
base, for one of the three young cricketers at this period to fling
back weariedly and exclaim: “By the Lord; too many gentlemen here!”
Evan heard him across the table. Lacking the key of the speaker’s
previous conduct, the words might have passed. As it was, they, to the
ale-invaded head of a young hero, feeling himself the world’s equal,
and condemned nevertheless to bear through life the insignia of
Tailordom, not unnaturally struck with peculiar offence. There was
arrogance, too, in the young man who had interposed. He was long in the
body, and, when he was not refreshing his sight by a careless
contemplation of his finger-nails, looked down on his company at table,
as one may do who comes from loftier studies. He had what is popularly
known as the nose of our aristocracy: a nose that much culture of the
external graces, and affectation of suavity, are required to soften.
Thereto were joined thin lips and arched brows. Birth it was possible
he could boast, hardly brains. He sat to the right of the fair-haired
youth, who, with his remaining comrade, a quiet smiling fellow,
appeared to be better liked by the guests, and had been hailed once or
twice, under correction of the chairman, as Mr. Harry. The three had
distinguished one there by a few friendly passages; and this was he who
had offered his bed to Evan for the service of the girl. The
recognition they extended to him did not affect him deeply. He was
called Drummond, and had his place near the chairmen, whose humours he
seemed to relish.
The ears of Mr. Raikes were less keen at the moment than Evan’s, but
his openness to ridicule was that of a man on his legs solus, amid a
company sitting, and his sense of the same—when he saw himself the
victim of it—acute. His face was rather comic, and, under the shadow of
embarrassment, twitching and working for ideas—might excuse a want of
steadiness and absolute gravity in the countenances of others.
The chairman’s neighbour, Drummond, whispered him “Laxley will get up a
row with that fellow.”
“It’s young Jocelyn egging him on,” said the chairman.
“Um!” added Drummond: “it’s the friend of that talkative rascal that’s
dangerous, if it comes to anything.”
Mr. Raikes perceived that his host desired him to conclude. So, lifting
his voice and swinging his arm, he ended: “Allow me to propose to you
the Fly in Amber. In other words, our excellent host embalmed in
brilliant ale! Drink him! and so let him live in our memories for
ever!”
He sat down very well contented with himself, very little comprehended,
and applauded loudly.
“The Flyin’ Number!” echoed Farmer Broadmead, confidently and with
clamour; adding to a friend, when both had drunk the toast to the
dregs, “But what number that be, or how many ’tis of ’em, dishes me!
But that’s ne’ther here nor there.”
The chairman and host of the evening stood up to reply, welcomed by
thunders—“There ye be, Mr. Tom! glad I lives to see ye!” and “No
names!” and “Long life to him!”
This having subsided, the chairman spoke, first nodding. “You don’t
want many words, and if you do, you won’t get ’em from me.”
Cries of “Got something better!” took up the blunt address.
“You’ve been true to it, most of you. I like men not to forget a
custom.”
“Good reason so to be,” and “A jolly good custom,” replied to both
sentences.
“As to the beef, I hope you didn’t find it tough: as to the ale—I know
all about THAT!”
“Aha! good!” rang the verdict.
“All I can say is, that this day next year it will be on the table, and
I hope that every one of you will meet Tom—will meet me here
punctually. I’m not a Parliament man, so that’ll do.”
The chairman’s breach of his own rules drowned the termination of his
speech in an uproar.
Re-seating himself, he lifted his glass, and proposed: “The
Antediluvians!”
Farmer Broadmead echoed: “The Antediloovians!” appending, as a private
sentiment, “And dam rum chaps they were!”
The Antediluvians, undoubtedly the toast of the evening, were
enthusiastically drunk, and in an ale of treble brew.
When they had quite gone down, Mr. Raikes ventured to ask for the
reason of their receiving such honour from a posterity they had so
little to do with. He put the question mildly, but was impetuously
snapped at by the chairman.
“You respect men for their luck, sir, don’t you? Don’t be a hypocrite,
and say you don’t—you do. Very well: so do I. That’s why I drink ‘The
Antediluvians’!”
“Our worthy host here” (Drummond, gravely smiling, undertook to
elucidate the case) “has a theory that the constitutions of the
Postdiluvians have been deranged, and their lives shortened, by the
miasmas of the Deluge. I believe he carries it so far as to say that
Noah, in the light of a progenitor, is inferior to Adam, owing to the
shaking he had to endure in the ark, and which he conceives to have
damaged the patriarch and the nervous systems of his sons. It’s a
theory, you know.”
“They lived close on a thousand years, hale, hearty—and no water!” said
the chairman.
“Well!” exclaimed one, some way down the table, a young farmer, red as
a cock’s comb: “no fools they, eh, master? Where there’s ale, would you
drink water, my hearty?” and back he leaned to enjoy the tribute to his
wit; a wit not remarkable, but nevertheless sufficient in the noise it
created to excite the envy of Mr. Raikes, who, inveterately silly when
not engaged in a contest, now began to play on the names of the sons of
Noah.
The chairman lanced a keen light at him from beneath his bushy
eyebrows.
Before long he had again to call two parties to order. To Raikes,
Laxley was a puppy: to Laxley, Mr. Raikes was a snob. The antagonism
was natural: ale did but put the match to the magazine. But previous to
an explosion, Laxley, who had observed Evan’s disgust at Jack’s
exhibition of himself, and had been led to think, by his conduct and
clothes in conjunction, that Evan was his own equal; a gentleman
condescending to the society of a low-born acquaintance;—had sought
with sundry propitiations, intelligent glances, light shrugs, and such
like, to divide Evan from Jack. He did this, doubtless, because he
partly sympathized with Evan, and to assure him that he took a separate
view of him. Probably Evan was already offended, or he held to Jack, as
a comrade should, or else it was that Tailordom and the pride of his
accepted humiliation bellowed in his ears, every fresh minute: “Nothing
assume!” I incline to think that the more ale he drank the fiercer
rebel he grew against conventional ideas of rank, and those
class-barriers which we scorn so vehemently when we find ourselves
kicking at them. Whatsoever the reason that prompted him, he did not
respond to Laxley’s advances; and Laxley, disregarding him, dealt with
Raikes alone.
In a tone plainly directed at him, he said: “Well, Harry, tired of
this? The agriculturals are good fun, but I can’t stand much of the
small cockney. A blackguard who tries to make jokes out of the
Scriptures ought to be kicked!”
Harry rejoined, with wet lips: “Wopping stuff, this ale! Who’s that you
want to kick?”
“Somebody who objects to his bray, I suppose,” Mr. Raikes struck in,
across the table, negligently thrusting out his elbow to support his
head.
“Did you allude to me, sir?” Laxley inquired.
“I alluded to a donkey, sir.” Raikes lifted his eyelids to the same
level as Laxley’s: “a passing remark on that interesting animal.”
His friend Harry now came into the ring to try a fall.
“Are you an usher in a school?” he asked, meaning by his looks what men
of science in fisticuffs call business.
Mr. Raikes started in amazement. He recovered as quickly.
“No, sir, not quite; but I have no doubt I should be able to instruct
you upon a point or two.”
“Good manners, for instance?” remarked the third young cricketer,
without disturbing his habitual smile.
“Or what comes from not observing them,” said Evan, unwilling to have
Jack over-matched.
“Perhaps you’ll give me a lesson now?” Harry indicated a readiness to
rise for either of them.
At this juncture the chairman interposed.
“Harmony, my lads!—harmony to-night.”
Farmer Broadmead, imagining it to be the signal for a song, returned:
“All right, Mr.—- Mr. Chair! but we an’t got pipes in yet. Pipes before
harmony, you know, to-night.”
The pipes were summoned forthwith. System appeared to regulate the
proceedings of this particular night at the Green Dragon. The pipes
charged, and those of the guests who smoked, well fixed behind them,
celestial Harmony was invoked through the slowly curling clouds. In
Britain the Goddess is coy. She demands pressure to appear, and great
gulps of ale. Vastly does she swell the chests of her island children,
but with the modesty of a maid at the commencement. Precedence again
disturbed the minds of the company. At last the red-faced young farmer
led off with “The Rose and the Thorn.” In that day Chloe still lived;
nor were the amorous transports of Strephon quenched. Mountainous
inflation—mouse-like issue characterized the young farmer’s first
verse. Encouraged by manifest approbation he now told Chloe that he “by
Heaven! never would plant in that bosom a thorn,” with such a volume of
sound as did indeed show how a lover’s oath should be uttered in the
ear of a British damsel to subdue her.
“Good!” cried Mr. Raikes, anxious to be convivial.
Subsiding into impertinence, he asked Laxley, “Could you tip us a
Strephonade, sir? Rejoiced to listen to you, I’m sure! Promise you my
applause beforehand.”
Harry replied hotly: “Will you step out of the room with me a minute?”
“Have you a confession to make?” quoth Jack, unmoved. “Have you planted
a thorn in the feminine flower-garden? Make a clean breast of it at the
table. Confess openly and be absolved.”
While Evan spoke a word of angry reproof to Raikes, Harry had to be
restrained by his two friends. The rest of the company looked on with
curiosity; the mouth of the chairman was bunched. Drummond had his eyes
on Evan, who was gazing steadily at the three. Suddenly “The fellow
isn’t a gentleman!” struck the attention of Mr. Raikes with alarming
force.
Raikes—and it may be because he knew he could do more than Evan in this
respect—vociferated: “I’m the son of a gentleman!”
Drummond, from the head of the table, saw that a diversion was
imperative. He leaned forward, and with a look of great interest said:
“Are you? Pray, never disgrace your origin, then.”
“If the choice were offered me, I think I would rather have known his
father,” said the smiling fellow, yawning, and rocking on his chair.
“You would, possibly, have been exceedingly intimate—with his right
foot,” said Raikes.
The other merely remarked: “Oh! that is the language of the son of a
gentleman.”
The tumult of irony, abuse, and retort, went on despite the efforts of
Drummond and the chairman. It was odd; for at Farmer Broadmead’s end of
the table, friendship had grown maudlin: two were seen in a drowsy
embrace, with crossed pipes; and others were vowing deep amity, and
offering to fight the man that might desire it.
“Are ye a friend? or are ye a foe?” was heard repeatedly, and
consequences to the career of the respondent, on his choice of
affirmatives to either of these two interrogations, emphatically
detailed.
It was likewise asked, in reference to the row at the gentlemen’s end:
“Why doan’ they stand up and have ’t out?”
“They talks, they speechifies—why doan’ they fight for ’t, and then be
friendly?”
“Where’s the yarmony, Mr. Chair, I axes—so please ye?” sang out Farmer
Broadmead.
“Ay, ay! Silence!” the chairman called.
Mr. Raikes begged permission to pronounce his excuses, but lapsed into
a lamentation for the squandering of property bequeathed to him by his
respected uncle, and for which—as far as he was intelligible—he
persisted in calling the three offensive young cricketers opposite to
account.
Before he could desist, Harmony, no longer coy, burst on the assembly
from three different sources. “A Man who is given to Liquor,” soared
aloft with “The Maid of sweet Seventeen,” who participated in the
adventures of “Young Molly and the Kicking Cow”; while the guests
selected the chorus of the song that first demanded it.
Evan probably thought that Harmony was herself only when she came
single, or he was wearied of his fellows, and wished to gaze a moment
on the skies whose arms were over and around his young beloved. He went
to the window and threw it up, and feasted his sight on the moon
standing on the downs. He could have wept at the bitter ignominy that
severed him from Rose. And again he gathered his pride as a cloak, and
defied the world, and gloried in the sacrifice that degraded him. The
beauty of the night touched him, and mixed these feelings with
mournfulness. He quite forgot the bellow and clatter behind. The beauty
of the night, and heaven knows what treacherous hope in the depths of
his soul, coloured existence warmly.
He was roused from his reverie by an altercation unmistakeably fierce.
Raikes had been touched on a tender point. In reply to a bantering
remark of his, Laxley had hummed over bits of his oration, amid the
chuckles of his comrades. Unfortunately at a loss for a biting retort,
Raikes was reduced to that plain confession of a lack of wit; he
offered combat.
“I’ll tell you what,” said Laxley, “I never soil my hands with a
blackguard; and a fellow who tries to make fun of Scripture, in my
opinion is one. A blackguard—do you hear? But, if you’ll give me
satisfactory proofs that you really are what I have some difficulty in
believing—the son of a gentleman—I’ll meet you when and where you
please.”
“Fight him, anyhow,” said Harry. “I’ll take him myself after we finish
the match to-morrow.”
Laxley rejoined that Mr. Raikes must be left to him.
“Then I’ll take the other,” said Harry. “Where is he?”
Evan walked round to his place.
“I am here,” he answered, “and at your service.”
“Will you fight?” cried Harry.
There was a disdainful smile on Evan’s mouth, as he replied: “I must
first enlighten you. I have no pretensions to your blue blood, or
yellow. If, sir, you will deign to challenge a man who is not the son
of a gentleman, and consider the expression of his thorough contempt
for your conduct sufficient to enable you to overlook that fact, you
may dispose of me. My friend here has, it seems, reason to be proud of
his connections. That you may not subsequently bring the charge against
me of having led you to ‘soil your hands’—as your friend there terms
it—I, with all the willingness in the world to chastise you or him for
your impertinence, must first give you a fair chance of escape, by
telling you that my father was a tailor.”
The countenance of Mr. Raikes at the conclusion of this speech was a
painful picture. He knocked the table passionately, exclaiming:
“Who’d have thought it?”
Yet he had known it. But he could not have thought it possible for a
man to own it publicly.
Indeed, Evan could not have mentioned it, but for hot fury and the ale.
It was the ale in him expelling truth; and certainly, to look at him,
none would have thought it.
“That will do,” said Laxley, lacking the magnanimity to despise the
advantage given him, “you have chosen the very best means of saving
your skins.”
“We’ll come to you when our supply of clothes runs short,” added Harry.
“A snip!”
“Pardon me!” said Evan, with his eyes slightly widening, “but if you
come to me, I shall no longer give you a choice of behaviour. I wish
you good-night, gentlemen. I shall be in this house, and am to be found
here, till ten o’clock to-morrow morning. Sir,” he addressed the
chairman, “I must apologize to you for this interruption to your
kindness, for which I thank you very sincerely. It’s ‘good-night,’ now,
sir,” he pursued, bowing, and holding out his hand, with a smile.
The chairman grasped it: “You’re a hot-headed young fool, sir: you’re
an ill-tempered ferocious young ass. Can’t you see another young donkey
without joining company in kicks-eh? Sit down, and don’t dare to spoil
the fun any more. You a tailor! Who’ll believe it? You’re a nobleman in
disguise. Didn’t your friend say so?—ha! ha! Sit down.” He pulled out
his watch, and proclaiming that he was born into this world at the hour
about to strike, called for a bumper all round.
While such of the company as had yet legs and eyes unvanquished by the
potency of the ale, stood up to drink and cheer, Mark, the waiter,
scurried into the room, and, to the immense stupefaction of the
chairman, and amusement of his guests, spread the news of the immediate
birth of a little stranger on the premises, who was declared by Dr.
Pillie to be a lusty boy, and for whom the kindly landlady solicited
good luck to be drunk.