snug, circular-fronted brougham, a comfortable couple, trotting out to
dinner in the Alpha Road, St. John’s Wood. Plenty of lobster sauce they
will have with their salmon, I wager; twice of boiled chicken and white
sauce they will not refuse, and oyster patties will they freely partake
of. A jovial couple, rosy, chubby, middle-aged, childless, I opine, which
makes them a _little_ too partial to table enjoyments. They should be
well to do in the world, fond of giving merry, corpulent little dinners
of their own, with carpet dances afterwards, and living, I will be bound
(our omnibus is ubiquitous, remember) at Maida Hill, or Pine Apple Gate.
There is another couple, stiff, starched, angular, acrimonious-looking.
Husband with a stern, Lincoln’s Inn conveyancing face, and pilloried in
starch, with white kid gloves much too large for him. Wife, with all
manner of tags, and tags, and odds and ends of finery fluttering about
her: one of those women who, if she had all the rich toilettes of all
King Solomon’s wives on her, would never look well dressed. I shouldn’t
like to dine where they are going. I know what the dinner will be like.
Prim, pretentious, dismal, and eminently uncomfortable. There will be a
saddle of mutton not sufficiently hung, the fish will be cold, the wines
hot, and the carving-knives will be blunt. After dinner the men will talk
dreary politics, redolent of stupid Retrogression, and the women will
talk about physic and the hooping-cough. Yet another couple—husband and
wife? A severe swell, with drooping moustaches of immense length, but
which are half whiskers. Transparent deceit! A pretty lady—gauzy bonnet
and artificial flowers, muslin jacket, skirts and flounces oozing out at
the sides of the carriage; hair _à la_ Eugénie, and a Skye terrier with
a pink ribbon. I know what _this_ means. Greenwich, seven o’clock dinner
(they are rather late, by the way, but they pass us on London Bridge, and
the coachman will drive rapidly), water souché, whitebait, brown bread
and butter, and iced punch; cigar on balcony, and contemplation of the
moon. Ride on, and be happy. Rejoice in your youth—and never mind the
rest. It will come, O young man, whether you mind it or not.
Hallo! there he is. I thought so. With a red face, shaven to the
superlative degree of shininess, with gills white and tremendous, with
a noble white waistcoat, and from time to time nervously consulting his
watch, lest he should be half a minute behind time with the spring soup,
rides by in a swift Hansom, the old gentleman who is going to a Charity
Dinner. Blessings on his benevolent, gastronomic old head, he never
misses one. He is going as quick as double fare will convey him to the
London Tavern. Quick! oh thou conductor, let me descend, for I must take
a Hansom too, and follow my venerable friend to the London Tavern; and,
by cock and pye, I will go dine there too.
I think my readers must be by this time sufficiently acquainted with the
fact that I am endowed with a very nervous temperament. Indeed, were I to
say that I start at my own shadow, that I do fear each bush an officer,
that I am continually in terror of Sudden Death, that I would rather not
go upstairs in the dark, and that (which is not at all incompatible with
a nervous organisation) in circumstances of real moment, in imminent
life-peril, in a storm, in a balloon, in a tumult, and in a pestilence, I
am perfectly master of myself, and, with a complete Trust and Reliance,
am quite contented and happy in my mind: when I state this, I don’t think
I need blush to own that I am as mortally afraid now of the boys in the
street as in the old days when they pelted me with sharp stones because
I preferred going to school quietly instead of playing fly-the-garter in
the gutter. I am afraid of my last schoolmaster (he is quite bankrupt
and broken, and pays me visits to borrow small silver occasionally),
and yet call him reverentially, “Sir.” I am afraid of ladies—not of the
married ones, in whom I take great delight, talking Buchan’s “Medicine,”
Acton’s “Cookery,” and Mrs. Ellis with them, very gravely, till they
think me a harmless fogey, hopelessly celibate, but sensible; not of the
innocent young girls, with their charming _naïveté_ and pretty sauciness;
but of the “young ladies,” who are “out,” and play the piano, and sing
Italian songs—of which, Lord bless them! they know no more than I do of
crochet-work—and who fling themselves, their accomplishments, and their
low-necked dresses, at men’s heads. I am afraid of policemen, lest in
an evanescent fit of ill temper they should take me up, and with their
facile notions of the obligations of an oath, swear that I was lurking
about with intent to commit a felon; and, transcendentally, I am afraid
of waiters. I watch them—him—the Waiter, with great awe and trembling.
Does he know, I ask myself, as he fills my tumbler with iced champagne,
that half-and-half is a liquid to which I am more accustomed? Does he
know that, sumptuously as I dine to-day, I didn’t dine at all yesterday?
Is he aware that Mr. Threadpaper is dunning me for that dress-coat with
the watered-silk facings? Can he see under the table that the soles of my
boots are no better than they should be? Is it within his cognizance that
I have not come to the Albion, or the London Tavern, or the Freemasons’,
as a guest, but simply to report the dinner for the “Morning Meteor?”
Does he consider the shilling I give him as insufficient? Shilling! He
has many more shillings than I have, I trow. He pulls four pounds in
silver from his pocket to change one a crown-piece. To-day he is Charles
or James; but to-morrow he will be the proprietor of a magnificent
West-end restaurant, rivalling Messrs. Simpson and Dawes at the Divan,
or Mr. Sawyer at the London. So I am respectful to the waiter, and fee
him largely but fearfully; and, were it not that he might take me for a
waiter in disguise, I would also call him “Sir.”
I no sooner arrive at the London Tavern, _pari passu_ with the old
gentleman with the gills and the white neckcloth, than I feel myself
delivered over to the thraldom of waiterdom. An urbane creature, who
might pass for a Puseyite curate, were not the waitorial stigmata
unmistakeably imprinted on him, meets me, and tells me in an oleaginous
undertone, which is like clear turtle-soup, that the Anniversary Festival
of the Asylum for Fatuous Monomaniacs is on the second floor to the
right. A second waiter meets me at the foot of the stair-case, and
whispers discreetly behind the back of his hand, “Two storeys higher,
sir.” A third waylays me benevolently on the first-floor landing, and
mildly ravishes from me my hat and stick, in return for which he gives
me a cheque much larger than my dinner ticket; which last is taken
from me on the second floor by a beaming spirit, the bows of whose
cravat are like wings, and who hands me to a Dread Presence—a stout,
severe man with a gray head, who is in truth the head-waiter at this
Anniversary Festival, and who with a solemn ceremony inducts me into the
reception-room.
Here, in a somewhat faded, but intensely respectable-looking apartment,
I find about fifty people I don’t know from Adam, and who are yet all
brothers or uncles or cousins-german, at the least, of my rubicund
white-waistcoated friend. And, to tell the truth, I don’t know him
personally, though his face, from meeting him at innumerable festivals,
is perfectly familiar to me. So are those of the other fifty strangers. I
have heard all their names, and all about them; but one is not expected
to remember these things at public dinners. You take wine with your
next neighbour; sometimes converse with him about eating and drinking,
the merits of the charity, the late political tergiversation of the
chairman, the heat of the weather, the fine voice of Mr. Lockey, and the
pretty face of Miss Ransford, and there an end. Your interlocutor may
be to-morrow the lawyer who sues you, the author whose book you will
slaughter in a review, the Commissioner of Insolvency who may send you
back for eighteen months. To have met a man at a public dinner is about
as valid a claim to the possession of his acquaintance, as to have met
him in the Kursaal at Hombourg, or on the steps of the St. Nicholas
Hotel at New York. After some twenty years of public dining together, it
is not, I believe, considered a gross breach of etiquette to make the
gentleman who has been so frequently your fellow _convive_ a very distant
bow should you meet him in the street; but even this is thought to be a
freedom by some rigid sticklers for decorum.
In genteel society, the half hour before dinner is generally accepted
as a time of unlimited boredom and social frigidity, but there you have
the relief, if not relaxation, of staring the guests out of countenance,
making out a mental list of the people you would not like to take wine
with, and turning over the leaves of the melancholy old albums, every
page of which you have conned a hundred times before. But in the half
hour (and it frequently is a whole one) before a public dinner, you have
no albums or scrapbooks to dog’s-ear. There is no use in staring at your
neighbours: the types of character are so similar—big and crimsoned
sensuous faces looming over white waistcoats, with a plentiful sprinkling
among them of the clerical element. You can’t smoke, you can’t (that is,
I daren’t) order sherry and bitters. If you look out of the window, you
see nothing but chimney pots, leads, and skylights, with a stray vagrant
cat outrunning the constable over them; and the best thing you can do is
to bring an amusing duodecimo with you, or betake yourself to one of the
settles, and twiddle your thumbs till dinner-time. But, joy, joy, here
are quails in the conversational famine; here is a welling spring in the
wilderness. The door opens, and the sonorous voice of the head-waiter
announces THE CHAIRMAN.
Very probably he is a lord. A philanthropic peer, always ready and
willing to do a kind turn for anybody, and to the fore with his
chairmanship, his set speeches, and his fifty-pound note for “fatuous
monomaniacs,” “intellectual good-for-nothings,” or “decayed bailiffs.” He
may be a regular dining-out lord, a not very rich nobleman, who has grown
gray in taking the chair at charity dinners, and who is not expected
to give anything to the institution save the powerful weight of his
presence and influence. He may be a young lord, fresh caught, generously
eager (as are, I am rejoiced to say, the majority of our young lords
now-a-days) to vindicate the power and willingness for usefulness of his
order; striving to show that there is not so much difference between
his coronet and the Phrygian cap, save that one is made of velvet and
the other of red worsted (ah! that irreconcileable red worsted), very
impulsive, very imprudent, sometimes slightly imbecile, but full of good
intentions and honest aspirations; or he may be a member of Parliament,
a veteran of the back benches, burning to make up for his silence in
the House by his eloquence in the forum of a tavern dinner. He may be
a worthy banker or merchant, who gets through the speech-making before
him in a business-like manner, and does not allow it in the least to
interfere with the consumption of his proper quantum of wine; or he may
be, as is very frequently the case, a lion—the “great gun”—the last blast
of Fame’s trumpet for the hour: a lawyer, a traveller, a philosopher, or
an author, whom the managing committee have secured, just as the manager
of a theatre would secure a dwarf, a giant, a wild beast tamer, a blind
piper, or a sword swallower, to enhance the receipts of the exhibition.
About thirty of the fifty people I don’t know from Adam gather
immediately in a circle round the chairman. The few who have the honour
to be on speaking terms with him jostle him sociably, and shake hands
with him with a rueful expression of contentment. Those who don’t know
him rub their hands violently, breathe hard, stare fixedly at him,
and whisper to one another that he is very like his portrait, or that
he isn’t at all like his portrait, or that he is getting old, or that
he looks remarkably young, or some equally relevant banalities. The
remaining twenty guests gather in the window-bays, and stare at nothing
particular, or else read the printed prospectus of the Asylum for Fatuous
Monomaniacs, and wonder how many of the fine list of stewards announced
may be present on the occasion. As for the chairman, he takes up a
position with his back safely glued (so it seems) to the mantelpiece, and
preserves a dignified equanimity, working his head from side to side in
his white neckcloth like that waxen effigy of Mr. Cobbett, late M.P. for
Oldham, which terrifies country cousins by its vitality of appearance
(those drab smallclothes and gaiters were a great stroke of genius) at
Madame Tussaud’s.
By this time a crowd of more people you don’t know from Adam, and
often outnumbering the fifty in the waiting-room, have gathered on the
staircase, the landing, and have even invaded the precincts of the dining
saloon, where they potter about the tables, peeping for the napkins
which may contain the special cards bearing their name and denoting their
place at the banquet. These are the people who _do_ know one another;
these are the stewards, patrons of the charity, or gentlemen connected
with its administration. They are all in a very excellent temper, as men
need be who are about to partake of a capital dinner and a skinful of
wine, and they crack those special jokes, and tell those special funny
stories, which you hear nowhere save at a public dinner. Then, at the
door, you see a detachment of waiters, bearing fasces of long, blue
staves, tipped with brass, which they distribute to sundry inoffensive
gentlemen, whose real attributes are at once discovered, and who are
patent to the dining-out world as Stewards. They take the staves, looking
very much ashamed of them; and, bearing besides a quaint resemblance to
undertakers out for a holiday, and in a procession, which would be solemn
if it wasn’t funny, precede the chairman to his place of honour.
The tables form three sides of an oblong quadrangle: sometimes the
horse-shoe form is adopted. In the midst, in a line with the chairman,
and as close to his august presence as is practicable, is a table of some
ten or a dozen _couverts_, devoted to some modestly-attired gentlemen
(some of them not in evening costume at all), whose particular places
are all assigned to them; who for a wonder seem on most intimate terms
mutually, and take wine frequently with one another; who are waited upon
with the most sedulous attention, and have the very best on the table,
both in the way of liquids and solids, at their disposal. They apply
themselves to the consumption of these delicacies with great diligence
and cheerfulness; but they do not seem _quite_ sufficiently impressed
with the commanding merits of the Royal Asylum for Fatuous Monomaniacs.
I wonder what special business brings these gentlemen hither. At some
distance from this table, towards the door, but still in a line with
the chairman, you see a pianoforte, and a couple of music-stands;
partially concealed behind a crimson baize screen, beneath the gallery
at the end, sit some stalwart individuals, of martial appearance, and
superbly attired in scarlet and gold lace, whom you might easily, at
first, mistake for staff officers, but whom their brass trombones and
ophicleides speedily proclaim to be members of the band of one of the
regiments of Guards. And high above all, supported on the sham scagliola
Corinthian columns, with the gilt capitals, is a trellised balcony, full
of ladies in full evening dress. What on earth those dear creatures want
at such gatherings,—what pleasure they can derive from the spectacle
of their husbands and friends over-eating and sometimes over-drinking
themselves, or from the audition of stupid speeches, passes my
comprehension. There they are, however, giggling, fluttering, waving tiny
pocket-handkerchiefs, and striving to mitigate the meaty miasma of the
place by nasal applications to their bouquets or their essence bottles;
and there they will be, I presume, till public dinners go out of fashion
altogether.[7]
[Illustration: SIX O’CLOCK P.M.: A CHARITY DINNER.]
I do not think I am called upon to give the bill of fare of a public
dinner. I have no desire to edit the next republication of Ude, or
Doctor Kitchener, Soyer, or Francatelli; besides, I could only make your
and my mouth water by expatiating on the rich viands and wines which
“mine host” (he is always mine host) of the Albion, the London Tavern,
or the Freemasons’, provides for a guinea a-head. You remember what I
told you the friend with the face like an over-ripe fig said of public
dinners—that they were the sublimation of superfluities; and, indeed, if
such a repast be not one of those in which a man is called upon to eat
Italian trout, Dutch dory, Glo’ster salmon, quails and madeira, Cherbourg
pea-chicks, Russian artichokes, Macedonian jellies, Charlottes of a
thousand fruits, Richelieu puddings, vanilla creams, Toulouse leverets,
iced punch, hock, champagne, claret, moselle and burgundy, port, sherry,
kirschwasser, and pale brandy, I don’t know the meaning of the word
superfluity at all.
Some three hours after the company have sate down to dinner; after
the “usual loyal and constitutional toasts,” with the usual musical
honours; after the toast of the evening—“Prosperity to the Royal Asylum
for Fatuous Monomaniacs”—with its accompanying (more or less) eloquent
speech from the noble or distinguished chairman, beseeching liberal
pecuniary support for so deserving an institution; after the prompt and
generous response, in the way of cheques and guineas, from the guests;
after a tedious programme of glees and ballads has been got through,
and the chairman has discreetly vanished to his carriage; after the
inveterate diners-out, who _will_ tarry long at the wine, have received
one or two gentle hints that coffee awaits their acceptance in an
adjoining apartment; and about the time that the feast begins to wear
a somewhat bleared and faded aspect (the lights cannot grow pale till
they are turned off, for these are of the Gas Company’s providing), the
waiters slouch about with wooden trays, full of ruined dessert-plates,
cracked nuts, muddy decanters, and half-emptied glasses; cherry stalks,
strawberry stems, squeezed oranges, the expressed skins of grapes, litter
the tables; chairs are standing at all sorts of eccentric angles; and
crumpled and twisted napkins are thrown pell-mell about. There is an
end to the fine feast: the cates are eaten, the wine drunk. Lazarus the
beggar might have taken his rags out of pawn (had he indeed any such rags
to mortgage), and his thin-limbed little brats might have grown plump and
rosy on a tithe of the money that has been wasted this night in guttling
and guzzling. Wasted? Oh! say not wasted, Cynic; take the mote from thine
own eye. Grumbler, for shame! I have done ill, I think, to caricature
the name even of any public charity. Let the “Fatuous Monomaniacs” be
numbered with the rest of my exploded fantastic conceits. Let this rather
be remembered: that the tavern feast of superfluities is prolific in
generous and glorious results; that from this seemingly gross and sensual
gathering spring charity, love, mercy, and benevolence. Pardon the rich
dinners and rare wines; look over the excess in animal enjoyments;
forgive even the prosy speeches; for _the plate has gone round_.
To-morrow Lazarus shall rejoice in his rags, and blind Tobias shall lift
up his hands for gratitude; the voice in Rama shall be bushed and Rachel
shall weep no more; and all because these good gentlemen with the rosy
faces and the white waistcoats have dined so well. For these dinners are
for the benefit of the sick and the infirm, the lunatic and the imbecile,
the widow and the orphan, the decayed artist and the reduced gentlewoman,
the lame, the halt, the blind, the poor harlot and the penitent thief,
and they shall have their part in these abundant loaves and fishes; and
the sublimation of superfluities must be condoned for the sake of those
_voluntary contributions_ which are the noblest support of the noble
charities in England. Remember the story of the Pot of Ointment. These
superfluities yield a better surplus than though the spikenard was sold
for an hundred-pence and given to the poor.
A very cream of waiters has taken good care of me during the evening. He
now fetches me my walking gear, and as he pockets my modest “largesse,”
whispers confidentially that he has had the honour of “seeing me afore;”
and, blushing, I remember that I have met him at private parties. It is
well for me if I can slip downstairs quietly, hail a cab, and drive to
one of the operas; for an act of the “Trovatore” or “Lucrezia Borgia”
are, in my opinion, far better than Seltzer water in restoring the
balance of one’s mind after an arduous public dinner. But it oft-times
happens that a man in your memorialist’s position has to pass a _quart
d’heure de Rabelais_, worse than paying the bill, after one of these
festive meetings. For, in a roomy apartment downstairs, lighted by waxen
tapers, such things as pens, ink, and paper, coffee, cognac, and cigars,
are, by the forethought of the liberal proprietors of the establishment,
laid out for the benefit of those merry gentlemen you saw upstairs at the
small table in a line with the chairman, where they were so well taken
care of; and if circumstances compel me to be in a merry mood to-night,
I must hie me into this roomy chamber, and scribble a column or so of
“copy” about the dinner, which will appear to-morrow morning in the
“Meteor.” Rubbing my eyes as I glance over the damp sheet between my own
warm ones in bed, I wonder who ever could have written the report of all
those elegant speeches. It seems at least a year since I dined with the
“Fatuous Monomanaics.”
* * * * *
This is again six o’clock p.m., but not by any means on the same evening.
The occasion could have no possible connection with going out to dinner,
for it happens to be six o’clock “sharp:” and, moreover, it is on Friday,
a day on which it is supposed to be as unlucky to go out to dinner as
to go to sea, to marry, to put on a new coat, to commence a new novel,
to cut your nails, or buy tripe. Now, what can I be doing in the city
on this Friday evening? Certainly not to perform any of the operations
alluded to above. Scarcely on business. Bank, Exchange, wharfs,
Custom-house, money-market, merchants’ counting-houses, are all closed,
and the inner city, the narrow winding lanes, that almost smell of money,
are deserted. What am I doing so close to St. Paul’s Cathedral, and why
do I turn off by St. Martin’s-le-Grand? For the simple reason, that
Friday evening is the very best one in the seven to witness the spectacle
I am going to see—Newspaper Fair at the General Post Office.
In the vast vestibule, or hall, of the establishment so admirably
presided over by Mr. Rowland Hill (for I do not reckon the aristocratic
placeman who is, turn and turn about, Whig or Tory, its nominal chief,
for much), and whose fostering care has made it (with some slight
occasional shortcomings) the best-managed and most efficient national
institution in Europe, you may observe, in the left-hand corner from
the peristyle, and opposite the secretary’s office (tremendous “counts”
are the clerks in the secretary’s office, jaunty bureaucrats, who ride
upon park hacks, and are “come for” by ringlets in broughams at closing
time, but who get through their work in about half the time it would
take the ordinary slaves of the desk, simply because their shrewdness
and knowledge of the world enables them to “see through a case” before
the average man of tape and quill can make up his mind to docket a
letter) a huge longitudinal slit in the panelling above, on which is the
inscription “For newspapers only.” And all day long, newspapers only,
stringed or labelled, are thrust into this incision; and the typographed
lucubrations of the some five hundred men who, for salaries ranging from
twenty shillings to twenty pounds per week, have to think, and sometimes
almost feel, in the Anglo-Saxon tongue, for some sixty millions of people
(I say nothing of the re-actionary influence upon foreign nations), go
forth to the uttermost ends of the earth. But as six o’clock approaches
(and six o’clock sharp is the irrevocable closing time for the departure
of newspapers by the current night’s mail), they open a tall window
above, and the newspapers are no more thrust, but flung in.
[Illustration: SIX O’CLOCK P.M.: THE NEWSPAPER WINDOW AT THE GENERAL
POST-OFFICE.]