and one which appeals strongly to the observant faculties, and which,
nevertheless, may escape us Cockneys who are to the metropolitan manner
born. It is the duality of the huge city, not so much as regards its
night and day side, as in its Sunday and week-day appearance. And this
is not wholly to be ascribed to the shop shutters being closed. The
Strand on Ash Wednesdays and Good Fridays is still the Strand; but on the
Sabbath it would seem as though every house in the West and East ends had
put on its special Sunday suit, and had decorated itself with a certain
smug spruceness quite marked and distinct. You have a difficulty in
recognising your most familiar streets. Regent Street is quite altered.
The aspect of Piccadilly is entirely changed; and Cheapside is no more
like the Cheapside of yesterday than Hamlet is like Hecuba. The people,
too, are not by any means the same people you meet on week-days. Not only
their clothes are different, but their faces, their manners, their very
gait and bearing, seem changed. You meet people out walking on Sundays,
who during the week are confined to places where they are hidden from
the public gaze, or are at most but half visible. You see the bar-maids’
skirts and the pawnbrokers’ legs on Sundays. From Monday to Saturday you
can see but their busts. You may nod to a sheriff’s officer on Sunday
without entertaining any apprehensions as to the piece of paper he may
have against you in that dismal black leather pocket-book of his. The
omnibus roofs are covered, the steamboats’ decks are crowded, the cabs
full, the pavement thronged, the very saddle-horses bestridden by men who
seem of a different race to the outside world of the previous four and
twenty hours. Dirty streets look clean; disreputable streets decorous;
and thoroughfares that were as still as mice during the week, become
quite noisy on Sundays with carriage and cab wheels, as sinners of wealth
and distinction rattle up to the doors of the fashionable chapel.
It is the privilege of the unique Haymarket to be like its week-night
self on Sunday; but in the six mundane days to be a totally different
Haymarket from the street which it becomes immediately after midnight.
True, by daylight, and during the early part of the evening, it is that
which it will remain all night: a broad thoroughfare inclining slightly
downhill northward; a theatre on its eastern, a colonnaded opera-house
on its western side; a thoroughfare containing a sufficiency of shops
for the sale of general merchandise, but, predominating above these,
a crowd of hotels, _restaurants_, cigar-divans, coffee-houses, and
establishments for the sale of lobsters, oysters, and pickled salmon,
according to the seasons in which those dainties are considered most fit
to be enjoyed. But it is not the same—no, not at all the same—Haymarket
to which it will suddenly turn, when the clock of St. Martin’s church
shall proclaim the hour of midnight. The change, at first imperceptible,
is yet in a moment more immense. As though Harlequin had smitten the
houses—and the people also—with his wand, the whole Haymarket wakes,
lights, rises up with a roar, a rattle, and a shriek quite pantomimic,
if not supernatural. The latter image would, I think, be the most _vrai
semblant_. “Hey for fun!” “How are you to-morrow?” and “How are you?” are
the cries and the pass-words. The painted Clown (in mosaic jewellery,
and all-round collar, an astonishing cravat, and a variegated shirt)
grins his grin and tumbles on the pavement. He is not above stealing an
occasional sausage, bonneting a policeman, overturning an image-boy’s
stock in trade, or throwing the contents of a fishwoman’s basket about.
Harlequin in a mask and patchwork-suit is here, there, and everywhere,
conjuring money out of people’s pockets, and perpetually pursued by a
vindictive Sprite, habited in the garb of a police constable. The lean
and slippered Pantaloon hobbles over the flags, and grimaces, with his
wicked old countenance, beneath the gas-lamps. And Columbine, _Wallah
billah!_ Columbine in muslins, spangles, and artificial flowers, is here,
there, and everywhere, too, and dances her miserable jigs to the sorry
music of the fife, viol, and tabor, squeaking, scraping, and thumping at
the gin-shop by the corner of the court.
Midnight: the play is over, and the audience pour from the Haymarket
Theatre. The aristocratic opera season is concluded by this time of the
year, and the lovers of the drama have it all their own way. Crowds of
jovial young clerks and spruce law students cluster beneath the portico,
yet convulsed by the humours of Mr. Buckstone. Happy families of rosy
children, radiant in lay-down collars, white skirts and pink sashes, trot
from the entrance to the dress-circle under the wing of benevolent papa
and stout good-humoured mamma, with a white burnous, and a tremendous
fan; their healthy countenances all beaming and mantling with smiles,
and joyously recalling the jokes of that funny old man in the farce, or
expatiating on the glories of the concluding _tableau_, with its tinsel
and gold leaf, its caryatides of ballet girls, and its red and blue
fire, in Mr. Talfourd’s last sparkling burlesque. Happy, happy days
and frame of mind, when the theatre can give such delights as these.
Isn’t it better to sit amazed and delighted in the front row of the
dress-circle, or on the third row of the pit, roaring at the stalest Joe
Millerisms, and clapping the hands at the tomfool feats of tumbling, than
to lie _perdu_ in a private-box, now scowling, and now sneering, like
Stricknine, the great theatrical critic, who will go and sup afterwards
at the Albion, on an underdone mutton-chop, and, calling for pen, ink,
and paper, slaughter the inoffensive burlesque mercilessly. Stricknine
can’t write burlesques himself. He can’t write books; he can only
slaughter, and must have been apprenticed in his youth to Bannister or
Slater. And, slaughterer as he is, he is not equal to the manly business
of knocking down a bullock with a pole-axe. Give him a long keen knife,
and he will puncture the neck of a lamb, and that is all.
Ethelred Guffoon (who has been to three theatres to-night) bustles out
from his stall with his lorgnette in its shagreen case. Mr. Kickeroe,
Q.C., comes from the pit, shouldering his umbrella. Kickeroe has been a
constant visitor to the pit of the Haymarket any time these twenty years,
though he could easily afford a private box once if not twice a week.
His greatest extravagance is to purchase four upper-box tickets when Mr.
Buckstone takes his benefit. He is an ardent admirer of the Haymarket
five-act comedies; and people say that many of his most effective and
jury-touching perorations have been drawn from the sentimental “tags”
of the Haymarket dramatists. Trotting down the box-stairs, too, comes
vivacious, learned, chatty, kindly, abusive Mr. Boblink, with his head
prematurely white, but his heart as green as it was thirty years since.
Mr. Boblink is generally beloved, though regarded with a humorous
terror for his vituperative qualities. He expatiates on the necessity
of breaking butterflies on the wheel, although, good man, he would not
harm a particle of pollen on their wings. His fierce language is but the
bellow of the blunderbuss: here is no bullet, not so much as a bit of old
hat for wadding in his gun. He strikes with a wooden sword, and scourges
malefactors with a knout whose lash is made of floss-silk. He wears the
mask of a Gorgon horrible to see; but the mask is transparent as glass,
and you may descry the honest genial face of the man wreathed with sly
smiles behind it. So he goes through life—a _bourru bienfaisant_—hitting
men sounding thwacks with a bladder full of peas, and recording sentence
of literary death against culprits, knowing full well that the sentence
will never be carried out. To hear Boblink talk, you would think him
the most malevolent creature breathing. He is so different from smooth,
quiet, smiling Mr. Stricknine, (_he_ only scowls when he is alone) who
presses your hand warmly, and immediately betakes himself to the Albion,
there to make a neat _fricassée_ of your reputation, and, in the most
polished and classical language, insinuate that you are a hopeless fool
with dishonest propensities. And yet Mr. Boblink has a deadly armoury of
his own at home, and knows the _tierce_ and the _carte_ and the “_raison
démonstrative_,” and has, when exasperated, proved himself so cunning
of fence, that I would see him hanged before I would fight with him in
earnest.
Supper is now the great cry, and the abundant eating and drinking
resources of the Haymarket are forthwith called into requisition.
Bless us all! there must be something very dusty and exhaustive in the
British drama to make this Haymarket audience so clamorous for supper.
By the ravenous hunger and thirst displayed by the late patrons of the
theatre, you would imagine that they had gone without dinner for a week.
You may sup in the Haymarket as your taste would lead, or as the state
of your finances would counsel—if people followed such counsel—you to
sup. You may cut your coat according to your cloth. Are you rich—there
is Dubourg’s, the Hôtel de Paris, and the upstairs department of the
Café de l’Europe. There is no lack of cunning cooks there, I warrant,
to send you up pheasants and partridges _en papillotte_; _filets_, with
mushrooms or truffles, culinary gewgaws that shall cost five shillings
the dish. Yea, and cellarers will not be wanting to convey to you the
Roederer’s Champagne, the fragrant Clos Vougeot, the refreshing Lafitte,
and the enlivening Chambertin with yellow seal; smooth waiters to attend
to your minutest wishes, and bring you the handsome reckoning on an
electro-silver plateau, and, with many bows, return you what odd change
there may be out of a five-pound note. I do not say that the Haymarket
contains such gorgeous supper-houses as the Maison Dorée, the Café de
Paris, the Café Anglais, or Vachette’s; but I have seen some notable
_parties fines_ within its precincts. The Haymarket never was virtuous;
so there is never any question about the cakes and ale, and the ginger
that is hot in the mouth, to be found therein.
If still your taste leads you towards French cookery—though you wince
somewhat at the idea of claret, Burgundy, and Champagne to follow—there
exists a second-class French _restaurant_ or two where succulent suppers
may be obtained at moderate prices. If unpretending chops, steaks,
kidneys, sausages, or Welsh rabbit, washed down by the homely British
brown stout, and followed perchance by the soothing cigar, and the jorum
of hot anything-and-water: if such be your ambition, I should advise you
not to sup in the Haymarket at all; but to wait till one o’clock and sup
with me. I will show you the whereabouts. Such chops and steaks and _et
ceteras_, you may indeed obtain in the neighbourhood, but I like them
not. If your funds and your credit be very low, why, you can enter one
of the taverns—if you can reach the bar for the crowd of Bacchanalians
that are gathered before it, and sup on the quarter of a pork pie, a
sausage roll, and a Banbury cake, washed down by a glass of pale ale;
nay, if you be yet lower in pocket, and your available wealth be limited
to the possession of the modest and retiring penny, you may, at the
doors of most of the taverns, meet with an ancient dame, of unpretending
appearance, bearing a flat basket lined with a fair white cloth. She
for your penny will administer to you a brace of bones, covered with a
soft white integument, which she will inform you are “trotters.” There
is not much meat on them; but they are very toothsome and succulent. It
is no business of yours to inquire whether these be sheep’s trotters or
pigs’ trotters, or the trotters of corpulent rats or overgrown mice. They
are trotters. Look not the gift-horse in the mouth; for the penny was
perhaps a gift, however strictly you may have purchased the trotters.
Eat them, and thank heaven, and go thy ways, and take a cooling drink
at the nearest pump with an iron ladle chained to it, which is, if I am
not mistaken, over-against St. James’s Church in Piccadilly. Or, perhaps
you are fond of ham-sandwiches. The unpretending dame with the basket
will straightway vend you two slices of a pale substance, resembling in
taste and texture sawdust pressed into a concrete form, between which is
spread a veneer of inorganic matter, having apparently a strong affinity
to salted logwood. This is ham! The concrete sawdust is bread! The whole
is a sandwich! These luxuries are reckoned very nice by some persons, and
quite strengthening.
Or, “another way,” as old Mrs. Glasse says in her cookery book. At the
Coventry Street extremity of the Haymarket stands that celebrated and
long-established institution known as the Royal Albert Potato Can. At
that three-legged emporium of smoking vegetables, gleaming with block tin
painted red, and brazen ornaments, the humble pilgrim of the Haymarket
may halt and sup for a penny. For a penny? What say I? for a halfpenny
even, may the belated and impoverished traveller obtain a refreshment at
once warm, farinaceous, and nourishing. Garnish your potato, when the
Khan of the Haymarket has taken him from his hot blanket-bed, and cut
him in two—garnish him with salt and pepper, eschew not those condiments,
they are harmless, nay, stimulating; but ho! my son, beware of the
butter! it is confusion. Better a dry potato and a contented mind, than
dreadful Irish salt grease—for butter I dare not call it, which may give
you a bilious attack that will last for a month.
I should like to know what has been the use of my recommending these
various grades of supper to you, from the lordly Café de l’Europe to the
humble Potato Can, when I should have known all along, and as it were
intuitively, that your mind was bent upon oysters, and that oysters after
the play you were determined to have. Come along, then, a’ goodness’
name, and if oysters are to be the order of the night, e’en let us have
them.
The London oyster, or rather shell and cured fish shop, for the sale
of lobsters, crabs, pickled and kippered salmon, bloaters, and dried
sprats, is combined with that of the delicious molluscs of which so
many thousands are nightly consumed; the London oyster-shop, and
particularly the Haymarket one, stands, and is a thing apart, among
the notabilia of this metropolis. You know how the French eat oysters.
There is the _belle écaillère_, generally a hideous old woman of about
sixty, with a snuffy-looking pocket-handkerchief twisted round her
head, who sits at the _restaurant_ door amid a grove of oyster-shells
and hanks of straw, and, in the intervals of oyster-opening, darns
worsted stockings. The nimble _garçons_ come skipping from the gilded
saloons of the _restaurant_ within, and demand their required dozens and
half-dozens from the _écaillère_ without. The bearded frequenters of
the _restaurant_ evidently think it an epicurean and fashionable thing
to commence, or rather precede dinner, by swallowing so many oysters.
There are enterprising _bon vivants_ who will even go so far as their
two dozen: but I dissent from them, for three reasons: The first, that,
in my opinion, oysters should be eaten either alone—of themselves, by
themselves, or for themselves—or that they should be consumed full twenty
minutes before the repast; for the second, that all French oysters,
whether of Ostend, Maremnes, or Canale, are to me utterly abominable,
having—even when they are fresh, which is seldom—a certain coppery
flavour, superlatively nauseous; for the third, that in the best French
_restaurants_, it is difficult, if not impossible, to procure Cayenne
pepper; and, without that rubicund condiment, I would give no more for
the best “natives” than for a plate of cold boiled veal without salt. The
_écaillère_ element is the only one prevalent in France relative to the
sale of oysters, and the consumers pick them off the shells with little
silver pitchforks, squeeze lemon over them, and eat them daintily in many
mouthfuls. Fie upon such miminy-piminy ways! Oyster-shops the French
don’t seem to understand at all. At Chevet’s, that vast comestible shop
in the Palais Royal, they keep oysters, and lobsters, and prawns, and
shrimps—keep them as a show in the windows for a week or two, when, their
novelty beginning to wear off, they are disposed of, I presume, to the
nobility and gentry. They tell a story of a Frenchman, who hoarded up his
money, in order to purchase _un homard magnifique_, which he had seen at
Chevet’s, and to which he had taken a fancy.
[Illustration: MIDNIGHT: SUPPER-ROOMS IN THE HAYMARKET.]
Americans tell me that though the oyster attains high perfection,
and is held in culinary reverence as high, in the States, anything
resembling our Haymarket oyster-shop is not to be found in New York. But
on Broadway Pavement, during the gay night, brilliant lamps, sometimes
coloured in fantastic devices, invite you to enter underground temples
of oyster-eating. These are called oyster-cellars. Some are low and
disreputable enough, and not impassible to imputations of gouging,
bowie-kniving, and knuckle-dusting; but others are really magnificent
suites of apartments, decorated with mirrors and chandeliers, and glowing
with gilding, mahogany, and crimson velvet; and here you may consume
oysters as small as periwinkles or as large as cheese-plates—oysters
of strange and wondrous flavours—oysters with _bizarre_ and well-nigh
unpronounceable names—oysters cooked in ways the most marvellous and
multifarious: stewed, broiled, fried, scolloped, barbacued, toasted,
grilled, and made hot in silver chafing dishes like the delicious
preparation known as “despatch lobster.” You wash down suppers in
oyster-cellars such as these with Hock and Champagne; yet for all the
splendour and the rarity of the cooking, and the variety of oysters,
I will abide by the Haymarket oyster-shop, rude, simple, primitive as
it is, with its peaceful concourse of customers taking perpendicular
refreshment at the counter, plying the unpretending pepper-castor, and
the vinegar-cruet with the perforated cork, calling cheerfully for crusty
bread and pats of butter; and, tossing off foaming pints of brownest
stout, (pale ale—save in bottles, and of the friskiest description—is,
with oysters, a mistake) contentedly wipe their hands on the jack-towel
on its roller afterwards.
* * * * *
As in this real life of ours, Old Age and Infancy often meet on neutral
ground, and the prattle of the child goes forth with hand out-stretched
to meet the graybeard’s maundering: so, oh reader, do I find the
beginning and the end of these papers drawing closer and closer together.
Ere many hours they will meet; and their conjunction shall be the signal
for their decay. You will remember how, when the day was very young,
the morning scarce swaddled, and kicking in his cradle with encrimsoned
heels (Aurora, the nurse, had chafed them), we visited a great newspaper
office, and saw the publication of the monster journal. Now, when
midnight itself is fallen into the sere and yellow, we stand once more
within the precincts of journalism. This is not, however, the monster
journal that has all Printing House Square to roar and rattle in. No:
our office is in the Strand. We are free of the charmed domains. We pass
up a narrow court running by the side of the office, push aside a heavy
door, ascend the creaking staircase, and discreetly tapping at a door,
this time covered with green baize, find ourselves in the presence of Mr.
Limberly, the sub-editor of the “Daily Wagon.”
Let us cast a glance round the room. What a litter it is in, to be
sure! what piles of newspapers, home and country ones, mangled and
disembowelled by the relentless scissors, cumber the floor! More
newspapers on shelves—old files, these—more on the table; letters
opened and unopened, wet proof-sheets, files of “copy,” books for
review, just sent by the publishers, or returned by the reviewers,
after they have duly demolished the contents and the authors. And all
about the room are great splashes and dried-up pools of ink, and the
ceiling is darkened with the smoke of innumerable candles—gas was, until
very lately, considered anything but orthodox in a newspaper office,
and many sub-editors still find its sharp, harsh, flickering, though
brilliant light, far inferior to the honest, though evil-smelling, old
tallow-candles, in their tin sconces and japanned shades. The “Daily
Wagon,” be it understood, is a newspaper of the good old Conservative
way of thinking—no Liberal notions, or humbug of that sort: Church
and State, strict constitutional and social discipline (including
game-laws, religious disabilities, church-rates, unequal taxation, rural
justices’ justice, and flogging in the army and schools)—the True Blue
British line of politics, in fact. Thus situated, the “Wagon,” one of
whose proprietors is said to be a peer, another a bishop, and a third
a brewer—nothing could be more respectable—sticks to its old office,
its old rooms, and its old staff. The two former have not been painted
within the memory of man; though it must be admitted that the latter
wash quite as frequently as the _employés_ of the “Morning Cracker,”
with its bran-new offices, its bran-new furniture, its bran-new type,
paper, machines, writers—bran-new everything but ideas. The “Daily
Wagoners” affect to sneer at the “Morning Cracker,” which, in its turn,
laughs the “Wagon” to scorn; but both combine in abusing the monster
journal of Printing House Square. “Wagoner” and “Cracker” are both
high-priced journals. So, of course, they both feel bound to ignore
even the existence of a journal called the “Daily Bombshell,” which
somehow manages to keep up a better staff of writers, and a larger
establishment, to give fresher news, more accurate intelligence, more
interesting correspondence, and reflections on public events incomparably
more powerful, than its high-priced contemporaries, all for the small
sum of one penny. The “Wagon” and the “Cracker” are in a chronic state
of rage at the “Bombshell,” though they pretend to ignore its existence;
but one day the bishop who is interested in the “Wagon,” hearing that
the circulation of the abhorred “Bombshell” exceeded fifty thousand,
while that of his own beloved journal fluctuated between five and seven
hundred, drove down in almost delirious excitement to the offices of the
“Wagon”—drove down in his own carriage, with his mitre on the panels—and
suggested to Mr. Fitzfluke, the editor, that the price of the paper
should forthwith come down to one penny. But Mr. Fitzfluke shook his
head in respectful deprecation of the proposition, and summoned to his
aid Mr. Limberly, who likewise shook his head, and whispered the magic
word “advertisements.” A grand consultation between the proprietors took
place next day, whereat the brewer came out in a rabidly conservative
point of view, and declared, striking a leathern-covered table, that he
would sooner see his own “Entire” retailed at a penny a pint, than submit
to an imitation in price of the “rubbishing prints” of a set of “dam
radicals.” So the “Daily Wagon” keeps up its price, and manages to crawl
on in a tortoise-like manner, supported by its advertisements. It sleeps
a good deal, and doesn’t want much to eat; and will bear being trodden
on, stumbled over, nay, occasionally jumped upon, without seeming in the
least to mind it.
[Illustration: MIDNIGHT: THE SUB-EDITOR’S ROOM.]
Mr. Limberly sits, then, in his sub-editorial throne—an unpretending
cane-bottomed arm-chair—surrounded by his _attachés_ and myrmidons, his
good men and true. The electric telegraph messenger—a spruce lad in the
not unbecoming uniform of that recently-formed corps—has just arrived,
bearing a message which may announce either war in the East or Peace in
China, either a fluctuation in the funds at St. Petersburg, or a murder
at Haverfordwest; either the wreck of a steamer, with all hands lost,
on the north-west coast of Ireland, or the arrival in the Mersey of a
clipper ship from Australia, with a few score thousand ounces of gold in
her treasure-room, to say nothing of the nuggets, the gold dust, and the
bankers’ receipts in the pockets of her wide-awake-hatted passengers.
But all is fish that comes to Mr. Limberly’s net. Leading article
and literary criticism, theatrical notices and prices of railway and
mining shares, advertisements and letters from eulogistic or indignant
correspondents, telegrams and foreign tittle-tattle, fires, murders,
fatal accidents, coroners’ inquests, enormous gooseberries, showers of
frogs, the acceptances of the St. Leger, and the prices of hops in the
Borough Market: he looks upon all these items but as so much “copy,”
for which the master printer is waiting, and which are required to fill
the ever-yawning columns of the “Daily Wagon.” Snipping and pasting,
extracting, excising, revising, and correcting, Mr. Limberly will work
late into the night and early into the morning; but he will not dream
of retiring to rest till the paper itself be “put to bed,”—_i.e._, laid
on the printing machine for the requisite number of copies to be struck
off; and even then he will probably go and smoke a cigar at the “Crimson
Hippopotamus,” in the Strand, hard by—the great house of call for morning
journalists—before he hails his matutinal cab, the driver of which waits
for him on the stand, and looks out for him quite as a regular customer,
and rattles over Waterloo Bridge to his well-deserved bed.