one. To the contemplative mind they are full of suggestions, and evidence
of the vast digestive powers of the English people. To any but a race of
hardy Norsemen, sons of Thor and Odin, hammerers of steel, welders of
iron, and compellers of adverse elements, men who are sometimes brought
to live when on shipboard upon weevily biscuit that breaks the teeth, and
salted leather, humorously nicknamed beef; or in trenches, upon rancid
pork, toasted on bayonet or ramrod tips; to any but that unconquerable,
hard-headed, and strong-stomached people, of whom it is sometimes said
that they would eat a donkey if they were allowed to begin at the hind
legs, this post-midnight repast at Evans’s would be full of menace of
perturbed slumbers, distraught dreams, nay, even ghastly nightmares. Your
Frenchman, when he sups, takes his cold salad, his appetising fruit,
his succulent partridge, his light omelette, or, at most, his thin weak
_bouillon_, with a lean cutlet to follow. He drinks sugar-and-water,
wine-and-water, or, on high holiday nights, a glass or two of champagne;
puffs his mild cigars, and goes to bed, simpering that he has _bien
soupé_. And even then, sometimes, your Frenchman has dreams, and rising
in bed, with the hair of his flesh standing up, vows that he will sup no
more. Your Italian sups on his three-halfpennyworth of maccaroni. Your
Spaniard rubs a piece of bread with garlic, and eats it, blesses heaven,
and goes to sleep with a cigarette in his mouth. Your gross German
affects the lighter kind of cold meats and salads at supper, and washes
down his spare repast—to be sure, it is the fourth within the twelve
hours—with some frothy beer. The Americans can’t be said to sup, any
more than they breakfast, lunch, or dine. They are always over-eating,
over-drinking, and over-smoking themselves; and were it not for their
indomitable pluck and perseverance, their tendency to dyspepsia would be
an insurmountable obstacle to their ever becoming a great people. _For
the great peoples have always had strong stomachs._ Homer’s heroes ate
beef undone. When the Romans took to made-dishes and kick-shaws, then
came their decadence, and the strong-stomached barbarians of the North
overran them. To make an end of foreign wanderings, Russian suppers,
among the people, are just no suppers at all. One—or at most two—meals
a day, is the rule with the moujik. In elegant society, the cook might
as well provide for supper painted chickens and lobster salads made
of sealing-wax and cut paper, as any genuine viands. A supper at St.
Petersburg, means champagne and gambling till the next morning.
But see the suppers set forth for the strong-stomached supporters of
Evans’s. See the pyramids of dishes arrive; the steaming succession of
red-hot chops, with their brown, frizzling caudal appendages sobbing
hot tears of passionate fat. See the serene kidneys unsubdued, though
grilled, smiling though cooked, weltering proudly in their noble gravy,
like warriors who have fallen upon the field of honour. See the hot
yellow lava of the Welsh rabbit stream over and engulf the timid toast.
Sniff the fragrant vapour of the corpulent sausage. Mark how the russet
leathern-coated baked potato at first defies the knife, then gracefully
cedes, and through a lengthened gash yields its farinaceous effervescence
to the influence of butter and catsup. The only refreshments present open
to even a suspicion of effeminacy are the poached eggs, glistening like
suns in a firmament of willow-pattern plate; and those too, I am willing
to believe, are only taken by country-gentlemen hard pressed by hunger,
just to “stay their stomachs,” while the more important chops and kidneys
are being prepared. The clouds of pepper shaken out on these viands are
enough to make Slawkenbergius sneeze for a fortnight; the catsup and
strong sauces poured over them are sufficient to convince Sir Toby Belch
that there are other things besides ginger, which are apt to be “hot
i’ the mouth,” and, as humble servitors in attendance on these haughty
meats, are unnumbered discs of butter, and manchets of crustiest bread
galore.
[Illustration: ONE O’CLOCK A.M.: EVANS’S SUPPER-ROOMS.]
Pints of stout, if you please, no puny half-measures, pints of sparkling
pale ale, or creaming Scotch, or brownest Burton, moisten these sturdy
rations. And when the strong men have supped, or rather before they
have supped, and while they have supped, and indeed generally during
the evening, there bursts out a strong smell of something good to
drink; and presently you perceive that the strong men have ordered
potent libations of spirituous liquors, hot whiskey-and-water being the
favourite one; and are hastily brewing mighty jorums of punch and grog,
which they undoubtedly quaff; puffing, meanwhile, cigars of potency and
fragrance—pipes are tabooed—taken either from their own cigar-cases, or
else recently laid in from the inexhaustible stores of the complaisant
Herr von Joel.
“Who will always be retained on this establishment,” the proprietor
good-naturedly promises, and more good-naturedly performs. “Why,” asks
the neophyte, “is it necessary for my well-being, or the prosperity of
this establishment, that the services of Herr von Joel should always be
retained thereon? Why this perpetual hypothecation of Joel? Can no one
else sell me cigars? What am I to Joel, or what is Joel to me? Confound
Joel!” To which I answer: “Rash neophyte, forbear, and listen. In the
days when thou wert very young and foolish, wore lay-down collars,
and had no moustaches, save the stickiness produced by much-sucked
sweetstuff on the upper lips—in the days when thou wert familiar, indeed,
with Doctor Wackerbarth’s seminary for young gentlemen, but not with
Evans’s—Herr von Joel, young and sprightly then, was a famous Mimic.
In imitating the cries of birds, Herr von Joel was unrivalled, and has
never been approached. In the old days, when he was famous, and did
the lark and the linnet so well, he brought crowds of visitors to the
old supper-rooms, who laughed and wondered at his mimicry, supped and
drank, and smoked, and paid fat scores. So Joel, in his generation, was
a benefactor to Evans’s. And now, when the thorax is rusty, and the
larynx no longer supple, the faithful servant rests upon “his well-earned
laurels”—of tobacco-leaves—among the old faces of old friends. “His
helmet is a hive for bees”—and Havannah cigars, and “his services will
always be retained in this establishment.” One would shudder to think
of Wellington’s old charger, Copenhagen, being sent to Cow Cross, to
the knackers, instead of ending his days peacefully in a paddock at
Strathfieldsaye. No one likes to hear of Sophie Arnould or Mademoiselle
Camargo (the ballet-dancer who introduced short petticoats) being brought
to indigence in their declining years. Guilbert in the hospital, Camöens
starving, blind Belisarius begging for an obolus, these are pitiable; and
to this day I think the country might have done something for the widow
of Ramo Samee. We give pensions to the families of those who use their
swords well, but I should like to know how many can swallow them as Ramo
did?
All the while the company have been supping and I have been prosing,
the “Cave of Harmony” has not belied its name. A bevy of fresh-coloured
youths, of meagre stature, of curly hair, in broad collars and round
jackets, such as distinguished you and me, neophyte, when we were pupils
at Dr. Wackerbarth’s, have made themselves manifest on the stage, and
in admirable time and tune have chanted with their silver-bell voices
those rare old glees which were written by the honest old masters before
the Father of Evil had invented Signor Guiseppe Verdi. Thersites Theorbo
(who is an assiduous frequenter of the Cave at hours when men of not
so transcendent a genius are in bed) Thersites Theorbo, down yonder in
the _café_ ante-saloon, glowering over his grog, cannot forbear beating
time and wagging his august head approvingly when he hears the little
boys sing. May their pure harmony do the battered old cynic good! Honest
old glees! though your composers wore pigtails and laced ruffles. And
none the worse, either, because we owe some of the most beautiful of
them to an Irish nobleman. Do you know who that nobleman was? Go ask Mr.
Thackeray, who, in an absurd copy of verses, written in barbarous Cockney
slang, has brought the “unaccustomed brine” to these eyes many and many a
time. He describes a stately lady sitting by an open window, beside the
“flowing Boyne,” with a baby on her lap. It is a man child, and not far
off is the father,
“... Most musical of Lords,
A playing madrigals and glees
Upon the harpsichords.”
And this child’s father was old Lord Mornington, whose son was Arthur,
Duke of Wellington.
If you scrutinise the faces of these juvenile choristers somewhat
narrowly, and happen yourself to be a tolerably regular attendant at the
abbey church of St. Peter’s, Westminster, it is not at all improbable
that you may recognise one or two young gentlemen whom, arrayed in snowy
surplices, you may have heard trilling forth in shrill notes their parts
of the service among the gentlemen choristers and minor canons of the
Abbey. I wonder if it is very wicked for them to be found at Evans’s
thus late. I don’t mean at one o’clock in the morning, for they mostly
disappear about midnight. Perhaps not so wicked, for I know there are
some people so very religious that they only think of religion on
Sundays; and fancy that week-day transactions can’t have the slightest
connection with the Sabbath. However this may be, I must mention it as
a curious fact in relation with the moral economy of Evans’s, that in
the old days, when Captain Costigan or one of his peers, was about to
sing anything approaching to a _chanson grivoise_, the juveniles were
invariably marched out of the room by a discreet waiter, in order that
their young ears might not be contaminated.
With respect to the remaining harmonic attractions of Evans’s, I shall
be very brief. I believe that on some evenings individuals of the
Ethiopian way of thinking, and accoutred in the ordinary amount of
lamp-black, Welsh wig, and shirt-collars, and provided with the usual
banjo, accordion, tambourine, and bones, are in the habit of informing
the audience that things in general are assuming an appearance of “Hoop
de dooden do;” also of lamenting the untimely demise of one Ned, an
aged blackamoor, who stood towards them in an avuncular relation, and
of passionately demanding the cause of their master effecting the sale
of their persons, by auction or otherwise, on the day on which they
entered into the state of matrimony. I am given to understand that a
gentleman with an astonishing falsetto voice is a great favourite among
the _habitués_, and that some screaming comic songs by popular vocalists
are nightly given with immense applause; but I candidly confess that I am
not qualified to speak with any great degree of certitude with respect to
these performances. I go to Evans’s generally very late, and as seldom
venture close to the proscenium. I am content to bide in the ante-saloon,
and to muse upon Thersites Theorbo, glowering over his grog.
This iracund journalist—to borrow an epithet from Mr. Carlyle—is not by
any means solitary in his patronage of the marble-tabled, portrait-hung
_café_. To tell the honest truth, as, in Paris, if you wish to see the
actors in vogue, you must go to the Café du Vaudeville—if the authors,
to the Café Cardinal or the Café du Helder—if the artists, to the Café
des Italians—if the students, to the Café Belge—and if the dandies,
to the Café de Paris; so in London, if you wish to see the wits and
the journalist men about town of the day, you must go to Evans’s about
one o’clock in the morning. Then those ineffables turn out of the
smoking-rooms of their clubs—clique-clubs mostly—and meet on this neutral
ground to gird at one another. _Autres temps, autres mœurs._ A century
since it used to be Wills’s or Button’s, or the Rose; now it is Evans’s.
I should dearly like to draw some pen-and-ink portraits for you of the
wits as they sit, and drink, and smoke, at one o’clock in the morning;
but I dare not. As for Thersites Theorbo, he is a shadow. You know what
I told you about clubs; and this place also is a prison-house to me. It
is true, Heaven help me, that I am not affiliated to witcraft myself,
that I am neither priest nor deacon. Still I have been one of the little
boys in red cassocks, who swing the censers, and I dare not reveal the
secrets of the sacristy. But I may just whisper furtively in your ear,
that Ethelred Guffoon is never seen at Evans’s. It makes his head ache.
Mr. Goodman Twoshoes, also, is but a seldom visitor to the Cave of
Harmony. He prefers his snug corner-box at the Albion, where he can brew
his beloved ginger-punch. It is not that the wits despise the “Cave.” Mr.
Polyphemus, the novelist, not unfrequently condescends to wither mankind
through his spectacles from one of the marble tables; and I have seen the
whole “Times” newspaper—proprietors, editors, special correspondents, and
literary critics—hob-nobbing together at—— _Will_ you hold your tongue,
sir?
One trifling indiscretion more, and I have done with Evans’s. “It is not
generally known,” as accurate, erudite, and amusing Mr. John Timbs would
say, that the sly gallantry of Mr. Green, the proprietor of the Cave of
Harmony, caused him, when his new and sumptuous music-hall was in course
of construction, to move the architect to build some cunning loop-holes
and points of espial connected with commodious apartments—in other words,
with private boxes, somewhat resembling the _baignoires_ in the Parisian
theatres, whence ladies could see and hear all that was going on without
being seen or heard. A somewhat similar contrivance exists, it will be
remembered, in our House of Commons; I only wish that the fair ones who
there lie _perdues_ during a late debate, were doomed to hear as little
trash as meets their ears from the secluded bowers overhanging Evans’s.
What passport is required to ensure admission into these blissful regions
I know not; but I have it on good authority that ladies of the “very
highest rank and distinction”—to use a “Morning Postism”—have on several
occasions graced Evans’s with their presence, and with condescending
smiles looked down upon the revelries of their lords.
* * * * *
Tell me, you who are so quick of hearing, what is that noise above
our heads—it must be in the street beyond—and which dominates the
revelry as the sound of the cannon did the music of the Duchess of
Richmond’s ball before Quatre Bras. It grows louder and louder, it
comes nearer and nearer, it swells into a hoarse continually-jarring
roar, as I sit smoking at Evans’s. The sham blackamoor on the stage
pauses in his buffoonery, forbears to smite his woolly pate with the
tambourine; his colleague’s accordion is suspended in the midst of a
phthisic wheeze, and the abhorred bones quiver, yet unreverberate in
the nicoto-alcholoicho-charged air. The rattle of knives and forks, the
buzzing conversation, cease; a hundred queries as to the cause of the
noise rise on as many lips; the waiters forget to rattle the change,
the toper forgets to sip his grog: there is intromission even in the
inspiration of tobacco fumes: then comes the mighty answer—comes at once
from all quarters—caught up, echoed and re-echoed, and fraught with
dread, the momentous word—FIRE!
Man, it has been somewhere pertinently observed, is a hunting animal. The
delight in having something to run after: whether it be a pickpocket,
who has just eloped with a watch or a silk handkerchief; a dog with a
kettle tied to his tail, a hare, a deer, a woman, a fugitive hat, a
slaver, a _prima donna_, a lord’s tuft, an oriental traveller, a deformed
dwarf—something to chase, something to scour and scud after, something
to run down, and ultimately devour and destroy: such a pursuit enlivens
and comforts the heart of man, and makes him remember that he has the
blood of Nimrod in his veins. The schoolboys at Eton have their “paper
chases,” and course miles through the pleasant playing-fields, crossing
brooks, and tearing through hedges, after a quire of foolscap torn up
into shreds. The child chases a butterfly; the adult exhausts himself and
his horse in racing after a much-stinking fox; and the octogenarian frets
his palsied old limbs, and bursts into a feverish snail’s gallop, after
a seat on the Treasury Bench, or a strip of blue velvet embroidered with
“_honi soit qui mal y pense_” in gold, and called a garter. There is a
wild, engrossing excitement and pleasure in hunting; the fox-hound, the
otter, the “harmless necessary cat,” would tell you so, were their speech
articulate; but of all things huntable, chasable, rundownable, I doubt if
there be one that can equal a Fire.
“Fire! fire!” It matters not how late the hour be, how important the
avocations of the moment, that magic cry sets all legs, save those of
the halt and the bed-ridden, in motion—strikes on every tympanum. “Fire!
fire!” as the sound rolls earwards, the gambler starts up from the
dicing-table, the bibber leaves the wine-pots, the lover rises from his
mistress’s feet, the blushing maiden forgets half of that last glowing
declaration, the captive runs to his grated window, the sluggard sits
up on his couch, the sick man turns his head on his pillow to whence
issues the portentous cry. Hundreds of impulses are bound up in the
uncontrollable desire that prompts us to run at once after the “Fire!”
Fear: it may be our own premises that are blazing, our own dear ones that
are in peril. Hope and cupidity: we may be rogues, and there may be rich
plunder from a fire. Duty: we may be policemen, firemen, or newspaper
reporters. Generous emulation, brave self-devotion: there may be lives
at stake and lives to save. Curiosity: it is as good to see a house
burned (when it doesn’t happen to be your own) as a bear baited or a man
hanged. All these may prompt us to follow the howl of the fire-dogs; but,
chiefest of all, is the vague, indefinite, yet omnipotent desire to swell
a pursuing crowd, to join in a hue and cry, to press to the van of the
chasers: to hunt something, in fact.
I never could understand where a London crowd comes from. Be the hour
ever so late, were the street ever so deserted a moment before, a man
quarrelling with his wife, or cry of Fire, will be sufficient to evoke
the presence of a compact and curious crowd, growing instantaneously
thicker and noisier. Whether they start from the sewers or the
cellar-gratings, or drop from the chimney-pots or the roof-copings,
is indeterminate; yet they gather somehow, and jostle, squeeze, yell,
stamp, and tear furiously. No conscription, no mustering of the _posse
comitatis_, no summoning of ban and _arrière_ ban, no “call of the
House,” no sending forth of the “fiery cross,” no beacon signalling, no
Vehmgericht convening under penalty of the cord and dagger, could be
half so successful in calling multitudes together as the one word—FIRE!
A minute past, I was at Evans’s, tranquilly conversing with the veteran
Herr von Joel, and now I find myself racing like mad up St. Martin’s
Lane, towards St. Giles’s. How I found my hat and donned it I haven’t
the slightest idea, and I sincerely hope that I didn’t forget to pay the
waiter for my chop, kidney, stout, and etceteras. All I know is, that
I am running after that hoarse cry, and towards that awful Redness in
the sky; that I tread upon unnumbered corns; that I hold cheap as air,
innumerable punches and thrusts which I receive from my neighbours; and
that I will not by any means undertake to make oath that I am not myself
also vociferating, “Fire! Fire!” with the full strength of my lungs.
I thought so. There goes the “Country Fire Office.” There it goes,
dashing, rattling, blazing along—only the very strongest adjective,
used participle-wise, can give a notion of its bewildering speed—there
it goes, with its strong, handsome horses, champing, fuming, setting
the pavement on fire with their space-devouring hoofs, and seeming to
participate in the fire-hunting mania. They need no whip; only the
voices of the firemen, clustering on the engine like bees, the loose
rattle of the reins on their backs, and the cheers of the accompanying
crowd. The very engine, burnished and glistening, flashing and blushing
in its scarlet and gold in the gaslight, seems imbued with feeling,
and scintillating with excitement—(Oh! critics of fishy blood, oyster
temperament, and tortoise impulses, pardon my heedless exuberance of
epithet)—so gleaming and glittering, and its catherine-like wheels
revolving, and the moon just tipping the burnished helmets and hatchets
of the fire-men, who will have a ruddy glare on those accoutrements
shortly, goes screaming through the night, the County Fire-engine. The
Northern Express blazing over Chatmoss at speed is a terrible sight
to see: that fiery messenger has subdued the wilderness, and made the
waste places, whilom the haunts of bats and dragons, tremble; but the
fast-tearing fire-engine is nobler and more Human. It cleaves its
way through the sleeping city; it bears the tidings of succour and
deliverance. Yon express-train may convey but a company of chapmen and
pedlars, thirsting to higgle in the cheapest so that they may haggle in
the dearest market; but the five-engine is freighted with brave manly
hearts, braced—with little lust of lucre, God knows! for their pay is but
a pittance—to the noble task of saving human life. That they do so save
it, almost every night throughout the year, save it in the midst of peril
to their own, in the ever-imminent peril of a sudden, hideous, unrewarded
death, Mr. Braidwood and the fire companies know full well. That the best
of the young British painting men, John Everett Millais, should have
chosen the every-day, but none the less glorious, heroism of a fireman
for the theme of a magnificent picture, is good to know; and the very
thought of the picture goes far towards making us forgive the painter
for his asinine “Sir Isumbrasse,” or whatever the abortion was called;
but it would be better if the knowledge of our firemen’s good deservings
were extended beyond Mr. Braidwood and the fire companies. The deeds of
those plain men with the leathern helmets and the trusty hatchets, have
received neither their full meed of praise, nor a tithe of their meed of
reward. I have yet to hear of the Fireman’s Order of Valour; I have yet
to learn that our bounteous Government, so prompt to recognise diplomatic
demerit, to reward political worthlessness, and to ennoble military
failure, have thought it worth their while to bestow even the minutest
modicum of a pension on a fireman. To be sure, these worldly, unwise men,
are, for their own interests’ sake, disastrously and inexcusably modest,
unobtrusive, and retiring. There is no trumpeter attached _ex-officio_
to the fire brigade. Would you believe it, that these unambitious men,
their glorious labours over, are content to retire to the sheds where
their engines stand at livery, where they eat bread-and-cheese with clasp
knives, read cheap newspapers, and teach tricks to their dogs? Their
principal recreation is to scrub, polish, tickle, and frictionise the
brass and wood work of the fire-engines to a Dutch pitch of cleanliness,
and they are much given, I am sorry to say, to the smoking of long clay
pipes. This is, in itself, sufficient to ruin them in the estimation of
such sages and public benefactors as ex-Lord Mayor Garden. Let us hope
that it is not his ex-Lordship’s house that is being burned down this
November morning.
[Illustration: ONE O’CLOCK A.M.: A FIRE.]
No—the fire is in the very thickest part of St. Giles’s. Unfaithful
topographers may have told you that the “Holy Land” being swept away and
Buckeridge Street being pulled down, St. Giles’s exists no more. _Ne’n
croyez rien._ The place yet lives—hideous, squalid, decrepit—yet full
of an unwholesome vitality. Splendid streets have been pierced through
the heart of this region—streets full of mansions four and six storeys
high—affluent tradesmen display their splendid wares through glistening
plate-glass windows. But St. Giles’s is behind, round about, environing
the new erections, sitting like Mordecai in the gate on the threshold of
the brick and mortar and stucco palaces with which cunning contractors
and speculative builders have sought to disguise the most infamous
district in London. The proof of what I have asserted is very easy. You
have but to be invited to dinner in Gower Street, or to have a morning
call to make in Bedford Square. Take a walk from young Mr. Barry’s
bran-new opera-house in Bow Street, and walk straight a-head—nearly a
measured mile to the Square of Bedford. You pass the gigantic carriage
factory, which I will call by its ancestral name of Houlditch’s—for it
always seems to be changing proprietors—at the corner of Long Acre. You
ascend Endell Street, and greet with satisfaction such signs of advancing
civilisation as baths and wash-houses, and a bran-new dispensary. I
had forgotten to mention that you might have had a back view of St.
Martin’s Hall. Then you cross the area of High Street, St. Giles’s, or
High Street, Holborn, whichsoever you may elect to call it. Then, still
straight a-head, you mount Charlotte Street, Bloomsbury, a thoroughfare
dignified by any number of churches, belonging to any number of
persuasions. And then you are at your journey’s end, and are free to call
in Bedford Square, to dine in Gower Street, or to go see the Nineveh
Marbles in the British Museum, _comme bon vous semble_.