SPIRITUALISM AND REALISM.
THE craze for “table-turning,” “spirit-rapping,” and every conceivable
trash connected with the occult sciences, was in full blast in the
long-ago Sixties, and old ladies would form tea parties and sit all day
and half through the night at round tables with their knotty old mittened
thumbs pressed convulsively against those of their neighbours waiting for
the moving of the waters. Lord Ashburton, who lived near Portman Square,
was the arch-priest and arch-culprit that disseminated this fashionable
twaddle, and there was not a spinster in that (then) highly-fashionable
district that did not devour the leaflets that were periodically issued
broadcast by the inspired old humbug. Occasionally invitations were
issued for séances, when refreshments (more or less light) were provided
to fortify poor human nature against possible unearthly attacks after the
lights had been judiciously lowered.
It was at one of these functions that I on one occasion found myself,
and, possessing in those days an appetite like a cormorant, was terribly
disillusioned after two hours’ waiting for the “spirits” to hear his
lordship order the butler to “bring in the urn.” (In those long-ago days
tea without an urn the dimensions of a safe was an absolute
impossibility.) Nor did spiritualism end here, for numerous haunted
houses were in the market where apparitions and unearthly sounds could be
seen and heard and which no one would rent.
It is the experience of a man I knew intimately that I will now—without
expressing an opinion—relate, as far as I can recollect, in his own
words:
“Looking for a house with plenty of elbow room and of reasonable
rent, my attention was attracted by a dilapidated building—with
garden in front and noseless statues liberally besprinkling
it—situated in the Marylebone Road. Proceeding to the agent’s, I was
considerably surprised by his terms. ‘The house,’ he began, ‘has a
bad name; no caretaker will live on the premises. In a word, sir,
here’s the key, and if you are willing to occupy it you shall have it
rent free for six months.’ I at once closed with his offer, and
seeking out a chum—lately ordained—we spent the next night in the
haunted house. It was in the dining-room we proposed to make a first
night of it, and barely had we settled down for a chat when footsteps
were distinctly heard in the hall. ‘Our lantern!’ I whispered as we
excitedly opened the door. Nothing was to be seen, nothing to be
heard. ‘Hush!’ whispered my friend, ‘I hear something behind me.’ I
heard the sound also. ‘Who’s there?’ I called out. ‘Who’s there?’ I
repeated; but still the silence of the Catacombs. Then the sound of
footsteps ascending the uncarpeted stairs was unmistakable till they
gradually died away in the attics. A moment of indescribable
stillness followed; a cold blast chilled the very marrow of our
bones, and our lantern went out like the crack of a pistol.
“We returned to our armchairs after carefully locking the door, but
we heard no more. And so we sat till welcome daylight made its
appearance, and as the kettle simmered on the hob and the sound of
awakening life made itself manifest in the Marylebone Road, it seemed
impossible to realise the weird manifestations we had witnessed.
“‘—,’ said my friend, ‘we have learnt a terrible experience; Satan
has been unloosed amongst us. Let us pray.’”
The house has long since been pulled down; majestic flats now occupy the
site, and instead of the sepulchral moans of disembodied souls the
untrained, throaty voice of lovely woman may be heard shrieking to the
accompaniment of a hired piano, and producing a discord as damnable, if
more up-to-date, than ever was heard in a haunted house.
In Surrey Street there was a house that rumour asserted had been
hermetically sealed, and was not to be re-opened till a hundred years had
passed, where, in the eighteenth century, a terrible tragedy had occurred
during the progress of a bridal feast, and the distracted bridegroom,
rushing out, had commanded that God’s sun should not again settle on the
accursed board till the generation yet unborn was in being. And I have a
vague recollection of having read, years later, a description of what was
seen as the portals were thrown back after their century of peace, and
light and air had percolated through the room. One can picture the table
decked with its moth-eaten cloth, the piles of dust that represented the
viands, the chairs pushed back in weird array, and the odour of the tomb
that pervaded everything!
To all which, my enlightened twentieth-century reader, there is probably
another side. The whole thing may be an absolute fable.
In the days before Trade had made those gigantic strides which have since
dumped its votaries amid the once sacred pages of Debrett, when knights
were not as common as blackberries, and the Victorian Order had not
become a terror in the land, when buttermen sold butter, and
furniture-men sold furniture, and before huge emporiums for the sale of
everything had come into existence, it was “bazaars” that supplied the
maximum of selection with the minimum of locomotion, such as to-day is to
be found in the huge caravanserai yclept “Stores” and in Tottenham Court
Road and Westbourne Grove in particular.
In Soho Square, on the western side, where to-day—and all day—men with
pronounced features, forbidding countenances, and of usurious tendencies
may be seen in a first floor window exchanging views on the iniquitous
restrictions associated with stamped paper, a bazaar existed in the
long-ago sixties where dogs that squeaked and elephants that wagged their
tails might have been bought by children of tender years who, for aught
we know, may have since been plucked of their last feather by the
vultures that now hover over those happy hunting grounds.
Turning into Oxford Street there was the Queen’s Bazaar, afterward
converted into the Princess’s Theatre, still with us, with its dismal,
dingy frontage and limited shelter for ladies with guttural voices;
whilst almost opposite was the Pantheon, with perhaps the most chequered
career of all, having been, in turn, the National Opera House, the
accepted Masquerade house, a theatre, and a bazaar till 1867, when it
attained its present proud position as the main tap for the supply of
Gilbey’s multifarious vintages.
Still further west was the St. James’s Bazaar, built by Crockford, and
soon converted into a hell, where more monies changed hands and more
properties were sold than in all the other bazaars in the universe.
But perhaps the most tenacious of life was the Baker Street Bazaar. In
its spacious area was situated an unpretentious shop (since spread half
up the street) with two or three windows in Baker Street, while on the
hinterland was the bazaar, and over it Tussaud’s Waxworks. Entering from
King Street was the area occupied annually by the Cattle Show, whilst
still further space was available—as we were lately informed by the
police reports—for empty coffins, false beards, volatile dukes, lead and
bricks in bulk, sleeping and reception rooms, scores of flunkeys, and
addenda too multifarious to mention. Never having seen the subterranean
Duke nor the bewhiskered Druce, one may be permitted to marvel where all
this ghastly conglomeration found shelter, and whether the confusion that
must have occurred amongst the Dutch dukes, the English shopmen, the
cattle, and the Waxworks can in any way be held responsible for the
startling contradictions with which we have lately been regaled.
But does any one who traverses the historic area between Soho Square and
Charing Cross give a thought to the interest that once clustered round
where Crosse and Blackwell’s factory now stands? Does any one realise
whilst “held up” in a broken-down “Vanguard” in Shaftesbury Avenue that
the neighbourhood once echoed with the Royalist battle-cry “So-ho” in the
days of that greatest of Englishmen—Cromwell? Does any one ever give it
a thought that Charing Cross was not so very long ago a resort of
footpads, and that even so late as the Sixties the sweet waters of the
somewhat putrid Thames oozed and bubbled where the District railway
station now stands? And how few are aware that, when Drummond’s Bank was
in course of construction, fossils of mammoth, cave lions, rhinoceros,
and Irish deer were found; and that in future ages, excavations will
probably unearth skeletons of hybrids we all try to dodge and whom
naturalists will describe as voracious, living on suction, apt to beg,
borrow, or steal, migratory to a limited extent, and usually to be met
with between Charing Cross and St. Paul’s or on the plateaus that abut on
the Criterion?
As an observant judge once remarked to one of these pariahs who filled up
his cup of iniquities by snatching a fowl from a confiding poulterer’s,
“God has given you intelligence; your parents have given you a good
education; your country has provided you with excellent prospects both
for the present and future, instead of which you go about stealing
ducks.”
Passing still further west along the Strand, the changes of time and idea
become more apparent as one contemplates that stronghold of
Christianity—Exeter Hall—plastered with bills and lately passed into
alien hands; and the period, the surging crowd, all lend themselves to
the illusion, and one might almost fancy one heard the echo of 1,000
years ago, “Not this man, but Barabbas.”
Oh, the irony of Fate! methought; truly does Time turn the old days to
derision; and one knows not whither one’s vapourings might have landed
one as a zealous constable fixed his official eye upon the stoic who,
deeming it advisable to “move on,” sought consolation, but found none, in
an adjoining tobacconist’s by indulging in one of Salmon and Gluckstein’s
real Havanas (five for a shilling).
Skimming (not wading through) the report of the Court of Inquiry lately
dragging its monotonous length in the vicinity of the Chelsea embankment,
one was struck by the change that has come over these senseless
preliminaries, which occasionally end in smoke and sometimes in legalised
military or civil tribunals. For such courts are as old as the hills,
and are convened on every possible excuse. If a soldier loses a
shoebrush it is (or was) a Court of Inquiry that established the
interesting fact; if an officer was accused of a more heinous offence, it
was a Court of Inquiry that heard what was to be said.
The only difference is that, whereas the old style cost no more than a
few sheets of foolscap and the unnecessary lumbering of regimental
records, the identical luxury cannot now be indulged in without an array
of Old Bailey lawyers, who harangue the old warriors that constitute the
court for hours, utterly oblivious of the fact that they are better
judges of things military, and not likely to be carried away by those
bursts of eloquence that so impress the twelve jack-puddings of which our
bulwarks and liberties are said to be composed.
The earliest of these Courts of Inquiry was in ’41, when Lord Cardigan
killed Captain Tucket in a duel—and ended in his trial and acquittal by
his brother peers.
Later on, in ’44, Lord William Paget and the same bellicose Earl had a
domestic squabble in which the former said “he had,” and the latter said
“he hadn’t,” and this began by a Court of Inquiry and culminated in the
High Court.
Again, in ’54 Lieutenants Perry and Greer were hailed before a Court of
Inquiry for practical jokes of a pronounced character, but the inquiry
ended in smoke, as it was “revised” by the Minister of War.
In ’61 was the Court of Inquiry in the 4th Dragoon Guards which,
disclosing undoubted bullying on the part of Colonel Bentinck (the
present Duke of Portland’s father), ended in a court martial, when
nothing but interest saved the old gentleman’s bacon.
Later on, there was the Mansfield affair, when a disagreement arose
between Sir William Mansfield (afterwards Lord Sandhurst), or his wife,
and an aide-de-camp that elicited much that was amusing in regard to
purloined jams and other preserves, for which her ladyship was supposed
to be celebrated; all which instances ended in the usual way after an
infinity of positive assertion met by flat contradiction.
Whether the farce lately enacted, with its lawyers and their speeches,
affected the result, or benefited anybody except the lawyers, is a point
upon which most people will agree; all which, however, sinks into
insignificance in comparison with the question as to when and how did
this interference with military tribunals first become tolerated, and how
can our Military Council or our Military anything, or the officers
constituting the Court, submit to be harangued by “only a civilian,” as
one of Robertson’s plays describes outsiders?
In all the military tribunals of the past such an innovation was unheard
of. Colonel Crawley, on his trial, had words put into his mouth by Sir
William Harcourt (whose reputation as an orator it made), but he was not
permitted to address the Court. In the Robertson Court Martial it was
the same, and in the Navy to-day a prisoner is defended by “a friend,”
but no civilian would be permitted to “quarter deck it” in that
conservative service.
Even Colonel Dawkins—who, by the way, was a Household Brigade man—amongst
all his eccentric experiences, never got so far as suggesting that a
civilian should bridge the chasm that has hitherto existed between the
Law Courts and the Horse Guards by all this special pleading, and one
wonders what old Sir George Browne or General Pennefather would have said
(or sworn) if such a suggestion had been proposed to them! It may be too
much to say there would have been an earthquake, but the foundations of
the house would certainly have vibrated.
And it is the ignorance of what the present privileges of the Guards are
that makes it difficult to form any opinion on the merits of the case.
The friction that these “privileges” used to cause when a Household
regiment was occasionally brigaded at Aldershot or Dublin or the Curragh
with regiments of the line was, however, undeniable.
It pained old captains with Crimean and Indian medals to be “turned out”
by a field officer with a fluffy upper lip and a youthful voice that had
not long before sounded at Eton; it was irritating (at least) for
colonels commanding distinguished regiments to see a Guard’s sentry
fumbling with his rifle and deliberately coming to the “carry,” and five
minutes after “presenting” to a brevet major of the Guards, who was
trundling a hoop when the old warrior was in the trenches before
Sebastopol; it was annoying to read in general orders special reminders
as to the prohibition regarding imperials and capricious shaving, and to
see half-a-dozen Guards officers with beards like pioneers; it was
amusing to hear (as one did) the son of old Sir Percy Douglas (who was
for a little season in the Guards) inform a distinguished field officer
that the “executive” command could only be given by a Guardsman to a
Guardsman; and still more amusing to hear the retort which made mincemeat
of the privilege, at least, on that occasion—all which nonsense has,
however, been considerably modified. By all means let the Guards retain
their privileges and licences—but let them in mercy be “consumed on the
premises.” And if the physique of these favoured regiments is not as
fine as of yore, no one will deny that their “marching past” and their
“dressing” are far superior to that of the line and “pretty” enough to
please even Admiral Scott himself.
It may further be conceded without fear of contradiction that the Queen’s
Company of the Grenadiers in 1862 was a magnificent specimen of physique
and drilled to perfection under Lord Henry Percy and Micky Bruce.
Beards, indeed, have always been a cause of offence. In the tropics
(except in India) a man is compelled to shave; with the thermometer below
zero, the same regulation is rigidly enforced.
It was Colonel Crealock’s beard at Gibraltar that was the indirect cause
of an officer being tried by Court Martial; it was Prince Edward of
Saxe-Weimar’s and Colonel Phillip’s beards that led to invidious remarks
in the Dublin Division; and, until the razor is abolished beyond the
precincts of the four-mile radius, so long will a link remain between the
grand old days of the muzzle loader and cold steel and the modern
requirements for potting an enemy at a thousand yards rise.
When the Metropolitan Board of Works was at the zenith of its power, and
thoroughfares were being projected, and whole streets were disappearing
and ancient rookeries being demolished, it was incredible the leakage
that appeared to exist, and how the friends of indiscreet or dishonest
employés reaped a harvest by acquiring dilapidated buildings for a song,
and standing out for huge compensation when the day for demolition drew
nigh.
An astute former hanger-on at Faultless’s cock-pit in Endell Street
surprised me considerably on one occasion as he stood at the door of a
dilapidated beer-house in Covent Garden by informing me that he had
bought it for a trifle, and six months later I was literally staggered by
again meeting the rascal shovelling out potatoes at a little greengrocery
shop where now stands the London and Westminster Bank opposite the Law
Courts.
He explained that he had a brother in a humble but trusted position at
Spring Gardens, and that his old beer-house had ceased to exist, and he
expected his “present property” would “come down” before long.
Green Street, leading from Leicester Square, was another channel for the
acquisition of large profits, and when every house was a bug-walk, and
demolition a matter of a few months, the news was actually “offered” to a
man I knew well able to find the requisite purchase money, but rejected
from misplaced prudential motives.
The present London Pavilion was another glaring instance of jobbery, and
years before it was necessary to hustle the ex-Scott’s waiter from the
cosy nest-egg he so diligently nursed, the Board of Works descended on
him like an avalanche with a peremptory notice to quit.
At this stage one Villiers comes upon the scene, but whether he was a
scion of the noble house of Jersey or Clarendon is not clear. Suffice
that tradition credited him with having once been a considerable actor
who had made a great hit in a minor part in the _Overland Route_ at the
Haymarket during the fifties. Later, he appears to have become lessee of
the transpontine Canterbury Hall, where he was a dismal failure, and
spent the latter portion of his tenancy in bed—a victim of gout and the
importunities of irrepressible bill-stickers.
It was in these darkest hours that the Board of Works entered into his
life, and in an incredibly short space of time he had enlisted the
co-operation of a sporting furrier, had hustled the unhappy Loibel out,
and was in undisputed possession of the London Pavilion. How the
£103,000 was found to pay the out-going man is of no particular
importance, suffice that so indecent was the haste that an auction was
deemed superfluous; the entire contents were turned over at a valuation,
and as Loibel toddled out Villiers toddled in, and—undisturbed by
parochial or other demands—he gradually rose to affluence, periodically
visited Continental watering-places, was a person to be reckoned with in
a mushroom political club, and died recently worth a considerable
personalty.
The juggle over the Pavilion never attracted much interest, and the
gladiators being respectively a German and a Jew the transaction was
forgotten almost at its inception.
Passing through the Opera Colonnade I tried not long ago to locate the
exact shop—once a cigar merchant’s—in which the Raleigh, originally known
as the “Old Havana Cigar Club,” may be said to have had its being, for it
was whilst sitting on tubs one afternoon in the fifties that three or
four Mohawks of the first order persuaded Tod Heatly—the ground
landlord—to provide some sort of superior night-house which, by opening
its doors at 10 p.m. and not closing them till the last roysterer had
reeled home, would “meet a want long felt,” as modern advertisements
occasionally describe their worthless wares.
It was later—in the early seventies—that the proprietorship changed
hands, and was worked on more commercial lines by the Brothers Ewen
(triplets), who, believing in quantity rather than quality, periodically
sat as a committee under the chairmanship of an amiable old gentleman
(Lord Monson) and elected everything and everybody capable of producing
the increased subscription.
It was in the solitary long room of the Tod Heatly era that details were
arranged for the duel (which never came off) in regard to an accusation
of foul play that was made in a Pall Mall club, when an old gentleman,
who was in Court dress, was considerably astonished at receiving a flip
on his calf from an erratic trump. And in this room, too, enough
Justerini’s brandy was consumed of a night to float the motors which now
lumber that once-sacred chamber. For whisky and other emanations of the
potato were then practically unknown and only heard of by the privileged
few who had seen an illicit Boucicault still on the stage.
Proceeding yet further west I passed the College of Surgeons—presented by
George IV. in a fit of after-dinner generosity to that distinguished body
to be held for all time on a pepper-corn rent. One can almost picture
the burst of humble gratitude that gushed forth at the gracious act, and
the bland smile that illumined the anointed features at the consciousness
of having done a generous deed without being one penny the worse for it.
It was condescensions such as this that endeared “the first gentleman” to
a loyal and dutiful people. And then across the square, where
Northumberland House once stood, I wondered if one human being could
locate the spot within fifty yards, and whether the old lion that topped
it pointed his tail to the east or west, a subject on which more bets
have been made than ever fell to the lot of man or beast.