1. CHAPTER I.
London is an abominable place to dine. I mean,
of course, unless you are free of a club, invited out, or
pay a ridiculous price for a French dinner. The unknown
stranger, adrift on the streets, with a traveller's
notions of the worth of things to eat, is much worse
off, as to his venture for a meal, than he would be in
the worst town of the worst province of France—much
worse off than he would be in New York or New Orleans.
There is a “Very's,” it is true, and there are
one or two restaurants, so called, in the Haymarket;
but it is true, notwithstanding, that short of a two-guinea
dinner at the Clarendon, or some hotel of this
class, the next best thing is a simple pointed steak with
potatoes, at a chop-house. The admirable club-system
(admirable for club-members) has absorbed all the
intermediate degrees of eating-houses, and the traveller's
chance and solitary meal must be either absurdly
expensive, or dismally furnished and attended.
The only real liberty one ever enjoys in a metropolis
is the interval (longer or shorter, as one is more or
less a philosopher) between his arrival and the delivery
of his letters of introduction. While perfectly
unknown, dreading no rencontre of acquaintances, subject
to no care of dress, equipage, or demeanor, the
stranger feels, what he never feels afterward, a complete
abandon to what immediately surrounds him, a
complete willingness to be amused in any shape which
chance pleases to offer, and, his desponding loneliness
serving him like the dark depths of a well, he sees lights
invisible from the higher level of amusement.
Tired of my solitary meals in the parlor of a hotel
during my first week in London, I made the round of
such dining-places as I could inquire out at the West
End—of course, from the reserved habits of the country
toward strangers, making no acquaintances, and
scarce once exchanging a glance with the scores who
sat at the tables around me. Observation was my only
amusement, and I felt afterward indebted to those silent
studies of character for more acquaintance with
the under-crust of John Bull, than can be gathered
from books or closer intercourse. It is foreign to my
present purpose, however, to tell why his pride should
seem want of curiosity, and why his caution and delicacy
should show like insensibility and coldness. I
am straying from my story.
The covered promenade of the Burlington Arcade
is, on rainy days, a great allure for a small chop-house
hard by, called “The Blue Posts.” This is a snug
little tavern, with the rear of its two stories cut into a
single dining-room, where chops, steaks, ale, and punch,
may be had in unusual perfection. It is frequented
ordinarily by a class of men peculiar, I should think,
to England—taciturn, methodical in their habits, and
highly respectable in their appearance—men who seem
to have no amusements and no circle of friends, but
who come in at six and sit over their punch and the
newspapers till bed time, without speaking a syllable,
except to the waiter, and apparently turning a cold
shoulder of discouragement to any one in the room
who may be disposed to offer a passing remark. They
hang their hats daily on the same peg, daily sit at the
same table (where the chair is turned down for them
by Villiam, the short waiter), daily drink a small pitcher
of punch after their half-pint of sherry, and daily read,
from beginning to end, the Herald, Post, and Times,
with the variation of the Athenæum and Spectator, on
Saturdays and Sundays. I at first hazarded various
conjectures as to their condition in life. They were
evidently unmarried, and men of easy though limited
means—men of no great care, and no high hopes, and
in a fixed station; yet of that degree of intelligence
and firm self-respect which, in other countries (the
United States, certainly, at least), would have made
them sought for in some more social and higher sphere
than that with which they seemed content. I afterward
obtained something of a clue to the mystery of
the “Blue Posts” society, by discovering two of the
most respectable looking of its customers in the exercise
of their daily vocations. One, a man of fine phrenological
development, rather bald, and altogether very
intellectual in his “
os sublime,” I met at the rooms of
a fashionable friend, taking his measure for pantaloons.
He was the foreman of a celebrated Bond-street tailor.
The other was the head-shopman of a famous haberdasher
in Regent street; and either might have passed
for Godwin the novelist, or Babbidge the calculator—
with those who had seen those great intellects only in
their imaginations. It is only in England, that men
who, like these, have read or educated themselves far
above their situations in life, would quietly submit to
the arbitrary disqualifications of their pursuits, and
agree unresistingly to the sentence of exile from the
society suited to their mental grade. But here again
I am getting away from my story.
It was the close of a London rainy day. Weary of
pacing my solitary room, I sallied out as usual, to the
Burlington Arcade (I say as usual, for in a metropolis
where it rains nine days out of ten, rainy-weather resorts
become habitual). The little shops on either
side were brightly lit, the rain pattered on the glass
roof overhead, and to one who had not a single acquaintance
in so vast a city, even the passing of the
crowd and the glittering of lights seemed a kind of
society. I began to speculate on the characters of
those who passed and repassed me in the turns of the
short gallery; and the dinner-hours coming round, and
the men gradually thinning off from the crowd, I adjourned
to the Blue Posts with very much the feeling
of a reader interrupted in the progress of a novel. One
of the faces that had most interested me was that of a
foreigner, who, with a very dejected air, leaned on the
arm of an older man, and seemed promenading to kill
time, without any hope of killing his ennui. On seating
myself at one of the small tables, I was agreeably
surprised to find the two foreigners my close neighbors,
and in the national silence of the company present,
broken only by the clatter of knives and forks, it
was impossible to avoid overhearing every word spoken
by either. After a look at me, as if to satisfy themselves
that I, too, was a John Bull, they went on with
their conversation in French, which, so long as it was
confined to topics of drink and platter, weather and
news, I did not care to interrupt. But with their
progress through a second pint of sherry, personal topics
came up, and as they seemed to be conversing with
an impression that their language was not understood,
I felt obliged to remind them that I was overhearing
unwillingly what they probably meant for a private
conversation. With a frankness which I scarcely expected,
they at once requested me to transfer my glass
to their table, and calling for a pitcher of punch, they
extended their confidence by explaining to me the
grounds of the remarks I had heard, and continuing to
converse freely on the subject. Through this means,
and a subsequent most agreeable acquaintance, I possessed
myself of the circumstances of the following
story; and having thus shown the reader (rather digressively,
I must own) how I came by it, I proceed
in the third person, trusting that my narration will not
now seem like the “coinage of the brain.”
The two gentlemen dining at the Blue Posts on the
rainy day just mentioned, were Frenchmen, and political
exiles. With the fortunes of the younger, this
story has chiefly to do. He was a man past the sentimental
age, perhaps nearer thirty-seven than thirty-five,
less handsome than distinguished in his appearance,
yet with one of those variable faces which
are handsome for single instants once in a half
hour, more or less. His companion called him Belaccueil.
“I could come down to my circumstances,” he said
to Monsieur St. Leger, his friend, “if I knew how. It
is not courage that is wanting. I would do anything
for a livelihood. But what is the first step? What
is the next step from this? This last dinner—this last
night's lodging—I am at the end of my means; and
unless I accept of charity from you, which I will not,
to-morrow must begin my descent. Where to put my
foot?”
He stopped and looked down into his glass, with the
air of a man who only expects an answer to refute its
reasoning.
“My dear Belaccueil,” said the other, after a moment's
hesitation, “you were famous in your better
days for almost universal accomplishment. Mimic,
dancer, musician, cook—what was there in our merry
carnival-time, to which you did not descend with success,
for mere amusement? Why not now for that
independence of livelihood to which you adhere so
pertinaciously?”
“You will be amused to find,” he answered, “how
well I have sounded the depths of every one of these
resources. The French theatre of London has refused
me, point-blank, all engagement, spite of the
most humiliating exhibitions of my powers of mimicry
before the stage-manager and a fifth-rate actress. I
am not musician enough for a professor, though very
well for an amateur, and have advertised in vain for
employment as a teacher of music, and—what was
your other vocation!—cook! Oh no! I have just
science enough to mend a bad dinner and spoil a good
one, though I declare to you, I would willingly don
the white cap and apron and dive for life to the basement.
No, my friend, I have even offered myself as
assistant dancing-master, and failed! Is not that
enough? If it is not, let me tell you, that I would
sweep the crossings, if my appearance would not excite
curiosity, or turn dustman, if I were strong enough
for the labor. Come down! Show me how to come
down, and see whether I am not prepared to do it.
But you do not know the difficulty of earning a penny
in London. Do you suppose, with all the influence
and accomplishments I possess, I could get the place
of this scrubby waiter who brings us our-cigars? No,
indeed! His situation is a perfect castle—impregnable
to those below him. There are hundreds of poor
wretches within a mile of us who would think themselves
in paradise to get his situation. How easy it is
for the rich to say, `go and work!' and how difficult
to know how and where!”
Belaccueil looked at his friend as if he felt that he
had justified his own despair, and expected no comfort.
“Why not try matrimony?” said St. Leger. “I
can provide you the means for a six months' siege,
and you have better qualification for success than nine
tenths of the adventurers who have succeeded.”
“Why—I could do even that—for with all hope of
prosperity, I have of course given up all idea of a romantic
love. But I could not practise deceit, and
without pretending to some little fortune of my own,
the chances are small. Besides, you remember my
ill luck at Naples.”
“Ah, that was a love affair, and you were too honest.”
“Not for the girl, God bless her! She would have
married me, penniless as I was, but through the interference
of that officious and purse-proud Englishman,
her friends put me hors de combat.”
“What was his name? Was he a relative?”
“A mere chance acquaintance of their own, but the
entered at once upon the office of family adviser. He
was rich, and he had it in his power to call me an adventurer.
I did not discover his interference till some
time after, or he would perhaps have paid dearly for
his nomenclature.”
“Who did you say it was?”
“Hitchings! Mr. Plantagenet Hitchings, of Hitching
Park, Devonshire—and the one point, to which I
cling, of a gentleman's privileges, is that of calling him
to account, should I ever meet him.”
St. Leger smiled and sat thoughtfully silent for a
while. Belaccueil pulled apart the stems of a bunch
of grapes on his plate, and was silent with a very different
expression.
“You are willing,” said the former, at last, “to teach
music and dancing for a proper compensation.”
“Parbleu! Yes!”
“And if you could unite this mode of support with
a very pretty revenge upon Mr. Plantagenet Hitchings
(with whom, by the way, I am very well acquainted),
you would not object to the two-fold thread in
your destiny?”
“They would be threads of gold, mon ami!” said
the surprised Belaccueil.
St. Leger called for pen, ink, and paper, and wrote
a letter at the Blue Posts, which the reader will follow
to its destination, as the next step in this story.
