 | CHAPTER I. People I have met, or, Pictures of society and people of mark, drawn under a thin veil of fiction |  |
1. CHAPTER I.
London is an abominable place to dine in. 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-guinca 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.
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
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 afterwards
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 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
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 Monsicur
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
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 he 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 Hitchings 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.
| CHAPTER I. People I have met, or, Pictures of society and people of mark, drawn under a thin veil of fiction | |