Kitabı oku: «Arthur O'Leary: His Wanderings And Ponderings In Many Lands», sayfa 26
CHAPTER XXIII. THE TRAVELLING PARTY
I have already taken occasion to indoctrinate my reader on the subject of what I deem the most perfect species of table d’hôte. May I now beg of him, or her, if she will be kind enough, to accompany me to the table-monstre of Wiesbaden, Ems, or Baden-Baden? We are at the Cursaal, or Shuberts, or the ‘Hof von Nassau’ at Wiesbaden. Four hundred guests are assembled, their names indicative of every land of Europe, and no small portion of America; the mixture of language giving the impression of its being a grand banquet to the ‘operatives at Babel,’ but who, not satisfied with the chances of misunderstanding afforded by speaking their own tongues to foreigners, have adventured on the more certain project of endeavouring to being totally unintelligible, by speaking languages with which they are unacquainted; while in their dress, manner, and appearance, the great object seems to be an accurate imitation of some other country than their own. Hence Frenchmen affect to seem English, English to look like Prussians, Prussians to appear Poles, Poles to be Calmucks. Your ‘elegant’ of the Boulevard de Ghent sports a ‘cut away’ like a Yorkshire squire, and rides in cords; your Londoner wears his hair on his shoulders, and his moustaches, like a Pomeranian count; Turks find their way into tight trousers and ‘Wellingtons’; and even the Yankees cannot resist the general tendency to transmutation, but take three inches off their hair behind.
Nothing is more amusing than these general congresses of European vagrancy. Characters the most original meet you at every step, and display most happily traits you never have the opportunity to inspect at home. For so it is, the very fact of leaving home with most people seems like an absolution from all the necessities of sustaining a part. They feel as though they had taken off the stage finery in which they had fretted away their hours before, and stand forth themselves in propria. Thus your grave Chancery lawyer becomes a chatty pleasant man of the world, witty and conversable; your abstruse mathematician, leaving conic sections behind him, talks away with the harmless innocence of a child about men and politics; and even your cold ‘exclusive’ bids a temporary farewell to his ‘morgue,’ and answers his next neighbour at table without feeling shocked at his obtrusion.
There must be some secret sympathy – of whose operations we know nothing – between our trunks and our temperaments, our characters and our carpet-bags; and that by the same law which opens one to the inspection of an official at the frontier, the other must be laid bare when we pass across it. How well would it have been for us, if the analogy had been pushed a little further, that the fiscal regulations adopted in the former were but extended to the latter, and that we had applied the tariff to the morals, as well as to the manufactures, of the Continent.
It was in some such musing as this I sat in a window of the ‘Nassau,’ at Wiesbaden, during the height of the season of – . Strangers were constantly arriving, and hourly was the reply ‘no room’ given to the disconsolate travellers, who peered from their carriages with the road-sick look of a long journey. As for myself, I had been daily and nightly transferred from one quarter of the hotel to another – now sleeping in an apartment forty feet square, in a bed generally reserved for royalty, now bivouacking under the very slates; one night exposed to the incessant din of the street beside my windows, the next, in a remote wing of the building, where there were no bells in the chambers, nor any waiter was ever known to wander. In fact, I began to believe that they made use of me to air the beds of the establishment, and was seriously disposed to make a demand for some compensation in my bill; and if I might judge from the pains in my bones I contracted in ‘Lit de Parade,’ I must have saved her Majesty of Greece, who was my successor in it, a notable attack of rheumatism. To this shuttlecock state of existence the easiness of my nature made me submit tamely enough, and I never dreamed of rebellion.
I was sitting conning over to myself the recollections of some faces I had seen before, when the head waiter appeared before me, with a request that I would be kind enough to give up my place at the table, which was No. 14, to a gentleman lately arrived, and who desired to sit near his friends in that vicinity. ‘To be sure,’ said I at once; ‘I have no acquaintance here, and 114 will do me as well as 14 – place me where you like.’ At the same time, it rather puzzled me to learn what the individual could be like who conceived such a violent desire to be in the neighbourhood of some Hamburg Jews – for such were the party around me – when the waiter began to make room for a group that entered the room, and walked up to the end of that table. A glance told they were English. There was an elderly man, tall and well-looking, with the air ‘gentleman’ very legibly written on his quiet, composed features; the carriage of his head, and a something in his walk, induced me to believe him military. A lady leaned on his arm, some thirty years his junior – he was about sixty-six or seven – whose dress and style were fashionable, and at the same time they had not that perfect type of unpretending legitimacy that belongs essentially to but one class. She was, in fact, trop bien mise for a table d’hote; for although only a morning costume, there was a display about it which was faulty in its taste; her features, without being handsome, were striking, as much for the carriage of her head as anything in themselves. There was an air of good looks, as though to say, ‘If you don’t think me handsome, the fault is yours.’ Her eyes were of a bluish grey, large and full, with lightly arched brows; but the mouth was the most characteristic feature – it was firm and resolute-looking, closely compressed, and with a slight protrusion of the lower lip, that said as plainly as words could say it, ‘I will, and that’s enough.’ In walking, she took some pains to display her foot, which, with all the advantages of a Parisian shoe, was scarcely as pretty as she conceived it, but on the whole was well formed, and rather erring on the score of size than symmetry.
They were followed by three or four young men, of whom I could only remark that they wore the uniform appearance of young Englishmen of good class, very clean-looking faces, well-brushed hair, and well-fitting frock-coats. One sported a moustache of a dirty-yellow colour, and whiskers to match, and by his manner, and a certain half-shut-eye kind of glance, proclaimed himself the knowing man of the party.
While they were taking their places, which they did at once on entering, I heard a general burst of salutations break from them in very welcome accent: ‘Oh, here he is, here he comes. Ah, I knew we should see him.’ At the same instant, a tall, well-dressed fellow leaned over the table and shook hands with them all in succession.
‘When did you arrive?’ said he, turning to the lady.
‘Only an hour ago; Sir Marmaduke would stay at Frankfort yesterday, to see Duvernet dance, and so we were detained beyond our time.’
The old gentleman half blushed at this charge, and while a look of pleasure showed that he did not dislike the accusation, he said —
‘No, no; I stayed to please Calthorpe.’
‘Indeed!’ said the lady, turning a look of very peculiar, but unmistakable, anger at him of the yellow moustache. ‘Indeed, my lord!’
‘Oh yes, that is a weakness of mine,’ said he, in an easy tone of careless banter, which degenerated to a mutter, heard only by the lady herself.
‘I ought to have a place somewhere here about,’ said the tall man. ‘Number 14 or 15, the waiter said. Hallo, garçon– ’
At this he turned round, and I saw the well-remembered face of my fellow-traveller, the Honourable Jack Smallbranes. He looked very hard at me, as if he were puzzled to remember where or when we had met, and then, with a cool nod, said, ‘How d’ye do? – over in England lately?’
‘Not since I had the pleasure of meeting you at Rotterdam. Did you go far with the alderman’s daughters?’
A very decided wink and a draw down of the brows cautioned me to silence on that subject; but not before the lady had heard my question, and looked up in his face with an expression that said – ‘I’ll hear more of that affair before long.’
‘Monsieur has given you his place, sir,’ said the waiter, arranging a chair at No. 14. ‘I have put you at 83.’
‘All right,’ replied Jack, as if no recognition were called for on his part, and that he was not sorry to be separated from one with an unpleasant memory.
‘I am shocked, sir,’ said the lady, addressing me in her blandest accents, ‘at our depriving you of your place, but Mr. Carrisbrook will, I ‘m sure, give you his.’
While I protested against such a surrender, and Mr. Carrisbrook looked very much annoyed at the proposal, the lady only insisted the more, and it ended in Mr. Carrisbrook – one of the youths already mentioned – being sent down to 83, while I took up my position in front of the party in his place.
I knew to what circumstance I was indebted for this favourable notice; she looked up to me as a kind of king’s evidence, whenever the Honourable Jack should be called up for trial, and already I had seen a great deal into the history and relative position of all parties. Such was the state of matters when the soup appeared.
And now, to impart to my readers, as is my wont, such information as I possessed afterwards, and not to keep them waiting for the order in which I obtained it: the party before me consisted of Sir Marmaduke Lonsdall and his lady – he, an old general officer of good family and connections, who, with most unexceptionable manners and courtly address, had contrived to spend a very easy, good-for-nothing existence, without ever seeing an hour’s service, his clubs and his dinner-parties filling up life tolerably well, with the occasional excitement arising from who was in and who was out, to season the whole. Sometimes a Lord of the Treasury, with a seat for a Government borough, and sometimes patriotically sitting among the opposition when his friends were out, he was looked upon as a very honourable, straightforward person, who could not be ‘overlooked’ when his party were distributing favours.
My Lady Lonsdall was a soi-disant heiress, the daughter of some person unknown in the city, the greater part of whose fortune was unhappily embarked in Poyais Scrip – a fact only ascertained when too late, and, consequently, though discoursing most eloquently in a prospectus about mines of gold and silver, strata of pearl necklaces, and diamond ear-rings, all ready to put on, turned out an unfortunate investment, and only realised an article in the Times, headed ‘another bubble speculation.’ Still, however, she was reputed very rich, and Sir Marmaduke received the congratulations of his club on the event with the air of a conqueror. She married him simply because, having waited long and impatiently for a title, she was fain to put up at last with a baronet. Her ambition was to be in the fashionable world; to be among that sect of London elect who rule at Almack’s and dictate at the West End; to occupy her portion of the Morning Post, and to have her name circulated among the illustrious few who entertain royalty, and receive archdukes at luncheon. If the Poyais investment, in its result, denied the means of these extravagances, it did not, unhappily, obliterate the taste for them; and my lady’s ambition to be fashionable was never at a higher spring-tide than when her fortunes were at the ebb. Now, certes, there are two ways to London distinction – rank and wealth. A fair union of both will do much, but, without either, the pursuit is utterly hopeless. There is but one course, then, for these unfortunate aspirants of celebrity – it is to change the venue and come abroad. They may not, it is true, have the rank and riches which give position at home. Still, they are better off than most foreigners: they have not the wealth of the aristocracy, yet they can imitate their wickedness; their habits may be costly, but their vices are cheap; and thus they can assert their high position and their fashionable standing by displaying the abandonment which is unhappily the distinctive feature of a certain set in the high world of London.
Followed, then, by a train of admirers, she paraded about the Continent, her effrontery exalted into beauty, her cold insolence assumed to be high breeding; her impertinence to women was merely exclusiveness, and her condescending manner to men the simple acknowledgment of that homage to which she was so unquestionably entitled.
Of her suite, they were animated by different motives. Some were young enough to be in love with any woman who, a great deal older than themselves, would deign to notice them. The noble lord, who accompanied her always, was a ruined baron, whose own wife had deserted him for another; he had left his character and his fortune at Doncaster and Epsom; and having been horsewhipped as a defaulter, and outlawed for debt, was of course in no condition to face his acquaintances in England. Still he was a lord – there was no denying that; Debrett and Burke had chronicled his baptism, and the eighth baron from Hugo de Colbrooke, who carried the helmet of his sovereign at Agincourt, was unquestionably of the best blood of the peerage. Like your true white feather, he wore a most farouche exterior; his moustaches seemed to bristle with pugnacity, and the expression of his eye was indescribably martial; he walked as if he was stepping out the ground, and in his salute he assumed the cold politeness with which a second takes off his hat to the opposite principal in a duel; even his valet seemed to favour the illusion, as he ostentatiously employed himself cleaning his master’s pistols, and arranging the locks, as though there was no knowing at what moment of the day he might not be unexpectedly called to shoot somebody.
This noble lord, I say, was a part of the household. Sir Marmaduke finding his society rather agreeable, and the lady regarding him as the cork-jacket on which she was to swim into the ocean of fashion at some remote period or other of her existence.
As for the Honourable Jack Smallbranes, who was he not in love with – or rather who was not in love with him? Poor fellow! he was born, in his own estimation, to be the destroyer of all domestic peace; he was created to be the ruin to all female happiness. Such a destiny might well have filled any one with sadness and depression; most men would have grieved over a lot which condemned them to be the origin of suffering. Not so, Jack; he felt he couldn’t help it – that it was no affair of his if he were the best-looking fellow in the world. The thing was so palpable; women ought to take care of themselves; he sailed under no false flag. No, there he was, the most irresistible, well-dressed, and handsomest fellow to be met with; and if they didn’t escape – or, to use his own expression, ‘cut their lucky’ in time – the fault was all their own. If queens smiled and archduchesses looked kind upon him, let kings and archdukes look to it. He took no unfair or underhand advantages; he made no secret attacks, no dark advances – he carried every fortress by assault, and in noonday. Some malicious people – the world abounds in such – used to say that Jack’s gallantries were something like Falstaff’s deeds of prowess, and that his victims were all ‘in buckram.’ But who could believe it? Did not victory sit on his very brow; were not his looks the signs of conquest; and, better than all, who that ever knew him had not the assurance from his own lips? With what a happy mixture of nonchalance and self-satisfaction would he make these confessions! How admirably blended was the sense of triumph with the consciousness of its ease! How he would shake his ambrosial curls, and throw himself into a pose of elegance, as though to say, ‘’Twas thus I did it; ain’t I a sad dog?’
Well, if these conquests were illusions, they were certainly the pleasantest ever a man indulged in. They consoled him at heart for the loss of fortune, country, and position; they were his recompense for all the lost glories of Crockford’s and the ‘Clarendon.’ Never was there such a picture of perfect tranquillity and unclouded happiness. Oh, let moralists talk as they will about the serenity of mind derivable alone from a pure conscience, the peaceful nature that flows from a source of true honour, and then look abroad upon the world and count the hundreds whose hairs are never tinged with grey, whose cheeks show no wrinkles, whose elastic steps suffer no touch of age, and whose ready smile and cheerful laugh are the ever-present signs of their contentment – let them look on these, and reflect that of such are nine-tenths of those who figure in lists of outlawry, whose bills do but make the stamps they are written on of no value, whose creditors are legion and whose credit is at zero, and say which seem the happier. To see them one would opine that there must be some secret good in cheating a coachmaker, or some hidden virtue in tricking a jeweller; that hotel-keepers are a natural enemy to mankind, and that a tailor has not a right even to a decimal fraction of honesty. Never was Epicurean philosophy like theirs; they have a fine liberal sense of the blackguardisms that a man may commit, and yet not forfeit his position in society. They know the precise condition in life when he may practise dishonesty; and they also see when he must be circumspect. They have one rule for the city and another for the club; and, better than all, they have stored their minds with sage maxims and wise reflections, which, like the philosophers of old, they adduce on every suitable occasion; and many a wounded spirit has been consoled by that beautiful sentiment, so frequent in their mouths, of —
‘Go ahead! for what’s the odds so long as you ‘re happy?’
Such, my reader, was the clique in which, strangely enough, I now found myself; and were it not that such characters abound in every part of the Continent, that they swarm at spas and infest whole cities, I would scruple to introduce you to such company. It is as well, however, that you should be put on your guard against them, and that any amusement you may derive from the study of eccentricity should not be tarnished with the recollection of your being imposed upon.
There happened, on the day I speak of, to be a man of some rank at table, with whom I had a slight, a very slight acquaintance; but in passing from the room he caught my eye, came over and conversed with me for a few minutes. From that moment Lady Lonsdall’s manners underwent a great change in my regard. Not only did she venture to look at me without expressing any air of supercilious disdain, but even vouchsafed the ghost of a smile; and, as we rose from table, I overheard her ask the Honourable Jack for my name. I could not hear the first part of his reply, but the last was couched in that very classic slang, expressive of my unknown condition —
‘I take it, he hain’t got no friends!’
Notwithstanding this Foundling-hospital sentence, Sir Marmaduke was instructed to invite me to take coffee – an honour which, having declined, we separated, as do people who are to speak when next they meet.
Meditating on the unjust impression foreigners must conceive of England and the English by the unhappy specimens we ‘grind for exportation,’ I sat alone at a little table in the park. It was a sad subject, and it led me further than I wished or knew of. I thought I could trace much of the animosity of foreign journals to English policy in their mistaken notions of national character, and could well conceive how dubiously they must receive our claim to being high-spirited and honourable, when their own experiences would incline to a different conclusion; for, after all, the Fleet Prison, however fashionable its inmates, would scarcely be a flattering specimen of England, nor do I think Horsemonger Lane ought to be taken as a fair sample of the country. It is vain to assure foreigners that these people are not known nor received at home, neither held in credit nor estimation; their conclusive reply is, ‘How is it, then, that they are admitted to the tables of your ambassadors, and presented at our courts? Is it possible you would dare to introduce to our sovereigns those whom you could not present to your own?’ This answer is a fatal one. The fact is so; the most rigid censor of morals leaves his conscience at the Ship Hotel at Dover; he has no room for it on a voyage, or perhaps he thinks it might be detained by a revenue-officer. Whatever the cause, he will know at Baden – ay, and walk with – the man he would cut in Bond Street, and drive with the party at Brussels he would pass to-morrow if he met in Hyde Park.
This ‘sliding scale’ of morality has great disadvantages; none greater than the injury it inflicts on national character, and the occasion it offers for our disparagement at the hands of other people. It is in vain that liberal and enlightened measures mark our government, or that philanthropy and humanity distinguish our institutions, we only get credit for hypocrisy so long as we throw a mantle over our titled swindlers and dishonourable defaulters. If Napoleon found little difficulty in making the sobriquet of ‘La Perfide Albion’ popular in France, we owe it much more to the degraded characters of our refugee English than to any justice in the charge against the nation. In a word, I have never met a foreigner commonly fair in his estimate of English character, who had not travelled in England; and I never met one unjust in all that regarded national good faith, honesty, and uprightness, who had visited our shores. The immunity from arrest would seem to suggest to our runaways an immunity from all the ties of good conduct and character of our countrymen, who, under that strange delusion of the ‘immorality of France,’ seem to think that a change of behaviour should be adopted in conformity with foreign usage; and as they put on less clothing, so they might dispense with a little virtue also.
These be unpleasant reflections, Arthur, and I fear the coffee or the maraschino must have been amiss; in any case, away with them, and now for a stroll in the Cursaal!
