Replying that he had a friend outside, and would not fail to accept the invitation, Evan retired. He was met by the hostess with the reproachful declaration on her lips, that she was a widow woman, wise in appearances, and that he had brought into her house that night work she did not expect, or bargain for. Rather (since I must speak truth of my gentleman) to silence her on the subject, and save his ears, than to propitiate her favour towards the girl, Evan drew out his constitutionally lean purse, and dropped it in her hand, praying her to put every expense incurred to his charge. She exclaimed:
‘If Dr. Pillie has his full sleep this night, I shall be astonished’; and Evan hastily led Jack into the passage to impart to him, that the extent of his resources was reduced to the smallest of sums in shillings.
‘I can beat my friend at that reckoning,’ said Mr. Raikes; and they entered the room.
Eyes were on him. This had ever the effect of causing him to swell to monstrous proportions in the histrionic line. Asking the waiter carelessly for some light supper dish, he suggested the various French, with ‘not that?’ and the affable naming of another. ‘Nor that? Dear me, we shall have to sup on chops, I believe!’
Evan saw the chairman scrutinizing Raikes, much as he himself might have done, and he said: ‘Bread and cheese for me.’
Raikes exclaimed: ‘Really? Well, my lord, you lead, and your taste is mine!’
A second waiter scudded past, and stopped before the chairman to say: ‘If you please, sir, the gentlemen upstairs send their compliments, and will be happy to accept.’
‘Ha!’ was the answer. ‘Thought better of it, have they! Lay for three more, then. Five more, I guess.’ He glanced at the pair of intruders.
Among a portion of the guests there had been a return to common talk, and one had observed that he could not get that ‘Good Evening,’ and ‘Good Night,’ out of his head which had caused a friend to explain the meaning of these terms of salutation to him: while another, of a philosophic turn, pursued the theme: ‘You see, when we meets, we makes a night of it. So, when we parts, it’s Good Night—natural! ain’t it?’ A proposition assented to, and considerably dilated on; but whether he was laughing at that, or what had aroused the fit, the chairman did not say.
Gentle chuckles had succeeded his laughter by the time the bread and cheese appeared.
In the rear of the provision came three young gentlemen, of whom the foremost lumped in, singing to one behind him, ‘And you shall have little Rosey!’
They were clad in cricketing costume, and exhibited the health and manners of youthful Englishmen of station. Frolicsome young bulls bursting on an assemblage of sheep, they might be compared to. The chairman welcomed them a trifle snubbingly. The colour mounted to the cheeks of Mr. Raikes as he made incision in the cheese, under their eyes, knitting his brows fearfully, as if at hard work.
The chairman entreated Evan to desist from the cheese; and, pulling out his watch, thundered: ‘Time!’
The company generally jumped on their legs; and, in the midst of a hum of talk and laughter, he informed Evan and Jack, that he invited them cordially to a supper up-stairs, and would be pleased if they would partake of it, and in a great rage if they would not.
Raikes was for condescending to accept.
Evan sprang up and cried: ‘Gladly, sir,’ and gladly would he have cast his cockney schoolmate to the winds, in the presence of these young cricketers; for he had a prognostication.
The door was open, and the company of jolly yeomen, tradesmen, farmers, and the like, had become intent on observing all the ceremonies of precedence: not one would broaden his back on the other; and there was bowing, and scraping, and grimacing, till Farmer Broadmead was hailed aloud, and the old boy stepped forth, and was summarily pushed through: the chairman calling from the rear, ‘Hulloa! no names to-night!’ to which was answered lustily: ‘All right, Mr. Tom!’ and the speaker was reproved with, ‘There you go! at it again!’ and out and up they hustled.
The chairman said quietly to Evan, as they were ascending the stairs: ‘We don’t have names to-night; may as well drop titles.’ Which presented no peculiar meaning to Evan’s mind, and he smiled the usual smile.
To Raikes, at the door of the supper-room, the chairman repeated the same; and with extreme affability and alacrity of abnegation, the other rejoined, ‘Oh, certainly!’
No wonder that he rubbed his hands with more delight than aristocrats and people with gentlemanly connections are in the habit of betraying at the prospect of refection, for the release from bread and cheese was rendered overpoweringly glorious, in his eyes, by the bountiful contrast exhibited on the board before him.
CHAPTER XII. IN WHICH ALE IS SHOWN TO HAVE ONE QUALITY OF WINE
To proclaim that yon ribs of beef and yonder ruddy Britons have met, is to furnish matter for an hour’s comfortable meditation.
Digest the fact. Here the Fates have put their seal to something Nature clearly devised. It was intended; and it has come to pass. A thing has come to pass which we feel to be right! The machinery of the world, then, is not entirely dislocated: there is harmony, on one point, among the mysterious powers who have to do with us.
Apart from its eloquent and consoling philosophy, the picture is pleasant. You see two rows of shoulders resolutely set for action: heads in divers degrees of proximity to their plates: eyes variously twinkling, or hypocritically composed: chaps in vigorous exercise. Now leans a fellow right back with his whole face to the firmament: Ale is his adoration. He sighs not till he sees the end of the mug. Now from one a laugh is sprung; but, as if too early tapped, he turns off the cock, and primes himself anew. Occupied by their own requirements, these Britons allow that their neighbours have rights: no cursing at waste of time is heard when plates have to be passed: disagreeable, it is still duty. Field-Marshal Duty, the Briton’s chief star, shines here. If one usurps more than his allowance of elbow-room, bring your charge against them that fashioned him: work away to arrive at some compass yourself.
Now the mustard ceases to travel, and the salt: the guests have leisure to contemplate their achievements. Laughs are more prolonged, and come from the depths.
Now Ale, which is to Beef what Eve was to Adam, threatens to take possession of the field. Happy they who, following Nature’s direction, admitted not bright ale into their Paradise till their manhood was strengthened with beef. Some, impatient, had thirsted; had satisfied their thirst; and the ale, the light though lovely spirit, with nothing to hold it down, had mounted to their heads; just as Eve will do when Adam is not mature: just as she did—Alas!
Now, the ruins of the feast being removed, and a clear course left for the flow of ale, Farmer Broadmead, facing the chairman, rises. He stands in an attitude of midway. He speaks:
‘Gentlemen! ‘Taint fust time you and I be met here, to salbrate this here occasion. I say, not fust time, not by many a time, ‘taint. Well, gentlemen, I ain’t much of a speaker, gentlemen, as you know. Howsever, here I be. No denyin’ that. I’m on my legs. This here’s a strange enough world, and a man ‘s a gentleman, I say, we ought for to be glad when we got ‘m. You know: I’m coming to it shortly. I ain’t much of a speaker, and if you wants somethin’ new, you must ax elsewhere: but what I say is—Bang it! here’s good health and long life to Mr. Tom, up there!’
‘No names!’ shouts the chairman, in the midst of a tremendous clatter.
Farmer Broadmead moderately disengages his breadth from the seat. He humbly axes pardon, which is accorded him with a blunt nod.
Ale (to Beef what Eve was to Adam) circulates beneath a dazzling foam, fair as the first woman.
Mr. Tom (for the breach of the rules in mentioning whose name on a night when identities are merged, we offer sincere apologies every other minute), Mr. Tom is toasted. His parents, who selected that day sixty years ago, for his bow to be made to the world, are alluded to with encomiums, and float down to posterity on floods of liquid amber.
But to see all the subtle merits that now begin to bud out from Mr. Tom, the chairman and giver of the feast; and also rightly to appreciate the speeches, we require to be enormously charged with Ale. Mr. Raikes did his best to keep his head above the surface of the rapid flood. He conceived the chairman in brilliant colours, and probably owing to the energy called for by his brain, the legs of the young man failed him twice, as he tried them. Attention was demanded. Mr. Raikes addressed the meeting.
The three young gentlemen-cricketers had hitherto behaved with a certain propriety. It did not offend Mr. Raikes to see them conduct themselves as if they were at a play, and the rest of the company paid actors. He had likewise taken a position, and had been the first to laugh aloud at a particular slip of grammar; while his shrugs at the aspirates transposed and the pronunciation prevalent, had almost established a free-masonry between him and one of the three young gentlemen-cricketers—a fair-haired youth, with a handsome, reckless face, who leaned on the table, humorously eyeing the several speakers, and exchanging by-words and laughs with his friends on each side of him.
But Mr. Raikes had the disadvantage of having come to the table empty in stomach—thirsty exceedingly; and, I repeat, that as, without experience, you are the victim of divinely given Eve, so, with no foundation to receive it upon, are you the victim of good sound Ale. He very soon lost his head. He would otherwise have seen that he must produce a wonderfully-telling speech if he was to keep the position he had taken, and had better not attempt one. The three young cricketers were hostile from the beginning. All of them leant forward, calling attention loudly laughing for the fun to come.
‘Gentlemen!’ he said: and said it twice. The gap was wide, and he said, ‘Gentlemen!’ again.
This commencement of a speech proves that you have made the plunge, but not that you can swim. At a repetition of ‘Gentlemen!’ expectancy resolved into cynicism.
‘Gie’n a help,’ sang out a son of the plough to a neighbour of the orator.
‘Hang it!’ murmured another, ‘we ain’t such gentlemen as that comes to.’
Mr. Raikes was politely requested to ‘tune his pipe.’
With a gloomy curiosity as to the results of Jack’s adventurous undertaking, and a touch of anger at the three whose bearing throughout had displeased him, Evan regarded his friend. He, too, had drunk, and upon emptiness. Bright ale had mounted to his brain. A hero should be held as sacred as the Grand Llama: so let no more be said than that he drank still, nor marked the replenishing of his glass.
Raikes cleared his throat for a final assault: he had got an image, and was dashing off; but, unhappily, as if to make the start seem fair, he was guilty of his reiteration, ‘Gentlemen.’
Everybody knew that it was a real start this time, and indeed he had made an advance, and had run straight through half a sentence. It was therefore manifestly unfair, inimical, contemptuous, overbearing, and base, for one of the three young cricketers at this period to fling back weariedly and exclaim: ‘By the Lord; too many gentlemen here!’
Evan heard him across the table. Lacking the key of the speaker’s previous conduct, the words might have passed. As it was, they, to the ale-invaded head of a young hero, feeling himself the world’s equal, and condemned nevertheless to bear through life the insignia of Tailordom, not unnaturally struck with peculiar offence. There was arrogance, too, in the young man who had interposed. He was long in the body, and, when he was not refreshing his sight by a careless contemplation of his finger-nails, looked down on his company at table, as one may do who comes from loftier studies. He had what is popularly known as the nose of our aristocracy: a nose that much culture of the external graces, and affectation of suavity, are required to soften. Thereto were joined thin lips and arched brows. Birth it was possible he could boast, hardly brains. He sat to the right of the fair-haired youth, who, with his remaining comrade, a quiet smiling fellow, appeared to be better liked by the guests, and had been hailed once or twice, under correction of the chairman, as Mr. Harry. The three had distinguished one there by a few friendly passages; and this was he who had offered his bed to Evan for the service of the girl. The recognition they extended to him did not affect him deeply. He was called Drummond, and had his place near the chairmen, whose humours he seemed to relish.
The ears of Mr. Raikes were less keen at the moment than Evan’s, but his openness to ridicule was that of a man on his legs solus, amid a company sitting, and his sense of the same—when he saw himself the victim of it—acute. His face was rather comic, and, under the shadow of embarrassment, twitching and working for ideas—might excuse a want of steadiness and absolute gravity in the countenances of others.
The chairman’s neighbour, Drummond, whispered him ‘Laxley will get up a row with that fellow.’
‘It ‘s young Jocelyn egging him on,’ said the chairman.
‘Um!’ added Drummond: ‘it’s the friend of that talkative rascal that ‘s dangerous, if it comes to anything.’
Mr. Raikes perceived that his host desired him to conclude. So, lifting his voice and swinging his arm, he ended: ‘Allow me to propose to you the Fly in Amber. In other words, our excellent host embalmed in brilliant ale! Drink him! and so let him live in our memories for ever!’
He sat down very well contented with himself, very little comprehended, and applauded loudly.
‘The Flyin’ Number!’ echoed Farmer Broadmead, confidently and with clamour; adding to a friend, when both had drunk the toast to the dregs, ‘But what number that be, or how many ‘tis of ‘em, dishes me! But that ‘s ne’ther here nor there.’
The chairman and host of the evening stood up to reply, welcomed by thunders—‘There ye be, Mr. Tom! glad I lives to see ye!’ and ‘No names!’ and ‘Long life to him!’
This having subsided, the chairman spoke, first nodding. ‘You don’t want many words, and if you do, you won’t get ‘em from me.’
Cries of ‘Got something better!’ took up the blunt address.
‘You’ve been true to it, most of you. I like men not to forget a custom.’
‘Good reason so to be,’ and ‘A jolly good custom,’ replied to both sentences.
‘As to the beef, I hope you didn’t find it tough: as to the ale—I know all about THAT!’
‘Aha! good!’ rang the verdict.
‘All I can say is, that this day next year it will be on the table, and I hope that every one of you will meet Tom—will meet me here punctually. I’m not a Parliament man, so that ‘ll do.’
The chairman’s breach of his own rules drowned the termination of his speech in an uproar.
Re-seating himself, he lifted his glass, and proposed: ‘The Antediluvians!’
Farmer Broadmead echoed: ‘The Antediloovians!’ appending, as a private sentiment, ‘And dam rum chaps they were!’
The Antediluvians, undoubtedly the toast of the evening, were enthusiastically drunk, and in an ale of treble brew.
When they had quite gone down, Mr. Raikes ventured to ask for the reason of their receiving such honour from a posterity they had so little to do with. He put the question mildly, but was impetuously snapped at by the chairman.
‘You respect men for their luck, sir, don’t you? Don’t be a hypocrite, and say you don’t—you do. Very well: so do I. That’s why I drink “The Antediluvians”!’
‘Our worthy host here’ (Drummond, gravely smiling, undertook to elucidate the case) ‘has a theory that the constitutions of the Postdiluvians have been deranged, and their lives shortened, by the miasmas of the Deluge. I believe he carries it so far as to say that Noah, in the light of a progenitor, is inferior to Adam, owing to the shaking he had to endure in the ark, and which he conceives to have damaged the patriarch and the nervous systems of his sons. It’s a theory, you know.’
‘They lived close on a thousand years, hale, hearty—and no water!’ said the chairman.
‘Well!’ exclaimed one, some way down the table, a young farmer, red as a cock’s comb: ‘no fools they, eh, master? Where there’s ale, would you drink water, my hearty?’ and back he leaned to enjoy the tribute to his wit; a wit not remarkable, but nevertheless sufficient in the noise it created to excite the envy of Mr. Raikes, who, inveterately silly when not engaged in a contest, now began to play on the names of the sons of Noah.
The chairman lanced a keen light at him from beneath his bushy eyebrows.
Before long he had again to call two parties to order. To Raikes, Laxley was a puppy: to Laxley, Mr. Raikes was a snob. The antagonism was natural: ale did but put the match to the magazine. But previous to an explosion, Laxley, who had observed Evan’s disgust at Jack’s exhibition of himself, and had been led to think, by his conduct and clothes in conjunction, that Evan was his own equal; a gentleman condescending to the society of a low-born acquaintance;—had sought with sundry propitiations, intelligent glances, light shrugs, and such like, to divide Evan from Jack. He did this, doubtless, because he partly sympathized with Evan, and to assure him that he took a separate view of him. Probably Evan was already offended, or he held to Jack, as a comrade should, or else it was that Tailordom and the pride of his accepted humiliation bellowed in his ears, every fresh minute: ‘Nothing assume!’ I incline to think that the more ale he drank the fiercer rebel he grew against conventional ideas of rank, and those class-barriers which we scorn so vehemently when we find ourselves kicking at them. Whatsoever the reason that prompted him, he did not respond to Laxley’s advances; and Laxley, disregarding him, dealt with Raikes alone.
In a tone plainly directed at him, he said: ‘Well, Harry, tired of this? The agriculturals are good fun, but I can’t stand much of the small cockney. A blackguard who tries to make jokes out of the Scriptures ought to be kicked!’
Harry rejoined, with wet lips: ‘Wopping stuff, this ale! Who’s that you want to kick?’
‘Somebody who objects to his bray, I suppose,’ Mr. Raikes struck in, across the table, negligently thrusting out his elbow to support his head.
‘Did you allude to me, sir?’ Laxley inquired.
‘I alluded to a donkey, sir.’ Raikes lifted his eyelids to the same level as Laxley’s: ‘a passing remark on that interesting animal.’
His friend Harry now came into the ring to try a fall.
‘Are you an usher in a school?’ he asked, meaning by his looks what men of science in fisticuffs call business.
Mr. Raikes started in amazement. He recovered as quickly.
‘No, sir, not quite; but I have no doubt I should be able to instruct you upon a point or two.’
‘Good manners, for instance?’ remarked the third young cricketer, without disturbing his habitual smile.
‘Or what comes from not observing them,’ said Evan, unwilling to have Jack over-matched.
‘Perhaps you’ll give me a lesson now?’ Harry indicated a readiness to rise for either of them.
At this juncture the chairman interposed.
‘Harmony, my lads!—harmony to-night.’
Farmer Broadmead, imagining it to be the signal for a song, returned:
‘All right, Mr.– Mr. Chair! but we an’t got pipes in yet. Pipes before harmony, you know, to-night.’
The pipes were summoned forthwith. System appeared to regulate the proceedings of this particular night at the Green Dragon. The pipes charged, and those of the guests who smoked, well fixed behind them, celestial Harmony was invoked through the slowly curling clouds. In Britain the Goddess is coy. She demands pressure to appear, and great gulps of ale. Vastly does she swell the chests of her island children, but with the modesty of a maid at the commencement. Precedence again disturbed the minds of the company. At last the red-faced young farmer led off with ‘The Rose and the Thorn.’ In that day Chloe still lived; nor were the amorous transports of Strephon quenched. Mountainous inflation—mouse-like issue characterized the young farmer’s first verse. Encouraged by manifest approbation he now told Chloe that he ‘by Heaven! never would plant in that bosom a thorn,’ with such a volume of sound as did indeed show how a lover’s oath should be uttered in the ear of a British damsel to subdue her.
‘Good!’ cried Mr. Raikes, anxious to be convivial.
Subsiding into impertinence, he asked Laxley, ‘Could you tip us a Strephonade, sir? Rejoiced to listen to you, I’m sure! Promise you my applause beforehand.’
Harry replied hotly: ‘Will you step out of the room with me a minute?’
‘Have you a confession to make?’ quoth Jack, unmoved. ‘Have you planted a thorn in the feminine flower-garden? Make a clean breast of it at the table. Confess openly and be absolved.’
While Evan spoke a word of angry reproof to Raikes, Harry had to be restrained by his two friends. The rest of the company looked on with curiosity; the mouth of the chairman was bunched. Drummond had his eyes on Evan, who was gazing steadily at the three. Suddenly ‘The fellow isn’t a gentleman!’ struck the attention of Mr. Raikes with alarming force.
Raikes—and it may be because he knew he could do more than Evan in this respect—vociferated: ‘I’m the son of a gentleman!’
Drummond, from the head of the table, saw that a diversion was imperative. He leaned forward, and with a look of great interest said:
‘Are you? Pray, never disgrace your origin, then.’
‘If the choice were offered me, I think I would rather have known his father,’ said the smiling fellow, yawning, and rocking on his chair.
‘You would, possibly, have been exceedingly intimate—with his right foot,’ said Raikes.
The other merely remarked: ‘Oh! that is the language of the son of a gentleman.’
The tumult of irony, abuse, and retort, went on despite the efforts of Drummond and the chairman. It was odd; for at Farmer Broadmead’s end of the table, friendship had grown maudlin: two were seen in a drowsy embrace, with crossed pipes; and others were vowing deep amity, and offering to fight the man that might desire it.
‘Are ye a friend? or are ye a foe?’ was heard repeatedly, and consequences to the career of the respondent, on his choice of affirmatives to either of these two interrogations, emphatically detailed.
It was likewise asked, in reference to the row at the gentlemen’s end: ‘Why doan’ they stand up and have ‘t out?’
‘They talks, they speechifies—why doan’ they fight for ‘t, and then be friendly?’
‘Where’s the yarmony, Mr. Chair, I axes—so please ye?’ sang out Farmer Broadmead.
‘Ay, ay! Silence!’ the chairman called.
Mr. Raikes begged permission to pronounce his excuses, but lapsed into a lamentation for the squandering of property bequeathed to him by his respected uncle, and for which—as far as he was intelligible—he persisted in calling the three offensive young cricketers opposite to account.
Before he could desist, Harmony, no longer coy, burst on the assembly from three different sources. ‘A Man who is given to Liquor,’ soared aloft with ‘The Maid of sweet Seventeen,’ who participated in the adventures of ‘Young Molly and the Kicking Cow’; while the guests selected the chorus of the song that first demanded it.
Evan probably thought that Harmony was herself only when she came single, or he was wearied of his fellows, and wished to gaze a moment on the skies whose arms were over and around his young beloved. He went to the window and threw it up, and feasted his sight on the moon standing on the downs. He could have wept at the bitter ignominy that severed him from Rose. And again he gathered his pride as a cloak, and defied the world, and gloried in the sacrifice that degraded him. The beauty of the night touched him, and mixed these feelings with mournfulness. He quite forgot the bellow and clatter behind. The beauty of the night, and heaven knows what treacherous hope in the depths of his soul, coloured existence warmly.
He was roused from his reverie by an altercation unmistakeably fierce.
Raikes had been touched on a tender point. In reply to a bantering remark of his, Laxley had hummed over bits of his oration, amid the chuckles of his comrades. Unfortunately at a loss for a biting retort, Raikes was reduced to that plain confession of a lack of wit; he offered combat.
‘I ‘ll tell you what,’ said Laxley, ‘I never soil my hands with a blackguard; and a fellow who tries to make fun of Scripture, in my opinion is one. A blackguard—do you hear? But, if you’ll give me satisfactory proofs that you really are what I have some difficulty in believing the son of a gentleman—I ‘ll meet you when and where you please.’
‘Fight him, anyhow,’ said Harry. ‘I ‘ll take him myself after we finish the match to-morrow.’
Laxley rejoined that Mr. Raikes must be left to him.
‘Then I’ll take the other,’ said Harry. ‘Where is he?’
Evan walked round to his place.
‘I am here,’ he answered, ‘and at your service.’
‘Will you fight?’ cried Harry.
There was a disdainful smile on Evan’s mouth, as he replied: ‘I must first enlighten you. I have no pretensions to your blue blood, or yellow. If, sir, you will deign to challenge a man who is not the son of a gentleman, and consider the expression of his thorough contempt for your conduct sufficient to enable you to overlook that fact, you may dispose of me. My friend here has, it seems, reason to be proud of his connections. That you may not subsequently bring the charge against me of having led you to “soil your hands”—as your friend there terms it—I, with all the willingness in the world to chastise you or him for your impertinence, must first give you a fair chance of escape, by telling you that my father was a tailor.’
The countenance of Mr. Raikes at the conclusion of this speech was a painful picture. He knocked the table passionately, exclaiming:
‘Who’d have thought it?’
Yet he had known it. But he could not have thought it possible for a man to own it publicly.
Indeed, Evan could not have mentioned it, but for hot fury and the ale. It was the ale in him expelling truth; and certainly, to look at him, none would have thought it.
‘That will do,’ said Laxley, lacking the magnanimity to despise the advantage given him, ‘you have chosen the very best means of saving your skins.’
‘We ‘ll come to you when our supply of clothes runs short,’ added Harry. ‘A snip!’
‘Pardon me!’ said Evan, with his eyes slightly widening, ‘but if you come to me, I shall no longer give you a choice of behaviour. I wish you good-night, gentlemen. I shall be in this house, and am to be found here, till ten o’clock to-morrow morning. Sir,’ he addressed the chairman, ‘I must apologize to you for this interruption to your kindness, for which I thank you very sincerely. It ‘s “good-night,” now, sir,’ he pursued, bowing, and holding out his hand, with a smile.
The chairman grasped it: ‘You’re a hot-headed young fool, sir: you’re an ill-tempered ferocious young ass. Can’t you see another young donkey without joining company in kicks-eh? Sit down, and don’t dare to spoil the fun any more. You a tailor! Who’ll believe it? You’re a nobleman in disguise. Didn’t your friend say so?—ha! ha! Sit down.’ He pulled out his watch, and proclaiming that he was born into this world at the hour about to strike, called for a bumper all round.
While such of the company as had yet legs and eyes unvanquished by the potency of the ale, stood up to drink and cheer, Mark, the waiter, scurried into the room, and, to the immense stupefaction of the chairman, and amusement of his guests, spread the news of the immediate birth of a little stranger on the premises, who was declared by Dr. Pillie to be a lusty boy, and for whom the kindly landlady solicited good luck to be drunk.