CHAPTER XVII

CLUB LAW

A VALID EXCUSE--AN ANONYMOUS LETTER--A RECIPE FOR ANNOYANCES--THE GENERAL ON THE PAVE--SECOND CHILDHOOD--RUNNING THE GAUNTLET--A SUIT OF CLUBS--SETTLED AT LAST--THE FRIEND IN NEED

“Who the deuce ever heard of ‘military duty’ interfering with dinner? and what’s the use of being one’s own commanding-officer if one can’t give oneself leave?--What?--read that, Blanche!” We need hardly observe that it was General Bounce who spoke, as he tossed a note across the luncheon-table to his niece, and proceeded to bury himself in his other dispatches. The General was none of your dawdling, half-torpid, dressing-gown and slipper gentlemen, who consider London a fit place in which to spend the greater part of the day in _déshabillé_--not a bit of it. The General was up, shaved, and rosy and breakfasted, and prepared to fuss through his day, every morning punctually at eight. On the one in question he had reviewed a battalion of Guards who were at drill in the Park, utterly unconscious of their inspection by such a martinet, and had been good enough to express his disapprobation of their dress, method, and general efficiency, to a quiet, unassuming bystander whom he had never set eyes on before, but who happened to be a peer of the realm, and whose son, indeed, commanded the very regiment under discussion. The peer was quite alarmed at the denunciations of a casual acquaintance, so fierce of demeanour and of such warlike costume, the General never stirring abroad, for these morning excursions, save in a military surtout, buttoned very tight, a stiff black stock and buckskin gloves, armed moreover with a bamboo walking-stick, which he brandished with great impartiality. After his strictures on the sovereign’s body-guard he proceeded into the City by a hansom cab; there was no cab-rebellion in those days, but, nevertheless, Bounce succeeded in having a violent altercation with his driver, which resulted in that observer of human nature setting him down for a madman, and his own discomfiture on referring the dispute to an impartial policeman. From thence he visited his stables, and instructed divers helpers belonging to the adjoining mews in the proper method of washing a carriage, a lesson received by those worthies with much covert derision. The General was by this time ready for “tiffin,” as he still called it--a meal at which, for the first time in the day, he met the ladies of his establishment, read his notes, letters, etc., and arranged with Blanche the details of the gay life they were every day leading. That young lady, in a very pretty morning-gown, now occupied the head of the table; Mary was up-stairs with a headache--she was very subject to them of late--yet a skilful practitioner might have guessed the malady lay elsewhere; and whilst the General, with his eyebrows rising into his very forehead, perused a dirty, ill-conditioned-looking missive, which seemed to afford him great astonishment, his niece glanced over her military suitor’s excuse for not dining with them, in which he expressed his regret that duty and the absolute necessity of his presence in barracks would prevent his having that pleasure, but did not as usual suggest any fresh arrangements for rides, drives, or walks, which should insure him the charms of her society. Blanche was a little hurt and more than a little offended; yet, had she closely examined her own feelings, she would probably have been surprised to find how little she _really_ cared whether he came or not. “Well, Uncle Baldwin,” she said, with her usual merry smile, “you and I will dine _tête-à-tête_, for I don’t think poor Mrs. Delaval will be able to come down. We shall not quarrel, I fancy--shall we?” The General was dumb. His whole soul seemed absorbed in the missive which hid his face, but, judging from the red swollen forehead peeping above, indignation appeared to be the prevailing feeling inspired by its contents. It was not badly written, though in an unsteady hand, nor was it incorrectly spelt; it bore no signature, and was to the following effect--

“GENERAL BOUNCE,

“Sir,--This from a friend.--Seeing that you would probably be averse to an exposure of family matters, in which Miss Blanche’s name must necessarily appear, a well-wisher sends these few lines to warn you that _all has been discovered_. The late Mrs. K.’s will has been found, in which she devises everything, with the exception of certain legacies, to C----. The writer has seen it, and knows where it is to be found. His own interests prompt him to make _everything_ public, but his regard for the family would induce him to listen to terms, could he himself be guaranteed from loss. General, time is everything: to-morrow may be too late. If you should be unwilling to disturb muddy water, an advertisement to X. Y., in the second column of the _Times_, or a line addressed to P. Q., care of Mr. John Stripes, Bear and Bagpipes, corner of Goat Street, Tiler’s Road, Lambeth, would meet with prompt attention. Be wise.”

We regret to state that the General’s exclamation, on arriving at the conclusion of this mysterious document, was of a profane fervour, inexcusable under any provocation, and very properly amenable to a fine of five shillings by the laws of this well-regulated country. It was repeated, moreover, oftener than once; and without deigning to explain to his astonished niece the cause of his evident discomposure, was followed by his immediate departure to his own private snuggery--by the way, the very worst and darkest room in the house, whither our discomfited warrior made a tremulous retreat, banging every door after him with a shock that caused the very window-frames to quiver again.

“Zounds! I won’t believe it!--it’s impossible--it’s a forgery--it’s a lie--it’s an artifice of the devil! Why, it’s written in a clerk’s hand. ’Gad, if I thought there was a word of truth in it, I’d go to bed for a month!” burst out the General, as soon as he was safe in his own sanctuary, choking with passion, and tugging at the black stock and tight frock-coat as if to put his threat of retiring into immediate execution. It was one of his peculiarities, which we have omitted to mention, to adopt this method of avoiding the common annoyances and irritations of life. When anything went wrong in the household, the General made no more ado but incontinently proceeded to _strip and turn in_. When there was an _émeute_ below stairs, and Newton-Hollows was in a “state of siege”--a calamity which occurred about once in two years--the proprietor used to go to bed till the disturbance had completely blown over. When the news arrived of Mrs. Kettering’s death, her brother gave vent to his feelings between the sheets, although he was obliged to get up within a few hours and travel post-haste to join the afflicted family at St. Swithin’s; nay, it is related of him that, on one occasion, when an alarming fire happened to break out in a country-house where he was staying on a visit, nothing but the personal exertions of his friends, who hurried after him, and carried him off by force from his chamber, where he was rapidly undressing, prevented his being burnt alive in his nightcap. At the present crisis the General had already divested himself of coat, waistcoat, etc., ere the sight of a clean change of apparel, laid out ready for his afternoon wear, altered the current of his ideas, and he bethought him that it would be wiser to walk down to his club, amuse himself as usual in his habitual resorts, and thus drive this impertinent “attempt at extortion,” for so he did not hesitate to call it, entirely from his mind, than place himself at once _hors de combat_ amongst the blankets. So, instead of his night-gear, the General struggled into a stiffer black stock and a tighter frock-coat even than those which he had discarded, and arming himself with his formidable bamboo (how he wished the head and shoulders of his unknown correspondent were within its range), strutted off to Noodles’, feeling, as he cocked his chin up, and threw his chest out, and struck his cane against the sunny pavement, that he was still young and _débonnaire_, as in the _beaux jours_ at Cheltenham twenty, ay, thirty years ago.

No place makes a man forget his years so much as London. In the great city, one unit of that circling population rapidly loses his individuality. There nothing seems extraordinary--nothing seems out of the common course of events--there, it is proverbial, people of all pretensions immediately find their own level. If a man thinks he is wiser, or better, or cleverer, or handsomer, or stronger, or more famous than his neighbours, in London he will be sure to meet those who can equal, if not excel him, in all for which he gives himself credit; and so if an elderly gentleman begins to feel at his country-place that all around him speaks of maturity, not to say decay--that his young trees, and his old buildings, and his missing contemporaries, and the boy to whom he gave apples standing for the county, and the village he remembers a hamlet growing into a town, and all such progressive arrangements of Father Time, hint rather personally at old-fellowhood--let him come to London, and take his diversion amongst a crowd of fools more ancient than himself: he will feel a boy again--Regent Street will not appear altered to his enchanted eye, though they _have_ taken down the colonnade in that well-remembered thoroughfare. Pall Mall is as much Pall Mall to him as it was when he trod it in considerably tighter boots, never mind how many years ago. At his club the same waiter (waiters never die) will bring him the paper, and stir the fire for him, just as he used to do when the Reform Bill was a thing unheard of, and he can contemplate his bald head in the very same mirror that once reflected locks of Hyacinthine cluster. He meets an old crony, and he is shocked (though but for the moment) to find him so dreadfully altered--it is possible the old crony, in his heart of hearts, may return the compliment, but in all human probability he will greet the friend of his boyhood as if he had seen him the day before yesterday. If a very demonstrative man, and it should be before two o’clock in the day--for in the afternoon our English manners are all squared to the same pattern--the old crony may perhaps exclaim, with languid rapture, “Why, I haven’t seen you _for ages_; I don’t think you were in London _all_ last season!” Why should our gentleman from the country undeceive him, and tell him they have not met for more than twenty years, and remind him with mellowing heart of boyhood’s sunny hours and joyous escapades? The old crony will only think him _a twaddle_ and _a bore_, and thank his stars that he has stuck to London and the world, and his gods, such as they are, and is a much _younger_ man of his age than his rustic friend. And so our country mouse will find in a day or two that the artificial sits quite as easily upon _him_. When he has visited two or three of his old haunts he will feel as if he had never left them. He will go, perhaps, to some well-remembered palace of revelry, and find there, it may be, one contemporary out of a hundred with whom he once drank deep of dissipation and amusement, but he forgets the other ninety-nine. He feels as if the world had gone along with him, and that threescore years and odd were, after all, as the French king’s courtiers said, _L’âge de tout le monde_; so he lifts the cup of pleasure once more with shaking hands to his poor, dry old lips, and pours its flood, erst so luscious, over a palate, alas! deadened to all but the intoxication of the draught. Why is it that we so sedulously strive to deceive ourselves about the lapse of time? Why do we so wilfully close our eyes to that certainty that every passing moment brings an instant nearer? It must come! Why will we not look the shape steadily in the face? We are not afraid to front our fellow-man in the struggle for life and death; why should we shrink from the shadowy foe, from whom there is no escape? Perhaps, like all other distant horrors, it will lose half its terrors when it does approach--perhaps it will turn out a friend after all. Man lives in the future; can he not carry his future a little beyond life? Will it be such a bereavement to lose a poor, old, worn-out frame, with its gout and its rheumatism, and its hundred aches and pains, and burdens dragging it day by day towards the earth from whence it sprung? But where will the disembodied self find shelter? “Ay, there’s the rub,” and so “conscience doth make cowards of us all.”

Well, young or old, boys will be boys, whether at one score or three, and all the sermonising in the world will not empty St. James’s Street towards four o’clock on a summer’s afternoon, or prevent one nose being flattened against those club-windows from which the _terrarum_ _domini_ of the present day look upon the world with a mixture of good-humoured satire and careless contempt. Stoics are they in manners and principles, Epicureans in tastes and practice, and Philosophers of the Porch on the clear bright evenings--or rather midnights--when they assemble to smoke in gossiping brotherhood. But now, in the afternoon, laws human and divine would vote it “bad style” to have anything in their mouths save the tops of their canes and riding-whips, and these are scarcely removed to make a passing remark on the unconscious General as, having accomplished the crossing of Piccadilly, he sweeps under the guns of battery No 1, on his way to his own resort, where he too will stand at a window and make comments on the passers-by. Talking of these batteries, we can recollect, old as we are, when we preferred to thread the press of Piccadilly, and so dodging down Bury Street to bring up eventually opposite Arlington Street, rather than face the ordeal of passing under those great guns. Yet was our cab well hung and well painted, our tiger a pocket-Apollo, and our horse well-actioned and in good condition, while no one but ourselves and the dealer who sold him to us could be aware of his broken knee. What strategy wasted! What skill in charioteering thrown away! How should we then, in our shy and sensitive boyhood, have winced from the truth, that no one probably in that dreaded window would have thought it worth while to waste a single monosyllable on anything so insignificant as ourselves. Verily, _mauvaise honte_ is a contradictory foible; but of this weakness the General, like most men who have arrived at his time of life, has but a small leaven. He toddles boldly down, under the battery, masked as it is by the _Times_ newspaper, and nods familiarly to a well-brushed hat and luxuriant pair of grey whiskers just peering above the broadsheet. The whiskers return the salutation, and a stout gentleman at the fireplace, where he has been standing for the last three-quarters of an hour, hatted, gloved, and umbrellaed, as though prepared for instant departure, carelessly remarks, “Old Bounce is getting devilish shaky;” to which the grey whiskers reply, “No wonder; he’s an oldish fellow now. Why, Bounce’ll be a lieutenant-general next brevet. By the by, when _are_ we to have a brevet?” the whiskers forgetting, as after the lapse of so many years it is natural they should, that they were at school with “the oldish fellow,” who was then a “younger fellow” than themselves. However, they have talked about him quite long enough, and pass on to a fresh topic by the time the General himself arrives at Noodles’.

This very excellent and exclusive club seems to bear to institutions of a like nature much the same relation that Greenwich and Chelsea Hospitals do to the crews and battalions of our forces by land and sea. Should the warrior who enlists under the banner of Fashion have the good fortune to escape the various casualties common in his profession, such as absenteeism, imprisonment, marriage, or any other sort of ruin, he is pretty safe to anchor at Noodles’ at last. There he brings up, after all his perils and all his triumphs, amongst a shattered remnant of those who set sail with him in the morning of life, when every wind was fair and every channel practicable. Many have been lured by the siren on to sunken rocks, and gone down “all standing”--many have lost their reckoning and drifted clean away, till they can “fetch up” no more--many have been captured by crafts trim and flaunting as themselves, and towed away as prizes into different havens, where they ride in somewhat wearisome monotony--and of many there is no account, save that which shall be rendered when the sea gives up its dead. Yet a few crazy old barks have made the haven at last--worn, leaky, and sea-worthless, with bulging ribs and warped spars, and tackle strained, yet are they still just buoyant enough to float--can still drift with the tide, and, above all, are still disposed to take in cargo on every available opportunity. As London is now constituted, you can almost tell a man’s age by the clubs he frequents. “Tell me your associates, and I will tell you your character,” says the ancient philosopher. “Tell me your club, and I will tell you your age,” says the modern “ingenious youth,” as that sporting Falstaff Mr. Jorrocks calls him, who begins with huge cigars, gin and soda-water, and billiards, much bemused, at Trappe’s. Anon, as his collars get higher, and the down upon his cheek begins to justify a nobler ambition, he aspires to the science of numbers, and lays the odds to more experienced calculators at “The Short-Grass.” But our youth is becoming a man-about-town, or thinks he is, and must have the _entrée_ to more than one of these luxurious republics; so according to his rank, his profession, or his pretensions, he affects another afternoon club, esteeming it, whichever it may be, the best and _most select_ in London. Here he has a plentiful choice. If a professional or a politician, he will find associations purposely established for those of his own practice or opinions; and here they are looming like a city of palaces--the Conflagrative, the Anarchic, the Regency, the Hat-and-Umbrella, the Chelsea, and the Peace and Plenty. Is there not the Megatherium for the literary, and the Munchausen for the travelled? But peradventure our youth is fast, and aspires to be a man of figure; so shall his carriage be seen waiting at the Godiva, or himself shall face the ballot at Blight’s. For a time all goes on smooth and sunny; but the young ones keep growing up, and they rather jostle him in his chair, and “people let in such boys now-a-days”; so in disgust he abdicates a sovereignty conferred by years, and retreats to quieter resorts, where the cutlet is equally well dressed and the wine a thought better. So we find him presiding over house-dinners at Alfred’s, or winning the odd trick after a quiet _parti carré_ at Snookes’s. But even from these celestial seats he must be ousted at last. Still that pressure from below keeps increasing year by year, “and the young men of the present day are so slangy, and so noisy, and so disagreeable,” that he can stand it no longer, and puts his name down for the first vacancy in that last refuge recommended by his old friend Sapless. Behold him at length shouldered into the harbour, and safely landed at Noodles’.

Thither we have likewise brought the General, and given him ample time to spell through the papers, and reconnoitre his acquaintance as they pass up and down St. James’s Street. But the General is ill at ease--he cannot get that infernal anonymous letter out of his head; do what he will, he cannot prevent himself from glancing at the second column of the _Times_, and poring over a map of London in search of Goat Street, Tiler’s Road, Lambeth. He fancies, too, as a man is apt to do when self-conscious of anything peculiar, that people look at him strangely; and if two men happen to whisper in a window, he cannot help thinking they must be talking about him. At last he gets nervous, and determines to take counsel of a friend; nor is he long in selecting a recipient for his sorrows, inasmuch as the most remarkable object in the room is Sir Bloomer Buttercup, who is standing in an attitude near the fireplace (Sir Bloomer, for certain mechanical reasons, cannot sit down in that particular pair of trousers), and to him the General resolves to confide his annoyances, and by his advice determines to abide. Although, probably, no man in this world ever managed his own affairs so badly as Sir Bloomer Buttercup--partly, it must be owned, in consequence of his having the most generous heart that ever beat under three inches of padding--yet in all matters unconnected with self, his judgment was as sound as his penetration was remarkable. No man had got his friends out of so many scrapes, no man had given such good counsel, and no man had probably done so many foolish things as kind, good-natured Sir Bloomer; and when he minced after the General into an empty room on those poor, gouty, shiny toes, he really felt as ready as he expressed himself, to “see his old friend through it, whatever it was.”

“I’ll tell you what, Bounce,” lisped the old beau, as the General concluded his tale with that most puzzling of questions, “What would you advise me to do?”--“I’ll tell you what. I think I know a fellow that can sift this for us to the bottom. You know, my dear boy, that I have occasionally been in slight difficulties--merely temporary, of course, and entirely owing to circumstances over which I had no control” (Sir B. had spent two fortunes, and was now living on the recollection of them, and the possible reversion of a third)--“but still difficulties--eh?--a ten-knot breeze was always more to my fancy than a calm. Well, I’ve been brought in contact with all kinds of fellows, and I do know one man, a sort of a lawyer, that’s in with every rogue in London. He could get to the rights of this in twenty-four hours if we made it worth his while. He’s a clever fellow,” added Bloomer reflectively, “a very clever fellow; in fact, a most consummate rascal. Shall I take you to him?”

“This instant,” burst out the General, with a terrific snatch at the bell; “I’ll send for my brougham--what?--it’ll be here in five minutes. Zounds! not go in a brougham? Why not?”

Sir Bloomer had frightful misgivings as to the effects on his costume of the necessary attitude in which carriage exercise must be taken; but in the cause of friendship he was prepared to hazard even a rupture of the most important ties, and he replied heroically, “I’ll see you through it, Bounce; what o’clock is it? Ah! I promised--never mind--they must be disappointed sometimes; and for the sake of your charming niece, I’d go through fire and water a good deal farther than the City. Bounce, Bounce, what an angel that girl is! She mustn’t be told a syllable of this--not a syllable; with me, of course, it’s secret as the grave.” So the pair started, firmly persuaded that not a soul in London, save their two selves, knew a word about the letter, or the will, or the dethronement of poor little Blanche from her pedestal as an heiress.