Evan Harrington. Complete
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‘Good evening, sir,’ said one who sat as chairman, with a decisive nod.
‘Good night, ain’t it?’ a jolly-looking old fellow queried of the speaker, in an under-voice.
‘Gad, you don’t expect me to be wishing the gentleman good-bye, do you?’ retorted the former.
‘Ha! ha! No, to be sure,’ answered the old boy; and the remark was variously uttered, that ‘Good night,’ by a caprice of our language, did sound like it.
‘Good evening’s “How d’ ye do?”—“How are ye?” Good night’s “Be off, and be blowed to you,”’ observed an interpreter with a positive mind; and another, whose intelligence was not so clear, but whose perceptions had seized the point, exclaimed: ‘I never says it when I hails a chap; but, dash my buttons, if I mightn’t ‘a done, one day or another! Queer!’
The chairman, warmed by his joke, added, with a sharp wink: ‘Ay; it would be queer, if you hailed “Good night” in the middle of the day!’ and this among a company soaked in ripe ale, could not fail to run the electric circle, and persuaded several to change their positions; in the rumble of which, Evan’s reply, if he had made any, was lost. Few, however, were there who could think of him, and ponder on that glimpse of fun, at the same time; and he would have been passed over, had not the chairman said: ‘Take a seat, sir; make yourself comfortable.’
‘Before I have that pleasure,’ replied Evan, ‘I—’
‘I see where ‘tis,’ burst out the old boy who had previously superinduced a diversion: ‘he’s going to ax if he can’t have a bed!’
A roar of laughter, and ‘Don’t you remember this day last year?’ followed the cunning guess. For awhile explication was impossible; and Evan coloured, and smiled, and waited for them.
‘I was going to ask—’
‘Said so!’ shouted the old boy, gleefully.
‘—one of the gentlemen who has engaged a bed-room to do me the extreme favour to step aside with me, and allow me a moment’s speech with him.’
Long faces were drawn, and odd stares were directed toward him, in reply.
‘I see where ‘tis’; the old boy thumped his knee. ‘Ain’t it now? Speak up, sir! There’s a lady in the case?’
‘I may tell you thus much,’ answered Evan, ‘that it is an unfortunate young woman, very ill, who needs rest and quiet.’
‘Didn’t I say so?’ shouted the old boy.
But this time, though his jolly red jowl turned all round to demand a confirmation, it was not generally considered that he had divined so correctly. Between a lady and an unfortunate young woman, there seemed to be a strong distinction, in the minds of the company.
The chairman was the most affected by the communication. His bushy eyebrows frowned at Evan, and he began tugging at the brass buttons of his coat, like one preparing to arm for a conflict.
‘Speak out, sir, if you please,’ he said. ‘Above board—no asides—no taking advantages. You want me to give up my bed-room for the use of your young woman, sir?’
Evan replied quietly: ‘She is a stranger to me; and if you could see her, sir, and know her situation, I think she would move your pity.’
‘I don’t doubt it, sir—I don’t doubt it,’ returned the chairman. ‘They all move our pity. That’s how they get over us. She has diddled you, and she would diddle me, and diddle us all-diddle the devil, I dare say, when her time comes. I don’t doubt it, sir.’
To confront a vehement old gentleman, sitting as president in an assembly of satellites, requires command of countenance, and Evan was not browbeaten: he held him, and the whole room, from where he stood, under a serene and serious eye, for his feelings were too deeply stirred on behalf of the girl to let him think of himself. That question of hers, ‘What are you going to do with me?’ implying such helplessness and trust, was still sharp on his nerves.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I humbly beg your pardon for disturbing you as I do.’
But with a sudden idea that a general address on behalf of a particular demand must necessarily fail, he let his eyes rest on one there, whose face was neither stupid nor repellent, and who, though he did not look up, had an attentive, thoughtful cast about the mouth.
‘May I entreat a word apart with you, sir?’
Evan was not mistaken in the index he had perused. The gentleman seemed to feel that he was selected from the company, and slightly raising his head, carelessly replied: ‘My bed is entirely at your disposal,’ resuming his contemplative pose.
On the point of thanking him, Evan advanced a step, when up started the irascible chairman.
‘I don’t permit it! I won’t allow it!’ And before Evan could ask his reasons, he had rung the bell, muttering: ‘They follow us to our inns, now, the baggages! They must harry us at our inns! We can’t have peace and quiet at our inns!—’
In a state of combustion, he cried out to the waiter:
‘Here, Mark, this gentleman has brought in a dirty wench: pack her up to my bed-room, and lock her in lock her in, and bring down the key.’
Agreeably deceived in the old gentleman’s intentions, Evan could not refrain from joining the murmured hilarity created by the conclusion of his order. The latter glared at him, and added: ‘Now, sir, you’ve done your worst. Sit down, and be merry.’
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.