Arthur O'Leary Part 17

'The torrent of laughter that shook the table never ceased for a full quarter of an hour. Old and young, smooth and grizzly, they laughed till their faces were seamed with rivulets like a mountain in winter; and when they would endeavour to address me, they'd burst out again, as fresh as ever.

'"Come over and join us, worthy friend," said he who sat at the head of the board--"you seem well equal to it; and perhaps our character as men of truth may improve on acquaintance."

'"What, in Heaven's name, are you?" said I.

'Another burst of merriment was the only reply they made me. I never found much difficulty in making my way in certain cla.s.ses of society where the tone was a familiar one. Where a _bon mot_ was good currency and a joke pa.s.sed well, there I was at home, and to a.s.sume the features of the party was with me a kind of instinct which I could not avoid; it cost me neither effort nor strain; I caught up the spirit as a child catches up an accent, and went the pace as pleasantly as though I had been bred among them. I was therefore but a short time at table when by way of matriculation I deemed it necessary to relate a story; and certainly if they had astounded me by the circ.u.mstances of their high and mighty acquaintances, I did not spare them in my narrative--in which the Emperor of j.a.pan figured as a very commonplace individual, and the King of Candia came in, just incidentally, as a rather dubious acquaintance might do. For a time they listened, like people who are well accustomed to give and take these kinds of miracle; but when I mentioned something about a game of leap-frog on the wall of China with the Celestial himself, a perfect shout of incredulous laughter interrupted me.

'"Well," said I, "don't believe me, if you don't like; but here have I been the whole evening listening to you, and if I 've not bolted as much as that, my name's not Con O'Kelly."

'But it is not necessary to tell you how, step by step, they led me to credit all they were saying, but actually to tell my own real story to them--which I did from beginning to end, down to the very moment I sat down there, with a large gla.s.s of hot claret before me, as happy as might be.

'"And you really are so low in purse?" said one. '"And have no prospect of any occupation, nor any idea of a livelihood?" cried another.

'"Just as much as I expect promotion from my friend the Emperor of China," said I.

'"You speak French and German well enough, though?" '"And a smattering of Italian," said I. '"Come, you 'll do admirably; be one of us."

'"Might I make bold enough to ask what trade that is?" '"You don't know--you can't guess even?" '"Not even guess," said I, "except you report for the papers, and come here to make up the news."

'"Something better than that, I hope," said the man at the head of the table. "What think you of a life that leads a man about the world from Norway to Jerusalem; that shows him every land the sun s.h.i.+nes on, and every nation of the globe, travelling with every luxury that can make a journey easy and a road pleasant; that enables him to visit whatever is remarkable in every city of the universe--to hear Pasta at St.

Petersburg in the winter, and before the year's end to see an Indian war-dance among the red men of the Rocky Mountains; to sit beneath the shadow of the Pyramids as it were to-day, and ere two months be over to stand in the spray of Trolhattan, and join a wolf-chase through the pine-forests of the north. And not only this, but to have opportunities of seeing life on terms the most intimate, so that society should be unveiled to an extent that few men of any station can pretend to; to converse with the greatest and the wisest, the most distinguished in rank--ay! and better than all, with the most beautiful women of every land in Europe, who depend on your word, rely on your information, and permit a degree of intimacy which in their own rank is unattainable; to improve your mind by knowledge of languages, acquaintance with works of art, scenery, and more still by habits of intelligence which travelling bestows."

'"And to do this," said I, burning with impatience at a picture that realised all I wished for, "to do this----"

'"Be a courier!" said thirty voices in a cheer. "Vive la Grande Route!"

and with the word each man drained his gla.s.s to the bottom.

'"Vive la Grande Route!" exclaimed I, louder than the rest; "and here I join you."

'From that hour I entered on a career that each day I follow is becoming dearer to me. It is true that I sit in the rumble of the carriage, while _monseigneur_, or my lord, reclines within; but would I exchange his ennui and depression for my own light-heartedness and jollity? Would I give up the happy independence of all the intrigue and plotting of the world I enjoy, for all his rank and station? Does not Mont Blanc look as grand in his h.o.a.ry panoply to me as to him; are not the Danube and the Rhine as fair? If I wander through the gallery of Dresden, have I not the sweet smile of the great Raphael's Madonna bent on me, as blandly as it is on him? Is not mine host, with less of ceremony, far more cordial to me than to him? Is not mine a rank known and acknowledged in every town, in every village? Have I not a greeting wherever I pa.s.s? Should sickness overtake me, where have I not a home? Where am I among strangers? Then, what care I for the bill--mine is a royal route where I never pay. And, lastly, how often is the _soubrette_ of the rumble as agreeable a companion as the pale and care-worn lady within?

'Such is my life. Many would scoff, and call it menial Let them, if they will. I never _felt_ it so; and once more I say, "Vive la Grande Route!"'

'But your friends of the "Fischer's Haus"?'

'A jolly set of smugglers, with whom for a month or two in summer I take a cruise, less for profit than pleasure. The blue water is a necessary of life to the man that has been some years at sea. My little collection has been made in my wanderings; and if ever you come to Naples, you must visit a cottage I have at Castella Mare, where you 'll see something better worth your looking at. And now, though it does not seem very hospitable, I must say adieu.'

With these words Mr. O'Kelly opened a drawer, and drew forth a blue jacket lined with rich dark fur and slashed with black braiding; a greyhound was embroidered in gold twist on the arm, and a similar decoration ornamented the front of his blue-cloth cap. I start for Genoa in half an hour. We'll meet again, and often, I hope.'

'Good-bye,' said I, 'and a hundred thanks for a pleasant evening, and one of the strangest stories I ever heard. I half wish I were a younger man, and I think I 'd mount the blue jacket too.'

'It would show you some strange scenes,' said Mr. O'Kelly, while he continued to equip himself for the road. 'All I have told is little compared to what I might tell, were I only to give a few leaves of my life _en courier_; but, as I said before, we 'll live to meet again. Do you know who my party is this morning?'

'I can't guess.'

'My old flame, Miss Blundell; she's married now and has a daughter, so like what I remember herself once. Well, well, it's a strange world!

Good-bye.'

With that we shook hands for the last time, and parted; and I wandered back to Antwerp when the sun was rising, to get into a bed and sleep for the next eight hours.

CHAPTER IX. TABLE-TRAITS

Morgan O'Dogherty was wrong--and, sooth to say, he was not often so--when he p.r.o.nounced a Mess to be 'the perfection of dinner society.'

In the first place, there can be no perfection anywhere or in anything, it is evident, where ladies are not. Secondly, a number of persons so purely professional, and therefore so very much alike in their habits, tone of thinking, and expression, can scarcely be expected to make up that complex amalgam so indispensable to pleasant society. Lastly, the very fact of meeting the same people each day, looking the very same way too, is a sad damper to that flow of spirits which for their free current demand all the chances and vicissitudes of a fresh audience.

In a word, in the one case a man becomes like a Dutch ca.n.a.l, standing stagnant and slow between its trim banks; in the other, he is a bounding rivulet, careering pleasantly through gra.s.sy meadows and smiling fields--now basking in the gay suns.h.i.+ne, now lingering in the cool shade; at one moment hurrying along between rocks and moss-grown pebbles, brawling, breaking, and foaming; at the next, expanding into some little lake, calm and deep and mirrorlike.

It is the very chances and changes of conversation, its ups and downs, its lights and shadows--so like those of life itself--that make its great charm; and for this, generally, a mixed party gives the only security. Now, a Mess has very little indeed of this requisite; on the contrary, its great stronghold is the fact that it offers an easy tableland for all capacities. It has its little, dry, stale jokes, as flat and as dull as the orderly book--the regular quiz about Jones's whiskers, or Tobin's horse; the hackneyed stories about Simpson of Ours, or Nokes of Yours--of which the major is never tired, and the newly-joined sub is enraptured. Bless their honest hearts! very little fun goes far in the army; like the regimental allowance of wine, it will never intoxicate, and no man is expected to call for a fresh supply.

I have dined at more Messes than any red-coat of them all, at home and abroad--cavalry, artillery, and infantry, 'horse, foot, and dragoons,'

as Grattan has it. In gala parties, with a general and his staff for guests; after sweltering field-days, where all the claret could not clear your throat of pipe-clay and contract-powder; in the colonies, where flannel-jackets were subst.i.tuted for regulation coats, and land-crabs and pepper-pot for saddles and sirloins; in Connemara, Calcutta, or Corfu--it was all the same: _colum non animum_, etc. Not but that they had all their little peculiarities among themselves-- so much so, indeed, that I offer a fifty, that, if you set me down blindfolded at any Mess in the service, I will tell you what corps they belong to before the cheese appears; and before the bottle goes half around, I'll engage to distinguish the hussars from the heavies, the fusiliers from the light-bobs; and when the president is ringing for more claret, it will go hard with me if I don't make a shrewd guess at the number of the regiment.

The great charm of the Mess is to those young, ardent spirits fresh from Sandhurst or Eton, sick of mathematics and bored with false quant.i.ties.

To them the change is indeed a glorious one, and I'd ask nothing better than to be sixteen, and enjoy it all; but for the old stagers, it is slow work indeed. A man curls his whiskers at forty with far less satisfaction than he surveys their growth and development at eighteen; he tightens his waist, too, at that period, with a very different sense of enjoyment. His first trip to Jamaica is little more than a 'lark'; his fourth or fifth, with a wife and four brats, is scarcely a party of pleasure--and all these things react on the Mess. Besides, it is against human nature itself to like the people who rival us; and who could enjoy the jokes of a man who stands between him and a majority?

Yet, taking them all in all, the military 'cut up' better than any other professionals. The doctors might be agreeable; they know a vast deal of life, and in a way too that other people never see it; but meet them _en ma.s.se_, they are little better than body-s.n.a.t.c.hers. There is not a malady too dreadful, nor an operation too b.l.o.o.d.y, to tell you over your soup; every slice of the turkey suggests an amputation, and they sever a wing with the anatomical precision they would extirpate a thigh bone.

Life to them has no interest except where it verges on death; and from habit and hardening, they forget that human suffering has any other phase than a source of wealth to the medical profession.

The lawyers are even worse. To listen to them, you would suppose that the highest order of intellect was a skill in chicanery; that trick and stratagem were the foremost walks of talent; that to browbeat a poor man and to confound a simple one were great triumphs of genius; and that the fairest gift of the human mind was that which enabled a man to feign every emotion of charity, benevolence, pity, anger, grief, and joy, for the sum of twenty pounds sterling, wrung from abject poverty and briefed by an 'honest attorney.'

As to the parsons, I must acquit them honestly of any portion of this charge. It has been my fortune to 'a.s.sist' at more than one visitation dinner, and I can safely aver that never by any accident did the conversation become professional, nor did I hear a word of piety during the entertainment.

Country gentlemen are scarcely professional, however the similarity of their tastes and occupations might seem to warrant the cla.s.sification--fox-hunting, grouse-shooting, game-preserving, road-jobbing, rent-extracting, land-tilling, being propensities in common. They are the slowest of all; and the odds are long against any one keeping awake after the conversation has taken its steady turn into shorthorns, Swedish turnips, subsoiling, and southdowns.

Artists are occasionally well enough, if only for their vanity and self-conceit.

Authors are better still, for ditto and ditto.

Actors are most amusing from the innocent delusion they labour under that all that goes on in life is unreal, except what takes place in Covent Garden or Drury Lane.

In a word, professional cliques are usually detestable, the individuals who compose them being frequently admirable ingredients, but intolerable when unmixed; and society, like a _macedoine_, is never so good as when its details are a little incongruous.

For my own part, I knew few things better than a table d'hote, that pleasant reunion of all nations, from Stockholm to Stamboul; of every rank, from the grand-duke to the bagman; men and women, or, if you like the phrase better, ladies and gentlemen--some travelling for pleasure, some for profit; some on wedding tours, some in the grief of widowhood; some rattling along the road of life in all the freshness of youth, health, and well-stored purses, others creeping by the wayside cautiously and quietly; sedate and sententious English, lively Italians, plodding Germans, witty Frenchmen, wily Russians, and stupid Belgians-- all pell-mell, seated side by side, and actually shuffled into momentary intimacy by soup, fish, fowl, and entremets. The very fact that you are _en route_ gives a frankness and a freedom to all you say. Your pa.s.sport is signed, your carriage packed; to-morrow you will be a hundred miles away. What matter, then, if the old baron with the white moustache has smiled at your German, or if the thin-faced lady in the Dunstable bonnet has frowned at your morality?--you 'll never, in all likelihood, meet either again. You do your best to be agreeable--it is the only distinction recognised; here are no places of honour, no favoured guests--each starts fair in the race, and a pleasant course I have always deemed it.

Now, let no one, while condemning the vulgarity of this taste of mine--for such I antic.i.p.ate as the ready objection, though the dissentient should be a tailor from Bond Street or a schoolmistress from Brighton--for a moment suppose that I mean to include all tables d'hote in this sweeping laudation; far, very far from it. I, Arthur O'Leary, have travelled some hundreds of thousands of miles in every quarter and region of the globe, and yet would have considerable difficulty in enumerating even six such as fairly to warrant the praise I have p.r.o.nounced.

In the first place, the table d'hote, to possess all the requisites I desire, should not have its _locale_ in any first-rate city, like Paris, London, or St. Petersburg; no, it should rather be in Brussels, Dresden, Munich, Berne, or Florence. Again, it should not be in the great overgrown mammoth-hotel of the town, with three hundred daily devourers, and a steam-engine to slice the _bouilli_. It should, and will usually, be found in some retired and quiet spot--frequently within a small court, with orange-trees round the walls, and a tiny modest _jet d'eau_ in the middle; a gla.s.s-door entering from a flight of low steps into a neat ante-chamber, where an attentive but un.o.btrusive waiter is ready to take your hat and cane, and, instinctively divining your dinner intentions, ushers you respectfully into the salon, and leans down your chair beside the place you select.

The few guests already arrived have the air of _habitues_; they are chatting together when you enter, but they conceive it necessary to do the honours of the place to the stranger, and at once include you in the conversation; a word or two suffices, and you see that they are not chance folk, whom hunger has overtaken at the door, but daily visitors, who know the house and appreciate it. The table itself is far from large--at most sixteen persons could sit down at it; the usual number is about twelve or fourteen. There is, if it be summer, a delicious bouquet in the midst; and the snowy whiteness of the cloth and the clear l.u.s.tre of the water strike you instantly. The covers are as bright as when they left the hands of the silversmith, and the temperature of the room at once shows that nothing has been neglected that can contribute to the comfort of the guests. The very plash of the fountain is a grateful sound, and the long necks of the hock-bottles, reposing in the little basin, have an air of luxury far from unpleasing. While the champagne indulges its more southern character in the ice-pails in the shade, a sweet, faint odour of pineapples and nectarines is diffused about; nor am I disposed to quarrel with the chance view I catch, between the orange-trees, of a window where asparagus, game, oranges, and melons are grouped confusedly together, yet with a harmony of colour and effect Schneider would have gloried in. There is a noiseless activity about, a certain air of preparation--not such as by bustle can interfere with the placid enjoyment you feel, but something which denotes care and skill.

Tou feel, in fact, that impatience on your part would only militate against your own interest, and that when the moment arrives for serving, the potage has then received the last finis.h.i.+ng touch of the artist. By this time the company are a.s.sembled; the majority are men, but there are four or five ladies. They are _en chapeau_ too; but it is a toilette that shows taste and elegance, and the freshness--that delightful characteristic of foreign dress--of their light muslin dresses is in keeping with all about. Then follows that little pleasant bustle of meeting; the interchange of a number of small courtesies, which cost little but are very delightful; the news of the theatre for the night; some soiree, well known, or some promenade, forms the whole--and we are at table.

The destiny that made me a traveller has blessed me with either the contentment of the most simple or the perfect enjoyment of the most cultivated cuisine; and if I have eaten _tripe de rocher_ with Parry at the Pole, I have never lost thereby the acme of my relish for truffles at the 'Freres.' Therefore, trust me that in my mention of a table d'hote I have not forgotten the most essential of its features--for this, the smallness and consequent selectness of the party is always a guarantee.

Thus, then, you are at table; your napkin is spread, but you see no soup. The reason is at once evident, and you accept with gratefulness the little plate of Ostend oysters, each somewhat smaller than a five-franc piece, that are before you. Who would seek for pearls without when such treasures are to be found within the sh.e.l.l--cool and juicy and succulent; suggestive of delights to come, and so suited to the limpid gla.s.s of Chablis. What preparatives for the potage, which already I perceive to be a _printaniere_.

But why dwell on all this? These memoranda of mine were intended rather to form a humble companion to some of John Murray's inestimable treatises on the road; some stray recollection of what in my rambles had struck me as worth mention; something that might serve to lighten a half-hour here or an evening there; some hint for the wanderer of a hotel or a church or a view or an actor or a poet, a picture or a _pate_, for which his halting-place is remarkable, but of whose existence he knew not. And to come back once more, such a picture as I have presented is but a weak and imperfect sketch of the Hotel de France in Brussels--at least, of what I once remember it.