MYSELF, PUNCH, AND THE KEELEYS.
I dined with my old friend and schoolfellow, Jack Withers, one day last September. On the previous morning, on my way to the India House, I had run up against a stout individual on Cornhill, and on looking in his face as I stopped for a moment to apologise, an abrupt “This is surely Jack Withers,” burst from my lips, followed by—“God bless me! Will Bayfield!” from his. After a hurried question or two, we shook hands warmly and parted, with the understanding that I was to cut my mutton with him next day.
Seventeen years had elapsed since Withers and I had seen or heard of each other. Having a good mercantile connexion, he had pitched upon commerce as his calling, and entered a counting-house in Idollane in the same year that I, a raw young surgeon, embarked for India to seek my fortune in the medical service of the East India Company.
Things had gone well with honest Jack; from a long, thin, weazel of a youngster, he had become a burly ruddy-faced gentleman, with an aldermanic rotundity of paunch, which gave the world assurance that his ordinary fare by no means consisted of deaf nuts; he had already, as he told me, accumulated a very pretty independence, which was yearly increasing, and was, moreover, a snug bachelor, with a well-arranged residence in Finsbury-square; in short, it was evident that Jack was “a fellow with two coats and everything handsome about him.”
As for me, I was a verification of the adage about the rolling stone; having gathered a very small quantity of “moss,” in the shape of worldly goods. I had spent sixteen years in marching and countermarching over the thirsty plains of the Carnatic, in medical charge of a native regiment—salivating Sepoys and blowing out with blue pills the officers—until the effects of a stiff jungle-fever, that nearly made me proprietor of a landed property measuring six feet by two, sent me back to England almost as poor as I had left it, and with an atrabilarious visage which took a two-months’ course of Cheltenham water to scour into anything like a decent colour.
Withers’ dinner was in the best taste: viands excellent—wine superb; never did I sip racier Madeira, and the Champagne trickled down one’s throat with the same facility that man is inclined to sin.
The cloth drawn, we fell to discoursing about old times, things, persons, and places. Jack then told me how from junior clerk he had risen to become second partner in the firm to which he belonged; and I, in my turn, enlightened his mind with respect to Asiatic Cholera, Runjeet Sing, Ghuzni, tiger-shooting, and Shah Soojah.
In this manner the evening slid pleasantly on. An array of six bottles, that before dinner had contained the juice of Oporto, stood empty on the sideboard. Jack wanted to draw another cork, which, however, I positively forbad, as I have through life made it a rule to avoid the slightest approach towards excess in tippling; so, after a modest brace of glasses of brandy-and-water, I shook hands with and left my friend about half-past nine, for I am an old-fashioned fellow, and love early hours, my usual time for turning in being ten.
When I got into the street an unaccustomed spirit of gaiety at once took possession of me; my general feelings of benevolence and goodwill towards all mankind appeared to have received a sudden and marvellous increase. I seemed to tread on eider-down, and, cigar in mouth, strolled along Fleet-street and the Strand, towards my domicile in Half-Moon street—“nescio quid meditans nugarum”—sometimes humming the fag end of an Irish melody; anon stopping to stare in a print-shop window; and then I would trudge on, chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancy as I conned over the various ups and downs that had chequered my life since Jack Withers and I were thoughtless lads together “a long time ago.”
In this mood I found myself standing before the New Strand Theatre, my attention having been arrested by the word PUNCH blazoned in large letters on a play-bill.
“What can this mean?” quoth I to myself. “I know a publication called Punch very well, but I never heard of a performance so named. I’ll go in and see it. Who knows but it may be an avatar11. The Avatar we do not allow—the illustrious periodical we do.—ED. OF PUNCH. of the Editor of that illustrious periodical, who condescends to discard his dread incognito for the nonce, in order to exhibit himself, for one night only, to the eyes and understandings of admiring London.”
In another minute I was seated in the boxes, and found a crowded audience in full enjoyment of the quiet waggery of Keeley, who was fooling them to the top of their bent, accoutred from top to toe as Mynheer Punch the Great, while his clever little wife—who, by the way, possesses, I think, more of the “vis comica” than any actress of the day—caused sides to shake and eyes to water by her naïve and humorous delineation of Mrs. Snozzle.
The curtain had hardly fallen more than a couple of minutes, when a door behind me opened hastily, and a box-keeper thrusting in his head, called out—“Is there a medical man here?” “I am one,” said I, getting up; “anything the matter?” “Come with me then, sir, if you please,” said he; “a severe accident has just happened to Mrs. Keeley; a falling scene has struck her head, sir, and hurt her dreadfully.”
“Good heavens!” said I, much shocked; “I will come immediately.”
I followed the man to the stage door, and was ushered into a dressing-room with several people in it, where, extended on a sofa, lay the unfortunate lady, whom I had but a few minutes before seen full of life and spirits, delighting hundreds with her unrivalled humour and espièglerie,—there she lay, in the same fantastic dress she had worn on the stage, pale as death—a quantity of blood flowing from a fearful wound on her head, and uttering those low quick moans which are indicative of extreme suffering.
Poor little Keeley stood beside the couch, holding her hand; he was still in full fig as Polichinel; and the grotesqueness of his attire contrasted strangely with the anguish depicted on his countenance. As I came forward, he slowly made way for me—looked in my face imploringly, as if to gather from its expression some gleam of hope, and then stood aside, in an attitude of profound dejection.
Having felt the sufferer’s pulse, I was about to turn her head gently, in order to examine the nature of the wound, when a hustling noise behind me causing me to turn round, to my infinite dismay, I perceived Mr. Keeley, having pushed the bystanders on one side, in the act of performing a kind of Punchean dance upon the floor, accompanying himself with the vigorous chuckling and crowing peculiar to the hero whose habiliments he wore. I was horror-stricken—conceiving that grief had suddenly turned his brain.
All at once, he made a spring towards me, and, seizing my arm, thrust me into a corner of the room, where he held me fast, exclaiming—
“Wretch! villain! restore me my wife—that talented woman your infernal arts have destroyed! You did for her!”
“Mr. Keeley,” said I, struggling to release myself from his grasp—“my dear sir, pray compose yourself.”
“Unhappy traitor!” he shouted, giving me an unmerciful tweak by the nose; “Look at her silver skin laced with her golden blood!—see, see! Oh, see!”
This was rather too much, even from a man whose wits were astray. I began to lose patience, and was preparing to rid myself somewhat roughly of the madman’s grasp, when a new phenomenon occurred.
The patient on the sofa, whom I had judged well nigh moribund, and consequently incapable of any effort whatever, all at once sat up with a sudden jerk, and gave vent to a series of the most ear-piercing shrieks that ever assailed human tympanum.
“Oh! oh! Mon Dieu! je suis étouffée! levez-vous donc, monsieur—n’avez-vous pas honte!”
I started up—O misery!—I had fallen asleep, and my head, resting against a pillar, had slipped down, depositing itself upon the expansive bosom of a portly French dame in the next box, who seemed, by her vehement exclamations, to be quite shaken from the balance of her propriety by the unlooked-for burthen I had imposed upon her; whilst a petit monsieur poured forth a string of sacres and sapristies upon my devoted head with a volubility of utterance truly astonishing.
I gazed about me with troubled and lack-lustre eye. Every lorgnette in the boxes was levelled at my miserable countenance; a sea of upturned and derisive faces grinned at me from the pit, and the gods in Olympus thundered from on high—“Turn him out; he’s drunk!”
This was the unkindest cut of all—thus publicly to be accused of intoxication, a vice of all others I have ever detested and eschewed.
I cast one indignant glance around me, and left the theatre, lamenting the depravity of our nature, which is, alas! always ready to put the worst construction upon actions in themselves most innocent; for if I had gone to sleep in my own arm-chair, pray who would have accused me of inebriety?
How I got home I know not. As I hurried through the streets, a legion of voices, in every variety of intonation, yelled in my ears—“Turn him out—he’s drunk!” and when I woke in the middle of the night, tormented by a raging thirst (produced, I suppose, by the flurry of spirits I had undergone), I seemed to hear screams, groans, and hisses, above all which predominated loud and clear the malignant denunciation—“Turn him out—he’s drunk!”
Upon my subsequently mentioning the above adventure to Jack Withers, it will hardly be credited that this villain without shame at once roundly asserted that, when I left him on the afore-mentioned night, I was at least three sheets and three quarters in the wind; adding with praiseworthy candour, that he himself was so far gone as to be obliged, to the infinite scandal of his staid old housekeeper, to creep up stairs à quatre pieds, in order to gain his bedroom.
Now this latter may be true enough, for it is probable that friend Jack freshened his nip a trifle after my departure, seeing that he was always something of a drunken knave. As for his calumnious and scandalous declaration, that I was in the least degree tipsy, it is too ridiculous to be noticed. I scorn it with my heels—I was sober—sober, cool, and steady as the north star; and he that is inclined to question this solemn asseveration, let him send me his card; and if I don’t drill a hole in his doublet before he’s forty-eight hours older, then, as honest Slender has it, “I would I might never come in mine own great chamber again else.”