The final test of a gentleman in those days was his behaviour at a stage-coach dinner. It was, if you consider it, a very severe and unfair test, for it is allowed that politeness generally leaves starving people at an early stage; and the appetites that coach passengers brought with them into the dining-room of an inn were usually very keen. An acquaintance of Constable, the painter, could find no more striking climax to a list of his virtues than to declare that he was “a gentleman at a stage-coach dinner.” “Then,” said his companion, “he must have been a gentleman indeed!”
What, then, did it mean, this gentlemanly conduct? It meant, in short, that one who could fairly lay claim to it must take some lady of the party into his care, escort her from the coach into the inn, see to it that she was provided with dinner, and pay her reckoning, he must not first attempt to satisfy his own hunger, although perhaps he was up at five o’clock in the morning, and had only taken a hurried coach-breakfast at the first stage out.
The gentleman who fulfilled the canons of this time could rarely hope to get any dinner for himself. On the later coaches, time was so strictly kept that the coachmen were off to the minute; and the landlords, who, of course, knew that, were generally suspected of delaying the appearance of the food so long that not one of the party could have time to do justice to it. Our gentleman, therefore, often had the mortification of paying both for the lady’s dinner and for his own, of which he had not tasted a mouthful. He returned to the coach as hungry as he had left it, and kept his gentility as warm as it was possible to do on an empty stomach. A very little of this was sufficient to wear the nap off the politeness of a Chesterfield, and it must not infrequently have happened that the person who had been all courtliness at dinner became selfishness incarnate at tea.
Those who did not come up to the high standard that Constable attained—and they were in the majority—hurried out of the coach without the slightest consideration for any one else, and flinging themselves into the inn, roared out for “dinner, d——d quick”; or—older travellers and more wary—filled their spirit flasks at the bar, and made sure of having a meal of sorts by demanding cold ham or beef, or any of those dishes which the hostelries of that time possessed in abundance.
Many writers have attempted to describe those coach-dinners, and one endeavoured to vividly picture them by declaring that they reminded him more of hounds feeding at a trough than human beings; but none have equalled the anonymous account quoted here.
“First of all, you had, in winter, to be called before daylight; then you had to proceed in a rattling hackney-coach (your teeth rattling to match with the cold) to the office from which the ‘Wonder,’ ‘Telegraph,’ ‘Regulator,’ ‘Highflyer,’ or ‘Independent’ started; then you were hurried over your meals, as the following account will show:—
“‘Twenty minutes allowed here, gentlemen, for dinner,’ exclaims the coachman, as we drive up to the ‘Bull’ at Smallborough.
“What a scene of confusion ensued! Bells rang, ostlers halloed, waiters ran, or rather broke into that shambling shuffle whose secret seems to be known only to those who ‘stand and wait’—at least, no other creature practises it.
“‘Please to alight, ladies and gentlemen,’ exclaims the landlord, addressing the four insides; while the ostler, bringing a somewhat crazy ladder, makes a similar request to the eleven outsides.
“The day has been a miserable specimen: incessant rain, with a biting easterly wind, giving an inappropriately jocose gentleman the opportunity of offering facetious remarks upon ‘heavy wet,’ and ‘cold without.’ You enter the best parlour of the inn, anticipating a warm welcome and a share in those creature comforts looked forward to in such circumstances by all. But here the legal axiom, that ‘possession is nine points of the law,’ is realised to your horror and dismay in a sight of the first-comers on an earlier coach occupying every seat near the fire; while a tablecloth covered with fragments, and a disarray of empty glasses tell a tale of another dinner having recently been ‘polished off.’