‘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 pronounced 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 canal, standing stagnant and slow between its trim banks; in the other, he is a bounding rivulet, careering pleasantly through grassy meadows and smiling fields—now basking in the gay sunshine, 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 substituted for regulation coats, and land-crabs and pepper-pot for saddles and sirloins; in Connemara, Calcutta, or Corfu—it was all the same: caelum 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 quantities. 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 masse, they are little better than body-snatchers. There is not a malady too dreadful, nor an operation too bloody, 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.’