CHAPTER IV.
WHAT THE LONDONERS QUENCH THEIR THIRST WITH.
SPEAKING within bounds, I should say that one-half of England is engaged in manufacturing beer for the other half. Possibly it takes two-thirds of the entire population to make beer enough for the other third, but I think an equal division would be about the thing. The British public is very drouthy.
One is astounded at the amount of drinking that is done here. Go where you will, turn whichever way you choose, the inevitable “public,” or the “pub” as they say between drinks, stares you in the face. And on the streets almost every other vehicle you see is a vast, massive, clumsy truck, loaded either with full kegs for the publics, or taking away empty ones.
The British public house is not the same thing as the American. Except in a few instances you see none of the glass and mahogany palaces of New York, you see none of the flashy bars with plate glass, silver rails, elegant glass-ware, and the gorgeous bar-tender with diamonds as large as hickory nuts.
The London public house is a dingy affair, the dingier the better, with barrels piled upon barrels, and cob-webs as plenty as liquor. There is a wild superstition prevalent that age has something to do with the quality of liquor, and therefore, every place devoted to the sale or handling of the stuff, assumes as much of a Methuselean appearance as possible. You are to have a party of friends at your lodgings, we will say. You must have at least two kinds of liquor to entertain them withal, for no Englishman does anything without moistening his clay, and his clay is of a variety that absorbs a great deal of moisture. You pay for it and the man sends home the bottles.
Now an American liquor dealer would carefully wipe the bottles, and they would be delivered at your house as clean and tidy as a laundried shirt, but not so here. They are sent with dust on them, and with cobwebs on them, and to brush off the dust would be sacrilege. That dust is a sort of patent—a testimonial to its age, and consequently a guarantee of its excellence.
I mortally offended one liquor dealer by asking him to show me his machine for dusting bottles, and also would he kindly explain to me his process for cob-webbing them, and was it expensive to keep spiders? The man actually resented it—was angry about it. Singular how sensitive the Islanders can be about trifles like that! To keep spiders for the manufacture of cobwebs would be more enterprising than to buy cobwebs, and no American would dust bottles by hand, when a very simple machine could be devised for the purpose.
The British landlord don’t set the bottle before his customer as his brother does in free and enlightened America. Now at home,—as I have been told by those who frequent bar-rooms—the barkeeper sets before his customer a bottle of the liquor he prefers, and the drouthy man helps himself to such quantity as he deems sufficient for the purpose desired. If he is fixing himself for a common riot, he takes a certain quantity; if for a murder, more or less, according to how aggravated the crime is to be. A man would take more to fit himself to kill his wife than he would for his mother-in-law, and the wife-killing draught is at the same price as the mother-in-law annihilator.
But over here the bar-maid measures your liquor. You may have three penn’orth, four penn’orth or six penn’orth. It is measured out to you and handed to you, and you swallow it and go away.
I remonstrated with one proprietor as to the absurdity of the custom, and the meanness of it.