Twice round the clock; or, The hours of the day and night in London

by George Augustus Sala

SIX P.M.—A CHARITY DINNER, AND THE NEWSPAPER WINDOW AT THE GENERAL POST-OFFICE.

Some years ago, at the cozy little dining club held in my friend Madame Basque’s back-parlour, in the Rue de la Michodière, and the city of Paris, I had the advantage of the friendship of one of the most intelligent and humorous of the American gentlemen. There is such a personage—the vulgar, drawling, swearing, black-satin-vested, stove-pipe-hatted, whittling, smoking, expectorating, and dram-drinking Yankee loafers, who infest the Continent, notwithstanding; and a very excellent sample of the accomplished and unpretending gentleman was the American in question. He had paid a visit to England, in which country his sojourn had been of about three months’ duration; but he frankly confessed to me that having come purposely unprovided with those usually tiresome and worthless figments, letters of introduction—the very Dead-Sea apples of hospitality, goodly on the exterior, and all dust and ashes within—he had not, with the exception of his banker, who asked him to dinner once as a courteous acknowledgment of the ponderosity of his letter of credit, possessed one single acquaintance, male or female, during his stay in the metropolis of the world. I asked him whether he had not felt very lonely and miserable, and sufficiently inclined, at the end of the first week, to cast himself over any given bridge into the river Thames. Not in the slightest degree, he replied. I politely hinted that perhaps, as an American, he possessed the genial facility, common to his countrymen, of making himself at home wheresoever he went, and of forming agreeable travelling acquaintances, occasionally ripening into fast friends, by the simple process of saying “Fine day, stranger.” Not at all, he replied. He kept himself to himself, and indeed he was of a disposition, save in casual moments of unbending, quite surprising for its saturnine taciturnity. At all events, I urged, he could not have amused himself much by prowling about the streets, sleeping at hotels, dining in coffee-rooms, frequenting theatres and singing-rooms, and wandering in and out of museums; but I was wrong again, he said. He had seldom been so jolly in his life. I began to think either that he was quizzing me—“gumming” is the proper Transatlantic colloquialism, I think—or else that he was the Happy Man described in the Eastern apologue. But then, the Happy Man had, as it turned out, no shirt; and my American was remarkable for displaying a vast amount of fine linen, both at breast and wristbands, profusely decorated with studs, chains, and sleeve-buttons. How was it, then, I asked, giving the enigma up in sheer bewilderment. “Wall,” answered my friend with his own peculiar dry chuckle, “I used to ride about all day on the tops of the omnibuses; and very fine institutions for seeing life in a philosophical spirit, those omnibuses of yours are, sir.” He said Sir—not “Sirree,” as Anglo-Americans are ordinarily assumed to pronounce that title of courtesy. I understood him at once; saw through him; had done the same thing myself; and admired his penetrative and observant aptitude.

Never ride inside an omnibus—I apostrophise, of course, the men folks; for till arrangements are made (and why should they not be made?) for hoisting ladies in an easy-chair to the breezy roof—they can manage such things on board a man-of-war—the vehicular ascent is incommodious, not to say indecorous, for the fair sex. But Ho, ye men, don’t ride inside. A friend of mine had once his tibia fractured by the diagonal brass rod that crosses the door; the door itself being violently slammed to, as is the usual custom, by the conductor. Another of my acquaintance was pitched head foremost from the interior, on the mockingly fallacious cry of “all right” being given—was thrown on his head, and killed. Inside an omnibus you are subjected to innumerable vexations and annoyances. Sticks or parasols are poked in your chest and in the back of your neck, as a polite reminder that somebody wants to get out, and that you must seize the conductor by the skirt of his coat, or pinch him in the calf of the leg, as an equally polite request for him to stop; you are half suffocated by the steam of damp umbrellas; your toes are crushed to atoms as the passengers alight or ascend; you are very probably the next neighbour to persons suffering under vexatious ailments, such as asthma, simple cold in the head, or St. Vitus’s dance; it is ten to one but that you suffer under the plague of babies; and, five days out of the seven, you will have a pickpocket, male or female, for a fellow-passenger. The rumbling, the jumbling, the jolting, and the concussions—the lurking ague in the straw when it is wet, and the peculiar omnibus fleas that lurk in it when it is dry, make the interior of one of these vehicles a place of terror and discomfort; whereas outside all is peace. You have room for your legs; you have the fresh air; you have the lively if not improving conversation of the driver and the conductor, and especially of the right-hand box-seat, who is invariably in some way mysteriously connected with dogs and horses, and a great authority thereupon. Finally, you have the inestimable advantage of surveying the world in its workings as you pass along: of being your own Asmodeus, and unroofing London in a ride from the White Horse Cellar to Hammersmith Gate. The things I have seen from the top of an omnibus!—more markedly in the narrow streets through which, from the main thoroughfare being blocked up by the incessant paving, lighting, sewerage, or electric telegraph communications of underground London, one is compelled to pass. Now a married couple enjoying an animated wrangle in a first-floor front; now a servant-maid entertaining a policeman, or a Life Guardsman, with a heart’s devotion and cold shoulder of mutton, in a far-down area; now a demure maiden lacing her virgin bodice before a cracked triangle of a looking-glass, at an attic window; now lords and ladies walking with parasols and lapdogs, and children in the private gardens of noble mansions, screened from the inquisitive pedestrians by sullen brick walls; now domestics hanging out the clothes in back-yards (seen over the roofs of one-storey houses), malicious birds of prey waiting, doubtless, round the corner for the fell purpose of pecking off their noses, while the astute King is in his counting-house on the second floor counting out his money, and the Queen, with the true gentleness of womanhood, is in the front kitchen, eating bread and honey in confident security, recking little of the four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie, or of the song of sixpence—or rather of five shillings—which I am this day singing about them all, in consideration of an adequate pocketful of rye. So shall you look down and see those things; but chiefly shall you enjoy delectation and gather experience from the sight of the men and women who are continually passing beneath you in carriages and in cabs; yea, and in carts and barrows. Varied life, troubled life, busy, restless, chameleon life. The philosopher may learn much by reading the tradesmen’s names over the shop-fronts, which—he will never read them as he passes along the pavement—will give him quite a new insight into nomenclature. But only let him consider the carriages and the cabs, and he may learn wisdom in the ways of mankind in every rood of ground he traverses.

Sweethearting in cabs and carriages; passionate appeals for mercy; men brawling and fighting; lunatics being borne away to captivity; felons, shackled and manacled to the chin, being taken to jail, and perhaps to death, by stern policemen and jailers; frantic women kneeling on carriage-floors, women with dishevelled hair, streaming eyes, clasped hands raised to a Heaven which is never deaf but is sometimes stern, a weeping child clinging to their disordered dress, and money and jewels cast carelessly on the carriage cushions; gamblers carding and dicing; knaves drugging fools; debtors in the charge of sheriff’s officers; roysterers gone in drink; the “fatal accident” on its way to the hospital, lying all bruised and bloody across the policeman’s knee; the octogenarian in his last paralytic fit, and the mother suckling her first infant. All these dramas on four wheels may be seen by him on the top of the omnibus, who may, if of a caustic turn, rub his hands, and cry, “Aha! little do you reck that a chiel is above you taking notes, and, faith, that he’ll print them!”

You see, there are some elements of sadness, nay, of deep and terrible tragedy, in these vehicular panoramas—the unconscious show-vans; but at Six o’Clock in the Evening the cabs and carriages on which you look down offer, mostly, a far pleasanter spectacle. They are full of people going out to dinner. Some in broughams, coupés, double-bodied carriages, and the occupants of these are ladies and gentlemen, attired in the full panoply of evening costume, and whom, at the first blush, you might take for members of the highest aristocracy. But they are not so. They simply belong to the first-class genteel circles, the very superior middle ranks; the dwellers in Lower Belgravia—Brompton, Kensington, and Pimlico; or in Lesser Tyburnia—Bayswater and Notting Hill. They have all the airs and graces, all the allurements, of the titled and the exclusive; but they have not the genuine Hall-mark of nobility and fashion; they are but Britannia metal, electro-gilt in a very superior manner. The undeniable Patricians, the satraps of our modern Persian splendour, do not dine (would not supper be a more appropriate term?) till half-past seven, or even eight, post meridian. They can have, I should imagine, but scant appetites for their dinner at that advanced period of the evening, unless, indeed, they partake of it in the ancient Roman manner, lolling on the triclinium, crowning themselves with flowers, and following, between the courses, the swinish examples of Apicius and Lucullus. Better, I take it, a mutton chop at the Cock, or the Cheshire Cheese, than these nasty Ancient Roman repasts. It is true our moderns stay their aristocratic stomachs early in the afternoon with a copious lunch of hot meats and generous wines; and they say that her blessed Majesty herself, like a good, sensible woman, makes her real dinner at two o’clock, with her little children, in the nursery, and takes but a mere bite and sup at the grand stall-fed feast of gold plate in the evening.

But there are plenty of good dinners going on at six o’clock in the evening, and plenty of good diners-out to attend them. Masters in Chancery, who are renowned judges of port-wine, dine at six. Six, for half-past, is the dinner-hour for East India Directors. Let us hope that their dinners will continue to be as good as of yore, though the new India Bill leaves them nothing to direct. Members of Parliament, during the session, dine whenever they can, and sometimes not at all; but on “no House” days, six o’clock—always taken with a reservation for the half-past, for “six o’clock sharp” is entirely gone out of fashion, save with Muswell Hill stock-brokers, Manchester Square proctors, Bedford Row solicitors, and people who live in Bloomsburia—is the great time for them to drop into their clubs, sneer over the evening papers, gnash their teeth because there may happen to be no leading articles eulogistic or abusive of them therein, and prendre des informations, as the French say (though why I could not just as well say it in English, save that the cook at the club is a Frenchman, puzzles me), about what there may be good for dinner. But I must not forget that I am on the top of an omnibus, looking down on the people in the broughams and the cabs. Admire that youthful exquisite, curled, and oiled, and scented into a sufficient semblance of the “Nineveh Bull,” with whom Mr. Tennyson was so angry in “Maud.” His glossy hair is faultlessly parted down the occiput and down the cranium behind. White as the fleece of Clarimunda’s sheep is his body linen. Stiff as the necks of the present generation is his collar. Black as Erebus is his evening suit. Shining like mirrors are the little varnished tips of his jean-boots. Severe as the late General Picton is the tie of his cravat. This gracilis puer is going to dine in Thurlow Square, Brompton. That gold-rimmed lorgnon you see screwed into his face, to the damaging distortion of his muscles, will not be removed therefrom—nor during dinner, nor during wine-taking, nor during the evening party which will follow the dinner, nor during the “little music,” the dancing, the supper, the shawling, the departure, and the drive home to his chambers. He will eat in his eyeglass, and drink in his eyeglass, and flirt and polk in his eyeglass. I am almost persuaded that he will sleep in his eyeglass (I knew a married lady who used to sleep in her spectacles, which led to a divorce: she alleged the cause to be systematic cruelty, but what will not an enraged woman say?); and I should not be in the least surprised if he were to die in his eyeglass, and be buried in his eyeglass, and if the epitaph on his gravestone were to be “veluti in speculum.”

Down and down again, glance from the omnibus summit, and see in that snug, circular-fronted brougham, a comfortable couple, trotting out to dinner in the Alpha Road, St. John’s Wood. Plenty of lobster sauce they will have with their salmon, I wager; twice of boiled chicken and white sauce they will not refuse, and oyster patties will they freely partake of. A jovial couple, rosy, chubby, middle-aged, childless, I opine, which makes them a little too partial to table enjoyments. They should be well to do in the world, fond of giving merry, corpulent little dinners of their own, with carpet dances afterwards, and living, I will be bound (our omnibus is ubiquitous, remember) at Maida Hill, or Pine Apple Gate. There is another couple, stiff, starched, angular, acrimonious-looking. Husband with a stern, Lincoln’s Inn conveyancing face, and pilloried in starch, with white kid gloves much too large for him. Wife, with all manner of tags, and tags, and odds and ends of finery fluttering about her: one of those women who, if she had all the rich toilettes of all King Solomon’s wives on her, would never look well dressed. I shouldn’t like to dine where they are going. I know what the dinner will be like. Prim, pretentious, dismal, and eminently uncomfortable. There will be a saddle of mutton not sufficiently hung, the fish will be cold, the wines hot, and the carving-knives will be blunt. After dinner the men will talk dreary politics, redolent of stupid Retrogression, and the women will talk about physic and the hooping-cough. Yet another couple—husband and wife? A severe swell, with drooping moustaches of immense length, but which are half whiskers. Transparent deceit! A pretty lady—gauzy bonnet and artificial flowers, muslin jacket, skirts and flounces oozing out at the sides of the carriage; hair à la Eugénie, and a Skye terrier with a pink ribbon. I know what this means. Greenwich, seven o’clock dinner (they are rather late, by the way, but they pass us on London Bridge, and the coachman will drive rapidly), water souché, whitebait, brown bread and butter, and iced punch; cigar on balcony, and contemplation of the moon. Ride on, and be happy. Rejoice in your youth—and never mind the rest. It will come, O young man, whether you mind it or not.

Hallo! there he is. I thought so. With a red face, shaven to the superlative degree of shininess, with gills white and tremendous, with a noble white waistcoat, and from time to time nervously consulting his watch, lest he should be half a minute behind time with the spring soup, rides by in a swift Hansom, the old gentleman who is going to a Charity Dinner. Blessings on his benevolent, gastronomic old head, he never misses one. He is going as quick as double fare will convey him to the London Tavern. Quick! oh thou conductor, let me descend, for I must take a Hansom too, and follow my venerable friend to the London Tavern; and, by cock and pye, I will go dine there too.

I think my readers must be by this time sufficiently acquainted with the fact that I am endowed with a very nervous temperament. Indeed, were I to say that I start at my own shadow, that I do fear each bush an officer, that I am continually in terror of Sudden Death, that I would rather not go upstairs in the dark, and that (which is not at all incompatible with a nervous organisation) in circumstances of real moment, in imminent life-peril, in a storm, in a balloon, in a tumult, and in a pestilence, I am perfectly master of myself, and, with a complete Trust and Reliance, am quite contented and happy in my mind: when I state this, I don’t think I need blush to own that I am as mortally afraid now of the boys in the street as in the old days when they pelted me with sharp stones because I preferred going to school quietly instead of playing fly-the-garter in the gutter. I am afraid of my last schoolmaster (he is quite bankrupt and broken, and pays me visits to borrow small silver occasionally), and yet call him reverentially, “Sir.” I am afraid of ladies—not of the married ones, in whom I take great delight, talking Buchan’s “Medicine,” Acton’s “Cookery,” and Mrs. Ellis with them, very gravely, till they think me a harmless fogey, hopelessly celibate, but sensible; not of the innocent young girls, with their charming naïveté and pretty sauciness; but of the “young ladies,” who are “out,” and play the piano, and sing Italian songs—of which, Lord bless them! they know no more than I do of crochet-work—and who fling themselves, their accomplishments, and their low-necked dresses, at men’s heads. I am afraid of policemen, lest in an evanescent fit of ill temper they should take me up, and with their facile notions of the obligations of an oath, swear that I was lurking about with intent to commit a felon; and, transcendentally, I am afraid of waiters. I watch them—him—the Waiter, with great awe and trembling. Does he know, I ask myself, as he fills my tumbler with iced champagne, that half-and-half is a liquid to which I am more accustomed? Does he know that, sumptuously as I dine to-day, I didn’t dine at all yesterday? Is he aware that Mr. Threadpaper is dunning me for that dress-coat with the watered-silk facings? Can he see under the table that the soles of my boots are no better than they should be? Is it within his cognizance that I have not come to the Albion, or the London Tavern, or the Freemasons’, as a guest, but simply to report the dinner for the “Morning Meteor?” Does he consider the shilling I give him as insufficient? Shilling! He has many more shillings than I have, I trow. He pulls four pounds in silver from his pocket to change one a crown-piece. To-day he is Charles or James; but to-morrow he will be the proprietor of a magnificent West-end restaurant, rivalling Messrs. Simpson and Dawes at the Divan, or Mr. Sawyer at the London. So I am respectful to the waiter, and fee him largely but fearfully; and, were it not that he might take me for a waiter in disguise, I would also call him “Sir.”