I no sooner arrive at the London Tavern, pari passu with the old gentleman with the gills and the white neckcloth, than I feel myself delivered over to the thraldom of waiterdom. An urbane creature, who might pass for a Puseyite curate, were not the waitorial stigmata unmistakeably imprinted on him, meets me, and tells me in an oleaginous undertone, which is like clear turtle-soup, that the Anniversary Festival of the Asylum for Fatuous Monomaniacs is on the second floor to the right. A second waiter meets me at the foot of the stair-case, and whispers discreetly behind the back of his hand, “Two storeys higher, sir.” A third waylays me benevolently on the first-floor landing, and mildly ravishes from me my hat and stick, in return for which he gives me a cheque much larger than my dinner ticket; which last is taken from me on the second floor by a beaming spirit, the bows of whose cravat are like wings, and who hands me to a Dread Presence—a stout, severe man with a gray head, who is in truth the head-waiter at this Anniversary Festival, and who with a solemn ceremony inducts me into the reception-room.
Here, in a somewhat faded, but intensely respectable-looking apartment, I find about fifty people I don’t know from Adam, and who are yet all brothers or uncles or cousins-german, at the least, of my rubicund white-waistcoated friend. And, to tell the truth, I don’t know him personally, though his face, from meeting him at innumerable festivals, is perfectly familiar to me. So are those of the other fifty strangers. I have heard all their names, and all about them; but one is not expected to remember these things at public dinners. You take wine with your next neighbour; sometimes converse with him about eating and drinking, the merits of the charity, the late political tergiversation of the chairman, the heat of the weather, the fine voice of Mr. Lockey, and the pretty face of Miss Ransford, and there an end. Your interlocutor may be to-morrow the lawyer who sues you, the author whose book you will slaughter in a review, the Commissioner of Insolvency who may send you back for eighteen months. To have met a man at a public dinner is about as valid a claim to the possession of his acquaintance, as to have met him in the Kursaal at Hombourg, or on the steps of the St. Nicholas Hotel at New York. After some twenty years of public dining together, it is not, I believe, considered a gross breach of etiquette to make the gentleman who has been so frequently your fellow convive a very distant bow should you meet him in the street; but even this is thought to be a freedom by some rigid sticklers for decorum.
In genteel society, the half hour before dinner is generally accepted as a time of unlimited boredom and social frigidity, but there you have the relief, if not relaxation, of staring the guests out of countenance, making out a mental list of the people you would not like to take wine with, and turning over the leaves of the melancholy old albums, every page of which you have conned a hundred times before. But in the half hour (and it frequently is a whole one) before a public dinner, you have no albums or scrapbooks to dog’s-ear. There is no use in staring at your neighbours: the types of character are so similar—big and crimsoned sensuous faces looming over white waistcoats, with a plentiful sprinkling among them of the clerical element. You can’t smoke, you can’t (that is, I daren’t) order sherry and bitters. If you look out of the window, you see nothing but chimney pots, leads, and skylights, with a stray vagrant cat outrunning the constable over them; and the best thing you can do is to bring an amusing duodecimo with you, or betake yourself to one of the settles, and twiddle your thumbs till dinner-time. But, joy, joy, here are quails in the conversational famine; here is a welling spring in the wilderness. The door opens, and the sonorous voice of the head-waiter announces The Chairman.
Very probably he is a lord. A philanthropic peer, always ready and willing to do a kind turn for anybody, and to the fore with his chairmanship, his set speeches, and his fifty-pound note for “fatuous monomaniacs,” “intellectual good-for-nothings,” or “decayed bailiffs.” He may be a regular dining-out lord, a not very rich nobleman, who has grown gray in taking the chair at charity dinners, and who is not expected to give anything to the institution save the powerful weight of his presence and influence. He may be a young lord, fresh caught, generously eager (as are, I am rejoiced to say, the majority of our young lords now-a-days) to vindicate the power and willingness for usefulness of his order; striving to show that there is not so much difference between his coronet and the Phrygian cap, save that one is made of velvet and the other of red worsted (ah! that irreconcileable red worsted), very impulsive, very imprudent, sometimes slightly imbecile, but full of good intentions and honest aspirations; or he may be a member of Parliament, a veteran of the back benches, burning to make up for his silence in the House by his eloquence in the forum of a tavern dinner. He may be a worthy banker or merchant, who gets through the speech-making before him in a business-like manner, and does not allow it in the least to interfere with the consumption of his proper quantum of wine; or he may be, as is very frequently the case, a lion—the “great gun”—the last blast of Fame’s trumpet for the hour: a lawyer, a traveller, a philosopher, or an author, whom the managing committee have secured, just as the manager of a theatre would secure a dwarf, a giant, a wild beast tamer, a blind piper, or a sword swallower, to enhance the receipts of the exhibition.
About thirty of the fifty people I don’t know from Adam gather immediately in a circle round the chairman. The few who have the honour to be on speaking terms with him jostle him sociably, and shake hands with him with a rueful expression of contentment. Those who don’t know him rub their hands violently, breathe hard, stare fixedly at him, and whisper to one another that he is very like his portrait, or that he isn’t at all like his portrait, or that he is getting old, or that he looks remarkably young, or some equally relevant banalities. The remaining twenty guests gather in the window-bays, and stare at nothing particular, or else read the printed prospectus of the Asylum for Fatuous Monomaniacs, and wonder how many of the fine list of stewards announced may be present on the occasion. As for the chairman, he takes up a position with his back safely glued (so it seems) to the mantelpiece, and preserves a dignified equanimity, working his head from side to side in his white neckcloth like that waxen effigy of Mr. Cobbett, late M.P. for Oldham, which terrifies country cousins by its vitality of appearance (those drab smallclothes and gaiters were a great stroke of genius) at Madame Tussaud’s.
By this time a crowd of more people you don’t know from Adam, and often outnumbering the fifty in the waiting-room, have gathered on the staircase, the landing, and have even invaded the precincts of the dining saloon, where they potter about the tables, peeping for the napkins which may contain the special cards bearing their name and denoting their place at the banquet. These are the people who do know one another; these are the stewards, patrons of the charity, or gentlemen connected with its administration. They are all in a very excellent temper, as men need be who are about to partake of a capital dinner and a skinful of wine, and they crack those special jokes, and tell those special funny stories, which you hear nowhere save at a public dinner. Then, at the door, you see a detachment of waiters, bearing fasces of long, blue staves, tipped with brass, which they distribute to sundry inoffensive gentlemen, whose real attributes are at once discovered, and who are patent to the dining-out world as Stewards. They take the staves, looking very much ashamed of them; and, bearing besides a quaint resemblance to undertakers out for a holiday, and in a procession, which would be solemn if it wasn’t funny, precede the chairman to his place of honour.
The tables form three sides of an oblong quadrangle: sometimes the horse-shoe form is adopted. In the midst, in a line with the chairman, and as close to his august presence as is practicable, is a table of some ten or a dozen couverts, devoted to some modestly-attired gentlemen (some of them not in evening costume at all), whose particular places are all assigned to them; who for a wonder seem on most intimate terms mutually, and take wine frequently with one another; who are waited upon with the most sedulous attention, and have the very best on the table, both in the way of liquids and solids, at their disposal. They apply themselves to the consumption of these delicacies with great diligence and cheerfulness; but they do not seem quite sufficiently impressed with the commanding merits of the Royal Asylum for Fatuous Monomaniacs. I wonder what special business brings these gentlemen hither. At some distance from this table, towards the door, but still in a line with the chairman, you see a pianoforte, and a couple of music-stands; partially concealed behind a crimson baize screen, beneath the gallery at the end, sit some stalwart individuals, of martial appearance, and superbly attired in scarlet and gold lace, whom you might easily, at first, mistake for staff officers, but whom their brass trombones and ophicleides speedily proclaim to be members of the band of one of the regiments of Guards. And high above all, supported on the sham scagliola Corinthian columns, with the gilt capitals, is a trellised balcony, full of ladies in full evening dress. What on earth those dear creatures want at such gatherings,—what pleasure they can derive from the spectacle of their husbands and friends over-eating and sometimes over-drinking themselves, or from the audition of stupid speeches, passes my comprehension. There they are, however, giggling, fluttering, waving tiny pocket-handkerchiefs, and striving to mitigate the meaty miasma of the place by nasal applications to their bouquets or their essence bottles; and there they will be, I presume, till public dinners go out of fashion altogether.[7]
SIX O’CLOCK P.M.: A CHARITY DINNER.