Gussy Brown, although the most diminutive of cavalry field officers, was also the most pompous, and on one occasion when the 4th were invited to a humdrum dance at Brighton the little man, to show his displeasure, walked slowly round the room with his “Gibus” under his arm, and making three stately bows to the astonished hostess slowly left the room.
On the occasion of the Goddard joke, his only remark was, “D— stupid!”
At this period touting for brewers and wine merchants was the curse of the Army. Every club contained retired colonels and others who buttonholed one on every occasion. Before a troopship entered the harbour a tout came on board with the pilot; dining at an Army club, the man at the next table inquired if your regimental canteen was well served; indeed, they penetrated the most sacred precincts with the pertinacity of a sandstorm.
As a cranky old general once exclaimed “D— it, I thought we were safe when militia men were not eligible; but these touts and store-keepers and bonnet-shop keepers will make the Rag a den of thieves, by Gad!”
The association of these respective vocations in the old warrior’s mind was evidently based on the legend that then obtained that when the captain was inspecting the front rank of the Tower Hamlets the rear rank was faced about by way of precaution.
Every one who knew Jonas Hunt must have been astonished to read that he left over £35,000 at his death a few months ago. As brave as a lion, he would assuredly—had he not been such a rip—have received the Victoria Cross for his share in the Balaclava charge, and when he sold out two years later, he was literally without a shilling, and continued in the same happy condition for twenty years after—not that Jonas stinted himself in anything, on the contrary, he would plunge to any extent, dunning you if chance made him your creditor, and forgetting any debt almost as soon as contracted. A bruiser of no mean class, he invariably suggested a round if any one had the temerity to remind him.
A highly objectionable individual, whose father was a buggy master in Calcutta, and actually got a commission in the “Blues” till ordered to sell out for writing anonymous letters to a celebrated beauty of the Sixties not long since dead, once had the impudence to remind Jonas of a debt, and was replied to as follows: “I should have thought it more in your line to have written anonymously to my wife, but if you prefer to settle the matter with your fists I am entirely at your disposal.” The man who procured the retirement of the anonymous letter-writer was at the time an officer in the Guards, and though still to be seen radiating between minor restaurants and 100 per cent. bureaus, has nothing left of his former self but a fly-blown prefix to his name, and even that has lost its commercial value amongst Hebrew financiers of shady enterprises.
CHAPTER XVIII.
SPIRITUALISM AND REALISM.
The craze for “table-turning,” “spirit-rapping,” and every conceivable trash connected with the occult sciences, was in full blast in the long-ago Sixties, and old ladies would form tea parties and sit all day and half through the night at round tables with their knotty old mittened thumbs pressed convulsively against those of their neighbours waiting for the moving of the waters. Lord Ashburton, who lived near Portman Square, was the arch-priest and arch-culprit that disseminated this fashionable twaddle, and there was not a spinster in that (then) highly-fashionable district that did not devour the leaflets that were periodically issued broadcast by the inspired old humbug. Occasionally invitations were issued for séances, when refreshments (more or less light) were provided to fortify poor human nature against possible unearthly attacks after the lights had been judiciously lowered.
It was at one of these functions that I on one occasion found myself, and, possessing in those days an appetite like a cormorant, was terribly disillusioned after two hours’ waiting for the “spirits” to hear his lordship order the butler to “bring in the urn.” (In those long-ago days tea without an urn the dimensions of a safe was an absolute impossibility.) Nor did spiritualism end here, for numerous haunted houses were in the market where apparitions and unearthly sounds could be seen and heard and which no one would rent.