Mrs Smiles, a respectable widow, lived with her five daughters in a third floor in —— Street. Thither we marched, with a hope, undiminished by the two preceding disappointments, that here at length we would find supper. Our knock at Mrs Smiles’s hospitable portal produced a strange rushing noise within; and when the servant appeared, I observed in the far, dim vista of the passage, one or two slip-slop figures darting across out of one door into another, and others again crossing in the opposite direction; and then there was heard a low anxious whispering, while a single dishevelled head peeped out from one of the doors, and then the head was withdrawn, and all was still. We were introduced into a room which had evidently been the scene of some recent turmoil of no ordinary kind, for female clothes lay scattered in every direction, besides some articles which more properly belong to a dressing-room. We had not been here above a minute, when we heard our advent announced by the servant in an adjoining apartment to Mrs Smiles herself, and some of her young ladies. A flood of obloquy was instantly opened upon the girl by one of her young mistresses—Miss Eliza, we thought—for having given admission to any body at this late hour, especially when she knew that they were to be up early next morning to commence their journey, and had still a great many of their things to pack. “And such a room you have shown them into, you goose!” said the enraged Miss. The girl was questioned as to our appearance, for she had neglected to ask our name; and then we heard one young lady say, “It must be these Balderstones. What can have set them a-gadding to-night? I suppose we must ask them to stay to supper, for they’ll have come for nothing else—confound them! Mary, you are in best trim; will you go in and speak to them till we get ourselves ready? The cold meat will do, with a few eggs. I’m sure they could not have come at a worse time.” Miss Mary accordingly came hastily in after a few minutes, and received us with a thousand protestations of welcome. Her mother would be so truly delighted to see us, for she had fairly given up all hope of our ever visiting her again. She was just getting ready, and would be here immediately. “In the meantime, Mrs Balderstone, you will lay by your cloak and bonnet. Let me assist you,”—&c. We had got enough, however, of the Smileses. We saw we had dropped into the midst of a scene of easy dishabille, and surprised it with unexpected ceremony. It would have been cruel to the Smileses to put them about at such a time, and ten times more cruel to ourselves to sit in friendly intercourse with a family who had treated us in such a manner behind our backs. “These Balderstones!” The phrase was wormwood. My wife, therefore, made up a story to the effect that we had only called in going home from another friend’s house, in order to inquire after the character of a servant. As Mrs Smiles was out of order, we would not disturb her that evening, but call on some other occasion. Of course, the more that we declaimed about the impossibility of remaining to supper, the more earnestly did Miss Smiles entreat us to remain. It would be such a disappointment to her mother, and still more to Eliza and the rest of them. She was obliged, however, with well-affected reluctance, to give way to our impetuous desire of escaping.
Having once more stepped forth into the cold blast of November, we began to feel that supper was becoming a thing which we could not much longer, with comfort, trust to the contingency of general invitations. We therefore sent home our thoughts to the excellent cold duck and green cheese which lay in our larder, and, picturing to ourselves the comfort of our parlour fireside, with a good bottle of ale toasting within the fender, resolved no more to wander abroad in search of happiness, unless there should be something like a certainty of good fare and a hearty welcome elsewhere.
Thus it is always with general invitations. “Do call on us some evening, Miss Duncan, just in an easy way, and, pray, bring your seam with you, for there is nothing I hate so much as ceremonious set calls,” is the sort of invitations you will hear in the middle ranks of life, given to some good-natured female acquaintance, while you yourself, if a bachelor, will in the same way be bidden to call “just after you are done with business, and any night in the week; it is all the same, for you can never catch us unprepared.” The deuce is in these general invitations. People give them without reflecting that they cannot be at all times ready to entertain visitors; cannot be so much as at home to have the chance of doing so. Other people accept and act upon them, at the risk of either putting their visitors dreadfully about, or receiving a very poor entertainment. The sudden arrival of an unexpected guest who has come on the faith of one of these delusive roving invitations, indeed, in many instances, disorganises the economy of a whole household. Nothing tries a housewife so much. The state of her larder or cupboard instantaneously flashes on her mind; and if she do not happen to be a notable, and, consequently, not a regular curer of beef, or curious in the matter of fresh eggs, a hundred to one but she feels herself in an awkward dilemma, and, I have no doubt, would wish the visitor any where but where he is. The truth is, by these general invitations you may chance to arrive at a death or a marriage, a period of mourning or rejoicing, when the sympathies of the family are all engaged with matters of their own.
If people will have their friends beside them, let them, for the sake of all that is comfortable, give them a definite invitation at once; a general invitation is much worse than no invitation at all; it is little else than an insult, however unintentional; for it is as much as to say that the person is not worth inviting in a regular manner. In “good” society, a conventional understanding obtains in the delicate point of invitations; there is an established scale of the value of the different meals adapted to the rank of the invited. I advise all my friends to follow this invaluable code of civility. By all means let your invitations have a special reference to time. On the other hand, if a friend comes plump down with a request that you will favour him with your company at a certain hour of the day, why, go without hesitation. The man deserves your company for his honesty, and you will be sure to put him to no more trouble than what he directly calculates on. But turn a deaf ear, if you be wise, to general invitations; they are nets spread out to ensnare your comfort. Rather content yourself with the good old maxim, which somebody has inscribed over an ancient doorway in one of the old streets of Edinburgh, Tecum Habita—Keep at Home.
CONFESSORS.
It is a very general impression that the system of auricular confession was given up at the Reformation. Such is by no means the case; every man and mother’s son in the country still keeps his confessor. By this epithet, it may be guessed, I mean that chief and most particular friend whom every man keeps about him—who stands his best man when he is married, and becomes his second when he fights a duel—his double, in short, or second self—a creature whom you almost always find with him when you call, and who either walks under his arm in the street, or is found waiting for him while he steps into some neighbouring shop, or, as the case may happen, is waited for by him.
I make bold to say, there is not a trader any where who does not keep his confessor. The creature haunts the shop, till he almost seems the Genius of the Place, to the grievous prepossession of newspapers, and, what is more intolerable still, to the exclusive occupation of the ear of the worthy shopkeeper himself. The evening is the grand revel-time for confessors of this genus. Between eight and nine, you see them gathering to the shops of their respective victims, like fowl to roost. As you pass about nine, you observe, on looking in, that the discipline and rigour of shop-life has dissolved. Master, men, and boys, feel the approach of the moment of emancipation, with a peculiar salience of thought, alternating with a deep and tranquil delight. The confessor reigns in the spirit of this glorious hour, and his laugh, and his joke, and his news, and his proffered pinch, are listened to, re-echoed, and partaken of by his devotee, with a pleasure of the keenest nature, and ominous, you may make sure, of oysters and gin punch on the way home.
In some shops, confessors cluster like grapes over a vintner’s door. They block up the way of custom; and it is evident, in many cases, that the devotee would rather lose the chance of a penny from a customer, by omitting opportunities of attack, temptation, and inveiglement, than lose the joke that is passing in the merry circle of his confessors, which his ear drinks in as a precious aside, while he only can spare a mere fragment of his attention—a corner of one auditory organ—the front shop of his mind—to the real business before him. In some shops, confessors get no encouragement before dinner. The broad eye of garish day, in those fastidious establishments, could no more endure such a walking personification of idle gossip, than a ball-room, at high twelve, could tolerate the intrusion of a man in a short coat, with a pen stuck in his ear. But this is by no means the general case; and even in some instances, where the front shop will not admit of such an appendage, ten to one but, if the premises were well ransacked, you would find a specimen of the class snug in some out-of-the-way corner, filling up the greater part of his time with a newspaper, but every now and then resorted to by his votary, in the intervals of actual employment, like an Egeria receiving the visits of a Numa, and no doubt administering equally precious counsel.
The more common position of a shopkeeper’s confessor is a chair opposite the door, whence he may command a view of all that passes on the street, with a full front inspection of every individual that makes bold to enter. Into this chair the confessor invariably glides as a matter of course. There he sits down, and, throwing one limb over the other, considers himself entitled to inflict his company upon the unhappy shopkeeper for any length of time. He notices, as if he were not noticing, all that goes on in the premises. Not an order is given for goods, not a payment made, or a pennyworth sold, but it is seen, and very likely made the subject of after comment. It is of no consequence to the confessor what description of customers enter the place. Were a princess of the blood to come in, he would keep his seat and his countenance equally unmoved, and a whole band of ladies, driven in to escape a shower of rain, will not stir him from the chair, to which he seems nailed, like the marble prince of the Black Islands, in the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. The customers very naturally feel disinclined to patronise a shop which is thus, as it were, haunted by an evil spirit. “Oh, how I do hate to enter that shop of Mr Such-a-thing,” says one young lady to another, “for every thing you do or say is noticed by that odious person who is always lounging there.” And in this manner Mr Such-a-thing loses his business, almost without the possibility of recalling it. He longs to discover a means of disposing of the confessor, but he finds a great difficulty in accomplishing his purpose. He is disinclined to be churlish to a person to whom he has confessed himself for years. Still he makes an effort. He grows cool in his civility, and makes a point of being always busy on his arrival. Perhaps he has the good luck, at length, to shake off this pest of his premises; but it is more than probable that he submits to the terrific infliction for life, his confessor only leaving him when he is fairly in his grave. I once knew a dreadful case of confessorship, in which the shopkeeper had the hardihood to expel his visitant, and by a plan so ingenious that I think it worth while to advert to it. The shop contained four chairs, including the confessional, which stood opposite the door. One day when the confessor arrived, and, as usual, proceeded to his seat, he was a little surprised in remarking that it was filled to a pretty good height with parcels of some kind or other. But as this appeared naturally enough to be caused by a press in the stock of goods, no observation took place regarding it, and another chair was selected. However, next day when he again appeared, another chair was found covered up in a similar manner. The following day, he even found a third filled with parcels; and on the fourth day the whole were thus engaged. The confessor now saw that a conspiracy had been formed to destroy his functions, and to expel him from his ancient settlements. Like the unhappy antediluvians, who, as the flood arose, were driven from one spot of earth to another, and at last did not find a dry piece of ground whereon to rest their foot, so the unhappy confessor had been driven from chair to chair, till at last he could not discover a place whereon he could plant himself. A pang of vexation shot through his heart; a gleam of mingled shame and indignation passed over his countenance; and, with a last look of despair, he burst from the shop, and “ne’er was heard of more.”
It must be allowed that some men do not stand so much in need of confessors, or do not indulge so much in them, as others; but, upon the whole, it may be taken as a general rule, that no man can altogether do without such an official. In the fair on-going business of life, one acts suo more solito, according to one’s regular custom of trade, or by the common rules of the world. But occasions occur, where common practice does not furnish a rule. You are in love, and wish to interest a friend in your passion; you are about to marry, and require information about arrangements, and also some one to stand beside you, and pull off your glove, preparatory to the ceremony; you have a quarrel, and need a third party to tell you that you are in the right; you are about to enter into some commercial or other enterprise a little beyond your usual depth, and find it necessary to fortify your resolution by the sanction of a friend; or you write a poem or a novel, and require to have somebody to read the manuscript, and tell you that it is sure of success. In all these cases, the confessor is indispensable. Without him, you would be crossed in love; get stranded in the straits of matrimony; permit yourself, after giving offence and insult, to let off the object of it with impunity for his remonstrance; break down in your new business scheme; and let your manuscript waste its sweetness on the desert scrutoire. But with him all goes smooth.