The safeguard of a strong committee will never stand between a proprietary club and eventual extinction. One of the strongest committees I have known was got together by Mr. Earn Murray when he founded the United Arts Club. The promoter was enterprising, sanguine, and ambitious. But the only two private members of the club who ever succeeded in achieving notoriety were “Old Solomon,” the racing tipster, and Percy Lefroy, the murderer of Mr. Gold.
Our legislature, which always does things in a grandmotherly sort of way, thought to purify the West End and suppress the Cyprian by closing the night-houses in the Haymarket and in the streets impinging thereon. The abolishing of those squalid dens did not, indeed, result in her disestablishment, but in the betterment of the conditions under which she carried on her sad but—if the unco’ guid will permit the use of the word in this relation—necessary calling. Phryne, like the poor, we shall always have with us. The obvious duty of society, therefore, is not to take measures for her suppression, but measures for her amelioration and regulation. School Board education and an acquired knowledge of the laws of hygiene have done much for her. When one compares the toilet, the costume, and the manners, of the demi-mondaines who nightly frequent the back of the dress-circle of certain houses of entertainment with the tawdry, over-painted, giggling, solicitous creature of thirty years ago, then, and only then, can one understand the gratifying change that has taken place in the habitude of this inalienable excrescence on the body politic.
When the night-houses were closed, and the police instructed to keep the West End streets clear at midnight, there opened, here and there, clubs for the accommodation of Phryne and her friends. So that the closing of the frowsy saloons in which she had been wont to congregate was a blessing in disguise, and, indeed, fixes the date of the gratifying amelioration in her manners. For in the clubs a certain decorum was observed even in the ballroom, which afforded the raison d’être of social rialtos of the small-hours. The proprietors saw to that; for the recurrence of disturbance or the report of sinister incidents might occasion a raid. Election to these clubs was not, as may well be supposed, a very difficult matter. One was proposed on the doorstep, seconded on the hall mat, and unanimously elected a member in the cloak-room. But the men “on the door” knew perfectly well whom to admit and whom to dismiss. The bully, the exploiter of frailty, the souteneur, were kept ruthlessly outside. Thus the proprietor protected at once himself and his customers. He ran a sort of bon marché in fact, where no middleman operated between the goods and the patrons of the exchange.
The children of Israel—whose mission in these later years is to be both our paymasters and our panders—were particularly zealous in the promotion of this kind of réunion bohémiene. Belasco opened the Supper Club in Percy Street, Tottenham Court Road. Sam Cohen provided the “Spooferies” in Maiden Lane. He had previously run the concern as a baccarat club, its useful career in that direction having ended in a raid, and a prosecution of the greatest number of persons ever called up at Bow Street to answer a single charge. Sam must have been a bit of a cynic in his way, for the house in which the “Spooferies” met was next door to the Jewish synagogue. A Hebrew named Foster established a similar place in Long Acre, and a coreligionist of his called Moore—a euphuism, I apprehend, for Moses—opened the Waterloo Club in Waterloo Place, Pall Mall. There were others. But those I have named are the only ones of which I had a personal knowledge. This admission may, I fear, horrify those readers who are of the dawn of the century. I can assure my prudish friends, however, that were I mischievously inclined I could give them a list of names of persons who were at one time young men about town, but who now occupy prominent positions in the Senate, at the Bar, and, generally speaking, in the public life of the country, who were to be seen, in the jocund years, thoroughly enjoying themselves in such Bohemian society as was to be found at the “Spooferies” or the Supper Club.
I can see—in my mind’s eye, Horatio—some adipose, sleek, and eminently respectable householder, some Member of Parliament, London County Councillor, West End physician, fashionable painter, or what not, who has taken up these reminiscences to while away an hour. I can see this staid citizen, this respectable family man, this stickler for morality, this Justice of the Peace, and all the rest of it, squirming as he reads the above passage. With a blush he lays down the book, and, looking suspiciously around, murmurs: “Damn the fellow, he means me!” Yes, I undoubtedly mean you. But you may read on without apprehension, my excellent friend, for I am the soul of discretion. Your early trespasses are safe. In return I would only ask this: that, remembering that you and I have sown some wild-oats in the same fallows, you should exercise a little more common-sense and charity in dealing with the peccadilloes of your juniors, and that, generally speaking, you would carry yourself with a less pompous air of conscious rectitude.
CHAPTER XI
THE JOKER
There are jokers and jokers. Professors of the art of practical joking are disappearing before an advancing civilization like the Red Indian of the Far West. The evanishment of the verbal joker is due to a deplorable shrinkage in the national sense of humour. There will soon be left to us the joker which is the fifty-third card in the pack, and is incapable of any sense or emotion whatever.
But in the days of my vanity grown men carried with them into a tun-bellied middle-age the fine flow of animal spirits and inordinate capacity for fun which nowadays would be deprecated by the well-regulated schoolboy. In Fleet Street one would have thought that there would have been no time for any joking beyond an occasional interchange of verbal pleasantries. But even in that busy thoroughfare the practical joker found—or made—occasions for the exercise of his fearsome talents.
It is something of a truism to say that the real man is very seldom the man as he is observed in his public appearances. Who, for instance, who only knew Edmund O’Donovan as the learned writer of travel articles in the Quarterly Review, the accomplished special correspondent of a one-time influential daily, the honoured guest of savants, the respected lecturer before Royal Societies—who, I say, who saw O’Donovan with his Society war-paint on could have imagined the wild, undisciplined, half-mad, but wholly delightful creature that was exhibited at intervals to Society in conventional garb. He was the maddest and the most modest Irishman I ever met. When he returned from his extraordinary adventures in Merv, he did not put up at some swagger hotel in London, where he would be easily accessible to Society intent on making him the lion of a season. He lodged at a public-house in Holborn kept by a fellow-countryman of his, named Peter Cowell. This house was at the time known to the police in connection with the visits of Irish patriots of the physical force party in national politics. It was the resort of the scattered remnants of a disintegrated Fenianism.
Cowell revered his strange guest, and when customers heard the sounds of revolver practice in the upper part of the house, you may be sure that he did not give his patrons the true explanation of the noise. The fact was that O’Donovan, in bed at midday, had grown greatly annoyed at the crude art evinced in the engravings that Cowell had hung upon his walls, and that he was engaged in shooting those masterpieces into smithereens. This revolver practice in his bedroom only ceased when there was nothing breakable left to fire at. “Glory be to God!” said Peter Cowell, in relating the circumstance to a correspondent, “there’s not a pictur’ nor a frame nor a utinshill of anny kyoind that Misther O’Donovan hasn’t bruk an’ ped for!”