LITMIR.BIZ

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the Club, with glassy, meaningless eyes, and an endless greasy simper--he fawns on everybody he meets, and shakes hands with you, and blesses you, and betrays the most tender and astonishing interest in your welfare. You know him to be a quack and a rogue, and he knows you know it. But he wriggles on his way, and leaves a track of slimy flattery after him wherever he goes. Who can penetrate that man's mystery? What earthly good can he get from you or me? You don't know what is working under that leering tranquil mask. You have only the dim instinctive repulsion that warns you, you are in the presence of a knave--beyond which fact all Fawney's soul is a secret to you.

      I think I like to speculate on the young men best. Their play is opener. You know the cards in their hand, as it were. Take, for example, Messrs. Spavin and Cockspur.

      A specimen or two of the above sort of young fellows may be found, I believe, at most Clubs. They know nobody. They bring a fine smell of cigars into the room with them, and they growl together, in a corner, about sporting matters. They recollect the history of that short period in which they have been ornaments of the world by the names of winning horses. As political men talk about 'the Reform year,' 'the year the Whigs went out,' and so forth, these young sporting bucks speak of TARNATION'S year, or OPODELDOC'S year, or the year when CATAWAMPUS ran second for the Chester Cup. They play at billiards in the morning, they absorb pale ale for breakfast, and 'top up' with glasses of strong waters. They read BELL'S LIFE (and a very pleasant paper too, with a great deal of erudition in the answers to correspondents). They go down to Tattersall's, and swagger in the Park, with their hands plunged in the pockets of their paletots.

      What strikes me especially in the outward demeanour of sporting youth is their amazing gravity, their conciseness of speech, and careworn and moody air. In the smoking-room at the 'Regent,' when Joe Millerson will be setting the whole room in a roar with laughter, you hear young Messrs. Spavin and Cockspur grumbling together in a corner. 'I'll take your five-and-twenty to one about Brother to Bluenose,' whispers Spavin. 'Can't do it at the price,' Cockspur says, wagging his head ominously. The betting-book is always present in the minds of those unfortunate youngsters. I think I hate that work even more than the 'Peerage.' There is some good in the latter--though, generally speaking, a vain record: though De Mogyns is not descended from the giant Hogyn Mogyn; though half the other genealogies are equally false and foolish; yet the mottoes are good reading--some of them; and the book itself a sort of gold-laced and livened lackey to History, and in so far serviceable. But what good ever came out of, or went into, a betting-book? If I could be Caliph Omar for a week, I would pitch every one of those despicable manuscripts into the flames; from my Lord's, who is 'in' with Jack Snaffle's stable, and is over-reaching worse-informed rogues and swindling greenhorns, down to Sam's, the butcher-boy's, who books eighteenpenny odds in the tap-room, and 'stands to win five-and-twenty bob.'

      In a turf transaction, either Spavin or Cockspur would try to get the better of his father, and, to gain a point in the odds, victimise his best friends. One day we shall hear of one or other levanting; an event at which, not being sporting men, we shall not break our hearts. See--Mr. Spavin is settling his toilette previous to departure; giving a curl in the glass to his side-wisps of hair. Look at him! It is only at the hulks, or among turf-men, that you ever see a face so mean, so knowing, and so gloomy.

      A much more humane being among the youthful Clubbists is the Lady-killing Snob. I saw Wiggle just now in the dressing-room, talking to Waggle, his inseparable.

      WAGGLE.--'Pon my honour, Wiggle, she did.'

      WIGGLE.--'Well, Waggle, as you say--I own I think she DID look at me rather kindly. We'll see to-night at the French play.'

      And having arrayed their little persons, these two harmless young bucks go upstairs to dinner.

      CHAPTER XL--CLUB SNOBS

      Both sorts of young men, mentioned in my last under the flippant names of Wiggle and Waggle, may be found in tolerable plenty, I think, in Clubs. Wiggle and Waggle are both idle. They come of the middle classes. One of them very likely makes believe to be a barrister, and the other has smart apartments about Piccadilly. They are a sort of second-chop dandies; they cannot imitate that superb listlessness of demeanour, and that admirable vacuous folly which distinguish the noble and high-born chiefs of the race; but they lead lives almost as bad (were it but for the example), and are personally quite as useless. I am not going to arm a thunderbolt, and launch it at the beads of these little Pall Mall butterflies. They don't commit much public harm, or private extravagance. They don't spend a thousand pounds for diamond earrings for an Opera-dancer, as Lord Tarquin can: neither of them ever set up a public-house or broke the bank of a gambling-club, like the young Earl of Martingale. They have good points, kind feelings, and deal honourably in money-transactions--only in their characters of men of second-rate pleasure about town, they and their like are so utterly mean, self-contented, and absurd, that they must not be omitted in a work treating on Snobs.

      Wiggle has been abroad, where he gives you to understand that his success among the German countesses and Italian princesses, whom he met at the TABLES-D'HOTE, was perfectly terrific. His rooms are hung round with pictures of actresses and ballet-dancers. He passes his mornings in a fine dressing-gown, burning pastilles, and reading 'Don Juan' and French novels (by the way, the life of the author of 'Don Juan,' as described by himself, was the model of the life of a Snob). He has twopenny-halfpenny French prints of women with languishing eyes, dressed in dominoes,--guitars, gondolas, and so forth,--and tells you stories about them.

      'It's a bad print,' says he, 'I know, but I've a reason for liking it. It reminds me of somebody--somebody I knew in other climes. You have heard of the Principessa di Monte Pulciano? I met her at Rimini. Dear, dear Francesca! That fair-haired, bright-eyed thing in the Bird of Paradise and the Turkish Simar with the love-bird on her finger, I'm sure must have been taken from--from somebody perhaps whom you don't know--but she's known at Munich, Waggle my boy,--everybody knows the Countess Ottilia de Eulenschreckenstein. Gad, sir, what a beautiful creature she was when I danced with her on the birthday of Prince Attila of Bavaria, in '44. Prince Carloman was our vis-a-vis, and Prince Pepin danced the same CONTREDANSE. She had a Polyanthus in her bouquet. Waggle, I HAVE IT NOW.' His countenance assumes an agonized and mysterious expression, and he buries his head in the sofa cushions, as if plunging into a whirlpool of passionate recollections.

      Last year he made a considerable sensation by having on his table a morocco miniature-case locked by a gold key, which he always wore round his neck, and on which was stamped a serpent--emblem of eternity--with the letter M in the circle. Sometimes he laid this upon his little morocco writing-table, as if it were on an altar--generally he had flowers upon it; in the middle of a conversation he would start up and kiss it. He would call out from his bed-room to his valet, 'Hicks, bring me my casket!'

      'I don't know who it is,' Waggle would say. 'Who DOES know that fellow's intrigues! Desborough Wiggle, sir, is the slave of passion. I suppose you have heard the story of the Italian princess locked up in the Convent of Saint Barbara, at Rimini? He hasn't told you? Then I'm not at liberty to speak. Or the countess, about whom he nearly had the duel with Prince Witikind of Bavaria? Perhaps you haven't even heard about that beautiful girl at Pentonville, daughter of a most respectable Dissenting clergyman. She broke her heart when she found he was engaged (to a most lovely creature of high family, who afterwards proved false to him), and she's now in Hanwell.'

      Waggle's belief in his friend amounts to frantic adoration. 'What a genius he is, if he would but apply himself!' he whispers to me. 'He could be anything, sir, but for his passions. His poems are the most beautiful things you ever saw. He's written a continuation of "Don Juan," from his own adventures. Did you ever read his lines to Mary? They're superior to Byron, sir--superior to Byron.'

      I was glad to hear this from so accomplished a critic as Waggle; for the fact is, I had composed the verses myself for honest Wiggle one day, whom I found at his chambers plunged in thought over a very dirty old-fashioned album, in which he had not as yet written a single word.

      'I can't,' says he. 'Sometimes I can write whole cantos, and to-day not a line. Oh, Snob! such an opportunity! Such a divine creature! She's asked me to write verses for her album, and I can't.'

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