by E A Dineley
Castle Orchard must belong to someone. It belonged to a Mr Arthur, known as Johnny to his innumerable friends. He was of that set of gentlemen known as dandies or ‘exquisites’ and they tended to address him as though he were a child. It was not an era in which a man might call his friends by their Christian names, but Arthur gave the impression of never having grown up. He was a slave to all things fashionable – from wearing a frockcoat with a nicety of gathering at the shoulders, a neckcloth just so . . . gloves just so . . . snuffbox, dancing pumps, canes, pins, quizzing glasses, all just so . . . and exaggerated and ridiculous – to never paying his bills and passing his time at the gaming tables. He was even able to set the fashion. His charm lay in his ability to find his own follies and the follies of fashion all amusing – and he laughed away at his own mishaps and escapades, and was declared a good fellow. As for Castle Orchard, he was estranged from it, this rustic retreat, as a man might be from his wife or even his best friend, estranged but unable to break the link that bound him to it.
He was of medium height and slender, but a little pulling in here and a little puffing out there was necessary to retain an elegant slightness of figure. His head was crowned with yellow curls, naturally his own. His face was round and pale and his eyes large, childlike and blue. He had been known to say that as a youth he had been pretty and ethereal – but maturity, for Arthur was past thirty, had made him handsome. He was no longer ethereal except to his creditors, who found in him a curious lack of substance. If he was to be associated with Castle Orchard, it could only be to the little, mostly blue, butterflies that flew, with a dizzying frenzy, over the kidney vetch and trefoil of his native chalk. His nature was that of a butterfly.
It was four o’clock in the afternoon. Arthur had breakfasted and left his lodgings in Half Moon Street. To leave his lodgings was an art, owing to the importunings of the myriads who, able to sneak up the stairs, haunted the landing hoping for some little amount towards their bills. He was making his way to the Haymarket in order to dally in the heavenly delights of the Old Snuff House. He had with him a young friend whom he had decided to patronise. The young friend had the makings of being quite as fanciful a creature as Johnny himself and had lent him a small sum of money, which act needed repaying somehow as it was not at all likely to be repaid in the customary fashion, of which both were aware.
It being June, Piccadilly was thronged with every sort of fashionable vehicle, cabriolets and curricles, each more elegant than the last; gentlemen on the finest horses and wearing the finest coats and boots and waistcoats and neckcloths, and tall hats with curly brims; ladies driving their own horses and pairs of horses matched to the last hair in their tails. Ladies in beautiful habits, with exquisite bonnets, ladies with crests on their cabriolets and liveried footmen and grooms, and the whole conglomeration wishing to be seen in Hyde Park sometime between the hours of four and six o’clock.
Such was fashionable London, aware yet unaware of the other London, a street away, thronged with the working poor, the beggars, the prostitutes, all of whom could arise as one body and become the mob, capable of murder though more often merely breaking windows; the partisan mob either shouting for reform or condemning Roman Catholics, all an excuse to throw stones.
‘Why don’t you ride?’ the younger man asked Arthur, waving his hand in the direction of the mêlée.
‘Oh, I have done, I have done, but a horse is a tiresome thing. I have from time to time given my heart to a horse, but a horse needs a groom and a stable and I’m not a rich man. One hundred and fifty pounds a year, at the least, for a horse and a groom. Whenever I have had a horse it has ended up in the bazaar, and next I look round to find it is being enjoyed by somebody else. Never mind. I don’t really care for riding. My delicate frame will hardly withstand it.’ Here Arthur smiled and laughed, knowing his frame would stand it perfectly well, choosing to make himself ridiculous. At the same time he raised his quizzing glass and stared fixedly at a pretty girl passing by in an open carriage with her mother beside her. His young friend thought this rude, but he knew it acceptable conduct for a dandy, who was expected to be rude to women, to ignore them, leave them without chairs or embarrass them with prolonged attention.
Arthur, as if reading his mind, said, ‘What a delicious, timorous creature, wrapped in fifty layers of gossamer. How stupid she would be if you found yourself next to her at dinner, but yes, a delightful child and to be ogled by me will make her quite the thing. I am conferring a favour by noticing her.’
‘Put that way, I suppose . . .’
‘No need to suppose anything. It is so if I say so. What a horrid crowd. One can hardly get along the pavement. Think of the dust, if the streets were not watered. I should have to retire and live on my estate in order to breathe. What a calamity. What should I do?’
He said no more until they reached their destination. Here, the Old Snuff House provided him with a few cronies, and threequarters of an hour was idled away in choosing and ordering. The young friend felt surplus to requirements and, eager as he was to retain his place beside the august person of Arthur, wondered if it was not the tactful moment to escape . . . but no, he was summoned and told they must proceed to St Martin’s Lane for the purchasing of buttons.
‘My tailor is making a coat,’ Arthur announced.
Silence pervaded while the younger man contemplated the paying of the tailor. Arthur took his arm in a companionable manner. He introduced him here and there. He hesitated before leaving the Haymarket, for he was close to the perfumer’s. His mind went to Oil of Roses but he determinedly turned his back. The young friend dodged a Punch and Judy Show and tripped over some ragged little boys.
‘Your coat is so much the best,’ he said, ‘I wonder you can bear to get another.’
He looked down at his own coat and wished he was less plump. The buttons were under stress.
‘A gentleman must have a new coat,’ Arthur declared, ‘or he would be nothing. I shall go into the country, for it’s June and shortly Quarter Day. The rents, for I take them on a quarterly basis, await me, and I shall rain pounds on the head of my tailor.’ He laughed. ‘Everybody owes their tailor. I should be quite ashamed not to owe him something. Only nobodies, like Allington, don’t owe anything.’
‘Who is Allington?’
‘Why, nobody. Didn’t I say so?’
They were soon absorbed in buttons. The choice was wide. Arthur thought of silk and then of silver and then of gilt or even of gold while rejecting mother-of-pearl. His friend fancied the ivory, but Arthur settled for gilt.
‘Are they not rather dear?’
Arthur gazed at him in mock astonishment. ‘My dear fellow, pecuniary interests may be reflected in the case of horses or opera girls, but not of buttons. They are too important.’ He then, of course, laughed.
They hired a hackney carriage to take them back to Half Moon Street. While the younger man paid, Arthur searched the crowds about his door and on the stairs for anyone who was likely to serve him a writ. For a moment he was uneasy but it was generally understood that Quarter Day would settle any debt of too pressing a nature. He elbowed his way to his apartments followed by his friend, a chorus of voices vying with the barrel organ in the street.
‘Settle our bills, sir, or the law will ’ave yer!’
‘Quarter Day, Quarter Day,’ Arthur answered, airily waving a glove in passing.
The door being slammed on the press, the younger man reached in his pocket to mop his brow, only to find his silk handkerchief gone.
‘Some small urchin will be flogging it, you may be sure, at this very moment. I hope you still have your watch,’ Arthur remarked, placing his cane in a stand amongst a host of other canes.
‘Indeed, I have my watch,’ his friend replied, anxiously feeling his waistcoat, whilst peering at himself in one of the two handsome looking glasses that dominated the apartment. He had been in Arthur’s rooms before and was, as usual, amazed and absorbed by the richness of the clutter. John
ny liked to collect things and was never content unless adding to the cabinets of snuffboxes and boxes for toothpicks; quizzing glasses, watches, rings, bottles of scent and cascades of silk awaited selection. A large dressing case lay open on a table and further bits and pieces spilled out of it.
Arthur’s demeanour suddenly changed. He held up his hand and said, ‘Listen, is that Allington going up? Open the door a crack. Quick, do as I say, Rampton.’
Thus appealed to by name, the young man, though bewildered, opened the door just a fraction. He saw nothing but the debt collectors and duns on the landing, but they then parted like the Red Sea and a voice said coolly, ‘Good day, gentlemen.’
All that could be seen was the long shadow of someone going up the stairs to the top floor.
‘Did you wish to speak to him?’ Rampton asked.
‘Certainly not,’ Arthur replied.
‘Well, he is gone. Did you wish me to speak to him?’
‘No. As you are not acquainted with him, you could hardly halloo him on the stairs as if he were a servant. He was in the street when we went out. He always gives money to the raggedy one-armed beggar on the corner, late of His Majesty’s 299th Foot.’
Rampton wondered why he had been required to open the door to watch the progress of a man, of whom only his shadow could be seen, going upstairs – and to whom Arthur had no intention of speaking.
‘I keep an eye on him,’ Arthur said. ‘Perhaps your father knows him. He frequents the Travellers’. He makes a living in a peculiar way.’
‘My father would not know a man who had to make a living in any way,’ Rampton replied, laughing.
‘Ah, but it would not be apparent. He plays cards.’
‘Who doesn’t?’
‘He wins.’
‘Always?’
Arthur shrugged. ‘He must occasionally lose, if he is dealt a very bad hand.’
‘But he has unbelievable luck?’ Rampton suggested.
‘It’s not luck.’
‘You don’t say he cheats?’
‘I shouldn’t dare say any such thing.’
‘But you believe it?’
‘No, no, besides, he plays no hazard, no games of chance. It is, no doubt, why he prefers the Travellers’, because there they play only whist and ecarté, with no cards before dinner. As you are a member yourself, I hardly need tell you this.’
‘Indeed, I am a member, but I don’t go.’
‘Allington will play piquet, chess, backgammon draughts, but chess is his game.’
‘It would be difficult to cheat at that.’
‘He’s clever – he forgets nothing. I myself give him a game if it is unwise to leave my rooms. There are times when I just can’t get out. Suppose the bailiffs took my snuffboxes? It is my belief Allington makes so much money he can live off it. He has enough to keep a pretty actress.’
Rampton could not help wondering how Arthur could afford to play with this person. After all, if such debts occurred, they were debts of honour: one was required to pay them immediately.
‘It can’t be his sole source of income,’ he said.
‘Oh, he is a half-pay officer but that doesn’t amount to anything. I dare say he got a meagre allowance from his father or his stepfather or whatever he was.’
‘And who was he?’
‘Lord Tregorn.’
‘And he was his stepfather?’
‘So it is said.’ Arthur rolled his blue eyes and smiled. ‘They all say that, don’t they? Except Allington. He says nothing. When I find it judicious to stay at home, I send my servant to ask if he will step down and give me a game. Sometimes he will and sometimes he won’t. From time to time he’s downright rude, which I feel a man in his position has no right to be. If I have a couple of friends in to dine, we ask Allington to join us later in a few rubbers of whist. He won’t always come even then.’ Arthur paused to reflect. He then said, ‘Debts of honour between gentlemen?’ He laid peculiar emphasis on the word ‘gentlemen’. ‘What makes a man a gentleman?’
Rampton had no doubt he was himself a gentleman, but then there was no irregularity attached to his birth.
Arthur continued, ‘But I have not told you the half of his peculiarities. It is, anyway, unfortunate to be in the same lodgings as a military man. I sometimes wish I might change them for that very reason, but I have a good understanding with my landlord, whom I always make sure I pay the moment I get my rents in. Some other might oblige me less.’
‘What’s wrong with a military man?’ Rampton enquired.
‘They are so superior, they have the attitude of one who has seen all. They forget that the rest of us don’t want to see what they have seen, or even to have been to all those foreign places. Think of the blood, the violence, the severed limbs, the floggings, the hardship. We don’t want our sensibilities blunted by fields of corpses.’
‘Perhaps their sensibilities were not very strong in the first place.’
‘How can one tell? Today is the eighteenth day of the sixth month. Had you not considered how we should be celebrating the death of all the young brothers of our friends and acquaintances? I had no younger brother myself, which was a blessing. My father had no one too immediate with whom to compare me. To think a man pays a fortune to buy a commission, say £3,000 for a captain in a respectable cavalry regiment, for a son, solely for the purpose of having the boy’s sensibilities totally deadened before he is butchered. Is it not odd?’
Rampton, who had never before given the matter a moment’s thought, agreed. They were interrupted by Arthur’s servant entering the room with a rose-pink figured-silk waistcoat on his arm.
‘To think,’ Arthur said, ‘when on campaign, they are often unable to change their clothes or wash for weeks. What must that do to a man?’
‘It must make him unbearable, but I suppose they are all in it together, a stable full of brute beasts.’ Rampton was casting envious eyes at the waistcoat as he spoke.
‘Not for you, my friend,’ Arthur said, laughing. ‘You are more full in the figure than me and will do best to stick to a darker shade. Your coat needs altering at the shoulder. The cap of the sleeve could be a little less, I suppose, though it’s useless to endeavour to turn you into a seriously fashionable man.’
‘Why ever not?’ Rampton asked, affronted, for he had been under the impression he was already a seriously fashionable man.
‘Not a hope.’ Johnny Arthur gave his customary peal of laughter. He leaped out of his chair, seized one of his canes and darted about the room while making slashing motions, both at Rampton and his valet, the latter dodging and skipping to avoid him. ‘If this were a sabre I could cut off your head.’
He sat down as abruptly as he had got up. His servant settled to rescuing the dressing case that had been dislodged.
‘Allington has a cane,’ he said.
‘Don’t we all?’ Rampton replied abruptly, not pacified.
‘We all have canes but we don’t need them. They are only for show. Allington’s is more of a walking stick.’
‘Mine is for show,’ Rampton said, picking it up and admiring its fine, flexible length and the little gold knob at the top with his engraved initials. ‘My father had it made for me.’
‘Your father is a poet. Why could I not have a poet for a father? How he would have understood and appreciated me. Alack, it was not so and my father has been dead these last ten years without ever knowing what a treasure he had in his only child. Oh, the filial piety I would have expressed in exchange for a few kind words.’
Arthur took the cane and examined it closely. He then said, ‘The only cane my father gave me was one with which to give me a hiding. Well, that’s not true, but it sounds good. I don’t recall he ever beat me much, but he was so stern and so dull. He would have made a good soldier, he had so little feeling. They can have no feeling or they couldn’t do the things they have to do. You listen to the way they talk. A military man will tell you how a bullet did for his best coursing dog at Salama
nca and how he had his favourite horse shot from under him at Vitoria and a couple more after that. He might continue by saying the regiment lost a hundred men that day, or the Army several thousand. What he will not mention is the loss of his best friend and both his brothers. No, no, he is more likely to remark that they had only half a chicken for the officers’ mess and nowhere to eat it but a roofless barn while the wolves ate the corpses outside.’
‘And such a man is this Allington?’ Rampton asked, slightly shocked.
‘How should I know? He doesn’t say enough to me that I should ever find out. Indeed, I believe some military men may be retrained for civilisation – I know of a few – and we must have soldiers or Napoleon would have translated us all into French by now. Your father never wanted you to be a soldier?’
‘Certainly not, though he thought it all very well and good for some.’
‘My father thought to be a soldier would make a man of me and I should come home all glorious, if minus a limb or two. If I wouldn’t be a soldier I must at least be a fox hunter. Now the fox hunter is a soldier manqué, but his injuries are self-inflicted. He thinks himself a hero all the same and his broken bones honourable. My father would hunt when he was seventy-three and then coming off, as was inevitable, my mother must nurse him, attend to his whims and his bad temper. Allington is, I believe, a fox hunter, and under his circumstance, I doubt he’s any safer than my father was in advanced old age. God knows who would nurse Allington. His servant, I suppose, if he was sober.’
Arthur’s own servant here emerged from a closet with an armful of clothes and said, ‘Excuse me, sir, but you asked me to remind you of the time. You are to meet Sir John.’ He spoke with a French accent.
‘Dear me,’ Arthur said, looking at his watch. ‘It takes me hours to dress. I shall be late.’
Rampton stood up to take his leave but there was something on his mind. ‘I defy anyone to say I am not up to the mark. My tailor is the best, yet you say you couldn’t make a fashionable man of me.’ He tried not to sound as peeved as he felt.
Arthur again laughed. ‘My dear fellow, it wasn’t my intention to offend you. It’s just that you are a married man. Whatever induced you to take a wife so young? A married man is nothing, for he’s saddled himself with the very worst thing – domesticity. Didn’t you tell me you aren’t free this evening, for you take your wife to the opera? Domesticity is the end, the bottom, the disaster, the bills, the housemaids, the whooping cough, the child once a year. A mistress one may have, some charming little nothing – I have had one myself when I have been in funds – but a wife is the ultimate rope by which a fashionable man may hang himself.’