Men's Wives Part 16

dinner was over, and we saw these youths, in their black horned-b.u.t.ton jackets and knee-breeches, issuing from their door in the cloisters.

There were no hoops, no cricket-bats, as usual on a half-holiday. Who would have thought of play in expectation of such tremendous sport as was in store for us?

Towering among the gown-boys, of whom he was the head and the tyrant, leaning upon Bushby's arm, and followed at a little distance by many curious pale awe-stricken boys, dressed in his black silk stockings, which he always sported, and with a crimson bandanna tied round his waist, came BIGGS. His nose was swollen with the blow given before school, but his eyes flashed fire. He was laughing and sneering with Bushby, and evidently intended to make minced meat of Berry.

The betting began pretty freely: the bets were against poor Berry. Five to three were offered--in ginger-beer. I took six to four in raspberry open tarts. The upper boys carried the thing farther still: and I know for a fact, that Sw.a.n.g's book amounted to four pound three (but he hedged a good deal), and t.i.ttery lost seventeen s.h.i.+llings in a single bet to Pitts, who took the odds.

As Biggs and his party arrived, I heard Hawkins say to Berry, "For heaven's sake, my boy, fib with your right, and MIND HIS LEFT HAND!"

Middle Briars was voted to be too confined a s.p.a.ce for the combat, and it was agreed that it should take place behind the under-school in the shade, whither we all went. Hawkins, with his immense silver hunting-watch, kept the time; and water was brought from the pump close to Notley's the pastrycook's, who did not admire fisticuffs at all on half-holidays, for the fights kept the boys away from his shop. Gutley was the only fellow in the school who remained faithful to him, and he sat on the counter--the great gormandising brute!--eating tarts the whole day.

This famous fight, as every Slaughter House man knows, lasted for two hours and twenty-nine minutes, by Hawkins's immense watch. All this time the air resounded with cries of "Go it, Berry!" "Go it, Biggs!" "Pitch into him!" "Give it him!" and so on. Shall I describe the hundred and two rounds of the combat?--No!--It would occupy too much s.p.a.ce, and the taste for such descriptions has pa.s.sed away. [3]

1st round. Both the combatants fresh, and in prime order. The weight and inches somewhat on the gown-boy's side. Berry goes gallantly in, and delivers a clinker on the gown-boy's jaw. Biggs makes play with his left. Berry down.

4th round. Claret drawn in profusion from the gown-boy's grogshop. (He went down, and had his front tooth knocked out, but the blow cut Berry's knuckles a great deal.)

15th round. Chancery. Fibbing. Biggs makes dreadful work with his left. Break away. Rally. Biggs down. Betting still six to four on the gown-boy.

20th round. The men both dreadfully punished. Berry somewhat shy of his adversary's left hand.

29th to 42nd round. The Chipsite all this while breaks away from the gown-boy's left, and goes down on a knee. Six to four on the gown-boy, until the fortieth round, when the bets became equal.

102nd and last round. For half-an-hour the men had stood up to each other, but were almost too weary to strike. The gown-boy's face hardly to be recognised, swollen and streaming with blood. The Chipsite in a similar condition, and still more punished about his side from his enemy's left hand. Berry gives a blow at his adversary's face, and falls over him as he falls.

The gown-boy can't come up to time. And thus ended the great fight of Berry and Biggs.

And what, pray, has this horrid description of a battle and parcel of schoolboys to do with Men's Wives?

What has it to do with Men's Wives?--A great deal more, madam, than you think for. Only read Chapter II., and you shall hear.

CHAPTER II. THE COMBAT AT VERSAILLES.

I afterwards came to be Berry's f.a.g, and, though beaten by him daily, he allowed, of course, no one else to lay a hand upon me, and I got no more thras.h.i.+ng than was good for me. Thus an intimacy grew up between us, and after he left Slaughter House and went into the dragoons, the honest fellow did not forget his old friend, but actually made his appearance one day in the playground in moustaches and a braided coat, and gave me a gold pencil-case and a couple of sovereigns. I blushed when I took them, but take them I did; and I think the thing I almost best recollect in my life, is the sight of Berry getting behind an immense bay cab-horse, which was held by a correct little groom, and was waiting near the school in Slaughter House Square. He proposed, too, to have me to "Long's," where he was lodging for the time; but this invitation was refused on my behalf by Doctor Buckle, who said, and possibly with correctness, that I should get little good by spending my holiday with such a scapegrace.

Once afterwards he came to see me at Christ Church, and we made a show of writing to one another, and didn't, and always had a hearty mutual goodwill; and though we did not quite burst into tears on parting, were yet quite happy when occasion threw us together, and so almost lost sight of each other. I heard lately that Berry was married, and am rather ashamed to say, that I was not so curious as even to ask the maiden name of his lady.

Last summer I was at Paris, and had gone over to Versailles to meet a party, one of which was a young lady to whom I was tenderly--But, never mind. The day was rainy, and the party did not keep its appointment; and after yawning through the interminable Palace picture-galleries, and then making an attempt to smoke a cigar in the Palace garden--for which crime I was nearly run through the body by a rascally sentinel--I was driven, perforce, into the great bleak lonely place before the Palace, with its roads branching off to all the towns in the world, which Louis and Napoleon once intended to conquer, and there enjoyed my favourite pursuit at leisure, and was meditating whether I should go back to "Vefour's" for dinner, or patronise my friend M. Duboux of the "Hotel des Reservoirs" who gives not only a good dinner, but as dear a one as heart can desire. I was, I say, meditating these things, when a carriage pa.s.sed by. It was a smart low calash, with a pair of bay horses and a postilion in a drab jacket that twinkled with innumerable b.u.t.tons, and I was too much occupied in admiring the build of the machine, and the extreme tightness of the fellow's inexpressibles, to look at the personages within the carriage, when the gentleman roared out "Fitz!"

and the postilion pulled up, and the lady gave a shrill scream, and a little black-muzzled spaniel began barking and yelling with all his might, and a man with moustaches jumped out of the vehicle, and began shaking me by the hand.

"Drive home, John," said the gentleman: "I'll be with you, my love, in an instant--it's an old friend. Fitz, let me present you to Mrs. Berry."

The lady made an exceedingly gentle inclination of her black-velvet bonnet, and said, "Pray, my love, remember that it is just dinner-time.

However, never mind ME." And with another slight toss and a nod to the postilion, that individual's white leather breeches began to jump up and down again in the saddle, and the carriage disappeared, leaving me shaking my old friend Berry by the hand.

He had long quitted the army, but still wore his military beard, which gave to his fair pink face a fierce and lion-like look. He was extraordinarily glad to see me, as only men are glad who live in a small town, or in dull company. There is no destroyer of friends.h.i.+ps like London, where a man has no time to think of his neighbour, and has far too many friends to care for them. He told me in a breath of his marriage, and how happy he was, and straight insisted that I must come home to dinner, and see more of Angelica, who had invited me herself--didn't I hear her?

"Mrs. Berry asked YOU, Frank; but I certainly did not hear her ask ME!"

"She would not have mentioned the dinner but that she meant me to ask you. I know she did," cried Frank Berry. "And, besides--hang it--I'm master of the house. So come you shall. No ceremony, old boy--one or two friends--snug family party--and we'll talk of old times over a bottle of claret."

There did not seem to me to be the slightest objection to this arrangement, except that my boots were muddy, and my coat of the morning sort. But as it was quite impossible to go to Paris and back again in a quarter of an hour, and as a man may dine with perfect comfort to himself in a frock-coat, it did not occur to me to be particularly squeamish, or to decline an old friend's invitation upon a pretext so trivial.

Accordingly we walked to a small house in the Avenue de Paris, and were admitted first into a small garden ornamented by a grotto, a fountain, and several nymphs in plaster-of-Paris, then up a mouldy old steep stair into a hall, where a statue of Cupid and another of Venus welcomed us with their eternal simper; then through a salle-a-manger where covers were laid for six; and finally to a little saloon, where Fido the dog began to howl furiously according to his wont.

It was one of the old pavilions that had been built for a pleasure-house in the gay days of Versailles, ornamented with abundance of damp Cupids and cracked gilt cornices, and old mirrors let into the walls, and gilded once, but now painted a dingy French white. The long low windows looked into the court, where the fountain played its ceaseless dribble, surrounded by numerous rank creepers and weedy flowers, but in the midst of which the statues stood with their bases quite moist and green.

I hate fountains and statues in dark confined places: that cheerless, endless plas.h.i.+ng of water is the most inhospitable sound ever heard. The stiff grin of those French statues, or ogling Canova Graces, is by no means more happy, I think, than the smile of a skeleton, and not so natural. Those little pavilions in which the old roues sported were never meant to be seen by daylight, depend on't. They were lighted up with a hundred wax-candles, and the little fountain yonder was meant only to cool their claret. And so, my first impression of Berry's place of abode was rather a dismal one. However, I heard him in the salle-a-manger drawing the corks, which went off with a CLOOP, and that consoled me.

As for the furniture of the rooms appertaining to the Berrys, there was a harp in a leather case, and a piano, and a flute-box, and a huge tambour with a Saracen's nose just begun, and likewise on the table a multiplicity of those little gilt books, half sentimental and half religious, which the wants of the age and of our young ladies have produced in such numbers of late. I quarrel with no lady's taste in that way; but heigho! I had rather that Mrs. Fitz-Boodle should read "Humphry Clinker!"

Besides these works, there was a "Peerage," of course. What genteel family was ever without one?

I was making for the door to see Frank drawing the corks, and was bounced at by the amiable little black-muzzled spaniel, who fastened his teeth in my pantaloons, and received a polite kick in consequence, which sent him howling to the other end of the room, and the animal was just in the act of performing that feat of agility, when the door opened and madame made her appearance. Frank came behind her, peering over her shoulder with rather an anxious look.

Mrs. Berry is an exceedingly white and lean person. She has thick eyebrows, which meet rather dangerously over her nose, which is Grecian, and a small mouth with no lips--a sort of feeble pucker in the face as it were. Under her eyebrows are a pair of enormous eyes, which she is in the habit of turning constantly ceiling-wards. Her hair is rather scarce, and worn in bandeaux, and she commonly mounts a sprig of laurel, or a dark flower or two, which with the sham tour--I believe that is the name of the k.n.o.b of artificial hair that many ladies sport--gives her a rigid and cla.s.sical look. She is dressed in black, and has invariably the neatest of silk stockings and shoes: for forsooth her foot is a fine one, and she always sits with it before her, looking at it, stamping it, and admiring it a great deal. "Fido," she says to her spaniel, "you have almost crushed my poor foot;" or, "Frank," to her husband, "bring me a footstool:" or, "I suffer so from cold in the feet," and so forth; but be the conversation what it will, she is always sure to put HER FOOT into it.

She invariably wears on her neck the miniature of her late father, Sir George Catacomb, apothecary to George III.; and she thinks those two men the greatest the world ever saw. She was born in Baker Street, Portman Square, and that is saying almost enough of her. She is as long, as genteel, and as dreary, as that deadly-lively place, and sports, by way of ornament, her papa's hatchment, as it were, as every tenth Baker Street house has taught her.

What induced such a jolly fellow as Frank Berry to marry Miss Angelica Catacomb no one can tell. He met her, he says, at a ball at Hampton Court, where his regiment was quartered, and where, to this day, lives "her aunt Lady Pash." She alludes perpetually in conversation to that celebrated lady; and if you look in the "Baronetage" to the pedigree of the Pash family, you may see ma.n.u.script notes by Mrs. Frank Berry, relative to them and herself. Thus, when you see in print that Sir John Pash married Angelica, daughter of Graves Catacomb, Esquire, in a neat hand you find written, AND SISTER OF THE LATE SIR GEORGE CATACOMB, OF BAKER STREET, PORTMAN SQUARE: "A.B." follows of course. It is a wonder how fond ladies are of writing in books, and signing their charming initials! Mrs. Berry's before-mentioned little gilt books are scored with pencil-marks, or occasionally at the margin with a!--note of interjection, or the words "TOO TRUE, A.B." and so on. Much may be learned with regard to lovely woman by a look at the books she reads in; and I had gained no inconsiderable knowledge of Mrs. Berry by the ten minutes spent in the drawing-room, while she was at her toilet in the adjoining bedchamber.

"You have often heard me talk of George Fitz," says Berry, with an appealing look to madame.

"Very often," answered his lady, in a tone which clearly meant "a great deal too much." "Pray, sir," continued she, looking at my boots with all her might, "are we to have your company at dinner?"

"Of course you are, my dear; what else do you think he came for? You would not have the man go back to Paris to get his evening coat, would you?"

"At least, my love, I hope you will go and put on YOURS, and change those muddy boots. Lady Pash will be here in five minutes, and you know Dobus is as punctual as clockwork." Then turning to me with a sort of apology that was as consoling as a box on the ear, "We have some friends at dinner, sir, who are rather particular persons; but I am sure when they hear that you only came on a sudden invitation, they will excuse your morning dress.--Bah! what a smell of smoke!"

With this speech madame placed herself majestically on a sofa, put out her foot, called Fido, and relapsed into an icy silence. Frank had long since evacuated the premises, with a rueful look at his wife, but never daring to cast a glance at me. I saw the whole business at once: here was this lion of a fellow tamed down by a she Van Amburgh, and fetching and carrying at her orders a great deal more obediently than her little yowling black-muzzled darling of a Fido.

I am not, however, to be tamed so easily, and was determined in this instance not to be in the least disconcerted, or to show the smallest sign of ill-humour: so to renouer the conversation, I began about Lady Pash.

"I heard you mention the name of Pash, I think?" said I. "I know a lady of that name, and a very ugly one it is too."

"It is most probably not the same person," answered Mrs. Berry, with a look which intimated that a fellow like me could never have had the honour to know so exalted a person.

"I mean old Lady Pash of Hampton Court. Fat woman--fair, ain't she?--and wears an amethyst in her forehead, has one eye, a blond wig, and dresses in light green?"