Originally published in Tinsley's Magazine (Tinsley Bros.) vol.1 #1 (Aug 1867).
It was a bungle from the very first. A pleasant yachting party in a private steamer, with a joyous cultivated company of clever men and women, selected from a herd of eager competitors for their brilliant social qualities; a cheerful run to Littlehampton on the day before; private rooms and much jollity at the pretty little hotel there, and an easy cruise among the fleet the next morning,—was the programme which tempted me to the naval review. How all this broke down; how, after tickets for the best of the Admiralty vessels had been rejected with disdain, and the only dignified mode of seeing the show had been laid down with some severity at clubs, Greenwich dinners, and among our friends generally; how we fell from our high estate, and became mere targets for plebeian scorners,—is a thing to tell. "I confess I don't care about sights unless I can see them in perfect comfort; and to get up at six in the morning, to race off to Portsmouth by special train, to spend the day on a crowded government ship, jostled by manufacturing M.P.'s and third-class Admiralty clerks, and after waiting for hours at a railway station to return to town the same night hungry, weary, and forlorn, is not my notion of amusement. I should not dream of going at all, but that the plan we've hit upon includes a variety of pleasures, in the course of which seeing the sham-fight is a trivial incident. We're sure of a charming yachting cruise; we know what Juvenal can be when presiding at a dinner-party; and with Festus, Jokeley, Sinnike, and ourselves, we can count upon more fun and sprightliness than would fall to the lot of that dull beast the House of Commons if it remained as much 'at sea' for another session as it has been during this. We'll make what Oliver Goldsmith—whose style, I observe, you make feeble and ridiculous attempts to imitate—called 'a shoemaker's holiday' of it; and if you're the man I take you for, you won't miss an opportunity which may never occur again." Thus Scriblerius, the popular novelist, who had distinct republican tendencies when I first knew him, but who has become a terrible aristocrat since his books have been successful, and their author admitted into regions which involve having your name printed in the Morning Post. Having considerable faith in the keenness of the Scriblerian eye where personal comfort is concerned, and a profound admiration for that faculty of "putting the foot down" wherever the standing-ground is advantageous, for which its owner is sneered at by his unsuccessful confrères, I yielded, and consented to join his party. From that moment I was in his power. He fascinated me into believing that the rank and fashion of the metropolis, its wits, its philosophers, its beauties were metaphorically knocking at the gate for admission into our favoured ranks. Our creature-comforts were to be looked after by the great contractors Sting and Briber; our ears would be bewitched by the quadrille band; our sleeping accommodation would be at the ratio of six to one—our steamer's certificate being for six hundred, and our limit rigidly fixed at one hundred. But the great feature would be the congenial and exclusive society we should enjoy; and when, as a favour—the weight of which nearly turned me gray with the sense of obligation—Scriblerius graciously hinted that he would use his interest to procure me a couple of tickets besides my own, if I wished to make any two people happy for life, I nearly wept upon his shoulder, and murmured, "This is friendship indeed!"
I never quite understood whether the mail-steamer and Littlehampton, the brilliant assemblage of fair women and clever men, the moral superiority over governments and parliaments, sovereign, peers, and commons, were the chimeras of a highly-gifted and imaginative brain, or whether a series of unparalleled catastrophes prevented the wits, philosophers, and nobles leaving their homes on the day fixed. I do know that Scriblerius abruptly informed me one morning that the particular scheme I'd heard something of—"heard something of!" why, I'd made a mental feast of it for weeks—had fallen through; but that if a few of us joined together, we could still make up a successful party on a steamer which was advertised to take the public from London Bridge to the review and back, at a fare of thirty shillings a-day, provisions and wine included. This was put so jauntily, and the evidence in favour of the company advertising seemed so favourable, that I took tickets for three with a stout heart, never doubting but that the friends I had asked would agree to the change of plan. One had been suddenly summoned into Wales; the other, curiously enough, "promised his partner not to leave town that day," and only vouchsafed to tell me so on my calling at his office in despair the night before. Both gentlemen were wise in their generation. Friend No. 2 gave his ticket away; his victim joined us unsuspiciously, and has been ill ever since. We were cramped, we were bullied, we were starved. Misery made us acquainted with strange bedfellows; and, except coffins, nothing was ever made for sleeping in so small as the wretched slabs the steamboat people called berths. The most rebellious convicts were never treated with greater harshness by the most callous warders than were we by the men whose supposed duty it was to minister to our wants; and it needs the bitter experience a famine only gives to realise our sufferings from want of suitable food. Yet the trip had its compensations too.
When Scriblerius hallooed at my window in Guelph-square, at seven A.M. on the morning of Tuesday the 16th July; when I shouted "In a minute," and deliberately read another of Tennyson's poems, and watched the rain-drops from behind the curtains; when I, putting on an assumption of feverish haste, at last joined him in the street, and asked why he was thus laden and on foot; when I heard he had tramped bag in hand in the rain all the way from his own fashionable district to me—for the very sufficient reason that all the night-cabmen had gone home and to bed; when he dilated petulantly on the difficulty of rousing his establishment and procuring a cup of coffee before six in the morning,—I laughed quietly to myself and my soul was glad.
"Not go at all unless he could go comfortably"! Ha, ha! my tempter had himself fallen, arid the rejected tickets for the Admiralty ships were avenged. In this pleasant spirit we started on our holiday. It was a weary walk, though, along Oxford-street, for I was laden too, and the rain continued to pour steadily down. I suppose it is part of the great law of compensations, that cabmen, not wanting a fare, should derive gratification from looking defiantly above and below and through the hapless people hailing them. The few night-cabmen still to be seen are on their way home; those on day duty have not yet come out; and after stumbling and sweltering under his unaccustomed load, and gazing wildly up and down every thoroughfare to the right and left, our student sees through the rain a crazy vehicle cross his street at perambulator speed. To rush and shout and mow the air wildly with his umbrella are with him simultaneous acts. To run at a pace which, with his encumbrances, is equal to the severest training given to the strongest athletes; to arrive panting and breathless abreast with the object of his wild chase, and to be received with an icy stare of contempt or a derisive smile by its driver, is his certain fate. It is like a revelation of cabman-nature when, aching with your portmanteau's bumps, and faint from unwonted exertion, you read the depth of gratified misanthropy and morose joy there is in this silent ignoring of your being. He becomes intensely interested in the shutters of the shop you stand before or the lamp-post above your head; but you? Accommodate you by keeping up another half-hour when he's resolved on bed? Gratify you by letting it appear that he knows what your hailing and bellowing mean? You might as well ask him to approve a legal fare.
To add to our comfort, we felt, as the time rolled on and Holborn was painfully reached, that it would be impossible to gain the starting-place by eight, at which hour the steamer was punctually to leave. The wharf was gained at last. We had bribed a cabman out of a public-house, after melting his dignity with early purl, and being obsequious to him as to a rich relation, and were in due course chaffed down the river-stairs, and appropriated bodily by the boatmen. The Mrs. POORHOUSE was our floating prison-house; and there she lay, wedged in between two other steamers as calmly as if leaving her present resting-place that week were a sportive hypothesis not to be reckoned on with certainty. Once on board, I was introduced by Scriblerius to his friend Dapple, upon whose recommendation we had selected our vessel, who had taken our berths, and personally vouched for our proper treatment. "Man of the world, Dapple!" said the novelist; "old traveller, knows the ropes, and has taken good care of us, you'll see." "The arrangements seem very good," said the hero of this eulogy nervously; "but I think I'd just ascertain that your berths—I didn't see them, you know, but engaged them at the office—are the same numbers as your tickets; you'll find the cabin aft." It seemed odd that our guide, philosopher, and friend did not offer to accompany us; but we found the cause of his absence, alas, too soon. There had been tall talk as to the airiness and comfort of our sleeping-places; Dapple had launched into positive eloquence on the subject of the beds and bedding of this liberal company; and a dark cupboard like an unusually small oven, fitted up with narrow trays, apparently for cooking sausage-rolls separately, scarcely realised his glowing picture. "Second-class cabin, where the soldiers and the deck passengers, hop-pickers, Irish labourers, and such-like sleep," was the comment of Victim, as he disconsolately wedged in his valise between two of the little shelves. "You'll find it a tight fit when you turn in, I can tell you," said a smothered voice from out of the darkness; and after a time we saw a head and beard and spectacles apparently occupying a berth by themselves. As, however, we had never heard of Colonel Stodare's Sphinx going to sea alone, we were driven to conclude, in spite of the evidence of our senses, and in defiance of the laws of space, that limbs and a body were packed away somewhere on the sausage tray, and we argued sanguinely from this for our own repose. What man has done man may do; and though the sheets were simply two bits of broad white tape, and the counterpane an obvious patch taken bodily from some bagman's pattern-card, we hoped against hope, and joked in ghastly fashion with each other about night.
When nine o'clock came, and the Mrs. Poorhouse showed no more symptoms of getting up her steam or of moving down the river than the Tower of London, opposite which she lay, we sat down to a fairly-served and ample meal. It was the last time we tasted decent food until we left the accursed ship, forty-eight hours later, at Southampton. Whether the stewards grew reckless at the impossibility of properly attending to three times the ordinary number of saloon passengers; whether the company had determined, as naval reviews are of rare occurrence, to revenge themselves upon the passenger-world for past exactions by one grand burst of ill-doing which was not likely to come to light; or whether, through some inadvertence, the staff had been selected from the most stupid and incompetent men in their service,—it is, of course, impossible to say. But, as a sufferer who has not yet recovered from the severity of his punishment, I wish to make it known that, through believing in an advertisement in the Times, and on the good faith of a well-known company, I paid three pounds for more contumely, discomfort, thirst, hunger, and degradation than it has been my lot to compress into two days and nights before.
The one thing the company could not destroy was our enjoyment of the bright, crisp, dashing sea, which was rough and brisk and turbulent enough to prostrate our weaker brethren, and to delight all good sailors. So far as the steamer and her nautical officers were concerned, neither was there any reason for complaint. The Mrs. Poorhouse is a finely-built vessel, well appointed, and with all proper accommodation. Her captain is a swarthy, burly convivialist, who looks more like a prosperous Loamshire grazier than a sailor, but who gave us a taste of his seamanship when the Queen passed up the fleet which won our hearts, and which I am delighted to acknowledge now. The crew were as unlike what artists and the melodrama have taught me are tars as could well be conceived; but, by bringing the good ship safely into Southampton, they enabled me to leave her, and are so entitled to my gratitude. What the purser and his helpers resembled will be best seen in the progress of this narrative. Everyone connected with the vessel talked the broadest Irish, save and except an "odd man" and his wife, hired for the occasion, who "waited" in the saloon, and eventually took the part of the passengers against his employers, and yielded to their cries for food. It must be understood that there were ample supplies on board, but that they were denied us. Sometimes the cook "could not be kept at work all day;" sometimes they were "out" of whatever was asked for; sometimes the refusal came point-blank, and without excuse.
The passengers, about ninety in number, were decidedly mixed. A proportion of them were, I suspect, friends of the management, among whom were pilots', directors', or managers' sons, and their little sets. But the main body was a curious medley. A bearded curate, who intoned his ordinary conversation, and asked you to pass the salt as if he were making a confession of faith; half-a-dozen roistering young fellows, who played at romps on the second deck, and dealt blows and pinched ears with much hilarity; a pleasant old half-pay warrior and his wife, who spent most of their time in the saloon contemplating the dirty plates and dishes, and reading extracts from old newspapers aloud for the delectation of the company; a bearded man, approaching middle age, who soon told us he'd been twice round Cape Horn; a yachtsman, the owner of the head previously mentioned, and our stanch ally; a handful of inoffensive uninteresting people, who bored each other equably with what they thought was conversation; and a residuum of Whitechapel Jews, petty tradesmen, and tavern-keepers, made up our party.
Dapple kept in high spirits all the way to Sheerness; for there was plenty of incident and character, and we all made the most of it in our little way. He was, moreover, yet in happy ignorance of the blow to come.
"Pilot's a fat man, ain't he?—I think pilots mostly are, though," said one of the residuum to his neighbour.
"Fat!" replied his friend sarcastically; "1 should think he wor. Do you know how much money he make? Why, a matter o' six and eight pound a week. I reckon I'd (blank) soon be fat if I made as much as that!"
While speculating upon the size of Baron Rothschild or the Marquis of Westminster if they ate in proportion to their income, as the last speaker seemed to intimate was the rule of life, we were told that our own meal would be served in half an hour. I really shrink from describing the ghastly mockery that followed. The places carefully taken for us by Dapple were seized by half-a-dozen of the residuum while we were looking another way, and their present occupants grinned exultantly at their successful joke. This was of little consequence. But when, an hour later, the food rejected by these and other gentlemen was placed before us, when remonstrance proved unavailing, and civility and attention ridiculous myths, the situation became unpleasant. There was a dark steward with black moustaches, civil in speech and uncourteous in act; an Irish steward who either would not or could not understand English; and "George," the tavern waiter, who, when sober, was rather an agreeable companion than otherwise. "Lord bless yer, sir," said he, "I know 'ow things oughter be, I do. Why, I served at the London Tavern, I 'ave, for years. They don't know, they don't" (profound contempt here); "and they seems in a regular mess, don't they? Get you some bread and cold meat if I can't get you any thin' else. Wy, of course I will, sir, in arf a minute."
This promise always wound up the conversation, for the fascinating George invariably heard a voice we could not hear which summoned him away the instant he was asked to perform work; received all complaints with "Bread and meat will you have, sir?" in a tone of pleased surprise, and again going on his way, to be no more seen. I never saw tomtits cooked as ducklings, and served with sage and onions, nor ate house-sparrows with white sauce, under the impression they were chickens. These, however, seemed to be the only dishes set before the second thirty diners, except what their predecessors had left; and on one passenger asking indignantly, "Didn't you say there'd be fresh joints for each dinner—where are they?" the Irish steward, giving a delicious wink at his colleague, replied in a brogue so rich as to be a meal in itself, "Shure, and wasn't there iligant ducks and chickens for yez?" "But joints?" "And wasn't there ducks, then?" "Joints?" "There was chickens!" and so on for a considerable time. Indeed, I stumbled over this steward on the companion-stairs late at night; and as he was then muttering, "Ducks and chickens for yez," I am inclined to believe that he had kept on saying it all day, though I could not swear to this portion of my story. To tell of one meal is to tell the history of all. When everybody grumbled, and threatened vengeance, the black steward said like a calm goblin: "Well, we can't please everybody; it isn't likely. Better food! Well then, the company would have had to charge a better price. What's three pounds for two days, indeed? why, it would have to be six pounds if you want real good living! But I don't approve of these trips myself; they puts everything out, and make it impossible to be comfortable. If you'd come over to Ireland with me" (I never will, and hereby warn my friends to beware the Mrs. Poorhouse), "it's plenty you should have, and of what you'd like too, and be waited on like princes." It was not the time or place to argue the point, or to insist that if we could not be fed remuneratively for thirty shillings a day, it would have been honester to say so before we embarked; but the speech and exculpation were a significant commentary on the blandness of the agent who took my check. Dapple's remorse became a pitiable thing to see, and even Scriblerius admitted the possibility of an Admiralty ticket having resulted in less flagrant ill-treatment than this.
After dark, when the heavy rain had subsided and the sea was at its freshest, a "free-and-easy club" was formed on deck by the roisterers and the residuum, who made night hideous with loud choruses and drunken bonhomie. O, the dreary conviviality, which culminates in "So say all of us!" O, the pot-house cheeriness when men are spirituously wise and musical and witty during the small hours! O, the unutterable weariness of humour at which you cannot laugh, of sentiment you know to be maudlin, of pipe-and-glass arguments which prove everything with vinous fervour, and yet leave all the questions they touch unsolved!—How flat, stale, and unprofitable you seem when the appetite for enjoying you has fled for ever, and when, toil-worn and _brain-weary, the only way of hearing the chimes at midnight seems to be in solitude, or with some well-tried familiar friend! The roisterers thought differently, as roisterers always will, and were happy after their kind.
A sleepless night of misery in the oven, with the steamer's screw saying, "You sha'n't go to sleep! you sha'n't go to sleep!" with malignant regularity, in our very ear—thanks to Dapple's choice of berths; a feeble and ineffectual struggle for breakfast, with stewards genially grumbling, "We can't go on serving things all day;" and after skirting the Hampshire coast, and tossing and rolling merrily past the Nab, we come upon the fleet. We are bound for Southampton, to take in as many passengers for the day as could be induced to come, and wild rumours are abroad that five hundred were expected. Scriblerius, Victim, Dapple, Sike, and the rest of us, promptly determined to give up the review, and once on the blessed shore, to bid the Mrs. Poorhouse a withering farewell; but this was made impossible when we met a sister steamer, and heard, "No use a-going on; there's nobody there!" shouted across the water. From this time, to do our captain justice, we shared the honours of royalty, and put all the Admiralty vessels in the shade, from a sightseers point of view. The newspapers called this our "stupidity," but we did not think it stupid at the time. Steaming steadily by the side of the Victoria and Albert, we saw the Sultan invested with the Garter, who, as one of our publican fellow-voyagers remarked delightedly, "blowed his nose like any christian." The grand sight presented by the gallant ships; the vast power and strength of the gunboats, which looked like so many iron factories towed out to sea and left there; the deafening sounds of cannonading; the cat-like activity of the tars, swarming like flies upon the fairy shrouds and spars,—were not all these recorded in the chronicles of the day?
When the cannonading was over we took up a snug position about half a mile from the fleet, and were kept in absolute ignorance of our fate. The illuminations in the rain and mist looked simply like a large Regent-circus of capacious warehouses, with every alternate warehouse unlit. We lay here some twenty hours, during which no one could or would give us the faintest intimation of the captain's intentions, and then steamed into Southampton docks, after undergoing the same squalid misery and ignominious privations as before. These were relieved, however, by the hearty chaff of one of the residuum—a publican we thought, a Jew we knew. Where modest remonstrances failed, brutal plain speaking was successful. In one of Mr. Shirley Brooks's admirable novels we are reminded that Hannibal used no fine-tempered instrument to subdue the Alps, but the coarsest and strongest vinegar; and the moral was enforced on board the Mrs. Poorhouse. "Put on the 'am, G'orge; a little more sherry, G'orge—don't drink it myself, it ain't good enough, but I likes to see my friends made 'appy. Found the soder-water and the lemonade, 'ave yer, G'orge, now the Southampton people ain't a comin'? Wosn't fine enough, we wosn't, though we wos a-willin' to pay for it—wos we, G'orge? Howsomever, I'm orf the blessed instant we touches shore. I'd give three pound not to 'ave come, I would, for I don't like bein' starved myself; and I wish those as is a-goin' back in 'er joy of the maggits they'll 'ave to eat"—and so forth only elicited the monotonous "We can't please everybody," from the ship's stewards. But persistent dropping moved "George" into rebellion, and before we left efforts were made to appease the vulgar wrath. Scriblerius, Dapple, Victim, and myself agreed solemnly to tell everyone we thoroughly enjoyed the review. But though we had an immense deal of Mark-Tapley jollity and fun, which no adverse circumstances could repress, I have never ceased admiring the instinctive prescience both of the friend who had business in Wales, and the other friend who sent Victim as a whipping boy to sea in his stead.