To my amazement he had a second and third helping of mutton and went through the rest of the menu with the same avidity, getting redder and redder, hotter and hotter all the while. He must have eaten a pound and a half of meat, and he admitted he had drunk three bottles of champagne before the close.
"Doesn't it make you drunk?" I asked.
"Bless you, no," he exclaimed. "If you eat your fill and put a good lining of this mutton round your belly, you can drink as much as you like, or at least I can.
Thank God for it," he added solemnly.
In the intervals of the speech-making after the dinner, he confided to me that he was the head, if I remember aright, of the Cordwainer's Company, and invited me in due course to their annual dinner a month later and treated me like a prince.
"You don't eat and drink as you ought to," was his conclusion. "There's no pleasure on earth like it, and unlike all other pleasures, the older you get, the keener your taste!" That was his philosophy. But I found William Smith a kindly host and was not surprised to hear that he stood well with all who knew him. "His word's his bond," they said, "and he's more than kind if you need him. A good fellow is Bill and a true blue Conservative." All in all, a model Englishman.
I remember at a later banquet having a little tub of a man for neighbour. He seemed uncomfortable and I couldn't account for his wrigglings till I saw he had an immense bottle between his legs.
"What's that?" I cried.
"A Jeroboam of Haut Brion '78'," he ejaculated. "The best wine in the world."
"Where on earth did you get that immense bottle?" I enquired. "It's as big as six ordinary bottles."
"No, it ain't," he said. "A magnum is two bottles and this here is four, and a rehoboam is eight, but I can't run to that."
"You don't mean to say," I interrupted, "that you're going to drink four bottles to your own cheek?"
"I don't know about cheek," he retorted angrily, "but thank God I can drink as I like without asking your permission."
"Is it really the best wine in the world?" I queried. "I'd like to taste it! Did you bring it?"
"You can have a glass," the manikin replied, "and I don't offer that to everybody, I can tell you, or there'd be d… d little left for Johnny; but you can have a glass with a heart and a half."
I went on with the bottle of champagne I had ordered till the end of dinner and then reminded my little neighbour of the promised glass.
"I oughtn't to give it you," he grumbled. "You've been smoking and no one can taste the bouquet of fine wine with tobacco smoke in his mouth. But," he added, withholding the bottle, "for God's sake, clean your palate before you taste this wine!"
"How shall I clean my palate?" I asked.
"By eating bread and salt, of course," he said, "but you'll never enjoy the real bouquet and body of wine till you've given up smoking." And as he spoke he poured into his own glass the last drops of the noble Bordeaux. "A great wine," he said, smacking his lips. "The phylloxera ruined the finest vineyards;
Chateau Lafitte had to be replanted with American vines. No one will ever again drink a Chateau Lafitte as our fathers knew it, but this Haut Brion is the next best. What do you think I gave for that Jeroboam?"
"I can't imagine," I said. "Perhaps three or four pounds."
He smiled pityingly. "Nearer ten," he replied, "and not easy to get at that! In ten years more it'll be worth double, mark my words. I know what I'm talking about."
A curious little man, I thought to myself when I saw him drinking port and then old cognac with his coffee. "Push coffee, the French call it," he said, tapping his glass of cognac, "and they know what's good."
When the banquet was over he asked me to help him to his carriage, as his legs were drunk. "The only part of me that ever feels the wine," he said grinning. I had nearly to carry him out of the room, but he was violently sick before I got him to his brougham. Evidently, his legs were not the only part of his body to revolt that night.
The way those men ate and drank, gluttonised and guzzled was disgusting, but I had seen German students drink beer till they had to put then-fingers down their throats and then go back to the Kneipe again, rejoicing in their bestiality. "It's the same race," I said to myself again and again. "The same race with bestiality and brutality as predominant features!"
One evening later I left the hall before the speech-making had begun, and as luck would have it, I met George Wyndham at the door. "You here!" he cried. "What do you think of English conviviality?"
"English bestiality, you mean," I retorted.
"Bestiality?" he repeated. "I've seen none; what do you mean?"
"Come outside," I said and drew him outside the door into the pure air for a minute or so. "Now," I went on, "put your head in when I open the door and you'll understand what I mean!"
As I opened the door the stench was insupportable. "Good God!" cried Wyndham, "Why didn't I notice it before?"
"You're on the right side of the top table," I explained, "and therefore you suffered less than we did."
"Good God!" he repeated. "What a revelation!"
That was the night, I think, when Lord Salisbury, then Prime Minister and chief guest, made a really great speech. He reminded his audience that the previous year, speaking in the same place, he had thought himself able to promise that peace would be maintained in the coming year. "Some might think I was mistaken," he went on, "when they read in this morning's paper of the Black Mountain campaign and other fightings on our northwest frontier in India, but such frays are not to be called war and hardly constitute a breach of the peace. Seen in true perspective, they are nothing but the wavebreaking in blood-stained foam on the ever advancing tide of English civilization." The fine image was brought out in his most ordinary manner and voice without any attempt at rhetoric and perhaps was the more effective on that account.
But if I wish to give a true picture of the London of my time, I must go further than I've yet gone.
In this year Sir Robert Fowler was elected Lord Mayor of London for the second time, an almost unique distinction. In view of the attacks that had been made on the city finances and the attempts to democratise the city institutions, it was felt advisable for the great Corporation to put its best foot foremost. Sir Robert Fowler was not only an out-and-out Conservative and a rich man, but also a convinced supporter of all city privileges, and for a wonder a good scholar to boot who had won high university honours. "A Grecian, Sir, of the best!"
I met this gentleman at dinner one night at Sir William Marriott's, who was M.P. for Brighton and had been made judge-advocate-general; and so had managed to lift his small person and smaller mind to the dignity of ministerial position that ensured, I believe, a life-pension.
I went to Marriott's dinner rather reluctantly; his wife was a washed-out, prim, little woman, kindly but undistinguished, and Marriott himself rather bored me. His dining-room was small and the half dozen city magnates I found assembled rather confirmed my doubts of the entertainment. Suddenly Fowler came in, a large man who must have been five feet ten at least in height and much more in girth.
We were soon at dinner and the way the guests ate and drank and commented on all the edibles and appraised all the wines was a sort of education. One guest held forth on the comparative merits of woodcock and partridge and amused me finally by declaring that a poet had settled the question. "What poet do you mean?" I laughed, for poetry and guzzling were poles apart, I thought.