The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 2 by Harry Furniss (best ereader for comics TXT) 📗
- Author: Harry Furniss
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Otherwise I should not have been eligible for the New York Pointed Beards, for no qualification is necessary except that one wear a beard cut to a point.
The tables were ornamented with lamps having shades cut to represent pointed beards. A toy goat, the emblem of the club, was the centre decoration. We had the "Head Barber," and, of course, any amount of soft soap. A leading Republican was in the barber's chair, and during dinner some sensation was caused by one of the guests being discovered wearing a false beard. He was immediately seized and ejected until after the dinner, when he returned with his music. It so happened we had present a member of the Italian Opera, with his beautiful pointed beard, and he had also a beautiful voice. But New York could not supply an accompanist with a pointed beard! So a false beard was preferred to false notes. The speeches were pointed, but not cut as short as the beard—rather too pointed and too long. It was just after the Bryan political crisis. The leading politician in the chair and one of the guests, a political leader writer, who had not met—not even at their barber's—since the election, had some electioneering dispute to settle. Americans, unlike us, drag politics into everything. Take away this peculiarity and you take away two-thirds of their excellent after-dinner speaking. The Pointed Beards may have something to do with the matter. The two lost their temper, and the evening was all but ruined thereby, when a happy thought struck me. Although as the guest of the evening I had spoken, I rose again to apologise for being an Englishman! I confessed that I had listened to the two speeches,[Pg 247] but their brilliancy and wit were entirely lost upon me; the subtle humour of the American passed an Englishman's understanding. Their personalities and political passages were no doubt ingenious "bluff," but so cleverly serious and so well acted that I had for four-fifths of the acrimonious speeches been entirely taken in. At this all laughed loud at my stupidity, and the evening ended pleasantly.
The secretary of this dinner, which was a most excellent one, was the celebrated Delmonico, but it was not held at his famous restaurant. To have been complete it ought really to have been held in a barber's shop, for some of those establishments in America are palatial, and even minor barbers' shops are utilised in a curious way. One Sunday afternoon as I was taking a walk I overheard some singing in a shop devoted to hair dressing, and looking in I saw an extraordinary sight. There were about a dozen old ladies seated in the barbers' chairs, with their backs to the looking-glasses and brushes, singing hymns. It was a meeting of the Plymouth Brethren, who hired the shop for their devotions!
Of course at the Pointed Beards' dinner in New York we had oysters with beards—but no American dinner is complete without their famous oysters. Unfortunately I have to make the extraordinary confession that I never tasted an oyster in my life, and as I am touching upon gastronomy, I may also mention that I never touch cheese, or hare, or rabbit, or eel, and I would have to be in the last stage of starvation before I could eat cold lamb or cold veal; so it will be seen by these confessions that my cook's berth is not a sinecure, and that these complimentary dinners, as dinners, are to a great extent wasted upon me. I once, in fact, was asked to a dinner at a club, and I could not touch one single dish! But my friends kindly provided some impromptu dishes without cheese or oysters and other, to me, objectionable things. I was not so lucky in Baltimore. We all know Baltimore is celebrated for its oysters, and the night I arrived a dinner was given to me at the Baltimore Club, which opened as usual with dishes of magnificent oysters. The head waiter, a well-known figure, an old[Pg 248] "darkie" with grey hair, placed a dish of oysters down before me with pride, and stood to watch my delight. I beckoned to him to take them away. He seized the dish and examined the oysters; got another dish, placed them before me. I again requested him to remove them. This happened a third time. I then told him plainly and emphatically that I did not eat oysters. By this time my host and his guests were at their third course, and I and the head waiter were still discussing oysters. My host did not notice this, as he was at the other end of the table, and there were many floral decorations between us; but I made bold to inform him of the fact that the waiter had not only taken away my plates but had removed my glasses, knives and forks, and left me with a bare cloth and no dinner. My host had to call the waiter out of the room and remonstrate with him, but it required some time and a great deal of persuasion before I, the guest of the evening, was allowed to begin my dinner when they were finishing theirs. It transpired that the humorous paper of Baltimore had published the impressions I would receive on visiting their great city, and prominently was a caricature of myself swallowing my first Baltimore oyster. This so interested the waiters of the club that they selected the largest for me, and were so disappointed at my refusing them that they punished me in the same way as Sancho Panza was punished before me.
Perhaps the most extraordinary dinner I ever took part in was held in New York on November 3rd, 1896, when twelve leading Democrats and twelve Republicans sat down on the night of the most sensational election that has ever taken place in the United States. English readers will hardly realise what such a combination meant. The only parallel in this country was probably caused by Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill, when leading Liberals and Conservatives stood on the same platform. But that was the result of a purely political question; political questions of that national character do not interest the better-class American. For instance, on my first visit to America I sat next to a very influential New Yorker at dinner. At that time also elections were pending,[Pg 249] and I casually asked my acquaintance what he thought of the situation. He raised his eyebrows with great surprise and said:
"Pardon me, sir, we take no interest in politics here; we leave that to our valets."
I met that man the day of this dinner four years later. He was positively ill with excitement; he could talk of nothing but politics. Party emblems decorated his coat; every pocket was full of pamphlets—he had been working night and day to defeat Bryan. His valet, no doubt, was sleeping soundly the sleep of indifference—nothing to lose or nothing to gain should Bryan succeed. The silver scare of Bryan's touched the pockets, not the politics, of the prosperous; and that touch is the one touch that makes the whole American world kin.
It happened that I was dining at the house of the chairman of this unique dinner ten days before the election, and he was telling us of the coming election-night dinner as the most extraordinary in the history of their politics. To my surprise, days afterwards, I received an invitation. They all had to be consulted, and agreed that I was the only outsider they would allow to be present.
The dinner was held in an hotel in the centre of New York, and special permission had been given to have the room next to the one in which we dined turned into a telegraph office, where all the messages going to the central office were tapped, and we[Pg 250] knew the result in the room as soon as it was known at the central office. Perhaps I was the only one present thoroughly indifferent, and certainly the only one who enjoyed his dinner. Speeches were indulged in even earlier than usual, and one of them had the portentous title of "England" coupled with my name! I rose and said that I felt exactly like a man who had been invited to a country house, and on his arrival was met by his friend on the doorstep with a long face and a cold, nervous hand. He was glad to see you, but had sad news: his wife was lying between life and death, and the doctors were round her bedside. Now, under such circumstances, one does not exactly feel one can make one's self at home. I assured my listeners that at the moment the Republic was lying in a critical condition, doctors were at her bedside, and it would be settled before midnight whether she was to live or die. If they would allow me I would rise later, and I trusted then my friends would be in a more genial and less excited mood. I had the pleasure of continuing my speech late that night, and congratulating them on the Republic having survived the Bryan crisis.
To describe the scenes after dinner when the results were announced, if I had a pen capable of so doing, would simply dub me in the minds of many readers as a second de Rougemont.
Late that night I reached the waterside. The North River was ablaze with red and blue lights, and rockets shot into the darkness from either shore. Every ferry-boat, tug-boat, scow, or barge in the harbour passed in an endless procession. The air quivered with the bellowings of fog-horns, steam whistles, and sirens. It was indescribable; language fails me. I can only quote the words of the New York paper with "the largest circulation in the world": "The wind-whipped waters of river and harbour glowed last night with the reflection of a myriad lights set aflame for the glory of the new sound and golden dollar. East and west, north and south, dazzling streams of fire played in fantastic curves across the heavens, and beneath this canopy of streaming flame moved a mammoth fleet of steam craft, great and small."[Pg 251]
As I laid my aching head on my pillow I murmured: "Had I been an American citizen, much as I believe in sound currency and an honest dollar, one more rocket, a few more fog-horns, and I should have cast my vote for Bryan and Free Silver!"
At this dinner I contrasted the look of anxiety with the callous indifference of a face I had watched under similar but still more unique circumstances a few years before: the face of the chief of French poseurs—General Boulanger—whom I was asked to meet at dinner in London. It happened to be the night the result of his defeat at the polls was made known. He sat, the one man out of the score-and-five concerned; but as telegrams were handed to him, of defeat, not success, he never showed any signs of interest.[Pg 252]
A few years afterwards, when on tour with my lecture-entertainments, I "put in" a week in the Channel Islands, under the management of a gentleman who had been intimately acquainted with Boulanger when he was a political recluse in Jersey; and one afternoon he drove me to the charming villa the General had occupied, situated in an ideal spot on the coast. The villa was most solidly built, and of picturesque architecture—the freak of a rich Parisian merchant, who had spared no pains or money over it. The work both inside and out was that of the best artists Paris could supply. It was magnificently furnished—a museum of beautiful objects, and curious ones, too. One bedroom was a model of an officer's apartments on board a man-of-war, even to the water (painted) splashing through a porthole. Another bedroom was a replica of an officer's tent. These were designed and furnished for the sons of the Parisian merchant, who for some domestic reason never went near his petite palace. He lent it to Boulanger, and there he lived the life of an exiled monarch. The place has never been touched since he walked out of it. In the stateroom, in which he received political deputations of his supporters from France, the chairs were arranged in a semi-circle round the table at which he sat when he received
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