THE BACHELOR BEDROOM.
The
great merit of this subject is that it starts itself. The Bachelor Bedroom is
familiar to everybody who owns a country house, and to everybody who has stayed
in a country house. It is the one especial sleeping apartment, in all civilized
residences used for the reception of company, which preserves a character of its
own. Married people and young ladies may be shifted about from bedroom to
bedroom as their own caprice or the domestic convenience of the host may
suggest. But the bachelor guest, when he has once had his room set apart for
him, contrives to dedicate it to the perpetual occupation of single men from
that moment. Who else is to have the room afterwards, when the very atmosphere
of it is altered by tobacco-smoke? Who can venture to throw it open to nervous
spinsters, or respectable married couples, when the footman is certain, from
mere force of habit, to make his appearance at the door, with contraband bottles
and glasses, after the rest of the family have retired for the night? Where,
even if these difficulties could be got over, is any second sleeping apartment
to be found, in any house of ordinary construction, isolated enough to secure
the soberly reposing portion of the guests from being disturbed by the regular
midnight party which the bachelor persists in giving in his bedroom?
Dining-rooms and breakfast-rooms may change places; double-bedded rooms and
single-bedded rooms may shift their respective characters backwards and forwards
amicably among each other—but the Bachelor Bedroom remains immovably in its own
place; sticks immutably to its own bad character; stands out victoriously
whether the house is full, or whether the house is empty, the one hospitable
institution that no repentant after-thoughts of host or hostess can ever alter.
Such a social phenomenon as this, taken with its surrounding circumstances,
deserves more notice than it has yet obtained. The bachelor has been profusely
served up on all sorts of literary tables; but, the presentation of him has been
hitherto remarkable for a singularly monotonous flavour of matrimonial sauce. We
have heard of his loneliness, and its remedy; of his solitary position in
illness, and its remedy; of the miserable neglect of his linen, and its remedy.
But what have we heard of him in connexion with his remarkable bedroom, at those
periods of his existence when he, like the rest of the world, is a visitor at
his friend’s country house? Who has presented him, in his relation to married
society, under those peculiar circumstances of his life, when he is away from
his solitary chambers, and is thrown straight into the sacred centre of that
home circle from which his ordinary habits are so universally supposed to
exclude him? Here, surely, is a new aspect of the bachelor still left to be
presented; and here is a new subject for worn-out readers of the nineteenth
century whose fountain of literary novelty has become exhausted at the source.
Let me sketch the history—in anticipation of a large and serious work which I
intend to produce, one of these days, on the same subject—of the Bachelor
Bedroom, in a certain comfortable country house, whose hospitable doors fly open
to me with the beginning of summer, and close no more until the autumn is ended.
I must beg permission to treat this interesting topic from the purely human
point of view. In other words, I propose describing, not the Bedroom itself, but
the succession of remarkable bachelors who have passed through it in my time.
The hospitable country seat to which I refer is Coolcup House, the residence of
that enterprising gentleman-farmer and respected chairman of Quarter Sessions,
Sir John Giles. Sir John’s Bachelor Bedroom has been wisely fitted up on the
ground floor. It is the one solitary sleeping apartment in that part of the
house. Fidgety bachelors can jump out on to the lawn, at night, through the
bow-window, without troubling anybody to unlock the front door; and can
communicate with the presiding genius of the cellar by merely crossing the hall.
For the rest, the room is delightfully airy and spacious, and fitted up with all
possible luxury. It started in life, under Sir John’s careful auspices, the
perfection of neatness and tidiness. But the Bachelors have corrupted it long
since. However carefully the servants may clean, and alter, and arrange it, the
room loses its respectability again, and gets slovenly and unpresentable the
moment their backs are turned. Sir John himself, the tidiest man in existence,
has given up all hope of reforming it. He peeps in occasionally, and sighs and
shakes his head, and puts a chair in its place, and straightens a print on the
wall, and looks about him at the general litter and confusion, and gives it up
and goes out again. He is a rigid man and a resolute in the matter of order, and
has his way all over the rest of the house—but the Bachelor Bedroom is too much
for him.
The first bachelor who inhabited the room when I began to be a guest at Coolcup
House, was Mr. Bigg. Mr. Bigg is, in the strictest sense of the word, what you
call a fine man. He stands over six feet, is rather more than stout enough for
his height, holds his head up nobly, and dresses in a style of mingled gayety
and grandeur which impresses everybody. The morning shirts of Mr. Bigg are of so
large a pattern that nobody but his haberdasher knows what that pattern really
is. You see a bit of it on one side of his collar which looks square, and a bit
of it on the other side which looks round. It goes up his arm on one of his
wristbands, and down his arm on the other. Men who have seen his shirts off (if
such a statement may be permitted), and scattered loosely, to Sir John’s horror,
over all the chairs in the Bedroom, have been questioned, and have not been
found able to state that their eyes ever followed out the patterns of any one of
them fairly to the end. In the matter of beautiful and expensive clothing for
the neck Mr. Bigg is simply inexhaustible. Every morning he appears at breakfast
in a fresh scarf, and taps his egg magnificently with a daily blaze of new color
glowing on his capacious chest to charm the eyes of the young ladies who sit
opposite to him. All the other component parts of Mr. Bigg’s costume are of an
equally grand and attractive kind, and are set off by Mr. Bigg’s enviable figure
to equal advantage. Outside the Bachelor Bedroom, he is altogether an
irreproachable character in the article of dress. Outside the Bachelor Bedroom
he is essentially a man of the world, who can be thoroughly depended on to
perform any part allotted to him in any society assembled at Coolcup House; who
has lived among all ranks and sorts of people; who has filled a public situation
with great breadth and dignity, and has sat at table with crowned heads, and
played his part there with distinction; who can talk of these experiences, and
of others akin to them, with curious fluency and ease, and can shift about to
other subjects, and pass the bottle, and carve, and draw out modest people, and
take all other social responsibilities on his own shoulders complacently, at the
largest and dreariest county dinner party that Sir John, to his own great
discomfiture, can be obliged to give. Such is Mr. Bigg in the society of the
house, when the door of the Bachelor Bedroom has closed behind him. But what is
Mr. Bigg, when he has courteously wished the ladies good-night, when he has
secretly summoned the footman with the surreptitious tray, and when he has
deluded the unprincipled married men of the party into having half an hour’s
cozy chat with him before they go up-stairs? Another being—a being unknown to
the ladies, and unsuspected by the respectable guests. Inside the Bedroom, the
outward aspect of Mr. Bigg changes as if by magic; and a kind of gorgeous
slovenliness pervades him from top to toe. Buttons which have rigidly restrained
him within distinct physical boundaries, slip exhausted out of their
button-holes; and the figure of Mr. Bigg suddenly expands and asserts itself for
the first time as a protuberant fact. His neckcloth flies on to the nearest
chair, his rigid shirt-collar yawns open, his wiry under-whiskers ooze
multitudinously into view, his coat, waistcoat, and braces drop off his
shoulders. If the two young ladies who sleep in the room above, and who most
unreasonably complain of the ceaseless nocturnal croaking and growling of voices
in the Bachelor Bedroom, could look down through the ceiling now, they would not
know Mr. Bigg again, and would suspect that a dissipated artisan had intruded
himself into Sir John’s house.
In the same way, the company who have sat in Mr. Bigg’s neighbourhood at the
dinner-table at six o’clock, would find it impossible to recognize his
conversation at midnight. Outside the Bachelor Bedroom, if his talk has shown
him to be anything at all, it has shown him to be the exact reverse of an
enthusiast. Inside the Bachelor Bedroom, after all due attention has been paid
to the cigar-box and the footman’s tray, it becomes unaccountably manifest to
everybody that Mr. Bigg is, after all, a fanatical character, a man possessed of
one fixed idea. Then, and then only, does he mysteriously confide to his fellow
revellers that he is the one remarkable man in Great Britain who has discovered
the real authorship of Junius’s Letters. In the general society of the house,
nobody ever hears him refer to the subject; nobody ever suspects that he takes
more than the most ordinary interest in literary matters. In the select society
of the Bedroom, inspired by the surreptitious tray and the midnight secrecy,
wrapped in clouds of tobacco smoke, and freed from the restraint of his own
magnificent garments, the truth flies out of Mr. Bigg, and the authorship of
Junius’s Letters becomes the one dreary subject which this otherwise variously
gifted man persists in dilating on for hours together. But for the Bachelor
Bedroom nobody alive would ever have discovered that the true key to unlock Mr.
Bigg’s character is Junius. If the subject is referred to the next day by his
companions of the night, he declines to notice it; but, once in the Bedroom
again, he takes it up briskly, as if the attempted reference to it had been made
but the moment before. The last time I saw him was in the Bachelor Bedroom. It
was three o’clock in the morning; two tumblers were broken; half a lemon was in
the soap-dish, and the soap itself was on the chimney-piece; restless married
rakes, who were desperately afraid of waking up their wives when they left us,
were walking to and fro absently, and crunching knobs of loaf-sugar under foot
at every step; Mr. Bigg was standing, with his fourth cigar in his mouth, before
the fire; one of his hands was in the tumbled bosom of his shirt, the other was
grasping mine, while he pathetically appointed me his literary executor, and
generously bequeathed to me his great discovery of the authorship of Junius’s
Letters. Upon the whole, Mr. Bigg is the most incorrigible bachelor on record in
the annals of the Bedroom; he has consumed more candles, ordered more footmen’s
trays, seen more early daylight, and produced more pale faces among and the
gentlemen at breakfast-time than any other single visitor at Coolcup House.
The next bachelor in the order of succession, and the completest contrast
conceivable to Mr. Bigg, is Mr. Jollins. He is, perhaps, the most
miserable-looking little man that ever tottered under the form of humanity. Wear
what clothes he may, he invariably looks shabby in them. He is the victim of
perpetual accidents and perpetual ill-health; and the Bachelor Bedroom, when he
inhabits it, is turned into a doctor’s shop, and bristles all over with bottles
and pills. Mr. Jollins’s personal tribute to the hospitalities of Coolcup House
is always paid in the same singularly unsatisfactory manner to his host. On one
day in the week, he gorges himself gaily with food and drink, and soars into the
seventh heaven of convivial beatitude. On the other six, he is invariably ill in
consequence, is reduced to the utmost rigours of starvation and physic, sinks
into the lowest depths of depression, and takes the bitterest imaginable views
of human life. Hardly a single accident has happened at Coolcup House in which
he has not been personally and chiefly concerned; hardly a single malady can
occur to the human frame the ravages of which he has not practically exemplified
in his own person under Sir John’s roof. If any one guest, in the fruit season,
terrifies the rest by writhing under the internal penalties in such cases made
and provided by the laws of Nature, it is Mr. Jollins. If any one tumbles
up-stairs, or down-stairs, or off a horse, or out of a dog-cart, it is Mr.
Jollins. If you want a case of sprained ankle, a case of suppressed gout, a case
of complicated earache, toothache, headache, and sore-throat, all in one, a case
of liver, a case of chest, a case of nerves, or a case of low fever, go to
Coolcup House while Mr. Jollins is staying there, and he will supply you, on
demand, at the shortest notice and to any extent. It is conjectured by the
intimate friends of this extremely wretched bachelor, that he has but two
sources of consolation to draw on, as a set-off against his innumerable
troubles. The first is the luxury of twisting his nose on one side, and stopping
up his air passages and Eustachian tubes with inconceivably large quantities of
strong snuff. The second is the oleaginous gratification of incessantly
anointing his miserable little beard and mustachios with cheap-bear’s grease,
which always turns rancid on the premises before he has half done with it. When
Mr. Jollins gives a party in the Bachelor Bedroom, his guests have the
unexpected pleasure of seeing him take his physic, and hearing him describe his
maladies and recount his accidents. In other respects, the moral influence of
the Bedroom over the characters of those who occupy it, which exhibits Mr. Bigg
in the unexpected literary aspect of a commentator on Junius, is found to tempt
Mr. Jollins into betraying a horrible triumph and interest in the maladies of
others, of which nobody would suspect him in the general society of the house.
“I noticed you, after dinner to-day,” says this invalid bachelor, on such
occasions, to any one of the Bedroom guests who may be rash enough to complain
of the slightest uneasiness in his presence; “I saw the corners of your mouth
get green, and the whites of your eyes look yellow. You have got a pain here,”
says Mr. Jollins, gaily indicating the place to which he refers on his own
shattered frame, with an appearance of extreme relish—”a pain here, and a
sensation like having a cannon-ball inside you, there. You will be parched with
thirst and racked with fidgets all to-night; and to-morrow morning you will get
up with a splitting headache, and a dark brown tongue, and another cannon-ball
in your inside. My dear fellow, I’m a veteran at this sort of thing; and I know
exactly the state you will be in next week, and the week after, and when you
will have to try the sea-side, and how many pounds’ weight you will lose, to a
dead certainty, before you can expect to get over this attack. He’s congested,
you know” continues Mr. Jollins, addressing himself confidentially to the
company in general, “congested—I mean as to his poor unfortunate liver. A nasty
thing, gentlemen—ah, yes, yes, yes, a long, tiresome, wearing, nasty thing, I
can tell you.”
Thus, while Mr. Bigg always astonishes the Bedroom guests on the subject of
Junius, Mr. Jollins always alarms them on the subject of themselves. Mr. Smart,
the next, and third bachelor, placed in a similar situation, displays himself
under a more agreeable aspect, and makes the convivial society that surrounds
him, for the night at least, supremely happy.
On the first day of his arrival at Coolcup House, Mr. Smart deceived us all.
When he was first presented to us, we were deeply impressed by the serene
solemnity of this gentleman’s voice, look, manner, and costume. He was as
carefully dressed as Mr. Bigg himself, but on totally different principles. Mr.
Smart was fearfully and wonderfully gentlemanly in his avoidance of anything
approaching to bright colour on any part of his body. Quakerish drabs and greys
clothed him in the morning. Dismal black, unrelieved by an atom of jewellery,
undisturbed even by so much as a flower in his button-hole, encased him grimly
in the evening. He moved about the room and the garden with a ghostly and solemn
stalk. When the ladies got brilliant in their conversation, he smiled upon them
with a deferential modesty and polite Grandisonian admiration that froze the
blood of “us youth” in our veins. When he spoke it was like reading a passage
from an elegant moral writer—the words were so beautifully arranged, the
sentences were turned so musically, the sentiment conveyed was so delightfully
well regulated, so virtuously appropriate to nothing in particular. At such
times he always spoke in a slow, deep, and gentle drawl, with a thrillingly
clear emphasis on every individual syllable. His speech sounded occasionally
like a kind of highly-bred foreign English, spoken by a distinguished stranger
who had mastered the language to such an extent that he had got beyond the
natives altogether. We watched enviously all day for any signs of human
infirmity in this surprising individual. The men detected him in nothing. Even
the sharper eyes of the women only discovered that he was addicted to looking at
himself affectionately in every glass in the house, when he thought that nobody
was noticing him. At dinner-time we all pinned our faith on Sir John’s excellent
wine, and waited anxiously for its legitimate effect on the superb and icy
stranger. Nothing came of it; Mr. Smart was as carefully guarded with the bottle
as he was with the English language. All through the evening, he behaved himself
so dreadfully well that we quite began to hate him. When the company parted for
the night, and when Mr. Smart (who was just mortal enough to be a bachelor)
invited us to a cigar in the Bedroom, his highly-bred foreign English was still
in full perfection; his drawl had reached its elocutionary climax of rich and
gentle slowness; and his Grandisonian smile was more exasperatingly settled and
composed than ever.
The Bedroom door closed on us. We took off our coats, tore open our waistcoats,
rushed in a body on the new bachelor’s cigar-box, and summoned the evil genius
of the footman’s tray.
At the first round of the tumblers, the false Mr. Smart began to disappear, and
the true Mr. Smart approached, as it were, from a visionary distance, and took
his place among us. He chuckled—Grandison chuckled—within the hearing of every
man in the room! We were surprised at that, but what were our sensations when,
in less than ten minutes afterwards, the highly-bred English and the gentle
drawl mysteriously disappeared, and there came bursting out upon us, from the
ambush of Mr. Smart’s previous elocution, the jolliest, broadest, and richest
Irish brogue we had ever heard in our lives! The mystery was explained now. Mr.
Smart had a coat of the smoothest English varnish laid over him, for highly-bred
county society, which nothing mortal could peel off but bachelor company and
whisky-and-water. He slipped out of his close-fitting English envelope, in the
loose atmosphere of the Bachelor Bedroom, as glibly as a tightly-laced young
lady slips out of her stays when the admiring eyes of the world are off her
waist for the night. Never was man so changed as Mr. Smart was now. His moral
sentiments melted like the sugar in his grog; his grammar disappeared with his
white cravat. Wild and lavish generosity suddenly became the leading
characteristic of this once reticent man. We tried all sorts of subjects, and
were obliged to drop every one of them, because Mr. Smart would promise to make
us a present of whatever we talked about. The family mansion in Ireland
contained everything that this world can supply; and Mr. Smart was resolved to
dissipate that priceless store in gifts distributed to the much-esteemed
company. He promised me a schooner yacht, and made a memorandum of the exact
tonnage in his pocket-book. He promised my neighbour, on one side, a horse, and,
on the other, a unique autograph letter of Shakespeare’s. We had all three been
talking respectively of sailing, hunting, and the British Drama; and we now held
our tongues for fear of getting new presents if we tried new subjects. Other
members of the festive assembly took up the ball of conversation, and were
prostrated forthwith by showers of presents for their pains. When we all parted
in the dewy morning, we left Mr. Smart with dishevelled hair, checking off his
voluminous memoranda of gifts with an unsteady pencil, and piteously entreating
us, in the richest Irish-English, to correct him instantly if we detected the
slightest omission anywhere.
The next morning, at breakfast, we rather wondered which nation our friend would
turn out to belong to. He set all doubts at rest the moment he opened the door,
by entering the room with the old majestic stalk, saluting the ladies with the
serene Grandison smile, trusting we had all rested well during the night, in a
succession of elegantly-turned sentences, and enunciating the highly-bred
English with the imperturbably-gentle drawl which we all imagined, the night
before, that we had lost forever. He stayed more than a fortnight at Coolcup
House; and, in all that time, nobody ever knew the true Mr. Smart except the
guests in the Bachelor Bedroom.
The fourth Bachelor on the list deserves especial consideration and attention.
In the first place, because he presents himself to the reader, in the character
of a distinguished foreigner. In the second place, because he contrived, in the
most amiable manner imaginable, to upset all the established arrangements of
Coolcup House—inside the Bachelor Bedroom, as well as outside it—from the moment
when he entered its doors, to the moment when he left them behind him on his
auspicious return to his native country. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a rare,
probably a unique, species of bachelor; and Mr. Bigg, Mr. Jollins, and Mr. Smart
have no claim whatever to stand in the faintest light of comparison with him.
When I mention that the distinguished guest now introduced to notice is Herr von
Müffe, it will be unnecessary for me to add that I refer to the distinguished
German poet, whose far-famed Songs Without Sense have aided so immeasurably in
thickening the lyric obscurities of his country’s harp. On his arrival in
London, Herr von Müffe forwarded his letter of introduction to Sir John by post,
and immediately received, in return, the usual hospitable invitation to Coolcup
House.
The eminent poet arrived barely in time to dress for dinner; and made his first
appearance in our circle while we were waiting in the drawing-room, for the
welcome signal of the bell. He waddled in among us softly and suddenly, in the
form of a very short, puffy, florid, roundabout old gentleman, with flowing gray
hair and a pair of huge circular spectacles. The extreme shabbiness and
dinginess of his costume was so singularly set off by the quantity of foreign
orders of merit which he wore all over the upper part of it, that a sarcastic
literary gentleman among the guests defined him to me, in a whisper, as a
compound of “decorations and dirt.” Sir John advanced to greet his distinguished
guest, with friendly right hand extended as usual. Herr von Müffe, without
saying a word, took the hand carefully in both his own, and expressed
affectionate recognition of English hospitality, by transferring it forthwith to
that vacant space between his shirt and his waistcoat which extended over the
region of the heart. Sir John turned scarlet, and tried vainly to extricate his
hand from the poet’s too affectionate bosom. The dinner-bell rang, but Herr von
Müffe still held fast. The principal lady in the company half rose, and looked
perplexedly at her host—Sir John made another and a desperate effort to
escape—failed again—and was marched into the dining-room, in full view of his
servants and his guests, with his hand sentimentally imprisoned in his foreign
visitor’s waistcoat.
After this romantic beginning, Herr von Müffe rather surprised us by showing
that he was decidedly the reverse of a sentimentalist in the matter of eating
and drinking. Neither dish nor bottle passed him, without paying heavy tribute,
all through the repast. He mixed his liquors, especially, with the most
sovereign contempt for all sanitary considerations; drinking Champagne and beer,
the sweetest Constantia and the tawniest port, all together, with every
appearance of the extremest relish. Conversation with Herr von Müffe, both at
dinner, and all through the evening, was found to be next to impossible, in
consequence of his knowing all languages (his own included) equally incorrectly.
His German was pronounced to be a dialect never heard before; his French was
inscrutable; his English was a philological riddle which all of us guessed at
and none of us found out. He talked, in spite of these difficulties,
incessantly; and, seeing that he shed tears several times in the course of the
evening, the ladies assumed that his topics were mostly of a pathetic nature,
while the coarser men compared notes with each other, and all agreed that the
poet was drunk. When the time came for retiring, we had to invite ourselves into
the Bachelor Bedroom; Herr von Müffe having no suspicion of our customary
midnight orgies, and apparently feeling no desire to entertain us, until we
informed him of the institution of the footman’s tray—when he became hospitable
on a sudden, and unreasonably fond of his gay young English friends.
While we were settling ourselves in our places round the bed, a member of the
company kicked over one of the poet’s capacious Wellington boots. To the
astonishment of every one, there instantly ensued a tinkling of coin, and some
sovereigns and shillings rolled surprisingly out on the floor from the innermost
recesses of the boot. On receiving his money back, Herr von Müffe informed us,
without the slightest appearance of embarrassment, that he had not had time,
before dinner, to take more than his watch, rings, and decorations, out of his
boots. Seeing us all stare at this incomprehensible explanation, our
distinguished friend kindly endeavoured to enlighten us further by a long
personal statement in his own polyglot language. From what we could understand
of this narrative (which was not much), we gathered that Herr von Müffe had
started at noon that day, as a total stranger in our metropolis, to reach the
London-bridge station in a cab; and that the driver had taken him, as usual,
across Waterloo-bridge. On going through the Borough, the narrow streets,
miserable houses, and squalid population had struck the lively imagination of
Herr von Müffe, and had started in his mind a horrible suspicion that the cabman
was driving him into a low neighbourhood, with the object of murdering a
helpless foreign fare, in perfect security, for the sake of the valuables he
carried on his person. Chilled to the very marrow of his bones by this idea, the
poet raised the ends of his trousers stealthily in the cab, slipped his watch,
rings, orders, and money into the legs of his Wellington boots, arrived at the
station quaking with mortal terror, and screamed “Help!” at the top of his
voice, when the railway policeman opened the cab door. The immediate starting of
the train had left him no time to alter the singular travelling arrangements he
had made in the Borough; and he arrived at Coolcup House, the only individual
who had ever yet entered that mansion with his property in his boots.
Amusing as it was in itself, this anecdote failed a little in its effect on us
at the time, in consequence of the stifling atmosphere in which we were
condemned to hear it. Although it was then the sultry middle of summer, and we
were all smoking, Herr von Müffe insisted on keeping the windows of the Bachelor
Bedroom fast closed, because it was one of his peculiarities to distrust the
cooling effect of the night air. We were more than half inclined to go, under
these circumstances; and we were altogether determined to remove, when the tray
came in, and when we found our German friend madly mixing his liquors again by
pouring gin and sherry together into the same tumbler. We warned him, with a
shuddering prevision of consequences, that he was mistaking gin for water; and
he blandly assured us in return that he was doing nothing of the kind. “It is
good for My——” said Herr von Müffe, supplying his ignorance of the word stomach
by laying his chubby forefinger on the organ in question, with a sentimental
smile. “It is bad for Our——” retorted the wag of the party, imitating the poet’s
action, and turning quickly to the door. We all followed him—and, for the first
time in the annals of Coolcup House, the Bachelor Bedroom was emptied of company
before midnight.
Early the next morning, one of Sir John’s younger sons burst into my room in a
state of violent excitement.
“I say, what’s to be done with Müffe?” inquired the young gentleman, with wildly
staring eyes.
“Open his windows, and fetch the doctor,” I answered, inspired by the
recollections of the past night.”
“Doctor!” cried the boy; “the doctor won’t do—it’s the barber.”
“Barber?” I repeated.
“He’s been asking me to shave him!” roared my young friend, with vehement
comic indignation. “He rang his bell, and asked for the ‘Son of the House’—and
they made me go; and there he was, grinning in the big arm-chair, with his mangy
little shaving-brush in his hand, and a towel over his shoulder. ‘Good morning,
my dear. Can you shave My——’ says he, and taps his quivering old double chin
with his infernal shaving-brush. Curse his impudence! What’s to be done with
him?”
I arranged to explain to Herr von Müffe, at the first convenient opportunity,
that it was not the custom in England, whatever it might be in Germany, for “the
Son of the House” to shave his father’s guests; and undertook, at the same time,
to direct the poet to the residence of the village barber. When the German guest
joined us at breakfast, his unshaven chin, and the external results of his mixed
potations and his seclusion from fresh air, by no means tended to improve his
personal appearance. In plain words, he looked the picture of dyspeptic
wretchedness.
“I am afraid, sir, you are hardly so well this morning as we could all wish?”
said Sir John, kindly.
Herr von Müffe looked at his host affectionately, surveyed the company all round
the table, smiled faintly, laid the chubby forefinger once more on the organ
whose name he did not know, and answered with the most enchanting innocence and
simplicity:
“I am so sick!”
There was no harm—upon my word, there was no harm in Herr von Müffe. On the
contrary, there was a great deal of good-nature and genuine simplicity in his
composition. But he was a man naturally destitute of all power of adapting
himself to new persons and new circumstances; and he became amiably
insupportable, in consequence, to everybody in the house, throughout the whole
term of his visit. He could not join one of us in any country diversions. He
hung about the house and garden in a weak, pottering, aimless manner, always
turning up at the wrong moment, and always attaching himself to the wrong
person. He was dexterous in a perfectly childish way at cutting out little
figures of shepherds and shepherdesses in paper; and he was perpetually
presenting these frail tributes of admiration to the ladies, who always tore
them up and threw them away in secret the moment his back was turned. When he
was not occupied with his paper figures, he was out in the garden, gathering
countless little nosegays, and sentimentally presenting them to everybody; not
to the ladies only, but to lusty agricultural gentlemen as well, who accepted
them with blank amazement; and to schoolboys, home for the holidays, who took
them, bursting with internal laughter at the “molly-coddle” gentleman from
foreign parts. As for poor Sir John, he suffered more than any of us; for Herr
von Müffe was always trying to kiss him. In short, with the best intentions in
the world, this unhappy foreign bachelor wearied out the patience of everybody
in the house; and, to our shame be it said, we celebrated his departure, when he
left us at last, by a festival-meeting in the Bachelor Bedroom, in honour of the
welcome absence of Herr von Müffe. I cannot say in what spirit my
fellow-revellers have reflected on our behaviour since that time; but I know,
for my own part, that I now look back at my personal share in our proceedings
with rather an uneasy conscience. I am afraid we were all of us a little hard on
Herr von Müffe; and I hereby desire to offer him my own individual tribute of
tardy atonement, by leaving him to figure as the last and crowning type of the
Bachelor species presented in these pages. If he has produced anything
approaching to a pleasing effect on the reader’s mind, that effect shall not be
weakened by the appearance of any more single men, native or foreign. Let the
door of the Bachelor Bedroom close with our final glimpse of the German guest;
and permit the present chronicler to lay down the pen when it has traced
penitently, for the last time, the name of Herr von Müffe.
First published:
All The Year Round vol. I, 6 August 1859 pp. 355-360.