The Complete Simon Iff (8 page)

“I see.”

“If you want to win your matches, play as if it were a medal round. You have all the keenness; and the disasters don’t hurt you, which gives confidence. But of course, if you can read a man’s psychology, there are even surer ways of winning. Only be sure not to let your opponent get the psychology on you, as happened this afternoon.”

“Ye’re a gran’ thinker, sir. I didn’t quite get your name; I wish ye’d dine wi’ me the nicht.”

“Iff,” said the old man, “Simon Iff.”

“Not much If,” muttered Macpherson, “aboot your wurrk on the green!”

“But I’m afraid I’m busy to-night. Are you free Monday? Come and dine with me at the Hemlock Club. Seven thirty. Don’t dress!”

Macpherson was enchanted. The Hemlock Club! He had a vision of Paradise. It was the most exclusive club in London. Only one scandal marred its fame; early in the eighteenth century, a struggling painter of portraits, who had been rejected by the Academy, was blackballed by mistake for an Archbishop of York, whom nobody wanted. They made it up to the painter, but there was no getting rid of the Archbishop. So the committee of the club had dismissed all its servants, and filled their places with drunken parsons who had gone to the bad; in a month the Archbishop withdrew with what dignity remained to him. They had then hung his portrait in the least respected room in the club. To consolidate their position, and arm themselves against counter-attack, they passed a rule that no man should be eligible for membership unless he had done something “notorious and heretical,” and it had been amusing and instructive to watch bishops attacking cardinal points of their faith, judges delivering sarcastic comments on the law, artists upsetting all the conventions of the period, physicists criticising the doctrine of the conservation of energy, all to put themselves right with the famous Rule Forty-Nine. Most of these people had no real originality, of course, but at least it forced them to appear to defy convention; and this exercised a salutary influence on the general tone of Society.

On the walls were portraits and caricatures of most of the club worthies, with their heresies inscribed. Wellington was there, with his “Publish and be damned to you!” So was a great judge with that great speech on the divorce law which begins, “In this country there is not one law for the rich, and another for the poor,” and goes on to tell the applicant, a working tailor, that to secure a divorce he needed only arrange to have a private act of Parliament passed on his behalf. Geikie was there with “I don’t believe that God has written a lie upon the rocks”; Shelley with “I had rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon than go to Heaven with Paley and Malthus;” Byron with “Besides, they always smell of bread and butter,” Sir Richard Burton, with a stanza from the Kasidah; “There is no God, no man made God; a bigger, stronger, crueler man; Black phantom of our baby-fears, ere thought, the life of Life, began.” Swinburne was there too, with “Come down and redeem us from virtue;” and a host of others. There was even a memorial room in which candles were kept constantly burning. It commemorated the heretics whom the club had failed to annex. There was William Blake, with “Everything that lives is holy;” there was James Thomson, with “If you would not this poor life fulfil, then you are free to end it when you will, without the fear of waking after death;” there was Keats, with “Beauty is Truth, Truth, Beauty;” John Davidson, with a passage from the Ballad of a true-born poet:

    
We are the scum

    Of matter; fill the bowl!

    And scathe to him and death to him

    Who dreams he has a soul!” 

Aubrey Beardsley, Ernest Dowson, Beddoes, Crackenthorpe, were all represented. They had even Victor Neuburg, with “Sex is one; go now, be free.”

There was in this room a votive tablet with the names of those who had been invited to join the club, and refused; notably Whistler, below whose portrait of himself was his letter of refusal, which he had sent with it; “I could not possibly consent to meet people of my own kind; my friends tell me it is very painful.”

King Edward VII, also, was in this group, with the letter from his secretary: “His Majesty commands me to inform you that greatly as he appreciates the good wishes and loyalty of the president and members of the Hemlock Club, he cannot possibly take an oath declaring himself a Republican, or a Jacobite, as he understands is necessary to comply with Rule Forty-nine.”

There were many other curious rules in the Club; for example, a fine of a guinea for failing to eat mustard with mutton; another of Five Pounds for quoting Shakespeare within the precincts of the Club. The wearing of a white rose or a plaid necktie was punishable with expulsion; this dated from the period when it was heretical to be a Jacobite but dangerous to display it.

Many other customs of the Club were similarly memorial; the Head Porter was always dressed in moleskin, in honor of the mole whose hill tripped the horse of William The Third; members whose Christian names happened to be George had to pay double the usual subscription, in memory of the Club’s long hatred of the Four Georges; and at the annual banquet a bowl of hemlock was passed round in the great hall, decorated for the occasion as a funeral chamber; for it was always claimed that Socrates was the real founder of the Club. There was a solemn pretence, every year, of a search for the “missing archives of the Club.” On November the Fifth there was a feast in honor of Guy Fawkes; and on the eleventh of the same month the Lord Mayor of London of the year was burnt in effigy.

Such is the club to which Macpherson suddenly found himself invited. He felt that now he could marry; he would have something to boast of to his grandchildren!

II

But, as things chanced, Macpherson nearly missed the dinner after all. He would have called off anything else in the world. But he couldn’t give up that! However, it was a very sorry Scotsman who appeared at the door of the Club. In keeping with the general eccentricity of the place, the entrance to the Club was mean and small, almost squalid; a narrow oaken door, studded with iron. And no sooner had he reached the great open space within than the Head Porter called him aside, saying in a whisper, “Excuse me, Sir, but the Hanoverian spies are everywhere. Allow me to relieve you of your necktie!” For Macpherson had worn the Tartan of his clan all day. He was accommodated with a selection of the latest neckwear. This trifling matter subdued him most effectively; he felt himself transported to a new strange world. It did him good; for to the very steps of the Club he had been obsessed by the calamity of the day.

Simon Iff received him with affability and dignity, offered him a cigarette, and proceeded to show him the Club. Macpherson was intensely awed; he was in a kind of private edition de luxe of Westminster Abbey. He resolved to put on all his panoply of Scottish culture. At the memorial chamber he exclaimed aloud: “And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!” He was enchanted with the Whistler portrait. “A true Scot, Mr. Iff!” he said. “He was a man, take him for all in all, we shall not look upon his like again!”

“True, very true!” replied Iff, a trifle hastily. Before Aubrey Beardsley the Scot grew more melancholy than ever, “For he was likely, had he been put on, to have proved most royally,” he cried. They came to the portrait of Keats, a Severn from Sir Charles Dilke’s collection. “I weep for Adonais — he is dead,” said the banker. “Thank Heaven!” murmured Iff to himself, hoping that all would now be well. But his luck was out: he brought the next blow upon himself. “Some have doubted the autograph of Thomson here,” he said. Macpherson was determined to shine. “Never fear!” he said, “that’s the man’s fist. Do we not know the sweet Roman hand?” And he added: “I am but mad nor’ nor’ west; when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.” Iff groaned in spirit. He was glad when the memorial chamber was done. They came to the gallery of club members. Here the banker unmasked his batteries completely. Before Shelley he said that he, “like the base Indian, cast away a pearl richer than all his tribe;” he recognized Pope with eagerness as “a fellow of infinite jest;” he said to Byron, “The sly slow years shall not determinate the dateless limit of thy dear exile;” he apostrophized Swinburne, “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments of princes shall outlive this powerful rime;” of Burton he sighed, “A great traveler; mebbe the greatest, save Dave Livingstone, that we ever had; and now he’s gone to that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns.” Before Bishop Berkeley, he said; “That was the fellow who thought he could hold a fire in his hand by thinking on the frosty Caucasus or wallow naked in December snow by thinking on fantastic summer’s heat.” He dismissed Wellington with an airy gesture. “Seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannon’s mouth,” he said; but, feeling the remark rather severe, hedged with the remark that he frowned “as once he did when an angry parle he smote the sledded Polacks on the ice.” Simple Simon decided to take his guest to dinner without further delay, to induce him to feed heartily, and to enter, himself, upon a quick-firing monologue.

“I am in a light, French, effervescing mood to-night; I will drink champagne,” he said, as they took a seat at the table where, as it was darkly whispered, Junius had composed his celebrated letters. “We have a wonderful Pommery.” “I’m with you,” replied the banker, “though, for my part, I need it to relieve my mind. ’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, nor customary suits of solemn black, nor windy suspiration of forced breath; no, nor the fruitful river in the eye, nor the dejected haviour of the visage together with all forms, moods, shows of grief, that can denote me truly. These indeed seem, for they are actions that a man might play; but I have that within which passeth show; these but the trappings and the suits of woe.”

Some of the men at the next table — that at which Clifford, Arundel, Lauderdale, Arlington, and Buckingham had formed their famous Cabal — began to laugh. Simon Iff frowned them down sternly, and pointed to the Arabic Inscription on the wall — it had been given to Richard I by Saladin — which reads in translation, “He that receiveth a guest, entertaineth God.”

“I am sorry you should be troubled on this particular night,” he said to the Scotsman; “it is the pride of the members of this club to make their guests happy; and if it be anything within the power of any one of us to amend, be sure that we shall do our best. But perhaps your misfortune is one in which human aid is useless.”

“I will not bother you with my troubles, Mr. Iff,” returned the banker; “on the surface, it’s a purely business matter, though a very serious one. Yet the onus is of a personal nature. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is, to have a thankless child!”

“Well, if you like to tell me about it after dinner ——”

“I think it would interest you, and it will comfort me to confide in you. I do not wear my heart on my sleeve for daws to peck at; but on the other hand, why should I sit like Patience on a monument smiling at grief? But till dinner is done, away with sorrow; we will talk in maiden meditation, fancyfree, and tell black-hearted fear it lies, in spite of thunder.”

“Then let me tell you something of the history of this club!” cried Simon desperately, and he began to rattle off a combination of legend and fancy, mingled so happily with fact, and touched so elegantly with illustration, that Macpherson quite forgot his culture, and became the plain Scottish man of business, or rather the ambitious boy again as he was thirty years before, when he had first set foot on the ladder that was to lead him to one of the highest positions in the financial world.

When the waiter presented the bill, Iff marked a 19 in front of a printed item at its foot; the waiter filled in £95, and made the addition. Iff scribbled his name. The figure caught the trained eye of the banker. “Excuse me!” he cried; “it’s the rudest thing possible, but I would like to see that bit o’ paper. I’m just that curious, where there’s money.” Iff could not refuse; he passed the bill across the table.

“Nineteen Shakespeares!” exclaimed the Scot. “Ninety-five pounds sterling! what ’ll that mean, whateffer?”

“Well, I didn’t mean to tell you, Mr. Macpherson; it’s not very charming of me, but you oblige me. There is a fine of five pounds for every Shakespeare quotation made in this club — and of course, as your host, I’m responsible. Besides, it was well worth the money. The men at the next table have not had such a lovely time for years. Simple Simon, as they call me, won’t hear the last of it for a while!” But the Scot was stunned. He could only keep on repeating in a dazed way, “Ninety-five pounds! Ninety-five pounds! Ninety-five pounds!”

“Don’t think of it, I beg of you!” cried Iff. “I see that it distresses you. I am a rich man, and an old one; I shall never miss it. Besides, the fine goes to a most worthy object; the Society for Destroying Parliamentary Institutions.”

“I never heard of it.”

“Indeed! it is very powerful, I assure you. It carried through Payment of Members; it has greatly enlarged the Franchise, and is now working to have it extended to women.”

“I thought ye said Destroying Parliament.”

“Just so. These measures are directed towards reducing the whole thing to a farce. Already the power of Parliament is a thing of the past; authority is concentrated in the cabinet — nay, in a Camarilla within the cabinet, and even this Camarilla is very much in the hands of permanent officials whose names the public never hears.”

“D’ye ken, I can hardly believe my ain ears.”

“When the public demands a law which those in authority don’t like, they either block it in the Commons, or throw it out in the Lords, or get the Judges to interpret it so as to mean nothing at all, or the opposite of what it was intended to mean.”

“Losh!”

“You’re a banker. Would you submit your bank to popular management, interference by people who don’t know the first principles of the business?”

“It wad be the shutters up in just one se’nnight!”

“Nor will we intrust our country to people who know neither law, nor history, nor geography, nor commerce — except in their own petty trade — nor foreign affairs, not so much as whether our interests lie with those of our neighbors or clash with them; nor any other of the arts necessary to government.”