To Make Sport for our Neighbours Read online

  To make sport for our Neighbours

  Being extracts from the commonplace books of

  Francis Bennet, Esq. of Longbourn, in Hertfordshire.

  Copyright © 2016 Ronald McGowan

  All rights Reserved

  Table of Contents :

  Chapter One : The Inexorability of Universal Truths.

  Chapter Two : Considerations of Rightful Property

  Chapter Three : The Joys of Matrimony

  Chapter Four : Mutual Society, Help, and Comfort

  Chapter Five: Ordained for the procreation of children

  Chapter Six: Why are you cast down, O my soul

  Chapter Seven : When I became a man, I put away childish things

  Chapter Eight : To a father waxing old, nothing is dearer than a daughter

  Chapter Nine: whose daughters ye are as long as ye do well, and are not afraid with any amazement.

  Chapter Ten: Coming Out

  Chapter Eleven : A Poetic Swain

  Chapter Twelve: New Arrivals.

  Chapter Thirteen : A Time to Dance

  Chapter Fourteen : Allowed to be a sweet girl

  Chapter Fifteen : The advantages of an indifferent constitution

  Chapter Sixteen : An old connexion renewed

  Chapter Seventeen Benefit of Clergy

  Chapter Eighteen A Name of Power

  Chapter Nineteen An Invitation

  Chapter Twenty Tread we a Measure

  Chapter Twenty-One A Stern Choice

  Chapter Twenty-two An Engagement

  Chapter Twenty-Three A Change of Visitors

  Chapter Twenty-Four Lacunae

  Chapter Twenty-five A Trip to the Seaside

  Chapter Twenty Six Arrivals and Departures

  Chapter Twenty-seven News from Brighton

  Chapter Twenty-eight Chasing Wild Geese.

  Chapter Twenty-nine Waiting

  Chapter Thirty Lydia Redux

  Chapter Thirty-one A Surfeit of Sons-in-Law

  Chapter Thirty-two A Distinguished Visitor

  Chapter Thirty-three Surprises

  Chapter Thirty-four Consultations

  Chapter Thirty-five The Benefits of Sea Air

  Chapter Thirty-six Magnaque pars mei vitabit Libitinam

  Certain is it that there is no kind of affection so purely angelic as of a father to a daughter. In love to our wives there is desire; to our sons, ambition; but to our daughters there is something which there are no words to express. ~Joseph Addison

  Chapter One : The Inexorability of Universal Truths.

  It is a truth universally acknowledged, at least by the female of the species, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

  However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

  How often have I benefitted from (or should that be suffered from) the consequences of this universal verity? From birth, certainly, and even before then, it may almost be said, for our fathers obtained their brides as a consequence of this assumption, and their fathers before them, in almost every case.

  How many of us have the strength of character, or the simple good fortune, to stand up to the assaults that are continually made upon such a man? Age is no defence. How often do we not see May matched with December? In fact it can almost be an advantage, in the eyes of the ladies, providing settlements are properly made. Nor does plainness of feature, even deformity or disablement, nor yet sheer imbecility, provide any reliable shelter.

  The man’s wishes or inclinations are very rarely of any consequence in the matter. He speaks casually to a young lady, thinks no more of it, and finds the next day all his acquaintance wishing him joy, the two mothers concerned confederates in planning parties and dresses, and the parson calling to discuss dates and hymns.

  So, at any rate, has been my personal experience of what is commonly termed ‘courtship’.

  I came down from college, much against my will, and much aggrieved at the interruption to my studies, but determined to do the right thing by the family estate. Matrimony was the last thing on my mind, but I found the subject introduced almost instantly by my father.

  “You, my boy, are the last of the Bennets,” was the first thing he said to me after the conventional greeting. “You must do your duty. You must produce an heir, or else Longbourn and all it contains will be lost forever to our family, and go to your odious cousin, Mr. Collins.”

  He continued at some length after this, but all that he said can be summed up in one word “entail”.

  I must confess that the benefits of the legal arrangement – I almost said ‘entanglement’ – known as an entail have never been clear to me, nor to any other lay person with whom I have discussed the subject. A lawyer will expound at great length upon the topic, extolling its supposed advantages the while, but I have yet to meet one who succeeded in conveying its purpose to me in terms that I could understand. And yet, surely, it cannot have been invented purely in order to create work for the legal profession?

  The drawbacks of the arrangement, however, are most abundantly clear to any father of daughters, as who should know better than I?

  As a second son, I never expected to have to occupy myself with such concerns. The estate would go to the heir, in the course of nature. I was to take my degree, progress to a fellowship at my college, and distinguish the family name by the production of some prodigiously learned treatise. It seems laughable to think of it now, but, in my salad days, I was highly regarded, indeed, much caressed by the faculty at Cambridge, and all sorts of distinctions were prophesied for me. Well in advance of my graduation, I had already settled on the subject of my thesis.

  The unexpected death of my elder brother, who was carried off rapidly and inexorably by a putrid fever, contracted after unwisely failing to change his wet socks after tramping through the long grass in the rain, occasioned (I could almost say ‘entailed’) a change of fortune for me.

  On my shoulders now would fall the burden of the estate in the fullness of time, and I must prepare for that contingency. It was only with difficulty that I prevailed upon my father to allow me to finish my degree. Thereafter, I must abandon all hopes of ever writing more than M.A. after my name, and attend to my duty, which now precluded any hope of a fellowship.

  The duty to which I refer was not that of managing the estate. We had a perfectly trustworthy steward who knew his business far better than any Bennet ever would. The duty which barred me from a fellowship and college life was that of fathering an heir, for a fellow may not marry. Fellows did marry, of course, but when they did so they forfeited their fellowship and had to leave the university.

  My old tutor attempted to console me on my last day at college, with the prospect of conducting independent research.

  “Mr. Priestley was of no college when he performed his great work with the electric fluid, and with dephlogisticated air,” he remarked, “nor was Mr. Gibbon when he wrote his great history. You will astonish the world yet, my young friend. You have it in you.”

  All of which was comforting but rather vague.

  What was even more vague and a lot less comforting was how I was expected to select a brood mare from among the daughters of the local gentry who were continually thrown in my way by their fathers or mine.

  I own I was, perhaps, rather nice at first. I made difficulties. This young lady was too fat, that one too thin, a third too old, a fourth too young. All of them were too…..well, they were too…. what, with the best will in the world and a s
incere desire to avoid a more offensive term, I can only call limited.

  The daughters of the local gentry came, as far as I could make out, in two varieties, long and short. The long ranged from towering beanpoles, with strictly tubular figures and the faces of horses, to strapping giantesses whose footsteps shook the ground and whom no-one but the fabled Jack would dare approach for fear of being swatted like a fly in a moment of inattention.

  The short tended to be of basically spherical build, sometimes with traces of a beard or moustache, and physically challenged by such daunting tasks as climbing the stairs to bed. Their faces were wont to display more of the porcine than the equine.

  Every one of them enjoyed the intellectual ability and mental capacity of a turnip, combined, for the most part, with the charm and tact of a slug.

  The one exception was Miss Coker. She was of just the right age, quite outrageously beautiful, in spectacular health, the daughter of an old friend of my father’s, and had 20,000L of her own.

  Unfortunately, she was convinced that she was a teapot, and would go about with her right arm raised just so, curved like the spout, and her left looped into the handle, and invariably insisted on pouring out for every person she met.

  Her sole topic of conversation, naturally, was tea, and any attempt to introduce any other subject threw her into such a frenzy of bending sideways, to pour out, and rotating on the spot, to stir the leaves, as could be quite distressing to the uninitiated.

  It shows how desperate I was that I even considered her, but that, at my father’s urging, I did. I went so far as to consult a mad-doctor in London, who convinced me that the risk of lunacy - or, at best, imbecility - being passed on to future generations was far too high for the enterprise to be taken any further.

  It began to seem that my father’s desire for a grandson and heir would never be accomplished. There exists for the male sex no equivalent of the fishing fleet to India, or I am sure I should have been despatched to that pestilential sub-continent.

  As it was, we found ourselves at a stand, and considering the advantages of a removal, for a period, to a fashionable watering place, where the expense could be set against the likelihood of encountering not merely eligible females, but eligible heiresses.

  “We must not be too nice,” pronounced my father. “Old county families are all very well, but you may see those already among our neighbours, and look how we have fared with them. A nabob’s daughter, laden with rupees would be just the thing, or even a tradesman’s, providing the dowry were sufficient and the relations not too objectionable. I do not wish to appear mercenary, however.”

  “I do not wish to appear at all in such a place,” was my rejoinder. “I can think of few things more tedious than an endless parade of balls and parties, pretending to listen to boring people mouthing vapid commonplaces while selecting breeding stock. At least a cattle market is open about its function.”

  We were at cross purposes, as ever, and must agree to differ. I positively refused to undertake a pilgrimage to Bath, but found myself constrained to agree to enquiries being made about lodgings at Brighton. Of whom such enquiries might be made, I had not the slightest notion, and was confident that my father had no more than I, and I comforted myself with the thought that no such change in circumstances was likely in the foreseeable future.

  This was the face of things that was seen when the Gardiners first came to Meryton.

  Chapter Two : Considerations of Rightful Property

  Mr. Gardiner was an attorney, who had made a modest competence from years of practising in London, and, seeking some country practice to ease his way into retirement, had taken over the clients of old Soames, our family solicitor when that gentleman had finally succumbed to the gout. He was a brisk, business-like man, who knew his –dear me, I almost said ‘trade’, but that would never do – who knew his profession inside out and whose social skills did him no harm at all in our little community. He had three children, a son and two daughters. His son was at a counting-house in the city, and came only rarely to Meryton, but Gardiner père and his daughters formed a welcome addition to our circle.

  Any addition at all would have been more than welcome, to be sure. It is impossible for the outside world to conceive how incredibly restricted the society of Meryton was at that time. Nowadays, even bankers and mill-owners are accepted in society, but when I was young, things were different. Gentry mixed only with gentry, and the local nobility, of course. Clergy were acceptable, as were officers in His Majesty’s service, although there were those who still had their doubts about the rude and licentious soldiery. The learned professions were only just beginning to be admitted to the society of their superiors. A Doctor of Divinity, or of Philosophy, or Letters, would be accorded due respect, but a Doctor of Medicine was just as likely to have to use the servant’s entrance. A judge or a magistrate would be welcomed to the squire’s board, but a barrister, or a mere attorney would find himself on shakier ground.

  Mr. Gardiner, however, proved himself to be a sound, gentlemanlike, conversible person, polite and reliable in his professional capacity, of course, but also in his private persona.

  His son I had hardly met at that time, but he struck me as very like to his father, a sensible man who did not require too much talking to. The daughter was seen at every local assembly and ball, and was much talked about for her beauty and wit.

  This did not impress me over much. For a young lady in our country, the possession of a sufficient number of arms, legs, digits, ears and eyes, topped by at least some covering of hair, was sufficient to qualify the possessor as a beauty, while the title of ‘wit’ was apt to be disposed upon anyone not patently completely witless.

  I had so far – I know not how it came about - avoided the meeting with this paragon of a newcomer. This, in itself, did not signify. I might almost say that I tend to avoid paragons on principle. On paper, and in repute, they may be very well. In the flesh, they invariably disappoint. Either they are not paragons at all, unless the word be so construed as to denote a person distinguished in no particular way from any other, or they are so engrossed with their own virtue as to be insufferable to ordinary mortals.

  It was by no particular design, however, that I had been otherwise engaged during the functions that the Gardiners had attended. In those days I was still keeping up my university acquaintance, and was often away from Meryton.

  In the course of nature, nonetheless, it could only be a matter of time before she and her father were invited to dine at Longbourn. When that momentous event came about, I found myself agreeably surprised.

  I had made not a little progress in my researches that afternoon, and was in a mood to be pleased with all that I encountered. That is the only excuse that I can allege for the events that stemmed from that meeting. Looking back now, with the supreme advantage of hindsight I find it hard to believe myself, and could almost be persuaded to agree with Shakespeare on the ‘destiny that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we may.’

  Miss Gardiner was certainly possessed of the requisite number of arms, legs, and other appendages, and the head of hair topping this assemblage positively shone like gold. In fact, she was quite astonishingly beautiful. My education, I believe, had, up to now, been in no way lacking. I had made the required tour of the best galleries in Italy before going up to the university, and thought myself not ill-equipped to judge upon that point. Not one of the madonnas, nor even Botticelli’s pagan goddesses that I had seen during that trip made such an impression upon me.

  Indeed, as she walked into our drawing room, I recollect to have found myself murmuring “In quella parte del libro de la mia memoria si trova una rubrica la quale dice: Incipit vita nova.”

  Perhaps my memory plays me tricks. It is apt to do so with increasing frequency these days, and it does all seem far too post hoc, ergo propter hoc to be true. But that is my recollection, for what it is worth, and I do not, and shall not retract it. If prophecy it was, then it was indeed self-fu
lfilling, and who should take the credit, if that be the word, for it but myself.

  The voice of this vision, when she uttered a few conventional words of greeting, proved to be in keeping with her appearance. It was rich in tone, well-modulated and clear, yet quiet and in no way raucous. It was quite unlike the boisterous tones of the local maidens. Her words, it is true, were commonplace enough, but they were apt to the occasion and not excessively engrossing of the conversation. Above all, she listened attentively when I spoke, or at least gave the appearance of doing so.

  I believe that very little else is needed, provided the young lady be not too undeniably hideous, to predispose a gentleman in her favour, than to appear to hang on his every word. This was certainly the effect I felt myself subject to.

  “Vanitas vanitatum”, the reader may cry at this point. I dare say he would be right, in every sense of the Latin words. And yet, once or twice during the evening, I thought I caught her practising upon her interlocutors with subtle puns that went beyond their notice. The shy smile that she bestowed upon me following each of these occasions convinced me the more.

  In short, by the time the evening was over, I was, if not already half in love with her, at least disposed to consider the possibility.

  Why this should be so, I have since had leisure to consider. The only conclusion I have been able to reach is that I was in a mood to be pleased with everything. I was also tired of constantly resisting the threats, entreaties and cajolements of my father, and all the other pressures constantly being imposed upon me.

  I was, I fear, susceptible, a very dangerous state of mind for a gentleman to be in when surrounded by unmarried ladies.