Philipson’s Party
Peter Philipson, Jr., chief clerk in the wholesale firm of Philipson Brothers, tallow chandlers and soap-boilers, Limehouse, London, arrived in Ballymurphy, County Cork, on the first day of March, 1880, for the express purpose of collecting the rents on his father’s estate there, which would fall due on the 31st of said month, and also of screwing out of the tenants various arrears which Mr. Gleeson, a former agent, had allowed to accumulate since the purchase of the property some three years previously by the senior Philipson. That enterprising candle manufacturer had invested in land just as he would in grease—with a view to a dividend; and his first action had been to raise the rents all round, a business arrangement which the obstinate farmers refused to view in anything like the cool, matter-of-fact manner in which it was regarded by Old Soapsuds,—which was the very irreverend title those benighted beings bestowed upon one of the most solvent merchants of the city of London. The agent, Mr. Gleeson, had been agent during the regime of the “old stock,” who had got along very comfortably with the tenantry until reverses on the turf and bad luck at the roulette table had forced the last of them to dispose of the estate to the highest bidder, the aforementioned manipulator of tallow and alkali. Mr. Gleeson had protested against the increased rents; he averred positively that it would be impossible to gather them, and, to do him justice, he made no effort in that direction, cheerfully accepting whatever he got, and calmly ignoring the reiterated mandates of the irate Philipson to evict Donovan and sell up Sullivan, and play the deuce generally with the rest of the tenants.
At last the man of soap bars and long dips had dismissed his easy-going agent and sent his son across, armed with plenary powers of eviction, ejectment, and all the multifarious legal weapons in the armory of landlordism. Young Peter felt fully equal to the task of reducing the entire Irish population to meek submission, and wasn’t going to be put down by a score or two beggarly Cork men, don’t you know. Peter was smart; Peter was more than smart, he was the most determined fellah of any fellah he knew. Why, he had been accustomed to deal with rascally workmen who were always wanting more wages, and he had once sacked fifty—fifty in a batch. The beggars were glad to send their wives to beg ’em back. He’d make these Irishmen sit up. He’d show ’em what was what. They had no old slow-coach of a Gleeson to deal with now. They had Peter Philipson—“no-nonsense Peter,” as they called him in the city.
The Manor House was fitted up for his temporary residence. He retained the old housekeeper and the cook and the coachman and a stable boy, only bringing from London with him his body-servant, one John Thomas Jones, a stolid cockney, who bade his relatives a sad adieu under the evident impression that he was about to face perils and catastrophes of the most alarming description among the cannibal Irish. Peter’s first proceeding was to present various letters of introduction to the neighboring landlords and the officers of the adjoining garrison; his next to extend to them an invitation to a soiree or party to be given as a kind of house-warming by him on the 20th of March, by which time he expected to be in a position to tell them that he had brought the recalcitrant occupiers of “his father’s ground” to their proper senses. These social duties performed, Mr. Philipson, Jr., despatched separate missives to each tenant, setting forth the amount of his arrears, including the incoming gale, and demanded a prompt settlement under penalty of immediate law proceedings. That task over, Peter rested upon his oars, purred contentedly to himself for a few days, wrote to his father that he had shaken the beggars up, and indicted a lengthy epistle to the Limehouse Chronicle on the proper method of settling the Irish difficulty.
On the morning of the 19th, Peter was astonished by a visit from his tenantry in a body. His first impression was that they had come to pay up arrears, and he chuckled at a success which he had scarcely expected so soon. On entering the room into which his housekeeper had invited the farmers, he changed his opinion. They hadn’t altogether the look of men who had come in either a penitent or a suppliant mood. Most of them retained their head-gear, and one or two were actually smoking. To say that Peter was amazed at this lack of respect for his presence would be a weak description of his feelings. He was shocked, startled, indignant, and, indeed, a little frightened, into the bargain. Recovering himself, he asked in a voice that sounded as if some of his own soap had got round his tongue, “Well, you’ve come to settle, I suppose?”
“Yes,” replied a sturdy, frieze-coated peasant, advancing from the rest without removing his caubeen. “You’re right; we want a settlement.”
“Ah, I thought I would bring you to your senses,” said Peter with an ill-disguised sneer.
Frieze-coat flushed and retorted, “It seems to me that you’ve got the wrong bull by the tail this time,” at which a broad smile lit up the twenty-odd faces, and there were one or two audible guffaws.
“Wrong bull? Who’s talking about bulls? What do you mean?”
“Well, we’re here to bring you to your senses; not to show that we’ve parted with our own.”
“I—I—” stammered Peter. “Upon my soul, my deah fellah, I don’t understand you.”
“Well, thin, I’ll try to insinse you. You’ve sint us notes askin’ for arrears that we don’t mane to pay. Yer ould father’s been thryin’ to raise rints on us that’s too high as it is. We ped the ould rint as long as we cud, but bad saysons an’ poor crops have med even the ould rint too heavy; so we’ve detarmined, every man, to offer you a fair rint for this gale, Griffith’s valuation, divil a ha’penny more, an’ if you don’t like to take that, troth you may whistle for your rints, for bad luck to the shilling you’ll get, at all, at all.”
Peter turned blue, red, yellow, white, and mottled by turns, and was nearly ten minutes searching for his voice before he found it. When he did get hold of it, he hardly recognized the tones as his own. “This is mo—mo—monstrous,” he ejaculated. “Begone! I shall have bailiffs in every cabin in the parish before the month’s out. I’ll evict—I’ll-I’ll—by Jove! I’ll—I’ll—Look here, go to Hong-Kong out of this!”
“Oh, we’re goin’,” responded the spokesman; “but, before we go, I’d like to give you a little bit of advice. We med you a fair offer, an’ ye’ve only returned abuse. Did you ever hear of Captain Boycott? Well, begorra, before this day-week you’ll think Captain Boycott a happy man to what you’ll be. We’re going to do the most complete, out-an’-out, thunderin’ boycottin’ on you that ever shook a man out of his breeches. Good day, an’ good luck to you. I hope your education in the fine arts of washin’ and cookin’, diggin’ yer own praties an’ lightin’ yer own fires, blackin’ yer own boots, an’ starchin’ yer own shirts, wasn’t neglected in yer youth, for ye’ll need it all, I assure you, on the word of a Sullivan. Come along, boys. Three cheers for the Land League!” A thundering hurrah shook the oaken rafters again and again, as the deputation filed slowly out of the room, and Peter sank into the nearest chair with a dim conviction surging through his brain that there was something wrong somewhere in the terrestrial system, and that Bow Lane, Limehouse, was a far more desirable location for his active genius than Ballymurphy, County Cork.
After half an hour’s diversified meditation, Peter decided that things were not so gloomy, after all. He would see his lawyer, and get out the decrees at once. As for the threat of boycotting, what did he care about that? He had no desire to cultivate the acquaintance of the tenantry, so how the deuce could he suffer by their refusal to speak or deal with him? Ha! ha! by Jove, it was absurd, ridiculously absurd. In his revived spirits Peter actually commenced an original fandango, but was interrupted in his terpsichorean evolutions by the entrance of his man Jones, over whose flabby countenance a facial eclipse had fallen, which at once arrested his master’s attention and his quickstep.
“Eh? Well? What’s up now?” queried Philipson.
“Hup! Heverythinks hup. Missus Moore, she’s hup and ’ooked it. The cook, she’s bin and gone and flued, also, likewise. The coachman and the ’ossler they’ve sloped, an’ the ’osses is a ’avin’ a jubilee on the front lawn. The kitchen fire, it’s gone out, and I do verily believe there ain’t a mossel of coal in the ’ouse. The butcher, ’e’s a bloomer, ’e is. Blow me if that ’ere butcher didn’t turn back with the legs o’ mutton, an’ the rounds o’ beef, an’ the shoulders o’ lamb as was a hordered for the lay-out to-morrow; and the fowl man, ’e did ditto with the turkeys an’ chickens, an’ the grocer, ’e’s another ditto, an’ I’ve come to give my notice. When I engaged to love, ’onor, an’ obey—I mean to brush your clothes an’ do all the other cetrys of a wally de sham—I didn’t bargain, not by no manner of means, for starvation. You may be as much Robinson Keruso as you like, but you don’t lug John Thomas in for Man Friday. Adoo. Fare you well. I’m going back to the roast beef of hold Hengland and Mary Ann Timmons, which, if she could see her faithful Jones a wearin’ to a skeleton she would break her ’art. Good-by, sir.”
Before Peter could gather in the full drift of his servitor’s disjointed sentences, that injured retainer was away, speeding to the nearest railway station with a firm conviction that his life depended on the distance he could place before nightfall between himself and Ballymurphy.
A hasty exploration of the premises convinced his master that he had spoken only too truly. There was not a servant in the house. The fires were all out; the larder was very nearly empty; the nearest provision store was four miles off; if he knew how to harness a horse to the gig he couldn’t do it, for, rejoicing in their unexpected freedom, his equine possessions were gaily gambolling in distant pastures; and Peter groaned as he pictured to himself the visit on the morrow of his invited guests, Captain Devereux and Lieutenant Talbot of the Lancers, the Rev. Jabez Wilkins, with his portly wife and buxom daughters, the neighboring squires from half a dozen estates—a goodly company of fifteen or sixteen in all, with not so much as a scullery maid to attend to their wants, and only three bottles of porter, a box of cigars, and a couple of loaves to feast their appetites!
It was awful. Marius amidst the ruins of Carthage, Casabianca on the burning deck, a Chinese mandarin in a Kearney convention, a fat alderman in a narrow lane with a Texan steer charging on his rear, Jonah in the whale’s belly, or a shipwrecked Mormon missionary contemplating burial in the digestive recesses of a tribe of cannibals may afford striking examples of perturbation of spirits, but Peter felt that day as if he would gladly change lots with any or all of them. What should he do? Would he tie black crape to the front knocker, with a card announcing his premature decease? Would he fly to other and fairer climes, where boycotting was unknown, and butchers, poulterers, grocers, cooks, and housekeepers had feeling hearts within their tender bosoms? Would he poison, hang, shoot, drown, or smother himself?
He didn’t do any of these things. He sought out Frieze-coat Sullivan. With tears in his eyes he besought that red-haired Cork-man to remove the edict which had brought desolation to his hearth and affliction to his soul. Sullivan was as merciful as he was mighty. He relented. He restored to Peter his satellite of the saucepan, his janitor of the stable, his legs of mutton, his groceries, and his peace of mind. The party came off, after all. Peter preserved his credit as a host, but it was at the sacrifice of his laurels as a land-agent.
If any reader desires now to ascertain the stormy depths of a soap-boiler’s soul, he has only do drop into the counting-house of Philipson Brothers, in the East end of London, and ask the manager his candid opinion of the Irish land question. He will probably be consigned to the nearest vat of boiling grease; but he will, at any rate, be firmly convinced that Philipson, Jr., entertains very strong ideas on the subject.