The Technology of Wafers and Waffles

II: Recipes, Product Development and

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 The Technology of Wafers and Waffles
II: Recipes, Product Development and
Knowhow - eBook PDF
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Rogues and
vagabonds
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
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eBook.

Title: Rogues and vagabonds

Author: Compton MacKenzie

Release date: October 10, 2023 [eBook #71848]

Most recently updated: October 29, 2023

Language: English

Original publication: New York: George H. Doran Company,

1927

Credits: Steve Mattern, Quentin Campbell, and the Online

Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
(This file was produced from images generously made
available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROGUES

AND VAGABONDS ***
 Transcriber’s Note

See end of this document for details of corrections and other changes.
ROGUES AND VAGABONDS
COMPTON MACKENZIE
By COMPTON MACKENZIE
Rogues and Vagabonds
Fairy Gold
Coral
Santa Claus in Summer
The Heavenly Ladder
The Old Men of the Sea
The Altar Steps
Parson’s Progress
Rich Relations
The Seven Ages of Women
Sylvia Scarlett
Poor Relations
Sylvia and Michael
The Vanity Girl
Carnival
Plashers Mead
Sinister Street
Youth’s Encounter
The Passionate Elopement
ROGUES AND VAGABONDS

By

COMPTON MACKENZIE

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

ON MURRAY HILL : : NEW YORK
 COPYRIGHT, 1927,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

ROGUES AND VAGABONDS

—B—
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
To A. H.
 CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE

I Neptune’s Grotto 11
II The Factory 26
III The Proposal 36
IV Married Life 43
V Tintacks in Brigham 55
VI The Diorama 74
VII True Love 83
VIII Rogues and Vagabonds 96
IX A Merry Christmas 110
X The Pantomime 121
XI The End of the Harlequinade 127
XII Looking for Work 135
XIII Lebanon House 144
XIV Letizia the First 163
XV The Tunnel 172
XVI Blackboy Passage 182
XVII The Two Roads 195
XVIII Triennial 215
XIX Nancy’s Contralto 222
XX Southward 232
XXI Classic Grief 240
XXII Sorrento 248
XXIII Cœur de Lion 267
XXIV Decennial 274
XXV The Common Chord 286
ROGUES AND VAGABONDS
 ROGUES AND VAGABONDS
CHAPTER I NEPTUNE’S GROTTO

SUPERIOR
FIRE WORKS
at the
NEPTUNE’S GROTTO
Tavern and Tea Gardens
PIMLICO
on Thursday Evening, 20th, July, 1829.
By
MADAME ORIANO
The Celebrated Pyrotechnic to HIS MAJESTY
The Exhibition will include
A Grand Display of various kinds of

WATER FIRE WORKS

On the Grosvenor Basin.

ORDER OF FIRING
1. A Battery of Maroons, or imitation Cannon
2. A Bengal Light
3. Sky Rockets
4. A Saxon Wheel
5. Tourbillions
6. Phenomenon Box and Mime
7. Line Rockets
8. A Metamorphose with alternate changes, and a
beautiful display of Chinese Lattice Work
 9. Sky Rockets
10. Horizontal Wheel with Roman Candles and Mine
11. Tourbillions
12. A regulating piece in two mutations, displaying a
Vertical Wheel changing to five Vertical Wheels and
a figure piece in Straw and brilliant fires
13. Grand Battery of Roman Candles & Italian
Streamers
14. A regulating piece in four mutations displaying a
Vertical Wheel changing to a Pyramid of Wheels, a
Brilliant Sun, and a superb shower of fire
15. Sky rockets

GRAND FINALE
MADEMOISELLE LETIZIA ORIANO
Will with a temerity hitherto unknown in the blazing
annals of her profession slide down an inclined rope 350
feet high, erected on the firework platform, wreathed in
Fizgigs and Fiery Serpents and accompanied by the
awful thunder of a Battery of Maroons.

Admission 1s each

Gardens open at half-past seven, and commences at

Nine o’clock precisely.

“Neptune’s Grotto” was one of the many pleasure-gardens that in

the days when the Londoner was comparatively a free man helped
to amuse his leisure. Yet even by the ninth year of the reign of King
George IV most of the famous resorts of the preceding century had
already been built over, and now that Lord Grosvenor was
developing the Manor of Ebury (Buckingham Palace appearing fixed
as the metropolitan abode of the Sovereign) “Neptune’s Grotto” was
likely to vanish soon and leave no more trace of its sparkling life than
the smoke of a spent rocket. Indeed, change was already menacing.
For two years Cubitt, the famous builder, had been filling up the
swampy land between Vauxhall Bridge Road and Ranelagh with the
soil he had excavated in the construction of St. Katharine’s Docks.
His cadaverous grey plastered terraces were creeping nearer every
week. Willow Walk, a low-lying footpath between the cuts of the
Chelsea Water Works, in a cottage hard by which Jerry Abershaw
and Gentleman James Maclaine the highwaymen once lodged,
would soon be turned into the haggard Warwick Street we know to-
day. The last osier bed would ultimately be replaced by the greasy
aucubas of Eccleston Square, and Lupus Street would lie heavy on
ancient gardens. The turnpike at Ebury Bridge had been gone these
four years; the old country road to Chelsea would within a lustrum be
lined by houses on either side and become Buckingham Palace
Road. Even the great basin of the Grosvenor Canal would run dry at
last and breed from its mud Victoria Station.
However, in 1829 “Neptune’s Grotto” still remained much as it had
been for over a century. The house of mellow red brick was covered
with lattice-work, which on this warm July evening was all fragrant
and ablow with climbing roses. Only the box trees had changed the
pattern of their topiary. In place of earlier warriors or statesmen you
would have found Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington at this
date, the general more freshly trimmed than the admiral, but likely to
go unpruned in the years of his unpopularity that were coming. His
sacred Majesty King George III had been allowed to sprout into the
rounder bulk of his sacred Majesty King George IV, but the new
portrait was hardly more attractive than the blowsy original. The
garden paths were bordered with stocks and hollyhocks. There were
bowling-greens and fishponds, and a dark alley in emulation of the
notorious dark alley of Vauxhall. Most of these amenities, however,
had been made familiar by a score of other pleasure-gardens all
over London. What gave “Neptune’s Grotto” its peculiar charm was
the wide green lawn running down to the edge of the great reservoir.
In the middle of this was the grotto itself, under the ferny arches of
which an orchestra of Tritons languorously invited the little world of
pleasure to the waltz, or more energetically commanded it to the
gallopade. The firework platform was built out over the water on
piles; and the lawn was surrounded on three sides by small alcoves
lined with oyster shells, in some of which the lightest footstep on a
concealed mechanism would cause to spring up a dolphin, or a
mermaid, a harlequin or a Mother Shipton, startling intruders for the
maiden who first encountered them, so startling that she would
usually fling herself into the arms of the beau in escort and require to
be restored with various liquors much to the satisfaction of Mr.
Seedwell, the owner of the gardens.
High tortoiseshell combs and full curled hair, wide skirts of Gros de
Naples flounced and pinked and scalloped and fluted, white
stockings and slippers of yellow prunella, Leghorn hats of
transparent crape bound with lavender sarsenet or puffed with small
bouquets of marabout, bonnets of jonquil-yellow with waving ostrich
plumes, bonnets of marshmallow-rose with ribbons of lilac and
hortensia floating loose, double Vandyke collars of Indian muslin,
grass-green parasols and purple reticules, leg-of-mutton sleeves and
satin roulades, pelisses and pèlerines most fashionably of
camelopard-yellow, ivory shoulders, Canezon spencers and gauze
capotes, fichus of ethereal-blue barège, laughter and whispers and
murmurs and music (ah, yes, no doubt and plenty of simpers too),
where now trains thunder past filled with jaded suburbans, whose
faces peep from the windows as their owners wonder if the new film
at the picture-theatre will be worth the trouble of visiting after tea in
our modish contemporary shades of nude, French nude, sunburn,
and flesh. Would that Stephenson had never cursed humanity with
his steam-engine, and would that this tale might never creep nearer
to the present than that July night of 1829! Alas, it has more to do
with the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those who fluttered
out like moths in that summer dusk to watch Madame Oriano’s
fireworks; and these at whom you gaze for the moment are but
creatures in a prologue who will all be ghosts long before the last
page is written.
However, here come those ghosts, still very much alive and
shilling in hand, some from Knightsbridge, some from Chelsea, some
from Westminster. “Strombolo House,” which used to charge half-a-
crown for its fireworks, so famous were they, is closed. To be sure
the “Monster” is still open, but there are no fireworks in the
entertainment there to-night; a performing bear is all that the
“Monster” can offer to-night. The “Orange Tea Gardens” are gone for
good: St. Barnabas’ Pimlico, will occupy their site, and on it cause as
much religious rowdiness in another twenty years as ever there was
of secular rowdiness in the past. “Jenny’s Whim” hard by the old
turnpike has already been covered with builder Cubitt’s beastly
foundations. There is no longer much competition with “Neptune’s
Grotto” in the manor of Ebury. A few pause in Vauxhall Bridge Road
when they see the hackney-coaches filled with merry parties bound
for the most famous gardens of all; but they decide to visit them
another evening, and they cross the road to Willow Walk, where one
remembers seeing Jerry Abershaw’s body swinging from the gibbet
on Putney Common and that scarcely thirty years ago, and another
marvels at the way the new houses are springing up all round. Some
shake their heads over Reform, but most of them whisper of
pleasure and of love while ghostly moths spin beside the path, and
the bats are seen hawking against the luminous west and the dog-
star which was glimmering long before his fellows is already dancing
like a diamond in the south.
While the public was strolling on its way to “Neptune’s Grotto,”
within the gardens themselves Mr. Seedwell, the proprietor, and
Madame Oriano made a final inspection of the firework platform.
“You think she can do it?” he was saying.
“Offa coursa she can do it,” Madame replied sharply.
Mr. Seedwell shook his head in grave doubt. Weighing eighteen
stone and a bit over he found it hard to put himself in Mademoiselle
Letizia’s place.
“I don’t want an accident,” he explained. “The magistrates are only
too glad of an excuse to close us down these days.”
“Dere willa not be no accident,” Madame Oriano assured him.
And Mr. Seedwell, looking at the raven-haired and raven-beaked
and raven-eyed woman beside him, took her word for it and went off
to see that all was ready inside the house for the entertainment of his
guests.
Madame Oriano squeezed a handful of her yellow satin gown.
“Bagnato!”[1] she murmured to herself. Then looking across to one
of the alcoves she called out in a shrill harsh voice, “Caleb! Caleb
Fuller!”

[1] Wet.

A beetle could not have left his carapace more unwillingly than
Caleb Fuller that alcove. He was a young man—certainly not more
than twenty-five, perhaps not as much—whose lumpish and pasty
face suggested at first an extreme dulness of mind until one looked a
little closer and perceived a pair of glittering granite-grey eyes that
animated the whole countenance with an expression that passed
beyond cunning and touched intelligence. Beside the dragon-fly
vividness of his employer he appeared, as he shambled across the
lawn to hear what she wanted of him, like an awkward underground
insect, with his turgid rump and thin legs in tight pantaloons and his
ill-fitting tail-coat of rusty black.
“Dissa English cleemat non è possibile,” Madame shrilled.
“Everyting willa be wet before we beginna to fire.”
“It’s the heavy dew,” said Caleb.
“Oh, diavolo! What do it matter which it is, if de fireworks will alla
be—how you say—spilt?”
“Spoilt,” he corrected gloomily.
“Che lingua di animali, questa English linguage! Where issa John
Gumm?”
“In the tap-room,” Caleb informed her.
“Drinking! Drinking,” she shrilled. “Why you don’ta to keep him
notta to drink before we are finished?”
 John Gumm who was Madame’s chief firer had already imperilled
by his habits several of her performances.
“Somebody musta go and putta clothes on de fireworks. Non
voglio che abbiamo un fiasco,[2] I don’ta wish it. You hear me,
Caleb?”

[2] “I do not want us to have a fiasco.”

Caleb was used to these outbursts of nervous anxiety before

every display, and on most evenings he would have humoured
Madame by bullying the various assistants and have enjoyed giving
such an exhibition of his authority. But this evening he would not
have been sorry to see the damp air make the whole display such a
fiasco as Madame feared, for he bitterly resented the public
appearance of Letizia Oriano, not so much for the danger of the
proposed feat, but for the gratification the sight of her shapely legs
would afford the crowd. In fact when Madame had summoned him to
her side, he was actually engaged in a bitter argument with Letizia
herself and had even gone so far as to beg her to defy her mother
and refuse to make the fire-clad descent.
“There won’t be enough dew to prevent the firing,” he argued.
“And more’s the pity,” he added, gathering boldness as jealousy
began once more to rack him. “More’s the pity, I say, when you’re
letting your only child expose her—expose herself to danger.” He
managed to gulp back the words he just lacked the courage to fling
at her, and though his heart beat “Jezebel! Jezebel!” he dared not
say it out.
“Dere is nottings dangerous,” she snapped. “She has walked the
slacka rope and the tighta rope since she was a bambina. Her fazer
has learnt her to do it.”
Caleb groaned within himself. Letizia’s father was as mythical and
as many-sided as Proteus. Italian prince, English nobleman, play-
actor, ballet-master, acrobat, with as many aliases as a thief, he was
whatever Madame chose he should be to suit her immediate