Letters From High Latitudes [17]
at a pinch, to payer de ma personne; should he not be content with seeing me at his table, I was ready, if need were, to remain UNDER it! but at the rate we were then going it seemed probable this consummation would take place before the second course: so, after having exchanged a dozen rounds of sherry and champagne with my two neighbours, I pretended not to observe that my glass had been refilled; and, like the sea-captain, who, slipping from between his two opponents, left them to blaze away at each other the long night through,--withdrew from the combat. But it would not do; with untasted bumpers, and dejected faces, they politely waited until I should give the signal for a renewal of HOSTilities, as they well deserved to be called. Then there came over me a horrid, wicked feeling. What if I should endeavour to floor the Governor, and so literally turn the tables on him! It is true I had lived for five-and-twenty years without touching wine,--but was not I my great-grandfather's great-grandson, and an Irish peer to boot? Were there not traditions, too, on the other side of the house, of casks of claret brought up into the dining-room, the door locked, and the key thrown out of the window? With such antecedents to sustain me, I ought to be able to hold my own against the staunchest toper in Iceland! So, with a devil glittering in my left eye, I winked defiance right and left, and away we went at it again for another five-and-forty minutes. At last their fire slackened: I had partially quelled both the Governor and the Rector, and still survived. It is true I did not feel comfortable; but it was in the neighbourhood of my waistcoat, not my head, I suffered. "I am not well, but I will not out," I soliloquized, with Lepidus [footnote: Antony and Cleopatra.]-- (Greek) "Sos moi ro prepov," I would have added, had I dared. Still the neck of the banquet was broken--Fitzgerald's chair was not yet empty,--could we hold out perhaps a quarter of an hour longer, our reputation was established; guess then my horror, when the Icelandic Doctor, shouting his favourite dogma, by way of battle cry, "Si trigintis guttis, morbum curare velis, erras," gave the signal for an unexpected onslaught, and the twenty guests poured down on me in succession. I really thought I should have run away from the house; but the true family blood, I suppose, began to show itself, and with a calmness almost frightful, I received them one by one.
After this began the public toasts.
Although up to this time I had kept a certain portion of my wits about me, the subsequent hours of the entertainment became henceforth developed in a dreamy mystery. I can perfectly recall the look of the sheaf of glasses that stood before me, six in number; I could draw the pattern of each remember feeling a lazy wonder they should always be full, though I did nothing but empty them,--and at last solved the phenomenon by concluding I had become a kind of Danaid, whose punishment, not whose sentence, had been reversed: then suddenly I felt as if I were disembodied,--a distant spectator of my own performances, and of the feast at which my person remained seated. The voices of my host, of the "Rector, of the Chief Justice, became thin and low, as though they reached me through a whispering tube; and when I rose to speak, it was as to an audience in another sphere, and in a language of another state of being: yet, however unintelligible to myself, I must have been in some sort understood, for at the end of each sentence, cheers, faint as the roar of waters on a far-off strand, floated towards me; and if I am to believe a report of the proceedings subsequently shown us, I must have become polyglot in my cups. According to that report it seems the Governor threw off (I wonder he did not do something else), with the Queen's health in French: to which I responded in the same language. Then the Rector, in English, proposed my health, under the circumstances a cruel mockery,--but to which, ill as I was, I responded very gallantly by drinking to the beaux yeux of the Countess. Then
After this began the public toasts.
Although up to this time I had kept a certain portion of my wits about me, the subsequent hours of the entertainment became henceforth developed in a dreamy mystery. I can perfectly recall the look of the sheaf of glasses that stood before me, six in number; I could draw the pattern of each remember feeling a lazy wonder they should always be full, though I did nothing but empty them,--and at last solved the phenomenon by concluding I had become a kind of Danaid, whose punishment, not whose sentence, had been reversed: then suddenly I felt as if I were disembodied,--a distant spectator of my own performances, and of the feast at which my person remained seated. The voices of my host, of the "Rector, of the Chief Justice, became thin and low, as though they reached me through a whispering tube; and when I rose to speak, it was as to an audience in another sphere, and in a language of another state of being: yet, however unintelligible to myself, I must have been in some sort understood, for at the end of each sentence, cheers, faint as the roar of waters on a far-off strand, floated towards me; and if I am to believe a report of the proceedings subsequently shown us, I must have become polyglot in my cups. According to that report it seems the Governor threw off (I wonder he did not do something else), with the Queen's health in French: to which I responded in the same language. Then the Rector, in English, proposed my health, under the circumstances a cruel mockery,--but to which, ill as I was, I responded very gallantly by drinking to the beaux yeux of the Countess. Then