Part 6

In handing ladies to their carriage a man offers his right arm to the senior of the party and walks with her to the door, opening it with his left hand. The others will probably follow without escort, but if not, he must offer it to each in turn, holding an umbrella over them should it be raining. He closes the door and conveys their orders to the footman or coachman.

Should he be invited to enter the carriage with them, he always takes the back seat--that is, with his back to the horses--unless specially invited to the front one. He must not either raise or lower the windows unless requested to do so.

Should he be smoking, he throws away his cigar or cigarette at once. If he should be a very intimate acquaintance of the lady, he may ask her permission to smoke, but never otherwise, since it is disagreeable for a woman to refuse such permission, and consequently she often gives it when she really dislikes the smell of tobacco, especially in the limited space of a carriage, should it be a closed one.

It may be as well to mention here that the proper pronunciation of the word “brougham” is as though it were spelled “broom,” quite short and monosyllabic. This is a trifle, of course, but, like many another equally small matter, it is indicative of those accustomed to good society.

IN A HANSOM.

In handing a lady into a hansom care must be taken to protect her dress from the muddy wheel. The gentleman asks if she would like the glasses down, and conveys her instructions to the driver, then raises his hat as she drives away.

Should he be accompanying her in the hansom, she seats herself at the nearest side to the pavement, so that when he enters he will not have to go round a corner, as it were. In this case he gives the cabman instructions across the roof of the cab, and if his companion wishes the glasses to be lowered, he asks for them through the trap-door at the top of the cab. He must never smoke when the glasses are let down--to do so would render the atmosphere unbearable to almost any woman. But if he knows his partner in the drive sufficiently well, he can ask permission to smoke, should the glasses not be required.

SMOKING.

The etiquette in this, as in many other matters, has quite altered during the last few years. At one time it was considered a sign of infamously bad taste to smoke in the presence of women in any circumstances. But it is now no longer so.

So many women smoke themselves, that in some houses even the drawing-room is thrown open to Princess Nicotine.

The example of the Prince of Wales has been largely instrumental in sweeping away the old restrictions. He smokes almost incessantly. On one occasion, at the Ranelagh Club, I noticed that he consumed four cigars in rapid succession, almost without five minutes’ interval between them. The only time that he left off smoking, during the three hours that he remained in the Pavilion with the Princess and other ladies, was for ten minutes when tea was handed round.

It is now no uncommon thing to see a man in evening dress smoking in a brougham with a lady on their way to opera, theatre, or dinner engagement. This is going rather far, for a woman’s evening dress implies shut windows, except in the height of summer, and her garments become as much impregnated with the odour of tobacco as if she had herself been smoking.

Some men have a knack of ridding their clothes and themselves of the fumes of smoke in a wonderful way. Perhaps one reason of this is that the tobacco they use is of a mild sort.

Perhaps the diligent use of the clothes-brush is another. But there are also men round whom cling the odours of stale tobacco with a very disagreeable constancy. Why it should be so I cannot pretend to say. It must be due to carelessness of some kind, and carelessness in such matters amounts to bad manners. Even to men who smoke--and much more to those who do not--the smell of stale tobacco is revolting. Fancy, then, how it must offend the olfactory nerves of women. Such men suggest the stableyard while they are yet several yards away!

A very delicate, even exquisite, personal cleanliness is characteristic of the true gentleman, and more particularly the English gentleman, who is noted all the world over for his devotion to his “tub” and his immaculate propriety in all matters of the toilette. This is not claiming too much for my countrymen. It is acknowledged by other nations that ours is superior in this respect. Once, indeed, I heard a curious inversion of this. At a foreign hotel one waiter said to the other in their mutual language: “What dirty fellows these English must be to want such a lot of washing! I’ve carried up four cans of water to No. 47 this morning!”

Sauntering up the street of a small German town one day, two English ladies saw, a couple of hundred yards away, a party of men standing admiring an ancient gateway.

“They must be English,” said one of the ladies; and before she could finish her sentence the other finished it for her in the very words she had been about to utter: “They are so beautifully clean!”

This characteristic is carried to an extreme in the close clipping of the hair; but as fashion ordains that it must be worn very short, its behests must be obeyed by all who wish to be in society and of it.

“Who is that long-haired fellow?” is the question invariably asked about any man whose visits to the barber are infrequent. “Must be an artist or a music man,” is the frequent commentary. Sometimes he is merely careless of conventionalities, and by being so proves that he is rather “out of it” where good society is concerned. The rule appears to be that directly a man finds that he has any hair worth brushing, he must immediately go and have it cut. It would be much more becoming if allowed to grow a little longer, but things being as they are, only the few can afford to defy the ordinary custom.

IN OR ON AN OMNIBUS.

The humble omnibus may be thought by some readers too democratic a kind of conveyance to be considered in a book on Manners. Not at all! There are several reasons why it should have a place in such a volume.

The first is, that during the last ten years or so the omnibus has been largely used by women of the educated, cultured, and well-dressed classes. Another and stronger reason is that no considerations of the kind should affect a man’s manners. If he can behave like a gentleman in a carriage, he is almost certain to do so in an omnibus, and vice versâ. It is even more difficult in the humbler vehicle. In a carriage one is seldom crowded up to the degree that often occurs in the plebeian “’bus.” In fact, there are far more opportunities for the display of good manners in the latter than in the former. Many of them are of a negative character.

True courtesy, for instance, will prevent a man from infringing the rights of his neighbours on either side by occupying more than his own allotted space.

Very stout men are obliged to do so, but at least they need not spread out their knees in a way that is calculated to aggravate the evil. Nor need they arrange themselves in a comfortable oblique position, with the result of enhancing the inconvenience they must necessarily cause to those near them. Even a thin man can take up a quantity of room by thus disposing himself at an angle of forty-five with the other occupants of an omnibus.

The morning paper may be converted into an offensive weapon in the hands of the rude and careless, who open it out to its fullest width, regardless of the comfort of those sitting next them.

Newspapers are rather unwieldy things to turn and twist about in a limited space, but this very circumstance affords a man an opportunity of displaying his skill in manipulating the large, wide sheets, without dashing them in the face of his nearest neighbour, or knocking up against anybody in a series of awkward movements that a little care could easily convert into leisurely, graceful ones.

There is another way in which men are apt to be careless, and that is in the disposal of a wet umbrella. Women are even more so, but these remarks are intended particularly for men, and beyond acknowledging that members of my own sex are equal sinners, I must leave them out of the question. When any one takes a dripping umbrella into an omnibus, he must charge himself with the task of seeing that it annoys no one but himself. If he can, at the same time, protect himself, well and good; but he must be altruistic in the matter and care for others first; the alternative being to prove himself lacking in one form of good manners. He must not even let his wet umbrella lean up against a vacant part of the cushioned seat, rendering it damp for the next comer.

His social conscience cannot be up to its work if he permits himself to ignore the right of the absent to consideration, merely because they are absent.