CLUB AND COUNTRY

He felt secure at his club, at least for a while. No women were allowed on the premises so all activities such as drinking, smoking, playing cards or talking sport and business were things he could easily engage without his bachelorhood being too obtrusive as it might have been at other social functions such as balls, fetes, and church gatherings where perspicacious ladies could pick up personal nuances beyond the senses of the materially-oriented males. The club was a typical chauvinistic hell-hole of smoke, beer odors, mild uncouthness, and talk of money, politics, prejudices, and allusions to sex. It wasn’t really working class. There was no sawdust on the floor, no drunken fights, no spitting, cadging or threadbare clothing, but there was no old money either; nothing had been inherited and whoever had anything had made it by the sweat of their own hard work. Any prevailing hierarchy in the place was based solely on money and with it the club’s prohibitive cost of membership. There were no titles bandied around, no real “gentlemen,” and none of the type who talked nasally as a result of their moneyed higher education in exclusive public schools; working class accents had been retained as well as working class tastes. There was no hint of aristocratic correctness either, only the size of one’s wallet mattered and money alone—rather than blood color—had impelled the members to these better days. While the club’s initial cost to join filtered out the typical clientele of the free pubs open to all, its members had no taste for pretentiousness, the place was uncarpeted, the furniture inelegant and lacking in taste, heavy as it was rather than fine, such as the thick round tables standing on cabriole legs of plain cast iron, surrounded by chairs that lacked upholstery and needed no great level of care in their treatment. The men Bartlett sat with had for the most part retained their working-class manners but their professional and commercial accomplishments held them to a value system bespeaking that nothing should be given away free; the unspoken but unanimous gospel was if you wanted something you should work for it. There was a tacit kind of class system, pervasive in its conviction and conversation, in a milieu of meritocratic nouveau riche where lack of success of those below didn’t fit, and toffee-nosed upper classes in the social tier above were looked down on in a brusque inverted snobbery. The men made jokes that coursed with a slight sense of superiority, about the class of people they’d emerged from; poorer people whose constant gripes about their own failure as well as complaints about the injustice of the undeserving landed class were all ridiculed. It was a place redolent of self-made success, where complainants and whiners, who would be dismissed in much later years as “losers” would never fit. The jokes passed around were sometimes chauvinistic about the idiosyncrasies of females, at whom they guffawed as if they had that subject all worked out. While Bartlett allowed their view on money and its acquisition, he often wondered what their married worlds were really like as distinct from the impressions they gave in these all-male circles where prodigious carnal appetites were implied—and not susceptible to contradiction by the unadmitted wives ensconced modestly at home. Unlike Bartlett, most of those present had taken the obligatory walk down the aisle and had typical little nineteenth-century women largely confined to the house, restricted to household and children duties, tea with lady friends, chaperoned social functions like church, and as was expected, dutifully fitting into the preferred view the husbands had of themselves. But while being objectified in club conversation, the ladies were bequeathed a feminine dignity that would go extinct with liberation a century later when a different kind of respect, a masculine respect, or at least respect using male criteria, would be demanded. For now, ladies would largely be excluded from commerce and totally excluded from the vote, giving the last word to their