The Lake of Wine

Excerpt: Some time in June of the year 1800 (as privately chronicled) there came a famous evening at Whitelaw?s Club in St. James?s Street, off Piccadilly, London. There and then?according to the unattested evidence of an eyewitness?Mr. Ladislaw lost his head, Lord Dunlone his mistress, Sir Robert Linne his fortune, and Major Dalrymple his life. Thus it appears these four were all losers, and each of a material property, save the first, who, alone of the quartette, commuted his self-possession for a very real equivalent in hard cash. ?Whitelaw?s? in those days ran, of a host of gambling clubs, the deepest. It was there all heavy potations and long stakes (at which many a self-martyr burned); but the first of these were put down and the second up with an accepted solemnity of decorum that was traditional to the place and the sign of its moral endowment. Fox, in his heavier moments, had been known to hazard in its glooms occasionally, and to lose, of course; and?equally of course?to find immediate balm for his scorched fingers in the inevitable ?Herodotus.? Selwyn, also, and Topham Beauclerc, and many another Georgium sidus, had played and hiccupped within its pregnant walls; but always with gravity and a weight of personal responsibility towards the foundation. ?Brookes?s? might have held in its time more showy revelry; ?Almack?s? have gambled in broad-brimmed straw hats, bedecked with flowers, and masks to hide the play of emotions. ?Whitelaw?s? would have none of these. It had ever stood coldly aloof from flash and notoriety, accepting Todd?s definition of a club as ?An association of persons subjected to particular rules,? rather than that of Johnson (the rendering has a warm personal flavour), who calls it ?An assembly of good fellows, meeting under certain conditions.? From first to last it remained ponderous in self-importance and rigid in exacting the observance of its unwritten codes of conduct. If its gaming operations were large, it desired the company of no feather-brain ?plungers?; but rather of players of substance, to whom cards were a market, not a raffle. Therefore, when on this particular night no fewer than four of its members?like those in the fable?suddenly revolted against the central system, and, for a space of minutes, made havoc of its respectable traditions, it is no wonder that ?Whitelaw?s? rose at the outrage like one man, and, in the upshot, pronounced sentence of club ostracism upon the delinquents. This, as it affected three, is matter of private history. The fourth escaped the distinction there and then through the interposition of ?the man with the scythe.?