Clubhouse

“ I hate clubs where they have lectures and debates and other beastly things that they never have in men’s clubs. Now there’s the Kaiserin, that would suit you very well: handsome clubhouse, excellent cooking arrangements, spacious entertaining-room which you can hire and have all to yourself, every necessity and comfort to make a club thoroughly comfy—in fact, a second home without any bother.”
“But how do you know?” said Regina in a curiously small voice.
[Pg 231]
“Oh, I know several women who belong to the Kaiserin,” Julia answered carelessly. “What are you going to do to-day, dearest? ”

“ Men's clubhouses. It is a very common custom in barbaric society that the men have a clubhouse in which they spend much of their time together and in which the unmarried men sleep. Such houses are centers of intrigue, enterprise, amusement, and vice. The men work there, carry on shamanistic rites, hold dances, entertain guests, and listen to narratives by the elders. Women are excluded altogether or at times. In the Caroline Islands such houses are institutions of social and religious importance. ”

“ The Club House overhung the rolling green of the golf links; from a place of vantage he saw that Eliza was not on the veranda; at one end a group of young men were drinking—teal Beyond his father and three companions, followed by caddies, rose above a hill. His father grasped a club and bent over the turf; the club described a short arc, the ball flashed whitely through the air, and the group trotted eagerly forward, mingling explanation, chagrin and prediction with heated and simple sums in arithmetic. ”

“ The club-house is a low, white rambling building set among trees and the most perfect of lawns. It has really beautiful suites of rooms, including a dancing hall and a dining-room. From its broad verandah a steep grass slope drops down to the sea water of one of the harbour arms. Many trees shade the slope and the idling paths on it, and through the trees shines the water, which has an astonishing blueness.
At the water's edge is a bathing place, with board rafts and a high skeleton diving platform. ”

“ CRAVEN. My child, I have my own club.
CHARTERIS (contemptuously) . Yes, the Junior Army and Navy! Do you call that a club? Why, they daren't let a woman cross the doorstep!
CRAVEN (a little ruffled) . Clubs are a matter of taste, Charteris. You like a cock and hen club: I don't. It's bad enough to have Julia and her sister—a girl under twenty—spending half their time at such a place. Besides, now really, such a name for a club! The Ibsen club! I should be laughed out of London. The Ibsen club! Come, Cuthbertson, back me up. ”

“ Every member appears to be at home, and all seem to own a share in the Club. There is a free-and-easy way with those who frequent Clubs, and a licence given there that is unknown in the drawing-room of the private mansion. I met the gentleman at the Club, at the appointed hour, and after his writing my name in the visitors' book, we proceeded to the dining-room, where we partook of a good dinner. ”

“ We may get very hot at lawn tennis or keep comparatively cool at bowls or croquet, or, coolest of all, we may sit on the terrace or in the garden and give ourselves wholly and solely to loafing. The club-house is a gorgeous palace, a dazzling vision of white stone, of steps and terraces and cupolas, with a lake in front and imposing trees in every direction, while over it all broods the great Chief-Justice Coke, looking down benignantly from the top of his pillar and gracefully concealing his astonishment at the changes in the park. ”

“ Large, with dark panels, and heavy beams which spring up and lose themselves in warm shadows overhead, it is a room combining dignity with gracious informality. And let me add that, to my mind, such a combination is at once rare and desirable in a club building—or, for the matter of that, in a home or a human being. A club which is too informal is likely to seem trivial; a club too dignified, austere. A club should neither seem to be a joke, nor yet a mausoleum. If it be magnificent, it should not, at least, overwhelm one with its magnificence ”

“ We had a club-house, eight or ten of us, that summer, which was located on Hicks’s Beach, on the extreme western end of the Great South Bay, not far from the Long Beach Hotel. It was about as unpretentious as any club-house need be, being only a shanty, but it was weather-proof, and with cots and hammocks we made ourselves thoroughly comfortable when we slept ashore. More often we would sleep on board the little sloop yacht that we had chartered for the summer, for we used to cruise through the entire day, using the club-house as a rendezvous. ”

“ The Peak Club, a much smaller institution, is designed, as its name implies, to meet the gregarious tendencies of those who reside at the Peak and feel disinclined in the evening to return to the city of Victoria in quest of society. Ladies are admitted to the privileges of the Club, and dances and bridge parties form the chief amusements between the tea and dinner hours in the cool months of the year. The club-house commands charming views of the surrounding scenery and is enclosed in a garden which is always bright with flowers. ”

“ There is the dinner of the village benefit club, year after year. The object of the club is of the best, but its appearance upon club-day is a woeful spectacle to eyes that naturally look for a little taste upon an occasion of supposed festivity. What can be more melancholy than a procession of men clad in ill-fitting black clothes, in which they are evidently uncomfortable, with blue scarves over the shoulder, headed with a blatant brass band, and going first to church, and then all round the place for beer? ”

“ It is now so firmly established, and it is so popular that there is not a village or even a settlement in the United States which has not at least its casino, or its little coterie organized for golf, tennis, athletic, or merely social enjoyment. All of these, from the great metropolitan clubs of the cities down to the very humblest in the "wilds," are governed by club laws and are regulated by club etiquette. In New York, now a city of clubs, this etiquette differs much from that observed in London, Paris, or any of the large continental centers. In London, a man is identified with his club. ”

“ But at gayer times, when there are gala receptions at the club, its steps are all buried under expensive carpet, soft as moss and covered over with a long pavilion of red and white awning to catch the snowflakes; and beautiful ladies are poured into the club by the motorful. ”

“ Let us try to give our readers a glimpse of the club room and its guests on this memorable evening.
Imagine, then, a large room with low ceiling and walls of dark oak panel, a large old-fashioned fireplace with dogs, and a Yule log blazing on the hearth. The curtains are old and embroidered, and closely drawn. The room is well lighted, and in the middle is a long table, at which, through a cloud of tobacco smoke, a party of nine—all lords of the creation—may be discovered. A bowl of punch is in the centre of the table, at which every now and then each guest replenishes his glass. ”

“ Very different is the bran-new modern club whose interior my faithful artist has depicted, and whose appearance at five o’clock in the afternoon I am now called upon to describe. Gentlemen members of clubs, these gorgeous palaces are but the growth of one generation. Your fathers had, it is true, their Wattier’s, the Cocoa-Tree, White’s, and Boodle’s, but those were considerably more like gambling-houses than clubs. To obtain admission was exceedingly difficult, and to remain a member was, save to men of immense fortune, absolutely ruinous. ”

“ On the night after the great fog of 1897 there were five members in the Club, four of them busy with supper and one reading in front of the fireplace. There is only one room to the Club, and one long table. At the far end of the room the fire of the grill glows red, and, when the fat falls, blazes into flame, and at the other there is a broad bow-window of diamond panes, which looks down upon the street. ”

“ I know no clubs in any town so spacious, so reposeful, so dignified and so pleasant. I imagine, the human spirit tired of endless competition and the unceasing striving of the individual to assert himself, instinctively makes a refuge where communism in the arts of living reaches its highest point. Some of the best Clubs are in Fifth Avenue or just off it. When one has had an overdose of the street they are the only restoratives. ”

“ I proposed that a group of forward-looking people should get together and establish what might be called a home-club, or a hotel owned and run by its guests. There was nothing so very radical about this idea, for up in the Adirondacks are a number of clubs whose members rent cottages in the summertime and eat their meals in a club dining-room. Why might there not be in the same community a school, owned and run by the parents of the children? ”

“ For true revelry, the glass that sparkles and the jug that foams, you must go to some club at least a hundred years old, and in St James’s Street or Pall Mall, where ‘old man’ and ‘old thing’ know each other’s record and capacity, where, under an ancient roof, the prairie oyster revives the spirits that flagged in the Row. Watch the bow windows of some ancient club, and, while still holding that good wine needs no bush, confess that good wine gets it. ”

“ Louis is struck by the very small, exclusive clubs. One is the Florissant Valley Country Club, with a pleasant, simple club-house and a very charming membership. But the most famous little club of the city, and one of the most famous in the United States, is the Log Cabin Club. I do not believe that in the entire country there is another like it. The club is on the outskirts of the city, and has its own golf course. Its house is an utterly unostentatious frame building with a dining room containing a single table at which all the members sit at meals together, like one large family. ”

“ Treading almost noiselessly on his rubber soles the steward led me along the deck to the back of the bridge where a door hooked back revealed a glimpse of a long low-ceilinged saloon set about with comfortable settees and club chairs in soft green Morocco leather, the portholes screened against the blinding light from without.
Even below the awning the light outside was so much stronger than the comparative obscurity within the smoke-room that at first I could not distinguish much. Parsons left me at the door and I was about to sit down when I discovered to my surprise that I was not alone. ”

“ Within the last ten years clubs have become as plentiful as hotels nearly. And the enterprising City gentleman who fits up a big house with a dining and reading and smoking and morning and billiard room, and advertises the inauguration of the Pantheon Club, 'for the benefit of those gentlemen who are unable to enter the older clubs owing to their overcrowded condition,' requires names for his committee. ”

“ Almost every large city in the country has one solid, dignified old club, occupying a solid, dignified old building on a corner near the busy part of town. The building is always recognizable, even to a stranger. It suggests a fine cuisine, an excellent wine cellar, and a great variety of good cigars in prime condition. In the front of such a club there are large windows of plate glass, back of which the passer-by may catch a glimpse of a trim white mustache and a silk hat. ”

“ The Country Club is most charming, and in it a big room so appealing in color and furnishing that you feel irresistibly like settling yourself in the corner of one of the chintz-covered sofas and staying indefinitely. Yet the same people whose own houses are so attractive will seriously take you to admire a horticultural achievement that, in its magentas and scarlets, purples and heliotrope, orange, Indian red and Paris green, lacks no element of discord except an out-of-tune German band to play among its glass globes. ”

“ The history of
“The dear old street of clubs and cribs,
As north and south it stretches,”
is one which, if its record were fully written, would be found to have no little connection with the annals of the country. Its position, its proximity to the Palace, its past inhabitants, its famous club houses (where so much of the history of the country was, and is, evolved,) all make for its claim in this respect.
WHITE’S CLUB.
On our left is the famous bow window of “White’s,” where the dandies used to assemble to quiz the ladies on their way to the drawing-rooms. What a history has that club! ”

“ No dinners are so good to him as the club dinners; he can read no journals but those he finds in the club news-paper-room; he writes his letters on the club paper, pops them into club envelopes, seals them with the club seal, and despatches them, if they are not intended for postage, by the club messengers. He is rather sorry that there is no club uniform. He would like, when he dies, to be buried in a club coffin, in the club cemetery, and to be followed to the grave by the club, with members of the committee as pall-bearers. ”

“ The station club-house, frequented by all the civil and military swells and their families, was a low down, mud-walled, tawdry affair, with a dingy, thatched grass roof, the building having been erected during years by additions, so was without form or comeliness, becoming more disreputable in appearance in proportion as our building grew in size and beauty. ”

“ Tick is the exception, not the rule, at a club; though there have been Irish members who have run goodly scores in their time with the cook and the waiter.
A man may, if he be so minded, make his club his home; living and lounging luxuriously, and grazing to his heart’s content on the abundant club-house literature, and enjoying the conversation of club friends. Soap and towels, combs and hair-brushes, are provided in the lavatories; and there are even some clubs that have bed-rooms in their upper storeys, for the use of members. ”