‘I adore Sarah.’
Everyone will know, attractive though she may be, that it is her money you are after. You could of course brazenly declare this but it is advised instead to remain silent. And don’t, immediately following the ceremony, attempt to obtain information concerning the enormity of your wife’s wealth or be caught trying to gain access to her bank vaults where a lot of this news you seek may reside. The little pride you have left can really be entirely extinguished by such encounters.
During your wedded bliss and to keep it that way, certain rules should be scrupulously observed. Under no circumstances whatever, fart in your wife’s presence, except where at a distance she sees you from her own window early morning cantering booted and horsed across the park lands. Rise early, bathe daily, be alert, dapper and spring to do courtesies at all times. It will be found that a wife who has all the money requires the utmost in bedroom decorum and deportments. Do not be found standing hairy belly revealed without a dressing gown. Three paisley silk ones should always be ready at your grasp at a moment’s notice. Nor be seen by your wife in under shorts or garters or cutting a ridiculous and ordinary figure. Therefore it is de rigueur that you have your own bed chamber and dressing room. This also prevents your marriage partner from witnessing your more irritating and perhaps sordid little habits which could needlessly mar the normally debonaire cut of your jib.
When your wife signals you to attend upon fulfilling her carnal cravings, drop immediately what you are reading and appear in your pyjamas, dressing gown and slippers. Depart the same way. Do not stay the night unless invited to, as extremely rich wives least prefer the sight of their husbands in the morning. But if she should surprise you in your own apartments as you tipple your night cap, greet her appearance with a robust stream of superlatives and as she advances throw open your arms to her. Any hesitation here could kick you right off the money nipple.
At home, always mix her drink. Never allow a servant to do this. And of course be aware that you will sometimes experience vague shirtiness from the household staff as they figure you as excess baggage on the same gravy train. To them always speak in a firm but low tone of voice and make sure to never countermand your wife. Have at your tongue tip the best jokes you can dredge up from among your friends but be careful that these are not needlessly sordid. She will of course appreciate the exercise of your well timed and placed wit, which can often momentarily make her forget you are a parasite hysterically dancing attendance upon her.
While out in public do not take admiring notice of other ladies. And never be without your weekly haircut and manicure or wear any undergarment twice, remember your wife can afford that you have a good supply. And if she is at all fascinated by you beyond your stunning looks and physique, it is permitted to laughingly suggest to people that it is your brains combined with your wife’s money that makes you such a swell couple.
To further entrench your hooks and secure your sinecure it helps to be engaged with a multitude of altruistic projects. Hire a renowned architect at the earliest opportunity who can accompany you to your various town houses and country retreats where he can cause to amend or provide new embellishments. The more lavish and fantastic and long building these are, the better. Provided you have romantically kept up to scratch, such as bowingly opening car doors for your spouse when the footmen are otherwise engaged, your satisfied wife will write strong letters to her trustees to overrule their advice not to appropriate such money for such purpose.
Always profess satisfaction with your allowance. And even though your stingy wife has put you on a restricted sum, don’t stamp your feet and throw your polished leathers all over the place. Remember other guys, even some less smellier than you, are always sizing up your personal gold mine wishing they were in there with their spoons digging too, and are only just waiting for an opportunity to jump champagne splashing in. It is even a nice touch once in a while to demonstrate your own frugality. Don’t for instance charter an entire aircraft when first class seats will do to get you on the spur of the moment to a favoured watering place. Remember rich people love to keep their money carefully regulated, and you too can enjoy to stand by adoring to watch the steadiness of your disbursements.
Your wife will at times seem selfishly fussy and demanding and may suddenly want to go off on strange train, plane or boat trips by herself. This is your chance to show you are a man of the world. Rich women delight to pursue secret horny travels where they can indulge to the limit their fantasies of erotically getting to know the whole globe. Even to the point of gross multiple assignations with fly by night gentlemen some of whom may be extremely dark complexioned when your wife herself is distinctly not. About these private experiences you are advised not to inquire. When the servants cluster to welcome her back home, behave as if nothing had happened. And don’t crowd her for a few days. She may feel reluctant that you should see her bruises and bites of love.
In attempting to permanently cement your position regarding your wife’s fortune, it is of some concern to produce progeny. Give the old girl plenty of you know what. If for any reason you can’t get it up, rush to your oysters and wheat germ until this makes you can. And feign slight rupture whenever disgraced by a hopelessly flaccid penis. As nothing will get you thrown out of the house quicker. Not even the lazily acquired habits of belching, teeth and nose picking, ear digging, pudenda scratching, or constant twenty one gun salvos from your rear portal.
Along with daily luxuriating in your wife’s easy circumstances, it is essential you give to your life an air of busy efficiency. For this purpose supply yourself with a desk and a few ledgers. And even though she waves it away, show concern when bringing a questionable expenditure to your spouse’s attention. What the hell it doesn’t hurt to at least appear to carefully check tradesmen’s accounts. But avoid her seeing motor fuel bills for your specially designed hand made many cylindered sports car, which, among other things, requires a resident mechanic and footman to keep in a high state of performance and polish. Well to do wives seem to find this kind of consumption particularly irritating especially when it is your pet indulgence. But always refuse to stay in a cheap little room in a crummy part of town because this is what your rich mate thinks is so quaintly romantic. Such predilection can bring back the chronic memories of your pre-nuptial impoverishment and put your spirits in such a slump that you may reveal to your wife a dark, alienating and probably evil side of your nature.
However, you will normally meet with her encouragement in lavishing opulent hospitality on a large circle of friends, hiring where necessary steam yachts, hotels, restaurants and even entire spa towns to entertain. Guests who attend will say behind your back that you must sing for your supper. But never let it be said you sing for your breakfast. Although an astonished if not pleased reaction can be had from a not only rich but cultured wife if after dinner and on your hind legs you can knock off a well phrased aria from a classical repertoire while colourfully ablaze in your pyjamas just before bed time.
Should your golden squaw make a pig out of herself and grow fat and lazy, go with it. But you at all times must keep thin and sprightly. And do not be caught deceiving her. Or arousing suspicions by spending too much time abroad on trips or at your club. But do maintain to cut your usual swatch through good sporting society. And in the event of not being able to stand the sight of her, call upon all your reserves of compassion. Try to see something spiritually beneficial in her aside from her precious metals. Remember it’s worth a lot of mild discontent to continually know where your next meal is coming from.
Alas, however, the day may come when she has had enough of you. Do not take it on the chin like a gigolo. And when you are turned out into the cold with only your silks and leathers, do not agonize in long commiseration. Remove yourself with dignity despite the anguish of leaving motor cars, estates, yachts and other substantial elegancies behind. Suggest, however, that along with all your haberdashery you be allowed to take your horse. And where real
pan handling hardship may confront, it is not improper to request a modest temporary emolument to give you a headstart. But above all, do not attempt by ruses to get back into the house. Or upon departure create a scene in front of the servants. Lying prostrate surrounded by your luggage on the lawn beating your fists into the grass is a shabby demonstration which only further confirms good reason for your banishment. Although some chaps pulling this sordid stunt and adding to it with an immersion in the gold fish pond, have managed temporarily to get back in the house. And what a humourless hollow little victory that is.
But upon your final irrevocable ejection and after a suitable period spent in regaining your composure, get to the nearest spa fast. And don’t in your eagerness to avoid working for a living give yourself away as a fortune hunter. Nor be seen, because of your recent deprivation, eating chocolate bars or other sweet candies. As some experienced rich ladies know that this is a sure sign you intend gobbling up their riches next. But remember another wife, more affluent than the last, may lurk somewhere, provided you keep your pomade on.
At the Club
These are, at their best, exclusive sociable places where the food and wine is cheap and where a member not only can practise the exchange of the barbed innuendo with other members but can also feel the cosy quality of belonging. Depending upon whom the club keeps out, and these days there is a nice selection of people around to exclude, it can add comforting human ornament to your day and even sometimes, solace to your very life.
Do not harbour disillusionment when you find that after years of waiting to gain membership you end up among chaps hardly any better than yourself. Which is why there is always the urgent need to admit members overnight who are important and influential. In cases where a member procures membership for an undesirable with whom he is doing a deal, harden yourself to such shabbiness as otherwise it could ruin not only your digestion but also curdle the esteem in which you hold your fellow members. Such blots on the club are regrettably as flagrantly frequent as they are heinous.
Be careful to abide by club deportment and rules. Never mount the steps of your club quickly but lift one foot solemnly in front of the other. Similarly in descending, do so slowly, not to say majestically. Remember members lurk everywhere trying to size you up in order to make and foster convivial friendship. But it is never done to sit peering over the edge of your periodical desperately ready to jump up with a handshake to meet some famous or distinguished personage or to stare at such chaps close up when they are in for a quick lunch. Rather it is suave to deeply occupy yourself in reading and then, if you are really that hysterical to meet a celebrity, forthrightly go over and introduce yourself. However, be prepared. For upon disengaging from you he will ask who the hell is that, and hear the reply.
‘The club bore.’
Clubs which include members of great intellectual and political achievement frequently dine communally in order that the free exchange of ideas can flow. This does upon occasion cause a member whom you detest to come sit next you. There is little that can be done about this but if for the sake of good manners you listen silently to his damn stupid opinions you are entitled when you have had enough of them to display your distaste. By stuffing your napkin in your mouth in a gesture of stiflement and to there chew angrily upon it, you will not only momentarily shut up your adversary but will also render the entire table speechless for even longer.
In harbouring intense amusement over a joke it is permissible to exercise your friendly camaraderie by repeating this to another member stopped in the club lounge or lobby. But on no account confront others with your uncontrollable mirth in the latrine or library. And in this latter context, any club member who monopolizes several periodicals at once and insists upon keeping them all after being requested to unhand those he is not reading, should immediately be put on notice that he risks not only odium but challenge to a duel. Minor inconveniences demand major remedies in the private confines of one’s club.
Be careful playing cards. And especially avoid the club cheat if you are an easily angered straight shooter. To sit with a chap who has just removed an undue quantity of club stationery as well as combs, brushes and hair tonic from the lavatories and who is now peeling cards off the bottom of the deck, is dangerously provocative. And it does not do to have a trickster defending his honour to his accuser while both are engripped by each other’s waistcoats and end up tumbling down the main marble staircase into the front lobby. Although a demonstration of instant justice, this behaviour does upset other tolerant members who may have become fond of this chap’s cheeky swindling.
Where a club elects only the very haughtiest of haughty chaps, a deportment annex invariably exists to tone up a member’s character when slack. Such facilities however remain among a club’s most guarded and treasured of secrets. The healthful practice of taking a little bit of the whip now and again to improve the inner man has been long recognized as a means of purging accumulated guilts. Which get mountainous because of members’ usually high and mighty station in life lording it as they do over their world at large. Such lashings are usually administered by specially tutored employees of the club and painfully shy members are naturally accorded use of a private room.
In taking your chastisement it is not done to piercingly cry out. But screams and grunts within the normal range of pain are permitted. Enjoying obvious pleasure from such thrashings is frowned upon. Nor is it proper to borrow another member’s personal whip. And in the rarely permitted case of one member administering punishment to another, this, as it can encourage unseemliness, must be witnessed and duly recorded in the log for the purpose. Until you are a member it is extremely bad form to request to be advised of a club’s whipping facilities.
One last but important matter. For some unaccountable reason club entrances attract the deranged. And members should always quickly pass until they are safely inside the premises. To delay while some nut to whom the hall porter has just summarily refused admittance, not to mention membership, makes the usual declaration.
‘Hey I don’t give two hoots for the members of this joint.’
Is looking for trouble. And although many members die safely inside their club lobbies from natural causes many another has met an embarrassing death at the hands of a violent lunatic on the front steps.
Athletic Clubs
Although less socially elite these sporting precincts are where allround regular guys really let their hair down or have it clipped extremely short for wrestling. In among the agile muscle men will also be found the more physically sluggish leading bankers, stockbrokers, investment counsellors, judges and politicians, who, if they aren’t daily huffing and puffing to slough off their fat, at least convene at the annual dinners to yell, hoot, throw rolls and rain sugar cube bombardments on each other. This provides a delightful way of purging the year’s accumulation of aggression which stems from making big decisions when your neck is at stake and other people’s opinions are in the way.
It is seemly never to flaunt your athletic prowess or to bulge your biceps or act in a fashion which makes it obvious you could tear another member’s arm out of his socket or even kill him if he tried something funny. Always comport yourself in an unassuming manner and do not while in the corridors or social rooms of the club burst into practice paroxysms concerning your sport. With every member doing this it could fast make the place look like a mental institution. Nor is it becoming to express yourself with erudition in these he man confines, even though it is well known that mental alertness is increased by physical workouts. However some discomfort must be taken from the fact that the dangerously insane are rarely recognized lurking at athletic club entrances due to the difficulty of distinguishing them from the more eccentric members.
At the Theatre
Although the theatre attracts a rather culturally senile lot of folk, the worst of these being those who arrive late for curtain up, it is nevertheless a way of treating yourself and a companion to antics which should ma
ke you think you are thinking and feel you are feeling.
During the performance, if someone blatantly misses their cue or the wrong piece of scenery descends from the flies onto the star’s skull, don’t laugh unless it really is damn funny. Following a poignantly theatrical nuance it is always stylish to clap heartily for the actor who has made such scene work. But remember there is always some little bastard in a side aisle who has money in the show who is leading the clapping even for the on stage silences. Don’t be tricked by him.
In telling your partner of your personal first hand information concerning scandal involving a principal player always whisper this flagrant tidbit in order that nearby folk in the audience will not find it more interesting than what is going on behind the footlights. But if you violently disagree with the drama, farce or histrionics on stage, don’t hesitate to get up and protest and make your views loudly known. However, do then sit down promptly so the play may go on. And be tolerant if the players stumble over their lines a little before they fully recover their cool after your heated outburst. Also be ready to be slugged by the author.
At the final curtain if you are pleased with the performance, be generous with your applause. There is nothing quite so moving as repeated waves of clapping which yet again bring the players to bow, genuflect and make obeisance bathed in the beams of many limelights. And when the entire audience are standing on their seats shouting bravos you can depend upon getting some free drinks from the actors backstage who adore to be appreciated in this fashion.
Wear your finery. That little extra frippery you were saving for a special occasion can make all the difference especially if you’ve got the gumption to make an entrance. It is haughtier to be seen attending extremely early or extremely late in a play’s run. And it’s positively allround aristocratic to be present at the last performance of a loud flop. Current hits attract an unsavoury type of person, and it is always a dead giveaway when you are caught at these that you are just as ordinary as what you are watching.
The Unexpurgated Code Page 17
