With that, they roll into the Square, and the coach driver pulls up short, leans down to rap softly on the side of the carriage. Louisa comes quickly out of Boswell’s arms, begins to gather herself to alight, but before she can say or do anything more, he suddenly hugs her tightly again, so tightly that she can only laugh in delighted surprise.
“I suspect I love you, Mrs. Digges,” he whispers as they come apart.
And Louisa strokes his cheek and then kisses him quickly and matter-of-factly on the lips, as though she understands very well that he has just confessed far less than he might otherwise have done.
BOSWELL WATCHES LOUISA go until her fashionable green-and-sable outline is lost irretrievably in the Soho crowd. And then he watches just another moment more, to see the world press on without her, and to test his own response to her vanishing. When the coachman finally calls down for directions, Boswell gives him Louisa’s own address on King Street, and the hackney lurches into motion again.
By the time they’ve navigated the Square, Boswell’s sense of direction has been upended, any trace of Louisa’s path erased. And although he misses her already, a small, reasonable voice inside says that tomorrow will be soon enough.
For the last several years, Boswell has had the romantic but unshakable idea that he will know his soul mate because she, and she alone, will discover the tiny letters inked at the hollow of his ankle. There is a children’s-fairytale quality to the idea, of course, but that is precisely why he clings to it.
Still, the fact that Louisa is apparently not his soul mate causes Boswell’s spirits to rise in any event. Finding a soul mate, like meeting Samuel Johnson, could easily ruin everything were it to happen a month or a year too soon, after all.
When the coach reaches King Street, Boswell tells the driver to wait, then goes to the door of Louisa’s flat. There he asks for Louisa, and expresses some visible surprise when told that she is not at home. That accomplished, Boswell returns to the coach and for lack of any better idea gives his own Downing Street address. The night with Louisa has left him with the tingling feeling that he can cajole the city into giving him whatever he desires.
But after a quick moment, he can think of no good way to advance his two other Grand Enterprises, for Dilly will take his own sweet time producing Johnson, and Boswell is not to breakfast with the Duke of Queensberry until the following week, to discuss his commission. Then he has a wonderful idea.
Drury Lane Theater is only another block or so back through the Market, and if he cannot call on Johnson, to whom he has never been introduced, he can certainly call on Garrick, to whom he has, at least technically. Of course the chances of catching the great man in the theater and unoccupied are slim indeed, and slimmer still that he will consent to see a young man with no appointment whom he does not remember.
But the truth is that Boswell could not give a fig for the odds this afternoon, and he has the carriage brought immediately around.
IN THE SAME way that Johnson has always been an icon of morality and Englishness for Boswell, David Garrick—the Kingdom’s most celebrated actor—has always signified culture and manliness and style. Boswell actually met Garrick very briefly two years ago, on his mad first excursion to London to convert to Roman Catholicism.
Since coming back up to London two months ago, though, Boswell has tried several times to cultivate the acquaintance by calling for the great actor at his house, but his cards have all gone unanswered. The thought of simply dropping by the theater itself has never seemed a possibility before now.
Having conspicuously dismissed the coach just outside the theater’s Russell Street entrance, Boswell breezes through the stone arch and up into the foyer. He knows that the theater’s offices are somewhere up off the gallery stairs to the left, but on a whim Boswell simply stops the first person he encounters, a middle-aged man with the look of a bookkeeper, and asks him to tell Mr. Garrick that Mr. Boswell would be delighted to speak with him, if he has a moment free. The man seems startled, but then simply nods and disappears. And when Boswell hears footsteps less than a moment later, he turns around fully expecting to see the bookkeeper once again, shaking his head and offering to take a message.
Instead it is Garrick himself, hand thrust out and his gravelly bass overwhelming the small foyer. “Mr. Boswell, what a genuinely delightful surprise! I was speaking of you just the other day with Mr. Sheridan, who says you have got a prologue for his wife’s comedy that shows great promise. He said you were come up to Town, but I said he must be mistaken. You could not be in London without giving us the pleasure of your company at tea, I said. But Sheridan seemed quite sure, and here you are after all.”
It is more than Boswell can well answer at once. As Garrick pumps his hand, he manages, “Indeed, I have called once or twice for you, sir, and left a card—”
“A card. Ah, there’s the trouble,” Garrick says, beaming. He is burly, but surprisingly short for an actor, Boswell remembers now. His suit—matching coat, breeches, and waistcoat of red corded velvet—is fashionably out of fashion, and it immediately makes Boswell think less of his own figured vest. The face is dark by London standards, almost swarthy, the shadow of his beard clearly visible although Boswell would be willing to wager that Garrick was neatly shaved just this morning. “My wife has been known to order the day’s cards cast to the four winds, if she feels our home is in danger of becoming a branch of Drury Lane. But in my defense, I must report that I bowed to you some weeks back in the House of Lords, but you did not observe me. My feelings were quite hurt, I assure you.”
“Indeed! I am sorry for it. Of course, had I known—”
“Had you known, I could not have taxed you with it, and I should have had no defense for missing your calling card not once, but twice. And we should have no end of recrimination. I consider us well off. Have you seen the paintings of Mr. Zoffany in the Piazzas? Ah, these you must see, although, truth to tell, they are most of them of me.”
And they are, of course: Garrick as Macbeth, Garrick as Lord Chalkstone, Garrick in a host of roles, as well as a series of sketches showing multiple Garrick prototypes, in a range of different attitudes.
Boswell is absolutely enchanted: it is like the Northumberland Picture Gallery, but with every other one of the paintings modeled after oneself. He looks over at Garrick, who is himself busy looking his various likenesses over, and speaks the first words that come to his mind. “Mr. Garrick, I would dearly love to know your secret.”
“What secret is that, pray?”
“This, sir. All of this about us,” Boswell says, waving a hand at the theater and the gallery, laughing.
Garrick looks back at the wall and nods once before steering Boswell away. “My secret? There is no secret. But shall I invent one for you?” He walks a moment in thought, then lowers his voice to a stage whisper. “As much as possible, strive to be someone other than yourself. Not as a whim, but as a deliberate mode of life.” Garrick waits a beat, then adds, “I have found it a useful pursuit.”
Boswell searches the man’s face to see whether, and precisely how much, he is being kidded. “But suppose, in doing so, a man should lose himself altogether, never to find himself—his real self, that is—ever again?”
“You say such a man is lost. I say he is free. Indisputably free.”
By the time they reach the foyer again, Boswell has sketched his plan for the Guards, which is to say his plan to remain in London, as well as his father’s standing opposition. But Sheridan has backed him to the hilt.
“To be sure,” Garrick maintains, “it is a most genteel thing, and I think, sir, you ought to be a soldier. As well as whatever suits your genius. The law requires a sad deal of plodding.”
With a start, Boswell realizes that the man has moved him back precisely into the spot where they shook hands fifteen minutes previously, down to the direction each is facing and the approximate amount of space between them. He has the distinct sense now that Garrick, while still physically pre
sent, has already begun removing his attention elsewhere. It is as though the large spirit is emptying gradually out of the small stout body, a few particles at a time, and regathering itself somewhere in the theater, or in the city, or in the world at large.
But at the very last he manages to capture Boswell’s heart forever.
“Sir,” Garrick says, taking his hand in parting, and looking him sternly in the eye, “you will be a very great man. I have an aptitude for knowing these things, you understand. And when you are so, remember the year 1763. I want to contribute my part toward saving you. You must therefore fix a day when I shall have the pleasure of treating you with tea. We must plan this campaign at much greater length, that is certain.”
It is all Boswell can do to name the same day a week hence.
“Done! And then, Mr. Boswell,” Garrick says, turning on his heel and calling the last words brightly over his shoulder, “the cups shall dance and the saucers skip!”
* * *
Boswell is so exceedingly delighted when he walks out into the thin sunlight again that it is all he can do to restrain himself from hailing another hackney coach. It is a good long walk in the cold back to Downing Street, but he comes quickly to his senses: the fact is that he’s already pledged himself to skip several meals in order to cover the cost of the room at the Black Lion last night, as well as the coach to it and from it.
Still, the walk is colder even than he expected, and by the time Whitehall dwindles into Parliament Street, he has given up replaying the Garrick incident and is concentrating entirely on covering distance and warming his fingers. So bent is he on reaching his lodgings that Boswell nearly brushes past his brother John idling on the corner of Downing Street before he recognizes him.
Although John is bent forward looking into an apothecary’s window, finger brushing against the glass, there is no mistaking the head and ears rising up out of the drab brown surtout. He takes John gently by the shoulder, startling him still.
“Johnny!” Boswell says, more genuine concern creeping into his voice than he suspects John will bear. “Had we arranged to meet today? Am I late again? I am sorry if so. You look frozen solid.”
John chafes his hands together, and Boswell sees he has no gloves. It suddenly strikes him that John’s entire appearance today has something slightly haphazard to it, from his hat, which he has jammed down over his forehead, to his breeches and stockings, which are spattered with street dirt, as though he dressed in the dark and began walking before the sun was up. There is something wild in his appearance that is more than the sum of its various details.
But John smiles easily. “No, Jemmie, we had no plan. You can be sure that if we had, I wouldn’t have waited so long for you as I’ve done. But I thought I might drop by and entice you away from your writing. Your landlord said you might be back soon.”
“But has not Mr. Terrie offered you a warm place to sit indoors? Or offered to let you into my rooms? I will speak to him if he has not. I will berate him, in fact.”
John jams his fists into the pockets of his overcoat, and Boswell can see that sitting under the eye of Mr. Terrie for twenty minutes or a half an hour would be torture, and worse than torture should Mr. Terrie decide to make conversation.
He stops John before he can answer: “We shall take it out of Mr. Terrie’s hands entirely by having a set of keys made for you. And I shall tell Mr. Terrie that he must accept your presence as he would my own. What say you to that?”
John’s face brightens, but as it does Boswell’s own heart is suddenly freighted with guilt. He has shown his brother so little of the City, has offered so little of himself, and his meditations of last night come back to him.
It could hardly be helped, Boswell thinks, given John’s surprise arrival just at the point where Boswell’s plans were moving into their most demanding phases. Yet the fact remains that he has seen John almost not at all, and when he has, Boswell has generally reduced their hours together to a line or two in his journal, as though shielding even its pages from the sudden fact of John’s presence. He strikes a bargain instantly with himself that he will make this day John’s most memorable yet in London, and his heart buoys up immediately.
But when the evening is through—after an admirably silly performance of Brome’s Jovial Crew, after John has said good night and trudged off toward his own anonymous rooms—Boswell finds himself bent over his journal, rereading the entry for the day that he has just penned.
I dined nowhere, but drank tea at Love’s, and at night went to Covent Garden gallery and saw The Jovial Crew. My frame still thrilled with pleasure, and my want of so much rest last night gave me an agreeable languor. The songs revived in my mind many gay ideas, and recalled in the most lively colors to my imagination the time when I was first in London, when all was new to me, when I felt the warm glow of youthful feeling and was full of curiosity and wonder. I then had at times a degree of ecstasy of feeling that the experience which I have since had has in some measure cooled and abated. But then my ignorance at that time is infinitely excelled by the knowledge and moderation and government of myself which I have now acquired. After the play I came home, eat a Bath cake and a sweet orange, and went comfortably to bed.
The writing is passable, Boswell allows, but one thing about the entry is inescapable, even in his fatigue: John is nowhere to be seen.
It is Boswell’s last thought before snuffing his candle, that he has methodically created two lives, one that John may share, and one closed and hidden away from his brother. He has made of his life a series of nested boxes, and allowed John access only to the outermost, the plainest and shabbiest—the least Boswell, in short, of all the boxes.
Still, as he lies in the dark, winter keening quietly outside the window, Boswell tells himself that it simply isn’t to be helped. For the moment, it is all he can do to wedge the door to London society open far enough to force his own shoulder inside.
Later, John may follow with far less trouble, and he should be content with that prospect. Boswell even allows himself a bit of manufactured annoyance with his brother’s unspoken demands. For when all is said and done, he thinks just as sleep begins to move over him, I am eldest.
WITHIN A WEEK, as though his fleeting thought has closed a pending enchantment of some sort, Boswell’s life is in ruins.
Every noble prospect before him has been overthrown, completely and methodically smashed; and what is worse, it couldn’t be any clearer that completely and methodically smashed is what God Himself now fully intends Boswell’s various plans to be. For each of Boswell’s three Grand Enterprises the Lord has carefully matched with a stunning disappointment, one per day for three days running.
It began Tuesday, the 18th of January. Boswell was invited to the Sheridans’, to speak with Mrs. Sheridan about the prologue he had written for her new comedy. Although he would detest himself for it later that evening, Boswell literally sang in the street as he went, so ecstatic was he with the idea of hearing his lines spoken in Drury Lane on opening night. And having heard Garrick praise them only days before, Boswell could only congratulate himself on the prospect of hearing that all was settled.
But before Boswell had taken more than a sip or two of his tea, Thomas Sheridan leaned over to tap him on the knee, a bit roughly. The man’s long, pale face hovered uncomfortably close, the faint bite of brandy there on his breath. “Why, sir, don’t you ask about your prologue?” Sheridan prompted.
“Indeed, sir, I am too indifferent,” Boswell replied with a smile, after an awkward moment’s pause.
Sheridan put on a sober look, but deep in the eyes was a twinkle of malice. “Well, but prepare your utmost philosophy.”
Boswell felt his stomach tilt. “How so?”
“It is weighed in the balances and found light.”
“What, it is not good?”
“Indeed,” Sheridan replied, shooting a glance at his wife, “I think it is very bad.”
The next hour was one long pedant
ic nightmare: Sheridan pointing out supposed flaws in Boswell’s lines, one by one, and shouting him down whenever Boswell made bold to defend them. Yet the connection was too valuable to throw away in an argument, and Boswell managed to smile and take it.
He slept very poorly and awoke the next morning, Wednesday the 19th, to the odd sensation of heat in his groin, an intense heat at that: reaching down, he found his left testicle had swollen in the night to the size of a ripe plum.
Boswell sat up suddenly in his bed, the bedclothes scattered about him, and he could feel a cold sweat break at his hairline, then work its way quickly over his entire body. He clung to the faint hope that perhaps he had simply strained himself somehow during his various rendezvous with Louisa over the last several days.
But as the afternoon wore on, even that scant hope dwindled. He tried his best to make light—“Too, too plain was Signor Gonorrhea,” he quipped in his journal—but a weight bore down on his chest, and having spent Tuesday night despising Sheridan, he lay awake deep into Wednesday night hating Louisa, and then himself.
By the next morning, Thursday the 20th—when Molly walked into his dining room during breakfast with an elaborately sealed letter—Boswell knew enough to let the letter lie a moment. There was an Old Testament quality to his days suddenly, and he had the eerie sense that he could hope for nothing but retribution in the post.
However there was no escaping it, finally.
And indeed, the letter was from the Duke of Queensberry, with whom Boswell had an appointment in several hours, an appointment to which he had looked forward for weeks. Clearly the note was meant to pre-empt the meeting: the duke repeated his high regard and his desire to help, but made it sufficiently clear that a commission in the Guards was a fantasy and no more.
The rest of that Thursday passed in a treacherous haze. Boswell felt nauseous and weak as he moved about the icy streets, boots sliding between the cobbles, clutching his coat about him to fight the chills, and conducting the anxious self-examinations that hypochondriacs have no choice but to conduct.
The Brothers Boswell Page 24
