‘We shall take a dose of him every night after dinner to complete the resemblance. But seriously, dear, I think that now that we have taken up a course of reading, we should try to approach it in a grave spirit, and endeavour to realise - Oh, I say, don’t!’
‘I am so sorry, dear! I do hope I didn’t hurt, you!’
‘You did - considerably.’
‘It all came from my having the needle in my hand at the time - and you looked so solemn - and - well, I couldn’t help it.’
‘Little wretch -!’
‘No, dear; Jemima may come in any moment with the coffee. Now, do sit down and read about Mr Pepys to me. And first of all, would you mind explaining all about the gentleman, from the beginning, and taking nothing for granted, just as if I had never heard of him before.’
‘I don’t believe - ‘
‘Never mind, sir! Be a good boy and do exactly what you are told. Now begin!’
‘Well, Maude, Mr. Pepys was born - ‘
‘What was his first name?’
‘Samuel.’
‘Oh dear, I’m sure I should not have liked him.’
‘Well, it’s too late to change that. He was born - I could see by looking, but it really doesn’t matter, does it? He was born somewhere in sixteen hundred and something or other, and I forget what his father was.’
‘I must try to remember what you tell me.’
‘Well, it all amounts to this, that he got on very well in the world, that he became at last a high official of the navy in the time of Charles the Second, and that he died in fairly good circumstances, and left his library, which was a fine one, to one of the universities, I can’t remember which.’
‘There is an accuracy about your information, Frank - ‘
‘I know, dear, but it really does not matter. All this has nothing to do with the main question.’
‘Go on, then!’
‘Well, this library was left as a kind of dust-catcher, as such libraries are, until one day, more than a hundred years after the old boy’s death, some enterprising person seems to have examined his books, and he found a number of volumes of writing which were all in cipher, so that no one could make head or tail of them.’
‘Dear me, how very interesting!’
‘Yes, it naturally excited curiosity. Why should a man write volumes of cipher? Imagine the labour of it! So some one set to work to solve the cipher. This was about the year 1820. After three years they succeeded.’
‘How in the world did they do it?’
‘Well, they say that human ingenuity never yet invented a cipher which human ingenuity could not also solve. Anyhow, they did succeed. And when they had done so, and copied it all out clean, they found they had got hold of such a book as was never heard of before in the whole history of literature.’
Maude laid her sewing on her lap, and looked across with her lips parted and her eyebrows raised.
‘They found that it was an inner Diary of the life of this man, with all his impressions, and all his doings, and all his thoughts - not his ought-to-be thoughts, but his real, real thoughts, just as he thought then at the back of his soul. You see this man, and you know him very much better than his own wife knew him. It is not only that he tells of his daily doings, and gives us such an intimate picture of life in those days, as could by no other means have been conveyed, but it is as a piece of psychology that the thing is so valuable. Remember the dignity of the man, a high government official, an orator, a writer, a patron of learning, and here you have the other side, the little thoughts, the mean ideas which may lurk under a bewigged head, and behind a solemn countenance. Not that he is worse than any of us. Not a bit. But he is frank. And that is why the book is really a consoling one, for every sinner who reads it can say to himself, “Well, if this man who did so well, and was so esteemed, felt like this, it is no very great wonder that I do.”’
Maude looked at the fat brown book with curiosity. ‘Is it really all there?’ she asked.
‘No, dear, it will never all be published. A good deal of it is, I believe, quite impossible. And when he came to the impossible places, he doubled and trebled his cipher, so as to make sure that it should never be made out. But all that is usually published is here.’ Frank turned over the leaves, which were marked here and there with pencilings.
‘Why are you smiling, Frank?’
‘Only at his way of referring to his wife.’
‘Oh, he was married?’
‘Yes, to a very charming girl. She must have been a sweet creature. He married her at fifteen on account of her beauty. He had a keen eye for beauty had old Pepys.’
‘Were they happy?’
‘Oh yes, fairly so. She was only twenty-nine when she died!’
‘Poor girl!’
‘She was happy in her life - though he did blacken her eye once.’
‘Not really?’
‘Yes, he did. And kicked the housemaid.’
‘Oh, the brute!’
‘But on the whole he was a good husband. He had a few very good points about him.’
‘But how does he allude to his wife?’
‘He has a trick of saying, “my wife, poor wretch!”’
‘Impertinent! Frank, you said to-night that other men think what this odious Mr. Pepys says. Yes, you did! Don’t deny it! Does that mean that you always think of me as “poor wretch”?’
‘We have come along a little since then. But how these passages take you back to the homely life of those days!’
‘Do read some.’
‘Well, listen to this, “And then to bed without prayers, to-morrow being washing-day.” Fancy such a detail coming down to us through two centuries.’
‘Why no prayers?’
‘I don’t know. I suppose they had to get up early on washing-days, and so they wanted to go to sleep soon.’
‘I’m afraid, dear, you do the same without as good an excuse. Read another!’
‘He goes to dine with some one - his uncle, I think. He says, “An excellent dinner, but the venison pasty was palpable beef, which was not handsome.”’
‘How beautiful! Mrs. Hunt Mortimer’s sole last week was palpable plaice. Mr. Pepys is right. It was not handsome.’
‘Here’s another grand entry: “Talked with my wife of the poorness and meanness of all that the people about us do, compared with what we do.” I dare say he was right, for they did things very well. When he dined out, he says that his host gave him “the meanest dinner of beef, shoulder and umbles of venison, and a few pigeons, and all in the meanest manner that ever I did see, to the basest degree.”
‘What are umbles, dear?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘Well, whatever they are, it sounds to me a very good dinner. People must have lived very well in those days.’
‘They habitually over-ate and over-drank themselves. But Pepys gives us the menu of one of his own entertainments. I’ve marked it somewhere. Yes, here it is. “Fricassee of rabbits and chickens, a leg of mutton boiled, three carps in a dish, a great dish of a side of lamb, a dish of roasted pigeons, a dish of four lobsters, three tarts, a lamprey pie (a most rare pie!), a dish of anchovies, good wine of several sorts, and all things mighty noble and to my great content.”’
‘Good gracious! I told you that I associated him with indigestion.’
‘He did them pretty well that time.’
‘Who cooked all this?’
‘The wife helped in those days.’
‘No wonder she died at twenty-nine. Poor dear! What a splendid kitchen-range they must have had! I never understood before why they had such enormous grates in the old days. Naturally, if you have six pigeons, and a lamprey, and a lobster, and a side of lamb, and a leg of mutton, and all these other things cooking at the same time, you would need a huge fire.’
‘The wonderful thing about Pepys,’ said Frank, looking thoughtfully over the pages, ‘is that he is capable of noting down the mean little impulses of human nature, which m
ost men would be so ashamed of, that they would hasten to put them out of their mind. His occasional shabbiness in money matters, his jealousies, his envies, all his petty faults, which are despicable on account of their pettiness. Fancy any man writing this. He is describing how he visited a friend and was reading a book from his library. “A very good book,” says he, “especially one letter of advice to a courtier, most true and good, which made me once resolve to tear out the two leaves that it was writ in, but I forbore it.” Imagine recording such a vile thought.’
‘But what you have never explained to me yet, dear, or if you did, I didn’t understand - you don’t mind my being a little stupid, do you? - is, what object Mr. Pepys had in putting down all this in such a form that no one could read it.’
‘Well, you must bear in mind, dear, that he could read it himself. Besides he was a fellow with a singularly methodical side to his mind. He was, for example, continually adding up how much money he had, or cataloguing and indexing his library, and so on. He liked to have everything shipshape. And so with his life, it pleased him to have an exact record which he could turn to. And yet, after all, I don’t know that that is a sufficient explanation.’
‘No, indeed, it is not. My experience of man - ‘
‘Your experience, indeed!’
‘Yes, sir, my experience of men - how rude you are, Frank! - tells me that they have funny little tricks and vanities which take the queerest shapes.’
‘Indeed! Have I any?’
‘You - you are compounded of them. Not vanity - no, I don’t mean that. But pride - you are as proud as Lucifer, and much too proud to show it. That is the most subtle form of pride. Oh yes, I know perfectly well what I mean. But in this man’s case, it took the form of wishing to make a sensation after his death. He could not publish such a thing when he lived, could he?’
‘Rather not.’
‘Well, then, he had to do it after his death. He had to write it in cipher, or else some one would have found him out during his lifetime. But, very likely, he left a key to the cipher, so that every one might read it when he was gone, but the key and his directions were in some way lost.’
‘Well, it is very probable.’
The fire had died down, so Maude shipped off her chair, and sat on the black fur rug, with her back against Frank’s knees. ‘Now, dear, read away!’ said she.
But the lamp shone down upon her dainty head, and it gleamed upon her white neck, and upon the fluffy, capricious, untidy, adorable, little curlets, which broke out along the edges of the gathered strands of her chestnut hair. And so, after the fashion of men, his thoughts flew away from Mr. Pepys and the seventeenth century, and all that is lofty and instructive, and could fix upon nothing except those dear little wandering tendrils, and the white column on which they twined. Alas, that so small a thing can bring the human mind from its empyrean flights! Alas, that vague emotions can drag down the sovereign intellect! Alas, that even for an hour, a man should prefer the material to the spiritual!
But the man who doesn’t misses a good deal.
CHAPTER XIII - A VISIT TO MR. SAMUEL PEPYS
There are several unjustifiable extravagances which every normal man commits. There are also several unjustifiable economies. Among others, there is that absurd eagerness to save the striking of a second match, which occasions so many burned fingers, and such picturesque language. And again, there is the desire to compress a telegraphic message into the minimum sixpennyworth, and so send an ambiguous and cryptic sentence, when sevenpence would have made it as clear as light. We all tend to be stylists in our telegrams.
A week after the conversation about Mr. Pepys, when some progress had been made with the reading of the Diary, Maude received the following wire from Frank -
‘Mrs. Crosse. Woking. - Pepys buttered toast suède gloves four Monument wait late.’
As a sixpennyworth it was a success, but as a message it seemed to leave something to be desired. Maude puzzled over it, and tried every possible combination of the words. The nearest approach to sense was when it was divided in this way - Pepys - buttered toast - suède gloves - four - Monument, wait late.
She wrote it out in this form, and took it section by section. ‘Pepys,’ that was unintelligible. ‘Buttered toast,’ no sense in that. ‘Suède gloves,’ yes, she had told Frank that when she came to town, she would buy some suède gloves at a certain shop in the City, where she could get for three and threepence a pair which would cost her three and ninepence in Woking. Maude was so conscientiously economical, that she was always prepared to spend two shillings in railway fares to reach a spot where a sixpence was to be saved, and to lavish her nerve and energy freely in the venture. Here, then, in the suède gloves, was a central point of light. And then her heart bounded with joy, as she realised that the last part could only mean that she was to meet Frank at the Monument at four, and that she was to wait for him if he were late.
So, now, returning to the opening of the message, with the light which shone from the ending, she realised that buttered toast might refer to a queer little City hostel, remarkable for that luxury, where Frank had already taken her twice to tea. And so leaving Mr. Pepys to explain himself later, Maude gave hurried orders to Jemima and the cook, and dashed upstairs to put on her new fawn-coloured walking-dress - a garment which filled her with an extraordinary mixture of delight and remorse, for it was very smart, cost seven guineas, and had not yet been paid for.
The rendezvous was evidently a sudden thought upon the part of Frank, for he had left very little time for her to reach the trysting-place. However, she was fortunate in catching a train to Waterloo, and another thence to the City, and so reached the Monument at five minutes to four. The hour was just striking when Frank, with his well-brushed top-hat and immaculate business frock-coat, came rushing from the direction of King William Street. Maude held out her hand and he shook it, and then they both laughed at the formality.
‘I am so glad you were able to come, dearest. How you do brighten up the old City!’
‘Do I? I felt quite lonely until you came. Nothing but droves of men - and all staring.’
‘It’s your dress.’
‘Oh, thank you, sir!’
‘Entirely that pretty brown - ‘
‘Brown! Fawn colour.’
‘Well, that’s brown. Anyhow, it looks charming. And so do you - by Jove you do, Maude! Come this way!’
‘Where are we going?’
‘By underground. Here we are. - Two second singles, Mark Lane, please! - No, that’s for the west-end trains. Down here! Next train, the man says.’
They were in the mephitic cellar, with the two long wooden platforms where the subterranean trains land or load their freights. A strangling gas tickled their throats and set them coughing. It was all dank and dark and gloomy. But little youth and love care for that! They were bubbling over with the happiness of this abnormal meeting. Both talked together in their delight, and Maude patted Frank’s sleeve with every remark. They could even illuminate all that was around them, by the beauty and brightness of their own love. It went the length of open praise for their abominable surroundings.
‘Isn’t it grand and solemn?’ said Maude. ‘Look at the black shadows.’
‘When they come to excavate all this some thousands of years hence, they will think it was constructed by a race of giants,’ Frank answered.
‘The modern works for the benefit of the community are really far greater than those which sprang from the caprice of kings. The London and North-Western Railway is an infinitely grander thing than the pyramids. Look at the two headlights in the dark!’
Two sullen crimson discs glowed in the black arch of the tunnel. With a menacing and sinister speed, they grew and grew until roaring they sprang out of the darkness, and the long, dingy train, with a whining of brakes, drew up at the platform.
‘Here’s one nearly empty,’ said Frank, with his hand on the handle.
‘Don’t you think - ‘ said Maude.
‘Yes, I do,’ cried Frank.
And they got into one which was quite empty. For the underground railway is blessed as regards privacy above all other lines, and where could a loving couple be more happy, who have been torn apart by cruel fate for seven long hours or so? It was with a groan that Frank remarked that they had reached Mark Lane.
‘Bother!’ said Maude, and wondered if there were any shop near where she could buy hairpins. As every lady knows, or will know, there is a very intimate connection between hairpins and a loving husband.
‘Now, Frank, about your telegram.’
‘All right, dear. Come along where I lead you, and you will understand all about it.’
They passed out of Mark Lane Station and down a steep and narrow street to the right. At the bottom lay an old smoke-stained church with a square tower, and a small open churchyard beside it.
‘That’s the church of Saint Olave,’ said Frank. ‘We are going into it.’
He pushed open a folding oaken door, and they found themselves inside it. Rows of modern seats filled the body of it, but the walls and windows gave an impression of great antiquity. The stained glass - especially that which surmounted the altar - contained those rich satisfying purples and deep deep crimsons which only go with age. It was a bright and yet a mellow light, falling in patches of vivid colour upon the brown woodwork and the grey floors. Here and there upon the walls were marble inscriptions in the Latin tongue, with pompous allegorical figures with trumpets, for our ancestors blew them in stone as well as in epitaphs over their tombs. They loved to die, as they had lived, with dignity and with affectation. White statues glimmered in the shadows of the corners. As Frank and his wife passed down the side-aisle, their steps clanged through the empty and silent church.
‘Here he is!’ said Frank, and faced to the wall.
He was looking up at the modern representation of a gentleman in a full and curly wig. It was a well-rounded and comely face, with shrewd eyes and a sensitive mouth. The face of a man of affairs, and a good fellow, with just that saving touch of sensuality about it which makes an expression human and lovable. Underneath was printed -
Delphi Complete Works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Illustrated) Page 609
