Mrs Vaughan had won the right for Robert Seymour’s afternoons to be devoted to artistic practice, while the mornings would be given over to her husband’s pattern-drawing.
At breakfast the next day, attended by Vaughan and all the apprentices at a single table – with Mrs Vaughan absent, as was her custom – it seemed, by various smiles and pleasantries, that Vaughan had accepted his wife’s conditions, and resolved to make the best of it. For Vaughan was – as Wonk had told Seymour as they sat upon their beds sharing bread and cheese – at heart a good soul. That soul was certainly reflected in the excellence of the breakfast, with nicely browned and seasoned sausage, eggs in which the yolk was neither overdone nor underdone, thickly buttered toast and strong coffee; though the deeper resentments provoked by the new apprentice manifested themselves in the way Todd stared across the table at Seymour and in the slow sawing action with which his cutlery worked, and in his laboured chewing in which he made certain that Seymour looked into his mouth.
With the meal over, all transferred to the drawing office, a well-lit annexe with a high ceiling and walls decorated with framed watercoloured fabric patterns, mainly combining the floral with the geometric: pink rows of Euclidean peonies and nasturtiums, each half an inch high, then dropped down, inset, and repeated in reverse. In contrast to this neatness, the apprentices’ desks were pockmarked and scratched, through intense application of dividers, sharp pencils and rulers.
When all had taken their seats, Vaughan closed the door and cleared his throat. Looking towards the new apprentice, he said: ‘The name “Seymour” begins with “S”. What sort of S? Is it a gently curving S – a shiver in a straight line? Or a grossly bulging undulating S – a snake sleeping off a meal? Todd, how would you recommend our new man start his signature?’
‘With a satisfying medium S, a perfect S, neither too straight nor a distasteful swerve.’
‘Good. Field, what do I say about the representation of petals?’
‘The representation of petals must flow with an ease and a grace.’
‘Good. Barton, what do I say about the work overall?’
‘That it should be done, sir,’ said Wonk; there was a hint of a twinkle in his eye, and a half-smile at Seymour.
Vaughan smiled. ‘I will let that pass. But tell him, Kibble.’
‘There is the necessity of a sweetness being given to the work overall.’
‘All of these things you will learn, Seymour, until they become second nature. Field, what do I say about geometry and botany?’
‘Aim for the flowering pentagon and the blossom within squares.’
‘Kibble, what are our favourite colours?’
‘Red, purple and cherry-blossom pink.’
‘Indeed – red, purple and cherry-blossom pink.’ He stood directly in front of Seymour’s desk. ‘You will copy from vases, from engravings, from patterns already made. You will learn about weaves, repetitions, and the use of metal threads. You will produce designs for shawls and dresses and curtains. You will immerse yourself in petals, berries, feathery fronds, weeping willows, and all variations on lupins and calla lilies. What were your favourite colours before you came here, Seymour?’
‘Blue and green, Mr Vaughan.’
‘In due course, your tastes will change to red, purple and cherry-blossom pink.’
*
In the afternoon, Robert Seymour joined Mrs Vaughan, and after tea was poured, she sat back in her armchair and said: ‘You may sketch me, if you like.’
Just as he lifted his pencil, she said: ‘I wish to talk while you draw. I have not told you yet about my son’s own apprenticeship, to an artist. I have held back, because of – what happened. You are happy to listen, as you draw?’
‘It will not distract me, Mrs Vaughan.’ Then, as an afterthought, he said: ‘I have the ability to listen intently as I work. I believe I inherited it from my father.’
She took several sips of tea, and then put down her cup. After nervous motions of one hand within another, she began.
‘Years ago, when Thomas’s father and I realised that our son had great talent, but that it needed to be developed, we apprenticed him to a certain Mr Edward Dayes, who was recommended to us. He had exhibited at the Royal Academy, and was known for landscapes and miniatures, as well as paintings of cathedrals and so forth, and he seemed a very good choice for Thomas. I remember Mr Dayes calling at our house for the first time – but when he took my hand, I confess I was disappointed. There was a weakness in his face – it made me think of melting wax, especially under the eyes. But he had been recommended, and I took that seriously, and so did my husband. Mr Dayes took Thomas on, and at the start, we were pleased enough to pay the premium. Until we came to realise that he was jealous of our son.
‘I believe he used the apprenticeship to deliberately hold Thomas back. He gave our son every menial task he could, with very few lessons at all. He would make Thomas grind paint and clean brushes, or apply watercolour washes, or simply sweep the floor. These are part of an apprentice artist’s everyday life – but there didn’t seem to be anything else in this apprenticeship.
‘But, such was Thomas’s determination, he could not be held back. He practised late into the night, sketching and painting, and if Dayes ever saw these works he would make a great show of tossing them aside and sometimes he would not speak to my son for a week at a time, except in odd grunts, or in short commands to grind paints and clean brushes. I believe that Edward Dayes knew Thomas would grow into a more distinguished artist than himself, and he couldn’t bear that thought.
‘Well, through Edward Dayes, there was a person my son came to know, a young and wealthy draper with premises in Cheapside, not far from Mansion House. This draper was very hobby-horsical about old castles and monasteries and suchlike, and he liked to travel around and record these buildings with a pencil. Well, being a draper, he dealt in cloth, and cloth lasts only until the moths have had a meal, and that is perhaps why he liked old things in stone and brick.’ She smiled. ‘My husband sees his designs as everlasting, even if the cloth they are printed on goes threadbare. But that aside – what I do know is that this draper was no artist. And, one day, he came to Mr Dayes with a large batch of exceedingly poor drawings, and he asked if they might be improved. Mr Dayes took the draper’s money, and was all flattery and smiles, saying that they hardly needed any work at all, apart from a touch here and there. Then he passed all the drawings to Thomas – and as Edward Dayes only ever gave Thomas menial tasks, that was how he viewed the draper’s assignment. So Thomas worked upon them, and added colour, and made them better in whatever way he could. He made them splendid! The draper was so pleased with the results that he and my son became friends.
‘The two of them would walk through the streets of London on a summer’s night. Thomas told me that sometimes the draper would become distracted, and, ignoring all the people on the street, he would take Thomas by the arm and pull him to some fragment of London from before the Great Fire. Sometimes it would be a decoration protruding from the brickwork, which didn’t match the rest of the building. Often it was an old merchant’s sign – the draper had a particular fondness for those – I remember Thomas mentioning a griffin under a window. A stone feather – that was another. And the draper would insist that Thomas sketch the decoration, and make a record. So the bond between them grew.
‘But this friendship was the bellows to the flames of Edward Dayes’s jealousy. And one afternoon, Edward Dayes quarrelled with my son, and accused him of spending too much time with the draper, and neglecting his work, and after just three years of the proposed seven, Dayes dismissed him from the apprenticeship. It was for the best, of course, for what more could my son learn from a man who was riddled with such ill feelings? So Thomas took his own way, and often accompanied the draper on his excursions.
‘But even when Thomas left his service, Edward Dayes was consumed with jealousy. I suspect he spent his time dwelling upon the thought of the young apprentice
who was better than the master. You see, one day – some years later – in a fit of desperation – when his jealousy must have taken him to a pinnacle of loathing himself – one day, Edward Dayes—’
Seymour looked up, as the interruption to her story was so marked. He watched as she drew her finger from ear to ear and made a sound suggesting a blade.
He said in astonishment: ‘He slit his own throat?’
‘He made a hole in the water, yes. The circumstances of how he killed himself are not clear. No one seems to know. That is very strange. You would expect every detail to come out. It must have been a truly terrible death, too terrible even to describe. Perhaps it was with a knife – it may not have been his throat, perhaps he thrust it into his stomach and disembowelled himself. Perhaps he tied himself to a beam, and jumped, and his own weight removed his head clean from the shoulders. Perhaps he set fire to himself – I have thought of that, and remembered my old observation that he seemed made of wax. We shall never know.’ She sipped her tea. ‘How is the drawing coming along?’ she said, in complete blitheness.
‘There is just a little more to do.’ He resumed sketching, but he fidgeted awkwardly, and this communicated itself to the pencil, and the little cotton ruff at her throat he drew in a careless line, and the lead broke upon the paper.
‘You are fast. But don’t be impatient,’ she said, as he picked up another pencil. ‘Yet don’t be timid. The one good thing my husband will teach you with his little petals and leaves will be a confidence with the hand. You need a good sweeping movement across the paper.’
He turned the portrait for her to see.
Mrs Vaughan looked at the picture, then at Seymour, then at the portrait again. In a welling up of feeling, she asked him to come to her, and she grasped him to her bosom, hugging him as though for dear life.
*
It was a Sunday evening, two years on, in a bachelor’s narrow and untidy dining room, on the other side of London, and baked carp was served.
Wonk had accepted an invitation from his uncle, because his father had always advised him to keep in with this relative, a half-brother, as one day it might bear dividends: a letter had arrived at Vaughan’s a few days before, stating that a friend may also be brought. It occurred to Wonk that if Seymour attended, it would spread the sometimes difficult work of conversation – and besides, the offer of supper meant Seymour was perfectly happy to go.
The bearded uncle, who had been known to discourse on the hierarchy of a herd of cows after a roast beef sandwich and on the Dutch trade in cloves after a spoonful of apple pie, now turned his attention to fish.
‘A friend of mine caught this carp and I am grateful to him,’ he said. ‘But no fish tastes as fine as the fish you have caught yourself. And the tastiest fish in the river are usually the hardest ones to catch.’
‘You speak from experience as an angler, sir?’ asked Seymour.
‘I do. I don’t get the time these days.’ Piles of loose papers around the dining room, whether on the floor, or on the sideboard, or stuffed into bookshelves, were testimony to other interests.
‘What is the tastiest fish you have ever caught, Uncle?’ said Wonk, as it was the only question that occurred to him.
‘I know that without a moment’s consideration. I spent a week at the River Irk, and the eels there are uniformly delicious. A truly beau catch, every single one. It is the fulling mills on the river. All the fat, oil and grease scoured out of the cloth gets under their scales. Oh I can taste the eels now!’ He rapped the hilts of the knife and fork upon the tablecloth as he usually did when a new idea occurred to him over dinner. ‘Why don’t you lads take up fishing?’
‘I don’t know that Mr Vaughan would approve,’ said Wonk.
‘Nor Mrs Vaughan,’ said Seymour.
‘Sunday afternoon is your own, isn’t it? Come with me.’ They left the baked carp steaming upon the plates as he led the boys to an attic, where he sorted out two bamboo fishing rods, as well as reels and other equipment. ‘Ah, and something else. Come with me again.’ He returned to the dining room, as the boys carried the equipment downstairs. From a high shelf, among many books on diverse themes, he reached down a copy of Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler. The carp by this time was stone cold; but all thought of eating was gone as the bachelor reminisced about angling expeditions of the past, and the heat of his enthusiasm began to kindle the curiosity and interest of Seymour and Wonk as well.
*
The result was that every fine Sunday, Seymour and Wonk sought the joys of river and pond. On a scorching afternoon they sat upon the bank until the skin on the backs of their hands peeled, with Walton as the only balm.
‘Walton says that no life is so happy and so pleasant as the life of an angler,’ said Seymour, gazing into the river.
‘Anglers,’ replied Wonk, taking up the theme, ‘sit on cowslip banks. And drink cowslip wine. And hear the birds sing. And feel as quiet in their hearts as a stream.’
‘But Walton makes it harder to go back to the city afterwards,’ said Seymour. ‘Where there are no fish except those on fishmongers’ slabs and the birds sing shrilly just to make themselves heard.’
He stood, stretched his legs, and then lay down prone upon the bank, looking into the water. ‘Have you ever noticed, Wonk, a curious thing – that a dark fish which is swimming close to the surface can look darker than a fish that swims at the bottom among the weeds?’
‘I think I have noticed that,’ replied Wonk. ‘But without you I wouldn’t have been truly aware of it.’
Seymour turned his head and he and Wonk looked at each other for several seconds. Seymour took in the deep, dark eyes of his friend, and then smiled, made a flourish with his hands, and broke the stare.
‘Let me tell you something that I have observed,’ said Wonk. ‘When you are in a good mood, you always do a little movement with your hands, just like you did now, just like a stage performer after a trick.’
‘Oh – hands, hands, hands. Do you know, Wonk, hands are one of the most troubling things to draw. If you have the hands empty in a picture, there is too much fussy detail in the fingers. It is better to have hands holding something. Like a bag, or a cane, or an umbrella. Or a fishing rod. Or something else.’ He looked across to the opposite bank, where sat a patient angler who had not been observed to catch anything at all. ‘Now what’s he going to try next?’
Beside the angler, upon the grass, was an unrolled cloth, which showed off an outstanding collection of artificial fish and other lures, which by a crafty disposition of painted wood, stuffed leather and mother-of-pearl suggested the glint of scales. The angler was currently taking great pains to select the right lure, and eventually settled upon a leather frog, which he attached to his line and cast into the water.
Seymour took out his sketchbook and embarked on a rapid drawing of the angler. ‘You know, Wonk,’ said Seymour as he added details, ‘an angler seeks three things. To catch many fish, to catch large fish, and to catch difficult fish. The bungling angler has these ambitions too – except that he will catch no fish at all – or if he does catch a fish it will be a very small one – and if he should land a difficult fish he will sustain personal injury and be arrested for trespass. Here.’ In the drawing, the angler had sat so long in the same position that a spider had woven a web between his person and the rod. ‘I might call this “A Study in Patience”.’ He very deliberately made the flourish with his hands.
‘You draw so effortlessly, Robert,’ said Wonk.
‘No, it is not effortless!’ The sudden anger made Wonk start.
‘I meant to say,’ said Wonk, ‘that you draw so quickly. You could sell pictures like these. Perhaps you could even get them etched and printed, and sell lots of copies.’
‘Strangely enough, Mrs Vaughan showed me some of her son’s old copper etching plates the other day. She had a whole box of them, all caked with verdigris and filth. She came over mopey, though. She said one of the last things her son asked her t
o do was to sell the plates, to be melted in a refiner’s pot. But she couldn’t bear to do it.’
‘Can she teach you how to etch the plates?’
‘She doesn’t know enough. She just knows you bite the metal with aqua fortis, and that when the plates go in a press, it forces the paper into the grooves. Ha, she recalled something her son said once. “The paper is forced into the grooves, and sucks up the ink like an old aunt sucking on her gin.”’ He stood up. ‘We’ve got something!’ Seymour’s line was taut.
They glimpsed the arrow-shaped head, the flash of gold-green scales, there were the struggles on the surface. It was a pike.
Seymour reeled the fish in, and Wonk administered the club to its head.
‘Look at the teeth!’ said Wonk, inserting his finger right inside, as Seymour held open the bony jaw, revealing the inward-curving fangs.
They stopped at an inn before returning to Vaughan’s, carrying the prized pike in a sack.
‘Anything you want to sell in that?’ said the landlord with an artful look.
‘It’s our first pike, and we intend to eat it,’ said Seymour.
They took a small circular table at the rear. Shortly afterwards, an unkempt man entered, with a bulging sack of his own, who said a word to the landlord and was promptly shown into a back room. The man emerged a few minutes later, carrying no sack at all. About a quarter of an hour later, a small respectably dressed man – in his black garb, and with his grey hair, he could have passed for a lawyer – entered the inn and was shown into the back room, and reappeared with a sack identical to the one carried by his unkempt predecessor. He left immediately.
‘Something nice for his supper there,’ said Seymour. ‘I would like to taste game myself. But Vaughan is too law-abiding to touch it.’
‘Not so. The cook gave me a slice of poacher’s pie once that she made for him. Pheasant.’
‘I am surprised. Still, who needs game when we have pike?’
For they had come to an arrangement with Vaughan’s cook that she would prepare any fish they caught, as long as they would give her a share. Thus, that evening they dined on baked pike with mushroom sauce. Cook had strongly urged that the fish should be brined for a whole day first, but Seymour and Wonk were not to be denied. They ate it on their own, on trays, in their room.
Death and Mr. Pickwick Page 8