He still did not stop.
Now the scheme became even grander in Seymour’s mind: perhaps other authors might be included, as well as Shakespeare. He brought down a volume of Byron.
Over the next weeks and months, he produced 260 complicated lithographic pictures, and this in addition to work for McLean, and many other commissions.
If his wife passed the open doorway, she would see him hunched over the paper, and often she heard moans as he rubbed his neck, though even as he rubbed he did not cease drawing. When she eventually saw her husband at meals, he would massage his eyes as he chewed. She would talk about a letter from her mother, and then she would ask his opinion, and he would say ‘On what, Jane?’ Sometimes on his way back to drawing Shakespeare, he would steady himself against the wall. He smiled and told her: ‘Just a moment’s dizziness.’
One night in bed he cried out in agony from a headache, and in the morning as he attempted to rise, the movement of simply throwing back the covers and standing on the floor was too great a strain.
A venerable doctor came to the bedside, who listened to the artist’s chest, and then pronounced his verdict: ‘There is no doubt in my mind – you need a complete rest from drawing.’
‘I cannot,’ said the artist, ‘I need to finish my drawings from Shakespeare. And then the English poets.’
‘Mr Seymour, you will finish yourself first,’ said the doctor. ‘You must stop drawing. You must put yourself in pleasant circumstances for a few weeks, with good air.’ The doctor looked towards Jane, suspiciously eyeing her necklace, as though he suspected her husband worked primarily to pay for her personal adornment. ‘I would recommend a break from everything familiar,’ said the doctor, turning back to Seymour. ‘I suggest you go alone. Please yourself in any way, forget all your responsibilities. Enjoy the sun. Do nothing. Or do anything, as long as it does not involve a pencil.’
*
In the summer of 1830, the doctor’s recommendation sent Robert Seymour to Richmond. He stood on the bridge in the sunshine and gazed at the water, and at the families who picnicked in the meadows nearby. He wandered on Richmond Green, and along the gravelled High Walk, and paused to admire the deer in the distance. In the evening he approached the theatre, but decided not to attend a performance of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. He strolled in the afternoons in the Terrace Gardens, between the closely gathered elms, where scarcely a ray of sun could penetrate and old bachelors endeavoured to walk in as sprightly a manner as they could manage. He would simply sit on the grass and gaze down at Petersham Wood and the Thames Valley. Then he lay back with the sun upon his face. After a while, he descended to the Star and Garter public house, and cast glances at the well-tanned bargemen who drank outside.
He had already pledged to make reading – with no purpose other than pleasure – part of his convalescence. A book which accompanied him to Richmond was the sequel to Life in London. This sequel had not been the hurricane of success that was the original work, and Seymour had not even inspected the volume until the moment he sat in the garden of the Star and Garter.
Now he smiled as he read of the cousin from the country, Jerry, leaving the metropolis after the adventures of Life in London, having decided to return home. The stagecoach reached Speenhamland, and stopped at a hotel to pick up passengers. Here, a fat bachelor whose dimensions were larger than the width of the coach door was forced to travel upon the roof. ‘There should be an Act of Parliament which regulates the size of coach doors,’ said the bachelor, ‘and when the House next sits, I shall certainly petition on the great importance of this matter.’ The bachelor began chatting to Jerry. This man, the reader learnt, was Sir John Blubber, retired from business, and radiating benevolence. Then, to Seymour’s delight, the coach stopped at the very village he knew: Pickwick.
Pleasant memories of the village returned, inseparable from the desire to produce works of art, and involved the Hare and Hounds, and that peculiar publican and coaching proprietor, Moses Pickwick.
The day afterwards, Seymour bought pencils and paper, having convinced himself that if he became frustrated and anxious merely because he could not draw, he would make himself ill again. As a concession to the doctor’s orders, he resolved to draw new subjects, unrelated to his work in London.
So he produced A Water Party, showing anthropomorphic cats holding a picnic at Richmond. On the very spot where Seymour sat, the felines sat too, at a cloth spread with platters, raising their wine glasses in their paws. Afterwards, he drew cats playing whist, then an army-officer cat courting a well-dressed lady cat in her parlour, bending to kiss her paw. Then stray cats caterwauling in the streets, dressed as ragged beggars, accompanied by a one-legged cat-fiddler. The musical theme led to Musical Mousers, showing an entire orchestra of cats – but, suddenly overcome with fatigue, Seymour decided to pause in his drawing and take a doze in the sun.
He lay back on the grass with his jacket under his head. By a natural tendency of the mind to play with words, ‘mousers’ suggested ‘Moses’; and in a dreamy state, with the warmth of the sun upon his eyelids, he wondered what had happened to that strange publican and coachman.
*
IN A DESK DRAWER IN Moses Pickwick’s office at the White Hart lay a curious green ledger in which the overall profit-and-loss account for the inn was kept. Common opinion holds that arithmetic is the field of human knowledge most likely to be true, but the Pickwick family had a congenital dislike of subtraction, addition and matters mathematical. Moses had once cried inconsolably in school when the headmaster gave him a problem concerning compound interest, and Eleazer seemed especially delighted that his cousin shared the family aversion to manipulating numbers. As long as his cousin knew that the family owned about three times as many horses as miles between Bath and London, Eleazer was happy to make Moses his successor.
So Moses and Eleazer put figures in the ledger when the mood struck. If a total looked about right, it was right. Yet in the Pickwicks’ ledger, if errors were the rule and correctness a fluke, accuracy was the miraculous result. Figures in the pessimistic way by Eleazer were counteracted by figures in the optimistic way by Moses, and vice versa. Whatever their exact income, the Pickwicks were well-to-do. Their three hundred horses proved it. If they should need to make an exact calculation, they could always hire a clerk.
The account-book’s pages proved accommodating to all types of material. This began when, rather than become involved in numerical calculation, the Pickwicks wrote down the names of items they had acquired year by year, in lists, with no monetary values attached. At first glance, these lists resembled recipes. It was but a short step to actual recipes making their appearance in the pages – for gingerbread, Sally Lunns, milk punch, prepared hams, stewed cucumbers and pickled lemons. Soon there were prescriptions for ailments, such as for treating a wasp sting, and then methods of killing flies, and then contractual terms for footmen, and then pieces of proverbial wisdom, and then anything that Moses and Eleazer Pickwick considered worthy of note. Eleazer once told Moses – after Eleazer swatted a bluebottle with a twelve-inch ruler, because he could not concentrate on compiling a waybill, and after he had remarked that they must make some more flypaper – ‘Anything can have an effect upon profits, even a buzzing fly.’ A piece of wisdom which Moses duly committed to the account book.
On rare occasions, Moses Pickwick brought this book out into public. One Saturday evening, when visitors in the White Hart’s bar talked of the actor James Quin’s legendary appearance as Falstaff, one man remarked that it was a shame nobody was alive who could have seen it. This led Moses to fetch the account book – he announced that he would ask the cook to prepare Quin’s Sauce, using the recipe recorded in its pages. In the bar, he read the ingredients and directions aloud to the visitors, beginning with ‘Pound six large anchovies in a mortar’ and passing through sundry items including black walnut pickle, mushroom catchup, and a double-glass of claret.
‘Quin’s Sauce is one of my favo
urites,’ said Moses in his alternation of bass and falsetto, ‘but did you know the sauce is the secret basis of Quin’s Siamese Soup?’
The men in the bar had heard of neither sauce nor soup. ‘Shall I tell you a story about the soup?’ said Moses.
Having caught the attention of his audience, Moses Pickwick told his tale of James Quin, the renowned actor and gourmand; for the subject of Bath’s distinguished citizens, from Bladud to himself, never tired him at all.
*
Not everyone held James Quin’s acting in high esteem. The novelist Tobias Smollett once said that the movements of Quin on stage resembled heaving ballast in the hold of a ship. Certainly, if a play script required an actor to tremble with fear, Quin threw all twenty stone of limbs and body into tremulous emotion. In his novel Peregrine Pickle, Smollett singled out Quin’s seismic handling of the first-person singular for particular comment:
His behaviour appeared to me so uncouth that I really imagined he was visited by some epileptic distemper, for he stood tottering and gasping for the space of two minutes, like a man suddenly struck with the palsy; and, after various distortions and side-shakings, as if he had got fleas in his doublet, heaved up from his lungs the letter I, like a huge anchor from foul ground.
In 1751, as a result of these attacks, Quin retired to Bath, taking his style of acting with him. Here, he devoted himself to his two true loves: eating and drinking. Before his retirement, Quin had merely played Falstaff; now he was Falstaff – Falstaff in the flesh, in real life, and proud of it! By half-past eight of a Friday evening, Quin would have emptied six full bottles of claret from the White Hart’s cellar. He grew so stout that even sedan chairmen in Bath in low season had been known to turn down his custom. If two chairmen did accept him as a passenger, his limbs had to be lifted into the vehicle, for he was too far gone in his cups to bring them to life himself, and the two men hauled his legs up one at a time. If they took Quin to the street door of his house, they earned a large gratuity if they could then help him to bed, aided by two servants. And, once in bed of a Friday night, Quin gave orders not to be disturbed until Sunday at noon. ‘The bear must hibernate,’ he said, before he collapsed into his own fat and snores.
Yet for all his gluttony, Quin had a fierce abhorrence of particular victuals. Any food that was ordinary and unadorned was intolerable. ‘I would rather starve than eat a plain boiled potato or a piece of unseasoned meat,’ he often said. He confessed that as a lad, when he was starting out in the acting profession, he was once reduced by financial circumstances to a dish of raw potatoes after a performance as a citizen in Coriolanus. ‘There they were, these potatoes, sitting white and round on a white plate,’ he said when he reminisced about the experience. ‘For a long time, I simply stared at them. Summoning up courage, I forked a potato towards my mouth at least five times – but I still could not overcome nausea. At last, by sheer force of will, I got a small one into my mouth. But the smooth curves of the peeled potato, like a child’s alabaster marble sitting on my tongue, induced such revulsion that I had to spit it out on to the plate. I went hungry that night, and I have never attempted a plain potato since.’
Spiciness and exoticism of food were so important to James Quin that he would waddle into the kitchen at his house, sample a steaming spoonful of liquor from a pot and declare, with great authority, the exact adjustments to seasoning that his cook had to make – from half-a-trimmed-fingernail-of-the-little-finger of pepper to a tweezerload of salt. He took it as absolutely true that, just as men exist in different shapes, sizes and colours, so there are men born with exquisitely sensitive palates, capable of discerning minute differences in taste, men for whom the plain and ordinary on the dinner plate are the greatest horrors the world can contrive. Thus, anyone receiving an invitation to his table would be sure of exotic food and drink, as well as gossip of the theatre and general good cheer, marred only by Quin’s tendency to talk too much of himself.
There was one meal he served that was prized by his guests above all others: Quin’s Siamese Soup.
The legend of this pottage spread so widely that its reputation was itself a rich aroma arising from the surface of the soup bowl. It was without question the most sought-after meal in Bath, and made all the tastier because, despite every inducement short of blackmail, Quin refused to reveal the recipe. Rumours circulated about the ingredients. Was it made from pulverised turtle? Or flaked John Dory? Did all its ingredients come from the East? Was there – as some claimed – a supernatural ingredient, and was it true that water blessed by an anchorite in an Athenian cave was used to boil the onions? Attempts were made to bribe his cook, but she could not reveal the secret even if she had wanted to do so – for Quin always made her stand outside the kitchen, and locked the door while he added seasoning in the right proportions, as well as ingredients known only to himself.
To taste the famous soup was worth enduring an entire evening of Quin’s anecdotes.
‘Oh what japes we had in those days!’ he said, turning his large face so that he observed the reactions over the soup bowls. ‘Oh what laughs!’ His shirt was unbuttoned to show off even more of his profound physique. He blamed a mild head cold for not eating his own soup that night, which had blunted his tongue’s keenness but had not in any way affected his voice. Still, he looked with a keen eye upon the sips of others, and seemed to take in the taste through his pupils, as he recounted events in theatrical life.
Most fascinating, in his own opinion, was the occasion he was put on trial for murder, later recorded in that illustrated collection of outrages known as the Newgate Calendar. At his dinner table, punctuated by long, long pauses to heighten the drama, and long, long gulps of claret to make the guests wait, Quin told of the extraordinary events surrounding his appearance in Addison’s Roman drama Cato.
‘When the great Booth’s infirmities meant that he was obliged to leave the stage, the general clamour was that I should be his successor at Drury Lane,’ he said, ‘and there was no part more popular than his Cato. I doubt that any role in any dramatic performance in history had attracted more interest from the public. No one else had acted it, and no one else should. So I refused. Still, it was demanded I step into his shoes. So, with reluctance, I accepted. Although – I insisted the playbills should read “The part of Cato will be attempted by Mr Quin”. My friends, I entered the fray. I especially remember when the body of Cato’s dead son, slain in battle, was brought on stage. I said the line “Thanks to the gods, my boy has done his duty” – and the cry came up from the audience: “Booth outdone! Booth outdone!” Oh! And then when I expired!’ He swilled the claret round his mouth to prepare himself for the reciting of the line from his death scene. ‘“Oh when shall I get loose from this vain world, Th’abode of guilt and sorrow.” The audience cried “Encore! Encore!” Well, I had no alternative but to repeat the soliloquy. And when the curtain finally fell, the applause! Oh the applause!’
Quin nodded a bow to all sides of the table, before resuming his tale.
‘This acclaim continued night after night, until there came a performance when a low actor called Williams, a Welshman, took over the part of a messenger. He was – perhaps understandably – nervous being near me. He had never, I believe, had his name upon the bills. When he came on stage, he should have said “Caesar sends health to Cato.” But he pronounced Cato as “Keeto”. Keeto! I was outraged! So I departed from Addison’s text and said, “Would he had sent a better messenger.” It went down very well, because many in the audience had of course seen my performance before. But when the scene was over Williams followed me to the green room. He said I had made him contemptible in the eyes of the audience. Then the fool demanded that I either apologise or fight a duel. I said that I would give him an answer when he had learnt to read a script. And he flew into a worse rage! He uttered a torrent of threats and abuse. I remained calm, gentlemen. My response was to repeat his words back to him, but changing the vowels. He had said, “I will make you pay.” I
said back, “I will meek you pee.” He said, “Take the smile off your face.” I said, “Teek the smile off your feece.” The fellow was frankly outdone, and he stormed out of the room in a complete state of fury!
‘Later that night, I was on my way back to my lodgings. But Williams lay in wait for me under the piazza of Covent Garden. Suddenly he emerged from the shadows and drew his sword. He tried to mock me, saying, “I will MEEK you PEE, Quin.” Well, I drew too. My years of experience in stage swordsmanship were now matched against this puppy – though, I confess, he was better than many an actor I have fenced with. But, in defending myself, I ran him through.’ Quin jabbed the air with his butter knife. ‘He fell down dead upon the spot.’
‘Instantly?’ asked one distinguished guest, whose squeezed face appeared involved in sucking even when not at the soup.
‘As good as instantly.’ Detecting some scepticism, Quin said: ‘A man be dead ’ere he dies.’ This profundity apparently assuaged any misgivings about the story’s strict veracity. ‘But I had killed a man. So I surrendered myself without delay to the authorities.’ There was the longest gap in the anecdote so far, and Quin slowly, slowly, shook his head, reliving the emotions stirred by that anxious time.
Suddenly he said: ‘The trial, oh the trial! Yet, gentlemen, I knew I had justice on my side. I was found guilty of manslaughter. I was soon back on the stage.’
With great effort, Quin lifted himself from his seat. ‘I must excuse myself,’ he said, and exited the dining room.
‘He got off lightly,’ said a distinguished merchant of Bath as he wiped a piece of bread around the bowl, doing a thorough job of cleaning it.
‘I will forgive him any crime if he gives us the recipe,’ said the squeezed-faced man. ‘That was the most delicious soup I have ever tasted.’
Death and Mr. Pickwick Page 27