Overworked and ill-paid, Robert Surtees would have submitted his resignation, had there been another sporting publication in London at which he could find employment; but as there was no other publication, he took the only course of action available – he founded such a publication himself.
*
‘WHERE DID HE GET THE money to start it?’ asked Richard Penn.
‘He found a backer,’ said the landowner.
‘Who?’
*
ONE DAY IN THE OFFICE, Mr Shury stood with his posterior towards the fire, gaining the additional benefit of raising his coat-tails, when his attention was seized by the yard-wide bare wooden panel opposite. He had never before realised how bare, and he was struck by a pang of conscience.
He considered whether the prints on the wall could be arranged more felicitously. At the end of this exhausting process, he made an announcement.
‘I do believe the office could be enlivened by the purchase of a new hunting print,’ he said.
‘I’m sure,’ said Surtees, without looking up from his work.
‘If it were a nicer day, I would go out and buy something for that wall.’
‘Indeed.’
Mr Shury had made several attempts to start a conversation that morning, and each had received a similar response. To his remarkable comment that there was a subscription water called Shury’s, no relation, near Chingford, there had been merely an ‘Is there?’ from Surtees. While to the suggestion that staghorn beakers might be an appropriate addition to the office’s collection of drinking vessels, Surtees had said: ‘Definitely.’ Mr Shury had always prided himself upon his creativity in solving problems, and experiencing Surtees’s reticence as the problem of the moment, he took the petty-cash box from his drawer and said: ‘Why don’t you go and buy a print?’ He placed the box on Surtees’s desk. ‘Take the rest of the day off. You will come back refreshed in the morning.’
Showing every indication of being instantly refreshed, Surtees took himself off to the sporting gallery recommended by Mr Shury, which was situated in the crescent between Burlington and Conduit streets.
When Surtees entered the gallery, a tall, ruddy-cheeked man stood behind the counter – in the act of forking a piece of pie into his mouth, while a glass of wine stood at the ready. The man swallowed at once, thrust the plate and the wine below the counter, and brushed an unprofessional crumb from his mouth.
‘Please excuse me, I would normally eat at the back,’ said the man, ‘but both my assistants have food poisoning, an album needs to be compiled, and I can assure you I have never spilt anything on a print in my life.’
‘You must not be embarrassed.’ Surtees sniffed an aroma, and a flicker of interest crossed his face.
‘Would you be offended if I offered you a piece of pie, sir?’ said the gallery owner.
‘I would not be offended at all. Is it gooseberry?’
‘It is. I confess I have had a passion for gooseberry pie since boyhood.’
‘I would be delighted to try a small piece.’
‘And a glass of Moselle?’
‘How kind.’
As the print seller disappeared through a door at the rear, Surtees cast an eye around the gallery. The many framed hunting scenes might be expected to capture his attention, but the drudgery of the Sporting Magazine had dulled their content. Instead, his gaze was drawn to a curious porcelain figurine on the counter, of a bony man sitting on a tree stump. The china chin jutted so much, Surtees’s fingertips experienced an insurmountable urge to make contact.
‘My father’s greatest achievement,’ said the gallery owner as he emerged from the door, to see Surtees stroking the porcelain chin. ‘I presume you know Dr Syntax?’
‘I confess I don’t,’ said Surtees as he took the wine and pie. ‘Should I?’
‘It was an illustrated publication of some twenty years ago. You still see Dr Syntax around though. I was a boy myself at the time. I knew the author very well – dead now, alas. Strangely enough, I used to eat gooseberry pie with him too. But let me introduce myself. I am Rudolph Ackermann Junior.’
Under the influence of wine and gooseberry pie, an easy sociability developed between the two men. Surtees learnt from the gallery owner that his father, the senior Ackermann – the associate of Combe and the also-deceased Rowlandson – now sat at home, his faced twisted by a stroke. Before his illness, he had established his son’s business as a sporting-print publisher.
‘Out of respect for my father,’ he told Surtees, ‘this business is called Ackermann’s. But there will come a time – this is my firm intention – when I shall turn this business into the leading publisher of sporting prints in the country. I already know what I will call it: the Eclipse Sporting Gallery, because it will eclipse all others.’
In response, Surtees told of his unhappy employment at the Sporting Magazine.
A peculiar focus came to Ackermann’s eyes. ‘Do you not think,’ he said as he set down his wine glass, ‘that I, a sporting-prints publisher, and you, a sporting writer, could collaborate? Could we not enjoy some sort of profitable association?’
Within an hour, they had formulated the idea of the New Sporting Magazine, which Surtees would edit after resigning from the Sporting Magazine. Nimrod would be the person to recruit to the staff of the New, but Surtees mentioned the legal prohibition on the name.
‘I already know all about that,’ said Ackermann. ‘But I have heard rumours that the Quarterly Review want to employ him, if he ever comes back from France. They have the money to fight a legal challenge. But perhaps there could be ways around the problem. Nimrod is prohibited from writing about sport. But perhaps Nimrod could write about other matters, tenuously connected with sport?’
‘How tenuous?’
‘Tenuous enough for us to get away with it! And if we could at least recruit Nimrod, we might keep him with us until the great day when he was free, and Nimrod would rise again.’
*
‘THE QUESTION OF NIMROD’S EMPLOYMENT remains to be resolved,’ said the elegantly boned landowner, drawing upon his cigar in the Boot. ‘But it is interesting that a change occurred in Robert Surtees’s personal character not long after the launch of the New. By all accounts, from the earliest times, Surtees was a morose fellow, with that special talent for dourness which one finds in remote corners of north-eastern England. But then came the letter informing Surtees that his elder brother had died of smallpox in Malta.’
*
ROBERT SURTEES’S BROTHER ANTHONY HAD travelled extensively on their father’s money, taking in Tripoli, Damascus, Beirut, Tyre and Jerusalem. Although Malta was ravaged by smallpox, Anthony Surtees believed that the hardened traveller need have no fear of landing on the island. Perhaps he was right – for the disease struck him down on the ship from Alexandria. He died two days after reaching Malta’s Grand Harbour.
After his brother’s death, Robert Surtees was a changed man. Of course, he was now the heir to his father’s estate at Hamsterley; and, by some complex psychological process, which might perhaps be reduced, crudely, to the formula that the rich smile more than the poor, the floodgates of humour opened within Surtees. This happened especially in connection with one of the few friends that he had made in London – a man connected with the oyster trade. Surtees had always been aware of his friend’s oddities, but if he had ever laughed at them before the death in Malta, it was inwardly, and in silence. Now he was thoroughly tickled whenever he thought of this friend and sometimes he sniggered audibly. For his friend aspired to be a fox-hunter – but did not quite have the manner of one born in an old country family.
‘It was a very good day when I inherited a share in an oyster shop,’ he recalled the friend saying, as the latter stood in a bulging apron behind a barrel of oysters soon after they had met. The friend was a dough-faced white-haired man in his fifties. ‘Every bachelor in London who roasts oysters between the bars of his grate can contribute to my prosperity.’
‘Including me,’ said Surtees, who had met this gentleman because of just such a craving, one lonely Saturday evening.
Surtees learnt that, over the course of his business life, the oysterman had invested in other concerns until he had built a fortune of more than £50,000. Contemporaneously, he had grown in girth until he weighed somewhere in the region of eighteen to twenty stone – and then, like many other city folk, he longed for the life of a hunter. This was the basis of the bond between the oysterman and Robert Surtees; and on the very first day that Surtees purchased oysters from the shop, an observation of the Sporting Magazine in the young man’s hands led to the oysterman’s confession of unfulfilled sporting yearnings.
‘Last century, a short ride would prob’ly have taken me to kennels,’ said the oysterman, ‘but every building erected and every street paved pushes the countryside a bit further out.’
‘Well, one day we shall hunt in the country together,’ said Surtees.
They rode together for the first time with a pack of staghounds in the country around Uxbridge. The oysterman rode in the stiff style of a dragoon, though with more flesh on his frame than a military man. Surtees explained the need for acquiring the easy, flowing, relaxed style of a hunter, and the oysterman learned quickly, and with a passion. By the time they had passed through Hammersmith, he rode like a man with a season’s experience to his credit. With more practice, the oysterman became extremely competent on a horse – but the style and finesse of a country gentleman were not so easily acquired.
Thus when he took Surtees along, for his useful advice, on an expedition to the most expensive saddler in the West End of London, the oysterman continually asked the assistant the cost, in his own choice words and in his exceptionally loud voice. ‘What’s the blunt for this?’ he would shout, or ‘What’s the stuff for that?’ Surtees coughed at such moments, and took an immense interest in the saddle blankets on the far side of the shop. But in the end, the oysterman paid the highest price. ‘Well, you have to cough up the chink,’ he said. With the use of the word ‘cough’ indicating, possibly, that he was not oblivious to Surtees’s embarrassment.
It was much the same on outings to buy whips and clothes. For there was in the oysterman an inclination for smartness at no small expense, a definite do-look-at-me. His huntsman’s coat was not scarlet but antique red, instantly attracting the eye – as well as disdain, if all the other hunters wore the royal colour. While, to emphasise his dedication to the sport, his very buttons, in mother of pearl, bore engraved black fox heads. The horse upon which he was mounted was no jade enlivened by the ginger-arse tactics of a Smithfield trader, but a fine steed, in mane, hoof, tail and body – as though sired in accordance with sir’s look-at-me requirements. Expense, newness and showiness characterised the horse’s furnishings as much as they did the oysterman’s own apparel: the ring under the jaws holding the reins was ivory, while the saddle was replaced before it displayed any slight tendencies to abrasion or scuffs.
Until the death of his brother, Surtees had enjoyed this man’s company, and given him the benefit of his knowledge. But now, confident in his own wealth, Surtees found the oysterman a figure of fun. He imagined a Master of Foxhounds like Lambton remarking, concerning the antique-red coat: ‘What does he do – deliver letters?’
An idea began to form in Surtees’s mind for basing a fictional character upon the oysterman, and publishing his exploits in the New Sporting Magazine – for the desire to write blossomed at the same time as Surtees’s sense of humour. He would not have the gall to state that the character was the owner of an oyster shop, for the friendship would not survive. So he conceived of a prosperous man in another line of business – and thus invented Mr Jorrocks, grocer, who had made his money from quarters of tea and ounces of cheese, a man with the passion to learn the sport of fox-hunting, but lacking the elegance and savoir faire of those born into the life.
*
‘I AM AMUSED BY THE JORROCKS pieces in the New,’ said Seymour. ‘Though they would benefit from being illustrated.’
‘Mr Seymour,’ said Barnard – who, like many of the members, was beginning to slur his words, ‘do you ever go to Putney?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Do you ever notice the men who go fishing on punts there, moored near the bridge?’
‘The notorious Putney puntites!’ said Seymour. ‘Indeed I do!’
‘They would benefit from being illustrated.’
‘Why, Edward?’ said the elegantly boned landowner. ‘There are those of us who have only fished from a bank. And I have never been to Putney in my life. What is a “Putney puntite”?’
‘Let me explain.’ Barnard took another mouthful of brandy. ‘There is nothing so dull in the entire sport of angling as sitting in a punt, except at the very moment when the fish are biting.’
‘Then why do these puntites do it?’ said the landowner.
‘I was coming to that. There is just one sort of angler who seeks this kind of recreation. You might think of them as a sect of piscatorial philosophers – a sect whose aim is to eat, drink and smoke to excess. The one excuse is that the quarterdeck of a punt doesn’t give room for any exercise – so what can you do but stuff yourself, crack a bottle and blow a cloud when the fish aren’t biting? And if the fish aren’t biting, you set them an example by doing some biting yourself.’
‘So they are not serious anglers, that’s what you’re saying,’ said the landowner.
‘Serious! The Putney puntite just wants to pass a few hours away from his normal business. They are rarely experts.’
‘They may catch a roach or two,’ said Seymour.
‘They may catch a roach,’ said Barnard. ‘They may catch a gudgeon, because any angler can. But I have seen what these men do afterwards. When the tide changes, they go to the nearest tavern, with other puntites, and have a plate of stewed eels. So they miss out on the great aim of fishing – which is to eat the fish one’s skill has caught.’
‘That’s true,’ said Warburton. ‘You should just have simple fare while you’re at the rod, and reserve yourself for the great meal of your catch afterwards. Angling’s the greatest relish for food there is.’
There was another lull in the conversation, with Warburton effectively ending the flow of thought. Penn, unable to abide the silence, then attempted to build upon Warburton’s comment.
‘Ah,’ said Penn. ‘What did Addison say? All celebrated clubs are founded upon eating and drinking. And so is the Houghton. Do you know, Mr Seymour, we are rarely angry, for what is anger but something that impedes digestion?’
‘In a sporting club concerned with fowl, fish or game,’ said Warburton, ‘there is, surely, a natural inclination towards good humour because a meal is the end of our endeavours. You will not find selfish jealousy in our ranks, Mr Seymour. Our practice is goodwill and unanimity. There are men in our club who are great thinkers, but it is rare for conversation to be deep.’
‘Especially after dinner!’ said Barnard, and everyone laughed.
‘In any case,’ said Penn, ‘when our stomachs are working, heads shouldn’t distract them in their work. And if there are no fish we laugh. When we are together at Stockbridge, Mr Seymour, it is the oblivion of all care.’
The ornamented hour hand of the clock showed that it was approaching midnight, and therefore just the right time for a speech and the club’s song. Barnard stood, somewhat unsteadily, and perhaps had forgotten some of the points he intended to raise.
‘Fellow Houghtonians – honoured guest, Mr Seymour. In this club, the good example of Izaak Walton, our patron saint, has been invariably followed, and each meeting has been the means of establishing more firmly – if possible – the friendship and good fellowship which have manifested themselves from the beginning.’ He paused, and stared into the distance. Penn reached across and tugged his jacket. Then Barnard said: ‘It must be admitted that one day, it is possible that our society may be dissolved by circumstances over which we have no co
ntrol.’
Shouts of ‘No, no!’
‘I say, that one day, it is possible, the last entry may be written in our chronicles.’
Shouts of ‘Never!’
‘But let us drink, and put such thoughts aside. To the Houghton Angling Club.’ After the toast, they struck up the club song:
All hail to my club of good fellows
Again now, so happily met
Old Izaak himself couldn’t tell us
The thing that we’re wanting in yet.
Verse after verse followed, each member praised for his talents and personal qualities – this man for his skill with a rod, that man for his devotion to God, he for his wit, he for his clothing’s fit. Then came a sombre verse for sadly departed members:
To their memory then let us drink, boys
Since now we can’t drink to their health
And in grace to the toast let us think, boys
That heart should be ever our wealth.
There came a reprise of the first verse, which was the signal for a final, universal swallowing. Then all shook hands and slapped backs and adjourned to their beds in the Grosvenor.
*
After breakfast, the members gathered in the lobby with their rods and equipment. There was a joke they shared with Seymour that all had bad heads – not so much in the sense of an aftermath to an alcoholic binge, but because of an extraordinary profusion of eccentric hats. One member wore a large and floppy item that drooped upon his shoulders; another a hat of dog’s hair with a puffy brim that turned upwards and resembled a forest fungus. But the eccentricity did not extend to colouration, as all hats were sombre, and could easily blend in with the hues of an English riverbank, for they never lost sight of their serious pursuit – angling.
Death and Mr. Pickwick Page 37