by Sophie Gee
“No, I believe that it is he,” Harry replied. “But though he is not dead, he must at the very least be blind, for he has been sitting at the servants’ end of the room without noticing.”
Alexander looked over his shoulder in dismay. Indeed it was William Wycherley walking to their table. He was unmistakable, tall and corpulent, dressed formally in a style now thirty years old. He moved with a distinctive limp caused by his gout, but no doubt made worse by lumbering about town under the weight of so much flesh. By the luckiest stroke, Alexander thought, he had just written to let Wycherley know that he had arrived in London—but had implied that ill health would make a meeting difficult to arrange. He felt particularly ashamed of having used his health for an excuse, knowing that the old playwright was unwell himself. Tonson had said he was losing his memory. He corrected the careless slouch into which he had slipped in unconscious imitation of his companions.
When Sir Anthony Englefield had arranged his introduction to William Wycherley three or four years previously, Alexander had felt more excitement than from any other meeting in his life. But he had realized almost immediately that their friendship would not be what he had hoped. Wycherley had once been the greatest playwright of his age, but even then he was already in a much enfeebled state, and openly craved the admiration of a young, talented poet. Wycherley had asked Alexander to help him prepare a volume of his poems for publication, and although Alexander had known that the verses were inferior, he had nonetheless helped to make them respectable, telling himself that it was an honor to assist so great a writer. He had been so shocked by Wycherley’s fallen condition that he could not bring himself to acknowledge it frankly.
“Mr. Wycherley!” said Alexander, springing to his feet as soon as the dramatist was near him.
The old man had grown even fatter since they had met the previous year; his great bulk dwarfed Alexander and his little bow of greeting. Wycherley regarded him in silence. His wig, piled high and ornately, sat slightly awry. He was accompanied by his page, a middle-aged man whom Alexander had met before. Alexander reddened. He knew that they were watched by everyone in the room, and feared suddenly that Wycherley was about to cut him. But the page stepped up to his master and said very quietly, “’Tis Mr. Pope, sir. Your young friend.”
Wycherley said immediately, “Ah, Mr. Pope; I do not see so well as I once did. Are you visiting the town with Mr. Caryll?”
“No, sir. I am staying with my friend Charles Jervas, whom I believe you know.” Jervas bowed, but stayed clear of their exchange.
Wycherley appeared not to notice Jervas at all. “And how does Mr. Caryll do?” he asked.
Alexander wondered whether he ought to correct Wycherley, and tell him that he had not seen Caryll for three weeks. He could hardly bring himself to look at the older man, aghast at this evidence of his further deterioration. Only a few years ago he had still been commanding; now he was a figure of fun—it was hardly dignified for him to be seen out. How bitterly ephemeral was fame, Alexander thought.
“He is well, sir,” he replied, adding, “he remains in the country this year.” There was a pause, and Alexander glanced across at Jervas, widening his eyes in a gesture of mute appeal.
But suddenly the fog of Wycherley’s confusion cleared away and he said confidently, “I am glad to see you returned to health, Mr. Pope. I feared that you might not be able enjoy the pleasures of the season. Mr. Tonson tells me that your Essay Upon Critics is soon to appear.” He was entirely unlike the self of two minutes previously. Alexander was astonished.
“Essay on Criticism, yes. I am delighted with it, sir, though apprehensive of its reception,” Alexander replied, feeling no apprehension at all at that moment, but only relief that Wycherley had returned to something approaching a normal manner.
“When I do have the happiness of reading your new poem, Mr. Pope,” Wycherley replied in a mannered voice, “I shall praise it immoderately.”
Alexander answered him with as much deference as he could summon. “If you find pleasure in my green verses, sir,” he said, “it must be the pleasure a man takes in observing the first shoots and buddings of a tree which he has raised himself. Your compliments will shame me.”
“If I displease you by commending you, I shall please myself nonetheless,” came the overwrought reply. “Remember that incense is sweeter to the offerer than the Deity to whom it is offered; he being too much above it to take pleasure.”
Jervas, sensing Alexander’s discomfort and hoping to bring the meeting to a close, stepped in at this moment to ask Wycherley where he was traveling to, and to offer him a ride in his carriage. Wycherley accepted readily, saying that he was going to Will’s coffeehouse. Jervas took leave of Tom and Harry and they set off immediately.
Alexander could hardly suppress a laugh at three such vastly different men crammed into a small London coach, struggling to appear at ease while their mismatched forms were compacted ever more tightly together. Alexander and Jervas had been wedged in on either side of Wycherley, as if to protect the safe passage of the larger man. Being, Alexander suspected, the only person in the carriage who still had unrestricted access to his respiratory system, Wycherley began the conversation. “Why does our friend John Caryll come to town so seldom?” he asked Alexander.
“Caryll’s family is of a retiring temperament, sir,” he replied, thinking that Caryll came more frequently than Wycherley probably knew. “They do not enjoy the bustle of London, and Caryll would not think of coming without them.”
Wycherley gave a scornful humph, which served to stuff the two other men still more firmly into their corners, and countered, “I think it is because the family’s fortunes are still not recovered from his late uncle’s foolish extravagances. Caryll cannot afford to be in town.”
Alexander believed that this guess was nearer the mark, but he had no intention of gratifying Wycherley’s appetite for gossip by admitting it. “I would not describe old Lord Caryll’s misfortunes as extravagances, sir,” he said in as prim a voice as his position allowed. “He was unfairly imprisoned for the Popish Plot—although he manifestly played no part—and then he lost his lands over an assassination attempt that he knew nothing about.”
“Knew nothing about it; what nonsense! Lord Caryll was a Jacobite. He confessed it openly. He more than confessed it; he lived in France when James’s court was exiled there. I have even heard that he was the exiled king’s secretary of state. He was undoubtedly involved in plans to bring James back to the throne.”
In a more pious tone than he would normally use, Alexander said, “Whatever his uncle may have done, John Caryll has suffered wrongly at the hands of those people who wish harm to the Roman Catholic Church.”
“I did not think you were a defender of the Jacobites, Mr. Pope.”
“I am defender of my friends the Carylls, sir.”
“And of the Catholics, I wager. Well, I suppose you cannot help it. But why did John Caryll not stay out of the affair altogether? I heard that he actually went to prison for it—and now his whole family are held to be traitors.”
“Caryll’s imprisonment was only for two weeks, and he was unjustly convicted,” Alexander argued in an impassioned tone.
“Well, if they were my fortunes, or my family, I should have become a Protestant long ago,” Wycherley said complacently. “All of Caryll’s troubles might then have been avoided.”
“I do not think that Caryll ought to be censured for protecting his family,” said Alexander. “Nor old Lord Caryll for being a Jacobite. His generation of Catholics suffered cruelly. If the Catholics are safe now, it is only because they—we—have learned to keep silent.”
Alexander was surprised by how angry Wycherley’s attack had made him. He had certainly never considered himself a defender of the Jacobites, nor even of his own religion, but Wycherley had forced from him a loyalty that he had not known before. After all, he himself had been barred from attending university, excluded from property and position. It w
as easy enough to forget now that he was staying with Jervas in Westminster, but only a few weeks previously it had seemed to blight his fortunes. He felt a perverse pleasure in seeing Wycherley stumble as he lumbered out of the carriage at Will’s. Barely able to mutter a good-bye, Alexander turned away from his old friend and slammed the coach door.
Jervas was in a good temper on the way home. “How luxuriously comfortable we are without Wycherley’s immense bulk in here,” he said. But Alexander was scowling and quiet, staring out the window and kicking his foot against the seat. After a while Alexander’s kicks began to grate on Jervas’s ear, and he exerted himself to pull his friend out of his brooding silence.
“Were Wycherley’s remarks about your friend Caryll true, Pope?” he asked.
Still looking out the window, Alexander replied, “Oh, true and yet untrue. Old Lord Caryll was a Jacobite, but I do not believe that his nephew is involved.”
“What a strange, old-fashioned world it seems,” Jervas said. “Plots, counterplots, imprisonment, treason. Old Lord Caryll, Wycherley, even your friend John Caryll seem like men from another time to me.”
Alexander replied sharply. “Happy for you that they seem so, Jervas. But the taint of popery still hangs over me as well; I shall probably never shake free of its deadening grip.”
“I cannot understand the attractions of Jacobitism,” Jervas replied. “It renders rich people poor and sane people mad. It is perfectly plain that James III will never be installed upon the throne, and yet, year after year, men cast their fortunes, and their family’s fortunes, into the Channel, believing that they will wash ashore in France and lure him back.”
“That is not precisely how the Jacobites arrange their affairs,” Alexander said in a censorious tone. “To you, the Jacobites seem merely diverting lunatics, for you have nothing to lose by their actions. But suppose that the persecutions begin again. I might find that nobody will print my poems.”
Jervas wanted to laugh at Alexander’s determined gloominess, but he kept himself from smiling, and said instead, “You think that because it is raining, and we have not yet dined.”
But Alexander was not to be consoled. “When I am with men like Wycherley I find that my energy for poetry ebbs away entirely. Their verses and plays are as feeble as ass’s milk—but how can I succeed, if I cannot be like them?”
Jervas looked at Alexander in alarm. He never knew what to say to these outbursts of his friend’s, and his silence merely goaded Alexander to further outrage.
“Most writers are insufferable, always complaining of their failures: that the style of their verse is not in fashion; that they have not the patronage to succeed; that they are not rich enough, not poor enough; that they have not a loud enough voice to be heard. Anything, in short, except that their talents are insignificant, their writing of the meanest kind.”
“But your verses are not mean, Pope,” said Jervas consolingly. “Has not Jacob Tonson said some flattering things to you?”
“I will not be beguiled by flattery!” Alexander answered, biting back the words as you allow yourself to be. He saw Jervas shrink back from him; he knew that he was behaving badly, but the sight of Jervas’s anxious, conciliatory face made him feel more frustrated still. It was not his fault that he could not be easy with everybody, and find all the world charming, as his friend did.
“Do you not long to show the world its vanity, its hypocrisy?” Alexander barked. “When you find yourself doing the portrait of some vain, idle whimperer, do you not want to crush him with the strokes of your brush? No! You do not. I have never known you to judge the subjects that sit before you, Jervas.”
“But I am not a judge, Pope; I am a painter. Thank heavens!” Jervas gave a little laugh, looking warily at Alexander for his response. “I would not care to be a judge, though my father thought the law might do well for me. What right have I to determine the merits of those I paint? My patrons pay me to show them as they would have the world see them—not as I happen to feel on a wet morning after too many oysters the evening before!”
“But I am a poet,” Alexander replied, with such a combination of pride and uncertainty in his voice that Jervas nearly laughed again. “Nobody pays me to praise them.” He paused, and then, unable to stop himself, said, “The trouble with men like you is that you hesitate to be bold. You only ever hint at a person’s faults; you hesitate to suggest anything so forthright as enmity. I believe that you are afraid to strike!”
He looked defiantly at Jervas, half hoping, half dreading that he had provoked him to anger at last. But Jervas looked back at him composedly, and said, “It has nothing to do with fear, Alexander. It is because I have no desire to wound.”
Alexander sank back in his seat as Jervas spoke, suddenly ashamed of his outburst, and wishing, far too late, he knew, that he had shown more self-control.
But after a minute or two, Jervas put out his hand to Alexander and said, “At home there will be beef and mutton and cheese waiting for us, and pudding and a fire to warm us through the evening. Enough of this ranting and raving, Pope. I command you to cheer up!” Alexander smiled gratefully, and gave Jervas’s hand an apologetic shake.
Some days earlier Martha and Teresa Blount had invited Alexander to visit, but with his cold and the bad weather he had not gone. When the sun came out on the day after his argument with Jervas, Alexander decided that he would pay a visit to the girls.
“So you are come at last,” Teresa said as he was shown in to the sisters’ sitting room. “Patty believed that you had commenced an amour with that little milkmaid to whom you were speaking at the masquerade.” She stood up to kiss him on both cheeks.
Alexander wondered why she was in such a good mood. Was it the effect of London, or had she seen Lord Petre again?
“You have been ill, Alexander—I am sure of it,” Martha said, looking at Alexander’s troubled face.
But Alexander, thinking of Lord Petre, wanted to show Teresa that he, too, could be gallant when he chose. “Yes, I suffered a constant ache at being apart from you both, and a dreadful fever from longing to see you once again,” he said. “But having brought the condition upon myself, I cannot be nosing about for sympathy.”
“Have you been busy writing poetry, Alexander?” Martha asked.
“Only the commonest, meanest kind, having no muse nearby to inspire the higher sentiments,” he replied.
“It would be a shame were so much wit as you have not to be recorded for posterity,” Teresa said in her old tone of teasing challenge.
In spite of himself, Alexander took the bait. “If I do have wit,” he answered, “I had better write to show it off than not. For as any lady who has seen me will attest, I have nothing to show that is better.”
“If you pass the plate for compliments too often, Alexander, you will collect fewer than you deserve,” Teresa answered. “I am happy to praise your verses—and Patty is willing to compliment your person—but only when you do not clamor for it.”
The door opened, and a footman announced that Miss Arabella Fermor was waiting for the ladies in her carriage. The mood in the room changed immediately.
“Heavens, I had forgotten that Bell was coming this morning,” said Teresa, jumping up to look at herself in the mirror. “I must buy a headdress to wear to the opera tonight. Patty, you said yesterday that you would come.” From the glass, she looked commandingly at her sister.
“But Alexander is here, and we have not finished our sewing from this morning,” Martha replied, testily meeting Teresa’s reflected gaze. “I believe that I shall stay behind.”
At this Teresa wheeled around, saying in an accusatory voice, “Oh, do not start talking in that tone, invoking Alexander and the sewing as though it were an offense against religion to be seen in a lace headdress.”
Alexander had risen also, and was standing stiffly between the two girls, not knowing which of them to turn to.
But he wanted Teresa to leave the house feeling well-disposed toward h
im. “Madam, though there may be pride and vanity in the wearing of a lace headdress, your friends will consider it one of the highest acts of charity that you can exercise,” he said.
At this Teresa gave Martha a triumphant smile, and gathered her things for going out.
Wishing to be evenhanded, Alexander turned to Martha. “But you need not worry that Teresa will become too much accustomed to pleasure, Patty,” he said. “She will return soon enough to the country, with its cold, old-fashioned halls, morning walks, and three hours of prayer a day.”
“I shall not!” Teresa replied defiantly. “But if we are to do nothing in London but sit about the house sewing, we might as well go home directly. Why do we come to town, if not to attend balls and plays and assemblies? And why go to those, if not to look handsome?”
“You should take care, Teresa,” said Martha sharply. “Some winters hence your face about the town will be like a rich old-fashioned silk in a shop, which everybody has seen and nobody will buy.” Alexander suppressed a smile, and Teresa shot him a resentful glance.
“Oh, very witty, Patty!” she answered. “But in your conceit I should be more like a richly admired brocade—far too good to be cut and made up to suit just anybody’s humor.”
With this riposte she swept out of the room, leaving Martha and Alexander standing awkwardly side by side. Martha looked at Alexander and he reached out as if to take her hand, but then, suddenly, changed his mind.
Martha gave a sigh as she sat down. “Teresa is catching Bell’s habit of believing that she can persuade any man into admiring her,” she said. “She does not seem to understand that where there is no fortune, there can be no persuasion.”
Alexander smiled at her. “I can only say in reply that if your sister’s stubborn nature were to be set against ten thousand pounds, I would call them pretty evenly matched. Any man that she cannot overcome by argument, she very likely will by temptation.”
Martha looked grave. “You do not suppose that Teresa could be so foolish as to fall into an affair, Alexander?”