Death and Mr. Pickwick (124 page)

‘In the morning, Sam will go into Mr Pickwick's room, carrying a cup of tea,' said Besant. ‘Now what if we said: “There was Mr Pickwick, sleeping on his side, the covers brought up like a much-loved baby, but still showing the sweet smile.”'

Rice continued. ‘Sam stood and looked down – and started to shake. He could hardly walk to the table, but still put down the tea. He knew what he had to do. His hand stretched out, shaking all the time, and touched the great forehead. It was cold. Deathly cold.'

Besant took over: ‘Sam touched the pulse. But, as though there was still hope, he turned down the covers, and stretched his fingertips to Mr Pickwick's heart. There was no beat.'

Besant stood up. ‘We shall write it properly after we've had some sleep, and put Mr Pickwick in his grave. He will be buried in Dulwich. And Sam – poor griefstricken Sam – he will be buried next to his master, just seven days later.'

‘What would be written on Mr Pickwick's grave?'

‘I think – “His works live after him.”'

‘And on Sam's?'

‘“Faithful to the end.”'

 

*

AS MR INBELICATE'S HEALTH DECLINED,
he became increasingly agitated as to whether I had made the right selection of material. Many times a day he would rap on the floor with his Dr Syntax cane, call ‘Scripty!' and when I arrived at his bedside he would interrogate me on a certain point. One day, for instance, it was the Daffy Club's rule of ‘accommodation'.

‘You know it means that tall tales are listened to respectfully. Nobody is called a liar.'

‘I have included that, I believe.'

‘You
believe
! That isn't good enough. Go and fetch me
The Squib Annual
.'

Just as I arrived downstairs, rap, rap, rap went the Syntax cane. ‘Scripty!' came the yell.

This continued for several weeks. I confess that my enthusiasm for the entire project waned. Many were my conversations with Mary when I said I could not continue. She placed her hand on mine, and urged me to go on, as best as she could. ‘Only
you
can write this book,' she said once.

Matters came to a head in the summer when, at the point of exhaustion, I asked Mr Inbelicate if I could take a short holiday.

‘There is no time,' he said. He asked me to fetch some notes on a subject which, at that moment, I could have done without: the relative typeface sizes of ‘Boz' and ‘Seymour' on the wrapper of
Pickwick
– as the former was larger than the latter, one might be led to the conclusion that Boz was in charge of the affair, and not writing up to Seymour at all. ‘This would be a wholly erroneous conclusion,' he said. He proceeded to talk of how
The Book of Christmas
was a perfect refutation. The letterpress showed, at numerous points, that Hervey was following Seymour's lead. Yet Hervey's name was considerably larger than Seymour's on the title page.

‘Are you listening, Scripty?'

‘Yes.'

‘If we look at the earliest advertisement for
Pickwick
, a leaflet inserted into the
Domestic Magazine
, you will see the difference in typeface is not so pronounced. True, “Edited by Boz” is in slightly larger type than “Seymour”; but the greatest impact is “Embellished with Four Illustrations”, in bold type, which precedes “by Seymour”. It is the pictures which are obviously the main attraction here.'

‘I am sorry – I cannot take any more today,' I said.

‘You
must
continue, Scripty. We have so little time.'

‘I simply cannot. My brain is shutting down.'

He lay back on his pillow. I could see he was considering some new way of whetting my appetite for the task. Eventually he said: ‘You will not feel the same after I have shown you a particular manuscript.'

‘I cannot take any more
Pickwick
today.'

‘This manuscript is about a man who knew
Pickwick
as no other man has ever known it. His single-minded devotion to the book makes our endeavours seem an idle whim.'

‘I do not believe that is possible.'

‘I shall prove it.'

He made me fetch the account which follows. It is a chapter extracted from a work of unpublished memoirs, whose author it is unimportant to know. The plan was, apparently, to write chapters on people the author had met, with each person receiving one chapter, and the whole arranged alphabetically. The people were identified only by a single letter.

 

*

I MET THE MAN, WHOM I
shall call Mr N, twice. The first time was late one evening in the spring of 1902, in Holborn.

I happened to mention
Pickwick
to enliven a dull social gathering, and the chap I addressed said: ‘Do you know, I should definitely take you to meet a former colleague of mine. I think you would find him quite a curiosity. We could even go tonight, if you like, as he lives close to here. I am certain he will be in.' Certain? I queried that. ‘Yes,' he said, ‘there is not a shadow of a doubt – he will be indoors.'

In a short while, I found myself in a cramped home-office. Mr N was thin, and I would say in his mid-forties. Spectacles hung from a cord around his neck. I shall never forget the strange lifelessness in his eyes as he shook my hand, as though he saw nothing whatsoever in my personality to stir his interest. This was undoubtedly the effect of years of laborious study.

There were cabinets on every wall of the office, each of numerous drawers, and each drawer labelled, so there were, let us say, ‘SA—SH', ‘SI—SM', ‘SN—SP', and so forth. Several drawers were open, and I could see they contained slips of paper, each slip apparently bearing a single word, with a string of numbers below. There was a copy of
Pickwick
on a desk, open about a third of the way through, and the two pages I saw were marked in pencil: every word on the verso side, and over a half of the recto, having a single stroke passing through it.

Mr N's aim was to produce a concordance to
Pickwick
. That is to say: a catalogue showing the occurrence of every single word in the novel. This catalogue would state the position, precisely, of any given word in the text of
Pickwick
, by chapter number, paragraph, line, and position in line. I learnt that, already, five years had been spent by Mr N on this task – and his progress was indicated by the marked copy on the desk, as every word in the first third of the book had been ‘done', with a single neat pencil stroke, and its position noted on the slips. When the entire book had been gone through in this way, the slips would be collated, analysed, and a single masterwork,
The Pickwick Concordance
, the key to the book of books, would result, unlocking as never before the life of the immortal Mr Pickwick.

I had heard of a concordance for the Bible, and concordances probably exist for other holy scriptures, but never had I heard of such work for a novel.

‘It is not my first and only work on
Pickwick
's atoms,' said Mr N. ‘There was a previous effort, but it was wholly inadequate, sir. I was dissatisfied the day I wrote the last entry.'

From a filing cabinet, he brought out a ledger. ‘This is my pitiful
Pickwick
index.
Sir Charles Grandison
is, I believe, the only other English novel which has been indexed. At the time, I thought that an index to
Pickwick
was – unquestionably – of value.'

‘But what made you start?' I said as I examined the ledger.

‘I found myself – if I may put it this way – haunted.'

There was one seat only in the office, and a well-worn one at that, but he fetched two kitchen chairs. We settled down, and my associate from earlier in the evening took out a cigarette case. This panicked Mr N, who said: ‘Please do not smoke – I beg you – the possibility of a spark – all the slips of paper.'

When the cigarette case was returned to the pocket, Mr N began his tale.

‘Some years ago,' he said, ‘I attended a gathering in the upstairs room of an inn to mark the retirement of the senior partner in my legal firm. I have worked in the law, in a minor capacity, for much of my life. It was a light supper, and one of the items of fare was pickled salmon. I declined it – fish never agrees with me – and I went for the cured ham. But as I chewed, I thought of pickled salmon – it was mentioned somewhere in
Pickwick
but where? In which chapter? Who said it? I believed I could remember a scene with
boiled
salmon, or at least some other way of serving salmon, and knew exactly where that was, but pickled salmon was a different question.

‘It was an unpleasant experience for me. You have to understand my aversion to fish. As I chewed, the very thought of pickled salmon began to make the ham in my mouth seem quite fishy. I recalled brine tubs I had passed, containing fish. I started to think of a herring stall in Amsterdam I had encountered as a boy, where I covered my mouth. I started to feel quite nauseous. I can hardly describe the anguish of that evening for me – what if I – what if there had been – what if there had been an accident, right in the middle of the retirement dinner? I would have been humiliated. The thought of pickled salmon would not go away, yet somehow I got through the meal. But afterwards, I was gripped by a disturbing thought. I would describe my state of mind as almost one of panic. I thought I was cursed – it must seem ridiculous to you – but that night I believed that if I didn't find out where pickled salmon was mentioned in
Pickwick
, an appalling fishy taste would haunt my palate, and corrupt every meal, until I
did
find out.

‘When I reached home, I found my copy of
Pickwick
, and I stabbed at likely places for the pickled salmon. I couldn't find it. I soon felt giddy with frustration. I felt that there was no alternative but to start at page one and work my way forwards, page by page, methodically – I knew it wasn't on page one, but I had to be thorough, you understand. And there is so much food mentioned in
Pickwick
that it might be almost anywhere.

‘I kept going through the night, running my eyes down one page after another, until I discovered that pickled salmon was in chapter twenty-two, and Sam Weller's father mentions it.

‘I can hardly describe the relief I felt – and I was determined –
absolutely determined
– that I would never be placed in that situation again. The thought came to me:
Pickwick
needs an index. It might seem peculiar at first, but when you think about it, it isn't. I had heard of the examination on
Pickwick
which was conducted in a Cambridge college, about half a century ago, and if there were enough topics in the book to set an exam, might not an index be justified? That was my reasoning, from a practical point of view. It also occurred to me that
Pickwick
has so many words and phrases which are dear to readers – and I thought it would be nice to see them given their own place in the limelight. We might take as an example: “pig's whisper” or “dog's nose” or “frog hornpipe”. Then there are the proper names.
Pickwick
has about 650 of those, I now know – a large number for any work, and especially so for a work of fiction.

‘So over the course of about a year, in the evenings I produced my index. I was tickled by my own cross-referencing. I was particularly fond of “for soirée see swarry”. I laughed out loud at that, I remember.

‘Yet, the concordance principle often entered my mind. It was like a second haunting. I would think about whether to include a certain word or phrase in my index and if I didn't include it, I would feel a small inexpressible guilt. Could I be sure I had made the right decision? When, finally, the index was done, I went out that night, for the first time in a year, just to mark the event. I took myself to an inn to eat, and lo, and to my joy, there was ham. Cured ham. I had avoided ham completely for a year. I chewed it, and it was good – at first – but – then – it was as though, in the course of the meal, the taste left the ham. There was no taste of pickled salmon, but I felt so overwhelmed by a sense of the index's inadequacy, that the ham tasted – well, almost of nothing.

‘I could no longer deny the need for the concordance. It would be a work of purity, free of arbitrary decisions about which words to include. It would be hospitable to
every
word. I even liked the expression
Pickwick Concordance
. It could be abbreviated to PC – just like the Pickwick Club.

‘And that night, after a year's work, I felt my index was worthless. I was struck by a conviction that if
I
didn't compile the concordance, someone else would. This was like a third haunting. It occurred to me that perhaps someone was already compiling the concordance. I was suspicious about all the lawyers I knew, because lawyers love
Pickwick
. I thought of the senior partner – he was the one who told me about the
Pickwick
examination, and that made me suspect him. How was he spending his retirement? Someone would do it, if they were not already doing so. After all,
I
had thought of compiling the concordance, and that convinced me that others could think the same.

‘I cursed my year wasted on the index. Why did I ever do it? So, I started on the concordance as soon as I came home from the inn. That was five years ago.

‘It is an undertaking which I may describe as –
vast
.
Pickwick
is approximately three hundred thousand words long. Even ignoring conjunctions, definite and indefinite articles and the like, there are some one hundred thousand significant words. I venture to suggest that the arrangement in a final alphabetical order is one of the most painstaking tasks any human being has ever attempted. I hope I will be forgiven for wanting to tell the world at large of my enterprise. So, about two years after I started work on the concordance – which was a point when I decided that I must have built up a substantial lead on anyone else who might attempt the task – I privately printed a four-page pamphlet setting forth my plan, and I inserted a small advertisement in a newspaper saying that anyone who was interested should send a stamped addressed envelope, and they would receive a copy of the pamphlet. You would be surprised at the number of envelopes I received! Many included expressions of good luck; I remember one man said it would be interesting simply to know that such a work exists.