Death and Mr. Pickwick (49 page)

Two days later, Mr Shury received the unsolicited communication, arguing for the acceptability of breaking ground on the basis that a distinguished Master of Foxhounds, Ralph John Lambton, a man of high character, had once broken into a drain, whereupon, as the writer put it, ‘Sly Reynard forfeited his life for his cowardice.' The letter was signed ‘A Durham Sportsman'.

It was apparent to Mr Shury – a tubby, pleasant, smoky-haired man, with a genial smile and a genius for delegation – that the Durham Sportsman was both knowledgeable and well connected: two qualities much to be prized in the wake of Nimrod's departure. Thus, Mr Shury tapped his stomach and hummed, as he often did when he made a decision which afforded him some pleasure, and he not only published the correspondence, but immediately wrote to the Durham Sportsman asking for further contributions.

It was not long before the Durham Sportsman received an offer of paid employment at the premises of the
Sporting Magazine.
To a young man who knew the drudgery and dullness of the law, the offer was impossible to decline.

Now, Mr Shury came from a decent family, and was decent in his own dealings too. He ensured that the office was warm and dry, and pleasantly decorated with sporting prints, and he was not too lofty to pour a cup of tea. He would indulge in charming conversation from the very moment he arrived in the morning, he even purchased cakes as a treat in the afternoon. He had but one shortcoming as the editor of the
Sporting Magazine
: he possessed no sporting knowledge whatsoever. The upshot was that he wrote virtually nothing himself, and allowed his staff to write almost every article – and the staff was now mainly Robert Surtees. There were just two other contributors.

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.