Death and Mr. Pickwick (94 page)

‘My uncle believed it would be a good thing for me to take up. He paid for my indentures.'

*   *   *

Over the coming months, the resistance of the metal to Hablot Browne's burin might have been his own resistance to the techniques of engraving. If one thing could be learnt quickly at Findens, it was this: engraving was an excruciatingly tedious business, and learning all the traditions of cross-hatching and parallel line, to produce reflections, shimmers and shades, would take years.

Soon, as a regular occurrence, Browne was twenty minutes late for work in the morning, sometimes thirty-five. The warmth of the blankets at his lodgings was too comfortable to be disturbed by cold, hard, engraving plates. One morning, as he lay in bed, he was vaguely aware of a knocking succeeded by calls of ‘Mr Browne!
Mr Browne
!
Mr Brooowwwne
!' – and with the last call still resonating behind the door, a dream of galloping horses' hooves and spinning carriage wheels cleared, and Browne sat bolt upright in bed. ‘Who's there?' he called.

‘John Dubbin, sir.'

‘Who?'

‘John the office boy.'

He did not need to ask why the boy had turned up. ‘I am on my way.'

Browne suddenly spurred himself into action. He should have been in work an hour before. Even the panic at being late did not sustain itself. He walked slowly and wearily along the streets. He looked with envy at the cabs, and decided to summon one, an expense he could ill afford: but a trip in a cab was a frivolity to be seized, worth the shilling, before the drudgery began.

He entered and sat quietly at the bench, apologising profoundly. He looked down at his engraving plate, and rarely spoke that day – but then, he rarely spoke to anyone on any day, except to Young, after work. Sometimes the only sound he made, apart from the apology for late attendance, was a sharp cry of pain when, in a distracted mood, he forgot to remove the burr made by the tool and he cut himself.

‘Here, we must put a bandage on that,' said the muscular specialist once, as blood dripped across the bench.

‘I don't like to cause a fuss,' said Browne, and he sucked his wounded finger instead.

In the main, his day consisted of odd jobs which did not fit easily into the specialist pictorial categories occupied by the other engravers. A tiled roof, for instance, or a few small background figures. Occasionally, for speed, some parts of pictures were etched rather than engraved, and these jobs too landed in Browne's lap – and thus, over time, he acquired the skills of wax, needle and acid. Etching was one of the few activities he enjoyed at Findens: engraving meant pushing hard upon the mushroom-shaped handle of the burin, and exerting just the right pressure on the steel with the palm – but etching was almost as smooth as pencil drawing, with the wax offering so little resistance to the point that it seemed nothing like engraving at all, except that both incised a line.

The odd job at Findens considered the least prestigious was the taking of plates to the printers to oversee the production of proofs. The task involved hours of tedium at the printing works, sitting among washing lines draped from one side of the room to the other on which were hung moist blankets, among a smell reminiscent of cats, emanating from a pot of linseed oil boiling on a stove, which a man stirred with a ladle, drawing up thick strings. Or rather, the task
would
have involved sitting in such circumstances, for Browne usually took himself off to the British Museum, where he indulged in the considerably more pleasant pursuit of sketching the antiquities. The lure of the British Museum sometimes overcame the urge to go into work at all.

One morning, when Browne returned to work, after an absence of several days due to sickness, John Dubbin came to the bench, and whispered to Browne that the two proprietors, the older Mr Finden and the younger Mr Finden, wished to see him in their office. It was unusual to be summoned to see both. The younger Mr Finden, a smiling and energetic man of about forty, would typically stand over an engraver's shoulder, look at the progress on a plate and say: ‘Keep at it!' He would always distribute the drawings. The older Mr Finden – older by three or four years – possessed as formidable a grasp of engraving techniques as any man in England, and had too much fascination with grooves in copper and steel to be as warm as his younger brother, to whom he delegated most administrative work.

When Browne entered their office, the older Mr Finden was already seated behind his desk. The younger Mr Finden stood to one side.

‘Please take a seat, Mr Browne,' said the younger Mr Finden. ‘You are perhaps not fully recovered from your illness.'

‘That is very kind of you, sir,' said Browne. ‘I
am
feeling a little unsteady.'

Then the older Mr Finden said: ‘Your fever confined you to bed, Mr Browne.'

‘It did, sir.'

‘Do you walk in your sleep, then?'

‘Sir?'

‘Perhaps your fevered brow needed the cooling of corridors, and proximity to marble. Because your living ghost was seen at the British Museum yesterday, sketching the exhibits.'

The younger Mr Finden then said: ‘Do you see a future for yourself with us, Mr Browne?'

*   *   *

‘The Browne boy, as you call him,' said John Jackson to Edward Chapman, ‘was awake enough to cancel his indentures at Findens. Some would call it stupidity.'

‘Browne told me he was based at Furnival's Inn,' said Chapman. ‘That's quite a coincidence. That's where Boz is.'

‘I believe Browne has set himself up in business with another former Findens apprentice, someone who has a withered leg, and they do whatever artistic jobs they can find. Watercolours, etching, cleaning pictures. If you have any work for them, they'll appreciate it, I am sure.'

‘I have just sent a couple of prospective artists along to Furnival's to meet Boz. I am going to ask Browne to see him too.'

*   *   *

An extraordinarily tall and monocled man was one of the applicants for the illustrative work in
Pickwick
– his very height suggested a dominance that even Seymour had not possessed, and so he walked downstairs at Furnival's, rejected.

Another applicant was a bearded man in his early thirties with a powerful frame and a roman nose. His beard was wilder and bushier than Buss's beard model – and should this artist ever need a beard model himself, a hand mirror would suffice.

‘My name is Forrester,' he told Boz, who smiled at the appropriateness of the name as they shook hands in the doorway, ‘but you may know me better under the name of Crowquill. Other artists may have a nom de plume. My nom de plume is
actually
the name of a plume!' He laughed as though it were the funniest joke in the world, and a bubble of saliva appeared among his bristles.

‘There is a new character I have in mind,' said Boz, when the two were seated. ‘If you were taken on, he would be among the first you would draw.'

‘A new character? I should paint my beard red in his honour. That'd make you laugh. What sort of character?'

 

*

‘ADAM CAME FROM DUST; AND
from London mud would arise another man – a bootblack,' said Mr Inbelicate.

 

*

BOZ HAD ALREADY, FOR A
play, invented a one-eyed boots, who walked along the corridor of an inn carrying a lantern, picking up the footwear outside the doors, chalking the room number on the soles of each pair. This bootblack saw customers as their shoes: ‘Werry happy to see there an't no high-lows – they never drinks nothing but gin and vater,' said the bootblack, chattering away to himself. ‘Them and the cloth boots is the vurst customers an inn has – the cloth boots is alvays abstemious, only drinks sherry vine and vater, and never eats no suppers.'

Something of this could be used again for the Sancho Panza figure. Though a second eye should be added. The new bootblack would see very well. Or rather, he vould see werry vell. He vould see werry vell indeed.

Perhaps he would be a rascal. The sort to pilfer a bottle of Madeira from his employer's cellar if he could get away with it. Perhaps he would be a ‘weller', in the criminal sense of the word.

No, that wasn't right. He shouldn't be a thief. Just sharp.

But the name of Weller
was
right.

The name had followed Boz around over the years. That in itself was a good augury. The first Weller in his life was his childhood nurse, whose passion for gruesome tales was a trait he might use in the bootblack. Then there was Sam Vale, the actor with the peculiar sayings; Vale – when pronounced as ‘Wale' – was close to Weller. What if the bootblack had picked up some of the actor's sayings – and coined new ones of his own? If he cleaned boots in Southwark, near the Surrey Theatre, that was plausible. Sam would be an excellent first name for him, too.

Then there was Seymour's drawing of a servant. It could be improved, sharpened. Soon Boz could see – actually see, in his mind's eye – the character cleaning boots in the yard of the White Hart Inn in Southwark. Sam Weller wore a striped waistcoat – black calico sleeves – blue glass buttons – a bright red handkerchief around his neck – no, not merely around, but wound in a very loose and unstudied style – and a hat too, an old white hat, carelessly thrown on one side of his head. There were plenty of characters on the streets who had these as bits and pieces of appearance, but they needed to be brought together. And there he was in the inn yard, when his work shining shoes was interrupted – the maid on the balcony called out ‘Sam!'

‘Hallo,' replied the man with the white hat.

‘Number twenty-two wants his boots.'

‘Ask number twenty-two vether he'll have 'em now, or vait till he gets 'em.'

Boz burst out laughing himself at that, when he heard – actually heard – Sam Weller give that response.

*   *   *

It was evening, the end of the first week of June, when Boz carried the manuscript of the fourth number of
Pickwick
to the Strand. Upon entering the establishment of Chapman and Hall, he saw neither of those gentlemen, but rather an unfamiliar young man who sat behind the counter reading a copy of
The Christian Year
. He was perhaps twenty years old, with a dark greasiness to his skin, and deep pools of eyes which flickered with bright intelligence. The young man stood to attention as soon as the door opened and revealed himself to be extraordinarily tall and thin.

‘You must be Boz,' he said.

‘How on earth did you know?'

The young man chuckled. ‘You are too determined to be a customer, and I am aware of the manuscripts expected to come in over the next few days. And' – he chuckled again – ‘you should also know, I have charged three previous men with being Boz today! Pleased to meet you, sir. I am Thomas Naylor Morton, Chapman and Hall's reader, among other things.'

‘Is Mr Chapman here?'

‘Today no. Nor Mr Hall.'

Boz stroked his lips, wondering whether to entrust the manuscript to the hand he had just shaken, with no further message. ‘You are quite young to be their reader,' he said.

‘I persuaded Mr Chapman of my suitability from the start. He asked me about my upbringing, so I told him that my father was the author of a life of St Francis of Assisi as well as one of the first men in England to cultivate asparagus. I seemed to have almost infinite experience with that in my background.'

Boz smiled. ‘You didn't mention Mr Hall. Was he persuaded too?'

‘Mr Hall was a different matter. However, I have dabbled in enough areas to advise on the merits of many different manuscripts. I am not a complete innocent in geology – theology – classical languages. I have interests in birds – beasts – fishes – flowers. A great interest of mine is palaeography. Ancient writing and inscriptions.'

‘That is an extraordinary coincidence. I have included a little jest on ancient writing in the latest number of
Pickwick.
'

‘Is that so? Now you have truly captivated me, sir.'

‘Mr Pickwick finds some modern graffiti on a piece of stone, and believes that it is an inscription from the distant past, made by an unknown civilisation. In fact, the inscription merely says a man's name, Bill Stumps, but poorly spelt and badly laid out. Mr Pickwick is fooled into believing he has made a great antiquarian discovery.'

*   *   *

Boz had walked on the rainy high road from Rochester to Maidstone, when a harsh wind blew. Leaving the road, he made an outcrop of ancient standing stones his shelter – three large flat stones some eight feet high, and a fourth laid flat across, as a roof. It was a place of peculiar loneliness. Leaning against an upright, he smoked a cigar. On a fine day, a picnic here would be excellent, he thought, when the weather was sunny, with an accompaniment of dry white wine instead of rain, when the bluebells on the hills were out in bloom. He presumed the stones were a Druidic altar, devoted to the worship of the sun and the moon and mistletoe. Perhaps a place for human sacrifice. There were other monuments in the area as well, and any stroll could reveal evidence of the flint tools of the first Englishmen.

*   *   *

‘The derided antiquary is a joke with a great tradition,' said Thomas Naylor Morton. ‘Now let me show off my knowledge. The fourth-century Roman poet Ausonius had great fun with the idea. But I risk making myself into a figure of ridicule simply by being aware of that fact. Tell me – was the idea for including the graffiti yours or Mr Seymour's?'

‘We both had an interest in the vein of humour.'

‘I am not surprised. It is the general belief that an antiquary will mistake an old pigswill trough for a sarcophagus or a chamber pot for a Roman vase. And it is not altogether inaccurate. Have you heard of the antiquary Gough?'