Death and Mr. Pickwick Page 4

  Then Rowlandson showed a picture of a runaway horse pulling a gig, the wheel lifting up in the foreground. ‘I can feel the power of the horse,’ said Mitchell. ‘The horse is tugging me, Rowly—’ Suddenly Mitchell looked past Rowlandson and his face twisted in horror: ‘What is that?’

  A small black kitten had climbed on the back of a chair, from which it sprang upon the mantelpiece. Sensing some game, the kitten jumped down, and dashed towards the chair where Mitchell sat. ‘Take it away!’ cried Mitchell. He raised his elbow in self-defence and twisted his body round, away from the animal, visibly quivering. Rowlandson scooped up the kitten and stroked its head, not at all comprehending the reaction of the other man.

  ‘What possessed you to get that, Rowly?’

  ‘I rescued it. It was being chased by boys. They had a sack, and no doubt were going to torture it. It keeps me company when I work. I can put it outside.’

  ‘But then I shall pass it going downstairs … ooohhhh.’

  Rowlandson lifted the kitten into a cupboard, leaving the door ajar, so an eye and a nose could be seen. There were plaintive mews.

  ‘Close the cupboard, Rowly.’

  ‘The poor thing won’t be able to breathe!’

  ‘I can scarcely breathe! It could get out!’ He snatched a look at the cupboard. ‘The eye is staring at me.’ Mitchell winced and then grimaced. ‘Kittens are gremlins. They creep up on you. They have a mind of their own. They are sly. They cannot be trusted. And then they jump! Then they become monstrous! Huge!’

  ‘I can see that you feel all this. But I do not pretend to understand it.’

  ‘To me, a kitten is a creature whose every hair is like a spider’s leg and its tail a vicious viper.’

  ‘But huge and monstrous?’

  ‘Would you like to be sat upon by an elephant?’

  ‘The comparison is ludicrous!’

  ‘A kitten is an elephant in the shadows. Its eyes catch a light and glow. Then they pounce. That is the best I can do to explain it, Rowly. Were it an adult cat, I would be calm enough. But – kittens! I don’t even want to look at them. I don’t know – first the stairs, then this!’ He was sweating again.

  ‘In future we will meet elsewhere or you can wait until the kitten is grown.’

  ‘I have a better idea. The kitten cannot push the door open can it? No. Well, I have been meaning to invite you to Cornwall. Then we can talk at length and you can draw for me all the time. Put this kitten-monster with a friend if you must keep it, and come with me to Cornwall. What do you say?’

  *

  There was a fortnight of drawing and hospitality. In the afternoons, Mitchell and Rowlandson often walked down a winding Cornish lane, or sat by a trout stream, and the artist drew for his admirer. After dinner with the Mitchell family, the two would light pipes over a bowl of punch, and chat until sunrise when Rowlandson would knock his pipestem against the bowl and say: ‘I am done. Pipe out. Sun up. Time for bed.’ They shook hands, parted, and after breakfast in the afternoon, the ritual would start again.

  *

  A few days after the artist’s return to London, he made his way to a public house in Oxford Street, the Man Loaded With Mischief. He passed under the sign – of a husband tottering under the weight of an ugly gin-guzzling wife upon his shoulders – and stooped to enter the door. When he righted himself, standing a foot and a half taller than every other person, a middle-aged cupid-faced man called out across the hot and crowded room: ‘Rowly, over here!’

  After exchanging greetings, the man lifted a hatbox on to the table. There were holes in the lid, through which Rowly could see the green eyes of the kitten.

  ‘I don’t know how your friend can be frightened of kittens, Rowly.’ He then spoke directly to the hatbox, imitating a cat. ‘Meeeww. I don’t know how anyone can be frightened of you. No, no, no, I don’t know how. Meeeew.’

  ‘You’re as good at doing cats as John Bannister the actor,’ said a bald and wrinkled man with scarcely a tooth, from across the aisle.

  ‘Thank you, sir. Perhaps it is because I am John Bannister the actor.’

  ‘I thought I recognised you. I’ve seen your Cats in the Barrow.’

  Bannister made a slight bow.

  The actor continued to make cattish noises, while Rowlandson attracted a barmaid’s attention – a woman who could have been the model for the hussy in the picture he had shown Mitchell. Her curves were scarcely controlled by her clothes, and her strong forearms abundantly in evidence as she deposited beers in front of Bannister and Rowlandson.

  When the barmaid left, Bannister asked: ‘So, how was Cornwall?’

  ‘A fountain of hospitality. There could be no better host than Matthew Mitchell.’

  ‘You’re bursting to tell me something.’

  ‘I am. I am indeed. It’s how to tell you. Very well. I am used to people looking at me because of my size. But I have never received such looks as when out walking with Mitchell.’

  ‘You told me he was fat.’

  ‘Fat! The man is a walking turtle. When we went strolling down a country lane or wandered along the coast, the stares we got. Mitchell is a fat man who makes other fat men look thin. And when he was shrieking with fear at the kitten, I was thinking to myself: there is something extraordinarily memorable about this man. You should have seen the fear rippling in the lard of his face and the way it travelled through his entire body.’

  ‘Well – what of it?’

  ‘Whether it was because I was spending so much time with Mitchell, or whether it was all the stares that especially provoked me, I don’t know. But when I was in Cornwall, I craved to put Mitchell in my pictures.’

  ‘You would not dare!’

  ‘I can hardly express the desire I had to use him. He was born for comic drawings. But it is true that only a fool would turn his patron into a figure of fun.’

  ‘It would be appalling ingratitude.’

  ‘He has been kinder to me than anyone I have known. And yet, as I sat drinking his punch and filling my pipe with his oronooko, all the time I would look at him across the table and think: if you only knew what I want to do with you, Matthew Mitchell. I thought of passers-by laughing at him in the print-shop windows. I thought of gentlemen opening up albums of pictures after dinner, showing their friends scenes in which he fell over, or was frightened by a tiny kitten.’

  ‘You cannot do this, Rowly. Think of what you would lose. Drop these thoughts. He is just a fat man.’

  ‘Let me put it like this. Suppose I were commissioned to draw illustrations for a book. An edition of Smollett or Fielding, perhaps. I draw a handsome young man – but he could be any handsome young man, there is nothing special about him, nothing memorable. And in the next picture, although it is supposed to be the same handsome young man, you would scarcely recognise him at all.’

  ‘If a picture does its duty, and you pocket your money, what does that matter? Once the covers of the book are closed, people forget the young man in any case.’

  ‘That is my very point. You forget him. And it isn’t good enough, John. You are recognised, as an actor. But just about the only recognisable and memorable characters we draw are politicians and royalty. Think about it. We recognise the prime minister and the Cabinet and Napoleon – everyone knows them. But when I looked at Matthew Mitchell, as he was scared by the kitten, I wanted everyone to know him at a glance – and they would, were I to draw him!’

  ‘But you cannot. Memorable as he may be, you must forget this insane desire. You can invent other characters. Do a club scene instead. Do another Swan Tavern picture. Your last was popular enough.’

  *

  The Swan Tavern, off Chandos Street, came alive when the theatres emptied – when the journalist clutching his notes for tomorrow’s review was accompanied by the actor who had died magnificently (as the review would say). These, and men of their class, would ascend the dark stairs of the Swan to the private room. When the gas chandelier was lit and brilliant, so wer
e the members of this club gathered around the table beneath – The Brilliants. But they took their name not from gaslight, but from the ale they drank, Brilliant Ale, brewed in Chandos Street itself. Around the table assembled more than a dozen members, one of whom was Thomas Rowlandson, while another was John Bannister.

  The landlord entered, accompanied by a serving girl who carried a pile of chamberpots on top of each other, which she distributed at the foot of every third chair. The club’s girthy chairman, who probably earned the right to sit at the head of the table by virtue of the number of his chins, looked displeased as he ran a finger along the table’s surface. ‘The table’s still sticky from last week,’ he said. ‘We prefer it fresh, landlord.’

  The girl was sent to fetch a damp cloth. With that cleansing operation accomplished, the door closed upon the club. The chairman banged a gavel and proceeded to read the rules, as he always did, at the start of every meeting. Twenty-four toasts to be drunk – each with a full bumper of ale – and foreign wine would not be an acceptable substitute – and if any member refused to join in with the toast, the penalty would be applied.

  Adopting a grave expression, commensurate with the justice and severity of the sentence to be imposed, the chairman filled a bumper with water from a ewer, and then added spoon after spoon of salt. He stirred and clanged the spoon upon the bumper’s rim. Were the penalty of the brine pronounced, he informed the members, the offender must drink of the brine, or be expelled from the club. Only after twenty-four toasts – with full bumpers – were the members free to drink as they pleased. The chairman then declared the meeting of The Brilliants open.

  One member immediately stood – and proposed the glory of Viscount Nelson. A toast was drunk. When that member resumed his seat, another stood, and struck a sentimental note on the immortality of clubs compared to the frailty of the individual members, but as no member had died for several months, the general feeling, as expressed in certain remarks across the table, was that the member had been drinking before the meeting, and a maudlin note had infiltrated his consciousness. A toast was still drunk to the immortality of clubs, during which the watchful eye of the chairman spied one member whose bumper had not been raised to the appropriate angle for full quaffing. The gavel sounded.

  ‘It is the brine for you, sir.’

  ‘I am ripe. More than ripe. I was ripe when I came up the stairs.’

  ‘Then leave our ranks, sir.’

  ‘Brine! Brine!’ came the shout from Rowlandson. The chant was taken up by Bannister, and by the other members, and they thumped the table. The bumper in front of the chairman was passed down to the offender.

  The penalised man looked into the brine. ‘All right,’ he said. A twinkle in his eye suggested, perhaps, that he arrived fully expecting to receive chastisement, and was not lacking in enthusiasm for its application.

  A chamberpot was raised from the floor and placed upon the table, in front of the offending member. He stood, took one mouthful, swallowed and the next instant he disgorged with a roar into the waiting receptacle. Far from showing disgust, those around the table shouted ‘Bravo!’ ‘Hear hear!’ and ‘A true Brilliant!’ The brine-drinker punched the air in triumph, wiped his mouth, and bowed to each side of the table before resuming his seat.

  In this manner, the meeting continued, with speeches that traversed the continuum from sensible to incoherent, with occasional resort to the chamberpot. At five o’clock in the morning, when the members were half dead with drink, the landlord’s boy came round, and the perpetual president, a wiry actor known for his tragedies, settled the bill. The top item on the sheet of paper was the ostentatious: ‘Hire of Room – No Charge’. For with the huge bill for drink itemised underneath, the landlord was more than happy to provide free facilities – and he always made certain the clubmen were reminded of his generosity.

  Rowlandson retained enough of the session in his memory to produce his drawing The Brilliants for the print-publisher Rudolph Ackermann as soon as he had recovered from the experience. No detail was held back, no curtain drawn discreetly over events. In a corner of the picture, two members vomited into chamberpots, and the contents of one pot overspilled like a waterfall on to a man who lay passed out on the floor. The empty bottles resulting from the toasts were shown in shining array in another corner.

  Five days later, the print was up for sale in a bow window that was five minutes’ walk from the Swan Tavern. As soon as it appeared, two fashionable gentlemen, both with a man-of-the-world manner, scrutinised the print and smirked at each other in evident delight; and though they both smelt of cologne, and the print suggested the ranker odours of disgust, they promptly entered the shop to purchase copies.

  Undoubtedly the picture reminded the gentlemen of similar evenings they had passed themselves, for there were hundreds – indeed thousands – of clubs established in the upstairs rooms of taverns in and around London. In the print-shop’s window were numerous other club scenes, showing drunkenness and fights, with liquid punch pouring out of cracked bowls and a flesh-and-bone punch flying as men clashed in arguments. Adjacent to Rowlandson’s The Brilliants was Gillray’s Union Club, with its own share of bloated-face boozers gathered around a table, or passed out in a stupor on the floor in the company of overflowing chamberpots, while chairs and candlesticks flew through the air, used as missiles in a melee between the club’s members.

  *

  ‘Let’s you and me go to the Swan Tavern soon, Rowly,’ said Bannister, ‘and put your pencil to work.’

  ‘I have not finished, John. I was frustrated by the whole business, but a peculiar turn of events happened on the Sunday morning.’ He downed his ale, and signalled to the barmaid for another two. ‘Mitchell drove me and his family to a church on the edge of the moors, St Breward. I still craved to draw him – and I was half willing to take a chance on losing a patron, just to put him down on paper. Well, we took our places in the pews, and the vicar stepped up to the pulpit. His name, I had learnt from Mitchell, was the Reverend Ralph Baron. And when I saw this Reverend Baron – well, it was like a miracle, John. I saw a man who was so distinctive he made me instantly lose all desire to draw Matthew Mitchell.

  ‘It was because he was Mitchell’s exact opposite. He was a thin, old, shrivelled-up walking corpse – so thin and so shrivelled it was as though there was not a drop of blood running in his veins. It was as if his bones were his flesh. He had a jutting chin, and a prominent nose, and with just a tiny amount of caricature from me, his profile would be a crescent moon. He was the solution to my dilemma. Let me show you.’

  Rowlandson produced from his pocket a sketch of the vicar of St Breward standing in the pulpit. An old woman sat asleep on a pew in the foreground, as an indication of the sermon’s dullness. On the left were the only members of the congregation listening like Christians.

  ‘Evidently these are your patron and his family,’ said Bannister, pointing to this group. ‘But I agree – this vicar has something to him. If Mitchell makes fat men look thin, then this fellow makes thin men look fat.’

  ‘I watched in utter fascination as he gestured in the pulpit – though he delivered the least fascinating sermon you will ever hear. His voice droned on, but as I sat in the pew, my mind was flooded with thoughts of how I would use Reverend Baron. I imagined sketching him as a pedantic old schoolteacher in a classroom, who teaches his poor suffering boys religious instruction and Latin grammar.’

  ‘A suitably dried-out pursuit for a desiccated man.’

  ‘Yes, John, yes! But I couldn’t just leave him in a classroom. Then I recalled one of my jaunts, and a picture I did a few years ago – a drawing of an amateur artist travelling in Wales, carrying his easel, palette and sketchbook down a steep hill, a slave to picturesque views—’

  ‘You showed it to me. I know where this is going, Rowly – you have a crumbling old man, with limbs like twigs, who goes in search of ruins and dead trees.’

  ‘Or he stops to sketch an old nag that
should be meat for one of your stage-cats. I was in a virtual frenzy, John, thinking of how I could use him – he could fall backwards into a lake, because he is too distracted with the scene in front of him; or he could be fascinated by gnarled old cows, and ignores the handsome horse in another field. And he could make notes of any sights or anything at all he found interesting, but which would send anyone else to sleep. I knew I had found the perfect character to draw. I saw Ackermann about it as soon as I came back to London. He will publish the pictures. But it is on one condition: that I work with a partner.’

  ‘A partner?’

  ‘A man to supply words.’

  The kitten mewed loudly and placed its paw at one of the holes. ‘He needs feeding,’ said Rowlandson. ‘I must go, John. Besides, I must get to work.’ He swallowed the contents of the second tankard in almost a single quaff, shook hands with his friend, stooped under the beams and lintel, and left.

  It was then that the wrinkled and mainly toothless man from across the aisle re-entered the conversation. ‘I overheard you and your friend. Artist is he?’

  ‘He is. You probably heard his idea for a man of skin and bone. If I know my friend, and I do, he will come to me shortly to help him develop his scheme. Sometimes his imagination is as dry as his throat. But there is definitely something amusing to the idea. A dull pedant. A schoolteacher or a vicar who bores people to death. I must give it some thought.’

  ‘A man of skin and bone – a pedant – aye, that should work. What Englishman wouldn’t laugh at a man like that?’

  *

  In Cell Number 2 on the uppermost floor of the King’s Bench Prison for debtors, Southwark, were: a faded rug, a writing desk with a drawer handle missing, a rusted bedstead – though the sheets were spotlessly clean – and a table, on which stood a perfect porcelain tea service with gilding on the rims of the cups; but the most noteworthy object was an elderly man, sitting to one side of the teapot in a pose of great elegance.

  Everything in this man’s manner spoke good breeding: his finger upon his cheek; the way he sat cross-legged with his feet seeming the ornament of his legs; and the delicate arrangement of his features. Though he had shiny elbows, and shirt cuffs with straggling threads, his waistcoat bore pearl buttons, making his shabbiness appear deliberately crafted. But he was old, this William Combe – indeed he was reputed to be the oldest inhabitant of the prison. He looked towards a bookcase, where stood a fellow examining the spines of the books with evident interest. This latter man turned and revealed a kid-goatish face, to which silvery spectacles added a few years, but he was undoubtedly one of the youngest men in the prison.