CHAPTER XII--MR. SAMUEL PEPYS
There were few things which Maude liked so much as a long winter
evening when Frank and she dined together, and then sat beside the
fire and made good cheer. It would be an exaggeration to say that
she preferred it to a dance, but next to that supreme joy, and higher
even than the theatre in her scale of pleasures, were those serene
and intimate evenings when they talked at their will, and were silent
at their will, within their home brightened by those little jokes and
endearments and allusions which make up that inner domestic masonry
which is close-tiled for ever to the outsider. Five or six evenings
a week, she with her sewing and Frank with his book, settled down to
such enjoyment as men go to the ends of the earth to seek, while it
awaits them, if they will but atune their souls to sympathy, beside
their own hearthstones. Now and again their sweet calm would be
broken by a ring at the bell, when some friend of Frank's would come
round to pay them an evening visit. At the sound Maude would say
'bother,' and Frank something shorter and stronger, but, as the
intruder appeared, they would both break into, 'Well, really now it
WAS good of you to drop in upon us in this homely way.' Without such
hypocrisy, the world would be a hard place to live in.
I may have mentioned somewhere that Frank had a catholic taste in
literature. Upon a shelf in their bedroom--a relic of his bachelor
days--there stood a small line of his intimate books, the books which
filled all the chinks of his life when no new books were forthcoming.
They were all volumes which he had read in his youth, and many times
since, until they had become the very tie-beams of his mind. His
tastes were healthy and obvious without being fine. Macaulay's
Essays, Holmes' Autocrat, Gibbons' History, Jefferies' Story of my
Heart, Carlyle's Life, Pepys' Diary, and Borrow's Lavengro were among
his inner circle of literary friends. The sturdy East Anglian, half
prize-fighter, half missionary, was a particular favourite of his,
and so was the garrulous Secretary of the Navy. One day it struck
him that it would be a pleasant thing to induce his wife to share his
enthusiasms, and he suggested that the evenings should be spent in
reading selections from these old friends of his. Maude was
delighted. If he had proposed to read the rig-vedas in the original
Sanskrit, Maude would have listened with a smiling face. It is in
such trifles that a woman's love is more than a man's.
That night Frank came downstairs with a thick well-thumbed volume in
his hand.
'This is Mr. Pepys,' said he solemnly.
'What a funny name!' cried Maude. 'It makes me think of indigestion.
Why? Oh yes, pepsine, of course.'
'We shall take a dose of him every night after dinner to complete the
resemblance. But seriously, dear, I think that now that we have
taken up a course of reading, we should try to approach it in a grave
spirit, and endeavour to realise--Oh, I say, don't!'
'I AM so sorry, dear! I do hope I didn't hurt, you!'
'You did--considerably.'
'It all came from my having the needle in my hand at the time--and
you looked so solemn--and--well, I couldn't help it.'
'Little wretch--!'
'No, dear; Jemima may come in any moment with the coffee. Now, do
sit down and read about Mr Pepys to me. And first of all, would you
mind explaining all about the gentleman, from the beginning, and
taking nothing for granted, just as if I had never heard of him
before.'
'I don't believe--'
'Never mind, sir! Be a good boy and do exactly what you are told.
Now begin!'
'Well, Maude, Mr. Pepys was born--'
'What was his first name?'
'Samuel.'
'Oh dear, I'm sure I should not have liked him.'
'Well, it's too late to change that. He was born--I could see by
looking, but it really doesn't matter, does it? He was born
somewhere in sixteen hundred and something or other, and I forget
what his father was.'
'I must try to remember what you tell me.'
'Well, it all amounts to this, that he got on very well in the world,
that he became at last a high official of the navy in the time of
Charles the Second, and that he died in fairly good circumstances,
and left his library, which was a fine one, to one of the
universities, I can't remember which.'
'There is an accuracy about your information, Frank--'
'I know, dear, but it really does not matter. All this has nothing
to do with the main question.'
'Go on, then!'
'Well, this library was left as a kind of dust-catcher, as such
libraries are, until one day, more than a hundred years after the old
boy's death, some enterprising person seems to have examined his
books, and he found a number of volumes of writing which were all in
cipher, so that no one could make head or tail of them.'
'Dear me, how very interesting!'
'Yes, it naturally excited curiosity. Why should a man write volumes
of cipher? Imagine the labour of it! So some one set to work to
solve the cipher. This was about the year 1820. After three years
they succeeded.'
'How in the world did they do it?'
'Well, they say that human ingenuity never yet invented a cipher
which human ingenuity could not also solve. Anyhow, they did
succeed. And when they had done so, and copied it all out clean,
they found they had got hold of such a book as was never heard of
before in the whole history of literature.'
Maude laid her sewing on her lap, and looked across with her lips
parted and her eyebrows raised.
'They found that it was an inner Diary of the life of this man, with
all his impressions, and all his doings, and all his thoughts--not
his ought-to-be thoughts, but his real, real thoughts, just as he
thought then at the back of his soul. You see this man, and you know
him very much better than his own wife knew him. It is not only that
he tells of his daily doings, and gives us such an intimate picture
of life in those days, as could by no other means have been conveyed,
but it is as a piece of psychology that the thing is so valuable.
Remember the dignity of the man, a high government official, an
orator, a writer, a patron of learning, and here you have the other
side, the little thoughts, the mean ideas which may lurk under a
bewigged head, and behind a solemn countenance. Not that he is worse
than any of us. Not a bit. But he is frank. And that is why the
book is really a consoling one, for every sinner who reads it can say
to himself, "Well, if this man who did so well, and was so esteemed,
felt like this, it is no very great wonder that I do."'
Maude looked at the fat brown book with curiosity. 'Is it really all
there?' she asked.
'No, dear, it will never all be published. A good deal of it is, I
believe, quite impossible. And when he came to the impossible
places, he doubled and trebled his cipher, so as to make sure that it
should never be made out. But all that is usually published is
here.' Frank turned over the leaves, which were marked here and
there with pencilings.
'Why are you smiling, Frank?'
'Only at his way of referring to his wife.'
'Oh, he was married?'
'Yes, to a very charming girl. She must have been a sweet creature.
He married her at fifteen on account of her beauty. He had a keen
eye for beauty had old Pepys.'
'Were they happy?'
'Oh yes, fairly so. She was only twenty-nine when she died!'
'Poor girl!'
'She was happy in her life--though he DID blacken her eye once.'
'Not really?'
'Yes, he did. And kicked the housemaid.'
'Oh, the brute!'
'But on the whole he was a good husband. He had a few very good
points about him.'
'But how does he allude to his wife?'
'He has a trick of saying, "my wife, poor wretch!"'
'Impertinent! Frank, you said to-night that other men think what
this odious Mr. Pepys says. Yes, you did! Don't deny it! Does that
mean that you always think of me as "poor wretch"?'
'We have come along a little since then. But how these passages take
you back to the homely life of those days!'
'Do read some.'
'Well, listen to this, "And then to bed without prayers, to-morrow
being washing-day." Fancy such a detail coming down to us through
two centuries.'
'Why no prayers?'
'I don't know. I suppose they had to get up early on washing-days,
and so they wanted to go to sleep soon.'
'I'm afraid, dear, you do the same without as good an excuse. Read
another!'
'He goes to dine with some one--his uncle, I think. He says, "An
excellent dinner, but the venison pasty was palpable beef, which was
not handsome."'
'How beautiful! Mrs. Hunt Mortimer's sole last week was palpable
plaice. Mr. Pepys is right. It was not handsome.'
'Here's another grand entry: "Talked with my wife of the poorness
and meanness of all that the people about us do, compared with what
we do." I dare say he was right, for they did things very well.
When he dined out, he says that his host gave him "the meanest dinner
of beef, shoulder and umbles of venison, and a few pigeons, and all
in the meanest manner that ever I did see, to the basest degree."
'What are umbles, dear?'
'I have no idea.'
'Well, whatever they are, it sounds to me a very good dinner. People
must have lived very well in those days.'
'They habitually over-ate and over-drank themselves. But Pepys gives
us the menu of one of his own entertainments. I've marked it
somewhere. Yes, here it is. "Fricassee of rabbits and chickens, a
leg of mutton boiled, three carps in a dish, a great dish of a side
of lamb, a dish of roasted pigeons, a dish of four lobsters, three
tarts, a lamprey pie (a most rare pie!), a dish of anchovies, good
wine of several sorts, and all things mighty noble and to my great
content."'
'Good gracious! I told you that I associated him with indigestion.'
'He did them pretty well that time.'
'Who cooked all this?'
'The wife helped in those days.'
'No wonder she died at twenty-nine. Poor dear! What a splendid
kitchen-range they must have had! I never understood before why they
had such enormous grates in the old days. Naturally, if you have six
pigeons, and a lamprey, and a lobster, and a side of lamb, and a leg
of mutton, and all these other things cooking at the same time, you
would need a huge fire.'
'The wonderful thing about Pepys,' said Frank, looking thoughtfully
over the pages, 'is that he is capable of noting down the mean little
impulses of human nature, which most men would be so ashamed of, that
they would hasten to put them out of their mind. His occasional
shabbiness in money matters, his jealousies, his envies, all his
petty faults, which are despicable on account of their pettiness.
Fancy any man writing this. He is describing how he visited a friend
and was reading a book from his library. "A very good book," says
he, "especially one letter of advice to a courtier, most true and
good, which made me once resolve to tear out the two leaves that it
was writ in, but I forbore it." Imagine recording such a vile
thought.'
'But what you have never explained to me yet, dear, or if you did, I
didn't understand--you don't mind my being a little stupid, do you?--
is, what object Mr. Pepys had in putting down all this in such a form
that no one could read it.'
'Well, you must bear in mind, dear, that he could read it himself.
Besides he was a fellow with a singularly methodical side to his
mind. He was, for example, continually adding up how much money he
had, or cataloguing and indexing his library, and so on. He liked to
have everything shipshape. And so with his life, it pleased him to
have an exact record which he could turn to. And yet, after all, I
don't know that that is a sufficient explanation.'
'No, indeed, it is not. My experience of man--'
'YOUR experience, indeed!'
'Yes, sir, my experience of men--how rude you are, Frank!--tells me
that they have funny little tricks and vanities which take the
queerest shapes.'
'Indeed! Have I any?'
'You--you are compounded of them. Not vanity--no, I don't mean that.
But pride--you are as proud as Lucifer, and much too proud to show
it. That is the most subtle form of pride. Oh yes, I know perfectly
well what I mean. But in this man's case, it took the form of
wishing to make a sensation after his death. He could not publish
such a thing when he lived, could he?'
'Rather not.'
'Well, then, he had to do it after his death. He had to write it in
cipher, or else some one would have found him out during his
lifetime. But, very likely, he left a key to the cipher, so that
every one might read it when he was gone, but the key and his
directions were in some way lost.'
'Well, it is very probable.'
The fire had died down, so Maude shipped off her chair, and sat on
the black fur rug, with her back against Frank's knees. 'Now, dear,
read away!' said she.
But the lamp shone down upon her dainty head, and it gleamed upon her
white neck, and upon the fluffy, capricious, untidy, adorable, little
curlets, which broke out along the edges of the gathered strands of
her chestnut hair. And so, after the fashion of men, his thoughts
flew away from Mr. Pepys and the seventeenth century, and all that is
lofty and instructive, and could fix upon nothing except those dear
little wandering tendrils, and the white column on which they twined.
Alas, that so small a thing can bring the human mind from its
empyrean flights! Alas, that vague emotions can drag down the
sovereign intellect! Alas, that even for an hour, a man should
prefer the material to the spiritual!
But the man who doesn't misses a good deal.
