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.