Death and Mr. Pickwick (115 page)

At Harrow, Calverley came to love literature in dead languages, especially Virgil, but equal to his enthusiasm for
The Aeneid
was the living language of
Pickwick
, and after reciting the fifteenth idyll of Theocritus in the original Greek, he would switch to reciting Weller in the London slang. So frequently did
Pickwick
occur in Calverley's conversation that his knowledge of the immortal work appeared encyclopedic. He did not
overtly
flaunt his knowledge – he was not a show-off or a man of pretension – but the great mind of Calverley was designed to probe its way, unstoppably, through the great book. There was, it must be admitted, a Calverley tendency to probe others about
Pickwick
as well, and difficult questions would sometimes occur in conversation. This was the one time of discomfiture in Calverley's company; but the moment soon passed, and could be overcome by throwing questions back at Calverley himself.

‘What is my favourite part of
Pickwick
?' he said when asked. ‘I have a special fondness for the tale of the goblins.'

There was a good reason for this preference. Calverley, like those creatures of the graveyard where Gabriel Grub dug, was the most astonishing leaper – all the more astonishing because, like a goblin, he was not tall. He especially liked to demonstrate his skill within graveyards, when, exactly as in
Pickwick
, he did not merely leapfrog over common-sized gravestones, but bounded over family vaults with iron railings. And, as he said himself, quoting
Pickwick
, ‘with as much ease as if they had been so many street posts'.

There simply was no leaper like Calverley! Once, conversing on the subject, he proceeded to the account of his jump over the wall at Harrow.

‘There was the school wall ahead of me,' he said to a party of fascinated listeners. ‘On the other side – a fall – an abyss if you are scared – of nine or ten feet. I looked at the wall – and the leap, I knew, was mine. No one had ever done it before. I would be the first. But I thought a simple leap too easy. There would be no flailing of arms. I would do it with my hands in my pockets.'

‘No!' said a student who abyssed his mouth. He was not alone.

‘Indeed, yes. And I ran – and I went over – admittedly I
did
land on my head!' He raised his hand, so the laughter would subside. ‘I had to pick the gravel out of my hair. But I was inspired to perfect the leap. I got up, walked to the other side without a moment's delay, and jumped, hands in pockets. I landed perfectly on the soles of my feet.'

There was a round of applause, and he bowed.

‘But, there is an idea I have for another first. Something I want to do.' As Calverley always got what he wanted, it was sure to happen. ‘I was thinking of
Pickwick
last night, and I asked myself: do we
really
know it well? What if our knowledge were rigorously tested?'

*   *   *

Seven o'clock in the evening, a fortnight later.

Twelve young men in academic gowns waited in a corridor. Among them were Mr Skeat and Mr Besant. Skeat, although a student of mathematics, had a great interest in etymology, and in the corridor was involved in a conversation about the Pickwickian phrase ‘it's all gammon'.

‘It is nothing to do with bacon,' he said. ‘The meat comes from Norman French
gambon
, from
gambe
, leg, from Latin
gamba
, the leg of an animal. “It's all gammon” comes from Anglo-Saxon
gamen
, a game.'

One young man asked Skeat whether he knew anything about the correct spelling of the word ‘dickey', a coach driver's seat.

‘It
could
be spelt without the “e”, for the “e” contributes nothing to meaning, and is altogether useless. But it
should
be done for the sheer sake of anomaly, which in my opinion is a great thing in the English language.'

Besant then said: ‘Do you have any thoughts on all the swapping of “v”s and “w”s? That's not real is it? It's exaggerated, at least.'

‘You are not the first to make that assertion, Besant. But you are quite wrong. People are never ready to believe in pronunciations they have not heard themselves. It is true that some of these London pronunciations are an infectious mistake. If you tell a boy that he should pronounce “winegar” as “vinegar”, don't be surprised if he starts calling “wine”, “vine”.'

A door opened, and there stood Calverley in gown, cap and hood, with a forbidding expression upon his leonine looks. He said merely: ‘Gentlemen.'

The twelve young men took their places at twelve arranged desks. When all were settled, Calverley progressed down the aisles, distributing, face down, the examination paper he had prepared. He returned to the front of the room. He looked briefly towards the clock on the mantelpiece and said, in all solemnity: ‘Begin.' A lightning-fast wink interrupted the seriousness of his demeanour.

Turning over their papers, the young men read: ‘Candidates Should Answer All Questions'. Thus began the two-hour written examination in
Pickwick
, formally testing knowledge of the most popular book in the language. Heads went down and pens dipped in inkwells.

Although there was silence, sometimes a noise emanated from a basket in the corner. Here lay a strange, squirrel-like dog, Calverley's pet, and from the basket hung a college sign saying ‘The Keeping of Dogs is Strictly Forbidden'. The dog would occasionally yap, to which Calverley would say: ‘No help from you, sir.' Calverley eventually moved the sagacious creature to the desk at the front, and there sat master and dog, the master smoking a short-stemmed pungent-smelling pipe in between sips from a pewter pot of beer, the dog chewing a bone in between laps from a bowl – a bowl which contained a little too much froth to be pure water. Even if the invigilation of other university examinations demanded strict sobriety,
Pickwick
was an exception.

Every twenty minutes, Calverley walked down the aisles between the desks, sometimes pausing to inspect the candidates' progress on the various questions. Few seemed to have attempted an answer to question nineteen, though Skeat did, and so did Besant. The question asked: ‘What is a red-faced Nixon?'

The Story of Red-Faced Nixon

The qualities that made a good ploughman were the very qualities which Robert Nixon the idiot ploughboy lacked. But assuredly, his cheeks were ruddy – some would compare them to apples, and thereby suggested his devotion to cider. Though Nixon had no need of strong juice to be foolish.

At the first cut of the plough, the fresh smell of Cheshire earth made Nixon retch. He would roll his goggle eyes, throw back his huge head, stagger forward, and grumble unintelligibly to himself. Soon, he became annoyed by the hiss of the plough's board parting the earth and would beat his own ears. Long before a mile of ploughing was done, he stopped to rub his calves. Only a boot on the buttocks from his master would set him going again.

Nixon liked hard frosts and prolonged rain, when it was impossible to plough, but in better weather if he
did
complete the ploughing of a field, he would stand back to admire his work – even though his field had furrows as straight as broken arrows, and was ornamented with grass, cornstalks and holes in shameful abundance.

Robert Nixon also had a noted aversion to three things: children, birds and horses. He always shouted at children and they shouted back. Sometimes he ran at them, on his short and stubby legs, abandoning his work. When he gave up the chase, he shouted at the birds in the furrows. And when he returned to the plough, the horses received his curse. The horses hated him back, and showed it – for after the plough went forward, it would stop suddenly, so the handles crashed into Nixon's thighs. He shrieked in agony and cursed the horses again. Even if the horses kept going, they could still annoy Nixon, for he hitched them too tightly, making it harder to walk behind the plough, and he was often pulled forward, with the horses barely under his control.

Nixon was without doubt the worst ploughman in all Cheshire. Only after Christmas, on Plough Monday – when Nixon was dressed up in the part of the fool with old skins and an ass's tail, and decorated with ribbons tied up in bows – was he of any use. Too stupid to understand why he was dressed so, the celebration made Nixon happy.

Why did his master keep him on? The rumour persisted that Nixon was the master's natural son. Often the master would take over the plough from Nixon's control and do the work himself. The idiot ploughboy would wander behind, kicking clods of earth in the direction of the birds, swigging water – cider if he could get it – or chewing a hunk of bread, dropping crumbs as he did so, failing to realise that this attracted the cursed birds in the first place.

It was one such day, when the master had assumed control of the plough, and they were near the River Weaver. Nixon waved at a salt-boat as he followed. He did so for every vessel, and he usually accompanied the wave with a hoot – and suddenly the master was struck with the realisation that Nixon was silent. The master looked over his shoulder: there was Nixon standing still in the field. At his feet was a bottle of water; a hunk of bread was a little further away, which birds had found. Nixon simply stared upwards at the sky. The master called out: ‘What are you doing, you fool?' There was no answer.

The master approached and looked into Nixon's face. It was unblinking. He prodded the boy in the stomach. No response. He shouted in the boy's ear. Again, to no avail. Finally, he struck the boy across the cheek, making it redder than it already was. Nothing elicited a reaction, as though Nixon were asleep wide awake.

Soon, other workers came over to inspect the motionless ploughboy. No slap, no dig in the ribs, no kick in the thigh, had the slightest effect at all.

The master resumed ploughing, and ordered the men back to work. There stood Nixon, like a scarecrow, as though his aversion to birds were the only part of his personality that remained.

Suddenly Nixon moved and gave a sustained moan. The master ran over, and the boy looked at him, fully aware. There was none of his usual babble, no mutters or groans escaped his lips. Instead, an unearthly and sage-like demeanour had come over the boy. The master took Nixon back to the farmhouse.

‘What's with him?' said the wife.

‘The boy ain't as he normally is.'

From that time onward, strange sayings came from the mouth of Nixon. His speech was slower and clearer than before, and the next day a significant utterance occurred.

After Nixon had whacked an ox with a stick, hard enough to injure the beast, the master told him to stop – and Nixon turned and said: ‘With the passing of three days, this beast will not be yours.' On the third day, the settlement of a debt required the master to give up the ox as the means of payment.

The master was troubled, and said to his wife again: ‘The boy ain't as he normally is.'

One day soon afterwards, Nixon looked into the distance, across the fields, and said: ‘When an eagle shall sit on top of the house, then shall an heir be born.' Sure enough, an eagle did alight on the top of a local mansion, and a child was born that evening.

His next proclamation was: ‘A boy shall be born with three thumbs on one hand, who shall hold three king's horses, while England is three times won and lost in a day.'

When a boy was indeed born nearby with three thumbs, men feared for the kingdom; but they forgot about this part of the prediction, which was not fulfilled, and remembered only the part about the thumbs.

It was the case that, far from being an idiot ploughboy, Nixon was seen as a great prophet. And in the mornings he looked into the distance, over the fields, and men waited for the next prophecy to come.

Nixon's fame spread wider and wider, until eventually it reached the ears of the king.
Which
king is a matter of conjecture.

Some say Nixon was born in the reign of Edward IV, and experienced a vision of the Battle of Bosworth, and predicted its outcome. Others place him 150 years later in the reign of James I. While cynical souls will point out that, not only was Caxton too busy to tear himself away from printing
The Mirrour of the Worlde
to publish Nixon's prophecies, but that no account of Nixon exists prior to 1714, when the new Hanoverian dynasty came to England, bringing their strange accents with them, and that they would have found a prophet of some use.

It may be that there is not the slightest evidence for Nixon's existence but, as is the case with many things, that did not stop people's belief.

Perhaps the king was Henry VII, victor of Bosworth, for that is the monarch shown in the frontispiece of a twopenny coarsely-wrappered peddler's book,
The Original Predictions of Robert Nixon, Commonly called The Cheshire Prophet, from an authentic manuscript found among the papers of a Cheshire gentleman lately deceased.
Even this depiction of a monarch fosters doubt, for the king and his loyal followers are in the garb of the late seventeenth century, as though wearing garments sewn together from Nixon's predictions. Still, the woodcut showed Nixon with a headful of wild curls, and cheeks so red a worm might reside blissfully within.

Whichever king it was, he issued a proclamation that Nixon should be brought to his court.

When the king's men came, Nixon ran across the ploughed lines of a field, screaming: ‘No! I shall be starved to death!'

As the king could not be denied, Nixon was soused in cider to subdue resistance, then bundled up, placed in a cart, and driven to the royal court.

Nixon stood quivering before the king. The monarch decided to put the prophet to the test.

‘Upon my finger,' said the king, ‘there used to be a very fine diamond ring. It is not there any longer. Can you tell me where it is?' Now, the king had not really lost the ring but had hidden it in a drawer. ‘If you have the powers of a prophet you can surely help me find it. Or are you leading my people astray with your words?'