The Scandal of the Season (35 page)

 

It took Alexander three weeks to finish the first draft of the poem. He spent hours in his room, blocking out the noises that constantly threatened to distract him: the housemaid treading up and down the staircase with her mop and brooms, the cook and kitchen boy calling to each another outside in the yard, his mother talking to his father from one room to another. He broke off for meals, thankful to have a reason to lay down his pen, and yet anxious to be back at his desk as soon as he was away from it. The worst moments in the composition came at the beginning of each couplet, when all he had were two words or a snatch of a phrase that he wanted to make rhyme. He struggled to recall the thoughts he had had about the episode when Martha first described it to him. He paced about his room, lay on his bed for long periods, read his lines over and over until they made no sense. He realized, when he had finished the first canto of the poem, and was beginning work on a second, that he could no longer remember which of the lines had been funny when they had first come to him, and he wished that he had put a mark next to the words that had seemed particularly inspired.

Each day he would take long walks with his father, but while they were out he was constantly thinking of ideas and trying to find ways to remember them.

One morning, Alexander's father asked him what his new poem was about.

“Oh, it is a satire, sir,” Alexander replied, dreading his father's reaction to the news. “On the court and the men and women of fashion,” he added, hoping that this description might modify what he knew must be coming.

“A satire!” his father replied in surprise, disapproval edging his words. “You told me that you were going to write a sacred hymn called
The Messiah
.”

Pope hesitated. He remembered mentioning such a poem when he had written to ask if he might stay in town longer. He had never imagined that his father paid the slightest attention to what he was doing—but he should have guessed that this particular detail would be remembered.

“I have been writing
The Messiah,
sir,” he said, trying not to sound guilty. “But Mr. Caryll has asked me to break off from that work to compose the present verses. They are intended to help two Catholic families to become friends again.”

“Mr. Caryll!” exclaimed Alexander's father. He paused, and then added in an appeased tone of voice, “He would encourage you in nothing that was wrong.” Another pause, and then, “Who are the two families?” Alexander knew that this was his trump card. “The Petres and the Fermors,” he said. His father nodded, savoring the names. Alexander smiled to himself, but felt a sting of conscience.

By way of atonement he decided to divulge something that he had been planning to keep to himself. “I have been thinking, sir,” he began, “as I reflect on all that I did and saw while I was in London, that I do not properly fit into the world of the town. I wonder if I ever will. I am so very different from Charles Jervas and Richard Steele—and from Lord Petre, of course.”

“Well, you are not a baron's son, that's certainly true,” his father replied.

Alexander looked at him and saw that his father was embarrassed, refusing to meet his son's eye. It had not occurred to him until now that their lack of position might be why his father so resisted Alexander's joining the fashionable world. He felt a pang of remorse for his own failure to understand.

“But then I should not want to be, sir,” he replied.

Mr. Pope was silent for a moment, and Alexander thought that his father was going to upbraid him for dismissing social privilege so lightly. But instead he said, “Be not too quick to cast aside those things that make you very different from your fellow men. If you look and think and dress exactly as they do, nobody will remember who you are. I have always known that you were exceptional, Alexander. I hope that you will learn to accept it, too.”

 

When Alexander was on the point of finishing his new poem, he received a letter from Bernard Lintot, a well-known publisher in London and Jacob Tonson's great rival. Lintot wrote to say that he had admired Alexander's
Pastorals
and the
Essay on Criticism.
He was sorry not to have printed them himself, and he wondered whether Alexander might have any new material for him to see. Alexander knew that Lintot paid more than any other publisher in London, but he had half-promised his next piece to Tonson, and he reasoned that he should not change publishers now; he had no desire to be thought of as a troublemaker. But then he reconsidered. Perhaps that was exactly what he wanted people to think. And Lintot offered to include Alexander's work in a new volume he was preparing, which would have a much larger circulation than Alexander had previously hoped for.

But he did not as yet have a title. He had been thinking of it all along as
Lines, Upon a Young Lady Recently Deprived of a Most Important Possession,
but that would not do. Absurd and verbose. He decided that it must be called
The _____ of _____.
That was how all the best titles were arranged.
The Merchant of Venice, The Jew of Malta, The Way of the World
. But perhaps they only sounded so well because they were famous.

It must also be something to tempt sluggish schoolboys a hundred years hence.
The Baron and the Belle?
He would feel that he needed to apologize for that name every time he said it. No schoolboy would spend two minutes reading such a document.

The poem sat on Alexander's table for a week or so, untitled and unsent. But the days ticked by, and Alexander began to fear that if it did go not go off, Lintot would print his
Miscellany
without him. He looked though his books, but inspiration did not come. He asked his family, but of course they had no suggestions to make.

At last an idea came to him in the middle of the night—he thought it brilliant, and got out of bed to write it down. But in the clear light of morning it seemed idiotic. Overwrought and hysterical—his poem would sound as puffed up as anything that Dennis might have written. But more time passed, and he could not think of one better. So he scribbled down his foolish title and sent it off, hoping that Lintot might improve on it.

 

A few days later, Bernard Lintot received the morning's mail as he walked out of his shop door to Will's coffeehouse. There were a dozen or so letters, and several larger packages—manuscripts, he guessed—all addressed to Mr. Bernard Lintot, at Cross Keys between two Temple Gates in Fleet Street. He picked up the pile and walked out. While he drank his coffee at Will's he sorted through the mail, coming at last to a package containing fifteen or twenty pages of writing, copied in a meticulous hand, with a covering letter signed “A. Pope.” Lintot remembered Tonson's hunchbacked client, to whom he had sent a note some weeks previously. He snatched up the poem eagerly, and began to read.

Moments later, he sprang up from his chair, holding aloft the pages of verse.

Good God! he thought to himself. This poem will make my fortune!

The patrons of Will's looked up simultaneously, smiling and nodding at the great Mr. Lintot. Every one of them was imagining, wildly, that he had somehow got hold of their own half-written doggerel and perceived its brilliance.

“Alexander Pope has sent me his new satire,” Lintot cried victoriously. The poets all looked down again, crestfallen. Alexander Pope, they were thinking bitterly. The venomous, hunchbacked toad. But they had better be civil to him next time they met.

Charles Jervas was among the men present that morning. He had been at a loose end since Alexander had returned to the country, and today he had come to meet Harry Chambers and Tom Breach, who had lately appointed Will's as the setting for their morning's idleness. Upon hearing Lintot's enthusiasms, Jervas hurried over to claim Alexander as his old and dear friend and Tom and Harry followed closely behind.

Lintot wrung Jervas by the hand, as though he were Alexander himself. “It is the first poem of its kind to be written,” he exclaimed, clapping him vigorously upon the back, and turning to greet Tom and Harry, too. “I thank God Tonson did not get his hands on it,” he declared. “Your friend Pope is to be congratulated for showing the good sense of sending it to me. And the title is splendid!
The Rape of the Lock.
That alone will sell a thousand copies.”

Lintot hurried away so that he could write to Alexander, and Jervas was left to the conversation of his old schoolfellows. They all sat down again, and Harry opened a new topic.

“What do you think of this trouble in Barbados, Tom?” he asked.

“Barbados?” Tom repeated with surprise. “I have not the slightest knowledge of it. I am hard enough pressed to keep pace with last week's gossip at Lady Sandwich's levee. There is not time in the day to think of other people's troubles as well.”

“But this will amuse you, for it involves Lord Salisbury—whom I know you dislike.”

“Awful man,” Tom agreed. “I recall him boring me one evening with a brutal tale about his slaves. Tell me of his misfortune.”

“Oh—it involves the slaves, as a matter of fact,” said Harry, a little put out that Tom had already heard about them. “There was a story in the
Daily Courant
the other day. Lord Salisbury has been the object of unscrupulous scheming.”

“Capital. Of what kind?” asked Tom with a smile.

“He has been buying slaves from a trader whom Edward Fairfax knows,” Harry began.

“Oh yes,” Tom replied. “I remember him showing off about it.”

“Well, it turned out that Fairfax's trader was charging them for the full boatload that he brought from Africa, but he was in fact stealing fifty slaves or so to sell to another man. He told Fairfax and Salisbury that the slaves had died on the voyage.”

“To judge from Salisbury's description of the boat, I should have expected the slaves to be dying in vast numbers. It sounded infernal.”

“Some of them were dying, of course,” Harry replied. “But not nearly so many as the trader pretended. He was selling them off to a second dealer, who took them off the slave ship before it docked. So Lord Salisbury has been paying for somebody else to have cheap slaves. He is wild about it, as you might imagine.”

“I am glad to hear it. But how did Salisbury discover the fraud? God knows he is never in Barbados.”

“Oh, the second dealer, the man who bought the ‘dead' slaves, was running quite a regular racket out there. His name was Dupont, a Frenchman. Apparently he was once the manager on one of the plantations, until he was dismissed for stealing the sugar.”

“A Frenchman,” said Tom. “Lord Salisbury should have known there would be trouble.”

“Dupont's scheme was rather clever,” said Harry after a short pause. “He had a partner in London who made all the arrangements, raised the capital for him to use, and found plantation owners who wanted to buy the slaves in the West Indies. But somebody got wind of the scheme and told Fairfax.”

“I wondered how it had come to light,” said Tom. “It's far too clever for Lord Salisbury to have worked it out.”

“This Dupont is obviously a man of talent,” Harry agreed with a smile. “Or at least his partner in London is. I've half a mind to get in touch with Dupont myself to offer my services. A shame that I have no energy for work, or I might become rich.”

“It is a pity that James Douglass is not present to hear your story,” Jervas piped up. “It would divert him.”

“Divert him!” Harry rejoined. “He would rant and storm that he did not think of it himself. It is just his sort of affair. Was he not in Africa himself once?”

“Perhaps Douglass
is
Dupont's man in London!” Tom said with glee. “After all, he has just gone to ground himself!”

“Douglass is always disappearing and reappearing—never the worse for wear, and always filled with cheerful optimism that his next scheme will make his fortune. A rum fellow, but capital.”

“Yes,” Jervas agreed. “The town is dull without him.”

 

The months went by. Summer became autumn; autumn, winter. At long last, it turned to spring again, and
The Rape of the Lock
was published. Alexander went to Whiteknights to give Martha a copy of the poem. He knew that she was there alone; she had told him in a letter that Teresa had gone to join Arabella in Bath for the new season. It had surprised Alexander to learn that the cousins' friendship had continued, but he concluded that Arabella must now depend upon Teresa for a companionship that she had not needed in the past, and that a winter spent in the country had provided Teresa with the perspective required to overlook Arabella's offenses during the last season.

“I should hardly be making you, of all people, a present of
The Rape of the Lock,
” Alexander said to Martha as he gave it to her while they walked in the garden, “for you know all too much about the tale of Miss Fermor and her stolen hair. But I promised it to you last year, and I feared that you would think me negligent were I not to present it now.” He smiled, and then said, “The volume has been so long in coming out that Miss Fermor's charms will have half decayed while the poet was celebrating them, and the printer has been publishing them. Perhaps you had better not pass that last observation on to Miss Fermor,” he added.