Without a leg to stand on, he must do as he was told. On the 12th November, therefore, he must call Deb to his chamber in the presence of his wife, “and there did, with tears in my eyes, which I could not help, discharge her, and advise her to be gone as soon as she could, and never to see me, or let me see her more while she was in the house, which she took with tears too.” She had found herself a place, and went to it; and Pepys looked forward now to a peace which he had not known, he says, for twenty days. He did not get it, because he was both knave and fool. Which this shows him to be I don’t pretend to decide. He writes on the very day the girl left: “The truth is, I have a good mind to have the maidenhead of this girl, which I should not doubt to have if je could get time para be con her.” The Italians used to call the compound of inclination and ability il talento, a word which our language lacks. Under the spur of il talento this incurable rascal hunted London to find Deb’s whereabouts. He had reason for suspecting Holborn, and quartered that; then Whetstone Park seemed probable, in the service of one Dr. Allbon. Not known there. In Eagle Court, off the Strand, he presently found out that “this Dr. Allbon is a kind of poor broken fellow that dare not show his head, nor to be known where he is gone.” Nevertheless, he did finally run down his doctor in Fleet Street or thereby, even met a man in his employ, bribed him to take a message “to a little gentlewoman, one Mrs. Willett, that is with him,” and waited in the court of Somerset House for an answer. He did not have it till after dark. She was well, and he might see her if he would, “but no more.” That was enough for Pepys. Off he went in a coach, “it being now dark,” and “she come into the coach to me, and je did baiser her....” Then the real, the incredible Pepys: “I did nevertheless give her the best council I could, to have a care of her honour, and to fear God, and suffer no man para avoir to do con her as je have done, which she promised.” The advice was sound and, from him, infallible. To-morrow was to prove that much to him. I must afford myself the morrow’s entry.
“19th. Up and at the office all the morning, with my heart full of joy to think in what a safe condition all my matters now stand between my wife and Deb and me, and at noon, running upstairs to see the upholsterers, who are at work hanging my best room ... I find my wife sitting sad in the dining-room; which enquiring into the reason of, she begun to call me all the false, rotten-hearted rogues in the world, letting me understand that I was with Deb yesterday, which, thinking it impossible for her ever to understand, I did a while deny, but at last did, for the ease of my mind and hers, and for ever to discharge my heart of this wicked business, I did confess all, and above stairs in our bed chamber there I did endure the sorrow of her threats and vows and curses all the afternoon.... So with most perfect confusion of face and heart, and sorrow and shame, in the greatest agony in the world I did pass this afternoon, fearing that it will never have an end; but at last I did call for W. Hewer, who I was forced to make privy now to all, and the poor fellow did cry like a child, and obtained what I could not, that she would be pacified upon condition that I would give it under my hand never to see or speak with Deb while I live, as I had before with Pierce and Knipp, and which I did also, God knows, promise for Deb too, but I have the confidence to deny it to the perjury of myself.”
It is extraordinary that Pepys, who could face with sangfroid committees of Lords and Commons, marshal his facts and figures and come off with credit, could be such a poltroon in this domestic inquest as to deny what was obviously within his wife’s knowledge. But when to terror you add a sense of guilt, a man will tell you anything. It is still more incredible that that did not finish the story—but it did not. The next day, what must he do but send W. Hewer off to Deb, “to tell her that I had told my wife all of my being with her the other night, so that if my wife should send she might not make the business worse by denying it.” The alert Mrs. Pepys made it her business to find out the whole of that, no doubt from W. Hewer himself; so that when Pepys came home the whole thing began all over again, and this time with violence. She “did fall to revile me in the bitterest manner in the world, and could not refrain to strike me and pull my hair, which I resolved to bear with, and had good reason to bear it.” He was driven to call in Hewer again as intermediary; but this time the conditions were terrible. Nothing would suit Mrs. Pepys but a letter conceived in the most insulting and outrageous terms to the girl, who was not what it styled her, from Pepys, who had done his best to make her so. Even he was shocked at it, and once wrote it out without the word. Mrs. Pepys tore it up. Then, on a wink passing from Hewer, he wrote it down, and domestic fury was satisfied. It was handed to Hewer to deliver, with “a sharp message” from Mrs. Pepys. That was the climax. No man could be more deeply degraded than that; and to do Pepys credit, he knew it, and could hardly bear himself. Hewer, on his own motion, it would seem, delivered but half of the letter; the other, the injurious half, was brought back to the unfortunate sinner. Deb never knew the worst of him, and, so far as the Diary reveals, never saw him again.
Love will lead a man any lengths, and justify itself, at least to himself; but not lust. That is a sensitive plant, and shrivels in the cold. Pepys, it will have been seen, was not prepared to go a yard out of his prosperous way in pursuit or defence of the favourites of his whim. If it is to his credit that he reports at length his humiliating rebuffs, that is all that can be said for him. If he affords a disagreeable spectacle, luckily it is also exceedingly ridiculous, and the only thing about it difficult to understand is that he does afford it. To me it is much more interesting to speculate upon the attitude of his victims towards these amorous advances. Concerned they must have been; but were they interested, amused, embarrassed, or bored? Did they take it as all in the day’s work; had they resentment and feared to show it; or were they, poor children, led to take him seriously? I am not thinking of the Knipps and Pierces, Betty Lanes and half-dozen Nells—hardy perennials—but of his fresh young Mercer, “decayed tradesman’s daughter,” or grave young Deb, carefully educated at Bow, come also of a good Bristol family, with established aunts and uncles, and all the rest of it—girls who certainly came new to the kind of thing. Is it possible that Deb thrilled to a possible romance? And how did she accept the discovery of what in fact it was? With the one exception of Mercer, they are almost lay figures in the Diary, mute and passive under his greedy hands. Some were baggages, no doubt, or baggages-elect. They cannot all have been baggages. Deb, with her gravity and measured speech, what was she? There’s no telling. I don’t commend her for having seen him again, certainly not for sitting with him in the coach. Then I remember that she was barely twenty years old. She escaped, however, with some smirches, and one may hope that she found a good husband. Bocca baciata non perde ventura.
FOOTNOTE:
[3] In 1665, for instance, he laid out, at one blow, £55 on his own, and £12 on her clothes.
ONE OF LAMB’S CREDITORS
There are writers upon the roll of whom nobody demands, “How begot, how nourishéd”—not many, but one or two. Milton, for instance: does anyone try to derive Milton? Or Cowper? Or Wordsworth? Others, nearly all the others, abide our question, and no wonder. Is not all creative effort the agony of recalling? Is not the brain a sponge? Is there anything new except arrangement? Very well—then Defoe must have been a borrower, though he seems stark new. We know that Charles Lamb picked up words, phrases, cadences as a magnet steel-filings; but his latest and best biographer now goes further and seeks to lay his mental habit to somebody. He has devoted an essay to deriving his whimsicality, as he calls it, for want of a more comprehensive term, which shall include the freakish humour which is peculiarly Lamb’s, and the “unreluctant egoism” which he thinks Lamb was the first of us to signalise. I could quarrel with him there, “if I had the mind,” being very sure that Lamb was not the first egoist in English Literature by a very long way. If he was, then Mr. Lucas must devote another essay dealing with the claims of Sterne, Colley Cibber, Sir Thomas Browne, Cowley, Pepys, and Lord Herbert of Cherbury, to name no more. However, let that go. Lamb’s cast of humour, a glancing, many-faceted thing, as wayward as the wind, but like the wind, from whatever airt it blow, bringing upon it the scent of what garden plots, hedgerows, beanfields and thymy uplands it may have crossed—that Mr. Lucas has been driven, seeing that he must needs buckle it to his egoism, to obtain from the mild mock-epic of Cowper, which does seem to me a wide cast to have made, with a small fry netted for his pains. When I came upon and had read that essay, in Mr. Lucas’s Giving and Receiving, I gazed for a few minutes thoughtfully into the fire, then got up and took down from the shelf the second volume of the Life of Charles by the same hand. In a useful Appendix III, upon “Charles Lamb’s Books,” I found what I wanted.