When I went home to dinner, my hair insufficiently dried and clinging dankly to my head, I remarked that I had met the curate and he was coming up that afternoon.
‘Old Mrs Shepherd died last night,’ said my uncle in explanation.
The curate’s name was Galloway; he was a tall, thin, ungainly man with untidy black hair and a small, sallow dark face. I suppose he was quite young, but to me he seemed middle-aged. He talked very quickly and gesticulated a great deal. This made people think him rather queer and my uncle would not have kept him but that he was very energetic, and my uncle, being extremely lazy, was glad to have someone to take so much work off his shoulders. After he had finished the business that had brought him to the vicarage Mr Galloway came in to say how-do-you-do to my aunt, and she asked him to stay to tea.
‘Who was that you were with this morning?’ I asked him as he sat down.
‘Oh, that was Edward Driffield. I didn’t introduce him. I wasn’t sure if your uncle would wish you to know him.’
‘I think it would be most undesirable,’ said my uncle.
‘Why, who is he? He’s not a Blackstable man, is he?’
‘He was born in the parish,’ said my uncle. ‘His father was old Miss Wolfe’s bailiff at Ferne Court. But they were chapel people.’
‘He married a Blackstable girl,’ said Mr Galloway.
‘In church, I believe,’ said my aunt. ‘Is it true that she was a barmaid at the Railway Arms?’
‘She looks as if she might have been something like that,’ said Mr Galloway with a smile.
‘Are they going to stay long?’
‘Yes, I think so. They’ve taken one of those houses in that street where the Congregational Chapel is,’ said the curate.
At that time in Blackstable, though the new streets doubtless had names, nobody knew or used them.
‘Is he coming to church?’ asked my uncle.
‘I haven’t actually talked to him about it yet,’ answered Mr Galloway. ‘He’s quite an educated man, you know.’
‘I can hardly believe that,’ said my uncle.
‘He was at Haversham School, I understand, and he got any number of scholarships and prizes. He got a scholarship to Wadham, but he ran away to sea instead.’
‘I’d heard he was rather a harum-scarum,’ said my uncle.
‘He doesn’t look much like a sailor,’ I remarked.
‘Oh, he gave up the sea many years ago. He’s been all sorts of things since then.’
‘Jack of all trades and master of none,’ said my uncle.
‘Now, I understand, he’s a writer.’
‘That won’t last long,’ said my uncle.
I had never known a writer before; I was interested.
‘What does he write?’ I asked. ‘Books?’
‘I believe so,’ said the curate, ‘and articles. He had a novel published last spring. He’s promised to lend it me.’
‘I wouldn’t waste my time on rubbish in your place,’ said my uncle, who never read anything but The Times and the Guardian.
‘What’s it called?’ I asked.
‘He told me the title, but I forget it.’
‘Anyhow, it’s quite unnecessary that you should know,’ said my uncle. ‘I should very much object to your reading trashy novels. During your holidays the best thing you can do is to keep out in the open air. And you have a holiday task, I presume?’
I had. It was Ivanhoe. I had read it when I was ten, and the notion of reading it again and writing an essay on it bored me to distraction.
When I consider the greatness that Edward Driffield afterward achieved I cannot but smile as I remember the fashion in which he was discussed at my uncle’s table. When he died a little while ago and an agitation arose among his admirers to have him buried in Westminster Abbey, the present incumbent at Blackstable, my uncle’s successor twice removed, wrote to the Daily Mail pointing out that Driffield was born in the Parish and not only had passed long years, especially the last twenty-five of his life, in the neighbourhood, but had laid there the scene of some of his most famous books; it was only becoming, then, that his bones should rest in the churchyard where under the Kentish elms his father and mother dwelt in peace. There was relief in Blackstable when, the Dean of Westminster having somewhat curtly refused the abbey, Mrs Driffield sent a dignified letter to the Press in which she expressed her confidence that she was carrying out the dearest wishes of her dead husband in having him buried among the simple people he knew and loved so well. Unless the notabilities of Blackstable have very much changed since my day, I do not believe they vastly liked that phrase about ‘simple people’, but, as I afterward learnt, they had never been able to ‘abide’ the second Mrs Driffield.
4
To my surprise, two or three days after I lunched with Alroy Kear I received a letter from Edward Driffield’s widow. It ran as follows:
Dear friend,
I hear that you had a long talk with Roy last week about Edward Driffield and I am so glad to know that you spoke of him so nicely. He often talked to me of you. He had the greatest admiration for your talent and he was so very pleased to see you when you came to lunch with us. I wonder if you have in your possession any letters that he wrote to you, and if so whether you would let me have copies of them. I should be very pleased if I could persuade you to come down for two or three days and stay with me. I live very quietly now and have no one here, so please choose your own time. I shall be delighted to see you again and have a talk of old times. I have a particular service I want you to do me, and I am sure that for the sake of my dear dead husband you will not refuse. Yours ever sincerely,
Amy Driffield
I had seen Mrs Driffield only once and she but mildly interested me; I do not like being addressed as ‘dear friend’; that alone would have been enough to make me decline her invitation; and I was exasperated by its general character which, however ingenious an excuse I invented, made the reason I did not go quite obvious, namely, that I did not want to. I had no letters of Driffield’s. I suppose years ago he had written to me several times, brief notes, but he was then an obscure scribbler and even if I ever kept letters it would never have occurred to me to keep his. How was I to know that he was going to be acclaimed as the greatest novelist of our day? I hesitated only because Mrs Driffield said she wanted me to do something for her. It would certainly be a nuisance, but it would be churlish not to do it if I could, and after all, her husband was a very distinguished man.
The letter came by the first post, and after breakfast I rang up Roy. As soon as I mentioned my name I was put through to him by his secretary. If I were writing a detective story I should immediately have suspected that my call was awaited, and Roy’s virile voice calling hallo would have confirmed my suspicion. No one could naturally be quite so cheery so early in the morning.
‘I hope I didn’t wake you,’ I said.
‘Good God, no!’ His healthy laugh rippled along the wires. ‘I’ve been up since seven. I’ve been riding in the park. I’m just going to have breakfast. Come along and have it with me.’
‘I have a great affection for you, Roy,’ I answered, ‘but I don’t think you’re the sort of person I’d care to have breakfast with. Besides, I’ve already had mine. Look here, I’ve just had a letter from Mrs Driffield asking me to go down and stay.’
‘Yes, she told me she was going to ask you. We might go down together. She’s got quite a good grass court and she does one very well. I think you’d like it.’
‘What is it that she wants me to do?’
‘Ah, I think she’d like to tell you that herself.’
There was a softness in Roy’s voice such as I imagined he would use if he were telling a prospective father that his wife was about to gratify his wishes. It cut no ice with me.
‘Come off it, Roy,’ I said. ‘I’m too old a bird to be caught with chaff. Spit it out.’
There was a moment’s pause at the other end of the telephone. I felt that Roy did
not like my expression.
‘Are you busy this morning?’ he asked suddenly. ‘I’d like to come and see you.’
‘All right, come on. I shall be in till one.’
‘I’ll be round in about an hour.’
I replaced the receiver and relit my pipe. I gave Mrs Driffield’s letter a second glance.
I remembered vividly the luncheon to which she referred. I happened to be staying for a long weekend not far from Tercanbury with a certain Lady Hodmarsh, the clever and handsome American wife of a sporting baronet with no intelligence and charming manners. Perhaps to relieve the tedium of domestic life she was in the habit of entertaining persons connected with the arts. Her parties were mixed and gay. Members of the nobility and gentry mingled with astonishment and an uneasy awe with painters, writers, and actors. Lady Hodmarsh neither read the books nor looked at the pictures of the people to whom she offered hospitality, but she liked their company and enjoyed the feeling it gave her of being in the artistic know. When on this occasion the conversation happened to dwell for a moment on Edward Driffield, her most celebrated neighbour, and I mentioned that I had at one time known him very well, she proposed that we should go over and lunch with him on Monday when a number of her guests were going back to London. I demurred, for I had not seen Driffield for five and thirty years and I could not believe that he would remember me; and if he did (though this I kept to myself) I could not believe that it would be with pleasure. But there was a young peer there, a certain Lord Scallion, with literary inclinations so violent that, instead of ruling this country as the laws of man and nature have decreed, he devoted his energy to the composition of detective novels. His curiosity to see Driffield was boundless, and the moment Lady Hodmarsh made her suggestion he said it would be too divine. The star guest of the party was a big young fat duchess, and it appeared that her admiration for the famous writer was so intense that she was prepared to cut an engagement in London and not go up till the afternoon.
‘That would make four of us,’ said Lady Hodmarsh. ‘I don’t think they could manage more than that. I’ll wire to Mrs Driffield at once.’
I could not see myself going to see Driffield in that company and tried to throw cold water on the scheme.
‘It’ll only bore him to death,’ I said. ‘He’ll hate having a lot of strangers barging in on him like this. He’s a very old man.’
‘That’s why if they want to see him they’d better see him now. He can’t last much longer. Mrs Driffield says he likes to meet people. They never see anyone but the doctor and the parson and it’s a change for them. Mrs Driffield said I could always bring anyone interesting. Of course she has to be very careful. He’s pestered by all sorts of people who want to see him just out of idle curiosity, and interviewers and authors who want him to read their books, and silly hysterical women. But Mrs Driffield is wonderful. She keeps everyone away from him but those she thinks he ought to see. I mean, he’d be dead in a week if he saw everyone who wants to see him. She has to think of his strength. Naturally we’re different.’
Of course I thought I was; but as I looked at them I perceived that the duchess and Lord Scallion thought they were too; so it seemed best to say no more.
We drove over in a bright yellow Rolls. Ferne Court was three miles from Blackstable. It was a stucco house built, I suppose, about 1840, plain and unpretentious, but substantial; it was the same back and front, with two large bows on each side of a flat piece in which was the front door and there were two large bows on the first floor. A plain parapet hid the low roof. It stood in about an acre of garden, somewhat overgrown with trees, but neatly tended, and from the drawing-room window you had a pleasant view of woods and green downland. The drawing-room was furnished so exactly as you felt a drawing-room in a country house of modest size should be furnished, that it was slightly disconcerting. Clean, bright chintzes covered the comfortable chairs and the large sofa, and the curtains were of the same bright clean chintz. On little Chippendale tables stood large Oriental bowls filled with pot-pourri. On the cream-coloured walls were pleasant watercolours by painters well known at the beginning of this century. There were great masses of flowers charmingly arranged, and on the grand piano, in silver frames, photographs of celebrated actresses, deceased authors, and minor royalties.
It was no wonder that the duchess cried out that it was a lovely room. It was just the kind of room in which a distinguished writer should spend the evening of his days. Mrs Driffield received us with modest assurance. She was a woman of about five and forty, I judged, with a small sallow face and neat sharp features. She had a black cloche hat pressed tight down on her head and wore a grey coat and skirt. Her figure was slight and she was neither tall nor short, and she looked trim, competent and alert. She might have been the squire’s widowed daughter, who ran the Parish and had a peculiar gift for organization. She introduced us to a clergyman and a lady, who got up as we were shown in. They were the Vicar of Blackstable and his wife. Lady Hodmarsh and the duchess immediately assumed the cringing affability that persons of rank assume with their inferiors in order to show them that they are not in the least conscious of any difference in station between them.
Then Edward Driffield came in. I had seen portraits of him from time to time in the illustrated papers, but it was with dismay that I saw him in the flesh. He was smaller than I remembered and very thin, his head was barely covered with fine silvery hair, he was clean-shaven, and his skin was almost transparent. His blue eyes were very pale and the rims of his eyelids red. He looked an old, old man, hanging on to mortality by a thread; he wore very white false teeth and they made his smile seem forced and stiff. I had never seen him but bearded, and his lips were thin and pallid. He was dressed in a new, well-cut suit of blue serge, and his low collar, two or three sizes too large for him, showed a wrinkled, scraggy neck. He wore a neat black tie with a pearl in it. He looked a little like a dean in mufti on his summer holiday in Switzerland.
Mrs Driffield gave him a quick glance as he came in and smiled encouragingly; she must have been satisfied with the neatness of his appearance. He shook hands with his guests and to each said something civil. When he came to me he said:
‘It’s very good of a busy and successful man like you to come all this way to see an old fogy.’
I was a trifle taken aback, for he spoke as though he had never seen me before, and I was afraid my friends would think I had been boasting when I claimed at one time to have known him intimately. I wondered if he had completely forgotten me.
‘I don’t know how many years it is since we last met,’ I said, trying to be hearty.
He looked at me for what I suppose was no more than a few seconds, but for what seemed to me quite a long time, and then I had a sudden shock; he gave me a little wink. It was so quick that nobody but I could have caught it, and so unexpected in that distinguished old face that I could hardly believe my eyes. In a moment his face was once more composed, intelligently benign, and quietly observant. Luncheon was announced and we trooped into the dining-room.
This also was in what can only be described as the acme of good taste. On the Chippendale sideboard were silver candlesticks. We sat on Chippendale chairs and ate off a Chippendale table. In a silver bowl in the middle were roses, and round this were silver dishes with chocolates in them and peppermint creams; the silver salt-cellars were brightly polished and evidently Georgian. On the cream-coloured walls were mezzotints of ladies painted by Sir Peter Lely and on the chimney-piece a garniture of blue delf. The service was conducted by two maids in brown uniform and Mrs Driffield in the midst of her fluent conversation kept a wary eye on them. I wondered how she had managed to train these buxom Kentish girls (their healthy colour and high cheek-bones betrayed the fact that they were ‘local’) to such a pitch of efficiency. The lunch was just right for the occasion, smart but not showy, fillets of sole rolled up and covered with a white sauce, roast chicken, with new potatoes and green peas, asparagus, and gooseberry fool. It was
the dining-room and the lunch and the manner which you felt exactly fitted a literary gent of great celebrity but moderate wealth.
Mrs Driffield, like the wives of most men of letters, was a great talker and she did not let the conversation at her end of the table flag; so that, however much we might have wanted to hear what her husband was saying at the other, we had no opportunity. She was gay and sprightly. Though Edward Driffield’s indifferent health and great age obliged her to live most of the year in the country, she managed notwithstanding to run up to town often enough to keep abreast of what was going on, and she was soon engaged with Lord Scallion in an animated discussion of the plays in the London theatres and the terrible crowd at the Royal Academy. It had taken her two visits to look at all the pictures, and even then she had not had time to see the water-colours. She liked water-colours so much; they were unpretentious; she hated things to be pretentious.
So that host and hostess should sit at the head and foot of the table, the vicar sat next to Lord Scallion and his wife next to the duchess. The duchess engaged her in conversation on the subject of working-class dwellings, a subject on which she seemed to be much more at home than the parson’s lady, and my attention being thus set free I watched Edward Driffield. He was talking to Lady Hodmarsh. She was apparently telling him how to write a novel, and giving him a list of a few that he really ought to read. He listened to her with what looked like polite interest, putting in now and then a remark in a voice too low for me to catch, and when she made a jest (she made them frequently and often good ones) he gave a little chuckle and shot her a quick look that seemed to say: this woman isn’t such a damned fool after all. Remembering the past, I asked myself curiously what he thought of this grand company, his neatly-turned-out wife, so competent and discreetly managing, and the elegant surroundings in which he lived. I wondered if he regretted his early days of adventure. I wondered if all this amused him or if the amiable civility of his manner masked a hideous boredom. Perhaps he felt my eyes upon him, for he raised his. They rested on me for a while with a thoughtful look, mild and yet oddly scrutinizing, and then suddenly, unmistakably this time, he gave me another wink. The frivolous gesture in that old, withered face was more than startling, it was embarrassing; I did not know what to do. My lips outlined a dubious smile.
Cakes and Ale Page 6
