Cakes and Ale Page 10

  ‘Oh, it’s you. We wondered when we were going to see you.’ Then he called out: ‘Rosie, it’s young Ashenden.’

  There was a cry, and before you could say knife Mrs Driffield had come into the passage and was shaking my hands.

  ‘Come in, come in. Take off your coat. Isn’t it awful, the weather? You must be perishing.’

  She helped me with my coat and took off my muffler and snatched my cap out of my hand and drew me into the room. It was hot and stuffy, a tiny room full of furniture, with a fire burning in the grate; they had gas there, which we hadn’t at the vicarage, and the three burners in round globes of frosted glass filled the room with harsh light. The air was grey with tobacco smoke. At first, dazzled and then taken aback by my effusive welcome, I did not see who the two men were who got up as I came in. Then I saw they were the curate, Mr Galloway, and Lord George Kemp. I fancied that the curate shook my hand with constraint.

  ‘How are you? I just came in to return some books that Mr Driffield had lent me, and Mrs Driffield very kindly asked me to stay to tea.’

  I felt rather than saw the quizzical look that Driffield gave him. He said something about the mammon of unrighteousness, which I recognized as a quotation, but did not gather the sense of. Mr Galloway laughed.

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ he said. ‘What about the publicans and sinners?’

  I thought the remark in very bad taste, but I was immediately seized upon by Lord George. There was no constraint about him.

  ‘Well, young fellow, home for the holidays? My word, what a big chap you’re growing.’

  I shook hands with him rather coldly. I wished I had not come.

  ‘Let me give you a nice strong cup of tea,’ said Mrs Driffield.

  ‘I’ve already had tea.’

  ‘Have some more,’ said Lord George, speaking as though he owned the place (that was just like him). ‘A big fellow like you can always tuck away another piece of bread and butter and jam, and Mrs D. will cut you a slice with her own fair hands.’

  The tea things were still on the table and they were sitting round it. A chair was brought up for me and Mrs Driffield gave me a piece of cake.

  ‘We were just trying to persuade Ted to sing us a song,’ said Lord George. ‘Come on, Ted.’

  ‘Sing All through stickin’ to a Soljer, Ted,’ said Mrs Driffield. ‘I love that.’

  ‘No, sing First we mopped the Floor with him.’

  ‘I’ll sing ’em both if you’re not careful’ said Driffield.

  He took his banjo, which was lying on the top of the cottage piano, tuned it and began to sing. He had a rich baritone voice. I was quite used to people singing songs. When there was a tea party at the vicarage, or I went to one at the major’s or the doctor’s, people always brought their music with them. They left it in the hall, so that it should not seem that they wanted to be asked to play or sing; but after tea the hostess asked them if they had brought it. They shyly admitted that they had, and if it was at the vicarage I was sent to fetch it. Sometimes a young lady would say that she had quite given up playing and hadn’t brought anything with her, and then her mother would break in and say that she had brought it. But when they sang it was not comic songs; it was I’ll sing thee Songs of Araby, or Good-night, Beloved, or Queen of my Heart. Once at the annual concert at the Assembly Rooms, Smithson, the draper, had sung a comic song, and though the people at the back of the hall had applauded a great deal, the gentry had seen nothing funny in it. Perhaps there wasn’t. Anyhow, before the next concert he was asked to be a little more careful about what he sang (‘Remember there are ladies present, Mr Smithson’) and so gave The Death of Nelson. The next ditty that Driffield sang had a chorus and the curate and Lord George joined in lustily. I heard it a good many times afterwards, but I can only remember four lines.

  First we mopped the floor with him;

  Dragged him up and down the stairs.

  Then we lugged him round the room,

  Under tables, over chairs.

  When it was finished, assuming my best company manners, I turned to Mrs Driffield.

  ‘Don’t you sing?’ I asked.

  ‘I do, but it always turns the milk, so Ted doesn’t encourage me.’

  Driffield put down his banjo and lit a pipe.

  ‘Well, how’s the old book getting along, Ted?’ said Lord George heartily.

  ‘Oh, all right. I’m working away, you know.’

  ‘Good old Ted and his books,’ Lord George laughed. ‘Why don’t you settle down and do something respectable for a change? I’ll give you a job in my office.’

  ‘Oh, I’m all right.’

  ‘You let him be, George,’ said Mrs Driffield. ‘He likes writing, and what I say is, as long as it keeps him happy, why shouldn’t he?’

  ‘Well, I don’t pretend to know anything about books,’ began George Kemp.

  ‘Then don’t talk about them,’ interrupted Driffield with a smile.

  ‘I don’t think anyone need be ashamed to have written Fairhaven,’ said Mr Galloway, ‘and I don’t care what the critics said.’

  ‘Well, Ted, I’ve known you since I was a boy and J couldn’t read it, try as I would.’

  ‘Oh, come on, we don’t want to start talking about books,’ said Mrs Driffield. ‘Sing us another song, Ted.’

  ‘I must be going,’ said the curate. He turned to me. ‘We might walk along together. Have you got anything for me to read, Driffield?’

  Driffield pointed to a pile of new books that were heaped up on a table in the corner.

  ‘Take your pick.’

  ‘By Jove, what a lot!’ I said, looking at them greedily. ‘Oh, it’s all rubbish. They’re sent down for review.’ ‘What d’you do with them?’

  ‘Take ’em into Tercanbury and sell ’em for what they’ll fetch. It all helps to pay the butcher.’

  When we left, the curate and I, he with several books under his arm, he asked me:

  ‘Did you tell your uncle you were coming to see the Driffields?’

  ‘No, I just went out for a walk and it suddenly occurred to me that I might look in.’

  This of course was some way from the truth, but I did not care to tell Mr Galloway that, though I was practically grown up, my uncle realized the fact so little that he was capable of trying to prevent me from seeing people he objected to.

  ‘Unless you have to I wouldn’t say anything about it in your place. The Driffields are perfectly all right, but your uncle doesn’t quite approve of them.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s such rot.’

  ‘Of course they’re rather common, but he doesn’t write half badly, and when you think what he came from it’s wonderful that he writes at all.’

  I was glad to know how the land lay. Mr Galloway did not wish my uncle to know that he was on friendly terms with the Driffields. I could feel sure at all events that he would not give me away.

  The patronizing manner in which my uncle’s curate spoke of one who has been now so long recognized as one of the greatest of the later Victorian novelists must arouse a smile; but it was the manner in which he was generally spoken of at Blackstable. One day we went to tea at Mrs Greencourt’s, who had staying with her a cousin, the wife of an Oxford don, and we had been told that she was very cultivated. She was a Mrs Encombe, a little woman with an eager wrinkled face; she surprised us very much because she wore her grey hair short and a black serge skirt that only just came down below the tops of her square-toed boots. She was the first example of the New Woman that had ever been seen in Blackstable. We were staggered and immediately on the defensive, for she looked intellectual, and it made us feel shy. (Afterward we all scoffed at her, and my uncle said to my aunt: ‘Well, my dear, I’m thankful you’re not clever, at least I’ve been spared that’; and my aunt in a playful mood put my uncle’s slippers which were warming for him by the fire over her boots and said: ‘Look, I’m the new woman.’ And then we all said: ‘Mrs Greencourt is very funny; you never know wh
at she’ll do next. But of course she isn’t quite quite.’ We could hardly forget that her father made china and that her grandfather had been a factory hand.)

  But we all found it very interesting to hear Mrs Encombe talk of the people she knew. My uncle had been at Oxford, but everyone he asked about seemed to be dead. Mrs Encombe knew Mrs Humphry Ward, and admired Robert Elsmere. My uncle considered it a scandalous work, and he was surprised that Mr Gladstone, who at least called himself a Christian, had found a good word to say for it. They had quite an argument about it. My uncle said he thought it would unsettle people’s opinions and give them all sorts of ideas that they were much better without. Mrs Encombe answered that he wouldn’t think that if he knew Mrs Humphry Ward. She was a woman of the very highest character, a niece of Mr Matthew Arnold, and whatever you might think of the book itself (and she, Mrs Encombe, was quite willing to admit that there were parts which had better have been omitted) it was quite certain that she had written it from the very highest motives. Mrs Encombe knew Miss Broughton too. She was of very good family and it was strange that she wrote the books she did.

  ‘I don’t see any harm in them,’ said Mrs Hayforth, the doctor’s wife. ‘I enjoy them, especially Red as a Rose is She,’

  ‘Would you like your girls to read them?’ asked Mrs Encombe.

  ‘Not just yet perhaps,’ said Mrs Hayforth. ‘But when they’re married I should have no objection.’

  ‘Then it might interest you to know,’ said Mrs Encombe, ‘that when I was in Florence last Easter I was introduced to Ouida.’

  ‘That’s quite another matter,’ returned Mrs Hayforth. ‘I can’t believe that any lady would read a book by Ouida.’

  ‘I read one out of curiosity,’ said Mrs Encombe. ‘I must say, it’s more what you’d expect from a Frenchman than from an English gentlewoman.’

  ‘Oh, but I understand she isn’t really English. I’ve always heard her real name is Mademoiselle de la Ramée.’

  It was then that Mr Galloway mentioned Edward Driffield.

  ‘You know we have an author living here,’ he said.

  ‘We’re not very proud of him,’ said the major. ‘He’s the son of old Miss Wolfe’s bailiff, and he married a barmaid.’

  ‘Can he write?’ asked Mrs Encombe.

  ‘You can tell at once that he’s not a gentleman,’ said the curate, ‘but when you consider the disadvantages he’s had to struggle against it’s rather remarkable that he should write as well as he does.’

  ‘He’s a friend of Willie’s,’ said my uncle.

  Everyone looked at me, and I felt very uncomfortable.

  ‘They bicycled together last summer, and after Willie had gone back to school I got one of his books from the library to see what it was like. I read the first volume and then I sent it back. I wrote a pretty stiff letter to the librarian and I was glad to hear that he’d withdrawn it from circulation. If it had been my own property I should have put it promptly in the kitchen stove.’

  ‘I looked through one of his books myself,’ said the doctor. ‘It interested me because it was set in this neighbourhood, and I recognized some of the people. But I can’t say I liked it; I thought it unnecessarily coarse.’

  ‘I mentioned that to him,’ said Mr Galloway, ‘and he said the men in the colliers that run up to Newcastle and the fishermen and farm hands don’t behave like ladies and gentlemen, and don’t talk like them.’

  ‘But why write about people of that character?’ said my uncle.

  ‘That’s what I say,’ said Mrs Hayforth. ‘We all know that there are coarse and wicked and vicious people in the world, but I don’t see what good it does to write about them.’

  ‘I’m not defending him,’ said Mr Galloway. ‘I’m only telling you what explanation he gives himself. And then of course he brought up Dickens.’

  ‘Dickens is quite different,’ said my uncle. ‘I don’t see how anyone can object to the Pickwick Papers.’

  ‘I suppose it’s a matter of taste,’ said my aunt. ‘I always found Dickens very coarse. I don’t want to read about people who drop their aitches. I must say I’m very glad the weather’s so bad now and Willie can’t take any more rides with Mr Driffield. I don’t think he’s quite the sort of person he ought to associate with.’

  Both Mr Galloway and I looked down our noses.

  9

  As often as the mild Christmas gaieties of Blackstable allowed me I went to the Drifflelds’ little house next door to the Congregational Chapel. I always found Lord George and often Mr Galloway. Our conspiracy of silence had made us friends, and when we met at the vicarage or in the vestry after church we looked at one another archly. We did not talk about our secret, but we enjoyed it; I think it gave us both a good deal of satisfaction to know that we were making a fool of my uncle. But once it occurred to me that George Kemp, meeting my uncle in the street, might remark casually that he had been seeing a lot of me at the Drifflelds’.

  ‘What about Lord George?’ I said to Mr Galloway.

  ‘Oh, I made that all right.’

  We chuckled. I began to like Lord George. At first I was very cold with him and scrupulously polite, but he seemed so unconscious of the social difference between us that I was forced to conclude that my haughty courtesy failed to put him in his place. He was always cordial, breezy, even boisterous; he chaffed me in his common way and I answered him back with schoolboy wit; we made the others laugh and this disposed me kindly toward him. He was for ever bragging about the great schemes he had in mind, but he took in good part my jokes at the expense of his grandiose imaginations. It amused me to hear him tell stories about the swells of Blackstable that made them look foolish and when he mimicked their oddities I roared with laughter. He was blatant and vulgar and the way he dressed was always a shock to me (I had never been to Newmarket nor seen a trainer, but that was my idea of how a Newmarket trainer dressed), and his table manners were offensive, but I found myself less and less affronted by him. He gave me the Pink ’Un every week and I took it home, carefully tucked away in my greatcoat pocket, and read it in my bedroom.

  I never went to the Driffields’ till after tea at the vicarage, but I always managed to make a second tea when I got there. Afterward Ted Driffield sang comic songs, accompanying himself sometimes on the banjo and sometimes on the piano. He would sing, peering at the music with his rather shortsighted eyes, for an hour at a time; there was a smile on his lips and he liked us all to join in the chorus. We played whist. I had learned the game when I was a child and my uncle and aunt and I used to play at the vicarage during the long winter evenings. My uncle always took dummy, and though of course we played for love, when my aunt and I lost I used to retire under the dining-room table and cry. Ted Driffield did not play cards, he said he had no head for them, and when we started a game he would sit down by the fire and, pencil in hand, read one of the books that had been sent down to him from London to review. I had never played with three people before and of course I did not play well, but Mrs Driffield had a natural card sense. Her movements as a rule were rather deliberate, but when it came to playing cards she was quick and alert. She played the rest of us right off our heads. Ordinarily she did not speak very much and then slowly, but when, after a hand was played, she took the trouble good-humouredly to point out to me my mistakes, she was not only lucid but voluble. Lord George chaffed her as he chaffed everybody; she would smile at his banter, for she very seldom laughed, and sometimes make a neat retort. They did not behave like lovers, but like familiar friends, and I should have quite forgotten what I had heard about them and what I had seen but that now and then she gave him a look that embarrassed me. Her eyes rested on him quietly, as though he were not a man but a chair or a table, and in them was a mischievous, childlike smile. Then I would notice that his face seemed suddenly to swell and he moved uneasily in his chair. I looked quickly at the curate, afraid that he would notice something, but he was intent on the cards or else was lighting his pipe.

&nbs
p; The hour or two I spent nearly every day in that hot, poky, smoke-laden room passed like lightning, and as the holidays drew nearer to their end I was seized with dismay at the thought that I must spend the next three months dully at school.

  ‘I don’t know what we shall do without you,’ said Mrs Driffield. ‘We shall have to play dummy.’

  I was glad that my going would break up the game. While I was doing prep I did not want to think that they were sitting in that little room and enjoying themselves just as if I did not exist.

  ‘How long do you get at Easter?’ asked Mr Galloway.

  ‘About three weeks.’

  ‘We’ll have a lovely time, then,’ said Mrs Driffield. ‘The weather ought to be all right. We can ride in the mornings and then after tea we’ll play whist. You’ve improved a lot. If we play three or four times a week during your Easter holidays you won’t need to be afraid to play with anybody.’

  10

  But the term came to an end at last. I was in high spirits when once more I got out of the train at Blackstable. I had grown a little and I had had a new suit made at Tercanbury, blue serge and very smart, and I had bought a new tie. I meant to go and see the Drifflelds immediately I had swallowed my tea, and I was full of hope that the carrier would have brought my box in time for me to put the new suit on. It made me look quite grown up. I had already begun putting vaseline on my upper lip every night to make my moustache grow. On my way through the town I looked down the street in which the Drifflelds lived, in the hope of seeing them. I should have liked to go in and say how-do-you-do, but I knew that Driffield wrote in the morning and Mrs Driffield was not ‘presentable.’ I had all sorts of exciting things to tell them. I had won a heat in the hundred-yard race in the sports, and I had been second in the hurdles. I meant to have a shot for the history prize in the summer, and I was going to swot up my English history during the holidays. Though there was an east wind blowing, the sky was blue and there was a feeling of spring in the air. The High Street, with its colours washed clean by the wind and its lines sharp as though drawn with a new pen, looked like a picture by Samuel Scott, quiet and naive and cosy: now, looking back; then it looked like nothing but High Street, Blackstable. When I came to the railway bridge I noticed that two or three houses were being built.