Cakes and Ale Page 11

  ‘By Jove,’ I said. ‘Lord George is going it.’

  In the fields beyond little white lambs were frisking. The elm trees were just beginning to turn green. I let myself in by the side door. My uncle was sitting in his arm-chair by the fire reading The Times. I shouted to my aunt and she came downstairs, a pink spot from the excitement of seeing me on each of her withered cheeks, and threw her thin old arms round my neck. She said all the right things.

  ‘How you’ve grown!’ and ‘Good gracious me, you’ll be getting a moustache soon!’

  I kissed my uncle on his bald forehead, and I stood in front of the fire, with my legs well apart and my back to it, and was extremely grown up and rather condescending. Then I went upstairs to say how-do-you-do to Emily, and into the kitchen to shake hands with Mary-Ann, and out into the garden to see the gardener.

  When I sat down hungrily to dinner and my uncle carved the leg of mutton I asked my aunt: ‘Well, what’s happened at Blackstable since I was here?’

  ‘Nothing very much. Mrs Greencourt went down to Mentone for six weeks, but she came back a few days ago. The major had an attack of gout.’

  ‘And your friends the Driffields have bolted,’ added my uncle.

  ‘They’ve done what?’ I cried.

  ‘Bolted. They took their luggage away one night and just went up to London. They’ve left bills all over the place. They hadn’t paid their rent and they hadn’t paid for their furniture. They owed Harris the butcher the best part of thirty pounds.’

  ‘How awful,’ I said.

  ‘That’s bad enough,’ said my aunt, ‘but it appears they hadn’t even paid the wages of the maid they had for three months.’

  I was flabbergasted. I thought I felt a little sick.

  ‘I think in future,’ said my uncle, ‘you would be wiser not to consort with people whom your aunt and I don’t think proper associates for you.’

  ‘One can’t help feeling sorry for all those tradesmen they cheated,’ said my aunt.

  ‘It serves them right,’ said my uncle. ‘Fancy giving credit to people like that! I should have thought anyone could see they were nothing but adventurers.’

  ‘I always wonder why they came down here at all.’

  ‘They just wanted to show off, and I suppose they thought as people knew who they were here it would be easier to get things on credit.’

  I did not think this quite logical, but was too much crushed to argue.

  As soon as I had the chance I asked Mary-Ann what she knew of the incident. To my surprise she did not take it at all in the same way as my uncle and aunt. She giggled.

  ‘They let everyone in proper,’ she said. ‘They were as free as you like with their money and everyone thought they ‘ad plenty. It was always the best end of the neck for them at the butcher’s and when they wanted a steak nothing would do but the undercut. Asparagus and grapes and I don’t know what all. They ran up bills in every shop in town. I don’t know ’ow people can be such fools.’

  But it was evidently of the tradesmen she was speaking and not of the Driffields.

  ‘But how did they manage to bunk without anyone knowing?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, that’s what everybody’s askin’. They do say it was Lord George ’elped them. How did they get their boxes to the station, I ask you, if ‘e didn’t take them in that there trap of ‘is?’

  ‘What does he say about it?’

  ‘He says ’e knows no more about it than the man in the moon. There was a rare to-do all over the town when they found out the Driffields had shot the moon. It made me laugh. Lord George says ’e never knew they was broke, and ’e makes out ’e was as surprised as anybody. But I for one don’t believe a word of it. We all know about ’im and Rosie before she was married, and between you and me and the gatepost I don’t know that it ended there. They do say they was seen walkin’ about the fields together last summer and ’e was in and out of the ’ouse pretty near every day.’

  ‘How did people find out?’

  ‘Well, it’s like this. They ’ad a girl there and they told ’er she could go ’ome and spend the night with her mother, but she wasn’t to be back later than eight o’clock in the morning. Well, when she come back she couldn’t get in. She knocked and she rung but nobody answered, and so she went in next door and asked the lady there what she’d better do, and the lady said she’d better go to the police station. The sergeant come back with ’er and ’e knocked and ’e rang, but ’e couldn’t get no answer. Then he asked the girl ’ad they paid ’er ’er wages, and she said no, not for three months, and then ‘e said, you take my word for it, they’ve shot the moon, that’s what they’ve done. An’ when they come to get inside they found they’d took all their clothes, an’ their books – they say as Ted Driffield ‘ad a rare lot of books – an’ every blessed thing that belonged to them.’

  ‘And has nothing been heard of them since?’

  ‘Well, not exactly, but when they’d been gone about a week the girl got a letter from London, and when she opened it there was no letter or anything, but just a postal order for ’er wages. An’ if you ask me, I call that very ’andsome not to do a poor girl out of her wages.’

  I was much more shocked than Mary-Ann. I was a very respectable youth. The reader cannot have failed to observe that I accepted the conventions of my class as if they were the laws of Nature, and though debts on the grand scale in books had seemed to me romantic, and duns and money-lenders were familiar figures to my fancy, I could not but think it mean and paltry not to pay the tradesmen’s books. I listened with confusion when people talked in my presence of the Driffields, and, when they spoke of them as my friends, I said: ‘Hang it all, I just knew them’; and when they asked: ‘Weren’t they fearfully common?’ I said: ‘Well, they didn’t exactly suggest the Vere de Veres, you know.’ Poor Mr Galloway was dreadfully upset.

  ‘Of course I didn’t think they were wealthy,’ he told me, ‘but I thought they had enough to get along. The house was very nicely furnished and the piano was new. It never struck me that they hadn’t paid for a single thing. They never stinted themselves. What hurts me is the deceit. I used to see quite a lot of them and I thought they liked me. They always made one welcome. You’d hardly believe it but, the last time I saw them, when they shook hands with me Mrs Driffield asked me to come next day and Driffield said: “Muffins for tea tomorrow.” And all the time they had everything packed upstairs and that very night they took the last train to London.’

  ‘What does Lord George say about it?’

  ‘To tell you the truth I haven’t gone out of my way to see him lately. It’s been a lesson to me. There’s a little proverb about evil communications that I’ve thought well to bear in mind.’

  I felt very much the same about Lord George, and I was a little nervous too. If he took it into his head to tell people that at Christmas I had been going to see the Driffields almost every day, and it came to my uncle’s ears, I foresaw an unpleasant fuss. My uncle would accuse me of deceit and prevarication and disobedience and of not behaving like a gentleman, and I did not at the moment see what answer I could make. I knew him well enough to be aware that he would not let the matter drop, and that I should be reminded of my transgression for years. I was just as glad not to see Lord George. But one day I ran into him face to face in the High Street.

  ‘Hallo, youngster!’ he cried, addressing me in a way I particularly resented. ‘Back for the holidays, I suppose.’

  ‘You suppose quite correctly,’ I answered with what I thought withering sarcasm.

  Unfortunately he only bellowed with laughter.

  ‘You’re so sharp you’ll cut yourself if you don’t look out,’ he answered heartily. ‘Well, it looks as if there was no more whist for you and me just yet. Now you see what comes of living beyond your means. What I always say to my boys is, if you’ve got a pound and you spend nineteen and six you’re a rich man, but if you spend twenty shillings and sixpence you’re a pauper. Look after the penc
e, young fellow, and the pounds’11 look after themselves.’

  But though he spoke after this fashion there was in his voice no note of disapproval, but a bubble of laughter as though in his heart he were tittering at these admirable maxims.

  ‘They say you helped them to bunk,’ I remarked.

  ‘Me?’ His face assumed a look of extreme surprise, but his eyes glittered with sly mirth. ‘Why, when they came and told me the Driffields had shot the moon you could have knocked me down with a feather. They owed me four pounds seventeen and six for coal. We’ve all been let in, even poor old Galloway, who never got his muffins for tea.’

  I had never thought Lord George more blatant. I should have liked to say something final and crushing, but as I could not think of anything I just said that I must be getting along and with a curt nod left him.

  11

  Musing thus over the past, while I waited for Alroy Kear, I chuckled when I considered this shabby incident of Edward Driffield’s obscurity in the light of the immense respectability of his later years. I wondered whether it was because in my boyhood he was as a writer held in such small esteem by the people about me that I had never been able to see in him the astonishing merit that the best critical opinion eventually ascribed to him. He was for long thought to write very bad English, and indeed he gave you the impression of writing with the stub of a blunt pencil; his style was laboured, an uneasy mixture of the classical and the slangy, and his dialogue was such as could never have issued from the mouth of a human being. Toward the end of his career, when he dictated his books, his style, acquiring a conversational ease, became flowing and limpid; and then the critics, going back to the novels of his maturity, found that their English had a nervous, racy vigour that eminently suited the matter. His prime belonged to a period when the purple patch was in vogue, and there are descriptive passages in his works that have found their way into all the anthologies of English prose. His pieces on the sea, and spring in the Kentish woods, and sunset on the lower reaches of the Thames are famous. It should be a mortification to me that I cannot read them without discomfort.

  When I was a young man, though his books sold but little, and one or two were banned by the libraries, it was very much a mark of culture to admire him. He was thought boldly realistic. He was a very good stick to beat the Philistines with. Somebody’s lucky inspiration discovered that his sailors and peasants were Shakespearian, and when the advanced got together they uttered shrill cries of ecstasy over the dry and spicy humour of his yokels. This was a commodity that Edward Driffield had no difficulty in supplying. My own heart sank when he led me into the forecastle of a sailing ship or the taproom of a public-house, and I knew I was in for half a dozen pages in dialect of facetious comment on life, ethics, and immortality. But, I admit, I have always thought the Shakespearian clowns tedious, and their innumerable progeny insupportable.

  Driffield’s strength lay evidently in his depiction of the class he knew best, farmers and farm labourers, shopkeepers and bartenders, skippers of sailing ships, mates, cooks, and ableseamen. When he introduces characters belonging to a higher station in life even his warmest admirers, one would have thought, must experience a certain malaise; his fine gentlemen are so incredibly fine, his high-born ladies are so good, so pure, so noble that you are not surprised that they can only express themselves with polysyllabic dignity. His women hardly come to life. But here again I must add that this is only my own opinion; the world at large and the most eminent critics have agreed that they are very winsome types of English womanhood, spirited, gallant, high-souled, and they have been often compared with the heroines of Shakespeare. We know of course that women are habitually constipated, but to represent them in fiction as being altogether devoid of a back passage seems to me really an excess of chivalry. I am surprised that they care to see themselves thus limned.

  The critics can force the world to pay attention to a very indifferent writer, and the world may lose its head over one who has no merit at all, but the result in neither case is lasting; and I cannot help thinking that no writer can hold the public for as long as Edward Driffield without considerable gifts. The elect sneer at popularity; they are inclined even to assert that it is a proof of mediocrity; but they forget that posterity makes its choice not from among the unknown writers of a period, but from among the known. It may be that some great masterpiece which deserves immortality has fallen stillborn from the press, but posterity will never hear of it; it may be that posterity will scrap all the best-sellers of our day, but it is among them that it must choose. At all events Edward Driffield is in the running. His novels happen to bore me; I find them long; the melodramatic incidents with which he sought to stir the sluggish reader’s interest leave me cold; but he certainly had sincerity. There is in his best books the stir of life, and in none of them can you fail to be aware of the author’s enigmatic personality. In his earlier days he was praised or blamed for his realism; according to the idiosyncrasy of his critics he was extolled for his truth or censured for his coarseness. But realism has ceased to excite remark, and the library reader will take in his stride obstacles at which a generation back he would have violently shied. The cultured reader of these pages will remember the leading article in the Literary Supplement of The Times which appeared at the moment of Driffield’s death. Taking the novels of Edward Driffield as his text, the author wrote what was very well described as a hymn to beauty. No one who read it could fail to be impressed by those swelling periods, which reminded one of the noble prose of Jeremy Taylor, by that reverence and piety, by all those high sentiments, in short, expressed in a style that was ornate without excess and dulcet without effeminacy. It was itself a thing of beauty. If some suggested that Edward Driffield was by way of being a humorist and that a jest would here and there have lightened this eulogious article, it must be replied that after all it was a funeral oration. And it is well known that Beauty does not look with good grace on the timid advances of Humour. Roy Kear, when he was talking to me of Driffield, claimed that, whatever his faults, they were redeemed by the beauty that suffused his pages. Now I come to look back on our conversation, I think it was this remark that had most exasperated me.

  Thirty years ago in literary circles God was all the fashion. It was good form to believe and journalists used Him to adorn a phrase or balance a sentence; then God went out (oddly enough with cricket and beer) and Pan came in. In a hundred novels his cloven hoof left its imprint on the sward; poets saw him lurking in the twilight on London commons, and literary ladies in Surrey, nymphs of an industrial age, mysteriously surrendered their virginity to his rough embrace. Spiritually they were never the same again. But Pan went out and now beauty has taken his place. People find it in a phrase, or a turbot, a dog, a day, a picture, an action, a dress. Young women in cohorts, each of whom has written so promising and competent a novel, prattle of it in every manner from allusive to arch, from intense to charming; and the young men, more or less recently down from Oxford, but still trailing its clouds of glory, who tell us in the weekly papers what we should think of art, life, and the universe, fling the word with a pretty negligence about their close-packed pages. It is sadly frayed. Gosh, they have worked it hard! The ideal has many names and beauty is but one of them. I wonder if this clamour is anything more than the cry of distress of those who cannot make themselves at home in our heroic world of machines, and I wonder if their passion for beauty, the Little Nell of this shamefaced day, is anything more than sentimentality. It may be that another generation, accommodating itself more adequately to the stress of life, will look for inspiration not in a flight from reality, but in an eager acceptance of it.

  I do not know if others are like myself, but I am conscious that I cannot contemplate beauty long. For me no poet made a falser statement than Keats when he wrote the first line of Endymion. When the thing of beauty has given me the magic of its sensation my mind quickly wanders; I listen with incredulity to the persons who tell me that they can look with ra
pture for hours at a view or a picture. Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all: that is why the criticism of art, except in so far as it is unconcerned with beauty and therefore with art, is tiresome. All the critic can tell you with regard to Titian’s ‘Entombment of Christ’, perhaps of all the pictures in the world that which has most pure beauty, is to go and look at it. What else he has to say is history, or biography, or what not. But people add other qualities to beauty – sublimity, human interest, tenderness, love – because beauty does not long content them. Beauty is perfect, and perfection (such is human nature) holds our attention but for a little while. The mathematician who after seeing Phèdre asked: ‘Qu’est-ce que ça piouvel’ was not such a fool as he has been generally made out. No one has ever been able to explain why the Doric temple of Paestum is more beautiful than a glass of cold beer except by bringing in considerations that have nothing to do with beauty. Beauty is a blind alley. It is a mountain peak which once reached leads nowhere. That is why in the end we find more to entrance us in El Greco than in Titian, in the incomplete achievement of Shakespeare than in the consummate success of Racine. Too much has been written about beauty. That is why I have written a little more. Beauty is that which satisfies the aesthetic instinct. But who wants to be satisfied? It is only to the dullard that enough is as good as a feast. Let us face it: beauty is a bit of a bore.