Cakes and Ale Page 12

  But of course what the critics wrote about Edward Driffield was eyewash. His outstanding merit was not the realism that gave vigour to his work, nor the beauty that informed it, nor his graphic portraits of seafaring men, nor his poetic descriptions of salty marshes, of storm and calm, and of nestling hamlets; it was his longevity. Reverence for old age is one of the most admirable traits of the human race, and I think it may safely be stated that in no other country than ours is this trait more marked. The awe and love with which other nations regard old age is often platonic; but ours is practical. Who but the English would fill Covent Garden to listen to an aged prima donn a without a voice? Who but the English would pay to see dancers so decrepit that they can hardly put one foot before the other and say to one another admiringly in the intervals: ‘By George, sir, d’you know he’s a long way past sixty?’ But compared with politicians and writers these are but striplings, and I often think that a jeune premier must be of a singularly amiable disposition if it does not make him bitter to consider that when at the age of seventy he must end his career the public man and the author are only at their prime. A man who is a politician at forty is a statesman at three score and ten. It is at this age, when he would be too old to be a clerk or a gardener or a police-court magistrate, that he is ripe to govern a country. This is not so strange when you reflect that from the earlier times the old have rubbed it in to the young that they are wiser than they, and before the young discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture; and besides, no one can have moved in the society of politicians without discovering that (if one may judge by results) it requires little mental ability to rule a nation. But why writers should be more esteemed the older they grow, has long perplexed me. At one time I thought that the praise accorded to them when they had ceased for twenty years to write anything of interest was largely due to the fact that the younger men, having no longer to fear their competition, felt it safe to extol their merit; and it is well known that to praise someone whose rivalry you do not dread is often a very good way of putting a spoke in the wheel of somone whose rivalry you do. But this is to take a low view of human nature and I would not for the world lay myself open to a charge of cheap cynicism. After mature consideration I have come to the conclusion that the real reason for the universal applause that comforts the declining years of the author who exceeds the common span of man is that intelligent people after the age of thirty read nothing at all. As they grow older the books they read in their youth are lit with its glamour and with every year that passes they ascribe greater merit to the author that wrote them. Of course he must go on; he must keep in the public eye. It is no good his thinking that it is enough to write one or two masterpieces; he must provide a pedestal for them of forty or fifty works of no particular consequence. This needs time. His production must be such that if he cannot captivate a reader by his charm he can stun him by his weight.

  If, as I think, longevity is genius, few in our time have enjoyed it in a more conspicuous degree than Edward Driffield. When he was a young fellow in the sixties (the cultured having had their way with him and passed him by) his position in the world of letters was only respectable; the best judges praised him, but with moderation; the younger men were inclined to be frivolous at his expense. It was agreed that he had talent, but it never occurred to anyone that he was one of the glories of English literature. He celebrated his seventieth birthday; an uneasiness passed over the world of letters, like a ruffling of the waters when on an Eastern sea a typhoon lurks in the distance, and it grew evident that there had lived among us all these years a great novelist and none of us had suspected it. There was a rush for Driffield’s books in the various libraries and a hundred busy pens, in Bloomsbury, in Chelsea, and in other places where men of letters congregate, wrote appreciations, studies, essays, and works, short and chatty or long and intense, on his novels. These were reprinted, in complete editions, in select editions, at a shilling and three and six and five shillings and a guinea. His style was analysed, his philosophy was examined, his technique was dissected. At seventy-five everyone agreed that Edward Driffield had genius. At eighty he was the Grand Old Man of English Letters. This position he held till his death.

  Now we look about and think sadly that there is no one to take his place. A few septuagenarians are sitting up and taking notice, and they evidently feel that they could comfortably fill the vacant niche. But it is obvious that they lack something.

  Though these recollections have taken so long to narrate they took but a little while to pass through my head. They came to me higgledy-piggledy, an incident and then a scrap of conversation that belonged to a previous time, and I have set them down in order for the convenience of the reader and because I have a neat mind. One thing that surprised me was that even at that far distance I could remember distinctly what people looked like and even the gist of what they said but only with vagueness what they wore. I knew of course that the dress, especially of women, was quite different forty years ago from what it was now, but if I recalled it at all it was not from life but from pictures and photographs that I had seen much later.

  I was still occupied with my idle fancies when I heard a taxi stop at the door, the bell ring, and in a moment Alroy Kear’s booming voice telling the butler that he had an appointment with me. He came in, big, bluff, and hearty; his vitality shattered with a single gesture the frail construction I had been building out of the vanished past. He brought in with him, like a blustering wind in March, the aggressive and inescapable present.

  ‘I was just asking myself,’ I said, ‘who could possibly succeed Edward Driffield as the Grand Old Man of English Letters, and you arrive to answer my question.’

  He broke into a jovial laugh, but into his eyes came a quick look of suspicion.

  ‘I don’t think there’s anybody,’ he said.

  ‘How about yourself?’

  ‘Oh, my dear boy, I’m not fifty yet. Give me another twenty-five years.’ He laughed, but his eyes held mine keenly. ‘I never know when you’re pulling my leg.’ He looked down suddenly. ‘Of course one can’t help thinking about the future sometimes. All the people who are at the top of the tree now are anything from fifteen to twenty years older than me. They can’t last for ever, and when they’re gone who is there? Of course there’s Aldous; he’s a good deal younger than me, but he’s not very strong and I don’t believe he takes great care of himself. Barring accidents, by which I mean barring some genius who suddenly springs up and sweeps the board, I don’t quite see how in another twenty or twenty-five years I can help having the field pretty well to myself. It’s just a question of pegging away and living on longer than the others.’

  Roy sank his virile bulk into one of my landlady’s armchairs and I offered him a whisky and soda.

  ‘No, I never drink spirits before six o’clock,’ he said. He looked about him. ‘Jolly, these digs are.’

  ‘I know. What have you come to see me about?’

  ‘I thought I’d better have a little chat with you about Mrs Driffield’s invitation. It was rather difficult to explain over the telephone. The truth of the matter is that I’ve arranged to write Driffield’s life.’

  ‘Oh! Why didn’t you tell me the other day?’

  I felt friendly disposed toward Roy. I was happy to think that I had not misjudged him when I suspected that it was not merely for the pleasure of my company that he had asked me to luncheon.

  ‘I hadn’t entirely made up my mind. Mrs Driffield is very keen on my doing it. She’s going to help me in every way she can. She’s giving me all the material she has. She’s been collecting it for a good many years. It’s not an easy thing to do, and of course I can’t afford not to do it well. But if I can make a pretty good job of it, it can’t fail to do me a lot of good. People have so much more respect for a novelist if he writes something serious now and then. Those critical works of mine were an awful sweat, and they sold nothing, but I don’t regret them fo
r a moment. They’ve given me a position I could never have got without them.’

  ‘I think it’s a very good plan. You’ve known Driffield more intimately than most people for the last twenty years.’

  ‘I think I have. But of course he was over sixty when I first made his acquaintance. I wrote and told him how much I admired his books, and he asked me to go and see him. But I know nothing about the early part of his life. Mrs Driffield used to try to get him to talk about those days, and she made very copious notes of all he said, and then there are diaries that he kept now and then, and of course a lot of the stuff in the novels is obviously autobiographical. But there are immense lacunae. I’ll tell you the sort of book I want to write: a sort of intimate life, with a lot of those little details that make people feel warm inside, you know, and then woven in with this a really exhaustive criticism of his literary work, not ponderous, of course, but although sympathetic, searching and … subtle. Naturally it wants some doing, but Mrs Driffield seems to think I can do it.’

  ‘I’m sure you can,’ I put in.

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ said Roy. ‘I am a critic, and I’m a novelist. It’s obvious that I have certain literary qualifications. But I can’t do anything unless everyone who can is willing to help me.’

  I began to see where I came in. I tried to make my face look quite blank. Roy leaned forward.

  ‘I asked you the other day if you were going to write anything about Driffield yourself and you said you weren’t. Can I take that as definite?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘Then have you got any objection to giving me your material?’

  ‘My dear boy, I haven’t got any.’

  ‘Oh, that’s nonsense,’ said Roy good-humouredly, with the tone of a doctor who is trying to persuade a child to have its throat examined. ‘When he was living at Blackstable you must have seen a lot of him.’

  ‘I was only a boy then.’

  ‘But you must have been conscious of the unusual experience. After all, no one could be for half an hour in Edward Driffield’s society without being impressed by his extraordinary personality. It must have been obvious even to a boy of sixteen, and you were probably more observant and sensitive than the average boy of that age.’

  ‘I wonder if his personality would have seemed extraordinary without the reputation to back it up. Do you imagine that if you went down to a spa in the west of England as Mr Atkins, a chartered accountant taking the waters for his liver, you would impress the people you met there as a man of character?’

  ‘I imagine they’d soon realize that I was not quite the common or garden chartered accountant,’ said Roy, with a smile that took from his remark any appearance of self-esteem.

  ‘Well, all I can tell you is that what chiefly bothered me about Driffield in those days was that the knickerbocker suit he wore was dreadfully loud. We used to bicycle a lot together, and it always made me feel a trifle uncomfortable to be seen with him.’

  ‘It sounds comic now. What did he talk about?’

  ‘I don’t know; nothing very much. He was rather keen on architecture, and he talked about farming, and if a pub looked nice he generally suggested stopping for five minutes and having a glass of bitter, and then he would talk to the landlord about the crops and the price of coal and things like that.’

  I rambled on, though I could see by the look of Roy’s face that he was disappointed with me; he listened, but he was a trifle bored, and it struck me that when he was bored he looked peevish. But though I couldn’t remember that Driffield had ever said anything significant during those long rides of ours, I had a very acute recollection of the feel of them. Blackstable was peculiar in this, that though it was on the sea, with a long shingly beach and marshland at the back, you had only to go about half a mile inland to come into the most rural country in Kent. Winding roads that ran between the great fat green fields and clumps of huge elms, substantial and with a homely stateliness like good old Kentish farmers’ wives, high-coloured and robust, who had grown portly on good butter and homemade bread and cream and fresh eggs. And sometimes the road was only a lane, with thick hawthorn hedges, and the green elms overhung it on either side so that when you looked up there was only a strip of blue sky between. And as you rode along in the warm, keen air, you had a sensation that the world was standing still and life would last for ever. Although you were pedalling with such energy you had a delicious feeling of laziness. You were quite happy when no one spoke, and if one of the party from sheer high spirits suddenly put on speed and shot ahead it was a joke that everyone laughed at and for a few minutes you pedalled as hard as you could. And we chaffed one another innocently and giggled at our own humour. Now and then one would pass cottages with little gardens in front of them, and in the gardens were hollyhocks and tiger lilies; and a little way from the road were farmhouses, with their spacious barns and oasthouses; and one would pass through hop-fields with the ripening hops hanging in garlands. The public-houses were friendly and informal, hardly more important than cottages, and on the porches often honeysuckle would be growing. The names they bore were usual and familiar: The Jolly Sailor, The Merry Ploughman, The Crown and Anchor, The Red Lion.

  But of course all that could matter nothing to Roy, and he interrupted me.

  ‘Did he never talk of literature?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t think so. He wasn’t that sort of writer. I suppose he thought about his writing, but he never mentioned it. He used to lend the curate books. In the winter, one Christmas holiday, I used to have tea at his house nearly every day, and sometimes the curate and he would talk about books, but we used to shut them up.’

  ‘Don’t you remember anything he said?’

  ‘Only one thing. I remember it because I hadn’t ever read the things he was talking about, and what he said made me do so. He said that when Shakespeare retired to Stratford-on-Avon and became respectable, if he ever thought of his plays at all, probably the two that he remembered with most interest were Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s very illuminating. Didn’t he say anything about anyone more modern than Shakespeare?’

  ‘Well, not then, that I can remember; but when I was lunching with the Driffields a few years ago I overheard him saying that Henry James had turned his back on one of the great events of the world’s history, the rise of the United States, in order to report tittle-tattle at tea parties in English country houses. Driffield called it il gran rifiuto. I was surprised at hearing the old man use an Italian phrase, and amused because a great big bouncing duchess who was there was the only person who knew what the devil he was talking about. He said: “Poor Henry, he’s spending eternity wandering round and round a stately park and the fence is just too high for him to peep over, and they’re having tea just too far away for him to hear what the countess is saying.”’

  Roy listened to my little anecdote with attention. He shook his head reflectively.

  ‘I don’t think I could use that. I’d have the Henry James gang down on me like a thousand of bricks … But what used you to do during those evenings?’

  ‘Well, we played whist while Driffield read books for review, and he used to sing.’

  ‘That’s interesting,’ said Roy, leaning forward eagerly. ‘Do you remember what he sang?’

  ‘Perfectly. All through stickin’ to a Soljer and Come where the Booze is cheaper were his favourites.’

  ‘Oh!’

  I could see that Roy was disappointed.

  ‘Did you expect him to sing Schumann?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know why not. It would have been rather a good point. But I think I should have expected him to sing sea chanties or old English country airs, you know, the sort of thing they used to sing at fairings – blind fiddlers and the village swains dancing with the girls on the threshing-floor and all that sort of thing. I might have made something rather beautiful out of that, but I can’t see Edward Driffield’s singing music-hall song
s. After all, when you’re drawing a man’s portrait you must get the values right; you only confuse the impression if you put in stuff that’s all out of tone.’

  ‘You know that shortly after this he shot the moon. He let everybody in.’

  Roy was silent for fully a minute, and he looked down at the carpet reflectively.

  ‘Yes, I knew there’d been some unpleasantness. Mrs Driffield mentioned it. I understand everything was paid up later before he finally bought Ferne Court and settled down in the district. I don’t think it’s necessary to dwell on an incident that is not really of any importance in the history of his development. After all, it happened nearly forty years ago. You know, there were some very curious sides to the old man. One would have thought that after a rather sordid little scandal like that the neighbourhood of Blackstable would be the last place he’d choose to spend the rest of his life in when he’d become celebrated, especially when it was the scene of his rather humble origins; but he didn’t seem to mind a bit. He seemed to think the whole thing rather a good joke. He was quite capable of telling people who came to lunch about it and it was very embarrassing for Mrs Driffield. I should like you to know Amy better. She’s a very remarkable woman. Of course the old man had written all his great books before he ever set eyes on her, but I don’t think anyone can deny that it was she who created the rather imposing and dignified figure that the world saw for the last twenty-five years of his life. She’s been very frank with me. She didn’t have such an easy job of it. Old Driffield had some very queer ways and she had to use a good deal of tact to get him to behave decently. He was very obstinate in some things, and I think a woman of less character would have been discouraged. For instance, he had a habit that poor Amy had a lot of trouble to break him of: after he’d finished his meat and vegetables he’d take a piece of bread and wipe the plate clean with it and eat it.’

  ‘Do you know what that means?’ I said. ‘It means that for long he had so little to eat that he couldn’t afford to waste any food he could get.’