Cakes and Ale Page 5

  ‘Oh, yes, they’re the flash in the pans. I’ve known them.’

  ‘You’ve even lectured about them.’

  ‘One has to. One wants to give them a leg up if one can and one knows they won’t amount to anything. Hang it all, one can afford to be generous. But after all, Driffield wasn’t anything like that. The collected edition of his works is in thirty-seven volumes and the last set that came up at Sotheby’s sold for seventy-eight pounds. That speaks for itself. His sales have increased steadily every year and last year was the best he ever had. You can take my word for that. Mrs Driffield showed me his accounts last time I was down there. Driffield has come to stay all right.’

  ‘Who can tell?’

  ‘Well, you think you can,’ replied Roy acidly.

  I was not put out. I knew I was irritating him and it gave me a pleasant sensation.

  ‘I think the instinctive judgements I formed when I was a boy were right. They told me Carlyle was a great writer and I was ashamed that I found the French Revolution and Sartor Resartus unreadable. Can anyone read them now? I thought the opinions of others must be better than mine and I persuaded myself that I thought George Meredith magnificent. In my heart I found him affected, verbose, and insincere. A good many people think so too now. Because they told me that to admire Walter Pater was to prove myself a cultured young man, I admired Walter Pater, but heavens, how Marius bored me!’

  ‘Oh, well, I don’t suppose anyone reads Pater now, and, of course, Meredith has gone all to pot, and Carlyle was a pretentious windbag.’

  ‘You don’t know how secure of immortality they all looked thirty years ago.’

  ‘And have you never made mistakes?’

  ‘One or two. I didn’t think half as much of Newman as I do now, and I thought a great deal more of the tinkling quatrains of Fitzgerald. I could not read Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister; now I think it his masterpiece.’

  ‘And what did you think much of then that you think much of still?’

  ‘Well, Tristram Shandy and Amelia and Vanity Fair, Madame Bovary, La Chartreuse de Parme, and Anna Karenina. And Wordsworth and Keats and Verlaine.’

  ‘If you don’t mind my saying so, I don’t think that’s particularly original.’

  ‘I don’t mind your saying so at all. I don’t think it is. But you asked me why I believed in my own judgement, and I was trying to explain to you that, whatever I said out of timidity and in deference to the cultured opinion of the day, I didn’t really admire certain authors who were then thought admirable, and the event seems to show that I was right. And what I honestly and instinctively liked then has stood the test of time with me and with critical opinion in general.’

  Roy was silent for a moment. He looked in the bottom of his cup, but whether to see if there were any more coffee in it or to find something to say, I did not know. I gave the clock on the chimney-piece a glance. In a minute it would be fitting for me to take my leave. Perhaps I had been wrong and Roy had invited me only that we might idly chat of Shakespeare and the musical glasses. I chid myself for the uncharitable thoughts I had had of him. I looked at him with concern. If that was his only object it must be that he was feeling tired or discouraged. If he was disinterested it could only be that for the moment at least the world was too much for him. But he caught my look at the clock and spoke.

  ‘I don’t see how you can deny that there must be something in a man who’s able to carry on for sixty years, writing book after book, and who’s able to hold an ever increasing public. After all, at Ferne Court there are shelves filled with the translations of Driffield’s books into every language of civilized people. Of course I’m willing to admit that a lot he wrote seems a bit old fashioned nowadays. He flourished in a bad period and he was inclined to be long-winded. Most of his plots are melodramatic; but there’s one quality you must allow him: beauty.’

  ‘Yes?’ I said.

  ‘When all’s said and done, that’s the only thing that counts, and Driffield never wrote a page that wasn’t instinct with beauty.’

  ‘Yes?’ I said.

  ‘I wish you’d been there when we went down to present him with his portrait on his eightieth birthday. It really was a memorable occasion.’

  ‘I read about it in the papers.’

  ‘It wasn’t only writers, you know, it was a thoroughly representative gathering – science, politics, business, art, the world; I think you’d have to go a long way to find gathered together such a collection of distinguished people as got out from that train at Blackstable. It was awfully moving when the PM presented the old man with the Order of Merit. He made a charming speech. I don’t mind telling you there were tears in a good many eyes that day.’

  ‘Did Driffield cry?’

  ‘No, he was singularly calm. He was like he always was; rather shy, you know, and quiet, very well-mannered, grateful, of course, but a little dry. Mrs Driffield didn’t want him to get over-tired and when we went in to lunch he stayed in his study, and she sent him something in on a tray. I slipped away while the others were having their coffee. He was smoking his pipe and looking at the portrait. I asked him what he thought of it. He wouldn’t tell me, he just smiled a little. He asked me if I thought he could take his teeth out, and I said, No, the deputation would be coming in presently to say good-bye to him. Then I asked him if he didn’t think it was a wonderful moment. “Rum,” he said, “very rum.” The fact is, I suppose, he was shattered, He was a messy eater in his later days and a messy smoker – he scattered the tobacco all over himself when he filled his pipe; Mrs Driffield didn’t like people to see him when he was like that, but, of course, she didn’t mind me; I tidied him up a bit, and then they all came in and shook hands with him, and we went back to town.’

  I got up.

  ‘Well, I really must be going. It’s been awfully nice seeing you.’

  ‘I’m just going along to the private view at the Leicester Galleries. I know the people there. I’ll take you in if you like.’

  ‘It’s very kind of you, but they sent me a card. No, I don’t think I’ll come.’

  We walked down the stairs and I got my hat. When we came out into the street and I turned towards Piccadilly, Roy said:

  ‘I’ll just walk up to the top with you.’ He got into step with me. ‘You knew his first wife, didn’t you?’

  ‘Whose?’

  ‘Driffield’s.’

  ‘Oh!’ I had forgotten him. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Fairly.’

  ‘I suppose she was awful.’

  ‘I don’t recollect that.’

  ‘She must have been dreadfully common. She was a barmaid, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wonder why the devil he married her. I’ve always been given to understand that she was extremely unfaithful to him.’

  ‘Extremely.’

  ‘Do you remember at all what she was like?’

  ‘Yes, very distinctly,’ I smiled. ‘She was sweet.’

  Roy gave a short laugh.

  ‘That’s not the general impression.’

  I did not answer. We had reached Piccadilly, and stopping I held out my hand to Roy. He shook it, but I fancied without his usual heartiness. I had the impression that he was disappointed with our meeting. I could not imagine why. Whatever he had wanted of me I had not been able to do, for the reason that he had given me no inkling of what it was, and as I strolled under the arcade of the Ritz Hotel and along the park railings till I came opposite Half Moon Street I wondered if my manner had been more than ordinarily forbidding. It was quite evident that Roy had felt the moment inopportune to ask me to grant him a favour.

  I walked up Half Moon Street. After the gay tumult of Piccadilly it had a pleasant silence. It was sedate and respectable. Most of the houses let apartments, but this was not advertised by the vulgarity of a card; some had a brightly polished brass plate, like a doctor’s, to announce the fact, and others the word Apartments neatly painted on the fanligh
t. One or two with an added discretion merely gave the name of the proprietor, so that if you were ignorant you might have thought it a tailor’s or a money-lender’s. There was none of the congested traffic of Jermyn Street, where also they let rooms, but here and there a smart car, unattended, stood outside a door and occasionally at another a taxi deposited a middle-aged lady. You had the feeling that the people who lodged here were not gay and a trifle disreputable as in Jermyn Street, racing men who rose in the morning with headaches and asked for a hair of the dog that bit them, but respectable women from the country who came up for six weeks for the London season and elderly gentlemen who belonged to exclusive clubs. You felt that they came year after year to the same house and perhaps had known the proprietor when he was still in private service. My own Miss Fellows had been cook in some very good places, but you would never have guessed it had you seen her walking along to do her shopping in Shepherd Market. She was not stout, red-faced, and blousy as one expects a cook to be; she was spare and very upright, neatly but fashionably dressed, a woman of middle age with determined features; her lips were rouged and she wore an eyeglass. She was businesslike, quiet, coolly cynical, and very expensive.

  The rooms I occupied were on the ground floor. The parlour was papered with an old marbled paper and on the walls were water-colours of romantic scenes, cavaliers bidding good-bye to their ladies and knights of old banqueting in stately halls; there were large ferns in pots, and the arm-chairs were covered with faded leather. There was about the room an amusing air of the eighteen-eighties, and when I looked out of the window I expected to see a private hansom rather than a Chrysler. The curtains were of a heavy red rep.

  3

  I had a good deal to do that afternoon, but my conversation with Roy and the impression of the day before yesterday, the sense of a past that still dwelt in the minds of men not yet old, that my room, I could not tell why, had given me even more strongly than usual as I entered it, inveigled my thoughts to saunter down the road of memory. It was as though all the people who had at one time and another inhabited my lodging pressed upon me with their old fashioned ways and odd clothes, men with mutton-chop whiskers in frock-coats and women in bustles and flounced skirts. The rumble of London, which I did not know if I imagined or heard (my house was at the top of Half Moon Street), and the beauty of the sunny June day (le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui), gave my reverie a poignancy which was not quite painful. The past I looked at seemed to have lost its reality and I saw it as though it were a scene in a play and I a spectator in the back row of a dark gallery. But it was all very clear as far as it went. It was not misty like life as one leads it, when the ceaseless throng of impressions seems to rob them of outline, but sharp and definite like a landscape painted in oils by a painstaking artist of the middle-Victorian era.

  I fancy that life is more amusing now than it was forty years ago and I have a notion that people are more amiable. They may have been worthier then, possessed of more solid virtue as, I am told, they were possessed of more substantial knowledge; I do not know. I know they were more cantankerous; they ate too much, many of them drank too much, and they took too little exercise. Their livers were out of order and their digestions often impaired. They were irritable. I do not speak of London, of which I knew nothing till I was grown up, nor of grand people who hunted and shot, but of the countryside and of the modest persons, gentlemen of small means, clergymen, retired officers, and such-like who made up the local society. The dullness of their lives was almost incredible. There were no golf links; at a few houses was an ill-kept tennis court, but it was only the very young who played; there was a dance once a year in the Assembly Rooms; carriage folk went for a drive in the afternoon; the others went for a ‘constitutional’! You may say that they did not miss amusements they had never thought of, and that they created excitement for themselves from the small entertainment (tea when you were asked to bring your music and you sang the songs of Maude Valérie White and Tosti) which at infrequent intervals they offered one another; the days were very long; they were bored. People who were condemned to spend their lives within a mile of one another quarrelled bitterly, and, seeing each other every day in the town, cut one another for twenty years. They were vain, pig-headed, and odd. It was a life that perhaps formed queer characters; people were not so like one another as now and they acquired a small celebrity by their own idiosyncrasies, but they were not easy to get on with. It may be that we are flippant and careless, but we accept one another without the old suspicion; our manners, rough and ready, are kindly; we are more prepared to give and take and we are not so crabbed.

  I lived with an uncle and aunt on the outskirts of a little Kentish town by the sea. It was called Blackstable and my uncle was the vicar. My aunt was a German. She came of a very noble but impoverished family, and the only portion she brought her husband was a marquetry writing-desk, made for an ancestor in the seventeenth century, and a set of tumblers. Of these only a few remained when I entered upon the scene, and they were used as ornaments in the drawing-room. I liked the grand coat-of-arms with which they were heavily engraved. There were I don’t know how many quarterings, which my aunt used demurely to explain to me, and the supporters were fine and the crest emerging from a crown incredibly romantic. She was a simple old lady, of a meek and Christian disposition, but she had not, though married for more than thirty years to a modest parson with very little income beyond his stipend, forgotten that she was hochwohlgeboren. When a rich banker from London, with a name that in these days is famous in financial circles, took a neighbouring house for the summer holidays, though my uncle called on him (chiefly, I surmise, to get a subscription to the Additional Curates Society), she refused to do so because he was in trade. No one thought her a snob. It was accepted as perfectly reasonable. The banker had a little boy of my own age, and, I forget how, I became acquainted with him. I still remember the discussion that ensued when I asked if I might bring him to the vicarage; permission was reluctantly given me, but I was not allowed to go in return to his house. My aunt said I’d be wanting to go to the coal merchant’s next, and my uncle said:

  ‘Evil communications corrupt good manners.’

  The banker used to come to church every Sunday morning, and he always put half a sovereign in the plate, but if he thought his generosity made a good impression he was much mistaken. All Blackstable knew, but only thought him purse-proud.

  Blackstable consisted of a long winding street that led to the sea, with little two-storey houses, many of them residential but with a good many shops; and from this ran a certain number of short streets, recently built, that ended on one side in the country and on the other in the marshes. Round about the harbour was a congeries of narrow winding alleys. Colliers brought coal from Newcastle to Blackstable and the harbour was animated. When I was old enough to be allowed out by myself I used to spend hours wandering about there looking at the rough grimy men in their jerseys and watching the coal being unloaded.

  It was at Blackstable that I first met Edward Driffield. I was fifteen and had just come back from school for the summer holidays. The morning after I got home I took a towel and bathing drawers and went down to the beach. The sky was unclouded and the air hot and bright, but the North Sea gave it a pleasant tang so that it was a delight just to live and breathe. In winter the natives of Blackstable walked down the empty street with hurried gait, screwing themselves up in order to expose as little surface as possible to the bitterness of the east wind, but now they dawdled; they stood about in groups in the little space between the Duke of Kent and the Bear and Key. You heard a hum of their East Anglian speech, drawling a little with an accent that may be ugly, but in which from old association I still find a leisurely charm. They were fresh-complexioned, with blue eyes and high cheekbones, and their hair was light. They had a clean, honest, and ingenuous look. I do not think they were very intelligent, but they were guileless. They looked healthy, and, though not tall, for the most part were strong a
nd active. There was little wheeled traffic in Blackstable in those days and the groups that stood about the road chatting seldom had to move for anything but the doctor’s dogcart or the baker’s trap.

  Passing the bank, I called in to say how-do-you-do to the manager, who was my uncle’s churchwarden, and when I came out met my uncle’s curate. He stopped and shook hands with me. He was walking with a stranger. He did not introduce me to him. He was a smallish man with a beard and he was dressed rather loudly in a bright brown knickerbocker suit, the breeches very tight, with navy-blue stockings, black boots, and a billy-cock hat. Knickerbockers were uncommon then, at least in Blackstable, and being young and fresh from school I immediately set the fellow down as a cad. But while I chatted with the curate he looked at me in a friendly way, with a smile in his pale blue eyes. I felt that for two pins he would have joined in the conversation and I assumed a haughty demeanour. I was not going to run the risk of being spoken to by a chap who wore knickerbockers like a gamekeeper, and I resented the familiarity of his good-humoured expression. I was myself faultlessly dressed in white flannel trousers, a blue blazer with the arms of my school on the breast pocket, and a black-and-white straw hat with a very wide brim. The curate said that he must be getting on (fortunately, for I never knew how to break away from a meeting in the street and would endure agonies of shyness while I looked in vain for an opportunity), but said that he would be coming up to the vicarage that afternoon and would I tell my uncle. The stranger nodded and smiled as we parted, but I gave him a stony stare. I supposed he was a summer visitor, and in Blackstable we did not mix with the summer visitors. We thought London people vulgar. We said it was horrid to have all that rag-tag and bob tail down from town every year, but of course it was all right for the tradespeople. Even they, however, gave a faint sigh of relief when September came to an end and Blackstable sank back into its usual peace.