Cakes and Ale

II

WHEN I rang for my letters and the papers next morning a message was delivered to me, in answer to my note to Miss Fellows, that Mr. Alroy Kear expected me at one-fifteen at his club in St. James’s Street; so a little before one I strolled round to my own and had the cocktail, which I was pretty sure Roy would not offer me. Then I walked down St. James’s Street, looking idly at the shop windows, and since I had still a few minutes to spare (I did not want to keep my appointment too punctually) I went into Christie’s to see if there was anything I liked the look of. The auction had already begun and a group of dark, small men were passing round to one another pieces of Victorian silver, while the auctioneer, following their gestures with bored eyes, muttered in a drone: “Ten shillings offered, eleven, eleven and six” … It was a fine day, early in June, and the air in King Street was bright. It made the pictures on the walls of Christie’s look very dingy. I went out. The people in the street walked with a kind of nonchalance, as though the ease of the day had entered into their souls and in the midst of their affairs they had a sudden and surprised inclination to stop and look at the picture of life.

Roy’s club was sedate. In the ante-chamber were only an ancient porter and a page; and I had a sudden and melancholy feeling that the members were all attending the funeral of the head waiter. The page, when I had uttered Roy’s name, led me into an empty passage to leave my hat and stick and then into an empty hall hung with life-sized portraits of Victorian statesmen. Roy got up from a leather sofa and warmly greeted me.

“Shall we go straight up?” he said.

I was right in thinking that he would not offer me a cocktail and I commended my prudence. He led me up a noble flight of heavily carpeted stairs, and we passed nobody on the way; we entered the strangers’ dining room, and we were its only occupants. It was a room of some size, very clean and white, with an Adam window. We sat down by it and a demure waiter handed us the bill of fare. Beef, mutton and lamb, cold salmon, apple tart, rhubarb tart, gooseberry tart. As my eye travelled down the inevitable list I sighed as I thought of the restaurants round the corner where there was French cooking, the clatter of life, and pretty painted women in summer frocks.

“I can recommend the veal-and-ham pie,” said Roy.

“All right.”

“I’ll mix the salad myself,” he told the waiter in an off-hand and yet commanding way, and then, casting his eye once more on the bill of fare, generously: “And what about some asparagus to follow?”

“That would be very nice.”

His manner grew a trifle grander.

“Asparagus for two and tell the chef to choose them himself. Now what would you like to drink? What do you say to a bottle of hock? We rather fancy our hock here.”

When I had agreed to this he told the waiter to call the wine steward. I could not but admire the authoritative and yet perfectly polite manner in which he gave his orders. You felt that thus would a well-bred king send for one of his field marshals. The wine steward, portly in black, with the silver chain of his office round his neck, bustled in with the wine list in his hand. Roy nodded to him with curt familiarity.

“Hulloa, Armstrong, we want some of the Liebfraumilch, the ’21.”

“Very good, sir.”

“How’s it holding up? Pretty well? We shan’t be able to get any more of it, you know.”

“I’m afraid not, sir.”

“Well, it’s no good meeting trouble halfway, is it, Armstrong?”

Roy smiled at the steward with breezy cordiality. The steward saw from his long experience of members that the remark needed an answer.

“No, sir.”

Roy laughed and his eye sought mine. Quite a character, Armstrong.

“Well, chill it, Armstrong; not too much, you know, but just right. I want my guest to see that we know what’s what here.” He turned to me. “Armstrong’s been with us for eight and forty years.” And when the wine steward had left us: “I hope you don’t mind coming here. It’s quiet and we can have a good talk. It’s ages since we did. You’re looking very fit.”

This drew my attention to Roy’s appearance.

“Not half so fit as you,” I answered.

“The result of an upright, sober, and godly life,” he laughed. “Plenty of work. Plenty of exercise. How’s the golf? We must have a game one of these days.”

I knew that Roy was scratch and that nothing would please him less than to waste a day with so indifferent a player as myself. But I felt I was quite safe in accepting so vague an invitation. He looked the picture of health. His curly hair was getting very gray, but it suited him and made his frank, sunburned face look younger. His eyes, which looked upon the world with such a hearty candour, were bright and clear. He was not so slim as in his youth and I was not surprised that when the waiter offered us rolls he asked for Rye-Vita. His slight corpulence only added to his dignity. It gave weight to his observations. Because his movements were a little more deliberate than they had been you had a comfortable feeling of confidence in him; he filled his chair with so much solidity that you had almost the impression that he sat upon a monument.

I do not know whether, as I wished, I have indicated by my report of his dialogue with the waiter that his conversation was not as a rule brilliant or witty, but it was easy and he laughed so much that you sometimes had the illusion that what he said was funny. He was never at a loss for a remark and he could discourse on the topics of the day with an ease that prevented his hearers from experiencing any sense of strain.

Many authors from their preoccupation with words have the bad habit of choosing those they use in conversation too carefully. They form their sentences with unconscious care and say neither more nor less than they mean. It makes intercourse with them somewhat formidable to persons in the upper ranks of society whose vocabulary is limited by their simple spiritual needs, and their company consequently is sought only with hesitation. No constraint of this sort was ever felt with Roy. He could talk with a dancing guardee in terms that were perfectly comprehensible to him and with a racing countess in the language of her stable boys. They said of him with enthusiasm and relief that he was not a bit like an author. No compliment pleased him better. The wise always use a number of ready-made phrases (at the moment I write “nobody’s business” is the most common), popular adjectives (like “divine” or “shy-making”), verbs that you only know the meaning of if you live in the right set (like “dunch”), which give ease and a homely sparkle to small talk and avoid the necessity of thought. The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried this device to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment’s reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication. Roy’s repertory was extensive and his scent for the word of the minute unerring; it peppered his speech, but aptly, and he used it each time with a sort of bright eagerness, as though his fertile brain had just minted it.

Now he talked of this and that, of our common friends and the latest books, of the opera. He was very breezy. He was always cordial, but to-day his cordiality took my breath away. He lamented that we saw one another so seldom and told me with the frankness that was one of his pleasantest characteristics how much he liked me and what a high opinion he had of me. I felt I must not fail to meet this friendliness halfway. He asked me about the book I was writing, I asked him about the book he was writing. We told one another that neither of us had had the success he deserved. We ate the veal-and-ham pie and Roy told me how he mixed a salad. We drank the hock and smacked appreciative lips.

And I wondered when he was coming to the point.

I could not bring myself to believe that at the height of the London season Alroy Kear would waste an hour on a fellow writer who was not a reviewer and had no influence in any quarter whatever in order to talk of Matisse, the Russian Ballet and Marcel Proust. Besides, at the back of his gaiety I vaguely felt a slight apprehension. Had I not known that he was in a prosperous state I should have suspected that he was going to borrow a hundred pounds from me. It began to look as though luncheon would end without his finding the opportunity to say what he had in mind. I knew he was cautious. Perhaps he thought that this meeting, the first after so long a separation, had better be employed in establishing friendly relations, and was prepared to look upon the pleasant, substantial meal merely as ground bait.

“Shall we go and have our coffee in the next room?” he said.

“If you like.”

“I think it’s more comfortable.”

I followed him into another room, much more spacious, with great leather armchairs and huge sofas; there were papers and magazines on the tables. Two old gentlemen in a corner were talking in undertones. They gave us a hostile glance, but this did not deter Roy from offering them a cordial greeting.

“Hullo, General,” he cried, nodding breezily.

I stood for a moment at the window, looking at the gaiety of the day, and wished I knew more of the historical associations of St. James’s Street. I was ashamed that I did not even know the name of the club across the way and was afraid to ask Roy lest he should despise me for not knowing what every decent person knew. He called me back by asking me whether I would have a brandy with my coffee, and when I refused, insisted. The club’s brandy was famous. We sat side by side on a sofa by the elegant fireplace and lit cigars.

“The last time Edward Driffield ever came to London he lunched with me here,” said Roy casually. “I made the old man try our brandy and he was delighted with it. I was staying with his widow over last week-end.”

“Were you?”

“She sent you all sorts of messages.”

“That’s very kind of her. I shouldn’t have thought she remembered me.”

“Oh, yes, she does. You lunched there about six years ago, didn’t you? She says the old man was so glad to see you.”

“I didn’t think she was.”

“Oh, you’re quite wrong. Of course she had to be very careful. The old man was pestered with people who wanted to see him and she had to husband his strength. She was always afraid he’d do too much. It’s a wonderful thing if you come to think of it that she should have kept him alive and in possession of all his faculties to the age of eighty-four. I’ve been seeing a good deal of her since he died. She’s awfully lonely. After all, she devoted herself to looking after him for twenty-five years. Othello’s occupation, you know. I really feel sorry for her.”

“She’s still comparatively young. I dare say she’ll marry again.”

“Oh, no, she couldn’t do that. That would be dreadful.”

There was a slight pause while we sipped our brandy.

“You must be one of the few persons still alive who knew Driffield when he was unknown. You saw quite a lot of him at one time, didn’t you?”

“A certain amount. I was almost a small boy and he was a middle-aged man. We weren’t boon companions, you know.”

“Perhaps not, but you must know a great deal about him that other people don’t.”

“I suppose I do.”

“Have you ever thought of writing your recollections of him?”

“Good heavens, no!”

“Don’t you think you ought to? He was one of the greatest novelists of our day. The last of the Victorians. He was an enormous figure. His novels have as good a chance of surviving as any that have been written in the last hundred years.”

“I wonder. I’ve always thought them rather boring.”

Roy looked at me with eyes twinkling with laughter.

“How like you that is! Anyhow you must admit that you’re in the minority. I don’t mind telling you that I’ve read his novels not once or twice, but half a dozen times, and every time I read them I think they’re finer. Did you read the articles that were written about him at his death?”

“Some of them.”

“The consensus of opinion was absolutely amazing. I read every one.”

“If they all said the same thing, wasn’t that rather unnecessary?”

Roy shrugged his massive shoulders good-humouredly, but did not answer my question.

“I thought the Times Lit. Sup. was splendid. It would have done the old man good to read it. I hear that the quarterlies are going to have articles in their next numbers.”

“I still think his novels rather boring.”

Roy smiled indulgently.

“Doesn’t it make you slightly uneasy to think that you disagree with everyone whose opinion matters?”

“Not particularly. I’ve been writing for thirty-five years now, and you can’t think how many geniuses I’ve seen acclaimed, enjoy their hour or two of glory, and vanish into obscurity. I wonder what’s happened to them. Are they dead, are they shut up in madhouses, are they hidden away in offices? I wonder if they furtively lend their books to the doctor and the maiden lady in some obscure village. I wonder if they are still great men in some Italian pension.”

“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 judgments 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 judgment, 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 P.M. 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 overtired and when we went into 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 toward 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 fanlight. 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’s 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 armchairs 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.