Cakes and Ale

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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 Driffields 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 Driffields 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 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 naïve 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.

“By Jove,” I said, “Lord George is going it.”

In the fields beyond little white lambs were gambolling. The elm trees were just beginning to turn green. I let myself in by the side door. My uncle was sitting in his armchair 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”

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 reasonable, 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 was as free as you like with their money and everyone though 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 the 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 knew 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 rung, 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, after all 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 to-morrow.’ 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 which 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.

“Hulloa, 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 pence, young fellow, and the pounds’ll 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.