Cakes and Ale

XI

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 them. 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 Shakespearean, 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 Shakespearean 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 able seamen. 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 difficultly 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 still-born 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 humourist 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 a 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 and New England, 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 rapture 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 prouve?” 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 Pæstum 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.

But of course what the critics wrote about Edward Driffield was eye-wash. 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 donna 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 earliest times the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser than they, and before the young had 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 authors 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 someone 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 book 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 analyzed, 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 for 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 lacunæ. 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 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 immense 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 home-made 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 holidays, 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 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 chanteys 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 singing music-hall songs. 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.”

“Well, that may be, but it’s not a very pretty habit for a distinguished man of letters. And then, he didn’t exactly tipple, but he was rather fond of going down to the Bear and Key at Blackstable and having a few beers in the public bar. Of course there was no harm in it, but it did make him rather conspicuous, especially in summer when the place was full of trippers. He didn’t mind who he talked to. He didn’t seem able to realize that he had a position to keep up. You can’t deny it was rather awkward after they’d been having a lot of interesting people to lunch—people like Edmund Gosse, for instance, and Lord Curzon—that he should go down to a public house and tell the plumber and the baker and the sanitary inspector what he thought about them. But of course that could be explained away. One could say that he was after local colour and was interested in types. But he had some habits that really were rather difficult to cope with. Do you know that it was with the greatest difficulty that Amy Driffield could ever get him to take a bath?”

“He was born at a time when people thought it unhealthy to take too many baths. I don’t suppose he ever lived in a house that had a bathroom till he was fifty.”

“Well, he said he never had had a bath more than once a week and he didn’t see why he should change his habits at his time of life. Then Amy said that he must change his under linen every day, but he objected to that too. He said he’d always been used to wearing his vest and drawers for a week and it was nonsense, it only wore them out to have them washed so often. Mrs. Driffield did everything she could to tempt him to have a bath every day, with bath salts and perfumes, you know, but nothing would induce him to, and as he grew older he wouldn’t even have one once a week. She tells me that for the last three years of his life he never had a bath at all. Of course, all this is between ourselves; I’m merely telling it to show you that in writing his life I shall have to use a good deal of tact. I don’t see how one can deny that he was just a wee bit unscrupulous in money matters and he had a kink in him that made him take a strange pleasure in the society of his inferiors and some of his personal habits were rather disagreeable, but I don’t think that side of him was the most significant. I don’t want to say anything that’s untrue, but I do think there’s a certain amount that’s better left unsaid.”

“Don’t you think it would be more interesting if you went the whole hog and drew him warts and all?”

“Oh, I couldn’t. Amy Driffield would never speak to me again. She only asked me to do the life because she felt she could trust my discretion. I must behave like a gentleman.”

“It’s very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.”

“I don’t see why. And besides, you know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you’re cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism. Of course I don’t deny that if I were thoroughly unscrupulous I could make a sensation. It would be rather amusing to show the man with his passion for beauty and his careless treatment of his obligations, his fine style and his personal hatred for soap and water, his idealism and his tippling in disreputable pubs; but honestly, would it pay? They’d only say I was imitating Lytton Strachey. No, I think I shall do much better to be allusive and charming and rather subtle, you know the sort of thing, and tender. I think one ought always to see a book before one starts it. Well, I see this rather like a portrait of Van Dyck, with a good deal of atmosphere, you know, and a certain gravity, and with a sort of aristocratic distinction. Do you know what I mean? About eighty thousand words.”

He was absorbed for a moment in the ecstasy of æsthetic contemplation. In his mind’s eye he saw a book, in royal octavo, slim and light in the hand, printed with large margins on handsome paper in a type that was both clear and comely, and I think he saw a binding in smooth black cloth with a decoration in gold and gilt lettering. But being human, Alroy Kear could not, as I suggested a few pages back, hold the ecstasy that beauty yields for more than a little while. He gave me a candid smile.

“But how the devil am I to get over the first Mrs. Driffield?”

“The skeleton in the cupboard,” I murmured.

“She is damned awkward to deal with. She was married to Driffield for a good many years. Amy has very decided views on the subject, but I don’t see how I can possibly meet them. You see, her attitude is that Rose Driffield exerted a most pernicious influence on her husband, and that she did everything possible to ruin him morally, physically, and financially; she was beneath him in every way, at least intellectually and spiritually, and it was only because he was a man of immense force and vitality that he survived. It was of course a very unfortunate marriage. It’s true that she’s been dead for ages and it seems a pity to rake up old scandals and wash a lot of dirty linen in public; but the fact remains that all Driffield’s greatest books were written when he was living with her. Much as I admire the later books, and no one is more conscious of their genuine beauty than I am, and they have a restraint and a sort of classical sobriety which are admirable, I must admit that they haven’t the tang and the vigour and the smell and bustle of life of the early ones. It does seem to me that you can’t altogether ignore the influence his first wife had on his work.”

“What are you going to do about it?” I asked.

“Well, I can’t see why all that part of his life shouldn’t be treated with the greatest possible reserve and delicacy, so as not to offend the most exacting susceptibility, and yet with a sort of manly frankness, if you understand what I mean, that would be rather moving.”

“It sounds a very tall order.”

“As I see it, there’s no need to dot the i’s or to cross the t’s. It can only be a question of getting just the right touch. I wouldn’t state more than I could help, but I would suggest what was essential for the reader to realize. You know, however gross a subject is you can soften its unpleasantness if you treat it with dignity. But I can do nothing unless I am in complete possession of the facts.”

“Obviously you can’t cook them unless you have them.”

Roy had been expressing himself with a fluent ease that revealed the successful lecturer. I wished (a) that I could express myself with so much force and aptness, never at a loss for a word, rolling off the sentences without a moment’s hesitation; and (b) that I did not feel so miserably incompetent with my one small insignificant person to represent the large and appreciative audience that Roy was instinctively addressing. But now he paused. A genial look came over his face, which his enthusiasm had reddened and the heat of the day caused to perspire, and the eyes that had held me with a dominating brilliance softened and smiled.

“This is where you come in, old boy,” he said pleasantly.

I have always found it a very good plan in life to say nothing when I had nothing to say and when I do not know how to answer a remark to hold my tongue. I remained silent and looked back at Roy amiably.

“You know more about his life at Blackstable than anybody else.”

“I don’t know about that. There must be a number of people at Blackstable who saw as much of him in the old days as I did.”

“That may be, but after all they’re presumably not people of any importance, and I don’t think they matter very much.”

“Oh, I see. You mean that I’m the only person who might blow the gaff.”

“Roughly, that is what I do mean, if you feel that you must put it in a facetious way.”

I saw that Roy was not inclined to be amused. I was not annoyed, for I am quite used to people not being amused at my jokes. I often think that the purest type of the artist is the humorist who laughs alone at his own jests.

“And you saw a good deal of him later on in London, I believe.”

“Yes.”

“That is when he had an apartment somewhere in Lower Belgravia.”

“Well, lodgings in Pimlico.”

Roy smiled drily.

“We won’t quarrel about the exact designation of the quarter of London in which he lived. You were very intimate with him then.”

“Fairly.”

“How long did that last?”

“About a couple of years.”

“How old were you then?”

“Twenty.”

“Now look here, I want you to do me a great favour. It won’t take you very long and it will be of quite inestimable value to me. I want you to jot down as fully as you can all your recollections of Driffield, and all you remember about his wife and his relations with her and so on, both at Blackstable and in London.”

“Oh, my dear fellow, that’s asking a great deal. I’ve got a lot of work to do just now.”

“It needn’t take you very long. You can write it quite roughly, I mean. You needn’t bother about style, you know, or anything like that. I’ll put the style in. All I want are the facts. After all, you know them and nobody else does. I don’t want to be pompous or anything like that, but Driffield was a great man and you owe it to his memory and to English literature to tell everything you know. I shouldn’t have asked you, but you told me the other day that you weren’t going to write anything about him yourself. It would be rather like a dog in a manger to keep to yourself a whole lot of material that you have no intention of using.”

Thus Roy appealed at once to my sense of duty, my indolence, my generosity, and my rectitude.

“But why does Mrs. Driffield want me to go down and stay at Ferne Court?” I asked.

“Well, we talked it over. It’s a very jolly house to stay in. She does one very well, and it ought to be divine in the country just now. She thought it would be very nice and quiet for you if you felt inclined to write your recollections there; of course, I said I couldn’t promise that, but naturally being so near Blackstable would remind you of all sorts of things that you might otherwise forget. And then, living in his house, among his books and things, it would make the past seem much more real. We could all talk about him, and you know how in the heat of conversation things come back. Amy’s very quick and clever. She’s been in the habit of making notes of Driffield’s talk for years, and after all it’s quite likely that you’ll say things on the spur of the moment that you wouldn’t think of writing and she can just jot them down afterward. And we can play tennis and bathe.”

“I’m not very fond of staying with people,” I said. “I hate getting up for a nine-o’clock breakfast to eat things I have no mind to. I don’t like going for walks, and I’m not interested in other people’s chickens.”

“She’s a lonely woman now. It would be a kindness to her and it would be a kindness to me too.”

I reflected.

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do : I’ll go down to Blackstable, but I’ll go down on my own. I’ll put up at the Bear and Key and I’ll come over and see Mrs. Driffield while you’re there. You can both talk your heads off about Edward Driffield, but I shall be able to get away when I’m fed up with you.”

Roy laughed good-naturedly.

“All right. That’ll do. And will you jot down anything you can remember that you think will be useful to me?”

“I’ll try.”

“When will you come? I’m going down on Friday.”

“I’ll come with you if you’ll promise not to talk to me in the train.”

“All right. The five-ten’s the best one. Shall I come and fetch you?”

“I’m capable of getting to Victoria by myself. I’ll meet you on the platform.”

I don’t know if Roy was afraid of my changing my mind, but he got up at once, shook my hand heartily, and left. He begged me on no account to forget my tennis racket and bathing suit.