Cakes and Ale

IV

TO my surprise, two or three days after I lunched with Alroy Kear I received a letter from Edward Driffield’s widow. It ran as follows:

DEAR FRIEND,

I hear that you had a long talk with Roy last week about Edward Driffield and I am so glad to know that you spoke of him so nicely. He often talked to me of you. He had the greatest admiration for your talent and he was so very pleased to see you when you came to lunch with us. I wonder if you have in your possession any letters that he wrote to you and if so whether you would let me have copies of them. I should be very pleased if I could persuade you to come down for two or three days and stay with me. I live very quietly now and have no one here, so please choose your own time. I shall be delighted to see you again and have a talk of old times. I have a particular service I want you to do me and I am sure that for the sake of my dear dead husband you will not refuse.

Yours ever sincerely,

AMY DRIFFIELD.

I had seen Mrs. Driffield only once and she but mildly interested me; I do not like being addressed as “dear friend”; that alone would have been enough to make me decline her invitation; and I was exasperated by its general character which, however ingenious an excuse I invented, made the reason I did not go quite obvious, namely, that I did not want to. I had no letters of Driffield’s. I suppose years ago he had written to me several times, brief notes, but he was then an obscure scribbler and even if I ever kept letters it would never have occurred to me to keep his. How was I to know that he was going to be acclaimed as the greatest novelist of our day? I hesitated only because Mrs. Driffield said she wanted me to do something for her. It would certainly be a nuisance, but it would be churlish not to do it if I could, and after all her husband was a very distinguished man.

The letter came by the first post and after breakfast I rang up Roy. As soon as I mentioned my name I was put through to him by his secretary. If I were writing a detective story I should immediately have suspected that my call was awaited, and Roy’s virile voice calling hullo would have confirmed my suspicion. No one could naturally be quite so cheery so early in the morning.

“I hope I didn’t wake you,” I said.

“Good God, no.” His healthy laugh rippled along the wires. “I’ve been up since seven. I’ve been riding in the park. I’m just going to have breakfast. Come along and have it with me.”

“I have a great affection for you, Roy,” I answered, “but I don’t think you’re the sort of person I’d care to have breakfast with. Besides, I’ve already had mine. Look here, I’ve just had a letter from Mrs. Driffield asking me to go down and stay.”

“Yes, she told me she was going to ask you. We might go down together. She’s not quite a good grass court and she does one very well. I think you’d like it.”

“What is it that she wants me to do?”

“Ah, I think she’d like to tell you that herself.”

There was a softness in Roy’s voice such as I imagined he would use if he were telling a prospective father that his wife was about to gratify his wishes. It cut no ice with me.

“Come off it, Roy,” I said. “I’m too old a bird to be caught with chaff. Spit it out.”

There was a moment’s pause at the other end of the telephone. I felt that Roy did not like my expression.

“Are you busy this morning?” he asked suddenly. “I’d like to come and see you.”

“All right, come on. I shall be in till one.”

“I’ll be round in about an hour.”

I replaced the receiver and relit my pipe. I gave Mrs. Driffield’s letter a second glance.

I remembered vividly the luncheon to which she referred. I happened to be staying for a long week-end not far from Tercanbury with a certain Lady Hodmarsh, the clever and handsome American wife of a sporting baronet with no intelligence and charming manners. Perhaps to relieve the tedium of domestic life she was in the habit of entertaining persons connected with the arts. Her parties were mixed and gay. Members of the nobility and gentry mingled with astonishment and an uneasy awe with painters, writers, and actors. Lady Hodmarsh neither read the books nor looked at the pictures of the people to whom she offered hospitality, but she liked their company and enjoyed the feeling it gave her of being in the artistic know. When on this occasion the conversation happened to dwell for a moment on Edward Driffield, her most celebrated neighbour, and I mentioned that I had at one time known him very well she proposed that we should go over and lunch with him on Monday when a number of her guests were going back to London. I demurred, for I had not seen Driffield for five and thirty years and I could not believe that he would remember me; and if he did (though this I kept to myself) I could not believe that it would be with pleasure. But there was a young peer there, a certain Lord Scallion, with literary inclinations so violent that, instead of ruling this country as the laws of man and nature have decreed, he devoted his energy to the composition of detective novels. His curiosity to see Driffield was boundless and the moment Lady Hodmarsh made her suggestion he said it would be too divine. The star guest of the party was a big young fat duchess and it appeared that her admiration for the celebrated writer was so intense that she was prepared to cut an engagement in London and not go up till the afternoon.

“That would make four of us,” said Lady Hodmarsh. “I don’t think they could manage more than that. I’ll wire to Mrs. Driffield at once.”

I could not see myself going to see Driffield in that company and tried to throw cold water on the scheme.

“It’ll only bore him to death,” I said. “He’ll hate having a lot of strangers barging in on him like this. He’s a very old man.”

“That’s why if they want to see him they’d better see him now. He can’t last much longer. Mrs. Driffield says he likes to meet people. They never see anybody but the doctor and the parson and it’s a change for them. Mrs. Driffield said I could always bring anyone interesting. Of course she has to be very careful. He’s pestered by all sorts of people who want to see him just out of idle curiosity, and interviewers and authors who want him to read their books, and silly hysterical women. But Mrs. Driffield is wonderful. She keeps everyone away from him but those she thinks he ought to see. I mean, he’d be dead in a week if he saw everyone who wants to see him. She has to think of his strength. Naturally we’re different.”

Of course I thought I was; but as I looked at them I perceived that the duchess and Lord Scallion thought they were too; so it seemed best to say no more.

We drove over in a bright yellow Rolls. Ferne Court was three miles from Blackstable. It was a stucco house built, I suppose, about 1840, plain and unpretentious, but substantial; it was the same back and front, two large bows on each side of a flat piece in which was the front door, and there were two large bows on the first floor. A plain parapet hid the low roof. It stood in about an acre of garden, somewhat overgrown with trees, but neatly tended, and from the drawing-room window you had a pleasant view of woods and green downland. The drawing room was furnished so exactly as you felt a drawing room in a country house of modest size should be furnished that it was slightly disconcerting. Clean bright chintzes covered the comfortable chairs and the large sofa, and the curtains were of the same bright clean chintz. On little Chippendale tables stood large Oriental bowls filled with pot-pourri. On the cream-coloured walls were pleasant water colours by painters well known at the beginning of this century. There were great masses of flowers charmingly arranged, and on the grand piano in silver frames photographs of celebrated actresses, deceased authors, and minor royalties.

It was no wonder that the duchess cried out that it was a lovely room. It was just the kind of room in which a distinguished writer should spend the evening of his days. Mrs. Driffield received us with modest assurance. She was a woman of about five and forty, I judged, with a small sallow face and neat, sharp features. She had a black cloche hat pressed tight down on her head and wore a gray coat and skirt. Her figure was slight and she was neither tall nor short, and she looked trim, competent, and alert. She might have been the squire’s widowed daughter, who ran the parish and had a peculiar gift for organization. She introduced us to a clergyman and a lady, who got up as we were shown in. They were the Vicar of Blackstable and his wife. Lady Hodmarsh and the duchess immediately assumed that cringing affability that persons of rank assume with their inferiors in order to show them that they are not for a moment aware that there is any difference of station between them.

Then Edward Driffield came in. I had seen portraits of him from time to time in the illustrated papers but it was with dismay that I saw him in the flesh. He was smaller than I remembered and very thin, his head was barely covered with fine silvery hair, he was clean-shaven, and his skin was almost transparent. His blue eyes were very pale and the rims of his eyelids red. He looked an old, old man, hanging on to mortality by a thread; he wore very white false teeth and they made his smile seem forced and stiff. I had never seen him but bearded and his lips were thin and pallid. He was dressed in a new, well-cut suit of blue serge and his low collar, two or three sizes too large for him, showed a wrinkled, scraggy neck. He wore a neat black tie with a pearl in it. He looked a little like a dean in mufti on his summer holiday in Switzerland.

Mrs. Driffield gave him a quick glance as he came in and smiled encouragingly; she must have been satisfied with the neatness of his appearance. He shook hands with his guests and to each one said something civil. When he came to me he said:

“It’s very good of a busy and successful man like you to come all this way to see an old fogey.”

I was a trifle taken aback, for he spoke as though he had never seen me before, and I was afraid my friends would think I had been boasting when I claimed at one time to have known him intimately. I wondered if he had completely forgotten me.

“I don’t know how many years it is since we last met,” I said, trying to be hearty.

He looked at me for what I suppose was no more than a few seconds, but for what seemed to me quite a long time, and then I had a sudden shock he gave me a little wink. It was so quick that nobody but I could have caught it, and so unexpected in that distinguished old face that I could hardly believe my eyes. In a moment his face was once more composed, intelligently benign, and quietly observant. Luncheon was announced and we trooped into the dining room.

This also was in what can only be described as the acme of good taste. On the Chippendale sideboard were silver candlesticks. We sat on Chippendale chairs and ate off a Chippendale table. In a silver bowl in the middle were roses and round this were silver dishes with chocolates in them and peppermint creams; the silver salt cellars were brightly polished and evidently Georgian. On the cream-coloured walls were mezzotints of ladies painted by Sir Peter Lely and on the chimney-piece a garniture of blue delft. The service was conducted by two maids in brown uniform and Mrs. Driffield in the midst of her fluent conversation kept a wary eye on them. I wondered how she had managed to train these buxom Kentish girls (their healthy colour and high cheek bones betrayed the fact that they were “local”) to such a pitch of efficiency. The lunch was just right for the occasion, smart but not showy, fillets of sole rolled up and covered with a white sauce, roast chicken, with new potatoes and green peas, asparagus and gooseberry fool. It was the dining room and the lunch and the manner which you felt exactly fitted a literary gent of great celebrity but moderate wealth.

Mrs. Driffield, like the wives of most men of letters, was a great talker and she did not let the conversation at her end of the table flag; so that, however much we might have wanted to hear what her husband was saying at the other, we had no opportunity. She was gay and sprightly. Though Edward Driffield’s indifferent health and great age obliged her to live most of the year in the country, she managed notwithstanding to run up to town often enough to keep abreast of what was going on and she was soon engaged with Lord Scallion in an animated discussion of the plays in the London theatres and the terrible crowd at the Royal Academy. It had taken her two visits to look at all the pictures and even then she had not had time to see the water colours. She liked water colours so much; they were unpretentious; she hated things to be pretentious.

So that host and hostess should sit at the head and foot of the table, the vicar sat next to Lord Scallion and his wife next to the duchess. The duchess engaged her in conversation on the subject of working-class dwellings, a subject on which she seemed to be much more at home than the parson’s lady, and my attention being thus set free I watched Edward Driffield. He was talking to Lady Hodmarsh. She was apparently telling him how to write a novel and giving him a list of a few that he really ought to read. He listened to her with what looked like polite interest, putting in now and then a remark in a voice too low for me to catch, and when she made a jest (she made them frequently and often good ones) he gave a little chuckle and shot her a quick look that seemed to say: this woman isn’t such a damned fool after all. Remembering the past, I asked myself curiously what he thought of this grand company, his neatly turned out wife, so competent and discreetly managing, and the elegant surroundings in which he lived. I wondered if he regretted his early days of adventure. I wondered if all this amused him or if the amiable civility of his manner masked a hideous boredom. Perhaps he felt my eyes upon him, for he raised his. They rested on me for a while with a meditative look, mild and yet oddly scrutinizing, and then suddenly, unmistakably this time, he gave me another wink. The frivolous gesture in that old, withered face was more than startling, it was embarrassing; I did not know what to do. My lips outlined a dubious smile.

But the duchess joining in the conversation at the head of the table, the vicar’s wife turned to me.

“You knew him many years ago, didn’t you?” she asked me in a low tone.

“Yes.”

She gave the company a glance to see that no one was attending to us.

“His wife is anxious that you shouldn’t call up old memories that might be painful to him. He’s very frail, you know, and the least thing upsets him.”

“I’ll be very careful.”

“The way she looks after him is simply wonderful. Her devotion is a lesson to all of us. She realizes what a precious charge it is. Her unselfishness is beyond words.” She lowered her voice a little more. “Of course he’s a very old man and old men sometimes are a little trying; I’ve never seen her out of patience. In her way she’s just as wonderful as he is.”

These were the sort of remarks to which it was difficult to find a reply, but I felt that one was expected of me.

“Considering everything I think he looks very well,” I murmured.

“He owes it all to her.”

At the end of luncheon we went back into the drawing room and after we had been standing about for two or three minutes Edward Driffield came up to me. I was talking with the vicar and for want of anything better to say was admiring the charming view. I turned to my host.

“I was just saying how picturesque that little row of cottages is down there.”

“From here.” Driffield looked at their broken outline and an ironic smile curled his thin lips. “I was born in one of them. Rum, isn’t it?”

But Mrs. Driffield came up to us with bustling geniality. Her voice was brisk and melodious.

“Oh, Edward, I’m sure the duchess would like to see your writing room. She has to go almost immediately.”

“I’m so sorry, but I must catch the three-eighteen from Tercanbury,” said the duchess.

We filed into Driffield’s study. It was a large room on the other side of the house, looking out on the same view as the dining room, with a bow window. It was the sort of room that a devoted wife would evidently arrange for her literary husband. It was scrupulously tidy and large bowls of flowers gave it a feminine touch.

“This is the desk at which he’s written all his later works,” said Mrs. Driffield, closing a book that was open face downward on it. “It’s the frontispiece in the third volume of the edition de luxe. It’s a period piece.”

We all admired the writing table and Lady Hodmarsh, when she thought no one was looking, ran her fingers along its under edge to see if it was genuine. Mrs. Driffield gave us a quick, bright smile.

“Would you like to see one of his manuscripts?”

“I’d love to,” said the duchess, “and then I simply must bolt.”

Mrs. Driffield took from a shelf a manuscript bound in blue morocco, and while the rest of the party reverently examined it I had a look at the books with which the room was lined. As authors will, I ran my eye round quickly to see if there were any of mine, but could not find one; I saw, however, a complete set of Alroy Kear’s and a great many novels in bright bindings, which looked suspiciously unread; I guessed that they were the works of authors who had sent them to the master in homage to his talent and perhaps the hope of a few words of eulogy that could be used in the publisher’s advertisements. But all the books were so neatly arranged, they were so clean, that I had the impression they were very seldom read. There was the Oxford Dictionary and there were standard editions in grand bindings of most of the English classics, Fielding, Boswell, Hazlitt, and so on, and there were a great many books on the sea; I recognized the variously coloured, untidy volumes of the sailing directions issued by the Admiralty, and there were a number of works on gardening. The room had the look not of a writer’s workshop, but of a memorial to a great name, and you could almost see already the desultory tripper wandering in for want of something better to do and smell the rather musty, close smell of a museum that few visited. I had a suspicion that nowadays if Driffield read anything at all it was the Gardener’s Chronicle or the Shipping Gazette, of which I saw a bundle on a table in the corner.

When the ladies had seen all they wanted we bade our hosts farewell. But Lady Hodmarsh was a woman of tact and it must have occurred to her that I, the excuse for the party, had scarcely had a word with Edward Driffield, for at the door, enveloping me with a friendly smile, she said to him:

“I was so interested to hear that you and Mr. Ashenden had known one another years and years ago. Was he a nice little boy?”

Driffield looked at me for a moment with that level, ironic gaze of his. I had the impression that if there had been nobody there he would have put his tongue out at me.

“Shy,” he replied. “I taught him to ride a bicycle.”

We got once more into the huge yellow Rolls and drove off.

“He’s too sweet,” said the duchess. “I’m so glad we went.”

“He has such nice manners, hasn’t he?” said Lady Hodmarsh.

“You didn’t really expect him to eat his peas with a knife, did you?” I asked.

“I wish he had,” said Scallion. “It would have been so picturesque.”

“I believe it’s very difficult,” said the duchess. “I’ve tried over and over again and I can never get them to stay on.”

“You have to spear them,” said Scallion.

“Not at all,” retorted the duchess. “You have to balance them on the flat, and they roll like the devil.”

“What did you think of Mrs. Driffield?” asked Lady Hodmarsh.

“I suppose she serves her purpose,” said the duchess.

“He’s so old, poor darling, he must have someone to look after him. You know she was a hospital nurse?”

“Oh, was she?” said the duchess. “I thought perhaps she’d been his secretary or typist or something.”

“She’s quite nice,” said Lady Hodmarsh, warmly defending a friend.

“Oh, quite.”

“He had a long illness about twenty years ago, and she was his nurse then, and after he got well he married her.”

“Funny how men will do that. She must have been years younger than him. She can’t be more than—what?—forty or forty-five.”

“No, I shouldn’t think so. Forty-seven, say. I’m told she’s done a great deal for him. I mean, she’s made him quite presentable. Alroy Kear told me that before that he was almost too bohemian.”

“As a rule authors’ wives are odious.”

“It’s such a bore having to have them, isn’t it?”

“Crushing. I wonder they don’t see that themselves.”

“Poor wretches, they often suffer from the delusion that people find them interesting,” I murmured.

We reached Tercanbury, dropped the duchess at the station, and drove on.