Cakes and Ale

V

IT WAS true that Edward Driffield had taught me to bicycle. That was indeed how I first made his acquaintance. I do not know how long the safety bicycle had been invented, but I know that it was not common in the remote part of Kent in which I lived and when you saw someone speeding along on solid tires you turned round and looked till he was out of sight. It was still a matter for jocularity on the part of middle-aged gentlemen who said Shank’s pony was good enough for them, and for trepidation on the part of elderly ladies who made a dash for the side of the road when they saw one coming. I had been for some time filled with envy of the boys whom I saw riding into the school grounds on their bicycles, and it gave a pretty opportunity for showing off when you entered the gateway without holding on to the handles. I had persuaded my uncle to let me have one at the beginning of the summer holidays, and though my aunt was against it, since she said I should only break my neck, he had yielded to my pertinacity more willingly because I was of course paying for it out of my own money. I ordered it before school broke up and a few days later the carrier brought it over from Tercanbury.

I was determined to learn to ride it by myself and chaps at school had told me that they had learned in half an hour. I tried and tried and at last came to the conclusion that I was abnormally stupid (I am inclined now to think that I was exaggerating), but even after my pride was sufficiently humbled for me to allow the gardener to hold me up I seemed at the end of the first morning no nearer to being able to get on by myself than at the beginning. Next day, however, thinking that the carriage drive at the vicarage was too winding to give a fellow a proper chance, I wheeled the bicycle to a road not far away which I knew was perfectly flat and straight and so solitary that no one would see me making a fool of myself. I tried several times to mount, but fell off each time. I barked my shins against the pedals and got very hot and bothered. After I had been doing this for about an hour, though I began to think that God did not intend me to ride a bicycle, but was determined (unable to bear the thought of the sarcasms of my uncle, his representative at Blackstable) to do so all the same, to my disgust I saw two people on bicycles coming along the deserted road. I immediately wheeled my machine to the side and sat down on a stile, looking out to sea in a nonchalant way as though I had been for a ride and were just sitting there wrapped in contemplation of the vasty ocean. I kept my eyes dreamily averted from the two persons who were advancing toward me, but I felt that they were coming nearer, and through the corner of my eye I saw that they were a man and a woman. As they passed me the woman swerved violently to my side of the road and, crashing against me, fell to the ground.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I knew I should fall off the moment I saw you.”

It was impossible under the circumstances to preserve my appearance of abstraction and, blushing furiously, I said that it didn’t matter at all.

The man had got off as she fell.

“You haven’t hurt yourself?” he asked.

“Oh, no.”

I recognized him then as Edward Driffield, the author I had seen walking with the curate a few days before.

“I’m just learning to ride,” said his companion. “And I fall off whenever I see anything in the road.”

“Aren’t you the vicar’s nephew?” said Driffield. “I saw you the other day. Galloway told me who you were. This is my wife.”

She held out her hand with an oddly frank gesture and when I took it gave mine a warm and hearty pressure. She smiled with her lips and with her eyes and there was in her smile something that even then I recognized as singularly pleasant. I was confused. People I did not know made me dreadfully self-conscious, and I could not take in any of the details of her appearance. I just had an impression of a rather large blond woman. I do not know if I noticed then or only remembered afterward that she wore a full skirt of blue serge, a pink shirt with a starched front and a starched collar, and a straw hat, called in those days, I think, a boater, perched on the top of a lot of golden hair.

“I think bicycling’s lovely, don’t you?” she said, looking at my beautiful new machine which leaned against the stile. “It must be wonderful to be able to ride well.”

I felt that this inferred an admiration for my proficiency.

“It’s only a matter of practice,” I said.

“This is only my third lesson. Mr. Driffield says I’m coming on wonderful, but I feel so stupid I could kick myself. How long did it take you before you could ride?”

I blushed to the roots of my hair. I could hardly utter the shameful words.

“I can’t ride,” I said. “I’ve only just got this bike and this is the first time I’ve tried.”

I equivocated a trifle there, but I made it all right with my conscience by adding the mental reservation : except yesterday at home in the garden.

“I’ll give you a lesson if you like,” said Driffield in his good-humoured way. “Come on.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“Why not?” asked his wife, her blue eyes still pleasantly smiling. “Mr. Driffield would like to and it’ll give me a chance to rest.”

Driffield took my bicycle, and I, reluctant but unable to withstand his friendly violence, clumsily mounted. I swayed from side to side, but he held me with a firm hand.

“Faster,” he said.

I pedalled and he ran by me as I wobbled from side to side. We were both very hot when, notwithstanding his struggles, I at last fell off. It was very hard under such circumstances to preserve the standoffishness befitting the vicar’s nephew with the son of Miss Wolfe’s bailiff, and when I started back again and for thirty or forty thrilling yards actually rode by myself and Mrs. Driffield ran into the middle of the road with her arms akimbo shouting, “Go it, go it, two to one on the favourite,” I was laughing so much that I positively forgot all about my social status. I got off of my own accord, my face no doubt wearing an air of immodest triumph, and received without embarrassment the Driffields’ congratulation on my cleverness in riding a bicycle the very first day I tried.

“I want to see if I can get on by myself,” said Mrs. Driffield, and I sat down again on the stile while her husband and I watched her unavailing struggles.

Then, wanting to rest again, disappointed but cheerful, she sat down beside me. Driffield lit his pipe. We chatted. I did not of course realize it then, but I know now that there was a disarming frankness in her manner that put one at one’s ease. She talked with a kind of eagerness, like a child bubbling over with the zest of life, and her eyes were lit all the time by her engaging smile. I did not know why I liked it. I should say it was a little sly, if slyness were not a displeasing quality; it was too innocent to be sly. It was mischievous rather, like that of a child who has done something that he thinks funny, but is quite well aware that you will think rather naughty; he knows all the same that you won’t be really cross and if you don’t find out about it quickly he’ll come and tell you himself. But of course then I only knew that her smile made me feel at home.

Presently Driffield, looking at his watch, said that they must be going and suggested that we should all ride back together in style. It was just the time that my aunt and uncle would be coming home from their daily walk down the town and I did not like to run the risk of being seen with people whom they would not at all approve of; so I asked them to go on first, as they would go more quickly than I. Mrs. Driffield would not hear of it, but Driffield gave me a funny, amused little look, which made me think that he saw through my excuse so that I blushed scarlet, and he said:

“Let him go by himself, Rosie. He can manage better alone.”

“All right. Shall you be here to-morrow? We’re coming.”

“I’ll try to,” I answered.

They rode off, and in a few minutes I followed. Feeling very much pleased with myself, I rode all the way to the vicarage gates without falling. I think I boasted a good deal at dinner, but I did not say that I had met the Driffields.

Next day at about eleven I got my bicycle out of the coachhouse. It was so called though it held not even a pony trap and was used by the gardener to keep the mower and the roller, and by Mary-Ann for her sack of meal for the chickens. I wheeled it down to the gate and, mounting none too easily, rode along the Tercanbury Road till I came to the old turnpike and turned into Joy Lane.

The sky was blue and the air, warm and yet fresh, crackled, as it were, with the heat. The light was brilliant without harshness. The sun’s beams seemed to hit the white road with a directed energy and bounce back like a rubber ball.

I rode backward and forward, waiting for the Driffields, and presently saw them come. I waved to them and turned round (getting off to do so) and we pedalled along together. Mrs. Driffield and I complimented one another on our progress. We rode anxiously, clinging like grim death to the handle-bars, but exultant, and Driffield said that as soon as we felt sure of ourselves we must go for rides all over the country.

“I want to get rubbings of one or two brasses in the neighbourhood,” he said.

I did not know what he meant, but he would not explain.

“Wait and I’ll show you,” he said. “Do you think you could ride fourteen miles to-morrow, seven there and seven back?”

“Rather,” I said.

“I’ll bring a sheet of paper for you and some wax and you can make a rubbing. But you’d better ask your uncle if you can come.”

“I needn’t do that.”

“I think you’d better all the same.”

Mrs. Driffield gave me that peculiar look of hers, mischievous and yet friendly, and I blushed scarlet. I knew that if I asked my uncle he would say no. It would be much better to say nothing about it. But as we rode along I saw coming toward us the doctor in his dogcart. I looked straight in front of me as he passed in the vain hope that if I did not look at him he would not look at me. I was uneasy. If he had seen me the fact would quickly reach the ears of my uncle or my aunt and I considered whether it would not be safer to disclose myself a secret that could no longer be concealed. When we parted at the vicarage gates (I had not been able to avoid riding as far as this in their company) Driffield said that if I found I could come with them next day I had better call for them as early as I could.

“You know where we live, don’t you? Next door to the Congregational Church. It’s called Lime Cottage.”

When I sat down to dinner I looked for an opportunity to slip in casually the information that I had by accident run across the Driffields; but news travelled fast in Blackstable.

“Who were those people you were bicycling with this morning?” asked my aunt. “We met Dr. Anstey in the town and he said he’d seen you.”

My uncle, chewing his roast beef with an air of disapproval, looked sullenly at his plate.

“The Driffields,” I said with nonchalance. “You know, the author. Mr. Galloway knows them.”

“They’re most disreputable people,” said my uncle. “I don’t wish you to associate with them.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“I’m not going to give you my reasons. It’s enough that I don’t wish it.”

“How did you ever get to know them?” asked my aunt.

“I was just riding along and they were riding along, and they asked me if I’d like to ride with them,” I said, distorting the truth a little.

“I call it very pushing,” said my uncle.

I began to sulk. And to show my indignation when the sweet was put on the table, though it was raspberry tart which I was extremely fond of, I refused to have any. My aunt asked me if I was not feeling very well.

“Yes,” I said, as haughtily as I could, “I’m feeling all right.”

“Have a little bit,” said my aunt.

“I’m not hungry,” I answered.

“Just to please me.”

“He must know when he’s had enough,” said my uncle.

I gave him a bitter look.

“I don’t mind having a small piece,” I said.

My aunt gave me a generous helping, which I ate with the air of one who, impelled by a stern sense of duty, performs an act that is deeply distasteful to him. It was a beautiful raspberry tart. Mary-Ann made short pastry that melted in the mouth. But when my aunt asked me whether I could not manage a little more I refused with cold dignity. She did not insist. My uncle said grace and I carried my outraged feelings into the drawing room.

But when I reckoned that the servants had finished their dinner I went into the kitchen. Emily was cleaning the silver in the pantry. Mary-Ann was washing up.

“I say, what’s wrong with the Driffields?” I asked her.

Mary-Ann had come to the vicarage when she was eighteen. She had bathed me when I was a small boy, given me powders in plum jam when I needed them, packed my box when I went to school, nursed me when I was ill, read to me when I was bored, and scolded me when I was naughty. Emily, the housemaid, was a flighty young thing, and Mary-Ann didn’t know whatever would become of me if she had the looking after of me. Mary-Ann was a Blackstable girl. She had never been to London in her life and I do not think she had been to Tercanbury more than three or four times. She was never ill. She never had a holiday. She was paid twelve pounds a year. One evening a week she went down the town to see her mother, who did the vicarage washing; and on Sunday evenings she went to church. But Mary-Ann knew everything that went on in Blackstable. She knew who everybody was, who had married whom, what anyone’s father had died of, and how many children, and what they were called, any woman had had.

I asked Mary-Ann my question and she slopped a wet clout noisily into the sink.

“I don’t blame your uncle,” she said. “I wouldn’t let you go about with them, not if you was my nephew. Fancy their askin’ you to ride your bicycle with them! Some people will do anything.”

I saw that the conversation in the dining room had been repeated to Mary-Ann.

“I’m not a child,” I said.

“That makes it all the worse. The impudence of their comin’ ’ere at all!” Mary-Ann dropped her aitches freely. “Takin’ a house and pretendin’ to be ladies and gentlemen. Now leave that pie alone.”

The raspberry tart was standing on the kitchen table and I broke off a piece of crust with my fingers and put it in my mouth.

“We’re goin’ to eat that for our supper. If you’d wanted a second ’elpin’ why didn’t you ’ave one when you was ’avin’ your dinner? Ted Driffield never could stick to anything. He ’ad a good education, too. The one I’m sorry for is his mother. He’s been a trouble to ’er from the day he was born. And then to go an’ marry Rosie Gann. They tell me that when he told his mother what he was goin’ to do she took to ’er bed and stayed there for three weeks and wouldn’t talk to anybody.”

“Was Mrs. Driffield Rosie Gann before she married? Which Ganns were those?”

Gann was one of the commonest names at Blackstable. The churchyard was thick with their graves.

“Oh, you wouldn’t ’ave known them. Old Josiah Gann was her father. He was a wild one, too. He went for a soldier and when he come back he ’ad a wooden leg. He used to go out doing painting, but he was out of work more often than not. They lived in the next ’ouse to us in Rye Lane. Me an’ Rosie used to go to Sunday school together.”

“But she’s not as old as you are,” I said with the bluntness of my age.

“She’ll never see thirty again.”

Mary-Ann was a little woman with a snub nose and decayed teeth, but fresh-coloured, and I do not suppose she could hare been more than thirty-five.

“Rosie ain’t more than four or five years younger than me, whatever she may pretend she is. They tell me you wouldn’t know her now all dressed up and everything.”

“Is it true that she was a barmaid?” I asked.

“Yes, at the Railway Arms and then at the Prince of Wales’s Feathers at Haversham. Mrs. Reeves ’ad her to ’elp in the bar at the Railway Arms, but it got so bad she had to get rid of her.”

The Railway Arms was a very modest little public house just opposite the station of the London, Chatham & Dover Railway. It had a sort of sinister gaiety. On a winter’s night as you passed by you saw through the glass doors men lounging about the bar. My uncle very much disapproved of it, and had for years been trying to get its license taken away. It was frequented by the railway porters, colliers, and farm labourers. The respectable residents of Blackstable would have disdained to enter it and, when they wanted a glass of bitter, went to the Bear and Key or the Duke of Kent.

“Why, what did she do?” I asked, my eyes popping out of my head.

“What didn’t she do?” said Mary-Ann. “What d’you think your uncle would say if he caught me tellin’ you things like that? There wasn’t a man who come in to ’ave a drink that she didn’t carry on with. No matter who they was. She couldn’t stick to anybody, it was just one man after another. They tell me it was simply ’orrible. That was when it begun with Lord George. It wasn’t the sort of place he was likely to go to, he was too grand for that, but they say he went in accidental like one day when his train was late, and he saw her. And after that he was never out of the place, mixin’ with all them common rough people, and of course they all knew what he was there for, and him with a wife and three children. Oh, I was sorry for her! And the talk it made. Well, it got so Mrs. Reeves said she wasn’t going to put up with it another day and she gave her her wages and told her to pack her box and go. Good riddance to bad rubbish, that’s what I said.”

I knew Lord George very well. His name was George Kemp and the title by which he was always known had been given him ironically owing to his grand manner. He was our coal merchant, but he also dabbled in house property, and he owned a share in one or two colliers. He lived in a new brick house that stood in its own grounds and he drove his own trap. He was a stoutish man with a pointed beard, florid, with a high colour and bold blue eyes. Remembering him, I think he must have looked like some jolly rubicund merchant in an old Dutch picture. He was always very flashily dressed and when you saw him driving at a smart pace down the middle of the High Street in a fawn-coloured covert-coat with large buttons, his brown bowler on the side of his head and a red rose in his button hole, you could not but look at him. On Sunday he used to come to church in a lustrous topper and a frock coat. Everyone knew that he wanted to be made churchwarden, and it was evident that his energy would have made him useful, but my uncle said not in his time, and though Lord George as a protest went to chapel for a year my uncle remained obdurate. He cut him dead when he met him in the town. A reconciliation was effected and Lord George came to church again, but my uncle only yielded so far as to appoint him sidesman. The gentry thought him extremely vulgar and I have no doubt that he was vain and boastful. They complained of his loud voice and his strident laugh—when he was talking to somebody on one side of the street you heard every word he said from the other—and they thought his manners dreadful. He was much too friendly; when he talked to them it was as though he were not in trade at all; they said he was very pushing. But if he thought his hail-fellow-well-met air, his activity in public works, his open purse when subscriptions were needed for the annual regatta or for the harvest festival, his willingness to do anyone a good turn were going to break the barriers at Blackstable he was mistaken. His efforts at sociability were met with blank hostility.

I remember once that the doctor’s wife was calling on my aunt and Emily came in to tell my uncle that Mr. George Kemp would like to see him.

“But I heard the front door ring, Emily,” said my aunt.

“Yes’m, he came to the front door.”

There was a moment’s awkwardness. Everyone was at a loss to know how to deal with such an unusual occurrence, and even Emily, who knew who should come to the front door, who should go to the side door, and who to the back, looked a trifle flustered. My aunt, who was a gentle soul, I think felt honestly embarrassed that anyone should put himself in such a false position; but the doctor’s wife gave a little sniff of contempt. At last my uncle collected himself.

“Show him into the study, Emily,” he said. “I’ll come as soon as I’ve finished my tea.”

But Lord George remained exuberant, flashy, loud, and boisterous. He said the town was dead and he was going to wake it up. He was going to get the company to run excursion trains. He didn’t see why it shouldn’t become another Margate. And why shouldn’t they have a mayor? Ferne Bay had one.

“I suppose he thinks he’d be mayor himself,” said the people of Blackstable. They pursed their lips. “Pride goeth before a fall,” they said.

And my uncle remarked that you could take a horse to the water but you couldn’t make him drink.

I should add that I looked upon Lord George with the same scornful derision as everyone else. It outraged me that he should stop me in the street and call me by my Christian name and talk to me as though there were no social difference between us. He even suggested that I should play cricket with his sons, who were of about the same age as myself. But they went to the grammar school at Haversham and of course I couldn’t possibly have anything to do with them.

I was shocked and thrilled by what Mary-Ann told me, but I had difficulty in believing it. I had read too many novels and had learnt too much at school not to know a good deal about love, but I thought it was a matter that only concerned young people. I could not conceive that a man with a beard, who had sons as old as I, could have any feelings of that sort. I thought when you married all that was finished. That people over thirty should be in love seemed to me rather disgusting.

“You don’t mean to say they did anything?” I asked Mary-Ann.

“From what I hear there’s very little that Rosie Gann didn’t do. And Lord George wasn’t the only one.”

“But, look here, why didn’t she have a baby?”

In the novels I had read whenever lovely woman stooped to folly she had a baby. The cause was put with infinite precaution, sometimes indeed suggested only by a row of asterisks, but the result was inevitable.

“More by good luck than by good management, I lay,” said Mary-Ann. Then she recollected herself and stopped drying the plates she was busy with. “It seems to me you know a lot more than you ought to,” she said.

“Of course I know,” I said importantly. “Hang it all, I’m practically grown up, aren’t I?”

“All I can tell you,” said Mary-Ann, “is that when Mrs. Reeves gave her the sack Lord George got her a job at the Prince of Wales’s Feathers at Haversham and he was always poppin’ over there in his trap. You can’t tell me the ale’s any different over there from what it is here.”

“Then why did Ted Driffield marry her?” I asked.

“Ask me another,” said Mary-Ann. “It was at the Feathers he saw her. I suppose he couldn’t get anyone else to marry him. No respectable girl would ’ave ’ad ’im.”

“Did he know about her?”

“You’d better ask him.”

I was silent. It was all very puzzling.

“What does she look like now?” asked Mary-Ann. “I never seen her since she married. I never even speak to ’er after I ’eard what was goin’ on at the Railway Arms.”

“She looks all right,” I said.

“Well, you ask her if she remembers me and see what she says.”