Chapter I: HAD a good deal to do that afternoon, but my conversation with Roy and

the impression of the day before yesterday, the sense of a past that still dwelt in the minds of men not yet old, that my room, I could not tell why, had given me even more strongly than usual as I entered it, inveigled my thoughts to saunter down the road of memory. It was as though all the people who had at one time and another inhabited my lodging pressed upon me with their old-fashioned ways and odd clothes, men with muttonchop whiskers in frock coats and women in bustles and flounced skirts. The rumble of London, which I did not know if I imagined or heard (my house was at the top of Half Moon Street), and the beauty of the sunny June day (_le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui_), gave my reverie a poignancy which was not quite painful. The past I looked at seemed to have lost its reality and I saw it as though it were a scene in a play and I a spectator in the back row of a dark gallery. But it was all very clear as far as it went. It was not misty like life as one leads it when the ceaseless throng of impressions seems to rob them of outline, but sharp and definite like a landscape painted in oils by a painstaking artist of the middle-Victorian era.

I fancy that life is more amusing now than it was forty years ago and I have a notion that people are more amiable. They may have been worthier then, possessed of more solid virtue as, I am told, they were possessed of more substantial knowledge; I do not know. I know they were more cantankerous; they ate too much, many of them drank too much, they took too little exercise. Their livers were out of order and their digestions often impaired. They were irritable. I do not speak of London of which I knew nothing till I was grown up, nor of grand people who hunted and shot, but of the countryside and of the modest persons, gentlemen of small means, clergymen, retired officers, and such like who made up the local society. The dullness of their lives was almost incredible. There were no golf links; at a few houses was an ill-kept tennis court, but it was only the very young who played; there was a dance once a year in the Assembly Rooms; carriage folk went for a drive in the afternoon; the others went for a “constitutional!” You may say that they did not miss amusements they had never thought of, and that they created excitement for themselves from the small entertainment (tea when you were asked to bring your music and you sang the songs of Maude Valérie White and Tosti) which at infrequent intervals they offered one another; the days were very long; they were bored. People who were condemned to spend their lives within a mile of one another quarrelled bitterly, and seeing each other every day in the town cut one another for twenty years. They were vain, pig-headed, and odd. It was a life that perhaps formed queer characters; people were not so like one another as now and they acquired a small celebrity by their idiosyncrasies, but they were not easy to get on with. It may be that we are flippant and careless, but we accept one another without the old suspicion; our manners, rough and ready, are kindly; we are more prepared to give and take and we are not so crabbed.

I lived with an uncle and aunt on the outskirts of a little Kentish town by the sea. It was called Blackstable and my uncle was the vicar. My aunt was a German. She came of a very noble but impoverished family, and the only portion she brought her husband was a marquetry writing desk, made for an ancestor in the Seventeenth Century, and a set of tumblers. Of these only a few remained when I entered upon the scene and they were used as ornaments in the drawing room. I liked the grand coat-of-arms with which they were heavily engraved. There were I don’t know how many quarterings, which my aunt used demurely to explain to me, and the supporters were fine and the crest emerging from a crown incredibly romantic. She was a simple old lady, of a meek and Christian disposition, but she had not, though married for more than thirty years to a modest parson with very little income beyond his stipend, forgotten that she was _hochwohlgeboren_. When a rich banker from London, with a name that in these days is famous in financial circles, took a neighbouring house for the summer holidays, though my uncle called on him (chiefly, I surmise, to get a subscription to the Additional Curates Society), she refused to do so because he was in trade. No one thought her a snob. It was accepted as perfectly reasonable. The banker had a little boy of my own age, and, I forget how, I became acquainted with him. I still remember the discussion that ensued when I asked if I might bring him to the vicarage; permission was reluctantly given me, but I was not allowed to go in return to his house. My aunt said I’d be wanting to go to the coal merchant’s next, and my uncle said:

“Evil communications corrupt good manners.”

The banker used to come to church every Sunday morning, and he always put half a sovereign in the plate, but if he thought his generosity made a good impression he was much mistaken. All Blackstable knew, but only thought him purse-proud.

Blackstable consisted of a long winding street that led to the sea, with little two-story houses, many of them residential but with a good many shops; and from this ran a certain number of short streets, recently built, that ended on one side in the country and on the other in the marshes. Round about the harbour was a congeries of narrow winding alleys. Colliers brought coal from Newcastle to Blackstable and the harbour was animated. When I was old enough to be allowed out by myself I used to spend hours wandering about there looking at the rough grimy men in their jerseys and watching the coal being unloaded.

It was at Blackstable that I first met Edward Driffield. I was fifteen and had just come back from school for the summer holidays. The morning after I got home I took a towel and bathing drawers and went down to the beach. The sky was unclouded and the air hot and bright, but the North Sea gave it a pleasant tang so that it was a delight just to live and breathe. In winter the natives of Blackstable walked down the empty street with a hurried gait, screwing themselves up in order to expose as little surface as possible to the bitterness of the east wind, but now they dawdled; they stood about in groups in the space between the Duke of Kent and the Bear and Key. You heard a hum of their East Anglian speech, drawling a little with an accent that may be ugly, but in which from old association I still find a leisurely charm. They were fresh-complexioned, with blue eyes and high cheek bones, and their hair was light. They had a clean, honest, and ingenuous look. I do not think they were very intelligent, but they were guileless. They looked healthy, and though not tall for the most part were strong and active. There was little wheeled traffic in Blackstable in those days and the groups that stood about the road chatting seldom had to move for anything but the doctor’s dogcart or the baker’s trap.

Passing the bank, I called in to say how-do-you-do to the manager, who was my uncle’s churchwarden, and when I came out met my uncle’s curate. He stopped and shook hands with me. He was walking with a stranger. He did not introduce me to him. He was a smallish man with a beard and he was dressed rather loudly in a bright brown knickerbocker suit, the breeches very tight, with navy blue stockings, black boots, and a billycock hat. Knickerbockers were uncommon then, at least in Blackstable, and being young and fresh from school I immediately set the fellow down as a cad. But while I chatted with the curate he looked at me in a friendly way, with a smile in his pale blue eyes. I felt that for two pins he would have joined in the conversation and I assumed a haughty demeanour. I was not going to run the risk of being spoken to by a chap who wore knickerbockers like a gamekeeper and I resented the familiarity of his good-humoured expression. I was myself faultlessly dressed in white flannel trousers, a blue blazer with the arms of my school on the breast pocket, and a black-and-white straw hat with a very wide brim. The curate said that he must be getting on (fortunately, for I never knew how to break away from a meeting in the street and would endure agonies of shyness while I looked in vain for an opportunity), but said that he would be coming up to the vicarage that afternoon and would I tell my uncle. The stranger nodded and smiled as we parted, but I gave him a stony stare. I supposed he was a summer visitor and in Blackstable we did not mix with the summer visitors. We thought London people vulgar. We said it was horrid to have all that rag-tag and bobtail down from town every year, but of course it was all right for the tradespeople. Even they, however, gave a faint sigh of relief when September came to an end and Blackstable sank back into its usual peace.

When I went home to dinner, my hair insufficiently dried and clinging lankily to my head, I remarked that I had met the curate and he was coming up that afternoon.

“Old Mrs. Shepherd died last night,” said my uncle in explanation.

The curate’s name was Galloway; he was a tall thin ungainly man with untidy black hair and a small sallow dark face. I suppose he was quite young, but to me he seemed middle-aged. He talked very quickly and gesticulated a great deal. This made people think him rather queer and my uncle would not have kept him but that he was very energetic, and my uncle, being extremely lazy, was glad to have someone to take so much work off his shoulders. After he had finished the business that had brought him to the vicarage Mr. Galloway came in to say how-do-you-do to my aunt and she asked him to stay to tea.

“Who was that you were with this morning?” I asked him as he sat down.

“Oh, that was Edward Driffield. I didn’t introduce him. I wasn’t sure if your uncle would wish you to know him.”

“I think it would be most undesirable,” said my uncle.

“Why, who is he? He’s not a Blackstable man, is he?”

“He was born in the parish,” said my uncle. “His father was old Miss Wolfe’s bailiff at Ferne Court. But they were chapel people.”

“He married a Blackstable girl,” said Mr. Galloway.

“In church, I believe,” said my aunt. “Is it true that she was a barmaid at the Railway Arms?”

“She looks as if she might have been something like that,” said Mr. Galloway, with a smile.

“Are they going to stay long?”

“Yes, I think so. They’ve taken one of those houses in that street where the Congregational chapel is,” said the curate.

At that time in Blackstable, though the new streets doubtless had names, nobody knew or used them.

“Is he coming to church?” asked my uncle.

“I haven’t actually talked to him about it yet,” answered Mr. Galloway. “He’s quite an educated man, you know.”

“I can hardly believe that,” said my uncle.

“He was at Haversham School, I understand, and he got any number of scholarships and prizes. He got a scholarship at Wadham, but he ran away to sea instead.”

“I’d heard he was rather a harum-scarum,” said my uncle.

“He doesn’t look much like a sailor,” I remarked.

“Oh, he gave up the sea many years ago. He’s been all sorts of things since then.”

“Jack of all trades and master of none,” said my uncle.

“Now, I understand, he’s a writer.”

“That won’t last long,” said my uncle.

I had never known a writer before; I was interested.

“What does he write?” I asked. “Books?”

“I believe so,” said the curate, “and articles. He had a novel published last spring. He’s promised to lend it me.”

“I wouldn’t waste my time on rubbish in your place,” said my uncle, who never read anything but the _Times_ and the _Guardian_.

“What’s it called?” I asked.

“He told me the title, but I forget it.”

“Anyhow, it’s quite unnecessary that you should know,” said my uncle. “I should very much object to your reading trashy novels. During your holidays the best thing you can do is to keep out in the open air. And you have a holiday task, I presume?”

I had. It was _Ivanhoe_. I had read it when I was ten, and the notion of reading it again and writing an essay on it bored me to distraction.

When I consider the greatness that Edward Driffield afterward achieved I cannot but smile as I remember the fashion in which he was discussed at my uncle’s table. When he died a little while ago and an agitation arose among his admirers to have him buried in Westminster Abbey the present incumbent at Blackstable, my uncle’s successor twice removed, wrote to the _Daily Mail_ pointing out that Driffield was born in the parish and not only had passed long years, especially the last twenty-five of his life, in the neighbourhood, but had laid there the scene of some of his most famous books; it was only becoming then that his bones should rest in the churchyard where under the Kentish elms his father and mother dwelt in peace. There was relief in Blackstable when, the Dean of Westminster having somewhat curtly refused the Abbey, Mrs. Driffield sent a dignified letter to the press in which she expressed her confidence that she was carrying out the dearest wishes of her dead husband in having him buried among the simple people he knew and loved so well. Unless the notabilities of Blackstable have very much changed since my day I do not believe they very much liked that phrase about “simple people,” but, as I afterward learnt, they had never been able to “abide” the second Mrs. Driffield.

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 got 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.

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 have 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 buttonhole, 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.”

VI