Chapter I: DO not know why the Driffields bothered about me unless it was from (1)

pure kindness of heart. I was a dull little boy, not very talkative, and if I amused Ted Driffield at all it must have been unconsciously. Perhaps he was tickled by my attitude of superiority. I was under the impression that it was condescension on my part to consort with the son of Miss Wolfe’s bailiff, and he what my uncle called a penny-a-liner; and when, perhaps with a trace of superciliousness, I asked him to lend me one of his books and he said it wouldn’t interest me I took him at his word and did not insist. After my uncle had once consented to my going out with the Driffields he made no further objection to my association with them. Sometimes we went for sails together, sometimes we went to some picturesque spot and Driffield painted a little water colour. I do not know if the English climate was better in those days or if it is only an illusion of youth, but I seem to remember that all through that summer the sunny days followed one another in an unbroken line. I began to feel a curious affection for the undulating, opulent, and gracious country. We went far afield, to one church after another, taking rubbings of brasses, knights in armour and ladies in stiff farthingales. Ted Driffield fired me with his own enthusiasm for this naïve pursuit and I rubbed with passion. I showed my uncle proudly the results of my industry, and I suppose he thought that whatever my company, I could not come to much harm when I was occupied in church. Mrs. Driffield used to remain in the churchyard while we were at work, not reading or sewing, but just mooning about; she seemed able to do nothing for an indefinite time without feeling bored. Sometimes I would go out and sit with her for a little on the grass. We chattered about my school, my friends there and my masters, about the people at Blackstable, and about nothing at all. She gratified me by calling me Mr. Ashenden. I think she was the first person who had ever done so and it made me feel grown up. I resented it vastly when people called me Master Willie. I thought it a ridiculous name for anyone to have. In fact I did not like either of my names and spent much time inventing others that would have suited me better. The ones I preferred were Roderic Ravensworth and I covered sheets of paper with this signature in a suitably dashing hand. I did not mind Ludovic Montgomery either.

I could not get over what Mary-Ann had told me about Mrs. Driffield. Though I knew theoretically what people did when they were married, and was capable of putting the facts in the bluntest language, I did not really understand it. I thought it indeed rather disgusting and I did not quite, quite believe it. After all, I was aware that the earth was round, but I _knew_ it was flat. Mrs. Driffield seemed so frank, her laugh was so open and simple, there was in her demeanour something so young and childlike, that I could not see her “going with” sailors and above all anyone so gross and horrible as Lord George. She was not at all the type of the wicked woman I had read of in novels. Of course I knew she wasn’t “good form” and she spoke with the Blackstable accent, she dropped an aitch now and then, and sometimes her grammar gave me a shock, but I couldn’t help liking her. I came to the conclusion that what Mary-Ann had told me was a pack of lies.

One day I happened to tell her that Mary-Ann was our cook.

“She says she lived next door to you in Rye Lane,” I added, quite prepared to hear Mrs. Driffield say that she had never even heard of her.

But she smiled and her blue eyes gleamed.

“That’s right. She used to take me to Sunday school. She used to have a rare job keeping me quiet. I heard she’d gone to service at the vicarage. Fancy her being there still! I haven’t seen her for donkey’s years. I’d like to see her again and have a chat about old days. Remember me to her, will you, and ask her to look in on her evening out. I’ll give her a cup of tea.”

I was taken aback at this. After all, the Driffields lived in a house that they were talking of buying and they had a “general.” It wouldn’t be at all the thing for them to have Mary-Ann to tea, and it would make it very awkward for me. They seemed to have no sense of the things one could do and the things one simply couldn’t. It never ceased to embarrass me, the way in which they talked of incidents in their past that I should have thought they would not dream of mentioning. I do not know that the people I lived among were pretentious in the sense of making themselves out to be richer or grander than they really were, but looking back it does seem to me that they lived a life full of pretences. They dwelt behind a mask of respectability. You never caught them in their shirt sleeves with their feet on the table. The ladies put on afternoon dresses and were not visible till then; they lived privately with rigid economy so that you could not drop in for a casual meal, but when they entertained their tables groaned with food. Though catastrophe overwhelmed the family, they held their heads high and ignored it. One of the sons might have married an actress, but they never referred to the calamity, and though the neighbours said it was dreadful, they took ostentatious care not to mention the theatre in the presence of the afflicted. We all knew that the wife of Major Greencourt who had taken the Three Gables was connected with trade, but neither she nor the major ever so much as hinted at the discreditable secret; and though we sniffed at them behind their backs, we were too polite even to mention crockery (the source of Mrs. Greencourt’s adequate income) in their presence. It was still not unheard of for an angry parent to cut off his son with a shilling or to tell his daughter (who like my own mother had married a solicitor) never to darken his doors again. I was used to all this and it seemed to me perfectly natural. What did shock me was to hear Ted Driffield speak of being a waiter in a restaurant in Holborn as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world. I knew he had run away to sea, that was romantic; I knew that boys, in books at all events, often did this and had thrilling adventures before they married a fortune and an earl’s daughter; but Ted Driffield had driven a cab at Maidstone and had been clerk in a booking office at Birmingham. Once when we bicycled past the Railway Arms, Mrs. Driffield mentioned quite casually, as though it were something that anyone might have done, that she had worked there for three years.

“It was my first place,” she said. “After that I went to the Feathers at Haversham. I only left there to get married.”

She laughed as though she enjoyed the recollection. I did not know what to say; I did not know which way to look; I blushed scarlet. Another time when we were going through Ferne Bay on our way back from a long excursion, it being a hot day and all of us thirsty, she suggested that we should go into the Dolphin and have a glass of beer. She began talking to the girl behind the bar and I was horrified to hear her remark that she had been in the business herself for five years. The landlord joined us and Ted Driffield offered him a drink, and Mrs. Driffield said that the barmaid must have a glass of port, and for some time they all chatted amiably about trade and tied houses and how the price of everything was going up. Meanwhile, I stood, hot and cold all over, and not knowing what to do with myself. As we went out Mrs. Driffield remarked:

“I took quite a fancy to that girl, Ted. She ought to do well for herself. As I said to her, it’s a hard life but a merry one. You do see a bit of what’s going on and if you play your cards right you ought to marry well. I noticed she had an engagement ring on, but she told me she just wore that because it gave the fellows a chance to tease her.”

Driffield laughed. She turned to me.

“I had a rare old time when I was a barmaid, but of course you can’t go on for ever. You have to think of your future.”

But a greater jolt awaited me. It was halfway through September and my holidays were drawing to an end. I was very full of the Driffields, but my desire to talk about them at home was snubbed by my uncle.

“We don’t want your friends pushed down our throats all day long,” said he. “There are other topics of conversation that are more suitable. But I do think that, as Ted Driffield was born in the parish and is seeing you almost every day, he might come to church occasionally.”

One day I told Driffield: “My uncle wants you to come to church.”

“All right. Let’s go to church next Sunday night, Rosie.”

“I don’t mind,” she said.

I told Mary-Ann they were going. I sat in the vicarage pew just behind the squire’s and I could not look round, but I was conscious by the behaviour of my neighbours on the other side of the aisle that they were there, and as soon as I had a chance next day I asked Mary-Ann if she had seen them.

“I see ’er all right,” said Mary-Ann grimly.

“Did you speak to her afterward?”

“Me?” She suddenly burst into anger. “You get out of my kitchen. What d’you want to come bothering me all day long? How d’you expect me to do my work with you getting in my way all the time?”

“All right,” I said. “Don’t get in a wax.”

“I don’t know what your uncle’s about lettin’ you go all over the place with the likes of them. All them flowers in her ’at. I wonder she ain’t ashamed to show her face. Now run along, I’m busy.”

I did not know why Mary-Ann was so cross. I did not mention Mrs. Driffield again. But two or three days later I happened to go into the kitchen to get something I wanted. There were two kitchens at the vicarage, a small one in which the cooking was done and a large one, built I suppose for a time when country clergymen had large families and gave grand dinners to the surrounding gentry, where Mary-Ann sat and sewed when her day’s work was over. We had cold supper at eight so that after tea she had little to do. It was getting on for seven and the day was drawing in. It was Emily’s evening out and I expected to find Mary-Ann alone, but as I went along the passage I heard voices and the sound of laughter. I supposed Mary-Ann had someone in to see her. The lamp was lit, but it had a thick green shade and the kitchen was almost in darkness. I saw a teapot and cups on the table. Mary-Ann was having a late cup of tea with her friend. The conversation stopped as I opened the door, then I heard a voice.

“Good-evening.”

With a start I saw that Mary-Ann’s friend was Mrs. Driffield. Mary-Ann laughed a little at my surprise.

“Rosie Gann dropped in to have a cup of tea with me,” she said.

“We’ve been having a talk about old times.”

Mary-Ann was a little shy at my finding her thus, but not half so shy as I. Mrs. Driffield gave me that childlike, mischievous smile of hers; she was perfectly at her ease. For some reason I noticed her dress. I suppose because I had never seen her so grand before. It was of pale blue cloth, very tight at the waist, with high sleeves and a long skirt with a flounce at the bottom. She wore a large black straw hat with a great quantity of roses and leaves and bows on it. It was evidently the hat she had worn in church on Sunday.

“I thought if I went on waiting till Mary-Ann came to see me I’d have to wait till doomsday, so I thought the best thing I could do was to come and see her myself.”

Mary-Ann grinned self-consciously, but did not look displeased. I asked for whatever it was I wanted and as quickly as I could left them. I went out into the garden and wandered about aimlessly. I walked down to the road and looked over the gate. The night had fallen. Presently I saw a man strolling along. I paid no attention to him, but he passed backward and forward and it looked as though he were waiting for someone. At first I thought it might be Ted Driffield and I was on the point of going out when he stopped and lit a pipe; I saw it was Lord George. I wondered what he was doing there and at the same moment it struck me that he was waiting for Mrs. Driffield. My heart began to beat fast, and though I was hidden by the darkness I withdrew into the shade of the bushes. I waited a few minutes longer, then I saw the side door open and Mrs. Driffield let out by Mary-Ann. I heard her footsteps on the gravel. She came to the gate and opened it. It opened with a little click. At the sound Lord George stepped across the road and before she could come out slipped in. He took her in his arms and gave her a great hug. She gave a little laugh.

“Take care of my hat,” she whispered.

I was not more than three feet away from them and I was terrified lest they should notice me. I was so ashamed for them. I was trembling with agitation. For a minute he held her in his arms.

“What about the garden?” he said, still in a whisper.

“No, there’s that boy. Let’s go in the fields.”

They went out by the gate, he with his arm round her waist, and were lost in the night. Now I felt my heart pounding against my chest so that I could hardly breathe. I was so astonished at what I had seen that I could not think sensibly. I would have given anything to be able to tell someone, but it was a secret and I must keep it. I was thrilled with the importance it gave me. I walked slowly up to the house and let myself in by the side door. Mary-Ann, hearing it open, called me.

“Is that you, Master Willie?”

“Yes.”

I looked in the kitchen. Mary-Ann was putting the supper on a tray to take it into the dining room.

“I wouldn’t say anything to your uncle about Rosie Gann ’avin’ been here,” she said.

“Oh, no.”

“It was a surprisement to me. When I ’eared a knock at the side door and opened it and saw Rosie standing there, you could ’ave knocked me down with a feather. ‘Mary-Ann,’ she says, an’ before I knew what she was up to she was kissing me all over me face. I couldn’t but ask ’er in and when she was in I couldn’t but ask her to ’ave a nice cup of tea.”

Mary-Ann was anxious to excuse herself. After all she had said of Mrs. Driffield it must seem strange to me that I should find them sitting there together chatting away and laughing. I did not want to crow.

“She’s not so bad, is she?” I said.

Mary-Ann smiled. Notwithstanding her black decayed teeth there was in her smile something sweet and touching.

“I don’t ’ardly know what it is, but there’s somethin’ you can’t ’elp likin’ about her. She was ’ere the best part of an hour and I will say that for ’er, she never once give ’erself airs. And she told me with ’er own lips the material of that dress she ’ad on cost thirteen and eleven a yard and I believe it. She remembers everything, how I used to brush her ’air for her when she was a tiny tot and how I used to make her wash her little ’ands before tea. You see, sometimes her mother used to send ’er in to ’ave her tea with us. She was as pretty as a picture in them days.”

Mary-Ann looked back into the past and her funny crumpled face grew wistful.

“Oh, well,” she said after a pause, “I dare say she’s been no worse than plenty of others if the truth was only known. She ’ad more temptation than most, and I dare say a lot of them as blame her would ’ave been no better than what she was if they’d ’ad the opportunity.”

VIII

THE WEATHER broke suddenly; it grew chilly and heavy rain fell. It put an end to our excursions. I was not sorry, for I did not know how I could look Mrs. Driffield in the face now that I had seen her meeting with George Kemp. I was not so much shocked as astonished. I could not understand how it was possible for her to like being kissed by an old man, and the fantastic notion passed through my mind, filled with the novels I had read, that somehow Lord George held her in his power and forced her by his knowledge of some fearful secret to submit to his loathsome embraces. My imagination played with terrible possibilities. Bigamy, murder, and forgery. Very few villains in books failed to hold the threat of exposure of one of these crimes over some hapless female. Perhaps Mrs. Driffield had backed a bill; I never could quite understand what this meant, but I knew that the consequences were disastrous. I toyed with the fancy of her anguish (the long sleepless nights when she sat at her window in her nightdress, her long fair hair hanging to her knees, and watched hopelessly for the dawn) and saw myself (not a boy of fifteen with sixpence a week pocket money, but a tall man with a waxed moustache and muscles of steel in faultless evening dress) with a happy blend of heroism and dexterity rescuing her from the toils of the rascally blackmailer. On the other hand, it had not looked as though she had yielded quite unwillingly to Lord George’s fondling and I could not get out of my ears the sound of her laugh. It had a note that I had never heard before. It gave me a queer feeling of breathlessness.

During the rest of my holidays I only saw the Driffields once more. I met them by chance in the town and they stopped and spoke to me. I suddenly felt very shy again, but when I looked at Mrs. Driffield I could not help blushing with embarrassment, for there was nothing in her countenance that indicated a guilty secret. She looked at me with those soft blue eyes of hers in which there was a child’s playful naughtiness. She often held her mouth a little open, as though it were just going to break into a smile, and her lips were full and red. There was honesty and innocence in her face and an ingenuous frankness and though then I could not have expressed this, I felt it quite strongly. If I had put it into words at all I think I should have said: She looks as straight as a die. It was impossible that she could be “carrying on” with Lord George. There must be an explanation; I did not believe what my eyes had seen.

Then the day came when I had to go back to school. The carter had taken my trunk and I walked to the station by myself. I had refused to let my aunt see me off, thinking it more manly to go alone, but I felt rather low as I walked down the street. It was a small branch line to Tercanbury and the station was at the other end of the town near the beach. I took my ticket and settled myself in the corner of a third-class carriage. Suddenly I heard a voice: “There he is”; and Mr. and Mrs. Driffield bustled gaily up.

“We thought we must come and see you off,” she said. “Are you feeling miserable?”

“No, of course not.”

“Oh, well, it won’t last long. We’ll have no end of a time when you come back for Christmas. Can you skate?”

“No.”

“I can. I’ll teach you.”

Her high spirits cheered me, and at the same time the thought that they had come to the station to say good-bye to me gave me a lump in my throat. I tried hard not to let the emotion I felt appear on my face.

“I expect I shall be playing a lot of football this term,” I said. “I ought to get into the second fifteen.”

She looked at me with kindly shining eyes, smiling with her full red lips. There was something in her smile I had always rather liked, and her voice seemed almost to tremble with a laugh or a tear. For one horrible moment I was afraid that she was going to kiss me. I was scared out of my wits. She talked on, she was mildly facetious as grown-up people are with schoolboys, and Driffield stood there without saying anything. He looked at me with a smile in his eyes and pulled his beard. Then the guard blew a cracked whistle and waved a red flag. Mrs. Driffield took my hand and shook it. Driffield came forward.

“Good-bye,” he said. “Here’s something for you.”

He pressed a tiny packet into my hand and the train steamed off. When I opened it I found that it was two half-crowns wrapped in a piece of toilet paper. I blushed to the roots of my hair. I was glad enough to have an extra five shillings, but the thought that Ted Driffield had dared to give me a tip filled me with rage and humiliation. I could not possibly accept anything from him. It was true that I had bicycled with him and sailed with him, but he wasn’t a sahib (I had got that from Major Greencourt) and it was an insult to me to give me five shillings. At first I thought of returning the money without a word, showing by my silence how outraged I was at the solecism he had committed, then I composed in my head a dignified and frigid letter in which I thanked him for his generosity, but said that he must see how impossible it was for a gentleman to accept a tip from someone who was practically a stranger. I thought it over for two or three days and every day it seemed more difficult to me to part with the two half-crowns. I felt sure that Driffield had meant it kindly, and of course he was very bad form and didn’t know about things; it would be rather hard to hurt his feelings by sending the money back, and finally I spent it. But I assuaged my wounded pride by not writing to thank Driffield for his gift.

When Christmas came, however, and I went back to Blackstable for the holidays, it was the Driffields I was most eager to see. In that stagnant little place they alone seemed to have a connection with the outside world which already was beginning to touch my daydreams with anxious curiosity. But I could not overcome my shyness enough to go to their house and call, and I hoped that I should meet them in the town. But the weather was dreadful, a boisterous wind whistled down the street, piercing you to the bone, and the few women who had an errand were swept along by their full skirts like fishing boats in half a gale. The cold rain scudded in sudden squalls and the sky, which in summer had enclosed the friendly country so snugly, now was a great pall that pressed upon the earth with sullen menace. There was small hope of meeting the Driffields by chance and at last I took my courage in both hands and one day after tea slipped out. As far as the station the road was pitch dark, but there the street lamps, few and dim, made it easier to keep to the pavement. The Driffields lived in a little two-story house in a side street; it was of dingy yellow brick and had a bow window. I knocked and presently a little maid opened the door; I asked if Mrs. Driffield was in. She gave me an uncertain look and, saying she would go and see, left me standing in the passage. I had already heard voices in the next room, but they were stilled as she opened the door and, entering, shut it behind her. I had a faint impression of mystery; in the houses of my uncle’s friends, even if there was no fire and the gas had to be lit as you went in, you were shown into the drawing room when you called. But the door was opened and Driffield came out. There was only a speck of light in the passage and at first he could not see who it was; but in an instant he recognized me.

“Oh, it’s you. We wondered when we were going to see you.” Then he called out: “Rosie, it’s young Ashenden.”

There was a cry and before you could say knife Mrs. Driffield had come into the passage and was shaking my hands.

“Come in, come in. Take off your coat. Isn’t it awful, the weather? You must be perishing.”

She helped me with my coat and took off my muffler and snatched my cap out of my hand and drew me into the room. It was hot and stuffy, a tiny room full of furniture, with a fire burning in the grate; they had gas there, which we hadn’t at the vicarage, and the three burners in round globes of frosted glass filled the room with harsh light. The air was gray with tobacco smoke. At first, dazzled and then taken aback by my effusive welcome, I did not see who the two men were who got up as I came in. Then I saw they were the curate, Mr. Galloway, and Lord George Kemp. I fancied that the curate shook my hand with constraint.

“How are you? I just came in to return some books that Mr. Driffield had lent me and Mrs. Driffield very kindly asked me to stay to tea.”

I felt rather than saw the quizzical look that Driffield gave him. He said something about the mammon of unrighteousness, which I recognized as a quotation, but did not gather the sense of. Mr. Galloway laughed.

“I don’t know about that,” he said. “What about the publicans and sinners?”

I thought the remark in very bad taste, but I was immediately seized upon by Lord George. There was no constraint about him.

“Well, young fellow, home for the holidays? My word, what a big chap you’re growing.”

I shook hands with him rather coldly. I wished I had not come.

“Let me give you a nice strong cup of tea,” said Mrs. Driffield.

“I’ve already had tea.”

“Have some more,” said Lord George, speaking as though he owned the place (that was just like him). “A big fellow like you can always tuck away another piece of bread and butter and jam and Mrs. D. will cut you a slice with her own fair hands.”

The tea things were still on the table and they were sitting round it. A chair was brought up for me and Mrs. Driffield gave me a piece of cake.

“We were just trying to persuade Ted to sing us a song,” said Lord George. “Come on, Ted.”

“Sing, ‘All Through Stickin’ to a Soljer,’ Ted,” said Mrs. Driffield. “I love that.”

“No, sing ‘First We Mopped the Floor with Him.’”

“I’ll sing ’em both if you’re not careful,” said Driffield.

He took his banjo, which was lying on the top of the cottage piano, tuned it, and began to sing. He had a rich baritone voice. I was quite used to people singing songs. When there was a tea party at the vicarage, or I went to one at the major’s or the doctor’s, people always brought their music with them. They left it in the hall, so that it should not seem that they wanted to be asked to play or sing; but after tea the hostess asked them if they had brought it. They shyly admitted that they had, and if it was at the vicarage I was sent to fetch it. Sometimes a young lady would say that she had quite given up playing and hadn’t brought anything with her, and then her mother would break in and say that _she_ had brought it. But when they sang it was not comic songs; it was “I’ll Sing Thee Songs of Araby,” or “Good-Night, Beloved,” or “Queen of My Heart.” Once at the annual concert at the Assembly Rooms, Smithson, the draper, had sung a comic song, and though the people at the back of the hall had applauded a great deal, the gentry had seen nothing funny in it. Perhaps there wasn’t. Anyhow, before the next concert he was asked to be a little more careful about what he sang (“Remember there are ladies present, Mr. Smithson”) and so gave “The Death of Nelson.” The next ditty that Driffield sang had a chorus and the curate and Lord George joined in lustily. I heard it a good many times afterward, but I can only remember four lines:

_First we mopped the floor with him;_
_Dragged him up and down the stairs;_
_Then we lugged him round the room,_
_Under tables, over chairs._

When it was finished, assuming my best company manners, I turned to Mrs. Driffield.

“Don’t you sing?” I asked.

“I do, but it always turns the milk, so Ted doesn’t encourage me.”

Driffield put down his banjo and lit a pipe.

“Well, how’s the old book getting along, Ted?” said Lord George heartily.

“Oh, all right. I’m working away, you know.”

“Good old Ted and his books,” Lord George laughed. “Why don’t you settle down and do something respectable for a change? I’ll give you a job in my office.”

“Oh, I’m all right.”

“You let him be, George,” said Mrs. Driffield. “He likes writing, and what I say is, as long as it keeps him happy why shouldn’t he?”

“Well, I don’t pretend to know anything about books,” began George Kemp.

“Then don’t talk about them,” interrupted Driffield with a smile.

“I don’t think anyone need be ashamed to have written _Fairhaven_,” said Mr. Galloway, “and I don’t care what the critics said.”

“Well, Ted, I’ve known you since I was a boy and _I_ couldn’t read it, try as I would.”

“Oh, come on, we don’t want to start talking about books,” said Mrs. Driffield. “Sing us another song, Ted.”

“I must be going,” said the curate. He turned to me. “We might walk along together. Have you got anything for me to read, Driffield?”

Driffield pointed to a pile of new books that were heaped up on a table in the corner.

“Take your pick.”

“By Jove, what a lot!” I said, looking at them greedily.

“Oh, it’s all rubbish. They’re sent down for review.”

“What d’you do with them?”

“Take ’em into Tercanbury and sell ’em for what they’ll fetch. It all helps to pay the butcher.”

When we left, the curate and I, he with three or four books under his arm, he asked me:

“Did you tell your uncle you were coming to see the Driffields?”

“No, I just went out for a walk and it suddenly occurred to me that I might look in.”

This of course was some way from the truth, but I did not care to tell Mr. Galloway that, though I was practically grown up, my uncle realized the fact so little that he was quite capable of trying to prevent me from seeing people he objected to.

“Unless you have to I wouldn’t say anything about it in your place. The Driffields are perfectly all right, but your uncle doesn’t quite approve of them.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s such rot.”

“Of course they’re rather common, but he doesn’t write half badly, and when you think what he came from it’s wonderful that he writes at all.”

I was glad to know how the land lay. Mr. Galloway did not wish my uncle to know that he was on friendly terms with the Driffields. I could feel sure at all events that he would not give me away.

The patronizing manner in which my uncle’s curate spoke of one who has been now so long recognized as one of the greatest of the later Victorian novelists must arouse a smile; but it was the manner in which he was generally spoken of at Blackstable. One day we went to tea at Mrs. Greencourt’s, who had staying with her a cousin, the wife of an Oxford don, and we had been told that she was very cultivated. She was a Mrs. Encombe, a little woman with an eager wrinkled face; she surprised us very much because she wore her gray hair short and a black serge skirt that only just came down below the tops of her square-toed boots. She was the first example of the New Woman that had even been seen in Blackstable. We were staggered and immediately on the defensive, for she looked intellectual and it made us feel shy. (Afterward we all scoffed at her, and my uncle said to my aunt: “Well, my dear, I’m thankful you’re not clever, at least I’ve been spared that”; and my aunt in a playful mood put my uncle’s slippers which were warming for him by the fire over her boots and said: “Look, I’m the new woman.” And then we all said: “Mrs. Greencourt is very funny; you never know what she’ll do next. But of course she isn’t quite quite.” We could hardly forget that her father made china and that her grandfather had been a factory hand.)

But we all found it very interesting to hear Mrs. Encombe talk of the people she knew. My uncle had been at Oxford, but everyone he asked about seemed to be dead. Mrs. Encombe knew Mrs. Humphry Ward and admired _Robert Elsmere_. My uncle considered it a scandalous work, and he was surprised that Mr. Gladstone, who at least called himself a Christian, had found a good word to say for it. They had quite an argument about it. My uncle said he thought it would unsettle people’s opinions and give them all sorts of ideas that they were much better without. Mrs. Encombe answered that he wouldn’t think that if he knew Mrs. Humphry Ward. She was a woman of the very highest character, a niece of Mr. Matthew Arnold, and whatever you might think of the book itself (and she, Mrs. Encombe, was quite willing to admit that there were parts which had better have been omitted) it was quite certain that she had written it from the very highest motives. Mrs. Encombe knew Miss Broughton too. She was of very good family and it was strange that she wrote the books she did.

“I don’t see any harm in them,” said Mrs. Hayforth, the doctor’s wife. “I enjoy them, especially _Red as a Rose is She_.”

“Would you like your girls to read them?” asked Mrs. Encombe.

“Not just yet perhaps,” said Mrs. Hayforth. “But when they’re married I should have no objection.”

“Then it might interest you to know,” said Mrs. Encombe, “that when I was in Florence last Easter I was introduced to Ouida.”

“That’s quite another matter,” returned Mrs. Hayforth. “I can’t believe that any lady would read a book by Ouida.”

“I read one out of curiosity,” said Mrs. Encombe. “I must say, it’s more what you’d expect from a Frenchman than from an English gentlewoman.”

“Oh, but I understand she isn’t really English. I’ve always heard her real name is Mademoiselle de la Ramée.”

It was then that Mr. Galloway mentioned Edward Driffield.

“You know we have an author living here,” he said.

“We’re not very proud of him,” said the major. “He’s the son of old Miss Wolfe’s bailiff and he married a barmaid.”

“Can he write?” asked Mrs. Encombe.

“You can tell at once that he’s not a gentleman,” said the curate, “but when you consider the disadvantages he’s had to struggle against it’s rather remarkable that he should write as well as he does.”

“He’s a friend of Willie’s,” said my uncle.

Everyone looked at me, and I felt very uncomfortable.

“They bicycled together last summer, and after Willie had gone back to school I got one of his books from the library to see what it was like. I read the first volume and then I sent it back. I wrote a pretty stiff letter to the librarian and I was glad to hear that he’d withdrawn it from circulation. If it had been my own property I should have put it promptly in the kitchen stove.”

“I looked through one of his books myself,” said the doctor. “It interested me because it was set in this neighbourhood and I recognized some of the people. But I can’t say I liked it; I thought it unnecessarily coarse.”

“I mentioned that to him,” said Mr. Galloway, “and he said the men in the colliers that run up to Newcastle and the fishermen and farm hands don’t behave like ladies and gentlemen and don’t talk like them.”

“But why write about people of that character?” said my uncle.

“That’s what I say,” said Mrs. Hayforth. “We all know that there are coarse and wicked and vicious people in the world, but I don’t see what good it does to write about them.”

“I’m not defending him,” said Mr. Galloway. “I’m only telling you what explanation he gives himself. And then of course he brought up Dickens.”

“Dickens is quite different,” said my uncle. “I don’t see how anyone can object to the _Pickwick Papers_.”

“I suppose it’s a matter of taste,” said my aunt. “I always found Dickens very coarse. I don’t want to read about people who drop their aitches. I must say I’m very glad the weather’s so bad now and Willie can’t take any more rides with Mr. Driffield. I don’t think he’s quite the sort of person he ought to associate with.”

Both Mr. Galloway and I looked down our noses.

IX

AS OFTEN as the mild Christmas gaieties of Blackstable allowed me I went to the Driffields’ little house next door to the Congregational chapel. I always found Lord George and often Mr. Galloway. Our conspiracy of silence had made us friends and when we met at the vicarage or in the vestry after church we looked at one another archly. We did not talk about our secret, but we enjoyed it; I think it gave us both a good deal of satisfaction to know that we were making a fool of my uncle. But once it occurred to me that George Kemp, meeting my uncle in the street, might remark casually that he had been seeing a lot of me at the Driffields’.

“What about Lord George?” I said to Mr. Galloway.

“Oh, I made that all right.”

We chuckled. I began to like Lord George. At first I was very cold with him and scrupulously polite, but he seemed so unconscious of the social difference between us that I was forced to conclude that my haughty courtesy failed to put him in his place. He was always cordial, breezy, even boisterous; he chaffed me in his common way and I answered him back with schoolboy wit; we made the others laugh and this disposed me kindly toward him. He was for ever bragging about the great schemes he had in mind, but he took in good part my jokes at the expense of his grandiose imaginations. It amused me to hear him tell stories about the swells of Blackstable that made them look foolish and when he mimicked their oddities I roared with laughter. He was blatant and vulgar and the way he dressed was always a shock to me (I had never been to Newmarket nor seen a trainer, but that was my idea of how a Newmarket trainer dressed) and his table manners were offensive, but I found myself less and less affronted by him. He gave me the _Pink ’Un_ every week and I took it home, carefully tucked away in my great-coat pocket, and read it in my bedroom.

I never went to the Driffields’ till after tea at the vicarage, but I always managed to make a second tea when I got there. Afterward Ted Driffield sang comic songs, accompanying himself sometimes on the banjo and sometimes on the piano. He would sing, peering at the music with his rather short-sighted eyes, for an hour at a time; there was a smile on his lips and he liked us all to join in the chorus. We played whist. I had learned the game when I was a child and my uncle and aunt and I used to play at the vicarage during the long winter evenings. My uncle always took dummy, and though of course we played for love, when my aunt and I lost I used to retire under the dining room table and cry. Ted Driffield did not play cards, he said he had no head for them, and when we started a game he would sit down by the fire and, pencil in hand, read one of the books that had been sent down to him from London to review. I had never played with three people before and of course I did not play well, but Mrs. Driffield had a natural card sense. Her movements as a rule were rather deliberate, but when it came to playing cards she was quick and alert. She played the rest of us right off our heads. Ordinarily she did not speak very much and then slowly, but when, after a hand was played, she took the trouble good-humouredly to point out to me my mistakes, she was not only lucid but voluble. Lord George chaffed her as he chaffed everybody; she would smile at his banter, for she very seldom laughed, and sometimes make a neat retort. They did not behave like lovers, but like familiar friends, and I should have quite forgotten what I had heard about them and what I had seen but that now and then she gave him a look that embarrassed me. Her eyes rested on him quietly, as though he were not a man but a chair or a table, and in them was a mischievous, childlike smile. Then I would notice that his face seemed suddenly to swell and he moved uneasily in his chair. I looked quickly at the curate, afraid that he would notice something, but he was intent on the cards or else was lighting his pipe.

The hour or two I spent nearly every day in that hot, poky, smoke-laden room passed like lightning, and as the holidays drew nearer to their end I was seized with dismay at the thought that I must spend the next three months dully at school.

“I don’t know what we shall do without you,” said Mrs. Driffield. “We shall have to play dummy.”

I was glad that my going would break up the game. While I was doing prep I did not want to think that they were sitting in that little room and enjoying themselves just as if I did not exist.

“How long do you get at Easter?” asked Mr. Galloway.

“About three weeks.”

“We’ll have a lovely time then,” said Mrs. Driffield. “The weather ought to be all right. We can ride in the mornings and then after tea we’ll play whist. You’ve improved a lot. If we play three or four times a week during your Easter holidays you won’t need to be afraid to play with anybody.”

X

BUT THE term came to an end at last. I was in high spirits when once more I got out of the train at Blackstable. I had grown a little and I had had a new suit made at Tercanbury, blue serge and very smart, and I had bought a new tie. I meant to go and see the Driffields immediately I had swallowed my tea and I was full of hope that the carrier would have brought my box in time for me to put the new suit on. It made me look quite grown up. I had already begun putting vaseline on my upper lip every night to make my moustache grow. On my way through the town I looked down the street in which the Driffields lived in the hope of seeing them. I should have liked to go in and say how-do-you-do, but I knew that Driffield wrote in the morning and Mrs. Driffield was not “presentable.” I had all sorts of exciting things to tell them. I had won the hundred-yard race in the sports and I had been second in the hurdles. I meant to have a shot for the history prize in the summer and I was going to swot up my English history during the holidays. Though there was an east wind blowing, the sky was blue and there was a feeling of spring in the air. The High Street, with its colours washed clean by the wind and its lines sharp as though drawn with a new pen, looked like a picture by Samuel Scott, quiet and naïve and cosy: now, looking back; then it looked like nothing but High Street, Blackstable. When I came to the railway bridge I noticed that two or three houses were being built.

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

In the fields beyond little white lambs were gambolling. The elm trees were just beginning to turn green. I let myself in by the side door. My uncle was sitting in his armchair by the fire reading the _Times_. I shouted to my aunt and she came downstairs, a pink spot from the excitement of seeing me on each of her withered cheeks, and threw her thin old arms round my neck. She said all the right things.

“How you’ve grown!” and “Good gracious me, you’ll be getting a moustache soon!”

I kissed my uncle on his bald forehead and I stood in front of the fire, with my legs well apart and my back to it, and was extremely grown up and rather condescending. Then I went upstairs to say how-do-you-do to Emily, and into the kitchen to shake hands with Mary-Ann, and out into the garden to see the gardener.

When I sat down hungrily to dinner and my uncle carved the leg of mutton I asked my aunt:

“Well, what’s happened at Blackstable since I was here?”

“Nothing very much. Mrs. Greencourt went down to Mentone for six weeks, but she came back a few days ago. The major had an attack of gout.”

“And your friends the Driffields have bolted,” added my uncle.

“They’ve done what?” I cried.

“Bolted. They took their luggage away one night and just went up to London. They’ve left bills all over the place. They hadn’t paid their rent and they hadn’t paid for their furniture. They owed Harris the butcher the best part of thirty pounds.”

“How awful,” I said.

“That’s bad enough,” said my aunt, “but it appears they hadn’t even paid the wages of the maid they had for three months.”

I was flabbergasted. I thought I felt a little sick.

“I think in future,” said my uncle, “you would be wiser not to consort with people whom your aunt and I don’t think proper associates for you.”

“One can’t help feeling sorry for all those tradesmen they cheated,” said my aunt.

“It serves them right,” said my uncle. “Fancy giving credit to people like that! I should have thought anyone could see they were nothing but adventurers.”

“I always wonder why they came down here at all.”

“They just wanted to show off, and I suppose they thought as people knew who they were here it would be easier to get things on credit.”

I did not think this quite reasonable, but was too much crushed to argue.

As soon as I had the chance I asked Mary-Ann what she knew of the incident. To my surprise she did not take it at all in the same way as my uncle and aunt. She giggled.

“They let everyone in proper,” she said. “They was as free as you like with their money and everyone though they ’ad plenty. It was always the best end of the neck for them at the butcher’s and when they wanted a steak nothing would do but the undercut. Asparagus and grapes and I don’t know what all. They ran up bills in every shop in the town. I don’t know ’ow people can be such fools.”

But it was evidently of the tradesmen she was speaking and not of the Driffields.

“But how did they manage to bunk without anyone knowing?” I asked.

“Well, that’s what everybody’s askin’. They do say it was Lord George ’elped them. How did they get their boxes to the station, I ask you, if ’e didn’t take them in that there trap of ’is?”

“What does he say about it?”

“He says ’e knows no more about it than the man in the moon. There was a rare to-do all over the town when they found out the Driffields had shot the moon. It made me laugh. Lord George says ’e never knew they was broke, and ’e makes out ’e was as surprised as anybody. But I for one don’t believe a word of it. We all knew about ’im and Rosie before she was married, and between you and me and the gatepost I don’t know that it ended there. They do say they was seen walkin’ about the fields together last summer and ’e was in and out of the ’ouse pretty near every day.”

“How did people find out?”

“Well, it’s like this. They ’ad a girl there and they told ’er she could go ’ome and spend the night with her mother, but she wasn’t to be back later than eight o’clock in the morning. Well, when she come back she couldn’t get in. She knocked and she rung but nobody answered, and so she went in next door and asked the lady there what she’d better do, and the lady said she’d better go to the police station. The sergeant come back with ’er and ’e knocked and ’e rung, but ’_e_ couldn’t get no answer. Then he asked the girl ’ad they paid ’er ’er wages, and she said no, not for three months, and then ’e said, you take my word for it, they’ve shot the moon, that’s what they’ve done. An’ when they come to get inside they found they’d took all their clothes, an’ their books—they say as Ted Driffield ’ad a rare lot of books—an’ every blessed thing that belonged to them.”

“And has nothing been heard of them since?”

“Well, not exactly, but when they’d been gone about a week the girl got a letter from London, and when she opened it there was no letter or anything, but just a postal order for ’er wages. An’ if you ask me, I call that very ’andsome not to do a poor girl out of her wages.”

I was much more shocked than Mary-Ann. I was a very respectable youth. The reader cannot have failed to observe that I accepted the conventions of my class as if they were the laws of Nature, and though debts on the grand scale in books had seemed to me romantic, and duns and money lenders were familiar figures to my fancy, I could not but think it mean and paltry not to pay the tradesmen’s books. I listened with confusion when people talked in my presence of the Driffields, and when they spoke of them as my friends I said: “Hang it all, I just knew them”; and when they asked: “Weren’t they fearfully common?” I said: “Well, after all they didn’t exactly suggest the Vere de Veres, you know.” Poor Mr. Galloway was dreadfully upset.