“Oh, you wouldn’t ’ave known them. Old Josiah Gann was her father. He was a wild one, too. He went for a soldier and when he come back he ’ad a wooden leg. He used to go out doing painting, but he was out of work more often than not. They lived in the next ’ouse to us in Rye Lane. Me an’ Rosie used to go to Sunday school together.”
“But she’s not as old as you are,” I said with the bluntness of my age.
“She’ll never see thirty again.”
Mary-Ann was a little woman with a snub nose and decayed teeth, but fresh-coloured, and I do not suppose she could hare been more than thirty-five.
“Rosie ain’t more than four or five years younger than me, whatever she may pretend she is. They tell me you wouldn’t know her now all dressed up and everything.”
“Is it true that she was a barmaid?” I asked.
“Yes, at the Railway Arms and then at the Prince of Wales’s Feathers at Haversham. Mrs. Reeves ’ad her to ’elp in the bar at the Railway Arms, but it got so bad she had to get rid of her.”
The Railway Arms was a very modest little public house just opposite the station of the London, Chatham & Dover Railway. It had a sort of sinister gaiety. On a winter’s night as you passed by you saw through the glass doors men lounging about the bar. My uncle very much disapproved of it, and had for years been trying to get its license taken away. It was frequented by the railway porters, colliers, and farm labourers. The respectable residents of Blackstable would have disdained to enter it and, when they wanted a glass of bitter, went to the Bear and Key or the Duke of Kent.
“Why, what did she do?” I asked, my eyes popping out of my head.
“What didn’t she do?” said Mary-Ann. “What d’you think your uncle would say if he caught me tellin’ you things like that? There wasn’t a man who come in to ’ave a drink that she didn’t carry on with. No matter who they was. She couldn’t stick to anybody, it was just one man after another. They tell me it was simply ’orrible. That was when it begun with Lord George. It wasn’t the sort of place he was likely to go to, he was too grand for that, but they say he went in accidental like one day when his train was late, and he saw her. And after that he was never out of the place, mixin’ with all them common rough people, and of course they all knew what he was there for, and him with a wife and three children. Oh, I was sorry for her! And the talk it made. Well, it got so Mrs. Reeves said she wasn’t going to put up with it another day and she gave her her wages and told her to pack her box and go. Good riddance to bad rubbish, that’s what I said.”
I knew Lord George very well. His name was George Kemp and the title by which he was always known had been given him ironically owing to his grand manner. He was our coal merchant, but he also dabbled in house property, and he owned a share in one or two colliers. He lived in a new brick house that stood in its own grounds and he drove his own trap. He was a stoutish man with a pointed beard, florid, with a high colour and bold blue eyes. Remembering him, I think he must have looked like some jolly rubicund merchant in an old Dutch picture. He was always very flashily dressed and when you saw him driving at a smart pace down the middle of the High Street in a fawn-coloured covert-coat with large buttons, his brown bowler on the side of his head and a red rose in his button hole, you could not but look at him. On Sunday he used to come to church in a lustrous topper and a frock coat. Everyone knew that he wanted to be made churchwarden, and it was evident that his energy would have made him useful, but my uncle said not in his time, and though Lord George as a protest went to chapel for a year my uncle remained obdurate. He cut him dead when he met him in the town. A reconciliation was effected and Lord George came to church again, but my uncle only yielded so far as to appoint him sidesman. The gentry thought him extremely vulgar and I have no doubt that he was vain and boastful. They complained of his loud voice and his strident laugh—when he was talking to somebody on one side of the street you heard every word he said from the other—and they thought his manners dreadful. He was much too friendly; when he talked to them it was as though he were not in trade at all; they said he was very pushing. But if he thought his hail-fellow-well-met air, his activity in public works, his open purse when subscriptions were needed for the annual regatta or for the harvest festival, his willingness to do anyone a good turn were going to break the barriers at Blackstable he was mistaken. His efforts at sociability were met with blank hostility.
I remember once that the doctor’s wife was calling on my aunt and Emily came in to tell my uncle that Mr. George Kemp would like to see him.
“But I heard the front door ring, Emily,” said my aunt.
“Yes’m, he came to the front door.”
There was a moment’s awkwardness. Everyone was at a loss to know how to deal with such an unusual occurrence, and even Emily, who knew who should come to the front door, who should go to the side door, and who to the back, looked a trifle flustered. My aunt, who was a gentle soul, I think felt honestly embarrassed that anyone should put himself in such a false position; but the doctor’s wife gave a little sniff of contempt. At last my uncle collected himself.
“Show him into the study, Emily,” he said. “I’ll come as soon as I’ve finished my tea.”
But Lord George remained exuberant, flashy, loud, and boisterous. He said the town was dead and he was going to wake it up. He was going to get the company to run excursion trains. He didn’t see why it shouldn’t become another Margate. And why shouldn’t they have a mayor? Ferne Bay had one.
“I suppose he thinks he’d be mayor himself,” said the people of Blackstable. They pursed their lips. “Pride goeth before a fall,” they said.
And my uncle remarked that you could take a horse to the water but you couldn’t make him drink.
I should add that I looked upon Lord George with the same scornful derision as everyone else. It outraged me that he should stop me in the street and call me by my Christian name and talk to me as though there were no social difference between us. He even suggested that I should play cricket with his sons, who were of about the same age as myself. But they went to the grammar school at Haversham and of course I couldn’t possibly have anything to do with them.
I was shocked and thrilled by what Mary-Ann told me, but I had difficulty in believing it. I had read too many novels and had learnt too much at school not to know a good deal about love, but I thought it was a matter that only concerned young people. I could not conceive that a man with a beard, who had sons as old as I, could have any feelings of that sort. I thought when you married all that was finished. That people over thirty should be in love seemed to me rather disgusting.
“You don’t mean to say they did anything?” I asked Mary-Ann.
“From what I hear there’s very little that Rosie Gann didn’t do. And Lord George wasn’t the only one.”
