“I was just asking myself,” I said, “who could possibly succeed Edward Driffield as the Grand Old Man of English Letters and you arrive to answer my question.”
He broke into a jovial laugh, but into his eyes came a quick look of suspicion.
“I don’t think there’s anybody,” he said.
“How about yourself?”
“Oh, my dear boy, I’m not fifty yet. Give me another twenty-five years.” He laughed, but his eyes held mine keenly. “I never know when you’re pulling my leg.” He looked down suddenly. “Of course one can’t help thinking about the future sometimes. All the people who are at the top of the tree now are anything from fifteen to twenty years older than me. They can’t last for ever, and when they’re gone who is there? Of course there’s Aldous; he’s a good deal younger than me, but he’s not very strong and I don’t believe he takes great care of himself. Barring accidents, by which I mean barring some genius who suddenly springs up and sweeps the board, I don’t quite see how in another twenty or twenty-five years I can help having the field pretty well to myself. It’s just a question of pegging away and living on longer than the others.”
Roy sank his virile bulk into one of my landlady’s armchairs and I offered him a whisky and soda.
“No, I never drink spirits before six o’clock,” he said. He looked about him. “Jolly, these digs are.”
“I know. What have you come to see me about?”
“I thought I’d better have a little chat with you about Mrs. Driffield’s invitation. It was rather difficult to explain over the telephone. The truth of the matter is that I’ve arranged to write Driffield’s life.”
“Oh! Why didn’t you tell me the other day?”
I felt friendly disposed toward Roy. I was happy to think that I had not misjudged him when I suspected that it was not merely for the pleasure of my company that he had asked me to luncheon.
“I hadn’t entirely made up my mind. Mrs. Driffield is very keen on my doing it. She’s going to help me in every way she can. She’s giving me all the material she has. She’s been collecting it for a good many years. It’s not an easy thing to do and of course I can’t afford not to do it well. But if I can make a pretty good job of it, it can’t fail to do me a lot of good. People have so much more respect for a novelist if he writes something serious now and then. Those critical works of mine were an awful sweat, and they sold nothing, but I don’t regret them for a moment. They’ve given me a position I could never have got without them.”
“I think it’s a very good plan. You’ve known Driffield more intimately than most people for the last twenty years.”
“I think I have. But of course he was over sixty when I first made his acquaintance. I wrote and told him how much I admired his books and he asked me to go and see him. But I know nothing about the early part of his life. Mrs. Driffield used to try to get him to talk about those days and she made very copious notes of all he said, and then there are diaries that he kept now and then, and of course a lot of the stuff in the novels is obviously autobiographical. But there are immense lacun?. I’ll tell you the sort of book I want to write, a sort of intimate life, with a lot of those little details that make people feel warm inside, you know, and then woven in with this a really exhaustive criticism of his literary work, not ponderous, of course, but although sympathetic, searching and … subtle. Naturally it wants doing, but Mrs. Driffield seems to think I can do it.”
“I’m sure you can,” I put in.
“I don’t see why not,” said Roy. “I am a critic, and I’m a novelist. It’s obvious that I have certain literary qualifications. But I can’t do anything unless everyone who can is willing to help me.”
I began to see where I came in. I tried to make my face look quite blank. Roy leaned forward.
“I asked you the other day if you were going to write anything about Driffield yourself and you said you weren’t. Can I take that as definite?”
“Certainly.”
“Then have you got any objection to giving me your material?”
“My dear boy, I haven’t got any.”
“Oh, that’s nonsense,” said Roy good-humouredly, with the tone of a doctor who is trying to persuade a child to have its throat examined. “When he was living at Blackstable you must have seen a lot of him.”
“I was only a boy then.”
“But you must have been conscious of the unusual experience. After all, no one could be for half an hour in Edward Driffield’s society without being impressed by his extraordinary personality. It must have been obvious even to a boy of sixteen, and you were probably more observant and sensitive than the average boy of that age.”
“I wonder if his personality would have seemed extraordinary without the reputation to back it up. Do you imagine that if you went down to a spa in the west of England as Mr. Atkins, a chartered accountant taking the waters for his liver, you would impress the people you met there as a man of immense character?”
“I imagine they’d soon realize that I was not quite the common or garden chartered accountant,” said Roy, with a smile that took from his remark any appearance of self-esteem.
“Well, all I can tell you is that what chiefly bothered me about Driffield in those days was that the knickerbocker suit he wore was dreadfully loud. We used to bicycle a lot together and it always made me feel a trifle uncomfortable to be seen with him.”
“It sounds comic now. What did he talk about?”
“I don’t know; nothing very much. He was rather keen on architecture, and he talked about farming, and if a pub looked nice he generally suggested stopping for five minutes and having a glass of bitter, and then he would talk to the landlord about the crops and the price of coal and things like that.”
I rambled on, though I could see by the look of Roy’s face that he was disappointed with me; he listened, but he was a trifle bored, and it struck me that when he was bored he looked peevish. But though I couldn’t remember that Driffield had ever said anything significant during those long rides of ours, I had a very acute recollection of the
