wanted to see him and she had to husband his strength. She was always afraid he’d do too much. It’s a wonderful thing if you come to think of it that she should have kept him alive and in possession of all his faculties to the age of eighty-four. I’ve been seeing a good deal of her since he died. She’s awfully lonely. After all, she devoted herself to looking after him for twenty-five years. Othello’s occupation, you know. I really feel sorry for her.”
“She’s still comparatively young. I dare say she’ll marry again.”
“Oh, no, she couldn’t do that. That would be dreadful.”
There was a slight pause while we sipped our brandy.
“You must be one of the few persons still alive who knew Driffield when he was unknown. You saw quite a lot of him at one time, didn’t you?”
“A certain amount. I was almost a small boy and he was a middle-aged man. We weren’t boon companions, you know.”
“Perhaps not, but you must know a great deal about him that other people don’t.”
“I suppose I do.”
“Have you ever thought of writing your recollections of him?”
“Good heavens, no!”
“Don’t you think you ought to? He was one of the greatest novelists of our day. The last of the Victorians. He was an enormous figure. His novels have as good a chance of surviving as any that have been written in the last hundred years.”
“I wonder. I’ve always thought them rather boring.”
Roy looked at me with eyes twinkling with laughter.
“How like you that is! Anyhow you must admit that you’re in the minority. I don’t mind telling you that I’ve read his novels not once or twice, but half a dozen times, and every time I read them I think they’re finer. Did you read the articles that were written about him at his death?”
“Some of them.”
“The consensus of opinion was absolutely amazing. I read every one.”
“If they all said the same thing, wasn’t that rather unnecessary?”
Roy shrugged his massive shoulders good-humouredly, but did not answer my question.
“I thought the
“I still think his novels rather boring.”
Roy smiled indulgently.
“Doesn’t it make you slightly uneasy to think that you disagree with everyone whose opinion matters?”
“Not particularly. I’ve been writing for thirty-five years now, and you can’t think how many geniuses I’ve seen acclaimed, enjoy their hour or two of glory, and vanish into obscurity. I wonder what’s happened to them. Are they dead, are they shut up in madhouses, are they hidden away in offices? I wonder if they furtively lend their books to the doctor and the maiden lady in some obscure village. I wonder if they are still great men in some Italian pension.”
“Oh, yes, they’re the flash in the pans. I’ve known them.”
“You’ve even lectured about them.”
“One has to. One wants to give them a leg up if one can and one knows they won’t amount to anything. Hang it all, one can afford to be generous. But after all, Driffield wasn’t anything like that. The collected edition of his works is in thirty-seven volumes and the last set that came up at Sotheby’s sold for seventy-eight pounds. That speaks for itself. His sales have increased steadily every year and last year was the best he ever had. You can take my word for that. Mrs. Driffield showed me his accounts last time I was down there. Driffield has come to stay all right.”
“Who can tell?”
“Well, you think you can,” replied Roy acidly.
I was not put out. I knew I was irritating him and it gave me a pleasant sensation.
“I think the instinctive judgments I formed when I was a boy were right. They told me Carlyle was a great writer and I was ashamed that I found the
“Oh, well, I don’t suppose anyone reads Pater now, and of course Meredith has gone all to pot and Carlyle was a pretentious windbag.”
“You don’t know how secure of immortality they all looked thirty years ago.”
“And have you never made mistakes?”
“One or two. I didn’t think half as much of Newman as I do now, and I thought a great deal more of the tinkling quatrains of Fitzgerald. I could not read Goethe’s
“And what did you think much of then that you think much of still?”
“Well,
