Cakes and Ale

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