Cakes and Ale

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 buttonhole, 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.”

“But, look here, why didn’t she have a baby?”

In the novels I had read whenever lovely woman stooped to folly she had a baby. The cause was put with infinite precaution, sometimes indeed suggested only by a row of asterisks, but the result was inevitable.

“More by good luck than by good management, I lay,” said Mary-Ann. Then she recollected herself and stopped drying the plates she was busy with. “It seems to me you know a lot more than you ought to,” she said.

“Of course I know,” I said importantly. “Hang it all, I’m practically grown up, aren’t I?”

“All I can tell you,” said Mary-Ann, “is that when Mrs. Reeves gave her the sack Lord George got her a job at the Prince of Wales’s Feathers at Haversham and he was always poppin’ over there in his trap. You can’t tell me the ale’s any different over there from what it is here.”

“Then why did Ted Driffield marry her?” I asked.

“Ask me another,” said Mary-Ann. “It was at the Feathers he saw her. I suppose he couldn’t get anyone else to marry him. No respectable girl would ’ave ’ad ’im.”

“Did he know about her?”

“You’d better ask him.”

I was silent. It was all very puzzling.

“What does she look like now?” asked Mary-Ann. “I never seen her since she married. I never even speak to ’er after I ’eard what was goin’ on at the Railway Arms.”

“She looks all right,” I said.

“Well, you ask