“Well, that may be, but it’s not a very pretty habit for a distinguished man of letters. And then, he didn’t exactly tipple, but he was rather fond of going down to the Bear and Key at Blackstable and having a few beers in the public bar. Of course there was no harm in it, but it did make him rather conspicuous, especially in summer when the place was full of trippers. He didn’t mind who he talked to. He didn’t seem able to realize that he had a position to keep up. You can’t deny it was rather awkward after they’d been having a lot of interesting people to lunch—people like Edmund Gosse, for instance, and Lord Curzon—that he should go down to a public house and tell the plumber and the baker and the sanitary inspector what he thought about them. But of course that could be explained away. One could say that he was after local colour and was interested in types. But he had some habits that really were rather difficult to cope with. Do you know that it was with the greatest difficulty that Amy Driffield could ever get him to take a bath?”
“He was born at a time when people thought it unhealthy to take too many baths. I don’t suppose he ever lived in a house that had a bathroom till he was fifty.”
“Well, he said he never had had a bath more than once a week and he didn’t see why he should change his habits at his time of life. Then Amy said that he must change his under linen every day, but he objected to that too. He said he’d always been used to wearing his vest and drawers for a week and it was nonsense, it only wore them out to have them washed so often. Mrs. Driffield did everything she could to tempt him to have a bath every day, with bath salts and perfumes, you know, but nothing would induce him to, and as he grew older he wouldn’t even have one once a week. She tells me that for the last three years of his life he never had a bath at all. Of course, all this is between ourselves; I’m merely telling it to show you that in writing his life I shall have to use a good deal of tact. I don’t see how one can deny that he was just a wee bit unscrupulous in money matters and he had a kink in him that made him take a strange pleasure in the society of his inferiors and some of his personal habits were rather disagreeable, but I don’t think that side of him was the most significant. I don’t want to say anything that’s untrue, but I do think there’s a certain amount that’s better left unsaid.”
“Don’t you think it would be more interesting if you went the whole hog and drew him warts and all?”
“Oh, I couldn’t. Amy Driffield would never speak to me again. She only asked me to do the life because she felt she could trust my discretion. I must behave like a gentleman.”
“It’s very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.”
“I don’t see why. And besides, you know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you’re cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism. Of course I don’t deny that if I were thoroughly unscrupulous I could make a sensation. It would be rather amusing to show the man with his passion for beauty and his careless treatment of his obligations, his fine style and his personal hatred for soap and water, his idealism and his tippling in disreputable pubs; but honestly, would it pay? They’d only say I was imitating Lytton Strachey. No, I think I shall do much better to be allusive and charming and rather subtle, you know the sort of thing, and tender. I think one ought always to see a book before one starts it. Well, I see this rather like a portrait of Van Dyck, with a good deal of atmosphere, you know, and a certain gravity, and with a sort of aristocratic distinction. Do you know what I mean? About eighty thousand words.”
He was absorbed for a moment in the ecstasy of aesthetic contemplation. In his mind’s eye he saw a book, in royal octavo, slim and light in the hand, printed with large margins on handsome paper in a type that was both clear and comely, and I think he saw a binding in smooth black cloth with a decoration in gold and gilt lettering. But being human, Alroy Kear could not, as I suggested a few pages back, hold the ecstasy that beauty yields for more than a little while. He gave me a candid smile.
“But how the devil am I to get over the first Mrs. Driffield?”
“The skeleton in the cupboard,” I murmured.
“She is damned awkward to deal with. She was married to Driffield for a good many years. Amy has very decided views on the subject, but I don’t see how I can possibly meet them. You see, her attitude is that Rose Driffield exerted a most pernicious influence on her husband, and that she did everything possible to ruin him morally, physically, and financially; she was beneath him in every way, at least intellectually and spiritually, and it was only because he was a man of immense force and vitality that he survived. It was of course a very unfortunate marriage. It’s true that she’s been dead for ages and it seems a pity to rake up old scandals and wash a lot of dirty linen in public; but the fact remains that all Driffield’s greatest books were written when he was living with her. Much as I admire the later books, and no one is more conscious of their
