“What are you going to do about it?” I asked.
“Well, I can’t see why all that part of his life shouldn’t be treated with the greatest possible reserve and delicacy, so as not to offend the most exacting susceptibility, and yet with a sort of manly frankness, if you understand what I mean, that would be rather moving.”
“It sounds a very tall order.”
“As I see it, there’s no need to dot the i’s or to cross the t’s. It can only be a question of getting just the right touch. I wouldn’t state more than I could help, but I would suggest what was essential for the reader to realize. You know, however gross a subject is you can soften its unpleasantness if you treat it with dignity. But I can do nothing unless I am in complete possession of the facts.”
“Obviously you can’t cook them unless you have them.”
Roy had been expressing himself with a fluent ease that revealed the successful lecturer. I wished (a) that I could express myself with so much force and aptness, never at a loss for a word, rolling off the sentences without a moment’s hesitation; and (b) that I did not feel so miserably incompetent with my one small insignificant person to represent the large and appreciative audience that Roy was instinctively addressing. But now he paused. A genial look came over his face, which his enthusiasm had reddened and the heat of the day caused to perspire, and the eyes that had held me with a dominating brilliance softened and smiled.
“This is where you come in, old boy,” he said pleasantly.
I have always found it a very good plan in life to say nothing when I had nothing to say and when I do not know how to answer a remark to hold my tongue. I remained silent and looked back at Roy amiably.
“You know more about his life at Blackstable than anybody else.”
“I don’t know about that. There must be a number of people at Blackstable who saw as much of him in the old days as I did.”
“That may be, but after all they’re presumably not people of any importance, and I don’t think they matter very much.”
“Oh, I see. You mean that I’m the only person who might blow the gaff.”
“Roughly, that is what I do mean, if you feel that you must put it in a facetious way.”
I saw that Roy was not inclined to be amused. I was not annoyed, for I am quite used to people not being amused at my jokes. I often think that the purest type of the artist is the humorist who laughs alone at his own jests.
“And you saw a good deal of him later on in London, I believe.”
“Yes.”
“That is when he had an apartment somewhere in Lower Belgravia.”
“Well, lodgings in Pimlico.”
Roy smiled drily.
“We won’t quarrel about the exact designation of the quarter of London in which he lived. You were very intimate with him then.”
“Fairly.”
“How long did that last?”
“About a couple of years.”
“How old were you then?”
“Twenty.”
“Now look here, I want you to do me a great favour. It won’t take you very long and it will be of quite inestimable value to me. I want you to jot down as fully as you can all your recollections of Driffield, and all you remember about his wife and his relations with her and so on, both at Blackstable and in London.”
“Oh, my dear fellow, that’s asking a great deal. I’ve got a lot of work to do just now.”
“It needn’t take you very long. You can write it quite roughly, I mean. You needn’t bother about style, you know, or anything like that. I’ll put the style in. All I want are the facts. After all, you know them and nobody else does. I don’t want to be pompous or anything like that, but Driffield was a great man and you owe it to his memory and to English literature to tell everything you know. I shouldn’t have asked you, but you told me the other day that you weren’t going to write anything about him yourself. It would be rather like a dog in a manger to keep to yourself a whole lot of material that you have no intention of using.”
Thus Roy appealed at once to my sense of duty, my indolence, my generosity, and my rectitude.
“But why does Mrs. Driffield want me to go down and stay at Ferne Court?” I asked.
“Well, we talked it over. It’s a very jolly house to stay in. She does one very well, and it ought to be divine in the country just now. She thought it would be very nice and quiet for you if you felt inclined to write your recollections there; of course, I said I couldn’t promise that, but naturally being so near Blackstable would remind you of all sorts of things that you might otherwise forget. And then, living in his house, among his books and things, it would make the past seem much more real. We could all talk about him, and you know how in the heat of conversation things come back. Amy’s very quick and clever. She’s been in the habit of making notes of Driffield’s talk for years, and after all it’s quite likely that you’ll say things on the spur of the moment that you wouldn’t think of writing and she can just jot them down afterward. And we can play tennis and bathe.”
“I’m not very fond of staying with people,” I said. “I hate getting up for a nine-o’clock breakfast to eat things I have no mind to.
