I told him that I had come down to see Mrs. Driffield and left him to guess on what errand.
“I used to see a lot of the old man,” said Mr. Brentford. “He used to be very partial to dropping in here and having his glass of bitter. Mind you, I don’t say he ever got tiddly, but he used to like to sit in the bar and talk. My word, he’d talk by the hour and he never cared who he talked to. Mrs. Driffield didn’t half like his coming here. He’d slip away, out of the house, without saying a word to anybody, and come toddling down. You know it’s a bit of a walk for a man of that age. Of course when they missed him Mrs. Driffield knew where he was, and she used to telephone and ask if he was here. Then she’d drive over in the car and go in and see my wife. ‘You go in and fetch him, Mrs. Brentford,’ she’d say; ‘I don’t like to go in the bar meself, not with all those men hanging about’; so Mrs. Brentford would come in and she’d say, ‘Now Mr. Driffield, Mrs. Driffield’s come for you in the car, so you’d better finish your beer and let her take you home.’ He used to ask Mrs. Brentford not to say he was here when Mrs. Driffield rang up, but of course we couldn’t do that. He was an old man and all that and we didn’t want to take the responsibility. He was born in this parish, you know, and his first wife, she was a Blackstable girl. She’s been dead these many years. I never knew her. He was a funny old fellow. No side, you know; they tell me they thought a rare lot of him in London and when he died the papers were full of him; but you’d never have known it to talk to him. He might have been just nobody like you and me. Of course we always tried to make him comfortable; we tried to get him to sit in one of them easy chairs, but no, he must sit up at the bar; he said he liked to feel his feet on a rail. My belief is he was happier here than anywhere. He always said he liked a bar parlour. He said you saw life there and he said he’d always loved life. Quite a character he was. Reminded me of my father, except that my old governor never read a book in his life and he drank a bottle of French brandy a day and he was seventy-eight when he died and his last illness was his first. I quite missed old Driffield when he popped off. I was only saying to Mrs. Brentford the other day, I’d like to read one of his books some time. They tell me he wrote several about these parts.”
XXIV
Next morning it was cold and raw, but it was not raining, and I walked down the High Street toward the vicarage. I recognized the names over the shops, the Kentish names that have been borne for centuries—the Ganns, the Kemps, the Cobbs, the Igguldens—but I saw no one that I knew. I felt like a ghost walking down that street where I had once known nearly everyone, if not to speak to, at least by sight. Suddenly a very shabby little car passed me, stopped, and backed, and I saw someone looking at me curiously. A tall, heavy elderly man got out and came toward me.
“Aren’t you Willie Ashenden?” he asked.
Then I recognized him. He was the doctor’s son, and I had been at school with him; we had passed from form to form together, and I knew that he had succeeded his father in his practice.
“Hullo, how are you?” he asked. “I’ve just been along to the vicarage to see my grandson. It’s a preparatory school now, you know, and I put him there at the beginning of this term.”
He was shabbily dressed and unkempt, but he had a fine head and I saw that in youth he must have had unusual beauty. It was funny that I had never noticed it.
“Are you a grandfather?” I asked.
“Three times over,” he laughed.
It gave me a shock. He had drawn breath, walked the earth and presently grown to man’s estate, married, had children and they in turn had had children; I judged from the look of him that he had lived, with incessant toil, in penury. He had the peculiar manner of the country doctor, bluff, hearty, and unctuous. His life was over. I had plans in my head for books and plays, I was full of schemes for the future; I felt that a long stretch of activity and fun still lay before me; and yet, I supposed, to others I must seem the elderly man that he seemed to me. I was so shaken that I had not the presence of mind to ask about his brothers whom as a child I had played with, or about the old friends who had been my companions; after a few foolish remarks I left him. I walked on to the vicarage, a roomy, rambling house too far out of the way for the modern incumbent who took his duties more seriously than did my uncle and too large for the present cost of living. It stood in a big garden and was surrounded by green fields. There was a great square notice board that announced that it was a preparatory school for the sons of gentlemen and gave the name and the degrees of the head master. I looked over the paling; the garden was squalid and untidy and the pond in which I used to fish for roach was choked up. The glebe fields had been cut
