‘You wouldn’t believe it, first I ‘ad to put in a bathroom, and then I ‘ad to put in the electric light, and then nothin’ would satisfy them but I must ’ave a telephone. What they’ll want next I can’t think.’
‘Mr George says it’s pretty near time Mrs ’Udson thought of retiring,’ said Hester, who was laying the tea.
‘You mind your own business, my girl,’ said Mrs Hudson tartly. ‘When I retire it’ll be to the cemetery. Fancy me livin’ all alone with George and ‘Ester without nobody to talk to.’
‘Mr George says she ought to take a little ’ouse in the country an’ take care of ’erself,’ said Hester, unperturbed by the reproof.
‘Don’t talk to me about the country. The doctor said I was to go there for six weeks last summer. It nearly killed me, I give you my word. The noise of it. All them birds singin’ all the time, and the cocks crowin’ and the cows mooin’. I couldn’t stick it. When you’ve lived all the years I ’ave in peace and quietness you can’t get used to all that racket goin’ on all the time.’
A few doors away was the Vauxhall Bridge Road and down it trams were clanging, ringing their bells as they went, motor buses were lumbering along, taxis were tooting their horns. If Mrs Hudson heard it, it was London she heard, and it soothed her as a mother’s crooning soothes a restless child.
I looked round the cosy, shabby, homely little parlour in which Mrs Hudson had lived so long. I wondered if there was anything I could do for her. I noticed that she had a gramophone. It was the only thing I could think of.
‘Is there anything you want, Mrs Hudson?’ I asked.
She fixed her beady eyes on me reflectively.
‘I don’t know as there is, now you come to speak of it, except me ’ealth and strength for another twenty years so as I can go on workin’.’
I do not think I am a sentimentalist, but her reply, unexpected but so characteristic, made a sudden lump come to my throat.
When it was time for me to go I asked if I could see the rooms I had lived in for five years.
‘Run upstairs, ‘Ester, and see if Mr Graham’s in. If he ain’t, I’m sure ‘e wouldn’t mind you ’avin’ a look at them.’
Hester scurried up, and in a moment, slightly breathless, came down again to say that Mr Graham was out. Mrs Hudson came with me. The bed was the same narrow iron bed that I had slept in and dreamed in and there was the same chest of drawers and the same washing-stand. But the sitting-room had the grim heartiness of the athlete; on the walls were photographs of cricket elevens and rowing men in shorts; golf clubs stood in the corner and pipes and tobacco jars, ornamented with the arms of a college, were littered on the chimney-piece. In my days we believed in art for art’s sake and this I exemplified by draping the chimney-piece with a Moorish rug, putting up curtains of art serge and a bilious green, and hanging on the walls autotypes of pictures by Perugino, Van Dyck, and Hobbema.
‘Very artistic you was, wasn’t you?’ Mrs Hudson remarked, not without irony.
‘Very,’ I murmured.
I could not help feeling a pang as I thought of all the years that had passed since I inhabited that room, and of all that had happened to me. It was at that same table that I had eaten my hearty breakfast and my frugal dinner, read my medical books and written my first novel. It was in that same arm-chair that I had read for the first time Wordsworth and Stendhal, the Elizabethan dramatists and the Russian novelists, Gibbon, Boswell, Voltaire, and Rousseau. I wondered who had used them since. Medical students, articled clerks, young fellows making their way in the City and elderly men retired from the colonies or thrown unexpectedly upon the world by the break-up of an old home. The room made me, as Mrs Hudson would have put it, go queer all over. All the hopes that had been cherished there, the bright visions of the future, the flaming passion of youth; the regrets, the disillusion, the weariness, the resignation; so much had been felt in that room, by so many, the whole gamut of human emotion, that it seemed strangely to have acquired a troubling and enigmatic personality of its own. I have no notion why, but it made me think of a woman at a cross-road with a finger on her lips, looking back, and with her other hand beckoning. What I obscurely (and rather shamefacedly) felt, communicated itself to Mrs Hudson, for she gave a laugh, and with a characteristic gesture rubbed her prominent nose.
‘My word, people are funny,’ she said. ‘When I think of all the gentlemen I’ve ‘ad here, I give you my word you wouldn’t believe it if I told you some of the things I know about them. One of them’s funnier than the other. Sometimes I lie abed thinkin’ of them, and laugh. Well, it would be a bad world if you didn’t get a good laugh now and then, but, lor’, lodgers really are the limit.’
13
I lived with Mrs Hudson for nearly two years before I met the Driffields again. My life was very regular. I spent all day at the hospital, and about six walked back to Vincent Square. I bought the Star at Lambeth Bridge, and read it till my dinner was served. Then I read seriously for an hour or two, works to improve my mind, for I was a strenuous, earnest, and industrious youth, and after that wrote novels and plays till bedtime. I do not know for what reason it was that one day toward the end of June, happening to leave the hospital early, I thought I would walk down the Vauxhall Bridge Road. I liked it for its noisy bustle. It had a sordid vivacity that was pleasantly exciting, and you felt that at any moment an adventure might there befall you. I strolled along in a daydream and was surprised suddenly to hear my name. I stopped and looked, and there to my astonishment stood Mrs Driffield. She was smiling at me.
‘Don’t you know me?’ she cried.
‘Yes. Mrs Driffield.’
And though I was grown up I was conscious that I was blushing as furiously as when I was sixteen. I was embarrassed. With my lamentably Victorian notions of honesty I had been much shocked by the Driffields’ behaviour in running away from Blackstable without paying their bills. It seemed to me very shabby. I felt deeply the shame I thought they must feel, and I was astounded that Mrs Driffield should speak to someone who knew of the discreditable incident. If I had seen her coming I should have looked away, my delicacy presuming that she would wish to avoid the mortification of being seen by me; but she held out her hand and shook mine with obvious pleasure.
‘I am glad to see a Blackstable face,’ she said. ‘You know we left there in a hurry,’
She laughed and I laughed too; but her laugh was mirthful and childlike, while mine, I felt, was strained.
‘I hear there was a to-do when they found out we’d skipped. I thought Ted would never stop laughing when he heard about it. What did your uncle say?’
I was quick to get the right tone. I wasn’t going to let her think that I couldn’t see a joke as well as anyone.
‘Oh, you know what he is. He’s very old-fashioned.’
‘Yes, that’s what’s wrong with Blackstable. They want waking up.’ She gave me a friendly look. ‘You’ve grown a lot since I saw you last. Why, you’re growing a moustache.’
‘Yes,’ I said, giving it as much of a twirl as its size allowed me. ‘I’ve had that for ages.’
‘How time does fly, doesn’t it? You were just a boy four years ago, and now you’re a man.’
‘I ought to be,’ replied somewhat haughtily. ‘I’m nearly twenty-one.’
I was looking at Mrs Driffield. She wore a very small hat with feathers in it, and a pale grey dress with large leg-of-mutton sleeves and a long train. I thought she looked very smart. I had always thought that she had a nice face, but I noticed now, for the first time, that she was pretty. Her eyes were bluer than I remembered and her skin was like ivory.
‘You know we live just round the corner,’ she said. ‘So do I.’
‘We live in Limpus Road. We’ve been there almost ever since we left Blackstable.’
‘Well, I’ve been in Vincent Square for nearly two years.’ ‘I knew you were in London. George Kemp told me so, and I often wondered where you were. Why don’t you walk back with me
now? Ted will be so pleased to see you.’
‘I don’t mind,’ I said.
As we walked along she told me that Driffield was now literary editor of a weekly paper; his last book had done much better than any of his others, and he was expecting to get quite a bit as an advance on royalties for the next one. She seemed to know most of the Blackstable news, and I remembered how it had been suspected that Lord George had helped the Driffields in their flight. I guessed that he wrote to them now and then. I noticed as we walked along that sometimes the men who passed us stared at Mrs Driffield. It occurred to me presently that they must think her pretty too. I began to walk with a certain swagger.
Limpus Road was a long, wide, straight street that ran parallel with the Vauxhall Bridge Road. The houses were all alike, of stucco, dingily painted, solid, and with substantial porticoes. I suppose they had been built to be inhabited by men of standing in the city of London, but the street had gone down in the world or had never attracted the right sort of tenant; and its decayed respectability had an air at once furtive and shabbily dissipated, that made you think of persons who had seen better days and now, genteelly fuddled, talked of the social distinction of their youth. The Driffields lived in a house painted a dull red, and Mrs Driffield, letting me into a narrow dark hall, opened a door and said:
‘Go in. I’ll tell Ted you’re here.’
She walked down the hall and I entered the sitting-room. The Driffields had the basement and the ground floor of the house, which they rented from the lady who lived in the upper part. The room into which I went looked as if it had been furnished with the scourings of auction sales. There were heavy velvet curtains with great fringes, all loops and festoons, and a gilt suite, upholstered in yellow damask, heavily buttoned; and there was a great pouffe in the middle of the room. There were gilt cabinets in which were masses of little articles, pieces of china, ivory figures, wood-carvings, bits of Indian brass; and on the walls hung large oil-paintings of Highland glens and stags and gillies. In a moment Mrs Driffield brought her husband, and he greeted me warmly. He wore a shabby alpaca coat and grey trousers; he had shaved his beard, and wore now a moustache and a small imperial. I noticed for the first time how short he was; but he looked more distinguished than he used to. There was something a trifle foreign in his appearance, and I thought this was much more what I should expect an author to look like.
‘Well, what do you think of our new abode?’ he asked. ‘It looks rich, doesn’t it? I think it inspires confidence.’
He looked round him with satisfaction.
‘And Ted’s got his den at the back where he can write, and we’ve got a dining-room in the basement,’ said Mrs Driffield. ‘Miss Cowley was companion for many years to a lady of title, and when she died she left her all her furniture. You can see everything’s good, can’t you? You can see it came out of a gentleman’s house.’
‘Rosie fell in love with the place the moment we saw it,’ said Driffield.
‘You did too, Ted.’
‘We’ve lived in sordid circumstances so long; it’s a change to be surrounded by luxury. Madame de Pompadour and all that sort of thing.’
When I left them it was with a very cordial invitation to come again. It appeared that they were at home every Saturday afternoon, and all sorts of people whom I would like to meet were in the habit of dropping in.
14
I went. I enjoyed myself. I went again. When the autumn came and I returned to London for the winter session at St Luke’s I got into the habit of going every Saturday. It was my introduction into the world of art and letters; I kept it a profound secret that in the privacy of my lodgings I was busily writing; I was excited to meet people who were writing also, and I listened entranced to their conversation. All sorts of persons came to these parties: at that time weekends were rare, golf was still a subject for ridicule and few had much to do on Saturday afternoons. I do not think anyone came who was of any great importance; at all events, of all the painters, writers, and musicians I met at the Driffields’ I cannot remember one whose reputation has endured; but the effect was cultured and animated. You found young actors who were looking for parts and middle-aged singers who deplored the fact that the English were not a musical race, composers who played their compositions on the Driffields’ cottage piano and complained in a whispered aside that they sounded nothing except on a concert grand, poets who on pressure consented to read a little thing that they had just written, and painters who were looking for commissions. Now and then a person of title added a certain glamour; seldom, however, for in those days the aristocracy had not yet become Bohemian, and if a person of quality cultivated the society of artists it was generally because a notorious divorce or a little difficulty over cards had made life in his own station (or hers) a bit awkward. We have changed all that. One of the greatest benefits that compulsory education has conferred upon the world is the wide diffusion among the nobility and gentry of the practice of writing. Horace Walpole once wrote a Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors-, such a work now would have the dimensions of an encyclopedia. A title, even a courtesy one, can make a well-known author of almost anyone, and it may be safely asserted that there is no better passport to the world of letters than rank.
I have indeed sometimes thought that now that the House of Lords must inevitably in a short while be abolished, it would be a very good plan if the profession of literature were by law confined to its members and their wives and children. It would be a graceful compensation that the British people might offer the peers in return for the surrender of their hereditary privileges. It would be a means of support for those (too many) whom devotion to the public cause in keeping chorus girls and race-horses and playing chemin de fer has impoverished, and a pleasant occupation for the rest who by the process of natural selection have in the course of time become unfit to do anything but govern the British Empire. But this is an age of specialization, and if my plan is adopted it is obvious that it cannot but be to the greater glory of English literature that its various provinces should be apportioned among the various ranks of the nobility. I would suggest, therefore, that the humbler branches of literature should be practised by the lower orders of the peerage and that the barons and viscounts should devote themselves exclusively to journalism and the drama. Fiction might be the privileged demesne of the earls. They have already shown their aptitude for this difficult art and their numbers are so great that they would very competently supply the demand. To the marquises might safely be left the production of that part of literature which is known (I have never quite seen why) as belles lettres. It is perhaps not very profitable from a pecuniary standpoint, but it has a distinction that very well suits the holders of this romantic title.
The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes; he makes the best of us look like a piece of cheese. It is evident then that the writing of poetry should be left to the dukes, and I should like to see their rights protected by the most severe pains and penalties, for it is intolerable that the noblest of arts should be practised by any but the noblest of men. And since here, too, specialization must prevail, I foresee that the dukes (like the successors of Alexander) will divide the realm of poetry between them, each confining himself to that aspect with which hereditary influence and natural bent have rendered him competent to deal: thus I see the dukes of Manchester writing poems of a didactic and moral character, the dukes of Westminster composing stirring odes on Duty and the Responsibilities of Empire; whereas I imagine that the dukes of Devonshire would be more likely to write love lyrics and elegies in the Propertian manner, while it is almost inevitable that the dukes of Marlborough should pipe in an idyllic strain on such subjects as domestic bliss, conscription, and content with modest station.
But if you say that this is somewhat formidable and remind me that the muse does not only stalk with majestic tr
ead, but on occasion trips on a light fantastic toe; if, recalling the wise person who said that he did not care who made a nation’s laws so long as he wrote its songs, you ask me (thinking rightly that it would ill become the dukes to do so) who shall twang those measures on the lyre that the diverse and inconstant soul of man occasionally hankers after – I answer (obviously enough, I should have thought) the duchesses. I recognize that the day is past when the amorous peasants of the Romagna sang to their sweethearts the verses of Torquato Tasso and Mrs Humphry Ward crooned over young Arnold’s cradle the choruses of Oedipus in Colonus. The age demands something more up to date. I suggest, therefore, that the more domestic duchesses should write our hymns and our nursery rhymes; while the skittish ones, those who incline to mingle vine leaves with the strawberry, should write the lyrics for musical comedies, humorous verse for the comic papers, and mottoes for Christmas cards and crackers. Thus would they retain in the hearts of the British public that place which they have held hitherto only on account of their exalted station.
It was at these parties on Saturday afternoon that I discovered very much to my surprise that Edward Driffield was a distinguished person. He had written something like twenty books, and though he had never made more than a pittance out of them his reputation was considerable. The best judges admired them and the friends who came to his house were agreed that one of these days he would be recognized. They upbraided the public because it would not see that here was a great writer, and since the easiest way to exalt one man is to kick another in the pants, they reviled freely all the novelists whose contemporary fame obscured his. If, indeed, I had known as much of literary circles as I learned later I should have guessed by the not infrequent visits of Mrs Barton Trafford that the time was approaching when Edward Driffield, like a runner in a long-distance race breaking away suddenly from the little knot of plodding athletes, must forge ahead. I admit that when first I was introduced to this lady her name meant nothing to me. Driffield presented me as a young neighbour of his in the country and told her that I was a medical student. She gave me a mellifluous smile, murmured in a soft voice something about Bob Sawyer, and, accepting the bread and butter I offered her, went on talking with her host. But I noticed that her arrival had made an impression, and the conversation, which had been noisy and hilarious, was hushed. When in an undertone I asked who she was, I found that my ignorance was amazing; I was told that she had ‘made’ So-and-so and So-and-so. After half an hour she rose, shook hands very graciously with such of the people as she was acquainted with, and with a sort of lithe sweetness sidled out of the room. Driffield accompanied her to the door and put her in a hansom.
Cakes and Ale Page 14