“I don’t mind having a small piece,” I said.
My aunt gave me a generous helping, which I ate with the air of one who,
impelled by a stern sense of duty, performs an act that is deeply
distasteful to him. It was a beautiful raspberry tart. Mary-Ann made
short pastry that melted in the mouth. But when my aunt asked me whether
I could not manage a little more I refused with cold dignity. She did
not insist. My uncle said grace and I carried my outraged feelings into
the drawing room.
But when I reckoned that the servants had finished their dinner I went
into the kitchen. Emily was cleaning the silver in the pantry. Mary-Ann
was washing up.
“I say, what’s wrong with the Driffields?” I asked her.
Mary-Ann had come to the vicarage when she was eighteen. She had bathed
me when I was a small boy, given me powders in plum jam when I needed
them, packed my box when I went to school, nursed me when I was ill,
read to me when I was bored, and scolded me when I was naughty. Emily,
the housemaid, was a flighty young thing, and Mary-Ann didn’t know
whatever would become of me if _she_ had the looking after of me.
Mary-Ann was a Blackstable girl. She had never been to London in her
life and I do not think she had been to Tercanbury more than three or
four times. She was never ill. She never had a holiday. She was paid
twelve pounds a year. One evening a week she went down the town to see
her mother, who did the vicarage washing; and on Sunday evenings she
went to church. But Mary-Ann knew everything that went on in
Blackstable. She knew who everybody was, who had married whom, what
anyone’s father had died of, and how many children, and what they were
called, any woman had had.
I asked Mary-Ann my question and she slopped a wet clout noisily into
the sink.
“I don’t blame your uncle,” she said. “I wouldn’t let you go about with
them, not if you was my nephew. Fancy their askin’ you to ride your
bicycle with them! Some people will do anything.”
I saw that the conversation in the dining room had been repeated to
Mary-Ann.
“I’m not a child,” I said.
“That makes it all the worse. The impudence of their comin’ ’ere at
all!” Mary-Ann dropped her aitches freely. “Takin’ a house and
pretendin’ to be ladies and gentlemen. Now leave that pie alone.”
The raspberry tart was standing on the kitchen table and I broke off a
piece of crust with my fingers and put it in my mouth.
“We’re goin’ to eat that for our supper. If you’d wanted a second
’elpin’ why didn’t you ’ave one when you was ’avin’ your dinner? Ted
Driffield never could stick to anything. He ’ad a good education, too.
The one I’m sorry for is his mother. He’s been a trouble to ’er from the
day he was born. And then to go an’ marry Rosie Gann. They tell me that
when he told his mother what he was goin’ to do she took to ’er bed and
stayed there for three weeks and wouldn’t talk to anybody.”
“Was Mrs. Driffield Rosie Gann before she married? Which Ganns were
those?”
Gann was one of the commonest names at Blackstable. The churchyard was
thick with their graves.
“Oh, you wouldn’t ’ave known them. Old Josiah Gann was her father. He
was a wild one, too. He went for a soldier and when he come back he ’ad
a wooden leg. He used to go out doing painting, but he was out of work
more often than not. They lived in the next ’ouse to us in Rye Lane. Me
an’ Rosie used to go to Sunday school together.”
“But she’s not as old as you are,” I said with the bluntness of my age.
“She’ll never see thirty again.”
Mary-Ann was a little woman with a snub nose and decayed teeth, but
fresh-coloured, and I do not suppose she could have been more than
thirty-five.
“Rosie ain’t more than four or five years younger than me, whatever she
may pretend she is. They tell me you wouldn’t know her now all dressed
up and everything.”
“Is it true that she was a barmaid?” I asked.
“Yes, at the Railway Arms and then at the Prince of Wales’s Feathers at
Haversham. Mrs. Reeves ’ad her to ’elp in the bar at the Railway Arms,
but it got so bad she had to get rid of her.”
The Railway Arms was a very modest little public house just opposite the
station of the London, Chatham & Dover Railway. It had a sort of
sinister gaiety. On a winter’s night as you passed by you saw through
the glass doors men lounging about the bar. My uncle very much
disapproved of it, and had for years been trying to get its license
taken away. It was frequented by the railway porters, colliers, and farm
labourers. The respectable residents of Blackstable would have disdained
to enter it and, when they wanted a glass of bitter, went to the Bear
and Key or the Duke of Kent.
“Why, what did she do?” I asked, my eyes popping out of my head.
“What didn’t she do?” said Mary-Ann. “What d’you think your uncle would
say if he caught me tellin’ you things like that? There wasn’t a man who
come in to ’ave a drink that she didn’t carry on with. No matter who
they was. She couldn’t stick to anybody, it was just one man after
another. They tell me it was simply ’orrible. That was when it begun
with Lord George. It wasn’t the sort of place he was likely to go to, he
was too grand for that, but they say he went in accidental like one day
when his train was late, and he saw her. And after that he was never out
of the place, mixin’ with all them common rough people, and of course
they all knew what he was there for, and him with a wife and three
children. Oh, I was sorry for her! And the talk it made. Well, it got so
Mrs. Reeves said she wasn’t going to put up with it another day and she
gave her her wages and told her to pack her box and go. Good riddance to
bad rubbish, that’s what I said.”
I knew Lord George very well. His name was George Kemp and the title by
which he was always known had been given him ironically owing to his
grand manner. He was our coal merchant, but he also dabbled in house
property, and he owned a share in one or two colliers. He lived in a new
brick house that stood in its own grounds and he drove his own trap. He
was a stoutish man with a pointed beard, florid, with 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.”