by James Hilton
It was a few minutes past the hour when he rang the bell beside the massive blue-enamelled door. He recalled the last time he had been there, ten years before, when his youngest boy had been discovered tubercular; it had been Blenkiron’s partner then whom he had seen, and he had still a memory of the old man, and of his calm and somehow almost reassuring way of telling a father that his boy was seriously affected. He remembered coming out of the house with the boy’s hand in his; they had walked aimlessly round a few corners, and had then had muffins for tea in a small caf�, which he was sure he would never be able to find again, even if it still existed. Eighteen months after that, the boy had died.
Now, he thought, waiting for the door to open, it was his turn. The door swung back; he gave his name to the maid; he was shown into the same room, with the same furnishings—exactly the same, they looked, despite the fact that the old man had died in the interval and his assistant- partner had succeeded to the practice. There was certainly the same ormolu clock on the mantelpiece and the same locked bookcase full of richly bound copies of Dickens, Thackeray, and Lord Lytton. Howat put his hat and gloves on the table with a gesture almost of familiarity, and the maid, as she left him, switched on a cluster of lights that hardly illumined the room so much as extinguished the fading daylight outside.
The clock ticked on; and he knew, as he listened to it, that he was no longer nervous at all, but just calm, frozenly calm, and ready for whatever fate might send. Even the pain his his throat had merged into that all- enveloping numbness of sensation.
The door opened, and there half-entered a man of rather more than middle- age, keen-faced and handsome in conventional morning-dress. He shook hands with Howat, and guided him into an inner room.
Half an hour later the examination, which had been very thorough, was finished. Blenkiron sat in his swivel desk-chair, with his long fingers splayed out on the shining mahogany. He looked as if he could not quite decide how to begin. So far he had hardly spoken at all, except to ask questions. Howat faced him steadfastly from an armchair opposite; he was pale, excited, and twitching about the mouth as he sometimes did when he began sermons.
“I understand, Mr. Freemantle,” mused Blenkiron at length, “that you decided to consult me because my late partner, Doctor Newsome, once examined your son?”
“Yes. It was the only medical address in London I knew.”
“Quite.” A faint superciliousness edged round the doctor’s clear—cut lips. “And you have a great deal of faith, I suppose, in a London medical address?”
“Perhaps one has, rather naturally.”
Blenkiron smiled and began to fidget with a brass paperweight. “Well, well, I wonder whether one ought to say so—but it’s a fact, you know, that there are some exceedingly clever doctors and surgeons in the provinces. Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester—really, I could give you names in those cities, but of course I won’t—dear me, no. It is a most gratifying and profitable superstition that the best medical brains in this country are all congregated in the region bounded by Oxford Street and the Marylebone Road. Only a superstition, of course, but I don’t know what we doctors would do without it. I suppose you think that every brass plate in Wimpole Street and Harley Street means a fabulous income? Not at all—the superstition has shown signs of waning in recent years. Believe me, there are men in this road who can hardly find the cash for their quarterly telephone bills.”
Howat nodded and wished he would get to the point. Doctors seemed to enjoy keeping their patients in suspense as long as possible—as a nerve test, perhaps? Blenkiron caught the impatient glance and went on: “But these are digressions, are they not? By the way, Mr. Freemantle, how is your boy now? It was—let me see—what was the trouble exactly?”
“He died. It was consumption.”
“Oh, that’s bad, very bad. I didn’t realise.” He paused, apparently for deep thought, and then added: “And I understand that you yourself are a clergyman in Browdley?”
“A minister—a Nonconformist minister.”
“I don’t know the town, but I gather from the papers that trade has been very bad lately in that part of the country. I suppose cotton is the black spot.”
“Yes.”
“And coal? Have you any coal mines?”
“Several in the district.”
“And I don’t suppose you’ve ever been down one, eh? You’re just as bad as some of us Londoners. I had a titled person consulting me yesterday—I won’t tell you his name, but he’s very well known in politics—he confessed to me that he had never yet been inside the Tower of London. As I never had either, we were able to share the deep disgrace…However, that is rather by the by…Are you happy in your work in Browdley? Have you any particular worries—professional worries, I mean?”
“No more than most parsons, I should think.”
“You work hard, no doubt?”
“I try to.”
“Yes, of course. And you have to talk a good deal in public, that’s rather inevitable, isn’t it?”
“It is, I’m afraid, yes.”
“Well, you’ll have to drop doing so much of it for a time. I don’t suppose you’re surprised to hear me tell you that, eh?…Is your wife living?”
“Yes.”
“And in good health?”
“Fairly good. She’s not strong, I’m sorry to say.
“And your children—have you any other children?”
“I have a boy—in Canada—and a girl, who lives at home.”
“They are both well?”
“The girl is. The boy—well, we haven’t heard from him for several years.”
“Really? Perhaps he’ll come romping home someday with his pockets bulging with banknotes. They do sometimes, you know.”
“I should be glad to see him whether his pockets were bulging or not.”
“Ah, yes, of course…What would you do, though, if he did strike lucky and make you a present of a few thousand pounds? I suppose you’d rebuild your church or something of the sort.”
“I don’t know. I’ve never considered it.”
“I thought you clergymen always knew what to do with money?…But tell me now, coming back to the point, do you often have headaches?”
“Fairly often.”
“And your eyes—have they been tested lately?”
“About a year or so ago.”
“Do you enjoy your food?”
“Moderately.”
Only moderately?”
“I don’t think I ever was very keen on eating and drinking.”
“Are you an abstainer?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps that accounts for your not being keen on drinking, eh? Seriously, though, it’s a pity you don’t enjoy good food. Do you like corn on the cob?”
“I don’t think I know what it is.”
“It’s an American dish—they do it very well at Fouchard’s, in Greek Street. It’s something you oughtn’t to miss during your visit to London. You eat it, you know, with your fingers—rather like playing a mouth organ. Very messy, but extremely palatable. I have a doctor friend who says that a great part of its value lies in the mode of eating—it satisfies the atavistic desire we all have, consciously or unconsciously, to take our food in our hands and tear it to pieces with our teeth. I wonder if that is really so.”
“I wonder,” said Howat, without wondering at all.
Blenkiron gave the brass paperweight a little push to one side of the desk. “Well, I expect you’re waiting for me to tell you something about yourself. Of course the really hard problem in such a case as yours is not ‘what’ but ‘why’. I must confess that for the last ten minutes I’ve been puzzling myself over that…and I’m not much nearer an answer. You’ll have to knock off most things for a time, that’s clear. I daresay you know that your nervous system isn’t exactly a strong spot. But what prevented you from letting your own local doctor tell you so? As for your throat, I gather it’s been causing you a fair amount of wo
rry, lately?”
“It has, yes.”
“Which means, I suppose, that you’ve been having the same worry that ninety-nine people out of every hundred have nowadays when they feel a pain. Oh, you needn’t bother to confide in me—I know all about it. Even doctors aren’t immune. I made a report on one the other day—a woman doctor—she suspected she had an internal carcinoma, but it turned out she was only going to have a baby. So you see—”
“You mean, then, that there’s nothing wrong with me?”
“My dear sir, there’s a very great deal wrong with you. You are, I should say, within a very short distance of a serious nervous breakdown. But apart from that, which is quite bad enough, surely, I don’t find anything much amiss—your heart and lungs are sound, you have a reasonable blood pressure, and as for the larynx—well, clergyman’s sore throat is rather a vocational disease, isn’t it?”
He went on to say a great deal more, but Howat did not hear him, and was hardly aware of the three pound notes that somehow escaped from his wallet and into the doctor’s. The fee, in fact, was three guineas, but Howat forgot the odd shillings and Blenkiron did not remind him. Of that final handshake and the maid’s guidance through the hall to the street-door Howat was almost totally unconscious; but the cold air awakened him when he found himself standing on the pavement outside the house, with his hat and gloves still in his hand and the street-lamps glittering like chains of gems in either direction. Beyond them, into the star-speckled sky loomed the tall grey houses, and a taxi came cruising slowly down that enchanted canyon. Howat raised his hand; the driver pulled up at the kerb; Howat sprang inside, without a word till the driver asked where he was to drive to; then Howat stammered—“Oh, yes, of course—the main street, where the shops are—Oxford Street, yes—oh, anywhere…”
He sat well forward on the seat and stared hard out of the window, as one who had somehow never used his eyes before. It did not even occur to him that he had never been in a London taxi before, so completely was that trivial novelty submerged in the vaster novelty of life itself. All the doubts and miseries of the last few months were lifted; the barrier was down, and life stretched ahead of him like a new dream, buoyant and zestful and rich in promise. He opened the window, despite the cold, and took in deep draughts of air that seemed to him purer than any he had ever breathed before; he could see a woman crossing the road with a pram and smiling at the baby inside it; there, over there, two men were standing at a corner reading the same newspaper and laughing; in the middle of the road a night-watchman slowly filled his pipe as he settled himself beside a brazier-fire. And suddenly, with a little swirl, the taxi turned out of that lovely tributary into the full tide of the river itself, that blazing river of shops and omnibuses and skysigns—Oxford Street. “Go on!” he shouted through the window on the driver’s side, and then sank back amidst the cushions with glorious exhaustion.
The cab soon became embedded in a long line of slow-moving traffic, and he thought, during those moments, that he had never seen anything in the world so truly lovely as that pageant of shop-windows and eager happy faces. There was one window full of gorgeously tinted silks, slung rainbow-like from corner to corner, and there was a shop that had a machine in the window that twisted skeins of toffee together, and a sky-sign, high up above, that gave the weather forecast in scampering electric letters, and a huge shop-building with a frontage of Ionic columns silver-white in the upward glow of arc-lamps, and people, people—hundreds and thousands of them in one long, throbbing, colourful fresco of life itself.
And the loveliness was in his ears as well—he heard the clamour of motor-horns and the shouting of newsboys and all the mingled noises of streets and houses like some triumphant symphony on a new theme; he wanted to join in it, to lean his head out of the window and shout to someone in sheer exultation; and then he thought: Steady, Steady—keep calmer—you’ve got a happy evening before you—there’s that concert—have you forgotten it? They’re playing Brahms…and all at once, with that little twist of recollection, his mind was flooded with imagined melody, and he saw himself, as in those ridiculous boyhood dreams, standing on a conductor’s rostrum, baton in hand, controlling a world of his own creation.
There were trees now, iron railings, vistas of glittering headlights, and a faint smell of wood-smoke on the air; then he caught sight of a clock—twenty-five past five—and suddenly remembered that business at Charing Cross. His spirits fell momentarily at the thought, but rose again almost instantly and with new intensity, for his imagination transformed him magically from the conductor of an orchestra into an orator of burning zeal, a Peter the Hermit and Savonarola combined, whose impassioned pleadings no sinner could hope to resist. He was certain now that he would meet that girl, talk to her, convince her, and have her returning to Browdley that very night; there was no longer any doubt about it; he could not fail with this new and god-like strength that was in him. He put his head out of the window and called to the driver—” Charing Cross—the post office—as quick as you can!”
It was beginning to be the evening ‘rush’ period, and the taxi was held up many times, at the Marble. Arch, at Berkeley Street, and for several minutes at Piccadilly Circus. It was nearly a quarter to six when Howat stepped to the pavement at the corner of Trafalgar Square; he was rather excited by that time; perhaps she hadn’t come, or had got tired of waiting; he paid the driver, adding a far too lavish tip, and found him-self staring vacantly at buses and sky-signs and a pavement artist’s drawings of Ramsay MacDonald and Lloyd George; it was an absurd place, he reflected, as he became conscious of the crowds all about him, to have fixed for meeting anyone, especially someone he didn’t know very well.
He had been staring about for several minutes when he felt a hand touching his arm. He looked round and saw a girl, and though he knew immediately that it was Elizabeth Garland, he was certain he would never have recognised her of his own accord. Really, it was as if he had never seen her before.
* * *
CHAPTER SIX — FRIDAY TEA
“Good evening, Mr. Freemantle,” she said, in a slow soft- toned voice (it was as if, too, he had never heard it before), and he said “Good evening” and observed her rather incredulously. A certain sense of the extraordinariness of the situation came over him, and with a little effort he made himself recollect how matters stood—he a Browdley parson meeting a young girl at Charing Cross to persuade her not to run away to Paris with an elderly Jew with a bald head and gold teeth (he could not unfix that graphic picture from his mind). But the picture gave him renewed and indignant confidence; by God, he thought, glancing at her again, she mustn’t do a thing like that; it would be worse than an offence against morals, it would be—and then he checked himself and wondered what could be worse than an offence against morals? Dimly he felt that something could be, and the feeling, obscure and transient, linked itself with all the new and astonishing perceptions that were invading him from all directions. By God, no, she mustn’t; he must prevent her, at all costs. And, as earnestly as he had ever prayed for anything, he prayed, wordlessly, for strength to achieve that end.
“I got your letter,” she was saying, returning his glance with one just as curious. “It was nice of you to think of meeting me. Are you in London for long?”
“I go back to-morrow. Just a business visit. I’m afraid I must have kept you waiting a long time—the traffic delayed me. What a crowd there is here!”
“Yes,” she agreed. They were still standing exactly where they had met, on the edge of the pavement, surrounded by eddies of omnibuses, cabs, and pedestrians. “Have you had tea?” she continued. “Because if not we might find it quieter inside a caf�.”
“Ah, a good idea.” He had forgotten all about tea himself and was relieved by the suggestion. It would be easier, no doubt, than talking in the streets. There was a Lyons tea-shop within a few yards of them, and they made their way to it, finding a couple of scats at a small table in a corner of a first-floor room. I
n the sudden brilliance of electric lights his eyes were dazzled at first, but as soon as he could see her clearly again he felt indignation and determination rising in him to fever-point—she must not, must not, do a thing like that—it was monstrous, a sin more certainly a sin than anything he could ever have imagined. He wondered how he should broach the matter, whether directly or by oblique remarks; or whether, during tea, he had better let the talk remain just casual. But it was she who left him no choice, for she said, almost straightway: “Did you give my message at home, Mr. Freemantle?”
He shook his head. “I’m afraid I didn’t.” Then he went on, slowly and with not half the fluency he had hoped for: “The fact is, you don’t seem to realise what—what a commotion you have caused by—by leaving home like this.”
“Has there been such a terrible fuss?”
“Well, naturally. What else could you have expected? Your parents are both extremely upset, and I would gladly have conveyed your message if I had thought it would relieve their minds at all. Unfortunately it seemed to me quite likely to make matters worse, which was why—or one of the reasons why, at any rate—I didn’t do as you suggested.”
“You mean that they wouldn’t have been relieved to learn that I’m all right and quite happy?”
“Well, that’s not quite the way to put it. You must remember how deeply you have hurt their pride as well as their affections. I saw your father the other day, and I found him in a very angry mood about you. After all, you can understand that, I’m sure. He feels you have disgraced him. But I still think it possible—even probable—that if you were to go back now, immediately, giving up all—all that you have in mind—they would be reasonable with you. At least I can promise that I would do my best to smooth matters over.”