by James Hilton
Howat stared at the letter with a sharp sensation of dismay. This Garland affair seemed to get more and more complicated and to be dragging him, against his will, nearer and nearer to the centre of it. He had always been careful to avoid any sort of private friendship with the younger girls of his chapel—he thought it undesirable for a good many reasons—yet here he was, the confidant, whether he chose to be or not, of a girl who had run away from home and was eloping (to use the politest word) to Paris. It was all rather unfortunate, and he did not quite know what would be the best course to take. If he showed the letter or conveyed the message to Garland, he could imagine the fellow’s conclusions. Nor, despite the girl’s optimism, did he feel at all equal to explaining to Garland that his daughter was ’too old to be treated as a child’. Really, it was a most difficult situation and he went into dinner feeling sadly perplexed. Almost as soon as he sat down, his wife said: “I suppose you didn’t call on the Garlands, Howat? Don’t you think you ought to—to express our sympathy?”
He answered: “I met Garland in the street outside his shop and we went in for a little talk. I told him how sorry we were.”
“Did he tell you that the person the girl’s run off with is a man over fifty—married and with a family?”
“Good heavens, no? Wherever did you hear that?”
Mrs. Freemantle smiled in a satisfied way and exchanged a glance with Aunt Viney; it was so rarely that she could rouse her husband’s interest, much less a touch of excitement, in any titbit of local gossip. “Viney heard it from a woman in the baker’s shop this morning. It’s true, because the woman’s son has a job at the same cinema—he’s a ticket attendant or something.”
“I—I don’t know. It sounds so—so incredible. A man of that age and a girl of—how old would she be—nineteen—twenty or so—I suppose?”
“She’s twenty-two.”
Howat did not answer for a time, and at last he merely remarked, as if to himself: “Oh, then she has a legal right to do as she likes. I didn’t quite realise that. But still…” He checked himself, feeling he had already discussed the matter at far too great a length. “It’s all most unfortunate,” he ended up, “and I do think that the less people talk and spread gossip about it, the better.”
Wednesday afternoon was the time for the weekly meeting of his Ladies’ Working Party and Sewing Guild, and it was his custom to look in about three o’clock, and take an unwanted cup of tea in a schoolroom that always smelt rather depressingly of old clothes. He did not much care for the job, but it was expected of him; the women liked the few minutes of social contact with the minister; it gave them food for gossip afterwards whether he looked well or ill, whether his clothes were shabby, whether he got on all right with his wife, if it were true that his son in Canada had entirely gone to the bad and never wrote home, and so on.
Howat read in his study till three o’clock that afternoon; then he walked over to the schoolroom. The women greeted him with their usual fussy murmurs of appreciation, but it was noticed immediately by the more observant of them that he did not seem altogether himself’—he did not make those customary jovial remarks about the garments they were working at, those time-honoured witticisms which never failed to produce attacks of coyly restrained giggling. On the contrary, he seemed preoccupied, his smiles went over their heads as if directed at another world, and he went on stirring his tea in an absent-minded way long after the two lumps of sugar were most certainly dissolved.
And at a quarter-past three, which was rather earlier than his habit, he bade adieu to the ladies and went out into the glooming streets. He felt he wanted a walk, and left the town by the main road, turning into muddy fields as soon as he could. He walked briskly for a mile or so, and then leaning against a stile, re-read the letter in his pocket amidst the falling twilight. A puzzle, really, to know what to do. She had appealed to him, and despite the impossibility of what she asked, he rather liked the style of the letter—simple, straightforward, neither explaining nor apologising, but merely asking. And no mention of the man in the case. That, he thought, showed a certain delicacy. But a married man with a family…really, how could such a thing be possible?
Howat, in fact, was bewildered; for, despite his years, he knew little about the world of private scandal—certainly less than did an average girl at a boarding-school, He never read the News of the World, and never went to the cinema; throughout his adult life, even during the War, he had preserved an ignorance, perhaps even an innocence, that was largely compounded of distaste and lack of interest. Divorces, liaisons, crimes passionels, and all the rest of the Sunday diet of many a quite respectable family, affected him with a slightly disgusted incredulity which he found hard to conceal; fortunately, however, such things belonged mainly to a world with which Browdley had little in common.
Then, with a jerk of inward perception, he passed from bewilderment to personal misgiving. Here was a girl, a daughter of one of his own chapel officials, proposing to do something monstrously unwise (quite apart from any question of morals); and he, the Reverend Howat Freemantle, was stirred by the matter to no more profound emotion than a sort of peeved fastidiousness. It was rather as if Ringwood, meeting a man bleeding to death by the roadside, should pass by for fear of getting Ms clothes soiled. After all, what was the good of his pastorate if he couldn’t make himself of use in such an emergency? He thought, with a quick return of his old self-upbraiding mood: Oh yes, you’re all right for giving addresses about Mozart and drinking tea with the ladies, but when it comes to tackling the practical sort of work that justifies the rather eccentric costume you wear and the prefix to your name, then you fail utterly and hopelessly. Really, really, you aren’t going to let a girl of twenty-two run off with a married man of fifty…or are you? (He answered himself: But you can’t stop her; she’s over age; she has the legal right to do what she wants and she knows it.) But, man, you can stop her, or you’ve got to try, anyhow. She’s given you a loophole; she’s sent you an address; there’s nothing, indeed, to prevent you from actually meeting her, if she’ll see you, when you go to London on Friday; then you can put your persuasive eloquence to a more vital test than the luring of threepenny bits into the collecting plate. However much you dislike the job, you’ve got to see that girl, you’ve got to talk her into her right senses, and you’ve got to make her return home. (But then, Garland says he won’t have her back at any price.) Nonsense; he will, or, if he says he won’t, then you’ve got another job—to persuade him. And in any case, whether he relents or not, your duty with the girl is plain…
Howat was thoroughly wretched by the time he returned to the Manse for tea. He had made up his mind that he would not and could not shirk his duty, but he felt no sort of enthusiasm about it, still less any confidence of being successful. It was all so extraordinary, so unpleasantly removed from his usual ‘beat’. During the past dozen years there had been many occasions on which he had had to exert his personal influence in some cause or other, but they had all been interventions of a more straightforward kind—pleading with an employer not to prosecute in a case of theft, arranging terms of peace between landlord and tenant, telling youths they oughtn’t to spend so much money in the public-houses, and so on. But this affair was clearly different in kind as well as in degree.
That evening there took place in the chapel the customary week-night service, and for perhaps the first time in his life Howat gave an address which he knew, while he was speaking, did not represent the best that was in him. The subject was ‘prayer’, and he heard, with dismay, his own voice, perfectly fluent and modulated, dispensing a representative selection of all the more obvious platitudes that had ever been coined on the topic.
He wished, while he was leading the singing of the last hymn, that he could remember more about the girl. He couldn’t even picture her in his mind, but then, he had never had a good memory for faces. All he recollected (rather oddly, in the circumstances) was that she had seemed to him quite normal and pleasa
nt.
He felt so sure that he would not easily sleep that night that after making cocoa in the kitchen he took the cup to his study, and settled himself in his favourite armchair. But in such a solitude he was more than ever at the mercy of upbraiding conscience; he knew that he must, inevitably, see the girl, and he could no longer even shirk the necessary details of fixing an appointment. In the end (about midnight) he took pen and paper and wrote the following:
“Dear Miss Garland,— I received your letter, but before attempting to do what you ask, I would rather like to talk things over with you. It happens that I shall be in London on Friday of this week—could you meet me, say, at Charing Cross post office at 5.30 p.m.? There will not be time for you to write in answer, so I will hope to see you there if you can manage it.”
As he read this over he had the ignoble thought: Maybe she won’t come; she’ll guess I mean to argue with her and try to get her back…And that, after another troubled bout with his conscience, made him compose a much shorter note—merely:
“Dear Miss Garland,—I shall be in London on Friday—can you meet me at Charing Cross post office at 5.30 p.m.? There will not be time for you to reply to me here, but I will hope to see you if you can possibly manage it.”
It was almost one o’clock when he went out to post the letter. Caution advised him not to drop it in the pillar-box at the corner of School Lane; the Browdley post office was notorious as a centre of gossip and scandal- mongering. Instead he walked to a small wall-box about a mile away in the country and in a different postal area. A tired wakefulness was on him, and his throat was giving pain again; well, never mind, in another couple of days he would know the truth about that. The walk calmed him a little; the night was cold and clear, and even the badly-proportioned fa�ade of the chapel loomed with a certain dignity into the blue-black sky. The theme of the song he had been composing that morning recurred, but somehow failed to satisfy—poor stuff now, remembered against a background of pain and starlight that seemed to throb in rhythmic unison together.
Back at the Manse he thought of the earlier draft of his letter, thrown into the wastepaper-basket; safer, perhaps, to burn it. He did so, with difficulty in the dying embers of the fire, and afterwards, on sudden impulse, opened the drawer of his desk which contained the Raphael picture. He stared at it for a moment, almost as if he hoped it would tell him something; then, after a faint sigh, nothing was left but to put it away, turn out the light, and go to bed.
* * *
CHAPTER FOUR — THURSDAY
He had slept poorly; his throat was bad again; and the bacon and eggs, due to renewed miscalculation or negligence on the part of Ellen, were almost uneatable. He did not grumble, partly because Mary grumbled so much, but chiefly because he had no appetite. “I suppose you’ll be wanting your breakfast early tomorrow, Howat?” Aunt Viney said, but he replied: “Oh no, I’ll make myself a cup of tea before I go—I can get a meal on the train. There’s no need for you or Ellen to get up any earlier than usual.” He disliked giving trouble, not wholly from unselfish motives—he disliked the trouble that giving trouble caused.
After breakfast he had hoped for an hour or so of quietness; as it chanced, however, several callers took up his time; a woman wanted a ‘character’ written out for her small boy, a Sunday school pupil; and an unemployed young fellow, a complete stranger, called to know if Howat could give him some job of painting or cleaning windows in the chapel. Howat couldn’t, but the man’s long story of tramping the country in search of work depressed him in a way which the narrator joyfully perceived; he amplified his tale till Howat was finally reduced to a condition of nodding melancholy. In the end a ten-shilling note, which Howat could ill afford, changed hands, and the man was sent to the kitchen to see if he could be given a meal. He got one, but Aunt Viney meanwhile put him through various tests of her own devising, with the result that, so she claimed afterwards to Mrs. Freemantle, she felt sure he was a fraud—“though, of course, you can never prove these things, and Howat had given him something, I’ll dare be bound, as he always does unless I catch them first before they get inside the house.”
Afterwards came a professional call from Salcombe, the Wesleyan minister at the other end of the town—a large, grey-bearded man with a harsh voice and a curious trick of fidgeting with his pince-nez all the time he was speaking. He wanted to talk to Howat about the Armistice Day service; Howat, he understood, had charge of the hymns; what hymns were going to be chosen? Something well-known, of course; and if he, Salcombe, might be excused for making a few suggestions…Howat found that Salcombe had everything most accurately mapped out—he wanted this hymn and that, and this and that verse omitted—all, naturally, for reasons which he was quite prepared to explain in detail. Howat, however, saved him the trouble by a swift and comprehensive acquiescence; yes, quite; exactly; he was perfectly agreeable; oh, most certainly, just so, just so. And Salcombe went home afterwards and remarked to his wife at lunch (they took dinner in the evening): “By the way, I called on Freemantle this morning, my dear. I got my way with him about those hymns. An easy man to deal with, if only one uses a little tact.”
About a quarter-past eleven Howat went out; he had several calls to make in the town. One was at the bank; he cashed a cheque on his own private account for twenty pounds (more than enough, he reckoned, for the London trip, including the cost of a new suit of clothes, if he should decide to buy one, and the highest conceivable specialist’s fee.) Then visited the library, verified the times of his trains the next morning, and chose another batch of books for young Trevis. The boy read so fast it was difficult to keep up with him, but at length Howat made a selection which he hoped would please—Haldane’s “Possible Worlds”, and two novels, Hergesheimer’s “Java Head” and one called “Brown on Resolution” by a writer named Forrester. Those ought to last Trevis over the week-end, anyway. He went round to Mansion Street with them and spent an hour or so chatting with the boy, whom he found at first in a rather depressed mood. Before leaving, he asked if there were anything Trevis would like him to bring back from London—“I shan’t be there more than a few hours, but I’ll have time to run round the shops, if there’s anything you think you’d care about.”
Trevis answered, rather sadly: “If it isn’t too much trouble you could bring me a London evening paper—I haven’t seen one since I left Cambridge. And it’ll only cost threepence if you get them all. There’s nothing else I want, thanks all the same.”
“Right, then. I won’t forget. And you can expect me round with them on Monday morning.”
He shook hands and was just going out of the room when Trevis called back: “Oh, by the way—any more news about that girl of Garland’s?”
Howat answered: “Nothing very definite, I’m afraid. Only rumours which perhaps I oughtn’t to repeat.”
“No need—I’ve probably heard them. They say the man’s a dreadful creature fat little Jew with a bald head and gold teeth. So they say, mind you But I thought you might know something.”
Howat shook his head. “I wish I did. Who gave you that description of the man?”
“Our maid had it from one of the neighbours, and heaven knows where she got it.”
“It’s extraordinary—if it’s true.”
“Yes, isn’t it? But then, Elizabeth was always an extraordinary girl.” There was a pause, after which Howat continued, with growing intensity: “It’s not only extraordinary, it’s—it’s monstrous. A young girl barely out of her teens and a man—like that—married—twice her age—”
“But I suppose it all counts for nothing when two people reckon themselves to be in love.”
“Love?”
Howat uttered the word incredulously, as if it were the last that would ever have occurred to him in such a connection. Even its very sound, though he enunciated it often enough in his public prayers and sermons, had a way of seeming different when uttered in a small room and in the course of casual conversation. Love, indeed? Love to hi
m was the feeling he had for his wife, and which he presumed other men had for their wives; he understood it as such; it was a straightforward, simple feeling, perfectly reasonable and devoid of complication. Whereas this feeling of Elizabeth Garland for her paramour (the quaintly old-fashioned term was the only one he could bring to mind) must be something altogether different, something totally and mercifully outside his own and most other people’s personal experience.
He said, abruptly: “Good-bye, Trevis, must get away—so many odd things to do before tomorrow. I won’t forget those papers for you…And as for that other matter—the one we’ve just been discussing I’m afraid it’s useless to theorise. Perhaps things may not turn out as badly as we fear. Good-bye, now, until Monday.” Then he went home to dinner at the Manse.
He was busy all afternoon; it was amazing how even a projected absence of two days entailed all sorts of arrangings and postponements, letters to this person and that, instructions, suggestions, and excuses. He was by nature a hard and enthusiastic worker, and Browdley had well learnt that if there were a charity concert to be organised, a subscription to be raised, a movement to be launched, a defunct society to be resuscitated, or any particularly tiresome or exasperating piece of work to be done, the Reverend Howat Freemantle could usually be relied upon for the job. It was not that he enjoyed the fuss and bother of such things (quite the contrary, indeed), but it was always easy to persuade him that they were duties that someone ought to do, and that if he didn’t tackle them, probably nobody would. It was known, too, that once he had set his hand to a task, he never flagged, never complained, and never shirked responsibility.
So, during a dozen years, his life had gradually become more fretfully busy, nor had he developed to any degree the art of delegating authority and leaving odd jobs to subordinates. He was old-fashioned, too, in his methods; a telephone would have been a help to him, but he believed he could not afford it, and he still wrote out all his letters by hand. He would sometimes have welcomed assistance from his daughter, but he felt that she had her own work to do, and he did not care to ask her. Often, when a succession of exacting trivialities tired him out completely, he would feel that he really must cut down some of his societies; but when he began to think out which ones to cut, he always found the problem far too hard. Enthusiasm, indeed, was ever ready in him to rise up at the mere thought of neglecting or abandoning anything.