by James Hilton
This afternoon, this Thursday afternoon, he found the hundred and one urgencies of the moment producing in him that familiar mood of tired resentment. One of his activities was the treasurership of a Savings Certificate Club; children at day and Sunday school brought their pennies to him or to Mary, and the accumulation was invested at the local post office. All this required careful booking, and now, he discovered, as he went through the records, Mary had let things get in a muddle. After over an hour of exceedingly tiresome reckoning he succeeded in restoring the club to solvency by means of a grant from his own pocket of three and ten-pence. It was annoying, and he was, so far as he could ever be, annoyed. If Mary had been there in the house he might even have addressed her strongly; but she was out, and he could only feel vaguely out of humour with himself and things in general. Really, he reflected, surveying the litter on his desk that represented work both finished and unfinished, he would have to prune away a lot of his routine work; he felt like a pioneer in a tropical jungle, growing weaker every moment while the enveloping foliage became denser and harder to penetrate. There was the Antiquarian Society, which always for some reason sent him the most troublesome Latin documents to translate he knew Latin, it was true, but he was no particular scholar—why couldn’t the Grammar School masters try their hands at that sort of thing? And the Tennis Club (he wasn’t interested in tennis and couldn’t imagine why they had asked him to be secretary), and the local League of Nations Society (he was interested in the League of Nations, but there were other people who ought to be able to do the job of President quite as adequately), and the Hospital Sunday Fund (a splendid thing, doubtless, but why didn’t some of his professional colleagues take their turn with it?)—he reviewed them all in his mind, one after the other, and wondered which obligation he could get rid of with least commotion.
And then, on top of it all, and in addition to that annoying three and ten-pence, came the thought of the morrow—the early rise, the walk through the dark streets to the station, bag in hand, the crawling local train, the ride across Manchester in a tram, the express to London, booking a room at a hotel, visiting the heating-apparatus people in the afternoon, then the appointment with the specialist, and after that, if she turned up, his meeting with that girl at Charing Cross. What a day! It was the last two items that seemed most to be feared, and perhaps even of the last two, the vision of the Wimpole Street consulting-room did not trouble him quite so much as the thought of what he would have to say to the girl. Yet he felt, with slow rage inside him: This is my real work, this job of saving souls—this one job which I shirk is the real thing I’m here for. All this other stuff, this parade of being busy that makes many a parson think he’s a success when he’s really only doing a clerk’s job—all this merely disguises the real issue—the fact that if I fail in this Garland affair, I fail utterly. These societies and clubs and meetings and such-like have been a veil hiding life from me and me from life; after all my years of ministerial work, I don’t know where I am when I’m faced with something out of the ordinary; I don’t understand the mainsprings of human conduct, probably not as well as young Trevis, certainly not as well as Ringwood or the Catholic priest…
Towards twilight he took his letters to the pillar-box, and after posting them walked along School Lane as far as the edge of the town, despite a light rain that was falling. The problem of what he should say to Elizabeth Garland and how he should persuade her to return to Browdley, was more than perplexing; it was beginning to be an obsession. All the so far known and meagrely reported ingredients of the affair danced before his mind like animated fragments of a jig-saw puzzle—the Raphael picture she had sent him, the fuss with Garland, her letter from London, and Trevis’s description of the fat little Jew fiddler with the bald head and the gold teeth. What was it that she or any girl could feel for such a man? Some kind of physical infatuation? But there once more he was in uncharted seas, wondering at the sort of desire that could so outweigh considerations of home, family, position, and morals.
He tried even to recollect his own desires, so far as he had ever been conscious of them; and, though he felt it almost sacrilegious to do so, he cast back in memory to his early days of courtship and marriage. Of course he had always loved his wife, and he was still, he would have said, ‘in love’ with her; but he recognised, nevertheless, that there was a fiercer passion that belonged peculiarly to youth. In his own life it had coincided with his ‘conversion’, and when he tried to think of those early days he had a vision of peaceful evening walks across fields to chapel, with Mary by his side; he could not, at such a distance in time, recollect exactly what had been his feelings during those walks, but he was quite certain that the course of true love, in his case, had been exceptionally smooth.
As for temptation of any kind since marriage, he could honestly and with confidence assert that he had never even known what it was; indeed, the mere contemplation of it was distasteful. Yet there was a world, he knew, in which unpleasant things of that sort did abound—a strange world in which Elizabeth Garland, for one, was dangerously adrift, and which lay pitilessly beyond the scope of all the societies of which he was president and secretary. He dared not, merely to preserve his own comfort, shirk total knowledge of that world; on the contrary, it might sometimes be his unpleasant duty to explore.
He went home for tea, and in the evening there was the weekly Brotherhood Meeting. His throat, which was definitely worse, gave him a good excuse for not attending, but he would not take it; he went, sang, spoke, and made his throat so painful that it kept him awake for half the night. In the early morning darkness of his bedroom he felt desperately afraid of all that the coming day might bring, and when at last he fell asleep and dreamed, his dreams were of restless, inexplicable things.
* * *
CHAPTER FIVE — FRIDAY MORNING AND AFTERNOON
Unless on some definitely professional errand Howat always travelled in mufti. He did so quite openly, even sometimes when he went no further than Manchester, and though many of his colleagues in the town did not approve, the lay population were quite accustomed to seeing him dressed as one of themselves. “There’s something about a parson’s collar that puts people off,” Howat had once said to Doxley, of the Congregational Church, “especially in such a confined space as a railway compartment, where they have nothing to do but stare. It makes them uncomfortable among themselves, they feel under constraint with one another—they either talk at’ you, or else relapse into a brooding silence which you can feel to be anti-clerical. When I was a young fellow, just beginning, I used to wear the whitest and highest of clerical collars because I was so proud of my profession, but now I think I’m less proud of that than I am of my common humanity. I feel that if I’ve got to wear something that marks me out as different or superior to others, then in fairness to them I ought to travel first-class—like officers in the army.”
“But surely,” Doxley had said, “that argument would apply just as much against wearing the clerical habit at all, even in Browdley?”
“Not quite. In Browdley, I’m on business, as it were—my professional badge is as appropriate as a doctor’s black bag or a collier’s black face. But when I’m shopping, say, in Manchester, or on holiday at the seaside, then I’d feel as unseemly in my parson’s rig-out as a judge if he had to play golf in his wig and gown.”
“You mean that when you’re out of Browdley, you don’t want people to know what you are?”
“Well, I don’t see why I should fling my profession in their faces, anyhow.” Doxley always put Howat in the impish mood of the small boy who knocks at doors and then runs away; he had added, then, with a touch of that impishness: “I consider it an impertinence to approach strangers with a sort of label tied on to you saying—’ Beware! I’m not an ordinary person like you’.”
And as the Reverend Jefferson Doxley had never for a moment believed himself to be an ordinary person like anyone else, the argument had here tapered away into an infinite shaft o
f disagreement. Doxley had, however, said one thing that Howat afterwards remembered. “Well, Freemantle, whatever you say, you can’t deny that a parson’s collar does mean something to people; they look on it as a guarantee of character, even if they pretend to scoff at it. Take, for instance, the case of some timid, nervous girl walking alone along a country lane late at night. She sees a man approaching her in the distance, wonders who and what he is, begins to feel rather terrified, and then—suddenly—sees that collar. Don’t you think it’s a relief? She may be agnostic or an atheist or anything you like, but she knows she needn’t be afraid of meeting a parson in the dark.”
“It seems a rather negative tribute to parsons in general,” Howat had answered, still impishly. That conversation had taken place some half- dozen years before, since when Doxley had never wholly ‘approved of’ his brother minister; he suspected him, indeed, of being dangerously imbued with eccentric, undignified, and even socialistic ideas.
But now, on this Friday morning in November as the Manchester-London express raced over the plains of Northamptonshire, there could have seemed little eccentric, much less dangerous, in the quiet, tired-looking man who took lunch by himself at the far end of the dining-car. He had been sleeping for part of the journey, and there were lines beneath his eyes that made many a traveller, especially women, give him a fleetingly compassionate glance as they hurried along the centre aisle. There was something in his face that curiously attracted most people—a sort of rather sad winsomeness that made them feel they could rely on him for infinite depths of sympathy and understanding. Though, as a matter of fact, he did not always understand as well as they imagined; people often poured out intimate personal confessions to which his carefully kind attention was only a mask to cover up extreme uncomfortableness and a bewildered lack of comprehension.
He took coffee and a cigarette after lunch (he only very rarely smoked, and never knew quite whether it gave him any pleasure or not); then he looked through the Manchester Guardian, and tried to interest himself in the passing scenes of the countryside; but soon his head was slipping forward again and he dozed fitfully till the train slowed down for the terminus.
After leaving the train he walked to an hotel in Southampton Row, at which he had stayed on the occasion of his first overnight visit to London as a youth. It consisted of three adjacent Georgian houses, a good deal spoiled in the process of conversion into one establishment, and always smelling (more or less, according to the time of day) of cabbage and floor-polish. Its principal and perhaps only merits were that it was cheap (seven-and-six for bed-and- breakfast), respectable, and near the big northern railway stations.
This last was an important consideration for Howat, who reckoned himself unable to afford cabs (he knew little about the prices of things and had never bothered to discover that London taxis were only half as expensive as those in Manchester and about a quarter the cost of hiring any sort of car in Browdley).
Having lunched on the train, he had nothing to do at the hotel except book a room. They gave him a small low-ceilinged, top-floor apartment, overlooking the roof of a garage, sparingly but perhaps just adequately furnished for its purpose, with a shilling-in-the-slot gas-fire, and an electric light in the most difficult of all positions for either tying a tie or reading in bed. Howat hurriedly dumped down his bag; it was already two o’clock (the train had been rather late); he must get along to those engineering people. In the hotel lobby as he descended, the proprietress called to him to sign the register; he did so, writing ‘Howat Freemantle, Browdley, British’ in his usual clear script. He disliked the title ‘Reverend’ and never used it of himself, though he could not prevent others doing so. He disliked it for a certain pretentiousness it seemed to have, just as he never much cared for the word ‘study’ as applied to the room at home in which he worked.
It was a fine day, fortunately, for it had been intermittently on his mind throughout the journey that he had forgotten to bring an umbrella. He boarded a bus outside the hotel and rode to Aldwych; then he changed to another bus and got down at Mansion House station. It was a quarter to three when he arrived at the showrooms and city headquarters of Neal & Sons, Sanitary, Hydraulic, and Central Heating Engineers. In another hour and a quarter, he reflected, he would be arriving at Wimpole Street. Another hour and a quarter of uncertainty, followed, perhaps, by a certainty that would be even more dreadful. He felt his throat like something burning and malevolent that did not belong to him; he was sure now, with a sudden inward lurch of panic, that the verdict would be all that he had feared.. As he gave his name to the clerk in the outside office he heard his own voice as that of another man speaking; he wondered if he would be able to mobilise his wits for this earlier interview. The clerk ushered him through an inner office into the presence of a smartly dressed and very shining, voluble person who shook him eagerly by the hand, offered him an arm-chair, and proceeded to talk in a hearty way about the weather. “And was it raining in Manchester when you came through this morning, Mr. Freemantle? Ha, Ha!” The weather, politics, bad trade, and finally, as if with apologies that such an irrelevant thing should after all be mentioned, this question of a new heating apparatus.
Howat sat back and wished that the chair were not such an easy chair; he was in grave danger of falling into a sleep, or at any rate, into a dream; he kept hearing the other man’s voice and had to wonder whether he were still just talking or had begun to ask questions that demanded answers. “Well, Mr. Freemantle, we could probably do you quite a satisfactory system for a hundred pounds or so—of course I couldn’t give an exact quotation till our man has been up to see the place. I can assure you we’re used to the job just take a look at this catalogue—it contains merely a few examples of churches and chapels throughout the country that have given us their heating contract…” Howat fingered the smooth, glossy pages and had a misty vision of one church after another—plain-looking churches with oblong windows, elaborate- looking churches with stone facings and Gothic stained-glass, churches with stone crosses, churches without stone crosses, churches surrounded by a litter of schoolrooms and vestries, churches with turrets, cupolas, even (so it appeared) minarets, churches with machicolated towers, crocheted spires, and Ionic porticoes, churches enveloped by apparently tropical verdure, churches with the minister standing on the front step, churches of all sizes, denominations, architectures, and degrees of prosperity. It had hardly seemed possible that there could be so many churches in the world, and all, it appeared, were warmed by radiators supplied by Neal and Sons.
Howat said at length: “Well, yes, I think it will be all right. We shall be very glad to have your system.”
“I can promise you, sir, that both you and your congregation will be well pleased with it.”
“Oh, I’m sure, I’m sure.”
“A good heating apparatus, sir, is half the battle, I always think. Warm your church well and people will flock into it. How can people worship when their feet are cold?”
“Quite—oh, quite.” At any other time Howat might have found it refreshing to talk to this enthusiastic young fellow, and even to discuss with him such vital matters as he had just touched upon; but as it was, he felt anxious at all costs to end the interview. He said: “Perhaps, then, you’ll get on with the job as soon as you can, eh?”
The other seemed genuinely grieved by this display of haste. “Would you care to step down into the basement, sir, and see the kind of installations we put in? We have a few models on view and we can also show you the apparatus that actually heats this office, and is heating it at the present moment—identical, of course, with the type we shall he supplying to you. I think you’ll admit, sir, that the temperature of this room is just about what one would wish for.”
Too hot, Howat thought sleepily—far too hot; but he said: “Oh yes, just about right.”
“We can regulate it, of course. A single turn of the knob—like this—”
Howat watched him rather sadly. Was it merely profession
al, such enthusiasm? Did the youth go home and dream about heating-apparatus? Did heating-apparatus fill a ’niche in his soul? Howat felt: I wish at this present moment I could believe in anything as fervently as this fellow seems to believe in these pipes and radiators…
“Perhaps, sir, you would care to come down and inspect—”
Howat rose and shook his head sombrely. “Well, no, I don’t think I’ll bother, if you don’t mind. I—I have several other appointments this afternoon, and not much time left for them. Your apparatus, I have no doubt, will suit us admirably. I’d better be getting along now.”
“Very good, sir. And when would it be convenient for us to send our man up to Browdley?”
“Your man? Oh yes, about the pipes and things—yes—oh, any time next week would do.”
“Very good, Mr. Freemantle. We will advise you definitely by postcard. Good-bye, sir—very pleased indeed to have met you.”
And in another moment Howat was outside in the street again. It was nearly half-past three.
He boarded a bus at the corner and rode past the Temple and Charing Cross and up Regent Street. By that time it was ten minutes to four, and at Oxford Circus he took to the pavements and began to thread his way diagonally into that stately district almost equally consecrated to music and medicine. He tried to think of the concert he might attend that evening, and of his more immediate rendezvous at Charing Cross at half-past five; but he hardly succeeded in either effort; a greater imminence was on him, a vertical barrier of time beyond which even futurity seemed scarcely to exist. He knew now that this interview with the specialist had been an unrealised background of all his thoughts and emotions for weeks. He felt beyond panic just numb with a secret, paralysing excitement of mind.