by James Hilton
She turned to him with a look of eager, startled friendliness, clutching his arm meanwhile like an excited child. “Thank you—thank you very much,” she said simply, and he responded—“Oh, no, no—” and held her gloved fingers for a fraction of a moment in his cold hand. Her instant response to his benediction had filled him with overmastering ease of mind; he had done right, he was certain now, and he could even feel a touch of that priestly serenity he had so often imagined and envied. “But I do thank you,” she insisted, and he could only repeat-“-Oh no, not at all…” His head was full of a divine singing, and all he could think of again was the astonishing rightness of himself, herself; and of all the world.
* * *
CHAPTER SEVEN — FRIDAY DINNER
She had said the Soho restaurant was not expensive; but it was, in fact, like most Soho restaurants, cheap if you picked out the very cheapest things, but fairly expensive to the person who asked for just what he wanted. Howat, sitting down at the small table and studying the bill of fare, did not feel in any mood to make intricate mathematical calculations. He was never very competent with money; if he had been alone he would doubtless have had eggs on toast in a Lyons shop for cheapness’ sake; but, on the other hand, if Lyons had grossly overcharged him he would never have noticed it. So that, though he stared hard at the items on Barroli’s comprehensive list, they conveyed little to his understanding—three and six for poulet en casserole seemed to him neither more nor less outrageous than a hundred pounds for a heating apparatus. Nor, apart from the prices, did he peruse very intelligently; he knew French, but to know French is not always to know the identities of dishes in a Soho restaurant owned by an Italian. Two things, however, supervened immensely above all his perceptions; he was hungry, and the world still retained its extraordinary attributes of perfection. As he gazed about he could not have conceived any restaurant pleasanter than the one whose interior surrounded him; he liked its touch of old-fashionedness, its red plush benches and baroque decorations; he liked the red-shaded table-lamp near his elbow, and the French and Italian newspapers on wooden frames that lay about; he liked the quick-moving and slightly shabby waiters, the smallness and easygoingness of the place, and the fact that at two tables nearest his own two different gentlemen were dining, the one, in full evening dress, with a lady, and the other, alone, in a very exuberant plus-fours.
In truth, it was just an average sort of place, better than some and not so good as others; its chief title to distinction, among a limited circle being an attractive kind of egg-nog made with sherry.
He said, across the table: “Remember now, this is a little farewell dinner in celebration of your Vienna adventure.”
She smiled, and looking at her as she did so, he wondered how it had been possible for her to come to him for those lessons week after week without his noticing her more particularly. In the glow of the table-lamp he saw a rather pale oval face with a slender nose, longer than average, and a decidedly small mouth—like an Italian picture, he thought suddenly, and then, remembering the Raphael Saint Catherine, he said: “Oh, by the way, thanks for the picture you sent me. I liked it very much.”
“I hoped you would. I felt I had to send you something, however trivial, in return for your kindness to me.”
“My kindness to you?” As always, he was bewildered by the notion that he had ever been particularly kind to anybody.
“Yes, indeed,” she answered, spiritedly. “You worked hard with my German, and you were always so patient. I did appreciate it, though I had an impression you didn’t appreciate me. I rather came to the conclusion that I bored you.”
“I’m sure you didn’t do that.”
“You always would keep so strictly to the subject—I so often wanted to have a real talk with you about other things, but you froze me up.” She laughed. “How absurd it is to be telling you all this now!”
He laughed also. “It’s rather odd as well as amusing, considering my daughter’s opinion of me as a teacher. Sometimes, you know, I visit the school and take her class for a chance hour or so. She says I wander about from one subject to another in a most distracting way, that I never teach the children anything, and that I undermine her discipline by making them laugh too much.”
“That sounds utterly delightful.”
“Not from her point of view, though. She has to prepare them for examinations.”
“Well, anyhow, I can’t join her in complaining about you. You certainly taught me German all right and I don’t think you made me laugh at all—not even once.”
“Probably because I was being paid for the job. A sort of fundamental honesty urging me to give the utmost value for money.”
They both laughed again, but in the background he was searching his memory for some clue to that earlier attitude; how was it, once again, that he had never noticed her particularly during those German lessons? He remembered how, when she had first approached him about giving them, he had wondered who she was, for the moment, and would have made some excuse for declining had she not revealed herself as his chapel secretary’s daughter. Even after accepting, he had felt a little doubtful; he hadn’t cared for the idea of giving private lessons to young girls…But the waiter’s approach cut short such tangled recollections; it was more important now to decide what to eat.
A moment later, when the waiter had left them after taking the order, they intercepted each other’s glances and smiled. “You’re just thinking how extraordinary it is for you and me to be here, aren’t you?” she asked.
“Yes, I was. But so many extraordinary things have been happening to me to-day. One of them, for instance, happened just before I met you. I went to see a specialist, thinking I might have something rather serious the matter with me, and he told me it was all nerves.”
“Weren’t you delighted?”
“Yes, altogether. I felt like a condemned prisoner who’s been give a reprieve and a free pardon all at the same moment. I still feel rather like that. I left the doctor’s place soon after a quarter to five, I suppose it was, and I hardly know what I did between then and seeing you. I remember getting into a taxi and being driven along Oxford Street. I never ride in taxis as a rule. For that matter, I never dine alone with young ladies in Soho restaurants. If I could see myself now from the outside, I daresay I should think I’d gone completely crazy.”
“Having left the Euclid world and passed into the Einstein—that was your own simile, wasn’t it?”
He looked across at her then with a curious, tranquil admiration. She was clever; she could seize a point; she had an alertness of mind that perfectly matched the alertness of her eyes and bearing. Trevis had the same kind of alertness, dimmed, though, by physical suffering; Ringwood had a touch of it, but in him it was rougher, less clarified. Only in her did this quality which he liked so much seem brought almost to perfection.
She went on: “I’m glad it was nothing seriously wrong. As a matter of fact, I had noticed you looking ill lately. I suppose you were worrying?”
“Yes, frightfully.”
“I think you work far too hard in Browdley. Didn’t the doctor tell you you had to take a rest?”
“I believe he did. D’you know, I hardly remember what he did tell me, except that I hadn’t got what I thought I had. I believe he forbade me to speak in public again for a long time—it was my throat, you see, that was the bother—and I rather think he talked about a nervous breakdown. A breakdown! Do I look like it?”
“Not now, but you may when you get back to Browdley. I think you probably will. I don’t know how you can ever stand the place. You must be so unhappy.” She spoke that last word with a rather scared glance, as if it had arrived too impulsively to be checked.
“Unhappy?”
“Well, yes. Of course it’s always difficult to imagine oneself in someone else’s place, but I always feel—I always have felt—that if I were you I should be terribly unhappy.”
“Unhappy!” he echoed again, but not interrogatively
this time. He was so happy at that moment that the mere conception of being otherwise evaded him till, with a strong effort of imagination, he pictured Browdley, the Browdley he would be returning to on the morrow, its narrow streets of slums leading from the railway station to the Manse, the factory overshadowing the chapel, the little rooms in all the little houses that he visited.
“Because,” she suggested, again with a scared glance, “because I feel that you try for so much, and must so often be disappointed.”
He said: “Ah yes, but it isn’t all disappointment, you know. And whether it is or not, I have to do it.”
“You feel about it as I feel about music? That you must do it, whatever happens? You never have any doubts?”
“I don’t think I ever had any when I was your age, anyhow. Perhaps when one reaches middle life, it isn’t natural to be as certain of things.”
“You have doubts, then?”
“Only of my own usefulness. It doesn’t seem quite so inevitable that I shall convert the world as it did when I first left college.”
“Do you want to convert the world?”
“I don’t say I do—now. I’ll be satisfied with doing a certain amount of good in Browdley.”
“Giving up the big ambitions?”
“Don’t you think doing a certain amount of good in Browdley is a big ambition? I do.”
“Yes, so do I, but—” The waiter came with soup, and the interruption broke the sequence of discussion. “Really,” she said afterwards, with a smile, “you must think I’m terribly impertinent, cross-examining you like this.”
“Not so impertinent as I was to you a little while ago, I’m sure.”
“Oh, that?” She laughed. “You don’t mind my being amused by it, do you?”
“I’m relieved that you can be.”
“Well, don’t you think it was rather funny?”
“Perhaps…” And he laughed, with an effort at first, and then spontaneously.
“It was such an odd way of getting to know you,” she went on. “I’d imagined all sorts of ways, but none in the least like that. Yes, I had imagined all sorts of ways. As a matter of fact, I’d been really wanting to know you ever since I heard you give an address on William Blake—two years ago, it must have been. Usually I hate literary talks, they’re so artificial, and gushing, and speakers always quote the tags that you privately don’t think much of—but you were different. You were rather queer, in a way. You talked totally above the heads of everybody in the audience (totally above my head, anyhow), and you went rambling on and on, about all sorts of things that had nothing to do with the subject—and yet somehow, in the end, I did get a vague idea of what you were driving at. Anyhow, I didn’t come away feeling bored.”
“So that was why, when you wanted to learn German—”
“Yes, precisely. I knew you knew the language, because I’ve seen you getting German books out of the library. But my parents didn’t at all approve. To begin with, they couldn’t see why I wanted to learn German at all, and then they said that since I never attended the chapel it was a piece of impudence for me to ask you.”
“Oh, no, no, that never occurred to me.” He paused a moment and then said: “By the way, as a mere matter of curiosity, why have you never attended the chapel?”
“Do you really want me to tell you?”
“Yes, very much.”
She seemed to be having to arrange her thoughts. At length she replied: “I used to go regularly when I was younger. I was made to. It was the Silk Street chapel then, till my father had some kind of row with the minister there and decided to change to yours. I was seventeen and came to the conclusion that if he could please himself about which chapel he attended I ought to be able to please myself whether I attended one at all. There was a fuss about it at home, of course, but after all, at seventeen one can’t exactly be dragged screaming along the aisle. And. I did go once or twice, just to sample it.”
“And you didn’t like it?”
“Not a very great deal. I never heard you preach, if that’s any personal consolation.”
“I’m afraid it isn’t. What I really want to find out is your reason for disliking chapel itself.”
“Well, to begin with, the building’s not very attractive, is it? I wouldn’t mind if it were downright ugly, like a factory, but it’s got all those extra things on it—I don’t know how to describe them—but it looks as if it had been built in a straightforward way by a builder and then someone had gone round sticking architecture on afterwards. Perhaps that’s rather a vague criticism. As a matter of fact it reminds me too much of Gounod’s music.”
“You don’t like Gounod?”
“No.”
“Neither do I, particularly. And I quite agree with all that you say about the chapel building; it’s the product of a period when taste in architecture was at its lowest. Still, that alone oughtn’t to keep anyone outside.”
“Oh no, it wouldn’t keep me, either, if I liked everything else. But I suppose I don’t.”
“Tell me, if you can, some of the other things that you don’t like.”
“Well, there’s the organ, and the way the organist plays it, and the hymns—such stupid words, very often, which people sing without meaning them—’False and full of sin I am’, for instance—do you think anyone in your chapel really thinks he’s false and full of sin? I’m quite sure my father doesn’t. Nor do the rest, either—they’re far too proud of being respectable middle- class people ever to have such a thought…And the tunes are sometimes rather dreadful, too.”
“I’ll even agree with you in most of all that. I did try years ago to improve the music, but it led to trouble with the organist and choirmaster; they said I was interfering outside my province. Probably I was. It isn’t an easy job, you know, being a parson.”
“I’m sure it isn’t. That’s why I said just now I was sorry for you—you must find so many things that seem all wrong.”
“Most of us have that experience, don’t we? But tell me now, apart from the building and the music, which we both agree are far from perfect, what is it that you really dislike? I’m certain it can’t be entirely a matter of externals.”
“It isn’t, but it’s rather difficult to answer without being impolite.”
“Oh, I shan’t be offended—I asked for it, and anyhow, I really do want to know.”
She replied, musingly and with evident care: “I think it’s probably that I don’t feel sympathy with the spirit of the place. It all seems rather bleak to me, and it doesn’t seem to have much room for art and beauty—in a way, I feel it almost distrusts that sort of thing. I know I can’t prove what I’m saying—I’m only telling you just how things appear to me. And the revivals you sometimes have—they’re a bit hysterical—and I’m not built to like that sort of business. And then the preaching—I don’t care much for the system that encourages practically anybody to preach. I can’t feel interested, somehow, in what all kinds of people tell me, out of their own heads, so to speak, about religion.”
“There, of course, you attack the whole foundation of Nonconformity—perhaps even of Protestantism altogether.”
“Do I? I’m not really trying to attack anything—I’m only describing a few rather shadowy feelings I have.”
“Quite. I see that.” On any other occasion he would have felt immensely worried and perturbed and would have been bursting with eloquent confutations and counter-arguments; but with her, rather oddly, he felt no inclination to do anything but just go on talking quietly and discovering her opinions on one thing after another. It was queer how comfortable he felt, and how pleasantly in sympathy with her, even all the time that she was undermining, in a few calm sentences, the whole fabric of his professional existence; the truth was that beyond and surpassing any disagreement with her ideas was an extraordinary interest in them that had taken possession of him.
The waiter here provided a second interruption by removing the soup- plates and bringing a large
Sole Colbert on a dish; it looked so enormous, even when divided, that they broke off their religious argument to discuss the more urgent if less exalted matter of appetite. “I’m astonished to find how hungry I am,” he declared, zestfully. “I never fed equal to this sort of thing at home. It must be the change of air.”
“More likely the good cooking,” she answered, and then, perceiving the implication of her remark, flushed slightly. “Really, I’m saying the most dreadful things; I don’t know why it is; I just seem to find myself speaking to you exactly as I feel—anything that comes into my head…But I think it’s true, though, about the cooking. Once, when I came to your house for a German lesson, you were out, and the maid had me in the kitchen talking to her. She was alone there, cooking your dinner, I suppose, and ever since watching her that morning, I’ve had an extra reason for being sorry for you.”
He laughed. “I never trouble about food when I’m at home. I don’t think I’m really very interested in it. Of course, it’s different to-night, but then, to-night…”
The waiter approached with the wine-list, and Howat, after a moment’s hesitation, passed it across the table to her. “Will you choose something you like?” he asked, doubtfully.
She also was doubtful. “I’m afraid I’m very ignorant about drinks. I’d rather you ask for something you would like.”
“Something I’d like?” He was about to disclaim any desire for non-teetotal drink of any kind when suddenly an impulse seized him and he began talking, almost to himself: “I remember something I once had—I was in Germany, on a holiday, as a youth—it was some kind of beer, I think—ah, here’s the list—I wonder if I shall call to mind the name…” He glanced down the column and felt a slight stirring of memory. “Ah, Pilsener, Pilsener—that was it. Yes, I think I’d like to drink it again, after all these years. But what about you? Won’t you have wine?”
“I’ll have the beer with you. May I?”
“All right.” And he gave the order to the waiter, who had probably never before heard Pilsener discussed with such solemnity.