by James Hilton
There were, indeed, seven of them, and they were presented one after another. Howat was struck almost completely dumb; he had never had anything to do with girls, and didn’t know in the least what to say to them. He merely answered their questions when they asked if the train had been late, and whether he liked the hot summer; for the rest of the time he sat silent and uncomfortable. They chattered loudly all around him, and he wondered if it would be very rude to ask permission to go to his bedroom and wash, but he was too nervous to do so, and he actually made up his mind to run away to London the following morning after breakfast. Soon, however, the girls disappeared in ones and twos, leaving him alone with Mrs. Coverdale. He was not so nervous with her; she had a very genial and easygoing manner, and asked him scores of questions about himself, what his tastes were, what subjects he had liked best at school, and so on. He told her he liked music, and she said: “Ah, Mr. Coverdale will want you to play the harmonium this evening, then.” The thought of that made him nervous again, and he wished he had said nothing at all about music.
Towards seven o’clock a mysterious imminence made itself felt in the atmosphere; there was a good deal of scurrying about on the part of the seven girls, and at a certain moment one of them, who had apparently been looking out of an upstairs window, called out: “Father’s coming!” A few moments later a rather elderly man, grey-haired but very upright, walked briskly between the two rows of hollyhocks and entered the house. He kissed his wife and each one of his daughters very loudly, and then, on being made aware of Howat’s presence, said gruffly: “How do you do, my boy?” and shook hands with him. After that he led the way to the dining-room and said a slow and solemn grace. There was little talking during the meal; sometimes he made a remark to which someone gave answer, but there was none of the chatter that had made the tea-table so noisy, and even Mrs. Coverdale did not seem in such an easy-going mood.
Afterwards she mentioned that Ho wat had confessed to being ‘musical,’ and sure enough, Mr. Coverdale suggested that he should ‘play a tune’ on the harmonium. For this purpose he was conducted into a very primly furnished drawing-room, full of stuffed birds and china ornaments; he was terribly nervous with all the family crowding round him, and more especially because he had never played a harmonium before. At first he failed to realise that he had to work the pedals, and even when he had made this important discovery he found that some of the notes wouldn’t sound, and that a rather rapid Chopin study hardly suited the peculiarities of the instrument. He made what he felt to be a complete hash of the whole thing, but to his surprise and relief everyone appeared delighted, and Mr. Coverdale even went so far as to thank him in a deep booming voice.
A fortnight later it was somehow or other settled that Howat’s holiday should not come to an end in the normal way, but that he should take up a permanent position in the Coverdale household.
Mr. Coverdale, indeed, thought the boy might ‘do pretty well’, and this, from such a source, was high enough praise. He had been a little prejudiced against him at first for having been brought up ’Church of England’, but he soon found that the boy was intelligent, well-mannered, and ready to work hard. Mr. Cover-dale owned a saw- mill and timber-yard adjoining Kimbourne station, and it was not difficult to find ways in which the boy, by working eight or nine hours a day, could thoroughly earn the weekly half-crown which, in addition to his keep, became his initial wage.
Mr. Coverdale was a strict employer, but he was a strict man altogether; he neither drank nor smoked; he would literally have shrunk from touching a pack of cards; and his dislike of strong language went so far as to bring even such phrases as ‘good heavens’ under the ban. Every Sunday, without fail, he preached long and lugubriously eloquent sermons in little dissenting chapels scattered over the surrounding districts; some of these engagements involved journeys of ten or a dozen miles, and he would always make these on foot and in all weathers, disdaining even to saddle a horse, much less to make use of the unhallowed Sunday train service. Fortunately, he was a man of strong constitution and excellent physique; it was his boast, made with due thankfulness, that he had never had a day’s illness in his life.
Howat did not dislike him even from the beginning, and soon came to be quite comfortable at Kimbourne. After a week or so he knew all the girls by sight and by name, though he was still rather nervous of them; the eldest, Lavinia, was hardly a girl at all; she was twenty-four, which seemed to him an immense age. It was Lavinia who kept the others in order, but Howat, if his shyness permitted him to have any active preferences at all, liked the younger ones better; the youngest of all was Mary, aged fifteen. He felt rather more drawn to Mary because she was only a ‘kid’, and was a good deal bullied by the elder girls.
Life would really have been very pleasant, but for Sunday, which came as a day of gloom after the comparatively cheerful activities of the working week. On Sunday no newspapers or ordinary books were allowed to be read, though if Mr. Coverdale’s preaching engagements were at a distance it was sometimes possible to persuade Mrs. Coverdale to unlock the bookcase after he had gone. When, however, as very often happened he was occupied locally, the day progressed from morn to evening according to a most rigid routine. The whole family trooped out twice to the bleak little chapel at the Dover end of the village and filled up the pew immediately under the pulpit. Howat usually sat at one end and Mrs. Coverdale at the other, with the seven girls in between. He did not exactly enjoy the services, which seemed to him cold and uninteresting compared with the ones he had been used to, but there were times when Mr. Coverdale’s rough eloquence stirred him to a vague self-scrutiny; and in any case, he always liked the singing, for he was beginning to develop a good voice and enjoyed using it. Then one Sunday the organist failed to appear, and Howat was asked, in an emergency, to play the hymns. He did so, fairly well, and when, some months later, the organist died, the boy was officially appointed in his place.
It was only an old and very wheezy American harmonium, but in it Howat found something to make Sunday a day to look forward to; he enjoyed particularly the opening and closing voluntaries, which gave him a chance of showing what he could do. Usually he played one or other of the simple pieces that had been left behind by the previous organist, but one morning, in a mood of great daring, he ignored the music sheet before him and made up something of his own as he went along. Rather to his astonishment no one complained or even appeared to notice any departure from the normal; and thus emboldened, he made a fairly regular habit of such improvisations. He did not, though, tell anyone about it.
After be had been at Kimbourne a year Mr. Coverdale increased his wage to ten shillings a week, and declared himself ’quite satisfied with him.
Those were the years when Howat was growing up, and when every month, almost every day, marked new and noticeable development. He was a rather quiet boy, good-looking in a thoughtful way, and he had very fine and striking eyes. He was not, however, particularly observant or knowledgeable, or he would have been aware that at least three of the Coverdale girls were head over ears in love with him. Lavinia, the eldest, considered she had a prior right to any attachment he might eventually make, and there were frequent quarrels between her and her sisters on this account. Howat, in fact, treated them all with complete impartiality, except that Mary, as still something of a kid, was admitted to more casual intimacies.
Howat’s chief thoughts at this time were all on one subject—music. Since his very earliest days he had been entranced by tunes, and now, with advancing youth, the desire to explore the magic world of harmony became speedily a passion. After the discovery that he could improvise, he seriously set himself to study the technique of composition; and most evenings, if he had time to spare, he would go to the harmonium in the drawing- room and try over invented tunes of his own. The family believed him to be ‘practising’, but at last the secret had to come out. He had submitted a song in a competition run by a musical journal, and had received the second prize of a guinea.
The cheque arrived one morning at breakfast-time, and his delight was quite impossible to hide. When they all learned the truth, they were rather mystified; it seemed odd to them that Howat should have been able to pick up actual money in such a peculiar way.
One effect the disclosure had was to remove any further need for secrecy; henceforth all Howat’s musical work was carried on openly. Some of the girls had mediocre voices, and Howat sometimes composed songs for them; but this was never much of a success, and the girls only bothered about it because they enjoyed the intimacy with Howat which trying over the songs involved. Even Lavinia, who had no voice at all, tried to develop one so as not to be at a disadvantage in this respect.
Howat was happy enough. He had come gradually to like as well as to respect Mr. Coverdale, and the old man, in his turn, had begun to feel for the boy an affection all the deeper because he had always wished for a son of his own. The family did nit know, and would perhaps hardly have credited, the terms upon which the two worked together at the timber-yard. Howat’s job had developed into a sort of informal private secretaryship, but there was not always much work of that sort to be done, and sometimes in the afternoons they would sit together in the little matchboard office amidst the smells of glue and sawdust and hold most solemn discussions. There was something very impressive about the old man; with his white bushy hair and bright almost jet- black eyes, he looked rather like Howat’s conception of an Old Testament patriarch. Howat soon perceived that the saw-mill and timber-yard were utterly secondary considerations with him; he ran them efficiently and conscientiously ’enough, but his real interest in life, and more and more as he was growing older, was religion. There was no doubting the sincerity of that religion, or that it was vastly more than a one-day-a-week affair. It steeped Coverdale’s whole life, not precisely in happiness, but in a sort of wild and stupendous triumph. Once when Howat heard a certain theme of Beethoven’s he thought instantly that it reminded him of Coverdale’s attitude.
Howat was always very sensitive and impressionable, and the fervent booming eloquence of the old man, both publicly and in private, easily stirred him emotionally. Coverdale had, indeed, a noble though undisciplined command over English; he could paint the joys of heaven and the pains of hell in language which filled Howat’s mind like great chords of music. The girls were all apparently unmoved by it, but often when Howat raised his head in chapel at the close of one of Coverdale’s long prayers, his eyes were dim with tears. He always felt that the prayers had been framed to apply to himself personally, and though he knew that this was absurd, he could not get the idea out of his mind.
One day a curious incident took place at the saw-mill. A workman had been censured by Mr. Coverdale for using bad language; Coverdale had had him up in the office and, in Howat’s hearing, had delivered a long and impressive harangue on the sinfulness of such conduct and on the possibility that Providence might inflict sudden and condign punishment on anyone guilty of it. A few minutes after the man had returned to his work loud screams sounded from the saw-mill; Howat and Coverdale both rushed down, and found that the offending machinist had had all the fingers of one hand taken off by the circular saw. After he had been removed to hospital, Howat fainted; the sight had been too much for him; and when he recovered he saw Coverdale kneeling by his side with a fiercely triumphant light in his eyes. He was convinced that Providence had spoken through the medium of the ghastly affair, and into Howat’s ears he poured there and then a terrific exposition of his own religious feelings and convictions. It was then that he told Howat that he prayed every night that the boy might ‘get’ religion as he had ‘got’ it, and might come to realise that there were more serious things in life than experimenting with little bits of tunes. Howat was touched and moved by the revelation that Coverdale thought so much about him and his future; and when the old man suggested that they should both pray aloud and in turn for the quick recovery of the injured workman, Howat, who was in a rather dazed mood, agreed. After a little preliminary nervousness when it came to his turn, he found that the words sprang to his lips quite fluently; he had listened to so much of Coverdale’s eloquence that mere imitativeness, if nothing else, could have carried him along. He found the experience rather exhilarating in a way; he enjoyed the consciousness of control over language; it was rather like the first zestful sensation of riding a bicycle. When he had finished Coverdale signified a grave approval; he was convinced, from that moment, that the boy was destined to be the means of saving innumerable souls.
Gradually, after that, and to a degree that Howat hardly realised, Coverdale’s influence over him deepened and became more dominating. The day came when Coverdale at last persuaded him to use his ’gift of tongues’ in public; he was very reluctant, but at last consented. It was a meeting held in the chapel schoolroom to raise funds for a new organ, and Howat, as organist, felt that there was some small excuse if he chose to say a few words on such an occasion. When he first stood up before that audience of forty odd people he was so nervous he could scarcely enunciate a word; his mouth began to twitch; and Lavinia’s eyes, staring at him from the front row, seemed to transfix him into stupor. He did, however, manage at last to begin, and after a few halting sentences found himself escaping into some extraordinary upper air in which words came pouring on him, copiously and without effort. He spoke for ten minutes, and those ten minutes established his fame far more thoroughly than any of his tunes had done. The family, in particular, were thrilled to the point of hero-worship. They had never been able to comprehend the significance of his musical activities, but his eloquence, modelled on that of Mr. Coverdale, but delivered with such a refreshingly youthful and pleasant-sounding voice, seemed to them convincingly successful.
He was nineteen then, and a youth for whom in that little world of Kimbourne, the future seemed large with promise. There was a world, however, beyond Kimbourne, which he still privately inhabited, and even this world, to some extent, gave him encouragement. He bought himself a violin, and learned to play it moderately well; but it was not so much his intention to become a skilled executant as to master the technical possibilities of stringed instruments. In that twentieth year he began to compose pieces for violin and piano; he even tried his hand at trios and quartets, and a string quartet of his actually won a ten-pound prize at a London musical festival, and was performed once at a special concert. Kimbourne knew little of this, and the family, though they knew, were much less interested in it than in the verbal eloquence with which Howat could occasionally be persuaded to deluge them. For his successful first speech had naturally led to others, even to short addresses in the chapel; he found that he rather liked talking in public when once he got over the initial nervousness that always assailed him; it was the same sort of enjoyment that he derived from improvising on the organ or on the schoolroom piano to which he now had permanent access—all his speeches were, in a sense, improvisations on a theme. Success did not make him conceited, though he was human enough to enjoy sometimes the fulsome flatteries that were showered upon him; he was still very shy and rather unapproachable by strangers. But it was true, in a literal way, that he liked the sound of his own voice; and no wonder, for that voice, both in talking and singing, was a vibrant baritone which perfectly matched a face of singularly tender and thoughtful handsomeness. All the Coverdale girls were now more or less in love with him, even including Mary, and he was still entirely unaware of it. Even the prettiest girls in the village (which the Coverdale girls certainly were not) found him disappointingly aloof and unsusceptible.
At last he made a further surrender to Cover-dale’s fervent pleading, and conducted a whole Sunday service—prayers, sermon, hymns, organ voluntaries, everything. As a one-man show it would in any case have been a noteworthy exhibition of versatility; but it was actually much more than that—so much more that it is possibly remembered to this day by some of the older inhabitants of Kimbourne. It happened that a massacre of workmen had just taken place in St. Petersburg, an
d Howat’s sermon was a spirited attack on autocracy which brought the small assembly dangerously near to cheering point; Coverdale felt that there should have been more religion in it, but as a strong Liberal in politics, he could not but approve of the boy’s sentiments. One effect of this rather astonishing outburst was to attract the attention of the local Liberal party organisers, and during the general election campaign a year later Howat made many speeches throughout the constituencies. By that time he had become a recognised local preacher, and the chapels in which he preached were always crowded with folk who came, many of them, to savour the novelty of a youth of twenty who could, as was said, ’let go as well as all the rest of them put together’.
Coverdale’s dream was now that Howat should ascend to far loftier pinnacles than that of mere preaching in country chapels. He saw in the boy a coming Spurgeon, and he wished him to have all the benefits that the completest religious training could provide. His idea was that Howat should spend a few years at a college for prospective ministers, and then astonish the world by eloquence made more tumultuous than ever by means of book-learning; the old man, whose education had been entirely self-acquired, had a pathetically simple belief in the efficacy of study and collegiate life. To Howat, however, the whole idea did not especially appeal; he was not keen on becoming a full-time professional minister, nor did he wish to give up helping Coverdale at the saw- mill. He liked sermonising as a sort of hobby, but he was not sure that he wanted more of it than that. A good many of his friends, too, were urging him to take up a political career, and several constituencies were nibbling at him as a prospective Liberal candidate for the next election.