Howat said: “Yes, I’d heard something to that effect, but I
was hoping it could be no more than a rumour.”
“A
rumour
? God bless my soul, they were seen together at
Manchester getting into the train!” His voice thickened with
indignation. “Of course neither my wife nor I could countenance that
sort of thing. Not at any price would we take her back now that we know what
has happened. She’s disgraced our name—the only thing we can do
is to try to forget that she’s our daughter.”
Howat found himself staring at a peculiarly sinister-looking
tailor’s dummy, armless and legless, that had been flung into a corner
of the office amidst a heap of brown paper. He had been propelled so
abruptly, as it were, from the world of his own thoughts into this other
world of angry fathers and erring daughters and rolls of gents’
suitings that he could hardly, for the moment, get his bearings. Then the
last few words of Garland’s remarks echoed in his mind and brought him
up with a jerk. He said, rather sadly: “Don’t you think it may be
a little too early to reach such a decision, Mr. Garland?”
“Not at all. We’re a respectable family—we’re not
going to make any terms with evil-doing. Out she stays, now that she’s
gone, and I’d say the same to any of my other children. She need never
come back to Browdley thinking she’ll be admitted here
again.”
“Well, well, I suppose if you feel like that about
it—”
I
do
feel like that, and my wife would say the same. If thine eye
offend thee, pluck it out, so the Good Book says.”
“It also, I believe, mentions forgiveness—”
“It says we should forgive our enemies, not our
daughters.”
Which set Howat reflecting absently that it was, most certainly, much
easier to forgive one’s enemies than one’s friends and
relatives—could it be, then, that the more difficult achievement was
not seriously expected of us? Garland, however, had clearly not meant so
much, and Howat answered, with sudden distaste for the entire argument:
“Anyhow, Mr. Garland, there doesn’t seem much point in discussing
all this till we definitely hear where the girl is and what she’s
doing. I wish—I do wish sincerely—that I could help you in some
way—I assure you I sympathise most deeply—”
“I don’t see what anybody
can
do. Personally, I
don’t expect ever to hear from her again—if she’s decided
to live that sort of life, she’ll know that we won’t have
anything more to do with her. We don’t even want to hear her name
mentioned. Henceforward—”
Garland continued in this strain for several minutes longer, and Howat, at
the first considerable pause, was glad to make his excuses and get away.
The second post usually arrived at the Manse towards noon, and was placed
on the study table to await Howat’s return from his morning’s
visits. That Wednesday morning, when he reached home, there was quite a
collection for him to deal with—bills, circulars, appeals—the
usual mixture, and then, between two larger envelopes, a small one, addressed
in a writing which he faintly recognised, though he could not quite decide
where he had seen it before. He opened the envelope and read, from a single
sheet of plain paper without any address heading:
“
Dear Mr.
Freemantle
,—You will be surprised to hear from me, I am sure,
but I am presuming on our slight acquaintance to ask a favour. No doubt by
this time you and everyone else in Browdley must know that I have left home,
and though I do not regret doing so, I do not want my parents to worry about
me unnecessarily. I wish you could assure them that I am perfectly all right
and quite happy. I hate leaving as I had to do, but I really do feel that I
am too old to be treated as a child. Do you think you could possibly explain
that to them? I know it is asking a great deal, but I cannot think of anyone
else who could do it. I must thank you, too, for the German lessons which I
am sure will prove of use to rue, and I enclose two pounds which I think I
owe you for them. I have no permanent address just at present, but for the
next few clays anything addressed c/o the Charing Cross post office would
reach me. With kindest regards and many thanks,
Yours sincerely,
Elizabeth Garland
.”
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 pleasant.
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: