“
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.
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 him 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.
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.