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, and 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.
Then, quite suddenly, Coverdale had a slight stroke. For the first time in
his life he had to resign himself to the ways of a semi-invalid; the doctor
said he would probably recover, but would never be the same again, and would
certainly have to sacrifice the cast-iron routine to which his life had up to
then been dedicated. To Coverdale this meant only one thing; he would have to
give up the saw-mill, since he would not, while there was breath in him,
neglect his religious duties. Unfortunately Howat, though a hard and willing
worker, had no aptitude for business and could not, it was clear, take on the
job of management; but at that time, as it chanced, the profits were
considerable, and it was not hard to obtain a satisfactory offer of purchase
from a big joinery firm in Maidstone. The deal was put through; the Coverdale
family found themselves with some thousands of pounds comfortably invested in
gilt-edged securities, and Howat, of course, was out of a job.
That was in May of the year in which he had turned twenty-one. Coverdale,
now a retired gentleman, passed most of his time at home, greatly to the
family’s discomfort; the immense seriousness of the problems of life
and death weighed upon him more heavily than ever. He bought quantities of
theological literature and studied it in a rather uncomprehending way; his
mind was not attuned to subtleties, but he felt that the books would be very
useful to Howat when he went to college. He had quite made up his mind that
the boy should go, and Howat, with nothing else immediately in prospect, was
also beginning to let such a future be taken for granted. Term began the
following September, and the college, with which Coverdale had been in
communication, had already signified its willingness to accept so promising
an entrant.
But towards the end of June Howat went up to London for a concert; it
would finish too late for him to return the same night, so he put up at a
little hotel in Southampton Row which had been recommended him as cheap. It
was the first time he had ever stayed overnight in London, and he was rather
thrilled at being so completely on his own. The concert was not a public one;
it was given by the students at a college of music, and Howat had been sent a
ticket by a friend. A few men and girl students played Mozart and Haydn
chamber music, not very marvellously, but with much enthusiasm, and
afterwards there were ham sandwiches and lemonade and informal chatter round
the piano. Howat got into conversation with several youths and was invited to
join a party in somebody’s rooms in St. John’s Wood, close by; he
went, and stayed there front eleven until the party broke up about three in
the morning. As usual he was very shy at first, but after a time he found
himself talking and discussing with the rest, and he even played over on the
piano one or two of his own compositions, which were admired, though not
excessively. A rather elderly man, well-known as a critic on a weekly paper,
led him aside, however, and asked him if he intended to take up music
composition seriously. “I don’t want to give you a swelled
head,” he said, “but I think your stuff shows a certain amount of
promise.”
That night, as he walked from St. John’s Wood to his hotel, with the
first glimmer of dawn streaking the eastern sky, Howat saw the future clearly
enough. He did not want to be a minister. He did not want to go into
politics. His overwhelming triumphs in the pulpit and on the platform seemed
tame and petty things compared with the very moderate amount of success he
had so far achieved in the realm of music. He hated himself for having
already wasted so much time. He felt that there was only one thing in life he
could do, with any honesty of purpose; and that was to devote himself to the
work that he loved, whether it would eventually bring success or not.
When he arrived at Kimbourne he made this decision known to Coverdale. He
had guessed that the latter would be extremely disappointed, but he had
scarcely been prepared for such a storm as ensued. Still less had he
conceived it possible that Coverdale, in the heat of his excited protests,
would have another and more serious stroke, rendering him speechless and
partly paralysed.
During the days that followed, Howat spent hours at the old man’s
bedside, stared at by quivering eyes that now, in default of words, had to
perform the whole function of expression. Howat was stirred as he had been
years before, on the occasion of the saw-mill accident; only now he felt a
personal remorse; he knew that he had given Coverdale what might prove a
deathblow. The odd thing was that no one else knew this; no one had heard the
argument; no one suspected that Howat had changed his mind about the training
college. If only the others had known all about it, Howat could have defended
himself; after all, it hadn’t been really his fault—surely he had
a right to please himself about his own future. But as he watched Coverdale
through so many hours, he began to be oppressed with an emotion profounder
than such comforting assurances; he began to doubt whether, after all, he had
done right in flouting the old man’s wishes; and he heard again, as in
a dream, the Beethovian chords that stood for the grandeur and magnificence
of Coverdale’s beliefs. Remorse blackened and deepened upon him, and
one afternoon, alone by the bedside, he was so moved that he knelt down, took
Coverdale’s hand, and asked for forgiveness. He would go to college, he
said, and would become a minister. The look in Coverdale’s eyes,
instant and revealing, came to him then as a directly approving answer from
Providence.
A kind of frenzy swept over Howat during that summer. He was definitely
booked to enter college in September, and in the meantime he sought, with
every atom of strength that was in him, to make amends for the harm he
reckoned himself to have done. His sermons and prayers in the little chapels
rose to impassioned intensity; he gave up all his political work, and took a
leading part in an evangelist revival that was being conducted in the
district. All this was reported to Coverdale and so encouraged his partial
recovery that by August he was able to speak again, though slowly and with
difficulty. His first words were to utter a prayer of thankfulness that Howat
had at last ‘seen the light’.
Howat, in fact, was in an almost hysterically emotional condition and
overworked himself dangerously; he discontinued all his music composition
because he found that the revival he was assisting in left him no time for
it; yet somehow, rather to his dismay, he discovered that he could not escape
it altogether; casual airs and tunes often obsessed him when he walked hone
at evening across starlit fields; all kinds of things, moreover, seemed to
excite him emotionally in a way he had never exactly experienced
before—the sight of sunset over the long ridge of the Downs, the
distant hoot of a steamer entering harbour at night, the smell of hay in the
noonday lanes. Sometimes at twilight he passed lovers strolling side by side,
and though they presented no novel phenomenon, he was aware of them now, for
the first time, as part of the strange insurgent problem to which only
religion, he felt, could supply an answer. He was dimly conscious that love
must be a very lofty and spiritual thing, and he was sure that if he ever
loved a woman, it would be in such a way.
Mary was then almost twenty. He had always been more intimate with her
than with any of her sisters, some of whom he now almost disliked; they were
silly, he had discovered, and shirked the main seriousness of life. Three,
anyhow, had definitely given up all hopes of him and had accepted the
attentions of other young men; Howat would occasionally find them loitering
in the garden late at night, caressing and being caressed in a manner which
seemed to him unnecessary as well as disagreeable. Lavinia was still
unattached; she was too busy about the house to have time for that sort of
thing, she said; for now Mrs. Coverdale also was in failing health, and a
good deal of domestic responsibility fell on the eldest girl. Fortunately she
was the type that could well shoulder it—a brisk, managing young woman,
hardworking and capable, except that she did not cook very well. Howat now
liked her perhaps best of the lot, next to Mary.
He liked Mary because, of all the seven, she was the only one who appeared
to him in any way spiritual. Formerly he had appreciated her as a
‘kid’; now it was as if at one clear bound she had acquired
womanhood, but womanhood of a rather special kind. Even physically she was
marked out from the rest; she had none of that tendency to plumpness that was
a family trait. Really, she was not at all strong; she was nervous (Howat was
nervous, too), and little things often upset her in a way that drew his
particular sympathy. Moreover, she was deeply interested in his religious
work; she attended all his meetings and services most assiduously, and during
homeward walks she talked earnestly, if a shade ingenuously, about the more
momentous concerns of life. On the night before he left for college, after a
very prolonged and emotional talk with Mr. Coverdale, he asked her calmly if
she would marry him when he had finished his training, and she answered,
instantly but with equal calmness, that she would…
Most of this, so far as he was able to recollect it, Howat told Elizabeth
as they sat by the studio fire throughout that November night.
About five o’clock they wakened after fitfully dozing in
armchairs…
She prepared a small meal (they were far too excited to be very hungry),
and by dawn were in the streets. It was bitterly cold, and there was a bleak,
scouring easterly wind with a hint of snow in it. Everything had been planned
and discussed; it only remained to put into execution all the strange things
that had been decided on. The first Howat did without delay; he called at his
hotel, retrieved his luggage, paid the bill for the room, and gave the
proprietress (who was not really interested) some shadowy reason for not
having occupied it. So much had been easy, but the next thing, though it
seemed at first only a detail, gave much more trouble—the question of
passports for the journey. Elizabeth had hers, of course, but Howat did not
possess one at all, and the matter proved full of complications. He had the
necessary photographs taken at a shop in the Strand as soon as it opened, but
then came the business of having them endorsed by someone who knew him. He
rushed to Blenkiron, in Wimpole Street, but found the doctor had gone away
for the week-end; failing him, and after much cogitation, the nearest person
he could think of was a minister, living near Kettering, whom he had not seen
for six years. It meant a journey, but it had to be done, and he would
probably be back in time to have the passport made out before the office
closed that afternoon—then they could cross by the night boat and be in
Paris the following morning.
It was settled that they should go to Kettering together, because they
were in the mood of children; to have been separated even for those few hours
would have seemed intolerable to both. They were wildly excited, but she,
beyond her excitement, was calm enough to remember all the details of what
had to be done; though it was he, perhaps, who was in the bigger hurry to get
through them all. In the bus to the station he talked and laughed in sheer
high spirits; he was a little drowsy, but it was the rapturous drowsiness of
a small boy awakened early for some gloriously anticipated outing.
They caught the nine-fifty express with a few minutes to spare, and as
soon as they were settled for the journey, in a compartment which they had to
themselves, an attendant asked if they would take breakfast. Howat did not
need to look long for her answer; they were both, it appeared, exceedingly
hungry.