“All right, old chap, all right. Sorry if I dropped a brick.”
(He thought: Poor devil, does he really think anyone would believe that? And
Ringwood reflected curiously upon the morbid mentality that would embark upon
a totally unnecessary confession and then furiously deny the only thing that
gave the confession any point at all.) He went on, almost gently: “My
dear Freemantle, I still say—Why bother about it? Whether you did or
didn’t do this or that, what the hell’s the use of arguing about
it now? It’s over and done with for better or worse—why
can’t you forget it with all the rest?”
But Freemantle still went on, and still with the same slow and inexorable
emphasis: “I was telling you, wasn’t I, that she and I had
discovered that—that we—meant everything to each other.
So—so we talked things over—and decided—in the end—to
go and live in Vienna together.”
“
What?
What’s that?”
“Just as I said. And the next morning we—she and I—were
going to Kettering, because I knew somebody there who would sign my passport
papers—that was necessary, you know, before I could get away. We were
having breakfast together on the train, and she’d just gone along to
the compartment while I stayed behind a moment to settle the bill—I
didn’t even have time to do that—I never paid it, as a matter of
fact—because the other thing happened so quickly…Now—
now
do you understand?”
Ringwood’s heels banged against the desk. “What? I don’t
quite follow—what’s that you’re saying?”
“It happened—then—you see—while she was
away—and I was staying behind…Don’t you understand?”
“Good God, man, I’ve heard all you’ve said,
but—but I can’t grasp it—surely you don’t
mean—”
“Yes, yes, I do mean it. It’s—it’s a rather queer
and awful thing to have happened, isn’t it? But it’s the
truth.”
“The truth!”
“Yes. The truth that the newspapers never guessed.”
“You mean—that she—this girl you were travelling
with—was
killed?
”
Freemantle answered quietly, but with his voice deep with horror:
“She must have just reached the first coach when—it happened. I
saw her there—amongst it all. I tried to get her out. I couldn’t.
She was burned to death. I
saw her
…”
His eyes took on a vivid glare, and Ringwood, even in the midst of his
amazement, sprang to instinctive professional awareness. “Come,
come,” he said, putting down his glass and walking over to Freemantle.
“None of that, now. No good, you know.” He put a hand on the
parson’s swaying shoulders, and Freemantle seemed to derive strength
from the contact. After a while he looked up with more tranquil eyes and
said, with a sharp sigh: “Well, there it is. I’ve told you now.
I’m glad somebody knows at last.”
“My dear chap, yes…” Ringwood went to a cupboard and drew
out his emergency bottle of brandy, but Freemantle waved it aside; he was all
right, he said, now that he had told what he wanted to tell. He added,
plaintively: “I’m sorry, Ringwood, for wasting your time all the
other evenings of this week.”
“Oh, that’s all right…”
“I must have been a terrible nuisance.”
“Oh, nonsense…”
“Well…you can understand…now…”
“I’m trying to, anyway. But—but
it’s—it’s all so damned extraordinary I don’t know
what to think. It’s just about taken the wind out of my sails.
D’you mean—I suppose you do—that nobody’s got the
slightest inkling of what’s really happened?”
“Not the slightest, Ringwood. All the passport things were left in
the compartment and were burned. Nobody who knew either of us had seen us on
the train, and it happened to be a Manchester train that I might very well
have been travelling on in any case. I was even using up the return half of
my Manchester ticket. And she—she was wearing no
jewellery—nothing that gave any clue—afterwards. Even her parents
aren’t curious—they’ve quite made up their minds that
she’s gone to the bad, and they neither expect nor wish to see her
again.”
“It’s all most amazing. The most amazing thing I ever heard of
in my life.” A faint thought struck him and he added: “I suppose
you’ve not been dreaming all this by any chance, have you,
Freemantle?”
“Hardly.”
Ringwood flung himself down in his swivel-chair and for a few seconds
scribbled idly on his blotting pad, trying to absorb the intricacies of a
situation to which all his years of experience could provide nothing
approaching a parallel. He was not a very imaginative person, and he found
himself more and more befogged as he pondered over it all. The only theory
which to him, as a medical man, seemed to fit the case was that Freemantle
might be completely off his head, and have invented the whole story with the
fervid ingenuity of the mentally deranged. At last, throwing down his pencil,
he exclaimed: “Well, if you say it all happened I’ll have to
believe it did, that’s all. But what I chiefly can’t fathom is
this Vienna business. You say you had definitely made plans to go out there
with this girl?”
“Yes. If the passport could have been arranged quickly enough, we
should have left London that same Saturday evening.”
“But what on earth would you have done when you got
there?”
“She was going to study music. I was going to compose, if I
could.”
“
Compose?
”
“Yes. Compose music.”
“Would it have brought in any money?”
“Probably not. I might have tried for some teaching job in a school.
I could have taught English, perhaps.”
“And what if you couldn’t have found such a job?”
“Then I don’t know how things would have turned
out.”
“Had you money?”
“She had nearly two hundred pounds, and there were a few shares and
things I might have sold for a hundred or so. It would have been enough to
begin on.”
“To begin what on?”
“Our lives. To begin our lives on.”
He said that with such simplicity that Ringwood was swept into still
further bewilderment. “But good heavens, man, do you mean you were
never going to come back at all?”
“Yes, probably that.”
“But what about your wife—your daughter—and, for that
matter, your chapel?”
“I felt that all that didn’t matter compared—compared
with the other thing.”
“What other thing?”
“Something I can’t exactly describe—I never
could—but I saw it then—while I was with her.”
Ringwood shrugged his shoulders with a gesture of profound bafflement.
“You’d have had to be less vague than that to your wife when you
wrote explaining things.”
“I shouldn’t have tried to explain. She wouldn’t have
starved—she has money of her own. And as for caring, do you think
she’d have cared a great deal, apart from the scandal?”
“But really, Freemantle, even if she wouldn’t, you can’t
throw over your responsibilities in that casual fashion. It’s
preposterous!”
“I felt then that everything else was preposterous.”
“You mean that you’d no doubts or misgivings of any
sort?”
“I couldn’t doubt anything that seemed so beautiful to me at
the time.”
“Seems to me, old chap, it isn’t so much a question of
what’s beautiful or not beautiful as of what’s right and
what’s wrong.”
“I wonder if thinking that makes you really a more religious man
than I am.”
Ringwood shrugged his shoulders again; he was no metaphysician; his code
was rough but simple. Much as he disliked Freemantle’s wife, he was,
though he would not perhaps have used the word, a little shocked at the idea
of any husband so calmly deserting his legal partner. Casual adultery he
could comprehend and excuse, much as he might deplore the bad taste of
subsequent confession; it was human, in his view, compared with the chilly
ruthlessness of Freemantle’s Vienna proposition. He gave his nose a
vigorous blowing and went on, rather gruffly: “Well, all I can say,
Freemantle, is that to me the whole thing’s still perfectly
astonishing. Do you really believe you could have been happy for long in a
foreign country with a mere girl you hardly knew?”
“Yes. Absolutely happy. And always.”
A quarter of an hour later Ringwood had recovered something of his normal
equanimity of mind. It was characteristic of him that he never worried for
long over a problem; if it proved too much of a twister he merely gave it up,
and passed on to the next. Freemantle’s emotional altitudes were beyond
him, and he felt, moreover, a sort of reluctant crossness over them; he
preferred a discussion in territory where he knew a few signposts. He
didn’t want to preach; but there was, after all, a certain
rough-and-ready morality which, as a man of the world, he felt it his duty to
impart on rare occasions; and the more he thought about it, the more
convinced he was that Freemantle was desperately in need of someone to give
him a dose of good ‘horse sense’. That was, of course, assuming
that his amazing story were true; Ringwood could not yet make up his mind
entirely about that. He noticed that Freemantle’s face was very pale
and that a rather unnatural and bloodshot brilliance was still in his eyes;
he felt so confoundedly sorry for the chap, but what could one
do—except give him sound advice? Completely mad, he must have been,
Ringwood reflected, to be bowled over like that by a mere
girl—attractive girl, though, with a deuced good figure, he
remembered—and some excuse, perhaps, for any man with a wife like that
and a sister-in-law bullying him all the time…But what was clearest of all
to Ringwood was that it was the future that had to be faced, not a lot of
had-beens and might-have-beens. Ringwood’s natural outlook on life soon
cut through the tangle of Freemantle’s position; he did not solve the
problem; he just thrust it to one side in a you-be-damned kind of way, and
with growing confidence gave the man’s shoulder a few encouraging
shakes. “Look here, old chap, you may think I’ve not been
particularly sympathetic over all this, but believe me, I’m just about
as sorry for you as anyone could be. I can quite understand how you feel
about it all, but the fact is, you’re rather bound not to see things as
logically as a mere outsider can. That’s natural, isn’t it? Well,
I’m the outsider, and I look at it rather in this way, if you
don’t mind d a very candid opinion—You’ve had a damned
narrow escape!”
“
An escape?
”
“Yes. Don’t you see what I mean? Really, though I
wouldn’t call myself in any sense a religious chap, there does almost
seem a sort Providence in it—don’t you feel that? At any rate,
what’s the harm in thinking so? You go and get yourself into the deuce
of a hole and then, just as you stand on the very brink of the precipice
Providence steps in and cuts all the knots for you, so to speak. Those are
mixed metaphors, but you can see what I’m driving at. Don’t you
realise that you’re being given a chance—a chance to put all that
silly escapade on one side as if it had never happened? Why, man,
you’ve got half your life in front of you yet—think of
it—think of the future—and if at odd times you do happen to
recollect this queer business, call it just a mistake—a single solitary
mistake that you couldn’t help!”
“
A mistake?
”
“Well, we all make ’em don’t we? And we’re dashed
lucky if we’re given the chance of covering them up without a trace.
Why, when you’re as old as me, and you look back on a lifetime of
decent honest straightforward doing-your-job, you won’t bother much
about a mad mood that happened in the midst of it all.”
“Doing my job? What do you mean by that?”
“Why, your ordinary everyday parson’s job, of
course.”
“Here—in Browdley?”
“Why not.”
“You think I can carry on here—as if—as if nothing had
happened?”
“Why not? You told me yourself that nothing did happen.”
“Did I?”
(Ah, Ringwood thought, just as I suspected—anyhow, he’s
admitted it now—that’s better than persisting in an absurd
fairy-tale that nobody in his senses would believe—and, after all,
there’s nothing so very dreadful in it—she probably lured him on,
anyway.) He replied, with growing cordiality: “My dear Freemantle, I
understand all that of course, of course. But the point is, as I’ve
been saying a good many times, it’s what’s going to happen that
matters, not what did happen. Here you are, with all your roots, as it were,
in Browdley, working well and doing quite a deuce of a lot of
good—perhaps in a smallish way, but then, when you come to think about
it, aren’t all our ways pretty small? It’s the small ways,
anyhow, that keep the world going—I’m certain of that. Well, here
you are, as I said, and whether you know it or not, you’re liked in
this town, you’re respected, even admired, and folks would damn well
miss you. That’s as much as can truthfully be put on most tombstones.
You’ve had a dozen years of useful slogging away, and there ought to be
at least twice as many ahead of you in the future—are you going to
smash all that for the sake of a single incident that nobody knows or could
ever know about unless you tell them?”
“Some of the biggest things that have ever happened have been single
incidents.”
“Nonsense!” replied Ringwood, stoutly, in haste to check any
further plunge into abstract philosophy. “Believe me, nothing’s
forgotten more quickly than a week-end flirtation, however much you think it
means at the time…The point is, once again, that you’ve been given
this chance to carry on, and you’ve jolly well got to take it.
D’you suppose other people haven’t got Secrets in their pasts?
See, here’s a little yarn about myself—it’s the sort of
story most doctors could tell, no doubt, only they don’t—no more
would I, except to convince a chap like you. It happened about five years
ago; I was called in to attend to two kids with the measles—ordinary
working-class family, you know—no nurse or anybody like that to look
after them. Well, they didn’t have it very badly, and all seemed to be
going along quite normally when one afternoon I was sent for in a mighty
hurry—those two kids had suddenly got worse. I went along and
found—to make the story short—that somehow or other in mixing up
the medicine for them I’d come an awful cropper—I’d put
loads of strychnine in by mistake—heaven knows how I’d managed to
do it, but there it was. My God, I worked pretty hard, that day—I was
at the house till nearly midnight, trying to rinse out the stomachs of those
kids. The boy kicked the bucket, but I managed with the girl. Well, what
d’you suppose I did then? Blabbed it all to the first person I met? Not
a bit of it—I said to myself: Ringwood, this is a nasty business, but
mistakes will happen—it’s the first of this kind you’ve
ever made, and with luck it’ll be the last. You do more good than harm
on balance, and that’s as much as can be said of most men. So I just
signed ‘measles’ as the cause of death on the certificate and
that was that. The kids’ mother swears by me—she tells everyone
how I slaved away for hours trying to save their lives—nobody could
have done more, she says, which is true enough, by Jove. I’m not
Inventing that, Freemantle—I once actually overheard the woman praising
me to the skies at a street-corner…I suppose it seems a terribly immoral
story to you? Perhaps you think I ought to have phoned the coroner and
confessed to manslaughter?”