Proceeding along School Lane he entered the High Street. It had stopped
raining, but the roadway and pavements were covered with a film of brown mud
which glittered in the light of some of the shops. The sky was already
yellowing into a kind of twilight; probably there would be fog again later
on. People passed dimly by with a nod or a greeting—women doing their
marketing, unemployed men lounging around, business folk bustling about the
town, and so on. He had to keep his eyes well open—people were so
offended if he didn’t see them, they were always prone to think he had
cut them deliberately. Whom should he visit first? Higgs would be at his
place in the High Street; Mrs. Roseway lived over at Hill Grove; there was
young Trevis in Mansion Street, close by. Better leave Mrs. Roseway till
afternoon—she wouldn’t like him to call before everything in the
house had been put to rights’, though, Heaven knew, he wasn’t the
man to notice whether things of that sort were right or not. Young Trevis
then, it might as well be; and he was walking briskly along with this
intention when a little girl suddenly ran up to him. “Please, Mr.
Freemantle, Aunty says will you come and see her at once, as she’s been
took very had in the night.”
He stared down with a kind of surprised vagueness and then identified the
child as Nancy Kerfoot, one of his Sunday School youngsters. Her aunt, he
knew, was Miss Letitia Monks, and lived in the end house in Lower George
Street. “Very well, my dear,” he replied. “Run along and
tell your Aunty I’ll come.”
It wouldn’t do to ignore a summons of that sort, despite the fact
that he had been abruptly sent for by Miss Monks on several previous
occasions. She was a character, the old lady, and he had always rather liked
her, despite the fact that her piercing voice, her equally piercing eyes, her
stern old- fashioned principles, and her quite spotless four-roomed cottage
in which she lived on a very few shillings a week, made him feel
uncomfortably like a large fly in the presence of a small but exceptionally
strong-willed spider. There was something indubitably wonderful about her, he
felt; she was eighty-nine, and had never been further away from Browdley than
Blackpool. Moreover, she had worked in the same cotton-mill for half a
century, had invested all her savings in that same cotton-mill, and during
the last few years had lost the greater part of them.
He hastened towards Lower George Street, and outside the end house saw
Ringwood’s battered Morris-Cowley. As he approached, Ringwood himself
came out of the doorway—an elderly, apple-cheeked, rather shrewd-
looking general practitioner.
“Hullo, Freemantle. You been sent for too?”
“Yes.”
“Go along then. Mustn’t keep you. It’s no false alarm
this time, I’m afraid.”
“You think not?”
“Bet you a shilling not.”
Ringwood was always outrageously flippant about death. The other clergy in
the town did not care for that, or for him either, but Freemantle found it an
oddly bearable trait. He half-smiled, nodded, and passed through the open
door into the front parlour which had never, he supposed, been used except
for funerals, weddings, Christmas and other exceptional occasions. The fender
was crowded with huge brass fire-irons that gleamed through the shadows as he
passed to the narrow steep staircase beyond. A woman, doubtless a neighbour,
called to him to come up. He obeyed, feeling his way in almost complete
darkness, and was at last manoeuvred into a very small, hot, and dimly-lit
bedroom.
Miss Monks was the oldest member of his chapel; she had belonged to it
ever since its opening in 1860. She had regularly attended services twice
every Sunday until quite recently; she had given generously to all chapel
funds and charities; nor, during her prime, had she ever shirked personal
duties. But that was only one side of the picture. For over four
decades—ever since most people could remember—she had constituted
herself a sort of super-authority to which all chapel questions must in the
last resort be submitted. She had waged bitter and incessant warfare against
anything and everything new, different, or experimental, and it was hardly an
exaggeration to say that she had driven several parsons out of the town, and
at least one into a home for the victims of mental breakdown. Of Freemantle
himself she had misgivings, but they were weaker ones; and this was partly
because she was getting old, partly because he was tactful, and partly
(though neither she nor he realised or would have admitted it) because she
was attracted by his face.
His eyes, accustoming themselves to the dimness, observed the shrivelled
cheeks and piercing eyes that confronted him from the head of the bed.
“Good morning, Miss Monks,” he began, stooping slightly. His
greeting, rather huskily spoken, filled the room with its deep resonant
tones—he had a magnificent voice (Ringwood had once
said—“It’s so damned easy to listen to you talk that one
sometimes doesn’t bother what it is you’re
saying”—and he had never felt quite the same about his own words
after that). The neighbour passed him a chair and whispered loudly in his
ear: “Doctor says she won’t last out the day.”
“Ah,” he answered vaguely, seating himself at the bedside and
gazing at the subject of this despairing prophecy. He was, he was aware, a
little terrified by Miss Monks. He was just wondering whether she were fully
or only partly conscious when she startled him by croaking suddenly:
“Very poor attendances there must have been at chapel yesterday, Mr.
Freemantle.”
“Yes,” he admitted, fidgetting under her glance. “The
weather, you know, was most unfortunate. I suppose one really can’t
expect people to turn out in thick fog.”
“In my young days people wouldn’t have let that keep them at
home on a Sunday.”
It was her favourite theme, and he gave her the cue she wanted. “Ah,
Miss Monks, I’m afraid this is a slacker generation
altogether.”
She talked for a few minutes as she enjoyed talking, and as he knew she
enjoyed talking. The conversation touched upon the question of Sunday games
in the parks (soon to come before the Borough Council again), and the
forthcoming service on Armistice Day. She was, of course, a bitter opponent
of Sunday games, and as for the Armistice Day affair, she had doubts as to
the wisdom of those so-called ‘undenominational’ ceremonies, at
which parsons of all creeds appeared together on a single platform.
“Safer to keep ourselves to ourselves,” she declared, with a
tightening of wrinkled lips.
After a time talking seemed to tire her, and Howat was just beginning to
think he might decently take his leave when she whispered, with a kind of
sinister pride: “Doctor says I won’t last out the day.”
“Oh, dear me, what nonsense!” The exclamation came out
trippingly. “I’m sure Dr. Ringwood never said anything of the
sort, and even if he did—”
“He
did
,” she insisted, in such a way that further
conventional protests found themselves checked at source. She added hoarsely:
“Perhaps we could have a prayer together, Mr. Freemantle.”
“Why, certainly.”
And he bent his head into his hands (Miss Monks would have thought any
more abject posture idolatrous) and began to pray. He felt a little unnerved
by it all. It was so difficult to think of anything really suitable. What
could
you say to the Almighty by way of introducing an old lady of
eighty-nine who was perfectly certain of going to Heaven and equally certain
that Heaven was full of marble and white tiles, like a combination of
underground convenience and fish-shop? And all the time he was speaking he
knew too that Miss Monks was listening with the air of a connoisseur; she
felt herself in no pressing need of his interpolations on her
behalf—she was merely trying him, seeing what he could do, enjoying a
luxury to which she considered herself entitled.
That, he felt, was the worst of being a Nonconformist parson—in the
last resort people didn’t need you, they felt themselves able to get
just as near Heaven on their own. Not that they probably couldn’t, but
still, if they thought that, why bother to keep a parson at all? As some
species of communal pet, perhaps. It was different in the Roman Church, where
people really believed in priestly functions. And again, as often before, he
wished there were some ritual for such occasions as this…What could he say,
anyhow?…Yet, to his considerable surprise, he heard himself saying all
kinds of things, quite eloquently and not at all insincerely; he really meant
every word of them—the poor old creature was dying—there had been
something rather grand and magnificent about her—he was stirred,
touched, and aware that his voice was vibrating with emotion. And when at
last he raised his head there were actually tears in his eyes.
“Thank you, Mr. Freemantle,” said Miss Monks rather in the
tone of an examiner to a student who has done passably well in a
viva
voce
.
He bade her a kindly farewell, and held her thin hand for a moment. The
stuffy air inside the room (all the windows closed for the past dozen years,
he guessed) and the smells of drugs and bedclothes made him feel a little
faint. His throat too, was giving him pain again. After a few conventional
courtesies to the woman who had shown him up, he descended the stairs and
passed out gladly into the street.
Too late now to call on young Trevis; he had to sec Higgs the councillor,
and there wouldn’t be time for both visits. He hastened out of Lower
George Street and into the High Street again. Higgs was an optician, who had
an office and consulting-room on the first floor of Bank Buildings, just
above Phillips’s gramophone shop. He was a clever fellow, not yet
thirty, the youngest and in many ways the ablest of the local Labour Party.
Self-educated, he had worked as a mill-hand while studying for the
examinations that entitled him to set up in business. He never attended a
place of worship, but had once surprisingly turned up at a series of lectures
Howat had given on music. The relationship between the two men was cordial up
to a point, and then sharply antagonistic.
Howat felt still somewhat exhausted as he walked along the passage by the
side of the gramophone shop, and climbed the stairs to the first floor. He
rang the bell and Higgs himself answered it. “Oh, Hullo,
Freemantle—glad to see you—do come inside.” Howat did not
in the least mind being called Freemantle’ without the ’Mister
’—indeed he rather preferred it—but he could not help
reflecting that at Higgs’s age he should never have had the nerve to
leave out the prefix with a man nearly twice as old…Nerve, that was
it—and Higgs had plenty of it. Cool-headed fellow climbing steadily up
the ladder which began with a seat on a local council and ended, quite
possibly, at Westminster. He was determined to get on in the world, and Howat
liked him for it.
“Good morning, Higgs. I hope I’m not interrupting—I
thought I’d better call where I’d be sure of finding
you.”
“Quite right. Do take a chair. I’ve an appointment in ten
minutes, but I daresay he’ll be late.”
“Well, I don’t suppose my business will take more than the ten
minutes in any case. I only wanted to know the plans for the Armistice Day
service.”
“Ah, yes. There’s been the usual fuss about it, you know. Or
perhaps you don’t know. Doxley of the Congregationals thought it was
unfair for the Baptist fellow to be given the opening prayer two years in
succession. So we’ve given him the opening prayer instead. The Vicar of
the Parish Church, of course, does the address—that seems to be
generally agreed upon. Then there’s the second prayer—Salcombe
rather wants that. Unfortunately that means you’ll have to take the
hymns, as you did last year and the year before. I don’t know how you
feel about it—if you object, then Salcombe will have to take his turn
with the hymns, whether he likes it or not, only he’s not so good at
the job—fusses with the tuning-fork for about five minutes before he
can get the note—I daresay you’ve seen him.”
Howat smiled. “I don’t mind what I do—I’ll fit
myself in just wherever’s convenient. As it happens, I have absolute
pitch, so I don’t need a tuning-fork.”
“Absolute pitch? What’s that?”
One thing in Higgs that always especially attracted Howat was his
eagerness to assimilate any casual scrap of knowledge that might come his
way. He answered: “It means that if I want a certain note—middle
C, for instance—I know it, instantly, without having to think. Nothing
very unusual a good many people can do it.”
“I see. A sort of gift? Must be very useful. You’re fond of
music, aren’t you, Freemantle?”
“Yes, extremely.”
“I think I’m beginning to be, too. When I’ve time to
spare I sometimes go down to the shop below and play over records. I like
Bach.” He pronounced it ‘Back’ and added: “By the
way, how should one say that fellow’s name—was I
right?”
Howat replied: “Well, I think ‘Bark’ is nearer the
German pronunciation. But you don’t need to be too particular. Far more
important to enjoy him.”
“Far more important to enjoy everything.” The youth’s
face clouded over with a look of half-truculent eagerness. “Which
reminds me, Freemantle, there’s that Sunday games question coming up
before the Council again. I suppose it’s no use trying to persuade you
to come over to our side?”
“No good at all,” Howat answered, with a shake of the head.
“And you ought to know better than ask, after that last argument we
had.”
“The trouble is, that last argument didn’t convince me. And
not only that, but it didn’t convince me that it convinced you,
either.”
“Come now, that’s too subtle for a parson on Monday
morning.”
Higgs leaned forward and tapped Howat’s knee with his forefinger.
“Look here, why can’t you be serious about it? I’ve always
had a sort of feeling you were the only parson in the town there was any hope
at all for.”