by James Hilton
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 s
trong; 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.
They passed along the corridors to the restaurant car and there commenced what Howat felt to be altogether the most delightful meal of his life. A thin film of snow had fallen during the night, enough just to cover the fields and roofs; bright sunshine struck tints of saffron into the pallor and a delicate unearthly glow came flooding into the train through the wide windows. As he watched her, he saw that it had turned her face to golden-brown; she looked lovelier to him than ever, and it was as if he were bathing all his nerves in that soothing loveliness. Even his sore throat, which had returned somewhat, he could now regard with toleration if not affection.
He was happy in an almost foolish way; he kept laughing and chattering and then falling half-asleep for a moment; and the smallest and most trivial things gave him infinite pleasure—because, for instance, he found he could have fish for breakfast as an alternative to eggs and bacon his eyes glistened like a child’s. He felt, indeed, that in some secret way he had got back to childhood, that he was facing all life afresh, and with no anxiety save lest the years he was escaping from might somehow turn in pursuit. For the sake of that instinct rather than reason, he was feverishly eager to begin everything; he wanted to cross the Channel that night if it could possibly be managed, and she kept comforting him by talking about it and about the rest of the journey they would have. She was concerned for his tiredness and would gladly have spent another night in London, but he was passionately determined; and when she asked if he would not find three successive nights without proper rest rather fatiguing, he only laughed and answered: “I shall be perfectly happy on the train, unless you happen to know some kind friends in Paris who’ve gone off for the week-end and left their studio vacant.”
That put them both in a mood of ecstatic recollection. “Oh yes, wasn’t it extraordinary? Will you ever forget it, Howat? Even if I were never to see you again, I know I’d remember last night better than anything else that could ever happen.”
“Yes, so would I. That curious way the clock stopped at seventeen minutes to four. Did you notice it? I suppose it was the sort that needs winding every night.”
“We might really have wound it ourselves, mightn’t we?”
“It would only have gone on for another twenty-four hours.”
“Till we were over in France, perhaps.” And there they were, back again at the irresistible topic. “We reach Dieppe about three in the morning, don’t we? It’s the cheapest route, and I don’t mind a long crossing. At least I think I don’t. I’ve been abroad once before, but only to Paris. We get there towards breakfast-time, I think. What shall we do if we have a few hours to spare? Have you been to Paris ever?”
“Once, years ago. I had the usual tourist’s week. We’ll stroll along the Boulevards, if it isn’t too cold, and drink beer outside a caf�.”
“And then we go through Switzerland, don’t we, into Austria? I’ve never seen high mountains before. We go through Z�rich and Innsbr�ck and Salzburg. What shall we do as soon as we get to Vienna?”
“Drive straight to the best hotel—if they’ll have anything to do with us when they see our luggage. We’ll afford it, for one day, anyhow. Then the morning after we’ll search for that big room with the piano in it. And also, by the way, I shall have to buy some shirts and things. I won’t have time in London to-night.”
“What fun it’s all going to be, Howat, as well as everything else!”
Just then they became aware of the grinding of brakes on the train- wheels, and she said, getting up: “I think we’re slowing down for somewhere. We mustn’t forget we’ve left things in the compartment—it’s not the coats that matter, but those passport papers in the pocket of yours are really too precious…perhaps I’d better dash back and make sure that they’re safe.”
He answered: “All right. I’ll attend to the bill and follow you along in a moment…”
She nodded smilingly and left him signalling to the waiter. Those were the last words he ever spoke to her.
* * *
EPILOGUE
One April evening Ringwood sat sipping his whisky and water in a very characteristic attitude. He was balancing himself on the edge of his pedestal desk, with his legs dangling and kicking the drawers, and his eyes directed over the edge of the tumbler in a rather quizzical stare. It was a favourite pose, though instead of a tumbler he would more usually hold up a medicine- bottle or a thermometer or a box of pills. The front of his desk was full of marks where he had been kicking it for thirty years.
To-night, however, the object of his scrutiny, though a patient, was also rather more than a patient. Ringwood was not quite certain how much more, but he knew, as he would have said, that he ‘kind of cottoned on’ to that chap Freemantle. He disliked parsons, as a rule (though no more than they disliked him); but Freemantle was an exception; you could talk to him; he wasn’t stiff and starchy or shocked at a little strong language; and he had been particularly decent with young Trevis. Pity he had such a wife and that dreadful sister-in-law…
But Ringwood was puzzled. It was a week now since Freemantle had returned from
his three months’ rest-cure in Bournemouth, and every evening of that week he had called round at the surgery. Not that Ringwood minded, of course; he enjoyed a chat, especially if Freemantle wanted one; but the chats had not been the usual desultory discussions of politics and local affairs. On the contrary, Freemantle had seemed to have something on his mind all the time; he had kept harking back to matters which, Ringwood was sure, it was far better that he should try to forget altogether.
Ringwood, indeed, was just a little contemptuous of the newspaper fuss that had been made over Freemantle. It was all over now, of course, but at the time it had slightly irritated him. He disliked mob-emotion, and it seemed to him rather silly that a man should work hard and meritoriously for twenty years without any recognition at all and then suddenly leap into fame because of something perfectly accidental and irrelevant. Of course he’d behaved very pluckily; but wasn’t there something rather fatuous in the way the Press and public had gone wild over him? It had been nothing less than disgusting, anyhow, to see those two women exploiting the poor devil as hard as they could go—that article, for instance, in one of the Sunday papers—“My Husband, by the Wife of the Clergyman-Hero of Browdley”—it was rumoured that she’d been given a hundred guineas for it, and every word had been written by a Fleet Street journalist. Disgusting…And Ringwood had thought, after reading it: God, I wish they’d give me a hundred and five quid to write “My Patient, by the Doctor of the Clergyman-Hero of Browdley”—I wouldn’t need to have it done for me; I’d just tell the stark truth; I’d say: This chap’s been slaving away at a damned hard job for donkey’s years, and that’s why he’s a hero, if he is one, not because of a few hectic minutes after a railway smash…And I’d also say: It’s true he’s had a bad breakdown, but that’s not all through doing the heroic stuff, as the mob likes to think—he was heading for trouble long before that, and if anyone wants to know the reason, call at the Manse and take a look at those two damned women, or three, counting the scraggy daughter…’
