by James Hilton
He drank a little whisky, and then resumed his gaze at the man for whom, as much as for any person in the world, he felt a concern mounting to affection. Yes, he did look ill, there was no doubt of that; and his hand, his right hand, unfortunately, would never be much good to him again; he had gone greyer, too, much greyer, since the affair. The Bournemouth holiday had toned him up physically, but there was a good deal, obviously, that was still wrong. Yet if the whole experience had been so terrible, as could well be believed, why did he want to go on talking about it night after night, and to Ringwood only, it appeared, out of the entire population of Browdley?
“Look here,” Ringwood said, with more seriousness than was usual with him, “why don’t you drop it all, Freemantle? I can see how it’s still on your mind, and I can understand it’s something you can’t easily forget, but why don’t you try to? After all, you did your best, and a damn good best it was—you’ve nothing to reproach yourself with.”
“Oh, I know…” Freemantle’s quiet, troubled voice trailed off, but his eyes continued to speak; and they were queer eyes, Ringwood thought—indeed, he could almost agree with a sensational journalist’s description of them as ‘haunted’. He thought to himself: We’ll have him going off his rocker yet if we’re not careful…
“You see, Ringwood,” Freemantle continued, you haven’t heard the true story. The newspapers got hold of everything but that.”
“They seem to get hold of quite enough, if you ask me. Frankly, in your place, I’d just drop the matter—”
“But I can’t, Ringwood. I want to begin at the beginning—before the newspapers came into it at all. Last night and for several nights I’ve been trying to tell you, but somehow I couldn’t get started. But I’ve made up my mind to-night. I’ll be happier afterwards. Do you remember, before I went to London, you said when I came back I was to report to you what sort of a time I’d had there?”
“Oh yes, I think I remember. I was only chaffing you, of course.”
“Well, I’ve come to make that report now. You don’t mind listening, do you? Am I taking up too much of your time?”
“Oh, Lord, no, don’t think that. It’s only that I feel…still, if you say it’s going to do you good, fire away, by all means.”
And Freemantle began, with what Ringwood at first took to be a mere irrelevance that would further delay the matter: “Do you remember that girl who ran away from home—Elizabeth Garland, her name was?”
Some little time afterwards, Ringwood interrupted: “Well, Freemantle, if that’s your yarn, all I can say is, I don’t quite know what you’re being so dashed serious about. First you went to a specialist who diagnosed a sore throat—which I could have done for less than three guineas, by the way—then, feeling pretty bucked with life, you met this girl, and discovered that she wasn’t, after all, eloping with a Jew old enough to be her father, but was off to Vienna on her own to study music. Personally I’d have thought the former project rather less of a risk, but that’s by the by. Anyhow, you took her to dinner in Soho, and then went on to a concert. Quite the thing to do—I’d have done the same myself except that I’d have chosen a music-hall. Really, Freemantle, you don’t expect me to be very shocked by this revelation of a parson’s night out in the metropolis, do you?”
(Behind his banter, Ringwood was thinking: Wonder what they talked about, those two? Fearfully highbrow stuff, I suppose—can’t imagine Freemantle being very gallant—she probably thought he was rather sweet, but a bit of a bore—unless, of course, she was a bit of the same sort of bore herself. Must say, I can’t abide ‘arty’ women at any price, but then, I’m not artistic, and as for music, I hardly know ‘God Save the King’ till I see people standing up…)
“I’ve more to tell you yet,” Freemantle went on, deliberately. “After the concert we spent an hour or so at an hotel, and then, as it was getting late, I took her to the place where she was staying. It was a studio over a garage in Kensington—it belonged to some friends of hers. When we got there she asked me to come up and meet them, but we found the place empty. They’d left a note to say they’d been called away suddenly for the week-end.”
“I see. So there you were, pleasantly parked with this girl in an untenanted studio?”
Freemantle took no notice. “She made some coffee and we sat and talked by the fire. I stayed on—talking—and—in the end—I didn’t go back to my hotel at all.”
“Didn’t you, by Jove? Bit imprudent, eh? Supposing the studio people had come back unexpectedly?”
“I don’t think we either of us thought about that. We were too absorbed thinking of other things. We—we discovered that—that we were both rather—rather desperately fond of each other.”
Ringwood flushed slightly, not exactly from embarrassment, but because he felt he was going to be made a reluctant confidant in a matter which, for some reason, he would not be able to treat in any of his usual ways. Scores of times in that surgery men had confessed, as a rule shamefacedly, to some kind of amorous adventure, and scores of times he had kicked his heels against the desk and shouted at them, blusteringly: “Well, don’t look so solemn about it—it’s not the first time such a thing’s been done in the history of the world, you know!” But with Freemantle an instinct warned him that his customary banter would not be appropriate; in his case there might be, after all, a certain seriousness. Ringwood, in fact, was just a little astonished; he hadn’t really suspected Freemantle of being that sort of chap. Not that he thought any less of him for it; as a man; heavens, no—but really, you did somehow expect parsons to behave themselves a bit more than other people. Rather like the Wakeford case, in a way…
He said, after another gulp of whisky: “Look here, old man, I really don’t see the point in your telling me all this. I’m not a father-confessor or a censor of morals or anything like that, but I do suggest, as a man of the world, that all that sort of thing is better not chattered about. Know what I mean, eh? Lots of things we all do that we shouldn’t—naturally—but what I do feel is, Why tell people—why tell anybody?”
But you don’t understand what I am telling you, Ringwood! There wasn’t anything anything like that! We just talked—and talked—there was nothing—of the kind of thing you’re suggesting—nothing at all—”
“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 th
e 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.”
