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.
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…’
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—”