“Really? He guessed that? How curious!”
“Well, we priests aren’t such simpletons, you know.”
Fothergill laughed. “I’ll bet he never guessed the sort of
past it had been, though. I daresay I’d have told him if I hadn’t
known him so well. As a matter of fact, I knew he liked me and I liked him to
like me, and I didn’t want to see my stock going down with a bump…You
see, I seem to have broken so many of the commandments.”
“Most of us have.”
“Yes, but I’ve gone rather the whole hog. I’ve killed
men, for instance.”
“If you walked out now into the Strand you could find hundreds of
middle-aged fellows who’ve done that.”
“Oh, the war—yes, but my affairs weren’t in the
war—at least, hardly. One of them was pretty cold-blooded murder. And
then there are other matters, too. I never married, but I lived with a
woman—once.”
“That, again, is nothing very unusual.”
“I daresay not, but if my soul depended on it, I couldn’t say
I was sorry. It’s the one thing in my life which I feel was fully and
definitely right.”
“Of course, without knowing the circumstances—”
“If You’ve time, and if you think you wouldn’t be bored,
I’ll tell You how it all happened.”
“I wish you would.”
“Splendid.” And he began at the day he left England twenty-
three years before. About three-quarters of an hour later, when he came
hoarsely to an end, Farington said: “Well, that’s really a most
astonishing story. How relieved you must be to have told it to
somebody!”
“Yes, that’s just what I’m feeling. Relieved and rather
tired.”
“Not too tired to continue our chat for another half-hour or so. I
hope?”
“Provided you do most of the talking.”
“Oh, I’ll engage to do that.” He kept his word, and the
conversation continued until it was absolutely necessary for him to leave to
catch the train. Fortunately his bag was at the station, so that he could
proceed there directly. Fothergill, strangely eager despite his tiredness,
accompanied him in the taxi, and their talk lasted until the moment the train
began to move. “We probably shan’t meet again,” Fothergill
said, as they shook hands, “but I shall never forget how—how
reasonable
you have been. Does that sound a rather tepid word in the
circumstances?”
“Not at all. Just the right one, I should like to think. Though
there’s no reason why we shouldn’t meet sometime—you have
my address—it’s only a train-ride out of Manchester.”
“I hate tram-rides and I’m sure I should hate
Manchester.” He laughed excitedly, and was aware of the silliness of
the remark. He added, more soberly: “In my old age I’m beginning
to attach great value to comfort—just comfort.”
“Old age, man—nonsense! You’re not fifty yet!”
“One is made old, not by one’s years, but by what one has
lived through. That’s sententious enough, surely—another sign of
age.” The train began to move. “I shan’t forget, however.
Good-bye.”
“I must make the most, then, of your rubber articles in
The
Times
. Good-bye then.” They laughed distantly at each other as the
train gathered speed.
He drove back to the hotel with all his senses warmed and glowing. On what
trifles everything depended—if he had not made for Rule’s that
evening and been those few minutes too early!
In a corner seat of a first-class compartment on the Irish Mail the next
morning, he had leisure to think everything over. So much had happened the
day before. But the interview with the Harley Street man hadn’t
surprised him; he had been suspecting something of the sort for several
months, and wasn’t worrying; there was no pain—at worst a sort of
tiredness. He would take a few but not all the precautions he had been
recommended, and leave the rest to Fate.
He opened a small attaché-case on the seat beside him and took out letters
and papers. The proofs of his first
Times
article—how well it
looked—’by Ainsley Jergwin Fothergill, author of
Rubber and
the Rubber Industry
’! He seemed to be staring appreciatively at the
work of another person—the hardworking, painstaking person who had
spent five years in Kuala Simur. Five years of self- discipline and
orderliness, with the little rubber trees all in line across the hillside to
typify a certain inner domestication of his own soul. He had liked the
plantation work; it had given him grooves just when most of all he had wanted
grooves. To save himself he had plunged into rubber-growing with a fervour
that had startled everybody, especially poor William; he had worked, read,
written, thought, and lived rubber for five years. And the result, by an
ironic twist of fortune, had come to be two things he had never known
before—a status and a private income.
He turned over a few letters. One from his publisher, enclosing a cheque
for six months’ royalties and suggesting a small ‘popular’
book in a half-crown series to be called just
’Rubber’—something rather chatty and not too
technical—could he do it?…It would be rather interesting to try, at
any rate…A letter from Philippa, thanking him for his subscription to her
slum children, and hoping he would manage a visit soon—he could come
any time he liked and stay as long as he liked—“both Sybil and I
are looking forward so much to seeing you again.”
He would never, in all probability, see either of them again.
A letter from a firm of enquiry agents in New York City, dated several
months back and addressed to him in Paris: “With reference to your
recent enquiry, we regret that up to the present we have found it impossible
to obtain any information. We are, however, continuing to investigate, and
will report to you immediately should any development occur.”
Another letter, some weeks later: “
Re
Mary Denver, we are at
last able to report progress. It appears that the child was adopted by a
family named Consett, of Red Springs, Colorado, middle-class people of
English descent, moderately well-off. Mr. Consett died in 1927. We have had
difficulty in tracing the rest of the family since then. They left Red
Springs, and are believed to have gone to Philadelphia. We are continuing our
enquiries.” A third letter, dated three weeks back:
“We are now able to inform you that Mrs. Consett and daughter
crossed the Atlantic in November of last year and spent Christmas at Algiers.
Our European representative, to whom we have cabled instructions, will take
the matter in hand as from there.” A fourth letter, from this European
representative, conveying the information that the Consetts had left Algiers
with the intention of touring in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
Pretty vague, that, but a fifth letter had narrowed it down to ‘England
and Ireland,’ and a sixth letter—the one that had arrived only
the day before—had stated, with admirable definiteness: “I
understand that Mrs. and Miss Consett left Stratford-on-Avon on Tuesday last
and crossed to Ireland. They are now believed to be staying at the Shelburne
Hotel, Dublin.”
He gathered the letters into a pile and took them into the dining-car with
him when he went to lunch. He was on the right-hand side of the train, whence
he could see the North Wales coast, blue sea and sandy shore, streaming past
the window like a cinema-film. Crowds of holiday-makers, pierrot
entertainers, bathers bobbing up and down in the water, a sudden jangle of
goods-yard, a station, a tunnel, the sea and shore again, deserted for an odd
half-mile or so; then bungalows, boardinghouses, a promenade, a bandstand,
bathing-huts, crowds, a jangle of goods-yard, a station—on, on, beyond
the soup to the fish and the underdone roast beef of that very English and
mediocre train-lunch.
He arrived in Dublin at seven that night, and drove straight to the
Shelburne. The Consetts, he learned from the hotel porter, had gone on to
Killarney two days before. “Americans, sir. See Killarney and
die—you know the kind of thing? After that, I expect they’ll be
rushing to kiss the Blarney Stone.”
He stayed at the Shelburne for the night and caught the morning express to
Killarney. The porter at the Shelburne had given him the names of some of the
more likely hotels, and it was easy to drive from one to another making
enquiries. At a third asking he discovered that the Consetts had left that
morning for Carrigole, Co. Cork, where they were almost bound to be staying
at Roone’s Hotel.
There was no railway to Carrigole, so he hired a car to drive him the
forty-odd miles over the hills. It was a marvellous summer afternoon, just
beginning to fade into the soft glow of evening; by the time he reached the
top of the pass and the driver pointed out Carrigole harbour in the distance,
all the world seemed melting into a rarefied purple dusk. After the
metropolitan bustle of Dublin and the stage-Irishry of Killarney, this, he
felt, was the real Ireland, and immediately, in a way he hardly understood,
he felt kinship with it. Successive days of travel had increased his fatigue,
but the calm, tranquil mountain-air was uplifting him, giving him
satisfaction, almost buoyancy.
It was dark when he reached Roone’s, and the yellow oil-lamps were
lit in the tiled hall and under the built-out verandah. Somehow by instinct,
as he took his first step into that cool interior, lie knew that he would
have to go no further, and for that reason he did not ask about the Consetts
when he booked a room. All that would come later; he must give himself the
pleasure of doing everything sweetly and with due proportion. “May I
have dinner?” he enquired, and was directed to a room whose windows,
ranging from floor to ceiling along one side, showed the still darkly glowing
harbour with the mountains brooding over it as in some ancient, kindly
conspiracy.
The room was fairly full, but he had a table to himself, and the dinner
was good. The faces of others glowed yellow-brown in the lamplight; the night
was full of talking and laughing, the bark of a dog, the hoot of cars
entering the drive; yet permeating it all, in a queer way, there was
silence—silence such as seemed to rise out of the very earth and sea to
meet the sky.
He chatted to the waiter; it was his first visit to Carrigole, he
explained, or, for that matter, to Ireland at all. “You seem pretty
full—the height of the season, I daresay?”
“Just a little past it, sir. We get a lot of American tourists in
July and August, but most of them are beginning to go back by now.”
“Ah yes. I suppose, though, a few of the people here now are
Americans?”
“Oh yes, quite a number. Most of them come on from Killarney and
stay here a night or so on their way to Cork.”
He did not enquire further, but that evening, after dinner, the problem
became merely one of identification. For he was asked to sign the hotel
register, and as he wrote “A.J.
Fothergill—London—British” he glanced up the column of
names and read in plain round handwriting a few inches
above—“Mrs. and Miss Consett, Philadelphia.”
He lit a cigar and took coffee in the lounge and wondered who they might
be among the faces that passed him by. It would be simple, of course, to
enquire directly, to approach them with equal directness, to introduce
himself remarkably and dramatically, to talk till midnight about the
exceeding singularity of the fate that had linked, then sundered, and now
linked again his life and the girl’s. Yet he shrank from it; his mind
was sore from drama, aching for some quieter contact, for something at first
and perhaps always remote. He wanted everything to be peaceful, gradual, even
if it were additionally intricate; he wanted to preserve some path of secret
retreat, so that at any moment, if he grew too tired, he could escape into
forgotten anonymity. Yet, on the other hand, there was an urgency in the
matter that he could not avoid, for the Consetts might not be staving at
Carrigole for long, and he could not undertake to follow them all over the
world.
Chance came to his aid. The post arrived at Roone’s rather late; he
saw the bundle of letters brought in by the cyclist-postman and handed across
the counter to Mrs. Roone, who began to sort them. A cluster of people
gathered around, and suddenly he heard a girl’s voice asking if there
were anything for Mrs. Consett.
There was, and she took a letter, studying its envelope as she walked away
across the tiled hall to a table under the verandah where a woman sat reading
a magazine.
For a moment he did not look at either of them; all had happened so calmly
and comfortably. Then he suddenly knew that his heart was beating very fast.
That would never do. He must see them; he must know what they were like. He
got up and strolled deliberately by, puffing at his cigar and appearing to
stare through the windows at nothing. The woman was plump, cheerful,
talkative, fairly attractive; but the girl was less ordinary. She was quiet,
rather well- featured, with calm brown eyes that were looking at him before
his dared to look at her. That was curious, he thought, that she should have
stared first.
He went to bed, slept well, and was down early for breakfast. The Consetts
came in later, but to a table at the other end of the room. During the meal
the waiter asked him if he would care to join an excursion to visit an
ancient hermitage some score miles away over the hills. “It is quite
interesting sir,” he recommended, “and if you have nothing else
in mind, it would make a pleasant trip.”
“Are most of the others going?”
“Practically everybody, sir, except the fishing
gentlemen.”
“I don’t want to have a lot of walking to do.”
“There is hardly any—you just drive right there by
car.”
“All right, I daresay I’ll go.”
It was a chance, he realised, and perhaps a better one than many
others.
Four large five-seater touring-cars were drawn up outside the hotel. The
excursionists arranged themselves as they chose, usually, of course,
manoeuvring to be with their friends. It was natural that he should wait
rather diffidently until most had taken positions, and that, as an odd man,
he should be fitted into the back seat of one of the cars with two other
persons. Partly by luck and partly by his own contrivance, those two
compulsory fellow- passengers were the Consetts. He was at one side of the
car, Mrs. Consett at the other; the girl sat in between them. The driver and
a large picnic-hamper shared the seat in front.