And Now Goodbye Read online

  Passing along Browdley High Street, and then up School Lane beyond the tram junction, the pedestrian reaches the Manse, after a short and rather depressing walk through a district given over to factories and slum property. There is a privet hedge along the street frontage, but it is low enough for a vague interior view of the study to be available to anyone who deliberately stares, and the Reverend Howat Freemantle must often have been seen at work there during the last dozen years, especially in winter when it is so dark as a rule that the lamps have to be lit.

  On that Monday morning in November Howat lit the single gas-burner over his desk and gave his morning’s mail a second perusal. Besides a bunch of obvious-looking circulars there were three private letters, the first from a firm of engineers in Queen Victoria Street, London, confirming an arrangement by which he should call at their head office on the coming Friday to consult about a new heating apparatus. For his chapel members, after freezing and catching influenza for several successive winters, had at last decided to spend money on such an unspiritual but none the less necessary object; sixty pounds had already been subscribed, and there would be a bazaar or something to raise whatever extra might be required. To Howat had fallen the job of going to London to make final arrangements; of course he knew nothing at all about central heating, but his congregation had the usual optimistic belief that a parson must know something about everything.

  The second letter was from a well-known missioner, offering to conduct a week’s revival in Browdley for twenty pounds plus his hotel and travelling expenses.

  The third letter was from another London address—Wimpole Street. It fixed an appointment for the Reverend Howat Freemantle to see Doctor Blenkiron at 4. p.m. that same Friday. Howat turned it over rather awesomely in his hand; he had somehow nourished a slender hope that his little plan to fit in a visit to a London specialist might not have succeeded. However, there it was; Blenkiron could see him, even at such short notice, and no one at home, for the present at least, need be told anything about it. It was not only that he was anxious not to worry them—he was equally anxious that they should not worry him. He knew from frequent observation how magisterially Aunt Viney took command of other people’s illnesses; she was always so noisily optimistic about them, and at the same time so full of parallel anecdotes of persons who had either died lingering deaths, or had cured themselves by Christian Science or herbs, or some other specific in which Howat had no particular faith. She had, too, a robust common sense which would certainly have made her point out the absurdity of his paying hard-earned guineas to a London specialist before Ringwood’s verdict, which could be obtained for as many shillings, had been even asked for. Nor could Howat say precisely why he was unwilling to consult Ringwood first—except that Ringwood was a personal friend as well as a family doctor, and he shrank, somehow, from the human touch in such a business.

  Ah, he told himself a shade irritably, throwing the letter into the fire, he was getting nervy—mustn’t think any more about it—wait till Friday, anyhow. Plenty of jobs to be done meanwhile. There was the address on Mozart he was due to deliver at the Young People’s Guild that night. Fortunately he knew a good deal about Mozart—no need to prepare anything especially. He might carry over his portable gramophone and a few records…He took the remainder of his correspondence to the fireside and pencilled a few memoranda on the back of a circular. Mozart…There was a Trio in E Major he might play over and also, of course, the overtures to “Figaro” and the “Magic Flute “. His eyes brightened a little at the prospect, and he stared across the room to observe, without irony, the view through the window of dilapidated slum cottages overtopped by a five-storeyed cotton-mill. Then, in a mood almost of abstraction, he began to open the circulars hitherto neglected. One was from a tailoring firm in London, advertising a sale of lounge suits at five guineas—to be had in either black or ‘clerical grey’. Well, perhaps on Friday, if he could find time, he would call and see about it—he certainly needed a suit badly enough…Another circular was from a firm of outside stockbrokers in Leicester, recommending shares in a brewery. A third was from an ecclesiastical supply stores in Paternoster Row, offering a job line of individual communion cups. A fourth came from Boston, Mass., and accosted him with a list of pertinent questions—“Are your sermons full of pep? Are you sure you are delivering the goods? Are you satisfied with your freewill offerings? Do you feel tired Sunday nights? Are you inclined to be low-spirited, diffident, disheartened?” And for a twenty-dollar course of ten lessons it could all, apparently, be put right.

  Howat read through the enclosed and illustrated brochure, but did not tear it up afterwards as he had done the other advertising matter. Instead he put it away in the middle drawer of his desk; it would do for Ringwood to see some time—he would be amused.

  Still with the trace of a smile he tore open one of the remaining envelopes. A coloured picture dropped out and fell at his feet, making a little patch of brightness on the drab carpet. He picked it up, guessing it to be a sample sent him by some firm of art publishers—Raphael’s “Saint Catherine of Alexandria”, he recognised, for he had often admired the original in the National Gallery. The reproduction pleased him, and he was still examining it when he perceived a handwritten note in the envelope. It was just the shortest of messages—“Dear Mr. Freemantle, I am afraid I shall not be able to come for a lesson on Tuesday, as I shall be out of Browdley that day. I saw the enclosed in a shop recently and thought you might like it. Yours sincerely, Elizabeth Garland.”

  His first thought was that he would have an extra free hour on the following day. Every Tuesday for some months past he had been giving lessons in German to Miss Garland, the daughter of his chapel secretary. It was a means of adding to his rather poor income, besides which it meant rubbing up his own knowledge of German, which was good for him. She was a pleasant and intelligent girl, and had seemed to pick up the language quite satisfactorily; still, he could not but feel grateful for one engagement less during a more than usually crowded week.

  He studied the picture again and reflected that it was kindly of the child to have sent it him—yes, very kindly. There was something boyish and simple in him that showed instantly when anyone gave him anything, or even thanked him; he was always pleased in a rather bewildered kind of way—bewildered because he quite genuinely could not think what he had done to deserve it.

  He put the picture on the mantelpiece, and several times looked towards it with pleasure during the clerical tasks that kept him employed during the next hour or so. Finally Aunt Viney came in, saw it, and smiled steadfastly while he explained the circumstances of its arrival. “Very kind of her indeed, Howat,” was her verdict at length, “but are you quite sure it is very suitable? After all, it looks rather a Catholic picture, don’t you think?”

  Perhaps it was, he admitted, and put it away in a drawer. As a Nonconformist clergyman he could not be too careful.

  Punctually at eleven he put on his overcoat and hat (an ordinary dark grey and somewhat shabby felt) and went out into School Lane. There, in the murky daylight that was only a degree brighter than the gloom of the study, it was possible for one to observe him in some detail. Tall and slim-built, with just the very slightest stoop of the shoulders that suggested thoughtfulness, he was, beyond doubt, fine-looking, and would have been conspicuous among his fellows even had his collar not buttoned at the back. His hair was touched with silver over the temples, but otherwise he looked younger than his age, which was forty-three. His eyes were grey, deep-set, and very bright; he had a strong, rugged profile, and an expression which, in its stern setting, was rather astonishingly winsome. Dr. Ringwood often told him he had missed his vocation in being a parson—he should have been an actor. “With that face you could have been the answer to the maiden’s prayer,” he used to say, and Howat was always, beyond his amusement, a little puzzled, and beyond his puzzlement, a little grieved. There seemed such a lot of irrelevance in the world. He was dimly aware that he might be
considered not bad-looking, but, so far as the matter affected him at all, he found it rather tiresome. Some of the girls at the chapel, for instance, whenever there was a bazaar or a social—so silly and pointless, all that sort of thing. Anyhow, he had never tried to trade on his looks, and most certainly never attempted any gallant airs.

  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.