And Now Good-bye (13 page)

It was a few minutes past the hour when he rang the bell beside the
massive blue-enamelled door. He recalled the last time he had been there, ten
years before, when his youngest boy had been discovered tubercular; it had
been Blenkiron’s partner then whom he had seen, and he had still a
memory of the old man, and of his calm and somehow almost reassuring way of
telling a father that his boy was seriously affected. He remembered coming
out of the house with the boy’s hand in his; they had walked aimlessly
round a few corners, and had then had muffins for tea in a small caf�, which
he was sure he would never be able to find again, even if it still existed.
Eighteen months after that, the boy had died.

Now, he thought, waiting for the door to open, it was
his
turn. The
door swung back; he gave his name to the maid; he was shown into the same
room, with the same furnishings—exactly the same, they looked, despite
the fact that the old man had died in the interval and his assistant- partner
had succeeded to the practice. There was certainly the same ormolu clock on
the mantelpiece and the same locked bookcase full of richly bound copies of
Dickens, Thackeray, and Lord Lytton. Howat put his hat and gloves on the
table with a gesture almost of familiarity, and the maid, as she left him,
switched on a cluster of lights that hardly illumined the room so much as
extinguished the fading daylight outside.

The clock ticked on; and he knew, as he listened to it, that he was no
longer nervous at all, but just calm, frozenly calm, and ready for whatever
fate might send. Even the pain his his throat had merged into that all-
enveloping numbness of sensation.

The door opened, and there half-entered a man of rather more than middle-
age, keen-faced and handsome in conventional morning-dress. He shook hands
with Howat, and guided him into an inner room.

Half an hour later the examination, which had been very thorough, was
finished. Blenkiron sat in his swivel desk-chair, with his long fingers
splayed out on the shining mahogany. He looked as if he could not quite
decide how to begin. So far he had hardly spoken at all, except to ask
questions. Howat faced him steadfastly from an armchair opposite; he was
pale, excited, and twitching about the mouth as he sometimes did when he
began sermons.

“I understand, Mr. Freemantle,” mused Blenkiron at length,
“that you decided to consult me because my late partner, Doctor
Newsome, once examined your son?”

“Yes. It was the only medical address in London I knew.”

“Quite.” A faint superciliousness edged round the
doctor’s clear—cut lips. “And you have a great deal of
faith, I suppose, in a London medical address?”

“Perhaps one has, rather naturally.”

Blenkiron smiled and began to fidget with a brass paperweight.
“Well, well, I wonder whether one ought to say so—but it’s
a fact, you know, that there are some exceedingly clever doctors and surgeons
in the provinces. Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester—really, I could
give you names in those cities, but of course I won’t—dear me,
no. It is a most gratifying and profitable superstition that the best medical
brains in this country are all congregated in the region bounded by Oxford
Street and the Marylebone Road. Only a superstition, of course, but I
don’t know what we doctors would do without it. I suppose you think
that every brass plate in Wimpole Street and Harley Street means a fabulous
income? Not at all—the superstition has shown signs of waning in recent
years. Believe me, there are men in this road who can hardly find the cash
for their quarterly telephone bills.”

Howat nodded and wished he would get to the point. Doctors seemed to enjoy
keeping their patients in suspense as long as possible—as a nerve test,
perhaps? Blenkiron caught the impatient glance and went on: “But these
are digressions, are they not? By the way, Mr. Freemantle, how is your boy
now? It was—let me see—what was the trouble exactly?”

“He died. It was consumption.”

“Oh, that’s bad, very bad. I didn’t realise.” He
paused, apparently for deep thought, and then added: “And I understand
that you yourself are a clergyman in Browdley?”

“A minister—a Nonconformist minister.”

“I don’t know the town, but I gather from the papers that
trade has been very bad lately in that part of the country. I suppose cotton
is the black spot.”

“Yes.”

“And coal? Have you any coal mines?”

“Several in the district.”

“And I don’t suppose you’ve ever been down one, eh?
You’re just as bad as some of us Londoners. I had a titled person
consulting me yesterday—I won’t tell you his name, but he’s
very well known in politics—he confessed to me that he had never yet
been inside the Tower of London. As I never had either, we were able to share
the deep disgrace…However, that is rather by the by…Are you happy in your
work in Browdley? Have you any particular worries—professional worries,
I mean?”

“No more than most parsons, I should think.”

“You work hard, no doubt?”

“I try to.”

“Yes, of course. And you have to talk a good deal in public,
that’s rather inevitable, isn’t it?”

“It is, I’m afraid, yes.”

“Well, you’ll have to drop doing so much of it for a time. I
don’t suppose you’re surprised to hear me tell you that, eh?…Is
your wife living?”

“Yes.”

“And in good health?”

“Fairly good. She’s not strong, I’m sorry to say.

“And your children—have you any other children?”

“I have a boy—in Canada—and a girl, who lives at
home.”

“They are both well?”

“The girl is. The boy—well, we haven’t heard from him
for several years.”

“Really? Perhaps he’ll come romping home someday with his
pockets bulging with banknotes. They do sometimes, you know.”

“I should be glad to see him whether his pockets were bulging or
not.”

“Ah, yes, of course…What would you do, though, if he did strike
lucky and make you a present of a few thousand pounds? I suppose you’d
rebuild your church or something of the sort.”

“I don’t know. I’ve never considered it.”

“I thought you clergymen always knew what to do with money?…But
tell me now, coming back to the point, do you often have
headaches?”

“Fairly often.”

“And your eyes—have they been tested lately?”

“About a year or so ago.”

“Do you enjoy your food?”

“Moderately.”

Only moderately?”

“I don’t think I ever was very keen on eating and
drinking.”

“Are you an abstainer?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps that accounts for your not being keen on drinking, eh?
Seriously, though, it’s a pity you don’t enjoy good food. Do you
like corn on the cob?”

“I don’t think I know what it is.”

“It’s an American dish—they do it very well at
Fouchard’s, in Greek Street. It’s something you oughtn’t to
miss during your visit to London. You eat it, you know, with your
fingers—rather like playing a mouth organ. Very messy, but extremely
palatable. I have a doctor friend who says that a great part of its value
lies in the mode of eating—it satisfies the atavistic desire we all
have, consciously or unconsciously, to take our food in our hands and tear it
to pieces with our teeth. I wonder if that is really so.”

“I wonder,” said Howat, without wondering at all.

Blenkiron gave the brass paperweight a little push to one side of the
desk. “Well, I expect you’re waiting for me to tell you something
about yourself. Of course the really hard problem in such a case as yours is
not ‘what’ but ‘why’. I must confess that for the
last ten minutes I’ve been puzzling myself over that…and I’m
not much nearer an answer. You’ll have to knock off most things for a
time, that’s clear. I daresay you know that your nervous system
isn’t exactly a strong spot. But what prevented you from letting your
own local doctor tell you so? As for your throat, I gather it’s been
causing you a fair amount of worry, lately?”

“It has, yes.”

“Which means, I suppose, that you’ve been having the same
worry that ninety-nine people out of every hundred have nowadays when they
feel a pain. Oh, you needn’t bother to confide in me—I know all
about it. Even doctors aren’t immune. I made a report on one the other
day—a woman doctor—she suspected she had an internal carcinoma,
but it turned out she was only going to have a baby. So you
see—”

“You mean, then, that there’s
nothing wrong with
me?
”

“My dear sir, there’s a very great deal wrong with you. You
are, I should say, within a very short distance of a serious nervous
breakdown. But apart from that, which is quite bad enough, surely, I
don’t find anything much amiss—your heart and lungs are sound,
you have a reasonable blood pressure, and as for the larynx—well,
clergyman’s sore throat is rather a vocational disease, isn’t
it?”

He went on to say a great deal more, but Howat did not hear him, and was
hardly aware of the three pound notes that somehow escaped from his wallet
and into the doctor’s. The fee, in fact, was three guineas, but Howat
forgot the odd shillings and Blenkiron did not remind him. Of that final
handshake and the maid’s guidance through the hall to the street-door
Howat was almost totally unconscious; but the cold air awakened him when he
found himself standing on the pavement outside the house, with his hat and
gloves still in his hand and the street-lamps glittering like chains of gems
in either direction. Beyond them, into the star-speckled sky loomed the tall
grey houses, and a taxi came cruising slowly down that enchanted canyon.
Howat raised his hand; the driver pulled up at the kerb; Howat sprang inside,
without a word till the driver asked where he was to drive to; then Howat
stammered—“Oh, yes, of course—the main street, where the
shops are—Oxford Street, yes—oh, anywhere…”

He sat well forward on the seat and stared hard out of the window, as one
who had somehow never used his eyes before. It did not even occur to him that
he had never been in a London taxi before, so completely was that trivial
novelty submerged in the vaster novelty of life itself. All the doubts and
miseries of the last few months were lifted; the barrier was down, and life
stretched ahead of him like a new dream, buoyant and zestful and rich in
promise. He opened the window, despite the cold, and took in deep draughts of
air that seemed to him purer than any he had ever breathed before; he could
see a woman crossing the road with a pram and smiling at the baby inside it;
there, over there, two men were standing at a corner reading the same
newspaper and laughing; in the middle of the road a night-watchman slowly
filled his pipe as he settled himself beside a brazier-fire. And suddenly,
with a little swirl, the taxi turned out of that lovely tributary into the
full tide of the river itself, that blazing river of shops and omnibuses and
skysigns—Oxford Street. “Go on!” he shouted through the
window on the driver’s side, and then sank back amidst the cushions
with glorious exhaustion.

The cab soon became embedded in a long line of slow-moving traffic, and he
thought, during those moments, that he had never seen anything in the world
so truly lovely as that pageant of shop-windows and eager happy faces. There
was one window full of gorgeously tinted silks, slung rainbow-like from
corner to corner, and there was a shop that had a machine in the window that
twisted skeins of toffee together, and a sky-sign, high up above, that gave
the weather forecast in scampering electric letters, and a huge shop-building
with a frontage of Ionic columns silver-white in the upward glow of
arc-lamps, and people, people—hundreds and thousands of them in one
long, throbbing, colourful fresco of life itself.

And the loveliness was in his ears as well—he heard the clamour of
motor-horns and the shouting of newsboys and all the mingled noises of
streets and houses like some triumphant symphony on a new theme; he wanted to
join in it, to lean his head out of the window and shout to someone in sheer
exultation; and then he thought: Steady, Steady—keep
calmer—you’ve got a happy evening before you—there’s
that concert—have you forgotten it? They’re playing Brahms…and
all at once, with that little twist of recollection, his mind was flooded
with imagined melody, and he saw himself, as in those ridiculous boyhood
dreams, standing on a conductor’s rostrum, baton in hand, controlling a
world of his own creation.

There were trees now, iron railings, vistas of glittering headlights, and
a faint smell of wood-smoke on the air; then he caught sight of a
clock—twenty-five past five—and suddenly remembered that business
at Charing Cross. His spirits fell momentarily at the thought, but rose again
almost instantly and with new intensity, for his imagination transformed him
magically from the conductor of an orchestra into an orator of burning zeal,
a Peter the Hermit and Savonarola combined, whose impassioned pleadings no
sinner could hope to resist. He was certain now that he would meet that girl,
talk to her, convince her, and have her returning to Browdley that very
night; there was no longer any doubt about it; he could not fail with this
new and god-like strength that was in him. He put his head out of the window
and called to the driver—” Charing Cross—the post
office—as quick as you can!”

It was beginning to be the evening ‘rush’ period, and the taxi
was held up many times, at the Marble. Arch, at Berkeley Street, and for
several minutes at Piccadilly Circus. It was nearly a quarter to six when
Howat stepped to the pavement at the corner of Trafalgar Square; he was
rather excited by that time; perhaps she hadn’t come, or had got tired
of waiting; he paid the driver, adding a far too lavish tip, and found
him-self staring vacantly at buses and sky-signs and a pavement
artist’s drawings of Ramsay MacDonald and Lloyd George; it was an
absurd place, he reflected, as he became conscious of the crowds all about
him, to have fixed for meeting anyone, especially someone he didn’t
know very well.