And Now Good-bye (21 page)

A fortnight later it was somehow or other settled that Howat’s
holiday should not come to an end in the normal way, but that he should take
up a permanent position in the Coverdale household.

Mr. Coverdale, indeed, thought the boy might ‘do pretty well’,
and this, from such a source, was high enough praise. He had been a little
prejudiced against him at first for having been brought up ’Church of
England’, but he soon found that the boy was intelligent,
well-mannered, and ready to work hard. Mr. Cover-dale owned a saw- mill and
timber-yard adjoining Kimbourne station, and it was not difficult to find
ways in which the boy, by working eight or nine hours a day, could thoroughly
earn the weekly half-crown which, in addition to his keep, became his initial
wage.

Mr. Coverdale was a strict employer, but he was a strict man altogether;
he neither drank nor smoked; he would literally have shrunk from touching a
pack of cards; and his dislike of strong language went so far as to bring
even such phrases as ‘good heavens’ under the ban. Every Sunday,
without fail, he preached long and lugubriously eloquent sermons in little
dissenting chapels scattered over the surrounding districts; some of these
engagements involved journeys of ten or a dozen miles, and he would always
make these on foot and in all weathers, disdaining even to saddle a horse,
much less to make use of the unhallowed Sunday train service. Fortunately, he
was a man of strong constitution and excellent physique; it was his boast,
made with due thankfulness, that he had never had a day’s illness in
his life.

Howat did not dislike him even from the beginning, and soon came to be
quite comfortable at Kimbourne. After a week or so he knew all the girls by
sight and by name, though he was still rather nervous of them; the eldest,
Lavinia, was hardly a girl at all; she was twenty-four, which seemed to him
an immense age. It was Lavinia who kept the others in order, but Howat, if
his shyness permitted him to have any active preferences at all, liked the
younger ones better; the youngest of all was Mary, aged fifteen. He felt
rather more drawn to Mary because she was only a ‘kid’, and was a
good deal bullied by the elder girls.

Life would really have been very pleasant, but for Sunday, which came as a
day of gloom after the comparatively cheerful activities of the working week.
On Sunday no newspapers or ordinary books were allowed to be read, though if
Mr. Coverdale’s preaching engagements were at a distance it was
sometimes possible to persuade Mrs. Coverdale to unlock the bookcase after he
had gone. When, however, as very often happened he was occupied locally, the
day progressed from morn to evening according to a most rigid routine. The
whole family trooped out twice to the bleak little chapel at the Dover end of
the village and filled up the pew immediately under the pulpit. Howat usually
sat at one end and Mrs. Coverdale at the other, with the seven girls in
between. He did not exactly enjoy the services, which seemed to him cold and
uninteresting compared with the ones he had been used to, but there were
times when Mr. Coverdale’s rough eloquence stirred him to a vague
self-scrutiny; and in any case, he always liked the singing, for he was
beginning to develop a good voice and enjoyed using it. Then one Sunday the
organist failed to appear, and Howat was asked, in an emergency, to play the
hymns. He did so, fairly well, and when, some months later, the organist
died, the boy was officially appointed in his place.

It was only an old and very wheezy American harmonium, but in it Howat
found something to make Sunday a day to look forward to; he enjoyed
particularly the opening and closing voluntaries, which gave him a chance of
showing what he could do. Usually he played one or other of the simple pieces
that had been left behind by the previous organist, but one morning, in a
mood of great daring, he ignored the music sheet before him and made up
something of his own as he went along. Rather to his astonishment no one
complained or even appeared to notice any departure from the normal; and thus
emboldened, he made a fairly regular habit of such improvisations. He did
not, though, tell anyone about it.

After be had been at Kimbourne a year Mr. Coverdale increased his wage to
ten shillings a week, and declared himself ’quite satisfied with
him.

Those were the years when Howat was growing up, and when every month,
almost every day, marked new and noticeable development. He was a rather
quiet boy, good-looking in a thoughtful way, and he had very fine and
striking eyes. He was not, however, particularly observant or knowledgeable,
or he would have been aware that at least three of the Coverdale girls were
head over ears in love with him. Lavinia, the eldest, considered she had a
prior right to any attachment he might eventually make, and there were
frequent quarrels between her and her sisters on this account. Howat, in
fact, treated them all with complete impartiality, except that Mary, as still
something of a kid, was admitted to more casual intimacies.

Howat’s chief thoughts at this time were all on one
subject—music. Since his very earliest days he had been entranced by
tunes, and now, with advancing youth, the desire to explore the magic world
of harmony became speedily a passion. After the discovery that he could
improvise, he seriously set himself to study the technique of composition;
and most evenings, if he had time to spare, he would go to the harmonium in
the drawing- room and try over invented tunes of his own. The family believed
him to be ‘practising’, but at last the secret had to come out.
He had submitted a song in a competition run by a musical journal, and had
received the second prize of a guinea. The cheque arrived one morning at
breakfast-time, and his delight was quite impossible to hide. When they all
learned the truth, they were rather mystified; it seemed odd to them that
Howat should have been able to pick up actual money in such a peculiar
way.

One effect the disclosure had was to remove any further need for secrecy;
henceforth all Howat’s musical work was carried on openly. Some of the
girls had mediocre voices, and Howat sometimes composed songs for them; but
this was never much of a success, and the girls only bothered about it
because they enjoyed the intimacy with Howat which trying over the songs
involved. Even Lavinia, who had no voice at all, tried to develop one so as
not to be at a disadvantage in this respect.

Howat was happy enough. He had come gradually to like as well as to
respect Mr. Coverdale, and the old man, in his turn, had begun to feel for
the boy an affection all the deeper because he had always wished for a son of
his own. The family did nit know, and would perhaps hardly have credited, the
terms upon which the two worked together at the timber-yard. Howat’s
job had developed into a sort of informal private secretaryship, but there
was not always much work of that sort to be done, and sometimes in the
afternoons they would sit together in the little matchboard office amidst the
smells of glue and sawdust and hold most solemn discussions. There was
something very impressive about the old man; with his white bushy hair and
bright almost jet- black eyes, he looked rather like Howat’s conception
of an Old Testament patriarch. Howat soon perceived that the saw-mill and
timber-yard were utterly secondary considerations with him; he ran them
efficiently and conscientiously ’enough, but his real interest in life,
and more and more as he was growing older, was religion. There was no
doubting the sincerity of that religion, or that it was vastly more than a
one-day-a-week affair. It steeped Coverdale’s whole life, not precisely
in happiness, but in a sort of wild and stupendous triumph. Once when Howat
heard a certain theme of Beethoven’s he thought instantly that it
reminded him of Coverdale’s attitude.

Howat was always very sensitive and impressionable, and the fervent
booming eloquence of the old man, both publicly and in private, easily
stirred him emotionally. Coverdale had, indeed, a noble though undisciplined
command over English; he could paint the joys of heaven and the pains of hell
in language which filled Howat’s mind like great chords of music. The
girls were all apparently unmoved by it, but often when Howat raised his head
in chapel at the close of one of Coverdale’s long prayers, his eyes
were dim with tears. He always felt that the prayers had been framed to apply
to himself personally, and though he knew that this was absurd, he could not
get the idea out of his mind.

One day a curious incident took place at the saw-mill. A workman had been
censured by Mr. Coverdale for using bad language; Coverdale had had him up in
the office and, in Howat’s hearing, had delivered a long and impressive
harangue on the sinfulness of such conduct and on the possibility that
Providence might inflict sudden and condign punishment on anyone guilty of
it. A few minutes after the man had returned to his work loud screams sounded
from the saw-mill; Howat and Coverdale both rushed down, and found that the
offending machinist had had all the fingers of one hand taken off by the
circular saw. After he had been removed to hospital, Howat fainted; the sight
had been too much for him; and when he recovered he saw Coverdale kneeling by
his side with a fiercely triumphant light in his eyes. He was convinced that
Providence had spoken through the medium of the ghastly affair, and into
Howat’s ears he poured there and then a terrific exposition of his own
religious feelings and convictions. It was then that he told Howat that he
prayed every night that the boy might ‘get’ religion as he had
‘got’ it, and might come to realise that there were more serious
things in life than experimenting with little bits of tunes. Howat was
touched and moved by the revelation that Coverdale thought so much about him
and his future; and when the old man suggested that they should both pray
aloud and in turn for the quick recovery of the injured workman, Howat, who
was in a rather dazed mood, agreed. After a little preliminary nervousness
when it came to his turn, he found that the words sprang to his lips quite
fluently; he had listened to so much of Coverdale’s eloquence that mere
imitativeness, if nothing else, could have carried him along. He found the
experience rather exhilarating in a way; he enjoyed the consciousness of
control over language; it was rather like the first zestful sensation of
riding a bicycle. When he had finished Coverdale signified a grave approval;
he was convinced, from that moment, that the boy was destined to be the means
of saving innumerable souls.

Gradually, after that, and to a degree that Howat hardly realised,
Coverdale’s influence over him deepened and became more dominating. The
day came when Coverdale at last persuaded him to use his ’gift of
tongues’ in public; he was very reluctant, but at last consented. It
was a meeting held in the chapel schoolroom to raise funds for a new organ,
and Howat, as organist, felt that there was some small excuse if he chose to
say a few words on such an occasion. When he first stood up before that
audience of forty odd people he was so nervous he could scarcely enunciate a
word; his mouth began to twitch; and Lavinia’s eyes, staring at him
from the front row, seemed to transfix him into stupor. He did, however,
manage at last to begin, and after a few halting sentences found himself
escaping into some extraordinary upper air in which words came pouring on
him, copiously and without effort. He spoke for ten minutes, and those ten
minutes established his fame far more thoroughly than any of his tunes had
done. The family, in particular, were thrilled to the point of hero-worship.
They had never been able to comprehend the significance of his musical
activities, but his eloquence, modelled on that of Mr. Coverdale, but
delivered with such a refreshingly youthful and pleasant-sounding voice,
seemed to them convincingly successful.

He was nineteen then, and a youth for whom in that little world of
Kimbourne, the future seemed large with promise. There was a world, however,
beyond Kimbourne, which he still privately inhabited, and even this world, to
some extent, gave him encouragement. He bought himself a violin, and learned
to play it moderately well; but it was not so much his intention to become a
skilled executant as to master the technical possibilities of stringed
instruments. In that twentieth year he began to compose pieces for violin and
piano; he even tried his hand at trios and quartets, and a string quartet of
his actually won a ten-pound prize at a London musical festival, and was
performed once at a special concert. Kimbourne knew little of this, and the
family, though they knew, were much less interested in it than in the verbal
eloquence with which Howat could occasionally be persuaded to deluge them.
For his successful first speech had naturally led to others, even to short
addresses in the chapel; he found that he rather liked talking in public when
once he got over the initial nervousness that always assailed him; it was the
same sort of enjoyment that he derived from improvising on the organ or on
the schoolroom piano to which he now had permanent access—all his
speeches were, in a sense, improvisations on a theme. Success did not make
him conceited, though he was human enough to enjoy sometimes the fulsome
flatteries that were showered upon him; he was still very shy and rather
unapproachable by strangers. But it was true, in a literal way, that he liked
the sound of his own voice; and no wonder, for that voice, both in talking
and singing, was a vibrant baritone which perfectly matched a face of
singularly tender and thoughtful handsomeness. All the Coverdale girls were
now more or less in love with him, even including Mary, and he was still
entirely unaware of it. Even the prettiest girls in the village (which the
Coverdale girls certainly were not) found him disappointingly aloof and
unsusceptible.