And Now Good-bye (4 page)

“That’s very flattering.”

“I mean it sincerely, flattering or not. We Labour fellows
constantly find you on our side in all sorts of things—the housing
question, unemployment grants—oh, any amount of matters that crop up.
What we sometimes wonder is why you don’t come over to us altogether.
Frankly, we’d welcome you just as wholeheartedly as we respect you
now.”

Howat smiled, but rather wearily. He was in no mood for a political
argument, especially with such a notoriously adroit debater as Councillor
Higgs. He said, quietly: “I don’t really believe that parsons
ought to identify themselves entirely with any political party. It’s
quite true that I often find myself on your side. On the other hand, I
sometimes don’t, and what would you have me do then?”

“Well, we’d try to convince you. This question of Sunday
games, now—”

“My dear chap, I’m not going to go over all that again with
you. My position is exactly the same as it was last year—in such a
matter I regard myself as the delegate of my congregation, and as
they’re overwhelmingly against the idea, there’s nothing more to
be discussed.”

“I always thought a shepherd led his flock, not was led by
it.”

“Don’t you think a shepherd would be foolish if he led both
himself and his flock over a precipice?” Howat’s voice became
more animated. “Why don’t you try to understand my position? I
hope—I even try to believe—that I do some good in this town.
Amongst other things, I try to broaden people’s minds—I’m
keen, as I daresay you know, on literary societies, debating clubs, music,
the drama; anything that I think will get and keep people out of the
commonplace rut. If I step warily, I may succeed—indeed, I sometimes
feel that I am succeeding. But if I were to back you up in supporting Sunday
games, I should merely split my congregation, smash up all the good work
I’m interested in, and—quite likely—make my whole position
in Browdley an impossible one. Do you think that would really be the best
thing that could happen?”

“Yes, since you ask me, I do. It’s the only course I’d
honour you for. As it is, I know for certain what I’d for a long time
suspected—that you’re secretly on our side, but haven’t the
courage to stand with us.” His voice rose excitedly, and after a pause
for breath he added quickly: “I’m sorry, Freemantle, I really
don’t mean to be insulting at all—I’m only being as frank
as I know how.”

“Yes, I quite see that.” And at the back of Howat’s mind
was the thought: I’ve said too much, somehow or other; I oughtn’t
to have let myself be enticed into an argument with this fellow—Heaven
knows where it will lead to, or what tales he’ll spread about
afterwards…Higgs was one whom eloquence always stirs to greater eloquence.
He went on: “I wouldn’t mind so much if your people were all as
virtuous as they pretend to be. But they’re not. Look at the
Makepeaces, the Battersbys, that dreadful old Monks woman—are they
really
the moral cream of Browdley society? Oh, and Garland the
draper—mustn’t forget
him
. He’s the chap who shakes
hands at your chapel door after Sunday services—the ’right hand
of fellowship’, isn’t that what you call it? There’s not
much fellowship about him on week-days, I can tell you. We’re on to him
now about some cottages he owns in Silk Street; the rain comes in at all the
roofs, but he won’t do any repairs—we’re trying to make
him, but he’s got a cute solicitor. I suppose, though, since he’s
a pillar of your chapel, this kind of talk must sound rather
offensive?”

Howat thought despairingly: I mustn’t argue, whatever happens; the
rain comes in at my roof too, by the way; Higgs and Garland are natural
enemies, and I’m not going to interfere between them…He said:
“It doesn’t strike me as particularly offensive, but that’s
not to say I’d consider it good taste to join in a discussion of
individual chapel members with outsiders.”

“Have a look at those houses in Silk Street and see things for
yourself”

“Well, I might do that.”

“Good of you if you do. And I don’t mind a bit being called an
outsider. Perhaps you’ll feel one yourself some day, so far as the
chapel’s concerned. The fact is, this town’s sunk in narrow-
mindedness, and it really makes a fellow sick sometimes to find out what
he’s up against. And I can’t help feeling, too, that the sort of
chap in these days who wants to do real good, to improve and elevate people
and all that, doesn’t find much scope or encouragement in the church.
The church, if he lets it, will just use him up, waste his energies, and
cramp him all the time. He can find better machinery elsewhere. There’s
dirt and hypocrisy in politics, I admit, but I think on the whole it gives
bigger opportunities.”

Howat smiled again. “Perhaps so, perhaps so. But I sometimes wonder
whether the people who live most usefully of all are neither parsons nor
politicians, but just ordinary folk, like village postmen and engine-drivers
and charwomen. It’s an interesting question, but I mustn’t wait
to argue it—I’ve already taken up far too much of your time, and
I’m pretty busy myself, too…It’s settled, then, that I take the
hymns?”

“Yes, if you will. Thanks for making so little trouble about it. And
as for the Sunday games—”

“You’ll find me, I’m afraid, ranged alongside my brother
ministers. Perhaps that will make you reconsider the comparison you made
between me and them—I hope it will, anyway.”

They both laughed and shook hands cordially, and Howat went down the
stairs to the street with a feeling of almost reluctant liking for the young;
councillor. Dangerous, though, to say too much to him…It was becoming
foggy, as had seemed likely, and through the yellow gloom came the muffled
chiming of the parish clock—a quarter to one. He hurried, so as not to
be late for his midday dinner.

Monday’s dinner at the Manse was always predictable; it consisted of
the remains of Sunday’s joint minced into a sort of rissole and warmed
up. Howat had had this so often and so unfailingly that it seemed now, by
sheer familiarity, to have become appropriate—it both smelt and tasted,
somehow, of Monday. He did not, however, bother a great deal about food,
which was perhaps as well in the circumstances. He was not even aware that a
few minor ailments from which he had suffered at times during the past dozen
years had all been dyspeptic in origin.

Dinner was served for four, since by that time Mrs. Freemantle had dressed
and come downstairs. She was a thin, angular woman with everything rather
sharp about her—her nose, her chin, her cheekbones, her eyes, her way
of moving about, and her voice and speech. She was the youngest of her
family, while Aunt Viney was the eldest, and despite a difference of physique
which could hardly have been greater, there was yet an obvious sisterhood
between them. They might bicker when they were alone (indeed, they sometimes
did), but whenever they were together they had an air of being ranged
foursquare against the rest of the world, even when the rest of the world
consisted only of Howat. Their dispositions were complementary rather than
similar; Aunt Viney could bluster, fly into tempers, and shout; but Mrs.
Freemantle’s voice, even in most perturbed moments, never rose above a
high-pitched and hurried wail.

Howat was always extremely thoughtful and polite to both of them, and
submitted good-humouredly to their varying attentions. It was Aunt Viney who
sewed buttons on for him (when she remembered), cooked, ordered from shops,
and did the more domestic work of the household; in a shadowy way, if ever he
were inclined to be irritated by her, he could always reflect comfortingly
that she worked very hard, and that no one could imagine what they would all
do without her. For his wife, of course, he had tenderer feelings, and if
ever she were a little trying he always remembered how highly strung she was,
and that quite small things were apt to upset her in a way that she
couldn’t really help.

This particular Monday dinner found both Aunt Viney and Mrs. Freemantle a
little cross, the former from a noisy and indeterminate quarrel with the
servant which had been in progress; most of the morning, and the latter
because the roof of one of the bedrooms was leaking again and the builder, in
her opinion, couldn’t have done his job properly when last he had come
to repair it. But she was the kind of woman who could never he satisfied with
saying a thing once; she had to talk rapidly and indignantly about the
leaking roof for over ten minutes, while Howat listened with sympathy
tempered by the knowledge that the roof always would leak till it was
overhauled thoroughly, and that such an operation would cost more than he was
ever likely to he able to afford. His stipend was just under three hundred a
year, and though both his wife and Aunt Viney had small incomes of their own,
there was really nothing like enough for the upkeep of so big a house. He
himself would have preferred to move into a much smaller one, but his wife
would never listen to the suggestion, and always talked of any residence less
in size than the Manse as ‘one of those poky little working-class
houses’.

During or just after the midday meal it was Howat’s habit to outline
and discuss with her some part of his daily routine; he did this even when it
was an effort, for he believed it his duty to let her share in all his
affairs. He hardly realised that she had other and more satisfying points of
contact with the small world of Browdley, and that a good deal of his well-
meant conversation bored her. It bored her now, for instance, when he began
to talk about the address he was going to deliver that evening on Mozart. He
began to sketch out a plan of his ideas, and as often happened when once he
began, he went chattering on, with slowly mounting enthusiasm, till Mary
began to fidget and his wife to exchange supercilious glances with her
sister. Their private opinion was that ideas might be all right for the
platform or pulpit, but were hardly suitable for the dinner-table. In the end
Mary neatly torpedoed the monologue by enquiring the date of Mozart’s
birth. Howat, after a rather vacant pause, said he didn’t know exactly,
but he fancied it must be somewhere about the middle of the eighteenth
century. They were all very much amused at his confessed ignorance, and Mary
rejoined pertly: “You know, dad, I think you always go far above
people’s heads when you talk to them about music. Why don’t you
tell them the useful facts—when he was born, when he died, the names of
the things he wrote, and so on?”

Howat answered: “Yes, of course—I ought to include all that, I
admit.”

“Anyhow,” added Mary, “I don’t suppose it matters
a great deal, for if this fog keeps on, there won’t be more than half a
dozen there.”

Howat nodded and stared blankly at the window, where yellow was already
merging through orange to grey.

It was too foggy, indeed, to go visiting in the town that afternoon,
especially with the excuse of his bad throat; so he spent a pleasant couple
of hours in the little school associated with his chapel. It was a
second-rate school, doomed, no doubt, to extinction when any enterprising
education policy should take possession of the Browdley authorities; but that
day was unlikely to happen soon. Architecturally the school was hopelessly
out of date; its rooms were small and badly lit, its corridors long and
draughty, and its playgrounds mere patches of wasteland strewn with ink-black
cinders. In this establishment there were three classes, the senior in charge
of the headmaster, a Mr. Wilkinson, and the two junior ones taught by his
daughter and another young woman.

He first of all, as a matter of courtesy, paid a visit to Mr. Wilkinson.
Wilkinson was a shabby little man with a pompous manner and a very large,
pale, and flabby nose. He experienced certain difficulties of discipline, of
which both he and Howat were well aware, but of which they both steadfastly
pretended not to be aware; the wastepaper-basket in his room was usually
sticky with the remains of half-sucked sweets which, from time to time, he
made his pupils disgorge. (Howat would never have known this but for a
complaint by the caretaker’s wife.) After spending a few perfunctory
moments in the senior room, Howat passed on to his daughter’s, and
here, indeed, his pleasure began. For he liked children, with an intensity
that was no affectation; he often thought: If I were not a parson I should
like most of all to be a schoolmaster. It was true enough, in a way, though,
on reflection, he recognised that he would never have made a very good
schoolmaster. He would always have shrunk from teaching the dull stuff that
had to be learnt. Besides, he had the most preposterous ideas about
education—preposterous, he was prepared to admit, from any normal
parent’s standpoint. As it was, he could put his theories into strictly
limited practice with the certainty that as soon as he was out of the school
the teacher would undo any harm he might have perpetrated.

His daughter was pleased to let him take the class for a time, since it
gave her extra moments to work at her Latin verbs. He began by walking round
amongst the desks and observing what the children were doing; it was a
geography lesson, apparently, and most of them were laboriously copying a map
of Ireland out of ancient and very dirty text-books. He asked one boy why
they were doing this, but the boy said he did not know. Then he began to talk
to the boy, at first in an undertone, but later, without definitely realising
it, in a voice to which all the class soon came to listen. He asked if anyone
had ever been to Ireland; none had; then he asked if anyone had ever crossed
the sea in a ship. And from that he progressed to a general talk about
islands, and then islands very far away, and then uninhabited islands, and
soon he was off on one of those extraordinary impromptu stories which he
enjoyed just as much as did any of his listeners. This one was about two
small boys sailing across the sea in a small boat, and coming to a land where
nobody from England had ever been before. Howat then went to the blackboard,
wiped out a careful list of exports and imports which his daughter had drawn
up, and began to sketch a map of this strange land just as it came to the
knowledge of the two boys. First the vague outline of the shore in the
distance, then a narrow river inlet leading into the heart of dense jungle,
and so on. Mountains, lakes, and vast swamps all figured in the boys’
wanderings, and as each exciting adventure happened Howat marked it down on
the board. By the time that the young travellers had lost themselves in the
midst of a forest infested with giant spiders and boa- constrictors, the
whole class was in a ferment of excitement, as was Howat himself; for half an
hour during that November afternoon Browdley did not exist for some four
dozen of its inhabitants; the fog and the cotton-mill across the road were
lost behind a blaze of tropic sunshine. When at last the school-bell rang,
Howat stopped as one disturbed suddenly from a dream; he seemed to recollect
himself and added, in an ordinary voice: “Well, boys and girls,
that’s all to-day, I think. Perhaps I’ll tell you more about what
happened to the two boys some other time. I hope you know now something about
maps, anyhow.” But it was a lame excuse; he didn’t particularly
hope they did, or care whether they did or not; his aim had been
different—something not very easy to put into words—something,
indeed, which he was never quite sure of understanding himself.