And Now Good-bye (16 page)

A moment later, when the waiter had left them after taking the order, they
intercepted each other’s glances and smiled. “You’re just
thinking how extraordinary it is for you and me to be here, aren’t
you?” she asked.

“Yes, I was. But so many extraordinary things have been happening to
me to-day. One of them, for instance, happened just before I met you. I went
to see a specialist, thinking I might have something rather serious the
matter with me, and he told me it was all nerves.”

“Weren’t you delighted?”

“Yes, altogether. I felt like a condemned prisoner who’s been
give a reprieve and a free pardon all at the same moment. I still feel rather
like that. I left the doctor’s place soon after a quarter to five, I
suppose it was, and I hardly know what I did between then and seeing you. I
remember getting into a taxi and being driven along Oxford Street. I never
ride in taxis as a rule. For that matter, I never dine alone with young
ladies in Soho restaurants. If I could see myself now from the outside, I
daresay I should think I’d gone completely crazy.”

“Having left the Euclid world and passed into the
Einstein—that was your own simile, wasn’t it?”

He looked across at her then with a curious, tranquil admiration. She was
clever; she could seize a point; she had an alertness of mind that perfectly
matched the alertness of her eyes and bearing. Trevis had the same kind of
alertness, dimmed, though, by physical suffering; Ringwood had a touch of it,
but in him it was rougher, less clarified. Only in her did this quality which
he liked so much seem brought almost to perfection.

She went on: “I’m glad it was nothing seriously wrong. As a
matter of fact, I had noticed you looking ill lately. I suppose you were
worrying?”

“Yes, frightfully.”

“I think you work far too hard in Browdley. Didn’t the doctor
tell you you had to take a rest?”

“I believe he did. D’you know, I hardly remember what he did
tell me, except that I hadn’t got what I thought I had. I believe he
forbade me to speak in public again for a long time—it was my throat,
you see, that was the bother—and I rather think he talked about a
nervous breakdown. A breakdown! Do I look like it?”

“Not now, but you may when you get back to Browdley. I think you
probably will. I don’t know how you can ever stand the place. You must
be so unhappy.” She spoke that last word with a rather scared glance,
as if it had arrived too impulsively to be checked.

“
Unhappy?
”

“Well, yes. Of course it’s always difficult to imagine oneself
in someone else’s place, but I always feel—I always have
felt—that if I were you I should be terribly unhappy.”

“Unhappy!” he echoed again, but not interrogatively this time.
He was so happy at that moment that the mere conception of being otherwise
evaded him till, with a strong effort of imagination, he pictured Browdley,
the Browdley he would be returning to on the morrow, its narrow streets of
slums leading from the railway station to the Manse, the factory
overshadowing the chapel, the little rooms in all the little houses that he
visited.

“Because,” she suggested, again with a scared glance,
“because I feel that you try for so much, and must so often be
disappointed.”

He said: “Ah yes, but it isn’t all disappointment, you know.
And whether it is or not, I have to do it.”

“You feel about it as I feel about music? That you must do it,
whatever happens? You never have any doubts?”

“I don’t think I ever had any when I was your age, anyhow.
Perhaps when one reaches middle life, it isn’t natural to be as certain
of things.”

“You have doubts, then?”

“Only of my own usefulness. It doesn’t seem quite so
inevitable that I shall convert the world as it did when I first left
college.”

“Do you want to convert the world?”

“I don’t say I do—now. I’ll be satisfied with
doing a certain amount of good in Browdley.”

“Giving up the big ambitions?”

“Don’t you think doing a certain amount of good in Browdley is
a big ambition? I do.”

“Yes, so do I, but—” The waiter came with soup, and the
interruption broke the sequence of discussion. “Really,” she said
afterwards, with a smile, “you must think I’m terribly
impertinent, cross-examining you like this.”

“Not so impertinent as I was to you a little while ago, I’m
sure.”

“Oh,
that?
” She laughed. “You don’t mind my
being amused by it, do you?”

“I’m relieved that you can be.”

“Well, don’t you think it was rather funny?”

“Perhaps…” And he laughed, with an effort at first, and then
spontaneously.

“It was such an odd way of getting to know you,” she went on.
“I’d imagined all sorts of ways, but none in the least like that.
Yes, I
had
imagined all sorts of ways. As a matter of fact, I’d
been really wanting to know you ever since I heard you give an address on
William Blake—two years ago, it must have been. Usually I hate literary
talks, they’re so artificial, and gushing, and speakers always quote
the tags that you privately don’t think much of—but you were
different. You were rather queer, in a way. You talked totally above the
heads of everybody in the audience (totally above my head, anyhow), and you
went rambling on and on, about all sorts of things that had nothing to do
with the subject—and yet somehow, in the end, I did get a vague idea of
what you were driving at. Anyhow, I didn’t come away feeling
bored.”

“So that was why, when you wanted to learn German—”

“Yes, precisely. I knew you knew the language, because I’ve
seen you getting German books out of the library. But my parents didn’t
at all approve. To begin with, they couldn’t see why I wanted to learn
German at all, and then they said that since I never attended the chapel it
was a piece of impudence for me to ask you.”

“Oh, no, no, that never occurred to me.” He paused a moment
and then said: “By the way, as a mere matter of curiosity, why have you
never attended the chapel?”

“Do you really want me to tell you?”

“Yes, very much.”

She seemed to be having to arrange her thoughts. At length she replied:
“I used to go regularly when I was younger. I was made to. It was the
Silk Street chapel then, till my father had some kind of row with the
minister there and decided to change to yours. I was seventeen and came to
the conclusion that if he could please himself about which chapel he attended
I ought to be able to please myself whether I attended one at all. There was
a fuss about it at home, of course, but after all, at seventeen one
can’t exactly be dragged screaming along the aisle. And. I did go once
or twice, just to sample it.”

“And you didn’t like it?”

“Not a very great deal. I never heard you preach, if that’s
any personal consolation.”

“I’m afraid it isn’t. What I really want to find out is
your reason for disliking chapel itself.”

“Well, to begin with, the building’s not very attractive, is
it? I wouldn’t mind if it were downright ugly, like a factory, but
it’s got all those extra things on it—I don’t know how to
describe them—but it looks as if it had been built in a straightforward
way by a builder and then someone had gone round sticking architecture on
afterwards. Perhaps that’s rather a vague criticism. As a matter of
fact it reminds me too much of Gounod’s music.”

“You don’t like Gounod?”

“No.”

“Neither do I, particularly. And I quite agree with all that you say
about the chapel building; it’s the product of a period when taste in
architecture was at its lowest. Still, that alone oughtn’t to keep
anyone outside.”

“Oh no, it wouldn’t keep me, either, if I liked everything
else. But I suppose I don’t.”

“Tell me, if you can, some of the other things that you don’t
like.”

“Well, there’s the organ, and the way the organist plays it,
and the hymns—such stupid words, very often, which people sing without
meaning them—’False and full of sin I am’, for
instance—do you think anyone in your chapel really thinks he’s
false and full of sin? I’m quite sure my father doesn’t. Nor do
the rest, either—they’re far too proud of being respectable
middle- class people ever to have such a thought…And the tunes are
sometimes rather dreadful, too.”

“I’ll even agree with you in most of all that. I did try years
ago to improve the music, but it led to trouble with the organist and
choirmaster; they said I was interfering outside my province. Probably I was.
It isn’t an easy job, you know, being a parson.”

“I’m sure it isn’t. That’s why I said just now I
was sorry for you—you must find so many things that seem all
wrong.”

“Most of us have that experience, don’t we? But tell me now,
apart from the building and the music, which we both agree are far from
perfect, what is it that you really dislike? I’m certain it can’t
be entirely a matter of externals.”

“It isn’t, but it’s rather difficult to answer without
being impolite.”

“Oh, I shan’t be offended—I asked for it, and anyhow, I
really do want to know.”

She replied, musingly and with evident care: “I think it’s
probably that I don’t feel sympathy with the spirit of the place. It
all seems rather bleak to me, and it doesn’t seem to have much room for
art and beauty—in a way, I feel it almost distrusts that sort of thing.
I know I can’t prove what I’m saying—I’m only telling
you just how things appear to me. And the revivals you sometimes
have—they’re a bit hysterical—and I’m not built to
like that sort of business. And then the preaching—I don’t care
much for the system that encourages practically anybody to preach. I
can’t feel interested, somehow, in what all kinds of people tell me,
out of their own heads, so to speak, about religion.”

“There, of course, you attack the whole foundation of
Nonconformity—perhaps even of Protestantism altogether.”

“Do I? I’m not really trying to attack
anything—I’m only describing a few rather shadowy feelings I
have.”

“Quite. I see that.” On any other occasion he would have felt
immensely worried and perturbed and would have been bursting with eloquent
confutations and counter-arguments; but with her, rather oddly, he felt no
inclination to do anything but just go on talking quietly and discovering her
opinions on one thing after another. It was queer how comfortable he felt,
and how pleasantly in sympathy with her, even all the time that she was
undermining, in a few calm sentences, the whole fabric of his professional
existence; the truth was that beyond and surpassing any disagreement with her
ideas was an extraordinary interest in them that had taken possession of
him.

The waiter here provided a second interruption by removing the soup-
plates and bringing a large
Sole Colbert
on a dish; it looked so
enormous, even when divided, that they broke off their religious argument to
discuss the more urgent if less exalted matter of appetite. “I’m
astonished to find how hungry I am,” he declared, zestfully. “I
never fed equal to this sort of thing at home. It must be the change of
air.”

“More likely the good cooking,” she answered, and then,
perceiving the implication of her remark, flushed slightly. “Really,
I’m saying the most dreadful things; I don’t know why it is; I
just seem to find myself speaking to you exactly as I feel—anything
that comes into my head…But I think it’s true, though, about the
cooking. Once, when I came to your house for a German lesson, you were out,
and the maid had me in the kitchen talking to her. She was alone there,
cooking your dinner, I suppose, and ever since watching her that morning,
I’ve had an extra reason for being sorry for you.”

He laughed. “I never trouble about food when I’m at home. I
don’t think I’m really very interested in it. Of course,
it’s different to-night, but then, to-night…”

The waiter approached with the wine-list, and Howat, after a
moment’s hesitation, passed it across the table to her. “Will you
choose something you like?” he asked, doubtfully.

She also was doubtful. “I’m afraid I’m very ignorant
about drinks. I’d rather you ask for something
you
would
like.”

“Something
I’d
like?” He was about to disclaim
any desire for non-teetotal drink of any kind when suddenly an impulse seized
him and he began talking, almost to himself: “I remember something I
once had—I was in Germany, on a holiday, as a youth—it was some
kind of beer, I think—ah, here’s the list—I wonder if I
shall call to mind the name…” He glanced down the column and felt a
slight stirring of memory. “Ah, Pilsener, Pilsener—that was it.
Yes, I think I’d like to drink it again, after all these years. But
what about you? Won’t you have wine?”

“I’ll have the beer with you. May I?”

“All right.” And he gave the order to the waiter, who had
probably never before heard Pilsener discussed with such solemnity.

But when the waiter had gone she laughed. “I think that’s
rather a symbolic act,” she said. “Wouldn’t Browdley be
shocked?”

“Possibly. But without reason. It’s merely another instance of
the quite exceptional things that can happen during an Einstein
interlude.” He smiled buoyantly, yet a moment later, after watching the
pale brown liquid stream into the glasses, he took up his own with a certain
sense of significance. It was true, of course, that this simple glass of beer
was quite sufficient to shatter all kinds of reputations that he possessed in
Browdley; but somehow he could not bring himself to be concerned about it.
The cool drink, slightly iced, gave him far different thoughts, breaking
through the years till he remembered himself, a young man in his early
twenties, on that first thrilling holiday abroad, walking along a winding
Rhenish lane amidst blazing sunlight, and calling for a drink at a little
wayside refreshment-house where he had sat outside at a bare scrubbed table
with a group of working men in peaked caps. He had asked for mineral water,
but the girl, misunderstanding his German, had brought him a mug of something
which he drank and enjoyed before he realised that it was actually that
horrible and dreaded infamy—beer.