And Now Good-bye (18 page)

He had never thought about the matter until now, but he answered:
“Oh no, I’m not tired, either.”

“I’m afraid it’s selfish of me—I’m
forgetting the long day you’ve had.”

“I’ve had one of the most extraordinary days of my
life—far too wonderful to have been tiring.”

“You’ll be tired to-morrow.”

“I shall probably sleep in the train all the way.

“Then at Browdley I suppose your work begins again
immediately?”

“Yes. I’ve got a Bazaar Committee meeting and the Young
Men’s class to-morrow night, and Sunday’s going to be even busier
than usual, because it’s Armistice Day.”

“And I shall be on my way to Vienna. Isn’t it odd to think
about it? Do you suppose we shall ever meet again?”

“If you come to Browdley, perhaps, or if I go to Vienna.”

“Neither of which seems very likely, does it?”

“I’m afraid it doesn’t.”

“Then we’ve got to make the most of what’s left. When I
think of all those hours we spent over the German without ever guessing how
much we both liked—Brahms—”

“I once heard you humming the opening theme of that sonata. I was
rather surprised.”

“There was your chance. If you had only asked me about
it—”

“I know. I wish I had asked you. I’m an awful misser of
chances.”

“Does nobody in Browdley know
anything
about you?”

“Oh, I’m not really such a mystery as all that. I think quite
a number of people know me fairly well.”

“But the music?”

“That’s not a secret—it’s merely that most people
aren’t interested. You wouldn’t be, unless you were keen on the
thing yourself.”

They had walked away from the hall and were now in quiet and almost
deserted side-streets. “Where shall we go?” she asked, and he
could not give any definite answer, except a suggestion that they should make
their way nearer to the the theatres and restaurants. He knew little about
London’s night civilisation and at that moment cared even less. His
senses were full of enchantments, and he was perfectly happy to be strolling
in a direction which, by instinct rather than calculation, he believed to be
correct. With her arm in his they walked all the way, skirting spacious
squares and across the main traffic highways and into narrow yards and alleys
and diagonally across short streets from lamp-post to lamp-post, past
shuttered windows and cabmen’s shelters and cats sitting delicately in
doorways; till at last a distant glow over roofs came so near that they
walked abruptly right into it—it was Piccadilly Circus. All the way
they had been talking, but now they stopped, dazzled by the brilliance, and
felt for a moment like country cousins. There were so many restaurants where
evening dress was clearly expected, and so many others whose precise
character did not look too obvious, that finally Howat made for the swing
doors of the Regent Palace Hotel; he had heard of it; it was where people
from Browdley sometimes stayed.

Under the dome in the lounge of that rather amazing establishment they
took coffee and sandwiches and smoked cigarettes. A certain recklessness was
on him, not diminished by the realisation that it was approaching an hour
when all good parsons are in bed. The colourful scene alternately attracted
and repelled; it pulsated with crude, animal vitality, and the saxophones
droning in the distance expressed that vitality to perfection, within the
limits of their own peculiar technique. It was all something that he rather
disliked, yet it drew him nearer in mind and sympathy to the girl at his
side; he looked at her as she sat there, so calm and close to him, and he
thought: But for you I should be fantastically unhappy in this place, but
with you it’s rather exhilarating; you make its vitality stand out;
you’re like a prism, through which I’m managing to see all kinds
of different, magical things…And then, in a way that had never happened
before, he reflected: Browdley—Browdley—Browdley to-morrow…

“I hope we
shall
meet again sometime,” he said,
transmuting his thought a little.

“Yes, I do, too,” she answered, and they exchanged a glance
that lasted only a fraction of a second, and then went on talking, about
music and pictures and books and all kinds of side-topics that thrust
themselves unwanted yet unshirked into the conversation; it was midnight
before they decided that they really must go. As they passed through the
crowded lobby and into the street, he said: “Let me see now—where
is it you said you were staying?”

“South Kensington. It’s a studio in a sort of mews. The people
who have it are rather amusing—the man’s an actor and the woman
paints—very badly, I’m afraid—but they’ve both been
awfully nice to me. They’re friends of Isaac’s, and when he wrote
to them about me they asked me to stay with them as long as I was in
London.”

Crowds were jostling down the tube entrances.

“I suppose the tube’s your best way,” he said,
“but there seems a tremendous rush. Would you rather try for a bus?
It’s not so quick, but usually pleasanter.”

“I’ve got a return ticket from Charing Cross. That’s
only a few minutes’ walk away.”

So they set off down the Haymarket and across Trafalgar Square; six-and-a-
half hours, he reflected, since he had met her there outside the post office;
but the interval was hardly reckonable in time. Down Northumberland Avenue to
the river the wind swept past them in cold gusts; little pools in the gutters
were already frozen hard. They crossed the tramlines to look at the river,
rolling by like coils of black snakes; the railway bridge soared above them,
glittering with red and green signal-lights. A moving brilliance zoomed
across and sent a cascade of silver-blue sparks into the darkness below.
“How beautiful that is,” she exclaimed, watching the train
disappear over the south side.

“That’s the bridge they’re always talking of pulling
down because they say it’s ugly and spoils what’s supposed to be
one of the finest views in the world.”

“I think it’s much more beautiful than a good many views of
that sort.”

“Yes. It represents the best of its period just as the architecture
of my chapel represents the worst. The Victorians only achieved beauty when
they aimed at utility.”

“I know. I always think the best things in Browdley to show visitors
are the cotton-mills. They’re so downright ugly you can stand
them—they’re almost beautiful because of that. Anyhow,
they’re not depressing, and they don’t put on airs, like the Town
Hall and the Technical School.”

They walked over the road to the station entrance and he was full of the
feeling that there were unnumbered things he wanted to say to her and that as
soon as she was gone they would all come tumbling upon him. But when they
reached the booking-hall they found there were no more trains. They might get
a bus, someone suggested, in the Strand, so they hurried back along
Northumberland Avenue to Trafalgar Square and puzzled themselves over several
vehicles, all quite full, that were bound for places neither of them had ever
heard of. At length he said: “Well, we can walk a little way, unless
you’re tired, and get one as it overtakes us. I daresay there’ll
be room in them soon.” It sounded rather vague, but she agreed without
argument, and they skirted the corner of the square and passed under the
Admiralty Arch into the Mall, unaware that omnibuses did not traverse that
spacious highway. But it was pleasant enough to stroll at one o’clock
in the morning under the leafless trees. At last a turning opened out on the
left and she exclaimed: “Oh, let’s go down here, it leads through
St. James’s Park to Victoria Station—I know there are always late
buses from there. And there’s no hurry so far as I’m concerned;
those people I’m with always stay up half the night. Besides, they gave
me a key.”

They entered the park. He was not quite sure how it would help the journey
to South Kensington, but he was still in rather the mood of not
caring—after all, it was their last chance, they would never meet and
talk again. The prospect of that imminent farewell gave him not so much a
feeling of sadness as of something cold and rather blank that he must soon
encounter and become used to. He wondered, then, for the first time, if they
would correspond. On the whole, he thought better not; there could be no
particular point in it, since they would probably never renew the
acquaintance. But he did say, with a fervour that rather astonished him:
“When you’re in Vienna I don’t suppose you’ll think a
great deal about Browdley—no reason, of course, why you
should—but I do want you to feel that—in any emergency—you
have a friend there. Remember now. At any time—years hence,
perhaps—a letter to me will not be wasted. I mean, I shall always want
to help you, if it should ever happen that I can. And I daresay I shall
always be in Browdley, so you’ll know where to write.”

She said: “It’s very kind of you, and I do thank you. I shall
like to feel that. I wish there’d been more time for us to get to know
each other. It’s absurd, really—dashing away like this to the
opposite ends of the earth. They are rather opposite ends, aren’t
they?”

“Absolutely, I should say.”

“And it’s so lovely here to-night. What’s that building
over there with all the lights shining on it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think I really know where I
am.”

“Probably I’m dragging you miles out of your way. I keep
forgetting how tired you must be. What time’s your train to-
morrow?”

“There’s one at ten-thirty I might try for.”

“Mine’s at ten.”

“I suppose we both ought to hurry up and get some sleep.”

“I won’t sleep. I’ll be too excited.”

“About to-morrow?”

“Yes. And to-day.”

He felt the very slightest pressure of her arm in his, and the sensation
moved him to a curious whimsical tenderness. “Elizabeth,” he said
(he had never called her by her name until then)—“to-day
has
been rather fine, hasn’t it? Finer, for me, probably, than
for you. It seems a hundred years since a solitary grey-haired parson stepped
out of a train at St. Pancras Station and carried his bag to a second-rate
hotel in Bloomsbury. He was tired and worried, partly because he thought he
was very ill, and partly because he had to face an embarrassing interview
with a certain young lady of whom he had not had, to be candid, the very best
reports.”

He had expected her to be amused, but instead she was silent for a time
and then responded, as if with some effort to achieve the same mood:
“But you’re not solitary and I don’t think you’re
really very grey- haired, either. Besides, even if you were both, the
description wouldn’t do, because it suggests someone old and decrepit.
You aren’t exactly that, are you, Howat? Is ‘Howat’ what I
have to call you? It’s a queer name, isn’t it?”

“It was my father’s. I think it suits a parson, though
he
wasn’t one—it has just a slight flavour of
pretentiousness. I sometimes wish I had another name. No, no, I
don’t—I really don’t care at all. I’m not sure that I
know what I’m talking about.”

“Perhaps that’s why you called yourself solitary.”

“More likely I was thinking of those old-fashioned boys’ yarns
in magazines years ago that used to begin—’One glorious
summer’s evening, in the heart of the Canadian Rockies, a solitary
horseman might have been seen—’”

“I don’t think you do know what you’re talking
about.”

“Of course not. I warn you, I shall talk nothing but nonsense till
we say good-bye.”

He felt, indeed, as if a divine yet rather wistful nonsense were closing
round him on all sides. The sky was full of stars and there was a new moon,
and that shining building, whatever it was, now stood directly ahead, its
tall square tower, brilliantly flood-lit, facing them like some fairy goal
beyond the trees. The path they were traversing sloped gently down to the
suspension bridge over the ornamental water, and there the loveliness of the
scene was like a sudden droning in his ears; he stopped, and put his arm
round her shoulder as they both gazed down at the water and then across to
the spectral buildings in the distance. “There’s the Foreign
Office, I think,” she said, and he replied: “Ah yes,
yes…” But he was thinking of something else; he was thinking—By
God, I believe there is something in me, if it had a chance; I believe what
I’m everlastingly seeking for wouldn’t always elude…He felt as
if some utmost beauty of the world were calling to him with open arms, while
he, for some unfathomable reason, wanted to answer yet could not either speak
nor stir.

When, a few moments later, they entered Bird-cage Walk, Big Ben was
chiming the quarter, and it was too late, he guessed, to think of finding an
omnibus. He asked for the address where she was staying and summoned the
first taxi that carne along. He would accompany her, he planned, say good-bye
at her destination, and return to his hotel in the same taxi.

As they drove off she said: “Don’t go back straight away.
Can’t you spare a minute to come up and see the people I’m
staying with? I think you’ll probably like them—they’re
interesting.”

“Isn’t it rather late for paying a call?”

“Oh, they don’t care. They very often stay up most of the
night talking to people. And they’ve got a photograph of
Isaac—I’d rather like you to see it.”

“Yes, ’I’d like to myself. All right, I’ll come,
but I really mustn’t stay long. Think of my train to-morrow.”

“And mine. Just now I find them both rather dreadful to think
of.”

“Ah, but you’ll love Vienna.”

“Have you been there?”

“No, but I’ve always had a great desire to go. Not that I ever
will—it’s too far. The Viennese are supposed to be delightful
people.”

“So long as Viennese landladies don’t object to fiddle
practice.”

“Perhaps some day I shall pay my five-and-ninepence to hear that
fiddle.”