And Now Good-bye (6 page)

“It’s all very outrageous. She was full of mad ideas, always
was.”

“But in these days, Mrs. Garland—”

“
These days
? It’s a pity these days are what they are.
A sinful, godless age, that’s what it is.”

Howat’s fingers drummed on the desk-lid; he was becoming just a
shade impatient. “Well, well, that’s a big subject—you were
telling me about your daughter, weren’t you? Do you mean that
she’s disappeared, and that you don’t know where she is at
all?”

Garland here thought fit to intervene; he said, as if realising that his
wife would only bungle the business: “The fact is, Mr. Freemantle, we
can only guess. We’ve had no news at all except a card saying she was
quite well but wouldn’t be coming back. We couldn’t read the
postmark. And what crossed our minds was that perhaps she might have hinted
to you something about her intentions. It’s a most upsetting thing to
have happened altogether.”

“I agree with you, Mr. Garland, and I wish I could help, but I
assure you she never gave me the slightest idea that such a notion was in her
mind. If she had, I need hardly say that I should have strongly dissuaded her
and even, if necessary, approached you on the matter.”

Garland seemed to find this reply moderately satisfactory, but Mrs.
Garland’s eyes narrowed sharply. “You mean that you haven’t
heard from her at all, then?” she interposed.

He shook his head and then suddenly remembered the Raphael picture that
had arrived by the first post that day. “Stay, though—well yes,
now I come to recollect it, I did hear from her this morning, but it was
merely a short message to say she wouldn’t be coming for her usual
German lesson to-morrow.”

“Oh? So she has written to you then? Was that all she said? Did she
give no explanation?”

“She merely said she would be out of Browdley at the
time.”

“What was the postmark?”

“I must confess I didn’t notice.”

“Perhaps you still have the letter and it could be
examined.”

“I don’t know, I’m afraid. It may be torn up—quite
probably it is. Naturally it didn’t strike me as particularly important
when I received it.”

Garland again took the lead. “Well, Mr. Freemantle, it’s an
unfortunate business, anyhow. She’s left home, and we don’t know
what’s happening to her.”

Howat found himself slowly rising out of a dream into this new and
intricate reality that was being forced upon him. “But surely, Mr.
Garland, you have some idea
why
she’s gone, at any rate? That
seems to me almost as important as where she is, apart from the fact that it
might afford a clue. She can’t have acted like that without some big
reason of her own.”

He felt: Why are they bothering me about it? I can’t help them, but
I can see now it was a mistake to give the girl German lessons—I never
guessed that her parents didn’t approve of it. She ought to have told
me, really…

“Oh, she has her reasons, I’ve no doubt,” retorted Mrs.
Garland, sourly. “And precious fine reasons they are, too, if they were
only known, I daresay. The idea—talking of giving up her job at the
library and going abroad! That’s what she did talk about, though you
mayn’t believe it. Of course we forbade it—absolutely. A good
deal that we don’t like we may have to put up with in these days, but
there are certain limits, I’m glad to say.

“She talked of going abroad, did she?”

“She’s been talking of it off and on for some time. But it
came to a head last Friday night when we found she’d been writing to a
travel agency about railway tickets to Paris. And then, if you please, she
calmly told us that she was going to go abroad in any case.”

“To Paris?”

“That’s one of the things we have to guess. It doesn’t
sound a nice sort of place for a young girl to want to go to, does
it?”

“But, really, she must have had some purpose in mind? People
don’t suddenly go to Paris without any reason at all. Did she give you
no idea how—how she intended to support herself while she was
away?”

Mr. Garland rubbed his nose decisively. “We didn’t argue with
her, Mr. Freemantle. When a daughter calmly informs her parents that
she’s going to do what they’ve forbidden her to do, there’s
nothing left to argue about. She went up to her bedroom—as we hoped, to
think it over and come to her senses. It seems, though, that she just packed
her things, went to bed, and went off early in the morning by the first train
before any of us was up. Altogether a most disgraceful affair. Of course one
naturally thinks of all sorts of possibilities when a girl does a thing like
that.”

Howat stared far away over Garland’s head. “I must say, from a
very slight acquaintance with your daughter, she didn’t really seem to
me the sort of girl who would do anything that either you or she would need
to be ashamed of.”

“That remains to be found out,” answered Mrs. Garland.
“And I don’t mind telling you to your face, Mr. Freemantle, I
think you’re one of the prime causes of it all! You have a thoroughly
unsettling influence on the young people—you always have had—you
put ideas into their heads—it was quite enough to listen to you
to-night to realise how all these things begin. As my husband said,
there’s a great deal too much loose talk in the world nowadays, and
ministers, of all people, ought to know better than join in it. They’re
here to give us religion, that’s what I say, not the things of this
world.”

Howat said, rather curtly: “I don’t think we can discuss all
that. You must let me know if there’s anything practical I can do. And
I’m afraid I must go now. Good-night, Mrs. Garland. Goodnight, Mr.
Garland.” There was something unusual and rather sharp in his eyes.

He strode out of the schoolroom into the cold moist fog. Something was
hammering away in his head—a sort of desperately controlled temper,
something that made him feel hot and ice-cold simultaneously. Those
intolerable people! He could not bring himself to hate them, but his
impatience of them was like a flame. And then quite suddenly the flame died
down and he felt merely tired, emptied of all energy and willpower and
enthusiasm. He found his way into the dark house and, over the remains of the
kitchen fire, made himself a cup of cocoa. It was after midnight when he got
to bed, and though his tiredness had increased with every moment, he did not
find it easy to sleep.

The next morning, Tuesday, there was no fog or rain, but a
clear frosty sunlight and a high wind from the east that scoured the streets
of Browdley till they looked like bones picked clean. Most of Howat’s
morning study hours were taken up by callers, and at eleven he went out with
the intention, before anything else, of getting his first breath of fresh air
for several days.

Once the pedestrian leaves the outskirts of Browdley he enters a flat,
loamy, and not unpicturesque countryside, stud ded with small farms and semi-
industrialised villages, with here and there a barn or an old mill that
Rembrandt might have etched. There are paths through almost every field and
in all directions, but one cannot, during an ordinary walk, lose sight of
Browdley. Indeed, Browdley looks almost more massive and dominating at a
distance of a few miles than closer by. Its factories huddle together into a
compact pile, and on a misty day the observer might with a little effort
fancy himself in sight of some medieval walled and fortified city, so sharply
do the square cliff like factories mark the outlines of the place. There are
dozens of tall chimney-stacks, but at such a moment they can seem almost
decorative—the spires, perhaps, of the black cathedrals of
industrialism.

On Tuesday morning Howat took his favourite walk, which was along School
Lane for a quarter of a mile beyond the town, across the potato fields to
Shandly’s Farm, and then back over the railway and along the bank of
the canal. The sun was shining, and he walked fast, enjoying the cold wind
and the cheerful landscape. Those who saw him doubtless envied a
parson’s freedom to take a constitutional on a fine morning.

Mentally, however, he was still ruffled from that talk with the Garlands
the previous evening, and as often happened, his mood was inclined to be one
of rather desperate unbelief in himself. After all,
could
he be quite
sure that what he was doing in Browdley was for the best? Could he even be
quite sure that he was doing any good in Browdley at all? Mrs. Garland had
accused him of unsettling the young, of putting ideas into their
heads—well, all that, in a way, was what he wanted to do; and yet, when
the balance was struck, was the net result indubitably favourable? He wished
there were someone over him to say, with authority, either Yes, go ahead,
you’re all right’, or No, stop it at once, you’re
wrong’. That was the weakness, he had always felt, with these
independent Nonconformist creeds—a man, if he were sincere, had to work
everything out for himself, and by the time he had finished doing that he had
often worried himself into complete lack of confidence in his own
judgment.

Of course, so far as the runaway daughter herself was concerned, he was
fairly certain he had not been to blame. She had rarely attended chapel, and
had not been a member of any of its associated societies; his influence on
her, of whatever kind, could only have been slight. There had been the German
lessons, true, but they had always, he recollected, been strictly matter-of-
fact; indeed, it was curious how little he knew about the girl after those
regular weekly meetings—she had told him practically nothing about
herself, and he, perhaps unconsciously, had found this a welcome change from
the usual outpourings of self-revelation to which every parson becomes
accustomed. Apart from those German lessons, and a few chance words in the
library where she worked, he hardly remembered ever speaking to her at all.
And that reminded him, as he turned homeward along the canal bank, that he
might use the remaining time before dinner to change a few library books for
young Trevis.

It was a relief, after so much doubting and self-incredulity, to be of
some plain and obvious service to somebody. Trevis was a young fellow of
twenty- one, who, after a successful and even brilliant career at Cambridge,
had had a bad motorcycling smash and was compelled for the present to take a
complete rest. The injuries had affected his spine, and Ringwood as well as
more exalted medical authorities were not too optimistic about recovery.
Fortunately old Mr. Trevis was fairly well off and could afford to keep the
boy at home but the latter hated Browdley with a fierceness of which only
Howat and Ringwood, perhaps, were aware; it was maddening, on the very brink
of what had promised to be a fine career, to have to spend day after day in a
stuffy little drawing- room full of presentation silver and unreadable
law-books. For Mr. Trevis was a solicitor, a prominent local Freemason, and
one of the most popular men in the town. Bluff, cheery, happy in his
widowerhood, and with an elder son to take over the practice eventually, he
did not worry alarmingly about the lad who, apart from a certain stiffness in
moving about, did not appear to have very much wrong with him. “What
you want is fresh air and exercise,” he often said; he did not realise
that the boy could not have walked a hundred yards without falling down.

Howat had liked the boy at their first meeting (Ringwood had brought them
together—neither Trevis nor his family had ever had any connection with
the chapel); and had soon come to feel for him an affection deeper than for
anyone he knew outside his own home circle. One of the few ways he could help
besides visiting was this changing of library books; he knew the kind of
stuff that Trevis liked and took a keen pleasure in making selections which
he thought would please. This morning he chose Somerset Maugham’s
“Moon and Sixpence”, Edith Wharton’s “Ethan
Frome”, and a book by a youth named Michael Terry detailing his
adventures whilst driving a Ford car across the Northern Territory of
Australia from Queensland to the Indian Ocean. Carrying this oddly assorted
literature under his arm, Howat called at the house in Mansion Street, and
thoroughly enjoyed a half-hour’s chat. There was something almost
radiantly attractive about the boy now; his earlier robust good looks had
been transmuted into a more remote and poignant charm; and to Howat, always
acutely eager to put himself into another’s position, it seemed as
though Trevis must look on life as a receding pin-point of light glimpsed
from the interior of a darkening tunnel. He talked to him for a little time
about books; it was what they generally talked about; they certainly did not
discuss religion. That was a topic Howat would never have been the first to
broach. Ringwood, he was aware, told the boy improper stories, and though
Howat hoped to satisfy a loftier need, he could never be quite sure that any
gift, in such a case, could be more precious than a moment of any sort of
amusement.

After they had chatted desultorily for a time, Trevis asked if Howat had
chanced to notice Miss Garland on duty at the library. Howat said no, she
hadn’t been there, and asked why Trevis had enquired. The boy replied:
“Because there’s a definite rumour going about the town that
she’s run away with a man.”

“With a man, eh?” Howat exclaimed, and in such a tone that
Trevis interposed acutely: “Oh, so you did know that she’d run
off, then?”

Howat’s forehead contracted into a slow frown. “Well, yes, I
had heard so. But I didn’t know that there was any suggestion of a man
in the case.”

“Perhaps it isn’t true. It’s just the sort of thing
people in this town would say, anyhow. Did you know her at all, by the way?
Her father’s something to do with your church, isn’t
he?”

“Yes, he’s the chapel secretary. But I don’t know the
girl at all well, though it so happens that for the last few months
I’ve been giving her private lessons in German.”