Джеймс Хилтон - So Well Remembered

Towards midnight most of the ballot-boxes had been brought in from outlying districts and half the count was over, with George leading by a narrow margin. Watching the proceedings, he found it hard to realize that his fate lay in those slips of paper—his own fate and Livia’s. And then, whimsically, he thought of his election slogan—“A Vote for Boswell is a Vote for Your Children’s Future”. It was a vote for HIS children’s future, anyhow, he reflected.

By midnight he knew what his fate was, for the last few ballot- boxes, drawn from the suburban fringe where mostly professional and retired people lived, had contained a heavy preponderance of votes for Wetherall. The final figures were not even close enough to justify a recount; George had lost the election by a hundred and forty-eight.

As in a trance he received the impact of the news and went through the ritual prescribed for defeated candidates on such occasions. He stepped out on the balcony to make a short speech to his supporters, congratulated and shook hands with the victor, seconded a vote of thanks to the returning officer; it was all over by one o’clock in the morning, and the rain had not stopped.

As he was leaving the Town Hall Jim Saunders handed him a throw- away leaflet printed in the opposition colours that had been given eleventh-hour circulation throughout the town.

George scanned it over and shrugged more indifferently than he felt. “Poor stuff, Jim. And not even true. I’ll bet it’s not libellous, though.”

“I wasn’t thinking of that. But there’s a good many voters it may have influenced.”

It was an artfully worded suggestion that George had secured a municipal appointment for his wife—concealing the all-important fact that he had not even met her till after she took the job.

“It’s the sort of thing that swings votes,” Saunders went on. “Shouldn’t wonder if you’d have been in but for this.”

“I doubt it, Jim…” And all the way home George kept telling himself that he doubted it.

Not till he turned the corner of Market Street and saw the familiar printing-office (now plastered, and how ironically, with adjurations to ‘Vote for Boswell’) did he contemplate the really worst penalty of failure, and that was having to tell Livia. He wondered if she would already have heard.

When he entered the house he waited to hear her voice, but only Becky came up to him rather forlornly; and then he saw a note on the table. It told him she had had to call the doctor early that evening and had been sent to the hospital.

An hour later he sat at her bedside, realizing that for a new and far happier reason this was one of the memorable days of his life. His child was born, prematurely, but thrivingly—a boy. And as he looked first at his son, and then at Livia, a great tenderness enveloped him, so that he took her hand and could not find words for anything in his heart or mind.

“I didn’t want you to come earlier,” she said weakly. “I wouldn’t let them tell you because I knew you’d be busy… Is it over yet?”

“Why… don’t you know?” He realized afterwards that he had doubtless been left the job of breaking the bad news gently, but it seemed so trivial then that he answered outright and almost casually: “Aye, it’s all over. I lost. By a hundred and forty- eight…”

“You LOST?” He was still so happy that the look of disappointment on her face startled him, especially when she added: “No luck, George. I said so, didn’t I?”

“LUCK? Why, isn’t THIS luck?” And he pointed to the child.

Of course his own personal disappointment returned, though he knew he would not have felt it so keenly but for hers. She had, and always had, that curious capacity to weight or lift his mood with her own, to give him peace or no-peace at will. In his own mind the loss of the election need not have been tragic; after all, he was still young, and there would be other chances —possibly within a short time. But she made it seem tragic by the way she regarded it, and he, as if in defence of Browdley against this attitude, plunged anew into work for the town.

Foremost was his plan to stir some civic spirit among the richer citizens. There were no millionaires, but a few who were well off, and one was Richard Felsby, partner of Livia’s father and grandfather in the days when the firm had been Channing and Felsby. George had never been able to understand what exactly the trouble was between Livia and the old man, perhaps a family feud of some kind, certainly no concern of his own; and since Richard was over eighty, ailing, a bachelor, and the owner of some land on Browdley’s outskirts that would make a fine municipal park if given to the town, George called on him one evening—quite prepared to be kicked out unceremoniously, but unwilling to neglect even a hundred- to-one chance.

Richard Felsby, dressing-gowned, night-capped, and from a bedroom armchair, astonished him by saying, during their first minute of conversation: “Let’s not waste time, Boswell… When ye married Livia, ye married a problem, and it’s not a bit of use comin’ to me about it.”

“But—” George protested, and then let the old man have his say, since the saying might be of interest.

“And neither of ye need think ye’re going to get a penny o’ MY money, because I’m leavin’ it all to Sarah.”

George did not even know who Sarah was, and perhaps his look showed it, for Richard went on: “Sarah looked after Livia and her mother and father and grandmother and grandfather for the best part of sixty years… and where d’ye think she’d be now but for me?… Why, in the workhouse. That’s all Livia cared. I know the woman’s stone-deaf and cranky and no beauty either, but she deserved better than to be left stranded when Livia ran off to marry you.”

“I never knew that,” George gasped.

“Aye, and I don’t suppose ye know a good many other things. But it’s the truth, and ye can tell her so. Sarah gets my money, and if ye’ve come to talk me into anything else it’s not a bit of use.”

George then felt that his simplest disclaimer was to tell the old man frankly what he HAD come for, and now it was the latter’s turn to be astonished. It had clearly never occurred to him that he owed anything to the town, and George’s suggestion that he did so roused a host of vaguely associated antagonisms—to mollycoddling and spoon-feeding and high taxes and socialist agitators and what not. But the odd thing was that as the interview proceeded, Richard Felsby found himself rather liking George personally. (He was not the first to fall under that spell, or the last either.) And when George rose to go, he grunted: “It’s all a pack of nonsense, Boswell. This boom that’s on now isn’t going to last, and when it’s over Browdley’ll need jobs, not parks.”

“So you won’t let go any of that land, Mr. Felsby?”

“Not a yard, except at a fair price… But ye can stay and have a drink, if ye like.”

“Thanks, but I don’t drink.”

“Just as well, because the drink ye’d have got here is tea… I’ve often caught chaps that way. To my mind it’s a misuse of the word that it should only apply to alcohol… So ye’re a teetotaller, eh?”

George nodded.

“Teetotal family?”

“Not all of ‘em. My Uncle Joe drank plenty.”

“The black sheep?”

“Maybe, but I liked him better than some of the white ones.”

“Ye did?… Sit down, lad, and what about a cup?”

George accepted, and then had a chance to verify that Sarah was indeed as had been described. Meanwhile Richard Felsby, who had enjoyed no such congenial human contact since the death of his best friend, Dr. Whiteside, made the most of the occasion and became almost garrulous. He admitted that he wasn’t a big “giver” (George had known this already), but when he did give, he said he liked to suit his own ideas—as when, for instance, he had offered an annual prize to the Browdley Grammar School for the boy who achieved “the best all-round lack of distinction”. “It was the prize I’d have won myself when I was there,” he chuckled asthmatically, “but they wouldn’t even let me offer it.” It appeared, too, that sometimes he amused himself by sending cheques for small sums to people momentarily headlined in the news —the farmer who refused to let a fashionable Hunt cross his fields, the postman’s wife with her second set of triplets, and so on. “I reckon ye think I’m a queer sort of chap,” he added, after these confessions.