Джеймс Хилтон - And Now Good-bye

He nodded, drew on his gloves, and took Howat’s arm; and the latter, with a murmured farewell to the old lady, allowed himself to be piloted downstairs and into the street. The doctor’s Morris, five years old, waited at the kerb. “Get inside,” said Ringwood, “I’m going to drive you home.”

Howat clambered in; he was weary, and not sorry to be given a lift. “It’s a cold night,” he commented. “Damn cold,” agreed Ringwood, and slipped into gear. It was difficult to talk during the drive, as the car made at least twice as much noise as any other Howat had ever experienced; he stared ahead through the murky windscreen, a little confused in mind with that sudden rush of lamp-posts and shop-fronts past him. “That was a stuffy room,” he shouted, as if in indirect explanation of his silence. Ringwood shouted back: “Sour as a midden. Why don’t she have a window opened? How long had you been there?” Howat answered: “Since about half-past seven,” and Ringwood, with a curious and characteristic noise in his throat, exclaimed: “Good God!”

Then it was gradually borne upon Howat’s mind that Ringwood was driving him, not to the Manse, but to his own house in Dawson Street. He said “I say, Ringwood, I thought you were taking me home,” and Ringwood replied, gruffly: “So I am—to my home. What more do you want?” Howat began to explain his Temperance meeting, but Ringwood interrupted: “My dear man, you’re coming in with me for a while, and your temperance people can all go and drink themselves to death.”

They drew up outside the ugly detached villa in which the doctor lived. He had only a housekeeper to look after him, and the house was many rooms too big; it had formerly belonged to an older-fashioned doctor with a large family, a top-hat and tail-coat, and a brougham. Ringwood had made no effort to adapt the premises to his more modest uses; some of the rooms were altogether unfurnished, and all were shabby. He had a decent income, but he never cared about the more complicated comforts of life; he would keep the chairs in his dining-room till they actually fell to pieces, just as he would drive his old car till the repairers finally declined to patch it up any more. He liked good, plain food and fifteen-year-old whisky, and (when he had any spare time, which was not often) he would read any sort of book except novels.

“Go on,” he said, almost pushing Howat out of the car. He followed the parson up the short gravelled path and, unlocking a side-door, manoeuvred him into the unlit waiting-room that adjoined the surgery. “Straight through—you know the way,” he directed, switching on a light. The unlovely room faced them with its stiff array of straight-backed chairs and table of ancient magazines. Ringwood passed through into the surgery beyond. It was a crowded, glass-roofed apartment, not unlike a greenhouse, full of the usual smell of drugs and india-rubber, and lined with shelves of books, bottles, and the accumulated litter of three decades in Browdley. It was extraordinary, though true, that amidst this confusion Ringwood always did know exactly where everything was.

“Now,” said the doctor, “sit down and make yourself comfortable.”

He put Howat in a big leather chair that could be made to tilt backwards—the chair in which, before the days of specialised dentistry, many a Browdley sufferer had lost an aching tooth. Then he lit the gas-fire and wandered away into the small dispensary that opened off the surgery at the further end. He kept shouting out from this inner room, his words punctuated with the clink of bottles and glasses.

“Yes, I was wrong about the old girl after all, Freemantle—you win that bob. Could have sworn she’d peg out during the night—never was more surprised than when I saw her perking up in bed at ten o’clock this morning. They’ll have to shoot her, that’s all…Seriously, though, her heart’s pretty dicky—take her off sudden one of these days. I wouldn’t mind betting all the money I’ve got that you and I’ll be in at the kill before this time next month.”

Howat half-smiled; Ringwood’s flippant phrases sometimes shocked, but never exactly offended him. He said, after a pause: “You know, Ringwood, I often envy you doctors. There’s something so downright about the things you do for people. We parsons have to grope about wondering what we can do. You just go and do it. To-night, for instance, you took that woman’s pulse and temperature in about a minute—probably a far more useful service than I managed to perform in the whole hour and a half I was there with her.”

“Oh, I don’t know—it depends a lot on what you did do. Chattered, I suppose—I noticed her heart was a bit jerkier after it. If she dies in the night I shall put on the certificate ‘Talked to death by a parson.’ Can’t think what you found to say to her all that time, I must admit.”

“Well, for one thing, I prayed.” He said that in a queerly troubled voice, and added: “Does that sound to you a rather odd confession?”

“Not at all. After all, it’s in your line of business, just as I tap chests and look at tongues.”

“I wonder if it really is quite the same sort of thing as that.”

“Sometimes, Freemantle, I think you wonder a damn sight too much.” Ringwood came bounding out of the dispensary with a tumbler of whisky and water in one hand and a half-filled medicine-glass in the other. The latter he held out to Howat. “Here, drink this. You need it—it’s only a pick-me-up—quite harmless and nonalcoholic. Don’t think I haven’t noticed the state you’ve been getting yourself into these last few months.”

Howat took the glass. “Thanks, Ringwood—though I’m not sure I do need it. Touch of nerves, perhaps. A few rather troublesome things have been happening lately. Last night, for instance, I had a worrying kind of interview with the chapel secretary, Garland.”

“Oh, Garland the draper?—yes, I know him. Little chap with black moustaches—looks rather like a seedy croupier at a fifth- rate casino. Well, what was all the fuss over? They say, by the way, his daughter’s hopped it—maybe the old boy was feeling a bit peeved over that when you saw him.”

“It was about that—that we had the—the argument,” said Howat. Then he told Ringwood briefly all the details. Ringwood listened intently, perching himself on the edge of the desk and sipping whisky from time to time. At the end of the story he said: “So they’re trying to blame you for what’s happened, are they? Well, I don’t think I’d worry about it if I were you. Queer sort of girl, I remember—rather nice voice—good figure, too—I had to give her the once-over, you know, before she took on that job at the library. Cut above her pa and ma, I thought jolly good luck to her if she has left the old folks at home. Wish there were more would do it—look at the unemployed—thousands of ’em—no initiative—no ambition—rather hang about Browdley street-corners than try their luck anywhere else. Of course they might say much the same of us—we stick to the old place, don’t we?—but then, we’re getting on—at least I am—I’m sixty next birthday. But you’re not so old, Freemantle—I often wonder why you stay on here. Don’t you ever feel you’d like to try for a change?”

“Often. Terribly often. But there again, you doctors have the advantage. You could clear out to-morrow and feel that you were doing just as much good somewhere else, but I couldn’t—it’s taken me twelve years even to begin to do anything here, and if I went away all that would probably be wasted.”

“Oh, nonsense. You parsons take yourselves far too seriously. After all, if you do your best, what more can you do? That’s how I always feel in my job. Sometimes I cure, sometimes I kill—people take the risk when they call me in—I make no promises except to do as well as I know how. If I come a cropper over something it’s not my fault—I can’t help it—and I assure you I never let it lose me a wink of sleep. Why should I?”