Джеймс Хилтон - And Now Good-bye

In truth, it was just an average sort of place, better than some and not so good as others; its chief title to distinction, among a limited circle being an attractive kind of egg-nog made with sherry.

He said, across the table: “Remember now, this is a little farewell dinner in celebration of your Vienna adventure.”

She smiled, and looking at her as she did so, he wondered how it had been possible for her to come to him for those lessons week after week without his noticing her more particularly. In the glow of the table-lamp he saw a rather pale oval face with a slender nose, longer than average, and a decidedly small mouth—like an Italian picture, he thought suddenly, and then, remembering the Raphael Saint Catherine, he said: “Oh, by the way, thanks for the picture you sent me. I liked it very much.”

“I hoped you would. I felt I had to send you something, however trivial, in return for your kindness to me.”

“ My kindness to you?” As always, he was bewildered by the notion that he had ever been particularly kind to anybody.

“Yes, indeed,” she answered, spiritedly. “You worked hard with my German, and you were always so patient. I did appreciate it, though I had an impression you didn’t appreciate me. I rather came to the conclusion that I bored you.”

“I’m sure you didn’t do that.”

“You always would keep so strictly to the subject—I so often wanted to have a real talk with you about other things, but you froze me up.” She laughed. “How absurd it is to be telling you all this now!”

He laughed also. “It’s rather odd as well as amusing, considering my daughter’s opinion of me as a teacher. Sometimes, you know, I visit the school and take her class for a chance hour or so. She says I wander about from one subject to another in a most distracting way, that I never teach the children anything, and that I undermine her discipline by making them laugh too much.”

“That sounds utterly delightful.”

“Not from her point of view, though. She has to prepare them for examinations.”

“Well, anyhow, I can’t join her in complaining about you. You certainly taught me German all right and I don’t think you made me laugh at all—not even once.”

“Probably because I was being paid for the job. A sort of fundamental honesty urging me to give the utmost value for money.”

They both laughed again, but in the background he was searching his memory for some clue to that earlier attitude; how was it, once again, that he had never noticed her particularly during those German lessons? He remembered how, when she had first approached him about giving them, he had wondered who she was, for the moment, and would have made some excuse for declining had she not revealed herself as his chapel secretary’s daughter. Even after accepting, he had felt a little doubtful; he hadn’t cared for the idea of giving private lessons to young girls…But the waiter’s approach cut short such tangled recollections; it was more important now to decide what to eat.

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.