Джеймс Хилтон: And Now Good-bye

Mary was then almost twenty. He had always been more intimate with her than with any of her sisters, some of whom he now almost disliked; they were silly, he had discovered, and shirked the main seriousness of life. Three, anyhow, had definitely given up all hopes of him and had accepted the attentions of other young men; Howat would occasionally find them loitering in the garden late at night, caressing and being caressed in a manner which seemed to him unnecessary as well as disagreeable. Lavinia was still unattached; she was too busy about the house to have time for that sort of thing, she said; for now Mrs. Coverdale also was in failing health, and a good deal of domestic responsibility fell on the eldest girl. Fortunately she was the type that could well shoulder it—a brisk, managing young woman, hardworking and capable, except that she did not cook very well. Howat now liked her perhaps best of the lot, next to Mary.

He liked Mary because, of all the seven, she was the only one who appeared to him in any way spiritual. Formerly he had appreciated her as a ‘kid’; now it was as if at one clear bound she had acquired womanhood, but womanhood of a rather special kind. Even physically she was marked out from the rest; she had none of that tendency to plumpness that was a family trait. Really, she was not at all strong; she was nervous (Howat was nervous, too), and little things often upset her in a way that drew his particular sympathy. Moreover, she was deeply interested in his religious work; she attended all his meetings and services most assiduously, and during homeward walks she talked earnestly, if a shade ingenuously, about the more momentous concerns of life. On the night before he left for college, after a very prolonged and emotional talk with Mr. Coverdale, he asked her calmly if she would marry him when he had finished his training, and she answered, instantly but with equal calmness, that she would…

Most of this, so far as he was able to recollect it, Howat told Elizabeth as they sat by the studio fire throughout that November night.

About five o’clock they wakened after fitfully dozing in armchairs…

She prepared a small meal (they were far too excited to be very hungry), and by dawn were in the streets. It was bitterly cold, and there was a bleak, scouring easterly wind with a hint of snow in it. Everything had been planned and discussed; it only remained to put into execution all the strange things that had been decided on. The first Howat did without delay; he called at his hotel, retrieved his luggage, paid the bill for the room, and gave the proprietress (who was not really interested) some shadowy reason for not having occupied it. So much had been easy, but the next thing, though it seemed at first only a detail, gave much more trouble—the question of passports for the journey. Elizabeth had hers, of course, but Howat did not possess one at all, and the matter proved full of complications. He had the necessary photographs taken at a shop in the Strand as soon as it opened, but then came the business of having them endorsed by someone who knew him. He rushed to Blenkiron, in Wimpole Street, but found the doctor had gone away for the week-end; failing him, and after much cogitation, the nearest person he could think of was a minister, living near Kettering, whom he had not seen for six years. It meant a journey, but it had to be done, and he would probably be back in time to have the passport made out before the office closed that afternoon—then they could cross by the night boat and be in Paris the following morning.

It was settled that they should go to Kettering together, because they were in the mood of children; to have been separated even for those few hours would have seemed intolerable to both. They were wildly excited, but she, beyond her excitement, was calm enough to remember all the details of what had to be done; though it was he, perhaps, who was in the bigger hurry to get through them all. In the bus to the station he talked and laughed in sheer high spirits; he was a little drowsy, but it was the rapturous drowsiness of a small boy awakened early for some gloriously anticipated outing.

They caught the nine-fifty express with a few minutes to spare, and as soon as they were settled for the journey, in a compartment which they had to themselves, an attendant asked if they would take breakfast. Howat did not need to look long for her answer; they were both, it appeared, exceedingly hungry.

They passed along the corridors to the restaurant car and there commenced what Howat felt to be altogether the most delightful meal of his life. A thin film of snow had fallen during the night, enough just to cover the fields and roofs; bright sunshine struck tints of saffron into the pallor and a delicate unearthly glow came flooding into the train through the wide windows. As he watched her, he saw that it had turned her face to golden-brown; she looked lovelier to him than ever, and it was as if he were bathing all his nerves in that soothing loveliness. Even his sore throat, which had returned somewhat, he could now regard with toleration if not affection.

He was happy in an almost foolish way; he kept laughing and chattering and then falling half-asleep for a moment; and the smallest and most trivial things gave him infinite pleasure—because, for instance, he found he could have fish for breakfast as an alternative to eggs and bacon his eyes glistened like a child’s. He felt, indeed, that in some secret way he had got back to childhood, that he was facing all life afresh, and with no anxiety save lest the years he was escaping from might somehow turn in pursuit. For the sake of that instinct rather than reason, he was feverishly eager to begin everything; he wanted to cross the Channel that night if it could possibly be managed, and she kept comforting him by talking about it and about the rest of the journey they would have. She was concerned for his tiredness and would gladly have spent another night in London, but he was passionately determined; and when she asked if he would not find three successive nights without proper rest rather fatiguing, he only laughed and answered: “I shall be perfectly happy on the train, unless you happen to know some kind friends in Paris who’ve gone off for the week-end and left their studio vacant.”

That put them both in a mood of ecstatic recollection. “Oh yes, wasn’t it extraordinary? Will you ever forget it, Howat? Even if I were never to see you again, I know I’d remember last night better than anything else that could ever happen.”

“Yes, so would I. That curious way the clock stopped at seventeen minutes to four. Did you notice it? I suppose it was the sort that needs winding every night.”

“We might really have wound it ourselves, mightn’t we?”

“It would only have gone on for another twenty-four hours.”

“Till we were over in France, perhaps.” And there they were, back again at the irresistible topic. “We reach Dieppe about three in the morning, don’t we? It’s the cheapest route, and I don’t mind a long crossing. At least I think I don’t. I’ve been abroad once before, but only to Paris. We get there towards breakfast-time, I think. What shall we do if we have a few hours to spare? Have you been to Paris ever?”

“Once, years ago. I had the usual tourist’s week. We’ll stroll along the Boulevards, if it isn’t too cold, and drink beer outside a caf�.”

“And then we go through Switzerland, don’t we, into Austria? I’ve never seen high mountains before. We go through Z�rich and Innsbr�ck and Salzburg. What shall we do as soon as we get to Vienna?”

“Drive straight to the best hotel—if they’ll have anything to do with us when they see our luggage. We’ll afford it, for one day, anyhow. Then the morning after we’ll search for that big room with the piano in it. And also, by the way, I shall have to buy some shirts and things. I won’t have time in London to-night.”