Джеймс Хилтон: And Now Good-bye

“Yes. If the passport could have been arranged quickly enough, we should have left London that same Saturday evening.”

“But what on earth would you have done when you got there?”

“She was going to study music. I was going to compose, if I could.”

“ Compose? ”

“Yes. Compose music.”

“Would it have brought in any money?”

“Probably not. I might have tried for some teaching job in a school. I could have taught English, perhaps.”

“And what if you couldn’t have found such a job?”

“Then I don’t know how things would have turned out.”

“Had you money?”

“She had nearly two hundred pounds, and there were a few shares and things I might have sold for a hundred or so. It would have been enough to begin on.”

“To begin what on?”

“Our lives. To begin our lives on.”

He said that with such simplicity that Ringwood was swept into still further bewilderment. “But good heavens, man, do you mean you were never going to come back at all?”

“Yes, probably that.”

“But what about your wife—your daughter—and, for that matter, your chapel?”

“I felt that all that didn’t matter compared—compared with the other thing.”

“What other thing?”

“Something I can’t exactly describe—I never could—but I saw it then—while I was with her.”

Ringwood shrugged his shoulders with a gesture of profound bafflement. “You’d have had to be less vague than that to your wife when you wrote explaining things.”

“I shouldn’t have tried to explain. She wouldn’t have starved—she has money of her own. And as for caring, do you think she’d have cared a great deal, apart from the scandal?”

“But really, Freemantle, even if she wouldn’t, you can’t throw over your responsibilities in that casual fashion. It’s preposterous!”

“I felt then that everything else was preposterous.”

“You mean that you’d no doubts or misgivings of any sort?”

“I couldn’t doubt anything that seemed so beautiful to me at the time.”

“Seems to me, old chap, it isn’t so much a question of what’s beautiful or not beautiful as of what’s right and what’s wrong.”

“I wonder if thinking that makes you really a more religious man than I am.”

Ringwood shrugged his shoulders again; he was no metaphysician; his code was rough but simple. Much as he disliked Freemantle’s wife, he was, though he would not perhaps have used the word, a little shocked at the idea of any husband so calmly deserting his legal partner. Casual adultery he could comprehend and excuse, much as he might deplore the bad taste of subsequent confession; it was human, in his view, compared with the chilly ruthlessness of Freemantle’s Vienna proposition. He gave his nose a vigorous blowing and went on, rather gruffly: “Well, all I can say, Freemantle, is that to me the whole thing’s still perfectly astonishing. Do you really believe you could have been happy for long in a foreign country with a mere girl you hardly knew?”

“Yes. Absolutely happy. And always.”

A quarter of an hour later Ringwood had recovered something of his normal equanimity of mind. It was characteristic of him that he never worried for long over a problem; if it proved too much of a twister he merely gave it up, and passed on to the next. Freemantle’s emotional altitudes were beyond him, and he felt, moreover, a sort of reluctant crossness over them; he preferred a discussion in territory where he knew a few signposts. He didn’t want to preach; but there was, after all, a certain rough-and-ready morality which, as a man of the world, he felt it his duty to impart on rare occasions; and the more he thought about it, the more convinced he was that Freemantle was desperately in need of someone to give him a dose of good ‘horse sense’. That was, of course, assuming that his amazing story were true; Ringwood could not yet make up his mind entirely about that. He noticed that Freemantle’s face was very pale and that a rather unnatural and bloodshot brilliance was still in his eyes; he felt so confoundedly sorry for the chap, but what could one do—except give him sound advice? Completely mad, he must have been, Ringwood reflected, to be bowled over like that by a mere girl—attractive girl, though, with a deuced good figure, he remembered—and some excuse, perhaps, for any man with a wife like that and a sister-in-law bullying him all the time…But what was clearest of all to Ringwood was that it was the future that had to be faced, not a lot of had-beens and might-have-beens. Ringwood’s natural outlook on life soon cut through the tangle of Freemantle’s position; he did not solve the problem; he just thrust it to one side in a you-be-damned kind of way, and with growing confidence gave the man’s shoulder a few encouraging shakes. “Look here, old chap, you may think I’ve not been particularly sympathetic over all this, but believe me, I’m just about as sorry for you as anyone could be. I can quite understand how you feel about it all, but the fact is, you’re rather bound not to see things as logically as a mere outsider can. That’s natural, isn’t it? Well, I’m the outsider, and I look at it rather in this way, if you don’t mind d a very candid opinion—You’ve had a damned narrow escape!”

“ An escape? ”

“Yes. Don’t you see what I mean? Really, though I wouldn’t call myself in any sense a religious chap, there does almost seem a sort Providence in it—don’t you feel that? At any rate, what’s the harm in thinking so? You go and get yourself into the deuce of a hole and then, just as you stand on the very brink of the precipice Providence steps in and cuts all the knots for you, so to speak. Those are mixed metaphors, but you can see what I’m driving at. Don’t you realise that you’re being given a chance—a chance to put all that silly escapade on one side as if it had never happened? Why, man, you’ve got half your life in front of you yet—think of it—think of the future—and if at odd times you do happen to recollect this queer business, call it just a mistake—a single solitary mistake that you couldn’t help!”

“ A mistake? ”

“Well, we all make ’em don’t we? And we’re dashed lucky if we’re given the chance of covering them up without a trace. Why, when you’re as old as me, and you look back on a lifetime of decent honest straightforward doing-your-job, you won’t bother much about a mad mood that happened in the midst of it all.”

“Doing my job? What do you mean by that?”

“Why, your ordinary everyday parson’s job, of course.”

“Here—in Browdley?”

“Why not.”

“You think I can carry on here—as if—as if nothing had happened?”

“Why not? You told me yourself that nothing did happen.”

“Did I?”

(Ah, Ringwood thought, just as I suspected—anyhow, he’s admitted it now—that’s better than persisting in an absurd fairy-tale that nobody in his senses would believe—and, after all, there’s nothing so very dreadful in it—she probably lured him on, anyway.) He replied, with growing cordiality: “My dear Freemantle, I understand all that of course, of course. But the point is, as I’ve been saying a good many times, it’s what’s going to happen that matters, not what did happen. Here you are, with all your roots, as it were, in Browdley, working well and doing quite a deuce of a lot of good—perhaps in a smallish way, but then, when you come to think about it, aren’t all our ways pretty small? It’s the small ways, anyhow, that keep the world going—I’m certain of that. Well, here you are, as I said, and whether you know it or not, you’re liked in this town, you’re respected, even admired, and folks would damn well miss you. That’s as much as can truthfully be put on most tombstones. You’ve had a dozen years of useful slogging away, and there ought to be at least twice as many ahead of you in the future—are you going to smash all that for the sake of a single incident that nobody knows or could ever know about unless you tell them?”