Джеймс Хилтон: And Now Good-bye

“Some of the biggest things that have ever happened have been single incidents.”

“Nonsense!” replied Ringwood, stoutly, in haste to check any further plunge into abstract philosophy. “Believe me, nothing’s forgotten more quickly than a week-end flirtation, however much you think it means at the time…The point is, once again, that you’ve been given this chance to carry on, and you’ve jolly well got to take it. D’you suppose other people haven’t got Secrets in their pasts? See, here’s a little yarn about myself—it’s the sort of story most doctors could tell, no doubt, only they don’t—no more would I, except to convince a chap like you. It happened about five years ago; I was called in to attend to two kids with the measles—ordinary working-class family, you know—no nurse or anybody like that to look after them. Well, they didn’t have it very badly, and all seemed to be going along quite normally when one afternoon I was sent for in a mighty hurry—those two kids had suddenly got worse. I went along and found—to make the story short—that somehow or other in mixing up the medicine for them I’d come an awful cropper—I’d put loads of strychnine in by mistake—heaven knows how I’d managed to do it, but there it was. My God, I worked pretty hard, that day—I was at the house till nearly midnight, trying to rinse out the stomachs of those kids. The boy kicked the bucket, but I managed with the girl. Well, what d’you suppose I did then? Blabbed it all to the first person I met? Not a bit of it—I said to myself: Ringwood, this is a nasty business, but mistakes will happen—it’s the first of this kind you’ve ever made, and with luck it’ll be the last. You do more good than harm on balance, and that’s as much as can be said of most men. So I just signed ‘measles’ as the cause of death on the certificate and that was that. The kids’ mother swears by me—she tells everyone how I slaved away for hours trying to save their lives—nobody could have done more, she says, which is true enough, by Jove. I’m not Inventing that, Freemantle—I once actually overheard the woman praising me to the skies at a street-corner…I suppose it seems a terribly immoral story to you? Perhaps you think I ought to have phoned the coroner and confessed to manslaughter?”

“No, no—I don’t blame you.”

“Well, isn’t it the same sort of thing in your case?”

They talked for a little time longer, but Freemantle seemed exhausted, and Ringwood, too, felt that the argument might prove all the more effective if it were now curtailed. When Freemantle rose to go, Ringwood wanted to drive him home, or at least walk with him, but Freemantle said no; there was no need; it was bright moonlight; and Ringwood had an impression he rather wished to be alone to think things over. “Just as you prefer then,” he answered, jovially, and gave the parson a hearty handshake at the surgery-door. “Good-bye, old chap, remember what I’ve said.”

Howat walked slowly along the High Street, trying to remember what had been said by both of them, but hardly a word or a sentence of the long discussion came to memory. All he could sec and think of was that silver slope of the roofs as the moonlight streamed upon them, and the pale glare that filled the middle of the roadway. He was more tranquil in mind than he had been for many days, but it was the moonlight making him so, he felt—not anything that had been said that night. And yet he was glad to have had that talk with Ringwood; he liked the doctor—a thorough good fellow.

Just one small matter was still on his mind, even when all else had been pacified; he was aware, though dimly, of having forgotten something—some time ago—yet not so very long ago, really—what was it, he wondered? He had been wondering for many days and had often felt himself on the brink of recollection; and now, all at once, as he was turning the corner from the High Street into School Lane, he remembered; it was those evening papers he had promised to bring back for Trevis. Only a little thing, but he felt helplessly sorry about it; it was the one thing, of all things, that stirred him to real remorse. Perhaps he might visit Trevis in the morning.

And suddenly then the whole familiar routine of life swung into focus and became once more possible. The meetings and services and committees and what not, the daily hours in the study and the visits to old ladies and the baptisms and weddings and funerals and all the rest of it—there it was, facing him inexorably, but somehow with the beauty of that night around it all, lending it a rich and fragrant hopefulness. That factory over there, black against the sky, but with all its windows gleaming, and that line of workmen’s cottages pushing out into the sea of moonlight like a long black jetty, and the tramlines shimmering into the distance as he crossed the road—lovely, lovely, all that was. He hummed a tune that was in his head—ah, that thing of Brahms again—strange how it seemed to fit in with everything he felt. How short life was, and how brief the moments in it that really mattered! Nor could the framework of years enclose such divine fragments; they were timeless, notes in the never-finished symphony of the world. It was the quality of life that counted; forty years, a whole lifetime, could be as nothing weighed in the balance against a moment’s lifting of the veil that hid beauty.

As he came within sight of his house and chapel a small boy passed by with a timid smile. Howat stopped and spoke to him in the friendly way he always had with children, and after a few shy answers the boy asked: “When are you going to tell us some more, sir, about the two little boys who sailed in a boat to an island?”

Howat was puzzled at first; he could not think was being referred to; but at length he called to mind that foggy afternoon when he had given his daughter’s class a so-called geography lesson. He said, happily: “Very soon—perhaps this week,” and gave the boy all the money he had in his pocket—four pennies and two half-pennies.

When he reached the Manse he found his wife waiting up for him in one of her less amiable moods; but of course she was so highly-strung—he knew it was really not her fault. “If you’re well enough to stay gossiping with that man Ringwood until this hour,” she said, with some asperity, “I should think you might begin on the pile of correspondence that’s been waiting for you to answer for the last four months.”

“Perhaps so, perhaps so,” he replied softly, blinking his eyes to the light. “It’s time I was back again at work, isn’t it?” He gave her a very gentle smile and added: “If you like, my dear, you can tell Ellen to put a fire in the study to-morrow…”

First published by Ernest Benn Ltd, London, 1931