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The Reverend Howat Freemantle awoke about the usual time on Monday morning of that second week in November. From habit, as soon as he was completely conscious, he lit the bedside candle, glanced at his watch ticking loudly on the table, and then at his wife, whose huddled back and deep regular breathing presented a familiar picture close by. Seven-thirty. He reached out an arm to light the gas-ring under the kettle—a manoeuvre dexterously performed as a result of long practice. Then he leaned back to doze for those last and frequently most delightful minutes.

But this morning they were not particularly delightful. Parsons, he had often reflected, were not immune from the ‘Monday morning’ feeling—on the contrary, they were subject to a peculiarly distressing Monday morning feeling of their own. After Sunday, with its sermons and services, Monday came, not as the beginning of a six days’ holiday, as so many lay persons imagined, but as a sudden drop to the bottom of a hill which had to be slowly and laboriously climbed over again.

And it had been a difficult Sunday, he recollected, dark and foggy all day, with congregations and collections very small—serious matters to a Nonconformist minister in a northern manufacturing town already impoverished by the trade slump and unemployment. The chapel, too, had been bitterly cold, owing to an ancient and defective heating apparatus (soon, however, to be replaced), and the fog and chill had got at his throat and given him acute pain during the evening service—’that pain’, he had already begun to call it in his mind. Curious how people could stare at him up there in the pulpit, and not know that the chief thought in his mind all the time was—’I’ve got the most frightful sharpness in my throat—wonder if anything serious starts like this?’

When the kettle began to boil he warmed the teapot, put in the tea, and poured. Then, reaching out further, he gave his wife’s shoulder the gentle shove which was nearly always sufficient to wake her. She stirred, opened her eyes sleepily, and gave an incoherent murmur. “Good morning,” he said, with a smile at her huddled shoulders. He did not look at her face. He felt, though he scarcely admitted it even to himself, a reluctance to observe her during those first few inelegant moments after waking—with her hair crimped up in clusters of curlers, her skin greasy with perspiration, and her lips dry and parched through breathing through her mouth. She could not, of course, help all that; the fault, he knew, lay with himself—in a certain initial fastidiousness which, he feared, was hardly less a sin for being involuntary.

She did not reply to his ‘good morning’ except by further murmurs, and after a little pause he poured out a cup of tea and placed it on the table next to a novel by W. J. Locke which she was in the course of reading. Then, after putting on an old brown dressing-gown, he poured two other cups and carried them out of the room, across the landing, and into another room where his daughter Mary slept. She was a thin-faced, sallow-complexioned girl of twenty, working as a teacher in the school that adjoined the chapel. He lit the gas and wakened her now, according to established routine; he liked that early morning habit of tea and a chat. He began desultorily to mention politics (there was a by-election pending in the neighbourhood), though he had not uttered many words before he felt again that sharp, cramping sensation in his throat. Mary, however, was not interested in politics, and plunged into chapel and school matters with a briskness that made him, as for relief, pull aside the curtains and see the pale grey dawn outlining the roofs and factories of Browdley; there was no fog, but a soft slanting rain. Then she asked if he would ’hear some Latin verbs she had been learning by heart; she was cramming for a degree examination, and had to make use of every odd moment. He agreed, and for the next five minutes stood solemnly and shiveringly by the window with the text-book in his hand (she had slept with it under her pillow), while she went through the various moods and tenses of the third conjugation. “Rego, Regis, Regit...” How chilly it was, he reflected, and there would be no hot water in the bathroom (the kitchen fire was always allowed to go out on Sunday afternoons), and the smell of bacon was drifting up the stairs just as it had done for goodness knew how many years—did there await him, he wondered, some glorious morning in the dim future, an alternative breakfast smell that would amaze and delight his nostrils? Not that he disliked bacon, or would have preferred any other dish for breakfast; it was in atmosphere rather than actuality that something in him craved for a change..."Regimus, Regitis, Regunt."...He must call and see Mrs. Roseway some time today, and perhaps young Trevis as well—oh yes, and Councillor Higgs about the Armistice Day service. “Well, there you are !” he exclaimed brightly, when she had finished. “You seem to know them all right. Now we’d better hurry up and dress, or else Aunt Viney will have something to say to us when we get down.”

Half an hour later breakfast at the Manse began—Quaker oats, bacon and eggs, toast and marmalade—the whole rather carelessly prepared by the maid-of-all-work, Ellen, whose intelligence was so far below normal that Aunt Viney, in her more blustery moments, usually referred to her as ‘that half-wit’. But then, you could never get satisfactory servants in Browdley, and Aunt Viney, with or without the slightest encouragement, would tell you why. It was because of the dole, which enabled out-of-work factory hands to live in luxury (silk stockings and lip-stick, Aunt Viney said) while honest people searched vainly for ‘good girls to train’.

Aunt Viney (short for ’Lavinia’), viewed in the grey daylight that came in through the dining-room window, was always a rather imposing spectacle. She was fifty-one years of age, and had large staring eyes, quick bustling movements, more than a tendency to stoutness, a menacing optimism that was not quite matched by a sense of humour, and the most decided opinions upon everything. She was an excellent ‘manager’, and for more than a decade had lived at the Manse with her sister and brother-in-law and their children (there had been boys at one time), looking after them all with undoubted if rather relentless competence. Mrs. Freemantle, it was generally known, was ‘not strong’, but happily there was no such fragility about Aunt Viney. Vigorous in body and mentally impervious, she knew exactly how to control the children at a Sunday School treat, she could organise round games at a Missionary bazaar, prepare tea for seventy at the Women’s Annual Social, win the egg-and-spoon race at the summer outing, turn away the crowd of mendicants who knocked at the door of the Manse—and all with that same air of confident downrightness. She entertained a just slightly contemptuous admiration for Howat. In truth she had never really managed to like Browdley (she was Kentish by birth), and when, on holiday at Southport or Llandudno, she saw sleek, well-dressed parsons playing golf or motoring in smart-looking cars, she often wished that her brother-in-law, with all the brains he was supposed to have, had belonged to one or other of the wealthier denominations.

This morning, as on so many other Monday mornings, she faced the oncoming week with a nonchalant glint of her prominent blue eyes. Breakfast was her particular scene of triumph, since Mrs. Freemantle took hers in bed, rarely appearing downstairs till the morning was well aired. Aunt Viney poured out tea with a steady hand, rebuked her niece for grumbling at the bacon (it was abominably cooked, she perceived, and privately made up her mind to have a real good row with that girl Ellen afterwards), and watched the progress of her brother-in-law’s breakfast with managerial solicitude. He seemed to her exactly as she had always known him at breakfast times—quiet, good- tempered, perhaps a little dreamy. Over the Quaker oats he opened his private letters, slitting the envelopes with the knife he would later use for the bacon. Over the bacon and eggs he talked a little, and after that, during the hurried moments before his daughter left for school, he glanced through the Daily News and mentioned a few odd things that were happening in the vast world outside Browdley. All this was perfectly according to custom.

From nine till eleven every morning, except Sunday, the Reverend Howat Freemantle was to be found in his ‘study’. During those two hours he answered letters, planned addresses and sermons, interviewed callers, and (if he had any spare time left over, which did not often happen) read books and the more serious type of periodicals. The study was a moderate-sized and rather gloomy room on the ground floor, overlooking a tiny soot-blackened front garden. A dozen years ago it had been furnished by Mrs. Freemantle, who had modelled it upon that of her father, himself a dissenting preacher; and Howat, who had no especial preferences in furnishing, had been content to leave it undisturbed from that primal exactitude. There were books, of course—shelves of them—his own training college textbooks, and stacks of theological works inherited from his father-in-law. There was a pedestal writing-desk, a swivel desk-chair, and a pair of ragged leather armchairs. Two black and white lithographs, one of “Dawn” and the other of “Sunset,” embellished alcoves on either side of the fireplace; a many-volumed series of the Expositor’s Bible (a gift from his first chapel) occupied a frontal position above the mantelpiece; and a bust of Beethoven (many visitors thought it was Luther) stood on the top of a bookcase containing the latest edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, on which Howat was still paying monthly instalments. Apart from the Beethoven bust the room was impeccably what Mrs. Freemantle had originally planned it to be—the sanctum of a dissenting minister of the more ‘thoughtful’ type. Its composition as such was far too massive to be overlaid by any freakishness of personality, and all that Howat’s occupation ever inflicted on it was a merely surface litter that Aunt Viney easily and regularly cleared away.

Passing along Browdley High Street, and then up School Lane beyond the tram junction, the pedestrian reaches the Manse, after a short and rather depressing walk through a district given over to factories and slum property. There is a privet hedge along the street frontage, but it is low enough for a vague interior view of the study to be available to anyone who deliberately stares, and the Reverend Howat Freemantle must often have been seen at work there during the last dozen years, especially in winter when it is so dark as a rule that the lamps have to be lit.

On that Monday morning in November Howat lit the single gas-burner over his desk and gave his morning’s mail a second perusal. Besides a bunch of obvious-looking circulars there were three private letters, the first from a firm of engineers in Queen Victoria Street, London, confirming an arrangement by which he should call at their head office on the coming Friday to consult about a new heating apparatus. For his chapel members, after freezing and catching influenza for several successive winters, had at last decided to spend money on such an unspiritual but none the less necessary object; sixty pounds had already been subscribed, and there would be a bazaar or something to raise whatever extra might be required. To Howat had fallen the job of going to London to make final arrangements; of course he knew nothing at all about central heating, but his congregation had the usual optimistic belief that a parson must know something about everything.

The second letter was from a well-known missioner, offering to conduct a week’s revival in Browdley for twenty pounds plus his hotel and travelling expenses.

The third letter was from another London address—Wimpole Street. It fixed an appointment for the Reverend Howat Freemantle to see Doctor Blenkiron at 4. p.m. that same Friday. Howat turned it over rather awesomely in his hand; he had somehow nourished a slender hope that his little plan to fit in a visit to a London specialist might not have succeeded. However, there it was; Blenkiron could see him, even at such short notice, and no one at home, for the present at least, need be told anything about it. It was not only that he was anxious not to worry them—he was equally anxious that they should not worry him. He knew from frequent observation how magisterially Aunt Viney took command of other people’s illnesses; she was always so noisily optimistic about them, and at the same time so full of parallel anecdotes of persons who had either died lingering deaths, or had cured themselves by Christian Science or herbs, or some other specific in which Howat had no particular faith. She had, too, a robust common sense which would certainly have made her point out the absurdity of his paying hard-earned guineas to a London specialist before Ringwood’s verdict, which could be obtained for as many shillings, had been even asked for. Nor could Howat say precisely why he was unwilling to consult Ringwood first—except that Ringwood was a personal friend as well as a family doctor, and he shrank, somehow, from the human touch in such a business.

Ah, he told himself a shade irritably, throwing the letter into the fire, he was getting nervy—mustn’t think any more about it—wait till Friday, anyhow. Plenty of jobs to be done meanwhile. There was the address on Mozart he was due to deliver at the Young People’s Guild that night. Fortunately he knew a good deal about Mozart—no need to prepare anything especially. He might carry over his portable gramophone and a few records...He took the remainder of his correspondence to the fireside and pencilled a few memoranda on the back of a circular. Mozart...There was a Trio in E Major he might play over and also, of course, the overtures to “Figaro” and the “Magic Flute “. His eyes brightened a little at the prospect, and he stared across the room to observe, without irony, the view through the window of dilapidated slum cottages overtopped by a five-storeyed cotton-mill. Then, in a mood almost of abstraction, he began to open the circulars hitherto neglected. One was from a tailoring firm in London, advertising a sale of lounge suits at five guineas—to be had in either black or ‘clerical grey’. Well, perhaps on Friday, if he could find time, he would call and see about it—he certainly needed a suit badly enough...Another circular was from a firm of outside stockbrokers in Leicester, recommending shares in a brewery. A third was from an ecclesiastical supply stores in Paternoster Row, offering a job line of individual communion cups. A fourth came from Boston, Mass., and accosted him with a list of pertinent questions—“Are your sermons full of pep? Are you sure you are delivering the goods? Are you satisfied with your freewill offerings? Do you feel tired Sunday nights? Are you inclined to be low-spirited, diffident, disheartened?” And for a twenty-dollar course of ten lessons it could all, apparently, be put right.

Howat read through the enclosed and illustrated brochure, but did not tear it up afterwards as he had done the other advertising matter. Instead he put it away in the middle drawer of his desk; it would do for Ringwood to see some time—he would be amused.

Still with the trace of a smile he tore open one of the remaining envelopes. A coloured picture dropped out and fell at his feet, making a little patch of brightness on the drab carpet. He picked it up, guessing it to be a sample sent him by some firm of art publishers—Raphael’s “Saint Catherine of Alexandria”, he recognised, for he had often admired the original in the National Gallery. The reproduction pleased him, and he was still examining it when he perceived a handwritten note in the envelope. It was just the shortest of messages—“Dear Mr. Freemantle, I am afraid I shall not be able to come for a lesson on Tuesday, as I shall be out of Browdley that day. I saw the enclosed in a shop recently and thought you might like it. Yours sincerely, Elizabeth Garland.”

His first thought was that he would have an extra free hour on the following day. Every Tuesday for some months past he had been giving lessons in German to Miss Garland, the daughter of his chapel secretary. It was a means of adding to his rather poor income, besides which it meant rubbing up his own knowledge of German, which was good for him. She was a pleasant and intelligent girl, and had seemed to pick up the language quite satisfactorily; still, he could not but feel grateful for one engagement less during a more than usually crowded week.

He studied the picture again and reflected that it was kindly of the child to have sent it him—yes, very kindly. There was something boyish and simple in him that showed instantly when anyone gave him anything, or even thanked him; he was always pleased in a rather bewildered kind of way—bewildered because he quite genuinely could not think what he had done to deserve it.

He put the picture on the mantelpiece, and several times looked towards it with pleasure during the clerical tasks that kept him employed during the next hour or so. Finally Aunt Viney came in, saw it, and smiled steadfastly while he explained the circumstances of its arrival. “Very kind of her indeed, Howat,” was her verdict at length, “but are you quite sure it is very suitable? After all, it looks rather a Catholic picture, don’t you think?”

Perhaps it was, he admitted, and put it away in a drawer. As a Nonconformist clergyman he could not be too careful.

Punctually at eleven he put on his overcoat and hat (an ordinary dark grey and somewhat shabby felt) and went out into School Lane. There, in the murky daylight that was only a degree brighter than the gloom of the study, it was possible for one to observe him in some detail. Tall and slim-built, with just the very slightest stoop of the shoulders that suggested thoughtfulness, he was, beyond doubt, fine-looking, and would have been conspicuous among his fellows even had his collar not buttoned at the back. His hair was touched with silver over the temples, but otherwise he looked younger than his age, which was forty-three. His eyes were grey, deep-set, and very bright; he had a strong, rugged profile, and an expression which, in its stern setting, was rather astonishingly winsome. Dr. Ringwood often told him he had missed his vocation in being a parson—he should have been an actor. “With that face you could have been the answer to the maiden’s prayer,” he used to say, and Howat was always, beyond his amusement, a little puzzled, and beyond his puzzlement, a little grieved. There seemed such a lot of irrelevance in the world. He was dimly aware that he might be considered not bad-looking, but, so far as the matter affected him at all, he found it rather tiresome. Some of the girls at the chapel, for instance, whenever there was a bazaar or a social—so silly and pointless, all that sort of thing. Anyhow, he had never tried to trade on his looks, and most certainly never attempted any gallant airs.

Proceeding along School Lane he entered the High Street. It had stopped raining, but the roadway and pavements were covered with a film of brown mud which glittered in the light of some of the shops. The sky was already yellowing into a kind of twilight; probably there would be fog again later on. People passed dimly by with a nod or a greeting—women doing their marketing, unemployed men lounging around, business folk bustling about the town, and so on. He had to keep his eyes well open—people were so offended if he didn’t see them, they were always prone to think he had cut them deliberately. Whom should he visit first? Higgs would be at his place in the High Street; Mrs. Roseway lived over at Hill Grove; there was young Trevis in Mansion Street, close by. Better leave Mrs. Roseway till afternoon—she wouldn’t like him to call before everything in the house had been put to rights’, though, Heaven knew, he wasn’t the man to notice whether things of that sort were right or not. Young Trevis then, it might as well be; and he was walking briskly along with this intention when a little girl suddenly ran up to him. “Please, Mr. Freemantle, Aunty says will you come and see her at once, as she’s been took very had in the night.”

He stared down with a kind of surprised vagueness and then identified the child as Nancy Kerfoot, one of his Sunday School youngsters. Her aunt, he knew, was Miss Letitia Monks, and lived in the end house in Lower George Street. “Very well, my dear,” he replied. “Run along and tell your Aunty I’ll come.”

It wouldn’t do to ignore a summons of that sort, despite the fact that he had been abruptly sent for by Miss Monks on several previous occasions. She was a character, the old lady, and he had always rather liked her, despite the fact that her piercing voice, her equally piercing eyes, her stern old- fashioned principles, and her quite spotless four-roomed cottage in which she lived on a very few shillings a week, made him feel uncomfortably like a large fly in the presence of a small but exceptionally strong-willed spider. There was something indubitably wonderful about her, he felt; she was eighty-nine, and had never been further away from Browdley than Blackpool. Moreover, she had worked in the same cotton-mill for half a century, had invested all her savings in that same cotton-mill, and during the last few years had lost the greater part of them.

He hastened towards Lower George Street, and outside the end house saw Ringwood’s battered Morris-Cowley. As he approached, Ringwood himself came out of the doorway—an elderly, apple-cheeked, rather shrewd- looking general practitioner.

“Hullo, Freemantle. You been sent for too?”

“Yes.”

“Go along then. Mustn’t keep you. It’s no false alarm this time, I’m afraid.”

“You think not?”

“Bet you a shilling not.”

Ringwood was always outrageously flippant about death. The other clergy in the town did not care for that, or for him either, but Freemantle found it an oddly bearable trait. He half-smiled, nodded, and passed through the open door into the front parlour which had never, he supposed, been used except for funerals, weddings, Christmas and other exceptional occasions. The fender was crowded with huge brass fire-irons that gleamed through the shadows as he passed to the narrow steep staircase beyond. A woman, doubtless a neighbour, called to him to come up. He obeyed, feeling his way in almost complete darkness, and was at last manoeuvred into a very small, hot, and dimly-lit bedroom.

Miss Monks was the oldest member of his chapel; she had belonged to it ever since its opening in 1860. She had regularly attended services twice every Sunday until quite recently; she had given generously to all chapel funds and charities; nor, during her prime, had she ever shirked personal duties. But that was only one side of the picture. For over four decades—ever since most people could remember—she had constituted herself a sort of super-authority to which all chapel questions must in the last resort be submitted. She had waged bitter and incessant warfare against anything and everything new, different, or experimental, and it was hardly an exaggeration to say that she had driven several parsons out of the town, and at least one into a home for the victims of mental breakdown. Of Freemantle himself she had misgivings, but they were weaker ones; and this was partly because she was getting old, partly because he was tactful, and partly (though neither she nor he realised or would have admitted it) because she was attracted by his face.

His eyes, accustoming themselves to the dimness, observed the shrivelled cheeks and piercing eyes that confronted him from the head of the bed. “Good morning, Miss Monks,” he began, stooping slightly. His greeting, rather huskily spoken, filled the room with its deep resonant tones—he had a magnificent voice (Ringwood had once said—“It’s so damned easy to listen to you talk that one sometimes doesn’t bother what it is you’re saying”—and he had never felt quite the same about his own words after that). The neighbour passed him a chair and whispered loudly in his ear: “Doctor says she won’t last out the day.”

“Ah,” he answered vaguely, seating himself at the bedside and gazing at the subject of this despairing prophecy. He was, he was aware, a little terrified by Miss Monks. He was just wondering whether she were fully or only partly conscious when she startled him by croaking suddenly: “Very poor attendances there must have been at chapel yesterday, Mr. Freemantle.”

“Yes,” he admitted, fidgetting under her glance. “The weather, you know, was most unfortunate. I suppose one really can’t expect people to turn out in thick fog.”

“In my young days people wouldn’t have let that keep them at home on a Sunday.”

It was her favourite theme, and he gave her the cue she wanted. “Ah, Miss Monks, I’m afraid this is a slacker generation altogether.”

She talked for a few minutes as she enjoyed talking, and as he knew she enjoyed talking. The conversation touched upon the question of Sunday games in the parks (soon to come before the Borough Council again), and the forthcoming service on Armistice Day. She was, of course, a bitter opponent of Sunday games, and as for the Armistice Day affair, she had doubts as to the wisdom of those so-called ‘undenominational’ ceremonies, at which parsons of all creeds appeared together on a single platform. “Safer to keep ourselves to ourselves,” she declared, with a tightening of wrinkled lips.

After a time talking seemed to tire her, and Howat was just beginning to think he might decently take his leave when she whispered, with a kind of sinister pride: “Doctor says I won’t last out the day.”

“Oh, dear me, what nonsense!” The exclamation came out trippingly. “I’m sure Dr. Ringwood never said anything of the sort, and even if he did—”

“He did,” she insisted, in such a way that further conventional protests found themselves checked at source. She added hoarsely: “Perhaps we could have a prayer together, Mr. Freemantle.”

“Why, certainly.”

And he bent his head into his hands (Miss Monks would have thought any more abject posture idolatrous) and began to pray. He felt a little unnerved by it all. It was so difficult to think of anything really suitable. What could you say to the Almighty by way of introducing an old lady of eighty-nine who was perfectly certain of going to Heaven and equally certain that Heaven was full of marble and white tiles, like a combination of underground convenience and fish-shop? And all the time he was speaking he knew too that Miss Monks was listening with the air of a connoisseur; she felt herself in no pressing need of his interpolations on her behalf—she was merely trying him, seeing what he could do, enjoying a luxury to which she considered herself entitled.

That, he felt, was the worst of being a Nonconformist parson—in the last resort people didn’t need you, they felt themselves able to get just as near Heaven on their own. Not that they probably couldn’t, but still, if they thought that, why bother to keep a parson at all? As some species of communal pet, perhaps. It was different in the Roman Church, where people really believed in priestly functions. And again, as often before, he wished there were some ritual for such occasions as this...What could he say, anyhow?...Yet, to his considerable surprise, he heard himself saying all kinds of things, quite eloquently and not at all insincerely; he really meant every word of them—the poor old creature was dying—there had been something rather grand and magnificent about her—he was stirred, touched, and aware that his voice was vibrating with emotion. And when at last he raised his head there were actually tears in his eyes.

“Thank you, Mr. Freemantle,” said Miss Monks rather in the tone of an examiner to a student who has done passably well in a viva voce.

He bade her a kindly farewell, and held her thin hand for a moment. The stuffy air inside the room (all the windows closed for the past dozen years, he guessed) and the smells of drugs and bedclothes made him feel a little faint. His throat too, was giving him pain again. After a few conventional courtesies to the woman who had shown him up, he descended the stairs and passed out gladly into the street.

Too late now to call on young Trevis; he had to sec Higgs the councillor, and there wouldn’t be time for both visits. He hastened out of Lower George Street and into the High Street again. Higgs was an optician, who had an office and consulting-room on the first floor of Bank Buildings, just above Phillips’s gramophone shop. He was a clever fellow, not yet thirty, the youngest and in many ways the ablest of the local Labour Party. Self-educated, he had worked as a mill-hand while studying for the examinations that entitled him to set up in business. He never attended a place of worship, but had once surprisingly turned up at a series of lectures Howat had given on music. The relationship between the two men was cordial up to a point, and then sharply antagonistic.

Howat felt still somewhat exhausted as he walked along the passage by the side of the gramophone shop, and climbed the stairs to the first floor. He rang the bell and Higgs himself answered it. “Oh, Hullo, Freemantle—glad to see you—do come inside.” Howat did not in the least mind being called Freemantle’ without the ’Mister ’—indeed he rather preferred it—but he could not help reflecting that at Higgs’s age he should never have had the nerve to leave out the prefix with a man nearly twice as old...Nerve, that was it—and Higgs had plenty of it. Cool-headed fellow climbing steadily up the ladder which began with a seat on a local council and ended, quite possibly, at Westminster. He was determined to get on in the world, and Howat liked him for it.

“Good morning, Higgs. I hope I’m not interrupting—I thought I’d better call where I’d be sure of finding you.”

“Quite right. Do take a chair. I’ve an appointment in ten minutes, but I daresay he’ll be late.”

“Well, I don’t suppose my business will take more than the ten minutes in any case. I only wanted to know the plans for the Armistice Day service.”

“Ah, yes. There’s been the usual fuss about it, you know. Or perhaps you don’t know. Doxley of the Congregationals thought it was unfair for the Baptist fellow to be given the opening prayer two years in succession. So we’ve given him the opening prayer instead. The Vicar of the Parish Church, of course, does the address—that seems to be generally agreed upon. Then there’s the second prayer—Salcombe rather wants that. Unfortunately that means you’ll have to take the hymns, as you did last year and the year before. I don’t know how you feel about it—if you object, then Salcombe will have to take his turn with the hymns, whether he likes it or not, only he’s not so good at the job—fusses with the tuning-fork for about five minutes before he can get the note—I daresay you’ve seen him.”

Howat smiled. “I don’t mind what I do—I’ll fit myself in just wherever’s convenient. As it happens, I have absolute pitch, so I don’t need a tuning-fork.”

“Absolute pitch? What’s that?”

One thing in Higgs that always especially attracted Howat was his eagerness to assimilate any casual scrap of knowledge that might come his way. He answered: “It means that if I want a certain note—middle C, for instance—I know it, instantly, without having to think. Nothing very unusual a good many people can do it.”

“I see. A sort of gift? Must be very useful. You’re fond of music, aren’t you, Freemantle?”

“Yes, extremely.”

“I think I’m beginning to be, too. When I’ve time to spare I sometimes go down to the shop below and play over records. I like Bach.” He pronounced it ‘Back’ and added: “By the way, how should one say that fellow’s name—was I right?”

Howat replied: “Well, I think ‘Bark’ is nearer the German pronunciation. But you don’t need to be too particular. Far more important to enjoy him.”

“Far more important to enjoy everything.” The youth’s face clouded over with a look of half-truculent eagerness. “Which reminds me, Freemantle, there’s that Sunday games question coming up before the Council again. I suppose it’s no use trying to persuade you to come over to our side?”

“No good at all,” Howat answered, with a shake of the head. “And you ought to know better than ask, after that last argument we had.”

“The trouble is, that last argument didn’t convince me. And not only that, but it didn’t convince me that it convinced you, either.”

“Come now, that’s too subtle for a parson on Monday morning.”

Higgs leaned forward and tapped Howat’s knee with his forefinger. “Look here, why can’t you be serious about it? I’ve always had a sort of feeling you were the only parson in the town there was any hope at all for.”

“That’s very flattering.”

“I mean it sincerely, flattering or not. We Labour fellows constantly find you on our side in all sorts of things—the housing question, unemployment grants—oh, any amount of matters that crop up. What we sometimes wonder is why you don’t come over to us altogether. Frankly, we’d welcome you just as wholeheartedly as we respect you now.”

Howat smiled, but rather wearily. He was in no mood for a political argument, especially with such a notoriously adroit debater as Councillor Higgs. He said, quietly: “I don’t really believe that parsons ought to identify themselves entirely with any political party. It’s quite true that I often find myself on your side. On the other hand, I sometimes don’t, and what would you have me do then?”

“Well, we’d try to convince you. This question of Sunday games, now—”

“My dear chap, I’m not going to go over all that again with you. My position is exactly the same as it was last year—in such a matter I regard myself as the delegate of my congregation, and as they’re overwhelmingly against the idea, there’s nothing more to be discussed.”

“I always thought a shepherd led his flock, not was led by it.”

“Don’t you think a shepherd would be foolish if he led both himself and his flock over a precipice?” Howat’s voice became more animated. “Why don’t you try to understand my position? I hope—I even try to believe—that I do some good in this town. Amongst other things, I try to broaden people’s minds—I’m keen, as I daresay you know, on literary societies, debating clubs, music, the drama; anything that I think will get and keep people out of the commonplace rut. If I step warily, I may succeed—indeed, I sometimes feel that I am succeeding. But if I were to back you up in supporting Sunday games, I should merely split my congregation, smash up all the good work I’m interested in, and—quite likely—make my whole position in Browdley an impossible one. Do you think that would really be the best thing that could happen?”

“Yes, since you ask me, I do. It’s the only course I’d honour you for. As it is, I know for certain what I’d for a long time suspected—that you’re secretly on our side, but haven’t the courage to stand with us.” His voice rose excitedly, and after a pause for breath he added quickly: “I’m sorry, Freemantle, I really don’t mean to be insulting at all—I’m only being as frank as I know how.”

“Yes, I quite see that.” And at the back of Howat’s mind was the thought: I’ve said too much, somehow or other; I oughtn’t to have let myself be enticed into an argument with this fellow—Heaven knows where it will lead to, or what tales he’ll spread about afterwards...Higgs was one whom eloquence always stirs to greater eloquence. He went on: “I wouldn’t mind so much if your people were all as virtuous as they pretend to be. But they’re not. Look at the Makepeaces, the Battersbys, that dreadful old Monks woman—are they really the moral cream of Browdley society? Oh, and Garland the draper—mustn’t forget him. He’s the chap who shakes hands at your chapel door after Sunday services—the ’right hand of fellowship’, isn’t that what you call it? There’s not much fellowship about him on week-days, I can tell you. We’re on to him now about some cottages he owns in Silk Street; the rain comes in at all the roofs, but he won’t do any repairs—we’re trying to make him, but he’s got a cute solicitor. I suppose, though, since he’s a pillar of your chapel, this kind of talk must sound rather offensive?”

Howat thought despairingly: I mustn’t argue, whatever happens; the rain comes in at my roof too, by the way; Higgs and Garland are natural enemies, and I’m not going to interfere between them...He said: “It doesn’t strike me as particularly offensive, but that’s not to say I’d consider it good taste to join in a discussion of individual chapel members with outsiders.”

“Have a look at those houses in Silk Street and see things for yourself”

“Well, I might do that.”

“Good of you if you do. And I don’t mind a bit being called an outsider. Perhaps you’ll feel one yourself some day, so far as the chapel’s concerned. The fact is, this town’s sunk in narrow- mindedness, and it really makes a fellow sick sometimes to find out what he’s up against. And I can’t help feeling, too, that the sort of chap in these days who wants to do real good, to improve and elevate people and all that, doesn’t find much scope or encouragement in the church. The church, if he lets it, will just use him up, waste his energies, and cramp him all the time. He can find better machinery elsewhere. There’s dirt and hypocrisy in politics, I admit, but I think on the whole it gives bigger opportunities.”

Howat smiled again. “Perhaps so, perhaps so. But I sometimes wonder whether the people who live most usefully of all are neither parsons nor politicians, but just ordinary folk, like village postmen and engine-drivers and charwomen. It’s an interesting question, but I mustn’t wait to argue it—I’ve already taken up far too much of your time, and I’m pretty busy myself, too...It’s settled, then, that I take the hymns?”

“Yes, if you will. Thanks for making so little trouble about it. And as for the Sunday games—”

“You’ll find me, I’m afraid, ranged alongside my brother ministers. Perhaps that will make you reconsider the comparison you made between me and them—I hope it will, anyway.”

They both laughed and shook hands cordially, and Howat went down the stairs to the street with a feeling of almost reluctant liking for the young; councillor. Dangerous, though, to say too much to him...It was becoming foggy, as had seemed likely, and through the yellow gloom came the muffled chiming of the parish clock—a quarter to one. He hurried, so as not to be late for his midday dinner.

Monday’s dinner at the Manse was always predictable; it consisted of the remains of Sunday’s joint minced into a sort of rissole and warmed up. Howat had had this so often and so unfailingly that it seemed now, by sheer familiarity, to have become appropriate—it both smelt and tasted, somehow, of Monday. He did not, however, bother a great deal about food, which was perhaps as well in the circumstances. He was not even aware that a few minor ailments from which he had suffered at times during the past dozen years had all been dyspeptic in origin.

Dinner was served for four, since by that time Mrs. Freemantle had dressed and come downstairs. She was a thin, angular woman with everything rather sharp about her—her nose, her chin, her cheekbones, her eyes, her way of moving about, and her voice and speech. She was the youngest of her family, while Aunt Viney was the eldest, and despite a difference of physique which could hardly have been greater, there was yet an obvious sisterhood between them. They might bicker when they were alone (indeed, they sometimes did), but whenever they were together they had an air of being ranged foursquare against the rest of the world, even when the rest of the world consisted only of Howat. Their dispositions were complementary rather than similar; Aunt Viney could bluster, fly into tempers, and shout; but Mrs. Freemantle’s voice, even in most perturbed moments, never rose above a high-pitched and hurried wail.

Howat was always extremely thoughtful and polite to both of them, and submitted good-humouredly to their varying attentions. It was Aunt Viney who sewed buttons on for him (when she remembered), cooked, ordered from shops, and did the more domestic work of the household; in a shadowy way, if ever he were inclined to be irritated by her, he could always reflect comfortingly that she worked very hard, and that no one could imagine what they would all do without her. For his wife, of course, he had tenderer feelings, and if ever she were a little trying he always remembered how highly strung she was, and that quite small things were apt to upset her in a way that she couldn’t really help.

This particular Monday dinner found both Aunt Viney and Mrs. Freemantle a little cross, the former from a noisy and indeterminate quarrel with the servant which had been in progress; most of the morning, and the latter because the roof of one of the bedrooms was leaking again and the builder, in her opinion, couldn’t have done his job properly when last he had come to repair it. But she was the kind of woman who could never he satisfied with saying a thing once; she had to talk rapidly and indignantly about the leaking roof for over ten minutes, while Howat listened with sympathy tempered by the knowledge that the roof always would leak till it was overhauled thoroughly, and that such an operation would cost more than he was ever likely to he able to afford. His stipend was just under three hundred a year, and though both his wife and Aunt Viney had small incomes of their own, there was really nothing like enough for the upkeep of so big a house. He himself would have preferred to move into a much smaller one, but his wife would never listen to the suggestion, and always talked of any residence less in size than the Manse as ‘one of those poky little working-class houses’.

During or just after the midday meal it was Howat’s habit to outline and discuss with her some part of his daily routine; he did this even when it was an effort, for he believed it his duty to let her share in all his affairs. He hardly realised that she had other and more satisfying points of contact with the small world of Browdley, and that a good deal of his well- meant conversation bored her. It bored her now, for instance, when he began to talk about the address he was going to deliver that evening on Mozart. He began to sketch out a plan of his ideas, and as often happened when once he began, he went chattering on, with slowly mounting enthusiasm, till Mary began to fidget and his wife to exchange supercilious glances with her sister. Their private opinion was that ideas might be all right for the platform or pulpit, but were hardly suitable for the dinner-table. In the end Mary neatly torpedoed the monologue by enquiring the date of Mozart’s birth. Howat, after a rather vacant pause, said he didn’t know exactly, but he fancied it must be somewhere about the middle of the eighteenth century. They were all very much amused at his confessed ignorance, and Mary rejoined pertly: “You know, dad, I think you always go far above people’s heads when you talk to them about music. Why don’t you tell them the useful facts—when he was born, when he died, the names of the things he wrote, and so on?”

Howat answered: “Yes, of course—I ought to include all that, I admit.”

“Anyhow,” added Mary, “I don’t suppose it matters a great deal, for if this fog keeps on, there won’t be more than half a dozen there.”

Howat nodded and stared blankly at the window, where yellow was already merging through orange to grey.

It was too foggy, indeed, to go visiting in the town that afternoon, especially with the excuse of his bad throat; so he spent a pleasant couple of hours in the little school associated with his chapel. It was a second-rate school, doomed, no doubt, to extinction when any enterprising education policy should take possession of the Browdley authorities; but that day was unlikely to happen soon. Architecturally the school was hopelessly out of date; its rooms were small and badly lit, its corridors long and draughty, and its playgrounds mere patches of wasteland strewn with ink-black cinders. In this establishment there were three classes, the senior in charge of the headmaster, a Mr. Wilkinson, and the two junior ones taught by his daughter and another young woman.

He first of all, as a matter of courtesy, paid a visit to Mr. Wilkinson. Wilkinson was a shabby little man with a pompous manner and a very large, pale, and flabby nose. He experienced certain difficulties of discipline, of which both he and Howat were well aware, but of which they both steadfastly pretended not to be aware; the wastepaper-basket in his room was usually sticky with the remains of half-sucked sweets which, from time to time, he made his pupils disgorge. (Howat would never have known this but for a complaint by the caretaker’s wife.) After spending a few perfunctory moments in the senior room, Howat passed on to his daughter’s, and here, indeed, his pleasure began. For he liked children, with an intensity that was no affectation; he often thought: If I were not a parson I should like most of all to be a schoolmaster. It was true enough, in a way, though, on reflection, he recognised that he would never have made a very good schoolmaster. He would always have shrunk from teaching the dull stuff that had to be learnt. Besides, he had the most preposterous ideas about education—preposterous, he was prepared to admit, from any normal parent’s standpoint. As it was, he could put his theories into strictly limited practice with the certainty that as soon as he was out of the school the teacher would undo any harm he might have perpetrated.

His daughter was pleased to let him take the class for a time, since it gave her extra moments to work at her Latin verbs. He began by walking round amongst the desks and observing what the children were doing; it was a geography lesson, apparently, and most of them were laboriously copying a map of Ireland out of ancient and very dirty text-books. He asked one boy why they were doing this, but the boy said he did not know. Then he began to talk to the boy, at first in an undertone, but later, without definitely realising it, in a voice to which all the class soon came to listen. He asked if anyone had ever been to Ireland; none had; then he asked if anyone had ever crossed the sea in a ship. And from that he progressed to a general talk about islands, and then islands very far away, and then uninhabited islands, and soon he was off on one of those extraordinary impromptu stories which he enjoyed just as much as did any of his listeners. This one was about two small boys sailing across the sea in a small boat, and coming to a land where nobody from England had ever been before. Howat then went to the blackboard, wiped out a careful list of exports and imports which his daughter had drawn up, and began to sketch a map of this strange land just as it came to the knowledge of the two boys. First the vague outline of the shore in the distance, then a narrow river inlet leading into the heart of dense jungle, and so on. Mountains, lakes, and vast swamps all figured in the boys’ wanderings, and as each exciting adventure happened Howat marked it down on the board. By the time that the young travellers had lost themselves in the midst of a forest infested with giant spiders and boa- constrictors, the whole class was in a ferment of excitement, as was Howat himself; for half an hour during that November afternoon Browdley did not exist for some four dozen of its inhabitants; the fog and the cotton-mill across the road were lost behind a blaze of tropic sunshine. When at last the school-bell rang, Howat stopped as one disturbed suddenly from a dream; he seemed to recollect himself and added, in an ordinary voice: “Well, boys and girls, that’s all to-day, I think. Perhaps I’ll tell you more about what happened to the two boys some other time. I hope you know now something about maps, anyhow.” But it was a lame excuse; he didn’t particularly hope they did, or care whether they did or not; his aim had been different—something not very easy to put into words—something, indeed, which he was never quite sure of understanding himself.

After he had gone his daughter resumed her work of teaching. She had been glad of the interval’s respite, though she always said that after her father’s intervention a class was completely ruined for the rest of the day.

Howat usually ignored afternoon tea, though if he were out visiting and were offered it, he would accept. He preferred, however, when he was at home, an uninterrupted hour by the fire before his ‘proper’ tea—a meal which consisted as a rule of tea and an egg. After this there was often another gap of an hour or so before the beginning of evening engagements.

On this unpleasant November day Howat occupied both odd hours in reading a book which would have deeply shocked ninety per cent of his congregation had there been the slightest possibility of their understanding it. It was Jeans’s “The Universe Around Us,” borrowed from the local library, which had obtained it at his own request.

As Mary had predicted, there was only a very small attendance at the Young People’s Guild that evening. The Guild was one of Howat’s pet institutions; he had founded it himself some half-dozen years before, and it had flourished, he ventured to think, as handsomely as could have been expected. It met weekly during the winter months; in summer there were country rambles, visits to places of interest, and so on. It had always been Howat’s idea to make it a centre of secular enlightenment (backgrounded, of course, by the chapel atmosphere); most of the weekly talks were on literary, musical, or artistic subjects—very few were definitely religious. This aspect alienated the sympathies of some of the older people, who thought that Howat was coddling the young and shirking his plain job of rubbing religion into them. Howat, though, did not care about that; if there were ever to be a choice (though there would not be if he could help it) he was all out for the young; the old, he felt, were so confident of attaining Heaven that they could look after themselves.

As founder and president, Howat always opened the terminal session by an address on some subject or other; it also fell to him to fill in any gaps made by speakers dropping out after the programme had been made up. This November Monday was one of these gap-filling occasions, his talk on Mozart being in lieu of a paper on modern town-planning by a young local architect.

The place of meeting was a bleak schoolroom furnished and panelled in pitch pine—a very hot room at one corner near a stove, and very cold and draughty elsewhere. Nothing relieved the brown varnished monotony of the walls except a map of Palestine and a tattered and faded temperance banner. A desk stood on a slightly raised platform, and on the desk lay a Bible, a hymn- book, and a carafe of water. (The room was used regularly for Sunday School and other chapel functions.) There was also a cupboard which, when incautiously opened, usually emitted a cascade of ragged hymn-books and tea-party crockery. Two inverted T-shaped gas-brackets shed a hissing illumination over the rather melancholy scene, and this evening wisps of fog curled in fitfully when the green-baize doors opened from the vestibule.

Howat gazed with a certain dreamy satisfaction on the dozen or so young persons who comprised his audience. In some ways they satisfied him as much as a far larger gathering; because he could think of most of them individually, knowing their names, homes, and circumstances; and he could marvel a little at the spirit that had brought them out, on a foggy night, to hear him talk about Mozart. Surely he was not wrong, at such a moment, in thinking that he was accomplishing some kind of good in Browdley, that his years of persistence were bearing fruit after all? And he felt, as deeply as he had ever felt in the pulpit, inspired by a passionate desire to give these few youngsters something adequate to their degree of needing and wanting. The whole world stretched out beyond Browdley, a world they might and probably would never see; could he not show them an inner world of beauty, visible to all whose eyes were attuned to it? He thought then, quite suddenly and with an odd sensation of mind- wandering: These walls would look better with a few pictures—why not some of those coloured reproductions of Italian primitives, and so on? It wouldn’t cost more than a few shillings; I daresay I could afford it myself. Still, I shall have to economise for a time—that trip to London will cost a bit, and the specialist’s fee will probably be stiff- five guineas, maybe, or three if I plead poverty. Wonder if there is anything really serious the matter—queer how that pain comes and goes—I hadn’t it this afternoon while I was talking to those children in school, but it came back during tea. Never mind, stick it out, whatever it is—no sense in whining over things...

The mere thinking of his throat made it feel dry and parched; he would have poured out a drink from the carafe had not the water repelled by its stale, yellowish tinge. And just for a moment there carne over him the most absurd and ridiculous longing for something he would never dream of having—a glass of beer. One of those dark brown frothing tumblers he sometimes saw through the windows of public-houses—public-houses all warm and brightly lit, with men in them talking sociably and perhaps playing darts. In his mind, just for the moment, the picture stood out in vivid contrast to the chill, comfortless room in which he was shortly to begin his address.

He half-smiled at the quaintness of the vision, and then, with a quick return to reality, nodded and smiled to Mr. and Mrs. Garland, who had just entered. They were by no means ‘young people’, and he did not recollect their ever having attended a Guild meeting before; still, he was glad enough to see them, though faintly surprised.

Swallowing hard to ease the dryness of his throat, Howat rose from his chair and began to speak. He began haltingly, unfluently, as he so often did; those who heard him for only the first minute of any speech or sermon must certainly have thought him a very poor orator. It was as if he had, by a tremendous effort, to launch himself into a world of mind and spirit in which words came of their own accord. He kept saying: Mozart...Mozart...His face had a peculiar nervous twitch during those initial struggles; his rugged features looked, for the time, almost agonised; till, with a suddenness that was sometimes rather amusing, he was ‘off’. He had, beyond doubt, a voice and an enunciation of great beauty.

Certain of his words and phrases sounded, in his own ears, far above others, and went on echoing long after he had spoken them. Was he soaring above their heads, he wondered, momentarily, remembering his daughter’s caution? Well no, he thought not; he hoped not; and besides, even if he were, perhaps he could get them to soar with him—above their own heads and his too. If only that sharpness in his throat would disappear; it was absurd, at his age, to be bothered in such a way; he was only forty-three and already seeing specialists and worrying about his health. And suddenly, looking round at the young faces in front of him, he saw them all labelled, as it were, with the inevitable doom of age and death; life was so tragically short, and it seemed in some sense a kind of divine toss-up whether one succeeded or failed in getting anything out of it during the time allowed. How necessary to make the most of youth, to pursue while the pursuit had zest, to apprehend the beauty of the world that lay everywhere around, in sight and sound and feeling...He made a pause in his remarks, wound up his portable gramophone, and played over the Trio in E Major and then the two great Overtures; the music floated past him, dissolving, as it were, into the air of which it was born; he always felt that Mozart was like that, perfectly and enchantingly meaningless except for that one central unanalysable meaning—beauty. ’fever, he said when the records were finished, there had been an angel born upon this earth, that angel was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. We might not know a very great deal about the future life, but we must feel—indeed it was almost impossible not to feel—that it was linked up in a marvellous way with the beauty of our own world...Mozart...Raphael the painter...William Blake the poet...And then, with a little mist before his eyes, he was aware that he was making contact, that he was actually and for a second or so putting into the minds of these boys and girls an urge, a longing for something beyond their own immediate surroundings.

He finished in secret triumph. He sat down. He felt drained of power, yet with a tired dreamy feeling of having conquered. Yes, yes, he would get those pictures. Was the fog worse, he wondered? His throat was not so bad now, and anyway, he didn’t care—he was too tired and triumphant to care. The tune of the E Major Trio was in his ears. What happened next? Oh yes, someone usually got up and moved a vote of thanks. Only a formality—wouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes. Then a little chat with anybody who chose to stay behind, then the short walk through the fog across the playground and past the front of the chapel, and so into his house. A cup of hot cocoa. Bed. Heavens—he was tired—he was sure he would sleep well.

Suddenly he realised that Garland was on his feet and beginning to talk. Pity it couldn’t have been somebody else; Garland had such a raucous voice and would go on far too long. Never mind, though—decent of him to come.

Garland, in fact, was one of those fussy, self-important men, full of official correctness, who never miss a chance to say ‘a few words’. An air of portentous solemnity hovered over everything he did and had, from the pompous modulations of his ill-pronounced words to the black cut-away coat whose collar was always lightly powdered with dandruff. He was rather squat in build, and had a black curling moustache whose waxed ends were absurdly visible when one saw him from the rear. Howat respected him as a trustworthy chapel official, but they had never attempted any more intimate relationship.

Mrs. Garland was a thin-lipped precise-looking woman with a rigidity of bearing less solemn but more aggressive than her husband’s.

Garland was saying: “Of course we’re all extremely grateful to Mr. Freemantle for his address, but I do feel there is an aspect—and a very important aspect—of his subject which he has left quite out of account. And that is religion. All this talk about beauty—music, poetry, and all that—isn’t any use without the true spirit of religion. And I must say I don’t hold with him when he said that we might not know a great deal about the future life. I contend, as every true believer must, that we do know a great deal about it—we know all about Heaven, and anyone who doesn’t has only got to read his Bible. Fact of the matter is, people don’t read their Bibles enough nowadays—there’s far too much discussion of other books, poetry, music, and what not. First things should come first...And now let’s refresh ourselves with a hymn—’There is a Book who runs may read’...”

Howat’s chin and mouth were half-hidden in the palm of his hand. At the mention of the hymn, however, he looked up abruptly and gave the opening note with his clear, vibrant baritone. In a scattered and rather ineffectual way the audience began to sing, led by Howat, and with Garland supplying a morose and untuneful rumble far below any classifiable key. It was unusual to sing hymns after a Guild meeting, but Howat didn’t care—Garland could go through the whole hymn-book if he wanted. Howat felt: He means well, but I’m glad he doesn’t come to these affairs oftener.

The hymn came to an end, and as the audience began to pick up hats and wraps and prepare to disperse, he realised that Garland was waiting behind deliberately, as if he wanted to say something. Howat was just slightly peeved about that; if the fellow wanted to see him, why didn’t he call at the Manse? After meetings Howat liked a chat with the youngsters, but there wouldn’t be any, clearly, if Garland stayed.

After a few moments he was quite alone in the room with Garland and Mrs. Garland. The others had all disappeared through the green-baize door, and there was left no sound except the hissing of the four gas jets. Howat remarked conversationally as he packed up his gramophone: “Bad night, Mr. Garland.” (Garland was the sort of man who wouldn’t do for anyone to drop the prefix.)

“Very,” replied Garland, massively, and went on: “As a matter of fact, Mr. Freemantle, we shouldn’t have come but, only we thought it would give us a chance of seeing you in private.”

“Really? Well, anything I can do, of course—” He felt so thoroughly tired, and more in the mood for anything on earth than for a private talk with Garland. However...

“You see, Mr. Freemantle, it’s about our girl. She’s run away from. home.”

“Indeed?” he made the necessary mental effort—Garland’s daughter—the girl he had been teaching German—a pleasant girl, she had always seemed, and she had surprised him once, he recollected, by humming a tune from a Brahms sonata.

He repeated: “Indeed? She’s run away from home, you say?”

“Yes. On Saturday. She packed up all her things and went before we knew anything about it.”

“But surely—”

“Oh, it astonishes you, does it?” interrupted Mrs. Garland, tartly. “We thought maybe you mightn’t be so astonished as we were, seeing the chances she’s had lately of confiding in you.”

“Confiding in me?” Howat was sheerly bewildered. “I don’t understand you, Mrs. Garland—I really don’t understand. Your daughter has been taking lessons in German from me week by week, but apart from that—”

“And it wasn’t our idea she should do it, please don’t think that for a moment. What would she be wanting to learn German for, I should like to know?”

“She gave no definite reason—not to me, anyhow—but I suppose she wished to improve her general education. Surely there’s nothing very outrageous in that.”

“It’s all very outrageous. She was full of mad ideas, always was.”

“But in these days, Mrs. Garland—”

“These days? It’s a pity these days are what they are. A sinful, godless age, that’s what it is.”

Howat’s fingers drummed on the desk-lid; he was becoming just a shade impatient. “Well, well, that’s a big subject—you were telling me about your daughter, weren’t you? Do you mean that she’s disappeared, and that you don’t know where she is at all?”

Garland here thought fit to intervene; he said, as if realising that his wife would only bungle the business: “The fact is, Mr. Freemantle, we can only guess. We’ve had no news at all except a card saying she was quite well but wouldn’t be coming back. We couldn’t read the postmark. And what crossed our minds was that perhaps she might have hinted to you something about her intentions. It’s a most upsetting thing to have happened altogether.”

“I agree with you, Mr. Garland, and I wish I could help, but I assure you she never gave me the slightest idea that such a notion was in her mind. If she had, I need hardly say that I should have strongly dissuaded her and even, if necessary, approached you on the matter.”

Garland seemed to find this reply moderately satisfactory, but Mrs. Garland’s eyes narrowed sharply. “You mean that you haven’t heard from her at all, then?” she interposed.

He shook his head and then suddenly remembered the Raphael picture that had arrived by the first post that day. “Stay, though—well yes, now I come to recollect it, I did hear from her this morning, but it was merely a short message to say she wouldn’t be coming for her usual German lesson to-morrow.”

“Oh? So she has written to you then? Was that all she said? Did she give no explanation?”

“She merely said she would be out of Browdley at the time.”

“What was the postmark?”

“I must confess I didn’t notice.”

“Perhaps you still have the letter and it could be examined.”

“I don’t know, I’m afraid. It may be torn up—quite probably it is. Naturally it didn’t strike me as particularly important when I received it.”

Garland again took the lead. “Well, Mr. Freemantle, it’s an unfortunate business, anyhow. She’s left home, and we don’t know what’s happening to her.”

Howat found himself slowly rising out of a dream into this new and intricate reality that was being forced upon him. “But surely, Mr. Garland, you have some idea why she’s gone, at any rate? That seems to me almost as important as where she is, apart from the fact that it might afford a clue. She can’t have acted like that without some big reason of her own.”

He felt: Why are they bothering me about it? I can’t help them, but I can see now it was a mistake to give the girl German lessons—I never guessed that her parents didn’t approve of it. She ought to have told me, really...

“Oh, she has her reasons, I’ve no doubt,” retorted Mrs. Garland, sourly. “And precious fine reasons they are, too, if they were only known, I daresay. The idea—talking of giving up her job at the library and going abroad! That’s what she did talk about, though you mayn’t believe it. Of course we forbade it—absolutely. A good deal that we don’t like we may have to put up with in these days, but there are certain limits, I’m glad to say.

“She talked of going abroad, did she?”

“She’s been talking of it off and on for some time. But it came to a head last Friday night when we found she’d been writing to a travel agency about railway tickets to Paris. And then, if you please, she calmly told us that she was going to go abroad in any case.”

“To Paris?”

“That’s one of the things we have to guess. It doesn’t sound a nice sort of place for a young girl to want to go to, does it?”

“But, really, she must have had some purpose in mind? People don’t suddenly go to Paris without any reason at all. Did she give you no idea how—how she intended to support herself while she was away?”

Mr. Garland rubbed his nose decisively. “We didn’t argue with her, Mr. Freemantle. When a daughter calmly informs her parents that she’s going to do what they’ve forbidden her to do, there’s nothing left to argue about. She went up to her bedroom—as we hoped, to think it over and come to her senses. It seems, though, that she just packed her things, went to bed, and went off early in the morning by the first train before any of us was up. Altogether a most disgraceful affair. Of course one naturally thinks of all sorts of possibilities when a girl does a thing like that.”

Howat stared far away over Garland’s head. “I must say, from a very slight acquaintance with your daughter, she didn’t really seem to me the sort of girl who would do anything that either you or she would need to be ashamed of.”

“That remains to be found out,” answered Mrs. Garland. “And I don’t mind telling you to your face, Mr. Freemantle, I think you’re one of the prime causes of it all! You have a thoroughly unsettling influence on the young people—you always have had—you put ideas into their heads—it was quite enough to listen to you to-night to realise how all these things begin. As my husband said, there’s a great deal too much loose talk in the world nowadays, and ministers, of all people, ought to know better than join in it. They’re here to give us religion, that’s what I say, not the things of this world.”

Howat said, rather curtly: “I don’t think we can discuss all that. You must let me know if there’s anything practical I can do. And I’m afraid I must go now. Good-night, Mrs. Garland. Goodnight, Mr. Garland.” There was something unusual and rather sharp in his eyes.

He strode out of the schoolroom into the cold moist fog. Something was hammering away in his head—a sort of desperately controlled temper, something that made him feel hot and ice-cold simultaneously. Those intolerable people! He could not bring himself to hate them, but his impatience of them was like a flame. And then quite suddenly the flame died down and he felt merely tired, emptied of all energy and willpower and enthusiasm. He found his way into the dark house and, over the remains of the kitchen fire, made himself a cup of cocoa. It was after midnight when he got to bed, and though his tiredness had increased with every moment, he did not find it easy to sleep.