And Now Good-bye Read Free Page A

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