“I say! Fancy being friends with Chinamen! But you must know somebody in London, if you used to live here?”
“A few business acquaintances, but I don’t count them. Oh, and two people in Surbiton. I went to see them last night, but I don’t suppose I shall go again.”
“Why not? Weren’t they nice to you?”
“Oh yes. Rather nicer, perhaps, than I was to them.”
“Then why—”
He laughed. “Never mind. I hardly know myself. But you can fill me up another glass of sherry and have one with me.”
“Righto, and thanks, though mine’s a gin, if you don’t mind…Well, here’s luck to you, anyway.”
Once he toyed with the idea of asking her out to some theatre or music- hall, but he decided, on reflection and without any sort of snobbishness, that the perfection of their relationship depended on the counter between.
He staved in London over a week, and on the whole he enjoyed himself. He dined at his publisher’s town house and met there a man on the staff of The Times who promptly commissioned from him a series of articles on the future of the rubber industry. It gratified and perhaps slightly surprised him to realise that his book had become, in its own field, something of a classic.
He also vent to theatres, cinemas, exhibitions; he walked in the parks; he listened to the open-air speakers near the Marble Arch; he lunched and dined in any hotel or restaurant that chanced to catch his eye; he sat in the Embankment gardens and pencilled drafts of his Times articles; he had casual and agreeable chats with policemen and bus-conductors. Philippa wrote to him, inviting him to Surbiton for any week-end he liked and he wrote back thanking her, but fearing that his arrangements would so soon be taking him temporarily out of London that he could not settle anything just yet. He enclosed, however, five guineas for her slum children, and hoped she would forgive him.
Then one morning he went to Harley Street to be examined and overhauled by a specialist. He went quite calmly and came away equally so. It was about noon, and he took a taxi back to the hotel, where he found a letter awaiting him—one he had been expecting. After reading it through he said to the bureau-clerk: “I shall be leaving to-morrow.” Then he stepped out into the sunshine and walked across the Strand to Romano’s Bar. The dark-haired girl placed his sherry before him with a smile. “Here again,” she said. “You’re becoming one of our regulars.”
“Not for long, I’m afraid,” he answered. “I’m off to-morrow.”
“Where?”
“Ireland.”
“Business?”
“In a way, yes.”
“Going for long?”
“Don’t know, really.”
“It’s queer, seems to me, the way you don’t know anybody and don’t seem to know even things about yourself. Fact is, I’m beginning to think you must be a queer one altogether.”
He laughed. “I had a queer sort of adventure this morning, anyway. Went to a doctor and was told I ought to give up smoking and drinking, go to bed early every night, and avoid all excitements. What would you do, now, if your doctor told you that about yourself?”
“I don’t suppose I’d take any notice of it.”
“Quite right, and I don’t suppose I shall either.”
“Go on!” she laughed. “You don’t look ill! I don’t believe you went to any doctor at all—you’re just having me on!”
“Honestly, I’m not. It’s as true as those Chinese friends of mine.”
He joked with her for a little longer and then went to lunch at Simpson’s. Afterwards he returned to the hotel, wrote a few letters, and began to pack his bags in readiness for the morrow. Then he went out for a stroll; he walked up to Covent Garden Market, where there were always interesting scenes, and then westward towards Charing Cross Road, where he liked to look at the bookshops. But he felt himself becoming very tired long before he reached this goal, so he turned into the familiar Maiden Lane for a drink and a rest at Rule’s. But it wanted a quarter of an hour to opening time, he discovered, when he reached the closed door, and as his tiredness increased, he entered the little Catholic church almost opposite and sat down amidst the cool and grateful dusk.
He felt refreshed after a few minutes and began to walk round the church, examining the mural tablets; in doing so, without looking where he was going, he almost collided with a young priest who was also walking round. Apologies were exchanged, and conversation followed. The priest, it appeared, was not attached to the church; he was merely a sightseer, like Fothergill himself. He was from Lancashire, he said, on a business visit to London; when he had time to spare he liked going into churches—“a sort of ’busman’s holiday,” he added, with a laugh. He was a very cheerful, friendly person, and Fothergill, who liked casual encounters with strangers, talked to him for some time in the porch of the church as they went out. Then it suddenly occurred to both of them that there was no absolute need to cut short a conversation that had begun so promisingly; they walked down Bedford Street to the Strand, still talking, and with no very definite objective. The priest, whose name was Farington, said he was going to have a meal somewhere and take a night train back to Lancashire; Fothergill said he was also going to have dinner. Farington then said that he usually took a snack at Lyon’s Corner House, near Charing Cross; Fothergill said, all right, that would do for him too. So they dined together inexpensively and rather uncomfortably, surrounded by marble and gilt and the blare of a too strident orchestra.
Yet Fothergill enjoyed it. He liked Farington. He liked Farington’s type of mind—intellectual, sincere, interested in all kinds of matters outside the scope of religion, worldly to those who saw only the surface, spiritual to those who guessed deeper. He was emphatically not the kind of man to insist on rendering to God the things which were Caesar’s. During the meal Fothergill chanced to mention something about rubber plantations, and Farington said immediately: “I say, didn’t you tell me your name was Fothergill? I wonder, now you’re talking about rubber, whether you’re the Fothergill who used to be at Kuala Simur?”
“Yes, I am.”
“That’s odd. It means I know quite a lot about you—Father Richmond and I are great friends—we were at Ware together.”
“Really? Oh yes, I remember him very well. Where is he now?”
“Still at Kuala Simur. He had a great opinion of you—especially after that small-pox epidemic.”
“Oh, that wasn’t much.”
Farington laughed. “It’s too conventional to say that, surely? I wish you could sec some of Richmond’s letters about you, anyway—he almost hero-worshipped.”
“I hope not.”
“He did. His great dream, I think, was to convert you some day.”
“Well, he didn’t come far short of doing so.”
“Oh?”
“We used to argue a good deal about religion and so on—and I used to joke with him and say I should end by becoming a Catholic. At least, perhaps he thought I was joking, but all the time, in a sort of way, I meant it. Then my brother died and all the rubber estates fell to me, and I got suddenly fed up with everything and sold out. That just happened to be right at the top of the rubber boom in ’twenty-five, which is why I’m more or less a rich man now. I sold out to an Anglo-Dutch syndicate, packed up, and pottered about Europe from then till now. The syndicate, incidentally, paid me about five times what the place is worth to- day.”
“That must have been very good for your bank account.”
“Better than for my soul, perhaps, eh? To come back to that, the rather curious thing is that all the time I was at Kuala Simur I felt a sort of conversion going on—if you can call it that—I know of course that nothing really counts until you’re definitely over the line. Probably if I’d had much more to do with your friend Richmond, whom I liked exceedingly, he’d have pushed me over.”
“I wish that had happened.”
“Oh well, I pushed myself over a year later, so perhaps it didn’t matter.”
??
?So you are a Catholic?”
“I was received into the Church in Vienna three years ago. I’m not sure that I’m entitled to call myself a Catholic now, though. Slackness, I suppose. All very unsatisfactory from your point of view, I’m afraid.”
“And from yours too, surely?”
“Well, perhaps—perhaps.”
They talked on for some time, and Fothergill found it strangely and refreshingly easy to be intimate with the young man. Farington’s train was due to leave at midnight, and towards nine o’clock Fothergill suggested that they should adjourn to his hotel for a smoke. They walked along the crowded Strand to the Cecil and were soon snugly in the lounge. There and then conversation developed as if all barriers had suddenly been destroyed. Fothergill said: “You know, Farington, there was one thing I never told Richmond and that was the whole truth about my life.”
“I know. He used to grumble about that in his letters to me. He said he was sure you had some mysterious and grisly past which you never breathed a word about to anybody.”
“Really? He guessed that? How curious!”
“Well, we priests aren’t such simpletons, you know.”
Fothergill laughed. “I’ll bet he never guessed the sort of past it had been, though. I daresay I’d have told him if I hadn’t known him so well. As a matter of fact, I knew he liked me and I liked him to like me, and I didn’t want to see my stock going down with a bump…You see, I seem to have broken so many of the commandments.”
“Most of us have.”
“Yes, but I’ve gone rather the whole hog. I’ve killed men, for instance.”
“If you walked out now into the Strand you could find hundreds of middle-aged fellows who’ve done that.”
“Oh, the war—yes, but my affairs weren’t in the war—at least, hardly. One of them was pretty cold-blooded murder. And then there are other matters, too. I never married, but I lived with a woman—once.”
“That, again, is nothing very unusual.”
“I daresay not, but if my soul depended on it, I couldn’t say I was sorry. It’s the one thing in my life which I feel was fully and definitely right.”
“Of course, without knowing the circumstances—”
“If You’ve time, and if you think you wouldn’t be bored, I’ll tell You how it all happened.”
“I wish you would.”
“Splendid.” And he began at the day he left England twenty- three years before. About three-quarters of an hour later, when he came hoarsely to an end, Farington said: “Well, that’s really a most astonishing story. How relieved you must be to have told it to somebody!”
“Yes, that’s just what I’m feeling. Relieved and rather tired.”
“Not too tired to continue our chat for another half-hour or so. I hope?”
“Provided you do most of the talking.”
“Oh, I’ll engage to do that.” He kept his word, and the conversation continued until it was absolutely necessary for him to leave to catch the train. Fortunately his bag was at the station, so that he could proceed there directly. Fothergill, strangely eager despite his tiredness, accompanied him in the taxi, and their talk lasted until the moment the train began to move. “We probably shan’t meet again,” Fothergill said, as they shook hands, “but I shall never forget how—how reasonable you have been. Does that sound a rather tepid word in the circumstances?”
“Not at all. Just the right one, I should like to think. Though there’s no reason why we shouldn’t meet sometime—you have my address—it’s only a train-ride out of Manchester.”
“I hate tram-rides and I’m sure I should hate Manchester.” He laughed excitedly, and was aware of the silliness of the remark. He added, more soberly: “In my old age I’m beginning to attach great value to comfort—just comfort.”
“Old age, man—nonsense! You’re not fifty yet!”
“One is made old, not by one’s years, but by what one has lived through. That’s sententious enough, surely—another sign of age.” The train began to move. “I shan’t forget, however. Good-bye.”
“I must make the most, then, of your rubber articles in The Times. Good-bye then.” They laughed distantly at each other as the train gathered speed.
He drove back to the hotel with all his senses warmed and glowing. On what trifles everything depended—if he had not made for Rule’s that evening and been those few minutes too early!
In a corner seat of a first-class compartment on the Irish Mail the next morning, he had leisure to think everything over. So much had happened the day before. But the interview with the Harley Street man hadn’t surprised him; he had been suspecting something of the sort for several months, and wasn’t worrying; there was no pain—at worst a sort of tiredness. He would take a few but not all the precautions he had been recommended, and leave the rest to Fate.
He opened a small attaché-case on the seat beside him and took out letters and papers. The proofs of his first Times article—how well it looked—’by Ainsley Jergwin Fothergill, author of Rubber and the Rubber Industry’! He seemed to be staring appreciatively at the work of another person—the hardworking, painstaking person who had spent five years in Kuala Simur. Five years of self- discipline and orderliness, with the little rubber trees all in line across the hillside to typify a certain inner domestication of his own soul. He had liked the plantation work; it had given him grooves just when most of all he had wanted grooves. To save himself he had plunged into rubber-growing with a fervour that had startled everybody, especially poor William; he had worked, read, written, thought, and lived rubber for five years. And the result, by an ironic twist of fortune, had come to be two things he had never known before—a status and a private income.
He turned over a few letters. One from his publisher, enclosing a cheque for six months’ royalties and suggesting a small ‘popular’ book in a half-crown series to be called just ’Rubber’—something rather chatty and not too technical—could he do it?…It would be rather interesting to try, at any rate…A letter from Philippa, thanking him for his subscription to her slum children, and hoping he would manage a visit soon—he could come any time he liked and stay as long as he liked—“both Sybil and I are looking forward so much to seeing you again.”
He would never, in all probability, see either of them again.
A letter from a firm of enquiry agents in New York City, dated several months back and addressed to him in Paris: “With reference to your recent enquiry, we regret that up to the present we have found it impossible to obtain any information. We are, however, continuing to investigate, and will report to you immediately should any development occur.”
Another letter, some weeks later: “Re Mary Denver, we are at last able to report progress. It appears that the child was adopted by a family named Consett, of Red Springs, Colorado, middle-class people of English descent, moderately well-off. Mr. Consett died in 1927. We have had difficulty in tracing the rest of the family since then. They left Red Springs, and are believed to have gone to Philadelphia. We are continuing our enquiries.” A third letter, dated three weeks back:
“We are now able to inform you that Mrs. Consett and daughter crossed the Atlantic in November of last year and spent Christmas at Algiers. Our European representative, to whom we have cabled instructions, will take the matter in hand as from there.” A fourth letter, from this European representative, conveying the information that the Consetts had left Algiers with the intention of touring in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Pretty vague, that, but a fifth letter had narrowed it down to ‘England and Ireland,’ and a sixth letter—the one that had arrived only the day before—had stated, with admirable definiteness: “I understand that Mrs. and Miss Consett left Stratford-on-Avon on Tuesday last and crossed to Ireland. They are now believed to be staying at the Shelburne Hotel, Dublin.”
He gathered the letters into a pile and took them into the dining-car with him when he went to lunch. He was on the right-hand side of the train, whence he could see
the North Wales coast, blue sea and sandy shore, streaming past the window like a cinema-film. Crowds of holiday-makers, pierrot entertainers, bathers bobbing up and down in the water, a sudden jangle of goods-yard, a station, a tunnel, the sea and shore again, deserted for an odd half-mile or so; then bungalows, boardinghouses, a promenade, a bandstand, bathing-huts, crowds, a jangle of goods-yard, a station—on, on, beyond the soup to the fish and the underdone roast beef of that very English and mediocre train-lunch.
He arrived in Dublin at seven that night, and drove straight to the Shelburne. The Consetts, he learned from the hotel porter, had gone on to Killarney two days before. “Americans, sir. See Killarney and die—you know the kind of thing? After that, I expect they’ll be rushing to kiss the Blarney Stone.”
He stayed at the Shelburne for the night and caught the morning express to Killarney. The porter at the Shelburne had given him the names of some of the more likely hotels, and it was easy to drive from one to another making enquiries. At a third asking he discovered that the Consetts had left that morning for Carrigole, Co. Cork, where they were almost bound to be staying at Roone’s Hotel.
There was no railway to Carrigole, so he hired a car to drive him the forty-odd miles over the hills. It was a marvellous summer afternoon, just beginning to fade into the soft glow of evening; by the time he reached the top of the pass and the driver pointed out Carrigole harbour in the distance, all the world seemed melting into a rarefied purple dusk. After the metropolitan bustle of Dublin and the stage-Irishry of Killarney, this, he felt, was the real Ireland, and immediately, in a way he hardly understood, he felt kinship with it. Successive days of travel had increased his fatigue, but the calm, tranquil mountain-air was uplifting him, giving him satisfaction, almost buoyancy.
It was dark when he reached Roone’s, and the yellow oil-lamps were lit in the tiled hall and under the built-out verandah. Somehow by instinct, as he took his first step into that cool interior, lie knew that he would have to go no further, and for that reason he did not ask about the Consetts when he booked a room. All that would come later; he must give himself the pleasure of doing everything sweetly and with due proportion. “May I have dinner?” he enquired, and was directed to a room whose windows, ranging from floor to ceiling along one side, showed the still darkly glowing harbour with the mountains brooding over it as in some ancient, kindly conspiracy.