James Hilton: Collected Novels (74 page)

“You mean you had no plans for—the evening?”

“Well—er—nothing special.”

“Then I wonder—if you
really
have nothing else to do—it would give me great pleasure if you’d both dine with me—”

It was Paula who answered, in the instant way in which she decided everything: “Why, yes, we’d be glad.”

The parson wrinkled another smile and began fumbling his way through a passage running by the side of the Mission building into an unkempt garden; beyond it stood a large ugly soot-black three-story house. He unlocked the front door, admitting them into a lofty hallway totally unfurnished down to the bare boards of the floor. “I don’t think names are at all important,” he said, ushering them further into a room, “but mine is Blampied.”

“Smith,” said Paula.

He offered them chairs, following their glances round the room with a perverse pride. “Isn’t this a terrible house? It was built in 1846, when parsons were supposed to live in style. Twenty rooms—I only use five. Kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, this, and my housekeeper’s. This is the best. We live in squalor punctuated by small simple meals of excellent quality—onion soup tonight, if you happen to like it.”

Meanwhile an elderly gaunt-faced woman was preparing the table, showing neither surprise nor any other emotion at the presence of guests, and needing no instructions from the parson. Presently the three were sitting down before big bowls of the soup; there was nothing else but cheese, he warned them, but they could have more soup if they wanted. It was so good that they did, and asked for it with enthusiasm. Meanwhile the parson chattered on, a cordial increasingly inquisitive host.

“You two people have much further to go?”

Smith said: “No, not very far.”

“You live here in London?”

“Er … yes.”

“Don’t let me keep you, but don’t go till you want to.”

She said: “Oh, there’s plenty of time.” It was as if she were reluctant to leave.

“Yes, the buses and trams run late. I expect you can get to your home that way.”

“I—I think so.”

“You only
think
so?”

“Matter of fact, we haven’t got a home—yet. We’ve got to look for one.”

Smith flashed her a warning glance, but she went on: “I don’t suppose it’ll be very hard.”

The parson’s curiosity seemed to become less rather than more as he responded: “If it’s the slightest help to you, please stay here for the night. My housekeeper can find you bedding, and there are fifteen rooms to choose from.”

“That’s awfully kind of you, but—”

“Just as you please, of course. Only I thought your husband looked tired.”

“He’s not my husband—yet.”

The parson smiled. “To be sure … but after all—fifteen rooms? Enough—one would think.”

Then suddenly she said: “Maybe, as you’ve got a sense of humor, you can help us. … We want to get married, but it has to be quiet—we don’t want anyone to know—”

“Runaway?”

“Yes, that’s it … maybe you know of a registry office somewhere near?”

“There’s an office nearly across the street, but for sheer quietness, why don’t you allow me to marry you in my own church? Hardly anyone ever comes to any of the services—it would be we most unnoticed marriage I could possibly imagine. …”

So they were married at St. Clement’s, Vale Street, London, N.W., and as they left the church after the ceremony newsboys were racing down we street offering extra editions—“Peace Treaty Signed at Versailles.” It was June 28, 1919. The bridegroom bought one of the papers on his way with his bride to their home further along Vale Street—a tall Victorian house that possessed the initial advantage of being owned by a deaf old woman who lived in the basement and offered the higher floors for rent. She had agreed to let them have two big furnished rooms, plus bath and kitchenette, for a pound a week; there was also an oblong walled garden they could share with other tenants, but of course they never did. After several weeks of living in the house they still hadn’t said more than “Good morning” and “Good evening” to the people who occupied the floors above and below; and an especially odd thing was that the man who lived above was a policeman.

But they were happy. It was strange, in a way; they had hardly any money and so far no jobs, and they were half scared of every knock on the door, because a daily visit to the newsroom of the free library revealed that the police were still probing what had already attained some small renown as “the Fulverton case.” The victim was said to be “still improving,” but that began to seem almost ominous, since anything short of recovery showed how seriously he had been hurt; and one morning there was an even worse sound in the news item: “Hospital authorities at Fulverton report no change in the condition of Thomas Atwill, who is still suffering from head injuries as a result of an assault by an unknown man under a railway viaduct three weeks ago.”

The unknown man felt sincere remorse over the fate of the innocent Atwill, but even that could not dim the joys of a partnership that was half fun, half fear, so that every falling asleep was like an unspoken prayer for safety and every waking up a miracle of survival. Sometimes they would hear the policeman clumping down the stairs and back again in his heavy boots, and she would run to the window to look out and come back saying—“It’s all right, Smithy—it’s there—go to sleep.” That was a joke between them, because they had once agreed that nothing in the world could be more reassuring than a London policeman, half-dressed, going downstairs at midnight to put out an empty milk bottle on a front doorstep—a symbol that no harm would come, that God was somewhere over the policeman’s roof and theirs.

They felt their chief danger might come from a chance recognition in the streets, and for this reason they avoided the better-known parts of London where country visitors might be expected to sight-see; they also kept indoors most of the day, discovering almost with surprise how quickly the time passed and how little the restrictions bothered them, provided they were together. They would do most of their shopping late at night, economy combining then with prudence, for just before closing time in those unfashionable districts the butcher and greengrocer and fishmonger would sell off cheap what was left of their day’s supplies. While she was bargaining Smith would often stop to listen to some street-corner orator haranguing the multitude—the multitude consisting, as a rule, of a few apathetic onlookers, workingmen with one hand round the bowl of a pipe and the other in a trouser pocket. “The typical English attitude,” Blampied commented afterwards, “good-humored, tolerant, vaguely skeptical—skeptical just as much of the truth as of lies. What a lot it will take to move men like that, but when they
do
move—they ever move—what a cataclysm!”

They were beginning to feel a friendly intimacy with the parson, all the friendlier because his attitude was such a quaint mixture of particular inquisitiveness and general incuriosity. He could put the most intimate questions—once he asked: “Are you and your wife so united that you could use the same toothbrush?” Yet he never mentioned or fished for information about Smith’s background or parentage, until one day, when they were having dinner with him as they had come to do rather often, he suddenly asked: “What shall I say if somebody traces you here and questions me about you?”

They stared at him with such disconcerted blankness that he added: “Didn’t you say it was a runaway marriage?”

They knew him so well by then that they did not particularly mind having betrayed themselves by the startled stare; and the fact that his later remark gave them an easy cue for evasion tempted them all the more to tell him nothing but the truth. Paula looked across the table to Smith, caught and exchanged a glance, then began: “Yes, it was certainly runaway, but probably not the kind you’re imagining. We aren’t likely to be troubled by objecting parents. Mine are both dead, and his are …” She looked again at Smith.

Blampied nodded, as if satisfied, but Smith addressed him with a smile: “There wouldn’t be much point in deceiving you, would there?”

“Depends what you want me to do. If you want me to lie about you to others, at least you must tell me the truth about yourself.”

“That sounds a rather unusual standpoint—for a clergyman.”

“Perhaps I’m a rather unusual clergyman.”

“Well, here’s an unusual story.”

“Good … go ahead.”

Smith then spoke briefly of his war injury and resultant lack of memory. He called it a
lack
now, not
loss
—“because I don’t
feel
any loss. It doesn’t really bother me any more—there are days and nights when I never even think about it … but there it is, all the same. Perhaps I ought to have told you when you married us.”

“Why?”

“Well, signing my name in the register. Smith may not be the true one.”

The parson, sitting at the head of the table, half rose and extended his arms over their shoulders. “But it was
you
I married,” he said, “not your names.”

“So it doesn’t matter?”

“Not a bit. And it’s perfectly legal and binding. Is that all you have on your conscience?”

“Not quite all.” Encouraged by a further look from Paula, Smith went on to relate the incongruous mishap to Thomas Atwill under the railway viaduct. Blampied listened with increasing interest; once or twice his face twisted into a smile; they were so accustomed to his taking the oddest possible view of things that it did not surprise, although it considerably relieved them when at the end of the recital he began to laugh. “It’s the idea of a
railway company
having a right of way that tickles me! Know anything about rights of way?”

This seemed a side issue, but most of Blampied’s conversations avoided anything in the direct line of argument. Smith said no, not very much.

“They’re trying to close them all over England. You must come with me sometime on one of my crusades. I make a nuisance of myself on village greens every now and again—just by way of a holiday from London. I inform the villagers of their ancient heritage—the commons and the pastures and the paths across the fields that the landlords have stolen and will go on stealing, whenever they get the chance. A clerical predecessor of mine, John Ball by name, made a similar nuisance of himself six hundred years ago or thereabouts—but I think he must have been much more of an oratorical spellbinder.” He added, coming back to the point, “So
that’s
why you two children are in hiding? You’re afraid that if anything should happen to Thomas Atwill—”

“Oh, he’ll get better all right,” Paula intervened hastily, “but even when he does it could be troublesome if we were traced because—because—” She looked across the table, adding: “We’ve told you so much we may as well finish—don’t you think so, Smithy?”

Smith said: “I mentioned that the war injury affected my memory. It also—at one time—had other effects. They sent me to Melbury—the big hospital for shell-shock cases. I was on their dangerous list.”

“You mean liable to die?”

“Well no—liable to live—but dangerously.”

Again Blampied laughed. “I see. I really begin to see.”

They both joined him in laughing, glad to ease their embarrassment by so doing. Then the parson came behind Smith, putting his arm affectionately round the young man’s shoulders. “You needn’t worry. The reputation of crank and misfit gives me a certain freedom of reply. If, for instance, I’m asked if I know anyone named Smith, and I say I never heard the name before, it’ll merely give rise to an extra legend. …”

The more they came to know Blampied the more they realized his remarkableness and the less they felt they completely understood him. At their first meeting in the train he had seemed just the timid, unworldly parson of fiction, almost of caricature, bearing his cross in the form of Mission boys he could not control and summer outings he must have loathed. Later he showed himself more perplexingly as a mixture of ascetic and gourmet—only onion soup for dinner, but how good it had to be. Later still, when he described “crusades” that had sometimes led to rough-and-tumble fights on village greens and once at least to his own imprisonment, he almost became the conventionally unconventional “fighting parson.” And beyond that, but by no means finally, there was the visionary, the mystic. It was not easy to analyze or estimate the sum total, and many persons with whom he came into contact had long since given up the task as either hopeless or unprofitable. But one could not meet and talk to him for ten minutes, in any one of his moods, without an impression of stature—mental, moral, psychic, or perhaps some blending of all three. And he had also (as Smith found out when he came to work for him) an astoundingly various collection of intimate friends.

Most of these friends lived abroad, so that occasions for personal meetings were rare; but he corresponded, regularly and voluminously, and it was this task that had lately made him aware of failing eyesight, and so of the need for someone to help him with it. Smith gladly volunteered, and it became a habit that two or three mornings a week Blampied would dictate slowly while the other took down in a longhand that soon developed into a private shorthand, marked by curious abbreviations and a general meaninglessness to the outsider. Afterwards, at his leisure, Smith would rewrite or type the letters in full. They went to most of the corners of the world—a hotelkeeper in Yokohama, a university professor in Idaho, a train conductor on the Orient Express, an Austrian soldier lying wounded in a hospital in Salzburg, an editor in Liverpool, a rubber planter in Johore, a woman head of an advertising agency in Brisbane … these were a few out of the twenty-odd. All, it appeared, were people whom Blampied had met at one time or another. “I used to travel a good deal, before the war put an end to it, and now, I fear, I have neither the zest nor the money to resume. But for a few shillings’ worth of stamps each week, I can almost achieve the same object. … This morning, for instance, I shall write to M’sieur Gaston Auriac, Rue Henri Quatre, Antananarivo, Madagascar. We met only once—on a steamer between Capetown and Durban, but we talked for long enough to make the discovery of each other. Maybe you were surprised when I asked you whether you and Paula could use the same toothbrush? You see I have never married, so I don’t know whether physical oneness goes as far as that—but I do know that in the realm of mental and spiritual things there can be a similar oneness—the knowledge that yours and mine are no longer yours and mine, but
ours
for every possible use. And this awareness, once acknowledged by both parties, lasts forever. Gaston and I may disagree about this and that, but because our thought processes are in the same world, there’s a sense in which we can use each other’s minds. We’re both impervious to sentimentality and mob optimism, and both of us also, if I may so express it, are accustomed to think proudly. … We found that but during our three-hour talk seven years ago, and though we have never met since, we both know that it must still be true, despite all the changes that have taken place in the world about us. … Just now, we’re in the midst of an argument as to the right way to treat Germany now the war’s over. Gaston thinks the Allied armies should have pushed on to Berlin, even at the cost of an extra year of fighting, and men have broken Germany into fragments, acting with ruthless severity on the lines of
delenda est Carthago. …
I, on the other hand, would have offered terms of simply astounding generosity—lifting the blockade the day after the Armistice, forbearing to ask for meaningless and uncollectable reparations, and inviting all the defeated countries into an immediate conference on equal terms to discuss the disarmament and rehabilitation of Europe. As you can imagine, we’re enjoying as violent a discussion as the somewhat intermittent mails to Madagascar will permit. But the point is: both of us are still thinking proudly. Gaston is no frenzied sadist wishing to destroy for the sake of destroying; I am no milk-and-water humanitarian yearning over a defeated enemy merely because he is defeated and has been an enemy. Both of us have the same aim in view—the cure of the thousand-year-old European disease; both methods have succeeded at various times throughout history—his, I admit, more often than mine. Either might succeed today. But what will
not
succeed, and what we both know will not succeed, is the unhappy mean between the two—the halfway compromise between sentiment and vengeance—the policy of
safe
men playing for
safety?
He added, smiling: “So you see, Mr. Smith, why it did not shock me the other day to hear that you had been classed at one time as a dangerous man. All my friends are dangerous men.”