And Now Good-bye by James Hilton

adjoined the surgery.
“Straight through—you know the way,” he directed, switching
on a light. The unlovely room faced them with its stiff array of
straight-backed chairs and table of ancient magazines. Ringwood passed
through into the surgery beyond. It was a crowded, glass-roofed apartment,
not unlike a greenhouse, full of the usual smell of drugs and india-rubber,
and lined with shelves of books, bottles, and the accumulated litter of three
decades in Browdley. It was extraordinary, though true, that amidst this
confusion Ringwood always did know exactly where everything was.
    “Now,” said the doctor, “sit down and make yourself
comfortable.”
    He put Howat in a big leather chair that could be made to tilt
backwards—the chair in which, before the days of specialised dentistry,
many a Browdley sufferer had lost an aching tooth. Then he lit the gas-fire
and wandered away into the small dispensary that opened off the surgery at
the further end. He kept shouting out from this inner room, his words
punctuated with the clink of bottles and glasses.
    “Yes, I was wrong about the old girl after all, Freemantle—you
win that bob. Could have sworn she’d peg out during the
night—never was more surprised than when I saw her perking up in bed at
ten o’clock this morning. They’ll have to shoot her, that’s
all…Seriously, though, her heart’s pretty dicky—take her off
sudden one of these days. I wouldn’t mind betting all the money
I’ve got that you and I’ll be in at the kill before this time
next month.”
    Howat half-smiled; Ringwood’s flippant phrases sometimes shocked,
but never exactly offended him. He said, after a pause: “You know,
Ringwood, I often envy you doctors. There’s something so downright
about the things you do for people. We parsons have to grope about wondering
what we can do. You just go and do it. To-night, for instance, you
took that woman’s pulse and temperature in about a
minute—probably a far more useful service than I managed to perform in
the whole hour and a half I was there with her.”
    “Oh, I don’t know—it depends a lot on what you did do.
Chattered, I suppose—I noticed her heart was a bit jerkier after it. If
she dies in the night I shall put on the certificate ‘Talked to death
by a parson.’ Can’t think what you found to say to her all that
time, I must admit.”
    “Well, for one thing, I prayed.” He said that in a queerly
troubled voice, and added: “Does that sound to you a rather odd
confession?”
    “Not at all. After all, it’s in your line of business, just as
I tap chests and look at tongues.”
    “I wonder if it really is quite the same sort of thing as
that.”
    “Sometimes, Freemantle, I think you wonder a damn sight too
much.” Ringwood came bounding out of the dispensary with a tumbler of
whisky and water in one hand and a half-filled medicine-glass in the other.
The latter he held out to Howat. “Here, drink this. You need
it—it’s only a pick-me-up—quite harmless and nonalcoholic.
Don’t think I haven’t noticed the state you’ve been getting
yourself into these last few months.”
    Howat took the glass. “Thanks, Ringwood—though I’m not
sure I do need it. Touch of nerves, perhaps. A few rather troublesome things
have been happening lately. Last night, for instance, I had a worrying kind
of interview with the chapel secretary, Garland.”
    “Oh, Garland the draper?—yes, I know him. Little chap with
black moustaches—looks rather like a seedy croupier at a fifth- rate
casino. Well, what was all the fuss over? They say, by the way, his
daughter’s hopped it—maybe the old boy was feeling a bit peeved
over that when you saw him.”
    “It was about that—that we had the—the argument,”
said Howat. Then he told Ringwood briefly all the details. Ringwood listened
intently, perching himself on the edge of the desk and sipping whisky from
time to time. At the