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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