The Long Farewell Read Online Free PDF Page A

answer: that I’ve found a tolerably harmless way of keeping myself out of the pub. Of the pub and – well – other things in that general area. But the devil of it is, you know, that it may let a chap down. A chap may feel he’s been missing things.’ Packford shook his head; he seemed suddenly depressed. ‘And get into a scrape, eh? Rebound, as they say.’
    ‘No doubt.’ Appleby was puzzled before this somewhat incoherent vein.
    ‘And, of course, it’s simply chance that takes one in the first place into one manner of life rather than another. And one looks back, and imagines one might have chosen better – whereas, really and truly, choice didn’t enter into the matter. What do you think?’
    Appleby thought only that the hour was too advanced to enter upon a discussion of the mildly perplexing problem of necessity and free will. ‘What sort of career,’ he asked rather at random, ‘would you now fancy entering upon, supposing you were thirty years younger?’
    ‘Busting atoms, probably. Or perhaps being a professional amorist. You remember the name of Edward Dowden? Not a bad Shakespeare critic, in an old-fashioned way. Well, after a long life of blameless scholarship, he confessed that what he would really have liked to be was the lover of many women. A bit frightening, wouldn’t you say?’
    ‘Possibly so. And if he’d put in that long lifetime simply pursuing wenches, he’d no doubt have looked back and said his only true ambition had been to be a great scholar.’
    ‘I suppose there’s a happy mean.’ Packford laughed again – but this time it was a short nervous laugh that seemed unlike him. ‘But these desires are all diseases, damn them. Scholarship – that’s a disease. Browning’s Grammarian died of it. And sex – that’s a disease too. Either can make an idiot of you, so that you positively stare at yourself.’
    They were standing beside Appleby’s car, so that there was now a distinct awkwardness in parting upon this obscurely confessional note. For it was certainly that. Packford, who seemed to have been living for some time in a very solitary way, had been prompted to reveal some present preoccupation in a manner that he would no doubt later regret. ‘I must step on it,’ Appleby said, ‘or Judith will be in Verona hours before me.’
    ‘And that wouldn’t do? I see you’re the experienced married man. I’ve sometimes thought of having a shot at it. But here I am – finding Giuseppina and Gino quite enough to cope with.’
    ‘I suppose you may spring a surprise on us one day. It’s your habit, after all.’ Appleby shook hands, and climbed into the car. It was a rather queerly abrupt leave-taking – the more so because of the darkness into which his host immediately vanished. Appleby had a single brief impression of him, lumbering rapidly back to his summer-house, as if he had a tryst in it.
    He was never to see Lewis Packford alive again.

 
     
II
    Development at Urchins
     
    Farewell, farewell… Why did I marry?
     
    — Othello

 
     
1
     
    It was over Lewis Packford’s open grave that Appleby first became aware of Mr Rood. One could tell at once – perhaps simply by the way he held his silk hat – that Mr Rood was an old hand at funerals. Indeed, if he hadn’t so obviously belonged to the higher professional classes it would have been reasonable to suppose that he was in charge of the lay and technical part of the proceedings.
    It was only later, of course, that Appleby learnt his name; and the thing mightn’t have happened as it did but for the fact that it came on to rain hard. The heavy drops could be heard plonking on the coffin with a small hollow sound – as if the undertakers had inadvertently provided something a size too large even for Packford’s enormous bulk. There was scarcely, it seemed to Appleby, a soul present who had any substantial occasion for private grief. And this, together with the weather, imported a certain element of mere