And Now Good-bye by James Hilton — Read

He slept rather well (it might have been, he guessed, that Ringwood's pick-me-up had contained something to make him do so) and woke up feeling considerably refreshed; then, after breakfast, a rare mood seized him, and for the first time for many months he did not spend his allotted morning hours in the study. Instead he adjourned to the room on the opposite side of the lobby--the parlour, a chilly bay-windowed apartment used only on fairly infrequent occasions, and furnished in a style which future period connoisseurs will perhaps extol as Edwardian. There was a litter of spindly chairs, a large-patterned and highly-coloured Axminster, and a good deal of poor-quality inlaid work and china in cabinets. The only object, however, which lured him to this unrewarding scene at nine o'clock on a November morning was the pianoforte--an upright German instrument, not very good in tone, but on the other hand not nearly as bad as its surroundings might have suggested. On and off since he got out of bed Howat had been thinking of that concert on Friday evening; he had already begun to feel a little excited about it, and excitement had put him in one of his periodic moods for what his wife called 'making up bits of tunes'. She could never see much point in the occupation, for although some of the tunes had occasionally won prizes in competitions, they were never 'printed,' as she said, nor did they seem to her at all attractive when Howat played them over to her. She also disliked the sound of improvising and experimentation on the piano, and complained that even in the bedroom she could hear it, and that it always gave her a headache. Howat, therefore, never devoted himself to his 'tunes while she was in the house, which meant that for years he had had very few opportunities of doing so at all. But this morning, Mrs. Freemantle, contrary to usual habit, had taken breakfast downstairs and had gone out immediately afterwards with Aunt Viney; there was a sale at a dress shop in a neighbouring town, and it was most important that she should arrive in time.

Howat, in that cold and unwelcoming room, was almost childishly happy with his music-paper and pencil. They revealed a part of him that few people ever saw; indeed, he kept it particularly to himself, because (for one reason) he did not wish his congregation to think he still had designs on their hymn-book. Years before, when he had first arrived in Browdley, there had been a tremendous row over that; he had nourished great visions of making the chapel a centre of musical culture (why, he had argued, should that sort of thing be left entirely to the Anglicans and Romans?) and had incautiously let it be known that he did not consider certain old and well-known revivalist hymn-tunes to be musically first-rate. The resulting upheaval, which he had barely managed to live down, had convinced him that his more important work would be sadly hampered if he allowed himself to be sidetracked into the position of a musical Savonarola; so thenceforward he had scrupulously left all questions of hymns and anthems to the organist, a local insurance-agent, whose dream was to play the "Poet and Peasant" overture on a three-manual instrument that had a Vox Humana stop.