A Clergyman's Daughter
if he had ever possessed one, had perished many years ago. Perhaps
it had been killed by overwork in a lifetime of squalid affairs
with women.
For an hour, perhaps, Dorothy was ill at ease, but after that the
train reached Ipswich, where it stopped for a quarter of an hour,
and there was the diversion of going to the refreshment room for a
cup of tea. For the last twenty miles of the journey they talked
quite amicably. Mr Warburton did not refer again to his proposal
of marriage, but as the train neared Knype Hill he returned, less
seriously than before, to the question of Dorothy's future.
'So you really propose', he said 'to go back to your parish work?
"The trivial round, the common task?" Mrs Pither's rheumatism and
Mrs Lewin's corn-plaster and all the rest of it? The prospect
doesn't dismay you?'
'I don't know--sometimes it does. But I expect it'll be all right
once I'm back at work. I've got the habit, you see.'
'And you really feel equal to years of calculated hypocrisy? For
that's what it amounts to, you know. Not afraid of the cat getting
out of the bag? Quite sure you won't find yourself teaching the
Sunday School kids to say the Lord's Prayer backwards, or reading
Gibbon's fifteenth chapter to the Mothers' Union instead of Gene
Stratton Porter?'
'I don't think so. Because, you see, I do feel that that kind of
work, even if it means saying prayers that one doesn't believe in,
and even if it means teaching children things that one doesn't
always think are true--I do feel that in a way it's useful.'
'Useful?' said Mr Warburton distastefully. 'You're a little too
fond of that depressing word "useful". Hypertrophy of the sense of
duty--that's what's the matter with you. Now, to me, it seems the
merest common sense to have a bit of fun while the going's good.'
'That's just hedonism,' Dorothy objected.
'My dear child, can you show me a philosophy of life that isn't
hedonism? Your verminous Christian saints are the biggest hedonists
of all. They're out for an eternity of bliss, whereas we poor
sinners don't hope for more than a few years of it. Ultimately
we're all trying for a bit of fun; but some people take it in such
perverted forms. Your notion of fun seems to be massaging Mrs
Pither's legs.'
'It's not that exactly, but--oh! somehow I can't explain!'
What she would have said was that though her faith had left her,
she had not changed, could not change, did not want to change, the
spiritual background of her mind; that her cosmos, though now it
seemed to her empty and meaningless, was still in a sense the
Christian cosmos; that the Christian way of life was still the way
that must come naturally to her. But she could not put this into
words, and felt that if she tried to do so he would probably begin
making fun of her. So she concluded lamely:
'Somehow I feel that it's better for me to go on as I was before.'
'EXACTLY the same as before? The whole bill of fare? The Girl
Guides, the Mothers' Union, the Band of Hope, the Companionship of
Marriage, parish visiting and Sunday School teaching, Holy
Communion twice a week and here we go round the doxology-bush,
chanting Gregorian plain-song? You're quite certain you can manage
it?'
Dorothy smiled in spite of herself. 'Not plain-song. Father
doesn't like it.'
'And you think that, except for your inner thoughts, your life will
be precisely what it was before you lost your faith? There will be
NO change in your habits?'
Dorothy thought. Yes, there WOULD be changes in her habits; but
most of them would be secret ones. The memory of the disciplinary
pin crossed her mind. It had always been a secret from everyone
except herself and she decided not to mention it.
'Well,' she said finally, 'perhaps at Holy Communion I shall kneel
down on Miss Mayfill's right instead of on her left.'
2
A week had gone by.
Dorothy rode up the hill from the town and wheeled her bicycle in
at the Rectory gate. It was a fine evening, clear and cold, and
the sun, unclouded, was sinking in remote, greenish skies. Dorothy
noticed that the ash tree by the gate was in bloom, with clotted
dark red blossoms that looked like festerings from a wound.
She was rather tired. She had had a busy week of it, what with
visiting all the women on her list in turn and trying to get the
parish affairs into some kind of order again. Everything was in a
fearful mess after her absence. The church was dirty beyond all
belief--in fact, Dorothy had had to spend the best part of a day
cleaning up with scrubbing-brushes, broom and dustpan, and the beds
of 'mouse dirts' that she had found behind the organ made her wince
when she thought of them. (The reason why the mice came there was
because Georgie Frew, the organ-blower, WOULD bring penny packets
of biscuits into church and eat them during the sermon.) All the
Church associations had been neglected, with the result that the
Band of Hope and the Companionship of Marriage had now given up the
ghost, Sunday School attendance had dropped by half, and there was
internecine warfare going on in the Mothers' Union because of some
tactless remark that Miss Foote had made. The belfry was in a
worse state than ever. The parish magazine had not been delivered
regularly and the money for it had not been collected. None of the
accounts of the Church Funds had been properly kept up, and there
was nineteen shillings unaccounted for in all, and even the parish
registers were in a muddle--and so on and so on, ad infinitum. The
Rector had let everything slide.
Dorothy had been up to her eyes in work from the moment of reaching
home. Indeed, things had slipped back into their old routine with
astonishing swiftness. It was as though it had been only yesterday
that she had gone away. Now that the scandal had blown over, her
return to Knype Hill had aroused very little curiosity. Some of
the women on her visiting list, particularly Mrs Pither, were
genuinely glad to see her back, and Victor Stone, perhaps, seemed
just a little ashamed of having temporarily believed Mrs Semprill's
libel; but he soon forgot it in recounting to Dorothy his latest
triumph in the Church Times. Various of the coffee-ladies, of
course, had stopped Dorothy in the street with 'My dear, how VERY
nice to see you back again! You HAVE been away a long time! And
you know, dear, we all thought it such a SHAME when that horrible
woman was going round telling those stories about you. But I do
hope you'll understand, dear, that whatever anyone else may have
thought, I never believed a word of them', etc., etc., etc. But
nobody had asked her the uncomfortable questions that she had been
fearing. 'I've been teaching in a school near London' had
satisfied everyone; they had not even asked her the name of the
school. Never, she saw, would she have to confess that she had
slept in Trafalga
r Square and been arrested for begging. The fact
is that people who live in small country towns have only a very dim
conception of anything that happens more than ten miles from their
own front door. The world outside is a terra incognita, inhabited,
no doubt, by dragons and anthropophagi, but not particularly
interesting.
Even Dorothy's father had greeted her as though she had only been
away for the week-end. He was in his study when she arrived,
musingly smoking his pipe in front of the grandfather clock, whose
glass, smashed by the charwoman's broom-handle four months ago, was
still unmended. As Dorothy came into the room he took his pipe out
of his mouth and put it away in his pocket with an absent-minded,
old-mannish movement. He looked a great deal older, Dorothy
thought.
'So here you are at last,' he said. 'Did you have a good journey?'
Dorothy put her arms round his neck and touched his silver-pale
cheek with her lips. As she disengaged herself he patted her
shoulder with a just perceptible trace more affection than usual.
'What made you take it into your head to run away like that?' he
said.
'I told you, Father--I lost my memory.'
'Hm,' said the Rector; and Dorothy saw that he did not believe her,
never would believe her, and that on many and many a future
occasion, when he was in a less agreeable mood than at present,
that escapade would be brought up against her. 'Well,' he added,
'when you've taken your bag upstairs, just bring your typewriter
down here, would you? I want you to type out my sermon.'
Not much that was of interest had happened in the town. Ye Olde
Tea Shoppe was enlarging its premises, to the further disfigurement
of the High Street. Mrs Pither's rheumatism was better (thanks to
the angelica tea, no doubt), but Mr Pither had 'been under the
doctor' and they were afraid he had stone in the bladder. Mr
Blifil-Gordon was now in Parliament, a docile deadhead on the back
benches of the Conservative Party. Old Mr Tombs had died just
after Christmas, and Miss Foote had taken over seven of his cats
and made heroic efforts to find homes for the others. Eva Twiss,
the niece of Mr Twiss the ironmonger, had had an illegitimate baby,
which had died. Proggett had dug the kitchen garden and sowed a
few seeds, and the broad beans and the first peas were just
showing. The shop-debts had begun to mount up again after the
creditors' meeting, and there was six pounds owing to Cargill.
Victor Stone had had a controversy with Professor Coulton in the
Church Times, about the Holy Inquisition, and utterly routed him.
Ellen's eczema had been very bad all the winter. Walph Blifil-
Gordon had had two poems accepted by the London Mercury.
Dorothy went into the conservatory. She had got a big job on hand--
costumes for a pageant that the schoolchildren were going to have
on St George's Day, in aid of the organ fund. Not a penny had been
paid towards the organ during the past eight months, and it was
perhaps as well that the Rector always threw the organ-people's
bills away unopened, for their tone was growing more and more
sulphurous. Dorothy had racked her brains for a way of raising
some money, and finally decided on a historical pageant, beginning
with Julius Caesar and ending with the Duke of Wellington. They
might raise two pounds by a pageant, she thought--with luck and a
fine day, they might even raise three pounds!
She looked round the conservatory. She had hardly been in here
since coming home, and evidently nothing had been touched during
her absence. Her things were lying just as she had left them; but
the dust was thick on everything. Her sewing-machine was on the
table amid the old familiar litter of scraps of cloth, sheets of
brown paper, cotton-reels and pots of paint, and though the needle
had rusted, the thread was still in it. And, yes! there were the
jackboots that she had been making the night she went away. She
picked one of them up and looked at it. Something stirred in her
heart. Yes, say what you like, they WERE good jackboots! What a
pity they had never been used! However, they would come in useful
for the pageant. For Charles II, perhaps--or, no, better not have
Charles II; have Oliver Cromwell instead; because if you had Oliver
Cromwell you wouldn't have to make him a wig.
Dorothy lighted the oilstove, found her scissors and two sheets of
brown paper, and sat down. There was a mountain of clothes to be
made. Better start off with Julius Caesar's breastplate, she
thought. It was always that wretched armour that made all the
trouble! What did a Roman soldier's armour look like? Dorothy
made an effort, and called to mind the statue of some idealized
curly-bearded emperor in the Roman Room at the British Museum. You
might make a sort of rough breastplate out of glue and brown paper,
and glue narrow strips of paper across it to represent the plates
of the armour, and then silver them over. No helmet to make, thank
goodness! Julius Caesar always wore a laurel wreath--ashamed of
his baldness, no doubt, like Mr Warburton. But what about greaves?
Did they wear greaves in Julius Caesar's time? And boots? Was a
caligum a boot or a sandal?
After a few moments she stopped with the shears resting on her
knee. A thought which had been haunting her like some inexorcizable
ghost at every unoccupied moment during the past week had returned
once more to distract her. It was the thought of what Mr Warburton
had said to her in the train--of what her life was going to be like
hereafter, unmarried and without money.
It was not that she was in any doubt about the external facts of
her future. She could see it all quite clearly before her. Ten
years, perhaps, as unsalaried curate, and then back to school-
teaching. Not necessarily in quite such a school as Mrs Creevy's--
no doubt she could do something rather better for herself than
that--but at least in some more or less shabby, more or less
prison-like school; or perhaps in some even bleaker, even less
human kind of drudgery. Whatever happened, at the very best, she
had got to face the destiny that is common to all lonely and
penniless women. 'The Old Maids of Old England', as somebody
called them. She was twenty-eight--just old enough to enter their
ranks.
But it didn't matter, it didn't matter! That was the thing that
you could never drive into the heads of the Mr Warburtons of this
world, not if you talked to them for a thousand years; that mere
outward things like poverty and drudgery, and even loneliness,
don't matter in themselves. It is the things that happen in your
heart that matter. For just a moment--an evil moment--while Mr
Warburton was talking to her in the train, she had known the fear
of poverty. But she had mastered it; it was not a thing worth
worrying about. It was not because of THAT that she had got to
stiffen her courage and remake t
he whole structure of her mind.
No, it was something far more fundamental; it was the deadly
emptiness that she had discovered at the heart of things. She
thought of how a year ago she had sat in this chair, with these
scissors in her hand, doing precisely what she was doing now; and
yet it was as though then and now she had been two different
beings. Where had she gone, that well-meaning, ridiculous girl who
had prayed ecstatically in summer-scented fields and pricked her
arm as a punishment for sacrilegious thoughts? And where is any of
ourselves of even a year ago? And yet after all--and here lay the
trouble--she WAS the same girl. Beliefs change, thoughts change,
but there is some inner part of the soul that does not change.
Faith vanishes, but the need for faith remains the same as before.
And given only faith, how can anything else matter? How can
anything dismay you if only there is some purpose in the world
which you can serve, and which, while serving it, you can
understand? Your whole life is illumined by the sense of purpose.
There is no weariness in your heart, no doubts, no feeling of
futility, no Baudelairean ennui waiting for unguarded hours. Every
act is significant, every moment sanctified, woven by faith as into
a pattern, a fabric of never-ending joy.
She began to meditate upon the nature of life. You emerged from
the womb, you lived sixty or seventy years, and then you died and
rotted. And in every detail of your life, if no ultimate purpose
redeemed it, there was a quality of greyness, of desolation, that
could never be described, but which you could feel like a physical
pang at your heart. Life, if the grave really ends it, is
monstrous and dreadful. No use trying to argue it away. Think of
life as it really is, think of the DETAILS of life; and then think
that there is no meaning in it, no purpose, no goal except the
grave. Surely only fools or self-deceivers, or those whose lives
are exceptionally fortunate, can face that thought without
flinching?
She shifted her position in her chair. But after all there must be
SOME meaning, SOME purpose in it all! The world cannot be an
accident. Everything that happens must have a cause--ultimately,
therefore, a purpose. Since you exist, God must have created you,
and since He created you a conscious being, He must be conscious.
The greater doesn't come out of the less. He created you, and He
will kill you, for His own purpose. But that purpose is inscrutable.
It is in the nature of things that you can never discover it, and
perhaps even if you did discover it you would be averse to it.
Your life and death, it may be, are a single note in the eternal
orchestra that plays for His diversion. And suppose you don't like
the tune? She thought of that dreadful unfrocked clergyman in
Trafalgar Square. Had she dreamed the things he said, or had he
really said them? 'Therefore with Demons and Archdemons and with
all the company of Hell'. But that was silly, really. For your not
liking the tune was also part of the tune.
Her mind struggled with the problem, while perceiving that there
was no solution. There was, she saw clearly, no possible
substitute for faith; no pagan acceptance of life as sufficient to
itself, no pantheistic cheer-up stuff, no pseudo-religion of
'progress' with visions of glittering Utopias and ant-heaps of
steel and concrete. It is all or nothing. Either life on earth is
a preparation for something greater and more lasting, or it is
meaningless, dark, and dreadful.
Dorothy started. A frizzling sound was coming from the glue-pot.
She had forgotten to put any water in the saucepan, and the glue
was beginning to burn. She took the saucepan, hastened to the
scullery sink to replenish it, then brought it back and put it on
the oilstove again. I simply MUST get that breastplate done before
supper! she thought. After Julius Caesar there was William the