They were talking—but indeed, Mr Warburton never failed to manoeuvre the conversation towards this subject—about the question of religious belief.
‘My dear Dorothy,’ he was saying argumentatively, as he walked up and down with one hand in his coat pocket and the other manipulating a Brazilian cigar. ‘My dear Dorothy, you don’t seriously mean to tell me that at your age—twenty-seven, I believe—and with your intelligence, you will retain your religious beliefs more or less in toto?’
‘Of course I do. You know I do.’
‘Oh, come, now! The whole bag of tricks? All that nonsense that you learned at your mother’s knee—surely you’re not going to pretend to me that you still believe in it? But of course you don’t! You can’t! You’re afraid to own up, that’s all it is. No need to worry about that here, you know. The Rural Dean’s wife isn’t listening, and I won’t give the show away.’
‘I don’t know what you mean by “all that nonsense”,’ began Dorothy, sitting up straighter in her chair, a little offended.
‘Well, let’s take an instance. Something particularly hard to swallow—Hell, for instance. Do you believe in Hell? When I say believe, mind you, I’m not asking whether you believe it in some milk and water metaphorical way like these Modernist bishops young Victor Stone gets so excited about. I mean do you believe in it literally? Do you believe in Hell as you believe in Australia?’
‘Yes, of course I do,’ said Dorothy, and she endeavoured to explain to him that the existence of Hell is much more real and permanent than the existence of Australia.
‘Hm,’ said Mr Warburton, unimpressed. ‘Very sound in its way, of course. But what always makes me so suspicious of you religious people is that you’re so deucedly cold-blooded about your beliefs. It shows a very poor imagination, to say the least of it. Here am I an infidel and blasphemer and neck deep in at least six out of the Seven Deadly, and obviously doomed to eternal torment. There’s no knowing that in an hour’s time I mayn’t be roasting in the hottest part of Hell. And yet you can sit there talking to me as calmly as though I’d nothing the matter with me. Now, if I’d merely got cancer or leprosy or some other bodily ailment, you’d be quite distressed about it—at least, I like to flatter myself that you would. Whereas, when I’m going to sizzle on the grid throughout eternity, you seem positively unconcerned about it.’
‘I never said you were going to Hell,’ said Dorothy somewhat uncomfortably, and wishing that the conversation would take a different turn. For the truth was, though she was not going to tell him so, that the point Mr Warburton had raised was one with which she herself had had certain difficulties. She did indeed believe in Hell, but she had never been able to persuade herself that anyone actually went there. She believed that Hell existed, but that it was empty. Uncertain of the orthodoxy of this belief, she preferred to keep it to herself. ‘It’s never certain that anyone is going to Hell,’ she said more firmly, feeling that here at least she was on sure ground.
‘What!’ said Mr Warburton, halting in mock surprise. ‘Surely you don’t mean to say that there’s hope for me yet?’
‘Of course there is. It’s only those horrid Predestination people who pretend that you go to Hell whether you repent or not. You don’t think the Church of England are Calvinists, do you?’
‘I suppose there’s always the chance of getting off on a plea of Invincible Ignorance,’ said Mr Warburton reflectively; and then, more confidently: ‘Do you know, Dorothy, I’ve a sort of feeling that even now, after knowing me two years, you’ve still half an idea you can make a convert of me. A lost sheep—brand plucked from the burning, and all that. I believe you still hope against hope that one of these days my eyes will be opened and you’ll meet me at Holy Communion at seven o’clock on some damned cold winter morning. Don’t you?’
‘Well—’ said Dorothy, again uncomfortably. She did, in fact, entertain some such hope about Mr Warburton, though he was not exactly a promising case for conversion. It was not in her nature to see a fellow being in a state of unbelief without making some effort to reclaim him. What hours she had spent, at different times, earnestly debating with vague village atheists who could not produce a single intelligible reason for their unbelief! ‘Yes,’ she admitted finally, not particularly wanting to make the admission, but not wanting to prevaricate.
Mr Warburton laughed delightedly.
‘You’ve a hopeful nature,’ he said. ‘But you aren’t afraid, by any chance, that I might convert you? “The dog it was that died”, you may remember.’
At this Dorothy merely smiled. ‘Don’t let him see he’s shocking you’—that was always her maxim when she was talking to Mr Warburton. They had been arguing in this manner, without coming to any kind of conclusion, for the past hour, and might have gone on for the rest of the night if Dorothy had been willing to stay; for Mr Warburton delighted in teasing her about her religious beliefs. He had that fatal cleverness that so often goes with unbelief, and in their arguments, though Dorothy was always right, she was not always victorious. They were sitting, or rather Dorothy was sitting and Mr Warburton was standing, in a large agreeable room, giving on a moonlit lawn, that Mr Warburton called his ‘studio’— not that there was any sign of work ever having been done in it. To Dorothy’s great disappointment, the celebrated Mr Bewley had not turned up. (As a matter of fact, neither Mr Bewley, nor his wife, nor his novel entitled Fishpools and Concubines, actually existed. Mr Warburton had invented all three of them on the spur of the moment, as a pretext for inviting Dorothy to his house, well knowing that she would never come unchaperoned.) Dorothy had felt rather uneasy on finding that Mr Warburton was alone. It had occurred to her, indeed she had felt perfectly certain, that it would be wiser to go home at once; but she had stayed, chiefly because she was horribly tired and the leather armchair into which Mr Warburton had thrust her the moment she entered the house was too comfortable to leave. Now, however, her conscience was pricking her. It didn’t do to stay too late at his house—people would talk if they heard of it. Besides, there was a multitude of jobs that she ought to be doing and that she had neglected in order to come here. She was so little used to idleness that even an hour spent in mere talking seemed to her vaguely sinful.
She made an effort, and straightened herself in the too-comfortable chair. ‘I think, if you don’t mind, it’s really time I was getting home,’ she said.
‘Talking of Invincible Ignorance,’ went on Mr Warburton, taking no notice of Dorothy’s remark, ‘I forget whether I ever told you that once when I was standing outside the World’s End pub in Chelsea, waiting for a taxi, a damned ugly little Salvation Army lassie came up to me and said—without any kind of introduction, you know—“What will you say at the Judgement Seat?” I said, “I am reserving my defence.” Rather neat, I think, don’t you?’
Dorothy did not answer. Her conscience had given her another and harder jab—she had remembered those wretched, unmade jackboots, and the fact that at least one of them had got to be made tonight. She was, however, unbearably tired. She had had an exhausting afternoon, starting off with ten miles or so bicycling to and fro in the sun, delivering the parish magazine, and continuing with the Mothers’ Union tea in the hot little wooden-walled room behind the parish hall. The Mothers met every Wednesday afternoon to have tea and do some charitable sewing while Dorothy read aloud to them. (At present she was reading Gene Stratton Porter’s A Girl of the Limberlost.) It was nearly always upon Dorothy that jobs of that kind devolved, because the phalanx of devoted women (the church fowls, they are called) who do the dirty work of most parishes had dwindled at Knype Hill to four or five at most. The only helper on whom Dorothy could count at all regularly was Miss Foote, a tall, rabbit-faced, dithering virgin of thirty-five, who meant well but made a mess of everything and was in a perpetual state of flurry. Mr Warburton used to say that she reminded him of a comet—‘a ridiculous blunt-nosed creature rushing round on an eccentric orbit and always a little behind time’. You could trust Miss Foote with the church decorations, but not with the Mothers or the Sunday School, because, though a regular churchgoer, her orthodoxy was suspect. She had confided to Dorothy that she could worship God best under the blue dome of the sky. After tea Dorothy had dashed up to the church to put fresh flowers on the altar, and then she had typed out her father’s sermon—her typewriter was a rickety pre-Boer War ‘invisible’, on which you couldn’t average eight hundred words an hour—and after supper she had weeded the pea rows until the light failed and her back seemed to be breaking. With one thing and another, she was even more tired than usual.
‘I really must be getting home,’ she repeated more firmly. ‘I’m sure it’s getting fearfully late.’
‘Home?’ said Mr Warburton. ‘Nonsense! The evening’s hardly begun.’
He was walking up and down the room again, with his hands in his coat pockets, having thrown away his cigar. The spectre of the unmade jackboots stalked back into Dorothy’s mind. She would, she suddenly decided, make two jackboots tonight instead of only one, as a penance for the hour she had wasted. She was just beginning to make a mental sketch of the way she would cut out the pieces of brown paper for the insteps, when she noticed that Mr Warburton had halted behind her chair.
‘What time is it, do you know?’ she said.
‘I dare say it might be half past ten. But people like you and me don’t talk of such vulgar subjects as the time.’
‘If it’s half past ten, then I really must be going,’ said Dorothy. I’ve got a whole lot of work to do before I go to bed.’
‘Work! At this time of night? Impossible!’
‘Yes, I have. I’ve got to make a pair of jackboots.’
‘You’ve got to make a pair of what?’ said Mr Warburton.
‘Of jackboots. For the play the schoolchildren are acting. We make them out of glue and brown paper.’
‘Glue and brown paper! Good God!’ murmured Mr Warburton. He went on, chiefly to cover the fact that he was drawing nearer to Dorothy’s chair: ‘What a life you lead! Messing about with glue and brown paper in the middle of the night! I must say, there are times when I feel just a little glad that I’m not a clergyman’s daughter.’
‘I think—’ began Dorothy.
But at the same moment Mr Warburton, invisible behind her chair, had lowered his hands and taken her gently by the shoulders. Dorothy immediately wriggled herself in an effort to get free of him; but Mr Warburton pressed her back into her place.
‘Keep still,’ he said peaceably.
‘Let me go!’ exclaimed Dorothy.
Mr Warburton ran his right hand caressingly down her upper arm. There was something very revealing, very characteristic in the way he did it; it was the lingering, appraising touch of a man to whom a woman’s body is valuable precisely in the same way as though it were something to eat.
‘You really have extraordinary nice arms,’ he said. ‘How on earth have you managed to remain unmarried all these years?’
‘Let me go at once!’ repeated Dorothy, beginning to struggle again.
‘But I don’t particularly want to let you go,’ objected Mr Warburton.
‘Please don’t stroke my arm like that! I don’t like it!’
‘What a curious child you are! Why don’t you like it?’
‘I tell you I don’t like it!’
‘Now don’t go and turn round,’ said Mr Warburton mildly. ‘You don’t seem to realize how tactful it was on my part to approach you from behind your back. If you turn round you’ll see that I’m old enough to be your father, and hideously bald into the bargain. But if you’ll only keep still and not look at me you can imagine I’m Ivor Novello.’
Dorothy caught sight of the hand that was caressing her—a large, pink, very masculine hand, with thick fingers and a fleece of gold hairs upon the back. She turned very pale; the expression of her face altered from mere annoyance to aversion and dread. She made a violent effort, wrenched herself free, and stood up, facing him.
‘I do wish you wouldn’t do that!’ she said, half in anger and half in distress.
‘What is the matter with you?’ said Mr Warburton.
He had stood upright, in his normal pose, entirely unconcerned, and he looked at her with a touch of curiosity. Her face had changed. It was not only that she had turned pale; there was a withdrawn, half-frightened look in her eyes—almost as though, for the moment, she were looking at him with the eyes of a stranger. He perceived that he had wounded her in some way which he did not understand, and which perhaps she did not want him to understand.
‘What is the matter with you?’ he repeated.
‘Why must you do that every time you meet me?’
‘“Every time I meet you” is an exaggeration,’ said Mr Warburton. ‘It’s really very seldom that I get the opportunity. But if you really and truly don’t like it—’
‘Of course I don’t like it! You know I don’t like it!’
‘Well, well! Then let’s say no more about it,’ said Mr Warburton generously. ‘Sit down, and we’ll change the subject.’
He was totally devoid of shame. It was perhaps his most outstanding characteristic. Having attempted to seduce her, and failed, he was quite willing to go on with the conversation as though nothing whatever had happened.
‘I’m going home at once,’ said Dorothy. ‘I can’t stay here any longer.’
‘Oh nonsense! Sit down and forget about it. We’ll talk of moral theology, or cathedral architecture, or the Girl Guides’ cooking classes, or anything you choose. Think how bored I shall be all alone if you go home at this hour.’
But Dorothy persisted, and there was an argument. Even if it had not been his intention to make love to her—and whatever he might promise he would certainly begin again in a few minutes if she did not go—Mr Warburton would have pressed her to stay, for, like all thoroughly idle people, he had a horror of going to bed and no conception of the value of time. He would, if you let him, keep you talking till three or four in the morning. Even when Dorothy finally escaped, he walked beside her down the moonlit drive, still talking voluminously and with such perfect good humour that she found it impossible to be angry with him any longer.
‘I’m leaving first thing tomorrow,’ he told her as they reached the gate. ‘I’m going to take the car to town and pick up the kids—the bastards, you know—and we’re leaving for France the next day. I’m not certain where we shall go after that; eastern Europe, perhaps. Prague, Vienna, Bucharest.’
‘How nice,’ said Dorothy.
Mr Warburton, with an adroitness surprising in so large and stout a man, had manoeuvred himself between Dorothy and the gate.
‘I shall be away six months or more,’ he said. ‘And of course I needn’t ask, before so long a parting, whether you want to kiss me good-bye?’
Before she knew what he was doing he had put his arm about her and drawn her against him. She drew back—too late; he kissed her on the cheek—would have kissed her on the mouth if she had not turned her head away in time. She struggled in his arms, violently and for a moment helplessly.
‘Oh, let me go!’ she cried. ‘Do let me go!’
‘I believe I pointed out before,’ said Mr Warburton, holding her easily against him, ‘that I don’t want to let you go.’
‘But we’re standing right in front of Mrs Semprill’s window! She’ll see us absolutely for certain!’
‘Oh, good God! So she will!’ said Mr Warburton. ‘I was forgetting.’
Impressed by this argument, as he would not have been by any other, he let Dorothy go. She promptly put the gate between Mr Warburton and herself. He, meanwhile, was scrutinizing Mrs Semprill’s windows.
‘I can’t see a light anywhere,’ he said finally. ‘With any luck the blasted hag hasn’t seen us.’
‘Good-bye,’ said Dorothy briefly. ‘This time I really must go. Remember me to the children.’
With this she made off as fast as she could go without actually running, to get out of his reach before he should attempt to kiss her again.
Even as she did so a sound checked her for an instant—the unmistakable bang of a window shutting, somewhere in Mrs Semprill’s house. Could Mrs Semprill have been watching them after all? But (reflected Dorothy) of course she had been watching them! What else could you expect? You could hardly imagine Mrs Semprill missing such a scene as that. And if she had been watching them, undoubtedly the story would be all over the town tomorrow morning, and it would lose nothing in the telling. But this thought, sinister though it was, did no more than flight momentarily through Dorothy’s mind as she hurried down the road.
When she was well out of sight of Mr Warburton’s house she stopped, took out her handkerchief and scrubbed the place on her cheek where he had kissed her. She scrubbed it vigorously enough to bring the blood into her cheek. It was not until she had quite rubbed out the imaginary stain which his lips had left there that she walked on again.
What he had done had upset her. Even now her heart was knocking and fluttering uncomfortably. I can’t bear that kind of thing! she repeated to herself several times over. And unfortunately this was no more than the literal truth; she really could not bear it. To be kissed or fondled by a man—to feel heavy male arms about her and thick male lips bearing down upon her own—was terrifying and repulsive to her. Even in memory or imagination it made her wince. It was her especial secret, the especial, incurable disability that she carried through life.
If only they would leave you alone! she thought as she walked onwards a little more slowly. That was how she put it to herself habitually—‘If only they would leave you alone!’ For it was not that in other ways she disliked men. On the contrary, she liked them better than women. Part of Mr Warburton’s hold over her was in the fact that he was a man and had the careless good humour and the intellectual largeness that women so seldom have. But why couldn’t they leave you alone? Why did they always have to kiss you and maul you about? They were dreadful when they kissed you—dreadful and a little disgusting, like some large, furry beast that rubs itself against you, all too friendly and yet liable to turn dangerous at any moment. And beyond their kissing and mauling there lay always the suggestion of those other, monstrous things (‘all that’ was her name for them) of which she could hardly even bear to think.
Of course, she had had her share, and rather more than her share, of casual attention from men. She was just pretty enough, and just plain enough, to be the kind of girl that men habitually pester. For when a man wants a little casual amusement, he usually picks out a girl who is not too pretty. Pretty girls (so he reasons) are spoilt and therefore capricious; but plain girls are easy game. And even if you are a clergyman’s daughter, even if you live in a town like Knype Hill and spend almost your entire life in parish work, you don’t altogether escape pursuit. Dorothy was all too used to it—all too used to the fattish middle-aged men, with their fishily hopeful eyes, who slowed down their cars when you passed them on the road, or who manoeuvred an introduction and then began pinching your elbow about ten minutes afterwards. Men of all descriptions. Even a clergyman, on one occasion—a bishop’s chaplain, he was. . . .
But the trouble was that it was not better, but oh! infinitely worse when they were the right kind of man and the advances they made you were honourable. Her mind slipped backwards five years, to Francis Moon, curate in those days at St Wedekind’s in Millborough. Dear Francis! How gladly would she have married him if only it had not been for all that! Over and over again he had asked her to marry him, and of course she had had to say No; and, equally of course, he had never known why. Impossible to tell him why. And then he had gone away, and only a year later had died so irrelevantly of pneumonia. She whispered a prayer for his soul, momentarily forgetting that her father did not really approve of prayers for the dead, and then, with an effort, pushed the memory aside. Ah, better not to think of it again! It hurt her in her breast to think of it.
She could never marry, she had decided long ago upon that. Even when she was a child she had known it. Nothing would ever overcome her horror of all that—at the very thought of it something within her seemed to shrink and freeze. And of course, in a sense she did not want to overcome it. For, like all abnormal people, she was not fully aware that she was abnormal.
And yet, though her sexual coldness seemed to her natural and inevitable, she knew well enough how it was that it had begun. She could remember, as clearly as though it were yesterday, certain dreadful scenes between her father and her mother—scenes that she had witnessed when she was no more than nine years old. They had left a deep, secret wound in her mind. And then a little later she had been frightened by some old steel engravings of nymphs pursued by satyrs. To her childish mind there was something inexplicably, horribly sinister in those horned, semi-human creatures that lurked in thickets and behind large trees, ready to come bounding forth in sudden swift pursuit. For a whole year of her childhood she had actually been afraid to walk through woods alone, for fear of satyrs. She had grown out of the fear, of course, but not out of the feeling that was associated with it. The satyr had remained with her as a symbol. Perhaps she would never grow out of it, that special feeling of dread, of hopeless flight from something more than rationally dreadful—the stamp of hooves in the lonely wood, the lean, furry thighs of the satyr. It was a thing not to be altered, not to be argued away. It is, moreover, a thing too common nowadays, among educated women, to occasion any kind of surprise.
Most of Dorothy’s agitation had disappeared by the time she reached the rectory. The thoughts of satyrs and Mr Warburton, of Francis Moon and her foredoomed sterility, which had been going to and fro in her mind, faded out of it and were replaced by the accusing image of a jackboot. She remembered that she had the best part of two hours’ work to do before going to bed tonight. The house was in darkness. She went round to the back and slipped in on tiptoe by the scullery door, for fear of waking her father, who was probably asleep already.
As she felt her way through the dark passage to the conservatory, she suddenly decided that she had gone wrong in going to Mr Warburton’s house tonight. She would, she resolved, never go there again, even when she was certain that somebody else would be there as well. Moreover, she would do penance tomorrow for having gone there tonight. Having lighted the lamp, before doing anything else she found her ‘memo list’, which was already written out for tomorrow, and pencilled a capital P against ‘breakfast’, P stood for penance—no bacon again for breakfast tomorrow. Then she lighted the oilstove under the glue-pot.
The light of the lamp fell yellow upon her sewing-machine and upon the pile of half-finished clothes on the table, reminding her of the yet greater pile of clothes that were not even begun; reminding her, also, that she was dreadfully, overwhelmingly tired. She had forgotten her tiredness at the moment when Mr Warburton laid his hands on her shoulders, but now it had come back upon her with double force. Moreover, there was a somehow exceptional quality about her tiredness tonight. She felt, in an almost literal sense of the words, washed out. As she stood beside the table she had a sudden, very strange feeling as though her mind had been entirely emptied, so that for several seconds she actually forgot what it was that she had come into the conservatory to do.
Then she remembered—the jackboots, of course! Some contemptible little demon whispered in her ear, ‘Why not go straight to bed and leave the jackboots till tomorrow?’ She uttered a prayer for strength, and pinched herself. Come on, Dorothy! No slacking please! Luke ix, 62. Then, clearing some of the litter off the table, she got out her scissors, a pencil, and four sheets of brown paper, and sat down to cut out those troublesome insteps for the jackboots while the glue was boiling.
When the grandfather clock in her father’s study struck midnight she was still at work. She had shaped both jackboots by this time, and was reinforcing them by pasting narrow strips of paper all over them—a long, messy job. Every bone in her body was aching, and her eyes were sticky with sleep. Indeed, it was only rather dimly that she remembered what she was doing. But she worked on, mechanically pasting strip after strip of paper into place, and pinching herself every two minutes to counteract the hypnotic sound of the oilstove singing beneath the glue-pot.