A Clergyman's Daughter Read online

her lips moved, but there was neither heart nor meaning in her

  prayers. She could hear Proggett's boots shuffling and her

  father'Beasts of England's clear low voice murmuring 'Take and eat', she could see

  the worn strip of red carpet beneath her knees, she could smell

  dust and eau-de-Cologne and mothballs; but of the Body and Blood of

  Christ, of the purpose for which she had come here, she was as

  though deprived of the power to think. A deadly blankness had

  descended upon her mind. It seemed to her that actually she COULD

  not pray. She struggled, collected her thoughts, uttered

  mechanically the opening phrases of a prayer; but they were

  useless, meaningless--nothing but the dead shells of words. Her

  father was holding the wafer before her in his shapely, aged hand.

  He held it between finger and thumb, fastidiously, somehow

  distastefully, as though it had been a spoon of medicine. His eye

  was upon Miss Mayfill, who was doubling herself up like a geometrid

  caterpillar, with many creakings and crossing herself so

  elaborately that one might have imagined that she was sketching a

  series of braid frogs on the front of her coat. For several

  seconds Dorothy hesitated and did not take the wafer. She dared

  not take it. Better, far better to step down from the altar than

  to accept the sacrament with such chaos in her heart!

  Then it happened that she glanced sidelong, through the open south

  door. A momentary spear of sunlight had pierced the clouds. It

  struck downwards through the leaves of the limes, and a spray of

  leaves in the doorway gleamed with a transient, matchless green,

  greener than jade or emerald or Atlantic waters. It was as though

  some jewel of unimaginable splendour had flashed for an instant,

  filling the doorway with green light, and then faded. A flood of

  joy ran through Dorothy'Beasts of England's heart. The flash of living colour had

  brought back to her, by a process deeper than reason, her peace of

  mind, her love of God, her power to worship. Somehow, because of

  the greenness of the leaves, it was again possible to pray. O all

  ye green things upon the earth, praise ye the Lord! She began to

  pray, ardently, joyfully, thankfully. The wafer melted upon her

  tongue. She took the chalice from her father, and tasted with

  repulsion, even with an added joy in this small act of self-

  abasement, the wet imprint of Miss Mayfill's lips on its silver

  rim.

  2

  St Athelstan's Church stood at the highest point of Knype Hill, and

  if you chose to climb the tower you could see ten miles or so

  across the surrounding country. Not that there was anything worth

  looking at--only the low, barely undulating East Anglian landscape,

  intolerably dull in summer, but redeemed in winter by the recurring

  patterns of the elms, naked and fanshaped against leaden skies.

  Immediately below you lay the town, with the High Street running

  east and west and dividing unequally. The southern section of the

  town was the ancient, agricultural, and respectable section. On

  the northern side were the buildings of the Blifil-Gordon sugar-

  beet refinery, and all round and leading up to them were higgledy-

  piggledly rows of vile yellow brick cottages, mostly inhabited by

  the employees of the factory. The factory employees, who made up

  more than half of the town's two thousand inhabitants, were

  newcomers, townfolk, and godless almost to a man.

  The two pivots, or foci, about which the social life of the town

  moved were Knype Hill Conservative Club (fully licensed), from

  whose bow window, any time after the bar was open, the large, rosy-

  gilled faces of the town's elite were to be seen gazing like chubby

  goldfish from an aquarium pane; and Ye Olde Tea Shoppe, a little

  farther down the High Street, the principal rendezvous of the Knype

  Hill ladies. Not to be present at Ye Olde Tea Shoppe between ten

  and eleven every morning, to drink your 'morning coffee' and spend

  your half-hour or so in that agreeable twitter of upper-middle-

  class voices ('My dear, he had NINE spades to the ace-queen and he

  went one no trump, if you please. What, my dear, you don't mean to

  say you're paying for my coffee AGAIN? Oh, but my dear, it is

  simply TOO sweet of you! Now tomorrow I shall SIMPLY INSIST upon

  paying for yours. And just LOOK at dear little Toto sitting up and

  looking such a CLEVER little man with his little black nose

  wiggling, and he would, would he, the darling duck, he would, he

  would, and his mother would give him a lump of sugar, she would,

  she would. THERE, Toto!'), was to be definitely out of Knype Hill

  society. The Rector in his acid way nicknamed these ladies 'the

  coffee brigade'. Close to the colony of sham-picturesque villas

  inhabited by the coffee brigade, but cut off from them by its

  larger grounds, was The Grange, Miss Mayfill's house. It was a

  curious, machicolated, imitation castle of dark red brick--

  somebody's Folly, built about 1870--and fortunately almost hidden

  among dense shrubberies.

  The Rectory stood half way up the hill, with its face to the church

  and its back to the High Street. It was a house of the wrong age,

  inconveniently large, and faced with chronically peeling yellow

  plaster. Some earlier Rector had added, at one side, a large

  greenhouse which Dorothy used as a workroom, but which was

  constantly out of repair. The front garden was choked with ragged

  fir-trees and a great spreading ash which shadowed the front rooms

  and made it impossible to grow any flowers. There was a large

  vegetable garden at the back. Proggett did the heavy digging of

  the garden in the spring and autumn, and Dorothy did the sowing,

  planting, and weeding in such spare time as she could command; in

  spite of which the vegetable garden was usually an impenetrable

  jungle of weeds.

  Dorothy jumped off her bicycle at the front gate, upon which some

  officious person had stuck a poster inscribed 'Vote for Blifil-

  Gordon and Higher Wages!' (There was a by-election going on, and

  Mr Blifil-Gordon was standing in the Conservative interest.) As

  Dorothy opened the front door she saw two letters lying on the worn

  coconut mat. One was from the Rural Dean, and the other was a

  nasty, thin-looking letter from Catkin & Palm, her father's

  clerical tailors. It was a bill undoubtedly. The Rector had

  followed his usual practice of collecting the letters that

  interested him and leaving the others. Dorothy was just bending

  down to pick up the letters, when she saw, with a horrid shock of

  dismay, an unstamped envelope sticking to the letter flap.

  It was a bill--for certain it was a bill! Moreover, as soon as she

  set eyes on it she 'knew' that it was that horrible bill from

  Cargill's, the butcher's. A sinking feeling passed through her

  entrails. For a moment she actually began to pray that it might

  not be Cargill's bill--that it might only be the bill for three

  and nine from Solepipe's, the draper's, or the bill from the

 
; International or the baker's or the dairy--anything except

  Cargill's bill! Then, mastering her panic, she took the envelope

  from the letter-flap and tore it open with a convulsive movement.

  'To account rendered: L21 7S. 9d.'

  This was written in the innocuous handwriting of Mr Cargill's

  accountant. But underneath, in thick, accusing-looking letters,

  was added and heavily underlined: 'Shd. like to bring to your

  notice that this bill has been owing a VERY LONG TIME. The

  EARLIEST POSSIBLE settlement will oblige, S. Cargill.'

  Dorothy had turned a shade paler, and was conscious of not wanting

  any breakfast. She thrust the bill into her pocket and went into

  the dining-room. It was a smallish, dark room, badly in need of

  repapering, and, like every other room in the Rectory, it had the

  air of having been furnished from the sweepings of an antique shop.

  The furniture was 'good', but battered beyond repair, and the

  chairs were so worm-eaten that you could only sit on them in safety

  if you knew their individual foibles. There were old, dark,

  defaced steel engravings hanging on the walls, one of them--an

  engraving of Van Dyck's portrait of Charles I--probably of some

  value if it had not been ruined by damp.

  The Rector was standing before the empty grate, warming himself at

  an imaginary fire and reading a letter that came from a long blue

  envelope. He was still wearing his cassock of black watered silk,

  which set off to perfection his thick white hair and his pale,

  fine, none too amiable face. As Dorothy came in he laid the letter

  aside, drew out his gold watch and scrutinized it significantly.

  'I'm afraid I'm a bit late, Father.'

  'Yes, Dorothy, you are A BIT LATE,' said the Rector, repeating her

  words with delicate but marked emphasis. 'You are twelve minutes

  late, to be exact. Don't you think, Dorothy, that when I have to

  get up at a quarter past six to celebrate Holy Communion, and come

  home exceedingly tired and hungry, it would be better if you could

  manage to come to breakfast without being A BIT LATE?'

  It was clear that the Rector was in what Dorothy called,

  euphemistically, his 'uncomfortable mood'. He had one of those

  weary, cultivated voices which are never definitely angry and never

  anywhere near good humour--one of those voices which seem all the

  while to be saying, 'I really CANNOT see what you are making all

  this fuss about!' The impression he gave was of suffering

  perpetually from other people's stupidity and tiresomeness.

  'I'm so sorry, Father! I simply had to go and ask after Mrs

  Tawney.' (Mrs Tawney was the 'Mrs T' of the 'memo list'.) 'Her

  baby was born last night, and you know she promised me she'd come

  and be churched after it was born. But of course she won't if she

  thinks we aren't taking any interest in her. You know what these

  women are--they seem so to hate being churched. They'll never come

  unless I coax them into it.'

  The Rector did not actually grunt, but he uttered a small

  dissatisfied sound as he moved towards the breakfast table. It was

  intended to mean, first, that it was Mrs Tawney's duty to come and

  be churched without Dorothy's coaxing; secondly, that Dorothy had

  no business to waste her time visiting all the riffraff of the

  town, especially before breakfast. Mrs Tawney was a labourer's

  wife and lived in partibus infidelium, north of the High Street.

  The Rector laid his hand on the back of his chair, and, without

  speaking, cast Dorothy a glance which meant: 'Are we ready NOW?

  Or are there to be any MORE delays?'

  'I think everything's here, Father,' said Dorothy. 'Perhaps if

  you'd just say grace--'

  'Benedictus benedicat,' said the Rector, lifting the worn silver

  coverlet off the breakfast dish. The silver coverlet, like the

  silver-gilt marmalade spoon, was a family heirloom; the knives and

  forks, and most of the crockery, came from Woolworths. 'Bacon

  again, I see,' the Rector added, eyeing the three minute rashers

  that lay curled up on squares of fried bread.

  'It's all we've got in the house, I'm afraid,' Dorothy said.

  The Rector picked up his fork between finger and thumb, and with a

  very delicate movement, as though playing at spillikins, turned one

  of the rashers over.

  'I know, of course,' he said, 'that bacon for breakfast is an

  English institution almost as old as parliamentary government. But

  still, don't you think we might OCCASIONALLY have a change,

  Dorothy?'

  'Bacon's so cheap now,' said Dorothy regretfully. 'It seems a sin

  not to buy it. This was only fivepence a pound, and I saw some

  quite decent-looking bacon as low as threepence.'

  'Ah, Danish, I suppose? What a variety of Danish invasions we have

  had in this country! First with fire and sword, and now with their

  abominable cheap bacon. Which has been responsible for the more

  deaths, I wonder?'

  Feeling a little better after this witticism, the Rector settled

  himself in his chair and made a fairly good breakfast off the

  despised bacon, while Dorothy (she was not having any bacon this

  morning--a penance she had set herself yesterday for saying 'Damn'

  and idling for half an hour after lunch) meditated upon a good

  conversational opening.

  There was an unspeakably hateful job in front of her--a demand for

  money. At the very best of times getting money out of her father

  was next door to impossible, and it was obvious that this morning

  he was going to be even more 'difficult' than usual. 'Difficult'

  was another of her euphemisms. He's had bad news, I suppose, she

  thought despondently, looking at the blue envelope.

  Probably no one who had ever spoken to the Rector for as long as

  ten minutes would have denied that he was a 'difficult' kind of

  man. The secret of his almost unfailing ill humour really lay in

  the fact that he was an anachronism. He ought never to have been

  born into the modern world; its whole atmosphere disgusted and

  infuriated him. A couple of centuries earlier, a happy pluralist

  writing poems or collecting fossils while curates at 40 pounds a

  year administered his parishes, he would have been perfectly at

  home. Even now, if he had been a richer man, he might have consoled

  himself by shutting the twentieth century out of his consciousness.

  But to live in past ages is very expensive; you can't do it on less

  than two thousand a year. The Rector, tethered by his poverty to

  the age of Lenin and the Daily Mail, was kept in a state of chronic

  exasperation which it was only natural that he should work off on

  the person nearest to him--usually, that is, on Dorothy.

  He had been born in 1871, the younger son of the younger son of a

  baronet, and had gone into the Church for the outmoded reason that

  the Church is the traditional profession for younger sons. His

  first cure had been in a large, slummy parish in East London--a

  nasty, hooliganish place it had been, and he looked back on it with

  loathing. Even in those days the l
ower class (as he made a point

  of calling them) were getting decidedly out of hand. It was a

  little better when he was curate-in-charge at some remote place in

  Kent (Dorothy had been born in Kent), where the decently down-

  trodden villagers still touched their hats to 'parson'. But by

  that time he had married, and his marriage had been diabolically

  unhappy; moreover, because clergymen must not quarrel with their

  wives, its unhappiness had been secret and therefore ten times

  worse. He had come to Knype Hill in 1908, aged thirty-seven and

  with a temper incurably soured--a temper which had ended by

  alienating every man, woman, and child in the parish.

  It was not that he was a bad priest, merely AS a priest. In his

  purely clerical duties he was scrupulously correct--perhaps a

  little too correct for a Low Church East Anglian parish. He

  conducted his services with perfect taste, preached admirable

  sermons, and got up at uncomfortable hours of the morning to

  celebrate Holy Communion every Wednesday and Friday. But that a

  clergyman has any duties outside the four walls of the church was a

  thing that had never seriously occurred to him. Unable to afford a

  curate, he left the dirty work of the parish entirely to his wife,

  and after her death (she died in 1921) to Dorothy. People used to

  say, spitefully and untruly, that he would have let Dorothy preach

  his sermons for him if it had been possible. The 'lower classes'

  had grasped from the first what was his attitude towards them, and

  if he had been a rich man they would probably have licked his

  boots, according to their custom; as it was, they merely hated him.

  Not that he cared whether they hated him or not, for he was largely

  unaware of their existence. But even with the upper classes he had

  got on no better. With the County he had quarrelled one by one,

  and as for the petty gentry of the town, as the grandson of a

  baronet he despised them, and was at no pains to hide it. In

  twenty-three years he had succeeded in reducing the congregation of

  St Athelstan's from six hundred to something under two hundred.

  This was not solely due to personal reasons. It was also because

  the old-fashioned High Anglicanism to which the Rector obstinately

  clung was of a kind to annoy all parties in the parish about

  equally. Nowadays, a clergyman who wants to keep his congregation

  has only two courses open to him. Either it must be Anglo-

  Catholicism pure and simple--or rather, pure and not simple; or he

  must be daringly modern and broad-minded and preach comforting

  sermons proving that there is no Hell and all good religions are

  the same. The Rector did neither. On the one hand, he had the

  deepest contempt for the Anglo-Catholic movement. It had passed

  over his head, leaving him absolutely untouched; 'Roman Fever' was

  his name for it. On the other hand, he was too 'high' for the

  older members of his congregation. From time to time he scared

  them almost out of their wits by the use of the fatal word

  'Catholic', not only in its sanctified place in the Creeds, but

  also from the pulpit. Naturally the congregation dwindled year by

  year, and it was the Best People who were the first to go. Lord

  Pockthorne of Pockthorne Court, who owned a fifth of the county, Mr

  Leavis, the retired leather merchant, Sir Edward Huson of Crabtree

  Hall, and such of the petty gentry as owned motor-cars, had all

  deserted St Athelstan's. Most of them drove over on Sunday

  mornings to Millborough, five miles away. Millborough was a town

  of five thousand inhabitants, and you had your choice of two

  churches, St Edmund's and St Wedekind's. St Edmund's was

  Modernist--text from Blake's 'Jerusalem' blazoned over the altar,

  and communion wine out of liqueur glasses--and St Wedekind's was

  Anglo-Catholic and in a state of perpetual guerrilla warfare with

  the Bishop. But Mr Cameron, the secretary of the Knype Hill

  Conservative Club, was a Roman Catholic convert, and his children