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4

But of course, it could not last.

Not many weeks had gone by before the parents began interfering
with Dorothy's programme of work. That--trouble with the parents--
is part of the regular routine of life in a private school. All
parents are tiresome from a teacher's point of view, and the
parents of children at fourth-rate private schools are utterly
impossible. On the one hand, they have only the dimmest idea of
what is meant by education; on the other hand, they look on
'schooling' exactly as they look on a butcher's bill or a grocer's
bill, and are perpetually suspicious that they are being cheated.
They bombard the teacher with ill-written notes making impossible
demands, which they send by hand and which the child reads on the
way to school. At the end of the first fortnight Mabel Briggs,
one of the most promising girls in the class, brought Dorothy the
following note:

Dear Miss,--Would you please give Mabel a bit more ARITHMETIC? I
feel that what your giving her is not practacle enough. All these
maps and that. She wants practacle work, not all this fancy stuff.
So more ARITHMETIC, please. And remain,

Yours Faithfully,

Geo. Briggs

P.S. Mabel says your talking of starting her on something called
decimals. I don't want her taught decimals, I want her taught
ARITHMETIC.

So Dorothy stopped Mabel's geography and gave her extra arithmetic
instead, whereat Mabel wept. More letters followed. One lady was
disturbed to hear that her child was being given Shakespeare to
read. 'She had heard', she wrote, 'that this Mr Shakespeare was a
writer of stage-plays, and was Miss Millborough quite certain that
he wasn't a very IMMORAL writer? For her own part she had never so
much as been to the pictures in her life, let alone to a stage-
play, and she felt that even in READING stage-plays there was a
very grave danger,' etc., etc. She gave way, however, on being
informed that Mr Shakespeare was dead. This seemed to reassure
her. Another parent wanted more attention to his child's
handwriting, and another thought French was a waste of time; and
so it went on, until Dorothy's carefully arranged time-table was
almost in ruins. Mrs Creevy gave her clearly to understand that
whatever the parents demanded she must do, or pretend to do. In
many cases it was next door to impossible, for it disorganized
everything to have one child studying, for instance, arithmetic
while the rest of the class were doing history or geography. But
in private schools the parents' word is law. Such schools exist,
like shops, by flattering their customers, and if a parent wanted
his child taught nothing but cat's-cradle and the cuneiform
alphabet, the teacher would have to agree rather than lose a pupil.

The fact was that the parents were growing perturbed by the tales
their children brought home about Dorothy's methods. They saw no
sense whatever in these new-fangled ideas of making plasticine maps
and reading poetry, and the old mechanical routine which had so
horrified Dorothy struck them as eminently sensible. They became
more and more restive, and their letters were peppered with the
word 'practical', meaning in effect more handwriting lessons and
more arithmetic. And even their notion of arithmetic was limited
to addition, subtraction, multiplication and 'practice', with long
division thrown in as a spectacular tour de force of no real value.
Very few of them could have worked out a sum in decimals themselves,
and they were not particularly anxious for their children to be able
to do so either.

However, if this had been all, there would probably never have been
any serious trouble. The parents would have nagged at Dorothy, as
all parents do; but Dorothy would finally have learned--as, again,
all teachers finally learn--that if one showed a certain amount of
tact one could safely ignore them. But there was one fact that was
absolutely certain to lead to trouble, and that was the fact that
the parents of all except three children were Nonconformists,
whereas Dorothy was an Anglican. It was true that Dorothy had lost
her faith--indeed, for two months past, in the press of varying
adventures, had hardly thought either of her faith or of its loss.
But that made very little difference; Roman or Anglican, Dissenter,
Jew, Turk or infidel, you retain the habits of thought that you
have been brought up with. Dorothy, born and bred in the precincts
of the Church, had no understanding of the Nonconformist mind.
With the best will in the world, she could not help doing things
that would cause offence to some of the parents.

Almost at the beginning there was a skirmish over the Scripture
lessons--twice a week the children used to read a couple of
chapters from the Bible. Old Testament and New Testament
alternately--several of the parents writing to say, would Miss
Millborough please NOT answer the children when they asked
questions about the Virgin Mary; texts about the Virgin Mary were
to be passed over in silence, or, if possible, missed out
altogether. But it was Shakespeare, that immoral writer, who
brought things to a head. The girls had worked their way through
Macbeth, pining to know how the witches' prophecy was to be
fulfilled. They reached the closing scenes. Birnam Wood had come
to Dunsinane--that part was settled, anyway; now what about the man
who was not of woman born? They came to the fatal passage:

MACBETH: Thou losest labour;
As easy may'st thou the intrenchant air
With thy keen sword impress, as make me bleed:
Let fall thy blade on vulnerable crests,
I bear a charmed life, which must not yield
To one of woman born.

MACDUFF: Despair thy charm,
And let the Angel whom thou still hast served
Tell thee, Macduff was from his mother's womb
Untimely ripp'd.

The girls looked puzzled. There was a momentary silence, and then
a chorus of voices round the room:

'Please, Miss, what does that mean?'

Dorothy explained. She explained haltingly and incompletely, with
a sudden horrid misgiving--a premonition that this was going to
lead to trouble--but still, she did explain. And after that, of
course, the fun began.

About half the children in the class went home and asked their
parents the meaning of the word 'womb'. There was a sudden
commotion, a flying to and fro of messages, an electric thrill of
horror through fifteen decent Nonconformist homes. That night the
parents must have held some kind of conclave, for the following
evening, about the time when school ended, a deputation called upon
Mrs Creevy. Dorothy heard them arriving by ones and twos, and
guessed what was going to happen. As soon as she had dismissed the
children, she heard Mrs Creevy call sharply down the stairs:

'Come up here a minute, Miss Millborough!'

Dorothy went up, trying to control the trembling of her knees. In
the gaunt drawing-room Mrs Creevy was standing grimly beside the
piano, and six parents were sitting round on horsehair chairs like
a circle of inquisitors. There was the Mr Geo. Briggs who had
written the letter about Mabel's arithmetic--he was an alert-
looking greengrocer with a dried-up, shrewish wife--and there was a
large, buffalo-like man with drooping moustaches and a colourless,
peculiarly FLAT wife who looked as though she had been flattened
out by the pressure of some heavy object--her husband, perhaps.
The names of these two Dorothy did not catch. There was also Mrs
Williams, the mother of the congenital idiot, a small, dark, very
obtuse woman who always agreed with the last speaker, and there was
a Mr Poynder, a commercial traveller. He was a youngish to middle-
aged man with a grey face, mobile lips, and a bald scalp across
which some strips of rather nasty-looking damp hair were carefully
plastered. In honour of the parents' visit, a fire composed of
three large coals was sulking in the grate.

'Sit down there, Miss Millborough,' said Mrs Creevy, pointing to a
hard chair which stood like a stool of repentance in the middle of
the ring of parents.

Dorothy sat down.

'And now,' said Mrs Creevy, 'just you listen to what Mr Poynder's
got to say to you.'

Mr Poynder had a great deal to say. The other parents had
evidently chosen him as their spokesman, and he talked till flecks
of yellowish foam appeared at the corners of his mouth. And what
was remarkable, he managed to do it all--so nice was his regard for
the decencies--without ever once repeating the word that had caused
all the trouble.

'I feel that I'm voicing the opinion of all of us,' he said with
his facile bagman's eloquence, 'in saying that if Miss Millborough
knew that this play--Macduff, or whatever its name is--contained
such words as--well, such words as we're speaking about, she never
ought to have given it to the children to read at all. To my mind
it's a disgrace that schoolbooks can be printed with such words in
them. I'm sure if any of us had ever known that Shakespeare was
that kind of stuff, we'd have put our foot down at the start. It
surprises me, I must say. Only the other morning I was reading a
piece in my News Chronicle about Shakespeare being the father of
English Literature; well, if that's Literature, let's have a bit
LESS Literature, say I! I think everyone'll agree with me there.
And on the other hand, if Miss Millborough didn't know that the
word--well, the word I'm referring to--was coming, she just ought
to have gone straight on and taken no notice when it did come.
There wasn't the slightest need to go explaining it to them. Just
tell them to keep quiet and not get asking questions--that's the
proper way with children.'

'But the children wouldn't have understood the play if I hadn't
explained!' protested Dorothy for the third or fourth time.

'Of course they wouldn't! You don't seem to get my point, Miss
Millborough! We don't want them to understand. Do you think we
want them to go picking up dirty ideas out of books? Quite enough
of that already with all these dirty films and these twopenny
girls' papers that they get hold of--all these filthy, dirty love-
stories with pictures of--well, I won't go into it. We don't send
our children to school to have ideas put into their heads. I'm
speaking for all the parents in saying this. We're all of decent
God-fearing folk--some of us are Baptists and some of us are
Methodists, and there's even one or two Church of England among us;
but we can sink our differences when it comes to a case like this--
and we try to bring our children up decent and save them from
knowing anything about the Facts of Life. If I had my way, no
child--at any rate, no girl--would know anything about the Facts of
Life till she was twenty-one.'

There was a general nod from the parents, and the buffalo-like man
added, 'Yer, yer! I'm with you there, Mr Poynder. Yer, yer!' deep
down in his inside.

After dealing with the subject of Shakespeare, Mr Poynder added
some remarks about Dorothy's new-fangled methods of teaching, which
gave Mr Geo. Briggs the opportunity to rap out from time to time,
'That's it! Practical work--that's what we want--practical work!
Not all this messy stuff like po'try and making maps and sticking
scraps of paper and such like. Give 'em a good bit of figuring and
handwriting and bother the rest. Practical work! You've said it!'

This went on for about twenty minutes. At first Dorothy attempted
to argue, but she saw Mrs Creevy angrily shaking her head at her
over the buffalo-like man's shoulder, which she rightly took as a
signal to be quiet. By the time the parents had finished they had
reduced Dorothy very nearly to tears, and after this they made
ready to go. But Mrs Creevy stopped them.

'JUST a minute, ladies and gentlemen,' she said. 'Now that you've
all had your say--and I'm sure I'm most glad to give you the
opportunity--I'd just like to say a little something on my own
account. Just to make things clear, in case any of you might think
_I_ was to blame for this nasty business that's happened. And YOU
stay here too, Miss Millborough!' she added.

She turned on Dorothy, and, in front of the parents, gave her a
venomous 'talking to' which lasted upwards of ten minutes. The
burden of it all was that Dorothy had brought these dirty books
into the house behind her back; that it was monstrous treachery and
ingratitude; and that if anything like it happened again, out
Dorothy would go with a week's wages in her pocket. She rubbed it
in and in and in. Phrases like 'girl that I've taken into my
house', 'eating my bread', and even 'living on my charity',
recurred over and over again. The parents sat round watching, and
in their crass faces--faces not harsh or evil, only blunted by
ignorance and mean virtues--you could see a solemn approval, a
solemn pleasure in the spectacle of sin rebuked. Dorothy
understood this; she understood that it was necessary that Mrs
Creevy should give her her 'talking to' in front of the parents, so
that they might feel that they were getting their money's worth and
be satisfied. But still, as the stream of mean, cruel reprimand
went on and on, such anger rose in her heart that she could with
pleasure have stood up and struck Mrs Creevy across the face.
Again and again she thought, 'I won't stand it, I won't stand it
any longer! I'll tell her what I think of her and then walk
straight out of the house!' But she did nothing of the kind. She
saw with dreadful clarity the helplessness of her position.
Whatever happened, whatever insults it meant swallowing, she had
got to keep her job. So she sat still, with pink humiliated face,
amid the circle of parents, and presently her anger turned to
misery, and she realized that she was going to begin crying if she
did not struggle to prevent it. But she realized, too, that if she
began crying it would be the last straw and the parents would
demand her dismissal. To stop herself, she dug her nails so hard
into the palms that afterwards she found that she had drawn a few
drops of blood.

Presently the 'talking to' wore itself out in assurances from Mrs
Creevy that this should never happen again and that the offending
Shakespeares should be burnt immediately. The parents were now
satisfied. Dorothy had had her lesson and would doubtless profit
by it; they did not bear her any malice and were not conscious of
having humiliated her. They said good-bye to Mrs Creevy, said
good-bye rather more coldly to Dorothy, and departed. Dorothy also
rose to go, but Mrs Creevy signed to her to stay where she was.

'Just you wait a minute,' she said ominously as the parents left
the room. 'I haven't finished yet, not by a long way I haven't.'

Dorothy sat down again. She felt very weak at the knees, and
nearer to tears than ever. Mrs Creevy, having shown the parents
out by the front door, came back with a bowl of water and threw it
over the fire--for where was the sense of burning good coals after
the parents had gone? Dorothy supposed that the 'talking to' was
going to begin afresh. However, Mrs Creevy's wrath seemed to have
cooled--at any rate, she had laid aside the air of outraged virtue
that it had been necessary to put on in front of the parents.

'I just want to have a bit of a talk with you, Miss Millborough,'
she said. 'It's about time we got it settled once and for all how
this school's going to be run and how it's not going to be run.'

'Yes,' said Dorothy.

'Well, I'll be straight with you. When you came here I could see
with half an eye that you didn't know the first thing about school-
teaching; but I wouldn't have minded that if you'd just had a bit
of common sense like any other girl would have had. Only it seems
you hadn't. I let you have your own way for a week or two, and the
first thing you do is to go and get all the parents' backs up.
Well, I'm not going to have THAT over again. From now on I'm going
to have things done MY way, not YOUR way. Do you understand that?'

'Yes,' said Dorothy again.

'You're not to think as I can't do without you, mind,' proceeded
Mrs Creevy. 'I can pick up teachers at two a penny any day of the
week, M.A.s and B.A.s and all. Only the M.A.s and B.A.s mostly
take to drink, or else they--well, no matter what--and I will say
for you you don't seem to be given to the drink or anything of that
kind. I dare say you and me can get on all right if you'll drop
these new-fangled ideas of yours and understand what's meant by
practical school-teaching. So just you listen to me.'

Dorothy listened. With admirable clarity, and with a cynicism that
was all the more disgusting because it was utterly unconscious, Mrs
Creevy explained the technique of the dirty swindle that she called
practical school-teaching.

'What you've got to get hold of once and for all,' she began, 'is
that there's only one thing that matters in a school, and that's
the fees. As for all this stuff about "developing the children's
minds", as you call it, it's neither here nor there. It's the fees
I'm after, not DEVELOPING THE CHILDREN'S MINDS. After all, it's no
more than common sense. It's not to be supposed as anyone'd go to
all the trouble of keeping school and having the house turned
upside down by a pack of brats, if it wasn't that there's a bit of
money to be made out of it. The fees come first, and everything
else comes afterwards. Didn't I tell you that the very first day
you came here?'

'Yes,' admitted Dorothy humbly.

'Well, then, it's the parents that pay the fees, and it's the
parents you've got to think about. Do what the parents want--
that's our rule here. I dare say all this messing about with
plasticine and paper-scraps that you go in for doesn't do the
children any particular harm; but the parents don't want it, and
there's an end of it. Well, there's just two subjects that they DO
want their children taught, and that's handwriting and arithmetic.
Especially handwriting. That's something they CAN see the sense
of. And so handwriting's the thing you've got to keep on and on
at. Plenty of nice neat copies that the girls can take home, and
that the parents'll show off to the neighbours and give us a bit of
a free advert. I want you to give the children two hours a day
just at handwriting and nothing else.'

'Two hours a day just at handwriting,' repeated Dorothy obediently.

'Yes. And plenty of arithmetic as well. The parents are very keen
on arithmetic: especially money-sums. Keep your eye on the parents
all the time. If you meet one of them in the street, get hold of
them and start talking to them about their own girl. Make out that
she's the best girl in the class and that if she stays just three
terms longer she'll be working wonders. You see what I mean?
Don't go and tell them there's no room for improvement; because if
you tell them THAT, they generally take their girls away. Just
three terms longer--that's the thing to tell them. And when you
make out the end of term reports, just you bring them to me and let
me have a good look at them. I like to do the marking myself.'

Mrs Creevy's eye met Dorothy's. She had perhaps been about to say
that she always arranged the marks so that every girl came out
somewhere near the top of the class; but she refrained. Dorothy
could not answer for a moment. Outwardly she was subdued, and very
pale, but in her heart were anger and deadly repulsion against
which she had to struggle before she could speak. She had no
thought, however, of contradicting Mrs Creevy. The 'talking to'
had quite broken her spirit. She mastered her voice, and said:

'I'm to teach nothing but handwriting and arithmetic--is that it?'

'Well, I didn't say that exactly. There's plenty of other subjects
that look well on the prospectus. French, for instance--French
looks VERY well on the prospectus. But it's not a subject you want
to waste much time over. Don't go filling them up with a lot of
grammar and syntax and verbs and all that. That kind of stuff
doesn't get them anywhere so far as _I_ can see. Give them a bit
of "Parley vous Francey", and "Passey moi le beurre", and so forth;
that's a lot more use than grammar. And then there's Latin--I
always put Latin on the prospectus. But I don't suppose you're
very great on Latin, are you?'

'No,' admitted Dorothy.

'Well, it doesn't matter. You won't have to teach it. None of OUR
parents'd want their children to waste time over Latin. But they
like to see it on the prospectus. It looks classy. Of course
there's a whole lot of subjects that we can't actually teach, but
we have to advertise them all the same. Book-keeping and typing
and shorthand, for instance; besides music and dancing. It all
looks well on the prospectus.'

'Arithmetic, handwriting, French--is there anything else?' Dorothy
said.

'Oh, well, history and geography and English Literature, of course.
But just drop that map-making business at once--it's nothing but
waste of time. The best geography to teach is lists of capitals.
Get them so that they can rattle off the capitals of all the
English counties as if it was the multiplication table. Then
they've got something to show for what they've learnt, anyway. And
as for history, keep on with the Hundred Page History of Britain.
I won't have them taught out of those big history books you keep
bringing home from the library. I opened one of those books the
other day, and the first thing I saw was a piece where it said the
English had been beaten in some battle or other. There's a nice
thing to go teaching children! The parents won't stand for THAT
kind of thing, I can tell you!'

'And Literature?' said Dorothy.

'Well, of course they've got to do a bit of reading, and I can't
think why you wanted to turn up your nose at those nice little
readers of ours. Keep on with the readers. They're a bit old, but
they're quite good enough for a pack of children, I should have
thought. And I suppose they might as well learn a few pieces of
poetry by heart. Some of the parents like to hear their children
say a piece of poetry. "The Boy stood on the Burning Deck"--that's
a very good piece--and then there's "The Wreck of the Steamer"--
now, what was that ship called? "The Wreck of the Steamer
Hesperus". A little poetry doesn't hurt now and again. But don't
let's have any more SHAKESPEARE, please!'

Dorothy got no tea that day. It was now long past tea-time, but
when Mrs Creevy had finished her harangue she sent Dorothy away
without saying anything about tea. Perhaps this was a little extra
punishment for l'affaire Macbeth.

Dorothy had not asked permission to go out, but she did not feel
that she could stay in the house any longer. She got her hat and
coat and set out down the ill-lit road, for the public library. It
was late into November. Though the day had been damp the night
wind blew sharply, like a threat, through the almost naked trees,
making the gas-lamps flicker in spite of their glass chimneys, and
stirring the sodden plane leaves that littered the pavement.
Dorothy shivered slightly. The raw wind sent through her a bone-
deep memory of the cold of Trafalgar Square. And though she did
not actually think that if she lost her job it would mean going
back to the sub-world from which she had come--indeed, it was not
so desperate as that; at the worst her cousin or somebody else
would help her--still, Mrs Creevy's 'talking to' had made Trafalgar
Square seem suddenly very much nearer. It had driven into her a
far deeper understanding than she had had before of the great
modern commandment--the eleventh commandment which has wiped out
all the others: 'Thou shalt not lose thy job.'

But as to what Mrs Creevy had said about 'practical school-
teaching', it had been no more than a realistic facing of the
facts. She had merely said aloud what most people in her position
think but never say. Her oft-repeated phrase, 'It's the fees I'm
after', was a motto that might be--indeed, ought to be--written
over the doors of every private school in England.

There are, by the way, vast numbers of private schools in England.
Second-rate, third-rate, and fourth-rate (Ringwood House was a
specimen of the fourth-rate school), they exist by the dozen and
the score in every London suburb and every provincial town. At
any given moment there are somewhere in the neighbourhood of ten
thousand of them, of which less than a thousand are subject to
Government inspection. And though some of them are better than
others, and a certain number, probably, are better than the council
schools with which they compete, there is the same fundamental evil
in all of them; that is, that they have ultimately no purpose
except to make money. Often, except that there is nothing illegal
about them, they are started in exactly the same spirit as one
would start a brothel or a bucket shop. Some snuffy little man of
business (it is quite usual for these schools to be owned by people
who don't teach themselves) says one morning to his wife:

'Emma, I got a notion! What you say to us two keeping school, eh?
There's plenty of cash in a school, you know, and there ain't the
same work in it as what there is in a shop or a pub. Besides, you
don't risk nothing; no over'ead to worry about, 'cept jest your
rent and few desks and a blackboard. But we'll do it in style.
Get in one of these Oxford and Cambridge chaps as is out of a job
and'll come cheap, and dress 'im up in a gown and--what do they
call them little square 'ats with tassels on top? That 'ud fetch
the parents, eh? You jest keep your eyes open and see if you can't
pick on a good district where there's not too many on the same game
already.'

He chooses a situation in one of those middle-class districts where
the people are too poor to afford the fees of a decent school and
too proud to send their children to the council schools, and 'sets
up'. By degrees he works up a connexion in very much the same
manner as a milkman or a greengrocer, and if he is astute and
tactful and has not too many competitors, he makes his few hundreds
a year out of it.

Of course, these schools are not all alike. Not every principal is
a grasping low-minded shrew like Mrs Creevy, and there are plenty
of schools where the atmosphere is kindly and decent and the
teaching is as good as one could reasonably expect for fees of five
pounds a term. On the other hand, some of them are crying
scandals. Later on, when Dorothy got to know one of the teachers
at another private school in Southbridge, she heard tales of
schools that were worse by far than Ringwood House. She heard of a
cheap boarding-school where travelling actors dumped their children
as one dumps luggage in a railway cloakroom, and where the children
simply vegetated, doing absolutely nothing, reaching the age of
sixteen without learning to read; and another school where the days
passed in a perpetual riot, with a broken-down old hack of a master
chasing the boys up and down and slashing at them with a cane, and
then suddenly collapsing and weeping with his head on a desk, while
the boys laughed at him. So long as schools are run primarily for
money, things like this will happen. The expensive private schools
to which the rich send their children are not, on the surface, so
bad as the others, because they can afford a proper staff, and the
Public School examination system keeps them up to the mark; but
they have the same essential taint.

It was only later, and by degrees, that Dorothy discovered these
facts about private schools. At first, she used to suffer from an
absurd fear that one day the school inspectors would descend upon
Ringwood House, find out what a sham and a swindle it all was, and
raise the dust accordingly. Later on, however, she learned that
this could never happen. Ringwood House was not 'recognized', and
therefore was not liable to be inspected. One day a Government
inspector did, indeed, visit the school, but beyond measuring the
dimensions of the schoolroom to see whether each girl had her right
number of cubic feet of air, he did nothing; he had no power to do
more. Only the tiny minority of 'recognized' schools--less than
one in ten--are officially tested to decide whether they keep up a
reasonable educational standard. As for the others, they are free
to teach or not teach exactly as they choose. No one controls or
inspects them except the children's parents--the blind leading the
blind.

5

Next day Dorothy began altering her programme in accordance with
Mrs Creevy's orders. The first lesson of the day was handwriting,
and the second was geography.

'That'll do, girls,' said Dorothy as the funereal clock struck ten.
'We'll start our geography lesson now.'

The girls flung their desks open and put their hated copybooks away
with audible sighs of relief. There were murmurs of 'Oo, jography!
Good!' It was one of their favourite lessons. The two girls who
were 'monitors' for the week, and whose job it was to clean the
blackboard, collect exercise books and so forth (children will
fight for the privilege of doing jobs of that kind), leapt from
their places to fetch the half-finished contour map that stood
against the wall. But Dorothy stopped them.

'Wait a moment. Sit down, you two. We aren't going to go on with
the map this morning.'

There was a cry of dismay. 'Oh, Miss! Why can't we, Miss? PLEASE
let's go on with it!'

'No. I'm afraid we've been wasting a little too much time over the
map lately. We're going to start learning some of the capitals of
the English counties. I want every girl in the class to know the
whole lot of them by the end of the term.'

The children's faces fell. Dorothy saw it, and added with an
attempt at brightness--that hollow, undeceiving brightness of a
teacher trying to palm off a boring subject as an interesting one:

'Just think how pleased your parents will be when they can ask you
the capital of any county in England and you can tell it them!'

The children were not in the least taken in. They writhed at the
nauseous prospect.

'Oh, CAPITALS! Learning CAPITALS! That's just what we used to do
with Miss Strong. Please, Miss, WHY can't we go on with the map?'

'Now don't argue. Get your notebooks out and take them down as I
give them to you. And afterwards we'll say them all together.'

Reluctantly, the children fished out their notebooks, still
groaning. 'Please, Miss, can we go on with the map NEXT time?'

'I don't know. We'll see.'

That afternoon the map was removed from the schoolroom, and Mrs
Creevy scraped the plasticine off the board and threw it away. It
was the same with all the other subjects, one after another. All
the changes that Dorothy had made were undone. They went back to
the routine of interminable 'copies' and interminable 'practice'
sums, to the learning parrot-fashion of 'Passez-moi le beurre' and
'Le fils du jardinier a perdu son chapeau', to the Hundred Page
History and the insufferable little 'reader'. (Mrs Creevy had
impounded the Shakespeares, ostensibly to burn them. The
probability was that she had sold them.) Two hours a day were set
apart for handwriting lessons. The two depressing pieces of black
paper, which Dorothy had taken down from the wall, were replaced,
and their proverbs written upon them afresh in neat copperplate.
As for the historical chart, Mrs Creevy took it away and burnt it.

When the children saw the hated lessons, from which they had
thought to have escaped for ever, coming back upon them one by one,
they were first astonished, then miserable, then sulky. But it was
far worse for Dorothy than for the children. After only a couple
of days the rigmarole through which she was obliged to drive them
so nauseated her that she began to doubt whether she could go on
with it any longer. Again and again she toyed with the idea of
disobeying Mrs Creevy. Why not, she would think, as the children
whined and groaned and sweated under their miserable bondage--why
not stop it and go back to proper lessons, even if it was only for
an hour or two a day? Why not drop the whole pretence of lessons
and simply let the children play? It would be so much better for
them than this. Let them draw pictures or make something out of
plasticine or begin making up a fairy tale--anything REAL, anything
that would interest them, instead of this dreadful nonsense. But
she dared not. At any moment Mrs Creevy was liable to come in, and
if she found the children 'messing about' instead of getting on
with their routine work, there would be fearful trouble. So
Dorothy hardened her heart, and obeyed Mrs Creevy's instructions to
the letter, and things were very much as they had been before Miss
Strong was 'taken bad'.

The lessons reached such a pitch of boredom that the brightest spot
in the week was Mr Booth's so-called chemistry lecture on Thursday
afternoons. Mr Booth was a seedy, tremulous man of about fifty,
with long, wet, cowdung-coloured moustaches. He had been a Public
School master once upon a time, but nowadays he made just enough
for a life of chronic sub-drunkenness by delivering lectures at two
and sixpence a time. The lectures were unrelieved drivel. Even in
his palmiest days Mr Booth had not been a particularly brilliant
lecturer, and now, when he had had his first go of delirium tremens
and lived in a daily dread of his second, what chemical knowledge
he had ever had was fast deserting him. He would stand dithering
in front of the class, saying the same thing over and over again
and trying vainly to remember what he was talking about. 'Remember,
girls,' he would say in his husky, would-be fatherly voice, 'the
number of the elements is ninety-three--ninety-three elements,
girls--you all of you know what an element is, don't you?--there are
just ninety-three of them--remember that number, girls--ninety-
three,' until Dorothy (she had to stay in the schoolroom during the
chemistry lectures, because Mrs Creevy considered that it DIDN'T DO
to leave the girls alone with a man) was miserable with vicarious
shame. All the lectures started with the ninety-three elements, and
never got very much further. There was also talk of 'a very
interesting little experiment that I'm going to perform for you next
week, girls--very interesting you'll find it--we'll have it next
week without fail--a very interesting little experiment', which,
needless to say, was never performed. Mr Booth possessed no chemical
apparatus, and his hands were far too shaky to have used it even if
he had had any. The girls sat through his lectures in a suety
stupor of boredom, but even he was a welcome change from handwriting
lessons.

The children were never quite the same with Dorothy after the
parents' visit. They did not change all in a day, of course. They
had grown to be fond of 'old Millie', and they expected that after
a day or two of tormenting them with handwriting and 'commercial
arithmetic' she would go back to something interesting. But the
handwriting and arithmetic went on, and the popularity Dorothy had
enjoyed, as a teacher whose lessons weren't boring and who didn't
slap you, pinch you, or twist your ears, gradually vanished.
Moreover, the story of the row there had been over Macbeth was not
long in leaking out. The children grasped that old Millie had done
something wrong--they didn't exactly know what--and had been given
a 'talking to'. It lowered her in their eyes. There is no dealing
with children, even with children who are fond of you, unless you
can keep your prestige as an adult; let that prestige be once
damaged, and even the best-hearted children will despise you.

So they began to be naughty in the normal, traditional way.
Before, Dorothy had only had to deal with occasional laziness,
outbursts of noise and silly giggling fits; now there were spite
and deceitfulness as well. The children revolted ceaselessly
against the horrible routine. They forgot the short weeks when old
Millie had seemed quite a good sort and school itself had seemed
rather fun. Now, school was simply what it had always been, and
what indeed you expected it to be--a place where you slacked and
yawned and whiled the time away by pinching your neighbour and
trying to make the teacher lose her temper, and from which you
burst with a yell of relief the instant the last lesson was over.
Sometimes they sulked and had fits of crying, sometimes they argued
in the maddening persistent way that children have, 'WHY should we
do this? WHY does anyone have to learn to read and write?' over
and over again, until Dorothy had to stand over them and silence
them with threats of blows. She was growing almost habitually
irritable nowadays; it surprised and shocked her, but she could not
stop it. Every morning she vowed to herself, 'Today I will NOT
lose my temper', and every morning, with depressing regularity, she
DID lose her temper, especially at about half past eleven when the
children were at their worst. Nothing in the world is quite so
irritating as dealing with mutinous children. Sooner or later,
Dorothy knew, she would lose control of herself and begin hitting
them. It seemed to her an unforgivable thing to do, to hit a
child; but nearly all teachers come to it in the end. It was
impossible now to get any child to work except when your eye was
upon it. You had only to turn your back for an instant and
blotting-paper pellets were flying to and fro. Nevertheless, with
ceaseless slave-driving the children's handwriting and 'commercial
arithmetic' did certainly show some improvement, and no doubt the
parents were satisfied.

The last few weeks of the term were a very bad time. For over a
fortnight Dorothy was quite penniless, for Mrs Creevy had told her
that she couldn't pay her her term's wages 'till some of the fees
came in'. So she was deprived of the secret slabs of chocolate
that had kept her going, and she suffered from a perpetual slight
hunger that made her languid and spiritless. There were leaden
mornings when the minutes dragged like hours, when she struggled
with herself to keep her eyes away from the clock, and her heart
sickened to think that beyond this lesson there loomed another just
like it, and more of them and more, stretching on into what seemed
like a dreary eternity. Worse yet were the times when the children
were in their noisy mood and it needed a constant exhausting effort
of the will to keep them under control at all; and beyond the wall,
of course, lurked Mrs Creevy, always listening, always ready to
descend upon the schoolroom, wrench the door open, and glare round
the room with 'Now then! What's all this noise about, please?' and
the sack in her eye.

Dorothy was fully awake, now, to the beastliness of living in Mrs
Creevy's house. The filthy food, the cold, and the lack of baths
seemed much more important than they had seemed a little while ago.
Moreover, she was beginning to appreciate, as she had not done when
the joy of her work was fresh upon her, the utter loneliness of her
position. Neither her father nor Mr Warburton had written to her,
and in two months she had made not a single friend in Southbridge.
For anyone so situated, and particularly for a woman, it is all but
impossible to make friends. She had no money and no home of her
own, and outside the school her sole places of refuge were the
public library, on the few evenings when she could get there, and
church on Sunday mornings. She went to church regularly, of
course--Mrs Creevy had insisted on that. She had settled the
question of Dorothy's religious observances at breakfast on her
first Sunday morning.

'I've just been wondering what Place of Worship you ought to go
to,' she said. 'I suppose you were brought up C. of E., weren't
you?'

'Yes,' said Dorothy.

'Hm, well. I can't quite make up my mind where to send you.
There's St George's--that's the C. of E.--and there's the Baptist
Chapel where I go myself. Most of our parents are Nonconformists,
and I don't know as they'd quite approve of a C. of E. teacher.
You can't be too careful with the parents. They had a bit of a
scare two years ago when it turned out that the teacher I had then
was actually a Roman Catholic, if you please! Of course she kept
it dark as long as she could, but it came out in the end, and three
of the parents took their children away. I got rid of her the same
day as I found it out, naturally.'

Dorothy was silent.

'Still,' went on Mrs Creevy, 'we HAVE got three C. of E. pupils,
and I don't know as the Church connexion mightn't be worked up a
bit. So perhaps you'd better risk it and go to St George's. But
you want to be a bit careful, you know. I'm told St George's is
one of these churches where they go in for a lot of bowing and
scraping and crossing yourself and all that. We've got two parents
that are Plymouth Brothers, and they'd throw a fit if they heard
you'd been seen crossing yourself. So don't go and do THAT,
whatever you do.'

'Very well,' said Dorothy.

'And just you keep your eyes well open during the sermon. Have a
good look round and see if there's any young girls in the
congregation that we could get hold of. If you see any likely
looking ones, get on to the parson afterwards and try and find out
their names and addresses.'

So Dorothy went to St George's. It was a shade 'Higher' than St
Athelstan's had been; chairs, not pews, but no incense, and the
vicar (his name was Mr Gore-Williams) wore a plain cassock and
surplice except on festival days. As for the services, they were
so like those at home that Dorothy could go through them, and utter
all the responses at the right moment, in a state of the completest
abstraction.

There was never a moment when the power of worship returned to her.
Indeed, the whole concept of worship was meaningless to her now;
her faith had vanished, utterly and irrevocably. It is a
mysterious thing, the loss of faith--as mysterious as faith itself.
Like faith, it is ultimately not rooted in logic; it is a change in
the climate of the mind. But however little the church services
might mean to her, she did not regret the hours she spent in
church. On the contrary, she looked forward to her Sunday mornings
as blessed interludes of peace; and that not only because Sunday
morning meant a respite from Mrs Creevy's prying eye and nagging
voice. In another and deeper sense the atmosphere of the church
was soothing and reassuring to her. For she perceived that in all
that happens in church, however absurd and cowardly its supposed
purpose may be, there is something--it is hard to define, but
something of decency, of spiritual comeliness--that is not easily
found in the world outside. It seemed to her that even though you
no longer believe, it is better to go to church than not; better to
follow in the ancient ways, than to drift in rootless freedom. She
knew very well that she would never again be able to utter a prayer
and mean it; but she knew also that for the rest of her life she
must continue with the observances to which she had been bred.
Just this much remained to her of the faith that had once, like the
bones in a living frame, held all her life together.

But as yet she did not think very deeply about the loss of her
faith and what it might mean to her in the future. She was too
busy merely existing, merely struggling to make her nerves hold out
for the rest of that miserable term. For as the term drew to an
end, the job of keeping the class in order grew more and more
exhausting. The girls behaved atrociously, and they were all the
bitterer against Dorothy because they had once been fond of her.
She had deceived them, they felt. She had started off by being
decent, and now she had turned out to be just a beastly old teacher
like the rest of them--a nasty old beast who kept on and on with
those awful handwriting lessons and snapped your head off if you so
much as made a blot on your book. Dorothy caught them eyeing her
face, sometimes, with the aloof, cruel scrutiny of children. They
had thought her pretty once, and now they thought her ugly, old,
and scraggy. She had grown, indeed, much thinner since she had
been at Ringwood House. They hated her now, as they had hated all
their previous teachers.

Sometimes they baited her quite deliberately. The older and more
intelligent girls understood the situation well enough--understood
that Millie was under old Creevy's thumb and that she got dropped
on afterwards when they had been making too much noise; sometimes
they made all the noise they dared, just so as to bring old Creevy
in and have the pleasure of watching Millie's face while old Creevy
told her off. There were times when Dorothy could keep her temper
and forgive them all they did, because she realized that it was
only a healthy instinct that made them rebel against the loathsome
monotony of their work. But there were other times when her nerves
were more on edge than usual, and when she looked round at the
score of silly little faces, grinning or mutinous, and found it
possible to hate them. Children are so blind, so selfish, so
merciless. They do not know when they are tormenting you past
bearing, and if they did know they would not care. You may do your
very best for them, you may keep your temper in situations that
would try a saint, and yet if you are forced to bore them and
oppress them, they will hate you for it without ever asking
themselves whether it is you who are to blame. How true--when you
happen not to be a school-teacher yourself--how true those often-
quoted lines sound--

Under a cruel eye outworn
The little ones spend the day
In sighing and dismay!

But when you yourself are the cruel eye outworn, you realize that
there is another side to the picture.

The last week came, and the dirty farce of 'exams', was carried
through. The system, as explained by Mrs Creevy, was quite simple.
You coached the children in, for example, a series of sums until
you were quite certain that they could get them right, and then set
them the same sums as an arithmetic paper before they had time to
forget the answers; and so with each subject in turn. The
children's papers were, of course, sent home for their parents'
inspection. And Dorothy wrote the reports under Mrs Creevy's
dictation, and she had to write 'excellent' so many times that--as
sometimes happens when you write a word over and over again--she
forgot how to spell it and began writing in 'excelent', 'exsellent',
'ecsellent', 'eccelent'.

The last day passed in fearful tumults. Not even Mrs Creevy
herself could keep the children in order. By midday Dorothy's
nerves were in rags, and Mrs Creevy gave her a 'talking to' in
front of the seven children who stayed to dinner. In the afternoon
the noise was worse than ever, and at last Dorothy, overcome,
appealed to the girls almost tearfully to stop.

'Girls!' she called out, raising her voice to make herself heard
through the din. 'PLEASE stop it, PLEASE! You're behaving
horribly to me. Do you think it's kind to go on like this?'

That was fatal, of course. Never, never, never throw yourself on
the mercy of a child! There was an instant's hush, and then one
child cried out, loudly and derisively, 'Mill-iee!' The next
moment the whole class had taken it up, even the imbecile Mavis,
chanting all together 'Mill-iee! Mill-iee! Mill-iee!' At that,
something within Dorothy seemed to snap. She paused for an
instant, picked out the girl who was making the most noise, walked
up to her, and gave her a smack across the ear almost as hard as
she could hit. Happily it was only one of the 'medium payers'.

6

On the first day of the holidays Dorothy received a letter from Mr
Warburton.

My Dear Dorothy [he wrote],--Or should I call you Ellen, as I
understand that is your new name? You must, I am afraid, have
thought it very heartless of me not to have written sooner, but I
assure you that it was not until ten days ago that I even heard
anything about our supposed escapade. I have been abroad, first in
various parts of France, then in Austria and then in Rome, and, as
you know, I avoid my fellow countrymen most strenuously on these
trips. They are disgusting enough even at home, but in foreign
parts their behaviour makes me so ashamed of them that I generally
try to pass myself off as an American.

When I got to Knype Hill your father refused to see me, but I
managed to get hold of Victor Stone, who gave me your address and
the name you are using. He seemed rather reluctant to do so, and I
gathered that even he, like everyone else in this poisonous town,
still believes that you have misbehaved yourself in some way. I
think the theory that you and I eloped together has been dropped,
but you must, they feel, have done SOMETHING scandalous. A young
woman has left home suddenly, therefore there must be a man in the
case; that is how the provincial mind works, you see. I need not
tell you that I have been contradicting the whole story with the
utmost vigour. You will be glad to hear that I managed to corner
that disgusting hag, Mrs Semprill, and give her a piece of my mind;
and I assure you that a piece of MY mind is distinctly formidable.
But the woman is simply sub-human. I could get nothing out of her
except hypocritical snivellings about 'poor, POOR Dorothy'.

I hear that your father misses you very much, and would gladly have
you home again if it were not for the scandal. His meals are never
punctual nowadays, it seems. He gives it out that you 'went away
to recuperate from a slight illness and have now got an excellent
post at a girls' school'. You will be surprised to hear of one
thing that has happened to him. He has been obliged to pay off all
his debts! I am told that the tradesmen rose in a body and held
what was practically a creditors' meeting in the Rectory. Not the
kind of thing that could have happened at Plumstead Episcopi--but
these are democratic days, alas! You, evidently, were the only
person who could keep the tradesmen permanently at bay.

And now I must tell you some of my own news, etc., etc., etc.

At this point Dorothy tore the letter up in disappointment and even
in annoyance. He might have shown a little more sympathy! she
thought. It was just like Mr Warburton after getting her into
serious trouble--for after all, he was principally to blame for
what had happened--to be so flippant and unconcerned about it. But
when she had thought it over she acquitted him of heartlessness.
He had done what little was possible to help her, and he could not
be expected to pity her for troubles of which he had not heard.
Besides, his own life had been a series of resounding scandals;
probably he could not understand that to a woman a scandal is a
serious matter.

At Christmas Dorothy's father also wrote, and what was more, sent
her a Christmas present of two pounds. It was evident from the
tone of his letter that he had forgiven Dorothy by this time. WHAT
exactly he had forgiven her was not certain, because it was not
certain what exactly she had done; but still, he had forgiven her.
The letter started with some perfunctory but quite friendly
inquiries. He hoped her new job suited her, he wrote. And were
her rooms at the school comfortable and the rest of the staff
congenial? He had heard that they did one very well at schools
nowadays--very different from what it had been forty years ago.
Now, in his day, etc., etc., etc. He had, Dorothy perceived, not
the dimmest idea of her present circumstances. At the mention of
schools his mind flew to Winchester, his old school; such a place
as Ringwood House was beyond his imagining.

The rest of the letter was taken up with grumblings about the way
things were going in the parish. The Rector complained of being
worried and overworked. The wretched churchwardens kept bothering
him with this and that, and he was growing very tired of Proggett's
reports about the collapsing belfry, and the daily woman whom he
had engaged to help Ellen was a great nuisance and had put her
broom-handle through the face of the grandfather clock in his
study--and so on, and so forth, for a number of pages. He said
several times in a mumbling roundabout way that he wished Dorothy
were there to help him; but he did not actually suggest that she
should come home. Evidently it was still necessary that she should
remain out of sight and out of mind--a skeleton in a distant and
well-locked cupboard.

The letter filled Dorothy with sudden painful homesickness. She
found herself pining to be back at her parish visiting and her Girl
Guides' cooking class, and wondering unhappily how her father had
got on without her all this while and whether those two women were
looking after him properly. She was fond of her father, in a way
that she had never dared to show; for he was not a person to whom
you could make any display of affection. It surprised and rather
shocked her to realize how little he had been in her thoughts
during the past four months. There had been periods of weeks at a
time when she had forgotten his existence. But the truth was that
the mere business of keeping body and soul together had left her
with no leisure for other emotions.

Now, however, school work was over, and she had leisure and to
spare, for though Mrs Creevy did her best she could not invent
enough household jobs to keep Dorothy busy for more than part of
the day. She made it quite plain to Dorothy that during the
holidays she was nothing but a useless expense, and she watched her
at her meals (obviously feeling it an outrage that she should eat
when she wasn't working) in a way that finally became unbearable.
So Dorothy kept out of the house as much as possible, and, feeling
fairly rich with her wages (four pounds ten, for nine weeks) and
her father's two pounds, she took to buying sandwiches at the ham
and beef shop in the town and eating her dinner out of doors. Mrs
Creevy acquiesced, half sulkily because she liked to have Dorothy
in the house to nag at her, and half pleased at the chance of
skimping a few more meals.

Dorothy went for long solitary walks, exploring Southbridge and its
yet more desolate neighbours, Dorley, Wembridge, and West Holton.
Winter had descended, dank and windless, and more gloomy in those
colourless labyrinthine suburbs than in the bleakest wilderness.
On two or three occasions, though such extravagance would probably
mean hungry days later on, Dorothy took a cheap return ticket to
Iver Heath or Burnham Beeches. The woods were sodden and wintry,
with great beds of drifted beech leaves that glowed like copper in
the still, wet air, and the days were so mild that you could sit
out of doors and read if you kept your gloves on. On Christmas Eve
Mrs Creevy produced some sprigs of holly that she had saved from
last year, dusted them, and nailed them up; but she did not, she
said, intend to have a Christmas dinner. She didn't hold with all
this Christmas nonsense, she said--it was just a lot of humbug got
up by the shopkeepers, and such an unnecessary expense; and she
hated turkey and Christmas pudding anyway. Dorothy was relieved; a
Christmas dinner in that joyless 'morning-room' (she had an awful
momentary vision of Mrs Creevy in a paper hat out of a cracker) was
something that didn't bear thinking about. She ate her Christmas
dinner--a hard-boiled egg, two cheese sandwiches, and a bottle of
lemonade--in the woods near Burnham, against a great gnarled beech
tree, over a copy of George Gissing's The Odd Women.

On days when it was too wet to go for walks she spent most of her
time in the public library--becoming, indeed, one of the regular
habituees of the library, along with the out-of-work men who sat
drearily musing over illustrated papers which they did not read,
and the elderly discoloured bachelor who lived in 'rooms' on two
pounds a week and came to the library to study books on yachting by
the hour together. It had been a great relief to her when the term
ended, but this feeling soon wore off; indeed, with never a soul to
talk to, the days dragged even more heavily than before. There is
perhaps no quarter of the inhabited world where one can be quite so
completely alone as in the London suburbs. In a big town the
throng and bustle give one at least the illusion of companionship,
and in the country everyone is interested in everyone else--too
much so, indeed. But in places like Southbridge, if you have no
family and no home to call your own, you could spend half a
lifetime without managing to make a friend. There are women in
such places, and especially derelict gentlewomen in ill-paid jobs,
who go for years upon end in almost utter solitude. It was not
long before Dorothy found herself in a perpetually low-spirited,
jaded state in which, try as she would, nothing seemed able to
interest her. And it was in the hateful ennui of this time--the
corrupting ennui that lies in wait for every modern soul--that she
first came to a full understanding of what it meant to have lost
her faith.

She tried drugging herself with books, and it succeeded for a week
or so. But after a while very nearly all books seemed wearisome
and unintelligible; for the mind will not work to any purpose when
it is quite alone. In the end she found that she could not cope
with anything more difficult than a detective story. She took
walks of ten and fifteen miles, trying to tire herself into a
better mood; but the mean suburban roads, and the damp, miry paths
through the woods, the naked trees, the sodden moss and great
spongy fungi, afflicted her with a deadly melancholy. It was human
companionship that she needed, and there seemed no way of getting
it. At nights' when she walked back to the school and looked at
the warm-lit windows of the houses, and heard voices laughing and
gramophones playing within, her heart swelled with envy. Ah, to be
like those people in there--to have at least a home, a family, a
few friends who were interested in you! There were days when she
pined for the courage to speak to strangers in the street. Days,
too, when she contemplated shamming piety in order to scrape
acquaintance with the Vicar of St George's and his family, and
perhaps get the chance of occupying herself with a little parish
work; days, even, when she was so desperate that she thought of
joining the Y.W.C.A.

But almost at the end of the holidays, through a chance encounter
at the library, she made friends with a little woman named Miss
Beaver, who was geography mistress at Toot's Commercial College,
another of the private schools in Southbridge. Toot's Commerical
College was a much larger and more pretentious school than Ringwood
House--it had about a hundred and fifty day-pupils of both sexes
and even rose to the dignity of having a dozen boarders--and its
curriculum was a somewhat less blatant swindle. It was one of
those schools that are aimed at the type of parent who blathers
about 'up-to-date business training', and its watch-word was
Efficiency; meaning a tremendous parade of hustling, and the
banishment of all humane studies. One of its features was a kind
of catechism called the Efficiency Ritual, which all the children
were required to learn by heart as soon as they joined the school.
It had questions and answers such as:

Q. What is the secret of success?
A. The secret of success is efficiency.
Q. What is the test of efficiency?
A. The test of efficiency is success.

And so on and so on. It was said that the spectacle of the whole
school, boys and girls together, reciting the Efficiency Ritual
under the leadership of the Headmaster--they had this ceremony two
mornings a week instead of prayers--was most impressive.

Miss Beaver was a prim little woman with a round body, a thin face,
a reddish nose, and the gait of a guinea-hen. After twenty years
of slave-driving she had attained to an income of four pounds a
week and the privilege of 'living out' instead of having to put the
boarders to bed at nights. She lived in 'rooms'--that is, in a
bed-sitting room--to which she was sometimes able to invite Dorothy
when both of them had a free evening. How Dorothy looked forward
to those visits! They were only possible at rare intervals,
because Miss Beaver's landlady 'didn't approve of visitors', and
even when you got there there was nothing much to do except to help
solve the crossword puzzle out of the Daily Telegraph and look at
the photographs Miss Beaver had taken on her trip (this trip had
been the summit and glory of her life) to the Austrian Tyrol in
1913. But still, how much it meant to sit talking to somebody in a
friendly way and to drink a cup of tea less wishy-washy than Mrs
Creevy's! Miss Beaver had a spirit lamp in a japanned travelling
case (it had been with her to the Tyrol in 1913) on which she
brewed herself pots of tea as black as coal-tar, swallowing about a
bucketful of this stuff during the day. She confided to Dorothy
that she always took a Thermos flask to school and had a nice hot
cup of tea during the break and another after dinner. Dorothy
perceived that by one of two well-beaten roads every third-rate
schoolmistress must travel: Miss Strong's road, via whisky to the
workhouse; or Miss Beaver's road, via strong tea to a decent death
in the Home for Decayed Gentlewomen.

Miss Beaver was in truth a dull little woman. She was a memento
mori, or rather memento senescere, to Dorothy. Her soul seemed to
have withered until it was as forlorn as a dried-up cake of soap in
a forgotten soap dish. She had come to a point where life in a
bed-sitting room under a tyrannous landlady and the 'efficient'
thrusting of Commercial Geography down children's retching throats,
were almost the only destiny she could imagine. Yet Dorothy grew
to be very fond of Miss Beaver, and those occasional hours that
they spent together in the bed-sitting room, doing the Daily
Telegraph crossword over a nice hot cup of tea, were like oases in
her life.

She was glad when the Easter term began, for even the daily round
of slave-driving was better than the empty solitude of the
holidays. Moreover, the girls were much better in hand this term;
she never again found it necessary to smack their heads. For she
had grasped now that it is easy enough to keep children in order if
you are ruthless with them from the start. Last term the girls had
behaved badly, because she had started by treating them as human
beings, and later on, when the lessons that interested them were
discontinued, they had rebelled like human beings. But if you are
obliged to teach children rubbish, you mustn't treat them as human
beings. You must treat them like animals--driving, not persuading.
Before all else, you must teach them that it is more painful to
rebel than to obey. Possibly this kind of treatment is not very
good for children, but there is no doubt they understand it and
respond to it.

She learned the dismal arts of the school-teacher. She learned to
glaze her mind against the interminable boring hours, to economize
her nervous energy, to be merciless and ever-vigilant, to take a
kind of pride and pleasure in seeing a futile rigmarole well done.
She had grown, quite suddenly it seemed, much tougher and maturer.
Her eyes had lost the half-childish look that they had once had,
and her face had grown thinner, making her nose seem longer. At
times it was quite definitely a schoolmarm's face; you could
imagine pince-nez upon it. But she had not become cynical as yet.
She still knew that these children were the victims of a dreary
swindle, still longed, if it had been possible, to do something
better for them. If she harried them and stuffed their heads with
rubbish, it was for one reason alone: because whatever happened she
had got to keep her job.

There was very little noise in the schoolroom this term. Mrs
Creevy, anxious as she always was for a chance of finding fault,
seldom had reason to rap on the wall with her broom-handle. One
morning at breakfast she looked rather hard at Dorothy, as though
weighing a decision, and then pushed the dish of marmalade across
the table.

'Have some marmalade if you like, Miss Millborough,' she said,
quite graciously for her.

It was the first time that marmalade had crossed Dorothy's lips
since she had come to Ringwood House. She flushed slightly. 'So
the woman realizes that I have done my best for her,' she could not
help thinking.

Thereafter she had marmalade for breakfast every morning. And in
other ways Mrs Creevy's manner became--not indeed, genial, for it
could never be that, but less brutally offensive. There were even
times when she produced a grimace that was intended for a smile;
her face, it seemed to Dorothy, CREASED with the effort. About
this time her conversation became peppered with references to 'next
term'. It was always 'Next term we'll do this', and 'Next term I
shall want you to do that', until Dorothy began to feel that she
had won Mrs Creevy's confidence and was being treated more like a
colleague than a slave. At that a small, unreasonable but very
exciting hope took root in her heart. Perhaps Mrs Creevy was going
to raise her wages! It was profoundly unlikely, and she tried to
break herself of hoping for it, but could not quite succeed. If
her wages were raised even half a crown a week, what a difference
it would make!

The last day came. With any luck Mrs Creevy might pay her wages
tomorrow, Dorothy thought. She wanted the money very badly indeed;
she had been penniless for weeks past, and was not only unbearably
hungry, but also in need of some new stockings, for she had not a
pair that were not darned almost out of existence. The following
morning she did the household jobs allotted to her, and then,
instead of going out, waited in the 'morning-room' while Mrs Creevy
banged about with her broom and pan upstairs. Presently Mrs Creevy
came down.

'Ah, so THERE you are, Miss Millborough!' she said in a peculiar
meaning tone. 'I had a sort of an idea you wouldn't be in such a
hurry to get out of doors this morning. Well, as you ARE here, I
suppose I may as well pay you your wages.'

'Thank you,' said Dorothy.

'And after that,' added Mrs Creevy, 'I've got a little something as
I want to say to you.'

Dorothy's heart stirred. Did that 'little something' mean the
longed-for rise in wages? It was just conceivable. Mrs Creevy
produced a worn, bulgy leather purse from a locked drawer in the
dresser, opened it and licked her thumb.

'Twelve weeks and five days,' she said. 'Twelve weeks is near
enough. No need to be particular to a day. That makes six
pounds.'

She counted out five dingy pound notes and two ten-shilling notes;
then, examining one of the notes and apparently finding it too
clean, she put it back into her purse and fished out another that
had been torn in half. She went to the dresser, got a piece of
transparent sticky paper and carefully stuck the two halves
together. Then she handed it, together with the other six, to
Dorothy.

'There you are, Miss Millborough,' she said. 'And now, will you
just leave the house AT once, please? I shan't be wanting you any
longer.'

'You won't be--'

Dorothy's entrails seemed to have turned to ice. All the blood
drained out of her face. But even now, in her terror and despair,
she was not absolutely sure of the meaning of what had been said to
her. She still half thought that Mrs Creevy merely meant that she
was to stay out of the house for the rest of the day.

'You won't be wanting me any longer?' she repeated faintly.

'No. I'm getting in another teacher at the beginning of next term.
And it isn't to be expected as I'd keep you through the holidays
all free for nothing, is it?'

'But you don't mean that you want me to LEAVE--that you're
dismissing me?'

'Of course I do. What else did you think I meant?'

'But you've given me no notice!' said Dorothy.

'Notice!' said Mrs Creevy, getting angry immediately. 'What's it
got to do with YOU whether I give you notice or not? You haven't
got a written contract, have you?'

'No . . . I suppose not.'

'Well, then! You'd better go upstairs and start packing your box.
It's no good your staying any longer, because I haven't got
anything in for your dinner.'

Dorothy went upstairs and sat down on the side of the bed. She was
trembling uncontrollably, and it was some minutes before she could
collect her wits and begin packing. She felt dazed. The disaster
that had fallen upon her was so sudden, so apparently causeless,
that she had difficulty in believing that it had actually happened.
But in truth the reason why Mrs Creevy had sacked her was quite
simple and adequate.

Not far from Ringwood House there was a poor, moribund little
school called The Gables, with only seven pupils. The teacher was
an incompetent old hack called Miss Allcock, who had been at
thirty-eight different schools in her life and was not fit to have
charge of a tame canary. But Miss Allcock had one outstanding
talent; she was very good at double-crossing her employers. In
these third-rate and fourth-rate private schools a sort of piracy
is constantly going on. Parents are 'got round' and pupils stolen
from one school to another. Very often the treachery of the
teacher is at the bottom of it. The teacher secretly approaches
the parents one by one ('Send your child to me and I'll take her
at ten shillings a term cheaper'), and when she has corrupted a
sufficient number she suddenly deserts and 'sets up' on her own,
or carries the children off to another school. Miss Allcock had
succeeded in stealing three out of her employer's seven pupils, and
had come to Mrs Creevy with the offer of them. In return, she was
to have Dorothy's place and a fifteen-per-cent commission on the
pupils she brought.

There were weeks of furtive chaffering before the bargain was
clinched, Miss Allcock being finally beaten down from fifteen per
cent to twelve and a half. Mrs Creevy privately resolved to sack
old Allcock the instant she was certain that the three children she
brought with her would stay. Simultaneously, Miss Allcock was
planning to begin stealing old Creevy's pupils as soon as she had
got a footing in the school.

Having decided to sack Dorothy, it was obviously most important to
prevent her from finding it out. For, of course, if she knew what
was going to happen, she would begin stealing pupils on her own
account, or at any rate wouldn't do a stroke of work for the rest
of the term. (Mrs Creevy prided herself on knowing human nature.)
Hence the marmalade, the creaky smiles, and the other ruses to
allay Dorothy's suspicions. Anyone who knew the ropes would have
begun thinking of another job the very moment when the dish of
marmalade was pushed across the table.

Just half an hour after her sentence of dismissal, Dorothy,
carrying her handbag, opened the front gate. It was the fourth of
April, a bright blowy day, too cold to stand about in, with a sky
as blue as a hedgesparrow's egg, and one of those spiteful spring
winds that come tearing along the pavement in sudden gusts and blow
dry, stinging dust into your face. Dorothy shut the gate behind
her and began to walk very slowly in the direction of the main-line
station.

She had told Mrs Creevy that she would give her an address to which
her box could be sent, and Mrs Creevy had instantly exacted five
shillings for the carriage. So Dorothy had five pounds fifteen in
hand, which might keep her for three weeks with careful economy.
What she was going to do, except that she must start by going to
London and finding a suitable lodging, she had very little idea.
But her first panic had worn off, and she realized that the
situation was not altogether desperate. No doubt her father would
help her, at any rate for a while, and at the worst, though she
hated even the thought of doing it, she could ask her cousin's help
a second time. Besides, her chances of finding a job were probably
fairly good. She was young, she spoke with a genteel accent, and
she was willing to drudge for a servant's wages--qualities that are
much sought after by the proprietors of fourth-rate schools. Very
likely all would be well. But that there was an evil time ahead of
her, a time of job-hunting, of uncertainty and possibly of hunger--
that, at any rate, was certain.

CHAPTER 5

1

However, it turned out quite otherwise. For Dorothy had not gone
five yards from the gate when a telegraph boy came riding up the
street in the opposite direction, whistling and looking at the
names of the houses. He saw the name Ringwood House, wheeled his
bicycle round, propped it against the kerb, and accosted Dorothy.

'Miss Mill-BURROW live 'ere?' he said, jerking his head in the
direction of Ringwood House.

'Yes. I am Miss Millborough.'

'Gotter wait case there's a answer,' said the boy, taking an
orange-coloured envelope from his belt.

Dorothy put down her bag. She had once more begun trembling
violently. And whether this was from joy or fear she was not
certain, for two conflicting thoughts had sprung almost
simultaneously into her brain. One, 'This is some kind of good
news!' The other, 'Father is seriously ill!' She managed to tear
the envelope open, and found a telegram which occupied two pages,
and which she had the greatest difficulty in understanding. It
ran:

Rejoice in the lord o ye righteous note of exclamation great news
note of exclamation your reputation absolutely reestablished stop
mrs semprill fallen into the pit that she hath digged stop action
for libel stop no one believes her any longer stop your father
wishes you return home immediately stop am coming up to town myself
comma will pick you up if you like stop arriving shortly after this
stop wait for me stop praise him with the loud cymbals note of
exclamation much love stop.

No need to look at the signature. It was from Mr Warburton, of
course. Dorothy felt weaker and more tremulous than ever. She was
dimly aware the telegraph boy was asking her something.

'Any answer?' he said for the third or fourth time.

'Not today, thank you,' said Dorothy vaguely.

The boy remounted his bicycle and rode off, whistling with extra
loudness to show Dorothy how much he despised her for not tipping
him. But Dorothy was unaware of the telegraph's boy's scorn. The
only phrase of the telegram that she had fully understood was 'your
father wishes you return home immediately', and the surprise of it
had left her in a semi-dazed condition. For some indefinite time
she stood on the pavement, until presently a taxi rolled up the
street, with Mr Warburton inside it. He saw Dorothy, stopped the
taxi, jumped out and came across to meet her, beaming. He seized
her both hands.

'Hullo!' he cried, and at once threw his arm pseudo-paternally
about her and drew her against him, heedless of who might be
looking. 'How are you? But by Jove, how thin you've got! I can
feel all your ribs. Where is this school of yours?'

Dorothy, who had not yet managed to get free of his arm, turned
partly round and cast a glance towards the dark windows of Ringwood
House.

'What! That place? Good God, what a hole! What have you done
with your luggage?'

'It's inside. I've left them the money to send it on. I think
it'll be all right.'

'Oh, nonsense! Why pay? We'll take it with us. It can go on top
of the taxi.'

'No, no! Let them send it. I daren't go back. Mrs Creevy would
be horribly angry.'

'Mrs Creevy? Who's Mrs Creevy?'

'The headmistress--at least, she owns the school.'

'What, a dragon, is she? Leave her to me--I'll deal with her.
Perseus and the Gorgon, what? You are Andromeda. Hi!' he called
to the taxi-driver.

The two of them went up to the front door and Mr Warburton knocked.
Somehow, Dorothy never believed that they would succeed in getting
her box from Mrs Creevy. In fact, she half expected to see them
come out flying for their lives, and Mrs Creevy after them with her
broom. However, in a couple of minutes they reappeared, the taxi-
driver carrying the box on his shoulder. Mr Warburton handed
Dorothy into the taxi and, as they sat down, dropped half a crown
into her hand.

'What a woman! What a woman!' he said comprehensively as the taxi
bore them away. 'How the devil have you put up with it all this
time?'

'What is this?' said Dorothy, looking at the coin.

'Your half-crown that you left to pay for the luggage. Rather a
feat getting it out of the old girl, wasn't it?'

'But I left five shillings!' said Dorothy.

'What! The woman told me you only left half a crown. By God, what
impudence! We'll go back and have the half-crown out of her. Just
to spite her!' He tapped on the glass.

'No, no!' said Dorothy, laying her hand on his arm. 'It doesn't
matter in the least. Let's get away from here--right away. I
couldn't bear to go back to that place again--EVER!'

It was quite true. She felt that she would sacrifice not merely
half a crown, but all the money in her possession, sooner than set
eyes on Ringwood House again. So they drove on, leaving Mrs Creevy
victorious. It would be interesting to know whether this was
another of the occasions when Mrs Creevy laughed.

Mr Warburton insisted on taking the taxi the whole way into London,
and talked so voluminously in the quieter patches of the traffic
that Dorothy could hardly get a word in edgeways. It was not till
they had reached the inner suburbs that she got from him an
explanation of the sudden change in her fortunes.

'Tell me,' she said, 'what is it that's happened? I don't
understand. Why is it all right for me to go home all of a sudden?
Why don't people believe Mrs Semprill any longer? Surely she
hasn't confessed?'

'Confessed? Not she! But her sins have found her out, all the
same. It was the kind of thing that you pious people would ascribe
to the finger of Providence. Cast thy bread upon the waters, and
all that. She got herself into a nasty mess--an action for libel.
We've talked of nothing else in Knype Hill for the last fortnight.
I though you would have seen something about it in the newspapers.'

'I've hardly looked at a paper for ages. Who brought an action for
libel? Not my father, surely?'

'Good gracious, no! Clergymen can't bring actions for libel. It
was the bank manager. Do you remember her favourite story about
him--how he was keeping a woman on the bank's money, and so forth?'

'Yes, I think so.'

'A few months ago she was foolish enough to put some of it in
writing. Some kind friend--some female friend, I presume--took the
letter round to the bank manager. He brought an action--Mrs
Semprill was ordered to pay a hundred and fifty pounds damages.
I don't suppose she paid a halfpenny, but still, that's the end of
her career as a scandalmonger. You can go on blackening people's
reputations for years, and everyone will believe you, more or less,
even when it's perfectly obvious that you're lying. But once
you've been proved a liar in open court, you're disqualified, so to
speak. Mrs Semprill's done for, so far as Knype Hill goes. She
left the town between days--practically did a moonlight flit, in
fact. I believe she's inflicting herself on Bury St Edmunds at
present.'

'But what has all that got to do with the things she said about you
and me?'

'Nothing--nothing whatever. But why worry? The point is that
you're reinstated; and all the hags who've been smacking their
chops over you for months past are saying, "Poor, poor Dorothy, how
SHOCKINGLY that dreadful woman has treated her!"'

'You mean they think that because Mrs Semprill was telling lies in
one case she must have been telling lies in another?'

'No doubt that's what they'd say if they were capable of reasoning
it out. At any rate, Mrs Semprill's in disgrace, and so all the
people she's slandered must be martyrs. Even MY reputation is
practically spotless for the time being.'

'And do you think that's really the end of it? Do you think they
honestly believe that it was all an accident--that I only lost my
memory and didn't elope with anybody?'

'Oh, well, I wouldn't go as far as that. In these country places
there's always a certain amount of suspicion knocking about. Not
suspicion of anything in particular, you know; just generalized
suspicion. A sort of instinctive rustic dirty-mindedness. I can
imagine its being vaguely rumoured in the bar parlour of the Dog
and Bottle in ten years' time that you've got some nasty secret in
your past, only nobody can remember what. Still, your troubles are
over. If I were you I wouldn't give any explanations till you're
asked for them. The official theory is that you had a bad attack
of flu and went away to recuperate. I should stick to that.
You'll find they'll accept it all right. Officially, there's
nothing against you.

Presently they got to London, and Mr Warburton took Dorothy to
lunch at a restaurant in Coventry Street, where they had a young
chicken, roasted, with asparagus and tiny, pearly-white potatoes
that had been ripped untimely from their mother earth, and also
treacle tart and a nice warm bottle of Burgundy; but what gave
Dorothy the most pleasure of all, after Mrs Creevy's lukewarm water
tea, was the black coffee they had afterwards. After lunch they
took another taxi to Liverpool Street Station and caught the 2.45.
It was a four-hour journey to Knype Hill.

Mr Warburton insisted on travelling first-class, and would not hear
of Dorothy paying her own fare; he also, when Dorothy was not
looking, tipped the guard to let them have a carriage to themselves.
It was one of those bright cold days which are spring or winter
according as you are indoors or out. From behind the shut windows
of the carriage the too-blue sky looked warm and kind, and all the
slummy wilderness through which the train was rattling--the
labyrinths of little dingy-coloured houses, the great chaotic
factories, the miry canals, and derelict building lots littered with
rusty boilers and overgrown by smoke-blackened weeds--all were
redeemed and gilded by the sun. Dorothy hardly spoke for the first
half-hour of the journey. For the moment she was too happy to talk.
She did not even think of anything in particular, but merely sat
there luxuriating in the glass-filtered sunlight, in the comfort of
the padded seat and the feeling of having escaped from Mrs Creevy's
clutches. But she was aware that this mood could not last very much
longer. Her contentment, like the warmth of the wine that she had
drunk at lunch, was ebbing away, and thoughts either painful or
difficult to express were taking shape in her mind. Mr Warburton
had been watching her face, more observantly than was usual for him,
as though trying to gauge the changes that the past eight months had
worked in her.

'You look older,' he said finally.

'I am older,' said Dorothy.

'Yes; but you look--well, more completely grown up. Tougher.
Something has changed in your face. You look--if you'll forgive
the expression--as though the Girl Guide had been exorcized from
you for good and all. I hope seven devils haven't entered into you
instead?' Dorothy did not answer, and he added: 'I suppose, as a
matter of fact, you must have had the very devil of a time?'

'Oh, beastly! Sometimes too beastly for words. Do you know that
sometimes--'

She paused. She had been about to tell him how she had had to beg
for her food; how she had slept in the streets; how she had been
arrested for begging and spent a night in the police cells; how Mrs
Creevy had nagged at her and starved her. But she stopped, because
she had suddenly realized that these were not the things that she
wanted to talk about. Such things as these, she perceived, are of
no real importance; they are mere irrelevant accidents, not
essentially different from catching a cold in the head or having to
wait two hours at a railway junction. They are disagreeable, but
they do not matter. The truism that all real happenings are in the
mind struck her more forcibly than ever before, and she said:

'Those things don't really matter. I mean, things like having no
money and not having enough to eat. Even when you're practically
starving--it doesn't CHANGE anything inside you.'

'Doesn't it? I'll take your word for it. I should be very sorry
to try.'

'Oh, well, it's beastly while it's happening, of course; but it
doesn't make any real difference; it's the things that happen
inside you that matter.'

'Meaning?' said Mr Warburton.

'Oh--things change in your mind. And then the whole world changes,
because you look at it differently.'

She was still looking out of the window. The train had drawn clear
of the eastern slums and was running at gathering speed past
willow-bordered streams and low-lying meadows upon whose hedges the
first buds made a faint soft greenness, like a cloud. In a field
near the line a month-old calf, flat as a Noah's Ark animal, was
bounding stiff-legged after its mother, and in a cottage garden an
old labourer, with slow, rheumatic movements, was turning over the
soil beneath a pear tree covered with ghostly bloom. His spade
flashed in the sun as the train passed. The depressing hymn-line
'Change and decay in all around I see' moved through Dorothy's
mind. It was true what she had said just now. Something had
happened in her heart, and the world was a little emptier, a little
poorer from that minute. On such a day as this, last spring or any
earlier spring, how joyfully, and how unthinkingly, she would have
thanked God for the first blue skies and the first flowers of the
reviving year! And now, seemingly, there was no God to thank, and
nothing--not a flower or a stone or a blade of grass--nothing in
the universe would ever be the same again.

'Things change in your mind,' she repeated. 'I've lost my faith,'
she added, somewhat abruptly, because she found herself half
ashamed to utter the words.

'You've lost your WHAT?' said Mr Warburton, less accustomed than
she to this kind of phraseology.

'My faith. Oh, you know what I mean! A few months ago, all of a
sudden, it seemed as if my whole mind had changed. Everything that
I'd believed in till then--everything--seemed suddenly meaningless
and almost silly. God--what I'd meant by God--immortal life,
Heaven and Hell--everything. It had all gone. And it wasn't that
I'd reasoned it out; it just happened to me. It was like when
you're a child, and one day, for no particular reason, you stop
believing in fairies. I just couldn't go on believing in it any
longer.'

'You never did believe in it,' said Mr Warburton unconcernedly.

'But I did, really I did! I know you always thought I didn't--you
thought I was just pretending because I was ashamed to own up. But
it wasn't that at all. I believed it just as I believe that I'm
sitting in this carriage.'

'Of course you didn't, my poor child! How could you, at your age?
You were far too intelligent for that. But you'd been brought up
in these absurd beliefs, and you'd allowed yourself to go on
thinking, in a sort of way, that you could still swallow them.
You'd built yourself a life-pattern--if you'll excuse a bit of
psychological jargon--that was only possible for a believer, and
naturally it was beginning to be a strain on you. In fact, it was
obvious all the time what was the matter with you. I should say
that in all probability that was why you lost your memory.'

'What do you mean?' she said, rather puzzled by this remark.

He saw that she did not understand, and explained to her that loss
of memory is only a device, unconsciously used, to escape from an
impossible situation. The mind, he said, will play curious tricks
when it is in a tight corner. Dorothy had never heard of anything
of this kind before, and she could not at first accept his
explanation. Nevertheless she considered it for a moment, and
perceived that, even if it were true, it did not alter the
fundamental fact.

'I don't see that it makes any difference,' she said finally.

'Doesn't it? I should have said it made a considerable
difference.'

'But don't you see, if my faith is gone, what does it matter
whether I've only lost it now or whether I'd really lost it years
ago? All that matters is that it's gone, and I've got to begin my
life all over again.'

'Surely I don't take you to mean,' said Mr Warburton, 'that you
actually REGRET losing your faith, as you call it? One might as
well regret losing a goitre. Mind you, I'm speaking, as it were,
without the book--as a man who never had very much faith to lose.
The little I had passed away quite painlessly at the age of nine.
But it's hardly the kind of thing I should have thought anyone
would REGRET losing. Used you not, if I remember rightly, to do
horrible things like getting up at five in the morning to go to
Holy Communion on an empty belly? Surely you're not homesick for
that kind of thing?'

'I don't believe in it any longer, if that's what you mean. And I
see now that a lot of it was rather silly. But that doesn't help.
The point is that all the beliefs I had are gone, and I've nothing
to put in their place.'

'But good God! why do you want to put anything in their place?
You've got rid of a load of superstitious rubbish, and you ought to
be glad of it. Surely it doesn't make you any happier to go about
quaking in fear of Hell fire?'

'But don't you see--you must see--how different everything is when
all of a sudden the whole world is empty?'

'Empty?' exclaimed Mr Warburton. 'What do you mean by saying it's
empty? I call that perfectly scandalous in a girl of your age.
It's not empty at all, it's a deuced sight too full, that's the
trouble with it. We're here today and gone tomorrow, and we've no
time to enjoy what we've got.'

'But how CAN one enjoy anything when all the meaning's been taken
out of it?'

'Good gracious! What do you want with a meaning? When I eat my
dinner I don't do it to the greater glory of God; I do it because I
enjoy it. The world's full of amusing things--books, pictures,
wine, travel, friends--everything. I've never seen any meaning in
it all, and I don't want to see one. Why not take life as you find
it?'

'But--'

She broke off, for she saw already that she was wasting words in
trying to make herself clear to him. He was quite incapable of
understanding her difficulty--incapable of realizing how a mind
naturally pious must recoil from a world discovered to be
meaningless. Even the loathsome platitudes of the pantheists would
be beyond his understanding. Probably the idea that life was
essentially futile, if he thought of it at all, struck him as
rather amusing than otherwise. And yet with all this he was
sufficiently acute. He could see the difficulty of her own
particular position, and he adverted to it a moment later.

'Of course,' he said, 'I can see that things are going to be a
little awkward for you when you get home. You're going to be, so
to speak, a wolf in sheep's clothing. Parish work--Mothers'
Meetings, prayers with the dying, and all that--I suppose it might
be a little distasteful at times. Are you afraid you won't be able
to keep it up--is that the trouble?'

'Oh, no. I wasn't thinking of that. I shall go on with it, just
the same as before. It's what I'm most used to. Besides, Father
needs my help. He can't afford a curate, and the work's got to be
done.'

'Then what's the matter? Is it the hypocrisy that's worrying you?
Afraid that the consecrated bread might stick in your throat, and
so forth? I shouldn't trouble. Half the parsons' daughters in
England are probably in the same difficulty. And quite nine-tenths
of the parsons, I should say.'

'It's partly that. I shall have to be always pretending--oh, you
can't imagine in what ways! But that's not the worst. Perhaps
that part of it doesn't matter, really. Perhaps it's better to be
a hypocrite--THAT kind of hypocrite--than some things.'

'Why do you say THAT kind of hypocrite? I hope you don't mean that
pretending to believe is the next best thing to believing?'

'Yes . . . I suppose that's what I do mean. Perhaps it's better--
less selfish--to pretend one believes even when one doesn't, than
to say openly that one's an unbeliever and perhaps help turn other
people into unbelievers too.'

'My dear Dorothy,' said Mr Warburton, 'your mind, if you'll excuse
my saying so, is in a morbid condition. No, dash it! it's worse
than morbid; it's downright septic. You've a sort of mental
gangrene hanging over from your Christian upbringing. You tell me
that you've got rid of these ridiculous beliefs that were stuffed
into you from your cradle upwards, and yet you're taking an
attitude to life which is simply meaningless without those beliefs.
Do you call that reasonable?'

'I don't know. No perhaps it's not. But I suppose it's what comes
naturally to me.'

'What you're trying to do, apparently,' pursued Mr Warburton, 'is
to make the worst of both worlds. You stick to the Christian
scheme of things, but you leave Paradise out of it. And I suppose,
if the truth were known, there are quite a lot of your kind
wandering about among the ruins of C. of E. You're practically a
sect in yourselves,' he added reflectively: 'the Anglican Atheists.
Not a sect I should care to belong to, I must say.'

They talked for a little while longer, but not to much purpose. In
reality the whole subject of religious belief and religious doubt
was boring and incomprehensible to Mr Warburton. Its only appeal
to him was as a pretext for blasphemy. Presently he changed the
subject, as though giving up the attempt to understand Dorothy's
outlook.

'This is nonsense that we're talking,' he said. 'You've got hold
of some very depressing ideas, but you'll grow out of them later
on, you know. Christianity isn't really an incurable disease.
However, there was something quite different that I was going to
say to you. I want you to listen to me for a moment. You're
coming home, after being away eight months, to what I expect you
realize is a rather uncomfortable situation. You had a hard enough
life before--at least, what I should call a hard life--and now that
you aren't quite such a good Girl Guide as you used to be, it's
going to be a great deal harder. Now, do you think it's absolutely
necessary to go back to it?'

'But I don't see what else I can do, unless I could get another
job. I've really no alternative.'

Mr Warburton, with his head cocked a little on one side, gave
Dorothy a rather curious look.

'As a matter of fact,' he said, in a more serious tone than usual,
'there's at least one other alternative that I could suggest to
you.'

'You mean that I could go on being a schoolmistress? Perhaps
that's what I ought to do, really. I shall come back to it in the
end, in any case.'

'No. I don't think that's what I should advise.'

All this time Mr Warburton, unwilling as ever to expose his
baldness, had been wearing his rakish, rather broad-brimmed grey
felt hat. Now, however, he took it off and laid it carefully on
the empty seat beside him. His naked cranium, with only a wisp or
two of golden hair lingering in the neighbourhood of the ears,
looked like some monstrous pink pearl. Dorothy watched him with a
slight surprise.

'I am taking my hat off,' he said, 'in order to let you see me at
my very worst. You will understand why in a moment. Now, let me
offer you another alternative besides going back to your Girl
Guides and your Mothers' Union, or imprisoning yourself in some
dungeon of a girls' school.'

'What do you mean?' said Dorothy.

'I mean, will you--think well before you answer; I admit there are
some very obvious objections, but--will you marry me?'

Dorothy's lips parted with surprise. Perhaps she turned a little
paler. With a hasty, almost unconscious recoil she moved as far
away from him as the back of the seat would allow. But he had made
no movement towards her. He said with complete equanimity:

'You know, of course, that Dolores [Dolores was Mr Warburton's ex-
mistress] left me a year ago?'

'But I can't, I can't!' exclaimed Dorothy. 'You know I can't! I'm
not--like that. I thought you always knew. I shan't ever marry.'

Mr Warburton ignored this remark.

'I grant you,' he said, still with exemplary calmness, 'that I
don't exactly come under the heading of eligible young men. I am
somewhat older than you. We both seem to be putting our cards on
the table today, so I'll let you into a great secret and tell you
that my age is forty-nine. And then I've three children and a bad
reputation. It's a marriage that your father would--well, regard
with disfavour. And my income is only seven hundred a year. But
still, don't you think it's worth considering!'

'I can't, you know why I can't!' repeated Dorothy.

She took it for granted that he 'knew why she couldn't', though she
had never explained to him, or to anyone else, why it was impossible
for her to marry. Very probably, even if she had explained, he
would not have understood her. He went on speaking, not appearing
to notice what she had said.

'Let me put it to you', he said, 'in the form of a bargain. Of
course, I needn't tell you that it's a great deal more than that.
I'm not a marrying kind of man, as the saying goes, and I shouldn't
ask you to marry me if you hadn't a rather special attraction for
me. But let me put the business side of it first. You need a home
and a livelihood; I need a wife to keep me in order. I'm sick of
these disgusting women I've spent my life with, if you'll forgive
my mentioning them, and I'm rather anxious to settle down. A bit
late in the day, perhaps, but better late than never. Besides, I
need somebody to look after the children; the BASTARDS, you know.
I don't expect you to find me overwhelmingly attractive,' he added,
running a hand reflectively over his bald crown, 'but on the other
hand I am very easy to get on with. Immoral people usually are, as
a matter of fact. And from your own point of view the scheme would
have certain advantages. Why should you spend your life delivering
parish magazines and rubbing nasty old women's legs with Elliman's
embrocation? You would be happier married, even to a husband with
a bald head and a clouded past. You've had a hard, dull life for a
girl of your age, and your future isn't exactly rosy. Have you
really considered what your future will be like if you don't
marry?'

'I don't know. I have to some extent,' she said.

As he had not attempted to lay hands on her or to offer any
endearments, she answered his question without repeating her
previous refusal. He looked out of the window, and went on in a
musing voice, much quieter than his normal tone, so that at first
she could barely hear him above the rattle of the train; but
presently his voice rose, and took on a note of seriousness that
she had never heard in it before, or even imagined that it could
hold.

'Consider what your future would be like,' he repeated. 'It's the
same future that lies before any woman of your class with no
husband and no money. Let us say your father will live another ten
years. By the end of that time the last penny of his money will
have gone down the sink. The desire to squander it will keep him
alive just as long as it lasts, and probably no longer. All that
time he will be growing more senile, more tiresome, more impossible
to live with; he will tyrannize over you more and more, keep you
shorter and shorter of money, make more and more trouble for you
with the neighbours and the tradesmen. And you will go on with
that slavish, worrying life that you have lived, struggling to make
both ends meet, drilling the Girl Guides, reading novels to the
Mothers' Union, polishing the altar brasses, cadging money for the
organ fund, making brown paper jackboots for the schoolchildren's
plays, keeping your end up in the vile little feuds and scandals of
the church hen-coop. Year after year, winter and summer, you will
bicycle from one reeking cottage to another, to dole out pennies
from the poor box and repeat prayers that you don't even believe in
any longer. You will sit through interminable church services
which in the end will make you physically sick with their sameness
and futility. Every year your life will be a little bleaker, a
little fuller of those deadly little jobs that are shoved off on to
lonely women. And remember that you won't always be twenty-eight.
All the while you will be fading, withering, until one morning you
will look in the glass and realize that you aren't a girl any
longer, only a skinny old maid. You'll fight against it, of
course. You'll keep your physical energy and your girlish
mannerisms--you'll keep them just a little bit too long. Do you
know that type of bright--too bright--spinster who says "topping"
and "ripping" and "right-ho", and prides herself on being such a
good sport, and she's such a good sport that she makes everyone
feel a little unwell? And she's so splendidly hearty at tennis and
so handy at amateur theatricals, and she throws herself with a kind
of desperation into her Girl Guide work and her parish visiting,
and she's the life and soul of Church socials, and always, year
after year, she thinks of herself as a young girl still and never
realizes that behind her back everyone laughs at her for a poor,
disappointed old maid? That's what you'll become, what you must
become, however much you foresee it and try to avoid it. There's
no other future possible to you unless you marry. Women who don't
marry wither up--they wither up like aspidistras in back-parlour
windows; and the devilish thing is that they don't even know that
they're withering.'

Dorothy sat silent and listening with intent and horrified
fascination. She did not even notice that he had stood up, with
one hand on the door to steady him against the swaying of the
train. She was as though hypnotized, not so much by his voice as
by the visions that his words had evoked in her. He had described
her life, as it must inevitably be, with such dreadful fidelity
that he seemed actually to have carried her ten years onward into
the menacing future, and she felt herself no longer a girl full of
youth and energy, but a desperate, worn virgin of thirty-eight. As
he went on he took her hand, which was lying idle on the arm of the
seat; and even that she scarcely noticed.

'After ten years,' he continued, 'your father will die, and he will
leave you with not a penny, only debts. You will be nearly forty,
with no money, no profession, no chance of marrying; just a
derelict parson's daughter like the ten thousand others in England.
And after that, what do you suppose will become of you? You will
have to find yourself a job--the sort of job that parsons'
daughters get. A nursery governess, for instance, or companion to
some diseased hag who will occupy herself in thinking of ways to
humiliate you. Or you will go back to school-teaching; English
mistress in some grisly girls' school, seventy-five pounds a year
and your keep, and a fortnight in a seaside boarding-house every
August. And all the time withering, drying up, growing more sour
and more angular and more friendless. And therefore--'

As he said 'therefore' he pulled Dorothy to her feet. She made no
resistance. His voice had put her under a spell. As her mind took
in the prospect of that forbidding future, whose emptiness she was
far more able to appreciate than he, such a despair had grown in
her that if she had spoken at all it would have been to say, 'Yes,
I will marry you.' He put his arm very gently about her and drew
her a little towards him, and even now she did not attempt to
resist. Her eyes, half hypnotized, were fixed upon his. When he
put his arm about her it was as though he were protecting her,
sheltering her, drawing her away from the brink of grey, deadly
poverty and back to the world of friendly and desirable things--to
security and ease, to comely houses and good clothes, to books and
friends and flowers, to summer days and distant lands. So for
nearly a minute the fat, debauched bachelor and the thin,
spinsterish girl stood face to face, their eyes meeting, their
bodies all but touching, while the train swayed them in its motion,
and clouds and telegraph poles and bud-misted hedges and fields
green with young wheat raced past unseen.

Mr Warburton tightened his grip and pulled her against him. It
broke the spell. The visions that had held her helpless--visions
of poverty and of escape from poverty--suddenly vanished and left
only a shocked realization of what was happening to her. She was
in the arms of a man--a fattish, oldish man! A wave of disgust and
deadly fear went through her, and her entrails seemed to shrink and
freeze. His thick male body was pressing her backwards and
downwards, his large, pink face, smooth, but to her eyes old, was
bearing down upon her own. The harsh odour of maleness forced
itself into her nostrils. She recoiled. Furry thighs of satyrs!
She began to struggle furiously, though indeed he made hardly any
effort to retain her, and in a moment she had wrenched herself free
and fallen back into her seat, white and trembling. She looked up
at him with eyes which, from fear and aversion, were for a moment
those of a stranger.

Mr Warburton remained on his feet, regarding her with an expression
of resigned, almost amused disappointment. He did not seem in the
least distressed. As her calmness returned to her she perceived
that all he had said had been no more than a trick to play upon her
feelings and cajole her into saying that she would marry him; and
what was stranger yet, that he had said it without seriously caring
whether she married him or not. He had, in fact, merely been
amusing himself. Very probably the whole thing was only another of
his periodical attempts to seduce her.

He sat down, but more deliberately than she, taking care of the
creases of his trousers as he did so.

'If you want to pull the communication cord,' he said mildly, 'you
had better let me make sure that I have five pounds in my pocket-
book.'

After that he was quite himself again, or as nearly himself as
anyone could possibly be after such a scene, and he went on talking
without the smallest symptom of embarrassment. His sense of shame,
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 Trafalgar 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 the 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
Conqueror to be thought of. More armour! And presently she must
go along to the kitchen and remind Ellen to boil some potatoes to
go with the minced beef for supper; also there was her 'memo list'
to be written out for tomorrow. She shaped the two halves of the
breastplate, cut out the armholes and neckholes, and then stopped
again.

Where had she got to? She had been saying that if death ends all,
then there is no hope and no meaning in anything. Well, what then?

The action of going to the scullery and refilling the saucepan had
changed the tenor of her thoughts. She perceived, for a moment at
least, that she had allowed herself to fall into exaggeration and
self-pity. What a fuss about nothing, after all! As though in
reality there were not people beyond number in the same case as
herself! All over the world, thousands, millions of them; people
who had lost their faith without losing their need of faith. 'Half
the parsons' daughters in England,' Mr Warburton had said. He was
probably right. And not only parsons' daughters; people of every
description--people in illness and loneliness and failure, people
leading thwarted, discouraging lives--people who needed faith to
support them, and who hadn't got it. Perhaps even nuns in
convents, scrubbing floors and singing Ave Marias, secretly
unbelieving.

And how cowardly, after all, to regret a superstition that you had
got rid of--to want to believe something that you knew in your
bones to be untrue!

And yet--!

Dorothy had put down her scissors. Almost from force of habit, as
though her return home, which had not restored her faith, had
restored the outward habits of piety, she knelt down beside her
chair. She buried her face in her hands. She began to pray.

'Lord, I believe, help Thou my unbelief. Lord, I believe, I
believe; help Thou my unbelief.'

It was useless, absolutely useless. Even as she spoke the words
she was aware of their uselessness, and was half ashamed of her
action. She raised her head. And at that moment there stole into
her nostrils a warm, evil smell, forgotten these eight months but
unutterably familiar--the smell of glue. The water in the saucepan
was bubbling noisily. Dorothy jumped to her feet and felt the
handle of the glue-brush. The glue was softening--would be liquid
in another five minutes.

The grandfather clock in her father's study struck six. Dorothy
started. She realized that she had wasted twenty minutes, and her
conscience stabbed her so hard that all the questions that had been
worrying her fled out of her mind. What on earth have I been doing
all this time? she thought; and at that moment it really seemed to
her that she did not know what she had been doing. She admonished
herself. Come on, Dorothy! No slacking, please! You've got to
get that breastplate done before supper. She sat down, filled her
mouth with pins and began pinning the two halves of the breastplate
together, to get it into shape before the glue should be ready.

The smell of glue was the answer to her prayer. She did not know
this. She did not reflect, consciously, that the solution to her
difficulty lay in accepting the fact that there was no solution;
that if one gets on with the job that lies to hand, the ultimate
purpose of the job fades into insignificance; that faith and no
faith are very much the same provided that one is doing what is
customary, useful, and acceptable. She could not formulate these
thoughts as yet, she could only live them. Much later, perhaps,
she would formulate them and draw comfort from them.

There was still a minute or two before the glue would be ready to
use. Dorothy finished pinning the breastplate together, and in the
same instant began mentally sketching the innumerable costumes that
were yet to be made. After William the Conqueror--was it chain
mail in William the Conqueror's day?--there were Robin Hood--
Lincoln Green and a bow and arrow--and Thomas a Becket in his cope
and mitre, and Queen Elizabeth's ruff, and a cocked hat for the
Duke of Wellington. And I must go and see about those potatoes at
half past six, she thought. And there was her 'memo list' to be
written out for tomorrow. Tomorrow was Wednesday--mustn't forget
to set the alarm clock for half past five. She took a slip of
paper and began writing out the 'memo list':

7 oc. H.C.

Mrs J. baby next month go and see her.

BREAKFAST. Bacon.

She paused to think of fresh items. Mrs J. was Mrs Jowett, the
blacksmith's wife; she came sometimes to be churched after her
babies were born, but only if you coaxed her tactfully beforehand.
And I must take old Mrs Frew some paregoric lozenges, Dorothy
thought, and then perhaps she'll speak to Georgie and stop him
eating those biscuits during the sermon. She added Mrs Frew to her
list. And then what about tomorrow's dinner--luncheon? We simply
MUST pay Cargill something! she thought. And tomorrow was the day
of the Mothers' Union tea, and they had finished the novel that
Miss Foote had been reading to them. The question was, what to get
for them next? There didn't seem to be any more books by Gene
Stratton Porter, their favourite. What about Warwick Deeping? Too
highbrow, perhaps? And I must ask Proggett to get us some young
cauliflowers to plant out, she thought finally.

The glue had liquefied. Dorothy took two fresh sheets of brown
paper, sliced them into narrow strips, and--rather awkwardly,
because of the difficulty of keeping the breastplate convex--pasted
the strips horizontally across it, back and front. By degrees it
stiffened under her hands. When she had reinforced it all over she
set it on end to look at it. It really wasn't half bad! One more
coating of paper and it would be almost like real armour. We MUST
make that pageant a success! she thought. What a pity we can't
borrow a horse from somebody and have Boadicea in her chariot! We
might make five pounds if we had a really good chariot, with
scythes on the wheels. And what about Hengist and Horsa? Cross-
gartering and winged helmets. Dorothy sliced two more sheets of
brown paper into strips, and took up the breastplate to give it its
final coating. The problem of faith and no faith had vanished
utterly from her mind. It was beginning to get dark, but, too busy
to stop and light the lamp, she worked on, pasting strip after
strip of paper into place, with absorbed, with pious concentration,
in the penetrating smell of the glue-pot.