But here Dorothy saw that she must make off instantly, at no matter what cost. She could imagine nothing more uncomfortable than to have to discuss Mr Warburton with Mrs Semprill. She mounted her bicycle, and with only a very brief ‘Sorry–I really can’t stop!’ began to ride hurriedly away.
‘I wanted to tell you–he’s taken up with a new woman!’ Mrs Semprill cried after her, even forgetting to whisper in her eagerness to pass on this juicy titbit.
But Dorothy rode swiftly round the corner, not looking back, and pretending not to have heard. An unwise thing to do, for it did not pay to cut Mrs Semprill too short. Any unwillingness to listen to her scandals was taken as a sign of depravity, and led to fresh and worse scandals being published about yourself the moment you had left her.
As Dorothy rode homewards she had uncharitable thoughts about Mrs Semprill, for which she duly pinched herself. Also, there was another, rather disturbing idea which had not occurred to her till this moment–that Mrs Semprill would certainly learn of her visit to Mr Warburton’s house this evening, and would probably have magnified it into something scandalous by tomorrow. The thought sent a vague premonition of evil through Dorothy’s mind as she jumped off her bicycle at the Rectory gate, where Silly Jack, the town idiot, a third-grade moron with a triangular scarlet face like a strawberry, was loitering, vacantly flogging the gatepost with a hazel switch.
4
It was a little after eleven. The day, which, like some overripe but hopeful widow playing at seventeen, had been putting on unseasonable April airs, had now remembered that it was August and settled down to be boiling hot.
Dorothy rode into the hamlet of Fennelwick, a mile out of Knype Hill. She had delivered Mrs Lewin’s corn-plaster, and was dropping in to give old Mrs Pither that cutting from the Daily Mail about angelica tea for rheumatism. The sun, burning in the cloudless sky, scorched her back through her gingham frock, and the dusty road quivered in the heat, and the hot, flat meadows, over which even at this time of year numberless larks chirruped tiresomely, were so green that it hurt your eyes to look at them. It was the kind of day that is called ‘glorious’ by people who don’t have to work.
Dorothy leaned her bicycle against the gate of the Pithers’ cottage, and took her handkerchief out of her bag and wiped her hands, which were sweating from the handle-bars. In the harsh sunlight her face looked pinched and colourless. She looked her age, and something over, at that hour of the morning. Throughout her day–and in general it was a seventeen-hour day–she had regular, alternating periods of tiredness and energy; the middle of the morning, when she was doing the first instalment of the day’s ‘visiting’, was one of the tired periods.
‘Visiting’, because of the distances she had to bicycle from house to house, took up nearly half of Dorothy’s day. Every day of her life, except on Sundays, she made from half a dozen to a dozen visits at parishioners’ cottages. She penetrated into cramped interiors and sat on lumpy, dust-diffusing chairs gossiping with overworked, blowsy housewives; she spent hurried half-hours giving a hand with the mending and the ironing, and read chapters from the Gospels, and readjusted bandages on ‘bad legs’, and condoled with sufferers from morning-sickness; she played ride-a-cock-horse with sour-smelling children who grimed the bosom of her dress with their sticky little fingers; she gave advice about ailing aspidistras, and suggested names for babies, and drank ‘nice cups of tea’ innumerable–for the working women always wanted her to have a ‘nice cup of tea’, out of the teapot endlessly stewing.
Much of it was profoundly discouraging work. Few, very few, of the women seemed to have even a conception of the Christian life that she was trying to help them to lead. Some of them were shy and suspicious, stood on the defensive, and made excuses when urged to come to Holy Communion; some shammed piety for the sake of the tiny sums they could wheedle out of the church alms box; those who welcomed her coming were for the most part the talkative ones, who wanted an audience for complaints about the ‘goings on’ of their husbands, or for endless mortuary tales (‘And he had to have glass chubes let into his veins,’ etc., etc.) about the revolting diseases their relatives had died of. Quite half the women on her list, Dorothy knew, were at heart atheistical in a vague unreasoning way. She came up against it all day long–that vague, blank disbelief so common in illiterate people, against which all argument is powerless. Do what she would, she could never raise the number of regular communicants to more than a dozen or thereabouts. Women would promise to communicate, keep their promise for a month or two, and then fall away. With the younger women it was especially hopeless. They would not even join the local branches of the church leagues that were run for their benefit–Dorothy was honorary secretary of three such leagues, besides being captain of the Girl Guides. The Band of Hope and the Companionship of Marriage languished almost memberless, and the Mothers’ Union only kept going because gossip and unlimited strong tea made the weekly sewing-parties acceptable. Yes, it was discouraging work; so discouraging that at times it would have seemed altogether futile if she had not known the sense of futility for what it is–the subtlest weapon of the Devil.
Dorothy knocked at the Pithers’ badly fitting door, from beneath which a melancholy smell of boiled cabbage and dish-water was oozing. From long experience she knew and could taste in advance the individual smell of every cottage on her rounds. Some of their smells were peculiar in the extreme. For instance, there was the salty, feral smell that haunted the cottage of old Mr Tombs, an aged retired bookseller who lay in bed all day in a darkened room, with his long, dusty nose and pebble spectacles protruding from what appeared to be a fur rug of vast size and richness.
But if you put your hand on the fur rug it disintegrated, burst and fled in all directions. It was composed entirely of cats–twenty-four cats, to be exact. Mr Tombs ‘found they kept him warm’, he used to explain. In nearly all the cottages there was a basic smell of old overcoats and dish-water upon which the other, individual smells were superimposed; the cesspool smell, the cabbage smell, the smell of children, the strong, bacon-like reek of corduroys impregnated with the sweat of a decade.
Mrs Pither opened the door, which invariably stuck to the jamb, and then, when you wrenched it open, shook the whole cottage. She was a large, stooping, grey woman with wispy grey hair, a sacking apron, and shuffling carpet slippers.
‘Why, if it isn’t Miss Dorothy!’ she exclaimed in a dreary, lifeless but not unaffectionate voice.
She took Dorothy between her large, gnarled hands, whose knuckles were as shiny as skinned onions from age and ceaseless washing up, and gave her a wet kiss. Then she drew her into the unclean interior of the cottage.
‘Pither’s away at work, Miss,’ she announced as they got inside. ‘Up to Dr Gaythorne’s he is, a-digging over the doctor’s flower-beds for him.’
Mr Pither was a jobbing gardener. He and his wife, both of them over seventy, were one of the few genuinely pious couples on Dorothy’s visiting list. Mrs Pither led a dreary, wormlike life of shuffling to and fro, with a perpetual crick in her neck because the door lintels were too low for her, between the well, the sink, the fireplace, and the tiny plot of kitchen garden. The kitchen was decently tidy, but oppressively hot, evil-smelling and saturated with ancient dust. At the end opposite the fireplace Mrs Pither had made a kind of prie-dieu out of a greasy rag mat laid in front of a tiny, defunct harmonium, on top of which were an oleographed crucifixion, ‘Watch and Pray’ done in beadwork, and a photograph of Mr and Mrs Pither on their wedding day in 1882.
‘Poor Pither!’ went on Mrs Pither in her depressing voice, ‘him a-digging at his age, with his rheumatism that bad! Ain’t it cruel hard, Miss? And he’s had a kind of a pain between his legs, Miss, as he can’t seem to account for–terrible bad he’s been with it, these last few mornings. Ain’t it bitter hard, Miss, the lives us poor working folks has to lead?’
‘It’s a shame,’ said Dorothy. ‘But I hope you’ve been keeping a little better yourself, Mrs Pither?’
‘Ah, Miss, there’s nothing don’t make me better. I ain’t a case for curing, not in this world, I ain’t. I shan’t never get no better, not in this wicked world down here.’
‘Oh, you mustn’t say that, Mrs Pither! I hope we shall have you with us for a long time yet.’
‘Ah, Miss, you don’t know how poorly I’ve been this last week! I’ve had the rheumatism a-coming and a-going all down the backs of my poor old legs, till there’s some mornings when I don’t feel as I can’t walk so far as to pull a handful of onions in the garden. Ah, Miss, it’s a weary world we lives in, ain’t it, Miss? A weary, sinful world.’
‘But of course we must never forget, Mrs Pither, that there’s a better world coming. This life is only a time of
