A black, very dusty shovel hat was approaching round the corner of the hedge. It was Father McGuire, the Roman Catholic priest, also bicycling his rounds. He was a very large, rotund man, so large that he dwarfed the bicycle beneath him and seemed to be balanced on top of it like a golf-ball on a tee. His face was rosy, humorous, and a little sly.
Dorothy looked suddenly unhappy. She turned pink, and her hand moved instinctively to the neighbourhood of the gold cross beneath her dress. Father McGuire was riding towards her with an untroubled, faintly amused air. She made an endeavour to smile, and murmured unhappily, ‘Good morning.’ But he rode on without a sign; his eyes swept easily over her face and then beyond her into vacancy, with an admirable pretence of not having noticed her existence. It was the Cut Direct. Dorothy–by nature, alas! unequal to delivering the Cut Direct–got on to her bicycle and rode away, struggling with the uncharitable thoughts which a meeting with Father McGuire never failed to arouse in her.
Five or six years earlier, when Father McGuire was holding a funeral in St Athelstan’s churchyard (there was no Roman Catholic cemetery at Knype Hill), there had been some dispute with the Rector about the propriety of Father McGuire robing in the church, or not robing in the church, and the two priests had wrangled disgracefully over the open grave. Since then they had not been on speaking terms. It was better so, the Rector said.
As to the other ministers of religion in Knype Hill–Mr Ward the Congregationalist minister, Mr Foley the Wesleyan pastor, and the braying bald-headed elder who conducted the orgies at Ebenezer Chapel–the Rector called them a pack of vulgar Dissenters and had forbidden Dorothy on pain of his displeasure to have anything to do with them.
5
It was twelve o’clock. In the large, dilapidated conservatory, whose roof-panes, from the action of time and dirt, were dim, green, and iridescent like old Roman glass, they were having a hurried and noisy rehearsal of Charles I.
Dorothy was not actually taking part in the rehearsal, but was busy making costumes. She made the costumes, or most of them, for all the plays the schoolchildren acted. The production and stage management were in the hands of Victor Stone–Victor, Dorothy called him–the Church schoolmaster. He was a small-boned, excitable, black-haired youth of twenty-seven, dressed in dark sub-clerical clothes, and at this moment he was gesturing fiercely with a roll of manuscript at six dense-looking children. On a long bench against the wall four more children were alternately practising ‘noises off’ by clashing fire-irons together, and squabbling over a grimy little bag of Spearmint Bouncers, forty a penny.
It was horribly hot in the conservatory, and there was a powerful smell of glue and the sour sweat of children. Dorothy was kneeling on the floor, with her mouth full of pins and a pair of shears in her hand, rapidly slicing sheets of brown paper into long narrow strips. The glue-pot was bubbling on an oil-stove beside her; behind her, on the rickety, ink-stained work-table, were a tangle of half-finished costumes, more sheets of brown paper, her sewing-machine, bundles of tow, shards of dry glue, wooden swords, and open pots of paint. With half her mind Dorothy was meditating upon the two pairs of seventeenth-century jackboots that had got to be made for Charles I and Oliver Cromwell, and with the other half listening to the angry shouts of Victor, who was working himself up into a rage, as he invariably did at rehearsals. He was a natural actor, and withal thoroughly bored by the drudgery of rehearsing half-witted children. He strode up and down, haranguing the children in a vehement slangy style, and every now and then breaking off to lunge at one or other of them with a wooden sword that he had grabbed from the table.
‘Put a bit of life into it, can’t you?’ he cried, prodding an ox-faced boy of eleven in the belly. ‘Don’t drone! Say it as if it meant something! You look like a corpse that’s been buried and dug up again. What’s the good of gurgling it down in your inside like that? Stand up and shout at him. Take off that second murderer expression!’
‘Come here, Percy!’ cried Dorothy through her pins. ‘Quick!’
She was making the armour–the worst job of the lot, except those wretched jackboots–out of glue and brown paper. From long practice Dorothy could make very nearly anything out of glue and brown paper; she could even make a passably good periwig, with a brown paper skull-cap and dyed tow for the hair. Taking the year through, the amount of time she spent in struggling with glue, brown paper, butter muslin, and all the other paraphernalia of amateur theatricals was enormous. So chronic was the need of money for all the church funds that hardly a month ever passed when there was not a school play or a pageant or an exhibition of tableaux vivants on hand–not to mention the bazaars and jumble sales.
As Percy–Percy Jowett, the blacksmith’s son, a small curly-headed boy–got down from the bench and stood wriggling unhappily before her, Dorothy seized a sheet of brown paper, measured it against him, snipped out the neckhole and armholes, draped it round his middle and rapidly pinned it into the shape of a rough breastplate. There was a confused din of voices.
VICTOR: Come on, now, come on! Enter Oliver Cromwell–that’s you! No, not like that! Do you think Oliver Cromwell would come slinking on like a dog that’s just had a hiding? Stand up. Stick your chest out. Scowl. That’s better. Now go on, Cromwell: ‘Halt! I hold a pistol in my hand!’ Go on.
A GIRL: Please, Miss, Mother said as I was to tell you, Miss–
DOROTHY: Keep still, Percy! For goodness’ sake keep still!
CROMWELL: ’Alt! I ’old a pistol in my ’and!
A SMALL GIRL ON THE BENCH: Mister! I’ve dropped my sweetie! [Snivelling] I’ve dropped by swee-e-e-etie!
VICTOR: No, no, no, Tommie! No, no, no!
THE GIRL: Please, Miss, Mother said as I was to tell you as she couldn’t make my knickers like she promised, Miss, because–
DOROTHY: You’ll make me swallow a pin if you do that again.
CROMWELL: Halt! I hold a pistol–
THE SMALL GIRL [in tears]: My swee-e-e-e-eetie!
Dorothy seized the glue-brush, and with feverish speed pasted strips of brown paper all over Percy’s thorax, up and down, backwards and forwards, one on top of another, pausing only when the paper stuck to her fingers. In five minutes she had made a cuirass of glue and brown paper stout enough, when it was dry, to have defied a real sword-blade. Percy, ‘locked up in complete steel’ and with the sharp paper edge cutting his chin, looked down at himself with the miserable resigned expression of a dog having its bath. Dorothy took the shears, slit the breastplate up one side, set it on end to dry and started immediately on another child. A fearful clatter broke out as the ‘noises off’ began practising the sound of pistol-shots and horses galloping. Dorothy’s fingers were getting stickier and stickier, but from time to time she washed some of the glue off them in a bucket of hot water that was kept in readiness. In twenty minutes she had partially completed three breastplates. Later on they would have to be finished off, painted over with aluminium paint and laced up the sides; and after that there was the job of making the thigh-pieces, and, worst of all, the helmets to go with them. Victor, gesticulating with his sword and shouting to overcome the din of galloping horses, was personating in turn Oliver Cromwell, Charles I, Roundheads, Cavaliers, peasants, and Court ladies. The children were now growing restive and beginning to yawn, whine, and exchange furtive kicks and pinches. The breastplates finished for the moment, Dorothy swept some of the litter off the table, pulled her sewing-machine into position and set to work on a Cavalier’s green velvet doublet–it was butter muslin Twinked green, but it looked all right at a distance.
There was another ten minutes of feverish work. Dorothy broke her thread, all but said ‘Damn!’ checked herself and hurriedly re-threaded the needle. She was working against time. The play was now a fortnight distant, and there was such a multitude of things yet to be made–helmets, doublets, swords, jackboots (those miserable jackboots had been haunting her like a nightmare for days past), scabbards, ruffles, wigs, spurs, scenery–that her heart sank when she thought of them. The children’s parents never helped with the costumes for the school plays; more exactly, they always promised to help and then backed out afterwards. Dorothy’s head was aching diabolically, partly from the heat of the conservatory, partly from the strain of simultaneously sewing and trying to visualize patterns for brown paper jackboots. For the moment she had even forgotten the bill for twenty-one pounds seven and ninepence at Cargill’s. She could think of nothing save that fearful mountain of unmade clothes that lay ahead of her. It was so throughout the day. One thing loomed up after another–whether it was the costumes for the school play or the collapsing floor of the belfry, or the shop-debts or the bindweed in the peas–and each in its turn so urgent and so harassing that it blotted all the
