‘It’s all we’ve got in the house, I’m afraid,’ Dorothy said.
The Rector picked up his fork between finger and thumb, and with a very delicate movement, as though playing at spillikins, turned one of the rashers over.
‘I know, of course,’ he said, ‘that bacon for breakfast is an English institution almost as old as parliamentary government. But still, don’t you think we might occasionally have a change, Dorothy?’
‘Bacon’s so cheap now,’ said Dorothy regretfully. ‘It seems a sin not to buy it. This was only fivepence a pound, and I saw some quite decent-looking bacon as low as threepence.’
‘Ah, Danish, I suppose? What a variety of Danish invasions we have had in this country! First with fire and sword, and now with their abominable cheap bacon. Which has been responsible for the more deaths, I wonder?’
Feeling a little better after this witticism, the Rector settled himself in his chair and made a fairly good breakfast off the despised bacon, while Dorothy (she was not having any bacon this morning–a penance she had set herself yesterday for saying ‘Damn’ and idling for half an hour after lunch) meditated upon a good conversational opening.
There was an unspeakably hateful job in front of her–a demand for money. At the very best of times getting money out of her father was next door to impossible, and it was obvious that this morning he was going to be even more ‘difficult’ than usual. ‘Difficult’ was another of her euphemisms. He’s had bad news, I suppose, she thought despondently, looking at the blue envelope.
Probably no one who had ever spoken to the Rector for as long as ten minutes would have denied that he was a ‘difficult’ kind of man. The secret of his almost unfailing ill humour really lay in the fact that he was an anachronism. He ought never to have been born into the modern world; its whole atmosphere disgusted and infuriated him. A couple of centuries earlier, a happy pluralist writing poems or collecting fossils while curates at £40 a year administered his parishes, he would have been perfectly at home. Even now, if he had been a richer man, he might have consoled himself by shutting the twentieth century out of his consciousness. But to live in past ages is very expensive; you can’t do it on less than two thousand a year. The Rector, tethered by his poverty to the age of Lenin and the Daily Mail, was kept in a state of chronic exasperation which it was only natural that he should work off on the person nearest to him–usually, that is, on Dorothy.
He had been born in 1871, the younger son of the younger son of a baronet, and had gone into the Church for the outmoded reason that the Church is the traditional profession for younger sons. His first cure had been in a large, slummy parish in East London–a nasty, hooliganish place it had been, and he looked back on it with loathing. Even in those days the lower class (as he made a point of calling them) were getting decidedly out of hand. It was a little better when he was curate-in-charge at some remote place in Kent (Dorothy had been born in Kent), where the decently down-trodden villagers still touched their hats to ‘parson’. But by that time he had married, and his marriage had been diabolically unhappy; moreover, because clergymen must not quarrel with their wives, its unhappiness had been secret and therefore ten times worse. He had come to Knype Hill in 1908, aged thirty-seven and with a temper incurably soured–a temper which had ended by alienating every man, woman, and child in the parish.
It was not that he was a bad priest, merely as a priest. In his purely clerical duties he was scrupulously correct–perhaps a little too correct for a Low Church East Anglian parish. He conducted his services with perfect taste, preached admirable sermons, and got up at uncomfortable hours of the morning to celebrate Holy Communion every Wednesday and Friday. But that a clergyman has any duties outside the four walls of the church was a thing that had never seriously occurred to him. Unable to afford a curate, he left the dirty work of the parish entirely to his wife, and after her death (she died in 1921) to Dorothy. People used to say, spitefully and untruly, that he would have let Dorothy preach his sermons for him if it had been possible. The ‘lower classes’ had grasped from the first what was his attitude towards them, and if he had been a rich man they would probably have licked his boots, according to their custom; as it was, they merely hated him. Not that he cared whether they hated him or not, for he was largely unaware of their existence. But even with the upper classes he had got on no better. With the County he had quarrelled one by one, and as for the petty gentry of the town, as the grandson of a baronet he despised them, and was at no pains to hide it. In twenty-three years he had succeeded in reducing the congregation of St Athelstan’s from six hundred to something under two hundred.
This was not solely due to personal reasons. It was also because the old-fashioned High Anglicanism to which the Rector obstinately clung was of a kind to annoy all parties in the parish about equally. Nowadays, a clergyman who wants to keep his congregation has only two courses open to him. Either it must be Anglo-Catholicism pure and simple–or rather, pure and not simple; or he must be daringly modern and broad-minded and preach comforting sermons proving that there is no Hell and all good religions are the same. The Rector did neither. On the one hand, he had the deepest contempt for the Anglo-Catholic movement. It had passed over his head, leaving him absolutely untouched; ‘Roman Fever’ was his name for it. On the other hand, he was too ‘High’ for the older members of his congregation. From time to time he scared them almost out of their wits by the use of the fatal word ‘Catholic’, not only in its sanctified place in the Creeds, but also from the pulpit.
Naturally the congregation dwindled year by year, and it was the Best People who were the first to go. Lord Pockthorne of Pockthorne Court, who owned a fifth of the county, Mr Leavis, the retired leather merchant, Sir Edward Huson of Crabtree Hall, and such of the petty gentry as owned motor-cars, had all deserted St Athelstan’s. Most of them drove over on Sunday mornings to Millborough, five miles away. Millborough was a town of five thousand inhabitants, and you had your choice of two churches, St Edmund’s and St Wedekind’s. St Edmund’s was Modernist–text from Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ blazoned ever the altar, and communion wine out of liqueur glasses–and St Wedekind’s was Anglo-Catholic and in a state of perpetual guerrilla warfare with the Bishop. But Mr Cameron, the secretary of the Knype Hill Conservative Club, was a Roman Catholic convert, and his children were in the thick of the Roman Catholic literary movement. They were said to have a parrot which they were teaching to say ‘Extra ecclesiam nulla salus’. In effect, no one of any standing remained true to St Athelstan’s, except Miss Mayfill, of The Grange. Most of Miss Mayfill’s money was bequeathed to the Church–so she said; meanwhile, she had never been known to put more than sixpence in the collection bag, and she seemed likely to go on living for ever.
The first ten minutes of breakfast passed in complete silence. Dorothy was trying to summon up courage to speak–obviously she had got to start some kind of conversation before raising the money-question–but her father was not an easy man with whom to make small talk. At times he would fall into such deep fits of abstraction that you could hardly get him to listen to you; at other times he was all too attentive, listened carefully to what you said and then pointed out, rather wearily, that it was not worth saying. Polite platitudes–the weather, and so forth–generally moved him to sarcasm. Nevertheless, Dorothy decided to try the weather first.
‘It’s a funny kind of day, isn’t it?’ she said–aware, even as she made it, of the inanity of this remark.
‘What is funny?’ inquired the Rector.
‘Well, I mean, it was so cold and misty this morning, and now the sun’s come out and it’s turned quite fine.’
‘Is there anything particularly funny about that?’
That was no good, obviously. He must have had bad news, she thought. She tried again.
‘I do wish you’d come out and have a look at the things in the back garden some time, Father. The runner beans are doing so splendidly! The pods are going to be over a foot long. I’m going to keep all the best of them for the Harvest Festival, of course. I thought it would look so nice if we decorated the pulpit with festoons of runner beans and a few tomatoes hanging in among them.’
This was a faux pas. The Rector looked up from his plate with an expression of profound distaste.
‘My dear Dorothy,’ he said sharply, ‘is it necessary to begin worrying me about the Harvest Festival already?’
‘I’m sorry, Father!’ said Dorothy, disconcerted. ‘I didn’t mean to worry you. I just thought–’
‘Do you suppose’, proceeded the Rector, ‘it is any pleasure to me to have to preach my sermon among festoons of runner
