A Clergyman’s Daughter

2-2

It was not that he was a bad priest, merely as a priest. In his purely clerical duties he was scrupulously correct – perhaps a little too correct for a Low Church East Anglian parish. He conducted his services with perfect taste, preached admirable sermons, and got up at uncomfortable hours of the morning to celebrate Holy Communion every Wednesday and Friday. But that a clergyman has any duties outside the four walls of the church was a thing that had never seriously occurred to him. Unable to afford a curate, he left the dirty work of the parish entirely to his wife, and after her death (she died in 1921) to Dorothy. People used to say, spitefully and untruly, that he would have let Dorothy preach his sermons for him if it had been possible. The ‘lower classes’ had grasped from the first what was his attitude towards them, and if he had been a rich man they would probably have licked his boots, according to their custom; as it was, they merely hated him. Not that he cared whether they hated him or not, for he was largely unaware of their existence. But even with the upper classes he had got on no better. With the County he had quarrelled one by one, and as for the petty gentry of the town, as the grandson of a baronet he despised them, and was at no pains to hide it. In twenty-three years he had succeeded in reducing the congregation of St Athelstan’s from six hundred to something under two hundred.

This was not solely due to personal reasons. It was also because the old-fashioned High Anglicanism to which the Rector obstinately clung was of a kind to annoy all parties in the parish about equally. Nowadays, a clergyman who wants to keep his congregation has only two courses open to him. Either it must be Anglo-Catholicism pure and simple – or rather, pure and not simple; or he must be daringly modern and broad-minded and preach comforting sermons proving that there is no Hell and all good religions are the same. The Rector did neither. On the one hand, he had the deepest contempt for the Anglo-Catholic movement. It had passed over his head, leaving him absolutely untouched; ‘Roman Fever’ was his name for it. On the other hand, he was too ‘High’ for the older members of his congregation. From time to time he scared them almost out of their wits by the use of the fatal word ‘Catholic’, not only in its sanctified place in the Creeds, but also from the pulpit. Naturally the congregation dwindled year by year, and it was the Best People who were the first to go. Lord Pockthorne of Pockthorne Court, who owned a fifth of the county, Mr Leavis, the retired leather merchant, Sir Edward Huson of Crabtree Hall, and such of the petty gentry as owned motor-cars, had all deserted St Athelstan’s. Most of them drove over on Sunday mornings to Millborough, five miles away. Millborough was a town of five thousand inhabitants, and you had your choice of two churches, St Edmund’s and St Wedekind’s. St Edmund’s was Modernist – text from Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ blazoned over the altar, and communion wine out of liqueur glasses – and St Wedekind’s was Anglo-Catholic and in a state of perpetual guerrilla warfare with the Bishop. But Mr Cameron, the secretary of the Knype Hill Conservative Club, was a Roman Catholic convert, and his children 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 beans? I am not a greengrocer. It quite puts me off my breakfast to think of it. When is the wretched thing due to happen?’

‘It’s September the sixteenth, Father.’

‘That’s nearly a month hence. For Heaven’s sake let me forget it a little longer! I suppose we must have this ridiculous business once a year to tickle the vanity of every amateur gardener in the parish. But don’t let’s think of it more than is absolutely necessary.’

The Rector had, as Dorothy ought to have remembered, a perfect abhorrence of Harvest Festivals. He had even lost a valuable parishioner – a Mr Toagis, a surly retired market gardener – through his dislike, as he said, of seeing his church dressed up to imitate a coster’s stall. Mr Toagis, anima naturaliter Nonconformistica, had been kept ‘Church’ solely by the privilege, at Harvest Festival time, of decorating the side altar with a sort of Stonehenge composed of gigantic vegetable marrows. The previous summer he had succeeded in growing a perfect leviathan of a pumpkin, a fiery red thing so enormous that it took two men to lift it. This monstrous object had been placed in the chancel, where it dwarfed the altar and took all the colour out of the east window. In no matter what part of the church you were standing, the pumpkin, as the saying goes, hit you in the eye. Mr Toagis was in raptures. He hung about the church at all hours, unable to tear himself away from his adored pumpkin, and even bringing relays of friends in to admire it. From the expression of his face you would have thought that he was quoting Wordsworth on Westminster Bridge:

Earth has not any thing to show more fair:

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

A sight so touching in its majesty!

Dorothy even had hopes, after this, of getting him to come to Holy Communion. But when the Rector saw the pumpkin he was seriously angry, and ordered ‘that revolting thing’ to be removed at once. Mr Toagis had instantly ‘gone chapel’, and he and his heirs were lost to the Church for ever.

Dorothy decided to make one final attempt at conversation.

‘We’re getting on with the costumes for Charles I,’ she said. (The Church School children were rehearsing a play entitled Charles I, in aid of the organ fund.) ‘But I do wish we’d chosen something a bit easier. The armour is a dreadful job to make, and I’m afraid the jackboots are going to be worse. I think next time we must really have a Roman or Greek play. Something where they only have to wear togas.’

This elicited only another muted grunt from the Rector. School plays, pageants, bazaars, jumble sales, and concerts in aid of were not quite so bad in his eyes as Harvest Festivals, but he did not pretend to be interested in them. They were necessary evils, he used to say. At this moment Ellen, the maidservant, pushed open the door and came gauchely into the room with one large, scaly hand holding her sacking apron against her belly. She was a tall, round-shouldered girl with mouse-coloured hair, a plaintive voice, and a bad complexion, and she suffered chronically from eczema. Her eyes flitted apprehensively towards the Rector, but she addressed herself to Dorothy, for she was too much afraid of the Rector to speak to him directly.

‘Please, Miss –’ she began.

‘Yes, Ellen?’

‘Please, Miss,’ went on Ellen plaintively, ‘Mr Porter’s in the kitchen, and he says, please could the Rector come round and baptize Mrs Porter’s baby? Because they don’t think as it’s going to live the day out, and it ain’t been baptized yet, Miss.’

Dorothy stood up. ‘Sit down,’ said the Rector promptly, with his mouth full.

‘What do they think is the matter with the baby?’ said Dorothy.

‘Well, Miss, it’s turning quite black. And it’s had diarrhoea something cruel.’

The Rector emptied his mouth with an effort. ‘Must I have these disgusting details while I am eating my breakfast?’ he exclaimed. He turned on Ellen: ‘Send Porter about his business and tell him I’ll be round at his house at twelve o’clock. I really cannot think why it is that the lower classes always seem to choose mealtimes to come pestering one,’ he added, casting another irritated glance at Dorothy as she sat down.

Mr Porter was a labouring man – a bricklayer, to be exact. The Rector’s views on baptism were entirely sound. If it had been urgently necessary he would have walked twenty miles through snow to baptize a dying baby. But he did not like to see Dorothy proposing to leave the breakfast table at the call of a common bricklayer.

There was no further conversation during breakfast. Dorothy’s heart was sinking lower and lower. The demand for money had got to be made, and yet it was perfectly obvious that it was foredoomed to failure. His breakfast finished, the Rector got up from the table and began to fill his pipe from the tobacco-jar on the mantelpiece. Dorothy uttered a short prayer for courage, and then pinched herself. Go on, Dorothy! Out with it! No funking, please! With an effort she mastered her voice and said:

‘Father –’

‘What is it?’ said the Rector, pausing with the match in his hand.

‘Father, I’ve something I want to ask you. Something important.’

The expression of the Rector’s face changed. He had divined instantly what she was going to say; and, curiously enough, he now looked less irritable than before. A stony calm had settled upon his face. He looked like a rather exceptionally aloof and unhelpful sphinx.

‘Now, my dear Dorothy, I know very well what you are going to say. I suppose you are going to ask me for money again. Is that it?’

‘Yes, Father. Because –’

‘Well, I may as well save you the trouble. I have no money at all – absolutely no money at all until next quarter. You have had your allowance, and I can’t give you a halfpenny more. It’s quite useless to come worrying me now.’