man, peering with veiled malevolence round the corner of the rush
baskets that hung in his doorway. He had caught the word
Socialist, and was mentally registering Mr Warburton as a Socialist
and Dorothy as the friend of Socialists.
'I really MUST be getting on,' said Dorothy hastily, feeling that
she had better escape before Mr Warburton said something even more
tactless. 'I've got ever such a lot of shopping to do. I'll say
good-bye for the present, then.'
'Oh, no, you won't!' said Mr Warburton cheerfully. 'Not a bit of
it! I'll come with you.'
As she wheeled her bicycle down the street he marched at her side,
still talking, with his large chest well forward and his stick
tucked under his arm. He was a difficult man to shake off, and
though Dorothy counted him as a friend, she did sometimes wish, he
being the town scandal and she the Rector's daughter, that he would
not always choose the most public places to talk to her in. At
this moment, however, she was rather grateful for his company,
which made it appreciably easier to pass Cargill's shop--for
Cargill was still on his doorstep and was regarding her with a
sidelong, meaning gaze.
'It was a bit of luck my meeting you this morning,' Mr Warburton
went on. 'In fact, I was looking for you. Who do you think I've
got coming to dinner with me tonight? Bewley--Ronald Bewley.
You've heard of him, of course?'
'Ronald Bewley? No, I don't think so. Who is he?'
'Why, dash it! Ronald Bewley, the novelist. Author of Fishpools
and Concubines. Surely you've read Fishpools and Concubines?'
'No, I'm afraid I haven't. In fact, I'd never even heard of it.'
'My dear Dorothy! You HAVE been neglecting yourself. You
certainly ought to read Fishpools and Concubines. It's hot stuff,
I assure you--real high-class pornography. Just the kind of thing
you need to take the taste of the Girl Guides out of your mouth.'
'I do wish you wouldn't say such things!' said Dorothy, looking
away uncomfortably, and then immediately looking back again because
she had all but caught Cargill's eye. 'Where does this Mr Bewley
live?' she added. 'Not here, surely, does he?'
'No. He's coming over from Ipswich for dinner, and perhaps to stay
the night. That's why I was looking for you. I thought you might
like to meet him. How about your coming to dinner tonight?'
'I can't possibly come to dinner,' said Dorothy. 'I've got
Father's supper to see to, and thousands of other things. I shan't
be free till eight o'clock or after.'
'Well, come along after dinner, then. I'd like you to know Bewley.
He's an interesting fellow--very au fait with all the Bloomsbury
scandal, and all that. You'll enjoy meeting him. It'll do you
good to escape from the church hen-coop for a few hours.'
Dorothy hesitated. She was tempted. To tell the truth, she
enjoyed her occasional visits to Mr Warburton's house extremely.
But of course they were VERY occasional--once in three or four
months at the oftenest; it so obviously DIDN'T DO to associate too
freely with such a man. And even when she did go to his house she
was careful to make sure beforehand that there was going to be at
least one other visitor.
Two years earlier, when Mr Warburton had first come to Knype Hill
(at that time he was posing as a widower with two children; a
little later, however, the housekeeper suddenly gave birth to a
third child in the middle of the night), Dorothy had met him at a
tea-party and afterwards called on him. Mr Warburton had given
her a delightful tea, talked amusingly about books, and then,
immediately after tea, sat down beside her on the sofa and begun
making love to her, violently, outrageously, even brutally. It was
practically an assault. Dorothy was horrified almost out of her
wits, though not too horrified to resist. She escaped from him and
took refuge on the other side of the sofa, white, shaking, and
almost in tears. Mr Warburton, on the other hand, was quite
unashamed and even seemed rather amused.
'Oh, how could you, how could you?' she sobbed.
'But it appears that I couldn't,' said Mr Warburton.
'Oh, but how could you be such a brute?'
'Oh, THAT? Easily, my child, easily. You will understand that
when you get to my age.'
In spite of this bad beginning, a sort of friendship had grown up
between the two, even to the extent of Dorothy being 'talked about'
in connexion with Mr Warburton. It did not take much to get you
'talked about' in Knype Hill. She only saw him at long intervals
he found opportunities of making casual love to her. But it was
done in a gentlemanly fashion; the previous disagreeable incident
was not repeated. Afterwards, when he was forgiven, Mr Warburton
had explained that he 'always tried it on' with every presentable
woman he met.
'Don't you get rather a lot of snubs?' Dorothy could not help
asking him.
'Oh, certainly. But I get quite a number of successes as well, you
know.'
People wondered sometimes how such a girl as Dorothy could consort,
even occasionally, with such a man as Mr Warburton; but the hold
that he had over her was the hold that the blasphemer and evil-
liver always has over the pious. It is a fact--you have only to
look about you to verify it--that the pious and the immoral drift
naturally together. The best brothel-scenes in literature have
been written, without exception, by pious believers or pious
unbelievers. And of course Dorothy, born into the twentieth
century, made a point of listening to Mr Warburton's blasphemies as
calmly as possible; it is fatal to flatter the wicked by letting
them see that you are shocked by them. Besides, she was genuinely
fond of him. He teased her and distressed her, and yet she got
from him, without being fully aware of it, a species of sympathy
and understanding which she could not get elsewhere. For all his
vices he was distinctly likeable, and the shoddy brilliance of his
conversation--Oscar Wilde seven times watered--which she was too
inexperienced to see through, fascinated while it shocked her.
Perhaps, too, in this instance, the prospect of meeting the
celebrated Mr Bewley had its effect upon her; though certainly
Fishponds and Concubines sounded like the kind of book that she
either didn't read or else set herself heavy penances for reading.
In London, no doubt, one would hardly cross the road to see fifty
novelists; but these things appeared differently in places like
Knype Hill.
'Are you SURE Mr Bewley is coming?' she said.
'Quite sure. And his wife's coming as well, I believe. Full
chaperonage. No Tarquin and Lucrece business this evening.'
'All right,' said Dorothy finally; 'thanks very much. I'll come
round--about half past eight, I expect.'
'Good. If you can manage to come while it is still daylight, so
m
uch the better. Remember that Mrs Semprill is my next-door
neighbour. We can count on her to be on the qui vive any time
after sundown.'
Mrs Semprill was the town scandalmonger--the most eminent, that is,
of the town's many scandalmongers. Having got what he wanted (he
was constantly pestering Dorothy to come to his house more often),
Mr Warburton said au revoir and left Dorothy to do the remainder of
her shopping.
In the semi-gloom of Solepipe's shop, she was just moving away from
the counter with her two and a half yards of casement cloth, when
she was aware of a low, mournful voice at her ear. It was Mrs
Semprill. She was a slender woman of forty, with a lank, sallow,
distinguished face, which, with her glossy dark hair and air of
settled melancholy, gave her something the appearance of a Van Dyck
portrait. Entrenched behind a pile of cretonnes near the window,
she had been watching Dorothy's conversation with Mr Warburton.
Whenever you were doing something that you did not particularly
want Mrs Semprill to see you doing, you could trust her to be
somewhere in the neighbourhood. She seemed to have the power of
materializing like an Arabian jinneeyeh at any place where she was
not wanted. No indiscretion, however small, escaped her vigilance.
Mr Warburton used to say that she was like the four beasts of the
Apocalypse--'They are full of eyes, you remember, and they rest not
night nor day.'
'Dorothy DEAREST,' murmured Mrs Semprill in the sorrowful,
affectionate voice of someone breaking a piece of bad news as
gently as possible. 'I've been so WANTING to speak to you. I've
something simply DREADFUL to tell you--something that will really
HORRIFY you!'
'What is it?' said Dorothy resignedly, well knowing what was
coming--for Mrs Semprill had only one subject of conversation.
They moved out of the shop and began to walk down the street,
Dorothy wheeling her bicycle, Mrs Semprill mincing at her side with
a delicate birdlike step and bringing her mouth closer and closer
'Do you happen to have noticed,' she began, 'that girl who sits at
the end of the pew nearest the organ in church? A rather PRETTY
girl, with red hair. I've no idea what her name is,' added Mrs
Semprill, who knew the surname and all the Christian names of every
man, woman, and child in Knype Hill.
'Molly Freeman,' said Dorothy. 'She's the niece of Freeman the
greengrocer.'
'Oh, Molly Freeman? Is THAT her name? I'd often wondered. Well--'
The delicate red mouth came closer, the mournful voice sank to a
shocked whisper. Mrs Semprill began to pour forth a stream of
purulent libel involving Molly Freeman and six young men who worked
at the sugar-beet refinery. After a few moments the story became
so outrageous that Dorothy, who had turned very pink, hurriedly
withdrew her ear from Mrs Semprill's whispering lips. She stopped
her bicycle.
'I won't listen to such things!' she said abruptly. 'I KNOW that
isn't true about Molly Freeman. It CAN'T be true! She's such a
nice quiet girl--she was one of my very best Girl Guides, and she's
always been so good about helping with the church bazaars and
everything. I'm perfectly certain she wouldn't do such things as
you're saying.'
'But, Dorothy DEAREST! When, as I told you, I actually saw with my
own eyes . . .'
'I don't care! It's not fair to say such things about people.
Even if they were true it wouldn't be right to repeat them.
There's quite enough evil in the world without going about looking
for it.'
'LOOKING for it!' sighed Mrs Semprill. 'But, my dear Dorothy, as
though one ever wanted or NEEDED to look! The trouble is that one
can't HELP seeing all the dreadful wickedness that goes on in this
town.'
Mrs Semprill was always genuinely astonished if you accused her of
LOOKING for subjects for scandal. Nothing, she would protest,
pained her more than the spectacle of human wickedness; but it was
constantly forced upon her unwilling eyes, and only a stern sense
of duty impelled her to make it public. Dorothy's remarks, so far
from silencing her, merely set her talking about the general
corruption of Knype Hill, of which Molly Freeman's misbehaviour was
only one example. And so from Molly Freeman and her six young men
she proceeded to Dr Gaythorne, the town medical officer, who had
got two of the nurses at the Cottage Hospital with child, and then
to Mrs Corn, the Town Clerk's wife, found lying in a field dead
drunk on eau-de-Cologne, and then to the curate at St Wedekind's in
Millborough, who had involved himself in a grave scandal with a
choirboy; and so it went on, one thing leading to another. For
there was hardly a soul in the town or the surrounding country
about whom Mrs Semprill could not disclose some festering secret if
you listened to her long enough.
It was noticeable that her stories were not only dirty and
libellous, but they had nearly always some monstrous tinge of
perversion about them. Compared with the ordinary scandalmongers
of a country town, she was Freud to Boccaccio. From hearing her
talk you would have gathered the impression that Knype Hill with
its thousand inhabitants held more of the refinements of evil than
Sodom, Gomorrah, and Buenos Aires put together. Indeed, when you
reflected upon the lives led by the inhabitants of this latter-day
City of the Plain--from the manager of the local bank squandering
his clients' money on the children of his second and bigamous
marriage, to the barmaid of the Dog and Bottle serving drinks in
the taproom dressed only in high-heeled satin slippers, and from
old Miss Channon, the music-teacher, with her secret gin bottle and
her anonymous letters, to Maggie White, the baker's daughter, who
had borne three children to her own brother--when you considered
these people, all, young and old, rich and poor, sunken in
monstrous and Babylonian vices, you wondered that fire did not come
down from Heaven and consume the town forthwith. But if you
listened just a little longer, the catalogue of obscenities became
first monstrous and then unbearably dull. For in a town in which
EVERYONE is either a bigamist, a pederast, or a drug-taker, the
worst scandal loses its sting. In fact, Mrs Semprill was something
worse than a slanderer; she was a bore.
As to the extent to which her stories were believed, it varied. At
times the word would go round that she was a foul-mouthed old cat
and everything she said was a pack of lies; at other times one of
her accusations would take effect on some unfortunate person, who
would need months or even years to live it down. She had certainly
been instrumental in breaking off not less than half a dozen
engagements and starting innumerable quarrels between husbands and
wives.
All this while Dorothy had been making abortive efforts to
shake
Mrs Semprill off. She had edged her way gradually across the
street until she was wheeling her bicycle along the right-hand
kerb; but Mrs Semprill had followed, whispering without cease. It
was not until they reached the end of the High Street that Dorothy
summoned up enough firmness to escape. She halted and put her
right foot on the pedal of her bicycle.
'I really can't stop a moment longer,' she said. 'I've got a
thousand things to do, and I'm late already.'
'Oh, but, Dorothy dear! I've something else I simply MUST tell
you--something most IMPORTANT!'
'I'm sorry--I'm in such a terrible hurry. Another time, perhaps.'
'It's about that DREADFUL Mr Warburton,' said Mrs Semprill hastily,
lest Dorothy should escape without hearing it. 'He's just come
back from London, and do you know--I most PARTICULARLY wanted to
tell you this--do you know, he actually--'
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