The Complete Novels Of George Orwell (53 page)

‘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.’

‘But, Father–’

Dorothy’s heart sank yet lower. What was worst of all when she came to him for money was the terrible, unhelpful calmness of his attitude. He was never so unmoved as when you were reminding him that he was up to his eyes in debt. Apparently he could not understand that tradesmen occasionally want to be paid, and that no house can be kept going without an adequate supply of money. He allowed Dorothy eighteen pounds a month for all the household expenses, including Ellen’s wages, and at the same time he was ‘dainty’ about
his food and instantly detected any falling off in its quality. The result was, of course, that the household was perennially in debt. But the Rector paid not the smallest attention to his debts–indeed, he was hardly even aware of them. When he lost money over an investment, he was deeply agitated; but as for a debt to a mere tradesman–well, it was the kind of thing that he simply could not bother his head about.

A peaceful plume of smoke floated upwards from the Rector’s pipe. He was gazing with a meditative eye at the steel engraving of Charles I and had probably forgotten already about Dorothy’s demand for money. Seeing him so unconcerned, a pang of desperation went through Dorothy, and her courage came back to her. She said more sharply than before:

‘Father, please listen to me! I
must
have some money soon! I simply
must!
We can’t go on as we’re doing. We owe money to nearly every tradesman in the town. It’s got so that some mornings I can hardly bear to go down the street and think of all the bills that are owing. Do you know that we owe Cargill nearly twenty-two pounds?’

‘What of it?’ said the Rector between puffs of smoke.

‘But the bill’s been mounting up for over seven months! He’s sent it in over and over again. We
must
pay it! It’s so unfair to him to keep him waiting for his money like that!’

‘Nonsense, my dear child! These people expect to be kept waiting for their money. They like it. It brings them more in the end. Goodness knows how much I owe to Catkin & Palm–I should hardly care to inquire. They are dunning me by every post. But you don’t hear
me
complaining, do you?’

‘But, Father, I can’t look at it as you do, I can’t! It’s so dreadful to be always in debt! Even if it isn’t actually wrong, it’s so
hateful
. It makes me so ashamed! When I go into Cargill’s shop to order the joint, he speaks to me so shortly and makes me wait after the other customers, all because our bill’s mounting up the whole time. And yet I daren’t stop ordering from him. I believe he’d run us in if I did.’

The Rector frowned. ‘What! Do you mean to say the fellow has been impertinent to you?’

‘I didn’t say he’d been impertinent, Father. But you can’t blame him if he’s angry when his bill’s not paid.’

‘I most certainly can blame him! It is simply abominable how these people take it upon themselves to behave nowadays–abominable! But there you are, you see. That is the kind of thing that we are exposed to in this delightful century. That is democracy–
progress
, as they are pleased to call it. Don’t order from the fellow again. Tell him at once that you are taking your account elsewhere. That’s the only way to treat these people.’

‘But, Father, that doesn’t settle anything. Really and truly, don’t you think we ought to pay him? Surely we can get hold of the money somehow? Couldn’t you sell out some shares, or something?’

‘My dear child, don’t talk to me about selling out shares! I have just had the most disagreeable news from my broker. He tells me that my Sumatra Tin shares have dropped from seven and fourpence to six and a penny. It means a
loss of nearly sixty pounds. I am telling him to sell out at once before they drop any further.’

‘Then if you sell out you’ll have some ready money, won’t you? Don’t you think it would be better to get out of debt once and for all?’

‘Nonsense, nonsense,’ said the Rector more calmly, putting his pipe back in his mouth. ‘You know nothing whatever about these matters. I shall have to reinvest at once in something more hopeful–it’s the only way of getting my money back.’

With one thumb in the belt of his cassock he frowned abstractedly at the steel engraving. His broker had advised United Celanese. Here–in Sumatra Tin, United Celanese, and numberless other remote and dimly imagined companies–was the central cause of the Rector’s money troubles. He was an inveterate gambler. Not, of course, that he thought of it as gambling; it was merely a lifelong search for a ‘good investment’. On coming of age he had inherited four thousand pounds, which had gradually dwindled, thanks to his ‘investments’, to about twelve hundred. What was worse, every year he managed to scrape together, out of his miserable income, another fifty pounds which vanished by the same road. It is a curious fact that the lure of a ‘good investment’ seems to haunt clergymen more persistently than any other class of man. Perhaps it is the modern equivalent of the demons in female shape who used to haunt the anchorites of the Dark Ages.

‘I shall buy five hundred United Celanese,’ said the Rector finally.

Dorothy began to give up hope. Her father was now thinking of his ‘investments’ (she new nothing whatever about these ‘investments’, except that they went wrong with phenomenal regularity), and in another moment the question of the shop-debts would have slipped entirely out of his mind. She made a final effort.

‘Father, let’s get this settled, please. Do you think you’ll be able to let me have some extra money fairly soon? Not this moment, perhaps–but in the next month or two?’

‘No, my dear, I don’t. About Christmas time, possibly–it’s very unlikely even then. But for the present, certainly not. I haven’t a halfpenny I can spare.’

‘But, Father, it’s so horrible to feel we can’t pay our debts! It disgraces us so! Last time Mr Welwyn-Foster was here’ (Mr Welwyn-Foster was the Rural Dean) ‘Mrs Welwyn-Foster was going all round the town asking everyone the most personal questions about us–asking how we spent our time, and how much money we had, and how many tons of coal we used in a year, and everything. She’s always trying to pry into our affairs. Suppose she found out that we were badly in debt!’

‘Surely it is our own business? I fail entirely to see what it has to do with Mrs Welwyn-Foster or anyone else.’

‘But she’d repeat it all over the place–and she’d exaggerate it too! You know what Mrs Welwyn-Foster is. In every parish she goes to she tries to find out something disgraceful about the clergyman, and then she repeats every word of it to the Bishop. I don’t want to be uncharitable about her, but really she–’

Realizing that she
did
want to be uncharitable, Dorothy was silent.

’She is a detestable woman,’ said the Rector evenly. ‘What of it? Who ever heard of a Rural Dean’s wife who wasn’t detestable?’

‘But, Father, I don’t seem to be able to get you to see how serious things are! We’ve simply nothing to live on for the next month. I don’t even know where the meat’s coming from for today’s dinner.’

‘Luncheon, Dorothy, luncheon!’ said the Rector with a touch of irritation. ‘I do wish you would drop that abominable lower-class habit of calling the midday meal
dinner!’

‘For luncheon, then. Where are we to get the meat from? I daren’t ask Cargill for another joint.’

‘Go to the other butcher–what’s his name? Salter–and take no notice of Cargill. He knows he’ll be paid sooner or later. Good gracious, I don’t know what all this fuss is about! Doesn’t everyone owe money to his tradesmen? I distinctly remember’–the Rector straightened his shoulders a little, and, putting his pipe back into his mouth, looked into the distance; his voice became reminiscent and perceptibly more agreeable–’I distinctly remember that when I was up at Oxford, my father had still not paid some of his own Oxford bills of thirty years earlier. Tom’ (Tom was the Rector’s cousin, the Baronet) ‘owed seven thousand before he came into his money. He told me so himself.’

At that, Dorothy’s last hope vanished. When her father began to talk about his cousin Tom, and about things that had happened ‘when I was up at Oxford’, there was nothing more to be done with him. It meant that he had slipped into an imaginary golden past in which such vulgar things as butchers’ bills simply did not exist. There were long periods together when he seemed actually to forget that he was only a poverty-stricken country Rector–that he was not a young man of family with estates and reversions at his back. The aristocratic, the expensive attitude was the one that in all circumstances came the most naturally to him. And of course while he lived, not uncomfortably, in the world of his imagination, it was Dorothy who had to fight the tradesmen and make a leg of mutton last from Sunday to Wednesday. But she knew the complete uselessness of arguing with him any longer. It would only end in making him angry. She got up from the table and began to pile the breakfast things on to the tray.

‘You’re absolutely certain you can’t let me have any money, Father?’ she said for the last time, at the door, with the tray in her arms.

The Rector, gazing into the middle distance, amid comfortable wreaths of smoke, did not hear her. He was thinking, perhaps, of his golden Oxford days. Dorothy went out of the room distressed almost to the point of tears. The miserable question of the debts was once more shelved, as it had been shelved a thousand times before, with no prospect of final solution.

On her elderly bicycle with the basketwork carrier on the handle-bars, Dorothy free-wheeled down the hill, doing mental arithmetic with three pounds nineteen and fourpence–her entire stock of money until next quarterday.

She had been through the list of things that were needed in the kitchen. But indeed, was there anything that was
not
needed in the kitchen? Tea, coffee, soap, matches, candles, sugar, lentils, firewood, soda, lamp oil, boot polish, margarine, baking powder–there seemed to be practically nothing that they were not running short of. And at every moment some fresh item that she had forgotten popped up and dismayed her. The laundry bill, for example, and the fact that the coal was running short, and the question of the fish for Friday. The Rector was ‘difficult’ about fish. Roughly speaking, he would only eat the more expensive kinds; cod, whiting, sprats, skate, herrings, and kippers he refused.

Meanwhile, she had got to settle about the meat for today’s dinner-luncheon. (Dorothy was careful to obey her father and call it
luncheon
, when she remembered it. On the other hand, you could not in honesty call the evening meal anything but ‘supper’; so there was no such meal as ‘dinner’ at the Rectory.) Better make an omelette for luncheon today, Dorothy decided. She dared not go to Cargill again. Though, of course, if they had an omelette for luncheon and then scrambled eggs for supper, her father would probably be sarcastic about it. Last time they had eggs twice in one day, he had inquired coldly, ‘Have you started a chicken farm, Dorothy?’ And perhaps tomorrow she would get two pounds of sausages at the International, and that staved off the meat-question for one day more.

Thirty-nine further days, with only three pounds nineteen and fourpence to provide for them, loomed up in Dorothy’s imagination, sending through her a wave of self-pity which she checked almost instantly. Now then, Dorothy! No snivelling, please! It all comes right somehow if you trust in God. Matthew vi, 25. The Lord will provide. Will He? Dorothy removed her right hand from the handle-bars and felt for the glass-headed pin, but the blasphemous thought faded. At this moment she became aware of the gloomy red face of Proggett, who was hailing her respectfully but urgently from the side of the road.

Dorothy stopped and got off her bicycle.

‘Beg pardon, Miss,’ said Proggett. ‘I been wanting to speak to you,
Miss–
partic’lar
. ‘

Dorothy sighed inwardly. When Proggett wanted to speak to you
partic’lar
, you could be perfectly certain what was coming; it was some piece of alarming news about the condition of the church. Proggett was a pessimistic, conscientious man, and very loyal churchman, after his fashion. Too dim of intellect to have any definite religious beliefs, he showed his piety by an intense solicitude about the state of the church buildings. He had decided long ago that the Church of Christ meant the actual walls, roof, and tower of St Athelstan’s, Knype Hill, and he would poke round the church at all hours of the day, gloomily noting a cracked stone here, a worm-eaten beam there–and afterwards, of course, coming to harass Dorothy with demands for repairs which would cost impossible sums of money.

‘What is it, Proggett?’ said Dorothy.

‘Well, Miss, it’s they–’–here a peculiar, imperfect sound, not a word exactly, but the ghost of a word, all but formed itself on Proggett’s lips. It seemed to begin with a B. Proggett was one of those men who are for ever on the verge of swearing, but who always recapture the oath as it is escaping between their teeth. ‘It’s they
bells
, Miss,’ he said, getting rid of the B sound with an effort. ‘They bells up in the church tower. They’re a-splintering through that there belfry floor in a way as it makes you fair shudder to look at ’em. We’ll have ’em down atop of us before we know where we are. I was up the belfry ’smorning, and I tell you I come down faster’n I went up, when I saw how that there floor’s a-busting underneath ’em.

Proggett came to complain about the condition of the bells not less than once a fortnight. It was now three years that they had been lying on the floor of the belfry, because the cost of either reswinging or removing them was estimated at twenty-five pounds, which might as well have been twenty-five thousand for all the chance there was of paying for it. They were really almost as dangerous as Proggett made out. It was quite certain that, if not this year or next year, at any rate at some time in the near future, they would fall through the belfry floor into the church porch. And, as Proggett was fond of pointing out, it would probably happen on a Sunday morning just as the congregation were coming into church.