The Complete Works. George OrwellЧитать онлайн книгу.
you seem positively unconcerned about it.”
“I never said you were going to Hell,” said Dorothy somewhat uncomfortably, and wishing that the conversation would take a different turn. For the truth was, though she was not going to tell him so, that the point Mr. Warburton had raised was one with which she herself had had certain difficulties. She did indeed believe in Hell, but she had never been able to persuade herself that anyone actually went there. She believed that Hell existed, but that it was empty. Uncertain of the orthodoxy of this belief, she preferred to keep it to herself. “It’s never certain that anyone is going to Hell,” she said more firmly, feeling that here at least she was on sure ground.
“What!” said Mr. Warburton, halting in mock surprise. “Surely you don’t mean to say that there’s hope for me yet?”
“Of course there is. It’s only those horrid Predestination people who pretend that you go to Hell whether you repent or not. You don’t think the Church of England are Calvinists, do you?”
“I suppose there’s always the chance of getting off on a plea of Invincible Ignorance,” said Mr. Warburton reflectively; and then, more confidentially: “Do you know, Dorothy, I’ve a sort of feeling that even now, after knowing me two years, you’ve still half an idea you can make a convert of me. A lost sheep—brand plucked from the burning, and all that. I believe you still hope against hope that one of these days my eyes will be opened and you’ll meet me at Holy Communion at seven o’clock on some damned cold winter morning. Don’t you?”
“Well——” said Dorothy, again uncomfortably. She did, in fact, entertain some such hope about Mr. Warburton, though he was not exactly a promising case for conversion. It was not in her nature to see a fellow-being in a state of unbelief without making some effort to reclaim him. What hours she had spent, at different times, earnestly debating with vague village atheists who could not produce a single intelligible reason for their unbelief! “Yes,” she admitted finally, not particularly wanting to make the admission, but not wanting to prevaricate.
Mr. Warburton laughed delightedly.
“You’ve a hopeful nature,” he said. “But you aren’t afraid, by any chance, that I might convert you? ‘The dog it was that died,’ you may remember.”
At this Dorothy merely smiled. “Don’t let him see he’s shocking you”—that was always her maxim when she was talking to Mr. Warburton. They had been arguing in this manner, without coming to any kind of conclusion, for the past hour, and might have gone on for the rest of the night if Dorothy had been willing to stay; for Mr. Warburton delighted in teasing her about her religious beliefs. He had that fatal cleverness that so often goes with unbelief, and in their arguments, though Dorothy was always right, she was not always victorious. They were sitting, or rather Dorothy was sitting and Mr. Warburton was standing, in a large agreeable room, giving on a moonlit lawn, that Mr. Warburton called his “studio”—not that there was any sign of any work ever having been done in it. To Dorothy’s great disappointment, the celebrated Mr. Bewley had not turned up. (As a matter of fact, neither Mr. Bewley, nor his wife, nor his novel entitled Fishpools and Concubines, actually existed. Mr. Warburton had invented all three of them on the spur of the moment, as a pretext for inviting Dorothy to his house, well knowing that she would never come unchaperoned.) Dorothy had felt rather uneasy on finding that Mr. Warburton was alone. It had occurred to her, indeed she had felt perfectly certain, that it would be wiser to go home at once; but she had stayed, chiefly because she was horribly tired and the leather armchair into which Mr. Warburton had thrust her the moment she entered the house was too comfortable to leave. Now, however, her conscience was pricking her. It didn’t do to stay too late at his house—people would talk if they heard of it. Besides, there was a multitude of jobs that she ought to be doing and that she had neglected in order to come here. She was so little used to idleness that even an hour spent in mere talking seemed to her vaguely sinful.
She made an effort, and straightened herself in the too-comfortable chair. “I think, if you don’t mind, it’s really time I was getting home,” she said.
“Talking of Invincible Ignorance,” went on Mr. Warburton, taking no notice of Dorothy’s remark, “I forget whether I ever told you that once when I was standing outside the World’s End pub in Chelsea, waiting for a taxi, a damned ugly little Salvation Army lassie came up to me and said—without any kind of introduction, you know—‘What will you say at the Judgement Seat?’ I said, ‘I am reserving my defence.’ Rather neat, I think, don’t you?”
Dorothy did not answer. Her conscience had given her another and harder jab—she had remembered those wretched, unmade jackboots, and the fact that at least one of them had got to be made to-night. She was, however, unbearably tired. She had had an exhausting afternoon, starting off with ten miles or so of bicycling to and fro in the sun, delivering the parish magazine, and continuing with the Mothers’ Union tea in the hot little wooden-walled room behind the parish hall. The Mothers met every Wednesday afternoon to have tea and do some charitable sewing while Dorothy read aloud to them. (At present she was reading Gene Stratton Porter’s A Girl of the Limberlost.) It was nearly always upon Dorothy that jobs of that kind devolved, because the phalanx of devoted women (the church fowls, they are called) who do the dirty work of most parishes had dwindled at Knype Hill to four or five at most. The only helper on whom Dorothy could count at all regularly was Miss Foote, a tall, rabbit-faced, dithering virgin of thirty-five, who meant well but made a mess of everything and was in a perpetual state of flurry. Mr. Warburton used to say that she reminded him of a comet—“a ridiculous blunt-nosed creature rushing round on an eccentric orbit and always a little behind time.” You could trust Miss Foote with the church decorations, but not with the Mothers or the Sunday School, because, though a regular churchgoer, her orthodoxy was suspect. She had confided to Dorothy that she could worship God best under the blue dome of the sky. After tea Dorothy had dashed up to the church to put fresh flowers on the altar, and then she had typed out her father’s sermon—her typewriter was a rickety pre-Boer War “invisible,” on which you couldn’t average eight hundred words an hour—and after supper she had weeded the pea rows until the light failed and her back seemed to be breaking. With one thing and another, she was even more tired than usual.
“I really must be getting home,” she repeated more firmly. “I’m sure it’s getting fearfully late.”
“Home?” said Mr. Warburton. “Nonsense! The evening’s hardly begun.”
He was walking up and down the room again, with his hands in his coat pockets, having thrown away his cigar. The spectre of the unmade jackboots stalked back into Dorothy’s mind. She would, she suddenly decided, make two jackboots to-night instead of only one, as a penance for the hour she had wasted. She was just beginning to make a mental sketch of the way she would cut out the pieces of brown paper for the insteps, when she noticed that Mr. Warburton had halted behind her chair.
“What time is it, do you know?” she said.
“I dare say it might be half past ten. But people like you and me don’t talk of such vulgar subjects as the time.”
“If it’s half past ten, then I really must be going,” said Dorothy. “I’ve got a whole lot of work to do before I go to bed.”
“Work! At this time of night? Impossible!”
“Yes, I have. I’ve got to make a pair of jackboots.”
“You’ve got to make a pair of what?” said Mr. Warburton.
“Of jackboots. For the play the school-children are acting. We make them out of glue and brown paper.”
“Glue and brown paper! Good God!” murmured Mr. Warburton. He went on, chiefly to cover the fact that he was drawing nearer to Dorothy’s chair: “What a life you lead! Messing about with glue and brown paper in the middle of the night! I must say, there are times when I feel just a little glad that I’m not a clergyman’s daughter.”
“I think——” began Dorothy.
But at the same moment Mr. Warburton, invisible behind her chair, had lowered his hands and