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?” enquired 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 the First,” 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 baptise Mrs. Porter’s baby? Because they don’t think as it’s going to live the day out, and it ain’t been baptised 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 the 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 meal-times 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 baptise 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
