have you managed to remain unmarried all these years?'
'Let me go at once!' repeated Dorothy, beginning to struggle again.
'But I don't particularly want to let you go,' objected Mr
Warburton.
'PLEASE don't stroke my arm like that! I don't like it!'
'What a curious child you are! Why don't you like it?'
'I tell you I don't like it!'
'Now don't go and turn round,' said Mr Warburton mildly. 'You
don't seem to realize how tactful it was on my part to approach you
from behind your back. If you turn round you'll see that I'm old
enough to be your father, and hideously bald into the bargain. But
if you'll only keep still and not look at me you can imagine I'm
Ivor Novello.'
Dorothy caught sight of the hand that was caressing her--a large,
pink, very masculine hand, with thick fingers and a fleece of gold
hairs upon the back. She turned very pale; the expression of her
face altered from mere annoyance to aversion and dread. She made a
violent effort, wrenched herself free, and stood up, facing him.
'I DO wish you wouldn't do that!' she said, half in anger and half
in distress.
'What is the matter with you?' said Mr Warburton.
He had stood upright, in his normal pose, entirely unconcerned, and
he looked at her with a touch of curiosity. Her face had changed.
It was not only that she had turned pale; there was a withdrawn,
half-frightened look in her eyes--almost as though, for the moment,
she were looking at him with the eyes of a stranger. He perceived
that he had wounded her in some way which he did not understand,
and which perhaps she did not want him to understand.
'What is the matter with you?' he repeated.
'WHY must you do that every time you meet me?'
'"Every time I meet you" is an exaggeration,' said Mr Warburton.
'It's really very seldom that I get the opportunity. But if you
really and truly don't like it--'
'Of course I don't like it! You know I don't like it!'
'Well, well! Then let's say no more about it,' said Mr Warburton
generously. 'Sit down, and we'll change the subject.'
He was totally devoid of shame. It was perhaps his most outstanding
characteristic. Having attempted to seduce her, and failed, he was
quite willing to go on with the conversation as though nothing
whatever had happened.
'I'm going home at once,' said Dorothy. 'I can't stay here any
longer.'
'Oh nonsense! Sit down and forget about it. We'll talk of moral
theology, or cathedral architecture, or the Girl Guides' cooking
classes, or anything you choose. Think how bored I shall be all
alone if you go home at this hour.'
But Dorothy persisted, and there was an argument. Even if it had
not been his intention to make love to her--and whatever he might
promise he would certainly begin again in a few minutes if she did
not go--Mr Warburton would have pressed her to stay, for, like all
thoroughly idle people, he had a horror of going to bed and no
conception of the value of time. He would, if you let him, keep
you talking till three or four in the morning. Even when Dorothy
finally escaped, he walked beside her down the moonlit drive, still
talking voluminously and with such perfect good humour that she
found it impossible to be angry with him any longer.
'I'm leaving first thing tomorrow,' he told her as they reached the
gate. 'I'm going to take the car to town and pick up the kids--the
BASTARDS, you know--and we're leaving for France the next day. I'm
not certain where we shall go after that; eastern Europe, perhaps.
Prague, Vienna, Bucharest.'
'How nice,' said Dorothy.
Mr Warburton, with an adroitness surprising in so large and stout a
man, had manoeuvred himself between Dorothy and the gate.
'I shall be away six months or more,' he said. 'And of course I
needn't ask, before so long a parting, whether you want to kiss me
good-bye?'
Before she knew what he was doing he had put his arm about her and
drawn her against him. She drew back--too late; he kissed her on
the cheek--would have kissed her on the mouth if she had not turned
her head away in time. She struggled in his arms, violently and
for a moment helplessly.
'Oh, let me go!' she cried. 'DO let me go!'
'I believe I pointed out before,' said Mr Warburton, holding her
easily against him, 'that I don't want to let you go.'
'But we're standing right in front of Mrs Semprill's window!
She'll see us absolutely for certain!'
'Oh, good God! So she will!' said Mr Warburton. 'I was forgetting.'
Impressed by this argument, as he would not have been by any other,
he let Dorothy go. She promptly put the gate between Mr Warburton
and herself. He, meanwhile, was scrutinizing Mrs Semprill's
windows.
'I can't see a light anywhere,' he said finally. 'With any luck
the blasted hag hasn't seen us.'
'Good-bye,' said Dorothy briefly. 'This time I really MUST go.
Remember me to the children.'
With this she made off as fast as she could go without actually
running, to get out of his reach before he should attempt to kiss
her again.
Even as she did so a sound checked her for an instant--the
unmistakable bang of a window shutting, somewhere in Mrs Semprill's
house. Could Mrs Semprill have been watching them after all? But
(reflected Dorothy) of COURSE she had been watching them! What
else could you expect? You could hardly imagine Mrs Semprill
missing such a scene as that. And if she HAD been watching them,
undoubtedly the story would be all over the town tomorrow morning,
and it would lose nothing in the telling. But this thought,
sinister though it was, did no more than flight momentarily through
Dorothy's mind as she hurried down the road.
When she was well out of sight of Mr Warburton's house she stopped,
took out her handkerchief and scrubbed the place on her cheek where
he had kissed her. She scrubbed it vigorously enough to bring the
blood into her cheek. It was not until she had quite rubbed out
the imaginary stain which his lips had left there that she walked
on again.
What he had done had upset her. Even now her heart was knocking
and fluttering uncomfortably. I can't BEAR that kind of thing! she
repeated to herself several times over. And unfortunately this was
no more than the literal truth; she really could not bear it. To
be kissed or fondled by a man--to feel heavy male arms about her
and thick male lips bearing down upon her own--was terrifying and
repulsive to her. Even in memory or imagination it made her wince.
It was her especial secret, the especial, incurable disability that
she carried through life.
If only they would leave you ALONE! she thought as she walked
onwards a little more slowly. That was how she put it to herself
habitually--'If only they would leave you ALONE!' For it was not
that in other ways she disliked men. On the contrary, she liked
them be
tter than women. Part of Mr Warburton's hold over her was
in the fact that he was a man and had the careless good humour and
the intellectual largeness that women so seldom have. But why
couldn't they leave you ALONE? Why did they always have to kiss
you and maul you about? They were dreadful when they kissed you--
dreadful and a little disgusting, like some large, furry beast that
rubs itself against you, all too friendly and yet liable to turn
dangerous at any moment. And beyond their kissing and mauling
there lay always the suggestion of those other, monstrous things
('ALL THAT' was her name for them) of which she could hardly even
bear to think.
Of course, she had had her share, and rather more than her share,
of casual attention from men. She was just pretty enough, and just
plain enough, to be the kind of girl that men habitually pester.
For when a man wants a little casual amusement, he usually picks
out a girl who is not TOO pretty. Pretty girls (so he reasons) are
spoilt and therefore capricious; but plain girls are easy game.
And even if you are a clergyman's daughter, even if you live in a
town like Knype Hill and spend almost your entire life in parish
work, you don't altogether escape pursuit. Dorothy was all too
used to it--all too used to the fattish middle-aged men, with their
fishily hopeful eyes, who slowed down their cars when you passed
them on the road, or who manoeuvred an introduction and then began
pinching your elbow about ten minutes afterwards. Men of all
descriptions. Even a clergyman, on one occasion--a bishop's
chaplain, he was. . . .
But the trouble was that it was not better, but oh! infinitely
worse when they were the right kind of man and the advances they
made you were honourable. Her mind slipped backwards five years,
to Francis Moon, curate in those days at St Wedekind's in
Millborough. Dear Francis! How gladly would she have married him
if only it had not been for ALL THAT! Over and over again he had
asked her to marry him, and of course she had had to say No; and,
equally of course, he had never known why. Impossible to tell him
why. And then he had gone away, and only a year later had died so
irrelevantly of pneumonia. She whispered a prayer for his soul,
momentarily forgetting that her father did not really approve of
prayers for the dead, and then, with an effort, pushed the memory
aside. Ah, better not to think of it again! It hurt her in her
breast to think of it.
She could never marry, she had decided long ago upon that. Even
when she was a child she had known it. Nothing would ever overcome
her horror of ALL THAT--at the very thought of it something within
her seemed to shrink and freeze. And of course, in a sense she did
not want to overcome it. For, like all abnormal people, she was
not fully aware that she was abnormal.
And yet, though her sexual coldness seemed to her natural and
inevitable, she knew well enough how it was that it had begun. She
could remember, as clearly as though it were yesterday, certain
dreadful scenes between her father and her mother--scenes that she
had witnessed when she was no more than nine years old. They had
left a deep, secret wound in her mind. And then a little later she
had been frightened by some old steel engravings of nymphs pursued
by satyrs. To her childish mind there was something inexplicably,
horribly sinister in those horned, semi-human creatures that lurked
in thickets and behind large trees, ready to come bounding forth in
sudden swift pursuit. For a whole year of her childhood she had
actually been afraid to walk through woods alone, for fear of
satyrs. She had grown out of the fear, of course, but not out of
the feeling that was associated with it. The satyr had remained
with her as a symbol. Perhaps she would never grow out of it, that
special feeling of dread, of hopeless flight from something more
than rationally dreadful--the stamp of hooves in the lonely wood,
the lean, furry thighs of the satyr. It was a thing not to be
altered, not to be argued away. It is, moreover, a thing too
common nowadays, among educated women, to occasion any kind of
surprise.
Most of Dorothy's agitation had disappeared by the time she reached
the rectory. The thoughts of satyrs and Mr Warburton, of Francis
Moon and her foredoomed sterility, which had been going to and fro
in her mind, faded out of it and were replaced by the accusing
image of a jackboot. She remembered that she had the best part of
two hours' work to do before going to bed tonight. The house was
in darkness. She went round to the back and slipped in on tiptoe
by the scullery door, for fear of waking her father, who was
probably asleep already.
As she felt her way through the dark passage to the conservatory,
she suddenly decided that she had gone wrong in going to Mr
Warburton's house tonight. She would, she resolved, never go there
again, even when she was certain that somebody else would be there
as well. Moreover, she would do penance tomorrow for having gone
there tonight. Having lighted the lamp, before doing anything else
she found her 'memo list', which was already written out for
tomorrow, and pencilled a capital P against 'breakfast', P stood
for penance--no bacon again for breakfast tomorrow. Then she
lighted the oilstove under the glue-pot.
The light of the lamp fell yellow upon her sewing-machine and upon
the pile of half-finished clothes on the table, reminding her of
the yet greater pile of clothes that were not even begun; reminding
her, also, that she was dreadfully, overwhelmingly tired. She had
forgotten her tiredness at the moment when Mr Warburton laid his
hands on her shoulders, but now it had come back upon her with
double force. Moreover, there was a somehow exceptional quality
about her tiredness tonight. She felt, in an almost literal sense
of the words, washed out. As she stood beside the table she had a
sudden, very strange feeling as though her mind had been entirely
emptied, so that for several seconds she actually forgot what it
was that she had come into the conservatory to do.
Then she remembered--the jackboots, of course! Some contemptible
little demon whispered in her ear, 'Why not go straight to bed and
leave the jackboots till tomorrow?' She uttered a prayer for
strength, and pinched herself. Come on, Dorothy! No slacking
please! Luke ix, 62. Then, clearing some of the litter off the
table, she got out her scissors, a pencil, and four sheets of brown
paper, and sat down to cut out those troublesome insteps for the
jackboots while the glue was boiling.
When the grandfather clock in her father's study struck midnight
she was still at work. She had shaped both jackboots by this time,
and was reinforcing them by pasting narrow strips of paper all over
them--a long, messy job. Every bone in her body was aching, and
her eyes were sticky with sleep. Indee
d, it was only rather dimly
that she remembered what she was doing. But she worked on,
mechanically pasting strip after strip of paper into place, and
pinching herself every two minutes to counteract the hypnotic sound
of the oilstove singing beneath the glue-pot.
CHAPTER 2
1
Out of a black, dreamless sleep, with the sense of being drawn
upwards through enormous and gradually lightening abysses, Dorothy
awoke to a species of consciousness.
Her eyes were still closed. By degrees, however, their lids became
less opaque to the light, and then flickered open of their own
accord. She was looking out upon a street--a shabby, lively street
of small shops and narrow-faced houses, with streams of men, trams,
and cars passing in either direction.
But as yet it could not properly be said that she was LOOKING. For
the things she saw were not apprehended as men, trams, and cars,
nor as anything in particular; they were not even apprehended as
things moving; not even as THINGS. She merely SAW, as an animal
sees, without speculation and almost without consciousness. The
noises of the street--the confused din of voices, the hooting of
horns and the scream of the trams grinding on their gritty rails--
flowed through her head provoking purely physical responses. She
had no words, nor any conception of the purpose of such things as
words, nor any consciousness of time or place, or of her own body
or even of her own existence.
Nevertheless, by degrees her perceptions became sharper. The
stream of moving things began to penetrate beyond her eyes and sort
themselves out into separate images in her brain. She began, still
wordlessly, to observe the shapes of things. A long-shaped thing
swam past, supported on four other, narrower long-shaped things,
and drawing after it a square-shaped thing balanced on two circles.
Dorothy watched it pass; and suddenly, as though spontaneously, a
word flashed into her mind. The word was 'horse'. It faded, but
returned presently in the more complex form: 'THAT IS A HORSE.'
Other words followed--'house', 'street', 'tram', 'car', 'bicycle'--
until in a few minutes she had found a name for almost everything
within sight. She discovered the words 'man' and 'woman', and,
speculating upon these words, discovered that she knew the
difference between living and inanimate things, and between human
beings and horses, and between men and women.
It was only now, after becoming aware of most of the things about
her, that she became aware of HERSELF. Hitherto she had been as it
were a pair of eyes with a receptive but purely impersonal brain
behind them. But now, with a curious little shock, she discovered
her separate and unique existence; she could FEEL herself existing;
it was as though something within her were exclaiming 'I am I!'
Also, in some way she knew that this 'I' had existed and been the
same from remote periods in the past, though it was a past of which
she had no remembrance.
But it was only for a moment that this discovery occupied her.
From the first there was a sense of incompleteness in it, of
something vaguely unsatisfactory. And it was this: the 'I am I'
which had seemed an answer had itself become a question. It was no
longer 'I am I', but 'WHO am I'?
WHO WAS SHE? She turned the question over in her mind, and found
that she had not the dimmest notion of who she was; except that,
watching the people and horses passing, she grasped that she was a
human being and not a horse. And that the question altered itself
and took this form: 'Am I a man or a woman?' Again neither
feeling nor memory gave any clue to the answer. But at that
moment, by accident possibly, her finger-tips brushed against her
body. She realized more clearly than before that her body existed,
and that it was her own--that it was, in fact, herself. She began