George Orwell - The Greatest Works of George Orwell

Victor threw down his wooden sword, took out his watch and looked at it.

“That’ll do!” he said in the abrupt, ruthless tone from which he never departed when he was dealing with children. “We’ll go on on Friday. Clear out, the lot of you! I’m sick of the sight of you.”

He watched the children out, and then, having forgotten their existence as soon as they were out of his sight, produced a page of music from his pocket and began to fidget up and down, cocking his eye at two forlorn plants in the corner which trailed their dead brown tendrils over the edges of their pots. Dorothy was still bending over her machine, stitching up the seams of the green velvet doublet.

Victor was a restless, intelligent little creature, and only happy when he was quarrelling with somebody or something. His pale, fine-featured face wore an expression that appeared to be discontent and was really boyish eagerness. People meeting him for the first time usually said that he was wasting his talents in his obscure job as a village schoolmaster; but the truth was that Victor had no very marketable talents except a slight gift for music and a much more pronounced gift for dealing with children. Ineffectual in other ways, he was excellent with children; he had the proper, ruthless attitude towards them. But of course, like everyone else, he despised his own especial talent. His interests were almost purely ecclesiastical. He was what people call a churchy young man. It had always been his ambition to enter the Church, and he would actually have done so if he had possessed the kind of brain that is capable of learning Greek and Hebrew. Debarred from the priesthood, he had drifted quite naturally into his position as a Church schoolmaster and organist. It kept him, so to speak, within the Church precincts. Needless to say, he was an Anglo-Catholic of the most truculent Church Times breed—more clerical than the clerics, knowledgeable about Church history, expert on vestments, and ready at any moment with a furious tirade against Modernists, Protestants, scientists, Bolshevists and atheists.

“I was thinking,” said Dorothy as she stopped her machine and snipped off the thread, “we might make those helmets out of old bowler hats, if we can get hold of enough of them. Cut the brims off, put on paper brims of the right shape and silver them over.”

“Oh Lord, why worry your head about such things?” said Victor, who had lost interest in the play the moment the rehearsal was over.

“It’s those wretched jackboots that are worrying me the most,” said Dorothy, taking the doublet on to her knee and looking at it.

“Oh, bother the jackboots! Let’s stop thinking about the play for a moment. Look here,” said Victor, unrolling his page of music, “I want you to speak to your father for me. I wish you’d ask him whether we can’t have a procession some time next month.”

“Another procession? What for?”

“Oh, I don’t know. You can always find an excuse for a procession. There’s the Nativity for the B.V.M. coming off on the eighth—that’s good enough for a procession, I should think. We’ll do it in style. I’ve got hold of a splendid rousing hymn that they can all bellow, and perhaps we could borrow their blue banner with the Virgin Mary on it from St. Wedekind’s in Millborough. If he’ll say the word I’ll start practising the choir at once.”

“You know he’ll only say no,” said Dorothy, threading a needle to sew the buttons on the doublet. “He doesn’t really approve of processions. It’s much better not to ask him and make him angry.”

“Oh, but dash it all!” protested Victor. “It’s simply months since we’ve had a procession. I never saw such dead-alive services as we have here. You’d think we were a Baptist chapel or something, from the way we go on.”

Victor chafed ceaselessly against the dull correctness of the Rector’s services. His ideal was what he called “the real Catholic worship”—meaning unlimited incense, gilded images and more than Roman vestments. In his capacity of organist he was for ever pressing for more processions, more voluptuous music, more elaborate chanting of the liturgy, so that it was a continuous pull devil, pull baker between him and the Rector. And on this point Dorothy sided with her father. Having been brought up in the peculiar, frigid via media of Anglicanism, she was by nature averse to and half afraid of anything “ritualistic.”

“But dash it all!” went on Victor, “a procession is such fun! Down the aisle, out through the west door and back through the south door, with the choir carrying candles behind and the Boy Scouts in front with the banner. It would look fine.” He sang a stave in a thin but tuneful tenor:

“Hail thee, Festival Day, blest day that art hallowed for ever!”

“If I had my way,” he added, “I’d have a couple of boys swinging jolly good censers of incense at the same time.”

“Yes, but you know how much Father dislikes that kind of thing. Especially when it’s anything to do with the Virgin Mary. He says it’s all Roman Fever and leads to people crossing themselves and genuflecting at the wrong times and goodness know what. You remember what happened at Advent.”

The previous year, on his own responsibility, Victor had chosen as one of the hymns for Advent, Number 642, with the refrain “Hail Mary, hail Mary, hail Mary full of grace!” This piece of popishness had annoyed the Rector extremely. At the close of the first verse he had pointedly laid down his hymn book, turned round in his stall and stood regarding the congregation with an air so stony that some of the choirboys faltered and almost broke down. Afterwards he had said that to hear the rustics bawling “ ’Ail Mary! ’Ail Mary!” made him think he was in the four-ale bar of the Dog and Bottle.

“But dash it!” said Victor in his aggrieved way, “your father always puts his foot down when I try and get a bit of life into the service. He won’t allow us incense, or decent music, or proper vestments, or anything. And what’s the result? We can’t get enough people to fill the church a quarter full, even on Easter Sunday. You look round the church on Sunday morning, and it’s nothing but the Boy Scouts and the Girl Guides and a few old women.”

“I know. It’s dreadful,” admitted Dorothy, sewing on her button. “It doesn’t seem to make any difference what we do—we simply can’t get people to come to church. Still,” she added, “they do come to us to be married and buried. And I don’t think the congregation’s actually gone down this year. There were nearly two hundred people at Easter Communion.”

“Two hundred! It ought to be two thousand. That’s the population of this town. The fact is that three-quarters of the people in this place never go near a church in their lives. The Church has absolutely lost its hold over them. They don’t know that it exists. And why? That’s what I’m getting at. Why?”

“I suppose it’s all this Science and Free Thought and all that,” said Dorothy rather sententiously, quoting her father.

This remark deflected Victor from what he had been about to say. He had been on the very point of saying that St. Athelstan’s congregation had dwindled because of the dullness of the services; but the hated words Science and Free Thought set him off in another and even more familiar channel.

“Of course it’s this so-called Free Thought!” he exclaimed, immediately beginning to fidget up and down again. “It’s these swine of atheists like Bertrand Russell and Julian Huxley and all that crowd. And what’s ruined the Church is that instead of jolly well answering them and showing them up for the fools and liars they are, we just sit tight and let them spread their beastly atheist propaganda wherever they choose. It’s all the fault of the bishops, of course.” (Like every Anglo-Catholic, Victor had an abysmal contempt for bishops.) “They’re all Modernists and time-servers. By Jove!” he added more cheerfully, halting, “did you see my letter in the Church Times last week?”